MediaShift

Poll: How Much Have You Given to Crowdfunding Projects?

mark@mediashift.org — Fri, 25 May 2012 11:30:29 -0800

We've all heard the heart-warming stories of inventors and creators who couldn't get their ideas funded, and then turned to crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter or IndieGoGo to raise the money they needed. And then there are the other-worldly stories like the Pebble smart watch that raised millions on Kickstarter. While you might kick in some money for a promising project, you can't fund all of them. How much have you participated in funding these kinds of projects? Have you given a little or a whole lot? Vote in our poll and explain more in the comments below.

Mediatwits #50: Facebook Face-Plant; Craig Newmark + Poynter; Crowdfunding Bible

mark@mediashift.org — Fri, 25 May 2012 06:00:39 -0800

Welcome to the 50th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, with Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali as co-hosts. The joy of the Facebook IPO was quickly replaced with disdain as the stock nosedived and lawsuits ensued. We run down the headlines, including the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Oregon Daily Emerald killing daily print editions for thrice- and twice-weekly editions, respectively. Special guests Craig Newmark of Craigslist (with birds chirping in the background) and Kelly McBride of Poynter talk about their upcoming symposium where they will draw up new principles for ethics in journalism for the digital age. Will the so-called "Fifth Estate" take notice?

Plus, we talk to author and speaker Scott Steinberg about his new book, "The Crowdfunding Bible," all about how artists, singers, videogame makers, writers and startups have funded projects directly from fans online. Steinberg says that crowdfunding isn't for everyone, but those that succeed usually make headlines because they are the ultimate Cinderella stories.

Check it out!

mediatwits50.mp3

Subscribe to the podcast here

Subscribe to Mediatwits via iTunes

Follow @TheMediatwits on Twitter here

Our show is now on Stitcher! Listen to us on your iPhone, Android Phone, Kindle Fire and other devices with Stitcher. Find Stitcher in your app store or at stitcher.com.

Intro and outro music by 3 Feet Up; mid-podcast music by Autumn Eyes via Mevio's Music Alley.

Here are some highlighted topics from the show:

Intro

1:00: Facebook's face-plant IPO: what went wrong

2:40: Rafat: Can Facebook still focus?

3:10: Times-Picayune coming out 3 times a week; Daily Emerald going to 2 times a week

5:20: Rundown of stories on podcast

Craig Newmark + Poynter

6:20: Special guests Craig Newmark and Kelly McBride

8:20: Newmark: We need better fact-checking and stronger ethics in journalism

11:30: McBride: The audience can influence your work, sometimes that's good or bad

14:20: Newmark: TV stations should be honest about who funds political ads

17:30: McBride: The AEJMC certifies J-schools so can help push new ethics principles

19:20: Newmark: I wouldn't pay for news I can't trust

Crowdfunding Bible

20:00: Special guest Scott Steinberg

23:10: Steinberg: Crowdfunding lets people vote with their wallets

25:00: Less commercial projects can get funding

26:30: Steinberg: Crowdfunding not right for raising millions of dollars, usually

29:00: Vast majority of projects fail to reach funding goals

Weekly Poll

Don't forget to vote in our weekly poll, this time about your crowdfunding efforts:

Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit. and Circle him on Google+

Why We Killed Our College Daily Paper for a More Digital Future

rfrank@dailyemerald.com — Thu, 24 May 2012 06:00:00 -0800

We're about to close the book on the Oregon Daily Emerald.

After 92 years, the University of Oregon's newspaper will end its run as a Monday-to-Friday operation in June. Yes, it's the end of an era, and we're sad about that. But it's also the start of a new era, the digital one.

Next fall, we will replace our traditional newspaper with a modern college media organization, Emerald Media Group.

This isn't about rebranding. This isn't about ramping up revenue for our non-profit company. Sure, we face the same economic pressures as every legacy media company. But this is our best financial year since 2000, and we have no debt and a reasonable reserve fund.

This is about delivering on our mission to serve our community and prepare our student staff for the professional world. Here's how we plan to do that:

Print: Two weekly print editions -- Emerald Monday and Emerald Weekend -- modeled after alternative weeklies, such as Willamette Week in Portland and The Stranger in Seattle.

Web and mobile: Real-time news, community engagement, photo galleries and video on the web, mobile and social media. New web and mobile apps that make students' lives richer and more entertaining.

Events: A promotions and events division -- Emerald Presents -- to sponsor political debates, football watch parties, and student music festivals.

Advertising and marketing: A full suite of marketing services that combines print, web, mobile, social media and street team services.

Why We Changed

I had a general sense of the challenges faced by newspapers when I started as publisher of the Oregon Daily Emerald in February 2011. I had devoted more than half my life to the industry, from teenage paperboy to Emerald editor in chief to professional news reporter.

At the Emerald, I figured that if we ramped up our journalism, students would rush to grab the paper each morning.

I soon realized our challenges were much more complex.

In the 1990s, college newspapers owned the campus audience. Advertisers had few options other than the paper to reach the coveted college demographic, and students had few other options for news and information. We printed 10,000 papers daily for about 17,000 students.

The Emerald made money most years.

But in the 2000s, the options for advertising and information multiplied with technology. The student body rose to 24,000, but our circulation fell to 6,000. The daily print production schedule consumed our days and made it difficult to grow our audience on the web and mobile platforms.

And, we lost money most years.

By the time I joined the Emerald a year ago, we had cut costs and recovered enough revenue to squeeze out small annual operating surpluses again. But looking to the future, we had two options: Convince more students to pick up the paper, or search for a new model.

We started doing our homework last fall.

We read every relevant white paper, magazine article and book we could find and consulted our peers in the college and professional media world. We paid special attention to the Red & Black at the University of Georgia as it converted last fall from a daily to a weekly newspaper, the first major college paper to do so.

Through all our research, two things stood out:

The other 93%: The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press asked Americans in 2006, 2008 and 2010 if they had read a print newspaper yesterday. Not surprisingly, the college age demographic of 18 to 24 reported the lowest readership. But the rate of decline shocked us. In those three surveys, the rate fell from 20 percent to 14 percent to 7 percent. In our presentations, the 7 percent slide almost always prompted a gasp.

The alt-weekly influence: We met face-to-face with about 100 students and laid down a few copies of the Emerald next to a few local alternative weeklies. Then we asked, "For the typical college student, which of these formats would compel them to stop at a box and grab the paper?" Students who work on our staff or in student politics tended to favor the traditional format. But the other 90 percent pointed to the alt-weekly.

The idea of dropping 92 years of tradition made many on the student staff nervous. Though they had literally grown up on Facebook, ink still coursed through their veins. They liked the tradition.

But the more we looked at the facts, the more students started to see the benefits of a major change. One ambitious sophomore reporter looked skeptical as he sat down to hear about our options. I shared the bullet points and handed him a local alt-weekly as an example. He flipped the pages and looked up with wide eyes to say: "We have to do this."

What We're Building

We considered four options for our future print publication: five, three, two and one time per week. Each option included an expanded web, mobile and marketing effort for news and advertising.

At first, I loved the once-a-week approach. It's simple and easy to explain. People know what a weekly is. But a student on our board suggested we look closer at twice a week. We debated and tweaked the concept and ended up with an approach that seemed to fit our campus. Our board agreed.

Emerald Monday: A news and sports edition with a meaty, 1,200-word cover story that dives deep into a major campus issue. The rest of the news section will be 300 to 600 news briefs and stories. The sports section will wrap up the weekend games. All of our stories will take a magazine approach to storytelling. While our online coverage focuses on the "what happened," our print edition focuses on the "how and why." We're modeling this section after Newsweek, Bloomberg Businessweek and ESPN Magazine.

Emerald Thursday: An entertainment and culture edition with a thoughtful feature story that anchors the cover. This section will include the most comprehensive events calendar on campus and features on topics most relevant to students: technology, under 21 entertainment, music and sex. This section is modeled after Rolling Stone, Wired and Vanity Fair.

We're taking a new approach to digital, too.

In the newsroom, daily is too slow. We will report in real-time on the web, mobile and social media. To do this, we made digital news its own team and set aside money to equip them with new iPads and video cameras to report live from the field.

On the business side, we created a mini-tech startup within the Emerald. We hired a professional mobile/web programmer and assigned him to combine data and technology to build apps that makes students' lives better.

Our advertising services will grow far behind print, too. We will offer a full suite of marketing services to help our clients. Those services may or may not be tied to our news products. But all the revenue those services generate will go toward subsidizing our journalistic mission.

A Model That Fits Our Mission

We are excited about our future, but we don't pretend we can predict it.

We will roll out these changes next fall. We know some ideas will take flight and others will flop. That's OK. We've tried to adopt a culture of innovation, much like a tech startup. We'll experiment, test, learn, revise, repeat. We're looking for progress, not perfection.

We have a strong brand and a coveted audience of young, educated, ambitious students. We'll figure out a model that fits our mission.

Ryan Frank is publisher of the Oregon Daily Emerald. Learn more about the Emerald's transition at future.dailyemerald.com and follow along on the Emerald's blog at thegarage.dailyemerald.com.

Mediatwits #49: Facebook IPO Mania; Internet Week; 16th Webby Awards

mark@mediashift.org — Fri, 18 May 2012 06:00:36 -0800

Welcome to the 49th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, with Mark Glaser and Dorian Benkoil as co-hosts. Today is the day for the Facebook IPO, so we've got it covered like a wet blanket. Special guests Debra Aho Williamson of eMarketer and Troy Young of SAY Media talk over the ins and outs of Facebook as it soars into the ionosphere. What are its possible weaknesses? Why is its ad revenue outlook falling short? Plus, it's Internet Week in the Big Apple, and Dorian and Troy are there. What are ad folks talking about, outside of the Facebook IPO?

Plus, it's web awards season time, and that means five-word acceptance speeches at the 16th annual Webby Awards, being streaming online on Monday. Special guest David-Michel Davies tells us why the awards will be even better this year, with geeky humorist Patton Oswalt hosting. But guest Josh Seifert thinks that digital awards can do better, and gives his own criticism of the Webbys and other advertising awards.

Check it out!

mediatwits49.mp3

Subscribe to the podcast here

Subscribe to Mediatwits via iTunes

Follow @TheMediatwits on Twitter here

Our show is now on Stitcher! Listen to us on your iPhone, Android Phone, Kindle Fire and other devices with Stitcher. Find Stitcher in your app store or at stitcher.com.

Intro and outro music by 3 Feet Up; mid-podcast music by Autumn Eyes via Mevio's Music Alley.

Here are some highlighted topics from the show:

Intro

0:30: Dorian Benkoil co-hosting from Internet Week in NYC

1:30: Is there another tech bubble? Different this time

3:00: Facebook IPO leads to real estate, luxury car boom in Silicon Valley

4:00: Rundown of stories on podcast

Facebook IPO and Internet Week

4:40: Special guests Debra Aho Williamson and Troy Young

7:00: Williamson: CNBC devoted all coverage yesterday to Facebook

9:10: Williamson: Facebook controls tons of data about people

11:15: Young: Question is how much advertisers will spend on Facebook

14:00: Williamson: Facebook's data store could be exciting... or scary

15:00: Dorian: Internet Week includes ad business movers and shakers

16th Webby Awards

16:25: Special guests David-Michel Davies and Josh Seifert

18:10: Davies: Webbys go beyond just the web

20:00: Seifert: Advertising online isn't so great

22:30: Davies: We've given out awards for more than just ads

25:10: Davies: Partnering with Buzzfeed to name "Meme of the Year"

Weekly Poll

Don't forget to vote in our weekly poll, this time about the Facebook IPO:

Poll: What Do You Think About the Facebook IPO?

mark@mediashift.org — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:00:03 -0800

Now we have a date (May 18) and a price range ($28 to $35 per share) for what could be the biggest initial public offering in the history of tech stocks: Facebook. The company has grown by leaps and bounds since it was born in Mark Zuckerberg's dorm at Harvard in 2004, and now could make Zuckerberg richer than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. If the IPO prices at the high end of the range, $35 per share, Zuckerberg could be worth $17.6 billion. So what's your take? Would you invest your hard-earned dollars in Facebook stock? Would you short the stock? Do you even care? Vote in our weekly poll, and explain your vote in the comments below.

Can Web-Only Original Programming Finally Stick?

Dorian@teemingmedia.com — Thu, 17 May 2012 06:00:00 -0800

The days of skateboarding dogs holding sway on the web may be numbered. Technology companies and advertisers are professing their belief in the value of professionally produced original content.

Portals and platforms like YouTube, AOL, MSN and Yahoo -- once known for aggregating and optimizing video produced by others -- are spending millions of dollars to develop and acquire programming of their own.

The demand is clearly there. YouTube reported 30 percent growth in views over eight months, and online video viewing rose nearly 45 percent in January over the previous year, according to Nielsen.

So, while the trend comes after previous forays into original programming, this time it may stick.

Earlier efforts largely flopped. Amazon launched, then pulled, a series hosted by Bill Maher. Terry Semmel unsuccessfully tried to make Yahoo into a media company. Disney and MSN tried original series that never generated the numbers they needed to justify the effort.

But this time the technology is here -- from tablets and cell phones to high-speed connections, Google TV and game boxes that stream movies -- and too many big players are invested to let it completely fail.

A Safe Well-Lit Environment for Advertisers

The portals hope that while they have to spend a lot to get great content made, they can get many times more in ad revenue.

User-generated videos of dogs, cats and cute babies can fetch millions of views, but the advertising rates can be as low as $1-3 per thousand.

By contrast, ad rates on professionally produced content are ranging from $15 to $40, said John McCarrus, who hosted Digitas' recent New Front event, at which many of the major players showed off their new programming initiatives.

"They've got big enough audiences now, and they believe they can charge the premiums to deliver a premium audience to premium advertisers," McCarrus, who is the ad agency's vice president and director of Brand Content, told me.

Karen Cahn, AOL's general manager of Branded Experiences, concurred. Major brands "don't want to buy [advertising on] user-generated content," she said in a phone interview. "They want to buy premium video [in a] safe, well-lit environment."

Big Names, Big Productions

The big portals seem to be discovering that aggregation and optimization -- the big trends of previous years -- will not alone bring the kinds of traffic they want.

One reason is that search engine algorithms have been tweaked to try to diminish the rankings of sites that mainly re-publish what others have done.

Good original content also generates stronger user engagement -- from larger amounts of time on site, to repeat visits and social sharing.

To try to ride the new wave, the portals are attracting some of the biggest names in TV and film to produce their original programs. Each is trying out different concepts and business models.

Yahoo has signed Tom Hanks, Jeff Goldblum, and CSI creator Anthony Zuiker to devise and produce original web-based entertainment series.

Hanks' "Electric City" is a dark, dystopian animated series in which the hunt for electric power controls people's every move.

MSN executives at New Fronts showed off an interactive show for children that lets them pretend to participate with celebrity chefs preparing meals, all through the Kinnect gaming system.

YouTube, AOL Place Bets

YouTube, meanwhile, says it's spending $100 million to entice top producers such as Zuiker and "Fast Five" director Justin Lin to create nearly 100 new channels, for the first time paying producers up front.

"We see what's happening [on the web] like the advent of cable," said Jamie Byrne, YouTube's global head of content strategy. "Now, we're transitioning from cable delivery of content to Internet delivery, from hundreds to thousands of channels."

Chris Dale, a spokesman for Google, YouTube's parent, said via email that the producers' advance will be applied against future advertising dollars the videos bring in, and that the producers keep the rights to their content.

Meanwhile, AOL, in the midst of reshaping itself into a media company, is spending millions to acquire and produce original content.

Having already purchased TechCrunch and The Huffington Post, and having launched blogs on politics, finance, lifestyle and entertainment, it's also creating 14 video channels. Heidi Klum, Queen Latifah, and top TV producer Mark Burnett will all have shows. A live political show will adjust its flow according to feedback from the social stream.

Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are producing their own shows, too, taking small steps away from simply being platforms for others' content -- which has, no coincidence, become increasingly difficult to acquire.

Amazon this month solicited proposals for original children's and comedy series it said it will develop for its Instant Video service.

Netflix in February launched "Lilyhammer," an original dramatic series starring Steve Van Zandt, and is also producing "House of Cards," starring Kevin Spacey, and a new season of the comedy "Arrested Development," which was dropped by the Fox TV network.

Tech Companies Move Into Content, Too

Some tech companies, too, are looking to produce their own content in the hopes of attracting more users and engagement -- and revenue -- and, as with AOL's moves, it's not only video.

Tumblr, the blogging and social platform, earlier this month launched Storyboard, a new "home for community content" that features original stories by Jessica Bennett, who is also an editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

Remark Media, formerly known as How Stuff Works International, is transitioning from a company that licenses content management technology to also becoming a publisher in potentially profitable niches such as personal finance and health.

"How big, ultimately, is your market for licensing?" Remark Media CEO Carrie Ferman asked, noting that large publishers, many squeezed by declining revenues, are resistant to buy tools they believe they can develop on their own. "I wanted to be able to use this amazing technology and design and do content in a different way."

The company has hired Mike Benzie, formerly with Yahoo in Atlanta, as editor-in-chief and is bringing on more editors, Ferman said. It's also acquired Banks.com and is launching a personal finance site called Dimespring.

There's no guarantee that any of the initiatives will stick, and it's certain that not all of them will. But with so many making big financial bets, I'd be surprised if some of them don't succeed.

The better the content on the web, the more eyeballs will come, and the longer they will stay. For now, at least, professional content producers -- especially high-profile, big names -- will be able to make a buck by making content for the web.

An award-winning former managing editor at ABCNews.com and an MBA (with honors), Dorian Benkoil handles marketing and sales strategies for MediaShift, and is the business columnist for the site. He is SVP at Teeming Media, a strategic media consultancy focused on attracting, engaging, and activating communities through digital media. He tweets at @dbenk and you can Circle him on Google+.

Poll: What's Your Philosophy on Paying for Online Content?

mark@mediashift.org — Fri, 11 May 2012 11:00:51 -0800

Pay walls, metered walls, subscriptions, micro-payments. There are so many ways that online publishers are considering charging visitors for content. While most content online was free in the old days of the web, more publications are following the lead of WSJ.com and NYTimes.com and putting up some kind of pay wall -- leaky or not. So what's your philosophy on paying for quality journalism online? Will you pay for content, or a membership with perks, or have you paid enough? Vote in our poll below and share your thoughts in the comments. And if you really want to hear a good debate on pay models, check out the latest Mediatwits podcast.

Mediatwits #48: Yahoo CEO Under Fire; Pros and Cons of Metered Pay Walls

mark@mediashift.org — Fri, 11 May 2012 06:00:55 -0800

Welcome to the 48th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, with Mark Glaser and the Rafat Ali as co-hosts. On this show, we turn to the chaotic soap opera that continues at Yahoo, once an Internet darling on its umpteenth remake. Its new CEO Scott Thompson appears to have padded his bio with a computer science degree that he never received. An activist investor found the "mistake" and our special guest Kara Swisher of AllThingsD has been on this story all week with updates. She talks about possible successors for Thompson and also gives the skinny on the upcoming 10th edition of the D conference.

Next up is the ever lovable debate on pay walls and paid content online. When we approached Gawker honcho Nick Denton about the subject, he said, "Pay wall discussions make me want to blow my brains out." Be that as it may, we ended up having a lively debate between Steven Brill, creator of CourtTV and American Lawyer magazine and current co-CEO of Press+, and Mike Masnick, who runs the TechDirt blog and community. Brill says that Press+ could be running metered pay walls for up to 1,000 publications by the end of the year, while Masnick says that keeping content free and sharable is the best way to stay relevant online.

Check it out!

mediatwits48.mp3

Subscribe to the podcast here

Subscribe to Mediatwits via iTunes

Follow @TheMediatwits on Twitter here

Our show is now on Stitcher! Listen to us on your iPhone, Android Phone, Kindle Fire and other devices with Stitcher. Find Stitcher in your app store or at stitcher.com.

Intro and outro music by 3 Feet Up; mid-podcast music by Autumn Eyes via Mevio's Music Alley.

Here are some highlighted topics from the show:

Intro

0:30: Rafat prepping for launch of new startup, Skift

2:40: Comcast fights back against cord-cutters

3:30: NBC will have streams of Olympic games online, but you need to have cable, satellite subscriptions to watch

6:40: Rundown of stories on podcast

Yahoo CEO under fire

7:40: Special guest Kara Swisher

9:45: Swisher: A lot of people would have been fired at Yahoo if they did what he did

12:20: Thompson could have corrected bio many times but never did

15:20: Swisher: Vetting process was shoddy at Yahoo

17:10: Highlights for the upcoming D conference include an interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook

Future of online paid content

18:50: Special guests Steven Brill and Mike Masnick

20:20: Brill: Never in history has a journalistic venture been profitable giving its content away free

22:40: Rafat: The answer is somewhere in the middle, with multiple revenue streams

24:00: Masnick: There's a mental cost to putting up metered walls

27:10: Brill: My book would have done better if the publisher gave it away free

29:10: Masnick: TechDirt has been exceptionally profitable with membership and advertising model

32:40: Brill: Publishers have hit a wall with their business model

36:40: Brill: Google never really put enough resources into One Pass, didn't offer bundle of print and digital subscriptions

Weekly Poll

Don't forget to vote in our weekly poll, this time about your philosophy on paid content:

Journalists' Biggest Pet Peeves About PR -- And Vice Versa

Raschanda.Hall@businesswire.com — Mon, 07 May 2012 06:00:00 -0800

When journalists were asked by MuckRack.com to offer up their biggest PR pet peeves recently, it sparked a spirited Twitter conversation. But then, PR folks got their turn, and what ensued sheds light on both of the industries, how they work together, and what their futures hold.

The following is a Storify collection from the discussion by Raschanda Hall.

If you're a journalist, what upsets you about PR people? And if you're a PR person, what behavior by journalists gets under your skin? Sound off in the comments.

UPDATE: The folks at Muck Rack tell us they will be having more PR/journo Twitter chats, including one this Wednesday at 11 am ET about how journalists want to be pitched on social media. More info here.

Raschanda Hall is the global media relations manager for Business Wire, a Berkshire Hathaway company. In her role, Raschanda leads the largest dedicated, worldwide media relations team in the wire industry, leveraging their relationships with external audiences and influencers. Raschanda's focus is on strategies to further establish and expand Business Wire's media reach and advantage to both traditional and social media audiences. She works closely with journalism organizations and has served on the boards of the National Association of Black Journalists, the Black Public Relations Society of Chicago and The Publicity Club of Chicago. Prior to joining Business Wire, she worked as a Field Producer and Studio Crew Supervisor for Fox and WB affiliates in San Antonio, TX. Hall earned her BA in Mass Communications from Dillard University in New Orleans, LA. Raschanda currently lives in a south suburb of Chicago and is the proud mother of her 18-month-old son, CJ.

Mediatwits #47: Positively Dan Rather; Future of Facebook; Rise of Snip.it

mark@mediashift.org — Fri, 04 May 2012 06:00:45 -0800

Welcome to the 47th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the Rafat Ali as co-hosts. On this show, Rafat had the honor (and early-morning wakeup call) to interview news icon Dan Rather at 7 a.m. while Rather was traveling by train to Washington, D.C. Rather has a new memoir out, "Rather Outspoken," and talked to Rafat about why he's positive about journalism, the lack of online business model for news and the rise of Al Jazeera. With the Facebook IPO coming in a couple weeks, we had special guest Eric Jackson talk about his new Forbes story, with the catchy title: "Here's Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years." Jackson believes that a school of thought called organizational sociology might be relevant to the tech business today.

Finally, we looked deeper at a new social curation tool called Snip.it, similar to Pinterest but where people "snip" stories they like and put them into categories. Special guest Ramy Adeeb, founder and CEO of Snip.it, explained how he started the service after his frustration with sharing the best stories covering the Arab Spring a year ago. Now the service is growing, and helping to drive traffic to publishers' sites. But does it have staying power?

Check it out!

mediatwits47.mp3

Subscribe to the podcast here

Subscribe to Mediatwits via iTunes

Follow @TheMediatwits on Twitter here

Our show is now on Stitcher! Listen to us on your iPhone, Android Phone, Kindle Fire and other devices with Stitcher. Find Stitcher in your app store or at stitcher.com.

Intro and outro music by 3 Feet Up; mid-podcast music by Autumn Eyes via Mevio's Music Alley.

Here are some highlighted topics from the show:

Intro

0:20: News roundup

1:20: Could Facebook IPO tank (eventually)?

4:45: Byliner drops Amazon after a Buzz Bissinger story's price was dropped to 0.

7:50: Rundown of stories on podcast

Positively Dan Rather

8:40: Special guest Dan Rather, interviewed by Rafat Ali

10:00: Rather: I'm an optimist by nature, fairly optimistic about journalism

12:25: Rather: No one has created a new business model to support quality journalism online

14:20: Rather: Entertainment values have overwhelmed news values

17:00: What about newer international sources such as Al Jazeera?

18:30: Rather: I applaud the BBC coming into the American market

Future of Facebook, Google?

19:40: Special guest Eric Jackson

21:45: Sociologists don't give much credence to company leaders

24:20: Jackson: Google has failed at many businesses despite having money, brains

28:00: Jackson: Facebook will be slower to adapt to the new mobile world

Snip.it and social curation services

30:20: Special guest Ramy Adeeb

32:30: Adeeb: Social media tools good at info dissemination but not saving stories

35:00: Adeeb: Goal is to get people to go to Snip.it site, read more stories

36:20: Adeeb: We will make sure users know which content is sponsored

Weekly Poll

Don't forget to vote in our weekly poll, this time about the Facebook IPO:

Why It's a Bad Idea for Student Press to Fall in Love with Pay Walls

dreimold@gmail.com — Wed, 02 May 2012 06:00:00 -0800

The Daily O'Collegian at Oklahoma State University is enjoying marginal success with its metered pay wall a bit more than a year after enacting it. At the start of spring semester 2011, the paper became the first U.S. student media outlet to charge a subset of readers for its content online, requiring a $10 yearly subscription fee for individuals outside the campus area who wanted to read more than three articles per month.

In an excellent recent MediaShift piece, Alexa Capeloto provided a progress report on the O'Colly's efforts, confirming the paper now has 177 paid subscribers. The numbers beat the expectations of the paper's general manager, even prompting him to already slightly raise the annual subscription fee to $15.

As Capeloto writes, "There wasn't any national news on the OSU campus that might have lured a burst of new paid subscribers. They came slow and steady, never exceeding three per day. Looking ahead, [the GM] has budgeted $3,000 to $4,000 in revenue from online subscribers for the next fiscal year ... a mere drop in the outlet's $700,000 budget, but a drop nonetheless."

As a huge fan of innovation and experimentation within college media, I enthusiastically applaud the O'Colly for being a pay wall pioneer. But at the moment, I am still against the mass adoption of metered pay walls by student press outlets nationwide.

A Financial Pinch

The hard truth is that student newspapers are financially struggling at the moment. The decade-long economic plights of the professional press have at last weaved their way into the land of college media. If not quite a time of reckoning, it is definitely a prolonged period of profound change -- cutbacks, weary sighs, and hopefully a few spirited reinventions.

Some campus papers have cut the number of days they publish each week. Others have reduced the number of pages they print or their page sizes. Many are pulling back on staff pay and perks like conference travel. A few have appealed directly to students and alumni for funding help. A small amount have launched magazines in hopes of broadening their readership and ad appeal. And a few papers have even gone dark entirely, mostly at smaller schools or community colleges in which related journalism programs have also been shuttered due to state funding cuts.

Students are still reading their campus newspapers in print, by all accounts at a reliable, surprisingly high rate. But advertising is tougher to come by. Related school budgets in some cases are tightening or disappearing entirely. And student governments are getting occasionally restless as they look at papers' financial bottom lines.

Amid this bleak backdrop -- what USA Today describes as a pronounced "financial pinch" -- any idea within reason to generate new revenue digitally is being considered.

Pay walls are a bold idea, to be sure, but not yet the right one for most of the student press. They embody what Bryan Murley at the Center for Innovation in College Media calls "the coins-in-the-couch model of making money." They may help papers scrounge up a few bucks short term, but at what cost?

Pay walls are still part of a closed online culture most netizens are not yet willing to broach. Within college media, they will hurt student learning and employment opportunities. And most student press outlets are simply not ready to provide the content and creativity paying readers will demand.

Student Media's 1 Percent

The O'Colly is a top-tier publication, boasting daily content online and a huge alumni and supporter base worldwide interested in checking out what's happening at Oklahoma State. In Occupy Wall Street terms, the O'Colly is among student media's 1 percent.

By comparison, a large majority of student media appeal to a very small readership. While their content might be appreciated, paying for it will most likely be a deal-breaker for all but a few diehards.

We need to be honest: Most student newspaper websites are nothing more than slightly repackaged versions of their print editions. Many are not updated more than once a week when school is in session and barely at all during summer and winter breaks. They offer few, if any, multimedia extras. And the featured work can be a tad, ahem, inconsistent.

For free, they are fun reads, but most don't scream worth-a-fee quality. Even with an über-cheap pay wall, it is hard to imagine most papers getting 17 subscribers, let alone 177.

Along with potentially turning away readers without generating much revenue, pay walls at heart also go against the purpose of the student press. For now, campus media are still learning vehicles more than moneymaking ventures. In that spirit, students must be able to share, share, share their work with others, without restriction, enabling them to join a larger conversation and learn firsthand about reporting and interacting with the public beyond the classroom or campus.

They also must be able to promote that work, and themselves. I dislike imagining a pay-walled dystopian future in which students must add an addendum to all articles placed on their online portfolios or within all messages sent to prospective employers. ("You can look at the first three pieces for free, but then you have to pay or I can send you a one-time special access code or here it is simply in the text of the email ...").

A Pay wall Brick Wall

Separately, what about when big news breaks -- a school shooting, out-of-control protests, a natural disaster, a visit by a head of state, an annual campus-wide event -- and media and a mass audience are seeking constant updates that only a student outlet can provide?

Three recent examples: The Corsair's comprehensive coverage of the tuition fight at Santa Monica College; The Daily Tar Heel's documenting of every detail of President Obama's campus visit; and The Daily Iowan's nonstop reporting on a charity Dance Marathon super-popular among University of Iowa students.

In these cases and others like them, student news teams post 10 times the amount of free articles allowed by the O'Colly pay wall -- in a single day or weekend. Should these celebrations of quality student press work be available only via surcharge for all off-campus readers, including alums, national news media looking to link, and the friends, family, significant others, and potential employers of the student staff creating them?

I recall months back when the O'Colly endured a mini-scandal surrounding its coverage of a local strip club opening. The situation was mentioned on a popular college media advisers' list-serv. A number of advisers wanted to read the related news reports, op-eds, and letters to the editor posted on the paper's website, but of course quickly ran into the pay wall brick wall.

There are of course loopholes galore within current pay wall schemes allowing the right people to see the right features without charge at the right time. (Press+, which provides the O'Colly's pay wall service, allows papers to exempt selected coverage from the metered system, for instance.)

But the idea of content only being free under special circumstances and through different access points versus being accessible by default seems backward at the student level.

The Rabbit Hole

In this respect, lastly, there is the "down the rabbit hole" argument. I actually think the worst thing that can happen for the student press is not for pay walls to fail, but for them to be marginally successful. Why? Because that will trigger even greater, more complicated reader restrictions.

In just the past year, the O'Colly has raised its annual subscription fee -- and it doesn't even have 200 subscribers. Yet, it's a typical move. For example, The New York Times recently reduced its monthly free article count by half, right around the one-year anniversary of its pay wall. It appears the realization that a niche effort like this can generate even a little bit of money triggers a desire to squeeze even more dollars out of it.

So do I think the O'Colly's minimally priced, fairly limited pay wall restriction is troublesome on its own? No, not really. What worries me is the precedent it sets, because the trend will surely be higher prices and ever-fewer free reads.

Dan Reimold is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Tampa. He writes and presents frequently on the campus press and maintains the student journalism industry blog College Media Matters, affiliated with the Associated Collegiate Press. His textbook Journalism of Ideas: Brainstorming, Developing, and Selling Stories in the Digital Age is due out in early 2013 by Routledge.

LedeHub to Foster Open, Collaborative Journalism

kzhu91@gmail.com — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 06:00:00 -0800

I'm honored to be selected as one of the inaugural AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship fellows for the 2012-13 academic school year, and am excited to begin work on my project, LedeHub.

I believe in journalism's ability to better the world around us. To fully realize the potential of journalism in the digital age, we need to transform news into a dialogue between readers and reporters. LedeHub does just that, fostering collaborative, continuous and open journalism while incorporating elements of crowdsourcing to allow citizens, reporters and news organizations to come together in unprecedented ways.

LedeHub in Action

Here's a potential case study: "Alice" isn't a journalist, but she loves data and can spot the potential for a story amid the rows and columns of a CSV file. She comes across some interesting census data illustrating the rise of poverty in traditionally wealthy Chicagoland suburbs, but isn't quite sure how to use it, so she points her browser to www.ledehub.com. She creates a new story repository called "census-chicago-12," tags it under "Government Data," and commits the numbers.

Two days later, "Bob" -- a student journalist with a knack for data reporting -- is browsing the site and comes across Alice's repository. He forks it and commits a couple paragraphs of analysis. Alice sees Bob's changes and likes where he's headed, so she merges it back into her repository, and the two continue to collaborate. Alice works on data visualization, and Bob continues to do traditional reporting, voicing the story of middle-class families who can no longer afford to send their children to college.

A few days later, a news outlet like the Chicago Tribune sees "census-chicago-12" and flags it as a promising repository -- pulls it, edits, fact-checks and publishes the story, giving Alice and Bob their first bylines.

As you can see, LedeHub re-imagines the current reporting and writing workflow while underscoring the living nature of articles. By representing stories as "repositories" -- with the ability to edit, update, commit and revert changes over time -- the dynamic nature of news is effectively captured.

Fostering Open-Source Journalism

GitHub and Google Code are social coding platforms that have done wonders for the open-source community. I'd like to see similar openness in the journalism industry.

My proposal for LedeHub is to adapt the tenets of Git -- a distributed version control system -- and appropriate its functionality as it applies to the processes of journalism. I will implement a web application layer on top of this core functionality to build a tool for social reporting, writing and coding in the open. This affords multiple use cases for LedeHub, as illustrated in the case study I described above -- users can start new stories, or search for and contribute to stories already started. I'd like to mirror the basic structure of GitHub, but re-appropriate the front end to cater to the news industry and be more reporter-focused, not code-driven. That said, here's a screenshot of the upcoming LedeHub repository on GitHub (to give you a general idea of what the LedeHub dashboard might look like):

Each story repository may contain text, data, images or code. The GitHub actions of committing (adding changes), forking (diverging story repositories to allow for deeper collaboration and account for potential overlap) and cloning will remain analagous in LedeHub. Repositories will be categorized according to news "topics" or "areas" like education or politics. Users -- from citizens to reporters or coders -- will have the ability to "watch" different story repositories they are interested in and receive updates when changes to that story are made. Users can also comment on different "commits" for a story, offering their input or suggestions for improvement. GitHub offers a "company" option, which allows for multiple users to be added to the organization, a feature I would like to mimic in my project for news outlets, in addition to Google Code's "issues" feature.

Next Steps

I recognize that the scope of my project is ambitious, and my current plan is to segment implementation into iterations -- to build an initial prototype to test within one publication and expand from there.

Journalism needs to become more open, like the web. Information should be shared. The collaboration between the New York Times and the Guardian over WikiLeaks data was very inspiring, two "competing" organizations sharing confidential information for publication. With my project, LedeHub, I hope to foster similar transparency and collaboration.

So, that's the proposal. There's still a lot to figure out. For example, what's the best way to motivate users to collaborate? What types of data can be committed? What copyright issues need to be considered? Should there be compensation involved? Fact-checking? Sound off. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Editor's Note: Katie hopes to launch LedeHub by June 2013, but a firm launch date is not yet set.

Keep up with all the new content on Collaboration Central by following our Twitter feed @CollabCentral or subscribing to our RSS feed or email newsletter:

Katie Zhu is a junior at Northwestern University, studying journalism and computer science, and is particularly interested in human-computer interaction, data visualization and interaction design. She has previously interned at GOOD in Los Angeles, where she helped build GOOD's mobile website. She continues development work part-time throughout the school year, and enjoys designing and building products at the intersection of news and technology. She was selected as a finalist in the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership in 2011.

Collaborating for Dollars: How to Raise Revenue With Others

Dorian@teemingmedia.com — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 06:00:00 -0800

At the recent Collab/Space 2012 event, more hands shot up when Journalism Accelerator's Emily Harris asked who was interested in generating revenue than for any other question. Clearly, there's big interest in collaborating to earn money.

Here, then, are some pointers on collaborating to earn revenue and otherwise improve business performance.

Share The Pie to Make It Bigger

The common model in the media business used to be that one party would pay another a flat fee for a specified service or product. A publisher, for example, paid a vendor for printing or distribution. A freelancer got a check for a specified amount, agreed upon in advance.

These days, however, it's increasingly common for two parties in a media deal to share revenue as it grows, rather than for one to fork over a single lump sum -- an approach that aligns interests and keeps both sides working toward the same goal.

Content creators for platforms like YouTube, BlogTV and Yahoo Voices can earn more revenue as what they produce gets more traffic. Vendors like AdSense and ad networks collect a share of revenue as it's earned, rather than simply charging a fee upfront for their technology.

Sure, if you're a content creator, it can be hard to let go of the impulse to keep all the money your efforts earn -- after all, the more participants there are, the more revenue has to be generated to support them. But your chances of earning more revenue grow if more people are collaborating to help make a project a success.

Help Promotion and Distribution

The more people or organizations there are collaborating on a media effort, the more promotional and distribution outlets become available, from websites to social networks, broadcast outlets, emails, mobile platforms, word of mouth, and so on.

A New York Times executive recently told me that the paper's collaboration with WNYC on SchoolBook generates a lot more awareness of the education website because of the radio station's reach. (Read our previous coverage of SchoolBook.)

Such active linking and sharing can, in turn, increase a product's search engine visibility, thus generating more traffic over time. And every additional pageview that carries revenue opportunities such as ads equals more money over time.

For non-profits, increased traffic can lead to increased funding.

"Collaborations could lead to ... more recognition, more distribution and more impact for stories," MediaShift's Mark Glaser, who co-hosted Collab/Space with UC Berkeley's Investigative Reporting Program (Berkeley IRP), wrote on a discussion thread started by Harris on the Journalism Accelerator website. "That could lead to more donations, memberships and foundation interest for funding."

At Collab/Space, co-host Lowell Bergman of Berkeley IRP pointed out that a Frontline collaboration with another news organization generated twice the viewership of a typical episode of the investigative documentary series.

Increase Efficiencies and Decrease Costs

In today's resource-starved news business, with reporters being laid off and fact-checking and copy desks eviscerated, it's increasingly difficult for any individual news organization to have the person-hours needed to carefully report a story and get it right.

"Collaboration has become something that is not just optional," Glaser said at the event. "It's become something that's really required and necessary."

Collaborating creates efficiencies by enabling partners to report and produce different parts of the same story. Rather than having multiple partners send a reporter or camera operator to a news conference, the partnership can send one coverage team, and other staff can focus on complementary work. People who are good at writing can write; those who specialize in video production can focus on that; and so forth. Organizations can share resources on the business side, too.

"Do we all want to be islands, or do we want to collaborate, share things like back-office operations?" asked Evelyn Larrubia of the Investigative News Network collaborative, which helps its dozens of members share "back-end" resources such as billing and accounting. "The problem we're solving is not a content problem. It's a resource problem and a depth problem."

Change the Mentality and Learn "Coopetition"

Journalists needed to learn, as technologists in Silicon Valley have, that sometimes, cooperation with competitors is the best thing for your business, Glaser said. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Foursquare and many other media and technology companies share some level of information and code with competitors, knowing they'll be stronger for having done so.

As The Huffington Post, Business Insider, and Gawker have shown, others will share your material and build a business on it with or without your active participation; in that case, it's better to form proactive partnerships for mutual benefit.

Many news organizations and some journalists still tend to be proprietary about their efforts. But in a linked economy, why invest resources in "matching" a story that's just a click away?

"We have to have this kind of cultural shift," Glaser said. "There's a kind of ownership of the story that ... becomes about us. 'I want this scoop, I want the award.' What we have lost along the way is it's not about us, it's about serving people -- uncovering things that are important."

Oakland Local's Susan Mernit talked at Collab/Space about a for-profit news organization that "doesn't link out" and refused to help fund her organization's efforts to contribute to their site for fear her not-for-profit group would eventually overtake them. Both, actually, could have benefited and earned more revenue from the content.

Build Smart Networks to Build Value

Collaboration can take advantage of the network effect, the concept that the more nodes there are in a network, the more value there is to the network and to each of those nodes -- even when the nodes are competitors.

One apt illustration is "private label" ad networks that allow similar, sometimes competitive websites to aggregate their page views and communities through platforms such as Addiply, BSA Private Label and AdKiwi and increase each site's ability to appeal to advertisers they'd have more trouble reaching on their own.

In one example, a group of local websites that reach different neighborhoods around Chicago are banding together and increasing their ability to sell throughout the region with one sales staff.

Large media companies such as NBC Universal and Cox media have formed their own private label networks to group sites by subject, such as health, sports and food. Collaborating in this way can lead to more revenue for all.

Limit Liability

Imagine if CBS News had collaborated with computer experts to vet documents allegedly showing George W. Bush shirked his duties in the National Guard, or if Jason Blair had collaborators on his false stories published in Times. In each case, the news organization could have saved huge embarrassment and cost, and even kept the focus on the issues in the stories rather than the mistakes.

Also, the more contributors and organizations there are behind a story, the less easy it is for someone offended by it to take legal action. As Bergman noted, "If you can spread the liability on a story," you can make those who might sue think a little more before they do.

By its nature, business is a collaborative venture. All sides must derive value for a deal to succeed, and that's never been truer than in today's media business. Journalists who've grown up in a lone wolf, competitive culture would do well to emulate the lessons of their brethren in other domains.

> Live Coverage of the Collab/Space 2012 Event by Ashwin Seshagiri

> Collab/Space 2012 Detailed Agenda

Keep up with all the new content on Collaboration Central by following our Twitter feed @CollabCentral or subscribing to our RSS feed or email newsletter:

Pie photo courtesy of Flickr user Mackenzie Mollo; arm wrestling photo courtesy of Flickr user Fabio Venni.

A Progress Report on a College Paper's Pioneering Metered Pay Wall

acapeloto@jjay.cuny.edu — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 06:00:00 -0800

It was just over a year ago that a college newspaper in Oklahoma became a digital media pioneer.

In what was believed to be a first for a college news outlet, The Daily O'Collegian at Oklahoma State University began charging for online content. Sure, the Wall Street Journal, Times of London and other professional publications had already gone for pay walls, but college newspapers are known for being a free and readily available resource on campus and online. As one commenter put it when the news broke, "They might as well charge a million dollars."

Bloggers and media watchers shared the skepticism. Why restrict access to work by student journalists who need all the exposure they can get? Who would pay for student content? Should they even have to, given that student newspapers are more about training future journalists and serving a campus community than turning a profit?

The O'Colly's decision to charge was more of a "why not?" than a grab for riches or precedent. General manager Ray Catalino figured it was worth placing a value on the outlet's content, and said he'd be happy if 100 subscribers signed up in the first year.

With that year now up, how is it going? Was it indeed a pioneering move in the march to monetize online content, or another failed experiment in the wild west of the web world?

Of course, the answer isn't simple or even fully formed yet.

The Update

The O'Collegian worked with a company called Press+ to launch what both call a "metered system" in March 2011. After viewing three free articles within a month, readers outside a 25-mile radius of the Stillwater campus and without an .edu email address were asked to pay $10 for a year of unlimited access. Those who said yes will be automatically renewed each year unless they cancel.

Press+ launched in 2010 and counts media entrepreneur Steven Brill among its three co-founders. The company works primarily with professional outlets to monetize online content through donation solicitation and metered systems. (Brill repudiates the term "pay wall" because readers are usually given some free content before being asked to pay. Others just call that a softer pay wall.)

A year in, Catalino's admittedly informal goal of 100 paid subscribers was met and exceeded. On the one-year anniversary, there were 156 paid subscribers, and as of last week there were 177. Not a windfall, considering the paper has a print circulation of 25,000 and a regular online audience of 2,000, but enough that Catalino recently upped the annual fee to $15 for new subscribers.

There wasn't any national news on the OSU campus that might have lured a burst of new paid subscribers. They came slow and steady, never exceeding three per day. Looking ahead, Catalino has budgeted $3,000 to $4,000 in revenue from online subscribers for the next fiscal year -- again, a mere drop in the outlet's $700,000 budget, but a drop nonetheless.

"The pay wall to me is almost a no-brainer," Catalino said. "It's very simple to implement; it's basically a technical change, and the money comes in. And as long as you're providing good content, it continues. So it has very little cost, has a nice upside and very little downside, in my opinion."

So how is it going? Well enough that the O'Colly will keep charging, and might even further up the price if readers continue to show a willingness to pay. But it's no cash cow and likely won't be anytime soon.

The Impact

Once anathema in the wide open world of the Internet, the idea of charging for online news content is becoming more comfortable for publishers squeezed by plummeting print subscriptions, declining ad sales, and few other revenue options.

Press+ began with 24 clients. Another 300 have signed up since then, and still more are devising their own pay systems and seeing some success, the most prominent example being The New York Times. Those who sign up with Press+ generally pay a set-up fee of a few thousand dollars and hand over 20 percent of revenue.

The O'Collegian was the company's first college publication, but others quickly followed suit, including Boston University's Daily Free Press, the Kansas State Collegian and Tufts University's Tufts Daily. Grant money from the Knight Foundation covered the set-up fee for those that got in early, including the O'Collegian, but Press+ now offers colleges a 90 percent discount on set up as an enticement.

Brill says college newspapers are not a huge business priority for Press+ and counts about 50 on the client list, but he predicts that more and more will turn to the company for help with either seeking donations (the option most current clients choose) or charging for online content.

"We wanted to seed the landscape there and have them benefit from it," Brill said of colleges. "We'll probably have twice the number today by next winter. It's worked well, and it's easy. It doesn't take any work on their part. It's found money."

Brill says the company's geo-location technology is crucial for college outlets because they can aim pay requirements solely at readers outside the campus community, preserving limitless access for students, faculty members, and local residents. If a mega-story breaks and a college newspaper wants full exposure for its content, it can exempt that coverage from the metered system.

The Implications

So the Press+ client list proves that at least some college papers are willing to ask online readers for money, and OSU's first year suggests that at least some readers are willing to comply. Neither addresses the question of whether student publications should make this move.

Dan Reimold, a journalism professor and student media adviser at the University of Tampa in Florida, wrote in January 2010 that college media "should ignore the siren song of pay walls." Why? Because as professional outlets increasingly wall off their online content, college media might become a viable alternative for readers, and because student journalists deserve maximum exposure for their work.

Reimold's opinion today is essentially unchanged. He applauds the O'Collegian for taking the lead on new ways to make money. And he obviously recognizes the significance of their decision to charge, because he broke the news of it on his blog, College Media Matters, in January 2011. But he worries about the long-term implications of a world in which online student content is increasingly restricted.

"I still feel strongly that it is not such an effective revenue technique that it should trump the main purpose of the student press, which is enabling students to get exposure for their work and hopefully join a larger conversation that will help them learn more about the process of reporting things to the world," Reimold said. "The learning vehicle aspect should trump the notion of restricting access."

Brill counters that his company has found no evidence that charging for content restricts the number of unique visitors to a site. If people don't want to pay, they might stop reading for that month, but they return the next month.

Personally, I'm not convinced that access to a student's work, and therefore valuable exposure for that student, remains unchanged in a pay wall world. How can it, when a reader might have read 10 stories but stops at five because he or she won't pay for more?

At the same time, I'm not sure the siren song should be avoided. Professional news publications must find new revenue sources to survive, and their online content does have value. If readers don't agree, that's that. But if they are willing to pay, and remarkably it looks like many are, then why not keep this trend rolling? And why not train future publishers, editors and reporters (not to mention consumers) that it's OK to put a price on such work?

Alexa Capeloto is a journalism professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/City University of New York. She earned her master's degree at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, and spent 10 years as a metro reporter and editor at the Detroit Free Press and the San Diego Union-Tribune before transitioning into academia.

Correction: This story has been corrected to show that Press+ gives a 90 percent discount to college papers on set up fees, not 10 percent as the source originally reported.

In the Age of Social Media, the Customer Really Is King

terri@territhornton.com — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:00:00 -0800

The following is a guest column by Kevin O'Connor, the president of User Insight, a user experience strategy firm.

The idea of putting customers first is not a new one. In fact, it was the start of the 20th century when Harry Gordon Selfridge coined the phrase "The customer is always right."

But customers have never been as powerful as they are today in the social media age.

The potential damage that can be done to a reputation on social media raises the stakes higher than they've ever been. A new era means new ways to collaborate with and serve valuable customers. It's time for companies to stretch beyond customer satisfaction surveys and stop relying on demographic research to determine how their brands should interact with their customers. It's time to start talking to customers, one on one, in order to understand who they are and how to wow them with a product or service.

Today, more and more companies realize they must spend time and effort to really get to know their customers. If one person has a bad experience, news travels at lightning-fast speed. They will post their woes to their friends, contacts and Twitter followers.

"If we knew someone had 50,000 Twitter followers, our call centers would escalate their call for support," someone once told me.

That's certainly understanding the power of social media, but the goal should be larger: to make sure the customer experience is as good as it can possibly be to avoid all complaints in the first place, whether public or private.

the case of Qwikster

Netflix clearly underestimated its customers last year when it announced it would rename its DVD-distribution service Qwikster. Creating separate charges for DVDs and streaming video would almost double prices. Plus, a high schooler already owned the Twitter handle @Qwikster, indicating even worse foresight.

The day Netflix announced Qwikster, online conversations spiked almost 300 percent. Seventy percent of the chatter was negative when emotion was tied to the posts. Netflix stock dropped 20 percent. $2 billion in value evaporated in eight hours. Hundreds of thousands of subscribers canceled their service. The customers had spoken -- Netflix abandoned the idea, and the CEO apologized.

On the flip side, if consumers love a product, store, brand or experience, they will shout it out into their vast digital networks. Take for example, musician Tommee Profitt, whose love for Target led him to record a music video using his iPhone 4S.

A new take on 'user experience'

Since today's customer truly is king, with powerful communication tools right at their fingertips, companies have to pay more attention to the overall "user experiences" they are creating for people. User experience, or UX, is a broad term used to describe all aspects of a person's experience with a system or brand.

User experience research and testing helps companies "put the customer first" in all aspects of their businesses.

In today's many-to-many world, consumers group themselves, especially online, largely based on values, interests and aspirations -- not by sex, race and age. In this scenario, companies must understand their consumers' behaviors and motivators -- the why behind their actions.

An example: A company in the financial services industry came to my firm, User Insight, to get to know its customers better. Based on the demographic and segmentation information, this client believed that people chose banks according to life stage. After spending hours one on one, in consumers' homes, interviewing them on how they choose a bank, we discovered that it wasn't about their sex, age, race or stage of life at all. Instead, we found three groups based on values and behaviors: customers who preferred to bank online, those who like a branch nearby, and those who want a banker who knows them by name and handles their complex finances.

Getting insights from the customers who will actually use the product at the end of the day allows a company to focus on the core experience these customers are looking for. It's not about "if" someone can use a product; it's about "will" they use the product. The key today is serving up the right content at the right time in the right way. Consumers have many ways to interact with a brand; understanding how they want to do that will make the brand successful.

Smart companies should be willing to seek out and accept the tough love they need to serve consumers and manage change well. They also need the right people to guide them who are passionate, pleasant and collaborative. Putting time and effort into quality user experience research can mean healthier businesses, happier customers, and fewer reputation-flaying diatribes online. Because in today's social media age, user experience matters.

Kevin O'Connor is president of User Insight, a user experience strategy firm providing research and consulting to more than 300 clients in 25 different industries. User Insight, an Inc. 5000 firm, is headquartered in Atlanta, Ga.

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