Let’s give it up for Joe Pulizzi.

When I first heard he was creating Junta42, a marketplace for custom publishers and brands, I thought we were in for another ad network play, a jobsite, or a competitor to the Custom Publishing Council’s referral service. J42 is most of that and a whole lot more. Pulizzi is one smart dude: When he sees a wind blowing, he tacks right into it. Custom: got that. Publishers’ referrals: got that. Digg-like aggregation about custom content: got that too. J42 has even managed the trick of coopetition with the CPC, no easy feat.

Pulizzi’s best trick, however, is turning this little windup toy about custom publishing into a model for his business: he really eats his own dogfood. J42  collects user-submitted articles to be voted up by registrants, and Pulizzi emails the best to his user, marketing his own custom publishing company (Z Squared) while simultaneously taking a cut on referrals—at this point more than 100 matches between brands and custom publishers who pay $4395USD a year—compared to membership in the CPC (from $1,700-21K/year (depending on company revenue) for roughly the same service. Between sales and referrals (no real advertising here), that’s a nice business. You have to give this guy props.

And yet.

As a onetime custom magazine publisher whose roots and tendrils have always been unambiguously digital even when he was working with print, I can’t reconcile the reality of custom publishing with distributed brand intelligence.

I sense Pulizzi knows this too: his definition of custom is nothing dogmatic, rather a big tent accommodating everything from the classic brand monologue, print or online, no matter how well or poorly produced, to the most up-to-the-minute social media and content marketing schemes. The Junta42 model, which Pulizzi explains in a white paper is based on the rising costs of interruption economics (brand advertising), the sinking fortunes of media companies, and the seeming bliss of consumers who seem to be just as open to blogs as they once were to big media brands and their partners in brand advertising. Inside this big tent, it’s all content marketing and it’s all good. As brands get bigger, savvier, and realize that their content—even their spec content—is gold, they will only pay more to bet smarter about content strategy, content marketing tactics, and content management, and Junta42 will be there to guide them.

Good stuff. Pulizzi is clearly onto something. If I had money, I might even join J42; I could use a new client or two, and if he’s doing as much volume as it seems, the $4K might even be a good investment. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have the cash—and (perhaps more important) can’t summon up the same enthusiasm for custom publishing. Don’t misunderstand: I believe there’s plenty of good brand-sponsored publishing to be done, nearly all of it online. Brands ignore the remixed associated value of their content—repeat: remixed, associated value of their content—at their peril. Understanding how to innovate down to the bit, relearning brand storytelling across the datasphere in new story forms is why I’m here.

Custom for dummies?

But that’s not custom publishing. The competitive essence of custom publishing is its ability to write and publish in the style of popular journalism—mimicking the real thing in look and feel—but wholly disassociated from the credibility and competence of newsgathering. Custom aims to boost and protect a brand. It’s not about you. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. There’s plenty of consumers who could care less about the news curve. But let’s call this what it is: a disguise, a feint, a kind of editorial ventriloquism. As if readers/users won’t know the difference between content related to news and content related to marketing, promotion, and sales. Here: take this magazine and remember us the next time you have a problem with your car! Here: take this magazine and remember us the next time you accuse us of not having any imagination! Here: take this magazine and remember us the next time you can’t find a product in our giant database. Here: take this magazine and FOR PETE’S SAKE WOULD YOU SHUT UP—we’re giving you this gorgeous magazine FOR FREE!

Charlie McCarthy: Editorial ventriloquist

This is why Luce wanted a Chinese wall between editors and business, Church and State. Why ASME still insists on labeling advertorials. Why nearly all custom cannot compete for brand advertising, even in unrelated categories. (Custom publishers say they create high perceived value with consumers but if that was the case, why wouldn’t they compete for customers and advertisers?) And (perhaps I don’t need to say this), it is why user generated content exists. To blow a hole in this mockery of independent judgment and reporting, of pseudo-news and real news. To put an end to dummy-to-dummy publishing—passive consumer to monologuing customer publisher.

Making the bridge from conversational farce (ventriloquism) to conversational, customer dialogue and customer service seems to me an almost impossible leap. As I said above: I just can’t square custom publishing with distributed brand intelligence. Juntas aren’t distributive democracies. Period. (Does anyone see the irony in naming a business that promotes popular ideas about publishing for a term that is all about a military brand monologue?)

Of course the custom publisher/content marketers of the world don’t see it this way. Since most big companies are dropping their expensive custom magazines, all they see is fresh opportunities, whether by sticking with the magazine model—locking content behind DRM systems such as Zinio and Idio or DRM-protected emags or even PDFs fit for the utopian ideal of a color Kindle. Or they are going the social media route, adding marketing blogs or other social media conventions to massive online brand destinations. Ad infinitum, ad nauseum: Follow us on Twitter! Check us out on Facebook! Hear our brand soundtrack on MySpace! Join our FunClub/Ambassadors Club/MeClub. We get it—even if we don’t know what we get out of it (but check out our white paper for the mumbo jumbo on why you should be promoting your brand on My Twitface including the 10 best ways to turn 140 characters into great marketing 22 times a day!). Welcome the age of content marketing!

Not. The problem with all of this is that content marketing, like custom before it, craves control and abhors real conversation. You don’t need a paternity test to see it’s the same DNA. This is the same ol’ same ol’. Content marketing prefers the lopsided asymmetry of promotion to real customer dialogue. Why do you think Twitter is the tool du jour of content marketers? If you have something to promote, what better way than getting into a realtime stream with asymmetrical follow? Why do ya think company after company is craving so-called social media experts and why an army of self-proclaimed social media expert is rising up to meet this demand. The whole thing gives me a strong sense  of déjà vu. I’ve seen this movie before, maybe even a couple times already: These are the same folks who made the “dot com” revolution. Who crowed about Web 2.0. And who are now heralding a new age of content marketing.

Conversation for dummies

Not all content marketing is so ugly. Since one of the hats I wear is “content strategist,” I’m among the first to recognize that there’s significant value in propping up marketing in the Orwellian newspeak of the distributive web. My experience is that when content marketing is conversational marketing—when it maintains authentic dialogue and conversation rooted in the use cases of real people who actually use the products, when it aims at participation instead of passive ingestion of brand factoids—it has the potential to be way cool. Conversational marketing may sound oxymoronic but it is a job that needs to be done. I’ve been saying for a decade that the web turns every company into a media company, whether they like it or not. A Citibank/HP/BP/Audi/Levi Strauss can spend money on brand advertising or they can touch consumers directly with brand-associated content through self-assembling evangelists. (By the way, I take it as obvious in the extreme that the first job of content strategy is helping companies get a grip on the fundamental audit, positioning, CMS, sort, and content creation routines that are the bread and butter of CS.)

But evangelism, especially self-organized evangelism, ain’t easy. Brand advertising works less and less. Web-site destinations are plummeting in popularity. Last week, David Armano, a top UX designer now working on Jeff Dachis’s stealth SaaS collaboration software,  wrote that he was killing his own website, and that almost everyone else should too. “Your website should provide value to all of your users,” wrote Armano. “If you can get them to participate, then do what ever it takes achieve that. In other words, it doesn’t matter if your site looks more or less like a blog, what matters is if you’re doing something to transform behavior from the passive to the active.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I’m not saying companies shouldn’t have brand publishing initiatives, or websites, or that they not undertake marketing initiatives via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest. Go for it. But if you do, try to make such initiatives be an invitation to active participation, to dialogue, to content that enjoins and extends a company content into a shared customer ecosystem of connection, conversation, and collaboration that is inherently uncontrollable—and highly prone to influence.

Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize: it’s an unrehearsed adventure. More like playing to gamble than to win or lose. It’s all about the bet, about the place where different universes meet, acknowledge each other, and enjoy an oblique relationship which doesn’t require or forecast assimilation. It’s the one place where difference really matters.

And as long as brands insist on control, they’re playing a losing bet.

Surrender with your hands up!

So how do you start a conversation? How do you give up control? How do you turn passive brand factoiding into active participation where the inmates are liberated from the asylum of the brand?

There’s a whole ‘nother post to be written about this. But it can be done. In print, online, and in just about any kind of application you’re interested in betting on. Blogs help a lot. Blogs establish voice, deepen authenticity, provide insight and create instant culture. Gawker, for example, is planning to grow its sponsored advertising faster than its brand advertising. Take a look at Bloodcopy, its recent experiment with HBO’s True Blood. Just as Valleywag no longer exists independently of Gawker, so Gawker is publishing Bloodcopy across its various properties— pretty much indistinguishable from its typical editorial “except [said Chris Batty, Gawker’s vice president of sales and marketing] that the blog is written by an undead, bloodsucking ghoul…“If we’re around in three or four years, the majority of our advertising revenue will be in sponsored posts like this.”.

OK, I know what you’re saying. That’s not participatory. It’s not on the newscurve. And it’s not very scalable. But what would happen if, say Dell, sponsored a beat on Jezebel, a Gawker property catering to women, about galtoys—and almost entirely unrelated to Dell technology. Or if Volkswagen sponsored a reporter to test drive a dozen cars running on biodiesel. Or if American Express sponsored a blog about small business and really let it rip, competing directly with the Wall Street Journal. (Oh wait: Amex is already more than halfway there with openforum.com— maybe the best site on small business anywhere.) What if your favorite hotel chain started using Facebook to let you tell the hotel what was terrific—or sucked—about its facilities? What if it helped you connect to someone on the other side of the pool? Whichever side of the continuum of social media avails we choose to enter—from blogs that can potentially exist on the newscurve to Tweets and Facebook pages that go beyond promotion to active engagement with products—the opportunity to engage in conversation over promotion must be true north for content marketing. This is most definitely not custom publishing.  

Indeed as a former ink stained wretch, one of the things I like best about this model is that it contains the opportunity for  brands to expand the reported environment through their own thirst for user intimacy. This works particularly well in microdistributed contexts (Twitter and Facebook) and provides far more returns—quantitatively (and maybe qualitatively)— in terms of content and sponsor value than both mainstream media and branded content marketing (i.e., custom publishing online).

Caveats? You betcha. First: Your Monetize May Vary. If you think this is the way to increased brand ROI, you might be disappointed. You might also be delighted. ROI direct to sales may be limited. But ROI related to brand strength may be strengthened. The question you have to ask is: What job does this campaign need to do? So if you go this route, do it because you want to touch a specific audience who will associate reporting on this subject with your brand. Think associatively, act directly. If you do it because you want to spread info about your company, raise its brand, or even have people think your company is on the ball, you lose. This is about authenticity and independence.

Second caveat: Custom publishing can’t do this. Once you go this route, you become the media. You are making the same wager media companies have taken for years, betting that your brand is strong enough to support and even shine on associated content and vice versa. You are no longer in the realm of brand boosting but consumer interaction in and through media.

So don’t screw it up with layers of control. It’s a conversation—not a monologue. Any dummy knows that!

Are they dummies? Are they custom publishers?

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Second in a series on Media innovation.

It’s happening. Agile is finally meeting media.

I noticed the trickle down about a week or two ago when Tim O’Reilly wrote about what happens when book publishing meets agile. Then, yesterday, I read a piece Ben Palmer from Barbarian Group, an up and coming NY webdev firm, had in AdWeek, “Agile in Adland.” Two mentions in a week: must be a trend, right?

Agile is not Flex

OK trendsters, if you don’t know Agile—sometimes called XP or Scrum; see your Wikipedia for the all important shadings—now’s the time. To begin with, Agile may be flexible but it has nothing to do with Flex (Adobe’s asynchronously data-driven version of Flash).

Agile is all about process. It began as the revolt of a bunch of software developers who were tired of the rigid hierachy that propelled most development through the early 1990s, and by 2001 were frustrated enough with that pseudo-military mindset—the so-called “waterfall process”—to set down their ideas in the Agile Manifesto (Shades of 1962’s Port Huron Statement if you ask me—and no I wasn’t around then!)

The seventeen (yep, 17) guys (yep, guys) who wrote that manifesto were in flight flight from the traditional hierarchical process of product management that basically aims to finish a project with military precision (is that an oxymoron?). The so-called “waterfall method” sets development in strict step order: from business requirements to func spec to code, design, content creation, and qa, etc—a strictly enforced product management demarche that leads, hopefully and purposefully, to a launch.

Agile, in contrast, focuses on getting stuff done in and through a group process that emphasizes progress over documentation, collaboration over silos. Instead of aiming for the Mission Accomplished banner over the ship’s prow, Agile posits that end products never really come to an end, but are rather destined for  a lifetime of lifecycle iterations. (Shades of Google’s infinite beta.)

That process actually begins on day one of development when a team—if you’re lucky, a truly self-organized, self-assembling group—comes together to tackle a project, a problem, in a closed, face-to-face working environment designed to lash together individuals across the silos: all the internal customers of a project in one place. Sales and marketers. Coders and designers. UX/IA folks and content strategists. As Dr. Bronner says: All One.

Projects are drafted as “epics” and “stories,” planned in “backlogs” (before there are actual backlogs) and then worked through  “sprints” and daily “scrums.” Working face to face, bringing business owners in contact with business creators, getting stuff done on a daily basis together: these are just some of the adaptive realities of the Agile and scrum process.

But notice that I said nothing about Business and Edit. The church/state divide that inhibits media innovation has been immune to organizational as well as editorial change. These articles by O’Reilly and Ben Palmer may mark the start of some real change in this regard.

Making media agile

indeed, imagine magazine editing and book publishing were run this way. (Newspapers represent different problems.) Not just on the digital “side” where, already, some  companies have already adopted Agile, but in the strategic allocation of resources that combine content creation with digital output. That’s right: what would happen if you put marketers and editors and coders and business managers together in a room to work on projects all the time, not just four (two?) times a year? Lots of big companies pay lip service to teams and to restructuring around teams, but there’s no process around that decision or around the team work environment.

The implications are massive, and they run directly to the kind of Luceian survivals of Church/State Business/Edit wall separation that still, madly, survive in traditional editorial businesses (and nowhere else more than in newspapers). Mind you, I’m not advocating the dismantling of this structure. I’m questioning its process.

Image via Wikipedia

Take book publishing. What would happen if we began to think of acquisitions not only as bets on a title’s author based on previous sales, other comps, and sniff, but rather on the constellation of natural community resources that clearly attach to a title? You can see obvious relationships to almost any non-fiction trade title, fiction a little less so. A little while ago I was in someone’s office and picked up the first book on his desk to illustrate the point: It was a forthcoming title by a mom with addiction problems. Bingo: pre-assembled communities of interest around addiction and parenting. Now instead of making the acquisition and then letting the author go away for a year or two to write that book, what other marketing resources in the house could be marshalled to support the book’s publication when it happens? What Twittstreams exist or can be created by the author to support this book? What blogs can the author create or manage or make sure his feed gets to? How can we create a place in the publisher’s own site to actively support the pre-sale and post-publication addenda to the book? Yes, we’ll need to rethink the business assumptions of p-books and e-books and the costs and revenues of all this new activity, but it’s better than wallowing in the duck ‘n’ cover fear that e-books are coming and will ruin p-books (or, ridiculously, that e-books won’t survive).

One more thing to notice: as workflow, this is not a once in a lifetime event but rather an ongoing cooperative, collaboratve process.

Magazine publishing makes that ongoingness even more tantalizing: How do we think through each and every article as an opportunity to catalyze the preexisting community an article captures within various publication frequencies? (And yes, I am most definitely thinking print here, but also not only print.) How do we bring photography to the writing process from assignment day? How should the writing be angled considering the mix of other pieces in an issue? What online elements—blogs, twitterstreams, interactive tools, live online panels (remember them?), etc.—should advance the story? What sources can be pulled in that the writer doesn’t have access to. What resources does the title have that the writer wouldn’t know about. What links can we aggregate around the story? What business can be sold against the story (travel ads for “Escape from New York,” in the  New York magazine, for example)?

Yes there will be times when business considerations will need to be looked at by editorial and vice versa: so how do you set processes and practices in place to ensure a free editorial culture? This is where it gets tricky with newspapers. Business side considerations may be welcome online but at the print entity, still behind its cordon sanitaire—I’m thinking more about newspapers like the NY Daily News for example, where the edit side sits on the other side of the building from webdev and then the other side still from business—they’re nowhere to be found.

Finally, these adaptive elements need to be considered against the entire lifecycle of a book and possibly even a story. Writers do lots of revisions; revisioning now needs to take place pre- and post-publication. This is blog country. Does it make sense for a weekly? For a monthly? What kinds of resources need to be applied here. To my mind it’s kind of a no-brainer that you’d want to do this—except for the obvious and glaring remunerative question: are you going to keep paying writers and editors for continual updates? (The answer is probably that you do it on a rev share based on continuing impressions.)

Beyond organizational happy talk

If you read this and you say, my edit organization is already Agile, already in Scrum mode—and you can do it with a straight face after reading this, cool for you. But for those who do the happy talk of collaboration without set processes, it’s time to stop bellyaching that there’s no innovation in media when the tools are lying all around you. Publishers and editors of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your paper.

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