The evidence doesn’t support the claims.

• I’d argue that publishing hasn’t been crushed at all so much as that it’s shifting from print to digital formats and, that as a whole, is healthy and growing despite the slow economy.
• Even printed book sales have been surprisingly robust and even grown at times. While local bookstores have been in decline, people haven’t stopped buying books, but are now buying them from Amazon.com (increasingly in electronic Kindle format).
• Where “digital sharing” has an impact on traditional publishing, it has little to do with piracy. With the plethora of free sources of high-quality content (including through “crowdsourcing”), people are less willing to pay unless it’s for something substantially better. The success of many ad-supported “free” news and social sites shows that a non-subscription model can work just fine. If a site providing high-quality, original content is accessible and easy to use, people will go there first rather than looking for copies of its content elsewhere.
• Industries will rise and fall because people may simply spend their time doing something else—e.g., more social media and video games, less TV and magazines.

I’ve also seen no signs of decline in the music business due to piracy or otherwise despite the industry’s claims over the years. On the contrary, it’s posted record sales and profits. While CD sales fell, it’s made up for it and then some through other channels, such as single iTunes downloads—part of a normal format shift we’ve seen many times. (Was it pirates that killed 8-track, the LP, and cassette tapes? Did the death of those formats kill the whole industry?)

Movie studio profits also appear to be in no danger (to put it mildly), as people still throng to theatres and buy pay-per-view movies at increasing rates.

What content industries should learn is that piracy is NOT the problem (and in fact likely increases sales by expanding the fanbase, as numerous studies show). The real problem is slow-reacting, out-of-touch companies failing to provide products or services that meet shifting consumer demands. When ordinary people casually pirate content, it’s usually because the pirated versions offer superior functionality (such as no DRM restrictions) or are just more readily available (no “legitimate” version was available for download to their computer or mobile device at any price). These reasons for turning to piracy are usually more compelling than price alone.

Media companies should certainly feel free to go after commercial pirates (which can be done effectively with existing legal tools), but going after their own customers and fans with restrictive DRM schemes, indiscriminate “takedown” requests, and overly-broad and harsh laws and treaties is not smart—and ultimately ineffective enough to be a waste of time and money.

With the backlash against overly-stringent anti-piracy measures growing, the smart money is to focus on keeping your customers happy—as it always has been.

Exhibit A: The Today Show on Tumblr

This team clearly “gets it”. The team at The Today Show takes a number of carefully selected photos, gifs, and articles each day and tailors them to fit today’s online meme culture. ”Faces of Kathie Lee” was clearly spawned by the popularity of the “Faces of Rejected Bachelorettes” Tumblr, and there are even blogs about cats and macaroni and cheese.

If you need more evidence of the show’s web-savvy, look no further than its own website. The Today Show website is built using Tumblr-like functionality, displaying all content in a dynamic, visually appealing manner. Advertisements are sprinkled in unobtrusively (but effectively), keeping with the flow of information on the page and allowing users to scan the content without breaks.

Exhibit B: The Today Show on Pinterest

I love that the social media folks over at The Today Show were quick enough to jump on this fast-moving bandwagon. Participating in a social network like Pinterest is one of the quickest and easiest ways to get free brand exposure and align yourself with your target demographic. Pinterest, which is growing at a break-neck pace, is about 80% women. These women love food, fashion, health and lifestyle trends, weddings, and babies—just like The Today Show’s main demographic: the stay-at-home mom. The Today Show has more of this content than it can fit in a morning show, so they share it online. Brilliant.

The Today Show brand is moving in the right direction, thanks to its experimentation and loyalty to social media. I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for other brands that recognize the importance of this investment and do the same!

What Are Rich Snippets?

Google officially launched “rich snippets” in May 2009. In the beginning, rich snippets were used to add “rich data” to search results for things like organizations, reviews, people, recipes, and events.

These rich snippets were the direct results of webmasters adding semantic markup/data to their webpage’s source code. Prior to this, documents on the web used to be associated via hyperlinks (i.e., Page A refers to Page B). Information was combined together in a single web page that was easy for humans to read and consume, but not so much for machines (think search engines). No distinction could be made between the entities within the page if there was no semantic data attached to that entity.

Machines could understand a page was about Alice, and where Alice might live, but what they weren’t able to tell was how Alice might know Bill. In other words, there was data that could answer things like who, what, and where, but no knowledge to answer things like “how?” With the addition of semantically enriched information within webpages, search engines are now able to build knowledge around entities across the web. This knowledge can be pulled into search results based on the way a webmaster codes a page.

In order for Google to take full advantage of the newly available semantic data, it made concerted efforts to reach out directly to webmasters to ask them to adjust some of their code so that Google could properly scrape—I mean crawl—the webmaster’s site for this new data. It’s been a few months since we’ve seen any of these reports, but undoubtedly many webmasters willfully obliged, and I think it’s safe to say at this point Google has amassed a vast knowledge base built around the semantic data scraped from websites within certain search verticals—i.e., “events.”

The Future of Rich Snippets and Vertical Search

What we now see happening for search queries like “Coldplay” and other artists/events that has not happened in the past is the addition of semantic data that is NOT present on the webpage shown in the results. Google is beginning to test a feature that adds semantic data from third-party websites to select search results. What is likely happening is that Google has begun to pool the semantic data that it’s scraped from the web into its own version of a DBpedia for the web. This database of knowledge is likely broken into search verticals where semantic data is readily available (recipes, events, books, TV, etc.). From this, we can expect Google to start inserting this knowledge base into universal search results for select queries that it thinks make sense for users. One of the safest search verticals to begin testing this on is artists/events, as it’s pretty safe to assume a user searching for Coldplay is likely also interested in when and where Coldplay may be playing next.

Some of the ways this may evolve is through other search verticals, some of which have yet to be rolled into Google’s left sidebar which allows users to search by vertical. For example, imagine a site that hosts content about the TV show “Arrested Development” suddenly having links to show schedule pages or streaming videos that are hosted on other domains. In this example, Google would have a knowledge base built around TV Series, which it could then use to add rich data to search queries relating to TV shows, even if that webpage does not have that semantic data coded onto its site.

Where Is the Opportunity?

The opportunity for search marketers here is not far off from the opportunity that rich snippets presented when they were first introduced. Investing time and resources now to add semantic data to your website can become an immense competitive advantage—should your competition be late to the rich snippet party. Taking advantage of this now can help improve search visibility, increase click-through rates, and, now in some cases, can attract traffic to your site for search keywords you would otherwise not rank for. This recent blog post from a marketer at SeatGeek.com who was positively affected by this new rich snippet change outlined this added traffic potential. The initial findings don’t provide any insight into why some sites are being promoted over others (e.g., sites like Ticketloot.com over more well-known sites like StubHub.com), but they do highlight how this could increase traffic for sites within this vertical.

It will be interesting to see how Google decides to expand upon these tests, and which verticals may be affected next, if any. Leave us your thoughts in the comments below.

The level of excitement around Facebook’s IPO last week is difficult to understate. “Facebook IPO” is currently a top rising search term on Google, and a query for news results generated over 20,000 listings on news sources. eMarketer estimates that Facebook stock will trade at 26X earnings. The market seems to anticipate that Facebook will be able to dramatically increase income.

Facebook’s Counter-Intuitive Advertising Success

Despite abysmal ad performance Facebook has accelerated its ad sales and display advertising market share, about $3.71B and 17% respectively according to eMarketer. Facebook’s current ad revenues grow despite the worst display click-through rates in the industry.

Facebook advertising thrives via the sheer volume of impressions it can serve on a given day to 800 million members. How much more can it expand inventory?

Facebook’s Untapped Advertising Potential

Facebook looks forward to becoming an advertising behemoth nevertheless. In spite of its low, low engagement levels, Facebook ads are projected to earn $4B this year. This success marks the beginning of a long, upward trend.

Last year Facebook introduced Open Graph—a platform that brings sharing to all kinds of sites outside the “walled garden”. For now, the Open Graph means people can share their favorite songs, food, movies, and products at places such as Spotify, eBay, Foodspotting, Pinterest, etc. How long will it be before Facebook can use this data to its advantage? My prediction is very soon.

AdWords revolutionized advertising because of its ability to reach the right customer at the just the right moment. Yet the AdWords auction is still far from perfect. All kinds of people use the same keywords, consternating advertisers, and the most valuable search terms are crowded with bitterly competitive marketers. Facebook stands to take digital advertising sophistication one step further by serving ads targeted against interests that audiences volunteer via sharing. This kind of advertising might seem eerie to us now, but may eventually become an expectation of audiences.

Facebook could enable new kinds of ads outside of its current exclusively social environment. Imagine a customized recommendation from a friend while shopping on your favorite retailer. That kind of offer fails in Facebook’s current, exclusively social domain. But it would excel in a well-merchandised retail outlet. Facebook’s forthcoming ability to serve socially enabled, engaging ads to receptive audiences would be a game-changer for the ad industry. Facebook’s immature ad products are already a force in display advertising. Just think of how well Facebook ads could perform with mature, innovative, socially enabled ads that spread across the Web.

Here are some of the key trends to capitalize on in 2012 that we think will help you strike it rich.

What you’ll notice is the constant across all of these themes is technology and data. At RBM, we believe there’s magic in the data (a.k.a. there’s gold in them hills).

1. All Marketing Is Now Digital

Because of social and mobile media, all marketing is now digital. Every single expression of offline/traditional marketing has the potential for ancillary expression through the social graph. Furthermore, with smartphones entering the mass market, experiences can be photographed, scanned, mapped, and shared like never before. Any piece of marketing put into the market is always seconds away from being digitally impactful. A recent piece in USA TODAY discusses the use of integrated digital experiences on cereal boxes.

2. Big Data Will Rule Marketing

If you don’t know what big data is, yesterday was the time to find out. It will revolutionize marketing. There is more consumer data being collected than ever before across the advertising and CRM continuum (awareness > interest > preference> purchase >evangelism). In advertising, data resides in ad servers, web analytics, media-buying platforms, and third-party sellers like Blue Kai. In CRM, it resides in retail purchase behavior, credit card-use pattern, and direct mail response files, to name just a few. The agencies of the future will use big data to draw insights to solve big marketing problems. That is the defensible competitive advantage of the brands of the future.

3. Data Integration Is Coming, and Faster Than You Think

There is a big pot of gold for those entrepreneurs who solve the data integration game, and a lot of VC money is chasing this problem. There’s already a big industry push to make data more integrated. I think the ability for marketers to link up all their disparate sources of big data will come faster than people think—there is too much money at stake for the winners in that space.

4. Consumers Will Be Rewarded for Their Data

Industry self-regulation or government regulation will likely lead to more consumer control over personal and marketing data. That data is incredibly valuable to marketers, so the more control consumers get, the more the industry will find ways to reward consumers for access to that data. Incentives may span discounts, loyalty club-like exclusive offers, or innovative models yet to be conceived.

5. Two Devices Will Run Your Life

Consumers will gradually move to a two-device paradigm to run the majority of their “personal” computing needs. Mobile phones will continue to serve the entertainment, payment, and communication needs of people on the go. At home, tablets will be responsible for home entertainment & media consumption, energy settings, lighting, grocery ordering, and more.

6. Data Will Be Portable and Will Define Your Identity

All your key data and assets will move into the cloud. This includes music, links, movies, photos, books, etc. Consumers will be able to access important items on demand from multiple devices. Given that these digital assets greatly define your social media identity, with portability they will increasingly define your real world identity. It won’t strictly be what you say that expresses your personality, but the data on the device that you carry—the 1s and 0s of it all.

7. Content Discoverability Is About a Key Unit of Measurement: Links

Many might think I’m making an SEO reference, but I am not. SEO links are important, but what is equally important to content discovery is link (URL) sharing. If you think about it, outside of images the most frequent things shared in social media are links. It’s this unit of measure and its associated shorteners that rule the content you share and discover. It’ the human transfer of URL “addresses” that powers the success of SEO as well as social marketing campaigns. A lot of emerging marketing technologies help publishers track the dissemination of links. Getting links shared and into the right hands, has to be central to any content marketing strategy.

8. Quality Content Will Always Win in the Long Run

Google is tightening down on content farms. Social networks are clamping down on Spam and favoring engaging posts. Algorithms seek to identify fake reviews on shopping sites. Using sophisticated technology, publishers and marketing infrastructure companies are getting an upper hand on poor-quality, un-engaging content. Marketers who commit to a long-term strategy to produce high-quality, engaging content will build a defensible competitive advantage.

9. Images Will Rule the Earth.

Our attention spans are shrinking, while our need for stimulus is increasing. Facebook programmed us to navigate via shared images and instant gratification—a lot of what you do on Facebook is scan and click on images (therein lies the genius of its ad program, but that is another story). Images can say an infinite amount in milliseconds while satisfying the new digital primal need for excessive stimuli. Enter Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr stage left, and the new world of social image streaming is upon us. These technologies allow anyone to aggregate found content and become as powerful as a magazine editor. Business Insider wrote an interesting piece worth citing “2012: The Year Of Social Curation?” Image are thus increasingly becoming central to how we experience content and spend time online.

10. It Is Not All About Apps, but Distribution

I think the apps trend is overrated and overstated. Yes I said it. The market is looking at the wrong drivers with all this app mania. This came to me when John Bosso, our head of engineering, told me that apps are increasingly just skins with most of the processing done on the server side. I thought “Well apps are just websites that give you access to premium content and hosted services.” Of course, unlike websites they can tie into some of your phone’s fancy features, but in essence they are websites. And if apps are websites that you buy access to, then the market is driven by the same forces that govern all media: Controlling distribution. I had this epiphany at a lunch with mobile technology exec. Fred Chieux. Apple makes money from owning the distribution network and charging you a premium for their hardware. Google gives you the software for free and then makes money on integrated services that drive advertising revenue. Both are fighting in the content distribution space. The biggest losers are Microsoft and traditional media companies.

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I am personally excited about what the future holds. I look forward to where new technologies will take our industry. Marketing is only going to get more complicated.

Happiness Takes (A Little) Magic | The Wirecutter

http://thewirecutter.com/2012/01/happiness-takes-a-little-magic/

The technology infers an Internet user’s demographics and interests by tracking web-browsing habits. It takes into account both the content of websites visited and the common demographics of people who tend to visit the same websites (based on site visitation survey data).

In Google’s example, Mary visits gardening-related websites so she is placed into the “gardening enthusiast” interest category and assumed to be female. Google then uses the results to show Mary relevant ads on news sites, blogs, and other websites she visits in the Google Display Network. The ads may be related to gardening and/or to women.

Increasing the relevance of ads to a specific Internet user makes total sense from all angles, including from the user’s (no more Cialis ads for me, please). Interest-based advertising is just one way of using data to target consumers and more effectively drive them to action. Finding the “magic in the data” is what powers our thinking here at RBM. Data can yield incredible insights into consumer behavior and their pain and pleasure points.

So here are Google’s full results for me:

Your categories

Below you can review the interests and inferred demographics that Google has associated with your cookie. You can remove or edit these at any time.

Computers & Electronics – Software – Multimedia Software – Photo & Video Software
Food & Drink – Cooking & Recipes – Meat & Seafood
Food & Drink – Cooking & Recipes – World Cuisines – Asian Cuisine
Food & Drink – Restaurants
Online Communities – Online Goodies – Clip Art & Animated GIFs
People & Society
Shopping – Consumer Resources – Coupons & Discount Offers
World Localities – Europe – Western Europe – United Kingdom – England – London (UK)
World Localities – North America – USA – California – San Francisco Bay Area
World Localities – North America – USA – South (USA) – South Carolina

Your demographics

We infer your age and gender based on the websites you’ve visited. You can remove or edit these at any time.

Age: 25-34
Gender: Female

Was Google right in its assessment? Well, I am 30 years old, female, and enjoy cooking and Groupon. But I’m confused about “Photo & Video Software,” and my visits to “World Localities” websites were work-related. So close, but no cigar—for now. I’m sure Google will be tweaking and refining its technology as it gathers even more data to find the right magic.

Click on this link to see what Google thinks of you: http://t.co/hSxzJaPf

1) Web analytics will become even more empowering for advertisers
Over the course of 2011, web analytics became smarter, richer, and more powerful through data management platforms (DMPs). Because of the high level of intelligence provided, data management technology has given rise to data-driven marketing strategies such as behavioral retargeting, allowing marketers to profile their audiences and serve them customized dynamic ads. Between 2010 and 2011, retargeting’s contribution to a site’s total revenue grew by 78%. End-to-end analytics, due to its ability to drive incremental value, are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Advertisers are now more equipped than ever to determine exactly what percentage of their online marketing dollars are driving offline sales. Such enhancements in web analytics will fuel greater growth of online marketing, and more and more advertisers will see the benefits of having big data at their fingertips to help them make marketing decisions.

2) Smartphones and tablets will continue undergoing explosive growth
In September 2010, the number of smart-phone users in the US was 58.7 million. In September 2011, this number grew by almost 50% to 87.4 million. Tablets are following suit – the number of tablet users rose by 159% between 2010 and 2011. The proliferation of these devices, which have features such as rich display screens, swipe touch, GPS etc., is resulting in the expansion of advertising inventory, options, and formats on these devices. Last year, Google launched new tablet ad formats which incorporate greater interactivity within ads. Advertising solutions on mobile and tablet devices are unique in that they are not just contextual but location-specific too, thanks to the explosive growth of the app market. This year, expect greater demand and supply for and supply of higher-quality, more relevant, and hyper-local mobile and tablet advertising.

3) Content on demand value chain – Internet TV and online radio will make a surge
Between 2010 and 2011, the average time spent watching online videos increased by 40% and the number of online videos watched grew by a hefty 800%. However, the opportunity brought about by this surge is still somewhat untapped by advertisers. For instance, last year, digital marketing was still largely regarded as a direct response channel. However, with changing media consumption habits, marketers will slowly move some of their branding budgets online. The same is true for audio streaming content, whose supply and demand have both increased, giving advertisers another channel to reach their target audiences effectively. In 2012, more advertising options will be available to marketers with an increase in ad spend in these channels.

4) Greater integration will happen within digital advertising
Last year, we saw some leaps towards integration in digital marketing across the board. Channel integration grew in importance as advertisers started to foray into multichannel marketing. There is an increasing demand for marketing campaigns to be integrated not only across online channels, but offline touch points such as in-store advertising and print marketing as well. Offline-online integration has been catalyzed by mobile devices. Customers are increasingly checking product features on their mobile phones while they’re shopping in a store and, at times, making the purchase online. The adoption of QR codes by marketers and mobile users alike, and the buzz around NFC, will also drive convergence between the online and offline worlds of consumers.

5) Social media advertising will gain maturity
Through 2011, social media sites have increased the options available to advertisers while attempting to measure brand engagement with greater accuracy. Facebook overhauled its “Insights” product to enable advertisers to capture better quality information on their target customers. This included adding a metric called “People Talking About This” to gauge user engagement with a brand, feeding into the maxim “content is king.” Brands with high “People Talking about This” ratings are the ones with the most compelling content. In addition to deeper analytics, Facebook introduced private messages between business pages and fans. Twitter is also enriching its offering to advertisers with its brand pages. And Google+ will be showcasing its unique Hangout ad format in the coming months. With the growing focus on social media marketing, more and more advertisers will incorporate a holistic social media strategy within their digital marketing initiatives this year, instead of keeping it on the sidelines as a nice-to-have.

These are certainly exciting times for the industry. We will keep a lookout for macro trends impacting the digital marketing arena as there is tremendous opportunity to stretch each marketing dollar even further.

However, content-creation companies, like newspapers, magazines, TV networks, and more, seem resistant to this trend. In their minds, not only is content still king, but their proprietary content reigns supreme.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and The George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs collaborated on a scientific study of Twitter usage among 13 major U.S. news organizations publishing in print, digitally, on TV, or on the radio. The researchers looked at every tweet made by primary Twitter handles over a one-week period, totaling 3,646 tweets.

The researchers discovered that 93 percent of tweets posted by the media outlets contained links to their own content. In other words, these companies are using Twitter more like a promotional RSS feed than a social network. Only 2 percent of tweets sent by primary handles were “information gathering,” either requesting input from the audience or posting links to information from outside sources. The Twitter feeds only contained 9 percent retweets, 8 percent of which came from a different branch of the same organization.

With only 1 percent of Tweets soliciting audience participation, it’s clear that news organizations are not anywhere close to reaching their true engagement potential. The possible consequences of this one-dimensional strategy could be diminished brand loyalty, which is a major risk in an industry that’s beginning to tread water. Business analysts have cited inability to adapt as one of the major weaknesses of publishing companies because they’ve failed to embrace digital trends.

It makes sense that news outlets don’t want to link to other sites. Page hits are vital to their advertising income, and it’s counter-intuitive to direct traffic to competitors. While we may never see Fox News and NPR mention each other on #FollowFriday, there’s still a lot that they—and all media organizations—should be doing to secure long-term readership. Namely, increasing their attempts to engage fans in conversation, and delivering breaking news at any costs, even if it means citing an outside source.

These days, citizen journalism is more than just a buzzword: social media offers anyone with access to the internet the ability to report real-time news. Not only are citizen journalists more likely to be on scene than professional reporters, but they have unique perspectives on issues in their communities that large news organizations may overlook.

News handles should request information and updates from their followers on a regular basis. Not only does this enhance audience engagement, but it provides valuable insights into the concerns of the consumers and may help the publication shape its content. Additionally, when consumers feel “heard” by a brand, it can increase their sense of loyalty to it.

Media outlets shouldn’t necessarily fear @ mentions of other publications in their tweets. As users scroll through their Twitter feeds, they will see tweets from the handles they follow as well as tweets that mention the handles they follow. Publications can increase their exposure to people who aren’t following them already by tweeting mentions of related brands. In this instance, rather than pushing the existing audience toward a competitor, organizations can draw some competitor followers to their feeds.

Twitter is a great tool for publishing breaking news and real-time updates, but it’s also a very effective platform for brand/consumer interaction. News outlets can only realize its full value if they use it not only as an RSS feed, but a true social network.

The Multi-Screen Paradigm
We are entering a paradigm where entertainment professionals and digital marketers are going to need to start to craft a second screen (tablet) and third screen (mobile) strategy for their programming. When shows are live, second and third screens present an opportunity for consumers to interact with content as never before. Imagine a talk show host allowing users to vote in real time from an iPad app. That data could be displayed in real time on the show. These additional screens also will allow consumers to have instant and highly social access to each other through rich applications. This trend has already begun, and I believe that the concept of real-time user generated color commentary will take on new forms that we cannot imagine today. These screens will also afford programming professionals access to consumer feedback in a way that makes the Nielsen rating system seem incredibly archaic. The future of truly interactive TV programming has just begun.

Good Bye Remote
The remote, with its painful linear scrolling, will be going away. Enter stage left will be tablets which will pave the way for a richer navigation interface. As video content continues to proliferate and become fragmented, strong search and discovery tools will emerge to meet the market need. As most cable subscribers currently know, the cable remote is an inadequate tool to navigate the hundreds of existing channels. Imagine YouTube, Vimeo and Cable all in one single TV experience. Technology will need to solve the challenges of navigating all this aggregated content in short order.

The Social Graph and Discovery
As video content multiplies and continues to become more niche, the social graph will be a key way for consumers to discover new programming. Consumers will increasingly rely on what their friends like and advocate to find new video programming. They will also be able to access respected influencers within their social graph to find quality content. Building viewership will increasingly be an exercise focused on three efforts: 1) Targeting consumers with relevant niche interests in social marketing to successfully introduce new content; 2) launching campaigns that get consumers to share their programming passions; 3) finding influencers who will share and advocate your programming. For content producers, engaging the social graph will be the most vital channel for launching programs and growing viewership.

What Network?
As content comes to be more on demand and personal, TV networks will matter a lot less to consumers. Consumers will increasingly develop relationships with shows and other consumers who have passions for those shows. The role of networks as curators of linearly consumed content will become obsolete. Networks will still serve, as records labels do, to fund and develop content.

RBM helps some of the most well regarded entertainment companies launch and manage social marketing programs. We are excited about what the future holds. We look forward to where new technologies will take us.