Adam Cohen's New Marketing Funnel

Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group did an interesting post last Friday called “When Real Time Is *Not* Fast Enough: The Intention Web“. Jeremiah describes an opportunity to “provide highly contextualized offerings and experiences for those explicitly stating their intents” as a new type of “Intention Web”. While Jeremiah was focusing on using status updates, tweets and events as a way to build contextual user experiences, I couldn’t help thinking about it in terms of our business- publishing.

Specifically, I was thinking about the role publishers play in creating demand, which if done successfully, influences the purchasing intentions of their audience. Whether we are creating an original piece of editorial, structured wikis or curated link sites, ultimately our products should create an enjoyable discovery experience to a person who has identified themselves as having interest in a subject. You do that, and you can make a good living.

Chris Moore at Redpoint Ventures and I were talking about this very topic last week. I was explaining to Chris that we don’t think about direct response revenue too much. We feel like if we do a great job of creating an environment for discovery, the conversions will take care of themselves. So Chris said, “You guys are focused on the intent web.” While I’d never thought of us that way, it seemed like a great way to describe our focus on building niche community sites around categories. Essentially all of Whiskey’s sites focus on a niche category where every person reading or creating content has the intention to buy video games, comics, anime, etc.

Another reason I like the word intent to describe social publishing is it reminds me of John Battelle’s “Database of Intentions” post back in 2003, where he talked about Google knowing the wants of all mankind, etc. But where does all the intent get created? Well, Google (and all search engines) are the beneficiaries of all the word of mouth, advertising and media exposure a person has had prior to that search. That white page with its empty box has to get filled somehow, right? Usually, that’s a good thing for the marketer who has placed an ad on tv, radio, or got a media hit through their PR agency. Awareness raised, customer acquired through either a SERP or Adword.

Unfortunately, because of Google’s monstrous success, the whole world is now over-tuning for Google and direct response. Marketers are disproportionally moving their marketing dollars to direct response, and media companies are killing themselves by over reacting to direct response in either their pricing or programming efforts. It is also breeding this concept of a “content farm”; an idea that’s getting a lot of attention now. In short, this “programming” built for intent (i.e. a search keywords) is so efficient you don’t even need editors! You just build pages where there are high paying keywords, and poof, you’ve got millions of dollars.

Now I may be a content luddite, but I believe (like Mike Masnick) this whole “robo-content” concept will fill the internet with crap quickly and efficiently. That’s not only problematic for media companies, but for Google. Many already say that the incessant gaming of Google is already hurting its search results. I feel a little less like some content luddite when I see that even SEO’s are worried about the proliferation of commodity content. Here’s the thing… there are better ways to create quality content cost effectively without resorting to building generic landing pages.

We may be drinking our own sour mash over here, but we believe the opportunity lies with those who can create powerful communities that can influence intent. Like Erick Schonfeld of Techcrunch (TC being one such publisher), we believe the future of publishing will be driven by “nichebusters“, who Erick describes as publishers who “create content that appeals to targeted audiences of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions“.  These types of publishers tend to be “Social Publishers”, who combine the best of original content with content producing communities. The audience contributes to the voice of the brand through structured wikis, active forums, recommending links, etc. Marketers would greatly benefit from the expertise of these niche-busting publishers to reach these influential communities to launch products or drive demand in a world polluted with this soulless, keyword-driven content.

Others like Hunch and GoodReads, for example, tackle the driving intent opportunity with innovative uses of technology combined with community contributions. Om said it best in his post about Hunch, saying “Hunch (and companies like it) represent a smart way to deal with the increasing deluge of information on the web. Simply put, Hunch marries such information with your personal tastes to help you make choices.” I am personally a big fan of both services, as I find each service does a great job of enabling discovery. I’ve probably bought 10 or more books from GoodReads community recommendations.

So in short, we think there is a big opportunity in creating communities that drive awareness and create demand. There has been such tremendous success in direct response models and technologies, and that there has been too much focus at the “bottom” of the funnel. Now, we need to refocus on the top of the marketing funnel where a community influences purchase intent.  Then again, that’s the business we’re in.