Sometimes, though, it’s not easy to know what your audience does want, what will work and what will not. Sometimes an initiative has stalled, and it’s a matter of needing to clarify and re-focus – or to change course.

Good news

People – your audience  – are open to being asked their opinion. And survey tools that are easy to use allow you to gather data that will help you to clearly see and meet those needs.

In a “clarify and re-focus” situation, we recently helped a client to design, deploy and analyze a survey focused on its audience’s use of online communities. The resulting data helped this client to understand where its own online community may not be meeting the desires of its audience. One unexpected surprise was the high number of respondents who indicated that they would welcome a follow-up phone interview.  Those calls were invaluable for their deeper insights into the problem at hand.

Creating a survey that works

• Focus on what information and data is important to your current goal. Keep in mind that this is not a full-on Readership Study; make the survey as uncomplicated – and short  – as it can be.
• Make your email personal, using language that invites your audience to help you to help them. Mention that it will take no more than five minutes of their time.
• Incentives work. Make it something that is compelling to your unique audience: a donation to a charity, a complimentary registration to an event. An iPad.
• Pick your survey tool:  Modern Media uses Survey Monkey for its depth, user-friendly survey design and reports features; more sophisticated research projects may require a specialized programming and data analysis expert.
• Invite respondents to engage in a telephone followup. Make sure that you have the bandwidth to follow up soon after the survey ends.

Let us know when we can help you reach your audience with a survey. In addition to using surveys for product development, we also help our media clients to conduct readership and audience studies, as well as in-depth buying studies for use as powerful sales tools.

Putting your brand on stage allows you to showcase people and topics that represent its most aspirational aspects and really bring it to life. By connecting in person, you will develop a deeper relationship with your audience. You will have conversations that not only may not have taken place, but that will continue long after the event ends. Events can be a source of new content in terms of story ideas, video, slide presentations and inside sources. And you’ll be creating a new revenue stream; for many media brands, conferences are one of their most profitable businesses.

6 Steps to Planning a Successful Event Strategy

1. Do the research. What competing events are already out there? What is their focus? Who attends? Who sponsors?  Is there a hole in the calendar?
2. Pick your own focus – a topic or industry that is focused, but that also offers the scope to attract diverse opinions, viewpoints and new, fresh themes every year.
3. Make it unique. What is it that your brand brings to the table that no other brand can?
4. Frame the focus in a way that is provocative – something that creates discussion will always make for a better event.
5. Plan to involve your audience. When planning the structure of the event, build in ways that you can get the audience involved.
6. Remember that the conversation starts well before the event … and is ongoing.  How will you get people talking? (Bringing social media into the mix is important here.) And think about ways you’ll be able to keep the conversations going long afterward by re-purposing event content on your website or in your publication after the event has ended.

Modern Media produces and markets events for clients that include The Wall Street Journal, Source Media, The Economist, Great Place to Work® Institute, VentureBeat, The Slate Group, Reputation Institute, IDG Enterprise and more.

Let us know how we can help put your media brand on stage!

Thank you for all of the tweets and messages about our 2011 holiday card.  If you did not receive one, and would like a print version of this card mailed to you, please email your mailing address to me at carolyn@modernmediapartners.com.

And, for a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Modern Media 2011 holiday card, read our recent cautionary tale!

See And the winners were… for the article.

We’ve been delighted to be a part of this extraordinary event for ten years, and thank The Economist for the opportunity!

We recently helped the folks at UBM TechWeb redesign and relaunch their Create Your Next Customer site. When it first launched in 2008 it was intended to be a relatively simple online media kit, with pages for each of InformationWeek’s media brands. Though we created it from the start with WordPress, the blog section was really just a “nice-to-have.” The site was 90% marketing and 10% blog.

Since then the site has grown, not only because UBM TechWeb has been busy creating new brands, but also because UBM TechWeb executives like Scott Vaughan and Winnie Ng-Schuchman have been blogging like mad. They use the site to share their take on what’s going on in the media and business technology industries, post research and conduct Q & A interviews with their clients.

The new site design puts the blog up front. The front page, which used to to be monopolized by media and marketing products, now walks and talks and crawls on its belly like a blog. We redesigned the single post pages to be more personal. We added more opportunities to comment and share. The brand and product information (about 200 individual pages and “sell sheets,” at last count) is still there, but the focus is on two-way engagement with business technology marketers.

We really like  the new look, and the way UBM TechWeb’s marketing teams have embraced the opportunity to use blogging and social media to engage with customers. Check it out, and let us know what you think!

If you have a WordPress blog, you can download the plugin here.  Enjoy!

This Lab encouraged us to fess up.

We specialize in project management. So why an internal “fail”?

Modern Media specializes in services that include project management for the programming and execution of a conference, the design and development of a new web site, the creation of a media kit and more. That the project manager is central to the success of any project, large or small, is a given that has much to do with our own success. How, then, did 2011 nearly end with a massive “fail”?

Simple. We didn’t assign a project manager for our own project.

The cautionary tale.

The Modern Media team first discusses our holiday card in late summer. As no company on earth makes the card of our dreams, its design becomes an annual in-house project. We flirted with digital in 2009, had great fun, and liked the interactive card very much. But we love the idea of a real card – the team effort of stuffing, signing, stamping and sealing as well as the thought of people opening them.

So a timeline was created. A budget was set. Lists were updated. The stamp was discussed, approved by all and purchased. Thanksgiving (on time and on budget) came and went. But missing in action on the first of December? A card. Oops.

It’s the 9th, and we do have a card, thanks to a bit of fancy and creative footwork.  Monday next the Modern team will be stuffing, signing, stamping and sealing, one West coast member even joining us on a Google+ Hangout. But the angst of it all has taught us a lesson:

Who’s on first? The project manager. Make sure you have one. 

A missed deadline is often unavoidable. A budget, not made to be broken, will be adjusted. The unplanned will happen. The real risk is not having one person at the center, all-knowing when it comes to the plan, timeline and budget, and able to manage and record change in matters large or small. One person who knows that all is not well if it’s not. Make sure you have a great project manager.

Comments (and similar confessions) are welcome!

P.S. If you’d like to receive a Modern Media holiday card, email us with your address at carolyn@modernmediapartners.com.

Your community relies on your content.
Make it easy to trust.

Marissa McNaughton covers social media statistics for The Realtime Report, our web site focused on social media business best practices, and she’s constantly searching for content that will be of real value to our readers. Marissa’s shared these simple tips for making it easy for your community to trust and rely on the research you quote:

• Cite the source (who commissioned the study, conducted the survey and analyzed the data?) and provide a link to the original study
• Include the study date — data gets old quickly in many industries
• Provide information on the sample that was surveyed
• Be sure to fact-check if you are quoting from a secondary source — they may not have meant to be sloppy, but…

Research presentations:
Make them easy to read & understand.

Modern Media often conducts market research for clients, working with a research house to field larger studies or conducting smaller surveys and polls ourselves. The results are often summarized in a slide deck presentation, whitepaper or both, and become valuable tools for our clients’ marketing and sales teams. We see too many research presentations that don’t include the labeling or information an audience needs to understand the data — follow these tips to make your next presentation one that is easy to read and trust:

• Include full information about the research team, methodology, sample size and source, fielding dates, margin of error, etc. in the deck. These slides can go in the introduction or be included as an appendix
• Include the wording of the question and the number of respondents on each slide that reports data
• Make sure that all data and chart axes are properly labeled
• The slide title and the chart title are not the same:  the slide title should give the audience the key take-away; the chart title tells the audience what data the chart is showing
• Tell a story:  don’t just present your slides in the same order as the questionnaire; think about the story you’re trying to tell and how to best tell it
• Get a second look:  ask your team for feedback — if something looks “off” or simply is not clear to them, they’ll let you know

We’d love to hear from you:  How often do you use research in your content marketing?  Are there any tips you’d add?

Tonia Ries, CEO of Modern Media and The Realtime Report. Photo: M. Grant for The New York Times

Over the past two weeks ago, Tonia Ries has been covering the story of how Klout, the site that assigns individuals a score based on its analysis of how influential you are on the social web, had crossed a serious line in online privacy.  Her posts about the issue and the many comments they continue to receive can be read on The Realtime Report:

Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far.
Oct 27, 2011

Klout Updates Privacy Features. Is it Enough?
Nov 8, 2011

The New York Times picked up this story today. The reporter did a terrific job, and we’re glad to see this issue get broader distribution.

For the story online: When Sites Drag the Unwitting Across the Web Nov 14, 2011 New York Times

Unfortunately the design and messaging is usually left to whoever developed the application or site. And once the site is up and running nobody goes “Oh wait, our logo has changed! Quick! Update the lost password email!”

If you’ve got a semi-literate webmaster you’re probably alright, but here are some easy things to check:

• The registration welcome email.
• The lost password email.
• Form errors.
• Form thank you messages.

I know these sound like minor details, but I think they matter.  They’re as much a part of your customer’s experience of your brand as the front page of your web site.