All Posts By marcdanziger

Here’s a document I did for a friend who’s a newspaper editor.

I left out a huge monetization stream from lead gen and affiliate sales, but otherwise it seems pretty on point:

A Modest Proposal For The [Xxxxxx] Newspaper
View more documents from Marc Danziger.

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Like most people I’m often kind of amazed when my mouth does my thinking for me – both good amazed and bad amazed. yesterday, meeting with a prospective client, and trying to explain the way I think through the problem of implementing social media I improvisationally explained something well enough that I want to get it down in text before I forget it.

What I explained is that “social media in the enterprise is a three-axis problem.”

The three axes are:

ABOUT
WITH
AMONG

…as in conversations ABOUT you, conversations WITH you, and conversations AMONG you.

And that you need to solve the problem in all three, but prioritize the axes based on the specifics of the organization and its situation.

Over the weekend, I was reading ReadWrite Web and TechCrunch about ‘content farms’ like Demand Media and the new Aol.

MacManus and Arrington are deeply worried about what they see (MacManus):

So is the Web becoming awash with low-quality content produced by content farms like Demand Media, Answers.com and now AOL? Yes it is.

From my analysis of Demand Media and similar sites, such content is very generic and lacks depth. While I wouldn’t go as far as wikiHow founder Jack Herrick and say that it “lacks soul,” it certainly lacks passion and often also lacks knowledge of the topic at hand. Arrington’s analogy with fast food is apt – it is content produced quickly and made to order.

It’s more of a ‘hierarchy’ than a law, but I always wanted a law…here’s something I just put together for a presentation I’m doing tomorrow that’s so right, Jack Black should have done it.

It’s a hierarchy for small business survival in the marketing sphere. Maybe even for big business. I’ll explain tomorrow afternoon…

The kind folks at eMediaVitals.com – an online site dedicated to the profession of journalism – were kind enough to invite me to put up an article building on my remarks to the LA Press Club a few weeks ago.

Here’s the opening:

Every media brand in existence is working to build a community.

Most of them won’t succeed.

Many won’t succeed because the business organizations that are trying to implement the communities are themselves crumbling, caught in a downdraft of declining revenues, causing cuts resulting in declining quality which leads to declining audiences who pay less and are less valuable to advertisers – and so on.

And some won’t succeed because they are doing community wrong – treating it as an adjunct, a bolt-on feature,

So as I’ve been trying to do a “Big Business Social Media” deck, the news is full of a study that seems to show that small business doesn’t use social media very much and doesn’t much like what it uses.

I’m shocked, just shocked (not really). Actually, it kind of confirms what I’ve been seeing in talking to small business owners out in the wild.

Here’s the lede (sorry, the study doesn’t seem to be available; I’m just piecing together clips about it from press releases and blog posts):

Sites like Facebook and Twitter have taken off among individuals for personal use. But what about the use of social networking at small businesses?

A survey commissioned by Citibank and conducted by GfK Roper found that some small businesses see little reason to hop onto the social-network bandwagon.