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media file 6.14.10 | The “Content Graph” and the future of media brands

The “Content Graph” and the future of media brands

On the Publishing 2.0 blog, Scott Karp introduces the concept of the Content Graph--like the Social Graph, a map of relationships that defines one’s “brand strength” relative to the other parties mapped on the graph. Just as on a Social Graph, one is measured by the number and quality of one’s friendships, on a Content Graph, a media brand is measured by the number and quality of its distribution relationships with other media brands on the graph. With Aol and Yahoo both jockeying for leadership in original content, the Content Graph could become an increasingly important metaphor for media brands looking for an opening in a newly promising digital content market. The big dollars in advertising, which are still locked up in traditional media, will start to flow to digital media brands that can demonstrate the distribution reach currently associated with search and social networks, combined with the strong brand equity that consumers still invest in traditional media.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for June 14, 2010:

How a digital-first strategy saved The Atlantic

The Folio site reports on 153-year-old The Atlantic magazine’s remarkable turnaround from a money-losing, declining traditional media enterprise to a growing, profitable digital brand. President Justin Smith cited five keys to its reinvention: creating a clear, compelling brand promise, which catalyzed organizational discipline around a set of specific goals; rallying around a digital-first product strategy, which unlocked resources that were otherwise tied up in the traditional business; launching a marketing services operation to drive digital revenues and differentiate the brand from low-margin ad networks; growing live events as a new profit center; and relentlessly focusing on hiring and retaining top talent. As a result of the overhaul, over $2 million in costs were driven out of the operation, while the organization is on track to sustainable profitability.

The ten keys to successful open innovation culture

The Innovation Tools blog summarizes the 10 essential elements of a successful open innovation culture, as described in a new book by Stefan Lindegaard, the leader of the LinkedIn Open Innovation Discussion Group. Among the key qualities cited: having people with the “soft skills” to effectively manage relationships with customers and partners; being willing to strike a balance between internal and external R&D; accepting the fact that open innovation creates intellectual property issues that the organization must work through internally before engaging with outside entities; and understanding that open innovation requires open communications with both staff and partners. The list grew out of a discussion among group members on the LinkedIn site.

The four types of organizational complexity

While corporate executives readily admit that complexity in the business environment makes it difficult to attain their strategic goals, they tend to think of the problem in terms of institutional complexity: the web of forces within the market that drive and disrupt business performance. Their employees, meanwhile, are likely to to think of the problem in terms of individual complexity: the internal norms and processes that make it hard for them to achieve their goals. McKinsey Quarterly examines the four types of organizational complexity: complexity intrinsic to the business or sector; complexity designed into one’s products or business model; complexity imposed by law, regulators, and NGOs; and unnecessary complexity that arises from misalignment between business goals and processes. Once they understand the kind of complexity they face, executives should eliminate any that doesn’t add value; and channel what’s left to staff with the professional skills to effectively manage it.

Closing the gap between vision and action in corporate sustainability

Has sustainability crossed the chasm from PR to strategy within US corporations? According to a recent Deloitte survey of 48 corporate executives, leaders are interested and involved in sustainability, and see a clear alignment with overall business strategy. But there remains a gap between their vision and the way that sustainability is enabled within their organizations. While many have broadly adopted the “triple bottom line” framework--pursuing performance in the economic, social, and environmental spheres--in practice, most are currently investing in environmental initiatives alone. For those companies taking an integrated approach to sustainability, four key success factors correlate to increased business value: aligning sustainability strategy with business strategy; integrating sustainability across the value chain; structuring non-traditional collaborations and extending existing collaborations; and establishing cross-disciplinary governance to drive performance.

What today’s CEOs can learn from history about socially responsible business

Although the concept of “triple bottom line” business is commonly considered an innovation of the 21st century, former AT&T CEO Leo Hindery, Jr. writes on Bloomberg Businessweek that its origins go back to the World War II era, when executives almost universally embraced the responsibility to balance the diverse interests of all stakeholders--shareholders, employees, partners, customers, and the nation as a whole. This model broke down in the 1980s, and in its place emerged the view that driving shareholder value was the only responsibility of the chief executive. As recent history amply demonstrates, it’s time for a corrective to this mistaken notion, but the business culture of the 1980s is now so fully entrenched in the boardroom that only government can provide the needed incentive for widespread behavioral change. A new tax and regulatory regime is needed to break the spell of “profits above all” and reintroduce the core concept of civic responsibility to the executive suite.

media file 2.1.10 | How Ford got social marketing right

How Ford got social marketing right

Marketing guru Grant McCracken drills into Ford Motor’s successful “Fiesta Movement” social marketing campaign to identify the strategic elements that made it click. To jumpstart its efforts to break back into the subcompact market--a space it abandoned in 1997--Ford gave 100 consumers each a Fiesta and asked them to complete a different “mission” every month, and document it in digital media. The campaign produced 6.5 million YouTube views, 50,000 requests for information, and 10,000 sales in its first six days. The secrets: (1) Ford selected “culturally creative” consumers--digital sophisticates with something to say and a track record for saying it well on the social web; (2) it offered a very attractive “fair trade”--a free car in exchange for content; and (3) it asked participants to document experiences where the car was used to advance a social cause or lifelong aspiration, thereby connecting the brand to deep, personal and social values. The Harvard Business site reports.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for 1 February, 2010:

Cars--the next digital platform

Advertising Age blogger Craig Daitch reports on the most compelling spectacle from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show--the sharp elbows flashed by in-vehicle electronics product and service providers attempting to break into the digital media space. Leading the way: Ford Motors’ game-changer, Ford Sync, which the company credits as a major factor in its recent sales uptick.

Bored with your TV? There’s an app for that

The Wall Street Journal reports on the emergence of iPhone-like digital app marketplaces on cable and satellite TV services. Although experimental set-top services like Microsoft’s WebTV failed horribly in the 1990s, thanks to big improvements in the underlying technology, today’s consumers are snapping up digital media service packages that combine phone, Internet, and TV; and a wide array of hardware and software providers are integrating them into next-generation platforms that permit users to wander far beyond TV’s traditional walled gardens. The future portends an explosion of TV-based, free and paid set-top applications that rival anything happening on desktops or mobile phones.

Let your customers sell themselves on you

On the Harvard Business site, MIT research fellow and author Michael Schrage discusses the power of prototyping to advance the adoption of new ideas. Whereas most innovation-driven firms rely on demos, simulations and other kinds of marketing to elicit a “gee-whiz” reaction from customers to their inventions, others put a prototype of the actual product in the customer’s hands, and give them a chance to sell themselves on its merits. The Apple App Store is great example of this kind of prototype-based approach--customers get to play, risk-free, with thousands of different apps; they provide valuable feedback to their developers; and upgrade to the paid version when the value proposition is right. This “sell yourself” sensibility can easily transcend the digital market, finding a home in retail, consumer and professional services, and any other market where playful exploration can speed the adoption of an innovation.

Is your brand a beacon or a spotlight?

Euro RSCG strategic planner Rose Cameron asks this question on the Advertising Age site: Are you shining a spotlight on consumers’ current preoccupations and concerns, or are you projecting a beacon that leads them where they want to go? The difference is huge. Beacon brands take consumers into an emerging future that they desire to embrace. Given a choice, more than 3/4ths of consumers will choose beacon brands over spotlight brands, according to a study conducted by Euro RSCG for the Atlantic Monthly.

Motivation 3.0: Finding satisfaction in a digital age

Advertising Age interviews “A Whole New Mind” author Daniel Pink about his new work, “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.” It’s not external rewards and punishments--that is, money, promotions, or the fear of losing those things--that drive today’s key business leaders and employees, but instead the desire to learn, create, and improve our world... what Pink calls autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

media file 11.16.09 | Why all great digital firms will build or buy an ad network

Why all great digital firms will build or buy an ad network

On the Advertising Age site, ad network exec Todd Sacerdoti confidently forecasts the future for his profession. Just as all major digital firms have either built or bought some form of email, communications, or social networking technology to unify their customer base, so too will they build or buy an ad network to unify the commercial marketplace for these customers.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for November 16,2009:

Why “lean” is the future of innovation

Can innovation initiatives succeed in business environments that stress efficiency and effectiveness? Sure, write the editors of Knowledge@Wharton, because lean processes force innovators to size up opportunities quickly, and move on if there’s no clear path to success. Companies typically waste a lot of time and money on product development because standards and processes for accelerating the best ideas and killing marginal ones are often implicit or nonexistent. Lean innovation works because it subjects new ideas to feasibility and marketplace tests much earlier in the development cycle than is typical for more white-coat development efforts, with the result that the greenlighted innovation already has an existing following among staff and customers.

Why innovation efforts usually fail

On the Forbes site, growth strategist Peter Hartung explains why corporate innovation initiatives have such a dismal success rate. Easy, Hartung says: Innovation is an inherently inefficient, messy, and disruptive process; whereas most corporate innovation efforts strive for the efficient and effective use of capital to leverage and preserve existing revenue streams. Such wishful thinking leads to a predictable result: Not only does the innovation effort fail, but at the end of the process the organization often finds itself on a downward spiral, with no new growth opportunities in sight to offset declines in its core business.

Why innovation is the engine of green business

Innosight’s Strategy & Innovation site documents a discussion between Innosight partner Mark Johnson and sustainability consultants Andrew Shapiro and Lewis Perkins on how innovation is jump-starting and sustaining the green economy.

Will “augmented reality” change how we know our world?

On the Harvard Business site, management consultant John Sviokla argues that while “augmented reality”--the novel technique of layering digital content on top of ordinary reality--holds the potential to spark the next revolution in business creativity, further accelerating the digital transformation of traditional industries such as media, advertising, health care, and consumer services--it also has the power to ultimately reframe our relationship with such basic concepts as information, knowledge, learning, and memory.

media file 6.15.09 | Is online advertising in secular decline?

Is online advertising in secular decline?

MediaPost covers a new report by Wall Street investment firm JP Morgan that indicates the recent dip in online display advertising revenues may have less to do with the impact of the economic cycle and more to do with the exponential increase in online display inventory. While TV networks managed to hold the line on CPMs for premium offerings in the face of an influx of ad inventory from cable channels, the scale of growth in new online ad inventory from social networks is raising doubts whether premium online display outlets like Yahoo will be able to sustain current prices.

Note: We’ve been on an impromptu hiatus for the last few months while retooling the richmedium site to reflect our intensified research and practice in the field of social innovation: the process of organizing “global tribes” over digital networks to support innovations that address broadly recognized social needs. For organizations in media, information technology, consumer services, and for-profit and non-profit social enterprise, social innovation holds the power to unlock a new, sustainable blend of social and financial value. We welcome your comments and suggestions about our work.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for June 15, 2009:

Newspaper billions become Craigslist millions

In a Chart of the Day, Silicon Alley Insider depicts how dramatically Craigslist has rained down “creative destruction” on the classified advertising business, the key to the newspaper industry’s historic profitability. Newspaper classified advertising peaked at $16 billion in 2005, only to plummet to an estimated $5 billion in 2009. Meanwhile, Craigslist started a climb from under $20 million in 2005 to an estimated $100 million today. The $11 billion or so in lost revenue represents a graphic study in the ruthless way that the Internet drives cost out of markets.

The greatest change in media? It’s not what you think

On ClickZ, publishing guru Vin Crosbie asserts that the greatest change to hit the media market in the last 35 years was not search engines, social networking, or even the Internet itself. Instead, the real game-changer has been the revolution in supply and demand driven by the enormous explosion in availability of media of all types--TV, radio, video, print, and the web. The destruction of scarcity as an economic lever in the media business went unnoticed for too long by old media, and its current response--in efforts, for example, to save the dying newspaper business--illustrate that it still doesn’t understand that the ground rules for competition have fundamentally changed, and there’s no going back.

Public media needs new economic models

On MediaShift Idea Lab, nonprofit media executive Tony Shawcross argues that the time has come for public media organizations to explore new economic models that could inject much-needed incentives to innovate and excel in producing and delivering content that explicitly serves the public interest. The article describes several of the most promising funding models.

Kiva brings microloans to low-income entrepreneurs in US

Kiva, the groundbreaking Internet-based microlender that has revolutionized the category for entrepreneurs in developing countries, is launching a pilot project to serve low-income entrepreneurs in the United States, Techcrunch reports. Kiva sidesteps the regulatory problems that have hampered other Internet-based microfinance institutions such as Prosper, by delivering a 0 percent return to investors, making the entire transaction charitable--similar to a program-related investment, a charitable investment category pioneered by the Ford Foundation. (Note: At its current annual run-rate of more than $50 million in small loans, Kiva is making more than twice the amount in charitable loans than Ford, according to the foundation’s last published annual report.)

GovLoop: A social network to reinvent government

Internet Evolution blogger Rob Salkowitz reports on GovLoop, a Ning-based social network that assists federal, state, and local government employees to informally share information and best practices. The brainchild of a young Homeland Security staffer, GovLoop reaches over 12,000 public employees in the US and has emerged as a model for foreign governments of a learning community that encourages unstructured knowledge sharing, spontaneous conversations, boundary-crossing relationships, and open discussion... a phenomenon that the site founders call “Government 2.0.”

A Hippocratic Oath for managers

The Economist reports on a grass-roots movement among MBA students to establish a code of behavior for the profession. Such a movement dates back to the founding of the Harvard Business School in 1908, when the goal was to establish a set of professional behavioral standards similar to those in medicine and law, where a set of shared social values is one of the earmarks of both professions. But the move was stymied by the widespread view that the manager’s job was solely to maximize shareholder value. In a period in which the Internet is forcing transparency upon institutions of all stripes, a code of ethics for professional managers is now coming to be seen as a crucial requirement and powerful force for business success.

Does the world need the venture capital industry?

Who is that behind the curtain? Not the Wizard of Oz, but your local friendly venture capitalist, according to a new report released in June 2009 by the Kauffman Foundation. While the VC industry has convinced itself that it is indispensable to the success of US entrepreneurship, and VCs compensate themselves accordingly, in reality only about 16 percent of the fastest growing companies in the country are VC funded, the report states. One structural problem: Contemporary Internet plays require significantly less capital to gain scale than in the past, and entrepreneurs are quicker to cash out early. That portends a future where VC money will simply be less relevant to the most innovative entrepreneurs. The New York Times reports.

media file 1.5.09 | Design thinking: A new strategic paradigm

Design thinking: A new strategic paradigm

To its proponents, it’s a new paradigm for product development and strategic marketing. To its detractors, it’s a pair of empty buzzwords. Either way, it’s called “design thinking”--a mashup of the strategic marketing and design disciplines that is being credited with bringing great new consumer products and services to market in record time, with startling success rates. Brandweek explores the phenomenon and asks: If designers are such great strategic thinkers, then why did it take them so long to land a punch on the marketing establishment?

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for January 5, 2009:

The coming creativity boom

From the ashes of the financial crisis, what is likely to emerge? A new and sudden boom of entrepreneurial creativity and invention, writes Forbes author and futurist George Gilder, based on four intersecting technological developments: cloud computing, advanced graphics processing, nanotechnology, and green building materials. The rapid advancements that these breakthrough technologies will make in the near future will dwarf any losses incurred in the current market collapse--demonstrating that creativity is the ultimate source of freedom and power, the author asserts.

Using design to crack society’s problems

Fast Company profiles Participle, a London-based agency that specializes in applying design solutions to intractable social problems. One example: redesigning healthcare delivery for chronic disease sufferers, shifting the focus away from hospital-based care to community-based solutions. Another example: repackaging support services for seniors in collaboration with Britain’s Sky TV. According to the article, Participle represents a new wave of design firms that believe that many of the institutions and systems set up in the 20th century are failing, and that design can help to build new ones better suited to the demands of 21st century.

Agile programming: A good model for media innovation?

Can journalists learn something about creativity and innovation from the software community? MediaShift Idea Lab blogger Rich Gordon chronicles his experience mashing top-tier journalism and computer science students together to create next-generation media development teams. From the start, the computer science students set the tone and pace for the collaboration by introducing cutting-edge “agile programming” methodologies to the journalistic creative process. The experiment offers a potential role model for building successful media projects in the interactive age.

Obama’s seven lessons for radical innovators

As Barack Obama prepares to take the reins of the presidency, Havas Media Lab Director Umair Haque reflects on what got him there: a radically innovative approach to organizational management that caught all his competitors flat-footed. Writing on his Edge Economy blog on the Harvard Business site, Haque lists seven qualities of the new kind of organization that such management innovation produced: self-organizing design; resilience in the face of threats; minimal attention to gamesmanship; maximum attention to authentic purpose; a unifying approach to the market; “thick power”--the power to inspire and lead; and an embrace of the world-changing power of ideals. In the business world, only a small handful of companies have yet to adopt anything quite like this kind of radically innovative management approach--Google, among these few--but its seven features represent the starting point for anyone wishing to build an institution suited for the 21st century.

Unintended consequences: Ten years under the DMCA

The Electronic Frontier Foundation marks the tenth anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with a review of its negative impact on free speech, scientific research, innovation, competition, privacy, and commerce. Did anything go right? Not really, the report concludes in exhaustive detail.

Evidence of a global super organism

Is Google an avatar of a global, super-intelligent organism that transcends anything we have seen or imagined on this earth? According to Kevin Kelly on The Technium, that’s exactly right. A planetary-wide super organism is emerging from the sum of the world’s digital infrastructure, with its own life, mind, intelligence, and consciousness. How far away are we from its birth? “Closer than you think,” Kelly writes.

media file 9.22.08: Marketers embrace their inner publisher

Marketers are publishers

In case you haven’t noticed, marketers produce a lot of content. So why don’t they think of themselves as publishers? ClickZ reports that marketers are indeed beginning to embrace their inner publisher, moving beyond advertising to new kinds of marketing content that goes viral, attracts community, and pops to the top of search results.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for September 22, 2008:

Can MySpace Music save the music industry?

Advertising Age posits that MySpace Music has what it takes to succeed where other ad-supported music efforts have failed. It has a large and growing global audience and advertising sales, creative services, and technical infrastructure that has proven capable of delivering new value to major brands. And by aligning itself with the major music labels and top independents, the site gets around a key obstacle faced broadly by social networks: advertisers’ coolness to user-generated content.

A jukebox on MySpace that takes aim at Apple

The New York Times covers the announcement of MySpace Music. The new site is a joint venture of News Corporation and the major recording companies, and has also secured a deal with the largest distributor of digital music from independent labels. Users will be able to select from the combined catalog of these companies and stream songs for free with embedded advertising. Users will also be able to purchase songs and ringtones for download via a partnership with Amazon.com. The site represents a collective bet by the music industry on free, advertising supported music as its future. If successful, industry leaders believe it could cause a steep climb in global sales up from its current $30 billion annually. Music companies also hope that the site will weaken Apple’s grip on the business.

Newspapers losing ground to other local media

More bad news for newspaper publishers attempting to effect the transition to a digital future: They appear to have hit a revenue wall compared to their online competition. According to a new Borrell Associates report cited on ClickZ, newspaper sites are currently still generating more revenue per site than their local competitors--pure-play Internet firms plus local TV and radio sites--but revenue growth has slowed to a trickle comparatively, and the sector is losing market share. Internet pure plays now account for 53 percent of all local online revenue compared to 27 percent for newspaper sites. The report argues that newspaper companies will not be able to successfully transition to the digital space without severing their online operations from their print operations,

Times Online to charge for archive access

News Corporation’s Times of London has erected a paid firewall in front of its online article archive, according to The Guardian. The online archive, which was launched in June 2008, features articles dating back to 1785.

To launch, perchance to dream

Oh no they didn’t! Advertising Age reports that News Corporation, Wenner Media, and Hearst are all launching new print magazine titles--all of them targeting the luxury market.

Trying to protect print business, celebrity mags risk losing all to web

If you thought you could never learn anything useful from celebrity magazines, think again. By sticking relentlessly to print, and giving miniscule lip service to the web, these newsstand-driven titles appear to be hanging on--just barely. But a closer look dishes up a darker picture. According to Silicon Alley Insider, the torch seems to have been passed to gossip sites like people.com and perezhilton.com, which are edging the franchise brands out of the celebrity space by virtue of their strong showing on the Internet.

25 million Adobe AIR apps have been downloaded

Adobe AIR, the framework for web/desktop hybrid applications, is on the cusp of widespread acceptance, says ReadWriteWeb. Over 25 million AIR-based applications have been downloaded since the framework launched earlier this year, and the developer toolkit has been downloaded 850,000 times.

media file 8.12.08: Content is king, again

Target the Audience or Ride Along With the Content?

Advertising Age analyzes a study released by the Online Publishers Association that supports the thesis that “content is king”: That is, content targeting trumps audience targeting as a means of improving advertising performance. Ads that appear on content sites produced by major media brands perform better in virtually all indicators of brand awareness and purchase intent than ads posted on non-branded sites.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for August 12, 2008:

New Veronis Suhler Stevenson Forecast Announced

Media investment bank Veronis Suhler Stevenson announced the publication of its 2008-2012 Communications Industry Forecast. Among the highlights: As advertising revenues in traditional media are continuing to contract, consumer spending on digital media is outpacing the market overall, signaling a long-term shift away from an advertising-supported media market. Communications is the second fastest growing economic sector in the US.

Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium a Hit With Users

Mediaweek recaps a Yahoo report showing that its Newspaper Consortium, a strategic partner program that places local newspaper headlines on the Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance home pages, has generated 100 million visits to partner sites since its inception in 2006.

What’s really killing newspapers: They’re no longer the best providers of social currency

Slate’s Jack Shafer posits that the reason newspapers are in such sharp decline is that they no longer are the best medium to deliver on their core social value proposition: To arm consumers with the news tidbits that make water-cooler conversations interesting and make them look smart to their peers. The web does a better job of that in general, and when social networks enter into the mix, it’s game over for newspapers. “What is Facebook but the Federal Reserve Bank of social currency?” Shafer asks.

The Future of Blogging Revealed

Want to know what comes after blogging? Meet “lifestreaming,” says ReadWriteWeb. Lifestreaming applications capture and document an individual’s activities and interests in real time, as they occur and are posted to the social web. Using tools like Twitter and Friendfeed, lifestreamers create blog-like environments that are always up-to-date, “always on,” the report states.

Kontagent: Game-changing analytics software for social network applications

VentureBeat reviews Kontagent, a web-based analytics application that provides a sophisticated set of off-the-shelf tools that allow social network application developers to perform detailed analysis of their users’ behavior. Such tools could spur a new wave of social application development, by putting small developers on par with large ones, who until now have had the advantage in being able to build their own custom analytics tools.

Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference

Harvard Business Review discusses how the rapidly increasing rate of corporate investment in strategic IT infrastructure is creating a climate of greatly increased competitiveness across a broad range of industries, and is leading to markets characterized by “creative destruction”--the dynamic by which markets come to be dominated by a single leader who is soon thereafter overtaken by an upstart rival, thanks to some game-changing innovation or process the rival has introduced.

Why Social Marketing Nirvana Escapes our Reach

On ClickZ, media strategist Sean Carlton predicts that corporate social networks will go the way of the corporate portals of the 90s--that is, into the dustbin of seemingly brilliant ideas that didn’t pan out in the long run. The main reason: Customers generally go to corporate sites for a specific, task-driven purpose, not merely to consume information or to make friends.

media file 7.29.08: NYT adopts open media strategy en route to global market

Leading in Turbulent Times

Advertising Age reports on how the New York Times web site is re-inventing itself as a web 2.0, open-media news environment, as part of a strategy to compete on a global scale with the Wall Street Journal and other leading news brands.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for July 29, 2008:

Announcing the Open Web Foundation

The Open Web Foundation announces its launch as an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.

MySpace Aims to Win Developers' Hearts With OpenID and User Data Caching

ReadWriteWeb reports that social network MySpace has announced it will adopt the OpenID identity management platform, allowing sites that support the standard to tap users' MySpace profile data.

Women-focused media site Glam launches developer network

VentureBeat reports that Glam Media has launched a program to distribute open-source widgets that carry content and advertising from the Glam network.

Beyond the API: Why Companies Should Have a Presence on All Major Platforms

ReadWriteWeb discusses the trend among Internet firms to publish APIs that allow third-party developers to extend their services onto new platforms, and notes that this is no substitute for proprietary extensions that preserve a uniform brand experience.

The Changing Newsroom

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has issued a report on US newspapers. Despite the fact that more people than ever are reading content produced by newspapers, revenues are in a free fall, and professionals are unsure of what the future holds.

Why Newspapers Shouldn't Allow Comments

The blog Gawker says that online newspapers should face up to the fact that most user-generated content detracts from their core value. They should stick to what they do best--producing news for the blogosphere, among others, to consume.

Reforming a Mean World: Hero Reports

MediaShift Idea Lab profiles Hero Reports, a civic media project by an MIT Media Lab student that combines user-submitted reports of "everyday heroicism" with mapping tools that depict where in a city good acts are occurring.

Google Buys Russian Contextual Ad Firm From Rambler For $140 Million

paidContent reports that Google announced the purchase of Russian online advertising network Begun from parent company Rambler Media, owner of the Rambler.ru portal. Separately, they announced a search and ad deal between Google and the Rambler site.

media file 7.23.08: US media firms baffled by global growth

U.S. Web Sites Draw Traffic From Abroad But Few Ads

The Wall Street Journal reports that US-based web sites are facing huge growth in traffic from overseas, but few have even begun to figure out how to take advantage of this latest product of globalization.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for July 23, 2008:

China: Web use accelerates, e-business still lagging

VentureBeat reports on new figures showing that, while China's Internet user base has ballooned to over 230 million, that huge number still represents only 16 percent of its total population; and only 25 percent of users currently shop online.

Twitter: Made in the USA, growing faster overseas

VentureBeat reports on Hitwise data showing that Twitter's market penetration and usage rates in the UK and Japan are outpacing those in the US.

Google Approaches 70 Percent of U.S. Searches in June 2008

Hitwise reports new search engine traffic figures that show Google now commands close to 70 percent of the market in the US. In the UK and Australia, Google owns more than 87 percent share. Google has been taking share from #2 Yahoo and #3 MSN.

Spending on online advertising surpasses TV, report says

The LA Times reports on a study by media research firm Outsell forecasting that online ad spending will grow 12 percent to $105 billion in 2008, surpassing TV spend when advertisers' web site development spending is included in the mix.

Corporate Social Networks Are A Waste of Money, Study Finds

ReadWriteWeb reviews a study by Beeline Labs revealing that a majority of corporate social networks analyzed were massive failures in driving user engagement. Main reasons: Heavy-handed approaches to branding and extremely weak social value propositions.

Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?

ReadWriteWeb describes how firms doing business on the social web are building new capacity to facilitate communication between themselves and their external stakeholders.

Where Do the Best Ideas Come From? The Unlikeliest Sources

Advertising Age reports on a study by consulting firm Prophet that the most innovative companies develop broad-based "inspiration networks" that tap into the best ideas of their stakeholders.

Recognition is the Reward

In this post for AlwaysOn Network, Flybridge Capital Partners' Jeff Bussgang discusses the huge explosion in volunteer-driven open source projects around the globe, and ask what motivates so many to offer their talents to corporations for free.

Yahoo! Opens Up Search Technology

Yahoo has announced Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS), a set of APIs that allows third-party developers to create custom search applications and mashups using the Yahoo search platform.

media file 6.25.08: Top 10 Media Death Memes we should stop repeating at cocktail parties

Th-Th-Th-That's All, Folks! No More Talk of Media End-Times

Advertising Age's Simon Dumenco lists the top 10 overexposed theories on why the media business is going down in flames, and recommends that we just drop them and get on with inventing the media future.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links daily as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for June 25, 2008:

Media revenue to hit $2.2 trillion by 2012: PwC

Reuters reports on a PwC forecast that global media revenues will grow by close to 7 percent annually through 2012, significantly outpacing global gross domestic product. Growth will be led by expanding broadband and mobile media platforms.

Top 100's Ad-Spend Growth Grinds to Halt

An Advertising Age analysis of spending by the top 100 US advertisers suggests that growth in online advertising has become a zero-sum game. While online ads grew by about $1 billion in 2007, newspaper ads fell by $674 million and TV ads by $406 million.

Venture Capital Funding and M&A Quarterly | Q1 2008

VentureDeal reports that companies in the Internet and Digital Media sectors raised more than $1.8 billion in new venture capital investment in Q1 2008, representing a 22% increase in total investment over the previous quarter.

Modeling The Real Market Value Of Social Networks

TechCrunch presents a model to calculate the value of a social network, based on the advertising spend per Internet user in all the markets where it is active. Based on this model, it calculates the valuation range for the top 25 social networks.

Hakia Announces Semantic API

ReadWriteWeb reports that semantic search engine Hakia announced a set of APIs that will permit developers to access its natural language processing technology.

Conde Nast's Reddit goes open-source

CNET reports that social news site Reddit has released its code under an open-source license, making it possible for third-party developers to independently extend the site's functionality and create mashups.

Fring API Could Shake Up the Mobile Web

ReadWriteWeb reports that fring, the mobile social network for IP-enabled phones, has released an API that is likely to spawn a new class of instant messaging and voice-over-IP applications.