Working Three is a future focused social media agency, something we call digital activism.

Through a unique blend of brand strategy, creativity and technology we create more meaningful brand experiences.

Since 2003, our approach to every job has been different but our commitment the same: to challenge stale marketing conventions and deliver long-term online and off-line solutions.

Our aim is to create exciting new ways to connect with people and force the boundaries of where a brand can go. Welcome to Working Three.

That social networks are useful tools for connecting to friends or people with the same interests is now widely understood. Many people, however, still have trouble understanding how they can be utilised effectively for distributing marketing messages. They see social networks and the Internet in general as “just another media channel”, behind the likes of newspapers and TV. In fact social networks are fundamentally impacting and reshaping the newspaper and TV industries worldwide. In an earlier article, “What the newspaper industry needs to do to survive”, I explained the changing dynamics of the newspaper industry. In this article I look at where TV is headed.

In this article I look at where TV is headed.

For a very long time TV has been the master of the house. If you wanted to watch your favourite program you had to be in front of the TV at the right time. VCRs and later hard disk recorders like Tivo, or Foxtel IQ here in Australia, changed that. Now you can record your programs and skip through the ads. End users love it but advertisers were obviously frustrated with this development. There has even been a movement in the US to make sure the logo can still be seen while fast forwarding ads on a Tivo.

Enter Hulu. If you haven’t heard of Hulu don‚Äôt worry. It‚Äôs not available outside of the US yet. But I guarantee that it will be. Hulu is a website that is free to join, provided you hand over a bit of background information about yourself. It has video content to an extent never seen before. Almost every show that airs on FOX and NBC is available to watch whenever you feel like it. And when I say every show I mean every show. Every episode of the Simpsons ever produced, feature films, documentaries, dramas – anything you can think of – is searchable and viewable a day or two after it is aired on the network itself. Recently the networks have started to restrict a bit of that content but regardless you don‚Äôt have to worry about recording anything again. Hulu stores everything for you. Available ‚Äúon demand‚Äù.

What is really interesting about Hulu is the business aspect of it. Each show still has commercial breaks but each break contains only one ad but a highly targeted one. Using the information you have provided about yourself,  advertisers can tailor a message specifically to you, or as a minimum, make sure it advertises a product you are interested in. In fact, advertisers can even put your name in it. It may still be considered interruption marketing, but at least there’s a good chance that you’ll find it relevant and interesting. And who can be bothered fast-forwarding when it’s just one 30 second TVC? Even if you could. We haven’t seen it yet but there is nothing stopping the advertisers making these ads fully interactive as well.

Sit down in front of your TV and watch anything you want, any time you want.

Early adopters have already worked out how to get Hulu onto media centres like Apple TVs or Xboxes and are able to view it on their main entertainment screen. They are not meant to be able to it but it works. Considering how popular this seems to be it can’t be long before there is a “plug and play” version. Just think about it for a minute. Sit down in front of your TV and watch anything you want, any time you want. It could be the ‘total control’ moment we’ve all been waiting for since the birth of the internet.

The social networking interaction is fairly simple at this stage. Topic controlled forums where users can comment and vote on a show allow viewers connect with each other. This information has the ability to be analysed to make the advertising even more targeted. So it is likely that the social media aspects are only going to get further developed over time.

Hulu is doing well and is being backed by a range of big players. This technology is going to get even more interesting when Google, the owners of YouTube, joins in. You can bet your bottom dollar that YouTube is going to provide premium content with targeted advertising in the not too distant future. After all Google is no longer just a search engine; it is the world largest media agency and they know how to spot an opportunity, and they desperately need to find a way to make money out of YouTube.

As with all ‘disruptive’ technology changes there is going to be resistance at first. Large corporations don’t particularly like changing their business models, but you can guarantee this is where the customers will go Рso the networks and advertisers will have to follow.

Television content providers need to be preparing for a time where this is common place. It’s what the customer wants and forcing your customers to put up with old models is a good way to lose them. Traditional broadcasting quickly became a platform for advertisers to speak to their customers. This new technology will be a similar platform but the conversation will be one to one. It’s measurable and testable. It’s direct marketing for TV.

Further reading:

How the economic downturn will mature internet marketing.

Hulu is Catching Up With YouTube – Fast

Free, Legal and Online: Why Hulu Is the New Way to Watch TV

From the TED website -¬†”Great design is a never-ending journey of discovery — for which it helps to pack a healthy sense of humor. Sociologist and surfer-turned-designer David Carson walks through a gorgeous (and often quite funny) slide deck of his work and found images.”

He said that he was ‘mad as hell’ at what he saw as intellectual property theft.

News aggregators like The Huffington Post and Google News recently came under fire from Dean Singleton, the chairman of Associated Press. He said that he was ‘mad as hell’ at what he saw as intellectual property theft. From Mr Singleton’s point of view social networking and search engines are killing the newspaper industry. He sees a future where people pay to log on to their content and other sites pay to link to their articles. Unfortunately for him this attitude is going to put him off side with a large portion of his potential market.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently told the Newspaper Association of America that newspapers were very close to committing suicide by alienating their online customers, the fastest growing segment. What’s more a recent study showed that the generation who grew up with Google and Facebook love news aggregators and free news. The study says “Not only are teens not rushing to pay for content but they also struggle to envision in what realm they would need to pay for content…. Ask teens where they find news, and they typically say Yahoo!, Google, AOL or MSN”.

Frankly it sounds like newspapers struggle to understand the opportunities and rules that govern the online world. There is a whole generation that has grown up with the concept of freemium economics. Try to charge them for something they have always had for free and you’ll lose them altogether.

They need to remember that their main customers are advertisers.

Newspapers are in the business of collecting and delivering information. They have to be agnostic and flexible about the method of delivery if they are to avoid being trapped in outdated and inefficient channels. The old model of monetising this information is on the way out. Even the term “newspaper” is starting to sound like a relic. They need to remember that their main customers are advertisers. If they embrace the new mindset and employ direct marketing principles there is a world of new commercial opportunities out there.

Here’s what we think hold the most amount of promise:

1 – More engaging advertising

One of the most difficult transitions for newspapers going online has been understanding how to sell advertising space online. Banners are OK but many of them are just annoying and get ignored.

Newsprint was a simple platform that advertisers could use to get a message out. Online newspapers need to create a new advertising platform. Develop a collection of tools that not only track users behaviour but allow advertisers to sell their products more easily.

Currently many advertisers create landing pages for banner ads. These pages pass on detailed information, get users to sign up or even make a sale.

If the digital arm of a newspaper were to develop easy to manage tools that allowed advertisers to perform these tasks, thus reducing the overall campaign cost and timeframe, advertisers would be over the moon.

Not so long ago we developed an online application for the Herald Sun’s sponsorship of the Melbourne Marathon. This application, utilising RFID technology, allowed each and every runner to see a video of themselves. With a bit more development time could have added targeted advertising to this type of application and created a platform that could be used for multiple events.

It is this type of thinking that advertisers are looking for.

2 – Utilise the Twitternet

Micro-blogging is here to stay. Twitter is currently the market leader in this space but who knows what will happen in the coming years. What’s certain is that 2009 is going to see the tipping point for Twitter. Well worded headlines can easily drive traffic to the source of the news. Again, The New York Times is already doing this. When this article was written the Times had more than 500,000 followers and this number will keep rising.

There are huge opportunities here to increase overall traffic.

There are huge opportunities here to increase overall traffic. Twitter lets people connect with ideas and information, and ideas and information are what news sources are all about.

3 – Realise that the brand is a social centre

Newspapers are brands with a customer base that identifies with it like any other brand. More than ever newspapers need to remember that fact and learn to leverage it. Connecting with local communities and encouraging them to add content.

Currently many online newspapers are concerned about moderating any user generated content and create rules and dedicate resources to achieving that end. An alternative and much better approach is to get other members of that community to vote on comments or images. Sites like ‘Digg’ do this very well. If a user posts an abusive remark it is very quickly voted out of the time line. Recently President Obama launched a website that did just that. Read more about it here.

This influx of user generated content can then be monetised. The Cincinnati Enquirer has a site that does this. CaptureCincinnati.com is a user generated photo sharing site. They have been selling a coffee table book and a DVD of this content and expect it’s popularity to continue to be strong. There could even be the possibility of users ordering photos to make a customised book through the site.

An online community based around a newspaper brand is a fruit ripe for the picking.

An online community based around a newspaper brand is a fruit ripe for the picking. You only have to look at the comments on any news site to see how eager the audience is to get involved.

4 – Personalisation

Some websites get it right but many don‚Äôt. Personalisation on the web is huge and is only going to get bigger. Google has a product called ‘iGoogle‘ that let‚Äôs you personalise a page. Stuff.co.nz is a news site that lets you order some elements of the page. Underlying these examples is an understanding that the end user has specific interests that they want information about. News site are uniquely positioned to be able to deliver that information in a very targeted way. If they focus on user experience people will flock to their sites.

BBC.co.uk have made an admirable effort with their widgetised home page, taking more than a hint of inspiration from iGoogle. You can drag the sections around, customise them a little, and add more from other areas of the site. However it’s only skin deep.  The big leap will be developing this idea to a point where users have control over the whole experience, not just what they find on the home page.

5 – Open up even more

APIs or application programming interfaces are driving the progress of the web, and newspapers need to embrace them. APIs allow third party developers to connect to websites and deliver customised content. I know this sounds counter-intuitive but it is already being done. The New York Times Developer Network allows developers to create applications that deliver their content to the end user.

What The Times has realised, that many other news sources have failed to do, is that what they really have is an information platform Рrather than an online newspaper, or even a website. Giving third party developers access to this opens up opportunities to deliver advertisers messages in a more direct way, allowing them to increase the size and value of their user database and cut down the cost of developing their own applications by only partnering with developers that get the formula right.

6 – Change the printed material

The news media industry is in transition, one day printed newspapers will be history. The industry needs to think very carefully about how they structure and deliver printed matter now and in the future. Design is paramount. The customer now has a choice. It’s time to respect that choice.

I think this recent TED talk demonstrates the proposition very well.

Further reading:
http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/more-bad-news-f.html

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.