FOLIO: Section Blogs by emedia and Technology

Managing Social Media in a Crisis

traphael — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:54:05 -0400

In the midst of a national crisis—a senseless shooting in Newtown, CT, a natural disaster in Joplin, MO, or a terrorist attack in Boston—social media becomes a source for instant information.

And the recent events surrounding the Boston Marathon underscore just how complex managing these social channels has become. Misinformation spreads on Twitter, the front pages of major newspapers identify innocent men as suspects and witch-hunts begin in forums like Reddit.

As an industry, publishing is in a unique position: Even if we’re not all go-to breaking news sources, we are media outlets whose core mission is to inform.

So, how should we handle these sensitive situations? Isn’t it our duty to dissipate information? Well, yes, but in order to maintain brand integrity, the info has to be factually correct. And in times of tragedy, early details are often foggy.

Here are my recommendations for what you should do the next time a crisis strikes. Take note: These are intended for lifestyle, trade and small b-to-b publications. Outlets such as the NYT, WSJ, AP and Reuters are in a class of their own for breaking news.

Halt Social Media Posts

Until you can assess the severity of the situation and connect with your team (which could take time), pause content sharing so you avoid an awkwardly timed post. And that goes for retweets and shares from other sources.

Communicate With Your Team

Start an email chain, gather in an office and get on the same page with your editors with everything you’re producing that day. Should the newsletter distribution be halted? Who’s calling tech to put a hold on the sweepstakes launching on the homepage?

Tip: Work with ad sales to include verbiage in advertiser contracts stating that any social support for brand promotions will be on tentative dates only. In the event you need to cancel or reschedule a tweet or Facebook promotion in the face of a tragedy, you won’t be legally bound to certain dates.

Be Cautious of What You RT and Share

Boston was a prime example of how things can go wrong in the race to be first. Inaccuracies were everywhere. Wired’s Matt Honan even called for Twitter to offer an “edit” button. So be judicious with your decisions: Remember that a RT is an endorsement of the content, and it’s your responsibility to make sure that what you are putting in your readers’ newsfeeds isn’t bogus.

Have a Crisis Plan in Place

If you don’t have a basic protocol, make an outline now and ask yourself: Does at least one other person have access to the publishing tool to edit outgoing posts (or halt them altogether?) If the social media manager is unavailable at the time of a crisis, the keys to the kingdom should be accessible to a senior-level editor or publisher. Also worth keeping in mind: Do you need a POV on the subject? In most cases you’ll want to offer up very neutral information. If you’re compelled to acknowledge the event, a short and succinct post like Coca Cola or Ebay did for Boston will suffice.

In The Aftermath, Consider a Reduced Posting Schedule

In the days that follow a tragic event, edit seemingly frivolous social copy. This is mostly applicable to lifestyle and consumer magazines. I’d suggest holding any “OMG, can you believe that actress got bangs?” tweets until the media climate has cooled. If you’re a b-to-b or trade pub, perhaps you could hold promotional posts or calls for conference sign-ups.

Here are three posts and discussions I found helpful below:

PR Newser: How should brands respond to tragedy
Social Media/Digital Expert Peter Shankman sparked an informed dialogue
PR Daily: What not to do

Agree? Disagree? Tweet me your POV @StephaniePaige

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Easy Steps to Going Viral & Mastering the Social Web

traphael — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:13:58 -0400

Yesterday Bloomberg Businessweek reported on a brilliant idea by a Korean tech entrepreneur and magazine professional: Won Hee Chang has developed a strategy for possibly "coercing virality" on the social Web, a move that may help her Seoul-based literary magazine gain new revenue and audiences.

“Readers who share content via social media will be able to access additional articles for free,” writes Businessweek's Caroline Winter. “Content, available in English, will initially be free. When readers log on to the site for the first time, they’ll receive a certain number of points—Chang calls them ‘karma points’—which will slowly be depleted as they click through articles. To restock on points and maintain access, they will have to share the site’s stories through social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter. It’s a bit like multilevel marketing—the more readers spread articles, the greater their access. Those who bristle at being asked to share content can buy points; five points will cost 99¢.”

This is an excellent concept that can extend beyond paid content models. Here are a few examples that could work:

Contests: Setting up a contest or sweepstakes can be a great way to leverage Chang’s tactic. Content providers can award readers with points for a contest or sweepstakes if they share articles. The more articles they share, the more points they earn to better their chances of winning the contest or sweepstakes prize—and publishers can get their brand in front of more readers who may not have been interacting with them on a social basis before.

Discounts: Team up with an advertiser to offer discounts or free products. Users can get access to these special offers or products by earning points for sharing out articles or sponsored content. It provides your advertising partner with instant gratification, and could be part of a larger value-add. In addition to an advertiser, a brand could use this tool to help them to boost subscriptions—the more points earned, the lower the price of a yearly print or digital subscription, incentivizing untapped leads.

Content: Like Chang’s model, provide exclusive content for those who earn points by sharing out links. Put the threshold for points earned at a lower level: If a user shares two stories they’ll earn enough points to get access to an exclusive video, photo gallery or even the rest of a story.

Some brands are already taking steps in this direction: Entertainment Weekly rolled out 11 covers in anticipation of the new season of HBO’s True Blood last June. Before the newsstand reveal, Entertainment Weekly’s social media editor leveraged the 11 covers to gamify her Facebook posts, slowly revealing the covers and then asking users to comment to see more. It was the most viral post of the month—it drove nine times more likes, five times more comments, and 19 times more shares on Facebook than the average post. The issues also garnered the second highest number of single copy sales, likely a result of the increased consumer awareness.

This same approach could be taken, but instead of doing the reveal on Facebook for generating comments, users could get this exclusive content from the points they earn from sharing out the promotion, and brands could develop a special landing page on their own sites to reveal the, in this case, exclusive cover photos.

T.J. Raphael is the Associate Editor of FOLIO:. Follow her on Twitter: @TJRaphael

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Where Google Misses the Mark for Premium Publishers

Bill Mickey — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 15:32:20 -0500

I love Google. I believe it to be one of the greatest American businesses ever launched. For the last dozen years, I have been a partner as well as competitor to Google. I have seen firsthand the incredible breadth of engineering talent and resources they bring to the market. As a publisher, I was a long-time customer of syndicated Google search advertising as well as embedded, contextual text advertising.

Google is brilliant at serving and monetizing text advertising. Whether done on the search result page or via contextual mapping to page level content into a dedicated module, these are solutions that no publisher can directly offer. These are solutions based on mapping scale of advertisers to scale of potential keywords, something no individual publisher can possibly replicate. The money generated from these placements is incremental and does not compete with the publishers’ own direct efforts to sell a similar product.

Display is a different ballgame. A premium publisher’s core business is in selling a high-value display placement into their curated environment at a premium price. While programmatic buying is surely challenging the value of this model, it still represents a significant market with hundreds of top-tier brand marketers placing value on the age-old premise of the right ad delivered to the right individual in the right environment.

Google’s core display product undercuts this model in damaging ways. Google will serve what its algorithm perceives to be the best possible ad at that given moment. It does not discern the appropriateness of the ad content itself or the economics involved. This often defaults to the lowest common denominator served into a premium display position—a text ad, from a direct response marketer, sold for less than 10 percent of what the publishers’ direct sales force is trying (and succeeding ) to get for that same inventory.

This is particularly damaging in emerging areas like mobile. Because most premium publishers don’t sell their mobile inventory yet, you often see Google text ads appearing in prime display mobile real estate. Because many of these publishers are using DFP as their first party ad server, Google wisely makes it very easy for them to automate their Adsense backfill.

Here is the prime example. This is a screen shot of The New York Times mobile home page from a few months back. The NYT has not sold this position so it defaults to a backfill solution from Google. This is what served:

Now I’m an old digital guy and still view the home page of the NYT as a very premium buy. I see top 50 brands paying top dollar to get that position. Google has done a great service to the Counseling Anxiety in Miami advertiser. I wonder if they even know they owned the homepage of the NYT. For the NYT, this is a horrible result. Never mind the poor quality of the ad content and how that sullies the environment for the reader; I’m not sure how their sales team can go to market selling the exclusivity of the placement to their top-brand advertising partners when this is what’s running there.

So what can you do if you’re a premium publisher with lots of unsold inventory?

1. Put the right resources in place to sell it yourself, and in the way it needs to be sold—as a high-value, high-impact display unit.
2. Work with specialist networks that focus on premium inventory and premium brands.
3. If you’re going to backfill, do it via an SSP (Pubmatic, Rubicon, or even AdMeld, which Google owns), where more competition for the inventory should produce better ads and better economics.
4. If you’re going to just run Google ads, then have somebody at the switch watching to make sure there are minimum standards of ad content quality and yield.

Don’t get me wrong; Google is a great and critical partner to the publisher and would be the first to point out they give the publisher control to manage their inventory. The reality is that most publishers don’t have the resources to do this, so they default to something that in the long run undermines their business.

Be smart. Protect the premium value of your brand and inventory.

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Don’t Call It a Redesign

Bill Mickey — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 12:51:56 -0500

For much of the last year, my colleagues and I have been working through a redesign of the home page of our flagship site, TheAtlantic.com. From whiteboard sketches and Google docs to Dunkin’ Donuts and the occasional conference-call squabble, we completed the project thanks to the standard tools of 21st-century workplace collaboration.

What was surprising, though, is how quickly the undertaking turned from “sprucing up the home page” to “what is our mission and how should we achieve it?” Midway through the process, in fact, we sought to avoid referring to the project as a redesign at all. That seemed to trivialize it, suggesting a facelift or a fresh coat of paint. The goal, we realized, was more strategic than aesthetic.

As it should be. A lot had changed since we last revamped the home page in early 2010. Perhaps the biggest difference was the size of the audience, which grew from 3.8 million monthly unique visitors in February 2010 to 12.5 million in October 2012 (Omniture). Likewise, we have about three times more daily visits to the home page than we did back then. For all the side-door social and search referrals (which are by far the major drivers of our audience), the home page still claims between 15 and 20 percent of our daily page views. Now that it was attracting nearly 300,000 visits a day, we needed to serve those readers better.

The goals we set out to accomplish, listed below, are hardly unique to The Atlantic. But familiar growing pains are not necessarily any easier to soothe. We tried, quite deliberately, to use the design process to fix problems and improve user experience. The mission included:

• Give the home page more visual oomph. We went with a larger lead photo and lead headline, and allocated more real estate to promoting our visual features, “In Focus” (our photo section) and video. We also adopted new typefaces and a cleaner look. I may sound confused; I just said a few paragraphs ago that the mission of the project was strategic, not aesthetic. That’s true, but one strategic goal was to flex some visual muscle – to reflect the more visual nature of the site, to keep pace with other sites that publish much larger home page photos than we do even now, and to ensure the focus of the page didn’t shift too far toward ever-more sophisticated and visually emphatic ads.

• Drive readers to the interior pages of the site. Six months ago, I wrote in this space that the home page matters, “but not, perhaps, for the reasons you may think.” The argument was that the home page is critical for conveying the sensibility and values of a site, for serving as a statement of the brand. So the page mattered even if it wasn’t triggering very many clicks, at least relative to social and search. True, but why not optimize the page (and all our pages) to drive depth? With the new design, we have introduced skyboxes on all pages as well as what we call the Belt on the second screen of the home page. Now we’re promoting 18 stories on the first screen and a half, compared to 13 before. To our eyes, at least, the page doesn’t seem busier.

• Fight the tyranny of the “right rail.” The clickstream data shows that the standard right column of a page has become easy for readers to overlook. That long gutter is a line that eyeballs just don’t cross. Unhappy about giving up 40 percent of our page, we decided to reclaim that real estate as a place for compelling content. To do that effectively, we got rid of the gutter.

• Make the bottom half of the page more dynamic. In the 2010 redesign, we tried to make the top of the page look sharp. But we failed to require the same ambition of the rest of the page. One exercise we've been going through in the last year: call up a site, scroll down one or two screens, and then ask ourselves, How does that look? More and more we came to admire those sites that put real effort into the second, third, and fourth screens down. So we've tried to bring strong design to the whole page, not just to the top.
• Reflect the important role of social media. The Most Popular box tells readers what stories others are reading. Our social strip at the bottom of the page goes a bit deeper, indicating which stories are popping on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon. (We’ll be adding more services as our analytics permit.)

• Give more of our on-staff writers regular presence. Our new Writers module promotes the latest posts from a fuller range of journalists on our team.

• Create a higher-impact experience for advertisers. For both the edit and sales teams, clutter is the enemy. To cut down on the noise and give the ads more impact, we reduced the number of spots on our home page from a banner and two boxes to one box and one high-impact pushdown unit. In some circumstances, the page features only one standard ad. At the same time, we built in flexibility to test new native promotions that will allow us to surface custom advertiser content, labeled as such.

• Promote our sister sites better. Since early 2010, we have added a new site to The Atlantic portfolio (The Atlantic Cities) and to our parent Atlantic Media Company portfolio (Quartz). With the new home page, we’re allocating space, when editorially appropriate, to teasing stories from those sites, as well as creating a footer that features top stories from all our sites at all times.

It’s been a week since we introduced our new home page. In the coming months, we’ll be altering article and channel landing pages to reflect the new look out front. Of course, even then we won’t be done. In a constantly changing media environment where data and reader comments are both instantaneous, you’re never done.

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Television: The Next Screen for Publishers?

traphael — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 11:40:54 -0500

By 2017, about 600 million televisions worldwide will be connected to the Internet, at least according to the Connected TV Forecasts report from Digital TV Research.

At the start of the decade there were an estimated 48 million Internet connected televisions in the United States or 45 percent of the global total. By 2017, it is expected that there will be 147 million Internet connected televisions in the U.S., which will account for 25 percent of the global total. China will have 93 million connected TVs by 2017, up from a mere 2 million at the end of 2010.

As tablets and smartphones continue to grow along with the need to diversify revenues, publishers have seen the value of extending their reach to every device available. While it is unlikely that readers will ever use their televisions to actually read content, they will likely use these newly connected devices to visit Web pages and to watch video.

The Internet can be publishers’ “side door” into television, so to speak, and many are already working hard to produce videos that are tied to print magazine brands.

At the 2012 American Magazine Conference in San Francisco this fall, for example, enthusiast publisher Source Interlink Media said it was turning its eye to video—it now has a 45-person production crew and is focusing on entertainment-based streaming content.

“YouTube has allowed us to dive into episodic content and it’s evolving to be able to provide a lot of advertising content,” said Chris Argentieri, president of Source Interlink Media. Source in the digital age will be “truly a diversified media company from a revenue standpoint,” he added.

Hearst already has its YouTube Premium Channel initiative, which includes the Hello Style and the Car and Driver Channels. Time Inc.’s This Old House is using video to power its website relaunch and has the potential to roll out about 34 years of video programming from its companion television program. TheAtlantic.com launched a video channel in August 2011 and regional title New York magazine turned a content staple, Eat Cheap, into a five-part YouTube series.

YouTube is the second largest and most used search engine on the planet, rivaling only its parent company, Google. With so many Internet connected televisions anticipated to come in the next few years, expect to see the number of users not only increase but the number of publisher-branded YouTube channels as well.

T. J. Raphael is Associate Editor of FOLIO: Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.
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Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson Leaves Wired

traphael — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 16:48:13 -0400

After an 11-year stint as Wired's top editor, Chris Anderson is stepping down. According to a memo released late Friday by Condé Nast CEO Charles Townsend, Anderson will leave the magazine, pursuing his "entrepreneurial dream." The announcement comes about 10 days after the publication announced it was increasing its rate base for the 11th consecutive year to 825,000--a bump of 3 percent or 25,000. Below is the full note from Townsend on Anderson's departure:

Today Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, announced that he will be leaving Condé Nast at the end of the year to become CEO of 3D Robotics, a company he cofounded several years ago.

“This is an opportunity for me to pursue an entrepreneurial dream,” Chris said. “I’m confident that Wired’s mission to influence and chronicle the digital revolution is stronger than ever and will continue to expand and evolve.”

Chris joined Wired as editor in chief in 2001. During his tenure, the magazine received eight National Magazine Awards, including the prestigious top prize for General Excellence in 2005, 2007 and 2009. In 2010, Adweek honored Wired as its Magazine of the Decade.

As with every brand that challenges the current times and predicts the future, Wired will now embark on the next phase of its quest to determine “what will matter.” Please join me in thanking Chris for his extraordinary contributions to the Wired franchise. We wish him the best of luck in his new venture and look forward to naming his successor shortly.

T.J. Raphael is a FOLIO: Magazine Associate Editor. Follow her on Twitter.
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Focus On Media’s ‘Great Realignment’ At the ACT III Conference

traphael — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 14:02:47 -0400

Oxford, Mississippi—Magazine publishers from a broad cross section of the industry spent two days presenting their best practices and innovative ideas for an era of transition during the third annual ACT III conference at the University of Mississippi.

Like at the AMC in San Francisco last week, the underlying theme of the event was whether print media's best days are behind it. And if it is, the question was how long the decline will take, and how far down print will go. And like at the AMC, there was no broad agreement. In fact, said opening keynoter Sid Holt, executive director of the American Society of Magazine Editors, no one really knows what form the business will take in the years ahead.

And in the meantime, publishers described how they're innovating and iterating to serve the changing needs of their communities.

The conference, organized by Samir Husni, founder and director of the Magazine Innovation Center here, featured an eclectic mix of speakers, from Rebecca Darwin, CEO of the acclaimed Garden & Gun, to Michael Capuzzo, publisher of Northern Pennsylvania's Mountain Home, and author of the best-selling real-life shark thriller, "Close to Shore." There were 145 attendees at the event, which also featured tours of the historic city and a visit to the Mississippi Delta, the birthplace of blues music.

Because it's held in an academic setting, the event included students as attendees and sometimes participants, and many speakers geared their remarks to the next generation of journalists as well.

Even as individual magazine operators and entrepreneurs told their own stories, the state of the industry was summed up in a presentation by Bob Sacks, the newsletter publisher and chronicler of the state of the magazine industry.

"We're in a period of what I call the great realignment," Sacks said. "We're going from being primarily print-revenue based to one that's primarily digital. But for print, a loss of dominance does not equal death. There will be hundreds of billions of dollars to be made in the reading industry."

Sacks also urged publishers to reinvent themselves before someone else does, and from the tone of the presentations, the attendees and speakers at ACT III are busy doing just that.

For example, in 2009, when it was in danger of being shut down, Garden & Gun set itself to developing new ways to connect, Darwin recalled. "I really always envisioned that this would be a national magazine that was about a region and a lifestyle," she said. "But during that time, the four "P's"—paper, printing, prepress and postal—kept coming. And at the same time the advertisers were paying late. So I got the staff together and said, 'We have got to come up with something that will generate some revenue. We created a club. We came up with the membership levels ourselves. We came up with the names, and now we have a very loyal audience and the club is working well."

And Kevin P. Keefe, vice president of editorial at Kalmbach Publishing Co. described a variety of spinoff business lines in his company's markets, which focus on railroading, model railroading and other enthusiast markets. Included in these products are track plans for modeling enthusiasts available for sale online, railroad maps that tell different stories about the industry, and DVD archives of back issues of print magazines.

"These are the most profitable products we've ever produced,” Keefe said, crediting Sue Roman of Taunton Press for the idea. "It's insane how popular they are."

Two speakers, Keefe and Jim Elliott, president of The James. G. Elliott Co., noted that apps have not played out as well as many publishers had hoped. "[The] Apple Newsstand hasn't been quite the bonanza we were hoping for, but it still has been a positive," Keefe said.

Perhaps the most passionate speaker was Capuzzo, who summarized the true value of the industry: "It starts with the writer," he said. "One of the things I wanted to talk about was content. At Mountain Home, we've suffered for something, and I hope this is it."

Paraphrasing Oxford native William Faulkner, Capuzzo said, "Journalism, at least on the newspaper side, has been a utopian venture, except they are aiming it at a tragic species."

Tony Silber is the general manager of FOLIO: Magazine.
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FT Has More Social Media Followers Than Customers

traphael — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 16:22:32 -0400

More people interact with business newspaper The Financial Times through social media than directly with the brand, according to a recent infographic released by the publication.

In late July, The Financial Times’ digital subscribers grew to about 300,000 paying readers, an increase of about 31 percent when compared to the same time in 2011, with the publication’s total circulation increasing to almost 600,000.

Meanwhile, the FT social community reaches 3.9 million people—2.2 million on Twitter, 1.3 million on Google+, 430,000 on Facebook and a surprising 18,000 on LinkedIn. To put this into perspective, there are about 500 percent more people interacting with the brand on social media than there are paying for its content.

News, analysis and opinion pieces are what FT readers want from the brand on social media, although when on Facebook, these consumers also like to see offers or competitions.

According to the FT, about 20 percent of its traffic in the last six months came from social media, a medium that “is growing faster than every other traffic source at FT.com. The volume of visits to FT.com driven by social media is at the highest level ever.”

What do these numbers mean? According to a recent report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, 66 percent of online adults use Facebook; 20 percent uses LinkedIn and 16 percent use Twitter. About 83 percent of adults aged 18-29 use Facebook, with the second highest group being 30-49-year-olds at 72 percent.

FT readers are on average 41 years old. However, based on the data from Pew, the majority of its social audience is likely a younger demographic than its typical subscriber (digital or otherwise)—a group that is not only coveted for advertisers, but likely enticing for its future growth. Young adults are less likely to pay for content, though they’re more likely to share it.

The puzzle for The Financial Times to solve will be the conversion of their young social media followers into paying subscribers.

T.J. Raphael is a FOLIO: magazine Associate Editor. Follow her on Twitter.

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Magazine Publishers & The iPad: An Unrequited Love

traphael — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 16:39:05 -0400

If this were a bad teen movie, the magazine publishing industry would not be (surprisingly) playing the glamorous cheerleader, but Apple would still be the big man on campus.

It seems that the industry has a case of unrequited love with Apple, at least according to recent findings from research firm MagazineRadar.

Apple hasn’t advertised the iPad in an MPA member magazine since July 2011. Last summer, Apple made a brief appearance within the industry’s pages, with the latest iPad campaign in magazines appearing from May-July 2011. During that time there were 21 ad pages placed strategically among 21 MPA monthly magazines, all with the same creative.

Apple did also place 18 back page cover ads in 9 MPA weekly and bi-weekly magazines during the same period. The seeming coolness from Apple doesn’t stop in print—the company has not advertised the iPad on MPA magazine websites at all in 2012.

Why would they? Magazine publishers have been doting over the product and Apple not only with each other at industry events, or to media journalists like this reporter, but they have, essentially, been running ads for them.

Magazines (trade or otherwise) are not just writing about the iPad, says MagazineRadar, but they are showing it off—in 2012, about 32 percent of all edit credits, which the research firm considers a “single mention or image of a brand in a magazine’s editorial,” appeared as images rather than text.

Apple’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for magazine advertising extends beyond the iPad, too. From September 2011 to August 2012 there were 216 ads for the iPhone placed in 200 MPA magazines. In comparison, the iPad received 1,847 edit credits so far in 2012. Additionally, Apple dominates other technology brands when it comes to editorial mentions (see below).

Apple is likely undertaking a strong advertising campaign for its new addition—the iPhone 5. Whether or not they pay attention to the adoring magazine industry remains to be seen. MagazineRadar, however, says one thing is certain: publications will continue writing about Apple and its products.

T.J. Raphael is a FOLIO: magazine Associate Editor. Follow her on Twitter: @TJRaphael1.

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The Partnership Puzzle

traphael — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 15:48:41 -0400

It’s an article of faith among digital publishers that content partnerships are one of the key levers for success. If you’re operating a small site and you want to grow, you need to partner up with big distributors that can serve as megaphones, amplifying your content and, the theory goes, bringing a new audience back to you. If you’re running a big site, you need partners to provide fresh content, and lots of it, to satisfy the millions of eyeballs arriving each day.

And so we live in a partnership ecosystem. As a medium-sized player, we at The Atlantic have partnerships going in both directions. We send some of our best stories to sites that have huge traffic. We take smart stories from smaller sites that are happy to share their goods with our strong brand and relatively large audience.

All of these partnerships raise the obvious question: Is it really a good idea for publishers to give away their content for free? The arguments cut both ways.

The chief argument in favor of sharing content is that you can get direct traffic in return. If the partner site is displaying your logo and linking to other stories on your site, it’s a fine idea to give away a story or two in return. This is a plausible theory that bears out on occasion. If, for example, Yahoo! runs a story from The Atlantic or one of our sister sites, especially on its home page, there can be a surge of traffic from Yahoo! back to our pages. Not always, and often the surge is more like a trickle, but it can be something.

But what if The Atlantic’s partner has a particularly strong presence in social media? If it rips an Atlantic article and then uses its social infrastructure to push that piece to the world, the inbound traffic from Facebook or Twitter goes to the partner site, not to us. (This assumes that the partner is linking to our article on its site, not our article on our site.)

We don’t worry much that when Yahoo! posts our story, they’re grabbing readers who would otherwise have read that piece on TheAtlantic.com. Those might be separate audiences. But if our partner was dominating Facebook, Twitter and Reddit with links back to our story on its site, our own social efforts might be drowned out. With social media now generating the plurality of our unique visitors, this could hurt.

Now let’s consider branding. This, some say, ought to be the tiebreaker. If you accept that there are gains to be made from direct links but losses to be suffered in social media (and maybe don’t be too quick to accept either of those theories), then the branding benefit could be persuasive. The theory, of course, is that just having your logo on another site, even if there are no clicks back, is good exposure for your brand. Certainly there’s logic in that: A highway road sign provides branding, even if customers are cruising past at 60 mph. Maybe you’ll stop at that pancake house not now, but in the next state over.

OK, but there’s a case to be made that people have been trained to tune out the noise when they’re on websites—to avoid the blinking ads and the right-rail modules and the partner logos. If they’re reading defensively, if they’re tuning out the noise, then you’re not getting exposure after all. And, if you were happily trading exposure for some losses in social media, well, maybe that trade isn’t worth it anymore.

I still believe in content partnerships. But we should be honest about the possible tradeoffs, and humble in our certainty about how exactly these arrangements work.
Bob Cohn is editor of Atlantic Digital. In this role, he oversees all editorial components of The Atlantic’s digital and mobile properties, including TheAtlantic.com, TheAtlanticWire.com, and TheAtlanticCities.com, as well as the print publication’s integration on digital platforms.
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Mobile Advertising Became 'Relevant' in 2011

Bill Mickey — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:13:09 -0400

The IAB released its Internet Advertising Revenue Report yesterday, which details full-year 2011 results and was conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers. As it has for the last ten years, except for a slight dip in 2009, annual revenue easily beat the previous year—hitting $31.7 billion in 2011, a 22 percent increase over 2010 and an all-time high.

In the last decade, revenues have shot up $25.7 billion at 20.3 percent CAGR. Even so, mobile got recognition as a format that came into its own in 2011, jumping 149 percent to $1.6 billion for the year. 2011 also marked the first year in the report that mobile was broken out as a standalone format. Its revenue increase drove 3.7 percent of the overall 22 percent advertising growth for the year.

While mobile's 5 percent slice of the full-year digital advertising pie is a tiny one, it's passed email (1 percent), sponsorship (4 percent) and rich media (4 percent) in share of revenues. Mobile is now tied with lead generation.

It's likely been singled out due to its big jump over 2010's $641 million, by far the fastest growing segment. Plus, the platform has traditionally been bemoaned as one that's not been capitalized on nearly enough.

Nevertheless, digital video (6 percent) and classifieds (8 percent) are still slightly ahead, as are display and banner advertising which command the highest share of revenues at 22 percent and 47 percent respectively.
For the full report, click here.

Annual Internet Ad Revenue (in billions)

Source: PwC and IAB, April 2012

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Bridging the Gap Between IT and Editorial

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:15:56 -0400

Creating and serving digital content across multiple devices typically requires a somewhat grueling conversation with your IT team. Unfortunately, I’ve been on the serving and receiving side of those painful discussions that focus on strained resources, support and the infamous “approved project list,” but they are quickly becoming a thing of the past. New products have emerged into the marketplace that will have your IT team singing your praises; not because it’s one more thing they need to help you build and support, but because it’s one less thing they need to worry about.

Over the past year, SaaS based solutions have been introduced into the marketplace and are designed to work seamlessly with the products your creative teams have been working with for decades. Typically, the authoring tools use some type of plug-in designed to work within the application, as opposed to alongside it. The creation of the files, and the subsequent storage and delivery, is all done in the cloud on a secure, scalable, truly multi-tenant platform.

Even with some of the ongoing debate associated with the cloud (like security and up-time), I think we can all agree these platforms are designed to remove the limitations of what you can achieve using your in-house IT hardware and support.

Simply put, these solutions put control back into the hands of your creative team and helps empower them to create great, interactive content with far fewer obstacles. By no means am I suggesting that you try to work in a black box; but when your overextended/understaffed IT group can stay focused on more mission-critical, back office functions and still act as an advisor for new business initiatives like digital content, everyone wins.

To that end, we’re also seeing companies use their IT groups in a more strategic/advisory capacity. This requires far less technical bandwidth of these staffers, but still allows them to be part of something that’s revolutionary on many levels. Through these changes, the adversarial relationship that sometimes exists between business and IT begins to dissipate. From my experience, many heads of IT still battle with this inside their organizations; anything that helps bridge this gap will be more supported then you may think. Additionally, less time required from IT resources helps keeps the overall internal costs of a project down, which certainly helps to build a successful ROI model.

Craig Morrow is Director of Strategic Accounts at MEI. MEI was founded in 1990 as Managing Editor Inc., with the goal of providing innovative software solutions to the rapidly evolving publishing industry. Today the company delivers a comprehensive package of digital publishing, editorial workflow and automated ad layout systems for magazines, newspapers and other print and electronic publishers and communicators. Visit the Managing Editor website to learn more about their services.
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New iPad on the Way

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:16:34 -0500

In a much-buzzed about announcement that was not a surprise to anyone with Internet access, Apple debuted the latest reincarnation of the iPad at a splashy event today at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. We think our invite [pictured, right] to the event must have gotten spammed, so we’re relying on the copious amount of live blogs saturating the Web to get the full Apple scoop. Here’s what we’ve learned so far.

• Name: The latest iPad is not called “the iPad 3”, or the “HD iPad” as speculated, but simply “the new iPad.”

• Price point: the 16 GB iPad with Wi-Fi will start at $499; $599 for the 32GB version; and the tablet with 64 GB is available for $699. According to AllThingsD, the 4G wireless versions cost $130 more a pop. ABC News reports the iPad 2 will now be sold at a beginning price of $399.

• Weight: 1.4 pounds.

• Dimensions: Mashable reports the new iPad will be 9.7 inches long and 9.4 millimeters thick.

• Presentation: The third version of the iPad has a 2048 x 1537-pixel “retina display.”
“It has 31 million pixels with a resolution of 2048 by 1536 pixels. That’s 1 million more pixels than an HD TV,” says marketing chief Phil Schiller said, according to AllThingsD.

• Color: The tablet will be available in black and white.

• Sales: In Q4 2011, 15.4 million iPads were sold. The new iPad is available for pre-order today, and for sale on March 16.

• Battery power: Similar to the iPad 2, the new iPad has 10 hours for regular use, and nine hours of 4G LTE use.

• Support: AllThingsD reports the new iPad is supported by an A5X chip “with quad-core graphics needed for new high-resolution display.”

• Networks: Coming to AT&T and Verizon. The new iPad will also act as a Personal Hotspot, allowing laptops, etc. to use its signal for Internet access.
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LinkedIn Expands Scope of Its Follow Company Feature

Bill Mickey — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 10:50:58 -0500

On Monday the LinkedIn announced a new Follow Company button that lets individuals follow a brand or company page. The feature is essentially an expansion of functionality that was already in place, but from within the network itself. Now companies can allow individuals to follow them from outside the LinkedIn ecosystem by clicking on a button embedded in their websites.

According to the blog post by LinkedIn product manager Mike Grishaver announcing the new feature, AT&T, Starbucks, Sony and American Express, among others, are already using the button on their sites.

There are four ways to follow a company, including the embeddable website button. On LinkedIn itself, you can click a follow button on the company's page, directly from a search results page, or by hovering over the company name in contact's page and clicking on the follow link in the pop-up window.

LinkedIn says it has more than 2 million companies and, as of early February, about 150 million members.

The 2 million companies is up from almost 1 million since the spring of 2010 when LinkedIn launched its original Follow Company feature. At that point, there was no way to receive status updates from companies, a function that didn't appear until later in 2011.
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Prospecting Up-sells with Behavioral Analytics

Bill Mickey — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:34:08 -0500

This post is republished with permission and originally appears here.

In paid content, one of the challenges for corporate sales is finding demand for content that can be monetized – finding a good lead. Our research shows one of the best sources for leads is within existing individual subscribers where several individuals are sharing the access to the paid content. The charts below show a typical example of how to identify an individual subscriber that is a lead for an up-sell to a corporate or group agreement.

The first chart shows the daily use profile for two different individual subscribers by graphing the total number of reports accessed over a 90-day period. Each daily use profile is color coded based on the unique devices used to access the reports. The daily use profile with just the blue color shows how one subscriber’s account accessed reports via a single device. The daily use profile with multiple colors shows how the other subscriber’s account accessed reports via five devices (each color representing a distinct device).

Whereas the daily use profile with one color represents a loyal subscriber, the daily use profile with five colors is a prospect for an up-sell because of unmonetized demand of multiple users sharing one subscriber’s account. But how can you be sure the multi-color profile isn’t simply a raving fan?

The number two is a good start. In the hourly use profile for each account, the shared account has twice as many active hours as the individual account. Additionally, some devices are active earlier than other devices (e.g., purple vs. orange) but overlap on their activity which means they are used in different time zones. Also, note the individual account profile shows inactivity for lunch in the middle of the day. There are no low activity hours for the shared account rather it peaks at the periods of most overlap between devices.

Looking at the quarterly use profile, it becomes clear that each of the shared account devices were active throughout the period. Unlike the individual account which had ten inactive work-days during the period, the shared account had no inactive days. Digging deeper into the quarterly profile, the shared account consumes three times the content as compared to the individual account.

The Implication

The shared account exhibits usage profiles with monetizable demand for content. Corporate sales has a number of avenues to pursue the lead either directly, through procurement, or even through compliance. Properly engaged, this lead will convert with high probability.

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