The Real Value of "Citizen Journalism"

Nicholas Lemann’s article Amateur Hour: Journalism without journalists in The New Yorker a few weeks ago set off a tempest in the blogosphere that anyone would dare to question the world-changing power of “citizen journalism”. I’m happy to leave the journalistic value judgements to others more qualified than me, but I think there is an important business issue here for media companies. At Biz360, we struggled for over a year with the question of whether blogs were important enough to our clients, and finally decided to simply take a leap of faith - launching our first blog measurement and analysis tools in a partnership with Feedster. We were a little late to the game, compared to Intelliseek (now BuzzMetrics), Cymfony, and Umbria, but it was clear that tracking consumer generated media was a phenomenon with “legs” and clearly something that PR and Corporate Communications professionals were interested in.

In spite of the disdain of professional journalists like Lemann for this “amateurism,” media companies are being driven by business realities to incorporate more elements of “social media” into their online offerings. Advertising is what pays the bills, and media business managers are well aware of the popularity of MySpace and Wikipedia. Interactivity with a user community creates stickiness and loyalty – in other words, the same things that make a print publication attractive to advertisers. Major media brands are in an excellent position to capitalize on the “social media” phenomenon, because as Lemann points out in his article, “Often the most journalistically impressive material on… citizen journalism sites has links to professional journalism.” Media properties with well-integrated social content create for themselves a virtuous circle that can grow their readership and brand value.

Bottom up, Top Down, and Sideways Categorization

I’ve been having fun with the new My Yahoo! Feature, “Recommendations for You”, that recommends RSS feeds based on the current feeds you are monitoring – sort of a Tivo for RSS. You can accept the recommendation and add the feed to your page, reject it, or just go on to the next recommendation. The system seems to have a learning feature, because the new recommendations appear to be progressively more on target, although not without occasional surprises.

Consumer-generated media generally lacks “top down” categorization schemes like those painstakingly applied news and trade content in traditional online databases like ABI/Inform or PROMT. So, we rely on keyword matching, contextual search and text mining to help keep us aware of which blogs or boards are talking about the subjects we’re interested in. For consumers, such personalization features have come to be expected. In a B2B setting, the ability to “discover” new relevant content is emerging as a key requirement - critical for managing reputation, staying on top of new technologies and business opportunities, and competing in a global economy. Since it’s based on the most granular data of all, let’s call this the “bottom up” approach.

User-generated tags, as in Technorati, Digg.com, and del.icio.us might be thought of as the “sideways” approach to categorization, since it relies on peer networks sharing common taxonomies. While one can speculate on the broader implications of “social tagging” and “folksonomies”, one advantage to this approach is its sheer scalability. Purists may cringe at the sacrifice of standards, but if the success of other collaborative internet projects, like Wikipedia, are any indication, this form of categorization is here to stay. Expect to see new search and syndication technologies and new practices in professional media analysis and measurement that will help businesses to harness the power of these new directions in categorization.

Right-Sourcing Content Competency

As Geoffrey Moore points out in his excellent new book, Dealing With Darwin, competing successfully in the global economy requires companies to regularly take a hard look at their businesses and figure out which parts of the operation are core competencies driving competitive advantage and what other parts are “context” – i.e. those functions that support the business but are not necessarily unique or proprietary. The rapidly changing electronic information industry contains many examples of companies where technology has made ubiquitous many processes where only large aggregators used to be competent. Examples of this revolutionary change over the last ten years, where readily available technologies have replaced formerly proprietary “core” capabilities, include print-to-digital conversion, data enrichment, text mining and data dissemination.

Publishers and other companies in content-intensive businesses like business intelligence, media analysis, and the myriad of new web-based end-user applications would do well to follow Moore’s advice and regularly review which technology and infrastructure investments are core sources of sustainable competitive advantage, and which are merely “context”. His key recommendation is that “context” functions (in this example perhaps print-to-digital data conversion or content acquisition via web-scraping) are those that might be outsourced at lower cost, without threatening competitive advantage.

This is obviously the rationale for the growing business process outsourcing movement, which has moved so many US companies to move basic operational functions to lower-cost providers in Asia. However, this is also a strategy to consider for fulfilling other functions where highly specialized knowledge or technical capabilities may be required that are still not necessarily “core” to the growth of a business. Some of these functions may include sales, marketing, finance, process design, licensing, IT and training. Enter a new type of company, made up of specialists with significant domain experience, who can offer a way to “right-source” those functions and permit their clients to invest in their core capabilities. One example is a new business, Unlimited Priorities, started by Iris Hanney, formerly President of Information Publishing Group, a division of Techbooks. Iris has assembled a team of veterans of the online information industry. The company will focus primarily on those evolving small and mid-size firms in need of senior managerial support and direction at all levels. A key difference between Unlimited Priorities and other consultancies that serve this market is that these specialists will do more than just advise – they will actually come in and do what is required to move the client company to the next step in its growth. This fills a significant gap in the market, and provides a solution where emerging businesses achieve the necessary focus that will allow them to bring their core innovations to market.

Mining the Deep Web: Message Board Content

Effyis, Inc., aka BoardReader, monitors over 2.5 million English-language message board posts per day, and an equal number of non-English ones. This is what might be called the ”deep web”, since it is content that is not covered by most search engines. As marketers become more aware of the importance of consumer generated media, it's clear that some of the most actionable insights are coming from within the threads of message board conversations. A quick look at BoardReader search results regarding the recent Dell laptops/ Sony batteries recall reveals highly opinionated users weighing in on the issues from investor forums, Dell users groups, and computer game enthusiast boards. Compared to the posts you might find in a Technororati or BlogPulse search using the same keywords, you find more coherent opinions and many fewer splogs.

This breakthrough content aggregation solution has valuable applications in a number of areas:
• Brand Management: monitor and measure corporate reputation and brand value
• Product Management – receive highly focused opinion of the heaviest users of your products and services
• Competitive Intelligence – track the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors through the unsolicited comments of this “virtual focus group”
• Mainstream Media - enrich and freshen news sites with new message board postings that comment on your own content or on the most popular news topics of the day

BoardReader is also building an application to monitor product review sites, but more on that later. For more information, and a demo, email me: bert.carelli@comcast.net

- Bert

A New Solution for Publishers to Monetize their Content

IndeXet is a new company that was started by a former Publisher Relations colleague of mine at Factiva, Samuel Leonel. Samuel and his team of engineers in Brazil developed this new service with the goal of turning around the traditional content aggregation model. Instead of an aggregator keeping sixty to eighty percent of the revenue from the sales of content, the publisher can retain the lion's share of revenue, while controlling the price at which articles or other digital media are sold, and the branding, look, and feel of the service.

indeXet is a hosted web ecommerce solution for large and small publishers who need a better way to distribute and monetize their content assets. Here are some of the features:

• Powerful search, content management, and distribution features that can be seamlessly integrated into a publisher’s own website, fully supporting the branding, look, and feel of the site.
• User collaboration and intelligent search features that will enable publishers to monetize not only their current audiences but also to conquer new ones.
• A unique business model that enables publishers to retain the lion’s share of revenues.
• Software-as-a-Service technology, like Salesforce.com, Webex, and Biz360, freeing the publisher from hardware and software investments, while enabling quick implemention of a customized, full-featured solution for distributing text, pictures, audio and video to their readers and web visitors.

Email me: bert.carelli@comcast.net to set up a demo. --Bert

From Company Man to Independent

A lot has happened over the past month, and what better way to sort through it all than to start a blog? The company where I'd been working for the last two and a half years did a massive restructuring, laying off a third of the employees. Not totally unexpected, given the problems we'd been having, but upsetting nevertheless. I suddenly found myself with new choices, new opportunities - not a bad place to be, really, but full of uncertainty. I am fortunately blessed with a wonderful network of former colleagues in the information industry, and we have all weathered enough changes in our careers to know a lot about how to support each other. So there has been no shortage of ideas about what to do, and where to apply myself.

It does seem like there are a lot of companies hiring here right now, so it’s not such a bad thing to be on the market. It's also a great opportunity to learn a lot about what trends are hot in the market, what new technologies are emerging and getting VC money. It’s tricky, though – especially here in the Bay Area – since often it seems that start-up companies go on hiring frenzies just because their VC’s told them to hire up, and these are seldom good prospects for long-term employment. Business strategies tend to change quickly, especially in the area of licensing and partnerships.

While I have been looking for the right fit with the right company, I've been fortunate to get offers from a few of my friends to help with their entrepreneurial projects. This has opened whole new perspectives of the content technology market for me. As I work on these projects, I will try and share some of my observations and insights in this blog. I'll try to keep it interesting and informative.
--Bert