Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.
Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week. This week’s theme is “Your 2011 Primer.” This week’s links take a look at some tips and trends to help get strategically prepared for 2011.
#5: Maybe next year…
Let’s get started with a quick pep talk from Seth Godin. “It’s not too late, it’s just later than it was.”
#4: 10 Trends That Are Shaping Global Media Consumption
In reading this article, I am reminded of Clay Shirky’s theorem of technology’s impact on society: “These tools don’t get socially interesting until they become technologically boring.”
What struck me in reading this article was how many of these models had been attempted before. It’s probably equally worthwhile to examine how these implementations succeeded when predecessors failed.
#2: Blogging Forefather Seeks to Re-Invent Blogging, Again
Dave Winer, inventor of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), is very concerned about silos. So he’s doing something about. “The important thing is that you and your ideas live outside the silo and are ported into it at your pleasure… You never have to worry about getting your stuff out of the silo because it never lived in there in the first place.”
At this time last year, Google seemed unstoppable: so much so, that many of the news stories and blog posts were questioning whether or not they were too powerful and even advocating a Google-free existence. Just a year later, many experts are questioning whether or not they are in real trouble.
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.
OK, I will admit it – I may have a slight man-crush on Clay Shirky. I quote him often, watch any video he’s in, and read everything he writes. The term “thought leader” is overused in our hyperactive blogosphere, but the term truly applies to Shirky. His first book, “Here Comes Everybody – The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” looked past the obvious points everyone else was making about social media and unveiled the long term effects it would have on organizations. Put another way, he was thought-leading.
His encore book is “Cognitive Surplus – Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age,” and it is vintage Shirky. Every page is dense with original ideas about how social media is going to affect society. The very title of the book suggests that there is a surplus of brain power up for grabs. But since cognitive capacity is a zero sum game, the surplus has to come from somewhere. This begs the question, “Where do people find the time?”
The Essence
Shirky tells a story about a conversation he had with a television producer who was trying to determine whether or not to have him on her show. He talked about the controversy of Pluto’s “delisting” as a planet and the sudden spike in activity on its Wikipedia page. Shirky waited for her to follow up with questions about the social implications of this phenomenon, but “Instead, she sighed and said, ‘Where do people find the time?” Hearing this, I snapped, and said, ‘No one who works in television gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from.’”
The 1970's television show "Gilligan's Island" had many pondering the eternal question, "Ginger or Mary Ann?"
He estimates that there are roughly a trillion hours spent watching television worldwide each year. The advent of the industrial age and, with it, the 40 hours work week meant that the post World War II industrialized societies had an abundance of free time and television swooped in and soaked up most of it. We laughed at ourselves for spending so much time contemplating the such mysteries of the universe as, “Ginger or Mary Ann?“.
Social media represents competition for our free time. The big difference between it and television is that our every use of social media is, by definition, a creative act. Whether it’s uploading vacation photos to Flickr or sharing pearls of wisdom on Twitter, we have made something that didn’t previously exist. We can debate the value and merit of this content until the cows come home, but what is not debatable is that watching television creates nothing.
The question now becomes, what will come from the creative activities of “The People Formerly Known as the Audience” as he calls them?
Means, Motive and Opportunity
In three of the book’s chapters, presents the implications of the Cognitive Surplus in the framework of a legal argument; means, motive and opportunity. “The harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways, relative to their old status as consumers and couch potatoes.” They payoff in the book comes from the motive and opportunity topics, where the rubber truly meets the road.
The Skinny
Why it rocks:
The book is fruitcake-dense with ideas, evidence, and challenges. It looks well beyond the horizon of such comparatively insignificant questions as “Google versus Facebook”, or “How much is a follower worth?” Cognitive Surplus is a book about how human beings will harness each others’ brains in order to work together at changing the world.
Why it doesn’t:
It’s not the easiest read in the world. Not because of his writing style, but simply because you spend so much time contemplating the implications of the machine gun pace of ideas he unleashes.
The Verdict
This is an important book. It may not necessarily be important to you, but the concepts are far reaching and somewhat mind boggling. If you’re wondering what role LOL Cats may play in the future of mankind, Shirky goes a long way toward putting all things social media into context.
Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.
This week’s High Five theme is, “Social Media Grab Bag.”
#5: Government websites get the chop
As part of the UK government’s austerity measures to combat rising debt levels, it announced that it will be shuttering over 600 web sites. But that’s not the interesting statistic. As Chris Rand puts it, “Sadly, like most public sector projects, the cost of running them is eye-watering.” He cites one example in which a UK government web site cost over $7M to build and received just under 400k visitors at a cost of over $15 per visitor.
#4: Former Facebook Executive Adam D’Angelo Confirms New Google Social Networking Effort
There has been some Buzz (rimshot) about Google’s next move to combat Facebook’s growing threat in the social search space. This article suggests that Google drastically underestimated Facebook’s potential and never made social networking a company priority – until now.
#3: How To Rank #1 In Facebook Search In 60 Seconds For Any Term
My reason for highlighting this article isn’t so much for people to learn how to accomplish this feat, but to understand the implications of the 21st Century Land Grab. Whether or not you intend or a ready to fully engage in social media marketing, it’s important to plant a flag to prevent someone else from claiming your territory.
#2: How This Author Got 674,716 Facebook Fans (Worth, Uh, $92 Million!)
Like the previous article, the most important lessons of this story aren’t the most obvious. While the author and columnist question the true value of a Facebook fan, what struck me was the negative impact that such a throng of the wrong fans can have on your brand. Like accidentally optimizing for the wrong keyword, having a fan page populated by the wrong demographic can be just as damaging.
#1: Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world
There are a trillion hours per year of “spare time” that are currently spent watching television. When you think about social media and wonder aloud, “Where do people find the time?” now you know. Shirky wants to start talking about how we should be using this cognitive surplus.
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.
