Short is free – the long tail version

Bill Wasik, flash mob trailing behind him, rambled, you know,  through an interview with Big Think that touches on music, viral video, short news content, the Kindle,  and, you know,  BuzzFeed.  He seems to come to the reluctant conclusion that short forms of content – read this “written” in this case – will always be, you know,  free.  He can’t seem to come up with a cogent argument for why the pay wall won’t work, though.

Well, you know, maybe I can help him. 

He touches on two things that really are, you know, salient in making the argument;

1.  The long tail, and the argument that people will tend to segment the infinite variety of content available on the web in a way that is pleasing to them.

2.  His term “relentless distraction” and his argument that the infinite choices available lead toward short term thinking and obsessive surfing around meaningless things.

These two conditions will cause, in my view, a premium to be earned for quality content delivered in short, readable, bites.  Just like the New York Times on Twitter, which is now a prolific headline engine, the money may not be made on the clicks.  It is much more likely to be made on the tailoring of content to the user’s profile.  And here we are back to the argument that Twitter, Facebook, Amazon et al know everything about us already and we give it to them willingly!

Now that businesses and news outlets have discovered Twitter, and its great capacity as a search engine, they will develop increasingly sophisticated and creative means to tease us with headlines and links that lead to their advertiser supported wonderland.  It’s really about breaking through the clutter with a relevant message.

I think Wasik is right on one other point as well.  He glorifies the Kindle as a device that allows the user to, you know, sit there and read “in a more leisurely way to things that you picked up for yourself”  because it is not connected to the internet.  I agree that consumers will seek “off line” time to consume content that they have chosen, whether it is music, video, writing, or you know, their own word documents.

Hulu Hoops – more like the HulA Hoop?

The gist of Peter Kafka’s interview article in All Things Digital (10/28/09) is that CBS Television hasn’t joined the digital convergence party –yet, and they may be acting like a dinosaur for doing so.  Just look at Hulu, he infers, started by some big networks and movie distributors as a bulkhead against the eventual demise of their over the air channels, and DVD distribution schemes.  And now they are talking about charging for it?  Will this be real, or just a passing fad, like the Hula Hoop?

 Paying for content.  Hmmm, seems like we have all been doing that since the dawn of cable television.  Back when we had four channels, and the FCC really controlled bandwidth, content providers had a pretty straightforward answer – pitch it to the networks and survive.  If they don’t buy it, you lose.  Cable, along with cheaper and quicker means of content creation and distribution began the revolution that is now on the doorstep of joining the internet with television and possibly spelling the demise of over the air (and free) broadcasting.

 Seems to me content creators fall into a continuum from the skateboarding dog citizens with a cheap camera and access to YouTube to the sophisticated studios producing Made for Cable movies and series that are now available on Hulu as well.  Good commercial content will draw an audience and really good content will potentially command a premium price from advertisers and viewers. 

 This leaves documentarists and public access creators to search for outlets and several have sprung up.  Vimeo is a fine example, and a shelter for serious content from the Wild West of YouTube.  It offers free space for those on a shoestring budget, but also makes additional bandwidth available to storytellers for a comparatively modest “pro” subscription.  This may not be the terminal market entry for web storytellers, but it is gathering creators and audience and is a credible alternative to TV-ized players like Hulu and the cable companies.  Public Broadcasting will also have to struggle to stay relevant, but the government will likely make sure it stays alive to provide public access to information.  Serious storytellers, Ken Burns for example,  have always had a market in public television.

A picture is worth a thousand characters

Our charge is to answer “If the currency of storytelling is text, where do pictures come in?”  And there are a couple of subsets – how does the web interface impact the user experience and what other modalities besides photo, video, graphics, etc. will work in storytelling?

I would prefer to turn the phrase upside down – Pictures are the currency of storytelling – words are secondary.

Perhaps the first cartoonists were also storytellers, using cave paintings to share the conquest of a mastodon, or a neighboring village.  You don’t need a written language to share a story this way, and your audience would certainly understand the drawings when framed by the words of the storyteller.  I think they are every bit as relevant today, and really aren’t degraded by the user interface – iPhone or bigscreen, they are scalable.  Gary Larson even took us back to those early days of storytelling with a number of panels that interpreted cave life in his own unique way.

And, who hasn’t read The New Yorker for the cartoons?  I have always been drawn to editorial cartoons as a form of brief storytelling.  They don’t need to have the political bent of some newspaper cartoonists, but they uniformly comment on our lives, our aspirations, our fears, or just give us pause to chuckle at ourselves.  This is an old line magazine, born in the 1920’s.  Yes, they are facing the same fate as other printed forms of communication, but there is a real energy at the New Yorker.com to embrace the social media forms as well.  There is no doubt that the cartoons will still be shown adjacent to the good writing we can expect from the New Yorker, but there is also a real emphasis on the cartoon staff and their craft.  Here are two cases in point that celebrate the medium and invite audience participation and sharing.

The caption contest:

Create your own cartoon

This feature has a great opportunity to share socially through submission and voting – it’s apparently getting some traction – this contest, which closes on Nov. 22, has  had 300 entries.  And, if you really like your submission or someone else’s, you can create an e-card and send it to a friend.  Of course the New Yorker captures your information for future reference.

My version of the future – digital media literacy

We hear a lot about how today’s generation of college students are more attuned to the electronic media than any other generation, we see the evidence around campus – Facebook and Twitter in class, smart phones, video posted to YouTube and other social networks.  And yet, there is something missing.

Digital media literacy.

We are educating a generation that uses language in short bursts – 140 character tweets, the slang of text messaging, emails with sparse explanation, and a lack of grammar that traces to the demise of all the white-haired English teachers now retired from the K-12 system.  But there is also a rising trend of good storytelling in the visual media.  J-schools teach video production and how to bring a story to life through slide talks.

My dream is to integrate a higher level of digital media literacy into the curriculum so that every undergraduate has a chance to experience visual storytelling as well as good writing.  Many, I believe, will embrace this new way of communicating.  They will use it in presentations to demonstrate their knowledge of a subject, in sharing their research findings and in group problem solving and team building.  As Clay Shirky says “perhaps the most significant effect of our new tools lies in the increased leverage they give the most connected people”. (Here Comes Everybody p.225). 

By embracing digital communication (not just networking) the students we educate today will be much better prepared to lead groups that will take action to make changes in society in the future. They will also present a valuable new skill set to prospective employers looking for collaborative and creative team members. And, they will bring us innovations in the way news is shared, organizations are managed, and the economy functions.

As an educational community we need embrace the change,  provide a platform to experiment with freedom to fail,  and to hone the skills that will create better leaders in the future.

Times embraces multimedia, video features share the spotlight

seattletimes.com multimedia reporting

This is not the type of headline that would have appeared in the Seattle Times a year ago.  The paper is over a hundred years old, and has just recently begun to embrace multimedia as a medium for reporting and feature writing.  Frankly, they are still sputtering a bit. At least one producer (reporter) from the paper is sharing the newfound information with others.  As I posted a few weeks ago, Tiffany Campbell from the Times presented on the use of Flip cameras in reporting at the Online News Association’s 2009 conference held in September.  The mantra is “good enough”, and that is a repetitive theme in all things social media these days.  So, I took a look at some of the Times video reporting. Here are some thoughts:

• Video is hard to find on the Times homepage – it is well down the scroll, and sandwiched in with AP video and moving photo galleries that you have to stop to click through.

• The video ads at the beginning of each story get annoying after awhile – maybe they should add an opt-out feature.  At least the featured story on the video page is ad free.

• Quite a bit of content is now in their filmstrip approach.  89 videos since July.  It will soon be time for a search feature.

• Content ranges from features, like the senior salons, to political action (McGinn interview, small business owners on healthcare) to the quirky (pumpkin tossing) so there is a nice balance of subject matter.

• Biggest trouble I found is that the videos don’t load well – They really have to  make this seamless if they want to play in the multimedia world!

So, how does this add to the paper’s mission of delivering the news and enhancing the public’s right to know?  At least the dotcom version of the paper is trying new things and empowering reporters to tell stories in a visual form.  Lots of times it really enhances the viewer experience and opens a lens to something that television news is not covering any more – maybe that is the lasting value here.

Argument? What argument?

Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired magazine, is a major proponent of the value of “free” in today’s digital marketplace.  His book Free: the Future of a Radical Price, sets out the basic arguments.  In the digital economy, pricing will gravitate toward free in three areas of the web based world, storage, processing power and  bandwidth.  And, when prices hit zero, extraordinary things begin to happen. He postulates that companies ought to be able to make huge amounts of money “around” the free thing – google gives away search and makes money on advertising, for example.

MALCOLM GLADWELL

In an article for the New Yorker, reviews “Free” and takes issue with Anderson’s use of YouTube as an example of the power of making money around what is free (downloads in this case). 

Gladwell’s point – YouTube has never made a profit.  He makes additonal points that consumers are flooding YouTube with content, it will never make up in advertising revenue what it has to pay to serve the millions of downloads requested by users every minute.  And, that YouTube has to pay for “premium” content from professional producers to attract advertisers.  He also makes points about the pharmaceutical industry and power producers and closes with the argument that the New York Times gives away its content for free on its website, but the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privelege of reading online.

One wonders, has he looked at the advertising on the Times website, or stopped for a minute to consider how much the Times received for selling his contact information or reading habits to their advertisiers?

Gladwell ultimately agrees with one of Anderson’s arguments – the one that seems to run through all four of these authors -  that there “IS” money to be made around the stuff you are giving away for free.

“Broadcast television – the original practitioner of free – is struggling.  But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine.  Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itelf (stuff)”.

SETH GODIN

The master proponent of tribalism in the marketplace is a bit more pointed in his entry into this debate.  His blog post is titled “Malcolm is Wrong”.  He is also brief and to the point:  People will pay for content so unique they can’t get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people. 

What I glean from this is that there are ways for brands, in what he terms the “attention economy”  to embrace Free as a relatively cheap way to get attention.  In many ways it is an “attention deficit” economy – if you don’t get attention, you lose.  But, brands that get attention, relate to their customers, and provide value can be big winners by thinking more broadly about the opportunities to provide stuff-around-the-stuff.

MARK CUBAN

And then there is Mr. Entrepreneur who picks up on one of Anderson’s claims that the music business is a prime example of the value of free.  

“The future of content outside the music industry is exactly what you are now seeing inside the music industry – First they cut the size of their organizations to the bone,  then they learn to work with the artists and those willing to pay for music in some form (CD, download, concert, licensing etc).

And they adopt the position – you can have it for free, if that’s how you want it, but you have to come get it where we want you to get it – on our websites. He admonishes marketers to follow the principle “free, but never freely distributed.”

 

So what is the upshot of all this posturing?  It isn’t really an argument. They all agree, at least in part, with Chris Anderson’s point that great opportunities can be created by creating ways to make money around the free stuff that is given away. 

Wait a minute!  This technique has been practiced in retail for decades!  Anderson uses the example of King Gillette, giving away the razor to stimulate sales of disposable blades in 1903 as part of his 2/23/08 post Free! Why $0.00 is the future of business. 

Why is there so much attention being paid to the overtures of Microsoft and Google in negotiations with Twitter?  Because Twitter has access to huge amounts of information that can be translated into buyer preferences, buying habits and consumer confidence in brands – they have a mountain of valuable information created by a free service.

ONA: Good enough video

Wouldn’t have seen this a year ago – great presentation (on video) about how journalists can and should embrace video creation using the Flip camera for their stories. Taught by Tiffany Campbell, senior producer, Seattle Times.com.

Com 597b Group project thoughts

Sitting in class on Thursday night, I was struck by the large number of my classmates who had just come to Seattle from somewhere else – many within days of the start of the Quarter. So here is my proposal for a group project theme:

Home

What is home? How do we know we are home? Is home where you are, or a secure base that isn’t placebound? I’m sure that in a class of 27 there are 27 definitions. The word home is also a metaphor for all kinds of feelings that people express. “I didn’t feel at home in that company”. “You can’t go home again”. “He was safe at home”. “I feel at home here”. On the other side of the coin, there is the concept of home-less. “He was a man without a country”. “People in Nicklesville just want to have a home while rebuilding their lives”. “Habitat for Humanity builds homes to give people in need a new start”.

So, how could we build categories to narrow the definitions into a set of stories that could be told in 90 sec. and, without titles or credits might fit together into a set of chapters without beginning or end? How about:

Home as a place
Home as a feeling
Homelessness
How people define ‘home’
Types of homes-people, animals, fish???
The power of home games (12th man)
How does it feel to be in a new home

Let your mind wander – what do you think about when you say “home”?

Viral Video – new wave in branding?

Advertising Age has just completed a two part look into the world of viral video as a branding tool, citing examples from Samsung and Cadbury.
Matt Cutler, VP of Visible Measures reports that the company is working with several brands and a new set of metrics that are leading the way toward making digital storytelling a compelling new channel for branding.

What’s interesting to me here is that his measurement company is using terms like digital storytelling and “new narrative constructs, new narrative formats – designed with the social web in mind”, and is advising clients to use all of the tools of social networks -commenting, user generated content, authentic hd video, to help support the storytelling. As taught in MCDM, storytelling is the basis for digital communication. As advertising expenditures decline, and audiences gain more control of the message, I suspect we will begin to see more creative approaches like these!

I have bookmarked the story on delicious

Finally! Social Media Ad metrics!

Our friends at MediaPost just celebrated the IAB’s publication of a set of definitions for social media ad metrics. Pretty groundbreaking stuff. Catherine Taylor’s post is cautiously optimistic on the changing world of social media and how to measure the effectiveness of conversations.

This world is all so new, and things are happening so fast, it is really hard to keep up – glad I don’t have a bottom-line driven product to flog at the moment!

Here is the IAB’s set of definitions to read, archive, and try out.