A world of search (or a world of hurt)

Disclaimer: the future of automotive journalism isn’t exactly the most important thing in the world. Consider the increased rates of global warming, or continued, conspicuous consumption in the West, and a bunch of fat, balding men fawning over the power delivery of a Chevrolet Camaro doesn’t seem too important.

Some food for thought: with the decline of newspapers (and magazines) well noted, and that decline attributed to the fact more people are getting their information online, automotive writers are facing a shrinking audience from traditional outlets.

But wait…there’s more: automotive ad spending in print — the stuff that keeps automotive magazines and newspaper sections in business — is in decline, while online ad spending has increased. Forget that two American car companies are on the brink; car sales across the board are down, down, down. So it’s a game of cost-effective marketing. Do ad buys target the back cover of (not-so) Autoweek, or do they spend the money on creating an effective social media campaign using mostly free tools like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr?

I’d hire an intern and have them manage the social media campaign, if I was an automaker. Actually, the Nissan cube is being marketed in Canada with just that strategy — minus the time-wasting, Vice-reading intern. Nissan’s campaign has created incredible online buzz for the cube, following — exactly — the first rule of marketing: target the early adopters, with the hope they spread your message to the rest of the curve.

The past, and fast

Marketing cars to early adopters used to be simple: the early adopters were the enthusiasts bemoaning Riverside Raceway’s destruction, or swaggering through “All-British” swap meets, wearing Lucas: Prince of Darkness T-Shirts. You know, the guys who worship the unflappable three-tyred auto journalist foundation of Peter Egan, David E. Davis, and Brock Yates.

As the page counts of Road & Track, Car and Driver, Performance Car, etc. swelled, it was directly in proportion to automakers wanting to woo the automotive early adopters.

Print is easy like this: You have news stand sales, and you have subscribers. Because you deliver to your subscribers, you know where they live, and have a rough idea of what they like. (And your salespeople naturally sell ads based around who and where your readership are.) News stand sales sell copies — and you can track what regions sell the most — but it’s better to have a subscriber.

That’s why when you open up a car magazine at Barnes and Noble or Chapters, you quickly find that the issue has been stuffed with annoying little cardboard subscription cards.

Google is the web, sort of

The Internet is different for a number of reasons, but mainly: distribution is almost completely flat. I can tweet, publish photos, write, or have a story published in print about the same vehicle, and all of it ends up on the web. If you search for “kia soul, banovsky” (without the quotes), you’ll find that the first page of Google results is not topped by what was published in the largest-distributed media company of the lot (the Toronto Star), but by a blog and a photo sharing site.

If we leave my ego out of this and just search for “kia soul” (including quotes), the first page is populated not only by Kia’s official vehicle site, but by professional reviews of the vehicle, a smorgasbord of vehicle photos, user-generated content, and advertising targeted exactly to my search and geographical location. And while the oldies will cry foul, saying, “People want to read professional reviews and a lot of the stuff on the web is just uninformed people and their self-serving opinions,” web users without a clear direction will always gravitate toward the search results at the top of the page, whatever it is.

So here’s the next lesson: want to be more important? Be more searchable. Google algorithms are the subject of much debate, but there are ways to improve your search results as an automotive “journalist.” Especially if you’re a freelancer, you’ll want your personal blog or portfolio to rank higher than the publications in which you’ve been published. Why? Because you control the content and how it was published.

If you’re really smart, you’ll start reading about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) marketing, and think of how best to get your material out there. Why? Well like I said, content distribution is almost flat on the web, and your reviews, photos, quips — whatever — will be competing with other writers, as well as vehicle manufacturers, enthusiasts, bloggers, disgruntled owners…

Monkeys and typewriters Bluetooth keyboards

It’s like the old saying of a how a million monkeys typing randomly on a million typewriters would eventually be able to complete the complete works of Shakespeare… But I bet they’d author a Jeremy Clarkson review before that. Every time someone types F-o-r-d onto a web page and someone else types F-o-r-d into a Google search box, there’s a chance the former will influence the latter — whether or not it’s in reference to a review, a deal on an oil change, or whatever.

And who is to say my review of a car should be read any more than an owner’s review of a car? Or a recall notice? Or the latest financing deal? Believing that the web will point people to your content because you’re a professional is pretty arrogant, and possibly career-curtailing.

Despite the increased amount of competition from everyone and figures to prove that more people are consuming more news on the web, there can’t be room for everyone reporting on the same stuff, on the Internet. After all, how do you attract advertisers while rocking a low hit count? Or perhaps persuade someone to purchase banner ads that people are ever more adept at ignoring.

The final nail in the coffin of thinking: “just being on the web is good enough”? If your content is available via an RSS feed, readers have the option to not even visit your site, your fancy front page with all the image gallery goodness, or use your carefully-constructed search boxes. There are even Firefox add-ons to identify the ad spaces on a page and strip them, so that your reader is never subjected to “your” ads.

Light at the end of the fibre optics

There are partial solutions bubbling to the surface, like Motormouths.com. Motormouths “reviews the reviewers” to not only give people an indication of how credible an automotive writer is, but helps average out scores for individual vehicles, so people can see how something has scored. This is positive because it puts writers and most reviews in once place so people don’t have to fight through pages of Google search results. It also exposes readers to sites they may not have heard of. (I refuse to believe every car shopper knows 1/100 of the automotive review sites out there.)

It presents two problems for automotive writers, though. Again, Motormoths links directly to reviews. Which is great — and how the web works, after all — but you have no easy way of exposing your new readers to other parts of your site. The other problem is that credibility is measured by owners of a specific vehicle. If I shelled out $10 on something, it’d be the best thing since sliced bread. More than $40,000 and saddled with payments for six years? Objectivity, out the window.

There is some advice I can give you: write what you know. Remember those targeted ads? To the early adopters? Well advertisers, search engines, and your readers are coming toward the conclusion that quality, targeted content is just as good as a huge following. On the web, it’s better in most cases to fill a niche than to wallow in a void.

Autoblog and Jalopnik do news well. Edmunds Inside Line and Cars.com do reviews and features well. But there’s Motherproof.com for moms, Gaywheels.com for homosexuals, and Askmen.com for metrosexuals. If you speak Spanish, write about cars in Spanish. If you know a lot about vintage racing, write about that.

You won’t need a million visitors per month, because you’ll have a much more dedicated following who is interested in what you say — after all, you are one of them. Seth Godin talks about this as building a Tribe, and some of my favourite websites prove the point perfectly.

7Tune.com, SpeedSportLife.com, JapaneseNostalgicCar.com, and PaulTan.org would not exist as print publications — but they’re brilliant websites. The Car Lounge and the H.A.M.B. would not exist as anything other than automotive forums. The web has simultaneously given people — at very little, if any, cost — the ability to create a niche and to allow others to find and contribute in that niche.

And do you think advertisers won’t respond? Wrong. Google AdWords, for instance, can be drilled down by an advertiser to their exact audience, as long as their potential customers belong to a niche. Buying ad space to sell grilles for ‘57 Chevys is much easier when there’s a website devoted to just ‘57 Chevys, after all. If I was Toyota, I’d much rather buy ads for the Yaris on a site geared toward hatchbacks, small cars, or fuel economy, because the people on that site are interested in attributes my product has.

I’ll end things there. But remember, if you’re serious about automotive writing and putting food on the table, it’s not enough to have your work published in the Saturday paper every week.

The future of automotive journalism is bright, as long as you don’t mind competition from everyone else with an Internet connection and a keyboard… (And especially from manufacturers themselves.)

So what are you waiting for? Get reading:

• Measuring online reputation
• Google in the middle
• The pace of innovation in journalism
• Drop in newspaper circulation accelerates
• How Google stole control…
• “Car magazines suck. Which sucks least?”
• Reinventing journalism on the web