Traditional media has a big problem.
They know they need to make the transition to digital, but still have to pay the bills and maintain margins. Unlike digital upstarts, incumbents don’t have investors willing to wait years for results, but have to earn money every day.
To make the transition to, new skills need to be learned. Yet, even more importantly, they need to unlearn some things that they thought they knew about how to make money in media.
Many digital marketers proclaim that they offer superior value than traditional media by delivering direct response metrics. No touchy-feely image talk, but concrete results. Just the facts ma’am.
That’s a mistake. The world’s premier marketers spend billions every year on brand image campaigns because they make money doing so. Anybody who believes that the profit oriented companies continue to invest because they are subject to some kind of mass delusion is just not thinking clearly.
The bulk of marketing budgets will continue to go toward building brand perceptions because brands are incredibly powerful.
With all of the excitement surrounding the Apple i-Pad, it seems like a new day for traditional media online. Nobody knows what the true impact will be, but odds are that it will be significant. Many media companies are rushing out i-Pad apps in order to get in on the ground floor.
However, it will be a while before i-Pads and similar devices achieve critical mass so this should also be a time for media companies to revisit their existing web sites, many of which need drastic improvement.
With that in mind, I put together a short guide to the most common mistakes.
Not all crowds are smart. In fact, some crowds can be pretty dumb. However, being able to use crowds successfully can mean the difference between tapping into a vast collective intelligence and losing your shirt.
A while back I posted an article about stupid crowds and got such insightful feedback from readers that it warranted a follow up.
Here’s a quick guide to making crowds smart.
In 1920, radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh began the first commercial broadcast in history. Ever since, major brands have been selling their wares by transmitting messages over wide audiences. It has been, and remains, the most powerful weapon in the marketing arsenal.
One of the big benefits to the emergence of social media is that it brings that same opportunity to small businesses and even sole proprietorships. Social broadcast is not free, and it’s certainly not easy, but it can deliver impressive results.
One who has been successful with this approach is my friend Pat Gallagher, a painter who lives in Louisville, Kentucky and has used social media to broadcast himself to the insular artistic communities which are disperse and far removed from his southern home.
The future, to borrow a phrase, ain’t what it used to be.
When Marshal McLuhan predicted that electronic media would create a Global Village, he foresaw a new reality where old assumptions would no longer apply; barriers would be broken down and human creativity unleashed. It’s clear that he was on to something.
Here are three key domains that are driving the transformation:
In 1983, Andy Grove knew that his company, Intel, was in trouble. Its core business, DRAM memory chips, a technology they had pioneered, was facing stiff competition from the Japanese. Both margins and market share were declining rapidly and the future seemed bleak.
Rather than stay and fight over what remained, Grove chose to bet the company on microprocessors. The rest, as they say, is history and Intel’s dominance today can be traced back to that fateful decision.
How did he know for sure that he was making the right decision? Is there a way to be certain?
Twitter is a social network, but social networks are not Twitter.
Much of the hype about social media obscures a vastly greater opportunity. Although social media types love to tell the rest of us that we “just don’t get it,” the fact is that very few social “gurus”s have actually taken the time to learn anything about social networks.
Happily, the joke is on them. Social networks are where the real money is.
I previously posted an article called 6 Ways to Spot False Gurus, which got an enormous response. It seems that I really touched a nerve.
While most of the feedback was positive, there was also some criticism. One woman pointed out (rightfully so) that it was a very negative post. I do feel that those who profess to advise others should be held to a higher standard.
Thankfully, there are many who meet that standard and are truly worth listening to. It is probably even more important to spot them as it is to avoid false gurus.
Following the same line of reasoning as the previous article, here are six ways to spot real gurus:
