04/02/08

Reaching Readers Online - follow up

So, a few technical hitches* aside, Thursday went well. The seminar was held at the London Stock Exchange, which was all very shiny and expensive and flash. (I particularly enjoyed seeing The Source sculpture first hand.)

All of the files presented are available here as PDF (with and without notes), and embedded Powerpoint.

My favourite bit was telling an industry what we thought was the future of their business whilst showing a slide of a mushroom cloud. Apologies for the hyperbole…

I also wanted to add a few snapshots from the other talkers; Future Foundation’s Barry Clark (an ex-client of mine); Channel4 Digital’s head of Marketing, Cameron Saunders, Hachette Digital’s George Walkely, and Chair Matt Seaton (editor of the Guardian’s awesome CommentIsfree blog.

Matt Seaton

The Guardian site has 40% UK visitors; 40% US; and 20% ROW.

Moderation is a big, big deal for Comment Is free: comments close after 3 days but even so, they find that they are targeted by lobbyists and other groups intent on spamming the comments; management recently even considered making all comments moderated (he compared this to the policy at the BBC) but CIF continues to “err on the side of free speech”. The overall tone of commenters is what the editors are responsible for - it should be rewarding and appealing and in line with the tone of the blogs themselves. (I thought of this in the light of recent coversourcing spats).

This next bit was illuminating: currently the only response to troll-like commenters is “the big stick” to block, delete, or suspend a user’s account. Obviously this is easily got round (for example by registering with a new email address), but it is still used.

GNL have recently changed their publishing platform, and are introducing a feature which will create pages for each registered member. This page will collate all comments, included any deleted, and will effectively champion the good commenters and name and shame the trolls. The same system will also be used to introduce some sort of crowd-sourced [as far as I could tell] trust metric, where a commenter can be voted up or down by other users, with the good ones in some way rewarded for good behaviour. It will go live in the next couple of months.

Obviously the system is open to abuse, but it is interesting to see how one’s favourite sites are being extended (particularly when we are grappling with similar issues on a number of projects currently in development.)

Barry Clark

Barry’s presentation was very stats-heavy. And he talked very quickly. If he gets in touch, I may link to his deck as well as it was very interesting. Here are the best stabs I can make from my notes. All are based on a recent survey of internet use in the UK, although I think it only went up to 2006.

33% increase in time spent online 2004-2006
22% of interviewees download music
21% watch TV programmes
14% use the web for games

There is always a big spike for any book mentioned on TV.

Biggest rise in online use is ABC1 35-54 group. Often people will use the web to research something, and then buy it with the option of human interaction. [Funny, I usually do it the other way round…]

23% of users see it as possible that they could have all of their (shopping?) needs met by the internet.

Barry quoted The Long Tail which suggested that it was unrealistic to expect more than 10-15% of all shopping to go online.

This year, social networks became 20% of all page impressions, overtaking web-based email services for the first time.

Barry noted how as marketing gets more sophisticated, the more our resistance to sophisticated marketing seems to grow. The web is the key “word of mouth” generator. 78% of people trust WOM when it comes to making a purchase; 63% trust newspapers; 61% trust opinions of other consumers. As far as books go - 63% state there is “no” influence; 30% cite word of mouth; 8% cite advertising and 6% didn’t know.

There are approximately 52,000 social network sites.

Barry talked a bit about the super advocate. These are the key influencers on social networks, who kick-start “viral” phenomena, and who will become more significant factors for producers as the growth of social networks continues. Barry sees the growth of specialist networks happening alongside - and not to the detriment of - the larger, established operations.

He also separated two types of activity: Functional and Elevated.

Functional activity is carried out on the web - it’s research, hurried and skim-read. Elevated is associated with leisure, and this is where books and paper fall and far outweigh the web. Our general expenditure on recreation is going up, which is “favourable” for the book business; but magazine circulation is down, and it’s much much worse for newspapers, particularly the tabloids, as their readers are very well served by the web.

65% of people say they have read a book in the last month. Non-fiction outpaced fiction from 2001 - 2007, which given the success of Harry Potter and Lord of The Rings in the period, Barry used to emphasise a point made by Gordon Brown about celebrities being, like, sooo over.

He ended by saying that the smart magazine subscriptions were going online; that the cultural capital of things like books will increase as we use these things to define ourselves more and more; and that - yes - celebrity culture is still rampant as hell.

Barry - if you’re out there - can you upload your deck somewhere too?

Cameron Saunders, Channel4 Digital

Cameron talked solely about the marketing C4 Digital (E4, More4, Film4) did for the brilliant Skins. And, basically, it was amazing.

They had a total spend - I think - of £1.2 million, of which £500,000 was online. And I think that their C4 / 4Digital airtime was probably free and not included in this figure. Their original target audience was 400,000 - the opening episode had 1.8m, which is more than the openers for either Lost or 24. By point of comparison, Cameron also marketed a Russell Brand show on which he spent £100,000 and got a paltry 223,000 viewers. (And that was his first gig in the C4 job.)

The key audience was 18-34 year olds, and the objective was using conversations to build relationships with the show in advance of its launch / transmission. And for Cameron, that had to be a genuine relationship. They “flipped” the usual media strategy from one which starts (at most) 1 month before transmission, to one that began 4 months before. And Cameron drew a parallel to the music industry and how they market a new act.

Their strategy was to move the marketing from awareness, and then to engagement; to make consumers make an effort to come to their marketing via a combination of online and combined media activities… to get the fans to recommend the show and to do the “filtering” that inevitably happens around the water cooler in advance of TX by creating buzz through the online stuff.

Cameron cited research that shows that we now stack media consumption in a way that squeezes 31 hours of media into one day (!) Including an allowance for sleep, I guess.

They began by allowing consumers to discover the show for themselves. (Let’s not forget here that the given is that the show is a blinder: written by the team behind Shameless, among the hottest writers on telly, and with a fantastic teen cast all about sex and drugs and rock and roll and teens - it’s a better start than most).

The “discovery” was all focused on driving people to the URLs on MySpace and E4 - which rewarded early visitors who came there with great stuff to talk about and share:

• Redesigning the skins logo
• Uploading their own tracks to be used in the show
• Remixing the Gossip track used for the main theme
• Getting ex-shoot clothing
• The ability to be an extra in the famous party scene
• Getting free tickets for the party (which featured Mylo and Massive Attack) via KissFM

By partnering with MySpace and KissFm exclusively, they managed to get even more free media time by sharing the “compelling content” with the channels instead of paying for advertising - which obviously drove so many more people to the content. (They described this as keeping hold of the best content to use as “bartering”).

So, before launch, they had 40,000 MySpace friends (compared to 46,000 for The Simpsons) - they now have 115,000.

And all this still before transmission. Brilliant. It’s not anything wildly original, just done on such a scale, and so well, and so joined-up, that made it so effective.

These things - i.e. great parties and kudos - got the show talked about. This was then followed up by traditional media spend (6 sheet posters in particular - nothing too wild yet) that allowed the “early adopters” to either say - “that’s what I was talking about” - or for their friends to recognise it as what their cool mates had talked about.

Cameron reaffirmed that people love to talk about cultural stuff - music, TV, films (and, generously, he included books) and that the web has become an accelerator for these discussions. So they were also careful to encourage (but not moderate) forums on C4 and other platforms, including MySpace.

But this led on to a part of his presentation I found particularly interesting. That of the resources required, and the commitment one makes to such an audience. You can’t just drop your fans when they’ve done the work of hyping your product for you - you need to look after them. So he talked about the choices - a half page advert in the Sun? Or a full-time content creator? Surely it’s a no brainer. They’ve had to keep the momentum going during season one and in the run up to season two. For him, it’s all about providing content (and exclusive content at that) for your audience, updating it on a weekly basis, and making use of “dead” material - e.g. dresses that would otherwise be thrown away - which can be used in competitions or for other prizes. It is time consuming by definition - but it’s so much more effective in the long-term.

In summary, this is what they tried to do with Skins:

• Include your audience in the conversation
• Get the audience to make themselves more interesting to other people through your marketing
• Blur the boundaries between marketing, content, advertising and PR
• Focus on the super-advocates - but get out of the “early adopter ghetto”
• Combine online and traditional marketing as much as possible - but in new ways

The rather interesting question he left us with was - OK, so this is all good for sex and drugs and teens - and entertainment in general. But how do you deal with the much more serious content that C4 is also putting out?

George Walkley, Digital Director, Hachette Digital

George gave a great call-to-arms to the industry on how to engage with ecommerce and email marketing. I was a bit buzzed after my slot, so didn’t take as many notes as I should have, but hopefully George will also share his slides on his blog.

But what I did take was all great stuff:

• The massive impact of subject lines and design in getting people to open email marketing;
• Orbit has many tens of thousands of subscribers and have a very high “open” rate of I think about 40-60%;
• The obvious importance of building a list organically rather than buying it in;
• The problems involved with using images (which get blocked by 98% of firewalls)
• The importance of testing on all platforms

this and the need to keep on talking to people, which I’d firmly back up.

George also talked about the four stages of direct to consumer sales:

• Acquire
• Convert
• Fulfill
• Improve

Orbit’s approach to the problems of alienating retailers by going direct is to get the retailers to fulfill for you - and to rotate the retailers you partner with from month to month. If you can mobilise an army of 30,000 readers towards one title, then surely that retailer can return the favour with some exclusive offers.

Apologies to the five presenters who followed the break, I didn’t take any notes there but that’s not to say that what you were saying wasn’t great.

Please feel free to leave any feedback - positive or negative - in the comments below.

Download presentation here

* Note to self. It’s true! Grumpy A/V technicians who run MS-only shows really don’t like it if you show up with a Mac. Even if you’ve squared it with them beforehand and told them which cables you’re bringing. Thanks James for the SOS mercy dash to the Apple Store.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Publishing.