Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

A few weeks ago, I saw a fairly steep drop in my Klout score and wondered about it for a few minutes. I chalked it up to an algorithm change – something they are not shy about doing.

However, I’ve been live-Tweeting the 2011 Inbound Marketing Summit for the past few days and was curious to see how it affected my score.

Obviously, the score was going to go up due to the unusually high number of updates and re-Tweets. But then, looking at the time graph it occurred to me to ask, “When exactly was WordCamp Boston?” That happened to be the last live-Tweeting event I attended.

As it turns out, the steep drop in my Klout score occurred exactly 30 days after WordCamp Boston:

It’s not terribly meaningful, but it does provide some insight into the Klout algorithm. Apparently, there the Network Influence and Amplification Probability calculations are performed over a 30 day moving window. It further seems to be a fairly simple calculation that is not using any sort of moving average, but just a basic summation.

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Jeff Atwood said (loudly) what many others were thinking: That there was “Trouble in the house of Google.”

Then Matt Cutts told us that Google was tweaking their algorithm to do better at excluding content farms and then announced a Chrome extension to crowdsource that effort.

And now Google is getting personal. On their blog last Friday, Google announced three changes that were all based on the searcher’s social graph. These changes are:

1. Social results used to be second class citizens relegated to the bottom of the page, but now they will be interspersed throughout the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) based on relevance.
2. They’re annotating results that were shared by friends in your social graph. For example, searching for “jeff atwood google trouble” may return a link to his blog post with my mug below it and a note that says, “Jon DiPietro shared this on Twitter.”
3. In addition to allowing you to configure social accounts publicly in your Google Profile, they will now be allowing you to link accounts privately through your Google Account.

Since I wrote about Internet marketing’s new currency last August, Google has been on a slow but steady march to incorporate more and more social search results into their algorithm. Last week’s announcement ups the ante significantly. Traditional SEO is still important – and always will be. But remarkable content and an extensive online social circle are increasing in importance every single minute.

Get that blog going. Start engaging online. And make sure your website has strong calls to action with well constructed landing pages.

DO IT NOW…

Here’s a video from Google that explains social search (and hints at how important it is to have a complete Google Profile):

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This is the chart no industry wants to see:

From "Publishing in the Digital Era" from Bain & Company

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Artists of America (RIAA) would have you believe this is the effect of piracy. But let’s dispel that right out of the gate: Digital music piracy has steadily declined for the past five years and is nearly half of where it was in 2005.

Is it just a coincidence that music theft began to decline at exactly the same time revenues fell off a cliff? I don’t think so.

In the Beginning…

In the beginning, Publishers created the record and the CD. Now the Internet was formless and lifeless, darkness was over the surface of computer monitors and the Spirit of Tim Berners-Lee was hovering over the wires.

During this dark age before the Internet, music consumers had two choices; the single or album. Once cassettes and CDs took over, however, even that choice disappeared. Consumers frequently had to buy twelve songs they didn’t want in order to get the one they did. There wasn’t any other choice, so we sucked it up and (more often than not) bought the CD.

And Tim said, “Let there be a world wide web,” and there was a world wide web. Tim saw that it was good and he separated the interface from the data. Tim called the interface a “browser” and the data he called “hypertext.” And there was Netscape and there was Lycos – the Internet.

But it wasn’t only the Internet that led to digitization. Inexpensive computers with CD drives that could burn songs into a compact format were also required. Once consumers acquired a taste of freedom to separate the songs from the album, piracy was born. Napster came on the scene and sparked an explosion in digital theft. Although Napster was shut down relatively quickly, new services and technologies popped up in the never ending game of “Whack a Mole” between publishers and pirates.

Yet, around 2005 piracy started to decline and music sales began to fall off of a cliff. Hmm… Wha happa?

Let There Be Downloads

I remember clearly sitting in front of my computer in 2003, calling a friend over to show him the announcement of a new online store that would sell individual songs and let you download them straight to your iPod. “This is great! I’ll never by another album again!” I exclaimed. My friend looked at me and deadpanned, “The record companies will never let that happen.” Well, you know what happened. In fact, take a look at what happened right around 2005 (click on the image for full size):

Downloads exploded but revenues fell off a cliff. Consumers were liberated from having to buy stuff they didn’t want. Meanwhile, the MPAA and RIAA spent enormous time and effort battling the white elephant of digital piracy and started sending their customers to jail. They were caught in a business death spiral.

Newspapers and magazines are battling a similar mirage. They think that the enemy is bloggers who are stealing their content and giving it away for free. In reality, consumers want their content in tiny, hyper-relevant bites. But so far, publishers haven’t figured that out and continue to try to force-feed us the all-or-nothing options on a shiny new object.

Freedom!

The chart at the beginning of this post is an illustration of what happens to an industry that has enslaved its customers when they are finally liberated. In his blog today, Seth Godin addressed the issue of “pricing power.” He suggested that there are two reasons why you aren’t getting paid what you think you’re worth:

1. People don’t know what you’re worth, or
2. You’re not (currently) worth as much as you believe

Most businesses refuse to believe #2 could be true. If it’s not, you have a marketing problem.

If it is, you have bigger problem.

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You may have heard this already, but this social networking thing is starting to get popular. It’s fundamentally altering the way we conduct our daily lives and that has lots of people coming unhinged. Daily shrieks on my Facebook wall warn of a new plan from the modern day Trilateral Commission(Facebook, Google, and Foursquare) to turn us into strung out, ad-clicking junkies so they can cut off our heads and mount them on pikes. News reporters who wouldn’t know the difference between a browser cookie and an Oreo cookie write terrifying stories about web sites stealing deep, dark, private secrets: like the URL for your Facebook profile that is already indexed by Google.

But I had to write this post after reading the latest prediction of the privacy apocalypse from the Intelligentsia. In a February Wired Magazine article titled “Your Life Torn Open,” Andrew Keen wails that we are being led down a primrose path to Hell with these social networking sites. Fear mongering has a long and glorious history – especially in journalism and politics – because it’s such a powerful emotion. If Gordon Gecko were a journalist instead of a wall street banker he would have said, “Fear, for lack of a better word, is good.”

While being concerned about your privacy is very important, articles like Keen’s focus the attention in the wrong place, in my opinion. In an effort to warn people about an impending doom, he’s inadvertently doing more harm than good. His article peddles three untruths that I see commonly thrown around and I will take exception to them now.

#1 – Social Networking is Narcissistic

In my opinion, this is the laziest, most gratuitous slap anyone can take at social networking. Almost invariably, they cite Tweets about what someone had for lunch or wall updates about their pet did this morning. Since social networking begins with us talking about ourselves, it’s really easy (too easy) to make quips about it being narcissistic. But it’s also demonstrably false.

If social networking were truly narcissistic, then NOBODY WOULD FOLLOW ANYONE BUT THEMSELVES. And that would pretty much defeat the whole purpose of a social network, wouldn’t it? The very fact that someone has Facebook friends or Twitter followers annihilates the argument. I follow other people because I either learn something from time to time, or am entertained by that person, or want to keep my relationship with them warm by seeing what they’re doing. I’m interested.

There are billions of people on this planet who could not possibly care less about what I have to say. From their perspective, I’m obviously self-absorbed for writing about stuff they don’t care about. But I’m not talking to them. I’m talking to few hundred or thousand who do care. I’m talking to you. Does that make me a narcissist?

Now, I have no doubt there are true narcissists in social networks, but that’s because they are already narcissists and would be whether Facebook existed or not.

#2 – We Aren’t Naturally Social Beings

This line in Keen’s story made burst out loud with incredulity. This is absolutely demonstrably false. There have been countless experiments that illustrate the fact that much of our irrational behaviors are specifically geared toward social acceptance and group dynamics. Fear of public speaking is an example. We developed a fear of standing out from a crowd as a survival mechanism because there’s safety in numbers. Cognitive researchers have shown that our decision process is highly dependent on and easily swayed by others’ opinions. This helps promote harmony in small groups so that consensus can be reached on important decisions.

Keen opines that “human happiness is really about being left alone.” Really? Do I really even need to make an argument against that? Everybody likes some alone time now and then, obviously. But for my entire adult life I’ve heard about how our social fabric is being torn apart by people moving out of cities and into solitary lives in suburbia.

Now all of a sudden we’re all Greta Garbo? Here’s a free tip if you’re feeling too “social” – shut down your laptop and turn off your phone for a few hours. Problem solved!

#3 – Social Graphs Are Evil

Whereas the first two points I’ve made are demonstrable facts, this one is a little more of an opinion and personal preference. However, I feel like the whole paranoia over privacy settings gets a bit hysterical sometimes. First of all, you’re in complete control over what data you want to share and what data you want to keep private. Yes, reasonable people can argue about whether or not it could be more user friendly but the capability is there.

Second, we’re not talking about sharing social security numbers and credit card details. We’re talking about the brand of car you drive, your favorite songs and television shows, and news articles you’ve read. Lots of people think it’s “creepy” that this information can be used to target advertisements to us when log into Facebook or visit a newspaper website. I prefer to think of it as spam-blocking. I’m all in favor of giving these websites information that lets them improve the ads I see and offers I receive so that it’s more relevant to me.

Let’s Be Smart

OK, please don’t waste our time by mis-characterizing my point: I am not saying you should make everything public. I am not saying there’s no such thing as identity theft. I am saying that you should be concerned about the important things, like strong passwords and recognizing a phishing attack when you see one. Those are much, much more important than preventing Facebook from telling someone your favorite artist is Justin Bieber.

Well, maybe you do want to keep that one private.

Let me know what you think about privacy and targeted ads. I think there are more dangerous things to worry about but maybe I’m missing something.

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The Who 1308720059 by Heinrich Klaffs on Flickr

In an article titled, “Meet the new boss” on Magellan Media’s blog, Brian O’Leary expresses skepticism about the characterization of a “new crop of chiefs” profiled by the New York Times as really being very new. O’Leary says:

First, these guys – all middle-aged white men – reflect experience in the old order, not necessarily an embrace of a new one. They aren’t part of a “born-digital” generation; they are on the other side of that divide.

This article caught my eye because I wrote a blog article earlier this year about this same group of companies called “Print Publishing’s Public Pity Party.”

The publishing industry has embarked on a quixotic journey.  A recent  Adweek article announces that “Close to 100 titles are planning to sacrifice prominent placements in their issues for an industry campaign.”  Their tilted windmill is a sense that we have all simply forgotten how wonderful their product is, and that by running ads they can remind us.  I can’t help but picture a group of buggy whip salesmen on the side of the road laughing at a car with a flat tire, secure in the knowledge that a horse would never succumb to such embarrassment.

I commented on O’Leary’s post, agreeing with him that it seemed that this new group would simply be tinkering with a model that needs to be blown up. Or as he quotes, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” And then it occurred to me to offer these titans of publishing some unsolicited advice: they could learn a lot from ESPN.

Inbound marketing is fueled by compelling content. The magazine publishing industry doesn’t have a content quality problem; they have a content packaging, promotion and delivery problem. As it turns out, there are two things that ESPN does exceedingly well in this regard, and I think any organization following a content marketing strategy can learn from them as well.

Repurposing

I’m a fairly avid sports fan and have been consuming sporting news in all its various forms for a long time. I’ve watched television programs, read newspapers, subscribed to magazines, listened to sports radio, and read blogs. ESPN has invaded all of those media channels and more with Napoleonic fervor. One thing I’ve noticed in particular is how effectively they’ve modularized their content and then squeeze every last drop of value out of it.

Take a simple 20 second sound bite from a post-game interview, for example. You’ll see this snippet embedded in a Sports Center broadcast, embedded in multiple ESPN.com articles, played throughout the day on ESPN Radio broadcasts, incorporated into relevant Podcasts, embedded in blog opinion pieces, uploaded to YouTube, posted on the Sports Nation fan page, Tweeted by one of their anchors, etc… And even that list doesn’t really do justice to the number of different places from which that singular chunk of content will be consumed.

Instead of embracing reuse and extracting the maximum value from their content, what are newspaper and magazine publishers doing? Erecting pay walls on the web and creating tablet applications (that are pretty terrible, by the way). But efficiently re-purposing content by itself isn’t enough…

Demand Publishing

Richard Nash is an independent publishing entrepreneur, having previously run the iconic indie Soft Skull Press for which work he was awarded the Association of American Publishers’ Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. I watched a 35 minute video of Nash at BookNet Canada’s Technology Forum 2010 in a session entitled “Publishing 3.0: Moving from Gatekeeping to Partnerships.” It connected a whole bunch of dots for me and blew my mind (the video is embedded at the end of this post).

In this presentation, Nash describes how the publishing industry must evolve from a supply model to a demand model. Under an economic model of scarcity, companies manage supply. From the invention of movable type until the proliferation of Web 2.0, information was – relatively speaking – scarce. Publishers would, in the words of Clay Shirky, “filter, then publish.” In other words, they would decide what books deserved to be published and then deliver them to the market. In an economic landscape where information is abundant, Nash argues that publishers must manage demand instead.

Mike Reiss began as a New England Patriots beat writer for the Boston Globe and is now ubiquitous across ESPN's many media channels.

How do you manage demand? You need to provide products and services along the entire demand curve; abundant but inexpensive (or free) as well as scarce but expensive experiences. ESPN does this by turning their content creators (formerly known as journalists) into experiences. Instead of writing one or two weekly columns, their correspondents deliver a constant stream of bit-sized content from short videos to blog posts and Tweets. This forms a sort of experiential pyramid, where we can consume lower value products (i.e. facts) at a greater volume and higher value products (i.e. video and opinion) at a lower volume.

Instead of embracing demand publishing, newspaper and magazine publishers are implementing draconian social media policies that attempt to keep their journalists as faceless as possible.

Here is Richard Nash’s 35 minute presentation. If you’re interested in the future of publishing, this is well worth the time.

Inbound Marketing Takewaways

Many organizations and individuals could do a better job at re-purposing and leveraging their content. Recall my social media strategy advice: Be authentic, relentless and everywhere. You can achieve better results by promoting your content relentlessly and everywhere, and by having your content creators engage with the audience in order to create enhanced, value-added experiences.

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