Q: How do you define social media at Whirlpool?
Brian Synder: It has to be defined separately for each area, and we tie it back to business objectives. We track share of voice and favorability. On customer service, we do interesting text mining.
Lee Aase (Mayo Clinic): We use the free tools that are available. “The need for measurement varies inversely with the amount of money you spend on it.” We use the measurement tools to prove the value of what we’re doing.

Q: Your biggest challenge?
Marcel Lebrun (Radian6): We only measure if there’s a practical purpose. Social media are now multi-purpose. We use social media for every possible purpose. So, it’s disrupting everything in the enterprise that has to do with reaching out to customers. But those different practices have different business goals and thus different needs for measurement.

Q: Where it’s going?
Marcel: In the past six months, we’ve gone from explaining what social media is, to businesses understanding that their brand is the sum of all the conversations about it.

[Missed some. Sorry]

Q: How do you measure influencers for a brand?
Marcel: We integrate a bunch of digital breadcrumbs and social metrics. We measure things like how often a person talks about a subject, how much comments, how many unique comments, inbound links, which ones of those are also talking about that topic. Influence is very topic-centric. You sometimes want to see total reach, and sometimes you just want to find the topic geeks.

Q: How do you determine sentiment?
Brian: Synergy1 has humans reading the posts. The Tensity program automates this.
Lee: We eyeball it. And we’re looking for the really positive ones so we can spread the word and engage.
Brian: We look to engage by actually talking about product issues. E.g., an unhappy customer was tweeting about a product arriving damaged three times. We talked with him and redesigned the packaging based on his suggestions. We’ve taught some of our customer care phone folks how to engage via social media.
Marcel: The bulk of brands are at the listen stage. But Dell has a full blogger outreach team, focused on different kinds of users. The measure quantitatively and qualitatively (e.g., stories).

Marcel: The fastest way to get a new feature into a product is to tweet it. The developers get excited. They like being in touch.

[Tags: nms09 marketing twitter pr social_media cluetrain ]

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Clay Johnson of the Sunlight Foundation and David Almacy (Edelman’s public affairs VP and former Director of Internet Operations, White House) are talking about government and engagement.

Clay says he’s a product guy who likes building things. Coming out of the Dean campaign, he co-founded Blue State Digital. When asked why Obama was successful online, he says he replies “Because Howard Dean had bad lawyers.” He could just build stuff there without consulting lawyers. Now, when they try to apply this stuff to governing, the lawyers are involved, and creativity is coming to a screeching halt, Clay says. But, he says, there’s another way: Publishing data. Data.gov aggregates data from the executive branch. Lots of businesses have been built using gov’t data, and this will be a seed bed.

Clay says that Twitter is as important to a political campaign as email. “I’m willing to go on record that in 2012 Twitter will be a bigger fund-raiser for campaigns than email.” Obama raised 80% of his funds through email. E.g., Tim O’Reilly has 200,000 subscribers.

He talks about Apps for America, a contest for apps that do useful things with open data. The new round has people working with the data at data.gov.

Q: [me] How can we encourage the gov’t and others to produce data in open formats?
Clay: I’m more focused on just getting the data out. I don’t care about the format. We should tell them just to do it in plain text, if that’ll get it out faster. Once the gov’t starts pumping it out we can have the debate about which standards.

[Tags: politics e-gov egov e-government transparency ]

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Marc Monseau (Johnson & Johnson): 50% of people change their behavior based on the medical advice they read on line. And most people are looking for info from other people like themselves. But that info isn’t always accurate. That means that the healthcare industry has an obligation to get out into the online world to present accurate info. We have lots of information, and we are companies of relationships: We have close relations with physician groups, patient groups, advocacy groups, gov’t organizations. We can tap into those resources of information and relations. E.g., we have an ADD product. The best info patients receive often come from other parents. at ADHD Moms at Facebook, there’s info, but also the possibility of linking to other patients. We set it up, but it’s unbranded.

Virginia Cox (Consumer Healthcare Products Association) gives an example: Teens getting high on cough medicine. There were 200 videos on YouTube about how to get high that way. So, we used social media to build awareness among mothers. We were completely transparent about who we are. Another example: We recruited five moms because people want to hear from other people like them. We put it on Gather and then on Facebook. We wanted to have them talking. It meant giving up control over what they’re saying.

Earl Whipple (AstraZeneca) says that while you want to provide accurate information, you don’t want to encroach on the physician-client relationship. You also have to be mindful of gov’t regulations, of course. He also notes that the search results are more often coming from bloggers than from sites of credentialed providers. The most controversial posts get pulled up first, frequently, and many people assume that those are the most reliable. Therefore, the question isn’t what’s the risk of engaging in the new social media space; the question is what’s the risk of not engaging.

Q: How are things changing? How authentic can you be?
Earl: The concept of spokespeople is now laughable. People want to hear directly from the content area expert.
Marc: You can be authentic while talking about highly regulated products by being transparent about what you can talk about and what you can’t. People understand we’re under limitations. And we can at least direct the traffic to the right place.

Q: Info across a global world?
Earl: When we put out information, we include who the information is intended for. It’s an unbounded environment.

Q: What is it that you can’t tell people because of regs?
Marc: The FDA limits what pharmas can say about approved products. If people notice a new use for a product, you have to go back to the script and say what’s on the product label. It doesn’t prevent you from engaging. But you can’t get into a detailed conversation about unapproved uses. And if you come across someone who’s had a problem with the product, you have to report that back.
Virginia: There are strict regulations around advertising. Companies have to be careful about what counts as advertising.
Earl: There are many unanswered issues. E.g., if you’re in a genuine dialog and someone brings up an unapproved use, what exactly is your responsibility?

Q: How do you monitor the Five Moms site, for example?
Virginia: We don’t have to monitor it for content. The Moms respond on their own. But we are required to monitor it for adverse reports, etc.

Q: What should all students know about social media and health if their in the communications field?
Virginia:

From the Five Moms Site:

Tips to monitor your kids online.

* Make sure that your children are never online without your permission.
* Be clear with your kids about your rules on Internet use at home and outside of the home.
* Place your computer in an area of the house where you can easily supervise their Internet activity.
* Ask your children about who they talk to and what activities they do online.
* Use parental filters to block access to questionable sites.
* Build an open and trusting relationship with your kids about their online use.

The last point is an unintentional punchline. [Tags: nms09 pr marketing health_care pharmaceuticals social_media social_netowrking cluetrain ]

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I’m at the New Media Academic Summit for a second day. [Disclosure: Edelman PR is the main sponsor of this, and I’ve consulted to them in the past. In fact, it looks like I’ll be doing some more consulting to them.]

Bob Shrum and Tony Blankley are talking. Shrum is a long-time Democratic political consultant and campaign manager. Blankley is his Republican counterpart (roughly). Shrum begins by saying that the Internet can be a tremendous tool for political persuasion. Blankley agrees and says the Net is weakening parties. And, says Blankley, this is the first communication tech that allows us to move from mass to more customized messaging. Congress is better at “sending out than capturing,” Blankley says.

Shrum: Obama has defied conventional wisdom about over-exposure. People now want the immediacy of their leaders. Second, his program is far more ambitious than usual. Blankley agrees that the exposure isn’t overdone, although he notes that O’s negatives have gone up faster than his positives have gone down. (“He’s still doing fine,” he notes.) It’d be better to have a bench of people who can speak, he says. (“Biden is not turning out to be a good communications device.”)

Q: If it’s a new era, why are the experts on the Sunday shows still male and pale?
Tony: I’m not sure it’s a new era. I thought we did see an increase in people of colors among the commentators during the campaign. Who gets booked for these shows isn’t a conspiracy. The bookers see someone on a show and devide to get him for their show. They’re desperately trying to find someone and they fall back on the people they know.
Shrum: The networks are trying, but they’re facing three centuries of discrimination.

Q: Is it now easier to mount an oppositional change?
Shrum: O has organized YouTube, etc., so well that it works in their favor.

Q: [me] Is it a generational change? If so, at the maximum, what does that change consist of?
Shrum: Yes. In fact, we may be at the end of the Reagan era. There may be a fundamental realignment in American politics. But we won’t know for ten years.
Blankley: Obama won in part because he won among the Millennials, because of his use of the new tech. There has been a generational shift in technology usage. Mass communication will just luck archaic. Will there be a new era? Possibly. But it won’t be based on the demographic shift. It will depend on O convincing us that there’s a better way to do politics.

[Tags: nms09 politics ]

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At the Edelman-sponsored NewMedia conference, a panel is beginning on “advancing reputation,” with Mike Slaby (CTO of Obama for America), Debbie Curtis-Magley (UPS), and David Liu (AOL). Premise: Companies can now advance their reputations through the channels they choose, without going through media distributors.

Mike (Obama): A lot of success came from Obama’s skills as a candidate. There was a movement, and our job in the new media departent was how to get the candidate in front of people more. Going into these spaces, you are an equal member with everyone else. It’s not broadcasting. If you tread on people’s space, you’ll piss them off. It’s hard for companies to find a persona and a personality for talking online, but it’s easy with a political campaign because you have a candidate. You have to have one set of values and one story, and you need to talk in the language of your audience. If you’re going to use Twitter, you have to have people in your organization who know how to tweet. And you have to trust your people and the people you’re talking about. We only filtered out comments that were truly, truly offensive. Sean Hannity came after us because someone at our social network made it look like the Black Panthers endorsed Obama on our social networking site, so we set up a profile for Hannity to show him that this was an open space.

We gave out our logos and let people make their own sites. There was an art exhibit of what people made out of this, called “Officially Unofficial.” Some of it I wish hadn’t been made, but so what? It made people feel that the campaign was theirs. This makes marketing people uncomfortable if they’re used to managing messages. You should give up control. It worked for us.

But social media works for politics only if it gets people out into the real world to vote. You have to convert your users into donors, volunteers, and voters. About 30% of our email was doing something in the real world … I’m proud of that.

He adds: Not every business should have a facebook page; it depends on what you’re trying to do.

Also: There are no switching costs online, which is a reason not to build your own social networking site. We had a multi-million person base ready to go, but that may never happen again in politics, and it probably never happens in business.

Q: Why did the campaign refer to Obama as Barack? Wasn’t that too informal?
A: People want an emotional connection. They want to know his story. We needed to talk about him as a person. But now I never refer to him as that. He’s president.

[Tags: newmedia politics obama social_media nms09 ]

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Chapter 3 left readers with a problem without resolution. If facts don’t provide as firm a bedrock as we’d thought, then are we left to believe whatever we want? Is there no hope? [Spoiler: No, we’re not free to believe whatever we want.]

Because Chapter 3 was pretty abstract, I want to be sure to address its question in some concrete ways. So, Chapter 4 opens with a brief scene-setter that says that we all love diversity, but when there’s too much, we can’t get anything done. I’m now at the beginning of a section that will give maybe four general rules for “scoping” diversity so that a group has enough internal difference to be smarter than the smartest individual, but not so much that they can’t get past bickering. I plan on following that with a more abstract section that asks whether the Net is making us more open or closed to other people’s ideas. At the moment, I like the idea of beginning with the concrete and moving to the abstract, in large part because I think the abstract question is pretty much impossible to answer.

I can’t tell yet if the chapter structure is going to work. There is so much to say about this topic. And I have a concern that the reader is not expecting the book to take this turn. But I won’t be able to tell that until I have enough distance on the prior chapters to be able to read them with some degree of freshness.

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Dan Gillmor is giving a Berkman lunch on media literacy.

He whips through a history of media, from stone age to now, in about ten seconds. He cycles through a dozen sites doing interesting work, compressing twenty minutes of his normal talk to about 20 seconds. He says he’s no longer very worried about the supply of good journalism.

He says the question of “Who is a journalist?” is the wrong one to ask. Better to ask “What is journalism?” It’s an And, not an Or, situation. NGOs and individuals have been doing good reporting. The best reporting on Guantanamo has come from the ACLU, not from professional journalists. As Clay Shirky says, there’s no barrier any more between ideas and action. Try things out, let them fail, try again. Dan quickly shows some student projects at ASU, where he teaches, ProPublica, NYTimes APIs, etc. “I’m just pretty sure we’re going to get enough journalism.” But, says Dan, that doesn’t solve the quality problem.

He says he is really worried about demand. There’s too much information. Not all of it is accurate, including info in the mainstream media. “The ecosystem is in bad need of repair.” He talks about principles for “consumers” (he puts it in quotes) and suppliers.

For news consumers, he says we need skepticism and judgment. We need to have our “bullshit meter” working all the time. “It’s a mistake to think of credibility as starting at zero.” We should be thinking of it as having a negative starting point. Anonymous comments start with negative credibility. “They’d have to work really hard to get to no credibility.” Sometimes there’s something good in there, but …

Anonymous speech is crucial, Dan says. It’d be a big mistake to try to ban it. “It’s a bad idea” to refuse to stand behind your words in most cases, but it’s crucial when we need it. People should assume that a personal anonymous attack on someone is a lie. Assume it’s false.

Another principle: Do research. Ask your own questions, especially when making big decisions. E.g., Wikipedia is often the best place to start, and usually the worst place to stop. Dan says that WP is getting better and better and becoming one of the most valuable sources of info on the planet.

Another principle: Get outside your own comfort zone. E.g., Global Voices.

Another principle: Question your own beliefs. Dan used to keep a list of things he believes, and every six months he’d relentlessly attack it. E.g., these days he’s thinking Google is getting worrisome, doing things that are “anti-trust worthy” [nice pun!] He needs to revisit and ask if that trend is true.

Finally, we need to learn the techniques by which media is created and manipulates us. Sourcewatch, NewsTrust, MediaCritic (for Phoenix AZ)

The principles for journalists include all of the above, plus: Asking the readers what they know; thoroughness; accuracy; fairness (enabling right of hyperlinked reply); independence; transparency. Dan’s example of the need for transparency: The NYT won a Pulitzer for exposing the Pentagon’s coopting of military experts showing up on TV shows in the run-up to the Iraq War, but the network news did not mention that when covering the Pulitzers. Transparency means “you’ll be believed less but trusted more.”

Dan is creating a users guide, under the name mediactivecom. It’ll be a book and a site. He’s also exploring the nature of books. Perhaps the slower moving stuff will be in the book and the faster stuff will be online. He’ll write it entirely in public.

Q: Is the media organization the right unit of trust? Maybe we trust the NYT for tech reporting but not on Iraq…
A: Yes. There are reporters who I trust and others I don’t so much. And good reporters sometimes get things wrong. We’re looking for people to help us develop systems that combine population and reputation, and reputation is an incredibly complicated word…

Q: Your principles for journalists look like an updated version of the professional code of ethics for journalists. The code hasn’t been updated since 1996. Maybe that’s a framework for you…
A: One of my beefs with the NYT and WaPo is how routinely they violate their own standard. BTW, you’ll notice the word objectivity occurred nowhere in my presentation.

Q: I’m worried that money + anonymity (or fake identity) means that people can be shills. And someone who has to work all day can’t contribute as much to citizen efforts.
A: It’s going to be messy. But we’ll have more good things. Manipulation via money is not a new problem. Relentless media criticism is the best sunlight. I don’t know if it’ll be enough. As far as the inability to participate: There will be various scales. Most people can’t do media criticism all day. They have a life. People are now aware that if the see something newsworthy and they have a cellphone camera, they should record it. They don’t all know what to do next, and that’s an area for education.

Q: At our university, all students must take media literacy. Do you have advice for students.
A: I wonder if it’s too late by college. We need to do this when kids are young. But to teach critical thinking in grade schools would get you fired as a dangerous radical in half the school districts.

Q: (eszter) Even if we agreed that literacy is something we need, it’s not clear whose jurisdiction it falls under.
A: I know of one university that has a course devoted to this required of all students: U NY Stony Brook.

Q: The best media criticism today is on Comedy Central. We need the political will to do this work.
A: The Daily Show has some of the best criticism of television news, but that’s a very narrow part of journalism in terms of its content. You want to see bad news watch local tv news.

(lisa williams) What happens when local newspapers go?
A: I challenge your assumption that there will be no daily paper in the top 50 cities in the US. There’s still a business to be had in print journalism for some period of time (but not forever). The problem is most of these guys have so much debt. If the Boston Globe goes, within weeks there will be two smaller newspapers that will be better than the Metro. They won’t be comprehensive. There will be no lack of information, though it’ll be harder to find the things that trust. Messiness is not something merely to fear.

Q: (cbracy) How do some sites/papers get past zero in credibility? E.g., Talking Points Memo
A: From the beginning, TPM told you who he was, stood behind his works, had some journalistic background. Then, over time, it’s earned our trust.
Q: Rush Limbaugh uses his own name …
A: But an important criterion is that what you say is true. I have nothing against Fox existing. I just despise the slogan “Fair and balanced” because it’s a lie. We’re never going to agree on everything, so the reputation system needs to include knowing the opinion of people who broadly think about the world as I do but also what people who don’t think the way I do, because I want to make sure that I read that to. I prefer the uncomfortable world of nuance and uncertainty than one to which we simply accept the news as given.

Q: (harry lewis) Where is the right place to teach people not to beleive anonymous stuff?
A: The best single thing we could do to have better journalism is to have journalist be covered by some other journalism. It sure as hell made me better. It a smart world, getting burned would not be the way you learn. But for some period of time, people are going to have to be burned by believing something anonymous and telling their friends. It’ll take a generation…

People will miss the current newspapers because they are a unifying force. Also, what about objectivity>
A: Objectivity is a nice ideal that is hopelessly impractical. The principles I outlined add up to something better. No one should ever believe only one media source. And, no, I’m not happy about the dissolution of forces that gave us some common ground. But I see all these self-organize things happening… Before it’s over, everyone will have heard Susan Boyle sing. We have a better chance of figuring things out now that the information accretes over time to a place where there’s more clarity. And, by the way, I do not buy the echo chamber idea; I think that’s easier to do in the era of broadcasting.

Q: (darius) I’m skeptical. Aren’t lazy users aren’t lazy. They work hard all day and then want to be entertained
A: They’re not lazy in their lives, but they’re being lazy in what they believe about the news. The era of mass media has encourage an intellectual and civic laziness that’s dangerous. We all to take more responsibility for knowing what we know.

Q: You’re worried that the demand side isn’t strong enough. Even if every university had a course in media literacy, but the 2/3’s of the country that doesn’t go to university …
A: There’s lot of work going on in media literacy at all levels of education. I avoid the phrase “media literacy” because it works better than Ambien in putting people to sleep. It has to start with parents. Journalists should have been working on this for years; it would have given them a reason for existing.

[Posted without being re-read. Sorry!] [Tags: berkman journalism media dan_gillmor citizen_media ]

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I went first. I talked about exceptionalism, responding to Eli Noam’s challenge at the beginning of the conference that if we’re going to think the Net is going to bring about substantial changes, we have to be able to point to characteristics of it that are different from other technologies that also looked revolutionary but that turned out to be rather prosaic.

Len Downie was executive editor of Washington Post. He’s not going to propose any new form of delivery of the news. He’s not sure the old will die out completely. WaPo is reorganizing itself as a news operation and as a company. They have Facebook and iPhone apps, etc. When it comes to UGC, “this is not a zero sum game.” On WashingtonPost.com you find lots of user comments, participation in blogs, user photos and videos, crowd-sourcing. E.g., Amanda Michel’s “Off the Bus” crowd sourcing, which went through professional editors. (Amanda is now at ProPublica.) They hope the Net will help end the traditional alienation from their readers. And the Net has made their audience bigger than ever before.

The big problem is the loss of classified advertising. Hundreds of millions of dollars lost, hitting local newspapers especially hard. Also, display ads have been driven down. Local news stations are covering fewer stories. There’s less reporting. That’s the problem Len is going to examine in his new academic role at Arizon State.

There are some things the government could do, but not a “bail out,” Len says. Maybe newspapers will become 501C3’s. Maybe they’ll become LC3’s, so they could still be profitable and yet receive tax-exempt contributions. Maybe convert them into endowments, although Len says there isn’t enough money for that: You’d need a ginormous endowment to generate the requisite funds. There are more and more non-profit investigative reporting organizations. There’s a lot going on. It’s impossible to tell what’s going to happen.

Q: How much does investigative reporting cost?
A: At ProPublica, they do it in the best way, and it’s tens of thousands of dollars, mainly for the reporter’s time.

Q: In Germany they’re aggregating news and selling access [I got this wrong] …
A: I’d have to look at it.
Q: Isn’t that what AP does?
A: Don’t get me started. AP is supposed to be a collaborative. If we don’t all charge at the same time, we won’t be able to raise enough money. Alan Mutters [sp] suggests that we all decide on July 4 to start charging. The Obama admin is concerned about the future of news. They’re going to look at loosening anti-trust regs so newspapers can band together, but you don’t want to create another cartel like AP.

Q: If the NYT shut down its presses and went totally online, how would that affect their costs and prices?
A: The Times might save 40-50% of their costs, but it would take away 90% of their revenue. Kindle is great for books but not very good for newspapers. Looking forward to the big multimedia tablets.

Q: The NYT is doing well on the Web. But last year their Web revenue increased just 1%. What’s the future business model?
A: That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

Greg Lastowka (law prof, Rutgers) is going to talk about legal aspects of UGC. First question: What is UGC? It’s a fuzzy concept. “User” is an important term because of copyright. Copyright is not about monetizing the works of authors. Copyright is there to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Our Constitutional mention is based on the earlier British Statute of Ann that took control away from publishers and gave it to authors, in order to promote education.

Greg predicts that copyright won’t change very much in the next ten years. Copyright law will probably ignore UGC and be large unaffected by it. UGC will be treated as a problem, it will change the rules somewhat (through litigation), but the fundamental shape of copyright law won’t change in response to UGC (says Greg). Ten years ago, he was more optimistic about it. He thought UGC was a huge social boon that was a very bad fit for copyright law, so copyright law would change to reflect that value. The Web was meeting the goals copyright law was established to meet.

Four changes to get copyright law to fit the Web: 1. Simplify the law. 2. People want credit for their work even when they’re happy to have it spread. People get copyright law mixed up with plagiarism. We should work the attribution right into it. 3. Reform terms of service and their enforcement. 4. Subsidize free access content. Copyright is a subsidy for authors.

Greg was arguing this ten years ago. Not much has changed, although there’s progress in open access to academic work. Why haven’t there been more changes? Maybe because our legislators don’t understand what’s happening. The better, sadder, answer is that Greg’s politics were naive. Copyright law today is realistically about protecting big money incumbents. Dan likes copyright and blockbuster movies, but thinks there should be an ecology that enables them and UGC. We’re unlikely to strike a new social contract that reflects the rights of amateur creators.

Q: To what extent is international trade motivating maintaining strict copyright?
A: Legislators certainly care about it.

Stefaan Verhuist (Markle Foundation) presents his model of UGC: Mediation 3.0. It has three new mediating functions that converge to create a new type of mediation. Those functions can be accelerated and made more valuable by making sure they are cheap, deep, and speed. The success depends on four challenges: the 4 Ps.

Setfaan draws a triangle: 1. Establish relations. 2. Provide a new kind of resource that has value for users and that may be created by the users. 3. Remix. Ensure a relation that creates a resource that may be remixed. Their convergence creates UGC. If you can provide resources that are cheap, deep (the value for its users, related perhaps to a geographical location), and speediness. But it can be hard to be cheap, deep and speedy; that’s the challenge.

The 4 Ps: Privacy (relationship), Property (remix), Public sphere obligations and responsibilities (resource), Push and pull (in the center of the triangle) of information. The push-pull presents the policy challenges.

[Posted without re-reading. Gotta run.]

[Tags: journalism media newspapers copyright copyleft creative_commons marketing ]

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Andres Hervas-Drane
Begins by noting the long tail in the market share of products. There’s empirical evidence that this is happening online. Why there? Standard answer: Supply side. But he wants to look at factors on the demand side that can affect this distribution.

He sets up a case where consumers have difference preferences and come to the market uninformed. In the offline world, search happens through word of mouth. They can search with evaluations or with recommendations. Recommendations come from consumers who searched with evaluations. Word of mouth results in a high concentration of sales.

Almost a third of Amazon’s sales are generated by recommendations. These are generated by users as meta-content, finding consumers who have similar preferences. This is taste-matching and it reduces sales concentration.

Then there are “artistic markets”: that increase the demand for niche producers and results in long term cultural variety.

Peyman Faratin talks about a case study of prediction markets. His main point: Scarcity is at play even in the UGC system. The new scarcity is of attention.

An incentive engineering problem is at foot in prediction markets. When you can’t bet real money, the incentives go down. The reward streams are delayed. You have to search for the market. There are significant transaction costs [which he goes over in some detail, but too hard to capture briefly…sorry]. That’s why prediction markets aren’t going very well; they’re lonely.

Solution: Reward the big hitters. Let them transfer their reputations. Give them content management rights. Rank markets and reputations. “Invisible hand of the algorithm: Recommendations.” Use widgets to let the market come to the user. [I missed the end of this. Sorry!]

Chris Derllarocas talksabout “Your Operations hvae become your New Marketing.” “Every customer is a potential brand ambassador or a lethal bran assassin.” E.g., in 2006, Comcast spent $100 M in advertising, wiped out by the youtube of a sleeping technician. UGC can make or break your business.

Most influential UGC occurs spontaneously and represents non-representative experiences. Companies need to take preventive measures. Consumers use UGC to decide if they should consume a product. Once they have, they decide what to report. Companies need to “Strategically re-engineer the consumption experience to spontaneously provoke the right mix of consumer content.”

Rules: Pay attention to extreme events. Move towards a culture that pays attention to outliers, positive and negative. “Redesign your monitoring practices and career incentives to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.” Also, “reasses yesterday’s yield management practices.” That is, make sure you do not systematically produce a small number of unhappy customers” (e.g., but routinely overbooking, or by routinely selling undesirable hotel rooms at very low rates). Also, get to know your power customers, i.e., the ones more likely to be vocal. They should receive “the special teratment that loyal big spenders used to receive ten years ago.” Also, not sock puppetry. Also, maybe have a Chief Perception Officer.

Q: You’re proposing an operational hit since we won’t be selling all the seats or rooms.
A: Yes. That’s the decision to be made. We need to make these decisions holistically. We don’t have the complete answer, There’s room for innovation.

Q: [me] This morning we heard that the population is not nearly as adept at using these tools as some of us (= me) would like to believe. This afternoon we hear about markets that are adept. How did you hear this morning’s research?
A: It varies by market. And consumers aren’t necessarily savvy. The UGC has effect even when they’re not savvy. You need to tier your efforts, taking account of the consumers’ Web savviness.

Q: How’s it work in other countries?
A: We haven’t done that research. Happy collaborate…

Q: How does this apply to B2B?
A: More limited.

Anindya Ghose will talk about combining textmining with econometrics. Firms want to know if there’s any economic value to social networks and UGC. How can they monetize UGC?

There’s economic value embedded in the content. E.g., product reviews, geo locations, online purchase behavior. His software mines the text and assesses the economic value of, say, a positive review and even more particular comments. E.g., “good packaging” lowers the value by $0.56 because customers expect superlatives. Particular keywords have particular monetary effects.

Hypothesis: The increasing availability of UGC is reflected in sponsored search metrics. And, yes, he found a correlation between the frequency with which key words are used in blogs and their cost-per-click on search sites. He’s researching whether there’s some sort of causal effect, but it’s not an easy problem. Hence, UGC can be monetized through sponsored search.

[Posted without re-reading. I have to prepare for my unprepared comments. I’m on a panel that’s supposed to be reflecting on the day.] [Tags: ugc ugc3 marketing cluetrain advertising textmining advertising prediction_markets everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Scott McDonald of Conde Nast gives the lunchtime talk. He reminds us of how big CN is: magazines, websites, events, digital apps.

His numbers show that lots of people are creating content.

UGC issues for “traditional” [the quotes are on Scott’s slide] media: Brand compatitiblity (vs. “snark/coarsening”. Commoditization of content (all gets treated the same). Value as “listening post” (media can hear their readers). DRM when everyone is an aggregator. Monetization.

Advertisers are reluctant to jump in, Scott says. They worry about brand. UGC video is cheap and plentifu. but it’s not selling. The CPMs are deeply discounted. Ad revenues are not going to UGC and marketing execs are pessimistic about this; only 22% think UGC is a “high-growth opportunity.” 73% of advertisers say they definitely will not run ads on UGC.

So, what are the other models? You can incorporate UGC on a site as a “retention device.” [CNN’s turn-the-channel “iReports”?] Authentication fees on microblogging sites? E.g., Twitter charges DominosPizza to assure that it in fact represents Dominos Pizza. How about sponsorships on crowdsourcing sites such as Digg? E.g., at Reddit, maybe a sponsor could be an “amplifier” that announces that each thumbs up counts 5x. [Wha??? Wouldn’t that destroy Reddit’s credibility?] Finally, there’s cross-platform marketing. Only 10% of visitors to a mag’s site are subscribers. So, cannibalization isn’t a worry. But how do you make money on the web site? Ads only work for very big sites. But,” online subscriptions sales are sweet.” People who subscribe that way have higher value than subscribers through other means: They’ve sought out the mag, they pay with a credit card, they are more likely to take an automatic renewal contract, they get added to the email list, etc.

He points to Conde Nast examples of UGC. Contests for designs, NYer caption contest, GQ tips on good grooming. [These are as much UGC as a man-in-the-street interview.]

He points to Reddit, a CN site. He acknowledges the bad language on the page. It produces no subscription revenues. They’re starting to have sponsored posts that still can be voted up or down.

Q: Are people dropping subscriptions because they can get the content for free online?
Scott: In general, no. The conditions for reading mags are special, e.g., reading one on the subway to create zone of privacy. [A good e-reader will destroy this.] For news mags, that’s more of an issue.

[Tags: ugc ugc3 conde_nast media mainstream_media advertising marketing ]

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