Former Editor's Letter

Colin Kennedy is one of the big brains behind the very excellent ditto.net (disclosure, ditto is a Bauer Consumer Media project and one I'm glad to help out from time to time).

Ditto puts the role of the editor in the hands of the crowd.

Colin was once the editor of one of BCM's great magazines. Interesting then to understand his journey.

Here's the letter he's written to the Ditto community. You can find it on the ditto blog, too - where you can read it with all the links intact!

"In another life, I used to be a professional entertainment critic. At one point, I was Editor-In-Chief of Empire, the British movie magazine, and its website Empireonline.com.

"I also spent some time developing a new entertainment magazine, but before it even had a chance to fail something called web 2.0 happened – the crowd got wise, the long tail wagged, the world went flat etc. etc.

"In short, it became clear to even old hacks like me that the entertainment guide of the future would require a very different solution.

"For the last eighteen months or so, I’ve been working on how to create what we’re now calling a ’social entertainment guide’. A best of both worlds solution - an entertaining entertainment guide read by the masses, created and edited by thousands of experts (this means you).

"There are more revolutionary solutions to entertainment recommendations of course: toolbar widgets that can capture your taste or gadgets that can scan your desktop – some are great, some are Skynet scary. But I feel strongly that there is a still a role for the relatively old fashioned way: the best staff in the world, working on the best entertainment guide.

"This isn’t simple nostalgia. There are things that an algorithm simply can’t compute - like who was the greatest Bond villain. And there are things that a hard sell online shop has no interest in ranking, like what was the best album title EVER.

"These are the kinds of lists that give all the best magazines 'soul’ and we proudly carry on that tradition here because I believe accidental discovery to be the most thrilling of all. And because it’s fun.

"Ditto definitely has to be fun because (beyond eternal glory) there are few rewards awaiting those who contribute. I could wax lyrical about the ‘personalised recommendations’ we can make once we have profiled your taste and how hard our developers have worked to make contribution effortless, but honestly, the best reasons to vote on our lists is a) it’s fun and b) it really matters - on Ditto every vote counts.

"We may be a very small democracy at the moment but we are built to scale - our existing entertainment catalogues are huge and they are only the beginning. (Organising YouTube comes next.)

"So basically, we’ve got big dreams and little to offer early adopters, but at least we’re not the first: when Jimmy Wales asked his friends to write the first contributions to Wikipedia, I believe he asked. “Humour me”. That’s about right.

"I don’t know if it’s even possible to create a Wikipedia of personal opinion - miracles seldom happen twice - but if you ‘humour me’ for the moment I will personally promise to do everything I can to make your choices really count.

"Besides, the way I see it - sooner or later, someone will create a new type of entertainment guide that covers the best of absolutely everything - might as well be us.

"And if we don’t quite get there… well, we can always try again after ‘Web 3.0’ - the inevitably disappointing threequel."

Colin

What's next in media? The Dead Fish bounce...

Neil Perkin, who writes the very excellent Only Dead Fish and also does something at IPC, has been kind enough to credit this blog as one of the sources of inspiration for the presentation you can share below. Frankly to be placed alongside the likes of Seth Godin, Clay Shirky, Joseph Jaffe, Jeff Jarvis, Mark Earls, Don Tapscott et al is the highest flattery I can think of. Consider me duly flattered... and not a little humbled.
Neil says: "...the story here is broader than just media and a lot of what I talk about applies to marketing and advertising as well. Unsurprising I suppose. After all, advertising is but a form of content, no? I hope you enjoy it."
Absolutely Neil: Ad as content, content as ad. And where they converge, you get a service.
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You owe this to yourself

And we owe it to (via) Euan Semple.

If you've found this we're interested in you

Here's an SEO challenge. We're searching for a Search Strategy Manager. Kind of hoping that person has some pretty good rss feeds and search strategies of their own set up - so you've already found this.

But if you know someone who needs a nudge... well that's the power of the network so we'll live with that...

So assuming you are a Search demigod you're probably still reading. Good, because this might be right up your street...
(here's the official job ad bit...)

THE DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS IS JUNE 12, 2008

Bauer Consumer Media's Digital Marketing team are looking to recruit a Search Strategy Manager who will report directly into the Digital Marketing Director.

The key purpose of the role is to manage natural and paid-for search strategies for Bauer Consumer Media and provide leadership in associated digital marketing activity (linking, affiliate marketing strategy.) Key responsibilities of the role include the following;

Agency co-ordination and Management

• Management of digital marketing agencies to support our activity.
• Challenge and direct these agencies to deliver against a set of agreed KPI’s
• First point of contact with Account Management.
  
• Establish and cascade best practice and thought leadership into the business.

Management of Natural Search strategy

• Develop with agency a NSO plan, and project manage the implementation across technical, marketing and editorial functions.

• Manage business analyst responsible for technical implementation and ensure that technical changes are supported at a senior management level.
• Work with digital marketing and editorial teams to ensure that pages and content are optimised.
• Ensure accurate measurement of campaigns.
• Focus on optimising campaign performance
• Working with Digital Directors to ensure cultural changes are implemented.
• Ensure that learning’s from agency relationship are captured and put back into the business.

Management of Paid for Campaign

• Oversee total PPC campaign budget and work with digital marketing managers to ensure campaigns are delivered to agreed KPI’s and ROI
• Troubleshoot and manage key PPC campaigns
• Work with Digital Directors and Advertising to deliver PPC campaigns to deliver specific advertising/commerce inventory and objectives.

Thought leadership in search strategy

• Coordinate training and best practice seminars.
• Ensure that video, image, location optimisation are built into our marketing plans.
• Build a strategy to focus on building up rankings in specialist directories, niche search sites etc.

Manage associated digital marketing strategy (affiliate marketing/linking)

• Develop an affiliate marketing strategy for the group and manage the implementation.
• Build a linking strategy for the group and manage the implementatio

Leadership

• To play an active role as part of the senor digital exec

• To influence and educate peers and Digital Directors to ensure appropriate investment and resource is applied to this area.

The ideal candidate will be able to demonstrate the following;

• Highly self-sufficient, collaborative and passionate about what they do;
• Excellent organisation and time management skills.
• Able to demonstrate sufficient experience implementing best practice NSO strategies.
• In depth knowledge of NSO methodology, including link community development, content and website accessibility.

• Search agency experience.
• Management of a £1m plus paid search campaign.
• Strong project management skills
• Passionate about sharing and communicating information
• The ability to communicate to groups of people at all levels of the organisation
• Pragmatic, flexible and creative approach;
• Commercially astute but consumer focused.
• Strong analytical skills in analysing and influencing ROI
• Strong interest and experience in media/digital marketing and future trends.
• Technically savvy.
• Hands on role in search
• Experience of online marketing

If you are interested in applying for this role, please send your CV and covering letter to chrisDOTlawsonATbauerconsumer.co.uk

Do hope this has been written with the engines in mind...

WidgetWebExpo: Meet up and pitch me!

WidgetWebExpo (NYC, June 16-17) organiser Ivan Pope is calling together speakers, conference goers and anyone else interested in the widgety world for either a widgety breakfast and/or evening get together on Sunday June 15 in New York.

I'll be adding a link for updates (locations, timings etc) to this asap. In the meantime tell Ivan Pope you'd like to join in. If you're particularly interested in hooking up with me; gmail me: davidpcushman AT gmail DOT com.

I'm speaking at WidgetWebExpo (I' ve sneaked in alongside a stellar line-up including Stephanie Agresta, David Armano, Josh Bernoff, Stowe Boyd, Marc Canter, Chris Cunningham Kris Loux, David Malouf, Ivan himself, Hooman Radfar, Steve Rubel, Ian Schafer, Fred Wilson... frankly too many to name here (so go here for the full list)

While I'm in NYC for the conference, I'm also particularly interested in meeting you if you've got widgets/application proposals or pitches you think might work with the brands I work with.

My particular focus is on our specialist media brands, but if you have a stunner for any other parts of the business I want to hear from you, too.

And if you just want to say hi, that's fine too.

I'm arriving Saturday (June 14) late afternoon and leaving right after the conference closes on the Tuesday June 17.

In between I'll be staying at the conference venue - so come get me!
Contact stuff is on this blog.