The New York Times has this extensive piece slated for Sunday’s edition that focuses on the media and digital communications habits of what marketers call the “millenials,” people born between 1980 and 2000. And the article, penned by Tom Zeller, Jr., is a real eye-opener to anybody who doesn’t already hang around one of these hyper-connected, always-communicating youngsters.
The bottom-line is that these millenials are always connected — via cell phone, Internet, social networking sites, blogs or text messaging. Not surprisingly, they don’t consume media the way more mature people do.
The preceding generation may have thought that e-mail, newsgroups, Web forums and even online chats accelerated the word-of-mouth phenomenon. They did. But they are nothing compared with the always-live electronic dialogue among millions of teenagers and 20-somethings.
The piece profiles actual millenials and I suspect it’s exhausting for oldsters to even read about this group’s frenetic communications activities. Highlighted in the piece is the incredible “feedback” loops that millenials live in — a typical twenty-something can poll friends, colleagues, old classmates in a dozen different ways every day.
The article digresses into a discussion of whether this feedback loop is creating a generation of group-thinkers, afflicted by “hive” mentality. Silly discussion if you know a group of active millenials, who are, if anything, more individuated than any preceding generation.
This age group does, however, move quickly from phenom to phenom.
“The period of rapid change we’ve been experiencing, it’s just been that much more dramatic,” said Vicki Cohen, a senior vice president at Magid and one of the leaders on its millennial strategy team. “I mean every time you turn around there’s something new on the horizon. And this group, as we’ve been noticing, is kind of the arbiter, quickly determining whether things are hot or not. “And it’s much more accelerated,” Ms. Cohen added. “With the technology, the Internet - in terms of being able to facilitate the social networking, which is a big part of this younger group - there’s just so much ability to quickly transfer information.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:53 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The Washington Post’s Leslie Walker has this piece today on how much Google knows about you — and she praises the DOJ for trying to get its hands on Google’s data because that move is a good wake-up call for Internet users. First, regarding the praise:
Rather, the request — and Google’s refusal to fork over its search data — is putting a helpful public spotlight on the vast amount of personal information being stored, parsed and who knows what else by the Web services we increasingly rely on to manage our lives.
In terms of what Google keeps on file, Leslie says it’s a lot in her case because she has turned on Google’s tracking widget, which stores a history of her searches. But, she also notes, Google stores a “tracking cookie” that doesn’t correlate user information with an individual’s search.
This tracking cookie merely stores the date and time of searches plus the user’s IP address. Hello? Google has a record of all Internet searches, and the date and time and originating IP address of every Internet search. Wouldn’t take a lot to mesh those two sets of data together to get everything on everybody, and it’s entirely up to Google to do that.
Walker points this out.
A Google spokesman said that data are not currently correlated with each user’s search query, but Google’s technology and privacy policies would allow the company to do so if it chose.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:47 PM | Print | Comments (0)
After trying to digest Scott Karp’s latest post on bridging the gap between Media 1.0 and Media 2.0, I took a look at Umair Haque’s commentary on a recent shutting down of comments on a Washington Post blog, which spoke to other aspects of this transition. Umair cited the WaPo move as an example of “how not to manage the edge.” Among the lessons he extracts from the episode:
1) The value’s in the conversation. 2) If you can’t have a conversation, you can’t create much value in the attention economy. 2.5) Pretending a conversation never happened isn’t just kind of infantile, it’s actively destroying value.
Umair acknowledges that conversations at the edge can be “raw, sometimes a bit brutal, often full of crap conversations.” But he contends that “from an economic point of view, they’re hyperefficient.” And “[n]ot to learn how to leverage this is going to be fatal - you can’t fight an economic discontinuity. What you can do is find new strategies which dominate it.”
You have to join the conversation - not kill it…You have to be willing to overturn the orthodox assumption that firms talk, and consumers…well, simply consume…New market leaders are learning how to create value at the edge, by innovating how they manage the universe of value external to the firm.
The big problem with the Post’s move is that it’s a barrier to learning: it stops it from learning how to leverage connected consumption - which is exactly the force that’s hypercommoditizing media. Learning to leverage the edge is a kind of judo. But if you’re not in the ring, by definition, you can’t learn how to play…Imagine a Post that did the opposite: highlighted in big letters on it’s front page the raging discussion, actively driving attention to it. Would the result probably have been a flame war? Sure. Flame wars mean your market, community, network, is working. Would the Post have learned a lot more about how to leverage the edge? Absolutely.
To extend the bridge-building metaphor, (perhaps a bit clumsily), it seems that the Post found itself partway across the Media 1.0/2.0 chasm, but without a bridge in place to take it safely across to a reasonably controlled landing on the other side. And then, when it found others (its readers) starting to build what it may have viewed as a wildly-swinging hanging bridge to some unknown (and potentially dangerous) destination, the Post tried to make an abrupt stop halfway across. According to Umair and others, the result may have been a painful and damaging fall, and one that could have been avoided.
While Post editors and managers may respond to Umair’s urging to “learn to manage the edge,” with “easy for you to say, but how,” his advice does seem on point.
But, at the same time, Scott Karp also seems correct in arguing that successful Media 2.0 strategies are not just about conversation, but also about “filtering and “synthesis.” The message here is that while some of us may be active commenters and online conversationalists, more of us remain—at least most of the time—relatively lazy media consumers.
It seems that in this case, the Post found itself with an unexpected and hard-to-control surge of conversation, but lacked tools and a strategy for filtering and synthesizing it, and for editorially and economically leveraging this rapid influx of community-generated content and the potentially valuable “attention” it might attract. But, not realizing that you often can’t safely turn back on this bridge to Media 2.0, it slipped, fell and probably hurt itself.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 12:58 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Credit for the title of this post goes to Scott Karp, who closed his own Publishing 2.0 post with it yesterday. Not only a fun play on words, the phrase summarizes Scott’s critique of RSS and his suggestions for moving it in the direction of a mass market publishing tool.
Scott’s first two suggestions struck me as good, common sense ideas that would be relatively simple to implement and could help bridge the cultural gap between what he calls the “technoweebosphere” and the traditional media world. The third seems more challenging and, as Scott suggests, may be the arena that yields “the real killer app for RSS.”
Scott’s first suggestion for “fixing” RSS is to start referring to “subscribing,” which everyone understands, and stop talking about “syndication,” “XML” and “feed.” The simple and clear message to people, he says, should be “[s]ubscribe by email, or subscribe with a ‘reader.’”
That leads to Scott’s second point—since everyone’s got email, the next step is to encourage everyone to get a reader.
Every site with an RSS feed should have a BIG link inviting people to “Get a reader,” because most people either don’t have one or don’t know that they have one. What’s a reader for? To read stuff from this site along with stuff from other sites, all in one place.
The final step, says Scott is to “use the iTunes model—Search browse, recommend, remix.” He notes that “Google Reader has the search part down,” that “Yahoo at least takes a stab at browsing and recommending” and that “an Amazon-esque ‘people who subscribed to this also subscribed to…’” would be “[b]etter than ‘most popular.’”
But quoting Paul Kedrosky that “people are lazy,” Scott suggests that these tools may not be enough to build a bridge from Media 1.0 to Media 2.0. “The real killer app for RSS,” he says “is the pre-packaged remix…Whoever gets really good at putting together content mixes will have overloaded, overburdened media consumers flocking to their door.”
Here’s the real problem - RSS feeds are still static media, just in a different package. The New Media revolution will come when content is completely atomized and fully tagged, so that it can be remixed into perfectly tailored packages to suit every taste, i.e. truly what I want (when I want it).
But remember - PEOPLE ARE LAZY. They don’t have the time to put these packages together themselves. The real competition in New Media will be among content remixers. We used to call these editors — the only difference is that remixers will have a nearly infinite diversity of content at their disposal.
Since Scott has at least one foot in the Media 1.0 world (he’s Managing Director of Research and Strategy for Atlantic Media), he’s well aware that the bridge from that world to the promised land of Media 2.0 has not yet been fully built. And while his post suggests there’s a lot of money to be made by those who can create Media 2.0 “editors” that extend the bridge to the other shore, he’s also appropriately adamant in his advice to “keep it simple.” I’d bet that bridge-builders (and publishers) who keep his advice in mind will serve themselves (and their investors) well.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 12:08 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Chris Stern, media policy analyst with Medley Global Advisors and former reporter for The Washington Post, has this op-ed piece in Sunday’s Post about the net neutrality fight. Given his journalistic background, Chris comes at the issue in an even-handed way but does raise the specter of a less-than-meritocratic web.
The telecommunications companies’ proposals have the potential, within just a few years, to alter the flow of commerce and information — and your personal experience — on the Internet. For the first time, the companies that own the equipment that delivers the Internet to your office, cubicle, den and dorm room could, for a price, give one company priority on their networks over another. This represents a break with the commercial meritocracy that has ruled the Internet until now. We’ve come to expect that the people who own the phone and cable lines remain “neutral,” doing nothing to influence the content on your computer screen. And may the best Web site win.
The piece doesn’t break any new ground for those who have been following the issue (perhaps by reading some of the “obscure” bloggers who Chris says scribble away about the whole two-tiered Internet debate) but he does raise something interesting. Hollywood, which has, perhaps, the biggest stake in a toll-gated Internet, isn’t really concerned.
In my job as a media analyst, I’ve been talking in recent weeks to lobbyists for some of Hollywood’s major entertainment conglomerates. These are people who know that consumers’ ability to download their studios’ movies and television shows as easily and cheaply as anyone else’s will be key to the studios’ future profits. Yet hardly any of them were more than vaguely concerned about the potential ramifications of network neutrality.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:27 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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