content and publishing

Digital Consultant links for June 9th through June 17th

These are my links for June 9th through June 17th:

Keynote: Three Ways Business Must Scale With Social Technologies – Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter on how brand discussions are now 'off domain' and companies (this carries through from large to small I believe) need to consider how by linking together empowered customers, internal teams and technology you can scale to meet the rising challenges off managing customers in social media.
Google Analytics for Facebook Fan Pages – A cheeky tech way to get the power of Google Analytics from you Facebook fan page data by adding an image to your fan page. A great way to compere your site and social network data.
Google Caffeine jolts worldwide search machine – Google has now successfully rolled out the latest changes to it's search engine, known as 'Caffeine'. This now brings you fresher, faster jolts of content and news as websites are archived more quicky page by page, meaning content published could show up on search results within hours of not minutes. Great news for content producers reacting to timely news content, and a move towards the power of the real-time web.
Q&A: Chris Gorell Barnes on online video for brands – Chril Barnes from Adjust Your Set (great company name) on online video for brands – interesting idea about a 'holy grail' of linking mobile video with vouchers to bring people in-store, and using in-store video to enhance sales promotions. He claims online video can increase conversion by 100% and reduce product returns by 60%.

Digital Consultant links for May 31st through June 6th

These are my links for May 31st through June 6th:

Well, what is a good digital music strategy ? Part 2 – Social Networks – Virginie Berger with some useful advice and stats on the potential for promoting music on social networks, and some tips to be more successful (like apparently adding 'video' to your video title is a winning tactic).
Public Enemy’s New Sellaband Target – Fan funding – getting your 'fans' to pre-pay for your material to fund its production costs – is a great new innovation in the music industry (I recently fan-funded the new Thomas Truax album and received my pre-release download of it today), but this reflection on the difficulties established group Public Enemy have had meeting their targets suggests fan funding may not yet be a mature enough funding mechanism to replace the role (particularly in sales and marketing) of the music industry.
The State of Online Video – A new report from the Pew survey of American life showing 7/10 adults are watching video online, with a large rise in humourous, eduactional, TV and film and political videos, with an increase in user-created content.
Experiments in delinkification – Nicholas Carr, academic and author of 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?', on why hyperlinking in text may be a distraction from the idea you are conveying, and an experiment with putting links after the text like footnotes in a book. I agree partly with this idea, but actually there's another issue (that newspapers and even some credible online publications like Mashable) that hyperlinking encourages users to leave your site rather than 'stickiness' of moving to elsewhere on your site. It's an interesting balance that needs to be struck between providing context and value to what you write, and making sure the hyperlink doesn't detract from either the flow of your idea or the user journey on your website.
Content is everything, so just do it – This is something that has bothered me for a while: the 'signal vs noise' ratio that we all have to be producing LOTS of content (status updates, links on Twitter, blog articles) in the drive for attention and search engine indexes. Of course this is a nonsense, you should write what is good, when you can (I ususally recommend to clients some sort of minimum commitment per month of types of content e.g. status updates, video, news article depending on the needs they identify). Ideas are good, volume is bad.

Digital Consultant links for April 8th through April 11th

These are my links for April 8th through April 11th:

The Collapse of Complex Business Models – Author and academic, and writer of "Here Comes Everybody" Clay Shirky write a good piece on simplifying bureaucracies and business models, using the example of user generated video and 'In The Motherhood', a small hit online drama that failed as a conventional TV series.
Forecast: TV, Internet Will Lead Advertising Back Up As Print Wanes – Predicted stats for advertising from 2008-2012 globally, showing that TV (after a fall) is set for growth to return to 2008 levels this year, and internet advertising will continue strong growth, whilst print, cinema and advertising are set for a slight decline in spend. Of digital, the strongest growth will be in paid search followed by display advertising.
Digital Economy Bill: Quick Guide To All 45 Measures – Great summary of the Digital Economy Bill, due to be passed as law this Monday, showing all 45 measures, and which have been withdrawn. Interesting to see that Channel 4 now have a remit of distributing film and supporting 'innovative content' and children's programmes as part of their public service remit.
What Social Media Will Look Like in 2012 – Insightful article by Freddie Laker on how social media will grow to become an intrinsic part of the digital experience by 2012, as the semantic web and user recommendation seemlessly interweaves with search, ecommerce and other web experiences. I like the idea of seeing aggregated realtime updates of users before you put in a phone call, and ratings as a core part of the e-commerce experience.
Bebo’s friends desert it – Business Analysis & Features, Business – Yet another social networking giant looks set to bite the dust.. as MySpace hangs in there, Bebo looks set to have its doors shut by owners AOL. Failure to invest and understand the needs of its youth demographic, particularly in failing to support social gaming, have led to the downfall of the fun site. Big shame as Bebo were once investors of online TV programming such as Kate Modern, and this gap, coupled with Endemol's recent annoucement of scaling down their digital team due to limited online tv investment, heralds the death-too-soon of pureplay web television.

Digital Consultant links for March 31st through April 6th

These are my links for March 31st through April 6th:

The Collective Intelligence Genome – Fascinating findings from research from MIT's Centre for Collective Intelligence showing ways you can use open source development or 'crowd sourcing' as part of a production or decision making process.
One-third of users willing to pay for apps – Interesting mobile stats: just 35% of mobile users willing to pay for apps, highest in iPhone users, lowest in Android, although Blackberry users pay far more than iPhone users on average per app. This is definitely the growth area for digital content and services development, showing users will pay up for mobile content. But it shows that the serious money isn't in iPhone and producers should look at spreading their production and distribution across multiple mobile platforms.
SEO 101: Everything You Need to Know About SEO (But Were Afraid to Ask) – Regular readers of this blog will know I'm no big fan of SEO (or 'snake something oil' as one social media guy I know described it) but in recent months I've mellowed on the subject – when using good navigation, good content and good structures supports people to find and discover good content I'm all for it and there's no doubt it's the affordable way for a small business to draw traffic to their e-commerce site. This is a brilliant guide – one of those that you can read and learn about 80% of what you need to know about SEO in one quick hit. Which is good because it means less time spent reading about SEO…

Today’s Digital Consultant Links for March 29th

These are my links for March 29th from 01:03 to 01:35:

Taking The Tablet: 15 Ways Publishers Are Re-Imagining The Magazine – Great set of video and text articles looking at how publishers are creating new work and experiences for tablet readers (including Adobe AIR and iPad) which provide rich, multimedia ways for users to interact with texts and advertisements to create enhanced experiences which complement the high value and branding associated with the magazines. The aim being not merely to provide content but experiences which can be monteized.
The Democratization of Video Content Creation – Visible Gains, the monetizing video service, sing the praises of cheap, portable HD cameras like Kodak Zi6 and Flip as a source for creating competitive advantage in the organisation: "buy handheld high-definition cameras and distribute them to your best spokespeople and writers. Today’s evolving marketplace requires that you create compelling content to engage your clients and prospects. These are wonderful tools that jump-start the process." My own HD camera weapon of choice is the affordable Kodak Zi6 (c.£70), an HD camera recommended to me by several video bloggers. With free edit software included, there really is no excuse needed to star video blogging and reporting on what your business does.
Mediacamp Nottingham: social reporting from CreativeNottingham.com – Yesterday I was live reporting the Medicamp Nottingham (a digital media barcamp) event for my online community site CreativeNottingham.com. This was my first experiment in 'social reporting' – using online tools to capture and disseminate an event. Our experiment was all about real-time reporting – capturing as close to live reports as possible. This included using 'CoverItLive' to live blog key talks (which were updated in realtime on the website), very quick event reports (my the end of the day I'd worked out how to report, photograph the room and upload the blog post by the end of each session), short audio and video interviews with speakers and delegates and photographs uploaded throughout the day. We used our community website www.creativenottingham.posterous.com as a repository for media content. A good (tiring) day, lots of lessons learnt as to how to do it better next time.
Does The Times’s New Paywall Add Up? – June 2010 (presumably after the election) will see a landmark event in UK online publishing: The Times will sit all their content behind a paywall costing online readers £1 day (the same cost as the print edition. Ouch). Commentator Nick Thomas at Forrester Research looks at the economics, which is likely to see a reduction in readership to a tiny 60,000. The Times believe the niche, commited readership will still attract quality advertisers. This is a significant event as other news publishers will be likely to either follow suite or move to freemium based models (under discussion for The Independent) embracing building larger pools of readers and online audiences. Murdoch may be a brave fool with this move, yet he may also have hit on a way to change the online economy – force those who value to pay.
Women in TV: the missing 5,000 – A shocking report from the Edinburgh TV festival showing that 5,000 women left the TV industry last year, versus 750 men. The festival's panellists irated the audience by suggesting freelancers should pull themselves together, whereas many women feel the inflexible working practices mean that women are simply forced out of the industry when they want to start a family. The TV crisis is unlikely to see any major changes in working practices but hopefully sparking a debate will put the issue at the forefront of agencies like Pact and Skillset.

Digital Consultant links for March 31st through April 6th

Today’s Digital Consultant Links for March 29th

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