From DM news, via MarketingVox: Internet may be a threat to local newspapers - while not a shock to anyone that has used craigslist, digg, Citysearch, or Google News before, the outlook is probably gets even worse as media evolves. I mean this not just from the shift of news consumption from dedicated news sites to news aggregators, but also from the growing incorporation of news feeds into social media platforms. With the recent hype around Google Reader on Facebook as an example, more and more users will consume their news in areas where the editorial board is composed of your peers. What’s more, these platforms have much greater resources to develop new ways of consuming raw content and much higher reach to make it worthwhile. Once integrated into mobile (which is already happening, albeit slowly), the relevance and utility of a local newspaper will slip even further. Of note is the fact that national newspapers actually increased online traffic over the course of the study cited in the article. Areas such as international news and government access are ones that it will be difficult/impossible for bloggers and citizen journalist to replace, and the larger papers will continue to grow their value based on that. What brings this back to marketing, however, is that the decline in readership on- and offline is far outpacing local marketers adjusting their media plans, leaving a gap that no new platform is completely prepared to fill.

Wired has a great article on how the open nature of Google Maps is changing how we interact with our surroundings. What really struck me as interesting is the potential of KML, which allows users to mash-up maps with any data they want and openly share it. Notably, Google is indexing all of the KML files they can find, whether or not it is specific to their own product. So what does this mean for marketers? Google Maps (and for that matter Live Local from Microsoft) will be integrated more and more into mobile, as evidenced by the iPhone’s deep integration of the service, and “third screen” marketing will become a much more effective and necessary part of the media arsenal. Will I drive an extra mile off the highway to go to a well reviewed local diner, versus a fast food chain at a rest stop? Definitely. Would I plan a vacation itinerary around other user reviews that I find via an online map, versus brochures I pick up, or a paid travel site listing? Absolutely. The talk about online local advertising is mostly focused on the online extensions of local media, not the local extensions of global portals, but I think that this will shift in the near-to-mid term. And again, what will drive the expansion, plus make local search (and by proxy, mobile search) much more effective is user tagging. Instead of a product page, it’s a businesses sticky on a map, and letting your users know how you want to be described (not that they’ll always listen) is a large part of taking advantage of this new platform. Whether I’m a car dealership that is betting that my location and advertising will carry the day, a casual dining restaurant chain that wants a new, better way to connect with my customers, or even a global CPG that wants to communicate with a customer base that is on a cell versus a laptop, the geoweb is worth exploring.

Digg’s popularity is not news, in fact, many mainstream news sites, like the Washington Post have embraced social news services for some time, based on the fact that a story on the front page of digg can drive tens of thousands of extra visitors in a 24 hour period. What I find fascinating, however, is that marketers have failed, AFAIK, to incorporate social news services on their own sites. The investment to incorporate such functionality on a product page is minimal, and the return can be significant. It also has SEO benefits, and can create a long term presence within social networks for accurate product information. Unlike news organizations, which have to maintain objectivity, companies are also free to suggest tags to shoppers who want to share their finds with others, and while screening out negative tags is impossible, the vast majority of shoppers who have come to a page will follow a recommendation versus creating their own. As we see more and more search engines begin to incorporate user tagging into their rankings, it is likely that experience integrating services such as digg now will potentially give a significant edge to marketers in the not-so-distant future.

Earlier this week, TNS released the latest media spending numbers broken out by platform. While most of the attention has focused on the continued decline in TV, radio, and print spending, and the 16.7% increase in online (not even including paid search, which is larger), something that struck me are the other gainers. Magazines (4.4%) and outdoor (2.4%) were the only platforms (besides Spanish media, which is moy cayente right now) to show an overall increase in spending. Two things that connect the two- they are non-interruptible (unless you tear the ads out of your People , but that is probably extreme), and their ability to be effectively tracked is very limited, especially compared to online. I’ll give magazines a pass for right now, as I get that there are advantages to editorial adjacency, it is easy to follow an ad online, and there are still times when consumers, even me, would rather read a magazine than my laptop. But outdoor? Even less trackable, and no ability to connect for further information, as most of the time, it is encountered in a car. That said, how many times have you seen a pedestrian stop, take out a notepad or their phone, and write down a URL or phone # on a billboard? I can kind of see how it would benefit local retailers, but I am mystified as to what the real gains a national marketer sees by placing an ad by a tunnel entrance. I see many of the same problems with radio, but investment fell 2.9%, continuing a long downward trend. There must be a concentration of amazing salespeople in this space, because it has managed to avoid the cold, hard stare of ROI that has eroded other media.

Funny or Die, a Will Ferrell-fronted comedy video site, has received plenty of coverage around its launch, more around his involvement and their intro clip, “The Landlord” than around the user-contributed content, which has been more tepid. That said, there is an onslaught of theme-based video-sharing launches, based around humor, non-profits, tech, etc., which brings up a familiar scenario- What if the audience that YouTube has aggregated fragments right as marketers finally figure it out? The struggles that agencies are going through trying to adapt creative to the online video platform will only be compounded when assets will have to be adapted to different formats, channels, tagging systems, and communities in addition to figuring out appropriate length. Clearly many of the start-ups around today will not be around to witness this additional shift, but as marketers focus on the “what?” in a message, they should also be anticipating a much more complicated answer to the “where?”. Oh, and the same thing is happening to social networks as well, but I’ll save that for another post.

Wired Magazine’s Jargon Watch picked up on our very own Online Analysts as an upcoming term, which is fitting as many of them are, in fact, trend setters. While Social Network Fatigue can be a problem in the position, it’s nothing that Slow Travel can’t fix, especially when it’s to meet an Ecosexual. I have now used all of the Jargon Watch terms in a sentence, which is oddly fulfilling.

King Kaufman over at Salon.com has an interesting take on our Super Bowl report, along with pretty much everyone else’s that proclaimed Salesgenie.com’s spot to be the worst received by viewers. The premise is that even though we all proclaimed the ad to be disliked by the vast majority of people (by our measure, a whopping 88%), the ad was still a success, because Salesgenie.com met their lead targets. Now put aside for a minute that their goal of 700 leads out of a viewing audience of over a hundred million makes this one of the most disproportionate direct efforts with one of the lowest conversion rates in the history of marketing (their claimed response of 10,000 doesn’t improve it much). Also take away the long-term damage negative brand perception can have to a bottom line.

What needs to be clarified is what everyone was measuring- we, and everyone else, looked at how the average viewer perceived the ad, and in this case, everyone agreed that fans hated the spot. We made no assumptions about how each ad would affect a company’s bottom line or whether it was a smart use of the marketing budget. The experts were the fans, and another interesting development will be how many of those fans react well to the cheesy guy in a Corvette who tells them he found them via Salesgenie lead.