new media | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

X Media Lab: Global Media Ideas

How are the creative and media industries adapting to a changing world?

As part of the Vivid Festival, X Media Lab returned to Sydney in June 2010 to look at how the creative and media industries are adapting to a changing world where societies very different to the existing dominant cultures are rising and asserting their place in the global economy.

X Media Lab’s Global Media Ideas conference day was billed as exploring “cultural and commercial content in a global world; creative ideas and innovation in media and technology; international media business opportunities; new media and new geographies; and new platforms, applications, and content.” It didn’t disappoint.

The great thing about X Media Labs is how it brings disparate ideas together and exposes the audience to worldwide trends and developments. The June 2010 Sydney X Media Lab was no exception with a great range of diverse speakers. Here’s a brief rundown of their themes, more comprehensive coverage can be found at Brad Howarth’s Lagrange Point blog;

Ralph Simon
Dubbed “the father of the ring tone”, Ralph Simon took us on a tour of innovation that started with the Sex Pistols, through applications like Red Lazer and sites like TuneWiki, which uses crowdsourcing to translate music lyrics, to end with mHealth applications where diabetic children use their mobile phone games to test their blood sugar levels. A broad and exciting view of where the mobile Internet and gaming platforms are going.

Dana Al Salem
The founder of Fanshake, Dana showed us how her site is used to connect bands with their fans. Her view is that today’s Gen Ys are just like their hippy grandparents except today’s groovers are wealthier have more technology. An interesting take on “the more things change, the more they stay the same“.

Gotham Chopra
Gotham described his journey of setting up superhero cartoons for young Indians and intertwined it with a story of his travels through Pakistan as a journalist. His hope is to replace the influence people like Osama Bin Laden have on the youth of South Asia with more positive role models.

Parmesh Shahani
The divide between the richer cities and poorer rural areas in developing nations is often just characterised as a migration story as millions of poor agricultural workers migrate to the cities. Parmesh gave us a broader perspective on what is happening in India including some fascinating case studies of how comparatively older technologies such as satellite TV and SMS mobile messaging are changing rural India.

Joy Mountford
Among the geeks and developers, Joy was probably the most anticipated of the speakers having being a designer with Apple and vice president of design innovation at Yahoo! Joy showed us how designers are moving from the “look” of computer programs to “feel”. She also showed us how crowdsourcing has worked for other projects including the fantastic Johnny Cash Project which reworks his Ain’t No Grave into a group video.

Wayne Borg
The Chief Operating Officer of twofour54, a content creation hub in Abu Dhabi, Wayne took us through the opportunities of 340 million Arabic Speakers covering diverse cultures and where 200 million are under the age of 25. His presentation showed us much of the development plans of the United Arab Emirates and how the kingdoms are seeking to be the Arab world’s creative centre.

Nick Yang
The entrepreneur label is often too easily given away, but no-one could begrudge Nick Yang, founder of KongZhong, ChinaRen.com and Wukong.com for using the title. Nick walked us through his journey of being a young student of Stanford, his return to China and both his and China’s growth over the last decade. He also showed us how his latest venture, Wukong.com, aims to change how search engines work.

Rob Mason and Scott Halcom
Local flavour was provided by Rob Manson from Sydney’s MOB Innovation Lab and Scott Halcomb from from SystemK in Japan, who walked us through the worlds of augmented reality. Rob concluded their joint presentation with the view that object recognition is going to change the way we see the world.

Haidong Pan
Like Nick Yang, Haidong is the founder of a Chinese Internet service, this time Hudong.com which is a “knowledge media” run along the lines of wikipedia that acts as a news and fact service. His presentation on how social knowledge changes the world was thought provoking in how societies are reclaiming their culture and history back from mass media.

Anand Giridharadas
Technology Columnist with The New York Times and International Herald Tribune, Anand challenged us to think about the ethics of the digital world and how foreign cultures are now beginning to colonise the dominant anglo-US culture. Personally I struggled with some of Ananda points as our online ethics should be no different to our off line standards and the US domination of global media stems from it being the richest nation, as other countries catch up with US living standards their cultures will reassert themselves.

John Penny
Like Anand, John forced the audience to think; he invited us to consider the problem of the television producer where audience fragmentation has meant we’re approaching the point where the only profitable TV productions will be reality shows and advertorials. John as an Executive Vice President of Starz Entertainment was well placed to walk us through this dilemma. John finished with a call to consider how dis-intermediation will help rebuild the fortunes of those who want to provide well written screen productions.

Amin Zoufonoun
As corporate development manager at Google, Amin was probably almost as highly anticipated as Joy Mountford had been earlier. Unfortunately his speech on the development of technologies from the Internet’s “Big Bang” fell flat, largely because the audience know this topic. The talk probably would have worked better with an audience of financiers or CEOs who don’t live this topic the way the X Media Lab audience do.

Robert Tercek
To finish a long, stimulating and challenging day Robert Tercek walked us through why great minds like Lord Kelvin, Edison and Einstein had missed emerging technologies in their times and how we can avoid it. Robert sees great opportunities for innovators as successful, large companies entering new markets don’t know more than anyone else and in many cases are blind to the potential of these sectors.

Overall, X Media Labs was another stimulating and fascinating day. The entrepreneurs and artists who had the opportunity to be mentored over the next two days by the speakers were very lucky to be exposed to this sort of talent.

The key message from this X Media Labs came from Parmesh Shahani when he said “don’t just look at India as a market, look at it as a source of innovation and inspiration”. We shouldn’t be just looking for the obvious, easy markets but watching the bigger trends that are developing around us.

The elephant in the room; why online publishing is very sick

Depending on cheap or free labour is a doomed business model and this is a problem for online publishers

Media 140’s Sydney meetup last week attempted to discuss the future of journalism. While it wasn’t really successful, it did expose the fundamental flaw in the online publishing model and the other crowdsourcing business ideas that rely on cheap or free labour.

All three panellists agreed that as publishers “The sustainability of our business is very much linked to the quality of content.” because with several million online voices a site needs compelling and relevant content to attract and retain readers.

Yet every panel participant agreed the cost of content is falling and in many cases is now free.

There lies the paradox; if content is so valuable, why is it so cheap or even worthless?

The model for online publishers is the same as it was in the days of every city having three evening newspapers or when the six o’clock TV news was the most watched show on television. Compelling content attracted readers and viewers which in turned attracted eager advertisers.

In the days of metro evening newspapers and the six o’clock news there were substantial barriers to competition with printing presses, broadcast licenses and distribution networks required. Today anyone who can afford $10 a month for website hosting can be a publisher.

Worse, the rates for online advertising are plummeting and with the site owners only making a few dollars there’s little for publishers, let alone the content creators.

Which brings us back to the fundamental problem, if there isn’t any money for those who create the content then there’s little point in the middle men distributing it.

Many of today’s online publishers are like the loom weavers of the early 18th Century who derived a short term benefit from the change that eventually destroyed them. The same forces that make journalists work for nothing are the same ones that will render the bulk of publishers insolvent.

And that could be where the future of journalism, writing and publishing really lies — the bulk of the industry eking out an existance providing commoditised, generic pap and a few niche publications with readerships that attract good incomes that in turn can pay a small number of writers.

That’s certainly the model the panel at Media 140 are betting on and I hope they all do well.

The Future of Journalism

Many occupations are faced with free or cheap labour swamping their marketplace. Journalism is one of those trades. Media140 met in Sydney to discuss exactly where the future of journalism lies.

Last week’s Media 140 meeting in Sydney looked at the future of journalism and how publishers are paying, or rather not paying, contributors to their online publications.

The evening was well documented by Martin Cahill and the message was clear — publishers are not going to pay for content because even if they want to they can’t afford it.

The prevailing view was journalists will have to learn how to multi task; but given YouTube is even more poorly rewarded than online journalism, it’s unlikely sites will be any more generous to video or audio contributions than they are to text contributors. Which only suggests a future of journalists doing more work for no money.

Valerio Veo, Head of SBS News and Current Affairs Online pointed out SBS is paying a 19 year a $1000 per contribution for covering Obama’s visit to Indonesia.

Ignoring this is pocket money in terms of sending a camera crew and traditional reporter, the fact SBS are one of the few Australian organisations paying online contributors suggests ABC Managing Director, Mark Scott’s, view at a previous Media140 that only government supported organisations will be able to afford to pay journalists is part of the future is correct.

So what is the future of professional journalism? Will it be restricted to a few subsidised outlets? Is it the gifted amateur contributing for their love of the masthead? Or is it that of the professional pushing their own or their employer’s agenda?

Maybe journalists will become editors cleaning up the shoddy contributions of not so gifted writers that have the only benefit of being free. Could it be that curating other people’s content will be the role of future journalists?

Or perhaps journalists are the new poets, starving in garrets and working in desperate jobs while waiting for the phone call from the ABC, BBC or PBS, penning great works that will lie undiscovered on obscure blogs which will only be found after their passing?

We didn’t really glimpse the answers at Media140 and this is an important discussion to have as the rise of the digital sharecropper isn’t confined to journalism.

Many professional and white collar occupations are going the same way and we need to understand what this means for large parts of our economy. Even if we choose not to discuss it, it’s the reality we face.

The company you keep

What you do on the Internet has real ramifications for your reputation. Take care with the people you meet and the groups you join online.

It’s an old but true saying that you’re judged by the company you keep and this applies online as much anywhere else in personal and professional life. Last week I was reminded of this three times.

Early in the week I was asked if connecting with someone on LinkedIn was an endorsement. I thought that was an odd question as LinkedIn has a separate function for recommendations and so I didn’t pay it much attention.

A few days later an industry group leader told me she’d assumed an individual was legitimate because I was a member of their LinkedIn group. While it was a compliment to think my opinion meant that much, it worried me as I didn’t really know the group’s founder and I certainly wasn’t endorsing his business.

Finally, at the Media140 Conference in Perth last Thursday, employment branding specialist Jared Woods gave an interesting overview of how an Engineering firm deals with social media issues in the workplace.

Jared described the company’s basic rule was if you state that you work for the organisation then you have to act professionally and in a way that doesn’t discredit yourself or the company. Which means no more drunken photos posted on Facebook or joining bad taste causes and online groups. By all means post silly pictures, but forget mentioning who you work for.

The killer line from Jared was social media gaffes can not only damage a business but they can also damage employee’s professional reputations. Just as the employee is part of the brand, staff have their own personal brands.

This isn’t new, there’s dozens of true stories of how people have lost jobs through inappropriate blog or Facebook postings and ten years ago the infamous Claire Swire incident nearly cost a group of young London lawyers their jobs .

All of these examples show just how important it is take care with everything you do online. You are not anonymous and most things you say and do on the Internet will be stored somewhere.

So play nice and remember not to post anything you wouldn’t like to see next to your name on the six o’clock news.

The value of communities

Businesses are just as much a part of the community as individuals. Cherishing and growing your businesses community of friends and supporter can reap big dividends.

Sydney’s Growthtown evenings are an irregular gathering of entrepreneurs discussing challenges facing fast growth businesses, and always a stimulating night with founders telling how they dealt with issues as diverse as setting up US operations, finding investors and exiting a successful venture.

Last week’s event featured Marketing Angels’ Michelle Gamble explaining how she uses the brand pyramid to help her clients and Kylie Little, founder of Essential Baby, describing the journey from a business idea to exiting from a big business buy out.

Kylie’s story of Essential Baby’s early days resonates with anyone who has started a business after the arrival of a baby. It’s always a relief to find you’re not the only one who thought it’s possible to run a business while your blissful cherub sleeps contently for most of the day.

In many ways, Essential Baby’s story describes the dream exit for many entrepreneurs, or at least most venture capital funders, with the website being bought out by Fairfax.

Interestingly, Kylie’s tale about what happened after a big organisation bought her business has some similarities to Lars Rassumussen’s experience of Where 2 Technologies’ absorption into Google.

The cultural shock of moving from an independent start-up to being part of a bigger organisation is huge and the problems can’t be underestimated. So there’s a lesson on being careful what you wish for.

One part that shone through both Kylie and Michelle’s presentations was how important communities are to a business. It’s often easy to think businesses are stand-alone entities, proudly independent of the world around them.

In reality every successful businesses relies on groups of supporters, be they customers, suppliers, financiers or just simply fans. Businesses need communities just as the community needs them.

Communities aren’t just generated by Twitter followers, witty blog entries or clever search engine optimisation, it takes credibility, honesty and doing the right thing by those around you.

So who are your communities and what are you putting into them? You may find those groups are your business’s most important assets.

Growing your business with Tweetups

Like most social media meetings in any big town these days, people from all walks of life gathered to meet and become more than just a Twitter handle or obscure forum name.

It’s hard to resist the offer of a free sandwich in Sydney’s Hyde Park on a beautiful spring day, so a“tweet up” offering was always going to be successful.

Like most social media meetings in any big town these days, people from all walks of life gathered to meet and become more than just a Twitter handle or obscure forum name.

Any idea that your average internet user is a pasty, overweight, underemployed 20-something is quickly dispelled as you meet all sorts of interesting people who are doing interesting things.

The hundreds of “tweet ups”, coffee mornings and social media dinners across the land are creating new networks which are changing business and society.

This is opposite of the stereotype being used to reinforce the mindset that blames the internet and social networking sites for everything from schoolyard bullying through to street riots and arrested brain development.

Over the last few days we’ve been treated to stream of stories about the views of professors and researchers detailing how the world and our minds are being destroyed by the internet.

My favourite is an English professor currently visiting Australia who claims computer game addled 20-something market traders may be responsible for the global financial crisis.

Perish the thought that good old-fashioned greed and hubris, the cause of every market crash since the Bronze Age, may have had something to do with the GFC.

The weekend press mentioned the professor applying for a study grant from an American university to prove her theory.

If that is true, it’s a shame the she didn’t take the time to check out the Twitter hashtag to join us for a sandwich in Hyde Park.

Had she done that she’d have had a nice sandwich, caught some sun and seen her theory disproved.

She would have met a far more diverse group than a bunch of stuffed shirts huddling in a cosy lunch club, desperately trying to validate their deliberate ignorance of the changing world outside.

It’s those stuffed shirts, along with their newspaper columnist friends, who are isolated. By choosing to demonise the internet and ignore the opportunities social media tools present, they are being left behind in a fast changing world.

The options for entrepreneurs and business owners are clear – you can lock yourself up with the stuffed shirts and rage about your dying business or you can use the net to help your business grow. The choice is yours.

Cannes Lions: Day Two

Day two of Cannes Lions continued the theme of dealing with new channels with a big focus on digital and Internet possiblilites.

One old channel using new technologies is the movies.

The future of Cinema with SAWA was an entertaining session that showed how movie theatres are going to bring together various technologies to enhance the audience’s experience.

These new experiences offer great opportunities for producers, studios and marketers and while naturally the audience were more interested in the marketing angles, it’s clear that everyone involved in movies will be focussed on how they can make these features work for them.

Jimmy Mayman from Go Viral showed some of the successes in viral marketing, including T-Mobile’s Dance and Sing clips.

I have to admit I was left cold by these examples. I’m not contrived flash mobbing events are even truly viral marketing as such.

Monday’s highlight was one of Twitter’s founders, Biz Stone, discussing the future of Twitter to a full auditorium.

The big news from the session was how Biz hopes to have a revenue based on advanced API functions for commercial users.

This is an innovative twist on the “freemium” business model. Where individual users are subsidised by the sale of aggregated data to businesses.

It will be interesting to see how Biz and his team deal with the inevitable privacy concerns that will be raised.

While the session was promoted as a tweet-up, it was limited by the lousy Wi-Fi access in the venue. In fact it’s surprising how little a role Twitter’s playing in the event given how it’s being used at Australian events like the Future Summit and CeBIT.

Wi-Fi problems illustrate just how event organisers are struggling with the demands of a modern market. It’s a theme we’re going to see continue.

Cannes Lions: Day One

The first day of the Cannes Lions illustrated how the advertising and marketing industries are not alone in being challenged by the rise of always on consumers and employees.

Day one of what’s going to be an extremely busy week at Cannes showed how digital technologies and the Internet are changing not just the advertising industry but all sectors of industry.

Schematic’s Dale Herigstad showed, among other things, where Microsoft’s Project Natal is pointing the direction of where computer controls are going.

Being able to remotely control equipment with body movements and facial expressions is going to be a massive change for entertainment, communications and many other sectors.

This theme was expanded upon by Andy Pimental of Razorfish who demonstrated his vision of where television is going.

In Andy’s future, the game controller and console are doomed. Movement recognition like Project Natal coupled with games being on the cloud means the game industry is going to be very different in a few years time.

An interesting aspect with Andy’s presentation is that most of the technology is already available to achieve his vision, as he put it “it’s the business constraints, not technology, that limits us”.

From a presenter’s point of view, the use of mock Tweets to illustrate points was a nice touch, too.

Kevin Eyres of LinkedIn probably had the most impact. While much of the presentation focused on how LinkedIn can be used as a marketing tool, Kevin’s comments at the beginning about every individual is now entreprenuer thanks to reduced job tenure and security really illustrated the challenges businesses and governments are going to face in the connected world.

There’s some interesting challenges for all businesses ahead, not just the advertising industry. There’s a lot more to come.

Dangerous Game

Associated Press have warned they will start taking action against news aggregrators like Google. Rupert Murdoch made similar noises last week.

As Fred Wilson has pointed out, the problem for AP and News is the web is now the newstand and taking publications off the shelves is not good business sense.

We see that with the Australian Financial Review. Its position as an Australian journal of record has been diminished by Fairfax’s incompetent obsession with protecting content.

As result, other channels such as The Australian, Business Spectator and blogs have stepped into the vaccuum and eroded the AFR’s online authority.

Following the RIAA path and suing Google, the Huffington Post and any blog that dares link to their sites will backfire on the news industry just as it did on the record industry.

In many ways newspapers are even more vulnerable as journalists employed by organisations like News and AP are quick to rip stories off from blogs, web forums or MySpace and Facebook pages with little regard for permission or attribution.

I suspect it’s one legal quagmire Associated Press or Rupert Murdoch might rue becoming bogged down in at the very time their business models are challenged by both economic and technological change.

Does your business need a blog?

It’s fashionable to tell business owners they need to embrace every aspect of the web. But do you really need a blog in your small business?

There’s no doubt a blog is worthwhile for many. It can give another perspective to the business and enhances their story. It can help smaller businesses cut through the noise to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

A good example is Mark Fletcher’s Newsagency Blog which has publicised Mark’s software company and his associated newsagencies while establishing him as a leader in the industry.

Not all businesses have Mark’s energy or some simply don’t have the time. For others, their markets don’t really care about blogs.

Also a blog is not an end in itself. A newsagent with an interesting blog is still going to fail if they don’t deliver service to their customers and the same applies for PR agencies, marketers and management consultants.

If blog is going to distract you from your core business, then maybe it isn’t a good idea.

Every business is unique and what works for one enterprise is not necessarily right for another. A blog is a business tool, just like every other aspect of the Internet, and you need to choose the right tools for your business.

Should you drop the Yellow Pages?

yellow-pages Today’s Australian reports Sensis’ Yellow Pages revenue is up 5% and White Pages over 11%. That’s an interesting result as it bucks the evidence that online advertising is hurting them.

At business events I’m finding many owners and managers are telling me they are dropping their Yellow Pages ads as they find they aren’t getting the returns they were hoping for and think online offers more return for their advertising dollar.

There’s a lot of people who agree with that idea and even Sensis’ e-business report showed 89% of consumers are using the net to research purchases.

So there is a pretty good argument for businesses to move their advertising online, but before doing so you need to look at what channels your market is using to find you.

For some businesses the Yellow Pages is still an important channel. For instance, the local plumber cannot afford to be without a Yellow listing.

But other businesses, say an online auction site, don’t need to worry about an expensive Yellow Pages display ad although a listing in the White Pages would probably help their credibility with some customers.

In the end, it depends upon your business and the customers you want to reach. If your business is a service business that generates work from emergency calls, such as the plumber, dentist, vet or a computer technician, then you will need some presence.

Even if your business doesn’t cater to those markets, the online Sensis listings are still useful as this plugs your business into the directory enquiries, 1234 and web based services, although these may not be as useful as Google or Yahoo!.

Marketing’s all about telling your story to the right people. While many of those people are now surfing the web, it may suit your business to still spend something for those people who insist on using the Yellow Pages.

Social networking and old media

I’m currently attending the Online Social Networking and Business Collaboration World Conference.

There’s some interesting perspectives on where social networking is going and how people are going to make money from it.

Personally, I think too many of the big players like Bebo and MySpace are too fixated on the old broadcast media model of top down content where they control everything.

Particularly fascinating is how dismissive many of the attendees are of YouTube and Facebook. The funny thing is there were five people around me with laptops on and all of them visited their Facebook pages during the morning seminar.

The icing on the cake was on the bus home. The girl in front of me had her MacBook open and she was editing her Facebook page.

It seems to me the big established media companies are struggling with their investments in the social media space.