Up-front editorial comment: I am familiar with a number of things that Time, Inc. is doing, they're really aggressive on many fronts to leverage their brands to the max online. Does that mean that these efforts will support their current valuation, management and cost structure? That's a different question. Look at Time within the framework of major media companies trying to find a path to the future by being all about brands from the bottom up. It's the right approach.

In every dark cloud there's a silver lining, continuing to evolve the business. Pages down 11.7 percent 2008, 2009 is looking worse, that's good news for us, because we're more than a magazine. Mergers such as CNN Money, one of the world's largest content companies, live in mags, books, online, mobile and more. Our trusted brand content is world-renowned. Strong multi-platform brands, RealSimple was conceived as a brand, not a magazine, promise is a life made easier. Product lines at Target stores. SI.com, the Vault with SI classic photos. Essence, with Warner Brothers launched the new Essence.com, the weekend of July 4th will have Beyonce at the Essence music festival. Nobody is better at telling multiplatform storytelling than Time. Created Life in 1936, photojournalism was that era's storytelling with technology. Words "plane crash in the Hudson," images of passengers on the wing, Luce's original concept remains the same. There's still a beginning, a middle and and end, but not always in order. When we text votes to American Idol the platform changes the experience. Can the new media platforms change the story? Yes.

Look at the Life brand, in continuous publication since 1936. Weekly issues, special books, one of the most iconic brands. If you're Time, how do you leverage ten million photos that you own? More than 73 million people search images, growing faster than any other type of search. In the middle of a digital image revolution. For the most iconic brand, they launched the Life archive search engine on Google. More and more are being scanned, example of Marilyn Monroe is a benchmark of scanning progress. New Life.com is a joint venture with Getty Images, millions of images from the annals of history.

Remember how magazine sites used to look, everything repurposed from print? No more. Content lives differently on each platform. Instyle knows how people feel about their hair, people can "try on" celebrity hair, upload your photo and try away. Editors have become great short format storytellers. Fifty percent of all finance videos are viewed on CNN Money.com. Editoral specials have become huge live online events. The People brand is growing, the "power of People" has become multi-touch-point, interactive community. When J-Lo's twins were born, broke news on People.com, interviews with their editors on TV, mag did 2 million copies, stories on People Espanol. One story equalled 133 million media impressions. Surround the story. Mia Farrow special issue is now a megabrand in its own way. People digital has several brands and skins. People Digital grew bottom line 48 percent. 2007 was 18 percent. Company overall bottom line now represents 10 percent of revenues of Time Inc., many of most profitable titles are online. (COMMENT: Yes, it's low compared to some B2B brands, but think of how quickly they've gotten back into the game). Users spend average 19 minutes on their sites.

We're a content company that makes great magazines. People who had their mags taken away for two weeks really wanted them back. Asked if they wanted them without ads, they said no, they wanted the experience (COMMENT: Lesson for online advertisers, you need to take more care to make your content a part of a person's online experience). Cosmopolitan, brand is getting hotter with younger people. Time's commemorative election issue sold five times more than normal issue. Mags overall up four percent for Time.

How to weather the storm?
1. Thow away your five-year plans. Look out two years at most, be nimble, stratgegy can be successful only when conditions are well understood. What worked today is not necessarily going to work tomorrow. Re-strategized, made three business units. Going to market more strategically, have bigger strategic discussions with clients.
2. Become true partners with your clients. Need to understand their businesses inside and out, have to come with full solutions (COMMENT: This is a long-term trend, ad shops are being trumped oftentimes by well-positioned brands such as Time, Inc.). Clients will remember who was in the foxhole with them when times were bad.
3. Collaborate. Take advantage of collaborative opportunities inside company. Lehman Brothers, a tenant in their building, came crashing down, Fortune magazine writers were chosen to cover it for Time.
4. Don't sweat the small stuff. Focus on mission-critical business issues, focus on what will win business and build the brand.
5. Trusted branded content matters. Branded journalism will take on an increasingly important role (COMMENT: True, but don't underestimate the power of personal social media brands.
6. Be optimistic. Bring a "can-do" spirit to the challenges.

Excellent address, great case studies, fun presentation. Good stuff, but darn, do big media companies need micropayments.

Question from audience - how do you handle much lower online ad rates?
A: If anyone thinks online digital revenues are going to make up falling print revenues, they're not getting it. Need to say to clients that they need each other, they need to keep each other from going out of business, going with collaborative solutions to clients, sometimes even basic merchandizing and bundling assets for them. We're helping them now and come back when times are better with fresh new ideas and new economic models.

Labels: events, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

Moderator: Patrick J. Spain, Chairman & CEO, Newser LLC

Panelists:
Michael Angle, Co-Founder, President and CTO, Alacra, Inc.
Christos Moschiovitis, CEO, tmg-emedia.com
Martin Howard, Executive Directors, Transaction Advisory Services, Ernst & Young LLP

Martin: Traditionally CTO was part of management team, CTO would report to CIO. CIO was more business-oriented, but now it's strategic, responsible for I.T. function, more and more has that CTO function, more heads. Still see some confusion in those roles, one may be called the other, titles in flux.
Michael: In my case a COO, my CEO introduces me as the person in charge of everything that plugs in. For our business is incredibly important to the success of our business, not just about accounting and back-office big iron. Unlike top sales person, etc., they have their own domains of expertise, what I do spans all of those functions in the company, help to develop new products, influence how sales does there job, influence how we do social media
Christos: Looking at a transformation in the media industry, CEOs and visionaries trying to figure out the appopriate roles, the marriage between CEOs and the technology function being worked out. Starting to see the ascention at the CEO level that have substantial ownership and understanding of the technology function (COMMENT: Hmm, just like Silicon Valley has done for decades. Amazing. We're finally getting past the post World War II MBA management phenomenon and back to people who want to make products and services work).

Patrick: "Insurmountable Opportunities," what are you embracing willingly and unwillingly.

Michael: Cutbacks with "X" in the double digits, how can we help clients do that. I need to be a part of that charge, leading it if possible instead of following it. Have to have statistics on the ROI of content and services within client organizations. Unglamorous stuff, but you have to build cost control and measurement into the product.
Martin: ROI has to be on a business strategy basis as well as a cost basis. Organizations are asking CTOs and CIOs to be more strategic. Where are the very best places to spend to mitigate risk.
Christos: You bring to the table more than just technology but innovation as well, may not be an apparent savings at first. As technology has increased the size of organizations, more focus on profits and what it all means. We are seeing tremendous growth in our practice because of this reason, looking at what is most cost-effective way to bring in expertise. In each different are there are different value points. ROI is the governing driver.
Martin: Execution is also incredibly important.

Patrick: Issue of "fair use," has technology made the issue of fair use more challenging, are you more aware of what your technology can and should use?
Michael: Monitor for "bots" and scrapers, have automatic shutoff mechanisms. Sometimes you want to get scraped for business opportunities, but not every opportunity is helpful. Have to look at how it's being used.
Martin: It's a key factor for due diligence, for integration and acquisition intellectual property protection comes in very strongly. The law hasn't caught up in a neat way yet, but investors are struggling with the issues when they look at acquiring content companies. Deals can fall apart when internal protections were seen as inadequate or when the threat of its inventors walking away from the company scared off investors.

Patrick: More people contributing content, how does this impact I.T.?
Christos: First on copyright. Obviously the issue of copyright is very complex, involves legislation. If you look at it over the period of the last fifteen years, people have been running for the hills. Content has enormous value. People are doing extremely bizarre things to monetize content, yet people put it up for free to get the eyeballs. How do you think that we're going to protect it? NYT was wrong, if I go to a newsstand with the NYT, all I can do is to read the headlines (COMMENT: again, micropayments can help with this). The issue of IP protection is linked to this problem.
Martin: Content is still king, but that doesn't mean that content has to be turned by professionals. Bloggers have had a huge impact, most bloggers make money indirectly. Wikipedia hasn't put Britannica out of business but they've had to change. People aren't buying papers because they're reading Google News, good enough and free. For news, maybe that's better, reporters can be controlled. Some times people want to pay for access to the analyst for expertise.
Christos: We need to talk about the problems of the business models in a very fundamental way, the pink elephant is that the model is changing, we're going to face the came changes as the music industry has faced. Verizon is in a sweet spot, they own the last mile of connectivity, how do you translate that into the media business? Verizon "owns" Manhattan (COMMENT: well, not on an enterprise level), how does that translate into a media level? "It will go away after I am no longer president". It will always be the next generation's problem; well the next generation is here.
Martin: There is no problem with content, more than ever before, reading more than ever before, a simple problem of companies trying to make money the old-fashioned way.

Patrick: At HighBeam we created a mobile application, didn't make a penny off of it. Mobile has had such great promise, is mobile the new CD-ROM that will be surpassed, are we waiting for a good way to deliver ads?
Michael: In finance mobile is very real, many professionals have given up their desktop, how do I deliver information on a screen three inches square, how do you pull out the meaningful chunks. Need to get content on Facebook, have to look if it's appropriate to get messages on Twitter.
Martin: The technologies and methods of delivery is coming along, coming to a world where each person will have their own intranet (COMMENT: One of the more interesting comments at the conference. Compelling).
Christos: Technology offers something that was not available a year or so ago: location awareness. Can provide very specific content. The world of science fiction is becoming fact rapidly. Happened earlier with instant messaging, it's not that it can deliver quick messages, it is that you aware that you are available. It knows when you've signed in. Your phone tells me where you are and when you are available. Mobile is very real and will dominate the space.
Michael: Technologies solve the filtering and context problem, geolocation helps with that, but what if I am making a pitch to Xerox and want to close the deal? It's not so good for that specifically. For the user it's all about the filtering, for the provider it's about getting the right stuff to filter.
Christos: Now we have technology where we can sell words (hover technologies) for advertising, when you have content that's sellable to the word, how does that affect editorial and sales? The two groups need to collaborate much more closely as a result. Editorial can no longer be in an ivory tower, they are now responsible for creating community around content.

Patrick: Video is entirely new to some in the audience, if you're a content creator and distributor, do you need video or can you live without it?
Michael: Many sites include a video on the outside, more than a teaser, the thought of the day, accomodates how people see core information.
Martin: Video's best for some things, words for others, as aggregators piece them together, not sure that providers have to be all things to all people.
Christos: At the end of the day it's all about relevance, video is straightforward to produce. Can never be ignored, need to talk specifics, though.

Good panel, operational views are a challenge to present in a conference of this sort, I think that Patrick handled it very well and brought some really interesting contributors to the discussion. In Q&A, Michael Angle suggested in a tongue-in-cheek way that perhaps we need to fire everyone in I.T. over thirty. That sounds like a familiar refrain from my own youth, but with online media there's a strong ring of truth to it. The technology landscape is changing so quickly, you cannot afford to rest on your laurels on older views of how I.T. should be done and to hold back your organization. But in defense of more mature technologists, there are plenty of forward thinkers of all ages who are ready to rock with new publishing technologies.

Labels: events, management, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009, technology

Moderator: Nicholas Ascheim, VP, Product Management, NYTimes.com

Panelists:
Sandy Malcolm, Executive Producer Video, CNN.com
Andy Plesser, Producer and Founder, Beet.tv
Kathy Yates, CEO, AllBusiness.com

Forecast was for a 1.35 billion market, was actually $587 million (eMarketer). Goalposts keep moving out but trends are promising. Number of people going up, Hulu up to 1.7 percent of all streams (COMMENT: that's better, but good..?).

Malcolm: Representing the content owner, cringe at Blodgett's comment about TiVos recording content. Our streaming service runs 24x7, podcasts, doing pretty well in video, in spite of tough times.
Plesser: Been doing a video blog for three years, help decision-makers in digital industry, a virtual meeting for "snacking" on conversations of authoritative voices. Small staff, low costs, small degree of profitability, going well.
Yates: For business owners, evergreen content, customers come to get smart quickly on topics outside of their domain expertise, 18 million of podcasts, webinars, video segments, video about 3,000 segments, also license content from other sources, including other video production units. Have invested quarter million dollars in video assets, operate on break-even with ads and sponsorhips.

Aschiem: What drove the decision to focus on video.

Plesser: Was in PR and ads for 20 years, clients want to get in video, took video camera and taped people and put it on the Web, on the blog. Evolving into a business slowly in a B2B model, Adobe and Akamai want to reach their audience. Niche publishing, lots of opportunities.
Yates: Very nuts-and-bolts, like how to set up a LAN, handy if you don't have a CTO. Scaled video quickly based on feedback from customers, operate on a testing environment, look at which kind of segments drive the most usage.
Malcolm: In video for years, 2002 started a subscription service, started us really thinking about the business, tried a pay firewall, tough to integrate, a perfect storm of events helped us to see that we could do a pay service for live video, upped the clips, built a digital ad sales team that could sell cross-platform. Took the free live service online last year, phenomenal growth.

Ascheim: How much does it cost really to produce video?

Malcolm: We can pick and choose what comes in to Atlanta, few restrictions, look at what works best for the Web, not everything that works for TV works for the Web. Have an editor pool, can pick from the best.
Plesser: The cost of news gathering has changed, reporters send their videos from webcams to be edited, may edit Skype feed. It's not so much the cost as the access to the content. The cost structure has dropped for news gathering and production. Where you had to get big editing systems, now you can get final cut for a thousand dollars and you're good to go. This has become apparent to bigger news organizations. With High-Def, cost of streaming has dropped. We have an editor who works 20 hours a week, an assistant blogger any myself, sometimes ten original videos a week, 800 in archive, grab videos from CNN, again, costs are very low.
Malcolm: Looking at Skype, we understand the value of keeping costs low. Moving away from bigger systems, taking advantage of easier, nimbler and cheaper systems.
Yates: We benchmark production costs at about $250 per segment for 3-5 minute segments. Keep the same cost benchmark, have worked with providers who have developed video for long format, not really focused on what the Web needs, so in-house works better and helps to control costs.

Ascheim: I it mostly the size of your own library that drives traffic?

Yates: We're a long-tail site, so the more content that we have, the larger our audience. We've looked at this, the activity is driven by promotion, sensitive to how it's promoted to people landing on our site.
Plesser: The whole notion of video search is very important, if you have a service about a video or product, put the metadata around it, or use blogging to get the data in the search engines, there's a huge opportinity to get videos in search engines in a big way. People aren't necessarily going to get into your show. Google is making video more discoverable via universal search.
Malcolm: Opening more bureaus, we want to own as much original content as possible. We are not an open platform, you're concerned about where your content is going to end up, but you need to be smart about it, we have an embed player now.
Plesser: If your content is of value and you want to make money from syndication, our ad travels in an embeddable player, so it's possible to play on a much larger field with an advertisting component. What's happening with the Web is that it's becoming more and more a television medium. We're watching video clips, video has to be a part of a site, demand is skyrocketing. Content creators are going to be in a position to get revenues from a licensing fee or revenue share. There's going to be a big demand.
Malcolm: Our ad sales team is working on that now, you can stay on your site, get a high CPM, have to get out there in the marketplace, look closely at revshares.

Ascheim: Is the Web becoming a television medium

Yates: Not so much about what the editor wants as what the audience wants, ability to deliver video content is there now on broadband, the quality of the production is less important to the user than the producer. Obviously very low quality doesn't work, but the greatest value comes from the relevance of the information.

Ascheim: Longer form content, seems to be more demand today, perhaps because the experience is better, but most is in entertaiment. Is there a future for more as the format matures?

Malcolm: News is more disposable, shorter shelf life, long form is a little trickier, can do well, spots for that, live service has taken off, the amount of time that people spend increases, even if it is "snacking," you can get what you want, where you want it. Internet can also harvest live events.
Plesser: It's about snacking now, can't do video online too long, as it becomes integrated into living rooms it will grow.
Yates: For entertainment long form is growing, they watch all of their shows on the Web, annoying to find a second segment on Hulu and YouTube. A growing appetite for Webinars, people cutting back on business expenses, people watching them on the Web.

Ascheim: What models will sustain video?
Yates: Will go to 2-3 percent, perhaps larger, as an audience, today all ad-based but we'll see other models and higher production quality at lower costs.
Plesser: Watching video on PC will be irrelevant, a lot we'll see on mobile and in the living room, the notion of learning from and meeting people will be key, where video becomes a more interactive experience. Broadband and high bandwidth will allow video communication will become two-way. Will comfort people in the know to be in touch.
Malcolm: Program for various mediums, community involvement is key, Facebook was successful beyond measure, 26 million live streams, complements TV. TV is that lean-back experience, you can do that and lots can do that, but the online experience was more intimate, Facebook comments were running as the videos were running, people were commenting all night, created a new community around live. Interaction and the ability to get involved is key, have to plan for all of them.
Plesser: Live streaming is so easy now, not like in the old days where you needed a big professional crew. Bandwidth is really bad in the U.S. compared to other nations.

Excellent session, tightly managed, lots of key best practices. Can't ask for much more. The stats on the inauguration are compelling, that's a mass-scale audience for the feed and mass interaction at a community level. Models are still being worked out, but they follow logically from other social media/Web content.

Labels: events, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

Silicon Alley Insider becoming Business Insider, TechCrunch model, 2 million readers, but facing same ad challenges as everyone else. Not a "lifecaster," but real journaism. Still, a new form of journalism is evolving. Old style is to take existing content and to throw it online, reading it online is great, but that's not the real form of online journalism looks like, with strengths and weaknesses.

Aggregation is the key to the new journalism, the very act of aggregation can be valuable. High-velocity production, more similar to broadcasting, like a "text broadcast" (COMMENT: read, "real-time." Again, Wall Street's real-time legacy comes into the online news world). Some say it's garbage, that it will all fail, but if you hear that Steve Jobs is sick you're going to check it out and see if it's credible. There are plenty of people who know that it's true, and it helps to get the truth out more quickly. A source said that there's going to be a massive layoff, in short order we got a lot more information that this was indeed going to happen. Access is great, but on the other hand, when employees contact you with information and emails, access is less important. A lot of the readers will know a lot more than a journalist will know.

People want "snackable" content, see what's happened in the last hour. He wrote an article for the Atlantic magazine, good topic, lots of readership, but nothing like the first Twitter of the video of the rescue of the plane that went down in the Hudson. Online journalism is taking sound, text, video, it's not one medium or another. Gawker pushes this furthest, has eight TiVos capturing shows where someone might say something interesting, then clipping it for online. It's different from MarketWatch and TheStreet.com, which were more online newspaper models.

Huffington Post bigger than the Boston Globe, they find the most interesting stories on the Web, it's cost-effective, which the Boston Globe is not. Gawker Media blog network was twice that of the LA Times. Total team: 80 people, LAT 800. Can't support that kind of newsroom with that kind of traffic, Nick Denton is way ahead. But still big problems, online readers think that everthing should be free. That has got to change, just not enough advertising. Ads haven't evolved, same little box ads, shouldn't have to mimic a newspaper (COMMENT: or a television). People complain nobody clicks on the ads, but we have done almost nothing to innovate. Advertisers only care about clicks, a great ad without a click is viewed as a failure, yet in print nobody clicks and people consider those ads successful.

But the problems are far worse for traditional media. Newspapers have had a great 200 year run, but now it's over. Disruptive technologies are not necessarily better, many products created with it are miles short of The New York Times, but it's cheaper and gradually it gets better. In the meantime the old technology pushes towards premium users with more expensive technology, pretty soon they're pushed out of the mass markets. Google is pushing Microsoft to the high end, won't stop Google's onslaught. The cost of producing online journalism is so much lower, HuffPo 20 editorial staff, Gawker only $15 million while NYT is $1+ billion, profits from lower costs are working. Craigslist is free, unlimited real estate, a lot of traditional publishing companies are hosed. But some do well, like Bloomberg, Dow Jones doing well, the NYT can be saved but will have to cut 40 percent of the cost and re-explore charging for online (COMMENT: yes, but not through the old models. Micropayments will be the way, we can pick up the New York Post for a quarter at the newsstand, micropayments will work if done neutrally).

Journalism is in great shape, will look different but it will be in great shape. There are vastly more journalists than ever before, experts can express their opinion online. Editors need to co through this, some are paid to be editors, others comment on others (COMMENT: or link to it in blogs, what Robin Good calls "Newsmasters." In today's world "Deep Throat" would have sent documents to "The Smoking Gun" and it would have all been online. Papers will continue to get hammered, some will adapt, many are already writing real-time, but they will survive (COMMENT: Maybe). Online journalism will continue to grow, some will build sustainable models, will develop more professional talent, will hire credible journalists, the only thing that will change is that the shareholders of existing companies will get hammered. Creating destruction will bring us to the better future.

COMMENT: Overall, completely spot on. This is the new role of media today, though I think that he underplays the role of on-site expertise, which is a definition that varies with events. For example, sometimes a lawyer or a stock analyst with a blog will be an on-site expert about events in their profession, other times a laborer in China who happens to be near the epicenter of a major earthquake who is equipped with Twitter will be the expert. Expertise is becoming more contextual, but the truth is always larger than a journalist. I do think that CQ's Bob Merry's outlook is closer to the greater truth - we've had journalism in its current form only for about two hundred years, it will continue to be a good profession in its own way but the aggregation of news is taking its place in many aspects, making insight from on-site facts more important.

Labels: Blodgett, events, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

Moderator: Jim Kolleger, CEO, Genesys Partners, Inc.

Panelists:
Dan'l Lewin, Corporate VP, Microsoft, and Head, Strategic and Emerging Business Development
Neal Lipschutz, SVP and Managing Editor, Dow Jones Newswires
Steve Lohr, Senior Writer and Technology Reporter, The New York Times
Jon Miller, Founding Partner, Velocity Interactive Group, former CEO, AOL

Jim: Economy?

Steve: Federal Reserve was the lender of last resort, now the Federal government will be the spender of last resort, but it will be a targeted approach, not just shoveling potholes. Anti-trust needs to be watched, new appointee, worked on Netscape/MSFT deal, anti-competitive practices will be scrutinized.

Jon: Our consumer business means impact, as seen in our recent financials, as enterprises cut back economic impact is in the long run optimistic, scaling out of seamless computing is good, very powerful smart devices, blending content that's user-created is key.

Neal: As long as this downturn is going to be, it's hard to go back to what we had before boom times, technology growth and disruption will make some sectors like finance risk-averse, jobs creation is going to be key but it's easier said than done. Free enterprise will be less so than recently.
Dan'l: EBITDAs aren't right, Ballmer's "reset" does not mean that they are going to go back to having companies trade at old levels.

(COMMENT: It's a shame that easy money propped up the valuation of fundamentally weak publishing properties for the past several years. This kept smart money from being spent more effectively on needed transformation in the industry. That doesn't mean that a good part of that transformation hasn't happened, it's just that so much investment was thrown at failing models.)

Neal: America is going to be less important now, opportunities may be greater outside of the U.S.

Steve Lohr: Isn't it amazing how the world fell off the cliff September 15th?

Jim: Money velocity has driven information velocity, will old media dollars be even digital dimes? "A new normal."

Steve: NYT approach is to double down, selling off portion of building, hope is that you can swim to the other shore. Online model that was supposed to help change from print is changing radically.

Neal: Business models will have to rely on quality content and subscription revenues.

Steve: Can the genie go back in the bottle once everyone decided to give it away?

Dan'l: Big believer in news business, not necessarily the newsPAPER business. News is proliferating, consumption never higher, I use 20-30 sources, many do. What model to get from there to there is not known, not supporting things now. The genie does not go back in the bottle.

Jim: Political change, were you suprised about going from X-Box to Atari in White House technology?

Dan'l: They think that digital can have a big impact on recovery plan, it's a question of how you go about it.

Jim: The tools of the teenager are now in the White House (COMMENT: Gentle jab, Jim, the teenagers grew up. It's young adults, now, that are driving social media growth). Organization for America, can be a force for good, but can ricochet, microscripts may embed themselves.

Steve: Obama admin message has been top-down and consistent, stuck with message, no panic when Hillary won in PA primary, in that sense very elitist. (COMMENT: It's different in social media, not a mater of polling strangers but of listening to people with whom you have relationship).

Jon: The polling methods of McCain who was going with where the wind blew showed through.

Jim: 37 billion of stimulus coming.

Steve: Health IT was 20 billion, broadband was 6, broadband will increase. Will not just throw money at things, pay per performance with metrics will rule. We've done this on a small scale so far, will be interesting to see where it goes.

(COMMENT: Interesting to see how this year's panel is really not about gadgets, as has been Jim's usual focus. It's now about what the technologies have done to change society. See "Content Nation" for more).

Jon: Now a matter of public discussion and policy to make more open and avialable content happening.

Jim: Other technology trends impacted by these issues?

Jon: Broadband is a big deal, more recent countries coming online have more, we're falling behind.

Neal: Some major cities will not have major newspapers in print, the trend will accelerate. If the downturn is longer, the trends will accelerate.

Dan'l: Fundamental trends, end of Moore's law, virtualization is starting to happen, lot of infrastrucutre going on, action in conversations at this conference is at the application level, but the data is where there's a lot of action. CIOs looking at where they will balance their infrastructure, where will the storage be, where will the backup be. New markets forming in education, global markets where infrastructure is growing. Won't see a pause. Robotics is hot, vision, spatial, voice interfaces, all of these are evolving rapidly.

Neal: The value of content will be there no matter what the technology, delivery mechanisms will change, but targeted content still valuable, though it may not include general news.

Jim: Always a new wrinkle, what's the new wrinkle?

Jon: Most recent is video and social networking on Web, before that Yahoo and AOL, goes in four-year waves, things do change. But the stuff that rises to the top isn't every day. The industry will continue to re-create itself over time, it's not the thousand little things. (COMMENT: Disagree. Reference the Museum of Modern Betas, where there are more than 4,000 new social media tools in four years. It's the little and the big and the little that become huge).

Jim: Huge changes for the industry?

Jon: iPhone was a huge change, most revolutionary was inclusion of Safari browser in iPhone (COMMENT: Agreed, the platform will be forgotten eventually, the Web will not be forgotten).

Jim: Where does workflow fit in?

Dan'l: Where you are is becoming increasingly important, your location and context is key, what comes to you is key, location-based services are growing, those kinds of services will surface soon. Notion of location in the cloud that's yours that synchronizes with friends' devices is being investigated at Microsoft, social networking is a little out of control, is it mostly noise.

Jon: Speaking up for consumer side, at end of 2008, consumer usage of Internet surpassed enterprise usage for first time (COMMENT: The world is indeed a nation of publishers!). Consumer applications are driving much of the Web use, that will work its way back.

Steve: Where would you invest?

Jon: As a consumer-oriented business, my whole thing is what the consumer is doing. Closed on sale of Expedia from Microsoft, over 3 billion, bad week, dot-com crash ended travel, no precedents, Barry Diller said will consumers continue to travel in the future, and if so will they do more of it using online tools. Video consumption is taking off, makes perfect sense as it is. On a worldwide basis, video consumption is still early days.

Jim: Jon, you ran AOL, how do you see online game playing out?

Jon: Two big trends, consolidation and breakups, content and distribution breaking up (COMMENT: Agreed, but depends in some sectors on availability of monetization tools).

Jim: If you're a company, what do you keep your eyes on, where are the opportunities?

Dan'l: Paying attention to lots of stuff, my particualr interest is to look at entrepreneurial activity and where the money goes to support them. Pragmatic answer as to how they help them. A pretty good bead on that side of global innovation. Larger concerns are there for acquisition, too. You'll see more of the same.

Jon: Mentioned video earlier, what are people doing in mobile environments, need to understand usage contours. iPhone apps, haven't yet understood behaviors, will be profound in a lot of ways.

Steve: iPhone was not an original idea, why couldn't Microsoft do it?

Dan'l: We should have, we'll play catch up. Microsoft is a "hundred flowers bloom" approach to platform, not the tight store and service integration of Apple, historically.

Great panel as always, high-level discussions like this are not always productive but Jim manages to keep them well-focused.

Labels: events, innovation, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009, technology

Moderator: Lee Greenhouse, President, Greenhouse Associates, Inc.

Panelists:
Diane Corrado, Vice President, Sales, Wolters Kluwer Health
Tom Brown, Vice President, Financial Services Solutions, LexisNexis Risk and Information Analytics Group
Joe Jaksha, Vice President of New Product Development, Thomson West

My former Quotron colleague Lee Greenhouse kicked off a panel of major enterprise information services providers from legal, credit and medical sectors. Lee's kickoff question: Michael Wolff said that the value of content is declining. Is that so?

Tom: For public records, applications built on them can quantify value. Maintaining a certain value proposition requires the ability to add to it constantly.
Diane: Clients say content is king, if the right data isn't there, then it's not worth it.
Lee: But they won't pay a king's ransom for it.
Diane: They don't want twelve million hits, they want one hit.
Joe: Raw aggregated content is less valuable, but you have to have that and layer on more value. Unfiltered, unannotated content is less valuable but clients expect it to be there.
Lee: How has West added value to content?
Tom: Classification of laws, the legal code, was the first step. Now focus on specific customers and wrap it in a package with sophisticated technologies and a services model (COMMENT: Again, it comes back to the Wall Street model. Lou Eccleston from S&P didn't come - again - but it would be nice for a financial person to nail this concept home). Adding value to the public record so that it's the authoritative record. Deploy analytics to make it more actionable in high-volume enterprise environments. In banking, help them to prevent money laundering, help them to know the individuals with whom they are doing business. Also focus on identity theft, will get worse as economy deteriorates and people from the inside help crime. Help customers evaluate companies that are not covered by the credit agencies, on terms that are acceptable to the consumer.
Diane: In legal and medical, years ago you had to bear a gift to get information from a corprorate librarian. Now it's in the hands and the pockets on portable devices of users. Books in a big room have to exist now on an iPod and be fast. Google is fast, but you don't want five million hits, you want the information that you're looking for, with as little librarian intervention as possible. Use contextual design process, work with clients in non-standard way. Usual client interviews give usual answers, contextual design watches how people actually do their work. (COMMENT: This is a key, key factor in product research, I've learned more in interviews just being quiet and watching how a subject responds to a phone call or works at their desk). Helps to reduce fatigue from information use - sometimes as much as 65 percent. We are a publisher, but also integrators, integrate from Thomson and other sources, new tools manage these sources side-by-side. Has revolutionized our industry (COMMENT: Again, done decades ago in finance, corprorate world is just starting to have the technology for more general content sources to catch up). We carry both peer reviewed content and clinical use information, so people can see both the theory and the practice side by side.

Joe: Focused on smaller information bites, could be just a piece of metadata that's monetizable, as a publisher you can take that same piece of information and present it in many different contexts. Contract attorneys get what they need at the point of need. Have to understand what target customers need.
Lee: Do you really get more money from customers or is it treading water?
Joe: Definitely a mix of the two, bigger part is making it a sustainable business model, contextual content changes how our clients do business, the "sticky, viral" way of doing business becomes part of what they do.
Tom: Depends on how much it's a pain point for customers, adding coverage, that's where the pain point is, clients are required to vett each client they do business with, if it's just redundant information, less valuable. Also new applications are key, in some ways we're in a nascent market sector, what we're doing is providing information about the "underbanked" to help people understand them.
Diane: It's also helping our customers' customers, our clients have to do more with less, if you have a relationship with their clients you can command higher prices, you can get a larger share that enhance client relationships, puts us in a unique position. Many are clinicians, scientists, drug manufacturers, defending legal cases, customer's customers could be doctors, consumers, product developers, important to prove value to them. Providing better materials that explain what the product does is valuable, getting the buyer to understand the value is key.
Tom: That's the essence of what we do, we try to be more relevant to the client.

Lee: What's the hard stuff?
Joe: Combining unique combinations of content that cannot be replicated by the next hot technology play. Customers are more and more specialized, means that where they get a question outside of their area of expertise, they need help. (COMMENT: Good point, and a very interesting one). People on the end of a phone line can help, too.

Lee: Lessons from failures?
Joe: Shoehorning content in a product or space where it doesn't belong, looks good on a drawing boards but doesn't work in real like. In contract law, we tested and re-tested things, but if you guess wrong with the customer, you may as well start over.
Tom: If you assume that the need is greater than it is, you can wind up over-engineering products.
Diane: We were working on a high-end product, someone released a similar thing as freeware that wasn't too bad. Have to make sure that it's a unique need.

A good panel, danced around some of the key challenges such as clients and third-party technology platforms eating up the same value proposition, but showed the typical best practices of today's enterprise publishing services.

Labels: credit, enterprise, events, legal, medical, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009, STM

Moderator: Dan Duncan, Senior Director, Government Affairs, The McGraw-Hill Companies

Panel:
Ed Collaran, Senior Director, International Relations, Copyright Clearance Center
Dominic Young, Director of Group Publishing Services, News International
Caitlin Grusauskas, 3rd year student, Columbia University School of Law
Mindy Pennington, Manager, External Content, Library Services, Pfizer Global Research and Development

Duncan: Apple taking DRM block off of music, France suits, law would have mandated taking off DRM, effort was abandoned. Apple got together with industry, no restrictions on reuse at a higher price. Today, new users all the time, new solutions as well. What works?

Caitlin: People have expectations that it's all going to be free, quick answers from things like Google Toolbar. The idea of copyright is foreign, you assume that you can share it, has serious implications for content owners.

Pennington: People want to make it easier to share, things like CCC Rightsphere work but take time to set up, content is desired on mobile devices, how or whether it works can be problematic, as is who you can share it with. Taking something from your digital library and giving it to partners is a problem, need for more flexible relationships.

Colleran: From the user's standpoint, they're busy people, make it easy as possible, but offering broader rights is key. Pharma industry initiative to broaden contract terms, looking to share content that they license as a key contract factor.

Young: Part of ACAP, news initiative for managing access. To actually manage and control it without licensing is needed in some way, licensing not well adapted for all circumstances, ACAP allows end-users to take control more easily when it's legal and reasonable to do so.

Duncan: Many users don't look at terms and conditions, if they do access it they don't access it or understand it. From the perspective of users, where do they fit in today?

Young: Doing it in a way that's highly automated is key, tools don't exist to do that, so people do things because there's no reasonable alternative. Business models aren't there, either (COMMENT: Micropayments is underutilized, technologies are there that COULD support it, but there is resistance. That resistance is a key factor in today's media revenue gap.)

Pennington: We get questions about usage even with Rightsphere, most people are aware of what they're allowed to do, internal news stories and other communications about what's allowed.

Duncan: Pfizer has its own valuable intellectual property as well. Caitlin, in your experience, are students aware of terms and conditions?

Caitlin: In law school it's different, they rely on Westlaw and LexisNexis, people understand that there are terms and conditions with their accounts. In the broader university community, I can access materials from the university library seamlessly. In some ways there's a problem because there's so much out there.

Pennington: In the last couple of years new programs provide text mining, automated systems may pull thousands of articles in a couple of hours, users may notice first when content is blocked. Work with publishers, understand what's allowed, text mining system will be programmed to obey terms. (COMMENT: But what if an agreement could be executed automatically? Huge under-explored opportunities, let people get a taste for free, when throttles are reached then an ecommerce opportunity can be activated, either through online human agents or an auto-execution micropayment system. Works for mobile carriers, folks, it's not rocket science).

Young: Search engine access works well for some publishers, not for others, ACAP helps search engines to discover terms and conditions. Can be done machine to machine. But scaling up the capability of the network is a challenge. (COMMENT: ACAP still has potential, but, no offense to my European friends, it's being pursued in a lethargic manner, needs to go open source, with multiple serving agents, akin to DNS services).

Collaeran: With social media tools, publishers find it to be an incredible branding tool, FT gives first five articles away, then second five with registration, then you have to pay. Don't have to pay for each article.

Duncan: Caitlin, what's your reaction?

Caitlin: Depends how easy it is to use, didn't sign up for NYT premium, but if price is right, it's worth it. Some kids want to "stick it to the man," but if it's pretty easy to do the right thing, then they comply. HuLu, good quality, people want it fast and quick, people will pay.

Pennington: A lot easier for people not to worry about it when the corproation licenses it, but more flexible arrangement for doing the right thing would be important. When the physician sees the advertising and is measurable, that's important. So, why not make a version of the online product that looks like the magazine? Why won't publishers make another version? We have devices like Kindle now. With copiers sharing was harder, would be nice to have technology advances for today's needs.

Caitlin: People doing online research are used to putting in all sorts of search terms to see what pops up. Topical search would be nice, to see what pops up, more like an index than a traditional book (COMMENT: Works on relatively discrete content sets with tools such as taxonomies).

Young: Things like ACAP are a step in the right direction, we have gloom and doom about old business models, innovation can help. In a world that's well functioning, rewards will be linked to access.

Colleran: Not just about text content, any type of media could be involved, need to license those different kinds of content. Not just publishers, authors are taking a far more prominent role with self-publishing.

Duncan: How will authors be paid for content, major publishing companies have marketing department, sells into an area where the customer understands the value.

Collaran: Creative Commons-style authors may want some content out there for free, but others may want payment (COMMENT: CC does have hooks in its licensing for payment, early days still, remarkably, on activating that capability.)

Pennington: Make licensing more relevant for the specific people using content, critical going forward, especially as organizations divide into global business units, granular licensing needed.

Caitlin: People may use terms and conditions, the ability to share music is there, but I haven't tried it, don't want to be restricted by DRM. Rhapsody is one model, could work for other types of content.

Colleran: Ease of use and compliance are key "microscripts" coming out of this. Education is not sexy but it can help. Users need to be educated what they can and cannot do with copyrighted content.

Young: Micropayments would be wonderful, need the best innovators to help the best content to win out, that may be authors as well.

Pennington: People are willing to pay for what they need.

Question: Agreement between Gatehouse Media and NYT on Boston.com?

Duncan: Not that familiar with it, but not settled law. IP community on the publishing side were happy, but also scratching heads.

Great panel, excellent moderation, Dan.

Labels: enterprise, events, media, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

Views from the "evidence-free" zone.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was the father of the atomic bomb, as they were getting ready to test it in New Mexico for the 6AM detonation, Oppenheimer noticed that the mathematician was not there, when to get him, he said, "If I got the math wrong, none of you are coming back."

We got the math wrong on a lot of things in the past several years, but certainly since September 15th.

2005 dinner with new senator Obama, Walsh concerned that Democrats aren't prepared for a knife fight. You're the savior of the Democratic party? Where's the bench strength? You're it? "Who knew?"

Politics is an odd business, it's Hollywood for unattractive people, like Junior High, one-day sale with 100 percent market share. Political marketing: how does it work and how does it affect consumer marketing?

When a sound bite takes hold it's hard to get rid of, we still attribute the "Al Gore invented the Internet" to him, but he never said it. Sound bites become micro-scripts, help your constituents to attack your opponents. "They work." 24 months ago, "Lipstick, Nowhere, Maverick, Change" were not microscripts, the campaign made them so. Candidate doesn't have to defend records with microscripts. When they work, they're powerful. Became the branding tactic for the whole campaign, gave us permission to validate Obama's aspiration and forgive a light background and plan details. "Change we can Believe In" - two microscripts together.

Marketers must have shorter ways to define their brands. Unique selling proposition - USP - the one thing that you can say about your brand that nobody else can. These are the future mantras in our markets. It will leak into our world. "It's not an elevator speech any more, it's a bumper sticker." Kids say "whatever," it's kind of a sub-microscript. How do we increase the bandwidth of customers and citizens? "Are we screwed?" This administration is the "reboot", Obama speaks deliberately and slowly, has thoughtful approaches, "the anti-microscript, human Ritalin." People will shun the easy label, the bon mot. Everybody knows when promises are kept and not kept, political marketers know it, other marketers have to catch up. Some proportion will not get it, they will continue to use microscripts to process things. "Playing to the base" is off to the left or right, they get microscripts such as "God, guns and gays," still useful. Try to bring the bell curve to where the microscripts don't work. "We're better than that." But my microscript: "Shift happens." Shifting away from patent phrases (COMMENT: great points, but I think that history shows that simple concepts are important for communication. They help to build consensus broadly. He acknowledges this in the Q&A when he acknowledges that brands like Apple do microscripting well. I think that the key point today is that social media allows us to discuss, spin and position microscripting very rapidly in a broader conversation).

Labels: commentary, events, media, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

Hal Espo, President of Contextual Connections, LLC interviews Glenn S. Goldberg, President Information & Media, The McGraw-Hill Companies. McGraw-Hill has a global footprint in which it delivers both traditional media and enterprise information products. "Content really matters," Notes Goldberg, looking at the energy markets Platt's is doing very well as an example, also helping OEMs build their network in China.

Espo: Content matters more in some markets and less in others. What does McGraw-Hill do to stay ahead?
Goldberg: B2B is key, construction marketplace is a good example, trading and energy also, people make big bets. B2C is more dubious, but in BWeek, traffic has returned to trusted brands.
Espo: Tell us about recent content investments.
Goldberg: Organized around principles, made the McGraw-Hill Construction Network, not just about advertising but also about solutions, not all efforts succeed. Need to understand how leverageable your brand is in specific spaces. We get some plaudits, but the customers need to respond, some customers are slow to pick up in some sectors.
Espo: Layered applications, how do you see content and technology interplay?
Goldberg: Believe deeply in it, but we're not there yet, some do wonderful things around code, still suspicion around motives. Most startups challenge large companies to think different about customers, then they hit a ceiling and look away. There are demarcations that need to be broken down in our own company to be as nimble.
Espo: Tell us about JD Power
Goldberg: Syndicated model focused on customer satisfaction, well-known by auto marketers, helped Toyota get into the marketplace. Were getting paid for surveys and access to surveys, saw that they were missing underlying value, went further in their research into other corporate roles, took a generation or two to move up the value chain. Sweets can now sell lead generation and other extensions of the core value proposition.
Espo: Is the overall strategy a portfolio play?
Goldberg: JD Power is a marketing services company, in autos but also in financial services. We view industries that have benchmarks and standards that can be embedded in the workflow of customers. Each of our properties are the standard in their industry in their own ways. Platt's is the benchmark in oil prices, construction - those are the standards that we look at, don't want to be all things to all people.
Espo: McGraw-Hill purchased Umbria, what does it do so extend the brand?
Goldberg: PhD/Math guys, every year we do syndicated studies, get paid a nice fee to sell studies, but in Web 2.0 once-a-year studies aren't going to cut it. They scrape the web for information on products and brands, can pull comments about brands, e.g. Honda is launching a new Accord, organize in "tribes"/market segmentation, can organize it in ways as to who's saying what by demographics, can complement once-a-year reports.
Espo: Web 2.0, in customer 3.0 model customers are going to dictate model. Shopzilla, Pricegrabber, etc.?
Goldberg: Good point, if you're building a billion-dollar brand, you'll need more than Shopzilla. People still care about quality information, quality content. It's a balance, don't turn our cheek to Shopzilla, but there are other angles.
Espo: Platt's - tell us about this.
Goldberg: 60 percent of revenues are from out of U.S., our oil prices are the industry benchmark. Hard not to see that with globalization trading in commodities is going to be the future. In industries where there's a benchmark, we do it well.
Espo: New energy sources, is that's where Platt's headed?
Goldberg: If it's commodity-related, that's where Platt's is headed.
Espo: What do you think about the new administration's impact on Platt's?
Goldberg: Hopefully they will get the economy in better shape, that will help Platt's, but "shovel-ready" projects will help construction, bailouts of Detriot OEMs will help, investment in education will help.
Espo: What role do ads play.
Goldberg: In aviation and construction it was all advertising, much more broad-based. Major constraint is not hurting brands. Trust is built up in aviation for initiatives for conferences, for example, but you need to be respectful for brand.
Espo: BizWeek, forecast?
Goldberg: Slower years recently, news is commoditized but content matters. We serve a business news audience, last 4-5 months traffic is better, the editorial model needs to evolve, need to create content as they always have, but will also curate content, not just a gatherer and interpreter of news and creating communities. Another way to think about content, helps editorial and helps advertisers, since advertisers want to see their ads in context.
Espo: Television, let's overlay print with TV changes, insufficiently local, what makes it different?
Goldberg: Needs to change as well, hard to envision the longer-term, but people are still going to it in some demographics, kids still put on ESPN, it's not about the medium, it's about the value proposition. When an avalance occurs people still turn to the television. The challenge is to respond to both localization and broader markets. TV still has a longer role to play in markets, but the balance is still to be figured out.
Espo: People turned to CNN.com, not television, for the revent airplane crash landing.
Goldberg: Some of our Web sites have more traffic than local Web sites. The economic model is a balance. We're not an enormous media player, being smaller gives us the opportunity to figure out.
Espo: You're a senior officer in a well-known company. What are the major challenges that you and your peers face?
Goldberg: Sounds trite, but the reality is we have people who really understand what the custoemr needs, I think that I have the right people to solve the next 25 years, but the barriers between content and technology people are hard to break down. Can you get it done, can you keep things simple and communicate with your audience and give them a stake in the future.
Espo: "Digital Immigrants" in our generation, what do you see in the digital native generation that makes you worry?
Goldberg: If my kids who have mid-terms today don't do well as they were multitasking the night before...democratization is a wonderful thing, they're curious, do things on Google immediately that are remarkable. The world truly is borderless now, great for business, thinking about where to place bets. Our kids need to build relationships, devices will be different, but they still need to conduct themselves holistically to be better people down the road.

Standard & Poor's role is under question now, need to evolve steps to transparency, welcome the opportunity to take uncertainty out of the marketplace, will work with regulators to make that happen.

Question: In efforts to trim costs, in a large public company what are the risks that you'll over-react and discover that you should have been more selective?

Goldberg: That's the reality, Platt's is doing very well, large Washington presence, regulatory presence, in business we've made a decision to downsize Washington a bit and deploy elsewhere, it's no longer the only very important place. New tools also allow people to deliver services more quickly. We can use third parties to cover less newsworthy hearing and events. Many of the Platt's investments were done three to four years ago, have to make tough calls sometimes.

Question: Old model was collecting information and selling by the pound, tell us about applications.

Goldberg: Example I use in contruction is forecasting, if you're about to bid on a major job, Autodesk will use our applications to help them to see what's different in a building design with different materials. Take some time, but we're getting there as investments mature.

Espo: Innovation is everywhere, right or wrong, there's a perception that McGraw-Hill is slow, doesn't get it. How do you respond to that?

Goldberg: The reality is that we've done as good a job as we can to be on the cutting edge. (COMMENT: Big problem at McGraw-Hill is culture, I.T. is very traditionally oriented, internally oriented, sales teams have their own resistance also. Heritage does matter, but in some divisions walls do need to be broken down. Heritage isn't always about the past, but about how you apply its lessons to new challenges.)

Great interview, Hal!

Labels: events, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

Moderator: Kevin English, SVP - M&E, Satayam

Michael Wolff: NYT not the future of publishing, traditional print organizations are "over", 18 months at the outside. A fascinating historical moment, general interest print is done. Model has to move "all the way," Google has established an absolutely new model. First, they don't create their own content. They don't "do" it. They have monopolized the primary revenue stream - advertising. Everyone here is looking at this and saying, "The game is changed. How do we look at this new model and mimic it or adapt to it?" How can we pay nothing at all for content is the primary strategic question. Just about using everyone's else's content (COMMENT: Not. It's about people creating their own content and putting it in the most valuable contexts. It's about the "printing press" being everywhere. Print is NOT dead, just waiting for new models to exploit it, even as electronic services expand.

Vivek Shah, Time, Inc - Fundamentals the same, you need a great product still. Way too many people knocking on marketers' doors waiting for them to help them. Voice, personality matter in successful brands, points of view matter, a change for parts of American journalism. Scale matters, need to address audiences. Google changes the scale of audiences that can be addressed effectively via advertising. As you go from PC-based web to mobile, real estate for ads is relatively small and revenue potential disappears. (COMMENT: Agreed. The fundamental experience of advertising online is deficient in comparison in many ways to the print experience. Part of the answer is new technologies, but part of the answer is also recognizing that what you do in a space where you used to do advertising has changed fundamentally online. It's about personal transactions as much as Vance Packard's "hidden persuaders.")

English: What do publishers provide now?

Shah: Looking at Time.com, you have to build the content around the formats, smaller audience for long form content. Just because you can write stuff doesn't mean that you have an online "metabolism."
Wolff: Hard to make the case that traditional print outlets know what they're supposed to be doing. Used to be the covers of Time and Newsweek changed national conversations, doesn't happen in the same way today.
Shah: People aren't racing for screen grabs. Time was launched when there were 28 dailies in Chicago alone. They responded to a glut.

English: Environment is changing, customers are changing, newest generation expects it all for free.

Bob Merrym CQ: 70 percent subscription/circ revs and high-margin ad revenues for focused audience. Shouldn't cede circulation revs.
Shah: Marketers. Google satisfies advertising ROI, rest is branding ads, which are hard to measure for success. CTRs are low. (COMMENT: The Web is not about seduction - unless you're looking for a "good time." It's about real relationships and real social transactions). The consumer movements can be overdone, there's lots of media.
Wolff: Direct model has much lower margins, direct marketers give "the piece" in the mail or the advertorial (Disagree, look at sponsorship and private media such as captive magazines, corporate blogs and forums.). Value of content has gone down consistently. Content costs less and less and less. Technology can create cheaper content, and technology itself can give functionality as well. People go to the web for technology AND function.
Oakliegh Thorne, Thorne Information Partners: People go to local papers for information, especially in local outlets. The Chicago Tribune has always been a lousy paper, so slow that they have to do features on the front page.
Merry: Community newspapers struggling, type of news is commoditized, available for free. Web practically killed my business, did kill my competitor, because it was commoditized, so we increased the value of the content. Editorial effort, extremely functional and efficient platforms to distribute. That's what you're going to have to grapple with. (COMMENT: Agreed, the basic formula, CQ bit the bullet at a great time and is reaping the rewards.)
Question: Who pays for foreign correspondents if everything's free? (Ken Wasch, President, SIIA)
Wolff: Probably no one, the "foreign bureau" goes away, and in fact in some ways HAS gone away. You can make the argument that we have more information from foreign markets than ever before. Where once we were dependent on Time magazine for foreign news, we're dependent on new sources and other sources that are on site - e.g., if the Guardian is on site, do you really need your own correspondent? Difficult to argue that we don't know more as a result.
Shah: If you look at Nielsen, sports, etc., all top ten brands are established brands (hmm, guess he's looking at different stats, but I would agree that established brands have capital and unique value as long as there's unique content.) Need voice, personality. (Didn't help NYT with columns, new voices compete.)
Merry: One of the factors is a clinging to the editorial model. (Dang, Bob gets it.) 19th century, papers were going to be objective. That's what we grew up with it, that's dead, technology destroyed it, and people in the news business don't get that. 1840's papers were highly partisan but had great coverage. (Agreed, we're getting a higher quality conversation overall, as long as it's not propaganda dominating the bandwidth). Times-Picayune used to dominate news from Mexico, made its way up and down the east coast. What we had is over, they were small businesses then, will be so again.

English: Who's the winner in this new environment?

Merry: I am! I am in Washington, where billions of dolars are being spent (CQ is indeed a very model for success, not always easy to replicate, but in the right niches it can be done well.)

Labels: events, media, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

Moderator: Tad Smith, CEO, Reed Business Information

Panelists:
Vivian Schiller, SVP/GM, NYTimes.com
Rich Skrenta, Co-Founder & CEO, Topix
Ken Stern, CEO, NPR
Kara Swisher, All Things D

Tad: What's the zeitgeist in the newsroom these days? Kara: Awful. Left a newsroom, saw the water was rising and the Web was higher land. People needed to be changing things rather than bellyaching. Ken: Our zeitgeist is rather good, has doubled in recent years, a market for serious and in-depth news. Tad: How do you avoid blood on the streets? Ken: Social media business model feels comfortable to us, get contributions from audience and corporations, foundations, government is about ten percent, listener donation growth has fueled in their growth. Tad: What's ailing newspapers generally? Vivian: Ad market is declining, but online is growing, we're in the process of rebalancing the business to shift more online. But there's no rainbow on the horizon for print newspapers. Focusing on the big opportunities in digital. Report says online ad revenues have stalled out, true? Vivian: yes, it has stalled, still most revenues come from print. Tad: Rich, do you make money? Rich: Yes, ten million uniques on our site, news by zip code commands good CPMs, ambitious plans for news in every zip code, went and got every bit of content, including blogs, and there wasn't enough. Nobody would cover routine news in Sunnyvale, had to turn to social media. Newsrooms are shrinking especially at the local level, if they're NYT is struggling what about the Palo Alto Daily News?

Tad: What is news today? Rich: New restaurant in your town could be news, no longer looking at what's news from a j-school perspective. Kara: That's very valid, doesn't have to be one way or the other, but when stuff gets corrupted by reporters or bloggers with a conflict of interest you get protection. Our disclosure is about 50 pages long, none of us is fully without something to disclose. It's not journalists are not going to say that fries are on sale at a local restaurant. Ken: There's information and there's news, there's a sense out there that we can get rid of reporters but we invest in editors and reporting. I worry about the space for serious journalism shrinking, people going to newspaper conventions are clinicially depressed. Rich: We see journalists are going away before their very eyes, the paper doesn't go away, it becomes a paper with more wire content. There's a lot of stuff floating around in places like Yahoo groups and it's not discoverable. Classified ad dollars going away, Craigslist destroyed 65 million dollars in classified ad dollars in Bay area. Without grass-roots news gathering we're looking at pre-radio days.

Tad: Is there a role for serious journalism? There's always a role for authoritative quality journalism, not scaling back our newsroom at all, looking at how we can do to make sure that we have the financial support for journalism in the long term. Kara: You are under pressure from investors, but a family controls the company, as with other papers, they don't have to worry about the bottom line as much. Vivian: Yes, but let's not loose sight of the fact that NYT and others are extremely profitable, we're talking about growth rates, it's not a business on its last legs. When we started a little publication we saw real opportunity in standards-based content with high quality, can't stand depression part. Why do you have to roll over and play dead? Ken: Do you have to pair with About.com? What about serious investigations? Kara: It's the mid-size papers that are struggling the most with quality.

Tad: Branding, how much does the brand matter to the average person? Kara: Had an argument with the 12-year old who runs Google News, he was saying that nobody cares where the news is from, people don't want to read about the White House from the Rajastan Times. Have to tip your hat to paidContent.org, went to publisher and said the blog thing was going to be big, now we can do it to.

Tad: Founding fathers and court decisions, protection? Rich: DMCA protects us, every day we get legal issues out of our forums, lawyers say that it's opinion, we try to apply a journalistic angle, does it actually look like libel but without some judgment you don't get discussions. We see cases of people flooding us with mail and it's not a valid case. Is it in the public's interest to see something. Tad: Is there a conflict between social media and news that serves the public good? Ken: There are places for a free-for-all, we're one of the few organizations that doesn't review everything before it goes up. Vivian: Major news orgs are some of the few that moderate comments, it's really about relevance and a great user experience. We want to make sure that comments are on message.

Tad: Is there an economic return from high-quality journalism? Is it shrinking? Kara: Always discussions at WSJ, maybe not, doesn't matter where it is, if they want it on salami put it there, focus on the high-quality product. Vivian: Instead of being afraid of the Diggs, bring it on. Kara: individual brands is inmportant, Mossberg is a Brangelina-scale brand. (COMMENT: Newspapers haven't figured out how to monetize journalists effectively in The New Aggregation, especially when a Google Print-like product kicks in. They're losing brand equity to user-aggregators and they haven't compenstated adequately). Question: How soon before citizen journalists win The Pulitzer Prize? Tad: Soon. Question: How do you make money? Kara: We have a really tiny site, our costs are incredibly low, easier to make money overall. Vivian: Constantly innovating. Ken: We ultimately sell in an uncluttered environment.

Question: Google? Kara: Google is a parasite but a helpful parasite. Vivian: We love Google, we get half of our traffic from Google. 35 million worldwide, good SEO. We fall down squarely on the friend side. Rich: syndication made a lot of sense in print, if Google can't do the best job of telling people the copy that you wrote maybe you should reconsider your syndication strategy. Kara: In ten years we'll look at today's Google and other search engines as very primitive. Question: WSJ clings to its pay wall, does this concern you that you're not being found? Kara: ATD is free, we feel free is better, it's better to be part of the conversation. WSJ provides a mass of information. Wouldn't dream of our stuff not being free.

Rafat: Variety dropped the firewall, how is it going? Variety: The early results are strong, looked at how the traffic is growing, felt that for the audience it was worth it. Have 20,000 subscribe online. Kara: so you'll never get to a million. WSJ Online: Online journal now 930,000 paid, trying to have it both ways, trying to offer up a free paragraph in a month, looking at lifestyle content that's not that well consumed behind the firewall. Kara: you can pick your way to sell.

Tad: Social media and the news, the best of times or the worst of times? Vivian: The best of times, new platforms have opened up ways to get the dialog out there. Every day there's a new way to communicate with their readers. Rich: There's no paper in my town, San Francisco paper still shows up but it's not quite as good as it used to be. Looking at the Cherry Hill Observer the news staff is going away while you watch. Ken: Good time to be in nonprofit journalism, a great time for public conversation, but it's a punishing time if you take off the cream. Kara: Grandfather said if someone's going to eat your lunch it might as well be you, people are hungry for great stuff, there's an opportunity for people with high standards to jump in there, sites like paidContent.org are not that hard to make.

Great panel, but clearly the model is going towards supporting independent journalists in context.

Labels: econSM, events, news

Moderators: Rafat Ali and Staci D. Kramer

Panelists:
Esther Dyson, Chairman, EDventure
Jason Hirschhorn, President, Sling Media Entertainment Group
Mike Lang, VP Strategy, Fox
Quincy Smith, President, CBS Interactive

Rafat: Quincy, you were looking for the next YouTube, is there one out there? Esther: These are people who you want to be friendly, small companies have good DNA, large companies sometimes have mass without DNA. Mike: We have a Bay area presence, spend a lot of time working with venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, we have a lot of "old companies" processes, there's nothing closed about where your technology partnerships are going to come from, build versus buy is no longer that simple, you need to nurture the DNA of an acquisition beyond the press release phase.

Rafat: What are the lessons for the MySpace integration? MySpace is so different, IDN is very different in game space, as a result a lot of content gravitates naturally to MySpace. In a lot of ways it's about management. Number one drivers were Chris and Josh, they were maniacally driven, needed that energy. They are now taking on an even larger role across our digital efforts, they've integrated successfully into our organization. Rafat: does social media fit better into angel investment? Jason: Not necessarily, there's been a huge change about the audience being in control, young entrepreneurs with not a lot of expertise so angel investors are forgiving. In some cases companies to acquisitions well, but sometimes it's "We'll change all the people and the name" so it doesn't go too well. When companies understand that you're the talent things can go very well. But Quincy pointed out that unfortunately integration oftentimes ends at the press release. Mike: First thing you say is "what can we do with our own brand" for an acquisition. Esther: There are two challenges: you could put in so much process that it overwhelms the small acquisition in the process of protecting P&L, won't invest in what they bought. Mike: some would rather pay USD 300 million on an acquisition than USD 2 million on creating your own. When you see talented people in an acquistion rise in a big company that's a good sign.

Quincy: Markets are forcing large companies to invest in growth, Internet is not the end of media, its the next step, and you have to invest in it. But they know that they don't control the audiences and that entrepreneurs have the touch. We were fortunate to acquire CSTV, great asset that we keep apart from the organization but we don't starve it, add more allocations around it. This creates a big weapon when talking to other entrepreneurs. Staci: More announcements of large chunk investment funds, but Fox has done small companies. Mike: Our shareholders are looking for value in investment returns, minority investments don't give a preferred path of control and may in fact increase the valuation if you want to acquire it later. We have a lot of commercial relationships that may result in acquisitions - or may not, or may go for warrants. Quincy: CBS might be a little different, made partial investments to help them understand a world unfamiliar to them, a chance to learn and to get exposure to DNA, we have cash, not give it right back to the shareholders all year long. Spend around USD 20 million in seeds. It's a chance to be in the board room to understand the decisions they're making. Mike: Who knows which one is right, it's difficult in today's investment community to have a rational conversation, valuations are out of whack. Esther: We have some companies you may want to invest in.

Rafat: Esther, what are you looking for in investments here vs. overseas? Esther: There just aren't that many people who know what they're doing except for social media, there aren't thousands of Russians using QuickBooks, exits are also harder. Everyone wants to go overseas, just invested in something in Brazil, the best social networkers are in Brazil. Staci: Do you acquire, hire or develop in-house? How do you make that decision? Jason: Hard when you have developers in-house, they feel that they can build things quickly, a lot of media companies were asleep at the wheel, so all of a sudden you need something that scales, if I can buy scale I can satsify advertisers immediately - though sometimes this may scare away audience for social media.

Question: After deal is signed, what advice can entrepreneurs take as to what to do and not to do in negotiations? Mike: Not being realistic. You need management that can say this is what the risk factors are, understand that things may not work out. Don't say that you don't have competition. You need a management team that can react to competition. Don't be too swayed by VCs wanting a theoretical return than to realistic returns from a business. VCs say no, then they don't get an opportunity later. Jason: Sometimes it's a self-fulfilling prophesy, especially when you're talking with 19-20 year-olds. When you have a great product you need to talk about how the company will be run. Oftentimes founders are better off as a chief product officer but they want to be CEO and things can fall if a founder leaves. Quincy: Acquiring companies tend to be slower growers, good at telling people how you need to scale back but not necessarily how to manage strong growth. Accept that acquirers may make mistakes also, speak up. Have to "get real" with each other.

Staci: CNET's been expanding, Zander has been investing, how do you move forward? Zander: Have expanded into games, TV.com, MP3 less so, vibrant properties in Tech Republic, American Babies. We have to go in and sell them a culture. If you pay top dollar, you better integrate successfully. Rafat: Google's acquisition of DoubleClick? Quincy: DC needed a next-generation platform, Google overwhelmed them with salesmanship. Was an anti-Microsoft move. Esther: There are some that are appropriate to sell to Google, some not. The culture match is not always good. Jason: Sometimes Google overpays wildly, hard to turn down.

Question: Esther, how would you now position relationships versus content value, what would you recommend or suggest entrepreneurs for revenue models for social media? Esther: Good advice never means much until you try to apply it. Board members can give specific advice. Try to keep them loyal. Ad models, Flickr has subscriptions, mobile charges for deeper content, selling marketing collateral such as T-shirts. Be creative. Rafat: Can you build a widget company to scale? Mike: Yes, distributors will embrace widget companies, ultimately it will be how experiences are monetized, if you have a small company with a great application come to MySpace, figure out how to get distribution, hard to build traffic on your own. Do whatever you can to partner with distributors. Difficult to hold on to it all yourself. Partners like MySpace will think about the user, that's why they've done so well.

Question: What would you be buying today? What genre? Quincy: Looking at buying reach, consumers control more of the content. We don't compete with Fox, competing with LonelyGirl who uploads her content everywhere. Look for CBS to get into the game like Fox and NBC with deals that help them to make a statement sooner rather than later. Also care about new content, arrogant to say that regurgitated TV shows are going to work. User-generated content can be hilarious, new content and reach is key. Mike: Video applications, ways to do things with video, bullish on video's future on Internet, different kinds of applications. International will be important also, new audiences and new kinds of content for new regions, in many cases mobile is stronger in overseas markets. PhotoBucket guy stands up, we made up with Shawn, it was miscommunication, didn't understand monetization on MySpace.

Question: eBay/Skype deal? Jason: Could be some potential but it seems to be sitting there. Rafat: How long can Facebook hang on? Quincy: A CMO's dream, profiles get bigger, develop stickiness. On Skype, always have to buy from a position of strength, eBay core business proposition had been hacked, I give acquisitions 3-5 years, still have core team, still evangelical, audience user base is growing. On FaceBook, users don't always incorporate a lot of professional media. Over-50s need to take notice. Esther: A few years ago everyone was talking about ideas, now it seems that everyone's destiny is to be sold. Jason: Don't know that FaceBook doesn't want to sell, may be that just the price isn't right.

Question: Have some of these companies taken too much from you? Mike: Yes. Over-200 valuations vs. IPOs. The best part of a MySpace deal is that they didn't have to tell Wall Street what's happening every quarter. We've had conversations where 50 million wasn't enough to cash out. VCs they deal with take the long view, try to work rationally. Rafat: If MySpace had been under MTV umbrella, what would they have done? Jason: They'd have to invest in it. NewsCorp did a yeoman's job of investing in infrastructure and supporting the management team. It's a model for other media companies to watch. You help but you get out of the way.

Question: Google acquisition of Blogger and Dodgeball versus Yahoo with Flickr? Staci: People who leave Google are disappointed in how they were treated, that could leave baggage. Jason: Google makes mistakes just like anyone else. They just happen to have a halo over them. Mike: Yahoo and AOL don't get enough credit for their acquisitions. Esther: Yahoo has the best record of keeping the management. Ex-Googler (ex-Pyra labs, aka Blogger) - they had never acquired a company before, took a while to get their sea legs and to get the right support. Dodgeball guys were in NYC, DoubleClick in NYC also but now has more center of gravity. Some acquisitions go well, looking now at people who are going to lead a product in Google. Jason: should never underestimate how important culture is. You're used to doing what you want to do versus being in a Google where you're not employee 100. Esther: Sometimes the best place for M&A people to come with is from HR.

Labels: econSM, events

Moderators: Staci Kramer, Rafat Ali

Panelists:
Peter Adderton, Founder and CEO, Amp'd Mobile
Maro Boerries, Senior Vice President, Connected Life, Yahoo!
Shawn Conahan, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Intercasting
Larry Shapiro, Executive Vice President, Walt Disney Internet Group
Jason
[NOTE: There's a lot of noise in a change of venue room, will do my best...]
Staci: What are you doing in social media? Larry: Trying to get more activity from users on our sites, as applied to mobile, looking at how it translates. We look at mobile as a part of a connected network, part of the same handheld ecosystem. ???: Sweet spot is where entertainment intersects with personalization and peer-to-peer, working on fantasy sports, can control entire lineup on mobile phone, can compete with friends, interacting with other people. Next frontier is intersection of mobile and Web, social networking and user-generated content. Has to be very different. Shawn: See massive opportunity on Web, social media is a construct, they all do the same thing, to provide a full-breadth approach you have to act as an aggregator. Marco: Mobile is going to be the platform for most of our social media interactions, all about new forms of sharing communications, mobile phone is with us all the time, helping people to aggregate their social networks. Peter: This is about how to make money about social media, and in the process you may lose what social media is all about, exclusive deals may stifle that, even if you think that it's going to make you money. Marco: I am not so sure about that. Shawn: Only new thing we're talking about is that consumers can communicate with other consumers, this is not a new thing. In 1999-2000 when phones were black and white, we thought about what we can do to make this a fun experience. Tried viral chain early on, network was overwhelmed, just made it cooler by letting people know who was sending the message.

Staci: How do you overcome the carriers? Shawn: When network operators shifted model from voice to mobile services they had to redefine their competitive matrix. People are now communicating through their MySpace friends' list. Peter: If you're relying on Sprint and Cingular to tap into users you're wasting your time, carriers are a few years away from working out relationships with social media sites. Shawn: Web is a well devised space, have cut and paste, mobile is far behind. You can provide integration for wireless network partners. Larry: Happy medium is value-add services. Peter: It's not about the user experience for carriers, it's all about money. Marco: Mobile carriers realize that if they cannot create valuable user experiences they're going to find another service that does. People want to see the latest photos from Flickr, that is consumer value. Some areas where Yahoo competes with Verizon.

Rafat: Why should a consumer care how much a carrier has invested in content? What's the value long-term of an exclusive deal? Missing link is an advertising model that works for mobile. Cross platforms applications are going to be very interesting. Question: Apple phone will have a full browser, how will that impact mobile products? Marco: It's all about the best user experience in the long term. Peter: Nobody cares whose network you're on, our job is to enable consumers to use the technology.

Sorry that I didn't get more of this one, had some distractions.

Labels: econSM, events

Moderator: Staci D. Kramer, Executive Editor, paidContent.org

Panelists:
Ilene Chaiken, Executive Producer, The L Word/CEO, OurChart.com
Alan Citron, General Manager, TMZ.com
Carson Daly, Host, Last Call with Carson Daly
David Eun, Vice President, Content Partnerships, Google
George Klavikoff, Chief Digital Officer, NBC Universal

Staci: Is social media like the little black dress in the closet, something that you have to have but you really don't use it? George: What we're about to do is to engage all our fans in what the content has to look like. David: What I'd like to see more is YouTube as a place where communities can form, a community of users worldwide upload responses on YouTube, needs to be more of that. Carson: Great interest in social media, back in 1998 hosted request live, hour of programming chosen by viewers, social media issues are quite important. Site soliciting content to incentivize users. Work also for Demand Media, relaunching DotTV. Alan: Main value of social media is creating value around stories that have most heat. We make it easy for them, doing a good job now and exploring new technologies. Ilene: OurChart.com inspired by character who did this on TV show, for engaged fans and users who congregated around their show, kind of a lesbian MySpace. L-Word has unusually engaged fan base, fans invited to write some episodes.

Staci: NBC has been having producers blog, but shows still die. How useful is social media? George: Very useful, helps to create communities around affinity brands, a piece in a puzzle to get ratings. (COMMENT: When are we going to get to the point when we see TV shows appearing at a sponsor's site rather than just at the media company's own portal? If advertisers want engagement it would seem to make sense. Kind of like Texaco Star Theatre at the Texaco portal) Alan: Now a predictable pattern, story that's exclusive gets posted and immediately the feedback comes in. Responses come in by the hundreds of thousands in forums, similar in comments, but the other part is that while this is happening at their site it ricochets out across the whole Web.

Staci: How can you tell when someone's sharing your video? Alan: A lot of people ask permission and tracking can show. Staci: How does the Chart spin out? Ilene: We have a chart, every one can create a profile on the chart, can go through profiles or go to the chart and get a representation of a primary user (like a Inxight star tree but more interactive). Up just a couple of months, have about 60,000 profiles. Staci: Does every show need a social network? Ilene: No, there aren't a lot of lesbian portals, it was a natural place for it on our site. Staci: Carson, how do you use social media? Carson: We're the caboose to the Conan O'Brien show, have to do everything that we can to engage the audience, invite the community to talk amongst themselves, engage with music.

Staci: YouTube says there's a huge promotional value for videos shown in their brand, does that really work? David: Have created branded channels in YouTube, something that appears bad on the surface could turn out to be good. Staci: NBA content wasn't embeddable, how do you get content partners to understand the value of embedding? David: It's early days, everything about the way that businesses are structured for rights and clearances can make simple things very difficult. We need to work with content partners to create more upside with limited downside. The industry doesn't necessarily reward the first-comers but you definitely don't want to be the last one in. Question: Is there any value to taking people who are popular in social media and putting them in a show? George: We see social media as a great talent system. Every time we make a bet on a television show it costs millions of dollars, any advantage is useful. A study showed that paying attention to how often shows are mentioned and how often positively, it correlates with ratings rankings and you can see it before the show is even launched. Need to use the wisdom of the masses to guide what they do. Staci: Ilene? Still evolutionary, a lot of users ask to be on the show, looking at using more user-generated content to see how it can fit and commissioning content, looking to see if something they're doing in a small venue could wind up being in a network TV show. Will get a better hearing when the show goes to an executive's office. Question: YouTube is a big platform, but there's nichification, Will Smith's site, are the platforms the way to go or is it about niche communities? David: Everyone talks about the long tail, what they forget about is the middle part, the "torso," niche producers who can afford to mine specific audiences, working with producers in the torso to feature their content, but don't want to lock any one in, use YouTube as a fantastic platform but use everyone else in the meantime, then use tools to measure success on YouTube. We're doubling down on the torso (COMMENT: Process of attraction by success. Familiar Google model) There's how-to stuff, serious stuff, too, but entertainment is also very important. George and I talk all the time, but we're not dependent on any one kind of content.

Rafat: You book a lot of MySpace bands, how does the conversation go with your producers? Carson: There's some pressure from above, but for a show that's on as late as we are we can focus on emerging bands. In the days of Johnny Carson your "shot" on his show was your chance, MySpace helps bands to build their own career. We try to find the ones who are right on the cusp of breaking and give them a shot. It's mostly Carson's tastes, small staff, scrappy, soldiers in the street, find out who's hot on the streets but also book bands right off the Internet. David: It's very early, second trial of syndicating content from major with embedded ads, potentially syndicated to AdSense network, experimenting with how long an ad should be, tend not to favor long pre-rolls, but lots of data to be gathered. George: The users will tell us that it's too long or too short. We chapter each show, have found a mix with pre-rolls where 70 to 80 percent stick through all five chapters. Question: Is the internet now seen as a stepping stone to get a TV deal? Does the Internet stand on its own? Carson: Thinking of Rosie O'Donnell, I'd look at the Internet as the priority platform moving forward and look at TV secondarily. Ilene: Talent and representation is always behind the curve. Getting representation to allow their talent to do something innovative is always the problem. Alan: An Imus could go anywhere now. Staci: Changes the dynamics when youlve have options. Carson: It's only been in recent months that networks are beginning to understand that they need a flow of original talent.

Question: Once users understand model how do you share revenues? David: 15 seconds of fame is attractive but hard to figure out how it happens. When we think about monetization we know where the traffic is coming from and its from the users. Corporate sites with video programming? George: speaking with some, looking at muscle cars, working with sponsor to create a destination, being underwritten by a marketer, not a car marketer. Made investment in company selling vertical networks, will assume that we'll be successful to attract people to their own site but will ensure that they can still work with other sites for their marketers.

Labels: econSM, events

Moderator: Jimmy Guterman, Editorial Producer, EconSM

Panelists:
Simon Assad, Co-Founder and CEO, Heavy.com
John Battelle, Chairman, Federated Media
Shawn Gold, Senior Vice President, MySpace
Tina Sharkey, Chairman, BabyCenter
Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO, Denuo/CIO, Publicis Media Group

Jimmy: Comment from mixer last night - the key is to understand when the ad is most desirable. When I hear people talk about marketing they oftentimes are really talking about advertising, not the full range of marketing. What is really going on?

Simon: Have been selling ads for ten years and it has helped us to get out of the gate but marketing is the discipline to create a conversation between two parties that is useful to both. Banners and search are the old world, marketing is about creating the conversations and bring together two people really interested in having a conversation.

Jimmy: The online promise was that we'd be able to track things on a very granular level, hasn't quite turned out that way, John, why can't we measure anything? John: One reason is that we haven't tried, much as the banner ad that made its debut on HotWired in 1994 we're still looking at panel-based measurement, but it doesn't work for niche audiences unless you make fractal-like numbers of panels. Nielsen and ComScore responded aggressively to say that they're going to figure it out, but as we get into conversational marketing what we're measuring is going to change. We're addicted to a certain number of metrics, how do you measure a lifetime value of a customer against a spend at a specific site like heavy.com, don't have the standards much less the conversations that get us to those standards, but we're moving towards it. Jimmy: what's the barrier? John: Time, we're twenty people, takes a lot of time, can't put an algorithm out there and everybody gets it as with AdSense, conversations aren't easy to code into an algorithm.

Jimmy: Quote from MySpace "If you live in a dorm room everything is yours, if the internet were your room it would be MySpace." How do you market differently to people if you think that you're doing it on their turf? Shawn: Have to look at why people are there in the first place and catch people in stride. MySpace is there to help people to discover culture, how do you enhance that value proposition? Talks to advertisers, have to create a subnetwork that is relevant to your value proposition, have to create recognition, brands have the ability to provide access, can offer access to events, discovery, knowledge. There are simple sociological guidelines for social networks. Simple program provided simple contact tables, send a message, personalized, early on was fairly innovative, about 76,000 people used them, not huge but impressions were 2.6 million, helped people to express themselves and to tap into their value proposition.

Jimmy: Because of new distribution methods the release of a film was no longer THE marketing event but an event that begins an extended marketing campaign. How do you adapt? Tina: Must-see TV on Thursdays will never be seen again in our lifetime, the aftermarket is key. Ecosystems are the focus, you have to become part of people's personal capital. People say the music industry's dead, but it's about what friends spin instead of what DJs spin, so those 76,000 people aren't many but their network is of millions, so once in their ecosystem you need to leverage their conversation.

Jimmy: Are there ideas from mass events that social media can learn from old media? Tina: I was watching a concert on MTV, was watching an announcer talk about something backstage that he thought was cool, it was annoying, meanwhile AOL had integrated messaging and other features so that the audience became the experience.

Jimmy: Rishad, the folks that used to be in control are looking for control in an era in which there is no control. What to they do? Rishad: There's still a lot of control, no one would market it there weren't. People are self-marketing, you need to get involved in their self-marketing but you need to be cautious. If you tell people things that are mathematically untrue they'll think that they're idiots and they won't listen to you. Social media will not displace things in five or ten years for marketing, there are companies trying to sell millions of things. What are the incentives for markets and suppliers to change, it's hard work, it doesn't scale. If it won't make money you won't do it.

Jimmy: Conversation in social media always goes towards Second Life, fascinating but a world that's mostly empty except for marketers. What's your experience as a marketer with virtual world? Shawn: unripe and inefficient for marketers, if you look at MySpace and other big social networks audience comes back multiple times a day, Second Life requires a much larger committment, ability to distribute information is very inefficient. John: Was a "Deadhead," went to The Well, there is an incredibly devoted group but it doesn't have the scale to truly pay back that marketers are putting into it. Tina: When we look at Korea we're very engages, multi-generational, think about a marketer from that perspective, very different than it is here.

Jimmy: The Well was so successful because it was really immersive, what sort of immersiveness do marketers need now, does it need to be an amazing looking thing like Second Life? Rishad: In Korea we're very bullish about cyberworlds, in US it's more oriented towards gaming, we monitors Second Life, but we recommend most marketers to stay away. Why do you want it, for a press releases? 90 Percent of SL is for press releases, how is this going to help you sell things and make money? (Scattered Applause) Question: B2B vs. B2C and Ad-generated revenue vs. user-generated revenue (subscription). How are the dynamics different. Simon: Traditional cable companies are set up exceptionally well to sell subscription services, have to buy utility service plus options. Internet isn't that way, for now. John: For now. Simon: Yes, it may become a very different world but right now it's not there. Subscription would be hard to make work where there are millions of options, porn is about the most successful example, ads are not going to solve everyone's problem, every week you hear about one more site or one more model, traditional advertising only grows about 4-5 percent a year, selling stuff is going to grow, advertising is going to be the only real revenue model, and there are a lot of them so you better have a good model. Shawn: On the B2B side, just different application, in the late 90's the "exchange" was a model, that's going to come back. John: Check out GlobalSpec, back end of scientific content, extraordinary, didn't take 50 million in VC to build it. Shawn: There will be technology that will allow you to assess a page, in some sense marketers are concerned about a backlash, it's about what messages you put in the network, so if you're WalMart and promoting greenifying America is doesn't matter if you're against something personal, the value is in the brands that you put in the network. John: Advertisers are afraid of conversations, they're afraid of people thinking about their brands, they get feedback in social media, have to turn this into judo, have to approach marketing from a different point of view, change the structure of how agencies go about their job. Rishad: Marketing is about listening to your consumers, ask them questions, Nike campaign had users send photos to judges, people liked having editing, Zbrand said we're living in a world of crapocopia, bands can eliminate crap.

Question: User strength and power, there are some you want to market to more to promote viral activity, how to you target those types of people? Tina: If you're really committed to social media, you can identify the influentials and send them back out. Can be leaders in the community and spokespeople. Question: The assumption is that individuals control their brands, but what happens when people are talking about their own brands on their own blogs, all of these things are happening away from their control. John: The Cluetrain Manifesto crystallized that markets and brands are conversations, you are the chief conversationalist for your own brands and to guide them, GM posted a blog entry about the do-it-yourself ads that drew some critical ads, but it also drew a lot of positive responses. Shepherding a brand was different before efforts such as this.

Jimmy: Question from social network, egg model, social media on your site, or chicken model, an existing site. Any egg could be the next chicken. Where do you start, a big site or a little site? Rishad: It could be the chicken an egg an ostrich, but please recognize that marketers in America are not stupid, they are not scared, they are not stupid, but they want to embrace a space. The brand does matter, GM incident looks like a mistake, people get bitter, bitterness doesn't attract money. Question: Blend of social media, combined TV, print, banner and community all tied in together, we're seeing that it's very successful. Shawn: You can advertise on home page and reach 30 million people, the marketing mix can be orchestrated, but the mix can take place entirely in social media if they have enough scale. Tina: Social media can become the source material for advertising, winners of contest got to go to Oscars, yet the source was social media. Social media is not one way to do it, prime time isn't dead it's not the only thing that matters. Audences have to be engaged at every point but let them be a part of the brand experience. Question: Is posting and contribution what it's all about, most are consumers, where is the medium going, are more people going to be participating or are they just going to continue to be consumers. Shawn: We choose our friends by our ability to amuse them, that's not going to change any time soon. If they tend to think that we're funny or attractive we stick with them. Content today is so sharable, used to be a cigarette was social currency, now it's social media. John: Surprised that NBC didn't release whole package from VTech killer on Web, social media could chew through it and make sense. White House would try to bury documents but bloggers went through it and found juicy bits for media outlets. Question: Thinking about TV marketing dialogue? Simon: Promise of interactivity has been there for years, broadband will drive the dialog before TV will drive it, kids are using YouTube as their entire entertainment system, by the time that TV figures it out it will be too late. Question: In Hollywood we've stumbled in creating dialogue into revenues, Snakes on a Plane died as a film release in spite of huge online buzz. Awareness might be high but it doesn't necessarily drive consumption. Can dialog move consumption? Simon: there's a fair amount of dialog around TV, 1.3 billion streams on YouTube, we're going to be developing a lot of tools for situations that we just don't know about. Shawn: XMen movie, was an enormous amount of people who found out about the movie on MySpace, 15 percent went to movie because of it, 50 percent became aware of it, AND about half were female. John: SOAP should have been done in DVD and released in 20 theatres.

COMMENT: John hit the nail on the head, social media is an inverted marketing model that allows things to be monetized in small ways, with mass monetization a secondary step. This is contrary to most people's thoughts about mass marketing today, but it's where it's going -and it's where product development will be going as a result. There's a much broader economic cycle that will be coming into play.

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