Quick Takes: 6/5/13

Toad the Wet Sprocket, Sting and U2 all have new albums coming out later this year and I’m very excited about all of them, but especially Toad.

An interesting look at free speech and how social network companies are trying to regulate “hate” and other distasteful speech by people while not infringing on stuff that might be caught by an algorithm.

The Onion’s AV Club has a full appreciation of The Kids in the Hall along with what they think are the 10 best episodes of the show. But aside from that it’s worth reading just for the breakdown of what sort of overall role each member of the troupe played in shaping its direction.

Adweek looks at the windowing issues that are going to increasingly crop up for consumers as more and more studios sign exclusive distribution contracts with various online video streaming and on-demand services. We’re basically entering a world that’s the equivalent of the VHS/Betamax wars of the 70s/80s.

By not engaging in the price discount mutually-assured-destruction game Ambercrombie & Fitch has managed to retain the sense among its target audience that it’s hip, relevant and still hot.

Quick Takes: 5/31/13

This piece about why niche media is important is not only spot-on but also more than a little distressing as it evaluates some recent mainstream foul-ups. But aside from that I think it exemplifies why newspapers in particular missed an opportunity back in 2003 or so to reach out to the emerging independent blogger field and work with subject matter experts, bringing them into the fold in a way that was mutually beneficial instead of playing around with paywalls and so on.

An interesting perspective on why Marissa Mayer is making the moves at Yahoo she is.

Poynter has a great rebuttal of Buzzfeed’s much-discussed “The Social Media Editor is Dead” piece. In my opinion there’s still a strong need for there to be one – two is actually better – who act not just in a traditional editorial capacity but who also are kind of the heart and soul of the program, who keep it true to itself, who know what the goals are, who knows the nuances of the fan base and more. This is’t a dead role, it’s one that is vital and necessary if if the responsibilities are and will continue to evolve over time.

I think this hand-wringing story about the demise of high school newspapers falls victim to the trap of getting hung up on form-factor. So what if a high school is producing a Tumblr blog instead of a print paper if the content is similar? It’s not about the printing press (or the blog platform or anything else) it’s about training kids to be writers, photographers, coders and more in a way that gets them excited about the process, not the distribution form.

This article shouldn’t be necessary as everyone should already be in complete agreement that The Monkess are and always have been cool.

Medium is a platform that I’m super-intrigued about. The closed beta that it’s been in for an extended period has allowed it to highlight and curate some high-quality material from some great folks. But when it does open up and it loses the mystique of being a high-end, prestige magazine of sorts it will have to use it’s cool set of tools and functionality to compete with WordPress, Tumblr and everything else in the platform market.

Movie theater chains want to force studios to make trailers shorter by 30 seconds, or about 1/5 of their current running time. The hilarity starts when the theater owners start talking about shorter trailers creating a better movie-going experience when they’ve done everything in their power to make that experience almost excruciating while grabbing every ad dollar they can.

Long story short: We’re not going to Mars any time soon, though it will be super cool when we do.

No, we don’t want Facebook – or any other company – deciding what is hate speech. That’s largely because at any scale it needs to be algorithm-driven and that leads to an incredibly faulty system that will penalize a lot of innocent people while still letting lots slip through.

Quick Takes: 5/20/13

Brian Steinberg hits a home run in his first column for Variety (which desperately needs to fix its RSS feed) as he talks about how the media, whose business models depend on viewers’ full attention, have been simultaneously making it clear that the viewers’ full attention is not necessarily. They’ve been doing this by including ads in the programming (and programming in their ads sometimes) and through encouraging people to have social media conversations at the same time they’re supposed to be watching a show.

There’s so much in this story about how LinkedIn has added to its original or curated editorial mix that can be learned from if you run or participate in some sort of publishing program it’s a bit overwhelming. Just a treasure trove of moments that had me bouncing over to Evernote to jot down an idea, question or action item.

Likewise this “thinking out loud” post from Paul Smalera about how content editors can’t be blind to the analytics, technical requirements and other factors that can influence what content is published, how it appears and more.

Fan activation is something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently and the WSJ has a story that looks at how a couple of fashion brands have begun sourcing photos from everyday folks – albeit still often young and attractive ones – and incorporating them into their online marketing. This is actually exemplified in a separate but similar story about how one particular company tapped popular Tumblr publishers to model their clothes, photos which were then aggregated on the company’s own Tumblr profile.

If ever there was a story that exemplified how some companies see social networks simply as content engines it’s this one about National CineMedia working in various ways to leverage Twitter and Foursquare information. Not only will NCM produce original content based on Twitter trends but it will ultimately sell ads against that data while also selling local business-oriented ads based on Foursquare check-in data. And most all of this is also being utilized across web and mobile platforms operated not just by NCM but also theater partner Regal Entertainment. Super interesting example of four or five different convergence points happening at the same time across platforms.

Quick Takes: 3/18/13

I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that the last thing I will ever do is connect my Netflix account with Facebook. That sounds absolutely awful, both in terms of what I would be sharing with people and seeing what they would be sharing with me.

An interesting defense of Quora’s weekly email digest and it’s role as a really good entry point into the site’s world of answered questions.

An interesting look at memes and the power they have on platforms like Instagram.

If you run a corporate publishing program and you haven’t already begun looking to adding Google Authorship to your site or blog you should probably do that. Serious SEO and other benefits await you on that front.

It’s about time digital delivery of movies to theaters was signed-off on. This has been a conversation for years and could revolutionize on-demand screenings since, theoretically, any movie could be stored remotely and beamed to theaters for a specially arranged viewing.

The idea of 3D printing of hardware is, honestly, something I have a hard time wrapping my head around it’s so mind-blowing.

Whether or not a secondary market of e-books and digital music is being hashed out in the courts. Meanwhile I still can’t easily rip a DVD to my computer to watch whenever I want.

I love Matt Mullenweg’s doubling-down on long-form content being key to the future of WordPress. There aren’t enough people writing good, long-form thought pieces these days and WordPress is a fantastic platform for that or whatever else someone wants to produce.

Wired has a good story on Foursquare has evolved from a location-based game you played with your friends to something that powers the location-specific data we now expect in so many of our apps and tools.

LinkedIn is acquiring news reading app Pulse, something that may tie into its recent efforts to become more of a media company, driving people back to its site for the latest content, whether it’s housed there or aggregated in their regular curated lists of stories.

The New York Times is joining the minimalist news-reading design trend, one that seeks to undo the feature creep that has resulted in a mess of ad clutter and return to quality packaging of stories while still offering premium ad opportunities.

John Battelle raises the question at the heart of Facebook’s filtering algorithm: If it’s my feed, why can’t I consume it in the manner that I choose?

Terry Heaton wins at internet for March with this quote: “Not only is this (brands behaving on social networks in the same way individuals do) something that businesses “will” do; it’s something they will “have” to do, because the network that connects all of us in the 21st Century is a network of equal nodes. It’s a network of people and personal brands, and if businesses want to connect with everybody else, they must do it as an equal. That means playing by the rules of human interactivity instead of the hierarchical “driving” of behavior.”

Quick Takes: 3/6/13

In which I seek to get all these stories out of Evernote and into my car. Or something like that.

A thousand times this.

I’m going to miss Tweetdeck’s iOS app, but the writing has been on the wall for a while. I’m actually more upset at the prospect of moving from the Mac desktop app to the web version than anything else.

I’ll admit to feeling a little weird I scrolled through a feed of my network’s Instagram updates on the web, but that’s exactly what you can now do.

Theaters are, amusingly, starting to charge movie studios in some instances to play their trailers. Studios obviously aren’t thrilled at theaters trying to get some extra cash by programming their trailer presentation like a commercial break but can’t exactly not participate since that’s still the primary way people become aware of new movies well in advance of their hitting their release dates.

It’s nice that someone has finally called foul on the idea that there is a best time, or a series of best times, to post a brand page update to Facebook. Studies that presume to lay out the ideal time for publishing to this, that or the other social network always drive me batty because such results are so variable from program to program.

TV Guide has an interesting story going into all the problems that have plagued Up All Night. I liked the show at first but soon found it to be a one-note story that, as the story points out, focused too much on Maya Rudolph’s character at the expense of the home-life of the characters played by Will Arnett and Christina Applegate.

That we’re still talking about the campaigns for The Blair Witch Project and even, to a slightly lesser extent, The Dark Knight as being the capstone of movie marketing efforts makes me sad and shows how little innovation there is in this field.

This is a classic case of a solution in search of a problem as companies vie to own the “same day product delivery” market that is of their own making and not something consumers are clamoring for at the moment.

While I’m by no means a huge hockey fan (though I have jumped aboard the Blackhawks bandwagon in recent years to a certain extent) it’s hard to imagine the Hawks not having the Detroit Red Wings as their primary divisional rival.

Years after it put it up and saw readership and revenue take a sharp decline, Variety’s new owners are tearing down its paywall and opening up stories to the masses.

Oscilloscope Laboratories released six-second installments of It’s a Disaster, its upcoming comedy starring David Cross, on Vine as a way to tease out people’s interest in the movie.

This is a great story on how the U.S., by ceding control of online access to private companies who often operate as controlled monopolies, is slipping in how its citizens can access the web and all the activities that are now taking place there. It’s also about how reliant we are on web-access devices and the data plans that come with them and is a really good read.

I wholeheartedly agree with the point made in this story about how, because your LinkedIn activity is tied back to your professional reputation, the quality of engagement and the potential for solid conversations is much higher.

The problem, I don’t think, is that people are unaware of what movie and other ratings mean. It’s that the ratings are so broken and out of date that they’re essentially meaningless to the point where a public awareness campaign isn’t quite the best answer. You need only watch just about any PG-13 movie from 1998 and compare it to a PG-13 movie from 2013 to see that the definition has changed so drastically that a new model is absolutely necessary.

The Chicagoland movie theater chain I worked for through most of high school and college has been profiled on the Google Developers Blog for their use of Google Apps. 

I get what this AdAge story is going for, but isn’t about 78% of the consumer products industry based on creating problems no one would ever have guessed existed and then offering a solution to them? So the advertising following suit doesn’t seem like a huge honking deal.

Quick Takes: 2/13/13

Universities are using Tumblr as a way to reach and communicate with prospective and current students. It’s an interesting example of not just using the right platform to go out and meet your target audience but also using the right content mix to appeal to them in their own way.

I’m intrigued by this Shareholder Letter from betaworks, the company behind the revamped digg, more for its form and structure than for its actual contents. I love the way the material is presented either in one big helping or in smaller chunks for easier navigation and being able to surf to what’s most relevant to you personally.

YouTube is reported to be exploring introducing paid subscriptions for select content partners. This could be an interesting experiment as we see what producers are able to make micro-payments (the reported price for a subscription would be $1-5 a month, which would then be split with YouTube) work on a sustainable level. I’m not sure this is the right model but it does show YouTube is getting more and more serious about being a home for professional-grade video material.

While I instinctively don’t like the idea of short-term social media executions that have end dates at which point they’re abandoned, the story of why the NYT launched an app that specifically for the 2012 elections and which is now defunct is an interesting one and I actually can’t fault their logic.

I’m not surprised by the finding that more people follow brands’ social media updates than actively visit the social profiles of those brands. After all, it’s so much easier to scan whatever shows up in news feeds than it is to actually visit the profile unless the reader feels like they’re missing out on too much. So, as is almost always the case, it’s up to the brand publisher to optimize for that news feed in whatever way they can.

A good overview of the current state of the social enterprise solutions over at RWW that makes it clear there’s still a long way to go to get social media baked into the organizational communication structure. As it states, directives don’t really work and there will likely be some belligerent hold-outs. It has to happen organically. We’ve been hearing for years now that as young people enter the work world they’ll bring the social tools they have grown up using with them. But that’s still a ways off as they can’t just come in and change right off the bat but instead find themselves stifled by existing infrastructures.

Regional definitions of hate speech are just one of the issues Twitter (and Facebook, and YouTube and all the other companies who would like to pretend they operate as dumb networks people can do with as they will while the company turns a blind eye) is going to have to deal with in the very near future.

If you ask me the very premise behind this particular bit of advice is flawed: It’s not that you need to start thinking about your social media postings in the same way that you think about longer, more substantive content. It’s that if you’re not already doing so you’re in a lot of trouble.That story also says you should respond to every question that comes in via Twitter or Facebook or blog comments within 24 hours. That’s great advice if you’re not talking about any sort of scale or if you have a team of a dozen or more members who can do so.

There’s a fantastic story at PBS MediaShift that I’ve been pouring over, extracting one good insight after another, about copyright law as it applies to images published to social media platforms and how that law does, on occasion, come into conflict with the terms of service of those platforms themselves. David Holmes at PandoDaily points out, though, that nature of how people share images not just on one platform but across many – Tumblr posts that are then linked to on Twitter and so on – the conflicting terms of service have the potential to make issues of copyright even messier.

Young people and old people are going to see movies in theaters pretty regularly but those in the middle, aged 25-54, aren’t doing so as often according to a recent Nielsen study of American’s movie-going habits. Gender differences aren’t all that pronounced but there are some interesting numbers in the study on race and ethnicity.

Foursquare has become the latest social media service/platform to launch an app that’s specifically designed for business usage. It joins Facebook (there are likely others but I can’t think of them) as a social network that allows business owners or managers to access a completely unique experience that’s separate from what the end user sees. This, I think, is going to only become more common as more apps/networks realize that the corporate managers they are trying to attract the attention of – especially when it comes to managing some sort of paid promotion or ad.

I think the most shocking thing to me about the closing of Everyblock by MSNBC is the suddenness of it. There was no one month, week or day notice that this was coming, something that smacks of the kind of corporate decision making that is antithetical to community-focused ventures.

There’s a lot of hay being made about a study that seems to show Facebook’s grip on the population and their free time is starting to slip. Personally I don’t think this is as much a leading indicator as much as I think it’s a reflection of the desire to see Facebook slip from its current pedestal. That’s not to say some of the behavior and thinking cited in the study isn’t real – Tumblr and some other platforms are definitely taking its audience – but I don’t think the “need to take a break” emotion is one that needs to be overly analyzed.

Let’s be clear that the reason Twitter is buying Bluefin is that the status update platform is in desperate need of an analytics package and obviously decided to buy their way into one rather than build one out itself. As it looks to rely more and more on its ad and other promoted products to power financial growth it’s going to need to provide numbers that people can bank on. Even outside of paid promotions if Twitter wants to attract more and more attention from major media companies it’s going to need to show those companies what the value of that attention has been and is going to be.

Interesting that about.me has severed ties with Aol and is once again an independent company. I love it when a company likes this gets back to its roots. Not that corporate ownership can’t be a good thing in a lot of ways but it sometimes can stifle innovation and distract  a company from its core goal, which is to make a good product that people find useful.

Quick Takes: 1/5/13 Part 3

Why Every Company Needs a Journalist… for Online Marketing: The main problem (there are a few) I have with this article is that it presumes there are only two options: Either a “journalist” as it defines the role of an SEO content writer. That’s not at all the case, with a lot of other options in the middle between someone who takes what can often be an antagonistic role (the journalist) and someone who is just focused on data (the SEO writer).

Journalism’s problem of scale demands a rethinking of the news product: Here’s what I always think about: Patch should work. It really should. But because there’s little to no curation under a known media brand being done it remains a marginal player in the field. No, journalism doesn’t scale, which is why it’s been so important for media organizations to do what they haven’t done, which is reach out to subject matter experts to contribute in their own way.

Social TV chatter grows 800% on Twitter over 2012: Short version: More people are discussing more TV programming on Twitter, GetGlue and elsewhere than they have been. In fact, GetGlue just released their top social show charts the other day.

Will Google+ Ever Get A Full Read/Write API?: No, no it won’t. At least no time in the foreseeable future as Google seeks to own the Google+ experience. The problem here is people are used to Twitter – which started out as incredibly open and has gotten more restrictive in the last year – whereas Google+ has remained a walled off experience.

The E-Reader Revolution: Over Just as It Has Begun?: E-readers didn’t destroy the printed book and they are, based on some recent stats (which may or may not signal a long-term trend), already starting to wane in terms of popularity. But what they did do is usher in a new experience that many people have found enjoyable, something that’s now carried over into more full-featured tablets.

Quick Takes: 1/5/13 Part 2

Why the mobile web vs. apps debate is a false dichotomy: I’m not sure where I come down in this conversation. If I had to choose I’d be more in favor of the “mobile web” side since it means that development is happening within open standards as opposed to closed systems. Plus I feel that long term mobile web development using HTML5 is going to prove more sustainable as people want an experience that is consistent between the devices they have *now* and others they might have down the road.

A Brand’s Best Use of Facebook: Engage With the Superfans: You can’t engage with everyone, so figure out what a good strategy for engaging with a passionate subset of everyone is and execute. That’s not to say you should ignore other groups of fans, but there is something to be said for focusing on those people who can do something for you.

What the New York Times’s ‘Snow Fall’ Means to Online Journalism’s Future: No, “Snow Fall” isn’t the future of journalism. But it is a very cool project – one that garnered over 3.5 million pageviews for the Times – and *that* is what media companies need to do more of, come up with cool projects that garner reader interest.

Think like the audience: This is done far too infrequently in any sort of communications program, whether we’re talking about news media or corporate publishing programs. Forget the marketing requirements and brand guidelines and deliver what you think – or know – the audience wants.

Things that happened in 2012: The Wreck of the FM News: Of local interest, to be sure, but a fascinating look at a Chicago radio experiment that did not succeed and what was learned from the whole process.

Quick Takes: 1/5/13

 

Why You Should Want to Pay for Software, Instagram Edition: While I really, really want to agree with the idea that paying for a service is the key to avoid having your data used for purposes you yourself don’t define it’s more than a bit naive. It’s not like a company that’s 100% payment supported (meaning they don’t have any advertising reliance) has never sold customers to a mailing list or something, which is similar to what’s going on here.

When to go fast, when to go slow on social media: Yeah, journalists need to put the brakes on when it comes to breaking news. It’s better to be right than first. If amateurs want to go ahead and spread lots of misinformation that’s their thing, but journalists have a bit of integrity that they need to hold on to.

Why Twitter Buzz ≠ Movie Ticket Sales: It’s not the number of the social media updates, it’s the quality and the influence of the person doing the updating. More than that, the marketing tactics that work on social media for movies are different than in other industries. If you’re surprised by any of this, well, you really shouldn’t be.

The broadcast-ification of social media: A very solid examination of Twitter’s increasing focus on big media brands publishing as a core function of the service.

The year responsive design starts to get weird: There’s a lot I need to learn about responsive design but it’s going to be a big part of media in 2013.

Quick Takes: 11/04/12 (Part 2)

• The decision by the NYT and WSJ to drop their paywalls for Hurricane Sandy coverage gets back to the issue of what role the press currently plays in serving the public interest and where that role becomes incompatible with a business model. If what’s being produced is so important it is made free for everyone during this period then where does that line exist in the future? And if what they’re producing now is in the public interest then what about the rest of the time? At the same time there’s new data showing digital paywalls are helping circulation numbers at some papers.
• I do agree that there was kind of a sea-change in how Instagram was being used – by photographers, by mainstream media and everyone else – as Hurricane Sandy swept across New York and New Jersey. An Instagram photo was even used as the cover to an issue of Time about the ravages Sandy had wrought.
• Did Lance Armstrong get away with lying about doping for so long because the press that covered him was afraid to ask too many questions? Not sure I 100% agree but it is an interesting thought starter on the state of the citizen press.
• With so much quality material on TV, movies are looking to maintain their relevancy. It’s interesting how these two things are moving in completely different directions, with movies getting dumber and TV getting smarter. But “be smarter” doesn’t seem to be in the cards for the film industry.
• More on “native advertising” and how it’s changing some parts of the media landscape.
• Don’t feed the trolls.