Category: New Media

Netflix on Facebook

Netflix Facebook

The posts have been sparse for the last couple of weeks for three main reasons:

  1. Life isn’t blogging. This will surprise some of my co-workers. I had 11 days off from work, during which time we had about 35 extended family members celebrating Christmas in our home and had our college students home. When you’ve got all that real life happening, virtual connections via social networks take a back seat.
  2. I’ve been switching computers, from a Macintosh PowerBook G4 to a MacBook Pro. I expect to be writing about that soon (the process has been great, and I love the new laptop), but it’s taken some time to be sure I have all of the files synchronized. It’s been a good chance to do some digital file hygiene, and get rid of files that had built up over the last three years or so.
  3. Netflix. While we also patronized our local cinema, including 10 of us catching the Enchanted matinee on Christmas Eve (I also took my bride to National Treasure: Book of Secrets and my youngest to Alvin and the Chipmunks), by far the biggest consumer of our family leisure time was Netflix, both in the DVD methodology and through the “Watch Instantly” feature.

That’s why I was excited to see the development of a Netflix Application for Facebook (hat tip: Anthony LaFauce) that puts the movies you’re watching and the movies in your queue on your Facebook profile.

Read Anthony’s review for fuller details, but I installed it and it’s pretty nifty. It’s one more example of Facebook being a platform that can integrate feeds from your various web activities in one place.

Some people complain about Facebook being a walled garden, and that you can get data in but can’t export it.  Some kinds of export and feeds have happened, but mainly Facebook is taking the Apple approach: engineer such a great experience that people will want to use it as the integration point (like iTunes and the iPod) because it’s so easy.

Compared to the vaporware of Google’s OpenSocial, I think it’s a winning strategy for social networking.

In Case You Slept Through 2007

Jeff Jarvis has a year-end wrap-up column in The Guardian that does a great job of summarizing the key developments in the media world. He calls 2007 “the year of Facebook.” I certainly agree with that, as regular readers of this blog would attest. I highly recommend this column for anyone looking for a succinct analysis of trends affecting both mainstream and social media. And check out his blog for more regular dispatches on the topic.

Jeff says it’s been Facebook’s year, but the century belongs to Google…so far. It’s good that he added that qualifier, because the century is still young. Facebook didn’t exist four years ago. Google is less than a decade old. We can’t imagine the changes we’ll see in the next 92 years.

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Social Media Disruptive Innovation

Disruption Social Media

Like Big Dan Teague the Bible salesman in one of my all-time favorite movies, Gary the church directory peddler showed an unexpected side in his comment today on this post, in which I had explored the idea of using a Facebook group as an alternative to a printed church directory:

You stupid p*$#k. The money you tell people that they are saving by not spending it with a church directory company is a false statement. Most people will spend it somewhere else like sears or a much more expensive studio. Just give it time. This is an excellent opportunity for people to get inexpensive portraits compared to a studio and the church gets free printing on the flip side. This is a lasting historical document. You are so simple in your view it just shows how pathetic you really are.
I can just tell you are a loser who has been envious of people who make money. That is why you have a mean on for this low margin business.
GO F&*@ YOURSELF!
You pathetic piece of s^!$!

I guess I should be thankful he didn’t show up in a bedsheet. (And by the way, I have edited his comment to at least modify if not delete his expletives.) Maybe cleaning up his language would help him make more sales in the church market.

I’m thinking this means he doesn’t want to be my Facebook friend.

Gary’s comments do illustrate, though, that when disruptive technologies provide new opportunities for consumers and businesses, there are some losers. (Gary says I’m one, but if that’s the case how come he’s the one who’s mad?)

I’ve written a lot about the disruption in the mainstream media. Cable TV started the disruption for the broadcast networks a generation ago. CNN stole viewership from the Big 3. Then came MSNBC and Fox News Channel. And now with internet video and iPods people have infinite choices. In the last year NBC has laid off 700 employees.

In addition to the web-based competition that affects TV, newspapers have found that their cash cow of classified ads has been milked by Craigslist and monster.com. So in the last year we’ve seen the Minneapolis Star Tribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press buy out nearly 100 employees from their newsrooms alone. Meanwhile, the valuation of Facebook, based on Microsoft’s investment, suggests that it may be worth more than the Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times combined, with YouTube and the Chicago Cubs thrown in to sweeten the deal.

And Wikipedia clearly makes it harder for World Book to sell multi-volume encyclopedia sets (like the one we bought at the county fair in the mid-1990s) for several hundred dollars.

So it’s easy to see how Gary and others who face the disruptive innovation of social media may feel like singing along with the smash hit of The Soggy Bottom Boys.

I am a man of constant sorrow
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Using YouTube, Facebook to Promote Organ Donation

In my last post, I told about Bob Aronson’s dedication to spread the word about organ donation through social media, after having had a heart transplant in August.

One of the things Bob’s done is start a Facebook group, where he’s inviting everyone affected by transplant to tell their stories. So whether you’re

  • a transplant recipient or caregiver
  • a living donor (e.g. kidney, liver, bone marrow)
  • a family member of someone who made the decision to donate and helped as many as 60 other people
  • a friend of any of the above, or
  • someone who has indicated a desire to be a donor via your driver’s license

I hope (and so does Bob) you will join this group and participate, and help promote it to your friends. Besides encouraging people to think about donation, he hopes it can bring support and encouragement to everyone involved in organ and tissue transplantation as people share their stories.

Some may write on the Wall, others may upload photos or engage in the discussion board, and still others may want to upload videos directly into the Facebook group, as Bob did. He also started a blog, Bob’s NewHeart, to help spread the word about the Facebook support group beyond the Facebook “walled garden.” And besides uploading his video to Facebook, Bob put it on YouTube, too. Check it out!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exk8lSHI3Dw]

Through my previous post I also met Scott Meis, who has been using social media, particularly Facebook, on behalf of Donate Life Illinois. He also maintains a blog for the campaign, which has a goal of signing up 3.5 million Illinois residents for the state’s donor consent registry by next April. It’s got some great transplant-related stories.

Part of the power (and fun) of social media, that I could have an interesting conversation today with someone I hadn’t met as of yesterday. And we’re Facebook friends now, to boot!

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IBM: You Won’t Recognize the Ad Industry in 2012

IBM has issued a report that crystallizes and formalizes through survey research what many of us have understood intuitively. It’s called “The end of advertising as we know it.” Duncan Riley pointed it out on TechCrunch late last week, and I’ve just finished reading both the report (get the PDFs of the Executive Summary and the full report here) and the accompanying press release. As the release says:

Traditional advertising players risk major revenue declines as budgets shift rapidly to new, interactive formats, which are expected to grow at nearly five times that of traditional advertising. To survive in this new reality, broadcasters must change their mass audience mind-set to cater to niche consumer segments, and distributors need to deliver targeted, interactive advertising for a range of multimedia devices. Advertising agencies must experiment creatively, become brokers of consumer insights, and guide allocation of advertising dollars amid exploding choices. All players must adapt to a world where advertising inventory is increasingly bought and sold in open exchanges vs. traditional channels.

In a previous post I wrote about PR measurement and blogging, and how because of their ability to give lots of numbers, social media can be over-valued relative to news editorial coverage. Even though I’m a huge social media supporter, I still believe that for most businesses the value of mainstream media news coverage is currently much greater than that of online “buzz.” Social media have engagement value, too, and businesses should be getting involved. But editorial coverage still has huge value.

I believe technology and social trends are much bigger threats to traditional advertising than they are to public relations. I will get into reasons for that in a future post.

But as the IBM report indicates, these next five years will be tumultuous for everyone who has been involved in the “one to many” mass media industry that has pushed messages at consumers for the last 50 years. IBM sums it up best by saying: “The next 5 years will hold more change for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did.”

The IBM report, and its four scenarios of how drastic these changes will be, is well worth reading and pondering for anyone interested in marketing and advertising. I’m betting that the “Ad Marketplace” scenario will best describe the picture in 2012.

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