Amazon Kindle has always been an odd duck of a platform, a proprietary e-book reader that bundled wireless access with a device that offered a very limited range of functionality. But as the first major e-book platform with an integrated ecommerce function, it gained early followers and a lot of media hoopla. Enter Apple, which is trying to become the default delivery mechanism for a galaxy of mainstream media content sources via its soon-to-be-released whiz-bang iSlate platform, including book content from Harper Collins. All of a sudden last year's bright, shiny thing from Amazon seems not so bright and shiny after all, prompting a late move by Amazon to open up its Kindle platform more aggressively to software developers.
As noted by CNET, though, this is way too little at a time in which software developers are inundated with platforms begging for appplications to make them stand out from the crowd. To boot, premium applications will have to pay a healthy chunk of their revenues to Amazon, presumably to cover the cost of downloads, which is bundled into the Amazon service from a consumer perspective. Kindle readers on iPhones and other platforms may help to buoy Amazon's overall e-book strategy, but it is highly doubtful that the Kindle itself has much of a lifespan as a multi-functional content delivery platform. In turn, this puts pressure on Amazon's overall sales picture, as a generation attuned to iTunes downloads may be more willing to add books to that list of items to cram into their portable devices than to shift to downloads on the Kindle platform that's centered around yesterday's content formats.
The vision of the Kindle was myopic from day one, too bent on luring timid publishers into the e-book era before others became premium e-book download kings. While this did leverage Amazon into an early advantageous position for e-books, its focus on a pioneering device locked it in to formats and concepts that reflected the fears and limitations of the book publishing industry more than it did the realities of a Web-enabled world of a multitude of content formats, publishers and delivery channels. Its onerous cut of Kindle e-book revenues also gave publishers a good reason to work with other platform providers to get a better piece of the action. The net result is that Amazon is in strong danger of becoming a book distribution channel that fails to lock in a new generation of book readers on emerging mobile platforms.
With Apple setting itself up as a primary download competitor, the question becomes whether Amazon wants to continue to try to be the Microsoft of e-books via its proprietary approach or to become the Google of e-books in response to this challenge. In other words, is Amazon willing to admit that it made a huge mistake in not aligning itself more with a cross-platform, open standards approach in preparation for the inevitable platform battles that required stronger technology partners? There may not be a black-and-white answer to this question, but clearly Amazon needs to focus more on channel strategies and content publisher relations than on multi-function platform development. This is especially important in light of media companies that manage multi-channel products - "Avatar" lives as a movie, as a game, and, inevitably, as videos, books and so on. Amazon should be focusing more on the question of how to be a download king for content of all kinds rather than a gizmo king.
The logical leading partner in this would seem to be Google, with its emerging Android and Chrome OS platforms, options that weren't on the table in any serious way a couple of years ago but which are now coming to market aggressively. Microsoft will certainly be in the mix also, but it's playing catch-up in mobile platforms at a time in which Google is preparing to soar past many established vendors with its cross-platform Android operating system. In February the Barnes & Noble Nook e-book reader will be the first model delivered to consumers based on Google's Android operating system, opening the door to thousands of applications that could be integrated with e-books easily on that device, as well as on other Android-based devices. While there are notable flaws in the Barnes & Noble strategy - too few books, no reader yet for other mobile devices - its use of the ePub standard for its downloads and an incorporated lending model is closer to what will help book publishers to integrate with many other kinds of content and platforms quickly and profitably.
Book publishers have, predictably, dug themselves into an early hole in the race for digital markets by rejecting standards that would make cross-platform use of e-books a simple thing for consumers. One of the great things about books traditionally is that they didn't require a special technology to use them. Why would publishers go out of their way to balkanize their market into dozens of different proprietary formats that can only discourage people from picking up books in general? While it will take some time to undo this damage, there is still time for book publishers to avoid the mistakes of the music and video industries and decide on formats that will encourage cross-platform use of e-books as simply and inexpensively as possible and which encourage developers to create functionality around e-books that enhances their value and their integration into Web-based content, collaboration and community services.
While there may be some sucking up of pride in Amazon's C-suite to make these things happen, they are absolutely necessary if Amazon is to extend its early ecommerce successes based on Web standards into mobile markets. Perhaps Amazon forgets that if it weren't for Web standards, the world would not have discovered its leading ecommerce services in the first place. Amazon needs to re-discover its appreciation of the power of Web-oriented industry standards for e-books and re-establish itself as a company that can carve out the broadest opportunities for content ecommerce via the widest array of content platforms. While this may not always sound like music to the ears of its publishing partners, it's the only way in which it will be able to offer a sound alternative to media companies that are locking themselves into proprietary platforms that will inevitably place Amazon in an awkward relationship with them. I don't put much hope on this happening in the short term - some changes at the top in Amazon may have to occur for this to happen - but it's likely their best road to success in the years ahead.
You may have noticed that the Web site for Shore is looking a little fresher these days, thanks in part to some overdue updating of our widget technologies and thanks in larger part to the expansion of our team which is dedicated to offering you the industry-leading insights that will help you to accelerate your content and technology marketing efforts. I am proud of the many experienced professionals who are now part of the Shore network who are now on board.
One key addition that you may have noticed is Stuart Weinstein, who, as our Business Development specialist, is helping Shore to focus on expanding our range of services available to you. First task on deck for Stuart: the marketing of our New Rules of Engagement subscription research service. Stuart Weinstein is a veteran of enterprise content sales with a long track record of success in the information industry.
In addition to helping Shore with its own business development efforts, Stuart is available to help your business engineer more robust sales and customer retention programs. Perhaps that will mean fresh thinking about cross selling, or a push to develop a VAR strategy to reach new clients. Perhaps your current sales personnel need to be realigned. Stuart can analyze your current sales infrastructure and then help you to design a new or enhanced model that will help you turn more prospects into customers, and then keep them as customers for the long haul.
Along with the rest of our team, Stuart believes in the comprehensive and holistic approach to marketing and selling information services that other Shore team members use to help our clients to accelerate their success. Stuart's "bona fides" include more than 17 years experience in sales, consistently exceeding quotas and developing a reputation as an expert in database marketing. He has built and managed sales teams, with full P&L responsibility, for some of the biggest names in the content industry. And he has designed powerful customer acquisition, cross-selling and retention strategies.
Before embarking on his consulting life, for example, Stuart held a senior sales position with Round1 Private Capital Marketplace, Inc., in New York City, where he sold market data to venture capital firms with substantial assets under management. He also served as an integral member of a management team that established product development priorities, features, functions and pricing strategy.
An earlier position was with Datamonitor, Inc., also in New York, where Stuart was the senior manager in the financial services sector. He built the sales team, managed territories and developed commission and bonus plans.
Prior to that post, Stuart spent a number of years at Thomson (now Thomson Reuters) units Gale Group and Intelligence Data. Among other assignments, he was responsible for managing major accounts. In one year, he exceeded quota by more than 200%.
In his off hours, Stuart is an avid and competitive sailor in his hometown of Fairfield, Connecticut. Indeed, on many evenings during the warm weather months, Stuart’s is the last of the boats on Long Island Sound to return to harbor as darkness falls.
Does your company need a new perspective on its sales efforts, and then a realistic, workable game plan to make it happen? Give Stuart a call. Welcome aboard!
It's a tough market out there for startup companies, much less enterprise-oriented content startups, but LaunchBox Digital is an efficiency-oriented funder of startups that is helping good ideas to get off the ground on a shoestring. One of LaunchBox's newer properties is Legal River, a startup spawned at the University of Maryland that focuses on enabling legal services providers to market their abilities more effectively to small and medium-sized businesses. That business model in and of itself is a tip-off that at least some of today's content-oriented startups are moving towards solutions that focus on solving very specific problems for very specific marketplaces - a refreshing change from "we have a feature, now what's the market for it?" approaches that haunted many of the early waves of content startups.
As announced recently by their CEO Reed Atkin, Legal River provides a marketplace in which people looking for legal services can provide information that describes their qualifications for obtaining services and that describes their needs for services anonymously to solicit offers from practicioners. While in some ways a page out of the Lending Tree playbook, Legal River is actually more of a cross between TechTarget's lead generation servicing model and a classifieds online response service. Legal River users don't reveal their personal data to potential services providers but can instead review the incoming offers anonymously and choose to deal with any of the providers who respond - or not. Legal River charges on a per-lead-provided basis, which encourages a broad range of respondents to requests, This is unlike LegalMatch, which requires an annual fee from legal professionals using the service.
Legal River is in its very early days, focusing largely on supporting tech companies in the Washington, DC area to prove out the mechanics of the model before expanding to broader markets. This is similar in approach in some ways to InsideView and Jigsaw, which honed their business information services amongst Silicon Valley companies before tackling broader markets. A good place to start as any, and one which promises to be able to scale easily into those broader markets, perhaps in partnership with some other business information services providers. I find it encouraging that companies such as Legal River are getting active backing at a time in which some business information suppliers have pulled back on some of their innovation initiatives in the face of challenging markets.
Even more encouraging, though, is that the Legal River business model focuses on key productivity challenges faced both by legal services providers who need to keep marketing time to a minimum and businesses that need to find legal services more efficiently to survive and thrive in challenging times. Instead of thinking like database curators, as some B2B directories publishers continue to do, Legal River is looking at the opportunities for transactions that generate win-win business scenarios from interactions. Expect the new wave of cost-conscious financiers such as LaunchBox Digital to eye additional business-oriented publishing models as key candidates for startups that can generate revenues quickly and scale rapidly using today's cloud computing resources.
BookExpo America is one of the premier U.S. trade events, encompassing more than a few Wal-Marts of display space wherever it sets down. This year's event in New York was no exception, but more than ever there was a pall in the air of its exhibit halls as much of the paper-based world of books began to come grinding to a halt in recessionary times. The other key factor, of course, was the meteoric rise of premium ebooks on Amazon's Kindle device, a blessing for publishers needing quick revenues without inventory commitments but a curse with its draconian revenue cuts and control over unit pricing. Who would have thought, then, that the name of Google would come along to offer the book industry...some hope?
As counterintuitive as it may seem to some, the light is finally going off in more than a few minds in the book publishing industry that Google's neutral stance on delivery platforms and its popularity as a destination for book readers courtesy of its library book scanning project may combine to offer publishers a more sane "plan B" for online publishing than they had originally thought. A recent New York Times article outlines some apparently positive responses from publishing executives to Google's strategic partnerships director Tom Turvey saying "We really mean it" to going live by the end of 2009 with Web-based premium ebook sales on all major PC and mobile devices. One key incentive to teaming up with Google: the promise to give publishers complete say over unit pricing.
The technology making this possible, though, is still a bit shaky. Turvey mentioned that books would be available offline only through Web browser caching capabilities; otherwise, your ebooks will be ready and waiting online for you. This is less optimal than the reader-centric features of Amazon's Kindle reader, but given the increasingly universal presence of Web connectivity, it's probably not a major hindrance for many readers more used to online access. It also underscores yet again the re-emphasis by Google of the importance of the Web browser as the most powerful platform for cross-platform electronic content delivery. "Lock-down" of content is easy enough for ebooks in whatever container a publisher would like in a browser, but more importantly it gets to live in a medium that doesn't require them to negotiate distribution deals with an expanding universe of platform providers with each new twist in their technologies. This is also bound to make more of their cash-strapped book consumers happy.
While Turvey made it sound after a fashion that Google had slipped on ebooks as a product priority, clearly there were a few other product priorities that needed to fall into place. With Google's Android operating system taking off now on both smart phones and netbooks, there is a growing Web counterforce to proprietary technologies that were hemming book publishers in to platforms that would ultimately hinder ebook growth. Google's new Wave messaging and collaboration technologies are likely in time to accelerate Google's ability to build real-time conversations around books, enabling publishers to create richer content to engage readers without having to invest in technologies that would take them away from their core editorial talents.
Although these seem to be positive trends for Google, no doubt publishers are still feeling their way through a relationship with Google that is only beginning to move past the tension and mistrust that lead up to the recent book scanning settlement covering orphaned works. It's also likely that Google will not find itself the only "plan B" that publishers investigate as they decide to expand their partnership options beyond Amazon. But when one thinks back a few short years ago when the book industry was trying to partner with Yahoo and Microsoft as alternatives to Google's book scanning efforts, it appears that book publishers, willingly or not, are ready to pursue more aggressive marketing strategies that embrace the Web on the Web's own terms.
I was telemarketed by a polling company the other night, one of those occasional attempts to figure out what adults listen to on the radio these days. Given my profile the questions were rather quaint. What New York music station do I listen to? (None.) How often do I listen to the radio? (Basically for traffic, occasional news and the ball game.) Do you listen to online music (oh yeah, that and the cable music stations). Mercifully they didn't make me go through a list of artists who I don't listen to anyway, but it was interesting to see that even in the face of more than a decade of online music radio station marketers are asking the same old questions so that they can tweak the same old radio formats again and again.
I think of this in particular in light of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's plans to auction off a portion of the radio spectrum for a free nationwide broadband Internet service. While the plan is experiencing a few snags at the moment, it appears that the free broadband network, which will be supported by advertising fees of which the feds will take a proposed cut, is likely to become a reality in the next few years. At that point there will be a fairly universal "ether" out there that will be available for any Web-enabled content for people - and autos - on the go. With that in mind, one wonders why the questions in these phone polls aren't already going:
"If you had a choice as to what content you'd like to hear come over a traditional radio station that coordinated with online services. what would it be?"
"If our digital sideband data services could allow you to purchase music that you're listening to on the radio with one click of a button into your Bluetooth-enabled music player while you're driving via a free broadband network installed in your car radio or mobile device, would that be of interest to you?"
"If our music programming could be tuned automatically to the most favorite music in a category from the Pandora online music service, would you listen to it?"
My apologies to questionnaire designers everywhere, but somehow these are the types of questions that radio executives should be asking their audiences - and themselves.
(NOTE: See the ShoreViews Video on this topic below in this post.)
At the recent Future of Business Media conference one of the key trends outlined by the speakers was that B2B media knows that social media is an important trend but that they are very reluctant to engage with social media tools. Most mainstream consumer publishers are about as far along, if truth be told, but it's of crucial importance that they wake up and see the opportunities in social media before others begin to skim off the best revenue opportunities.
One of the best examples of that can be seen in the recent launch of Facebook's advertising features, which are unlike most other tools used for marketers trying to reach audiences. Instead of just throwing up banner ads or typical CPM-oriented ad networks, Facebook is leveraging the power of their own social network to make companies, products and brands a real part of the Facebook community on a peer basis. The new Facebook marketing capabilities consist of two key components: SocialAds, which enables advertisers to get messages into the feed of Facebook activity appearing on member home pages, and Facebook pages for companies and products.
The SocialAds implementation on one level is not too different from any other ad feed that might appear in a weblog's RSS feed but with much more powerful capabilities based on member profiles and activity. An advertiser can target members on Facebook based on their personal profiles, including interests that match up with keywords, targeting both very small communities and very large communities based on those parameters. While keyword selections are fixed, as opposed to being able to define one's own, this still allows a fairly fine degree of targteting.
But the kicker in SocialAds is in the ability to link an ad to a member's reported activities on Facebook. So, for example, if a member visited a particular restaurant a graphic with a sponsored link to that restaurant could appear as a part of that member's post. Since there was probably a positive reason that the member mentioned this restaurant this then provides a very powerful personal endorsement to the advertiser, linking word-of-mouth directly to advertising. This is something very new and extremely powerful in advertising, a development that is potentially as revolutionary as Google's AdWords sponsored links were several years ago.
The introduction of Facebook pages for companies, products and brands is a more subtle features but equally important in its ability to support social media marketing. There are already more than 100,000 commercially-oriented Facebook pages for companies (our company page here) and their power is that they are so much like any other member's page. You can post company or product profiles, videos, links or any other type of content that you think is relevant, but the real value is that members can declare themselves "fans" of your commercial page - a high level of endorsement that enables a brand or product to become in effect a peer member of one's social network.
This is a positioning for marketing and messaging that for the first time really enables marketers to act in conversations within a social community as true peers. Certainly Second Life has shown the way on these types of capaiblities with its ability to allow brands to show of their stuff in virtual reality, but in Facebook's community it's less about glitz and more about rubbing shoulders with bona fide human beings rather than users wrapped in fanciful avatars with who knows what real persona behind them strolling into an online shopping mall. In Facebook pages a brand is less about exhibitionism than it is about engaging customers on a very personal basis.
Not all is sweetness and light in this new marketing environment - why is a sponsored link to ESPN's Pontiac-sponsored online site appearing in my news feed? A little TOO broad targeting, perhaps - but with futher refinements by Facebook and further refinements by Facebook members to indicate the kind of commercial messages they feel comfortable receiving the more powerful this kind of environment will become. It's perhaps a sneak preview of the kind of marketing environment that Google's OpenSocial may be able to make available to companies wanting to extend their message into a wide variety of media platforms that want to take advantage of the power of social media applications.
In the midst of a very busy week of product announcements bookmark Facebook's new marketing capabilities as one that you're going to the talking about - and thinking about - for a long, long time. This is just the beginning of a new era in conversational marketing that will change forever how goods and services enter the conversation of the marketplace.
For a visual run-through of how this all works take a peek at the following ShoreViews Video:
The Times Online notes along with the rest of the world Google's funding and sponsorship of the Lunar X PRIZE, a new effort by the X PRIZE Foundation to promote the private exploration of the moon. Having already spurred Scaled Composite's first manned private space flight that lead to to Richard Branson's budding Virgin Galactic space tourism enterprise, the Lunar X PRIZE promises to get entrepreneurs to lift their horizons away from the planet altogether for the very first time in human history - with Google's brand in tow.
This is the sort of brand and market development that continues to put Google head and shoulders above any other publishing enterprise for vision and return on investment. The total risk is USD 30 million, about a day's worth of Google revenues, with virtually no downside. The X PRIZE brand already has a hugely positive market presence and the actual space missions to the lunar surface are unmanned, so at worst someone else's hardware may go haywire on a dare. No wonder Google's own Boeing 767 gets landing rights at the Ames NASA center down the road from their HQ these days.
It's also an indication of the breadth and seemingly perpetual audacity of Google's market vision for publishing. Google may not always be the best developer of publishing products, but their ability to conceive of new markets and new ways of looking at existing markets allows them a great deal of leeway in reaping new rewards where others aren't even thinking of looking for revenues. The metaphor of a mission to the moon captures the Gooogle ethos perfectly: yes, we could stay in low earth orbit forever with online publishing waiting for others to catch up, but it's time to start pushing out the frontiers yet again. Google may get only 80 percent of their investments right, but when you open all-new territories for marketing again and again you can live with 80 percent in the long run.
The headline at BtoB Online announcing rosy revenue increases for magazines seemed like great news for the magazine industry, but when you look at the details of statistics from the Magazine Publishers of America’s Publishers Information Bureau there's a far less rosy picture for several major publishers to consider. While Time Inc.'s People showed a reasonable 6.4 percent revenue increase in 2Q07 versus 1Q06 Time magazine was down 16.8 percent, Fortune down 13.4 percent, Money magazine down 8.3 percent, Business 2.0 down 38.4 percent - enough to spark talk of Business 2.0 heading to the dead pool - and the now-deceased Life magazine clocking a 78.7 percent drop in revenues. Overall health, fitness, food titles and hardcore business magazines fared well while older regional and niche titles, small business, consumer-oriented finance and men's enthusiast magazines seemed to fare worst.
Magazine gainers easily trumped losers in overall title count and revenues so there's some good reason for print producers to feel that there is some good potential growth ahead as print becomes the status media of choice for affluent people trying to achieve more and to hold on to what they have through health and diet regimens. But general-interest print publications and publications catering to more traditional home and recreation interests (who has time?) seem to be fading or growing moderately at best, with few exceptions. This may be a reflection of the current U.S. economy as much as anything else, but it also indicates that print is going to continue to succeed as a status symbol for mostly high end up-and-comers but only when it meets very specific points of pressing concern. In the meantime most entrepreneurial and tech-oriented audiences seem to have migrated for good to online venues.
Where this leaves general interest publishers such as Time Inc. is uncertain. The Web's ability to excel in both general audience aggregation and to dissemble general interests into highly focused niches rapidly via social media and vertical portals puts any traditional publication's strengths in a precarious position. For the most part these publications are going to have to make sure that they are contextualizing their content online as effectively as possible via search engines, social media and personal syndication, with their revenue streams following their content to its most valuable contexts. In print these publications will need to consider how mass customization will enable them to extract editorial value from a range of staffs more effectively through different interest lenses.
In general publishers have to consider how they can use their online portal presences to drive print consumption more effectively. Users need to be encouraged to let publishers know what they'd like to see in print - and to facilitate its delivery along with other editorial content that complements those expressed interests. It is difficult for publishers to out-Google Google in contextualizing online content but for now they stand a chance to do that more effectively for individuals in the print medium
We all know those catchy jingles that companies like Microsoft and HP come up with to get us thinking about them as innovative companies, but what's an up-an-coming content company to do if they want their own tune? Well, they could try "Whatdoyouwannaknow," an upbeat tune from NLX Music. NLX is one of a number of indie music acts promoted by online music channel Harris Radio, founded by Pete Harris, a financial content industry veteran with a bent for great local music acts in NYC. The following clip of the song gives you an idea of the kind of energy that the song can invoke, you can contact NLX to arrange for your own cut of visuals or other tweaks as desired. I think that it's the type of tune that can play across a number of generations, so listen to it with an open mind - you, too, could have the next hot marketing anthem...
