Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

For Some, A World Wide Web That Never Was

Broadband, Internet, Mobile, Music, Online Video, Radio | Posted by Larry Greenberg
Aug 24 2010

Chris Anderson, Wired’s Editor-In-Chief, and Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair columnist and Rupert Murdoch biographer, recently wrote dueling columns in a special Wired feature called “The Web is Dead.”   For his part, Anderson described the World Wide Web’s diminishing role as the all-purpose gateway to the Internet.  Other Internet platforms and devices, including mobile, have become the preferred means of online access.

The piece speaks for the United States and probably reflects trends in many other developed countries.  A decade ago, especially in the United States, the Web was synonymous with the Internet future.  Today the terms “Web” and “Internet” are used interchangeably, although the web is just one way to get on the Internet.  As Anderson points out, thanks to iPhones, iPads, Blackberries and other smart mobile devices,  a majority of users’ online time is spent outside the confines of web browsers.  If the Internet is the Super Information Highway (sorry about the hackneyed metaphor), then the Web is becoming more like Route 66, a historic road that has since been bypassed by quicker and better ways of reaching their destinations.

The success of non-Web platforms has to do with an improved user experience, that is, the ability to get desired content more easily.   “Every time you pick an iPhone app instead of a Web site, you are voting with your finger,” Anderson wrote.  “A better experience is worth paying for, either in cash or in implicit acceptance of a non-Web standard.”

Of course, “The Web is Dead” title was likely meant to be more provocative than literal.  Perhaps it’s more accurate to say the Web is waning, evolving into just another useful means of Internet access.

So if the Web really is ebbing in the United States and other developed countries, what about emerging nations such as India?

In a July 30, 2009 post, “India’s Flourishing Newspaper Industry and Its Internet Future,” I discussed how India may well follow its own path to the online world.  In India, where landline penetration is low, the mobile subscriber base was nearly 525 million in 2009, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, up from 234 million connections at the end of 2007.  In May 2010, the government auctioned off its 3G broadband spectrum, creating opportunities for carriers and content providers to offer an infinite array of revenue-generating Value Added Services (VAS), including music streaming, radio, videos and online games.

In July 2010, the GSMA announced that the number of global mobile connections has surpassed the 5 billion mark. As 3G is adopted around the world, there could be hundreds of millions of people enjoying their first taste of advanced Internet connectivity without ever having surfed the Web. For these users, perhaps the Wired article might aptly be re-titled, “The Web: You Can’t Die If You Never Lived.”

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Gary Vaynerchuk: Insights from a Successful Web Entrepreneur

Audience Engagement, Branding, Free Content, Internet, Media, Online Video, Social Media | Posted by Larry Greenberg
Jul 30 2010

If you didn’t attend the July 28 NY Video Meetup, I recommend watching the following James Lipton-style interview that group founder Yaron Samid conducted with Gary Vaynerchuk.

nyvideo on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

A key discussion topic:  What can content producers learn from the 34-year-old Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV, a daily video blog about wine that he started in February 2006 and which now enjoys more than 90,000 daily viewers?

In 1997, before the emergence of such social networking platforms as Twitter and Facebook, Vaynerchuk used the web to rebrand his father’s wine business.  With the launch of Wine Library, a retail site, he increased the company’s annual revenue from $4 million to $60 million as of 2008.  Success begat success for Vaynerchuk, with the release of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Crush It! Why Now is the Time to Cash in on your Passion, in 2009, numerous national television appearances including Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and the co-founding with his brother AJ of VaynerMedia, a boutique agency that works with personal brands, consumer brands, and startups. He is also an angel investor in various startups.

“There’s no overnight success,” Vaynerchuk told the NY Video audience, which consisted of about 200 video producers, entrepreneurs and other industry professionals.  Building an audience is a “marathon,” in which expertise is “massively important” and the traditional concept that ‘content is king’ is “really a big deal.”

He also said that content providers really need to care about their audience, taking the time to respond to each inquiry, including emails.  “If anyone follows you or watches you, you should be grateful.  It’s not the size but the emotion” of the following that matters.  Vaynerchuk said the Twitter phenomenon has hurt because, “it’s created a culture about numbers.  How many of those (followers) really care, at least from a business standpoint.  To get them to really care, you must care about them first.”

Vaynerchuk said online entrepreneurs should be focusing on the revenue-generating potential of mobile.  He foresees possibly developing a Wine Library smartphone application that would include a barcode scanner that enables shoppers in the store to see if his show has reviewed a particular wine or to determine whether a store has a recommended wine in stock.  He also envisions each Wine Library TV episode ending with shopping list.

Oh, and he made this one prediction: Facebook Connect is going to win search over Google. He said people would prefer getting a friend’s recommendations than some anonymous opinion positioned through SEO.  “Context of relationship is really powerful,” Vaynerchuk said.

If you’re interested in developing a following for original web content, I highly recommend listening to Vaynerchuk’s entertaining and insightful discussion.

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Gulp! Avoiding Being Hooked By Bad People – or Bad Information

Internet, Journalism, Media | Posted by Larry Greenberg
Mar 05 2010

You may consider yourself too worldly to fall for a phishing scam.  But be honest.  Chances are that some time in your internet life, overwhelmed by the daily barrage of emails and other messages, you let your guard down.  That’s when you received an authoritative-looking email with a link you clicked on in haste, only to learn you were tricked by a cyber-criminal seeking to take control of your computer and/or steal your valuable personal information.

If this has never happened to you, then you are most savvy.  Or maybe lucky.   Care to test your level of gullibility? SonicWall, a company that provides secure network solutions, has a 10-question quiz you can take to see if you can tell the scammers from the mere spammers.  According to the site, only 7.4% of those who have taken the quiz have scored a 100%, so if you don’t get an “A,” don’t feel too bad.

But in addition to being taken by bad people, how good are you about not to be taken in by bad information?  If fending off phishers is difficult, consider how hard it is to sift through the countless news resources – broadcast and cable networks, newspapers and magazines, email newsletters, blogs, tweets, comments, and on and on.  Even the most respected, best- intentioned members of the fourth estate can sometimes, if inadvertently, misrepresent the reality involving a particular issue or story.  And while the blogosphere and comments boards offer democracy the greatest forum in human history, the conversations often have less to do with sober scholarship and due diligence than with emotional and even juvenile partisanship (partisanship in the broadest sense of that term).  Even the most discerning information consumer will at some point, due to data-weary vulnerability, accept something as fact when it should have been treated with a healthy dose of skepticism.

The tools that make it so easy to disseminate inaccurate and distorted information also enable simple double-checking of facts.  So while it’s easy to get caught in the frenetic pace of an electronic news junkie, it’s also simple enough to step back and carefully consider an article or statement that’s been presented as truth.  Just as one might use the web to authenticate or debunk a phishy-looking email, one can conduct a Google web and news search to bring up a wide range of well-documented results covering a seemingly infinite range of topics.

There are also numerous sites dedicated to fact-checking.  One such site is, in fact, called FactCheck, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, which tests the validity of assertions made in the world of politics.   Another, Snopes, has become popular for verifying or discrediting urban legends across a wide range of categories.

So the next time someone tries to play on your emotions, whether with a scary looking email pretending to be from your bank or a terrifying-sounding message masquerading as the truth, don’t forget the power of the Internet to shine a light on the reality of the situation.  It can’t hurt to get information from more than one source.

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Crowdsourcing: The Next Digital Age Phenomenon?

Internet, Social Media | Posted by Larry Greenberg
Aug 26 2009

I attended recently what might be termed a crowdsourcing event.

It was a Meetup.com group involving a presentation at a popular New York bar by Pepsi’s Gatorade brand team.  At the end of their presentation, the Gatorade folks solicited ideas for revamping the sports drink’s image from a room of social media and marketing professionals.  The reward?  Those who offered the best concepts might be invited to make a more comprehensive, one-on-one pitch for Gatorade’s business.

I don’t know if Pepsi ever contracted with any of the marketers who spoke up at that open call, but recent news suggests that crowdsourcing is growing in popularity as both a marketing and fundraising strategy.

A few years ago, when the internet was evolving into a practical way to distribute multimedia, brands began latching onto crowdsourcing as a new way to tap the brainpower of the masses. Actually, companies didn’t call it crowdsourcing then.  Other terms like “active engagement” and audience “conversation” were used to describe the promotions that brands created to gain mindshare. Many brands started awarding prizes, fame and the remote dream of an entertainment career to the consumer or prosumer who created the cleverest video, song or other type of content.   These crowdsourcing efforts were primarily about publicity, not necessarily about mining for marketing gold. Contests quickly became old hat.

That could be changing, however.  In Britain, Unilever has announced a new $10,000 competition soliciting ideas from the public through a specially created website for a new TV and print campaign promoting its Peperami snack food brand. What’s different is that Unilever jettisoning their advertising agency of 16 years, Lowe, in favor of the crowdsourcing strategy.

It could be that tough economic times helped influence Unilever’s decision to experiment with a crowd-driven creative approach. Likewise, the economy could be stimulating interest in new entrepreneurial models for raising funds.

As Silicon Alley Insider has noted, dwindling dollars from traditional investors may be prompting entrepreneurs to experiment with the crowd-funding approach.  Companies such as Kickstarter, SellaBand and Spot.us are enabling start-ups, artists, journalists and others to obtain micro-financing from thousands of individuals.  In a New York Times profile of his company, Kickstarter Co-Founder Perry Chen referred to it as, “a sustainable marketplace where people exchange goods for services or some other benefit and receive some value.”

It seems that social networking and microblogging have been hogging the news on the front page – or landing page, if you prefer – for some time now.  Don’t be surprised if a new phenomenon, crowdsourcing, begins grabbing some headlines of its own.

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Appealing to the Youngest Common Denominator

Audience Demographics, Branding, Film, Internet, Marketing, Media, Online Video, Television | Posted by Larry Greenberg
Aug 11 2009

New York Times film reviewer A.O. Scott recently lamented Hollywood’s reliance on formulaic juvenility.  Just look at this summer’s crop of sequels, comic-book based adventures and bawdy comedies. For Scott, the issue wasn’t whether they were financially successful – many were – but whether box office success means movie-goers actually liked what they saw.

Cinemas continue to attract audiences, despite countless other entertainment options. It could be that unlike professional movie critics,  ticket buyers, both young and old, enjoy what the studios are offering. It could also be that going to a movie theater is still a relatively inexpensive (if you forgo the super combo at the concession stand), immersive and social experience. It’s a good excuse to get out of the house. For many, it would take a record string of stinkers to break their movie-going habit.

Scott’s wish that Hollywood give more original, mature and complex films a chance to find an audience has been echoed by many.  I share the sentiment. I would probably go to the theater more often if only there were more interesting choices.  But the studio statisticians aren’t about to ignore numbers like these: According to a 2007 MPAA Movie Attendance Study, “although 12-24 year-olds represent 22% of the total population in the United States, they represent 27% of all moviegoers and 41% of all frequent moviegoers.”   No surprise that the teenager perspective totally rules.

Scott is not the only one to recently express unhappiness with Hollywood’s long-accepted youth marketing strategy. Late night talk show host Craig Ferguson recently railed in his monologue against television advertisers, their obsession with the young adult demo, and how this is the reason why many shows tend to be sophomoric or, as he puts it, “why everything sucks.”

You can view Craig Ferguson’s monologue here:

The conventional wisdom, established by the television advertising industry some time back in the 1950s, is that young audiences are most valued because they represent an opportunity to build a lifetime brand relationship. Television programming executives, therefore, must design shows to reel them in; to do otherwise would be innovative, but possibly career-ending, risk-taking.

Can we expect studios and networks to continue to cater to the tastes of a young audience at the expense of the older demographic?  Or will the emerging economics of the online world enable new opportunities for producers to serve the diverse tastes of a chronologically broader audience?

Decades after U.S. homes began being wired, cable networks finally began to deliver programming with the sophistication, interwoven plotting and nuanced character development of a great novel.  Premium networks like HBO broke the mold with The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, and now the basic cable networks have followed suit with such series as Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

Online “television,” which is associated typically with user-generated content, is often accused of celebrating juvenility.  As the technology grows up, it’ll develop into a platform that better serves a broader demographic. And then, who knows? If the quality of the content is good enough, some people might be willing to pay for it.

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