Media'ZBiz!

…in Social Media:

“At least one of the dominant tools for social networking will wind down and decline and people will leave it nearly as quickly as they joined it. I have no idea which one it will be, but not even Facebook or Twitter is immune from the possibility. The viral effect works in both directions.” — Jim McCarthy, Goldstar

“Many social network sites starting to charge for memberships for more quality control due to the amount of spam we saw in 2009.” – Mirna Bard, NuReach Global

“Location-based social media applications like Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite. Social media moving to the next level of interaction.” – Charles Harris, Coast2Coast Expert.

“Integration between platforms. Things like ping.fm, Google Wave and other utilities out there centralizing the interface and use between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo and all the others.” – Chip Ahlswede, RegalStrategies.com

“Mainstream media will actually change their 20th century business models to meet 21s century needs. Otherwise, they are toast.” – Ron Ploof, ronamok.com

“Measuring the return on investment on social media efforts will become the norm in 2010. This will mean some companies will not be able to justify their current efforts. – Jim Marks, Virtual Results

“People using social media for civic engagement with those public agencies using social media and to encourage governments that haven’t adopted social media to use these tools to have meaningful dialogue with their constituents.” – Ted Nguyen, Orange County Transportation Authority

“Growing number of things which aren’t strictly people on your buddy lists. Suddenly I think we will see people friending their laundromat to see when machines are available, the roads they use to watch traffic, and groups of their friends at once. The latter will be interesting because you will only see updates when all of your friends agree.” – Don Patterson, quub.com

“A plateau of people flocking to Twitter. This year it was the new shiny toy on the street, but soon the Twitterverse will become saturated with push marketers, spammers, and in-genuine marketing campaigns.” – Justin Moore-Brown, Mobo Media

Social video. “We may start to explore social video, not only user-generated but also brand-generated.” – Tracy Marks, Souplantation

“Google and Facebook will do something major to completely change the game, and take over the world.” – Rochelle Veturis, LPA architects

“I think that pitching stories to the media via social networks, or the media picking up stories they heard about via social media, could be the next big thing.” – Jen Dwyer, thecutekid.com

…in Media:

…in Search:

Ciaran Norris:

I think that next year will see the continued convergence of technologies and channels, particularly TV, mobile, search & social. The real-time search movement will continue in some way, shape or form, though the engines still need to perfect ranking & filtering.

The continued rise of mobile web, pulling in GPS & augmented reality, means that people will expect geo-results. And as TV gets webbed up (Yahoo TV Widgets etc…) people searching and chatting on and around shows will become a new way of reaching people, or at least learning about what they want.

Will Critchlow:

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I think 2010 will see the beginnings of a backlash against Google. There have been murmurings for some time among the tech community about their all-pervading presence, ambition to gather everyone’s data for their own marketing purposes and effective monopoly.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see them take a step too far and face political push-back over their expansion into the desktop and mobile phone markets. If they use market power in one arena to manipulate another, that’s classic monopolistic behaviour. Personally, I’d love to see Bing gain some market share. I think a strong competitor would ultimately benefit everyone.

Andrew Girdwood:

We’ll see continued improvements in visual search. Google Goggles is one example but we’ll also see mobile applications that affect an augmented reality that combine search and location-aware search. These will let searchers show the engines what they want help with and get back results.

Privacy will also be a hot issue in 2010. Targeting becomes ever more important to companies and yet the ability not to be targeted becomes ever more important to people. It seems impossible that we’ll avoid tension on this front.

Of particular interest will be looking beyond the last click. DoubleClick offers Click Path Analysis. Atlas offers User Engagement Mapping. There will be other offerings from alternative technology providers who wish to remain competitive against these search engine owned offerings. 2010 will see sites wrestle with tagging and tracking but invest in the required technology in 2010 with the ambition of not having to return to this fight for a while.

As real-time search helps surface social media sites in the blink of an eye the aspects of ‘search’, ‘marketing’, ‘public relations’ and even ‘customer care’ will all get drawn together. We’ll see different types of agencies pitching against one another for the first time. We’ll see corporate departments defending their turf and fighting for budget against their colleagues across the hall.

Kevin Gibbons:

Google page speed is going to have an influence over organic rankings in 2010 and is likely to have a strong impact on designers/developers as well as SEO’s. At the moment there are unanswered questions, such as how heavily will slow sites be penalised? Will fast sites be boosted in the search engines? So it will be interesting to see the impact this has.

Now that the Microsoft/Yahoo deal is now all tied-up, advertisers will need to start thinking seriously about Bing’s more sizeable market share and start to prepare for when this is integrated with Yahoo search.

Google Wave has been slowly rolled out to users so far during 2009, this has a lot of potential, which is unlikely to be truly realised until it reaches a greater audience. There’s a lot of uncertainly about how popular Google Wave will become at the moment, so it will be very interesting to see if this can really take off in 2010. I’m sure they’ll be new social media sites coming onto the scene too, along with developments to many of the current top social media sites; Twitter business accounts, for example, will be a good one to look out for.

Shane Quigley:

Rumoured for a while, and discovered live on the web by a clever person over at Gizmodo, there is a new Google Interface on the way for 2010. Being referred to as the three panel layout this change will mean it will become increasing important to rank highly in Image, Video and other search results as Google gives more prominence to these sections within its interface.

Real Time search has huge implications in terms of brand protection, what results people will click, as well as creating new opportunities to rank. Google also announced earlier this month that everyone’s search results are now being personalised (to an extent) based on your previous search behaviour, regardless of whether you’re logged in or not. Are the days of the ranking report now truly numbered?

(via Econsultancy)

…in Marketing:

Other Trend Predictions for 2010 in 140 characters:

We’re in a new age of realtime information. Earthquakes, the San Diego fires, the shootings in Mumbai, the situation in Iran, and even Michael Jackson’s death. The realtime web beat the mainstream media easily to each of these stories.

But, will this disparity increase going forward?

In 2008, the terrorist attacks in Mumbai were communicated more quickly on Social Media sites than on the TV screen.

Few weeks ago, it took CNN 45 minutes to give to its viewers the same level of information about the car crash of the famous golf player.

30 years ago, our only source of information was TV, newspapers and magazines, all controlled by big organizations and governments. In the 90s, Internet arrived enabling faster flow of information. But the real revolution came from social media ‘blogs‘. Information wasn’t controlled any more by big organizations. Everyone could start a blog and share his opinion about anything, with others having the power to comment, to talk back.

But, the question that most people ask themselves: Why this global Social Media phenomenon will be (is) changing our world, although there are cultural differences around the globe?

Clay Shirky explains it well in this video: “How social media can make history” at Ted.com (it’s 17 minutes).

MG Siegler goes even further, asserting that the Internet and Twitter are better news and information delivery channels than traditional TV, radio and print – and will ultimately lead to their demise (This is Why the Internet (and Twitter) Wins):

Of course, there is something to be said for these outlets independently verifying the news, but the the fact of the matter is that there was a report out there, filed by the police department and BNOnews was able to get it and send it out via Twitter much, much faster than any traditional news source.

Information wants to be free, and the web, with services like Twitter, provides the easiest way for that to happen.

What about ethics and accuracy? When talking about social media, people always question the validity of information.

In their recent study, ‘An Analysis of the Increasing Impact of Social and Other New Media on Public Relations Practice’, Donald Wright and Michelle Hinson from the Institute for Public Relations got the following responses to the question:

“Do you agree or disagree that social media (including blogs) . . .”

Social Media and Traditional Media seem not to be in conflict with each other. For Clay Shirky, accountability seems to be the urgent point.

Last month, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, have been picking on Google for destroying their business, blaming the Google for giving away their content for free and stealing their ad revenue. Eric Schmidt has responded with a column in The Wall Street Journal, saying:

Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue – for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.

The potential of social media (such as Twitter) is transforming the way we communicate in our respective countries. Information are exchanged within seconds. But I don’t think it will replace YET traditional media, because important vs popular news will only be considered credible once traditional media have confirmed it (and indeed, Google and Twitter could help to drive readers hungry for information to news sites).

Predictions for 2010?

FOLIO: has reached out to a wide selection of magazine/media industry professionals—publishers, editors, chief executives, dealmakers, bloggers—to channel their inner Nostradamus and work up some predictions. I’ve selected two. One from Bob Cohn, editorial director, theAtlantic.com and the other from Amanda Ernst from FBNY.

Amanda Ernest, from FBNY writes:

Media companies will also be looking to partner up in order to pool resources and keep costs low. Non-profit journalism organizations and Web sites that rely on citizen journalism are a good place for traditional media to look for partners.

Bob Cohn, editorial director, theAtlantic.com, writes:

Two indisputable facts: editors are constrained for resources, while the stories we’re facing-war, recession, terrorism, climate change-are not easy or cheap to cover. I predict that one way magazines will try to resolve this problem is through more frequent collaboration. Journalists have been trained to compete, not cooperate. But pooling resources, whether it’s money or reporters or technology, can make good sense for outfits that want to remain ambitious in lean times. We all still want to beat the other guy, but sometimes the best way to unpack a complex and multi-dimensional story may be to forge ties with like-minded colleagues.

Other related posts:

What will the next newsroom looks like? (by Peter Bihr)

Twitter and the Internet vs Traditional News Media (by Tom Watson)

Why Social Media is Killing TV News? (by Mike Elgan)

Real time, real discussion, real reporting: choose two (by Kevin Coldeway)

115 Magazine and Media Predictions for 2010 (by Jason Fell of foliomag.com)

Paramount’s micro-budgeted ($15,000) horror phenomenon “Paranormal Activity” reached another notable benchmark yesterday, clearing $100 million at the US box office. The unusual roll-out of this movie is one model that studios and filmmakers are going to need to look at closely as distribution options for smaller to midsize movies continues to shrink.

Independent filmmakers and distributors are turning more and more to social media to help build online buzz around television shows, theatrical and dvd releases of blockbuster and independent movies. There’s an obvious opportunity for them, since these platforms are more affordable, by and large, than traditional, “old media”, especially if you stumble upon the holy grail of online marketing: the appropriation of your messages by the audience. Some have started saying: ‘If we all thought that Facebook and Twitter social media growth phenomena were extraordinary, wait until Social TV hits your screens.‘

One thing is for sure: Hollywood Studio marketers are becoming Facebook friends and Twitter followers!

“Facebook is really the focus for us right now,” said David Singh, executive VP of creative content for Disney. “Something like 70 to 80 percent of frequent moviegoers under 25 visit Facebook seven or eight times a day. In fact, I think marketers are fixated on Facebook because we tend to use it a lot ourselves.” (posted in The Wrap October 8th)

David Singh is right. According to a study released last September by former New Line web marketing guru Gordon Paddison, who is now an industry consultant, 73% of 4,000 moviegoers have established profiles on social media networks.

David Poland has grouped them in 3 categories for us:

CRITICISM:
84% of moviegoers make up their mind to see a movie regardless of what the critics say about it.
62% of moviegoers now get review information online.
45% of heavy moviegoers rely on movie review aggregation sites, placing a high value in seeing an average score.
75% say they trust a friend’s opinion more than a movie critic.
80% say positive reviews from other moviegoers make them more likely to see a movie (vs. 67% who say a positive review from professional critics does).
40% say negative reviews from other moviegoers make them decide not to see a movie (vs. 28% who say negative reviews from professional critics would keep them from going).

WHO’S ONLINE?
94% of all moviegoers are online; this is true across age groups. 88% have high speed/broadband connections.
86% of moviegoers across all demo segments go online via computer or mobile device at least once a day. They spend more time each week online (19.8 hours) than they do watching TV (14.3 hours).
90% of all ages of moviegoers have mobile phones; 32% of moviegoers no longer use a landline (44% of the 18-29 demo).
93% use Internet search to find more information about movies. Exposures that trigger online search include: Seeing a trailer (71%), seeing a TV spot (60%), someone telling you about a movie (58%).

HOW DO MOVIEGOERS FIND OUT ABOUT MOVIES?
69% of moviegoers watch online video content; 66% of moviegoers who look at video content watch movie trailers and 55% watch movie clips.
70% credit awareness from in-theater trailers, 73% from television, 46% from word-of-mouth, and 44% from the internet… all ranking ahead of such traditional methods of advertising as billboards and newspaper advertising.

And this…

Movie choice is highly influenced by group decision-making. The fact that someone else in the group wanted to see a particular movie (55%) was as important to the decision process as the movie’s storyline (57%).

2012 just released in theatres is another (good) example. The movie’s Facebook and MySpace pages contain trailers, photos and other information on the film and promote the iPhone apps, the game and other elements.

Everyone seems to agree that consumers are more and more playing an important role in film distribution. Adertising Age looking at the ultra-low budget Paranormal Activity came up with four lessons to be learned for the marketing community:

- Let consumers dictate distribution.
- Don’t waste money on large-scale TV campaigns when you can talk directly to your fans.
- Don’t create false hype.
- When there are low financial barriers, have fun.

“Paranormal Activity” cost a mere $15,000 to produce, with little spent thus far on traditional media, so Paramount stands to recoup any overhead costs thousands of times over if the film catches on with a national audience. But despite the initial success, “If it all ended today we’d be very happy,” said Paul Greenstein, the studio’s co-president, marketing.

Futurist Ross Dawson interviewed by Davy Adams (CXO Australia) on the future of media and how should marketers best navigate the new order in order to influence buyer behavior, has answered:

There is no simple and foolproof path to success. For marketers, one of the most important issues to deal with is the shift to the “influence economy” (“influence landscape” document here), in which peer and expert influence dominates decision-making. Pushing messages will not give you access to key influencers; engaging in interesting conversations will. This requires capabilities that are new for most large companies.

So to conclude, social media technologies could help filmmakers and distributors in:

• providing insight and commentary in real time (from location during shooting)
• promoting special contests, sneak previews
• facilitating collaborative video production experienc
• involving online communities in the design
• building conversation about the movie or television season or individual episodes
• opening dialogue between promoter and promotion participants
• movie & television website traffic generation
• promoting events such as movie premiers
• posting press releases

but ‘none of it should be taken lightly (…), be elegant and responsible while at the same time being strategic’ (words by Gordon Paddison).

Related articles:

Film marketing: notes towards a social media toolbox.

Movie Marketing, Part 1

Social TV Reloaded

The content industry is worried about distribution becoming free. This is a global phenomenon. The more broadband we have the better devices, the more the push towards sharing without payment is clearly there.

BBC News in their yesterday’s Q&A, Internet Piracy Plans highlights the principal issues:

The creative industries estimate that six million people in the UK regularly file-share copyright content without permission, costing the industries revenue that they cannot recoup.

In 2007, an estimated one billion music tracks and 98 million movies were shared illegally. A report by analyst firm Forrester recently reported that 10% of all internet users in the UK share files illegally. The figure for Europe is 14%.

Will banning persistent file-sharers work?

The creative industries believe illegal file-sharing is almost endemic while the government has set a target of reducing the problem by at least 70% in the next two or three years.

The difficulty is that the problem is a moving target. More persistent illegal file-sharers are already beginning to use software which masks their IP address while online, and the files being exchanged are encrypted, so it is harder for ISPs to use DPI technology.

Stephen Garrett from Kudos, the firm behind Spooks and Ashes to Ashes, warns that illegal file sharing threatens the existence of hit and quality TV shows.

Gerd Leonhard, from MediaFuturist, said in a recent interview:

… On the other hand, the content industry has, to a very large degree, refused to license the content in so many new ways that are being asked for, starting with imeem and YouTube, and MySpace originally. The refusal to license has essentially created a vacuum to where everyone rightly then also says if we can’t actually do it legally, we have two choices which is to quit or to do it without permission. Then you have companies like imeem and MySpace and YouTube initially doing it without permission.

…The discussion about solving this problem with technology is nothing but a fig leaf because it will never work. In a democracy, it’s not actually technically feasible. If you imagine this, then I get disconnected from the web for downloading and I go to my neighbor and use his Wi-Fi.

….It’s basically not a technology problem. It’s a structural and licensing problem. It’s basically a business problem. Whenever you try to solve a business problem with technology, like we have with DVD region coding, and those kinds of things, you end up really going against the consumer and sacrificing things that otherwise the consumer will hate you for.

The key question really is this; does any of this make any money for anyone? Does kicking people off the web because they have downloaded without permission make any money for anyone?

In a perfectly timed article for Contagious Magazine, Faris Yakob (Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson) debunks the “Content is King” aphorism in favor of “Content is the Republic.”

At the heart of Yakob’s thesis are two ideas:

1) As more consumers produce content, traditional content monetization models (paid, advertising) are challenged. Because digital content is platform agnostic (no distinction between video, news, articles – it’s all content online) it creates room for different monetization models based on context and consumer desire.

2) Align servicing next to content: iTunes has been successful because it made buying music simple and cheap enough. Youtube is experimenting with a new monetization model by allowing users to offer high-quality downloads of videos for low prices.

So is Content 2.0 Content as a Service…

The leading social media company, Demand Media seems to think such wise and offers it.

The company is currently the 15th most visited property in the US according to comScore. Demand Media has created more than one million pieces of content (artciles and videoas), making it one of the largest producers of content on the web today. The content is distributed to an audience of more than 80 million via Demand Media’s network which include LIVESTRONG.COM, eHow.com, Trails.com, Golflink.com and others.

Demand Media seems to have found a new stable and profitable business model, that fits into consumers’ video on demand needs. Here is an extract from a great article published by WIRED MAGAZINE explaining the Demand Media business model:

Volume is also crucial to Demand’s top distribution partner, Google. The search engine has struggled to make money from the 19 billion videos on YouTube, only about 10 percent of which carry ads. Advertisers don’t want to pay to appear next to videos that hijack copyrighted material or that contain swear words, but YouTube doesn’t have the personnel to comb through every user-generated clip. Last year, though, YouTube executives noticed that Demand was uploading hundreds of videos every day — pre-scrubbed by Demand’s own editors, explicitly designed to appeal to advertisers, and cheap enough to benefit from Google’s revenue-sharing business model. YouTube executives approached Demand, asked the company to join its revenue-sharing program, and encouraged it to produce as many videos as possible.

In the wake of her high profile promotion of AMC’s “Mad Men” show on Twitter, Carri Bugbee has built a Twitter-based ad agency (Big Deal PR) for entertainment clients.

Last February, the first annual Shorty Awards honored Mrs. Bugbee’s “MadMen’ character tweets as the year’s best Twitter advertising campaign. Find out more about the details of how she did it in this video interview by AdvertisingAge.

Has the digital revolution got you a little worried? Confounded? Hopeful? Uh…RUINED? Watch The Chaos Scenario video on thriving in the Post-Media Age.

The Chaos Scenario from Greg Stielstra on Vimeo.

Who haven’t dream of finding that famous scene in that specific film?

Who haven’t repeated hundred times with friends the dialog of those two actors from that great movie?

Today, your dream came true… at least for French film lovers (to start). Vodkaster, the video collaborative platform has launched its beta service this morning. Users can watch thousands of film extracts, can help indexing them (tag, actors names, category/type of scene), commenting them, linking different scenes together, and sharing their findings with other members of the growing Vodkaster community.

Users have as well the possibility to upload extracts of films from YouTube, limited to 3 minutes length.

Users can create their own playlist from the thousands of film extracts available on Vodkaster and share it with friends on Facebook and Twitter.

At this stage, it is difficult to evaluate the future success of Vodkaster, which seems to be related to the number of fans that will freely register to the platform and collaboratively help uploading and indexing movie excerpts. The challenge will then be to monetize this audience and catalog of film excerpts. Probably licensing them to VoD platforms as additional teasers selected by film lovers … will see.

Dotan … since I saw you…can’t download you!!!

I’m always amazed (and surprised) about HOW complicated it can be to download sometime legal music on the net… a quick experience I like sharing with you.

My wife and I were in the Netherlands (Holland) during the summer break. We came across a new upcoming artist (discovered on MTV): DOTAN. We liked his music, rythm and song. We took down the artist’s name, so when back home in Paris (France) we could go (like we usually do) to iTunes store and download this new song into our library.

Surprisingly, we couldn’t!! Dotan’s song was (an still is) only available on the Netherlands iTunes store (not the French one).  My wife (being Dutch), tried to get an iTunes account in the Netherlands (giving her parents Dutch address)… that doesn’t worked either: the credit card details were France based!

Frustrated… YES!

Dotan is from the net generation, using social media to share his content. He has his own web site (and blog), his Facebook, MySpace and Hyves page, and his music video clip is available on YouTube.

So you can stream it as many times you want on your PC, your iPOD, iPhone etc… but you cannot own it!

For the last 5 years, I’ve been in the entertainment industry, working weekly with producers, rights-holders, authors, software vendors (such as Apple and Microsoft), has dealt with DRM issues, content identification, fingerprinting, watermarking and all these filtering technologies used by YouTube, Dailymotion and others… and had great difficulty to explain (simply) to my wife – a consumer – why it was SO DIFFICULT for her to get that song from a European artist, discovered in a European country, where goods are supposedly to circulate freely…!

As you may or not know, currently, most online retailers (including Apple) limit sales of digital media to either the countries in which they are based, or where the buyer is based, due to complex copyright rules and fees across Europe.  In fact, each E.U. country has its own collecting society, which has the exclusive right to collect royalties for the use of music of songwriters in that country. A percentage of the royalties is passed back to the artist who has contracted the society to look after its copyright.

The good news is that, apparently, music rights holders are nearing agreement on a pan-European music license, which would enable music to be bought online across the European Union, as stated last May by the European Commission (here). The commissioner Kroes notes Apple’s statements that if iTunes is readily able to license rights on a multi-territorial basis from publishers and collecting societies, it would consider making its content available to all European consumers, including those in EU countries where iTunes is currently not available.

Let us hope that this multi-territorial music licensing issue is dealt with rapidly, so that consumers are (still) encouraged to ‘legally’ download and for Dotan to get his music out of the Dutch boundaries!