Social Media Blog Posts

The "Future of TV Show, North America" review

Mr. Howard Greenstein — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:42:57 GMT

Yesterday I attended the WTG's Future TV North America conference. I was asked by Bill Sobel to attend as a co-facilitator of a round table in Social Media and TV during one of the conferences scheduled times for meetings and exhibits. I was also able to attend the show yesterday, but due to scheduling I couldn't attend today's event. (Thanks to show producer Gemma Fawcett and her team for their help). The show, held at the Marriot Marquis in Times Square, New York City, was in general well organized and the seating was comfortable, adequate and pretty standard. The conference organizers did provide wifi, and though it worked better in some rooms than in others, it was useful to have, and I saw many attendees taking advantage of it. I took notes at several of the panels, and learned a good deal. I missed the beginning of Amy Friedlander-Hoffman's talk on the "Progress and Potential of IPTV" but was not impressed by the ending. We've seen this vision of "all content on any device" and integrated home content for years at TV and Internet conferences, and this speech had little variation on what has come before. Most annoyingly, Ms. Hoffman didn't seem to have the historical take on those presentations, even though her bio indicates a history in the industry. Too many of her answers to audience questions seemed like canned PR-talk. The panel with Ms. Hoffman, Dimtry Shapiro of Veoh, Kevin Cohen of Turner Broadcasting, and moderator Mike Bloxham of Ball State University was better, with some good insights about what's coming for 2008. Kevin thought it was less likely that devices like AppleTV will significantly shift consumer viewing habits - in his experience once people have one "TV" box (such as a cable, satellite or fiber box) connected, in addition to their DVD or VCR player, the only thing that has been very successful at getting people to run wires has been video game consoles. Dimitry's main insight was that internet video viewing is significantly under-reported by ComScore. He even said "ComScore measurements suck and you can quote me." Thanks, I have. His reasoning- while ComScore is reporting Veoh having 3MM viewers, he claims he has 3 external and 2 internal measurements that put their viewers at around 23 Million. That's a huge difference. (Alexa reports Veoh.com with a traffic rank of 74, with just under 1% of all viewers seeing it. Draw your own conclusions). Dimitry also noted that advertisers want scale when they purchase, even if you can show them niche audiences. Kevin discussed some targeted ad campaigns that use TV to drive web response - such as Porches' use of TV (for the first time) in the UK. Finally, he noted that when Turner's sales force sells TV, 85-90% of the deals have an interactive component. It's taken them 12 years to get to this point, but they're truly able to sell an integrated package. Amy noted that some companies are creating native "3 screen" content (TV, Mobile, PC), but they're also working with Turner and others to change the way they shoot and encode TV events (such as a master's golf tournement) to be able to provide multiple camera angles and picture in picture in their UVerse product, as well as mobile and pc content. The ever-present (at TV Conferences) Shelly Palmer was there to share words of wisdom and shake up the crowd. He did so admirably. Shelly noted that every year for the last 10 or so has been "THE year of Internet Video" but last year, 2007 actually was it. We learned people watch video as "Snacking, Downloading to Own, or Streaming Internet 'TV.'" (Definitions are pretty obvious). He also said "People think online video is TV but it’s not. It’s on an open network not a closed network. It’s on a public network - the file is ‘out there’ whether it’s streamed or downloaded. The value chain is completely different." He went on to explain how closed networks monetize ads, and obtain ad revenue (the tv national and local ad sales model.) Problem is, 25% of TV ads are for...TV. Other shows, other networks etc. So, if you're hoping to capture a tv-like model of advertising for the net, better discount your expectations by at least 25%. He also believes there's not enough inventory on line to do a meaningful copy of TV. There are other currencies - Cash, etc. but other ones available, how do online properties transfer value? If you were to create a new version of IM, or Skype that could be very valuable. The key is to create "translation software" - translate value to wealth. Now, passion is a currency on the net, so is Fame. TMZ turned Britney’s fame (and lack of undergarments) into their own Wealth. How can you turn your value into wealth? He also noted innovations at CES such as USB jump drives that could hold hundreds of hi-def movies (changing the economics of streaming, cable on-demand, etc). Also noted that in Feb 2009, over-the-air broadcast is going digital, and for about 10 million homes, they won't be getting TV anymore (unless they buy converters). So this will skew TV ratings for a while. I didn't hear the end as I had to prep for the roundtable, but Shelly publishes daily, so check his blog. While moderating my own roundtable, I didn't get a huge amount of notes, but one firm noted was the recently launched eCirkit.com, makers of "Social Penetrator" (not what it sounds like, but of course, pun intended) which allow you to create a custom 'Web Top' to aggregate your content from many other sites. (Video Review of Social Penetrator at G4TV.) There was a Mobile TV panel about how Mobile is growing in Europe, with some specific case studies of how users will use everything from 'snack size' bites of content to really extended shows via their mobile screens. This was followed by a panel where the most interesting stuff was about WiMax, from a Sprint representative. Given their problems in the market, I hope they last long enough to roll out WiMax, because it seems like a much better solution, the way they describe it, than DVB-H and other broadcast/multicast solutions. The last panel about metrics was fascinating. They were talking about the difficulties of measuring what people actually do while watching TV. Fascinating, as the entire industry runs on these calculations, and yet there seems to be disagreement over what people actually "watch", in the way that President Clinton had a challenge with the word 'is.' I wrote: "I think I’m actually watching TV people on this panel putting their heads in the sand and not accept the leading edge of change." After talking about the scale of trying to manage minute-by-minute commercial ratings. The panelist noted: "16 individual measurements for shows, for hundreds of shows on my network and then figuring out data for same day, 1 day, up to 7 days ahead when PVR ratings are added in - the data is crashing our computers." Wow, better get some bigger computers and some better IT guys. This is nothing in the scheme of the kind of data big companies manage every day. The gentleman from Tivo had some good data -of course their ratings are skewed because Tivo is certainly a leading edge product, still! (I've had one for 5 years now, guess I'm a really early adopter). I had a bit of a disagreement with the panelist from Turner Jack Wakshlag , Chief Research Officer, Turner Broadcasting at the question session. He stated his data shows "Those who go online spend an average of less than 3 hours a month on video, based on 2 companies data." While I think that speaks to the prior remark from the guy from Veoh about undercounting of ratings by a factor of 10, he seemed to think that the trends wouldn't change and that around the same number of people will be watching TV (in some form) in 5 years, as opposed to shifting to other forms of content. I'm sure over a beer we could make each other understand more of our perspectives, but several people let me know that they thought he was a bit over the top in some of his claims. $5 says the 18-24 year olds of today will be a different crowd by the time they become the 25-44 year olds of 5 years from now, and the 13-18 year olds will be different still. All in all, a good day. Interested in your feedback if you attended.

The "Future of TV Show, North America" review

Mr. Howard Greenstein — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:43:11 GMT

Social Media Goes Local in January

Mr. Howard Greenstein — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 15:29:07 GMT

January is a month of some local events of note. While the hardware and software folks play at CES or MacWorld, people in Boston and Houston will be learning some new stuff and interacting in the Social Media Space. Social Media Club and the PRSA Boston are hosting "Beyond Blogging: PR and Today's Social Media Revolution" on January 10th at 6pm at the Conference Center at Bently. For more details visit the Social Media Club wiki. You can register here and you need to do it soon as the event is filling up fast. (Thanks to Greg Peverill-Conti for the tip).

I'll be running a Social Media Club event in NYC on January 15th featuring Andrew Weinreich, Founder and CEO, MeetMoi and Peter Shankman, CEO – The Geek Factory, Inc., Founder – AirTroductions. For more information about the panel and event registration, see the registration page or the wiki page.

Via Facebook's news stream, I learned from birthday girl Erica O'Grady about the "Got Social Media" event in Houston on January 24th. $50-65 for 4 very good speakers from Social Media, Technology, Design, and Marketing seems a very good price. I know Erica and Giovanni Gallucci and believe the others will be good as well. (Note: I'm not really attending, but this is their graphic. I would if I could.)

Finally, for those looking a little farther ahead, the Society for New Communications Research is having their New Communications Forum 2008 in California in April. There are some early bird discounts if you sign up before 2/15/08.

If you have events, make sure you send them to me at email name "publichoward" at the domain "gmail." Also, publish your events at Confabb! Finally, we're going to be posting Social Media jobs here on this board. Click the link above to post your jobs. First person to email me about this gets a free month of their posting.

Don't beam Spock Up

Mr. Howard Greenstein — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 18:44:21 GMT

Since there's not much of a conference market in the late December timeframe, I thought I'd write a quick bit about the latest Social Network service to get it wrong - Spock.com. Spock attempts to beam you up by creating a Borg collective of friends that all seem intent on assimilating you. In the picture

you can see that between 12/9 and 12/17 I got over a dozen requests to add me, or notifications that I had been added to Spock. And many of the people (whose names have been redacted per Starfleet Directive Alpha 65 -- ok I'll stop with the Star Trek jokes now) are really my friends. In fact, when I started getting these notes I was a member! I had signed up early, when it looked like this service might have some value in aggregating people and content around them. However, recently, as Jim Benson notes in his piece "It May be the Evil Spock," Spock misrepresents membership when you log in. It scrapes the web and creates dossiers on people, and when you log in, it says your friend is already a member. What it means is, your friend already has a profile that Spock created without permission. According to a Wired article from August, Spock was calling people pedophiles due to its practice of scraping without any real human intervention. An innocent-looking Facebook App that was "mad-libs like" let people fill out profiles about their friends, and some college-aged wiseguys tagged their buddies with "scandalous" terms. Spock evidently deleted much of these after Wired inquired, but some evidence of this must live on in Google and other internet caches. That'll be fun when HR does a background check before hiring you at the daycare center. Another thing it does wrong, which I call the Quechup effect (after the social network of the same name that spammed everyone this summer), is that it asks for access to your address book to "see if anyone you know is in the network." Brad Templeton points out in "The logical outcome of Spock" that "I have 1,000 or more people in my address book. If the average person engages in “mail everybody in my address book” once a year, I will get on average 3 such mails a day, and so will most others." Brad suggests people request to delete their profiles on Spock to protest the way they're acting. I requested to do so, and await the result. Finally, there's really no way to opt-out. As Spock is just trying to "logically" arrange what is out there about you on the net, so the only way not to show up is to be invisible on the net. Not so easy. At least ZoomInfo, which does a similar scrape and profile creation deal, has an FAQ response as to how to opt-out. So, before you open hailing frequencies or let the Vulcan shuttle dock, think twice about Spock and its practices.

Le Web Day 2

Mr. Howard Greenstein — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 12:48:08 GMT

Today at LeWeb it was the Startup Competition, and TechCrunch UK reviewed it and posted the winners here including GooJet, a mobile social network and phone customizing software package (currently in closed beta.)

Also at LeWeb, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo announced Mahalo Social, which is, according to Jason, "a set of new features on Mahalo.com that allow users to suggest links to not only their friends but on search results themselves."

Allen Stern over at Center Networks has a bit of a different take questioning why "this "incentivizes" anyone to leave more links - wouldn't a forced login process cause less content to be submitted?." Allen also has a link to the video of Jason's presentation. Adam Tinworth at One Man & His Blog had even more details, in a well written post.

Joi Ito had great praise for the event, saying "Le Web 3 was the best conference of its kind I attended this year. Great venue, great team and awesome speakers. Loic, Geraldine and team, super job. Thanks! Interestingly, my favorite talks were the two non-web people: Hans Rosling and Philippe Starck."

Finishing the conference, Doc Searls discussed VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management. (You can learn more at the Project VRM blog Susan Kish over at LunchOverIP captured notes of Doc's presentation.

Le Web 3, Day 1 review

Mr. Howard Greenstein — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 22:06:00 GMT

I'm not at LeWeb 3, so I'm doing a sweep of blogs to see what people are discussing. Joi Ito - my friend and the ubiquitous ambassador of the Interwebs from Japan spoke about Gaming, and running a guild in World of Warcraft. As Susan Kish notes in her piece on the LunchOverIP blog

"for kids the internet is ubiquitous, it is not something you log in / out of. The internet is part of the real world, it is not like you are offline when your mobile is in your pocket." (emphasis is hers). Joi also talked about the skills required to manage diverse teams: "You have 8 year olds who play with ex-cons, and you need to explain to them that the diversity is very important".

Ewan at Edu.blogs.com notes Joi's choices of words, and others choices of words, when they talk about gaming: Joi Ito at LeWeb3 talks about gaming in interesting terms. Isn't it funny how we never say that someone is 'addicted to church' or 'addicted to books' but we seem quite happy to say that it's 'awful that young people are addicted to gaming'? (via Why are we 'addicted', and not just enthusiastic?) This is true. When I spoke to a group about social media recently, someone lamented that kids spend their time staring at screens and not interacting. I suggested that 1. they're interacting, you're not perceiving it as such, and 2. we don't let kids go out to play at the park with other kids without adults like they used to "when I was young" so this is where they're finding SOME of their interaction. Evan Williams of Obvious/Twitter fame also spoke, and Adam Tinworth of "One Man & His Blog" noted that Twitter is about simplicity, saying:

"What can you create by taking things away?" asked Ev.

Examples:

Photolog - one pic a day - more comments. 11 comments per photo - like crack for web users. Much more addictive than uploading multiple photos.

Google - simplified Yahoo?

Adam also noted some uneasiness between Ev and Loic as Twitter and Seesmic are somewhat in a competitive space, though they did find their points of difference.

UK TechCrunch was generally underwhelmed by the sessions, but did like the party and the conversation in the hallway.

Bonus Link: Thanks to the folks from TED Europe for their review of the Google talk.

This week, the news is at LeWeb 3

Mr. Howard Greenstein — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:58:51 GMT

The big conference this week is LeWeb 3 in Paris. As I did not have le budget (Je dois faire attention à mon budget) I hope to give a bit of a summary here as to what people are writing.

Web 2.0 for Business: How Social Networking, Personalized Profiles and Web 2 technologies will change the way we work

Mr. Howard Greenstein — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:19:03 GMT

I spoke yesterday on a panel at the Eastern Technology Council at Penn State Great Valley. My host and the panel moderator was Thomas Cozzolino of Liquid Hub, and the panelists include Anthony Gold of Unisys, Liza Potts of Electronic Ink, Matt Baldwin of BEA, Sean Vandermark of Microsoft, and Derrich Beauchamp of Vignette.

The panel discussed the definition of Web 2.0, but often came back to terms covered in Tim O'Reilly's original article on the topic.

My key take aways were that Context, Communication and Collaboration are the watchwords, and when a Web 2.0 or Social Media application enables one or more of these things, it is usually successful. An example of Context is Del.icio.us or similar social bookmarking or rating sites. Communication - helping us find each other, is a hallmark of social networks such as Facebook. And Collaboration - many examples come to mind, but as this was an Enterprise-focused event, much of the discussion was around how exisiting systems could be retrofitted, expanded, or joined to let users find, communicate or collaborate with each other.

One major challenge is getting people to be contributors. In B2C type applications, there's social incentive to collaborate and contribute. An example is - I share my pictures with my friends. In an Enterprise, it's sometimes tough to get people off their duff and contributing. A typical way with was noted is that if you don't capture the documentation when the project is being created, good luck getting it afterwards. There were several examples of the use of Wikis as easy tools to let groups share data. One use was a simple database of who is doing what on a project, and for each person's page, allowing them to put updates in that fill in other members of the team on project progress. Another is a simple wiki of who does what at a client, so that sales or project teams can share knowledge that may be useful to others inside or outside of the project.

As Derrich said, "Everyone has an editor inside them, but not everyone is a creator." So enabling people to easily contribute should be a goal.

Other good advice, perhaps from Sean or from Anthony, was the idea that there's a lot you can do to enable current systems to benefit from the new Web 2.0 tech using existing APIs, RSS feeds and many bits of code, some open source. There was some lively post-panel discussion. Thanks to the Easter Technology Council for having me down.

Futures of Entertainment Conference 2 at MIT

Mr. Howard Greenstein — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 17:13:23 GMT

This past weekend at MIT, I attended the Futures of Entertainment Conference. It was the second year of the the conference, and I had heard great things about it from last year's attendees. FOE2 didn't disappoint, as the team at the Convergence Culture Consortium put on an event that was very in-depth and thought provoking. The attendees were a good mix of academics, advertising execs, broadcasting folks and internet media and technology company employees. There were people from Turner, AOL, Yahoo, Universal, Hill/Holiday, as well as the New School, MIT, Harvard, and more. One thing that certainly set this conference apart from many others was the length of panels - many of which were two and a half hours long. With panels of that length you're not just grazing on a topic - you're diving in and rooting around for the details. Admittedly, it was also tough to stay seated that long, especially with the room being very hot the second day. They had a TV showing the sessions in the lobby, where people were actively discussing the topics that came up on the panels. They also attempted to have an audience question board, using a web tool created by the media lab folks. This fell somewhat flat, as the moderators didn't incorporate the audience questions very well until the middle of the second day. I would have liked more audience participation earlier in the panels, as waiting until the last 45 minutes in most cases didn't let the audience set the course of the panels as much as would have been possible otherwise. I chose not to live-blog this conference because I knew both the conference organizers and the very intelligent Rachel Clarke were doing so. You may find the blogging efforts here:

CC - FoE2: Opening Remarks
CC - FoE2: Mobile Media
CC - FoE2: Metrics & Measurement
Rachel's take: FOE2 - Metrics and Measurement
CC- FoE2: Fan Labor
Rachel's take: FOE2 - Fan Labour
FoE2: Opening Comments for Day Two
Rachel's take: FOE2 - Day 2 Opening Remarks
FoE2: Advertising and Convergence Culture
Rachel's take:Advertising and Convergence Culture
FoE2: Cult Media

My takeaways on the conference: One of the best lines I heard was from Baba Shetty, Hill/Holliday advertising. I'm paraphrasing here, but he noted that in many agencies, the teams making the creative are completely separate from the teams creating the media plans. The media planning folks in many agencies are outsourced to large buying groups that serve many agencies. This is a good strategy when you buy standard media units, such as a 30 second commercial or a 1/4 page newspaper ad. But in the days of TransMedia (a term that was the significant buzzword of the conference due to it's leader, Henry Jenkins of MIT who coined it for his book Convergence Culture) the media opportunities and message possibilities are tightly intertwined. It may be difficult for a media person to understand the creative opportunities a property may have, such as Heroes, the NBC show, where they work brands into the show narrative, brands sponsor the comics and interaction on the website and even pay for content to be created. Conversely, a creative might not hear of opportunities if they come to the media buying side as an 'extra' when someone is looking to sponsor the TV show. This has helped me to generate a new set of thoughts about both why it has been hard to get advertisers to truly engage with properties in the Entertainment space, and also about how to approach companies in the future. Next, Jesse Alexander from Heroes is just so obviously passionate about fans, and about how to create a show that is written and created for the fans, that I'm going to go out and get the disk of Heroes and try to engage with season 2 as well. It's tough to be around someone that excited to do what they do and not catch it. A lesson for anyone - passion and excitement for what you're doing shines and is contagious. The other thing that became clear, from panels on Fan Labor (or Labour, if you're Rachel :-) and Cult Media, is that the people creating content for major media properties are clearly thinking about the fans or the future fans first. They're designing properties to be fan-friendly, creating narrative that allows room for creative fans to make fiction, discuss potential future stories, and explore the universe that the material is creating. There were a lot of insights into ways you can make audience into fans, and fans into engaged members of the community. I'll be attempting to further synthesize these take-aways, sharing them on my blog, and with my customers.