August 16, 2012 in Marketing, Social Media Marketing by Clay Zeigler
ADVICE: Olympic-Sized Lessons About Social Sharing from NBC

The London 2012 Olympic Games are history and the biggest surprise winner may have been NBC. The television network paid more than $1 billion for the rights to broadcast an event that would take place in the early mornings in the US, would be heavily discussed all day long on social media, and would still have to be interesting enough hours later to attract prime-time audiences in sufficient numbers to pay that billion-dollar bill.

How’d it go? The just-released television ratings show that in the last week of the Olympics NBC had the eight top-rated broadcasts. A quarter of all the televisions watched in prime time were tuned to NBC. The Games drew nearly 220 million viewers, and NBC sold about $1.25 billion in advertising, a gold-medal-winning performance.

How’d they pull that off in a media world dominated by status updates, competitive cooking shows and mindless reality TV? NBC was smart, and did some things that both media and marketers should think about when they strategize about social sharing.

The Bronze Medal Lesson: Ask for Something

This Olympics featured live video streams like never before — every sport, all-day coverage. What a great way to draw viewers who favor some of the less-popular events. My own athletic addiction is rowing, so I was right there on the first morning of the regatta eager to watch online. But wait: Gotta sign up. Give us your information. And, here’s a new one: Prove you pay us something through your cable provider. My reward after all that was to watch a commercial.

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June 14, 2012 in Content Marketing, Marketing, Media, PR and Pop Culture by Clay Zeigler
ADVICE: Marketing Realities in Black and White

The newspaper in New Orleans is laying off a third of its staff and shifting to three-days-a-week publication in just the most recent example of that industry’s decline. Meanwhile, Politico is hiring 20 journalists to beef up its coverage of the economy and the military. The easy analysis of their diverging fortunes is that the Times-Picayune primarily is in print and Politico is online, but it’s more complicated than that. The real reasons are familiar to marketers, or at least they should be.

Newspapers like the Times-Picayune aren’t dying solely because they’re in print. They’re dying because they failed to hold onto their audiences in profitable print and rushed free content online under the mistaken premise they could sell advertising there. Politico isn’t growing just because it’s online. It’s growing because it’s found an audience, built value with that audience, and extracts that value with a subscription model.

Does Politico share free content? Sure it does, a lot of it. But it doesn’t share everything. That helps increase the value of the content not shared with everyone. More importantly, Politico has found an audience that places a high value on its content, and it’s asking that audience to give something for it.

Find an audience that values what you do and build rapport that audience. Do that by sharing, but don’t share everything. Ask consumers to give you something in exchange for your best work. Sound familiar? It should. It’s the basic roadmap for effective content marketing.

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May 24, 2012 in Media Orchard, Picks by Scott Baradell
HEADS UP: Pick of the Orchard

We’re just trying to be social with this week’s Pick:

 
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May 14, 2012 in Brand Strategy, Media, Media Orchard, PR and Pop Culture by Clay Zeigler
RANT: Shock Value and Why Time Magazine Got it Wrong

Last week we got two reminders about going too far: the one you heard about and one you probably didn’t. But they prove the same point: If you’re going to go too far to call attention to something, you had better have a good reason and you had better deliver.

By now more than enough people have weighed in on the Time magazine cover that shows a Los Angeles woman breastfeeding her nearly 4-year-old son. The reaction was predictably mixed, but let’s focus instead on motivations. The stated reason for the photo was to illustrate a story on attachment parenting, which advocates extended breast-feeding, sleeping in the same bed with children, and carrying them in slings. Another reason for the photo could have been the slow decline of American news magazines. But is either an adequate reason to go too far?

Courage and ‘Emblematic Images’

The other reminder about going too far came with the death on Thursday of Horst Faas, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his photographs of wars in Vietnam and Bangladesh. Let’s let his New York Times obituary take it from there:

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March 9, 2012 in Media Orchard by Scott Baradell
IDEA GROVE VIDEO: We Build Thought Leaders

Building thought leadership is the essence of content marketing; and content marketing is at the heart of what we do.

 
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