New York Times and the Paid Content Debate

Apologies for hibernating all these months. I've been doing so much blogging, tweeting, and other writing for clients (including editing a book), that there's been no time to keep my own blog going.

However, I'm re-entering the fray today because so many folks emailed this morning asking what I think about the New York Times decision to start charging for some content next year that the blog seemed like the best place to post my two cents. Paid content is one of the most heated debates in online media and when a major player like the Times puts a stake in the ground it gets a lot of attention. I'm not too optimistic about the future of paid content online, but we'll all be watching the Times' experiment (assuming it comes to pass) in 2011. In any case, here are my thoughts about the Times announcement:

Look at the Basic Economics
   Print publishing is a variable-cost model where costs increase substantially with wider distribution. A subscription payment model that both constrains demand and raises revenue is a great solution for this type of business. Moving from print to online the dynamic changes and you need to rethink the business model. Online media is all about scale; it costs little more to serve an audience of 10 million than of 1 million. Ideally, online media monetization strategies should reward scale, not suppress it. That’s why advertising is such a popular and (if done right) successful method for monetizing web sites.
   If you do charge for content, the price should be low enough that it doesn’t constrain demand. For example, the NY Times probably has upwards of 25 million unique visitors per year. Because of the strength of their brand, I’m sure that few people would object to paying an iPhone-app-like price of one or two dollars per year for full access. This could produce $25-50 million in additional revenue—by contrast with the $10.5 million they report from the shelved Times Select program—with less collateral damage to ad revenue. The Times could also charge for specific types of content that have high utility to a small audience.

Deploy Technology Efficiently
   For web sites ranging from the Times to mom & pop e-commerce sites, technology is an expensive and scarce resource. Therefore it should be deployed in a highly strategic way. The Times says they will spend the better part of a year developing a proprietary system to support their partial-paid content plan. You have to wonder, what else could they do with their developers’ time/budget that might have a higher ROI and longer shelf-life? One answer that jumps out is a system that provides more value to advertisers. One thing motivating the Times to charge for content is an erosion of ad revenue. While part of this is the unavoidable cyclical nature of the media business, it points to an opportunity for the Times to differentiate itself in ways that are impossible in print. There’s tremendous room for improvement in the intelligence behind ad serving, as well as in the data and analytics provided to advertisers.
   As the media and advertising industries are transformed for the digital age, the relationship can evolve toward a partnering model where each is helping the other learn and grow. The business advantage of this approach is that to the extent a media site can consistently deliver better results, the advertiser will lower the risk discount it assesses on that site’s ad rates, yielding higher revenue. Also, media properties that deliver superior results are best situated to weather economic downturns.
   Another scale-aligned option for the Times’ technology budget would be products/services that build audience and engagement, for example, new ways to present content, navigate the site, help the audience find what they’re looking for and discover additional content of interest, and encourage user-generated content. Technology that supports these goals exploits scale and builds the brand through a superior user experience.

Manage Content Costs
   When we reinvent media for the digital age we must revisit traditional thinking about content sourcing. The current Times model, with most content created by staff writers, is expensive and inelastic. Writers are compensated similarly whether they create content that’s valuable to the business or something few people read. A more strategic approach is to concentrate expensive resources on high-value content, with writers being rewarded for creating content that, for example, drives high pageviews or conversions. The long tail of less engaging information should come from cheaper and more flexible sources, such as freelancers and user-generated content, that allow better cost management.

Use Analytics to Get It Right
   The Times is doing a lot of fretting over how to get their new strategy right, but they should be well positioned to do so. Compared to traditional media, businesses operating online have a wealth of data on user behavior and preferences that point the way toward optimal solutions. In addition, thanks to having raised and lowered payment gates on its content in the past, the Times should be able to estimate demand elasticity and forecast the ultimate benefit or harm of new approaches. In online media you can make highly granular ROI calculations on both content and resources—down to the ROI for each article or writer, if needed. This unprecedented visibility into business drivers is one of the reasons online media is a revolutionary departure from its traditional roots. Companies that focus decisions around these insights will grow faster and experience fewer missteps than those that try to build online businesses derived from traditional media assumptions.

Hiatus

With the bad economy casting a long, dark shadow over so many initiatives the blog is on hiatus for awhile, as I continue to talk to folks at startups and in the media business and seek a clear strategic path out of the doldrums. Conversations these days tend to focus more on problems than on opportunities. While there are plenty of promising ideas in the hopper, the risk/reward balance is profoundly altered from just a few months ago. For now, the riskiness of the overall business climate makes even small investment or product risks untenable. Even in healthy companies, cash flow is a challenge. Many businesses are focusing on tried-and-true options such as pricing and operational efficiency, shelving more ambitious plans until better times.

History tells us that the stressful conditions and inversion of the status quo in downturns can give rise to notable pioneers. With a critical mass of great technologies and creative thinkers primed to unleash the next round of the media revolution, I’m optimistic about the future. While businesses may seem to be hibernating or (worse) going into reactive mode, from what I’m hearing the wheels are starting to turn as people come to grips with the new environment and the magnitude of innovation required to break free. The blog will be back soon with fresh reports from the front lines.

Web 2.0 Marketing 101

Earlier this month I gave a webinar on the fundamentals of online, social, and Web 2.0 marketing to a group in Texas. The client wanted the basics for an audience who was hearing the buzz about the potential of Web 2.0 but had operated primarily in the offline sphere until now. They wanted pointers on how to get started and where to focus initial efforts.

Increasingly, I'm running into organizations in this situation, as the Web 2.0 mentality trickles into the mainstream. It's exciting to see so much interest in these strategies and tactics. The Obama campaign's high-profile use of social marketing to organize and raise money attracted lots of attention.

Ultimately Web 2.0 will drive profound structural changes in the media, advertising, marketing, and PR industries. Old barriers and hierarchies will fall and new opportunities will emerge. It will take awhile to overcome the inertia of the status quo, but every company that adopts a Web 2.0 approach moves all of us a step closer to the new order.

Meanwhile, a lot of businesses are looking for help taking those first steps. My presentation was very basic, but not everyone lives and breathes Web 2.0 the way we do in Silicon Valley. If you want to review fundamentals or know someone who does, here are the slides:

Marketing 2 0

View SlideShare presentation. (tags: social marketing)

Lessons Learned from Bacon Salt

One question a lot of people are asking is how to use Web 2.0, social marketing, and the elusive phenomenon of viral growth to enhance conventional online marketing and brand-building strategies such as SEO/SEM and email marketing. I recently came across a blog post that details how one improbable brand's Web 2.0 efforts helped build a groundswell of awareness and trial that led to getting scarce shelf space in crowded retail chains. The brand is Bacon Salt, a humble food product with the seductive premise that "everything should taste like bacon."

It turns out that Bacon Salt was the brainchild of a couple of internet guys whose marketing instincts naturally gravitated to the web. They set up a web site and blog for their product, put it on YouTube, created Bacon Salt groups in MySpace and Facebook, promoted it on Twitter, and of course, sold it online. They didn't have much money, which dovetailed well with the web-based approach; online, many of the best strategies are free.

Within three months Bacon Salt was gaining significant buzz, including a mention in The New Yorker. Users began requesting it in local supermarkets; soon it claimed coveted shelfspace in major grocery chains.

The Bacon Salt story is a Web 2.0 marketing primer. If you're eager to rev up your online marketing efforts, start with the Bacon Salt checklist. Watch your analytics closely to see what works best in your market; that's where to focus followon efforts.

Want to learn more? Read details on the genesis of the Bacon Salt brand here; check out the Bacon Salt website; and follow the official Bacon Salt blog.

Putting YouTube to Work

I'm often asked how to integrate Web 2.0 opportunities such as YouTube into marketing programs. YouTube is a tantalizing distribution channel, reaching millions around the world. But it's also an unruly universe of user-generated content that's hard to steer in a specific direction, and the highly diverse audience requires further segmentation to deliver much value. Making the most of YouTube and its Web 2.0 peers is a tough challenge, but one that marketers must solve to capitalize on the opportunities offered by today's technology.

I recently came across a great advertising campaign that camps onto the YouTube phenomenon in some smart ways. It's a good case history in marketing via web 2.0.

Last year Freixenet, the Spanish sparkling wine manufacturer, working with mega ad agency JWT, hired renowned film director Martin Scorsese to make a nine-minute commercial couched as a film within a film. Titled "The Key to Reserva," it's an homage to/spoof of Alfred Hitchcock movies. Scorsese worked with friends on the project and seems to be having fun...plus he was no doubt well paid. In any case, one of the things that makes the concept work so well on YouTube is an exclusivity that closely maps to Freixenet's target demographic. People who would gravitate toward a Scorsese/Hitchcock video are an urbane lot who may well enjoy sparkling wine. It's a lot easier to extract needles from the haystack with a powerful magnet.

Note that Freixenet could have make the same investment in another top director, say Steven Spielberg, who might have drawn an even larger YouTube following. But quantity could come at the price of quality, with viewers who were unlikely to buy Freixenet while potential customers stayed on the sidelines, not sufficiently motivated to watch the film. A tight match between content and audience is essential to uncovering value in the YouTube distribution channel.

Freixenet and JWT did some other things right. Viewers remain engaged with the brand for more than nine minutes, a huge amount of time compared to conventional 30- or 60-second spots. The choice of a suspenseful Hitchcock-like format almost guarantees the audience will remain glued to their monitors for the full run time. The film doesn't feel like a commercial; the Freixenet brand is mentioned but downplayed until the end. The "Hitchcock" portions are full of rich details that satisfy even the most avid Hitchcock buff. And YouTube's social focus makes it easy to share the video with friends who have similar tastes, driving the "virality" so highly prized by online marketers.

Bottom line, it's easy to label a splashy marketing effort like "The Key to Reserva" as a stunt, but in this case it's an example online marketers can learn from. New media require new methods. As Alex Martinez, an executive at JWT Spain who worked on the project, put it: "We wanted to produce something that would be pure entertainment, something that was true to our philosophy that it's not enough now to 'buy' audience time--we need to create advertising that the audience chooses to spend time with."

Kudos to Freixenet and JWT for some creative ideas that expand our thinking about new ways to reach audiences and build brands in the world of Web 2.0. And now, have a look at "The Key to Reserva":

How to Survive the Financial Panic: Sequoia Capital's Take

Those of us in the web 2.0 universe are eager to write history, but not the sort that's currently going down (yes, take that literally) in the financial markets. What's an early stage/high growth business to do? If you haven't yet seen the slides proliferating around the web, check out Sequoia Capital's analysis of the panic and advice to portfolio companies. Slide 49 sums it up: the VCs believe this is the time to slash expenses. Since they're often the ones funding the spending, there will likely be less cash in the pipeline for some time to come.

View SlideShare presentation or upload your own.

Most of the companies I've been working with have been tightening their belts all year, but now is the time to get really serious about fundamentals. Be extra selective about hires. There's lots of talent on the market now, and the smartest, most creative and proactive among them can fill the shoes of two or three ordinary employees. There couldn't be a better time to add a top-notch online marketer to the team. This needs to be someone who has specifically leveraged the online medium and metrics to increase awareness, traffic, engagement, and revenue, and build a brand. Someone with a top online marketing skillset will have a bag full of low cost ways to help your business grow, just when you need it most.

Now is also the time to sharpen the focus on ROI. In the current environment, ROI must be a litmus test for any proposal that requires resources. From the executive perspective, there's never been a more important time to set clear priorities for the company and communicate them throughout the organization. Ideas, perks, pet projects, etc., that don't survive the triage exercise can't chip away at the scarce resources needed to keep the business afloat.

In the end it's about getting back to basics: know why your idea warrants the overhead of its own company, how your product(s) differ from the competition, who your audience/customers are, how you will create enough value for them that they will fund your operations with a robust revenue stream, and how to manage the company in a way that minimizes costs and maximizes profit. They're Business 101-type questions, but sometimes it takes a jolt to bring them back top-of-mind. October 2008 has provided one of Wall Street's periodic wakeup calls.

PS - Speaking of online marketing, note Sequoia Capital's use of the web 2.0 site Slideshare to distribute their information. It's just one of many sites that facilitates tapping into the networking and viral power of the web for the heavy lifting to get the word out about your company, services, brand, etc.

Back from China

Just back from China, a place I love to visit because the quotient of innovation and social and cultural change is so high. Even as the US is having one of our periodic economic meltdowns, the average Chinese man in the street seems more prosperous, confident, and optimistic than when I visited only last year. There are many clouds to this silver lining; still, it's a fascinating laboratory for moving the needle on a massive scale.

Whenever I'm in China I enjoy making photos wherever I go. Maybe it's my attempt to freeze a few moments in a land where so many things these days are shockingly ephemeral. In any case, a favorite picture from this trip is a woman entrepreneur in Kunming (click photo to enlarge). She's a classic study in what it takes to build a winning brand, including innovation, confidence, a unique sense of style, creative problem solving, differentiation from the competition, and a product that raises the bar. All of us working to build value for companies could take a few lessons from this savvy lady.

Back in October

The blog has been on summer break and now I'm off to China for the rest of the month. I'll be back in October with an update from Asia and more posts, coming soon.

What a Difference a Day Makes!

I didn't need Dinah Washington to remind me that in "24 little hours" I went from leading-edge cool yesterday to has-been this morning, thanks to the release of the eagerly awaited new 3G iPhone. Luckily the new iPhone 2.0 operating system, also available today, works on old phones like mine and adds significant functionality even to the "vintage" models. The excitement is so high that many people looking to upgrade old phones haven't been able to connect to the iTunes store where the software is available.

After trying unsuccessfully for about an hour I started searching for options and came across a Macworld article that provides a link you can use to download the software directly, then you "restore" your iPhone to the new settings. It's a bit complex; be sure to read through the comments for specific instructions. I had to restore twice--not sure if that's part of the process or if there was just a glitch, but in any case it worked for me and I've been exploring some of the third-party applications on offer in the new App Store.

There are a number of mobile media apps--for now, most free to download and without advertising. The NY Times and Associated Press both offer iPhone-specific news apps. They're both useful; the one from the Times has a more polished interface while AP's offering allows you to set a location (no automatic detection) for local news. Bloomberg has a very nice financially oriented news app. There are several location-based apps that seem ready to plug into location-based advertising. The Google app also collects location up-front; can mobile ads be far behind? I like NowLocal's concept: they automatically detect your location and provide the latest news in your vicinity. Another interesting app is a citizen journalism effort from Fox News, UReport, which encourages iPhone owners to send breaking news photos directly to the local Fox outlet. And there's a personalizable mobile portal from Pocket Express. In all there are over a dozen apps so far in the App Store's News category.

There are more than a dozen radio-related apps. For example, AOL radio (which is free) brings 150 CBS radio stations and more to your iPhone. There are many audio apps, for example, Jott for iPhone, which promises voice-to-text (speak to the phone and it stores your message as a text memo) as well as a host of "talking phrasebooks" that range from free to about $10. On the content creation side, for bloggers who use TypePad there's a handy app with that service. NewsGator has a free RSS reader, NewsNetWire, or you can buy iRSS for $5, but I prefer my generic mobile reader from PressDisplay. There are a number of video apps as well.

For long-form reading you can download an e-reader, with options ranging from free to $10, or directly buy classic (copyright free) novels for a dollar or two apiece.

The only app I've noticed so far that integrates advertising is the free version of Twitterrific, a third-party Twitter client. If you don't like ads you can pay $10 for essentially the same service ad-free.

I'm only beginning to crack the surface...you can guess how I'll spend the weekend! But it's already clear that the iPhone software development kit has provided a huge boost to mobile media. The utility is here now; more coherent monetization won't be far behind. Many applications are free today in order to judge unfettered demand and determine the optimal business strategy: sales (low demand) or advertising (high demand). Keep an eye on: how things that are free now get monetized; how ads are integrated into the experience; and how audio and location are integrated with content and services. The fun is just starting!

"Yanked by Yelp": When Social Media Goes Bad

In retrospect it seems inevitable: email spawned spam; search engines engendered "black hat" SEO, now it's time for Spam 2.0, when spam enters the domain of user-generated content. An article last week in the San Francisco Chronicle tells the story: a network of mutual back-scratchers--primarily small businesses--exchanged favorable reviews on the locally powerful Yelp review site. When Yelp discovered the spam scam it deleted most of the offenders' reviews, prompting outrage and talk of a class-action lawsuit from those "yanked by Yelp."

Yelp defends the decision as vital to protecting the integrity of the brand, much as major search engines must be diligent about demoting or purging irrelevant or falsely inflated links. Companies hosting email and search services spend significant resources trying (not entirely successfully) to purge spam. The Yelp case gives notice to Web 2.0 businesses that it's their turn now to mount big cleanup efforts. Chances are that, as with other forms of spam, Spam 2.0 will remain a fixture on these sites for the foreseeable future. Spammers will get smarter and the effort required to keep them at bay will only increase. Over the longer term, Spam 2.0 will be a bigger problem for social media than current headaches such as inappropriate content or language.

Perversely, the rise of Spam 2.0 is a positive indicator for Web 2.0. Spam only afflicts the largest and most successful web apps with the greatest commercial potential: email, search...you see the pattern. The rise of social spam is a strong rebuttal to doubts about the popularity, credibility, sustainability, growth prospects, and revenue opportunities of community-oriented Web 2.0 models.

Yelp took the right approach: they acknowledged companies' need for a role in the conversation and started Yelp for Business Owners, which encourages owners to "claim" their businesses on the site, communicate openly through a structured channel, and use customer comments to improve operations instead of being too quick to refute negative information. The good guys will be glad for the opportunity; but Spam 2.0 is probably here to stay.

Feed Readers Evolve

It's been a few years since there was much exciting news around feed readers--software that allows users to collect and display content feeds in formats such as RSS and Atom. One early leader in the technology, Pluck, even shut down their reader product in January 2007 in order to refocus the business on social media. Nevertheless, newsreaders are an interesting concept with the potential to dramatically shift control from publishers to users, once again underscoring the democratic nature of the web.

Some recent innovations are starting to make the newsreader space interesting again by finding alternatives to the uninviting unstructured, text-centric approach that characterized these products in the early days. A few examples:

MSNBC's Spectra: This beta product blows the doors off the visually boring scroll of text that had become synonymous with feed readers or, as MSNBC's marketers put it, "merges the news spectrum and the color spectrum." Surprise, the colorful, animated interface turns out to be functional as well as fun. News categories are color-coded, you can save articles to read later (must be online), and there's keyword search. A significant limit to the current product is that it's essentially a front door to the MSNBC news service; you can't add feeds from other sources. Spectra is a free and web-based.

TalkingNews: TalkingNews, also a beta, decouples the newsreader from text entirely: it uses text-to-speech technology to turn RSS and Atom feeds into simulated podcasts. You can also add your favorite podcasts to your TalkingNews reader. There are four voice options for hearing your feeds. The audio files are downloadable so, like conventional podcasts, they're available offline. TalkingNews is web-based. Basic membership, limited to two channels of two feeds each (max 60 minutes of audio per day), is free, or you can upgrade to a $19.99 annual subscription that offers ten channels of ten feeds.

PressDisplay, a Canadian company, offers a configurable viewer to organize and read news content from over 600 newspapers around the world. There's a mobile version as well as a text-to-speech option, "Newspaper Radio." You can filter content by language as well as on a spectrum from user favorites to editors' choices. You can select content from PressDisplay's many news sources, but can't add personal favorite feeds. PressDisplay is web-based, but there's a downloadable PressReader that allows offline access. There are three subscription options ranging from a limited free plan to unlimited access for $29.95 per month.

Interesting Mobile-Related Web Sites

I've been increasingly involved with mobile projects lately, as this platform rapidly matures into a full-featured medium for social interaction, information, and commerce. That's led to a couple of interesting web sites that throw light on where mobile technology is headed. If they're not already on your radar, they're worth checking out:

1) Nokia's MOSH: Nokia started this very Web 2.0 content sharing site specifically for mobile content--audio, video, text, games, software, and images. The good news: it's not limited to content for Nokia handsets; the aim is to facilitate sharing content on all mobile devices. I like the focus on content across media types, as well as the assumption that mobile is a central platform for consuming as wide a variety of content as the PC. Added to Nokia's acquisiton of Mobile OS company Symbian, the MOSH initiative makes it clear Nokia wants to provide much more than handsets in the mobile future.

2) Alcatel-Lucent's Teen Lab blog: Telecom giant Alcatel-Lucent spends a significant amount each year studying the global youth market for mobile technology, in an effort to uncover and understand important trends. The Teen Lab team summarizes findings and links to interesting related content in their official blog. In addition to the mobile-specific observations, the site is interesting for its insights into the behavior and preferences of teens, the "market of the future." Alcatel-Lucent knows research; the company is the current owner of the historic Bell Labs research facility.

How to Be the Best Web 2.0 Developer

One of the sites I blog for is my friend Silvia Bassi’s CW Connect, a community for IT and telecom professionals in Brazil. Today a computer science student in the community asked what core skills are most valuable for developers aiming to work in the Web 2.0 environment. I’m a business person, not an engineer, so I passed the question to Joe Kleinschmidt, the CTO of Leverage Software—an online community software and services company that provides the CW Connect platform.

Joe promptly sent back a thoughtful response that I’ll share here, for the benefit both of aspiring Web 2.0 developers as well as managers who are building teams to actualize Web 2.0 product or business visions.

CTO Joe Kleinschmidt’s advice for building the most valuable skillset possible for the Web 2.0 world:

“Wow, quite an interesting question! Well, because technology tends to move so quickly--today's Ruby is tomorrow's FORTRAN--I typically find it's much more important to develop skills which span across technologies. For me the most important skills fall under the following headings:

• Communication. Web 2.0 applications today are designed by interdisciplinary teams, distributed across the globe, for a set of demanding customers, in a rapidly-changing industry. Thus, the best web developers I've ever worked with are outstanding at communication--both technical and nontechnical. Technical communication is frequently visual, so I recommend developers learn how to read and write architecture diagrams, data models, object models, UML--things that tend to cross language boundaries. Of course nontechnical communication is equally important. There is no substitute for elegant writing and speaking skills to convey an idea to a customer, partner, or colleague.
• Architecture. Web 2.0 applications are all about scale. Great developers understand--at their core--how an app will work when millions of people are using it. Learning about performance, stress-testing, being able to write simple, loosely-coupled apps that can be distributed across multiple servers at multiple locations is a tremendous skill. Great developers can "see" (and avoid) bottlenecks in code right out of the gate.
• Design. Call it the iPod effect: so many products succeed wildly because they are elegantly designed and a joy to use. Some developers think that usability and design "isn't their job," but I've found that the best web developers tend to have enough of an eye to know when something "feels right." Developing that creative intuition--whether through an art class, usability seminars, or anything--means that great designers will simply find it easier to work with you, which in turn means you're more likely to work on beautiful (and successful) products."
  

Great information Joe! One other thought: it’s helpful to have some insight into the business mindset as well. A course or two in economics, finance, or marketing can open the door on how and why business goals and priorities are set (maybe there’s a reason they’re counting those beans). That can facilitate getting everyone on the same page and aligning resources, efforts, and objectives. Especially in such a fast-evolving and competitive environment as Web 2.0, the more efficient the organization, the better the odds of success.

Are there other skills we should add to the list? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

iPhone's Touch Screen Is Contagious

Detouring momentarily from business models to the UI, Microsoft just announced that its next-gen operating system, Windows 7, will be touch-screen compatible. The feature is getting top-level endorsement: CEO Steve Ballmer personally announced the future feature at the Wall Street Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference, while Chairman Bill Gates articulated the company's vision of input beyond the keyboard: "Today almost all the interaction is keyboard-mouse. Over years to come, the role of speech, vision, ink — all of those — will be huge."

Windows 7 is slated to replace the controversial Vista in 2009. As explained in a post on the Microsoft Vista team's blog, its touch-screen capability derives from an earlier Microsoft touch initiative known as Surface.

As fans have predicted, the iPhone has kicked off the next round of UI innovations. Human-computer interactions 10 years down the road may not much resemble today's heavily text-input-centric approach, much as Windows (and of course the Apple OS that inspired it) transformed DOS. Inevitably, revolutions in interaction spawn new business models and opportunities. So far we've only scratched the surface of the potential for innovation in online media.

Bridging the Digital Divide

The Hickory Pit BBQ restaurant in Savannah, TN: wifi enabled. But it was hard to keep the sauce off the iPhone.

Peeking at the Future of Mobile

The mobile medium is one of the most exciting areas for innovation these days, as leading-edge Web 2.0 technologies and strategies (social networking, user-generated content, AJAX, widgets) start to intersect with the latest device trends, such as 24/7 availability, broadband, and location awareness. It's a complicated matrix so it's hard to guess exactly how the dynamics will play out. But some recent items in the news give interesting peeks.

At the recent Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco the founders of Zumobi, a mobile widget application, offered a list of six attributes required for success in the mobile space, summarized in Tom Krazit's One More Thing blog on CNET:

• Immediacy: the entire interaction with the device should occur with 15 seconds


• Adaptability: input on mobile devices is still a challenge and continues to evolve. Applications shouldn't depend on a single input method--it might become obsolete


• One-handed use: research shows that with mobile devices, people tend to create content with two hands and consume it with one hand. Mobile users consume far more content than they create, so devices should be optimized for this interaction.


• Visual elegance: devices such as the iPhone have raised the bar in terms of expectations about the visual user experience. Going forward, successful applications need to meet or exceed these standards.


• Put the user in control: Based on their experience with PCs, users are used to a certain level of control over the desktop, applications, etc. The mobile market, now dominated by carriers, doesn't offer comparable configurability, but it should.


• Thinking differently: never forget, mobile is a whole new world; quite possibly the rules that govern the web don't apply. For example, while online applications aim to be "sticky," in mobile it's ok to be "bouncy," allowing people to dip in and out of the application quickly. If your application is easy to use on the go, people will come back frequently.

The Zumobi founders, Ben Bederson and John SanGiovanni, have high praise for the iPhone as a device that points toward the future of mobile computing. As Krazit puts it, they believe the iPhone represents "the successful amalgamation and commercialization of design tidbits that had been circulating for years." The ability to synthesize existing features into a revolutionary leap forward is a key element in the process of inventing the future.

Meanwhile, yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle noted that in the US, the Latino demographic is the early and frequent adopter of a spectrum of mobile services beyond voice, including "messaging, downloading music, surfing the Web and e-mailing." A professor quoted in the article commented, "Things other people do on computers, a lot of Latinos do on cell phones."

It took marketers awhile to catch on to the power and vision of the Latino mobile opportunity. At first they were hindered by patronizing stereotypes that the demographic would prefer cheap, simplistic phones. On the contrary, Latinos were early adopters of the original $600 Motorola Razr. The Chronicle concludes, "Latinos are quick to embrace new technology, seeing in it a way to get ahead in life."

Takeaway for those designing or testing mobile services: be sure to include Latinos in your plans and observe their behavior carefully. They're an important mobile technology bellwether.

Some of the Chronicle's observations were drawn from a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project on Mobile Access to Data and Information. The December 2007 survey reveals that 62% of American adults have used either a mobile phone or PDA for a non-voice data application, or a wireless laptop connection. A majority of Americans (51%) now say their mobile phone would be the hardest technology to give up--ahead of the internet (45%), television (43%), and email (37%).

Currently 75% of Americans have a mobile phone and/or PDA. Of those, 77% have used the device for at least one non-voice application and 42% report that they engage in mobile data activity on a typical day. The Pew study found a strong affinity between mobile data applications and the Latino market, where 84% have mobile phones. Regardless of ethnicity, age is also highly correlated with mobile data use: 96% of the 18-29 age group who have mobile phones have used them for at least one data application, and 73% say they do so on a typical day. In that demographic, 62% say it would be hard to do without a mobile phone, compared to 51% who feel that way about the internet.

In Special-Purpose Communities Steak Trumps Sizzle

A consulting project I'm working on includes helping a global brand optimize and grow a special-purpose professional networking community. After the community had been in place a couple of months the client wanted to ask members what new features they'd like to see. Normally I'm all about putting the customer first, but in this case I thought it was the wrong approach. When you're building a social network in a niche market the steak should come first: get the fundamentals right. Leave the sizzle for later.

First, it's important not to set expectations you can't fulfill. In this case, the client is using a hosted solution built around a template with a limited feature set. Giving community members an open-ended invitation to suggest features the client can't deliver has a high probability of disappointment. They're likely to start listing fun or flashy applications that caught their eye on Facebook...the type of thing that builds engagement once you're a loyal member but may not correlate to establishing the core value that motivates someone to join and return in the first place.

In the early going it's smarter to concentrate on a straightforward presentation (think Google) of basic activities that create value, such as sharing questions and information and facilitating connections between people who want to find each other. Discussion groups, blogs, wikis, ratings, Q&A, and some type of personal matching engine are a good start. Early on, focus marketing efforts on building usage of essential features rather than on proliferating functionality. If the underlying concept of your community is on target, people will sign up and return with or without the extra bells and whistles. After it reaches critical mass and is yielding a positive ROI you can invest in sizzle to generate more usage and time on site.

Furthermore, while it never hurts to open communication channels and invite people to talk back, when you're operating online you don't need surveys to reveal the activities people like best. With recall more perfect than any questionnaire responses, your web analytics disclose what features people do and don't use, where they spend the most time, when they visit, and the paths they take through your site. To understand how your community is working, dive into site stats.

Here's a great example of how, in the world of special-purpose online communities, steak trumps sizzle. Just this week some former colleagues in Brazil launched a community for IT and telecom professionals, CW Connect. To get the community up and running quickly they chose a US vendor's hosted solution. In some cases, page templates unavoidably and a bit awkwardly mix English and Portuguese. But instead of stressing over imperfections, my friends focused on the opportunity of launching the first professional networking site in their market in Brazil. Instead of Facebook "feature envy" they kept it simple. The plan paid off: Brazilian IT and telecom professionals who haven't had a venue for making connections and sharing solutions are flocking to CW Connect. CW Connect is starting with a good steak, which means there will be opportunities for lots more sizzle in the future.

New Study on PR Measurement

Speaking of PR, the publication PR News has just released its Guide to Best Practices in PR Measurement Vol. 3. The guide costs $399, but you can check out the table of contents and a couple of articles for free. Chapters include Measurement Research, Measuring Media Relations, New Media Measurement, Measuring Integrated Marketing, 360-Degree PR Measurement, Measuring Reputation, Impacting the Bottomline, Measurement Case Studies, and Measurement Resources.

The web-enabled demand for measurability and demonstrable ROI is affecting every area where businesses spend to gain reputation, build brand, and promote products and services. Among the topics in the New Media Measurement chapter: Measuring Web 2.0, Measuring the Impact of Online Influencers, Measuring E-Mail Performance, How to Measure Social Relations, and A Conversation about New Media Metrics among Digital Luminaries. There's additional discussion of online and social media topics in other chapters, too.

The report notes that "measuring the value of PR's contribution to bottomline business results has never been harder--or more necessary." In any case, the focus on measurability is here to stay, and it's good to see various professional specialties specifically calling out the need to learn more.

Bypassing Media: Is PR the New Advertising?

It’s hardly news that the internet is leading to big changes for the advertising business, a transformation that has important consequences for online media companies that monetize with ad revenue. But in a Web 2.0 world where social media complicates the landscape and yesterday’s hierarchical models of content presentation give way to the audience’s collective wisdom, will brands start shifting resources from advertising to PR? If so, what does that mean for online media businesses?

Advertising and PR exist side by side, as complementary strategies for shaping opinion and motivating behavior. Traditionally, advertising has been a more direct investment in an anticipated outcome, where the advertiser has lots of control of the message and presentation—and pays for the privilege. PR, on the other hand, is about more subtle influence that attempts to work its way through the audience’s network of influencers and authority figures. It’s the network idea that makes PR an interesting option in the social media environment.

In classic PR, the “PR man” (or woman), either at an agency or a company, has a powerful file of media contacts to leverage when it’s time to get the word out. That model is endangered as change roils the media industry: there’s rapid turnover in newsrooms, and in any case, audiences now rely less on the voice of big media to tell them how to think. In a world where social networking and Web 2.0 put the “me” in media, people are more likely to depend on their favorite blogs, discussion groups, RSS feeds, wikis, online Q&A, and direct online networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, or Twitter. For an old-school PR traditionalist that could be a challenge; for a PR 2.0 professional, it’s a big opportunity.

That’s because PR’s classic strength of developing opinion-influencing messaging, and its intuitive grasp of how to navigate the web of persuasion, map well to Web 2.0’s proliferating content channels and network-based communication structure. The savvy PR professional can insert himself or his brand directly into the network without having to rely on a third-party introduction from a journalist—not via subterfuge, but by establishing the client brand as a valuable information resource. Then, through strategies such as tagging, RSS, voting, and old-fashioned hyperlinking, the content is disseminated virally.

The viral uptake model is also coveted by online advertisers, who look to social media to drive deeper engagement with products and brands. To be sure social media has many benefits for advertisers, especially in uncovering preferences, needs, and affinities that can provide better targeting, higher conversions, and an advertising experience that feels less intrusive. But the fundamental quid pro quo of the advertising value proposition can only go so far in social media. There’s a point where efforts cross the line into PR. That might mean companies will shift some budgets from advertising to PR as social media gains traction, cutting media sites out of the revenue stream.

The online medium constantly challenges us to rethink assumptions about boundaries between business categories. Advertising and PR will continue to exist as the conjoined twins of the persuasion industry. But in this new world we’re creating online, don’t be surprised if the bright line that used to divide them begins to blur around the edges.

Life After Facebook: Alternative Futures for Social Networking

I had an interesting discussion today about the future of social networking. It got me thinking that this functionality is being applied in two opposite directions. One you might call the Facebook-style umbrella approach. The other is more a la carte.

Sites such as Facebook are aggregating every social connection and sharing feature they can think of under one roof. Everything you’d want to do with your friends, relatives, business contacts, and other acquaintances—or even people who aren’t yet acquaintances but whom you’d probably like to know—is facilitated or enabled under a single social networking brand. It’s very efficient: create one profile, upload photos and videos to one place, enter one friend list, etc. More important from the business perspective, the brand gains tremendous insight into each network member, information that can then be used to target advertising or in other monetization schemes.

In the Facebook scenario there are only a few winners and many losers—similar to how EBay is on top with online auctions, Google wins web search, and Amazon corners the market for online book sales.

At the same time, though, there’s an alternative trend with many winners. These are the sites that are picking and choosing social networking features to enhance businesses across the spectrum of online services: media, e-commerce, financial services, games, informational sites, and all the rest. They aren’t Facebook rivals; they just want to harvest some of the engagement, loyalty, content creation, cost savings, insight into user preferences, and other benefits that various social strategies have to offer.

Sites that use these features well will enhance their businesses. Also, there are significant opportunities for third parties to provide software-as-a-service functionality to customers who lack the technical proficiency to develop applications themselves. While the universe of possible interactions online expands, the user experience paradigms converge. Business opportunities multiply. Sometimes the sum of the parts exceeds the whole.