Open The Dialogue

Although fashion and social media are two industries that have always seemed to be very separate, over the past year, with the news of publishing powerhouses losing readership to their online counterparts and advertisers dropping like flies, the fashion industry, once ruled by magazines, has seemingly surrendered and is beginning to embrace digital media.

Survival of the Fittest

Big-name magazines like Glamour, Vogue and Elle now have their own blogs – usually connected to the publication’s website. Most major magazines including Vanity Fair and Vogue’s UK edition also have a presence on Twitter as do many of their individual employees. New York Fashion Week even maintains its own Twitter account with details of shows and Fashion Week events.

Technologically speaking, it was recently reported that Conde Nast, one of the industry’s largest publishers, intends to release some of their top magazines on the newly released Apple iPad. Conde Nast also announced that Vogue, one of the publisher’s largest and most well known fashion magazines, will be launching an iPhone application. This application will help user with shopping and styling. The Wall Street Journal’s Christina Brinkley calls it “part of the all-out rush in the fashion industry to embrace technology—most notably with blogging and tweeting.”

Power Plays

Bloggers, once considered lint on the tailored jacket of the fashion industry, have become a force to be reckoned with. Blogs such as Bryan Boy and Style Rookie creator Tavi Gevison have garnered enough respect to warrant star-treatment typically reserved for the upper echelon of style writers and editors.  In fact, Tavi, who is 13-years-old, was flown to Tokyo to cover a party with popular French label Comme des Garcons for Harper’s Bazaar.

Not only are these bloggers writing extensively about the industry, they actively participate in events including runway shows. This past month at New York Fashion Week alone we saw an influx of bloggers not only attending designer’s shows but sitting front row amongst fashion industry royalty such as Anna Wintour, Grace Coddington and celebrities like the Olsen Twins.

To accommodate these bloggers, designers have also embraced the digital age. This past season, big name designers like Marc Jacobs and Calvin Klein made their shows available to home viewers by live streaming their shows.

Shares Well With Others

The fashion industry is traditionally based on a hierarchy of exclusivity and while some industry veterans disagree with the growing digital trends it seems that the industry as a whole is starting to accept that their target audience is paying attention to these mediums. What is the draw? Besides the obvious:  it’s cheaper and easier  to access –  interaction is key. Fashion bloggers are interacting with their readers; hosting giveaways and translating runway looks to the sidewalks. This accessibility is putting a different face on fashion – one other than models and style moguls.

The fashion industry has learned the same lesson as many other industries: shunning the online world will not make it disappear or lessen its influence. It seems, for now at least, that fashion publications, designers and editors are embracing digital media and learning to wield the powerful tools that are the digital world.

Seth Godin is on the tip of everyone’s tongue’s today (as he probably planned to be).  Not only did he launch the Brands in Public project yesterday evening but I was able to be in attendance (thanks HarperStudio!) today while he gave a talk to the Digital Publishing Group addressing critical issues in today’s publishing landscape.  Before getting into the re-cap about the event, a bit more about Brands in Public:

Squidoo has built several hundred pages, each one about a major brand. (Here are some examples). More are on the way. We’ll keep going until we have thousands of important brands, each on its own page (and we’ll happily add one for you if you like). Each page collects tweets, blog posts, news stories, images, videos and comments about a brand. All of these feeds are algorithmic… the good and the bad show up, all collated and easy to find.

Of course, these comments and conversations are already going on, all over the web. What we’ve done is bring them together in one place. And then we’ve made it easy for the brand to chime in.

That last sentence is probably most important.  For this ease-of-use, Seth wants $400/month for a brand to use this page as a portal to interact with consumers on the web.  Is this the right thing to do?  Is it worth it?  Where is the value for consumers and the brand?  There has been significant debate surrounding this move and even Seth himself says “BIP” probably shouldn’t be the 1st option:

If you have the tools and wherewithal to build a page like this on your own site, you should consider that. The challenge is getting it done, regardless of where the page lives.

A big post from Jason Falls today debates this even further.  He wonders if BIPs are holding brands hostage:

At first glance, you just think, “So what? The brands can just participate in the conversations on the various social networks and they Brands in Public spider will pick up those conversations as well. Hopefully, Brands in Public isn’t doing anything shady by parsing out the brand participation and that theory will hold true. However, think for a moment of the power, reach and influence Godin has. If his idea takes hold (it probably will because on the surface it’s a good one) and he markets it the way he’s capable of, Brands in Public could be come THE place to go see the “unfiltered” conversation about brands everywhere.

If that scenario plays out, then the $400 or more fee Godin’s company plans to charge is, in a way, blackmail.

It’ll be important to watch how this develops over the coming weeks and months.  There is no denying that time time is now to engage with consumers, directly, online but is this the best way to do it?  How many “walls” should be between you and your audience?  Seth talked a lot about platforms and tribes in today’s #digpub event and a lot of what one sees in this BIP execution also was discussed today in regards to the publishing industry.

During today’s talk, Seth made strong analogies between the necessary innovation that must and is happening in the music industry to what has to happen in the publishing industry in 2009 (arguably, it should’ve started 10 years ago).

• Thinking less about the physical product.  Actual books as “dead trees” shouldn’t be the focus but more books should be the vehicle of great ideas which people will forever be attracted to.
• Applicable to marketing in all industries, he then ran though some solid strategy points -
  • Permission marketing – it’s about developing relationships, creating value and making marking (with permission) a two-way street
  • Scarcity – simply, if you have something of overwhelming value and cap access – it usually becomes more sought after
  • Selection related to risk – as a publisher, you want to be in a position to be finding writers for your readers instead of the other way around
  • Finally, it’s all about attention – if the tools and content you’re producing are creating overwhelming value for your audience, you’ll often hold their attention and, subsequently, their permission

Update:  Seth posted a change in direction for the Brands in Public project today.  In what I think is a smart move, if a brand wants to participate, it becomes opt-in and they must contact Squidoo directly.  All the pilot pages set-up for brands to adopt are now inactive.

With news breaking this week that the Old Gray Lady is dipping her toe in the lucrative hyperlocal news market and looking to breathe new life into a business that is being squeezed from all sides, Mike Davidson paints a completely different picture out in Seattle with the Post-Intelligencer grasping for air.

While the Times is hopefully heading in the right direction (towards turf that Baristanet and Patch are vying for as well), Mike points out some great ways any news service can become more relevant:

Getting smaller and staying local

Many privately held businesses and all publicly held ones require growth. It isn’t enough to turn a healthy profit every year. If your business isn’t growing, your management is questioned and your stock declines. The first step in keeping local news viable is realizing that it may not be much of a growth business, and it may be quite a bit smaller of a business than it has been in the past. These two factors do not bode well for the prospects of publicly held local news companies in the future. Imagine the P-I as something more along the lines of what Cory Bergman has built with his network of neighborhood blogs like My Ballard. I would argue a fully built-out neighborhood blog network like this is more valuable than what the P-I currently has. Nothing against the P-I’s website… it’s great… but it doesn’t pull me in as a citizen of my neighborhood. It’s a conventional mix of local stories that usually aren’t that local to me along with national stories I prefer to read on sites like msnbc.com instead.

Local news companies need to concentrate on creating communities of people who talk to each other, not just people who read the news and leave. Where you can connect people, you can make money.

Make something that’s worth paying for again

I may not pay for every author I happen to read on a daily basis, but there exists a collection of more than a few people on my blogroll who I would pay $5 a month to read, if it were exclusive. I’ve always been bearish on paid content as a model, mainly because you could usually do better with advertising, but with CPMs dropping through the floor, I’m not convinced that is necessarily the case anymore. What I’d like to see attempted is positioning a publication as more of a “discussion club”. Heck, maybe you even can read the content for free, but in order to join the discussion, you need to be a paid club member. With membership also comes social events around town, swanky garb, and other niceties to help you rationalize your modest membership fee. I always thought the New York Times should have done this with Times Select.

Bear in mind, I’m not suggesting just throwing up a pay wall. That would not work. The idea is creating bits of value — in addition to content — that people would gladly pay several bucks a month for.

Partner with your people

As a great business, your customers should be your best partners. In the case of news agencies, this doesn’t need to stop at readers evangelizing your publication for you. In many cases, they are actually willing to help you run it. Why have a staff of 150 when you can have a staff of 15 and engage your community to help produce a lot of the content? People like doing things that benefit their community. Make sure your business is seen as a way to do that.

The future of journalism may be in pro-am publishing

 

Be sure to click over and read Mike’s entire post.  Lots of great insight and comments not just on ways to “save the news” but also why this is happening in the first place.

There’s not much that hasn’t already been said about the findings from Pew on how young people are getting their news not so much directly from the source but from friends – through the filters of email, social networks and other tools. But with a few days perspective and the appearance of other stories that offer additional insights into similar stories a fuller picture can be painted of the latest water-line we’ve reached in the evolution of news and community.

Take for instance the increased focus on creating “appealing content” by journalists in the recent PRWeek/PR Newswire Media Survey. Add to that the 73 percent that now say they turn to blogs as part of their research efforts. Even if it is just to “measure sentiment” that’s a significant number of writers that new touch base with social media outlets in order to get a sense of what’s being said on a topic as they’re writing their own stories. And add to that the fact that more journalists are being tasked with re-purpose their stuff for online and you get a feeling that, even if the corporations they work for aren’t quite sure of where they need to go, the men and women in the trenches know exactly what they need to survive as both employees and media brands.

One group of writers that won’t be working harder are movie critics, an industry that continues to be decimated by cutbacks as movie conversations shift to blogs and fan sites. While there is a bit of a case to be made that the loss of professional critics will hurt smaller movies that need critical praise to survive, I don’t think the serious film community is exactly going to be hurt. Plenty of niche sites exist that appeal to this crowd and the better films still make it to mainstream sites.

I wonder, though, if that situation could have been avoided if the professional critics that looked down on fan enthusiasm had instead gotten in the conversation more and engaged with online writers. If they had spent some time building relationships and gotten to know people would that have led to more links back to their reviews, leading to more links back to the sites in general and so on. I don’t know if that would have been successful but it certainly would have done a lot to avoid the “critics are out of touch in their ivory towers” attitude that has become pervasive over the course of the last number of years.

You still have surveys showing print publications are more trusted than online sources, though honestly the data isn’t sliced and diced enough in this MediaVest survey to show how opinions might vary by age group.

One way some major media companies are attempting to do that is by partnering with niche publishers, most often with advertising or content networks. But these aren’t conversational tactics, their branding efforts. That’s better than nothing but it’s also limiting in some regards because there’s still no opportunity for interaction with the people behind the brands.

The Internet is changing how we pull content into our days and how we interact with that content. From the way we research obscure trivia to finding and donating to political campaigns to what we get for our concert ticket money our expectations of content availability to how we think journalists will find information.

There’s value in creating your own experience, though there’s also some in having an experience defined by so-called experts. But people are, because communications are no longer limited by geography or even niche interest, finding the experts most relevant to them and latching on tightly. And that shift is only going to increase as new technologies develop.

Because I like to extrapolate (it’s my second favorite thing to do after insinuating) from one vertical to another, this AdAge story on what women want out of the Internet certainly got my interest. It’s certainly filled with some interesting information on current trends of female behavior online and how traditional behaviors might be shifting or changing, all presented via graphics that, if they were static and not interactive, would not be out of place in People Magazine or Entertainment Weekly.

Aside from that, this sort of story could be written on just about any given demographic any given week. That’s how fast things are changing. That’s why blogs and the industry watchers and players who pound them out are so valuable to marketers. If you’re going to try to reach people where they are, then it makes sense to know where that is, no?

The audience, now more than ever, is a constantly moving target. If one tool stops meeting their needs they’ll move on. And the early adopters are never going to sit still long enough for you to get a bead on them.

So while trade mags like AdAge and others serve a great role in terms of providing context and in-depth reporting, for insights on consumer trends I’ll take blogs any day of the week. That’s especially true since those blogs are often written by people who are trying to dissect and analyze the data for themselves, making their perspective all the more relevant to the reader that’s trying to do the same thing.

Wanted to follow up my previous post on the evolution of the media landscape with another batch of stories in that same vein.

First, the Chicago Tribune has added 13 new communities to its TribLocal site, which lets people in those communities post news, photos and events. The only thing I think they can be doing better in this venture would be to let the people add communities at will, extending the reach of the site indefinitely instead of putting themselves in the position of allowing areas to be involved.

Second, John Frost at the Disney Blog says that the crew from the Orlando Sentinel live-Twittered the opening of a new attraction at Universal Studios Orlando. This might not bring down Twitter like all the live coverage of MacWorld did, but it is great to see a mainstream pub embracing insta-micro-publishing like this.

Next is a piece from Marc Glaser on how mainstream media outlets are slowly beginning to embrace their place in the conversation and allowing for more reader participation on their sites. The internal debate, he notes, is now not about whether things like comments should be allowed, but to what extent they need to be moderated. I stick to my contention that moderation is not an absolute evil as long as the policies regarding said moderation are clearly spelled out for everyone to see.

Lastly, the magazine industry has gotten some advice to start thinking of itself as a multi-platform content provider and not view the Internet simply as a way to bring in print subscriptions.

Last week a report was released showing the extent to which reporters and traditional journalists felt their field was being impacted by bloggers, citizen journalists and other new media creators.

According to the survey that formed the report, 74 percent of journalists say new media outlets have “very” or “somewhat” effect on the speed of the reporting they do. So we can conclude from that, it seems, that journalists are feeling the eyeballs being trained on them and are speeding up their processes in order to make sure they get the story first.

But only 43 percent (and I say “only” lightly since that’s a pretty good-sized chunk of respondents) say that new media has had similar levels of impact on the quality of news coverage. 56 percent say little to no impact on quality has been felt.

The story ends with the author of the study saying journalists are at the very least turning to blogs for context and new ideas or angles for their own coverage, a topic I opined on before, bemoaning the fact that while they may get ideas and information on blogs, they rarely link out to or otherwise credit the bloggers.

Whatever impact journalists might feel blogs and new media in general is having, the tea leaves are aligning in such a way that it’s impossible to not see the tidal wave rolling around the bend.

(Mixed metaphor skillz: I haz dem)

Consider that political blogger James Pindell is leaving the Boston Globe for ThePoliticker, a new national network of such blogs. At the site a series of state-specific blogs will be brought together to form national coverage of the political arena.

Or that The New York Times of all papers is now openly soliciting for user-submitted photos of polling places during the primaries.

Or that magazine publishers are increasing the number of online features like social networking, games, and videos they roll out each year that not only make the sites more sticky but also allow for some creation of content by the visitor.

Or that this election cycle is featuring an incredible amount of new-media/old-media partnerships as each outlet looks to tap the other’s audience.

In an interview with New York Times “Bits” blogger Saul Hansell, he makes the case that blogging is not so very different from traditional journalism, at least not in the tools themselves. It’s the person wielding the tools and how they’re used that make some blogs – or even individual posts on a blog – what they are. Hansell acknowledges that the journalism world has changed to some extent because of the ubiquity of online publishing tools but that the worth of the outlet is determined more by the content than it is by the platform that content is published through.

Former Newsweek CEO Rick Smith, on the other hand, isn’t thrilled with how so many people with such easy access to publishing tools has devalued the news his magazine and others traffic in. Smith says that so much of the media people are now consuming is made up of opinion and not facts that the reporting is losing importance to readers – and the advertisers who want to be attached to breaking news.

I find more agreement with Hansell’s comments then I do with anything else. It’s always the content and the intent of the writer that trumps everything else. If someone puts out good stuff – be it audio, video or text – it will gain an audience and be taken seriously. If the content they’re producing is found to provide better context, be more relevant or in some other way more deeply and meaningfully connect with the audience then it will win the battle for eyeballs.

Instead of complaining over the injustice of consumer-generated content taking readers away from the reporting an established outlet does, it would be better for those editors to look at what they might not be providing to the audience and seek to address that shortcoming. Change. Adapt. Improve.

But still let your readers and other experts participate in the conversation. Allow comments on story and look to see who’s linking to you. Despite all the resources a newspaper or magazine might have (at least those resources that have survived the most recent round of budget cuts) there’s still going to be someone out there with a different take on any given story. They might live in the neighborhood you’re covering and know what their Alderman has just said on an issue. They might work in the industry and know that X was a direct result of W.

Traditional media no longer exists in a vacuum. They have to compete harder than ever for readers and advertisers. But there’s too much “Well we’re better” being proclaimed and not enough “Well we’re better” being practiced. The determination of your quality – whether it be media, consumer-packaged goods or anything else – comes from the number of people who shell out their money for what it is you’re producing.

(Afterward: I had this all written when I saw this pop-up – “How to get a job in journalism.” Lots of good stuff in there for the aspirational.)

Add Shel Holtz to the list of bloggers writing industry opinion pieces for Brandweek. His first contribution is on using social media as a customer relations contact system and is, unsurprisingly, well worth reading.

A few months ago I got an email from an editor at Brandweek asking if I would be interested in contributing an occasional op-ed to the magazine’s Website. Always being interested in finding new and interesting outlets for my thoughts and seeing Brandweek as the opportunity to reach a large new audience, I jumped at the offer and have since contributed nine or so columns.

But I was not alone in getting this offer. Brandweek was, unbeknownst to me at the time, building up its roster of blogger contributors. If you hit the site, you’ll see a number of items headlined “Blogger X talks about…” and such.

Here’s the list of contributors to date, with more said to be coming soon:

• Me (Self-promotion skillz – I haz dem)
• George Parker: AdScam
• John Moore: Brand Autopsy
• Mark Stevens: Unconventional Thinking
• Paul Dunay: Buzz Marketing for Technology
• David Armano: Logic + Emotion
• Peter Kim: Being Peter Kim
• Maria Popova: STICK and MOVE

In addition to being bloggers, it should be noted that these people are also doers. They’re agency practitioners, they’re industry analysts. In short, these people are out there on the front lines of the social media marketing world, a perspective that greatly increases what they’re contributing.

But just the fact that Brandweek has decided to open up the gates to people who are knowledgeable and passionate about topics, passion they normally express on their personal sites, is a story in and of itself. By tapping bloggers who are also industry professionals as contributors, Brandweek has in its own way embraced the power of social media. Opinions and industry insights are not the sole domain of mainstream publications. And by offering some fresh voices to Brandweek readers, the magazine has made itself more valuable to those readers and garnered some goodwill in new media circles at the same time.

1/15 Update: I fixed the link to Maria Popova’s blog. Maria also pinged me with the following thoughts that she apparently tried to leave as a comment. I agree with what she has to say for the most part, there is room for improvement. But any start is a good one and I’m hopeful Brandweek – and anyone who engages in such outreach – will evolve their approach as time goes by and lessons are learned. Anyway, here are Maria’s comments:

First of all, right on about Brandweek’s effort to finally embrace social media and move away from old-school “suits” marketing. Secondly, there’s a “but”: if they’re going to tap social media, they have to adhere to the implicit rules of the game. There’s nothing “social” about their blogger posts, they’re so user-unfriendly you have to go out of your way to see, say, what else this blogger wrote. Even the basics, like “love-links” and such, are either messed up or entirely missing.

• AdAge: Down is the New Flat for Magazines
• MediaBuyerPlanner: Newspapers Suffer Most in Ad Dollars Lost to the Internet
• Creative Loafing: Old media meets new realities at the AJC
• Jon Fine/BW: When Do You Stop the Presses?

I’m sure there’s absolutely new trend that can be determined, no matter how hard you might look, by the appearance of these stories, which only represent what I saw in one day. Move along. Nothing to see here…