Open The Dialogue

“Relevancy” is a word that’s thrown around a lot these days. Ads online are “contextually relevant” to the content they appear next to. Brands strive to remain relevant to customers who have many (a plethora?) of choices in whatever category that brand operates in.

Relevance to the mind of the consumer is, like trust, something that needs to be earned. And like trust it needs to be earned time and time again, at every touchpoint through which the brand interacts with its audience.

All of that is especially true when we’re talking about media choices. Established players need to work harder than ever to remain relevant to an audience that sees more of what they’re looking for in blogs and other outlets created by people who they feel a connection to.

So what is a media company to do?

1. Start your own blog: Seems like every media outlet is going bloggy. Inc. just launched four new ones to add to their existing roster of blogs that cover a variety of business niches. The Chicago Tribune, like other papers, has a ton that roughly replicate parts of the paper. Creating journalist-produced blogs is great since it can add depth and personality to news coverage. But it’s also important for these writers to join the larger community writing about their beat (whatever it is there will be one). That’s the kind of practice that brings about more readership, more engagement and ultimately leads to trust and relevance. Blogs do not exist in a vacuum and so their writers need to be commenting elsewhere, linking out generously and otherwise acting like a part of a village.
2. Pay attention to what others are doing: Entertainment news brands like Entertainment Tonight have found themselves flanked online by TMZ and others and are only now looking for ways to catch up. I’m sorry to say but it’s probably too late. The online audience is now turning to sites like TMZ and others for their celebrity gossip and not ET. Established players have a finite window of opportunity to mimic developments by upstarts before the audience decides those established brands apparently aren’t interested in servicing this particular need and move their attention elsewhere. They’ve essentially broken the trust and it’s harder to earn BACK then it is to earn in the first place.
3. Recognize that online is its own entity: If you’re looking at your website simply as a way to gain print subscribers (or TV viewers or anything else) then the online strategy you have is probably not going to work out. There’s no halfway here. If you’re faking it and don’t seem to be fully committed to being an online outlet the audience will be able to sense that a mile away. That sort of thinking also likely means you’re not interested in playing in the larger sandbox, resulting in no one sending traffic your way, no one interacting on the site (what’s the point?) and just getting little to no traction in general. The web needs to be more than simply a means to an end, it needs to be the end itself.
4. Don’t mess with the trust of others: Whether you’re CBS looking to utilize Digg to expand online content, a newspaper who adds Sphere links to stories or anyone else, don’t mess with the success of an existing brand in order to bend it to your control. If you’re really interested in harnessing the power of something the audience is using and trusting then the best approach to meshing it into your business is to do so in a hands-off manner. Don’t try to game the system, don’t try to utilize control over how its used and don’t – and this is the most important part – honk off the existing user base. That’s a good way to make sure that powerful tool you’re integrating loses almost all its power, defeating the purpose of the purchase or partnership.
5. Go where people already are: You can hope and pray and strategize all you want, but the simple truth is that the Internet is now simply too big for one outlet to try and become the sole outlet for whatever content it might be we’re talking about. That’s why networks are sending their shows to Fancast, Joost, Hulu, Veoh and a multitude of other sites. The old network model simply doesn’t hold water any longer and so, if you want to reach eyeballs, you need to go where those eyeballs are. Everyone has their own favorite online video site so there’s little to be gained by signing “exclusive” deals or deciding your homepage MUST be where video is viewed.
6. Make it easy for people to take it with them: The distribution of content is not restricted to officially partnered with sites. Make it easy for people to grab video widgets, graphics or any other materials they want so they can put it on their own blogs, Facebook pages or any other site they wish. They’ve just increased the reach of your content and you didn’t have to sit in 50 hours of meetings with lawyers to make it happen. They’re site is better and your stuff reaches more eyeballs. Isn’t that the very definition of a win/win?
7. Let people play: We live in a creative society online. People are either creating their own stuff or mashing up existing works and you know what? That’s really OK. Seriously, settle down and realize that someone likes your TV show clip, movie trailer (natch) or other video enough to mess around with it a bit. Even if they’re poking fun at it a little bit, that’s simply because they’re trying to add a bit of humanity to content they considered too self-important or stuffy to be relevant to them. They’ve adjusted the content and adjusted the relevance. That’s a good thing – you should be thanking them for that, not filing C&Ds.

Everywhere I look this week, it’s all about the social ads. Chris was discussing MySpace’s “targeting” abilities and how that was utilized for ads focused on Amanda Bynes fans, Brian Solis is all over Facebook’s efforts to get you, the user, to essentially identify the companies / brands / products you identify with, and integrate that in various fashions into how your friends and contacts see you in the social network.

But while we have something that might be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the online version of people walking around with your t-shirt on, and influencing their friends to want one, too, we’re also greeted with stuff like this, an “ad” in your Facebook feed featuring Odd Thomas (whose page, amusingly, only contains links to his MySpace profile, not the one on Facebook. OOPS!), made to “look” MUCH more like something that is, as Dave suggests, “more like friend news.” Is that any better than the typical “sponsored” items in your friend news? I guess that’s up to the whole eye, beholder thing, but I tend to lean with Dave on this one.

Sometimes I really feel like we take some great steps forward when it comes to companies “getting it,” and then, when turning around, I want to kick the wall in frustration for the marketing guy in me. So while Jeremy makes some awesome points when he says that advertising as an industry will “win” the business of social media from its clients, these are just some of the examples that make me feel like they, just as PRfolk say “Ohhh, yeah!” entirely too much, need to step out of their own little world for two seconds before getting people to drop tens of thousands of dollars on technology that no one has nailed down just yet.

[ed: I apologize for the reference to Disney's "Gummi Bears" in the title. But since I've already gotten it into your head, go check out the theme song. You know you want to.]

Catherine Holahan at BusinessWeek has a good story up about how the online experiences of everyday users could potentially change if a Do Not Track list is put into place. For those who may not have been following it, privacy groups have proposed a Do Not Track list that would halt advertisers and publishers from using visitor data to customize ads for them.

The problem, of course, is that so much of the Internet is now dependent on advertising. And that advertising has risen in value for publishers as they’ve increasingly been able to show ad buyers data on what sorts of people are visiting their sites. Higher value for targeted ads means publishers have been able to cut back on sheer volume and the combination creates, by most measures, a much better user experience.

So if vast swaths of the audience then opt not to have their behavior tracked and data collected the result will likely be more ads that are less relevant to the users.

As Holahan’s article states, the creation of such a list depends greatly on whether consumers actually care as much about the issue as privacy groups do. But this idea seems to be much more likely to collapse the Web 2.0 world much more than just about any other threat.

All these online services that launch with ad-support as a business model. All the ad networks that are built around various forms of targeted ad delivery (including those owned and operated by Google, AOL and Yahoo!). These are all in danger of having the rug pulled out from under them if they can’t pinpoint the advertising they buy, sell or otherwise depend on. And if you thought newspaper publishers were insufferable before, wait until their not-yet-substantive online ad revenue dries up.

I’m all for consumer privacy, and if this discussion creates an environment where those doing the tracking make adjustments in how they collect and protect identifiable data, then it’s an undeniable good thing.

But everyone needs to be aware of just what a Do Not Track list means.

There’s a new study from the Advertising Research Foundation and American Association of Advertising Agencies that shows the most effective TV commercials are the ones that tell stories.

This really shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s around my age (32), especially the guys. After all, we grew up in the Golden Age of long-form entertainment-as-advertising. G.I. Joe and Transformers, along with Thundercats, He-Man and a host of others were cartoons second and commercials for the respective toy lines first.

But they told interesting (at least they were at the time) stories and sucked us in. We needed the Cobra Hydrofoil because it played such an important part in that new episode and we absolutely-please-won’t-you-just-understand-mom needed to recreate that scene in our living rooms. We…wait for it…created content. And yes, I realize that by actually typing that I’m in danger of having my keys to the Internet revoked.

But as we got older we realized we were being spun and marketing’s effectiveness, to some extent, wore off. Our enthusiasm for (wince) creating content (/wince) didn’t diminish, though, since we’re now online creating blogs, participating in forums, building our social networks and starring in online sex tapes.

More than that, a good story in the marketing still hooks us. The problem for many companies is that they’re no longer in the position of instigating those stories. Instead the inspiration is coming from our friends and contacts. That’s why social media is such an effective marketing tool, because when you weave together the points of view of three or four people who are discussing a particular topic you come up with a really good story.

Some people are good storytellers and some aren’t. Some companies are good storytellers and some aren’t. The trick is to know which one you are and make sure you either use that talent to its fullest advantage or get out of the way so those who can.

If you’re a marketer and you just can’t adequately tell your brand’s story in a compelling way, the best thing you can do is step into the pitch and let the community do it for you. But then it’s up to you to provide them the best possible tools to do just that – high quality photos, videos, product information, etc. That’s what getting out of the way looks like in that case.

In their book Citizen Marketers, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba told the familiar story of an ordinary, non-marketing guy who was so in love with the iPod that he created his own commercial and posted it online. That user-generated spot created a tremendous amount of recognition and press coverage, despite – or maybe because of – being officially disowned by Cupertino.

So check out this story in the New York Times. Apple has taken a commercial created by 18 year-old Mac enthusiast Nick Haley and will remake it with the help of their agency TBWA/Chiat/Day. The spot he created, reportedly in just one day last month, has so far garnered over 2,000 views on YouTube. Some of those viewers were Apple employees, who then tasked T/C/D with getting in touch with Haley about reworking his video for official use. The agency apparently has futzed only limitedly with the actual content, wanting to maintain the originals spirit while making it just a bit more professional looking.

The spot will debut this Sunday during football telecasts, “Desperate Housewives” on ABC and during Game 4 of the World Series.

Everyone wants their spots to become viral sensations on YouTube, all the while people are creating their own videos that are achieving that goal with little to no effort on their part. It’s great to see someone like Apple – who could use the good PR right now – embracing their passionate users in a way like this. It actually makes me want to make sure to tune in and check out this spot on TV to see how it’s turned out.