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 “Choosing a basket for your Internet eggs.”
#5: WordPress Wins Open Source CMS Hall of Fame Award
Since the most important aspect of an effective inbound marketing strategy is remarkable, shareable, readable content, it therefore stands to reason that choosing the right basket (content management system) for your eggs (content) is also going to be critical to success. I’m a huge fan of WordPress and the Open Source Awards agree.
#4: iPad ‘newspaper’ created by Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch
Publishers are spreading their eggs in all kinds of baskets (print, open web, walled web, mobile, social media) in an attempt to figure out the best business model in a Web 2.0 economy. We now see the Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar of media by planning an iPad-only publication.
#3: Ask the Wise Guy: Facebook Fan Page or Website?
Guy Kawasaki is nothing if not a “bottom line” kind of guy (rimshot). In this article, he does a great job of explaining why he put all of his eggs in the Facebook basket for his latest book, Enchantment. The bottom line is that if you’re trying to establish a web presence for something more ephemeral and less permanent, then skipping the website and going for a Fan page may very well be your best option.
#2: Facebook Introduces Anti-Email: Social Inbox, Seamless Messaging, Conversation History
Where are you going to put your e-communication eggs? Facebook is betting on the current trend of teens and twenty-somethings shunning email in favor of texting and instant messaging. But the central issue here may turn out not to be the technology, but the trust. Facebook hasn’t engendered a very high degree of trust lately, but we’ll see whether convenience and expediency win out over trust.
Tim Berners-Lee authored a sort of “State of Internet” article this week. Much of it discusses eggs and baskets, and the threats to both. He argues that net neutrality (lack thereof) threatens to crush certain eggs while failure to adhere to open standards threatens to diminish the quantity and diversity of baskets we have to choose from. It’s big thinking from a big brain about big issues.
What do Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs have in common these days? It’s an odd question considering how frankly Steve Jobs has expressed his distaste with Microsoft and their business approach. That’s why I had to chuckle the other day when I heard Jobs’ comments on Apple’s earning conference call the other day.
…Apple strives to the integrated model so that the user isn’t forced to be the systems integrator. We see tremendous value at having Apple, rather than our users, be the systems integrator… And we also think that our developers could be more innovative if they can target a singular platform, rather than a hundred variants. They can put their time into innovative new features, rather than testing on hundreds of different handsets.
In other words, Apple wants to make it as easy as possible for developers to create applications that iPhone, iPod, and iPad users download from the “integrated” iTunes store. Jobs is arguing that their “closed” platform means “integrated,” while Google’s “open” platform (and at least one prolific developer challenges whether or not Google is really open) actually means “fragmented.” Apple is creating an ecosystem that will thrive based in large part on the diversity of stuff you can do with their devices.
Microsoft (founded by a couple of developers) understood this point from day one:
Windows was successful in large part because they deliberately created a developer-friendly ecosystem that led to an explosion in application development for their operating system, eventually becoming the de facto standard. Some may argue that Microsoft is more similar to Android than iOS because it still wasn’t very tightly integrated and while there is a valid argument to be made there, I’m referring more to the business strategy than the technical realities. After all, this blog is really about inbound marketing.
Speaking of which…
So What’s the Inbound Marketing Takeaway?
This whole point crystallized for me when I read “Is an App a Tool or a Behavior?” by John Jantsch on his Duct Tape Marketing blog. Jantsch wrote the forward for a book titled “App Savvy” that provides guidance for building apps that people will want to use. He is encouraging us to think of apps in a different way than perhaps most of us do:
When you come to view your app ideas and execution with a “feeding a behavior” mindset, ideas and the carrying out of those ideas will flow more freely.
So here’s the bottom line: apps are another channel that help you spread your ideas. They’re another means for achieving the third step of inbound marketing, promotion. Think about the gifts you can offer to your target market and ask yourself, “Is there an app for that?”
Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.
This week’s High Five is a grab bag of internet marketing topics.
#5: ACTA Draft: No Internet for Copyright Scofflaws
Regular readers of this blog will know that I often talk about net neutrality and copyright issues. This article discusses efforts by the U.S. to convince other nations to develop protocols for copyright protection that would make it the responsibility of Internet Service Providers to police copyright infringements and immediately suspend internet connectivity and terminate “in appropriate circumstances.” In addition to raising costs for ISPs, this will almost certainly result in a “shoot first, ask questions later” policy in order to reduce their risk.
#4: WSJ on iPad for $17.99 a month, magazines to be at or near newsstand prices?
It’s becoming clear that the print publishing industry is looking at the iPad as an opportunity to start with a clean slate <rimshot>. The horse has already left the barn in terms of providing free content on the internet, and so it seems that they intend not to make that mistake again. From the outset, several publications are intending to at least begin their subscriptions on the iPad at very near news stand pricing. Given Apple’s strict control of the content application rules on their platforms, this should not encounter the technical hurdles publishers have faced on the internet. This time, it’s personal.
Lisa Barone writes one of the best internet marketing blogs on the internet, in my opinion. She is a frequent guest writer on Small Business Trends and this article provides five simple, yet solid tips for improving the search engine optimization of your Facebook fan page.
#2: Are Marketing Dollars Shifting? Exhibit Industry Down 12.5%
There’s not a whole lot to tell for this one. While the decline of the exhibit industry isn’t shocking, I was a bit surprised at the steep drop from last year. More evidence that marketing dollars continue to flow from traditional channels like trade shows to inbound marketing.
#1: Facebook Foreshadows New Features With Privacy Policy Tweaks
It’s time for our monthly Facebook privacy policy fire drill! They are proposing a couple of new (and potentially disturbing to some) tweaks that will be made to their privacy policy. The first is the integration of automatic geolocation features. Applications like foursquare provide a fun way to localize social media and meet new friends, but they also broadcast your activities to the world and provide criminals with a possible blueprint for tracking your whereabouts. The second change is the implementation of the new Facebook Connect policy, which may automatically sign you into sites and share your public information simply based on the presence of a cookie on your computer. Given the fact that many Facebook users still don’t fully understand the implications of the “Everyone” default sharing mode on their wall, this has the potential to get a little nasty.
Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.
This week’s High Five is about protecting and promoting content.
#5: DMCA Muscle Kills DVD Copying, for Real
I’ve been covering several different lawsuits in which the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is prosecuting a scorched earth assault against its own customers guilty of piracy. While those arguments are about the punishment fitting the crime, this story is much more disturbing because it deals a serious body blow to the “fair use” aspect of copyright protection. This is the principal that makes it legal to make a copy of a CD (music, program, or otherwise) for your own personal backup purposes. However, in this case a judge has ruled that the crime exists in the breaking or bypassing of any encryption.
#4: Bogus Copyright Claim Silences Yet Another Larry Lessig YouTube Presentation
This story is a preview of things to come. In previous “High Five” posts, I’ve linked to articles about legislation that could threaten net neutrality by compelling Internet Service Providers to police their user base for copyright violations. If forced to do so, it will lead to several undesirable side effects. First, and most obvious, it will increase prices as these service providers will have to invest in additional resources to police their own customers (not to mention insurance policies for increased risk). Second, it will lead to far more restrictive policies as their terms of use will no doubt give them final say in what is or is not acceptable – legal standards will not be applicable because they will be more concerned with avoiding litigation than their own users’ rights. Finally, this story is obviously an example of an automated software application that is simply looking for digital footprints and stomping them out with extreme prejudice and no room for fair use.
#3: Apple Stacks The Deck Against Amazon’s Kindle App
It’s no great secret that the true source of success for many devices is the “killer app.” The most famous example is VisiCalc for the Apple II. The real secret to Apple’s domination of the personal MP3 player market was the iTunes store. This article discusses the potential impact of the iPad’s e-reader application being directly linked to the iStore, and how a couple of mouse clips could be a serious impediment to Amazon’s Kindle Reader application.
John Dvorak is no shrinking violet, and has been making bold assertions and predictions for many years. In this article, he makes the case that the New York Times’ decision to begin charging for online access is another example of the industry shooting itself in the foot. Like most brash pundits’ predictions, the vast majority of his predictions prove not to be true and I actually disagree with his opinion on this latest move by the times. So why am I including it? Because in describing the newspaper business’ past sins, he uses the simplest and single best metaphor I’ve read on the subject. After describing how publishers reacted to declining revenues as a result of underestimating the effects of online classifieds by laying off beat writers, he concludes that “It was like attempting to fix a flat by letting the air out of the rest of the tires.” Perfect.
#1: What The Heck Is Inbound Marketing (and how you can maximize it) With Brian Halligan
“Inbound Marketing” is the single most important concept that will determine the degree to which businesses, associations and individuals will be able to spread their ideas and gain visibility. In this interview, David Garland speaks with Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan, who literally wrote the book on Inbound Marketing. If you take the time to watch this video (and I hope you do), I encourage you to think about the concept of inbound marketing for your own personal online identity as well as that of your organization’s.
Clifford Stoll displays the presentation notes scribbled on his hand.
I was watching a TED video of Clifford Stoll last week, during which he was asked to talk about the future. He confessed that he didn’t think he was the best person to ask, saying “In fact, I think if you really want to know what the future’s going to be, don’t ask a scientist, a technologist, a physicist… No, if you want to know what society’s going to be like in twenty years, ask a kindergarten teacher.” I mention this because earlier that very same day, I was paying attention to my four daughters, all of whom were in the same room and all of whom were consuming one form of content or another in a different medium on a different device. What was running through my mind was the fact that these kids are not only going to demand content delivered on their terms, they will demand it.
Throughout this post, I am refusing to discuss a certain gadget announced by a certain company named after a certain fruit that will be released amid much fanfare next month. The first reason for this is that everyone is growing weary of such discussions. The second is that this first product release is only the beginning and will be opening the door to a new class of products that will heavily influence expectations and demands from upcoming generations.
And So It Begins
I bought my daughter the movie “Sitck It!” on DVD for her eleventh birthday yesterday. The cover proudly hailed, “DVD + Digital Content,” which I thought was strange because a DVD is digital content, but I was pretty sure a knew what they meant. And what they meant was that it contained a second disc with a DRM-signed file in iTunes and Windows Media Player format. My daughter was beside herself that she didn’t have to sit in front of the television to watch it. Instead, she could load it on her iPod, take it with her, and watch it wherever and whenever she chose.During the time when I was helping her download the movie into iTunes on our family desktop PC, her older sister was on a laptop watching videos posted to Facebook by her friends, her seven year old sister was watching an iCarly television episode on her iPod and her four year old sister was interacting with friends from across town on the Club Penguin web site. Not a single person sitting in front of the boob tube. No two people consuming the same content at the same time.
New Rules
Taking Dr. Stoll’s advice, I have combined my own habits and preferences for content consumption with observations of my own household to form these five rules that I think will dictate content consumption patterns five to ten years from now. Kids growing up in the digital age will expect and demand that content have the following qualities:
It must filterable. They will not tolerate having to spend their time reading through ten articles they don’t care about to find one they do. This is another way of saying that content distribution is going to flip from a push model to a pull model. If your content doesn’t have handles, it won’t be going anywhere.
It must be asynchronous. Again, I don’t think people appreciate the parallel universe our kids live in these days with DVRs and iTunes. We all grew up in a world where our schedules had to wrap around broadcasts (think not just television, but library and store hours, magazine and newspaper deliveries, etc…). This generation is entering a world where the broadcast schedule wraps around them. Content is downloaded now and consumed later, at their convenience.
It must be portable. This is a mega trend I see that, despite what many feel is a large amount of hype, is actually being underestimated. Most people think of portable in terms of taking content on to a plane or in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. I am talking about taking content into the other room or out on the porch – a few feet (meters if you prefer) away. In a family with four children, I am watching the splintering of content consumption with great interest as, at any given time, you will see four or five family members reading, listening to, and/or watching different content at the same time in the same room.
It must be compelling. Content production used to be expensive and time consuming. Amateurs can now upload high definition video with integrated graphics and subtitles that exceed the quality of professional versions from just five years ago. This can be uploaded to YouTube in seconds and viewed by hundreds or even millions in a matter of days. All this for the cost of a $500 flip camera and an hour of time. This democratization of content production and distribution means that, to a certain extent, all publishers are in the fashion business now. It’s not enough to have technically sound content; it must be visually appealing and grab attention.
It must be interactive. As a software developer, I know first hand how expensive a mouse click is. It’s astonishing how rapidly human tolerances can recalibrate, and a few extra mouse clicks can literally destroy a product. One inadvertent click might even cost you $150k. This is all to say that people are having less and less tolerance for hunting for answers and it needs to be embedded, linked, or otherwise a single click away. An article about cyber security, for example, may reference a particular news story. Many people will inevitably want to pause reading the article to gain a deeper understanding of the incident by reading the full account of the incident. Path of least resistance. Instant gratification. And so on.
Maybe publishers think I’m being an alarmist. Somehow, though, I can’t resist a shameful attempt at borrowing from Dirty Harry: “I know what you’re thinking. Will it take ten years or only five? Well, to tell you the truth in all this excitement I don’t know what to think myself. But being that this is the Internet, the most powerful change agent in the history of publication since the printing press, and can blow your publication clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?”
What do Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs have in common these days? It’s an odd question considering how frankly Steve Jobs has expressed his 
