Well, duh.
Notes Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion:
…we’re skunk drunk and it’s because of money. It’s almost like we all need to enter Betty Ford Clinic 2.0 together. This time, it’s not stock market money but private equity, M&A, VCs and to some degree the reckless abandonment of logic by some advertisers who are perpetuating what is sure to end badly when the economy turns. Hubris is back my friends.
Greed is bad.
Via Slashdot, word today that the best, most accurate content of Wikipedia will be harvested and formatted into “Veropedia.”
To qualify for inclusion in Veropedia, a Wikipedia article must contain no cleanup tags, no “citation needed” tags, no disambiguation links, no dead external links, and no fair use images after which candidates for inclusion are reviewed by recognized academics and experts. One big difference with Wikipedia is that Veropedia is registered as a for profit corporation and earns money from advertising on the site.
Couldn’t Wikipedia do this on its own?
via Slashdot
This has been bubbling in the UK media for about a week or so…and now Boing Boing has picked it up – Radiohead’s management has said it only did the download-pay-what-you-want deal to boost CD sales:
If we didn’t believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD, then we wouldn’t do what we are doing,’ Bryce Edge of Courtyard Management told Music Week, the UK’s industry magazine.
Questions:
-Is this just a PR stunt?
-Is it a good deed turning into a PR boo-boo for a very cool band?
-If it was a sweetener to get people to buy the CD, is that so wrong?
Maybe I am cynical about being cynical. Or I should be outraged that Radiohead tricked me into downloading an album that was part of a marketing campaign.
Grrr.
It’s for everyone. It’s for doctors – note the social networking site Sermo. Word today that pharma giant Pfizer will partner with Sermo to share information about its products with Sermo members through “HotSpots” which will be interactive and subject to moderation by the community. ClickZ reports:
The new tab-like HotSpots feature is intended to satisfy the doctors’ desire to interact with the industry, and Sermo’s decision to prohibit ads. It will allow companies like Pfizer to present information on clinical trials, drugs, or devices to the more than 30,000 doctors in the Sermo community. The branded tabs can be targeted based on discussion subject matter, keywords, or anonymous demographic data gathered through site registrations. Sermo is still determining a pricing model for the feature.
What is interesting to me here is that this seems to portend the beginning of a huge shift in the way drugmakers communicate with one of their most significant consituencies – doctors.
I’m guessing the free notepads and mugs will be with us for awhile.
Pfizer First of Many Pharma Partners for Doctors’ Community
related:
Audience: Ask “who,” not “how many”
What do people do online? Search.
Where do they do that? Google.
As if we needed to reaffirm that:
Google captured roughly 60 percent of the searches conducted worldwide in August, blowing away the field with 37.1 billion of 61 billion queries, according to new statistics from comScore. Five billion of Google’s August searches came from the Mountain View, Calif., company’s video property YouTube.com.
Maybe I run the risk of being repetitive, though we know that seeing the same message through different media often is more effective in getting one’s message delivered to the right people (integrated campaign, folks).
In a column aptly titled “You Can’t Stop Them Talking,” we see in today’s Financial Times the question of that most corporate of corporations, General Motors, and how they used social media to deftly deal with a dispute with the New York Times:
Last year the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman launched an attack on General Motors. GM demanded the right of response but found itself embroiled in a dispute with the paper over the words it could use.
So GM gave up and published the entire e-mail thread on its blog, FYI. Where previously it might have tried to throw its weight around, it went the other way – deciding to behave like an aggrieved individual and letting the world (or at least its blog readers) know how badly done by it had been. Goliath was behaving like David.
The dangers of social network sites for business have had much publicity, and they are real. The benefits are much more difficult to extract, but they are there, too. They require changes in behaviour, as exhibited by GM, and probably some strenuously lateral thinking. But the most dangerous thing businesses can do is to ignore the social networking phenomenon – it is not going to go away.
Social networks are all about a shift from vertical to horizontal communication on the web. Where until now most information has been transmitted downward from supplier to receiver, the receivers – that is individual web users – now have a mass of tools to talk to each other.
How about you? Do you get it? Do you see that you can’t just paste content online and spoon-feed your message to the masses? That even General Motors understands this, and sees how to use social media to respond to a traditional newspaper columnist.
I confess that I have become a Facebook addict since my summertime conversion earlier this year. This is perhaps a bit obvious, but one thing I really enjoy about the service vs. other social networking sites is the fact that there are so many third-party applications, made possible by what is called an API. This allows people to, for example, brag about places they have traveled (courtesy of tripadvisor) or try to turn each other into zombies (perhaps a too-apt metaphor for online marketing).
Editor and Publisher’s Steve Outing gives the download on how the news business might get into the game:
If you’re going to develop a headline feed app for Facebook, do some serious thinking about the content. Perusing the list of third-party applications that are headline feeds, many of them sport seriously underwhelming user numbers. The ones that seem to do best are sports feeds.
I’d recommend picking fairly narrow — but interesting or unusual or useful — content to become headline feeds. Just as an example of something that might work with the Facebook crowd: If you’ve got a pro football team in your town, develop a headline feed application for that. How about a celebrity headline feed, where the user selects the celebrity to track?
As a Facebook user, I do worry about the privacy implications of flinging my data all over the place to third-party apps (I concede that privacy is a relative term once going online and spraying my personal data all over the place). But the applications are a fun way to express oneself and share information with friends.
Common theme (and perhaps obvious statement of the century): content intermediaries, the people who decide what gets published / pushed to the wider world, are in trouble. They include (in no particular order): traditional media outlets, PR firms, book publishers, music distributors.
Case in point (I’m personally thrilled about this) is Radiohead’s decision to let folks pick their price to download the UK band’s latest album, out in one week. I myself will hand over a fair chunk of change because I’m a big fan, but reports from today’s Daily Telegraph indicate that it’s possible to download for as little as 45 pence (just under a dollar).
What is this “honesty box” culture? The Telegraph spells it out for us:
Numerous bands – mostly unknown and unsigned – have made their music available for free download with an honesty box policy on donations. ‘The Mooncakes Project’, a Belgian guitar and DJ duo, write on their website that donations are “not an obligation, but for every download made without a donation, we will be killing one kitten.” Jennifer Avalon, a Massachussetts-based Christian singer invites downloaders of her songs to “donate via Paypal for the music you really like”.
Pardon the Monty Python reference but I couldn’t help but smile while reading this analysis in the Economist about how magazines are losing ground to the increasingly ADD-like nature of consumers….yet it’s not all bad news:
To their credit, big magazine firms are doing far more than replicating their print products online. Whereas newspapers have concentrated on transferring print journalism to the internet, magazines offer people useful, fun services online—Lagardère’s Car and Driver website, for instance, offers virtual test drives, and Better Homes and Gardens online has a 3D planning tool to help people redesign their homes.
I’ve noticed this most recently with Vanity Fair which, as a Conde Nast property has been part of that publisher’s effort to increase web offerings that extend rather than replicate the reader’s experience. Many features in a New Yorker issue will have podcasts and extended interviews…ditto for Vanity Fair pieces.
|
