B2B Memes » Social Media

Wine, Roses, and Oil: PR and the Truth

John Bethune — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 12:30:38 +0000

Last night I happened to watch Days of Wine and Roses, a Jack Lemmon-Lee Remick movie from 1962 that, perhaps because of the overexposed theme song, I had resisted for years.

My mistake. It is a powerful, compelling story of an alcoholic couple whose refusal to acknowledge their alcoholism destroys their relationship. For a movie made nearly 50 years ago, it remains remarkably relevant, not just for its treatment of addiction, but also, surprisingly, for its critique of corporate marketing and PR.

It’s no coincidence that Jack Lemmon’s character works in public relations. In his career, as in his personal life, he papers over the ugly truth until it’s too late. The parallel becomes clear when Lee Remick takes Lemmon to introduce him to her father, played by Charles Bickford. When Bickford asks what Lemmon does for a living, things go rapidly downhill. Watching the exchange, it’s hard not to think of British Petroleum’s disastrous handling of the Gulf oil spill.

Charles Bickford: What kind of work you do?

Jack Lemmon: Um, uh, public relations.

CB: Public relations?

Lee Remick: Uh, you know, Daddy, um, well, uh, it’s hard to explain.

JL: Well, err, I, I suppose you might say my job is, uh, to sort of help my client, uh, create a public image, uh, by—well, for an example, um, let’s say my client—Corporation X!—uh, does some good. Or something of, uh, benefit to the public, or something that could conceivably be conceived as, uh …. benefit to the uh… Well, my job is to see that the public, uh, knows it.

CB: And what if this X Corporation does something bad?

JL: Well . . . . [chuckles nervously] Well, theoretically they don’t . . . um, theoretically. Well, uh, part of my job is to, uh, help my client to, um, to think of ways to operate, uh, in a way that the public would, you know, approve.

CB: But if your X Corporation makes a mistake, and the thing turns out bad?

JL: Well, uh, haha! I guess I try to make it look not quite so bad. [chuckles nervously] Well, there’s more to it than that, sir, actually—

LR: It’s terrifically complicated, Daddy.

CB: I don’t understand that kind of work.

The movie holds out hope for alcoholics through the intercession of Alcoholics Anonymous. It offers no similar shot at redemption for corporate PR. This was, after all, the 1960s, the zenith of corporate marketing and advertising (think Mad Men). PR was about controlling the message, not addressing the truth.

Now, though, in the era of social media and content marketing, corporate communications is increasingly less about “control over your messaging,” as Frank Reed put it recently, and more about “telling the truth and being accountable.”

As the movie shows, and as, one hopes, corporations are learning, the failure to face up to the truth and acknowledge your mistakes only compounds and delays your day of reckoning.

The Great Ghost-Blogging Debate

John Bethune — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 02:41:18 +0000

As he does so often and so well, Mark Schaeffer has sparked yet another fascinating debate on his blog today. Reviving a topic addressed last March by Jon Buscall and Mitch Joel, he argues against their position that CEOs should not use ghost writers for their blogs. While Schaeffer agrees with them in theory, in practice, he says, “ghost blogging” is routine. It’s a waste of energy, he concludes, to argue against it. Instead, the focus should be on improving ghost blogging, not deprecating it.

It may be true that it’s pointless to fight this trend, but the debate, to my mind, should be over whether it really works. It’s probably too early to say, but I’m inclined to bet that in the huge majority of cases, ghost writing and social media are fundamentally incompatible.

A lot depends, of course, on the extent and nature of the ghost writing. If it consists mostly of brainstorming, outlining, or light editing services, that’s helping the writer find his or her voice, not faking it. But let’s assume we’re talking about something closer to the extreme of a CEO who says “Here’s my idea. Write something.”

As Schaeffer notes, that’s not so different from the way many CEOs produce their speeches, annual-report letters, and autobiographies. So why, he asks, “do so many people seem to want to put blogs in a different class of writing?”

Curiously, though, his following sentence seems to do just that: “In the world of corporate communications it could be argued that blogs are even less important and critical than a major speech or a document being submitted to the SEC.”

Well, yes, precisely. Blogs are less critical, because they constitute a different class of discourse. Most people do not expect blogs to be carefully articulated legal documents or corporate position statements. Rather, they expect some personal reflection, an unvarnished and informal expression of an idea. A blog should be driven by passion and conviction, not precise phrasing or good grammar.

If a CEO doesn’t care enough to write his or her own blog, why pretend to? Maybe, just maybe, a blog isn’t a good idea for most CEOs. There’s a reason that the Fake Steve Jobs has a blog and the real one doesn’t.

So for me, it’s not a question of whether CEOs have the right to use ghost writers. Nor do I think writers should feel tainted by ghosting. In the end, what matters is whether ghost blogging is effective. Without the commitment to blogging that writing it yourself represents, the answer will almost always be no.

What B2B Publishers Don’t Get: You Can’t Own the Conversation

John Bethune — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 18:54:22 +0000

Although there may be a few exceptions, Stephen Saunders got it right this week when he wrote on Folio:‘s web site that most B2B publishers are miserable failures at social networking. He argues that you can’t build and maintain an online business community unless you produce lots of your own content to support it.

There’s some truth to that, as I’ll suggest. But he omits the bigger point. B2B networks usually fail because publishers expect to control them. Publishers have a product focus, and to them, a social network is just another product. They don’t realize that social networking is instead a conversation. And you can’t own a conversation.

Saunders draws a distinction between consumer and business networking. Consumer networks on any subject can pretty much take off by themselves, he argues, because there will be a “large potential audience of enthusiasts who will be interested in plopping themselves on your site and talking.”

By contrast, business networks, which generally focus on narrow topics of interest, will likely appeal to only a comparatively small group of people:

“But things are rather different if your site is about VOIP-based integrated multimedia applications designed to run over DSL last mile networks. First, there are only 300 people in the U.S. who know about said topic. Second, they are probably not interested in talking to other people about this subject on a public Web site.”

Though he doesn’t say this explicitly, his argument is that in smaller networks you need some kind of catalyst to get the conversation going. In the consumer network, there will be enough motivated people to provide content that others can respond to. But in the B2B network, the publisher has to provide that content, and lots of it:

“What is the answer? It’s quite simple. And it’s the same answer to pretty much all questions in business publishing. (No, not alcohol.) It’s content. In order to convince important people to talk about important things you need to lure them to your social network, and keep them pinned there, with large amounts of proprietary information. Produced by, like, editors and stuff.”

But, Saunders says, publishers don’t want to pay for the editors they need: “In our industry, money talks, and copy walks.”

I won’t argue with him on this point. You can’t be part of the conversation if you don’t contribute to it, and that means producing content.

But the bigger problem lies with the attitude of most publishers toward the social networks they want to build. It’s an attitude reflected in Saunders’s argument that you need to “lure” people to your community and “keep them pinned there.” This is the language of control, and that doesn’t build communities, it kills them.

As Jeff Jarvis has argued for years, you can’t own communities, and you can’t build them; you can only enable them. Being a responsive and generous participant in the conversation (i.e., producing lots of copy) is an important part of enabling a community. But if you expect to be in charge of that community, it ain’t gonna happen.

Social Media and the Decline of Editing

John Bethune — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 13:00:48 +0000

Earlier this month, after writing his final column for Inc. magazine, Joel Spolsky blogged about his experience in the magazine world. His feelings, clearly, were mixed:

“Writing for Inc. was an enormous honor, but it was very different than writing on my own website. Every article I submitted was extensively rewritten in the house style by a very talented editor, Mike Hofman. When Mike got done with it, it was almost always better, but it never felt like my own words. I look back on those Inc. columns and they literally don’t feel like mine. It’s as if somebody kidnapped me and replaced me with an indistinguishable imposter who went to Columbia Journalism School. Or I slipped into an alternate universe where Joel Spolsky is left-handed and everything he does is subtlely [sic] different.”

What bothers Spolsky isn’t that his intent or his ideas were changed; in fact, he says, they were communicated more effectively. His problem is that his voice was changed.

Spolsky’s observation illustrates a key difference between traditional publishing and blogging. Publishing is about communication. Blogging is about speaking. Yes, blogging is about communication too, but the voice is essential—more so than in publishing, though it matters there as well. A blog, in other words, is conversational.

You can, and usually should, edit a written communication. But unless you want to be a jerk, you shouldn’t edit a conversation.

For traditional editors thrown into the digital world, that’s a problem. Why? Because much of what makes up the Web is a conversation, not publishing. Which means we don’t get to edit as much as we’d like. At best, we get to throw in a “sic” here and there (not counting wikis, of course, but that’s a topic for another day).

The blogosphere flash point for this conflict lately has been comments. You can turn off comments, either altogether or selectively, but you can’t simply edit them. It’s as wrong as changing a quote. If you write it, I can edit it; but if you say it, I can’t.

From the old-media viewpoint, this just doesn’t seem right. Blogger Mark Schaefer wonders, for instance, “why newspapers, who have so staunchly defended the integrity of the published word, would suddenly open the floodgates of stupidity just because the forum has moved to the Internet.”

In a point-counterpoint blog post with journalist Jack Lail, Schaefer notes that “if I submit a letter to the editor of the newspaper and comment on a news story or issue, it has to come with clear proof of who I am, and even then might be subject to editing for appropriateness.” So why, then, he asks, “would the same newspaper allow the public commentary in their online versions to turn into a virtual free-for-all of hate”?

In response, Lail gives the new-media comeback:

“I don’t view comments as ‘letters to the editor.’ I often find them more akin to callers on talk radio, where people are identified as ‘Jim’ or ‘caller from Knoxville.’ (If you applied the ‘same rigorous identification standards’ to radio call-in shows, they wouldn’t have any callers.) The dynamics of online story comments are similar to what happens in forums and fairly open mailing lists.

They are, I think, a participatory experience unique to the online medium and whose benefits outweigh its negatives.

Intellectually, I side with Lail; emotionally, I’m with Schaefer.

I take some comfort in learning that Jeff Jarvis is torn about comments. No, he says, you don’t get to edit the “shit” out of them. But that doesn’t mean you have to like or accept the “level of discourse” they represent: “I’m coming to believe that comments—which I defended when I ran sites—are an inferior form of conversation.”

The solution he sees is not editing, but social controls of the sort found in Twitter and Facebook, built on “real identities and control of relationships”:

“The result is better discourse. I don’t find Twitter or Facebook littered with fools and nastiness and when I do stumble upon them, I unfollow; when they occasionally spit on me, I block (if only I could instead give them their meds).”

Jarvis doesn’t claim to know exactly how this can apply to comments, but “somewhere in there,” he says, “is a secret to improving discourse online.”

We may never uncover that secret, but the point is still valid. On the Internet, the only realistic goal is not to improve individual expression, but to improve discourse as a whole.

So I’ll just have to face it. In the new-media world, editing is not what it used to be. I may yearn to fix Spolsky’s spelling or complete Jarvis’s sentence fragment at the end of paragraph six—but I’ll have to settle for blogging about it.

Comments, anyone?

Editors Need to Think Like Marketers

John Bethune — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:54:59 +0000

Social media may be taking over the world, but in B2B publishing, many pockets of resistance remain, particularly among editorial staff. Paul Conley has been worried about this trend for years now. As he put it in a post last year, B2B journalists have been “adopting the techniques of conversational editorial more slowly than . . . the public relations and marketing executives of the industries we cover.”

How can B2B journalists catch up? Well, here’s a radical prescription. Think more like marketers.

In a recent post, RBI‘s Dan Blank wrote about the reasons editors at his company like—or don’t like—Twitter. (Like Blank, I’m using the word “editor” interchangeably with “journalist”.) The pros and cons he cited were all legitimate, but also circumstantial.

According to his editors, Twitter works or not depending on circumstances like whether readers use it or whether the editors have time for it. In companies that lack a social-media advocate like Dan, training and corporate support can also be issues. There’s no shortage of compelling excuses not to be enthusiastic about social media.

But the reasons editors tend not to love social media go a lot deeper than circumstances. My sense—and I speak as a long-time editor and manager of editors—is that the resistance has deeper roots.

Let’s think again for a moment about the difference between the attitudes of editors and marketers towards social media, as crystallized by Conley:

Journalists . . . are making incremental adjustments to the new world, but marketers and public-relations professionals . . . are morphing like crazy. Most of the marketing people I know love the new world. They’re excited. They can’t seem to believe their good fortune to be working in a field where the rules are being rewritten. But many journalism folks I know can generally be described as somewhat less than thrilled.

Why such a difference? I suspect it has to do with the way each type has traditionally viewed content.

Editors tend to have a craftsman’s view of their copy. It is a product that succeeds or fails on its own terms. It’s either good or bad. How it affects the reader, though important, is not the crucial test. You know when you’ve produced something good, even if no one ever reads it.

For marketers, the only important question is how their copy affects readers. The measure of its success is simple: if it doesn’t produce leads, it doesn’t work.

For editors, the copy is an end in itself. For marketers, it is a means to an end.

Granted, I’m making gross generalizations here. Writing of course is about communication, about interacting with an audience. But in the old print world, there were steep barriers to that interaction. The printed page is opaque, fixed. You can’t see your readers through it.

The new media, by contrast, are transparent. Your audience is much more immediate and interactive. Copy is no longer a product, but a process. The work editors produce is not fixed, but constantly evolving, being reworked by the interaction of writer and reader. In other words, content is now a conversation.

It’s not surprising that marketers love the world of new media. It brings them closer to their target. Editors, though, may feel cast adrift, having lost control over their product.

It may sound like heresy to them, but editors would do well to emulate marketers when it comes to social media. Like marketers, they need to look beyond their copy to the audience itself. The copy is no longer the end. Instead, the end is the conversation with the audience, whether through comments on blogs, Twittering, Facebook pages, podcasting, video, or any other new media methods.

Don’t worry, editors, it’s not the end of the world. It’s the beginning of a new one.

———

UPDATE 2/17/10: Dan Blank offers more details on RBI’s experience with Twitter in a eMedia Vitals blog post.

Reports of Twitter’s Death Exaggerated

John Bethune — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:49:03 +0000

Twitter, says Constantine Von Hoffman this week on eMedia Vitals, is a dead-end technology. Why? Because young people don’t use it:

“Just 7% of those between 12 and 17 use Twitter, according to a Quantcast study. These numbers appear to improve with the next age group: 47% of those between 18 and 34 are Twitterers. However, the median age of a Twitter user is 31, according to a Pew study. This means most of the people on Twitter are 25+. By comparison, the median ages of MySpace and Facebook users are 27 and 26, respectively. (And, just as you suspected, LinkedIn is for fogies – median age: 40.)”

I won’t argue with his conclusion that Twitter is doomed. It may well die off or evolve into something unrecognizable within a few years. But I don’t buy the death-by-demographics argument. Just because people in one age group don’t do something now doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t later in life.

There is a key difference between this and a more persuasive demographic argument earlier this week from Alan Mutter. His topic was the death not of Twitter, but of newspapers.

Mutter cited data that show “there is little doubt that consumer demand for newspapers is likely to decline as the population ages.” People under 50 are far less likely to read newspapers than those over 50, he noted. Therefore, “unless something unforeseeable happens to change the news-consumption habits of younger readers, it stands to reason that the total audience of newspaper readers will shrink as the older generation dies off.”

The key word here is habits. The assumption is that older people still read the newspaper not because it is the best way to get news, but because it’s a long-term habit. For younger people, by contrast, reading newspapers has not become an ingrained habit, and they can make more rational decisions about how to get news. Presumably, if you looked at the same statistics from 1960, you’d see a much higher proportion of young people reading newspapers.*

When it comes to Twitter, however, you can’t argue that use is related to habit. Twitter is in fact newer than either Facebook or MySpace. If it tends to be used predominantly by people over 30, the reason cannot be force of habit. More likely, it’s that people in that age group find it genuinely useful. So who’s to say that those young people who have no use for Twitter now won’t change their minds as they mature?

* Or would you? As one of Mutter’s commenters noted, “it would be enormously helpful to see a historical graph illustrating readership levels, by age, in 2000, 1990, 1980, etc.,” to see whether in fact “younger newspaper readers been outnumbered by their elders all along,” and “if so, by what margin, compared to today?”

Making Paying for Content More Personal

John Bethune — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 02:34:56 +0000

Laporte: His audience will determine his salary.

In all the discussions I’ve seen of the virtues and evils of paywalls, I have yet to see any mention of the relation of paid content to social media. This is perhaps because paying for content comes off, even to its proponents, as a kind of uncool, regrettably antisocial gesture (“we don’t want to charge you, but we have to in order to survive”).

It’s not so much that money has no social role—it obviously does. But the models commonly discussed, whether subscription or micropayment, don’t quite have the give-and-take, equal-participant ethos inherent in the concept of markets as conversations. The very word paywall implies just how antisocial the concept is: “you can’t come in here unless you pay, buddy.”

It’s no surprise that most of the noise about the need for paywalls is coming from old-media behemoths like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. or Mathias Dopfner’s Axel Springer. They want to set the terms of the payments, naturally, and I don’t imagine those terms will be very favorable to the content purchaser. In this model, payment doesn’t necessarily reflect what I as consumer think the content is worth, but what the provider thinks he can get for it. Can I get a refund if the article I buy is disappointing, or a discount if the site I subscribe to goes through a spell of lame or irrelevant content? Not likely (after all, paid circ sucks).

A very different model for payment has recently been proposed by new-media pioneer Leo Laporte. Laporte is the founder of the TWiT network (not related to Twitter, as he would be the first to exclaim here), a burgeoning new-media business producing podcasts and online video.

Though Laporte never erected a paywall per se, he originally intended his business to make all its money from voluntary payments. The money came in, but not at a rate sufficient to fund his plans for growth. Eventually, he started taking advertising, leading to annual revenues this year of between $1.5 million and $2.5 million. As donations shrank proportionally as a source of revenue, Laporte began debating aloud on his programs whether he should continue to take payments from his audience.

Yesterday, he announced that he will retain the contribution model, but with an interesting twist: his pay as CEO of TWiT will now come strictly from those payments.

“Up to now I’ve been taking my pay from TWiT’s general fund (along with all the other employees). Not any more. From now on you’ll pay me directly with your contributions. I won’t take a penny out of the operating funds. Think of your contributions as a tip jar. If you like what I’m doing with TWiT I hope you’ll contribute $2 a month (or more or less depending on what TWiT is worth to you). If you are unhappy with our direction, you can cancel your contribution completely. Believe me, I’ll notice. Your contributions will have a direct impact on how TWiT is run – because they’ll have a direct impact on my personal bottom line.”

As Laporte notes, his risk is not huge—his “day job” as host of the nationally syndicated Tech Guy radio show pays well. But clearly he will have a powerful incentive to perform well in his roles as CEO and host. In keeping with the key social-media value of transparency, he will also publish the amount contributed each month.

We won’t know for quite a while how this experiment turns out, and it is not clear how replicable it is. But as a way of making paid content personal and integrating into the social-media ethos, I think it has already succeeded.

B2B Blog Posts of the Week: The Turkey in the Room

John Bethune — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 20:52:42 +0000

Thanksgiving week in the States is never very productive for the B2B work world, and that appears equally true for B2B bloggers. While some tried to ignore the elephantine turkey in the room, others attempted, mostly in vain, to make the holiday pertinent to their usual subject matter. By mid-week, it was clear that we all just wanted to start chowing down. Nonetheless, a few notable posts stood out.

The Convergence of Content Marketing and B2B Publishing?: “Creating Interest vs Providing Solutions,” Dan Blank, Publishing, Innovation, and the Web, 11/22/09.

The estimable Dan Blank of the archetypal B2B publisher RBI, né Cahners, has made what I believe is a Radical Suggestion, if I’m interpreting him correctly. It’s an impressively argued piece, but at such a high level of abstraction that one longs for a concrete example or two.

In the absence of specifics, I have to read a certain amount into what Blank is saying. But his argument appears to be that the dissemination of content, no matter how interesting or popular, isn’t enough—publishers also need to sell solutions that go beyond content. In other words, just as content marketers (i.e., advertisers) are now competing with traditional publishers, publishers should be competing with them (or, in some cases, partnering with them) by selling similar products or services. What once would have been heresy is now innovative thinking.

Or do I have it wrong? I suggest that you judge for yourself—if his web host hasn’t accidentally deleted his blog again.

You Didn’t Have to Be There, Quite: “Highlights from SIPA’s Online Marketing and Publishing Summit last week,” Rory Brown, Rory Brown’s Blog, 11/23/09.

While it sounds like an event not to be missed, those of us who did should thank Rory Brown for a concise summary of the publishing and marketing summit put on by the UK branch of the Specialized Information Publishers Association. (The November 19 event in London was also covered by Neil Thackray here and here. )

Of particular note, evidently, was a presentation by David Cushman on “A New Era for Specialist Media” explaining how “the internet-powered long tail of demand is a disaster for traditional broad mass-media models but a huge opportunity for specialists.” (Cushman’s presentation was also cited in Dan Blank’s post.)

It Really Works, Maybe: “Companies Engaging in Social Media Have Higher Financial Performance,” Morgan Polotan, HubSpot, 11/25/09.

If the report Polotan cites is to believed, there is indeed ROI for companies heavily involved in social media. But maybe not because of the social media. The point, he says, is “simply that those companies who are highly engaged in social media also have superior financial performance when compared to their peers.”

Hug Your Followers: “Are your arms too long?,” Brian Courtney, B2B Marketing Blog, 11/25/09.

Last week I noted that “Increasingly, B2B means P2P (person-to-person).” To be more accurate, B2B has always been about personal relationships, as Brian Courtney points out in his post. The value of social media is that it can enhance that element of B2B commerce and communications—if you use it appropriately.

Courtney makes the case that bloggers for B2B companies need to loosen up when it comes to social media if they want to make the most of it.

“Social media demands not only transparency, but authenticity. And while guidelines for blogging and other social media activities are fine – in fact, needed – I’ve never seen regulations that excluded personality.”

As Courtney concludes, an arm’s length approach to social media just won’t work.

Liberating—and Monetizing—Your Inner Audience

John Bethune — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:00:43 +0000

Whether you’re in content marketing or B2B publishing, one of your main goals is to ensure your message is reaching the right people. While the theory is straightforward, the practice is anything but. You may have a clear vision of your target audience, but in the social-media era, that audience may not be your only audience. To maximize the revenue from your content, you should look beyond your target to what might be called your “inner” audience.

What exactly do I mean by inner audience? It is a group of readers you may not intend to address, but which is implied by your content. But how can content “imply” an audience? Let me explain. In a former life as a grad student in English, one of the critics I admired was Wayne Booth. (Current English majors: this was a long time ago, so if Booth is no longer cool or I don’t get the details right, be gentle.)

One of Booth’s ideas was that of an “implied reader.” A work of literature, he said, always implies a particular type or types of reader, with certain tastes, expectations, or interests. This reader will often be different from the actual reader, or even from the reader the author was consciously writing for.

It doesn’t take a big leap of imagination to apply this idea to your content. You may have a particular type of reader in mind when you write or assign your articles. But your content may well encompass a broader range of readers than you intend.

For example, let’s say you’re writing a blog about industrial valves, and you’re targeting the engineers who specify them. In writing about valves, you might discuss with some frequency issues involving materials or failure analysis. As you go deeper and more critically into these topics, you may find yourself addressing not just your target engineer, but others who are more concerned with those topics than with valves themselves.

In the old-media world, implying types of readers beyond your target didn’t often result in reaching those actual readers. But in new media, the game is different, thanks to Google. If you talk much about materials, you will get the materials people reading your page, even if they don’t care much about valves.

So the question is, what do you do with—and for—these readers? Do you ignore them, or actively cultivate and, if possible, monetize them? Your answer might depend on whether you’re a content marketer or a publisher. But in either case, you should resist the impulse to immediately reject them just because they are not your target.

Gary Vaynerchuk talks about precisely this situation in his book Crush It! (reviewed elsewhere on this blog). “Someone with ambition and talent decides she’s going to be the Martha Stewart of kid-friendly sandwiches, and then all of a sudden discovers that somewhere along the way she reached a core group of beer-drinking dudes who are religiously watching the show. Instead of embracing that demographic and adapting, she refuses to acknowledge it.”

Big mistake. For Vaynerchuk, ignoring any element of your audience that embraces you is unwise. In the new-media world, where multiple revenue streams are often the key to success, neglecting any of those streams can be a fatal error.

If you’re a content marketer whose ultimate goal is to sell products or services, you may be inclined to disregard unlikely buyers. But once you start marketing content, you’ve entered into a virtual line of business broader than your real-world trade. At the very least, cultivating a nontarget audience can help your message go viral. At best, you can build a new content-based revenue stream from this new audience.

Of course, if you’re a publisher, expanding your types of audience and subject areas is what new media is all about. You’re freed from the old-media restraints of rigid demographics and predetermined job-function and industry breakdowns. If your audience morphs, you can morph right along with it.

So how do you identify your actual, nontarget audience? First, you can be what Vaynerchuk calls a “reactionary.” Find out what unintended visitors you may already have. Analyze your metrics, run polls and surveys, and encourage comments to identify them. Then search the Web, Twitter, and other social networks to find out what kind of people are talking about you or your site. As their identity emerges, consider how you might develop them as an audience.

But if you’re really serious about expanding your revenue streams, you will also take a proactive approach. Like a new-media Wayne Booth, analyze your content for hints about your implied audience. As you identify potential new audience categories, look for evidence that they may be visiting your site already. If they’re not, you may want to actively pursue them, depending on the potential revenue.

So, are you ready to maximize the earning potential of your content? Then it’s time to uncover and embrace your inner audience.

B2B Blog Posts of the Week

John Bethune — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:50:26 +0000

Every Friday, beginning today, B2B Memes will feature notable posts of the week from around the B2B blogosphere. The picks are strictly my own (though suggestions are welcome) and reflect my particular interests in and perspective on trends in B2B media.

The Death of Print: “Will Content Marketing Kill Trade Publications?” Tom Pick, The WebMarket Central Blog, 11/9/09.

Clearly the meme-maker of the week, Tom Pick did an impressive job of summarizing how the rise of social media tends to favor content marketing over trade publishing. Though his perspective is that of a marketer, he has a clear-eyed and accurate understanding of how trade publishing works.

Updating Middle-Aged Media: “Are Your PDFs Social Media Friendly?” Galen De Young, B2B Marketing Blog, 11/11/09.

As noted elsewhere in B2B Memes, there is a whole class of “middle-aged media” like e-mail and webinars that can benefit from integration with newer social-media tools. De Young offers some simple but powerful tips for bringing PDFs into the 21st century.

Good Surveys: “3 B2B Social Media Takeaways from the Business.Com Social Media Survey,” Kipp Bodnar, Social Media B2B, 11/12/09.

Anyone involved in B2B media needs to know how B2B companies actually regard and use social media. A new survey from Business.com, as covered by Kipp Bodnar among many others, offers useful new data. As Bodnar suggests, it appears that businesses are still a bit behind on the new-media learning curve.

Bad Surveys: “If ‘advertising’ is your middle name, your surveys will always suggest the solution is …,” Rex Hammock, RexBlog, 11/12/09.

If you’ve ever been amused or irritated by the way surveys commissioned by publishing groups always seem self-serving, particularly when it involves the value of advertising, you’ll appreciate Rex Hammock’s take on a new study from the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Of course, Hammock has his own axe to grind, but his is a useful reminder always to regard survey results with a skeptical eye.

Face the Social Media Facts: “The 7 Harsh Realities of Social Media Marketing,” Sonia Simone, Copyblogger, 11/13/09.

So much of what we read about B2B social media makes it sound easy and unrelentingly positive. Simone offers a refreshingly and constructively critical take on the challenges to succeeding in the new-media world.

Straight Outta Left Field: “Make Everything Your Own,” Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and Robert Green, Huffington Post, 11/13/09.

OK, it’s a little weird to include 50 Cent in a collection of B2B posts, but in the following quote, he and co-author Green underscore the disruptive impact of the Internet on business:

We are living through an entrepreneurial revolution, on a global scale. The old power centers are breaking up. Individuals everywhere want more control over their destiny and have much less respect for an authority that is not based on merit but on mere power. We have all naturally come to question why someone should rule over us, why our source of information should depend on the mainstream media, and on and on. We do not accept what we accepted in the past.

The rise of social media favors the entrepreneur and the individual over the company and the group. Increasingly, B2B means P2P—person to person.