1. Paul Gillin: “The Future of Media is: Small, Aggregated, Inclusive, Community-driven, Conversational, Fast, Flexible, Experimental.”

2. New from the PCF: Video WTF?

First, a great presentation given by Paul Gillin at the Inbound Marketing Summit yesterday. Covered very quickly with dense references the shifts in mainstream media:

Second, Video WTF?, a great new site from the Participatory Culture Foundation (who also bring us Miro and and Make Internet TV) which will be helpful to those of you (us?) who are making the future of media:

VideoWTF: Questions and Answers About Video Production, Video Camera, Editing, Publishing, and et cetera

It’s about your digital footprint: the sum total of all the interactions your customers, prospective customers, fans, antagonists, employees, suppliers, and partners have with your content and services throughout the entire Internet.

A quotation in a recent post on the Inc. Technology blog, It’s Not About Web Traffic Anymore, put it this way:

It’s not about getting people to come to my web site anymore. It’s about getting my content; my videos,my articles, my event promotion announcements, on YOUR web site. That’s what I’m paying attention to now.

– Barbara Scala, Founder of Bloom

I agree wholeheartedly, but remember that “YOUR web site” might be a Facebook news feed, it might be a blog, it might be an link from YouTube sent via IM or a tweet. It’s no longer about getting folks to come play in your garden, but about making yourself available in all the places folks might already be hanging out.

Private Garden (Photo by surprise truck, cc-by license)

Your web presence (which should be a combination of sites, blogs, microsites, and official presences in social networks) is still critical, of course – as the place to which folks will often go for more information, to sign up, to interact with you – but if your efforts stop at the sites you own and control you’re missing out on the majority of the web.

Think Outside the Box (Photo by debaird™, cc-by-sa license)

On the distribution front, one of my favorite track sessions was “Joining the Party: Publishers Can Play and Prosper in the Social Media Sandbox,” during which Alan Levvy from BlogTalkRadio said:

Of course content’s got to be everywhere, because audience is everywhere.

I also found Sang Kim’s discussion of how communities built by brands can leverage personalization (another much hyped technology of the late 90s returns) to really encourage folks to engage, by recommending groups and discussions that seem relevant based on user profile or user action before registration.

In one of the keynotes, Darrell Huston from Microsoft showed off what they called a “multiscreen” experience branded for Harry Potter – on Web, XBox, Surface, and mobile phone. Interesting stuff, albeit quite clearly a product demo of the Microsoft World. (I couldn’t help but tweet out a link to the Surface parody which came out at the same time as the original product).

The whole notion, central to the Assembled Web, that the days of artificial scarcity, ignorance arbitrage, and driving eyeballs to sites are over was heard throughout the conference, really. The world now is all about getting your brand, your content, and your interactions or transactions in front of people where they are.

The goal is to be ubiquitous and useful, not to interrupt and distract – and this is true whether you’re a consumer brand, a business-to-business enterprise, or a media company.

Ubiquity (Photo by Mike Willis, cc-by license)

On the innovation front, another good track session was the horribly mis-titled “The Most Creative Social Media Campaigns of 2009” which really covered best practices and lessons learned from social campaigns, but also broadened into an interesting discussion about generational gaps. I worried at first this would descend into a “the kids are crazy” versus “the old folks don’t get social” discussion – one I particularly hate as I’m demographically old but behaviorally young in that equation – but it actually evolved into a nuanced discussion of mentoring, cross-generational understanding, and the business of retaining the creativity and innovation of a startup while scaling into a bigger more established firm.

Again, later, on the main stage, the discussion kept coming back to the notion of innovation as being that which will distinguish the survivors from the causalities in this difficult economic market. (If the theme of day one was that this is an age of uncertainty, I’d say the theme of day 2 was that innovation is the way out of that uncertainty, or at least the best possible response to it).

There was a panel which asked whether Madison Avenue had a future or not, but given that it was composed of senior agency execs, it’s not too surprising that they felt it did – so long as they kept the focus on getting rewarded for innovative new ideas.

Personally this made me wonder why it is that we so consistently associate innovation with startups – is it just a strong pro-entrepreneurial bent to US business culture? Is there something about an organization of more than say 50 employees that makes it impossible to innovate? (Or is the magic number more like 500?) Was the undercurrent I was feeling more about a suggestion that large advertising agencies can’t or don’t innovate, because they’re too focused on media planning and traditional creative?

Innovate (Photo by Uncleweed, cc-by-sa license)

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

How to Be Useful (Photo by Robert Banh, cc-by license)

I used to be fond of saying that the best advice for content-centric businesses on the web was a simple commandment:

Above all, be interesting – everything else will follow from that

Being interesting is still necessary, of course – if you’re trying to create a content-centric business and your content isn’t interesting, you’re in big trouble.

But is being interesting sufficient? In an attention economy, where interesting content is ubiquitous, and what’s truly rare is the users’ attention? In an era where every company is a media company?

In the era of the Assembled Web, where consumers expect to find content, community, and commerce pervasively and persistently throughout their online experience, is it enough to just be interesting?

I think we’ve got to set our sights higher than just being interesting, and aim to be useful. The new commandment might be something more like:

Above all, be useful. Provide value – what your audiences understand as utility on their terms – and everything else will follow from that.

This applies to companies which are only now realizing they are media companies as well as formerly-only-media-companies who are now realizing they need to be more. Put differently, if every company is a media company, that those businesses which were already media companies also need to think about what other utility they provide above and beyond the experience of interesting content.

This Shop is Useful (Photo by Robyn Gallagher, cc-by license)

Two quick examples, from the world of iPhone applications. (The same tenet – above all, be useful – would apply equally well to Facebook applications, iGoogle widgets, and plain old web applications).

Whole Foods’ recipes application not only uses the phone’s location to do traditional store locating, it also allows you to search recipes based on what ingredients you’ve got at hand.

Whole Foods' recipes application provides a store locator, but also lets you locate recipes matching what you have on hand

Sit or Squat (sponsored by Charmin) also takes advantage of location to help you locate the nearest public restroom, but adds community in the form of user ratings and comments. If you’ve ever been traveling in another city and in search of a clean bathroom (maybe even one with a changing table) you can imagine how useful such an app can be.

Charmin's sponsorship of Sit-or-Squat provides a branded presence for them but also adds value for the user

Both applications also, of course, provide a branded presence on the users phone to their sponsoring companies – but that’s secondary to the primary utility they provide.

As you evaluate web strategies and offerings, what role does utility play? What difference would it make for content-centric businesses to shift focus from “create compelling content” to “be useful”?

Useful Arts (Photo by dipfan, cc-by license)

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, among many other philanthropic initiatives in culture, community, and journalism generally, has been running the Knight News Challenge since 2007. Its basically a grant competition, in which various digital journalism initiatives compete for a pool of grants amounting to $25 million total over five years.

One aspect which makes the Knight News Challenge unique – other than the size of the grant pool – is that the winning grantees are required to:

1. Use digital, open-source technology.
2. Distribute news in the public interest.
3. Test your project in a local community.

It looks like a fantastic strategy: encourage innovation, provide funding without forcing the grantees into short-term, must-build-immediate-ROI type thinking, and share the results with the broader community through open source.

Knight - Photo by Ruth L., cc-by-nd license

Two recent successful projects from Knight Foundation grantees – EveryBlock and Village Soup (which I’ve written about before in this blog), however, suggest there might be some gaps in the Foundation’s overall plan.

The core of the issue is this question: once the Knight Foundation funding is expended, what happens to the open source project the grant process mandates?

Do the creators truly create, engage with, and sustain an open source community around the code they release, contributing to and supporting the open source version, or do they “take it private”, leaving the open source seed to either take root and grow (or wither) on its own?

First, Village Soup. When I wrote about them back in May, it was unclear what exactly would be released and in fact whether or not they were compliant with the terms of the grant:

As one of the commentators on [founder Richard M.] Anderson’s recent blog entry on making hyperlocal pay pointed out, however, that doesn’t seem likely to be what the Knight Foundation expected when it funded creation of an open source project. Perhaps we’ll hear more as the end of the grant period (June 2009) approaches?

Anderson himself later commented on that same post, clarifying:

In accordance with the terms of our Knight Foundation News Challenge Grant, we are using the funds to create an open source version of VillageSoup’s software, which combines blogs, citizen journalism, online advertising and reverse publishing from online to print. The Knight Foundation will sublicense the open source publishing system software to third parties under the GPL and Creative Commons License.

In fact, that code is now available from this google code project: vsce (Village Soup Community Edition). It’s GPL (v2) licensed, with content (the user manual?) available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

There’s a 1.0.0 release, dated July 15, 2009, as well as a 63-page user manual which covers installation, configuration, and operation of sites based on the platform. The platform components are pretty standard in the open source world: Java (specifically Java Server Faces), JBoss Application Server, JBoss Seam, Hibernate, MySQL, Maven, and JQuery.

Fighing Knights - Photo by threlkelded, cc-by-nd license

What’s missing, though, is any real sense of an open source community around the platform. Issues? none. Wiki pages? none. There’s only one check-in to the subversion code repository, with no changes since then. The only “person” attached to the project at Google Code, and also the project owner, is identified as “helpd…@villagesoup.com” (no great imagination necessary to suggest that this parses to helpdesk@villagesoup.com).

In other words, an open source project has been released, to comply with the terms of the Knight Foundation grant, but is it an open source project likely to succeed?

There’s nothing in GPL v2 nor in the Knight grant itself, so far as I can tell, that would prevent (or even, for that matter, strongly discourage) VillageSoup® from continuing to iterate on, improve, develop, and maintain the Enterprise (hosted) version, Village Soup Common, without contributing those fixes to the open source community edition, and simply let the VSCE project wither on the vine.

EveryBlock, another Knight Foundation News Challenge grant recipient, has received considerably more press coverage (the acquisition of EveryBlock by MSNBC this week was covered by the AP and the NYT) but is potentially in a similar situation: there is an open source project release, in accordance with the terms of the grant, but will it be sustained long term?

A few pointers to other blog posts laying out some of the issues:

• EveryBlock.com Sale Shows Impact of Knight-Funded Media Innovation
• The Trouble with Taking Charity
• Is this legal? Is it ethical?
• The Nuances of the Everyblock Sale to MSNBC
• In Detail: The Nuances of the Everyblock Sale to MSNBC
• Interview: MSNBC.com Likely Will Add EveryBlock Feeds To Its Local Section in ‘Next Few Months’

The emerging consensus seems to be that EveryBlock has fulfilled its obligation to the Knight Foundation, releasing the project under the GPL (v3 in their case) at the end of the grant period. It also seems clear that neither the GPL itself nor the Knight Foundation grant will require that MSNBC continue to make its changes to the project available as open source.

So MSNBC could continue to improve the code, starting from the GPL code base, without releasing those improvements to the open source project. Since whatever platform they offer will almost certainly be a web service, they will not be distributing the modifications and can keep them private.

Whoa! You Totally Conquered Him, Dude! Photo by Sister72, cc-by license

But here’s the rub: so can anyone else. I could also take the GPL’d EveryBlock platform, improve upon it by adding additional features, and run a hyperlocal site for Salem MA, without being obligated to redistribute my version. That’s how the GPL works.

What, precisely, did MSBC buy, then? Presumably, the people involved in the project, the name and domain, and perhaps the existing data (it isn’t clear to me what license the data itself is under).

Will MSNBC take EveryBlock private, or will they learn to value the benefit of working with an open source project, and sustain a real community around the codebase?

I was initially more optimistic about EveryBlock, since the ebcode site has some activity: code updates, individuals named as owners, a mailing list). ebcode is also built on top of Django and Python, which will connect them more clearly to other communities of open source developers working on journalism. But in the paidContent interview EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty reportedly said:

others will only have access to the code as it existed on June 30—when it was initially released—meaning MSNBC.com will likely have an edge over any competitors. “What happens after that we’re not obligated to make that open source,” Holovaty says, adding that so far only a handful of sites have actually adopted the code.

He goes on to say, in the same interview:

The Knight Foundation funded EveryBlock via its Knight News Challenge program but the foundation did not have equity in the startup. “Basically the grant was paying for development of the open source code and we fulfilled the obligation,” Holovaty says. Asked whether he was now considering returning some money to the group, Holovaty says he is “planning on pointing everyone I know to the News Challenge. That’s what they’ve asked me to do.”

This doesn’t bode well for the long term future of an open source project derived from that code.

Ritterrüstung - Photo by marfis75, cc-by-sa license

What does this trend (if two can be called a trend) begin to suggest a flaw in the News Challenge approach?

If the grantees are required to release an open source version of the code written during the grant period (and maybe only the subset of the code specifically funded by the grant money), but have no real investment in the community model, and no real open source community of contributors around that core, is there any real benefit?

One could argue that if these platforms prove valuable enough, the GPL’d core that comes out of the grant period could be taken by a community and “forked” to create a real vibrant open source project around them – but generally code dumps (significant sets of code that were created by others and then thrown over the wall into an open source community) lead to less successful open source projects than those which actually develop organically from the beginning. It’s difficult to find a group of developers interested in making a community around existing source code – you’re more likely to find a community of developers willing to contribute to creating a code base.

Put differently, communities are great at creating (and maintaining, supporting, extending) code: code is not great at creating communities.

Should the Knight Foundation, and the News Challenge in particular, be doing something else to encourage or require real communities to form around the open source projects? It’s difficult, even with the purest intentions, to ensure that a real community will evolve around any open source project – though getting the community involved throughout might go a long way in that direction. How would open source developers contributing to the effort but not partaking in the grant funding feel?

On the other hand, is this a case where everything is actually working as it should be? If communities evolve around the open source projects that’s great, and if they don’t then perhaps there was no need to release the open source version, but there was no harm in doing so either.

Coverville's Original Logo

Coverville is a podcast hosted by Brian Ibbott and recorded in his home near Denver, which features cover songs and the topic of covers generally. He does a fantastic job, hosting theme shows like originalville (in which he plays the original versions of songs people mostly know by a famous cover) and cover story (in which the whole episode is devoted to covers of and by a specific artist). Check out the Wikipedia entry on Coverville for a sense of how popular the show’s become.

One important note: from the beginning, Ibbott has been careful to work as necessary with “rights holders” through ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC – he even moderates a forum at podcast alley on using licensed music.

Recently, as the economy has depleted sponsorships and advertisers, it’s become more difficult for Coverville to make money. Rather than just folding, or moving all the way to “pay subscribers only,” Ibbott’s created a new offering: Coverville Citizenship.

Coverille Citizenship

Coverville Citizens get:

• a DVD each year of the previous 100 episodes (more than a year’s worth)
• a limited edition T-Shirt not available to non-citizens
• a subscription to a premium ‘bonus tracks’ podcast including tracks not used in the show
• the good feeling that comes from being part of something you enjoy and helping to support it

For which they (myself included) happily pay $40.

Is this the future of media?

A niche producer (though it feels odd to me to call cover songs a niche, since the genres Ibbott includes are so broad, he did identify and develop a specific hook or angle that was unique) connects to a long tail of fans, many of whom are casual fans dipping in and out, but a number of which are more devoted fans (in the case of Coverville those fans make suggestions, record trivia quizzes for Ibbot and wife Tina to play, phone in dedications, record intros for the annual countdown, and so on). Those devoted fans are willing to pay for premium access to bonus content.

Would it work if a mainstream media outlet tried to replicate it? I wonder if the producers or execs at such a company (could be radio, tv, film studio, whatever) would have the patience to let the show (and it’s audience) develop. Coverville’s almost 5 years old now – the first episode was in September of 2004 – and I’m not sure how early in the process the audience began to reach the levels an ROI focused company would require.

Would they be willing to let the host be so authentic and personal? Involving his wife and son in the show, doing the trivia bits live, and being willing to totally flub an answer (though of course he generally does quite well)?

If they would, maybe we’d stop hearing about how people online won’t pay for content . . .

• What motivates the contributors in crowdsourced efforts? Specifically, to what extent are monetary incentives a driver as compared to extra-monetary ones?
• What about “crowdsourced” projects which are not creative or knowlege-worker oriented, but outsourced menial labor?
• How can or should “creatives” respond to the rise of crowdsourced alternatives?

Jeff Howe at Berkman Center on Crowdsourcing

It’s long – just over an hour – but really worth your time if you’re interested in the issue of value that crowdsourcing raises. I especially enjoyed the extended Q & A session – which benefits from the collective wisdom and critical thought typical of Berkman attendees.

Howe admits a kind of radical ambivalence about the phenomenon of crowdsourcing and the ways in which it disrupts some existing relationships by changing the value of certain kinds of labor.

His ambivalence comes through in two ways. First, he focuses on the “creative” end of crowdsourcing – examples like Threadless, Innocentive, and iStockPhoto – rather than the “menial” end of crowdsourcing – Mechanical Turk’s “Human Intelligence Tasks” like transcription, solving CAPTCHA’s for spammers, etc. How does the equation for crowdsourcing change when your imagined participant isn’t the “college kid designing t-shirts” but people in developing markets doing work for fractions of pennies?

Howe confesses he essentially ignored Mechanical Turk (and other arguably non-creative examples of leveraging large scale online labor) in the book – in essence because it didn’t fit, in his mind, the picture of motivation he saw in the phenomenon in which he was interested. But are there really two fundamentally different models of crowdsourcing at play here, or is it just two different participating labor pools: one predominantly first world, leisure class, participating for fun and recognition, and another more developing world centered, participating for financial gain?

Second, he’s also deeply sympathetic with those – increasingly including his fellow journalists – who are arguably displaced by the impact of crowdsourcing on the value of what they produce. What about established professionals in the field who see the market value of their work decimated in the process? On the other hand, what about those trying to break into the market, who have always found spec work a valuable mechanism for demonstrating their skills before gaining professional, full time employment?

It’s especially interesting where these two issues come together – crowdsourcing for employement. What if anybody, anywhere, with any standard of living, could do your job and compete with your for your value?

There’s a good, well edited video summary from a panel Howe moderated at SXSW 2009 on this topic, specifically focused on spec work in creative fields, and sites like Crowdspring and 99designs:

I’m reminded of the debate among programmers about offshoring, in which similar arguments still go on. Can the quality of the design produced at a crowdsourced spec site ever compete with that produced by a reputable, professional shop? How can a design that doesn’t come out of an intimate, strategic, and interative process involving lots of face time and discussion with the client ever be truly on target? On the other hand, if the consumer of said work can’t tell the difference, and the price is several orders of magnitude less, does it make sense to continue to argue they should pay the premium?

(See No!Spec for more on the arguments about the dangers of speculative work).

Finally, I also saw Howe give a version of this talk at Media Bistro’s Circus event in New York during Internet Week, a few months after the Berkman Center talk. In his Media Bistro talk, Howe focused much more directly on crowdsourcing in journalism, highlighting as an example the excellent work being done at Spot.us, a kind of crowd-funding mechanism for journalists.

Ironically, to see that video, you’ll need to subscribe to MediaBistro OnDemand, for $19/month or $180/yr. Apparently the downward pressure of crowdsourcing and free video from various sources (Berkman, SXSW) hasn’t yet forced MediaBistro to share videos from their conferences for free.

Does that make his talk at MediaBistro more valuable than the talk at the Berkman center or the panel at SXSW?

Currently, however, they are running a Campaign to Save Paste, soliciting donations to offset operating losses. What does the need for such campaign tell us about the future of online publishing?

Many people, myself included, got hooked on Paste via the CD-sampler which accompanies each issue and lets you hear many of the artists being discussed and reviewed.

Paste has also made interesting moves to reflect the popularity and primacy of the Internet as a mechanism for discovering music, while still retaining their editorial vision and curatorial role.

First, they moved the sampler CD online. Instead of distributing physical CDs with every copy of the magazine sent to subscribers or sold at newstands, the CD is available for download, with subscribers having accounts and print versions containing a code to access the download. Subscribers who prefer the physical CD can still request one.

Digital VIP

• 12 Free Albums (downloads) selected by Paste editors, plus often bonus albums
• Digital versions of the magazine, including access to back issues
• Early access to the sampler and magazine
• A Paste t-shirt
• The ability to give gift subscriptions (not VIP but regular) to friends for $10

It’s a great program – allowing the brand evangelists to pay more and get premium access, while also enabling them to spread the brand. (Disclosure: Paste is not a client. I’m just a very happy subscriber and brand enthusiast!).

I wish, in fact, that magazines like Mojo and Q, which I often buy in print while in the UK, would emulate this model: keep publishing in print, but let people choose to subscribe to a digital edition and get the tunes which would otherwise come on a physical CD online.

None of this, however, has enabled Paste to completely avoid the global economic meltdown current recession. They’re recently launched a “Campaign to Save Paste,” calling on readers, musicians, and other supporters to help them get through what they’ve described as “a little cash infusion to make up for running at a loss for a while.” (See Save Paste FAQs).

The campaign itself is very well executed, including a letter to readers, a Facebook Group, a twitter account, over 70 tracks (many rare and otherwise unreleased) made available by musicians and labels to anyone who donates, and even banners supporters can take and embed on their own blogs, myspace profiles, and the like:

So what does this campaign, and the model of Paste in general, tell us about publishing in the age of the assembled web?

The pessimistic view would be that it demonstrates that even a small, dedicated, niche-focused print magazine can’t survive. Music, film, and book bloggers have taken over the curatorial role and publish mp3s, trailers, and samples – often with less respect for the strictures of current copyright than a published magazine can manage. In this view, even though Paste was doing everything right they can’t survive without the voluntary donations of supporters. Philanthropic patronage is the only hope of the print publication.

A more optimistic view, though, would take seriously the version Paste themselves offer. The model is fundamentally sound, subscriptions are growing, and the future looks bright. As they write in the Letter to Paste Readers:

Long-term, Paste will emerge in good shape. Even with the fall-off at the end of the year, 2008 was our best year yet—print subscribers, print ads, online readers and online advertising were all at record levels. Readers (print and online) remain strong. And new advertisers have come on board even in the recession, with more ready when their advertising budgets come back.

In the meantime, we’ve adjusted our business to weather this storm. We’ve cut costs, and we developed a robust online business that’s among the best in the industry. Fundamentally, we’re in good shape and won’t need another appeal down the road.

I have, of course, no visibility into Paste’s finances and can’t really discern which of these views will be more accurate in their specific case. But I truly hope it’s the latter.

Hope. Which Way? (Photo by bixentro, cc-by license, click through for details)

Mass High Tech, which I still read in print, featured on its front page Richard Anderson from Village Soup and Alan Baker of the Ellsworth American. (The article is online here: Two Maine newspapers test the future of newspapers’ plans). Additionally, there were a number of articles about Amazon’s new Kindle, and how e-Readers in general might represent new hope for publishers.

Approach one: hyperlocal, shared platform, business-sponsored

Village Soup sign in Belfast, ME (Photo by Timoth Valentine, cc-by-nc-sa license, click through for details)

Anderson’s model, which you can experience in a number of communities linked from VillageSoup.com, is essentially a hyperlocal model, in which a significant portion of revenue is driven by sponsored blog posts, which VillageSoup calls bizOffers:

The most distinctive component of our model are the sponsored postings . . . that businesses can buy. The posts, which run right next to the ordinary editorial content, are not controlled by us. No fetters, no filters.

In the two most mature of the four markets we serve, the sponsored blogs help generate a large portion of the online sales that collectively generate 19% of our $2.5 million in annual advertising revenues.

(You can see the bizOffers in action in the right column of the Knox County Village Soup site).

VillageSoup also received a Knight Foundation News Challenge grant in 2007 to

create an open-source version of VillageSoup’s successful community news software, combining professional journalism, blogs, citizen journalism, online advertising and “reverse publishing” from online to print.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to locate a meaningful update on their progress in that direction. There is some discussion of code access under the name “Village Soup Common”:

How does this model work?

VillageSoup handles the technical stuff. While a version of the platform code is available free, the installation, maintenance and improvement of the code is not. Software engineers and connectivity costs can be shared among all members of the Common. VillageSoup also allows provides the brand and its promotion. This promotion goes in two directions. To the public, we promote theSoup as a trusted source for hyper-local information around the globe. To the major product brands, we promote theSoup as a direct connection to the hyper-local residents as they head to their local retailer. Finally, a VillageSoup Common wiki provides a repository of experiences and ideas which empowers small operators to learn and advance in ways not achievable as stand-alone entities.

As one of the commentators on Anderson’s recent blog entry on making hyperlocal pay pointed out, however, that doesn’t seem likely to be what the Knight Foundation expected when it funded creation of an open source project. Perhaps we’ll hear more as the end of the grant period (June 2009) approaches?

Regardless, it stretches credulity to think of hyperlocal as a new strategy in 2009. Hyperlocal undoubtedly plays a role in the future of news publishing, but it is unclear whether it will produce the kind of revenue necessary to significantly impact the large publishers who are in trouble.

Approach two: rebuild the online paywall / make users pay for content

Not free (photo by ol slambert, cc-by license, click through for details)

Users are offered, on the landing page of the Ellsworth American, a choice: go to the free limited edition of the paper, a site called FenceViewer which offers summaries of stories from the paper, or subscribe:

The full Ellsworth American is available weekly as a PDF download to those willing to pay a $32 annual subscription.

While paid subscription to online newspaper editions is something the rest of the industry has struggled with – famously only the Wall Street Journal has been able to maintain a paywall over time – the paper is hopeful in the case of this small Maine community, perhaps due to its niche presence:

The Ellsworth American’s payment strategy serves an even narrower niche. From 12 percent to 15 percent of its subscription revenue is in mail subscriptions — typically snowbirds who get the paper by mail during winter months. Problems with the postal service have taken their toll.

So far, about 100 readers have subscribed online, said Chris Crockett, the paper’s IT manager, but it’s still early in the process. There have been “some comments,” about the new model, he said, but many people have been satisfied to be pointed to the paper’s trimmed-down free site.

Is 100 readers subscribing only a sign of hope, or yet another sign that users don’t want to pay for access to content online? While it may be too early to tell for Baker and Crockett, the rest of the web seems to have pretty clearly voted on this one already, and recreating an information scarcity economy seems unlikely.

Approach three: sell content on new devices

Kindle (Photo by Brian Vallelunga, cc-by-nc-nd license, click through for details)

While new devices can certainly reset user expectations – look at the influence of the iPhone on mobile web applications in the U.S. – it is difficult to imagine that such devices will create a market for paid content that replaces the drastic decline in traditional subscription revenue.

Additionally, while the gadget sites and tech press have been quite excited about the new e-reader formats, it’s hard to imagine proprietary format readers ever becoming nearly as ubiquitous as mobile phones and netbooks using existing open formats. As Alan Mutter puts it:

Instead of trying to persuade consumers to adapt to an expensive, awkward and idiosyncratic gizmo like the wide-body Kindle, newspapers would be wiser to spend their time and resources optimizing their existing offerings for the interactive formats already in popular use. Netbooks are already here, growing in popularity, and much more likely to find broad acceptance than dedicated readers.

While some users will adopt, and evangelize for, e-readers of various styles, they’ll never match the audience of the web (and the mobile web). If developing for those formats requires significant investment in proprietary formats (and associated DRM technologies to enable paywall and prevent piracy), publishers risk again missing the bulk of the audience. (See also MG Siegler’s excellent Tech Crunch post “The Big Screen Kindle Hail Mary To Newspapers Will Fall Incomplete“).

Users in the assembled web expect to be able to consume (and share, and interact with) content where they are – in social networks, on community sites, and throughout the web. Content I can’t share is inherently less valuable than content I can. In other words, what makes the e-reader story so attractive to publishers – relatively closed (non-generative) platforms which enable paid content subscriptions – is exactly what makes them unattractive to most readers. (Or, to put it another way, piracy of paid content will be what makes them attractive).

Will the short-term gain (a bump up in revenue as the initial readers roll out) be worth the long-term loss of taking focus off making the web work?

No silver bullet

Ultimately, all of these strategies (hyperlocal sponsorship, paywalls for niche web content, and new devices/new formats) can contribute to the evolution of existing publishers into new media, but none of them represents a silver bullet. Publishers need to focus on reigning in costs and eliminating unnecessary duplications of effort, while at the same time generating compelling content which will attract audiences that advertisers desire, and even potentially be worth paying for.

What should newspaper publishers, and other content-centered businesses, do? How should publishing evolve to accommodate the tremendous shift in publishing power represented by the fact that every internet user has a technical capability to create and distribute content never before seen? How should they adapt to the assembled web, in which users expect to interact with content in contexts they choose, rather than in contexts publishers control?

Sharing the morning paper (Photo by Marjon Kruik, cc-by license, click through for more info)

One of the most widely read recent salvos in this discussion has been Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.” In that post (not surprising a blog post, rather than a traditional article) Shirky argues forcefully that the desire to “save newspapers” in the U.S. is fundamentally misguided:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

Shirky places the current economic issues of major metropolitan dailies in historical context, as a revolution perhaps equal in upheaval to the original print revolution following Gutenberg.

Presses, Fort Wayne Indiana
(Photo by Jon B. Swerens, cc-by-nc-sa license, click through for details)

In that context, hoping to save the newspaper seems the ultimate act of futility:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Shirky doesn’t mean, of course, that nothing from the era of the newspaper is worth preserving, just that it will take profoundly different forms, many of which we can only begin at this point to imagine:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. . . . For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. . . . No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

Shirky’s piece resonated throughout the web, being favorited, shared, retweeted, re-blogged, bookmarked, stumbled upon, and dugg.

The Newspaper (Photo by Cobalt123, cc-by-nc license, click through for details)

A very thoughtful response, from someone with a serious background in mainstream journalism, came this week (also in the form of a blog entry) from Jason Pontin, the Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review: How to Save Media.

Pontin refuses to accept Shirky’s diagnosis, and declares the patient very much alive. He concedes that a number of practices of traditional print media have not helped in the current crisis – artificially inflating circulation, ignoring and cultivating a certain editorial disdain for ‘reader feedback’ – but also argues that there is strong and continued demand for well written, editorially curated content, and that this will continue to be the case in the future.

Newspaper stands in Cambridge MA (Credit will_hybrid, cc-by license, click through for details)

At some level, Shirky and Pontin are firing past each other, without realizing that in many ways they agree. Pontin takes issue with Shirky’s assertion that the root cause of the current crisis is that “printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run,” noting that most publishers have leased presses for the last several decades, and that the real cost of production is in all the other, knowledge-worker-driven work involved in producing a print publication:

The printing press stands here as an objective correlative for the material production and distribution of media. Shirky and Winer’s real error is that the physical is the least of it. The comparative advantage of mainstream media is not the ownership of presses, but the collaboration of professionals. The creation of good journalism is a tremendously laborious process, requiring an infrastructure more expensive than any press. The illustration and design of stories has an infrastructure, too. Developing an audience that will attract particular advertisers requires another infrastructure. Selling advertising requires yet another. These structures, which allow publications to reach large, coherent audiences, can exist only within complex organizations, mostly businesses.

While the point Pontin makes is certainly valid – the printing press here stands in for a whole set of organizational and bureaucratic structures which make large scale coordinated efforts possible: namely, the corporation. But that’s exactly Shirky’s point, and reading Shirky’s blog post in the context of Here Comes Everybody, it seems clear that he’s not ignorant of the large scale organizations (in corporate form) which made possible traditional production. What Shirky is arguing is that the large scale traditional newspaper is no longer the only – or even the most effectively adapted – method of organization capable of serving the needs newspapers historically served.

Newspaper stand in downtown Chicago
(Photo by Chris Metcalf, cc-by license, click through for details)

Where Shirky paints the newspapers (and by implication those who hope to “save” them) with a broad brush as ostriches with their collective heads in the sand, or unthinking luddites hoping to be spared the reality that times have changed, Pontin has a tendency to dismiss Shirky (and Winer, the other target of most of Pontin’s barbs) as outsiders from (gasp) the new media world:

Among those who write about new media, a fashionable consensus has emerged . . .

And:

This is all folly and ignorance. Shirky, Winer, and other evangelists know nothing about the business of media. . . . Shirky and Winer are disgruntled consumers and, as bloggers, advocates for an insurrection. Thus, they are to be read skeptically. Their prescriptions would be more convincing if they were less polemical and better informed by some knowledge of what publishers sell.

I don’t know (or care) what “business of media” bona fides Shirky or Winer bring to the debate, but it seems an unnecessary and unnecessarily self-conscious rhetorical circling of the wagons to keep the fanatical, evangelical, and insurrectionist outsiders from upsetting the publishing world’s self-image.

The Internet is not a Newspaper
(Photo by Mark O'Brien, cc-by-nc license, click through for details)

That said, Pontin’s set of recommendations seem utterly reasonable, well-fashioned, and on target (they also seem not too far from what Shirky might suggest, if he were focused on what publishers should do rather than on what will replace them). He breaks his recommendations into three major sections: circulation (subscriptions), advertising, and editorial.

For circulation, he accepts that print circulation must be allowed to shrink to “organic” levels, which will be much lower than today. Publishers need to determine how to deliver subscriptions to new devices in addition to print, as well as learn how to provide multiple subscription offering in ways which are sensible from the users point of view, including potentially a la carte or story bundle based pricing. Finally, he argues that printing and physical distribution should be done less frequently.

Newspaper and tea
(Photo by Matt Callow, cc-by-sa license, click through for details)

In relation to advertising, Pontin concedes that advertising has traditionally been “oversold,” and that classified ad revenue will never again be significant, sounding rather like Shirky (or even Winer):

Classifieds, except in the very narrow sense of job listings in professional publications, are no longer part of the business of publishing. Get over it.

Instead Pontin suggests publishers look to Google’s keyword based advertising model and increasingly accurate audience measurement online, as well as exploring custom advertising and microsites:

Among the most promising advertising forms for media companies is custom advertising. In these arrangements, a publisher works directly with an advertiser and its agency to create a unique campaign, attached to a particular editorial event, that targets a publisher’s audience and integrates all the publisher’s platforms, often with a microsite that harvests sales, leads, or whatever else the advertiser values.

Finally, in relation to editorial issues, Pontin concedes that editorial hubris is a barrier publishers must overcome to make significant progress:

As I rose through the editorial ranks of various magazines, I was encouraged to cultivate a mild contempt for readers. We disdained the market research our publishers commissioned, telling ourselves that readers didn’t know what they wanted. But electronic media and social technologies have had a paradoxical effect: on the one hand, disappointed readers can abandon a publication with a click of a mouse or stab of a thumb, and at the same time they have strengthened readers’ proprietorial sensibilities.

Readers expect, in the two-way medium that is the Internet, to be able to respond and influence the publications with which they interact, not just consume the publications they read:

One of the things that some readers say they want is to be able to post comments about stories as well as their own stories to the Web sites of media companies. Often, such readers want to be able to communicate directly with one another, using social technologies. The readers who want to do this are not very many, but they feel strongly about the subject, and become angry if they suspect editors wish to be “gatekeepers”. Editors must welcome such readerly participation, and should open their editorial departments to the wider world.

Kudos to Pontin for making the shift to Web 2.0, and understanding that “readerly participation” is not only a necessary concession but can also be a welcome one. (I can’t help but note though that the tone has not entirely changed: some readers say they want to be able to post comments? “Readerly participation” as a phrase is itself a bit dismissive, like “amateur photography” or “hobbyist programmer.”).

In essence, Pontin’s recommendations are entirely reasonable: focus on delivering valuable content to interested audiences through media they choose, adding the interactive capabilities (both in terms of community interaction and richer multimedia) and targeted advertising that those new media make possible. This will result in smaller editorial teams, smaller and less frequent print publications (likely also fewer of them, though Pontin doesn’t make this point explicit), and an increased reliance on advertising-supported, free, digital content.

Future City, Illinois
(Photo by ILMO JOE, cc-by-nc-sa license, click through for details)

If anything, the challenge to Pontin’s proposals may be that this is too little, too late. Newspapers as an industry have had over a decade to effectively respond to the opportunity that new media represents, and have broadly failed. While undoubtedly there is a future for content centric businesses online (and even for newspapers, in whatever form they might take), it does seem at this point that many existing business will disappear in the process. Thus Shirky may have the last word:

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

In the end, whether the “structures optimized for digital data” are the same “publishing companies” reorganized, made more efficient, with an infusion of digital thinking, remains to be seen.

MediaCloud

In essence, Media Cloud monitors a set of sources, and then semantically processes the news items from those stories, creating a rich structured dataset which enables various queries and visualizations.

Media Cloud Summary (Image from MediaCloud.org)

The project also relies on a partnership with Calais to provide the term extraction and entity identification capability.

Currently, the visualizations are rather limited. You can create a comparative graphic across any three media sources in the system, of one the following types:

• Top 10 most mentioned terms
• Top 10 Term Pivot
• World Map

Unfortunately there’s no easy way to identify what sources are in the database, other than starting to type and seeing if the autocomplete finds what you’re hoping to use. There’s also no way to tell what “terms” are considered significant, though the error message notes:

The available terms that you can currently serach for are focused on prominent people, places, and events. This will broaden considerably in the future.

It’s the long term plans, not the current visualizations, that make Media Cloud worth watching. Ultimately the Media Cloud project describes itself becoming:

A platform for open, collaborative research by scholars around the world . . . [which] does the heavy lifting in the “cloud” and provides the results as a web service

It isn’t clear at this point what specifically is meant by “in the ‘cloud’” – except in the limited sense that all remote web services could be said to be in the cloud. (See my colleague Andrew Webb’s The Open Cloud for a good overview of the various things “cloud” might mean in today’s environment). Similarly, I believe the only current access to the “web service” is via the front end site at mediacloud.org – no programmatic APIs are exposed yet.

Assuming, however, that the project can reach its goal of an infinitely scalable, cloud-hosted web service which would semantically index a great portion of the relevant media stream, and could be accessed by researchers at low or no cost – that would be a very powerful tool for understanding how media operates online.

Media Cloud is also a free and open source software project, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License and built in Perl using the Catalyst web framework and a PostgreSQL database. (Get code here).

Related:
Calais for Drupal

Panelists:

• Bruce Leichtman, Leichtman Research Group
• Stacey Lynn Schulman, Turner Broadcasting
• Maury Giles, GSD&M Idea City
• Jim Nail, Cymfony

Description:

As media companies have come to recognize the value of participatory audiences, they have searched for matrixes by which to measure engagement with their properties. A model based on impressions is giving way to new models which seek to account for the range of different ways consumers engage with entertainment content. But nobody is quite clear how you can “count” engaged consumers or how you can account for various forms and qualities of engagement. Over the past several years, a range of different companies have proposed alternative systems for measuring engagement. What are the strengths and limits of these competing models? What aspects of audience activity do they account for? What value do they place on different forms of engagement?

—
Notes:

Jim Nail – Cymfony is a brand monitoring company – tell enterprises what users are saying about them.

Maury Giles – GSD&M Idea City – ad agency / interactive agency in Austin. Background in political campaigns, where measurement is paramount.

Stacey Lynn Schulman – new to Turner. Previously at Interpublic group – consumer experience practice. Measurement in the old media are well understood and stable. Walks through history of shifts in measurement – movement into multi-network world (cable), move to “people meters” in households, etc.

Bruce Leichtman – based in Duram NH. Boutique analyst firm focused on future of entertainment. To understand the future we need to begin with the present. Talked about needing to avoid the sample of one problem. We don’t represent the masses – need to focus on quantitative research across broad audiences.

—

SF – Place to start. The Writers’ Strike.

BL – The writer’s strike over the 4.6 billion in revenue that could occur – but the hockey stick curves aren’t real yet.

SLS – We don’t know how big the pie will be – but that doesn’t mean that writers should have a piece of the pie. We have difficulty really quantifying this stuff – especially when it comes to fusing samples across media. People starting online then watching tv, rewatching things they downloaded, etc – we don’t have any way to capture this information reliably across channels.

MG – For me it comes down to how you measure success. Are we going to stick with eyeballs, audience size, etc., or can we adjust to a different way of measuring to understand the control users have. The old paradigm, based on eyeballs, is falling apart – rather than tracking the diffusion of media throughout channels, we focus on what is enabled by all these niche audiences. If we focus on the impact of content on niche audiences rather than mass media – it’s not about how many people we reach as opposed to our impact on niche markets.

JN – the challenge is that those hockey stick graphs are just opinions expressed in numeric form – the real discussion should be not about the size of the chart, but about what assumptions are made to generate them and what direction they indicate things are changing. But we cannot forget about the consumer and how rapidly they change, which is a slowing effect on change, no matter how much the technology changes. This has to come down to the number of times something is viewed, downloaded, etc – not a flat fee since we don’t know how much revenue this will generate.

—

SF – Is it someone’s fault that their isn’t a viable revenue stream?

JN – The networks have been in control for 50+ years. As their control and revenue stream erodes, they are struggling. It isn’t anyone’s fault it is just a fact of life.

BL – 6 minutes of video/day is the mean number in terms of what users are viewing. People talk alot about the YouTube phenomenon, but not much about “Don’t Forget The Lyrics” – but that is still something which got more eyeball time than YouTube did. It’s more about evolution than revolution.

SLS – When I was on the agency side, clients just wanted to be on the next big shiny object.

JN – I call that the GMOOT – get me one of those.

SLS – What happens is that the industry gets this sense that everybody is in these spaces and that they have to be in these spaces. But that’s because 80% of their mindshare is on that big shiny object. But the reality is that 80% of their dollars are in that traditional media, because thats where the audience is. They want to see these new bright shiny objects expressed in terms they understand – which means they want the market numbers they get for traditional media.

JN – During the bust, people were pointing at companies which spent money online going out of business failing and saying see – online advertising doesn’t work. At the same time, however, the % of time people spend online keeps increasing – the percentage of consumers media consumption online outpaces the marketing spend.

SLS – the flipside of the bright shiny objects crowd is the lean back arms crossed posture – the marketing folks who don’t even believe anything new is important or signficant. Yeah, but everytime I put that commercial in old media I sell X amount of Y.

BL – but as we see these things evolving, old media is not dead. We just saw the largest cable event ever in history – high school musical 2. Audience segmentation is important, and we can’t think that we are the audience.

JN – Appointment TV isn’t dead – it is just that the user is setting the appointment.

–

SF – Jericho / CBS. Fans rallying for a show. But also fans saying we’re watching, how come our eyeballs don’t count?

SLS – Engagement is the beginning of that. Trying to determine how much people like a show based on how much they talk about it. When Lost first was being talked about, everyone thought it wasn’t going to work – but our analysis of buzz said that it was going to work. In that case it turned out to be right. But there are also small, highly engaged audiences in some cases – Veronica Mars, The Office, Friday Night Lights – these are shows which ranked very high in buzz, but small in audience. The small engaged fan cultures are something we should be looking at. We also can’t forget that consumers are themselves channels – they are distributing content as well.

MG – The content seller has a need to validate the value of the content. What we’re trying to do is measure engagement in a context – what role that engagement has in the decision cycle of the consumer. Is it having an impact on how they purchase?

BL – if it doesn’t sell, today, tomorrow, or at some later point, it isn’t worth it for the agency.

JN – but branding does work. People deny it, but we’ve seen it time and time again – they may see an ad on toilet paper, and then later they pick that brand in the store – without even knowing it.

—

JN – people don’t like to talk about advertising. But they do talk about what is important to them, and how they talk about what’s important to them, it helps you figure out how to engage with them and how to position your products and where to position your products. Criticism is a useful metric because users who are critical of your product they tell you that because they want you to get better. Engagement is about also listening – you have to let go of that total control and develop a relationship with consumers where they help create.

SLS – We need to question this notion that as a marketer you have a portfolio of brands. What if we thought instead about having sets of consumers whose needs were meeting. What we have, what our asset is, is the consumers we are serving, not this portfolio of products we’re trying to sell.

JN – the control marketers or advertisers ever had was always a myth. We never had the control we classically thought we did. Now we can see that co-creation of meaning happening in much clearer ways. You cannot just surround people with integrated marketing messages and think that we control the conversation.

BL – Between DVR and On-Demand, about 5% is when the user wants it – the other 95% is viewed on the schedule created by the networks. Even that push is due to it being pushed by providers (cable box integration, dish integration) not end consumer demand (stand alone TiVo box). Even as the number of DVR’s grow, the % of viewing which is time shifted, it will still be only 15% of all viewing time even when we have 50 million DVRs in households.

—

Audience questions:

Q: When you make predictions about audiences over time, how do you account for the aging of the audience over time as well?

BL – My forecasts are based on demand and supply – in a 3-5 year time frame those issues don’t impact as much.

SLS – But it isn’t always about studying a single generation across time – the millenials have an impact across time, but when you project their teenage behavior over time, don’t assume they don’t change.

JN – it’s valuable for how to connect to them now, not what they will be like in 30 years or even 10.

—-

Q: What about the kids market? What kind of research are you doing in terms of how to reach that audience?

SLS – More difficult because there are restrictions and regulations about doing research with children, especially in the context of trying to sell them stuff.

—

Q: What about users recommending things to each other and how you can track that?

SLS – recommending products is something being enabled in facebook. It isn’t about the reach of one distribution mechanism but the reaggregation of all the various sums.

JN – 80% of word of mouth is still offline, so even measuring online word of mouth is only a proxy for the recommendations people make. If you think about the never ending friending report about MySpace, the revelation in that report to me was the importance of the widgets and portability – people putting that widget in their profile is so much more important than having your own brand page or banner ads.

MY – You also have to be very careful about that “facilitate” role – if you’re actually creating it and pretending people popularly / virally created it you’ve got a problem. I love the Nike/Apple iPod integration example – if we can provide a real service that happens to also be branded that is the loyalty solution. Facilitating the experience in order to drive to real results. The goal of the campaign is to have a specific impact on consumer behavior and that behavior might include telling friends about something, subscribing to a feed, etc.

SLS – Mass media isn’t going anywhere, even as we hear alot about fragmentation.

BL – We hear about how cable is beating broadcast – well, there are 4 broadcast networks and 100 cable channels – shouldn’t cable beat broadcast? Those 4 channels are still very dominant and that reflects something about human nature and centrality of shared experiences.

—

Q: Other than word of mouth, what other engagement metrics do you see.

MG – Some of the softer, traditional metrics from branding and advertising – it’s about what makes people think, feel, and act – and thinking and feeling are hard to measure, especially when the “act” comes much later.

JN – It’s about return on marketing objective. The right measurements are different in different places – growing awareness, repositioning a product when it relaunches, etc – those are valid metrics in different cases. It isn’t alwyas about specific ROI – there are things you do in marketing which lead to future sales, which you should do, and you have to do them whether they can be directly tied to sales or not.

MG – The thing that fascinates me currently is using complex scientific approaches to create virtual environments and test in them based on metrics tracked over time – you create virtual agents and introduce different stimulous and then see what emerges. Basically become predictive, rather than reactive – it isn’t just about measureing how effective this last campaign was, but predicting how effective the next one will be.

—

Q: What about an open, transparent approach to measurement? It is frustrating that we (users) have no access to how things are measured?

Great idea, but unlikely to happen – lots and lots of money in this space and lots of investment in how it is done today.

–

Q: Consumers as a channel for us to think about – what about Bebo Channels? Couldn’t the revenue in that space be shared with the writers? (Back to the WGA strike).

SLS – In terms of the writers strike, it is very layered here. It is just more complicated than simply saying because ads are there it is therefore profitable. It’s all too all over the place at this point to know what we can and can’t support from a cost/revenue perspective. Even the sites the networks are building have a hard time competing with bittorrent, file sharing, and other mechanisms out there which provide more control – so they are having a hard enough time creating the ability to actually get online distribution they control rather than the distribution users control, let alone worrying about paying more to be able to do it.

BL – but it also isn’t necessarily all incremental revenue – is this in place of other syndication later? Does the value of the show in broadcast, in rerun, in syndication, diminish as it is spread more broadly online?

—

Q: Are there any specific metrics you’ve seen advertisers believe which demonstrates people paying attention to ads?

SLS – IAG and the rewards tv model – there is a measurement here in which the user needs to recall copy points, but is the expectation it is setting real? This is an example of a metric the industry has accepted largely accepted because there is nothing better.

MG – What we’re trying to do is connect to the metric which really matters – incremental improvement in revenue. Skin in the game, tying marketing/advertising to how the company actually does – if we fail to have a positive impact on your revenue that puts us in a different position to worry about these other intermediate metrics which ultimately connect to improved company performance.

—

Q: What about online versus offline: we tend to think of offline as about brand awareness and online about direct action – but online can also be used to build brand awareness, can’t it?

MG – the interactivity of being online can still be a brand building experience – so the actions users take (click here, send this to a friend, whatever behaviors you offer) *are* part of building awareness and brand recall.

JN – TV is still very influential. What online can ad is reach to the lite tv viewer once you pass the point of inefficiency in tv.

SLS – Although TV is seen as the reach medium, remember that things are changing. In an on demand environment more options are available – TV may be growing into a medium which offers more interactivity . . .

JN . . . and those studies were all done on banner ads – as we get more online video, so both are evolving toward each other in terms of capabilities.

–

Q: Any case studies which surprised you about the impact of various kinds of media? Times where what happened was unexpected?

BL – High School Musical. The mass still does exist. How Disney was able to move that across media – an album, a show, a skating tour, etc.

JN – I’ll give you three: MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook. All of these really took the world of tracking influence by storm as places for people to express how they feel about various products and ads. A fourth is the people talking about their ads in advance of the superbowl – the tradition was to keep things quiet and try to make this big surprise. Instead, as folks were sharing info about their ads in advance of the big show – but we found that they still had the same influence.

BL – AppleTV as a great case study. 2 million by the end of the year? Now they won’t talk about it. Now it is Steve Jobs hobby – the case study was already written – people don’t want a standalone box.

—

Q: Any other outside examples in terms of measuring engagement, which didn’t originate in media but come from other fields?

SLS – check out a company called Neuro focus. Measureing brain waves to measure engagement.

MG – swarm theory, chaos theory – these worlds are increasingly relevant. Studies of complex biological systems and how they evolve – marketing is increasing like an organic system.

—

Q: Problem established. Tell us how you are addressing it

BL – not my problem. I’m trying to help understand the consumer and clearly define where we actually are not just where we are going.

SLS – our biggest challenge is trying to figure out how to keep commercial minutes relavant to content minutes. (New ways to get advertisers involved in the content, new ways to keep consumers engaged and get them to see messages from advertisers without interrupting your primary reason to be there).

MG – we’re focused on studying how the consumer engages with the product. Dynamics, triggers, stages of decision making – looking in depth at what “reachable moments” exist to influence that behavior.

JN – one of my notes from this panel has been SLS on the reaggregation of meaningful sums. In the future it isnt going to be who is the audience of this tv show – at the end of the day it is about reach and impact, regardless of the channel or mechanism. Advertisers want to reach a certain number of certain kinds of people in a certain timeframe with a message – they don’t care what *channel* is used – so maybe again it is aggregation from a lot of smaller more passionate audiences.

Check out the announcement on the Miro blog: Miro 1.0 is here.

There’s also:

• Comprehensive Feature Guide to 1.0
• The official Press Release
• Explanation of co-branding potential
• A comparison of Miro and Joost

To help understand why, watch this video from Nick Reville, the foundation’s executive director, talking about the mission behind Miro.

Click To Play

Panelists:

• Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove
• Ze Frank
• Philip Kaplan (pud), AdBrite (and AskPud)

Q: What is media?

Philip – networks are going away. We are all our own networks now. You no longer care so much about the “package” so much as the specific content you’re looking for. It’s no longer important where you get your content from.

Ze – For the purposes of this discussion, I’d define media as anything you can advertise against or put a brand statement next to.

Jeremy – you have to also think about the metadata, behavior and context – it’s not just the idea that content can come from many places and go through many channels, but what opportunities there are to make that meaningful.

Q: It all sounds very chaotic – how do you control effectiveness, reach, etc?

Jeremy – in some ways this seems chaotic, but on the flip side it is less chaotic since it is addressable and controllable in a way offline mechanism are not – activity can be measured and tracked, etc. The business of measuring and valuing of things has to keep up and it hasn’t yet.

Ze – Two approaches – Design, top down work in order to create a high degree of predictability,
but also bottom up, in which predictability is different – it comes from a real time tracking of what’s going on. Chaos is the pov of using a top down strategy to control a bottom up mechanism or vice versa.

Philip – It’s been said that now the customer is your competitor – if you put something out that isn’t good they will tell each other and compete with your message – your ability to control the message through scarcity is gone.

Q: How do you take the system in place today (media buying traditions) and bring it into this new universe? How do we get from here to there?

Philip – Yahoo in their last call mentioned losing audience to places like Facebook, MySpace – as more effective ways of getting to those audiences. What we’re finding is that lots of brand advertisers are looking to smaller markets. 150x times differential between ads on ESPN or Joes Great Football blog – but the difference may not be justified given the audience belief in Joe versus ESPN. Aggregating smaller sites may create broad reach with leveraged costs.

Qs from audience: How do you get sponsors to adjust budgets to these online formats?

Jeremy – the reasons for the shift are well understood – this is where the audience is going, plus the ability to measure and track performance much more directly.

Ze – There are broad ranges in terms of how aggressively you move into this space – setting up an island in Second Life is very different than buying ad banners on facebook. There’s a huge difference between MMPG and setting up a forum.

Philip – this requires a lot of trust and transparency. You’ve got to build relationships, and measurability. There is no easy simple answer.

Q: In general new is risky. Easier to go with what you know. What would you recommend prioritizing given that there are so many new things to try.

Philip – care less about where the ad appears and more about the audience it reaches. Let’s also not be afraid of more intrusive approaches – making ads part of the content.

Jeremy – it costs a lot to do one 30 second spot – with new interactive techniques you can create many different versions in tools like flash which can be shared in many new places. Don’t get stuck with your old “creative” work which is what you’ve done before. Example of a drug site created by a drug maker which allows individuals on the drug to talk about their experiences – some of which may not be entirely positive – creates conversation and trust.

Philip – totally agree. They will talk about it whether you want them to or not – so it is much better to have a place for that conversation to occur.

Ze and Philip argue over reviews – Philip says most are negative, Ze says people really want to love you. (Maybe the difference between running Fucked Company and running the Ze Frank show).

Ze – it needs to be anchored in very simple interactions around your product – complex is ok, but make sure it is anchored in the experience of the product. Bad reviews are part of the experience – it won’t all be roses, but people will give positive reviews.

Q from Audience: Some of the internet laggards are now the biggest name, so what is the incentive to be an early adopter rather than a late adopter?

Philip – ebay was an early ad banner buyer, and eighth to sign up for LinkExchange, and that is part of how they became so successful. Early adoption made them successful.

Shar – but was it early adoption which made them possible or the model?

Jeremy – why start now? Learning. Having competence, intelligence, and knowledge about an emerging opportunity, you allocate some resources to it. This is the number one reason.

Shar – is there value in waiting, until there are best practices to follow?

Ze – on the fringes, sure. You don’t want to start your first experience with some radically new feature or site that is unproven – but you don’t need to stay out altogether just to be able to learn.

Jeremy – Second Life is a good example – this was conceptually very interesting, but maybe those large brands who built out whole experiences jumped in too soon, given the cost/effort involved as opposed to blogging or ads or video.

Ze – but don’t overlook the PR value as well. Stories about stories is a major way of getting publicity online – if you want people to think of you as an innovative brand, there are opportunities there, but don’t build them based on large scale mass engagement.

Philip – if you see something new and small but you think it will be interesting, don’t hesitate – take some risks. As other folks come to see it as interesting as well – you will have been there first.

Q: What about the dark side of social media?

Philip – Well, if you’re kryptonite locks and someone figures out how to pick your locks with a pen, and posts a video of it, that sucks.

Jeremy – we shouldn’t really think about optimism or pessimism – it’s here. It just is, and you can’t avoid it. If you spend all your time thinking about all the bad things which could happen, you’d just stay in bed.

Q: What about large media companies who want to retain attention?

Jeremy – need to connect product to audiences. We see a lot of people, for example, putting television shows online as is – is that the best model? On the other hand, lots of newspapers and magazine brands are creating original video content directly – appropriate content which connects with their audiences. Reach consumers where they are, not where you want them to be. You don’t necessarily need to think of getting users to “your site” so much as connecting users to your data. Let users take embed codes, they will drag video with them all over the web, and ultimately result in bigger audiences – even higher website traffic.

Philip – of course everyone can make content now. But what can media companies do that individuals can? Throw a lot against the wall and see what sticks. If you just keep doing what you’ve been doing – hey come to my site or read my magazine, you’re gonna be screwed.

Ze – The issue is really fracturing. I think the winner of all this is really brands themselves. Users are craving content to help put back together this mass of content we’re exposed to – these mass brands have some opportunity to be that context which replaces the “network” in the old model.

Q: What about people producing viral videos that are product placement?

Jeremy: Just don’t tell anyone. Make it a secret project.

Ze – Wow. I would stay say away from it. Be transparent, be upfront. It’s ok to be self-deprecating and upfront about what you’re doing.

Philip – if you’re gonna do that (fake viral videos) you’re gonna get caught. If you make a cool viral video about what you’re doing and make it an ad, that’s great. The good news that way is that if it sucks no one will know – if it sucks and it is a fake viral video, everyone will know.

Q: Isn’t the end just google? Won’t google just eventually buy everyone who’s ever created a video tool or video?

Jeremy – I obviously don’t agree with that (though they are free to make an offer). The argument Ballmer and others have made about Google is that they haven’t really produced any innovation outside search – they’ve bought innovation but not really innovated businesses they developed. Most of the significant scaled consumer innovations came from outside Google.

Ze – turning away from Google for a moment – there is a wave coming, which is around facilitating innovation – things like Facebooks open API support, Nokia building that kind of philosphy into hardware – we’re going to see a lot of innovative stuff coming up.

Q: What limits is the all going to run up against?

Ze – there are built in hardware limits in the wires and processors – but those are scaling well. The real limits we will run into are our human capability to process all these stuff – the ability to maintain relationships and live our lives in a world of information overload and fracture -that’s the bigger bottleneck here.

Philip – totally agree. You larger network of randomness (above and beyond facebook and myspace and such) – people who comment on the same stuff as you, or random email discussions, etc – these are getting larger and overwhelming – but smaller niche communities may be needed to be really workable for people.

Jeremy – from an infrastructure perspective we don’t see operational issues – the capacity is there and people are using it, but we don’t see that as a major hurdle.

Shar – summary.

It isn’t about positive or negative – it just is. It is happening whether you like it or not.

Start small – don’t have to try to do it all the first time.

(She had a third one which I missed while typing.)