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Edelman's Six Digital Trends to Watch

From “marketing in the age of streams” to the “Googlization of media” to “situational awareness” to “location, location, locaton” to “business becomes social” to “private becomes public” – in their latest report, Edelman’s digital mavens Steve Rubel and David Armano provide a solid overview of the six key digital trends to watch.

Six Digital Trends To Watch by Steve Rubel and David Armano

 

In Search of the People Formerly Known as The Audience

Our friends from the Norman Lear Center in L.A. have put together a comprehensive primer on the "Business and Culture of Social Media." If you're intrigued by social media as entertainment and want to learn more about the notion of "mass self-communication," take a look at the presentation that Lear Center deputy director Johanna Blakley and director Marty Kaplan gave at the Barcelona Media Center. As brands are in hot pursuit of the ever more fragmented group of content generators formerly known as "the audience," the authors pinpoint an interplay of business economy, gift economy, and attention economy.

Download the pdf

Intention Economy: Data + Meaning

If you only see one slide show about the State of the Internet in 2009, "Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)" by David Gillespie, an Account Director at Maclaren McCann, Toronto, is a good choice: a mesmerizing 256 slide manifesto on the Intention Economy with Data (as the bank) and Meaning (as the currency).

Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)

View more documents from David Gillespie.

NPR and frog design Host Digital Think-In to Explore Future of Public Radio

"NPR is a brand to die for," as a colleague of mine said. Enjoying the authority of a well-established public media vanguard with a broad and extremely loyal listenership, it has also managed to become an agile innovator that is embracing (and even pioneering) the new rules of the digital era of broadcasting. NPR's social media footprint is constantly widening, its API much acclaimed, and its recent iPhone app has already surpassed that of the New York Times and other news outlets in terms of popularity.

It is thus not surprising (but still absolutely commendable) that NPR is experimenting with further opening its brand and in fact holding a full-blown digital strategy session in the public limelight, as it did this Friday with the NPR Digital Think In in San Francisco. I was priviliged to be involved in the planning and organization of the event, on behalf of my employer, frog design, which co-hosted the event. We facilitated the workshop sessions, provided our studio facilities, and also helped NPR connect with key thought leaders from the Bay Area tech and design communities.

The Digital Think In brought together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations. Hosted by NPR CEO and President Vivian Schiller and Digital Media SVP and General Manager Kinsey Wilson, the Think In harnessed the collective expertise and creativity of an exceptional group of entrepreneurs, executives, and innovators. Participants included leaders at the leading edge of technology and media innovation from academia, venture capital, internet design, public media, social media, and research. Notable participants contributing to the day-long brainstorm included: Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist; Reid Hoffman, Chairman and co-Founder of LinkedIn; Roger McNamee, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elevation Partners; Chris Beard, Chief Innovation Officer of Mozilla; Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist and creator of Google News; and Sue Gardner, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation, among many others.

Here's how NPR's Kinsey Wilson framed their mission:

"Historic changes in technology and the rapid growth in digital media have had a profoundly disruptive effect on journalism, calling into question the news media's ability to fulfill its time-honored function as civic watchdog. Hardly a week goes by that we don’t hear of yet another major news organization cutting staff, curtailing coverage or closing its doors. As traditional news organizations struggle to adapt, new, non-traditional outlets are beginning to take their place. As a not-for-profit with a distinct business model, National Public Radio has benefited from the disruption and seen its audience grow. Americans now spend more time with NPR than any other news source. But it's hardly immune from the technological challenges of the era. And it's clear that the rise of digital media will ultimately disrupt NPR's business model as well. NPR has responded by recruiting digital leaders to serve the top of the organization, embarking on an unprecedented staff training program and overhauling its digital media strategy. It is poised to take further steps to ensure it remains a vital source of news on every platform."

The Digital Think In explored five main topics that are significant to NPR's ecosystem and its future: social media and connection to the audience, the organization's national network of more than 800 stations, the potential of its open API, expansion of platforms, and its diversified revenue model. After an NPR overview and an opening session, participants broke out into small groups to develop concepts that NPR can incorporate into its organizational road map.

Closing out the day, NPR's Vivian Schiller suggested to call the next gathering "Open-mic Night," given the stand-up performances of the presenters. She said she was overwhelmed by the ideas that came out of the event and that some of them could be implemented soon. Kinsey Wilson assured everyone that their efforts will not end up tossed in a dusty drawer and forgotten. So be it!

The event was live-blogged on the Think In micro-site which also featured live video streams of the opening and closing sessions. In addition, attendees were tweeting the event throughout the day using the hashtag #nprthinkin (and there was a lively conversation going on between on-site and remote participants; also check out the NPR Facebook page for comments).

You can view pictures of the event on Flickr.

Brands in Public: The End of the Conversation?

It was just a matter of time: “With brands turning into curators of conversations about them and brand value increasingly determined by the value of aggregated content, third parties might be inspired to hijack these very brands by offering curated conversations on their behalf,” I wrote in early July.

And now Seth Godin and BzzAgent have done exactly this. The marketing guru and the marketing agency have launched a portal that aggregates conversations about brands and presents them in a unified public-facing dashboard that gives brands the chance to lead the discussion. Brands in Public translates the Get Satisfaction business model (a portal for public-facing aggregated customer support) into the broader realm of brand management. It aggregates the aggregation, if you will, and centralizes what Modernista, Skittles, and Crispin Porter Bogusky did on their own sites.

The cost of participation for a brand is US$400 per month, and the incentives are threefold: First, brands can publicly demonstrate their commitment to transparency. Secondly, because the portal presents branded conversations just one click away from each other, brands might benefit from an attention spill-over (while of course also having to fear a cannibalization of their feed). Finally, the aggregated conversation tracking comes with some metrics, kind of like FriendFeed and Google Analytics combined. The dashboard view puts brands in control of the conversation, or at least suggests as much.

However, I have a feeling that Brands in Public will fall flat. As with the new Google Sidewiki, one could argue that community dies in the very moment someone tries to “own” it. If it’s true that 'your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room,' how interesting then is what these people say when you’re not only in the same room (any social network feed, i.e. Twitter, Facebook) but actually on the same stage with them (Brands in Public)? The outcome of Godin’s and BuzzAgent’s experiment remains to be seen: It may mark the next stage of the 'conversation economy.' Or the end of the conversation.

(Hat tip to Kristina Loring)

Are Writers Selling Out to Marketers? Alain de Botton’s “Heathrow Diary”

For one week, Swiss author Alain de Botton was living the life I’ve always wanted to live. As the first-ever writer-in-residence of London’s Heathrow Airport, he was working on his new book on site, observing, documenting, and philosophically charging the emotions and motions of the two arguably most interesting things in life – people and planes – in transit, in situ.

My own fascination with airports started at an early age thanks to the location of my parents' house. I grew up with planes taking off and landing at the nearby airport, and as a student I spent one summer vacation working as a baggage handler on the tarmac. Ever since, aircraft noise makes me feel at ease, and if I could, I would become a permanent tenant of Narita’s Star Alliance lounge, where I would watch planes all day.

Airports have also long piqued the interest of artists of course – from Brian Eno’s "Music for Airports," to Steven Spielberg’s "The Terminal," to 747-turned-designer hotels. Exhibiting equally the technical routines and the emotional excesses of 21st century civilization, airports serve as mundane settings for the dramatic and dramatic settings for the mundane – de Botton, as Heathrow’s writer-in-residence, set out to capture both.

The assignment was simple: De Botton was commissioned by the British Airports Authority (BAA) to spend a week in the middle of Heathrow’s bustling Terminal 5 and write about life at the airport. He got his own desk, was awakened by Air Canada every morning, and immersed himself into the airport logistics while living his usual ascetic life (judging from all photos, he wore his signature blue shirt all week). Most of the time he observed and conducted what design researchers would call ethnographic research – knowing that you can best study human behavior, on any given scale, when you’re close enough to the action but not part of the commotion. The personal union of researcher and writer raises some interesting questions: Where exactly do you draw the line between observation and interpretation? Where does research end and authorship start? Is research even possible without storytelling?

But these are technicalities. Of bigger concern for reviewers appears to be the “precarious line between creative independence and commerce,” as the Guardian calls it. Blog site Gawker, among others, was fast in chastising the unconventional book deal as a shameless and rather desperate PR stunt, but the alleged cynicism reflects more poorly on the critics themselves: Isn’t the greatest cynicism of all to look for the cynical in all things? For the record, de Botton insists that BAA gave him complete editorial freedom and that his writing was thoroughly subjective and as unbiased as it can possibly be. He is not the first writer to experiment with commercial book mandates (bestselling author Fay Weldon shocked the arts world in 2001 when it emerged that her latest novel had been sponsored by Bulgari) and smart enough to know that his "Heathrow Diary" project might stir up a controversy. It would have been much safer, from his PR point-of-view, to not pursue it.

Yet de Botton's interest in airports seems genuine: “There are many places in the modern world that we do not understand because we cannot get inside them," he told the Guardian. Moreover, he believes the project is philosophically sound and in fact truly innovative as it revives an old tradition of underwriting: “That one of the largest organizations in the UK should take an interest in a book is almost quaint, like sponsoring a poet,” he said. “On behalf of my fellow beleaguered writers, it’s nice that writers seem to matter.”De Botton already has plans for the next underwritten project: “I’d like to be a writer in residence at a nuclear power station.”

And sure – why not? I think we have to overcome the notion that a distinction between marketing and publishing is still possible. Herman Miller’s See magazine was one of the most artful and best-curated print magazines out there, Strategy + Business by Booz is one of the sharpest business publications, and there are countless other examples of high-quality corporate publishing. What is wrong with the idea that not only marketers need to be good writers, but writers can be good marketers, too – for the common good of public life? Brands, advertisers, and PR agencies shape the cultural fabric of our societies as much as museums, galleries, artists, and writers do – if the mechanics of their complex interactions are more exposed these days, this can only be a good thing. As long as the involved parties’ agendas are transparent – as they were in De Botton’s airport project – readers can judge for themselves how valuable they find the products of such collaborations: there is no free lunch, there is no free content, after all.

Aside from that, it is naïve to assume that PR agencies and brand marketers are all evil and unconditionally push for a lopsided, overwhelmingly positive expression of their brands. By now, most of them are happy to tune into the choir of conversational marketing evangelists who understand that authenticity trumps news which may be good but lacks credibility. In this vein, Dan Glover, creative director at Mischief, BAA’s PR agency, told the NY Times that “If we funded a brochure that said how wonderful the airport was, people would switch off because they’d think they’re being marketed to.” Instead, he added, the Heathrow Diary campaign sought to stimulate “branded conversations” among travelers “through the experience of seeing a top literary figure at the airport — and potentially being a character in the book — and by receiving an exclusive copy to read on your travels. The overarching objective is to make a passenger’s time at Heathrow the best memory of the trip.”

It all goes back to the pillars of "meaningful marketing": Add value, create a (social) event, be a change agent, engage the audience, don’t market products, produce! Clients turning to artists and storytellers to create “meaning” for their brands intend that the return-on-meaning transcends the original assignment – the wealth spreads and generates a “meaning surplus.”

In this case, De Botton wasn’t hired to write an image brochure for an airport whose bad reputation is well known. The “Art of Travel” author took advantage of the opportunity to study one of his favorite subjects first-hand, and rather than just bitching and moaning about the notoriously inhumane experience of having to spend time at Heathrow, he and his client actually did something to make the experience better for travelers. The result of his work, "A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary," was published on September 24, and BAA is distributing 10,000 free copies of the book to Heathrow passengers (it is not devoid of irony to create artificial scarcity by limiting the book’s free distribution to one of the world’s most frequented travel hubs). Afterwards the book will be available for sale through Amazon’s British Web site and traditional bookstores. De Botton’s "Heathrow Diary" benefits the publisher, the writer, BAA, and travelers – a win-win-win-win and a story with a happy landing.

Read excerpts from “Heathrow Diary”

[Image credit: LA Times]

The Science of Re-tweeting

Hubspot viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella has examined 5 million tweets and 40 million re-tweets over the course of nine months and just published his study on the factors of re-tweeting success: What does/does not get re-tweeted, and for what reasons?

Some insights: We learn that semicolons are the "the only unretweetable punctuation mark," which I, as an avid semi-colon fan, find deeply disturbing. Speaking of which, emotions and ego-mania are not so popular. Tweets about work, religion, money and media/celebrities are far more re-tweetable than negative emotions, sensations, swear words, and self-reference. The least re-tweetable word is "game," and the most re-tweetable is "you." Time of day matters, and breaking news works, both of which are not too surprising. But "please retweet"? - please... 

Read Zarella's Nine Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted on Twitter on Fast Company or download the full report.

Marketing Links 09.15

This week's collection of remarkable marketing links, curated by the frog marketing team.

Is Obesity Viral? Clive Thompson on Social Contagion Theory in the NYT Magazine (fantastic cover above)

Is Your Marketing Too Nice? Yes - No

A Sibling for "Project Runaway": "Design for Life" – hosted by Philippe Starck – started on BBC this week.

Starbucks "Localwashing": Change.org's Nathaniel Whittemore on "The Difference Between Localism and Nativism"

Facebook Tries a New Ad Format: Free Samples

T-Shirts - Really? MJ, the new Obama and "Design a T-shirt for a CEO"

Android Catching Up: Android app downloads aren’t that far behind iPhone apps downloads – and, in some cases, the iPod Touch beats both.

The Future of News: Hyper-Distribution or Hyper-Branding?

Jeff Jarvis, who’s admirably trying to prevent the news industry from becoming the next music industry, recently wrote an interesting blog post in which he heralded “hyper-distribution” as a valuable new business model for news organizations. Responding to some industry pundits who propose embracing shrinking audiences as an effective means of consolidation and audience loyalty, Jarvis argued:

“Since when did it become OK for media people to shrink their audiences? Since they gave up on the ad model, that’s when. But I am not ready to surrender to the idea that advertising, which has supported mass media since its creation, is over. Yes, ad rates are lower; welcome to competition. That’s all the more reason why publishers must attract larger audiences publics – make it up on volume – as well as more targeted and valuable communities.”

To grow audiences through hyper-distribution, Jarvis proposes that news outlets utilize readers as distributors and embrace the very hyper-fragmented forces of the social web that might pose the most existential threat to them: reverse-syndication, “embeddable paper” formats, APIs, specialization, and engagement on social networks.

These are viable concepts (and some of them are already used, i.e. by the New York Times, the Silicon Insider, and others) but, if you were to be cynical, you could also view them as belated means of catching up to a new media reality in which the traditional notion of an advertising- funded news market is no longer valid. While hyper-distribution may provide formats for the post-article era, it still clings to the idealistic assumption that the world needs professional news organizations. But what if it doesn’t? What if the student who famously told the New York Times a year ago, “If the news is that important, it will find me,” doesn’t really consider news media to be trusted sources of news anymore, no matter how good they are in deploying social distribution channels to push them to him? What, in fact, if news brands don’t really matter anymore to Gen Y – as sources of news, trusted or not?

Arguably, CNN has lost some cachet through its #CNNfail debacle during the Iranian election (and similar defining news moments that seem to have shifted the intertwined powers of authority and attention to Twitter, i.e. the Hudson River plane crash and so on), and already, individual experts manage to establish themselves as the nimbler news aggregators on Twitter, cultivating individual audiences (of followers). What if the new news brand is @name? Or newsrooms, dispersed online, that converge amateurs, professionals, and experts? Google’s Marissa Mayer has hinted at what this scenario might look like: "hyperpersonal news streams," in which stories break like (Google) “Waves” and become the publication of collaborative processes rather than finished articles – constant iterations instead of interpretations.

Hyper-distribution may indeed overestimate the demand for trusted commercial news providers. As long as NPR, BBC, and other public services provide first-hand news coverage for free, chances are that the blogo-and Twittersphere will self-aggregate and hyper-distribute news without the mediation of commercial hyper-distributors. For them, innovating their distribution formats to catch up with social media may not be enough – they may want to innovate the very meaning of news. Rather than trying to generate incremental value against over-supply, they could generate disruptive value by creating a new kind of demand – pursuing a “reconstructionist” approach and yielding the type of “value innovation” that is commonly labeled under the sticky metaphor Blue Ocean Strategy.

And yet, two of the venerable US news weeklies, Time and, recently, Newsweek, are pursuing a third way out of the industry misery. They are neither adapting to the new rules of competition in a ‘red ocean’ nor are they creating a ‘blue ocean’ – instead, they are carving out a blue ocean within the red ocean, so to speak, by increasing their publications’ exclusivity. Both are deliberately reducing circulation to create a more loyal and targeted readership, and shifting their positioning from mere news engine to high-end background reportage and political commentary; and both are diametrically opposed to Jarvis’ hyper-distribution paradigm. Newsweek, 76 years old, is determined to shrink its circulation from 2.7 million to little more than half of that. Time’s circulation, which 20 years ago was close to five million, is now at 3.4 million.

Interestingly, it is another renowned weekly that presents the exception from this trend, and boasts surging circulation and ad revenue numbers: The Economist. According to the Publishers Information Bureau, the magazine’s revenues increased last year by a whopping 25 percent, whereas Newsweek’s and Time’s dropped 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively. With its US circulation nearing 800,000, The Economist may ultimately even overtake Newsweek in the States. Given that this growth trajectory has been consistent in the past few years, what is it that makes The Economist thrive while others are drowning in red ink? Michael Hirschorn, in a recent article in The Atlantic, opines that “The real value of The Economist lies in its smart analysis of everything it deems worth knowing – and smart packaging, which may be the last truly unique attribute in the digital age.”

Smart packaging of course means smart branding. The Economist has successfully branded itself as the de-facto print magazine for the global elite. “The secret to The Economist’s success is not its brilliance, or its hauteur, or its typeface,” Hirschorn contends, “The writing in Time and Newsweek may be every bit as smart, as assured, as the writing in The Economist. But neither one feels like the only magazine you need to read. You may like the new Time and Newsweek. But you must – or at least, brilliant marketing has convinced you that you must – subscribe to The Economist.”

Similar value is associated with Tyler Brule’s Monocle, a “briefing on world affairs,” as the monthly describes itself, delightfully packaged and suavely combined with fashion features, frequent traveler tips, and stylish gizmos – plus, online, a truly earnest old school radio podcast. The Economist and Monocle are both examples of the power of niche positioning, as Michael Hirschorn points out: “In the digital age, razor-sharp clarity and definition are the keys to success. Knowing what and who you are, and conveying that idea to an audience, is the only way to break through to readers ADD’ed out on an infinitude of choices. General-interest is out; niche is in. The irony, as restaurateurs and club-owners and sneaker companies and Facebook and Martha Stewart know – and as The Economist demonstrates, week in and week out – is that niche is sometimes the smartest way to take over the world.”

“News doesn’t build a brand anymore,” says serial German Web entrepreneur Alexander Görlach, who is poised to fill a niche with his new online magazine The European, which will launch at the end of September. Görlach believes that “To date, online formats have been designed as extensions of print outlet. But [in Germany], there is no autonomous online news brand that focuses exclusively on commentary and opinion.” The European will give experts and authors a voice, and cherish a culture of debate without violating the principles of the web by offering text-heavy articles. “Strong opinions. Journalism for the Web. No perks,” the tagline provides cues for what to expect. For US audiences, this formula may sound familiar: When Görlach promises rich multimedia programming and a departure from conventional section structures, one can’t help think that the Huffington Post is coming to Germany. In any event, The European, targeting 25-60 year old web users who earn more than 2,500 Euro per month, is one to watch, especially with a classy title like this that indicates that the publisher seems to have a good hand with branding and a confident, somewhat ironic grasp on history: "The European" was also the name of a British weekly newspaper in the 90s, billed as “Europe’s first national newspaper,” as well as that of a privately circulated cultural and political magazine that was published in the 50s. Obviously, neither lasted long.

The main lesson to be learned from the success of The Economist and Monocle and (quite possibly) The European: Culture beats economies of scale. Hyper-distribution (and hyper-localization) might be a (controversial) option for newspapers; it is certainly not an option at all for distinct magazine titles. For them, creating artificial scarcity in a sea of abundance – the essence of branding – remains the main imperative. I’m not saying that all outlets in the high-end category – The Economist, Monocle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and others – can survive simply because of their strong brands, but they stand much better chances of maintaining loyal audiences because of it. Access to information is important, sure, and innovative distribution models are to be explored, too, but it all comes down to the power of branding, the power of your voice. Distinction saves you from extinction. What do you stand for? What do you know? What do you have to offer as a handle on the world, a firm point of view in a world that is increasingly complex and full of ambiguity?

If brand is so important, then why is BusinessWeek up for sale, a supposedly strong name? Well, maybe precisely because its brand has suffered. By pioneering a compelling, state-of-the-art web presence – one of the best among business publications – BusinessWeek may not have done itself a favor; rather, it inadvertently over-extended its brand and diluted its editorial voice. It has experimented a lot but not really carved out a new identity: Is it a business magazine, a news portal, a blog network, or a social network?

While BusinessWeek expanded into digital formats and gradually blurred the boundaries between its print and online offerings, The Economist succeeded by sticking to it guns. It was very late to the web game and in fact never really caught up to the latest trends (and fads) of online journalism. It did not embrace the principles of the “link economy” as BusinessWeek did so fervently, and if you ask anyone about The Economist, you will certainly hear that it’s a weekly print publication. That’s all. Similarly, German business monthly Brand Eins, an award-winning collection of philosophical essays and reportages on the people behind the numbers, has never really hidden its disdain for the web – and its print circulation keeps growing. Both Brand Eins and The Economist have never compromised their print brands, never open-sourced their content to anyone, and are now in the most enviable position to defy Jarvis’ calls for “hyper-distribution.”

Perhaps, the most innovative thing you can do if you’re a publisher these days is to ignore the action bias – and not innovate.

[image credit: AdSoftWorld]

Nano-Blogging: When Micro is Not Micro Enough

Nano-blogging makes micro-blogging soooo long-form. If Flutter were real (and not a spoof, see the video below from earlier this year), it would allow only 26 characters, and (the supposedly real) Adocu is even more extreme: You have only one word. Hemingway would love this, although he was less economical. Remember his six-word story "For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn"?

Some nano-bloggers now want to see "picoblogging" or "femtoblogging." Nostalgic micro-bloggers, on the other hand, are worried: "Has nano-blogging gone too far?" Well, maybe not far enough. I guess the next extreme would be "Non-blogging:" say nothing at all (but do so in public).

It's hard to tell what's a joke and what's not these days but Twitter has told us a great lesson: Chances are that what may seem like a satire at first, can soon be our new reality.

We know that the short form flourishes in the Long Tail. And we also know that the best way to create a compelling story is to come up with one that is hard to believe. Sites like Flutter and Adocu combine both axioms and show that short and extreme - extreme as in "is that real?" - creates maximum attention in the age of short-attention.