The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

Marketing

Amazon Prime a Cult?

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Really insightful post by Jason Calacanis about the “cult” of Amazon Prime, and why it’s so attractive.

When you take the $79 leap into Prime, Amazon has you for life.

Once you’re in the cult you’re not leaving because leaving means you have the drudgery of having to drive to the store, finding the item you want, seeing if it’s in stock and then dealing with the most horrifying experience of all: retail employees.

I’ve been a Prime member since the beginning, and it’s only become more essential to me now that it comes with free videos for my Kindle Fire and one free book to “borrow” a month. Amazon has brilliantly made itself indispensable through services. Now that’s brand building.

Six Tips for Making Ad Dollars from Your Parenting Blog

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One of my day-to-day jobs at Federated Media is deciding — with input from sales and other members of the team — which parenting sites (including blogs) would be good partners for our company.

Parenting blogs are unique in that they so often start as labors of love, or just means of staying in touch with far-flung families, and later evolve into businesses. So, the first step, really, is to decide if you want to get into the advertising business. It might not be for you, because of your creative vision, your personality, or your other commitments. (One good test may be to review the following tips and see if they feel right for your site and yourself.)

So, without further ado, here are my tips for the fledgling mommy or daddy blogger with ambitions of reaping significant advertising revenue:

1. Post every day or even more often. Be consistent.

You may notice that some established bloggers don’t post every day. But the most successful are super-disciplined about churning out the content. If you really want to make your blog into a business, you need to treat it like one, rather than waiting around for inspiration to hit.

2. Cultivate your readership.

What you’re selling — to readers, to advertisers, to your advertising partners — is yourself, or your site’s brand. To build a brand in a grassroots way, you need to be out there. Engage bigger (and smaller) bloggers in their comments sections and on Twitter. Talk to your current readers when they comment on your site. Put yourself on Facebook. Consider advertising on similar sites, or doing guest posts that allow you to get your site’s name in front of larger audiences.

The first thing that advertisers and agencies look for are stats like unique users and pageviews. Next, for savvy marketers, is engagement (as measured by comments, contest entries, etc.). Numbers 1 and 2 on this list are about building up both of those key metrics.

3. Keep it PG rated.

But wait, you ask, those super-successful bloggers curse all the time, why can’t I? Controlled, contextual cursing is OK in moderation. Gratuitious f-bombs or worse are just a turn-off. Think twice before embedding that risque YouTube video. Personally, I’m all for letting it all hang out. It’s the Internet, after all. But, if you’re running a business and not pursuing a hobby, remember that advertisers want to be beside content that makes them feel safe and comfortable.

4. Think about your target advertiser.

This is probably most helpful for those just conceiving of a blog, but, when you’re defining your editorial focus, imagine what advertisers you’d like to see on your site and ask yourself if they’d be happy there. Sure, it’s great, and important, to crusade against unhealthy food or plastic toys, but realize that you may also be frightening away advertisers of such things. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, just do it consciously!) Think about who the big spenders are, and about what kinds of messages they spend the big bucks on spreading. If you can align yourself with the current flow of spending, and continue to be authentic, you’re in great shape.

Be consistent with your editorial, as well. So many times, a personal blog becomes a place for anything the person happens to be interested in, at the moment. Avoid that impulse and stick to a coherent theme, so advertisers understand what they’re getting.

5. Make room for ads above the fold (fewer than 550 pixels from the top).

It may surprise you to find that some bloggers who want to make money from advertising haven’t designed their site to accommodate ads. Getting advertisers and keeping them happy means giving them exposure in a prominent place. But that doesn’t mean your site has to look junky. Anyone who has visited an ad-supported site can tell you that there are good placements (that look nice, well-designed, etc.) and bad ones (that look junky, ugly, etc.). Some of this is influenced by the ad creative itself, but the integration of the ad units makes a difference.

6. Develop sponsorable opportunities. And provide stats!

Maggie Mason has done an amazing job (in partnership with FM) finding sponsors for her Life List. But just saying, “I have a Life List” isn’t enough for advertisers/agencies. You need to be able to say, “if you sponsor my Design section for $1000, for two weeks you’ll get all of the banner ads in that section (100,000 impressions), you’ll get mentioned on the front page (20,000 pageviews/day), and I’ll tease and link to it from my Twitter feed (3,000 followers).” Think about how you can package things up to be attractive and meet advertisers’ objectives.

It’s also measurable now!

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Pete Spande at Continuous Beta says:

Media hasn’t become social. It always was. I talked about the latest Dukes of Hazzard episode with anyone who would listen in 1980. My mother sent me newspaper clippings all the through my college career (for example – don’t use Bean0, it is made with penicillin! [I’m alergic.]) The difference now is that media is social with SCALE.

The other big difference, Pete, is that social media — word of mouth, to use the old term — is now measurable. I used to get a lot of gaff at ClickZ for writing about word-of-mouth marketing, because, uh… what’s digital or interactive about that?

My argument was always that the advent of digital media, and user-generated media, meant that you can now see and measure what people are saying about your brand. You can analyze positive versus negative; you can take that feedback and improve your products. And you can participate in the conversation and affect what people are saying about you. Pretty damned cool.

Baking Social Media Success

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I’m a little bit jaded, and, most of the time that I look at social media efforts, it’s as a professional. I think, “how engaging is this call to action?” “How well have they managed to encourage user participation?”

But this week, I got hit right at one of my passion points, and was dragged into participation myself. The campaign is called Bake2Share, and it’s for King Arthur Flour, one of the more premium flour brands that’s based in Vermont. This is a brand that caters to serious bakers, but also offers easy-to-use mixes, including a line especially for baking with kids. And it’s making a significant commitment to e-commerce. Internet Retailer named kingarthurflour.com one of its Hot 100 retail Web sites for 2009, and the company just won top honors from the DMA and Multichannel Marketer as best online food retailer.

It’s also a brand that is sharp about social media. They have a blog, whose RSS feed I subscribe to, and, of course, a very active Twitter account. I’m a big fan of King Arthur, and, though I don’t order from them all that much, I open their e-mail newsletter pretty consistently. Tuesday, I opened an e-mail from them that contained some pretty compelling language:

It’s part of our mission to inspire community-building through baking. When we bake and share, we forge honest, caring connections that help create and sustain a vibrant community. We believe that baking and giving go hand in hand. We want to encourage you to bake and share with family and friends, neighbors, and your community. To get you started, we’ll send you a 2-lb. bag of King Arthur Flour – absolutely free. We simply ask that you bake it forward. We’d love to hear your bake2share stories, and invite you to poste them at kingarthurflour.com/bake2share…

And then, at the bottom of the e-mail, there were links to Twitter, Facebook, delicious and StumbleUpon, with the directive “Share this email”.

Nicely done. It practically oozes with brand values — giving, sharing, community — and even the call-to-action is about sharing and community-building. Not to mention that the free bag of flour — free shipping included — was a pretty pleasant little gift.

When I signed up, there wasn’t yet much on the site. But now — the day I received my free bag — it’s been updated to say they gave away 5,218 bags, all in fewer than 24 hours. They list 106 participating bakers and 4,189 recipients of baked goods. No stories have yet been posted, which is a little disappointing, but also understandable. Another thing they did right: they made submitting a story very very easy. There are fields for what you baked and who you shared it with — stories and photos are optional. This will help them gather plenty of input — both from casual participants (like I probably will be) — and from those who go all-out and document their experience both in text and images.

I’m impressed, King Arthur Flour. I already was pretty fond of your brand, but this has tipped me over into passionate brand advocate territory. Now, off to bake those blueberry muffins.

UPDATE: I’ve finally baked my cupcakes and have been trying to submit my story, only to discover a major social media FAIL in this campaign. Every time I hit submit (and I’ve been doing it over and over again), I get a Network Error message: “The server at ecomm2.bos.kingarthurflour.com is taking too long to respond.” Not good, but a good lesson for others to take note of.

Journalism and Business — not always strange bedfellows

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There’s an interesting piece today in Inside Higher Education that discusses Columbia Journalism School and its mandate to educate journalists to handle the tumultuous shifts happening in media today (both consumption patterns and business models). Among the changes proposed by Bill Grueskin, the former deputy managing editor for news at The Wall Street Journal and the school’s new dean of academic affairs, is a course on the business of journalism:


Though he acknowledged that the course would bridge the longstanding gap between the business and editorial sides of the journalism world, he did not think this would present an ethical problem for students. If anything, he said, it might help them in a market where some journalists have had to become entrepreneurs to find an audience for their work online.

“Most journalism schools have a historical aversion to teaching the business of journalism,” Grueskin said. “It, however, is incumbent upon us to show our students the [changing business] model. We’re not blurring the lines between business and editorial. The truth is, business considerations have always enabled or disabled journalism — more the latter than the former as of late. We’re not trying to graduate people to work in ad departments but those who can talk to those in the ad department.”

At FM, especialy in the author services department, this is a topic we deal with every day, and it’s fascinating to see my alma mater deem it worthy of study. I wholeheartedly agree.

P.S. I would love to be an adjunct professor for such a course.