When news breaks that a traditional magazine company is looking to eliminate print and go all digital, the reflex assumption is that it’s a last ditch effort to keep a flagging franchise alive.

Take the report in yesterday’s Telegraph that Emap is looking at making some of its trade mags online only.

Editors from across the trade media and events business, which is jointly owned by Guardian Media Group and private equity group Apax, have been asked to examine “the best way of delivering content to users” between now and 2015, and to consider how they could reduce the frequency of print publications or phase them out altogether.

Is this a death sentence for the magazines that are told to cut back their print copies, or suspend them all together?

Not necessarily.  The article notes one Emap title that’s already made the change:

In 2010, Emap changed film industry magazine Screen International from a weekly to a monthly title, prompting a jump in profits and reader satisfaction.

Before you shake your head at the battering that traditional print takes, let’s spend a second celebrating the vibrancy of good brands.

I read this story on the web from a U.K. newspaper.  It’s primary journalism, sourced and cited, reporting on a development at an important company in its market.  When I saw that the story was from the Telegraph I assigned it more authenticity and credibility than I would have from another source.

Those are all attributes of the brand that were established over time, in the traditional world, and transferred into a digital world.

That’s a basic reason why we shouldn’t discount the efficacy of a brand shifting from print to digital.  As the article cites, readers experience a lot of satisfaction when they encounter a good digital content experience.

So what’s the problem, beyond the nervousness that those mired in traditional media experience when they contemplate a world without the processes they are familiar with?

The business model, or  lack thereof.

A decade or so of dis-intermediation, of booms and busts, of market re-invention, of unthinkable valuations, of technology usurping tradition, of automation, self-serve and free has cast a pall over the traditional ways of serving markets.  But what publishers are realizing, as they re-engage in conversations with marketers and look for ways to intersect with, educate and entertain readers, is that the combination of new technologies, consumer behavior and marketer demands has created a new foundation for building profitable targeted media businesses on digital platforms.

That those are common buzzwords I just rattled off doesn’t make the observation any less true.

When you combine a flexible content platform with a targeted and interactive digital distribution program, you are able to give marketers solutions that deliver high-quality connections and drive business results.  You can package solutions that enhance multiple elements of their marketing program, from brand advertising to lead generation to education to content marketing to web traffic.

A traditional print platform can’t offer the flexibility or breadth of the digital platform.

So, the examination that Emap has mandated isn’t a death knell, it’s an opportunity for a group of long-tenured brands to focus their resources on meeting their market where they can have the most impact: online.

Does that mean print is dead?

Not at all.  The printed product continues to offer high impact, engagement and value.  It just is the highest fixed-cost aspect of the integrated media model, and because of that needs to be able to justify its place in the media mix not just for the advertiser but for the publisher as well.

Interesting data point: TV’s per household grew at the fastest in a decade last year, according to Nielsen.

The TV is at the core of the multi-media experience. And, as The Economist points out in a recent special report, TV programming is being consumed across more platforms than ever before.

Compelling argument for the power of TV.

I do wonder, though, how many of those TV sets per household increased because of people combining households and brining their favorite TV with them….

Related articles by Zemanta

• Question for Nielsen: What the Heck’s a Television Set? (adage.com)
• More TV Sets (2.93) Than People Per US Household (2.54); Average TV Sets Per Home Sets New Record (benzinga.com)
• Nielsen fluffs up the TV ratings (thoughtgadgets.com)

Steve Rosenbaum did a great interview with Columbia’s Ana Seave that was published on MediaBizBloggers earlier this week.

Seave is one of the key contributors to The Curse of the Mogul, required reading for anyone in the media business who wants to dig into the critical issues facing media companies and their business models.

Seave’s thought a lot about content, cost, quality and digital. Media brands can create increased loyalty with their readers, she believes, by enriching their experience of content. A key element of that is curation, Seave explains:

I think that the actual idea of curation and aggregation and packaging stuff and being the in between, between the content production and getting it to a consumer is exactly the right place to be. I think that video is really the future of the Internet as well. The text business is where I come from and where I live and it’s easy to search, and so forth and so on, but YouTube as I understand it is the second largest search engine. What is that about? That means that people who are younger than me think of things in video and it is really, really important for all media companies to be in pictures at this point. So, that’s the reason why I am interested in Curation, I have a lot of faith in this space and I think it’s gonna go really far, and it’s gonna be in the right place with the right technology. (LINK: http://bit.ly/cPDkae)

The combination of curation and wholly-original content goes at the core of the cost issue for a publisher. One of the fundamental challenges of transitioning a print content model to the web is that the value of the ad inventory online doesn’t support that same content costs as the value of the print ad page.

Ultimately, content costs are a by-product of hours of labor. By shifting talented content professionals to a mode where they are able to identify and share good content — thereby extending the brand “voice, as Seave calls it — as well as create that content, the business is able to increase the ad inventory attributable to the content costs.

This is the kind of thinking that is both relevant to the digital market and attacks the puzzle of costs.

We believe more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within the next 5 years.
The Mobile Internet Report
Morgan Stanley

Apple’s launch of the iPad last month provides a catalyst to look at the implications that the broadly-defined term Mobile Computing has for the interplay of Media and Marketing. Clearly we are at a critical inflection point.

Broadly defined, the mobile Internet market includes a broad range of devices, like Smartphones, E-readers and cell phones, that can access applications and content over the web. (The category doesn’t include portable computers and netbooks.

Right now, the scale of the mobile computing market is relatively small. While 92% of Americans own a mobile phone, only 17% of them used their phone to conduct a mobile banking transaction in 2009, for instance. And, according to Comscore, only 27.5% of Internet users used a mobile web browser in the last three months of 2009. There are probably just over 10 million iPhones active in the U.S., a fraction of the 208 million users reported by Comscore in January.

The current scale of the mobile web is easy to marginalize as an early-adopters paradise. That would be a mistake. The rate of mobile web usage has accelerated rapidly over the past six months, and the configuration and usage of the mobile web has significant implications for those us of who are media and marketing professionals.

The Scale & Velocity of the Mobile Internet is of Consequence

Over the past six months, mobile data bandwidth worldwide has increased by more than 70%, with streaming video driving a significant portion of the demand. According to forecasts from Cisco, mobile data traffic will grow 40% from 2009 to 20014. By that time, mobile bandwidth will be equivalent of 249 years of DVD quality feature-length films.

The quote at the opening of this post, comes from Morgan Stanley’s report on the Mobile Internet, where Mary Meeker smartly frames the scale and impact of this inflection point .

The size of the mobile web is going to dwarf the size of the wired web by a factor of 10, Morgan Stanley projects. Already, the mobile internet, as measured by the iPhone and iTouch, has achieved scale at a faster rate than any other transformative technology.

Device Usage Changes on the Mobile Internet

The mobile device has become the hub of user’s digital activity executed off the backbone of the Internet.

Only 45% of the time spent on an iPhone is dedicated to talking on the phone. Texting and doing e-mail make up 26% of the activity, while listening to music and playing games make up 18% of the activity. Surfing the web makes up another 9% of the activity.

Emarketer shared some ComScore research recently that captured how diverse the web-based activity of smartphone users was. 94% of the respondents that used an iPhone consumed mobile media; 80% accessed news; 58% participated in mobile networking.

This new mobile user is markedly different from the traditional cell phone users, only 26% of whom consumer mobile media on their device, and only 14% who accessed news.

The best lens on the evolution of Internet habits is gained by looking at the behavior of young adults, for whom using digital devices of all kinds is second nature. ComScore’s recent study on wireless internet usage by Gen Y paints a picture of a wireless cohort who are leveraging targeted applications that are built on the backbone of the Internet. The portrait is very different from the accepted notion of Internet users browsing the web.

• 81% of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 are wireless internet users. By comparison, 63% of 30-49 year olds and 34% of those ages 50 and up access the internet wirelessly.
• Roughly half of 18-29 year olds have accessed the internet wirelessly on a laptop (55%) or on a cell phone (55%), and about one quarter of 18-29 year-olds (28%) have accessed the internet wirelessly on another device such as an e-book reader or gaming device.
• The impact of the mobile web can be seen in young adults’ computer choices. Two-thirds of 18-29 year olds (66%) own a laptop or netbook, while 53% own a desktop computer. Young adults are the only age cohort for which laptop computers are more popular than desktops.

The un-wiredness of Gen Y is a driver of the success of the iPhone and Facebook’s Mobile app. This early-mover position should have long-term benefits for both companies. Morgan Stanley report believes that Apple and Facebook have created dominant market positions in the early Mobile Internet ecosphere.

Of Facebook, the report says:

We believe Facebook has the potential to serve as a communications platform/engine of the one-to-one, one-to-some and one-to-many (and vice versa) for the Mobile Internet.

As for Apple, Morgan Stanley points out that “in technology, the product with the most/best apps usually wins.” Apple’s 100,000+ application universe dwarfs that of the next-closest competitor, Google’s Android platform. Apple’s mobile ecosystem is generating more than $4 billion a quarter in revenues; a combination of paid apps, subscriber fees and phone sales. The more-than 100,000 applications in Apple’s Apps Store had been downloaded more than 2 billions times, as of September 2009.

Facebook already is the most popular Mobile web site. According to ComScore, 4.9 million web users viewed the site using mobile handsets in December. The usage was frequent and intense: those 4.9 million users viewed more than 2.6 billion pages for more than 2.2 billion minutes.

High-Level Implications of the Un-Wiring of the Internet

The two most obvious implications of the explosion of the Mobile Internet are anytime, anywhere access to web content by a much bigger universe of users.

That kind of shift in scale gets the blood rushing.

The urgency that accompanied the launch of the iPad is an indicator, however, that this expansion of web access isn’t going to be a simple matter of taking the current business models and pushing them forward. In the iPad, many of us in media and marketing are looking for a mobile mass media device. Basically, a future with a iPad-like device as the dominant platform gives the current ecosystem of media and marketing models — content supported by advertising, with advertising becoming more deeply embedded in terms of relevance and utility — a richer, more accessible distribution point to consumers.

That’s not going to be the dominant model, however attractive it might be.

The model of Internet design that drives the current paradigm for media and marketing is a multi-function, data-processing device — the computer — connecting to a group of inter-connected networks — the Web — through a single point of entry — the browser.

Media, marketing, communications, interaction, storage all happen through this point of entry, creating a vast Swiss Army knife of utility.

Look at the way that computing and communications habits shift among Gen Y, according to the research.

Networking and communications becomes the core feature of their cellular device. Their web-based behavior shifts towards those applications that create utility and connectedness. Their “content” time — consumption and creation of edited content — is typically isolated to their computer. As the utility of their primary communications device expands, their usage of their primary computing device declines.

There isn’t going to be a seamless melding of these two environments. Computing and communications devices will have common attributes and functionality, but each will have their unique emphasis and usefulness. (Where does the iPad sit? As a tremendous media device. But that will be a subset of two larger markets — computing and communications.)

The shift towards unwired connectedness driven by communications-focused devices has a big impact on those of us in media and marketing.

The first shift is to begin thinking about our web assets in terms of defined applications rather than as content-publishing systems. The mobile Internet turns web assets into the backbone of targeted patterns of usage by consumers. They want to find a thing, learn a thing, do a thing, within the constraints of the device.

The second shift is to rethink mobile as a media platform. While there will be a much larger addressable market, the traditional inventory of advertising is going to shrink. As a result, more emphasis than ever will be put on integration of marketing messages into content and on the conversion of users into some measurable business activity.

The third shift is ownership. How do you get to a unique identifier for a consumer? How do you generate a relationship with the consumer that is not wholly gated by the cellular provider or the device provider?

The fourth shift is sustainability. The switching cost of applications on a mobile device are minimal. Apps downloaded on Apple’s platform have a remarkably short half-life.

We’re entering a new generation of connected content and communications, driven by a new set of devices that have a different topography than traditional web development. While it’s exciting, it will be a mistake to believe that the transition will be orderly, and it presents a new challenge that only the most creative and persistent media and marketing brands will solve.

Here is another link to the Morgan Stanley summary of The Mobile Internet Report.

Here’s two tables, courtesy of eMarketer, that put Mobile in perspective. Big perspective, that is.

The first shows Morgan Stanley’s outlook on the growth internet-enabled mobile devices, which the firm says will grow 120% in the next four years.

That growth is driven by a high-level of consumer desire. Pew Research released a study that shows that a majority of U.S. adults believe “handheld devices are a change for the better.” The younger you are, the more likely you are to share that sentiment. The dividing line appears to be 50. Younger than 50 and mobile is all good; older than 50 and you have reservations.

Here’s Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley presenting at the Web 2.0 conference last year. A large portion of the presentation is focused on mobile.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyZuoDIVXBQ

A steady meme over the past month has been the zero sum game that comprised the U.S. economy over the past decade. Net job creation was at zero; GDP, adjusted for inflation, grew less than 20%; and, household net worth (through November 2009) was down 4%.

The Washington Post ran a great graphic contrasting the performance of the last decade to the previous six decades. The contrast is astounding: the last 10 years were the least productive by a wide margin.

A cursory look at the chart makes you wonder whether we hit the top for the U.S. economy and are at the beginning of a long decline, or whether we’re simply poised at a critical inflection point for change. The disconnect for me is reconciling the sense that we’ve experienced remarkable changes in tools, processes and outcomes over the past decade, but have experiences virtually no  net tangible economic benefit.

One theme is that changing nature of work in our economy. A lot has been written about how we’ve transitioned from a manufacturing to a service base. The trend has been significant over that past 40 years, with manufacturing jobs dipping to below 10% of total employment this past March.

Economies have to make something in order for its participants to consume things. Our service economy relies on Americans having enough money to buy things — fast food, flat screen TVs, clothing, cars, homes and everything else. A lot of people spending money creates a lot of jobs for people, creating more people who can spend money.

But somewhere in our economy we have to make something. The shift away from manufacturing over the past 40 years has been partly offset by the shift towards creating information products — technology and media primarily — that are broadly consumed, at home and abroad.

After a decade of standing still, a disproportionate amount of hardship falls on groups that traditionally are less qualified to participate in the information economy.

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In November, both the number of unemployed persons, at 15.4 million, and the unemployment rate, at 10.0 percent, edged down. At the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed persons was 7.5 million, and the jobless rate was 4.9 percent.

Among the major worker groups, unemployment rates for adult men (10.5 percent), adult women (7.9 percent), teenagers (26.7 percent), whites (9.3 percent), blacks (15.6 percent), and Hispanics (12.7 percent) showed little
change in November. The unemployment rate for Asians was 7.3 percent, not seasonally adjusted.

One characteristic of the lost decade is the stagnation of educational levels. The chart below shows the change in the percentage of people who have graduated high school and college from 1947 to 2003.

There’s clearly incentive for getting an education. The economy provides higher rewards and security to people who have more education. (The chart below shows the figures for 2006 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

It’s striking that since 1970, when higher-paying jobs for unskilled labor (read manufacturing) began to decline as a portion of the overall economy, the level of educational attainment has shown relatively little growth.

Our economy is paying the price right now for an absence of vision and commitment to creating a workforce with the skills to push and innovate on an even wider margin than we have before.

The test of the next 10 years will be our ability as an economy to find new ways to make things and to put people in the position to do the work.

The technology skills of the newly educated are formidable. The broad absorption of social media tools into the population is an ultimate benefit for creating real-time training in the kind of skills and interactions that are going to be needed to these new ways of making things.

Take a look at one Millenium’s take on the lost decade of music

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GeD3wUy48o

A core element of successfully leveraging social media to build your business or personal brand is to identify and target your Community of Interest.

This simple starting point is too often overlooked when people begin to incorporate social media tools into their marketing.

What is your Community of Interest? It is a group of people who intersect with you around your personal or business brand. These are people who you know and interact with. They are enthusiasts, influencers, stakeholders and potential customers. They are people who you network with and who you have an interest in.

Your Community of Interest is made up of people drawn from four groups:

Peers: In your professional life, you have a group of peers who you are friendly with and who are part of a cooperative network that can have a tangible impact on your business success. These peers may be suppliers that you work with in order to complete jobs. They may be other providers of the same services or products who are in a different market, or even in the same market. They may be people who are in the media that serve your business. The thing that binds you to with your peers is common interest and shared experience. Your peers are a valuable part of your Community of Interest because they spend a high percentage of their time focused on an activity that is closely related to what you do day to day.

Friends:Your friends make up a strong cohort within our Community of Interest. They are people who you share important social connections with, and with whom you typically have explored the practice of reciprocal interest and support.

Past Customers: In your group of past customers, there are individuals who have a strong affinity for your products or services, and with whom you have developed relationships that are not just transaction-based, but that are built on mutual appreciation and interest.

Prospective Customers: This is the most nuanced component of a well-structured Community of Interest. This does not include anyone who is a prospect, or anyone who has connected with you as a result of your broad marketing activity. These are people who have established relationships with you that demonstrate a high degree of interest in your product or service, and with whom you’ve established a level of personal rapport beyond the standard back-and-forth of a sales process.

Traditionally your Community of Interest has been a loosely organized group: a group of names that show up frequently in your e-mail lists or on your phone speed dial. Some large number of the interactions are in-person and occasional. You’d be hard-pressed to mobilize everyone in the group at one time around one idea, activity or question.

Social media tools make your Community of Interest a powerful and organized force.

Imagine, however, that you were connected with your Community of Interest in such a way that each person could see the others, and that each person could follow your dialogue with another member of the group, and participate if they were so inclined. Within this dynamic set of connections, the power of your Community of Interest would increase as its combined and common knowledge grew.

Here are a few simple steps to create that power.

First, sit down with a blank sheet of paper split into four quadrants.

In each quadrant, quickly write down the first names that come to mind. These people are the foundation of your Community of Interest.

There is no right or wrong number. Each of us have different social make-ups. We relate to people differently.

Then, go back and look at the names in each quadrant. Ask yourself, Who else do I know that takes an interest in what I am doing? Who else do I know that I’m interested in? Who have I helped out recently? Who has helped me out?

Each name that comes to mind should go onto the list.

When you’ve completed this process for all the quadrants, you have identified your Community of Interest.

The next step is to connect with these individuals online. For your Community to have the most power, you’d like to connect with them in such a way that they are able to connect with each other, if they are so inclined. For this reason, social networks are a very effective, and Facebook, with its large reach, gives you the best odds of finding the people in your Community. Log on to Facebook and upload the e-mail addresses of each of the people on your list. If they appear, send a Friend Request. If they don’t, use Facebook’s tool to send a note to them inviting them to become your Friend. (Some of your friends may not use the e-mail address you have on record for their social identities.)

A third step is to explore in what ways your Community of Interest is actively using social media tools. You can do this by searching for them on Google, using not only their name but their e-mail address. You’ll find out who is blogging, where they have different social identities, whether they are active on other networks. In each instance, reach out and say hello: leave a comment on their blog, connect with them on different networks.

The final step is to Share and Interact.

How? Think about what you do when you network in your day-to-day life. Networking is about building familiarity and comfort with other people. while making apparent that you are interested in finding ways that you can practice Reciprocity, so that you can help them and they can help you.

Digital networking is the same as your day-to-day networking.

Because you are communicating with your Community of Interest, there is already a shared understanding of what you do and who you are. You can use the power of social media tools to share things that you find interesting and that you want your larger Community to know about. They might be related to your family, your hobby, your experience or your work.

The more you share, the more you will find other members of your Community sharing back. Over time, conversations will start, engage and tail off.

But what you can be confident about is that you will stay top of mind with your Community of Interest, just as each member in the Community will stay top of mind with you. This heightened awareness can lead to tangible development in your professional life.

Whatever your orientation to Internet marketing and social media, you should at the very least be using digital networking to enhance your relationship with your Community of Interest. It is easy and it is effective.

10 doesn’t sound like a big number, but when you start looking back over a decade, 10 years of an ever-expanding and innovating world, 10 years feels huge and unwieldy.

At the beginning of this past decade (the first decade of the 21th Century…how cool!) I was working with an Internet company called Themestream, started by a group of engineers out of Netscape.  They had made up the core team that  built the Open Directory.  Their vision was to take the human-filtered experience of the Open Directory and put simple content tools in the hands of the people who had the energy and vision to create content. This was an early blogging and community model. We weren’t successful: too many parts of the web were still undeveloped, but foundation assumptions of that initiative, as envisioned by Bill Turpin and Rafhael Cedeno, were dead on.

Fast forward 10 years later and the world of media and marketing is still grappling with the issues of content and community in a digital, interactive world.

The thing is, we’re at an inflection point where everything is possible. The tools are easy and effective. Consumers are willing to use them. The underlying processes of doing commerce, building online inventory, managing databases, driving audience have all been refined and tested. The challenges we all face now are how to apply these tools in logical and simple ways in order to create business models that offer sensible pricing to consumers and allow for acceptable profit margins to creators.

I think it’s really exciting.

Impressions of a decade

When I sat down to jot down some themes for this post, I could see it getting out of control. The notes have lots of questions about what was the scale of the Internet in 1999 and 2009; who were the biggest Internet companies then and now; what were the biggest themes.

Here are some of the highlights:

• US internet usage doubled in the decade to something over 160 million users. Worldwide internet usage topped 1 billion users.
• AOL acquired Time-Warner in 2000 for $117 billion. AOL had 21 million subscribers in 1999. In 2009, Time Warner spun AOL to shareholders for a fraction of the 2000 value.
• Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.6 billion. GeoCities closed in October 2009.
• In the 2000 Super Bowl, 17 Internet companies spent more than $20 million to advertise. This year? Go figure.
• At the end of the decade, a handful of companies had established what appear to be embedded positions in the infrastructure of the web. Google, Amazon and Facebook are the big three, covering information, commerce and community.

Are these companies likely to have the same positions at the end of the coming decade? The early history of the web teaches us that the ubiquity of access create few obstacles to consumer switching from one service to another. Market leaders have to sustain their positions through innovation, optimal service and an unerring focus on consumer benefits. Of the three big market footholds occupied by Google, Amazon and Facebook, the only one that can create value out of creating a highly transparent and efficient engagement with the consumer is Amazon. Google and Facebook rely on inefficiencies in the consumer experience to create value.

So, here are the notes that I made as I tried to organize my impressions of what happened and what lies ahead.

First, the decade of change.

The greatest change? Connectedness.

The Dispersion of Geekiness. Technological facility isn’t a pejorative any longer.

Fidelity. I think this phenomenon doesn’t gain enough attention. Media companies of that past controlled distribution in part because they had access to tools of production that created high-fidelity replications of content, whether it was music, video or photography. Today, everyone has access to easy-to-learn tools that allow them to create true fidelity: they perform into digital formats and are able to mix, clean, assemble and share high-quality content. This trend is only going to accelerate. As a result, distribution platforms are exploding: beneath the behemoths like YouTube there are all kinds of specialty platforms for sharing high-fidelity content. Today, you can build a simple blog and use multiple plug-ins to create an exceptional sharing platform. Media companies are going to have to demonstrate the ability to add value beyond production, replication and distribution.

Composition. The idea of what a composed media experience is has changed radically. A magazine, or a magazine article, is one artifact within a wide panoply of content types. A CD is the same. A song is the same. Consumers are changing the definition of composition, shifting it to include all kinds of types. Here’s a sample. In writing, there are standard artifacts: a short story, a novel, a poem, an epic poem, an essay, a review, a sketch. Writers who wanted to reach an audience needed to define their work within artifacts that were largely dictated by the production requirements of the media provider. Today, a writer can explore new modalities of composition, gather their own audience around their own content imperative. The publishing world can’t really replicate the unique experience. Want an example? Go look at Boing Boing. It’s all there.

The value of audience. All of the economics of media in the 20th century were embodied in the value of audience. It cost a certain amount to aggregate an audience in various media. That cost was passed along, with a markup, to advertisers or to content creators. The ability to amass audience and deliver content was at the core of creating economic value. That equation has been disrupted by the rapid shape-shifting of audience on the Internet. Google and Amazon are the exceptions over the past decade to a brutal lesson: Audience aggregation is ephemeral and doesn’t support long-term brand value on the web. I believe this was a transitional phase, and that we’re moving into a new ecosystem where the concept of audience will be replaced by a community of connections. [Not an original thought, by the way.]

What’s next?

Here’s what got scribbled down on the next page in the notebook.

Mobile. Mobile doesn’t just mean place-based. If you want to understand the next iteration of the interactive ecosystem, spend time with your iPhone. That’s the whole thing, all bundled up, right there. It is the first truly futuristic device of the Interactive revolution. Think about it. The guys on Star Trek couldn’t even have imagined what the iPhone does, how it works, how it becomes the operating system for your life. Mobile beens portable and interoperable. It means adaptable and intelligent. It means instantaneous and flexible. It’s a synthesis of all of the beneficial functionality that has been developed on the web over the past 20 years. Mobile is so big that it isn’t even its own thing: it’s the ultimate expression of everything.

OK. Get ready for this, because I wrote it down, but I’m not a 100% sure what it means, even though I’m a 100% sure it’s right.

Information/Entertainment/Content as the operating system.

This is the reverse engineering of the mobile experience onto the web. My iPhone interface, in its modularity and integration, is superior to anything that I’m able to accomplish with my laptop. The entire operating system is designed around the I/E/C paradigm, with an emphasis on easy functionality. The iPhone is the fastest adopted media platform in history. It’s lessons are more than Mobile; they are about what is necessary for ubiquitous consumer adoption.

Identity & Community. The trends that we see in social networks today are a point in time of a long-term evolution. These trends will continue to evolve because they satisfy a kind of use that all of us are looking for in our personal technology: How can it help me communicate easily across multiple shifting communities, without having to make radical changes in my behavior and while still managing my personal boundaries within the multiple groups.

Filtering. Get all this information and all these people connected in all these ways and the concept of filtering becomes more and more important. One of the most interesting developments of the past 12 months is how primitive Google has come to look. Google’s search is nowhere near as elegant or as filtered as the output of a well-developed social graph. We’re at the beginning of something large in filtering. How large? Imagine if I were able to search all of the content consumed by my social graph, with the different results coded against the different cohorts that I am connected with. I ask a question about media trends, and I first see the results of content that people in my social graph have accessed and consumed, possibly rated by them as well. The results are weighted by the frequency of my interaction with certain people. And then, when I look for an accountant in Fairfield County, CT, I see results that are filtered through another prism of my social graph. I would know that everything that I am looking at has been favorably interacted with by someone that I have a connection with. That’s an elegant filter.

And then, the last one:

The Quantum Theory of Content.

For companies to establish connections with consumers that can result in some economic benefit to both parties, the entire process of creating and distributing content will change. If you’ve read this far, you probably have read other things I’ve written, and you are familiar with some of the crude thinking I’ve done along these lines. Content needs to be conceived of on a molecular level, with the understanding that this content will combine and re-combine with other discrete content objects. The force that will drive this recombinant nature of content will be the interactive consumer. [This phenomenon includes marketing content as well.]

The content imperative of social media is the starting point for this re-envisioning. What it will look like in 10 years is anyone’s guess.

This isn’t the death knell of long-form content. It’s not the end of traditional media formats. It’s not the end of advertising and marketing.

However, if you want to be a relevant content brand in the next decade, you need to have direct connections with consumers — you need them to invite you into their social graph. The art will be in the kind of content that you share, the way that you share it and the degree to which the consumer feels that the sharing is open and conforms to their habits and needs. If you are able to do this, you’ll have the kind of access to consumers that will support your overarching business goals.

There you have: some impressions of what the themes of the next 10 years will be. I’m looking forward to sorting out practical applications for my businesses. I’m looking forward to being creative in this milieux. And, I’m especially looking forward to experiencing the vast realm of things that I didn’t see coming.

Have a Happy New Year.

As the year winds down, I was curious which posts over the course of the year were the most popular. I was pleased to see that the posts that had resonated the most with all of you were ones that I felt like I’d achieved some clarity around an idea that I’d been working through. (It’s also interesting that these posts are among the most frequently accessed through search.)

The number one post was from March: Social Media Can be A Marketing Platform. This was when we were taking Network Communications into its Project Massive Network, an effort to get every person in the company using social media to broaden and intensify their professional connections.

Through the year, I kept meaning to come back to the concept of Evangelist. The word too easily connotes intense passion, while I believe that the most effective Evangelists are the ones who have completely integrated their nature with their passions, so that they communicate a relaxed enthusiasm that inspires and attracts others. Evangelism is too often associated with a mania and mono-focus that can be off-putting.

The number two most-popular post was a very detailed case study that I did in June about migrating our marketing strategy at Apartment Finder to a social media focus. My intent with this post was to demonstrate each of the steps that we had taken to extend our communications with the multi-family marketplace to multiple platforms, and our efforts to modify and adapt our messaging to the unique attributes to the platforms. This effort continues today and deserves a follow-up: the most challenging aspect of the initiative is maintaining continuity and assessing its effectiveness. Despite our intent focus, we have areas of spotty execution with our own program.

The third most-popular post was my first attempt to consolidate the thinking that I’d been doing about how a traditional publishing content workflow needed to adapt to accommodate the inclusion of social media platforms. In Thoughts on Evolving the Content Strategy in Publishing to Leverage Social Media I outlined the Sharing Model of content creation. This model outlined here as served as a framework for developing new processes at our regional home design brands, and in some instances we’ve seen significant impact on audience and enthusiasm. The process is a living work in progress.

The fourth most frequently viewed post is an down-and-dirty analysis of State Farm’s presence on Facebook. This was a period when I was trying to understand the challenges that face traditional marketing departments when implementing social media programs. The post was published in April and is one of the two most-frequently accessed posts through Google search. I recently re-visited the State Farm Facebook sites and little had changed.

In the Spring, I was doing a lot of work to try to quantify the impact of the economic decline on consumer spending, marketing outlays and media allocations. In an early April post, I pointed out the contradiction between industry research showing the effectiveness of TV and magazine advertising and the steep declines in revenue. The point: When marketing budgets shrink, the most expensive media goes first.

I’m kind of proud that a self-serving post doesn’t show up until the number 6 spot. Over a period of 6 months, we radically shifted our traffic strategy at ApartmentFinder.com in order to leverage what we percieved as our core strengths. This shift was rewarded in April when Comscore reported ApartmentFinder was solidly in the top 5 destinations for apartment shoppers on the Internet. Our work put us solidly in the consideration set for online-only marketing in the multi-family industry, and we did it despite being heavily outspent on search engine marketing traffic by our competitors.

The seventh most-popular post, from July, demonstrates how powerful social media can be. I described a disappointing customer service experience with American Express. A couple of days later, I heard from the Chairman’s Office. It doesn’t match Jarvis’ Dell experience, but it was an instructive moment in the new age of marketing and media.

A May post reporting on research that shows how effective print advertising is in driving web traffic came in at number 8. Despite multiple instances of independent research like this, many people insist of maintaing a very simplistic “Print Is Dead” position. At this point, I just shake my head and wonder why the concept of using multiple platforms to intersect with consumers to drive business activity is so hard to accept. [I very accepting of marketers who say they don't have the money to invest in premium marketing choices, whether they are online or offline. Then we can have a conversation about how to leverage their marketing resources to build their business. Just sitting around arguing about living or dead media gets old very fast.]

An October post made the top 10 and is a big search favorite: The Current State of the Economy in 5 Pictures. I realized doing this analysis that I should update the post in January to reflect the fourth quarter results. Lesson: People like pictures.

The number 10 position is taken by a post where I ranged outside of my limited sphere of knowledge to speculate about how social media platforms would change the way that people searched for information. The premise was that “human search” would develop through the filtering of content by overlapping social graphs. This is happening on Twitter and is expressed by many as crowd-sourcing. I had fun thinking about the problem and putting together the schematics. The post attracted a broad readership and started many conversations. I’m sure that those followers soon dropped off as I returned to my more mundane noodling about business models, business processing and marketing approaches.

MarketingProfs today has an interesting post from Leigh Duncan-Durst, a 20-year veteran of internet marketing and e-commerce, about some of the likely challenges Facebook will face as it develops its platform in order to be more relevant for marketers.

Do the math on 20 years: that puts Duncan-Durst in the interactive world in 1989. It’s worth remembering what that world was like. Back in 1989, I was involved in one of the early content deals for AOL: our company produced a daily news feed about media, similar to what you see today on MediaBistro or I Want Media, that AOL paid a fixed fee for. The investment on AOL’s part was to create awareness among the media and marketing community about the ease of use and value of their platform. After all, they had a strong foothold with consumers and believed they could develop that foothold into a powerful advertising & marketing business.

The challenge, as Duncan-Durst points out, is that AOL developed its momentum because it was easy to use and combined a number of different applications on one platform.   All of the functions that AOL provided were available through assorted other channels on the digital networks. AOL’s genius was making it incredibly easy for their users to send e-mail, play games and connect with each other. The human force that propelled the service was the force of communications. This was the AOL’s root identity as a one-time network for Commodore 64 users — connect people who wanted to share information that would improve their experience.

The challenge AOL faced in creating an environment that would be effective for marketers had two foundational issues that were separate from the exogenous social issues of the day. (Those social issues where questions about the validity and practicality of interactive marketing, if you can believe it.)

One core foundational issue related to the industrial design of the service. Communications platforms are not easily translated into marketing platforms. Marketing is designed to augment and interrupt the consumption of a produced experience. Communications between people is by nature an unproduced experience.

Another core foundational issue related to the technical bias of the development platform. As a closed system, with proprietary code underlying the consumer experience, AOL had to create easy hooks for marketing product. While they were doing that, the interactive experience was undergoing a sea change: the web, with its open technology platform, became a more cost-effective way for companies to produce and distribute content — marketing or otherwise.

One of the confrontational negotiations we had with AOL back in the early 1990′s was about opening up our AOL content  to our nascent web sites. AOL didn’t want any cracks in the wall; we wanted to leverage the early web sites that we built in order to generate a marketing platform for our advertising clients. Our dialogue with AOL was about one small backwater of content, but it spoke to the real issues that the company was facing around its platform, its limitations and the greater trends on the web.

Turn to Facebook in 2009. Facebook has created a service that has reconstituted the situational genius of AOL.  Facebook has integrated a series of interactive applications and has created an effective way to create your own personal closed network. The service has put Facebook at the hub of a genuine human impulse: to participate in information transfer with people who are part of your personal social circle.

It is easy to look at the 350 million users of Facebook as a remarkable mass market that will create incredible value to marketers. And, the reports this week that Facebook’s revenue should top $700 million in 2010 point to the scale of the opportunity.

But, when you look at Facebook’s 350 million users, you need to think of them as 350 million personal networks, with, on average, 100 members. The power of Facebook isn’t its mass; it is in the multitude of small networks, and in the infinite array of overlapping synergies that exist within these networks.

Google is different. Google is able to identify a clear revenue strategy because the hundreds of millions of people who come to the search engine each day are there for one common purpose: to find information. They are looking for a produced media experience, and that search can be augmented and enhanced by marketing.

Facebook has at its core the momentum of communications. Its unique attribute is its ability to take what were once discrete communications — from individual to individual — and manifest those communications from the individual to a group.

In order to continue to maintain its primacy as an application, Facebook has to remain true to the consumer experience. In order increase its value as an enterprise, Facebook has to accommodate the needs of people with money — the marketers.

That’s the creative tension within the enterprise. It can be ultimately destructive, or it can be ultimately productive. It will depend on how well Facebook integrates its consumer focus with its marketing focus, accounting for the overriding trends of the Internet.

Duncan-Durst characterizes the challenge for marketers on Facebook today like this:

These are just a FEW of the many hurdles on Facebook that create higher barriers to participation — and negatively impact customer experience, interaction and revenue. The features aren’t terrible — they are immature. For those of us who were in the trenches with AOL — this is Deja Vu all over again. While the problems Facebook and AOL encounter are very different, the challenges of serving businesses users in a new channel are very much the same.

Her take is that if Facebook proceeds with an open, accountable bias, focusing on consumers and leveraging consumer interest in marketers, the service will be able to avoid many of the missteps that AOL experienced.

If developers — or investors for that matter — are allowed to create policies that damage the user experience, it will undermine the opportunity Facebook now has. However, if the team at Facebook can concentrate efforts on creating a more consistent, pleasing and positive user experience for both every day people and businesses they serve, it can bolster Facebook’s position.

This doesn’t mean Facebook has to be perfect — people are very understanding. It does mean Facebook should be a bit very careful to weigh the cumulative impact of iterative changes and releases on each audience. It means that Facebook may need to behave in a more humble manner, owning up to its shortcomings (including but not limited to the ones highlighted above) and proactively responding by making value-driven, iterative improvements. It’s my assertion that when this happens, there will be a very natural transition from this FREE for all model to more lucrative FEE-BASED model. That will make everyone — including the investors, pretty happy.

I’d add an additional prism to Duncan-Durst’s observations. Facebook also has to accommodate the overwhelming direction of the web. The technology arc of the Internet has a bias towards openness and simplicity. People have a bias towards privacy and convenience. The ultimate operating system on the web will be incredibly adaptive and well-organized. And it will serve as a fulcrum point for all kinds of transactions: human, commerce, information, knowledge, data, activity. Facebook has a natural bias to keeping the flow of information inside its walls — just look at their choice about giving Google access to the flow of content. Perhaps the bias should shift to trusting the consumer to make their own judgements about how their information should flow, what their network should look like.  This trust would lead Facebook to evolve the application platform in such a way that it hands the consumer increased control.

Facebook would give up some opportunity for short-term value creation. But it would open up a long-term path that would rival Google’s for its deep embeddedness in the basic DNA of the web.