Memorial Day weekend is the traditional kick-off to summer travel. But with the economy still in decline, industry analysts see a continued trend shaping American travel patterns that will have repurcussions throughout the summer and should send strong signals to marketers in a variety of industries.

Reports indicate that Americans will reduce the amount of summer travel by air. During the Memorial Day weekend alone, air travel is set to decline by 1 percent and could set the pace for a 7 percent drop in travel by plane this summer.

The beneficiary of this decline in air travel are localities. According to a survey done by American Pulse, 27.4% of those survey are looking for a local get-away that does not require air travel. Many are in fact contemplating a series of day-trips and trying to minimize hotel stays whenever possible. This has some states and regions making a push for local tourism in an effort to keep wealth within their own communities and encourage people to rediscover the world closest to them, their friends and families.

Of course, this trend also sends a strong signal to marketers and business developers across many industries that going local may be a way to help take some of the sting of a prolonged economic downturn.

For example, local search companies and online advertisers, as well as those companies connecting people with local listings through GPS and other technologies, stand to help local businesses who are seeking to get their online act together. According to data from The Kelsey Group, a division of BIA, by 2013, local mobile ad revenue is expected to reach more than $3.1 billion, up from $160 million in 2008. Mobile search, which is an area local businesses can start to get engaged in now, will constitute a majority of that revenue at $2.3 billion.

What does this mean to local businesses? Essentially, more people are using their phones as a means for shopping (local and online merchants) as well as local business search. Companies are rapidly developing mobile coupons and text / sms campaigns to help drive commerce through mobile devices.

By connecting people to local offerings, businesses are more likely to build stronger word-of-mouth or viral initiatives to compliment their online marketing efforts. Overall, tapping into the online world can help a local business develop new revenue streams – but now the key is not just to be online, but to target your local consumers as well to address the renewed emphasis on Americans to stay close to home. Using mobile advertising and targeted online ads are two methods local businesses need to consider very seriously.

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On Tuesday, May 5th, I will moderate a Webinar that will cover expanding revenue streams for media companies. The goal of this event is to provide an introduction in advance of the Winning Media Strategies conference to some practical strategies for the local media ecosystem.

Clearly, the economic downturn / recession has adversely impacted many in broadcast and print media. No one has been immune from the challenges created by declining advertising dollars and viewership. When you look ahead – the next several years the advertising pie is expected to decrease. With so many new media companies and devices emerging, radio, tv and newspaper companies will be fighting for market share rather than trying to grow overall ad revenues.

In order for media companies to grow their business during this period, their company must develop multiplatform strategies to diversify their business models and build multiple revenue streams. This is made tougher by the necessary response to the tight ad market in terms of budget cutting, employee reductions and less tolerance for risk taking.

In addition to steps a media company can take, this webinar will present some revenue forecasts by media platform; best management practices and case studies. The speakers are first rate, and include:

Rick Ducey, Chief Strategy Officer, BIA Advisory Services
Daniel Anstandig, President, McVay New Media
Erik Hellum, President, GAPWEST, GAP Broadcasting

Click here to register for this event (there is no cost to register).

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After negotiations appeared to stall last night and into today, the New York Times will give notice to federal authorities under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification law (WARN) that it will close the Boston Globe’s plants. Under law, this notice is required and will last 60-days before any action is taken. In the meantime, the Globe will continue to operate.

The decision by the Times does not prevent both sides from reaching an agreement, and is being described by many in media circles as a tough negotiation tactic designed to push the unions to meet Times management demands. According to the AP both sides have agreed to return to the table for talks in about 2 days.

But the bad blood between both sides that I talked about during yesterday’s radio program and that has been published widely in different reports is only growing worse. The Globe unions have called the approach by the Times as “bullying” while others have openly questioned both the management skills of their parent company and their own level of sacrifice. Not exactly the building blocks to a long-term future.

With that said, no one should forget that the NY Times is in a world of financial hurt themselves. Not only have they cut salaries and reduced staff, they have mortgaged their property, borrowed over $200 million, and are believed to have over $1 billion in debt. With diminishing circulations and ad revenues, there is not a lot of positive news in the short term for the newspaper industry as a whole, but especially for the Times and Globe.

The best advice for the Times still remains to either consolidate operations with the Globe, adopt a more defined multi-platform strategy, or to dump the Globe as soon as possible and try and stop the bleeding. In either case, the road is not an easy one – but one has to question the business logic of keeping a division that stands to lose over $85 million this year and will certainly lose money for the foreseeable future.

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The Boston Globe got a little more time to find $20 million, but the bad-blood between the Globe staffers and the New York Times appears to be reaching new levels. According to published reports there is a lot of anger amongst the Globbies that the Times has not been totally accurate on its estimates of Globe losses this year, as well as some of the cuts they are requiring the Globe to make. Globe staffers feel as if the executives and managers at the Times are not making enough sacrifices on their end.

This kind of bad blood could be the kind of thing that destroys a corporation’s unity and damages its ability to succeed over the long haul. That, of course, would assume that such unity existed previously and that success was something probable in the foreseeable future for either side. In both cases – neither appears true.

Never the less, with this recent extension to Sunday at midnight, it appears that the Globe unions are very close to striking a deal, which will help in the short term, but do nothing to address the structural challenges facing both the Globe and the Times in the long term (if we can call a year to a year and a half long term).

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The clock is ticking on the Boston Globe’s future. After the last several days of closed-door negotiations and union disagreements, there does not appear to much consensus on what the main unions for the Globe will do. The same is true for the New York Times, which continues a free-fall of its own.

The Globe lost around $50 million a year ago, and was on pace to lose roughly $85 million this year. But with circulation and advertising in a downward spiral (The Globe’s average weekday circulation, for example, fell 14 percent to 302,638 for the six months to March 31 from a year earlier, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations), as more and more people cut costs and get their news and information from other sources – the unions should consider the $20 million to be a gift.

The truth is really stacked in favor of the Globe being shut-down.

For starters, the New York Times cannot find potential buyers (apparently local Massachusetts politicians have struck out as well) because no one sees value in the Globe. Even local patriots to the area (pun intended to the Kraft family) ran away after reviewing the balance sheets.

Another possibility, consolidating newsrooms and resources to help streamline the operations of both the New York Times and the Globe, has been rejected by Times management.

This means the options are few. Either, find some ways to cut costs now and keep the paper on life-support for another year, or shut it down now and stop the bleeding.

Of course, the obvious pinch for the NY Times is that if the unions stand firm and refuse to find $20 million and they do not shut down the Globe, they will look weak to investors. And if they do shut down the Globe? They are admitting a $1.1 billion purchase (The Globe’s sale price a few years ago) of the historic Boston rag was a colossal bust.

At the end of the day, the worst possible outcome for the Globe and the NY Times is if the Boston unions pull their heads together and find the $20 million in cost savings. It does not take a rocket scientists to realize that if you lose $50 million and then lost $65 million (instead of $85 million), you are still… losing money at an unsustainable rate. The question the Times has to ask itself is, regardless of what the Boston unions do – why are they doing this to themselves?

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As a Bostonian, I have followed the negotiations between the Globe unions and the New York Times with a lot of interest. I grew up reading the Boston Globe, and a few of my good friends served as paper boys, waking up at obscene hours to bike or have their parents drive them around to deliver papers.

Of course, if you have tuned into my radio show over the last few weeks or talked with me about the situation, you will know that for once in my life I am actually rooting for NY to take it to Boston. This is not an easy thing for me to admit, because when you grow up in the Boston area, everything that is New York is despised.

Never the less, the Boston Globe has until Friday, May 1, 2009, to slash $20 million or it faces closure. I am hoping they do not find the money and the New York Times management decides to close them down. But part of me really wonders if the NYT has the guts to go through with it.

For starters, the Globe lost about $50 million a year ago. This year it is reportedly on pace to lose around $85 million. The very idea that $20 million in cost cuts is going to help save the paper or keep it running for more than another year or two seems ridiculous.

To add insult to injury, the union is refusing to eliminate benefits to reach the $20 million figure, including lifetime employment guarantees to a large number of people in the Globe’s workforce. The NYT is refusing to simply integrate newsrooms between the two papers or find other ways to reduce expenses.

For a company that was remored to have only $30 some-odd million in the bank to $1.1 billion in debt (enough cash analysts predict to last 4 more quarters), one would think the New York Times would cut its losses and let the Boston Globe turn into dust.

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One of the first lessons I had about the new media world dealt with the issue of content. At the time I was coming into social media, quite a few experts told me that the whole concept of content ownership was passé. In fact, I was told that charging for someone to use my content was the antithesis of what social media was all about. The goal is to spread and share your content, and increase your visibility.

Sound familiar? These are the typical buzz words to describe activities in the social web: engage, visible, share, viral, and… free…

But it was about more than just words. We all grew to hate the recording industry for going after people who downloaded music off the Internet. The same became true of video. In short, the Internet and all of us helped to create an ecosystem where content was king, great content was supreme, and all content was free.

Of course, not ALL content is free. If it were, musicians would not make money, authors would not sell books and Hollywood blockbusters would be measured strictly in audience and not in terms of ticket sales and dollars.

Enter the newspaper industry (or print publications a whole if you will). Advertising revenue for newspapers is disintegrating before our very eyes as segmentation means there are too many channels and so companies need to spread-out their advertising dollars. With the economic downturn, even less advertising revenue is headed towards newspapers. To make matters worse, newspaper circulation is declining and their readership going online.

Yet, the newspaper industry is angry and looking to strike back against villains it sees as part of the reason for their falling revenues: websites that use their stories without paying for them.
In a way, I totally empathize with the newspapers. Bloggers and others in the publishing business should not be allowed to steal content from others. The acceptance that exists in the marketplace for theft in some cases and not others is a direct result of how we are being socialized.

However, the issues plaguing the newspaper industry go far beyond some of the content copyright issues being complained about by newspaper and association executives.

According to the Newspaper Association, 2008 was the worst ever for the industry with print advertising revenue falling 17.7 percent and even online advertising revenue dropping — by 1.8 percent. Some newspapers have seen drastic declines in circulation and advertising revenue – some losing as much as 20% or more. Of course, newspapers have been losing ground for years as online and mobile technologies have grown at tremendous rates.

While defending copyrights is an important step for newspapers (and probably something they should have done a long time ago), the real issue at stake for newspapers is that they are often too one-dimensional. They need to develop multi-platform strategies in order to survive. In short, they need to be less of a newspaper and more of a new media company.

Also, while in many copyright cases they may have legal ground, the question ultimately becomes: will there be enough newspapers after cases work there way through the courts to have made the battles worthwhile.

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It seems as if a lot more people are talking about Twitter, its lack of a business model and how the service can be monetized. One idea is to charge users a small fee. I’ve heard various proposals around this, including – a charge up to your first 1,000 followers or a charge after you reach 1,000 followers.

The truth of the matter is – if Twitter were to charge anything for its basic service, people would stop using Twitter and jump onto another free service. Or another service would evolve and take Twitter’s place.

For the company as a whole, it’s time to start thinking less about advertising or a fee-for-service model for all Twitter users and think more about an enterprise model for Twitter’s corporate base. I recognize that on the surface this may seem contradictory to Twitter’s overall purpose or what many in the Twitter-sphere like about the microblogging platform. But the core reality of what Twitter is and what makes Twitter strong is the opt-in / opt-out nature of its user base; and the ability of people to find other people or companies that have something interesting to say. The truth of the matter is that if a corporation were to ever abuse its audience – its audience would essentially disappear. Twitter is not ABC – so mass appeal is not required – however appeal is absolutely necessary for success.

In my view an enterprise level application or SaaS for Twitter would be fine, but it would need to encompass a few key attributes:

1) There would need to be better management of each person a business account user had as a follower. This means Twitter users in general would need to offer up more data about themselves, such as a valid e-mail, website, and greater description of who they are. In turn, Twitter would need to develop a better system to allow for organizing followers by geographic information and other identifiers.

2) Following a business account with an enterprise-level profile would have to include more opt-in features. Followers would need to be able to specify their preferred method of contact beyond Twitter, and outline how they do not want to be contacted.

3) Similarly, business account holders would be able to offer information to a user that goes beyond Twitter feeds, such as discount coupons, targeted product placements and better customer support.

These are just a few items that would be needed in an enterprise version of Twitter.

Whether or not Twitter goes down this path, I think the alternatives offer Twitter less longevity in the market. Developing a more business-friendly solution would accelerate its adoption and allow for greater interaction to take place between a consumer and a business.

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Posted by: Michael Hackmer, Social Media and Online Marketing Manager, BIA

The question of what is a “winning media strategy” and what is working for your business online are two important questions being posed to media executives leading to BIA’s Winning Media Strategies conference, May 20 – 22, in Washington, DC.

In the embedded video within this blog post, BIA’s Chief Strategy Officer and WMS Program Director, Rick Ducey, poses the question to all of you. Watch the video and submit a video response (or submit a comment to this blog post) of how you would define a winning media strategy. We also are interested in knowing what is working for you online?

All results will be shared at Winning Media Strategies – click here to learn more.

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We all know that the Internet represents a natural fit for social and political causes. Quite a few companies and organizations have been born on the net, utilizing the direct-connect and person-to-person element to inform people in mass and mobilize activity.

I recently discovered a site (also discussed about 10 minutes into the March 8, 2009 radio show) while surfing the net that caught my eye as another good portal for sharing and spurring activity on various causes. The company is MyCauseTV.

MyCauseTV is a video platform and a social network for consumers who are passionately involved with a cause. The company is currently seeking to establish partnerships between “for-profit brands and non-profit organizations” and to build online participation from consumers. The entire dynamic is certainly a positive one, as the staff at MyCauseTV recognizes the growing importance corporate responsibility and authenticity in social causes play in consumer decision-making.

What’s more, by taking advantage of the video format, MyCauseTV enables activists to put a more personalized and visual message together that resonates with a core audience.

I have already signed up to try out the site, and though it is in the early stages – you can see there is a lot of promise. Check out my profile at: http://www.mycausetv.com/users/hackmer/.

A couple of things I did notice that you will notice as well that the folks at MyCauseTV should address:

1) I did not find an intuitive way to access my Yahoo!, Outlook or other email address book to spread my profile to my contacts or share the site. Since the community is just getting started and needs to grow (a larger community will help make it easier to establish some of the long-term strategic partnerships MyCauseTV desires), a viral / sharing component is absolutely essential. This also is not a hard thing to code into the website.

2) I had trouble uploading a photo. It could be me, but I noticed there were lots of other people without photos which makes the site look more vacant and uninteresting. If there are photo requirements, they need to be spelled out. If there is a technical glitch – it needs to get fixed. But one suggestion is that users – who may not have a photo they want to post immediately available to them – be allowed to choose from 3 to 5 default images / pictures as a placeholder for their profile. This will at least make the community’s profiles look a bit better.

3) Last comment / suggestion, MyCauseTV needs to find another source of revenue (both short-term and long-term) from Google advertising on the site. One model they might consider is to offer users the option of selecting an advertiser video to precede (and only precede) their content. This then allows the user to select a cause or company they respect and what to be associated with their content, and gives them a voice. It’s a boon for the advertiser, because it buys them some additional positive street cred. Also, it helps your advertising base understand what kinds of causes and people support which advertisers and which content. The other model, which can be run in conjunction with this, is to give users the option to pay a nominal fee to run their video without any corporate or non-profit advertising. In both cases, the company comes out ahead revenue-wise, and helps to build better engagement with the people using the site.

On the whole, I highly recommend you check out MyCauseTV

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