LDS Media Talk

The International Worldwide Web 2007 Conference just ended in

Banff, Canada. I’ve attended two of these conferences (2006 was in

Edinburgh, Scotland). This year was also great, although I echo many of Phil Windley’s feelings. These conferences are a mix of academic and commercial interests. My interests in attending are to learn where the Web is heading strategically and think through what content and services Church sites should be providing. I also picked up a lot of tactical tips on how to do what we do better. But my role is not to be a deep technical person, so many of the sessions didn’t interest me. But there were plenty of good sessions to keep me busy each hour of the full 5 days. Unlike Phil, I don’t have the budget to go to the conference next year in

Beijing. I’ll try to attend the Web 2.0 Summit in

San Francisco in October.

Phil’s blog covered the general sessions at WWW2007 pretty well, so I won’t share my notes here. There is also a good review of the talk by Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Web) on Nodalities. In the recent eWeek.com listing of the 100 most influential people in IT, they listed Tim as the second most influential person, right behind the Google guys. Therefore, I will only blog about a few issues in my next blogs.

On Monday, media titan Rupert Murdoch wrote a letter published at Forbes.com to explain how media is evolving. He’s the majority shareholder and chief executive of News Corporation, that owns 20th Century Fox, HarperCollins, Fox Broadcasting, dozens of prestigious newspapers and magazines, and MySpace.

User Interaction

Murdock said “People’s expectations of media have undergone a revolution. They are no longer content to be a passive audience; they insist on being participants, on creating their own material and finding others who will want to read, listen and watch.”

Have you thought about building a community around your online content? Users want to comment and add their own ideas about your content. Is there a way to establish a forum for comments on your Web site? People could post their faith-promoting experiences, ideas, and testimonies. If you make it easy to use, it will draw more users because they will want to contribute and see other users’ comments.

Quality of Content

Murdock also states that the quality of online content “is more important than ever, because the marketplace is more ruthlessly competitive.” The content we publish must be valuable to our users. More isn’t better. Better is better. Don’t just publish “flashy toys.” The content or services must offer more value to your readers. After you publish good content, you need to keep working at it, making it more focused, impactful, relevant, and current.

Murdock concludes his letter with “The future of media is a future of relentless experimentation and innovation, accelerating change, and—for those who embrace the new ways in which consumers are connecting with each other—enormous potential.”

“The US remains the single largest Internet market in the world with 181.9 million Internet users in 2006, but China is likely to take the lead before the decade is out.” That’s the lead line from a recent eMarketer report.

Although the U.S. Internet population continues to grow, the rest of the world is growing even faster–particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. China is growing quickly as its middle class grows and home Internet access becomes widespread. India is also a country of great growth potential.

Morgan Stanley estimates that by the end of 2007 there will be over 1.3 billion Internet users worldwide.

I just read the new Gartner report “Mobile Collaboration Will Be Driven by Consumer Technologies and Behaviors.” Smart phones already have keyboards and fully functional HTML Web browsers. The price of cell phones is dropping dramatically, while at the same time, their capabilities are increasing. The mobile phone is becoming a fully-functional computer in your hand.

But it’s more than that, because mobile devices also have a basic knowledge of their location from the network, and GPS and other location-sensing technologies will become increasingly common during the next five years. This will allow people to get location-specific information. For example, a person standing outside a restaurant can look up reviews left by previous customers commenting on the service.

Add to that our ability later this year to let Web users log in, and tie their identity to their membership record. Imagine…

• An endowed member traveling could get on his cell phone the directions to the nearest temple, a list of the session starting times, information on whether clothing rental is available, and the times the cafeteria is open.
• A nonmember (or member traveling in an unknown city) could get on his cell phone the address of the closest meetinghouse and times of the next sacrament meeting.
• A temple engineer who is having a problem with a piece of equipment could look up the maintenance manual off the Church Intranet and if that didn’t answer his question, he could take a picture of the problem with his cell phone and transmit it to an engineer at headquarters.
• A member in Japan who commutes to work two hours each way could get a podcast and listen to this week’s gospel doctrine scripture reading assignment.
• A humanitarian missionary providing emergency relief in Indonesia could share images and information with missionaries doing the same in Sri Lanka.

Just food for thought.

Nearly 2 weeks ago, I blogged about the Uses of Broadband, and commented that now that about half of US households have broadband, the issue to think about isn’t just high-speed connection, but what value-added services the broadband connection can use to increase our quality of life.

I believe we are on the cusp of seeing a huge convergence of technology, both in the hardware (cell phones, land phones, televisions, computers, iPods, iPAQs, PalmPilots, Blackberrys, DVD players, etc.) and the means of communicating with them (wires, wireless, cable, fiber optic lines, satellite dishes, infrared, AM/FM, Blue Tooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, etc.) to provide voice conversations, movies, television programming, music, data transmission, home control and security, Internet access, access to the world’s libraries, and many things we can only dream about today.

In their new forecast report, Parks Associates calls these new capabilities “digital living services.” They state that “recent investment and developments in such services as broadband access and television, including the shift to digital and IP delivery of communications and entertainment services, have given rise to a host of new digital living products and services.” In 5 years, they expect that more than 30 million households will have a network that bridges numerous products and extends the entertainment experience to multiple rooms in the home.

Over the next 5 years, they expect the following growth:

• broadband and communications to grow from $168 billion to $229B
• PC/CE digital media platforms to grow from $23B to $34B
• Home security to grow from $8B to $10B
• On-demand entertainment to grow from $3B to $10B
• Home controls to grow from $3B to $5B

According to a recent survey of worldwide marketers by ICOM, some traditional media choices are on the decline as a result of new media choices. For example:

• 42% of marketers say they use newspapers less.
• 20% use radio and television less.
• 18% use magazines less.

Fastest growing media?

1. Blogs, e-mails, group sites
2. Viral marketing
3. Internet
4. Commercial messages on handhelds

But don’t take survey results like this at face value. There’s more to the story than jumping to the conclusion that newspapers, radio, and TV are dying. eMarketer.com reminds us that “taking these survey results at face value is shortsighted. The idea that old media is a collection of monolithic business models doomed to death by static inaction misses the fact that these formats are changing to keep with the times. For one, all the alarmist claims that digital video recorders and video-on-demand will cause the death of TV and the loss of billions of dollars worth of advertising are just plain wrong. More people will watch more TV and video content in the future, not less. They will just be doing it in different ways via the Internet, the PC and portable devices.”

A November 2006 study by the American Advertising Federation found that U.S. advertising executives are highly interested in integrating online media with traditional media.

A colleague of mine who is an experienced public relations man agrees with this analysis: “The writer is spot on. New media is forcing old media to change and develop a different kind of style and relationship with their audiences. Old media will be around for a long time, but it’s certainly starting to look and feel different, even in our day-to-day working relationships with them. A fascinating time to be in the business.”

Social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and may others are beginning to go mobile. According to the “Mobile Social Communities” report from ABI Research, many social communities are now based on the mobile phone and other portable wireless devices in addition to computers. In a world that must constantly be in touch, you’re no longer tied to your computer; you can network over the phone 24×7.

Worldwide, there are almost 50 million members of “mobile social communities,” and projections say there will be 174 million in 5 years.

Broadband is no longer about the size of your pipe, but how you use it.

Now that about half of US households have broadband, the issue to think about isn’t just high-speed connection, but what value-added services can use the broadband connection to increase our quality of life. I’m talking about things like voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), Internet protocol TV (IPTV), and paid audio and video content.

In-Stat reports that more than 9 million US households have 1+ active VoIP users, and 49% of them have no land phone line. I want to get rid of my home land line as soon as I can convince my wife that her cell phone can work just fine at home. (All my kids have their own cell phones and they never use–or answer–the land phone.) I’d also like to get rid of my work land line as soon as our IT department finds a cost-effective way to jettison our land phones and issue VoIP cell phones to all employees; about half already have work cell phones.

On the hardware side: I want to reduce the number of gadgets I use (personal cell phone, work cell phone, home land phone, work land phone, work computer, home computer, iPAQ, etc.) and get better productivity in the process.

On the content side: I want to reduce the number of e-mail accounts, phone numbers, bank account numbers, utility bills, consumer credit accounts, and merge them all into one.

Kevin Maney writes an article in today’s USA Today about new media and user-generated content. He talks about major events in 2006 around user-generated content, then wisely comments that the “flavor of the week” usually doesn’t change the world radically. (Remember how artificial intelligence, interactive TV, portals, community sites, and social networking were going to change the world overnight?)

They do tend to change our worlds over time, but the change is more evolutionary.

Those of us who focus our attention to the Internet shouldn’t forget the value of traditional media. Lexis-Nexis reports that during major national events, consumers turn first to TV, radio, and print. According to their study, half of the respondents said they would use network TV during a news event and 42% would turn on the radio. One-quarter would visit a Web site and 6% would visit some form of online user-generated content such as a blog or chat group.

Two great magazines I read:

1. Internet Retailer. Although I’m not involved in retailing per se, it’s all about matching the needs of users with what you have to offer.

2. eContent available in print (free) and on the Web (subscription).

eWeek and Business 2.0 are also good for keeping up on technology in general.

South Korea now has ONE MILLION mobile TV subscribers. On average, South Korean mobile TV subscribers watch about one hour of TV programming per day on their phones.

Japan entered the commercial mobile TV arena in March 2006.

China plans plans to have a robust mobile TV infrastructure in place for the Beijing Olympics.

The rub: all three countries are pursuing separate technical standards for mobile TV.

In-Stat figures there will be 100 million global mobile TV subscribers by 2010.

Read more at eMarketer.