Exclusives in a distributed world

A discussion emerged on Twitter yesterday started by Devin Faraci of CHUD and then joined in by other movie blog writers over the role of exclusives. Faraci basically called on studios to stop doling out exclusive posters and trailers (and other content) and just distribute it themselves. The conversation quickly digressed into a back-and-forth about who had or hadn’t ripped off exclusives from elsewhere, but his initial point is a good one and indicative of a larger conversation happening within the media and marketing worlds.

Whether we’re talking about “exclusive” movie poster debuts – exclusives which are quickly grabbed by other sites and reposted there – or “exclusive” stories given to a newspaper – exclusives which are quickly linked to and summarized by a handful of blogs and aggregators – we’re seeing the end of exclusives lasting more than about 30 minutes, if even that.

So if the desired effects wind up being minimal, is there still a role for this strategy?

Before answering that it’s important to look at what’s possible right now if you eliminate it completely. Companies, organizations and brands can setup their own blogs and post news, photos, videos and other materials right there without needing to go through media outlets, the traditional gatekeepers and deciders of what’s important for their audience – whether it’s a general audience of an industry specific one – to know.

More importantly, the bar that needs to be cleared in order for something to get published is greatly lowered. Because there’s no additional level of someone deciding that it’s good enough to publish and no incremental costs associated with distribution as there would be through a traditional press release service, the only factor becomes whether or not it’s part of the story the organization wants to tell.

If you’ve setup a blog and RSS feed then you can tell all the smaller stories that add color and flavor to your brand’s story as well as hitting all the really important mile-marker type of stories. But there are still important considerations:

While this is cheap at its core – I can get you a WordPress.com blog up and running in about 30 minutes – it is important to consider the presentation of the message as well as the message itself. Don’t neglect design and development. Form follows function, after all. And if the function is to deliver materials you hope will attract an audience and spur discussion the form needs to convey that as well as the message itself.
This is not the place for “marketing speak.” Nothing will make sure your blog has a minimal audience like playing Buzzword Bingo (HT to John Ratcliffe-Lee) in every post. Press releases are fine, but I find that putting them after the jump and with an introduction at that top, works best.
There’s still a role for the traditional press outreach and not every story needs to be broken on the blog.

Wait, what?

Yes, I firmly believe that there’s still a place for conducting traditional media relations with traditional media outlets, even in a world of blogs and Twitter and everything else.

That’s because a blog can’t just be the strategy. A blog is a tactic. Message distribution is a strategy that should have multiple tactics associated with it in order to reach the goal of effectively communicating a corporate, organizational or brand story.

Marketers need to look at the overall communications strategy and work with their employers or clients to decide what goes where. Is this something we need to work with a newspaper writer who covers this beat on? Is this a “smaller” story that can go on the blog? Is this a question we ask of our Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn followers/fans/group members?

Back to the example of movie studios: The unveiling of a new poster or trailer is not something that would traditionally go to The Los Angeles Times or Variety. Indeed the whole idea of such debuts was pretty unheard of before blogs came around. There are some bigger corporate partners that facilitate such debuts now – Yahoo and Apple among the biggest – and we can look at them as being analogous to a mainstream newspaper or trade magazine, if for no other reason than their size.

So that becomes one tactic within the strategy – Some material gets released to Yahoo or Apple initially. Other items are released on the blog, whose public accessibility means it’s there for all to see, and then additionally sent to those bigger partners.

The traditional press outlets are still utilized in ways that maximize their strengths – Cast and crew interviews, behind the scenes looks and other coverage. Then that coverage is mentioned and linked to on the blog, where an additional audience can be found that not only supports the media outlet by sending online traffic but also bring an additional audience to that messaging.

It’s important, then to realize we’ve just talked about message conveyance and not distribution, at least not fully. That comes through the RSS feed that’s enabled on the blog and the pushing of all those items to a Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/whatever else profile.

What comes next is the discussion that these outlets facilitate. Don’t just spray and pray. There’s a conversation going on out there around the assets and stories you’re releasing so take part in it. Respond to comments on the blog post, reply to people on Twitter, watch for who’s picked up and linked to the blog post and monitor the conversation happening there.

Then use all that information you gather to figure out what’s working and what’s not and make the necessary adjustments.

Believe it or not, that’s more or less what news organizations have been doing for years. This type of story isn’t popular with our readers? OK, it gets dropped from future coverage. People really like this? Let’s put an extra reporter on it.

The difference is that these conversations are now not only happening in newsrooms but in marketing meetings. Marketers are media companies, a point recently revisited by Advertising Age’s Jonah Bloom.

And unsurprisingly, this sort of tactic has the added benefit of allowing movie studios – to bring it home to that example one final time – to brand themselves in a much more sustainable fashion. If they launch a blog for the entire studio then they have that tactic already ticked off and ready for utilization when it comes time to launch the campaign for their upcoming movie. Not only is that good for their bigger movies, whose campaigns have lots of moving parts, but it can bring needed awareness to their smaller movies who need all the exposure they can get in order to be successful.

Again, this sort of thinking is a tactic within a larger strategy, one that needs buy-in from all stakeholders. But it’s indicative of just how much control a company or organization can now have over their own public image, an image that’s derived from and a result of the story that’s told to their audience.