It’s GAME ON For Generation Y!

“Farmville now outpaces Twitter.” “One in four people plays social games online.” “More than $1.8 billion worth of virtual goods has been sold in virtual worlds.” These are just some of the headlines we see today about the popularity of online gaming, but what does this all mean for Gen Y and for brands?
Studies show that half of Gen Y plays online games, with women ages 18-34 being the most-active players and purchasers of goods in virtual worlds. In full disclosure, we have recently launched a game targeted at Gen Y women, with seven brand partners. It is easy to add more brands and is attractive for the players. It’s a win-win for both.

The eight months we spent developing this game has been a period of great learning and discovery. We have absolute certainty that there is a rabid, growing audience of Gen Y gamers that are willing to play with various brands. Here’s what we learned and how your brand can participate in the online gaming phenomenon:

You’ve got to give to get: We all want a deal and most times we will go out of our way to get one. Ever been to a warehouse sale at Barneys? The thrill of getting a deal is key and if brands can deliver an offering that either accelerates game play or adds value in virtual goods or other, they will be welcomed.
Limited edition: Create demand around your brand offering by either limiting the offer to a certain number of players, giving away a limited-edition product or providing them a way to show off to their friends. The same psychology here applies to that of people’s shopping habits. Employ some form of exclusivity in your offering and you will be more apt to get a quick response coupled with the engagement and word-of-mouth you seek.
It’s not all about you: Really, it’s not. For Gen Y, it’s all about them and their beliefs — regardless of what vehicle you market with. Specifically with gaming, it’s critical to be cognizant of why the user is there and recognize that this is not the time to disrupt them. Online advertisers have become adept at loud, in-your-face experiences. The gaming space is not the platform to do this with. Instead, be clever. The game player cares about exploration and winning. Tactfully insert yourself in their world by being thoughtful of their experience and you, too, will win.
Deliver a consistent and ongoing message: We’ve done significant research over the last few months on how brands have been integrated into games. What fascinates me most is the lack of consistent and constant messaging — I have yet to see any brand deliver an ongoing campaign on the same game with continuity.
While this space is new and it’s hard to determine what success looks like, it is the same as any medium — success will not be found in a one-off test. Let’s not forget what many years of marketing education has taught us. Although the platforms have changed, the basic fundamentals have not. Maintaining a constant, consistent and on-going message is a critical component for any long-term marketing success.

The online social gaming industry is still emerging and brands are still experimenting with how they can get involved. Although this is a relatively new phenomenon, playing games is not and the psychology of the gamer is the same as the offline game players of generations past — challenge and entertainment.

As marketers, we must take the time to understand and respect what motivates an individual to participate in game-play and then construct our campaigns to live harmoniously within this setting.

Jindal attended Baton Rouge Magnet High School, graduating in 1988. “He always had his eye on, first of all, where he wanted to go, and second, how he was going to get there,” said a former teacher. He competed in tennis tournaments, started a computer newsletter, a retail candy business, and a mail-order software company. He spent his free time working at the concession stands during LSU football games.[7] Jindal was one of 50 students nationwide admitted to the elite PLME program at Brown University, guaranteeing him a place in medical school. His interest was in public policy. Jindal also completed a second major in biology. He graduated in 1991 at the age of 20, with honors in both majors.[8][9]

Jindal was named a member of 1992 USA Today All-USA Academic Team. He was accepted by both Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School, but studied at New College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. He received an M.Litt. degree in political science with an emphasis in health policy from the University of Oxford in 1994 for his thesis “A needs-based approach to health care”.[8] He turned down an offer to study for a D.Phil. in politics,[10][11] but instead joined the consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

Warner Bros will lead the way promoting its intellectual properties on and in the official comic-con bag that will be received by attendee.

Warner Bros. Entertainment and Comic-Con Team Up On Official Bag for Comic-Con International: San Diego 2010

One of 11 Unique Collectibles Will Be Distributed to Each Comic-Con Attendee During Official Check-In, Featuring “The Big Bang Theory,” “Chuck,” “Fringe,” “Human Target,” “Nikita,” “The Vampire Diaries,” “Batman: The Brave and the Bold,” “The Looney Tunes Show,”"Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated,” “Clash of the Titans”or “Brightest Day”
BURBANK, Calif. (July 2010) — For the past four years, Warner Bros. Entertainment’s limited-edition, signature oversize canvas tote bags have been a must-have at Comic-Con, with tens of thousands of fans flocking to the Warner Bros. booth on the convention floor to snag one, and Entertainment Weekly once dubbing them the Con’s “ubiquitous accessory.” This year, Warner Bros. Entertainment (WBE) and Comic-Con are teaming up to put one directly in the hands of every attendee, with the Studio signing on as sponsor of the Comic-Con International: San Diego 2010 Official Bag.

•For Comic-Con 2010, the Warner Bros. Worldwide Television Marketing (WWTVM) unit has created 11 unique designs for the bags, with one side featuring the official Comic-Con 2010 artwork designed by WWTVM and the other side representing titles from across a number of WBE divisions, including Warner Bros. Television, Warner Bros. Animation, Warner Bros. Pictures, Warner Home Entertainment, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and DC Entertainment
•More than 125,000 collectible bags (24″X29″) have been produced and will be distributed to attendees when they check in at Comic-Con throughout the five days of the convention, including Preview Night
WBE and Comic-Con are unveiling artwork for four of the WBE bags, as well as artwork for the official Comic-Con side of the bags:
◦Warner Bros. Animation series “The Looney Tunes Show,” coming soon to Cartoon Network
◦Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment’s “Batman: The Brave and the Bold – The Videogame,” inspired by Warner Bros. Animation’s hit animated series based upon characters from DC Comics. The Videogame is available on Wii and Nintendo DS September 7. New episodes of “Batman: The Brave and the Bold” air Fridays at 7:30 p.m. on Cartoon Network, and “Batman: The Brave and the Bold” Season 1, Part 1 is available on DVD August 17.
◦DC Comics’ best-selling “Brightest Day” comic book series
◦Warner Bros. Home Entertainment’s Blu-ray™, DVD and digital download release of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “Clash of the Titans,” available July 27
•To download images of “The Looney Tunes Show,” “Batman: The Brave and the Bold – The Videogame,” “Brightest Day” and “Clash of the Titans” bag sides, as well as the official Comic-Con 2010 artwork side of the bags, please click here:
www.thewb.com/comiccon/officialbags2010
•To download images of the creative fashions that fans have put together utilizing the Warner Bros. bags in the past, please click here:
www.thewb.com/comiccon/bagswardrobe
•Other sponsored bags will feature the following titles:
◦Warner Bros. Television series “The Big Bang Theory,” “Chuck,” “Fringe,” “Human Target,” “Nikita” and “The Vampire Diaries”
◦Warner Bros. Animation series “Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated”
•For additional information about Warner Bros. Television activities at Comic-Con, follow us on Twitter @TheWBdotcom and use hashtag #WBSDCC, log on to www.thewb.com/comiccon, and read news at www.thewb.com/blog.
Created annually since 2006 by the Warner Bros. Worldwide Television Marketing unit specifically for Comic-Con, the highly sought-after totes provide devoted fans with a handy carrying case for all the merchandise they take away from the Con and serve as mobile billboards for a selection of the Studio’s key Comic-Con titles.

The service, launched in February by the Sequoia Capital-backed Bubble Motion, has soared to 2 million overall users in just a few months, quadrupling their first-month launch of 500,000 in March. Paid subscribers have been on a atmospheric rise, as well – the service had just 200,000 paid subscribers in April.

The company now plans to roll out parallel launches in Japan, Indonesia and the Phillippines.

“Growth to date has exceeded our wildest expectations,” said Tom Clayton, president and CEO of Bubble Motion. “At this point, it really has started to take a life of its own. Moreover, we believe that we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg here, as our traction to date has come from only a fraction of the addressable market.”

In essence, Bubbly — BubbleBlog to users in India -– is a phone service that allows users to record voice blogs, which are then shared with their “followers,” who dial a special code to listen to messages. It has caught on with Bollywood celebrities, who record messages for legions of fans. While listening to messages from fans and family is free, subscribing to a celebrity blog costs 10 to 30 rupees, or $0.21 to $0.65 a month to get notifications when there’s a new message.

“With so many mobile social networks looking for scale and revenue, Bubble Motion is proving that a new model exists for such services and can make money even in emerging markets,” said spokesman Kevin Jordan.

Part of Bubbly’s success has been fueled by the sign-on from Bollywood stars like Amitabh Bachan, whose Bubbly followers outstrip his Twitter audience, with 270,000 followers on Twitter and 350,000 on Bubbly.

The company partnered with service providers Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications to deploy the technology, which is available in all of India’s 23 telecom circles. As Bubbly catches on, content rises, with comedians and politicians signing on to record voice blogs, which in turn pushes subscription rates.

“Bubbly is being promoted differently in different circles, and what we’re seeing is that where we have regional and local stars voice-blogging, our adoption skyrockets,” Clayton said.

The technology behind the service has had to be retooled to handle the higher-than-expected volume, Clayton said -– with the initial goal of allowing a maximum of 100,000 followers to a blog (meaning the power to notify 100,000 subscribers instantly when a new voice message is available).

“Now, as our users have blown through those follower numbers — within the second month of launch, we have now designed the system to handle over a 1 million followers each and are quickly scaling that to 10 million-plus followers each,” Clayton said.

The service is already seeing its share of copycats in the fiercely competitive and booming mobile market in India, but Clayton said he’s confident his company has a head start and strong grip on the engineering

“There is a significant network effect here, so we’re moving fast to capitalize on this momentum and roll out the largest countries as fast as possible,” Clayton said. “Right now, we’re trying not to get distracted by new entrants, but rather are focused on execution and the ultimate goal of building communities and connecting people through voice.”

Background – Econsultancy was founded in the UK in 1999, it provides training, reports, research, case studies, buyers guides and advice for the digital marketing sector. The CEO and co-founder of Econsultancy is author, Ashley Friedlein. There is also an active jobs board. Econsultancy has over 85,000 members to date. In 2009, Econsultancy also launched an American office, operating from New York. Econsultancy won the Association of Online Publishers’ award for Specialist Digital Publisher 2009.

Here is a recent post from Econsultancy on Ten ways to advertise your business on Facebook.

By Econsultancy’s Kevin Gibbons
The marketing potential of Facebook is huge, but many companies struggle to devise a strategy that’s suitable for such a social platform.

But there are more than 400m active users of Facebook, meaning whatever your product or service, there’s a huge potential market there.

So, how can you use the platform to promote your brand? Here are some of the ways marketers can approach it.

Make a Facebook page

Let’s start with the most obvious; do you have a Facebook page?

Since the website began inviting users to ‘like’ business pages rather than ‘become a fan’ of them, it’s much less intrusive and people seem to be far happier about this slightly more subdued way of showing their approval.

If you’re marketing a lively brand or product, don’t make do with a dull standard Facebook page, make your landing page lively and interesting.

Promote your page offsite

Don’t expect your potential fans to find you on Facebook without a little support. Add a ‘Find us on Facebook’ button to your website, email marketing communications and even printed brochures, so that people know you’re on there.

You may disagree, but I think that having a Facebook page shows that a brand is interactive and personable. So, even if people don’t bother looking you up, they may be left with a better impression of your brand.

Make your page interesting

What are you going to do with your Facebook page? Will you post deals, links to blog posts, competitions, notes, photographs of your corporate summer party (guilty!)?

You need to add content to your page so that your fans have something to interact with and so that they see your brand in their news feeds, building brand awareness.

Have a clear content strategy before you start building the page, otherwise you could suddenly be left scrambling for something to say.

Have a clear idea of what you want people to do

What are you hoping to achieve with your Facebook page? If it’s just brand awareness then you want content that people will interact with on the page. If you want to get fans to click through to your site, you’ll need links to offers and exclusives.

If it’s to create brand advocates, you need to create applications and games that people will share with their friends.

If you don’t know what you hope to achieve, then you won’t be able to create appropriate content.

Use Facebook ads

Will your marketing budget stretch to some paid Facebook ads? You can use keywords from people’s profiles to target your advertising at relevant demographics, (female friends who’ve become engaged tell me they see nothing but weight loss ads from the moment they change their relationship status!).

So, you can target people of a specific age, gender, educational level, workplace, even location.

It is a fairly cost-effective way to market your brand. You may even decide to use your advertising to drive people towards your fan page and give it a proper kick off.

Build a Facebook app

Can you create an interactive app? Some of the cleverest Facebook marketing is app-based, with the potential to turn viral and suddenly create enormous interest in your company.

You can build games, quizzes and other types of dynamic content that people will use and share.

If you don’t have the skills inhouse to create this kind of content, many business have sprung up that will develop an app with you to market your brand.

Make your content easy to share

Do you have a blog back on your website? Linking works both ways, you shouldn’t just be driving people to your site through Facebook.

In fact, you should also give people the opportunity to alert their Facebook friends to interesting content on your company website. Add a button allowing people to share the article on Facebook, as well as to Tweet it, Sphinn it, Digg it, Buzz it, or whichever your social platforms of choice are.

Make it as easy as possible for people to spread your brand message.

Create and interact with Facebook groups

Join some relevant Facebook groups and maybe even create a few. This will allow more people to see your brand, giving you the chance to build a fan base without paying for advertising.

Of course, this is a dangerous tactic if you’re a bit blunt. You mustn’t simply charge in and start trying to sell to people who are busy socialising. Instead, you should offer tips, support and advice, building confidence in your brand.

Is there a cause or campaign your company believes in? Maybe you’re a debt management company campaigning against payday loans, or a restaurant campaigning for more local food to be eaten in your town?

Create a group that promotes your cause and you’ll be able to interact with people who wouldn’t necessarily ‘like’ a brand but are very willing to support a campaign they believe in.

Give your fans exclusives

If someone has updated their Facebook page to show friends that they like your brand, you really ought to reward them.

Give them exclusive deals, sneak previews of new products, discounts – special offers to show you appreciate their support.

Use Facebook analytics

Having created a Facebook page, you need to need to monitor the success of the page. Facebook’s analytics tools allow you to see what kind of content works well.

Once you’ve created a page, you’ll be able to access this information through Facebook Insights, meaning you can see how people are interacting with your content, what demographics they belong to, which countries they are in, how many people have signed up, how many people have unsubscribed.

Make use of this information. It’s free and it will inform your developing Facebook strategy.

Don’t forget

If you’re a marketing professional, it’s not just your business you can promote through Facebook – you can also market yourself and build connections with other people in your sector.

There are groups, discussions and a thousand other ways to connect. You can even have different settings for your work-related ‘friends’, meaning they never need to see that picture of you after 12 vodka shots…

Social Gaming

Social Gaming and Virtual Goods
US market size for virtual goods will reach $1.6 billion in 2010, with social gaming contributing $835 million of that total. The report, “Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming” is the latest in-depth study in the Inside Virtual Goods series, co-authored by Justin Smith and Charles Hudson.

“2009 was the year that casual games like Zynga’s popular FarmVille took over the major social platforms and changed the way millions of people socialized with friends online. Casual games introduced a rich, new way of interacting with friends on social networks, and saw the highest engagement numbers that the online entertainment industry has ever witnessed,” Justin Smith, founder of Inside Network’s InsideFacebook.com & InsideSocialGames.com, says. “With tens of millions of returning users, and millions of new visitors daily, it is no wonder that the social gaming industry saw significant M&A activity: an up-to-$400 million acquisition of Playfish by Electronic Arts, and hundreds of millions of dollars in additional venture investments. Social games are now impacting businesses across the media landscape,” adds Charles Hudson, VP of Business Development at Serious Business, and host of the annual Virtual Goods Summit.

The second research report in the Inside Virtual Goods series, “Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010″ concludes that social games will alone make up half of all virtual goods revenue in the United States this year.

To get in and fully understand and get in the virtual goods and social gaming game, here are some must attend conferences and events to be held this year:

Virtual Goods Summit 2010
Tuesday, October 12, 10:00 AM – 5:30 PM (PST)
Wednesday, Oct. 13, 8:30 AM – 6:00 PM (PST)

The Virtual Goods Summit is focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies. Once restricted to the world of online gaming, virtual goods and currencies are beginning to influence the development of social networks, community sites, and many other new and exciting markets. The market for virtual goods continues to grow – join us for two days of engaging talks and panels designed to highlight important trends in this fast growing market. With estimates suggesting this market will grow from $1 billion in 2009 to $1.6 billion in 2010, this is a must-attend event for those in the games, social media, and entertainment markets.

Virtual goods beyond games
Designing free-to-play games for maximum engagement
The virtual goods market in Asia
The virtual goods market in Europe
Virtual goods and mobile applications
Free-to-play MMOs and virtual worlds
Monetization infrastructure for virtual goods
Best practices for engagement and player lifecycle management

Social Gaming Summit
11th November, 2010
The first London Social Gaming Summit is a one day event focused on the intersection of games and the social web. The event focuses on helping social games developers build, monetise, and grow their social games. We’re bringing together the leaders in free-to-play games, social networking, and payments infrastructure for a full day of panels and talks.

Virtual Goods Summit
12th November, 2010
The first London Virtual Goods Summit is a one day event focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies. Once restricted to the world of online gaming, virtual goods and currencies are beginning to influence the development of social networks, community sites, and many other new and exciting markets. The market for virtual goods continues to grow – join us for engaging talks and panels designed to highlight important trends in this fast growing market. With estimates suggesting this market will grow from $1 billion in 2009 to $1.6 billion in 2010, this is a must-attend event for those in the games, social media, and entertainment markets.

And what else can provide you the cutting edge advantage, accept leveraging mobile hand-held is the best option. Mobile Application Development will help you to get your business with cutting edge advantage. Get develop your business logic and applications for mobile and smart-phones which helps you to connect each and every person while mobility and update them with latest information as well as give information. The smarter the applications the smarter the end result.

You may in need of a partner who provides the solutions and mobility to your system and IndiaNIC is one of them. IndiaNIC provides Mobile Application Development service and have expert team of Mobile Developer which helps you to transform your offline business to the world of mobility. Our Mobile developers has deep understanding of mobile technology, tools and has expertise in integrating it using different programming languages and systems.

Hire Mobile developer for different mobile platforms which includes…

iPhone Mobile Developer
The iPhone mobile developer at IndiaNIC takes an approach that needs to take advantage of the strengths of iPhone OS and forego features that might be irrelevant or impractical in a mobile environment.
Windows Mobile Developer
Windows mobile flexes, too, with a wide range of business applications designed for the devices your team wants, as well as interactivity with the technologies inside your organization.
Android Mobile Developer
Android Market is an Open Application Distribution System, for android platform which helps publishers to get their applications directly in the hands of users.
BlackBerry Mobile Developer
With BlackBerry Application Development at IndiaNIC, your business would be everywhere you are. No matter how large your organization or how diverse your workforce is. The world of business is changing.
Symbian Mobile Developer
IndiaNIC Symbian Mobile Developer has industry-leading expertise in delivering mobile Development for custom applications on different smart-phones platform including Symbian Application Development, for Series 60, Series 80, Series 90 and UIQ.

Beautiful Africa - A New Way to Look at Africa

“Spain and the Netherlands may be in the championship game, but the true world cup champion is the continent of Africa” says Jacob R. Miles, Co-Founder with Lap Ngo of Beautiful Africa, who’s copyrighted tag line is “A New Way to Look at Africa” reflects the brands positioning and view of how Africa is viewed worldwide. 

Africa is a frequent subject in the international news. However that news usually is focused on violence and poverty. This is not the total picture. There is more positive things happening in Africa then their are negative. Violence and Poverty, you would think that all of the 53 countries located in on the continent of Africa are defined by violence and poverty, nothing could be further from the truth. The South Africa World Cup 2010 is the counter to this false media driven perception.

The Africa World Cup is a positive force and confidence builder for the entire continent of Africa. Everyone knows that the problem with all major media outlets is that they focus on the negative and the sensational. The bottom line is…South Africa’s hosting of the World Cup uplifts Africa in its entirety’s spirit and touches the spirit of the world. Thank You FIFA for having the courage and confidence to host the 2010 WORLDS CUP in AFRICA…..WE SALUTE YOU!!                                        It is Important to Think! …What Do You Think?

As demoed recently by Apple’s Steve Jobs, ads on computers are about to undergo significant changes. Everything from tracking to animation will be altered in the process (for the better). Ad agencies & video ad networks will be able to provide real-time, interactive experiences that aren’t limited by plug-ins.

Here are some of the ways ads are going to change:

Real-time, in-depth analytics. Analytics for video is often separated from web analytics, but with the HTML5 video tag, this will no longer be the case. Playing video natively in the browser allows for a whole new level of analysis, including all video actions, engagement, % complete and view through rate (VTR) being trackable and linkable to standard web analytics such as funnels and conversion rates. For advertisers, this will make it easier to measure the effectiveness of video ads.

Measured interaction. Being able to engage and interact with a video introduces a whole new experience for the user (and publisher). The ability to play video natively in the browser opens a new world for those posting video online while allowing them to gain valuable feedback from viewers. While this scenario above has always been possible on the web to some degree, the difference now is that it will be seamless and ubiquitous (no downloading software, plug-ins or annoying interruptions). A user will be able to watch a video, interact with an ad, buy a product, and then return to the exact spot in the video without interruption.

A more entertaining experience. Imagine watching a video of the latest fashion striding down the runway at Milan. Click items that interest you to learn more information or pull up the designer’s website for direct purchase. Viewers will have the ability to interact with ads without interrupting their viewing experience. Furthermore, these ads can be fully immersive and full-page, moving beyond just the video dimensions The advertiser can track what users are doing and respond accordingly, allowing them to dynamically change the ads within the video and the interaction points — on-the-fly, via small changes in HTML and JavaScript. No video production or re-encoding necessary.

All’s well that sells well. HTML5 is probably the most significant update for all kinds of rich media. Especially for video, which has long been awkwardly implemented in browsers, fortunately the path looks clear for the future of in-browser video. As any good advertiser knows, videos create emotion & emotions mean sales.

(C) Media Post Communications

In past years it was common for Allen & Co. to invite leaders and moguls from traditional media, Film, TV and Publishing. The trend is to now add online media, technology entrepreneurs and executives in addition to the traditional gathering of film, television and publishing chiefs.
This year’s attendee list includes Facebook Inc.’s Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who is attending for the first time. Mark Pincus, chief executive of online gaming giant Zynga Game Network Inc., will be there, along with some lesser-known tech insiders, such as Gina Bianchini, former CEO of social-networking start-up Ning.

The newer arrivals will share the spotlight with the conference’s regular array of media moguls, which have been attending for years. They include Walt Disney Co. chief Bob Iger, Viacom Inc. CEO Phillippe Dauman, NBC-Universal’s, Jeff Zucker, News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch, and Barry Diller, chief executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp and others.

A few hundred executives and family members attend a schedule of sessions, meals and drinks. This is not a sign that the media convergence of new media and traditional media has converged.
Traditional media guys are cynics. If new media platforms don’t make money, they don’t talk about it. The way for new media to get traditional media’s attention is to make money, lots of it.

Lets take a look at will new media and traditional media be talking about this year?

Look for the traditional media moguls to discuss what Comcast Corp. will or will not do with NBC Universal, it’s CEO Jeff Zucker is a regular attendee and will surely be positioning for his next opportunity within or without Comcast.
The fate of ABC will be a topic of conversation. Disney denied rumors that it has considered selling ABC, but rumors persist. Hulu will definetly be a topic of conversation as well as Apple TV. With several moguls putting their content behind paywalls, expect talk about the emergence and viabilty of subscription models for newspapers and TV shows and the iPad.

Look for the new media moguls to discuss potential combinations and content-swapping deals, AOL Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., as all three plot ways to compete with ever-expanding Google. The escalating competition between Google and Apple Inc. is another hot topic of conversation. Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs is not normally in attendance at this or any other events other then his own. However his not being there will have no effect over Apple’s growing influence on changes effecting new and traditional media.

One thing that could get both sides buzzing would be a deal between traditional media and new media, particularly an Internet and Broadcast focused one. But despite signs that deal-making is picking up again, several investment bankers interviewed for this article say they do not expect any large deals to come out of this years conference.

About Allen and Company
The Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference is an annual conference hosted and wholly independently funded by private investment firm Allen & Company. The conference has taken place in Sun Valley, Idaho for one week each July since 1983. The conference typically features business leaders, political figures, and major figures in the philanthropic and cultural spheres. Previous conference guests have included Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren and Susan Buffett, Tony Blair, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch, eBay CEO Meg Whitman, BET founder Robert Johnson, Former Time Warner Chairman Richard Parsons, NBA player LeBron James, Katharine Graham of The Washington Post, Diane Sawyer, InterActiveCorp Chairman Barry Diller, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams (blogger), Linkedin co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Washington Post CEO Donald E. Graham.
Allen & Company is a private investment firm formed in 1922, located in New York. Allen & Company has advised, helped found and/or invested in numerous companies including BET, InterActiveCorp, Oxygen Media, Discovery Communications, News Corporation, The Coca-Cola Corporation and Google.

“This is our first time exhibiting at the Anime Expo, and we think that our lineup of titles launching over the next six months is the perfect fit for the show’s attendees,” said Hiro Maekawa, President and CEO at Natsume. “We have highly-anticipated new entries in the Harvest Moon and Rune Factory series with Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar and Rune Factory 3, the triumphant return of the Lufia series with Lufia: Return of the Sinistrals, and the fun and fright-filled rhythm game, Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove.”

Information on each title is listed below. For more information on Natsume or any of these titles, please visit www.natsume.com

Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar (DS)

The bazaar is now open! Zephyr Town’s bazaar was once the grandest in the world, drawing customers and peddlers from all four corners of the Earth. These days, though, the bazaar has more tumbleweeds than customers. Maybe you can turn its fortunes around! Raise animals, harvest crops, craft rare delicacies, and then sell your wares at your very own shop! Can you bring prosperity back to Zephyr Town?

Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals (DS)

The Sinistrals, four beings of legendary power, have returned to bring humanity to its knees. It’s up to the fiery monster hunter Maxim and his eclectic band of adventurers to put a stop to them once and for all. Their adventures will take them across an expansive world packed with dangerous enemies, powerful items, and diabolical puzzles!

Rune Factory 3: A Fantasy Harvest Moon (DS)

It’s an adventure that will transform you! The people of Sharance and their horned Univir neighbors are embroiled in a bitter conflict. An age-old hatred between humans and monsters divides them. You are an adventurer with an unusual secret: you’re half human and half monster. Are you the one who can unite the humans and the Univir? And will you be in time to stop the growing evil force that threatens to destroy them both?

Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove (DS)

Gabrielle’s having a bad day. She sneezed her soul right out of her body! She’ll have to travel to Monster Town, the home of all things that go bump in the night, to get help. Only by busting out the ghostliest dance moves and thrilling and chilling people will she be able to scare up the power she needs to get herself back into her body! It’s a spooktacular rhythm adventure!

For more information on any of these titles, please visit www.natsume.com. You can also follow all of the latest Natsume news at www.natsume.com/facebook and www.twitter.com/natsume_inc.

About Natsume

Natsume Inc. is a worldwide developer and publisher that specialize in unique and family-oriented interactive entertainment software for a variety of platforms. Most known for publishing Reel Fishing and Harvest Moon, Natsume is dedicated to producing quality video games. For more information about Natsume Inc., visit www.natsume.com

Hulu Plus supports browsers on the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X platforms, certain Samsung Internet-connected television and Blu-ray Disc players, and Apple’s iPhone 3GS/4, third-generation iPod touch, and iPad devices. Hulu (and Larry Hryb, Xbox Live Director of Programming at Microsoft) promises support for other devices, including the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360 game consoles. People can request invitations to join the service until Hulu ramps up the service to let anyone subscribe.

Netflix already offers a subscription streaming service alongside its DVD-by-mail program, and Crunchyroll and The Anime Network are among the subscription streaming services that focus on anime.

Lanzano, who brings 28 years of advertising experience to his new post, maintained that despite ongoing fragmentation within the media landscape, TV remains the premier medium for advertisers and agencies.

“The latest TVB Media Comparison Study shows by every measure that television reaches more consumers every day than newspapers, magazines, radio and the Internet, and that more people spend more time with TV than with any other medium,” he maintained. “That same study also shows that 71% of people learn about products and brands from television. Our competitors are left in the dust.”

Since joining the TVB from MPG US, where he oversaw all client accounts and led strategic and operational duties for MPG’s marketing service professionals across the country, Lanzano has become bullish about the power of mobile DTV.

“Mobile is such an exciting opportunity because consumers overwhelmingly want the ability to watch live programming on their mobile devices,” he said. “Advertisers are beginning to see mobile DTV as the next great marketing opportunity.”

Lanzano also used his 30-minute presentation to stress how local TV broadcasters need to see the Internet — not as a rival to television — but as a complement. “Television ads drive consumers to the Web,” he emphasized.

Lanzano concluded that TV stations’ websites are a also becoming a significant growth contributor to station revenues. “Local broadcast TV interactive revenues are projected to hit $1,361 million in 2010, up from $1,153 million in 2009,” he said. “I believe this revenue will only continue to grow.”

As business marketers, we feel obligated to participate in social media. But beyond the basics of setting up a Facebook page and Twitter profile, marketers are still finding ways to measure results. While some believe the intangible benefits of having a voice for your brand engaged in various social media channels is reward enough, other marketing departments need to provide the CMO and CEO with a more quantifiable answer. The best way to accomplish this is by demonstrating the value social media brings to lead generation. Not just lead quantity (volume), but lead quality (scoring) and conversion rates. However, truth be told, tracking business leads from social media is neither straightforward nor easy. It requires a serious investment in time and/or technology to get it right.

This Place We Call Social Media

Social media is a seemingly cluttered landscape with numerous vendors and customers vying for attention and voicing their opinions in 140 characters or less (in the case of Twitter). The origin of social media, which gained popularity with consumers, remains a space dominated by a collection of many individuals and few businesses. Admittedly, the challenge of reaching B2B customer prospects via social media is definitely more challenging than reaching individuals or consumers. Generating even one qualified business lead against this noisy backdrop may look and feel impossible.

Ironically, the very noise of this environment can play into your favor. Although many companies are using social media, only a handful of them are using it effectively to actually engage in a meaningful dialogue with their audience.

The key is to match a call-to-action with a state of mind, so you can properly engage customers — businesses or individual consumers — and move them through the purchase cycle. For example, a call-to-action on a blog post should match the visitor’s state of mind. Start with the simple assumption that visitors to a blog post are not there to buy the company’s product or sign up for a free account (at least, initially). Rather, they are there to read interesting content or learn more about the space. Therefore, the call-to-action should match that state of mind and prompt the visitor to “learn more” or “download a white paper.” These types of call-to-action align with the visitor’s reasons for visiting your Web site and are more likely to convert a visitor to a lead.

Social Media Takes it Personally

The biggest difference between social media and traditional media is the level of personalization. Social media is highly personal and interactive — it’s a two-way, interactive form of communication in real time. Traditional media is not.

In addition to being a more personalized communication medium, social media leads are more targeted than those generated through other online channels. This is a major bonus for marketers. If a call-to-action is strong, it can do an amazing job of bringing in solid leads.

If the channel and activity align, meaning you are using activities that are appropriate to the channel you are using, leads tend to be more engaged and thus more enthusiastic about a given product or service. As a result, leads involved in social media outreach tend to be more forgiving of problems with your product, as they feel more connected to the product and the company.

At the same time, social media opens up feedback channels and discussion loops that are muted or not present at all in traditional media. For example, if customers are disappointed in a particular product or service, social media provides equal opportunity to spread their own messages in their own words. Some control will be forfeited. This introduces new risks not associated with traditional media, as the reputation of your brand now rests in other people’s hands.. These effects on a brand, both positive and negative, are often said to be hard to track and measure.

Better Business Leads

The bottom line is that social media has the potential to generate more business leads. These leads are more targeted and they know what they want. If your call-to-action is relevant and aligned with your message, leads generated from social media can be highly qualified. On the other hand, as with traditional marketing, some leads from social media will be less qualified and require more lead nurturing. The key, as a marketer, is to establish a set of objective criteria and automated lead scoring that can help sales distinguish a “hot lead” from a cold one once they hit your site.

Consider the following six suggestions to begin capturing stronger, more qualified leads.

Six Tips for Generating Business Leads from Social Media:

1. Think like publishers:
- Break through the noise and get people interested in what you have to offer.
- Choose unique, eye-catching headlines and titles, and incorporate good images.
- Content is the bait. If you don’t make content sound and look good, no one will read it.

2. Create good, interesting content:
- Social media with no content is like a bicycle without a wheel: You’ll put a lot of effort into riding, but you will go nowhere.
- Again, content is the bait.

3. Organize your efforts into campaigns:
- Campaigns are easier as a way to create and shape the right message and call-to-action.
- Enable easy tracking and monitoring.
- Can be measured and analyzed as a learning tool for future activities.

4. Invest the time to make a campaign worthwhile:
- Social media takes time. It might be cheaper in dollars spent, but it’s definitely not free in terms of time invested.
- Use time management tools to track and measure the time you invest in social media, so you can truly measure your ROI.

5. Track and score your visits and leads:
- Qualify and score leads accurately to ensure the best conversion rates.
- Focus and align marketing and sales and force a discussion about what constitutes a good lead.
- Help with analyzing and prioritizing efforts.
- Focus on channels and campaigns that offer a higher lead quality based on your lead scores.

6. Measure and report in real time for ongoing success:
- Prioritize your efforts and invest the time in the places with the highest payoff.
- Measure based not just on quantity, but based on quality too.
- Track all the way to a sale, not just to a lead. This will help you refine your lead score and truly measure ROI.

Is social media going to disappear into the background after the hype winds down, or is it here to stay? This author’s opinion is that social media is not just a fad that will go away –it has become a significant marketing channel that can drive leads and increase revenue. Don’t be consumed by the hype and forget all your other channels; marketing is a mix, and social media is only one component.

This commentary is insightful. I recommend it to others.

Post your response to the public Performance Insider blog.

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Erez Barak is co-founder and vice president of products at Optify, where he defines and leads the company’s strategic product direction. Previously, he served as director of product marketing for Hewlett-Packard’s Software Business Unit.

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/16897

It’s coming to Amazon soon, too.  Check it out!

Grapevine Star Entertainment, (www.grapevinestar.com) based in the Dallas-Ft worth area has been working with intellectual property owners in South America, Korea, Japan and China to help them integrate and leverage intellectual properties and new media to generate licensing and merchandis revenue. Visit GrapevineStar at the Seoul Character & Licensing Fair 2010. Are you looking for a gateway into the Korean contents market?

The Seoul Character & Licensing Fair has become one of Asia’s largest licensing exhibitions. For the past 8 years, the licensing exhibition encompassing content business and industry has provided information about trends and issues to relevant industries. The exhibition deals with all kinds of items for licensing including characters, animations, comics, games, broadcasting and entertainment. It has made progress as Asia’s largest licensing trade fair with participation of over 190,000 and 170 companies at home and abroad every year.

Seoul Character & Licensing Fair 2010, the largest of its scale, will take place on July 21(Wed) ~ 25(Sun) at Hall A, B and C, Coex, Seoul. The fair is expected to be attended by many outstanding businesses and companies at home and abroad in dealing with characters and contents. Especially, various B2B programs such as showcases, business meetings and conferences are added to provide you with ideal business environment.

We wholeheartedly welcome exhibitors and buyers from all over the world. Our aim is to provide participants with international networking opportunities for direct communication, thereby contributing to your successful business. We will offer you a professional support from preparation to the end of the fair.

Just about everyone who ever met Michael Jackson will be on television tomorrow, as the anniversary of his death brings a blizzard of reports on either how it happened or what it has meant.

Those who prefer to remember Jackson primarily for his music can turn on the radio, where several stations will go all-Michael.

Jackson died a year ago tomorrow, at age 50, on the eve of a comeback tour. Those who will talk about him include his mother, Katherine, in a paid interview for “Dateline NBC.”

His brothers Jermaine and Tito will talk with Don Lemon on CNN, while ABC’s “2-0/20″ will look at unanswered questions about his death.

The CBS “Early Show” will have artists like Marc Anthony and LL Cool J talk about Jackson, and TV Guide will show a new documentary, “Gone Too Soon.”

Here are some TV programs, all tomorrow unless noted:

ABC: “2-0/20″ special, “Michael Jackson: After Life,” 9-11 p.m.

CBS: 8 a.m. hour of “The Early Show” is devoted to Jackson.

CNN: “Michael Jackson: The Final Days,” 8 p.m., with Don Lemon, followed by a Larry King special tribute, 9 p.m.

E!: “True Hollywood Story” (repeat), 8 a.m. and 1 p.m.; “The Last Days of Michael Jackson,” 10 a.m., 3 and 8 p.m.; “Michael Jackson,” 11 a.m., 4 and 9 p.m.

Fuse: Starting today, in heavy rotation through Sunday: “A Tribute,” “The Inside Story,” “Remember His Time,” “Devotion.”

MTV: “Michael Jackson Top 10 Video Countdown,” 5-6:30 p.m.; “Michael Jackson’s Influence,” 6:30 p.m.

NBC: “Dateline,” 9 p.m., Katherine Jackson interview.

TV Guide: “Gone Too Soon,” 9-11 p.m.; “Michael Jackson’s Entourage: Where Are They Now,” and “Michael Jackson: His Family Dynasty,” 11 p.m.

VH1: “The Jacksons: An American Family,” noon-5 p.m.; “Famous Crime Scenes,” 11:30 p.m.

And on the radio:

WBLS (107.5 FM): Musical features all weekend and comments from celebrities and friends. Supporting the Rev. Al Sharpton’s tribute tomorrow afternoon at the Apollo.

WCBS-FM (101.1): Listener-voted countdown of top 40 Michael songs, tomorrow at 9 a.m., plus Jackson songs all weekend in “Hall of Fame.”

WHTZ (100.3 FM): A Jackson song every hour tomorrow.

WKTU (103.5 FM): “MJ All Day,” 24 hours tomorrow, followed by Jackson music and specials all weekend.

WKXW (101.5 FM): Tribute with Joe Henry, tomorrow at 7 p.m., leading to a Jackson weekend.

WRKS (98.7 FM): Kicks off all-Jackson weekend tomorrow at 6 a.m. with the D.L. Hughley morning show. Also supporting “Throwback Comes to Harlem” concert at the Apollo, tomorrow night at 9, celebrating Jackson.

WXRK (92.3 FM): Jackson in a 5 p.m. minimix tomorrow.

Sirius/XM: Hourly Jackson songs tomorrow over “80s on 8,” “70s on 7″ and other channels.

The Giving Pledge is an effort to invite the wealthiest individuals and families in America to commit to giving the majority of their wealth to the philanthropic causes and charitable organizations of their choice either during their lifetime or after their death.

Each person who chooses to pledge will make this statement publicly, along with a letter explaining their decision to pledge. At an annual event, those who take the pledge will come together to share ideas and learn from each other.

The Pledge is a moral commitment to give, not a legal contract. It does not involve pooling money or supporting a particular set of causes or organizations.

While the Giving Pledge is specifically focused on billionaires, the idea takes its inspiration from efforts in the past and at present that encourage and recognize givers of all financial means and backgrounds. We are inspired by the example set by millions of Americans who give generously (and often at great personal sacrifice) to make the world a better place.

What do you think about this billionaire initiative?

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2010-2014, global entertainment and media spending is expected to rise from $1.3 trillion to $1.7 trillion by 2014, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 5.0%. The US E&M market is expected to grow at 3.8% CAGR reaching $517 billion in 2014, from $428 billion in 2009. Fast changing consumer behavior is expected to be the catalyst of the entertainment and media industry change over the next five years,

Ken Sharkey, US leader, entertainment, media & communications practice, PricewaterhouseCoopers, notes that “… the digital pace of change has proven to be even quicker than anticipated with consumers embracing new media… and digital downloads at often-unexpected speeds… the continued fragmentation of the E&M sector will fuel greater experimentation by both established industry giants and niche players… ”

Digital services continue to be the primary growth engine, but traditional revenue streams are expected to remain significantly larger throughout the forecast period. The industry will need to embrace digital not as a competitor to traditional services, but as a complement. Digital spending in the US is expected to account for 26% of all E&M spending in 2014, up from 19% in 2009.

While there are signs of a rebound, advertising is unlikely to return to former levels. By 2014, the US advertising spend is expected to still be 9% below its level in 2007. Overall US advertising is expected to increase at a 2.6 % CAGR from $159 billion in 2009 to $180 billion in 2014. In the US, Internet advertising is expected to surpass newspaper advertising spend in 2010.

Advertising spending for Internet, television, radio, out-of-home, and video games are expected to be larger in 2014 than in 2009, while consumer magazines, newspapers, directories and trade magazines are expected to be smaller. These projections reflect the market fragmentation and consumer behavioral changes. The advertising industry is responding to consumers’ shifting attention and migrating towards total marketing or total brand communication. Brands are changing their focus from advertising on a medium, to marketing through, and with, content.

Consumer feedback and usage provides the only reliable guide to the commercial viability of products and services, and the global consumer base is being used as a test-bed for new offerings and consumption models. PwC has identified three themes that are expected to emerge from changing consumer behavior and the industry must anticipate and pre-empt the needs and wants of consumers.

Rising power of mobility and devices: Advances in technology are expected to see increasingly converged, multi-functional mobile devices come of age as a consumption platform by the end of 2011. By 2014, US mobile Internet access subscribers are projected to increase to 96.1 million, a 40% CAGR from 2009.
Growing dominance of Internet experience over all content consumption: Increasingly, the consumer has moved beyond thinking of the Internet as an end in itself, and expects all forms of media to embed the convenience, immediacy and interactivity of the Internet. People are already consuming magazines and newspapers on Internet-enabled tablets, and streaming personalized music services in preference to buying physical CDs.
Increasing engagement and readiness to pay for content-driven by improved consumption experiences and convenience: Consumers are more willing to pay for content when accompanied by convenience and flexibility in usage, personalization and a differentiated experience that cannot be created elsewhere. Local relevance is also expected to enhance the content providers’ ability to charge.
Digital migration and consumer behavior changes have put extreme pressure on existing business models. The proliferation of platforms and rising consumer expectations mean companies can no longer ‘be everything.’

“The industry must radically rethink its approach to monetizing content in capturing new revenue sources, from transactions or from participation with others operating in the evolving digital value chain… ” added Ken Sharkey.

Segment highlights In the US:

Internet access and Internet advertising is expected to continue to outperform the other E&M segments, with 8.8 % and 7.7% CAGR, respectively
Video games (6.4% CAGR)
TV subscriptions (6.5% CAGR)
TV advertising (5.3% CAGR)
Radio (4.6% CAGR),
Filmed entertainment (3.6% CAGR)
Out-of-home advertising (3.2% CAGR)
Consumer and educational book publishing (2.5% CAGR)
Business-to-business publishing (0.9% CAGR)
Recorded music (-2.4 CAGR)
Newspaper publishing (-2.8 CAGR)
Consumer magazine publishing (-0.5 CAGR)
Overall, US consumer/end-user spending is expected to grow by 3.7% CAGR

A new report from IPG’s Mediabrands’ Magna Global says online advertising will climb 12.4% in 2010 to $61.0 billion. Plus, it will grow 64% from there to over $100 billion in five years.

Magna says online advertising will rise by 11.7% in 2011, an average rate of 11.0% through 2015. Overall, worldwide advertising estimates have been pegged at low- to-mid-single-digit gains in 2010.

The company estimates that North America will see a 12.3% rise in online advertising to $27.2 billion in 2010, hitting $45.2 billion in 2015.

Currently, the report says paid search continues to be one of the strongest components of all online advertising, roughly accounting for half of the $29.8 billion in revenues worldwide. It is pacing tup 16.5% over 2009 results. In North America, Magna estimates paid search to be at $13.1 billion for 2010, a 16.4% gain.

All other online advertising — display, email, video — will grow more slowly, 8.7% higher, to get to $31.2 billion worldwide.

Latin America will continue to be the fastest-growing region, notes Magna — reaching $3.5 billion of total supplier advertising revenue in 2015, on an average rate of 13.3% growth over the next five years. The biggest specific markets — China and Russia — will experience the greatest gains.

Almost three-quarters of chief financial officers at major entertainment and media companies say digital and mobile represent the industry’s biggest growth opportunities, despite a challenging business climate.

CFOs say they are finally seeing measurable growth in digital revenue even as declining sales from traditional media and the economic downturn combine to leave overall industry revenue stagnant, according to a new Ernst & Young report.

Figuring out how to manage that shift while maintaining pricing is the difficult balancing act they face. “Revenues are dropping due to the unbundling of media and the reduction of per-unit pricing, challenging CFOs to identify innovative ways to reach their financial objectives,” said John Nendick, global media and entertainment leader for Ernst & Young. “However, as the demand for digitally delivered entertainment continues to increase significantly, CFOs feel optimistic about revenue potential.”

But they can’t be happy with the downward pricing trends. The consulting firm estimates that by 2012, the average per-unit price of video and music content will decrease by almost 25% from the per-unit price in 2009. That’s on the heels of a 55% and 12% drop, respectively, in the prices of music and video between 2006 and 2009.

Total home video and music spending this year — including digital and physical products — is estimated at $28.5 billion, down from $36.4 billion four years ago.

The Ernst & Young study, which surveys CFOs at 75 global media and entertainment companies, also revealed that executives have aggressively adopted cost-cutting measures to offset contracting revenue and view technology as a way to produce content faster and more cheaply.

More than two-thirds of CFOs consider that emerging media platforms, such as e-books and mobile content, will have the greatest impact on the industry in the next two to three years. Underscoring the rise of digital media, Ernst & Young projects that 27% of households worldwide will have broadband connections by the end of the year and 55% will have 3G devices by year’s end.

The firm’s index of digital media users, growing at an annual rate of 32%, is expected to reach 2.2 billion by 2011 — more than double the total for 2007. To keep up with new media trends, CFOs say getting real-time information on where consumers are heading will help their companies better adapt product offerings, keep pace with current demand and anticipate future trends.

But the report warns that even as companies experiment with new business models, “they need to focus on maintaining revenues in the areas that have been their mainstay in decades past. CFOs cannot forsake traditional earning in their quest for the digital jackpot.”

Executives surveyed in the Ernst & Young study spanned companies including News Corp., The New York Times Co., ABC, Facebook, Hulu, Interpublic, Major League Baseball, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Warner Music Group.

There’s no arguing that word of mouth (WOM) marketing impacts sales. And while a large number of people talk about content they found online, three-quarters of the time those conversations take place offline.

A recent study from Yahoo on WOM marketing demonstrates that the Internet has grown more influential when it comes to informing people through conversations about brands, even more so than TV in certain categories. The study also finds that the best vehicles for influencing WOM come from consumers who play in social networks. These “Conversation Catalysts” drive a disproportionately higher percentage of WOM activity.

While many marketers have little doubt that the Internet can influence WOM marketing nearly as much as TV, the huge gap in budgets for online versus television tells a different tale, says Radha Subramanyam, Yahoo vice president, who heads corporate and media research. “There’s a bit of an intellectual gap in how marketers spend their budget that doesn’t exactly tie to ROI,” she says.

Although only 7% of all brand-WOM conversations occur online, 38% of people have brand-WOM conversations both online or offline influenced by the Internet, which Yahoo estimates at 74 million people.

Among the media channels influencing WOM, the Internet has grown while others like television and print remain flat. The level of Internet references rose to 15% in January 2010, compared with nearly 12% during the same time in the year-ago period.

Despite the buzz around social media and its role in WOM, most conversations take place face to face. Media — both online and off — are influential in driving these conversations, but it’s important to note that 76% of WOM conversations take place in person.

Two-thirds of WOM is positive, and only 8% is negative, according to the study.

Certain categories such as financial and automotive appear to do better than health and health care and personal care and beauty. The study recognizes a 17% impact on finance from the Internet, compared with 8% for television. Yahoo believes that impact has a 1% bump to 18% on its network.

The study finds that Yahoo’s audience drives more WOM marketing for automotive and finance categories. While the Facebook and YouTube audiences both have a considerable reach, a much higher volume of auto and finance WOM occurred among the Yahoo audience since January.

Automotive in Yahoo’s network drove 54% of WOM marketing volume compared with 48% in Facebook; 46%, YouTube; 21%, MSN; 17%, AOL; and 15%, Hulu. Finance in Yahoo’s network drove 55% of WOM marketing volume, compared with 48% in Facebook; 40%, YouTube; 23%, MSN; 17%, AOL; and 14%, Hulu.

Conversation Catalysts have become the most valuable WOM segment, because they have a large social network, belong to clubs, organizations and social groups, and often give advice in five or more product categories. They are 20% more likely to mention the Internet in brand WOM conversations.

This trend is driven by millennials, Subramanyam says. “This generation is moving into the years of life where they think about purchases. These kids are now becoming adults,” she says. “This generation is the first that literally grew up with the Internet.”

As millennials become the new adults, marketers will see an interesting cultural shift, Subramanyam says.

Even so, there’s a missed opportunity in understanding that traditional Internet marketing has a bigger impact on word of mouth, says Brad Fay, chief operating officer at Keller Fay Group, and marketing consultant at McKinsey. “There’s a big opportunity to drive word of mouth using something as simple as a brand Web site,” he says. “The study found it’s the number one component to drive word of mouth through the Internet.”

About 15% of all conversations include something from people who found the information online, Fay says. People sit side-by-side with a mobile device in hand, talking about restaurants, clothing stores or services they read about online, he says.

The study concludes that Internet content can significantly impact WOM activity, especially on sites that serve this market segment known as Conversation Catalysts.

Yahoo partnered with Keller Fay to observe WOM activity from more than 18,500 survey respondents between August 2009 and January 2010. WOM conversations were tracked with the assistance of a 24-hour diary and follow-up contacts to answer standardized questions about brands and companies they talked about.

Nielsen Co. and management consultant McKinsey & Co. this morning unveiled N M Incite, a joint venture to monitor and analyze the impact social media has on companies. The companies said that Nielsen’s existing social media tracking division, BuzzMetrics, would become part of MN Incite, which will be headed by Dave Hudson. Prior to leading N M Incite, Hudson was executive vice president-global client services of Nielsen’s Telecom Practice.

The announcement did not say what the role of Pete Blackshaw, the former head of BuzzMetrics, might be, but Blackshaw’s most recent role in Nielsen has been executive vice president-digital strategic services, Nielsen Online.

In a statement, Nielsen CEO David Calhoun explained the reason for merging its social media practice with McKinsey is to, “extend our ability to help clients answer one of the central questions facing CEO’s, how to unleash the promise of social media.”

The companies said McKinsey is contributing “client capability building and expertise” to the venture, and the alliance seems intended to push the role of social media up into the enterprise levels of corporations, well beyond advertising, marketing and online media operations.

The companies said the practice would “drive organizational transformation,” and said they already have begun working with “select pilot clients,” with the first set of “three solution areas” expected to rollout this fall.

“The initial areas of focus are measuring and improving marketing effectiveness, product launch optimization and customer service experience,” the companies said.

Much has been made of mobile applications as branding and advertising vehicles, but they’re also playing a role in encouraging m-commerce, according to a new study. The survey by electronics comparison shopping site Retrevo found the proportion of people that had bought something with their cell phones had doubled to 20% in just the last four months.

Of those who have made a mobile purchase, 42% did so using applications capable of transactions. Further, the iPhone, which offers some 200,000 apps, was the most popular type of smartphone when it came to mobile shopping.

Since consumers have flocked to mobile apps because they’ve typically provided a smoother user experience than mobile Web sites, it makes sense apps would gain ground as shopping tools.

But Retrevo’s latest Pulse Report found mobile users are still apprehensive about transferring credit card information to their phone. When asked what would make them more likely to buy something from a retailer via cell phone, 24% said not having to provide credit card information, and 13% said if credit card data was already stored with a retailer.

That suggests the easier retailers make it for customers to store account information, the more comfortable people will be to buy with their phones. To that end, Retrevo cited services such as Amazon’s PayPhrase, which lets customers create a unique phrase and a four-digit PIN to verify accounts and speed up online purchases.

Amazon last year also launched a mobile payments service for third-party developers and merchants that allows consumers to use their Amazon accounts to make purchases on other mobile sites or apps.

PayPal and other companies also provide mobile wallets, and some speculate that the major U.S. wireless carriers may eventually get into the payments game, as NTT DoCoMo has done in Japan — but perhaps not until m-commerce becomes more widespread.

More than half (53%) of those surveyed by Retrevo said they hadn’t made a mobile purchase to date and had no plans to. But another 27% said that though they hadn’t bought anything yet via cell phone, they would eventually.

So currently, about half of mobile users are open to mobile shopping — but only 20% have actually used their handset to buy goods. That still leaves room for plenty of room for growth for retailers and others looking to extend their business to mobile devices. Converting potential mobile shoppers into buyers will be the hard part, but an app offering some type of mobile wallet would appear to ease the process.

But CPM’s days may be numbered. Technology is fueling the consumer’s desire for personalized media content, while also driving fragmentation among traditional media channels. Thousands of cable networks, publications, websites, catalogs, social networks, blogs and more are serving up content specifically targeted for audiences that are small, but highly engaged. Audiences are shrinking, but at the same time they are becoming increasingly relevant to advertisers who want to target those specific groups. Without a doubt, mass media is evolving into a much more targeted advertising choice.

Given this monumental shift, how does the traditional method to value inventory, CPM, stack up? It doesn’t, because it puts the focus only on audience size, not audience relevance. And while the concept of using large amounts of actual customer data in media planning has been discussed in the industry for years, only a few, very expensive proprietary systems have been built that combine an advertiser’s business strategy with media planning. It is time for a new way.

CRM Media Planning is a new approach that leverages large amounts of actual customer data to create traditional advertising, marketing and communications programs designed to target customers through mass media channels. The approach takes the traditional customer relationship management (CRM) principles and applies them to mass media advertising channels. By inserting personalized customer information into the media buying process for cross-channel advertising campaigns, CRM Media Planning allows agencies and advertisers to evaluate media on the relevance of the message to their most valuable customers, not only on audience size. Additionally, agencies and advertisers can begin to value media based on results using metrics – such as cost per customer (CPC) or customer lifetime value (LTV) — that have primarily only been available in the direct response world.

But what does this mean to media buyers and advertisers everywhere? A lot. Let’s take a look at some of the major areas this new approach will have an impact on:

Results measurement. The ability to demonstrate measurable results and ROI on media spend has long been the Holy Grail in advertising. CRM Media Planning takes much of the guesswork out of determining ROI, because it incorporates customer response data into the evaluation process. Sound nearly impossible? It once was, but thanks to new technology and analytic approaches, advertisers are now starting to get measurable results on their media spend. For media companies, they can now price their inventory on the value they deliver to advertisers — e.g. customers or inquiries –versus audience size alone.

No more guesswork. Determining the best placement for ad spend was once a time-consuming task that required pouring over large quantities of third-party and compiled audience panel data. To make matters worse, it was often difficult to compare different data sets in any meaningful way. In contrast, CRM Media Planning combines thousands of variables across the entire U.S. population, advertiser’s customer data, syndicated research and media audience files into one integrated system. This means that media planners can more quickly, easily and cost efficiently evaluate which media plan is the best fit.

Today, everyone is working with fewer resources and expected to do more. CRM Media Planning helps make that an achievable goal.

No strings attached. Let’s face it: Media owners want advertisers to make a buy. But to achieve the best results, buyers should consider a variety of media channels of all shapes and sizes. Thousands of specialty media properties exist that may be the ideal vehicle for advertisers’ ad dollars. CRM Media Planning makes it possible to consider thousands of previously unmeasured media. Additionally, this approach is data- and media-agnostic, meaning that it sources data from across many media channels, properties, and sources. Ultimately, it is about selecting the best placement for your requirements.

Audience fragmentation, the dramatic increase in the number of media and the rising demand for marketing accountability are permanently changing the fundamental principles and long-held practices of media planning and buying. The most successful practitioners will be the ones who can use data, technology and analytics to make the best ad recommendations possible and demonstrate results from each media buy.

We’re moving past the recession, but digital now faces an even bigger challenge: an innovation crisis. Starcom CEO Lisa Donohue discusses how a secret weapon will help the industry thrive again.

Though it’s only been two years of managing recessionary business issues, it seems like a decade must have passed in terms of the changes weathered and obstacles overcome in the digital industry. Yet the need for change is what digital was founded on, and for those nimble professionals ready to embrace the opportunities it can bring, today may be nothing less than a renaissance for advertising innovation.

“It’s our time to seize the day,” says Lisa Donohue, CEO of Starcom USA, during her keynote presentation at the iMedia Agency Summit in Austin, Texas. Donohue contends that with clients reassessing the new industry landscape and realizing the increasing need for new ideas, models, and partnerships, digital is tragically mired in outdated structures, processes, and policies that are creating an innovation crisis.

The good news, says Donohue, is that the industry already has the power to steer and control the crisis, and just needs to place more of a priority on strategies that embrace change, reward experimentation, and let creativity lead the way for others to follow.

“The recession really was good for our industry,” says Donohue. “For all the pain it caused, it gave us a clean slate. We can push the reset button on our industry. We can begin from square one where we can reinvent ourselves.”

In the social space, Starcom is adjusting by learning how to keep pace with customers, rather than focusing on what other players in the space are doing. She feels that agencies must first build the necessary tools to understand the consumer mindset and to know what behaviors they are changing. She also believes that to develop these tools and adaptation strategies, change first needs to come from within. “We need to eliminate labels between creative and media, between campaigns and advertising, between traditional and digital,” she says. “These limit us. We need to be more open source. We need to pull information from both within and outside of our own companies.”

The new world order requires new business models

Donohue believes there are four Cs that should be the focal point of the flexible, creative business models that the digital agency of tomorrow needs to be founded on: community, conversation, content, and currency.

Community. We must renew our focus on how to join, build, and communicate with groups of people, based on how those people are doing this in their own social circles.

Conversation. Agencies need to work harder to find and participate in a natural connection with consumers.

Currency. We need to be taking a good, hard look at how we earn loyalty and attention through a dialogue. This applies both to our consumer outreach and among the employees of our own organization.

Content. Content will be the key to the future of digital. We need to stop thinking about our jobs as a means to create advertising and start thinking in terms of how we can create content and messaging opportunities.

Learning to embrace change

Donohue says she takes a look at the capabilities Starcom needs to build to address the future on a daily basis. “The recession allows us to focus on this. The limited resources we’ve had to work with are empowering us to be more creative.” Donohue also stresses the need to consider data to be an aid that can unlock insights into our creative mission, rather than an impediment. “We can use it to prove our worth, rather than explain our value [to clients],” she says.

In order to drive this shift in perception, Donohue contends that we need to develop a new entrepreneurism — and that it all boils down to talent.

But is talent also in crisis in digital marketing? While there is certainly no shortage of innovative minds and creative problem solvers, the industry needs to start fostering business cultures that let entrepreneurial minds take the lead in the industry’s forward momentum.

“Our industry has operated in a walled garden for too long. We hire people from the same old pools of advertising programs. Job descriptions haven’t changed much in 10 years. But walled gardens don’t last forever. Smart people chafe at being restricted,” says Donohue. “What we do isn’t a mystery. We need to invite others in to see how it works and create new ideas.”

How we need to change

Donohue points to three key areas where change should start: structure, culture, and recognition. We need to break down the old world hierarchy to make room for talent to thrive. We need to move from organizational cultures that focus on job descriptions and segmented responsibilities to positions that allow for shared experiences and responsibilities. And we need to shift from recognizing the accomplishments of our team members through financial compensation to a system that provides a variety of meaningful rewards.

“Company leaders are not determined by title or length of service, but rather by how they respect and support each other within the organization,” Donohue says. “It doesn’t all have to be about the money. The next generation of leaders will be about learning and experience.”

Donohue closed by reminding Summit attendees that no matter what the specific reason was that drew them to this industry, there is a commonality: the need to be challenged intellectually and creatively. And this vital quest to realize the possibilities of imagination is the lens through which we must view tomorrow’s digital marketing industry.

“At the heart of this, we are all problem solvers. We want to find creative solutions to the business challenges we face. Now, we need to take those same skills and apply them to our industry itself,” Donohue says. “In leadership, you have to model the behaviors that you seek.”

Jodi Harris is senior editor at iMedia Connection.

Want to hear the latest from this week’s iMedia Agency Summit? Follow the conversation on Twitter #iMediaSummit.

With Yahoo!’s recent acquisition of Associated Content, the controversial new category dubbed “content farming” moves into the mainstream. At our last OMMA Behavioral conference, we devoted a “Grill the Vendors” panel to these companies, including Associated Content, Demand Media and AOL’s Seed project. Understandably, all three companies took exception the term.

Generally, these companies are leveraging the search-driven content engine economy to create and push media that people want into the Internet bloodstream. In some cases, their libraries are filled with user-generated nano-niche content that fills specific needs for how-to material other publishers don’t carry.

In other cases, the companies are deftly reading the search trends to anticipate and then commission useful content. There is nothing outlandish about crafting content that anticipates user needs. Several traditional media providers scout under-served search terms in order to craft packages that will perform well in searches.

But many publishers complain “content farms” deliver mediocre content that is so well optimized for search, it crowds out the quality. Actually, you have to wonder why publishers with their own long tails of archived online content aren’t doing more to feed the search economy material from their own “farms.”

That is what a Idealab spinoff Perfect Market, Inc. is trying to achieve. The company evolved from a frustration among some traditional media companies that weren’t getting enough from the search economy. “We always gave the search ad opportunity short shrift,” admits Robertson Barrett, Perfect Markets Chief Strategy Officer and a veteran of Tribune Interactive, Time Inc. and Primedia. “You will generally see search ads at the bottom of pages, and they may not be very relevant, especially at news sites.”

The search-driven news economy has created duel audiences at many news sites. First, there are the brand loyalists coming to a specific news provider and generating value via long hang times and many page views. On the other hand, masses of drive-by users are coming off of search, usually to a specific page for a single hit before they are gone.

Publishers know how to monetize their well-defined loyal users (via targeted, high CPM placements, email, etc.), but they have not figured out how to monetize all of that search traffic. “Our idea is that people coming through the search engines to your site should have a different experience based on what they want,” says Barrett.

The search-driven customer is entering a site from a different mind-set, usually in research mode and in need of more evergreen content. Demand Media and others have built their businesses serving that user with the right content at the right time. But Barrett contends that traditional publishers are leaving money on the table by not realizing some of their own travel, business, auto or other content could fill this need.

Barrett uses current partner LA Times as an example of traditional media being able to play the content farm game. On a search for travel to Buenos Aires, Demand Media had already created an article that was prominent in search results and involved tips for packing and planning travel to Latin America. But the newspaper also had in its archives a multipart series on South American travel and a Buenos Aires itinerary.

The Perfect Match system uses algorithms to see what topics are not only in high demand but also have the highest revenue potential from contextually relevant search ads. They will host and create pages for publishers that optimize that material and that are also optimized for the search user rather than the brand loyalist.

“Intent-driven traffic has specific things they are looking for — the subject not the brand,” says Barrett. To maximize the revenue from that user, you want a page that will emphasize CPC advertising that best targets the intent that brought the user in the side door. And so the new landing page expressly for search-driven customers will have contextual text ads placed much more visibly than they would be on a standard page of the Web site.

Part of the model is that Perfect Match helps give search engines more granular information about the page to render better advertising. And they can help surface the keywords on pages that are falling under the radar. “We can expose more content to the ad networks so they crawl the pages better.”

But the page for intent-driven traffic also makes better use of the host publisher’s own content. “We know there are semantic clusters around relevant ideas that have high revenue potential,” he says. “We can look in the publisher’s library to see what content they already have and optimize links to that content.

Barrett says that the early results have been encouraging, with 20x and 30x the conversions on CPC ads placed on the landing pages. Barrett claims revenue-per-user lifts of $1 to $10. The company takes a share of the lift.

In the great transition from analog to digital media, intent-driven content models were a tech-fueled opportunity that seemed to elude or just offend traditional media publishers. It will be interesting to see if these publishers can start taking control of the very technologies that threaten their old models, then use them to leverage the one advantage they have left: quality.

Promoted Tweets will be the only sanctioned ads within the Twitter timeline, but users like Kim Kardashian will still be allowed to receive ad dollars in exchange for their posts. “We will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API,” Twitter Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo said in a blog post today.

The move, intended to preserve the integrity of the Twitter timeline, will sharply curtail the activities of a number of Twitter ad startups, including Ad.ly, Sponsored Tweets, 140 Proof and Magpie, while giving more prominence to Twitter’s own ads, called “Promoted Tweets.”

Promoted Tweets, Twitter’s version of a search ad, appear at the top of a user’s timeline based on “resonance,” a metric that includes the number of clicks on an included link or the number of times the tweet has been passed around. Twitter shares revenue with the applications that distribute the ads.

Twitter’s Promoted Tweets will be the only sanctioned ad within the Twitter timeline, but the new rules do not ban Twitter users themselves from taking ad dollars in exchange for Twitter posts, such as Kim Kardashian (also an Ad.ly client), who can charge $10,000 to tweet messages to her followers.

As part of the new rules, Twitter clarified that its users own their tweets and are free to do or say what they want with them, including selling them to advertisers.

New boundaries
The new Twitter rules still allow third parties to place ads around Twitter feeds in other applications or next to Twitter search results, but they cannot resemble actual tweets, and there must be clear separation between the timeline and the ads.

The new rules also don’t appear to affect those selling ads against Twitter search results, which is the model for TweetUp, a startup founded by search pioneer Bill Gross, and search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, which also index Twitter’s real-time results. If Twitter content is the basis of the sale, Twitter requires that you share revenue or license the content for commercial use.

Since Twitter was founded in 2006, a vibrant community of startups has grown up around it, including applications such as TweetDeck and HootSuite that allow users to access the service and businesses to manage Twitter accounts.

While Twitter was building its service, a number of startups started monetizing Twitter. One of the largest and most prominent Twitter ad network, Ad.ly, has signed up more than 70,000 Twitter users hoping to convert their tweet streams into ad revenue, and it just raised a $5 million first round of venture funding.

Contacted by Ad Age, an Ad.ly exec said the company was still trying to assess the impact of Twitter’s new policy on their business, and had called an all-company meeting to assess their options.

A Twitter spokeswoman said no startup tapping into Twitter should be surprised by any of the changes. “We don’t seek to control what users tweet, and users own their tweets. We aren’t going to speculate on the impact this will have,” the company said in a statement.

Mr. Costolo cast the switch as an attempt to preserve the integrity of Twitter itself, which he believed would be threatened by third parties serving ads into Twitter streams. He said Twitter itself is responsible for preserving the “enduring value” of the service, and that “third-party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created.”

Japanese clothing brand UNIQLO is the most hotly discussed topic on Twitter on the morning of May 24. The store, which is renowned for its low-cost but fashionable clothes, takes out the first and fifth places with the terms “UNIQLO LUCKY LINE?????” and “#uniqlo_line”. Twitter users are tweeting about UNIQLO in hope of winning one of the contests being held for the company’s 60th anniversary.

“Nigerian Monkey Pox” is trending in second place. “Nigerian Monkey Pox was a joke from the TV show “The Boondocks” that was on tonight”, explains one Twitter user.

In third place is the hashtag “iknowsomeonethat”. Microbloggers are spreading stories about the people they know, sharing their friends’ and acquaintances’ good and bad traits.

The hit American TV show “Lost” has finally come to an end after six seasons on air. The finale was aired on May 23 and fans of the show are tweeting about the much-anticipated ending with the terms “#lostfinale” (in fourth place), “About Lost” (in seventh place), “Series Finale” (in eighth place) and “Purgatory” (in tenth place).

According to recent news reports, Simon Monjack, the husband of late American actress Brittany Murphy, was found dead at his home in LA, USA on Sunday May 23. Twitter users are passing on their condolences with the term “Monjack,” which is currently trending in sixth position.

The name of Indian Bollywood film “Kites” is in ninth place. Twitter users are posting their micro reviews of the popular movie.

The top 10 most talked about topics on Twitter on May 24 at 9:30 AM GMT are:

1. UNIQLO LUCKY LINE?(new)
2. Nigerian Monkey Pox (new)
3. #iknowsomeonethat (new)
4. #lostfinale (new)
5. #uniqlo_line (new)
6. Monjack (new)
7. About Lost (new)
8. Series Finale (new)
9. Kites (new)
10. Purgatory (new)

Top industry experts—Michael Donnelly, group director, worldwide interactive marketing at The Coca-Cola Company; Carole Walker, vice president, integrated marketing communications group at Mars Incorporated; and Cheryl Guerin, senior vice president, group head, U.S. marketing and global digital marketing, MasterCard—will help point you in the right direction at the 2010 ANA Digital & Social Media Conference presented by Meredith in New York City. For the first time, the ANA is offering a live-streaming option for those who are unable to travel to the conference.

Details:
Date: July 15, 2010
Location: Grand Hyatt New York: 109 East 42 Street at Grand Central Terminal, New York, NY 10017
Member rate: $495* for a single registration or $495 for the live-streaming option.
Nonmember rate: $595* for a single registration or $595 for the live-streaming option.
Agenda/Registration: click here or email registration@ana.net.

For questions, please call 212.697.5950 or email registration@ana.net

*In addition, the cost of registration includes a pre-conference bonus session on social media on July 14 from 2 to 5 p.m. hosted by Reed Smith LLP, 599 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY.

Although I can’t say that I am a mayor yet at any local Chicago establishments, visiting my favorite merchants has never been more rewarding. That is — since location-based social networks like Foursquare, Gowalla and SimpleGeo have popped up allowing me to check in, provide reviews and be rewarded with badges and discounts.
As mobile phone and social network adoption continues, these applications have a substantial opportunity to capture more users and advertisers with a solid strategy and monetize their products. Like other local search platforms, content is king for these companies. In order to be successful, it is imperative networks like Foursquare and Twitter, who also gives users the ability to turn on/off latitude and longitude, start with accurate local business listings for consumers whenever, wherever.

Accurate listings information is crucial

Checking in and notifying “friends” where you are on social sites isn’t very interesting if you are sitting at home watching television, however, if you are trying a new restaurant in the neighborhood, local, user-generated content becomes more compelling. Friends and followers want to know how is the food, ambiance, should I try it out?

In order for location-based applications to succeed with monetization, they should make correct local business listings a #1 priority, ensuring that duplicate listings do not exist and that information is up-to-date and correct. Otherwise, these applications will lose appeal.

A critical issue for all location-based networks is verification of the venue information as a way to prevent duplicate and/or wrong listings information. Read through the posts on getsatisfaction.com for merging and deleting listings and tips for fixing spelling or other errors on Foursquare and you will see the problems cropping up related to local listings venue information.

Monetization ability

So far, local businesses are showing interest in location-based sites because it adds another layer of social interaction with frequent and prospective customers. This engagement will present many monetization opportunities if these sites can get control of the local user demographic info provided via check-ins. To handle this, many speculate that location-based sites will soon offer a dashboard with sentiment analysis where businesses can identify what consumers are saying on sites regarding their products/services ultimately giving more opportunity to create targeted campaigns. This information can be very powerful as ads can be tailored to specific audiences and sent through email, SMS and/or display ads — very similar to Facebook’s ad targeting. Here is a chance to really get to know the likes/dislikes of consumers at a granular level.

For example, if a location-based site knows I am in Chicago, specifically near the Magnificent Mile, and knows my latitude and longitude it will make a huge difference in recognizing whether I am outside of FAO Schwartz getting ready to shop for toys or approaching Tiffany & Co. to buy jewelry for my wife. If I am about to enter Tiffany & Co., this would be a great opportunity for Cartier to serve up an ad or another high-end store. Location-based networks give advertisers an incredible level of granularity and opportunity to really hone in on potential buyers.

Great opportunity for local and national businesses

Beyond targeting capabilities, location-based services provide local and national businesses many SEO benefits. Google and Bing maps are showcasing Foursquare venues when people search locally. Also, for national advertisers, targeting potential at the hyper-local level is now a reality. There might be a day where a company like Nissan for example will not need a mass advertising campaign because they can target online ads to local shoppers with families, environment-focused consumers or those interested in luxury cars.

As with all local searchable content, business listing identity management is key for advertisers. Businesses need to take control of the data that is out there on various search platforms and the user-generated content that is available through social sites and applications. We anticipate many partnerships will take place in this space to merge already popular platforms (Facebook, Twitter) with those that are successfully deploying the local-social gaming experience (Foursquare, Gowalla). In the end, what will really tie everything together is access to accurate and verified local search business listings.

©2010 MediaPost Communications. All rights reserved.
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tel. 212-204-2000, fax 212-204-2038, feedback@mediapost.com

This begins her third term in office, after having successfully served as the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media and the European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth, Media and Sport.

Here is our Top Ten Newly Developing Countries’, Most Innovative Companies:
LG Electronics, BYD-China, Samsung, TATA, Nintendo, Hyundai, Petrobras, HTC, China Mobile, Sony

Google and China

The multi billion dollar question is what will Google do in regards to its presence and operations in China. We do not believe that a trend would develop if Google no longer exists in China. There are more companies in the United States as well as the balance of the Americas (which has become increasingly more impactful, led by Brazil) that will step in and provide a intelligent tactful tit for tat with China to survive and prosper working with China. The Chinese community in America is to large and to important for China not to want to communicate and have a dialogue with them…..New Media is the space for that dialogue and that is bigger than China or the Americas. What do you think?

Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) Finds Audience Migration and Recession Reduce Time Journalism Has to Sort Out Finances and Business Model

Two developments converged in the last year to shorten the time that journalism has left to reinvent its business model and secure its financial future, according to a new comprehensive study on the State of the American News Media.

First, the audience migration to the web accelerated substantially in 2008, and even though most of that growth was at traditional news destinations, the financial impact of that was a negative one, according to the report by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Traffic to the 50 news websites, for instance, jumped 24%, triple the pace of growth of the year before, but online ad revenue flattened, and in newspapers it declined. Second, the recession hammered advertising and diverted attention away from innovating new revenue sources.

The news industry was already in a race to find new ways to underwrite the gathering of news online, using the declining revenue of the old platforms to do so. The result of the changes of 2008, according to the report’s overview, is an industry diminished, with less time and resources to finance the transition.

On the other hand, the notion that traditional journalism is on the brink of extinction is overstated.

Among the major trends the report cites, the debate over new economic models, especially for newspapers, has largely focused on the wrong things. That debate has focused on micro-payments for content and non-profit ownership models, when other potentially more promising options have gone less examined.

The report’s detailed Year in the News—a comprehensive analysis of some 70,000 stories from all the main media sectors—finds that the media to a significant degree did not see the economic collapse coming. The month before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, for instance, the economy was at its lowest point as a story all year, and the story of the summer had little to do with banking. It was focused on gas prices.

The death of newspapersis not imminent, despite news of bankruptcies and even some closures. The industry still took in roughly $38 billion last year, and earned profits in double digits. Some 48 million newspapers are sold everyday. Even newspapers whose companies are in bankruptcy are profitable. But revenues fell 14% last year, and have fallen 23% in two years. The industry lost 11% of its newsroom jobs last year, and more than that at larger papers. By the end of 2009, a quarter of all the newsroom jobs that existed in 2001 will be gone.

The only sector to really thrive in 2008 was cable news. With an almost singular focus on politics, cable saw overall average ratings through the day and evening rise 38% in 2008, and profits rose 33%. While much of that audience fell away after the election, not all of it did. In February, audiences were still 5% higher than for the same month the year before.

In addition to these major trends, the overview of the report includes key findings across media sectors by audience, economics, news investment, ownership, and digital trends.

The full report is quite comprehensive, nearly 180,000 words. We have synthesized the main points from each chapter into summary form. Those summaries include:

Newspapers

Online

Network TV

Cable TV

Local TV

Magazines

Audio

Ethnic

A Year in the News

The 2009 State of the News Media report examines the health of the U.S. news media and provides comprehensive data on each of the eight major sectors of the media. Totaling nearly 180,000 words, the sixth edition of the annual report also includes a Year in the News, a special look at Hispanic and African American media, a content analysis of Citizen Media in 46 communities, and lessons learned from the 2008 election. The report is the work of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonpolitical, nonpartisan research institute. The study is funded by the Pew Charitable Trustsand was produced with the help of a number of collaborators, including Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute and a host of industry readers.

For more information, call PEJ Director Tom Rosenstiel or PEJ Deputy Director Amy Mitchell at 202.419.3650.

Overview of Major Trends
By the Project for Excellence in Journalism

Beyond our broadest conclusions, we identify six new trends emerging in 2009, which build off those we have identified in past years.

The growing public debate over how to finance the news industry may well be focusing on the wrong remedies while other ideas go largely unexplored. Much of the discussion has centered on whether consumers would make micro-payments for online content and the possibility of nonprofits assuming ownership of the press. The micro-payment idea, however, was already tried and rejected by users early on and has run headlong into resistance from online advocates. Nonprofit financing, even with ad revenue, may make sense in targeted subject areas—health or investigative reporting, for instance—but it is unlikely that there is enough funding to become a general ownership model. The scale of the commercial media is too large and the potential losses too great. A host of other ideas, with more potential, are worth considering. While hardly a complete list, they include: 1. Adopt the cable model, in which a fee to news producers is built into monthly Internet access fees consumers already pay. News industry executives have not seriously tested this enough to know if it could work, but these fees provide half the revenue in cable. 2. Build major online retail malls within news sites. This could both create a local search network for small businesses and link them directly with consumers to complete transactions, not just offer advertising—with the news operation getting a point-of-purchase fee. 3. Develop subscription-based niche products for elite professional audiences. These are more than subject-specific micro-sites. They are deep, detailed, up-to-the-minute online resources aimed at professional interests, and they are a proven and highly profitable growth area in journalism. There are other ideas as well, including news companies collaborating to seriously challenge aggregators, especially Google, to start sharing more revenue. Several new revenue streams most likely are needed. The closest thing to a consensus right now is that no one source is a likely magic bullet.

Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions. The trend is still forming and its potential is uncertain but the signs are clear. Through search, e-mail, blogs, social media and more, consumers are gravitating to the work of individual writers and voices, and away somewhat from institutional brand. Journalists who have left legacy news organizations are attracting funding to create their own websites. Experiments like GlobalPost are testing whether individual journalists can become independent contractors offering reporting to various sites, in much the way photographers have operated for years at magazines. It would be a mistake to overstate the movement at this point. But for a few journalists at least, there are signs of a new prospect: individual journalists, funded by a mix of sources, offering expert coverage to many places. The movement offers the possibility of more skilled reporting from the field. Yet it would also require consumers to be discriminating and raises questions about how news organizations would ensure quality and reliability.

On the Web, news organizations are focusing somewhat less on bringing audiences in and more on pushing content out. The shift reflects the news industry more fully recognizing the viral nature of the Web and the rise of social media. What began as a few podcasts, RSS feeds and e-mail alerts a year or two ago has mushroomed into a more serious emphasis on developing multiple forms of distribution. One form involves helping citizens grab and share information with one another. Another involves placing content on as many platforms as possible. Most news websites now have links attached to stories so readers can more easily share that content, and many have gone further, creating their own Twitter or Facebook accounts to put more content into consumers’ hands and allow them to pass it along. News Corp. and NBC Universal jointly purchased Hulu.com—a site where users can view streaming video free of cost—giving both companies another outlet for their products. The economics of all this is unresolved and home websites still matter. The industry is also late in arriving. But the movement represents a dawning realization that the nature of the Web is something the news industry cannot fight and might even begin to employ.

The concept of partnership, motivated in part by desperation, is becoming a major focus of news investment and it may offer prospects for the financial future of news. Partly to cut costs, partly to make up for lost or more narrowly focused content and partly an effort to remain relevant, news organizations are beginning join forces with institutions they once saw as rivals. Papers in South Florida and Texas now share copy rather than simply compete. The local television affiliates of NBC and Fox are sharing video of breaking news events. Online, CBS Radio began a joint venture with AOL and Yahoo , pooling its stations together on one platform. The efforts are just taking root and, as with other experiments, there is little sign yet of how much success there could be in attracting new audiences or revenue. But the partnerships represent a small step toward individual companies in trouble beginning to pool ideas and resources in a way they traditionally have resisted. The move toward partnership also reflects change of another sort. The appeal of a news organization in the future increasingly will be not just the content it produces but also the fuller package of information it assembles from multiple sources.

Even if cable news does not keep the audience gains of 2008, its rise is accelerating another change—the elevation of the minute-by-minute judgment in political journalism. In 2008 cable news came close to becoming the primary television platform of American political discourse. It was the only medium to be a clear winner in 2008, profits rising by a third and audiences growing 38%. But with cable’s singular fascination on politics, the biggest impact may be a sense of accelerating journalistic judgment. The minute-by-minute assessment of daily campaign maneuverings, many offered by partisan spin doctors in ways deliberately coarse and provocative, are now snap judgments about governance. The notion of a media honeymoon has become passé. The journalist who earned perhaps the most attention in Obama’s first month was a cable news financial “editor” who ranted on a Chicago trading floor, became a YouTube star and accused the White House of “threatening” him when Obama’s press secretary chastised him by name. Add to that the rising role of blogs, and now political figures “tweeting” from the Senate and House floor their immediate personal feelings. Even President Barack Obama has warned the press and public about listening to “cable chatter” and cautioned Republicans not to take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh, whose role as a political leader is now news. Incrementally, it feels as if the line between unfiltered personal thought and public discourse is evaporating a little more.

In its campaign coverage, the press was more reactive and passive and less of an enterprising investigator of the candidates than it once was. In 1992, the Washington Post produced 13 major profiles examining the past record and biography of the eventual winner of the race. In 2008, the paper’s ombudsman found, it produced three. At the Los Angeles Times, the number of such enterprise stories about the winning candidate fell by two-thirds. Many factors have contributed to this less pro-active press. Smaller newsrooms leave people less time for enterprise. Blogs and websites are deep wells of information, but they consume time and attention. The campaigns have become more disciplined about controlling their message, keeping their distance and putting out their own information directly to the public (see Lessons of the Election). Similar to 2000, most of what we know about the new president came from his campaign rather than from media enterprise. And very quickly his political agenda, whether changed by events or there but not always clear, has proved more sweeping than advertised.

South By Southwest in Austin, Tx (SXSW.com)

South by Southwest (SXSW.com) is leading in the trend in discussing convergence, social media, interactive media, an incubator of cutting-edge technologies. The SXSW Interactive Festival brings together the world’s most creative web developers, designers, bloggers, wireless innovators, content producers, programmers, and social media experts. Five days of captivating keynote presentations and provocative panel sessions provide hands-on training as well as big-picture analysis of the future.

The ScreenBurn at SXSW Game Design Competition celebrates cutting-edge game design while the SXSW Interactive Web Awards salutes the past year’s most compelling social media websites.

GSEConnect.com Salutes South by Southwest for it’s leadership in next generation media conference sessions and events. SXSW is true to the tradition of doing it BIG in Texas.

Announcement: Confirmed Future15 Programming

Photo of 2009 SXSW Interactive panel room courtesy of Mary Sledd / www.marysledd.com.

We are very excited about the addition of Future15 sessions to the programming mix for the SXSW Interactive 2010. These 15-minute presentations will give attendees bite-sized information on a variety of relevant technology issues. What issues, you ask? Read below for a preliminary list of confirmed Future15 sessions for this March. More Future15 information to follow soon!

Convergence

Convergence: Already Here, and Gosh It’s a Mess! (Gabriel White, Punchcut)

Convergence 2010: Ten Cool Things That Could Happen This Year (Dan Shust, Resource Interactive)

Convergence 2015 – A Look Ahead (David Berkowitz, 360i)

From Hulu To Yahoo Widgets: Will the Internet Transform The TV? (Richard Bullwinke, Rovi Corporation)

Imminent Fusion of Intelligent Mobile Devices & Entertainment Content (Rebecca Allen, Nokia Research Center)

Transmedia Storytelling – Creating Stories That Work Over All Platforms (James Milward, thesecretlocation.com)

Government and Technology

Blamestorm: Who Is Holding Us Back? (Brian Reich, little e media)

How Nerds Can Foster Democracy in Local Government (Will Hampton, City of Round Rock)

I Can See Russia From My iPhone (Kyle McLellan, Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet)

Microformats and Government (Silona Bonewald, League of Technical Voters)

Should the Government Tweet? (Bev Godwin, USA.gov)

Yes, Mr. Lessig, We Can Change Politics (Julie Barko Germany, Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet)

Social Business

Customer Service Goes Social (Melanie Baker, PostRank)

Workplace Collaboration Goes Social (Nilofer Merchant, Rubicon)

Marketing Goes Social (David Meerman Scott, davidmeermanscott.com)

Media Relations Goes Social (Captain Nathan Broshear, US Air Force)

Hiring and Recruitment Goes Social (Jeff Berger, KODA)

Video Blogging and Web Video

Becoming a Real-Time Video Blogger in 2010 (Wayne Sutton, Twine Interactive)

How To Measure Digital Video Effectiveness (Matt Cutler, Visible Measures)

Hyperlocal Focus: Growing a Vibrant Community Media Ecosystem (Bill Simmon, VCAM)

Not Just the Host: A Web Video Diva Dishes (Amanda Congdon, Oxmour Entertainment Inc / Sometimesdaily LLC)

Web Video: Can We Now Say Something Sucks? (Liz Shannon Miller, NewTeeVee)

Video Search Optimization Strategies to Grow Your Business (Bill Leake, Apogee Search)

Wireless Innovation

iPhone Application Development: Myths and Facts (P.J. Tanzillo, Bearded Pony, LLC)

Mobile — the Great Channel Equalizer (David Gill, The Nielsen Company)

The Real Mobile Scoop — Agency, Manufacturer, and Carrier (David Hewitt, Sapient)

The Rise of Mobile Platforms (Daniel Appelquist, Vodafone)