This is the first part of the business section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection.
I am convinced that media companies could have avoided the disruption we are facing today if we had seized 15 years ago upon the possibilities for direct sales online. They are the logical way to do business in the digital world and we have already lost billions of dollars in sales and an opportunity to develop a new business model by standing idly by while Amazon, eBay, Ticketmaster, hotel reservation systems and hundreds of other vendors bypassed us and figured out how to sell directly to the consumer online.
But our bread and butter has always been local businesses and many local businesses in our communities and every community are still struggling to catch up in the digital marketplace, just as we are. A media company that can provide a digital marketplace for its community and help guide local businesses to success in that marketplace still faces tremendous opportunities.
In every product we develop and in every step as we develop our network, we need to look for ways to help businesses connect directly with customers, whether they can actually transact the sale through us or whether we simply provide the leads to genuinely interested prospects. We can never reclaim the prosperity we enjoyed so long based on selling advertisers a mass audience. Some businesses will always want that mass reach and we should continue to serve them well. But we can only ensure future prosperity by developing pay-for-performance models based on direct sales, lead generation, behavioral marketing and precise targeting.
Continue reading the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection with C3’s business services: Local search.
[…] calls for a new revenue approach, where we provide new services for business customers, including direct sales and local […]
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[…] Buttry says that simply adding video and 24 hour coverage is not real change for newspaper communities. I call for us to develop community content that has more lasting value than news. I call for us to develop personal content platforms that treat the big news in people’s lives as the big stories they are (in small circles), rather than boiling them down to formulaic announcements and agate listings. Most important, I call on us to move beyond our collapsing model of selling eyeballs by the thousand (and pretending that we can somehow start charging for digital content). We need to move swiftly to become the digital marketplaces for the communities, connecting businesses with customers andconducting the transactions ourselves. […]
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[…] entirely when times get tough and businesses start cutting those expense lines. But if we start selling products and services directly for a business or enabling transactions in a measurable way, we become a revenue line and a […]
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[…] relationship. We help businesses make transactions. We send them revenue, after keeping a modest cut for our services. In tough times, they seek ways […]
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[…] presentation was his call for our business to be more aggressive in developing mobile applications, direct transactions and local business directories (the links are to my previous posts on the topics, all key parts of […]
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[…] services (local search, direct sales, communication […]
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[…] December 22, 2009 by Steve Buttry I have become a bit tiresome, I suppose, in pushing my views that news companies need to stop pursuing paywalls, move beyond advertising and find a more prosperous future in direct transactions. […]
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[…] services (local search, direct sales, communication […]
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[…] wasn’t just any digital entrepreneur. Omidyar was the founder of eBay. When I explained the direct sales aspect of my Complete Community Connection business model, I cited eBay as an example of the […]
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[…] set aside that news media companies have barely started to explore the revenue possibilities of direct sales, local search and other possibilities I explored in explaining the revenue approach of my Blueprint […]
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[…] I discussed the possibilities for direct sales in my Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection. This is one of the best examples of moving […]
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[…] possibilities that will help some entrepreneurs succeed. And when entrepreneurs develop effective direct sales channels related to news products, social tools could help users tell friends about the deals they […]
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[…] I’ll repeat what I said in a comment on David Carr’s defense of the paywall: I just wish that the Times had spent all that time, energy and money on something that would be moving forward, rather than trying to resurrect the pay model of print. Since this model is essentially a voluntary payment (anyone who can use Twitter and/or Google never has to pay), why didn’t the Times develop a more forward-looking voluntary model, such as a membership program (as suggested by Steve Outing) or a Times-scale model of Kachingle or Spot.Us? Or a significant advance in daily deals or direct sales for your business customers? […]
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[…] marketing activities, up 91 percent during the year, and e-commerce and transactions (a service I advocated four years ago in my Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection), up 20 percent. The other three “new […]
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[…] revenue sources I have encouraged news organizations to explore, such as databases, local search, direct sales and commissioned obituaries and other life […]
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[…] have a narrow view of that third stream. A full-stack company should pursue such revenue streams as transactions, events, commissioned content, technology solutions and far more. Ken’s right that the […]
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[…] make local cash registers ring (beep, actually, but some clichés don’t update). I think local transaction-focused advertising and local search (which should go together) still hold potential, though giants such as Google […]
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