Tag: content

Facebook’s future: It’s in your shorts

Just yesterday, a friend (that’s a lower-case, analog friend) told me how much he hates Facebook. He can’t believe how much time people spend there, he wishes he had never registered for it, and he resents the amount of attention it tries to demand from him.

With that said, he asked if I thought it would eventually fade away.

Social media is here to stay, I responded. While Facebook and Twitter may not always be the dominant portals, the notion of social networking that they represent will continue to evolve and embed itself into our communication – just as web browsing and e-mail have done.

Then this article, on Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed, crossed my desktop and my opinion evolved.

The most insidious aspect of Facebook is how it brings in new members. First, as I explained to my flesh-and-blood friend, every time someone sets up a new Facebook page, they get the opportunity to scour their own address book for potential Friends (digital, capital-F friends). And because Friends are the currency of Facebook — the more you have, the “wealthier” you are — most people accept this initial chance to let the social networking site into their personal data.

So Facebook searches your computer address book for people who are already registered with the site. I don’t know if it just looks for e-mail addresses or follows a more complex algorithm, but within seconds, it will identify every Facebook member you know and offer — with a single click — to ask them to Friend you. (It’s notable that Facebook has already created a legitimate verb in the word “friend”.)

Then Facebook makes a more extraordinary offer: It identifies everyone in your personal address book who isn’t registered at the site and offers — again, with one click — to let them know how much you’d like them to join Facebook with the purpose of becoming your online Friend.

Insidious and ingenious. For the new user, this is simply a shortcut to Facebook-style wealth — lots of Friends. For Facebook, this is the shortest route to ubiquity — which it could be argued has already been achieved.

So now, Facebook has acquired Friendfeed, which “enables you to discover and discuss the interesting stuff your friends find on the web.” This isn’t unique; Digg.com is better known and does essentially the same thing.

But here’s the key: Friendfeed lets you “Read and share however you want — from your email, your phone or even from Facebook. Publish your FriendFeed to your website or blog, or to services you already use, like Twitter.”

This isn’t unique to Friendfeed either. I’ve seen lists of social media sites that have 350 to 400+ sites listed, with new ones being entered daily. Try Googling “list of social media sites”. Most of them make it easy to publish on your blog, Facebook, Twitter and other leading sites.

What’s the point? Facebook is paying $50 million to buy a social media site that, as its primary function, collects more people — not just from the Web, but also from their phones.

This won’t surprise anyone who thinks strategically about social networking. But for anyone who wonders whether Facebook is going to fade away: It’s less likely every day.

Resistance is futile: You WILL buy an e-reader

Amazon’s got the Kindle, now in generation 2.5. Sony just announced that it’s reducing the price of its base-level e-reader to $199 — $100 less than the Kindle — though you can’t download books via wi-fi like you can with Amazon’s unit.

You can also buy e-readers from Panasonic and Samsung, with another coming soon from a startup called Plastic Logic. Microsoft had been rumored to be moving toward the e-reader market, and everyone seems to be waiting for what Apple might come up with.

The Kindle is built around a proprietary platform, as I assume Apple’s would be.

Early this year, Barnes & Noble bought Fictionwise — an e-book vendor — to compete directly with Amazon. (Here’s one article announcing the purchase.)

Do you get the sense that you’re going to be hearing a lot about e-books in the months and years ahead?

At various times, it was unimaginable that we’d all have our own computers and cell phones. So if you’re insisting right now that the book can’t be improved upon and there’s no reason for an e-book reader to enter your life, it’s just a matter of time before you change your mind.

The price will have to come down; a war will have to be fought and won over platforms and standards, and at some point, some respected company will have to take a leap and make its products available only in e-book format. None of this will take as long as it is for BlueRay to replace DVDs.

Nintendo actually put an e-reader on the market in 2004 — as did Sony and a few others. They flopped; perhaps because the technology wasn’t advanced enough yet, but more likely because the content providers didn’t have enough economic reason to support it. At the time, an e-reader was just another gadget.

That’s changed.

From magazine companies to newspapers to book publishers, nobody’s business model can continue to absorb the high cost of printing and distributing paper. So your resistance is futile; there is just too much corporate desire now to replace paper with something digital.

At some point, there will be a first New York Times bestseller that never actually came out in a printed edition. I’m putting my money on it happening by 2013.

According to the chart below from Forrester Research, more than 4 out of 5 people are familiar with the concept of an e-reader — compared to less than 2 out of 3 last year.  And while ownership of e-readers has more than doubled in the past year, market penetration is still less than 2 percent.

So do the math: Hardware providers are climbing over each other to break into this market; content providers are eager to support them; consumers have very quickly become aware and curious.

It sounds like an obvious post-recession boom to me.

 

A new tipping point in favor of paid content

PaidContent.com reports that the annual media study by media investment banker VSS (Veronis Suhler Stevenson) showed a tipping occurred in 2008: It was the first time people spent more time with media they paid for — such as books and cable TV — than they did with media that is primarily ad-supported. That report raises a few points:

1. Cable TV is not predominantly ad supported? I must be watching the wrong cable stations.

2. It should come as good news to all the ad-supported media that are feverishly looking for ways to monetize their audience. It means people are willing to pay for content if there is enough value in it, and if they are trained over a long-enough period of time that the stuff just won’t come free.

3. By the time that happens, nobody knows how many traditional media will fail — their markets taken over by an upstart that “gets it.” My short answer: plenty.

4. Even those that are succeeding and profiting from paid content will have some struggles. Competition for the audience dollar is only starting to heat up, and over the next few years will become intense and insane. If you, as a consumer, are paying the full cost of content for books, movies, music, etc. and all of sudden you start hearing from newspapers and magazines that you need to pay more for their content too, and what point do you start making hard decisions about which content you really want and need? It’s not safe to assume that everything you’re paying full-ride for right now is necessarily going to be the winner in that evaluation.

The latest ain’t the greatest in new publishing models

Printcasting.com has launched the latest in an all-out salvo to find a business model that works for media in the digital age.

It’s community-based publishing. Here’s how Printcasting describes it:

If, like us, you’ve always wanted your own publications but you didn’t have the time, technical expertise or talent — no problem! We’ve made it as easy and fast to start a magazine as it is to start a blog…  We do this by separating apart the three primary roles  that exist in any magazine or newspaper: the publisher, the content and the advertising. Instead of one person or organization needing to be responsible for all of that, anyone can participate in any one role.

More specifically, if you’re a writer, you can have your blog’s RSS feed picked up by Printcasting as available content. If you’re a publisher, you can choose any subject  you like, pull content from people who have written about it, punch it into a template and you’re done.

You don’t have to sell any ads, according to Printcasting, because, “We’ve built an extremely simple self-serve advertising tool that makes it as easy for a small business to advertise its wares as it is to write an e-mail. Because Printcasts are niche, the ads are extremely affordable, starting at only $10 per ad.”

Printcasting is supported by a grant of more than $800,000 from The Knight Foundation, which puts a lot of money into media projects of all kinds, and which is especially interested in development of new media models. But that doesn’t mean it’s an idea that’s going to fly.

I’ve said to a lot of people, since the day I first tried to sell content online (1996), that if the Internet is going to prove one thing over time, it’s that people need editors. At the most basic level, that’s what Printcasting is all about. It’s about giving would-be editors the opportunity to practice their craft: identifying content around a theme, pick the best of it and packaging it for like-minded souls.

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

  1. The content is just repackaged from stuff that’s already available if anyone is actually looking for it.
  2. Being able to amass enough credible content to empower the would-be publisher of super-niche topics will be an obstacle.
  3. Printcasting’s view of what publishing is all about is simply wrong. Stating that there are 3 roles to a magazine — content, publisher and advertising — is like saying the principal components of water are ice and a heat source. In Printcasting’s world, audience doesn’t matter; publishing becomes a vanity that is all about picking up someone else’s words, plunking it into someone else’s template, running a few ads (maybe) that someone else sold, and getting to put your name on top of the masthead. The website says it benefits publisher, writer and advertiser alike. But that’s only if a large number of players in all three groups play their roles exceptionally well.
  4. And speaking of advertising, the message I’m getting here is that the problem with advertising is that it’s been too expensive and too hard to buy. So if you can knock down the price to almost nothing and make it self-service, businesses that have never advertised before will suddenly start. Nobody who has actually inhabited the world of advertisers — large or small — could actually believe this.
    Especially if the products they have to choose from are a bunch of magazines that haven’t been through the painful and fundamental process of creating an audience and demonstrating its desire for a publication.
  5. And finally, the ad rate is fixed, no matter how many or how few copies of a publication get printed. That’s a contradiction that can’t be overcome: Publishers need to develop an audience to prove the publication is wanted and read; but they have every incentive to print as few copies as possible, because they can’t recover printing expenses with an increased  rate base.

There is some nuance here. Printcasting could add value — as The New York Times describes it — at the hyperlocal level where a more traditional publication could never offset its costs. The local softball league, for instance, could have its own publication.

But is this new? Or is this just a slicker package around the same  newsletter that the softball league already publishes — with sponsor ads from local bars and the guy who won the trophy concession.

Maybe Printcasting.com will prove viable over time. But if it does, it won’t be as a serious media model or as a meangingful marketing outlet for advertisers. At best, it will be a success in the spirit of those websites that let you design your own greeting cards. It may serve a certain purpose for a certain number of people, and it is one more interesting idea of the Internet Bubble 2.0.

On YouTube, celebrity correspondents acknowledge the power of citizen journalism

YouTube has organized a library of how-to videos for citizen journalists. Much of it won’t be relevant to the vast majority of citizen journalists. But the talent that is now spending time helping ordinary folks to create content is amazing and impressive. I still talk to journalists almost every day who continue to resent the infiltration of their work by “ordinary people.”

In fact, I met this morning with 2 individuals who have been stymied in their efforts to cultivate citizen journalism by “old school” journalists who can, collectively, green-light or red-light their work — and who resent this intrusion by the untrained and unindoctrinated.

These old dogs are already finding themselves on the wrong side of history.

Journalism IS and always has been the work of ordinary people; every journalist is merely a proxy for a larger number of ordinary people. When the local investigative TV reporter asks a zinger to the director of the dysfunctional city water department,  that reporter isn’t there because of some special privilege or status; he’s there because it would be impractical to open the doors to anyone and everyone who questioned the director’s management. It’s easy to forget this in the day-to-day melee. But it’s still the truth.

More than that, though, the economics of media essentially mandates the growth of citizen journalism.  That Nicholas Kristoff, Bob Woodward and the Pulitzer Center (to name a few), are open to this fact is refreshing to me, and is an encouraging sign that the moribund state of the news is beginning to evolve.

A financial plan for the news’paper’ of tomorrow

Peter Kafka, former media writer for Forbes and now blogging his own MediaMemo, asks the question (non-rhetorically), “What happens when your newspaper goes digital?” His immediate conclusion: Most of the staff gets canned.blackberrypd3_4001

In his blog, Kafka channels Outside.in CEO Mark Josephson whose business is to support local news operations with broad-based content as they make the move to digital themselves.

Josephson tells Kafka that his prototypical digital newspaper would have 6 content people (reporters and editors), 12 sales reps and a total staff of 20 (that would seem to leave room for 1 administrative type and one boss type — and no room for a graphic designer, web developer or I.T. person, which already makes me suspicious that his plan is too lean). He even provides a basic P&L spreadsheet for do-it-yourselfers who want to use his math as a starting point.

If the site does 40 million pages views a month (that’s a big number), augmented by twice that much traffic through third-party agreements, he figures it could earn about $2.6 million/year on $6.3 million in revenue. That’s a great margin — 41%. But compared to the kind of revenues daily newspapers are scaled for, it’s a pretty small business.

Plans like this are about 25% experience and 75% assumption, and anybody who would use such a plan would deviate from it almost immediately once into real operations.

But the takeaway is that, while existing media executives may not be able to swallow hard enough to scale down their businesses that much, they are currently being forced by the economy to cast aside lots of sales and content talent. It’s only a matter of time before that talent starts to challenge traditional newspapers companies with startups that aren’t burdened by guild agreements, large buildings, printing plants and boards of directors that demand every old-line revenue dollar to be replaced.

Back in the ’90s, when bookstores were being driven out of business by a previously unforseen competitor, new-age jargon had it that they were being “Amazoned.”

I’m curious what we’ll be calling it in the future. Journaled? Posted? Picayuned?

Real social impact from social networks

If you doubt the potential of Twitter, Facebook and other social media, read this recent column by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times. The depth of meaning here is amazing. Twitter is an outlet for the voices of freedom in Iran; the ongoing human rights situation in China creates the impetus for incredible cyber innovation; and the United States could help, but doesn’t necessarily have to do anything except watch quietly.

Social media is not just the latest iteration of the Web; it’s already embedded in world-changing events.

Selling what your customers want v. what they need

Content marketing guy Newt Barrett turns around conventional wisdom, suggesting that instead of working to develop a unique selling proposition, you develop a Unique Buying Proposition. This is more than a semantic turn. The UBP forces you to think like your customers. It changes the question from “Why should they buy from me?” to “Why do they WANT to buy from me?”

You can read Newt’s complete case here.

Be honest: Would you spend more time buying this...
Would you do a better job buying this...

In the meantime, I’ll add this thought on selling: People will spend more to buy something they want than something they need. The corollary is that they’ll do whatever they can to avoid buying what they need, whereas they enjoy buying things they want.

So even if you’re offering business-to-business products or services, there is a benefit to communicating in a way that helps people WANT to buy what you’re selling.

... or this?
... or this?

If they feel the product has value-added benefits, some kind of cache, or is exciting and transformative, they’ll buy more readily (and tend to be more pleased) than if they buy something because it has the lowest price or simply fills an urgent need.

That’s the beauty of Newt’s concept of the UBP: It helps your prospects to see your product as something they WANT to buy.

If you can’t bring journalists to the computer, then bring geeks to journalism

Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism is turning out its first group of graduates in a master’s program that teaches computer geeks to be journalists, according to Time magazine. The idea is to combine advanced programming for computer applications and other interactive tools with reporting and journalism — making data and databases an integral part of the news.

Here’s a paragraph from Medill’s master’s degree course catalog:

The Digital Innovation Project (JOUR 435-0, 435-1)
This project challenges students to answer a specific editorial business challenge by inventing interactive solutions, often with a focus on innovative content delivery. Editorial challenges sometimes are posed by partner media organizations, sometimes by faculty or students. Students in this project have explored new ways of designing content for handheld devices, and new ways of creating interactive community, and in one case wrote a new software program to help a news operation engage more closely with its community.

In other words, if the medium is the message, this is huge. It has potential to change the very nature of how journalists work and what they do. Especially since Medill isn’t alone; among other schools starting to turn out journalist programmers are University of Missoure, Georgia Tech and University of California at Berkeley, according to Time.

Imagine an investigative article on government judicial conflict-of-interest, for example, that includes an application allowing readers to conduct their own searches by judge, defendant and plaintiff.

That’s admittedly a utopian view of journalism creating ultimate and constructive transparency — something it’s always strived to do and has rarely, if ever, achieved.

Or, I suppose, it could go the other direction: creating a bunch of people writing about the programming nuances of WordPress v. Blogspot. Which would you rather see?