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Social Media and Traditional Organizations

Who owns Social Media?

What consultant can offer advice?

What department should be in charge of Social Media?

These are questions that I have heard a number of times of late, first at Third Tuesday in Toronto and most recently, today in a post in Media Bullseye by Jay Moonah. I know Jay well, he worked with me at Canoe some years ago.

We talk a lot about Social Media marketing in the paradigm of traditional media. Social Media is about flipping the old paradigm on its head, not just tweaking it. You can’t hire a Social Media expert and WHAM! - we are now doing Social Media marketing.

Social Media marketing needs to begin inside the organization. How receptive is your organization to sharing, communicating and connecting?  If an organization is not ready to share internally, it isn’t ready to jump into the Social Media marketing game.

Would your organization allow the traditional company newsletter to become an internal blog? Maybe even with anonymous comments and guest staff writers?

Would any employee be allowed to have a blog and write about personal and business issues?

These are just a couple of the many questions that an organization needs to ask itself before even contemplating Social Media marketing. If the answer is generally no, then the organization is not ready and no amount of advice or ownership will help.

Social Media communication is about openness and openness is infectious. You can’t just share with your customers and not with your staff. In today’s organizations, many departments don’t know anything about what’s happening in other departments. Too often when I’m interacting with organizations, I find myself informing employees about what’s going on in their organization.

Did you know that such-and-such has left the organization? “No”, says the employee.

I understand that you will no longer be supporting “x” product. “I didn’t know that.” says the employee.

In too many organizations, things are held close to the chest in upper management. Not much is shared with staff. How could such organizations be prepared to share with the community at large when they can’t share with their own staff?

Let’s move the conversation to socializing our traditional organizations, before they can tackle Social Media marketing.

And the answer to the above questions?  Everyone in the organization!

Comparing Traditional and Online Advertising CPM Rates

I constantly hear about CPM (Cost Per Thousand) rate comparisons between online and offline media. It’s like comparing apples and cereal. And, it’s not as if these comparisons are being made by non-media people; they should know better. This only serves to complicate things for buyers and the industry at large. Let’s look at the pieces:

Audience vs. Watchers or Listeners

In broadcast, television and radio, CPM represents audience members based on differing means of measurement. Diaries and metres are the two most common. Measurement methodology aside, (that’s a whole other blog post) this means that CPM is based on the number of people that are supposedly tuned in to a program and therefore the ad in question. Of course, no one really knows if anyone was in the room. Anyway, the broadcast CPM represents 1000 audience members. Odds are that the actual number of watchers or listeners is significantly less than that.

Readership vs. Readers

In the print world of newspapers and magazines, the CPM is the readership number. The readership of a print product is usually measured through a survey, conducted a couple of times per year that collects information on reading habits. Readership numbers are most often a multiple on the number of purchased copies. For example, if 100 people subscribe to a magazine and on average 2.5 people read a copy, then the readership is 250. Again, no one really knows if anyone even opened their newspaper or magazine. So, when buying print media on a CPM basis, you’re buying assumed readership not readers.

Readers vs. Impressions

Online is a totally different ball game. Throw surveys, metres and diaries out the window – the online unit of measure is the ad impression. Yes, it’s a very accurate means of measure, but it’s not readers that are being measured. An ad impression is counted each time the ad shows up on the web page. A single user may be exposed to the same ad multiple times, sometimes on the same page with different ad units.

In Conclusion

Comparing these three very different measurements and effectively different things is useless. It seems the expedient way to compare media spend, but it really does not help anyone, and in fact it hurts. It hurts buyers because they are deluded into thinking that they can equate CPM’s and therefore make educated decisions. As an industry, we need to stop confusing the issue with inaccurate comparisons.

Top 5 reasons Retail Advertising isn’t on the Internet

Think of the number of retail advertisements that run everyday in your community. It’s easily hundreds, if not thousands, but few of them make it to the internet. Why is that? How can it be changed?

 

First off, let me explain the types of ads that I’m talking about; ads for new cars, food, clothing, housewares, sporting-goods and countless other local products and services. These types of ads usually have a price point or special offer associated with them. This generally reduces the ad’s target audience to people in market for the specific offering.

Retail advertising is a complex and diverse category. No two advertisers have the same objectives and their objectives can change from day to day. The product that was being offered yesterday may no longer be available tomorrow. This combined with the fact that most of these ads are run by small businesses, makes it one of the least understood advertising categories. No wonder it’s the last category to make it to the Internet.

Most retail advertisements run in newspapers, flyers and local magazines and so I’m focusing my list on print advertising:

 

1)       Long standing relationships

Media properties have long standing relationships with retailers and have no interest in migrating advertising to the Internet. Certainly not at the cost of high profit print advertising.

 

2)       Lack of ad creative

Generally, local advertisers don’t have full control of their creative. Media properties produce the bulk of retail creative and therefore only produce it for print.

 

3)       No online media of choice

When people are in the market for a product they tend to seek out the right media – “the paper of choice”. If you’re looking for a car you look in this newspaper, if you’re looking for grocery flyers you look in that one. This habitual behaviour has not translated to the Internet.

 

4)       Limited placement opportunities

The sites that run retail advertisements only do so in a limited fashion, usually in the form of a button or banner in non-targeted environment. This doesn’t serve the in market consumer.

 

5)       Timeliness

You can have an ad run in a newspaper the next day. The print industry is deadline driven and therefore has become very efficient at quick turnaround. That’s not yet true when it comes to current offerings on the Internet.

 

 

There are many more reasons why retail advertising has not migrated to the Internet. But these are the core of the problems that need to be overcome. In future posts, I hope to delve deeper into these issues and propose some solutions. If you feel that I have missed something please feel free to leave a comment.

Retail Advertising...Linking Local

Social Media is sharing

I just read a post from Mitch Joel about Ignoring Social Media - it’s forced me to start formalizing my thoughts on what I’ve been calling Open Marketing. Open Marketing is about sharing. Telling anyone who wants to know; who you are, what you’re doing, where you do it and most importantly why you do it. This applies equally to individuals and organizations.

 

I have a basic example that might help explain. Let’s start with the simple telephone. It’s been around forever and very little has changed, right? That shouldn’t be the case - not when it comes to this great new age of connectivity. When you try to call an organization, you typically are forced to call the main line. It’s often the only line that is promoted, making it difficult to find what or who you want. In many organizations hiding the phone list is standard operation. Pre-internet, you couldn’t easily distribute your phone list, even if you wanted to. As easy as it is today, most companies still choose not to do it.

 

Let’s look at some specifics. Say you want to buy some online advertising is Canada. You pick three major players; Sympatico/MSN, Yahoo and Canoe. You logon to their respective “Advertise with Us” pages and what do you get? In the case of Sympatico/MSN you get a single toll free number and a contact form (makes me feel so warm and fuzzy). Yahoo isn’t any better - they have the toll free number and a general email address. To my surprise Canoe actually has a list of all their advertising departments, management and staff with their direct emails and telephone numbers. When I worked there this wasn’t always the case. That’s a great start but why stop there?

 

How can an industry that lives and breaths online be missing the opportunity to engage their prospective customers on these pages? What do these people look like? What are their passions? Are they on LinkedIn? Do I have some kind of relationship that will make it easier for me to connect with them? If I can connect with them then I’m much more likely to do business with them.

 

Put simply, Open Marketing is about sharing information, as much and with as many people as possible. Organizations of all kinds need to start opening up to the possibility of letting their customers in.

 

Open Marketing...Linking Local

Media, Marketing and Local

Here we go - yet another blog about media, marketing and local.

 

Do we really need another blog?

 

I don’t know - but what I do know, is that some things need to be said about these topics that are not being said. I have recently resigned the role of Vice President and General Manager of CANOE.CA, Quebecor Media’s (Canada’s second largest media group) news portal. I left Canoe after 10 years, because of what's happening to media organizations and it’s not pretty. Many people in the media industry understand things are changing, what they don’t understand that it’s NOT only the medium that’s being replaced – it’s the whole business model.

 

Don’t get me wrong, there are marketing gurus talking about the new marketing, media experts talking about the future of media and everyone is talking about local search. The concern I have is that they are dealing with them as independent issues.

 

I hope you join me in starting the conversation.

 

Enjoy...Linking Local