No surprise, but the economy is taking its toll on media of all kinds.  The NY Times Media has announced 51% decline in profits and is teetering at the precipice.  That venerable institution has started my Sunday mornings ever since I can remember.  It would be a tragedy to see it go, or even cower in a corner.  Techcruch is keeping tabs on the layoffs (which seems a bit goulish, but oh well) as VC’s encourage getting lean and mean early.  Below are a few tips for all marketing and media professionals to help get through this:

1.  Stay positive.  I know, sounds like PollyAnna but you can’t make good decisions, either professionally or personally from a position of negativity or fear. 

2.  Double down where you are. And prepare in advance.  Bill Sanders of RealBranding did a fabulous 2 part post on this.  Read it.  All of it.

3.  From a media buying perspective, think globally.  Within the enterprise can you counter the tendency to silo and cluster as many departments together as feasible?  Walking across the aisle or cubie, you may find opportunities to consolidate objectives or at least spends and get much better pricing for any media.

4. Also from a media buying perspective, think long term.  If you can possibly forecast 2 – 4 quarters out and make even minimal commitments, you can command much better pricing.  The market is soft and softening.  Take every advantage of it.  We are pounding on pricing and not-so-subtly-nudging our clients to make even the most conservative of commitments past a single quarter and have been able to negotiate some great deals with this strategy.

5.  Work your customer base, current assets, and tried and true marketing activities.  Are you sure you know where past successes have been?  I’m amazed at how many companies minimize the analysis of all aspects of past campaigns for the sake of trying something new.  Can you put a new headline on previously used email copy, rework the abstract to a white paper so it appears fresh, and save money on creative?  Are you contacting your current customers often enough and with cross-buying opps?  Are you sure you have captured all of your customer base?  Does the training dept, or HR, or tech support have pockets of folks that aren’t consolidated on the main marketing database.  Revisit your in-house email strategies, Newsletter schedules – CRM is the cheapest and most responsive marketing method their is.

6.  That said, don’t stop marketing, and don’t stop testing – even modest testing.  You will still need to find new opportunites when the old successes tire.

Above all stay connected – to your family, your peers, to your boss, your agencies, to your professional network and keep talking.  Web 2.0 and social networks were never more important than they are now.  Collaboration will trump isolation any day.

As you may recall, we have yanked cable, and not even turned our TV on since the beginning of September, except to view the occasional movie.  We aren’t even missing it.  We are online for news and entertainment, and the kids have jumped into YouTube in a big way.  You knew?

Looks like we are not the only household.  MarketWatch did a story on just this phenom:

I recently gave a presentation on the how and whys of using Web 2.0 to a group of senior fundraisers from the Association of Fundraising Professionals.  It was one of the most gratifying and warmly received I’ve done in a long time.  I think the fact that it was targeted to this particular audience and was a step by step was just the introduction that was so sorely needed.  Here is the presentation itself: