Four years ago, I left journalism to venture into online marketing. Two years ago, I decided I still needed to be a journalist (though I still carry on with the marketing bit. It’s where the money is.) Scuzzy and doomed though it is “the craft” does not make me as uneasy as marketing. Bill Hicks explains why:
The Scotsman is dying. So is The Herald. Here are some notes towards a plan to save them – and all newspapers. I’d like to see a consortium to put this into practice and save Scotland’s native, quality, national press for the nation. This isn’t born out of delusion but rather a few discussions I’ve had with like-minded senior journalists who believe that the money can be raised and that this is last chance to save these two titles.
From the blog of my company, w00tonomy:
We are delighted to announce that, in conjunction with our consortium partners The Union and Conscia, that w00tonomy has been selected for the Scottish Government’s digital marketing services framework.
This is a major achievement for a young agency and we are delighted. Along with our consortium partners, we look forward to providing the Scottish Government and other bodies using the roster with our services:
Turbocharge content to optimise appeal to online customers.
Creating messages that interest customers rather than messages they ignore.
We make online spend work harder. We deliver higher returns on online investment through the use of targeted, quality content to build a lasting relationship with your target audience.
If you’d like to know more, please contact us.
All hail the New Media Company Generator – a worthy successor to the almost prophetic Web Economy Bullshit Generator. (I know companies that really do “exploit viral markets” and “scale robust communities”.)
The wickedly observed company generator came up with ThirstyBadger, which on the while I like better than w00tonomy.
I have made a return to newspapers of sorts. My agency, w00tonomy, has formed an alliance with Palmer Watson, one of the world’s leading newspaper design agencies.
Our expertise in online content will help them move into the field of newspaper websites while their knowledge of how design can maximise the appeal of words and pictures adds to our offering to our clients.
Click to continue reading “Back to newspapers … kinda”
This piece originally appeared in w00tonomy’s Content Marketing Watch column.
Hotfoot from ScotWeb2 – a get-together of those with an interest in the public sector and the internet. Organised by Alex Stobart, a recovering civil servant,
The highlights, apart from my workshop on making the most of content, were talks by James Munro of PatientOpinon and Simon Dickson of Puffbox.
Click to continue reading “ScotWeb2 on the net and the public sector”
Did an interview with Chris Dempsey of Registers of Scotland for my agency. Chris worked for the Scottish Government, Executive and Office for many, many years and has some interesting points about the state of marketing north of the Border.
At my agency w00tonomy, we’re very excited by the upcoming ScotWeb2 unconference on Hallowe’en at Edinburgh University for “those interested in learning about Web 2 from practitioners, government and business users”.
It is “an informal, bar camp style event allowing participants to listen, network and share experiences with those who have designed and are managing Web 2 services. Speakers and workshop leaders from Health, Business, Web design, Colleges and Universities, Social Enterprises, Social Media, Journalism, Government and Civic Society”.
The event is being organised by Alex Stobbart of the Scottish Government (née Executive). Alex is an evangelist for the opportunities offered by the web. He is a giant floating brain who has recruited a coven of like-minded individuals within the SG who meet at the dead of night in cowled hoods, exchanging arcane passwords and sharing forbidden knowledge about tags, tweetsand user content…
Actually I made that bit up – I got carried away with the fact the event is on samhainn. But Alex is an evangelist and does lead a high-powered group of colleagues who are keen to embrace the openness that the new web offers. Having worked closely on Scottish Government projects, we at w00tonomy have met many civil servants who “get it” and cheer Alex’s efforts to mobilise them.
However, ScotWeb2 is a separate project for Alex and BT are backing it. Tickets are available from Eventbrite.
The speakers include Simon Dickson: an e-government consultant and “Whitehall’s first full-time website specialist back in 1995″; Iain Henderson from personal data protector MyDex; Ross Ferguson from Dog Digital; and w00tonomy’s endlessly self-promoting Stewart Kirkpatrick, who will talk about how to optimise content to get messages across.
Over at the site of my new business, we’ve been having fun with the seven deadly sins. Nothing sordid, mind, all very tasteful. We’ve been listing the various downfalls we’ve seen befall sites and matching them up against the classical vices. (Of course, being a business, we then offer ourselves as the solution.) It’s part of our radical strategy of making clients’ content interesting.
For eight years I plied my trade as an online journalist. My mission, should I have no choice but to accept it, was to attract readers to pages where adverts were served. For every 1,000 page impression a piece of content received we could expect something like £10 (plus any sponsorship for the relevant section).
That’s a lot of work to get a lot of traffic for not much cash. That’s a key problem for commercial publishers online. Another key problem is the way that online has moved in the past two years or so.
Thanks to the phenomenon known as Web 2.0, the focus has shifted to individual items of content not to where they are displayed. Blogs, RSS feeds, widgets, wikis, social network and umpteen other phenomena take content out of its context and share, manipulate and distribute it in more ways than seem possible. If the content is interesting enough, that is.
This presents a bijout problemette for commercial content producers. While it’s great to have lots of people reading their stories or watching their videos it’s hard to generate revenue unless you can drag those users under an advertising banner or beside a sponsor’s logo. This mission is not impossible but it is damn hard.
But this is all great news if your aim is not to make money from attracting people but simply getting a message to them. And this is where the public sector wins big, especially when it comes to delivering public service messages.
Online is now about distribution and content. If you can embed your message in interesting content then the natural flow of the web will take it to the people for you.
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My tweets- calgacus: Useful Scots word: peerie http://t.co/payqnk3q #history #scotland
- calgacus: Good coach, poor selector – Robinson lives up to that harsh tag again http://t.co/NpfojEnK #rugby #scotland
- calgacus: Up for grabs: six possible recipients of Goodwin’s cast-off knighthood http://t.co/qhTCFfGt #ukpolitics #rbs
