"Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind." Louis Pasteur

"Genius is only a greater aptitude for patience." Comte de Buffon

"One morning one of us, having no black, used blue instead, and Impressionism was born." Pierre Auguste Renoir

Today's image: Late Night Travel By Thomas Hawk Beautiful shot. Thank you for sharing.

Markets are conversations

Thesis #1/95, The Cluetrain Manifesto

One key benefit of today's hyperconnectivity is the wealth of conversation. Not a day goes by without someone starting or adding to a discussion. On topics related to media there's a robust diversity of ongoing discussion. Those working in media will gain valuable insight and advantage by devoting attention to a couple of particular discussions.

First, serious inside broadcasting baseball conversations and, second, the abundance of comments on broadcast media emanating from what Jay Rosen has called "the people formerly known as the audience."

Many of us arrived here from a different world. Access or exposure to some kind of thought leadership or best practice wisdom and any continuing professional education whatsoever were limited; trade pubs were delivered weekly, popular industry conventions staged annually. The important exercise of "holding a mirror up to the audience" was typically a once a year ritual - the perceptual research study - more event than process.

This should not be understood as a suggestion we should discount the potential value of publications, conferences or survey research. Au contraire, my thought is each would be enriched, complimented, not replaced, by careful study of available conversations. What has forever changed is context. The conversations are already in progress. Get engaged and involved.

To review the (now) obvious fundamentals as stated in The Cluetrain: "The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media." and "We have real power and we know it. If you don't quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with."

Localized radar: To get a quick read on your market create a local Twitter list. Populate with all the usual suspects. For best results make it an ongoing curation. Invite listeners/viewers/followers to suggest additions. Here's an example created for Madison, WI. Such lists can well serve your market "listening" strategy. FYI - some clients have created a second list using a Twitter account not associated with the company so they can also track tweets of all media in their market.

The Broadcast Ecosystem

My sense is broadcasters would benefit from some discussion about ecosystems. Let's frame it this way: Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook are each building and fine-tuning (iterating) an ecosystem. A bespoke community set designed to create and sustain competitive advantage. What is the state of your company's ecosystem? Seems a fair, timely and important question.

You can Google "Amazon ecosystem" (or any, all of the big four above) and get an idea of the concept, including graphic representations. In my experience, a candid and valuable discussion about any ecosystem should begin with mapping. Have your associates independently create maps which reveal what they believe is your present ecosystem. Gather your team to share and discuss their maps. Create a map of your ecosystem. Iterate. How can your ecosystem be improved?

One example: broadcaster ecosystem maps include Audience & Advertiser clusters. Within the Audience cluster are lifestyle groups and their purchase needs/behaviors. These relate to buyer, potential buyer groups within the Advertiser cluster.

An area often overlooked in this mapping is your local developer community. The upside potential of establishing a formalized approach, a respectful place within your ecosystem, to effectively involve talented hometown geeks is not at all insignificant. Thank me later.

Good reads

The Future of UI: Contextual Intelligence. By Bob O'Donnell, here

EXCELLENCE. NO EXCUSES. By Tom Peters. This 737-page download is a gem, here

The Power of One. By Fred Jacobs. Fred offers up a solid post about the Nielsen LA Radio ratings scandal which turns into an interesting discussion via comments on how ratings are used, here

Witty Worried and Wolf. Nancy Wolf, the smart and celebrated communications lawyer, is not retiring, she's restarting. Enjoy her new blog here

SCOTUS: The Aereo decision, here

In closing let me share a wonderful image. This week Professor Gary Hamel delivered another of his thought-provoking talks. A keynote at the London Business School's Global Leadership Summit, his talk was about hacking management. The following image was taken from his deck. My thanks to Dr Hamel for allowing it to be shared here. Dare to distribute, discuss and post in your workspace.

"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." Naguib Mahfouz

"Scientists are explorers, philosophers are tourists." Richard Feynman

"Stay hungry. Stay foolish." Steve Jobs

Today's image: Wet Tracks by Thomas Hawk. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing.

Happy Halloween! During my annual the doc told me I had to lay off the boos.

Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?

With thanks to Carole King, let me suggest that in the massive, ongoing sea change that is digital disruption, few of us are staying in one place anymore. Consider this proffer: Your media consumption, your behavior, will be as different five years from today as your behavior today is from what it was ten years ago. Your media production, your acts of creation and those of everyone have been assisted, enabled in truly profound ways.

Let's take one of the moving parts: social networks. Facebook and Twitter are first generation platforms. Both have made a significant impact. Both enjoy global reach. Both are building a business, a brand, without the need to invest resources in traditional marketing channels (i.e., advertising). In fact, ad-supported measured media have been the aggressive, albeit unpaid, promotional partners of both. "We all need to spend more time on Facebook" opined Tom Webster, Edison Research's Vice President, Strategy and Marketing (and their resident social scholar). Of course, Tom's right. Last week, Jacob Media's Lori Lewis and Fred Jacobs issued a clarion call about social, Time Suck: "...it's time to adapt to a multi-channel environment and study the motivations behind each channel. Or simply get left behind..."

Nobody stays in one place anymore.

Occasionally I hear from folks kind enough to ask me why I'm not blogging any longer. It's a fair question given 200+ posts a year appeared in this space during 2006, 2007 and 2008. Recent years not so much. 54 posts in 2009, 13 in 2010 and, with this, 8 posts so far this year. The quick answer is I'm still sharing my thoughts but not in this one place anymore. For example, 3 years, 7 months and 15 days ago I began posting on Twitter. My guess is I'm sharing far more on Twitter than I was ever able to share here because I can tweet a real-time link to something just read. Moreover, I can do that on the fly without my laptop or desk top via a hand-held device. The sense of time and space has changed dramatically in recent years.

This is not to suggest blogs are dead or on the way out. Nonsense. My take: there are more and better blogs than there have ever been and I have a reader full of unread posts to prove it. The signal to noise ratio is also greatly improved because our tuning tools are better. As Nathan Jurgenson wrote just yesterday "Social media is like radio: It all depends on how you tune it." [Why Chomsky is wrong about Twitter] My sense is there's nothing wrong with the fire hose. Shirky was right. What we have is a filter problem.

Some might say I have over-shared on Twitter. 36,396 tweets and counting. Guilty, not every tweet has been a gem worthy of a retweet. Let me also say I love to blog and will continue to use this space to share thoughts that require more space and time. This blog isn't dead, yet. It has simply become only one of the places where I'm living out loud. Humblebrag: I'm told my smiling clown Twitter account ranks 107,373 out of the 10,999,157 scored by grader.com so I'm closing in on breaking into the exclusive five figures club.

While I'm not able to comment on the veracity of such rankings or grades, it's interesting to note Grader's Top 100 Twitter Elite includes only three American media outlets. Fox News at #14. Huffington Post Washington bureau at #18. New York Times at #76. The list is dominated by individuals. This seems to hold true across DMA after DMA. Media, broadcasters especially, should be doing a much better job. Congrats to Thomas Clifford, my Twitter pal from Appleton, Wisconsin. He's ranked #9 and lives by the motto "Find out what sucks and don't do that."

Want to gain solid insight into the emergent metrics of social? In my experience, the go-to-guy on social media data is the aforementioned Tom Webster. You may find his blog, brandsavant, here.

Doing business in 2011 without having some kind of personal digital presence (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blog) is equivalent to trying to do business in 1990 without a telephone number or fax machine or claiming you're competitive in business ten years ago without having an email account. Table stakes. What's changing is not only the cost of doing business but the resources required to be and stay competitive in business. New devices are also changing consumer behaviors. Example: Amazon is offering a tablet which, it may be argued, is a personalized point of sale device. The prospective impacts of social commerce are magnitudes of net force larger than the changes brought about so far by today's nascent social networks.

Identity is being redefined

Who are you on the web? Used to be having email was enough. Now, Facebook, Google, Twitter and players to be named, are in a battle to own the so-called identity space. Twitter, being asymmetrical, gained an early edge over symmetrical Facebook but Zuck changed it up adding the asymmetric feature "Subscribe." It's the Wild West, no standards yet for "social authentication." It's an important issue. Stay tuned.

It's the dawn of this digital disruption. The best is yet to come. My suggestion is we'll look back on 2011 someday soon and laugh about how lame, crude all of these early platforms really were. But in the meantime, in between time, the conversation is happening with or without you so it's important to get into the game. Now more than ever, your assets must be digital, discoverable and ready to share. Be yourself. Have fun. Share.

Another example of being in more than one place. This is a must-read not shared here last month but via my posterous. Speaking at Social Media Week - Chicago, the great media critic Robert Feder said...

"...It's about engaging the reader and that's one aspect of it but it's an important part of the new media and the world that we're in and that didn't happen in old media, that didn't happen at the Sun-Times. We wrote our piece, we went home, that was it. It was a monologue delivered and that was the end of the process...people, younger people in particular, are engaged in all media they consume and that includes news and journalism and they want to be able to react, they want to be able to use it in different ways, and that's what we're affording them the opportunity to do. I'm just setting the table, I'm starting the conversation every day and what happens out there is up to the people who read it."

Emphasis above (bold) mine. Robert speaks of a fundamental change. From delivering a monologue to starting a conversation. The difference is engagement. Once upon a time print writers heard from readers when readers had taken the time to call or write a letter to them or the editor. Letters, delivered a day or so after, may or may not have been edited and published. We didn't get to read the mail of the newspaper writer. Today we do and find it odd if the ability to comment fails to follow an online writing.

Robert offered many interesting and important points during his talk, here's another:

To me, you should never take your eye off the quality of the content, that's what matters

The play's the thing. It was ever thus. Read more excerpts from Robert's thought-provoking appearance, here.

Refresh: The People Formerly Known as the Audience, written by Jay Rosen in the summer of 2006, deserves a fresh reading, here.

Cool, new, on: findings  chime.in  Pinterest

Bonus: Patrick LaForge on the new "Generation Gap" via Google+, here

Video: "Studies show that sketching and doodling improve our comprehension - and our creative thinking. Sunni Brown makes the case for unlocking your brain via pad and pen." I highly recommend her book, Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers [Amazon info]

"Hire execs who love the product." Dave Winer

"Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity and truth accomplishes no victories without it." Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm." Winston Churchill

Today's image: Banksy. Cans Festival Leake Street SE1 by pomphorhynchus. Amazing. Thank you for sharing.

Good to be back. So much to catch up on. Let's get started.

Dave Winer inspired this post. Should you not be aware of Dave, please do get to know him. He was instrumental in bringing us game-changing breakthroughs including blogging, RSS and podcasting. He's an original thinker, a person not afraid of dealing in that most rare and refreshing of attitudes, he dares to offer unvarnished thought. You may find his blog, Scripting News, here. Longtime readers will recall the header of this blog once contained Dave's wise counsel "People come back to places that send them away." That has never been more true or relevant than it is today.

Recently Dave wrote: "Every crop of entrepreneurs thinks it's different. They never are, but they have to learn that for themselves. One thing they do over and over is hire execs who don't love the product. It's as if the guy who ran professional football didn't like football." My sense is Dave is spot-on in this observation. Read Dave's entire post, Hire execs who love the product, here.

Seems to me too many of those working in broadcast today don't truly love the product. Should we somehow be given the ability to Mirandize the majority of broadcast leadership, have them raise a hand and give us the straight dope under oath, my sense is our finding would be there ain't a lot of love. These guys are not happy, not having fun, not excited about the industry as it is today and not close to convincingly enthusiastic regarding the road ahead. Can't totally blame them. It's not the job they signed up for. Moreover, 2009 is turning out to be yet another one of those years that they would prefer we all just agree to forget. More on this leadership issue later.

Today, let us choose to learn rather than forget.

Here now the lessons of a media company about one hundred and thirty years old that put down one of it's most prized assets earlier this year. The Rocky Mountain News printed it's final edition on February 27, 2009.

At that ending, John Temple was the editor, president and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News. Now he presents us with an exceptional gift - lessons learned from the end of an institution. Here are his ten lessons. I strongly recommend you visit his blog, watch his video and read his entire presentation delivered earlier today at the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google. [Speakers list]

1. Know what business you're in.
2. Know your customers.
3. Know your competition.
4. Know your goal.
5. Have a strategy and be committed to pursuing it.
6. Measure, measure, measure.
7. Keep new ventures free from the rules of the old.
8. Let the people running a new venture do what's best for their business, regardless of the potential impact on the old.
9. To compete in a new medium, you have to understand it.
10. Invest in R&D.

Bravos, John. Well done. Thanks for sharing. This gentleman loved his product, loved his job, of that there can be no doubt. His leading by example, his generous offering of learning, is simply exemplary. You may find John's post, including video, slides and the text of his presentation, here.

Thanks, again, to Dave Winer for the inspiration and to NYU rock star Jay Rosen for his tip on John's wonderful gift of learning.

Your comments are always welcome.

More tomorrow. Thank you for stopping by.

"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem." G.K. Chesterton

"By definition, risk-takers often fail. So do morons. In practice it's difficult to sort them out." Scott Adams

"Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of values." Michael Porter

Today's image: To Miss You by michelleBlack. Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing.


Today, more lessons learned from the ongoing development, presentation, discussion and refinement of my social media brief.

"If the news is that important, it will find me."

Those are the oft quoted words of an unknown college student. The student threw out that insightful gem while participating in a focus group conducted by researcher Jane Buckingham. The quotation itself became widely known thanks, in large measure, to an article by Timesman Brian Stelter (Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On, NYT 3/27/08)

The attitude, the expectation, inherent in that quotation signals a significant shift in relationships and responsibilities. What is really at work here represents a profound sea change in media behaviors. The definitions, patterns and rule sets of consumption are in various stages of transition or disruption as some have suggested.

As a practical matter, consumption (the economic activity of purchase) is being redefined. My sense is we are moving from generations of media built on businesses premised on attraction (i.e., importing readers, listeners and viewers) to a wholly new generation of media, a nascent mediascape, in which business models are fundamentally different. Success is a moving target predicated on issues of multi-channel distribution (exporting). A world of one-to-many is adding another layer or two, new constructs, many-to-one and many-to-many and all the while one-to-one connecting is experiencing nothing less than a renaissance. Thank you, Facebook.

Import + Export

It is still important but no longer good enough for a successful media company to simply attract readers, listeners and viewers to a single specific newspaper, radio/TV station, cable channel or web site. The concept of reach, critical to the measured media enterprise, is moving beyond a single definition, it's embracing multiple interpretations. It's a new and different game; like going from the 2D chess we know and understand to that 3D chess of Star Trek. From readers, listeners and viewers reaching for our content to an audience also being reached by our content. Continuing to invite and direct attention to our place while also working to become a part of their places. Now in play...a new sense of place. Moreover, recent anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that while consumers are continuing to elect one or more traditional channels (soliloquies) they are adding to their media mix, they are participating (if only by observation) in one or more related conversations.

The entire notion of how consumer media transactions are conducted is changing. Dan Gillmor first referred to consumers as, "the people formerly known as the audience." Increasingly, these folks are in the game. What makes this difficult for some to grok is the so-called old media are not just going away. The new media, the emerging forms, are additive and sometimes appear to be the old media in the throes of some evolutionary process. Print = text, radio = audio, TV = video. The biggest issue for media managers is one of legacy, it's a matter of an accepted tradition of control. Jeff Jarvis, a former dead tree exec turned digital evangelist, has proffered a law, to wit: "Give the people control of media, they will use it. The corollary: Don’t give the people control of media, and you will lose. Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will." (Read more: The People Formerly Known as the Audience by Jay Rosen. June 2006)

For decades research was tasked with measuring media (s)elections, preferences of consumption after the fact. What ad did you notice? What station did you listen to? What program did you watch? As we move deeper into the new reality, the brave new world of hyper-connected real-time, the heads-up display, the dashboard, trumps looking in the rear view mirror.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
R. Buckminster Fuller

Going forward, the significant matters that deserve the considered attention of media management include mobile (the new black) and ensuring that all assets are...

Digital

Discoverable

Ready to share

Next time: Why Tribune made a very smart move in changing their SEO's supervisor from the CTO to the COO. Plus, my thesis of Ready to share benefits from a practical illustration in the Hugh MacLeod concept of Sociality.

Bonus: Quotetrain #1 The new normal is that we expect businesses to listen to us. The companies that don’t are now perceived as Dinosaurs. - David Weinberger.

Spinning in the Grave. The three biggest reasons music magazines are dying. Jonah Weiner writes all about it in Slate, here.

"He who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fears not to declare as freely what might be done better, gives ye the best covenant of his fidelity." John Milton

"A great business success was probably never attained by chasing the dollar, but is due to pride in one's work - the pride that makes business an art." Henry Doherty

"You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be." Lavater

Today's image: Sahara by raspootin. Amazing. Thank you for sharing!

Cramer vs Kramer: Thanks to paidContent for sharing video of a great insider discussion between Jimmy Cramer and Larry Kramer on business media. Some great takeaway: What's in a name? Larry tells us that the CBS name did not boost MarketWatch traffic, however, association with CBS delivered juice to reporters - they got their calls returned - and cred to sellers - they were able to get the attention of advertisers. Larry says "Radio going to the web means they need to be just like television...they need to build an audience for it." JC picks Disney as the media outfit that will most likely make it happen, LK's bet is CBS. Bravos to Jimmy and Larry! Very well done guys. Highly recommended. Three part video here.

The importance of your main page is in decline

Import vs Export: One of the issues we are dealing with on the day job is content distribution. The mindset of what we are calling Import vs Export. Case in point. Because he has decided to offer his cartoons via widget (upper left of this page) gapingvoid artiste Hugh MacLeod gains audience by orders of magnitude. His potential exposure, his reach, is now significantly greater than before the widget. Far more will view his widget than will likely ever visit his site. Broadcast and print alike are still driven by the dated notion that viewers, listeners and readers belong to them - the pov and the related pronoun are wrong. Our viewers, our listeners, our readers. This logic establishes a one dimensional strategy and the potentially flawed lens of single measurement. How much traffic are we getting? Broadcast and print are using resources to import visitors. The key to success, in our considered opinion, is an aggressive and complimentary strategy of export. It's understanding that the days of your main page are in decline. How are you allowing, encouraging and rewarding folks to export your content? What's your mobile strategy? What are you doing to ensure that your assets are discoverable? What are your factors of findability? These are issues of and rather than or; a continuing and radical shift away from the producer-centric mindset. Cohort replacement will dramatically accelerate this shift. You gotta be everywhere they wanna be.

Survey says: Zogby has released some key findings. 68% of conservatives never watch 60 Minutes. More from the national study on Politics and Entertainment here.

Congrats & cheers: Jay Rosen and team on the launch of Beat Blogging, very cool. NPR on their beta launch of NPR Music (Kudos too to Fred Jacobs and his uber-cool crew who played a part in the NPR initiative). Rafat Ali, Wenda Harris Millard, Paul Maidment, Roger Neil, Brian Quinn, Chuck Cordray honored by min magazine and among those named on the 2007 Digital Hot List. Complete list (including The 21 Most Intriguing People) of honorees here. Bob Wood on the debut of his latest venture The ComStar Network, good luck!

Bonus: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity. Fleder & Hosanagar, The Wharton School. A good read here.

Larry Lessig, the rock star Stanford professor and maven of all things copyright, presented at TED this year. The video here is a little over twenty minutes and well worth your bandwidth. As readers of this blog may be aware, I am a supporter of Creative Commons. Bravos to Larry!

How creativity is being strangled by the law

"We have more power than will; and it is only to exculpate ourselves that we often say that things are impracticable." La Rochefoucauld

The inconvenient truth: Almost daily we hear, see or read something that suggests today's teenagers are using media in dramatically different ways. True. We are living in a dramatically different media world. Nothing stops technology and the velocity of change is incredible, at times even difficult to fully grasp. What has not changed is the teen appetite for new. Like those who went before them they make the hits and make them fresh daily. The container always less important than the content, the technology becoming transparent. Their iPod, cell and computer compliment their other audio and video behaviors. First generation wireless is actually alive and well. It is not, as some have suggested, that teens no longer listen to the radio, they do. It is that not many in the trade are dedicating themselves to committing great radio for the youth market. There are notable exceptions. Brian Kelly is making it happen. He's the goods, one of the best radio programming chiefs working today; Brian's stations are fresh, engaging, arresting, entertaining and just plain fun to listen to. For those who may harbor the illusion that teens no longer listen to radio may I present the facts. Exhibit A: In the Spring 06 Arbitron, Kelly's station, Milwaukee's 1037 KISS FM (WXSS) delivered a 57.8 teen cume rating. In fact, a trending of each Fall sweep since 2003 reveals his teen cume rating has increased each and every year! MySpace. Station site. But wait...there's more. His team has cool vids on YouTube, to wit: this 100K+ views video and his latest "Tix in a box." Brian Kelly gets it, check out his stuff. All that's important is what's on the screen(s) and what's coming out of the speakers, everything else is a footnote.

Congrats & cheers: Jay Rosen launches AssignmentZero. "Pro-am journalism opens on the web" Bravo! WaPo's Joel Achenbach blogs the backstory here. Another music site debut, check out slacker.com here.

Your copier remembers: AP tech writer May Wong writes Your New ID-Theft Worry? Photocopiers via Wired here.

Things may appear larger than they really are: Today, many years ago, the great Bill Hartman and I took the shuttle to the city for a meeting at 90 Park. Our suggestion was to stop playing music and take WBZ 100% spoken word, 100% talent driven service, information and entertainment. Our proposal was 100% rejected. It was the brilliant Jimmy Yergin who weighed in on our side "The twelve hours you are doing talk is killing the twelve hours you are playing music, the reverse also holds true. Your successful evening sports talk program is killing your midday music show." Our corporate "angels" (as Bill called them) said as long as WHDH and WRKO were playing music we needed to play music and besides AM stereo was going to change everything and make us equal in fidelity to those FM stations. It was the story of WKTU and WABC that got the attention of our angels. Back in the day Mediastat issued a monthly ratings report. WKTU, an FM station playing disco, became #1 in the monthly report. The considered opinion of our corporate team was disco was the new rock n roll, WKTU's success a watershed. Tastes in popular music had been reset. It was 1955 all over again. Some execs at ABC jumped to the same conclusion and changed the music approach of WABC. Acting to preempt others ABC changed their Chicago FM from rock to disco; if ABC's WLS was to be hurt by an FM station it would be by their own FM station. The myth of first mover advantage. Being first is not important, being the first to get it right wins the race.

Bonus: My $100 Million Dollar Secret by David Weinberger