Tag Archives: YouTube

Only The News That’s Fit to Publish

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It only takes a brief perusal of the assorted headlines, blog postings and tweets, to see just how much the news industry is struggling with disruptive technologies today.

In pondering all this, I am struck by the relationship between the inherent intervals of various technologies and the ‘newsiness’ of the news. ‘Bringing you breaking news’ has been a long-time value proposition of the news industry but I’m not so sure it can survive.

By way of example, my Twitter feed is truly real-time news. It updates by the second. So fast in fact that I can’t keep up. In many ways its my personally-defined CNN news ticker (even if many of the headlines are obtuse and the TInyURL links blind).

Facebook (as a stand-in for traditional social networks) seems to run at an update interval of ‘a few times a day’. It’s news is hyper-local to me – not geographically but socially. And let’s face it, in this day and age, geography matters less and less in terms of the people we feel connected to.

Blogging seems to walk the line between ‘a few times a day’ to ‘once daily’. The content tends to be longer and better reasoned. Blog topics can also be rather granular so I get a very concrentrated dose of a topic I am interested in.  In short, blog posts have a greater opportunity to be of higher quality than a tweet or even a Facebook update. I may not know the bloggers I follow (so they’re not as ‘local’) but I have chosen them because I like the way they think and write about the topics I am interested in. Often they also feel more ‘authentic’ because I assume (often incorrectly) that they are pro-am writers and not salaried corporate suits.

So in comparison to traditional news sources, Twitter is faster, Facebook is more ‘local’ and blogs have a higher perceived authenticity alongside longer, meatier content.

So what’s left for the commercial news industry to sell that these other guys don’t seem to be better at?

Here I’d point to the YouTube v. Hulu slugfest. While YouTube got a lot of hype (and market valuation) Hulu has actually made money, attracted advertising revenue and demonstrated a longer-term value proposition by focusing on professional calibre content.

Where YouTube saw the Internet as a social technology with media distribution capabilities, Hulu seems to see the Internet as a distribution system with social capabilities. This isn’t symantics, it’s carving out a competitive advantage.

What would happen if the news industry focused less on ‘breaking news’ and more on ‘quality news narratives’? What if the news industry gave up reliance on the audience for fast, endless soundbytes and headlines and focused on reasoned discussion, in-depth analysis and professionally-assembled details. These are all things professional news companies should be able to do better than the UGC set.

If you think about it, a lot of what defines today’s professional news leaders are the people offering the editorial. Think Fox news. Think the op-ed section of the Times. While neither Fox nor the Times can be as fast as twitter or as local as Facebook or as authentic and granularly focused on single topics as the pro-am bloggers I like, it can deliver a production quality and talent base these other media can’t. Plus they’ve got the credentials to get into the right rooms with the right people to tell many types of stories – political, business, celebrity – first-hand.

When Gutenberg invented movable type it enabled anyone to produce text. That didn’t mean everyone’s text was worth reading, only that it could be made and distributed. Music production software has done the same for music. So have Podcasting, camcorders, blogging software, Twitter, etc.

All of these technologies enable anyone to publish. What they don’t do is assure quality. Quite the contrary, they bury us all in a lot of crappy content. For every piece that goes viral, most go nowhere. And a lot of the ‘viral’ stuff is a blip on our radar that vanishes as quickly as it appears offering 15 minutes of fame and then a return to unpaid obscurity.

A professional news provider could still build its reputation on having the best imagery, the best produced video, the most reasoned, well-researched and articulated stories all presented by charismatic talent that resonates with an audience. This news provider would not replace my Twitter stream or my Facebook friends or my blog surfing, but it would be something that, when I got tired of the banality of everyday content, would be stimulating and remarkable.

Social media is a great equalizer – for good and bad. It is highly disruptive and the reality is, the available marketshare for professional news may shrink overall (just like most markets as they mature and consolidate). Some outfits will simply lose and disappear. Others will have to rethink their infrastructure from the ground up if they’re to keep the lights on and their employees paid. But among the millions churning out user generated content something professionally made and remarkable will always find an audience.

Despite our culture’s infatuation with all things user-generated, quality content will always provide value to a well-defined audience whose needs are being met. The trick then is to build a business that can efficiently create that quality content by leveraging all the tools available. Doing this may be ugly work, but such is the nature of adaption.

‘All the news that’s fit to print’ might still be a useful governing principle. The focus must change from ‘all’ (volume and speed) to ‘fit’ (quality and value) and not necessarily assume ‘print’.

Skittles – A Monochromatic Rainbow

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So why does the Skittle social media experiment feel more ‘media’ than ‘social’? It has all the ingredients du jour – FB, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter – yet it still doesn’t live up to the holy grail promise heralded by the pundits of Web 2.0.

Skittles’ association with rainbows is an interesting reference point here. There are two ways to think of rainbows. One is singular. A rainbow is a band with many colors. The second is to realize that a rainbow is a composite of many bands of light, all with their own characteristics.

It is between these two definitions that I see Skittle’s problem. Skittles.com has leveraged all the right technologies but is treating its audience like a singular thing.

The Skittle experience feels monochromatic. There’s no real sense of diversity or even humanity to it. In many ways, its the old ad agency model (‘be really funny and carpet bomb the media’) applied to today’s distribution channels of choice. Like TV, Skittles efforts feel more like a broadcast than a dialogue. The customer doesn’t figure into the equation much deeper than the polarities of comments. (“Skittles rule” and “Skittles suck” to save you all a bunch of time.)

Inherent in the brand is the concept of diversity – in colors, in flavors, even in varieties of Skittles – yet the message of Skittles.com and the assorted Skittles pages on the sites they’ve chosen, is largely generic, Madison Avenue TV fare.

In fact, the whole thing feels almost lazy. Like all they did was slap a (poorly placed and annoying immoveable) sticker over a bunch of sites with a default ‘skittles’ search in place.

Ultimately, Skittles is making a splash, not a connection. And when the splashes’ ripples fade (usually in the shadow of the next confectioner’s attempt to out-funny or out-Facebook their competitor) all that’s left is, well, nothing but a dormant list of 600K+ ‘friends’ and some dusty repurposed TV spots on YouTube.

For my part, if Skittles focused more on the ‘social’ and less on the ‘media’ piece their efforts would bear more (artificially flavored) fruit.

As a brand that could leverage concepts of diversity easily, Skittles could support expressions of art, writing, dance, music, fashion, etc. – through social strategies. I’m not talking about some ‘upload your favorite Skittle rap’ nonsense here. I mean going out into communities and finding and spotlighting diversity as it exists authentically here and now.

There are opportunities of tribalism and competition. There are mixes to be made. Matches to be hatched. Games to be played.

In fact Skittles, more than many confections, is tied to color, which in turn is connected to emotions, personalities, preferences, and entire chapters in psychology tomes.

With all the technological power to narrowslice, create art and build individual connections, why has Skittles opted for a monocrhomatic, Madison Avenue tactic distributed in social media?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Mistakes, Change, Trial & Error

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I have been reading a great book on the neuroscience behind decision making. I was reading that the brain likes to be right. It wants to predict outcomes. Dopamine secretion happens when events work according to the brain’s expectation (i.e. dopamine is a reward). The secretions stop or change when things don’t work as planned. This abrupt reduction in dopamine is experienced as a jarring change by the body. Here, the brain modifies its expectations to try and be right the next time (and to keep the dopamine flowing).

So it seems that the brain’s use of dopamine is tied to learning via trial and error. Mistakes, to the brain, are useful (and necessary) learning tools provided we choose to learn from them. In fact, this type of learning often gives rise to the ‘instinctual’ reactions well-experience professionals make in athletics, combat, or emergencies.

In thinking about this idea of learning from mistakes, I couldn’t help being reminded of the ‘Now Not New‘ concept I organize many of my own business perspectives on.

In business terms, ‘Now Not New’ is a revenue-centric outlook that leverages the trials and errors of those focusing on ‘new’ to provide real solutions ‘now’. By my way of thinking, pioneers take big risks, probe the unknown, and most often fail. For some people the high-risk excitment of being on the bleeding edge is a great motivator.  Certainly our culture’s willingness to reward those people with hype and praise adds to the appeal.

For businesses, these pioneers provide great learning that can be refined and redirected with a higher probability of tangible success (see my earlier bit on inventions). In this sense, businesses focused on ‘Now Not New’ may not get the first wave of buzz that pioneers attract, but they tend to make the money and build new business categories. Hulu is doing it now against YouTube. YouTube you’ll recall got a lot of hype and market valuation but still isn’t making anyone much money. Conversely, because it is making money Hulu is getting plenty of hype. Which, as an executive would you prefer?

Related, it seems that neurologically speaking unpredictable outcomes – either from mistakes or change beyond our control – are jarring. It’s no surprise then that human beings tend to dislike making mistakes or coping with change despite lip service otherwise.

Companies, by extension, also seem to prefer homeostasis. Yes, there are plenty of people and books and seminars preaching the embrace of change and the positive benefit of mistake making. But between the lines, what they’re selling is a means of ‘expecting the unexpected’ which is in fact fighting the jarring feeling of mistakes and change and attempting to make it predictable.

Switching gears for a moment, in stories about wilderness survival, most tragedies stem from the endangered person’s refusal to acknowledge the change in their circumstances or to learn from a mistake once they’ve made it. They can’t let go of what was supposed to happen and won’t accept what is now happening. In this state of denial they become disoriented to the reality around them, make poor choices, and often pay the ultimate price.

Transferring this knowledge from the wilderness frontier to the business frontier: On the topic of expertise, it might make sense to be wary of anyone claiming to be an expert in an industry that hasn’t been around long. Expertise comes with experience which is an accumulation of a lot of trial and error. In businesses (and I’m thinking social media) that haven’t been around very long, it’s simply impossible to have made enough mistakes to be considered an expert at this nacent stage.

Second, we should admit when we’re lost, confused or uncomfortable. Denial in business leads to paying its own ultimate price. Once we acknowledge being lost, we can start looking for a way out.

Third, we should build mechanisms into our organizations that allow us to learn from mistakes.

Lastly, acknowledge and behave according to the fact that nothing is consistently predictable. This means setting up operational mechanisms to observe and asses at regular intervals. It also means thinking hard about how to adapt to change knowing that everyone in the company will be uncomfortable with it.

In mistakes, change and trial and error lie opportunities for business poised to see and solve for the problems of now which in turn will lead to growth and revenue (the dopamine of industry).

Inventions

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I’ve been picking away at Guns Germs & Steel since the holidays. Last night I happened to be reading it again after some time. The author was discussing how successful inventions often have nothing to do with the gifts of a single inventor but are rather the accumulation of prior inventiveness which is improved upon and finally ‘tips’ at a point when the culture is ready to accept the innovation. To quote:

“My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its users after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a forseen need.”

This is particularly interesting in light Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the other darlings of the social media revolution.

It seems clear that none of them was invented with the intention of becoming global platforms. After all, none of them had a revenue model baked in. In that sense, they were invented first and found their audience after (and in my opinion quite by accident).

In Jared Diamond’s book he details how the dominant use of many technologies isn’t what the inventor intended. This seems as relevant to Facebook or YouTube as in this historical example,

“A good example is the history of Thomas Edison’s phonograph, the most original invention of the great inventor of modern times. When Edison built his first photograph in 1877, he published an article proposing ten uses to which his invention might be put. They included preserving the last words of dying people, recording books for blind people to hear, announcing clock time and teaching spelling.”

Edison never saw Elvis coming. In fact, resent was his initial reaction to the phonograph being used for liesure enjoyment of music,

“A few years later Edison told his assistant that his invention had no commercial value. Within a few years he changed his mind and did enter business to sell phonographs – but for use as office dictating machines. When other entrepreneurs created jukeboxes by arranging for a phonograph to play popular music at the drop of a coin, Edison objected to this debasement, which apparently detracted from serious office use of his invention.”

In the same way, a website for garagebands to post music (MySpace) or college kids to see who else was at their school (Facebook) quickly morphed from its original intention into something else. And, as is well documented, the first colonists on those sites moved on once the masses arrived. Twitter’s original users are beginning to grumble now as well.

More interesting, though, is the idea that social networks, micro blogging and media sharing may not have yet found their true calling. Right now  most of the big name sites are purely recreational plays. And because revenue was not a part of the pact in at the beginning, it’s proving very hard to get users to start paying now. (Heck, the entire Internet has that problem on a macro level. Advertisers try to force their way in, but the only real advertising success story – unless you consider fractions of one percent click through success – is paid search which looks and feels less like advertising and more like ballot stuffing.)

What if the utility of social media is also (or better) suited for something else besides ‘social’ use? No one seems to be talking about that. What if all these technologies find their greatest utility in R&D? Operations? Human Resources? Governance? Compliance?

What if these inventions are not businesses unto themselves but enablers of business? TechCrunch and Mashable are full of small companies spending a lot of venture money trying to make widgets that are all conceptually banking on ‘social’ being the business need (and of course that people will suddenly decide to pay for it!). It might be. But what if it isn’t? What if the social applications of this technology are just the table stakes? What if, like email, instant messaging and web browsing, everyone will have it, but no one will pay for it? It sure seems to be trending that way.

Email and instant messaging technology don’t make money for many people. But they enable a lot of people to do interesting things within their existing businesses. Microblogging might be the same – destined not to make much money per se, but rather to enable businesses to make money (Zappos’ recent acclaim for masterful Twittering being an example).

In terms of finding a blue ocean in this crowded market, one place to focus might be a step or two back from the bleeding edge. It’s not as popular and you might not find yourself being invited to speak alongside the Biz Stones, Mark Zuckerbergs and Chad Hurleys of the world, but it’s an under-served market right now.

It took Edison twenty years to concede that his phonograph was well suited for listening to music. Today our cultural A.D.D. has us all moving on to the next thing within months, if not days. What opportunities are being missed?

My bet is, there’s plenty of money to be made finding out how to use technologies that exist today to solve problems now.

Now not new.

You heard it here first.