Interactive Content

Where in the World is Mobile Web Usage Highest?

2010-11-24T12:58:00.001-05:00

http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/11/23/mobile-web-usage-highest-in-asia-and-africa/

Royal Pingdom released this study of global benchmarks for mobile web usage as a percent of total web usage by region. Worldwide mobile users currently make up about 3.8% of all visitors to web sites. The finding that Asia and Africa exceed rest of world for this benchmark by 2x or more is completely in line with our own global research conducted with MoneyGram this Oct, which identified a similar mobile leapfrog happening in these two regions to about the same extent. Of course that’s a function of these regions having far fewer PC-based surfers in these areas, but the fact that a cheap Nokia unit with a basic browser can get someone online who otherwise couldn’t afford a PC w dial-up can’t be ignored.

Other US client sites we track seem to get 2-3% of web visits from mobile OSs, and generally iOS is #1 (iPhone and iPod), Android is 2^nd and RIM is 3^rd.

Global Payments: One Size Does NOT fit all

2010-10-26T11:01:00.001-04:00

This article would have been a near-perfect input to a payments brainstorm I led last week for a client:

http://www.getelastic.com/global-payments/

Apparently:

- China has the largest group of internet users in the world, but a very low card penetration rate... which has NOT slowed the growth of ecommerce.

- In Brazil, cards are used online, but installment payments are common.

- In Germany, people have cards but don't like to use them online.

- And in Europe and Asia, COD is still popular, even for online ordering.

Amazing how well this article frames the country by country opportunities based on user habits, not technology.

The multi channel challenge

2010-09-19T01:05:00.001-04:00

NYTimes: Why Bricks and Clicks Don’t Always Mix

The story of Netflix over Blockbuster is one of innovation for sure. It's a story of timing and of having the digital rising tide at your beckoning. But most of all, it's a story of channel focus. It's hard enough to manage a business in one channel, let alone two. As recently as 2005, analysts saw Blockbuster as a sure thing. But now, it's clear in hindsight that running a digital business well Could not be done as effectively when managing brick and mortar stores, Blockbuster's managers tried to do.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.9

The world is going online

2010-09-11T04:39:00.001-04:00

A couple of decent benchmarks in US and global traffic. In addition to Facebook taking number one in total minutes in the US:
Google crosses 1B users globally for first time, and Yahoo number one in total monthly traffic globally:
"In a research note on the latest monthly traffic figures from comScore, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney pointed out that Google said its number of global users crossed 1 billion for the first time last month. But Yahoo edged out Google in August to become the top site in monthly traffic, with 179 million unique visitors. Google had 178.8 million, followed by Microsoft with 165.3 million. Facebook remained the fourth-ranked site, at 148 million, up from 145.5 million in July. Rising traffic combined with increasing time spent on the site bodes well for Facebook's efforts to monetize its vast inventory."
FB ads are particularly sticky when a friend likes them:
"Research from Nielsen earlier this year showed people are 68% more likely to remember an ad and twice as likely to remember what it said when they see a friend has interacted with the ad on Facebook. The company struck a deal with Nielsen last year to help provide data to marketers demonstrating that its display ads work."
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=135476&nid=118430

Point systems reward contributors

2010-09-11T04:36:00.001-04:00

The McKinsey Quarterly says social starts with consumer needs, not the corporation.

check out https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Marketing/Digital_Marketing/Unlocking_the_elusive_potential_of_social_networks_2623

This article holds two gems: 1) Treat word of mouth as its own media type, and all of sudden you can measure it. And 2) Recognize that recognition is one of the most important drivers of participation. To me, that says an essential component of any initiative is to build in ‘fame feedback loops’ into whatever word of mouth or user-generated content program you do. Scoring, badges, points, credits—any or all of these make this a competition for your audience, not just a contribution with no hope of getting anything in return.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.8

Eric Schmidt's bad attitude gets Times Square airing

2010-09-03T04:05:00.001-04:00

Consumer Watchdog's InsideGoogle.com has taken its online privacy campaign to New York's Times Square, where it has purchased a 540 sq. ft. Jumbotron digital advertisement promoting an animated video satirizing Google CEO Eric Schmidt's attitude toward consumer privacy.

"We're satirizing Schmidt in the most highly trafficked public square in the nation to make the public aware of how out of touch Schmidt and Google are when it comes to our privacy rights," said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, and author of The Progressive's Guide To Raising Hell (Chelsea Green, September 2010).

"America needs a 'Do Not Track Me' list and Google is Exhibit A in the case for it." Titled "Don't Be Evil?" the avatar-style animation features Schmidt driving an ice cream truck and secretly spying on children. The animated short was produced by the nonprofit consumer group to shine a spotlight on the need for Congress to enact a national "Do Not Track Me" list.

View the animated short here: http://insidegoogle.com/2010/08/do-not-track-me/

View the 15 sec. digital Jumbotron ad here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aoGKAkM0oM

Google aims for the next platform

2010-08-17T19:46:00.000-04:00

Imagine the inhabitants of Earth in 100 years. They have spoiled the planet beyond use. They need to move, all 20 billion of them.

The effort to jump the ship of mother Earth involves finding a new planet, building a ship and making the trip, and then settling in.

Anticipating the end of the PC revolution, Google has begun the first phase of the move. Mobile is the new planet, and Android is the spaceship.

Google may be in the doldrums but they have a history of bouncing back. While GOOG is down $150 this year, they are in investment mode. Mobile is around the corner, and as Android phones pump out into the market, GOOG is quietly seizing a platform of global breadth. While the Nexus One experiment hasn't hit, that was simply a marketing failure. It's a great little phone. Android on the other hand, is aiming for world dominance and has been extremely well packaged so far, positioned as a techies revolt and user friendly interface. It's now the fastest selling mobile OS worldwide.

Google has to wait to reap the rewards of this platform. There's work to be done, specifically aggregating, processing and remixing location- and behaviorial-based data into insights for each user.

In the Journal today, Eric Schmidt offers a wide open view of Google's new strategy. He's appealing to investors to jump on the new ship. Says Eric:

' "In general in technology," he says, "if you own a platform that's valuable, you can monetize it." Example: Google is obliged to share with Apple search revenue generated by iPhone users. On Android, Google gets to keep 100%. That difference alone, says Mr. Schmidt, is more than enough to foot the bill for Android's continued development." '

And, he takes another swipe at the Great American Newspaper:

'"The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetization, and the only way I know of to increase monetization is through targeted ads. That's our business."'

The interview is here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704901104575423294099527212.html

A Planner finally arrives on Mad Men

2010-08-16T19:12:00.001-04:00

Any MadMen fans out there? Well, now its season four set in 1965, and in yet another nod to historical accuracy, they’ve added a Planner to the cast!

Dr. Faye conducts a focus group each episode and hits each one out of the park. Makes her subjects cry. Gathers intense cultural and consumer truths. Shatters myths around client challenges.

And each time she pro-offers her big idea, Don Draper snorts, “I can’t use that.” But he’s on such a downward spiral that there’s a good chance Dr. Faye is going to not only stand up to Don, but kick him in the ass and help him get back on his feet. What every good planner should do for her creative team. Of course, if Don has his way that reinvention will include some drunken sex. But I don’t see her giving in.

Played by Cara Buono, she’s what all of us modern day planners evolved into.

EW posted a nice interview and this pic of her: http://popwatch.ew.com/2010/08/16/mad-men-cara-buno-faye-miller-interview/

Fighting crime with some good old crowdsourcing

2010-08-09T15:01:00.000-04:00

What’s the old saw … two make news, three make a trend?

India police use Facebook to nab traffic violators:

http://www.psfk.com/2010/08/indian-cops-using-facebook-to-monitor-traffic-violations.html - check out the actual photo gallery on the FB page to see the misdeeds: backs of cars speeding through red lights.

Tweets + photo bust T-riding Boston Perv

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=133459&nid=117378

You may not want to see this picture, which was on the cover of the Herald print edition apparently, further adding to the irony of using Twitter to crowdsource arrests.

Daily Twitter users are biggest influencers

2010-08-09T13:32:00.001-04:00

Study says that: 1) Twitter users are most influential of social media, and 2) this influence is further amplified by active Twitterers who tend to publish across media much more than the online but non-Twitter users. They are five times more likely to blog, six times more likely to publish articles, seven times more likely to post to wikis, and three times more likely to review products online.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/08/06/twitter-users-have-big-impact-on-brands

Plus, Twitter is fundamentally different from most other social platforms. Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc., which are relatively closed to lurkers and search engines, Twitter content is wide open, publicly searchable and fully indexed. So ‘what happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter.’

What Every CMO Needs to Know About Content Strategy

2010-08-06T11:47:00.001-04:00

Content strategy can come in many forms, from copywriting to the business of content. This presentation nails the pure value creation around use and brand that great content can drive.

It boils down to an editorial calendar-led approach to updating your marketing, including your site. Yes, we are all media brands now. We all need to produce content that sings.

What Every CMO Needs to Know About Content Strategy

View more presentations from Mark Fidelman.

Facebook posts you don't want to read

2010-07-23T09:55:00.000-04:00

The most banal and douchiest Facebook posts you don't ever want to read? Here are my favorites:

5. Kids say the Darndest Things! Well golly gee, how nice is it that your bratty genius just told her sister that she's the boss of you. Other parents couldn't give a shit about your kid, and those without kids really couldn't give a flying f@ck. Three out of Five Douches.

4. I Just Ran 20.098 Miles! Ok, so you run. and you have some device tracking it all. What do you want me to say, congrats? Four out of Five Douches.

3. Help me become the Most Influential Reader of Fast Company! Oh, and by the way, if you click on this link, not only will you help me, you'll track back to this idiotic program. Five out of Five Douches.

2. I'm About to Hit The Road: What's the Best Restaurant Between Hicksville and Ramshack OH on I478? F@ck if I know. That question's gonna resonate with all 4 of your high school buddies. The rest of us haven't been within 8,000 sq miles of that godforsaken stretch of highway. Three out of Five Douches.

1. Hmmm, coffee. Yes, we all need a boost in the morning. You're so special? Two out of Five Douches.*

* Note, the list is in order of banality, but clearly douchiness is overlayed and correlates.

Mobile world is diversely appable

2010-07-20T12:26:00.001-04:00

Infographic: Our App-Happy World | Fast Company

What a difference a year makes. Last summer we had an iTunes app store dominating the mobile landscape. Today it's six plus stores though only Android is a serious rival. Blackberry users, what's your problem?

By this time next year, expect the debate to shift from app to cloud.

What do you think? Are apps forever like diamonds or is there a move to cloud computing via mobile? The Kindle app syncs seamlessly between my devices. I like that.

Location : 1-19 E Houston St, New York, NY 10012,

Out of Home Can Impact

2010-06-07T09:53:00.001-04:00

Loving how brands are truly out and open for fan (and in this case, anti-fan) participation. Can you think of any homage better than fans taking your logo and plastering it across prime real estate, in this case the median at Houston and Lafayette in front of the Puck Building, or LBi's home for now? I think not.

Location : 8901-8937 Interstate 95, Philadelphia, PA 19136,

CBS Unveils Branding Campaign as NBC Announces Fall Slate - MediaBuyerPlanner

2010-05-06T18:30:00.002-04:00

CBS Unveils Branding Campaign as NBC Announces Fall Slate - MediaBuyerPlanner

Why brand one of the most venerable brands in the history of media? Because you are number one in audience, viewers and even doing well with the young male demo. "Only CBS" is your tagline, of course.

CBS’s prime time audience has jumped 12% this season - thanks partly to its freshman hit The Mentalist - and it is also up 7% in 18-49s, with more viewers in that demo now than ABC or NBC. CBS’s branding campaign is clearly an attempt to forestall what analysts expect could be as much as a 15% decline in prime time ad revenue pulled during the upfront, notes the Los Angeles Times.

And TV viewership remains higher overall. In spite of TIVO, DVRs and digital video, TV viewership bumped up overall by about 2% in 2009 over 2008. Not the same story in the music industry, where overall listening (at least legal, paid for listening!) actually lessened with the growth of the 99 cent MP3.

Virtual Cash (Part 1 of 3)

2010-04-09T13:33:00.002-04:00

Happy to announce my first LBi US blog post on Virtual Cash has gone live! Great to collaborate with Hevan C, who is designing the images and infographics. It's the first of a 3-part series looking at the progression of virtual cash from Facebook credits to PayPal's move into personal payment to the emergence of 'do-it-yourself' virtual cash networks launched by the digerati.

One defining characteristic of any currency, real or virtual, is convertibility for use across a wide range of products and services in many different marketplaces. To date, FBCs are limited to a small number of mostly virtual sellers inside the walled garden of Facebook.

In the first part of the series, we talk about Facebook. With 400 million users worldwide, Facebook certainly could back a currency as portable as PayPal. What if a wide swath of eCommerce merchants started to accept FBCs in their own retail stores? This certainly could be achieved by synching Facebook Credits with Facebook Connect, which smooths out interactions between Facebook and 90,000 Connect sites. Today Connect is a content sharing play mostly for online publishers. Why not open the platform for retailers to share commerce as well?

Check it out!

-Craig Konieczko

iPad will be the kids' eReader

2010-04-06T07:40:00.001-04:00

My prediction is that the iPad will win in the classroom and as the definitive kids' eReader.

Kindle was just too dull for kids' books. But it's great as an eReader for grownups. Yes, our eyes get tired from screen flicker, and we actually longer testy pieces that don't always require embedded video or even color. So Kindle is the superior device for novel reading for the over-21 crowd.

The iPad, however, fills a gap in the classroom, where laptops are clunky and PCs immobile. It's a contained environment, where no one cares about fingerprints. Wifi is available, and kids don't need to type as much as consume interactive content. Eyestrain from a flickering screen just isn't a problem when kids' attention spans are short. Best of all tactile learning is now possible.

The ipad is Apple's newest play for education markets. Expect to see scholastic and other education publishers move fast.

Location : West Dr, Brooklyn, NY 11215,

US Smartphone share from comScore

2010-03-11T12:21:00.001-05:00

Questions (don’t peek below) – according to comScore on Monday:

1. Which smartphone platform (OS) leads in total share among the 42.7 million total users as of January?

2. Which platform had the largest absolute share gain in the last 3 months?

3. Which position does Microsoft OS have overall, and did its share grow, shrink or hold steady in the last 3 months?

Answers - Smartphone Platform Market Share

42.7 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones in an average month during the November to January period, up 18 percent from the August through October period. RIM was the leading mobile smartphone platform in the U.S. with 43.0 percent share of U.S. smartphone subscribers, rising 1.7 percentage points versus three months earlier. Apple ranked second with 25.1 percent share (up 0.3 percentage points), followed by Microsoft at 15.7 percent, Google at 7.1 percent (up 4.3 percentage points), and Palm at 5.7 percent. Google’s Android platform continues to see rapid gains in market share.

People You Know Influential, Social Media Isn't, in Purchase Decisions (Marketing Pilgrim)

2010-02-23T10:31:00.001-05:00

This is 2nd in a trend I'm seeing around the near-gospel data point that social media influence is far more persuasive than messages from the brand. The first was from Edelman's Trust Barometer 2010 released earlier this month, which showed data pointing to cracks in the wall of friend/family influence being considered more trustworthy than corporate messages.

Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim reports that people may be more honest on Facebook these days, but we still don’t trust them. MediaPost reports that an ARAnet study shows social media and search engine recommendations coming out tied among the general population—but search engine recommendations leap out in front among affluent (>$75,000/yr—49%) and younger adults (25-34—50% vs. 31% for social media).

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/02/people-you-know-influential-social-media-isnt-in-purchase-decisions.html

However, the general consensus was that personal advice from friends or family members was tops, with 59% rating it as important in influencing their buying decisions. But to me, that sounds like a completely different dynamic—are we supposed to be measuring the influence of people we know vs. strangers vs. corporate messages, or are we measuring what medium is more influential? If your mom delivers her advice via your Facebook wall, are you less likely to take it than if she told you in a phone call? Is it surprising that most people trust people they know, who know them and their preferences, than random strangers on search engines or social networks?

Maybe the medium isn’t the message.

The full breakdown, however, does show an interesting breakdown among the information from people we don’t know (and from corporate sources):

Overall, most people participating in the survey — 59% — choose personal advice from friends or family members; followed by TV news or other broadcasts at 40%; search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo or Ask at 39%; TV ads, 36%; articles in newspapers or magazines, 33%; newspapers or magazines ads, 31%; online articles, 28%; and radio news or other broadcasts ads, 25%.

The remainder of the breakdown follows. Direct mail came in at 24%; radio ads, 20%; emails from retailers or manufacturers, 20%; online ads, 19%; messages or posts on social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or MySpace, 18 percent; and billboards, 15%. Also note that the younger segment found social media to be far more influential than the general population did—31% vs. 18%. They also liked corporate information more: 32% (vs 20% for all respondents) appreciated information in emails from retailers or manufacturers, and 30% believed online ads were influential. So really, what we’re saying is that younger people on the Internet are more influenced by random strangers and advertising. What do you think? Is it the source of information or the medium used to convey it that has more influence here?

It seems to come down to the relationship we already have with the people who offer us tips or commentary about a product or brand we are considering, and not necessarily the medium, that influences us more. Is a phone call from your best friend any more or less influential than a Facebook post? No, it's the relationship that matters. And as we aggregate more 'friends' on FB and beyond (average friend list is now 140, up from 120 last year per All Facebook), our social graphs are stretching beyond our most familiar tipsters. This can only make the content we read on social networks ever so less relevant.

So, two instances make a hypothesis, but 3 a trend. Anyone seeing this happening elsewhere?

UNH Study: Facebook and kids' grades synch up nicely

2010-02-19T14:18:00.002-05:00

A UNH researcher found that Facebook doesn't hurt kids grades:

Professors may have to stop blaming Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for their students' unfinished papers and poor grades, according to a study from the University of New Hampshire's Whittemore School of Business and Economics. Contrary to popular myth, there is no correlation between student grades and heavy usage of online social media, the study found.

Outlook / Facebook integration makes me jump this AM

2010-02-18T15:20:00.001-05:00

Beware, info from your or friends’ Facebook profiles may now be attached to work email sent through Outlook. As a result of Microsoft Social Connector announced this week, links btw Outlook and FB, LinkedIn and MySpace are enabled so it’s easy to turn your LBi inbox something close to a Google Buzz experience. And as scary as it was to share my gmail contacts publically on Buzz w/o much control up front, nobody really wants snippets of friends FB profiles going out to clients.

http://mashable.com/2010/02/17/outlook-facebook-myspace/

http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/pages/help-with-updating-the-outlook-social-connector-in-the-outlook-2010-beta.aspx

I feel like I was included in a Beta b/c it started happening this AM w/o my knowledge. This happened to anyone else?

Mobile: it's all about cost of ownership

2010-02-14T09:58:00.000-05:00

@DavidJohnson of Poynter asks:

How much media could you buy for $1,189? That's the first-year cost to own the top-of-line 3G iPad before buying any content to view on it.

That's 60 books or DVDs (at an average of $20 apiece), 119 movie tickets ($10), 238 magazines at the newsstand ($5 apiece), or 24 AAA games for the Xbox 360 or a similar console (at an average of $50 apiece).

I say same for an iPhone, which goes for $2,500+ over two years. Wifi plus voice is where we are moving.

Use Taxihack on your way home tonight

2010-02-11T22:27:00.001-05:00

The NYC Econ Dev Office held a contest to back the best city-based “apps” that make use of open APIs local gov. has made available to developers, and announced the winners a few days ago: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/psfk/feed/~3/IU3FEAPO2Z0/new-york-city-names-winners-of-apps-contest.html

My favorite of the four winners is Taxihack, which uses open Taxi Commission data to associate Yelp-style comments to each driver medallion. The “app” is actually neither an app nor an m-site, but a smartphone optimized web site that posts user comments in real time and stores them in a searchable db. “Comment Live on NYC Taxis” via email or Twitter to benefit other readers, OR search on your taxi’s medallion to get the driver’s history, experience and vehicle, e.g.:

New accounting rules at Apple book all iPhone revenue now

2010-01-26T10:44:00.000-05:00

One major reason for Apple's huge boost in revenue is a small but significant change in accounting rules. When I bought AAPL last year, the company was booking revenue for iPhones over the period of the 24-month lock in, or roughly $25 per month per phone at $600 cost.

That very 'fair' approach ensured that revenue would grow steadily, with every new sale contributing to the bottom line for years to come.

But now, Apple reported $15.6BB in Q4, a huge bump up from the $11BB it reported this time last year. Sure, iPhone sales are booming. But really, Apple also took all $600 per phone and booked it in the quarter. That's a huge increase over $25 per phone that it would've otherwise booked.

Apple said its latest results were helped by new accounting rules that allow it to recognize all the revenue for iPhone sales at the time the phones are sold. Previously, it deferred such revenue over 24 months, or the length of time consumers are expected to use the handsets. the company also restated past periods to reflect this change.

In the art of IR, Apple also has leaked the iTablet, showing investors the next big thing and allowing them to forget the reasons for the huge increase.

Google, now having shown it is much less savvy when it comes to the art of the show, actually booked a similarly huge increase for Q4. But its stock took a nosedive, because people didn't see the increase as sustainable.

Too bad the Nexus One hasn't lept out of the gate with a bang. It's a great phone that shows how the interaction between apps is key to a streamlined experience. Something the iPhone ins't all that strong in.

Goshido raises first-round financing in just 8 days … entirely via LinkedIn

2010-01-25T18:12:00.001-05:00

Irish cloud-based productivity tool Goshido raised its first-round financing in just 8 days … entirely via LinkedIn. They sent out 700 invites to contacts and contacts of contacts, trying to find ten investors and €250K, and they actually raised €162,500. If you have a decent product, you could go the traditional VC route, or use LI instead: tap your contacts and call in some "social equity." This may become the expected track for funding needs under $1MM.

Coverage on Business Insider: http://bit.ly/85fhC1

· A nice shot in the arm for LinkedIn, of which rumors of demise are greatly exaggerated. Talk about a truly differentiated product – no spam, very little junk, great security, no privacy issues … a valuable experience because your professional reputation is on the line with every post. And now this.

· Goshido, a "project guidance system" aimed at managing media, games and software projects, is in private beta with open requests avail. on their home page. Might be worth checking out this or similar.

Speaking of, anyone want to get in to my new venture? See me on LinkedIn.

NY Times paid-decision agony is over, except it's just beginning: Metered access in 2011

2010-01-20T10:28:00.000-05:00

Thanks to paidcontent.org for the fast article and Digitas for the Tweet: NYTCo. announced that the "agony" I referred to in a post below is over. Paid is coming to the online paper in 2011, with a metered model as the selected direction. Per the PR:

The new approach, referred to as the metered model, will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number.

This is a search-savvy approach, of course, allowing blogger and Tweeting humans and crawling search spiders to access some content each month, with ongoing access limited with a roadblock to fall over access after some yet-indetermined amount of content has been read.

How much will be allowed? will it differ by user? It seems that some users who are influential but don't subscribe deserve more access, while infrequents should have to pony up after just 1 or 2 stories.

What about out-of-towners, as far away as China? One of the columnists whose readership plunged under TimesSelect complained that his Chinese readers couldn't afford or weren't willing to pay the $50 annual fee. Should IP addresses in China get a lower threshold? Maybe so.

On the tech side, how do you count? Cookies will only get you so far, so I'm sure it will all be registration based. Those who share registrations, such as households that share a PC, will hit their thresholds twice as fast. Will video views be included? Hopefully they can figure out a way to remove those annoying pre-reel spots.

Overall it's probably the right approach, because it starts to recognize the suppy and demand of news access, treating stories like a scarce commodity. I only hope the Times ads deep behaviorial demographic insights as a service for advertisers, because they will now be tracking a lot more data about every user. Privacy will be an issue.

New York Times in Agony over Paid v. Free

2010-01-18T12:20:00.001-05:00

The New York Times apparently is "agonizing" over a decision to go paid again, this time with much more protected content than TimesSelect.

While still rumor level, NY Mag reports that the decision is prompted by tanking online ad revenue. It's also likely that search is providing diminishing traffic as well. This is a hunch, but whatever model they are using would account for a 30% immediate drop in overall traffic if the firewall goes up.

That's why a hybrid model that gives users and spiders a couple of free views per week or month before shutting them down is the likely model. That's pretty obvious.

What's trickier is the price. TimesSelect was $50 a year for just the opinion pages. Now, much more would be protected. Are we looking at subscription fees on par with print?

Probably not. The subscription model isn't open enough and upfront all-you-can eat models are not too popular right now. NY Mag says that price is the killer:

What makes the decision so agonizing for Sulzberger is that it
involves not just business considerations, but ultimately a self-
assessment of just what Times journalism is worth to the world. This
fall, Keller told the Observer that at some point, the decision is a
"gut call about what we think the audience will accept." Hanging
over the deliberations is the fact that the Times' last experience
with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a
rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists,
particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at
their dramatic fall-off in online readership. Not long before the
Times ultimately pulled the plug on TimesSelect, Friedman wrote
Sulzberger a long memo explaining that, while he was initially
supportive of TimesSelect, he'd been alarmed that he had lost most of
his readers in India and China and the Middle East.

So, where do they go? Microtransactions? Charge by platform? Packages of multiple channels? New ad formats?

They've got to do something. Now the home page shows signals of desperation: Prada is taking over the home page, just when one of the biggest stories of the century is unfolding amidst the poverty in Haiti.

The Emporer's New Social Media ROI

2010-01-13T13:19:00.002-05:00

Peter Kim has rewritten this fable for today's marketing department: both agency and CMO share the blame. CMO plays the role of the Emporer, with agency social media guru playing sycophantic expert. They all want awards and bonuses which are given for quick wins and even splashy, empty victories, as he points out. The incentives are all wrong.

Because no matter what, any time you are going to take a client's or company's cold hard cash and invest it in a marketing or product development program (whether social channels or traditional), ROI matters. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but somewhere along the line, someone very high up will want to know what came of that $50 or $100K or more she "invested" into that fledgling social program.

Barry Judge, CMO of socially adept Best Buy, stated at the Forrester Consumer Forum late last year in Chicago that social needs to begin with the customer, not the bottom line. And he is right. Social projects need more time to grow organically. And fail along the way without the plug getting pulled.

But marketers do need to show ROI. That's why social projects are just like any other, but need a bit more time to grow. Think of them as strategic, longer term investments with potentially much higher impact. You want some of those investments in any portfolio, right?

How do we reward CMOs and their agencies for these kinds of organic successes over time, and not just recognize big, empty wins?

I'd say a tight focus on tracking and reporting ROI is the only hope for documenting the success of long-term victories. Stick with it, even if the ROI picture isn't all that rosy for a few quarters. If you've set expectations properly, built a true strategy and started with a relatively modest investment as is typical of social, you should be setting yourselves up for a series of big wins. Have heart.

Dominoes is Colbert's Angry Dawg this week - by accident?

2010-01-08T10:40:00.000-05:00

A colleague called out Dominos' Pizza Turnaround brand reinvention campaign yesterday. It’s clearly right out of the PR department and is a shame that market research would be used this way, but at the same time, it is quite progressive in approach. He wrote:

Personally I think we are going to see more of this type of access and transparency from brands (especially from those that have lost their way).

Couldn't agree more. Domino's was battered last year in a grassroots effort by disgruntled staff, and there really isn’t any place to go but up for Domino’s. I can imagine other bismirched brands might consider this type of campaign and leverage video in particular.

But what's next? How to take this "transparency" to the next level? A new logo, tv campaign or open letter from the CEO?

How about a back door PR placement on Colbert (Jan. 7):

Was this:

Mocking admiration?
Complete disdain?
Brilliant PR move by Dominos to get some traction?

What say you?

AP chief talks about supply and demand

2010-01-07T23:09:00.000-05:00

Finally re-read AP CEO Tom Curley's talk about news supply and AP3P: Now that I understand how the economics of this all come into play, it's starting to make more sense. AP will adopt human-curated search a la Maholo, in which an editor-driven News Registry will drive traffic to the site that broke the story. The objective here is to do a better job of sending traffic to the source of a story than Google might do.

But I'm still concerned - and only out of the deepest respect for AP (full disclosure - I spent nearly 6 years promoting AP Digital starting in 2000, and the company as a whole including at least a year or more under Curley, and also launched AP Essentials, the online company store, which my proudest moment of all ;-)

To start, I must say I agree with Curley's first argument - yes, there's a "oversupply" of AP news content, even as demand for online news has increased dramatically in the 2nd half of the 2000's, as a result of higher web use overall, and more recently, the mobile digital news explosion.

So even with greater demand, basic supply-demand curve tells you to reduce supply to increase the market clearing price of your news. Remember, news reporting is based on the fixed costs of maintaining a staff, but the economics of the web should give you nearly unlimited profit potential based on the possibility that a story can be replicated an infinite number of times for nearly no additional incremental cost.

But this potential must meet a demand for any revenue to be possible. And that's where far too many pages of content have been published - way beyond the demand of even an enormously news-hungry online audience that's growing everyday.

1,400 member paper sites publish a story, Yahoo News publishes the story, The New York Times publishes it, and even the India Times publishes that story, and because I, sitting in Brooklyn NY can find that story on any of these sites via search, there is no reason for me to discriminate among any of these sites.

I often will find an AP story on the St. Pete's Times, bounce over to Salon, jump to the Washington Times, and then read a wire story posted on a college paper site. I don't really care which paper site I'm on. And frankly, except for the NY Times & Yahoo, I'll probably never go back to any of the other sites.

AP and its members are responsible for this oversupply, by replicating their offline distribution model online and adding millions of additional impressions per story via digital deals. As a result, Yahoo and then Google became the top news destinations, while even the biggest newspaper sites dropped traffic.

In the old days, a paper in one town got to publish an AP story with no competition. Now that paper fights virtually every other news site in the world for eyeballs on that story. I remember when a friend of mine at Salon would mention that they couldn't believe how cheaply AP sold them their national news wire, and how much traffic those stories brought in.

End Non-Member Digital Distribution
Is it time to cut out the digital news aggregator sites? Maybe. Now that newspaper sites have matured, and google and yahoo news are less necessary.

But it's not time to cut out search engines. By limiting news distribution back to 1,500 member sites, and forcing google and yahoo to simply point to a limited number of sites, AP could make up the difference and improve the lot of its member sites as the only place to get this news.

This strategy would also require AP to cut out distribution of US news to international sites such as the Times of India. Remember that the web is truly global now, so I'm just as happy reading AP cover Washington on ToI as I am on the Post site.

Crowdsourcing
And I'd drop the News Registry, at least powered by AP editors. Human powered search is best left to passionate amateurs, and would be a waste of editorial time. This is where crowdsourcing or even a little bit of open source editorial work would invite news junkies in to do some necessary work that AP staff isn't equipped to handle. Remember, Wikipedia is 45 minutes away from total chaos, but that never happens, as long as a devoted global team edit out the spam and update disputes around the clock.

News Market
Finally, here's the big idea. Instead of a News Registry, I'd go with a News Market. When AP is breaking a story, and it often still does, don't flood the web with the story everywhere, for everyone, on every site. Instead, hold a quick auction. Let the highest bidder run the story, say for a day, and exclusively for that time. Or the highest 10 bidders. Or even 100. But contain distribution. Perhaps this is where the embedded meta tags and tracking cookies can help out.

As a result of search, a great story by AP on just a single member site, with the right promotion, will be found and can deliver that member and AP revenue and profits.

I'm optimistic that the AP will win this war. I just think there's a more digitally savvy way, and there's the old-school way. Hopefully there can be just a bit more new-world thinking here, so the news industry can save itself gracefully.

2010-01-05T09:47:00.002-05:00

Good morning from the Puck Building!

Just when I thought 2010 would be another year of pptx

2009-12-31T14:06:00.003-05:00

I'm finally inspired to write some resolutions, now that there's a chance PowerPoint will have been removed from my life come January:

1. No more PowerPoint
2. Be a better presented
3. Be a better dad
4. Be a more attentive husband
5. Build relationships, not opportunities
6. Listen

But most of all, fewer PowerPoints.

The AP is fighting an uphill battle

2009-11-15T07:27:00.007-05:00

Arriana Huffington wrote:

More and more new-media sites now perform two of the key functions formerly reserved for the old-media establishment—breaking major stories and offering original investigative reporting. And they do both with the speed, interactivity, and transparency that are the hallmarks of the Internet.

and Tom Curley said:

We content creators have been too slow to react to the exploitation of news content by third parties without input or permission. Random distribution of traffic by aggregators such as search engines directs audiences and revenues away from those who invest in original news reports. And randomness assures the aggregators and their ad networks a stream of revenue based on the aggregation and indexing of published news content. The content creators must act quickly and decisively to take back control.

The AP is fighting an uphill battle

Companies who absolutely defined Network and Speed in the Old Era prior to the rise of search, distributed feeds and photo sharing had all the market power. The AP was the model aggregator and distributor via satellite, leased line or Telex. It was the only game in town. The AP combined Network (180+ bureaus) with Speed (generally first on most major stories) for a truly differentiated, nearly unreplicable offering.

Today, this unique and differentiated Network and Speed combo has been completely undone by the Internet. Proof? Who broke the Hudson river landing last winter? A guy on Twitter on his iPhone. Where did the most compelling photos of the Green Revolution in Tehran come from? People on the street with Nokia camera phones. Where does the best digital industry news come from - The AP or 000s of online marketing bloggers? What's a more compelling top-line snapshot at the state of world business, Google News or AP Top 10 Business Headlines?

This new competition for eyeballs is hardly "Randomness" as Curley states. It just appears so to organizations that fiercely protected the production of truth and factual reporting with regimentation and strict ways of newsgathering. This randomness is actually a viable, self-policing super-organization that is capable of producing "good enough" news more quickly, more nimbly and occassionally superior to what AP struggles to write and shoot every day. It's enabled by broadband and mobile Internet access that gives every pair of eyeballs more choice and access to news from any source than ever before.

AP Internet News is now just one of dozens of industry news feeds that I scour every day. Five years ago it was pretty much my only source for digital industry news.

The inverted pyramid news story, which at best moves an hour or two after news breaks, still has a role to play, as a critical reality check on the citizen and Low-Pro news production that comes before it when stories break, and as a critical factual anchor source for the 000s of derivative news stories that will follow.

But it's no longer the only game in town, and the AP needs to move beyond this bedrock of news production to remain viable. Curley is correct that unauthorized re-use is an affront to AP's expertise and quality, but at the same time his strategy is sisyphean. The web is far too large and unweidly to police in the ways he plans. His News Registry approach tries to preserve the old guard but misses an opportunity to transform the web, and to become a leader in doing so.

Rather than try to draw lines in the sand to protect the old way of doing business, the AP must re-package its expertise and quality-news capabilities to acheive its larger objective of informing the world with facts and objectivity. By taking a page from the playbook of aggregators and platforms, AP can marry its capabilities with open-source distribution techniques to raise the bar for everyone.

In my next post, I'll suggest some ideas for how companies that have traditionally differentiated themselves using offline Network and Speed can transform these capabilities to lead the charge into digital channels.

Social Media ROI: Does it Matter?

2009-11-01T15:22:00.008-05:00

Let's just say for the record that ROI always matters. No matter what, any time you are going to take a client's or company's cold hard cash and invest it in a marketing or product development program, ROI matters. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but somewhere along the line, someone very high up will want to know what came of that $50 or $100K you "invested" into social.

This post is dedicated to those CMOs and clients from my past and present who demanded on ROI forecasting and tracking for every project, and for my budget as a whole.

I'm going to take a shot at offering a way to handle forecasting of social media ROI here, and hope to stand up to tracking in a subsequent post.

ROI Primer
Real quick primer on ROI, or Return on Investment. Another way to think of it is Return OVER Investment. It's best calculated using a conservative estimate of the actual profit to be generated by the project, over only the costs that will be incurred directly for the project.

(Revenue - Cost) / Cost

Put this way, it's a fraction that needs to be greater than 1 for a project to even be considered. Generally we want to see ROI of 2-3x or greater forecasted to even seriously consider a project.

ROI + Social Media
This turns ROI on it's head. The masters say don't worry about ROI and social. Barry Judge, CMO of socially adept Best Buy, stated at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago, that social needs to begin with the customer, not the bottom line. And he is right.

This means that payoff will not come right away, if at all, at least not directly. Instead, you need to look for social KPIs that fit your objective with whatever project is at hand.

Forrester does a great job mapping POST objectives to metrics in Nate Eliot's recent report on measuring social ROI:

Raise awareness

Exposures to brand
Visits to fan page
Fans of brand
Comments, posts or submissions
Referrals or posts to user's news feed or status

Boost engagement

Participants in community
Suggestions or tips submitted
Active (repeat) users

The bottom line is to choose metrics that describe what actions your users will take on your
behalf.

Calculating Social ROI
The added dimension here is engagement over time. Social is not a campaign, and results will not spike with a launch party. It's much more organic. Even "viral" social programs begin with a small number of first-finders who build over time.

Time of Engagement and Investment
This means that first, you must decide how long you can give yourself to succeed. Again, this correlates to your objectives. Generally social projects are not "campaigns" but require time to build over time. So you cut yourself some slack, perhaps. But the day of reckoning will come.

Next, use an ROI formula that keeps all assumptions clear and simple to understand. Here's one I use:

Audience x Engagement x Adoption x Value per User x Multiplier Effect X Time of Engagement
---------------------------------------------------------------

Investment X Time of Investment

Ideally, Time of Engagement cancels out Time of Investment top and bottom. But time on top might be
much greater than time on bottom: an evergreen success from a short investment. Or it might be much smaller: a flash in pan fan page that never goes anywhere else and does not inspire ongoing engagement.

The other parameters go like this:

Audience - total size of your segment. Say, 80 million moms in the US

Engagement - rate of participation on the platforms you've chosen. Say, 40% of moms aged 24-39 today are on Facebook. This is a stat you should be able to find

Adoption - rate you forecast your audience segment will find and use your app, widget, etc. Try to use a benchmark. Be conservative. One third of iPhone users download the Facebook app. Yours will not come close to this rate

Value per User - another forecast, this time based on whatever lifetime value the participant imparts on your business. Keep in mind that social participation typically does not match up directly with site conversion! The input here might simply be a PPC amount you would have spent using paid keywords to attract this user. Instead, she found you as a result of your presence on a social platform she's using. Now is she going to post on your / her wall, tell 3 friends or enter your contest? If so, what is that worth to your bottom line? This is probably an offset of another, more expensive marketing channel, which would lower your overall Cost Per Acquistion figure (CPA).

In fact, this value offset is typically a supercharged by what's great about social:

Multiplier Effect - this is the number of "friends" your participants will expose your brand to on your behalf. So that one participant who found you and offset your PPC spend also shares your brand implicitly with 120 of her friends on Facebook, when she posts to your wall. Channel choice can have a big impact here.

Investment - Here's where you factor all the time and costs you spent strategizing, designing, creating content, hosting micro-sites, curating a Facebook page, doing some SEM PPC to support your tool or offer, fulfilling coupons, administering contests, shooting video ...

So, there's a basic equation. The resulting ROI gives you a value in offset dollars, new brand equity or user enthusiasm over time, over some investment which should not be very large.

It's about planting seeds now that sprout and grow some other time
This participation is an expression of value moves your customers to either consider you at some point, or stick with you time and again. It may be delayed gratification. But if you have truly added value in terms of relevance to their lives, then you have built some esteem that will pay back on this social investment.

For now, let me know if this formula works, or how you might improve it. Especially the Multiplier Effect and the value and velocity of referrals it implies.

All in all, social ROI is all about

Books I want to read

2009-10-04T20:58:00.000-04:00

Books I want to read:

The 10 Demandments and the Open Brand
Linda Resnick, Orchard of Rubies
Dan Aurelli, Predictably Irational
Ory Brafman, Sway
The Cro-magnon CEO
Kelly Mooney, Resource International

MySpace, Facebook Move Lots of Display Ads, Not So Much Money

2009-09-03T10:38:00.003-04:00

Apparently no one clicks on display ads on social networks anyway. That probably explains the sharp dropoff after MS and FB. And FB is aiming high since their lowest meaningful entry-level ad package costs $50K.

It’s just that social networks number 3 and beyond get about 2% of the total traffic of FB+MS combined. And display ads are bought against volume, not relevance. Plus I bet the CTR on blackplanet.com is way higher than FB.

So do we or don't we place ads on these things?

What does your mobile consumer strategy look like

2009-08-20T12:02:00.005-04:00

Notice the title isn't mobile strategy, but mobile consumer strategy: there's a difference.

We need to design mobile around a completely different set of use cases and objectives - it's not a replication of an online service or commerce funnel on mobile.

Instead, mobile complements, supplements or replaces online entirely for each consumer.

First start with data on your audience. Here're some interesting facts about mobile consumers in the US courtesy of eMarketer.

and from comScore:

It's not just Gen Y, it's not just professionals, or upper income users. There's a groundswell and that means a lot of opportunity for strategy to harness the power of earnest consumers.

iAP the news aggregator

2009-04-13T07:17:00.003-04:00

The Associated Press would build a search engine that aggregates news like Google's. My first instinct is to say "No!" "Buy don't build" and "Push your content out to where your users are, don't try to pull them in."

But with Google sagging, and its algos not completely knocking off my socks anymore, particularly in the area of news, I say, why not?

Consider AP's plan a "disruptive innovation," on the low end. What if it aggregated valuable local and global content and found a way to analyze that news and make meaning out of it? Which local newspapers are most influential? Could AP create a proprietary "NewsRank" for international sources? How great would it be to find similarities between in coverage between Detroit's and Wolfburg's city papers?

For more on this story, see Businessweek. Unlike the NYT and WSJ, who treat this as a saga of the dying newspaper industry, Businessweek's coverage of the AP more accurately treats this as a David/Goliath story focusing on the AP's operations and management.

And if I may, as a former AP'er: Please guys, get out of the tower and re-integrate yourselves with your communities. It's about the people and having an identity in the place you cover. Go "Hyperlocal." See my next post, or simply this a.m.'s NYT business section.

Rupert Murdoch wants a 4-color e-reader

2009-04-03T17:46:00.003-04:00

Rupert is on the search for a "4-color" e-reader that can save the traditional world of print news. While Plastic Logic certainly can reproduce about a 1/4 swath of the NYT print edition page layout, it is still very much a B&W affair.

The color request keeps the iPhone/iPod Touch device very much in the running, albeit one with a somewhat larger screen. 4x6? I'd carry that as a Touch - but no way I'd use that size as a phone. Give me a bluetooth and maybe then.

Check out this product demo from PL:

My Reading List for the Winter Break

2008-12-15T11:17:00.004-05:00

The McKinsey Quarterly: “Getting more from prepaid mobile services” (February 2008) -> good for understanding innovation and adding services for lower end pre-paid customers.

Wellsprings of Knowledge, by Dorothy Leonard-Barton, Harvard Press book on market research method that's good for discovering non-consumption, as mentioned in Seeing What's Next by Clayton Christainsen.

The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

Infotopia, Cass Sunstein.

Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin.

Banktastic Blog.

Ethnio's Live Recruiter Goes Free

2008-11-25T11:00:00.002-05:00

Ethnio, a bolt/peters co, now offers its live recruiting tool for free. See a demo on this site pop up (the study is running as of today for a few weeks). This means you can now recruit users live on your site for follow up focus groups, phone interviews, usability studies, etc.

You monitor your recruitment on a dashboard online. Then, go ahead and either do the follow up meetings yourself, or ask bolt/peters to run part or all of the show.

My agency, IconNicholson, used them to recruit and carry out a usability study for a major hospital site. The results were great and the method helped us win the job.

Clintons to Obama: Sorry, bud, no time

2008-09-22T22:55:00.003-04:00

The Times is on to the Clintons and their lukewarm support of Obama overall. In the article today about Michelle Obama's role in the Obama campaign, they note Hillary's 2nd tier role:

Mrs. Clinton is campaigning only once or twice a week for Mr. Obama, as opposed to Ms. Palin’s appeals to women at events several times a day. That leaves Mrs. Obama as the Democratic campaign’s busiest and most high-profile female surrogate at a time when the fight for women is intensifying.

And today, AP found Bill telling us how great we all think Sarah Palin's life must be. But he'll be back on the trail after a four-day hiatus because of his Global Initiative.

Looks like Obama should be keeping friends closer ...

WSJ.com Adds SeenThis?

2008-04-03T22:07:00.005-04:00

Not many "seen it" yet

I enabled the SeenThis? widget by Loomia on my WSJ.com subscription, and invited a few newsy friends on FaceBook to join in. Only one did. That's too bad because the widget tells me what my friends are reading on WSJ when I'm on the site, and 9,999 other news sources when I'm on FB. Because fewer than 100 total people are actively using the widget on FB, I'm guessing that many people are encountering the same UX as me - a perfect mirror of my own reading habits.

SEO Haikus

2008-04-03T22:02:00.002-04:00

Today I gave an in-house presentation on SEO strategy. At finish, my co-presenter delivered these three haikus I wrote:

Google flattens sites
Every little detail page
Can now be a star

Don't make promises
Lightly. Users give you three
Seconds or they leave

Get links to your site
Make sure they are relevant
To the detail page

Redirect

2008-03-14T06:32:00.000-04:00

Please see my regular blog here.

Welcome to Interactive Content!

2008-03-14T06:04:00.000-04:00

Hi and welcome to my second blog. My first is my beta blog about news media. I frankly am surprised that Interactive Content is still available as a name. But it is, so I've grabbed it here. I