Ubiquitous Marketing

Speaking from purely a content-meaningful perspective, I’ve stopped caring so much about page views of stories. That’s not to say there isn’t relevance in page view stats for advertisers or in the ranking sense (my site gets X page views a month)…

But I’m tired of getting emotional about stories that are not that great that hit a hive of Twitter or blogs that prompt X page views, while the great stuff toils at X- 1,500 page views. We focus on quality and hope that what we write impacts every person that reads it the same way.

(Okay, I just wanted to get a post up).

Posting a video on YouTube does not a social media president make. Effective, but he’s not going to be reading the comments. And, if he does, he will be reading them for the same reason we all do. To see how long discourse can remain civil before someone compares someone else to Hitler.

I do believe that all print will go away some day. Ergo, I do believe at some time in the future, print will die. Anyone plugged into the media environment who saw the Christian Science Monitor go online only would be foolish to not agree. Yet - few can bring themselves to admit it! Last night, I had another conversation along these lines.

Me: Print will eventually die.

Someone else: I don’t believe that. I love reading books.

Me: As digital readers become better and cheaper, we’ll all probably look back at the time where you carried one book at a time as quaint and antiquated.

Someone else: I don’t know. I love books.

Me: I’m not saying it will happen in the next 20 years or so, but there are too many concerns that favor electronic distribution [paraphrase].

Someone else: Well, yeah - but it won’t be for awhile.

Saying print will eventually die does not mean your publication will go online only tomorrow or even in 2010 - but those in journalism need to prepare mentally for the (only) future (being that) of online media. The more the publication targets the affluent (those who have computers and disposable income to buy digital readers), the quicker it will be to transition. Community newspapers will probably be the last.

So… this is taking on a life of its own. I guess I can understand that some people are not a fan of the idea, but I’m a little surprised that a few people are upset. If anyone cares, I got the idea for it from a tournament that I ran on my music blog last year. A lot of people thought it was fun. What’s interesting is I told two of my friends what I was doing - and they both remarked - “Ah, combining your two loves.” That would be my work and March Madness. Anyway, if anyone wants to see that tournament, it’s archived here.

I will be following this new search engine Cuil quite closely - but, it’s got some kinks to work out.

Apparently Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien is my dopleganger - and while I have always thought I have had red hair; it appears I sometimes have black hair.

I need to check the actual stats, but it doesn’t seem to be moving any needles on our traffic. I wonder if this commentary is more apt than I originally thought.

That I think I shouldn’t blog about it. But, there’s this lunch place near work that makes a transcendental (ethereal?) sandwich of carrots, hummus, avocado, and greens. It is awesome. But the place is always small and packed. So… they lose a lot of customers who go on to substandard meals elsewhere. But what if they Twittered when the line was winnowing? Near-perfect crowd management.

The New York Times gets around to writing about “Garfield Without Garfield” - and links to one blog who had one thing to say about the site once. BUT DOES NOT LINK TO THE ACTUAL WEB SITE THAT SERVES AS THE SUBJECT OF THE PIECE. Um, okay.

Tomorrow, you’ll find a lot of interesting stories, analyses, and features that focus on the PR industry. What you won’t find, however, is something - anything - on Scott McClellan. Arguably the biggest story in a couple of weeks involving a PR person, and we have no coverage. This is a mistake on our part (my part especially). It also shows how a weekly publication can lose track of the important things. We’ll make mistakes like this from time to time, and that leads me to question how to best avoid such missteps in the future.

I don’t know if I have the best answer, but this CGM (consumer-generated media) I’ve been counseling my reporters to ask people in the beats they cover to always ask - what are the stories in which you’re interested. Maybe I should have some informal external editorial board - that serves as a check and balance to make sure we don’t again get lost in the fog of (weekly publication) war.

Re: my previous post, I also have my own FriendFeed - http://friendfeed.com/keithobrien.