If you’re an owner of content, you are faced with the rock-and-a-hard-place discussed below: content is plentiful and plenty of it is free, so how are you going to make money?
Yes, you can make your content the absolute best in class, and you will find a fraction of your audience that will pay because your content is just so damn good, but on a grand scale you can’t really add value to content. You need to come at the problem from the other side and add value to the consumer.
Social media, the tools we have now to learn about people, and the new way we build relationships between people and brands- these are the ways you’ll make each and every consumer more valuable. Display ads are nowhere – they’re a megaphone to an undifferentiated and indifferent world. But if you tell me you can reach Northwest dads in their 50s who rock climb and recently quit smoking (which you easily can, by mining plentifully available data) – and if you are a modern brand that’s built direct and personal relationships with those consumers- suddenly you’ve added value to those consumers, who, in turn, add value to you.

Great piece by Felix Salmon in his Reuters blog, which jumps off from News Corp and its proposed paywall and includes a quote from Group M characterizing non-paying readers of online news as “useless tourists”. Salmon says (I couldn’t possibly phrase it better):

Millions of people are willing to pay for a physical object — a newspaper — but are not willing to pay to read that same newspaper online. It doesn’t make sense that those millions of people are hugely desirable readers when they’re reading a physical newspaper, and hugely desirable readers if they pay to read content online, but are just “useless tourists” if they don’t pay to read content online.

Here we go again with the challenge we’ve faced since “content wants to be free” and “content is king” both came into being: how do you make the consumer of free content valuable?
Seems to me you’d better find a different means of valuation. If you can’t value the consumer by ad dollars because they’re not worth enough to advertisers, and you can’t value the consumer by the subscription dollars you so dearly WISH they’d pay…guess what?

It is up to you to make your consumer – your customer- your audience -more valuable.
More on that next post.

The spirit and essence of social media are completely separate from the tools we use to deploy them.

I kid, really, because I was excited to see a viable tablet, and if anyone can make it happen, it would be Cupertino. I was lucky enough to watch the unveiling from Robert Scoble HQ, along with my friend Don Dodge, and to watch Robert synthesize multiple live streams of video, audio, tweets, and photos into an overview of the event.
What did we think? The take was pretty much unanimous. We’ll all buy one because it’s a fun toy and that’s what we do. We love that the 16 GB base model is $499 but we want the 64GB 3G model at $829. We aren’t blown away. Scoble says “I was expecting a 10.0 and an 8.7 showed up.” What’s the use case?

I think there’s a potential new market for AAPL here. The theory seems to be that there is a consumer base that doesn’t need a workhorse computer, does not need enterprise, but wants to surf the Web, consume media, play games, and use the applications to which iPhone users have become addicted. The larger multi-touch screen is a great use of that technology. The iPad is really fun. It’s probably not really useful (more…)

The New York Times yesterday announced its paid online model. The model’s very much like that used by The Financial Times: a visitor may read a certain number of articles for free, and after that is asked to subscribe for a flat fee.
The Times has been racking its collective brain for a couple years on which model to use and how to implement it. The thing is: the online newspaper is far more valuable than the print version. The core audience should be willing to pay, if they can also be made to recognize that fact.

What makes the online paper so much more compelling? It’s alive and evolving. In a time of instantaneous news, what will make an institution like the NYT relevant and valuable is layers of content and perspective.

No paper can compete on news, but today, the initial coverage of, say, the crisis in Haiti (it’s hard to think of much else right now) can be overlaid with new information (as facts come in), new perspectives (from different reporters and civilians on and off the scene, photos and video from those who are on the ground, and human stories from those affected. The story never ends; it is constantly augmented and remains relevant.

News is a universal commodity and it can’t be sold as-is. But if the New York Times can find a way to be the best at creating this kind of deep, evolving, honest, relevant story, then readers will pay.

(I wrote a post on this last April and have reposted it below. It’s about NYT entertainment content being made more valuable by the participatory nature of the Web. Also, Fred Wilson just wrote a great piece about the NYT and the “Freemium” model.)

Today’s hot tools are tomorrow’s obvious must-haves and next week’s obsolete strategies.

Naturally we get a lot of calls these days from folks wanting social media programs.

When you’re building out a marketing strategy which calls for communication & outreach with/to/from brand fans and consumers on the Web:
DON’T say “What are we doing on Twitter and Facebook?”
Say “What are our goals? What are we hoping to achieve here?” and build your strategy from there.

This holiday season we were treated (literally) to a number of warm and fuzzy gestures by large Internet corporations, including Google footing the bill for wi-fi in fifty-plus airports around the country and on all Virgin America wi-fi flights, and Yahoo! picking up baggage fees at , um, two airports (see what Ad Age thinks of this on top of their justified disdain for the new Yahoo! campaign overall).

This whole “random acts of kindness” thing is a great idea and goes to the heart of what we still call emotional branding. I was a recipient of the Google largesse and it did give me a nice brand feeling (more because I didn’t have to fuss with logging in to GoGo than saving the $12.95, but still).
There is also a lot to be said for the tie-in of “free” Internet to the large Net providers/portals/whateveryouwanttocallthem. After all, everyone feels that Internet “should” be free. Why shouldn’t Google, Yahoo, AOL (hi guys, what’s up?), etc., provide that freedom?

The Yahoo! program is a truly bad example of this, unless it’s really not a consumer campaign at all. As a strange kind of B2B strategy, hitting San Jose and San Francisco airports might make some sense. These are hardly the geographical areas where Yahoo! really needs and should wish to build consumer awareness and goodwill. Yahoo! will never be cool again- Google is barely cool- so why not go be Santa all over the country?

Some really incredible work here at Weburbanist. I am a big fan of strong messaging right at the point of conversion/action. Advertising takes on a whole new life when it inhabits consumers’ everyday environment, and this work is visceral. It’s is killer creative from design to placement (which becomes part of the design).

Just a note re my personal qualms: I think the suicide prevention and pool death posters , while the latter especially is certainly very scary, go too far. There are people out there who’ve suffered terrible losses and don’t need this kind of unavoidable reminder. Yes, tough messages need strong presentation, and the starving child is proven effective even though it’s blatant guilting. Still. We all get to draw our own lines. (I don’t get the cleaver either, but that’s from a creative standpoint.)

Edited to note: every parent I know who saw this was affected strongly by the pool poster. It’s surely effective- pool safety is top of mind for a while – but I wonder if that is worth the pain that anyone who has lost someone to drowning would feel. Would love feedback on that.