August 2010 Archives - 2/3

Making some real world changes…

August 23, 2010 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

Sometimes it’s easy to spend time thinking about the digital world, tweaking websites and writing about all the exciting new trends, without ever making the real world changes that are just as important.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been spending a bit more time sorting my offline life, and I’m hoping it’ll have a positive effect on the digital one as well – if only because my first move means I might be around to write about it a bit longer…

Giving up smoking…

I’m finally making a concerted effort to kick the smoking habit after more than a decade. It’s been a meagre 8 days so far, and initially I was keeping it quiet, but after the first week, I figured it was worth sharing and using the risk of public shame and humiliation as an additional reason to stay off ciggies.

The approach so far is to tell myself I’m not forcing myself to quit forever, I’m making the choice not to smoke today, and that, combined with nicotine lozenges, seem to be working pretty well. I’m already cutting down on the lozenges to far below the nicotine I’m used to, and rarely feeling any physical cravings.

The main problem has been creatively – I’ve had smoking as part of my creative process since I first started writing for a living, and going outside for a cigarette mid-blog post has been part of my routine for my entire blogging life. That’s the only time when the psychological craving really kicks in, but I’m slowly getting used to thinking differently about it. Plus I should have an extra hour in my day at least!

Getting out more…

The temptation after a week of commuting and the office is to collapse at the weekend, but I’m fighting hard to resist that urge, and spend a lot more time actively having fun with my son - over the last couple of weekends we’ve managed to visit places with names like ‘Hills and Holes’ ‘Nine Bridges’ and cool local water park with all sorts of sprinklers and water fountains to run through and play with to make sure daddy is absolutely soaked by the end of it. If that means a little less time surfing without a defined purpose, then so be it.

Getting organised at home…

And the last piece is probably the most challenging and least fun. Organising bills and having to negotiate with companies who have no interest in providing decent prices for decent service is less enjoyable than giving up smoking, but it has to be done. And I’ve even started making a little progress towards sorting out the house, and my wreck of a car.

So that’s my offline life dump – I figured it was worth sharing considering I’ve been quieter than normal, and a lot of it has an effect on my digital output. It should all be positive changes, but just don’t feel offended if I turn down the offer of a cigarette from now on. (And this still doesn’t change the fact that the cool people are all outside the pub smoking – it just means I’ve accepted I’ll never be cool anyway!)

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Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: organising my offline life, realising I do have a little bit of lung capacity left, swapping smoking for blogging

Influence and Empire Avenue

August 19, 2010 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

The quest to measure and monitor online influence is one that is enticing a lot of companies and individuals. Empire Avenue is a particularly different approach in that it mixes the financial market of stocks and shares, social gaming and networking, and peer review and influence into one big pot.

It seems to have recently experienced a bit of a growth spurt, around the same time as it received a new round of funding, but can it succeed where most other services seem to struggle?

I signed up a while ago, and the premise behind the social gaming element is a logical one. You buy and sell shares in other people registered on the network (similar ideas have been applied to celebrities in the past, e.g. the BBC and Celebdaq), and you can also earn by registering your social networking profiles and blogs and having activity on those sites earn you cash (or in Empire Avenue, Eaves).

All good fun – especially now I’ve started seeing people I actually know virtually or in real life start to appear. The payoff is that brands will be able to contact and reward the biggest influencers relevant to them.

Information and influencers:

Besides adding your social networks, you’re also encouraged to list the brands and interest you have, in typical social network style to build connections and to gift data to the Canadian company behind Empire Avenue – and to indicate which brands can contact you in the future.

But the big data gain comes from the ability to rate the activity content imported by others – specifically those people you invest in. The level of investment and ratings gives you an influence ranking, and the reward is intended to be allowing brands to communicate with those who are deemed most influential by the investment level rather than follower numbers.

Will it work?

There are definite advantages to this approach. Inbound links to blogs are counted by Google, but the rise of social networks means some highly influential people don’t have their own online presence with trackable linking.

Follower counts, particularly on Twitter, are effectively meaningless, due to the fact so many people are chasing high counts, and you can even buy friends and followers these days.

So a peer investment market seems like a more logical way of judging things – we’ll tend to invest in people we know and trust, even if they’re not digital celebrities (Although I suspect if and when Robert Scoble arrives we’ll see an Empire Avenue investment frenzy)

I’m still not entirely convinced that people will focus on investing in people they see as influential rather than trying to ‘game’ the system by simply investing in new people whose value will rise as they add their social networking profiles etc, but I suspect, as with most systems, it’ll be a fairly small percentage of people putting in the time and effort to gain wealth in that way, and those buying patterns could be tracked and minimised in various ways.

I think the biggest challenge on a membership level is to encourage people onto a platform in addition to their main social networks, and effectively onto one which isn’t amount engaging in sharing or conversation. There are plans to open up APIs and allow developers to play with the information, and a Facebook App or integration into the popular Twitter clients would help.

The other big challenge is on the brand level. Brands are increasingly engaging in social media, investing in time and resource to find influencers and brand advocates, and reach out to reward them in some way. But the fact that this is embedded so heavily in a gaming mechanic may put some off (although the rise of social gaming, and the rise of the average age of gamers might mean that the time is right for their type of mechanic), and I do wonder if the rewards will appear before the initial level of enthusiasm has worn off for many people – there seem to be a fair number of people signing up, filling out some details, and then not doing very much. Mind you, the same thing happened with Twitter back in the early days.

And there is one very clever element of the service – by rewarding external activity, those people who sign-up, link profiles, and never come back are still contributing to the data and receiving investments, so the service is still building while they’re absent. And even if they’re not checking their account or registered email addresses, you’ll be able to see which networks they’re actively using and track them down that way…

Now, who wants to buy a piece of me?

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Filed Under: Analytics, Social Media Monitoring, social networks, Useful Tools Tagged With: buzz, buzz marketing, connecting with brands, empire avenue, finding influential people, game mechanics, influence tracking, social networking influencers

Thoughts on UK magazine ABC figures…

August 12, 2010 By Dan Thornton 9 Comments

It still feels a bit weird not to be involved in the magazine industry when the ABC figures are released – although I’m getting used to examining the RAJAR figures for radio instead.

The thing is, the ABCs feel a bit odd this year, with the period-on-period and year-on-year increases feeling a bit hollow considering magazine sales grew 0.3% from last year – but that year was a historic low of 23.8 million. At the start of the decade, 30 million plus was the regular figure. And although the recession has played a part in sales, the decline started in 2005.

Looking in more detail at the top 100 titles, it’s dominated by Sky and supermarket titles. 51 of the titles posted declines year-on-year and the same number dropping period-on-period.

There are some positives for magazines in the homes, business, current affairs, and women’s sectors – although the ‘classic’ women’s magazines and several of the newer ones dropped. And it seems covermounts are more important than ever… the biggest drop was OK! magazine, which dropped 20.2%

But the men’s market trumps that with FHM down 18.1%, Nuts down 22%,Zoo down 27.9%, and Loaded down 26.3%. Free magazine Shortlist grew, as did Stuff, BBC Focus, Men’s Fitness, Esquire and Front. But two of those only grew by 1% or under (and Bauer Media is planning a new glossy men’s mag?)… That market fall is only matched by the decline in TV mags. Only two magazines didn’t drop in that area.

And out of all the publishers, BBC, Dennis, Conde Nast and Shortlist were up on last year.

It’s still a situation where slightly down or flat figures are still ‘the new up’

So where are the readers going? A lot of people have commented on the changes in the media over the years…

The recession – not just disposable income, but the perception of value in times of economic hardship.
The internet – free, accessible content which matches many of the print markets –including digital editions of the same titles. And all kinds of alternatives for entertainment from social networks to video sharing.
Mobile – see above, although the potential of paid apps means free content might be harder to find…
TV on demand – allowing you to fill up your leisure time more effectively if that’s your choice.
Gaming – whether social, console, mobile, or PC, gaming is a huge market and a big source of entertainment time.
Wifi – suddenly the internet is more accessible when you’re travelling – by train for example. Add in laptops and tablets.

Presumably by coincidence, Steve Rubel suggests one route that media companies should take for the future, regardless of the format their content is delivered in.

It would be interesting to compare with book sales to see if the desire for more in-depth information is holding strong, but the last figures I can find are from January 2010, with a drop of almost 7% for print books in 2009. Meanwhile ebooks have overtaken hardbacks on Amazon US.

I think it’s a sign that mass-market print titles, and profit margins, will never return to the pre-2005 levels, whatever anyone tries. The future for a sustainable print business in the long term is most likely to be much, much smaller runs of higher quality issues which are special in some way by commemorating events or providing in-depth information and experiences. But even most of those are going to face a massive challenge, particularly from tablets. I’m not a huge fan of Apple’s iPad, but I’ve found it’s great for content consumption, as is the Kindle, and as, no doubt, at least some of the Android tablets will be.

Then look at the likes of Flipboard and Pulse – two recent iPad-friendly apps which do a great job of presenting user filtered, or user’s social graph-filtered news and information. Or the semantic technology used by the likes of the idio platform for a while now.

I firmly believe the media companies who are performing best in the market, and show the signs of continuing that trend are the ones that most closely resemble tech organisations, and which are diversifying in everything to find out what works now whilst there is still some money left on the table.

Something that really made me chuckle in this context is an article on Giga Om, in which Paul Graham, the founder of tech incubator Y Combinator, convincingly explains the reason that Yahoo has struggled is that it turned into a media company at the end of the 90s. That’s not to say Yahoo can’t be successful, but the fact that one of the largest websites and digital advertising networks moved too close to becoming a media company must worry anyone who isn’t trying to innovate their media company at the moment.

Speaking to someone earlier today about their ambition to become a journalist, I could only advise them to put digital first, spend time learning at least the solid foundations of coding, SEO and social media marketing, and consider starting up something themselves rather than pursuing a print job – I’m just not sure there will be many around soon, and probably a lot of them will be extremely small start-up operations with a 20k circulation for an extremely niche product.

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