Archive for the ‘Association Marketing’ Category
Smartest Things This Week
22 Feb 2010
by Rebecca Rolfes
A random sampling of things I’ve seen that might be of interest.
The Open Niche for Associations
Reed Business Information put its US-based magazines up for sale. Nielsen Business is selling off its media and entertainment brands. That’s two huge trade publishers getting out of the business.
For B2B associations, industry trade magazines are their major competitors. The field just got a lot more open for readers and advertisers. Do you have a strategic plan in place to walk into the door that just opened? If the trade magazines in your space are suffering—and I can guarantee they are—what are you doing to steal share from them?
Years ago I worked for Eason Publications in Atlanta. Debbie Eason, the founder, was not a good editor but she had the killer instinct of any good entrepreneur. Any time someone tried to launch another free alternative paper, Debbie quickly—very quickly—figured out what weakness they had discovered in us, fixed it, buried them and moved on. They were like hash marks on her sleeve.
This is not a market for the timid.
Social Media and Heavily Regulated Industries
Pharmaceutical and other healthcare-related companies have shied away from social media because of the regulatory risks and the open—and often off-topic—dialogue on social network platforms. Heavily regulated industries have taken a year or more to put their social media plans in place but they’re now getting with the program.
Recognizing that the Web is where consumers and even physicians go first for health information, companies are finding that they can use Web 2.0 applications to create custom messages and experiences for different groups of patients. A lot of companies turn off the comment function on social networking platforms to maintain the sort of control they legally need but with the right policies in place, they can provide real-time, real-life information to people who need it.
Video is huge and a great way to tell a story. Mobile applications will help people with chronic conditions.
Associations in heavily regulated industries like healthcare can learn a lot from such heavy hitters as Boehringer Ingelheim, Johnson & Johnson and its TextforBaby intiativeand Novartis. UCB sponsors the PatientsLikeMe site to reach people with epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. The site has communities for 11 diseases.
Associations that serve people with diseases and conditions that do not otherwise receive a lot of attention can take some of these ideas to their own communities and provide huge additional value.
The Sunday Paper
This is why I still love newspapers. How can you resist an article that asks the question, “What do you do once you’ve stolen a bus?” Quirky, well-written, something I would never have gone looking for nor even known I might read. Sunday mornings (or in this case, Saturday) will never be the same without a print newspaper.
Year of the Tier
17 Feb 2010
by Rebecca Rolfes
I’ve read Paul Conley’s comments to Folio’s Forecast for 2010 about 10 times. He says that this will be the “year of the tier.” Data is already showing that the winners and losers in the new, as-yet-still-undefined media future will be the ones at the top and the ones at the bottom. Huge, mass media will survive—Vogue, the New York Times, The Economist—as will niche publications—local newspapers and radio, enthusiasts magazines and, of course, association publications. The biggest of the big still deliver reach. Think of them as the Super Bowl of publishing. Niche publications, associations among them, deliver specialized, passionate audiences that can’t get the information they want anywhere else.
Conley takes this further to talk about how business models are splintering as well. The low end of that scale is a commodity, cheap content at a get-what-you-pay-for price. The high end is big-ticket subscriptions to data and research—a field that associations can certainly play in.
New Phase of Content Marketing
The middle is for content marketing. Custom publishing, the foundation of my company, is entering a new phase and one that associations can certainly take advantage of.
B2B advertisers are finding that they can do better with their own content. This can mean the direct-to-customer conversation of social media or it can mean very sophisticated marketing approaches like the IBM avian flu site that Conley mentions or something like www.rockmoto.com from the Motorcycle Industry Council.
It can also mean sponsored print content à la Monocle, a publication that blurs the line between advertising and editorial to such an extent that devout church-and-state types will ride their high horses out of town. The most recent issue contains seven pages sponsored by Blackberry. These are profiles of Blackberry users that look just like editorial pages and which have almost no overt sales pitch. They are sprinkled throughout the issue so that they don’t appear as an advertorial section, something that readers long ago learned to flip past. And oh, BTW, Monocle also brokered a deal with Blackberry for limited edition handsets with specially designed wallpapers and pre-loaded travel content from the magazine.
Even at the lower per-page rate of an association magazine, seven paid pages is a lot of money.
Association publications always were selling access to their audience. If they can strategically embrace new ways of granting that access, they can be among the winners as the rest of the publishing industry goes down around them.
When Members Pay Attention
10 Feb 2010
by Rebecca Rolfes
I’m a little late on my Super Bowl commentary. (The Saints won, in case you hadn’t heard.) I’m also late on the other morning-after topic of the commercials—lots of guys wearing their underpants and some bizarre screaming chickens. But there is a more evergreen association idea in there, really there is.
My viewing companion, the world’s biggest commercial avoider, asked why anyone would spend $2.8 million for a 30 second slot. I said that advertising is, of course, more complicated than this but when you get up into those sorts of numbers, it becomes very simple.
- Is your target audience watching?
- Are they paying attention?
One of the big selling points of a Super Bowl commercial is that advertisers are guaranteed that viewers will be paying attention and not in the bathroom or getting snacks or checking their email. It may be the one broadcast where we actually watch the commercials. So if you are targeting mostly men, skewing younger—beer, soft drinks, fast food, video games, cell phones and an irreverent take on personal investing—this is your moment. Expensive but worth it.
This year, however, Pepsi gave up on the Super Bowl after 23 years. Instead, Pepsi has budgeted $20 million for Project Refresh, a social media campaign that will give grants in six areas in line with its CSR goals. They feel that everyone knows who they are. They don’t need brand awareness; they need engagement.
Admittedly, engagement is a vague terms that gets vaguer as it is over used. But ask yourself three questions.
- What does your association brand need? Awareness? Engagement? Clarification? Stability? Positioning?
- Where is your target audience?
- What are they really paying attention to?
Chances are you don’t have $20 million to spend, but if you did, how would you spend it most wisely to build your brand? Should you do the whole panoply of promotional marketing: advertising, PR, direct mail, social media? Or should you throw everything at the one big game when you know they’ll be there?
Are You the Establishment?
21 Jan 2010
by Rebecca Rolfes
We all hear so much about associations’ difficulty in attracting younger members. They don’t want to hang with the old folks. They have different demands on their time. They’re not at the point in their careers when association membership typically occurs. They’re inventing their own version of community online. The economic downturn means that companies will not subsidize membership for junior staff, and promotions and raises are slower in coming.
All true, or at least partially true. All remediable.
Young professionals sections, career development opportunities, active social networking, entry-level and even job hunter membership rates can go a long way to overcoming the recruitment obstacles of simple demographics. All tactics employed by smart associations, many of which still have trouble attracting the next generation.
So what’s really holding them back?
I was reading something that mentioned “the establishment.” It’s very difficult these days to know what that means, who that is. Bill Clinton called Obama “the establishment candidate” (when Hilary was running against him) and just to prove how nebulous the term is, the New Republic called Mitt Romney the same thing and Jon Stewart said the same of Mrs. Clinton. Vanity Fair ranks the New Establishment of 100 technology power brokers every year while the New York Times says that the establishment is vanishing. But for the sake of argument, let’s say “the establishment” is whoever is currently in charge.
Is that you? Think about it. Aren’t associations in charge of making sure that the status quo stays the status quo? You have to protect and serve the members you have. They are the establishment in your industry or your profession. They don’t really want anything to change. They know it will but, as much as possible, their own interests focus on staying right where they are doing exactly what they’re doing. And then something like the recession comes along that forces change and makes everyone extremely uncomfortable.
Granted it’s not a comfortable situation but maybe part of the problem is that we are so unused to change and how to deal with it. We spend far too much time and energy protecting the current state of affairs. If we expended half that in leading members toward the inevitable changes, we would serve them better in knowing how to deal with unforeseen changes. And, I’ll argue, that in the process, we’d attract younger members. If associations were positioned less as “the establishment,” against which youth always rebels, and more as the agents and partners of change, they would be the dynamic, progressive forces that young people long to be part of.
We’ve all heard Mahatma Ghandi’s dictum, “Be the change.” I’ve already blogged about it once. Young people understand on some level that they are the force of change. If you’re not comfortable with that, they won’t be comfortable with you.
Trend to Mobile
18 Jan 2010
by Rebecca Rolfes
According to a new study of media platforms, marketers are using one of three techniques to pay for their use of social media.
- They’re diverting money from the traditional media budget.
- They’re shifting funds from other marketing communications budgets.
- They’re creating an incremental budget.
The study by the Association of National Advertisers, B2B Magazine and the marketing services firm mktg shows that social media and viral video have seen the largest jumps in usage over last year. There are some interesting differences between B2B and B2C marketers that apply to B2B and B2C associations as well.
- B2B marketers have not embraced mobile to the extent that B2C has.
- B2B marketers prefer LinkedIn to Facebook.
- Webinars are found to be effective by a very high percentage of B2B marketers.
Mobile and viral video are set to take off among B2B marketers, the study says. Associations would do well to jump on that trend. Those with lots of members who do not use computers during the day are finding it difficult to communicate with members in a world where print is dying and push vehicles like email may never be read. These days everyone has a cell phone, however, and mobile could be the next huge wave in member communications platforms.
Lost Generation
13 Jan 2010
by Rebecca Rolfes
I’ve been to two association clients’ events this week and people are a lot more cheerful now than they were a year ago. Both of these are industries that literally fell off the cliff and the companies are still dealing with the impact. One guy talked about how both the value of his business and the value of his house had gone to zero. The partners in his firm are “wearing tools”; they no longer manage people who do the work, they’re doing the work themselves. But they’ve survived and the feeling was that recession is the mother of innovation.
The problem for them and for associations is that they may have lost a generation. They laid people off and they didn’t hire. New graduates or people who lost their jobs may have had to leave the profession or the industry altogether. Reinvention is great but that leaves everyone with a dip in enrollment at the end of the decade.
One guy said that his company would hire the class of 2011 and that they will get better jobs with more responsibility and more autonomy. In the meantime, he loses that injection of energy and drive and ambition. And where does that leave the 10% of unemployed, and the classes of 2009 and 2010? Where does that leave the associations that would have recruited some of them to membership?
It leaves them with the need for innovation. How can you better serve the members you’ve got? What new ideas bring both benefits to them and revenues to you?
Where Is Your Circulation Department?
4 Dec 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
When I was the editor of Creative Loafing, the alternative newspaper in Atlanta, we always talked about the ‘three legs of the stool’: content (editorial and design), ad sales and distribution. As a free paper, we survived or died on ad sales. When cash flow was low, we looked a lot like one of those free shopper papers—one column of copy per page bordered by stacks of ads. The perennial weak leg of the stool was distribution. If the papers didn’t get into the boxes by Wednesday morning, if the boxes ran empty and weren’t replenished before the weekend, if the papers in the box were wet, if we discovered full boxes when we went back next Wednesday, we knew we had a problem. Advertisers wouldn’t be happy and that was always bad news.
Even when I’ve worked at publications with newsstand and subscription sales, distribution was the boring but crucial part of holding the stool up. If you can’t get the thing in their hands, neither of the other two legs matters.
Controlled circulation publications, including all association publications, have a database that feeds to a fulfillment house somewhere that puts the publication in the mail, ensures delivery, cleans the database for bad addresses, etc. and sends you a report. And a bill.
But what happens to that model when you start to distribute more and more content digitally? That question gets even bigger when you add a lot of social media to the mix. As print has declined, circulation departments have shrunk. Content creators now also distribute—and shoot video, and take photos, and do metrics and, well, this can’t keep up. It’s not efficient. It’s not realistic. It’s not, frankly, humanly possible, at least not if you intend to do it well.
The New Social Media Department
Sean Blanda, writing on eMedia Vitals, says that a new sort of “circulation” department would optimize the process. Depending on publication size, he recommends 1 to 3 staffers as a “social media department.” In this brave new everyone’s-a-content-creator world, associations can do this with staffers or with volunteers.
- Each SM Dept. member (staffer or volunteer) maintains a few high-value social media accounts. Again, 2 to 3 accounts depending on the amount of content.
- Each has a network of friends and followers.
- If the number of friends and followers doesn’t reach some set targets, either you find someone who’s more successful or you move on to different social media platforms that work with your membership.
Blanda recommends incentive pay and bonuses based on targets. Whether you are comfortable with that, knowing when to give up on something (or someone) is crucial. Social networking can be an enormous time suck. Like anything else, determine what success would look like and if something doesn’t succeed, move onto something else. There is already a long list of other platforms to try—or wait 15 minutes and there will be a new list.
Publishers still charge advertisers based on CPM and, in a digital world, on traffic and/or stickiness. Separating content creation from distribution can maximize your results while maintaining the high quality content your members demand.
Who Knows Your Association Is There?
30 Nov 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
We all have a tendency to think the world revolves around us. It is, after all, all about me. For associations, that means assuming that they are a household name in their particular niche. It means the certainty that the association’s priorities are everyone’s priorities, that what’s important to them is important to us.
But, well, sorry. No. The world revolves pretty much independently of any of us. In fact, sometimes we are simply unaware that an association exists. You think you’re everywhere you need to be, running the flag up the pole as often as possible and in all the right places. But for whatever reason, I haven’t seen it. Other times, I’m aware of something but it’s so irrelevant or so inconsequential that it just isn’t worth paying attention to.
The latter problem is about the value proposition. The former is about awareness, plain, old, garden-variety marketing and PR.
A lot of associations are still on the fence about social media, both in the guise of member engagement and of marketing. Many have the valid opinion that their members—often middle aged, male, non-technie types—don’t use social networks. What they’re ignoring is social media marketing’s ability to build awareness in lots of ways.
As you see, the benefits of SMM are the same as any plain, old, garden-variety marketing-awareness campaign, but turbo-charged by the online medium. Exposure, increased traffic, SEO, qualified leads, closing the sale and, hugely important these days, lower cost.
Who can argue with that?
Associations Still Prefer Print
19 Nov 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
According to the 2009 Association Publishing Survey in Folio magazine, 88% of associations publish magazines, almost all of them multiple titles. Magazines still rank extremely high in terms of the value they provide to members and the revenues they generate for associations.
For members, the magazine is the most frequent and consistent physical touch they have from the association. For associations, more than half gain between 10% and 24% of revenues from their magazines. The largest percentage, 16%, earned between $1 million and $2.9 million in 2008. Although half believe that that will decrease in 2009, associations with their targeted and dedicated audiences are not suffering as badly in the advertising downturn as their for-profit competitors.
I spoke to Folio a few months back about the trends I see in association communications and am quoted in the study on five key elements that are changing their roles as publishers.
- Nichification. Although this does boil down to people wanting more and more of less and less, the long tail is different for associations. The membership model rests on selling the whole package of member benefits. Today’s member may only want one piece of that package. Associations like the Arthritis Foundation are, for instance, now selling subscriptions to people who only want the magazine, or online-only membership to people who just want access to firewalled research.
- Speed. Associations are having to learn about competition. The study shows that association publisher’s second major concern is for-profit competitors. Quickness is essential in that sort of pitched battle.
- Peer-to-peer. Members always valued the ability to network and learn from their peers. Now they can do that online without the association’s help. Associations no longer control the messaging. The one-to-many publishing model has given way to the many-to-many social media model.
- Data. The amount of data generated by good online metrics are invaluable but without the tools and the staff that can analyze and adjust based on that data, associations are constantly on their heels in responding to market shifts.
- 5. Sophisticated governance. Competency-based boards now have members who understand publishing, communications, marketing or all of the above. They want to be more involved in shaping an association’s publishing program and in insisting on an ROI.
