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| Forums September 26, 2007 [New York Times]
Strategies to Succeed OnlineBy DAVID STROM
PUTTING a small business online used to be a relatively simple matter: buy the domain names that matched your company’s identity, set up a Web server and send out a press release and a few e-mail messages. No more. These days, a Web site may not even be the best place to start promoting your products or services. Instead, you can consider setting up a blog, participating in social-networking communities like Facebook and creating a storefront in virtual worlds like Second Life to get the buzz going. “We launched our company in May 2006 with a blog, not a Web site,” said Jody DeVere, the president of AskPatty.com, an advice site that helps women find car showrooms and repair shops that are friendly to them. “Our blog has been the driving force of our branding effort and become the way we find our readers and our customers.” Earlier this year, AskPatty created a virtual coffee shop at the online community site Second Life, where people can swap tips and stories. That move turned out to be a gold mine for the company. “The women in Second Life are the ultimate power Internet users, and are very comfortable doing business online,” Ms. DeVere said. “Plus, it is a very cost-effective way to reach lots of people.” The good news is that there are many sites that act as hosts for individual and corporate blogs at no cost. The three largest and most popular are WordPress, Google’s Blogger.com and Six Apart’s Typepad.com. Any of these services is fine for most small businesses’ needs, said John Patrick, a former I.B.M. vice president for Internet technology, who is a consultant and a member of several Internet companies’ boards. The important thing is to develop a lively and attractive Web presence, Mr. Patrick said, and to update it often. “You want to have an active and ongoing online discussion with your customers and suppliers,” he said. Pick topics that can be informative, and don’t shy away from controversy, but address it head-on, he continued, adding, “You want to give customers a recommended course of action and make them feel like they have a direct channel to your company.” An active blog helps draw visitors to a corporate Web site and can improve a company’s search rankings, said Tristan Louis, an Internet consultant who is a blogger himself and an expert on Web technology. “Blogging isn’t just about promoting you or your business,” he said. Instead, he recommended that corporate blogs focus on a niche or industry segment and become an authority by publishing advice and commentary on it. Once the blog is up and running, its reach can be extended by using so-called syndication tools — provided by the blogging sites — that generate “feeds,” to which customers can subscribe. Feeds are notifications that tell you when new content has been added, like comments and posts. Given the work involved, many businesses now have staff members whose responsibilities include maintaining Internet activities like blogs and online storefronts. “The old ways of hiring a public relations firm and putting out press releases just don’t cut it anymore,” Mr. Patrick said. “Today’s businesses have to be more hands-on, grass roots, interactive and maintain this flow of continuous communications.” Besides having a person responsible for online communities and communications, businesses must strive to develop a more conversational approach that includes everyone from the chief executive to the mailroom clerk. More than merely participating in social networks like Facebook and MySpace, that means answering e-mail, too. In addition, corporations should make use of e-mail distribution lists (also called Listservs or groups) to stay in touch regularly with their customers, employees and suppliers. Running such lists used to require software that was sophisticated, expensive and quirky. Now there are popular services sponsored by Yahoo (groups.yahoo.com), Microsoft (groups.msn.com) and Google (google.com/groups) that offer free distribution-list programs. What a company should not be doing is spending lots of money on dot-com speculators, buying specialized software or even paying for the services of Web developers. As Ms. DeVere said: “A new business doesn’t have the money to build a brand and pay for advertising. The biggest investment is your time, and these tools require a lot of that, but they can really pay off.”
September 27, 2007 [New York Times] Advertising A NONPROFIT organization that produces some of the most familiar public service advertising is joining its profit-making counterparts in radically rethinking its media choices, reflecting substantial changes in how its intended audiences consume media. The organization, Partnership for a Drug-Free America, is making a major commitment to reaching the public, particularly parents, through the Internet while reducing the amount of advertising it runs on traditional television outlets like broadcast networks. The shift is illustrated by initiatives like Time to Talk, which the organization intends as a resource for parents seeking to discuss drug and alcohol use with their children. The focus of Time to Talk is a Web site (timetotalk.org), rather than a spate of glossy television commercials. In introducing Time to Talk last month, the Partnership teamed up with Yahoo, not a conventional media company, for elements of the campaign like an online forum. That has taken the form of the Time to Talk Yahoo Group (groups.yahoo.com/group/timetotalk) and two-way communication between parents through the Yahoo Answers service, which according to data from Yahoo draws about 21 million users a month in the United States. Indeed, the digital media, which until now have carried few campaigns from the Partnership, are expected to account for 10 percent of all its ads this year and as much as 31 percent by 2010. In addition to using the Internet, the Partnership is experimenting with ads on cellphones and is even looking into opportunities in the new media, like ads in video games. • "The risk is not being useful to this generation of kids and parents," said Steve Pasierb, president and chief executive at the Partnership in New York. "Even if we’re on the 6 o’clock news with the greatest of spots," he added, "we’ve missed the target." About five years ago, Mr. Pasierb said, the leadership of the organization began to realize that "if we’re still doing in 2012 what we’re doing now, then we won’t deserve to be around because we won’t be relevant to our consumers."One eye-opener was the growing traffic on the Partnership’s primary Web site, drugfree.org, which attracts about a million visitors each month. Refocusing on new media was made easier by the work of Partnership board members like Sydney Hunsdale, senior vice president for worldwide operations at the Avenue A/Razorfish division of aQuantive, now part of Microsoft. Avenue A/Razorfish is handling media planning and placement for the Partnership on a pro bono basis. "Parents need resources that you just can’t give them in 30 seconds," Ms. Hunsdale said. "And because a lot of parents don’t want to admit to anyone their child is having trouble with drugs, the more private nature of the digital media makes a huge difference." Research that elicited information from parents about their changing media habits was important in the development of the Time to Talk campaign. "We follow the consumers," said Nick Moore, chief creative officer at Wunderman in New York, part of the Young & Rubicam Brands unit of the WPP Group. "If they want to be on a mobile phone, that’s fine with us." "The Partnership has a heritage in broadcast advertising," he added, "but they understand it’s a new world, all about dialogue, and the monologue approach is no longer enough." Television remains a significant part of the media mix for the Partnership, albeit with a growing emphasis on newer forms like video-on-demand services offered by cable systems on digital channels. For instance, Comcast is running video shorts for the Partnership on the On Demand channels of its local cable systems. The digital effort is part of a three-year, $55 million commitment that Comcast made to the Partnership in June, which is getting under way with the Time to Talk campaign. Comcast is one of three corporate sponsors of Time to Talk, along with King Pharmaceuticals and Wyeth Consumer Healthcare. "The lessons learned from the past show that what works is a grass-roots effort," said John LaLota, a senior vice president at King in Bridgewater, N.J., "and Time to Talk is focused on enhancing parents’ knowledge." "We’re all busy, working crazy hours, and families are not all eating at the same time," he added. "You’ve got to sit down and think about what it means to communicate with kids today, and then take time to talk to them about the risks of abuse." • The Partnership, which was founded in 1986, gets about $175 million worth of donated time and space each year from media companies. When more of its ads were in the form of TV commercials, which typically cost more than ads in the new media, the organization received donations of time and space worth about $365 million each year. "Our spend is down, but our effective reach is up," Mr. Pasierb said, adding, "I would rather be able to reach 100,000 parents well, the way they want to be reached, than reach 10 million with a generic message." "We had a five-hour board meeting recently," Mr. Pasierb said, during which "we spent four hours talking about online and digital media." "And we looked at one TV spot," he added.
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