Why Apple is like WalMart and Content is Still King

Image: Apple Corp.

It was Sumner Redstone who famously stated that “content is king,” a thesis being sorely tested these days. At the time he said it Redstone was running the family business, the movie theater chain National Amusements, which he parlayed through a series of acquisitions into the media giant Viacom. Redstone believed that content would become more important than distribution mechanisms, and so sought out content producers such as Paramount, CBS and MTV. It made him one of the hundred richest men in America.

Reading the news these days, it feels like we've come full circle. Today, the focus of attention is all on the devices that are delivering information, be they iPads, 3D Televisions or the latest 4G phones. In many ways they are the modern-day equivalents of the National Amusements movie palaces.

This doesn't feel right. It's as if we all suddenly became fixated with the copper pipes in our house, and forgot about the clean running water. Don't misunderstand me – there's no question that this plumbing is very sexy. My iPad feels like a sleekly engineered work of art, in the same way that a 1960s Ferrari does. And the ergonomics are so intuitive that my 6 year-old is an adept user, killing me at Angry Birds. But this isn't enough.

There's a fight going on to control the information supply chain, to become the new gatekeeper. This explains the move by Apple to make iTunes subcription billing mandatory; they want to become the focus of the relationship with consumers, relegating the content providers. In a sense Apple is emulating WalMart, with their relentless focus on supply-chain and market control. The difference is, WalMart is selling plastic crap from China, while Apple is trading on everything from the latest Black Eyed Peas hit to the news that informs an electorate.

Then I saw the news from The Huffington Post and AOL, along with the launch of News Corps' The Daily. In case you missed it, the ailing AOL put-down $315 million to buy the fast-growing Huffington, and pledged to continue to invest in new and original content. And News Corp released a new newspaper specifically for tablet computers, to be quickly followed by Yahoo's Livestand.

Seems like the news is all about the news; how it is created, distributed and consumed. Its not clear to me who will wind-up winning this war of words, images and ideas. I tend to think Mr. Redstone had it right all along and that content is still king, and not just royalties to the likes of Apple. After all, the iPad and its ilk are otherwise tabula rasa.

New Update: A definitive list of social media measurement and monitoring tools

It's been over ten months since I originally published my list of over 80 social media measurement and monitoring tools, and I continue to get a lot of updates. Many thanks to everyone for the corrections and additions.

This is my second round of edits and changes. This time, I've seen a handful of companies disappear (Intelligent Technologies, Kaleidico, Net Equity and Scanblog among them), as well as a few changes in business model or products offered. I've made updates to about half the listed, including Meltwater, Dow Jones, Appinions, Lithium, and Millard Brown.

You can find the complete and updated list here.

 I remain confused by the different capabilities and use-cases these products support -- am I alone?

Please let me know any omissions or errors.

What CMOs want from Social Media

A week or so ago The CMO Club published a short whitepaper titled CMOs on Social Media Plans for 2011. The report is a continuation of research begun in 2009 and gives a longitudinal view on how marketing leaders are thinking about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest.

So, what's the Cliff Notes summary? The research is a classic example of a glass half-full or half-empty, depending on your preconceptions. Take the question “What social marketing activity brings you the highest return on investment?” The glass half-full answer is that for most social media tools, the percent of CMOs that believe they provide “average to significant” ROI has more than doubled. In contrast, the glass half-empty answer is that well over 50% of CMOs either don't know or see no ROI for the vast majortity of social media activities.

What explains this? Certainly not a lack of data on which to draw an ROI conclusion – under 20% of CMOs have no way of measuring the value of social marketing. But the majority are measuring activities rather than outcomes, by which I mean things like site traffic, number of mentions, or number of posts. This is the More School of Marketing, who's thesis is that if we do more things, and we see more things happen, then we must be doing more things right. This is, or course, wrong.

Only a small minority of CMOs report measuring increased sales, or order size, or reduced call volume – all things that can be tied directly to a real ROI. Why so few? Because it is so hard.

Despite the abundance of data that comes with much online-based social media, there's very little insight into how social marketing really impacts the bottom line that isn't anecdotal. Take the example of a typical corporate blog: it is trivial to measure-to-death the traffic on the blog, and even to understand visitors feelings and dispositions. Blog comments and the migration patterns of visitors might give you richer insights. But unless your Zappos selling shoes or Amazon selling books, its tricky to equate all this traffic to a purchase, a sales problem solved, or a repeat buyer. For most of us in marketing, the trail from social media activity to eventual ROI is convoluted, long and indistinct.

Despite this, my glass remains half full. Saying that social media has value to marketing is like saying the sky is blue; saying that social media has ROI for business is hardly controversial either. What is difficult is quantifying where the value emerges and how much value can be gained. This is what CMOs want to know. The report is silent on these questions, and for most of us the answers will remain elusive.

Does the Mass Media Matter?

Columbine, Virginia Tech, Dunblane, Hungerford... and now Tucson. The recent, dreadful news from Arizona has energized an old debate about the root-causes of apparently mindless violent acts. The usual suspects – lack of gun control, healthcare for the mentally ill, and a caustic political environment – have all been suggested as “causes” for these terrible crimes.


And in this current debate, as in the past, the media have also not escaped blame. This time, it's the highly partisan, charged nature of the current news media that is held partly responsible, as if a lack of civility has somehow energized a clearly deranged individual. In the past, the focus has more often been on the violent content of the media, which is thought to desensitize viewers or encourage copycat acts. In both cases, the media is seen as articulating violence across our culture.

Is there any evidence to support the belief that the media can have these dramatic effects?


There's certainly no lack of research on the effects of violence in the media – the American Psychological Association claims an astonishing 3,500 research reports – but there's nothing like a clear agreement on the results. Both the APA and the American Academy of Pediatrics, among others, do claim that all this research does clearly show a link between exposure to violent and inciting media content and an increased propensity toward violent feelings and actions. Indeed, the link between media violence and violent behaviors has been said to be as significant as the link between smoking and lung cancer.

In all likelihood this is a gross overstatement and a wild oversimplification. I wish it were otherwise.

When the well-respected media researcher George Comstock looked across 219 examples of media violence research, he did indeed find a modest link between exposure and actions (the researchers found that the vast majority of the “3,500” reports cited above failed to meet basic methodological criteria or had not been properly reviewed or even published). However, Comstock (and later others) also pointed out that the so-called “file drawer” effect (where inconclusive or negative findings go unreported), as well as significant problems defining and measuring aggression, probably account for any remaining effect. The American Civil Liberties Union argued these points well. In other words, if there is any link between watching violence and acting violently, the link is superficial at best.

Most research suggests that the media is not as powerful as you might think, at least in terms of altering human behavior. Researchers talk about so-called “small effects” on audiences. In one example of this, dubbed agenda-setting, the media is shown to be very unsuccessful at telling people what to think, but rather good at telling people what to think about. Said another way, the media raise awareness and create a public conversation about a subject they highlight, but rarely impact actions or alter attitudes. Advertisers, take note.

Would that life be so simple that dramatically limiting violence and aggression in the media would somehow dramatically limit violence in the real world. The answers for Columbine, Virginia Tech and now Tucson are more complex and deep rooted.

What does Twitter and a Charles Dickens novel have in common?

Answer: Both have 140 characters.

2010 may well be the year remembered for marking the watershed between old and new media. After all, this is the year in which the odds-on favorite movie to win the Best Picture Oscar is about a a bunch of geeks writing social media software. It's also the year were the WSJ among others foresaw a social media bubble emerging. But whether Twitter, Facebook and the rest are really worth their extravagant evaluations is almost beside the point; it is unlikely that by the end of the next decade we will have any US daily newspapers, and the conventional information economy will have been reinvented.

But that isn't why I'm writing on New Year's Eve. This fall my eldest daughter was in the school play Oliver!, and this encouraged me to reread the book. It is a dark tale world's away from the jaunty musical, though many of the significant characters like Bumble, The Artful Dodger and Fagin are similar and true. It's a great, long novel (originally serialized in monthly installments) full of the usual Dickensian cacophony of character and plot. Over the holidays I also started Paul Murray's new and excellent Skippy Dies; at over 600 pages, it too is packed with character and plot, humor and tragedy. So my question is this: Is the sea-change in the media world ensuring the end of this kind of rich, detailed and thoughtful discourse? Nick Carr thinks so, and he's not alone; his eloquence had me convinced. And truthfully, what passes today for "news" in the new media world fills me with dread.

But I'm no longer to pessimistic. My eldest daughter is also an addicted reader, and The Hunger Games series got to her. It's on my list to read too,  but I'll be doing this on our ipod. There is a real social media bubble, and it will burst. But new media has already destroyed the conventional economic model for how mass media works, and how we get information, art, entertainment, even friends... But there is plenty of room for 140 characters, be they Bumbles and Fagins or A and Bs. Information of value, stories that sell... the content itself will likely not change much at all. McLuhan's prophecy is at best only partly true; the medium is rarely the message.

FTC's “Do Not Track” Proposal is a Victory for Online Privacy and a wake-up call for Marketing and PR

Earlier this month the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a landmark report proposing new guidelines for guarding online privacy. Among a wide range of suggested options the most concrete and far reaching is a recommendation to develop and mandate a “do not track” system. This system would allow users to prevent websites from collecting any information about their identity or their online behavior without first getting consent.

This is great news for advocates of online privacy and a blunt wake-up call to marketing and PR professionals.

Increasingly we all live online lives – we shop, socialize, entertain ourselves and conduct our business via the Web. And increasingly, our every move online is being tracked and recorded, building up a rich composite picture of who we are, what we do, and how we act. At worst, this results in gross invasions of privacy or the loss of personal information; at best, it allows website owners to customize experiences to our liking and even anticipate and predict what we're searching for or what might interest us.

For marketing pros, the news is mixed. We've all become accustomed to being able to gather – usually anonymously, usually without consent – a lot of information about how customers and prospects act online. This helps tell us which campaigns and offers work, how people navigate around our site, and even when someone returns to us and starts to show behaviors that would indicate they're moving down a sales process. These data make it possible for marketing to create an almost closed-loop measurement of a prospect lifecycle, and have created a whole new industry for tools that help aggregate and process this data.

If the FTC has its way, much of this could go away.

This is not a new problem. Back in the day, when direct mail was the cutting edge of response marketing, the Direct Marketing Association waged a bitter fight to ensure any “prior consent” legislation never made it through the US Congress. Similar fights have waged around “do not call” lists and telemarketing.

But with the Internet, the stakes are higher. There are too many unresolved security issues and too much latitude in what information is being taken from us. The FTC proposal is the right idea and should be supported.

Feeling Listless

December looms, the Month of Lists and prognostications. For example:

Five essential tips for traveling with your dog

Five vital components to succeed in business

Five things to consider when choosing an eating disorder cure

Conspiracy Theories: Top Five List


And there's a whole sub-genre just for social media:

Five ways social media will change journalism

5 Tips to Bring Out Your Inner Social Media “Kung Fu”

Five ways social media can save you money

5 Ways Social Media Marketing Can Help Your Business

5 stages of a blogger's life

5 Ways to become a Better Blogger

Keep in mind, this is just a recent sampling of the “Fives” -- Ten seems to be the preferred list length, Letterman-style. But whatever the length, the List Blog Post is getting very tired. In fact, if I were to list my Top 5 Things I Dislike about Social Media, Lists would be on the list. And solely in the interests of completeness, here's the other four items:

1. Authenticity
   There's a lot of unnecessary punditry claiming a greater authenticity in social media; A belief that somehow bloggers, Twitterers and the rest are encouraged by the form to exercise greater veracity and to hove closer to the facts of thing. Apparently, it just doesn't do to overtly sell, blatantly misinform or pretend to be other than who you are. Why social media should change a long media tradition of peddling falsehoods eludes me. Not that I'm advocating this, mark you, just that I have a more realistic expectation of what people do. And indeed, are doing. Social media is no more authentic than any other medium – in fact, the form invites some invention and evasion. While it might be theoretically best to be authentic and open, the evidence suggests social media hasn't changed basic human nature much at all.
   
   
2. unNews
   More is often less. There are 20 zillion bloggers and countless online news organizations, but there really isn't any more news in the world. Almost everything we read online is regurgitation, the retreading of actual news from other places. What social media has done is given everyone the right to express an opinion; A noble thing, but often confusing and sometimes an obfuscation to the facts of the news.
   
   
3. Paradigm Shiftiness
   I'm tired of reading how social media is changing the known universe, reinventing marketing and altogether turning our world upside down. The shifty characters peddling paradigm shifts have some well-argued points to make, and there's no question that the media landscape has forever changed. It's also true that many of these experts stand to make money if we all buy into their paradigminess.
   
   
4. Polarizing Bears
   When Sarah Palin talks about her Momma Grizzly Bears, she could more accurately be referring to Polarizing Bears. Especially in political circles, social media has become hostage to extremes. Instead of encouraging dialogue it encourages division. It has become the home of the zealot and the fringe.