Project: Create a marketing strategy to support the Prime Radicals TV show and games-filled website. The show “edutains” 6-12 year olds with a wonky crew showing how math is useful, fun and helps solve every day challenges. The website has a whole series of Flash-based games to further educate+entertain kids with math.

Challenge: Create a Facebook campaign that targets parents of younger children within a specific geographic target (Canada, and Ontario).

Services: Marketing, Web Strategy, Advertising, SEO

In Partnership With: GAPC, Waterwood Communications

Delivered: The first few thousand fans of a Facebook page are the most difficult to get, but the site achieved this with a low per fan acquisition cost. We went on to develop a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy focused on a B2B audience to help generate interest for licensing the show and web games in other markets.

An update to the goings on with our organization is in order as some clients have heard we are setting up a separate business to manage our training courses, workshops, and seminars. The website will be launching within the next couple of weeks.

Courses currently in our roster:

Writing for the Web – 2 day course – practical exercises, best practices, and lots of tips shared on how to write well for the web.

Social Media Marketing – 2 day course – walk out with a complete strategy ready to implement.

SEO for Writers – 1 day course – Search Engine Optimization is the ability for Google to find your site when people search for keywords relevant to you. Content writers play a significant role in improving SEO. Learn all about it.

Plain Language – 1 and 2 day courses available – writing clearly and plainly can boost every aspect of productivity, understanding, and improve clarity in communication. The benefits are endless.

We have seminars and talks about Web Strategy, Social Media, Article Marketing, PPC and Banner Advertising, and so on. Each talk is full of tips, best practices, and a few case studies depending on length.

Our courses and talks are all customizable – use examples and case studies relevant to your industry.

And finally, the Socail Media book I’ve been working on for the past few months will be published later this year. We’ll be giving away copies to all our clients.  Our work is founded on the precept of knowledge-transfer and education, the more you know, the better we can help you create winning web, social media, and online marketing campaigns!

A colleague, Jeremy Kuzub at Jufa Intermedia, recently sent me this video featuring the Wired creative director espousing the virtues of new digital delivery platforms and Wired’s approach to these.
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1813626064?bctid=66775419001

As summarized by Jeremy when he sent me the video “Wired’s approach is not optimal. In the video you’d think they were enamoured by the iPad/Pod touch-style interface and navigation. However, the main point holds true: people expect their content should to be available to them anywhere in the best possible format for that time and place. This content is no longer static, either; the concept of a monthly magazine that stays the same after it is printed simply does not hold true when distribution is digital and people expect social interaction with their content and their community. Wired also cites “new-to-print” features which have been a core-part of web sites for 5-10 years.”

Jeremy is spot on. Sure the experience on new touch-type devices is more tangible and feels closer to print (touch and flip) then a keyboard-mouse interface, but all the “new” features of having video, social media sharing capability, rich interfaces, etc. have all been standard on the web for years. It’s a slicker interface, sure, but is that enough?

One interesting comment made in the video is by the Editor in Chief (Anderson), “we can reset the economics. If people value the experience enough, they may be willing to pay for it”. Well I’m not sure I get that statement, since ads fund magazines generally, not subscriptions or cover sales.

The problem with the economics of web content publishing is 10-15 years ago the print publications gave away their digital real estate to advertisers FOR FREE. They basically pushed the web to consumers to get eyeballs, then they turned around and told advertisers “pay for our print ad, and you get X web impressions for free!”. They basically shot themselves in the foot right from the beginning.

Is a new interface or consumer “experience” enough to compel a consumer to pay for the content through a subscription? Will the perceived value of ad space escalate x100 fold because of you’ve changed the interface?

Now let me add my experience to this mix. I happen to have had a few clients with the print-to-web problems. What “problems” do I speak of? Well, the transition of eyeballs from print to web translates into a loss of 100:1 in revenue (every dollar earned for a print eyeball, is worth 1 penny on the web). That’s the biggest challenge, of course there are a myriad of others I’ll get to.

What was the solution?  I pitch several – including diversification of revenue sources from pure ad-sales to include other forms – a sort of “Parthenon” monetization principle – meaning that you want to support your organization with multiple revenue-generating pillars. Imagine holding up a ceiling with 1 pillar, it would have to be huge. But 4 smaller pillars can do the same job, and losing one of those doesn’t necessitate immediate collapse of your roof!

Unfortunately I have had very few clients actually implement any of my proposed solutions. Why? 3 main reasons…

1. The new business model is more complex than the simple ad sponsored content model of the past.
2. It requires a significant up-front capital investment to deploy new collaborative focused infrastructure (half the budget usually devoted to strategy to figure out exactly what to do and the other half to execution).
3. To maintain and support the new models (both content and revenue generation) requires new skill sets and new ways of thinking about the business – its actually a whole new business. As Jack Welch once said “it’s not enough to have the right bus going in the right direction, but you need the right people on the bus..”

I attended a conference in Toronto about a year ago that was focused on the publication industry (magazines and newspapers). The main speaker was showcasing The Economist and its approach to the digital divide. Great lessons to be learned from that case study. However, I toured the room and spoke to a dozen different types of publication owners in the room and they were much more scared then excited. They understood, intellectually, the issues, but none of them had the emotional capacity to carry out the changes they needed. They knew they were dying a slow death and effectively didn’t have the capacity, skills, or courage to do something. They were all working on an “approach” that was effectively tip toeing into a tidal wave. They knew it wouldn’t work, but they were all hoping it would. It was a very very sad room.

The web is a total disruption – a cataclysmic “E.L.E.”type event. Its one of the few times you can use the term “paradigm shift” and not sound like a hack.

(E.L.E. = extinction level event)

Digital media doesn’t change the old ways, it ignores every aspect of them – from revenue models to skill sets, to approach – publishers find themselves on a bus where the paved road they’ve known for years has turned to gravel and full of bumps they don’t know how to deal with. They don’t just need to reshuffle the bus, or change the tires, but completely abandon the bus, buy some Humvees, split into smaller teams, learn how to drive in the new terrain, and then punch the gas and go. To bury a hatchet in this analogy – it’s the difference between rally racing and Nascar. The rules have changed dramatically.

My final point is this — print is not dead.  Print is just one medium of publishing content beside many new ones.

MIT Technology Review (one of my favourite tech/science magazines) abandoned its print publication about 2 years ago in favour of a pure digital delivery format. After being a loyal subscriber for 5 years I dropped my subscription. After a year they abandoned their pure digital model and went back to a publication, instead of 6 issues a year, they were now printing 4 thicker ones. They realized they needed to deliver on multiple platforms, and that print was a highly prized platform, even by one of the technoratti (me among many others who are immersed in technology but still find value in print materials).

So what do you need to do if you are a print publication with an eroding revenue base?

Ask us and find out.

Bruce

What lesson to take from this? Two:

1. Understand the risk – what’s bigger, pot or a guy who’s a hero to millions, a dedicated athlete, symbol of American pride, and winner of 8 (EIGHT) Olympic gold medals?

2. Understand your audience – are they the kind of people to connect closer to their idols when they do something that humanizes them (for example, make a mistake)?

The backlash against Phelps’ critics is amazing – and in today’s self-publishing, easy-to-access soapbox that can reach millions instantly – you have to be very very careful which side you are on.

What’s interesting is that “Web 2.0” connects directly to society’s true sentiment by accessing individual commentary.

So understand your audience and balance the risk with this insight to ensure you find yourself on the winning side of the marketing game.

So here is an idea i’ve been toying with for a while. A colleague at Jufa Intermedia and I drew it out on a whiteboard over lunch one day. Should we develop it?

The idea is developing a CMS that treats pages as stand-alone pieces of micro-content. Here is the gambit: the navigation structure is dynamically created, and the pages are easy to find using search tools. So you can both explore and/or search for specific elements. If you don’t know what you want but know the topic you explore, and if you do know exactly what you want you can narrow your search down rapidly. But wait, there’s more…

People don’t usually consume whole websites, they use parts of it at any given moment of need. Search boxes are the second most used navigation element within most sites, yet most site-specific search functions… well, frankly suck.

One of the biggest problems client’s have is
how they will structure their IA:

copy the organization’s operational structure

or

discover how the user consumes the information provided.

The answer is sort of obvious from an effective marketing stand-point – you design for the user. But it’s not that simple, because in larger organizations, the workflow of how content is published does not usually correspond to how the world consumes that information. So if you can’t create good content, then your “effective” user experience is for naught.

So instead of publishing to an area that you are responsible for maintaining, you simply publish for various categories (to seed the choice), you tag it and you tell it who your intended audience is from pre-loaded user-profiles. So you don’t publish to a part of the site, you publish to the TYPE of person you want to read the content.

The CMS will dynamically generate menus based on traffic patterns for each pre-determined user type.

It will guess at what a particular user is looking for based on what the user is looking at and how long they spend looking at it. That’s the first part. Second, is that each page must standalone. So you publish a page so it can be found using an onsite search engine. You can categorize and tag, as you may a blog entry. So instead of a site of pages linked together through a man-made and stagnant architecture, you effectively create a catalog of the content.

Imagine surfing a large site
(1,000+ pages) like you would looking for a book on Amazon.

You have recommendations based on previous experience, you have recommendations based on others experience, you have categories you can browse, and you have simple and advanced search functions for narrowing your results. If the content contains “web 2.0″ user-generated features such as comments, ratings, etc. then they can be integrated into the CMS as well, by helping rank search results, and offering new navigations methods.

So, any VC’s out there want to fund this project?

Bruce

Client: International Development Research Centre (IDRC)

Project: Re-think, architect, and design IDRC’s website to better reflect the organizations leadership in international development and research.

Challenge: The IDRC website receives millions of yearly visitors, unfortunately many find it difficult to navigate its hundreds of thousands of pages. The site needed a complete overhaul from the ground up, but with a diverse organization with many constituents, objectives and audiences to satisfy, the task was daunting.

Services: Web Strategy, Architecture, User Experience, Usability, Functional Specifications

Delivered: This 12+ month project began with in-depth research and analysis of IDRC’s organization, values, and how that would translate to its online presence. Insight was sought from executives, managers, staff, partners, donors, researchers, grant recipients, media and others.

A Web Communication Strategy was drafted detailing the findings, analysis, and expert recommendations.  This document became the framework from which future decisions would be made. It also proved to be the gospel from which sermons were crafted to preach the new site’s purpose to gain needed buy-in and support from all levels and disciplines of the organization.

The Web Comm Strategy led to developing the Architecture of the site, including navigation and content on each page. Next came a content migration strategy which focused on eliminating and consolidating the hundreds of thousands of pages of content, most of which was unnecessary. The site was reduced to ~30,000 pages, less than 20% of the original amount.

Finally a complete set of functional specifications and detailed sitemap was crafted. These were presented to the developers in a 2” thick binder, as they represented every component, detailing exactly how each would work.