Edison Media Research has released a new study the podcast consumer. The study has lots of interesting information that I think reinforces the importance of traditional media companies starting to think of subscribable media as an important new line of business.

Key findings from the study include:

Podcasting continues to grow quickly: Audio podcast listeners grew from 13% of Americans to 18% and video podcast consumption grew from 11% to 15%.

Podcasts enable more media consumption: The people consuming podcasts spent approximately 90 minutes longer per week listening to online audio than other online audio consumers

Podcast consumers are an attractive advertising demo: Podcast consumers are more likely to have a college degree and earn in excess of $75,000. They are also more frequent online shoppers and spend more money online than other Americans. These consumers are also adverse to interruption based advertising and use pop up blockers, SPAM filters and other tools to block out commercials.

Podcast consumers are internet social: 25% of them have MySpace pages and spend lots more time on the internet than non listeners.

Edison’s key takeaways from the study for podcasters:

• Podcasting is a viable alternative means to target attractive consumers who are otherwise proving difficult to reach with traditional advertising. Consumers get to choose what they subscribe to and when they subscribe they can be both more engaged and more loyal
• Podcasters should consider lifestyles, context and even potential ‘dayparting’ for their audiences. In other words, don’t just leave it to chance that people will listen to your podcast any old time. Give them a time and a reason to listen to your content.
• Take lessons from broadcast media and improve production, staging and create true ‘theatre of the mind.” Production quality matters when your competing with NPR et al. Make your podcasts sound and look good. Make them easy to understand.
• Remember the ‘Mid-Tail.’ Don’t think you have to focus on the “long tail” niches. There are good segments of mid-sized audiences that are undeserved by traditional media that can be targeted via podcasting. Edison points to BMW drivers as an example.

Via MWGBlog.com

[tags]market research, edison media research, media consumption, podcast consumption, podcast market size[/tags]

Podcasting 1.0 has been the age of iTunes and iPods. The original software clients that were built in late 2004 and early 2005 were designed to automatically download media files and put them into your iTunes music folder. By labeling the files as podcasts, they automatically went into a folder on iTunes for podcasts and from there the files were automatically synchronized with your iPod.

Clever and simple it was. Using the RSS feed, you could set your software to record your favorite shows directly to your iPod for listening or viewing whenever you wanted. The iPod became a portable Tivo for audio and later video with the release of the video iPod.

Media could be published by anyone, anyone could subscribe and new stuff showed up on your iPod by simply connecting it to your computer. The term Podcast for this subscription based media distribution mechanism was a natural.

This simple innovation became even bigger when Apple saw the opportunity that podcasts presented. Massive amounts of new and free content that could be provided by iTunes. The fact that it was free meant that everyone could start filling up their 40 or 80 GB iPods with all kinds of subscribable media.

In 2005, we saw lots of growth in podcasting and by 2006 it had been picked up by mainstream media as well. NPR, NBC, ABC and many other media companies started to provide podcast content and these mainstream media publisher quickly rose to the tops of the iTunes charts along with a number of new players.

While the growth that came from Apple’s integration of podcasts into iTunes has been great, I believe the tight association and integration with iTunes and iPod is holding back podcasting from realizing its true potential.

The word itself leads one to believe you need an iPod if you want to get a podcast. Those of us in podcasting constantly try to communicate that you don’t need an iPod to enjoy podcasts, but it’s a small voice compared to the perceptions of consumers. The issue is further compounded by the fact that the easiest way to subscribe to podcasts is to use iTunes.

The Limitations of the Pod Market

The problem is that the installed base of between 100 and 200 million iPod devices is actually quite limited, particularly when you take into account the number of iPods people own and how many actually get used.

In my own home, my kids and I have six or seven iPods, and only one of them gets used for playing podcasts. I also have many friends who have been given the device for Christmas or a birthday, but don’t actually use it.

If we reduce the installed based by 50% for duplicate iPod owners and a further 50% for those who don’t use the device or listen to podcasts we end up with a potential market size of 25 to 50 million users. If we take the old 80-20 rule, it says that the hard core market for podcasts on iPods is probably between 5 and 10 million users at the current time.

If we move beyond iPods and say the market is iTunes users then things look a little brighter. iTunes is said to have an active user base of 500 million. If we apply the same math that we used above we could probably get the market up to 125 million people who have tried podcasts, with a hard core market of 25 million people who are heavy users.

Moving Beyond the iPod

The market starts to look more interesting if we move beyond iPods and iTunes to the broader internet. Some recent survey data from Universal McCann shows that of 475 million active internet users in the world 45 percent have downloaded a podcast and that 7 percent download daily. These numbers suggest a market of 213 million who have tried podcasts and a hard core market of 33 million users who download daily.

Beyond the PC, lies the huge potential of the mobile phone market. Phones that support subscribing to podcasts like the iPhone (received through iTunes) and Nokia’s N95 (received through an on-phone podcast application) show the potential of mobile phones as the next generation of portable Tivos.

There are billions of mobile phones in active use every day. While most of these phones don’t yet have the capability needed to be portable Tivos, the installed base continues to be upgraded at a rapid pace.

500 million cell phones equipped with mp3 players were shipped in 2007 and estimates call for over 900 million to be shipped each year by 2011. On the video front, 3G phones with video capabilities is one of the fastest growing segments.

Within the next 5 to 10 years, it is quite likely that most new mobile phones being sold will be video capable, and if good fortune/open markets prevail they will be WiFi enabled. This will expand the market for subscribable media to billions of mobile devices worldwide with potential audience sizes as big or bigger then television.

Connected digital TVs represent yet another big opportunity, but one that will take longer to evolve due to the slower turn over of the installed base of devices. HDTV’s are basically very large monitors that can be connected to the internet via set top boxes, PCs, Mac Minis, Apple TV and the like. Tivo is already providing some support for podcasting. The publish and subscribe model that is the foundation of podcasting can turn every one of these devices into Tivos for internet video and audio.

The PC, mobile and HDTV are the markets that will allow subscribable media/podcasting (or whatever new name it takes on) to realize its true potential. These markets will give podcasting the reach and scale required to turn subscribable media into a sizable industry. These are the markets that matter and the markets that every serious publisher should be working towards. Now is the time to establish your position.

Getting from here to there

Getting from here to there requires a change in mindset. In many cases, today’s traditional publishers treat subscribable media as a sideline with little strategic thought and poor execution.

In contrast, new media players like Revision3 and TWiT.TV are thinking strategically about building audiences and brands that form the basis of a real business. Winners will take the business seriously.

Publishers who see the opportunity on the horizon will begin to shift their focus from iPods/iTunes to the PC, mobile and connected TV segments. Too many publishers rely too heavily on iTunes. This dependence manifests itself in many ways such as the use of one click iTunes buttons as the only way to subscribe and the use of iTunes as the way to present the content archive.

This shift in focus requires a multi-device content strategy. This is particularly important for video, because what plays on an iPod, won’t necessarily play on a cell phone. In a recent survey I did of 25,000 video podcast episodes, I found only 6 episodes encoded with 3gp (the video standard for 3G phones). If publishers want to tap the mobile market, then they need to make sure that the content they produce can be played on these alternative devices.

Building real businesses in this sector will take investment and sound execution. Revision3 has taken in $9 million in investment and Mevio (formerly PodShow) has taken in $24 million in funding. This is the kind of investment that traditional publishers will need to make if they are serious about building new media businesses.

On the execution front, there are profound differences between those who are focused on building new media businesses and those that treat it as a sideline. Companies like Revision3 and TWiT.TV show a commitment to the business and best practices that is just not found in many traditional media companies.

These new media companies are successfully building brand franchises and growing audiences that are attractive to advertisers. They are positioning themselves ahead of the huge demand wave that’s building.

If you want to ride that wave, now is the time to get serious about building a new media business.

As always, comments and feedback are appreciated.

[tags]podcasting, podcast market size, podcasting 2.0, subscribable media, mobile media[/tags]

In this panel at the LA Games Conference, the expert panel talks about innovations in connected games. What does it mean to be connected? What are the big changes and what’s next? This is a continuation of our live blogging at the fifth panel from Digital Media Wire’s LA Games Conference 2008.

Panelists
Keive Huffman, SVP, Business Development & Sales, Championship Gaming Series
Robert Norton, VP, Business Development, King.com
Rob Uhrich, Senior Director, Digital Markets, PaymentOne
Brent Hurley, Strategic Partner Developments, YouTube
Jason Rubinstein, Senior Director, Entertainment, Mobile Devices, Motorola
Moderator: Jay Moore, Head of Special Ops, The Strategery Group

Jay asks What is connected gaming? What’s your perspective on what Connected Gaming is.

Jason: Connected gaming is a better experience. The ability to get it from your friends the ability to get it easily on your phone, and ulitimately how social networks connect with games.

Brent: Game developers can pull in relevant data to make the game better. If it’s raining outside, it could be raining in the game.

Rob: Connected relationships are what it’s all about. Usually my kids fight all the time. Seeing my kids working together on webkins shows the power of connected gaming. Strengthening current relationships and develop new relationships is an important part of connected gaming.

Robert: In all our games you are playing against other people. It’s about people vs. people. Helping them connect. The lobby system is the most important part of our site.

Kieve: We look at connected gaming as a huge part of what Championship Gaming Series is all about. We see a way for connecting a competitive gaming to main stream audience. Television is CGS’s primary distribution channel. The online element introduces a new element of interactivity. CGS just announced a YouTube channel.

Jay: What have been the big breakthroughs in the past year?

Robert: Figuring out pre-roll and post roll advertising has opened up free ad supported games. Another breakthrough is the social network sites that allow game developers to reach very large audiences.

Jason: VMK had to shut itself off due to unexpected success. Scrabulous is great. A couple of guys in India introduced something that ignited a lot of interest in casual gaming and it has a business model.

Kieve: It’s amazing how strong the communities are. Any time we run a tournament it’s a frenzy. Our traffic goes up 10x.

Robert: Scrabulous reinvented turn based games. The game had been around for a year before it went on Facebook. The social network allowed the game to become the marketing tool itself. By building in the right features, the engineering could drive the marketing of the game.

Jay: What’s been driving connectedness in the MMO space?

Kieve: We work with World of Warcraft. It’s been a lot of fun to work with them. They’ve created this immersive environment. The fun has been trying to mainstream this community by publicly broadcasting the game tournaments.

Jason: What’s not happening is MMO expansion into mobile. It doesn’t even have to be the game. There’s tremendous opportunity in mobile for applications like tools, utilities and teaser games.

Jay: Will the iPhone be disruptive?

Jason: The SDK and platform is not really open, so publishers should beware. Apple shattered some ceilings that only they may have been able to shatter. It still needs to achieve volume to be disruptive. Google’s open mobile is more likely to be disruptive.

Jay: What is the future of UGC games and mashups?

Brent: We want to encourage sharing of game video so people can share their in game experiences.

Robert: This is one of the most significant developments. Over the next 18 months, UGC around the game. The combination of community, games and flash skills set this up to grow. It opens gaming up to anyone with the right skills.

Kieve: One of the most popular things is sharing your best victory. Ode to Gamer Girl is one of the most popular videos around. It’s hard to beat this kind of marketing.

Kieve: Counterstrike is one of our most popular games. For the upcoming season, we are using a user generated map.

Jay: How will advertising play out?

Robert: Everyone is experimenting. Micro-transactions are the real revenue now. Advertising is the potential for real growth. Right now we’re experimenting with what works for users and how it impacts user’s interactions with the site and the games.

Jason: I side with the consumer. The consumers want free and they want quality. Diner Dash costs $20 for a download. On the mobile it costs $4-5. Consumers expect that games will be on the handset. Advertising could make this possible.

Rob: Advertising as a part of the business model continues to be a important part of the revenue mix. Game developers just need to be careful about how they integrate into advertising into the games.

Jay: What needs to change in the home?

Kieve: The technology in the US is getting better, but it still is not a great user experience. In Korea and China where they have the bandwidth, particularly in mobile, connected gaming is doing very well.

Rob: It needs to get much simpler.

Brent: Bandwidth into the home is the block for streaming high def into the home. So hitting the mainstream will take some time.

Jay: What categories will be disruptive in the next wave?

Jason: The companies that are positioned to do well are the big companies and the people who spin off from them and really understand the networks. Companies that are thinking about where the real numbers are and how to reach them with proven game mechanics can light up the mass markets.

Jay: What do you see happening next? What would like to see?

Kieve: True connectivity, that’s ubiquitous and that works.

Robert: The games that represent the cutting edge of content are teaching us about new things that work. Seeing these things move to other activities and applications is exciting.

Rob: The gaming market will become much more competitive.

Brent: Excitement about derivative works. It can be exciting to see and interact with the game and game play in different ways.

Jason: Open mobile networks. Fewer mobile operating systems. Super distribution – the ability for people to send media to friends get. Like to see US legalize online gambling.

[tags]LA Games Conference 2008, Connected Games, gaming[/tags]

You’ve seen the scantily clad cocktail waitresses in the casinos.  The sexy woman posed on the hood of a car.  We know that sex gets men’s attention.

But does sex actually sell?

A new research study by Brian Knutson of Stanford suggests the answer is yes; at least, that heterosexual men are more likely to take financial risks after being subjected to positive emotional stimuli—in the case of the study, erotic photos of a man and woman.

Why should digital marketers and publishers care?

As digital content and advertising become increasingly intertwined (here’s one of many posts on that topic), and marketers and publishers get better about measuring the effectiveness of their efforts (read more in our mini-eBook on social media performance management), we can expect the trend toward sex in advertising to be further invigorated (pun intended), at least in advertising that targets men.

And as social media becomes an increasingly effective marketing tool, we can also expect more of the digital equivalent of those cocktail waitresses.  The Stanford study alluded to the particular relevance in online gaming (gambling) businesses, and I noticed the effect firsthand when checking out XuQa.com, an online casual gaming community co-founded by Murtaza Hussain, co-founder and CEO of PeanutLabs and the subject of a recent DigitalPodcast interview.  Many of the most popular gaming rooms in XuQa are hosted by very attractive women (or at least hosts with photos of very attractive women), and the formula seems to be quite successful there.

By the way, for our female readers (my wife included) who by now are gloating over the superiority of your half of the species, beware:  Mr. Knutson is planning to test women’s responses in the future.

[tags]Brian Knutson, Erotic Content, Stanford University, Sex[/tags]

Andrew and Alex joined Forrester for its 2008 Marketing Forum, which focused on the challenge of customer engagement in a digital media world.  This second series of articles focuses on case studies of companies using interactive applications as the hook for building communities of superfans.

Creating Brand Advocates at Nike’s Jordan Brand
Emmanuel Brown, Director of Digital and Content, Nike’s Jordan Brand

Nike’s Jordan Brand has developed a couple of immersive experiences for highly engaged fans.  The experiences start with deep insight into these “superfan” needs, and build intense community engagement for these hardcore fans, but are small scale communities relative to the scope of the Jordan Brand.  Which raises the question, are these high ROI applications for engaging and activating superfans, or are they so focused on the hard core that they are failing to engage the brand’s mass market?  Read on and share your opinion…

Emmanuel began by sharing background on Nike, whose headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon is like a Disneyland for adults, and its Jordan Brand division, where Michael Jordan (MJ) still deeply interacts with the brand, the same way that he was engaged with the game of basketball.

Mentally, or digitally, cut to a stirring, inspiring Michael Jordan video (videos can be found at Nike’s site for the Jordan Brand, Jumpman23).

The Jordan Brand.  Nike approached Michael Jordan in 1984 to have a signature shoe built around him, a completely novel concept at the time.  In 1996, the Jordan Brand was born as a division within Nike.  The brand has 110 people versus the Tiger Woods Brand’s 400 people, and both brands support the same amount of revenue.  Nine out of ten people own (or have owned) Air Jordans, and the Jordan Brand is the second in the market behind Nike itself.

The Jordan Brand’s primary consumer is the core urban male 15-20 year old, highly competitive, a leader of the team.  These guys often know what the brand is doing before the news is made public.  The secondary consumer is 12-24 year old males and females, urban and suburban, not necessarily competitive.  Their consumers’ mind space includes social media, television, and the video game space.  The Jordan Brand does a lot of marketing through video games – with them, kids can see the entire line-up.  Most kids know what products they want before they get to the store.

The engagement philosophy for the brand is (1) to engage with consumers where and when they want (online!); (2) product and service together are critical to delivering a greater experience and engagement; and finally (3) the consumer decides.

The Jordan Breakfast Club.  A key platform for engagement is the Jordan Breakfast Club.  The challenge was to establish an authentic position for Jordan in the training marketplace.  Every morning, MJ and his teammates used to wake up and complete a workout regiment before he got to eat his four course breakfast.  So the Jordan Brand went after an unmet need of the target customer around training – everyone says that training is important, but no one tells kids how to train.  The Breakfast Club includes a simple peer-based assessment and a custom designed workout program that can be printed out or downloaded onto an iPod as videos for a huge number of possible workouts.  The Jordan Breakfast Club has 20,000 plus engaged users, and tens of thousands additional views on YouTube.  The Club also did a 10-city summer tour to reach thousands more at day long training camps.  The program won a 2007 Forrester Groundswell Award.

The Jordan Flight Club.  After building the Breakfast Club, the brand started getting more information about its consumers, and next started the Flight Club.  The Jordan brand has a huge “sneaker-head” following, and the Flight Club is about limited edition, one-at-a-time, high demand products for fiercely loyal customers who are willing to pay a very high price and avoid the disappointment of trying to get limited products through retail.  The brand got a lot of feedback from consumers in designing how the Breakfast Club would work.  Members of jumpman23.com got membership offers and the opportunity to invite two more friends – in others words, an “insider” offer for loyal customers only.  Demand went through the roof, with people selling their free invitations on eBay, and over 40,000 members joining in the first 45 days.

Emmanuel’s summary:  (1) create relevant experiences beyond the product, (2) service complementary needs of the consumer, (3) empower engaged consumers to be brand advocates, and (3) create and own communities where they are relevant and authentic.  The Jordan Brand’s next big challenge is to take these opportunities in the digital space and migrate them to the physical space, like the Jordan Breakfast Club tour.

Q&A Discussion

How do you share learning from the Jordan Brand throughout Nike?  We do case studies.  Things may work differently for us versus golf, and we use best practices.

The 15-20 year old market is refreshed every 5 years, so how do you target for the future, and specifically do you market to even younger (under 15) generations?  We try to communicate in a simplified format, keep MJ’s story relevant, and make great products.  We don’t market to the younger kids, but do try to emphasize success through working hard.

What do you mean that you’ve learned the hard way about ignoring customers?  We created a website where consumers could buy one-off products, and only created 6,000 units of a product that 1.6 million consumers tried to buy, crashing the site and generating hate mail.  We use sales data and forecasting to ensure that problem is not repeated going forward.  We’d rather overstock and deal with excess inventory than to have too little product and anger consumers.

For limited editions, doesn’t it help the brand to sell out so fast?  You have to appreciate the global effect of our brand.  Kids in Australia were getting their hands on US-only products; we responded to make the products available there.   We’re pushing to think more globally and satisfy demand, offering limited products in all parts of the world.

The Breakfast Club concept sounds great, but how are you measuring the true impact?  We’re not measuring the financials, but we do track the ongoing activities of the kids who sign up.  One of the Pro teams we visited adopted the philosophy as their primary means of training!

The Association for Downloadable Media, an organization whose purpose is to help provide advertising and audience measurement standards for episodic and downloadable media, announced today a proposal for advertising standards at Ad:Tech San Francisco.

A cross section of podcasters, agencies, device manufacturers and others interested in monetizing downloadable media have developed the proposed standards.

Why do we need standards for downloadable media?

• Lots of podcasts, lots of sponsors, lots of options and confusion
• Like IAB display ad unit guidelines for podcasts
• Allow sponsors to create 1 advertisement for multiple podcasts

The panel believed that the standards should be

• Simple
• Inclusive
• Acceptable

The group is proposing three types of ad standards: Insertions, Content Participation, and Collaterals

Insertions (as provided by advertisers)

• Definition: pre-recorded file provided by sponsor
• Time up to :10, ;15, :30, or :60 seconds
• Location: Pre-roll, post roll mid roll
• Frequency: Variable or time period
• Audio: 128k stereo/64k mono mp3, Sample Rate: 44.1 khz
• Video: H.264 MP$, Aspect 4×3 or 16×9 SD and HD

Content participation

• Definition: When an advertiser’s message is included as part of the audio or video podcast content.
• Time: Variable from :1 second to full episode
• Location: Pre-roll; mid-roll; post-roll; or integrated within one or a series of episodes
• Frequency: Variable by number of episodes per month; variable by number of insertions per user per month; or fixed per channel/feed per month.

Collaterals
All the other real estate that a podcaster has that may be included as part of an advertising or sponsorship package, or as separate items a lá carte.
Examples

• Show notes on podcast website
• ID3 tags in podcast episode file
• Album Art Cards
• Link and banner in enhanced audio podcasts
• Overlays, underlays in video podcasts
• Web banners, buttons, text links, hyperlinks (using IAB standards)
• Email sponsorships
• Press Releases
• Product sales (CDs, DVDs, merchandise)
• Signage/Outdoor (for retail)
• Brochures, flyers

The second area that the ADM focused on is developing a set of proposed measurement guidelines for audience traffic.

The Association of Downloadable Media is recommending compliance with one of two proposed methods to determine true download measurement. These two methods are Native Server Measurement or Third Party Measurement.

In order to comply with these guidelines, publishers would clearly state their download measurement methodologies to interested buyers. Buyers seeking to work with ADM-compliant publishers would be entitled to request and receive these download methodologies. The goal is to achieve high levels of confidence around the metrics for both parties.

Third Party Measurement (TPM)
A Third Party server is the intermediary between the Native Server and another Third Party Server. Third Party Measurement refers to the files measuring the initial download requests as received by a third party server to be delivered to the requester. Because the Third Party server is a constant, it may uniformly measure download statistics across multiple hosting services.

Data logged by third party servers include request information about the media being downloaded. Each request contains the following data that may be utilized for analysis.

• IP Address – Unique Internet address of the user consuming the media file.
• Time Stamp – Time at which the request was made for the media file.
• Request – The request specifies the media file requested and provides the method at which the request should be handled.
• HTTP Status Code – A technical code defined by the HTTP protocol that determines the status of the request.
• Referrer – Location where the request came from.
• User Agent – A unique value that identifies the service or application making the request. e.g. web browser such as Internet Explorer, podcatching agent such as iTunes, a web bot such as Google.
• Byte Range – This is the range of start and end bytes requested by the media consumer.

Native Server Measurement (NSM)
The Native Server is the actual end point where the media is hosted. Native Server
Measurement refers to the log files derived from the Native Server. It may include
the amount of data that was transferred in each log entry, and therefore may provide information to derive more than simple download statistics.

Data logged by native servers include request information about the media being downloaded as well as the amount of bytes transferred during the download transaction. All the data listed above (available to third party servers) applies to Native Servers. In addition, the following data may be utilized for analysis.

• Bytes Served - This is the amount of bytes that have been transferred to the media consumer in a given request. Depending on the type of request made, the bytes served may be less than or equal to the size of media file.

The data contained in either native or third party server log files does not necessarily mean that the data is analyzed. The method of analysis used varies.

Analysis Techniques and Factors

Both types of measurement include analysis techniques, in order to calculate download measurement. These analytic techniques are used to determine the validity of actual downloads (versus duplicated or aborted download attempts)

There are a number of factors used in any given technique to analyze log files.

• IP Address – The IP address may be used to determine if the request is unique or a duplicate. It may also be used to determine geographical information of the media consumer.
• Time Stamp – The date and time may be used to determine if the request should be counted.
• HTTP Status Code – The appropriate HTTP status code is examined to determine if the request should be counted.
• Bytes Served – The value may be used to determine if the media was completely downloaded. (Note: This information is only available from native server log files.)
• Referrer – The origin of the download may be used to determine if the request should be counted. e.g. media that is auto played upon loading a web page may be removed or reported.
• User Agent – The identifier of the application or service consuming the media may be analyzed to determine if the request is unique.
• Byte Range – The range of bytes requested in a given request may be used to determine what portion of the media is requested. When analyzed across multiple requests, the information may provide an accurate assessment to determine if the media was completely downloaded.

The ADM does not require a specific combination of factors or techniques, instead requires that you use analysis that’s appropriate to the business at hand in a way that provides high confidence data and you can explain the process used to create the data. It is left to any company following these guidelines to create techniques that fit their situation. However, it is strongly recommended to include the IP Address in analysis.

These types of measurements can be provided by services like Wizzard Media or PodTrac. UPDATE: ADM members RawVoice and Volomedia are also providing this kind of measurement service.

The proposed standards are open for public review and comment through May 16, 2008. Send to comments and feed back to info@downloadablemedia.org.

Once ratified will be reviewed bi-annually by ADM.

[tags]downloadable media, ADM, Association for Downloadable Media, Advertising, Standards[/tags]

I came up with a short starter list of why Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Communications Officers should make social media a priority.

You need to know what people are saying about you. There is a customer to customer and press to customer conversation going on throughout the internet. Any company that fails to understand and act on this puts themselves at risk for getting blindsided by the conversation. At a minimum, they should be tracking the conversation. The best practice is to go beyond monitoring to building a social media strategy to influence the conversation.

You need to know what your people are saying. If your customers are using social media, it’s also quite likely that your employees are using social media. They will be doing it no only for themselves, but also to fill gaps in the company’s social media strategy. Left un-managed, this presents numerous risks to the company’s reputation and customer/competitive relations. Inappropriate information may get disclosed and comments about policies by employees may confuse customers. Further, it is not uncommon for information published by employees with good intentions to be poorly maintained and out of date. Every company should have a Social Media Policy and a plan for cleaning up/maintaining information published about them across the internet.

You need to make your marketing/communications more efficient. Customer and stakeholder attention is now in shorter supply than ever. Traditional marketing and communications approaches are becoming increasingly less effective and consequently it’s becoming more expensive to realize communication goals. Social media and community are two mechanisms to radically improve efficiency. It will take an investment, but this investment has much greater leverage than investments in traditional media. Traditional media content scales up linearly with cost and have diminishing returns. Social media content scales up with the size of the community and can have compounding returns. Any cost conscious CMO or CCO should be figuring out how to use these tools to make their companies more cost effective.

Tell us why you think CMOs and CCOs should make social media like blogging, podcasting and networking a priority.

PS – Click here to learn more about how the University of Southern California’s CCO is using social media by listening to this Digital Podcast.

[tags]social media marketing, marketing priorities[/tags]

This panel at the Future of Television focused on user generated content, it’s role and the ways in which it can add value..

Panelists
Ken Todd, VP, Content, Showtime Networks
Richard Titus, Head of User Experience, BBC Future Media & Technology
Ivana Ma, Partner & President, New Media, Generate
Moderator: Rohit Bhargava, Author, Personality Not Included / SVP, Digital Strategy & Marketing, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide

What’s the role of UGC?

Much of UGC is seem as being funny and somewhat irrelevant. However,the BBC gets lots of content from citizen journalists who send in content and blogs are some of the most heavily trafficked sites on the network.

UGC also has a major role in contests. Ivana described how when a music contest incorporated UGC and was framed as competing communities (eg, Colleges), really made the contest a much bigger success.

UGC also plays a role as brand evangelists. Ken spoke about how they used a site to have people write fan lit and have people vote on the content. He also spoke about a UGC contest using the them song from Weeds – Little Boxes. The prize was playing five of the songs on TV, with a grand prize of $10,000. He says it has proven very successful for Showtime.

What role do bloggers play?

Ken speaks about how they can play the role of uber fans (Super Fans). They can have a huge impact. Ken says they have started treating these uber bloggers as they would reporters, sending them press kits and advance on shows.

Richard speaks about how bloggers have now added a new voice to the conversation. He says blogging has made the BBC wake up and work harder.

Ivana points out that brands have taken an interest and started courting bloggers. Richard asks that since bloggers are more likely to be easier to buy off than the traditional media, does that make them more interesting to brand advertisers. ( What BS – like the auto mags don’t demand advertising for reviews.)

Is it money or is it attention and micro-fame?

Some do it to communicate, others want that small moment of fame. If they are doing it for money, its not there yet. You just have to look at the content and you will usually see what the motivation is. Richard points to the opportunity for blogs to generate huge momentary fame based on controversial content.

What about the cost of supporting UGC?

The cost of supporting UGC should also be recognized. Supporting this content is not free. It takes substantial moderation and infrastructure costs. Richard says that the conversation is going on and if the BBC wants to be part of it they will have to bear the cost.

[tags]Future of Television, user generated content[/tags]

Michael Geoghagen, a leading figure in podcasting, has posted that podcasting is a community, not an industry. He focuses a lot of the attention of the difficulty podcasters experience making money via advertising supported podcasts and the failure of the podcast advertising networks to deliver real big dollars.

While I agree with virtually everything he says in the post, I find it funny that I never thought of podcasting as an industry. Publishing is an industry of which downloadable media is just one part.

It seems clear to me that podcasting is just one of the many channels that publishers have available for distributing content. And if we view the business as publishing then there is a much bigger pool of advertising money’s available for publishers.

But if we look at the publishing business, the first step is to build scale in audience and in ad sales. Publishers who make good money don’t rely on ad networks to provide their primary advertising revenues. The ad networks provide fill in ads for unsold inventory and the CPM from ad networks a much, much lower than ad inventory sold directly to advertisers. Podcasters who aren’t able to build significant audiences (big and/or valuable) and direct advertising sales will struggle to make much money.

Publishing is a tough business and all you have to do is look at the industry’s supply and demand curves to understand that impression based business models will continue to weaken. Even large scale publishers like Yahoo struggle to sell their inventory and have to resort to ad networks to fill in their unsold inventory. Inventory is expanding at a rapid rate and demand growth is severely restricted. That translates into deflationary pressure on revenue realization across the industry as the number of people dipping into the pie is increasing faster than the growth of advertising.

If you want to build a real publishing business, you better be prepared to go beyond advertising and think about how you build a valuable audience and provide them with lots of ways to pay you money.

[tags]podcasting, publishing, Michael Geoghagen[/tags]

If you’re not watching what’s said at Twitter, you’re missing the real time news.

Twitter, self described as a “social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time”, has rapidly become a source of real time juicy material for reporters and bloggers straight from the crowd.

Twitter asks people just one question: What are you doing now? You get to answer with up to 140 characters.

The resulting Tweets can be monitored on a web browser or on your phone. The service has proven remarkable popular and become an interesting, real time new sources for news tips. Two very recent examples have the tech industry twittering away.

I witnessed one of these events on Twitter as it happened. At the SXSW conference, an interview of Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Sarah Lacy got out of control. The tweets started flying and the press and bloggers piled on here, here, here and a whole bunch more here. The Tweeting just made the event spin way out of control. Here’s Sarah’s response as posted on cNet:

And in an unrelated story, Techcrunch referenced some Tweets to point out a somewhat heated back and forth between the Six Apart and Wordpress guys.

Anil Dash, Six Apart’s Chief Evangelist, took aim at Wordpress users in a blog post today. Instead of upgrading to the new version of Wordpress, he says, consider moving over to their platform.

Now, it’s generally fair game to target your competitors, and Dash’s blog post was so tame that I can’t even find a good quote to pull into this post. But that didn’t stop Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg from going for blood. In a Twitter message, Matt says “six apart is getting desperate, and dirty.” Anil fires back almost immediately with “@photomatt desperation is resorting to name-calling and slander instead of substance — if there’s a factual error, i’m glad to fix it.”

Not only has Twitter become a source for news, it has also become a broadcast channel for people who collect large followings, which results in a strange co-mingling of news with Tweets about everyday activities like “waking up, making coffee”. The phenomenon of Twitter as a source of real time news can only grow as bloggers like Jason Calaconis, CEO of Mahalo, observe the growing importance of Twitter to blog traffic.

While Twitter has some great potential as a source of buzz and news, the real time mob effect is scary. Sarah, of the “train wreck” interview fame, may be getting lots of advice about what she could have done differently, but with Twitter the crowd will be talking about every real time event and it may not be nice.

Anyone doing this kind of interview or a speech better be aware that the crowd is talking, and when disgruntled people realize they are not alone, they tend to speak up like they did at SXSW.

UPDATE: I saw this on Twitter from Tim Bourquin who runs the New Media Expo. It says it all. Anyone running a live event now runs the risk of being Twitterfied :

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[tags]Twitter[/tags]