Great quote form Stowe Boyd on the dying press release:
The argument that the press release is the right mechanism to transmit important information to the world because it works so well for newspapers, is something like saying that oats are what we should put into the gas tanks of cars because it works so well for horses.
Doc Searls points out that the Doomsday Clock is now five minutes to midnight.
Makes you realize how unimportant the Old Media Doomsday Clock is, although it would be interesting if they went hand in hand.
Ed Batista discusses successful relationships as put forth by John Gottman.
As I read what it takes to form a successful marriage, I couldn’t help but think that VRM and CRM need to embrace these same ideals.
This one really pops:
7. The creation of shared meaning.
In this age of empowerment, and in the same way that the Media must join the conversation, the vendors must join the bazaar.
It’s funny how quotes can deceive.
Dave Winer quoted Mike Arrington about Daylife and I thought the quote was a positive one.
I though it meant that Daylife left out all the garbage you find at typical newspaper sites.
Turns out Mike meant leaving out RSS feeds. That’s not good.
RSS (and OPML) is more important to me than HTML. I think that trend will grow. Will that become a truth for the mainstream soon? I don’t know, but IE7 will certainly push it in that direction. No?
Just for that, the Old Media Doomsday Clock may be making a shift back a minute or two in favor of Old Media. Wow!
Stay tuned.
A lot of talk lately about how page-views are dead.
Greg Yardley suggests a solution but it looks like he’s missing an important point.
It’s not just about widgets and “share” of the page, it’s the fact that a well-built Ajax application may now substitute a rich interface for what was tens or hundreds of page requests.
So now how do you calculate a CPM? By the number of clicks on a page? (I guess Ajax will report this data back to the server)
Are advertisers going to buy into the fact that a click that delivers new data to the page makes their ad on that page worth two impressions? Doubtful.
Do we need advertising engines that deliver ads in time based or action-based way so that one HTTP request can deliver more than one ad if the user is interacting with the page for an extended period? Maybe.
Or do we need to rethink advertising in general and admit that interruption based advertising is dead in general? I’d say so.
Which is why pay-per-click is so popular and why pay-per-action will continue to grow. No doubt.
By the way, it’s not just Ajax that’s causing this death of the page-view. It’s widgets, as Greg suggests, and RSS, and syndication of other sorts that make modern web marketing almost impossible to track effectively.
What can be tracked, as always, is the effectiveness of a campaign ROI, which methods like pay-per-action help immensely.
So what’s left to do in a pay-per-action world? Attention, Gestures and Intention are the gold that needs to be mined in order to create more effective marketing.
Using that gold will help us direct relevant offers to willing individuals. What could be better than that?
We can’t do it alone. CPM is one-way marketing, and one-way is dead in all things web.
That’s where VRM comes along. It stands for Vendor Relationship Management, and it refers to a new generation of tools on the way that allow the customers to assist in the marketing relationship.
Some will resist this loss of control at first, because what’s better for the customer doesn’t seem to equate to better for the vendor. But that’s wrong because the marketplace is not an equation, it’s a relationship.
A marriage doesn’t only get better for one of the spouses as the relationship grows stronger. It gets better for both.
Page views aren’t so dead as CPM is. Long live VRM.
Look at this post by Alex Barnett and check out the graph.
I can’t help but think that a large part of the people calling the shots in the Newspaper Industry fall into the “empty quarter” of non-adopters of 2.0 tools. This includes many veteran journalists as well as business folks.
Look at all the examples of Jarvis gives for the changing landscape of news. There is a pretty big gap between these news services and the average newspaper staff.
So the bet on whether they can transform their business before it’s irrelevant really comes down to this. Will the non-adopting group of managers be retired or replaced before it’s too late. Unless they can change themselves, but I doubt it.
That may sound harsh, but it’s not meant to be. It’s just an opinion based upon years of observation.
I used to go nuts when clueless folks called site visitors “viewers” instead of “users”.
My point was that if all they are doing is viewing and not interacting, then our product needs to get a little better.
Well, the times have changed and now I agree with Stowe Boyd on the term “User Generated Content” .
He’s got it right. We are all here and the world is flat. So any term that implies a publisher->reader or site->user type of relationship is headed for trouble.
As Stowe says, we are now all participants.
He says we are participants in Participatory Media, but I’m even against the word media.
Media can be disintermediated while participants in a conversation really can’t.
Now I’m fully aware that the term media can be used to mean film, tape and digital rather than Media Companies. But the reason why we call them media companies is because media is the plural of medium.
The web is the first mass distribution medium that isn’t scarce in it’s allocation, either through economics or scarcity of availability, like limited TV frequencies (channels)
By it’s very nature, then, it is qualitatively different from anything else we have ever called media.
But I’m not here to argue semantics.
I only know too well from first-hand experience that many “media” companies still see User Generated Content as some lower form of media species.
Their attempts to exploit it will be as successful as chasing a lizard’s long tail.
UGC = Unsuccessful Grasp for Control.
Great post from Chris Anderson about the Economics of Abundance.
More evidence of the commoditization of everything. Technology and Media are just not valuable in the same old way.
If Barry Diller gets it, maybe the tide is shifting for Old Media companies. Perhaps the Old Media Doom sday clock will click back a minute or two.
Still, there are many people in these companies who are calling the shots who will not be able to break out of the mold. These types have such a great fear of failure, that they just can’t adjust to the methodology of “failing your way to success” which is necessary in this user-centric world.
The other day I said Media was dead. Perhaps Advertising is dead.
From the BuzzMachine comments, in response to Hugh Macleod, I say:
Once you realize you can be disintermediated, it becomes clear that the old advertising model doesn’t work as well as it used to, so you find you must provide and extract value in another way.
Something has been bothering me since Adam Curry talked about media vs. technology on the Gillmor Gang.
And I’m also left wondering why Jason Calacanis pumps up AdSense and yet gets labeled a “media guy”, or even calls himself such.
I think it’s a dis-credit to himself. He’s much more than that.
He’s an “Attention” guy.
You see, media by it’s very nature can be disintermediated, and I don’t think any strategy that could fall prey to that is a good one.
Is Google a media company?
No.
Media companies aggregate content makers and act as mediaries between the advertisers and the media consumers. (sorry to Doc, i don’t like the word consumer either)
Google is doing more than that.
They are an Attention clearing house.
It’s what Jason might call an enabler, and it’s why the successful new companies we adore all seem to be doing just that. (del.icio.us, grazr, edgio, top ten sources etc.)
They are enabling an attention transaction to occur. Think eBay or Craigslist. OPML, not HTML. Tom Morris, not Morris, the Cat.
There is no enabling happening here, just intermediation.
Jason’s latest venture is about enablement, so I think he’s on the right track. Paying people doesn’t change that, as long as a service is open.
Attention enablers can’t be disintermediated. They can be replaced, but not disintermediated.
I don’t come from the software industry. I much more relate to what Dave Winer calls a himself, a “media hacker”. And that’s what he calls Scoble too.
It’s not really about technology. That is a means, not an end.
Technology itself can be disintermediated or commodified. Soon, we will plug into technology like we do into electrical outlets. It’s happening now.
So I say that the winning companies are not media companies or technology companies, but Attention companies.
And if PodShow is a media company, it may succeed in the short run. But to last and grow, it will have to transform to an Attention company. So will Tribune, New York Times, Microsoft, Podosphere.com and the whole lot.