Monthly Archives: March 2008

03.07.08
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Media08: Death of ‘broadcast’ advertising.

Assia Graziloi-Venier, head of Ministry of Sount TV (London) and flypaper.tv

I’m going to blog a little differently during these sessions. I’m going to seize upon a few things that the speakers say and talk about this.

In looking forward to this year, Assia talked about the difficult of brands letting go of the power as they try to encourage consumers to become brand evangelists. One thing she said was that spam was dead. That’s not a revolutionary idea. (In some places, not only is spam dead, but it’s actually illegal.) But let me take that one step further. As I said during my presentation, many of mass media’s mistakes in a social media era are down to the industrial, mass media model being shoe-horned into the social media world. Isn’t spam just a low-yield broadcast message? It’s antithetical to social media.

No one likes spam, but to be a little provocative, if you take that idea of spam as a generalised, unfocused and unwanted advertising message, could one not also argue that TV and radio ads are generalised, unfocused and often unwanted advertising messages? Isn’t that why people are not only time-shifting with TiVo but also cuting out the commercials? What about people who surf with display ad blockers?

I’m not anti-advertising. I’m actually not calling or predicting of all advertising, just questioning the over-reliance on relatively dumb, untargeted advertising.

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03.07.08
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Media08: Al Jazeera and new media

Mohamed Nanabhay, head of new media Al Jazeera Network. I missed the first part of Mohamed’s presentation because I was doing an interview. I came in as he was talking Al Jazeera’s focus on newsgathering. He said that while CNN showed the missiles taking off, Al Jazeera showed where the missiles landed.

It’s not about mobile TV. It’s about shift in media.

  1. The ability for anyone to create and share media. This is a cultural shift. People try to ignore, and we’re still trying to figure out how to deal with this shift. Public and private lives blurred Incredible choice. Shift in trust.
  2. We have a shift in how we deal with technology and media consumption. He tells his 4-year-old daughter to ask Uncle Google if he doesn’t know. What they of TV and media has shifted. We consume media totally different.

How do we deal with new engaged audience? We used to talk about coffee shop culture. Kids are now sitting forward.

Industry issues

  • TV and newspaper are losing audience to new platforms
  • Content is going online whether we like it or not
  • internal resistance to change
  • undefined business models

Al Jazeera’s response

  • Don’t fret over new platforms. Engage people wherever they are.
  • Content is going online. Al Jazeera is making our content online while everyone is taking it down.
  • Intternal resistance. Evangelise, experiment and empower. Win over people, and they will evangelise for you.
  • Undefined business models. Quick, low cost, experimental projects and see what works.

He talked about a distributed distributed model. It doesn’t mean that TV is broken or throw out your TV.

They added an Al Jazeera English channel. 1.6 million people were introduced to Aljazeera English. People have put up 4700 videos online, and there have been 20 million views of those video.

They put up five of their most popular programmes. They are full 40 minute episodes. They allow people to embed the videos on their sites and blogs.

We have been talking about empowering people in Gaza to do video. People took out their phones into Gaza to provide video. People took the initiative.

Benefits of these models. People are discovering their content. They compliment the programming with new voices and new context. We create a sense of community around our content and are trying to be a part of the conversation.

He told the tragic story of an Al Jazeera correspondent being killed, but it was great to hear him talk about the channel’s commitment to journalism even under difficult situations.

As Ammar, in the comments below, and Mohamed, on his blog, point out, his presentation has been posted at Slideshare.

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03.07.08
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Media08: Digital Media Innovation Conference

As I blogged about before I caught the flight to Sydney, I’m at Media08 in Sydney. I’ll be blogging about some of the sessions. I probably will backfill some of these posts because I’m juggling a lot today.

Jack Matthews, CEO of Fairfax Digital, kicked off the day of presentations. He said, that Fairfax did not the luxury of multimillion R&D departments. We need to be lean to innovate. And originally, we thought about doing this. We thought it was going to be an internal staff as part of our professional development plans to bring together this elite team of ‘thought leaders.

This is the conference equivalent of speed dating. RSVP, their dating site, set Guiness Book of World Records for largest speed dating event.

David Kirk, (former captain of the All Blacks and) CEO of Fairfax Media. The issues you will discuss are on my mind everyday. How we rise to the challenges of today and manage them. They are difference between achievement and growth and mediocrity and decline.

Innovation is often thought of as the new new. It is not often that innovation is thought of in the context of the old: Publishing, automotive and mining (for instance). The Sydney Moring Herald reaches more people than ever. Moving from print publisher to multimedia company. They are focusing on integration and collaboration.

Three cornerstones of our strategy:

  1. Defend and grow our newspapers. Involves innovation and change. Key to culture. Have to hang on to core of our values and history.
    “Our newspapers have to be connected to our audience and our readers. It remains the core of our success.” In US, see only decline. But the market is not the same here.
  2. We need aggressive growth online. Three years ago, less than 2% of revenues. It will grow to 20% in a couple of years. It is the high growth part of our business.
  3. We need to be a leading digital media company for media markets of 21st Century. The strategy has to be robust. Consumer behaviour is changing rapidly.

Discussing this to our staff has been the most difficult thing for me as a CEO. Rapid changes make it difficult to communicate a sense of certainty. We learn along the way to describe what we talk about.

Focus on transition from publisher to leading multimedia company. We have to the best at originating content. It is our fundamental history and heritage. I often say digital content, but everything that we do is digital these days. No one has the people on the ground in communities as Fairfax.

Building ability to deliver audio and video content. A year ago 800,000 downloads a month, now 4 million a month.

To be successful, we have to own and leverage cross media brands to drive extension of audience reach.

He then talked about building multimedia brands. As a social media guy, I talk about building connections not brands. Certainly now those connections are part off that brand. I am wary of the obsession around brand. The menu is not the meal, and sometimes abstract discussions of brand misplaces a focus.

I agree with him a lot more when he is talking about multi-platform.

Where the audience goes, we have to go. The only way to aggregate audiences is to chase them.

New media is littered with companies without business models. You need proven revenue models. The revenue models turn audience and brand participation into money. We are focused on classified and display ads and transaction market. We have stuck to our subscription model. WSJ and FT see as sensible way to go.

I don’t necessarily agree 100% with him. Comparing a general media company to the FT and WSJ misses a point. We used to joke that the only content you can sell online is sport, business and porn. General content is commodity.

We have to build innovation into the DNA of the company.

We believe that we can hold our own. We still need to focus on the basics of good business everyday whatever the medium.

Fundamental drivers:

  • compelling content, every minute, every hour, every day
  • innovative, creative advertising and content sales
  • reader, viewer, listener community – audience -connection and management
  • production and distribution excellence
  • every day need to be managing, developing and training people.

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03.06.08
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Please bear with us

We’ve had intermittent problems with Movable Type here at Strange Attractor for months now. Every time we think it has been fixed, something else goes awry. Right now, we’re battling with a problem with rebuilds which means that every time we post an entry, or someone posts a comment, the site fails to rebuild properly and spits out naught but a blank page. This is really annoying, and we are sorry if you’re inconvenienced by it.

We are hoping that we’ll be able to move to WordPress soon – that’s our aim, although the actual transition is in the hands of the chaps at Corante so we have no idea when it will happen. In the meantime, sorry if you have visited or tried to comment, only to get a sea of white. Please do email me if you have commented and the site is returning a blank page and I will pop in and do a manual rebuild.

03.05.08
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Media08: Making the change from mass media to social media

Suw and I just got back from our honeymoon on Sunday, and I’m at the airport again. I’m heading to Sydney to speak at Media08.

I’m going to be speaking about making the transition from mass media to social media. Trends in audience fragmentation continue, and mass media are increasingly challenged to deliver the size of audiences they once did, which threatens their underlying business model of mass audiences delivered to advertisers. Journalists have been particularly poor in adapting to these changes as the positive sense of public service that many journalists have has soured into a false sense of entitlement. Yes, journalism is important to the functioning of a democracy, but just because we believe what we do is important, doesn’t mean that people must pay attention to us. We’re competing for people’s valuable disposable time and income against not only other news outlets but also against other forms of information and entertainment. We’re competing against not only CNN, the Telegraph, the Washington Post and the Economist but also against iPods, YouTube, Digg, the Wii, Facebook, real books, instant messaging, text messaging and MySpace messaging. Time and attention is the scarce resource that we’re fighting for, and as I’ve said before, most journalists really don’t grok this.

As journalists, we should focus on quality content, but our audiences have moved on, too often quite literally. They expect not only quality content but real, social interaction around that content. Wrap your content in a community. In 2008, that can still be a unique selling point. But this isn’t rocket science, and while journalists have been fighting over fundamentalist definitions of what is and isn’t journalism, innovators not beholden to dogmatic definitions of journalism have been creating social experiences around media. See Newsvine, which iterated and innovated enough to get the attention of a small company up the road in Seattle (well MSNBC – part owned by NBC and Microsoft) who came knocking with a cheque. But the time to gain the first adopter edge is coming to a close. By the end of 2008, savvy media and technology companies will have already moved and social media won’t be such a differentiating competitive advantage.

I’ll blog more about this over the next few days as well as blogging about conference itself.

03.04.08
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A four-day week

Kevin and I are back from our honeymoon – we had a fabulous time in Barbados – and raring to go once again. I’m looking forward to reclaiming my evenings and weekends, after months and months of focusing on nothing but organising our wedding. I’m pleased that we chose to do so much ourselves, as the big day was just wonderful, but it really did take up time! Kev will attest to how many hours I spent beading fabric and making things!

Now that I’m back, and easing myself into my work again, I’ve made a pretty fundamental decision which will affect – and hopefully improve – the way that I work. I’ve long been an admirer of Ryan Carson and the gang at Carsonified who work a four day week, closing the office on Fridays. I saw Ryan talk about this at EuroFOO in 2006, and promised myself that I would work towards a four day week over the coming months.

For the self-employed, a four day week is both incredibly easy and astonishingly difficult to achieve. As I run my own business, I have total sovereignty over my time, something which is deeply important to me and the reason why I always turn down job offers, no matter how juicy. I’ve been a freelance for ten years, and adjusting to having to ask for holiday or leave early, and having to go to the same place every day would pretty much send me fruit loopy. I like my independence, and I like making my own decisions about how I spend my time, and on what.

The irony of freelancing, though, is that you end up working really, really hard, not taking holidays or finishing early, and working in the same place every day, even if it is just from your couch. I think my first first holiday with Kevin in 2006 was the first proper holiday I’d had since going freelance, or possibly even since leaving university. So whilst it’s easy for the freelance to decide to work a four-day week, it’s a lot harder to actually execute that decision.

In January 2007, I started marking out Fridays as busy in my calendar, blocking the time out as ‘Free Fridays’, with the intention of spending that time doing stuff that was fun or interesting. Sort of like my very own Google 20% Time. As a tactic for getting me to work a four-day week, it was a total failure as I almost immediately had to book a meeting on a Friday, and within a month, Fridays were just like any other day.

Ryan, on the other hand, has the advantage of running a company which employs people, so once company policy is made to shut the office on a Friday, it’s easy to stick to it. Everyone’s paid a full wage and they work 9am – 6pm Mon – Thurs, which is a 32 hour week, and plenty of time to get stuff done. A set-up like that is pretty easy to maintain because it’s embedded in company culture.

So, now’s the time to try again in a more formal, structured way. Rather than designate Fridays as ‘free’, I’m going to designate them as Reading and Research Day. I have a number of books on my bookshelf that are crying out to be read or, in some cases, re-read and there are even more that I want to get hold of. Plus there are various things that I want to research, whether it’s technology, applications, site, or something more academic.

I’m particularly interested in expanding my knowledge of ethnography, psychology, human behaviour, and usability testing methodologies. So much of what I do now is really about people, about understanding how people behave, how they view themselves and their jobs, how they relate to technology, how they use software, how they interact with each other, how they engage politically with their peers, superiors and subordinates.

The more time I spend working with people who are trying to foster social media adoption in their company, the more I see how much of the project’s success is down to the people, rather than the technology. You can make the best technology decision possible, but if you don’t make the right people decisions, your project will founder. This is something that few companies seem to realise, and frequently resist admitting because it complicate things quite significantly. People are, after all, complicated and you do have to take that into account when planning a social media project – you can come up with some lovely, slick ideas about how people “are going to use the software”, but without a solid grounding in reality, you can find that people aren’t doing what you expected them to do.

I am also inspired by ethnographer Grant McCracken, who splits his time between working as an ethnographer, and doing anthropology research. He says:

[E]thnography can be a great day job, the thing you do to earn enough money to do something else. This might be filmmaking, poetry, fine art collecting. In my case, I do it to fund my anthropology.

And, as I have argued here before, it consulting serves in a couple of ways. It pays me well enough to free up chunks of the year for research. But it also gives me data and understandings that work their way into my research.

I have to be careful not to violate my confidentiality agreements and I take these seriously. The moment the corporation believes you are “reselling” its data, that’s the end of your career as a consultant. The corporation is right to be vigilant on this point, but it is smart enough to see that I represent a peculiar bargain. Because I spend half the year doing my own anthropology they actually get two days for the price of one, the day they pay for, and the day I have spend working on my own. That anthropological research is frequently the source of the insight they most prize. Two-for-one, it’s a bargain. And it is a distinctly better deal than hiring a consultant who does not ever engage in intellectual development but instead exhausts his or her resources by taking on too much work.

I think this is a really important point. It’s not enough to just consult all the time. It’s not enough to be abreast of technology. Yes, I learn a lot every time I work with a company – the use of social media is a really new field and every consulting gig is an opportunity to understand more about how it all works – but if one is not careful, one can get caught up in one’s own assumptions of how things should work, rather than observing how they do work. This is why I feel the need to spread my net a little further and explore other people’s work in complementary disciplines.

The downside of this is that it does reduce the amount of time I have to work on client projects, and the number of clients I can take on simultaneously. As a freelance, that’s clearly something I have to take seriously, but I think in the end, it’ll be well worth it. Clients will get better work from me, and I will stay on top of my game.

There’s no time like the present, so this Friday I shall go to the Social Media Cafe Prototype meeting, and thence to the QR Code meeting (conveniently in the same place), and will be taking a book, and a notebook, with me. I shall, of course, report back.