There’s been much hoorah and hoopla surrounding Chris Anderson’s latest book “Free”. Part of it is due to the fact that he plagiarized Wikipedia entries. Part of it is due to Malcolm Gladwell disagreeing with Chris’s reasoning and then Seth Godin disagreeing with Gladwell’s. Part of it of course is also due to Chris himself and that his books tend to find their way on the shelves of many marketers, businessmen, and people who simply want to look like they still buy books.
To be honest, I haven’t read Chris Anderson’s book and probably won’t. In the past few years I’ve read many books by the threes company of marketing literature (Godin, Gladwell, and Anderson) and simply can’t swallow another one so soon. I often think that the first chapter explains their entire theory and every subsequent page is filled with case studies dug up by themselves and their minions to support it. If you’ve read this blog or know me well you’ll know that I don’t think studying business is the best way to become good at it – studying people through sociology, psychology, and simply reading is.
However, I wanted to include Chris Anderson’s free version of “Free” here as a reminder of a case that exemplifies change in the distribution of books and ideas. Feel free to read it and let me know how it is. I’ll read his articles on Wired and every other bloggers summary of it in the mean time.
Click on to read the book and thanks in advance for spending hours on my blog ;)
[click to continue…]
Before I even begin, I want you to know that I’m gathering information and insight and would love to hear from you in the comments section of this post. Your thoughts, advice, and direction make it possible for myself and others to understand all the forces at play and get a better idea of the bigger picture. Thank you in advance.
Ok now that that’s out of the way…
Recently, I’ve been researching and dissecting some of the ways in which people are utilizing the web at a hyper local level. Whether it’s a politician like Mayor Cory Booker who utilizes twitter as a communication tool as he resides over the city of Newark,NJ (@corybooker), or my old highschool choir who update an atrocious looking website with news of upcoming shows and MP3s of their performances. It fascinates me that information is plenty and readily available but that it is also disjointed and buried for individuals to find.
What I want to know more about is YOUR pattern of finding local information on the web.
First, do you even desire local information be it news, sports, politics, education, events, guides, reviews, etc.?
Second, where do you go to find this information if you need it? Is there one centralized place or are you scouring the web and Googling your heart out? Are town halls live-blogged, is there a facebook page for your neighborhood watch group, do your politicians and school officials tweet away, do local businesses have their own newsletter?
Third, well you make up third – just speak your mind freely and send over as many examples as you can about whose doing it well and whose failing miserably. Is your hometown a digital rockstar or are they dropping the ball and missing out?
Thanks again to anyone who contributes to the discussion, your input is what makes this dynamic and rewarding. If you know of anyone else who might be interested in sharing their two cents please feel free to pass this link along, tweet, facebook, or you can be old fashion and tell them about it in person. Cheers!
I only got 1 question wrong – though I’d love to debate the person who created it in the first place. More important than the quiz itself is realizing how difficult it is to objectively test someone’s knowledge of social media marketing.
If you’re bored and want to test your knowledge I guess it’s a decent way of doing so. Does anyone else know of any other quizzes/tests/programs etc that try to evaluate your knowledge of social media marketing.
I recently stumbled upon a great blog about one of my favorite topics, the future of newspapers journalism, called Invisible Inkling by Ryan Sholin. Ryan has been in the industry for a while working with newspapers and other publications but what I really like is that he’s trying to figure out how to make this thing work. By “thing”, I mean how to make sure that there is a sustainable business model to support quality journalism irregardless of the medium that delivers it.
In his latest post, Ryan gives his view on the key to authenticity. He provides five great points, which I suggest you read, but #5 – Show Your Work, was one that I never thought about in terms of a way to be more authentic. It’s not that I wasn’t putting in referral links or attributing flickr accounts, it was that I was simply doing these things as a process and because I thought it was the ethical thing to do. But it’s more than just ethical – it’s a way to pay respect, provide a service, sustain an intangible system, and ultimately be authentic.
Sure, authenticity means being original but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t draw inspiration from somewhere else. When I think about quality blogging, I think about taking in what is going on in the world around us and twisting it to reveal something else (@carlosmic ’s OwlSparks does a great job of this).
As always, the real excitement is the journey and not just the final destination so by showing your work we have a way of seeing the process and not just the product.
What are your sources of inspiration and insight?
Photo via Flickr
I learned a long time ago about the power of silence if and when used properly.
In music, it is often silence that gives depth and meaning to a song. Pink Floyd, for example, were great at using silence and minimal vocals to deliver powerful emotions. I was always amazed by how ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’, a song that lasted 13 minutes and 40 seconds, lacked a single vocal until the 8:48 mark. I’m still blown away every time the first words are sung.
In relationships, silence is your most powerful weapon to prove a point. One of my favorite lines of a song is in Royksopp’s ‘Remind Me’,“A brave man tells the truth, a wise man’s tools are analogies and proverbs. A woman holds her tongue knowing silence will speak for her.”
As a teenager my temper was raging and I realized that finding a solution wasn’t up to those around me it was up to me and I resorted to silence. At first, I arrogantly thought that not speaking my mind went against my freedom to do so; however, I quickly realized that biting my tongue even if just for a moment awarded me the time and ability to really phrase my responses effectively. That moment of silence was my opportunity to think about what I wanted from a situation and find the words that led towards meeting that goal. Silence helped me get what I wanted from people.
Anyone who has ever worked at a company that stirs controversy will tell you that there are times when to fall silent and times when you need to act. Good PR is knowing when to let a fire die down and when to douse the flames.
Today, on top of our every day interactions we have a number of tools that allow us to speak our minds instantly, openly, and with reach. As with any tool, we should take the time to learn how to use them responsibly and effectively. Biting your tongue and keeping silent can be a powerful tactic whether you are building your personal brand, your company’s brand, or just participating in the conversation.
In The Flawed Online Video Model (Part 1) I discussed how the freely available but ad-supported video streaming model, currently embraced by TV and movie studios with the likes of Hulu.com, could see them down the same path as newspapers. That path essentially is to shortsightedly see online distribution simply as an additional revenue stream without taking into account that the original medium would drastically decline in value and reach over the long run.
The internet that you and I know is young and although change is inevitable, it seems to many that erecting pay-walls and limiting access goes completely against the reason the web emerged in the first place. The internet unbinds, opens, tears-down, and connects people and information without succumbing to geographic or physical limitations. So why does it feel like we’re going backwards by building these virtual walls within it? Who gets to decide that this is the change we need, corporations or consumers?
Well, in many ways we are going backwards but that’s because media companies are in a frantic search for the right balance of supply and demand in the advertising models themselves. So what does any logical and experienced veteran do when faced with a crisis? That’s right they have a hissy-fit of a panic attack and put up walls to protect themselves. The hope for the end users like you and I is that all walls – even virtual walls – eventually fall. If paywalls are embraced I believe that they will quickly come down.
Life After The Paywall
Caution: Extreme Speculation Ahead
My hope and current prediction is that the convergence of technologies will lead us into the new information age and bring advertising back in a bigger but smarter way. The Hulu desktop client, for example, makes this future pretty feasible. Eyeballs are eyeballs: whether those eyes stare at a TV set, a computer screen, or a computer hooked up to a TV set is of no relevance at all to advertisers. The point of advertising and marketing is to put your brand and product in front of a relevant audience in the hopes of winning a few converts. When an audience embraces one medium the advertising dollars will quickly follow.
The cable box will die. The TV arm of telecom companies will merge with the ISPs. Many telecoms provide TV, phone, and internet services – it’s extremely obvious that if their TV subscriptions start to decline but internet bandwidth needs increase that they will simply transfer the charge from one to the other. (Overtime costs may decrease but what we’ve seen is that technology keeps advancing meaning infrastructure is in continuous need of improvement and therefore prices stay the same)
As for newspapers, all will decline, the majority of them will die, and only a few will be able to stay afloat to take advantage of future portable devices. Again, the advertising models will realign like they will with TV. Why should a full page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal print edition be of more value than a full page in the e-edition. However, there’s an obvious counter to this argument in that textual content is easy and cheap to replicate where as TV shows and movies are almost impossible. I’ve been scratching my head for days over a rebuttal to this argument but to be honest I can’t come up with one, maybe you can and be kind enough to leave it as a comment below.
What is Certain…
The future of media is not controlled by media companies, it is controlled by its consumption behavior. The two most important aspects to this behavior is that we as consumers want to decide when we receive content and how it’s received. What makes this unstoppable is that current technology can support this behavior. The will and the way are finally aligned and media companies will simply have to decide what their involvement is going to be. Unfortunately, it might already be too late for them to jump on board.
Yesterday I had that moment, the one where we realize that we are old and can relay first-hand information of how life was in the past. This realization occurred to me while I was discussing what dial-up modems were to my 11 year old niece. As I imitated the sounds of the dial tone she began to giggle in complete mockery of me — I resorted to describing it as a donkey arguing with a car alarm. My story didn’t matter to her; in fact, it probably wouldn’t even help her in the future either.
“How we got here?” is an important question, but it will never be more important than, “What’s next?”. Next time I see her, I’m going to ask how her and her friends interact online to find out what is important to them – that is a more valuable conversation.
I was just drafting a post discussing how the Hulu model of ad supported video content is wrong and that changes would have to be made. Unfortunately for me, Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s Cheif Digital Officer, beat me to the punch today and hinted at putting up a paywall on Hulu. It really does suck, and no there is no other better adjective to describe how the end user must feel. We’ve been given something for free just so you can take it away from us and flaunt it behind some barricaded paywall – you big media bastards!
To give you an idea of how we got to this point in the media industry, I’m going to put my original post below and then follow up in Part 2 with my thoughts on how life beyond the paywall may actually improve.
Hulu’s business model seems flawed to me, at least in the short term.
A decade ago a few media outlets were looking to distribute their content online, make it open, free, and gain a new revenue stream with an ad supported business model. These bright companies were newspapers. Now, over ten years later, those same companies are faced with the worst advertising climate in decades, negative circulation numbers, some pesky thing called social networking, and let us not forget all these unqualified bloggers robbing them of valuable unique visitors. These companies are all looking at this disastrous mess – the kind of gunk that’s stuck to the bottom of the trash can even after it’s flipped over but you’re too lazy and disgusted by to clean – while scratching their heads in amazement as to how they got there in the first place and more importantly wondering how they’ll get out. Sigh.
Today, there is so much content from so many different sources that supply dwarfs demand and the advertising dollars, in the form of CPMs, supporting these outfits are in rapid decline.
If you think about it, the newspapers were unfortunate to have to take first stab at becoming successful on the internet. The only reason the music and movie industry lagged behind was because of the cost and technology needed. Only in the past few years have streaming capabilities and bandwidth speeds for video content to be delivered to the masses in the way that text was in the mid 90’s. Now, the studios and networks can begin to offer their entire library of shows and feature films at the cost of simply a few pennies and with a little advertising every once in a while they can even turn a profit. But that’s actually where the similarities between the thriving online video market and the dying online news market emerge.
The only difference between the two industries, is that the TV and movie studios haven’t seen the dramatic decline in viewership that the papers have with readership – yet. What happens when people start embracing the convenience of watching practically any show they desire at any time they like for absolutely free (save for their already existing ISP cost)? Furthermore, what happens as the distinction between computers and cable boxes continues to blur? Hulu desktop was just announced, platforms like the Xbox 360 and PS3 have streaming capabilities integrated, and practically all computers can now support HD video and even have the same HDMI port as one’s cable box. This overlap of what used to be just TV technology and computer technology will only continue and soon enough more and more people will abandon their set top boxes for the free and easily accessible VOD services like Hulu.
In one way it sounds great for Hulu but it’s actually not. Yes, traffic to Hulu will grow and therefore ad inventory will as well but TV viewership will decline. In today’s market, Online pre/mid/post roll is relatively cheap compared to a TV spot. So what happens to Hulu? Well Hulu will essentially be at the same point the newspaper companies are at today: delivering high quality but high cost content while seeing a decline in their main source of advertising revenue (TV ads) and only a trickle of a revenue stream from their online efforts. Then they’ll start blaming it on Google or come up with ways to put a paid wall after years of not having one. Sounds awful yet familiar because it’s exactly what has happened to newspapers.
But there actually is hope.
In Part 2 of The Flawed Online Video Model I’ll discuss what’s coming next and my thoughts on what’s coming after what’s coming next.
Disclaimer: In no way does my writing and its content reflect the opinion or intentions of my employer, The New York Post – a News Corporation Company.
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