Ann Moore's Time Inc. plays hard to get at it tries to position itself as an online cash cow for its parent... Time Inc. Bolsters Digital Brands AdWeek
But Rupert Murdoch is focusing on developing the ability to reach far more contexts than traditional editorial output can create... News Corp builds online ad network Reuters
Attendees voiced the value of the range of tracks from strategic management of knowledge to the practical aspects of selecting and living with search software and applications, down to the nitty-gritty of taxonomy implementations. Traffic was good in the vendor booths of the Expo area, as technologists and content managers mingled over receptions, meals and seminars.
The opening keynoter for ESS was Susan Feldman, Research Vice President, Content Technologies, IDC. describing a market in flux with many competing technologies. Search is the missing piece for enterprise software, and large software vendors are entering the market. SaaS options are good solutions due to the complexity of search technology, and need to have the latest version.
The keynote was a nice lead into the session that I chaired on "Solving the Multiple Search Engine Problem" addressing approaches to the proliferation of departmental search vendors within organizations. Rennie Walker, Wells Fargo, described "waking up one morning with the multi-search engine blues", resulting in creating a Search Center of Excellence (COE). Swetswise uses a federating search software, Museglobal, to deliver a subscription delivery product incorporating multiple search indexes. Miles Kehoe, New Idea Engineering, identified the challenges of maintaining distributed search engine indexes--a practicality not addressed by vendors.
Security, ediscovery and regulatory compliance were themes in other presentations. Search across multiple repositories brings the thorny problems of access control to the underlying content. Depending on the application, different levels of security may be necessary, down to the sub-document level. Choices include "early binding" vs. "late binding" options for access. Additional challenges include the changes in Federal Rules of Civil Procedure of 12/1/2006, making risk management of the enterprise search environment more critical.
Steve Arnold, highly regarded industry expert on search engines chaired a keynote panel originally entitled "Giants Do Stumble: Are Google and Microsoft in Decline?" modified in the final program to "What's Next for the Search Engine Giants", questioning product managers from Google and Microsoft, who provided little new insight. Both companies are relative newcomers to the enterprise search space, and had vendor booths in the expo, joining traditional vendors. Arnold, in a later session, honed in on Google and his analysis of their patents to predict new directions.
Findability is more than keyword search in full text documents, a message which came through in both the sessions and vendor presentations. Sessions on semantic search indicate progress in actual implementation, which is closely tied to classification and taxonomy systems. Improved navigation, particularly faceted search, are another approach to improve the user experience, and improve findability.
Niche software vendors on the exhibit floor, demonstrated other approaches to improving findability. Siderean uses a relationship approach which intuitively fits research and discovery processes, to improve findability. Cognition was demonstrating their linguistic search software with great promise for in depth research, particularly in scientific and technical literature, with a plethora of potential search terms. Deep Web Technologies showed the power of federating search software, as implemented at science.gov and scitopia.org.
Enterprise search and management of organizational intellectual capital have become mission-critical. The challenge is finding the right approaches for the organization, then the technical tools for implementation. Increasingly, behavioral and linguistic aspects are being recognized as essential factors in the process of adding value to the organization. Search is not easy, and delivering answers to people is not straightforward. It's finding the right combination of solutions that challenges the attendees at these conferences..there is no one-size-fits-all!
TechCrunch picked up over the Thanksgiving holiday on a rumor that Rupert Murdoch is pursuing the acquisition of the LinkedIn social network, a rumor later denied by News Corporation in The Telegraph but which has more than a grain of strategic sense in it nevertheless. [UPDATE: VentureBeat provides comfirmation with details that parallel our original post.] With Fox Interactive Media head Peter Levinsohn confessing in a Reuters interview that he finds Facebook "substantially more entertaining" than their own MySpace, there's an acknowledgement that MySpace is more about traditional media in many ways than it is about the multi-dimensional networking that Facebook enables for adults in professional and personal roles. While MySpace's upcoming personal feeds will no doubt give MySpace a little more boost against the rapidly growing strength of Facebook it's clear that Murdoch has many fish to fry when it comes to attracting adults who are at the core of many of his holdings' revenue streams.
A LinkedIn acquisition would help News Corp to fill in not only dwindling business-oriented classifieds revenues as more jobs and services are posted and found on social media networks but as well give them a well-established network of professionals that could become the focal point of hard-core business information services that bridge media and enterprise markets. It's not likely that Murdoch's Dow Jones division will come up with a social network on its own to compete with financial communities on Bloomberg and Reuters networks, but with LinkedIn they would have the ability to have a key tool to help professionals network and execute enterprise business well beyond investment bank trading floors. That's likely to bolster revenues as Factiva database subscription revenues face tough times in a softening economy.
To some degree this might also help to solve some of the question marks as to how best to leverage the highly valuable network of Wall Street Journal subscribers, many of whom no doubt are LinkedIn members as well. What better way to give this elite business publication a powerful business social network than to equip it with the most popular business networking tool available to date? It's doubtful that the WSJ crowd would ever take MySpace seriously as a social networking environment, no matter how much News Corp tries to re-engineer it, so why waste time building one from scratch as potential rivals gear up their own efforts for business-oriented social networking? All of a sudden the idea of premium content takes on a whole new meaning in this context that can transform the WSJ community into an elite social networking community. In the meantime LinkedIn infrastructure can be repurposed to give MySpace some more adult angles as well for younger people who are looking for a Facebook alternative.
There are realistic options for LinkedIn other than News Corp, but few that would be able to leverage all of LinkedIn's value to its maximum potential. It's a logical and potentially powerful marriage of social media via an organization that understands both media and enterprise content value fluently. Murdoch is one of the few old-line publishers who really understands that the value in publishing is already way beyond the inventory that any one newsroom can create. In an era in which user-defined context is king, consider LinkedIn a key acquisition plum that's likely to be pulled out by a major player like NewsCorp sooner rather than later.
The image of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the cover of Newsweek clutching his new Kindle as if it were "the new, new thing" is designed to get us thinking that the new portable device from Amazon is going to revolutionize the way that we use books, etc.
In short, it's not.
The article in Newsweek is filled with gushing praise for Bezos' efforts to "revolutionize" book reading as we know it, but little of what it promises requires a Kindle to make it happen. As the article acknowledges eventually:
In 2007, screens are ubiquitous (and less twitchy), and people have been reading everything on them—documents, newspaper stories, magazine articles, blogs—as well as, yes, novels. Not just on big screens, either. A company called DailyLit this year began sending out books—new ones licensed from publishers and classics from authors like Jane Austen—straight to your e-mail IN BOX, in 1000-work chunks.
In other words it's fair to say that the cat has been out of the bag for books on mobile platforms for quite some time and that from a book perspective there's not much new to say about Kindle other than it's another new device for eInk technology and a good way for people to view Amazon-scanned books in a proprietary viewer. Other than that, you're looking at an Apple Newton with built-in wireless that costs $100 more than a comparable eBook reader from Sony.
Ah, but that wireless. Probably the most interesting things that the Kindle can handle have less to do with books and a lot more to do with other content and marketing opportunities via its wireless capabilities. The Kindle will be able to download newsstand content such as newspapers and magazines as well as books via a wireless system that can use both wireless hotspot technology and broadband wireless. While at launch time the downloads are going to be coming from the Amazon online store, there's the potential in this platform to be a device that could interact with "bricks" environments as well as "clicks." When the Newsweek article says:
Amazon has designed the Kindle to operate totally independent of a computer: you can use it to go to the store, browse for books, check out your personalized recommendations, and read reader reviews and post new ones, tapping out the words on a thumb-friendly keyboard. Buying a book with a Kindle is a one-touch process.
it means Amazon's Kindle Store online site. Not exactly Buck Rogers stuff.
But what if instead the Kindle were a device that you could use to point at items in a retail store to learn more about them and then click on the Kindle to enable immediate purchasing of either a physical or virtual version of that item? What if you were reading an interesting eBook at your favorite coffee shop and then picked up a hard copy of it at the counter from their print-on-demand machine while you ordered up your second latte? Or, better yet, if you're in Toys 'R Us you could browse online reviews of toys and games on your Kindle and use in-store electronic purchasing via the Kindle to speed up the checkout process. Given the enormous investment that Amazon has in retailing all kinds of manufactured goods you'd think that they'd focus on how to improve margins across their entire catalog of merchandise via an electronic gadget.
Given the premium price tag for one of these units it's not clear that there's going to be much of any thunder at the cash register for Kindles this holiday season. Consider this a modest step by Amazon to get into the mobile platform business in a way that could position it in a very interesting way over time as an alternative to Microsoft, Apple and Google - a positioning that would make Amazon more attractive as an acquisition target for a publisher-friendly online service. Say, like, Yahoo? With Yahoo's brand-friendly approach to content, it would be a natural fit. So consider Kindle less of a revolution in eBooks and more of an evolution of Amazon towards a marriage that can bring its investors to a new level in the marketplace via acquisition.
I heard from a colleague yesterday who mentioned that TrueAdvantage, one of the early leaders in advanced sales lead generation tools, is in the process of being dissolved. No callback yet from TrueAdvantage or one of its key investors, but it sounds as if this is probably one that's for real. If so then it's not good news for the dozens of content and technology companies that have been focused on providing value-add tools for sales and marketing automation. TrueAdvantage's focus seemed to be spot-on: analysis of a wide variety of published and enterprise content sources to identify companies that are highly likely prospects for very specific types of products and services. With nearly seven years of refinement you'd think that this would be a strong winning formula for a subscription service.
But there are two factors that may have been putting extra pressure on TrueAdvantage: rapidly evolving content technologies and an increasingly crowded marketplace for value-add sales and marketing tools. Tools such as Generate are providing a higher level of semantic analysis of content to not only filter general characteristics of companies and products but as well specific analysis of content to identify where a company is in the overall acquisition process. At the same time there is a widening array of major business information vendors that are building far more sophisticated filtering tools themselves: what was a sophisticated, advanced tool for business information a few years ago is becoming an expected filtering feature for standard business information databases.
Which brings us back to an all-too-familiar theme for many content technology companies: if what your company is building is a feature in search of a marketplace you're in a deadly race against the clock to turn that feature into a real product. Many patient private investors hope that through careful cultivation they can build their sales base to the point where a feature can survive on its own as a product but without raising the fundamental question of whether there is a broad enough business problem being solved to justify this optimism. Content technology companies need to think more like electronic publishers from the start and to look beyond their software expertise to the business problems that need to be solved first and foremost. At the same time, though, publishers need to foster the entrepreneurial spirit of new content technology companies and learn how to experiment with new capabilities that might indicate an opportunity for new products and services.
But even with all of the right buttons being pushed we may be reaching a saturation point for value-add sales and marketing tools. Return-on-investment arguments premised on sales efficiency don't always add up collectively: that is, if you have ten solutions that promise a 25 percent improvement in sales efficiency, purchasing all ten of them is not likely to improve your sales efficiency 250 percent! Content technology companies need to focus more on 10x-scale solutions that will change dramatically to make any sort of major impact in a market for sales productivity tools that's facing a softening economy. Good solutions will continue to do well in this environment, but investors should be prepared to challenge the speed with which deals can be closed and expect pilot programs to play out longer as customers try to milk advanced technologies for as long as they can on the cheap before considering full-blown commitments.
It's no secret that just about every pore of the Web that can be filled with bogus links and endorsements has already been equipped with astroturf content, stuff that's meant to seem like it's been posted by "just plain ol' folks" but which has been generated in fact by public relations firms or corporate hirelings. Astroturfing has long been associated with politicians and major PR firms trying to build the appearance of grass roots sentiment for products and people, but increasingly it's becoming a rallying cry for the censure of online publishers who are trying to build up traffic and revenues.
A spate of recent blog posts, for example, highlighted alleged astroturfing and social spamming by Shelfari, an online book discussion community. Posts on Gawker, O'Reilly Radar , competitor LibraryThing, Book Patrol and others detail how a Shelfari intern was pumping out synthetic kudos on blog comments and how a feature that enabled members to invite friends to Shelfari was rather ambitious in its use of their address books (you wanted to invite everyone, right?). Shelfari apologized for the astroturf comments on the Book Patrol blog and has announced a quick redesign of their signup process - as well as additional staff to help them with this and other growing pains.
It's not easy being an up-and-comer against established players, so perhaps a little benign neglect on Shelfari's part can be excused in passing. But if your product's whole rationale is to be a leading social media gathering place you'd think that you'd be extra-careful to make sure that you were playing by the unwritten law of social media: thou shalt not abuse personal trust for the sake of of commerce or ulterior motives. The "why" of this maxim is clear when you look at research from Faves.com, which indicates that at least weekly visits to social media sites jump to 90 percent when someone has at least moderate trust for a site's members, compared to about 34 percent for people with less trust. The formula for social media demands trustworthy intentions in order to scale effectively for advertisers.
While social media's growth is impressive the continuing challenge for social media outlets is to rein in the temptation to build traffic volume via less-than-genuine social contributions. It's not too different than the ongoing battles that search engines face with "link farms" that some publishes have used to simulate interest in content to play with page ranking algorithms, except that with these social media ploys the deception is much more direct in its abuse of people's personal endorsement power. In some ways what we're seeing is a generation of Web developers who have been trained on building "clicks" needing to adjust to a social media personal networking environment in which the power of personal endorsement amongst trusted peers carries a weight that is built one relationship at a time. Facebook's new ad and marketing services begin to rectify this trend somewhat by making it easier for commercial relationships to be defined in social networking environments in a way that honors the value of one's personal network while also honoring the value of commercial content and relationships.
Maintaining the boundaries of personal and commercial online relationships effectively is still a new science and art form. The good news is that social media has enormous power to build public relations, but the bad news is that people still think that good PR in social media is based on manipulation rather than constructive and authentic relationship building. While traditional PR by third-party firms will continue to thrive via mass media and single-voiced social media outlets such as weblogs, in social media outlets that rely on networks and conversations are going to require a different kind of PR investment - an investment based on authenticity and real relationships. There are different kinds of knobs to twist in social media to create amplification; hopefully traditional PR firms can learn how to do this more effectively as new firms learn how to master the art of social media PR.
Google may not always be great at creating products, but they sure do know how to create markets. In introducing its new Android open-source mobile phone platform via the Open Handset Alliance, Google has opened the gates for any and all software developers to develop new applications that can take advantage of Android's capabilities - already impressive in demo form.
This could catapult Andriod into a competitive position with Microsoft and Apple in relatively short time frame for mobile platforms if ambitious developers take up Google's challenge - and Google is making it easier for them to consider that challenge with USD 10 million in prize money for them to consider. The question is, though, will mobile carriers intent on maintaining proprietary control over their platforms to control services be willing to take on such an open platform?
According to Engadget the likely candidate for early adoption of Android for mobile devices in the U.S. is Sprint, which is the American telecoms carrier most aggressive in building out high-bandwidth, long-distance WiMax mobile Intenet infrastructure that could bring the mobile Web to the masses. Engadget speculates that perhaps Google would acquire Sprint to help accelerate WiMax growth, services fueled by Google mobile advertising revenues that might make mobile more affordable or, perhaps, free. Nice thinking, but with so many different communications technologies in play, including the impending action of soon-to-be-former analog television frequencies in the U.S. it's far more likely that Google will be looking towards an alliance with Sprint that would still leave the door open for Android via other carriers.
In the meantime Sprint has much to gain in working aggressively with Google. Slow to the mobile services dance as it grew incompatible network scale via its Nextel acquisition, Sprint needs an edge to catch up with rivals well entrenched with iPhones, Blackberries and other intelligent handsets. In doing so Sprint may be able to catch the next wave of mobile communications focused on both full-screen Web services and advanced messaging capabilities that can leverage WiMax efficiently while other technologies fall into place for even more mobile Web access.
The Zune-sized touch-screen demo unit with a Blackberry-like keyboard that Google's Sergey Brin used to show off Android certainly underscores that Android has the potential to develop features that can run with the current mobile big dogs very quickly - and begin to create a price war between Android-equipped units and currently pricey iPhones and Blackberries that might be just the trick to unlock the chicken-egg equation that seems to have slowed the growth of mobile Web services.
This is a long way of saying that we should expect Android to open up highly affordable Web access via mobile units far more quickly than other platforms are likely to do via telecommunication partners seeking to maintain status quo services pricing. While high-end content services will certainly find a home on Android it's the prospect of reaching people for whom a mobile phone is a necessity and high-speed Internet access via a PC a luxury that content producers and advertisers should consider most important in this rollout of content technologies.
The Web is about to get that much more powerful and affordable via Android-enabled devices and networks - and that much more important to marketers seeking audiences with limited attention spans. Pop in Google's OpenSocial initiative for social media services on top of an Android-enabled device and you have a thoroughly compelling platform for content development that other platform providers are going to be hard-pressed to match soon. Google's definitely in catch-up mode in mobile services but it looks like through Android they might be catching a big break at last.
As could be expected there is a lot of strong reaction to Facebook's new SocialAds program, ranging from the interested to the irritated in some instances but also pointing towards legal concerns in other instances. As noted in PC World a law professor at the University of Minnesota pointed out that Facebook might be in violation of privacy statues in several states - including New York and California. At issue is SocialAd's appropriating the name or likeness of a person for commercial purposes without explicit consent in their terms and conditions for such uses. It's an important and compelling angle to the new system that probably should have been thought through more carefully by Facebook, but also one which points to further refinements that might increase the potential value of the innovative contextual ad program.
The lack of a voluntary opt-in for SocialAds is certainly a potential legal concern but more importantly it does not allow advertisers to take full advantage of the power of personal endorsement. By linking ads to user posts without explicit permission the ad is only loosely associated with a person's personal endorsement of a product or service - one assumes that there's a positive impression of a product or service if someone bothers to mention it in their Facebook posts but the strength of that endorsement is not easily understood by someone viewing the ad. Is it a like, a love, or relative indifference? If I went to that restaurant that I mentioned in the post, was the food really good or was I just name-dropping to impress my friends and colleagues - and did I actually pick up the check?
A potential solution to this dilemma is seen in the other new ad feature on Facebook - pages for products and brands. Individuals can declare themselves "fans" of commercial entities with Facebook pages, a feature that seems to have been used mostly by a company's employees so far but that could expand in time to include real fan bases. This sort of passionate and loyal grass roots backing is what author Kevin Roberts refers to as "lovemarks," endorsements that have legs far longer than even superstars such as Michael Jordan backing the brand of basketball shoes for millions of dollars. Lovemarks get their endorsements for free - and with a little tweaking Facebook's SocialAds could be adjusted to tie "fan" endorsements to SocialAds placement to ensure that their presence in a fan's posts represented true enthusiasm for an advertiser's brand.
What has gone begging in this equation so far, though, is an obvious opportunity: if personal endorsements from sports superstars who aren't necessarily passionate about a product can command millions, why shouldn't the personal endorsements of Facebook members via SocialAds for benefit the person giving that implied or explicit endorsement more directly - and be under their control more directly? For example, if I am a person who's very influential in my online community or in a real-world community shouldn't SocialAds be able to reward me financially for their endorsement - or to enable them to funnel funds paid by an advertiser to place a SocialAds ad to their favorite charity or cause?
While such a mechanism alone would not address the potential legal exposures for the SocialAds program it may provide the incentive for people to participate proactively - and, in doing so, accept the legalisms that would apply to their use of personal endorsement. There are some potential complexities in such a system - would a member set a minimum bid for their endorsement rights or would this be determined algorithmically, or both? - I think that this is the likely direction in which systems such as SocialAds are likely to head. If being rewarded for endorsements works for sports superstars and other notable figures in mass media, why shouldn't it work in more highly focused social media as well? It's an interesting issue that is likely to unfold in a bigger way over the next several months.
You have to hand it to Yahoo: there is a lot of pressure on them from pundits and analysts to come up with something that would put them in the game with major social networking portals. But while still incubating their Mash social media platform they've come up with a product that says in effect that they know that they have a long ways to go. As such the introduction of Kickstart by Yahoo needs to be looked at through kinder, gentler eyes than might otherwise be the case. Instead of rushing a "we're everything to everyone" portal to market that would be sure to be met with disappointment Yahoo has gone to war with the platform that they've got and has chosen specific battlegrounds as a starting point.
The specific focus of Kickstart is young adults making the transition from college into professional lives. This is a gap that may be more theoretical than real given the strength of services such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Classmates.com in covering alumni relationships, but by focusing specifically on young adults making a transition Yahoo may have an opportunity to catch a toehold of acceptance with these people just at they're considering how to move out of campus mode into corporate mode. Sounds good on the surface, but this may be a case where traditional marketing analysis will leave Yahoo several yards short of their goal. Many of today's college-age generation see a strong blend between personal lives and careers that carries over well into their twenties - the odyssey years, some have termed them. The "prosumer" concept is something very comfortable to this generation, so sharing photos and videos is not necessarily something that conflicts in their minds with professionalism. The division between the Mash project and Kickstart seems like it's aiming at a gap that their audience may not perceive.
At the same time, though, there may be a few young adults who look at their Facebook profiles and say to themselves, oops, I did it again. The danger in mixing consumer and professional outlooks is that it takes a fair amount of maturity to show that you know how to balance these lives effectively. So Kickstart may be named as such to suggest the notion of "fresh start" to those young adults who didn't make the best use of social media to put their most adult foot forward. But at the end of the day it's far more likely that a service like Facebook can help these young adults to maintain meaningful relationships that can include their professional personnae than a service like Kickstart can loosen up and make networking seem to be a little more fun. From this perspective the dead-serious LinkedIn network seems like a more likely target for Kickstart than Facebook, creating a new generation of highly professional networkers that can make the most of people in their networks with great skillsets.
At the end of the day it's not Yahoo that's broken in designing products such as Kickstart but an information industry as a whole that focuses on databases more than the audiences that they serve. Social media is far less about what is stored on a server and far more about what happens in the browsers and mobile phones that connect peers to one another. Social media can yield highly valuable data and demographics for licensing and advertising support but as demonstrated in Facebook's new socially contextual ad and marketing program the premium value in social media is in the contexts that databases can generate on the fly based on interests and activities. Facebook may yet be trumped by a maturing brand out of a Yahoo that can manage some of the details of one's life with more professional panache but by separating the content experience from the networking experience Yahoo seems to have missed out on developing a platform that will create the most rich environment for both advertisers and content licensors.
Hopefully Kickstart can get some quick yardage for Yahoo to consider its next move in social media but in the meantime the rest of the teams are moving to a more sophisticated playing field altogether. Whatever way you slice it Kickstart is trying to define a niche product, in effect ceding the ground already seized by other social networks. With the introduction of Google's OpenSocial the Yahoo crew is becoming that much more isolated from the greater social media environment, becoming increasingly an island for copyrighted content and traditional brands that are powerful in their own right but missing out on many of the contexts in which they can find their greatest value. There's money in that model, but not necessarily money that has a future.
The Hulu hubbub has already died down as people realize that it's and old TV model in a new medium... Hulu to Threaten Cable TV, Not YouTube TheStreet.com
(NOTE: See the ShoreViews Video on this topic below in this post.)
At the recent Future of Business Media conference one of the key trends outlined by the speakers was that B2B media knows that social media is an important trend but that they are very reluctant to engage with social media tools. Most mainstream consumer publishers are about as far along, if truth be told, but it's of crucial importance that they wake up and see the opportunities in social media before others begin to skim off the best revenue opportunities.
One of the best examples of that can be seen in the recent launch of Facebook's advertising features, which are unlike most other tools used for marketers trying to reach audiences. Instead of just throwing up banner ads or typical CPM-oriented ad networks, Facebook is leveraging the power of their own social network to make companies, products and brands a real part of the Facebook community on a peer basis. The new Facebook marketing capabilities consist of two key components: SocialAds, which enables advertisers to get messages into the feed of Facebook activity appearing on member home pages, and Facebook pages for companies and products.
The SocialAds implementation on one level is not too different from any other ad feed that might appear in a weblog's RSS feed but with much more powerful capabilities based on member profiles and activity. An advertiser can target members on Facebook based on their personal profiles, including interests that match up with keywords, targeting both very small communities and very large communities based on those parameters. While keyword selections are fixed, as opposed to being able to define one's own, this still allows a fairly fine degree of targteting.
But the kicker in SocialAds is in the ability to link an ad to a member's reported activities on Facebook. So, for example, if a member visited a particular restaurant a graphic with a sponsored link to that restaurant could appear as a part of that member's post. Since there was probably a positive reason that the member mentioned this restaurant this then provides a very powerful personal endorsement to the advertiser, linking word-of-mouth directly to advertising. This is something very new and extremely powerful in advertising, a development that is potentially as revolutionary as Google's AdWords sponsored links were several years ago.
The introduction of Facebook pages for companies, products and brands is a more subtle features but equally important in its ability to support social media marketing. There are already more than 100,000 commercially-oriented Facebook pages for companies (our company page here) and their power is that they are so much like any other member's page. You can post company or product profiles, videos, links or any other type of content that you think is relevant, but the real value is that members can declare themselves "fans" of your commercial page - a high level of endorsement that enables a brand or product to become in effect a peer member of one's social network.
This is a positioning for marketing and messaging that for the first time really enables marketers to act in conversations within a social community as true peers. Certainly Second Life has shown the way on these types of capaiblities with its ability to allow brands to show of their stuff in virtual reality, but in Facebook's community it's less about glitz and more about rubbing shoulders with bona fide human beings rather than users wrapped in fanciful avatars with who knows what real persona behind them strolling into an online shopping mall. In Facebook pages a brand is less about exhibitionism than it is about engaging customers on a very personal basis.
Not all is sweetness and light in this new marketing environment - why is a sponsored link to ESPN's Pontiac-sponsored online site appearing in my news feed? A little TOO broad targeting, perhaps - but with futher refinements by Facebook and further refinements by Facebook members to indicate the kind of commercial messages they feel comfortable receiving the more powerful this kind of environment will become. It's perhaps a sneak preview of the kind of marketing environment that Google's OpenSocial may be able to make available to companies wanting to extend their message into a wide variety of media platforms that want to take advantage of the power of social media applications.
In the midst of a very busy week of product announcements bookmark Facebook's new marketing capabilities as one that you're going to the talking about - and thinking about - for a long, long time. This is just the beginning of a new era in conversational marketing that will change forever how goods and services enter the conversation of the marketplace.
For a visual run-through of how this all works take a peek at the following ShoreViews Video:
When first I arrived on Wall Street many years ago at a major financial information company I was totally captivated by the notion of real-time news and information being at our fingertips every moment of the day. While other people lived through events in a seemingly second-hand world of news we were in on the cutting edge of events at all times. Reporters leaping over one another to cover these events in our newsroom was a given, and a thrill to watch as they shaped the news for leading investors worldwide.
But times change. Today what we used to consider elite real-time news is what most people on the Web expect to get as a matter of course, while traders in financial circles measure information timeliness that can give them a trading advantage via "hot news" in sub-millisecond timeframes. The Associated Press' CEO Tom Curley painted a picture of this evolving landscape for news in a recent addressat the annual Knight-Bagehot Dinner in New York. In his address Curley was quick to chide "editors [who] need to stop pining for the old world and intensify the leading to the new" and to suggest that news organizations' "focus must be on becoming the very best at filling people’s 24-hour news needs." He also outlined how AP bureau offices would be staffed with more people dedicated to creating news rather than distributing it. Certainly moves such as these will help AP to generate quality news cost-effectively. But Curley fell short in his defining the scope of a number of key parameters that would help real changes to come about.
A key unrealistic expectation that Curley advanced is the role that distribution management plays in online content: "We have the power to control how our content flows on the Web. We must use that power if we’re to continue to be financially secure and independent enough to speak truth to power." It would be more accurate to say that publishers have the power to understand how their content flows on the Web. Yes, through proper packaging a publisher can employ business or legal measures to enforce some commercial arrangements over that flow in many instances, but the notion that a wire service or any other content distribution service has the ability to control distribution on the Web definitively is not only inaccurate but a folly for growing a business.
With the exception of high-end professional applications such as securities trading the ability to monetize news lies far less in its ability to be distributed and far more in its ability to be contextualized. "Hot news" without a hot context is just not hot - especially when the hot contexts far outweigh the relatively small handful of contexts that used to exist through distribution-oriented media outlets. With social media creating millions of highly personalized contexts for news it is to a publisher's advantage to maximize distribution in the most cost-effective manner to those contexts. The brand value is not in the "AP" logo next to the headline or lede but in the value that it provides in the moment. While copyright in those contexts is certainly worth defending if you make the brand less able to flow into the contexts in which news can be monetized most effectively you reduce the opportunity for revenues substantially.
The New York Times understood this well enough when it lowered its subscription barrier to TimesSelect content and the Wall Street Journal appears headed towards more such exposure. Curley's suggestion of introducing tiered pricing for "hot" news versus hours-old news may have some value in this regard but if others are adept at making money without such a scheme it will be hard position to defend except at the highest end of enterprise markets. The general abandonment of 15-minute delayed pricing for stock tickers on television and the Web points towards an environment where the ability to monetize news on an exclusive basis has disappeared in large part from consumer media. It's about value relative to what else can be created in a medium, not just what you feel is valuable independent of that medium. The fault lies not in the Web but in the reluctance of publishers to embrace monetization models beyond distribution control. "Speaking the truth to power" does indeed cost money, but it doesn't seem to ring true that this necessitates the primacy of one particular monetization model. AP has begun some experimentation with viral distribution via embedded content which is a hopeful sign for future efforts. But in an era in which the world edits its own front page and in doing so assigns value to news an organization creating news must adjust its expectations and acknowledge that speaking the truth to power also requires the active cooperation of those user-editors to make that truth relevant to power.
It's not just a matter of protecting copyright in a social media environment: it's a matter of being the master of monetizing social media through the inherent strengths of its contexts. Where value is created, monetization - and brand authority - follows. To insist that monetization and brand authority must be respected regardless of their relative value in new contexts leads inevitably to a degradation of both monetization and brand authority. Monetization isn't the real protection of quality news, it's really the creation of a defensible value proposition that protects quality news. The money - and the security to speak the truth confidently - comes from people valuing what you have to say in the most open marketplace of ideas available.
This is the inherent shift in publishing that continues to leave many in the industry not only at a fork in the road but well behind others who didn't even bother to look for the fork. It is, you might say, the difference in shifting an outlook from the East side of Manhattan to the West side versus shifting an outlook from the East coast to the West coast of the U.S. (or any other source of publishing innovation). Be a master of value in these new contexts, says the West coast, and the East coast time and again says, "Show me the money" - which sounds great and practical, except when the West coast comes up with so many new contexts that can make money that they are dumbfounded as to where to start to pick off what turns out to be sloppy seconds for monetization.
The solution to this problem lies in part in recognizing that the East coast crowd needs to be the master of monetizing contexts that the West coast creates, not the follower. Instead of sitting back on their heels and sending in a licensing team after the lawyers have roughed up a dot-com baddie established players in publishing need to think, "How can we be the next Google of content monetization? How can we be outrageously on the front lines of helping people make money from content that gets consumed the way that people want it? How can we create content packaging that is so compelling that it cannot help but to make money?" With an increasing stream of large media companies cutting deals for contextual ad networks you can see that they are starting to get a hint of what this is all about, but it's still mostly about putting up ads and not really about owning the most compelling value proposition that makes people want to advertise.
An example of this can be seen in the abandonment of print as a valuable medium. Curley suggests in his speech, "There’s still a place for appointment media -- a home-delivered newspaper on the porch each morning or an evening newscast while making dinner. But it is a smaller place. People, of course, want the news when they want it." While print's lack of exclusivity is hardly news, most publishers have been utterly uncreative in their approach to print as a highly valuable medium. Print is a medium for the most tactile and high-quality physical engagement with content: its value will be long-standing. An organization like AP has the ability to enable technologies that would allow consumers and enterprises to get highly customized print publications that would be highly affordable - and highly valuable to marketers. Instead, publishers crank out the same old proprietary content instead of putting the selection and the editing in the hands of their readers.
If this sounds as if I got up on the wrong side of the bed you may be right, but only because it is really frustrating at times to see how slowly major media companies adapt to these trends - frustration that is shared with many people working for those companies, I can assure you. There are scarce few that have had the courage to innovate with the fearlessness that's required to become a winner in the 21st century content world. AP may yet be one of those survivors under Curley's leadership as he strives to reinvent a culture that has much of which to be proud, but that equally needs to put aside that pride and acknowledge what the real goals must be for a news organization in the 20th century. AP's worldwide network of journalists and member organizations has an opportunity to reinvent the value of news around contexts rather than distribution, and many of the skills to make that so. But time is of the essence...
Monterey is the traditional setting for this conference, now celebrating its 11th year with the highest ever attendance, as attendees spilled into the overflow seating for the keynote speakers. Though not billed as a Web 2.0 conference, the presenters and attendees were exploring the new generation of Web technologies and their applications to library services. With many repeat attendees and speakers, community was evident in the conversations around food in the exhibition hall and in the corridors between sessions, as well as the Blogger's Alley.
Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project gave a fast paced summary of recent studies. Their research confirms trends toward more gadgets everywhere and increased participation. Yet there is another reality in their segmentation of web users. Only 8% of Internet users are the familiar technophiles, though they are thought leaders. Various types of low tech users are a whopping 49% of study participants. Lee emphasized that different people use technologies in different ways, and this should be reflected delivery of library services.
This means that library services need to evolve, particularly to involve younger, more technically savvy users. Joe Janes, Associate Dean, University of Washington, spoke eloquently about Reference 2.0, minus the usual PowerPoint presentation. He emphasized the importance of joining the conversation of the community, and getting outside the walls of the library. A practice requirement is measuring online activities as closely as gate count and book circulation statistics, to justify budget increases....
The search ecosystem from the library standpoint was a major theme of the conference. Danny Sullivan, Founder and Editor of Search Engine Land, looked back at his predictions for search, which have come true in 2007, with the introduction of blended search results by both ASK and Google, as well as more personalization. Mobile search is the next frontier for delivering information services onto the rapidly evolving cell phone platform. Search on this platform has small, focused results, with more emphasis on local businesses, as effectively demonstrated at the ASK mobile site.
Multimedia was another theme of the conference, from podcasting tools to searching tips for multimedia content explored by Ran Hock. Multimedia materials are highly in demand in the academic environment, but are yet another type of media to find. The technology for creating content is still too hard to use, but new services like telephone to podcast, will make this process easier (a tip of the hat to Gary Price, Resource Shelf and ASK.com). Creating YouTube videos and participating in Second Life and MySpace are effective tools for improving library visibility.
Virtual worlds were another major theme to the conference with libraries experimenting with Second Life in providing library services, particularly to teens. San Jose State University is a pioneer in utilizing Second Life in their distance learning program for the school of Library and Information Science. Cindy Hill pioneered Second Life in the corporate environment for Sun Microsystems.
Gaming and Learning in the Library tracks were well attended, giving a perspective on maintaining relevance to today's teens. A public library in Riverton, Wyoming, provides a game room for a much needed place for teenagers to hang out under non-parental adult supervision.Libraries report participants in gaming also utilize other library services and also become active volunteer, both positive outcomes.
Halloween was the last day of the conference, and the closing keynote speaker, Liz Lawley, Director, Rochester Institute of Technology, Lab for Social Computing presented as Maleficent, her character in World of Warcraft. I found her comparison of Second Life and World of Warcraftexperiences enlightening, as well as her message that gaming can promote professional networking, as well as family time. So why can't learning and doing a job be as much fun as World of Warcraft?
