ITZ Publishing

The real cost of social media

http://media.focus.com/images/uploaded/fyi/cost-social-media-infographic/110513-FOC-COST.png

 

 

 

The “Post-PC” Era: It’s Real, But It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does

Computing is changing. The news last week showed that loud and clear, as Microsoft bet big on Skype’s voice and video technology and Google announced partnerships with Samsung and Acer to build laptops running its Chrome operating system. These developments point to a future where computing form factors, interfaces, and operating systems diversify beyond even what we have today. The “Post-PC Era” is underway, but its definition is not self-evident.

First, some history. “Post-PC” has been a buzzword in the past few months, since Steve Jobs announced at the iPad 2 launch event that Apple now gets a majority of its revenue from “post-PC devices,” including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad—a major milestone for a company that was originally named “Apple Computer.” The phrase was also part of the public discourse in 2004, when IBM sold its PC unit and former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz told The New York Timesthat “We've been in the post-PC era for four years now,” noting that wireless mobile handset sales had already far surpassed PC sales around the world. In fact, the “post-PC” concept is more than a decade old: In 1999, MIT research scientist David Clark gave a talk called “The Post PC Internet,” describing a future point at which objects like wristwatches and eyeglasses would be Internet-connected computing devices.

So what does “post-PC” mean, anyway? It doesn’t mean that the PC is dead: Forrester Research forecasts that even in the US, a mature market, consumer laptop sales will grow at a CAGR of 8% between 2010 and 2015, and desktop sales will decline only slightly. Even in 2015, when 82 million US consumers will own a tablet, more US consumers will own laptops (140 million). But, as Forrester explains in a new report out today, it does mean that computing is shifting from:

• Stationary to ubiquitous. Contrast the experience of computing on a desktop PC, in one place with a clear start and finish time, to that of the anytime/anywhere computing done on a smartphone or tablet. Ubiquitous computing is also more context-aware computing, aided by sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes, and geolocators in smartphones and tablets.
• Formal to casual. In contrast to PC interactions with a formal start and finish time marked by booting up and shutting down, instant-on/always-on computing on smartphones and tablets fills in-between moments like standing in line or watching TV. 
• Arms-length to intimate. With desktops, computing is literally an arms-length activity. With portable form factors like laptops, netbooks, and tablets, computers become something consumers keep close to their body, and they use them in intimate places: The No. 1 place all three devices are used in the home is the living room, followed by an adult’s bedroom. 
• Abstracted to physical. The mouse/keyboard paradigm relies on an abstracted interaction with content. Touchscreens like those on smartphones and tablets enable direct physical manipulation of content in two-dimensional space. Cameras with facial recognition, voice sensors, and motion sensors like those on the Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360 permit an even wider range of physical interaction with devices, where a user’s body and voice become the controller.

There are a host of technological innovations that make the post-PC era possible. Form-factor diversity enables computing in more contexts. Flash memory eliminates computing downtime. Wi-Fi and mobile broadband networks permit continuous connectivity. And cloud services support computing across multiple devices.

These technological innovations fuel social change, and vice versa. As people conduct more of their lives online—shopping, banking, entertainment—we require more computing in more places. The rise of social networking requires real-time connectivity to manage our relationships. And eroding work-life boundaries means that consumers demand devices that can do double-duty in their work and personal lives.

So where is this all going? In the post-PC era, the “PC” is alive and well, but it morphs to support computing experiences that are increasingly ubiquitous, casual, intimate, and physical. The new MacBook Air and Samsung Series 9 demonstrate PCs going in this direction. In the post-PC era, PCs are joined by smartphones and tablets, as well as future devices like wearables and surfaces. Imagine computing via a heads-up display embedded in your eyeglasses or contact lenses or learning about breaking news updates from a change in your electronics-embedded clothing. The products that will win have yet to be determined, but the underlying technological and social changes that will drive the post-PC forward are already here.

Social Media Spending Habits Rise, New Research Reveals

From http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-spending-habits-rise-new-research-reveals/

By Phil Mershon
Published May 25, 2011 

Are you wondering how other businesses are allocating their social media activities in relation to other marketing tasks?

This article reveals the findings of a few new research studies. What they found might surprise you.

Small Business Focusing Big Time on Social Media and Blogging

Small businesses are spending three times more on social media and blogs than larger businesses.

In HubSpot’s 2011 State of Inbound Marketing Report, researchers discovered that small businesses plan to spend 29% of their lead generation budget on social media and blogs. Asked the same question, medium to large businesses only plan to spend 9% on the same categories.

HubSpot’s conclusion: all marketers are increasing their lead generation budgets for social media and blogs. In fact, the average company increased their spending from 9% to 18% between 2009 and 2011.

The HubSpot report has many more important insights on acquisition rates and comparative data on various industries. Check it out here.

Social Media Spending Trending Up

64% of all marketers plan to increase their social media budget in 2011 according to Target Marketing’s Fifth Annual Media Usage Report. Email marketing is the only area where more marketers will increase their spending.

Email and social media are becoming rivals for acquiring new customers and customer retention:

• Email – 85% of marketers use it for acquisition; 90% for retention
• Social media – 75% use it for acquisition; 65% for retention

No-one belittles our current economic crisis. That’s what makes these trends even more interesting.

In a day where many marketing budgets are frozen, marketers are allocating an increasing portion of the pie to social media. Some might say they are panning for gold, but I think the signs show that they’ve already found some gold.

Match Social Media Spending to Your Experience

All businesses should consider their social business maturity as they establish priorities and their social media budget. This is Altimeter Group’s conclusion after conducting a study of 140 social media strategists at enterprise-level corporations (1000 employees or more).

While the data is derived from large companies, the principles recommended apply to businesses of all sizes. See which of the following strategies match your needs and priorities for 2011:

What about you? How do these reports get you to look at your plans for 2011? How do your social media spending plans compare to these trends?

About the Author, Phil Mershon

Phil Mershon is a strategic marketing consultant specializing in customized events, mission-driven campaigns and creative communication strategies. He is also assistant director of summits for Social Media Examiner.

Study: Online Video Ads Beat TV Ads In Viewer Recall

From http://www.mediapost.com

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=151115&nid=127148

 

by Les Luchter, Yesterday, 4:46 PM

Viewers pay more attention to online video ads than to traditional TV commercials and also recall them better, according to new research that utilized Affectiva's facial tracking algorithms and second-by-second biometric modeling of cognition, excitement and stress levels.

The research measured the reactions of 48 viewers watching one hour of programming in Interpublic Group's West Coast IPG Media Lab.

Conducted by the Media Lab during March in conjunction with video ad network YuMe, the study determined that on average, online viewers pay more attention to the screen than do traditional TV viewers -- and the greater attention levels carry over to advertising.

Online video ads received 18.3% more viewer attention in the study than TV commercials -- a much higher disparity than the 8.5% greater viewer attention garnered by online video content over TV content.

This was largely due to the finding that when transitioning from program content to ads, the attention of TV viewers dropped off three times faster than that of online viewers.

While fast-forwarded ads, such as those recorded on a DVR, were partly to blame, IPG and YuMe found a much larger cause to be "the familiar cadence of TV content." Conversely, the study found that "systemic disruption" caused by online video's "unpredictable ad cadence and forced, short bursts of video ads (rather than predictable ad pods) appears to help decrease ad avoidance behaviors without causing consumer backlash..."

In fact, DVR users were found to pay higher-than-normal attention to commercials because they were concentrating on skipping them -- but their later recall was actually lower. "DVR users were 38% less likely to correctly recall the brand for any TV ad they saw, aided or unaided, compared to non-DVR users," the study found.

For TV viewers overall, paying attention during commercials had no effect on whether they could or could not remember them or recall them unaided. And those who recalled ads when aided actually had below-average attention scores. But online viewers who paid attention to ads later recalled them, with online video ad recall twice as high as TV ad recall -- "offering proof that recall and attention correlate," according to IPG and YuMe.

Both TV and online video content had plenty of competition from other media during the study, most notably smartphones. The 48 viewers studied had been surveyed a week earlier to determine how they normally watch TV, then told to bring with them what they needed to recreate their "normal" TV viewing experience.

They showed up at the Media Lab not only with phones, but with laptops, games, magazines, food, makeup and even a guitar, IPG and YuMe said. Other predetermined distractions were also available -- from DVRs stocked with participants' favorite shows to their own email and IM programs.

All these off-screen distractions hurt attention levels more during advertising than during program content. As the study summary put it: "If given the chance to avoid ads, most people will."

Yet while distractions affected both online and regular TV viewing, with over half of video viewers said to have had a second screen active during commercials, the distractions hurt TV to a larger extent -- with 62% of TV ads avoided while they played, compared with 45% of online video ads. Also, 17.5% of TV ads were fast-forwarded.

"DVRs hurt TV advertising in a way that has not yet come to online video," according to the research summary. "Compared to TV, online video is measurably better at delivering ads that are impossible to skip technologically and impractical to skip behaviorally."

A final conclusion: "normal ratings data is not nearly complex enough to measure how chaotic and highly individualized media consumption is."

Patch Is A Huge Waste Of Money

Patch Is A Huge Waste Of Money, And It Has Us Worried About Tim Armstrong's Ability To Run AOL

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/patch-is-a-huge-waste-of-money-and-it-has-us-worried-about-tim-armstrongs-ability-to-run-aol-2011-1#ixzz1LWtrG8Xj

By Nicholas Carlson | Jan. 26, 2011, 1:55 PM from www.businessinsider.com

 

Amstrong believes Patch will be a "major" part of AOL's turnaround. We do not.

Image: Flickr/Yaniv Golan

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong believes that its local blog network, Patch, will be a "major" part of the company's turnaround as it fills one of the largest "white spaces" left on the Internet.

This belief has us worried about AOL and – not to be rude – Armstrong's ability to run it.

Let's start with the amount of money AOL is pouring into Patch each year.

AOL now has about 800 Patch editors nationwide. The number is supposed to swell to 1,000 by year end. Each editors makes $40,000 to $50,000 per year. Add in payroll taxes and some benefits and you have to figure Patch's people alone cost AOL around $50 million each year.

What is AOL getting for this money?

About 3 million unique visitors per month, according to the New York Times. That is an absurdly small number.  By contrast, Gawker Media, with a headcount around 120, reaches around 30 million people each month, according to Quantcast. ComScore says the Huffington Post has 25 million unique visitors each month.

The question that must be driving Armstrong and Patch boss Warren Webster nuts is: Why is Patch's traffic so low?

Critics attack Patch's content as "piffle," too boosterish, irrelevant, or amateurish. All of that may be true, but it's not the real problem.

The real problem with Patch is that no one needs it.

When Tim Armstrong says Patch is supposed to fill one of the "largest white spaces" remaining on the Internet, what he means is that Patch is a product that tries to solve problems no other company already has.

But is that even true?

In his recent profile of AOL and Tim Armstrong, The New Yorker's Ken Auletta told the tale of Patch's origins:

While he was at Google, Armstrong had his revelation about local news. One Saturday morning in 2007, he and his three young children were driving home from a bagel store half a mile from their home, in Riverside, Connecticut. At a stoplight, they pulled over to look at the hand-lettered signs that residents had stuck in the grass to advertise local events. There was no online listing of events in Riverside, and the Greenwich Time lacked a calendar.

Parse this story and we can come up with two things Armstrong wants Patch to be.

• An online place for people to advertise local events.

• A place for a person like Tim "to find out what to do with his family."

Does Armstrong really think other companies on the Internet aren't already successfully addressing these needs? We can think of two that are.

The first is Facebook.

Facebook has over 600 million monthly active users. 250 million of those people make Facebook's "News Feed" their homepage and return to it every single day. 

Patch is supposed to be a local news outlet, but Facebook is already giving people the local news they actually care about. It has the local events Armstrong wants Patch to report, but also observations from friends, and photos that are better than any society pages.

Patch is trying to disrupt the newspaper business by, in Clay Christensen's words, giving local news consumers something that is not "better" but "good enough" at a much cheaper cost to the product's producer.

Turns out Facebook is already giving them something that's "good enough" but at even cheaper cost. Facebook has just 2,000 employees to Patch's 800.

The other big successful company crowding out Patch's supposed "white space" is Groupon.

In Patch, Armstrong wanted to create a product that told him "what to do with his family." Everyday, Groupon sends an email to 50 million people giving them things to do in their cities.

Unlike Patch, Groupon gives its subscribers a huge incentive to look at these "things do to" by sending out the news in the form of a coupon that makes these things cheap to do. Unlike Patch, founded years before Groupon, the business is going very, very well. It's set to IPO for $15 billion later this year.

So what is AOL to do, now that we know there isn't a "white space" for Patch to fill?

Four million subscribers give AOL $244 million each quarter. The safest, perhaps smartest, thing for Tim Armstrong and his board of directors to do is to fire everyone at AOL but the people who keep that money coming in and then pay out its profits as a dividend to shareholders.

But that's boring not something someone with big ideas like Armstrong's would ever do.

We reached out to AOL about the ideas we wanted to present in this story and never heard back.

 

Nicholas Carlson

Contact:

e-mail:

nicholas@businessinsider.com

AIM:

AlleyInsider         Work Phone:  646-484-6438

Subscribe to his RSS feed | twitter feed

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/patch-is-a-huge-waste-of-money-and-it-has-us-worried-about-tim-armstrongs-ability-to-run-aol-2011-1#ixzz1LWuG6PCy

Orange County Register showing way to iPad

Orange County Register showing way to iPad.

The OC Register’s app has six sections, which contain 10 stories each.

From www.newsandtech.com

Posted: Tuesday, May 3, 2011 12:37 pm | Updated: 3:26 pm, Tue May 3, 2011.

By Tara McMeekin editor | 

The Orange County (Calif.) Register last month rolled out an iPad app it hopes will be the foundation governing how Freedom Communications Inc. plans to serve the evolving market.

"It's magazine meets video meets news, and people may say, ‘What the hell happened to our newspaper?'" said Doug Bennett, president of Freedom Interactive.

Like most publishers, mobile and tablet publishing are at the top of The Register's agenda. FCI has already launched more than 50 apps for iPhone and Android smartphones, and 17 iPad apps geared at specific areas of interest, from general news to prep sports.

While Apple's iPad has been widely hailed as the newspaper industry's best hope for monetizing content, Bennett said The Register's app is "somewhere between free and paid," with a limited-time free period the publisher hopes will pique enough interest to generate a dedicated pay audience.

"We are first focused on making sure we have enough distribution to entice advertisers," he said. "There is so much experimentation going on with paid content and we are a smaller player so we are letting the dust settle."

When The Register does transition to a pay model, Bennett said the price will be in line with that of News Corp.'s The Daily, at 99 cents per week.

Like The Daily, the app features six sections, which contain 10 stories each.

"It's 60 stories and we curate what those are," Bennett said.

Dedicated publishing team

Taking a unique approach to the app, which is anchored by WoodWing's Digital Magazine Tools, The Register appointed a dedicated publishing team comprised of non-newsroom staff - a move Bennett admits was met with some opposition. The team consists of people from television, movie and magazine backgrounds.

Appealing to the 35- to 45-year-old segment that Bennett believes will make up the lion's share of users required a realization that all of the content for the app couldn't come from within Freedom.

"It has taken a lot of tough conversations and a lot of support to do something different, as well as a realization that our content centers that we use to produce our products up to this point are a key component, but not the only component."

Content generation

At its launch, approximately 90 percent of the app's content will be generated from FCI's content centers and tailored to fit the iPad audience. Six months to a year from now, though, Bennett envisions an increasing amount of content from outside sources and freelancers.

"There is no way with the reductions that we've had that we can fill all of the audience segments we want to reach," he said. "Our content centers have always done a great job but now we are going after an audience that wants content we don't generally create."

Creating a unique iPad experience was a key focus in the project and it was also the subject of Bennett's recent keynote during a tablet/publishing session at NAA's mediaXchange in Dallas.

"Most newspapers are going to work on a transition strategy to these devices, whereas we are working on an audience transition strategy," he said. "If it's the same as what you can get on the Web, then what's unique about it? We preach that here all the time and I took a lot of arrows in the early days."

Having an outside team to publish the app's content eliminates many of the restrictions that might be imposed by the newsroom, Bennett said, because it can choose features based on the medium.

Lean back, relax

Among the less news-oriented features of the app is a daily article that lends itself to the "lean-back experience" of the iPad, Bennett said. Those articles are created to be highly interactive with video and other elements.

"It's designed so that people can sit down and interact with a story."

Despite the focus on creating a unique experience, there will eventually be a place for iPad users who want a very similar experience to that of the printed newspaper.

Like the publisher has done with its smartphone apps, The Register will have multiple apps based on audience interest. One of those will likely be a replica edition of the paper, Bennett said.

Initial response from advertisers has been good, according to Bennett, with the launch issue of The Register's iPad edition selling out. Most advertisers don't have campaigns that can exploit the bells and whistles of the iPad platform, so The Register worked with marketers to design ads suited to the gadget. Bennett said 90 percent of the Register's iPad advertisers needed some help.

"Advertisers recognize that the audience and the ads better be different, or (their marketing campaigns are) going to be unsuccessful," he said.

The Register is first focusing on sponsorships but Bennett said the goal is to eventually get to a more targeted advertising model that increases CPM to as much as $35 to $45.

To get to that point, and since its subscriptions go through iTunes, Bennett said The Register built a feedback mechanism into the app itself.

"When you go into iTunes you don't know who the user is," he said.

In spite of that, Bennett said the publisher isn't opposed to selling its apps through iTunes because it offers the best option for wide distribution.

"We aren't like Hearst with thousands of users - we are trying to get back into a growth mode and we want user data, but we're more interested in getting in front of the 200 million iTunes users," he said. "We are going to have to follow as opposed to lead."

The Register and Freedom will continue to approach mobile and tablet products as an enterprise product line, Bennett said.

"As soon as we get done with OC, we'll move to other areas and show other Freedom papers how to do this."