In my little sketch above I am trying to tease out some of the key issues facing online media organizations. Our approach of course, as you can see in Heritage Key ( I hope), is from the almost-off-the-chart right position of newest media. We are trying to figure out how to mix the content-focus with social tools with the interactive tools in the most unique way.

I can break-down some of our ideas as follows in terms of the content that we make and people consume:

• News — breaking items, needs to be fast on the site and some value add to reacting to web flares, creating news content is a big plus

• Articles — this is the focus of the commission effort to effectively surround useful topics with a series of articles, interviews, video pieces. You would expect to gain some lift on google/SEO as you create content against sets of keyword objectives.

• Media — images, video, galleries, maps that are either unique or curated. Presentation and navigation are critical. We use Solr now to add discovery aspects to site search.

• Interactive — answer the challenge of what to do on the site. So we have some quizzes, but really the big attraction for Heritage Key is the Virual Experience (GoVirtual).  While enabling comments on a site is not always so easy, it is hard to consider that basic feature as very interactive these days.

• Directory — collects, curate, manage relevant data that is needed by the community. Add community/social filtering to expose data back to site visitors (i.e. popular, rated recently, new)

• UGC — shift now is to manage the flow of user generated content and raise relevance and quality. YouTube is struggling as an example to separate out the noise/infringing content from the serious/regular content creators. My sense is that the site owners need to direct/drive UGC a lot more. It will be the role in fact of the site to help people do more than they can otherwise do themselves = a better package, more traffic, more distribution, more promotion as much as a better concept.

These are the components, the challenge is to get the mix right and scale the production costs against the overall revenue potential of the site/brand.

As we continue to rollout our vision on this in Heritage Key, it is clear why Old Media doesn’t get Convergence and why even New Media players will have challenges making the next transition. Organizations work better on push. You can plan, manage push in a much more predictable manner. Where the site needs to marshall the community, well, it is a lot more difficult and outcomes less certain. Video killed the radio star. The requirements for success in the future will be no less dramatic. The “push” stars won’t “pull” communities.

One way to mitigate some of the risk is to get the hardcore users into the alpha/beta testing areas. It is important to engage people that will be the evangelists or even find solutions with you. But you will need to expose the ongoing work–which is a minimum is uncomfortable. With large deployed online brands it may require new branding and even new sites as testbeds/community crucibles.

Another point in comparing the players that is worth making is about the cost of content creation. The Old Media players have very high costs, often with long cycle times from idea to publish. Production costs must go down. Newest media content production is low and will get lower. The quality is perhaps not the same, but as we already see with blogs and tweets the immediacy is must greater.

Tweet This Post

People who wax eloquently about how nice it is to open a book and feel the pages, see the great images in them of course still have a great point, but they should also consider how hard it is to get a Wii controller out of the hand of a 6-year old (or forty+-year old).

Media Convergence, what is it all about? Well, in a simple way it is the endgame where you can finally browse the web on your tv. It is, however,  a lot wider than just your living room as you can consume digital media on the go as well. You can download an eBook to an inexpensive reader and subscribe to podcasts on your iPhone.  LED televisions, which might catalyse Convergence to the next phase, are awesome and not so expensive even. These slim, low-energy devices blast intense digital data at you and in their afterglow, you will understand that the digital future will be arriving at your home real soon.

What is exciting about this Convergence though is not just the really cool ways in which we can access media or how stunning the quality is–it is the shift from audiences being passive watchers of broadcasts, printed materials to the active mode of pulling what you want, when you want it, how you want it. Further the social web puts you into the mix and let’s you participate and (typically) enjoy the interaction a lot more.

It is really this fundamental change in consumer behaviour that will be impossible for “old media” to deal with.  The audience needs to become the community. The content creators are not commodities but the leading voices and micro-stars that engage and drive the energy. The web generation is consuming online data voraciously. It is active, it is multi-threaded, it is cross-platform — and they are the stars of their own shows.

Online advertising is already pushing beyond both print and television. What is going on in the Book Publishing Industry? Of course a lot of the latest data coming from print, media and book publishing industries is depressed due to the overall global economic crisis. But nonetheless, if you take a look at the stats from the AAP about US book sales in July 09 book sales you can see some interesting trends.  Sales for eBooks are $16.2mm and growing rapidly–but trivial in the mix of the $25 Billion industry.  New hardcover and paperbook sales were holding their own during the summer time, but taking a beating compared to last year. Mass market titles are potentially no-man’s land down 15% compared to last July and down 5.3% for 2009 trend–probably this area is under the most direct pressure from online.

Book publishers should also be very concerned about their Educational books — where they enjoy some big margins, but also face major issues with costs for students as well as a whole new way of studying.  Higher education titles had $941mm sales out of a total of  $1.54 billion which is more than 60% of the total pie. What will the new media landscape do to the textbook market? Is the combined force of economic pressure and the newest way of digital media consumption a cocktail that shakes the publishing industry into a froth in 2010? Net net, Book Publishers are fighting online for shrinking piece of a shrinking pie.

We are thinking a lot now on how to create the new wave of content and brand experiences that will thrive when it is really out with the old and in with the newest in 2010. Our first pass on all this is Heritage Key. Check it out and let us know if we got it right or not!

Tweet This Post