Digital Influence Mapping Project

WeMedia 08/Miami: Digital Health Empowerment

At WeMedia 08, Scott Mowbray from Health.com is talking with  Kendall Lockhart, Co-Founder, Nenuphar Mobile Media (and yoga practitioner - you had to be there for his intro) about what it means to empower people.

Ways of 'digital health' empowerment
1. Voting
2. Personal empowerment: during a prsonal health episode, it is critical to know what to ask for, what to demand from all of the health providers involved in your care

Social Marketing & Community
Kendall asks 'What if people don't want to change (e.g. lose weight)'
I would throw back - "what about transtheoretical model of social marketing?" that and other models to describe what causes people to change is begging for the suport systems now possible through social networks/communites. In general there is too much emphasis on simple delivery of credible information (vs. building credible community).

Kendall: Is there more 'community' now?
Scott feels that we live in a one-brand (WebMD) world. We are at an early stage of development of alternative sources for credible information.
I would throw back - what about the vast array of LongTail patient affinity groups? Are we really headed towards a model of a handful of WebMD competitors or will it be long tail from here on in with patient affinity groups like those hosted by Inspire.com and PatientsliekMe?

WeMedia 08/Miami: Zogby/WeMedia poll

John Zogby's group did a US based poll for the WeMedia guys and the data is what you would expect and have probably heard.

• 2/3 of Americans think traditional journalism is out of touch
• 70% think it's important to the quality fo life in their communities
• 48% say that the Internet is now the prinicipal source for news and information

WeMedia 08/Miami: Power On!

It always seems prophetic when some big "natural' event happens on the eve of something you care about. In this case, there was a huge power outage in southern Florida affecting up to 4 million people as I flew down for Andrew and Dale's most excellent WeMedia conference in Miami. They are not responsible. Someone somewhere flipped the wrong switch on the old nuclear power plant.

Power failures have way of building community ... before they turn ugly, of course.

All power is restored and we are beginning a great confluence/conflagaration of media, marketing, internet, academics and genrally smart and interesting people at the latest WeMedia conference held at the University of Miami. Sam Grogg is dean and our host. he will be speaking on my panel later on Media Literacy.

Blackout as a WeMedia moment
Great discussion about how the blackout provided a "we media" moment. Folks from Qualcomm, Miami Herald and other places talk about how the traditional media infrastucture was crippled by the loss of power: papers couldn't publish, radio wasn't local enough to cover it, talk radio was gone, Web site access was limited due to the limits on batery life at the head-end and at the user.

A couple of us talked about the power of locally-driven microblogging (e.g. Twitter) posted and delivered via mobile devices (limited by battery life) where people in the community can post to a common account - @blackoutmiami - and aggregate their twits to keep themeslves and their neighbors involved.
Someone else talked about the spanish-language radio station that switched gears to host phone-ins from citizens became a flash cgm experience. The conference is really about redefining media and our expectations for it.

Off to a great start.

We Media 08: Using Media to Innovate and Make the World a Little Better

What do you do in a world where "media" is no longer defined by newspapers, magazines, television and other 'traditional,' organizations who still know what the term "4th estate" means?

For Andrew and Dale at ifocos.org (The Insitute For The Connected Society) they collect some of the most interesting people wrestling with the impact of the digital media explosion and all its fallout, bring them together online and in person at We Media 08 in Miami from February 26-28.

They trigger dozens of conversations amongst these unlikely colleagues about what is media today and how we can use it to innovate our respective businesses while at the same time serving the world. Sound familiar? It shouldn't unless you remember the Thomas Carlyle's meaning behind the "fourth estate." Even still, things have changed. The whole fourth estate thing was a nod to the political power of the press. I would argue that WeMedia is less focused on political power or the impact within anyone country of a new, exploded view of media than it is with the global reach of a very public 'media' defined by the BBC, as well as,  a momblogger in New Mexico. This new media has the potential to transcend political and social boundaries. The idea behind the "fourth estate" comment was that the press at that time had a not-so-soft power equal to, or sometimes, surpassing the assigned leaders in power.

If anything has the potential to let global people get to know each other better, reduce our human fear of the unknown and help us connect over new affinities and ideas, it is this new media fueled by the connectivity of the Internet.

I will admit that one of my strongest attractions to Andrew and Dale's vision is how it plays into my hopelessly romantic and, I'm sure, naive belief that a global social network (the meta-network that is the Internet) can help make us global citizens working together to solve problems for other people regardless of political, ethnic and social boundaries.

The WeMedia 08 conference will have sessions like:

• The Power To Change The World
• Political World | Hype vs. Reality in Campaign 08
• Search World | Trust, relevance and rights
• Activist World | Social networks for social good
  and my personal favorite (and the one I am moderating):
• Informed World | The citizen’s guide to media literacy

The event will pull traditional media leaders, social media proponents, academics, tech start-ups, VCs, social activists and much, much more. It's a weird collection of people many of who will come based on a faith that they will discover new affinities and ideas from being social and alert with people unlike themselves in so many ways.

If you can make it - you should come. It may just be the most impactful conference you partiucipate in all year long as it is likely to touch your business side and your personal side.

Andrew and Dale have created an organization that we can all belong to and participate throughout the year. Join us now (and find out more about the group)>

Super Tuesday Thoughts on Twitterbowl

While I watched the game I twittered my responses to the ads as they played down. That was the goal. Jeremiah Owyang kicked off this little activity. It became a fun little speed activity in between the bursts of 3-4 commercials during the breaks.

You can read the fascinating analysis here - no, I am not kidding, I found the level of activity surprising. If you download the spreadhseet you will find that jeremiah tabulated almost 2000 responses. WHICH DOES NOT ACCOUNT FOR AT LEAST 8 OF MINE. Seems that my Twitterberry application was not reliably 'pasting' in the @superbowlads prefix which would have made all of my "votes" show up. Rohit covered it here. Still I had fun. There was a sense of community as we all participated. It actually went pretty far to extending the sense of a live shared experience. That's one thing Twitter can be really good for - sharing povs on a  common experience like a TV show, a conference or ....political candidates performance.

Forget the pundits who wrap up the debates. Let's get Twitter-bates going simultaneous to the next round of debates. If some miracle happens and the Democratic nomination isn't tied up by midnight tonight, then lets have Twitter-reviews during the key speeches of the convention.

Social Networks for Moms Need 2X Affinity

Resources and communities abound online for moms. I am thinking about this as BlogHer ramps up next week in Chicago. I went last year and had a great time. I cannot make it this year (despite the added bonus the Grinderman is making one of its four US performances in Chicago next week). And I have blogged before about some of the developments in social networks for moms and/or parents.

How can all of these social networks/communities survive? How can each find a critical mass of members to reach that tipping point that becoms the magical self-sustaining community?

Meanwhile, older new media like iVillage and BabyCenter/ParentCenter and even older, old media like Gannett newspapers are starting to introduce social media and consumer generated media into their mix. IVillage and the one-two-punch of BabyParentCenter have managed message board-based communities in one way or another for years. That experience in what it takes to nurture and grow activity (vs. launch a Web 2.0 enabled service) will help them regain ground they may have lost.

Then there is old media. This month's Wired print publication (not what I mean by old media) has a great comeback story for the Cincinnati Gannett paper and their embrace of consumer generated media. Specifically, they call out CincyMoms, the consumer content site run by The Enquirer.

A couple of years ago, old media like newspapers didn't seem to understand the value of consumer generated content. And even the old new media seemed to be having trouble re-tooling their businesses and platforms to be more social media friendly. Web 2.0 start-ups like BlogHer, MothersClick, and Minti seemed to be the wave of the future. Now old-new and old-old is giving Web 2.0 a run for their money.

They Need 2x Affinity to Have a Chance

Every social network or community must have some meaningful affinity that pulls the members together. Being a mom is not enough. In all cases, for these services to become viable businesses (not iVillage-sized buisnesses but long tail, Web 2.0-size businesses) there has to be a meaningful additional affinity.

cincyMoms - It's Hyper-Local

Home/Talk/Events/Pics/Resources - that's their main menu and between that and the tag cloud below, I love their simplicity. They are not trying to be all things to all people. The draw is that their audience lives near Cincinatti. As the wired article points out, the average annual revenue per online user (Enquirer online, not necessarily cincyMoms users) is about $35 vs. $350 for the print customers. To some extent, The Enquirer will be trying to promote print products to onlne users. And they will also be hedging their bets with an onlne business that can become sustainable should their print business eventually dip below viability. 

CincyMoms has some great community happening in the form of boards (that are not all that different than blog posts except they happen in common thread areas vs. personal spaces.) Here are their self-reported stats:

4518 of 7212 Members have made 82851 posts in 83 forums, with the last post on 07/22/07 12:44pm by: candiceschmitz.

There are currently 9056 topics and 1240 active topics since you last visited.

There are 13946 archived posts in 2011 archived topics

Pretty good activity for a  6 month-old site.

The headlines are pulled from "Talk" - the message board space. Karen Gutierrez is presumably the "managing editor" or community leader as she has a blog with a handful of posts on it. There is a bit of old media here in the way her blog feels like a simple editorial column, but I think my desire to see everyone embrace every facet of blogging (posting regularly, revealing themselves, getting into dialogue in the comments, etc..) is a bit unrealistic and unwarrranted.

Events hammers home the local value with easy-to-browse listings of where and when the local Anime Club meets. There are hidden gems in Resources which I hope grow such as this list of pediatricians that the cincyMom community assembled via a survey. There are member profiles, supposedly, as any SNS must have yet all I get are error messages when I try to call them up.

Moms + Local is a strong combination of affinities. Now that Gannett has embraced social media, I would expect this type of service to grow in communities across the country. They can use the power of the Enquirer to promote it, far more than any boot-strapped start-up could afford to do. And since the user experience is so extremely simple, they may actually win users who shied away from technology historically.

Work It! Mom - It's About The Work

Work It! Mom is pretty much what the name promises - a community where working moms can:

• start a blog
• participate in topical message boards
• write and read articles
• write and read interviews
• post and answer questions
• form groups
• read mom+career relevant traditional news stories

There's a lot here. Perhaps, too much. Working + Mom seems like a powerful affinity combination. Recently, I had some questions about parenting. Okay, recently, I realized that I had no idea how to be a good dad. Being a working dad, I actually picked up a book designed specifically for working parents. I get a sense of the tension about the issues surrounding work and being a good parent. So I would expect this service to be serving a real demand.

There is not much activity there yet. It is new. But I wonder whether their attempt to bundle so many features (Gather + ParentCenter + Yahoo Answers +Yahoo Gorups) was just trying to do too much. It's almost as if some VC's got together and said, "what's the killer recipe for a Web 2.0 play for working moms".

And as it turns out, the founders are not just working moms, they are VC's. Their board of advisors is dominated by VCs. Nataly Kogan, Co-Founder & CEO is a McKinsey-ite with lots of VC experience in early-stage funding. Victoria Grace, Co-Founder & President was a banker at Salomon Brothers and also a VC (why is it that VCs never identify the VC they worked for?). Nataly does a good job of maintaining her blog.

Doesn't mean they aren't sincerely trying to build a business they are passionate about. Since their advisors are dominated by other VCs, it does make me wonder if they aren't driven by the "Flip This House" mentality of some VCs.

Here's how they describe their approach to user contribution:

"We’re trying something different at Work It, Mom! Instead of hiring lots of editors and writers we would like to build up the greatest library of useful, interesting, and intriguing articles, interviews, and essays for professional moms by relying on contributions from real moms. We want Work It, Mom! to speak through your honest, revealing, and inspiring voices and to be the place where other busy professional moms come for advice, support, ideas, and a bit of laughter and relief from the daily juggle of work and family."

Only time will tell if Work It! makes It! They are trying to do a lot and the sincerity in their blog is undermined by what looks more like stock photography on their homepage. The affinity of Moms + Work is a strong one. But community development is hard work and it's not enough to build a platform with lots of community features. Even if your goal is the quick 10x-and-I'm-out, the will need to work hard to build a loyal user base that has large readership and that dedicated 1%-30% who actually create content.

Media Literacy 2.0: Facebook

Back in the 1980's when I was a wee lad, there was a program on NYC public access TV produced by Paper Tiger Television. They would examine a media institution like the NY Times and reveal it's ownership and management structure down to the board members and their own leanings - left or right. Here's what the TV Museum says about them:

"In 1981, the Paper Tiger Television Collective formed--a changing group of people that came together to produce cable programming for the public access channel in New York City. Drawing upon the traditions of radical video, Paper Tiger Television invented its own home-grown studio aesthetic using rather modest resources to make revolutionary television. Many of Paper Tiger's half-hour programs are live studio "events," faintly reminiscent of 1960s video "happenings." The show's hosts are articulate critics of mainstream American media who examine the corporate ownership, hidden agendas, and information biases of the communications industry via the media in all of their forms."

Now, we need the same thing. Not just a broad knowledge of how Wikipedia works (and Encyclopedia Brittanica) so we know what kind of trust to bestow upon it, but the new emergent Web 2.0 landscape. We all know Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace (and we seem to be okay with that). What about Facebook?

This video from Vishal Agarwala looks at the VC trail behind Facebook along with the terms of use statements to paint a pretty suspicious picture. Should we be worried?  And who is Vishal and what is her agenda? She seems to be a Use Interface designer in Florida.  The video has had almost 40,000 views up until now. It seems to be driven by information discussed in 2005 within the CommonGroundCommonSense progressive community. Okay but who are they? (I hate it when sites that have a clear agenda don't have an about us page that names names - makes me wonder) 

Even if I presume the information is all true and accurate, I am not sure if there is enough to draw a significant conclusion. In the incestuous world of VCs, someone involved in government-driven venture capital is invested in Facebook?

Paper Tiger had a track record or built one. And they associated with some of the better known critics of that generation. That gave them credibility. Without that, this well-produced video is just a shot in the dark.

Judge for yourself.

Summing up the Microsoft "People Ready" Controversy

Richard McManus over at one of my favorite and regular reads, Read/Write Web, sums up his experience as a publisher throughout the ad campaign for Microsoft that has generated a bit of a blogstorm.

For him, the issue isn't disclosure. There was nothing to disclose. His lesson learned: "don't use the corporate catchphrase" (People Ready) in his, otherwise heartfelt and genuine post.

Two other lessons I take away:

• Don't underestimate some people's distrust of advertising. And, therefore, respect that distrust.
• Perhaps we could all be a little more open minded about how advertising is explored in the world of social media. It's not always going to work well. When it doesn't, we try something else. 

Monetizing content will make it possible for Richard to make Read/Write Web into a sustainable, long-term business. I look forward to what comes next.

The 4 A's and aQuantitative Talk About A Microsoft World

The American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) is holding their first "Digital Conference for Agencies of All Kinds" at the Graduate Center at City University NYC. I will be speaking this afternoon and since I technically hail from a PR firm, I am a living example of their title. Still, it is really for members who are ad agencies.

Brian McAndrews, President & CEO of aQuantive, is on stage gloating over being acquired by Microsoft last month (just kidding). It only seems fitting that this forum talk about the acquisition burst of ad networks. Mike Donahue from AAAA is interviewing him.

Why sell?
We saw an opportunity here to accelerate our vision: more finances, more technology. Technology is the key distinction between traditional media and new media.

Will consolidation continue?
Yes.

How will your business units change?
(same answer as above plus the following)

Atlas - build a platform that brings one view of consumer to a marketer. Started with display ads and has expanded all the way to VOD
Atlas Ad Manager - publisher technology

Drive - 100% growth last year of this premium ad network. Top 250 Websites and top advertisers not going after the Long Tail. Very targeted cpms.

Avenue A/Razorfish - will remain the most independent. They have invested millions of dollars in knowledge management including a global wiki (I invested approximately $150 to establish my global wiki - so far so good).

"We have learned a lot from mistakes. It doesn't cost a lot these days to make mistakes We put the media planners next to the programmers and the statisticians - that's our model."

How can marketers measure success?
Digital has raised that bar. Third party ad serving helps (I presume they are credible providers). The conversion ad-model (counting the last clicked ad vs. the four that might have had an impact) is an imprefect model. This leads to search advertising being overvalued. They are working on a dashboard to help measure the steps along the way. He calls it conversion attribution. People who saw your message on multiple sites are twice as likely to buy. 

Brian is a confident CEO. Very natural yet on message. But you cannot blame him as the Microsoft deal has not closed yet. Mike Donahue from AAAA started to ask about "Engagement" but it didn't go anywhere. It will be interesting as my preso is all about engagement. We'll see what happens.

My POST (as in Washington) Launches! We Hope...

Jim Brady, Executive Editor, WashingtonPost.com presented yesterday afternoon at the WWWW conference in DC put on by the Art Director's Club of DC.

"My Post" will launch...yesterday. This is social networking functions on the site. This will allow users to "put down roots". Every registered use will have a page on the site. Users will be able to send messages to other users.

Groups will replace forums. Trendspotting and Education groups will launch first (they are managed by someone to keep them focused)

Beyond My Post, they see new options for storytelling:

• Multimedia
• Databases (e.g. database of every vote in Congress since 1991)
• Formats (i.e. distribute via iPod, etc...)
• Reader Engagment - most important change, readers as resources not just consumers; three tier blogs like On Faith; comments on articles

best quote:
"If we can get people to contribute to a conversation the likelihood that they will become a loyal reader/participant goes up exponentially"