Are You Ready to Become a Media Company?

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Admit it, you do like the idea of becoming a platform. Many organizations look to build a proprietary community for their customers so they can seed their brand messaging. The smarter companies know that having a way to capture community insights and ideas is one of the best ways to create products and services customers want and need.

A wholly owned community is a way to edge risky technology bets.

What if Twitter goes away one day soon in the way many publications and media channels have in the last couple of years? What if Facebook decides to charge you a steep fee to even develop a fan page, create a group or build a community there?

What happens to your content? Where are the connections going? How will you reestablish that influence?

Build and own the platform

Having your own platform is painful at first as you'll need to work hard at seeding content and conversations to build a tool that is useful and attracts customer participation. Versus being one voice on a well trafficked channel that may go away or change the rules on you. See how social media is like sharecropping.

Your platform is worth nothing without a community. A community can be useful to company and customers in different ways.

Having built one with Fast Company magazine a few years back, and having participated in a couple since, I thought it helpful to provide a list of considerations you want to think about when going the customer community route.

Costs of building a platform.

Start up costs

Many organizations that are not making headway in social media fail to understand this part. All costs are quantifiable, as long as you're ready to admit that the time and effort your team puts into potentially additional work have a monetary value associated with them.

The biggest cost an organization faces is that of lack of passion.

An organic tribe in a public tool will always trump your proprietary platform because by its very nature, it's free (each member pays a cost in time/attention), faster (participates in the knowledge flows), and flexible (doesn't have to please your boss).

1. conceptual work to map the community to the overall business strategy -- if you're ready to pay a consultant to come in and charge big $$$ to do this, why would you not put a dollar sign on an internal initiative. And your people may know a lot more about your business.

2. practical work to integrate the new technology into existing tools, for example a customer portal -- in many organizations IT handles the software and often forgets to check in with its user base. Don't make the same mistake with your customer base.

3. translation work to develop content that maps to customer needs and serves the organization -- while a lot of thinking goes into the tool implementation, often there is no investment made towards the creation of good content. Rather, many leverage what they already have, which was written and packaged for other purposes, or buy content with the same mindset of lead generation via online ads, by the pound.

Costs in the middle to make it happen

You found a common ground and built a community on your platform, now what? Engagement and activity come with their own sets of challenges and costs.

4. moderation work to facilitate conversations and information exchanges -- even more important than connecting customers to the company, it's connecting them to each other. This will begin to foster greater engagement.

5. curator work to surface information that is helpful to customers -- if you've done your job well, you will start to collect a lot of content from customers on the platform. Highlighting and making sense of that content will help time-starved customers get more value out of signing in your platform. For example, have you thought of packaging comments of a post or discussion thread in a forum?

6. formalization of a process to start documenting guidelines -- this is about making sense of what people do and want to do on the platform, as well as the kind of content that is voted as most useful to them by traffic and responses. Guidelines help with maintaining activities over the long haul and orienting new customers.

Sustaining the platform will cost you

This is the critical phase of the project and one that not too many are willing to invest in. It's the dip that will take you to realizing not just the benefits, but the returns on your investments from having built a platform.

We'll go deeper on how to think about this part in another post. For now, what you should think about is the level of emotional investment both your business and customers have poured into this platform. Moving forward will require you to think like a media company.

At this point in the community lifecycle, if you've done your work well, you have in fact created a channel and platform that hosts a library of useful content and interaction for many phases of the customer buying cycle.

So much information, in fact, that you could start extending it, repackaging it for new customer calls to action, going deeper for qualitative research and business insights, and so on.

You have the tremendous potential of going from using digital media to advertise your wares to being the thought leaders and organizers of information and knowledge to benefit your customers and industry. This is especially important for B2B companies.

If you thought you were going to squeeze value out of these emerging channels because of the nearly zero costs of posting your ads and articles on them, you'll need to rethink the shiny new object approach.

Are you ready to become a media company?

© 2010 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.

Comments

[Steve "@PodcastSteve" Lubetkin]

Thanks for putting this out there, Valeria. We have been advocating for this for several years now.

However, permit me to make a few arguments strongly reinforcing the part of your comment about content production.

Companies need to become media producers, not just consumers, or frankly, even just curators.

There are countless business organizations that already do this, including the Ford Motor Company, the Mayo Clinic, and many of my clients whose podcast production not only does not diminsh the attendance at their events, but expands the audience for their content by making it available to a worldwide audience.

The Rutgers Quarterly Business Outlook in South Jersey is a good example. We've been producing podcasts of the panel discussions since 2006. Each podcast is downloaded an average of 600-1,000 times. Attendance at the event has grown to more than 350 people every quarter.

We produce quarterly video podcasts from the NJ Bank Marketing Association's seminars, and their attendance is consistently 50-60 people for each seminar.

Each of these podcast series also draws a significant audience of several hundred viewers on the web and through Apple's iTunes Music Store, expanding the worldwide reputation of those sponsoring entities.

The cost of podcast production can be underwritten by offering sponsorship opportunities to companies already receptive to aligning themselves with your company and your content. Podcasts provide companies with a permanent record of their events, which they can use to promote their knowledge, expertise, and community commitments far longer than a 15-second b-roll segment behind the weather forecast will ever do.

Their sponsorship message in a podcast is permanently available on the Internet, at a much lower cost than buying a single newspaper or broadcast advertisement -- and it is seen and heard by audiences predisposed to the message, because they voluntarily sought out the podcast content.

There's another value -- the value of podcasts and vidcasts for Search Engine Visibility

People don't go to the Yellow Pages to find the services they need. They generally don't even go to a website of a firm. They go to Google (and to a lesser extent other search engines, but pretty much Google).

Firms that understand this dynamic need to ensure that they show up in the first page or so (mostly first page) of a google search.

There are several ways to do that, but Paid Ad-Words or other "search engine optimization" can be expensive if you have a popular search term.

A better way to do it is to create compelling "rich media" content like video and audio podcasts, online presentations and blogs, and to update the content on a regular, frequent basis.

Google and other search engines love pages that update frequently (blogs) have rich content (photos, videos, audio, RSS feeds) and lots of hyperlinks (blogs, podcast show notes pages, etc.) to other sites and resources. Production of this rich content results in organic improvement in search engine rankings.

Companies need to be willing to give up some of their knowledge content for free to the Internet world, in return for the visibility as a thought leader. Properly programmed, a company can be perceived as the ultimate resource for prospective clients who want to know how an organization works, or how consumers of that product or service can educate themselves to be more informed about using or comparing products or services in that sector.

Podcasting or Internet broadcasting is part of an overall marketing effort that focuses on where your potential audiences are, not where your business owners may want them to be or think they are.

Look at the top 100 podcasts listed in iTunes, and you'll find the vast majority are professionally produced by major names in traditional broadcast media. People want great content produced with broadcast quality production values, by trusted brands. To the extent that your brand has that goodwill, content produced in podcast form will attract viewers and listeners.

Lots of organizations and companies still think they will grow new customers/clients by putting ads in the newspaper. Most people under 35 don't even read a daily print newspaper, and a significant percentage of them only watch broadcast television by time-shifting technology (Tivo and DVR) and don't even glance at commercials..

And like it or not (if you are a 50-something business owner, you probably don't like it!) you're not going to reach those vendor-specifying middle and senior managers in traditional ways.

Here's an example of the power of a modest social media marketing strategy.

One of my clients is Walmart Stores. In addition to traditional media relations, we also produce digital photos and digital video reports about the events we cover for them, store openings, events with community groups, etc. We post the photos on Flickr.com, the social sharing site for photography (it's also a very easy way for me to transmit the photos to the agency I represent so they can email them to local weekly newspapers that still use a photo here and there) You can see these photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lubetkin/collections/72157605229322022/. We have a video blog for Walmart New Jersey at http://walmartnjvideos.blogspot.com/.

People in the community who are interested in Walmart can also see the photos when they search for Walmart on Google and other engines.

Few of the community activities we covered for Walmart ever made it on the local evening news (store openings, as economic news, do get covered, but community events are rarely staffed by the media).

So you have to create your own coverage options. It's just that simple.

Steve "@PodcastSteve Lubetkin
Senior Fellow, Society for New Communications Research
Managing Partner, Lubetkin Communications LLC
Professional Podcasts LLC
steve@professionalpodcasts.com
www.professionalpodcasts.com
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/podcaststeve

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Steve -- I should have let you do the post :) Content is important, and it needs to be a consideration along the path, not just something you throw in there at the end. However, I wanted to shine a light on the process -- how you need to think about it and what the costs are. We'll definitely talk more about the content part in future posts.

[Hunter Gatherer]

You might want to follow the development of the current Wordpress 3.0 Beta. This upgrade to the current 2.9.2 will include the functionality of WordpressMU, multiuser. It allows multiple instances of Wordpress blogs on a single domain. Combined with the BuddyPress plug-in, you can have your own hosted social network allowing users to add and edit their own content.

The good thing is that you own your content.

There will be a learning curve, relatively steep. But it should not dissuade someone wanting Ning or Facebook like functionality and keeping control of your content.

It will work with the vast majority of current Wordpress themes and plug-ins. It's well worth checking out and watching as it emerges from Beta later this spring. Personally, I will wait until Wordpress 3.1 to move my sites, just to allow the platform to mature a notch. No reason to be the first guinea pig. But as soon as the world gets it tested and the major bugs out, I have a lot of uses for it. If you're reading this, you will too.

[Robin Broitman]

Valerie: Great post - I really love your insights about costs in the middle to make it happen- especially around moderation and curation. You may enjoy something I posted earlier in the week on my blog "How Smart Marketers Think Like Media Companies" that focuses on some of the mindshifts required for marketers to help their companies become media companies. http://www.interactiveinsightsgroup.com/blog1/how-smart-marketers-think-like-media-companies/ Let me know what you think!