Author: Gerardo Orlando (Page 4 of 5)

      Social media vs voter fraud in Russia

      December 6, 2011 /

      Even Vladimir Putin isn’t immune to the power of social media. We’ve seen how social media has fueled revolutions across the Middle East in the Arab Spring, and now Russian citizens are getting into the act. An independent election observer in Russia witnessed blatant voter fraud. He captured video on his phone and then uploaded it for all to see.

      Mr. Duda raced home and uploaded the clip to YouTube. Though just three minutes long, it quickly became an election-day sensation, helping fuel a major demonstration of as many as 5,000 people on Monday evening in central Moscow. They chanted “Russia without Putin!” and “Putin is a thief.” Several hundred were arrested, including two major opposition leaders.

      Valentin Gorbunov, the head of the Moscow City Elections Commission, confirmed the substance of the video and announced that Russian investigators had opened a case into ballot tampering by the head at Polling Place No. 2501, where the episode occurred, Russian news agencies reported Monday.

      It’s stunning to see how oppressive regimes are losing their grip on the public. The key to power is controlling information, and in the past, control of TV and newspapers was the primary tool. But it today’s bottom-up world, that control is impossible with social media and the Internet. But it’s impossible to have a modern economy without an open web, so hence the dilemma for thugs like Putin. It also presents some risks but also huge opportunities for foreign policy goals in the United States.

      New Media, Social Media, Video

      Magazines and the iPad

      March 27, 2010 /

      Commentators have been debating whether online news and opinion articles should be put behind pay walls to help the struggling publishing industry, but developments like the introduction of the iPad by Apple will make many of these discussions moot.

      With the iPad and other tablets, publishers now have a new option with loads of potential, with the ability to send out electronic versions of their print magazines with colorful ads. Then, by adding interactivity and video, the ads can become more engaging and much more effective. This story from the WSJ offers a glimpse of what’s to come.

      Time magazine has signed up Unilever, Toyota Motor, Fidelity Investments and at least three others for marketing agreements priced at about $200,000 apiece for a single ad spot in each of the first eight issues of the magazine’s iPad edition, according to people familiar with the matter.

      At Condé Nast Publications, Wired magazine is offering different levels of ad functionality depending on how many pages of ads a marketer buys, according to a person familiar with the matter. Advertisers that agree to buy eight pages of ads in a single issue of Wired magazine will be able to lace video and other extra features through the iPad version, say people familiar with the matter.

      Magazines largely are planning downloadable iPad applications that are near-replicas of the stories in the print versions, but they are demonstrating the new-media bells and whistles for advertisers: add-ons like videos, social-networking tools and navigation that take advantage of the large screen, touch technology and Internet connections of the tablet computer.

      Time Inc.’s Sport Illustrated has been showing advertisers three video-heavy ad prototypes, including one for a Ford Mustang that includes an arcade-style driving game using the tilt-and-turn capability of the iPad. With a few touches to the screen, readers can pick paint colors and wheel styles for cars they might want to buy.

      “Some of the things you can do are just mind blowing,” says Steve Pacheco, FedEx’s director of advertising. “You are taking something that used to be flat on a page and making it interactive and have it jump off the page.”

      Magazine publishers see the device as crucial to their future as they scour for new ways to make money, with print advertising still under threat. Digital advertising has been a disappointment for many publishers, but with the iPad they feel they have a technology that best marries the splashy look and size of a full-page print ad with the cool interactive features of a digital ad—and the ability to count how many people saw it.

      As I’ve argued before, a pay for delivery model makes much more sense for advertisers when compared to a pay wall. Pay walls can severely hurt a publication’s popularity, as many users will not be interested in paying for content and most bloggers won’t link to a story behind a pay wall. But, I suspect many users will pay for the convenience of being able to download a beautifully laid out magazine on a device like the iPad. They’ll even pay for a black and white version on their Kindle. Imagine having all your favorite magazines loaded up on your device when you board your flight, along with the books you’ve been waiting to read.

      These changes are inevitable, and I expect most publishers and large brand advertisers to jump on this trend.

      Aaron Baar of Marketing Daily agrees that the iPad will be transformational for the publishing business.

      Q: Is the iPad the savior of the publishing industry?

      A: We do believe it will be transformational for newspaper and magazine publishers. Whether it will save the business or not is a different story, but we definitely think it will put a new face to the way consumers can actually interact with print content as well as advertising within print content. It kind of gives the industry a breath of fresh air.

      The iPad “provokes” customer responses. Naturally, part of that is because the format os relatively new. But the interactive qualities will mean this effect will have considerable staying power.

      Apps, Gadgets, Mobile, New Media

      AOL’s content strategy – will it work?

      February 12, 2010 /

      AOL’s content strategy is a mix of quantity and quality. We previously posted on how AOL plans to churn out gobs of content to compete with the likes of Demand Media. AOL also has it’s huge flagship site, which it uses to push traffic to its popular niche sites like Asylum and Engadget.

      I like the strategy, as they have a good chance of competing for premium ads on their network of quality sites, and they can also make money with the shotgun approach as well. Will it work with their cost structure? Who knows. They’re slashing costs and closing offices, so they seem to have the right idea.

      Regarding their prospects, one thing I won’t do is pay much attentions to analysts like Roger Kay.

      Tech industry analyst Roger Kay gave Armstrong and the company a mixed report card. “I’ve got to give him some credit for doing as well as he did,” Kay said.

      Still, Kay was skeptical of AOL’s new strategy as a Web publisher, given that the company never benefited from its years as a part of Time Warner, a company with ample supplies on the content front. “They couldn’t get content from a professional provider; now they’re going to do that on their own? I’d say the odds are against them.”

      Really? Let’s be clear – Time Warner knew practically nothing about how to create content for the web. If you needed movies or magazines, Time Warner was the gold standard, but when it came to the web they were like most other old media companies – clueless. So, AOL’s history with Time Warner is not at all relevant.

      New Media

      Old media struggles with the Tiger Woods story

      November 30, 2009 /

      While new media web sites like TMZ and SPORTSbyBROOKS are having a field day covering the Tiger Woods affair rumors and the questions surrounding his recent accident, old media (or mainstream media) outlets are having a little more trouble with it. I watched a news story on ABC over the weekend after the accident in which the affair rumors, Rachel Uchitel and the possibility that Tiger’s wife Elin Nordegren lied to police about the accident were not even mentioned.

      James Poniewozik from Time.com has an interesting take on the dilemma facing the MSM.

      And, of course, like any media issue today, it’s complicated by money. Or the lack thereof. Journalism organizations (like Time Inc.) are losing revenue and shedding jobs left and right. How much attention can we afford to pass up in the name of purity?

      So whenever a story like the Woods story emerges, one of the most entertaining aspects is watching the contortions the respectable media go through to put a sufficiently meta spin on it, to justify covering the hot topic (and not passing up all those free eyeballs), while appearing to be serious-minded, and not like all those other outlets just trying to pry into Tiger Woods’ personal life.

      Like so many things that the trapped-in-between mainstream media does nowadays, though, this probably does it little good in the long run. They don’t truly satisfy, for instance, the reader who just Google-searched “Tiger Woods golf club affair car crash,” and wanted to learn something new about the incident. Meanwhile, to anyone who expects them to ignore this kind of story and focus on “real news,” their game is transparent.

      What these half-measures do, more than anything, is convey the sense that the mainstream media is phony, inauthentic, that it lacks the courage of its convictions either to go all in and give the public what it wants, or take a bullet and stick to its principles. Trying to please everyone, it pleases no one.

      That said, hope springs eternal in the mainstream media that there is a way of properly threading the needle when it comes to juicy stories like this one—that if they are simply self-aware and meta-referential enough, acknowledging these contortions will make the contortions somehow more acceptable.

      In many ways he’s dead on here. But he also fails to mention one factor that doesn’t apply to Time but applies to the television networks. Tiger Woods is more than just a famous athlete. He’s a brand; he’s a multi-million dollar business; he’s a global icon. For the networks there’s a price to be paid for pissing of Tiger (and Nike as well). So while Time and other old media magazines might wrestle with how to handle this, the decision is a bit easier for the big television networks. They’ll be happy to bring up the rear on this story.

      New Media

      AOL’s content strategy – mass production

      November 30, 2009 /

      AOL has been very impressive with its new emphasis on content. New sites like Asylum and Lemondrop have produced cool content in their respective niches. It also doesn’t hurt to have them linked up from AOL’s high-traffic flagship site.

      The Wall Street Journal, however, is reporting that AOL will also get into mass-produced content (sometimes referred to as garbage content).

      AOL is putting the finishing touches on a high-tech system for mass-producing news articles, entertainment and other online content, the linchpin of Chief Executive Tim Armstrong’s strategy for reviving the struggling 25-year-old Internet company after Time Warner spins it off next month.

      Mr. Armstrong’s goal is to make AOL, which has been losing visitors and revenue, a magnet for both advertisers and consumers by turning it into the top creator of digital content. He hopes to do so in part by turning some media and marketing conventions on their ear, and potentially blurring the lines between journalism and advertising.

      “Content is the one area on the Web that hasn’t seen the full potential. Hopefully, we will spark a revolution of people doing content at a different scale,” says Mr. Armstrong, a former advertising executive at Google.

      AOL is betting it can reinvent itself with a numbers-driven approach to developing content, based on what Web-search and other data tell it is most likely to attract audiences and sponsors.

      As pointed out this the article, this strategy mimics the approach taken by companies like Demand Media and Associated Content. Wired has a long profile covering Demand Media’s strategy, which uses an algorithm to pick narrow content subjects that could generate significant revenue from sources like Google Adwords.

      Thousands of other filmmakers and writers around the country are operating with the same loose standards, racing to produce the 4,000 videos and articles that Demand Media publishes every day. The company’s ambitions are so enormous as to be almost surreal: to predict any question anyone might ask and generate an answer that will show up at the top of Google’s search results. To get there, Demand is using an army of Muñoz-Donosos to feverishly crank out articles and videos. They shoot slapdash instructional videos with titles like “How To Draw a Greek Helmet” and “Dog Whistle Training Techniques.” They write guides about lunch meat safety and nonprofit administration. They pump out an endless stream of bulleted lists and tutorials about the most esoteric of subjects.

      In one sense the strategy is brilliant. There’s obviously some demand for content in each of these areas, and companies like Demand are meeting the demand (what’s in a name?) and profiting nicely from it.

      On the other hand, much of the content is crap, and the crap from these big companies who get massive love from Google will often rank higher than similar content produced by others. This raises another question – will quality ever matter in search results? The criteria used by the search engines, which heavily rate factors like incoming links, are easily manipulated by content factories like Demand Media.

      Manipulating Google results is obviously a big business these days, and companies like Demand Media and AOL are just doing it on a much larger scale. But we’re getting to the point where content is turning into a commodity, and Google is feeding the beast. In the long run, it will be interesting to see if Google adjusts its secret sauce, or whether the content factories will litter the web and the search engine with second-rate content.

      New Media

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