NOAN Knowns: Content, malcontents, and building a 90-minute wine business

ARE YOU CONTENT? - There is great discontent in the world of content.?Contenting users is harder than ever - even reaching them is getting difficult. Let's talk about that in our CONTENT edition.

WHAT'S NEW WITH NOAN

THE NEW NOAN - First, we're proud to have launched an all-new NOAN experience . Our AI-powered workflows are more powerful than ever, NOAN Creator is mind-blowingly powerful, and we've made a lot of additional changes under the hood to improve NOAN platform performance and make it even more secure. We've redesigned it to be more intuitive and instructive, and it looks better than ever.

The new NOAN platform will allow us add features and integrations more quickly and continue to upgrade the NOAN experience. This is just the beginning, we can't wait to bring you even more.?

WE BUILT A WINE BRAND IN 90 MINUTES - As an experiment, we built a wine brand using the NOAN platform in just 90 minutes. From conception to execution, getting NOAN WINE live took 90 minutes. We created the brand and strategy in the NOAN platform, used NOAN's guidelines to create a logo & imagery in Dall-E, and pushed all the content to a Squarespace website. Read how we did it here . Hear Neal explain the process here .

In under two hours, we had crafted a wine membership strategy, positioned the brand to target surfers, published the job description for our Head of Marketing , published a number of blog posts supporting the brand , and set ourselves up to capture leads and sell cases of delicious Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir. All we need now is the wine (but we are talking to local vineyards - watch this space!).? This is how easy it should be for everyone to make their idea a business reality.? Build and launch your next business during your lunch break with NOAN.

WHAT WE'RE WATCHING??

I READ THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY – Media is in trouble. Beyond that, much of media is dying. Streaming is struggling. Streamers are furious . News is in a tightening death spiral , every business model that it has ever chased has run away laughing. Everyone with a website that once used content to make them money is now struggling to get people to even come visit and struggling harder to get them to pay. Pageviews are scant and miserly .

“ Between 2005 and 2024, roughly three thousand newspapers in the U.S. have closed. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, newspapers lost more than forty thousand staffers during the same period. Two hundred and four counties in the U.S. now have no local news—high-poverty areas are most affected—and, by the end of this year, it’s expected that the U.S. will have lost a third of its newspapers.”

The headlines on the demise of news lament how technology has undercut the funding models for media and journalism, cheapening content and making the house of cards that is advertising revenue even more precarious.? ? It's partly true, but blaming shifts in technology misses the point and solves nothing. Human behavior has shifted. Media companies have largely failed to understand and adapt to those big behavioral changes. As behaviors change so do needs. As needs change so do desires. As desires change so does willingness to spend, and what people are wiling to spend on.? All of these things demand change by the people trying to sell the product - the media themselves.?But on the whole, they're not good at that.

That's not to say there aren't?media companies and individuals ?that are bucking the downward trend by serving their users' behaviors. They're going direct, or changing what they serve, rather than continuing to crank out the same ol' product and trying to 'innovate' around how to cajole users toward it or change how they deliver or charge for it.

It takes courage to abandon trusted models and try new things. Fortune favors the bold. Know your users, serve their needs, and listen to what they tell you about how those needs are changing. Some crazy fools are even turning a profit.? And of course, what even is a media organisation now? Perhaps this is a crisis of definition more than anything else.

It's well put by commentator Simon Owens - the money has shifted with content consumption behaviors. There is a huge media business, it just doesn't look like the old media business any more. It's a chaotic tapestry of podcasters and video creators and newsletter writers all serving fragmented audiences, pockets of a la carte interests and needs that were once bundled in a newspaper or TV channel.?

The crisis masks the opportunity. Beyond media, the great companies of today have either brought about behavioral change or have capitalized on it.

Nobody thought it wise to sleep on a stranger's couch until AirBNB. Nobody thought they'd buy an annual delivery membership until Amazon Prime. Nobody thought artificial intelligence could make top-tier strategic consultancy available to the smallest of companies until NOAN ??.

THE TAKEAWAY?

HOW NOT TO GO VIRAL – Content is in a weirdly defined crisis, AI is probably not helping, so it takes more work than ever to connect with and convert a customer. Many brands are looking to TikTok, the current hotspot for virality, to reach a new audience and find new scale.?

TikTok is obliging, trying hard to convert that currency into cash by becoming the home of eCommerce . Get TikTok right and the only problem you might have is keeping up with the orders, or so the current thinking goes.? Going viral on TikTok isn't a guarantee of success, and there are plenty of lessons (should you need any) showing that you don't want to go viral the wrong way.? Case in point: the ongoing feud between beauty influencer?Mikayla Nogueira and small business owner?Matthew Stevens, owner of his own bronzer brand. (The Buzzfeed writeup is here ).

Stevens apparently counts A-list celebs as his clients but felt his product had been ripped off by a major brand, and asked Mikayla to review his product and help him claw something back. She loosely agreed (no contract, mind) and Stevens invested $10,000 in stock, preparing for the deluge of orders that would surely ensue. Her review, and the orders, however, never arrived (she reviewed the competitor brand) and so began a nasty, and hugely viral TikTok feud that is exactly as dignified as you already think it's gonna be.

By the old rule of 'there's no such thing as bad publicity', Stevens has notched up a win - 25 million views later on TikTok, he's got a deluge of pity/support orders and is now back on TikTok apologizing that it's taking him so long to fulfil them .

True facts, though: nobody emerges looking particularly good. Mikayla seems like she's steamrolled a small business, favoring the brand accused of attacking it. Stevens, meanwhile, looks alternately amateurish and bitter. Influencer marketing is a real business. It's a professional, billion-dollar industry, something of which both parties here are well aware.

Stevens took a risk and made an investment on a half-promise from a stranger, without any contract backing it up. Initially it didn't pay off, and he took to social media to have a moan about it hoping the internet would take his side. The squabbles continue in the comment section, and the reviews are decidedly mixed, but he's lucky to emerge with his credit score intact. It certainly wasn't a sure thing.

What are the takeaways here? Unless you have an established relationship with an influencer, or otherwise have a reasonable expectation that they'll do what they say they're going to do, don't rely on anybody unless you have something in writing. And the general, perennial lesson on social media is to keep your nose clean. Don't get dragged into the mud. 'Never tweet' was always sound advice, even before Elon. Conflict on social media is something you simply can't control. Don't stake your livelihood on winning, you just don't know how it's going to go.

MAGIC NUMBER – Every loves feedback (see above ??). For brands the world over, their NPS score is a magic number, and one you should be familiar with. Your NPS boils down user feedback to a single figure, it's your basic single-number metric for how your audience perceives you.?

The internet will tell you that it was a creation of mega-consultancy Bain in 2003, but in fact it was... borrowed from Enterprise Rent-a-Car, a family business who first rolled out their version of it ten years before . ESQi (Enterprise Service Quality Index) became the single magic number that steered that entire business, and grew it enormously ($30bn revenue in 2022), and teams in Enterprise still celebrate it today .

For Enterprise, turning to ESQi pivoted their strategic focus from chasing growth back to ensuring customer satisfaction, which they always saw as their differentiator from their competitors, who squabbled for business in every airport in the world. Everything from 1994 on was viewed through that number, at every level. It dictated who got bonuses, who got promoted.

And it worked. A decade on from ESQi's introduction, Bain consultant Frederick F. Reichheld wrote an article for Harvard Business Review entitled 'The One Number You Need to Grow ' about his research into Enterprise's ESQi metric and lo, the NPS was born (and trademarked by Bain).

The moral? Keeping your users content is good business. Just ask Enterprise.

(Bonus trivia: Enterprise Rent-A-Car was named after the USS Enterprise. Not, not the Star Trek one, the WW2 aircraft carrier that founder Jack Taylor flew combat missions from, and from which Captain Kirk's famous starship also took its name)

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