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?

A personal view of Socialnomics by Erik Qualman

Following on from by previous post about a social media and connectedness case study from the Socialnomics web site, here are my thoughts having read 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. 

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 smaller companies and charities have finite resources, especially time which is expensive to give away.

Qualman says on page 133 "Middlemen are becoming less important than they have been in the past, and the rise in power is shifting rapidly to the social graph". With peer review and recommendation together with the trust of people in your network there will be less need of middlemen. Or to putting it subtly, not, bypass the middleman and go to the horses mouth?

On page 130 he 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'.

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. 

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 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. I need to balance my posts and tweets about my work with other material so I don't just end up shouting about myself.

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.

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.”

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.

Digital Detox and the effects of 24-7 connectedness

Jemima Kiss has written an interesting article in The Observer about her family's weekend digital detox by visiting a farm for the weekend. She starts by asking....

Twitter, Facebook, emails, and voicemail – we are overwhelmed by digital data, is it time to rebel against information overload?

We were brushing through wet grass in the early morning when we saw it – a flash of white drifting behind a small patch of trees, backlit by the sun. Crouching down next to my small son, we watched the unmistakable shape of a barn owl until he disappeared into the wood. The look on my son's face was part of a brief moment of magic, the kind of memory that we live for.  Ordinarily, my next thought would have been to pull out my phone and take a photo, send a tweet or record a video. Connecting is something I do unconsciously now. Tweeting is like breathing and photos and video have documented nearly every day of my 21-month-old son's life. The meaningful merged with the mundane, all dutifully and habitually recorded – my enjoyment split between that technological impulse and the more delicate human need to be in the moment. This is how we live.

She goes on to observe the effect the weekend had on her partner Will before going on to explain about some recent research...

The hustle we develop as we struggle to keep up with the pace of digital information has produced a restless, anxious way of engaging with the world. Desperate for efficiency, this seeps into our physical lives; I feel compelled to tidy while on the phone, to fold the washing while brushing my teeth. No single task has my undivided attention. A study by the University of California, San Francisco, last week concluded that constant multi-tasking gradually erodes short-term memory. And interruptions are a massive problem, taking anything up to 20 times the length of the interruption to recover. For those of us compelled to check email every few minutes, that revelation explains where the day goes.

This is concerning stuff because in this world where we are expected to multi-task, even us men, it shows that our productivity can be seriously effected. I have also recently finished reading The Winter of Our Disconnect by Susan Maushart which took the digital detox onto another planet by removing all connected technology including iPods for 6 months. I can throughly recommend reading the book especially if you have children as it shows just how ingrained our connectivity has become in our lives. Susan recounted not only the experiences of her and her family but also explores the relevant studies and she too debunks the multi-tasking benefits of the younger generation as a myth. Jemima goes on in here Observer article...

The author, former Washington Post journalist William Powers, is, like me, a true believer in the power and potential of digital technologies, but concludes that we need a little discipline to restore control over our unsettling, hyper-connected lives. [He] offers practical solutions, including advocating the use of paper as a more efficient way of organising our thoughts. The theory of "embodied interaction" asserts that physical objects free our minds to think because our hands and fingers can do much of the work, unlike screens where our brains are constantly in demand.

We try very hard to keep a digital Sabbath on Saturdays and do things as a family, and find it hard and liberating at the same time. When we are connected we tend to turn outwards, take a look at any screen activity, you are all looking at a screen, not each other, and if it is multiple screens then you will often end up with your backs to each other or at least only see the tops of heads if the device is a portable one. Once the computers are off and the phones put away then it is possible to have shared time together.

Under 25’s swap remote controls for iPhones as ‘Social TV’ trend takes over

Digital Clarity, a specialist Digital Marketing Agency have released the result of a survey they undertook to explore social media habits wjhich included the figure that 72% comment on TV programmes via social networks as they watch them

How young people watch television is rapidly changing according to a new study of UK mobile internet users below the age of 25. 80% of those surveyed use a mobile device to communicate with friends while watching TV with 72% using Twitter, Facebook or mobile applications to actively comment on shows as they are watching them. These are the findings of a study conducted by Digital Clarity, a specialist digital marketing agency which polled over 1300 people under 25 from a cross section of the UK. The trend known as ‘Social TV’ is popular with young people as it allows them to instantly comment on their favourite shows to friends in different locations via the web or mobile phone. In the US, a joint Nielsen and Yahoo study late last year found that the trend is already well established with over 86% of mobile internet users choosing to communicate with each other in real-time during broadcasts. Now ‘second screening’ as it is referred to in the States has become common place in the UK too. Rather than social networks and television competing for attention it seems that young people are happy to embrace both and use one to enhance their enjoyment of the other. The UK study found that 34% described the trend as ‘fun’, 32% said it made television ‘more interesting’ with 42% mentioning the ‘community’ aspect of ‘Social TV’.
One survey respondent, Ashleigh Foulser, 18 a student in Bournemouth said, “I love being able to keep in touch with my mates while I’m at college. They are in different towns to me but it’s like having them round to watch TV. We share a lot of jokes and if I comment on something funny or stupid I get replies almost immediately.” The survey discovered that the most common way to communicate is to use Twitter (72%) Facebook was next popular (56%) and mobile applications (34%). 62% of Social TV users like a combination of all three. Certain shows such as X-Factor, Skins, Glee, as well as soaps Coronation Street and Eastenders are particularly popular in the UK generating very high Twitter traffic and Facebook messages as they are broadcast. Reggie James, founder of Digital Clarity explains, “Up until 12 months ago, TV was struggling to reach the younger market as more and more channels were becoming available. Social TV has changed this completely by turning programmes into online events where you have to watch them as they happen”. The significance of ‘Social TV’ is not lost on the television networks who have found themselves with whole new marketplace and a different pitch for advertisers. Last month, a US HBO channel reran the Howard Stern film ‘Private Parts’. Stern was watching simultaneously and started add a live commentary to the action resulting in sky high ratings far higher than could have been forecast breathing new life into a 14 year old movie.
“The audience have already taken their seats and are ready to join the conversation”, concludes James, “it’s now up to the TV companies to tap into this huge and lucrative market.”

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.

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.

When is the best time to post on social media?

Erik Qualman at the Socialnomics blog has posted this video from @equalman about the best times to post content on social media and the graveyard slots to avoid.

General guidelines:

• Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are your best days
• Saturday is the worst day
• Holidays are slow traffic days (except commerce sites)
• 10 am – 11:30 am and 1 – 3:30 pm are great times to post
• Stagger posts based on time zones

A recent study by Virtue specific to Facebook also shows that Social Media may follow similar patterns to the rest of the traditional Web.

• The three biggest usage spikes tend to occur on weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET.
• The biggest spike occurs at 3:00 p.m. ET on weekdays.
• Weekday usage is pretty steady, however Wednesday at 3:00 pm ET is consistently the busiest period.

Fans are less active on Sunday compared to all other days of the week; most sites slowest traffic day is Saturday, followed by Sunday. This is interesting since so many schools and companies block Facebook from 9 – 5 pm.  Tough to block mobile devices though.

There are exceptions to the above rules, depending on what you are posting, but these are good general guides for most sites, social media activity and blogs. Erik has been fortunate to have access to statistics to hundreds of different sites/blogs during my sixteen year career and roughly 90% of the time the above holds true.
When he was the Head of Marketing at Travelzoo his production team always sent out the Top 20 e-mail list to the 21 million subscribers on Wednesday at roughly 11 am.  Why?  This gave it the best chance to be read.  If you have an incredible Tweet you need to get out, but it’s 2 a.m. on a Saturday, use a tool like hootsuite to schedule for the tweet to go out when more potential readers might read it.
Ironically, this post may not be picked up as much as it could since I’m posting it in the afternoon on a Monday following a holiday.
Ric suggests these as other good posts on this topic: YouTube Traffic Patters, Best Time to Send E-Mail, When are Facebook Users Most Active?, Conversion Volume by Day

Socialnomics publish Top 10 brands on Facebook

Lauren Pelkey writes on the Socialnomics blog....

It appears Facebookers love their sweets and caffeinated beverages. Five of the top ten brands on Facebook are Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Oreo, Skittles and Red Bull. That means 50% of the top ten brands on Facebook are food and beverage. The other half include Facebook itself at number one, YouTube at number three, Victoria’s Secret at number eight, Disney at number nine, and iTunes at number ten.

For more you can read the full post on the Socialnomics blog.

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

The UK's media consumption habits from an OFFCOM report

We are social have posted an interesting summary on media consumption habits...

Ofcom released its seventh annual communications market report last week. Its a goldmine of information about media consumption habits in the UK and is worth reading in full, the internet section in particular. In terms of social media usage, it reveals interesting data such as:

• Social networking (in blue) is an all day long activity, filling the gaps between traditional media:

• The data above illustrates the popularity of television in the evening, when over half (52%) of all media activities undertaken involves watching television on a TV set. In the morning, radio is more popular, but declines by the evening when TV is at its peak. Text communications (including social media usage) and voice communications both make up a fair proportion of media activity during the daytime and after the end of television peak time

It is interesting to see how the text based communications in blue stay fairly constant throughout the full 24 hour cycle. There is alot more interesting analysis on the we are social post including...

• Proportion of media use through device by age group radio usage is holding up except in the 16 to 24 age band.
• Proportion of computer use by activity - interesting to see the percentage of phone and video calls at around 30%
• Internet and PC take up - which is levelling off  although the move to mobile internet is growing.

Do take a little time to look at these results. If you have more time then you could look at the original report.

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?

Social Media usage trends

Two articles have come up today that are interesting if a little contradictory.

The first posted on MacWorld but clipped from ComputerWorld is titled "Are we burning out on Facebook?"

Could it be that Americans are starting to grow a bit weary of Facebook, which has captivated our attention and much of our free time?That just might be the case, according to numbers released by Inside Facebook, a site that tracks its usage. The site reported last week that the Facebook’s growth dropped dramatically between May and June. This follows news in March that Facebook replaced Google as the most visited Web site in the U.S. for a full week. Facebook only picked up 320,800 new users in the U.S. in June, Inside Facebook reported. That might sound like a lot until you compare it with the number of new U.S. users the site grabbed in May: 7.8 million. The tracking site also noted that fewer current users in Facebook’s prime age category of 18 to 44 were active on the site last month, though it didn’t offer any specific numbers.

There is some debate as to whether Facebook's privacy issues might be having an effect on usage.

The second article is another one form the pen of Jemima Kiss at The Guardian. Entitled "Waging war on Wordpress: Posterous prepares the switch" Jemima writes...

Twitter has played a significant role in the demise of 'full' blogging, not because it replaced the medium but more that it claimed people's web time and pushed the focus of web publishing towards real time. Facebook, too, is a famous online time sink. But sites like Posterous and Tumblr have refined blogging by streamlining the posting process, stripping out many of the bulky features and offering slicker, more real-time features and designs. 
What's the attraction? A less bloated back end (there's pills for that) without multiple features you never use. An end to the barrage of spam comments that plague Wordpress - Posterous is free of those, for now. And a service designed to be so email-post friendly that you never even need to login at your desktop; I post everything to my trial Posterous blog from my phone. Photos, videos, text docs, even spreadsheets - if you can email it, you can blog it from your phone. I'm converted.

It is interesting that at last people are considering the time all this social networking takes and the desire for a simple interface as well as tools to make multi-platform posting easier appear to be coming to the fore.

How the internet really affected the election from The Guardian

In today's media section of The Guardian is an interesting article by Jemima Kiss on how the internet affected the election following a report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Jemima wrote...

Nic Newman, the BBC's former future media controller for journalism, spent six weeks reviewing Facebook groups, Twitter coverage and the use of social media by traditional media organisations. "This was never going to be an internet election," he says. "Social media is just another layer ... it has always been there, through discussion and networks in the pub."
Facebook dominated the media behaviour of the 18-24 age group he surveyed, with an emphatic 97% saying they used the site during the election. The same group used the web more than any other source of news – 89%, compared with 81% for TV and 59% for newspapers.

in conclusion she wrote....

"Mainstream media are largely getting it right, and recognising that this is about conversation and not broadcast," Newman says. "For politicians, this is the first election where they are really having a go and some, like John Prescott, have been authentic and posted regularly while others have been in broadcast mode, still finding their feet."
Easy to dismiss, but less easy to master – social media is yet to come of age. But its growing influence and ubiquity, particularly among younger voters, cannot be ignored. Newman cites one of the more modest estimates, by Mori, that the voting turnout of 18- to 24-year-olds increased by 7%, above the national average of 5%.
"The complications of this new reality are that 18- to 24-year-olds do enjoy big events like the TV debates, but they are not prepared to consume political messages passively," he says. "[Social media] puts more tools in the hands of audiences to make politicians and the media more accountable."

So Social Media hasn't made it yet, but this election has shown it is a way that the 18 to 24 generation are having their say, they are not prepared to be passive and absorb whatever is fed them.

Change Happens

Wow, another video with some incredible figures in it. You might want to be ready on the Pause button to take some of the figures in!




Social networking has outstripped email ages ago, for example. The church needs to take this on board ad it seems as if MediaLit is having an impact on this.

Thanks fro DigitalFingerPrint and JohnnyLaird for finding it.

ITV to incorporate social media into TV news bulletins

In todays Guardian Newspaper in and amongst all the pre budget stories is an interesting announcement from ITV news about involving viewers through social media...

During this evening's 6.30pm ITV News, viewers will be invited to join the nationwide project The Cuts: Your Stories.

From those who get in touch, ITV will recruit what it calls a "giant panel", focusing on public service workers such as GPs, teachers, refuse collectors, people who deliver care for the elderly and the disabled, librarians and swimming instructors.

The ITV News editor, Deborah Turness, said: "Government cuts will dominate the news agenda for a long time to come, and our panel will show their direct impact on people from all walks of life."
Turness added that the leaders' debates during the general election campaign earlier this year had spurred on ITV News to incorporate social media into bulletins.
"The debates brought social media out of the teenage bedroom and into the living room. So many people enjoyed the experience of watching TV whilst chatting online it became a mainstream experience.
"We wanted to build on that in our news programmes and use social media as a platform to offer useful information to our viewers whilst harvesting their take on living in 'austerity Britain'."

It will interesting to watch how this experiment works to engage and involve the audience through social media.

New 'Social Creativity' site for you to try

We have all heard about social media well now we have 'social creativity' and there is a new web site from the folk at 186 Networks Ltd who are clients of mine and they have just released a new social creativity site called Stringsta

Create, learn, work, play, think together.  Stringsta™ is an amazing new way to mash-up videos, audios, images and texts collaboratively!  Work with friends all over the globe to create, edit and publish rich
media content in one simple interface.  The free, open platform is plugged straight into YouTube®, enabling everyone to make use of the world’s biggest video library.

What is it for?

Stringsta is a collaborative rich media platform where groups of people or businesses  can create, learn, work, play and think together, wherever they are, whenever they choose.

Stringsta is for collaborative film making, story writing, brand developing, news gathering, e-learning, music making, scientific researching, project managing, documentary making, lyric writing, photo sharing, speech making, consumer researching, opinion mongering, audience engaging, travel writing, intelligence collecting, data pooling, design conceptualizing, feedback giving… 

I haven't tried it yet but I know they have been working hard on this for a long while, so have a look, try it out and see what you think.