Well, maybe not quite that easy, but outdoor projector advertising is a simple and interesting means of gaining consumer attention. Just like fireworks, the movement of colorful lights illuminating the darkness of the night will attract peoples attention and the technology allows for artistic creativity which can be rotated with the push of a button. The ease of rotating creative with projector advertising is a superior benefit over traditional outdoor advertising such as billboards, signs, banners, etc… which normally don’t rotate creative easily, but do maintain great frequency with long shelf life.

Kinetic Lighting, Inc in Los Angeles maintains an impressive outdoor projector advertising portfolio including the Nationwide promotion below. Visit their website for other examples and information.

Use of the Internet for business marketers is a reality. Television, print, newspaper, and other traditional marketing avenues will continue to be used but these who ignore the Internet will lose the race for competitive advantage. Those who have embraced the Internet have demonstrated its power and are innovators.

Marketing on the Internet is a new business channel, yet in many way it remains the same as traditional marketing, but companies need to learn what works on Web sites, how to communicate their message and how to differentiate their Web sites.

Due to its structure and capabilities, the Internet is the medium of today and tomorrow. Thus, more and more people connect and join the “cyberworld” as a new media, new distribution channel, new opportunity, new source of business.

The demand of it emerged and developed new tools, such as internet marketing, affiliate marketing, conversational marketing, viral marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, AdSence and AdWord techniques which are implemented today by many of companies who do care about their future and about their reputation.

More than a revolution, cybermarketing incorporates many changes induced by information technology on marketing. It does not replace traditional marketing, but adds features and new opportunities now available and ubiquitous tomorrow. Indeed, the various media (TV, radio, newspapers) converge, through the digitization of information to the future information superhighways. Thanks to its, there are many possibilities. The Internet provides a tremendous support and allows the cybermarketing preparation of the information services of tomorrow.

The implementation of an Internet project in a company now requires a prior appraisal. Indeed, if the connection is simple and economical, the creation, promotion and maintenance of a site require trendy and ongoing knowledge of the Internet market and the needs of users.

The Internet gives business a better way to do things they do. The Internet capability to cut costs for selling and buying organizations. Automated functions and instant data information can cut purchasing cycle times, reduce human resources costs, and lower transaction costs for suppliers.

Further to cost reduction, there is increased efficiency. Online functions for customer service, product information, product ordering are available to customer 24 hour a day every day of the year. These are value-added services that serve to differentiate the products they compliment.

Increasingly through innovative outside relationships, organizations are aggressively reshaping themselves and fundamentally changing the way they do marketing. Unprecedented levels of performance and profitability have resulted from these efforts. The bottom line is that the Internet has became one of today’s most powerful, organization-shaping management strategies.

Global competition has intensified with the introduction of new technologies. Those who can exploit the opportunities of this new technology will win. Cybermarketing enables a large company to be responsive, representative, innovative, and fast and a small company to compete internationally. Information technology changes on a month-to-month basis and sometimes week to week. The pace of change is accelerating. To remain competitive, companies must position themselves and commence marketing on the Internet, cybermarketing.

“It is the combination of direct marketing
principles with Internet technology in order to
find profitable customers and interact with them
to find out how they want to do business, when
they want to do it, and under what terms.”
EC-Concil

The Internet is no longer new. But the use of it in terms of business have been changed and recent. Most firms use it as an indispensable communication tool. It is an established focus on advertising spending. It is the biggest growing channel for sales and investment in any marketplace. Many big players moved from “real world” to online one. Internet technology has been developed an extraordinary way for the past decade. The number of internet users has risen exponentially and according to a interworldstats reached 1,5 billion worldwide in 2009.

The term “Cybermarketing” for the first time has been utilized in 1995 by Len Keeler in his book “Cybermarketing”. He defines the cyber prefix in its application to marketing, and more, as a meeting point for the world of computers and communications. Most of us would define marketing as whatever you do to promote the growth of your business. It can include market research, publicity, advertising, sales, merchandizing and distribution, and customer service and support.

“Computer theorists use the term cyberspace to refer to the notional social arena we enter when using computers to communicate. Cyberspace can be used more generally to refer to the potential lifeway or general type of culture being created via Advanced Information Technology (AIT)”, the congeries of artifacts, practices, and relationships coming together around computing” (Hakken, 1999, p. 1). Ethnographer Hakken, in his book Cyborgs @ Cyberspace (1999), sees the cyber prefix, and the word cyberspace, as representing a culture. “The new computer-based ways of processing information seem to come with a new social formation, or, in traditional anthropological parlance, cyberspace is a distinct type of culture” (Hakken, 1999, p.2).

Cybermarketing has become an indispensable segment of e-commerce as well as the internet and World Wide Web related topics. Cyber marketing simply refers to a technique of attracting potential customers by advertising your products or services through such means as websites, emails,banners, blogs and many different ways that internet provides. 

In other words, cybermarketing is a blend of internet technology and direct marketing principles that is adopted by business owners to find profitable customers and to interact with them in order to enhance their business activities, thereby ensuring improved ROI (Return on Investment.) A number of activities are involved in cyber marketing such as internet marketing, affiliate marketing, viral marketing, conversational marketing, social media marketing and google search.

Cybermarketing can take many forms as well as simple advertisements on websites. It can also be exploited through the use of email, individualized websites for the company or also via communication devices such as mobile phones. To bring in some academic theories, it is the combination of the internet and the use of direct marketing.

An advantage that is born of cyber marketing is the notion of interactivity. It means that the producer of the product, service or public service can communicate through the internet effectively and leave a lasting impression in the consumer’s mind.

Benefits derived from the adoption of cybermarketing techniques are immense. First of all, it enables to minimize business costs and helps to reach a substantial number of customers and that too within minimal time frame.

Another great benefit of cybermarketing is that it allows firms to cost-effectively reach in any type market, let it be regional, national, and international.

“The requirements of effective communications and persuasion are fixed and do not vary
from country to country. The specific advertising message and media strategy must often
be changed from region to region and must frequently be adapted from country to
country to correspond with the requirements for effective communication and persuasion
in the particular region or country” (Keegan, 1989, p.496).

Also, a significant benefit of cyber marketing is that it enables to win profitable customers. Exceptionally low marketing costs, high profit margin, increased customer loyalty, round the clock services, and expansion in customer base are the other obvious benefits of cyber marketing.

With the internet becoming an ever larger part of modern life, expert more companies and businesses to begin exploiting it, with new updates in cyber marketing news becoming the norm.

By Matt Harty 

Its been a bit of a rough time for a few brands recently. They have among the first brands to have tasted the lash of the mob and seen the power of Social Media to move negative branding rapidly to large audiences. 

I first saw this story “An Unwelcome Deliery” about the problems Domino’s Pizza have been having from UGC in Newsweek at the airport this week. It took Domino’s a few days to see this video turn up on YouTube and by that time over a million views of the video had been recorded. 

Then Apple gets hit. I had been following some threads about the Nine Inch Nails and their fight to get an iPhone app on iTunes because of some curse words. But then the very odd selection criteria applied by Apple OK an app where you shake a baby to death for sale . 

The backlash against Apple happened rapidly. Leading to TV and Newspaper coverage and demonstrations outside Apple stores. 

BusinessWeek have some recommendations on how companies prepare themselves against these types of problems. Number one on their list is Monitoring. 

I could not agree more.

By Matt Harty

All of the UGC pundits that I am following are (at least in part) mourning the death of advertising. Much of what they say makes sense and marketers who can see the social-path and make changes now will benefit greatly. However I think that (particularly here in Asia when banner-ads still rule the roost) advertising has a long way to go before the gig is up.

An article posted recently by the venerable e-marketer entitled “Does Anyone Trust the Media?” listed the most trusted news source is friends. They have Asia Pacific data in this report. For South East Asia with some similar restrictions on the mainstream press the China data from e-marketer report may have a closer relationship than a European or US model. UGC platforms like Facebook.com are making the sharing of brand-related information amongst friends easier and more and more common.

In a separate report e-marketer talk about the propensity of the users to take action based on varying online ad formats, including UGC. The article entitled “Brand Mentions Preferred over Ads” finds that online articles that mention a brand are 100% more likely to lead to an action than a banner-ad and marginally ahead of email marketing.

UGC will be embraced by brands. There is no doubt in my mind about this. Like PR, UGC has the allure of being a free (or at the very least highly cost effective) form or marketing. What the brands are not really taking on board it that there has been a very large behavioural shift in product research. Now web-users not only research purchases online but they are increasingly researching from social sources. Getting ads close to these sources will likely get harder and less appropriate.

Just like in US TV where the DVR has reduced the effectiveness of TV commercials and a new approach to TV ad formats must be envisioned. We will have to think about the changing standing of online display ads and their role in pushing the brand message forward.

by Matt Harty 

In an earlier post, I talked about the Holy Trinity of Social Media and User Generated Content (UGC). The first step in the responsible handling of UGC is Observation. An observation platform helps you see the UGC surrounding your brand. Without the right optics, you can’t see the threats or the opportunities in time to have a suitable effect on their outcome. 

When we observe UGC, we can see differing reactions to the stories posted. We need to make a decision whether the content is repeatable or not. Clearly some stories regardless of how big the buzz was you have no intention of rekindling. There are also a number of reasons that the content of the posts may not be repeatable, these range from vagueness to spreading the wrong message about the brand. 

If we feel that the content is repeatable then we next look to the reaction type to predict the value of the content to us. There are a number of differing types of social reactions that we can observe. These include blogs & articles linking to a piece of content, “Social Bookmarking” of the content or passing a URL in Twitter. 

The benefit to us varies based on the reaction type and our goals for the brand. This is partially where “Organic Search” (SEO) and UGC can co-exist. Where a link to your website URL has been passed in one of these social media transactions you see an SEO benefit in the form of a “Backlink”. 

Firstly, there are two types of posts we should focus on. One are our posts on your domain (press releases, blogs, etc) the other are stories written by others and not on your domain. The latter is less likely to create a direct backlink for SEO unless they carry a link to your domain. However links not contributing to SEO can still make up positive buzz around the brand. 

Where we have observed past positive social reactions to particular types of content and we feel it is repeatable, the next step is to produce content of our own in the same vein. 

The step after that is to distribute the content. I will cover distribution in a whole post of its own as it deserves to be treated as a topic in it own right. 

The final step is to monitor the reaction and see how your content was received in comparison to the similar content that you emulated. 

With an eye on what the mob will respond to, marketers can look for opportunities in the brand buzz to find areas of content that can be expanded on to further the objectives of their brand. I think this approach is far preferable to the random dissemination of brand information we often see now.

By Matt Harty

Lets face it, the world is a bit of a mess right now. Social media and User Generated Content (UGC) are growing concerns for those in the marketing world. Those who have been aware of the threats anyway.

In a case of life imitating art, we can see the empowerment of the end-user through giving the common man access to a potent broadcast medium. This has lead to a problem even that brands that are aware of the problem, have not yet worked out how to answer.

The world out there in the realm of UGC is not a bunch of sane, rational and sober people exchanging intelligent witty views on wine and restaurants. It is more like a lynch mob with pitchforks and flaming torches waiting to jump on the revolutionary bandwagon and cut down all the tall poppies.

Within the mob, there can be agitators. As the Internet is available to the general public we can not guarantee the sobriety or mental health of the users who may wish to comment on your brand. The agitators may or may not be completely nuts.

UGC gives these people a super-powered Soap-Box from which they can air their views. To make matters worse,  research is telling us that online comments are taken as truth by the vast majority of web users. So if these comments are close to your online transaction points or if they hit a large enough audience, then the results could be devastating.

When I was at law school we referred to the average man as “the man on the Clapham onmibus” to test for reasonableness. Whether our UGC man is average or not, he can cause so much trouble that a brand may be pushed into crisis mode repairing the damage.

Never before has the lone common man had the ability cause so much trouble.

Online points of transaction (Or even points close to transaction) are particularly vulnerable. These are points at which online business is actually transacted or where key decisions are made on the way to transaction. If we take Travel as an example then points of transaction may be flight or hotel booking sites and comparison shopping sites. Points close to the transaction would be review sites or destination information sites.

Don’t think that if you do not transact online that you get off scott-free. Brands regardless of their transaction points can still be held hostage. Just because your transaction points are offline does not mean that you are not exposed to the mob.

It is important to not take this as all being negative. The medium of UGC offers a great deal of upside but its dangers are not to be ignored and contingency plans for a variety of possible threats should be at least considered. As with earlier movements that took us closer to the customer (Database marketing and email marketing specifically) there are brand related risks and things to learn to avoid.

So I guess we all have to get our thinking caps on and think of how this affects our brand and the exposure our brands actually have. Then make some disaster plans and keep an ear to the ground.

By Matt Harty

I mentioned this in a previous post. I have been thinking about it more and more.

I am trying very hard to write about Social Media and User Generated Content (UGC) without plugging Buzzwareness. But in this regard it is unavoidable so my apologies for the pitch.

I have been watching the “Word Clouds” and “Tweets” that Buzzwareness gives me on a number of the brands I am monitoring. Between them I am detecting that there are moods surrounding the brands. The Tweets give an up-to-the-minute reflection of what is going on around the brand and the Word Cloud takes some of the randomness of micro-blogging out and gives a layer of depth from news items and blogs.

I have been trying to defend the inclusion of Tweets into Buzzwareness. What watching Tweets can tell us is how the brand is being used in a conversational way. The idea of marketing as “dialogue” is one close to my heart and this is possibly the ultimate expression of this idea. We are literally eavesdropping on thousands of conversations for the mention of our brand and we see how our brand is being used, discussed or portrayed.

Word Clouds are something deeper in nature than Tweets but no less informative. The Word Cloud is coming mainly from blogs. It takes all of the most common key-words surrounding the brand. This gives us another, different kind of insight. What we are seeing is a slower moving feeling towards the brand. Unlike micro-bloging where we look at many isolated statements, the Word Cloud is showing us a consolidated mood of many contributors. This adds sanity to the picture.

Micro-blogs in isolation may give a distorted view, particularly if you only read a few of them. The more Tweets you read the better the balance becomes. With the deep and slow moving Word Cloud data we can round out the perception of the brand amongst users of UGC websites.

For some brands who see mainly criticism in many UGC forums, this mood measurement may be an interesting tool. From playing with some generic terms I can see that the Tweets are often about how something is used or thought of and with the benefit of the Word Cloud this can be placed into perspective regarding the prevailing moods of the mob towards our brand.

Call me mad, but I honestly think I am seeing the moods that surround a brand.

By Matt Harty

Most brands are coming to the conclusion that User Generated Content (UGC) and Social Media are with us for the long term. At the same time, understanding of the impact and effects of UGC are lost on many marketers. If this understanding was widespread you would see a great deal of panic manifesting on the faces of marketers and brand managers.

Brands historically have had a kind of stand-off with the mass media. Brands spend money on advertising and the media generally need advertisers to stay in business. I am not suggesting that media is inherently corrupt, just that there has been a long-standing co-operation between the two sides.

Then along comes Media 2.0…

Marketers need to understand the touch-points of their brands in this new world order. The first thing to understand is that the nature of the Internet lends itself to dialogue rather than broadcast. What I mean here is that unlike most TV and Print, the Internet is a two-way communication, a bit like talk-back Radio gone demented.

Given this two-way nature the touch-points are also best looked at as Outward and Inward.

Outwardly brands Astroturf or broadcast to the Internet. This is done in a variety of ways using a variety of methods. Currently marketers are setting up blogs, they are building Facebook groups and writing Facebook aps. They are also seeding the internet with digital press releases and also carrying out other PR functions.

Apart from the accessibility the brand is offering/projecting to the end-users there is also a huge Search Engine Optimization (SEO) benefit being gained. This places competing companies who are not flexing their brand online at a disadvantage in the organic keyword arms-race.

Inwardly brands are at the mercy of the mob. Comments can be left in a variety of places online, sometimes very close to the point of transaction for companies doing ecommerce. According to an article I read in the New Straits Times this month Microsoft did a survey that claimed that 86% of people no longer believed the claims made by brands and 78% believed the recommendations of other consumers.

Even as I shake my head at this I realize I am just as guilty. with my habit of checking on TripAdvisor.com before I book any hotel room. I do like to read their user’s comments and look at the photos they have taken. It is often a stark contrast to the hotel’s website.

Also on the Inward side of things are discussion groups, comparison shoppers, review websites, press articles and blogs. Anything negative can easily turn up in the course of a user’s “research” prior to purchase. I wrote earlier about the approach brands need to take to deal with UGC.

Sanrio Digital (Hello Kitty to you non-fans) is a part of the Group of companies I work with. We have been monitoring the brand “Hello Kitty” for some months now and have noticed something interesting in the world of micro-blogging. Just as we have been monitoring the regular UGC from press and blogs we have also been tracking “tweets”.

What we have learned is that micro-blogging is a real-time brand barometer.

By looking back at the tweets over a few hours or days I can see the general mood surrounding a brand. Yes, brands have moods! A dip-stick into the hive mind of the mob. Thankfully the words surrounding Hello Kitty remain as “nice”, “cute” and the suchlike.

The comfortable stand-off between media and brands is over forever. Brands now find themselves surrounded. Just as in the early days of search an opportunity exists to take market share from your luddite, technophobe competitors. I think the words “break-out media strategy” are about to get a new meaning courtesy of UGC.

It appears the era of free flowing information on the Web is tapering off. The Associated Press announced last Monday that they will begin to track how their content is used in an effort to start receiving revenue share where their content is being repurposed and monies are collected. If the A.P. and the media outlet can’t come to some agreement, the Associated Press will threaten legal action.

I’m genuinely surprised it’s taken this long. As the Web has evolved, the legal ramifications that trail behind are establishing new precedents and case law. It’s been a bit of a free for all, but it looks like the good times are coming to an end.

To solve this pesky content ownership problem, the A.P. said it would build its own searchable landing page where links from member media outfits would aggregate tidily under the A.P. name.

There are thousands of news related websites that repurpose  content and serve up (usually Google) ads alongside that day’s featured stories. Suddenly that smug feeling of  having your business model dialed in and being profitable doesn’t seem so safe and secure. Although the A.P.’s announcement didn’t name names, the biggest culprit is a little website called Google News; Google relies heavily on the A.P.’s member newspapers for content.

It appears newspapers are getting a touch desperate. As David Carr succinctly put it:

The current recession combined with a structural shift in ad spending and consumer habits have left the newspaper industry in a box canyon. Many believe they have no choice but to shoot their way out, even if it means taking on Google and the hundreds of millions of eyeballs it represents.

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, made it clear that he doesn’t want to pay to distribute content to users, but Google could make it easier for newspapers to charge end users for their content. In a recent press conference after the Newspaper Association of America meeting in San Diego last week, Schmidt diplomatically stated:

Anything that makes it easier for your content to get to your users is a win.

As a new story emerges each week about a newspaper losing money or on the verge of closing down, the need to evolve with the times has reached a pivotal ‘change or die’ point.

By Matt Harty

Just in time for Easter, I have been putting some thought into what it takes to handle the world of User Generated Content (UGC) and get Web 2.0 working for you.

Social Media and UGC is a minefield. Marketers are struggling to understand not only the lay of the land but also the ramifications of what it means to promote and champion a brand. Some marketers are ahead of the curve and are setting the pace but most people are still hiding their heads in the sand.

It seems to me that there are 3 crucial elements to navigating a brand through Social Media.

#1 Observation. You need to know a few important basics. Who is saying what about you. Where are they saying it and what are the potential audiences seeing what have been written. This works for the good as well as the bad things. There are a number of channels to monitor; blogs, YouTube, social interaction and bookmarking sites, comment sections on mainstream media sites etc. Once you know what the feed back is, then its time to separate fact from fiction.

#2 Quantification. Once we know what is being said we need to take a step back and work out if the opinions being aired are widespread or just a loud minority. The observation part of your strategy can take you no further and it is time to turn to Market Research to clarify what is really going on.

With clarifying questions, based on the observations being answered by research panels you can get to the bottom of what you are seeing online and have the tools to handle the response.

#3 Response. It is very important that you appropriately answer your online critics and stem false or misleading information about you. Having all the facts from step #1 and #2 will help in the judgment of what is appropriate. Knowing when and how to step into the conversation shows that the brand cares and is in touch with the public on their level.

By Matt Harty

Oh how the world has changed. It seems only yesterday that I had never heard of a blog let alone something like Twitter. Social Media has invaded the Internet, our culture and our lives.

User Generated Content (UGC) is the reality TV of the Internet. We love the freedom and the voyeuristic possibilities. Websites love it because of all the free content they can place their ads against and the huge audiences it can deliver. There is even a solid media cross-over effect with broadcasters urging viewers online to “have their say”. Viewers are obliging in increasing numbers.

The promise of “you become the DJ” was not lost on the generation that grew up with the Internet. Older, even very web-savvy users have been slower to see the benefits but having seen the light, are shifting the age balance on the key UGC
sites.

So is UGC the tool of our techno-salvation? Will we free the oppressed global masses with its truth? The problem as always is who’s truth is being told?

In markets where the state controls the press, blogs have become a trusted media source (sometimes the trusted media source). Beyond obscure blogs people can add their comments and opinions to the works of skilled and respected journalists on major media sites using the comments box.

On this alter of freedom are we sacrificing fundamentals that have made the media and some journalists great? Balanced reporting, the checking of facts and journalistic integrity to name some of what is lost. Who is policing Media 2.0? Can the mob self-regulate?

The reality is that now virtually anyone can say virtually anything about virtually anyone and with the help of the top Social Media sites can find an audience in the millions. Just think about that for a minute.

The Internet has now provided an almost consequence free environment to air peoples bias and petty grievances. Luckily most of the time this manifests as photos of peoples pets, kids or holidays and brief knee-jerk reactions to news items.

In the older, safer times of a few short years ago, a Media Clipping service would adequately monitor mass media channels and see what was said about a politician, celebrity or a brand. Today the flood-gates are open and Pandora’s box can not be closed.

This is not all armageddon and doom & gloom. Where there is danger there is opportunity. A new discipline of marketing has been born. Called by some “Word of Mouth” marketing, marketers are trying to inject themselves into the conversation. This (like any new approach) has lead to a mixed-bag of results.

UGC is akin to a grass-roots movement. Some clever-clocks coined the phrase “Astroturfing” some time back to describe this planting of fake grass-roots.

Astroturfing can be as powerful as it is dangerous. Lets take the travel sector for an example. For a hotel to go onto a site like Tripadvisor.com and place professional photos in the appropriate section is just fine. For the same hotel to pose as guests and write a glowing review is not OK. That said, the hotel should participate in the discussion to answer critics in the forum provided, the hotel is entitled to defend itself.

Like with the earlier lessons inflicted upon marketers from earlier things like Email Marketing, moderation, honesty and empathy are the tests that a marketer should apply to steer clear of most icebergs.

So we have a new, crazy, anything goes UGC world to deal with. One that also gets us closer to the hearts & minds of the end-user than ever before. The double-edged sword is that as we get closer we also give these end-users a soapbox to vent any petty complaints and level any insane charges against us. This content is up there for millions to see. From the whims of the mob there is no place to hide. We have to face up and deal with our critics.

We must learn to make the most of it. Keep one eye open and an ear to the ground and hope like hell our customers are thinking good thoughts.

News is going digital and it is hitting traditional media organisations hard. But for regional news outlets, which have felt the worst of the media downturn – a study release last month by Princeton university found that only 15 US cities have competing local papers compare to 689 a century ago – web 2.0 is offering a glimmer of hope for the future.

Linda Preston, creator of local news site Darwenreporter.com, believes that the wealth of information created by web 2.0 means that many beleaguered journalists unable to find work are starting their own local websites to fill the vacuum left by the decline in local papers.

 “I’ve found that many journalists facing redundancy are considering following my example and using their skills and long experience to work their own postcode.”

Even for local papers struggling to survive, the web if offering new possibilities. Elaine Helm, new media editor at the Herald in Everett, Washington state, believes that the power of social media is creating a new golden age for online local news outlets. She says:

“For individual and small groups of journalists, there hasn’t been a better time to be doing what we’re doing and getting it out there.”

During the latest “hundred-year storms to hit Washington state, Helm used social networking to keep local residents informed of the latest developments. She sent out a tweet asking people to use a common hashtag – a metadata naming convention – for all information relating to the storm: #waflood.  

Within minutes, a network of journalists from the area were all using the common tag and soon other contributors from the region were joining in. The information was then picked up by federal and state agencies and soon a mass co-ordination of effort by the state, journalists and locals was providing real-time information on the floods.

For Helm, the wealth of information instantly available on the internet means journalists must stop seeing themselves as the gatekeepers of knowledge, but rather the curators. “There’s a role to play for journalists in sorting through all the stuff that’s out there,” she says.

It was hailed as a resounding success. Mayhill Fowler, a 61-year-old failed novelist with no journalism training, broke two of the most memorable stories of the election: Barack Obama’s “guns and religion” blunder and Bill Clinton’s fuming at a public rally.

I just finished reading Clay Shirky’s *phenomenal* (if comprehensive — i.e. long) post on the future of newspapers journalism that everyone was talking about at SXSW a couple weeks ago. Anyone interested in journalism as a social utility (which should be everyone IMHO) should make the time to read this piece in full.

But the reason I’m writing about it here is to highlight how many of the lessons Shirky has drawn from the plight of the newspaper industry in the Internet age can be equally applied to the entertainment industry (i.e. studios, labels, networks, and publishers). Here is my Readers’ Digest version of Shirky’s post with notes added to emphasize the analogies to the entertainment industry:

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several…As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios…In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason.

The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow…People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.)…DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

This is a classic example of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma theory in which entrenched incumbents (the newspapers in this case, but equally the labels and studios) see disruptive or even revolutionary innovations coming often before anyone else but still fail to adapt. Christensen’s explanation is consistent with if a bit drier than Shirky’s above. Entrenched incumbents are organizationally predisposed to choose sustaining innovations over disruptive innovations because of the phenomenon of middle-management. Middle-management is meant to act as a filter for senior management, and their incentive structures are generally set-up to reward passing up ideas that win the approval of their superiors. And of course the ideas most likely to win approval from senior management are those most similar to ideas that have been approved in the past. So, the system is inherently set-up to promote sustaining innovations and filter out disruptive ones — or as Shirky puts it, create “Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse.”

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

In his original Long Tail article for Wired (4.5 years ago!!!), Chris Anderson declared an end to the “tyranny of physical space.” What that meant was the Internet fundamentally undermines any business model based on technologically inferior distribution. As content has no inherent physical requirements for consumption (and thus distribution), any model reliant on that is technologically inferior and thus ripe for disruption. The effect of this disruption is to eliminate the market inefficiencies and redistribute any value that was artificially aggregated by exploiting them. In other words, the margins that the content distribution gatekeepers were able to extract from the old system do not exist in the new system without gatekeepers.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen…And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

People invested in the old model don’t want to switch to the new model because, while it may be better overall, it’s less appealing to *them*. Would you ask the buggy-whip industry to pioneer automotive technology?!

Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points [my emphasis]…[T]here is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

We don’t really want movies or tv shows or CDs either, what we want is entertainment. By moving us beyond the “tyranny of physical space” the Internet is also freeing entertainment from the packaged goods business model that is required for physical distribution and opening up the possibility of real models for entertainment-as-a-service. And just because there isn’t an immediately clear answer to what the successful new models will look like doesn’t mean they won’t come in time or that they haven’t already.

Today the Media 2.0 Best Practices went live. I’m very happy to see this come to light.

I’ve been working on something like it for a number of years now, and with JS-Kit’s backing and the participation of my friends it has taken shape.

I’d like to thank all involved. I look forward to having conversations with the participants and creating something that vendors can use to make and keep user-centric promises to their participants.

I’m also very happy that the Media 2.0 Workgroup was able to take on this process and see it through. There is a lot of potential in that group that is yet to be realized.

Check it out…

Visit the site and view the strawman at www.mediabestpractices.com

In the process of examining the outcomes there are two opposing sides who says viral marketing cannot be controlled and those that disagrees. First group who disagree think that viral marketing can be controlled, the others say no. 

According Joseph Carrabis,

“The completely controllable part of viral marketing is based on mathematics and deals with the following questions:”

• How many individuals does the campaign need to start with (seed)? 
• How fast will the campaign spread (propagation factor)? 
• How will the campaign spread (vectors)? 
• How large a group is required to sustain the propagation (viral burden)? 
• What is the campaign’s goal (maintenance factor)? 
• How large a group is required to sustain the campaign once the goal is achieved (threshold point)? 
• At what point is the campaign too successful (saturation point)?

He also developed his own theory the Meskauskas-Carrabis Effect or MCE as a phenomenon wherein Jim Meskauskas four necessary elements for viral marketing campaign and his trust and fair-exchange concept of B2C could be predictable and probabilistic if the right tools to determine audience-to-message match and related factors are used.

The four elements by Jim are:

• Entertainment
• Utility 
• Palpable Reward
• Uniqueness

If the viral marketing is controllable, marketers have to do the following:

• Start in the end (outcomes/goals) and work it back to the beginning.
• Have precise descriptions of all the situations.
• Look back from the goal

In the viral marketing there are 3 main roles: 

• Companies as advertisers whose role in distribution of their product, put on the first line the importance of gaining brand awareness. 
• Developers as publishers who create the medium of advertisements for the advertisers.
• Ordinary people as consumers who is emotionally affected by the mediums so they spread the word or the medium used via emails, videos, blogs, podcast.

According to the BIGresearch Simultaneous Media Survey, the typical blogger (ordinary people) is:

• Male (53.7%)
• Average age of 37
• Slightly lower than average income ($55,819 vs. $56,811)
• Better than average education (14.3 years of education vs. 14.2)
• Ethnically (69,70% caucasian, 20% hispanic, 12,20% african american, 3,70% asian)

Make your message reachable by the targeted audience…

This TimeOnline story about Twitter is clearly linkbait. But dammit, I can’t resist.

Here are some of the quotes from some clinical psychologist dude by the name of Oliver James and a Cognitive Neuropsychologist David Lewis. Oliver and David clearly have no idea what they are talking about and should quit their day job.

The clinical psychologist Oliver James has his reservations. “Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.”

“We are the most narcissistic age ever,” agrees Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and director of research based at the University of Sussex. “Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognise you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won’t cure it.”

Are these people for real? A lack of identity?

Twitter is simply the most recent tool by which we perform an age old, very human, very healthy behavior. Connection and Communication.

Connecting and Communicating is the very essence of identity. It is the method by which we test, refine, express, learn and declare our identities. It is everything.

Twitter is two friends chatting all day while they work. It is a group of friends sitting around a camp fire. It is a group of colleges learning from each other. It is the world expressing its collective identity to each other.

If it is narcissism to express yourself and tune into the expressions of your family, friends and peers then we are all narcissists.

Twitter is a return to story telling that was sublimated by the invention of mass media. It is the purest most durable expression of personal media to come out of the Web 2.0 bandwagon.

We’ve all heard these knee-jerk reactions before at the advent of the Telephone, The Internet and Blogging. Each time we find a new, easier ways to communicate, out of touch people need to question why human beings need to be so connected.

These crack pots who have not experienced these tools for themselves should do a little more research. Maybe Andy Pemberton, the author of this article, should have spent a few more days learning about and trying the tool he admits to have just discovered before passing judgment on it, lest someone confuse his self-expression (i.e. his ‘journalism’) as ill-informed filler.

I’ve written more about this on my book outline.

I also spoke about it in my interview for the ‘Life In Perpetual Beta’ documentary.

I appologize for the tone of this post, but when ‘professionals’ seem to make such clearly absurd statements it drives me a little crazy.

I just got back from a really fun (and delicious) lunch with Peter of Pantless Knights, who is in LA working on a hilarious new video, and one of the main things we discussed was the idea of Entertainment-as-a-Service. The term is a reference to the concept of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which is a business model generally contrasted with the conventional packaged or ’shrinkwrap’ software model. Essentially, SaaS is a subscription business and packaged software is a retail business.

The entertainment industry is a retail business. Books, movies, tv shows, music are almost universally sold as one-off purchases. But, those things are just the packaging and the people selling them to you are just middle-men. The business of entertainment (not to be confused with the entertainment *industry*) is fundamentally a marketplace of attention between fans and content creators — fans have a finite supply of attention for which content creators are competing. So, then what is the entertainment industry? To use a very relevant analogy, it is the collection of intermediary businesses (i.e. publishers, studios, networks, labels) that have been acting like investment bankers, taking the raw materials of talent and creativity and packaging them up in a form they know how to sell (i.e. retail) and commanding a big slice of profit along the way. Entertainment doesn’t want to be a retail business, and that is the fundamental essence of the disruption the Internet has unleashed on the entertainment industry.

[Clarification: For the sake of this discussion, I'm using the term 'content creator' to represent those who add unique creative talent to the production process. As my dad pointed out, content creation is rarely a solo effort (most notably in film production, which can involve hundreds of individual contributors) to which studios, networks, labels, and publishers often contribute substantial value. But as those contributions are opaque and thus interchangeable as far as the consumer is concerned, I am excluding those who make them from the class I refer to as 'content creators' in this post. Otherwise said, even though the sound engineer plays a crucial role in creating the album, no one buys it based on *who* the sound engineer was.]

When you think about what elements of the entertainment business technology has really undermined, it’s nothing more than the packaging — the time slots and release dates and viewing windows and region codes that are artificial constructs of these middle-men trying to slice-and-dice the content into as many tranches as possible to squeeze out every last cent of profit. Just like the investment bankers and their CDOs fragmented and obscured the connections between investors and their investments, so have the studios, networks, publishers, and labels introduced complexity into the connections between content creators and their audiences. While that complexity, and the companies who created it, may have been a necessity in an era of technologically inferior marketing and distribution systems, they are simply market inefficiencies in the Internet age.

So, what is the difference between retail and subscription when it comes to entertainment? In a recent post on my personal blog about SaaS vs shrinkwrap software, I wrote:

The business model of packaged software invites feature bloat, because it’s upgrade driven and you need to continually find ways to justify why Thingamajig 2009 Pro Edition™ is so much better than Thingamajig 2008 Pro Edition™. Software as a Service businesses have a much different (and arguably greater) challenge, they need to continue to create value for their customers month after month….So, you end up with a much more customer-centric product…and a vendor who is truly interested in addressing your customer needs.

The first priority of a retail business is to maximize sales, building brand loyalty and repeat business may be means to that end but they always take a back-seat to whatever else will drive more sales. Whereas in a subscription business, customer retention (and thus customer satisfaction) is always top priority, even above new customer acquisition. So if a studio believes they can get a lot of people to see a crappy movie by spending more on marketing and less on quality, they will (and do, again, and again, and again…). Because all you’re buying from them is the packaging, they know you aren’t really paying attention to whether it’s a Fox or Warner Brothers or Paramount film (do you buy your cereal based on who made the box it comes in?). But, a director would rather disown a bad film than endorse the studio releasing something that doesn’t meet his standards and his fans’ expectations. This is because the director knows that his relationship with his fans is a subscription business, and if he disappoints them he will be unable to continue exchanging his content for their attention in the future. The studios understand this too — they don’t give Tom Cruise $25M (plus a cut of the gross) per movie because his acting skills bring $25M of quality to the screen, they do it because he has more than $25M in ticket, DVD, and merchandise sales worth of fans. 

Entertainment is naturally a subscription business, and the Internet returns it to its natural state. The content creators who thrive online are those who understand this and focus on the ongoing satisfaction of their customers (see Ze Frank, Michael Buckley, Chris Leavins). The level of customer satisfaction these creators deliver is really only possible on the Internet because they can go direct-to-consumer without need of the middle-men and their packaging. These creators publish in all forms — video, photos, blogging, micro-blogging, music. They do not see themselves constrained by the legacy dividing lines of the entertainment industry, their goal is to entertain their audience by any and all means available. There is no distinction for them between primary and ancillary content, they are 360° entertainment brands. The other thing that has made these creators so successful online is their direct interaction with their customers. The best your most engaged fans can do offline is give you their personal attention (and the money that comes with it) and try to recruit others to do so as well. But online, they can interact with you and become part of the show. Empowering your customers is the surest way to make them even more engaged. As I wrote in another recent post on my personal blog:

Bringing your customers into the product development process has the dual benefits of helping you build better and more customer-centric products and making your customers your most passionate sales people (because after all, it’s their product too).

So, the Internet enables these creators to spend more time listening to their fans and creating new content they’ll enjoy while outsourcing the marketing to the community for free. This is the exact opposite of the offline retail model in which the studio takes money out of production budgets to put it into marketing campaigns. The ability to establish deeper relationships with their fans also allows online content creators to attain higher average attention per customer (ARPU) than is possible in the retail world, thereby making it easier to build more value by going deeper with a smaller audience. 

To be clear, I’m not trying to say the only business model for content on the Internet is a recurring subscription fee. The ’subscription business’ to which I’m referring is more the theoretical exchange of value between content creators and their fans, which can and will take many forms — including selling packaged goods. I’m also not saying that the online entertainment market is solely the domain of Internet-only content creators. In fact, I believe the Internet is most powerful as an entertainment marketplace when the quality and reputation of a historically offline content creator is freed of the constraints of the legacy packaged goods business model. Take for example Josh Freese, who gets extra points for using this freedom precisely to illustrate the absurdity of the conventional retail approach.

And now, I leave you with the profound product of the coming entertainment revolution:

P.S. Hat tips to Ian Rogers for the marketplace of attention thinking and Umair Haque for the marketing vs quality dichotomy.

There are some old school marketing techniques that still works:

● Press Releases 

When it used to be really read by the press, it was appropriate to call it a press release. Now it might be called as a news broadcast. Also, if you focus on a niche or use the more expensive services you may still hit some great media outlets.

● Email 

Way more attention seems to be given to social media than email marketing. However, email marketing will still generate a lot more money for you. 

● SEO 

Search Engine Optimization is not the new hot thing, but if there is one area that is actually using social media well, it is the people that get how SEO and Social Media tie in together. The key with SEO is that if you are in a tight target niche with little competition, you can probably pay for a one time project and reap the rewards for a long time. If you are in an even slightly competitive market, you need someone that goes to war on your behalf every month to increase ranking and get more pages indexed.

● Old Websites 

These old sites have great credibility in the eyes of search engines and can be ignited by a good search engine specialist.

● Directories 

Things like directories seem out of date, but getting listed in a good directory still gives you a valuable back-link and can generate a steady (if not huge) stream of traffic, like technorati and blogcatalog.

● Link Exchanges 

These things have a bad name, and anything that automates the process. However, doing an occasional link exchange with someone else in your industry will help – not hurt – your website. If link exchanges actually hurt websites, most blogs with blog rolls would be thrown out of Google long ago since they often link to each other. 

● Word of Mouth

The oldest of the old school marketing is the new mean. Finding ways to get people to talk about you are the holy grail of cutting through the clutter.

“Viral marketing is based on the belief that marketers, using traditional advertising, can no longer deliver credible messages. Only customers can!” 

Keith Bates

Viral marketing is a term used to describe the technique used to increase or to built awareness of a certain advertisement, one’s product or company through self-replicating processes. This technique is more often called “word-of-mouth marketing” because it is only you (as a company) who have to think of a way that your advertisement would encourage people to pass it along.

The term “viral marketing” is also sometimes used pejoratively to refer to stealth marketing campaigns—the use of varied kinds of astroturfing both online and offline to create the impression of spontaneous word of mouth enthusiasm (wikipedia).

Viral Marketing can be applied to any organizations, whether it is profit, non-profit, B2B, consumer product/consumer services companies in order to add viral effects to advertising so that it may achieve significant results in driving traffic to one’s ads. It brings more profitability of sales and increase brand awareness for the advertiser of the ads.

Many different forms of media can be used to reach out to the public without actually promoting a product. 

According to eMarketer, the number of a total internet users who are world-of-mouth influenced by 2011 will be increased and will reach 20%.

According to Forrester Research, enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is rapidly growing and expected to continue this upward trend. With an anticipated compound annual growth rate of 43%, enterprise Web 2.0 spending is expected to reach $4.6 billion globally by the year 2013.