Category Archives: social networking

broadcasting, converging, internet, IPA|ED:three, planning, social networking, user-generating, viewing

Darth Vader and The Evolving Ecology of TV

I was shown the above – somewhat delightful – clip at a conference last week.  a subsequent forwarding on to a colleague reignited a question I gave pause for thought to a year ago when I asked what is TV?  the answer I came to then is the same answer that I stand by now…  that TV is the act of consuming aggregated audiovisual content.

I pointed out at the time that this definition implied that, should you run with it, YouTube is television.  and I believe it is.  in Dec  06 I wrote:

"the aggregation of TV requires content and distribution.  technology
has allowed citizens to produce the former, and the internet has
allowed them to do the latter.  we are all – should we wish to be –
content aggregators.  we are all budding broadcasters.  and a
generation is learning to watch TV aggregated by commercial entities as
well as fellow citizens."
mediation post Weds 6th December 06

an obvious question then in all of this is – who is to do the aggregation?  …commercial broadcasters or – via PVR on TV / subscriptions on YouTube / wall posts on Facebook – viewers themselves?  in negotiating the future of media and communications – the aim of this blog – we have to accept the inevitable conclusion that it is of course both.

in the evolving ecology of TV (in both the broad and narrowcasting sense) the question in not who aggregates, but who – at a given moment in time – we want to aggregate for us.  its a question of context…  Saturday evening on the sofa is very different to 30mins web surfing on a Friday lunchtime.  as a viewer, my individual needs vary massively over the course of a day or week.

commercial broadcasters and internet unilateralists continue to be at war over the issue of who aggregates.  the battle is pointless.  in the year since I wrote my original ‘what is TV’ post, commercial TV has been under what seems to be continuous fire, not from futurologists predicting their demise, but from a media who have witnessed compromise after compromise of viewer trust.

if broadcast TV thinks it needs to win a perceived war against the internet by cutting corners and taking shortcuts in order to be as popular as possible, then it is fundamentally flawed on two fronts.  one; there is no war – both commercial and viewer-aggregated TV are here to stay, and two; the role of commercial broadcasters in this new ecology is not compete with YouTube by being as popular as possible, but to inspire it by being as original as possible…

the role of broadcast TV is to be the source of original, intriguing, inventive, surprising and high-quality content.  content that demands to sit alongside it’s online counterparts.  as Stephen Poliakoff comments in today’s MediaGuardian, "if you commission it, the viewers do turn up."

…just as millions turned up to see Darth Vader in cinemas in Empire Strikes back in 1980 (and on TV and DVD ever since)  …and just as millions have turned up to see the clip at the top of this post.  together they’re a great example of this new relationship: content originally produced commercially by Fox and Lucasarts as high-quality content, remixed by DoomBlake for fun, as parody, as art.

both are entertaining, and both have their place in the new TV ecology.  it’s notable that DoomBlake’s recreative remix is  entertaining because of the original context as defined by Lucas’s commercial creative vision.  these content siblings need each other – one as source material, and the other as a way to stay contemporary in a changing world.

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internet, social networking

The Value of Facebook: Knowledge and Power in the Age of Online Accountability

Chris_dewolfe_rupert_murdoch_john_bFrom left to right: Chris DeWolfe, Rupert Murdoch, John Battelle (Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET Networks)

it turns out I’m worth £160.  or to be more precise, what I (and people like me) click on when I’m logged on to Facebook, is worth £160.  a bit of number crunching…

  • Facebook wants to float on the stock-market.
  • Facebook (what with the overheads of servers, bandwidth and 300+ staff) can’t afford to.
  • so they need capital investment.
  • it was today announced that Microsoft have bought a $240m stake in Facebook
  • a stake (which I calculate = 1.6%) that values Facebook at $15bn (£7.3bn).
  • I am one of 47 million Facebook users.
  • I’m worth $15bn valuation / 47m users = $319.
  • or around £160 (based on $2 : £1 ratio)

I’ve made a big assumption: that most of the value of Facebook is locked into it’s user-base, and – more crucially – what it represents.  which seems to be a fair assumption.  the high valuation of Facebook certainly isn’t down to the physical assets of the company.  but nor is it due to the simple aggregation of it’s 47million-strong global audience.

the value of Facebook is information.  not on who or where they are (although thats important).  rather its information on what it’s users click on.  more numbers I’m afraid:

  • if the av. Facebook user gets served 6 ads per day,
  • then each month Facebook serves 47m x 6 x 30 ads.
  • thats 8.5 billion data points every month.

it’s this data that’s so valuable to Facebook, and to Microsoft should they get their hands on it,  because sales operations will use that information to understand who clicks on what, when, and how often.  targeting gets better, which improves response rates and efficiency of ad-serving.  which given the numbers involved (and Google’s head start in this area) isn’t a bad return on a very minor investment in the company.

as a point of comparison, Maxim USA was recently sold for a rumoured $250m.  based on a readership of 16m (source: Dennis publising), that equates to $15.63 (or around £7.80 per user) – around twenty times less the equivelant for my Facebook valuation (£160).

the point of course of all this is that according to a Guardian article Friday October 19th, Facebook is expected to bring in just $150m of revenues, so – assuming all users are equal – I’m generating around £1.60 for the company a year.  the fact that in their valuation I’m worth more than one hundred times that, is testimony to the value of data, and the accountability to advertisers that it affords.

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advertising, engaging, internet, social networking, user-generating

From ‘send’ to ‘recieve’ mode; lessons for politicians and advertisers

Houses_of_parliamentpic from solarnavigator.net

There’s been a lot of media-orientated political comment about over the last week.  Firstly Whitehall last Thursday published a report by Ed Mayo, Chief Executive of the national consumer council and Tom Steinberg, founder and director of mySociety, recommending that the Government acknowledges the importance of, and utilises, existing internet-based communities.

The three specific recommendations were that the Government:

  • welcomes and engages with users and operators of user-generated sites in pursuit of common social and economic objectives;
  • supplies innovators that are re-using government-held information with the information they need, when they need it, in a way that maximises the long-term benefits for all citizens; and
  • protects the public interest by preparing citizens for a world of plentiful (and sometimes unavailable) information, and helps excluded groups take advantage

These sentiments were echoed by Tim Montgomerie – editor of ConservativeHome.com – in The Spectator’s Politics column last week where he suggested that the next general election will be remembered as “Britain’s first internet election”.  He notes that “in this new world [of internet communities] the campaign staff of political parties and traditional media will have a much smaller share of power”; and points to the fact that “more Americans have watched Mr de Vellis’s advert [below] than have watched any official commercial”.

Such is the power of a searchable internet, populated by aggregations of communities with their own opinions, wants and behaviours.  It’s a force that both politicians and brands must understand and engage with on the communities’ terms; Montgomerie notes that politicians “still see the web as a way of providing superior distribution channels for unchanged messages.  They are in ‘send mode’ … the political parties that prosper in the internet age will embrace ‘receive mode’.

Try reading that last quote again replacing politicians with the word brands.  There are parallels indeed.

The third element in all of this is the broadcast media; Montgomerie – in citing predictions that “most print newspapers will have closed by 2025” – takes a different position to Tony Blair, who waded in to the debate this week in a polemic against the print media.  Blair believes that “there is a market in providing serous, balanced, news.  There is a desire for impartiality.  The way that people get their news may be changing; but the thirst for news being real is not”.

But deciding ‘what is real’ will no longer be the preserve of politicians and brands communicating through broadcast media.  In both the advertising and political arenas, that will be for us all – as co-creators and consumers – to decide.  There will be – as there has always been – two key questions; who owns the message and who owns the media?  In creating content we all have the potential to own the message, something politicians and advertisers will have to come to terms with.

As for who owns the media – that remains to be seen…  Different strategies will emerge.  This week HMV appointed digital agency LBi to create a new social networking site to take on rivals facebook and YouTube.  Good luck with that!  Gideon Lask, e-commerce director of HMV said “The HMV social networking site will be an important element in our customer engagement strategy”.  All admirable, but what’s wrong with utilising the networks already out there?  His brand – like politics – is still in ‘send mode’, I’d suggest that the sooner ‘receive mode’ is engaged, the better.

Sources:

‘The Power of Information’ – a review by Mayo and Steinberg

‘The next general election will be won and lost on the internet’, a Spectator column by Tim Montgomerie

Blair’s Feral Media speech – full text as reported by the BBC here

‘HMV appoints LBi to create facebook rival’ as reported in Campaign

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internet, planning, social networking, user-generating

It’s not what I post on facebook; but the fact that I post, that counts

Mark_zuckerberg_facebookpic source: Paul Sakuma / AP File

I’ve been wanting to write a post on social networking for a while now but it’s taken me ages, mostly because I’ve been mainly engaged in rampant friendgeneering.

let me explain.

about a month ago I joined facebook, an act which quickly and forever changed my internet browsing habits.  it became and remains the first and last site I visit in any online session, and keep it on in the background whilst tabbing thru other sites.  a straw poll suggests that I am not alone.  this is significant.

the other key behaviour I noticed myself adopting in the early weeks of facebook was some very serious (and along with my housemate, competitive) ‘friendgeneering’ – a term coined by my colleague and friend John V Willshire in his Artrocker Blog, to describe:

"the accumulation of friends that everyone goes through … because (a) it’s like engineering in it’s very methodical, processed, designed nature, unlike making friends in real life and (b) I have too much time on my hands clearly, and can sit around thinking of terms like ‘friendgeneering’"

now whilst it’s certainly true that John has too much free time – the phrase actually very succinctly captures the various acts of friend-collection I went through, and only stopped when I felt that a certain critical mass had been achieved (note: I don’t know why I felt I’d reached my personal critical mass – would be interesting to find out if other users had similar experiences).  I felt uncomfortable until ‘enough’ of them were there with me, and feel a great deal more comfortable now that they are there.

it’s a concept Faris Yakob – writing on his blog TIGS – described in a post in which he termed continuous partial presence:

"…everyone is always there. The most important feature of instant messenger programmes, in some ways, isn’t the actual messages – it’s the buddy list. With your buddy list there, you’re always in a group, you’re friends are always present, whenver they’re online. This is why it was so compelling, to begin with, to younger people – kids are far more likely to hang out in large social groups. This continuous partial presence is oddly satisfying, and also a feature of services like Twitter and Jaiku"

in her book Watching The English, Kate Fox describes how the mobile phone has had a similar effect:

"The mobile phone has, I believe, become the modern equivelant of the garden fence or village green.  the space-age technology of mobile phones has allowed us to return to the more natural and humane communication patterns of pre-industrial society, when we lived in small, stable communities, and enjoyed frequent ‘grooming talk’ with a tightly integrated social network of family and friends"

what both of these commentaries identify is the fact that the content of the status updates, photos, and now videos (and more) I put on facebook, aren’t as important as the act of putting them up there in the first place.  it’s the contemporary equivelant of "good morning, send my best to X" that was typical of times gone by, and just as reassuring.  indeed – as Fox suggests – the origins of my ‘comfort’ at having my friendgeneered buddies continually partially present, may be ancient indeed…  as old as the highly communal nature of homo sapien society itself.

this last fact alone is reason enough for advertisers and brands to take facebook and it’s rapidly expanding contemporaries very seriously indeed. it fulfills and deeply ingrained social need, and I fully anticipate that I will become as inseperable from my social network of choice as I am from my mobile phone.

but the reasons go beyond human social need…  the act of media planning in many regards is – at it’s basest – the identification and communication to, aggregated audiences (for obvious reasons I exclude direct forms of marketing from this description).  between October 06 and April 07, facebook increased it’s base from 500k to 3.69m; over the same period readership of the Sun dropped from 3.1m to 3.0m (source NRS).  facebook and social network sites per se are big, growing and committed aggregations of audience.

to that end, you can try putting an ad on facebook, but I wouldn’t recommend it; facebook is a place and space for friends, and a pushed media impact from a keen brand is an invasion – unless a brand suceeds in rewarding my just for watching it (for example Virgin Media feeding me live Big Brother updates, rather than a banner asking me to sign up now)…

the commercial model aside (till another day), other ways exist for brands to capitalise on this bigger-than-the-Sun audience (globally) of which I am a proud and active part; a facebook group created around your brand – or something for which it stands – is a great deal more involving that a bit of flash, and also acts as a badge for a social network user should they choose to join.  plus, with the opening up of application development to third parties, brands should be asking themselves what applications they could develop to graciously and appropriately feed and enhance online activities.

brands that understand how to talk to an audience in this way understand that it’s not how many friends you can reach; but how you talk to them, that counts.

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advertising, broadcasting, internet, planning, social networking

The Transmedia Tardis

the above video is from a MySpace page I came across with some clients whilst browsing some social networking sites last week.  it didn’t make much sense till Saturday, when during Doctor Who there was a reference to Mr Saxon’s election win.  the name rang a bell.  a few minutes digging this morning revealed the reason for the MySpace page, and also the suggestion of which character is due to make an appearance later this season.

it’s not only a great bit of marketing from the BBC – one that logged the existence of a character in my head long before any reference in the programme – but a piece of marketing that says much about the nature of the Doctor Who brand.  it follows on from a great bit of semiotic play from the first (contemporary) series in the form of Bad Wolf – references scattered across the series which pointed towards and larger more malevolent threat than any dealt with in individual episodes.

but above all this is a great bit of Transmedia storytelling.  TV does one job in broadcasting the crafted programme, the internet is doing another – inviting and encouraging the audience to explore the world behind the programme.  more than anything else this makes the world of Doctor Who seem bigger than it otherwise would on one media channel alone – something older as well as more contemporary audiences will have come to love and expect from the franchise…

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internet, social networking, user-generating

Welcome To The Post-Information Age

where content is free to create, distribute and consume
where everyone is a journalist
where everyone is watched
where everything is recordable and recorded
where everyone can contact anyone
where social networks rival commercial broadcasters
where value is in knowledge not just reach
where everyone can be seen and heard
where authourity records and reassures citizens
where citizens question the assertions of authourity
where opinions are facts and facts are opinions

as the saying goes; ‘beyond good and evil…’
just one word of caution…  be careful what you say.

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internet, planning, social networking, user-generating

quantifying digital behaviours

Two recent studies
by media owners are attempting to quantify the extent to which we are adopting
digital behaviours; ie audio / audiovisual downloads, creating / reading blogs,
or creating websites. Both the Guardian
and Emap have a vested interest in understanding these behaviours… as audiences
evolve and migrate to different channels for consuming information; impacts and
subsequent advertising revenues will follow.

Digination_insider_logos
The Guardian’s digi:nation project, which aims to “get a clear
picture of how the online population are engaging and interacting with digital
media”, surveyed 1,016 Guardian Unlimited users and 2,912 nationally
representative online respondents.  Another
project from Emap – The Insider – aims
to “offer greater understanding of
consumer behaviour and tracks consumer trends as they emerge”. It consists of a panel of 10,000 members, all
of whom have been recruited from Emap’s media brands.


The surveys
indicate that:

  • 67% of the UK population have tried some form of digital activity1
  • 1/3 of the digi:nation1 and 54% of The Insider’s panel2 had read a blog – of whom half of the latter read a blog at least once a week2
  • The Insider’s blog-consumption figure of 54% rises to 69% of 15-24s
  • 10% of the digi:nation have created their own blog1
  • 17% of the digi:nation have created their own website1
  • 43% of The Insider panel have created their own spaces2
  • 55% of The Insider panel have accessed social networking sites2
  • Women are more likely to be heavy users (everyday) of SN sites than men – 24% to 20% 
  • Finally, whilst over half the digi:nation have downloaded music, only 8% have downloaded a podcast1

Sources:
1 from Guardian’s digi:nation
survey – for more click here
2 from Emap’s The Insider
survey – for more click here


So what does this
all mean? Primarily these surveys are
putting quantifiable flesh on the bones of a belief in the industry that
blogging and social networking aren’t restricted to niche groups but have
become mainstream in terms of participation.  In addition the numbers of people creating as
opposed to just consuming these media are higher then you’d perhaps expect.


But as a result of
this, the research reminds us of two key considerations for the planning and
buying of commercial impacts. One, the
challenge to mainstream media in terms of the sheer volume of content that is
being produced and consumed by citizens, (although that fact that much of this,
certainly in the case of social networking, is now under the ownership of
established media owners – specifically MySpace and Newscorp – means it can be
planned and reached conventionally).


But secondly, and
following on from point one; any advertiser wading into consumer generated
waters must tread carefully… because blogging and social networking sites present
content to consumers in a personalised context, and as a result there’s a
veritable minefield of pissed off content creators and irritated UG content
consumers. It’s their world. They are creating and consuming it. And they have a prescribed notion of who and
who isn’t welcome.


The upshot for
advertisers?; If you want to talk to internet users (and most of them do), you
won’t be able to achieve mass reach without using UGC sites. And if you’re going to go there – have
something to say and say it in a relevant way; you may not get an answer, but
you’ll stand a much better chance of being listened to.

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gaming, praising, social networking, user-generating

in praise of… Anshe Chung

Anshe_chung_avatar
…who has become Second Life’s first virtual millionaire.  how?  by developing – according to the wiki entry – an "online business that engages in development, brokerage and arbitrage of virtual land, items and currencies"

no, I’m not quite sure what it all means either.  but with Linden dollars able to be swapped for real world money, I’m pretty sure it does mean that I’d better get my virtual entrepreneurial head on, and fast!  Anshe Chung, we salute you.

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branding, social networking

branded me

Me_brand_tshirtsomeone from MSN reminded me of something today that I’d thought about ages ago…  they said that users of their Live Spaces sites were "using social networking as the media space to sell their own brands".  they were impling that people were conscious of themselves as brands and marketing themselves as such.

in some respects we’ve always been brands; marketing ourselves to friends and acquaintances by how we look and behave.  but the advent of social networking has taken this to a new level.  with the removal of physical limitations, we can now market ourselves to the online world without meeting a single person.

we authors broadcast first impressions of ourselves to the great many more browsing observers.  in doing so, we’re creating shortcuts for and extensions of our own personalities to communicate what makes us who we are.  we’re selling ourselves and our lives.  we’re marketing.

does this make us more brand literate?  I’d suggest it does.  in doing so, we implictly learn to identify and actualise the shortcuts and cues of what makes us who we are, and learn to spot and understand them more readily in commercial brands.

does it make us more shallow?  absolutely not; its a though millions of autobiographies are being conceived and written before our browsing eyes.

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