Archive for the ‘Content Marketing’ Category
I Love Interns
4 Mar 2010
by Rebecca Rolfes
My company hires 60% of our interns. We’re a small company so we don’t have a lot of open slots nor a lot of interns but that still seems a really good indicator of the caliber of people coming out of school. More and more companies, 36% according to one study, look for great interns with the full intention of hiring a good percentage of them. Even at companies where hiring has dropped dramatically, interns move to the front of the line. Goldman Sachs hired 600 fewer entry level employees last year but 90% of them were former interns. At the same time, I know a young, bright, smart recent grad who has applied for 75 jobs, had 2 interviews and is selling popcorn on Navy Pier to make ends meet. (If you’d like to see her resume, let me know.) It’s killer out there.
I lived in Europe for 13 years and the unemployment rate was always in double digits, especially high among the young. Generations (plural) ended up living at home, sitting around, collecting benefits of some sort, feeling like failures and hating their lives. The societal cost of that is huge. Closer to home, the cost to companies, the loss, is equally huge.
We could not do what we do without interns. They have that eager spark of youth. They have skills that even those who graduated a few years ago don’t. They are hungry, not just because they want a job but because they’re curious and energetic and anxious for experiences. They not only do a lot of work, they keep the company young and I’m not just talking about age diversity. They’re the pipeline of new talent that keeps us ahead of changes in content marketing and publishing.
Two of them have been in my office already this morning and it’s not yet 9 o’clock. One has been doing man on the street interviews with a Flip cam. It’s probably easier to get someone on the train to talk to you when you’re young and cute but she is fearless in approaching people, asking questions, finding out what she wants to know—and then she can edit the video. The other was telling me about a crowd sourcing project called The Cosmonaut and talking about the future of creative communities. I mean seriously: the future of creative communities before breakfast!
You can’t buy that sort of energy. And you can’t survive without it.
Not the Sound of Silence
14 Dec 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
Years ago, I heard Bob Pittman, one of the founders of MTV, give a speech in Chicago. He told a story that made our increasingly insatiable appetite for media comprehensible. He said something like this:
“When I was a child, my grandparents had a telephone, one telephone. It was black. It never rang but when it did, it was always bad news. My parents had several phones, Princess phones in many colors, one in the bedroom, one in the kitchen, one in the living room. We had a television and a record player. Now I look at my own children, sitting on the floor doing homework with the TV on while talking to their friends on the phone.”
His point was that young people do not have the short attention spans they are so often accused of but that our ability to consume media simultaneously in multiple formats increases as new media platforms appear. We grow up with them and/or we adapt to them much more quickly than seemed possible in the age of the black dial phone.
Now the University of California, San Diego comes out with a study with staggering numbers.
- Americans consume on average about 34 gigabytes of data and information every day. That is an increase of 350% over the last 30 years.
- We “consume” about 100,000 words daily via print, web, TV and radio. According to the New York Times, War and Peace is only 460,000 words.
- Information consumption is increasing at about 6% per year.
- Our consumption of print media is declining but we are reading more than ever, according to Roger Bohn, professor of technology and management and one of the study’s authors.
- Most of our media consumption happens simultaneously. For instance, the average American listens to about 2.2 hours of radio a day but we also spend about 5 hours a day in front of some sort of screen. That means that the radio is likely on in the background while we sit at the computer.
- Almost 55% of total content consumption is gaming.
- American households consumed 3.6 zettabytes (!) of information in 2008. One zettabyte equals 100 billion copies of all the books in the Library of Congress.
So let me leave you with a thought for the day:
“Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorled ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.”
–Gerard Manley Hopkins
Content Needs Context
24 Apr 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
At a recent presentation to American Business Media in Chicago, Jim Lecinski, managing director of North American Sales for Google, asked “How does context impact engagement?”
Think about it: If you see something out of context, there is the element of surprise but that’s about the only benefit. If you see something within context, you can make better decisions based on previous experience with that context. That is, in fact, how most decisions are made. I trust this context because I’ve had good experiences with it before; this content makes sense within this context, therefore, I trust this content.
Lecinski was referencing a white paper by advertising research firm, Equiro, Does Contextual Relevancy Make a Difference? from August 2008. The research shows that, “Most executive-level purchasing decisions involve researching vendors, identifying vendors and making shortlists until there is a single preferred vendor.” When (in this case) ads are contextually relevant, it is 28% more likely that your brand will make the shortlist.
What about for associations?
If your members and potential members find your content somewhere else, what is their likely response?
- Will they recognize it, come to your site and engage with you?
- Or will they engage with the place they found it?
- If that place is a social network not created by you (a Facebook group that repurposes your content but that was not created by you, for instance), are they more likely to engage with that source—that context—than with you?
My guess is yes. They’ll see the content within an appropriate context and the mental shortlist just got shorter—and you’re no longer on it.
Several years ago my company was mentioned in a rather nasty article by a disgruntled former intern. What she said about us was completely without merit and I could prove it so I went to the owner of the website and asked that it be taken down. Their initial response was, sadly, that probably no one had noticed (they obviously had bigger problems than engagement) and if they had, they’d forget about it soon enough. My response to that was that this was not in a daily newspaper that, as they said, would be thrown away and forgotten with yesterday’s news.
Online content is forever. If a piece of content exists online, it can be found and used by someone else. And, of course, in this interactive, social media world, it will be.
This leads me to brand reputation management. First, you have to make the shortlist. You have to make sure that your content is appearing in all the right contexts but that it links back to you. Then, you have to manage what you can manage.
Online communities place an extremely high premium on authenticity. You can’t edit your Wikipedia page with a rosy PR agenda, for instance. Other users will slam you and the backlash will inevitably come. When your content, your brand, is floating around out there for anyone to use in another context, how can you ensure that it’s managed appropriately?
I have some ideas. Do you?
You Heard It Here
21 Apr 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
“Whatever we do comes down to content creation in some form, whether it’s a journal or an event or a standard. We’re investing a lot more in the competency and capacity that support that.”
Thomas Loughlin
Executive Director
American Society of Mechanical Engineers
Speaking at Digital Now 2009
The Exodus Begins
25 Feb 2009
by Rebecca Rolfes
Hachette Filipacchi Media, one of the world’s largest publishers, dropped its membership in the Magazine Publishers Association.
Six months after Jack Kliger, one of the best chairmen MPA ever had, retired as CEO of Hachette, the company left the association.
For those of you not in the magazine industry, the MPA is not a small association. It represents approximately 225 domestic companies publishing more than 1,000 titles, nearly 50 international companies and more than 100 associate members. And although I am abundantly aware that print is dying (like a stake in my heart after an entire career as a print journalist), it’s hard to believe that this could go away. 
Be that as it may, Hachette didn’t love the MPA enough—at least not any more. In this industry, as in many if not most others, if you were a magazine publisher, you belonged to MPA. You just did. Everyone did. And even though, as a trade association, MPA’s membership is based on size and therefore can run into the tens of thousands of dollars, you paid it. And then you paid more to attend the conferences or to get the research or to fund the lobbying effort.
Magazines, however, no longer enjoy what is affectionately known as “the thump factor.” When a magazine lands on your desk, it needs to make an impressive thump. That promises a meaty read and lots of ads. Remember when Fast Company could serve as a doorstop? Remember when InStyle was too fat to comfortably tote onto the subway?
Hachette, publisher of such still-strong titles as Elle and Road & Track, needs to drive revenues. That’s what all publishers, all companies and all associations need to do in this economy. Tony Silber, editor of Folio, the trade magazine for magazine publishers, wrote recently about how this is just the tip of the iceberg. Others will leave MPA, American Business Media, the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the Newspaper Publishers of America and on and on. An industry that was already in trouble because its business model was crumbling fell off a cliff when the recession hit.
When this recession ends, things will not go back to the way they were. No one will think, “Well, that was unpleasant but things are back to normal.” There will be a new, totally different normal. And it may not include newspapers or magazines with thump. It may not include these associations.
It may not include your association.
If you are not helping your members drive revenues, you will be just as dead as print media. If you are not ahead of the trends in the troubled industries your members work in, you will be off the cliff as well. It’s not about losing a champion (ref: the past-chairman’s retirement), it’s about what have you done for me lately, today in fact. Today and tomorrow. The exodus has begun. Don’t join it.
