FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

The recent financial losses on Wall Street were bad news for investors, but good news for the traffic to financial Web sites. You can use this news item to move along your dialog on why it is essential to maintain media spending during a recession.  

First, the news item:

ComScore Media Metrix, a company that ranks the Top 50 U.S. Web Properties, found that in September 2008 visitors to financial sites were up substantially:

"Business/finance – news/research web sites saw a substantial increase in visitation in September, gaining 9 More...

This is the ultimate resource, a collection of blog posts and articles on how to sell media during a recession. I hope it helps.

This was first shared a couple weeks ago at the FOLIO: Show in Chicago during my presentation entitled “Making Your Numbers in a Down Economy."

This is a free, 26-page Word document with live links to all the original source material. It's on an older version of Word so you should be able to share it with anyone. Feel free to distribute. Good luck out there!

Click More...

An excellent one sheet entitled "Recession Marketing Strategies" makes a great case why your clients should keep advertising during a recession is found on the Clark Company's Web site.

I like this piece because it is concise, full of specific examples, and highly credible coming from an ad agency—not a publishing association. This is a find, written in 2001 during the last recession, but the advice is just a true today.

Here is one example:

Over the years hundreds of studies have been conducted to prove companies should maintain adverti More...

An advertiser recently canceled his schedule because his biggest competitor did. For years, his company's rationale for budgeting for an ad campaign was to be present when competition was. When the competition left, so did they.

After many discussions, I kept the advertiser but I had to rerationalize the buy. They soon realized that with their competition cutting back they could achieve a "share of voice" advantage by continuing to advertise.

The reasons companies advertise in a recession are often different than in good times. Sometimes I get surprised. I think I know an account and what makes them tick, then along comes a More...

Earlier this year legendary Wall Street giant Bear Stearns collapsed and was acquired, in crisis, for a pathetic two bucks a share. But some of their problems started back with the 1990 recession when rival Merrill Lynch used the recession to pull ahead of them.

According to an Interbrand study "Leveraging Brand Value in a Downturn":
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If you have read my posts over the last year you know that I believe strongly in digital magazines. But early on I predicted that unless digital magazines can be proven to be an effective advertising platform, not just a delivery platform, they will fade into oblivion.

It's very nice that some consumer magazines now send out digital copies to "enhance" print subscriptions. It's also very pleasant that more b-to-b magazines send out digital magazines to stretch their BPA audits. But there is no long-term future in this.

The future of digital magazines belongs to content publishers who use them to capture a unique content niche, crawl into it, define it, dominate it, and attract a unique audience to it. Once More...

A terrific study was released earlier this year from DowJones advising that the key to success in selling in a recession comes not from looking at what is different for salespeople but rather at what is different at the companies they sell to. Researchers Jim Dickie & Barry Trailer studied corporate organization during the 2001 recession and concluded that the biggest change impacting sales was a shift in how client organizations bought things.

"Then the economy tanked, sales started to decrease for these firms, and the CFOs stepped in. They mandated that since revenues in were declining, expenses out would be decreasing as well. Enter the era of Buying by Commi More...

From time to time I find myself in a conversation with an advertiser who wants to sponsor an overly commercial webinar. Bad idea. Webinars that push product and do not provide useful information usually bomb.

Share this chart with them to explain that attendance in a webinar is voluntary and unless the event is honestly presented and the content has�real value attendees will leave their sponsored webinar with a less favorable attitude than when they started.

The key metric that tells you your webinar is failing is the number of attendees who click out of your event before it is over.

This chart from a Marketing Sherpa study measured the reasons More...

Media buyers have noticed. In the ad recession, we sellers have to work harder and innovate more to make the same sale. On the Media Life Web site, written for media buyers and planners, an article ran last week entitled "When the going's tough, the tough sell." Writer Diego Vasquez dug into the innovation being used to chase fewer ad dollars:

Conde Nast Traveler’s Hughes says it’s about coming up with better ideas. “You have to be really out there, you have to be aggressive as a sales team. Advertisers are demanding great programs, and they scrutinize every doll More...

A study released from the Microsoft owned Atlas Institute says that 71% of searches are for navigation only. Why should you care?

Many marketers believe that when a customer uses "search" to visit their Web site they are in a critical stage of the buying process as they source, research, and evaluate products. If true, search is extremely important and deserves a huge piece of the online ad budget.

But what if this is not true? What if most searches are just a lazy way to navigate to familiar Web sites? Too lazy to type in that whole exact URL? Forget it! Type a familiar few words into a search engine and you get there wit More...

I found a great article posted on the Syndicom Web site from CIO magazine on how to develop an online community. Here are four points I pulled out that relate to content publishers:

1. Design for Evolution

Because communities of practice are organic, designing them is more a matter of shepherding their evolution than creating them from scratch. As the community grows, new members bring new interests and may pull the focus of the community in different directions.

2. Open a Dialog Between Inside and Outside

Effective community design is built on the collective experience of community members. More...

According to a 2007 Pew Research study, 55 percent of U.S. teens have created a profile on an online social network and use it regularly. If you want advice on how to start a successful social network, ask a kid! I found this great advice on the Young/Upstart blog advising how to start a social network that plays to our core competency as content publishers:

Creating a Facebook group is the easy part. Invitin More...