BurrellesLuce | Hoipolloireport

How do you reach someone who’s fixated on print publications, and a digital nomad who’ll only scan the headline and the first few sentences of your story, online? What happens when both these people constitute your target demographic?

Johna Burke, VP of BurrellesLuce pried open that black box at the IABC Phoenix lunch seminar this afternoon. The “Four Generations” approach to media measurement means the Gen Xers and Millennials have to be reached –and tracked– in the same sweep as the Traditional and the Boomers.

It means PR practitioners and communicators should start paying attention to the core values, and what make these audiences tick. It’s not just about targeting (for marketing) but engaging them (for internal communications.) Media measurement is a “good pulse check” to understand how to best reach and manage these diverse generations, said Burke. For Millennials for instance, she recommends managers personalize their work and even their benefits package because one size does not fit all in their world. There were lots of other insights about measuring the outcomes based on this approach and the metrics.

Sidebar: There were echoes of the ‘social technographic profile‘ made popular by Forrester analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff in their blog, and their book, Groundswell.

If you are interested, a condensed version of Johna’s presentation, “Four Generations of Audience, Four Generations of Media–One Approach to Media Measurement,” can be found at Bulldog Reporter.

No matter what you write, or where you publish, your content is going to migrate online.

The long and winding road of the Writers Guild of America has now come to a yield sign. They signed a contract with the studios on the basis of residuals that will be paid to them, some of which only begin after 2010. But they did have a qualified win.

Interestingly, this week, another group is negotiating how their “work” might be remunerated. Faculty members at Harvard University are voting on on a proposal that will allow the university to push their scholarship through online distribution methods online for the princely sum of … free! They could opt-out, of course.

And also this week, BurrellesLuce has called for a a copyright compliance standard for PR firms that may otherwise unwittingly violate intellectual property rights when they distributes publishers’ content. It calls for charging “a small royalty” for delivering the online and print stories it selects for clients.

If we have learned something from the Writers’ strike, it’s the value of (and price we should put on) content. We have sipped the “information wants to be free” cocktail too long and have never questioned what the real price of “free” is.

OK, so YouTube wants to be free, and the New York Times online wants to be free, but writers need to be paid and nurtured, and have a motivation to go after or craft the content that needs brainstorming, travel, teamwork and publishers who appreciate their endeavor. It depends on the definition of “small royalty,” but and it ought to be settled across a table not a picket line.
If not, everything from research to sitcoms will be diluted –to refill our freebie cocktails, maybe.