Shaping your digital business for 2010

What struck me most about the AOP’s forum was the gentle patter of realism.

Similar digital publishing seminars and conferences in the past have often boasted what might best be described as “digital extremists” who argue that traditional media is doomed and digital business should be built from scratch. At this event, speakers from the FT.com, Deloitte, WAN-IFRA and Auto Trader focused on the challenges for any traditional media company trying to increase the percentage of its digital business. But they also argued that this current, hybrid state was not just inevitable but appropriate.

The best parallel came from Deloitte’s Howard Davies. He pointed out that a hybrid car like the Toyota Prius was absolutely essential until cheaper rechargeable batteries or recharging points became widely available. He then argued that traditional media similarly had to “run a mixture of models for a while” because “the digital motorway still did not run everywhere in the UK” and its take-up was slowing.

I’ve copied my Twitters (and expanded some of those that are less than comprehensible!) from the event below.

FT.com’s Head of Product Management Mary Beth Christie

• All attendees to the forum were invited to draw smiley faces on a flipchart – FT realised its employees had as diverse views of the web as the variety of smiley faces drawn by the attendees of the forum.
• FT’s solution to the conflicting demands of journalists, protective of the value of their content, and management focused on revenue was pay wall for each user after 10 free stories a month.
• FT’s advice: make all those impacted by a launch (journalists, sales or operations) make the time to find out about a new launch. No one (CEO to reporter/sales exec) is too busy. Or don’t complain after launch!
• More expensive to make a traditional business digital than from new – like rewiring an old house than building new.

Deloitte’s Media Partner Howard Davies

• Don’t just push yourself into an exclusive digital space because everyone else appears to be there; the boundary between traditional and digital media is an area not a wall.
• “The digital motorway does not go everywhere.” In fact the numbers for digital conversion are slowing leaving the percentage of those using traditional media at a considerable number remains substantial (only 84% on mobile, 76% have a PC and only 62% are on broadband).
• Just as the electric hybrid car, the Prius was produced because it was just too early for pure electric cars, so media will continue to run both traditional and digital media for a while.
• Good leaders see digital’s frequent failures as part of the learning process.
• Take some breaks from your digital journey.
• Few publishers value the Long Tail any more (a reference to Chris Anderson’s book which argues that the web allows retailers to sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities), claims Davies, since who has resources to cater for the visitor who comes once a month.
• Digital forces not just a change of behaviour but also culture. And you cannot change culture, you can only build it.
• Why resistance to digital? Lack of vision, goal, structure, support, communication, information and involvement lead to a climate of fear.
• Most problems with change management occur because people are expected to implement without explanation and adopt without support.

WAN-IFRA’s Dr Dietmar Schantin

• Digital forces a change to a company’s culture, not just behaviour. Yet you cannot change culture only build it.
• Why resistance to digital? Lack of vision, goal, structure, support, communication, information and involvement from team leaders create a climate of fear.
• Most problems with change management occur because people are expected to implement without explanation and adopt without support.

Trader Media Group’s Digital Publishing Director, Edwin Ulak

• Historically, the Trade Media Group set up its digital business as a national one to compete with its existing 13 print businesses.
• When the company’s digital revenue overtook print revenue there were only 250 employed on digital and 3500 still on print.
• Incentivise and motivate sales team not just on revenue but also profitable growth.

Runcat Consulting’s Tom Turcan

• Don’t underestimate the value of a good party to help relieve stress during a period of change.

Here is the AOP’s own report on the forum.

Guest post: what do traditional print and broadcast media have to learn from the music industry?

I attended Music Week’s ‘Making online music pay’ conference last week (run by colleagues from UBM) and got into conversation with Mark Muggeridge. He argued that some of the lessons learnt by the music business might apply to the some of the traditional and broadcast media landscape.

Mark is Creative Director at Evil Genius Media.  He Tweets @MM_EGM. The company works with clients to create and deliver events and communications via an Event Management Division, and Create Music Strategies via their Music Consultancy Division. Mark organised the recent visit of Seth Godin to London.

This is what he had to say.

The online and mobile space is arguably more developed for music than it is for other media, with a few notable exceptions. It’s too complex to discuss in one blog post here, however here are a few brief thoughts.

When Shawn Fanning launched Napster in 1999 the game changed forever.  The creativity of artists and the fight-or-flight instinct for survival, of the commercial music business has seen music delivery develop on numerous fronts ever since. These being:-

• Music Discovery – MySpace and it’s imitators have delivered a platform to artists that allows them to give listeners access to their work and build communities of fans.
• Access to Music – The ‘always on’  generation of music consumers born 1988 onward who take technology for granted don’t need to own music but just want access to it. Think ‘Comes with Music’, other subscription services etc.
• Legal Download – iTunes, Amazon etc.

These developments and others have fuelled changes in the music industry such as the current trend for artists to self release and market their own material, sell merchandise retaining 100% of the margin and perversely, focus on live performance as a primary source of income until the industry settles on a way to financially revalue music on line.
So what about other media ? How does the situation in, music compare with them?

Photo credit: James Cumpsty

• Book Publishers – Are only just coming to terms with the problems faced by the music business.  With electronic book readers now becoming more ubiquitous both publishers and retailers are waiting to find out if sales plummet via piracy and users distributing titles between themselves. They know that Digital Rights Management layers are got around easily. However the purchasers of expensive book readers tend to be older and the owners of publishing rights are hoping that this older generation will respect copyright.
• Newspapers – Have taken a range of approaches, from putting part of their publications on line, to placing valued content in the ‘Walled Garden’. However some, are beginning to take a distributed approach such as the UK Guardian Newspaper which recently began offering an API which will allow third-party developers to access and reuse the Guardian’s content database in their own applications
• Television – Is finally beginning to deal with the challenge of lower viewing numbers by allowing us to time shift via the use of products such as the BBC’s iplayer and Chanel 4’s On Demand Service.

Conclusion

‘Other’ media is beginning to see that by distributing it’s media, they can distribute their brand and make it stronger; that trying to ignore the digital space won’t work in a world  where digital touch points are accessible and intertwined into our lives, via phones, computers, game platforms etc.

Some of the speakers from print and publishing media were pretty confident that they had found a successful way forward at the conference.  Perhaps they need to acknowledge that the growing pains of the music business has been of benefit to them too.

You’ve been asked to write a digital strategy. Now what?

You work in a traditional business. You already make a little bit of digital revenue from a website. Now you’ve been asked to map out a digital strategy to increase your digital activity, and ultimately, revenue.

What do you say?

You’ve worked with websites for almost a decade so obviously you know everything there is to know. You don’t really like the web at all, if you were honest (but you definitely would not admit it). You think the web is a dull, unresponsive little thing. You hope it is a fad that will go away.

What do you do?

What you should do is to set about finding out how much you do not know. You probably won’t because you are not aware of what you do not know. You’ve managed to keep clear of new fangled things like Twitter (“what a silly name!”) and blogs (“no one ever comments on them anyway”). You think Facebook is for mooning teenagers and “online communities” means blasting out emails to an ever lengthening list of people.

What could you do?

You could give the web a try. You could sign up to some of these things with funny names that everyone is talking about. You might just find that, what you thought of as a dull, was actually quite interesting. More than that, you might just begin to glimpse the new world on the web. You might see how responsive it is, how you can network with people in very different ways and how you can conduct its rythmns and passions like a symphony.  

What would you do then?

You would experience happiness from the clarity. You would be relieved that you had not taken any irreversible decisions during your earlier ignorance. You would now be aware of how much you did not know. Now you are ready to research your community and find out what they really want and what they already use. You would begin to be in the position that you could write that digital strategy you had been asked to do several weeks earlier. You would do it rather well.

If you think your followers/community on Twitter would be interested in this post, show them your value by reTweeting it to them!

 Photo credit: Waponi 

Are bloggers ready for the competition from the arrival of so many former, print journalists?

Do bloggers realise quite what is about to hit them? 

Following wave after wave of redundancies on US and UK  newspapers and a marked shift to web-only or web-dominant on those titles that survive, hundreds of traditional journalists are about to flood the bloggers hallowed grounds. Once there, journalists will kick off blogs, competing for stories, attention and readers, rubbing up against exactly the group they have sometimes blames for much of traditional journalism’s malaise.

Are bloggers, and to be honest many New Media journalists, ready for this new wave of economic migrants? Will bloggers need to raise their game? Is the world big enough for both of them?

Bloggers will spot the newcomers easily at first. They will continue to operate in the same familiar and trusted ways that they are used to in print, presuming that those ways need only be transfered to the web. So notice how many of the blogs will be “broadcast” at first, written as if they are newspaper columns and expecting readers to come to them.

Are bloggers ready for what comes next, however? Bloggers have broken some great stories over the years but a new wave of professional journalists oozing great contacts and forced to use their blogs to break stories are going to be tough new competition. Are bloggers going to be just a little annoyed that the newcomers, with their strong links back to what remains of traditional media, will have their postings picked up and linked to major websites far quicker than theirs? Will the years of training to write quick, factually correct and legal articles translate into a new standard of accuracy and attribution which will fundamentally alter the content of blogs?

But could there be a different scenario? Could the new wave of people into New Media raise everyone’s game? Could it not bring new names to the fore, new ideas, new ways of creating blogs? After all, some of the greatest bloggers today started out as print journalists, Jeff Jarvis and Craig Stolz for example. WIll not the newcomers morph into New Media stars just as effortlessly?

The constant drip, drip, drip of bad news about print media has made us all think of the negative results of these seismic changes. The arrival of these journalists will bring a little wounded pride to those bloggers who have been toiling for years.  But, for any blogger of worth, the newcomers bring nothing but good.

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• TypePad’s Journalist Bailout Blog Program – Seems funny, but also valuable

In the future, will companies only consider candidates with a social media footprint?

Chris Brogan’s asks Should Every Outward Facing Employee Have a Web Presence? When the economy recovers and companies start hiring once more, should you only consider people for jobs who boast a social media profile?

It would be simple to police. Google their name and if it did not appear, they just aren’t suitable.  I do not only include people who might be joining a web team but also sales, marketing and all mainstream, traditional and outward-facing departments. Each and every one of them will be using social media to network with their community in the near future.

So what would be the minimum social media profile for an employee?

• A Facebook profile (with lots of “havin’ a laff’” photos)? Sorry, not good enough since most people cannot relate their personal use of a social network to the use of social media in a professional environment.  
• A LinkedIn profile? If your profile is bang up to date and you’ve joined some half-decent groups, I might look at your CV. Bonus points if you have links to some key contacts in the particular business sector you are covering or joining. But, still, you still don’t really know what social media is, do you? 
• Linkedin profile and a Twitter? Oooh, you’re well on the way to an interview now. I might have a quick one-over of your Tweets to see whether you have any idea of Twitter etiquette and have an even quicker scan through your followers/whom you are following. But, at least you’ve got going.
• LinkedIn, Twitter AND a blog? Wow. You’ve really got my attention. I do not even mind if your blog is about shoeing horses or the magic of Australia’s outback. I am interested in which web-hosted, social media apps’ you’ve cut-and-paste onto your blog. Let’s just hope you make the grade when you come for the interview!

The present economic climate might make such questions seem academic. But in these tough times, few traditional companies wish to come out of this recession with their digital business diminished, instead they want it to be enhanced. So the absorption of social media into all B2B and B2C activity will only accelerate. We need to think now what might be the skills future employees will need to deliver it.

Am I addicted to the web?

It sits in the corner of the room. An occasional blue light flashes innocuously. I head directly towards it. Am I addicted to the internet?

Should I keep the habit secret? Some people are obsessed with online betting until they lose everything. Others still are fixated with online porn, placing the pleasures of the screen before the pleasures of the flesh. Me, I am just addicted to the internet.

How do I know this? If I come into a room and see either of our laptops lying around, there is a unbearable desire to open it up, press the necessary button and get going. A meal on the table ready to eat, a phone call from family or friend, even Heroes Series 3 on the TV, none can get in the way of my instant endorphin rush.

It is not as if I know where I will end up when I get start. Will I come up with an idea for a blog posting that will attract an extraordinary bounce in traffic? Will I come across a new blogger who just seems to say the things I want to hear that night. Or will I see a new app on someone’s blog that I just cannot wait to cut and post the embed code on my own blog?

The addiction has already changed my media. I still read the Guardian on a daily basis. But TV has become a backdrop as we sit with our laptops flashing in the semi-darkness. Favourite series are now watched on BBC iPlayer. Only as I grabbed a magazine in the supermarket recently did I realise how I had not looked at something that has obsessed me all my life. And books might fill the shelves but I am not, for the first time in my life, aware of what I will next take on holiday.

But is it addiction? The more I become engrossed, the more I realise that it is not addiction. It is instead the web that was always promised. It just so happens, that through a series of coincidences, it has become MY web. It is no longer some flat thing from which I read the news or, at most, book a ticket. Instead it has become a wonderful, interactive place which recognises my arrival and presents me with my content. The more I interact, the more it comes back for me.

Addiction or not, is it good for me? A recent book, iBrian by Dr. Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, argues that the progress of the web is changing the way behave. Indeed like a continuing advertisement for Darwin, it is those who explore, absorb and respond to the web who will do better in the future. In a review in the Sunday Times, under the heading Keep clicking and you’ll be a snappy thinker, Gary Small, director of the memory and ageing research centre at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues:

The next generation, as [Charles] Darwin suggests, will adapt to this environment. Those who become really good at technology will have a survival advantage – they will have a higher level of economic success and their progeny will be better off.

It means that you should do all you can to educate your family and friends to get up to speed. Translate that to the workplace and it is not just cyclical (ie financial) and structural (ie readers moving online) reasons for becoming digital. But now we know. It is a matter of survival. Survival of the fittest.

A positive take on digital revenue in a credit-crunch era

All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher makes clear in two postings, Dear Web2.0: It’s Still the Economy, Stupid! and Layoffs Hit Silicon Valley: HP Today, Who Tomorrow?, that neither Web 2.0 start-ups or more established digital businesses will be immune from the credit crunch.

She argues that other established digital companies will follow Hewlett Packard’s lead to use the bad economic news to cut back on staff. Venture capitalists, meanwhile, will expect Web 2.0 start-ups produce profits or simply withdraw their funding.

She needed to say it because many digital companies appear to live in a non-parallel world where what happens on Wall Street has no impact on themselves.

Last week, one of the things that struck me about the coverage of the two main tech conferences devoted to start-ups, DEMOfall and TechCrunch50, was the almost complete lack of discussion–or, more appropriately, worry–about the troubled economy.

This, even though the subprime mortgage crisis remains in full swing, along with the continuing turmoil around the stability of Wall Street financial firms, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Also, let’s not forget those sky-high gas prices.

I am glad she said it. But dare I suggest, to one of the leading lights of the blogosphere, that there is one type of digital revenue that will remain a more positive subject to discuss despite the present calamity in the markets – digital revenues within traditional media companies. Let me try and explain.

However swiftly and dramatically total advertising spend might go down over the next year to 18 months, digital revenues will certainly not go down as swiftly. Indeed few companies will want to come out of the coming recession with their digital businesses anything but enhanced.

While they might cut back on their traditional advertising spend, they will not cut back, if at all, on their digital spend. We can already see this happening, hastening structural changes. The result? Digital revenues appear to be robust in an environment of declining revenues. And that position will become even more pronounced as time progresses.

Just as established digital businesses are different from Web 2.0 start-ups, so digital revenue within traditional media businesses needs to be analysed and discussed in a different breath!

Ten percent digital revenues at Trinity Mirror by 2011 – August 1, 2008.

Digital helps Daily Mail after drop in advertising revenues – July 24, 2008.

These Digital Times Daily 05/08/08 – China’s first blogger, bloggers becoming like journalists and Mygazines

My views on the most important digital stories of the day in the UK from the web, from the papers, from radio and TV.

more about “These Digital Times Daily – 8. 5. 200…“, posted with vodpod

In today’s broadcast

• An almost poetic interview “China’s first blogger Isaac Mao: it was just like a fairy story” from the Guardian. Mao quotes Sharism and suggests blogger wear halos.
• If a blogger focus on their audience are they becoming like a journalist? “How successful bloggers become bureaucratized too” from Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog
• Are UK magazines failing to spot the threat form the web just as the music industry did? “Mygazines creator defends mag-sharing website” from Press Gazette suggests so.

Do you want to see what I receommended yesterday? Click here.

A practical guide for print publications in a digital world

Fascinating posting by Popmatters’ Jason Gross, former geek turned rock journalist, offering advice for how long-running print publications can adapt to this brave new Net-driven world. Among his headings are

• Forget about easy answers “everything changes quickly”
• Forget about long-term answers too “there is not going to be a solution that’s going to last for years”
• Fear and ignorance drive the technology industry companies ” go ahead an buy [software] even if they do not know what they are getting into – they just do not want to fall behind”
• Don’t think that the latest hip craze will save you “even if a tech solution is working for one place, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to work for you”
• Stop resting on your laurels and stop crying about the past “having a solid print presence does not mean you’ll get good web traffic” 
  

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• Don’t hate on the newbie tech sites – make your own online presence “this means not just having blogs but also presences on places like Facebook”
• Work closer with tech eggheads – they might be your best friends ”what makes both sides in this equation equally brainless is that they don’t see the value of working more closely together”
• Squeeze as much you can outta tried and true web technology ”there’s some good, solid technology out there that you can and should be using for your publication’s website”
• Your web presence is global, not local, so you need to act that way ”Don’t give up on local stories…that’s a unique strength that you can and should take advantage of…but why ignore the outside world when it’s potentially knocking at your door”
• Think about what you can learn from other industries stressed out by the Net “when the main product that you’ve monetized ain’t bringing in revenue, look to the periphery for other ways to made do”

Why has Microsoft sent me a magazine?

How peculiar.

Arriving in the post (remember that!), a full-colour magazine on glossy paper (and remember that!) called Microsft Connections in Communications. I cannot even find the address for a website within its pages.

While Microsoft’s customers in the media are rushing to catch up with the digital revolution, what year does Microsoft think it is? Surely the company’s communication department should be communicating with its potential customers in way that reflects their own challenges – an online blog, perhaps, a Wikizine, a Twitter feed?