Future of Press...is perhaps now?

I was having an interesting conversation with my partner the other weekend over lunch in Balmain and we hit the topic about preferences with consuming media, the web or traditional newspaper. My response was the web of course: the web lets me scan the headlines, key stories by section and I can choose to read each article without necessarily needing to flip through other articles to get there. My partner was the complete opposite: he's quite content with the concept spending his brekkie or lunch going through the sections of the paper, browsing the headlines and then choosing which ones he wants to dedicate more reading time to. 

Perhaps it's just that - whilst we get caught up with declining newspaper sales and fears of online cannabilising the traditional channel of readership, the latter does not seem to be at risk with being significantly threatened by the virtual paper.  

Picture the weekend, couples and those flying solo with their cups of coffee and late brunches at the local cafe - unless Australia does something drastic with our WiFi rollout across metro regions, it is unlikely that we'll see the same people bringing their Netbooks out with them for their loungey sessions.

On the topic of WiFi, the last time I was involved at Optus was in 2006 when the NSW government was taking proposals from telcos on a free, public WiFi model. Considering they weren't even pondering the concept of any financial subsidy, I'd say we're a long way, away from getting better coverage in social places.

The iPhone and future of broadcast is another story though..that's for another day! :)

Curated Diagram (based on Ben and Meg's ones!) for Media09

Media09 – The Highlights

Since this was the first one I’ve even been to, I wasn’t sure what to expect at this year’s Media09 gathering. Aside from Nic Newman and Francisco Cordera, I hadn’t come across any of the other speakers but thought that having a look was probably worthwhile based on my boss’ recommendation.

I’m glad I did go– the diverse plethora of talks from head honchos across USA and UK were insightful, entertaining and more importantly, localized to the Australian media audience. If I was to wrap up the key takeouts from the day, this are:

• Context is now king (and so is engagement)
• Consumers of media are now effective ‘curators’ of content
• Social media doesn’t need to be sociable, yet social experience revolves around the content experience
• Media is now richer than ever, it’s global yet personal and it involves the community – the social element

For more details from the day, see below!

Media09 Wrap Up p2 - Engagement, Discovery through search, Disseminate

Understand your clients

Caroline Little of Guardian News & Media themed her talk around global trends and tips on keeping your audience. In 2009:

• Knowing that the web can transform your business is not enough
• Expectations of readers go beyond just the content: it’s about context, employing different ways to engage and reach different audiences. It’s also about enabling readers to analyse and understand ramifications of the story for their own purposes

To succeed the focus points should be:

• Looking at the best ways to tell a story, which will vary depending on your audience
• Database journalism (highly relevant!!): allowing readers to unlock rich info through searchability and organization (eg by topic)
• Reader engagement: Participation in the conversation and enabling readers to distribute (or curate!) your content elsewhere

This quote stuck in my mind: Fear of failure is debilertating. Getting it right the first time is probably wishful thinking, taking the attitude of refining your engagement model after it’s rolled out is key to winning and retaining readers.

Invest in online to grow your core product: iPlayer

To reinventing the old with the new – Nic Newman’s presentation was a sign of great speakers to come. He spoke about how BBC’s core product of news on paper was overturned in 2008 when this was surpassed by online as a news source – knowing their services was at risk, BBC developed iPlayer which provides free-to-air TV online, to capitalize on this trend. This is a smart strategy – BBC is cutting out the middleman and bring the news direct to the consumer (this is where our Australian model doesn’t agree). The results speak for themselves, between Jan and Nov 08, there were 300M videos downloaded to date, 3% of which was completed via iPhone, hinting that the new application has exceeded company expectations. With Nic viewing 2008 to be internet centric, dominated by multimedia that’s global, personal, tailored for the medium, and hence (my plug) pervasive, what tips did he have to offer?Content needs to be distinctive, or native to the medium – this compliments Caroline’s point on tailoring content to the audience:

• Embrace social community
• Make content sharable/embeddable (curation theme), reach out to audiences
  Keep it simple (it’s easy to say, but hard to do!)
• Future of TV lies with IPTV. iPlayer is a step towards this. This particular point hurts as Australia is somewhat heavily regulated with the type of content that can be accessed through this delivery type

All these learnings are directly transferable to any business. Critical to this is the ability for users to consume richer, more varied media on the Net and companies need to be in a position to identify and capture this diversity of content into their service mix.

Media09 Wrap up p3 - Context & Widgets

Obama: Grassroots Campaign at its Best

From here onwards, Tweets were flying left right and centre for #media09. Ben Self from Blue State Digital led Obama’s grassroots campaign which reached the scales of 15m views for the 1,800 videos created and achieved $US770m worth of funding, 65% of which was raised online by 3.2 donors.

Secret to success? Lower your barrier to entry by:

• Getting the community involved (participation and engagement). The campaign effectively recruited the audience to target the voter. Supporters also had the tools, a ‘MyCampaign’ like site that helped them manage activities and funding, including a prospect list containing which should be targeted by geography and demograghy
• Mobilisation of grassroots, making it personal by allowing people to blog about Obama on a regular basis (100K individuals involved)

The essence of the campaign focused on creating passion first before applying any technologies to the mix – raise interest before you think about making the experience an awesome one.

Content is so 80’s: context is now King

Meg Pickard, the head of Communities and User Experience then took stage with her gems on social media. Great succinct statements and useful engagement models made up this talk:
Social media doesn’t need to be sociable
Embrace things that already exist – recreation is not always necessary, drawing on Guardian’s recent compilation of ‘Message for Obama’ pics across the globe using Flickr & Blurb.com).
Generating goodwill comes about from collaboration

The content flowchart: consume --> react --> curate (eg. Delicious) --> create

‘Do what you do best and link with the rest’ and ‘find things people are interested in and get them to talk about it in your media’ are great mantras to go by.


Widgetbox – connecting users to their ‘third place’

The last speaker I heard was Will Price – started off a bit dry with definitions around the existence of a third place, an informal gathering venue outside of work and home – for Will, social media was asserted as this new neighbourhood pub that fosters human relationships, with Twitter being a great example of this.

The turning point though was when he localized his widget demo to suck in feeds from SMH, You Tube, RSS and Twitter’s #media09 feed that the true value of his widgets came to being.

The Erratic Blogger

Yes I’ve fallen in love with microblogging. I’m time poor, I have a kid, I’m a casual fitness instructor, I have a full time day job in media, so my work and play is a balancing act and I don’t really have much time to write long, meandering blogs (so expect succinct thoughts here!). I’m sure it’s a quick process for those veteran bloggers, but like most things, thoughts come on the fly and there’s no better way to capture these thoughts than through the likes of Twitter, Friendster and Yammer.

I’m lucky that part of my job involves being ‘in tune’ with the online community. Whilst some folks at work would find the notion of Twitter-ing a chore and rather monotonous, the notion of escaping to a third place, made up of people who have common interests and the same desire to share their sometimes wacky, sometimes serious thoughts on their view of the world is hard to come by.

And we’ve talked about it for a long time but its benefits remain alive and kicking – being online via these communities brings folks from all over the world into your local laptop, and that’s pretty cool.

I am relatively new to the whole thing (does this still make me early adopter) but it doesn’t take long to get hooked – mainstream folks who read this, give it a go! Find me here.

Cycle tracks from today's class 11/01/09

To all those fitness freaks out there,

Thought I'd start posting up the tracks I do each Sunday at Fitness First Castle Hill in a bid to keep track of which ones I teach and also give participants the chance to submit their suggestions for future classes.

Today's list included:
1. Single ladies - Beyonce
2. Smoke on Water - C/O Funky Freewheeling, Fitness Network
3. Cold as Ice - Scooter
4. Smells Like Teen Spirit - Warp Brothers
5. Renegade Master
6. Great Bouzouki
7. Use Somebody - Kings of Leon