What we’ve found: When it comes to spreading a story, the mainstream media isn’t as important as the micromedia. Being written up at the right blogs has had way more impact for us than the press we’ve gotten in big-circulation publications.
Traditional media is losing ground
“10 reasons why newspapers won’t reinvent news” [via JK] explains why papers are having a tough time keeping up with the web:
Newsrooms don’t trail the leading edge simply because they’re too dumb to keep up…Most newspapers can’t see what’s coming…Most newspaper payrolls are bloated with pluralities of resentful Luddites who struggle with the complexities of e-mail…Inertia, uncertainty and toxic paralysis rule most newspaper companies…In 2008, all meaningful political discourse — the essential element of social currency — takes place on the Web. Print (and televised) political coverage is now but a pale shadow of the real action online.
This bit from “On the Bus, But With No Reason to Go?” [Washington Post], an article about the evolving role of the press in the presidential campaign, shows the impact: The mainstream media just doesn’t matter that much anymore.
Obama advisers have concluded that newspaper and magazine stories no longer have the same resonance but that a brief item by, say, Politico bloggers can spread like wildfire.”
We’ve noticed a similar trend in our sphere too…
Time vs. Daring Fireball
We’ve been written up in big mainstream publications like Wired and Time, but we’ve found that we actually get more hits when we’re profiled on sites like Daring Fireball or Lifehacker. Links from these places result in bigger spikes in our traffic and sales.
When 43 Folders’ Merlin Mann lists one of our products at his site, we get thousands of new visitors. During a recent 37signals Live we were conducting, Digg’s Kevin Rose posted a note to Twitter that he was watching us. We instantly saw a bump of 200 viewers. Articles in bigtime publications are nice and sound impressive, but they don’t result in that level of direct, instant activity.
These smaller sites don’t have the same volume of readers as, say, Newsweek, but the people who do read them actually care about what they have to say. There’s a relationship. The audience isn’t made up of random readers, it’s people who think a certain way.
Lower barrier
Plus, it’s a lot easier to actually get through to these sites. Pitching Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal’s tech reporter, is hard. Good luck even getting ahold of him. And even if you did, he probably wouldn’t care about your startup (or whatever) anyway. (PR agencies may have more contacts but are also a good way to waste your money.)
With bloggers, the barrier is much lower. You can send an email and get a response (and maybe even a post) the same day. There’s no editiorial board or PR people involved. There’s no monthlong (or longer) pipeline to delay your message. When you go after micromedia, you get immediacy and approachability.
And they’re actually hungry for fresh meat too. They thrive on being tastemakers, finding the new thing, and starting the ball rolling. They are the opposite of “resentful Luddites who struggle with the complexities of e-mail.”
You may think that Wired, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and other big media outlets are the holy grail of getting noticed. But you’ll actually get a lot more results from the little guys who are willing to listen and have an audience that really trusts them.
Evan
on 27 Oct 08Here’s another thought as to why digital media gets you more hits than print media: When you’re reading a blog, you’re already sitting at your computer, so it’s easy to check out a site you just read about (and were probably linked to directly.)
If you’re holding a magazine, chances are you’re not sitting at your computer. So the best that happens there is that you make a mental note to go look later, and we all know how well that pans out.
Rob H
on 27 Oct 08Matt, great post! I couldn’t agree more with you about how traditional media outlets are losing favor to niche bloggers. I deal with a lot of people in the golf industry and they are finally seeing value in having bloggers review their products, which was probably unheard of 5 years ago. Rob
Bob
on 27 Oct 08It is about getting the greatest exposure to your desired audience. My mom reads Time, but she has no use for any of 37signal’s products. However, a blog will hit a far greater number of people who are likely to either want to use or need to use your product … like it was said, we’re obviously computer users and listing the blogs you did, more than likely ones with the technical savvy to use your options.
Then, from there, it is up to us to spread the word and get others to come on over because we can provide “tangible help” through our experiences.
Ed.T
on 27 Oct 08Wow! Very eye opening. Thanks for sharing this kind of information. In addition to bringing a higher number of hits, it is also seems exciting to be able to see the immediate impact.
Alan O'Rourke
on 27 Oct 08It’s not even the most popular blogs that you expect. We have had one of our products featured on some of the big blogs you mention above but the biggest jump in numbers and sign ups came from an email newsletter sent out by someone we never heard of (8000 in one day).
Patrick Berry
on 27 Oct 08It’s all about the new internet traffic spike. In the O’Reilly article they detail how sites like Digg will give you an instant surge while “old media” sites (NYT, Time, etc.) will give you more prolonged exposure. Well, it’s not all about that, but you get the drift.
Martin Edic
on 27 Oct 08We monitor social media and I couldn’t agree more with this post. First, things can easily bubble up from a low authority source very rapidly because exposure in social media is exponential. Things like Twitter are incredible B-B marketing tools because they’re so targeted. If I join a conversation about social media monitoring virtually everyone following that is my audience as are their followers. The network effect is over the top. Our customers are brand managers. Those that get it understand that this is a fundamental change in how marketing is done. Ironically it is the ‘traditional’ ad agencies who often don’t get it- they’re stuck in message broadcast mode…
Carl Meyer
on 27 Oct 08Evan and Patrick Berry raise a key question. Obviously, internet-media exposure results in a more noticeable immediate spike, because readers are at their computers, ready to click. Evan speculates that readers of a paper magazine will never get around to actually visiting your site after they read that feature article. But what data do you have to demonstrate that you don’t actually get more traffic from the Wired article, just over a longer period of time?
Not necessarily arguing with the conclusion, but I’m not sure the data points you present demonstrate it.
David William Edwards
on 27 Oct 08@Evan – Good point! I never thought about the proximity of the media to the result that you’re after. The more the “news” is connected to desired results, the greater the chances. You can’t “click” a link in the magazine article.
How does this effect products like the “Kindle”?
David William Edwards
Brandon Ferguson
on 27 Oct 08While I think that targeting is huge and the hits you get from focused media is great, I think it’s myopic to think that internet sites can out strip traditional media at this point.
Check out this post from one of the guys who created speedtest.net:
These guys have been Digg’d many many times – and one small mention by Oprah that people should go to their site and they saw something they didn’t think was possible. So convenience of clicking + well targeted audience is awesome for great responses, but will be far outnumbered by a receptive audience in a traditional media setting.
Joe Sheehan
on 27 Oct 08What about quantity vs quality? If your 200 instant new viewers for a 37Signals Live are people with nothing else to do with their time except follow Kevin Rose on Twitter, is that really more valuable than the thousands of high net worth eyes which look at the WSJ every morning? Nothing against those 200 viewers or Kevin Rose, just posing the question.
“Word of blog” and “word of twit” is fairly easy to measure – “word of mouth” is more difficult to measure unless you’re listening to what everyone in the world says.
ML
on 27 Oct 08But what data do you have to demonstrate that you don’t actually get more traffic from the Wired article, just over a longer period of time?
Our data is certainly less than scientific on this. However, it still seems we’d see a notable bump directly after an appearance regardless of the publication. I don’t think there’s a large number of people who come to us due to, say, a Wired article, but wait until months after it appears.
One small mention by Oprah that people should go to their site and they saw something they didn’t think was possible.
Oprah is on her own level with this stuff. Anyone who can get (tens of?) millions of Americans to read “Anna Karenina” is wielding a pretty amazing amount of power.
Stephane Grenier
on 27 Oct 08I have to admit, there’s a lot to what you’re saying. I’ve had my company (LandlordMax) profiled in over half a dozen major city newspapers and it definitely didn’t result in the same immediate quality traffic as certain blog posts.
It might be that the traffic is harder to monitor and measure, they could be typing in your web address and so on. But in any case, there’s definitely a very active and interested online community. I have no doubt that if you profiled a company or product here, it would get more resulting traffic than a mention in the Wall Street Journal. I suspect this is because, as you’ve mentioned, your readership is much more active and invested.
Interesting how things change isn’t it?
Btw, I’ve also noticed that even smaller blogs often have better sales conversion ratios than traditional media. Like I said earlier, although you can’t specifically measure it, we definitely didn’t see the spikes we expected. We’ve actually seen bigger spikes from mentions in medium profile blogs.
And don’t get me started on the long tail of a blog post. An article written a year ago can still be searched and read. Although it can happen with traditional media, it’s much less frequent.
But remember, that doesn’t mean you can rule out traditional media. A national post is great for credibility. Especially if you can leverage it ;) And it still does generate traffic.
Michael
on 27 Oct 08I disagree because you are comparing untargeted traditional media to targeted new media. You need to compare targeted to targeted and untargeted to untargeted. There are syndicated columns and trade journals just as focused as Merlin Mann. Time is like, as was said, Oprah.com.
Andrew Brown
on 27 Oct 08I thinkHubspot had a good article with a video by David Scott about how outbound marketing isn’t as effective anymore. I know we’ve been hearing Gary V screaming about this stuff for a while about the apocalypse of old marketing techniques.
Brandon Ferguson
on 28 Oct 08Haha, touche.
Travis Butler
on 28 Oct 08Context is everything. Of course a tech-oriented website/service is going to get a more focused response from a tech-oriented blog post than a general-audience traditional media outlet. As someone else noted, targeting is huge. (Though to be fair, a lot of the targeted traditional publications have been going partly or exclusively online, especially ones like the computer industry weeklies, for reasons of timeliness.)
However, jumping from that to the conclusion of ‘the mainstream media is losing relevance’ is, at best, reasoning from incomplete data. Call me a luddite if you like, but I prefer old-fashioned journalistic standards of integrity and neutrality to the axe-to-grind, chip-on-the-shoulder attitude of way, way too many bloggers out there.
Also, just from a practical POV… while using hit counts to measure the impact of an article/post on a technical issue may make sense, it’s hardly a good way to judge non-technical issues where the website isn’t the heart of the matter. Would you really try to predict election results just by measuring the hits on the candidates’ websites?
Ed Hayashi
on 28 Oct 08Check out the seats. Looks like someone ripped off some seats from Fenway Park.
Cat
on 28 Oct 08I agree, it’s hard to compare untargeted traditional media and targeted new media, but you also have to take into account that a blog post about anything will generate an audience (if it’s interesting). Really that means that most of new media is indirectly “targeted” as there are people of all backgrounds searching, finding and sharing it.
bsoudi
on 28 Oct 08It is true that media is moving from traditional to the Internet.
But that doesn’t work for every product. Like others have said, it depends on your product and your target consumer. It’s not hard to believe that 37signals got more hits for a tweet from Kevin Rose than Wired—that’s the main sandbox you play in!
How would that help you sell, say soap? Or snowmobiles [sold to 35-54, more rural folks]? Heck, there really aren’t any snowmobile blogs out there yet!
Second, I suppose the “lower barrier” is a good thing for companies, but is it a good thing for consumers? Just because anyone can blog, does that mean they should? Or are good at it?
At least traditional media make an effort to be unbiased and credible. One previous poster’s blog is little more than marketing material from manufacturers with a sentence or two “review.” And if you’re a “regular guy” getting free samples from manufacturers, are you really going to trash a bad product? Are you going to review only free samples you get? I’ll stick to old, established media and experts for that stuff, thanks.
Finally, the Obama campaign note is interesting, because as Jonathan Alter puts in his Newsweek column this week, the election will most likely be decided by “Low Information Voters.” They don’t read anything, do any research—they certainly aren’t reading Politico, FactCheck.org, etc. New media might be good for getting the base out to vote, but the campaigns are still spending tens of millions of dollars on good ol’ direct mail, TV ads and face-to-face [rallies, town halls].
Social Media Marketing Blog
on 29 Oct 08I 110 % agree and the proven example of this is twitter …
Anonymous Coward
on 31 Oct 08Theres nothing more tiresome than reading bloggers circle jerk over how important blogging and their opinions are.
Get over yourself, in the real world the lot of you are nobodies
This discussion is closed.