Greg Krehbiel on Publishing and Online Marketing

Zuckerberg has said that he’s building a new web where “the default is social,” and new Facebook apps are bringing that to life as they pop up on other sites. Those apps allow you to see what other people say about the site, or whether any of your friends like it.

We are witnessing a fundamental change in the nature of the Internet and how people use it. At one time the internet was about technology and information. The geek who could trick the search engines got all the traffic and most of the ad revenue.

The search engines responded by changing their algorithms, and there’s been a “who’s the better geek” contest ever since.

But now the internet is becoming social. That’s the driving force behind Facebook’s success. But it’s not so much that the web is social. People are social, and the web is catching up.

I’m more inclined to believe something from a friend than from a stranger. I’m more comfortable taking advice about my car from the mechanic I’ve used for 20 years than from anybody else. (Note: “social” doesn’t mean “free.”)

This is the challenge for publishers. They need to be like my trusted mechanic. Some people say that when they buy their groceries they prefer one cashier’s line. They like that particular cashier. IOW, there is a social element to the marketplace.

Publishers can’t only be about information and data and products. They need to establish a relationship with their customers.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized

News has gone through a few interesting changes over the years. Papers used to be openly partisan — supporting a political party or an ideology. Then we had the growth of organizations that claimed to be dispassionate and objective. The “independent” newspaper. Of course they never really were objective, but they tried.

Now the news business is going through its most serious challenge. Readership is down. Classified ad revenue has gone to Craigslist. Many people don’t feel they need to subscribe because they can read the content online for free, and online ads don’t compensate a newspaper for its costs.

The result — there will be a weeding out process over the next few years as superfluous news organizations go under.

Also, technology has exposed an ugly truth about news content. It’s basically all the same.

A long but interesting article about how Google is trying to save the news business (see How to save the news) highlights this through the inside perspective of a guy who helped run Google News — which, as you know, aggregates stories from thousands of different news services.

This aggregation provides an opportunity to compare news stories on similar topics, and apparently they’re just not that different, no matter which source they come from.

That could be the result of journalism training, or a journalism culture, or any number of things, but the bottom line is quite clear. There are too many outlets offering essentially the same content, and there’s no reason to purchase an article from one paper when you can get the same thing for free elsewhere.

This will doom any effort to put newspaper content behind a pay wall.

… however … a paper might be able to charge for access to content that is unique. The Wall Street Journal does okay with its paid model because it’s considered essential to business.

The conclusion is that the future of news is in niche marketing — i.e., stories written from a particular point of view for a particular audience. That helps the news organization in two ways: (1) the consumer might be willing to pay for such content, and (2) advertisers are willing to pay a premium for access to a niche audience.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized

At the coffee pot just now I was speaking with a colleague about an old Starbucks drink called chantico, which was a very rich, very strong, very sweet hot chocolate drink.

It was delicious, but you could only drink one every other week or so if you wanted to live until next month.

They discontinued it after a short while, and I had always thought people simply didn’t like it. But just now I googled it and found this old article, which claims that chantico died because the customers couldn’t customize it.

Starbucks seems to appeal to the kind of personality you really don’t want in a spouse — i.e., the need to have things just the way I like it.

Now they’ll have to factor that in to new product launches.

So beware! When you give customers endless flexibility, it takes away some of your options on the product development side.

Greg Krehbiel Uncategorized