From the desk of Patrick Ward...
In this
space, we have spent some time describing the shift in traditional news
consumption and the impact of new and social media on traditional journalism. Both are well-discussed
concepts and, while important to note, they are familiar to all of us.
The question then becomes, now what?
We noted somewhat in passing that there has been a dramatic increase in the
number of news sources people routinely consume; and that increase has undermined
the traditional news brands. And we truly believe that. But, we also
believe that brands consequently have a new opportunity to become their
own media company.
A startling story made this clearer to us than ever. Last winter, a friend
and colleague told us about an experience that succinctly related the dynamic
relationship between the media, social media and critical audiences. His
company, GoodData, is one of the hot ones, sporting all the ingredients for
a successful start-up. Its CEO, Roman Stanek
is a serial entrepreneur with a great reputation having sold a previous company
to Sun and another to HP, by way of Mercury Interactive. The company
boasts people like Esther Dyson and Tim O’Reilly as individual investors and Andreesen/Horowitz, the ‘it’ VC of the moment, led a
round of financing last year. Oh, and their business plan has the word
‘cloud’ in it. Enough said?
So, when Bob Evans at InformationWeek published a glowing success story on one of GoodData's customers, no
one was surprised, except the VP of Marketing, our friend, Sam Boonin, who waited to see that story translate into web traffic
and potential leads. Neither happened. And this was a big story.
To give it some legs, the management team, all with healthy personal and
professional social networks, started to push the story out to friends,
colleagues and gawkers through Twitter et al. That’s when the traffic began
to come and in bunches. In fact, traffic from Tweets and re-Tweets was 10
times higher than direct web traffic from InformationWeek.
We don’t think that means that these executives’ personal brands are more
influential than InformationWeek’s brand that has been built over 30 years.
Or do we? It’s probably not an either/or, but more of a complementary
relationship. We can’t deny that the magazine’s brand helped when people
read the Tweets. But, there is a clear argument to be made that GoodData’s brand and Stanek’s and other execs’ personal brands offered
significant credibility.
The other thing we noted about this story was that content was a driving force.
True, the content was promotional (not in intent, but in practice) and so
it should drive people to the site. But, a series of Mashable pieces last month extolled the promise
of content as a marketing vehicle and we think the preceding story
bears that out. We had a client last year, Daily Makeover that used content as a way to attract users to its online try-on tool
which women used to sample virtual cosmetics. Tips about spring looks,
easy ways to look natural etc. filled their site and got four million women to
that site monthly, giving Daily Makeover one of the richest databases of
personal cosmetics preferences in the world.
But most business-to-business companies don’t have content as part of their
everyday outreach to customers. In a world where people are so
starved for information that they have an incessant parade of alerts, and where
news organizations are losing their audience daily, why shouldn’t companies
fill the void with interesting and entertaining content. We think they
should and content gives PR firms, like ours, a formidable tool to advance
client’s positions and/or opinions.
We are advising clients to start thinking more like media purveyors and rely
less on intermediaries — from analysts to reporters — to tell their
stories for them. That’s a radical shift for some to grasp, but in a
forthcoming post, we’ll offer some insight into how that can work.
