Conferenza

AwaysOnOnHollywoodGoingOn: Rules Changing + 1 year

The main topic of the opening panel - "How the Rules Changed. One Year Later" - was more than apt with its IPTV and entertainment star-studded roster of YouTube CEO Chad Hurley, Sling Media CEO Blake Krikorian, Demand Media CEO Rich Rosenblatt, MP3tunes chief Michael Robertson and Carson Daly, who moderated.

And while the good news was much has changed and shifted forward in the last six months or so since Google announced it was acquiring YouTube, many panelists also said they expect the transition to take years. "I think you're gong to see this go on for decades," Rosenblatt predicted.

Earlier, the former MySpace chairman had launched with Daly his company's new forray into online video meets social networking meets domain registration meets $220 million of financing. Demand Media's new enterprise, dubbed "me.tv" or "dot.tv" provides a host of rich media tools to help users register a domain, create their own pages and generate traffic to their site. One click helps demonstrate the power of the revenue model - those $24.95 web domains aren't the cheapest you can find, but they do offer customers a way of getting up and running swiftly.

YouTube is concentrating on the tiny screen - i.e. mobile video - befitting the short-form format it has always promoted, Hurley shared. Details? Stay tuned.

Krikorian describe a 'reverse slingbox' now in development, which would involved a 'catcher' version which could sling items from the Internet or your phone or personal computer to a television. Down the road, he also sees the possibility of creating affiliate groups - such as a UCLA Bruins fan club for himself and other fans of the university's sports teams.

One impediment to growth is the complexity of different offerings on internet-related advertising, rather than the one-stop bucket available on television advertisements, for example. And another is the bicameral nature of many traditional media and agencies where 'traditional' journalists, editors, filmmakers, etc., are seen as different from their peers on the web, including the broad number of amateur participants. Yet panelists expect the experiment of amateurs using increasingly powerful production tools will likely produce top quality work that will challenge professionals and push the envelope.

sgp

Charlene Li at New Communications Forum

Forrester Research’s highly respected Charlene Li kicked off the second and final day of the second annual New Communications Forum at the Sheridan Palo Alto Hotel.  Like Rebecca Blood on the prior day, she was extremely well-received.

Li advised  corporate communications professionals who dominated the audience of 180 that they “have to let go of company-generated messaging, because technology is moving the power out of their hands and placing it at the fingertips of end users. This same ubiquitous connectivity is making geography irrelevant as it allows the easy formation of worldwide communities comprised of highly mobile individuals.

She showed Forrester Research data that corroborated earlier-released statistics from the Edelman Trust Barometer that indicated people trust their peers more than any other group, certainly more than designated corporate spokespeople. The implication might help explain the extraordinary power of the blogosphere, where endorsement—and criticism—comes from people like ourselves, rather than out-of-work actors or paid communications professionals.

“The result is that the firms are becoming irrelevant,” she said. “Brand loyalty is dropping. “

Defining “social media” as a social structure in which technology puts power into communities, not institutions,” she counseled companies to benefit from it by giving customers what they want. As one example she discussed a Forrester client, US Cellular who started a blog to find out what customers wanted and discovered what annoyed users most was paying for minutes when someone called them.  The result as they started offering an unlimited inbound service option which has proven popular.

She noted that peer-to-peer communities are forming that are selling goods, content and services that completely bypass corporations, which have historically enjoyed a top-down position in any marketplace positions.

An observation we had not previously heard, which we think may have huge repercussions over the longterm was that the social media are building communities that have greater loyalty to each other than to their own governments, a view that strikes a chord at our own blogging experience.

She also estimated that 11 percent of North Americans are reading blogs, a number that  nearly double one we heard less than three months ago.

The conference wound up at 2 pm yesterday.We'll have our wrap up shortly.

Rebecca Blood Strong Opener for New Communications Forum

The Second annual New Communications Forum (tag newcomm) got off to a spectacular start with a keynote talk by Rebecca Blood, author, blogger and thinker who was articulate, passionate and visionary in her talk.

Rebecca Blood, said, “we are standing at a unique moment in time. Technology connecting people will shape the coming age into which the world has so recently entered. Blood started blogging in April 1999 when there were about 90 bloggers worldwide and she was one of six women pioneering the new conversational medium.. That summer, blogging tools came out came out making blog authoring easier, and the number of bloggers jumped almost immediately to 1000. Now there are 27 million.

People describe blogging differently depending on what they do for a living—“diaries, communications channel, knowledge management” are all used by different segments .  To Blood, blogging is part of something that encompasses it all called “participatory media,” and the importance of it is that the internet enables this level of participation.

She believes that blogging is different in many ways from traditional journalism. “Most bloggers are not reporting, they are adding opinion and expertise. It has blurred the lines between professionals and amateurs, but that still doesn’t explain why 28 million people are blogging. “

So what s going on?  Why have we gone from the group of less than 100 that Blood joined just over a half dozen years ago?  She says its because blogging has made writing non-threatening and lots of people have something to say, even if it is just one thing. “Blogs happen in real time.  People can add bits of a story as it breaks. Bloggers can add readers for their opinions and facts.  This is called, among other things “ open source journalism.”

And as tools improve, the new internet-based conversational mechanisms will expand.   “As soon as podcasting is as easy as sending an email will take off” to the same degree as blogging, she forecast.

The essence of what is happening with the explosion of social media is nothing new.” Everyone has a story to tell,” she said, explaining that we have told each other stories since we were huddled around the fires in caves.  Centuries later we did the same thing around the well in the marketplace.  This essential need for people to tell their stories has now adapted onto the web.

Referencing Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, she pointed out that mavens have existed for centuries. They the people who tell you how to take care of your houseplants or get you computer working.  Online, these mavens become the connectors and the internet lets them transcend their own geographical limits to attain reach into global communities. An evidence of the power of these connectors is Wikipedia where there have now been one million entries by these maven-turned-connectors.  The founders of this online encyclopedia, according to Blood have succeeded because they had “a deep understanding of human behavior on the web where consumers become contributors” and anyone can participate. If you know one fact, you can contribute.” This behavior is a carryover from other days and other media. For example  citizen-scientists. Have been taking  annual bird census as volunteers for the Audubon Society for 100 years, and that is the same mechanism.  Withut the web, Audobon has more than 50,000 contributors. The internet has 28 million bloggers, giving some sense of the participatory scaling.,

This new era has just begun and where it is too early to define where it is going, Blood asserted. Calling it the Information Age is too myopic, sort of like calling the Industrial Revolution, the “Tool  Age,” she asserted. She prefers to call it the Age of a Participatory Future. I’m not convinced that line will catch on any more than our own tag, of The Conversational Era. Both seem to contain the sae big thought about what has changed.

She does not believe tradition journalism, music publishing or PR are dead, but she does believe they are transforming.  For example, she pointed out that magazines targeting very small, highly targeted audiences are enjoying a rebirth right now. The disruption s that the internet gives everyone nearly free direct access to everyone else who is connected.

Whatever we call this new era a key component, Blood argued, is the connectivity is essential and fundamental. The connectivity is enabled b the internet, and what’s important is that the web is not owed by anyone.  It is owned by everyone.  “People finally have a channel of their own, ”which allows them to reach everyone else without the traditional media serving as middlemen and gatekeepers.

If the rest of this two-day event is this good, then we are in for a very good conference.