OMMA Global Day Two: Content Has To Be Everywhere

Yesterday was day two of OMMA Global, and I think the theme(s) of the day were Innovation and Distribution.
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OMMA Global Day One: The Year the Media Died

Highlight of OMMA Global day one for me was Terence Kawaja of GCA Savvian, whose presentation included a verse by verse playing and discussion of his own satirical song “Mad Avenue Blues” (sung to the tune of “American Pie,” with the refrain changed to “The Year the Media Died”).

Like the original, it’s long (9:21 in this case) and as Kawaja said in presenting it, lends itself to the elegiac mode – he wouldn’t quite say media is dead but it’s hard to write a catchy lyric about the era in which large mainstream media companies faced downward revenue pressure:

Interesting video for the luncheon keynote at a conference on online media, marketing, and advertising – but it hits on much of the industry’s current malaise.

The good news, such as it is, is that John Battelle challenged Kawaja to write an upbeat song on the state of the media – send your suggestions to @tkawaja.

See Also: Wall Street Journal coverage of the song

Who Pays for Content? What’s in it for Me? Vote!

Pardon the brief, self-promotional nature of this post, but I just realized if I don’t get one up soon I’m going to miss the deadline – voting for SXSW Interactive 2010 ends this Friday!

Photo by ehnmark, cc-by license

I’ve submitted two panel proposals this year – each is described below with a voting link.

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Who clicks on Ads?

danah boyd asks the question that’s been on my mind since (at least) the Futures of Entertainment confernce panel on metrics and measurement: Who Clicks on Ads?

Advertising is the bread and butter of the web, yet most of my friends claim that they never click on ads, typically using a peacock tone that signals their pride in being ad-averse. The geekier amongst them go out of their way to run Mozilla scripts to scrape ads away, bemoaning the presence of consumer culture. Yet, companies increasingly rely on ad revenue to turn a profit and, while clicking on ads ?may? be declining, it certainly hasn’t gone away. This raises a critical question: Who are the people that click on ads?

She points out that many of the answers at this point are heavily anecdotal – the kind of assumed “middle America” we often project when we need to explain some mass behavior in which we don’t participate. What she finds, in what little research is available, is perhaps surprising:
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This little light of mine . . . I’m gonna turn it off

In case you live under a rock or haven’t read news in ~2 weeks online, Facebook Beacon is an application which allowed third-party web sites to access your Facebook cookie and post messages to your activity feed regarding your purchases.

For example: “John bought Finding the Perfect Job at Amazon.com” – how would you like your boss seeing that one in your activity feed!

(Note: I don’t believe Amazon actually participated – it’s just an example. Jeff, please don’t sue me).

Well, the powers that be at Facebook have finally publicly apologized for the whole snafu.

In what is becoming a bit of a tradition, Zuckerberg addressed the angry multitudes directly in a blog post titled “Thoughts on Beacon“:

We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I’d like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon.

They also created, and Zuckerberg linked to, a single global setting enabling you to block beacon: Privacy Settings for External Websites

Even this setting is a bit difficult to understand, though, since it appears to say that you will still recieve notifications on those third party sites that they are requesting to send stories to Facebook:

Show your friends what you like and what you’re up to outside of Facebook. When you take actions on the sites listed below, you can choose to have those actions sent to your profile.

Please note that these settings only affect notifications on Facebook. You will still be notified on affiliate websites when they send stories to Facebook. You will be able to decline individual stories at that time.

So when I check the box marked “Don’t allow any websites to send stories to my profile,” am I still going to have to decline individual stories?

One assumes not, but I guess they haven’t had time to change the interface the external providers use, so they will still make requests.