TechScout: Watching, chatting about, clipping, annotating and sharing the news
(Annette Moser-Wellman) -- Here's my latest guilty pleasure: lying on the family room couch watching mildly entertaining TV while working on my laptop. Somehow when I combine the two experiences, it seems to redeem them both. I just have to be careful not to get popcorn butter on my keyboard.
I suppose this multi-tasking activity is an awkward precursor to the convergence of devices that we hear so much about in the tech community. Device convergence is at the stage of development where it has created more questions than answers for people in the news business. Will access to the Internet on a TV screen alter the way we view news and information? Will mobile devices usher in the intersection of the Web and entertainment? When we can communicate seamlessly across mobile, TV and portable computing, will the nature of news change?
It's Venu Vasudevan's job to think about questions like these. A senior director in applications software platforms research within Motorola Labs, Venu is exploring the implications of convergence on media experiences.
"One aspect of convergence that's particularly exciting is that most devices will not only render rich content, they'll also have communication channels. We believe that when you blend content and communication – when you can talk about content, you can create some new collection of experiences that you couldn't if you were just watching content in isolation."
While Venu is talking, my mind is shifting from my laptop/TV experience to my nephew, who is a big Xbox 360 fan. His buddy is miles away and yet he and my nephew play Grand Theft Auto and chat about the game while they play. I ask Venu if this is the kind of interactivity he is talking about. He says it's similar to the video game experience, but more.
"We're looking for ways to bring back social interaction for media programs. How can you combine watching something with chat, speak, instant messaging, clipping, annotating and sharing? ‘Social TV' is a concept that digitally extends the couch, enabling my friends and me to join each other in watching a common TV program without being physically co-located. While Xbox 360 is fast paced, Social TV is a ‘lean back' experience that turns your electronic program guide into a social dashboard."
"TVlicious is a project of ours that brings a peer-to-peer content-sharing element to TV watching. Just like social bookmarking on the Web, TVlicious allows you to clip TV content to share with others and chat about it over the TV screen." The name TVlicious is an allusion to the social bookmarking site de.li.ci.ous that offers users the ability to tag Web content they are interested in and share it with others."
Sling Media has developed a similar technology it calls Clip+Sling. Users with a Slingbox can access their home TV program simultaneously on their laptops or cell phones through the Internet. With Clip+Sling, they can tag TV content, then send it to an open portal that anyone can access.
Venu believes this kind of technology will be of value to news organizations. When viewers clip stories, media companies can gauge the peaks and valleys of users' interests within a larger story in real time. News organizations can see what is propagating virally and use that information to tailor content.
"Without disturbing the TV experience, you can create a social experience around it," said Venu. You can imagine a scenario in which viewers are more interested in the news because they can interact and share their ideas online.
Venu goes further. He describes a future for TV news in which there is an overlay of content that would allow the viewer to research the subjects and characters more fully. These would be "advanced news experiences" that would allow you to access background information while you are watching. Venu likens this next-generation experience to participating in a reality show and having a relationship with the storyteller. The news ultimately becomes a dialogue.
"News is as much about the people who write the news as the news itself. The creators are also stories in and among themselves," Venu said.
When these technologies become widespread, media experiences will become intensely personal, reflecting our deeply held preferences but at the same time able to be broadly shared. We will sort out exactly what interests us and find communities with like interests.
"Personal media experiences are about convenience and about coherence. Convenience means anytime, anywhere consumption – time-shifted, play-shifted, device-shifted. Think of it as the end of appointment-based media. Coherence means that you can tailor the way the story is consumed. And that you can tailor the story to the device itself," he said.
Venu describes an application that makes convenience and coherence possible today. Advanced media synchronization software enhances the usability of mobile devices by allowing you to cache information on one device and port it to another. For example, you can pick up a story from the Internet on your desktop, then read it on your mobile as you commute home. Rather than a converged device, this application optimizes devices you already use – enabling your "ensemble" of devices to support your media needs by invisibly coordinating with each other with little or no action on your part.
The mobile experience is made effortless and "zero click" via Active Idle technologies such as Motorola's version, Screen3. Screen3 displays news items on your cell phone's menu and gives you the choice to read a few lines or the full story. It gives you the capability to record the content on your home TV or DVR so that, with this convenience, you experience a richer, more in-depth story.
"By allowing you to start an experience on mobile and continuing it on TV or start an experience on TV and continuing it to mobile, you're going away from the notion of listening or reading an item. You're instead going to the idea of consuming a story. Your devices will cater to you, and you can consume content across multiple devices," he said.
The good news is that these technologies optimize the key competitive advantage of a news organization – powerful stories. It allows the media company to focus on providing depth and information, to build out a narrative and tell a more complete story. Because a story is device-agnostic, it doesn't have to live on just the Internet, TV or a handheld. Stories have always had the ability to travel through time. And now they can travel through space as well.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below.
This TechScout article is part of a new series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view others in the TechScout series.
(Annette Moser-Wellman) --- "The Internet changes everything! The Web operates on new values! Old rules just don't work on-line!" We've all heard the refrain and maybe even said it ourselves.
But in a surprising interview with Albert Cheng, Executive Vice President, Digital Media, of Disney-ABC Television Group, I was reminded how rapid change also creates a bounce-back effect. We realize some important things stay the same.
"We've tried a lot of things [in news]. Some have succeeded and some didn't work. We thought, for example, user generated video would be core to our success and giving consumers the opportunity to upload what they wanted would be important. But that really hasn't come to fruition. A very small percent of people actually want to upload content. The greater majority, actually the vast majority, still want to read professionally produced, editorialized content," he said.
It's easy for any organization to get swept away in the latest craze. This is especially true in the tech space when a new, sexy feature is launched weekly on the Web. But it does a company good to step back and ask what the marketplace really wants that you should deliver.
Cheng explains, "We used to run this thing called ‘Talk Back' and we assumed people would want to talk to us, but, again, it was a very small amount of people. And that is not necessarily a good representative sample of what the general public wants. So it's an example of a nice thing to have but it's not core to your news editorial."
Cheng said they've taken other risks that have brought them back to their editorial core.
"We played around with citizen journalism, and it keeps coming back to the fact that consumers on the whole still value the editorial, so we've backed off on that. We've even tried blogging. We hired a blogger and we went through about a year of it and it stretched us to think of blogging as a way to report, but it just didn't work with our audience. Blogging wasn't what people expected out of a news organization such as ours."
Cheng believes there is ultimate value in high quality content.
"Less than 2% of users actually upload anything, even on YouTube. And that's because most people don't want to do it. What winds up being really popular on YouTube are things that are illegally pirated – things professional people have already produced. And that's why YouTube is popular -- because there is latent demand from the people who needed a place to go and see something they might have missed and that underlying demand drives the use of the technology," he said.
In a sense, media companies have exaggerated the trend for user generated content over professionally produced content, when in fact, it is the reverse.
Coming back to the consumer's wants and needs continues to be the only way to determine a ‘magnetic north' in the midst of change.
"When people talk to me about, ‘Oh, we can distribute live television over the Internet!' I look at them and go, ‘Are you crazy?' No one cares. Because it's not being able to pipe live television through the Internet that drives it. That's not what makes people care. You'd have far more success breaking up your schedule and making your content available at any time of the day," Cheng said.
In fact, this is what Disney-ABC has done both on their site and on iTunes.
Similarly, Cheng talked about the much-anticipated interactive TV in which people can click on a piece of clothing that someone is wearing and then buy it. "I have not seen that work. I think part of that is not because the technology isn't fully there to support it. I just think that consumers don't find it that interesting."
This concern for the consumers' perspective is what will finally drive the success of media companies.
As news organizations continue the sometimes-painful migration to the Web and pending mobile platforms, thinking like a technology company will be important. But first and foremost will be thinking like a content company.
Cheng said, "Our investment is in the content process and in creating good stories and creating things that people want to engage in from a content perspective. To the extent media companies can find partners in the technology space, it will only benefit them more.
"But news organizations need to spend more time really drilling down on their editorial. Where do they want to position themselves? What is compelling to my audience? The Facebooks of today will be gone tomorrow. The Googles and YouTubes aren't necessarily going to be there either because these guys differentiate themselves on technology. We differentiate ourselves on content. And we can reinvest in that."
Understanding your consumers' needs, creating content that differentiates you from the competition and investing in those choices - all sound like the classics of business leadership. Even in a world upended by technology, sometimes everything old can be new again.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below.
This TechScout article is part of a new series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view others in the TechScout series.
TechScout: Moving Eyeballs and Curating Communities
(Annette Moser-Wellman) -- If you want to see into the crystal ball of the future of media, talk with someone who heads the business development function of a media company. These leaders get the 30,000-foot view of how the Internet is changing the landscape of news.
One of them is Kenneth A. Bronfin, president of Hearst Interactive Media. You'll recognize the household names of ESPN, Cosmopolitan and the Houston Chronicle in the Hearst portfolio, but have you heard of E Ink and Idilia? These are media ventures hand-picked by Ken, who's charged with blending a traditional print and television company with strategic new and emerging technology. It's a role not without risk, and coupled with Ken's aerial view of new media, it's given him a unique perspective about the future of news and media technology.
On making technology investments:
"We look for companies that are developing new technologies and platforms that we believe will change the media world – or, as I sometimes describe to my kids, move eyeballs from one platform to another. That activity stretches across many forms of media. You're never sure what's going to work, but you can't wait around to find out. We get involved in the development of these new companies and help bring them to the forefront. We invest to own five, ten, fifteen or twenty percent or more in these start-up companies. We learn from them, we contribute to their thinking, and we make connections between them and our properties."
On a couple of bets for the future:
"I'm a strong advocate of E Ink technology. This is the display technology used on Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader. Imagine if you will an electronic display that looks a lot like paper. Just as easy to read as paper. It can also be as flexible as a piece of paper -- you could roll up and handle it just as you would a newspaper. We are now spending a lot of time considering the ramifications to the media industry brought about by E Ink technology. This should be on the mind of everyone in the newspaper industry – those seeking to save the readers they have now, those seeking to bring back readers that may have left or those seeking to lure new readers.
"We have an investment in a company called Idilia. They've developed substantial new technology in an area called word sense disambiguation. Very simply said, their technology determines the meaning of words in a sentence. Today's search technology can certainly be frustrating and difficult - and Idilia could be the breakthrough that brings about a significant improvement for the consumer. Idilia actually determines the meaning of a string of words – they are able to figure out what each word means in the context of the query."
Editor's Note: Things are moving fast. An E Ink executive just predicted that an e-newspaper would be tested by the end of 2008 and go commercial in late 2009. On online community:
"We still believe that for a traditional media company, an ideal mix is a combination of editorial and community. It's what I call "curated community." We want our readers to come in and talk about a topic. Our goal is to have an editorial voice but at the same time intertwine the community's opinion. Quality community is very much the way our sites are going, allowing user-generated content to bring people into the story. We strive for two-way communication, and we're getting better and better at that. At the end of the day, it makes the content richer, it brings people back more often and it adds to the editorial content that's already been developed by our editors. That's something that advertisers are happy to put their brands against."
On the melding of TV and newspaper:
"We used to see our newspaper and our TV businesses as very different businesses with different distribution and completely different business models. Five years ago, Websites were only about text and graphics but now have video. So the intersection of broadcast and newspapers is here. People still see these as two very different industries, but the fact is they seek the same audience and produce the same kind of content. We send out our newspaper reporters with not only a pen and paper, but now with a still camera or video camera."
On the outlook for traditional media companies:
"I'm often the guy who's screaming to traditional media folks: ‘You got to change your ways -- now!' Most traditional media companies have been focused on meeting their quarterly earnings targets, but I believe they've been doing that at the risk of sacrificing the future of their business. It's only in recent years that the media companies have begun to endure additional risk and begun to make significant investments on the Web. You have to be ahead of the curve…"
What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below.
This TechScout article is part of a new series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view others in the TechScout series.
TechScout: Getting the Kind of Online Metrics That Advertisers Need
(Annette Moser-Wellman) – We've all seen the stats. Online news is growing in popularity. But what do commonly-available usage statistics really tell us about the attitudes and behaviors of consumers on a news site? Wouldn't you love to have a deeper understanding of your online users? Better data to share with your advertisers? The future of online measurement is changing and Susan Hickey, Chief Marketing Officer of Nielsen Online explained to me some of the opportunities and barriers in the world of online measurement.
"We have a lot of metrics about how consumers use the Web, but when you are thinking about brand impact or consumer involvement you want to be thinking about the quality, not just the quantity. We are spending a lot of time working with clients to define engagement metrics, which may differ by industry – for example, e-commerce, media, health and consumer packaged goods," she said.
"As the Web has quickly become a communication platform for individuals, we are working to measure and analyze the impact of these consumer conversations…Who are the influentials? How does our overall online strategy work within CRM strategy? How is consumer generated media impacting our brand equity? Social networks and blogs have become the world's largest focus group," she said.
This type of consumer understanding is what advertisers are going to be looking for across the three screens of computer, television and mobile. As users consume content across platforms, measurement is going to have to merge across platforms.
Susan explains: "Advertisers don't want to differentiate between a TV campaign, an online campaign or a mobile campaign. It's all got to work together and so the metrics will have to work together. The questions they will ask are, ‘Am I reaching an incremental audience across these platforms? Or is it just the same audience in three difference places?'"
Measuring mobile content usage presents its own set of challenges. With the lack of standards in cell phone technology, it's tricky to build a software meter that translates across operating systems.
"Our clients see cell phones as a big area for growth and opportunity. Relative to other market sizes, cell phone penetration is high for things like texting and voice, but how people actually use it for content is not clear. Mobile content is still in its very early stages and will be a big growth area in the future, especially because of the global nature of it."
She noted that developing meaningful Internet metrics has always been a challenge.
"When Nielsen started measuring television 50 plus years ago, a handful, not even a handful, of networks were measured. But since Day One on the Internet, there have been potentially hundreds of thousands of sites to measure," she said.
Getting a clear picture of the who, how and why of online activity is a daunting task fraught with complications. How do you correct for traffic data without duplicating the same user from two different PC's? How do you deselect the activity of bots and crawlers? How do you use US panel data when you realize it isn't going to represent visitors coming from in around the world?
As online ad spending continues to increase relative to traditional media, these measurement questions take on a new urgency. More and more advertisers want to understand their return on investment. And they have high expectations. The Web is seen as so inherently measurable that it makes measuring the medium even more challenging.
"There are almost limitless numbers of data sets that you can get to - whether you use them to monetize your site, understand your consumers or benchmark against competitors. So establishing measurement standards, while supporting ongoing innovation, will be the key issue for the online advertising industry going forward. It's going to take the understanding and agreement of publishers, agencies and the research companies to come up with the right set of metrics we can all agree upon," Susan told me.
Even still, Nielsen is making significant strides in measurement of online video. The growth projections for both online video consumption and video advertising revenue are significant and advertisers want to know more about consumer behaviors. Nielsen's VideoCensus product combines panel and server research methodologies to provide an accurate count of viewing activity and engagement with in-depth demographic reporting.
And what they are learning about consumers is eye-opening. For example, online video watching by women tends to be more network television segments, yet men skew toward more consumer generated content. And, Susan said, "There is now a mini-prime time at work between 12:00 - 2:00. People are catching up on what they may not have seen previously."
They are finding that network websites are destinations for fans to deepen their experience – they go to see favorite scenes, episodes and outtakes. These viewers are very loyal and engaged and the Website is a place to become immersed in the program.
By contrast, with shorter clips and a viral nature, consumer generated media sites are much more about discovery and consumers are likely to view content on more than one.
Susan expects a balance will occur in measurement between the quantity of users and the quality of the content experience. In the future, there will be ways to measure the consumer engagement of a social networking function or a blog.
So accurate measurement may still lag behind adoption of technology, and certainly advertising, in many ways. But you can take comfort that someday and maybe even soon, you'll be able to get a bit closer to the who, how and why of your Website user. And won't your advertisers like that!
What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below.
This TechScout article is part of a new series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view others in the TechScout series.
Hanley Wood's "Idea Factory": An innovation process that delivers
(Stacy Lynch) -- Talk to any media executive and it isn't long before the discussion turns to how to generate new ideas for revenue, audience and product portfolio growth. It seems everyone is on their way to, or are back from, an off-site brainstorming session. So, why is it so hard to find companies with a real pipeline of good ideas that actually get to market?
We took a look at one company that's succeeding at innovation: Hanley Wood, which focuses on the housing industry and is one of the 10 largest business-to-business publishers. A look through the company's recent history shows a series of product launches across media. Since the start of the year - and amid the worst housing market in decades - they launched an online video platform channel, Architect TV (part of Build TV), Ecohome magazine and the companion ecohomemagazine.com. The company's $250 million in total revenue for 2007 included 50 percent growth in its online revenue line.
(Hanley Wood's CEO Frank Anton will share the secrets of Hanley Wood's approach at MMC's upcoming Newspaper Change Seminar June 16-19.)
The Hanley Wood portfolio has grown to 30 print titles with a network of companion websites; Build TV, an online video platform; e-build.com, a building products sourcing website; web video/webinar products; more than a dozen e-newsletter products – and that's just in their publishing division. They also have a conference and event division, a market intelligence division and a full-service marketing division.
How have they managed to find and develop so many new ideas? By building ideation into the core of the company's culture and developing a disciplined process for making those efforts smarter.
"Since 1994 we have a rolling three-year plan for the company that's built from the bottom up," said CEO Frank Anton. "It's formalized in an annual meeting called, ‘The Idea Factory.'"
Created in 2002, the Idea Factory is the brainchild of Peter Goldstone, president of Hanley Wood Business Media. "I decided to exploit the culture that was already in place but I wanted something that was more far-reaching and that involved a broader range of people."
The Idea Factory concept is simple: bring together a wide variety of talent to focus on the company's greatest areas of opportunity. Use the collective expertise of the room and across the company to identify, explore and vet ideas with the end result being a short list of ideas that the senior leadership can quickly act upon.
Anton and Goldstone have learned as they went and consider these elements essential:
You must have a long-term vision for your strategy.
Areas considered likely high-potential zones should be targeted in advance and brainstorming should focus there.
Metrics for success must be made clear from the start.
Idea proponents deserve quick responses (yes/no).
Each idea that gets the nod for development needs a champion responsible for owning it.
The value of their approach is clear. Since its inception, 63 ideas have been implemented, bringing in $88 million in new revenue since 2002. (Recently, Anton was named one of BtoB Media Business magazine's top innovators of 2008.)
"It's the most important thing we do each year," said Goldstone. "Think about how empowering it is to have an idea from any level of the organization acted on."
Leadership has to be prepared for a big commitment, Anton said. "It's the resolve to change and grow that really leads to success."
How it works
The structure and emphasis of the Idea Factory process varies each year and has evolved since its inception.
"In the early years we started with a clean slate. As we've become more sophisticated about where we want to take the company, we've become more focused on specific areas each year," said Goldstone.
One Idea Factory process developed by Boiling Point, a branding and innovation consultancy, demonstrates the discipline Goldstone suggests. Prior to the meeting, senior leaders identify seven areas of focus they believe have the greatest potential. They also develop specific criteria the ideas will be measured against. These could include timeframe for launch, minimum revenue requirements, maximum capital investment required and fit with core business strategies.
"This isn't a completely democratic process," said Goldstone. "We take into account all the ideas that people want to pursue and then top management thinks about which of those fit with the long-term strategy of the company."
Then a broad cross-section of the company is invited to the Idea Factory off-site retreat.
"The goal is to keep it very simple and engaging so that participants aren't encumbered by the process at all. It is a creative and empowering experience for the participants but at the same time it is very, very serious work," said Boiling Point's Founder and Creative Director Jerry Shrair. Among Shrair's tips for successful innovation meetings:
Avoid onerous pre-work or lengthy kick-off presentations – cover key facts, core assumptions and goals beforehand.
Broaden the diversity of people taking part to achieve a richer set of possible ideas.
Keep the process focused, fast-paced and highly interactive.
Create an efficient process to review and rank ideas leading to a set of "finalists."
Build and communicate a specific follow-up plan.
The morning session of an Idea Factory workshop is spent brainstorming against the seven opportunity areas. Participants are led through a variety of creative exercises that help spark ideas. Boiling Point's process is fast and intense, yielding 30-50 ideas before lunch. In the afternoon session, the group breaks into seven teams, each focused on one of the seven opportunity areas. Each team combines and further develops what they believe are the most promising ideas coming out of the morning session, bearing in mind the success criteria already established. They create a set of "semi-finalist" ideas. At the close of the workshop each team presents their ideas to the entire group.
It's what comes next that distinguishes the Hanley Wood process from most others.
The night after the workshop, Boiling Point posts all of the semi-finalist ideas on the password-protected web site. All meeting participants, as well as selected others throughout the company, then vote anonymously for the ideas they consider most promising based on the success criteria.
The result is list of three to five ideas that are put up for funding consideration. Both Anton and Goldstone emphasize the importance of taking action on those ideas very quickly.
"The worst thing in the world is not knowing if an idea has a yes or no," said Anton. "So, within weeks or months you get a clear answer. You know very quickly if your idea has made the grade."
"A lot of the challenge that I have as an executive who values this kind of work is making sure that there's the right kind of follow-up afterward," said Goldstone. "I want to know that there's a champion behind the idea and an action plan to follow up."
The culture component
Both executives emphasized that having a company culture that values innovation, change and growth is essential to the success of the Idea Factory.
"I think you really have to know what kind of company you are," said Goldstone. "You can't say you value ideas if you're not ready to invest in them. You run the risk of introducing a program and then not supporting it, which creates a lot of cultural anxiety. If you really do value organic growth then you have to walk the walk a little bit. And it's totally fine to say you're not that kind of company. It doesn't make you a bad company, it just means you shouldn't waste your time on this kind of work."
Leaders want that drive for growth and change to show through in every aspect of the business, including its hiring practices. "The people we want are ambitious, they want to make things happen," said Anton. "We don't hire people who want to do the same thing in five years. We tell people when we interview them that if you want to do the same thing forever, don't work here."
As Goldstone puts it: "Hanley Wood wouldn't be Hanley Wood without ideation."
What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below.
Stacy Lynch is an independent consultant based in San Antonio, Texas. She focuses on customer insight and innovation research. Lynch teaches in the Media Management Center's Newspaper Change and Digital Strategies for Media Executives seminars. She is also directing the MMC seminar "Beyond Commodity: Customer-Focused Strategy for Digital Media."
(Annette Moser-Wellman) -- I visited the Newseum in Washington DC, a permanent new museum dedicated to the role of news in our culture. Beautiful building and some great exhibits. But one exhibit (for which you had to pay $8) was called "Be a TV Reporter." It involved standing behind a large television camera, talking into a microphone while reading a script from a teleprompter. My first thought was, "Couldn't we get a bit more up-to-date on the art of reporting?" Surely gathering and distributing the news has evolved since ancient times of one person behind one camera?
I recently interviewed Max Haot from Mogulus. Talk about a new way to gather and distribute news. Mogulus is a company that enables you to produce your own 24/7 TV channel and broadcast it via the Web. Mogulus provides the tools so that you can broadcast live from a camera anywhere and then mix in live reporting with video from a play list of many online sources, develop a storyboard, customize your graphics and even invite others to collaborate live with you.
Mogulus currently has more than 60,000 producers online, creating and managing these channels. They are growing by 300 channels every day -- many of them run by media companies, including newspapers. But anyone can create and produce a channel.
Haot explains it like this: "TV is, most of the time, a pre-recorded scheduled broadcast that everyone watches together - synchronized. When there is a breaking event in the world or a scheduled live show, it can go live. If a Web producer wanted to do that, she would need to buy a lot of broadcast equipment, create a traditional channel and encode it for the Internet. We democratize the tools TV stations have access to and put them into a network- based platform – a Flash-based studio -- that allows anyone to do exactly the same thing on the Internet."
Haot said The Indianapolis Star puts its latest clips on Mogulus software and schedules them just like a TV station. If there is a live event, the Star reporters break in and broadcast it to thousands on their Website, with the use of a camera and a wireless connection. When reporters live-streamed a press conference with Hillary Clinton and the paper's editorial board, it wasn't just a Webcast followed by a blank screen. The live segment rolled into the existing video the Star had on its Mogulus player - snappy graphics and all.
This ability to host a 24-hour video feature on a site provides a lot of novelty for the viewer. They know that there will be new content there, already selected for them. Haot believes there is a place for what he calls ‘linear TV' on the Web vs. the on-demand video we are used to from the YouTubes of the world. Just like in your living room, sometimes consumers want to have a place where you can kick back and be passive. You don't always want to interact and troll for what you want on the Web. Mogulus channels help you watch a source you know and trust who has done the selection for you and may even break in live occasionally. For example,NLL (National Lacrosse league) puts clips into a Mogulus player and refreshes them regularly. They are generating 10 times more views by featuring 24-hour video than they were featuring on-demand video alone. Just one more way for a media company to enhance the offerings it provides its users online.
So the Newseum is right. Anyone can be a TV reporter. But what's really amazing is that with the tools available on the Internet, you can be a TV producer too.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below.
This TechScout article is part of a new series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view others in the TechScout series.
TechScout: Microsegmentation And the Opportunity Under Your Nose
(Annette Moser-Wellman) -- If you have a presence on the Web, your most pressing concern should be consumer engagement. How do you get people coming back again and again and remaining interested and involved? Wetpaint's Ben Elowitz has some ideas.
Consumers come to Wetpaint, a free wiki service, choose a template and build their own forums, from fan sites to hobby clubs. Since Wetpaint started in June of 2006, it has grown to host 700,000 user-generated sites. Elowitz credits the success of Wetpaint to one of the benefits of the Web 2.0 movement: microsegmentation.
Elowitz told me, "What we've found is there's a whole other category of media the Web enables which is more topic-focused. People are using technology to create a kind of replacement for the traditional magazine. They're looking at all sorts of new resources, opinion and information that they're able to share with others who care about the same topics."
Wikis deliver the consumer engagement we want because they pinpoint the passionate interests of users. Wetpaint sees its task as expanding the amount of content available about those interests through social publishing. But what's really surprising, and instructive to any media company, is that what started as a service for individuals is now delivering big value to media brands – especially in the television industry.
Wetpaint has more than 60 corporate sponsorships – companies that use Wetpaint's technology to create their own branded fan sites. These sites are hosted by Wetpaint and also embedded on corporate sites.
"Companies like Discovery Channel, American Express Publishing and Meredith want to build socially published properties around their existing published titles to encourage engagement and extend reach," he said. "Discovery Channel has a show called Mythbusters. There are only so many myths that they can test every week on one episode, so many times a year. But if they can engage their fans to start sharing what their fans know, it becomes an opportunity to build an even larger content page and extend the brand to become more powerful."
CBS is also looking outside to handle this social publishing function; a favorite is their crime show CSI. The official CSI wiki, hosted by Wetpaint, has more than 4,000 user-generated pages. That's engagement. Here fans embed their favorite clips, create their own custom episode guides and post their ideas, all in a dynamic forum.
This kind of partnership can be a double hit for a television company: no development costs to build the technology and new ways to capture incremental revenue. Within four to fourteen days, companies can partner with Wetpaint to create a wiki. Companies like Wetpaint handle everything from custom development to site moderation and search engine optimization. Partners can cross-promote within the network of Wetpaint's 700,000 user-generated sites. Interestingly 50% of the traffic on a Wetpaint wiki is generated from outside the partner's own network, Elowitz said.
Entertainment is where most of the wiki action is right now. Wetpaint's most trafficked topics are music, television and games. Halo 3 is a hot site. "People are posting everything from basic chat, to cheat codes, to their play videos and new narratives of the game," Elowitz said. This is called fan-fiction and has become an explosive area in social publishing as well.
It makes sense for a media company to ask itself, "What entertainment topics might my audience be uniquely passionate about?"
This ability to engage users around smaller segments of interest on the Internet is not new. Elowitz talked about the New York Times' investment in about.com, with 40,000 topic-focused sites that are all about microsegmented interests.
"When they bought about.com for $400 million, a huge investment, everyone thought they were crazy. Now it's worth well over $1 billion out of their roughly $5 billion market cap," he said.
What is thought-forward about Wetpaint is the ability to engage consumers more intimately in the process and provide templates to enable them to create their own sites and populate them with their own material. Wetpaint has category editors that act as ‘curators' and frame topic areas and let the audience build out the content.
Elowitz believes microsegmentation is fueled by the wide availability and popularity of bite-sized content. He notes the trend of dividing existing video content into smaller clips.
"Even folks who use Twitter are consuming teeny-tiny little snippets," he said. "The content is not as cumbersome to produce because it's smaller and can be distributed one-to-one so that if I have something valuable, it can be matched to someone who wants to find it. It's a ‘liquid distribution' market now that can match the producers and consumer of content on a micro-macro level.
"I love to think about what we do at Wetpaint as synthesis. We take all the little micro-contributions to make something bigger and that's beautiful because content is so much more valuable when it's in context."
At a recent Digital Strategies Conference at the Media Management Center, one public relations executive showcased the success of one of its microsegment sites: a place for people to post pictures of their mustaches!
So what microsegments are sitting under your nose that you've yet to serve?
What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below.
This TechScout article is part of a new series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view others in the TechScout series.
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