He points to our finite ability to consume content – we only have so much time in a day. When consumers reach their consumption threshold, it becomes ever more difficult to keep their attention. He says it’s an economic problem; basic supply and demand.

Content Shock Is Ancient, But That’s O.K.

In 533 A.D. the Byzantine-Roman Emperor Justinian saw the need to preserve Roman law. His cry of content shock led to the first compendiums of Roman legal statutes, which gave legal professionals of that era the nub of what was important to do their job well. Throughout ancient Europe, the “abridgment” or “digest” was a highly specialized literary form, wrote Daniel J. Boorstin, an American historian at the University of Chicago.

Schaefer’s argument is no less valid today. It’s an issue we have wrestled with throughout history. Since the Graphic Revolution exploded into the Digital Revolution, we’ve been curating and digesting content of all kinds – legal, financial, academic, medical and scientific have been the most processed. Could Schaefer’s argument be Deja Vous all over again? Quite possibly.

In these knowledge markets, organizations can beat content shock using the strategy The Reader’s Digest built its empire on.

Assuming Schaefer is right, as information multiplies, customers, clients and others who rely on organizations for niche news in these industries will demand vast amounts of abridged information. If the supply of content is high, and the demand for content is high, even as time remains finite, people in these markets will demand more curated content, digestions of content and summaries of content. They will be driven to consume more content -- will need it, want it, come to expect it, and reward the organizations that do it.

The Reader’s Digest to Digesting Content for the Masses

At its height, The Reader’s Digest published in nearly 30 editions, including Braille, in 13 languages and had a circulation of nearly 21 million copies a month. The U.S. circulation alone exceeded 12 million, twice that of the second most popular American magazine. The fascinating trait of The Reader’s Digest is this – it did not print any original content. Instead, its publishing empire was built on selling a shadow of the substance.

Could this be the next big content marketing strategy, to create the shadow of the original? And could that shadow become the substance?

The Digest Evolves

Wallace DeWitt created The Reader’s Digest from humble a beginning in the New York Library. There he copied (by hand) and abridged lengthy magazine articles for the first Digest. Over time, however, the magazine evolved and began commissioning original pieces of journalism, not to publish in its own pages, but in the annals of other magazines. Why?

First, the Digest’s strategy was so popular among other publications they rarely balked at an abridgment. Instead, they saw it as free advertising – and it was. But this was only moderately sustainable. There’s only so much content to abridge before the content cannibalization begins.

That’s when The Digest developed partnerships with other well-read magazines, commissioned other writers to create original pieces of journalism, and published those in companion outlets.

From this, the editors of The Reader’s Digest were able to create the illusion of more, and interesting content. On the other hand, it helped companion magazines by feeding them articles. After these “original pieces of journalism” where published, the Digest would abridge them and repurpose the content. The very success of the magazine created a need, which could be satisfied only by ensuring a steady flow of articles written for the purpose of being digested.

The Landscape Then And Now

Schaefer’s cry of content shock also echoes the cry of former IBM president Thomas J. Watson Jr. nearly 75 years ago. He warned of an information explosion. Watson’s came at the height of The Reader’s Digest dynasty. Alongside the king of all magazines, many other digests grew, attracting circulations that far surpassed the very publications those digests abridged. These compendiums of literature from all industry types abridged, condensed and curated vast amounts of information. They served readers’ information consumption need, which brings us back to the next big thing in content marketing.

A New Approach to Content Marketing

There’s no shortage of studies showing media is fragmenting, which means that more and more people are paying attention to niche blogs, websites and other news sources that cover slivers of industries. Technorati reports these smaller communities sway greater influence. But with each new splinter niche, we run the risk of compartmentalizing information. As the content in each of these grows, it will become increasingly important for brands to abridge, digest and curate the most important information in a given bailiwick.

Without continuous scanning of an industries environment – the media reporting on it, the bloggers writing about it, and the influencers sharing it, commenting on it and adding to the general wealth of information – a brand’s consumers could easily become overwhelmed. However, developing a content marketing strategy that leverages abridgments, digestions, and summaries of content will help consumers and build deeper ties and loyalty. To begin creating that strategy, follow in the footsteps of The Reader’s Digest model to organize and make sense of content in your industry:

• Find and begin curating the most relevant content in your market. Think about what your audience needs to know.
• Create a team of writers, editors and designers to begin reading, abridging and digesting the curated content.
• Form partnerships with other content providers and commission writers to develop special, long-form content to share with your partners.
• Curate, abridge and digest the commissioned content.
• Work with those partners, writers, and key influencers to promote the most important content through email and social media.

Markets will continue to create content at a staggering rate because the barriers to publishing it are tremendously low and the desire for content is high. While there will be plenty mediocre information that doesn’t provide utility, more than enough will be excellent content your readers need to know. Curating it won’t be enough to quail content shock, though; our customers and clients won’t have the time to consume it. Instead, do the digesting for them and give customers the most important information in succinct, clear and concise abridgments. That’s how you win content shock.

The post Will Content Shock Lead to Better Content Curation? appeared first on RELEVANCE.

In this article, “The Late-Adoption/Profitability Paradox,” he hypothesizes that emerging services lose their effectiveness over time, while the cost of fulfilling those services increase. He calls this an inverse proportional problem. It arises when marketing professionals must maintain profitability while delivering services with declining results for their client.

To understand how inverse proportionality can work against a marketing team, let’s take media relations as an example. I choose media relations because it has a long and rich history in the marketing mix and if it’s done right, the results can be quite valuable to the client and profitable to the marketer. Done wrong, a client will spend a lot of money to get meager results, while the marketer spends hours pitching without much success.

How we turn inverse proportional service delivery on its ear starts with challenging the notion many marketers hold about an audience and replacing it with a more strategic understanding of niche groups.

Why Audiences Are Different Than Niche Groups

Scan a few marketing blogs and you’ll see most professionals give credence to audiences. This focus may be the catalyst to inversely proportional marketing services. Marketers use the word audience to describe the large groups of people businesses should be connecting with, but this might be the wrong approach.

According to sociologist Herbert Blumer, audiences are made of individuals who passively consume information through mass media but rarely share the same views, beliefs, values or understanding of specific issues. And they almost never seek out solutions to such either.

On the other hand, in his research, “Public Opinion and Public Opinion Polling,” published in a 1948 edition of American Sociological Review, Blumer argues smaller groups share something in common – the same problem impacts all of them and they unite through mediated communication channels to seek out information as well as solutions.

Other research from Linda Putnam and Cynthis Stohl in their 1990 article, "Bona fide groups: A reconceptualization of groups in context," published in Communication Studies, argued niche groups are interdependent to the shared issue that affects them.

Building on Blumer, Putnam and Stohl’s research, we can understand that identifying niche groups gives marketers a strategic advantage when providing media relations services. Niche groups are interdependent because they share the same values, beliefs, views, understand a specific problem and actively seek out solutions.

Case in point: The Wall Street Journal vs. Cooperative Business Journal

Taking this reasoning to heart, we can reasonably say the mass of people who read the Wall Street Journal or listen to The Nightly News with Brian Williams, are more an audience than a niche, whereas individuals reading Cooperative Business Journal are more focused on issues related to the cooperative business industry.

If a marketer built a media relations service around the Wall Street Journal and neglected niche media, the result of that marketer’s efforts would be inversely proportional. While that marketer may land a story in the Wall Street Journal, the likelihood of people reading a mass media product to act upon the information they receive is less likely, thus a marketer must spend more time pitching media with no reasonable guarantee of converting readers to paying clients.

That is to say, a media relations service focused on mass media could be less likely to produce the tangible results to grow a business, because the people consuming mainstream media do it passively – it’s entertaining – whereas consumers of niche media are actively searching for information, perhaps even solutions to a business problem. So, targeting niche media puts a client’s message in front of people searching for that precise solution.

Why Inverse Propositional Strategies Damage Marketing Outcomes

If a marketing team depends on communicating with an audience, then the value of engagement decreases because an audience does not operate as a single system, rather its individual members passively consume media, but rarely act upon it. This causes two problems:

• Marketers try to create the broadest message possible, which never really addresses the values of a single, cohesive group of people.
• When messages fail to touch the core values of people, people remain latent.

Other researchers have confirmed that messages that touch the core values of smaller groups of people resonate better and the outcomes of engagement are quite a bit improved.

Leveraging Inverse Proportionality into Your Media Outreach

There is no silver-bullet approach to any marketing strategy, but there are some basic guidelines you should consider when planning media outreach:

• Mass media is good to get traffic and build awareness but does little to improve conversion without spending big because the audiences are heterogeneous.
• Building relationships with niche media, where smaller groups of people share common interests and search for answers to common problems, results in higher engagement and lower costs.
• Identifying specific problems those groups of people face, and writing service journalism pieces that answer those problems, strengthens a company’s competency in the eye of the people they want to engage.

To bring this concept full circle, let’s return the notion of inverse proportional services from the beginning of this article: one thing increases, while another decreases. It sounds simple enough, but there’s actually a lot happening:

1. If the marketer is billing by the hour and has to spend more time pitching, then that increases the cost for the client.
2. If the marketer is spending more time on a client, then that's less time he/she can spend on other clients.
3. If the hits or runs a marketer gets in big media do not generate leads to conversion, then ROI for the client decreases.

All you're left with is ambiguous “awareness.” Unless an organization does some heavy surveying, awareness is very hard to measure, and it often can't be measured at all.

On the other hand, as we learned from Blumer if outreach is targeted to niche, industry-specific publications, then the earned media placement increases. Suffice to say, small media are more likely to pick up a story because the niche group of people they cater to are homogenous.

As a result, marketers spend less time pitching, but more time doing front end research, and the client gets better results because of the homogenous niche of the small media, and more readers can turn into leads that generate conversion.

Understanding the concept of inverse proportional services and how it applies to your own situation is a challenging way of thinking, but one that can ultimately help make decisions about a company’s maturity level and how it should be allocating its resources.

What is your organization doing to turn this internet marketing paradox on its ear?

The post How to Beat Marketing's Inverse Proportional Paradox appeared first on RELEVANCE.

Research Paints A Picture of Opportunity for Brands

According to Pew researchers, “Perhaps more ominous for news outlets, those who are more aware of the financial problems and those who see a connection to reporting are the people most likely to have abandoned an outlet because it no longer provided them with the news and information they relied on.”

The picture is clear – fewer reporters mean fewer resources for news organizations. But this opens a tremendous opportunity for brands through honest journalism and content promotion.

Larry Kim of Wordstream used an earned media and content promotion strategy to strengthen his company’s brand online. His company created a head-to-head analysis comparing advertising on Facebook vs. the Google display network and released it days before Facebook announced its IPO. Kim’s team produced real news around a public announcement sure to garner media attention.

Photo by Flickr

The piece was relevant and ripe for journalists because of its angle. Instead of the IPO announcement, which every news organization would be reporting on, Kim’s team gave media an angle to develop stories about online advertising platforms. The hook was apropos because Google and Facebook rely on advertising platforms for revenue, and the success of an IPO is related to the health of profit-making streams of an organization. In his post he wrote, “The key to content promotion is having a strong hook. Since there are many different types of publications out there, it’s important that you have different hooks that appeal to their various interests.”

This hook helped journalists stand out from their contemporaries. Can you imagine the conversations Kim started in newsrooms across America? Brilliant.

Aside from getting the attention of journalist, earned media- supported by a robust content promotion and social media strategy- is the secret sauce. In fact, according to Ink House Design, 92 percent of marketers say social media campaigns have increased web traffic, and 78 percent say it generates more quality leads.

Building A Winning Strategy

Success with earned media doesn’t come without planning. Traditional media relations planning was relatively straightforward. Find media outlets and influential journalists, create the information for them to use as story fodder then pitch them at the right time. But today’s media environment is more complex. Companies must think about social media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Additionally, it’s important to think about paid promotion, as well as identifying non-journalistic influencers.

Connecting the Dots for Companies

Earned media has never been easy to acquire, that’s why it’s earned. However, once journalists and other influencers pick up your story, to be successful in today’s marketplace, the information must be newsworthy. It must provide journalists with a different hook, a new angle, a fresh perspective. You can’t neglect social. You shouldn’t ignore bloggers. And, your news should be available to share in print, on air, in a tweet, from a Facebook share, and email. Finally, use paid social promotion channels to break through the noise.

The post Giving Journalists New Angles Is Key to Earned Media Success appeared first on RELEVANCE.

Earned media return on investment from an outreach campaign can be measured through three distinct models:

• Impressions
• Media Impact
• Target Influence

By looking at these three models of evaluation, we can come to a deeper understanding of how to measure the impact of earned media and calculate ROI that gives us tangible results.

Impressions Model

Measuring media, based on impressions, can show executives how aware their target audience has become of a product or service.

Here’s how it works. Once a certain number of people with an audience have been exposed to and made aware of a media asset (newspaper story, magazine article, radio or television broadcast or relevant content assets designed for inbound marketing), a brand will need less exposure to trigger their knowledge, attitudes, and opinions for featured products, services or content. This continues through a cycle to influence commitment and their engagement.

There is a caveat, however: Impression analysis does not take into account other behavior, and it counts all media impressions equal. It assumes peoples’ actions are linear from message to purchase. In fact, things like social media, online product reviews and word of mouth all influence buyer decisions, as does their previous behavior—routine shopping in the same locations, for instance. “What’s important is not so much the total impressions, but that they are targeted to the media channel and vehicle favored by the potential customer,” suggest Likely, Rockland and Weiner.

Media Impact Model

At barebones, the media impact model tracks coverage against sales over time in different markets and is a useful statistical analysis for representing return on investment. During this type of evaluation exercise, patterns of sales by market and time are measured against marketing tactics—one being earned media. The evaluation can determine which tactic drove sales. This is a model in which multiple regression analysis and its variations are used to analyze key independent variables, such as earned media. Using this model, business can determine the approximate return on investment from campaign to campaign, and see sales change over time based on earned media exposure.

Generally, quality and quantity of media impact are measured consistently and rated on a scale of 0 – 100 for elements including tone, message, content, prominence, publication tier and whether a third-party spokesperson delivered the content. And the distribution of points is based on the campaign’s objectives.

At the same time, sales are tracked in tandem with earned media exposure. Analyses such as regression are used to discover how earned media moves the sales needle over time.  There are, as with any model, some things to consider:

• Sales lag behind earned media placement, so it’s important to conduct an impact analysis over the iterations of several campaigns.
• Not every factor for sales can be accounted for, which makes this model incomplete in itself. Aggregating data from customer surveys to pinpoint which media asset drove purchase decisions makes this method more complete.
• Other factors such as marketing and advertising may interfere with generating clean data from this analysis, which is why it’s important to isolate earned media, through additional studies.

Target Influence Model

As the most common method of evaluating influence, the survey of a representative sample can be used to determine whether exposure to a message has reached its target. With this approach, it’s important to measure for recall, retention and general indicators of attitude change such as motivation.

Once again, research suggests earned media has a lag effect on sales, so conducting a survey at the end of a campaign may not yield the best results. This is one reason why media relations work should be an ongoing iteration of successive campaigns measured and adjusted to market conditions and audience temperament. A survey is a snapshot of a moment in time. A meta-study of surveys brings trends into focus.

Paying for Measurement

All of this evaluation stuff comes with a price tag and varies based on the type of research you’d like to do. Generally, however, researchers tell us evaluation should consume no more than 10 percent of an earned media budget. For instance, targeted influencer research typically is higher end evaluation and costs more.

Final Words on Earned Media Evaluation

This post identifies three earned media evaluation methods. Each of these methods is data-drive. However, there is no “holy grail” methodology directly tying earned media to sales. That’s you should use these methods together, where one validates the other. With advances in Web analytics, it is possible to track earned media through online sources. Click through rates and the number of downloads associated with a relevant content asset are important measures of conversion. This is equally important and could reveal behavior trends, too.

Feeding those leads through the inbound methodology is important, the evaluation models suggested above work to augment data between the attraction and conversion stages, as well as the convert and close phases of marketing. Learning about our audience and customers helps us deliver better content and experiences that empower them to make better decisions.

And that’s what we want: better experiences for our customers who make better decisions.

The post Three Ways to Measure Earned Media ROI appeared first on RELEVANCE.

The big idea behind priming

Social psychological research tells us people don’t pay attention to everything. If we did, we would be overwhelmed.  Our decision-making would shut down, because attention is highly selective and our impressions tend to focus on a few central themes. Not surprisingly, media usually influences these themes.

As media focuses our attention, it affects our judgment, too. When faced with making decisions about information we receive from media we consume, we prefer to take shortcuts rather than overload ourselves. One of the most important elements we consider is access. How accessible is information? Research tells us people solve the majority of their problems (including purchasing decisions) with information that immediately comes to mind. The easier it is to access information, the more likely we are to use it.

Why social is priming on steroids

In the past, researchers have shown television news improved the effect of priming because the medium focused us on certain aspects of news while making it extremely accessible.  At a flip of a switch, we can see and hear an anchor tell and show us about the latest in our community and world. The Internet and social media intensify this phenomenon because they’re more accessible than television, radio, newspapers and magazines – and easier to consume. 

A Pew study found one-third of adults consume news through social media. For The Poynter Institute, Jeff Sonderman reports that 33 percent of the young adults Pew interviewed consumed their news through social networks, “while 34 percent watched TV news and just 13 percent read print or digital newspaper content.”

And the data supports a similar trend in mobile. Nearly 20 percent of Americans get their news from mobile devices, such as iPads and iPhones. The Pew report breaks that down even further. Over 30 percent of people consume news through smartphones.

But what about sharing?

A study commissioned by The New York Times found five reasons why people share news. The overarching conclusion from this study is that “content sharing is about relationships.” Brian Brett, the Times’ managing director of customer research, says “getting shared is about providing content that serves consumers’ relationships with one another.”

We also know relationships not only drive content, but a friend’s recommendation is more powerful in decision-making than some random piece of content. In other words, relationships are the catalyst that amplifies the priming effect in social media. We can also bet that these relationships help people focus on certain information, to the exclusion of other information –supporting the priming effect.

How social sharing impacts priming for your brand

Remember: we make decisions based on what media presents. That is to say, consumers make inferences about your brand when information is at their fingertips or in front of their nose. Data certainly suggests many Americans are using social media to consume news and, if your brand is in the news, it’s likely your customers are sharing news about your brand.

If that information is pointing to a relevant content asset, sharing it will prime people to take action. People trust people they know, and when someone they trust shares content, because it’s easy to remember. We rely on the most accessible information to make decisions, and social sharing brings that information front and center.

Drive traffic and rank with media

Kevin Bailey, co-founder of DigitalRelevance, reminds us that when trusted outlets report on or link to relevant content assets, that drives your brand’s ranking in search, which further amplifies the priming affect, and is fully measurable. One such example is Häagen-Dazs’ “Save the Honey Bee” campaign. For AdAge, Michael Bush reports, “The campaign generated 125 million PR impressions, the goal for the entire year, just one week after its launch. Other results included an increase in unaided brand awareness from 29 percent to 36 percent.”

The priming effect isn’t new, but digital PR is amplifying its impact on the perceptions of people viewing your brand. From tweets to Facebook updates, to organic search, to legitimate mentions in traditional media, the more accessible your brand is to consumers, the easier it is for them to make decisions about using your product or service. Aligning your business strategy around relevant content assets that media links to and people share drives whether your brand is top of mind in consumers.

Image credit: Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism

The post How Priming Works in Digital PR to Strengthen Your Brand appeared first on RELEVANCE.