Category: content strategy

Radio 2.0 blogger Mark Ramsey highlights today an announcement from Philadelphia’s WXPN; they will be gathering the 885 Most Memorable Musical Moments. [885 corresponds with WXPN’s FM frequency 88.5 — clever.]

He posits that which may be on other people’s minds as they see more and more social media vehicles emerge: “One of the toughest parts of integrating social media tools into a radio station website is plugging in those tools which listeners actually want to use on a radio station site as opposed to wherever they’re accustomed to using them now.”

As some major media companies spread themselves thin over all platforms to little effect, this becomes more apparent. Separate YouTube & Flickr accounts, Facebook and MySpace pages go only as far as the effort put in will take them. The decline in corporate interest in Second Life presence, both fiscally and in actual presence, points to a collective realization that perhaps the wrong tactics were used. The “L.A. Times” recently featured an article about this exodus.

Presence is not the only factor; being at the cool party doesn’t necessarily make you cool. Being able to make use of social media in a manner apropos the community and tool itself is key.

The PRPD blog [Public Radio Program Directors, for those unfamiliar] features a post about the phenomenon of Twitter. As you may know, Twitter is the latest efficiency for posting content to the web. Users sign up, and they are offered a space of 140 characters to explain what they are doing right then and there. These little entries are archived in a linear manner, and are out there for all to see. The social media aspect comes into play here when users get friends to join the site to “tweet” along with them [they have made a verb of it, already].

I learned about this over the shoulder of a fellow attendee of the Beyond Broadcast meetings at MIT this past February. I jotted down the url and signed up. Much like MySpace, this concept doesn’t have much excitement without a few friends to make it more than just a sub-140 character chronicle of existence. It gives users a chance to be quirky and off-the-wall and ironic, and it could possibly yield one second’s worth of fame via mashups like twittervision. Widgets allow your twitterings to be fed onto your blog, and you can tweet from your mobile–they are 100% web 2.0 compatible.

The PRPD post points out the fact that NPR is now set to tweet. They are tweeting as I type, likely. NPR has set it to tweet their new blog posts. Something that their RSS feeds seem to do just fine already. The NY Times is guilty of the same.

Barak Obama tweets, but John Edwards does more frequently. So do the folks at the fun internet newscast Rocketboom. Even I do it. Look over on the left-hand side for that widget on this blog!

The appeal to the tweeters is in the instant posting of your own life and seeing what others are up to, for fun. When major communication companies do so just to thrust out in front of users with little other sensitivity or effort, I must say the end result falls flat.

My compulsive viewing of MTV does have a benefit, even if it is only keeping tabs on media phenomenon.

Universal Music Group [UMG] has done a smart thing in collaboration with YouTube. The popular emo-rock band Fall Out Boy have released another album, and off it, another hit single with an accompanying music video. Since I can’t wait for it to show up on any of the ten video channels my cable provider, uh, provides, I sought it out on teh internets.

There are any number of versions of almost any music video you might like to see on YouTube. Fans will upload a copy and it will stay there unless someone [usually the record label] asks that it be removed. Recently, the labels have gotten hip to this and have started profiles of their own on ye olde ‘Tube. Universal Music Group is one of these enterprising entities.

They have uploaded an official version of the Fall Out Boy video. Smart! 1.6 million hits and counting!

But that is not all.

There are at least two product placements in the video. One of the product placements is reinforced by smallish commercial bookends at the video’s start and finish. The product is used by the band’s heartthrob bass player, very clearly showing the logo.

But even that is not all.

UMG’s version of the video posted to YouTube is of pretty poor quality. The video is full of compression artifacts [those blocky things best seen where there is a lot of dark image on the video] and the audio suffers from audio compression artifacts in the form of an overall watery sound.

Why upload such a poor-quality version?

Simple — because you are selling the high-quality version of the same video for $1.99 on iTunes, without the commercial bookends. You can see that screenshot of that at right.

What is the lesson here?

Content will be consumed in different ways by different consumers with different priorities. Know those ways, and do your damnedest to monetize each one of them. UMG, in all of its big business glory, has done so in this case in a pretty painless and low-key way.

When the musicians in the earlier days of jazz went into the recording studio, they could only solo as long at the format of the 78rpm record would allow, which was under four minutes, for the most part. Within those constraints, artists like Charlie Parker created brilliance.

The tables have since turned. Artists have gone on to create works of considerable length in film, television and music. Now the challenge is not in the limitation of the format, but rather in the limitation of the new generation of content consumers’ attention span. Wired Magazine highlights the phenomenon of re-formatting in their March issue under the apt banner of “Snack Culture.”

Much has been written about how writing for the web is an entirely different beast than writing for published books, magazines and newspapers. We are only now seeing the same happen in the world of online audio and video. As technology allows for consumption in places other than where a television or radio are present, ideas about the format are being called into question.

The 90 minutes that NBC still allows for Saturday Night Live serves as a fine example. They are dicing small bits of that now seemingly enormous chunk of broadcast time and placing the best parts on YouTube. One infamous clip [NSFW] was placed there by NBC in its uncensored form, and has since received over 17 million views.

Next New Networks is extrapolating this concept; two former content CEOs [of MTV and Nickelodeon pedigree] created a new venture to cater specifically to the changing format, boundaries and constraints of content. From their website:

We’re looking to be available everywhere, from phones to iPods and gaming devices, to whatever the next platform is. Each of our micro-networks consists of 3-11 minutes of content refreshed on a schedule, daily, weekly, or bi-weekly (depending on the network), and offers one or more regular shows.

We are witnessing the truncation of what used to be standard format-imposed content lengths, not only for time’s sake, but for the sake of the ever-shortening attention span.

Perhaps we will see a distillation of the idea, without the need to pad it to meet the guidelines of a 74-minute CD, thirty-minute sitcom or 100-minute film. For those that have been creating content like this, perhaps ventures like Next New Networks will provide a viable outlet.

Old-school public radio has been producing to this length for some time, but length isn’t everything. New approaches including relevant video and still images would be welcome augmentations in many instances.

Not since Current.TV have we seen formatics tossed out like this.

The BBC reports that UK television viewing on televisions has decreased due to folks watching television on their computers and mobile devices. This flies in the face of what is, by all accounts, a global stampede on the large, widescreen LCD televisions.

Once again we are witness to the importance people place upon getting the content they desire at their command.

When the mp3 audio format rose to popularity, audiophiles decried it as a regression in the heirarchy of high-fidelity. They were correct. However, the consumers of mp3s saw the sacrifice in quality a fair trade for portability and by extension, convenience. This occurred in an environment where not one but two separate formats were developed to supercede the ubiquitous CDs’ audio quality.

The same situation exists right now in the video realm. As companies are jockeying to put their high-fidelity successors to DVD [Blu-Ray and HD DVD] in consumers’ hands, the younger generation is more and more satisfied to view things on a two-inch screen of a mobile phone or iPod.

The market has revealed that there is room for both. The chasm between the viewing experiences widens. On one hand, there is better-than-cinema promises of widescreen HDTV, Blu-Ray, & HD DVD, and on the other, 2″ and smaller mobile phones and iPods & the low-fidelity of video sharing sites like YouTube.

Know your audience.

While everyone is g0ing on about the Clear Channel buyout, I shall give you a respite — today you can read about 3-D animation.

In the past year, Disney has gone to lengths to get the next generation into the 3-D movie mindset. About one year ago the BBC posted a story about Disney’s new push. A key line in that story points to the fact that these movies are playable only in theaters equipped with the new $80-100k systems. I would imagine that the cinemas that dropped thousands upgrading projectors to the ear-splitting Dolby Digital sound systems are not pleased that new equipment will be required to play the bigger-grossing versions of films.

This has relevance today, or yesterday, as I drove about 30 minutes to see the 3-D version of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. It was a delight. The effect was quite remarkable, as viewed through the crazy glasses they hand out, as pictured above. It was playing in Coon Rapids and Oakdale only. These are likely the only two theaters in the Twin Cities that have completed the upgrade. [Calling Coon Rapids a part of the Twin Cities is a bit of a stretch…]

What does this have to do with anything? I drove 30 minutes to a theater at 9:20pm on a Thursday to see a movie. I could have watched the DVD at home. We actually did, around Halloween. This 3-D version of a film I have seen several times offered an experience compelling enough to go out of my way to take it in.

The content was king here, but even more important was its exclusivity.

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