Media is the New Marketing

Once upon a time, the sole revenue source of local media -TV, radio, newsprint – was advertising. Media was a controlled channel with high barriers to entry (TV stations cost money). Then Internet media – Google AdSense, SEO and Craigslist – chiselled at mainstream media’s revenue model. Now social media marketing looks like it’s reaching a tipping point as small businesses start setting up their Facebook pages and Twitter campaigns for free.

Local business now have marketing options, and the sales game has completely changed. Pre-social media, nobody liked getting a call from a salesperson, now it’s the kiss of death to call a client and ask “how about an ad campaign this month?”.

GannettLocal is Gannett’s new positional initiative to engage local business by offering up their new service as marketing consultants. Simply put, mainstream media needs to maintain their perch in a marketing campaign. By filling out an on-site marketing survey, GannettLocal recommends a template strategic marketing plan that ensures Gannett’s services get a piece of the budget.

For example, if a small business has $1,000/month marketing budget, Gannett Local may recommend the following resource allocation:

If a small business has zero marketing budget, Gannett Local may recommend:

Conclusion:

Sales tactics now require value propositions to even get their foot in the door. Mainstream media is retooling its sales forces into consulting forces. It’s a sea change in the role of sales, and the reason why everybody’s title is advisor, consultant or strategic planner.

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Crowdsourcing doesn’t work without critical mass. A business review on Yelp with 1,000 individual reviewers is statistically much more credible than those with sparse number of reviews. Now that Facebook “Likes” seem ubiquitous, Facebook plans on harnessing the Likes that map their Open Graph to develop new methods for social search based on what the crowd likes.

AllFacebook (an independent resource not associated with Facebook) is analyzing how the Facebook “Like” functions like a link:

While there was a lot of speculation about Facebook’s search strategy, the company has confirmed with us that “all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them”…

Under this system “link baiting” will give rise to “like baiting”, which is how Facebook determines the relevance of information. This has become a full scale attack on Google on all fronts at this point as Facebook has officially entered the internet search market. While many of the details of the Open Graph were initially revealed at f8, it wasn’t clear what Facebook’s complete strategy would be and how big of a threat this would be to Google.

While we suggested that the like had just replaced the link, it has now become abundantly clear what Facebook’s intentions are. Facebook wants to launch the social semantic search engine as we alluded to during f8. Now that the search results are officially showing up as Facebook search results, the war has begun.

With Facebook building the semantic search engine based on data mining “likes”, the semantic web starts evolving in a surprising direction. Instead of building on top of the tagging and parsing of traditional media content, the semantic search engine can be built on the mass aggregation of the efficient one-click “like”. Even further down this road towards simplicity, the simple 140-character tweet will also attain semantic power when Twitter facilitates the inclusion of Twitter annotations to every tweet.

From: ReadWriteWeb:

Twitter posts already contain plenty of metadata that allows for smart filtering and organization, including date and location. With annotations, however, the metadata possibilities will be literally endless. Tweet metadata could eventually contain information or links based on words or phrases in the tweet itself, other options added to the tweet, or even other external data like the weather in the senders location at the time it was sent. Imagine being able to add an infinite number of hashtags to a post without wasting precious characters.

Conclusion:

The data mining of Facebook’s Open Graph and the metadata of Twitter tweets will give the simple acts of liking and tweeting more power to influence as new search engine criteria. Practically speaking, it will spawn new methodologies for getting recognized by social search. The most obvious one is simply just to get “liked”.

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Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable, with a take on new media at the Mashable Media Summit:

1:45> “Which company is the next big thing in social media?”
Pete: “the real obvious answer… would be Groupon…”

To elaborate, social “buying” via Groupon-type couponing systems really mirror a change in the way advertising is perceived. Advertising has essentially gone “real time”. Consumers respond to the instantaneous monetary benefit and call to action that a deep discount deal provides. To an advertiser, the coupon systems are cost effective and don’t have the fail risk of an expensive CPM-driven advertising campaign because there is no money upfront and they pay only for the customers who buy in. This “eat what you kill” philosophy drives online business models because there is an exact return on investment that advertisers can bank on.

2:43> Pete: “There’s a new trend… called User Generated Curation… users are curating content more than they’re creating it”. Pete talks about Facebook “likes”, Twitter “retweets”, and blogs that repurpose other content as evidence to the trend of content distribution. He also discusses how heavily curated news items will float to the top ranked positions on websites like Mashable because their popularity generates more traffic to the website.

Curation is, at its base, just the new media term for “publication”. Media has always published articles and columns based on the perceived strength of readership interest. Social media just makes this quantifiable through crowdsourcing algorithms. Mashable and Huffington Post are new media darlings because these sites curate popular news based on readership preference for social media and liberal politics, respectively.

Although Pete speaks about curation from a mass media viewpoint, he misses a point about where news is still being “created” en masse. That’s the hyperlocal social media that takes place in local blogs and the communities of Facebook and Twitter where local news is constantly created on a real time basis. The disappearance of salaried local journalists creates a void in local news, and various crowdsourced news models like spot.us are being tested.

Simply put, it’s easy to predict that crowdsourced community content will be generated more and more in Facebook, Twitter and other networks, and then curated by the community into contructs like 365 Things to Do and Breaking News.

There will be Facebook business pages by local retailers that will advertise their weekly specials like they currently do with Sunday ad circulars:

In sum, even weekly sales data can be considered local content, and will be curated by locals sharing this timely information. In Japan, there’s already a popular housewives’ social network that provides real time pricing information on local stores.

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As one of the volunteer organizers of Mortgage Revolution, I’m pleased that we put Mortgage Revolution, a leading edge mortgage industry conference, together with Spot.us, a nonprofit organization developing the new journalistic models to fund stories that need to be heard.

Mortgage Revolution is an industry conference that shares the proceeds from conference fees after expenses to nonprofits like Spot.us. With the proceeds, Spot.us is able to test a new method for funding stories. The sponsor, in this case, Mortgage Revolution, puts together a survey with Spot.us to initiate a discussion on a topic relevant to the sponsor. Spot.us’s community takes an online survey of three questions about how the mortgage industry is perceived in the wake of the housing foreclosure crisis. Each respondent then receives $5 worth of credit to apply to the funding of the Spot.us story of their choice.

The model accomplishes three goals:

• Spot.us involves its community of readers to discuss issues related to the sponsors’ mission.
• The journalistic community wins by getting more stories written through “credits” derived from sponsor funding.
• The people win by “voting up” the stories they want funded and written.

Mortgage Revolution’s mission is to show mortgage professionals how to make their business simple and transparent to the consumer, and to change the perception of an industry tainted by the foreclosure crisis. Spot.us steps up and illuminates that mission to their readers. It’s a good fit.

Related article:

Poynter Online / Bill Mitchell NewsPay

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