Author Archives: Paul

Panel: Community is Content

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Venture capitalist Esther Dyson

MediaPost assembles a panel of a dozen experts to discuss the future of media. They include top editors, marketers, regulators and technologists. While there’s no single conclusion to this long and varied discussion, the group agrees that marketers’ focus is shifting away from content and toward audience. Publishers who attract the right audience – in whatever medium – will win.

Technology enables those audiences to be smaller and more focused than in the past. There is nearly unlimited opportunity to define and attract these new groups online. As a result, the group agrees that it’s a great time to be a publishing entrepremeur. They point to sites like Dopplr and yappr as examples of new Web 2.0 ventures that creatively combine member contributions in ways that amplify the value of the group. This community publishing model has explosive potential, they believe.

An example of this is Mint , a site that tracks personal spending and compares it to that of other members. A couple of the panelists think this is a great example of a new form of publishing in which the value is derived from the collective. “I now have the tools to figure out whether you really are giving me a better deal, because if you try to give me a worse deal, the Mint analysis tools are going to show I’m actually paying a higher percentage rate,” says Esther Dyson. “So it’s going to force vendors to offer better deals.”This kind of innovation almost necessarily comes from entrepreneurs and small businesses, not from large companies, panelists agree. “It is almost impossible to change human behavior. And when someone drives to the top of the big company…it’s very hard for them to incorporate new ideas,” says Brian Napack, president of Macmillan.

Much of the discussion centers on the future of newspapers. While there’s no consensus on where the business is going. everyone agrees that the economics of mass distribution are becoming irrelevant. “A newspaper is going to kind of bifurcate into, on the one hand, a magazine with pictures, perhaps, and then something online where the news is actually up to date, and where you get news that’s tailored for you,” Dyson says. “I want to know what’s happening in my own neighborhood. I want to know which of my friends broke up and that belongs online, because the economics of mass distribution doesn’t make sense.”

Tip of the Week: Sxipper

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Do you get tired of constantly filling in Web forms in order to join groups or download information?  I reached my limit long ago, and have been using a $40 utility called Roboform to automatically fill forms and save passwords. Now there’s an open-source alternative. Sxipper (pronounced “Skipper”) is a Firefox plug-in that remembers your personal information and logons. It also learns from the experiences of other users so that it can fill out non-standard forms. Sxipper is free. If it’s as good as my early tests indicate, it may soon make Roboform history on my PCs.

Social Network Adoption Races Ahead

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Awareness, Inc., which has been in the social media software market for several years, has just come out with a new research report on enterprise adoption of Web 2.0. There are some interesting findings that I wanted to share with you. You can download the entire report after filling out a short registration form.

My basic take-away is that social media tools are ripping through the enterprise with amazing speed. Whether used internally, externally with open enrollment or externally with invitation-only enrollment, social networks are proliferating as business tools. Some highlights:

  • The number of organizations that allow employees to use social networks for business purposes has increased dramatically to 69% in 2008 from 37% last year;
  • More than six in 10 companies are using social media to build and promote their brands, improve communication and increase consumer engagement;
  • There has been a fivefold increase in the percentage of employees who use popular social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn for business purposes, from 15% in 2007 to 75% this year;
  • While only a tiny percentage of organizations are currently using internal communities, one in three plans to use them in the future;
  • A quarter of respondents say their companies are planning to deploy external-facing communities, which is double last year’s total;
  • Some 37% of organizations plan to focus communities on specialty areas where they can provide focused business value;
  • More than 40% of respondents report using one or more of the following tools: user groups, tags, communities, blogs, social networking and videos;
  • The most popular internal tools are social networks, blogs and wikis, with adoption rates of between 50% and 55%;
  • Seven in 10 respondents say their companies plan to deploy external blogs.
One of the most notable trends this research reveals is the rapid acceptance of social networking not only for marketing and customer support, but also for employee communications. When you consider that Facebook was barely known outside of the academic realm just two years ago, the acceptance of this technology for internal knowledge management is remarkable.

I’m also intrigued by the findings that seven in 10 businesses allow employees to use social media during business hours. This is a big change in corporate attitude. In the first couple of years of social media, businesses moved slowly to permit employees to speak outside the company walls. There were fears about people revealing company secrets or saying inappropriate things in public forums. Those fears appear to have largely melted away.

The lack of horror stories combined with the powerful utility of features likeLinkedIn’s Answers forum are clearly overwhelming these reservations. It turns out that when you give people the freedom to speak on behalf of the company and combine that freedom with clear guidelines about what’s appropriate to say, the vast majority do the right thing. This is inspiring and affirming. It may be an unanticipated benefit of social media acceptance, but it is a very welcome one.

Caveats: Any research conducted over the Internet needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The Awareness survey accumulated responses from 160 people, of whom 27.5% were from large companies and 40% were at a management level. Awareness says statistical accuracy is +/- 7%. Awareness also has a vested interest in promoting acceptance of social networks. However, the company used an independent research partner, Equation Research, to conduct the survey and I don’t think it has any incentive to fudge the results.

Use Social Media to Create Thought Leadership

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Social Media can make you a thought leader if you’re willing to put in the time and effort to share your expertise and connect with others. On Thursday, Sept. 25, I’ll be hosting a panel of four innovators who have successfully promoted their brands and themselves as opinion-leaders in their markets. They include speakers from the technology, business development and consumer markets. Register here and I hope to see you there!

Using Social Media to Catapult Your Company to Thought Leadership

Thought leaders capture a disproportionate share of their target markets. New ventures and companies introducing new products frequently struggle with the need to position themselves as thought leaders in emerging markets. In the old days, this meant begging media influencers to pay attention to often unknown firms. But times have changed. Today, businesses can take their messages directly to the Web using social media tools to achieve rapid awareness and legitimacy. The keys are to understand the options available to you, use them in the most effective manner and establish consistent metrics to measure success.

Featured speaker Paul Gillin offers guidance on choosing the best tools for the job and using free Web services to measure performance. Paul is the author of the critically acclaimed 2007 book The New Influencers and the forthcoming book Secrets of Social Media Marketing. Following his introduction, a panel of practitioners explains how they quickly gained traction in their markets by taking their message directly to customers and opinion leaders.

Participants:
Paul Gillin, Gillin Communications
John McArthur, Walden Tech Partners
Prat Moghe, Tizor.com
Jeremy Selwyn, Tacquitos.net
David Vellante, Wikibon.org

In Time for Playoffs, SkyBox Comes to iPod

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More than two years ago, I wrote about SkyBox, an innovative handheld computer that gives fans access to statistics, replays and even concession menus from their seats at a sporting event. I know that as a rabid baseball fan, I frequently want to see replays that the big board in the stadium doesn’t always oblige to show me.

Now, the producer, Vivid Sky, Inc., has announced SkyBox for the iPhone and iPod touch. SkyBOX Baseball offers on-demand video replays, real-time analytical stats on players and teams, in-depth player bios, current scoreboards, trivia, games and more goodies.

Fans in stadiums outfitted with the company’s proprietary SkyBox Stadium Technology can access video replays from multiple camera angles on-demand, view precise pitch and hit-tracker graphics and browse the team store, according to a press release. The iPod application costs $2.99 from

BTW, I’m not getting paid to promote this service. I just think it’s cool.

Freedom from Blogger

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Over the weekend, I completed my long-awaited move from Blogger to WordPress. There’s plenty of fine-tuning left to do – and I need to get rid of the hideous graphic in the header – but the transition went pretty smoothly.

I’ve been trying to get off of Blogger for about a year, but migration difficulties – in particular, the loss of link consistency – has frustrated me. With its release of version 2.6.2, WordPress has made migration almost one-button simple. Permalinks are still going back to the previous site template, but that’s an acceptable tradeoff for now to be free of the Blogger system.

I signed up for Blogger more than three years ago when I didn’t know any better. Since then, I’ve learned that blogging software can lock in a user almost as completely as any proprietary software. Because each publisher architects its service somewhat differently, migration has been a headache for years. WordPress is now resolving that problem to the point that moving to its platform no longer requires Herculean effort. I host four blogs on WordPress, with my main blog being the only exception.

Why had I grown frustrated with Blogger?

  • The selection of page templates is severely limited. I never found one I really liked. In contrast, there are thousands of free WordPress templates available. I’ve found many that I like.
  • I decided to host my blog on my own domain and use Blogger as an authoring system. This requires Blogger to FTP the files to my server, a process that had become frustratingly long and failure-prone as my site grew. Blogger offers an alternative to host your domain on its own servers for a fee, but since I was already paying a hosting service, this didn’t seem an attractive option.
  • Blogger has limited support for third-party widgets and plug-ins. WordPress has a vast library of them. This alone is enough reason to switch.
  • The Blogger content management system has far less flexibility than WordPress’, where you can customize almost anything.
  • I’ve found the results of Blogger’s “preview” function to have little to do with the resulting Web page. In contract, WordPress previews in the context of your chosen template.
  • WordPress has a function to automatically import Word documents. You still have to take out some code, but the process is pretty clean.

There are other reasons, but those are the big ones. For a basic one-button blog that’s drop-dead simple, Blogger is still a great option. But as you yearn to do more with your site, Blogger’s limitations become frustrating. Perhaps I will encounter some terrible problems in the next few days that force me to roll back, but for now, I’m enjoying the flexibility and open-source choice that WordPress provides.

Here’s a pretty good tutorial on how to make the switch.

The Case for Print

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In the publishing market for technology enthusiasts, print has almost evaporated. That’s what makes O’Reilly Media’s Make magazine so remarkable. Make was launched well after the destruction of the technology print media had already begun. The publishers thought there was value that print brought to their target audience of tinkerers that couldn’t be reproduced on a Web page. Not that the Internet isn’t important. In fact, most of Make‘s circulation development has been done on line. The publication also hosts a series of popular fairs where readers show off their inventions. But in a market that has largely turned up its nose at print, Make is a notable – and profitable – exception.

In this podcast, publisher and editor Dale Dougherty tells of the counter-intuitive wisdom that led to the creation of the Make brand. The speech is only 17 minutes long, but it will remind you of the value that print still brings to the publishing equation when applied sensibly.

Pet Owner Lookalikes

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While strolling through Pet Rock 2008, the annual festival in east-central Massachusetts that brings hundreds of dog owners together in a celebration of their pooches, I was struck by the old cliche that dog owners and their pets frequently look alike. I started snapping examples of where I thought that was true. While the cliche is by no means universally true, there are some striking similarities in some cases. Just for fun, here are a few examples.

Study Finds Rapid Enterprise Adoption of Social Networks

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New research funded by Awareness finds that Web 2.0 technologies are gaining rapid acceptance in enterprises and being combined with internal systems. I haven’t had a chance to read the full report yet, but you can download it here after filling out a short registration form (note, you may get a call from a sales rep later).

Here are highlights from a press release distributed today:

  • Employers are starting to allow social media participation more freely in their organizations: The number of organizations that allow social networking for business purposes has increased dramatically to 69 percent in 2008, up from 37 percent last year;
  • Employers are finding the benefits of using social media: 63 percent are using social media to build and promote their brand, 61 percent are using it to improve communication and collaboration, and 58 percent re using it to increase consumer engagement;
  • 75 percent of employees are already using social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn for business purposes, up 15 percent from 2007;
  • Use of internal-facing communities is on the rise with 6 percent of organization already reporting they deployed internal-facing communities, while 33 percent indicate their organization plans to implement internal-facing social media initiatives;
  • External-facing communities are increasing: 27 percent of respondents said their companies are planning to deploy external-facing communities while only 13 percent indicated their organizations already have external-facing communities;
  • Online communities directed at specific interests and groups of people allow for more targeted marketing techniques and better results so for this reason 37 percent of organizations have specific areas of focus for their communities;