I Love You Earl, but Engagement is an Activity, not a Statistic

Newspapers are places where marketing and branding are not only given little value, they are often viewed with suspicion. I remember being told not to call the paper a “product” in front of people from the newsroom.  Unless it’s their face on a billboard or bus somewhere, many journalists believe that they are above marketing (though who can deny that a headline isn’t the same thing as a tagline).

As such, it is nearly impossible for a marketer to discuss the need for brand attributes, brand positioning and brand statements at a newspaper.  And 10 years ago, as a lowly newspaper marketer, I was growing increasingly frustrated with my inability to communicate the importance of doing so.

Then I came a across a speech given by INMA CEO Earl J. Wilkinson in which he stated that newspapers reflect and affect the communities they serve. 

I fell in love. 

No one speaks and writes more poetically and passionately about the power of newspapers than Earl.  Though as much as I loved the notion of newspapers reflecting and affecting the communities they served, I felt that notion was incomplete. 

Newspapers also connect the communities they serve. 

At one time, these connections abounded: politicians and voters, cops and witnesses, performers and audiences, buyers and sellers, landlords and renters, the unfortunate and the generous, the bereaved and the comforting.

The newspaper’s ability to reflect, affect and connect a city and the people who live there became my marketing mantra.  It was our purpose, our strength and our unique selling proposition.  I spoke of it whenever I could, and across the organization people got it.  It had resonance, clarity and authenticity.

Ten years later, we don’t speak of connection so much as we speak of engagement.  But really, they’re the same thing.

And this week, Earl posted a piece on his blog lamenting the newspaper industry’s current inability to measure engagement.  He focused on how old media metrics don’t apply online:

Metrics, metrics everywhere.  We’re drowning in data.  Research budgets have been cut, so there aren’t enough smart people around to make sense of it all.  Our instinct is that we’re reaching more people than ever before.  Yet instead of brand loyalty, we’re fighting for every second of attention with more and more granular pieces of content with sensationalized headlines which turn out to be our biggest marketing weapon (what did “sex” and “headless chickens” have to do with last night’s city council meeting?).

All we want to do is make a difference.  Yet we can’t sleep at night because we have no idea what level of engagement we have with an audience we can’t quantify or weave together in an adequate enough storyline to monetize.

Sigh.

While I’m thrilled that Earl agrees with me about headlines being taglines, I must admit that I’m shocked that a piece about digital engagement didn’t have a single reference to social media.

Engagement is not a thing to be measured, it is a thing to be practiced (well yes, and then measured – but first practiced).

Earl, I hope I can help you the way you helped me all those years ago.   This is all you need to know:

Old marketing is archery, new marketing is ping-pong.

(Though I would very much like to, I can’t take credit for this simple yet brilliant observation.  I found it on SlideShare in a social media presentation by Jay Baer.)

As I wrote last month, a failure to embrace community will become a leading cause of death for newspapers.  The potential for meaningful audience engagement has never been greater than it is right now.  But I’m afraid that convincing newspaper execs that ping-pong is necessary is even more difficult than teaching them about branding.

Here’s hoping Earl buys-in and becomes a social media evangelizer.

Then we can all sleep better.

Comments

[Shafqat]

Great post, as always. I agree with your basic premise that engagement is an (ongoing) activity, and the ping-pong analogy is great. But my fear is that a lot of newspaper execs will just "do social media" for social media's sake. Because everyone else is doing it. Because smart people like Judy Sims are telling them to do it.

Readers are smart and can see through any half-hearted attempt at social media. Just like entrepreneurs know you can't sprinkle virality onto your product, I think publishers need to understand that you can just sprinkle social media into your news(paper/site). It needs to be embraced from the bottom up, baked into the product, and part of the new news process. It can't just be a new twitter account because "we should have a twitter."

For an example of a news site with social media deeply baked into the product (and news gathering process), look no further than TBD.com.

[Judy Sims]

Thanks Shafqat, you make a really good point. I'm afraid far too many publishers are doing exactly what you say they shouldn't.

[Earl J. Wilkinson]

To my eye, engagement is transactional -- part of the New Chatter that if you can’t quantify and make sense of it then it won’t have traction when it comes time to package-and-sell or get buy-in from senior management.

As for social media, I didn’t mean for the post to be all-encompassing. My own experiences tended to parallel what newsmedia executives are telling me, so I wrote from the heart based on something unique to me.

I find social media to be a lot like marketing in the eyes of publishers. We do a bad job of explaining it and its return on investment, so it’s perpetually up for review when senior management of another generation look over the P&Ls.

I’d throw social media metrics into what I wrote about -- another important data point that hasn’t been adequately incorporated into the storyline of total audience for internal and external clients.

Thanks for the love. :-)

[Willson Trusts]

Thanks for the post. I think you have ellucidated, with a certain passion, the reason newspapers are dying a [not so]slow death. The Times of London is having fun with its paywall. Good luck to them.