Gypsy Bandito » Social Media

HipMojo Episode 3 – comScore/YouTube Deal & HP Exits PC Market

CT Moore — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:15:19 +0000

This is the third instalment of the new video show format that Ashkan and I have been experimenting with. In this episode we discuss:

the YouTube/comScore deal
HP exiting the PC market
whether AOL should go private
Ashton Kutcher’s failure to disclose
Ooyala snagging an ESPN deal
and how social users aren’t that social, after all

What YouTube/comScore Deal Means for Marketers

In this first clip, Ash and I turn our attention to the new partnership between YouTube and comScore, and how comScore will now be providing engagement metrics on individual YouTube channels. Specifically, we address the opportunity, here, for both marketers and content producers. I touched upon YouTube’s value as a marketing tool from both a search engine and branding standpoint, and Ash discusses it’s potential for content creators. We also discussed how 58% of YouTube views in July were generated by only two channels: Vevo & Warner Bros.

HP Gives Up on PCs

In this second instalment, we move on discuss HP’s recent decision to drop their tablet and exit the PC market altogether. While I talk about the implications for their brand, Ash explores the rationale (numbers) behind this decision and questions it’s execution.

Lightning Round: AOL, Ashton Kutcher, Ooyala, & Anti-Social Users

In this last clip, we quickly touch on four topics:

Is AOL a candidate for private equity?
Did Ashton Kutcher act unethically when he wrote for Details magazine?
Did Disney/ESPN make the write move by outsourcing to Ooyala? (I think so).
And are social media users really that social?

Are You Rock n’ Roll?

CT Moore — Fri, 14 May 2010 13:35:21 +0000

Credit: Eva Blue

C’mon, you’ve heard about them before. The social media rock stars. Who are they? What do they do? How rock n’ roll are they? What does it mean to be rock n’ roll?

Let’s go back to the early days of rock n’ roll. Back then, it was a new sound that came out of mixing together a bunch of other sounds.

But then it hit critical mass. An industry grew around it — tours buses and groupies and album sales.

Rock n’ roll became a way of life. It came with a certain attitude, a certain “I don’t give a f**k.”

Finally, rock n’ roll went mainstream — it became business, as usual. The rock n’ roll way of life was only as good as how much money it made — how many albums it sold and how many shows it could sell out. If you wanted to trash a hotel room or cancel a show, you had better had a good excuse — you had better been big and made a lot of money.

Nowadays, you don’t hear so much about rock n’ roll. It’s been succeeded by rock and grunge and alternative and punk and indie rock — and even most of those are past their prime.

But it still means something to be rock n’ roll — just as it means something to be punk rock or indie rock.

So what does it mean to you? What kind of social media rock star are you trying to be? An early innovator? A legend in your heyday? Or a mainstream powerhouse?

Tribe, Trusted, and True

CT Moore — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:35:15 +0000

Credit: Christopher M. Dawson

The annual Edelman Trust Barometer is out, and tech journalist Tom Foreski did some digging into the findings. As Tom points out, the news isn’t good for PR agencies, “social media experts,” citizen journalists, or media companies of any kind:

Trust in information from friends and peers, “people like me,” dropped by 20 points, from 47 to 27 percent.

Trust in information from digital media–blogs, social networks, and free content sources like Wikipedia or Google news, remains low: only between 11 percent and 22 percent of respondents express trust in information about companies from these sources.
[...]

Trust in credibility of TV news declined by 20 points, from 44 to 24 percent

Trust in news coverage on the radio dropped by 17 points, from 48 to 31 percent.

Trust in newspapers fell by 14 points, from 46 to 32 percent.

Only 38 percent trust media (as an institution) to do what is right, down from 46 percent in 2008.

Media companies (as an industry) have declined in credibility by 16 points (from 48 to 32 percent).

In the U.S., media companies are tied with the insurance industry for last place. Banks are second from the bottom.

Top trusted industry is technology and it has widened its lead over other industries.

Tied for the second most trusted industry is Biotech and Automotive at 63 percent, followed by Energy, Retail and Food at 61 percent.

Naturally, this got Tom speculating whether it was simply a case of market factors at work: the media marketplace is simply over-saturated (with everything from mainstream to social media), and that might have driven the market value through the floor. As far as the mainstream media goes, Tom also suggested that it probably has to do with how “traditional media is under pressure, with fewer resources [which] means more mistakes, less time to check sources, [and] a lower quality product.”

I think another part of what’s going on here, though, is a case of over-exposure/fatigue. I mean, we’re tapped into information all the time. We spend the majority of our time staring at glowing rectangles. Our telescreens are on steroids. And we’re getting stupider because so much of our mind share is being taking up by other people’s messages that there hardly anything left for our own thought processes.

So maybe what’s starting to happen is that our minds are pushing back. Maybe it’s an evolutionary mechanism to coax our own, independent sense-of-self into re-asserting itself. ‘Cause something tells me that trust in peers that we actually share space hasn’t dropped. These are peers who we can read when they share information with us. We can see their body language and respond to it.

Who knows? Maybe what’s making us stupider is that we interact less with people and more with machines. We are, after all, social creatures, and those social tendencies have evolved over 3 millions years of physical interaction. So maybe our brains are pushing back. Maybe they’re trying to drive us away from the media circus and back home into the company of a real tribe.

Community Space

CT Moore — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:57:51 +0000

Credit: Aniara Trast

Let me tell you a story: Recently, a friend of mine told me how he needed help moving a sofa. There was someone who he knew online, and their relationship had spilled over into the real world because they lived nearby one another. But he couldn’t muster the nerve to ask for a hand because their relationship was so niche-based that it just didn’t seem appropriate to push it beyond that niche set of interests.

There’s a lot to be said for online communities, the “connections” they offer us, and how they factor into our moder social lives. But if you think about, before social media, communities centered aroumd physical space. Whether they were neighbourhoods or community centres, the were anchored to a geographical location, and couldn’t exist without them.

And something that’s interesting about these “organic communities” is that they accomodated differences better than do online communities. Take the neighbourhood: with the neighbourhood, we make a community because we live near each other, do business with one another, and have generational and family ties that bond us together. Families will have been part of a neighbourhood for x-amount of generations, and that shared history is a big part of what ties them together — for good or ill.

With these “organic comminuties,” it wasn’t shared personal interests that held people together. Rather, community members had all different kinds of interests (professions, sports, hobbies, etc.), and that vast array of interests made for a more colourful, diverse community. People were sharing a space, and that shared space took precedence over their differences. Your own personal interests didn’t matter as much as your physical ties to other community members.

And I believe, for the most part, that that dynamic fostered a more tolerant and less egocentric ethos than we find in online communities — which, in turn, led to deeper, more nuanced relationships between community members.

Credit: lanuchan

You see, online communities are driven by common interests and not by shared space. We come together and connect online because we share one, common interests. And the result, I think, is that the relationships we form with other online community members are more shallow. Just as Google might be turning us into “pancake people” by getting us out of the habit of learning and remembering, social media might be turning us into “pancake people” by coaxing us into trading up deep, naunced relationships with a few people for shallow, uni-dimensional relationships with many people.

I think this is why online networks get so excited about events such as Podcamps and TweetUps: it forces them into a shared space, and lends the relationship a bit more legitimacy. But even that shared space is ephemeral. You only share it for a limited time, you’re not in each other’s face in the same way, and you’re not force to push one another’s boundaries beyond your shared interests. In fact, these events are so few and far between that, despite sharing a physical space, your interactions tend to focus only on your shared interests.

It’s in this sense that I’m hoping RoadCamp will be a kind of “social (media) experiment.” By putting a couple dozen geeks into a relatively confined space for 3 days with no real escape (i.e. personal space), we’re going to be really pushing those personal boundaries. We’ll be forced to connect with each other on a much more nuanced level, and confront how we all have interests and perspectives that are completely alien to one another.

A lot of us blogger and tweeters like to quip that we’re social media rock starts. Well, we’re hoping that RoadCamp will be precisely the kind of experience that both tears bands apart and inspires them to do some of their greatest work — to put to the test whether we’re just another melee of one-hit-wonders, or really do have any of the kind of staying-power that bands like U2, The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith have demonstrated, decade over decade.

@oggy on Analytics and Social Media

CT Moore — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:15:58 +0000

Meet Agustin Vazquez-Levi. I work with him at NVI. We’re both down at SMX East 2009 in NYC this week, and he’s on a panel called Analytics for Social Media. I thought I’d ask him what he thinks about quantifying social media.

iPhone Version

Sex, Trust, & Transparency

CT Moore — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:16:47 +0000

I need your help. I pitched a session for Podcamp Montreal 2009, and now I have speakers’ block. With only a few days ago, I’m really short on time to make a creative comeback. So if you have any suggestions, I’d really appreciated some feedback. Let me explain further…

iPhone Version

Cloudvertising at Third Tuesday

CT Moore — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:58:37 +0000

Last night was a special summer edition of Third Tuesday Montreal. There were three presentations, in the style of Pecha Kucha (20 slides, 20 second each, for a total of 6min 40sec) and I had the pleasure of opening for Julien Smith and Sylvain Grand’Maison.

The title of my presentation was Cloudvertising: Social Media and the Future of Online Advertising, and it explored how social media will shape the way that online ads and marketing campaigns will be targeted. It was a great evening, and I had a lot of fun seeing old friends, meeting new people, and talking about everything from social media to hemp farming.

In any case, here’s the Ustream recording of the my spot, with the Powerpoint presentation below.

How to Save a Local Newspaper

CT Moore — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:15:04 +0000

Credit: Shadowgate

When Tom Foremski (a former Financial Times journalist) had some ideas on how newspapers can reinvent themselves, he was trying to address both falling subscriptions and declining ad revenues. He suggested that newspapers needed original content worth paying subscription fees for, and should develop a hyper-local focus to get that content:

Newspapers should own their local stories. For example, San Jose Mercury or the San Francisco Chronicle should “own” Silicon Valley stories. They should be breaking all the best Google stories, Oracle, Apple, etc. That would be something people would pay for.

Well, assuming that a newspaper is successful at owning their local beats, they still need to adapt their subscription and ad models to new media. Basically, if a newspaper can own its local beat, it has an opportunity to completely reinvent itself through better targeted ads, social media, and mobile engagement.

Hyper Targeted Ads

As a paying subscriber, a newspaper knows a lot more than my IP. They know my billing address, which means that they can show me ads for businesses in my own neighborhood.

This, in turn, means they can open up a variety of speciality ad rates that will make it affordable for a mom & pop to advertise “in the paper.” They know exactly how many people in that neighborhood subscribe to the paper, what content they interact with the most, and can target them accordingly.

Social Media & Added Value Subscriptions

The first thing that newspapers need to do is build community around their paying subscribers. This means the usual sweet of social media features such as user profile, opening comments, etc. This can help to both increase reader loyalty and page views which means more ad revenue.

Basically, as readers interact, debate, and “share” stories that interest them, page views rise and so do impressions. As a logged-in subscriber, then, I should be able to easily tweet and digg stories with a single click.

Going Mobile

If, as Foremski points out, papers are already thinking in terms “mobile journalists equipped with notebooks, cell phone modems, and cameras,” then the next step is thinking in terms of mobile subscribers — not mobile readers, but mobile subscribers.

First, by sending readers mobile alerts on topics they want, papers wouldn’t only be increasing engagement and offering more value on subscription fees, but they’d also be boosting impressions. As mobile readers click through on an SMS to view the story, papers further increase page views, and therefore impressions.

In fact, if their social media feature leverage the Twitter API, they might even consider using Twitter as an SMS service provider.

And to build on the idea of hyper targeted ads, they could also use location based services technology to show mobile subscribers ads that are relevant to their current location. Imagine a mom & pop restaurant reaching out to a mobile user who is not from that neighborhood, but happens to be in it.

The Watchdog Business

Newspapers are more than just content publishers. They serve an integral role in a healthy democracy, so there is more hinging on their survival than mere jobs and tradition.

What newspapers have to realize is that an edition printed on paper is not an integral part of their business model. Rather, their in the business of (1) providing authoritative information so that they can (2) sell subscriptions and ads. Web technologies enable them to disseminate said authoritative information, so they simply need to adapt their subscriptions and ad models to these new media.

Six Months Later

CT Moore — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:26:44 +0000

So Mike Maddaloni tells me that it’s been six whole months since Nokia brough a rag-tag bunch of geeks (including me) in Helsinki by Nokia for Nokia Open Lab 2008. Toward the end, I remember someone saying that if only we had had another couple days, we could’ve mapped-out Nokia’s entire strategy for the next year. Well, I think that if we had had any idea of what to expect, we wouldn’t have needed another few days to do that.

For one, I wish I’d known what to expect so that I could’ve scheduled a few video interviews in advance. It’s not every day that you get access to a pool of both Nokia execs and some really forward thinking bloggers from around the world. Then again, with everything that went down, I imagine that scheduling more than a couple interviews would’ve been hell.

All in all, the experienced really changed the way I think about social media and the web. For starters, it taught me that the web and desktops/laptops are not inextricably linked. More importantly, though, it made me realized that, insofar as social media is about people connecting and sharing with other people, the mobile web is going to be a hell of a lot more important than I think most of us realize. In a word, the mobile web will merge the internet and physical world, making for a much more tribal web:

The social web [...] made it possible for people to transcend a physical divide and come together to form a community. What it didn’t do, was afford them the physical experience of community participation.

The mobile web is going to close much of that gap. It will enable to transcend the physical divide when forming and joining communities, but still have some physical experience by including our physical environment in our community interactions.

Other things I learned included (1) don’t trust baggage handlers at Charles de Gaul with your luggage, (2) no matter how Irish you think you are, never try to out-drink a Finn, and (3) keep a close eye on your drink when Estonian hookers are lurking in the club (Nick Bouton can back me on this one).

In any case, here’s the official video diary of the event produced by Nokia. And if you have troube getting it to load, you can always check it out here.

Newspapers Becoming Social News Media Organizations

CT Moore — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:01:55 +0000

The reason that new media must be multi-media is that a web page can contain text, images, audio, and video. To remain fully competitive online, then, you should provide as many of those as your users can get value from (hint: at least 3 of the 4). And we’ve been seeing it for sometime. Where CNN used to be television news, they’re web portal is completely multi-media, and more recently, newspapers have started to embrace video.

But if that’s enough, how come newspapers are still struggling? Well, the answer is that it’s not enough. Newspapers have a business model that has evolve to need two revenue streams: ad sales and subscriptions. And when it comes to their online portals, they face a double whammy that (1) ad sales aren’t sufficient, and (2) users are loath to pay for online content.

If newspapers are not going to go the way of the dodo, then, they need to find a way to both increase their ad sales revenues and entice users to pay for content. Well, Tom Foremski (a former Financial Times journalist) has some ideas on how newspapers can reinvent themselves. For Tom, what it comes down to, is that newspapers have to become more than what they are now. They have to become news organizations, who (1) sieze control of their own ad revenues, and (2) own not just their content, but their stories and their beat. Here’s just a few of Tom’s ideas:

- Focus on original content, do not rewrite wire stories or press releases–people are more likely pay for content they can’t get anywhere else.

- Focus on hyper-local coverage, newspapers should “own” their regional beat because they have the best contacts and the best understanding of local companies and issues.

- Be a regular and visible part of your local communities by getting out of the office and into those communities.

- Celebrate the best citizen journalists/bloggers in your communities, publish them on your platform.

- Don’t let advertising networks sell your advertising. They take a huge cut for serving ads and you lose the customer connection. Newspapers should always own their customer relationship.

- Online readers that want to pay, have no way of paying for the the news except by buying a newspaper subscription! PBS does quite well with membership packages that include discounts from local businesses, while keeping broadcasts freely available. That’s a model that could be offered by newspapers.

- Become the host for all important discussions about local issues and politics. Moderate the discussions to ensure civil discourse. Nothing kills discussions faster than offensive comments made by anonymous people.

There are bunch more, and Tom does a great job of leading into them by outlining the current plight of newspapers. What’s interesting, though, is that there are two strains of thought co-mingling here: a business theory and a social theory.

On the business side, newspapers seem fated to embrace vertical integration or die. That have to sieze control of both their production and ad sales if they’re going to adapt. Vertical integration was largely overshadowed by horizontal integration in the 70s and 80s, but if there’s anything that the credit crisis has demonstrated, it’s that outsourcing your primary value proposition is not sustainable in the long-term.

I think that the businesses and industries that pull through this recession will be ones that find a way vertically integrate their operations in a profitable way. Now, doing so is no easy trick. It’s a lot easier to outsource and show returns than to “insource” and do so, but I guess that’s the difference between business-innovation and business-as-usual. As we’re starting to figure out, business-as-usual isn’t much business at all.

On the social side, Tom is talking about reconciling social media with both a business and editorial mandate. This is interesting because it’s not the usual evangelical kool-aid where you take a few sips and it all marshmellows and strawberry shortcake on a yellow submaring.

Rather, he’s saying this is what users expect online, so if you do find something to offer them that they’re willing to pay for, then it better come bundled with that as a bell and whistle.

He’s not suggesting that newspapers become aggregators of localized UGC. No, he’s saying that newspapers have to leverage social media tools to better connect with their readers and their community so that they can more easily (and efficiently, and cheaply) produce content that (maybe) someone will be willing to pay for.

Granted, as my buddy Ash once pointed out, “Mainstream media just isn’t what it used to be. They’re slow to react. That statement could apply to business or editorial.” I think what Tom is getting at, though, is that if some (of the better) newspapers change their way of thinking now, they might be able to adapt to the changing media landscape both more quickly and more profitably in the future.