Get A Clue(train) — Sustainable Digital Strategy for Author Platforms
In reality, markets consist of human beings and the conversations they have with each other, and those conversations can be messy and involve multiple points of influence. For authors trying to develop an effective and sustainable digital strategy, that means you’re not just competing with similar authors and books for readers’ attention—hello, myopic comp titles!—you’re competing with readers themselves and the various channels they use to connect with each other. With the right strategy, though, you’re not competing with anyone—you’re authentically engaging with and contributing to a dynamic community.
Data-Informed Content Strategy for Enthusiast Media
Enthusiast media, aka niche consumer, is my favorite sector because it prioritizes depth over scale, and its KPIs are different from general consumer media’s chasing eyeballs for advertisers. Instead of being dumb pipes driven by vanity metrics and anecdata, they can build self-sustaining communities with deep engagement that offers diversified revenue streams, including valuable intersections for marketing partners seeking strategic, long-term relationships. In its ideal form, enthusiast media (and some B2B verticals) combines community engagement, editorial integrity, and paid content into a diversified suite of relevant products and services which simultaneously minimizes its reliance on advertising while optimizing its effectiveness for savvier marketing partners.
Facebook Isn’t The Problem, YOU Are
Facebook doesn’t view publishers as valued partners and never has, despite so many helping it grow and engage a worldwide audience, handing over tons of invaluable data along the way, not just from engagement on Facebook itself, but from their own websites too. All for free! Facebook has transformed that invaluable data into billions of dollars of advertising revenue every year while steadily throttling publishers’ ability to reach their own audiences without becoming paid advertisers themselves. It’s an objectively and diabolically brilliant model that I simultaneously admire and despise.
YouTube, Algorithms, and Sponsored Content
As broadcast and cable TV fragmented into hundreds of channels serving various overlapping demographics in search of the occasional mainstream hit, and streaming competitors leveraged nostalgia and cheap licenses to fund their own original mix of niche and mainstream content, YouTube was quietly “democratizing” video content the same way Blogger and WordPress did years ago, to similar effect.
What’s Good, Publishing?
For an allegedly liberal industry, publishers do a much better job of packaging and peddling the worst aspects of conservative punditry (along with celebrity memoirs and coloring books), while truth, history, and “diverse” perspectives and experiences are often dismissed as having limited commercial potential regardless of their cultural value. Many are sitting on a treasure trove of great content and access to a roster of truly creative people with timely and compelling insights and ideas that could literally change the world, but we’ll most likely just see a few anthologies cranked out to modest acclaim, with minimal marketing and zero cultural or financial impact.
Audience Insights, Content Marketing, Dumb Pipes – FOLIO: Show 2017 Takeaways
I was excited to attend my first FOLIO: Show in ages, and after a slow start that included HTC’S awkward plea for VR content and some uninspired Facebook examples, things picked up with some great presentations from National Geographic, Harvard Business Review, The Foundry, and Revmade. While I didn’t come across anything particularly new, there were some solid takeaways that I found helpful and heartening.
Data-driven Storytelling
Over the years, I’ve worked with salespeople across a variety of industries and the best ones were always those who combined deep knowledge of our markets and products or services (backed by actual data) with an innate ability to identify their client’s or (prospect’s) real needs. They didn’t rely on fancy media kits or elaborate PowerPoint decks, nor discounts or hefty expense accounts—all valid tactical tools to be used, or not, as each situation calls for—and personal relationships were just the icing on the cake they got to have and eat, too because they instinctively grasped Kaushik’s underlying concept: understand a client’s needs and challenges better than they do themselves, and then help them understand how to achieve their goals.
Who Killed the Marketing Technopologist?
I’ve been fortunate enough to have had two great roles that explicitly embraced that overlap of marketing, technology, and social interaction–along with a history of that overlap benefiting me in more traditional roles. In both cases, it allowed me to take a holistic, strategic approach to integrated marketing, but neither title clearly communicates that on a resume, so I’m glad the Marketing question has been asked explicitly and I was able to address it head on.
We never look up anymore…
Don’t be fooled / by the cul de sac / the gingerbreading / the German engineering
On Llamas, Dresses, Net Neutrality: A Clue(Train)!
That desire for community, to connect with others who share your interests, is what drives the best and worst of what, as a whole, makes the internet so invaluable — from the early days of Usenet to Tumblr and whatever comes next — and for some (including business execs who don’t get it), so dangerous. I’m sure there are plenty of business lessons to be learned from all of this, and I’m sure there will be plenty of think pieces and hot takes addressing those, but I’m far more interested in grappling with the human element.