Only Dead Fish

As Many Paths As Possible

Since late November Russell Davies has been doing a splendid job of documenting his Kindle Highlights from the many and diverse books that he has read. One of my favourite quotes came from Kindle book number 34, The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway:

"You don't make strategy so that there's one path to victory; you make it so that as many paths as possible lead to something which isn't loss."

 Indeed.

Creative Commons & the Sharing Web

 

We've just passed the tenth anniversary of the release of the first collection of Creative Commons licenses, established by the non-profit Creative Commons organisation to facilitate a "simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work — on conditions of your choice". 

In the decade since that release the free and easy-to-use licenses have been expanded and improved, and their usage and application has grown exponentially. Hundreds of millions of creative works are now licensed under the system which has expanded to a network of affiliates that support and promote CC activities in over 70 jurisdictions around the world.

Creative Commons licenses work alongside copyright, and are important to the sharing web since they provide a framework to support creative re-use of content, and expand the available range of creative works upon which others can legally build and share. And in a world where everything is a remix, building on the work of others is a fundamental form of innovation and creativity. Such a framework provides a great foundation for a community built around sharing and constructive practices like attribution.

Flickr has long shown how to make mass adoption of CC easier, and YouTube, Google+, Slideshare and Soundcloud all support the CC licensing system, giving users flexibility to license their content as they see fit, and making it easy to create defaults under settings options.

Yet, as Ryan Singel wrote about over Christmas, some some of our largest and most popular social networks do not support Creative Commons. Facebook (and now Instagram) in particular, is focused on creating defaults set to share openly, but with most of that sharing happening within Facebook. There is no option for users to license their content for creative re-use, and settings for sharing are instead governed by complex, multi-page terms of service which no-one reads (two Carnegie Mellon researchers published a paper earlier this year that suggested that it would take 76 work days to read all of the privacy policies that an average Internet user encounters in a year).

In fairness, Facebook are not alone in not supporting CC, but with the huge volumes of content that are shared on the service every day, it's worrying that we are learning sharing behaviours set around defaults that don't encourage constructive re-use and voluntary attribution. 

Anil Dash recently wrote about the web we lost, lamenting the apparent drift from some of the core attributes that underpinned the heady early days of the sharing web. Surely one of the best ways in which we can rebuild the web we lost, is to encourage universal support for the one system that stands the best chance of providing users with a degree of flexibility and protection around their content and creative work, whilst establishing a sound foundation for communities built around constructive sharing.

The Best Blog Posts Of 2012

Last year around this time I posted a list of some of my favourite posts from the year. As I said then I'm a big believer in celebrating great writing and thinking (it's the motivation behind doing Post Of The Month) so I'm doing it again. So here are fourteen posts (in no particular order, and just the number I arrived at) that I really enjoyed this year:

Myself, Quantified by Dan Hon

Make Things People Want or Make People Want Things? from John Willshire

What Closing A Magazine Tells You About Why You Had To Close A Magazine by David Hepworth

To The Father I Never Knew On Father's Day by Erik Proulx

What Will Matter In The Future by Stowe Boyd

Leaving The Guardian, Creativity vs Mild Depression, The Quantified Self, and Running by Dan Catt

5 Ideas Trapping The Ad Industry Right Now from Mark Pollard

Words I Hate by Martin Weigel

Graft and Craft: What Makes a Planner from Martin Weigel

Advertising Is Dying, Long Live Design from George Prest

Subcompact Publishing from Craig Mod

Two Cities from Heidi Hackemer

The Web We Lost by Anil Dash

The Abundance Of Slowness by Matt Steel

There's so many I could have included in this list and it's heartening that blogging continues to add such enormous value to the debate in our industry. My appreciation goes to all the bloggers who care enough to have continued to provide us with such thought-provoking and well articulated thinking this year.

On Competitive Focus

So much management time in organisations is wasted analysing what the competition are doing. Competitive positioning and strategies are important of-course, but I often think that one of the downsides of an over-enthusiastic focus on responding to what others are doing in your market is that you forget to be awesome yourself. So in that context this quote from Larry Page, taken from this rare but informative interview, is illuminating:

"Obviously we think about competition to some extent. But I feel my job is mostly getting people not to think about our competition. In general I think there's a tendency for people to think about the things that exist. Our job is to think of the thing you haven't thought of yet that you really need."

Should Publishers Refocus on ARPU?

Newspaper and magazine publishers (and other media owners) typically run their businesses based on segmented revenue streams such as circulation, advertising, promotions and so on. The revenue streams often report vertically, ensuring that the focus is on vertical strategies and execution first, and horizontal second. But could it be the right time for publishing businesses to refocus around a central guiding metric such as average revenue per user? Here's five reasons why that might be a good idea:

• It would mean that revenues, and therefore activities to generate revenues, are focused and structured in a customer-centric rather than a company-centric way. Customer-centricity is the hallmark of many a successful digital (and otherwise) business, and ARPU is a naturally customer-focused measure
• If your starting point is the customer, that means that strategies for growing revenues have to be more joined-up. ARPU can illustrate better from a customer perspective what is driving revenue growth and margins, and joined-up approaches (particularly with data and analytics, and the ultimate objective of a single customer view) are becoming increasingly important to companies across many different sectors (not least for improved user experience, cross-sell, up-sell, and improving the targeting of value-add services)
• If your strategies for growing revenues are more customer-focused and joined-up, it means that the development of extra services to generate revenues is easier, and can be less restricted by legacy thinking or approaches. ARPU growth can be a good measure for how successfully a company or brands are transitioning users to new services that are both attractive to customers and strategically important to the business 
• If you are less restricted by legacy thinking and practices, you can take a genuinely platform neutral approach to growing the business
• ARPU is used successfully by companies that offer subscription based services to clients (telephony, ISPs). Content is increasingly a subscription business, and most publishers are already familiar with making subscription models work. As revenue streams diversify (for example into commerce and added value services) and become increasingly digital in origin, ARPU provides a unifying metric and objective for everyone in the business to get around - not just the commercial teams

It's certainly not an easy switch to make, but with the degree of challenge most media owners are dealing with perhaps it's exactly the kind of change that's needed. Agree? Disagree?

Image courtesy

What if Money Was No Object?

Post Of The Month - November 2012 - The Winner

A strong showing from Heidi Hackemer's Two Cities post and Craig Mod's take on Subcompact Publishing in this month's vote but in the end it was Graeme Wood's excellent post on Planning For Small Data that won. So well done Graeme. You get the props of your blogging peers and are entered into the hall of fame. Thanks everyone for taking part.

Post Of The Month - November 2012 - The Vote

Thanks for the nominations. Another good selection this month. So our vote is between:

Subcompact Publishing from Craig Mod

Planning For Small Data from Graeme wood

Is Innovation Dead? by John Winsor

Two Cities from Heidi Hackemer

The Dark Side Of Content Marketing by Tom Webster

And you can register your vote below:

Post Of The Month - November 2012 - Nominations

A good month for good writing I think. So it's time to nominate the best posts that you've read in the last month for the vote which I'll put up as soon as I have a good selection. I've had a couple of nominations sent to me already so have a pretty good starting list but if you'd like to add to it please do so in the comments below. So our starting list is:

Subcompact Publishing from Craig Mod

Planning For Small Data from Graeme wood

Is Innovation Dead? by John Winsor

Two Cities from Heidi Hackemer

The Dark Side Of Content Marketing by Tom Webster

And you can nominate any additional ones below. I thank you.

Digital Content Trends 2013

I was asked by the Content Marketing Association to give a talk to their members on my view of the upcoming trends in digital content for the coming year. There's so much I could have talked about but I had 40 minutes so chose to concentrate on some of the macro stuff, and incorporate a nod to the odd really interesting idea that has crossed my path of late.

The positioning of content marketing within the wider marketing mix is pretty interesting right now, given that such a large proportion of marketers agree that it will become significantly more important over the next year, and that agencies of all kinds are converging on it. Yet it's not without its challenges, not least that most clients don't have a defined strategy, dedicated skills or resources, and the fact that (as I quote Josh Sternberg) brands are simply not set up to be publishers.    

Thinking about the changing dynamic that is going on between Paid, Owned and Earned media provides good context for this shift. Whilst paid media may not be getting any less important, the increased focus on always on means a greater focus on owned and earned as well as more nuanced ways of using each element, often in support of the others. So as I've said before, the most interesting spaces within the POE model are how they can work together to amplify each other, how content can flow seamlessly between them, and where they overlap.

One of the biggest challenges here is adapting to what Robin Sloan has called the 'Stock and Flow', and the tricky balance of building value slowly over time, whilst adapting to/capitalising on the short spikes of attention. Content distribution (or circulation as Matt Locke called it) thinking needs to adapt to incorporate the bottom-up type of approaches that the internet is very good at, as well as the more traditional top-down type of approach.

Which brought me on to talk about curation - already an overused word, but an increasingly important concept. So here I talked about my vision of the three pillars of content curation, overlayed with the layer of our own actions and decisions, as being central to how we discover content, and how this can also be a model for the approach to content taken by brands. The shifting dynamic in each area of curation is endlessly fascinating I think, so I gave examples of each: the wonderful Maria Popova as an amazing example of a new type of professional curator of culture; The Guardian's Zeitgeist project as a great example of social curation, mashing up analytics and social media metrics to visualise the most popular stories on the site right now; and the super-smart Percolate as an example of how brands can utilise algorithmic curation to 'create content at social scale'. I think bringing these different forms of curation together (as Flipboard does) creates fascinating possibilties.

No talk about trends would be complete without mentioning mobile, but rather than show lots of charts with lines heading northwards I chose to focus on how content is being created and repurposed for mobile devices. Here I referenced Craig Mod's excellent recent post on Subcompact publishing, which talks about how often we take try to skeuomorphically take formats and approaches from one medium and try to make them work in a new medium (newstand being a good example). The interface of touchscreen devices encourages us to be additive in our approaches to content delivery whereas Marco Arment's (founder of Instapaper) The Magazine is an exercise in glorious simplicity that is designed for mobile from the bottom-up. And that's what people want - stuff that works, and enables a great user experience.

I then talked about the 70,20,10 model as a way of working and allocating resource that is altogether more appropriate for the world I just described, and used the example of GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) and the vertical stack as a way of understanding platform approcahes and the idea of taking data and value from one place in order to deliver a better experience in another part of your ecosystem. This led on to talk about how brands can use the idea of distirbuted and destination thinking to create content that both attracts and is sticky, but also lives out there in the fabric of the web.

To finish off, I talked about how the most interesting places in our industry right now are at the edges, in the art and the science - the programmatic buying of inventory, and the focus on planning for participation and the creation of immersive content exepriences. Algorithmic trading is enabling new levels of granularity and real-time optimisation, and the growth in native advertising formats leading to new opportunities via mobile and interest targeting. Meanwhile all types of agency (including media agencies) are converging around the opportunities provided by content driven solutions and experiences. These two extremes, although in many ways divergent, are leading to a squeezed middle characterised by average experiences, poor creative, lazy targeting. So we are in for interesting times.

My finishing point was to question the term 'Big Data', which I'm sure will feature large in many upcoming predictions posts. Whilst there can be little doubt that the volume, velocity and variety of data that companies can have access to has exponentially increased, and there is a real job to do within organisations to join-up disparate data silos, like Stephen Few I suspect that there are many out there who see the sudden popularity of the term as an opportunity to sell big pieces of kit to large organisations. Just as important though, are the skills to derive actionable insight and value from all that data and if you're not able to do that with the data you already have it's highly unlikely that you will be able to with a big shiny new piece of kit. A great example of how data can add value to what we all do came just recently with the Obama campaign and the prescient marriage of data and storytelling that we were all witness to.

Many of the ideas that I featured here are ones that I have thrashed out here on the blog so my thanks to those who have contirbuted to the debate and a namecheck to some smart folk whose thinking helped me along the way: Noah Brier, Craig Mod, Nick Burcher, Dave Chaffey, Simon Andrews, Patricia McDonald. Maybe one day I'll get around to writing that book.