Conferences & Panels

Hacks and flacks gathered at Varnish last night for the Waggener Edstrom-hosted panel on: "Embargo 2010: An Industry Discussion on Future Rules of Media Engagement."

Though panelist Dylan Tweney, editor of Wired.com's GadgetLab, kicked off the discussion by saying, "I think the word 'embargo' derives from a Latin phrase that means 'f--- you'," the discussion, which was moderated by Sam Whitmore and included a lot of back-and-forth with the audience, was mostly collegial with both PR folks and journos trying to figure out what makes the most sense in an age when anyone can be a publisher, not everyone plays by the rules, and minutes can mean the difference in thousands of pageviews.

No conclusions, though. Some journalists still like embargoes, because they provide the time necessary to do comprehensive reporting, but many are getting increasingly frustrated by the frequency with which embargoes are being broken.

The impetus for the event was TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's recent declaration that embargoes are dead. Arrington was originally scheduled to appear on the panel but backed out earlier this week.

Rafe Needleman, CNET, Paul Boutin, VentureBeat, John Hipsher, Waggener Edstrom

More pix, after the jump.

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BayNewser is reporting today from the Digital Media Conference West at Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco.

The "What's Next in Social Media" panel took a look at coming trends. Here are four observations.

1. The social media context is good for selling some things but not others

"There are certain categories that are going to do very well. I was talking to the guy who runs Cordarounds. They do custom corduroy pants. They're destroying on Facebook. It's their number-one referral. They make lots and lots of sales from it. Most of my clients, who tend to be more technical in nature, zero. A fan page is worthless.

"The analogy that we've finally come up with is to think about social networks much like the digital representation of things we do in our lives. So if you're out to lunch with a friend, or you go to a dinner party, or you're walking down the street... is that really where you might want to be buying insurance? Probably not. But if your friend told you about some great bottle of wine, that's a pretty good moment [for making that sale]."

-- Jeremy Toeman, Managing Partner, Stage Two Consulting

2. Look to gaming for clues about how to get people to pay for things online

The bubble we're headed into is one of how do we get people to pay for things directly online [ie: things that you experience online only, like movies, music, content, as opposed to physical products you buy online and then have shipped to you]. If you think about the Internet so far, it basically has two business models: e-commerce, with physical fulfillment, and advertising.... We see [gaming] as the tip of the spear of a transformation in how people interact online, how people get acclimated over time, behaviorally, to buy things...."

-- Michael Trigg, Vice President, Marketing & Business Development, hi5 (One of the largest social networks in the world, most popular outside the United States)

More, after the jump

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BayNewser is reporting today from the Digital Media Conference West at Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco.

The "Digital Madmen" panel took a look at the evolution of online advertising. Here are five practices that could portend the future.

1. Time-spent as a meaningful metric

"We found out that if we increased the amount of time that the impression is shown to the user, from 30 seconds to a minute, let's say, we can double the interaction rate.... 50 percent of the click rate is determined by the amount of time we show the ad impression to the user... because you don't know when the user is going to have that brief moment where they're going to be able to pay attention."

-- Martin Green, COO, Meebo

2. The megaphone effect

"The people who see your message, how broadly are they broadcasting it, sharing it, engaging your brand or your message with other people?"

-- Satya Patel, Principal, Battery Ventures

3. Intent data
Ie: data about a specific user's behavior that indicates they might be in the market for your product. For example, knowing that a particular user was searching for information on mini-vans, so you can serve up your auto ad to them.

"A company I'm on the board of, BlueKai, is building a marketplace of intent data, that helps solve this problem of finding the right audience. You want to buy cheaper, more premium inventory by making sure you're getting exactly the right audience that's deep in the funnel for your particular sets of products."

-- Patel

More, after the jump

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BayNewser is reporting today from the Digital Media Conference West at Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco.

For the past few years, large content sites have tended to let the crowd decide what's most interesting or relevant—through "most popular" lists, for example, or "most emailed."

But veteran online user behavior researcher Bill Tancer told attendees at the Digital Media Conference West today that that will most likely change. In the future, he says, users are going to be increasingly likely to flock to sites that curate—that apply some kind of human filter to sift through the reams of content and decide what's valuable.

How does he know? Tancer, the general manager of global research for Experian Hitwise and author of Click: What Millions of People Do Online and Why it Matters, says he studies the behavior of three categories of people for clues for what's to come, categories he calls "Young Digerati," "Money & Brains," and "Bohemian Mix."

In the past, those groups have been the early adopters of services online that subsequently became huge hits. And increasingly, he says, they're going to sites that have some degree of curation.

"They're going to niche video sites that provide an editorial layer," he said. "They're saying there's too much content out there. They're no longer happy with what's most popular on YouTube. They're looking for that editorial layer to [do some sifting]."

BayNewser is reporting today from the Digital Media Conference West at Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco.

Craig Newmark said today that the impact of Craigslist on newspapers—and the way it took over classified advertising—has been magnified. That's old news, of course. More importantly though, he said, newspapers have a "much bigger" problem: People simply don't trust them.

He pointed to the pre-Iraq war weapons of mass destruction reporting as well as reporting that preceded the economic collapse. In both instances, Newmark said, there actually was good reporting going on, but it was "buried in the back of newspapers" and it "wasn't repeated."

"People can see that somehow something has gone very wrong with that aspect of news," he said. "Meanwhile you see that the newspapers and on TV, there's still this pretense of objectivity, where you bring two sides of the story, even if it means you bring on someone that you know is going to come up there to mislead people. That doesn't inspire trust."

BayNewser is reporting today from the Digital Media Conference West at Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco.

Digg is going to release some new features in the coming week or so, Digg co-founder and CEO Jay Adelson announced at the Digital Media Conference West.

"Digg is in the process of creating another layer of vetting to really expose certain types of stories sooner," Adelson said. "We need to get out of the one-size-fits-all [approach]."

He wouldn't say more about the specific changes, but he did add that Digg is making "major and sustantive changes" to the site's platforms
and infrastructure.

What's driving the changes, Adelson told BayNewser, is the fact that Digg has gone "mainstream." Digg's user base used to be 80% male and mostly in the 18-35 range. Now, Adelson says, Digg users are almost half female and the age group is wider.

"We have to change the product to meet their demands," Adelson said. "We're blowing it right now [if we don't change]."

Adelson also advised that Digg isn't expecting the new features to be immediate home runs. Instead, he said, Digg will be using the "throw it up against the wall and see what sticks" approach to evolving its product. "We are assuming that when we push out our next version, we will make a lot of mistakes," Adelson said. Digg's plan is to closely monitor the use and response to the new features and release new tweaks frequently and quickly in order to get the product to where it needs to be.

BayNewser is reporting today from the Digital Media Conference West at Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco.

In a panel on Top Digital Media Trends at the Digital Media Conference West this morning, an audience member asked online behavior data guru Bill Tancer whether Twitter or Facebook was going to win the microblogging / online update war.

Tancer, who's the general manager of global research for Experian Hitwise and author of Click: What Millions of People Do Online and Why it Matters, said Twitter's growth peaked this summer.

More interestingly, however, is this phenomenon he noticed, as part of research to track things with an addictive nature: When MySpace goes offline, due to DNS attacks for example, visits go up, as users hammer away at the site, trying to get in. But when Twitter suffered a DNS attack this summer, visits actually went down.

"Who's going to win?" Tancer said. "Facebook most likely. But I wouldn't rule out new players."

The Online News Association Conference last weekend was full of smart people thinking about how news is evolving online. We decided to ask a bunch of them what their one piece of advice would be to traditional news organizations. Here are their answers.

Scott Lewis, CEO, voiceofsandiego.com

Raise the prices of the print products, cut circulation, and focus on adding value.

[Newspapers] are all trying to prove [to readers] that they're ubiquitous. Instead, they should be proving they deserve to be part of the stream of value.

Barbara Martinez, Managing Editor-Web, GlobalPost

Give up on bad ideas.

It's tough if there's a part of the business that's not working, because of loyalties, to give up on that. But in order to evolve and thrive, it's necessary to cut off dead limbs and move forward.

Patrick Stiegman, VP/Executive Editor/Producer, ESPN.com

Be agnostic about how people access the information.

Don't try to encourage or discourage people to go to one particular medium, but instead encourage them to engage with your brand wherever they want to. The ESPN mission is to serve sports fans. We want to be where they want to be.

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If there was an overarching theme at this year's Online News Association conference (which took place in San Francisco this past weekend), it was this: Embrace failure.

Speaker after speaker repeated the same message: To figure out what works in the digital world, to find sustainability, news organizations have to be willing to try stuff knowing that a bunch of it might not work and be OK when projects fail.

From VoiceofSanDiego.com CEO Scott Lewis:

"Vision isn't seeing exactly what will happen it's seeing what needs to happen to prepare for it.... There are so many people that want to write out exactly how it's going to go for the first year, and they think that that's what a business plan is, and if it skews, they think they've failed or something.... Understand that mistakes are good and that being smart is also knowing that you may have screwed up. You may not know everything. Being able to do difficult things like change direction or fire people or having to make tough decisions that make you look like you made a bad decision before are things you just have to deal with."

From Ann Grimes, acting director, Stanford University Graduate Program in Journalism:

"One of the toughest things we've seen with our students, and I think with journalists who try to move from reporting to the business side, is they think they know the answer. One of the things we get our students to do is to fail early and often—take that idea, test it out, get feedback, come up with a new prototype, go back out, get more feedback, iterate all over again, get more feedback, and then refine your idea according to what your users or customers [tell you]."

More insights, after the jump.

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BayNewser is reporting from the 2009 Online News Association conference in San Francisco.

Social media expert and president of the Social Media Group (and Bay Area resident) JD Lasica does a video interview with YouTube News chief (and "Video Free-for-All" panelist) Olivia Ma in between ONA09 sessions.