Comcast’s purchase of TV network NBC and movie studio Universal seems backwards to older media veterans who remember the ascent of upstart cable versus the powerful Big 3 TV networks in the 70′s/80′s. It proves that media itself has become a commodity to be digested across a panoply of distribution channels. It just so happens that cable, with its reliable subscription revenue streams and multiple channel assets, now has more financial clout than advertising based network TV and with it, the ability to finance programming through a movie studio as well.

Moreover, TV/cable and Internet are merging towards display across a common TV/monitor display platform. Cable channels pay significant syndication fees to broadcast relevant programming. They are curating content for their audience. However…

Social media facilitates the same content curation done by cable channels. Justin.TV allows anybody to broadcast hit movies (illegally) like a Showtime channel and now, personal broadcasters can get paid for it as a pay-per-view affiliate:

Obviously, copyright issues on Justin.TV seem to fall by the wayside just as they have done on Youtube (Google no longer seems diligent in deleting uploaded copyright content). This tolerance becomes a moral hazard that makes copyright protection unenforceable.

Like other content, video has essentially become free and curatable. For every Hulu, there will be copycat channels. Even Hulu’s exclusive licensed content are easily replicated by screen scraping video software like Camtasia.

Justin.TV’s pay-per-view channels will be the first of a new video revenue model that YouTube (which already announced this intention) and other video channels will follow. Why? Because everybody wants to be a broadcaster.

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.

Witnessing the Consolidation of Hyperlocal News into Media Companies

Examiner.com has accumulated 15,000 contributors nationally in developing a citizen journalist task force, and today announces the addition of NowPublic’s global citizen reporting staff.

Consolidation of hyperlocal news reporting by media groups like Examiner.com,  CNN iReports, MSNBC (recently acquired Everyblock), and AOL’s Patch, together with the online local TV and news outlets, will gradually establish the infrastructure, or tapestry of local content sources.

(The stories in Examiner’s Bakersfield pages sure looks a lot like San Francisco!)

The Media’s Hyperlocal Business Model is “Big Market = Good”

With hyperlocal content sources in place, the challenge for media companies will be to execute a cost-containing and scalable hyperlocal business model that presumably doesn’t have thousands of sales reps knocking on the doors of local moms and pops. They will focus on cost effective national media buys. Will Home Depot blanket banner/Google ads nationwide on Examiner.com like they do in Sunday papers across the nation? That’s the likely initial stab.

However, communities that congregate around hyperlocal content are geographically intimate. They know each other through two degrees of separation and may begin to demand social exchange as a precursor to transaction. National ad buys may not be effective if there isn’t local follow through or customization of the campaign. In fact, co-op type advertising programs that bring advertising decisions down to the local level may be more efficient than one-size-fits-all national campaigns.

Mass Media is finding hyperlocal content sources, but not the hyperlocal business drivers

So where does that leave the rest of the local merchants who aren’t HomeDepot? Media companies may set up impersonal self-serve ad server applications for the SMEs who want to access their media traffic. More likely, SMEs that cater locally will discover they can tap into their community social media and use Twitter, Facebook and blogs to market and advertise their businesses for free.

Hyperlocal business models will be driven on-the-ground by local merchants.  National business models need to tap into those “drivers”, the hubs of their communities, to be successful, but so far none of the national media companies have been courting the community business hubs, only the citizen journalists.

image from: http://bit.ly/zqYhz

The hype around social media is undeniable. The question is always: is it worth pursuing?

Simply put, the social media is contributing to the sea change in how society interacts, and by extension, how business is conducted. Nobody can deny that we’re in an era of flux – economically, socially – and we’re feeling the effects of warp speed change around us. In time like this, dinosaurs die – economic theories, bubbles, Bush, spending.

Answer: Participating in the social media is now essential to staying relevant in society and business. It’s simple, those businesses who refused to use telephones, or use PCs, or email back in the day got left behind. If you can’t see the value of social media yet (and most haven’t for business purposes), remember, participating in the social media is the price of admission when that value becomes evident and powerful. Think of how you would live without the internet now. The tipping point of social media happens when most of society is switched “on”, and it becomes mass media. Then, you’ll see mass media business models overlaid onto this massive massive social graph. It’s inevitable… remember the dotcoms crashed in 2000 for the lack of “real world” business models, and Internet business models eventually became sustainable once the global Internet became essentially ubiquitous.

The Domus Breaking News Network is an initiative by the Domus Consulting Group to create new online media to broadcast real time information. The emergence of social media applications like Twitter that provide instantaneous ways to broadcast and communicate any kind of news is changing the way people digest information. For example, advertising as a blast-out commercial media will transform into customized solicitations where merchants discuss their “deals of the day” directly with interested customers over, say, Twitter. The new media becomes more relevant than “days old” Google searches. Try finding a sale on tennis racquets in your city… Google fails; you still have to call each store and ask them for pricing.

The Domus Breaking News Network is a unique “instant” data distribution and marketing platform. Three reasons why the Network is innovative and changing the way web applications are being developed:

1. Breaking News sites like Breaking San Francisco News aggregate the best Twitter feeds in a city. They filter the Twitter experience so you’re not seeing the noise.
2. The Breaking News Network is grass roots application design. We give it away to media/publishing companies and real estate brokerages and agents, and they can build a Breaking News site in 5 hours. And they OWN the sites; it’s on the WordPress platform so it’s easily accessible to non-programmers and customizable to the market. Once up, that real estate brokerage or media company provides a community service and instantly becomes the hub of their Twitter community in their city.
3. As the Breaking News Network expands to cover every city in America (as well as overseas), the network begins to look like the Craigslist for Twitter feeds. We plan to overlay new business models across this network.

The Breaking News Network Awarded “Most Innovative Media 2009″ by Inman News

Ongoing documentation on the Breaking News Project can be found at Media Transparent.com.

Hyperlocal Breaking News – bringing cities and communities into real time conversation

Breaking Topical News – aggregating the best breaking news on a variety of topics

Media celebrities, from on-air personnel to executives, reaped the high salaried rewards of a high margin business model based on promoting “air” time.

Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman suggests that the CNBC decision to part ways with ex-news chief Jonathan Wald reflects the new budget reality predicated by the slow decline of the broadcast media combined with an advertising recession:

The Wald story is a defining moment. You can call it, with apologies to author Malcolm Gladwell, the tipping point of the news industry.

CNBC put a line in the sand for all media companies. It’s sending a message to the world that it wouldn’t pay up to keep Wald, one of the brightest executives around.

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Today, there’s further evidence of media retrenching… Harper Collins Lays Off Two Executives. It’s notable that “superstar” industries are downsizing top down, presaging a new management structure that processes instead of making deals.

Few news media companies know how to effectively develop their social media resources; they still hide behind their call letters or mastheads and broadcast one way. Citizen journalists – in effect, the masses – are the closest to breaking news events and stories, so tapping into the social media is becoming the key to real time news sourcing. News producers, anchors, reporters and writers should leverage their media celebrity to build their social network standing and position themselves as the “hubs” for all news in their communities. After all, being the hub is the value proposition for any news organization and attracts audiences.

Domus Consulting Group has been a leader in educating the real estate industry on how to use the social media systematically to become hubs within their local community. The mainstream media have the exact same mission to reach out to their community.

We call our system the Social Broadcasting System and invite you to attend a free two-part webinar series specifically focused on demonstrating to producers, journalists and reporters. (And there is absolutely no upsell or even hint of it, we want to show you a revolutionary concept for media business and branding that will increase media market share and thus, revenue opportunities. We’ll show you new business models).

Session #1: Flight 1549, and the Mumbai and Gaza incidents demonstrated how powerful Twitter and citizen reporting has become for breaking news. Tips on the right ways to leverage Facebook and other social networks to reach your audience.
Session #2: How the Social Media and Mainstream Media are converging based on the new “Breaking News” reporting paradigm. Explaining a new business model: how to connect your news network into massive local social media infrastructures… efficiently and free.

Register for the Free 2-part Webinar Mini-Series

Dates:

* Session 1:  Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 9am Pacific time
* Session 2:  Tuesday, February 10, 2009 at 9am Pacific time

About Pat Kitano

The Domus Consulting Mini-Series are for educating industries, organizations, companies and individuals who need an efficient and powerful online community presence. We started with the real estate industry, demonstrated how effective social media is in making real estate professionals hubs within their community, and are now offering the same methodology to the news media and to non-profit organizations.

I sometimes ruminate over new concepts for 24 hours to figure out their implications rather than jot down a quick “yowza” blog post. CNN.com and Facebook’s integrated coverage of the Obama Inaugural yesterday was striking because it was the first time I saw all my Facebook friends come to life in a unified, mostly coherent conversation.

In social network applications like Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook, conversations are siloed. I don’t feel a part of the ecosystem until somebody or I start a conversation. An event like the Inauguration lays down a contextual foundation for the conversation so everybody feels involved. It’s the reason why we go to live sporting or concert events – Facebook provided a proxy for “being there” by gathering all the people I know (at least on Facebook) in one room.

This is one of the powerful applications of Facebook Connect that will surely be used in connection with other events, live or programmed (as in movie watching), to provide the same social experience by proxy. Yes, the conversations may be boring or obnoxious, but that’s like any other cocktail party. I think this is addictive.