Follow along if you can:
1) You walk up to a vending machine in a busy metro station.
2) A camera built into it scans your face to determine age and gender.
3) It makes a recommendation on what product you should purchase.
(…)
(5. Profit!)
So, in the era of immense opportunities to listen to consumers via online media and their social networks, the opportunity to over innovate and go against that was just too much to pass up for Japanese marketers keen on measuring the number of eyeballs – literally – that hit their advertisements.
What won’t our friends over in the Pacific Rim over-tech next? Only they could turn buying sodas into a video game.
The other way to find out what consumers want? Listen.
If one of the great benefits today of digital journalism is the technological ability to understand much more about the audience consuming, sharing and helping to create content, then Facebook Insights is one of the basic tools.
In her post for Mashable, Intel social media strategist Ekaterina Walter examines how Insights can be employed to comprehend much more about the audience for pages. Good metrics equals better business, the argument goes.
Walter walks through the measurements Facebook provides on engagement, audience growth, likes and dislikes, pages, mentions, referrals and the like. It's an impressive dashboard.
"Some of these metrics require constant manual tracking and analysis, which is a big downside, " she writes. But the metrics "will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy that would allow more effective interactions with your customers."
Weekend Reporter newspapers full of news and entertainment
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In the current conversation about the Web vs. the Internet, the template for which is the second in a “series” of articles published by Wired Magazine over the last decade about the death of the Web (“The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet”), there is a subtle thread to the argument damning the Web that depicts it as a place of empty and pointless wandering. Michael Wolff, who co-authored the Wired piece with Wired Editor, Chris Anderson, writes:
“Facebook became a parallel world to the Web, an experience that was vastly different and arguably more fulfilling and compelling and that consumed the time previously spent idly drifting from site to site.”
The same notion pops-up in John Gaffney’s DigiRant on August 25th, “Death of The Long Tail.” He writes.
“Casting around for new blogs, commerce deals and other content should be compressed. The Long tail gets shorter.”
And he adds,
“If we’re all gaming and yapping, why would we try to discover anything that can’t be emailed or posted on Facebook? We won’t.”
I never “surfed” the Web; which is to say it was never my idea of fun to wander from place to place in search of a sudden discovery I could share with my friends. Not that I haven’t been trapped falling down the rabbit hole many times on a linear path to nowhere. But the Web has never been an app to me, a carnival ride, or a box of chocolates with a “Cool Site of the Day” in the center. The Web has been about creativity and expression, along with destination and purpose, the second two of which have always been the things to qualify the media and advertising opportunity.
So this notion of replacing idle drifting on the Web with the more fulfilling experience of applications such as Facebook is a disconnect, unless you’re a relentless new media drifter. In which case, the app world offers an assuredly better drifting experience – and Facebook the consummate drifting environment (with Foursquare not far behind).
I have 366 friends on Facebook (a total that probably inflates the number of friends I really have). If I were a searcher (or technology editor) like Chris Anderson I might browse Facebook over breakfast. I don’t. Admittedly, it may be because I don’t exploit the tool in the way it could be exploited, but the musings of the 20 – 30 people (out of 366) that account for most of the idle bits and bites of my Facebook environment are – well – they make me more inclined to watch the morning cable news show over breakfast.
I accept all the evidence of app intrusion in our lives that is fundamentally reshaping how we communicate with each other and consume media. I own an iPad and a Blackberry. I agree with Doug Weaver, however, who wrote in his blog, The Drift:
“The future is all about “and.” We’ll be navigating and building on a world that’s filled with web pages and apps and social media communities and video and….. Wired (for whom I worked in 1994-95) is tossing us a red herring in saying that all the meaningful financial action will shift into applications and closed environments. It’s a false choice.”
It is made more false by the points that get made by Anderson and Wolff in the Wired piece, but never connected. Says Anderson:
“The wide-open Web of peer production, the so-called generative Web where everyone is free to create what they want, continues to thrive, driven by the nonmonetary incentives of expression, attention, reputation and the like.”
In so saying, Anderson makes the media case for the Web: “expression, attention, reputation and the like.” Wolff chimes in elsewhere:
“ …What the Web has lacked in its determination to turn itself into a full-fledged media format is anybody who knew anything about media. Likewise, on the media side there wasn’t anybody who knew anything about technology. This has been a fundamental and aching disconnect: There was no sublime integration of content and systems, of experience and functionality – no clever, subtle, Machiavellian overarching design able to create that codependent relationship between audience, producer and marketer.”
About the lack of people who knew anything about media in the evolution of this industry I couldn’t agree more; but Chris Anderson has made the case for the integration of content and systems - freeing everyone to create what they want - and it “continues to thrive.” Wolff says, “The new business model is to try and let the content – the product as it were – eclipse the technology.”
Yes and the model thrives.
In the end, for anyone that does understand media, it is never idle, which is why, also for anyone that understands media, social networking still makes them scratch their heads. But, Wired Magazine is a technology publication and, accordingly, its producers and readers are restless adopters in constant pursuit of the killer app. Fair enough.
For the rest, for the media-types, “aching” for their turn at the helm in this brave new world Chris Anderson offers this elixir:
“But the Web is now 18 years old. It has reached adulthood. An entire generation has grown up in front of a browser. The exploration of a new world has turned to business as usual. We get the Web. It’s part of our life. And we just want to use the services that make our life better. Our appetite for discovery slows as our familiarity with the status quo grows.”
Drink this, and the Web becomes like TV and Radio before it: the status quo. Or, in media land, the killer app.
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doug weaver,
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From the Discovery gunman — which first “broke” on Twitter — to the New Zealand earthquake, it’s been quite the week for Twitter on the news front. The Washington Post wrote a timeline story on how the Discovery story played out on Twitter, and Paul Farhri writes this:
“TV can offer live pictures of an event (and local stations were on the scene quickly on Wednesday), and newspapers can provide context and fact-checking, but for raw speed and real-time eyewitness accounts, it’s now virtually impossible for the mainstream media to keep pace with the likes of Twitter.”
That’s quite the statement when you think about it. Adds Twitter’s Robin Sloan, who linked the story on Twitter’s media blog: “What I like about Farhi’s piece is that it emphasizes the synthesis. Tweets don’t replace journalism; they kick-start it and turbo-charge it.”
Related posts:
- News stories appearing in Facebook search
- Props to TBD for Discovery Channel hostage coverage
- Will local TV adopt animated news?
Facebook adds like-ranked news stories to its search returns http://nie.mn/ahqc9m »
"Tweets don’t replace journalism; they kick-start it and turbo-charge it." http://nie.mn/cRtvCM »
Google simplifies its privacy policies to make them "more transparent and understandable" http://nie.mn/9Lm7yT »
Per Quantcast’s estimate, Android’s share of the mobile web market should equal that of Apple iOS within the year http://nie.mn/cEeOel »
"A magazine made out of Internet": @alexismadrigal shares some lessons of @longshotmag with @CJR http://nie.mn/bbpSR6 »
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The number of mobile users of Twitter has jumped 62% since mid-April http://nie.mn/cGmfBb »
It looks like Facebook as adding most-liked stories into its search results.
This search for the word “Discovery” brought up a TBD.com and WashingtonPost.com story on the Discovery gunman. Clicking on the headline takes you straight to the story. The stories are ranked by “the number of likes and the number of friends who liked that object,” explains AllFacebook.
Is it the beginnings of a competitor to Google News? Perhaps. As Flipboard has shown us, it wouldn’t be difficult for Facebook to whip together a social news experience that would be pretty compelling. Stay tuned.
Related posts:
- Facebook unveils local ‘Places’ feature
- Foursquare preps new features, links coming?
- Props to TBD for Discovery Channel hostage coverage
In the current conversation about the Web vs. the Internet, the template for which is the second in a “series” of articles published by Wired Magazine over the last decade about the death of the Web (“The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet”), there is a subtle thread to the argument damning the Web that depicts it as a place of empty and pointless wandering. Michael Wolff, who co-authored the Wired piece with Wired Editor, Chris Anderson, writes:
“Facebook became a parallel world to the Web, an experience that was vastly different and arguably more fulfilling and compelling and that consumed the time previously spent idly drifting from site to site.”
The same notion pops-up in John Gaffney’s DigiRant on August 25th, “Death of The Long Tail.” He writes.
“Casting around for new blogs, commerce deals and other content should be compressed. The Long tail gets shorter.”
And he adds,
“If we’re all gaming and yapping, why would we try to discover anything that can’t be emailed or posted on Facebook? We won’t.”
I never “surfed” the Web; which is to say it was never my idea of fun to wander from place to place in search of a sudden discovery I could share with my friends. Not that I haven’t been trapped falling down the rabbit hole many times on a linear path to nowhere. But the Web has never been an app to me, a carnival ride, or a box of chocolates with a “Cool Site of the Day” in the center. The Web has been about creativity and expression, along with destination and purpose, the second two of which have always been the things to qualify the media and advertising opportunity.
So this notion of replacing idle drifting on the Web with the more fulfilling experience of applications such as Facebook is a disconnect, unless you’re a relentless new media drifter. In which case, the app world offers an assuredly better drifting experience – and Facebook the consummate drifting environment (with Foursquare not far behind).
I have 366 friends on Facebook (a total that probably inflates the number of friends I really have). If I were a searcher (or technology editor) like Chris Anderson I might browse Facebook over breakfast. I don’t. Admittedly, it may be because I don’t exploit the tool in the way it could be exploited, but the musings of the 20 – 30 people (out of 366) that account for most of the idle bits and bites of my Facebook environment are – well – they make me more inclined to watch the morning cable news show over breakfast.
I accept all the evidence of app intrusion in our lives that is fundamentally reshaping how we communicate with each other and consume media. I own an iPad and a Blackberry. I agree with Doug Weaver, however, who wrote in his blog, The Drift:
“The future is all about “and.” We’ll be navigating and building on a world that’s filled with web pages and apps and social media communities and video and….. Wired (for whom I worked in 1994-95) is tossing us a red herring in saying that all the meaningful financial action will shift into applications and closed environments. It’s a false choice.”
It is made more false by the points that get made by Anderson and Wolff in the Wired piece, but never connected. Says Anderson:
“The wide-open Web of peer production, the so-called generative Web where everyone is free to create what they want, continues to thrive, driven by the nonmonetary incentives of expression, attention, reputation and the like.”
In so saying, Anderson makes the media case for the Web: “expression, attention, reputation and the like.” Wolff chimes in elsewhere:
“ …What the Web has lacked in its determination to turn itself into a full-fledged media format is anybody who knew anything about media. Likewise, on the media side there wasn’t anybody who knew anything about technology. This has been a fundamental and aching disconnect: There was no sublime integration of content and systems, of experience and functionality – no clever, subtle, Machiavellian overarching design able to create that codependent relationship between audience, producer and marketer.”
About the lack of people who knew anything about media in the evolution of this industry I couldn’t agree more; but Chris Anderson has made the case for the integration of content and systems - freeing everyone to create what they want - and it “continues to thrive.” Wolff says, “The new business model is to try and let the content – the product as it were – eclipse the technology.”
Yes and the model thrives.
In the end, for anyone that does understand media, it is never idle, which is why, also for anyone that understands media, social networking still makes them scratch their heads. But, Wired Magazine is a technology publication and, accordingly, its producers and readers are restless adopters in constant pursuit of the killer app. Fair enough.
For the rest, for the media-types, “aching” for their turn at the helm in this brave new world Chris Anderson offers this elixir:
“But the Web is now 18 years old. It has reached adulthood. An entire generation has grown up in front of a browser. The exploration of a new world has turned to business as usual. We get the Web. It’s part of our life. And we just want to use the services that make our life better. Our appetite for discovery slows as our familiarity with the status quo grows.”
Drink this, and the Web becomes like TV and Radio before it: the status quo. Or, in media land, the killer app.
Journalism Online partner Gordon Crovitz on how the company might enable newspaper publishers to finally start turning “digital dimes” into hard profits.
In a spare, four-paragraph story today, The Desert Sun says only that Richard Ramhoff is no longer the Southern California paper's chief executive, and is now on an unspecified assignment at Corporate.
This is a quick iPhone post; more later.
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Major Garrett quits Fox News, returns to print journalism
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It's one of my bromides for those times when my daughter wonders aloud, like many young children, if other kids think she's different. ...
ozdj (Derek Jenkins)
Last of the great newspapers. </sarcasm> http://twitpic.com/2l2htv •
Sep 4
WilmaBernardy75 (Wilma Bernard)
Reporters Notebook: Be on alert for scammers Notebook http://bit.ly/bO7Zzh . •
Sep 4
Conniej82 (Connie Hendrix)
http://bit.ly/bO7Zzh Notebook Reporters Notebook: Be on alert for scammers :O •
Sep 4
KRADeC (Keith R.A. DeCandido)
And "journalists"--who ask tough questions like "what was going through your head?"--are paid to transcribe this bile & call it reporting. •
Sep 4
LibraryLizC (Liz Chapman)
RT @ronanlyons: Friday's random fact: by 1770, Dublin had already had over 100 newspapers! http://bit.ly/aXS0lX via @puesoccurrences •
Sep 4
jimsterling (Jim Sterling)
Oh yeah. and since I've criticized some of the PAX gamers, a note to PAX "journalists" - don't act like you're a better class of human. •
Sep 4
WriteSwell (Susanne Van Cleave)
RT @Mercypolitics: MediaGlobal: Is the pen still mightier than the sword? The plight and protection of journalists http://t.co/omPxKc7 •
Sep 4
HumanityNews (Humanitarian News)
News: Yemen - Two journalists held incommunicado for more than two weeks http://dlvr.it/4hV4f •
Sep 4
aidnews (AidNews)
Yemen - Two journalists held incommunicado for more than two weeks http://dlvr.it/4hV4g •
Sep 4
dorledor (FifthAliya&K.Bialik)
@nickjonas Here the "important meeting" is some thing very seacret that was writen on newspapers...(seacret music style...) •
Sep 4
Sourcews_World (Sourcews World)
Two journalists held incommunicado for more than two weeks: http://bit.ly/bXGfyJ •
Sep 4
DinoTalesByKari (Kari Klein)
@novanine sounds like they're the same reporters who said our $50,000 5ft tall animatronic dino was stolen in Mexico when it was only Nigel •
Sep 4
Mercypolitics (Mercypolitics)
MediaGlobal: Is the pen still mightier than the sword? The plight and protection of journalists http://t.co/omPxKc7 •
Sep 4
Niteowl009 (Niteowl009)
RT @StockMail: Generally sideline reporters add nothing to a sports telecast. Pam Shriver has managed to add less than nothing with her awkward interviews. •
Sep 4
Netcropole (Netcropole)
www.netcropole.com Obituary Laws: There are two types of obituaries that appear in newspapers: e... http://bit.ly/b1xCMz www.netcropole.com •
Sep 4