Last week Dave Morgan,Chairman of Tacoda, posted on MediaPost Publications a great article called Newspapers, Now Or Never. As you all know, I tend to pick on newspapers, but I also say good thing as well, see my article on Canadians logging on for Daily News or Newspapers Can Survive If They Can Lose Their Arrogance (sounds negative, but really it was a positive article).
Basically what Dave Morgan was telling the newspaper industry is the following:
What do newspapers need to do to turn the scale issue around? Four things, I believe:
1) Set their digital divisions free.
2) Think beyond the page.
3) Embrace user-generated media.
4) Create local ad networks
According to Dave, What are newspapers’ biggest competitive weakness relative to GYM (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo)? It’s lack of scale and lack of vision. Yahoo and Google built their market positions first by establishing extraordinary scale and communicating a very compelling vision for the future into the marketplace and to their customers, partners and employees.
Read the rest of his article at MediaPost.
As far as small business owners go and how this impacts them, my last discussion about having multiple marketing plans and execute based on what is best for your business. Let’s face, are small business really loyal to their newspaper, tv station, Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. etc. – I don’t believe that. As small business owners we want to sell products and services, period, and whoever can provide us the most customers for the least amount of money will ultimately wins our business.
If you are a current newspaper advertising, ask your rep. about what their organization is doing and what their future vision is. Believe me some of the Canadian newspapers have good visions and if they can execute properly they will be major forces in the next 5-years. However, some of them are so caught up in everything that is going wrong that they are now in the mood of sucking every last penny they can from advertisers, getting defensive when business challenge the model and their sales people are resorting to hard-ball tactics to sell.
Again, sit back enjoy the show and extract the most you can for your advertising options knowing that many advertising vehicles can deliver you results.
My next post will be more about specific Internet strategies for small businesses – stay tuned.