Faster Future: Possibilities now and beyond: publishing

Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Collaboration vs Competition

Competition is often touted as the powerhouse of successful growth. Beat the market or sink.
The battleground/adversarial approach has even worked successfully within companies. Successive Governments have tried unleashing it on the NHS.
There was little collaborative about the way emap operated in its fastest growing years for example. That publishing company (where I spent 20 years of my career) housed several motorcycle magazines within one building. All they shared (apart from healthy contempt for each other) was a desire to beat each other. Journalists on the same titles would fight against each other to claim the glory of the best stories.
If they had to share anything it was more likely to be with a foreign title from another company altogether.
Despite what the collaboration canon tells us, from Harvard Business Review to Wikinomics, it worked. Spectacularly. For many years emap's growth made it among the most admired companies on The FTSE.
And others have either adopted the model or arrived at it independently - promoting the cut-throat over the collaborator, the I over the team, keeping over sharing.
And they think it works.
But I wonder if they kid themselves?
Success is relative. They may be doing all right but could they do so much better by adopting a more collaborative approach - aggregating and distributing best practice rather than hoarding the tricks that allow some to win as others lose.
Could collaboration allow more to shine instead of the competitive approach which results in someone in the shade for every shining light?
I do think the no-share model has a place: where it is vital that the various parts of your company have distinct cultures and generate distinct outputs then there is potentially risk in sharing.
In our emap example, if the bike mags shared their exclusives, their contacts, their leads, their way of writing, their picture choices - well they'd have all shared the same character. And it was the differences which attracted readers, allowing them to label themselves through the choices they made.
So perhaps let that be your guide? Where you want to deliver a consistent outcome (if you are all part of one brand for example) collaborate internally. if you need to be different, compete internally.
But even then collaboration can help. It can help you shape the processes you can apply to reach very different and relevant outcomes. One best-practice process can result in very different outputs providing the inputs are different
And of course you can collaborate externally too.
Just make sure you don't end up collaborating with the same folk your competitors are...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Privacy, permission and concern for the individual versus concern for the network

Data, published conversations, recordings of what we say to each other, call it what you will, ownership of what you publish online has long been fraught with complexity.

Traditional media companies kept it simple when they went online. They got you to agree that everything you publish on their site is theirs to reuse as they wish. They did it at sign up.

They've got a little greedy about this if most print news publications are anything to go by. From their repeated sourcing of quotes and stories from the likes of Twitter it appears they feel they can reuse pretty much anything you publish online.

They haven't sought your permission.

Neither do those companies who spider the web to gather and index what you say. Google, for example. And, of course the wide range of alternative search and social media monitoring tools.

Publish to the web and your default state is that your data is discoverable and can be reused for profit and gain by, well, anyone.

That's a truth. And it's one rarely considered.

Now, if you don't like that truth, you can opt out. You could set twitter to locked, Facebook to absolute private, tell google not to index your blog etc. Or just publish nothing online at all.

These are all options. And they are all actually more about permissions than privacy.

For example, let's imagine that when you sign up to use the web (at all, anywhere) you get the option to set your permissions.

Would you set yours at 'allow my data to be used by companies for gain'? That's effectively the default in the age of social media monitoring. If your data is discoverable it is discoverable by all. On or off.

If you're 'on' monitoring technologies can pick up what you say. There's nothing CIA about that. You can do exactly the same with some patience and a search engine. They can only track open conversations.

Then nice people like my company (90:10group) will slice, dice, analyse and interpret. And if the nice people we work with take the appropriate action and make change based on what they hear then you get better things, things that you cared enough about to want to publish to the web about. (This, by the way, is just part of what 90:10Group does, but it's the part that is relevant in this conversation).

Four groups just gained from your data:

The monitoring tool makers.

Companies like mine: which turn the data (your conversations) into something that can drive change - one to the benefit of both producer and customer.

The producer: Who gets to make a more efficient fit with the expressed needs of their customer.

You. You just improved something you care about.

But should we have asked your permission before we began the search?

My good friend Jonathan Macdonald believes so. And he makes his case very well himself so I will simply link to that here.

I don't object to the provision of an opt-in to this kind of data collection. Many people do make choices already to opt out via the methods I described earlier. The concern is the current internet-wide default that you are opted in.
We could tackle this through a big new 'opt out' button, or education, or by the insight industries opting themselves out.

But for myself I won't be opting out.

When I choose to express my metadata in public (ie publish online) I do so with the intention of connecting with others who care about the same thing I do.

I do so to join with others who may be trying to solve the same issue as I am right now. I do so because together we make things better.

The problem is more important than the individual.

One extra connection (node) doubles the number of connections in a network. It doubles the value of the network.

Which means when I limit the spread of my metadata I'm limiting the connections all of us can make and the value of the network to all of us.

And I'm all for the network over the node.

So maybe what all this does come down to is concern for the individual vs concern for the network.

Tough choices to make. But these are the realities of the networked world.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone so I may have to tidy it up later ;-)

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Publishers should abandon both paid content AND advertising to survive

I'm glad that some Murdoch publications are going back to the failed experiment of paywalls - if only because it will reveal once and for all how far from right they've got their strategy for the networked world.

I understand completely why they are doing it - they've done the math (I've been through it with similar orgs). With only small audiences who pay they can make more money than with vast audiences who don't.

That's because those who advertise online don't pay as much as those who advertise in more traditional mediums. There has been a race to the bottom on advertising pricing which made certain of that.

Mass media publishers have learned that they can't make as much money in the networked world (where everyone is publisher, distributor and creator of their own user journey/experience) as they did in the world of control. So, they are attempting to go back to the world of control (when that genie is well and truly out of the bottle and showing no signs of wanting to return to it).

Information is free. But the way it is packaged - the experience of it - you can add a price to. Music, for example is commoditised. People don't pay Apple for music at iTunes. They pay for the packaging, the user experience, ease of usefulness. If this is what the TimesOnline etc will deliver for news content, they may have a business case. I struggle to imagine the parallel myself.

And if all they are going to do is offer access to information in the way they have done until now - but behind a paywall - then they will lose. They can only ever offer access to limited information with limited sources and processes of verification (and trust creation). The rest of the open web is unlimited in both these key respects. Open wins.

But I think through all this publishers are avoiding the key questions. Why do people pay less to advertise online than they did in traditional media? Online the Times et al can acquire greater audiences, more eyeballs. Why isn't that of higher value than print to those taking the broadcast approach to advertising? More eyeballs = pay me more - surely? Why is an online 'eyeball' worth less than an offline one?

Is it that the many digital innovations in advertising that the internet has enabled has lifted the wool from many eyes? It has shown that an eyeball doesn't equal a sale. Never did. But when you are able to measure the lack of transaction, the lack of interest, the scale of your interruptive spam - as the internet has enabled like no other medium - then the wastage of 'Advertising' becomes ever more clear.

Yet publishers persist with pay-for-my-content/pay-for-adverts-on-my-content as their only experiment - as if the solution can only be one or other, or both. Perhaps it's time for them to try a new experiment rather than repeat a failed one? Perhaps it's time to try not one, or other, or both... but neither.

How can publishers create value if they do not charge for content and do not take adverts?

Micro-contributions? Nah - that's just paying for content by novel means (as was Radiohead's pay what you like for our album) Sponsorship? Nah - that's just placing adverts on my content, by another name. Affiliate deals - just another digital ad innovation.

What can they do? Start with the Because Effect. Don't try to make money with content, try to make it because of it.

Content can be the social object around which communities of purpose form - co-creating communities ready and willing to wikifix solutions with brands and organisations - instead of having them imposed on them and fed to them through advertising.

Publishers can become platform organisations: platforms for creating outcomes with genuine ROI rather than platforms for pumping out things people may find useful attached to ads for things they rarely do.

Pay for content/Place ads on content, worked in a world of mass production and distribution - of mass media. But a new 'neither' model is required in a world of niche, of communities of purpose, of active rather than passive consumers - in a networked world.

Platform could be it.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

No 1 in the UK; No 11 in the world

I came across this recently. A list of blogs in which FasterFuture emerges as No1 in the UK (No 11) globally.
|It always interests me; the lists this blog ends up on. What is pleasing is that there is never one type.

On this occasion it's a list of the '100 Top PR Blogs' derived from those in the Adage Power 150 ranking (which lists advertising/marketing/pr/marcomms types of blogs). As an aside, looks to me like Neville Hobson's blog is missing from the list - and that certainly sits higher than FasterFuture in the Adage rankings.

FasterFuture has also been ranked among the top 10 'publishing' blogs globally.

And it's currently listed in the top 5000 of all blogs (there are some 300m globally) by the up-and-down-o-meter that is Technorati. Interestingly I saw FasterFuture appear in Technorati's top 100 small business blogs at one point, not so long ago, too.

Marketing? Advertising? PR? Publishing? Business?

Yep, FasterFuture is about all of that.

In a converging world where (as David Bausola so nicely puts it) Mess is Lore, I'm happy not to fit comfortably in any centrally contrived niche :-)

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Video and slides: A new era for specialist media

As promised, here's the video of me presenting my keynote on 'A New Era For Specialist Media' at SIPA 09 (Online Marketing and Publishing Summit) in London, last week.
It's shot on a flipcam - and mangled to add to vimeo (at sub 500mb for almost an hour of video) so don't expect a TV experience!

Topics covered:
• Why the internet-powered long tail of demand is a disaster for traditional broad mass media models but a huge opportunity for specialists
• How fragmentation means you can never hope to target all emerging niche communities - and what you can do to counter that
• Why the control of content production, distribution and user experience is now in the hands of everyone - and what that means for publishers
• Why we need to think of specialist content as 'social objects' to discover where the ROI will come from when nobody wants to pay for content and no one clicks on the ads.

You can download a WMV version here. The link is bottom, right of that page.

Below the video I've placed the slideshare slides, so you can play click-along-a-david if you choose.
Thoughts and comments all welcome.

A new era for specialist media from david cushman on Vimeo.

A new era for specialist media

View more presentations from david cushman.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

A new era for specialist media?

I'm doing a keynote at SIPA's (Specialist Information Publishers Association) online publishing and marketing summit this morning. As is my custom, I like to share my slides beyond the silo of the room :-)

This is my brief, on the subject 'A new era for specialist media':

Media fragmentation and social technologies are opening the door to a new era for specialist media – find out how to adapt to a world of global mass niche publishing.

• Why the internet-powered long tail of demand is a disaster for traditional broad mass media models but a huge opportunity for specialists
• How fragmentation means you can never hope to target all emerging niche communities - and what you can do to counter that
• Why the control of content production, distribution and user experience is now in the hands of everyone - and what that means for publishers
• Why we need to think of specialist content as 'social objects' to discover where the ROI will come from when nobody wants to pay for content and no one clicks on the ads.

So, here here are the slides (below); hope you'll see a few #SIPA09 tweets (my guess) as we go.

A new era for specialist media

View more presentations from david cushman.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Media that publishes without a comment box, publishes broken

To corrupt a Clay Shirky phrase (a screen that ships without a mouse, ships broken):

Media that publishes without a comment box, publishes broken

That is to say I am somewhat amazed that there are still publishers, (even those who profess an open approach), who publish content without allowing the reader to publish back at them - to comment on their story.

It's an extraordinary attitude that says:

There, I'm done.
That's all you need to know.
All your questions have been answered - because I say so.
This is as good as it gets.
Me producer, you consumer.
Me expert, you little man/woman.
Nothing to be challenged here. Move along
Your opinion counts for zip

And it misses out on a great deal of crowd wisdom and value creation too. The social object that is the article still exists - the value of that gets removed to where the conversation flows.

And the originators would like a little of that value, right?
(image courtesy frangipani)

Friday, September 04, 2009

Top of the publishing pops (almost) - lucky no7

Nice surprise today: Si Alhir (an active and supportive member of this blog's community) shared with me an email he'd received telling him FasterFuture is ranked No7, globally, for publishing by BlogRank.

BlogRank claims its algorithms are better than anyone's etc etc. If you want to know more about the methodology try here.

What I should point out is that it only tracks 20,000 blogs at the moment. I'm sure there are plenty of worthy publishing blogs which should be appearing. Scott Karp's Publishing2.0 springs immediately to mind.

Anyway - we'll be happy with the No7 spot for now. Thank you magic algorithm.

Still happier with a personal recommendation from one person who cares to another one that also cares though, to be honest ;-)

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Come on out, the land is lovely!

On Friday I was asked for my thoughts on the UK Government's appointment of Andrew Stott as its Digital Engagement Director.

The reporter who contacted me said there was some concern that this node-connecting role, this leader of democratizing democracy and breaking down internal and external silos, should have some form of social media creds.

The most critical factor in success in social media is not having been CEO of Facebook or similar. It is being human. Andrew Stott most assuredly ticks that box.

But then, so do we all. (Image courtesy Webecho)

So what else might be helpful for the Andrew Stott's of this world?

I take a Darwinian view about success in the networked world - it is dependant on your adaptation to the new environment. And one thing is certain about adapting to an environment; first you have to live in it.

You have to flip your fishy self out of the receding waters of traditonal media (and traditional non-networked approaches to comms and value-creation, full stop), and try gasping for air on the edge of this new land.

You have to start developing the rudimentary stubby legs required - and adapt to breathing air - if you want to start leading others into this new landscape.

So, I hope Andrew Stott has been blogging away for years, learning the new ways of distribution and the epic fail of total control when making widgets. I have fingers crossed that he is Mr Two-Way Comms on twitter, where he is joining in the adhoc forming and reforming of communities of purpose on a daily basis.

And I look forward to bumping into him because surely we'll be expressing similar metadata at some point...?

You have to experience the biggest shift in communication and value creation since the printing press for yourself to have any chance of adapting to it and leading others through that adaptation.

Now, I can hear the stubborn old-school business bosses even now making the argument that you didn't need to be a book printer to understand the impact the book would have on society. You could academically dissect what was going on and predict what was likely. You could buy in a management consultancy to advise and you could make the right business decisions as a result.

Perhaps you could with books.

But the revolution of the web of co-operation is more complex, and arguably even more seismic, than Gutenberg's contribution. It is less mass and more niche. Less supply chains - more adhoc communities of purpose.

Long tails reach everybody and everything, hits don't.

The web of co-operation empowers everyone it touches. Broadcast media informs everyone it touches - in one direction only. The power flows in similar ways. The network is different - a web, not a chain.

If you could have had a stab at post-printing press rules for business success by analysing the supply chain of book publishing then for our latest revolution you must look at the shifts in who produces content, who distributes it, who controls the user experience, who controls the way in which people organise - to achieve any and everything. You have to think about all the twists and turns of the coming Eighth Mass Media.

In the eighth mass media we are the connections and how the connections are made. If you are neither a node nor a connector and have not experienced the value in bringing one extra node to a network (to a community of purpose) then I fear you'll struggle to understand how different life is up here on the dry land.

Looking with your fish eye from below the surface of the water you're going to get a very distorted view of this emerging new land.

To try to direct activity on it from under the waves seems a little optimistic.

Monday, April 06, 2009

Listening: expectations, realities and incentives

Now that we have tools to make everyone a publisher, a distributor and a marketer, many of those of us who employ those tools are raising our expectations.

When we publish we expect our voices to be heard by companies, organisations and brands we are publishing about - where-ever and when-ever we publish.

If we publish a moan about service we are coming to expect that service provider to hear us.

And we expect action, real change, as a result. (image courtesy josephgilbert.org)

But for them to even listen requires the employment of good listening tools and expertise (and many businesses have not tackled this first step) AND quite fundamental shifts in thinking.

They have to raise how they value what customers think and say to new, empowering, highs.

They have to see you as much more than their customer. Few have taken that leap.

So, often the power the citizen thinks they weild (and should be weilding) when they use social media to publish, lacks the effectiveness they hoped for and intended.

Their friends will hear them ( and that will hurt your business of course) but the intended receipients remain deaf to the message.

Two fundamentals about social media:

We want to be heard
We want to make a difference.

With these two notions we can start to build tools to connect more silo'd businesses and orgs with the citizens of the networked world in a way that brings value to both parties.

It's in the interests of the business because listening and responding to people who care about your products and services brings huge value for:

R&D
A/B testing
Marketing
Market Research
Reducing Churn
Recruitment
Etc (please do add your etc in a comment below :-)

And it's in the interests of the networked citizen because we want to be heard by the org to effect change.

Outward facing orgs are ready to reach out. Great listening tools and a willingness to engage with the conversations they discover give them their launch pad.

More inward facing orgs, those a little more disinclined to relinquish control, have a workable alternative:

Create and maintain a set of social tools around yourself where those who care about your products and services can interact one with another and with you.

Create a conversation-about-you portal; complete with an aggregation of related conversations-about-you RSS feeds.

If you build it, they will come? Perhaps. Some. But you will also need a listening strategy to find those who care.

And their incentive to have their conversation on your portal?

They want to be heard
They want to make a difference

Guarantee that and they may come. Dell ideastorm guaranteed that.

And to improve the value exchange still further, offer rewards for contribtions that do make a difference.

Make it so the people who publish and distribute and market where and when they like, see value in publishing about you to your face.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

The evolution of control: Coding is power

I had lunch with some of the guys from ThirdE yeT yesterday, and apart from business (I'm pleased to say I sit on the advisory board) we talked about something I think could be as revolutionary as the peer-to-peer publishing ability of the internet.

It all stems from a notion raised by Dom Penrice, one of the big brains behind the very interesting publishing model driving www.basedrift.com

Dom suggests the new owners of the means of production/control are not all of us (as you may conclude from the fact that we are all publishers now) they are, in fact, the coders. (image courtesy)

The ownership of the means of production has always been a pretty centralised affair.

Centralizing ownership meant centralizing control.

Way back when, The church owned the books and their production so it owned information. And that gave it control.

With the arrival of the printing press those who owned the means of creating and distributing information multiplied.

The result was new ideas spread more rapidly and were put into action faster, creating value for more and more people.

Or, the Renaissance, as it's otherwise known.

As industrialisation got swinging, and mass production started matching lowest common denominator needs, we developed faster and faster printing presses and distribution processes.

Cinema, radio, tv are all examples. Faster printing presses with ever broader reach.

Ownership of the means of production was still in the hands of the few though.

With the arrival of the Internet we all became publishers. Control of information was suddenly harder to make money from. Ask any traditional media owner.

Where once the ability to publish information (and therefore control it and everything reliant upon that) was scarce (and therefore valuable) now that ability had become abundant.

Publishing is virtually ubiquitous now. And almost ubiquitously virtual.

So a new currency emerged, a new scarce means of production: code.

Programmers now decide our experience and control our opportunities. They are the new press barons.

Except there are lots of them. Not ubiquitous. But lots.

So we've reached a new stage of control where more people (those with programming skills) have control, but still not enough for the true group forming value of the Internet to fulfil its potential.

How so? Well, just as an idea benefits from evolution, so an implementation.

If I share an idea, you will take elements of it that you find useful to share among your peers. Your feedback to me may benefit my version of the idea. Your evolution of it (with your next community of purpose) may make the idea a better fit for you and/or a better fit for the larger fitness landscape (the evolutionary model).

Ideas benefit from complex adaptive systems - such as peer to peer digital networks. The Internet.

They benefit so effectively from this today because our ability to publish our ideas one to another has become ubiquitous. We (pretty much) all know how to do this peer to peer publishing of ideas thing.

But far less of us know how to implement them when it comes to the coding and design.

And when an idea reaches that stage the evolutionary processes slow right down. There are too few people available to lend their skills to adapt code to make it a better fit for their purposes in rapid iterative processes of the kind we have for ideas.

Imagine if we could make it as easy to code as it is to publish.

Look what ubiquitous publishing has done for the production and exchange of content/information/ideas/

human relationships.

More content uploaded to Youtube in the last year than broadcast by TV ever.

Ubiquitous publishing.

Imagine ubiquitous coding.

That's precisely what Dom Penrice has in mind: finding ways to allow anyone to manipulate code, parcel up the value created and pass it on to the next person with shared need. The next person can then add their value to hone or reshape for their community of purpose. And so on ad infinitum with evolutionary processes amplifying or damping as dictated by the fitness landscape.

Dom's vision is that at each iteration those that have contributed get paid, feeding back, pyramid style, to the originator.

It is a supply web, networked world approach to programming and one which could be as revolutionary as the arrival of ubiquitous publishing itself.

ThirdeyeT are starting to put the idea of ubiquitous coding to practical effect in their new publishing cms. It allows them to change the design of their site (and not just reskin it) in two days flat - without the need for any specialist skills.

I know many a editor who would be very grateful of that.

In the days of the constant relaunch giving control directly to the people with the vision has to be a good thing.

We're all publishers now. All advertisers, all marketers.

When we are all coders, then the next revolution will begin.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

TwitterFriends - joining the dots

TwitterFriends. If you tweet, try it.
Twitter is a fantastic enabler of adhoc real-time self-forming communities of purpose.

Which means some connections are more important/relevant to you than others on a daily/hourly/by-the-minute basis. Some have more influence.

TwitterFriends helps you visualise that. The image here is just one of the many ways in which it cuts up and displays the data about the networks you share.

It's the kind of thing that has the potential to be really valuable in enabling the measurement of influence - something which is essential in empowering conversational marketing, but which also changes by the minute and by the interaction.

As I noted previously, measuring influence is complex (not complicated) it depends on:

Me sticking to my brief – you trust me to talk social media, future of publishing, impact of the power of the network etc. If I start giving you tips about horse racing you’re going to treat them with caution – at the very least.
I remain consistent: If I give you a series of bum steers my value to you will rapidly reduce.
2 and 3 can mix. If I start giving you horse racing tips AND I am consistently right – you’ll value this new aspect (I’ll even attract new communities of purpose as a result.
The result of 2 and 3 mixing can impact on those who followed me because of 1&2.
The value of my influence can only be measured from the receivers point of view – recommendation happens in the mind of the receiver.
My influence among those who are yet to connect with me, but have the potential to through meta data is somewhere between 0 and infinity.

The toolkit to make THIS work is coming together... TwitterFriends gives us a glimpse.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Measuring influence is complex, not complicated

An individual’s ‘grading’, ‘influence’, ‘fame’ or however else you wish to describe it is no longer about who gets the biggest number. It is all about relevance.

I outlined that in a chapter of The Power of The Network and you can also find the thinking here

I’m relevant to you if you’re reading this blog. So my influence may be reasonably high. But it only remains so if:

I stick to my brief – you trust me to talk social media, future of publishing, impact of the power of the network etc. If I start giving you tips about horse racing you’re going to treat them with caution – at the very least.
I remain consistent: If I give you a series of bum steers my value to you will rapidly reduce.
2 and 3 can mix. If I start giving you horse racing tips AND I am consistently right – you’ll value this new aspect (I’ll even attract new communities of purpose as a result.
The result of 2 and 3 mixing can impact on those who followed me because of 1&2.
The value of my influence can only be measured from the receivers point of view – recommendation happens in the mind of the receiver.
My influence among those who are yet to connect with me, but have the potential to through meta data is somewhere between 0 and infinity.

Complex, isn’t it?

I've explored this in a more detail on the BrandoSocial blog, which I'd like to introduce you to, right here, if I may.

By way of disclosure; BrandoSocial is where I work four days a week.

Monday, August 11, 2008

17 lessons for the new marketing

There's a question I ask publishing teams planning on building websites or digital services:

What do you do if you don't have any content?

It's a question aimed at editorial peeps, generally. People who have a pile of 'content' they see as assets. As publishers, when we go digital our first response is to consider how we should re-use/re-deploy that asset.

To do without it takes your thinking to interesting places. It's the kind of thinking that results in Google, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, networked solutions playing to the power of networks and the nodes and connections (that's us folks) who create those networks.

Bill Drummond's 17 project (picture by grewlike via flickr) is, I think, asking the same question; about music.

To paraphrase Bill, now that you can access pretty much all of recorded music ever it's lost its magic for us.

Recording music (particulary the hits) was and is part of the mass production/mass media culture that the broadcast world nurtured and sustained. But the emerging networked world has less need for it and places less value on it (Why Hits Must Have Less Value in a Networked World).

His 17 project gathers choirs of 17 people. Their creations, their output, their performances are never recorded. They don't even have an audience. They are a unique, relevent experience for those who take part. And this delivers a far richer experience than listening to a long-since recorded (and therefore closed and finished) piece of music.

The networked world wants unfinished symphonies. Participatory culture is leading us to 'us' as the eighth mass media.

Think of this in the context of social networks and how messages are spread, in which we compare how communities of purpose gather to share in the co-creation of messages, to the old broadcast notions of audience and static, controlled messages.

What Bill is doing is taking us to a place where music exists but isn't recorded. Music without content. Music of course, before the broadcast/industrial age was made by the people listening to it, or at best, experienced in a unique (one off) form by small groups for whom it was relevant (carnival dancers, wedding banquets, village feasts).

The grand orchestral pieces for whom an audience was required to sit listening politely (the precurser of electronic mass broadcast) coincided with the arrival of the industrial age. The first stirrings coincided with the printing press and accelerated as the age of mass production began to pick up steam (literally).

In the networked world we are wise to ask:

How do we publish if we don't have content?
What is music without recordings?

So, if advertising is to marketing as content is to publishing then we should also ask:

How do we market without advertising?

If you want to change behaviour but can't run a traditional ad campaign, can't come up with your 'on brand' message and broadcast and control it, what then?

Perhaps one clue to successful connection, successful relationships in the networked world is in offering/hosting/participating in unique, relevant experiences. Co-created experiences, shared with those we think will think its cool, too.

I don't suggest publishers shouldn't make use of the content they have. Nor should marketeers completely ditch their use of advertising. Advertising (even broadcast) has a place.

I do say publishers/marketers will make better use of content/advertising when they start from the premise that they should use neither. Use the idea as a tool to unleash your networked thinking.

The conversation on this one had already started, via twitter. But please join in by posting your comments below. When I floated an idea or two about this blogpost...

Richard Marshall asked: "Do you think it's important that the reader/consumer knows it's marketing or not? Advertorial versus content+ads?"

It's an interesting question because it reveals our distrust of marketing/advertising. We expect that the message from the centre is lieing to us (at the very least spinning the facts) and so we insist on warnings that we may be being played (eg we insist on transparency).

The new marketing should be less like traditional advertising in this way. If the message can be taken and adapted in order to be adopted it is being done so by people you trust - not by some distant third party (the brand?). If you can't trust your friends to be transparent with you - well that's perhaps down to your own choices - you can't blame the centre for that.

In the new marketing therefore the question of transparency, the need to know whether you are being marketed to or not is less relevant. Your friends (your social graph) are distributing their version of the message to you - and only if they think you will think it's cool, too.

David Bausola remarked: "Marketing is listening. Advertising is talking. Can't have one without the other. Did I just imply advertising will never die?"
Richard asked: "What do you call conversation between consumer and brand then?
And David came back with: Brands are deities not entities, so have to pray for help. Brands need to be nihilists so that people can prey on them
Seriously,people talk to each other. Brand has to inspire their conversation. How can Brand have dialogue when it's not an entity."

Looking forward to the discussion continuing... please add your thoughts below! Let's make this a shared, unique and relevant experience for those who wish to participate! Pass it on to anyone who you think will think it's cool, too!

Monday, April 21, 2008

Has media forgotten what it does?

It goes without saying (but I'm going to say it anyway) that paper has had a huge influence on the way print media developed. But I wonder if we take for granted the huge influence the medium we have grown up with has had on how we are viewing our digital future?

Paper is finite.

That simple fact leads to a number of outcomes. For example; there is a cost involved in adding extra pages to a publication. Paper constrains how much we can publish and therefore what we choose to publish. Paper demands that we are selective - that we edit. We filter the world's information and publish only that which we see fit. And then we make it fit, the way we see fit.

We filter on the way in.

We place ourselves in a self-selecting position of authority. It's a seat we find hard to give up.

We do this, of course, from a perspective of 'serving the needs of the consumer'. We aim to give them what they want. It is in our financial interests so to do.

But the needs of the consumer have to fight for resources with the demands imposed by the medium. And the medium tends to win.

Paper has mass.

This creates distribution challenges. We have to move this mass from one place to another (driven by an initial transcation). We do our best to distribute it to distribution hubs (we call them shops) where we hope the supply chain can be completed with another transaction (which puts them in the hands of the consumer.

These facts (paper is finite and has mass) mean we are forced to serve consumers as large, lowest-common-denominator-driven groups. Paper's physical nature imposes a structural limitation on what print media does and how it must treat its users.

It is conceivably possible that each consumer could have a magazine crafted precisely for themselves, to meet their precise needs. All it would take is a dedicated team of content producers (and in the print world this means employing a team of writers, photographers, designers and sub-editors), a one-off print run and a delivery direct to the lucky receipient's door.

There is nothing standing in the way of that. Nothing but cost.

If you're prepared to pay multiple thousands for each issue of your magazine you can have what the digital space can give you right now (where you'd get it for free). It'll just take a while to deliver.

Print never felt there was much of a market for that. So it created content aimed toward the lowest common denominator (granted, niche by niche on occasion).

It distributed to reach as many as possible with as little waste as possible - but still found 20-25% of its output pulped. The need to drive down unit cost make us err towards a mass production approach. It forces us to think locally, too. (Distributing a newspaper globally is something of a challenge precisely because of that mass and cost thing.)

Consider then how digital is different.

Digital space is infinite. There is zero cost attached in adding an extra page. There is therefore no need to filter on the way in. There is therefore no reason for us to be selective, no cause for us to take up our seat upon our self-appointed editorial throne. The user gets to filter on the way out.

Digital has no mass. There are zero costs to distribution. We don't need supply chains or distribution hubs in the physical sense. Distribution can be pulled to those who want it, distributed by those who advocate it. And it can happen everywhere right now.

Now you can have your ultra personalised content at zero cost - and you can have it this very instant, updated the moment relevant change occurs. It's unlikey you'll do this alone, because you are a human being and hard-wired to be social.

When we think of the role of media in the digital world, are we considering what is equivalent to newspapers and magazines (that is media properties) in digital form - or do we want to become the paper (the medium)?

Is the platform approach (and it's one I advocate myself) about trying to be the digital equivalent of paper? Bearing in mind digital 'paper' has no mass and is limitless, would we be better off delivering brilliantly creative media properties closer in form to user accounts than to social networks?

My initial thoughts are that we may may have multiple roles - as nuancers of the culture (helping with collaborative filtering) in a platform/aggregational style AND as brilliant media properties (of the user account kind) where we become part of the conversation, pulled into someone else's aggregator or platform.

Who says it has to be either/or? The digital world offers more dimensions than we've had to consider before.

Please contribute your thoughts by commenting below.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Mippin: Satisfying the long tail - extending the reach of the stumpy dog

Some time ago I asked for the moon on a stick.

Today I saw something which might not offer the entire lunar body, but I think it gets us into orbit. Mippin is in beta right now. Next week it'll be shown in public and go into public beta.

I was lucky enough to get a pre-preview preview, if you like - and VP, product management, Prashant Agarwal is happy for me to share. So go check it out for yourself.

It's the latest thing from Refresh Mobile - the former T-mobile management buy-out team which previously gave us Mobizines.

And it ticks a lot of the boxes from my moon-on-a-stick list.

As I said once before ...the fixed line net was initially grown by content providers of the mass industrial age, the mobile web will explode as a direct result of User Generated Content.
And because of the social nature of 2.0 I expect the growth to be exponential - and to dominate the way the mobile web develops in a faster and more pervasive way than we saw with the original fixed-line internet.
The long tail will wag the mobile internet dog more vigorously than it has the fixed line internet."

And I identified these drivers for the long tail to go truly exponential.

1. Really easy creation of mobile pages (on fixed line and on mobile)
2. Really easy ability to change the design to our tastes (and I'm thinking icons/desktop style as well as background colours and layout)
3. Ability to add and create rss feeds
4. Ability to add code snippets (ie YouTube video, google adsense)
5. Really easy share/ creator propogation (ie socially networked)
6. Enabled for social trade.
7. It has to be free to the site owner.
8. Option to offer as an application-based widget.

Mippin gets a long way along the route. It's really easy to create mobile pages (from rss feeds from your current content - your blog for example, or your website, if you are a publisher). So it also ticks number 3 on the list. FasterFuture is, of course, already available on it!

There are both sharing and rating functions (5) and community scoring edits the 'hits' you find on your portal home page.

Critically it integrates with ad services such as admob (or at least it will very soon) which allows the UGC creator to benefit from their efforts. The ability to monetise long-tail content was a huge driver for the explosion of the fixed web (eg google adsense, the most powerful widget yet!)

Mippin is free (that's no7) and there are plenty of widget plans (they've even got a bit of an in with facebook... watch that space).

This is Widsets on steroids. Where Widsets doesn't allow you to make cash from your rss feed in, the admob integration (Screen Tonic for bigger publishers if you prefer) means you benefit from your labouts.

And powerfully, while you have to download a client to your phone to make Widsets work, there's no need for this with Mippin.

How do they make their cash? Ads on the aggregated elements (users create their own portal of content they want to have fed to them, they get to rate it and share it too (though the share via sms function is too clunky at the moment - but it is early days).

There are no ads on the publisher's content - other than the ones the publisher selects AND which that publisher is earning cash from. This trumps the peperonity model, for example.
They take no revenue share from your arrangement with Admob, google adsense or whoever, either. They expect to make money from their introduction of your content to the likes of Admob. Which seems fine and reasonable to me.

In a nutshell, what Mippin does is allow individuals to create their own mobile portals of content they care about and rate and share that content.

Their marketing plan involves mobile ad campaigns of their own. It remains to be seen how effectively they can position themselves as your first-choice mobile portal.

The publisher (be it users creating their own mobile sites from their blog feeds etc, or publishers of bigger websites seeking to move into the mobile space) are simply extending their reach.

We shouldn't confuse Mippin with something which allows the creation of mobile-focused services fitting the 6Ms of mobile to perfection - as described by Tomi Ahonen (and those who attended Mobinar will be clear on these).

It also doesn't carry links from the original content, nor videos (though it does manage images from the rss feeds.)

What it does do is radically simplify the process of extending reach into mobile - and monetising it.

To publishers, I do not recommend Mippin as your long term mobile strategy - but it does seem an ideal quick fix to get you on the road and to use as part of your strategy. Create new mobile services alongside this - but perhaps use this to extend your reach and make a little revenue - free.

To those who are about to create the long tail - this is going to help a whole lot of shaking happen faster.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Does a straightforward transaction site need a social element?

As publishers start to work out that content (in and of itself) has little or no value outside of print, there's an increasing urge to shuffle along the supply chain.

There's also a growing willingness to understand that a disaggregated internet is best served by one trick ponies - sites/services which do one thing, but do that one thing better than anything else does.

This leads some to conclude that what they should deliver is a really good shop - a place that helps you make the transaction of your choice swiftly and efficiently.

This doesn't sound like the place for the socialised web2.0 - does it?

But a shop which ignores the attributes of 2.0 is a shop with a limited shelf life.

Why?
1. Consumers want to co-create. If your shop site doesn't allow the community of users to share their ideas about what it should sell, rate what is on sale, come together to propose improvements to what is on sale etc etc - you're locking out all the value of the network. Let members of your community pitch next year's ideas, rate them and shape them - and big up the things they love. If they score down some items - don't sell them. The community has spoken.
2. Two-way flow of communication beats the market: How do you know what your users want NEXT. The market shows you what they want now, and also what they don't want - but it can never tell you what next year's hit or miss is. Your community can - if you're engaged in a two-way flow. This is genuine 'consumer insight' based on real conversations with real people - not on generalised assumptions that "we know our market".
3. Convergence of buyer/seller/product developer/user/employee: If the employee and the user is converging in the concept of user generated content - the same can be said of communities of people trading together. eBay writes this large: The buyer and the seller converge. The buyer is also converging with the developer/designer (think BMW cars for a solid example happening now - the customer customises). This is a 3-dimensional version of a person - not a one dimensional "treat me as the customer... and only the customer" approach. In a 'shop' community environment one person can be a buyer/seller/developer/user/employee
4. Trust is communal: Trust is now created in a wiki-way. The social tools of 2.0 (eg diigo) make it ever easier for people to share what they think of a product or a supplier with their community, rapidly and in a way that is much more readily trusted by most consumers than old-style marketing messages. Sony tells you its PlayStation 3 is the dog's. The community tells them its made a heap of mistakes (1.1m views on YouTube of How to Kill a Brand 1.1m of PS3 vs Wii - apple style). How does your shop help the community decide what to trust?

4. The Social Customer manifesto (see recommended blogs, left) reads:

I can't see those boxes ticked by a shop front...

Conclusion: A shop site is just dandy - providing its a shop selling things the community rates, allows buyers to be sellers and designers, makes its offers spin free, opens doors to transparent two-way flows, and lets the community decide which products and or suppliers it is going to trust - and why. It's worth adding, that all trade has always been social. A one-to-one relationship ain't a business. A one-to-many is a trading community.

Create Social Bookmark Links

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

The future is startlingly similar to the present...

I'm intrigued to see what the wider world make of my most recent post on The Way of the Web.
My views on how editorial sites will be fuelled by user generated content have become more coherent over recent weeks. Certainly when it comes to text submissions, there seems to be a lot that suggests the new editorial model for many publications will in fact be very similar to the current set-up.
Anyway, I'd be very interested in hearing some more points of view, so get yourself over to The Way of the Web

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

If we keep repeating, they will listen....

John Audette, responsible for the Internet News Bureau, has chosen to share his 'Sweet 16' of things that have worked well in making successful internet sites...e.g. integrity, niches etc...

Most are probably pretty obvious to anyone schooled in the web, but they bear repeating...particularly when dealing with people who don't use/understand this wonderful "new" technology which is being forced upon them...

e.g. "The customer might not always be right -- but the customer always rules."

There are a couple which might not be so apparent, such as No 4..."Put the power of inertia on your side", No5 "Build scalability", and my personal favourite...No15 "Respect the power of the index finger"

An important note for print types:
" If you try to do business the old push way and simply focus on what you want and try to jam products or services down the markets throat, then it's bad. In fact, you don't have a prayer of succeeding."

The man talks sense. Read more at The Sweet 16

Monday, October 02, 2006

Media companies. Engage with yourselves!

Interruptive advertising, of the kind we most graphically see on TV, but which also populate our magazines (and fill our coffers) is offering rapidly dwindling RoI for a whole host of reasons.
The most critical is that people are fed up with the tone, hype, bullshit of ads - and are collectively switching off from them.

That has a message for the way we present editorial copy too - but that's another story.

What I want to discuss here is the 'new engagement marketing tools' (and whether or not you think they are actually new or just new variations on old themes ain't that important) and how publishers have to strive to offer these to advertisers.

Engagement marketing tools
( listed by Communities Dominate Brands - see recommended blogs)
1. Entertainment, info-tainment, Edu-tainment initiatives
2. Information Service brands for edited choice*
3. Audience activation via SMS text messaging, IM etc
4. Participation in discussions threads via blos, chat etc
5. Gaming, including sponsored gaming and adver-games
6. Real time community information
7. Previews offered to the community
8. Embedded sponsorship rather than 'passive' sponsorship
9. Managing multiple communication channels to that each target member is reached by his/her preferred channel
10. Activate through influencers and 'Alpha Users' **
11. Good will through volunteer evangelists
12. Word of mouth, viral marketing and 'buzz' to promote.

*Good news for consumer channels?
** See blog entry on Alpha Users vs Target readers below.

And if we don't get cracking and establish an expertise and a lead in this stuff - is there a risk that advertisers will just bypass us and our channels - and do this stuff for themselves? Direct to communities they find or help build? Almost certainly.

So ask yourself, what is your company doing to focus (really focus, not just set up a ghetto) to move this forward? How are you placing engaging communities at centre stage?

And how are you engaging with your customers, users or even your own colleagues? If you can't crack the community thing within the company, are you really ready to go external with it?

Does your company have a blog where all its customers are welcome to contribute ideas?
Boeing does - it's getting them to design aeroplanes.
Ford does. They are creating evangelists from having good conversations with consumers.

Maybe all publishers should have a blog where your communities are invited to tell you what they actually want from you? CreateYourPerfectMag.blogspot.com or MyIdealMobileContent etc?

If a community can design an aircraft, perhaps we could trust them to have some great ideas about media content/direction?

Sorry, that's a bit long and lots of different ideas perhaps. Your comments, as always, welcome. Your contributions, likewise (see top of page).