Left: The Future of Media Panel rounds off Day 1 at Forrester’s Marketing Conference.
I’m sitting in the front row here in Orlando at Forrester’s Marketing Conference. We’re talking about the “M”M world, no not the Mouse but Media. This closing panel is discussing the Future of Media. Moderator is colleague David Card, Annis Lyles, VP Media of Coca Cola, Greg Clayman, EVP of MTV, and David Verklin CEO of Canoe Ventures. David’s not taking any prisoners and is intending to make this a pretty tough panel, rightfully so, media is undergoing some serious changes.
David starts out showing that newspapers is struggling, from NYT, Rocky Mountain, and SFgate. First let’s start with the client side. Coke recalls the day when there were only three major media networks –now there are many. She focuses her strategy on consumers, and first starts with her kids. David, from Canoe has a focus on TV, and says “TV is getting back in the game”. How? to bring interactivity to the TV. He’s extremely optimistic saying that “TV is a platform”, and says he’s going to launch a new product in three weeks. I’m a bit hesitant to his optimism, but hey, I’m open to a briefing.
Annis from Coke brings us back to reality, but suggesting we should first collect information from our consumers. David suggests that we can use data to only show TV ads about dog supplies to dog owners. The panel debated over how to get this data, from a variety of sources, such as panels, existing data sources. I certainly hope they read my upcoming report on the Future of the Social Web, some of the answers are in there. David suggests that “the Internet has really raised our game”, and nods to how the benefits of search, and it’s ability to measure. Yet, he suggests that the accuracy and relevancy of internet ads are very low.
Moderator David Card fires a blow to the panel and says “What happens when consumers skip through advertisements on TV” The panels spins, rebalanced and comes back. David says that we’ve had ad skipping technology for years, called the “clicker”, nice counter. I didn’t hear any epiphanies out of the panel, not sure if they have a strong idea of the future of media, but hey, this is a very difficult topic.
A question from audience: “Why is new interactive ads on TV relevant? It’s still push, interruptive advertising” David suggests that interactive TV will provide new engagements for segments. Cooking shows are entertainment, and chefs are taking notes, instead, they’ll need new experiences to get recipes.
The final question from the audience? When does TV and Internet combine. Coke says “all media will merge” and says “it’s now”. Good answer. David from Canoe says 2011, “in next five years content will come across 3 screens” nice bold statement. Greg suggests 3-5 years.
David Berkowitz, who I’ve known for years, a top marketing blogger and practitioner is live blogging, see what he wrote. David always has to outdo me and has not 1, but 4 pictures.
I’m updating this post live
Steve Rubel and I exchanged emails early this morning. I asked him for his thought on how MicroMedia was taking hold. If you remember, Rubel was one of the fanatics of Twitter when it first hit the scene.
What’s really intersting is that Steve is modyfing the strategy on his blog, he’s going to be changing his strategy to accomdiate how media is evolving (well at least this month).
Here’s how Steve is evolving:
“So, net net, what does this mean? Well, by posting less on Micro Persuasion I actually am able to give you more. I am freed of the need to write here daily. This means when I do post on this site it is more substantive and meaningful and it incorporates my learnings from the conversations I have had elsewhere.
Further, micro blogging – especially because it is mobile – makes it easy for me to converse with a good number of you in real-time. This fits perfectly into a busy schedule where many days I use my iPhone more than I do a computer. It also flows with our growing need as a society for all that is brief.”
I, on the other hand, will not be changing my strategy on this blog, but will continue to make this my primary platform and continue to grow out those other tools.
Let’s hear from you, will you be changing your media, blog, or web strategy as things move faster, smaller, and more mobile?
Just got off the phone with a person doing research at a very large technology corporation, they are doing research for their website and asked me what I though websites would be like in 3-5 years as they are planning out their web strategy.
Here’s a summary of what I predicted:
1. content will be amorphous (content will take many forms and shapes, from RSS to widgets)
2. content will be ubiqutous (content will be access everwhere)
3. Communications are moving from asynchronous to real time
4. Existing corporate websites are irrelevant, and they will become community websites
5. Employees and customers will be communicating in real time, openly and collaborating on the live web. In fact, we’re starting to see some technologies already appear, like Facebook, Ustream (I advise them) and PublicSquare
6. Corporate websites will become more ‘human’ and employees personas will show through.
7. Online video will be a huge factor, either live, or archived
8. Corporate web marketing will spread way off the corporate domain to where communities have formed elsewhere on the web.
9. The truth that the brand is owned by those that are involved in the conversation will hold true
10. Corporations are media companies (even if they are not now) and employees and customers will be creating the media collectively
I gave a lot of concrete examples, features, and companies and technologies to look at, it was far to extensive to discuss here. In fact, each of the points above are already full blog posts that I’ve already written.
Love to hear your feedback, what do you think corporate websites will look like in 3-5 years? What did I miss?
As you know, I’m carefully watching the Social Media Measurement space (see all these posts), as that’s the precursor to improve a program, and also how companies measure value, and then increase budgets. I’m a corporate web guy, and I know how important measurement is to these programs. As you probally aready know, Nielsen has shifted it’s measurement from Page Views to Attention (PDF). Here’s a few discussions that I’ve found interesting over the past few weeks, I was saving these up, analyzing them, and looking for patterns.
Eight Meaningful Measures of Social Media
1. “Number of unique users
2. Returning versus new readers
3. Referring source statistics
4. Links from other sites
5. Google PageRank
6. The ratio of blog comments to blog posts (where applicable)
7. Total time spent on the site
8. The popularity of the content itself, which gets the most views”
Good start, but it’s leaning on the traditional attributes we already know. There’s a few that are missing from this, such as “Tone”, “Speed or Velocity of spread”, “interaction”, and of course any qualitative info that can be gleamed.
Yulia is doing some great analysis by trying to make sense of the various KPIs that could be measured during a program, she compares how different experts have different measurement attributes. Me? I say it varies depending on the type of goals you have setup.
Jeff Jarvis thinks forward in trying to understand what’s next after the homepage? He delves in to RSS, Blogs, and RIAs, do companies even need a homepage? That’s why I say the irrelevant corporate website needs to evolve.
I found quite a few juicy podcast interviews from Buzz Marketing for Tech, dive into there and learn more.
In a recent post, I listed out all the Many Forms of Web Marketing. In fact, there are over 40 of them!
I’ve put Widget Marketing in section 5F, under Community Marketing and Social Media. Why are widgets viable? The theory of modern marketing is to join the companies where the currently exist, rather than trying to build your own.
In this great article by Alex from Read Write Web; The Evolution of Web Widgets: From Self-Expression to Media Companies:
“Media companies see widgets as an important new method of reaching audiences both inside and outside their domains. It seems that widgets cover array of tasks ranging from brand propagation to instant transactions and customer tracking. In this post we will take a look at how web widgets have evolved from cool, viral toys of self-expression to important big media tools.”
In fact, Google is offering $100,000 to developers to build widgets, details from this Keynote of Marissa Mayer.
Web Strategies: There’s a few theories that you have to understand before you engage in Widget Marketing:
1) Web Marketing is not limited to two domains only
2) Content is Amorphous
3) Content is Ubiquitous
4) The savvy join communities where they currently reside
5) Many are content publishers, widgets reward them, keeping traffic on their sites, not yours
6) APIs and hooks into multiple widget platforms will be needed
7) Your website is Irrelvant, and must evolve
There’s an interesting program by the W3C to standardize widgets. Makes sense.
For a variety of reasons, I’m watching the online video space very closely, I see the web moving this direction: Richer media, near-real time, and content being amorphous, and ubiquitous (mobile).
I don’t have any insider information, but here’s my predictions for where Google will be headed for the online video market.
Predictions about Google and Online Video
1) Contextual Advertising
As I understand it, Google makes 80% of it’s revenue from the Search Marketing space, this is not going away. Google will apply a similiar model to Video over the coming year. Here’s how they’ll do it:
A) Contextual Video
If you haven’t noticed already, Google has been experimenting with a new player design. Just like the slick Apple OS, when a user puts the mouse over the video, other contextual videos will show up. This is contextual delivery of content. Just like text based Adsense, this will be offered to marketers who want to connect their videos with an existing channel or content creator. It’s mini-sponsorship.
B) Embedded Ads
In addition to just sponsoring contextually, Google (I predict) will acquire one of the companies that allows dynamic, embedded pre and post roll advertisements. What’s that? This means that a video can have a short and sweet advertisement, before, during, or after a video plays. The trick will to make it as fast as possible. The other way is to include text right on the video, making it clickable, see example.
C) Incentives
What’s in it for the content creator? Just like web managers who deploy adsense, They get a cut of the money.
2) Video Previews on Search
We already know this is coming, see my live conference notes, it was announced that Google will allow video previews in Google results. I’ve got tons of session minutes from the recent Searchnomics conference.
3) Live Streaming
If you’ve been under a rock, then you’ve not heard of companies that provide live video web streaming like Ustream (I advise them) Blog TV, Justin TV, or Kyte.tv. I predict that Google will launch or acquire a live video streaming service on Nov 18th. Why then? It’s one week before all the families of the world will want to start connecting before the Holiday season. (The week after is Thanksgiving, an American Holiday) The world becomes more connected with free online live video streaming. This tool will evolve to a ‘capture’ tool that will feed into the Web Editor.
4) Free Video Editing Software
Just like Yahoo already has Jumpcut, a webbased video editor, Google will introduce a similiar basic Video editor. Coupled with Google docs, spreadsheet, and other tools, it may be an online or even desktop application that lets users quickly create video edits. This tool will work well with live video streaming as well as archived video. The true video prosumer emerges.
5) Video Search
Not news either, Marissa Mayer told us at Searchnomics that Google is already experimenting with voice to text search ability, as well as scraping closed captions (CC). So in addition to metadata, video content will start to get analyzed for better search and ad results.
6) Measurement
This is the most critical. Advertising dollars don’t shift until measurement is in place. Google is already measuring their YouTube investment and it will continue. Social Media is different than other traditional broadcast methods, as users can interact with the content, talk aobut it, and then share it with others –it’s multi-dimensional. I expect Google to acquire one of these companies that measure online video. Oh yeah, has anyone heard what happened to Measuremap? which was acquired quite a while ago?
So there, that’s what I’ve been thinking about over the last few weeks, I see Google making some strong movements into this space, and here’s how I predict it will happen.
If you’d like to to talk to me further about this, (perhaps for an article) please leave a comment or email me
I just got back from a bbq with quite a few famous bloggers in Silicon Valley, in fact it was at Maryam’s house, and it was her birthday. Happy Birthday!
During some of the bbq, some of us were talking about Singapore and how we’re seeing this as a great place to visit and how I see it as a new testing ground for many web 2.0 companies to sprout. I’ve met so many people from Silicon Valley that have been to Singapore, from Shel Israel to Lisa Stone.
Kevin Lim is reporting in from his “Web 2.0 in South East Asia” panel @ Microsoft ReMIX 2007“, it’s worth a read if you’re watching the web industry in South East Asia. By the way, Singapore is the cleanest and most tech savvy country I’ve ever been to, it’s very modern, and the native language is English.
I recently provided some feedback to NBC 11′s Hometown project, an advancement for hyperlocal citizen journalism and the neighborhood network in USA. I was pleased to meet Jennifer here in Singapore who’s very involved with citizen journalism here with the one of the most notable newspapers, the Straits Times.
She toured me through a sub-site called STOMP, which is a hybrid of citizen journalists that report in and classically training journalists and editors (yes, with fact checking). From a user experience standpoint you’ll find the design of the site to be very graphic heavy which may seem foreign to western eyes.
One area is to watch the Hot Topic area Singaporean seen, which includes stories from the first-hand witnesses on the streets, pictures, testimonials are present. Some contributors don’t feel comfortable giving their identity, and the newspaper will honor that. The editors will help them write the story (as many are contributed orally) and then give a round back to the contributor for final review –it’s a merge of both words
I’m pinging my friends at the Stanford Innovation Journalism program as well as UC Berkeley, where they’re also carving out the future of Journalism. This is a good case study.
As it ends up, I’m going to be interviewed by the Straits later today, I’ll post a link when the interviews goes out. Are you familiar with what we’re doing with the San Jose Mercury news? Old and new media can work together.
Update: I’ve given this some thought, one of the strategies I recommend to clients is to consider building a community website that aggregates all types of content from the community, not just one. Check out what Techmeme does for the tech industry, it’s a combination of mainstream and social media all on one page –this is yet another form of the future of media. It’s an “and” not an “or”. It’s a “we” not a “me”
Just landed in Singapore, an amazingly clean city, looking forward to learn about the tech culture. It was quite a commute getting here, nearly 20 hours from SFO to HK, to Singapore, but well worth it. My presentation for the main congress (I’m giving another one to the local university) is about audio and video podcasts for the enterprise.
While looking at the program, I was seeing quite a few topics on preparing the IT infrastructure for streaming media, or preparing the anticipation of the enterprise being the media producer. I’m not so sure that’s the way it’s going to unfold.
The more I think about it, I see Google, PodTech, and a variety of other media creators to be where content is created, uploaded, and distributed –it doesn’t have to be hosted on the enterprise.
There’s a lot of talk about Software as a Services (SaaS), and we’re seeing more evidence of this as raw computing power, storage, web-architectures, and I think it’s spreading to the media space.
I’m part of the Media 2.0 Workgroup, a great feed to subscribe to if this topic interests you, I hope some of those folks in the group chime in.
Perhaps the greatest thing that enterprises could do is to make sure that 1) Those media networks (and whatever comes next) are never blocked from the firewall 2) there’s enough bandwidth to easily view any of those networks 3) Empower, educated, and encourage employees to join those media networks –as that’s where the conversations about a market will happen.
Media will be uploaded, edited, modified, shared, published, and mashed into new forms in the “cloud” –all outside of the corporate firewall.
I started to read Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger, it’s an easy read, I’m already half way through the book by reading on the plane.
(Left: I chatted with Erin FitzGerald, Robert Calo (who’s running the program) and evangelist Kara Andrade at UC Berkeley last night)
I shared with Berkeley’s The Initiative on the Future of Journalism
While my focus is primarily on corporate web strategy, I was asked by Kara to come in and share with graduate students at the The Initiative on the Future of Journalism, here’s their project site. The folks I met (and their facilities) are geared up to use the new (social media) tools that are present in today’s modern communications. They’re adapting quickly where others have withered.
The news room itself was rows and rows of brand new Mac computers, and when I walked in I saw Twitter, their blog, and tons of other tools, you can check out their site to learn what they’re doing. As I understand it, Dan Gillmor, (we both presented at the New Media Summit this week) is a big supporter of this program. Be sure to read his eloquent piece that Journalism isn’t dying it’s evolving, I have to agree, I witnessed it last night.
I hope that this group meets up with the Stanford Innovation Journalism program. To me, they should be bouncing ideas off each other in near real-time speed. I’ve already made some introductions via email. PodTech has hosted the Injo program at least twice.
Key concepts we talked about:
Faster and Faster: From asynchronous to real-time.
I showed them how communications are moving faster and faster with tools like Twitter and Ustream (a company I advise). As I launched Ustream (live video streaming with chat, watch the archive) Chris Heuer jumped into the chat room and started to ask questions and add to the conversation. That’s disruptive (in a good way). I’m speaking at Chris’s event the Social Media Club this Monday, and he added a very good point in the chat room. Editing still has an important role, as no one has time to watch JustinTV all the time, a 10 minute summary once a day in video format would really make it digestible. I recorded the live ustream video, usually I’d spend more time with aiming the camera, but this is more of a demo.
Amorphous and Ubiquitous media
Media is taking new forms and shapes, expect media pieces to be captured everywhere (some of the students had the new Nokia phones) distribute everywhere and into different shapes and forms (RSS will pull content into new forms) and then morph into something new as the community will help add, edit, or comment it. I’ve been discussing this amorphous ubiquitous concept since 2005.
Join vs Build
I shared how they need to start learning how to listen, by using Technorati to find people in your community (whoever has been linking to Stanford’s Injo program is in your community) and how to add them to your feedreader. Why only use Lexis Nexus, when the communities that you’re reporting on are telling their stories first person using social media tools? In many ways, journalists could be embedded reporters, by just using a feedreader to listen in on what’s being said. I mandated that those present should be using a feedreader in the next five days. How can you report if you’re not listening to the stories already being told? Those that are already sharing may be the most passionate, knowledgeable, and connected ones in your industry so you’ll need to connect to them both to get your story as well as help distribute your story.
Web Strategies
This is my focus area. I was asked to share some ideas on how to launch a story, or an interactive story. The future of media is amorphous, so be prepared for your content to take many shapes. It could appear in a feedreader, an aggregator, a widget on Facebook or on a blog. Your website is no longer a static website authored by you. Embrace the community in which you’re reporting about, include links, quotes, or aggregate their content.
I explained that I believe that corporate websites are irrelevant, and that probably relates to news websites too. The future of websites will have all members of the community writing, adding, editing, and voting on it. This is why I’m closely following tools like PublicSquare, which allow just that (more news on that soon). I forgot to share with the group about newstrust, (my review of newstrust) which is a unique multi-tiered system that I was given a demo by the founders, it uses several sources of editorial layering.
Audience replaced by Community
It’s an ecosystem where everyone is sharing (remember that you can share without ever typing, there are tools like Digg, or even sharing from your feedreader like Scoble). The concept that journalists are writing for an audience needs to evolve. Journalists should join the communities (it’s easy with social media) that they are learning about, adding value. In return, these communities will add to the piece, promote the piece, and build upon it.
Us vs Them
When I attended the WeMedia conference in Miami earlier this year, I was amazed at the tension of “us vs them”. It was clear that the hard liners were resisting and having a hard time letting go to gain more. It didn’t feel like this with this group, or with Stanford’s Injo. I remember that the hardliners were attacking blogging as journalism. Blogs are simply communication tools and can be used in a variety of ways, by no means am I a reporter or consider this blog a news source, it’s intended to be a living white paper. Of course any media revolution is only as good as it’s message. Even with mass layoffs at the SF Chronicle this last few weeks, it’s a clear indicator that the hard-liners are being asked to move off and new skills and concepts that it’s “We” not “us vs them” are needed.
Case Study: Coexistence in the Tech Industry
Let’s take for example the tech industry. For the most part journalists and bloggers co-exist (except from a minor scuffle here and there). That may be due to the ‘open source’ mentality that we all share in order to gain more collectively, or that bloggers read mainstream, and vice versa. Techmeme is a manifestation of this, as it aggregates the conversations and stories and viewpoints in near-real time. Here’s an example of Dan Gillmor’s piece and the discussions around it. On the preferences, be sure to expand discussion excerpts, there you will see the site cascade like a threaded river of news. Also check out Tailrank which has similar features.
The press room of the future
I forgot to share the future newsroom, where PodTech hosted BlogHaus at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas for 120+ hours straight at a suite in the Bellagio. Here we accepted bloggers, pocasters and videobloggers as the new journalists. It wasn’t exclusive however, we embraced mainstream journalists in addition. This video is a good sample of this event, the output, just staggering, see my clip report. What is PodTech? It’s a network of video bloggers, (some are former journalists) we’re an example of this new media generation, we break news, be interesting, or add value.
What’s my role with the evolving journalism industry? Honesty, I’ve not given it much though before meeting Tina (who’s with Stanford’s Injo program) who’s now on loan at Podtech this is an expanded scope in my focus. I see how it can directly apply to corporate web strategy as I will need to make sure that corporations stay relevant to adapt to the changing media landscape, and how employee/prospect/customer blogs can easily be aggregated for new stories in any industry.
I affectionately call Kara Andrade the sneezer, or the evangelist. Why? Because she got me to come, and now I’m sharing with you all on this blog, I’m sneezing to my community, and everyone I linked to, it spreads that fast. Kara gives me a tour of the facilities, there’s a pretty advanced multi media lab and video lab. Check out the video below for details.
Other resources
I’m part of the Media 2.0 Group, a collection of thought and practice leaders on the next generation of media
You can learn more about PodTech
My ustreaming gear
Forrester’s Technographics Report
PodTech and San Jose Mercury are working together
