Speaking to Listen

Last week I spoke at the BIA/Kelsey Marketplaces Conference about NCI’s Digital Sherpa product. The conference covered local, vertical online markets and was well represented by online businesses large (Google, AOL), medium (Groupon, ServiceMagic, Oodle) and Small (Loopt, MojoPages). What was interesting and liberating for me was speaking with the only goal of eliciting response and conversation to learn.

At NCI, we are not raising money; none of our customers were in attendance; we are not really seeking buzz amongst our peers – we are working with our customers, experimenting to determine the best ways to market their products and services in the social media space.

Here was the premise of the presentation was that local media has always been about high touch service at an affordable price. We can look at NCI’s history with The Real Estate Book to see that in action. In the early days we were not just a media provider, but truly a full-service provider. Our interaction with our customer often began with taking photos of a house, included production of a 4 color advertisement and concluded with printing and targeted distribution of a magazine – an awesome value, priced today at ~$400 a page.

Now we are offering a local social media marketing tool that is designed in the same light. Our customers recognize that there is likely to be value in establishing an active presence in Facebook and Twitter and understand that having a current, active, blog-like web presence is better than an old (dusty) static web page.

Here is the presentation I used.

Here are some of the challenges people posed to me after the panel.

1 – You are just a content factory like Associated Content.

Not really. While we produce a ton of content (thousands and thousands of content elements per month), some are unique, born out of conversations with our customers, some are curated elements sourced from around the web, some are invitations to submit content from our audiences (who has the cutest dog) and some are guest elements from the area or our customer. While we certainly write a lot, our factory is more about aggregation, organization and presentation than it is about unique creation. Also, while we have a factory we treat each of our customers uniquely – kind of like a custom tailor. While everyone can get a shirt, no two shirts are exactly the same. (Think mass-customization of content.)

2 – You can’t really provide high touch service at that price point.

Yes, we can. We already do this throughout our organization. We retouch tens of thousands of photos every month. We create tens of thousand of ads every year. We customize our distribution patterns in over 400 markets and tune them every quarter. We execute marketing campaigns down to the customer level with tens of thousands of customers. We monitor our business advertiser-by-advertiser, making sure we understand our delivery on the value propsition for each of them. We are uniquely positiond TO provide high touch service at low cost.

3 – You can’t really curate 1,000+ blogs and keep them unique and relevant.

A lot about these blogs is local. While everyone wants to know the best pizza delivery sources in their commuity – each community has a different set of sources. Just curating the differing opinions about delivery pizza can be interesting to a resident deciding to try an new place or who is just moving in. Every one of our design customers has a unique perspective on their market – we just help them express it. Again, think of the custom tailor – lots of shirts, no 2 the same.

And these were the confirming statements that I heard.

1 – “At that price point, you are right in the local wheelhouse.”

2 – “I think your company was the only one on stage creating profit in social media.”

3 – (From a publisher) “The high touch service makes a ton of sense.”

The benefit of speaking with the intention of listening came from conversations that could extend what we are already doing into mobile, game mechanics and content curation tools.   I found that having a direct, honest, no-hype panel discussion created direct, honest, no-hype feedback, lots of learning and some potential immediate actions.