MediaFlect

At the We Media conference in London. Coverage on FishbowlNY or RebuildingMedia.

Given “hot off the presses” copy of a new Yahoo! study done with Ipsos Insight whose headline conclusion is that 27 percent of the people use RSS but don’t know that they’re using it. That’s another sign the medium is arriving. We all use telephones. Few of us wonder about, or care about, the technology behind it. I can’t give you a link to the study, because so far there’s only a white paper, in print (no kidding), headlined “RSS – Crossing Into the Mainstream.”

Other findings: 12 of people are aware of RSS. 31 percent use RSS (but 27 percent unknowingly). My Yahoo, Firefox and My MSN are the top three providers of RSS to the “RSS Aware” public. For the “unaware” it’s My Yahoo at a whopping 72%, My MSN at 41% and Google’s personalized page at 10%. Bloglines is in fourth at 2%.

See coverage of the We Media conference at Rebuilding Media.

CORRECTED from an earlier version to clarify that 27% figure is of all Internet users.

Going to the “We Media” conference tomorrow for Corante’s Rebulding Media. Look there for more.

I blogged on Rebuilding Media about this paper saying they’re on their way as a more successful mechanism. I also wanted to point out here that in reading the paper, if you download the PDF, you can skip to the end pages of it — that’s the meat. The rest is just discussion.

I have been reading a seminal essay on marketing by Prof. Theodore Levitt from the Harvard Business Review some 30 years ago (reprinted last year), which talks in part about how companies, or industries, that focus on product, rather than the consumer, are doomed. In other words, if you’re obsessed with your product – making it better, looking at its features, etc. – rather than fulfilling customer’s needs, you’re ultimately setting yourself up for obsolescence, or worse.

I feel media, especially news media, are extremely guilty of this problem. If viewers or readers (consumers) don’t flock to a news program (product), top editors (“product managers”) take a sort of “eat your spinach” approach. People “should” consume this news if they’re good citizens in a democracy. The editors may bemoan the declines but seldom consider how to in a a systematic way determine or fulfill customer needs.

Even focus groups or surveys and research panels have tended to focus more on the existing product — how to improve it, what’s right or wrong with it or the competition — than any sorts of open-ended questions or exploration that would tend to turn up needs, wants or desires. In digital media, Web analytics tell us only the response to the existing product, not how we should define the business moving forward, and use that to determine strategy and tactics.

The New York Times, under Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., has famously defined itself as now being “platform agnostic” – giving users the news they want in whatever medium they want. I agree that’s the best approach, but a deeper and more fundamental question would be to ask folks how they want their news, or what they want from it. Being “platform agnostic” presupposes that the news being gathered and disseminated is already the correct product and it’s merely a question of distribution. But what could be done to better the product from the start to better meet customer needs?

More to come.

Poynter’s The Chaser breathlessly tells us that teens are using text messaging in droves. I guess, being academically oriented, they have to have “proof” even of the obvious. But anyone interested in the next generation need only ask any college professor about their latest tech annoyance (students using Sidekicks in class, for example, is what I heard one prof complain about on Saturday), to find out which way the wind is blowing among this choice demographic. (Is it really a surprise to anyone that young people are using text messaging? Is there any news organization that hasn’t at least considered the impact of handheld devices? Well, yes, of course…).

I guess that’s a marketing research tip for new media: Ask college instructors what their students are using, to find out how the new generation of high HHI, 18-24s consumer their media. Ask the kids, themselves, what media they consume — but that’s a more rigorous research project.

Recently had an exchange with an old friend, who works for a major magazine at a major media company. I’ll put it here because I think it’s illustrative of the kinds of thinking some people are doing, and the kinds of terror the current changes sweeping through our industries are causing.

I told my friend I was doing Internet publishing consulting, and he asked me the following (I’ve edited somewhat to protect his, and the company’s, identity): “A large, famous media company in the United States seeks a strategy to make money publishing on the web, because its famous old media properties are going down the tubes. Problem is, the company’s management doesn’t have the first iota of a clue as to what to do, let alone how to do it. All that’s at stake is whether the company will exist in ten years. Any ideas?”

Well, that was pretty stark. And frank, coming from someone within, whose livelihood depends on these decisions. But, as I said, indicative of the terror within.

Here’s my answer, again edited for masking purposes: “Yeah, I’ve got some ideas and I think an executive had lunch with there a couple months ago probably “gets it,” but I don’t know if upper management can. It’s quite a quandary: What company in any industry wants to participate in destroying its own business, making radical change, become its own competitor in order to survive? (Like gnawing off your own legs, perhaps, to get out of a trap — except in this case many new legs can grow back.)”

“[Your company] is not alone — we are at an inflection point, and shakeups continue. There will continue to be a need for good journalism and entertainment. That “content”, I think, has to come with an acceptance of dispersal or flattening of the information and command chains — again, something [your company] may not be terribly good
at.”

I’m sure some of the behemoths will survive in some fashion. But some will go the way of RCA or the Mutual Broadcast Network or the New York Herald Tribune.

TV stations might be ecstatic that the Nielsen ratings have found many many more 18-24 and 18-34 year-olds watching TV in urban centers, thanks to their new people meter systems, which rely more on technology than human beings keeping logs. The findings go counter to the usual logic that folks say they watch more than they do, which is fine — I’ll take more scientific measurement any day.

But am I the only one who finds the jumps startlingly large? According to AdAge: In Washington, D.C., the 18-to-34 viewership increase was 83%; Philadelphia, 56%; San Francisco, 55%; New York, 24%; Chicago, 21%; and in Los Angeles, 10%.

83 percent, 56 percent, 55 percent jumps when switching to the new technology? What does that say about accuracy of Nielsen’s diary-keeping system? There’s some discussion about whether this is a jump in viewership or a change due to the new measurement techniques. I vote for the former (what’s the chance 83% more 18-34 year-olds are watching in DC or 55% more in SF or Philly?)

For any of you who get Cynthia Turner’s Cynopsis — essentially a pre-blog blog of the broadcast industry and its ratings — I found it here on Blogger. Seems to be the full text. Today’s headline: a repeat of “Two and a Half Men” beat Monday night NFL.

Imagine my surprise when, reading this AP article on the new Central Asian “Great Game” in the print version of “The Commercial Appeal” newspaper in Memphis, TN, I noticed an accompanying chart citing “Sources: Wikipedia, Associated Press”. Unfortunately, I can’t show it to you via a link because after a few minutes of searching, I can’t find the chart online (if you do, I’ll be grateful). I also can’t find the Great Game story in the Commercial Appeal site, nor in AP.org, which frustratingly gives me a map of the US, but when I put in my search terms then click on a state, all I get is the AP stories in the wrapper of whatever paper’s site I click on in whatever state. The tool should at least pass through my search terms (”‘great game’ gannon”) to the Web site I click … who would stay with the AP search tool after that?

But I digress — I find it fascinating that a very helpful chart in the newspaper cites Wikipedia for its information. Means someone, at least in the graphics department of The Commercial Appeal, finds this community-controlled wiki knowledge base authoritative enough to cite as a source! (Anyone seen that before or somewhere else in such a fashion?)

The chart, I’ll note, is a very helpful adjunct to Kathy Gannon’s article, giving me such info as the basic timeline of The Great Game, the 19th-century battle between Russian and British imperialists and such factoids as who supposedly coined the term Great Game (British officer Arthur Connolly, who went by the alias “Khan Ali” (get it?) as a spy before being executed), when the Brits first tried to install a government in Afghanistan (1838), that the regime lasted only until 1842 and other tidbits.

Fascinating, as Mr. Spock might say.