You know all too well that traditional journalism has changed. We’ve read the Huffington Post and heard about the Google-Murdoch punch up. The journo genie has left the bottle.
So when change has taken place in your industry and the future indicates far more, what are you expected to do? Unsurprisingly Gary Vaynerchuk advocates jumping the sinking ship. What’s new is his push to start a collective of freelancers building a new centre of journalism.
From his inspiring Crush it! “…those who possess that rare combination of fiery entrepreneurial spirit and reporting chops could team up and form a killer online news service without any biz dev partnership at all. They’re going to really win big.”
I completely agree. No, you don’t need to send four people to New York to cover a plane landing on the Hudson. Or send a John Simpson wannabe to a war torn corner of Asia. Instead, save the airfares, expenses, insurance and security costs by running original, insightful and discerning thought pieces, commentary and analysis. Suddenly, a handful of talented ladies and gents are delivering true fidelity.
Thanks to some sharp printers you can even go old school and get a paper run along side your site. The Newspaper Club will print 12 page tabloids in quantities as low as five!
The web has disrupted nearly every vertical on the planet and sent the established incumbents into a spin (obvious example: the Royal Mail). With so many undiscovered opportunities, which will you choose?
You’re having a conversation with a company Big Wig, perhaps an interview, and she asks, “What do you think of this social media phenomenon?”
Well, imagine it’s the 1960s. Horses pull milk floats, colour TV is just around the corner for most households, shillings are in your pocket and the Bay of Pigs has petrified the world. In between watching Steptoe and Son and listening to Elvis or the Beatles, someone asks you, “What do you think about this telephone phenomenon?”
With 20/20 hindsight you could’ve said, “It’s going to be amazing in ways we can’t yet imagine. The infrastructure we and other countries are laying now will be used for revolutions in communications and commerce that sound like science fiction if we talk about them now (think fax and Internet). User take-up will be so overwhelming that the lines will be stretched to breaking point and the ‘phones themselves will become like your watch or wedding ring – always with you. In short, phones will become an integral part of our personal and business lives.
The ‘60s Big Wig would nod sagely, probably with a slight smirk, and take the conversation elsewhere. But the answer to the question if you’re asked tonight at dinner is that, “History will repeat itself here…”
On the right - Prevent search engines from indexing news content and have readers pay through a variety of subscriptions to recoup lost earnings from physical news sales. People have no right to free journalism and aggregator sites (especially Google News) are to news, what Pirate Bay is to music.
On the left –
If you build it they will come. The internet is an unparalleled open space where the common good is freedom of information without class divides. If providers open their content equally the market will ensure the winners are the cream of crop. Revenue will be made through increased attention and trust.
Further right against ‘Don’t be evil’ - Stop the Google vampire by embracing its largest competitor instead – Microsoft’s Bing.
If Bing courted enough content providers to bed exclusively with them (by paying, say, the world’s top 50 newspapers and top 1,000 magazines) that would be a huge boon. Would it be enough to grab 10 or 15 percent of market share?
Of course it’s all about money for Murdoch, not attention and that’s where he and the digerati are looking at same issue from different ends.
Marc Prensky is acknowledged to have coined the term Digital Natives, but when the business world heard Rupert Murdoch use it, the term became commonplace (remember he owns MySpace).
The reference is to the swathes of people who don’t think twice about technology being an integral part of their everyday lives. It’s not exclusively a generation Y (18-28 year-olds) phenomenon either, even though saturation surely peeks there. Two ingredients strike me most about young digital natives:
They are not colour blind. They are arguably the first to start/finish higher education with a true post-racism attitude. An Obama Whitehouse can only help cement that mindset.
They are not data phobic. On the contrary, they often broadcast and share masses of information in an open display of incredible honesty.
Seems to me companies might benefit from having a digital native or two in their organisation, regardless of the CV’s relevant work experience. How about you?
I recently heard comedian Frank Skinner being interviewed by Dermot O’Leary on his Radio Two show. Skinner, former host of his own guest TV show which ran for six years, said that TV is rather unreal. With his makeup applied, his shirt choice amended to avoid a camera clash, specific timing, outtakes, warm ups, breaks, editing and so on, Skinner called it ‘manufactured.’
He went on to say that radio is much more authentic – like two blokes sat at the end of the bar in the pub. Just raw conversations really, making radio much more true to itself (I’m paraphrasing here).
Social media is described as many things, both good and bad. How about thinking of social media’s offer of authenticity as an opportunity for companies to host their own radio show?
They’ve flirted for years. Constant advances were spurned and due diligence seemed wasted but Ballmer’s finally got his gal. Well, sort of. This week has seen a sharing of search revenue, not a sale between Microsoft and Yahoo.
Despite her strong words of rebuilding and turning-the-tanker, we all assumed Carol Bartz’s number one play when she parachuted into Yahoo in January was to negotiate the sell. Is this a toe-in-the-water on the way to a full-blown takeover?
Of course, search is where the rubber meets the road on the Internet and as Steve Ballmer said, “This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.”
Not so long ago Yahoo’s search was ‘Powered by Google.’ If only they’d realised they were creating a seesaw of strength: as Google grew, Yahoo shrank. Fatal error.
It’s a ten year partnering, not an acquisition, but Google must be hoping this is a bit like the dog who chases cars and finally catches one. Can the undisputed also-ran in second place actually do anything different? Will the partnership lead to growth or confusion? What about the raft of other questions this throws up?
And, just in case you missed it, Amazon bought the highly respected Zappos earlier this month for about $937 million. I’m thinking the web just got a bit smaller but a couple of big players have sharpened their teeth further.
The Times is reporting on a modern classic. The Facebook faux pas is a recent phenomenon witnessed too closely by the head of MI6 as he was outed by his wife on her Facebook wall.
From the piece: …entries by his [Sir John Sawers'] wife Shelley on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, their friends’ identities and where they spend their holidays. On the day her husband was appointed she congratulated him on the site using his codename “C”.
As Yoda said, “Be mindful of your thoughts Obi Wan, they betray you.”
What’s remarkable is that the same candidate could be ideal for both positions, yet the view from both chairs couldn’t be more polarised.
MySpace is one of the great brands of the new millennium and the next CEO has a massive opportunity if he/she thinks big enough (could you put Facebook on the ropes?). ITV is a beacon of the past with largely outdated revenue models and the reality that its scale is shrinking.
Both are ‘big ask’ tenures as they’ll surely oversee the most challenging make-or-break, eat-or-be-eaten stuff either firm has encountered. Very exciting times.
The New York Times blinked first and opened its 2.8 million articles allowing users to build things with its content via API.
But the Guardian has suddenly become the pie-piper of the newspaper business by opening up its data more fully. The Guardian trumps NYT by allowing for-profit use of the data (opposed to NYT’s non-profit stance) and it allows full data from articles and pieces, as opposed to excerpts.
With the newspaper industry crumbling by the month, this really is a stake in the sand by the Guardian. They’re clearly enthusiasts of the freemium business model and I applaud their bravery. Will it be follow us or die; or is it a case of a freemium too far?
As usual, Mathew Ingram and Greg Stirling have great takes on it but I really want to know what the industry is planning next. This is a modern day equivalent to the steam liners fighting back against the passenger airliners of Howard Hughes et al. We’ve all heard enough whining about Google their ilk eating newspapers’ lunch – what are they cooking for dinner? Photo credit: Terje S. Skjerdal
Seth Godin is giving his only UK talk on Tuesday. Yep, yours truly has booked a day off and got a ticket to the Big Smoke to see my man Seth.
He’s not a ground-breaking intellectual – academia would never cite him like they do Philip Kotler et al (and we wouldn’t read him either). But he’s superb at taking ideas and formatting them into cohesive thoughts that spread via his stories. He is a visionary and he’s dialled into leveraging the web 100%.
He’s most captivating because his ideas are top-notch and he shares absolutely loads of them. This, coupled with his style and honesty, make him unmissable.
My wife thinks I’ll meet him in the corridor. She also reckons I’ll dribble and soil myself at the mere presence of a [my] marketing god. Let’s hope she’s 50% right.
Viral campaigns are an enigma. Word of mouth is, by definition, viral, but marketers want much more bang for their brand communicating buck. How can you spread your ‘message’ by engaging users (and potential clients) exponentially without devaluing your brand or using slapstick comedy?
Few marketers can claim to have pulled this business magic trick off, but two significant examples have already been seen this year: T-Mobile and the Best Job in the World.
T-Mobile orchestrated an involuntary dance with 300 people in London’s Liverpool Street station. The fact that the public joined in to varying degrees, with plenty taking out their phones and capturing the moment to relay it to others, was right on cue.
This technology in the participation of the event is a masterstroke. No, they’re not in the dancing business; they’re in the communication business and they demonstrated how we all interact today through some very clever ‘cause and effect’ staging. Over 3 million YouTube views, 7,000 comments and a national TV ad campaign would certainly allow the team to claim that they ‘got the eyeballs.’
Best Job in the World
The self-proclaimed ‘Best Job in the World’ lit the blogosphere’s blowtorch. Marketing RSS feeds squawked with the ingenuity of Tourism Queensland accepting video applications for the job as caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef. A once-in-a-lifetime job deservedly received massive exposure and applicants surged forward for six months of ‘work’ at $150K.
The tactic scored right from the off, but a touch of greed must’ve set in as the ad agency started posting fake applicants (which are public viewing). One of these was from the Digital Project Manager for the agency. Oops.
This was the pin to the party balloon. Trust evaporated and respectful praise turned into negative PR with the crying of ‘Fake’ from hundreds of keyboards. When caught they failed to pull the brakes and it went on to be a train wreck – they denied it. This went down as well as an oil spillage.
The job is real – more authentic, even, than T Mobile’s “spontaneous” dancers – but one campaign stepped over the line that the other seems to have courted.
Tread carefully, folks. Innovatively, openly and carefully.
Twitter, much revered as THE social media application by those heavily engrossed within, also finds itself slammed as a catastrophic misspend of one’s precious time by those on the sidelines (if they’ve heard of it at all). It’s all very Yin and Yang.
I got to thinking there’s a simile to be drawn with the recent snow across the UK that has loads of people excited (especially my daughter) while causing massive inconvenience – and obvious cost – for business.
Substitute Twitter or snow fights for the following viewpoint:
Sideline humbug of snow fight/Twitter – fruitless waste of energy spent on juvenile entertainment in existence purely for its own sake. Where workers are engrossed in something pleasing to themselves with no business outcome but for the few (e.g. grit suppliers in the case of snow, contacts in the case of Chris Brogan).
or
Engaged participant ofsnow fight/Twitter – liberating and inspiring in the sense of something different from the monotony. It’s not a task ridden process and outcome – it’s original, genuine and creative. It improves your outlook and certainly broadens it. No, ten more widgets weren’t sold but maybe, just maybe, my heightened spirits and/or that new connection I made might just turn out for the better.
What say you? Is Twitter the best social business tool since the telephone, or is it a toy for time wasters?
[BTW Stephen Fry is the most popular person on Twitter. President Obama is followed by the world's terrorists and every political party under the sun, so we'll claim his numbers void. Ergo Fry wins.]
Crossing machine and cinema gives you machinima. It’s a geek’s bedroom hobby that’s breaking into Hollywood. Companies like Rooster Teeth show game content and skew it to a story rather than playing the game itself. Halo and World of Warcraft are classic petri dishes for this art.
Well, things look to be going all Sky One for this genre. These creations have attracted A-list attention as “a collaboration with fifteen leading episodic television writers from popular series–such as The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live and Seinfeld–to develop 15 original episodic comedy pilots…”
There’s plenty of talk lately about what the blending of online TV will mean with the BBC, ITV and BT soon to become bedfellows on a common platform for IPTV (known as Project Canvas). We shouldn’t be closed to the fact it’ll be as much about content as it is accessibility. New ground is soon to be broken, I hope it’s original and entrepreneurial and not all crass reality show spin offs.
Newspapers are in their twilight years. With every print run, they step closer to oblivion. Of course, you’re smart and you know full well that they exist for advertisers, not news, and there lies the rub: ad revenues are dwindling at an alarming rate. Oh, but what to do with that high brand equity and shrinking readership? Go online, right? Surely they’ll read us [insert major name] on tinterweb and we can sell banner ads instead of print ones?
If they’re half as committed to that oversimplified strategy as I believe they are, why don’t they help us digest their content more easily? Granted, they’re much better than they were (understanding that we don’t want to log in to read was a real boon) but much boundary pushing is needed if they’re going to carve a real niche out of the net.
Next to Google Earth, RSS is the best thing about the Internet. It’s simple and brilliant. Instead of typing in dozens of web addresses to check out what’s new, you can tell the web which sites you’d like to read and watch them all come into one page (or reader) as and when they refresh themselves. Instead of buying a paper or magazine which will have a good proportion of waste (i.e. I won’t read) Google can deliver 100% relevant content to any desktop or mobile device I choose – for free. Helpful. Genius. Time saving. Wonderful.
Not so the experience you’ll find online at most of our British newspapers. Check out this article by Timothy Fadek at the Guardian.co.uk (note: no RSS in their address bar). Where is the feed for this page? There’s the usual social networking buttons, but what about a longer term buy-in? Sure, you can subscribe to the RSS feed from the business home page and get hooked up. The trouble is, it feeds you the whole of the business section (approx 270 posts per week) not the daily missives of your chosen journo or subject.
Telegraph.co.uk and timesonline.co.uk (what a dreadful URL) help you a wee bit by offering a selection of feeds, but they’re insufficient. You’ve got more chance of most writers cooking you dinner tonight than giving you an easy to find RSS feed. It’s a genuine shame that their technology is missing such an opportunity to gain attention and eyeballs.
A 20 second brainstorm on what could be better:
Allow us to plug in to ANY correspondent/writer;
Allow us to filter the feed by keyword or tag e.g. I want Brian Moore at the Telegraph.co.uk (actually possible if you’re persistent in your quest) but only on international rugby, not his club rugby, football or general pieces;
Allow us to skew to excerpt or full text (don’t force me to your site to read a whole article – it’s just tight);
Allow us to take the feed live, daily, weekly or monthly (as a magazine would arrive);
Allow the feed on keyword only but across all sections e.g. Lewis Hamilton could be in several areas other than F1 sport; and,
Allow a matrix of any the above.
RSS is chronically underused; newspapers could blow it open to become one of their saving graces. Of course, their content (and their contributors) is another matter entirely.
You know all too well that traditional journalism has changed. We’ve read the Huffington Post and heard about the Google-Murdoch punch up. The journo genie has left the bottle.
On the left –
Marc Prensky is acknowledged to have coined the term Digital Natives, but when the business world heard Rupert Murdoch use it, the term became commonplace (remember he owns MySpace).
I recently heard comedian Frank Skinner being interviewed by Dermot O’Leary on his Radio Two show. Skinner, former host of his own guest TV show which ran for six years, said that TV is rather unreal. With his makeup applied, his shirt choice amended to avoid a camera clash, specific timing, outtakes, warm ups, breaks, editing and so on, Skinner called it ‘manufactured.’
They’ve flirted for years. Constant advances were spurned and due diligence seemed wasted but Ballmer’s finally got his gal. Well, sort of. This week has seen a sharing of search revenue, not a sale between Microsoft and Yahoo.
From the piece: …entries by his [Sir John Sawers'] wife Shelley on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, their friends’ identities and where they spend their holidays. On the day her husband was appointed she congratulated him on the site using his codename “C”.
Two huge media companies are looking for new top dogs this week. MySpace chief executive and co-founder, 
The New York Times blinked first and 
Twitter, much revered as THE social media application by those heavily engrossed within, also finds itself slammed as a catastrophic misspend of one’s precious time by those on the sidelines (if they’ve heard of it at all). It’s all very Yin and Yang.
Not so the experience you’ll find online at most of our British newspapers. Check out this article by