JP Douma | Media - Business - Marketing

Amazon, IBM and more and are willing to put their investments behind a business that is future-ready, today.

So how do you create a future-ready model for the content business? Content is going to keep getting bigger, but you have to look beyond the old publishing landscape. Today, every brand is a potential publisher because people are consuming content like never before. Whether it’s through tablets, smartphones or computers, people today are used to a content-rich environment.

Thanks to this, content has become a carrier – a vehicle to convey brand messages and values. The first step in creating a business model is to gain access to a large creative pool, people who can create great content. Next comes the task of monetizng content by connecting brands with great content that will help them in turn connect to their target audiences.

A new and also old component of such a plan will be the creation of mass content platforms. These are properties where a huge online audience consumes and shares content on a variety of topics. Brands pay to associate themselves with platforms like this, gaining mileage and points of contact with their audience. You can even create content channels for brands – a healthcare site that is constantly updated with timely, gripping content for a pharmaceutical brand or a topical channel for a new site and so on.

Content creators stand to earn a lot in this scheme of things, through revenues from brand sponsors as well as through opportunities to sell directly to fans from the mass online audience. The opportunities for multimedia and collaborative storytelling will also increase.

As you can see, there are a lot of exciting ideas floating around. But the point is to covert buzz into business and that’s what I am working at. I’m busy hammering all these great concepts into a workable, step-by-step watertight business plan. A plan that will convert investors’ interest into a substantial, tangible commitment any day now. I look forward to building a new kind of content business and welcome your views and opinions on how we can achieve this.

Remember – our industry is in a state of disruption and this is good news for us. From this disruption, order will emerge again – and it will be shaped by those of us who are ready to think ahead and make the leap.

What next? That’s a question I like to ask myself. In this case, what lies ahead for the business of monetizing content? It’s pretty clear that traditional venues and revenue sources aren’t what they were.

In the past, the difficulty of broadcasting a story to a mass audience made mass media the most lucrative platform for storytelling, with some money being made in bespoke or limited content.

Today, anyone can create a story and share it with a huge audience. Furthermore, that audience has got used to a couple of things that don’t sit well with the old broadcasting model:

• They expect content to be free
• They expect to be able to interact with content and add their own voice

So how do you continue to make money as a professional storyteller? Whether you’re a writer, photographer, videographer or some combination of these (and other) skills, do you settle for giving your content away for free and looking for some dull day job to pay the bills? You could do that, but I think you can do better.

I think there’s still money in content. But it’s going to be earned by making use of new business models. As a content creator, you will need to broadly focus on two areas: selling to corporates rather than traditional publishers and finding ways to get and monetize an audience of your own, preferably in collaboration with a creative collective.

Let’s look at the new corporate market first. Content marketing is gaining significant traction in corporate circles with businesses looking to dedicate significant portions of their ad budgets to this new technique– yes, those same ad budgets that they’re pulling out of the magazines that used to be a content creator’s primary market. Corporates are becoming publishers.

If you have a journalism background, this sounds like an unholy alliance with PR.  But content marketing and brand journalism are ways to cater to the new audience. An audience that doesn’t take well to marketing hype but is willing to engage with content that is relevant, useful and/or entertaining – most (or if we’re honest, all) of which are qualities shared by journalism.

In fact, this new discipline needs the inputs of seasoned journalists. You will bring to the table well-honed storytelling skills as well as a regard for the ethics of storytelling that will shape an environment in which compelling stories are used in a responsible manner.

Next, we come to the issue of gaining your own audience and monetizing it. Traditionally, you would sell your stories to some venue that has an audience – a magazine, a radio station or a television channel. In the new environment, you have the ability to build your own audience. A blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel and many other options exist for you to build a following. Of course, it takes time and effort to build that audience – one successful blogger I know of puts in around 4 hours a day into his blog.

Once that audience is in place, there are multiple ways to monetize it, directly and indirectly. Directly, there are options like crowdfunding – soliciting a large number of micropayments that cumulatively help fund your stories or some sort of freemium model, where limited or customized editions of your content can be sold to fans of your regular output of free content. Indirectly, you can make money through banner advertising or through affiliations with brands that want visibility with an audience that matches your own.

But when it comes to monetizing an audience, I think the power of the collective is going to become increasingly important.

If you can create your own audience and combine it with a larger audience that is linked within a collective, it allows for multiple monetizing options:

Store - a large following interested in your work creates more opportunities to sell to traditional markets

Premium services – As part of a branded collective, you can offer master classes, critiques and other exclusive services.

Branded content – Brands are looking for talented content creators who can create stories that relate to their brand and their market. As a paid affiliate, you can syndicate any relevant work or create stories that relate to brands.

Editorial services – You can, individually or with collaborators from various disciplines, provide editorial services to corporate that need experts to oversee their content activities or to other publishers who are looking for outsourced alternatives.

Tie ups - Everything is connected in the online environment. Old clients can transform into partners sharing revenues from existing sources. Or new sources can be explored utilizing the power of the crowd.

Here’s the bottomline: the next million dollar revenue source will be found only if you’re active in this new space. New environments require a new way of thinking which you can only develop by operating in that environment and acquiring the new skill sets.

I’ve touched upon the Public Relations aspect of social media in the past; it’s clear that the internet has broadened the playing field for businesses who are trying to reach out to an audience. Today, PR has the power to be a real-time one-to-many, one-to-one, interactive conduit between you and your target market. Another topic I’ve posted a lot on is the power of crowdsourcing.

So I was thrilled to read that a leading American PR industry body, the Public Relations Society of America has decided to work towards a new definition of the discipline of PR. The organization last changed its definition in 1982; practically the Stone Age! Today, blogs and social networking platforms and more have broadened the process of PR.

What used to be a one-way street now has the potential to be a real dialogue. As marketing buffs churn out new terms like buzz marketing, viral marketing and the like, PR’s role needs to be clarified in the light of its new, broader ambit.

What better way to define PR for the social media age than to crowdsource the definition? The PRSA has a website where anyone who is interested can contribute a definition. Submissions will be accepted until December 2nd, 2011. Three finalists will be selected and posted for public voting from December 6th to December 15th. At the end of it all, hopefully, a definition will emerge which reflects the new, broader scope of PR both in its content and the manner of its creation.

Perhaps this exercise will pave the way for more inclusive decision making processes, not only within industry associations but in businesses themselves, perhaps even including the public. I look forward to seeing the new definition and I just might submit an idea of my own – and so should you!