This is a new map of what the emerging news ecology looks like, based on a Value Network Mapping and Analysis tool developed by Verna Allee for the recent NewsTools2008 conference among 150 journalists, technologists and educators. Talk about change!

According to journalists and bloggers Chris Peck, Peggy Holman and Stephen Silha over at Journalism That Matters, here’s what’s emerging:

• Some reporters become “beat bloggers” tapping into networks of bloggers to bring complex stories into focus.
• “Community weavers” create a sense of community among the former audience and with formal news entities.
• “Information architects” make intelligible the vast amounts of data and images now available.
• While editors continue to be sense makers, connecting facts and making story lines visible, ultimately who filters news from noise, how it happens, and who pays for it is still unfolding.
• Even the definition of “news” is up for grabs as memes — cultural units of information equivalent to genes in the body — replace an event orientation to story.

Fascinating model that can be applied to traditional media, online communities and social networks, or company communities for customers or employees.

Last week I had lunch with an editor of a major daily newspaper who is trying to innovate his paper. The question his execs keep asking: “How do we make money on a different kind of model?” As with this news ecology model, no one has figured out a magic money-making model.

What is clear is that if newspapers do nothing as they wait for the magic model, they will continue to lose their customers, many of whom are no longer just “readers” but active participants. Ditto for marketers and corporate communications execs.

For years, classic brand strategy has always been about the creation of a single message that can be used with all of your constituents; investors, employees, senior management and customers about who you are and what value your company provides. Brand managers tend to write it up and paste it on every wall and train every new recruit in it. It’s a classic approach to command and control brand messaging which then gets deployed via all the traditional media and used in every communications channel.

But these days you hear a lot of discussions about the explosion of new media types and formats like RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts, video, communities, micro-blogging and other emerging forms of social media. And it is causing plenty of concern that this disruption of media is eroding the traditional command and control branding that has become such common place for marketers.

Well, I say hallelujah and good riddance!

I believe that there is a very compelling argument that media doesn’t have to be fragmented while at the same time the message need not be command and control anymore. It is only a matter of knowing how to orchestrate it.

One of the first instances of this to hit the marketplace was Ogivly & Mather’s Dove “The Campaign for Real Beauty” (ok yes it is B2C but sometimes we marketers can take inspiration from our B2C brethren) Which won the 2006 Grand EFFIE Award and for good reason, They did a great job finding a powerful attribute of their brand and made a very inviting campaign around it that engaged their key audiences into a conversation. Evidence this by the nearly 3000 blog entries about it on Tecnhorati, the 2,000,000 viewers of their video on YouTube and you will see that they got the blogosphere humming about an ad campaign. Now I am not professing you drop everything and just do some clever video with your ad campaign, I do applaud the use of video to make their campaign more viral. What can we learn from this as technology marketers? Take a look at my next example.

Now compare this to the “Greg the Architect” campaign from TIBCO. Here is a B2B example that took a very different approach to making their technology funny, and engaging. What they have done is told the TIBCO story through a series of episodic vignettes and allows the viral component to kick in. Viewers are bound to have an opinion on these videos and so is the blogosphere. Also they have given the audience something to react to for better or worse rather than say “we do SOA better than the next guy”. Also don’t forget about the reaction internally to these videos and how that helps give everyone in the organization a conversation starter for the next meeting.

So why is this good news for technology companies? Because for the first time ever, technology companies specifically in B2B can lead the way using technology tools to get their message out to the masses for very little money. Just one tactic like using a video on YouTube can reach 325,000 viewers and engage them with your brand but more importantly with a message that they have sought out. But how to you take something so tactical like a video and make it part of an overall approach to your brand?

Here is the secret.

First, the brand manager needs to architect a single theme that can be used across all media traditional or otherwise. Notice here I didn’t say command and control at all – just to create a theme that is broad enough to use across every aspect of your media plan and “invite” customers and prospects to “engage” with it.

Next, you need to give your customers and prospects the digital tools to comment, to interact, and to add to the conversation. Then you add in more traditional elements of a media plan that all point to the online conversation and you will end up supercharging your media plan!

The bottom line for technology firms is your customers and prospects are perhaps the most savvy engaged technology users of any buyer in any industry. You can’t expect to reach them with traditional media only any more, you need to deliver your message in a way that is targeted to their exact interests. So why not get out there where they talking about your product or service, and give them a conversation starter along with the permission to start a dialog with your brand!

I am waiting for the moment when the light bulb goes off: this blogger is my customer. That is PR 2.0, ladies and gentlemen. The sooner you realize that, the better your conversation gets. Instead of asking yourself: how can I send this pitch in a way that all these bloggers will publish it? Ask: how can I talk about my service and product to a potential customer?

Remember when we were talking about advertising that way not a year or so ago? Well, we may still be talking about it that way. You’ve got to stop treating your customers like they are morons - they are your (increasingly) daughter, too. If you think of it that way, wouldn’t your whole attitude towards the medium change?

So, now that you know that bloggers are your customers, what are the thoughtful steps you will take to open a dialogue with them?

1. First off, lose the attitude. They owe you nothing. Just because you are showing up announced in their email box, it does not mean they should even read your message. There are many messages just like yours piling in their in box.
2. Then figure out if who you are trying to reach is a match for what you’d want to say. It begins with listening, in this case reading. What is the author writing about? What if you find out that that blogger does not write about what you’ve got? Go out of your way to connect them with content they want, as a kind gesture. You may know where it is.
3. You do that and add a third step, depth. See, bloggers are proud about what they write, and they like to have a special angle for their readers. Have you got one to offer? It will probably not take you long to ascertain what the core interests of both readers and author. Look at the list of topics and see which ones have the most entries.
4. Do you want to score points? Continue a conversation they started at their blog. I know, I know, that would mean you’d actually want to pay attention to what they write about. This is not exactly the same as pitching main stream media. This means reading more closely, contributing to the conversation in a meaningful way to the blogger. He selects his content, not his editor.
5. Talk with them (not at them) as if they were your customer, chance are they may very well be. When you do that, keep it real. Be yourself, answer additional questions honestly, go out of your way to be helpful. Bloggers don’t mean to be difficult, they are generally busier than main stream media - in many cases, the blog is not their day job.

Has the light bulb gone off, yet?

The folks at Bulldog Solutions compiled the Q&A session from a live Webinar I did last week with them called “A Case Study: Improving Lead Quality and Quantity” with the American Marketing Association.

Lead nurturing is something I am very passionate about and feel marketers need to start embracing more. A recent Forrester study cited over 50% of B2B marketers rated Lead Quality as their TOP concern. The antidote to this stay awake issue is clearly a well defined process for nurturing those leads so no lead gets left behind. I hope you enjoy the Q&A session below and feel free to reach out or comment on a question you might have regarding lead nurturing.

Q: What would my first step in starting a lead nurturing process like the one described in the Webinar?

Paul: Sit down with Sales and explain what you are doing. Then hammer out a common definition of what it means to be a “Sales Ready Lead” and what the attributes of this lead would be, such as company size, geographic location, etc.
Rob: That alignment with Sales is critical, absolutely. If there is not agreement– preferably backed up with data from closed deals and current clients showing that everyone’s impressions of what makes a good lead are correct—then the entire exercise is just academic.

Q: How do you begin to get support and buy-in from your IT partners?

Paul: We didn’t use IT to bring this in. We bought an ASP software, and we brought it in through the interactive marketing group. They essentially are the caretaker of this system. Naturally there is an IT person that takes part in the interactive group, and they are aware of it, but they are not involved in the care and feeding of this in the way the interactive group is.

Rob: We see this a lot: When it becomes an IT initiative, it can get mucked up quickly because you begin to lose sight of what it’s for. This really needs to be a marketing initiative. What’s good about that is that the tools don’t necessarily require a lot of horsepower on the front end. I should also point out that when you do it right, there are a lot of dividends for everyone. Not just marketing and sales, but it makes the database management so much cleaner, it has spillover effects to IT.

Q: It seems to me that one of the difficult steps is getting your database in order. This seems to be the holly grail to build your nurturing processes.

Paul: And you are right, it totally is. I redid my database three times before I had it perfect. Put extra effort into this step. We started by grabbing every conceivable list of opt-in contacts we could find and putting them all in Excel. Then we de-duped and made sure company names were consistent (for example, Amex vs. American Express). Then we tagged them with the industry and the solution they expressed interest in before we attempted any remarketing efforts.

Q: What percentage of lead nurturing falls under Sales’ responsibility vs. Marketing’s?

Paul: In our organization, field marketing reports to sales, so it’s seen as 100% sales focused. But I’d say lead nurturing is a marketing responsibility versus a sales responsibility.

Q: How does Sales help in updating lead status? Do they literally go into the system and update?

Paul: It depends on where it is in the selling stage. When it’s in the marketing funnel we have the inside sales team go in and update the status after any contact. They also add any other feedback they might have. Once they find they have interest and they can set an appointment with the prospect, the contact is moved over to the sales person, and then it becomes the domain of the sales person.

Rob: Leads may move from hot to cold and back to hot again, and many of the technology tools have real-time notification that helps with the process of communicating with them at the right time. For example, if all of a sudden I see that someone has downloaded my white papers and is forwarding them to colleagues, it’s time for me to step back in and connect with them.

Q: What are some ways you would score if your call to action just brought them to a splash page enabling them to have a rep call them? Not all of us have the ability to offer up to 5-6 touches. Could you score by feedback rep received during follow-up call?

Paul: Absolutely! Keep in mind the “Gold Standard” of qualifying leads is still the phone. If you can afford to do that, please do. My flow is too much to qualify each one with the phone until they are done with enough “self qualification.”

Q: How do you assign “credit” to the channel that generated the sale when it’s likely that there were several activities that lead to the sale?

Paul: I am not foolish enough to believe that marketing is a straight shot – meaning you do one event and you have tons of qualified leads. In fact I think you need an average of five to nine touches (depending on the lead) before they are really qualified. But having said that, when you know which channel was the last touch (which we do) you can do that type of scoring. The magic there is you can start to look for “unique combinations,” which is something I am just beginning to do.

Q: How can one tell how long to hold onto a lead, and work it thoroughly, before giving up on it as unusable?

Paul: In this system, I’m not giving up on anybody unless they change jobs and I lose their e-mail contact. But I know the tolerance on the sales side is much less than that! Sales is quarterly driven, they have their own specific goals. But if you look at how many touches it takes to get through to a CEO, that number of touches is in the 15-20 zone. So if a sales person gives up after five, they’re only a third of the way there.

This type of system can help, because you’re passing something along to sales that’s already been qualified, and it behooves them to work it thoroughly.

Q: What should the expectations be for rejected/returned prospects?

Paul: Simply that we put them back into the funnel for more nurturing AND we know what the issue was, so perhaps we can evolve the system. Again, whatever your vision is for your own lead nurturing system, I guarantee it will change. So you must stay committed to constant improvement.

Jerry Yang of Yahoo yesterday blogged (“OK, so now what?” ) about Microsoft’s decision to withdraw its offer. I give Yang credit for writing something and allowing comments, which is more than most CEOs do.

But Yang’s post doesn’t sound genuine; it sounds like something the corporate PR folks wrote in a committee. Too bad. In today’s world, people want the real language of the person behind the ideas. After reading the post my reaction was, “Does Yang really care — or is this just a PR move?”

A better approach would be to give the CEO a few of the major points that communications thinks should be conveyed — and then let him express it in his own words and style. Who cares if the words and grammar aren’t perfect. Neither are real people.

What do you think about his post? A good example of Marketing 2.0 — or misguided?