Micro Media Maze

End of year cleaning of my hard drive presented me with an unexpected Christmas present: notes from the Chinwag panel Micro Media Maze back in September. The session was quite interesting so I will try to make sense of the cryptic shorthand and write up a summary of what were the most interesting points to me. The people standing out on the panel were the very opinionated Umair Haque of Havas, Miles Lewis of Last.fm and Gerd Leonhard the media futurist. The main topic of the panel: "Content is being disaggregated into ever smaller pieces, to be syndicated, widgetised and re-aggregated, for multi-platform distribution by both owners and consumers at accelerating speed. Who have been the winners and the losers in this new dynamic media landscape?"

-Listening brands
There was a big discussion about brands and their current PR and Marketing strategies. Haque pronounced traditional advertising dead. He believes that messages created by brands in a vacuum without their customer will no longer succeed with the advent of social media. While the statement is extreme it does make sense, as there is a lot of data from satisfied, angry, influential and creative customers out there available for marketers to listen to. Social media monitoring tools like Radian8 help with such endeavors by sifting through blog posts, forums, viral videos, status updates etc. to collate such information for marketers to understand the real perception of the brand by product, geography and customer segment.

-Pay by say
An interesting point that Gerd Leonhard raised was that more and more users pay for services by giving providers information rather than money. Take for instance the Last.fm model. Users do not pay a dime for using the service but by tagging songs, commenting on them, linking similar songs by favoring them, create a lot of meta data with value for Last.fm. In other cases I tell the NY Times my sex, age and income bracket to get relevant ads served to me. It all very often comes down to the user trading in information to use a service.

-One reader for everything
Another interesting point by Gerd was the idea of a RSS reader that basically delivers everything to me. Not only news stories could come in through this stream but also video and audio. The problem for content owners is obvious: how can we still monetize our content in a disaggregated scenario like this. When users do not visit the content providers site anymore and consume content in a reader type environment what is the right business model? Ads is one obvious answer but Miles gave us a great Last.fm example. The Last.fm widget has many users which generate a lot of traffic for the website. The key is to get the users back to the site through the social community aspect. Commenting on a song, tagging tunes, or even buying music can only be done on Last.fm which drives the user back to their turf.

-Too targeted ads
Many concerns were raised about how effective online advertising really is and how targeted ads can ultimately be. There is a fine line between serving me the perfect ad and violating my privacy. Users could be turned off by too good advertising and stop using services as they would freak out on the quality of ads. I have to say that I do not share those concerns. Then again I am in my late twenties and probably have a different attitude than the mid thirties panelists. As long as the data is not shared with any third party I am happy to receive ads from my favorite sneaker brand while on Facebook.

-Don't be evil or die
This point ties in very well with the previous one. The idea is basically that many companies today live off the loyalty of their customers. Switching from my Audi to a BMW comes with a hefty price tag, while switching from Google to MSN search doesn't cost me anything (apart from my soul). In such times companies have to act in responsible ways and respect their users privacy to the utmost. In the end of the day it takes one scandal to break your brand.

-Wise up or die
As so many times the music industry was proclaimed dead once again. The traditional music distribution strategy is very far away from the reality of every day life with users legally or illegally sharing, mashing up or listening to music. What to do? Again a lot of wise words from Gerd on this topic which I rather not summarize but recommend you to read in his free book Music 2.o.

All together another interesting event with some great networking opportunities afterwards. Maybe see you there next time.