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Be Actionable, Tell Stories and ‘End With a BANG!’ ACS Wins With Innovative Communications Guide

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It’s interesting that the 2022 Gold EXCEL Award Winner for Best New Innovation (C&EN’s How to Sell Your Science: The Art of Science Communication) focused on reaching audiences—given that our Editorial Council meeting this week also focused on getting our words out to our audience. As usual with any American Chemical Society product, there’s a lot to learn from how they did it.

“I will never forget the phone call I received from my mother after she opened an electronic copy of my dissertation… Before I could even bring the phone to my ear, I could hear my mom’s deep belly laugh as she cackled, ‘Katie, I don’t know what any of these words mean.’ ¶ I was completely speechless. ¶ How could she not understand?”

Those words came from Kate the Chemist—Kate Biberdorf, a chemist, science entertainer and professor at The University of Texas—at the beginning of a special guide from American Chemical Society’s Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) titled How to Sell Your Science: The Art of Science Communication. The guide, which was part 3 of their email course and won a 2022 Gold EXCEL Award for Best New Innovation, attracted 408 subscribers from 49 countries in just the first two weeks.

Biberdorf goes on to say that given the chance, she would’ve sent a different email to her family telling of her exploits—explaining how her research was used, highlighting her “favorite part of the results,” and sparing them the entire 400-page document.

It was a warm and wonderful way to start this essential guide. Let’s take a look at some of the other things that C&EN got right here. Congratulations to Dorea Reeser, executive editor, for heading up this initiative. (Nominations for our 2023 EXCEL Awards open on Nov. 14.)

Offer a simple sign-up page (pictured above). The only answers people need to give are name, country, email and profession or student status. And their descriptive paragraph is brief (85 words) and to the point: “Science communication is the job of every scientist, and C&EN’s 6-week guide is here to help you communicate your science effectively to audiences, including those outside of your area of research.”

They didn’t overwhelm and made it personal. People could sign up “at any time” to receive the guide and one email per week (on Thursdays). The writers were all science communication influencers “that represent the diversity of our audience, and the tone is personal and inspiring through the anecdotes and advice they share.”

Brought in revenue. The guide was part of four email-courses that generated significant revenue in advertiser underwriting, allowing C&EN’s sales team to price and sell branded versions. Even the sign-up page has a thank you ad for funding support from the Genentech Foundation.

It’s solution-oriented and looks to connect scientists with their audience. The guide “provides advice on topics that are important to scientists, including how to sell your science to your friends and family, create an engaging research poster, give an engaging research talk, get your science in front of journalists, win research funding, and create a website to showcase your work.”

Practices what it preaches. The four main tips it offers are: Start with the big picture; tell them why you care; introduce the science; and end with a BANG! (their all-CAPS). “Leave on a high note.” At the end of the guide, they do what they say and offer this advice: “And if all else fails, blow something up. It works every time.”

Used social media well. They leveraged the social media reach of C&EN, ACS, ACS Education and writer accounts of science communication social media influencers. (Kate the Chemist’s alone must be HUGE – my all-CAPS.) On his LinkedIn page, writer Fernando Gomollon Bel posted this: “I’m super grateful to Dorea and Linda at C&EN for having invited me to this wonderful initiative! If you’re interested in #scicomm and learning how to speak about your research to new audiences, check it out! It’s a totally free subscription, with tips and tricks from several experts in #communications. 😊😎”

They give advice and actionable takeaways… “Tell them why you care. This is your chance to humanize the science and transfer your passion about the material.” “Think of yourself as a popular TikTok star and keep the science short and sweet.” “People are more willing to listen to you if you immediately connect the science to their everyday lives.” “Give a clear, one-sentence summary of the science, and do it as passionately as you can.”

…And warnings. “If you slip up and find yourself going on a tangent about quarks, forgive yourself! The most important thing is that you are out in the real world engaging in conversations about science.”

 

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‘Our Biggest Investment Is in People’; a Q&A With Breaking Media CEO John Lerner

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This is the first in a series of BIMS 2023 Speaker Q&A Previews. We hope you get a taste for what these speakers will deliver IN PERSON on Feb. 23-24 in Orlando and choose to join us. Register here for this much-anticipated summit event! 

Last year, John Lerner, CEO of Breaking Media, spoke about their amazing 50% growth during the pandemic: “We are doing a lot of content marketing programs. We added really strong editorial teams.” It was good to hear content given such royal stature. We caught up with John, a speaker at BIMS 2023 in February, to ask him about digital advertising and how best to maximize growth.

With the Business Information & Media Summit (BIMS) set for Feb. 23-24 in Orlando, our director of programming and development, Tony Silber, has embarked on a new Q&A series featuring some of the incredible speakers we have lined up. In the weeks ahead, we’ll publish one or two brief Q&As every week, each of them zeroing in on a specific topic related to sessions at the event.

Last year, given the times we were still in, Lerner spoke a lot about the online experience, giving customers “the opportunity to run their own native content (labeled as such) intermingled with our editorial content.” And how customers want to be considered thought leaders in their space.

In this first installment of this BIMS series, Lerner moves on to talk about digital advertising and what’s needed for growth to continue.

Tony Silber: Given the macroeconomic uncertainty, what’s your sense of the digital advertising market for 2023?
John Lerner: The conversations with our customers regarding 2023 are focused on ROI and strategic hyper-targeting. There is obvious trepidation about the economy, but at the same time, many feel this is an opportunity to gain market share. Just as digital focused on ROI was an efficient way to market during the pandemic, we feel that this trend will continue moving forward as marketers can see the results of their digital media spend in real-time or close to that.

What are the media products most in demand by marketers?
JL: Any marketing solution that leverages first-party data and/or contextually relevant content is in high demand. We get a lot of feedback that marketers are fed up with waste. This applies to the entire marketing funnel, even at the top. We are laser-focused on targeting appropriately for all marketing programs.

What kinds of tech support do you need to maximize growth?
JL: We continue to invest in people, processes and tools that allow us to track, segment, deliver and report on targeted-marketing programs. That being said, this only works if we have quality editorial coverage of the markets we serve. So at the end of the day, our biggest investment is in people.

Where do events fit in the marketing mix going forward? We know that dollars pivoted to digital advertising in 2020 after events were cancelled.
JL: We feel that events have really segmented into two categories: trade shows and niche boutique events. Each market will support 1-2 large trade shows, but I have heard many marketers are still evaluating ROI beyond the #1 show in their market. The highly focused boutique events offer an opportunity for more networking, and we feel these fit well with highly targeted digital media.

Thanks, John. Looking forward to seeing you at BIMS!

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‘Habit Is More Important Than Intensity; Study Offers Keys to Reader Retention

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“Habit is more important than intensity,” said Arvid Tchivzhel, managing director of digital services at Mather Economics. “I’d rather have someone read one article a day and come back than someone who reads six articles at a time and doesn’t come back for months.” A recent study offers ways to help your readers say, “I’ll be back.”

Last year, Tara Lajumoke, managing director of FT Strategies, said that “if 2020 was ‘the year of subscriptions,’ 2021 [was] ‘the year of the light readers.’ It’s therefore worth investing in big drivers of engagement for loyal and casual readers—on the homepage, via newsletters and recommendation engines—and developing non-news propositions, so that those who come for the headlines will stay for the podcasts, or the crosswords.”

An article earlier this year on Medill’s site reported that “regularity is more important than intensity” when it comes to subscriber/reader retention. Analysis of millions of page views by digital subscribers of a business weekly for 6 months in 2021 showed that “having readers who read more often is 10 times more important than having them read more articles.”

“This research is significant because it shows the key to success in keeping readers is building habit, whether you’re a general interest metro daily or a weekly business publication with a more upscale audience,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean and John M. Mutz chair in local news at Medill. “The formula is the same. Do things that regularly lead readers back to you.”

This may not be breaking news, but it’s still vital to note. Here are more strategies, based on the findings:

Focus on your loyal readers. Medill advises downplaying breaking news for “a balance of content that attracts your most loyal readers, the ones who will subscribe… Put the big photo and headline on the content that serves most of your readers.” Add a newsletter to address the specific, high-traffic niches, they urge. They also recommend using “teaser” links to related content at the bottom of stories and, even for this political publication, links should also go to “real estate or healthcare news because of the synergies between those readership areas.”

Initiate a comprehensive “onboarding” process for new subscribers. It should include a set of messages highlighting exclusive content and website navigation, said Michael Silberman, senior vice president of strategy at media consultancy Piano. He also recommends emailing daily round-up newsletters to subscribers and making sure that the content that drives frequency is highlighted. “Putting all those pieces together is really important,” he said.

Experiment with additional content areas. “The analysis found that articles about restaurants and dining ranked in the top four areas of page views by prospective readers, those who visit the website but aren’t yet subscribing.” Tchivzhel said that makes sense because it’s an affluent audience. Experiment with additional content areas—there’s nothing to lose. “We’re really trying to use the data to see how far we can expand our audience outside of traditional business,” the publisher said. “We see some potential opportunities if we put more resources behind those areas.”

Learn what topics drive your most regular readers. Stories about commercial and residential real estate resonated most for this business weekly. Second place went to a long-time political columnist. They were surprised that healthcare stories came in third, said the publication’s publisher, calling it a “something of a revelation. We know this is a big healthcare market, but we didn’t have a lot of data around how many subscribers are there because of that.”

Build up and market your popular writers/columnists. That columnist is “worth his or her weight in gold,” said Medill Spiegel Research Center research director Edward Malthouse, and brought in many subscribers they termed “political junkies.” Not surprisingly, they hired a second politics writer. The finding “affirmed some of our hunches and gave us more confidence about doubling down in those areas,” the publisher said. “This will help us refine some of our audience strategies around [converting] more casual readers.”

Find a habit your readers can latch onto. In what they called Project Habit, The Wall Street Journal also found habits to be crucial to reader retention, especially during the first 100 days after a reader had signed up. They found that “playing a puzzle had a more dramatic impact on reader retention than other actions the team had been promoting.” You start to understand why Wordle was worth so much to the New York Times. (Though I haven’t heard much about it lately.)

 

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‘Attacking the Creator Content From a B2B Standpoint’; Workweek Has the Write Stuff

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When Workweek began almost a year ago, co-founder Becca Sherman, a BIMS 2023 keynote speaker, said that “influential business content is no longer limited to Wall Street Journal articles or Gartner white papers, but also comes in the form of tweets, product reviews, YouTube clips, newsletters, and more… Workweek is designed to grant more opportunities…” Since then, they’ve been practicing what she preached.

Almost 4 years ago exactly, Hamish McKenzie, one of the three co-founders of Substack, told me this: “We strongly believe that in 5 years there will be a very obvious critical mass of people who will pay for content from writers who they trust. And it will be a mainstream, accepted part of the ecosystem. In the meantime, we have this induction period where people are figuring it out. This can work. People are learning how good an experience it is to be subscribed to an independent writer you love. We’re really focused on building that relationship—to get people interested in that model. We’ll keep looking for allies.”

Fast forward to today, and newsletters have become a huge part of the media ecosystem, thanks in part to Substack. And now other startups are taking that model and running some new steps with it. One of those is Workweek, a media company built around a roster of 21 newsletter writers. Workweek wants to grow name recognition for its talent, not itself.

“My goal over time is not for Workweek, the brand, to be front and center for the audiences of these creators,” Sherman, Workweek founder and CEO, said in an article on Insider last week. Instead, she hopes the company can grow individual media brands that succeed on their own, like Architectural Digest does under Condé Nast.

Sherman will be a keynote speaker at our BIMS event in Orlando, Feb. 23-24, speaking at a session titled, Here’s a Content-Centric Digital Native Who Wants to Remake B2B. Reading the Insider article and a couple other sources, some ideas stood out that I’m sure she will expound upon in February:

Establish a range of niches. Like Substack, which has 27 niches listed on their site, Workweek’s roster of writers, podcasters and social-media creators cover everything from fintech and healthcare to work talk, cannabis and climate tech.

Offer services to support the content creators. Workweek creates and run ads to help the newsletters grow subscribers. “In-house ghostwriters and meme-makers” take to social media to build engagement. An ad sales team works to bring in revenue for their newsletters and podcasts. The Insider article began with a story about a website the Workweek team created called Sunday Side Chicks to help one of their newsletters that was promoting a Sunday alternative food truck to Chick-fil-A.

Push the writers, “low-key” the company. This may be the new newsletter strategy. Workweek creators may not even mention their relationship to the company even though they’re considered full-time employees. Similarly, according to Insider, Semafor, the new news brand started by former Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith and NYT vet Ben Smith, designs its reporters’ bylines to look like headlines to bring them more attention. Here’s an example.

Being B2B may be their secret sauce. Workweek says it has 350,000 subscribers across its newsletters. A year ago, Substack said they had more than half a million. (When I interviewed McKenzie, they had about 11,000.) “No one’s really attacked the creator economy from a business-to-business standpoint,” said Rich Greenfield, general partner of LightShed Ventures, which has led their $7.5 million funding. “How do you best monetize thought leadership if you’re a creator focused on the business marketplace for whatever industry you’re in? And how do you scale that business? It’s really hard to do well on your own.”

Diversify revenue. Workweek is also getting into events, merchandise, and pay-to-download publications. According to Insider, they project that less than half of their October revenue will come from advertising. They also announced at the beginning of the year they’re launching a $10 million venture fund to invest in businesses brought in by the newsletter writers. Smartly, they’re also operating a job search and recruiting business that goes to those writers’ email lists.

Give back to the talent. Writers also get some cut of earnings generated from their work—from sponsorship revenue, events or merchandise sales. (The chicken website tee-shirts sold well apparently.) “Every dollar that we drive from a creator’s brand is shared back with a creator,” Sherman said. “Too often, executives and operators take home a lot off of the back of the people who are creating a ton of value. We try to really flip that model here.”

By February at BIMS, Sherman will be able to tell us much, much more about their progress, strategies and outcomes.

 

 

‘It Can Really Make Information Come Alive’; Neal Award Winners Talk Power of Data Journalism

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Data has become a focus of many B2B media organizations and will be one of the many focuses for BIMS 2023, Feb. 23-24, in Orlando. “The stuff that is going to really set your journalism apart is learning how to [use data] on a day-to-day basis in your stories and getting story ideas,” Winsight’s Jonathan Maze told us in a recent Editorial Training Session.

“It’s important to remember that data only supplements a report, it does not replace it,” said Maze, Winsight’s Restaurant Business editor in chief. “You have to still talk to people, you have to get the lay of the land, you have to make sure you’re sourcing right and that people can help you provide proper information.” (Winsight and Maze won the 2022 Neal Award for Best Editorial Use of Data for Restaurant Business’s Top 500.)

Maze cited instances where “running data past internal sources found that the data was completely off or there was something wrong and it saved me. So it’s still important to cover your beat very extensively when doing these pieces.”

Data Journalism 101 co-presenter Todd Dills, editor of Randall-Reilly’s Overdrive Magazine and a multi-Neal Award-winner himself, backed this up. “Data is no substitute for reporting, but it can really make information come alive.” He pointed to a download they put together that showed a key inspection trend for the trucking industry. “One of the things that I want to point out is that when you’re reporting, you get great examples that illustrate a trend you’re seeing in data, but you also get the opposite. And it’s the exception to the rule sometimes that’s even better.”

Here are more insights from that session:

Find story leads. “You can find story leads and ideas simply by looking at numbers,” Maze said. “It also really helps provide context, which is super important. You can’t have a good story without really good context.” He also said that if you do not know Excel really well, you should take training on it. And he emphasized the positives of persistence and that just gathering data over time can eventually yield some big stories.

Prioritize mobile when it comes to visualization. “Generally speaking you’ll have to prioritize mobile at this particular point,” Maze said. “Because that’s where we’re getting most of our page views. So it’s super important that whatever you do has to work for mobile. If it doesn’t, you have to figure out a way to make it work.” Added Dills: “I totally agree [but] it’s not easy. We’re all sitting in offices working on this talk, and they look really great and then you go, ‘oh wait a second.’ This is not going to look [like this] for our guys that are behind the wheels of trucks out on the road. Datawrapper does a pretty decent job of accounting for mobile.” Maze said Instagram also works well.

Drive feature stories. Maze showed us a story he did on Crumbl Cookies. “It’s one of the hottest restaurant chains in the country. We have access to data from Technomics, our data arm. I crunched some data and found out Crumbl grew by 463% over the past two years, and we hadn’t written anything on it. I also got some franchise disclosure document data which is really important if your industry has any franchises. I found out that the average local Crumbl unit makes $2 million, which just selling cookies is actually really good. And I used that [and a podcast interview with the CEO] as a foundation for a story on why it was successful.”

Call companies out. Executives may sometimes overemphasize their success, Maze said. He pointed to a story he did on Subway, which liked to take a victory lap for sales jumps at its restaurants. But by going over the data, he found that 25% of its restaurants averaged a 26% decline. “Sometimes data journalism is just simple mathematics,” he said. “We did another story more recently on a pizza buffet chain and found some data that said it actually is not doing nearly as well as its competitors. Again, [data] helps you call out when companies are not necessarily giving you the full story. It helps provide proper context, [and that] is super important.”

Make the extra effort. “You should prioritize making that extra effort [with data] and making it a part of your routine,” Dills said. “Persistence is key. We do small stories with data; we do bigger ones in different ways that evolve over time. And, to this day, they’re still evolving so it’s pretty nice.” He also pointed to examples of crowdsourcing and polls that they’re doing.

Put stories in context. For a story on jobs, Maze saw that private companies hit pre-pandemic levels, but restaurants didn’t. So he went and got access to bls.gov (the Bureau of Labor and Statistics) to look at the historical data. “You could go to the tables to find your industry and very, very quickly find out total job growth in that sector,” Maze said. “I was able to find that the restaurant spaces were actually [thousands of] jobs short of where it was before the pandemic. That’s a pretty important story—that could be done in a day and just a few clicks—and helps put job growth in the restaurant space in proper context.”