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Are we finally in the “Age of Engagement”?

posted by Tatum on July 20, 2009 – 5:15 pm

Back in 2005, I saw a presentation about engagement marketing that said it was the end of pure tonnage in impressions and clicks for internet advertising. The crux of the argument was that innovations in user behavior and data presentation due to Web 2.0 technologies (read: AJAX) would kick the old click model to the side. These new tools let us build sites that broke the connection between pageviews and user satisfaction. With pageviews going down and time spent going up, it seemed obvious that simple clicks were the metric of the first era of internet marketing. Since then, there has been a lot of talk about how to measure user engagement in marketing.  I remember reading this post over a year ago, and thinking that successful engagement marketing metrics were just around the corner. However, most of our sales conversations still revolve around impressions and clicks – even though we live in an inventory glut.

Today I read Charlene Li and Ben Elowitz’s study, ”The Most Engaged Brands On The Web“. In the study (see below), they take a stab at identifying some engagement marketing success stories. Not surprisingly, many of the companies that are cited as successful engagement marketers online are already great global marketers (for example Starbucks, Toyota). They also identify a correlation between the companies that successfully engage customers online and positive financial performance. It’s no revelation that companies that market well do well financially, but the report does a great job of telling the back stories on some of the success stories, and pointing to practices that seemingly work well. In addition, they have built an engagement database site where companies can “evangelize” their social media efforts and consumers can provide feedback. Its an interesting way to bridge the two groups and it will be interesting to see how it all works out. Sharing best practices about socially connected corporate communication sites efforts (or extensions thereof like Twitter, Facebook et al) are great tools to help brand marketers deal with their customers online.

Their effort got me thinking that it would be great to see the same level of openness on the original content (editorial) side of consumer marketing. I’d love to see a similar effort where publishers, marketers and advertising agencies could share their successes in “engagement publishing”. Engagement publishing is just a further extension of the brand marketer’s connection to its customers through its publishing partners; a.k.a. the classic “beyond the banner” ad product.  It would be great to have a venue to share stories between agencies and publishers who have worked together with brand marketers to create something valuable beyond pure impression value, and compare notes on what is working in this market as it is coming of age. And as the study points out, there are lots of companies that are still testing the waters in engagement (or worse, struggling with a fragmented presence) that could use a little help from the agencies and publishers who are creating new and innovative products in this area. The more we share on the publishing and advertising side of the business, the steeper the learning curve toward engagement practices that can work and be effectively sold and measured- and the faster we can get off this dying click model.


ENGAGEMENTdb: Most Engaged Brands On Social Media –

The Iconoclastic Business Problem

posted by Tatum on April 21, 2009 – 9:33 pm

If youre different, you need a t-shirt to proclaim it.

Iconoclastic t-shirts are for sale at the Onion. This insider insider joke will make your head explode.

I loved reading Sarah Lacy’s post at Techcrunch, Bloggers: Let’s Band Together and Stop the Hype Cycle,  last Sunday.  Lacy touches on so many rich parts of our industry, that I find it not only a definitive Techcrunch post but a great insight piece into a common media challenge. Specifically, how does one retain brand cache in the face of mainstream success. What is interesting to me is that it is not only Twitter’s success issues that are on display here. Let me explain.

In the piece, Lacy implores Bloggers to “unite” against the hype cycle that eats its young before their first hint of mainstream exposure. She also does a nice job of placing the recent “Twitter jumps the Shark post-Oprah” conversation in context through the telling of the Marc Andressen, Google and now Facebook development arches, while exploring the vicious cycles of birth to popularity.

There are number of hurdles facing her plea though. The first, as Mark Penn points out in his WSJ piece today,  “America’s Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire“, there are a lot of freakin’ bloggers now. According to Penn’s estimates there are 452,000 folks identifying their profession as blogger now. Extract out the mommy, food, etc bloggers, and you will still have quite a few folks solely focused on technology blogging -as technology is still one of the most popular subjects online. Having had a few Techcrunch pieces in the last year, it is amazing how dense TC’s echo frequency is out there. I think we saw 20 links where the article was just re-posted in its entirety, and almost twice as many half-hearted rewrites on smaller blogs. Based on this last bit of information however, you could make a case that their influence is strong enough that they actually could set tone. Because essentially, they often start the cycle.

The second hurdle, also addressed in Penn’s article, is that the blogger compensation model is predicated on volume and the sensationalist nature of each piece of content. If you’re going to maximize revenue, and if every writer is now a businessman, you’re more than willing to let a fact go unchecked or a vicious rumor fly if that is what you have to do to hit the 100,000 viewer monthly goal. Referencing Penn’s math, that’s $6,250 smackeroo’s for said independent blogger. If that’s the gig, and this is how it paid, I would probably say screw the inverted pyramid too.

But I believe there may be a underlying issue that poses a bigger hinderance to Lacy’s call for unity. By nature, both early adopters and verbose bloggers tend to be iconclasts. This initial thought leading audience being “over” their in-the-moment cultural reference is a well-worn modality of mass market consumption. It is almost a rite of passage for both the consumer and producer to out grow each other in the development process.  Community or communication websites also seem to act strikingly similar to music acts in terms of market development. For example, as soon as a band plays a venue larger than 500 people or end up licensing their song in a car commercial they’ve “sold out” and are immediately tore down by the same audience that brought them up. Any respectable “real” music fan wouldn’t dare have their mp3s on their iPod for fear of being outed as a pedestrian listener. Check your local hipster for Vampire Weekend mp3s if in doubt. (They are so Jan 2008 its sick….). For a technology example, I often catch myself questioning any engineering job applicant who sends in their resume from a Hotmail account. In the back of mind, I’m thinking…. hmmm, Hotmail….seriously?

Back to Twitter for a moment: they will easily survive any backlash from any 2007 SXSW adopters who get goobed out that Aunt Donna just followed them on Twitter. As Andrew Anker pointed out a few weeks ago, former golden children rarely die quick deaths. For example check out the graph below. Yeah, Geocities is still BIG. I’m now waiting for a cheeky job applicant who applies through Hotmail and points me to their Geocities page for the resume. 

Twitter finally catching up to Geocities

This is always the dilemma in any business that relies on popular culture to drive growth. I like to call this the Iconoclastic Business Problem. If you can get mind share with these elusive “taste makers”, you can get propelled to the next level of the market easier than building a business through brand and direct marketing. As Gregory Berns points out in his book Iconoclasts, often very successful entrepreneurs, scientists and even country singers (he references the Dixie Chicks) do a great job of establishing themselves early on as they are very adept at capturing early mind share with influencers. They can do this because they understand how to position their product against the establishment naturally.

So back to Techcrunch and Lacy’s post. It’s been interesting to watch Techcrunch’s own development arc as an updated twist to new media brand development. The Techcrunch transformation from enthusiastic backyard BBQ’s of entrepreneurs to “journal of record” for the Silicon Valley internet industry could be looked at as a playbook for upstart to establishment development. Initially dismissed by those who were in the technology media establishment (I was at such an establishment, so I can confidently tell you they were from the business side), they are now going through their own tribulations as they reach mass adoption (See here and here). Over the years it has been interesting to see Mike unabashedly drop a thin rumor or report something that has been ultimately untrue under the guise “hey, we’re just a blog!” while simultaneously tackling the establishment’s value chain. Whether that is challenging the credibility of an established mass media brand, debunking the PR industry’s practices or just being caustic for the sake of it. Techcruch now dictates what’s technology news or not now. Now when they make a post on the “potential possible Twitter acquisition rumor” it’s scrolling across the CNN ticker within minutes. At that point, you’re the establishment in this neck of the woods.

So that’s why I found the post so interesting- Techcrunch is facing their own success transition moment- even as they defend Twitter’s. What’s also interesting is over the last year, Techcrunch has started acquiring some of the best journalism talent in the business. With Lacy and Erick Schonfeld coming on board, Mike and Heather are dropping real world credibility against an already proven ability to develop new talent. They are also growing as our industry is supposed to be imploding, and settling into a real office space (and its inevitable overhead) when we’ve seen more vacancies and empty floors of cubicles than we’ve seen in awhile. As a start up publisher, I find this incredibly encouraging and think there are great lessons to pull from the Techcrunch example.

Tomorrow, a post more specifically tied to the Iconoclast Business Problem and how we are addressing it.

The attention span of our Giant Bomb video audience

posted by Tatum on March 26, 2009 – 5:28 pm

One of the biggest surprises we’ve seen so far in the business is the attention span of our Giant Bomb video audience. Our internal tool, Metrimatics, tells us how many people start a video, make it to the middle and make it to the end. Here’s the graph from the last 30 days:

Giant Bomb Video Usage

So I wasn’t able to get the percentages in the screen grab, but it breaks down like this: 68% of the people who started a video at Giant Bomb finished the video. That might not sound all the impressive until we tell you our average video is over 10 minutes. When we look at these metrics, we start to wonder why we are so worried about dropping in a 15-second ad. Compared to TV, we would still be giving our audience a tremendous amount of value for their entertainment dollar/time.

From a programming perspective, we’ve also been blown away by the desire of our audience to watch episodic content online. For example, we are doing an “Endurance Run” where Jeff and Vinny are playing this PS2 game called Persona 4, which has something like 72 hours of game play in it. So every day, we push 20 minutes of video game play with voice over commentary “Mystery Science 3000″-style. It has turned into one of our most popular, and interactive content features on the site. I’ve embedded the 34th episode below.

Once we saw this data, we immediately re-focused on video content and saw an immediate impact on visits and returns. Our other brands are really stepping up their video as well to similar results. It’s been great to watch.



You Can Do Karate In Your Sweatpants

posted by Tatum on March 25, 2009 – 4:39 am

Karate in your sweatpants

These sweatpants can be bought at Walmart. Beard sold separately.

After yesterday’s article on Techcrunch, we got a couple of questions about how we maintain focus on costs while growing. That’s probably a question that we’ll talk about a lot here on this blog this year, but there is one story that best sums it up. Vinny Caravella, who produces all of the video for Giant Bomb, has a great saying that keeps us in check when entering new projects. The first time I heard him use it was when we were discussing building out our video production architecture. As most of you know, if you want to produce a lot of video quickly at high quality that you will eventually run into some insane (by small company terms) bills quickly. It’s real easy, especially when you come from the big company mentality, to “buy” your way out of the problem. “Let’s just buy that $30,000 bank of HD transcoding servers and be done!” is easily rolled off the lips- until you stop and think for a second and realize, “holy (explicative), that’s $30,000!”. This is where Vinny’s brilliant truism on starting new projects diverted our potential misappropriation of funds.
“You know, you can do karate in your sweatpants. Why don’t we just get started with a few videos, see how it goes, and see if we really need those machines before we buy them.”
Um, yeah. That was so “Getting Real” that it should have been obvious. But it is so hard not to buy the bad ass karate kimino, golf clubs, road bike or laptop when jazzed about doing something new. I have a garage full of kick ass gear that’s never been used and should be showcased on eBay right now. The time vs. money battle is so lopsided to time that money should always be the last resort to problem solving for core features of your business.
We’re still tweaking on the problem, but we’re getting ‘er done without that fancy bank of boxes giving us “real time HD rendering”. That said, we’ve now seen such an uptick in traffic and interest in videos that spending $30k sounds more feasible than it did a few months ago….

It has been a good year for Whiskey

posted by Tatum on March 23, 2009 – 3:26 pm

Like everyone, we share a certain anxiety over what is happening with our economy and how it will impact our businesses, familes and friends. And while some speculate on the end of print publishing and the failure of online advertising, we still find ourselves very enthusiastic over building a publishing business. Having launched three entertainment focused brands last year (Giant Bomb, Comic Vine and Anime Vice), we see a promising future for our brands and other publishers who can grow and flourish under these economic conditions.

A little under two years ago, we launched Whiskey Media to build brands that are high on audience engagement and editorial authority. Early on in the formation of the company in 2007, we made a conscience effort to keep our costs low so that we could afford a reasonable amount of creative and editorial freedom to find our voice and establish our process. So far, we’re happy to say that we are really pleased with the results while looking at the past 30 days of Google Analytics data:

Across the Whiskey Media Network:

  • Absolute Uniques/mo: 2.36M
  • Pageviews/mo: 19M
  • Over 825k moderated wiki submissions
  • 1.4M images submitted
  • Avg 7 page views per user session

Our primary focus has been a basic rethink of the content model, at least as we knew it. Our goal was to develop a publishing platform that is both high on engagement and authoritative content- while at the same time keeping expenses in check. In particular, we wanted the ability to have both editorial and creative freedom and not be in the position where we ever had to do anything un-natural based on a desire for revenue. We found out a couple of things a long the way we would like to share.

There is a big difference between being a blog and a structured wiki.

The graph above is from Giant Bomb’s Google Analytics. We launched Giant Bomb as a blog on March 6th and it was moderately successful doing around 15k visitors a day 20k pages a day. Now we are doing 75k visits and 250k pageviews, and you can see the big difference in terms of both user growth and pageviews after we relaunched it on the Whiskey Media structured wiki platform. We spent the time between March and July doing two significant things for the company. First, we moved to the Django framework from the homegrown PHP framework we were using with Comicvine at the time. Second, we spent a significant amount of time thinking through the data model so that the database could grow naturally through user contribution, but in a way that made enjoyable and useful to browse.
You never get it right the first time
Again, having a background building multiple content brands over and over again, we were sensitive to launching sites that could be easily maintained . We also realized immediately after launching a new site, that we had learned new ways to improve the functionality and streamline maintenance if we went back in and refined the code. So we waited a few weeks, watched what was happening with usage. Then we realized we needed better tools than Analytics to monitor usage specific to our platform and business needs.  Specifically we were concerned about”ease of contribution”. We built a set of tools to monitor engagement for each site in our network we call “Metrimatics”. Metrics such as “friending”, video completion, wiki moderation and trivia contribution are examples of engagement we monitor daily and use as a way to measure how well our publishing platform and content is resonating with each brand’s audience. Here’s a screenshot of what this tool looks like:
Some features we thought were going to be killer, turned out to be filler. So we axed them, and did boring things like move the images to Cloudfront and improve the image uploader as we saw users struggle with upload. Immediately we saw better results across all the sites with each incremental tweak, and we’ve been more cautious about adding new features and focusing on the core user experience of sharing knowledge with their community. In short, giving the people what they want.
You got to give what you get
As we showed above, there has been a tremendous amount of data contributed to all of our sites over the year. The data is so deep and rich, we struggle with not building more and more ways to view and consume the data. So we quit fighting it and we recently opened up the data to the public through our Whiskey API. We are already seeing some amazing Facebook and iPhone apps, as well as new websites that look promising. We’re looking forward to seeing even more cool products derived from our communities work going forward.
Looking forward
While we have the ability to rollout sites the scale of Giantbomb every couple of weeks (like we did with Animevice), we have decided against launching rapidly. Instead, we’re focusing on areas where we have the most interest and think we can offer something unique. Expect to see some new products this year in other entertainment verticals, specifically areas where our communities already have shown interest. And then there is the next big challenge….making money. We have a plan to make money in the context of the value we create, and it will not come solely from advertising support. We believe ads still work- as long as they are in context and add to the content value. More on that soon.
In all, it’s been a great year. Thanks to all of you for the support.

Welcome to Whiskey Media, Makers of Fine Websites

posted by Shelby on June 9, 2008 – 2:04 pm

To start, we all love web publishing. All of us having been doing this for a while, and find no less thrill today in launching a new site than we did years ago. If anything the medium has gotten significantly more exciting and powerful as users literally build the site along side you.

We have all worked in small entrepreneurial companies before they grew, were acquired, or died. We are strong believers that this medium still favors a small team with a powerful idea.

Our company is built on the belief that “small is the next big”. One inarguable fact is that a small team of exceptional people can beat an army of good people. It is a very American principle. On that premise, our team working out of a small office in Sausalito is building a platform to launch lots great sites. How will we do? We will have to let users be the ultimate judge.

As much magic and innovation that have come out of the small publisher category, few have become great businesses for those publishers. One of our missions will be to change that, to help develop the tools and models that empower and pay this merry band of content producers.

You might wonder about the name — a bunch of people like it and a bunch of people hate it. When we started a year ago, four of us signed a bottle of Bourbon. When we set up our account on BaseCamp, we used as a working name “Whiskey Four”. Not to bore you with the details, but the vagaries of the naming process shot down about twenty other names that we tried. We finally went back to Whiskey.

The name and the logo have some personal history for me. My family, the Bonnies, is from Kentucky and had a distillery named “Bonnie Brothers” which we unfortunately shut down thanks to prohibition. The logo we are using is literally a copy of the old “Bonnie Brothers” label with “Whiskey” replacing “Bonnie”.

From small batch whiskey to small batch publishing.

Thanks for visiting,

Shelby and the rest of the team.