I found this video on Robert Scoble’s blog. I thought it was a great overview of the Blogworld event. They do a great job of bringing the life of the event to everyone who couldn’t be there.
At BlogWorld Expo, Leo Laporte announced in his keynote some exciting news. You can now get his podcasts on your TV using a Roku box, all thanks to a new service from Mediafly which aims to put podcasts onto every device you have. No more subscribing in iTunes messiness, just find the show and press the play button.
Brent Mitchell, MediaFly’s Chief Technology Officer, explains how the system works in this video interview from BlogWorld Expo.
One of the more interesting booths on the BlogWorld show floor was the US Army booth. You might be asking what’s the Army doing at a blog conference. Well, the US Army seems to get it. They need young men and women to join them and help protect our country, and they know that these young people are spending their time on the social web.
So how is the US Army dealing with the messy, distributed, un-controllable social web? It’s doing what it does best. It’s developing processes, tools, roadmaps and training to deal with ambiguity. I don’t think there’s any one better at taking potentially complicated, almost always ambiguous, and frequently dangerous situations and preparing its people to perform at consistently high levels.
In another social track, Social Web Analyst Jeremiah Owyang answered my question about who is putting processes around social web and he points quickly to the military. In his case, he pointed to the US Air Force’s response roadmap. (BTW, The US Army has one too.)
The star of the Army’s social media efforts on display at BlogWorld was ArmyStrongStories.com, a blogging system that lets anyone in the Army post to the blog. It can be used to help recruits see what it’s like from first hand accounts by people like themselves and to bring the soldiers’ voice to life for all of us.
Major Mary Constantino was kind enough to share a few minutes explaining ArmyStrongStories.com.
Here’s the video:
Go Army! Follow the US Army.
Blog: http://ArmyStrongStories.com
Facebook: http://facebook.com/goarmy.com
Myspace: http://myspace.com/usarmy
Twitter: http://twitter.com/armystories
YouTube: http://youtube.com/armystrongstories
Press: http://armyaccessionsnewsroom.com
At the BlogWorld Expo, Jason Van Orden talked about achieving an effective $816 CPM for his downloads, as compared to the average podcaster getting $15-40 CPM. He got my attention.
Here’s the quick video version of how he did it. The longer post summarizes the rest of his presentation about how to grow your audience on the web. He has some excellent advice, which may be one of the reasons he has been able to realize such a return on his efforts.
Jason is an expert in new media and internet marketing. He is also the author of Promoting Your Podcast.
Jason starts out by discussing goals. The end goal is an action, something we want the audience to do because of our efforts. But we have some work to do to earn the action.
We need influence to make the action happen, and we don’t get influence instantly. We have to bank influence overtime and then we can make the withdrawel.
Before influence, comes engagement. We need an audience that this active and engaged with the content and the subject.
Before engagement, comes permission. We need the audience to opt-in in some way, to sign up for our email list, subscribe to our podcast or blog, or follow us on Twitter or Facebook. We need them to take a step to give us permission to send them stuff.
Finally, before permission, comes attention. We need to get their attention to get the process started.
Jason describes these steps as the New Media Money Map:
Jason then dove into the subject of attention in more detail.
He pointed out that we live in an attention economy and that competing for attention is the focus on new media marketers.
Jason went on to describe the components of new media magnetism that can help you gain more attention.
He described the components as relevance, reciprocity, authority, trust, convenience and desire (either urgent pain or rational passion). Building these components into your content and behavior will help you gain more attention.
He went on to describe what he called the preeminence principle. This is all about making sure you are the expert everywhere your users go. This ubiquitous expertise helps reinforce your position in the users mind.
Jason provided some great tips on how to be ubiquitous. He described how high rankings in search engines is essential and how it’s not just Google, but also iTunes and Youtube. He described how all search engines use relevance and authority to drive their rankings. In iTunes, he has found that keywords are what drives relevance and subscriptions, ratings and reviews help to drive authority.
Some other tools to use include Feedburner and Tubemogul to help with distribution. He also suggested Webcam Max and Camtasia as software tools to help generate content.
Moving on to permission, he described how your email list is still your most important list, but now you have Twitter followers, RSS followers, Facebook fans etc. Don’t overlook building those lists as well. He pointed out that you should make your opt-in one of the most prominent parts of your web page and make sure it’s above the fold. Aweber and iContact were his two suggestions for mailing list management.
He suggested GotoWebinar as one of his key tools to convert people on Twitter and Facebook into email lists and conversion opportunities. Don’t sell on Twitter, use it for sending invitations.
Jason then described his thoughts on engagement. The drivers of engagement are knowing you, liking you and trusting you.
You want your audience to resonate with you. He also said that telling stories is a method that works exceptionally well.
He suggested The Story Factor by Annette Simmons as a great resource for improving your story telling.
At this point, we started running out to time, but you can get more information from Jason at his blog.
The last two days, I attended BlogWorld Expo, held in Las Vegas. The show covered a wide range of topics interesting to bloggers and podcasters, including topics for bloggers who want to turn their new media efforts into commercial successes, newbies wanting to get started and companies trying to develop strategies and processes for working with social media. I focused my time on the tracks relating to turning your blog or podcast into a commercial success.
From those tracks, I came away with four key takeaways for bloggers and podcasters who are trying to become commercial successes at what they do.
1. You have to be willing to work hard. Whether you’re trying to break through or already well known, you need to put in the hours to make it work. The evidence suggests that the most successful bloggers 3-5 times every day. Whether it’s blogging, podcasting, video, or micro-blogging, consistently producing lots of content is a key component of success.
2. You need to be the expert, or a least perceived as the expert. And you need to put in the time to stay ahead of others in your field. Expertise leads to credibilty which can lead to trust and conversion.
3. You need to develop and follow a process for successful new media marketing, capturing attention, engaging your audience, building influence and ultimately getting your audience to take action. I saw a great presentation on the topic from Jason Van Orden and will be providing detailed notes in a later post, so stay tuned.
4. Most of us need produce a signature product to be commercially successful. Making money via advertising just doesn’t seem to pay enough to make it work unless you have a huge audience. Whether it be an ebook, a coaching class or a continuity program, product seems to be the way people make good money. If you can develop a successful continuity program, that seems to be the most lucrative product.
Tim Westergren, chief strategy officer and founder of Pandora, was the keynote speaker at the Digital Music Forum West this morning. We interviewed Tim about a year and a half ago and at that time Pandora faced some real challnges.
In his keynote, Tim updated the audience on the current state of Pandora and his thoughts on the future of online radio.
Tim started his speech by observing the how the when you book a flight on Expedia you get a slew of other offers for hotels, cars, shows and even pedicures. He stated that their might be a lot of lessons for the music industry that can be learned from the travel industry.
The focus of his talk was “From Competition to Interdependence”. He observed that in the arduous discussions of royalties and the subsequent compromise everyone had to give to make it work for everyone.
Broadcast radio is a big guerilla in music. Of the 20 hours people spend listening to music each week, 17 are listened to on radio. Music will go as radio goes.
Artists and labels have organized themselves around the radio industry. All the effort goes into getting on the air.
Broadcast radio is gradually being replaced by online radio, driven heavily by the mobile revolution. This is changing the relationship between radio and artists.
In online radio, it’s much more democratic and inclusive thousands and thousands of artists can now be included.
And the money flows are changing too. The money broadcast radio collected from advertisers mostly stayed with the radio station. In contrast with online radio a large percent of the money flows through to the artist. Of the $40 million in revenues that Pandora collects a 75% will flow through to artists via royalties.
The industry structure is also changing as artist services are growing fast.
The missing piece has been scale. How do you get this new interdependence to work at scale?
Pandora is now starting to reach scale. Pandora now has 36 million registered users,
12 million mobile users, 65,000 new registrations a day and providing 2 billion hours of radio in 2009. This is an example of online radio starting to reach the scale tipping point where they attract national advertisers who want to reach large markets. This means that more and more money can flow through online radio to the artists.
He also sees a day when services like Pandora can become a really rich source of information to bands about who is listen to their music, what they listen too, where they are etc all provided via a dashboard.
Tim’s ultimate vision is to have 1 billion users listening to music on Pandora creating a global scale that provides lots and lots of money to artists.
At the Digital Music Forum West event, a panel focused on the future of internet radio.
Panelists
Why is Internet Radio relevant?
Kurt Hanson, of RAIN, points out that radio is how the average music fan finds music.
Johnie Floater, from Live365, the most important aspect of internet radio is bandwidth to support huge diversity of content. Even the classical music of the Canary Islands can have its own channel on the internet, something which is not possible on terrestrial or satellite radio.
Jim Rondeinelli, of Slacker, points out that most people don’t want to program their own music flow and radio provides that programming.
How do you make money on a radio focused on a micro segment?
According to Floater, subscriptions are about 50% of the revenue coming into Live365 radio stations. Rondinelli seconds the subscription model as being an important part of Slacker’s revenue.
Is advertising on internet radio working?
From the discussion on the panel, it seems to be hard to find advertising for internet radio due to the small size of each channel’s audience. Sponsorship seems to be a model that the panel sees as having more success. Slacker seems to be having more success with advertising selling out their inventory in the first quarter. Floater says that they get their advertising on traditional channels focused on popular music.
Rondinelli points out that local advertising pays a lot better than broadcast advertising.
What about internet royalties?
The panel dove into the discussion without hesitation. Rondinelli describes the major differences between the royalties paid by satellite radio, terrestrial radio and internet radio, with internet radio paying much higher rates. He goes on to say that paying different royalties based on method of delivery is ludicrous.
Hanson points out that if the music industry got the royalties they want then the entire internet radio would shut down.
Is Internet radio competing with terrestrial radio?
Hanson says that it is both a competitor and a supplement to terrestrial radio. When Live365 etc are built into the car, then it acts like a competitor. Floater says that if you look at the entertainment pie, music is just one slice. Over time the internet is gaining an increasing share of the music slice.
Rondinelli says it really is location dependent. If your in your car, you’re most likely listen to terrestrial radio. Hanson points out that with an iPhone you can get internet radio right in your car. Rondinelli says its not so great with the AT&T network in many places.
Kevin Reilly – President of Entertainment, Fox Broadcasting Interviewed by David Wertheimer, Executive Director, The Entertainment Technology Center @ USC.
How is the business different today?
When Kevin started at NBC in 1988, he started to see articles being written about how network TV was a dinosaur. The articles we see today are similar. The death of TV is greatly exaggerated. Back then you could see that cable would grow and network TV would lose share to cable.
There was no discussion of how the business model would change back then. TV was the greatest advertising mechanism every invented. While the media mix will change, there is so much information coming out now that people actually miss ads when they get pulled out of shows. People want to know about products and ads play a useful role.
People will declare TV dead. While there is no turning back the clock, there will be TV networks in the future.
What are the fundamentals that will always apply?
Kevin says he’s really shocked to see how much sometimes nobody knows anything.
We can’t make declarations about what will work and what won’t. He tells the story of how everybody passed on the Sopranos, how Law & Order was not seen as the great show and the same thing applies to the media and the business model. There is massive change going on, but when people declare something to be the “way things will be” it’s more often wrong. He says the one constant is quality content.
If we were at this conference 2 years ago everybody would be saying long form video won’t work on the web. Now, we see it as one of the leading drivers of video on the web.
Where are you on UGC?
We all love a polished production, but great entertainment can be some 5 minutes of truly entertaining content. He’s all for it if we can make a living with it.
What experiments have worked and what haven’t?
This is not like trying to re-tool the auto industry. He says the media business is very responsive. It’s all about the risk takers. He points to Rupert Murdoch as someone who has challenged the status quo and its one of the traits of News Corp.
Talk about year round development
The more things stay the same, the more they stay the same. The old network model was a license to print money. The cycle worked. It wasn’t very efficient. Peaks and valleys in work were huge.
It seemed to outlive it’s usefulness, but people kept doing it. When we came out to the strike, it seemed like an opportunity to move to a year round basis. It’s a risk, but it creates opportunity to use highly viewed shows at the end of their season to promote new shows.
Talk about the Remote Free TV idea.
The idea is an experiment. Last year they were setting the schedule and they decided they needed to do something different. They had been stuffing more and more commercials into shows. Advertisers had come to view the commercial load as clutter. They decided to cut the ads in half and charge twice as much per ad. Fringe was the first experiment. It was really received well by the audience. The rub was that the advertisers who would pay the premium were few in number.
Not sure whether this will be the model for the future, but it may be the way to go. (My note: he should read the Innovators Dilemma. TV is in segment retreat to the high end. Higher quality ads at higher prices. Same move as the steel industry etc. Worth reading if you care about this stuff.)
What about the relationship with Cable Networks.
We are at a saturation point with cable. People have 118 networks and watch 16. It’s no longer good to add more networks. They are negotiating with cable networks to take cash for their network broadcasts, but it may mean a reduction in the number of cable networks that companies like Fox have.
When things are available online via Hulu, how does that change the relationship with cable companies?
We have to create legitimate models before illegitimate ones pop up, like they did in music industry. Fox makes high end content which need 10 minutes of premium advertising to support. When people watch 24 on Hulu we make less money. How we balance this is important. Windowing might help this. Cable companies have a 7 day delay before it goes online. It’s just one of many challenges we are dealing with.
For example, the way we finance these shows has changed as well. It used to be getting to re-run syndication. That market has seriously contracted. We need to figure out new revenue models.
What’s popped culture?
Pop culture and mass media had a symbiotic relationship. It was a great robust time for media. Now we’re living in the era of Moore’s law. Everything is moving much faster. Managing the relationship with pop culture is challenging when things are moving so fast. Media is not moving in lock step with pop culture. It’s the beginning of a really big transition. Even in a forest fire, there is rebirth after the fire.
Stan Rogow, Executive Producer/Director, Gemini Division and CEO of Electric Farm Entertainment.
Why is a successful producer even dealing with the Internet?
Stan says he has a son who was just not watching TV. He says his son asked him about CSI which he saw on YouTube. His son’s generation just doesn’t know about networks.
The Internet is just growing and growing.
What does it take to make a successful show on the internet?
Principally, it starts with a simple thing – a great idea that the audience will embrace. If you don’t have that nothing else matters, no matter what channel of distribution you use.
The difficulty of making a 3 minute episode with a beginning, middle and an end, with a cliff hanger to bring people back is very hard. Some writers figure that out, some don’t. It’s very challenging to make that short format work.
The other thing that is becoming very important is the social networks into account. They are different and they will evolve into places where different type of entertainment will migrate to different places.
The challenge is to stay ahead of the curve. It changes always.
One of Stan’s partners spent two years working on games. They see the game aspects of the core piece of entertainment is important and growing in importance.
How did you get Rosario to do the show?
One of the writers of Afterworld is a friend of hers. She did one of the voices on Afterglow and it turns out she’s a sci-fi fan. We asked if we could do something with her and she said yes. Finding an artist that thinks the internet is cool and wants to be there, is what it takes.
Where’s the money?
Gemini Division has different model. They are using product integration with 5 different brands that are very organic. Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, UPS. They talked to the brands to find what was really cool about their stuff. They then could integrate the product features into the show.
The show starts with Rosario talking into the PDA, they had her talking into the Windows Mobile software. They created a new interface which was not the traditional Windows Mobile interface. Microsoft let them go ahead and it got really good reviews. Now waiting to see what Microsoft does with the interface.
They have not done pre-rolls – but they are open to experimenting. They believe there is more value in product integration, but traditional media buyers still want the things they know.
What about distribution?
Phase 1 was tied to NBC for the first 50 episodes. Phase 2 will be opened up to much wider distribution. There are lots of people who love the show now, but it can be opened up to many more people with wider distribution.
What can be learned from Quarterlife?
Internet entertainment is internet entertainment and TV entertainment is TV entertainment. They will re-cut the web version to make a DVD, but the TV version is a different thing as is a game version of the show.
At the 2009 Future of Hollywood conference, held at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California, Blair Westlake, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Media & Entertainment Group was interviewed by Tom Adams, President of Adams Media Research.
Hulu has been a great consumer success. But it’s not clear how it plays out for the traditional distributors like cable and the content producers.
The traditional distributors are saying hold on, we’re paying to distribute this content and you are giving it away for free online.
The content producers are used to the TV load of advertising revenues which is much higher than the ad load at Hulu. We may not be talking about trading analog dollars for digital pennies, but it may be analog dollars for digital dimes.
If the cost per thousand impressions doesn’t change, it’s a hard to see how things progress quickly. It just doesn’t make economic sense for Madison Avenue.
One of the things that technology allows to do is to target ads much more effectively, which may be a way to increase the digital revenue without the same advertising load. There is some certainty that advertising will remain a major component of the revenue model.
There’s a tendency to lump music, TV and movies into an entertainment bucket. Movies have two primary sources of revenue. Renting a night at the movies which represent about 30% of revenues and then the sales of DVDs and the like representing the bulk of the revenue.
Cloud computing based movie distribution will begin to substitute for DVD’s as rental on demand grows. For example, while DVD sales may be down 30%, Xbox video on demand revenues have roughly doubled.
Looking at TV, before DVRs, TV viewers would watch about 2 out of 4 episodes of shows. With DVRs, that number has increased to the average viewer watching 3 out of 4 episodes. Cloud based access could play a role in further increasing the viewing ratio.
Is the next step the Netflix subscription model? Fewer and fewer movies are being distributed via the ad supported model. The Netflix model is not new. HBO has been around for a long time and is the premier movie channel. Netflix is a different time window than HBO. It’s offering access to the library. One in ten Netflix subscribers use the Xbox Live service to access movies to consume billions of minutes of media.
The two models that seem to make the most sense are subscription and ad supported distribution.
What’s been the impact on the rental market? The VOD market should see strong growth. The average consumer only watches a movie a couple of times which makes rental a sensible alternative.
However, the switch to online will take longer than people expect. It won’t be one model for everyone.
Westlake looks at the audience and see different segments. The older audiences will be stay wedded to the traditional channels. The younger generation will be different. Just like they prefer cell phones, they will be looking at it with a very different set of eyes. They will drive the change.
You are currently browsing the archives for the Event category.
 |
|||
| Company | Contact Us | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Support Digital Podcast| OPML Links| Podcast Search Service | |||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|||
Copyright ©2005-2008 Bella Ventures, Inc. |
|||
