Daily Reading 05/30/2008

• Time Inc. Tries Hand at Reader-Generated Issue

  Another publisher - this time a unit of venerable Time, Inc. - tries its hand at a print publication composed entirely of user-generated content. 8020 Publishing and the Hartford Courant are doing the same thing. Editors say the quality of ideas contributed by readers is remarkably good, although the copy needs a lot of work. They all plan to keep the conversation going.

  tags: daily_reading, citizen_journalism

• This Blog Post Is Available At No Charge!

  Tim Lee writes in the Atlantic about the creeping economy of free. Content providers will increasingly find themselves under pressure from competitors who offer similar information at little or no cost. The challenge is to develop new business models around ancillary services. Chris Anderson is big on this topic right now. He notes that the value of commodities falls quickly to the cost of production and in the content world, that's zero.

  tags: daily_reading

  ¶ 8:31 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 05/29/2008

• Open Source Evolution podcast: The Changing Landscape

  Tom Hanrahan, Director of Linux Interoperability at Microsoft, speaks with Wharton Legal Studies and Business Ethics Professor Kevin Werbach about the value of open source development in today’s marketplace. It's interesting how the mindset is changing at Microsoft.

  tags: daily_reading, open_source

  ¶ 8:30 AM 1 Comments

  Daily Reading 05/28/2008

• Everywhere, JPG - magazines for the future

  8020 Publishing has a strong ownership pedigree (Halsey Minor and ex-Conde Nast execs) and a fascinating model. Each bi-monthly issue of its two magazines is composed entirely of content submitted by readers. It takes a staff of only 19 people to produce the two titles and they'll be profitable by next year.

  tags: daily_reading, citizen_journalism

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  Daily Reading 05/26/2008

• French skydiver plans 130,000-foot free fall

  I am so happy there are people in the world who will do this kind of thing willingly so the rest of us don't have to.

  tags: daily_reading

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  An Online Video Strategy That Hits The Mark

From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

I just returned from my second trip to Toronto in the last two months and was again impressed with the Web-savviness of the Canadian audience. Did you know, for example,that Canadians are the world's most active users of Facebook? Or that Canadians spend, on average, two morehours per week viewing online video than their counterparts south of the border?

And don't give me that "Of course! It's cold up there!" cliché. Canadian homes are wired and its businesses are doing some very innovative things to reach those web-savvy customers.

Take FutureShop. Canada's largest consumer electronics retailer is using online community not only to learn more about its customers, but to help sell products and support customers. It has built an online advisory and customer support service that is like nothing I've ever seen.

"Ask an Expert" is formulated on a high-touch model in which sales associates are taught to be valued customeradvisers. The company has come up with a strategy to duplicate that real-world experience online. The screen shot shows "Aaron," one of the video avatars who guides customers.

Since mid-2007, visitors to Future Shop's website have been greeted by a video image of a sales associate who offers to help guide their experience. Customers can ask any question of the avatar (he'll even dance for you) and get results from a growing database of advice contributed by sales associates and customers. Future Shop created the video front-end itself and bound it to a community portal from Lithium Technologies.

"We're trying to blur the lines between the offline and online experience," says Robert Pearson, Future Shop's director of e-commerce. "Our goal is to become the largest technology community in Canada."

Future Shop is well on its way to that objective. In less than a year, the site has signed up 50,000 members, which would be equivalent to about 450,000 members in the much larger U.S. market. But the community isn't just a discussion forum. Future Shop co-developed a ranking system with Lithium that lets customers provide feedback on each other and on the quality of information offered up by sales associates. Customer contributors can earn discounts and status in the community. The most helpful sales associates can earn cash.

Next up: Facebook-like functionality that gives contributors their own personal spaces and ties sales associate profiles to store locations. Success is measured by a survey of customer affinity with the brand. It's still too early to draw measurable conclusions, but all the trends are pointing in the right direction. "We're getting about 250,000 visitors a day out of a population of 33 million," Pearson says. "That's many more than come into a store. We actually see people walking in with printouts and asking for specific experts they've met online."

Future Shop isn't using video to be cool. It's using video to reinforce an in-store experience that is essential to its business strategy. It has also bound its customers to the company in a way that is rewarding for both parties. The company is now owned by Best Buy, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar capability showing up on a retail website near you.

Labels: retail, socialmedia, video

  ¶ 5:37 AM 1 Comments

  Daily Reading 05/17/2008

• Web start-up unveils semantic Wikipedia search tool

  Powerset searches Wikipedia using conversational phrasing instead of keywords. It's one of a new breed of search engines that tries to get at the underlying questions that Web searchers are trying to answer.

  tags: daily_reading, search_engines

• EMarketer cuts social media ad spend forecast

  Social networks are still having trouble coming up with compelling ad models. EMarketer predicts ad spending on those networks will be just $2.6 billion by 2012, about five percent of the overall market. MySpace and Facebook collectively command 72% of social network ad spending.

  tags: daily_reading, research

• Facebook backlash develops

  It was inevitable that Facebook growth would slow and critics would turn out to start talking about all that's wrong with the social network. This CNet blog points to a developer's observation that fewer people are developing Facebook apps than a year ago and extrapolates that Facebook may be in crisis. What's really happening is that the market is becoming more mature and competitive.

  tags: daily_reading

• Why Twitter Matters

  BusinessWeek's Stephen Baker updates the Twitter phenomenon, explaining why microblogging is becoming an intrinsic part of people's lives and how businesses are tapping in to the conversation.

  tags: daily_reading, twitter

• Blogs Blossom into a Big Business

  "By 2012, more than 145 million people—67% of the US Internet population—will be reading blogs at least once a month. That is up from a readership of 94 million in 2007, or 50% of Internet users." Ad spending is forecast to grow to about $750 million by 2012, which is nearly triple today's total but still a small number overall.

  tags: daily_reading, research

  ¶ 8:31 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 05/16/2008

• Online Ad Spend Surpasses $21B

  Although the growth rate of online ad spending has slowed, it's easily outpacing growth in all other media categories.

  tags: daily_reading, research

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 05/14/2008

• Remarks on Clay Shirky's essays on group think

  This post summarizes and links to Clay Shirky's 2003 essay "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy." Shirky's work on group dynamics is important to understanding how social networks govern themselves.

  tags: daily_reading

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  IDG Reinvents Itself Online Last week, The New York Times wrote about International Data Group’s (IDG) successful transition from a print to an online model. I was intrgued to read about IDG Chairman Patrick McGovern’s enthusiasm for the economics of new media. Having gotten to know McGovern a bit during my 15-year career at IDG, I asked him to appear on the weekly MediaBlather podcast that I co-host with David Strom. He immediately agreed. That's the kind of person McGovern is. With all of the weighty issues that he must deal with every day, he is never too busy to chat with a colleague, whether current or past. In fact, McGovern still visits every IDG operation in the U.S. each December to distribute bonuses individually to every employee.

Our interview was about the business issues of IDG’s transition from a print powerhouse to an online specialty publisher. McGovern’s perspective is be inspiring. While the print industry collectively moans about the pain of transitioning from print to online, IDG has quietly taken its medicine and reinvented itself. Today, the company derives less than half its revenue from print titles, and McGovern expects online business to make up 70% of sales by 2012.

At InfoWorld, which was spotlighted in the Times article, the closure of the print edition and shift to a wholly online model actually increased margins from a small net loss to a 37% net profit. “Not only is there survival after going online, but it’s a much better environment,” McGovern told us.

IDG’s strategy is now to launch all new titles online first, build an audience and then take the business to print if the market demands it. “That way, we already have the audience and we can show the advertisers who’s asking for [the print title] and who’s going to read it,” McGovern said. “It takes away the risk.”

What works in the U.S. doesn’t work the same way globally, of course. Scandinavia and Korea are among the regions of the world that are innovating most successfully in online publishing, McGovern told us. In contrast, India is still a healthy print market but with a budding cell phone culture that may make it the first major economy to jump from paper to mobile devices without an intermediate PC stage.

There are some other gems in this interview. One is about IDG’s flirtation with a public offering through its books division a decade ago. McGovern, who has always taken a dim view of the public markets, relates how the experience distracted the group from its traditional market into ancillary businesses where it had no expertise. “If they had stayed private, I think they’d be a larger and more successful company today,” he commented.

We also talked about IDG’s phenomenal success in China, where it publishes a host of consumer titles in addition to its big technology brands. IDG’s venture capital arm now makes more money for the company from investing in Chinese businesses than the rest of the company does from publishing.

If you want to hear an optimistic perspective on the future of media from someone who is leading the charge, listen to this podcast (right click and choose “Save As…” to download to your computer). I think you’ll find it to be 25 minutes well spent.

Labels: computerworld, hina, IDG, infoworld, newmedia, publishing, technologypublishing, venturecapital

  ¶ 5:08 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 05/13/2008

• New Google Service Makes Web Pages Social

  Someone was going to figure this out sooner or later. Social networks should be part of the broader Web, not a walled garden. Google is on to something here.

  tags: daily_reading, social_networks, google

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 05/11/2008

• If pigs could fly

  Jeff Jarvis tells an incredible story of airline cluelessness, illustrating why that industry's focus on wringing every last dollar out of the customer is repelling the people it most needs to attract.

  tags: daily_reading

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 05/09/2008

• Army reacts to shoddy barracks

  A video posted on YouTube spurs the US Army to award $250 million to clean up the filthy barracks. Citizen journalism in action?

  tags: daily_reading, ndw, citizen_journalism, video

• Forrester: B-to-b marketers fail community marketing test

  Companies that delegate community engagement to their marketing and PR departments are setting themselves up for failure. They need to involve people at all levels of the organization. Unfortunately, the recipe-for-failure model appears to be the more popular one at the moment.

  tags: daily_reading, research, social_media

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Secrets of Blogger Relations From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

Since embracing social media two years ago, Dell Computer has learned a few lessons. One of its key blogger relations people shared some secrets last week in a keynote interview at the New Communications Forum in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Richard Binhammer is charged with monitoring and engaging with the active ecosystem of people who blog about Dell. In a keynote interview with John Cass, Binhammer talked about negativity, a concern often voiced by PR people. Dell has had its share of blogger criticism, going back to the famous Dell Hell incident of three years ago. But by methodically reaching out to complainers, the company reduced negativity from nearly half of all online posts to about 20% in a little less than a year. The secret? "Just talk to people," Binhammer said. Most of the time, all they want is to be heard. Demonstrate that you're listening and you can resolve most complaints.

But here’s an interesting fact: After reducing that negativity factor to 20%, the Dell team has been unable to bring it consistently below that level. Binhammer, whose background is in politics, theorizes that 20% is a natural floor, in the same way that 20% of the population always votes for the same political party, regardless of who runs.

This is worth remembering. Even the best businesses have a few unhappy customers. Your mileage may vary, but you should never expect to achieve 100% satisfaction. It’s more likely that your blogger relations program will get you to a manageable yet stubborn base level. That's your floor, and you probably can't do much to break through it.

Finding Resources
Binhammer also shed some light on how Dell allocates its communications resources. With so many tech bloggers out there, you'd think the company would have a small army of communications folks monitoring and responding to conversations. In fact, it has just two people sharing the job. The reason? Dell is lining up the whole company behind the effort to get more engaged with customers. PR monitors the airwaves, but doesn’t try to resolve every issue. Most comments are forwarded to the appropriate group for response.

I wish more companies would do this. Bloggers tend to be well-informed and passionate, which means that their inquiries and comments demand knowledgeable responses. Companies that simply delegate the response to PR are failing to benefit from the really rich conversations they can have with their most informed customers. Everyone from sales to engineering should want to speak to customers whenever possible. Why let marketing have all the fun?

Labels: blogculture, blogging, corporate_blog

  ¶ 9:53 PM 2 Comments

  Daily Reading 05/08/2008

• Gartner Says Social Networks Are Attracting Too Much Traffic for Retailers to Ignore

  But don't just dive in. The research organization has a list of 10 factors retailers should consider before leveraging social networks. The opportunities are too good to overlook.

  tags: daily_reading, social_networks, vertical

• Twitter Apps and Tools Becoming More Plentiful

  Bloggers Blog has a whole bunch of new Twitter tools.

  tags: daily_reading, twitter

• Southwest Airlines' Blog Re-launches

  ...and it's a big improvement, says corporate blogging expert Debbie Weil.

  tags: daily_reading, corporate_blog

• Measuring a blog's success

  Online Journalism Blog gathers up a variety of online measurement metrics and applies them to a set of top UK journalism blogs. There are some tools listed here that I wasn't aware of. This is well worth reading if you want a holistic view of your blog's popularity

  tags: daily_reading, metrics, blog

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 05/06/2008

• 28 Tips To Make You a StumbleUpon Superstar

  The more I use StumbleUpon, the better I like it. This post goes into some of the finer points of the SU culture, particuarly how to manage the limited friends network.

  tags: daily_reading

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments