Paywalls are medieval while social media is gunpowder

That's the view of Heidi Nordby Lunde, a columnist with the Norwegian media website Kampanje.com as published in The Guardian today by Roy Greenslade. Heidi writes, according to the translation courtesy of FollowTheMedia:

"Paywalls are reminiscent of the classic city walls, which were common from ancient times and into the Middle Ages. They are also about as innovative.

City walls were erected to protect the population against attacks from outside. Although the wall was effective against enemies for a while, it also proved to be an effective end to growth.

"In the end, there was a lack of opportunity for growth within the walls, combined with the military innovation that tore at them. When gunpowder came, high walls did not help.

"Today, one can see in many medieval towns the remnants of the old city gates or parts of walls, the old defences, overgrown by urban structures. New military strategies, opportunities for growth and alternative organisational forms won out."

 It is an interesting premise and so I commented on the story...

However paywall or not, there needs to be a sustainable business model. The Guardian has no walls but your online business model isn't sustainable yet and you have fantastic content and are completely committed to the platform. Pay Walls do generate income, however I accept they may not always be sustainable too. In my opinion we are still developing business models like the Freemium model to produce a viable business model for the online world where people have come to expect everything for free or at least free at the point of use. I do find it interesting that folk will sign away all kinds of rights to get a free service.

 What do you think?

"I am done with the Freemium Model" says Tyler Nichols

Tyler goes onto say....

"I am done with “free”. I have come to the realization that most people who want something for free will never, ever think of paying you, no matter how valuable they find your service. I found this cold hard fact out over this Christmas holiday with my free Letter From Santa site. The site uses a freemium model allowing people to create personalized printable santa letters for their children for free. In addition to the free version, I also offered a paid version that includes a higher resolution letter, a personalized envelope and door hanger for a nominal cost."

He goes on to explain that free customers where higher maintenance than the paying customers with free customers not reading the FAQ and then going on to mark his thank you letter as spam.

So let me get this straight, you just used my service to make something for your kid for free and then you nail me with a spam complaint?

Even though they had agreed in the privacy policy to the occasional email. Where as the paying customers didn't spam his letter and only 20 of them asked for help.

You can read his full post here and all the comments people have made. 

My only comment is that the whole point of the fermium model is that there has to be enough income from the paying customers to pay for the free service and still make a profit. So the business model has to meet this criteria or it isn't a viable business. Maybe he shouldn't have offered support to the free customers? Would that have made the difference?

Business to Business – a case study of how to use social media

This example of what using social media in a B2B content has been posted on the Socialnomics blog...

Some  B2B marketers are slow to invest in social media because they believe that the ROI should be based on an increase in sales. Wrong. The focus should be on engaging conversation with influencers who matter. It’s the first step toward social business.

A year ago at Cisco, we launched the  The Connected Life Exchange blog and invited industry experts to be the authors, along with only a few company employees. We do not blog about our company or products, but discuss the industry issues that are relevant to our customers: the telecom service provider. It has proven to be a powerful approach in engaging analysts, bloggers and customers in a welcomed way — through storytelling.

We just finished production of a web documentary series, “The Network Effect,” again with no mention of our company, but focusing on entertaining stories about the inventors who built the network and the impact it has on economic growth, particularly in developing counties.  Here’s  the first episode of six:

If you haven't heard of Socialnomics I would throughly recommend reading the book.

Following blogs is likely to form connections, it is largely a "listen" form of communication closer on Marshall McCullan's 'broadcast' culture that the 'digital' culture that we are moving into now, especially with social media. Social network platforms like Twitter, Facebook or Linked In are much more likely to create conversations and connections. From a business perspective these are much more likely to generate interest and new leads.



I will be posting a more detailed view having read the book, look out for it.

'One Stop Digital' kick start new 'Radio Wizards' partnership

Seven radio producers – all based in the north of England – have joined forces to launch a new co-operative venture – ‘Radio Wizards’. It’s equally remarkable that their aim now is to work together on every kind of sound production… except radio! “It’s taken over a year to get to this point,” says ‘wizard’ Mike Thornton, “but now we’ve got a viable business plan, we’ve launched our website and we’re already starting to attract commissions. As a facilities provider we decided to facilitate this partnership and set them up with a web site to help kickstart this venture while our new partners worked out their pitches for every kind of business from visitor attraction guided-tours to management ‘webinars’ delivering audio-guides and podcasts to the highest production standards."

Says wizard Peter Everett, a veteran Radio 4 producer (and former editor) “We have been competitors until now, but we have a lot of respect for each other and between us we have an unbeatable range of skills, contacts and experience. The spoken word is the most important medium of communication, but it has to be used to maximum effect, and we know how to do that.”

One of the Wizards’ first customers is Sir Richard FitzHerbert of Tissington Hall in Derbyshire, who will feature a ‘favourite objects’ guide to this Jacobean mansion on his website.

The team is keen to design tours using a range of state-of-the-art technology. ‘For every visitor attraction, coach trip or travelling holiday there’s a perfect way to deliver an audio-tour,’ says Peter Everett. ‘For example in Australia, car hire companies are now offering a system where each point on the journey triggers a GPS signal and plays the appropriate audio on your stereo. Another way to do it is through QR coding, which will link the visitor’s own phone to an Internet audio source. A third approach might be to use an individual MP3-player that is so cheap to supply that it can be branded with a logo and sold as a ‘buy-it, use-it, take-it-home’ souvenir.’

What brought the Wizards together was an initiative by Vision and Media North-West, who had spotted that there’s a much bigger market for audio production skills than just radio broadcasting. V+M hosted a series of seminars with successful entrepreneurs in the advertising, games, digital and PR industries. After a dozen sessions it was clear that the commercial sector currently finds it hard to achieve top-class audio production, so the Wizards agreed it was time to sell their radio skills in a whole new marketplace.

Janet Graves of Pennine Productions adds: “We’ve all done bits and pieces in the commercial sector – for example, I’ve made oral history projects, Peter has produced coach-tour commentaries, and Mike has done infotainment podcasts for the drug company Pfizer. Combining our efforts will let us offer a one-stop shop for any kind of commercial audio production.”

Monetising Digital Platforms & Rights

I went to an excellent 1/2 day session on Monetising Digital Platforms & Rights on Wednesday at Vision & Media. The day was led by two top flight guys in this sector, Justin Judd - director of i-Rights Ltd and formerly ran Granada TV's digital division and Peter Cowley from Spirit Digital Media, who I heard at the Nations & Regions Media conference earlier this year.

These are some notes of things discussed that appealed to me. But it is by no means an accurate record of everything that was discussed!

I Pay, You Pay, Some else Pays
We looked at these 3 business models.
The I Pay obviously isn't a viable long term business model as putting your own money into a business for ever will end up in certain failure, but it may be necessary to get a business going.
You Pay - is where the consumer pays you for a product or service, in this context subscription models are a good example.
Someone else Pays - this is usually some form of sponsorship or advertising funded model which usually means the product or servie is free at the point of use.

The best model is probably the I Pay turning into You Pay. The problem with the Someone else Pays is that to get advertising funding you need proven scale before advertisers will support your product and as a new start up proven scale is hard to come by!

Scarcity is important
You can't make money from anything that is easily available. The music industry has learnt this the hard way and now puts the product out  but makes money from the live experience where they can control the scarcity factor. The news industry is in the process of learning this. A number of newspapers have put most of their content behind a pay wall. The FT may be able to make it stick because they have a niche market in financial related news, but The Times is going to find it harder. The Guardian is producing excellent free content but it still isn't clear how they will make money. The Daily Mail is making a go of the Someone else Pays model by producing news people want,  like celebrity news and gossip, which drives traffic to their site and they get a income form the advertising they can sell on their site because they have 'proven scale'. So simply put don't try and monetise a product which isn't scarce.

You need to understand the digital world.
This includes the scarcity issue because it is largely the digital world that has made things like music and news freely available but also the digital world has produced new routes to the market place. We were given the example of John Locke who was able to publish his book direct to the market without a conventional publisher by producing a digital version of his book using Amazon's Kindle platform and Amazon's site. He sold 1 million copies in 5 months priced at 99 cents, even based on the Amazon business model he still cleared just over 1/3 million dollars, he now has many more titles and has even written a book on how he did it, but remember no publisher, no marketing, but he will have got a major free publicity push from being an early adopter which is another thing you need to understand about the digital world. Being an early adopter brings you scarcity.


So if you can bypass the big guys and get your product or service direct to market and avoid the middle men you can make a good return. Now harness some key middle guys like Amazon or Apple and you can really make some money but you still need a good product!

Strictly Sexual was another example. It was a movie made for $100,000 and distributed through Hulu in the US, so no DVD or broadcast release, direct on line and then have cleared $200,000 already. But again it had to be a good product, with a good story, clever plot and title angle etc and despite the title isn't a porn movie. I haven't seen it because unfortunately Hulu is only available in the US . It is geo-blocked elsewhere just as our iPlayer service is blocked outside the UK.

Facebook Games
Games on Facebook is another example of making money in the digital world and often use the Freemium model. The game is free to download and use, but the free version runs slowly. So you can buy add ons that make the game run  faster and also buy add ons that help you play it. A typical example was one of the more popular games which has been downloaded 7.5 million time. If only 1% buy anything, a typical pickup ratio fror the freemium model, then then 750,000 people pay $5 brings you in a lot of money, to carry on supporting that 99% of your market doesn't pay for. Again it is much easier for the early adopters to make money.

Apps
We were shown some examples of the iTunes App chart and it was interesting to note that there were a number of audio related Apps doing very well in the chart, like Keith Lemon's Mouthboard and also an app called Fonejacker which is an app based on the radio spoof prank phone call model, but people are paying good money to listen to prank phone calls.

The ABCD of media revenue options
A for Advertising - a 'some else pays' model
B for Broadcasting revenues - the traditional broadcaster conmmisions and pays for you to produce a product but you probably won't retain all the rights to. Again 'some one else pays' either through the license fee or advertising revenue.
C for Consumer - this is the 'you pay' model, and includes services that are funded using the subscription model like Sky. One interesting fact is that in the TV world the value of Subscription TV worldwide far out values the value of advert funded TV. So the 'you pay' model is the way to go.
D for Data - this is becoming a fourth business model where you can provide a product free at the point of use but the data you collect has value which you can monetise. The new buzz phrase is 'Data is the new Oil'. This can include data like email addresses, Facebook likes and Twitter followers.

It was interesting that in the discussion of projects people were looking at, Justin & Peter were strongly recommending that a Mountain Sports Film Festival didn't set up and expensive web site to promote and sell the films that were presented at the festival. They were suggesting they use the data to make money.

Thoughts after attending Media & Digital Futures workshop at Salford University

I have just taken part in a very interesting, simulating and thought provoking workshop where as industry representatives we were asked to work through and comment on two scenarios as to how the Manchester city region might look in 2017. One had a positive slant and the other a more negative one. I was in one of two groups looking at the more negative scenario which was called the 'noise' scenario.

In a nutshell this scenario says that the UK will still be in recession, technology has advanced but businesses are struggling to make good use of it. The lack of variety of industries and decline of manufacturing has made the region unsustainable with the emphasis being on service and knowledge based.  It is difficult to generate revenue on line as consumers expect it to be free and although there are a large number of digital startups the business models are generally unsustainable.  There is a skills gap with the education system not geared up to produce students with the skills needed and so young people are not making the transition from education to employment. Digital technologies have disrupted rather than helped our everyday lives and people have become overwhelmed by the amount of information, communication and 'noise' coming at them. On top of that the city's digital infrastructure cannot handle the demand with rural areas only having limited access. Finally the region is over regulated, public transport is unreliable and expensive and although everyone is talking about the problems there are no radical strategies being put forward.

I have to say this scenario is not to far from where I feel we are now.

So to start with we were asked as a group to come up with 5 key points from the scenario to start the discussion. I came up with 4 which were..

1. There is no space for the little guy.
2. Education is not delivering equipped young people.
3. 'Free' is stifling innovation as it hard to produce a return on investment. Which is why we no longer make anything.
4. Both the transport and digital infrastructure are failing.

Others thoughts included a negative impact on families and society. We discussed how the use of computers smart phones and other devices has continued the impact on family cohesion, that eating in front of the TV, had started. Family members occupying the same space but back to back looking at screens rather than face to face round the dinner table. Another point was the lack of a 'ladder' structure where larger companies support and provide small businesses with work and then we started to explore more sustainable business models. The current funding cuts are already causing the social businesses to revisit their mix of commissions to social work proving free or subsidised services, with the need to make  a profit to replace the grant funding to support the social work.

Next we looked at placing these issues, as well as a number from a previous group, onto a matrix made up of more or less likely to happen against being harder or easier to resolve. These other issues generated some debate including one about people not able to understand the technology they were using which got us into 'digital natives' versus 'analogue grans'.

Then we looked at how some of the 'easier' & 'likely' issues might be resolved with the suggestion that the tech one would get resolved without too much intervention because more and more of the population will be digital natives. I made the point that although more and more people have access to the technology they don't necessarily have the skills to use them creatively.  However it was interesting to note that most of the points we placed in the 'likely' and 'hard' quadrant of the matrix and we didn't really have an opportunity to discuss how some of those could be resolved other than a consensus that education is key. One comment was our education system is still based on victorian principles and when you consider Carole Vorderman's report on Maths recently and the need for two different maths qualifications,  if you extend that out to all the other subjects we have a major issue with not preparing our young people for a life in a 'post modern' society, our education system at best is still turning out 'moderns'. With my apprenticeship assessors hat on I am only too aware that most of the graduates from the mountain of 'medja' degrees aren't ready to work in our industry, their degrees haven't given them the skills to work as new entrants but has generated the expectation that they can come straight in as directors or producers. So the industry has set up an apprenticeship scheme to take on 16 to 22 year old and give the training and experience to become valuable team players in the industry.

I then brought up the whole collaboration issue and coined the phrase 'collaborate or die". One of the repeating threads in all my research into how our industry is changing is the mantra of 'you must collaborate'. Unfortunately although we encourage our children to collaborate at an early age, once they hit primary school the concept of collaboration is pushed out and so we now have several generations that just aren't interested in collaborating on creative or business projects which is a real shame.

Then we were given the opportunity to identify 5 issues for our own business, again I came up with 4...

1. 'Free' on the internet makes developing viable business models more challenging!
2. How do I get above the 'noise'?
3. I need to create links with other businesses and collaborate.
4. The challenge is to persuade potential clients to buy my skills, as they feel more and more that they can do it themselves or they just don't value them. Just look at most corporate videos, the sound is rubbish!

Finally we all came back together and we shared the findings of all 4 groups and although we had been looking at two different scenarios the findings were remarkably similar.  One comment that struck me was we live in a 'greed economy' where the aim is to make as much money as possible so I can have the latest this that or the other, instead of the motivation being, doing what is best for the community whilst making enough money to be OK with my lot, going from a 'me based culture to an 'us' based one. In the light of the recent riots etc this really hit home with me.

I found the whole morning a very enlightening experience and I look forward to the outcomes of this research and hope that Salford University can take it further.

BBC online developments - new radio player?

The BBC made an announcement about plans to improve the radio player part of their site but it got some what lost in the jobs cuts story. Today they have posted more details of this development on one of their blogs.

Daniel Danker is General Manager, Programmes and On Demand, BBC Future Media & Technology and he writes...

Yesterday we announced the next phase of Putting Quality First. As part of that announcement, we made the first mention of our upcoming 'Radio and Music product', which created a bit of confusion about our plans for online radio: I hope this post explains in a little more detail.

Yes, we do plan to build a new product for radio but this isn't to cut corners, or downplay what we do for radio online - as with everything we announced yesterday it's because we want to make the service better, not worse. In the case of radio and music, we think this means giving radio its own home.
Radio first became part of BBC iPlayer in 2008 because the BBC iPlayer brand was growing, so it made it easier for audiences, and there were benefits from bringing TV and radio closer together. It's not the only way of listening to BBC Radio online and you can access podcasts through the separate podcast website and also stream live through the network sites. We think this can be made simpler.

The majority of radio listening comes through the radio station web sites rather than iPlayer. At its heart, iPlayer is a product built for TV and audiences have different needs from TV and radio on the web. For instance, in BBC iPlayer nearly 90% of TV requests are for catch-up, whereas radio requests are around 70% live. Hence our decision to build a new product for radio and music that builds in podcasts and plays to the strengths of live radio.

The teams in Audio and Music and Future Media are working together to shape the product. We've not yet fully decided what it will look like, but broadly speaking, here's what we want the product to do:

• Better bring out the personality of the networks, presenters and DJs
• Rich pages for our flagship programmes (e.g. The Today Programme, The Archers)
• Integrate music events
• Be highly personalised and available on lots of internet-connected devices (people want radio on the move)
• Be highly social; pulling in the buzz around live radio
• Become a home for podcasts (both 'catch-up' and 'archive' content), as well as improve the way we offer clips
• Make better use of technology to improve exploration, discovery, sharing, and listening
• Create a new design especially for radio and music
• Link up closely with the TV & iPlayer product (but not duplicate it), sharing links

Also, as we said yesterday, there are things it won't do. It won't offer track-by track streaming or aggregate third party stations, which brings me onto Radioplayer.
Though the BBC have been the technical architects in this project, it's a partnership. With our partners Global, GMG Radio, Absolute and the RadioCentre we want to bring all UK radio together in one place, and any Ofcom-licensed station can be involved. With listeners able to search by genre, presenter, programme and locality, audiences can discover new programmes and stations, and make use of other features. This has been running in beta for a while now, is looking great, and we expect it to launch very soon. Though we've not yet worked the details through, we think both projects add up to a vastly improved online radio experience for audiences and hope to share more details soon.

BBC On line cuts jobs and sites

Jemima Kiss from The Guardian has reported that the BBC plan to cut 360 jobs from BBC On Line.

Management said the job cuts break down across the corporation and only a small number relate to currently vacant positions. Of 360 posts to be cut, 120 are from Future Media & Technology, up to 90 from BBC Vision, up to 39 from Audio & Music, 17 from Children's, 24 from Sport and 70 in journalism from national news and non-news posts on regional news sites.  The corporation also outlined five editorial priorities for BBC Online and clarified its remit. The BBC aims to meet all these objectives, and make 360 posts redundant, by 2013. The restructured BBC Online department will consist of 10 products including News, iPlayer, CBeebies and Search. Editorial will be refined, with fewer News blogs, and local sites will be stripped of non-news content.

In another Guardian article they break down the changes in more detail...

• The closure of half of the 400 top-level domains (with 180 closing ahead of schedule later this year)
• The replacement of the majority of programme websites with automated content
• The automation of bespoke digital radio sites 1Xtra, 5 Live Sports Extra, 6 Music and Radio 7
• The closure of RAW, Blast, Switch, Video Nation and the disposal of h2g2
• The removal of non-News features content from Local sites
• A substantial reduction in show business news on the News website
• Fewer News blogs, with more focus on the updates from leading editors and correspondents
• A reduction in the overall amount of Sports news and live sport
• Standalone forums, communities and message boards and blogs to be reduced and replaced with integrated social tools
• The closure of the 606 community site and the closure of the BBC iPlayer message board

BBC Online will not:
• Launch its own social network
• Offer specialist news content for specialist audiences
• Publish local listings
• Develop encyclopaedic propositions in Knowledge
• Provide continuing professional development materials for teachers or a managed learning environment for schools
• Become a video-on-demand aggregator in BBC iPlayer, although it will link to other on-demand providers
• Produce online-only music sessions
• Offer track-by-track music streaming
• Invest in exclusive online sports rights

The BBC Online service licence budget will be reduced by £34m from £137m today to £103m by 2013/14.

Clearly this has as much to do with pressure being bought to bear on the BBC to reduce the size of its we site so as not to compete as much with commercial rivals, as it does with the need for the BBC to reduce its costs as a result of the recent license fee settlement.

How-Do has also reported this story and asked about the impact of these cuts on Media City...

a division-wide reduction of staff and budgets by 25% is expected to be felt as much in Salford as it will be in London. At the time of writing the BBC had been unable to provide How-Do with tailored information as to the regional ramifications of the cuts.

BECTU have reacted swiftly saying they will be on hand to support staff with on line changes.

"Staff in BBC Online need to join BECTU in large numbers to demonstrate just how serious they are about representation during the talks announced today,” said supervisory official, Helen Ryan.
The top line headcount reduction of 360 posts actually impacts on approximately 200 staff given a number of unfilled vacancies and the deployment of short term and contract staff. “Whilst we expect the BBC to respond positively to our concerns that absolutely every effort should be made to avoid compulsory redundancies, the fact that several departments are affected, and to different degrees, means that staff will need to work with their union to get the best outcomes from this reorganisation,” Helen Ryan concluded.

It is good to see the union on the case and lets hope they are able to help staff through this difficult transition.

Thoughts on Socialnomics by Erik Qualman

Having finished reading Socialnomics an excellent updated book on the economics of social media, here are some thoughts that have been simulated by my reading this book.

Listen or connect?
Following blogs is likely to form connections, it is largely a "listen" form of communication closer on Marshall McCullan's 'broadcast' culture that the 'digital' culture that we are moving into now, especially with social media. Social network platforms like Twitter, Facebook or Linked In are much more likely to create conversations and connections. From a business perspective these are much more likely to generate interest and new leads.

Marketing myself
When it comes to marketing myself how should I use social media? Its all very well for Qualman to show how large companies like Starbucks can tweet about a free coffee and afford to give loads of small value items away, but I have finite resources, especially time which is expensive to give away. I am already doing this with my Pro Tools for Media blog and my Twitter profile @MikeProTools and these benefit other Pro Tools users and help to keep my profile up in the Pro Tools world but how much new business will come from this work? On page 130 Qualman says...

Often our customers will market the product better than we can". In a social media world this can be really powerful. 

We have always had personal recommendation but it has always been a one to one word of mouth. How we have what Qualman describes as a 'world of mouth', or a 'many to many' digital culture to use McCullan speak, our clients can tell the world how good we are and it will have much more respect than saying it ourselves. So we need to encourage our clients to share their experiences of our services. But we have to make sure that we maintain the correct balance in our conversations so that the marketing doesn't stand out as 'selling'.

Only one of me
Qualman dedicates chapter 6 "Death of Social Schizophrenia" to the need for everyone to have one persona or identity in this connected world. Where as before we could have a work, social, and family peronas and maintain them because we could keep each segment of our lives separate. Now in a connected world we can't get away with it. Our work colleagues see what we are doing at home, our friends see what we do at work and so on. Currently I have two blogs, a personal one here and my Pro Tools blog and similarly I have two Twitter accounts. Should they be one? In this case I believe not as the Pro Tools blog and @MikeProTools Twitter account are very niche. I am sure most of the folk following my @Sound_Mike twitter feed and my personal blog wouldn't want to hear about the inner workings of how to use Avid Pro Tools in a media context. However I was posting more personal stuff as well as details of programmes I have been involved in on my @MikeProTools twitter account and Pro Tools for Media blog, but as a result of reading Socialnomics I have stopped that now and will keep these for purely Pro Tools matters.

Play to your strengths
On page 135 Qualman says...

Being well rounded as a company, or an individual is less beneficial. Its more productive to play to your core strength. This differentiates you from the competition. You need to stand out in order to be outstanding.

He then goes onto to refer to a book called Strengths Finder Now, Discover Your Strengths: How to Develop Your Talents and Those of the People You Manage which I have read and been through the programme to identify my strengths a while a go. If you haven't done it, I can strongly recommend this programme above other similar ones. A number of times I have considered some possible diversification routes, like becoming a video editor and rejected them. I am an audio editor and producer, sound is what I do, so I am much better to play to my strengths than invest a lot of time and money trying to improve weak spots, only to end up making them less weak.

Embed the sponspor
Qualman does an in depth study of an American series called Football Fantasy and how the presenters decided to set up a podcast in their own time. One of the reasons they did this is there were TV presenters one day a week as it was a weekly show, where as they have made the podcast a daily show and so are able to react to changing stories and audience responses so much quicker. Also because it was a podcast they didn't stick to a standard programme slot. They made the podcast as long as it needed to be to cover the content that day, rather than make the content fit the slot. They also developed techniques for embedding the sponsor and the sponsors content into the programme. They didn't use standard ad format straps and spots. Rather they worked the sponsors message into the programme content which provided variety so they weren't using the same spot every time. Qualman says on page 142...

Consumers today in particular Millennial's and Generation Zer's don't want adverts to shout; they'd rather have conversations and ongoing relationships with companies. 

If the ads top and tail a podcast they can easily be stripped off when the content is spread virally. However if the sponsorship references are embedded in the programme and become an integral part of it, then they travel virally too!

On page 148, Qualman talks about CNN anchor Rick Sanchez who started tweeting and realised that it was more important to talk less about himself and more about the interviewees. On page 175 Qualman outlines how social media gives you so much more data about your audience and their habits. We need to use that data to determine our marketing decisions, 'The audience has spoken'. Remember if we create conversations, that will lead to a trusting relationship which is so much more valuable. So shouldn't PR folk be asking what we can do to create these conversations.

With our experience surely we can help clients develop these conversations, also look at the complete web presence. On page 221 Qualman outlines the Skittles experiment with their web site in 2009. They turned their static web site into a simple landing page with some links took you off their site to social media.

Connect = Skittles Facebook page
Video = Skittles YouTube channel
Photos = Skittles Flickr account
Info = Skittles Wikipedia entry
News = Skittles blog.

Skittles were acting as an integration point or hub to great authentic content that existed elsewhere about them.

This shows that we need to be prepared to experiment and that will mean we fail sometimes but Qualman has a phrase he repeats through the book about failing - Fail forward, fail fast, fail better.

What next?
These are some random thoughts from things that caught my attention as I read through this book. It certainly has made me think about social media and its growing power. One of the conclusions Qualman also makes at the end of chapter 8 is that

The younger generation's interpersonal communications skills are starting to suffer as a result of over-dependence on non-verbal and non face to face interactions. 

So the next book I want to look at, which has just been Radio 4's book of the Week, follows on from this observation and is called "The Winter of Our Disconnect" by Susan Maushart. She writes...

The Winter Of Our Disconnect started out as a kind of purge. It ended up as so much more. Long story short: our digital detox messed with our heads, our hearts and our homework. It changed the way we ate and the way we slept, the way we "friended", fought, planned and played. It altered the very taste and texture of our family life. Hell, it even altered the mouth-feel.

In the end, our family's self-imposed exile from the Information Age changed our lives indelibly - and infinitely for the better.

At the simplest level, The Winter Of Our Disconnect is the story of how one highly idiosyncratic family survived six months of wandering through the desert, digitally speaking, and the lessons we learned about ourselves and our technology along the way. At the same time, our story is a channel to a wider view into the impact of new media on the lives of families, into the very heart of the meaning of home.

With two daughters as well as my wife and myself, very much 'connected' I look forward to reading this book.

AudioBoo's Mark Rock on 2010 and predictions for 2011

Jemima Kiss has written an article in The Guardian on what Mark Rock head of AudioBoo has to say on 2010 and what will happen in 2011....

What do we have to look forward to in 2011? The past twelve months have been a defining period for the digital industries, says Audioboo chief executive Mark Rock, but there's plenty to come next year as, he predicts, Mark Thompson will stand down and Flickr will be sold.

Here are what appealed to me from what Mark had to say....

What will 2010 be remembered for?
Overall, 2010 was a defining year for so many things - digital, politics, data, mobile. Wikileaks cracked open what hopes to be a better discussion around open data next year and the role of digital in that.
Mobile is (finally) huge thanks to Apple and Google and not the telcos. The BBC was forced to face up to the fact that it can no longer operate like an extension of the civil service and expect us to pay for its inefficiencies.
The government seems to think the digerati in Shoreditch will happily move to Stratford (no). DAB radio is still the floppy disk equivalent of the internet."

What was your best and worst moment?
The best was the surprise at personally ranking so highly in the top 100 tech people in the UK. At least my dad was impressed. The worst?
Worst work moment? The BBC taking 14 months to finally state officially they were too busy to work constructively with us on a professional basis because they were too busy. We're used loads by individual reporters and departments there but their audio is not allowed onto the BBC site. Bizarre."

What's your hot tip for 2011?
Mobile, mobile, mobile. Apps, apple, android, advertising, tablets and the mobile internet.
Traditional TV set top box manufacturers will move to Android as an OS for increased user interaction and lower development costs.
Mark Thompson will gracefully stand down from the BBC. Microsoft will release a poor cousin to the iPad.
Audioboo raising some more cash to go truly global.
Android Marketplace getting less techy and more consumer friendly.
Flickr being sold to a company that actually cares about it. 

You can read the full article at The Guardian.

Thoughts on 'Free' by Chris Anderson

I have read this book as part of my research for the programme I am taking part in, called Radio Revisited. You can read some more about the reasons for this and what Radio Revisited aims to do on the Vision and Media blog.

There is no doubt that the work is changing and the reduction of digital storage and delivery to an almost un-metered price means a change in what can be charged for and what will become 'free'. Chris Anderson in his previous book The Long Tail showed how cheaper and cheaper digital storage means digital stores can hold a huge inventory and still make money from selling just a couple of units from their many lines.

Atoms v bits
Now in Free, Chris compares anything that is made of 'atoms' as something that has value and can be traded for real money and anything that is made up of 'bits' is perceived as not worth spending money on.  But my problem is that anything I make, as a sound designer, is in 'bits' and so how do I make a living in this 'atoms v bits' world? What I have is intellectual property (IP). So my challenge is to monetize my IP and how to go about making money around 'free'?

Anderson outlines that to compete with 'free' you have to produce something better, or at least different from the 'free' alternatives and quotes examples like people passing the free office coffee machine to go to Starbucks to buy a coffee there. Or in the digital world he compares Microsoft Office with the open source 'office' equivalents, where if you want a relatively reliable product with customer service you buy Microsoft. If you want a 'free' product and can put up with it not being as reliable and can spend the time hunting on the net for the fix, then the open source option offers a low cost solution. Also if what you are doing is being replaced by software and/or 'on line', like travel agents, real estate agents, or stockbrokers then you need to move upstream to use your IP to resolve the more complex problems which people will still pay for.

Journalism
The newspaper industry is being decimated in this 'information free' world. So journalists need to adapt to survive. The top tier newspapers will survive but most journalists aren't employed by them. They work in the 101 magazines and trade journals, local papers etc. The journalists that are prepared to adapt will need to move upstream and become editors and gatekeepers of the information overloaded world of the internet. They also need to become coaches and editors to the growing amateur journalists, bloggers etc.

So it is looking as if the phrase 'time is money' is looking less and less secure....

If you are interested in buying the book then please consider using the links below.

Who is going beyond the Murdoch paywall 3 months in

I posted about this at the start back in July here and here. Now Peter Preston has written in today's Observer an article about numbers and types of people venturing behind The Times paywall in the first 3 months.

Fleet Street is gagging to discover whether Mr M has shot himself in the foot. Interim answer, from the heavyweight Nielsen company: foot still attached to leg. They reckon that total unique monthly UK visitors to the Times site went down from 3,096,000 to 1,782,000 when the wall went up, and that only 362,000 – about 20% – ventured on to pages beyond the wall. You can weave webs of relative triumph or disaster from all this. The good news for News International is that those who vaulted the wall were a bit older, richer and more dedicated to scanning the site carefully. They are the "engaged readers" advertisers admire – as opposed to the click-by-night trade who never stop to buy anything. The bad news is that a few hundred thousand unique visitors sounds pretty puny compared with the 20 million or so the Times was claiming before the wall went up. If you want a guess in the fog, 362,000 "engaged" UK readers was broadly what the Mail (a believer in a web without walls) found a year or so ago when it took a 30m unique visitor monthly total and whittled away overseas callers and click-by-nighters. By those lights, the Times's great wall isn't a flop, nor yet a necessarily a glowing path to future riches. But there's something worthwhile left to work with, so start counting the ads.

Back in July I compared the two models, the paywall from The Times and the traffic driven site from The Mail. Well 3 months on into the Murdoch paywall and it seems that both models are producing about the same number of engaged users.

Socialnomics refresh their excellent Social Media Revolution video

Social Media Revolution 2 is a refresh of the original video with new and updated social media & mobile statistics that are hard to ignore and is based on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman.

It’s amazing how fast the world of social media moves!  As many of the statistics from the original Social Media video have changed, I took a moment to refresh the video with a few new statistics and graphics.  Thanks to all of you for your support in making the first Social Media Revolution and Social Media ROI videos such a huge success and I hope that you enjoy this refresh!
Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
2. 96% of them have joined a social network
3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
4. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
5. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
6. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…
7. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
8. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
9. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”
10. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
11. Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China
12. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
14. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
15. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
16. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
17. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
18. Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
19. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
20. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
21. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
22. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
23. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
24. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
25. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $1,712.32 per hour
26. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
27. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
28. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
29. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
30. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
31. Only 14% trust advertisements
32. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
33. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
34. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
35. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
36. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
37. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
38. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
39. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
40. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
41. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
42. Bonus: comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network

Put broadband rollout in the hands of the BBC

Tony Ballard, Partner with law firm Harbottle & Lewis LLP has been talking about idea of getting the BBC to roll out the the government's planned 2Mb/s universal broadband service and so bypass the various quangos being set up to do this.  He has spoken on the Broadcast magazine's blog but I suspect unless you have a subscription you won't be able to read it.

Public money, or at least the BBC’s underspend on its provision for digital switchover, is to be made available through Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK), a creature of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, to procure the building of the necessary facilities. Why not put this in the hands of the BBC instead? ..... And since the BBC is going to be obliged to pay for it anyway out of the switchover underspend, why not put it on the BBC instead of a new quango?  The framework is already there – not just in the principle of universality but also in the BBC’s new Charter commitment to help to deliver the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services in promoting its other services..... It would avoid what might be an unfortunate precedent in the Government taking back some part of the licence fee.  It would avoid an unnecessary quango and associated costs.  It would increase the reach of its online services.  And the internet being a truly open platform (since all that it would be financing would be the transport layer of the local access networks), it would enable basic broadband access in the not-spots and fulfil the USC.

 However if you can't get to this, he has said very similar things in Computer Weekly recently too.

I love the comment from the Computer Weekly article from Lindsey Annison...

No, no, no, this will never work. It's joined up thinking for crying out loud and that is just not permissible within BIS, etc. And anyway, the USC doesn't have to be delivered until 2015 as of today (Jeremy Hunt's speech at BDUK event-in-a-small-room), so by the time we get close to that most people who know that they cannot run their businesses or homes on less than 100Mbps will have left the rural areas for a) the cities b) other countries. I spoke at the Digital Media Conference in Oxford a few years ago on a panel about the future use of the digital spectrum post-switchover. I pushed for it to be used for broadband, against the mobile operators, HDTV guys etc, and cited the existence of BBC towers etc to make the job even easier in remote places. What you are saying is an extension of that idea - spectrum + money + BBC and we have **a workable plan.** There's no chance then, is there? ;o)

 

More on social media trends - is blogging the future for publishing?

Jeff Bullas has posted this question on his blog. He writes....

Blogging is publishing, it is content, and that can be a video, images, text or all of these. Blogging is about niches and  allows those that are passionate about their interests to start publishing and sharing online and through promotion drive traffic, eyeballs and then revenue.

Sure, the big blogs he refers to are going to be succesful like  The Huffington Post with 37.6 Million hits for the month of March, 2010. Other big sites are

• Mashable – 5.16 Million views (Technology Blog)
• Nymag.com -  3.4 million views (Entertainment Blog)
• BoingBoing.com – 3.1 Million views (Cultural curiosities and interesting technologies Blog)
• Businessinsider.com – 2.8 Million views (Business Blog)
• Inhabitat.com – 656,000 views (Environmental Blog)

 for the same period. But it is some of the comments that are almost more interesting than the post itself like this from Jean Sarauer...

I definitely think blogging is the future of publishing. As a writer, I’m seeing print markets shrink and fold all the time now, and some excellent writers are skipping that whole route and going straight into blogging. And why not? No editor to cramp your style, immediate publication, direct interaction with readers, and the ability to create your own products. I don’t see this going away anytime soon.

and then this from Crosbie Fitch

Yup, blogging is the future. It’s journalists publishing their intellectual work directly to their readers – missing out the publisher, no longer needing to charge the reader for printing, distribution, retail.

But my question is in all this freeing up how does the writer get paid? How are they going to monetise their blogs to get a reasonable income?

Is Google about to sell us a Newspass?

Roy Greenslade in The Guardian today has reported a story about Google potentially providing a 'one click' payment system for content....

For their part, publishers will be able to designate what type of payment they want to accept, including subscriptions and micropayments. People who find content from participating publishers in Google search will see a paywall icon next to that content and be able to purchase access directly from there by using Google's Checkout platform.

Read the full article here on The Guardian's web site

In the light of various business models that are coming to the fore something like this, that makes it easy to buy the bits of content as you need it,rather than having to take out a raft of subscriptions is a good idea, because for paid content to work it has to be this kind of model or for it to be included in our mobile device package.