In the six years since joining digital marketing agency Twist Image , Mitch Joel has become known as a leading digital marketing expert fi rst in Canada and then beyond.
This ex-music journalist and magazine publisher and now Twist Image president is sharing the stage with Bill Clinton at speaking events and giving presentations for Google, and just published the highly anticipated Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone is Connected, Connect your Business to Everyone. Joel spoke with Marketing’s Patrick Bellerose about how blogging helped grow Twist Image, why social media matters to all companies and how publishers of traditional media have to change for a wired world .
Since you joined twist image, the agency has grown from only a few people to about 90 employees, including a new office in Toronto. and it seems you did that mainly through your blog and online promotion. What prompted you to use those channels, relatively new at the time?
In 2003, when I started at Twist Image, I would call magazines and ask them to talk about my company. The usual answer always went something like, “Who the hell are you and why would we talk about you?” They were right; I was just a guy in Montreal with no clients. So I started blogging to get my message out there. And then I realized it could help me get clients. I never sell my services on my blog. But we grew our business by providing tremendous value to people online, in hopes that if someone was ever looking for a digital marketing agency, they would call us. And the blog led to the podcast, to speaking tours, to the book deal, etc. And, looking back, the book is the blue print of how I built my business.
It’s a book written by one business person for another business person in a language that’s easy to understand.
And to do that, I used my experience. We built a multimillion dollar agency with two offi ces and world-class clients with nothing but the media available online and speaking tours.
I understand the strategy for a company like yours, but how is having friends on Facebook really important for businesses like Shell or Best Buy?
It doesn’t matter if it’s B2C or B2B, a small business or a big company, everyone is online. [Companies can] use online communities as focus groups, to make an informed decision.
It’s also a really good way to know what is being said about your company and your industry. Even if you’re a plumber and you think it doesn’t apply to you, there is still a conversation going on about new plumbing tools and materials and you need to be a part of it. If you take my blog, for example, it’s very popular, but it’s not in the top 100 on Technorati, nor do I want it to be. All I really need is for fi ve or six CMO s a year to see my blog. That’s my real audience, five or six people.
Since your days as a publisher, how has the media world changed and what does it mean for advertisers?
It has changed entirely. For example, when I was a publisher in the 1990 s, I would have to wait a whole month for a new issue of Wired magazine. Now, they have about 200 new items online every day. And they publish it as it happens. But marketing and advertising hasn’t advanced as fast as the delivery mechanisms [the media], or matured as quickly as the consumers of that media. We’ve placed the audience in this highly interactive and highly immersive environment and we’re getting similar results because we haven’t fi gured out yet, as advertisers, what the new models for marketing and PR are.
Are we still transferring our traditional media habits onto the web?
Yes, and I don’t like that. Let me illustrate the point by talking about publishers. [Some] newspapers and magazine publishers copy and paste the print article online. As if the only form of publishing is the one we use in the traditional world. That’s crazy. But then you have magazines like Business Week that will do podcasts on the cover story. They’ll interview the editor of the story, tell you why they decided to talk about this topic, maybe play the audio interviews used to create the story. That to me is smart integration. When I see the trouble publishers are in, to me it’s very simple. It’s because they publish their articles from the print edition online.
In the book, you also talk about how businesses need to create an entirely new business model if they want to succeed online.
Let’s stay in the publishing industry. Say we have a magazine and we decide to do a podcast online to complement the article in print. How do we monetize that? Most people resort to old habits, by adding a pre-roll, for example. What we have to do is fi nd completely new ways to advertise. For example, my publisher could sponsor the podcast version of this interview.
Or we could go to Amazon and ask them to sponsor this audio version. Take Craigslist, for example.
It’s free classifi ed ads, but still it’s worth over $500 million . The business model Craig Newmark uncovered is charging only for real estate listings and employment.
People are willing to pay for that. The other stuff is only traffi c builder. The new models will look odd at fi rst, like free classifi ed ads. But this idea is literally bringing the newspaper industry to its knees.
