1) Community Engagement will become the Driver of Local Media

Local news used to be the province of the local newspapers, radio stations and TV. It’s become clear consumers will digest local news online as newspapers shut down, and on the Internet, all media are equal – TV, radio and print websites compete for the same eyeballs. A swelter of recent big media portal deals – for example, MSN/NBCU/Hearst,  to cover local news threatens local media institutions through sheer size and scale. Curatorial portals – Huffington Post’s local editions and Outside.in (with investment from CNN among others to support content development for CNN Local editions) will aggregate the news, and local reporter infrastructure will be nurtured at citizen journalist engines like Examiner.com or AOL’s Seed.

Here’s the problem: local is local. Media portals need to figure out how to engage the community at a grass roots level so they have drivers and participants pushing the conversations and attracting their peers.  Portals believe they can scale and develop the website traffic required to support a local advertisement model. However, communities may develop their own home grown commercial systems for the same reasons why “buy local” is becoming a mantra; and the portals aren’t entitling ownership of their local media systems to the community. For that reason, a community may rather spend its local advertising dollars with an on-the-ground local publisher like Minnpost or OaklandLocal, or even a Chamber of Commerce sponsored local media resource than CNN Local.

2) Mobile + Local advertising = Penny Saver 2.0

The first local advertising and search media are starting to emerge: Postabon facilitates the broadcast of local discounts and coupon offers and Milo searches for specific products at the large chains like the neighborhood Best Buy by accessing the store’s inventory database. Expect popular geotagging applications like FourSquare and Gowalla to integrate local coupons and product search. These coupons are not perceived as advertisements. If they save you money, they are called “unexpected cash”.

These systems help solve the consumer impulse buy decision (“I’m shopping at the mall tomorrow, what stores are having sales?”). Traditional search engines haven’t been able to answer these temporal questions down to the local level (try querying Google to find a snowboard sale in your town this weekend).

Related: Examples of Twitter hyperlocal advertising models

3) Mobile + Advertising + Pubsubhubbub = Alert systems

The real time web is pushing business society into a new value paradigm that rewards those who can react instantly and systematically to opportunities. A concept not unlike Wall Street program trading, these new systems work on alerts that ping users for decisions. Mobile devices eventually won’t need “refreshes” to alert; they are always on and by extension, almost coerce its owner to be “always on”.

For consumers, marketing companies like Local Thunder will connect merchants with their community through rich media content development and RSS feeds for alerts. Google’s Pubsubhubbub essentially deploys RSS feed data in real time so alerts can be time and location targeted.

We start getting into Augmented Reality / Minority Report territory when coupon alerts popup as one walks by a store, but some company will make this real time location based alert system a reality, if not a hit, by the end of 2010.

4) Advertising as Content

Infomercials got it right; advertising as content engages customers at the story telling level. And the content may be ridiculous:

new ad from the California Milk Board

Today’s business can no longer resort to trite marketing, and say “buy from me because I’m honest… high touch… lower priced… give great service” with a straight face any more. It now comes off as, well, an advertisement.

Advertisements used to be crafted to lead into the “call to action”. In 1960′s Madison Avenue’s ideal world, consumers would make the purchase decision based on the facts presented in the ad or by the incessant aggregate impressions made in what has always been called “branding”.  In the fuzzy world of social media marketing, where is the call to action?

5) Everybody becomes a marketer, and some will become sales closers

The call to action still originates from consumer need. A call to action may simply be an attractive price, but in many circumstances, the transaction close is facilitated by a personal sales pitch or a referral. As advertising becomes content driven, the combined testimonials for a product or service become far more persuasive to support the call to purchase. Testimonials and ratings of local services (like the current standards  Yelp.com and Citysearch) will be built into every local media resource (see Postabon‘s rating system). In fact, Yelp has elevated the standard so that the 5-star review is becoming the minimum parsing criteria for real estate agents because so many have this grade.

Bad, or even 4 star reviews are now potential disqualifiers

So how can somebody profit from providing testimonials and otherwise supporting the marketing efforts of others around them? Locals will do the same things they did pre-Internet with their Chambers, Lion’s Clubs and networking groups – support each other. New social media – enabled referral systems will be built out locally through Facebook and LinkedIn groups, and through the new local ad applications.

The bigger trend will be the development of local affiliate marketing systems that compensate referrals. Think of websites that have an Amazon affiliate widget or link that compensate owners if their users go through the widget to buy Amazon stuff. Companies will provide applications to build local merchant guides for use by other local business websites to create networks of affiliated services. And local affiliate marketing systems is only a start; affiliate marketing programs extend sales forces without adding overhead, and we’ll start seeing mainstream adoption by enterprises developing strategic partnership programs.

Related: The essence of affiliate marketing

5)a) Everybody can become a traveling sales person

Anybody can become a virtual mobile storefront using the upcoming Square, a secure, simple to use iPhone application with a credit card reader that allows anybody to become a street merchant. Point-of-sale becomes redefined when anybody can potentially sell anything anywhere.

6) Virtual socializing and Webinar ubiquity

Webinars are social media too. They are already changing the landscape on how people meet for business on the cheap, and worry the airlines.

2009 British Airways face-to-face campaign

Current webinar systems like Webex are still too difficult to use. Within 2010, some company will develop a simple to launch, one-click web meeting system that can broadcast live discussions across ad hoc participant groups. Call the concept adhoc webinars. Why will this work? Webinars can become venues like happy hours where groups can meet and share. The key is ease of use, anybody should be able to participate so weekly scheduled meetings can expand as more people know about them. Imagine Robert Scoble producing a one-click webinar party every Friday afternoon to discuss ideas – he would essentially have an interactive TV program that can be produced on the fly without studios and cameras.

Virtual socializing is the natural evolution to social networking because it’s location independent. One example in the real estate world are the virtual REBarCamps that aggregate speakers and audience together in a virtual national conference.

7) The grass roots Web

Website and application development should be simple enough for normal folks who know nada about code, but still want to custom develop a clean, workable application by themselves without hiring tech talent. The ascendance of plug/play blogs and WordPress themes and plug-ins, and Ning based social network applications facilitate the quick building of applications by non-techies. Add in automated features like Facebook Connect, Twitter Lists, Posterous posting, and the latest mini-applications that provide snippets of value to the website, and website development is becoming accessible and experimental to the masses. However, I’m frankly surprised there isn’t more activity to provide simple plug/play applications to individuals and SMEs… will 2010 be the year?

Speaking of websites, the next great media company won’t have a website (h/t Steve Rubel).

Related: How to build a community media resource

8 ) The stream is more important than website

Anybody immersed in the social media already knows this. The content stream constitutes a conversation, and can be perceived as far more “real” than a calculated marketing-focused website presentation. The same new paradigm that makes an advertisement seem  promotional applies to websites. Yes, conversations can happen on websites but there are likely many more occurring on Twitter, Yelp, Facebook and other blogs that are deemed more credible because they are third party commentary.

fr. Fast Company http://bit.ly/5bRTxL

AshtonKutcher.com the website does not exist. He is a Twitter celebrity whose breakthrough social media credential was challenging @CNNBRK to a 1,000,000 follower contest. Media presence isn’t just website traffic, it’s providing value to the readership through new media channels… which leads us to the reason why anybody can now become a media resource, if not a media star:

9) Curation is the new syndication

Mass media used to rule syndication, now anybody can curate and present content across a panoply of social media platforms. Curating breaking news is key to readership – it’s the reason why people follow CNN, Marketwatch or engadget. Twitter has distinguished itself as the forefront application for breaking news, and anybody can use Twitter Lists to curate Twitter feeds by topic, geography and industry. Curation tools, like Outside.in Publisher for hyperlocal news, are being developed for local content publishers.

Curators are the new news editors, and the window is open to create new media properties. Curated local media will be a focus because there’s a media void that both national media and independent journalistic efforts are now trying to fill (see #1 above).

Related:

Hyperlocal curation of real time news

Build a dynamic community media resource on Twitter in one hour

10) A new era of open social media (the adjective “social” will soon be redundant)

Facebook and LinkedIn are closed networks simply because they require confirmation of “friend” status. Frankly, it’s just too much manual clicking to accept a lot of friends. Twitter has distinguished itself as an open network that can amass networks of millions of followers, and is the application closest to a personal broadcast media. Facebook certainly sees the power of massive networks (being the biggest one itself), and in order to compete with Twitter’s broadcast power, will unveil similar broadcast functionality. Simply put, in 2010 Facebook will create an opt-in setting that allows users to open their status updates to anybody who wants to follow them. Becoming a Facebook Fan today is similar but statuses can’t be filtered within the main feed. Once 350+ million Facebook broadcast systems are potentially unleashed, they can be curated categorically like Twitter Lists and conversations more conveniently filtered. Yes, Facebook already has Friendfeed as the model, but it needs to be simpler to use, and will likely cede to a new Facebook open network product.

LinkedIn can open itself up the same way. Since LinkedIn is a more industrial network, value would be derived from curated lists developed by users based on industry or discipline. Although LinkedIn Groups encourages industry conversations, they are generally sparse and hard to follow if one has joined many Groups.

Once networks open up, conversations become even more multi-channel than they are today. A Tweet that gets syndicated across Facebook, LinkedIn, and other networks will provoke dialogues characteristic of each network. Clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic see this coming and have integrated multi-channel monitoring systems. In the latter part of 2010, evolved versions of Google Wave and the Google OS, and possibly Facebook, will provide the same multi-channel operability integrated into their offering.

Related: Check my 2009 predictions for social media last year.

from: http://bit.ly/4Bv7NE

The chronicles of Tiger continue daily with the Mistress countdowns and porn star exposés that are contributing to the collapsing public opinion of a global sports icon. The financial impact hits whole industries – the PGA, Tiger’s sponsors, and the TV networks all relied on Tiger as the drawing card.

This is a case of tipping point media. Mass media will only jump on sensational stories when they’re credible. Once that happens, the social media takes over with the notorious confessionals by otherwise un-famous people. That’s probably one reason why Tiger practiced tight media control… it’s easy to quash one-off rumors when there isn’t a bandwagon of story pursuers. Tiger’s surprise announcement of “transgressions” after the car crash positioned him as fair game for all media.

Tiger is a defining moment in celebrity reputation management. Celebrities will now have to think very carefully about doing questionable things with other people because they have a media mouthpiece – themselves, and a reason to use it for attracting attention.

This week’s Time declares on its front cover ” Jay Leno is the Future of TV”. By parading Jay’s new show at 10:00 to compete with expensively produced dramas like CSI: Miami and other scripted shows, NBC is beta testing whether live content will be as attractive as or more cost effective than canned content.

What’s the revolution? PC monitors are already used like TVs for on-demand programming. Add time-shifting digital video services and Tivo, and it’s notable that TV no longer can provide instant programming gratification with the touch of the ON switch. Canned programming is more efficiently watched by time-shifting to one’s own schedule.

So what is TV good for?  Real time news… breaking news… sports… programming relevant to the here and now. Jay Leno will break the mold to see whether a TV audience will tune into live programming just because it is not canned. If it works, the cost of paying Jay Leno playing talk show host for 5 hours per week is a magnitude lower than producing a series of 5 one-hour dramas. If it works, scripted content will go direct to big screen, YouTube or Hulu, and TV will be littered with sports, talk shows, news shows, reality shows and talent shows, all designed to force people to set an alarm to watch them. Then social media converges with TV because everybody sitting on their coaches watching a national football game or Dancing with the Stars can participate live with others, and make that experience relevant to their lives.

Conclusion: PCs became TV proxies, and now TV is going the route of emulating the real time relevancy of PCs. This is simply a manifestation of media convergence; in fact, it’s cross-convergence.

Breaking Hollywood News is a topical breaking news site that aggregates the Twitter feeds of celebrities. Think of it as a real time version of E!. It’s a simple example of how “verticals” for breaking news can be easily developed and customized for specific audiences. Mass media calls these verticals channels.

Over the weekend, blogger pioneer Dave Winer discusses how Twitter can evolve into a media network, stating:

I think it’s pretty obvious that Twitter is on a trajectory to become one of the major media networks, a Turner, Fox, NBC, Time-Warner, Viacom, Disney. When it’s apparent to more of the heads of these companies, they’re going to start wondering why their stars are on Twitter and not on their own network.

Twitter can evolve along the same paths as other new media in the past. Cable TV introduced multi-channel broadcast, and the Internet itself created early opportunities for variegated channel strategies ranging from Yahoo! to Match.com.  The land grab for the creation and development of Twitter channels is just starting.

The Celebrity Twitter sites (here are two – Twitya and Twitter Fan Wiki MinorCelebrities can’t keep up with the onrush of celebrities – essentially, anybody with name recognition – discovering Twitter. (UPDATE 3/15 3:00PDT – Kevin Rose’s user-tagged Twitter directory WeFollow launched yesterday with a prominent celebrity component.

Here are three of the most recent I’ve seen:

@TheEllenShow – Ellen DeGeneres came out Monday as a Twitter devotee with a monologue to get 1,000,000 followers by day’s end.

(LOL)

@ShiaLaBeouf – First, you won’t be able to find his Twitter account if you’re searching for his uncommonly hard to spell name. (This is a Twitter search problem, it’s also impossible to find people on Twitter who don’t use their real names). His celebrity tweets adds some light into the daily life of a popular actor:

@NadiaComaneci – Nadia, Nadia, you’re just a Twitter newbie so you fall into the same first mistake promoters make – devote your tweets exclusively to promoting your fan club. You should be commenting on the state of gymnastics and sports, and providing insights on the techniques, the new concepts and yes, the politics of international gymnastics (how old really were those Chinese Olympians?).

Accessibility is becoming a component to celebrity in the new social society.

Shaq  encourages folks to talk with him in a Phoenix diner. (And the Suns have Tweetups!

Today’s Washington Post highlights prominent news anchors chronicling their lives on Twitter:

“Here’s a chance through Twitter, all these social networks, to break the glass in front of the tube,” says “Nightline” co-anchor Terry Moran. “It gives you a chance to offer more about your life as a reporter, a person living in Washington.” Being on Twitter counters “the whole notion that newscasters speak from Olympus…”

Then again, they may be Twittering to boost ratings or the Q Score with “buzz appeal” to the audience.

UPDATING @THE_REAL_SHAQ

Now he’s at the Phoenix Fashion Square Mall asking Twitterers to touch him for two free tix!

TODAY’S ONLINE CONTENT FATIGUE

Web 2.0 could be described as a phase in the evolution of the Internet that facilitated individuals in creating content within the constructs of social websites (blogs) and social networks (as participants). User-generated content was the New New Thing when it first appeared refreshingly on blogs (in 2002 blogs were being recognized as media), MySpace (2003), YouTube (2005) and Facebook (in 2006, it opened up beyond colleges).

Now, the discovery phase of Web 2.0 is over. Thinking bird’s eye level, all the content that needs to be online is now online. For example, there are literally thousands of articles (and videos) about how to raise your credit score, and using Google isn’t really going to help you find the best or most appropriate advice. Conclusion: content creation is now not as highly valued when it’s already ubiquitous and en masse.

However, one kind of content is still prized; it’s in the taglines of CNN and Huffington Post: “Breaking News“. Breaking news, in all its forms from reporting to analysis, holds the most social and economic value – world society reacts, trades and competes with New News.

MEDIA 2.5 – POSITIONING AS THE HUB OF BREAKING NEWS

The mainstream media finally figured out that journalist content creation also didn’t need to be salaried. Breaking news can now be reported by anybody in Mumbai or Gaza. Media measures its worth by traffic, and solidifying the market position of being the hub of Breaking News is where Media 2.5 is headed. That means having producers like CNN’s Tori Blase on Twitter‘s front lines receiving and monitoring news stories and alerts from her Twitter network. This reinforces CNN’s status as the breaking news hub when it has dispatches at the borders of citizen journalism. News sourcing is social, every news producer must do this to stay connected with the new citizen news sources and be relevant in the future.

WEB 2.5 – EMPOWERING WEB 2.0 INDIVIDUALS TO CREATE BREAKING NEWS MEDIA HUBS

The New New Media Properties have none of the mainstream media overhead and infrastructure for collecting breaking news – Huffington Post, Politico and video-based Funny or Die are the collaborative media that Web 2.0 facilitates. All they need are writers/video producers who want syndication, and what aspiring journalists/producers will turn that opportunity down? These sites have become talent agencies that trade talent exposure for content quality, and in turn elevates their online presence and traffic.

The window is open, but nobody sees it’s open yet. Any organization, company or even a team of like-minded individuals can now create Politico-type blog network/breaking news distribution properties cheaply by leveraging Web 2.0′s blog and website design applications. A key distinction needs to be made in developing a media property – the content being created and distributed must be quality controlled to attract traffic. Social networks built on platforms like Ning won’t work due to noise and content credibility arising from any yahoo who wants to be a participant. The mainstream media understands this distinction and have been augmenting their journalistic offering with a J-School trained blogger corps (examples: NYT, SFGate), basically trading in the name “column” for “blog”.

Web 2.0 facilitates individuals. Web 2.5 facilitates the development of collaborative websites. The real estate industry in particular can leverage Web 2.0 tools to create collaborative websites that position real estate agents as local “reporters”. Properties like Homescopes leverage Web 2.0-savvy real estate professionals to break local news like the details of recent home sales only they would know about. Seth Godin mentions today that real estate brokerages should create local e-newsletters… this idea aligns with the idea of real estate agent as reporter.

You wouldn’t buy GM stock today without checking Marketwatch.com, and consumers will soon understand they won’t put an offer on a house (in this weird market!) based on month-old data. Breaking news is the killer app.

WEB 2.5 – LEVERAGING THE MEDIA HUB TO ATTRACT TRAFFIC (AND ONLINE FAME)

If you want evidence that content creation is taking a back seat to content distribution, see Justin.TV, an online streaming media application initially launched to allow the masses to chronicle their lives in video. Unfortunately, most people’s 24-by-7 lives are excruciatingly boring, and Justin.TV has evolved into the leading do-it-yourself online Cable Access channel network that facilitates anybody who wants to “program” online TV. Naturally, the most in-demand content are the free broadcasts of subscription streams of sporting events and movies… value-based content is king.

And just so content creators won’t complain that I’m positing the “death of content”, on the contrary, good content creators will now flourish, and gain access to exposure and fame much more easily with the proliferation of the new Web 2.5 content distribution channels (and let’s just call them media).

Media hubs/channels are the antidote to content fatigue by facilitating relevant filtering for discovery of great stuff. Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop and Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo are based on nothing more than the collaborative insights of what is online good “breaking news” content. Somewhat autocratic, but a simple formula. It’s no coincidence that both Guy and Jason have attuned themselves to real time trends as well-networked Twitter celebs.

What I’m trying to say is – the opportunity is build these media hubs is wide open and easy to do… the challenge is to convince your network to participate in your hub. This is the spirit of post-Web 2.0.

Justin Kan, founder of Justin.TV, achieved notoriety in March 2007 by hooking up a webcam on a helmet and broadcasting his life 24-by-7. Justin.TV was born to facilitate similar life streaming broadcasts by individuals.

The evolution of the business model twisted from personal, user-generated broadcast content, Justin style, to a media site that hosts individual broadcast channels.

It’s a play on the “be your own DJ” online model, and many participants are using the pulpit to broadcast sporting events and movies that they are (likely illegally) re-broadcasting from existing online subscriptions. The more interesting feature that YouTube or Hulu don’t have is real time chat functionality to pundit the broadcast.

The moral of the story is the power of combining cutting edge technology (in this case, online streaming video) and outrageous action to develop first, celebrity, and then an online media model. Through discovery, a true online business model – personal broadcast channel – emerged based on the simple cable access channel paradigm.

The early Hollywood Studio system institutionalized vertical ownership of the creative process, in this case movies. Now, with digital media inevitably moving towards free, music companies are requiring artists sign multiple rights “360 deals” that take a cut from every revenue stream. In exchange, the artist receives the marketing and distribution machinery for celebritization. It makes the music distribution industry look more like venture capital.

Techcrunch discusses Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman’s take on 360 Deals at the Web 2.0 Summit:

Today, though, those deals are becoming mandatory. Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman told the Web 2.0 Summit audience that his label now requires all new artists to sign 360 Deals, and that about a third of their signed artists are under those contracts.

Bronfman argued to a hostile crowd that it doesn’t make sense for labels to pour money into artist development when CD sales, their primary source of revenue, continue to decline (although he did say that digital sales now make up 20% of their revenue). Without other ways to make money from an artist, he said, they wouldn’t continue to promote artists.

Bronfman also said that 360 deals give labels the ability to give away music for promotional purposes to spur event and merchandise sales.

And that, for me, is the key. Bronfman, an outsider to the music world until recently, sees the writing on the wall – music downloads will eventually be free, and will serve as little more than marketing collateral to other revenue streams.

In the future, social media – YouTube, LastFM, blogs – spawns the artist, and mass media then offers their distribution package to the artist. Talented individuals get discovered faster, and mass media benefits from lower talent development costs.

The most popular A-list blogs become go-to sources by posting breaking news first before anybody else. Wired has chronicled how cut-throat the competition is. Now, “everybody media” is out there trying to get breaking news up on YouTube and on their blogs.

Tonight’s SNL appearance of Sarah Palin has all the trappings of being a historic media event combining politics and laughs. The East Coast has the advantage as YouTube devotees set up their vidcams in front of their TVs at 11:30EDT for “taping” and subsequent posting on YouTube. The winners are rewarded with lots of traffic to their YouTube site.

This simple news-gathering linkbaiting strategy will snowball into a massive social media trend – “everybody media” – where individuals seek to become go-to news sources.

I’m hoping that SNL plays it straight up and provides Palin with a script that has her do Weekend Update impersonating Tina Fey’s role.

UPDATE 10/18/08 9:30pm PDT: Huffington Post posts Sarah Palin on SNL, who is getting uniformly poor reviews on Election.Twitter.com. What a wasted opportunity for both NBC and Palin… just see how Obama and McCain shine as comedians in their own right in the previous article Obama and McCain do Stand-Up.