Rich's comments

Hi Chris, Thanks for the stimulating view on how to advance the application of social media in the enterprise. As you probably know, many professionals in the hybrid social-traditional media milieu are talking about “App-vertising”, a term that refers to how applications relate to customers and potential customers by providing them with a channel for self-expression, an opportunity to take action toward a cause that they care about, or provide them with a moment of entertainment while building the bridge of authority, trust, engagement, and attention that the enterprise cannot obtain solely through traditional media. That sounds abstract, so let me cite some cases: Speaking before OMMA Social SF earlier this year, Mike Lazerow (CEO of Buddy Media) set the stage. My summary for “The New Ad Unit” is here: <a target='_blank' href=' http://vator.tv/n/70b '>["http://vator.tv...</a> Also at OMMA Social SF, Angela Courtin (SVP of Marketing, Entertainment, and Content at MySpace) spoke about “What users care about in social media” <a target='_blank' href=' http://vator.tv/n/6ce '>["http://vator.tv...</a> and how major brands capitalize upon that knowledge in their integrated marketing programs Quite a few of your recommendations came up last night at the Social Media Club of San Francisco/Silicon Valley, with a variety of caveats. Many people ask how an enterprise sets objectives or expectations for social media programs within the context of an integrated marketing strategy, while others feel that these two processes frequently take place in separate opaque silos. I'd like to say that they meant it in a good way, but that would make me less than honest. Social media practitioners who have built enduring partnerships with traditional media planners and agencies accept that they look like “odd couples” to the enterprise-at-large, but know that they’re pooling skills which can’t easily and effectively be performed solely by one type of media organization. They have to work hard to reconcile the financial and operating structure collisions between programs and campaigns. It’s one thing to hit a metric for a rollout in 90 days and another to trash customer relationships when the services implemented in a campaign have the plug pulled. Is your organization already listening to customers and potentials in the blogosphere on an ongoing basis? It’s a monumental task to make sense of the input. How much do you trust and respect the authority of the process for aggregation, classification, distilling, and scoring? How do you act upon the shifts in sentiment from a stream of hundreds or thousands of posts in a day? Before you bring all the stakeholders together, know how you’re going to sell the integrated campaign and ongoing-program benefits at a higher net value than running campaigns and programs separately. At the end of the day, you have to sell the enterprise on a great deal more than spending some money on social media. If there is to be any lasting benefit, social media facilitates overdue organizational transformation. Thus, many of the stakeholders are liable to fear the changes that are being thrust upon them, rather than embrace the necessity of change. Instead of taking my word for it, watch what Rob Key (CEO of Converseon) says about social media and fostering change “Start afresh to enable social media programs” <a target='_blank' href=' http://vator.tv/n/6b3 '>["http://vator.tv...</a> If you will be in the Palo Alto area late this afternoon, you might want to sign-up for a panel discussion at SAP on the “Enabling Organizational Transformation Through Social Media” with Ken Kaplan from Intel and SAP’s own Donald Bulmer. The Society for New Communication Research, in partnership with the Social Media in Marketing and Advertising monthly meetup have organized the event: <a target='_blank' href=' http://publicrelations.meetup.com/79/calendar/9948766/ '>["http://publicre...</a> I’ll be there. Thanks for listening and watching. Kind regards, Rich
on 10 tips to get started in app marketing

I concur with Ammar Hanafi. The money needed to develop and role out services is much scarcer in 2009 than it has been for quite a few years. For example, business models that depend upon interactive video, such as flash overlays for "Buy Nows" or the Intel-Yahoo WidgetTV framework, won't be able to launch such transactional services at full steam until early 2010 at the earliest. Large-device equipment makers will not innovate this year, while service providers/gateways will be slow to development and deploy on the cutting edge, according to Lance Koenders (TA at Intel Digital Home Group), who spoke to the outlook of new ventures in a discussion panel "The Marriage of TV and the Internet" at the Cinequest Film Festival. A similar timeframe estimate came from Reed Hastings in his keynote to NewTeeVee Live in November 2008, where the VC panel on investment outlook underscored this air of caution. You know it's going to be a weak year when everyone tells you to wait for the next CES. The bigger question is how the smaller businesses will innovate with those services and hardware which are already available, without making too large an investment in technology and methods that will be superseded by mid-year 2010.
on NCAA iPhone app; MySpace cuts? M&A recovery

You're quite right that there's nothing like a real newspaper. However, economic Darwinism is rescuing the environment. I advised the CFO at the Chronicle, Leo Hindery, Jr. in 1985 that over the next 20 years they would have to move away from paper and their so-called Joint Operating Agency (the real villain in this tragic affair) with the Examiner to stay in business. Leo got hip and into cable TV, and took me with him. The rest of the ownership group was too hung up on tradition and the status that owning a paper-based company lent to their news organization and social milieu. Fast forward 24 years (to the present) and a new ownership family …Unfortunately for the SF Chronicle, its’ egomaniacal and brain dead executive offices has chosen to enlist the power of new presses to improve the look and feel of the newsprint, thus spelling out the certain doom of what might have remained as a good news organization and service enterprise in the internet. However, loaded with the continuing operating expense and resource waste in pumping out billions of tons of newsprint delivered over millions of miles on diesel smoking trucks, all hope is lost. It's not rocket science, just good common sense.
on What Am I Missy? Episode 10

The market doesn't want a better looking pile of newsprint, it wants better news collection, analysis, reporting, presentation, marketing, and distribution. Remaining in business demands a product or service produced at sustainable margins. New presses and higher fees for home delivery are a large part of the problem, not the solution. As a case in point, look at how the challenge has been taken on by The Christian Science Monitor, who has converted to 100% online because print costs more to operate than it contributes. It's terrible to have to downsize a company, but it's much worse to lose the whole thing.
on San Francisco Chronicle coming to an end?

fascinating that Antica Terra has so many distinct terroirs.
on What wine should I drink?

If the abuse of copyright and trademark laws is “the trees”, then the abuse of economic power to manipulate everyone and everything is “the forest”. If we become so obsessed with each individual abuse of power, then we are missing the forest through the trees: <a target='_blank' href=' http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/can%27t_see_the_trees_for_the_forest '>["http://en.wikti...</a> The irony is far from being lost on me. For example, while better WYSIWYG text editing capabilities in the VatorTV comment submission system might arrest misspellings (i.e. help us see the trees)”, it wouldn’t semantically decipher our intentions, rescue us from incorrect usages, or steer us clear of disconnected tangents that distract our readers from our intended logical thread (i.e. help us to see the “forest”) . I am a consultant and innovator, though neither an employee of nor contractor to VatorTV. I have been in the media, marketing, entertainment, IT, and online services industries for about 30 years. The excessive dominance of large and powerful enterprises has always been frustrating for most of us, even on the best of days. I can only hope that we are about to enter an era in which many of those abuses will be removed or ameliorated. However, I still do business with such devilish and tormenting enterprises when doing so is the most appropriate choice. AT&T is my ISP; DISH Network provides my home theater with programming; State Farm insures my residence, business, and vehicles; I purchase automotive fuel from BP; I eat (although I try not to) food produced with Monsanto’s GMOs; I patronize the Google Search Engine; run my computers on operating systems from Microsoft; have paid federal taxes to a government that tortures suspects and shreds the constitution; and I refuse to speak the name of the satanic banking giant that handles my checking account. Take inventory on your own complicity with these thieves, liars, cheats, grifters, fascists, murderers, and warlords, and you will confront the larger irony: Neither you nor I are in any position to criticize other small business people for their strategic partnerships with such behemoths. Ultimately, we will forever confront dogma in choosing our battles and forging our alliances. Pretty ironic, is it not? kind regards, Rich
on Bambi's blog: Vator on Entrepreneur

I've WOM-buzzed this story with the a la carte micro-transactions angle: <a target='_blank' href=' http://richreader.blogspot.com/2009/01/ooyala-expands-online-la-carte-vod.html '>["http://richread...</a>
on Ooyala to launch transaction model for video

Ooyala is on the cusp of a big win with the mix of options for the end user. This should enable a new tier of networks and distributors to become profitable sooner. I'll be watching with great interest as the barriers-to-entry lower and sustainability rises for independent content creators.
on Ooyala to launch transaction model for video

Hi Scott, "Admiral" is a noun which refers to a high-ranking naval military executive. Perhaps the word that you wanted to appply in this usage is the adjective "admirable". For example, one might say that it's admirable that you have studied the trademark issue with such passion, while it would be harder to say the same thing about your professional usage of the English language in a business publishing environment. However, one could interpret the usage of "admirable" in this context to mean that you think of Ms. Francisco as a trophy wife or object, which would be degrading and insulting. Worse yet, you have taken your case too far off of whatever its' intended course might have been. Thus, you are losing many readers long before they get the chance to weigh your arguments about whether or not Vator has chosen well in its' exchange of distribution links and clickthroughs with Entrepreneur. When one's arguments are meritorious, properly toned and targeted, they should also be properly framed in the linguistic sense, such that they might command the attention that they would otherwise deserve. Isn't it hard enough to sell ideas in a crowded marketplace or to persuade participants in an open community space without an impeccable command and diligently assured usage of the language? kind regards, Rich
on Bambi's blog: Vator on Entrepreneur

Perhaps some word other than "rapes" would be more accurate.
on Merry Christmas from What am I Missy?

If anyone can turn Yahoo around, it would have to be Leo Hindery, Jr., former CEO of AT&T Broadband. I was with Leo when he bailed out of the hopelessly misled Chronicle Company in 1987, and helped him to startup InterMedia Partners, the tenth largest cable tv multisystem operator in its' day. Leo is a real turn-around god. The media industry, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street all know him and believe in him. Now that he's done with his part in Obama's election campaign, he's available. see <a target='_blank' href=' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Hindery '>["http://en.wikip...</a>
on Who's going to reinvent Yahoo?

The Itunes App Store is a genuinely natural channel for Iphone applications. To generalize the hypothesis more broadly, shouldn't we explore how content providers are succeeding (or not) with "direct to consumer" distribution channels?
on Why working with carriers is a waste of time

The killer-app will remain invisible and unadvertised, like a black hole, observed only by the apparent effect that it has on the parts of the universe that surround it. It will dependably power actionable business intelligence and decisions based upon mining profile and live feed data to gain rapid insights into broad-based shifts in consumer behavior, while still protecting every individual's privacy and confidentiality.
on What's Facebook's killer-app revenue model?

Reach can not be optimized through this approach, because you cannot rely on the large networks closest to you to transmit your message effectively. That's not a service that they do a good job of, unless they are properly incented, which is a distinct business proposition (though not easily supported by influence traders in smaller networks). It's a little like the challenge of affiliate networking optimization. One might want to build level one from medium-sized networks that are not so overlapping or duplicating of each other. At the end of the day it's still very much a mater of how we filter, distill, leverage, and activate the intelligence that we collect from our extended networks. As Matt Weeks points out, aggregation builds noise much faster than it extracts actionable knowledge.
on Managing the mob

Summize was noted today at SocialMediaCampSF as a great companion to Twitter.
on What next - Twitter ego searches?

When Ms. Francisco asks “will Hollywood adapt to our models or will we have to move more toward their model?”. Tim Chang answers, “We’re both learning in two directions … we (ed. SV)’re learning the importance of high quality … meanwhile Hollywood is learning the value of UGC tools, social media, and widgets to build community around their content.” Who’s to say whether we should applaud or duck-and-cover? Is this what Hollywood thinks is their highest priority purpose in adopting social media? Is this on target toward building enduring relationships and trust? To some, it might sound like a booty call: an irresistible though unsustainable relationship. Do these parties really desire co-existence, or do they merely seek to copy from and rip each other off? I’m wondering about the lessons learned for the social media practitioners as the struggle continues over their role in traditional media, and vice-versa. Will a lingua franca, and a new era of working relationships, emerge between independent media influencers and the old school of hidden persuaders? <a target='_blank' href=' http://richreader.blogspot.com/ '>["http://richread...</a>
on How to get Norwest's Tim Chang to listen to your idea