Four social media lessons from the New York Times
For years the doomsayers have predicted – and in some cases even rooted for – the demise of the New York Times. Print advertising revenues plummeted. Ownership of and overpayment for papers like the Boston Globe drained resources. Endless digital real estate diminished the value of every online property’s available ad space.
But the Times isn’t doing all that badly at the moment. For the first time in a long time total ad revenues stayed flat rather than falling. In fact in its most recent quarter, digital ad revenue jumped 21 percent. Operating profit doubled and an improved cash situation gives the paper more time to plot a strategy for real growth. Given that the recent good news comes in a miserable economy, I’m betting the venerable paper pulls it off.
If you look at the Times from another perspective – that of partnerships, social media behavior, and content – the company’s actually a shining example of how to hold onto core values and evolve at the same time.
Here are four things it’s done that serve as examples for any traditional company, including advertising agencies.
Get over the not invented here syndrome
For more than a couple of years now the Times has offered up content from a number of new sources that in earlier days would never have justified an appearance under the masthead. But there they are: ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm and other blogs’ content front and center on the Technology page. Stop there once a day and you practically have a centralized source of content. Granted it’s filtered by the Times, but there’s only so much filtering you want to do on your own anyway.
Lesson: There are plenty of great sources of content outside your walls and beyond that generated by your staff. Why not take advantage of it, whether it’s for your company blog, the blogs you maintain for clients, a YouTube channel, or any of the other places you need content?
Embrace change and new technology as fast as you can
OK, perhaps the Times hasn’t always been lightning speedy at this, but in the last couple of years they’ve done a pretty decent job. Case in point is their iPad app. Not only were they among the very first publications to have one, it was well thought out with a clean, simple interface and just the right amount of content for a pad. All the sharing you need is built in. And while its elegant lacquer-black type on the iPad’s white linen background presents the ideal screen experience, their standby iPhone app’s not bad either. I’ve read 5000 word magazine articles on the thing.
Lesson: Create utility. Make your brand available everywhere. Consider the context in which the user is engaging.
Be social in every way possible
I like how the Times does this, too. Times People is what every brand with customers or subscribers should do: introduce them to each other. It’s a benefit to users. It helps to spread content around. And it gives readers an added reason to come back and share what they find. The Times also does a pretty good job on Twitter. They’ve created their own lists of writers by category, and even gathered recommended lists of other writers and bloggers by categories that include technology, the arts, opinion and more. They don’t always engage as much as they should, but it’s still a valuable feed to keep you informed. Need someone interesting to follow? Go grab a new list.
Lesson: Take advantage of all the social tools and tactics. Market your employees and their content. Gather your company’s social presence and make it easily accessible to customers and prospects.
Great content wins out in the end
Want to know the reason that properties like the Times along with other content creators of note (including great creative advertising agencies) will always prevail? Quality content. Not only does the Times continue to deliver stuff you want to read, they’ve done a damn good job covering the very topic we’re talking about right here: digital technology and social media. Consider two great examples from the last week alone. One on whether Twitter encourages a distortion of who we really are. A second on whether the digital age diminishes originality and encourages plagiarism. Great stuff that will keep you thinking.
Lesson: Don’t abandon the core values that got you where you are. Just bring them to life in new places and apply them to relevant subjects.
What do you think? Is the Times doing it right? Can you replicate any of their practices? Will the “paper” survive?
10 reasons to keep on blogging
Do we still need to blog? We have Twitter and Facebook where we can publish, connect, engage and debate with an update and a like button. Foursquare and Plancast let us inform the world of our whereabouts and our gonna be’s. Posterous and Tumblr give us the option to lifestream in a freestyle way. All of these alternatives are easier and less time consuming than posting on a regular basis.
But over the last couple of years I’ve found the advantages of blogging in a structured manner far outweigh the commitment of time and energy. Here’s why I’m doing it. If you stop by here frequently regularly, I’d love to hear your reactions. And if you’re a blogger as well, I’m curious what drives you to continue.
Focus your thinking
Interestingly the best reason to write doesn’t have to do with reaching an audience. Blogging helps you think more clearly, explore a subject, develop a point of view and reach conclusions. We carry an inordinate number of disparate thoughts around in our brains. Sometimes writing them down, editing them and challenging your own thinking is invaluable.
Find your tribe
Ben Malbon once told me he wants to work with the smartest people in the world and they obviously can’t all work for his company. So he has to find them somewhere else. Blogging by nature connects you to those who think about the same stuff you think about. You write a piece; someone posts it on Twitter; someone else sees the link, reads it and comments — possibly referencing another writer you’d find interesting — and your tribe has just grown.
Discover better sources of content
In an age of sharing, participation and conversation, you quickly realize that a blog is not a discrete property, rather it’s part of a larger eco-system, connected via readers, other bloggers who explore the same topics, and comment streams that start in one place and move across the web. All of which provide you with links to additional content that makes you smarter.
Learn from your readers
This is perhaps my favorite aspect of blogging. Rarely do I write something that doesn’t get modified, added to, or questioned by someone. Could be a regular reader who’s comfortable calling me out, or a first time visitor who’s inspired to share something I don’t know about. You might be lucky enough to find someone like Ben Kunz to show up and challenge your every premise.
Understand inbound marketing
This is an added benefit. But in an age when outbound advertising is getting less and less effective, blogging is an opportunity to learn all about SEO, inbound links, search results and analytics. You know when a post works, whether it gets attention, and how long someone has spent with it. Spend just a small amount of time on learning this stuff and you have a new language and set of skills that increases your value to clients.
Develop content
If you’re someone who has to speak or present frequently, blogging gives you a head start on any material you have to create. Inevitably your past posts become the foundation and themes for presentations, talks and panels. They also become an opportunity to crowdsource ideas, answers, suggestions and get your readers to actually help you out.
Build your business
This is not a for-profit enterprise, but it’s helped prospective clients discover both me and Mullen and it’s also been a marketing tool for the agency’s new business efforts. You can’t very well claim to have much expertise in the digital space or in social media if you’re not using it yourself. A blog that gets read and referred to helps to convince clients you know what you’re talking about.
Experiment and fail
You can try things with a blog that you can’t necessarily put into practice in real life. Post something crazy, rant a little, proffer a hypothesis and see what kind of reaction it gets. It’s also a chance to say things that turn out to be stupid and wrong. What the hell? It’s just a blog.
Preserve your stream
This is a topic worthy of numerous posts. We still don’t own our own streams. Sure you have your status updates and online photos. But if you really want a stream of your entire life you’d need not only your status but your health, expenses, music, travel and thoughts aggregated in one easily accessible place. Not gonna happen for a while. A blog at least gives you a historic reference that you own and control. A great way to look back at what you were thinking and when.
Helps you avoid watching television
If you’ve read Clay Shirky’s new book, you know this basic premise: for the last 60 years, watching television has occupied the majority of our free time. Amazing to think that after generations of really working that all most of us did with the post war boom’s gift of free time was watch TV. Anyway, one of the best things about all things social is that it turns us into creators instead of passive spectators. May save us from getting Alzheimers. Blogging may take time, but there’s plenty of time available if you turn off the tube. You won’t be missing much.
There’s actually an 11th reason. Blogging is a chance to give something back: knowledge, advice, experience, or just your sense of humor. Somewhere along the line plenty of people must have helped you out. Why not do a little digital mentoring from your keyboard as a way of paying it forward?
What about you? Worth the time, energy and effort?
You don’t need a gigantic network to create, experiment and succeed
I was excited today to make a small donation to The Bucket Brigade, a project that might actually end up a book; presuming Bud Caddell’s attempt at crowdfunding its publication raises enough money.
According to Bud’s Kickstarter pledge page, if he manages to solicit $5000 from his social media friends and followers, he’ll have enough cash to take time off to write and pay an editor to help him complete what he promises will be directions for how to profit in the “attention economy.”
It’s my guess that Bud will raise his money in no time. And I hope this post helps in some small way. Bud’s experiment – in his words he’s “trying to prove that there’s more value in our networks than we can even fathom” – is the epitome of what new social media platforms like Kickstarter and Kachingle or old ones like Twitter and Facebook allow us to do.
We live in an age when anyone can publish, broadcast, design a product or start a movement. The only thing stopping us is fear, inertia or lack of a network. If Bud raises his $5000.00 – in $25 and $100 increments – it will be one more reminder of how much power has shifted to the individual.
Bud has 5000 followers on Twitter. That’s a pretty good number, though a far cry from a Chris Brogan. He has a blog that gets between 4,000 and 12,000 visits a month. That’s influence, but it’s not Seth Godin. I point that out as a reminder that you don’t have to be Brogan, or Godin or Gary Vaynerchuk to make things happen.
Sheena Matheiken’s The Uniform Project raised over $100,000 to send kids in India to school. Its Facebook fan page has 7,400 “likes,” while it’s Twitter followers number just over 5,900.
Erik Proulx, with his blog and his supporters on Twitter, was able to produce Lemonade the movie and get started on Lemonade Detroit. Erik has a similar number of followers and blog readers to Bud.
When you get started in social media – one person among millions, with nothing more than a Twitter account and no clear set of instructions – it seems unlikely that you can actually accomplish all that much. But you can. If you follow the examples of Bud, Sheena and Erik – engage, give, share, create, experiment – you’ll be surprised at what you can do.
Got other really good examples of what individuals have done by gathering a community, building a network and trying something ambitious? Please share here. And as always,thanks for reading.
Surround yourself with people who give you energy
When John Winsor talks I usually listen
Yesterday I had yet another invigorating conversation with John Winsor, founder or Victor & Spoils, committed co-creationist, and author of Flipped.
John and I seem to feed off of one another’s passion and ideas. We rarely have a conversation that doesn’t leave us each energized and thinking about new possibilities.
In fact, John called when I was at mile 45 of a 60-mile ride. I usually don’t take calls from anyone but my wife or kids when I’m screaming along a country road. But when my mobile screen said it was John on the line, I pulled over, unclipped and welcomed the interruption.
As far as I’m concerned there are only two kinds of people in business: those you want to avoid, and those with whom you want to surround yourself. The former sucks energy out of you by complaining, criticizing and making excuses. The latter infuses your imagination with fresh thinking, interesting ideas, and a contagious enthusiasm for what’s possible.
John ranks high among the latter. While he has chosen to leave the traditional advertising agency environment in an attempt to invent the new one, he rarely wastes time condemning the past, instead celebrating the potential of what’s next. He may be determined to change the business from outside a mainstream agency, but he never fails to encourage my efforts to change it from within. He gleefully shares his plans, solicits mine, and turns every conversation into a productive exchange about how to do things better.
Ten minutes without pedaling should have slowed my heart rate significantly. Instead, after listening to John’s excitement about his newest investor, the continued momentum of Victors & Spoils, and the knowledge he’d gathered about crowdsourcing platforms and co-creation technology (which, by the way he willingly agreed to send me in support of a project I’m trying to get underway) I found myself even more pumped up.
I think one of the greatest things about the new digital platforms that let us connect, share, discover and expand our tribes is that we can find sources of inspiration anywhere.
If the person in the cubicle next to you is a downer, if the colleague across the lunch table likes to complain, blow them off. Get out here among the passionate, energized, enthusiastic people who believe the possibilities are endless. You can always start with @jtwinsor.
Who injects you with energy and ideas? Introduce me to him or her.
Panera introduces “take all you need, pay what you can”
It’s only on occasion that I write something specific on this blog about Mullen or our clients. But once in a while there’s something too good to pass up. This week’s move by Panera Bread to open a “community café,” that allows people to “take what they need and give all they can,” is a case in point.
I don’t need to tell you too much, as the story is pretty much everywhere. In a nutshell, Panera opened a new non-profit store in the St. Louis suburb of Clayton. It looks and feels like any Panera except the prices are different. There aren’t any. You pay what you feel is fair or whatever you can afford.
According to Ron Shaich, Panera’s Chairman (he just resigned his CEO position to head up this new initiative) this is something he’s wanted to try for a long time.
A skeptic could come up with any number of reasons to question a project like this. It doesn’t make good business sense. It could eat into business at the for-profit stores. It’s not a long-term growth strategy. An optimist, on the other hand, might argument that it’s brilliant. Showing that Panera cares about the community. Conveying it’s a brand with a social conscience. Endearing itself to the thousands of customers who won’t merely patronize the café but will turn into vocal advocates for the idea.
This week’s Fast Company declared that the most important leadership quality a CEO can possess is creativity. Not operations. Not finance. Not management. Creativity. Creativity means breaking with the status quo, trying things that have never been done, innovating on a regular basis. And in the case of Panera, and Ron Shaich, following your heart.
Here’s to hoping this little experiment works and inspires more brands to be equally inventive.
