Blended (paid-owned-earned media) Communications Campaigns Handicapped by Internal Obstacles

Altimeter conducted a webinar on converged media last week that was excellent.

Analysts Jeremia Owyang and Rebecca Lieb walked listeners through a session on POE (paid-owned-earned) media that highlighted success factors.

Based on our experience executing blended campaigns, I thought there was one area that deserved more attention during the webinar –

Fiefdomville.

This is the practice by those who lead one slice of the marketing effort – and control the budget for that slice – to not play nice with those outside their area of responsibility.

As a general rule of thumb, the bigger the company, the more you see people playing Fiefdomville  (I should trademark before Zynga gets any ideas).

Power.

Politics.

Control.

Jealousy.

Like a Johnny Cash song, they all come together in the game of Fiefdomville.

Even silly pettiness can a wreck a campaign.

Here’s what I mean.

We developed a blended campaign a couple years ago for a client that integrated the following elements:

• Landing page
• SEO
  • Link building
• Storytelling (content)
• Guest posting
• Twitter
  • Giveaways
• News releases
• Posted comments
• Media outreach
• User-generated content
• Facebook
  • Focus on universities

The implementation phase went fantastic … with one not-so-little detail.

The client’s Web team was not pleased that our work overlapped into its fiefdom. To demonstrate their displeasure, they refused to add the right two-word phrase to the title tag which came from the keyword taxonomy based on research and analysis.

So the long-term goal of an evergreen destination and increasing organic search from this particular phrase was never fully realized.

Back to the Altimeter webinar, Jeremiah and Rebecca shared several real-world vignettes involving big names like Intel and GE.

They’re impressive and the decision by Intel’s Nancy Bhagat to merge social media with the global media team sounds downright radical.

But I still believe there’s a massive opportunity for smaller organizations to lead this #POEmedia charge.

They have the intrinsic advantage of no or little Fiefdomville being played.

Note: The full Altimeter Group report on converged media can be accessed here.