Posts Tagged ‘new paradigm’

8
Jun

Paid Content: New Paradigm Under Construction?

   Posted by: Michael Carney    in newspapers, paid content

Latest development on the paid content front, as news sites around the world consider locking away their content behind paywalls: BBC News (the website) is planning to flag (but not exclude) links that go to paid content.

Here’s the official word from BBC News web editor Steve Herman:

“As the [UK] Times moves into online subscription and others consider the options … there is likely to be a changing landscape with some sites and stories behind paywalls, some not, and some which are in between – a certain number of visits or part of an article free, all depending on the user’s individual circumstances.

“Some said they’d like us also to flag links which require subscription if you follow them.  That is broadly the direction we are going in. We will, where practical, aim to tell you if the link is going to a subscription site. Our automated Newstracker module, for example, should be able to do this and already signals when registration is required.”

What’s of particular interest is that the Beeb is actually planning to link to paid content with a caveat, rather than simply ignoring stories that aren’t freely available.

In the past, the few paid content providers that have existed out there (in particular, the Wall Street Journal) have often been excluded from news aggregators and search engines such as Google because their content hasn’t been readily accessible.

If this new BBC News policy becomes a new standard for online linking, the whole dynamic of paid content will become much more viable: instead of losing public awareness by switching to paid content, news sites will remain linkable (and thus able to benefit from passing mention in other articles) as well as searchable.

What, we wonder, will Google do?

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21
Apr

Have You Talked About A Ford Lately?

   Posted by: Michael Carney    in automotive, social media

“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

French Algerian author/philospher Albert Camus had a way with words — and coined a phrase that still resonates today, half a century after his death.

Jim Farley, group VP-global marketing at Ford Motor Co., echoed that sentiment last week when he told attendees at Advertising Age’s 2010 Digital Conference that the recession forced companies to find innovative ways to reach out to consumers, giving a big boost to digital and social marketing. “If the economy hadn’t dropped the way it did, we would have been on auto pilot and not experimented the way we did.”

The Ford marketing chief said the new paradigm that media owners and clients have to get used to involves spending a lot more money in post-launch with new partners. “Yes, we still need traditional media partners and integration will become more and more important,” Mr. Farley said. “But then post-launch we can’t just go away. We have to allocate [social and digital] resources because these different resources change the content and the dialogue of the product after the launch. It’s much more manageable, and it impacts how we build the product.”

Turning social may have been an unintended consequence of the recession for Ford and other marketers but it was also a sign of the times for other reasons — most especially, as consumers worldwide look to their peers for information about products and services they’re considering. The old ‘Interruption Marketing’ paradigm isn’t dead — it was never that healthy to begin with, but it was the only hammer in our toolbox — but it’s becoming less and less effective.

Digital and Social Media aren’t the new “one size fits all” solution, but they’re certainly turning out to be a useful new tool for marketers.

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