Communities Dominate Brands Archive

Cost Per Related Audience

Nice thought from Ajit at Open Gardens

Cost Per Related Audience Which follows on from the beginning o our discussion which started as cost per relevant audience.

Ajit writes

The mathematical theories underlying social networks have existed for some time now. Also, online social networks have become mainstream. However, the applicability of the advertising model to social networks remains the missing link ? the solution of which is commercially very significant especially if it is computable as a metric.

In a nutshell, we need a set of quantifiable advertising metrics (like CPM) – applicable to social networks. In previous blogs, I discussed the calculation of Personal CPM. In this blog, we discuss the idea behind Cost per related audience(CPRA). CPRA involves the concept of identifying a set of related profiles within a social network by navigating the social graph. Consequently, the advertiser would ?buy? advertising against a set of profiles through a metric called Cost per related audience. Further, reputation within the social network can be used to further refine the results. All the above factors are quantifiable within a social network – (including reputation) ? and thus we can create a truly useful metric that can benefit advertisers

Analogue media presses the panic button

Trinity Mirror, the owner of the flagship daily and the largest regional newspaper group, sent tremors through an ad-dependent industry when it revealed a 12.6% fall in ad revenues over the past two months. Other regional publishers – Newsquest, publisher of the Herald and the Northern Echo, and Daily Mail and General Trust plc (DMGT) – also reported double-digit declines for May. Fears over Johnston Press’s future have been particularly marked with a 45% decline in its share price in just one week. In the US, the LA Times added to the gloom when it announced a 15% reduction in pages and 250 job losses, including 150 journalists, largely as a result of declining revenues.

The stock market, which is meant to look for signs of future earnings success, reacted badly. Trinity’s warning that profits would be 10% lower led to more than a quarter of its stock market value being wiped out in one day.

Shares in other listed media companies also fell sharply, pushing shares in ITV, the largest commercial broadcaster, to fall to a record low.

Writes the Guardian

John Hagel writing in Shift Happens ? The future of Advertising points out that

In the advertising world, multiple shifts are piling on top of each other and it is often hard to keep track of them, much less understand their implications. Let?s look at just some that are re-shaping the advertising world:

1). Shifts from advertising placed in digital content to ads placed in social networks and applications?

2). Shifts from digital advertisements delivered through conventional PC?s to a growing array of mobile devices, with an increasing ability to target messages based on the physical location of the person?

3). Shifts in the behavior of digital users in their responsiveness to advertisements online?

4). Shifts in the way that companies connect with and build relationships with stakeholders (e.g., blurring boundaries between customers, partners and suppliers)?

5). Shifts in the revenue models for businesses, as online businesses in particular become more and more dependent on advertising as a key revenue source (e.g., is there any Web 2.0 start-up that doesn?t blithely answer ?advertising? when asked about their revenue model?).

Hagels message to advertisers is that they should be able to genuinely engage people around their products and services. And to do so in such a compelling way that people seek them out ? and keep coming back because they have received so much value. What we describe as Engagement Marketing.

In 2005 Rupert Murdoch, in what one might describe as an historic speech to the American Association of Newspaper Editors said

For centuries, newspapers as a medium enjoyed a virtual information monopoly ? roughly from the birth of the printing press to the rise of radio. We never had a reason to second-guess what we were doing. Second, even after the advent of television, a slow but steady decline in readership was masked by population growth that kept circulations reasonably intact. Third, even after absolute circulations started to decline in the 1990s, profitability did not.

But those days are gone.

Yet apparently Trinity Mirror’s chief executive, Sly Bailey, believes that the present state of the advertising market is “inextricably linked” with the health of the economy. As does Johnston Press CEO Tim Bowdler.
Although he admits that there are structural changes to the industry. Indeed – technological change occurs by clusters of radical innovations forming successive and distinct revolutions that modernize the whole productive structure.

And there is no doubt that the economic downturn is serious. But I argue that its the structural changes that are in fact key here. I think traditional media is less trusted, Nick Davies in his excellent book on the media Flat Earth News outlines a media world that trades daily in Falsehoods, Distortions and Propaganda, he writes

I commissioned research from specialists at Cardiff University, who surveyed more than 2,000 UK news stories from the four quality dailies (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent) and the Daily Mail. They found two striking things. First, when they tried to trace the origins of their “facts”, they discovered that only 12% of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters. With 8% of the stories, they just couldn’t be sure. The remaining 80%, they found, were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. Second, when they looked for evidence that these “facts” had been thoroughly checked, they found this was happening in only 12% of the stories.

The implication of those two findings is truly alarming. Where once journalists were active gatherers of news, now they have generally become mere passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but churnalists. An industry whose primary task is to filter out falsehood has become so vulnerable to manipulation that it is now involved in the mass production of falsehood, distortion and propaganda.

The transition is almost too painful to watch – but the reason is dead simple – The management of these companies just can’t grasp the fundamentals of living in a digitally networked society. The profound implications of living in a pull not a push economy pass them by like faint shadows.

They fail to grasp the fact that the media is now embedded in society as social media, that we live in a participatory culture, and they have failed to grasp the possibilities of how data, its collection and refinement could in fact be a key aspect to its survival.

In a paper I am preparing for Nokia on data analytics I write

What companies will be creating, using and selling in the near future is what is described as Social Marketing Intelligence . The more unique the ?intelligence? extracted from the raw material of multiple data flows, the more valuable that ?intelligence? becomes. Unique and valuable intelligence = $$$.

Or it could be that the process of evolution is so traumatic it just can’t be achieved – leaving the door open to new competitors – without the baggage to get on with the job. Lets face it – if you had been a scribe all your life, cosetted, fed. clothed etc., – why change that for the nonsense they call the printing press?

Then the selling of advertising interruptive inventory in a PULL marketplace seems just as absurd. In fact I would go as far as to say its negligent. In my post Regional Press Owners Need to Get with the Beat: Intelligence I argued that how one created value for readers and advertisers is different. Display advertising as John Grant wrote is the junk mail of the 21st Century.

Yet the understanding, the mindset, the technologies used and the type of advertising inventory sold has just not moved with the times. This is because those who now own and run these print media have been more focused on the business of profit and not on the business of journalism – the extreme example of that is Metro – a cut and paste job in the news factory of churnalism.

You reap what you sow.

So the challenge is how does one become attractive to ones customers? The answer is to provide services that although driven by a commercial agenda can be?

1). Life-enabling
2). Life Simplifying
3). Navigational (help be navigate through al the noise to the stuff that can really help me)

Intelligent Classifieds 1st in the Q
For example, a local newspaper instead of creating a simplistic inventory of display advertising, and then trying to replicate that in a digital context. Could create Intelligent Classifieds, that can be created around people?s needs which are; time specific and therefore carry a different form of value. I am looking for a new car, a flat to rent etc., If I sign up to First in the Queue I can be delivered information that is timely, relevant and contextual.

These are what could be described as Contextual, interactive, permission-based advertiser packages.

Life is local – Right?
Local newspapers should have dominated from the beginning. They should have been a trusted and through their print editions the promotional muscle to make their web sites into unassailable and attractive community hubs. But they didn’t, and now they’re reduced to playing catch-up. Because what has community got to do with the business of making money?

Are we in the business of print or the business of information gathering and dissemination?
The classic cliche is that the US railways in the end failed cause they saw themselves as in the railway business, not the transport business, the press has the same problem they see themselves as in print not information.

The Four Principles Of Social Computing In Business

Euan Semple and I met up yesterday to talk stuff about a project we want to do together.

On his blog was a great piece of insight he had – Ffffound via wikipedia

Whoever comes are the right people – this is meant to alert the participants to the fact that whoever attends a session is “right” simply because they care to be there.

Whatever happens is the only thing that could have – this is meant to tell the attendees to pay attention to what is going on at the moment, instead of worrying about what could possibly be.

Whenever it starts is the right time – clarifies that there is no given schedule or structure and emphasises creativity and innovation.

When it’s over, it’s over – to tell the participants not to waste time, but move on to something else when the fruitful discussion is over.

Nice.

Euan adds his own view

As those of you who have experienced the power of Open Space will know these are not irresponsible laissez faire but tough principles that unlock all sorts of magic that would never happen in more directed environments.

Metrics in the networked society

Ajit Joakar of Open Gardens has posted this

In a previous blog, I discussed how Long tail social network analysis could be a business model for Web 2.0

The key insights are

a) The Web has a higher CPM since the search is tied to the intent

b) For various reasons as indicated in the above blog, we cannot get the same synergies between advertising and social networks

c) New metrics are needed in the social network space if we are to get advertisers to support social networking sites

Ajist asks the question what metrics do we need?

I think we do need to qualify what are social networking sites? As we are beyond the standard fare here. Ajit indicates an interesting concept

One of the most interesting metrics I can see is the idea of personal CPM.

and

However, this gets more interesting if we extend the idea of the personal CPM to a converged environment. Specifically, with the telecoms/mobile(and increasingly fixed and cable) industries as well .. we are seeing the deployment of IMS ( IP Multimedia Subsystem ) IMS has a feature called HSS ? which maintains a rich profile including user attributes, location and many other elements

I wonder if there are thoughts out there that could add to Ajit’s hypotheses?

The data flow wars [2]

In my post The data flow wars I wrote

…data, and the extraction and refining of that data to support commercial communications is about to become mainstream – this new currency will becme the black gold of the 21st Century – in the future we will fight over oil, food, water and data. If we are living in a world that is increasingly networked, if we are living in a world where social intraction is a primary function online and on the mobile and on converged platforms, then you need data analytics that can understand these social data flows.

So – ladies and genl’men tonite in the Blue corner we have the master of disaster, Gooooooooooooogle and in the Red we have the play it again sam, faster than you can say wow that was a double combination Youuuuuuuuuuuuuu Tuuuuuuuuuuube.

Its gonna get painful

The internet giant Google is being forced to hand over the personal information of every person who has ever watched a video on the YouTube website as part of a billion-dollar court case in the US.

A judge in New York has ordered that Google, which owns YouTube, must pass on the details of more than 100 million people – many of them in the UK – to Viacom, the US broadcasting company which owns channels including MTV and Nickelodeon.

The data will include unique internet addresses, email accounts and the history of every video watched on the website, giving Viacom’s experts the ability to conduct a detailed examination of the viewing habits of millions of people around the world.

Via the Guardian

and its no laughing matter.

Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation

The court’s erroneous ruling is a setback to privacy rights, we urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users

Google correctly argued that the data should not be disclosed because of the users? privacy concerns, Kurt Opshal said in a EFF blog post

De-schooling Society

Having lunch with a friend Sophia Parker, ex-Demos. She is the author of Unlocking Innovation. Why citizens hold the key to public service reform And perhaps also of relevance The Journey to the Interface. How public service design can connect users to reform.

We were engaged in a deep conversation at RIBA the other day concerning – how one creates and shares knowledge and information in a networked society. How one builds a better society and that the logic and way of doing things in a networked society is different to what one did in an industrial society.

Sophia, mentioned Ivan Illich famous for his book – Deschooling Society (1971), which according to wikipedia is

a critical discourse on education as practised in “modern” economies. Full of detail on then-current programs and concerns, the book’s core assertions and propositions remain as radical today as they were at the time. Giving real-world examples of the ineffectual nature of institutionalized education, Illich posited self-directed education, supported by intentional social relations, in fluid, informal arrangements

Illich writes

Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education–and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.

Illich arose out of a conversation about dyslexia – as all 3 of my children are gifted with dyslexia. And the fact that I had spent the last 15 years of my life supporting my children in the private sector – as the state system does not educate the child – the state processes the child. And for dyslexic’s its even worse, they fall out the bottom, off the sides – with low self-esteem because the system says they are not intelligent, nor useful nor relevant to society.

My frustration is this is not how you truly enable all children to fulfill their true potential. In a networked society Illich’s views I think make even more sense.

the institutionalization of education is considered to tend towards the institutionalization of society, and conversely that ideas for de-institutionalizing education may be a starting point for a de-institutionalized society

All institutions built and created over the last 150 years are premised upon the linear mindset of the industrial era – in a post-industrial society – what Sophia also touched upon, and I hope she will personally expand more about is, that its not the vision, the big hairy audacious goal that what drives these organisations on a day-to-day but the process of treading water.

Sir Ken Robinson in a presentation said

We educate our children from the waist up, then we focus on their heads, and then we only educate one side of their brain. The whole purpose of education is to produce university professors. Who live only in their heads. Their bodies are only there to transport their heads to meetings.

Read here the text of Deschooling Society

Illich opens his book so…

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

But perhaps Achieving world class public services published by the Cabinet Office today might provide a ray of light?

Government 2.0 a rubbish name for a good initiative?

I really enjoyed this article in the Guardian Government 2.0 is a rubbish name for a good initiative

Government 2.0 is a daft term. Its first airing, as the title of one of those management-consultant books on “how the digital revolution is transforming government and politics” was at least fresh. But that was in 2005. That said, government 2.0 is a useful code – purely temporary, and in the absence of anything better – for a fascinating revolution happening in British public life. This is a new and nearly ubiquitous enthusiasm for the power of information, including but not exclusively web 2.0 innovations, to improve public services. Look at this week’s draft constitution for the NHS, with its talk of professionals being steered by the output of “digital dashboards”. Watch for the forthcoming policing green paper, the white paper on local government “empowerment” and the cross-government strategy on digital equality. All will be stuffed with ideas about giving citizens the information they need.

The Cabinet Office published today the following

The Prime Minister today outlines a bold vision for transforming England’s public services. In a Cabinet Office report ? Excellence and fairness: Achieving world class public services ? published today, he argues that although public services have improved dramatically over the past decade they are not yet world-class and a new stage of reform is required.

The objectives

1). Empowering citizens who use public services: extending choice and complementing it with more direct forms of individual control, such as personal budgets, opportunities for people to do more themselves, stronger local accountability, and providing greater transparency over service performance.

2). Fostering a new professionalism in the public service workforce, which combines increased responsiveness to users, consistent quality in day-to-day practices, higher levels of autonomy from central government wherever those at the front line show the ambition and capacity to excel and greater investment in workforce skills.

3). Strong strategic leadership from central government to ensure that direct intervention is more sharply concentrated on underperforming organisations, while the conditions are created for the majority to thrive more autonomously.

The Guardian writes

This is exciting stuff. Twelve years after John Major’s enfeebled administration first suggested computerising citizens’ dealings with officialdom, e-government is evolving to a new concept of administration.

Technology and learning – a thought for the day

In April 2006, Susan Greenfield sponsored a debate ( More ) in the house of Lords based around the impact of the latest technologies on the way young people might think and learn differently from previous generations.

In her book The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century – ( book review she writes

The more I thought about it, the more fascinated I became with how we define ourselves and others, which in turn relates to how fulfilled we are as individuals

She goes on

In his book The Meaning of the 21st Century, James Martin argues that we shouldn’t just ask what is going to happen, but how we are going to shape the future

This is interesting in that I believe people are perhaps starting to believe that fact – as Howard Rheingold says

What we make is up to us

Why the furniture of traditional advertising fails within a social media context

Dave Cushman at Faster future blogspot has put together a slide deck explaining the above principal

| View | Upload your own

Nice one Dave and JMac adds his own contribution

All good stuff and of course this all comes down to communication based not upon Interruption but Engagement

As Bill Gates was quoted as saying

the first digital decade, centred on the keyboard and the mouse, is over. The second digital decade will be more focused on connecting people

Engaged Politics in the networked society

On Friday, citizen reporters, “broadcasting jockeys”, members of Internet communities and bloggers gathered at the OhmyNews’ fourth International Citizens Reporters’ Forum held in Nurtikum Business Tower in Seoul. Under the theme “Candlelight 2008,” they discussed how the candlelight vigils are changing the media leadership in Korea. The forum was broadcast live over the Internet, and netizens could participate through an online forum.

Migrating from a passive social network to an active one

Before the candle light vigils, Afreeca, a popular Korean web-portal for web-casting, and Agora was mainly used for entertainment. People published videos for fun and discussed topics as food, celebrities and music. But during the last two months, Afreeca have become the main platform for webcasting the protests and the members of Agora has been organizing themselves to participate in the protests.

This is interesting – as I was talking to a friend of mine on Saturday about where all this could go.

There is developing a sense that there is a way to do things that is not based upon the straight line logic of the industrial world. So a political motivation starts to grow – in frustration with the current status quo.

Via OhMyNews

On Democracy Korea – the author writes

What you see in the Republic of Korea right now is a completely new and innovative form of political participation. (Ever seen our crosswalk protests? ) Really, our protests are more like festivals than demonstrations. They are an expression of our sovereignty as a People. We don’t fight for an ideology. Ideologies are relics of the last century. We fight for our own rights and those of our brothers and sisters, parents and children. This is the democracy of the 21st century. What century do you live in?

So do Communities Dominate Politics?

The simplistic answer to that is no – the more complex answer is movements engage people around higher order ideals and beliefs, it asks people to become self motivated. And in a participatory culture there is more reason and capability to do so.