The NY Times and its Paywall Decision — A B2B Discussion

Filed under Discussion by Allan Schoenberg on 18 March 2011 at 09:52 {no comments}

It’s not a secret anymore. Yesterday, the NY Times started rolling out its new paywall for content. In a letter to readers the media company said the change will come in two stages. Many have weighed in on the paywall decision, including an outspoken opponent Felix Salmon, an unconvinced blog boing boing, and a skeptical investor Leigh Drogen. Jack Shafer at Slate thinks it’s the right decision. In addition, TechCruch has posted All You Need to Know About the NYTimes.com Paywall.

I am a long-time reader of the NY Times. Today, it’s a daily ritual to read it on my Kindle during the morning train ride to our London office. Yes, even after my move to London I still read the NY Times. Given their strong emphasis on entertainment, sports and local New York coverage I’ve often viewed it as mostly a B2C media outlet. That doesn’t mean it’s not an important source for B2B companies, and I personally think this decision will have little impact on B2B communicators. B2B communicators will still target the NY Times for our story pitches and we will still value their credibility as a news outlet.

Here’s a quick roundup of quotes from around the web on the news:

The paywall is certainly being set high enough that a lot of regular readers will not subscribe. These are readers who would normally link to the NYT from their blogs, who would tweet NYT articles, who would post those articles on Facebook, and so on. As a result, not only will traffic from these readers decline, but so will all their referral traffic, too.– Felix Salmon, Reuters

Yes, I was going to hate this paywall no matter what the NYT did. News is a commodity: as a prolific linker, I have lots of choice about where I link to my news and the site that make my readers shout at me about a nondeterministic paywall that unpredictably swats them away isn’t going to get those link. — Cory Doctorow, boing boing

How much of the NYT content would you say is REALLY good, stuff you can’t get anywhere else, first hand investigative journalism that is really deep.  4%-5%?  Maybe.  Is that worth paying for the whole site?  Is that worth a subscription? — Leigh Drogen

But there’s a great big hole in that wall that the Times doesn’t mention in its FAQ or press release. According to two people close to the situation, the 20-story limit can be breached if you access the site from multiple devices, and/or if you delete your cookies — paidContent.org

The pricing scheme and process by which the paper evicts its millions of squatters doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to increase revenues appreciably. If it does that, I’ll be happy to call it a success. — Jack Shafer, Slate

The Times now enters an arena already occupied by The Wall Street Journal, which has always restricted access to its website, and the Financial Times, which like The Times of London is locked down to non-subscribers. But the conventional wisdom is that these two newspapers serve a niche audience willing to pay a premium for deep coverage in a specific area — financial news. General-interest newspapers serve a broader constituency that, in the age of the internet, can find most of the news it needs for free elsewhere. — John Abell, Wired

And yes, there are even two hashtags on Twitter to follow: #nytpaywall #NYTimesNews

As a B2B communicator what are your views? Will you continue to pay for the NY Times or will you look elsewhere for content? Will this decision make you take your news and media pitches to other outlets? Or will you continue to value the NY Times as a key business outlet knowing the readership may be smaller, but more targeted? Basically, is it business as usual for you? Let us know.

5 Ways to Combine Traditional & Social Media in B2B

Filed under Discussion, Uncategorized by Aaron Pearson on 3 December 2009 at 13:20 {5 comments}

I continue to be disturbed by the frequency with which social media is treated as this isolated specialty area, with the result inevitably being that social media messaging and strategy is cut-off from other marketing communications programs, leading to redundancy, mixed messages, wasted money and blown opportunities. I can’t speak for consumer products companies but in B2B I can only implore you to never go this route.

Instead, as I’ve preached before, our point of view is that a B2B purchase decision is an “inline” journey – that prospects using a mix of offline and online sources of information and influence to ultimately become a buyer and hopefully an advocate. As University of Pennsylvania sociologist Keith Hampton said in an article about the myth of urban isolation, “Online and offline life are inherently connected.”

handSo here are 5 thought starters on just how to do that:
1. Bring Offline Conversations Online. You’ll get more return on your investment in live gatherings of customers, prospects or influencers if you encourage online conversations to run in parallel. They will help engage people in live attendance more intensively, provide important contextual information (such as online videos or collateral that complement live presentations), and pull in a lot of people who otherwise couldn’t attend.
2. Be an Inline Thought Leader. Most B2B public relations campaigns have a strong thought leadershp component because when you’re making an expensive, complex purchase, you’re more likely to do so with a vendor with demonstrated expertise, not just because they’re running a “buy one, get one free” sale. Make sure your online thought leadership efforts are thematically in sync. One of our consulting firm clients targeting banks did this by complementing news releases and bylined articles (traditional PR tools) with online video interviews of subject matter experts and a Twitter presence that linked to both their own and third-party content that was topically consistent.
3. Activate Your Intelligence Network. Leveraging social media doesn’t just mean trying to connect with current and potential customers. It can also include creating an internal network or a partner network designed to facilitate intelligence gathering about competitors, sales trends or sales and marketing best practices. Tools like Yammer, Delicious, iGoogle and Radian6 can help and even more sophisticated ones are coming onto the market.
4. Ignite Advocates. Word of mouth remains the No. 1 source of influence in B2B, according to most of the research I see from Forrester and others. A lot of that is happening through pretty traditional channels – face-to-face, phone and email mostly. You can arm your advocates for those conversations by sharing information specifically designed to help them tell your story, via Twitter perhaps, or even a password-protected online advocacy toolkit.
5. Work With the Media – and Be the Media. We’re still going to be pitching stories and working with media and bloggers, but we can self-publish good content ourselves too and the evidence is that good content will be embraced even if it comes from a vendor. For example, a vice president at one of my former clients covered their industry trade show with video and regular blog posts, and was included in an industry trade round-up story as one of the individuals “covering” the event. It gave a big boost to his blog traffic. As journalist A.J. Liebling said, “Freedom of the press is guranteed only to those who own one.” Now you can.

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