media | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Lords of the digital manor

How free content and expensive management can’t live together

There is something fundamentally wrong with AOL’s media business states a Business Insider headline.

What is fundamentally wrong is quite basic to anyone who has owned or managed a business – money.

The problems at AOL illustrate the deep flaws in the “digital sharecropper” business model of putting free or cheap content on the web to harvest online advertising.

Lords of the digital manor

Sites like Demand Media and Huffington Post can’t make money from content if too many staff expect to get paid. Chris Anderson illustrated this in a rebuttal to Malcolm Gladwell where he examined the economics of his GeekDad blog and the work of its manager, Ken;

So here’s the calculus:

Wired.com makes good money selling ads on GeekDad (it’s very popular with advertisers)
Ken gets a nominal retainer, but has also managed to parlay GeekDad into a book deal and a lifelong dream of being a writer
The other contributors largely write for free, although if one of their posts becomes insanely popular they’ll get a few bucks. None of them are doing it for the money, but instead for the fun, audience and satisfaction of writing about something they love and getting read by a lot of people.

It’s almost touching to picture the modern day digital serf touching his flat cap and murmuring “thank you m’lud” on receiving a ha’penny from the lord of the digital manor before scampering back to working on becoming a well read, but unpaid writer.

We don’t pay writers

The business model of the Geek Dad blog or the Huffington Post relies upon these unpaid writers donating their work and time –the digital sharecroppers as described by Jeff Attwood.

Low paid or free labour is essential to the success of these site, when the bulk of advertising income goes straight to the proprietors the digital aristocrats – Lord Chris of Wired or Duchess Arianna – can live well.

The business model falls apart when management starts taking a cut of the profits; install a highly paid CEO and management team with their squadrons of Executive Vice Presidents or Group General Managers with the Medici-esque perks and entitlements these folk demand and the profits disappear.

AOL’s problem is it has too many highly paid managers extracting wealth from the company’s cashflow.

This is exactly the same problem print and television media empires have, once the rich rivers of gold allowed them to build up well paid management castes that are now crippling the businesses as revenues can’t support their financial burden.

Paying for digital media’s future

Over time, online media revenues are improving. As Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker pointed out in 2010 that U.S. consumers spend 28 percent of their media time online, yet in 2010 only 13 percent of ad spending goes to the Internet. As advertisers follow consumers, publishing on the web will become more profitable.

The risk for big media organisations is their money will run out before the digital renaissance arrives and when it does, they may have squandered their natural advantages by shedding quality journalists, experienced sub-editors and good editors in an effort to prop up executive bonuses.

AOL’s management problem is part of a much bigger problem across markets and industries, we can call it managerialism – there are too many highly paid managers getting in the way of the writers, engineers, scientists, artists and tradesman who add real value to their organisations.

Strangely, it may be Chris Anderson’s “free” model that kills the managerial culture as enterprises that can’t afford to pay product creators certainly won’t pay an Executive Vice President’s entitlements.

The dying Yelp of Sensis

Can a social review site save a fading directory company?

This story originally appeared on Technology Spectator

Fifteen years ago Sensis, the directories arm of Telstra, was untouchable. A listing in the Yellow and White Pages was essential for every business and Sensis’ monopoly was a true river of gold.

Sensis’ launch this week of an Australian partnership with the US based review site Yelp is Telstra’s desperate throw of the dice to survive in a market where its directories business has become irrelevant.

Attempts to stay relevent

There have been many attempts by Sensis to overcome this erosion of its core maket including purchasing an IT services business and unsuccessful forays into publishing and online search with Trading Post and CitySearch.

Probably Sensis’ lowest point was the squandered millions of dollars and years of management time wasted in trying to compete against Google after Telstra CEO Sol Trujilo made the sneering comment of “Google Schmoogle”.

Declining values

At the time of Trujillo’s comment in 2005 Sensis was valued at $10 billion as a stand alone company. After last week’s disappointing results that saw revenue drop 18 per cent for the year, the value of the division is an optimistic $5 billion.

Yelp itself is unlikely to help Sensis’ revenue woes. Despite filing for a $100 billion public offering, Yelp has never made a profit in its seven years of operation. Although licensing their service to failing directory companies around the world might prove to be a handy revenue stream.

That lack of profit – on North American revenues that are tiny compared to Sensis’ Australian cashflow – shows the fallacy in the social media business model that many of the popular online services are faced with.

Users of social media services like Yelp are looking for a community of trustworthy and relevant referrals. The directory sale model is based on displaying the biggest advertisers prominently, which is exactly what social media users don’t want.

Yelp also comes into a marketplace already crowded with competing, established services like Word Of Mouth Online, Eatability, and the faster moving social media platforms like Foursquare.

Competitors’ Missed Opportunities

In many ways Sensis has been lucky in that most of the competition has been from smaller upstarts while their bigger competitors haven’t capitalised on the market opportunities.

Google Places, the biggest competitor to the world’s Yellow Pages directories, is mired in bureaucracy and isn’t doing a good job in telling business its story while Facebook’s local search function isn’t getting much traction either.

Of the local Australian incumbents, ninemsn isn’t interested in local business with its international partner Microsoft not offering an Australian product and the local team preferring to deal with big spending advertising agencies, while Fairfax squandered its early advantage and eventually sold the CitySearch service to Sensis.

News Limited’s True Local is having limited success while it struggles with the transition from print to online. At News’ recent launch of its new digital platform, the company’s executives stated they expected journalists to develop a “digital mind”.

Lacking a Digital Mindset

That “digital mindset” is the key to the problem at companies like News Limited, Fairfax and Sensis. In a marketplace where customers, advertising and readers have moved online it requires management, not just the lower workers, to “think digital”.

Sensis’ key problem is its management structures – and more importantly its sales teams’ commissions and KPIs – which are still based around its traditional business models that will make selling services like Yelp difficult.

The phone directory business model is a product of the 1920s and in many ways Telstra and the other Yellow Pages franchisees around the world should be grateful it has lasted so long.

Whether the phone directories that have been so profitable for phone companies can make it to their one hundredth birthday is an open question. One thing is for sure, bolting on an unprofitable and late to market social media service isn’t the answer.

Spotting a security charlatan

The tell tale signs of technology and web falsehoods

Google’s Open Source Programs Manager, Chris DiBona recently pointed out how IT security industry charlatans keep making false claims to push the sales of their software products and consulting services.

“If you read an analyst report about ‘viruses’ infecting ios, android or rim,” says Chris, “you now know that analyst firm is not honest and is staffed with charlatans. There is probably an exception, but extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.”

Sadly, the computer press tends to accept these extraordinary claims at face value and allows the charlatans to repeat their snake oil pitches without subjecting them to critical analysis.

Fortunately for those who care about the security of their home and business IT systems, there are ways to spot the charlatans and their dodgy wares.

The Big Target theory

When you read a claim that the Windows malware epidemic of the early 2000s was due to Microsoft being a big target as opposed to the tiny market shares of Apple and Linux, you can be sure they are the words of someone who is at best clueless selling a dubious product.

This theory is nonsense, as I’ve explained previously, and anyone who genuinely believes this has no experience in dealing with the poorly secured operating systems that were Window98, Me and the early versions of XP.

If you are confronted by somebody making this claim ask them why, now smartphones are outselling desktop computers, where is the widespread malware promised for mobile systems? It doesn’t exist for exactly the reasons Chris gives in his Google+ post.

Real Soon Now

The other key indicator is the “real soon now” claims – that a virus is about to burst onto the scene that will rub the smile off the face of smug Mac and Linux users.

Invariably the hysterical headlines are backed up with claims, almost always taken from a vendor’s press release, that a security company’s researchers have identified a threat that is about exploit wilfully clueless users.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has done an excellent job of dismantling this rubbish in his classic post “Wolf”.

His post was provoked by the ‘news’ that a wave of Apple malware was on its way. That was six months ago and we’re waiting. John tracked similar stories back to 2004, none of which came to fruition.

The modern snake oil men have an advantage in that tech journalists are desperate for page views and in many media organisations they no longer have the resources to critically analyse PR claims.

Sadly there are real security issues that home and business users need to be aware of. Of course, much of the solution for this doesn’t sell dubious antivirus or expensive consulting services.

In some respects, the proliferation of these stories is a reflection of the decline of the mainstream media business model.

As more ‘news’ stories become lightly rewritten PR spin, the less readers take those outlets seriously and once trusted journals of record become little better than online gossip rags.

Important issues, like information security, deserve more than repeating the lies of those who profit from fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Facebook timelines and the long tail

Can the Internet’s long tail work for small business?

The Financial Times’ Tech Hub blog reports how Facebook’s Timeline function is driving views to old newspaper articles to unexpected stories.

On one level, this is a vindication of Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory of the value of older inventory; that older assets and data become more valuable in an age of unlimited choice.

The question remains though just have valuable old news really is, does the digital equivalent of fish and chip wrapping really have any intrinsic value.

It will probably turn out that information consumers will pay for unique, timely content while leaving the lolcats and funny videos to ad supported content farms.

The long tail model is the digital equivalent of the Fast Moving Consumer Goods business model, just as a big supermarket only makes pennies from each can of baked beans or milk they sell, they make big profits due to the volume they move.

As business writer Seth Godin has put it, the long tail is good for organisations that own big warehouses, and newspapers have the news equivalent of that.

For small businesses, the long tail is not where we need to be, our economics mean margin, not volume.

Reinventing webinars

How do we re-interpret webinars to deliver better results for presenters and audiences?

I’m currently preparing a Smart Company webinar on local search for business. Like most other presenters I prepare for a webinar by putting together a presentation on Keynote or Powerpoint and talk over it while the audience watch and listen over the web.

That’s pretty typical of most webinars, but I can’t help but think we’re doing this the wrong way by falling into the trap of appliying old techniques to new technologies.

In most industries we fall for this problem; when the motor car came along, our forefathers applied the ways of horse and carts to the new technology, going as far as calling them “horseless carriages”.

The movie industry is probably the best example of this. When movies first appeared, producers and writers applied theatrical techniques and it took a decade or so for them to figure out how to work best with the new media, then they had to relearn for talkies, followed by the arrival of TV and now the industry is adapting to Internet streaming.

In many ways we’re still in the “silent movie” phase of online presentations; we’re learning through trial and error what techniques work while inventing new tricks that take advantage of a personal screen.

So that gives rise to the question, how do we adapt our presentations that are designed for being presented to a room full of people to a more intimate online medium?

Magazines 2020

Content Providers, curators or experience makers?

As hundreds queued around the world for the latest Apple iPad an Australian media tycoon told a business breakfast that newspapers were a sunset industry. Where does this leave magazines and other print media?

The last decade for magazines has been tough, as readers drifted to largely free websites with the advertisers following. The challenge for publishers is how do they follow their markets onto the web while still making money.

Magazines aren’t unique in this challenge – the media industries, like many others, have been affected by the rise of the web. Magazines themselves sit somewhere between the recording and newspaper industries with news stand sales and subscriptions being a bigger proportion of incom while not having the same newspaper classified income which has collapsed so dramatically in recent years.

The Shift Online

We’ve seen a massive shift to the web over the last decade and that movement is only accelerating as advertisers start to follow consumers and the public embraces social media and online gaming.

PriceWaterhouseCooper’s Entertainment and Media Outlook forecasts the magazine industry to lose 1% of advertising market share – from 5 to 4% of the overall spend – over the 2010 to 14 period with all the losses going online.

While the magazine industry looks at losing 20% of its advertising revenue to the Internet, figures are similar for newspapers, radio and free to air television with online advertising moving from 18% to 26% of the market. The advertisers are, quite rightly, following the customers.

Following readers online is the great challenge for the magazine industry, the question is how do they do it and continue to be profitable.

The Internet Challenge

The greatest problem on the Internet is making money, businesses have trained web surfers to expect online products – particularly news and entertainment – for free. Even physical goods have become increasingly commoditised as deal of the day and group buying sites have used “cheap” as the main hook for buyers.

Today’s reader and consumer expects goods they find online to be cheap and any content they discover to be free.

That isn’t fatal for a business as the broadcast television industry has shown us you can provide free content paid for by advertisers and make a good living while there’s no shortage of merchants who’ve built empires on the fast moving consumer good model of “stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap”.

Part of the online magazine industry’s response to the challenge of adapting to these models has been to use free labour. The rise of the Digital Sharecroppers, where writers provide content for free, has been the result.

People have been prepared to provide content for free for all manner of reasons. The problem for publishers, and readers, is quality writing is not sustainable under this model and we’re beginning to see the end result where writers are forced to drive buses and the free content is being increasingly sourced from PR agencies, their tame blogger bunny friends or from content farms more concerned about gaming Google through SEO keywords.

Free content also reduces the barriers to entry, which are already extremely low in online given a geek with a WordPress site or YouTube account can have a site up and running in a couple of hours for less than a hundred dollars. If content is low quality, there’s little reason for readers to have any loyalty or to stick to any one site.

There is the other type of free content though, User Generated Content (UCG) consisting of the comments, forum posts and free articles submitted by readers. Many of these followers are fans and this is perhaps where salvation for the magazine industry lies.

What formats can we expect

The old magazine format isn’t going to go away, it’s just going to decline as part of the overall distribution. We’re going to see more short and long format online content complimenting the magazines along with a lot of user content in the comments and forums sections.

We’ll also see more cross platform selling like we currently see with magazines like Better Homes and Gardens though with a much bigger online and interactive component than the present TV-magazine tie ups.

Content though will be more important than format. The SEO driven plays and content farms are a transition effect and as both search engines and readers become more savvy, the influence of sites like eHow and The Huffington Post drop away.

Probably the biggest sleeper though are the electronic readers such as the iPad and Kindle, it is just possible these devices might resurrect the fortunes of the publishing industry in a similar way to the Compact Disk did for the music industry in the 1990s. Certainly Rupert Murdoch is hoping this.

How will magazines engage with consumers in 2020?

Successful magazines are going to find the niches where readers and advertisers will pay to be engaged and identified with key groups, demographics and markets. Adding value to readers is going to be the key to revenue on an Internet that is full of noise of movement but with increasingly fewer nuggets of wisdom.

It’s those nuggets of wisdom, useful analysis and unique worthy content that will be what time poor and somewhat information addled consumers are going to be looking for.

They are also going to be looking for a platform to get their views heard. So it’s going to be critical that magazines make that platform available through comments, forums, reader blogs and giving loyal and knowledgeable readers the opportunity to write for the publication.

Engagement is going to mean allowing site visitors some ownership of the content. The more you can build conversations and contributions around content, the more likely it is that readers will come back and the more likely they are to pay for add ons and read advertisements.

Where will the revenue come from?

The great challenge in the Internet era is making money online. We’ve trained the market to expect news and information to be free and that genie is now out of the bottle, and despite the paywalls we try to put up, we’re going to struggle to convince readers of our value.

As writers, journalists, editors and publishers, we’re going to have to demonstrate our worth to the people who are prepared to pay for content. Right now there aren’t many of who will pay for relevance and quality, but things may be changing as readers realise much of what they currently find on content farms is unsatisfactory.

Subscriptions and advertising are still going to be critical while events, merchandise and other revenue streams are going to be useful revenue centres but it’s hard to see how they will contribute to the bottom line any more than they currently do. It’s also important to remember that successful staging events is an expensive task involving skills many publishers simply don’t have.

Hyperlocal is a fascinating area for magazines. While much of the focus has been on adopting local search to the newspaper industry it could be that specialist magazines can deliver effective localised products through directories and mobile phone applications.

For instance let’s say we have an offal magazine for those who like to offal. A Brisbane businessman visiting Adelaide feels like a plate devilled kidneys for dinner. It could be that Offal Eaters Monthly magazine has a paid app or a subscriber site that allows him to find what he wants in a strange city.

What is the role of the publisher/editor?

More than ever the publisher and editor are going to have to know their market intimately. At a time when audiences are going to be widely fragmented it’s going to be essential to understand what the readers want.

User generated content provides an opportunity for publishers and their editors to understand the market and monitoring what is being said by the target audience is going to be a key role of the modern editor.

Moderating and controlling what’s being said on the platform will also be a key role for an editor. We all know the Internet is God’s gift to opinionated idiots and the risks of defamation, piracy and other brand damaging activity on websites are very real. The editor’s job will increasingly be to filter out the lunatics while encouraging interesting discussion.

Most people though don’t want to create content, beyond having a quick comment on a post or sometimes joining a discussion. Another important role of the editor is to balance the higher quality, paid content with user generated material to ensure the publication’s site doesn’t dissolve into just another web forum.

Publishers too are going to be challenged by this and their task is to find the deep niches where these models can succeed then convince advertisers and subscribers that their sites are worth signing up to.

Given the ease of launching new sites, the key to success is being the trusted leader in your segment. If your content can be easily replicated or bought from another source then the survival odds are firmly against you.

The next nine years

We should also keep in mind change isn’t new, broadcast television gave a death sentence to news magazines like Life or the Bulletin a generation ago, and these publications only survived because of indulgent owners. The magazine industry met those challenges, evolved and survived albeit with great change and a few casualties.

The same is happening now, the industry is evolving and adapting to the new mediums and the changed behaviour of advertisers and readers. It’s not pretty or easy but the rewards are going to be there for those who figure it out.

Had we been around when Gutenberg invented the printing press we would have wondered what will happen to all the monks who up until then had spent their lives manually copying religious texts and important documents. Change came to the monks, but not in the ways they expected.

The web only recently turned 20 and in 2020 it will still be less than thirty years since its invention. All of us will still be learning, making mistakes and discovering where the opportunities are.

It’s a time of challenge and the rewards for those who get it right are great. The key for magazines, like all of us, lies in understanding our markets and audiences.

Tipping points

What happens when industries are hit by massive change.

We often assume change is immediate – for instance, the moment the motor car was invented, all the horse cart makers went out of business – what usually happens though is the two technologies or industries sit side by side for some time and the old industry may even continue to prosper for sometime and the new methods struggle.

Eventually though the newer technology takes over and the older one falls away quickly, leaving slow to change incumbents with an irrelevant business model.

Illustrating this, two fascinating posts by Michael DeGusta on his blog The Understatement tracks two major trends in the US newspaper and record industries, noting how the sectors are now at 1960 and below 1973 levels respectively.

The record industry

Michael’s tracking of per capita recording sales is striking both for how technology, trends and musical tastes have shaped the record industry along with the predicament it now finds itself in.

The 1970s show how the recording industry adapted, we see sales start the decade in decline until a sharp uptick in vinyl sales happens in the late 1970s, probably driven by the heavily hyped “rock opera” and concept albums foisted on us by the likes of Pink Floyd and the Electric Light Orchestra.

It’s interesting that during this period cassette sales largely flat lined, as digital revenues have today. As a child of that late 1970s era, we used cassette recorders – mine won in competition at a jeans shop in outer suburban Melbourne – to tape stuff off the radio and jerryrig with record players so we could create mashups of Alice Cooper and Skyhooks.

Cassette revenues eventually grew, but the the Compact Disk quickly took the growth off the cassette tape and drove the record industry to new highs, probably as people replaced their vinyl collections with CDs that weren’t easily copied through the 1980s and much of the 90s.

The peak of CD sales was hit in the late 1990s, which is almost certainly due to the arrival of personal computers equipped with recordable CD units. All of a sudden, we could go back to copying the music we’d already bought.

To make things worse, the rise of the World Wide Web meant we suddenly didn’t have to go through the gatekeepers – the record stores, radio stations and magazines – to find the music we wanted.

For a while the record industry fought back, even seeing a minor resurgence in 1999 and 2000, but then the rot sets in. The tipping point was clearly in 2001 and can probably be traced to the online streaming services, including YouTube, and the rapidly maturing peer-to-peer services.

The only solace the record industry in its current form can hope for is to see a surge in digital sales like they saw with cassettes in the mid-1980s. It’s difficult to see how that can happen unless they can quickly strike some very favourable deals with Apple and other online distributors.

Newspaper advertising

Print media’s performance over the last fifty years has been one of success until 5 years ago. Despite most of us turning from newspapers to broadcast television for our news through the 1960s and 70s, revenues stood up.

From the 1980’s there was a slow decline and in a few years early in the new millennium it even looked like the Internet wasn’t affecting revenues and the new streams from online advertising were actually increasing overall income.

Then in 2005, the tipping point was reached as classified advertisers, particularly employment and real estate, fled to online competitors with the display buyers not far behind.

For newspaper publishers, that their online revenues have barely grown in the last five years most be the most worrying aspect of the collapse in their income. Their online strategies simply aren’t working.

What this means for other industries

This “tipping point” pattern is typical when we see technological shifts. For various reasons – customer inertia, government regulations, uneven distribution of the new tools – a game changing technology usually takes time to be adopted and usually goes through a process best described by the Gartner Hype Cycle.

New technologies and ideas rarely change industries or societies overnight, but once a technology reaches maturity and mass acceptance, the barrier eventually gives gives and people quickly move across to the new way of doing things.

We see this in the record industry – particularly in the switch to cassettes, CDs and then collapse as the net takes over – then again in the newspaper industry.

These two industries though are just examples, the same process is happening to many others. One good example is the phone directory business where the tipping point is happening right now as consumers and businesses move online and away from printed directories.

That many businesses still haven’t figured out this change in consumer behaviour indicates they too are being blind sided by tipping points that could leave their ventures stranded by history.

All of us have to understand how these changes will affect our livelihoods and trades. Are you looking at how your business is affected by the rise of the net and the end of the cheap credit?

The age of the whistleblower

Wikileaks shows how anonymous online channels undermine old media models.

“I would have done it anonymously” when the girl in the middle of the Australian football “dickileaks” scandal was asked what she would have done differently after being ordered by a court not to post any more nude photos of star players she had obtained through a relationship with one of their team mates.

Having unsuccessfully tried to pass them over the local Melbourne press, who instead tipped off the governing Australian Football League, the girl posted them on Facebook and was quickly shut down by lawyers and a hostile local media more concerned about their access to star footballers than the ethics or behaviour of their beloved sports teams.

The lesson has been learned with events like this and the systemic corporate shut down of Wikileaks; that the media, big business, governments and the media cannot be trusted.

For anybody with sensitive information that upsets people in power – be it Julian Assange, a girl with nude footballer photos or a US pilot posting inconsistencies in the Transport Security Administration’s policies – it is essential to get your message out, you don’t have to wait for a producer or editor to decide to publish the story based upon whatever news values they think have priority.

The next wave of Wikileakers won’t be waiting for Julian Assange to do deals with The Guardian, New York Times or Der Spiegel, they’ll be setting up anonymous websites on services like Blogger or WordPress and hiding their IP address to publish the details directly.

Sure most of them will get caught, but instead of finding the leaker in ten minutes, as would happen should they post on Facebook or contact a journalist more loyal to powerbrokers than their readers, it may take the authorities weeks or months to find them and shut them down.

For the media – who have largely sat on the girl’s story since it first broke in May last year, kept silent on the TSA’s flaws and ignored much of the obvious that is stated in the Wikileaks cables – they are no longer the trusted brokers. Too many journalists and media proprietors have cosy, safe relationships with the organisations they should be reporting upon.

For those journalists, their cosy world is over. No longer are they the trusted gate keepers with the privileges that come with the position.

The next generation of media proprietors and journalists understand this and are figuring out the ways to regain trust as sources of factual, useful information.

Digital technology means there will be many Deep Throats and Daniel Ellsbergs in the future, while they won’t need a newspaper editor to get the message out, a channel to vouch for their veracity will be needed and that’s where trusted journalists will matter.

Wikileaks and similar direct publishing channels won’t kill media, but it’s going to be a very different world from that of the 20th Century.

Can we trust online reviews?

Customer review sites are important. But can we trust the comments?

Travel review site Tripadvisor was in the news last week when a british hotelier threatened to sue the service over a subscriber’s poor report that alleged, among other things, a dead mouse was found in their suite.

Online review sites are changing the way we do business, particularly in the hospitality industries where sites like Tripadvisor, Urbanspoon and Eatibility are becoming the first places people check when planning a meal or holiday.

The value in these sites are the user reviews, people trust others opinions and experiences far more than they trust marketing material or even the world of professional reviewers.

For customers and the industry this is a good thing, however there is a downside as anonymous reviewers can’t always be trusted to tell the truth.

So how do we separate the false reviewers, be they positive ones placed by the establishments or negative ones places by competitors or people with an axe to grind?

Reviewer profiles
All review sites show the reviewers’ history. If a reviewer has only one review then the credibility is suspect, particularly if that one review is overly critical or complimentary. Trust reviewers with multiple, fair minded posts.

The nature of the reviews
Real reviewers rarely score ten or nine out of ten on all aspects. So treat gushing reviews with suspicion.

Mixed reviews
Even the best establishment has a bad day and even if they are perfect there is always a customer who is never happy. Real reviews vary across a range where a venue with top service might see the review scores ranging from 7 to 10 out of 10.

Review length
Long rambling reviews praising or criticising everything from the online booking facilities through to the dining room’s cutlery are either the work of plants or a nutters. Most genuine reviews are a paragraph or two.

Age of reviews
Establishments change over time, some get better and some go downhill. Newer reviews deserve more weighting although some managements decide it’s easier to fix a problem by making their own reviews so be cautious of a recent wave of positive reviews.

Regardless of whether managers and business owners like them or not, review sites are here to stay and they are spreading out of hospitality into almost every industry.

So for business owners, it’s important to take reviews seriously and use the legitimate ones as a reality check to make sure you and your staff are delivering the best possible product.

For customers, these sites can be a really useful service but they rely on real people giving genuine reviews. If you do use one of these sites to research your travel and dining, give a little back to the community by adding your own honest reviews.

Review sites are part of the information economy that’s developed around the Internet and we expect trustworthy data to be at our fingertips. Time will tell just how much we can trust these sites

The good news story

We have some great tales to tell. It’s time to do it.

Last night, 700 children gathered at the Sydney Opera House for The Festival of Choral Music. Over the four days the event is run, over 2,000 kids will have performed in the choirs, bands and ensembles.

Why aren’t we telling these stories of talent, potential, happiness and beauty? Why are we bogged down in the negative, backward looking view of the world we see in much of our commentary of the world?

Maybe it’s time for a rethink about the stories we tell.

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.