The Praized Blog

Le Devoir, an independent French language newspaper from Montreal, recently celebrated its 100th anniversary. Jean Dion, one of their star columnists, wrote an article detailing what you could find in the first and second editions published in January 1910. Of note, the second issue saw the birth of the “Mondanités” column (society gossip). The column mentions the latest weddings and funerals happening in Montreal but I was specifically intrigued by a section called “déplacements” (movements).

Dion writes (loosely translated from French):

… the “movements” section is quite comical when you look at it with the eyes of a modern reader. “Mr. Ovila Perrault from Imperial Tobacco is back from a trip to New York.” “Mr. Omer Marchand, architect, is in Quebec City.” “Mr. Montarville B. de LaBruère jr. is back from a 10-day trip to Sorel”. Nothing more, nothing less.

Wow. And here we thought location-based status updates had been invented by Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or Gowalla. People used to broadcast their trip information in the newspaper! This was certainly done for two reasons: information (i.e. don’t try to reach me, I’m in New York.) and status. The more things change…

In the most-awaited session of the afternoon of Day 1 at LeWeb, Michael Arrington (from TechCrunch) sat down with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products and User Experience at Google to discuss a series of hot topics like recent Google innovations, mobile and the newspaper industry.

On recent innovations:

• Mayer says Google is focused on future of search and they expect different modality of search, not just through keywords. That’s why they launched Google Goggles this week which is basically image recognition (you take a picture and Google tells you what it is). See this example. They also expanded voice search to Japanese and added the “What’s nearby” mobile functionality. Mayer thinks that people will eventually talk to their phone or take a picture to make a search. They also added real-time results (from Twitter, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, etc.) to regular search results, which drastically increases the relevancy of Google search results.
• On Google Chrome, she mentioned the release of Chrome Extensions which allows anyone to add functionalities via plugins in the Chrome browser (like Firefox). She said there are “tens of millions of Chrome users”.
• On Google Wave, Arrington stated “there’s something there” but wondered if we needed more “training”. I think most people are unsure of the value of Wave today and that’s why the Techcrunch founder asked the question.

On mobile searches:

• Mayer says they’ve grown tremendously on smart phones. Asked by Arrington if their total share of mobile searches over total searches was in the 1 to 5% range, she answered “slightly higher than that”.

On newspapers:

• Arrington started by saying we all understand the dire situation of print media and mentioned Eric Schmidt recent vision piece in the Wall Street Journal. He then asked Mayer: “What’s your vision?”. The VP from Google answered with a question: “how do you get users more engaged with news online?” She continued by stating that if we could build a news site from scratch today, it would probably look very different than what we have today. She then mentioned The Living Stories experiment they’re doing with the New York Times and the Washington Post. “What if the story was alive? Not just the print version posted online.” She added that the Web ”puts pressure on the atomic unit of consumption. The article is the atomic unit.” She then suggested we could aggregate all news story on the same topic on one page, like Wikipedia, to help with discovery in Google.
• She closed that topic by suggesting “personalized stream of news”, probably on your mobile phone, would be interesting. The stream would be filtered according to your social circle, location, the news brands you like, the writers you like, and the important news you should know about (she called them “veggies”).
• Asked if newspapers will move fast enough, she thought so and mentioned the New York Times and Washington Post are very progressive partners and very interested on how they can reinvent themselves.
• On Murdoch, Mayer mentioned the partnership with MySpace. Asked if she thought News Corp would pull their content from Google, she answered ”I hope not” as it would impact comprehensiveness of their results set. She added ”we have to respect the content owners. We would respect his will.”
• Finally, Arrington asked if Google would consider paying for content, Marissa Mayer proposed that they already have programs for content monetization through Google Adsense and their display ads network.

See more on Techcrunch.

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…

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.

Found in Jeff Jarvis’ blog a few minutes ago:

Here at Aspen, the most inspiring idea I have heard came from Google’s Marissa Mayer, who went past the old web to imagine what’s next: not hyperlocal news sites but hyperpersonal news streams. Of course, we see the start of that in Facebook and Twitter. Mayer emphasized to the media folks at Aspen that they must go to where the people are and not expect the people to come to them (“if the news is that important, it will find me”). How does news become part of my stream?

via NewBizNews & Hyperpersonal news streams « BuzzMachine.

What it means: if Marissa Mayer is talking about activity streams, you can be sure this is top of mind at Google (she’s the Vice President of Search Product and User Experience).

Online highlights from McClatchy’s second quarter 2009 results unveiled yesterday:

“McClatchy continues its transition to a successful hybrid print and online company. Our digital audience continues to grow impressively. Average monthly unique visitors to our websites were up 30.1% in the second quarter following 26.7% growth in the first quarter of 2009. Still, the recession is impacting our digital business. Our digital advertising was down 2.9% in the second quarter of 2009, hurt particularly by declining employment advertising. Excluding employment advertising, which has declined nationally both in print and online, our online advertising revenue grew 24.7% in the second quarter of this year.

“Our digital performance has been aided by ownership stakes in CareerBuilder, Cars.com, and Apartments.com, leading companies in the digital classified advertising arena. And our growth in digital retail advertising of 50.7% in the first half of 2009 is fueled in part by our partnerships with Yahoo! and other technology companies.

“As we continue our successful migration to a multimedia company, we are less vulnerable to print declines and the secular shifts of advertising to digital media. Digital advertising represented 16.5% of total advertising in the second quarter, up from 11.8% in the second quarter of 2008. In June, digital advertising represented 17.3% of total advertising.

via McClatchy Reports Growth in Second Quarter 2009 Earnings – Yahoo! Finance.

What it means: McClatchy, the Sacramento newspaper publisher, reported better than expected profits even though ad revenues fell more than 30%. Cost-cutting measures (severe layoffs and salary reductions) contributed to the results. Interesting to see that online revenues are up a very good 24.7% if you exclude employment ads. Also interesting: 17.3% of their total revenues came from online in June.  McClatchy is the third-largest newspaper publisher in the US. They bought Knight-Ridder in 2006.

I have seen the next evolution of local media…

Yes, I have. And why am I so sure? Because I’ve seen it happen before and it’s about to happen again.  I hope you’re sitting down comfortably with a good coffee because it’s a long blog post (more than 2300 words!). But stick with me, it’s worth it!

Let’s go back to 2003. I’m running Yellow Pages Group’s online strategy and business development. YPG owns the leading online directories in Canada. At the time, our focus is on building the best “online directory” site in Canada (called Internet Yellow Pages or IYPs in the US). “Online directories” at the time are characterized by the infamous 4-fields search boxes (category/heading, business name, city, province/state) that basically recreate the print Yellow Pages experience online. Not always a very good user experience but all major directory publishers worldwide offer the same thing. It’s the design standard/convention for online directory sites.

According to general perception then, our biggest online competitor was Superpages.ca, owned by Telus, a major telco from Western Canada. Superpages was entering Yellow Pages Group territories (Toronto, Montreal, etc.) with print books and monopolizing a lot of the attention. In 2003, I had been using Google as my home page for at least three years. It seemed to me like it was the best entry door to Web content and Google’s traffic and revenues had been growing like crazy. Remember, this is pre-IPO (August 2004) and pre-Google Local (September 2004). Except for early adopters, small merchants were not yet talking about Google (that will come post-IPO) and directory publishers didn’t see Google as a threat.

But consumers were clearly starting to use Google for local searches and every time I used it, I found the experience was satisfying and the results were quite relevant.  I came to the realization that Google had just created a new design convention around “Web search” (simplified user interface, focus on results relevancy) but the train had left the station and it meant the whole industry had to play catch-up. In Canada, Superpages.ca is not important, Google is. Over the next three years, the entire online team at Yellow Pages Group would work at transforming our online strategy around local search. That included the delivery of a streamlined YellowPages.ca user interface (seen here on archive.org when first launched in 2006), an improved search technology, the introduction of enhanced content in search results (via digitized ad content, etc.), better search engine optimization for the site and a content partnership with Google for the launch of Google Local Canada. Over this transformative period, YPG becomes better at being user-focused which is what made Google’s success. Over the same period of time, the whole directory publishing industry worldwide metamorphoses itself into local search hubs.

The rise of social media

Fast forward to September 2006, I start writing about local search and social media. Blogs have been very popular for a couple of years allowing a new level of self-expression. Online social media as we know it today still hasn’t exploded but I get the feeling it’s going to be important. I remember when I first joined Yellow Pages Group (back in 1999 when it was still called Bell ActiMedia), someone told me word-of-mouth was the biggest source of leads for small businesses. That stuck with me. What if social media was able to create this enormous word-of-mouth machine? What if consumers become able to ask questions, share recommendations and have discussions on local places on a massive scale? It could happen but, at that time, I have no idea yet what form it would take.

In 2006, I’m already a heavy user of Linkedin but have missed the boat completely on MySpace. Facebook is growing but is still not open to everyone. They have just introduced their newsfeed feature (more on that later) and Twitter’s will slowly surface in March 2007 at the SXSW conference. In July 2007, Silicon Valley starts to get excited about Facebook. That same week, after studying the activities of famed blogger Robert Scoble, I understand what he’s doing with Facebook and what that means. An individual can become “media” by broadcasting his activities and having many friends/followers/fans. In August 2007, I reflect on the fact that the web is becoming a big word-of-mouth machine because of human activity.

In October 2007, Friendfeed, co-founded by Google Maps lead developer Bret Taylor, launches. They’ve taken the newsfeed element of Facebook and made it a standalone feature calling it a lifestreaming service. In March 2008, Twitter explodes. I write about how they’re slowly becoming “the new Facebook“. In June 2008, following an experiment I did on Twitter and Facebook, I see how practical it is to “ping” your social graph (i.e. your network of friends) when you have questions or needs. It works very nicely when you’ve “collected” hundreds of friends/people/fans around you.

Fast forward to this year. March 2009, Facebook redesigns its home page to make it more Twitter-like, with a focus on the activity stream. Beginning of April, Friendfeed also redesigns its home page and integrates real-time updates. Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed all feel strangely similar now. I believe we’ve now reached a new gold standard in terms of display and interaction with real-time conversations, which means that consumers will be now be expecting a similar user experience in this context.

Small merchants have started creating a presence on Twitter. You can already find bars, restaurants, pizza places, lawyers, plumbers, bakeries, etc. These technology early-adopters are joining the conversation, the same way early small merchant adopters started doing local advertising on Google back in 2003.

New “‘Marketplaces”

With Facebook and Twitter, we’re clearly seeing the emergence of new ”marketplaces”, where people and companies/brands meet to discuss, to share links (including news) but also to “buy” and “sell”. To the foreign eye, they’re noisy, unruly and useless but I think they are a modern version of souqs. According to Wikipedia, “souqs were more than just a market to buy and sell goods; they were also major festivals and many cultural and social activities took place in them”. Sounds familiar?

Flickr picture by khalid almasoud

Need more proof? Michael Bauer found a 1901 New York Times article talking about a new growing technology called the telephone. “No doubt the telephone is used unnecessarily, and sometimes abused. Its sharp alarm jars on the nerves, and its incessant and insistent demands upon the attention of the subscriber who is much in request are (…) very wearing” but it adds “to dispense with it now would be to necessitate the reorganization of our business system”. As Bauer says, “Sounds like a twitter morning.”

Traffic explosion

In any case, consumers seem to love their Twitter and their Facebook. According to ComScore, “Worldwide visitors to Twitter approached 10 million in February (2009), up an impressive 700+% vs. year ago” while Facebook welcomed its 200 millionth active user in April 2009. Again according to ComScore, Google’s monthly searches grew by 42% to 9.1B in the last 12 months in the US (March 08 to March 09). So, they still have an excellent growth rate but I’d be curious to know how many “interactions” (a proxy for searches) happen in one month in Facebook and Twitter. This Techcrunch article gives us a better idea by indicating that “more than 850 million photos (are) uploaded to the site each month”.

Fighting yesterday’s battle?

Let’s go back to Yellow Pages publishers. A few weeks ago, RHD presented me their new DexKnows site. I was impressed by the evolution of the site with its simplified user interface (search engine-like) and better taxonomy. But at the same time, as I wrote in my post, “it also made me realize that the industry is still very much looking at Google (or Yahoo or MSN) as the local search benchmark.”  I then wondered out loud: ”instead of doing incremental innovation, how do you leapfrog search engines? In other words, what is keeping Google up at night? The answer to that question leads to a possible new strategic direction.  Community, humans, social interactions, marketplaces are what’s keeping Google up at night.” As I said in this interview with Michael Boland from the Kelsey Group, “There have been many recent IYP redesigns that have been drastic improvements but I’ve started to wonder if they aren’t fighting yesterday’s battle. All IYPs are innovating on an incremental fashion but there is no game changing innovation going on.”

Where do we go from here?

What is it then? I think you can guess where I’m going. I know “newsfeeds” are a key element of that brave new real-time world. They’re addictive and allow for content discovery. I know “real-time conversation” is a crucial component as well. After all, social media is all about communication. But I was missing one piece of the equation. That piece was “real-time search”. I discovered its tremendous value when I installed this GreaseMonkey script that integrates Twitter search results on top of Google search results. For timely queries in Google, the Twitosphere offers much better results. For example #1, see this screenshot of a search query when author JG Ballard died a few weeks ago. The Twitter results gave me relevant links to find out more information about his death. You need to scroll down the page to find Google News results that mention the writer’s demise. The screenshot for example #2 was taken when we learned that scientist Stephen Hawking was gravely ill and had been taken to the hospital. Once again, Google failed to provide me timely, relevant results.

What if you were to apply these three fundamental social elements to local media? The newsfeed would allow for publishing of local activities and discovery of new places to go to, important local news and cool people that share similar tastes. The real-time search would allow for structured search on recent activities, showing consumers where the action is happening in their city. Finally, the real-time conversation would enable consumers and merchants to engage in conversation, increasing user satisfaction and generating new leads for businesses. Sounds like this would be a cool and brave new local world isn’t it? This is a game changer and represents a major opportunity for all local media publishers. Ok now, I’m warning you, I’m switching to pitch mode!

Introducing Praized Media’s newsfeed, real-time search and conversation platform

My company, Praized Media, was created to help media companies tap into the growing potential of online word-of-mouth and social media. I believe the future of local media is right in front of our eyes and that if we act now, we can maintain (and even increase) the relevancy of media companies in the next years. We’ve developed four key enterprise-class social modules that can be integrated within an existing platform or be used to create a brand new social destination site.

1) The Local Buzz local newsfeed (integration of a real-time local activity stream including user and advertiser actions, advertising, editorial content, classified ads, weather, events, etc.). Praized will create an activity stream out of your current content and ideally, that feed should be displayed on the home page of your main site.

Click for larger view

2) Real-time search integration within existing local search platform. This module provides structured data search results based on the newsfeed activity. It enables the integration of the most recent activities around a specific keyword/merchant name in a specific geographical area. It gives user the freshest results around specific keywords.

Click for larger view

3) Real-time users and merchants communication module. This module provides the ability for consumers and merchants to start posting short-form web messages (à la Twitter) in the newsfeed located on your home page. Consumers can “follow” other consumers or merchants and can engage in real-time asynchronous conversations.

Click for larger view

4) Answers (a “local” Question & Answer service, including a social network broadcast mechanism). Consumers can ask questions to the community and to their Facebook/Twitter friends and all answers come back to a unique page. Merchants can even join the conversation!

Click to see actual implementation

What it means: Ten years ago, Google invented a new paradigm for search. The local media industry was blindsided by this upstart which has now become a juggernaut. Back in early 21st century, quick industry reaction would have made the fight more even-handed. Fast-forward to now, Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed have created a new gold standard for real-time conversations and search. Consumers are using them in drove. Small merchants are creating a presence on those sites and joining the conversation. These sites have become marketplaces but they have yet to fully discover their local angle. The rise of social media online is a game-changing opportunity for local media publishers. People are discussing, sharing and recommending to each other news to read and places to visit. Millions of word-of-mouth conversations about local places are occurring every day on the Web, yet they are not happening on major media portals.

I firmly believe that this is going to be the gold standard for local media and that, in the next three years, all major Yellow Pages, newspaper publishers and possibly magazine, radio and television Web site will serve their content via a newsfeed on their home page. They’ll show real-time community activity that way and will allow conversations between all local stakeholders (consumers, merchants, journalists, politicians, etc.). Praized Media might not power them all but we’ll do our part to make this change happen.

I leave you with this perfect quote from Robert Scoble, famed Silicon Valley thinker. He thinks the future of local is in real-time. He says ” You’ll find all sorts of things this way in the future. How about a restaurant? A plumber? A TV repair shop? A lawyer? Consider that you’re walking down the street with a future version of Facebook or Twitter or friendfeed in your hand. You’re looking for a restaurant. Which is going to be able to bring back the best restaurants that your friends care about? That requires having metadata to study. That’s why Facebook copied friendfeed’s likes so that it can come back and say “there are four restaurants that have more than 20 likes from your friends within walking distance.” Translation: the future hasn’t been built yet. That’s why Twitter has not won the entire game yet. That’s why this is a fun industry to watch.”

Update: many people have asked me for a portable/printable version of the article. I have created an acrobat (.pdf) version that you can download here.

“Online news aggregators – friend or foe?” via Hitwise Intelligence.

Like many categories, search is one of the main sources that drive traffic to the News & Media category, referring nearly 22% of visits in March 2009. Branded searches for news properties represent a large share of the top search terms driving traffic to the category. Another major source is the front pages of portals such as Yahoo! and MSN, including the personalized versions like My Yahoo and My MSN. In comparison, social networking websites and blogs referred a far smaller share of visits to News & Media websites from links or references posted on their pages.

Mini what it means: as I blogged about a few days ago, many newspaper organizations are questioning the role of Google (and other search engines & aggregators) in the Web ecosystem. Hitwise has data that shows that aggregator (if they respect “fair use”) create traffic value in the ecosystem.  One question mark though: are aggregators building their brands to the detriment of news outlets? I don’t think anyone has answered that question yet.

“Google CEO Eric Schmidt to newspapers: Innovate your way out of it” via the  Los Angeles Times

In order to move themselves forward, he said, newspapers will have to get used to the idea that they are not just generators of trusted, professional content, but also aggregators of the new kinds of information the Web has enabled — the collectively edited knowledge structures like Wikipedia, and user-generated information like blogs, images and online video.

“In that model, newspapers become platforms for the technology to use their services,” Schmidt said, “to build businesses on top of them, and also to interlink — hyperlink — all of the different information sources that end-users will take.”

(…)

“One of the fundamental problems with the Internet is that it doesn’t respect traditional scarcity structures. It’s very hard to hold information back.” In order to create value from content that can be difficult to control, he said, “We think the answer is advertising.”

Update: Greg Sterling, over at SearchEngineLand, has the verbatim of all questions that were asked by the audience.

Mini-what it means: newspapers have to become curator of content, they have a trusted consumer brand they can use to keep readership. Newspapers have also the opportunity to become news “platform”. Many newspaper groups are playing with the concept of APIs but it needs to become central to their strategy.  Finally, as Schmidt said, because of the lack of scarcity online, advertising will probably be the best way to monetize news.

Yesterday, Sophie Cousineau, a business journalist from Montreal’s La Presse, offered her explanation as to why Barack Obama had to fire Rick Wagoner, the CEO of General Motors Corporation (GM). She talked about some of Wagoner’s past successes but also the fact that he hung on too long to his strategy that centered on SUVs and trucks.

It struck me that with the GM situation, we are facing a perfect example of the innovator’s dilemma. Coined by Clayton M. Christensen in the book of the same name, the innovator’s dilemma is “a theory about how large, outstanding firms can fail “by doing everything right.” The Innovator’s Dilemma, according to Christensen, describes companies whose successes and capabilities can actually become obstacles in the face of changing markets and technologies. ” (source: mit.edu) Christensen also talked about “disruptive technologies”.

In GM’s case, they were so focused on their high-profit margin products (SUVs, trucks, minivans) that they ended up being blindsided when the easy credit required to buy these expensive vehicles evaporated and the price of gas went through the roof.  It also reminded me that sometimes you need to kill your cash cow before someone else does it for you (or said otherwise, it’s better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do if to you).

Which brings me to traditional media (you knew I was going there, were you?).

Newspapers traditionally have been huge cash-generating vehicles but they now have clearly met disruptive technologies both on the reader and on the advertiser side. Basic news is a commodity and aggregators (like Google News) serve as destination site. On the advertiser front, classifieds revenue has been completely disrupted via the free model (pioneered by Craigslist) and online eyeballs do not monetize as well as print readers. That leaves an industry that’s questioning itself with many people wondering what will happen to it in the future.

Directory publishers have very good profit margins but, for most of them, 80%+ of their revenues still come from the print platform. The good news is there hasn’t been too many disruptive technologies yet but you always have to wonder what will blindside the industry. Social media and mobile should be top of mind IMHO.

TV networks and cable providers are still enjoying a successful ride with broadcast/cable television and are slowly starting to think of a post-broadcast world. Disruption there will clearly come from the ability for viewers to go à-la-carte on the Web (either through legit or pirated channels) and link back to their television set. A startup like Boxee is trying to crack that nut.

What it means: the GM and the newspaper industry examples definitely show us that smart people, doing what feels like the right thing, can lead whole industries to catastrophe. What should media companies do? As Clay Shirky said recently “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did…”