It’s all about people (not “consumers”)

February 17th, 2010

In my early presentations to groups that wanted to talk about disruptions to media, I always began with a slide that said, “It’s not about technology; it’s about people.” For those who’ve not read or heard me on the subject, let me give you the basics, because I need to answer a question posed to me by colleague Jim Willi over the weekend on his blog.

While everybody points fingers of blame this way or that over what’s been taking place with media companies over the past few years, we would all do well to look in the mirror. The Internet has brought Western culture to a new place, and here’s what’s important to know: the Web is unlocking deeply-held feelings and awakening new possibilities for everyday people. To begin with, people are able to be better informed about a great many things today. And if information is power, then people are more powerful today. On many fronts, they are enabled to do something about their former helplessness. They’re involved in their lives and the lives of their friends, families and communities on levels never known before, largely because they’re all connected and can respond on a dime to anything. This is new under the sun, and we cannot look the other way.

This is why I say that technology may be providing the means, but it’s what’s being released in people that’s generating the heat. In my view, we are in the midst of the second Gutenberg moment in history, and it will have profound ramifications for all of culture.

So when Mr. Willi wrote this weekend of the failure of Superbowl advertisers to successfully drive viewers to their websites, the question about why is rather simple.

Apparently Super Bowl advertisers missed the mark in their attempt to extend their ads from the big game by using social media to give life to their brands beyond one multi-million dollar spot within the most-watched event. I leave the diagnosis of why this effort missed the mark to 2.0 guru’s like our Terry Heaton – but I find the information fascinating.

Jim wrote of strategies by advertisers to involve social media in their ads, but noted that research after the fact showed that few people actually were moved to do anything. “The advertisers’ goal,” he noted, “was to drive the viewers to go on line and chat, Tweet and become a Facebook fan.”

When marketing people use phrases like “drive the viewers” — and media companies are certainly guilty of this as well — we dismiss any notion that, just perhaps, people don’t care to be so driven. In the seminal book of the new revolution, The Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc Searls wrote extensively about this. Here’s a key paragraph:

So the customers who once looked you in the eye while hefting your wares in the market were transformed into consumers. In the words of industry analyst Jerry Michalski, a consumer was no more than “a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash.” Power swung so decisively to the supply side that “market” became a verb: something you do to customers.

If you’ve never read the book, I strongly recommend you make it your weekend project. It’s free as a PDF online.

The point is that people are tired of the relentless carpet bombing of unwanted messages, and so they’ve turned them off and tuned them out (think TiVo). The marketing world’s response is to try and jam more into every conceivable sight, sound, touch, taste or smell. If it can get into your brain, marketing will try to get in there with it, or at least that’s the way it used to be.

Newscasts and news departments, for example, that radiate a “watch or you might die” persona are challenged, because people know it’s just not true. Hubris is our big enemy, along with the presumption that we can say or do anything — no matter how it challenges the integrity or intelligence of the audience — and they’ll respond the way we want them to respond.

This is why Jay Rosen refers to them as “the people formerly known as the audience.”

So why didn’t people respond to those ads? Well, it certainly could be lots of things, but the place I’d begin is the presumption in the first place that they would. Social media isn’t a place where we can butt in and take over. Just because you’re a big brand doesn’t mean you have a license to treat people as pawns on your self-serving board game. Until mass marketing accepts the new realities of life in an empowered culture, they will continue to find failure with old thinking. People simply need to be treated differently.

Here’s Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo, and formerly Starcom’s chief innovation officer:

(We’ve entered) an empowered era in which humans are God, because technology allows them to be godlike. How will you engage God?

Douglas Rushkoff in his book, Get Back In The Box:

The internet is not a technological or even a media phenomenon; it is a social phenomenon. And in this sense, interactivity has changed everything.

Chris Anderson in his book, The Long Tail:

As the tools of production and distribution are democratized, institutions lose power and individuals gain it. As the Web becomes the greatest word-of-mouth amplifier in history, consumers learn to trust peers more and companies less.

So I’m not surprised when marketing fails today, and the lessons for all of us are pretty clear. Old assumptions about people, especially those that involve fun verbs like drive, move, shift, and my favorite “reposition” must be carefully reconsidered in our dealings with our audiences. New words like participate, involve, transparency, and friend are strong but only if we deliver what we promise.

I can still remember sitting in an office at Nielsen in Dunedin, Florida and reading comments in diary after diary from viewers in the Northwest begging for the TV stations to stop insulting them with teases. I asked myself, “Do station managers ever read this stuff?” Because if they did, they might have a different view of how we interact with viewers.

(Now that’s not to say we shouldn’t do “teases,” only that we might want to try less insulting approaches than “15 dead in an accident on highway 101. The story at 11.” And it turns out to be pigs. You get my drift.)

In the old world, people couldn’t escape that nonsense. Today, not only can they escape, they are — and in big numbers.

“Spam” is a nasty word for unwanted messages via email — or any other delivery system. Think about that before you create some clever way to “drive” people from here to there.

(Originally published in this week’s AR&D Media 2.0 Intel Newsletter)

Posted in Culture, Disruptions, Media 2.0 | No Comments »

The future of paid content

February 17th, 2010

The hopes of newspapers to shift their Web users from free to paid models suffered a fairly substantial setback this morning with word of a new study from the folks at Nielsen. According to a report in Online Media Daily,

A new Nielsen survey says 79% of users would no longer access a Web site that charges them. The finding also assumes that consumers can find the same information at no cost. The new report from Nielsen surveyed 27,000 consumers from 52 countries.

Looking at new fee-based areas, the survey shows that 71% of global consumers say that if have to pay for online content it must be considerably better than what is currently available for free.

Obviously, media companies need to get paid for their efforts, so this disconnect between users (let’s remember that they’re real people, see below) and the copyright community needs resolution somehow, and fortunately, there are smart people trying to work on the issues. A lot of them will be on hand this weekend at a new conference in New York on the concept of paid content by the people who report daily on the subject, PaidContent.org. The scope of “Paid Content, Discussing The Economics Of Content” includes:

• Business strategy and models that are working across news, information and entertainment
• The people and companies driving innovation
• The cross-platform approach to developing these diverse revenue streams
• Music, TV and movie downloads
• Subscription streaming
• A la carte payments, micropayments, subscriptions, donation models, subsidy models, and mobile payments

In other words, just about everything involving people paying for content. I caught up with ContentNext Media EVP and co-editor of paidcontent.org, Staci Kramer, with some tough questions about the idea of paid content:

Q – What is the future of paid content? Content that used to be ad-supported is now competing with content that IS advertising, and I’ve read from many knowledgeable observers that “content” is no longer king. Given that this is the namesake of your company and your conference, what are your thoughts?

KRAMER: Our flagship site, paidContent.org, was founded by Rafat Ali in 2002. As we added sites and other elements to the company, the corporate name became ContentNext Media — chosen in no small part to reflect a constantly changing area. To me, all content is paid content — the differences are in who pays for it. With our sites and newsletters, advertisers pay to gain access to our readers. In theory, and often in practice, readers pay for “free” and ad-supported content with attention. Cable, newspaper and magazine subscribers pay for access and delivery, usually subsidized by advertisers; some are willing to pay more to get media and entertainment without ads. You get my drift.

So what is the future of paid content? Nothing that makes money now is going away any time soon. We’re in an age of maintenance mixed with experimentation — keep as much money coming in as you can while you look for solutions. It’s also an age of opportunity. That’s one reason we’re having paidContent 2010 — to hear about what’s working and to explore the possibilities.

Q – Your speaker list is a veritable “Who’s Who” of the content world. Do today’s “content” people really have a handle on what’s disrupting their world, and, more importantly, what to do about it? I’m partly referring to the issue of aggregators, like Google.

KRAMER: A lot of them do — or at least are trying very hard to get one — and our speakers reflect that. John Squires, for instance, is heading Next Issue Media, the joint venture of five major magazine publishers looking for a solution together, They want to create an electronic newsstand that gives each publisher control over its own pricing, customer relationships, etc., but solved the technological and marketing issues as a group.

Google News’ Josh Cohen is on the news panel so I expect we’ll hear a fair amount about why Google doesn’t think aggregation or search should be the bogey man. Most publishers want to use search literally as an engine for traffic to their sites so cutting it out completely isn’t an option but the “solutions” are all over the map. The FT’s Rob Grimshaw will talk about how they’re limiting full “first click” access from Google, while the New York Times has already said it won’t block in-bound links.

Q – Do you think content people will be able to successfully pull back on “free” content to bring about another revenue stream? This must be a constant source of your attention, so your view is pretty important (I think).

KRAMER: Thanks for thinking my view is important. I’ve been through this drill before. When I was at Inside.com, the site had an enormous amount of buzz from its free content, which was meant to fuel subscriptions. When we went behind the paywall, the buzz died down. If you can calibrate the launch of a new product with a blend, you have a chance at success.

As for “successfully”:– that may depend on your definition of success. If you’re trying to take back something people already get for free — like Newsday did late last year — be prepared to pay the consequences in lower traffic and possibly lower relevance. Newsday and parent Cablevision think they can win by creating a higher-value, more targeted local audience.

On the broadcast/cable side, because so much cable video is out there, most people don’t realize that more than 80 percent of full-length cable programming hasn’t been available free. When Hulu’s’ investors talk about subscriptions, they’re not looking at making everything on Hulu’s’ pay only. The focus will be on video that isn’t out there yet or is made available in different ways That has a better chance of succeeding. Disney’s Bob Iger has already said broadcast programming won’t be moved to pay only.

Q – Finally, like so many people who’ve been around this for awhile, I’m proud to know both of you and to have watched your business – and stature – grow. How have things changed for the PaidContent empire?

KRAMER: It’s been about 18 months since we were acquired by Guardian News & Media, which is the biggest change for the company. We have the resources of Guardian to draw on and share a CEO, Caroline Little, with Guardian North America and operate independently editorially. But our focus and that of paidContent and ContentNext remains the same: doing our best to keep up with this crazy space so we can help all of you keep up with it. We’ve come a long way from 2004 when I joined — with Rafat working from his home in California and me from St. Louis — to a full company with a nice (but not glam) office in New York and staff in Seattle, LA and London. One of the best parts is so many people like you have been on the journey with us.

We’ll be watching the conference closely and hope to report on it next week. Like last week’s conference with Gordon Borrell’s company, this one is being organized and planned by people who really know the space. And the exciting thing to me is that neither conference existed last year. It should be good.

(Originally published in this week’s AR&D Media 2.0 Intel Newsletter)

Posted in Copyright, Disruptions, Newsletter, Reinventing Local Media | No Comments »

“Nashville is Talking” to close

February 9th, 2010

So my old friend Nashville is Talking is closing down. You can read about it here, here, and here.

This is a tough one for me personally. That site is a part of my life, an innovation in local media that accomplished much in teaching us about aggregating and curating a local blogosphere. However, the site didn’t meet the economic needs of its owners, Young Broadcasting, who were going through a severe financial season. In that way, what happened to it is a sad reminder that innovations by companies with serious bottom line issues can’t compete with those funded by venture capital.

A part of me dies with NiT, but here are a couple of thoughts.

In today’s fire hose of content known as the Web, we need curators more than ever. The value proposition of Nashville is Talking always was it was one RSS feed that could give you insight into 400. Who will do that tomorrow (or today, for that matter)?

It’s ironic I’m at a conference in New York with local media companies who are discussing ways to make money locally via the Web, and friendship with local bloggers seems to be high on everybody’s agenda. I disagree with those who say we’ve moved past blogging. Broadcasters tend to understand Twitter and Facebook, because they can function very much in a broadcast mode. The problem with NiT was that we didn’t have time to create the ad network that would have sustained it, and that’s simply a matter of timing. The idea was ahead of the ability to pull it off.

I’m really sad to see it go. Yesterday, I was talking with another company in a bigger market about building such a curator/aggregator in his city. So the concept is still very much of interest to people who wish to help grow the personal media revolution locally. That’s a good bet for relevancy tomorrow.

And who knows if somebody in Nashville won’t acquire the domain and resurrect the original model. For that reason, I’m disinclined to say R.I.P.

Posted in Media 2.0, Passages | 4 Comments »

Borrell conference notes

February 9th, 2010

I’m writing this from the Admiral’s Club at LaGuardia, as I await my transportation back to DFW. A lot of people hate LaGuardia, but I love it. It’s nasty, old and doesn’t have the amenities of newer airports, but this place has character like few other airports. It’s crowded and everything is “in your face.” I also love the Plexiglas display cases of “things you can’t take on an airplane.” One includes a chainsaw, which I’ve always found humorous.

The conference on local revenue was pretty remarkable and a great learning experience for all who attended. Gordon tells me he’ll do it again next year, and I certainly hope that’s true. I’ve been to many media conferences, and this was the first that specifically addressed strategy, revenue and the realities of our future from people who are deeply involved in everything. I had the chance to spend a few private minutes with many of the presenters and was most impressed with Court Cunningham, CEO of yodle, a hot, hot company in the world of local online revenue. He’s a really smart guy with deep understanding of the new definition of “local media,” and I expect his company will lead many others in this space.

I have a couple of important take-aways that I’ll write more about later. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that successful local media companies downstream will require some form of call center in order to “sell” online at the local level. Be it simply qualifying leads or closing deals, a call center is a highly efficient way to deal with the relatively low-priced advertising for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). Yodel uses a call center. So do the people at Datasphere, the company responsible for 1,000 new advertisers for KOMO-TV in Seattle this year.

It was also fun to hear – for the first time – from companies like Raycom, Lin and Capital Media’s WRAL-TV on the creative things they’re each doing to make money. This idea of industry sharing is something that has long been overdue in the business of local media, but it’s exactly what we need to take some of the energy out of the growth of pureplays in sucking local revenue out of markets of all sizes.

Gordon Borrell is a friend of mine, so consider the source on this. By organizing this conference, he has done more to advance the cause of local media than anyone, and that includes the associations that actually represent the best interests of newspapers and television. There was no B-S here. The disruptors were represented along with the disruptees, and those familiar with my work know that I’ve been asking for such for many years.

Thank you, Gordon.

Posted in Advertising, Broadcasting, Disruptions, Newspapers, Reinventing Local Media | No Comments »

First they came for the downloaders…

February 6th, 2010

CNET: “The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes.” This is wrong on so many levels, but especially because we already know what the FBI will do with this stuff – play Gestapo with our freedoms. Let me digress.

A survey by MTV and The AP in December revealed that a shocking one-third of U.S. teens have engaged in “sexting,” the sending or receiving of sexually explicit pictures or video via the Web. Here’s the key finding, according to Wired:

Of those who admitted to distributing suggestive images of themselves, about 61 percent report that they were pressured by someone to send the image. Girls were more likely to share a naked image of themselves than boys. Those who are already sexually active were much more likely to send an image than those who were not sexually active.

Most of the respondents sent the image to a significant other or a person of romantic interest to them. But 29 percent said they shared naked images of themselves with someone they knew only online.

So there’s a whole lot of pictures of naked teenagers floating around cyberspace to potentially be used against those who participated, one way or the other. After all, we have laws pertaining to child pornography, for which, let’s face it, this certainly fits.

Take the strange case of Matt White in Sacramento, the 22 year old man who is headed for jail for “accidentally” downloading child pornography. He’s pleading guilty for a reduced sentence, but he’s going to serve three years and be branded a sex offender for the rest of his life. For what?

Two years ago (that’s right. Let me repeat that: two years ago) White was downloading “Girls Gone Wild” via the file sharing service LimeWire when he says he discovered the images and immediately deleted them. “I’m into girls my own age.”

About a year later, FBI agents showed up at his family’s home. The family agreed to let agents examine the computer, and at first, they couldn’t find anything.

Investigators later were able to recover the deleted images from deep within the hard drive.

“I asked them, ‘Where did you get that? I don’t remember that.’ I asked them, ‘Could I access that if I wanted to?’” Matt said. “They said no.”

To throw the book at a young guy for this is evidence of how far our culture has bought into the boogeyman theory of Web users. If the FBI has nothing better to do than destroy lives for something like this, we need to seriously rethink not only the laws but also the duties of those who enforce them. Of course, nobody in any legislative capacity has the balls to step forward and say such, because, after all, we’re convinced people like Matt White are predators who are after our children.

“Well, Terry, cough-cough, this will, ah, cough-cough, have a chilling effect, cough-cough, ah, um, on those who would, ah, cough-cough, prey on our, cough-cough, youth.” Yeah, right.

Where will this end, folks? A deleted file that the cops admit can’t even be accessed by the user is evidence only that it was, at one point in the past, downloaded. Go after LimeWire, if you wish, or one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of “sharing” sites, where evidence of this exists in the here and now. He committed this evil deed when he was 19, for crying out loud. Is he a child rapist in the making? Bring on the gang from Criminal Minds.

And now that teens are filling cyberspace with this “sexting” craze, the FBI is going to need a bigger boat while having a field day knocking on unsuspecting doors years after the fact. And they want ISPs to do their work for them.

People, really. Is this the kind of world we want to live in? First they came for the downloaders, but I was not a downloader, so I said nothing…

Posted in Culture, Legal | No Comments »

Michigan State logo is a lesson in transparency

February 5th, 2010

I have written extensively about the cultural shift to postmodernism for almost ten years now, and occasionally something pops up that cements my position. The issue of “transparency” in all walks of life is really a matter of PoMos wanting to participate in their world than it is some new moral mandate for hierarchical behavior.

Take the strange case of the Michigan State logo. The school had been embroiled in a controversy with alumni and fans over a “discovery” that the school was trying to bring a new logo through the trademark registration process. Somebody found it and made it public, which prompted several weeks of sometimes contentious give and take. It was apparently to be a part of a sweeping, Nike-sponsored brand marketing plan that gets underway this Spring. Then, yesterday came this statement from Michigan State athletic director Mark Hollis:

“After careful consideration, we will use the current Spartan logo design, first used in the late 1970s, to build our visual brand identity.”

The logo on the left is the old logo. The one on the right is what was discovered during the trademark registration process.

This is a case where a little participation by students, alumni and fans up front could have made things turn out differently. Remember, it’s hierarchical modernity that’s being disrupted, so anywhere unilateral decisions are made, they run the risk of backfiring in a culture that increasingly wants to participate in the decisions that influence their lives. Technology may provide the engine, but it’s the cultural shift that’s providing the heat.

Frankly, I like the old logo, so in this case, it might not have mattered anyway.

Posted in Culture, Postmodernism | No Comments »

Are you just a node on a network?

February 5th, 2010

This comment to a PaidContent.org article on Belo’s 4th quarter losses caught my attention. The report included that revenue from the TV station websites in their network was off 3.2 percent during the quarter and 5.2 percent for the whole year. That prompted the Disqus comment below:

Now I know what you might be thinking about an anonymous comment, but this is something I’m hearing rather regularly, especially from advertisers who really understand the web. The days of media companies setting high rates for display ads associated with news content are numbered. Moreover, local media companies that function as third-party ad networks will not fare well in the future, because the assumption that ads adjacent to content “work” is suicidal.

This is one of the reasons Gordon Borrell’s conference next week in New York is so important. It looks at companies that are making money beyond their brands and their brand.com websites. I also have believed for years that the flexibility for revenue growth with local media companies exists at the property level, and not by lumping all those properties together as a network. Why? Because all the tactical flexibility for revenue growth exists at the property level. Moreover, the needs of the network outweigh the needs of the individual nodes on that network, so media company divisions that function as ad networks eventually do a disservice to the company as a whole.

Thank you, redsonja420, whoever you are.

Posted in Advertising, Media 2.0 | No Comments »

Media 2.0 101: Continuous News is a social loop

February 4th, 2010

The next step for a newsroom participating in the “news as a process” business is to include the audience in the process of gathering and reporting events as they’re occurring. This may seem obvious, but Continuous News is a continuous loop that includes consumers on a scale with which traditional media companies are unfamiliar.

Traditional media is a one-to-many paradigm, and this influences our use of social media. We “get” that Twitter, for example, is a great notification system, so a part of its appeal to us is its one-to-many side. We want to get a message “out,” and Twitter is very good at that. It’s the feedback loop that we fumble with, and this is even true in the Continuous News model. To begin today’s lesson, let’s back up a bit.

News is evolving away from what I’ve called “finished products” for several years. To be sure, we’ll always have newscasts on TV, some version of a “daily record” in print (after all, we need that first writing of history), and websites that offer completed stories, whether they are blogs, like Duncan Riley’s wonderful Inquisitr or online newspapers, such as the Huffington Post. What the news is evolving “to” is a continuous stream of elements that need no finished packaging, as is practiced by the gossip site TMZ.com. You can laugh all you want about the content of TMZ, but they are masters of the concept of continuous news.

Social media is also driving the news business to the continuous stream. This is a new form of news, which, I suppose, is why it’s so hard for media companies to explore. We keep defaulting to finished stories and everything that goes with that, and we’re missing the opportunities of professional life in the stream.

One thing we must all learn about the stream is that it’s not exclusive, because our contributions are just that — our contributions. They’re part of a vast linear timeline that is here and now. We don’t wait for anything; our deadline is always “now.” So if we are but contributing to a much bigger stream than our own, what are our responsibilities to others participating in the stream? This is a critical question, as it relates to our future relevancy as professional journalists in the ongoing stream of consciousness that is the Web. We may even have to interact one day with, OMG, our competitors!

One problem we have with this feedback loop is that we don’t control it, and this is counterintuitive. We may not control it, but we can influence it. For example, let’s say a television station airs a segment in one of its finished product newscasts that shines a light on the best local tweets of the day on that particular story or issue. We certainly can use such — and we should — but how many of us go the extra mile and notify those people that we’re using their creations? What happens when we do that? Lots of things:

• We acknowledge that the stream is bigger than just us.
• We give credit to those who participate, thereby encouraging others to do so.
• They get a chance to notify their friends about “being on TV.”
• Our Twitter street creds grow exponentially.
• Our “finished” presentation is better served, and we’re better off for it.

The same holds true for comments on our sites. Merely acknowledging their presence is big, but connecting back with them is even bigger. Interaction begets interaction. If we have none, we must look in the mirror. The stream is alive with people — our people — each of whom has a place in the infrastructure that is Continuous News, and we’re smart if we lead that all that participation by example.

When big events take place, do we create hashtags that everybody can use? Do we engage those on Twitter through the use of hashtags or through replies or direct messages? The people formerly known as the audience are waiting to be invited in, but not just to become our pawns (let’s face it — that’s what they mostly are have been to us).

In the stream, we’re all equal. Let’s not forget it.

Continuous News is a work-in-progress. We’re all learning as we go along. The AR&D clients who practice the concept are, we believe, far ahead of their competitors who don’t. “News as a process” is a lot different than finished product news, and that includes the way it’s monetized. The sooner we learn how to drop commercial messages into the stream, the better off our bottom lines will be served. Our clients are figuring all this out as they go along.

Others in the business are waiting for somebody to figure it out first. What they don’t realize is that by the time “the book” is complete on Continuous News, it’ll be too late for them.

(Originally published in AR&D’s Media 2.0 Intel newsletter)

Posted in Continuous News, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment »

The rules of the old don’t govern the new

February 3rd, 2010

The new deal between Netflix and Warner Brothers (and soon to be every Hollywood studio) to not rent films until 28 days after DVD release is another clear example of a 20th Century institution refusing to accept the reality of the 21st Century. The problem here is that DVD sales have plummeted, and the studios believe that by forcing a delay on cheap rentals, people will return to buying DVDs. That, I’m afraid, is a fallacious assumption.

This is similar to the thinking – Mark Cuban included – that media companies are expressing in attempts to put the toothpaste back into the tube in their dealings with aggregators. They believe they can force people to go to their own sites to get the news by blocking access to their content from aggregators like, well, Google.

These people actually think that distribution is the problem. Or supply and demand.

It’s not. It’s the people formerly known as the audience who are using technology to avoid the pocketbook rape that they’ve had no choice but to accept from the so-called copyright industry for many, many years. What will the studios do when they realize that DVD sales are going down even further during this new deal? What will media companies do when their revenue falls even further after closing off the aggregators? Who will they blame then?

We’ve turned the page on a massive cultural shift, from the hierarchical modernist world to that of participatory postmodernism. No amount of wishful thinking (that’s what this is, BTW) is going to put the quo back with the old status. It ain’t happening.

It’s like the Roman Catholic Church’s efforts to license printing presses in the 15th Century. Their authority was forever altered as the Bible found its way into the everyday lives of people, and the scribes who used to hand-write copies of the scripture found themselves unemployed. Human achievement exploded, and the modern culture was born.

We’re in the midst of the “second Gutenberg moment” in the history of the West, and this one will change things even more than the first. Getting in sync with this new culture will determine who will lead and who will follow, as a new elite is inevitably created. That which defines the new elite will be very different than that which defined the elite of the old, and therein lies the rub.

Rather than following this foolish assumption, Hollywood should be working within the disruption, for that’s where opportunity exists. Could Warner Brothers have created Netflix or Redbox? Of course. The problem is they didn’t.

Posted in Copyright, Culture, Disruptions, Postmodernism | 1 Comment »

“Tweet Me” is a new Valentine’s wish

February 1st, 2010

I’m a little late on this one, but…

Sweethearts, the company that makes those cute little heart-shaped Valentine’s candies with messages, has jumped into the social media world with a couple of new additions this year: “Tweet Me” and “Text Me.”

According to the NECCO website:

“For the first time in its 145 year history, the New England Confectionery Company is unveiling a new generation of Sweethearts® that includes all new expressions selected entirely by the American public, along with a re-formulation of the iconic candies made in the USA.”

The company discarded all its previous flavors and sayings this year and launched an entirely new series, including Strawberry, Green Apple, Lemon, Grape, Orange and Blue Raspberry.

The chances of finding “Tweet Me” are one in 80, according to Jackie Hague, vice president of marketing, who told ABC News that the phrase was the number choice of a consumer survey of suggestions for new messages.

“It’s a recognition that society is changing the way to say, ‘I love you,’ ” she says. In fact, she says, because the phrase was the top vote-getter among consumers, “It’s less commercial and more democratic.”

To meet the demand for its “Conversation Hearts,” NECCO produces them from late February through mid-January of the following year. According to the website, the entire production–about 100,000 pounds a day– sells out in an amazing six weeks.

I can report from experience that the new purple, blue and yellow hearts are tasty, but the green and pink, not so much.

Posted in Culture, Just Plain Fun Stuff, Uncategorized | No Comments »