The Praized Blog

For every kid that I bump into who is wandering the media industry looking for an entrance that closed some time ago, I come across another who is a bundle of ideas, energy and technological mastery. The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down.

Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well.

via The Media Equation – For Media, a Sunset Is Followed Quickly by a Sunrise – NYTimes.com.

What it means: David Carr describes what happens to an industry (newspaper, magazine, book publishing in this case) when it waits too long to change and innovate. Reading this, I can’t help but think of my recent blog post on Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (founders of Kazaa, Skype and Joost) who chose to work against and with media.  These two paragraphs also makes me think of the vibrant energy felt in the Web industry circa 1997-1999.  It also reminds me of this article Kevin Kelly wrote post- dotcom bust, when everyone in the digerati was licking their wounds.  Let’s not forget the Dotcom bust lead to what we call today Web 2.0 and the rise of social networking.

You know what? It’s all intuition at this point, so I can’t back this up with data, but we’re probably on the verge of another major shift in local media. The year of mobile is happening right now. Location is the hottest topic amongst techies.  The Kelsey Group invites people to attend ILM ‘09 conference (you should!) by saying “Get Ready for the Post Recovery Digital Shift”. I think they’re right. Expect investments in disruptive local technology and startups to pick up once again next year and traditional media companies need to be ready for this new game.

Update: don’t believe that VC investments are coming back? Read this post written today on the True Ventures corporate blog. Excerpt: “Over the past few weeks we’ve seen extremely high activity in new venture investments. Starting in September, we witnessed the return of multiple term sheet deals, short fuse situations, and a renewed urgency to most fund-raisings. (…) Venture is back. And it’s back because of one word: exits.”

Mathew Ingram, communities editor at The Globe and Mail, just published a presentation he prepared to help reporters understand Facebook and how it can help them. Ingram says that fundamentally, Facebook helps with:

1. Finding information and reaching out to people who might be involved in stories they are writing about
2. Allowing fans of the Globe and Mail content to share and promote news stories and content

A good read. More information can be found in his presentation on Slideshare.

Ingram also gave a very interesting talk (the slides are here) at TEDxToronto last September titled “Five Ways New Media Will Save Old Media”. The five ways are:

1. By enlarging the size of the media pie

• Publishing tools are cheap and widely distributed now and more sources of media is better

• Real events don’t occur in time-specific packages. This was due to the limitations of the print product.

• People look to trusted filters for information and more information means more filters are needed
• You can’t have trust in a faceless institution except through the human beings that are part of it
• We earn trust by being human (important not to hide mistakes)

• People may know more about that story than the journalist, you should allow them to tell you what they know

• The idea of mass media is over, you have to see media as a spectrum
• You need to balance between what readers want to know and what they “should know”
• Readers are sometimes trading accuracy vs. immediacy. Journalists should be prepared to give them different experiences of the news at those different times.
• A print newspaper is a bundle of news. Media is being unbundled.
• Twitter is a tool, not journalism.

Ingram finished his presentation with this clear conclusion: “If anyone can publish, trust is the only thing news media has left, the only competitive advantage.”

What it means: I love how Mathew Ingram thinks. His journalism and social media experience allows him to distill the essence of the impact of new media on news organizations. It’s also making me think differently about the way social media impacts directory publishing. For example,

• How do you define trusted filters in a Yellow Pages environment? (friends, editors, experts, etc.)
• How do you make social local search a process instead of a product? (I suspect real-time search plays a role)
• How does a directory company stop being “faceless”?
• How do you give people choices? (is it through aggregation?)

Food for thought for future blog posts…

This guest post is written by Annie Bacon, a freelance game designer (www.anniebacon.com) living in Montreal. She’s also the author of the youth novel series Terra Incognita and akidstory.com personalized books.

It all started with this link to a blog post with a YouTube video in which someone puts an iPhone into an actual physical book to make it interactive. My first feeling upon looking at the video is a simple and complete “wow”, isn’t that remarkable! Considering that I’m both a youth novel writer and game designer, it looked like the best of both worlds merging book and videogame together. But then, I started to wonder why is the physical book frame needed? The interesting part is how the touch screen of the iPhone allows for the story to come alive; the rest is just a pretty shell… or is it?

After years of laissé-faire (70s and 80s), parents have started putting their foot down on the amount of time their kids spend in front of the TV. “Obesity” and “passivity” were the two words most currently used to demonize the entire medium. By association, videogames and computer games are also considered “time wasters” even though they actively engage the child with their interactivity. “Less TV” has quickly become “Less time in front of a screen”, even in my own home, I must admit!

Interactive stories have been on the market as CD-ROMs and websites for years, and yet none of them ever got the reaction that the aforementioned YouTube video got. Why? Because they were not cleverly disguised as the sacred object that is a book! Books are wholesome! They make kids smarter! They prevent school drop-out! Not actual reading, just the books itself!

This brings me to the electronic book. I follow a lot of writers and editors on both Twitter and Facebook, and the “what do you think of the Kindle” conversations are multiplying. A lot of purists are strongly against them, as if the smell of the paper was more important to the experience than the story contained within. Again, it’s the screen that causes a problem. If e-readers were made of paper with magical ink instead of plastic and pixels, they might be more widely accepted, and yet, the experience would be exactly the same. Some wonder if they’re here to stay. Of course they are! But they’ll also transform. They’ll add colors to accommodate illustrations, then sound, then interactivity, and suddenly the line between books and web-like content will blur.

What it means: It’s the habit of this blog to have a thought-provoking analysis at the end of a post. I would have liked to do the same but I find I have more questions than answers. Once children books are on interactive e-readers, will parents see them as acceptable reading material, or will they just be thrown in the “more screens” category? Will authors need to adjust to the new philosophy and add bells and whistles (read interactivity) to their books if they want to go mainstream? Will books, interactive content, videogames and movies stay in separate categories or are we looking at a merger of media? Will the next generation really care about those categories or just think of it as Entertainment with a capital E? Two things are certain: first, the paper book is not going to disappear any time soon. After all, in this “MP3” world, my daughter still listens to good old vinyl records once in a while! Secondly, creators and consumers should rejoice: in whatever form it takes, the future of entertainment is going to be exciting! Like in a good book, I can’t wait to see what happens next!

Seeing Niklas Zennstrom’s name on LeWeb’s list of speakers along with the news that Joost’s assets were being acquired by Adconion Media Group got me thinking about the dynamics of that specific startup. Joost was founded in 2006 to build a online video portal with the core idea that legal video streaming would be more efficient if it was built on peer-to-peer technology. The company signed content licensing agreements with major media companies, they had major funding ($45M), 150 software developers and experienced founders/entrepreneurs (Zennstrom and Janus Friis) who had had major successes with Kazaa and Skype. It seemed they would be successful once again.

It didn’t happen. Why? CNET explains that their technology choice of a downloadable application certainly impaired their chance of success. The arrival of Hulu, a big hit with users, also didn’t help  but I was specifically struck by this other reason: “Some of the big-name content partners seemed to be putting in a halfhearted effort with Joost, offering up reruns and esoteric programs instead of the new programming that people actually wanted to watch”. Hmmm…

Think about Kazaa and Skype. What did Zennstrom and Friis successfully achieve with these new initiatives? They directly attacked major players in large mature markets using industry weak points. Kazaa was an assault on the music industry, Skype took on telcos. They didn’t say “let’s work with these guys”. They just did it and leveraged the fact that these two industries were very profitable and slow to innovate. They foresaw the disruptive impact of technology and created a lot of value for their shareholders. Venture capital firms usually love these startups. When they created Joost, they changed their entrepreneur paradigm and it failed. Zennstrom and Friis’ new startup Rdio is in the online music space and it looks like they’re going to be working with the music industry. Will it impair their chance of success or has the music industry matured enough in the last 10 years to embrace innovation?

It got me thinking about newspapers, directory publishers, the movie industry, radio, magazines, and other traditional media companies. At one point or another, all these industries (who generate or used to generate fat profit margins) fought technology and we’re slow to innovate. I think it’s getting better (still not fast enough in my own opinion) but I was reminded it is still very slow in Canada by this blog post (in French) written by Yannick Manuri. He says that 40% of all online advertising spent in the country benefited foreign media companies and anecdotally he doesn’t see the sense of urgency in Canadian media companies. It’s a reality in other countries as well.

Why do we need industry disruptors to stimulate innovation in media? Couldn’t it happen by itself?

LeWeb, the major European conference (the equivalent of the Web 2.0 Summit in North America), just released their complete schedule for the next event happening in Paris on December 9 and 10. The theme of the conference is the real-time Web.

As I wrote about a month ago, I’ve been selected as one of their official bloggers. Here are the speakers I’m most looking forward to:

• A fireside chat with Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s creator. Will be interesting to hear his vision about where Twitter is going.
• Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform, Twitter. His background as a “local” expert makes him an interesting speaker for anyone interested in local media.
• “The Platform Roundtable” with representatives from Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, Ustream, SixApart, MySpace and Twitter. Expect the discussion to revolve around APIs and open ecosystems…
• A fireside chat with Robert Scoble. Always interesting perspective as a good observer of the Web scene.
• Niklas Zennstrom (of Kazaa-Skype-Joost fame). I want to hear more about their new venture in the music industry Rdio.
• The Money Roundtable with a group of very interesting VCs including David Hornik and Fred Wilson. Expect them to say they’re still cautious but that 2010 should be a good year.
• “The rise of emotional Web” by Yossi Vardi. Should be a fascinating session.
• Gillmor Gang Live. Always explosive!

Loic Le Meur, the organizer, often has surprise guest speakers as well. If you want to attend and haven’t bought your ticket yet, you can get a 10% discount if you use the following code: BLOG09 .

I still haven’t had chance to blog about the first Local Social Summit but the organizing team has just published the videos of the event on YouTube. I was on a panel titled “Local Gets Social – UGC and the Promise of Real-Time Search” and ran a presentation called “What does the Perfect Local Media Company Look Like in 5 Years Time “.

Panel video in five parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Presentation video in four parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

I’ve uploaded the actual presentation document on Slideshare. It complements the four-part video. The event was a definite success. Attendees were defining the future of local and social. Expect a repeat in 2010.

Three-quarters of small businesses will increase their spending on e-mail marketing in 2010, while nearly seven in 10 will put more dollars toward social media, according to VerticalResponse data.

via Small Businesses Look to E-Mail and Social Media – eMarketer.

What it means: another survey that clearly shows the high interest of social media for small businesses but they will need help. A significant business opportunity.

We’re almost at the end of the first decade of the 21st century (yes, it went by really fast!) and it’s probably time to reflect on what characterized the last ten years. Each decade gets its own descriptive “brand” and this one won’t be different. The seventies were all about “the peak of hippie culture“, social change and related values. The eighties were all about the individual, economic liberalization and some would say money and greed but it also saw the end of the Cold War. The beginning of the 90’s was very nihilistic with the grunge movement but finished on a high note with the start of a long period of economic growth, an amazing era of technology innovation and the dotcom boom.

So, what defined the 2000’s? We obviously could talk about September 11, the dotcom bust and the recent worldwide financial crisis but those are punctual events. They definitely influenced the zeitgeist but they are not the zeitgeist. I believe the decade that’s ending was all about “me” and the extreme democratization of media. I call it “The Self-Media Decade”.

It all started with the reality television phenomenon in 2000. Survivor, the famous TV show, ignited the genre and there’s been no looking back since then. Every time you watch television today, you see “real” people in “real” situations. In parallel to that, blogging and blog platforms arrived on the market (LiveJournal in March 1999 and blogger.com in August 1999). Throughout the decade, millions of people took up blogging. Some blogs became a real alternative to newspapers and magazines, journalists started blogging and the line with mainstream media started blurring. In the newspaper industry also, Craigslist democratized classifieds, allowing anyone to post a classified ad online for free. Their first real expansion out of the San Francisco market happened in 2000.

Another parallel was the arrival of Napster, also in 1999. By enabling downloads of individual songs, Napster was allowing everyone to become their own radio programmer (or CD mixer). Why listen to radio (or buy packaged music CDs) when you can just download your favorite songs and get instant gratification. We all knew at the time that television and movie distribution would be impacted in the coming years. Tivo became a phenomenon in itself and created the personal video recorder product category. No need to sit down at a fixed date and time to watch a television show. Can you guess when Tivo launched? Yup, 1999.

On the shopping side, the birth of Epinions (again in 1999) was the first signal of the important role consumers would play regarding merchant and product recommendations via user reviews. Up until then, directory publishers were pretty much the sole gatekeepers in a very advertiser-focused world.

With the introduction of these new sites and tools, the only thing missing was a solid broadcast ecosystem. Facebook (and later Twitter) created those much needed amplifiers starting mid-decade. By building your social graph, you’re creating your own media network. I quickly clued in to this when I wrote my “Robert Scoble is Media” blog post. We were all becoming media (production and broadcast) including myself.

I’m actually a good case study of the power of social media tools. Up until I started blogging in 2006, I had an excellent professional reputation but in a very small circle of industry colleagues and peers. By blogging extensively since then and by using broadcast mechanisms provided by sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, my worldwide reputation has grown tremendously. I now have thousands of monthly industry readers on my blog and I’m often invited to speak at conferences. I’ve become an important influencer in the directory publishing industry and I’m amazed at the speed at which it happened.

So, what did we gain as a society? We now have more transparency, democracy and meritocracy. What did we lose? We lost common “experiences” (traditionally focused by media) and we’re not always sure who we can trust out there. There’s a lot more noise. But clearly, we’ve all become media by participating, with everything good and bad that comes with it and this will continue in the next decade.

From an article published by Techcrunch this morning:

At the core level, using a social network to facilitate actual social interaction just seems to make sense. Though I poked fun at them in the intro of this post, don’t think that Facebook doesn’t recognize this. In some ways they already do this through their popular events offering. But anything they do with location — which it should be no surprise, they are working on — will go far beyond this. When you have a social graph with over 300 million users and you add a realtime location component into the mix, it’s going to change things.

What it means: we knew Facebook was working on its “local” strategy but it’s the first time we read about it more or less officially. I’ve always felt Facebook was really a “local” play with a tremendous social component and the people there are cluing in to the enormous potential of local, both from a revenue (local ad dollars) and a user perspective. This is potentially very disruptive from a traditional local media point of view.

In my dual role as industry blogger and co-founder of a company that provides social media technologies to local media companies (including ratings/reviews), I’m often asked about deployment of user ratings/reviews in the context of a directory publisher.

Here are my current thoughts (in no particular order) about what’s needed to successfully deploy that core user feature:

1. A separate brand. Up until a few months ago, I would have said that core directory brands were adequate for user ratings and reviews but I’ve come full circle on this. I think you need a separate, “cooler” brand in order to build a community and to drive participation around merchant reviews.
2. Community management. You need to hire staff to animate the community online and in person in all your major markets. You need to organize real offline events (i.e. get-together and parties) to build up the cohesiveness of your user ecosystem.
3. Champions. You need to identify your site champions (power users) and nurture them. Give them perks, benefits and empower them.
4. Rewards system. To influence “positive” user behaviour, make sure you have a virtual rewards system with titles, badges and/or reviewer levels. Make sure that reward system is holistic to take into account user and business interests.
5. Friend system. You absolutely need a “friend” system to allow users to see what their “friends” are doing in the site. Don’t built it from scratch. Use an existing identity system like Facebook or Twitter.
6. Engage merchants to join conversation. Directory publishers have great ties with small businesses. They should use that relationship to invite them to come to the review site to engage conversation with users. This starts by allowing businesses to claim their listing(s) and inviting them to leave comment when activities (sales, events, etc.) are happening at their store.
7. Mobile application. As a lot of activities around merchant reviews happen at the point of sale, you need a mobile application (certainly iPhone and Blackberry) connected to your review site.
8. Weekly email. You need to send a weekly summary to all your site users to give them a digest of everything that’s happening in their city and/or their favorite categories/merchants. This gives your users a reminder to come back to your site and check out the latest activities.
9. Crosslink/embed content in your other sites. Even though I recommend creating a new brand for user reviews, you should definitely embed content and links in all your other network sites (for example, in merchant listings and profile pages).
10. Activity stream + widgets. You need to have an activity stream showing all activities (user reviews, comments, discussions, searches, top, etc.) on your review site and you need widgets to allow 3rd party sites to embed those activities on their own websites.
11. Promote your new site. “If you build it, they won’t necessarily come”. You need to make sure you’re actively promoting your site through advertising, social media and public relations. That’s in addition to community management and event organization mentioned above.
12. Local Twitter accounts. Create Twitter accounts for all your major local markets to broadcast local activities to Twitter users interested in following up what’s going on in their city.

Do you agree or disagree with these success factors? Did I forget any critical ones?