This is more of a shift of focus than a switch.  Since the Web exploded, communications professionals – from PR to advertising – have been focused on driving to traffic to destinations.  This was true whether it was for informational purposes (such as in PR or branding programs) or for sales.   This is like focusing marketing on getting people to go to a store just to learn about the product instead of teaching them through the magazines they read and the TV shows they watch.  It can be a lot of effort for relatively little return. 

Now efforts are shifting to distributing branded or messaging carrying content.  The focus is moving to getting information to all the appropriate places where consumers congregate.  Go where the consumers are, put information in the context that they, and the community in which they congregate, naturally appreciate. 

The three main drivers of this shift – social networking, Web video video and personal portals like Netvibes of My Yahoo that are driven by RSS feed – have gained an enormous amount of momentum the last few years.  However, marketers have only experimented with these sites and remained focus on driving traffic to proprietary sites. 

Ad budgets will focus on driving traffic to third part sites.  We already see micro-versions of this with Facebook ads driving users to branded Facebook pages.  Next we might see a Yahoo based ad driving a user to a branded video channel on Heavy.com or section of Dailymotion (disclosure: a client).

But a careful balance will have to be sought.  Advertisers will still want to capture that traffic and not simply invest to build up traffic to someone else site.  I would not be surprised to see some third party sites make it easier for advertisers to register users on those sites.

I’ve been testing out flyers and here’s what I found:

1. They have the potential of targeting very specific interest groups.  Right now, you can either target everyone or university campuses.  If they take the university targeting capability and expand it to any Facegroup group, it would allow professionals to identify groups of individuals with appropriate interest, and post flyers (communicate messages) to those groups.
2. General flyers or flyers targeted to other groups can be used to build membership in new groups.  Direct to audience communications programs, such as ambassador programs, can form groups in Facebook then use Flyers to recruit (right now you can just invite people in).  Here is a group for mobile gadget users that I’m testing now: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5852073717
3. If Facebook’s approach takes off, then maybe other social networks will implement similar tools, making it easier for communications professionals to identify specific audiences and deliver messages only to those audiences.

Take a test drive at http://www.facebook.com/flyers.php.  This is the basic version.  There is also a new pay-per-click version.

And please feel free to contact me with any questions at cohen AT fortexgroup.com

Wize provides product scores based on a formula that combines professional reviews, consumer reviews and buzz.  I’m not sure what buzz is though I suspect it’s how much a product is being discussed online.  While they don’t publish the algorithm, it seems to be a combination of the quantity and quality of reviews and discussion.  So, simply put, if your product positive professional reviews  + positive consumer reviews + volume (how I think Wize defines buzz as per their formula below, then you’ll have a nice high ranking showing reflecting awareness and a positive image amongs the professional and consumer influentials:

Now, would someone build something similar for enterprise products?

1. The oldest media, word of mouth, is not a hot topic for marketers.
2. Newspapers have continued to grow in terms of reach and influence well after the introduction of the next few types of media.
2. Radio, which continues to grow well after the introduction of the television (and local radio may even survive satellite).
3. Television continued to grow after the introduction of Web based news.
4. You can’t really enjoy Web based news over a cup of coffee or on the couch.  Maybe digital paper will change that, but until then, I know plenty of people that still have their Times and Journal arrive in the morning.
5. Blogs are about opinions and community.  Not news.  Don’t confuse the two.  Oh, ask the average person on the street if they get their news and opinions from blogs and their answer will usually not match the hype.
6. Big media companies own or are on their way to owning the major properties in all categories.
7.  Consumers tend to end up using all this stuff for various purposes (e.g., radio on the go, television to relax, newspapers to read at leisure, Web news to read for a quick fix, blogs to get opinions and fun commentary.

And now to address some of the common arguements as to why blogs and other new media will hurt traditional media.

• People are spending less time reading newspapers and more time reading online news, blogs and other new media – Of course they are.  The media pie is changing.  They didn’t spend anytime on new media when it didn’t exist.  Now to spend some time on it, they take away a bit from newspapers.  Hey, the family used to gather around the radio at dinner time before television was invented.  Just because they stopped gathering didn’t mean radio would go out of business.
• Heavy users of media like blogs and communities like Myspace aren’t subscribing to newspapers –   That’s becuase they are mostly the younger crowd that tend to subscribe to and read fewer papers anyway.  Let’s wait ten years and then see how they’re doing.
• Old media is not moving fast enough to change their business model – If you ran a $23 billion media company with $2 billion in net income, how fast would you be to mess with it?  Especially when you can just purchase the new media properties should they get that powerful.

So are we really looking at the death of old media?  It’s highly doubtful.  Just a bigger media pie, an adjusted business model (in the end, they’re all living off advertising – just selling and designing it in new ways) that probably all going to be owned by the same media conglomerates..

1. Assume your customer is armed with all the information you have about your product and your competitors’ product.  These days, consumers can access all types of product technical, pricing, quality and customer service information, and compare it to competitors.  Assume the consumer has all this when laying out the companies positioning.  This means companies can no longer say they have great customer service if they don’t.  A consumer can easily find out it’s a false message, and that affects the consumer’s belief in anything a company says.

2. Defy comparison (I love this one).   Any product should have something unique – it may be it’s design/simplicity, a technical feature, price or product quality.  Find that unique aspect that appeals to the buy base and focus the message around that.  This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for competitors, media and other influentials to make potential negative comparisons.  For example, Motorola’s Razr isn’t a technical marvel (in fact, it turned out to be a minor technical mess) and many would argue there are nicer looking phones.   However, it was the slimmest when it first came out and that’s what the messaging centered on.  It turns out, people loved slim and, ignoring the technical and feature quality, consumers bought a ton of these phones.

3. Match the message to the target.  This was always true for public relations but it’s become for more critical.  Today’s communications and marketing environment is one of a highly segmented target audience.  Demographic A watches one show,  B surfs a specific Web site, C is a sports fanatic, etc.  Mass messaging is like throwing out a giant, expensive net to catch several fish.  Instead, figure out what bait (message) and fishing spot (demographic group) matches up, and go fishing.  Don’t do this and lose out to companies catching more customers with fewer marketing dollars (i.e., better businesses).  And, yes, it’s the start of fishing season here in the Northeast.

4. “Deliver what you promise.”  You’d think this was a Duh statement.  Remember the statement, ”you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time”?  For years companies seemed to focus on the latter group and get away with it.  Cigarette, anyone?  In today’s environment, there’s a good chance that a broken company promise will be a top search result when people search for the company. 

It can seem quite simple – treat your customers as educated consumers, position your product as unique, match messaging to audiences and keep your promise.  Like so many things, it’s easier said than done.  But in this case, not doing it isn’t simply bad business, it’s an exposed business.

By making me a part of their content decision making process, the acquirium has drawn me in to being an internal audience.  After getting the email, I thought about the differences and gains companies make by making the customer, an external audience by default, an internal audience. I came up with a few differences.  Do you have anything to add?