The Association for Downloadable Media (ADM) announced the appointment of a special advertising agency liaison to the organization, along with the confirmation of a fourteen-member Ad Council, comprised of media professionals from leading interactive advertising agencies.

The council will act as a sounding board for the ADM committees, which are creating downloadable media advertising standards and guidelines. David Herscott, President of San Diego-based interactive agency MEA Digital, has been appointed the liaison between the Ad Council of media strategists and the ADM committee chairs.

The Association for Downloadable Media is focused on creating a landscape favorable to the commercialization of portable media. The ADM’s focus includes revenue generation from advertising and sponsorships of audio and video podcasts, (aka vidcasts, or vlogs), and other digital content distributed via RSS, ATOM, peer-to-peer, mobile devices, downloads from Web sites and other platforms to come.

The Association for Downloadable Media, formed to focus on monetizing consumer-downloaded content will be releasing initial ad unit standards and audience measurement guidelines for public consideration at the ADM Forum at ad:tech San Francisco April 16th from 9:00 am – 11:45 am at Moscone Center.

Chris MacDonald, Chairman of the ADM and Executive Vice President for Business Development and Operations, Libsyn PRO Enterprise Platform, said regarding this announcement: “People have been talking for years about the need for podcasting ad standards. We’re taking the first big leap on standards-setting and are working proactively to verify that the ad formats and audience measurement processes we set will work for both the buyer and seller.”

“Podcasting and downloadable content are the next frontier of digital media. The members of the Ad Council and I are excited to work with the ADM committees. Our work together will help brands leverage the amazing engagement we find with the audiences of downloadable content, says David Herscott, President, MEA Digital”

The members of the Ad Council are volunteering to be the sounding board for the ADM committees as they develop standards for monetization of downloadable media, making sure the standards dovetail with prevailing digital advertising best practices.

The Ad Council members include:

• Jonathan Adams, Vice President, Group Director, Media Digitas (Publicis Groupe)
• Kendall Allen, Managing Director, Incognito Digital
• David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i
• Jason Burnham, CEO, Burnham Marketing
• Jocelyn Griffing, Senior Vice President Online Media at ICON International, an Omnicom Company
• David Herscott, President, MEA Digital
• Tom Hespos, President, Underscore Marketing LLC, Underscore Marketing
• Alyson Hyder, Director, Digital Marketing Services, Avenue A-Razorfish
• Jennifer Kim, Vice President, Integrated Strategy, Sigma Group
• Susan MacDermid, Senior Vice President, Real Branding
• Stephen Smyk, CEO, Performance Bridge
• Jeff Adelson-Yan, Managing Partner, Levelwing Media

[tags]Association for Downloadable Media, ADM, ad standards[/tags]

Last week I attended Graphing Social Patterns West and reported on the sessions that took place down in San Diego. It was a great event with lots of content.

After a bit of reflection, these are my top 10 takeaways from the event.

1. Hollywood and Video Game Players were MIA. I went through the attendee list and could not find anyone in attendance from traditional media or big gaming companies like Disney/ABC, NBC Universal, CBS, Activision, EA etc. The only person from a traditional media company was a developer from Condenast. Given the amount of time people are spending on these social networks and the growth of social gaming, the social networks are perhaps some of the biggest competitive threats and opportunities for traditional media. I was shocked by the chasm between the techies and the media.
2. The social application space has gotten big fast and will get a lot bigger. Over the past 8 months, the Facebook application space has exploded and real companies have emerged to take advantage of the space. This is only going to get bigger as OpenSocial opens up more networks and data portability finally starts being a reality.
3. Social objects are at the center of healthy micro-communities. I had not thought about this before, but social networks are not just about looking at each other, talking to each other and helping each other. Social objects like books, movies, cars, etc. are powerful mechanisms for building networks that link together people who don’t know each other.
4. OpenSocial apps will grow rapidly in next six months. For the past few months, OpenSocial has been in a development mode. In the coming weeks, it will be released at MySpace an other places opening up huge new markets.
5. MySpace will get Facebook like functionality. I got this from listening to what seemed to be a subtle conversation about the differences in the platforms and concerns by the Facebook app developers that MySpace had been self expression oriented and that Facebook had been communication oriented. Whether true or not, it seems that the effect of the open APIs will be to make all of the social networks more alike through the integration of third party applications that plug functionality gaps. No one talked about this explicitly, but when I brought it up with some of the leading developers I would get knowing smiles, but no comments.
6. There’s money to be made, and advertising is only part of it. Virtual goods and virtual currencies are a very important part of the social business model. Advertising will play a big role, but it’s not the only way to monetize the communities that are being built by these applications.
7. Social shopping is coming soon. Facebook will add credit card functionality and with it will come social shopping. Look for this to emerge later this year.
8. Social networks are a powerful new force for fund raising. Beth Kanter showed that she could use social networking and social media to raise $200,000. The Obama campaign seems to be using it to raise huge amounts of money. Every organization that needs to raise money should be paying attention.
9. We need better data. The data we get now is ok, but we need more if we are going to be able to learn and drive innovation systematically. We need data beyond page views. We need data that reflects on not just users, but also social objects.
10. Social application development is a learnable skill. Stanford is teaching it and I’m sure other schools will too. Stanford was able to teach students to develop 50 applications and learned a lot by sharing experiences. This means that others can do this too. This is good news for traditional media as their content can be at the center of the social object, and a good social object is the basis for the good application. It’s also good news for organizations that need to raise money or that want to use social networking to build their relationships with other stakeholders.

 

 Digital Podcast 42 [15:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Jia Shen, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of RockYou, and R. Tyler Ballance, lead developer of Slide’s Top Friends application, spoke at Graphing Social Patterns West about social application development.

Both Jia and Tyler flew through their presentations so I had a hard time keeping up. I have enclosed Jia’s slides below.

Jia focused on a three phase approach to application development that map to the lifecycle of the application. It starts with marketing and validation. You need to decide the target audience, the messaging you will use and the channels to reach them.

Understanding what audience you are targeting helps to define which social networks will work best based upon their demographics. Once you have defined the audience you need to determine what application verticals and what channels will be important. On Facebook, these channels include news feeds, notifications, email profile, news, email profile, invites, profile action nonuser pages, and profile pages.

On Facebook, these channels include news feeds, notifications, email profile, news, email profile, invites, profile action nonuser pages, and profile pages.

The next phase is the growth phase. Here you need to break the viral barrier and drive up the viral multiplier. You are seeking to get it up above 1 user causing at least 1 other user to install. From there, you need to tune growth. You can track every thing and look for the trends.

Next part of the process is engagement. You need to tune the application to improve engagement and drive monetization. In this phase, email, profile and non-user pages become more important channels. It’s important to balance virality versus engagement to maximize growth and retention.

OpenSocial giving ability to add functionality. Still open questions about will it help with distribution and monetization still an open issue.

The audience is different than Facebook’s audience with a different use case. MySpace has been more about self-expression. We need to find out what will be successful with OpenSocial.

Open social channels include news feed, profile main page, bulletins, messaging, invites, non user pages.

Tyler pointed out that we need to understand the platform – the functionality, the data models and relationships provided are different. This should drive differences in what gets developed.

Part of this discussion also hinted at the differences between MySpace and Facebook as it relates to activity feeds in Facebook that may cause more viral spread of applications.

SLIDES

| View | Upload your own

[tags]gspwest08, Graphing Social, social application development[/tags]

Tim discusses why he loves hackers and why eTech is important. It’s working at the edges. He distinguishes between received vs. original/created knowledge and how eTech is all about original knowledge.

The work hackers do is not done not for the money, but for the technology that matters. Tim goes through history describing how inventors throughout time have been hackers, including Archimedes. Tim speaks of the passion that drives hackers. They believe in themselves and what’s possible.

These are the areas that are interesting to Tim. These are the things that are small tomorrow, but may be big tomorrow.

• Developing world’s use of technology
• Space
• Open Source
• Sensors and Ambient Computing – moving beyond keyboards to sensors doing the data collection
• Reality Mining
• Connecting you life to the web
• Phones as controllers
• New interfaces
• Information visualization
• Body Hacking and wearable computing
• Personal robotics
• Open source vision and machine learning
• Brain hacks/imaging
• Personalized geonomics – 23 and me as social
• Synthetic biology – building new organisms
• Collective intelligence such as digital democracy, coding against corruption, prediction markets, ensemble learning
• Green

Tim ends with a poem called The Man Watching

The Man Watching

by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Via http://www.cdra.org.za/

Don’t choose the easy path. Find a hard problem and try to solve it!

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, Why I Love Hackers, Tim O’Reilly[/tags]

Ian Kennedy, from Yahoo, spoke about new things at MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog announced an About Me widget and the public release of it’s API. He showed a number of examples of sites using the API to enrich their environments

• Blog Juice – pulls in recent Tweets from visitors
• Raven social Network members – pulls in data from MyBlogLog – also available as a wordpress plugin
• Everwas – popular tags
• Meetspace – people around you from m.mybloglog.com

UPDATE: Video

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, mybloglog api[/tags]

Beth Kanter is a trainer, blogger, and consultant to nonprofits and individuals in effective use of social media. Beth discussed how social media can be used to help social causes. She describes how she does large experiments to find out what works.

She has raised over $200,000 to help Cambodian children. She won the America’s Giving Campaign which was based on number of donors and focused on how new web tools can drive the result. She has learned what works and what annoys donors.

Her example is to jump right into asking her network what the strategy should be using her blog.

Strategies for success:

• Make it personal – “It’s about why the messenger cares” She describes why she cares about Cambodian children
• Stories with Faces – This helps drive people up the ladder of engagement to scale. Story example: Why is this Cambodian Orphan wearing a creative commons t-shirt?
• Network Weaving – Use the three R’s relationships, rewards, reciprocity
• Fun, Humor, Easy, Urgency, Competitive Spirit, Passion. Beth describes how she used Facebook to tell people what she wants for her birthday 51st Birthday Challenge donations, use Youtube with Kids video, Twitter challenge, Facebook challenge that she had tagged as evanglists, Twitter rallies
• Make it competitive
• Say Thank You in creative ways
• Include Paypal as payment mechanism

UPDATE: Slides from presentation

| View | Upload your own

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, social causes, Beth Kanter[/tags]

In Digital Podcast 41, we connect with Wizzard Media’s CEO Chris Spencer to talk about podcast based advertising. As Chris puts it, how else can you advertise on an iPod.

We cover some of the history of Wizzard and how they have brought together some of the most popular podcast hosting companies such as Libsyn and SwitchPod, and built a podcast advertising network to go with it.

The show focuses on podcast based advertising and in particular we discuss the two advertising campaigns Wizzard is running for the US Navy.

 

 Digital Podcast 41 [56:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The first of those ran on 20 podcasts with wide distribution and focused on recruitment. The current campaign is much more focused and is running on 7 podcasts. It focuses on recruiting medical personnel.

We get into some good detail about how the process works, what Wizzard does and what podcasters have to do to make it all work. We talk numbers and Chris tells us how different ads support different CPMs, depending upon their placement and whether they are audio or video. Videos commands the highest CPMs running $5-7 to $20-35 depending upon whether it’s a pre-roll or a mid-roll. Audio runs at lower CPMs that range from $3-5 to $15-25 depending upon placement.

Chris explains how the revenue share works. The advertising agencies get their 15% off the top and then Wizzard and the podcasters split the rest 50-50. Wizzard pays the sales force and covers the costs of setting up and running the campaign.

Wizzard published that they supported over one billion downloads last year from the over 8,500 podcasts that use their hosting services. Some have questioned how that could be, so we ask Chris to help us verify those numbers and to understand how 8,500 podcasts produce so many downloads. Chris explains how they count downloads and filter out the spiders and bots. He says that there are some blockbuster podcasts that do really high volumes and just as in other media forms there is a long tail of podcasters, so looking at mean based average per podcast just does not make sense. It’s the old 80-20 rule once again. Chris also clarifies that some recent problems with reporting to podcasters has nothing to do with how the count their download figure.

Chris ends the show by providing some tips for podcasters – The one to remember most is that if you think you want to advertise in your podcast someday, start tagging them now so that ad inserts are easy to do and you don’t have to go back and re-edit your catalog.

It’s good to see organizations like Wizzard taking up the flag and promoting podcasting. Wizzard along with a few others is taking the risk to build the platforms that we need to scale the downloadable media business. We wish them well on their mission to help marketers advertise on an iPod (or a Zune for you Zune fans.)

[tags]Wizzard Media, podcast advertising, podcast hosting, downloadable media[/tags]

It’s good to see brand marketers are working to produce some interesting work that ties TV together with online social communities. This post from Dave Deal titled Listening through communities shows off efforts by Levi and Kraft Crystal Light.

It’s great to see marketers start to understand why community matters, and it’s why we’re seeing investment in sites like these. Both are nicely designed sites that offer the promise of community.

The problem is that huge brands like these need to be attracting the attention of large audiences to make their marketing efficient, and trying to create large, new communities from scratch is both high cost and high risk.

In the physical world, you don’t try to create another shopping mall so people can come to your store, you take your store to the existing shopping mall so you can tap into an existing community. The mall shoppers are not going to go to a remote store in large numbers because it’s too much hassle.

By that logic, brands should not expect people to leave where they are now to travel to these new spaces. If the people are hanging out in MySpace and Facebook, why not build community there, or at least make that a major part of the your community building effort?

I looked, but could not find ways these sites link into MySpace/Facebook. If they are not built to connect to these huge social networks then they are making a mistake. Perhaps they are, but I couldn’t find out how. It would be interesting to find out if they have plans to connect into these communities.

I looked to see what others thought about the build versus join question. The question has been asked and debated in some depth. While there seems to be a strong leaning towards “it depends”, I think you have to go with the economics of community building.

Building large communities from scratch is hard, costly and risky. Anything you can do to lower the cost (hassle, time, etc) of connection and participation is incredibly important to building community. A well thought out strategy that makes it easy for people to connect to these new spaces from their existing hang outs will reduce the cost and risk of community building.

The social web is a distributed community with people in lots of places and increasingly they expect the content to come to them. RSS, embeddable players, and Facebook apps are training people that they can get what they want, wherever they want it. And that place is where they hang out now. Start there, and then give them a good reason to come visit your place.

If brand marketers don’t start getting this, they will spend lots of money and end up with lots of disappointments.

[tags]brands, community, social marketing, Levi, Krystal Light, Razor Fish[/tags]

Or maybe I should call it a CinchCast. Cinch is a new service from Blog Talk Radio that makes it extremely easy to record a podcast and produce the necessary RSS feeds. Just call 646-200-0000, record your CinchCast and you will find an RSS feed all ready for you at http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/YOURPHONENUMBER.

Here’s the mp3 it made for me:

 

 Digital Podcast CinchCast [1:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

And you can see the RSS it created for me here.
http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/5628245193

While I was a little disappointed in the sound quality, I found the experience so simple and easy that even my Mom could do this.

Ease of use breakthroughs like this open up whole new possibilities. Need to record that interview you’re doing, call Cinch. Need to report from the field, call Cinch. The instantaneous nature of it is fantastic.

I’m excited to see this. Kudos to BTR and their new VP of Product Development, Kris Smith of Croncast fame.

Via Twitter and Scripting News

[tags]cinch, cinchcast, Blog Talk Radio, phone call podcast, mobile podcasting[/tags]

We want to know what you think makes a podcast great. Tells us why you listen or watch your favorite podcasts. We’re using a social polling technology from Sodahead to give everyone a chance to say what they think makes a podcast great.

Poll Answers“

[tags]podcast, podcast poll, social polling, sodahead[/tags]