BlueCoast Media Group

BlueCoast Media Group provides professionally generated, quality content in column form for professionals wishing to establish themselves as thought leaders.

We give your original articles the highest credibility for distribution to the media, for your website's intellectual library, newsletters and customer mailings. We work closely with you on ideas and organization. Our work corresponds to the highest media industry standards. We know what they want!

We also distribute your content nationally, regionally and to targeted trade media to our 150,000 searchable media database.

The Count: EXPERT articles in 125 posts have reached targeted business website and newsletter audiences totaling 28 million as of 1/15/12. 

For the latest articles published by our clients, click here.

NewMedia : Seven ideas to make you a better thought leader

Media Relations

We also perform more coventional media relations duties for clients, such as coordinating this cover story in Investment Advisor Magazine:

 Wealth Mattersby Melanie Waddell.
 

New Media News Bytes by Keith DuBay

January 2012 -Denver Bronco quarterback Tim Tebow is worth his weight in publicity, well, a little more, maybe $10 million a year, one marketing exec said. Tebow is in the Trendsetter Top 85 world list of celebrities. The Steelers-Broncos game was the highest rated first-round NFL playoff game in 24 years. Tebow mentions set a peak rate record of 9,420 tweets per second on Twitter. Cha-Ching!  Something tells me that the kid can get a date.

In March, the formerly staid magazine Ladies Home Journal will turn over a good deal of its pages to what it calls readers. This move is being heralded by magazine executives as a New Media sea change, where the readers write the content for the 3.2 million paid subscribers. My view is that this is not a crowd-sourcing model. The mag will not only edit and fact-check the content submissions, but will also pay contributors its going freelance rate.  So essentially Ladies Home Journal is going to use more freelance writer material – it’s a smart way to go – because although some abject rookies will make it through the screens, freelance pros will end up toting the luggage.

October 2011-Talk about in your face. New York University professor Scott Galloway told an audience at the American Magazine Publisher’s conference that their industry was facing a double-dip recession because their traditional advertisers were connecting directly to their customers through Facebook. His evidence? Burberry today has more than 8.6 million likes on Facebook, while Gucci has nearly 5.4 million, Chanel has almost 4.6 million and Ralph Lauren has more than 4 million. Vogue has nearly 1.7 million, by comparison, while Cosmopolitan has less than 1.2 million.

In case you hadn’t noticed before, Google wants to own your online identity. This is more than Big Brother; this is trying to get inside your noodle. The search giant takes a hard line on anonymous names because it sees Google+, its social networking site, as an “identity service” or platform on which it can build other products, Business Week reports. Talk about creepy. I can see this backfiring on Google.

September 2011 -Ad Age says that iCrossing, the No. 1 agency by U.S. search revenue with $92.4 million in 2010, is making  a push toward producing branded videos, blogs and other content for clients. Some other agencies are following suit. This is a push towards content marketing. I hope that’s good news for writers. The agency plans to tap into parent company Hearst Corp.’s “vast network of freelancers.” iCrossing’s blog contains some good pieces, such as “Why chief marketing officers need content marketing.”

Good news from PitchBook News, a company that tracks private equity investments, recorded 52 investments in 2010 and 37 so far this year in B2B media and information companies. That’s compared to a low of 27 investments in 2009. It is considered a bullish sign because corporate wallets are loosening for marketing and similar business development activities.

I don’t always place a lot of confidence in Forrester Research because they were a driving force behind the Dot Bomb crash of 2001. Here’s their latest: The firm is predicting that U.S. interactive marketing spending will reach $76.6 billion by 2016, equal to TV spending this year and comprising 35% of all advertising. That's a big jump considering that this year interactive will comprise 19% of all spending, according to Forrester. Mobile advertising is taking a big jump and will be a main component of the mix soon.

August 2011 - Author Scott Donaton says that marketers “have an unprecedented opportunity to move upstream in the content development business.” He says forget product placement, brand integration, advertainment and every other buzzword. Trust me, this is pretty vague writing, but essentially what he means is that brands need to combine creativity with the art of story-telling to deliver meaningful insights to their audiences. This will create a lasting bond between brand and customer, he argues.

 Back to good ol’ advertising. L’Oreal, the cosmetics maker, got busted for over-air-brushing Lancome ads featuring model Christy Turlington and actress Julia Roberts. The United Kingdom watchdog agency, the Advertising Standards Authority, banned the ads from the UK for being “misleading” and an “exaggeration.” You mean those women don’t really look that good?

May 2011 -It’s always interesting to learn how marketing financial services is evolving. Merrill Lynch has rolled out a new strategy: The company is spending $20 million on its “The Power of the Right Advisor” campaign. Instead of relying just on TV and print ads, Merrill has expanded to all media platforms, including sponsorships, events and media partnerships. It’s also heavily using articles, billed as “co-created sponsored content in Forbes Magazine.” Another feature creating its own talk show type videos for YouTube. 

Shares of media companies that don’t want the burden of going public – at least until the recent Linked-In IPO – are burning up the private, unregulated exchanges as employees take the chance to unload their stock to venture capital and private equity companies. They are using so-called “private” exchanges such as SecondMarket and SharesPost. SecondMarket reported trades of more than half a billion worth of trades in companies such as Facebook and Groupon since 2009. Look for inevitable regulation of these trading sites by the SEC.

March 2011 – “A Media-Saturated World With a Scarcity of True Media Brands” on MinOnline is a good article that shows how it is rare that any particular medium can attract an unduplicated audience that cannot be found elsewhere. Ask any media buyer, and they’ll agree that no single media property is a “must buy” anymore. A buyer can literally buy around any property and still accumulate audience reach. “The old model is broken: There is nothing proprietary or particularly compelling in distribution pathways or audiences. The media, themselves, are becoming a commodity.”  A media site – maybe your own – has to clearly define and stick to your “brand” so that you can move the audience, not the other way around. * Forbes has begun selling space in its magazine and site for advertorial articles, but AdAge complains that the content looks too much like Forbes own staff writing. The American Society of Magazine Editors complained that that ad content shouldn’t look like editorial. * Journalist/poet and former ColoradoBiz editor Bob Schwab won a $176,000 appeal for cancer-related treatments. Good for him and his fight to be a 5-year survivor of colon cancer.

January 2011 – Self-publishing content by businesses has gone way beyond the company newsletter. Best Buy has been in soft launch mode of its own multi-media publishing network, called Best Buy On, comprised of 145,000 video screens in stores, plus media players and website ads on its home page. It hired an editorial and ad sales staff. Manufacturers such as Sony and Proctor & Gamble have purchased advertising on Best Buy On. The website, BestBuyOn.com features how-to articles and features such as, “Are Your Kids Too Connected?” and behind-the-scenes looks at popular movies. They sent a team of videographers and reporters to report on the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. I thought the comment by Best Buy director of media strategy Keith Bryan was indicative of how companies feel about getting their message out today: “Customers expect us to have a point of view. If the only way we can do that is in a 30-second spot or a Sunday free-standing insert, then we're screwed.”

A New York company called Schoology just snagged $1.25 million worth of venture capital financing. According to its website, “Schoology is a free web-based learning management system (LMS) built on a social network.” The site is modeled after and looks like Facebook to organize classes, give tests, create school, class and group pages and share information and messages, such as, “No class today due to snowstorm.” It’s free to schools and students, with upgrades paid for by schools.

Want to create your own radio talk show? Head to BlogTalkRadio.com. The site, which raised $6.5 million in VC money the last two years, lets bloggers or anyone else host their own talk show over the phone. The idea behind the company is that “terrestrial” radio will lose in popularity to web-based radio. The show categories range from business to paranormal to romance.   

New Media Bytes October 2010 – One of the New Media clichés I’m hearing more of is “Facebook is the new Google.” On the face of it, it seems like a non-sequitur. Google is a sophisticated and powerful search engine, Facebook a social networking site. The author of the article points out that for the first time, people spent more time on Facebook than Yahoo or Google. The article talks about how businesses are attempting to tap the site’s 500 million users. Most of the techniques involve creating free applications that gain awareness for the advertiser, or slipping ads and coupons into online games. Though a few businesses in the article found sales success with their cheaper Facebook campaigns, I don’t get it. By and large, I don’t think Google has much to worry about from Facebook, which I see as a niche play for advertisers. Search advertising is powerful because it is so pinpointed. It should be an interesting area to watch, however.

In a related article, web site publisher Marta Wohrle argues that social is the new search. Her subject is different – how many media sites are getting more referrals from social media than from Google. A lot of that is because Google cut the “long tail” of key words that it will search for in half, leading to fewer Google referrals. That hurt sites with richer content: More words, more key word referrals from Google. I’m not convinced of her argument, because Facebook and Google serve different purposes. With search, I’m looking for a specific piece of information when I want it. Facebook has its uses, and will become more clever about turning itself into a money-making business but has a way to go yet.

August 2010 - Keith’s Summer Burger-I’m taking a little time off from our normal seriousness at New Media Bytes for a summer break. How about an easy, great recipe? Given the economy, we were looking to stretch our dollar a little bit so we bought some hamburger and split it up into smaller freezer bags. I get real bored with ordinary hamburgers so I decided to put a little flair into this one. Former colleague Mike Taylor and I used to trade cooking ideas, and his was to put chopped onions in his burger. I took it a little further. This burger was the best I’ve ever had; moist and succulent, with both heavy and mild flavors that seem to balance each other.

Ingredients:

A pound or two of ground beef.

Equal amounts of diced onions and jalapenos from a jar. About a half cup each or to taste.

A finely chopped head of fresh raw garlic.

One egg.

About a cup of crushed salad croutons.

¼ cup of teriyaki sauce. I used Soy Vay’s Very Very Teriyaki that I found at Costco. Good stuff.

Combine all this stuff in a mixing bowl. Add some sea salt and fresh ground pepper. I used a wooden spoon to mix fully. The egg and croutons help bind it together and extend the hamburger. I don’t like slimy hands so when I form the patties, I wear throwaway plastic kitchen gloves.  I make my patties fairly thin and wide to avoid the round, high hamburger syndrome.

Heat up a skillet (not a grill because they’ll fall apart if stressed) with light olive oil, then reduce the heat to simmer. After you put the burgers on, top them with some fresh rosemary or tarragon. Reduce some white wine in the sauce. Cook them slowly under a cover. This is key as you don’t want a hard brown crust, just a little. Flip them when thoroughly cooked and add your favorite cheese. Cover again to melt it. Don’t worry about the rosemary; it’ll flip over with the burger and add flavor.

You’re done. Put it on a quality bun and serve. Garnish with a little sprig of rosemary. You might want to try it before adding condiments. You’ll be surprised. Fresh raw spinach and tomatoes make a nice side dish. Messiness factor: High. It’s so juicy that the bun will likely be soaked through.

You would think that those jalapenos and garlic would make this burger smoking hot, but it’s not. The meat and cooking mellows them out and they go well with rosemary. Fresh jalapenos would probably increase the heat factor. You can also substitute chili powder for jalapenos, though it loses something. Enjoy the compliments; you’ll be the most popular summer chef.

June 18: Magazine digital watershed-A permanent shift from print to digital ad revenues is underway in the magazine industry, PriceWaterhouseCoopers says. In its annual global media and entertainment outlook, the accounting and consulting firm predicts that print ad revenues - the backbone of the business - will decline this year plus two more years before making small gains in 2013 and 2014. Digital for magazines has not declined. U.S. consumer magazines can expect digital ad revenue of $1.6 billion in 2014, up from $902 million in 2009 and $414 million in 2007, the firm predicts. Those revenues don’t come close to replacing the lost print advertising.

In a related development, Internet marketers spent more on advertising than in magazines in 2009, the New York Times reported. This figure includes search advertising on Yahoo and Google. The revenues for online ads was $22.6 billion, versus $19.5 billion for major magazine print ads. The Times called it a watershed moment.

April 8 - New Search Engine - A friend sent me a link to another interesting site. GEEK ALERT! It’s called Wolfram Alpha, which bills itself as a computational knowledge engine. You enter in questions framed in math-like formulas, such as “wind chill calculator, 25 degrees F, 30mph.” The site spits out a wind chill of 8 degrees Fahrenheit. Must be spring in Denver. The display is pretty cool and gives you charts and additional information. Many different things, such as population, geography and a lot of science stuff, can be calculated. My problem with this site is that I don’t think mathematically, so the question structure isn’t intuitive to me.

Battle of the Bulge, New Media Style-In order to combat an expanded waistline, I recently began swimming laps again after not having done so in 30 years. I asked Wolfram how many calories I would burn if I swam 1,000 yards. It didn’t like the question, but amazingly enough, it automatically referred me to, what else, Google, and Google came through like a champ. Some site called Spirita Health republished charts that give this information. I had to work a little, though. No one calculates calories per yard but I extrapolated that because my 1,000 yards takes me 30 minutes to haul my 200 lbs through the water at about 140 heart beats per minute, I’m burning somewhere between 350 and 400 calories per half hour of swimming. I usually lift weights for about 20 minutes after swimming, so that’s another 200 calories at 12 calories per minute (I don’t stop and rest).

Let’s see, my other activities are biking (246 calories for my half-hour ride and 492 for the hour ride) and gardening (350 calories per hour). You would think that if I just did all that stuff, I could lose weight, as I’m not a big eater. The problem is that after swimming, weight lifting and biking, I’m ready for a few glasses of wine or cocktails. After all, I’m in a little bit of pain. Let’s not even go there about the GUI (gardening under the influence). Is there any greater pleasure in life than pulling some weeds with a beer in your hand? At 150 to 200 calories per, I’m only breaking even on workout days, which believe me, aren’t more than three per week. And GUI only turns the calorie burner backwards. This is hopeless. I’ll default to my favorite activity – playing golf walking and pushing a cart for 4.5 hours. Estimates vary for this – probably based on how much your putting is aggravating you – between 810 and 1,890. But I don’t drink until golf is over, so I don’t get the head start consuming empty calories that the other activities provide. It’s only basic logic that I shouldn’t be wasting my time doing those other workouts. I think I’ll call and get a tee time.

Feb. 24 – Why indeed, do authors need publishing houses? They offer the expertise of editors who can edit well and presumably know what sells, I guess. They are supposed to promote your book to the booksellers and to set up author publicity tours. Also, under the old model, they can advance authors advances so that the author can take the time to work on a book, once accepted through the proposal process.

Things have changed to the point that anyone can publish a book, even if it means spending $20 to print one book through one of the online print-by-book printers. Publishing houses already force their authors to self-promote their books through websites, social media and do-it-yourself PR. So the need for publishers diminishes. Now, Amazon is offering authors 70 percent royalties for Kindle sales. If that technology takes off, print publishers should be very afraid. The new model is to write your book, hire your own editor and designer, print it yourself, do your own promotion and sell the tomes online and out of the back of your car without paying the publisher 80 percent. Obviously this works better for more established authors and many of them may not be cut out for self-promotion. But every consultant or business service provider should look hard at publishing their own book for marketing purposes.

The future of television is linked to the Internet. A firm called In-Stat polled consumers on whether they wanted to download movies off and play them on their big-screen TVs. Ah, only about 70 percent of them said yes. And what consumers want, they’ll get. Will this future make it harder for businesses to advertise on downloaded content? I think they’ll find a way, but the danger for broadcasters is a scenario where the TV ad market gets downsized, just as the digital revolution has decimated printed advertising.

Dec. 22 – BlueCoast Media first year audience hits 2.69 million. In our first year of  business, 53 articles written with our clients and distributed to targeted media have reached a total of 2.69 million people, including websites with 1,822,366 visitors and newsletters totaling 876,200. We’re proud of our clients, who are establishing themselves as thought leaders in their fields.

The decline of SEO (search engine optimization) – If you think you can make use of a few key words and metatags on your website and then forget everything else about appealing to search engines, you’re wrong. In this post, Robert Scobleizer predicts 2010 will mark the end of SEO as we’ve known it. Google and Bing are learning to mimic human behavior and find out what people are really interested in while incorporating social media pointers and links to web sites. What does that tell us? It’s what professional writers have always known. Write something interesting and the audience will follow.

Editor & Publisher shut down – Wow, you really know an industry is on it’s back when its trade journal bible is shut down. Nielsen Media sold eight of its titles, including Adweek, Billboard and Hollywood Reporter. One of the dogs that wasn’t making money is being shuttered, the venerable Editor & Publisher. Others have taken its place, including MinOnline, which is a good website for the publishing industry. Only bad thing is, gasp, there’s a paywall for some of its comment.

Nov. 17 - Hitting the blob of media mercury with a hammer – In another stunning example of how Big Media is being flung apart by the digital revolution, Comcast is buying a controlling stake in NBC. It’s a sign that mass audience networks are in decline. The buyer, a cable company that offers specific targeted audiences by channel, is on the upswing. Why? Because advertisers like to reach people who are interested in their products, or target markets. I don’t think we’re getting less media; it’s just being splattered all about, like a blob of mercury hit with a hammer. I stole that image from former Colorado securities commissioner Phil Feigin, who used the image to describe penny stock operators. The point of the image is that the mercury, once scattered, naturally coalesces again. If that image holds true, and I think it will, powerful mass media will return.

Starbucks of local news – While we’re on the subject of target markets, San Diego News Network, a local city site, is not only competing with the San Diego Union-Tribune but has launched two other local news sites in California and is trying to raise $40 million to build 40 more across the country. The model uses a skeleton editor staff and freelancers for its news, plus republishing content from other sources. Local online only efforts have been attempted before, including by Microsoft with its city sites, and have failed. I didn’t see much advertising on the SDNN sites but this is worth watching because local established newspapers will see many city model competitors. I don’t see much happening with the Examiner model because its bloggers are unpaid contributors. The site’s content is dodgy, undisciplined, amateurish and full of marketing news releases. There’s nothing on there I have to read.

Oct. 22, Selling through search – If you’re reading this, chances are you already see the benefits of showing up on Google and Bing searches when potential clients and referral sources are researching a topic online. This is because the New Media is a pull – with individuals searching out information that is important to us – not a push from the Big Dying Media that used to require expensive printing plants and talented editorial staffs.

Searching Tweets - The engine behind the pull is search engines and in my view, they are flirting with degrading their products. Both Google and Bing (Yahoo and Microsoft) announced they are incorporating Twitter messages in their results. Twitter is being used to build communities and drive traffic to blogs, websites and all manner of digital publishing platforms. I’m afraid that even though Google and Bing say they will filter the search results from displaying such useless tweets as, “That sucks,” I’m afraid that Twitter’s power of frequency will bombard search engine results and make it harder to find useful information. You might have to sift through dozens of “tweets” to produce anything useful. There’s not a lot you can do with the 140 characters that Twitter messages are allowed. By the way, as a friend told me, I caved and I’m now on Twitter and if you have no life whatsoever, you can follow me there.  

Sept. 29, Click Fraud – When I was an online editor, we were always thinking of ways to increase our page views and therefore the number of impressions – the number of time your banner ad would be viewed – on our site. We didn’t cheat but there are those who do and it should serve as a warning to any business buying advertising based on impressions and page views. The most obvious way to cheat is to program an automatic refresh into your page so that every time your page refreshes on someone’s browser, page counters would tally another page view and more impressions. Recently I viewed stories about the Colorado Rockies on three different sites and watched for automatic refreshes. On the LA Times site, it never refreshed by itself. On the Denver Post and 9News sites, the page refreshed every few minutes. On the Sports Illustrated site, the screen blinked and refreshed every few seconds. Unique visitors is still the standard most advertisers should heed. Serious online advertisers should hire a click fraud company, which can keep you from spending your entire ad budget on a roomful of fake clickers in China.

More digital marketing basics – Entrepreneur Magazine has a wealth of information for small business owners. This list of topics is a great tool for learning the online ad and promotion game. And now you can add Twitter to the list of advertising business models. It’s changed user agreements to allow advertising to the 45 million monthly users.

Sept. 8, 2009 - Radio station upheaval - Talk about perception being in the ear of the beholder. Denver radio stations – and their business advertisers – are in the midst of a gestalt switch after a change in the way the audiences are measured resulted in former winners turning into losers. Big name shows took at hit and inevitably their big dollar revenues will do the same after Arbitron rolled out its “more accurate” portable electronic device that measures what listeners are tuning into on an ongoing basis. Conservative talker Mike Rosen lost half his “audience” and jokester oldie rock guys Lewis & Floorwax dropped from No. 3 to No.11. A soft rock station jumped to the top, gaining about 300,000 estimated listeners. As one analyst put it, there are some nervous station managers out there. Ironically, the shows all probably had the same audiences as they ever did. It’s just the measuring stick that changed. In old and new media, you have to suspend judgment about claimed audiences.

What will my mom read? – Don’t know if you caught the Reader’s Digest bankruptcy but it is just more evidence of the death of the way things were in media. There aren’t so many ads in the printed book. It can also be argued that the company, which was purchased by Ripplewood Holdings LLC. and saddled with debt, is also victim to the leveraged buyout craze, propagated by clowns who came up names such as Ripplewood Holdings. The only thing that made such crazy deals possible was easy credit from banks.

Magazine revenues probably won’t recover from the recession – Says this story in AdAge. As a result, magazines are scrambling to find any source of revenue they can get, using webinars, higher subscriptions, book sales, events and with select titles, digital advertising, namely the younger set. It makes ad buys for businesses all that more confusing in trying to reach an audience.