applying marketing focus to journalism

On page 129 Jordan Gold speaks generally about moving print content online. When picking out this particular segment of Gold’s interview I must have misread what was actually being said, since nothing of real essence is brought to the table in this short excerpt. However if we take a closer look at the few substantial statements Gold does make on page 129, taking the rest of the interview in consideration, it still becomes clear that Gold is a person that knows his field, obviously
Something I did find interesting here was the topic of applying marketing focus to journalism, i.e. with an online headline you are no longer just telling what’s in the article, instead you’re marketing the article. Gold doesn’t fully agree with this and remarks that it’s always been about making good leads to draw people in, in both print and in web journalism. It’s not clear if this means that he has always considered headlining to be a form of marketing, or if he has never considered it at all, though I think it’s implied that he’s leaning towards the later. He does however make the distinction of drawing a person into an article and drawing a person to clicking a link, and to me this is the fundamental difference between print and online journalism. If you already have a newspaper in front of you, it doesn’t take even half the effort to get you to read the article, however if you have to click a link to see the article, if you actually have to take action to get to the article, so much more interest has to have been awaken to get you to do it, especially if you happen to have a slow Internet connection. To me this is where it starts being about marketing the article. Instead of making the headline a compact summary of the article, as so the case in traditional print journalism, it’s about creating a buzz of interest. A buzz big enough to make a user click the link. Is this then really still pure journalism? Well obviously not in its purest form, but starting a discussion of what journalism really is about is an endless one. However something else of interest here is how Gold relates web headlining to the one on the cover of traditional magazines, and now when thinking about it, the similarities are really obvious, wondering how this has never passed my mind before. Magazines have been using the same type of half mysterious headlines with that higher drawing power on their covers for ages, trying to get people to buy them and open them up, on the same way online headlines want people to click their links. The transition for magazines to the online world should therefore not be a very hard one. I believe the only thing holding publishers back from transferring from print to web is the fear that Gold speaks about in his interview, the fear of the web not being sustainable.

Converting Old Media Contents to New Media (last Q of p. 124)

Hello, Prof. Amblee and friends. Now, I am in Detroit for 2008 Public Relations Society of America annual conference, and this morning, Craig Newmark from Craiglists, which our professor mentioned in the class, delivered a speech.

One of Craig's key message was he simply "listen what they want/need," and match the service. In our textbook, the question is about converting newspaper content for online consumption. Gold replied it got to be changed by adding video, audio, etc., to make it more web friendly. More and more newspaper companies adapt this change.

However, if we look at magazine industry, they are behind, esp. in Korea. There could be a reason for that. Compared to the newspaper, still, people may want to read magazine through paper, rather than web, however, still, magazine industry should seriously look at how they can adapt online technologies. Their website does not tell story properly, and few research is done for this.

Another area that media companies are not good at converting their content into online consumption in Korea is trade publication. Probably, this might be related to the budget issue. At the same time, experts in each industry, deliver up to dated, and in depth news/opinions through their blog, so, it is "replacing" trade publication.

My thinking is that trade publication, sports/entertainment newspaper will need to move to online faster than general dailies, which will have a much longer life of paper version.

Page 130 First Question

The Web audience is growing at a great speed, while print circulation is not. And online revenues are growing faster, too. If the trend continues, I think there’s little doubt that eventually online becomes the main business. Advertising plays a key role for the development of online newspaper or books business. This type of Ads is quite different. The online newspaper business need to build a community of interest where people coming in and tend to buy books. To take a newspaper and putting it online is not interesting in the internet sense. The firms have to do more like on the site with news, there needs a video or Audio as well to run it with the simplest player. The headlines should be written in such a way that looks interesting to readers. the length may be change etc.This means that the firms are customer focused and customers can visit easily and happily to the site. The headlines are web friendly plus quizzes, contests, voting etc need to be developed. In the past few years, newspaper companies have been rapidly expanding their Web presence - adding blogs, slide shows and podcasts in the belief that if they built it, advertisers would come. As for the blogs and video content that the site is adding, "those investments will definitely add to advertising revenue.

P105 Greg Jaboe: Optimization

The question is about important of optimization that works for the company. Greg Jarboe shows Google as a case of optimization. Before 2003, Google search page and news ware totally separated field. In early 2003 to 2007, Google was optimizing content for Google news and they put Google news in search page. For example, if you search for “Hillary Clinton.” And scan down the results, you see a little photo somewhere around the fourth listing, in the section labeled New Results. New Results link is news that coming Google news. Google always tries to figure user’s POV. And they improve and optimize content for practicality.

I think optimization is very important issue for the company. The firm needs to improve or develop a research system for analyze product or site. Optimization should accomplish by POV of user.

Drawing People to Online Content, page 128

On page 128 Jordan Gold promotes the idea of special “online headlines” that are constructed especially to drive a click from the reader. The headlines are such as “The 10 Things You Should Never Do at Work” (which if you ask me is not so much just an inviting headline as it is an interesting topic) and “Eagles Release ProBowl Linebacker” (which is withholding information to force the curious user to click).

Frankly, I think it’s kind of stupid to use misleading headlines, such as the second example, to “cheat” an extra click from the visitors. Clicks themselves aren’t worth anything, what you want as a website is for people to spend time on the website. Tricking people into unwanted clicks is just inflating the numbers. To me, the only reason that people are measuring clicks and not time spent on sites is that it’s too hard to make an accurate measurement of time spent.

Apart from cheating the numbers (and the advertisers who trust in them) I also think that this practice is a disservice to the website itself. In Sweden we have a website called Aftonbladet.se which is basically an evening paper that’s grown into the biggest news website in Sweden. Up until a while ago they often used very misleading headlines which sometimes had you wondering if you’d clicked the right news item. For me it got so annoying I even stopped visiting the website, because it was just too much work digging through all the rubbish to find what I was really interested in.

On a sidenote, they seem to have changed this practice now, and, if I may guess, their newly introduced user comments functionality may have something to do with it. On the news items with misleading headlines the comments were often filled with angry people bashing the website and its writers (who, coming from an evening paper background, are constantly fighting a reputation of being relatively unserious about journalism and the truth). This may be an interesting example of a website using the community functionality not only as a service to users, but also as a means of communication from its users.

We also spoke briefly about how Gold’s headline conviction contradicts that of Greg Jarboe, whose interview we read last week, and Heather Lloyd-Martin in the second interview we read this week. The two believe that headlines should be constructed to be easily found by search engines, thus to the point and containing keywords relevant to the article.

I think website owners should only worry about the users – provide a good service and people will link your website. If anything, the one thing the Internet does is shift power towards the “little people” – the users. I believe that when you have them, the rest will follow.

link building - the fundamental essence of the web

On page 114 Eric Ward speaks about link building as the fundamental essence of the web. The World Wide Web is basically a web of links. Although this may seem very trivial, Ward did manage to get me thinking when posing the question, “does a website exist if nobody links to it”? I found this to have something of a philosophical cling to it, something in style with, “if a tree falls down in the forest and there's nobody around to hear it fall, does it make a sound”? Okay this is kind of wandering into the roam of philosophy and the topic of existence, but I still find it to be somewhat relevant. Can something exist without being perceived? As this however is a topic that can be discussed forever, let’s quickly bring it back on track and leave it at as Ward puts it in the very beginning of the chapter: No matter how much time or money you spent on it, a website is invisible until somebody links to it. Users can only get to a website if they know that it exists. This mere fact makes link building as fundamental as the links themselves and Ward manages to emphasize the importance of link building in the online world of PR and marketing. In the offline world a store's at least something physical, so even without any publicity it could still catch some passing-byers and then rely on word of mouth to make it's existence known. In the online world, there are no passing-byers. If a website isn’t linked to the web, it simply isn’t part of the web; it doesn’t exist. Of course the URL could be entered directly, but again the same problem, the user has to know the URL to be able to enter it. It has to be made known, whether it be through online or offline advertising or word of mouth.
Ward mentions two different approaches to link building, the white and the black hat approach. I’ve never really understood why the black hat approach, more known as spam, is still being used until now, especially when everybody hates it. But after reading Wards thoughts about link building, it suddenly makes a little bit more sense why spam is still kept alive. As long as somebody clicks the link, and there will always be a couple that do, no matter how few, it can be seen as success. Cause if the users that clicks through find the website to satisfy their needs, the website owners can rely on word of mouth to make the website known, turning the black hat approach over to a white hat. I'm sure that finding the right channels for building your links is strategically better choice, but I can imagine the desperation of just wanting to get yourself out there. Link building is basically just making your website known and connecting it to the web.

Old PR and Results/Sales Measurement(p. 100)

I really enjoyed reading Jarboe interview as a PR practitioner. Indeed, PR is changing, and PR people are nervous, in a sense, and little bit confused out of this whole change. Basically, Jarboe showed an example where he made a linkage between publicity results and actual sales. This is great, but, we(maybe Jarboe too) have to understand a bigger context.

While there are many ways to categorize PR, here, we need to keep in mind that PR has two subjects: Organization and Product. Traditionally, PR has been 'organizational image marketing' and in 1990s, with the trend of IMC(Integrated Marketing Communication) and a popularity of MPR(Marketing PR), PR has been leveraged in product marketing. In reality, normally, marketing PR budget comes out of marketing budget, while corporate PR budget is allocated separately.

In this interview, Jarboe talks about product PR, not corporate PR, and I agree, if it can, it is better to show the value of PR in terms of $. But, PR shouldn't and wouldn't limit itself to only product marketing PR. Rather, in this age where trust becomes an important corporate asset, businesses would require PR to do more of corporate side of activities.

Question on Page 118

Link Building is an important issue of the web. With the help of link building researchers, scientists, Academics can find out documents very easily. The basic purpose of www is that it is a web of links where any body can link to anything. It is important that links have relevancy which means to place links on relevant sites and pages. The link must be replaceable if the site owner are unhappy with the link and there the exact location, text and description are need to build the link on a site.
Some links are more valuable than others like a site which have the links of some popular website or search engines. The links of sending emails in the form of newsletters say yahoo, MSN etc are very useful because a lot of visitors can see it. Every site has their own potential depending on own linking and its subject matter. Paying for a link is not so much big issue I think because when you pay more the link will also be more popular like links of Cnn.com, ESPN.com, BBc.com etc.The high value links can improve the ranking of a site. If some Art work is included to links that is also a factor of ranking.
Link building is one of the solutions that help in providing high search engine page ranking and improved visibility to a website. For any professional web developer, link building forms the backbone of SEO (Search engine optimization) operations that helps in bringing quality web traffic to your website. I think Link building is an efficient way of enhancing the popularity of a website. To avail the benefit of link building, create genuine and information rich back links that are useful to clients. Make sure that the links are keyword rich that help in boosting the web traffic of website.

Writing Press Releases for the Consumers, page 101

Greg Jarboe has a very practical view on press releases, as is shown in his answer on page 101 (and 102). He preaches optimization of press releases so that they will be found by consumers searching the Internet.

In the interview, he gives a very long answer, but most of it is spent on two extensive examples. There is really not that much substance and Jarboe basically only makes this one point: Plant common search phrases in your press releases so that it will be found by searching consumers.

It really seems to be that simple, and it probably is. However, I think that Jarboe missed the point of the question somewhat, Miller asked “[...] you’re writing a release to be read by the consumer. How does that change the press releases you create?”

Jarboe extensively explains how to get found by consumers, but does not spend a second on how to address them. Press releases are traditionally not very entertaining and follow a certain style that is aimed at journalists, offering quotes and background information to fill up an article. For an ordinary consumer this is not the most effective way of finding information.

Personally, even when looking for information and a press release turns up, I don’t read press releases, unless I’m pretty desperate. If there is a sale – put it on the front page and I will see it.

What I’m slowly getting to is that I don’t think press releases is a good way of communicating with consumers. I believe companies should separate the press releases that they send the press to be forwarded further and what’s essentially just news for and directly to consumers.

Regarding Jarboe’s answer, there is little to add. If you want customers to pick up your press release and read it, they obviously need to find it, and with the amount of press releases being thrown out there being easily found in searches is essential. The question is how effective traditional press releases really are in communicating with customers and how much they really affect sales.

Greg Jarboe on the importance of blogs in PR

When a company wants to get some new information out to the public, they usually publish a press release. The press release then, hopefully, gets picked up by some media and reaches the public. When you talk about media you usually mean newspapers, magazines, TV and more recently news webpages.
I wrote that the press release “hopefully” will get picked up. Well that might make it sound like its all about luck, that’s not completely true. All companies have a PR staff, and ne of their jobs is to make sure the press releases gets picked up by the viable media. I’m not going to go in to how they do this because it’s too off topic. Anyhow, lets say you get allot of hits on your press release and you want to know from what media most of the hits was referred. This is of course very valuable information for the PR staff, so they can know what media to target harder next time.
Oki, back to the topic. There is a new type of news media now days, namely the blogs and podcasts. But, as Jarboe points out, many companies haven’t realized this fact yet. Jarboe really emphasise the importance of blogs. His company made some research for other companies to see where the traffic to the press release came from, and it turned out that in many cases blogs contributed with more traffic than big news organizations.
I have to say that I’m actually not surprised by this. I think it has to do with what type of reader sees the different media. The newspaper might have a hundred times more readers than the blog, however only a small percent of those readers are actually interested in the topic of the press release. With the blog it’s a different story. Blogs are usually specified into one area, so the readers of the blog are more likely to be interested in your information. Another aspect that is in favour for the blogs is the trust issue. Big news media are very faceless or anonymous. With blogs you know that there is an actual person, maybe allot like yourself, writing the content. Of course actual persons write the news for the newspaper as well, but I hope you can see the distinction. My point is that if you follow a certain blog regularly, you are very likely to value the bloggers opinion and thus very likely to read about the things he/she writes about.

P78 Tamara Adlin: adlin, inc.How do you measure success?

“I think customer experience should be a consistent focus in an organization.”

In this Adlin’s question, he didn’t deal with essential meaning of success. He wants to tell elements that help the firm in control. Most people are interested in measuring ROI (Return on investment) but condition of present and future is more important issue for the firm. If you can figure out problems of company in process, product and communication, then you can easily measure success. Quicken finding problem in product which could mean the web site can bring better communications between marketing and product development and able to help an executive team to make a quick decision. Adlin said all of these things impact a company’s ability to satisfy their customers.

I agree with Adlin’s idea but I think the answer doesn’t match to the question. I think measuring success is calculation of profit. Figuring out the problems of product is important but the firm should see expansive review of problem in social, economic and political matter. Once the firm is in stabilization, it is easy to make a profit.

competition in today's online market

So on page 16 Greg Hartnett speaks of the differences of starting up a web business today compared to the early days of the Internet, and initially brings up how the online market has gotten dramatically more competitive over the years, which, no offense to Hartnett, is kind of obviously logical. Back in the early days of the Internet nobody really knew what to make of it. The future of the Internet was extremely clouded, and I can imagine there were many that thought it was just a fad that wouldn’t last. Of course with few players entering the market, it didn’t leave much competition and I can imagine that many of the pioneers did fairly well, which probably lifted the whole “it’s just a fad” thought and triggered the boom. And with the whole boom and bursting of the bubble, I think the online business roam reached that stage of stability that any technology or market eventually reaches. Everything kind of swings into place. There are now the few strong players, which any new enterer has to compete with. And I don’t think competing with branding, whether it be in the brick- and mortar roam or WWW branding, is ever easy, ergo the market has become a lot more competitive.

Hartnett’s advice to be more specific makes a lot of sense in a market where I believe most general grounds have been covered since long ago. Because I think competing with the big guys, which consumers of course always will prefer, is closer to impossible than to hard. One of the fundamentals of marketing is offering something that your competitors don’t have, and the big guys most likely have a whole lot more than a new enterer could ever offer. But since the big players mostly cover a very broad consumer base, niching makes a lot of sense in a strategically marketing approach. I think the number of niches out there is endless. I think there’ll always be a market seeking those very specific products, no matter how niched. So instead of thinking big and instead strategically targeting these smaller chunks of the market is the best way to success, as it is in any competitive environment. And there’s nothing that would stop you from expanding to other niches once you’ve conquered a market, and on this way slowly taking down the big guys.

What I found rather interesting is what Hartnett brings up about search engine marketing. He sees niching as the way to go because of the growing value of search engines, and I just realized the logic in this marketing approach. Any new online business that targets a too general market has no chance of competing with the big players in a search engine query. If a potential consumer types in a query that’s too general, of course the results will be more than covered by the existing businesses. However, if the newbie targets a specific niche, I believe they have more than a fair chance to catch those potential consumers searching for that specific niche. Since most Internet users go through search engines in their online browsing, niching is most likely the best way to compete in today’s online market.

Issue of Persona (75-76)

Tamara Adlin suggested "persona" perspective while approaching your web marketing. A few thoughts on this:

1/ Her job is interesting, customer experience consulting. I think her notion of 'persona' all boils down to the basic: look at your marketing from a customer POV, rather than company POV. She noted "I think that far too many companies just look at it page by page by page, so the site ends up being not so pleasant to use"(p. 76) Too many websites focus on fancy design, emphasize their strengthes, but, not considering user's persona/experience.

2/ If I can borrow Adlin's term, I think now company also should think about "their persona". What this means, with the web 2.0, through web, companies need to share 'conversation' not just promoting their strengthes. To share the conversation, companies no longer should build impersonal website, but, web conversation channel with personality. One of the strategies to do this is to showing a real person(employee) when sharing conversation through the web. For example, corporate blogs these days, upload contents with a real people's voice, rather than "Dell", company name.

3/ As Patrik pointed out below, persona, if it took too narrowly, it could have a risk. So, companies should have a balance between the use of statistics and persona.

Tamara Adlin on "personas" - page 73-74

Tamara Adlin talks about how a site can improve their customer experience. The main thing she points out is that you shouldn’t think in terms of “users” or “customers”, but instead what she calls personas. Personas are basically an imaginary person of a certain sex, age, income, etc. Adlin proposes that personas give a much clearer picture of what is needed to improve customer experience. She makes a good example, instead of having a segment, like 35- to 45-year-old women who live in the suburbs, you have the persona Maryanne. Maryanne is 37, lives in Bellevue, has two kids and not allot of time for shopping, etc.
I definitely see her point, and agree that personas probably is a better way to approach the issue. However, I see a risk of getting too focused. If you dig down too low you might end up with a service that is perfect for Maryanne, but at the same time is completely horrible for anyone who doesn’t fit the very narrow persona that is Maryanne. Also, if you want to make a service for more than one persona, you will probably have allot of trouble satisfying everyone without some more general view. I feel that it’s still viable to think in broader terms as users and customers but in combination with the personas.

Adlin also talks allot about the importance that everyone in the company has a very clear picture of who their customers are. Her style for making this happen is by starting at the top, with the shareholders, executives and other influential personnel. This way all directives going down will already be focused on the target.
I can’t do anything else than agree on this point. When you are selling a product or a service, the most important thing is to know who is going to buy it. If you fail at this point, your company will most likely not exist for very long. So everyone working inside the company needs to be very clear about who your buyer is. If for example the CEO has one perception of whom the buyer is and then sends down directives to a lower level manager who has another perception, well anyone can understand that this will cause problems.

Using the Competition, page 77

I chose this question in Adlin’s interview mainly because I think he broke a tough taboo when saying that he looks at “competitive web sites as version 1.0 of our redesign”. Stealing, or even just being inspired, by competitors, is, according to my background, not something that we speak loudly about. Still, it’s obviously impossible not to be influenced by what your competitors are doing, and if there is a competitor’s idea that users love, you too need to supply them with it to stay in the competition.

It’s too bad the question (and thus also Adlin’s answer) is focused on the usability aspect, and not the competition itself. I agree with Adlin that with regard to usability competitors may be used to learn from. However, you can’t really copy usability without copying an entire web site. It’s the context – not individual details – that decides whether or not a web site is easy to use or not. Sure, certain features, such as perhaps Amazon’s one click buy (had it not been patented), can be picked up, but to me that is not about usability but features and services.

Something I’d like to have seen Adlin discuss is how a company should really act in the online community. When people can easily communicate with each other and with companies, the company’s personality may become a greater issue than it has been up till now.

For example, if customers (and general Internet users) realize that a company is copying other companies it will affect how people see that company. Also the number of people who actually realize that the company is copying other companies will be greater due to the ease of communication online.

What I’m getting at, though perhaps a little off topic, is that when people really start talking with and about companies’ and the way they act (such as has increasingly been the case in blogs), having a good social image may become more important to companies.

Personally I think that companies need to pay extra attention to the ethics of their actions, and the way in which the public will interpret their actions. It would have been interesting to see how Adlin thinks a company should relate to its competition online with this in mind.