Future of Media Summit Blog

As part of our ongoing research into iPad and media, and also to provide some insights for the audience of the iPad Strategy Workshop we ran at Newspaper Publishers Association, we created a visualization of the top 30 paid and free iPad apps in Australia, as of 24 August 2010.

The chart shows in the left hand column free apps, and on the right hand side paid apps, each ranked from #1 to #30 in order of popularity on iTunes. The following bar shows the price (for paid), the user rating on iTunes, and the size of the download in MB. The horizontal axis for paid apps indicates price.

The color code shows the type of app, bringing to attention a number of interesting features, for example that aggregators are very popular in paid apps, and that broadcast and newspapers dominate in free apps.

The iPad Strategy Workshop at Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum was a big success. In a large room laid out for 120 there was just standing room by the time it started, with great content and a highly engaged audience.

The Twitter stream for #iPadStrat gives a pretty fair overview of proceedings, though there were just a small minority of people on Twitter in a room full of newspaper publishers.

Here are the slides from opening presentation, as promised:

This morning I ran the iPad Strategy Workshop at Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum in Sydney. To provide a framework for discussion at the workshop (and also as part of our ongoing research into effective approaches to the iPad for media and news organizations) I created a visual framework of key strategic issues, as below.

I will delve into these strategic issues in later posts.

This is a Beta v1 version, so as always, please give feedback on how to make it more useful, including anything that's missing or things that could be put better.

When I wrote my recent article Creating the Future of Media: 4 Driving Forces, 4 Strategic Issues, 4 Essential Capabilities for Media Titles magazine, they kindly offered Future Exploration Network a full page ad in the magazine.

The ad provides a nice overview of our current work with media organizations that are having to develop and implement strategies on the fly as the industry landscape shifts.

Click on the ad image for a larger version, or the key offerings are described below. If you're interested in finding out more, some of the strategy tools we think are particularly useful in the current environment are described in our Future of Media: Strategy Tools framework.

I just had a chat with Ariel Roda (formerly of PLDT) who apparently has a platform that flattens corporate communications in the spirit of Social Media philosophies.

During product road shows, every presentation of the platform to the typical target audience (IT managers and senior executives I'm guessing) results in consistent "We still don't get it" looks on their faces.

Experiences such as Ariel's display the challenges that slow down the enterprise adoption of social media concepts and tools.

The truth is, making an effective pitch for Enterprise Social Media should take into consideration key strategies.

Know the Market

The oft cited Mcann Wave3 Study on Social Media underlines very significant figures that should be understood and exploited. For example, some statistics vis-a-vis the Philippine internet universe of 3.7 million users are as follows:

• 90.3% of users read blogs (#2 in the world), 65.8% have written blogs (#4 in the world)
• 83.1% belong to at least one social network (#1 in the world)
• 86.4% upload and share photos (#1 in the world)
• 98.6% watch videos on the web (#1 in the world), 60.5% upload and share videos (#2 in the world)
• 61.8% download podcasts (#5 in the world)
• 45.2% read RSS feeds (#6 in the world)

Such numbers would at first glance be clearly valuable from a marketing perspective. However, from the enterprise point of view, the above points to two postulates.

1. 1. The filipinos are immersed in social media and have embraced it with a passion.
2. 2. If social media is injected into the filipino workplace, filipinos will adopt it and be expert users.

Complete the Context: Enterprise 2.0

The biggest mistake when presenting the case for Enterprise Social Media is neglecting to complete the story. The foundation must be laid to make the value leap more apparent.

Refrain from pitching a social network, or a blogging engine, or a wiki platform. What you should be introducing is a philosophy, and subsequently, tools and platforms that give life to this philosophy within the enterprise. Interestingly, the transformation into Enterprise 2.0 will not happen from the top but will instead be initiated from the bottom-up.

Value the Conversations.

The Cluetrain Manifesto is the key foundation of Social Media. The basic posit is that knowledge in a familiar context is more powerful than an encyclopedic collection of information difficult to retrieve and comprehend.

Provide the Tools not the Solutions.

The best way to solve users' challenges is to arm them with the tools to find their own solutions based on their desire lines -- their quest to get from point A to point B. Sets of tools that enable users to share, retrieve, improve, and grade knowledge is all that's needed. Given time, the users themselves will create solutions no amount of pre-planning might foresee. One needs to keep in mind though that tools aren't just software and systems. Tools also include processes, frameworks, and methodologies.

Evangelize Agility.

The effective transformation of a company to Enterprise 2.0 is significantly bound to the adoption of the Agile Manifesto. Agile methodologies allow tools to be implemented and put into use immediately. After which, use cases are observed and these tools are improved and adjusted according to continuous feedback. Meanwhile, users themselves continue to develop novel applications of these tools leading to a cycle of increasingly more intelligent solutions from the work of all parties.

Embrace the Ambient Webstream.

With the emergence Social Media tools, it is important to recognize that information retrieval no longer just becomes an on-demand activity with search powering the harvesting of information. A far more significant scale of information will flow to the user without consciously requesting it. This is already becoming apparent on public platforms such as twitter, friend activity feeds, RSS feeds, and other channels that constantly stream knowledge outside one's normal frame of web activity.

Tapping the network effect.

With knowledge as the asset, the size of one's network exponentially increases the ability to tap into crowd wisdom. The network likewise ensures the quality of knowledge and its sources through peer review. In a way, this makes every bit of knowledge that the network interacts with, a product of collective intelligence.

In light of the above, the only effective way to penetrate the enterprise with Social Media is to continue to evangelize, implement the tools for free for a certain time frame, then let the users decide to keep them and how to best use them.

I have long believed that location-based mobile social networking is central to how technology will connect us. The advent of next generation phones including the iPhone combined with people’s familiarity and engagement with social networks means that the space is – finally – ready to take off. Here is a very quick review of the past, present, and future of the space.

The Past
The original location-based social networking application was proximity dating, which I wrote about in chapter 2 of my book Living Networks in 2002, in describing some of the many ways that networks bring people together:

In mobile-mad Japan, "proximity dating" has had a big success. As in Internet dating, you complete a profile of both yourself and your desired partner. Instead of suggesting people to exchange e-mails with, the service rings you on your cell phone to let you know that someone with a matching profile is within a few hundred yards of you, and allows you to arrange to meet them. Since high bandwidth mobile technology is now available in Japan, the system can also allow you to see each other on your mobile videophone before you meet.
[Download Chapter 2 of Living Networks]

People were very interested in the idea, and I got a lot of media coverage at the time for my thoughts on where this was going. There were a variety of technologies and platforms available for location-based social networking in the early days, however the major constraint was that very few phones had GPS, so the location of each phone had to be determined by cell tower triangulation, giving an accuracy often not better than one kilometre. One early example of location-based social networking at the time was from Swisscom, in which people could engage in anonymous chat, with indicators of both the numbers of degrees of separation from their counterpart in their phone books, and the approximate distance between them (from low to high).

The Guardian is now providing full-text RSS feeds.

Let’s dig into why this is important, and an indicator of one of the broadest shifts happening in the information landscape.

Over the last few years RSS has shifted from a geek-thing that required explanation, to the point where most people have an RSS reader of some type on their desktops. As people go to more and more information sources, it becomes highly inefficient to visit to them separately, while an RSS readers allows all of your selected information sources to be found in the one place.

Currently virtually every professional publisher provides partial feeds, meaning that if you subscribe to their news feeds in an RSS reader you only get an excerpt or the beginning of the article, and you have to click through to the publishers’ website to read the article. For some years there has been a vigorous debate on whether publishers should provide full or partial feeds. Professional publishers have almost always chosen to direct readers back to their sites, where they can ply them with advertising and make money.

The Guardian is in fact the first major newspaper in the world to provide full-text feeds, according to the Google Reader team.

Hitwise has just released statistics on Twitter usage in Australia, showing that Twitter usage is up over 500% over the last year. More interestingly, Australia’s share of Twittering globally has more than tripled in that time. It should also be noted that people increasingly use mobiles and Twitter clients such as Twhirl, so Hitwise would not be seeing this traffic, suggesting that the increase in usage is probably significantly greater than the figures they’re reporting.

Of particular interest is that Twitter’s peak of usage in Australia was at the time of the Future of Media Summit 2008, on July 15. This isn’t that surprising given the very strong use of Twitter at and beyond the Summit (see Twitter posts tagged #fom08), and the many people who commenced Twittering at the event.

Certainly other more recent events in Australia (for example today’s Web Directions South #wds08) are likely to have more Twitter usage than the Future of Media Summit, however that is on the back of a significant increase in the local Twitter population since then. It’s certainly great to see that the Future of Media Summit got such great Twitter uptake, especially since the event covered the entire media landscape, not just social media, and many attendees were from traditional media and unlikely to ever Twitter.

Thanks for the reference from the blog of social media strategist and Twitterer extraordinaire Laurel Papworth!

Also see the original release from Hitwise for more interesting insights, such as the fact that Twitter delivers 10x more traffic to financial institution websites than it did a year ago, suggesting that Twitterers are saying either nice or bad things about banks.

Photon Group, in their annual results presentation today (Revenue up 94% to A$376m, Net Profit up 33% to A$21.7m - go to ASX to download FY2008 Annual Results) used three quotes to support their “media neutral, consumer driven “ strategy:

“The current agency model, producing marketing programs built around 30 second television ads, is no longer relevant for today’s business environment” Tony Palmer, Chief Marketing Officer for Kimberly Clark

“Today almost every business and social activity is a form of media. An increasing proportion of our social interactions happen across media channels”
Ross Dawson, Chairman of Future Exploration Network

“We will spend our marketing funds where the consumer will be and that is changing rapidly”
Craig Herbison, General Manager, Brand and Communication for Vodafone Australia

The quote from me is taken from the introduction to our Future of Media Report 2008, which has been getting a fantastic amount of attention globally since its launch in July.

I have spoken and written before about how media is beginning to encompass almost everything in the economy (for example in my speech on Enterprise 2.0 at KMWorld in Silicon Valley last year). I think it’s worth reviewing the first paragraph of the Future of Media Report 2008 below. I believe this view is central to how media, business, and society will unfold over coming years.

We are entering the media economy. The traditional boundaries of the media and entertainment industry have become meaningless. Today almost every business and social activity is a form of media. An increasing proportion of our social interactions happen across media channels. Every organization is now a media entity, engaged in creating and disseminating messages among its staff, customers, and partners to achieve business objectives. As the physical economy becomes marginalized and economic value becomes centered on the virtual, media encompasses almost everything.

One of the issues that I am increasingly shifting my attention to is how smaller developed economies compete in an intensely connected global economy. For example, in different sectors Ireland, Finland, Israel, and Singapore have had significant success in shifting their economic structure. While the large economies of US, Japan, and Western Europe as well as the emerging BRIC giants face their own issues, there are a particular set of challenges for smaller countries or regions. In addition to the general drivers of economic success in a hyper-connected world, there are a range of specific issues within industries, particularly in the media and technology sectors.

The Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development in the Australian state of Victoria recently commissioned an independent review of the screen industry in the state, which goes through to a proposed vision for the future of the industry in the state. Beyond this specific initiatives will be established. The review was performed by consulting firm Nous Group, and I was an ‘Expert Advisor’ on the review. The Screen Industy value chain (as below) on page 14 of the report was developed based on some of my thinking, including my Future of Media Strategic Framework.

The Victorian Screen Industry Review can be downloaded, and makes for some very interesting reading.

Below is a summary of the key trends identified in the report across sectors, followed by five key issues raised by the report.

I have said for many years that the best way to understand Google is as an advertising aggregator (I would argue that even with its diversification over the last few years). Building on its successful search engine, it has sold ads that are served both on its search results, and also on a broad array of non-Google sites, initially through its AdSense program. It has for some years also sold advertising for delivery on radio, television, and newspapers. This was described in our Future of Media Strategic Framework which appeared in the Future of Media Report 2006.

Back in March I was interviewed by the ABC's Media Report program about Google and Microsoft's bid for Yahoo! at the time. While some of the interview topics are a bit dated now, much of it is still relevant, including my description of Google's role in the media landscape. I'll expand on this in another post soon.

You can read the transcript on the ABC site and below (note that there are some errors in the transcript).

Antony Funnell: Now let's stay with search engines for a little bit longer, and look at the business manoeuvrings of some of the big players. Google last week announced it's beefing up its presence in Australia with a new headquarters, and it's seeking to grow in a whole range of areas. It's also announced that it's successfully acquired internet advertising firm DoubleClick.

Meanwhile, in another online universe, Microsoft appears to be still actively stalking the second-tier search engine company Yahoo. What's it all about? Well let's ask Ross Dawson. Ross is a communication strategy consultant and chairman of the Future Exploration Network.

Ross Dawson: It's important to understand that Google is not just a search engine, and that it is in fact, more than anything else, an aggregator of advertising. What it does is it goes to advertisers and says, 'We can present information about you, not just on our own search engine, but also on many, many other websites'.

Media Trends+Strategy magazine (click on the link to access the magazine in interactive format) includes a piece titled Media: The State of Play - Expert Analysis which features edited interviews with a variety of participants in the media space, including John Sintras, CEO of Starcom, Belinda Rowe, CEO of ZenithOptimedia, Collin Segelov, Executive Director of the Australian Association of National Advertisers, and myself.

My interview is below. You can also read it and the other interviews by going to the magazine from the link above - my interview is on page 30.

Further context on some of my comments is available from the Seven Driving Forces of Media and Creating the Future of Advertising.

What does the ongoing consolidation In the industry mean for marketers?

The first thing to understand is that the most powerful broad trend in media is fragmentation and while mass media remains, it is becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of the overall media landscape. So within that context, what we see is that there is consolidation within particular segments and in some of the larger players. We have seen more and more cross media ownership as regulation has eased. One of the implications for marketers is that they are increasingly being offered media packages across different segments from the same owner. This is obviously not a new trend, but as we get more and more cross media ownership, more and more marketers are being presented with these offers to access an audience through a multiplicity of different channels. From a marketers or media buyer perspective , these can only be judged on their individual merits. It really needs to be driven by the media buyer as to what is the appropriate set of media channels to reach their audience with the right message, and that may or may not tally with what is being offered by some of the larger media owners.

Firstly, let me say congratulations again to Ross for a great conference. I was asked to moderate one of the Roundtable discussions held during the day - namely one of the three on the topic: 'Media and Social Networks', although we probably discussed 'Social Media' more broadly than we did the specific topic.

Participants in this conversation were:

Some of the discussion around the table follows ...

Definition of Social Media

NFP and Community Social Networks

Hope that gives you some insight into some of the thoughts that were discussed by a table-full of passionate and interested observers and participants in this very interesting time we find ourselves in!

It is inevitable that news dissemination will become a largely social function. By whatever means, we will be provided with extremely low touch ways of sharing content we think would be interesting to specific people we know. This will then be filtered in various ways by the recipients, however most will value being recommended articles and sites on an individual basis.

Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and other tools allow us to recommend content to the world at large. But recommendations are far more valuable if they are specific to the person and context. The best way to disseminate these recommendations is through our social networks, if we happen to spend time there. So social networks can become a platform for the collaborative filtering of content, giving individuals the benefit of their network’s judgment and access to information.

In this context, the announcement today by New York Times and LinkedIn of a way of providing custom content and recommendations to their network is a landmark. Over the next few years this integration of social networks and content will rapidly evolve to be a very important part of the landscape.

Sorry I’ve been slow to follow up on the Future of Media Summit – it’s been a very busy time since the event, including some long flights :-)

To start off here are some of the most interesting blog posts on the Summit. There are some fantastic ideas and insights in these, so well worth a read. In no particular order :

Stephen Collins: What will the future of media look like?, including the ‘artificial split’ between journalism and new media

Chris Bishops: Monetising future content: business models as traditional content models break down.

JD Lasica: Takeaways from Future of Media Summit, including the ‘Great Decoupling’ and media as ‘Distraction Machine’

Phil Morle: A Future for TV: The Collaborative Crowd - the future is (crudely) present

Seth Yates: Comprehensive Future of Media Summary including notes on all the panels

Jay Cross: review of Future of Media Summit, including the US future of journalism panel

Stilgherrian: Note to “old media: journalists: adapt or stfu!
(Same post at Crikey with different comment stream)

Jonathan Este: Bloggers: the biggest whingers since journalists (Response to Stilgherrian, originally posted on Crikey and reposted on Stilgherrian's blog with comments)

Brad Howarth: Live from Future of Media Summit Part 1, Live from Future of Media Summit Part 2, Live from Future of Media Summit Part 3 - detailed insights and commentary

Craig Wilson: review of the Future of Media Summit, including discussion of the Twitter backchannel at the event

Gavin Heaton: review of future of Media Summit: the future of media is PARTICIPATION

Alex Gibson: compilation of ideas and annotations from the event Twitter stream

Kathy Drasky: live blogging and commentary from the Future of Media Summit in Silicon Valley

Gordon Whitehead: Future of Media: Opportunity or Train Wreck – believing in opportunities

Also be sure to see the initial review of social media commentary on the Future of Media Summit. Since then, additional posts on the Future of Media Summit blog include two additional summaries of discussions on Participant Roundtables on the Sydney side:

Media and social networks Roundtable
Shifts in the advertising industry Roundtable

Media and Social networks.

Moderated by Jim McNamara.
We were asked to think about the word “social” with regards to social networks – since the networks were used for many more things than just social interaction.
What about calling them community networks for instance? A group like Advance, meant to link the Australian diaspora around the world used it as a means of business, while Financial institutions used the networks for business interaction.

Also, since there are so many uses for social networks, should they be classified under the generic term of ‘media”?

One of the key points about the networks was that they used ‘trust’ and word of mouth, based on the user being empowered. Rather like an Irish pub, said someone, an example of a social and communications network and also a place for distribution of material.

There was discussion about misterminology about the words social networks – since after all they were mediated – so were they not just another form of media?

Or have social networks morphed into another and different form of media altogether?
Depends on your point of view, said one participant: it’s a generational thing. Older people would use them to push agendas, whereas younger people used them more for communications and social purposed.

The definition is irrelevant, said another: whatever you want to call it – you are a target audience to the advertiser. Not so, was the reply, since the advantage of Web 2.0 was the ability to talk back and interact. It gives participants a voice.

There was talk about traditional media being ‘closed media’, in the sense the audience was told what to look at, whereas social networks were ‘open media’.

Should we therefore, said the moderator, be thinking about a term such as ‘emergent’ media as it was still developing.

The conversation moved on to the issue of the audience as content generators and the day of the citizen journalist .

We agreed on the core concepts of social media as being: Open/interactive/participatory

We then turned to history and reviewed the fact that there used to be the marketplace and the forum in a village society, which allowed for participatory contact and interaction. Mass media had in fact taken away from people the ability to talk to one another. “We’re back to the global town hall meeting and the world as a village”.

Final Key points to consider:

Information vs communication
Enabling
Interative
Peer to peer influences at work
Social for engagement rather than just to be cosial

And so, does this now make social media a mainstream concept?

* Donald McBain, Head of Brand Marketing, MLC
* Alena Jang, MLC
* Nicholas Wong, Manager, Corporate Strategy, SBS
* Stephen Hollings, CEO, News Digital Careers
* Chris Bishop, BizNet
* Caesar Wong, Web Managing Editor, IBM
* Craig Blair, Netus
* Roger Kermode, Prime Digital Works
* (sorry, didn't catch her name)?, Yahoo
* Michael Broadhead, Folk
* Kara Sullivan, Folk

Marketers changing focus on CPC, wanting more action.
Underlying metrics: Different publishers have different spins. Some
emphasise engagement, UB's, PI's, CPM, etc.
Yahoo! Gateway - performance display, connection between offline and
online. On back of TV commercial - "Search on Yahoo for XYZ"
Much greater fragmentation, unbundling. Takes longer to buy media.
Instead of 5 calls, now it takes dozens.
Agency commission gone in the last 10 years for most, but agencies
starting to charge "consulting fee" to claw this back.
Online consolidating to representation (e.g., "networks")
Clients saying they want to do innovation for sake of innovation ("I
want to do an online ad", vs focussing on the message and target)
Agencies often having independent "strategy units" to tie together
different media types
Media agencies currently unskilled at doing the cross-media planning.
Many set up a "new media" division. Clients don't want that, they
want a media plan.
Influx of hedge fund skills into media buying. Think of them as asset
managers vs agencies.
Demand for data and analytics increasing rapidly.
Can we design our sites for larger screen sizes? Are those people in
a more valuable demographic?
"Free will win, but it will come at a cost" - Nicholas Wong, SBS

I’ll do some more detailed reflections on the Future of Media Summit tomorrow. I’m just about to fall over after a very long day, but thought I’d post a few important social media references and commentary on the event.

First stopping point has to be the Future of Media Summit Blog, where participants have been busily posting all day, notably:

Participant roundtables in Sydney:
Mobile Media and Content
Future of Media and Television

Flow Economy/ Media Strategy Workshop in Silicon Valley:
Yahoo!
CBS

Reviews of panel discussions:
Global Media Strategies – 1
Global Media Strategies – 2
CEO Panel – 1
CEO Panel – 2
Future of TV and video – by Mark Pesce 1
Future of TV and video – by Mark Pesce 2
Future of Privacy and Targeted Advertising
Future of Journalism (Sydney)

Unconference sessions:
New Media – 1
New Media – 2

Twitter comments:
See the Summize search for Twitters with the #fom08 tag – literally hundreds of Twitters from attendees at the Future of Media Summit (which included a Twitter 101 session during the Unconference session in Sydney).

Live video:
The Ustream video from Phil Morle

All this will give you a good feel for the event from the perspective of participants. I'll provide some of my thoughts soon.

In previous years the Summit blog has continued to be active for quite a while after the event as discussions continue online - hopefully this will be the case this year too! Subscribe to the blog to keep up with the conversation.

New Media

- Is consumer a dead word? It implies that they are passive
- Does the same content player work for all audiences?
- Participants drive
o Content
o Format
o Delivery
- Segmentation – not age but levels of interaction / media usage
- Content
o What you want, when you want it
- Progression of people
o Media literacy/interfaces
o Demanding short attention spans of people
- As quality increases peoples standards go up
- Production quality not important on a 2x2 screen
o Versus relevance quality
- Advertising – selling a product through need or desire
-
- Content
o Interaction vs experience
o Peer recognition
o Sharing value with others
- Technology
o MID – Mobile Internet Device
- Cheaper – increases penetration
• Fundamental change in internet demographics
- Variable content by device
o Quality of the idea
o People are not necessarily looking for production quality (time, relevance immediacy)

- Funding notes
o Selling product vs trafficking
o Traditional model – aggregate – very little mass appeal content
- We can’t make all of the good stuff free – public sponsorship
- Wider distraction channels
o Audience distribution / greater reach
o What is the measure of sources and how can discussion be monetise / the value recognised