Fellow MCDMers way up there in Seattle, I have a thought to share with you from my new digs in Los Angeles. Consider it my sermon from the bottom of the social media hill.
So, I’m sitting here talking to a fellow MCDMer via IM, and they are lamenting their job prospects to me. Of course, I am also freelancing, it’s a tough economy, etc, etc. Nothing we haven’t heard before.
As we are talking I begin to think that there seems to be this idea floating around out there that since we are the supposed digital media experts, that we can just show up on company doorsteps and pitch to them what we do as new positions, expecting them to completely understand, see the need for our knowledge, and then allocate resources. I’ve had a tiny bit of success with this, but I certainly don’t subscribe to this approach on the whole (plus I kinda got burned by it – though I’ve purged the evidence, so you’ll never catch me doing it again! wink wink nudge nudge).
Truthfully, real connections and genuine relationships need to be established first. You know, you intern a while, or you hob-knob at Social Media Club events, you take a position maybe only tangentially related to what you want, you wash the dishes, etc. You can’t just call on someone randomly and expect results.
Below is a Web version of a white paper (pdf here, embeddable Slideshare document here) I prepared for Anita Crofts’ Emerging Markets in Digital Media Fall 2009 course in the University of Washington’s Master of Communication in Digital Media program. The paper, entitled “The Emerging Market for Pocketmedia Storytelling in the Developing World” (and accompanying slide presentation, embedded at top) was delivered 5 December 2009, in the Communications Building at the University of Washington.
I’ll explain what this image is about momentarily, but first, let me begin with a prologue. Tuesday night in my Net Economics course at the UW MCDM a lively debate, to say the least, was had over Chris Anderson’s new book “Free”; whether free as a concept was good or bad. I took the free side, but it made me feel a little lonely. I almost felt like I was the only student in the room who believed that it’s a good thing that we’re moving towards a digital economy based on giving bits away, harnessing business models that find alternative sources of revenue. For instance, a fellow student mentioned that Microsoft has a 90% market share of netbook operating systems, a testament to the strength of their software, no doubt. However, I posited that if MSFT went the Anderson route and gave their OS away for free they could have a 100% market share. I’m not going to say what the reaction to that was, but considering our proximity to Redmond and the makeup of the class, which includes Microsoft employees, you can take a wild guess…
Anderson’s “Free” starts out by giving us a quick economics briefing, using that as backdrop to defend the notion of ‘free’. He explains that, for instance, traditional, or old media has used a third-party advertising model to earn revenue while still providing a “free” product. I may not pay for 30 Rock, but when I buy products advertised during commercial breaks on TV or in interstitials on Hulu, I am still giving my money to NBC. It’s pretty basic and has worked for Google, a benevolent empire that has largely amassed their wealth through selling advertising and diversifying revenue streams. Of course, the model isn’t absolutely identical – the web magnifies things by presenting opportunities to apply wisdom gleaned from specific metrics and target users with relevant advertising, as well as ways of satisfying niches with long tail services – but the principle is the same: subsidize one product (free content) with money made from another (paid ad space). Multiply and diversify.
With the notion of one product funding the other in mind, I further illustrate the point by explaining how I helped inadvertently save ABC, Monday Night Football, and the Disney company in 2004. Maybe. Or not. But keep reading! I think you’ll enjoy the reasoning anyways!
This quarter in the MCDM at the University of Washington (my final quarter, w00t!), I am taking a course entitled “Economics of Digital Communication”. During introductions in the class I rightly indicated that I am only in the class because it is one of the two being offered this quarter that I had not yet taken. I don’t know anything about economics, and I am not certain it’s a field that is of any interest to me. However, after one night of class and doing some reading for my other course, also related to economics, I am beginning to feel much more interest. I am realizing that economics is actually a realm expressly critical to everything we do, because there is a dollar sign attached to everything in the universe, or so it seems.
This isn’t at all to say I know absolutely nothing about technology and business, if not specifically economics. I know plenty about innovation, incumbents, disruptors, and so forth. But, now I need to learn about the Information Economy. And, gladly, our instructor has been going over the basics of economics already, so I feel I won’t be utterly lost in this course.
Client: Hanson Hosein and Independent America – Rising From Ruins
The following post contains the final social media strategy to promote the recently released independent feature film, Rising From Ruins, part of the Independent America documentary series produced by HRHMedia.
Client: Hanson Hosein and Independent America – Rising From Ruins
The following contains a proposal, amended for discovery and including useful tools, for a social media strategy to promote the upcoming independent feature film, Rising From Ruins, part of the Independent America documentary series produced by HRHMedia.
The following is a proposal for a social media strategy for promoting the upcoming independent feature film, Rising From Ruins, part of the Independent America documentary series produced by HRHMedia.
About Independent America: Rising From Ruins
Independent America: Rising From Ruins is the 2008 follow-up to 2005′s Independent America: The Two-Lane Search For Mom & Pop. Both feature-length documentaries are directed by Hanson Hosein, former CBC and MSNBC reporter and current director of the Master of Communication in Digital Media at the University of Washington. As a series, Independent America focuses on the struggles and challenges faced by small businesses and business owners, as well as those communities such businesses occupy. 2005′s Mom & Pop took the documentarian road-tripping across the United States, capturing stories of hardship and determination in the face of growing mega-corporate encroachment. Unfortunately, August 2005 brought devastation to one location the filmmakers were unable to visit until much later. 2008′s Rising From Ruins returned to the scenes of post-Katrina New Orleans to document the growing struggles faced by NOLA residents and small business owners as both government and big business attempt to execute a difficult and controversial recovery – one that hardly includes ‘mom and pop’.
Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Instituteappeared on The Daily Show Monday, February 9th, to discuss his recent cover article in Time Magazine about ways to save the dying newspaper industry. During his interview with Jon Stewart, he talks about how he’d like to see on-line versions of newspapers charge for articles in a manner similar to the way iTunes charges for songs. While I don’t condone piracy or copytheft of any kind, I do have two words for Mr. Isaacson: COPY, PASTE
Why do I feel like he’s dug up a dead horse? Barriers to entry for illegal filesharing are minimal at best these days; but circumventing news subscription services is an absolute piece of cake! I can’t think of a single time I have come across an article hiding behind a subscription service, usually mentioned in a forum at a news aggregator like Digg or Fark, where someone didn’t simply copy and paste the content to the forum or other venue for everyone else to see.
Stewart astutely posits the idea of news aggregators, like HuffPo or Drudge Report, giving portions of their ad revenue to sites that they link to, akin to a cable TV model. This seems a much more practical idea than returning to subscription models, but getting aggregators to play ball will be no easy feat. If major aggregators cave, others will crop up that don’t play, and the model will eventually fail.
Maybe journos should follow their broadcast journalism and cinema studies friends, ditch their keyboards, grab a camera and go find some news to shoot. As mentioned, video isn’t much for copypasta. And that’s the sort of thing the UW MCDM is preaching.
The following has been prepared as an exercise for my Digital Storytelling class at the UW MCDM. It is in no way, shape, or form officially endorsed by Stan Orchard, The Pacific Science Center, or GPS Adventures.
PROPOSAL| Using Social Media with Traditional Advertising: A way to bring technologically unsavvy families to the upcoming GPS Mazes exhibit at the Pacific Science Center
LOGLINE | A series of 5-6 thirty second traditionally crafted commercials promoting the upcoming geocaching exhibit at the Pacific Science Center. Each ad is hosted at Myspace Video and posted to the center’s Myspace profile. Each video depicts a different well-known local Seattle personality being asked to explain what geocaching is to a kid interviewer. Each personality fails to explain it, in a comical manner. Local kids facepalm. A narrator then declares: “Kids, adults don’t know anything about geocaching. Bring your parents to the GPS Mazes exhibit at the Pacific Science Center. We’ll help you teach them a thing or two.” (web ad video series, color, 2009)
Yes, that’s a long title, but I have so much to talk about! This week’s readings for my Evolutions and Trends in Digital Media course covered myriad subjects, but I have been able to draw out some common ideas and will assiduously attempt to tie them all together here. We students were asked to take a look at some more of Brian Winston’s book, Media, Technology, and Society, on the subject of the telephone and recorded sound, as well as Clay Christensen’s Seeing What’s Next, regarding the semiconductor, and lastly, Vannevar Bush’s prophetic 1945 treatise “As We May Think“, which rightly predicted the era of the computer. I will somehow connect these works together and bring them all back to the subject of communication in general. Wish me luck!
Hi, I'm Matthew Stringer and this is my blog. I'm an online producer, focusing on generating and curating video content. This blog is about (just insert buzz word here) media. Like, digital, social, Web, new, multi-, interactive, mass, convergent, emergent, ad nausea. Plus, occasional musings on old media - film, TV, print, news and pop culture.
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