Saturday, July 01, 2006

Adriana Lukas's event notes

Many thanks to Adriana Lukas for blogging the notes from her talk at What MySpace Means on 21 June. Adriana is currently travelling around the US on business - and will be for several weeks - so I really appreciate her taking the time to sit down and process her discussion notes for the rest of us. Cheers, A!

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Researching for What MySpace Means in the US

I’m flying to San Francisco tomorrow with Engagement Alliance advisory board member (and What MySpace Means presenter) Adriana Cronin-Lukas. While in the Bay Area, we’ll attend Techdirt Greenhouse, an event being put on by the corporate intelligence firm Techdirt. I attended the very first Techdirt Greenhouse, back in February, and am delighted that I can make it to the second. I daresay there will be lots of interesting discussions which will feed into our event on June 21st.

On Sunday, I’ll watch Adriana present at Vloggercon, a conference for video bloggers (or video podcasters, depending on your preferred term). There will no doubt be many excellent conversations held about the cultivation of communities through video blogging, and especially with the likes of YouTube blowing up business models all over the place, the entire event should be quite interesting. With attendees and speakers at Vloggercon who have mobilised the demand side of the web to supply its own entertainment online, I should return to London with plenty of fodder for What MySpace Means.

I will, of course, be connected during my trip and hope to blog the details of each event here. Stay tuned.

Monday, June 05, 2006

MySpace for non-dummy beginners

If you’re looking for a primer on sites like MySpace and Bebo and why they matter, you could do much worse than to read this interview with Danah Boyd, a cultural anthropologist at Berkeley who also works with Yahoo Research, and Henry Jenkins, co-director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. Danah - an expert in the digital lives of children who maintains that MySpace is now safer for kids than for sexual predators, due to the high level of law enforcement presence on the site - and Henry talk in-depth about the particular concerns of parents, legislators, and journalists over the possible threats posed by MySpace.

Monday, May 15, 2006

MySpace for enterprise

It seems that News Corp is putting together something called Fox Interactive Media, headed by the longtime manager of FoxSports.com, Ross Levinsohn. Levinsohn seems to know a thing or two:

Mr. Levinsohn calls MySpace the antiportal. “It’s not about a central hub, because that’s not where things are going,” he said. “The under-30 set wants choice. It’s not about one destination; it’s about 65 million."

The thing about this New York Times piece is that either the journalist or the Fox execs think they’ve hit upon some kind of new idea - companies conversing online with individual customers and communities.

Fox officials wonder whether this sort of commerce, built on relationships, can be extended to small businesses.

No need to wonder, Fox - there are plenty of business (large and small) doing it already, and have been for years. I and some of our event speakers have actually shown them how to do it, with great success, through business blogging. So how is News Corp going to turn a profit on this?

A Ford dealership in, say, Indiana could create a profile, said Mark A. Jung, the chief operating officer of Fox Interactive. The profiles themselves, he said, would probably be free, but MySpace would sell enhancements to help businesses attract customers and complete transactions, Mr. Jung said.

If the huge awareness of MySpace is what it takes to get more SMEs aware of the fact that even tiny sheet metal companies in deepest Lancashire can yield the rewards of online conversation with niche communities, this is something to which we’ll look forward.

That said, if those companies want to avoid the business equivalent of the MySpace teen horror stories and sensationalist scare items that have been so widely publicised to date, they might want to try to understand the etiquette of online conversations and the nature of the network before they unleash their commercial interests online. (The good news is, we’ll be covering some of this on June 21st.)

NYT story link courtesy What MySpace Means speaker Adriana Cronin-Lukas

Monday, May 08, 2006

Cultivating online communities doesn't involve lawsuits

I recently met with the MD of a prominent UK media company, who told me that the attitude to most companies (and client companies) in his industry to customers with blogs is simply this: Shut them down.

For anyone who thinks that customers having online voices is a passing fad or something that can be fought with bare teeth or lawsuits, you might want to heed the tale of the ad agency that sued a blogger for badmouthing a client - and found themselves on the receiving end of an avalanche of bad PR and hostility.

Individuals and communities are online and are here to stay. Some of those individuals - and perhaps entire communities - may have negative things to say about your company. You are going to need a better strategy for dealing with that than Shut them down. Come along on the 21st of June and get some practical advice on how to make the most of the opportunity presented by the huge growth of online customer conversations. 

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Media still selling audiences, now trying to buy communities

A friend and a known UK vlogger, Danny Fleet, had an interesting run-in with the Old Big Media.

They [CNN] wanted to film me driving around in ‘the style of my vlog’. I asked if I could host it on my site for all and sundry - but to no avail - they wanted £1000 for the usage.

Loaded pun adds:

News agencies don’t interact although they want to give the impression that they do through the addition of comments on their sites, blog readings on the tv news, and user generated video content.

They harvest. They turn us into product and sell us back to ourselves - apparently, at £1000 a shot.

This reminds me of a comment by a Fox News journalist made to Danny Finkelstein at an ASI event about journalism and bloggers a couple of weeks ago.

You don’t sell news anymore, you sell audiences.

Needless to say, the Times journalist looked rather puzzled by this.