Steve Newman Digital Marketing Blog

New Internet study highlights the ongoing fragmentation of news consumption and the rise of social media

Steve Newman — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 02:04:20 +0000

I was extremely sceptical about Rupert Murdoch’s comments last year that “consumers will have to start paying for online news”. In a world where media is fragmenting at an ever increasing rate, his comments struck me as incredibly naive. The beauty of the internet is that it gives people choice. If readers have the option of getting their daily news fix from multiple sources, its unlikely that they’re going to continue to keep a site bookmarked that asks them to pay to get their fix – particularly when much of the news these days seems to originate from one story that is then rereported by other outlets.

I think my views were given additional weight today with the release of the Pew Internet study “Understanding the Participatory News Consumer” that flagged that “more than 90% of Americans were getting their news from multiple sources”. Interestingly, the study also flagged that many people were now also getting their much of their news through social media – either via blogs or referrals from friends and family.

As I flagged previously, against such a background, its important that news organisations understand that they need to tackle ths issue intelligently. Over the longer term I think the winners are going to be niche or genre players – those that focus on addressing specific issues for distinct audiences (e.g. investing for retirement) or those that take a particular ‘angle’ when reporting on stories.

In the latter camp, there are various companies addressing the issue head on. Here in the US you have Fox News – very much playing to the right and other media such as the “Daily Show with Jon Stewart” or the “Colbert Report” who are tackling this issue with a mix of comedy and extremely insightful comment. Of course, the interesting thing to note is that Fox News is owned by NewsCorp, which brings us full circle back to Rupert Murdoch. Is his intention to run NewsCorp as lots of “little” fiefdoms with their distinct mandates and approaches? This would afterall, allow for considerable flexibility – if an ‘approach’ or ‘genre’ wasn’t working, companies could be cut loose and sold off to competitors… hmm that’s worth thinking about…

Its only those companies who can tap in to distinct audiences with distinct views or news requirements who are going to have the luxury of charging for content - the rest, well they’re doomed!

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Blogging success one year on – a job done

Steve Newman — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 09:43:21 +0000

While doing a little housekeeping on my blog recently I realised that its first anniversary had just passed. Reflecting on the past year I was surprised at how much of an impact it has had on my life. It finally allowed me to set up shop here in the US, establishing another office overseas for my business Condor Digital Marketing Consultancy Limited. That may sound implausible but I can honestly say its not an understatement.

I originally considered setting up a blog while Business Development Director for Ptarmigan Media, a very traditional London based media buying agency. I had read around how successful blogs were at helping companies demonstrate expertise in crowded marketplaces. As a point of differentiation I wanted the agency to be able to firmly go on record about industry developments and more importantly teaching best practice in the area of financial services digital marketing.

I had realised during my previous incarnation as Head of Internet for Investec Asset Management how much guidance and help I and other digital marketers needed in navigating the digital minefield. The simple issue for me as a financial services digital marketer was that there weren’t enough hours in the day trying to stay up to date with the fast moving digital environment. At least it was impossible to do this while also holding down my normal day job.

This ‘lack of hours in the day’ despite working from 7am to 7pm and often weekends too, led me to move to the dark and murky ‘Agency’ world – I wanted to have more time to work directly with publishers and companies such as Google. In parallel to try and combat some of these issues around digital best practice I started producing a range of whitepapers for Ptarmigan Media, either drawing on my own experience or researching the topics from scratch where necessary. The initial response from within the Agency surprised me. They were sceptical that the whitepapers would be of any value, indeed some considered them a waste of time.

This attitude was soon to change. Not only did clients resoundingly love the insight they offered around topics such as ‘Email marketing to financial advisers’ but the whitepapers were acting as strong points of differentiation between Ptarmigan Media and their peers in the industry. They soon became leave behinds during pitches or discussion points at meetings. Indeed, the ultimate accolade came when one of the largest UK asset managers approached Ptarmigan Media to write their digital strategy document as a result of its ‘expertise’ in this area.

While I was happy that the whitepapers were going down so well, I was frustated that such ‘high’ value content was effectively locked up within the agency and was reliant on email and hard copy distribution to a relatively limited audience. I decided that the answer resided online in the form of a blog. Why distribute the content to the Agency’s clients alone when a far broader ‘global’ audience could be tapped into – by their very nature, if configured correctly, blogs are highly Search Engine friendly allowing for content to be easily found, indexed and made available to anyone and everyone within a matter of a few clicks.

The benefits to Ptarmigan Media of an inhouse agency blog would be considerable. Ptarmigan would be able to demonstrate its thought leadership online, add to the digital debate and even lead it in some areas such as B2B financial services marketing through the UK and Europe. I was shocked therefore when my approaches to establish an agency blog were firmly rebuffed. Undaunted, I decided to set up my own blog writing about financial services digital marketing. The timing could not have been better.

After 8 months in the role of Business Development Director for Ptarmigan Media I could already see that while I appreciated aspects of the agency world greatly, the access to publishers and new techologies, the money and conditions were less than appealing. I had already decided to ‘take the hit’ in those areas for the sake of my long-term career, but I hadn’t factored in the ‘dubious’ managerial aspects of the job and the intense internal politics of the firm. The time was ripe to do something!

With hindsight the results were comical. Within 3 weeks of my going live I was approached by Ptarmigan and asked whether or not my blog could be brought in-house. I considered this but rejected it out of hand. I wanted independent editorial control and anyway, Ptarmigan had been given the opportunity to be on board from day 1 – that boat had already sailed!

Within 2 months of going live I had been quoted in the Financial Times and other publications and received sufficient interest to be able to set up my own business and part ways with Ptarmigan amicably.

The best bit of all, my only financial outlay was less than $100 for hosting – the rest was simply a question of time. Researching and finding content to write about, I was more than happy to do. While regular readers may have noticed that I write less now than I used to, this is I’m afraid a pure reflection of the success of my blog – the work and clients that it has brought me now keep my small but thriving business well occupied!

If you are looking at setting up your own Wordpress blog, I wrote an earlier post detailing how I went about doing this here.

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The new dragon slayer courtesy of Apple

Steve Newman — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 07:11:40 +0000

My ‘hot’ money at the moment is firmly on Apple. Not only have they managed to capture, nay obliterate some of the largest and longest established cell phone companies with a portable music player (well that’s what the iPhone started its life as…) through capturing significant smart phone market share but they are now intent on challenging and transforming other established and emerging industries with the launch of the iPad. While there is every risk of getting caught up in the ‘hype’ of the moment, often commonplace with the launch of new Apple gadgets, I’ve purposely sat on the sidelines since news of its launch hit the headlines. But after careful consideration, I’ve decided that Apple could be on to another serious winner. My reasoning is not simply because the iPads seriously ‘whizzy’ but because of its likely ability to change the way we work rest and play (again).

I was drawn to that simple conclusion by my 8 year old son who has on long car trips started forgoing the use of his beloved Nintendo DSi and turned instead to using my iPhone 3GS – to play games, watch videos and read (courtesy of the Kindle iPhone application). Because Apple invested some serious time and thought on making the iPhone as easy to use as possible (just check out the manual that comes with it – oh that’s right there isn’t one) he has taken to it like a duck to water – even teaching me a thing or two in the process. Even taking into account his naturally higher ‘geek’ quotient (I am his father after all), he is using my iPhone as a truly convergent device.

The fact that my 8 year old can use my iPhone in this way and by implication would be interested in our family acquiring an iPad at launch intrigues me. Here will be a device that my son will be interested in particularly for road trips, my wife for accessing books and news content (of the decidedly entertainment variety) and myself for its more business oriented applications, access to books, blogs, RSS video and email on the go – how can Apple NOT be on to a winner? If you still disagree with me all I can do is refer you to the following video – demonstrating one of the capabilities coming to an iPad near you soon…

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Forrester report highlights the likely conflict within agencies and the growth in importance of strategic marketing

Steve Newman — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:06:21 +0000

During the summer of 2009, Forrester produced a paper “US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 To 2014” highlighting the enormous changes marketers and their agencies will encounter in coming years. At its heart the paper highlights that interactive marketing spend will continue to grow rocketing to $55bn by 2014 representing 21% of all media expenditure. This growth in expenditure in areas such as search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing will come at the expense of traditional media as budgets are cannibalized.

Indeed, Forrester go one step further and say that the likely long term impact is that advertising budgets (but not necessarily marketing budgets) will actually decline as money is allocated to those interactive channels with clear ROI – gone will be the days of spending 80% of your advertising budget on ineffectual campaigns with the remaining 20% only actually proving effective.

I can vouch for this from personal experience. I now manage the email marketing and interactive campaigns for a number of principally financial services companies and have seen a significant switch in budget towards digital at the expense of other channels. The implication, as highlighted in the Forrester report is clear. Traditional agencies with little or no experience of delivering effective interactive marketing campaigns are doomed. The results will speak for themselves and account security will no longer be dependent on a handshake and the witty bonhomie of your neighbourhood media director.

Of course, in the financial services space, some companies are slower to adapt to change than others and many agency CEO’s may sleep soundly at night knowing that many of their clients aren’t that switched on – but how long is this ‘model’ sustainable. Financial services marketers need to ask themselves a simple question – can you justify spending $200k driving 10,000 anonymous visits to a website when a targeted and well executed email campaign can deliver the same result for $500 – (and you know exactly who these 10,000 visitors are)? hmm that’s a tough one!

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New legal white paper published for businesses trying to navigate social media

Steve Newman — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 05:21:08 +0000

Law firm Reed Smith has published an extremely comprehensive guide for businesses attempting to navigate the increasingly important world of social media. The 10-chapter, 73 page tome titled ‘Network Interference – A legal guide to the commercial risks and rewards of the social media phenomenon‘ covers all manner of issues including:

Advertising and marketing, Commercial litigation, Data Privacy & Security, Employment Practices, Litigation, Evidence & Privilege, Product Liability, Securities and finally Trademarks.

Although many of these topics appear quite dry in nature they cover key practical areas such as running competitions on such sites, using them to provide customer services, issues over the ownership of copyright on user-generated content and more. Financial Services marketers should certainly read chapters 3 & 9. These look at areas such as ‘advertising and promotion’ and the relationship netween social meda and ‘Securities’.

With sufficient detail to be an interesting read even for more accomplished digital marketers, I would recommend taking a look.

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Maximizing your site traffic with Google’s bid simulator

Steve Newman — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:58:22 +0000

During the summer of 2009 Google made a number of changes to its AdWords interface. An extremely interesting addition was the inclusion of a bid simulator that provides increased transparency into the AdWords auction process. In short, for a range of bids that you specify, the simulator will provide you with estimates of the number of impressions and clicks your ads should receive as a result.

The following video explaining this new feature can be accessed on the Google Business channel on YouTube:

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Problems with HTML Email rendering in Outlook 2007

Steve Newman — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:01:27 +0000

Many designers already know what a complete nightmare Outlook 2007 can be to design for from an HTML email perspective. Microsoft in their infinite wisdom chose to use its own Word HTML email rendering engine for their latest edition of Outlook.This can unfortunately have a profound impact on how brands email messages are displayed in Outlook 2007 as documented by Datamation here.

At the time of writing Microsoft have confirmed that they intend to use the Word rendering engine for HTML emails in Outlook 2010 despite widespread industry condemnation and even a campaign by the Email Standards Project by way of Campaign Monitor pleading with the developers at Microsoft.

Nonetheless it remains that these issues with Outlook 2007 need attending to and I have tried to address them by referring to some excellent email sources such as Email Marketing Voodoo and most importantly testing messages with Litmus. Litmus has saved my proverbial neck on many an occassion through its ability to provide you with examples of how HTML communications render via the following clients:

Desktop email clients

Apple Mail 3
Apple Mail 2.1
Lotus Notes 8
Lotus Notes 7
Lotus Notes 6.5
Outlook 2007
Outlook 2003
Outlook 2002/XP
Outlook 2000
Thunderbird 3.0 Beta
Thunderbird 2.0

Web-based email clients

AOL Mail
Gmail
Gmail (older version)
Live Hotmail
Mail.com
Mobile Me
Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! Mail Classic

Litmus also provdes you with SPAM scores for the following filters:

Desktop spam filters

Apple Mail 3
Apple Mail 2
Outlook 2007
Outlook 2003

Server-side spam filters

AOL
Barracuda
Brightmail
Gmail
Hotmail
MessageLabs
Postini
SpamAssassin
Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! SpamGuard Plus

Through careful testing and monitoring of the results I can ensure that communications look the way they should when they get delivered and that they make it through the SPAM filter in the first place. It would be nice however for a proper email standard to be established and then for all major players toc stick to it. Microsoft, please take note!

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Setting up an effective Facebook fan page for your business

Steve Newman — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:56:56 +0000

With news from Hitwise that Facebook now accounts for 1 in 7 of all page impressions in the UK brands really should consider setting up their own fan pages on the site. This makes sense on a number or levels – at the very least it makes sense for your brand to be seen in a place that many of your customers are obviously spending so much of their time.

Of course, there remains a huge amount of cynicism around Facebook and its perceived teen userbase. The numbers below show however the age breakdown of Facebook in the UK as at 18 October 2009:

18 – 25 6.6 million registered users

26 – 35 5.7 million registered users

36 – 45 3.6 million registered users

Clearly the site is not just for ‘teens’.

Even if a brand isn’t interested in actively having a presence on Facebook a page should be setup purely from from an SEO perspective as this could help with the brands natural search engine rankings.

Items to include on a Facebook Fan page

This article from mashable.com includes consderable detail on:

How to setup a brand Facebook fan page
What content you should look to incorporate
How the Facebook page could work with with other social media, Twitter etc
How to promote the page to your audience
How applications can be developed to interact and actually transact with your desired target audience

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Bloggers to be forced to declare interests by the US FTC

Steve Newman — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 01:06:22 +0000

The Federal Trade Commission announced last Monday its intention to introduce rules forcing bloggers to declare any interest in products reviewed or discussed in their blogs. While it is always best practice to be as open and transparent as possible, some bloggers use sites such as PayPerPost.com to try and earn an income from blogging. While the vast majority of blogs are unlikely to make their authors rich, (unless of course you are the HuffintonPost), it is interesting that the FTC has felt it necessary to introduce these rules and restrictions around citizen journalism.

While I applaud efforts to regulate this space, I’m not certain how effective or realistic these rules are likely to be. Many in the UK Fund Management industry are well aware that a certain former head of a now infamous investment manager effectively prevented any kind of negative commentary around his products via the omnipresent threat of legal action and writs – even if that comment was often founded in fact. Perversely, isn’t ‘forcing’ people to only ever consider writing good stories about your products or services pretty much the same as paying them to do so in the first place – particularly if there’s also the risk of the publishers advertising revenue also disappearing overnight?

Good luck to the FTC!

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Click fraud getting increasingly sophisticated

Steve Newman — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 22:13:15 +0000

News yesterday from BrandRepublic that click fraud is becoming increasingly sophisticated with the discovery of a 1,000 member-strong click fraud ring in China. I suspect that the reality is with the growth of social media and the ease with which people can communicate with each other on a global basis, crimes of this type are more likely to proliferate than be one-off in nature. My recommendation to marketers, pay careful attention to your pay per click (PPC) programs and if at all possible invest in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as well – it may prove less costly over the long term….

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