FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

A publisher client of mine lost a large media sale when a CMO said, "I have a huge social media presence and post as much content as you do. Why advertise with you?" How do you respond when social media tools enable all your advertisers to become online publishers themselves?  

What publishers do (and always have done) that business cannot do for themselves (even in the age of social media) is to offer content as a third party. Chances are, your client’s content, no matter how great the volume, comes from their point of view. It will about their products, their customers, and told from their perspective. Their competition li More...

A recent issue of Media Life laid out a compelling case making the current enthusiasm for social media sound a lot like the "irrational exuberance" leading up to the dot com bubble crash of 2001.

Consider:

"The fact is, it's a good bet these social networking sites will never figure out
a workable business model because there may not be one. On the
internet, it's accepted faith that if you build traffic, revenue will
follow, typically from advertising.

But it simply may not apply to social networking sites such as MySpace, Twitter and Facebook.

That's for a reason that makes perfect sense on the face of it. Social networking
sites are about people communicating More...

The findings of my recent study, "The Coming Change in Social Media Business Applications,” should give traditional publishers a reason to take another look at social media. Results showed that social media is used as a general communications tool in public relations and marketing, but is evolving into a major tool of customer engagement.
 
Research found that companies are now looking to social media as a primary way to engage their customers, enabling lead generation, immediate customer contact and customer interaction.

As content publishers, consider that all ads and sponsorships sold are for this same goal; customer engagement. If social media becomes a primary wa More...

One great way to get on the "inside" of an account is to follow key marketing decision-makers on Twitter. Anyone can "follow" anyone with a Twitter account, and by "following" a marketing executive you will receive a steady stream of anecdotal information that can better help you understand and ultimately sell the account.

The question is, who in your client's marketing department is on Twitter? I've noticed that most ad managers and people focused on internal functions are often not. Even though Twitter is all the rage, More...

A digital magazine story making the rounds on the Web is about a subject some publishers dread and media buyers have suspicion: digital magazine open rates. Napier News asked a few European digital magazines what their open rates were. The admittedly informal query yielded the following:

Four titles had open rates of 11-12 percent
One title had an open rate of 16 percent
One title had an open rate of 19 percent

A media buyer hearing these numbers might conclude that digital editions are useless for advertising.

But there's a huge difference between digital magazines created as replicas of print magazines for the convenience More...

Nielsen released some startling figures yesterday for anyone involved in the business of media.

In February, social network usage exceeded Web-based e-mail usage for the first time.

As you fight to sell that e-mail sponsorship, some of the numbers—like these—might be against you. While every content publisher’s newsletter is different, if the one you sell is tracking along with what is going on throughout the web, your clickthroughs are down.

If this becomes an issue, I recommend you bring this just released study from Epsilon on your next call. The study is based on the performance of 7.7 billion promotion More...

I'm involved with a project to help build the case for advertising in digital magazines. As part of the proposal process, I created a list of digital magazines that are optimized for digital delivery that support advertising sales.

If you are trying to sell advertising into a digital edition and getting resistance, show them this PDF. It contains the best list of high profile ad supported digital magazines I could find.

Also, if you know of any other ad supported digital magazines not included here, please post them!

Here is the list so far: 

US Newsweekly: More...

For several weeks now, this white paper I wrote for the Customer Collective ("What is Your Recession Sales Strategy?") has been one of the top ranked white papers on the Web, according to ZDNet. This is great news for media salespeople because it is a great media sales tool. The white paper is based on a research study that challenges assumptions of how selling should be done in a recession and can open conversations that lead to a media sale.

There are six findings in the white paper and each can help you sell ads. Here are the first two:

1. In a recession, the most common sales direction is to go after new categories of customers. Instead, focus on selling more products to your current customers. More...

Having a tough time selling ads into your digital magazine? You're not alone. While it is nearly impossible to sell ads into digital replicas of print magazines, there is a thriving new breed of digital magazine originals blowing away the conventional wisdom that digital magazines are an ad sales death trap.

These digital-original publishers are doing things very differently. One of true pioneers and success stories is Monkey, a “lad” book from Dennis Publishing U.K. with an impressive 270,000 weekly ABCe audited ci More...

This is the title of a new free white paper I wrote for the Customer Collective. It is based on a survey and packed with strategies you can use to sell more effectively in challenging times.

While tough times often bring new ideas to many company functions, when it comes to sales, organizations are making no strategic adjustments, doing things they way they always have, only opting to “sell harder" and wait for better times.

But a recession is more than just period of slow sales. It is a time when the markets and customers we sell to change behavior, with “b More...

I’ve heard it all over the magazine industry. As an ad revenue generator, digital magazines are a flop. “We tried doing a digital magazine,” one publisher told me, “but couldn’t sell any additional ad space. The clickthroughs were abysmal and after a few issues we stopped doing it.”

But digital magazines are a distribution success story. B-to-B publishers have deployed digital editions successfully to boost their BPA circulation cheaply, and consumer magazines are selling digital edition subscriptions. But these editions typically include only the ads sold into the print issues.

Many media buyers do not understand th More...

Ron Wall, SVP of publishing at Canon Communications, shares a great story of how he beat a "print ads are dead" objection raised by a client by making him an offer he had to refuse.

The client told Ron that print ads were not responsive and therefore of little value. Ron countered by offering a free spread in his magazine. But there was a catch. The ad had to make an offer, have an 800 number, and anyone who called even just to inquire about the offer would get a free iPod.

The offer of a free spread got Ron's client thinking. What would the offer be? How many callers would buy as result? How many iPods wo More...