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Media and Brand Supremacy: Why the New Media Brand Could Be Nike

Re-posted from Huffingtonpost.com BY: Heidi Sinclair Chief Executive Officer, Heidi Sinclair & Co. The traditional media brand scions of Time, the Washington Post and Newsweek are of diminishing import with circulation and advertising declines. Major city newspapers are disappearing like the rainforest. In the past six months, we have witnessed the closing of the Denver Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the San Francisco Chronicle. There is a great deal of teeth gnashing about how this came to be and mostly it is deemed that they just didn't make the transition to the web soon enough, or haven't figured out the business model, etc. All true, but fundamentally, these brands forgot what business they were in--they thought their product was the newspaper, when it was the news. The paper was the distribution platform. Being able to separate content from distribution and determine how to monetize each is critical to being an effective media organization. We don't buy newspapers, we buy news and advertisers buy access to markets. We don't buy CDs, or DVDs we buy music or movies. Clarity of business is key, as is clarity of brand. A strong brand and a strong product can thrive on any form of distribution, and will draw the market to it. A few "newspaper" brands will find that they can thrive on the Internet and other distribution platforms. But many won't and so a whole new set of media brands are starting to emerge. What are the emerging and future brands Americans will trust for information and news? Web-Based News Media Brands New media brands are emerging and gaining traction like Politico.com, Gawker and the Huffington Post, joining online stalwart, Slate. Experiments such as True/Slant may take hold and gather readership momentum. But this is also a time when consumers of news and information are not as tied to the media brand. We don't wake up thinking I need to read my newspaper this morning to find out what is going on in sports, the weather, international events, what new movie is out, etc. we have multiple options to get that information. Web-based brands that rise up to have a following in a niche will be successful. Traditional news organizations will also be successful because they have a following. And here is where many of the traditional news media brands could end up finding life, having successfully shed their newsprint but kept their great newsgathering teams, and found a way to become profitable. The Journalist as Media Brand Today, individual journalists are becoming media brands in their own right--think Maria Bartiromo, who not only has her CNBC show, but also has a show on NBC's Meet the Press, has a regular feature in Business Week and is a featured speaker. It is no longer about CNBC, it is about Maria--she is the trusted source on financial news. Fareed Zakaria also has become a cross-platform media brand, from Newsweek columnist to author to host on CNN. Fareed is the brand for current events and foreign news. One can easily argue that the success of the Huffington Post is tied to brand that is Arianna Huffington. Not all of the working journalists today can become a media brand. It requires the ability to work across multiple media platforms--to be not just a great writer, but also a telegenic. Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist, has for years created periodic video stories. This has made him very comfortable moving off the printed page. Staff journalists today are being required to conduct their interviews on camera. This is a tough transition for the majority of journalists whom were trained not to become the story. Suddenly, they need to not only dress for the camera, but also be media trained. Their interviews are awkward--even the world's top journalists appear painfully stiff and unpracticed in their questioning. For those who can work in various mediums and are comfortable promoting themselves, becoming a media brand is a certain path to career success. Big Brands as Media Brands Traditionally big brands have been the big advertisers, keeping media in business. With the disaggregation of media, brands can talk directly to their customers and have direct relationships. A lot of experimentation has gone on in this area with sponsored programming, branded content on websites and television and joint media advertiser partnerships. I have been dabbling in this space for over a decade, and believe that now is the time for certain brands to extend into media directly. Nike could be the next ESPN. I'd go to Nike to get sports scores, watch games and get fitness tips. Martha Stewart took a media brand and turned it into products. Not all product brands can make the reverse morph but many can. Home Depot or Lowes can develop content and channels for home improvement. Expedia or Orbitz can create and distribute travel content. Yes, they invite competitive advertising in potentially but it is all about building audience, market and brand loyalty. Starbucks has always sold the coffeehouse, not just the coffee, as part of its brand promise. The extensions it has made into music, books, and a little film have supported that brand concept. Clearly not every brand can or should be in the media business. There also needs to be distinction made between what is marketing content and what is news whatever the media platform source is. I believe that consumers of information will not be bothered with journalistic integrity issues regarding content on brand-based platforms. Consumers are smart enough to know if it is good information or not. And when they want truly objective views, they will seek that out. The blur between marketing and information has been going on for decades on a variety of platforms, not just the web. The media landscape has been in a state of change for the past 20 years, and with broad-based high-speed Internet access, change is accelerating. But with change remain a few key value constants: the value of brand, whether it be an individual, an emerging entity or a major established consumer brand; the value of information, news and entertainment and what consumers will pay to access them and the value of social interaction and communication. Visit me on twitter http://Twitter.com/RainbowUSA Visit Me On Face Book http://RonMills.us/facebook

Turn Twitter, Facebook info into web-wide social ads

SocialMedia turns Twitter, Facebook info into web-wide social ads

Eric Eldon | Re-posted it it's entirety from venturebeat.com

If
you were to see ads for things that your friends care about, you might
be more inclined to pay attention — or that’s the theory behind a new
set of advertising products that SocialMedia.com is announcing today.

The ad network is using Twitter, Facebook and other social data to
figure out who your friends are and when they talk about a company.
Then, it’s letting the company buy ads that feature what your friends
are saying. Called “People Powered Ads,”
they appear as widgets and banners around the web and are complemented
by a couple of other new products designed to make ads mix in better
with people’s online interactions.

I expect to see many more of these types of ads in the future, in
one form or another. Other ad companies, like Federated Media, have
already been experimenting with a range of the same ideas — as have
social networks themselves, including Facebook and MySpace.

The Twitter-powered banner ad unit, called Twitter Pulse, lets a
brand filter any public tweet by users, keywords, or through manual
approval, and display these tweets on other sites. The ad unit prompts
users to respond with their own tweets from within it — those
responses, of course, feed back into Twitter so that person’s followers
can see, thereby furthering the reach of the advertiser. Dell could
decide to only show Tweets from its own employees, for example, or it
might choose to filter out vulgarity, says SocialMedia.com’s Nick
Gonzalez. A related service, Twitter MegaPulse, lets advertisers create
their own micro-sites for tweets about a company or product; another,
called Twitter Sparq, lets them run these ads on their own sites.

San Francisco-based SocialMedia.com also has a couple of
complementary services for community-driven web sites, such as blogs.
One, the “Community Stream,” is a widget that sites can embed, where
users can leave comments either anonymously, using a real name, or
using Facebook Connect. Also for community sites, there’s a “Community
Poll” widget, where users can answer a question, then their friends can
see it.

Tech publisher conglomerate IDG is partnering with SocialMedia.com
to run these Twitter and community ads across its hundreds of
publications around the world, in a customized version it’s calling
“Amplify.” It will display reader feedback from Twitter and the
community widgets across its web properties. See the ad for AMD in IDG
title PC World above that just went live. The partnership could give
these still-experimental ideas a big boost of traffic.

What about Facebook?



Meanwhile, SocialMedia.com — which started out as an ad network on
Facebook — is still seeing the largest chunk of its business there.
(Note: Chief executive Seth Goldstein told me in January that SocialMedia made more than $15 million in revenue last year,
through a combination of traditional and experimental ads). And it’s
not neglecting that audience. Another new product today, called Friend
to Friend, is a web-wide extension of a program that it has been
testing out on Facebook for months. That program used banner ads to ask
people a question — Macy’s ran a campaign last December asking users
what kind of Santa they were, for example (”cheap,” “jolly,” or
“giving”). Then SocialMedia ran follow-up banner ads showing people’s
responses to their friends on the site — so in Macy’s case, what kind
of Santa their friends were.

How
do friend connections impact the effectiveness? In a study by Dynamic
Logic on this form of advertising, Gonzalez tells me, people’s purchase
intent went up 13 percent when they saw what their friends were saying
versus when they were exposed to traditional advertising.

Friend to Friend uses Facebook Connect, the social network’s service
for accessing information like friend relationships from anywhere on
the web, so it can run these sorts of conversational banners anywhere.
SocialMedia also offers a customized version of Facebook’s public
profile pages, so users can go interact there. If users aren’t logged
into Facebook, SocialMedia uses its own cookies and matches that
information with publicly available information on friend relationships
to try to target the right ad to the right person. Of course, if users
don’t want to share what they think with friends, they just don’t
respond to the ad.

Big picture, SocialMedia is trying to take any sort of real-person
interaction happening on social web sites and channel it into
easy-to-use brand advertisements. It’s an open question whether or not
people will feel comfortable getting such direct messaging on other web
sites. Personally, I think I’m okay with this — I’d rather see ads that
are a little creepy but meaningful than ads that are not creepy but
meaningless.

Interview With Personal Branding Expert Dan Schawbel, Part II

Interview With Personal Branding Expert Dan Schawbel, Part I

Guest Commentary: A Reflux-Free Guide to Utilizing Social Media

By Steve Shepard and Kevin Yamano

What you need to know about social media: Social media is dead. It’s a boom time for social media. Online ads rule. Online ads don’t work. Twitter is hot. Twitter is passé.

Marketers peddling media properties find the confusing and contradictory headlines an invitation to reach for the Maalox or tune out the topic altogether.

The former might be a good idea, but ask the ostrich how well the latter tends to work out. Social media is too huge to ignore; we must brave the contradictions, obfuscations, buzzword compliance and speculation.

Why is social media difficult to pin down? Because this stuff works … except, of course, when it doesn’t. As with any other marketing effort, success requires skillful research, clever execution—and luck. It’s impossible to build a recyclable template or blindly co-opt anyone else’s model. (Consider Apple’s iPhone compared with Blackberry’s Storm; enough said.)

So faced with more than 75 distinct social media tools—social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, user-generated content like YouTube, blogging and micro-blogging tools like Twitter, wikis—how do marketers hedge their bets?

The first necessary steps we explain to our entertainment industry students: Understand how everything works together, prioritize, and then know what works for your audience … this month.
What’s working now? We’re excited by two developments: social networking sites’ roadblock ads and widgets.

It’s widely understood that younger audiences have gravitated to social networking. Even big studios get this: It’s common to see a major release promoted in a Facebook fan page or plastered across MySpace’s front screen.

It’s not enough to place plain ads on such sites, though. We’re browsing the Web and see flat ads for a video rental service, a bank and a punch-the-monkey game. We don’t click a single one. What’s the point? They already communicated their point; there’s nothing left to pique our interest. They’re ignorable.

Buy a one-day roadblock ad instead. As TV spots are knocked out by fast-forwarding digital video recorders and radio ads are vanquished with the push of a preset button, marketers need ads that cannot be ignored. Roadblocks serve this exact purpose.

Audiences want their social networking—Nielsen Media said these sites had a global reach of 68.4% in February and that number probably already has risen. But before they can get in, they have to click through your ad. Nothing builds awareness better.

To go beyond awareness to engagement, consider the widget, a small application that lives on a user’s profile pages. Widgets use fun or interesting content to earn persistent placement onscreen, bearing content that the marketer can change at will.

Widgets seem like a “soft sell” but, by being engaging, they can earn placement on a user’s homepage. Targets end up seeing a brand message every day, receiving a subtle but repetitive reminder. Compared to ordinary web ads, that’s powerful stuff.

Will roadblocks or widgets rule in the long term? Maybe not. But it’s not readily apparent what would supplant them, either. We’re intrigued by the possibility that it might be a mash-up of new and old technologies: Tweens are so unaccustomed to receiving snail mail that maybe direct mail pointing to an online campaign, for instance, could surge into the marketing vanguard. This could work until it doesn’t any longer.

Where did that Maalox go?

Steve Shepard is an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. Kevin Yamano is affiliate networks director for ClearSpring. Beginning June 4, they will conduct Really Useful Information’s online Digital Media and Technology Management program for entertainment