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Posts Tagged ‘Media Outlets’

5 Old-School Businesses That Rely On User-Generated Content

You think the idea of user-generated content as a business model was invented in the Aughts? No way. Media outlets have been drawing on material created by amateurs, consumers and customers for generations and repackaging it for your entertainment.

Folksy as it may sound, our history is driven not strictly by the polished content produced by a class of citizens with a slew of degrees and many years of training – a surprisingly amount has been generated in a largely unfiltered form by the masses.

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Lon S. Cohen is a freelance writer and social media consultant. He is @obilon on Twitter.

Necessity meant that user-generated content was packaged and presented through very structured channels. That’s not that different from today, where the stuff that we produce is presented through some slick content management system on websites like Blogger or Square Space or through podcatching software like iTunes.

Talk Radio

Click and Clack (Tom and Ray) are two brothers from the very funny and very informative nationally syndicated NPR call-in show, “Car Talk.” Since the 1980s, these guys have done nothing but take calls from real life people who are having trouble with their cars, and then attempt to give good advice and be funny at the same time. It works. While the actual talking is done by these two grease monkeys the fodder is all provided by real people who call in with real automotive woes.

Dear Abby

Think that newspapers are being killed by user-generated content? Well it’s about time we returned the favor since so many advice columnists made a name for themselves using our pitiful problems to advance their fame, dispense advice, sell a few newspapers and make some dough to boot.

One of the most famous and recognizable names in the advice column game was started in 1956 by one Pauline Phillips using the pen name Abigail van Buren or Dear Abby to dispense her “uncommon common sense“. Without the contribution of hundreds of thousands of users over the years, Dear Abby and her twin sister, Eppie Lederer (a.k.a Anne Landers), would never been able to produce such a voluminous supply of folksy advice.

America’s Funniest Home Videos

With the invention of the hand-held Super8 film camera and the video tape recorder, average people could tape themselves doing all sorts of silly, stupid, dangerous, profound or mundane things. Sometime in the late 1980s, television producers saw a goldmine in the stockpile of footage the average American had been recording for more than two decades.

In closest precursor to YouTube that anyone can probably point to, AFV consisted of the serendipitous slapstick of the average American man and beast. From sledding into the side of a house to a cake in the face, American viewers are still not tired of this shows format even though much more of the same can be found on YouTube every day.

Fanzines

Of course, the geeks rule in this very early form of user-generated content. In the 1930s, amateur magazines were produced by science fiction fans as a way to connect with other like-minded people. This became a massive network of people who produced, collected, commented and held conversations about science fiction. Some of the early fanzine publications even consisted entirely of letters sent in by subscribers – a publication with a cool sort of self-generating content paradox!

The preeminent SciFi convention, Worldcon, even instituted a best Best Fan Writer and Best Fan Artist category in the mid fifties to recognize the best of fan made content. Technological innovations like mimeograph and photocopy machines allowed for faster, quicker reproduction of fanzines to a global audience but unfortunately it wasn’t until bulletin board newsgroups and blogging technologies came about until that information could be transmitted faster than the postal system allowed.

Late-Night Television

David Letterman had some wild antics by decidedly non-professional persons and animals with the Stupid Human Tricks and Stupid Pet Tricks segments on his late night show.

Along with fellow comedy writer, Merrill Markoe, Letterman hit on success with these two segments that invited the public to showcase their talents (and the talents of their furry friends) on national television. There were others who followed the David Letterman model of plumbing regular people for content to display on big media outlets.

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Gain a Job, Lose Two Jobs: Do Tech Companies Wield Too Much Power?

I’m a big fan of maxims and technology. It should be no surprise, then, that Melvin Kranzbergs six laws of technology really speak to me. Perhaps my favorite is, “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” There have always been – and will always be – winners and losers. Lately I have been wondering if there have been too many of the latter and not enough of the former.

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Guest author Phil Simon is an independent technology consultant and a dynamic public speaker for hire. He focuses on the intersection of business and technology. Phil is the author of two books: Why New Systems Fail and The Next Wave of Technologies. He maintains a blog, writes for a number of technology media outlets, and hosts the podcast Technology Today.

What specifically am I talking about? I’m talking about how there are only a few companies and industries actually creating jobs these days – and how they’re certainly in the driver’s seat. In this post, I’ll take a realistic (as opposed to moralistic) look at the power that technology companies are wielding these days vis-à-vis job creation.

Supply and Demand at Work

Consider the recent announcement by Facebook to create 200 jobs in Austin, Texas. However, there’s a hitch. The company’s U.S. expansion is contingent upon Austin officials approving considerable tax breaks.

Some might question why local governments would essentially bid for jobs. It’s really quite simple: supply and demand. In this case, the demand for jobs is quite high while the supply is not. What’s more, from Austin’s perspective, the costs of lost tax revenues need to be viewed against the self-explanatory benefits of newly created jobs.

Google in North Carolina

With that in mind, it’s hard to blame Facebook or Austin city officials for trying to make a deal. In fact, they are hardly the first parties to work out a sweetheart deal. I can cite a number of recent examples of organizations that have played would-be suitors against each other for the purposes of procuring the lowest corporate taxes.

Perhaps the most publicized recent case involved Google and Research Park, North Carolina. In that very piece, Rick Smith writes about the complicated negotiations that Google executives held with public officials about job creation – and the subsequent public backlash. Smith rightly asks two questions: Should North Carolina government officials accede to Google’s demands? And what’s the alternative?

Technology’s Role in Unemployment

So there’s a fundamental imbalance between the supply and demand of jobs. Let’s not pretend that this has never happened before. However, let’s compare The Great Recession with previous economic crises. What’s different this time? Two things.

First, technology has made jobs more portable, less tied to an individual community. It’s not as if Procter & Gamble in 1932 could make contemporary arguments in an attempt to bargain for tax concessions from local government. Employees had to work near other employees; they weren’t virtual.

Now, my plumber still needs to be local but he is increasingly the exception to the rule. High-tech companies such as Facebook and Google can take their operations virtually anywhere around the globe. What’s more, without getting all political, U.S. tax laws are hardly as employer-friendly as that of other countries that are equally if not more desperate for job creation. Don’t think that tech companies are not acutely aware of these facts when they make local U.S. communities in essence bid for job, a trend that will continue.

Second, technology seems to be destroying jobs much faster than it is creating others. German economist Joseph Schumpeter coined a term for this phenomenon in 1942: creative destruction. No doubt that has endured for both its relevance and its wonderful dichotomy.

Technology has always been a disruptive force, but has it become a net negative with respect to job creation? Journalists certainly come to mind. Also, what about the downward pressure that technology exerts on wages? What about the emergence of “The Disposable Worker“. As Peter Coy, Michelle Conlin and Moira Herbst argue in a recent BusinessWeek article, more and more people are forced to work as independent contractors, absent the benefits of W-2 – e.g., health benefits, sick time, etc.

Business Realities and the Swinging Pendulum

Let’s not kid ourselves here. No economic system is perfect. With capitalism, you have to take the fleas with the dog. Publicly traded corporations such as Google have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to maximize profits. As for privately held companies such as Facebook, VCs investing millions of dollars surely want to see a ROI sooner rather than later.

Bottom line: We can’t blame any organization for minimizing expenses and seeking the lowest taxes, the biggest loopholes. Current economic conditions allow companies to be extremely picky with regard to hiring and establishing new offices. The pendulum has swung squarely to their side.

The Downside of the Internet and Globalization

The question becomes: Is the pendulum permanently stuck on the side of employers? In other words, have globalization, the widespread adoption of broadband, and collaborative tools collectively put too much power in the hands of employers? If so, then are employers unjustly wielding their power to extort onerous terms from communities desperate for job creation?

I know enough about economics and history to rarely use the term “permanently.” To me, it’s the acme of foolishness. I’d also argue, however, that it’s equally foolish to take a Pollyannaish view of technology. Returning to Kranzberg for a moment, technology always creates winners and losers. For the foreseeable future at least, it appears as if employers will fall into the former group.</P

Photo by dreamguy.
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Navigon keeps MobileNavigator iPhone app fresh with 3D terrain views, Facebook / Twitter integration

Hey, software engineers of all shapes and sizes — are you keeping an eye on this? Navigon is releasing yet another significant update for its continually improving MobileNavigator iPhone GPS app, and at this point, we reckon these guys and gals should get some sort of medal for pursuing innovation on an existing product rather than leaping to “the next best thing.” The latest refresh adds in three primary features: 3D terrain views, a 3D panorama view ($9.99 extra) and in-app connectivity with Facebook and Twitter. As you’d expect, the latter enables users to broadcast current position, destination and ETA to social media outlets, which should make existing Foursquare addicts overwhelmed with joy. Version 1.5.0 also throws in MyRoutes, which is said to analyze your driving habits, patterns, location and time / day in order to provide “up to three routes clearly displayed in-map with ETA, distance and driving times for each.” Best of all? It’s just $69.99 ($20 less than normal) until February 15th, while the real-time traffic add-on is reduced $5 to $19.99 for the same duration.

Navigon keeps MobileNavigator iPhone app fresh with 3D terrain views, Facebook / Twitter integration originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s ok to steal…

(Editor’s note: Michael Greenberg is COO of Loyalty Lab. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

It has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur.  There are very large companies spending huge resources to develop applications and operating environments and then saying, “Please steal this.”

Well, virtually steal.  The cost to run substantial implementations on Google Sites, use Amazon Web Services or leverage Salesforce.com are obscenely small compared to what the features in those services would have cost five years ago.

Open source started the trend and still makes up a huge portion of the theft-worthy applications available.  A website CMS is essentially free these days, requiring just some nearly-free design talent (such as 99designs), a decent nearly-free writer (i.e. elance) and some of your time.

You now can do three of five basic components of a pre-product company for almost nothing: A web presence, a good idea, and a good business model.  The fourth depends on the idea – either a good team or good operations.  Either way, you need resources to translate your idea into something people can interact with.

Once you’ve got these four, you can get to market. But it’s the fifth component – finding enough feedback to validate your idea – that’s toughest to get. Ultimately, you need to get input from potential consumers before spending years on what might turn out to be a bad idea.

These days, there are four ways to get the minimum necessary attention to determine if your idea is worth investing additional time and effort:

Public relations – Getting media outlets to do your job for you, by covering your idea and disseminating it far and wide, is the dream. But achieving that dream isn’t easy, given the sheer overload of pitches reporters get daily.

Many entrepreneurs go no further than cutting a check to a PR firm.  An alternate approach is to find an out of work PR pro, hire them for a week, suck their brains dry and do it yourself.  This isn’t for the faint of heart, and it may just be simpler to keep the PR person on retainer, but the basic PR tasks of developing relationships, pitching story ideas, and helping writers aren’t rocket science. They just require discipline and focus. (The larger question is: Do you have the time to do it right?)

Natural search – Like good media coverage, this is exceedingly difficult area to master these days unless you have an incredibly focused topic or lots of friendly inbound links from your contacts. The average entrepreneur doesn’t have the specialized expertise to develop this.  Again, it might be worth hiring an out of work SEO specialist for a week and suck him or her dry.  Better yet, negotiate a low rate and keep them on retainer.  (Elance is a good option here as well.)

Social networks – There are dozens, if not hundreds, of people who spend every second thinking about this, so I’ll spare you another essay.  My one word of advice is to stay focused on the target audience’s needs and find their watering holes.  Whether it’s Twitter, YouTube, Slideshare, LinkedIn, or one of a hundred other resources, there are plenty of ways to reach your audience.

A great byproduct of the social phenomenon is that most expertise is disseminated for free, open to steal.  Applying the expertise is, of course, the hard part, but a smart entrepreneur can figure out 90 percent of it from readily available resources.

Search engine marketing –You can always buy Web traffic if you have the bankroll.  If all else fails, buy a thousand visits and see how customers interact with the site. This, unfortunately, is tough to steal. (Google has lots of lawyers, so stealing from them is a bad, bad idea.)

Practically everything you need to succeed is waiting for you to raid it.  You can get enough from a single credit card advance to pay for everything mentioned above.

Unleash your inner pirate and steal the technology and knowledge that are there for the taking.  If you have the brains, drive, and disciple, there’s no longer a capital barrier to proving yourself well enough to figure out if you have the next Facebook or the next Pets.com.

Photo by Spanner Dan via Flickr

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Week in review: Apple tablet rumors gather, Seesmic launches Look

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Apple tablet roundup: Who’s going to use the thing? — Apple’s tablet has provided no shortage of rumors. Everything from design specs to pricing have flooded the internet from various media outlets and sources. To gain a better perspective on the scope of rumors, we put together a snapshot below of the most recent speculations.

Three ways the Apple tablet will save the Earth — Yes, the headline is a bit facetious. But even if Apple’s tablet doesn’t save the planet, its users will be cutting carbon in three major industries.

Want new apps for your Android or iPhone? Here are the best directories — The best way to find new apps is to use one of the 20 or so directories out there that try to make sense of the thousands of apps. Writer Jacob Lyssy tried out a number of directories over the course of the week and recommends his favorites.

Will The New York Times meter kill traffic from social media? — Following the newspaper’s announcement that it will start charging visitors a flat fee for full access to its site, we looked at data from Hitwise to see how the move might affect traffic.

As Oracle-Sun deal gains approval, Oracle exec’s affair splashed on billboards — Just as the European Union finally gave its blessing to Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystem’s, Oracle’s co-president found details of his 8.5-year extramarital affair splashed on billboards around the United States.

And here are five more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Seesmic goes after mainstream consumers, tablets with Look — The typical Twitter client, which is used to read tweets, might resemble rocket science to grandma. With that in mind, Seesmic, which is behind several mobile, desktop and web-based social media clients for keeping track of tweets and Facebook updates, is going after regular consumers with a new product called Seesmic Look.

Google: Our focused approach paid off, ‘We like the Chinese people’ — While crowing about Google’s strong fourth quarter earnings, the search giant’s executives looked back on 2009 as a whole. Google seemed to elbow its way into many new markets over the course of the year, but Vice President of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg said it also benefited by deciding to “double down” on its core products like search.

AdMob: Apple may break its tie with Nokia for world domination — Apple, with its iPhone OS, is the dominant force in North America, Western Europe, Latin America and Oceania, while Nokia, running the Symbian OS, still leads in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, according to December 2009 survey data published by mobile advertising network AdMob. But data shows that Apple may finally be making inroads on a global level.

Facebook shows off latest versions of its game and app dashboards — Facebook showed off a new version of its dashboards that are meant to give more attention to games and other apps on its social network. It gave developers access to the new design so that they can start creating apps that are well-integrated with the dashboards.

BumpTop launches for Mac, turns your desktop into your desk (+100 accounts) — BumpTop thinks it can bridge the gap between your computer desktop and your physical desk. An application that launched initially in April of 2009, BumpTop launched a Mac version this week.

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Wanted: Your Weather Reports, Geotagged and Tweeted

If your natural reflex when the weather gets rough is to tweet about it, that reflex can now help the National Weather Service do its job better thanks to a new Twitter storm reporting program.

The NWS has always solicited severe weather reports from the public. After all, no amount of technology can ever be a substitute for an accurate report of what’s actually happening on the ground. Because of the new Twitter geolocation API and the increasing number of applications that support it (TweetDeck for iPhone is the latest to add geotagging support), it’s become very simple for the public to submit severe weather reports and for the NWS to pinpoint where they happened.

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How does it work? According to the program’s documentation, a system monitors Twitter for tweets starting with the hashtag #wxreport. These tweets are then plotted on a Google map using the tweet’s geolocation information, or in cases where the geotag data is not available, an approximation of the reporter’s location within the tweet using the format WW [location] WW. Finally, the report is relayed to the appropriate NWS field office for use by the office’s meteorologists in a variety of ways, including possible inclusion in an official storm report.

It’s not just the NWS that could benefit, either. The public already will be more informed simply by watching the #wxreport tag, regardless of whether one of those reports is released in an official storm report. Sites such as Weather Underground, which already hosts an extensive network of citizen-owned weather stations, could further integrate these reports into its own products. Media outlets monitoring Twitter for storm information can use the tweets in their own reporting; The Weather Channel already does a good job of this.

You can see some of these reports in action today. Check out the Twitter search for #wxreport to see how much snow fell from a winter storm that’s hit much of the U.S. We can’t help but wonder what this search will look like once spring rolls around and the severe weather season kicks off. Hopefully, the NWS has the tools in place to handle a high volume of tweets and an effective way of dismissing hashtag spam and other Twitter nuisances.

The National Weather Service program demonstrates how powerful geolocation on Twitter can be, and we can’t help but wonder what else will be created with geolocated tweets. Look for even more creative uses of geolocation throughout 2010.

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It’s Not Easy Being Popular. 77 Percent Of Facebook Fan Pages Have Under 1,000 Fans

In this age of instant Internet celebrity, anyone can become famous for 15 seconds (to rework Andy Warhol’s oft-quoted maxim). But what does famous mean exactly when anyone can have a Facebook fan page—those public pages on Facebook set up by brands, media outlets, celebs, and wanna-be celebs. As it turns out, being popular is not as easy as it looks. A full 77 percent of Facebook fan pages have less than 1,000 fans, according to an upcoming report by Sysomos, a social media monitoring and analytics firm.

Once a fan page is set up (here’s ours), anyone on Facebook can become your “fan,” which is like following someone on Twitter in that it doesn’t require a reciprocal friendship. Sysomos analyzed 600,000 fan pages on Facebook and came up with the distribution curve in the chart above.  The vast bulk of fan pages have between 10 and 1,000 fans.  Only 4 percent have more than 10,000 fans, and less than 1/20th of a percent have more than a million fans.  It breaks down as follows:

• 95% of pages have more than 10 fans
• 65% of pages have more than 100 fans
• 23% of pages have more than 1,000 fans
• 4% of pages have more than 10,000 fans
• 0.76% of pages have more than 100,000 fans
• 0.047% of pages have more than one million fans (297 in total).

The Internet has long been defining celebrity down, and now we know by how much (if you accept that Facebook, the world’s fourth most popular Website with more than 300 million members, is as good a proxy as there is for the Web as a whole).  To be Facebook famous, all you need is a moderately popular fan page, with the biggest chunk of those pages (42 percent) having between 100 and 1,000 fans.  Another 30 percent have between 10 and 100 fans.

The categories Facebook fan pages fall into are remarkably evenly distributed.  Celebrities, products, stores, restaurants, bars and clubs, websites, music, organizations, and non profits each make up between 6.9 percent and 7.5 percent of fan pages by category.

So-called celebrities only make up 7 percent of all fan pages.   Of course, there are also some real celebrities (both dead and alive) who attract massive followings to their Facebook fan pages. Okay, there’s only 297 of them.  For instance, Michael Jackson has the biggest fan page with 10.4 million fans, and that’s not counting the probably-overlapping 4.7 million who are fans of R.I.P. Michael Jackson (We Miss You). The action movie star Vin Diesel clocks in at 7 million fans, which is more than Barack Obama (6.9 million) or Megan Fox (5 million). Yes, people on Facebook are idiots (Megan Fox is much hotter than Vin Diesel). In contrast, the most popular person on Twitter, Ashton Kutcher, has 4 million followers, and Obama’s Twitter account only has 2.75 million—although that’s without even trying.

The biggest product page is Facebook’s own page, with 5.8 million fans (hey, is this rigged?), followed by Starbucks with 5.1 million (the page is filled with wall comments such as, “MMMMM Pumpkin Spice Latte!”).  Sysomos drilled down further, looked at the 297 pages with more than one million fans, and properly categorized them—or at least tried.  It turns out many of them (39.2 percent) are uncharacterizable such as “Nights Out With Friends.”  But the rest can be broken down into music (16.7 percent), celebrities 16.0 (percent), products (11.9 percent), TV shows (8.5 percent), films (3.4 percent), and games (1.4 percent).

And that’s just like it is in the real world. If you have more than a million fans, chances are you are either a rock star or an actor.

And unlike on Twitter, where popularity is correlated with how many times you Tweet, Facebook fan pages tend to be updated only once every 16 days.  And that’s really the big difference between Facebook fans and Twitter followers. On Twitter, you follow someone because you want to hear what they have to say. On Facebook, you fan them just to show your support of affinity.  Too often, it’s a throwaway gesture.  But then, fame is fleeting.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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More transparency coming to blog reviews under new FTC rules

Bloggers will come under the watchful eyes of the Federal Trade Commission for the first time, as the agency has finalized new rules governing bloggers and the products they write about. “Consumer-generated media” outlets (e.g., bloggers) will now have to disclose if they are being compensated by a manufacturer, advertiser, or service provider when they review an item. So if a blogger gets a laptop from a manufacturer to review and gets to keep it, he or she will have to make that fact public.

The new guidelines don’t tell bloggers how they need to make the disclosure, but they do lay out the penalties: up to $11,000 per violation with the possibility of injunctions to boot. The FTC could also order that consumers be reimbursed in cases where a relationship between blogger and advertiser isn’t disclosed and they suffer financial harm because of it.

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