Media2010: Notes from Frédéric Filloux and Russ Fradin

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Continuing my notes from the Media 2010 conference on the presentations by Jack Matthews, Richard Titus and Marc Frons, here are the notes I took from the presentations by Frederic Filloux and Russ Fradin.

I will be digesting what I’ve heard today and pulling into some upcoming content on the future of media.

FRÉDÉRIC FILLOUX, EDITOR – INTERNATIONAL, SCHIBSTED

1. Failure of ad model

– CPM lower than ever

– Clickthrough rate never took off

– endless inventories pushing prices down – ad networks are bottom feeders

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The polarization of film budgets

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When I walked out from seeing Avatar 3D in December, I tweeted: “$300 million very well spent!”

Movie theaters can create extraordinary experiences, but the cost of production is ever greater.

On the other hand, movies can be made for extremely low cost, using HD cameras, digital editing, and volunteer labor.

At Media 2010 Suzanne Stefanac pointed to Escape to City 17, a machinima movie that had been made with a budget of less than $500, mainly for the costumes. It looks pretty good considering how little was spent.

Expect both increasing film budgets at the top end, and lowering film budgets at the bottom end.

Media2010: Notes from Jack Matthews, Richard Titus, Mark Frons

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I am at the Media 2010 conference in Sydney, where there is an extraordinary line-up of speakers through the day. I am here to get my head back into gear on future of media strategy, which will be a major theme for me through this year.

Below are my notes taken on-the-fly from the first few speakers. Hopefully I will get hold of some laptop power to be able to continue after this.

JACK MATTHEWS, CEO, FAIRFAX DIGITAL

We are at the point of singularity – beyond which we cannot see.

Highly recommend Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks.

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Interactive scenarios for 2030: provocation for long-term strategy

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Last year I kicked off a strategy session of a major infrastructure company with a presentation to the executive team on the world in 2030. This used a set of four scenarios to provoke new thinking about the world moving forward.

I wrote about these in The World in 2030: Four scenarios for long-term planning and strategy, providing some of the background to the scenarios and presentation.

We’ve now created a flash piece to make it easier to navigate and interact with the scenarios. Please play with the interactive piece.

The battlefield for mobile platforms and mobile applications becomes clear: fragmentation, innovation, and dead-ends

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I was just interviewed on Sky Business this morning about the news coming out from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

In the plethora of announcements, what stands out for me is the increasing clarity of the emerging platforms battle, which is happening on two levels: mobile operating system and applications.

Mobile operating system

The launch of the iPhone 3G redefined how people thought about mobile devices. Now we are finally getting a range of serious and comparable alternatives.

The most visible of these is of course Android. Eric Schmidt said yesterday that there now 60,000 Android phones sold every day, and there appear to be new mobile models launched almost daily.

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Research: how journalists use social media (and PR professionals)

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George Washington University and media relations software firm Cision have released a very interesting study of how journalists use social media and online tools.

The headline news is that 56% of journalists consider social media to be important to some degree. This figure pushed up to 69% of journalists writing for online outlets, while just 48% of magazine writers found social media to be important.

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Journalists on the importance of social media for reporting and producing their stories

Source: Cision

Social media is used extensively by journalists to publish and promote what they have written, with just 14% saying they don’t use social media at all for spreading word on their work. Almost two-thirds say they use blogs (presumably usually not their own), and 57% use Twitter or other microblogging sites to point to their articles.

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Journalists on the social media tools they use to publish, promote and distribute what they write

Source: Cision

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Predictions for enterprise social software and social network analysis

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Gartner has released five interesting predictions for social software. Here are the predictions along with a few of my thoughts.

By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

This is a transition that we’ve seen for a very long time, and looks finally ready to come to fruition. Coming from a financial markets background, I’d seen from as far back as the late 1990s that email as a primary medium was resulting in communication breakdown. I’ve long believed that shifting communication out of email was one of the main ways that social media would be valuable, as for example expressed in my 2005 white paper How Collaborative Technologies are Transforming Financial Services.

This prediction will play out very differently across organizations. Many companies will remain bound in email. Others, particularly those that are project-centric and effectively implement social software, could well see a substantially more than 20% of communication shift out of email. The development and evolution of new tools such as Google Wave will see email not quite die, but rapidly erode in the most innovative organizations.

By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.

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Sky Business: The implications of social media for business and why Australia leads in social media usage

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Last week I was interviewed on Sky Business about recent data showing that Australia leads globally in use of social media, and the implications of such high levels of social media usage for business.

Here is the full interview, with major points noted below.

  • It is surprising to see Australia at the top of the global charts in social media usage, given that just a few years ago it was significantly behind in uptake – this has been a dramatic acceleration in usage.
  • It is a fascinating question why social media usage surged in Australia (see here for more detailed thoughts on the topic). Contributing factors include the sudden improvement in mobile data costs when the iPhone 3G was launched in July 2008, and the shift to more a conversational style of social media that suited the culture and dispersion of Australians.

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The power of personal brands in strategy and attracting talent

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A few months ago I wrote about The shift from corporate brands to personal brands, referencing Jeremiah Owyang’s move from Forrester to the newly-founded Altimeter Group with former colleagues.

This is a long-term secular trend – in fact last week when I spoke at the Online Marketing by Design event I pointed to it as one of the three most important trends for this year. I was discussing it in the context of marketing, where companies must recognize that trust resides in individuals not institutions, and use this to shape their external engagement. However it is just as important in the context of attracting and retaining talented people. I wrote:

Now, as personal brands grow in relative strength, corporations need to consider how they can best reflect and tap the influence of the individuals working for them. As Jeremiah notes, social media means that personal brands are immensely portable, as are personal networks.

This is about power to the worker, absolutely, but those companies that understand this and tap this shift can do extremely well. They can attract those with strong personal brands and create immense value from their influence, simply by focusing on building the brands of their key staff as much as they do their corporate brand.

In this context, I find it striking that Forrester Group has decided to ban personally-branded research blogs by its staff, as reported by analyst-watchers SageCircle. It says:

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Tapping the power of crowdsourcing for good

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I am not that keen on the word “crowdsourcing”, because people mean many different things when they use the term. However since it is the word most used to describe tapping the power of distributed talent, which is one of the most important emerging themes in our hyper-connected world, I will embrace it, and hopefully soon draw up my own taxonomy of what crowdsourcing means to help clarify the conversation.

I was struck by a post by Steve Kelman on The dark side of crowdsourcing?. Kelman attended a presentation by Jonathan Zittrain (esteemed scholar and author of The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It) in which Zittrain pointed to how crowdsourcing approaches could used for bad things. However Kelman came out primarily impressed with the vast potential of the field.

One of the best-known domains for crowdsourcing is getting contributions for inventors and innovators to contribute, using innovation markets such as Innocentive (which I described in Chapter 5 of Living Network on Innovation), and prizes such as the X-Prize Foundation.

An emerging domain is using large pools of people to monitor for crime:

Zittran then noted the growth of applications (this one from the U.K.) where people, for very small amounts of money, are apparently willing, from the comfort of their couches, to monitor crime surveillance cameras to look for suspicious activity and report it. Some companies are also getting people, again for micro-payments, to report in if they recognize photos of people participating in a mass marijuana smoke-in.

The downsides of these kinds of applications were then raised:

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