Filtered Media

Ok, let’s be honest. Would you rather read a good story or a bad story? Do you like happy endings (non-Hollywood style), or the dramatic melancholy of an unresolved dissonance?

If you think about the new media meta-narrative, it strikes me that we’ve become fixated on the drama that’s affecting incumbent media. You’re familiar with the story: mainstream newspapers and TV are “losing” while new media like consumer-generated content and social networking is “winning.”

Just about every media debate I can think of – blogging vs. journalism, the future of advertising, digital rights management, mobile content – fits into this paradigm. Every conference, panel discussion or private meeting I’ve enjoyed over the past two years has roughly echoed this story. And it’s a fascinating story, even if it sometimes seems overplayed. It’s fascinating because it echoes other big underdog stories that capture our attention: David vs. Goliath, Vietnam vs. the United States, Maxine McKew vs. John Howard.

I realise I’m speaking in pretty general terms, but today I realised what’s been bugging me about this story. As an industry we’ve spent so much time focused on who is losing that we’ve lost sight of where the opportunities lie.

Let me give you some examples. At Ross Dawson’s Future of Media Summit 2008, it was interesting to see a few eyebrows raised when he predicted the total worldwide media industry would be worth US$5.7 trillion by 2024 (pdf here). You could almost hear people thinking: “Huh? That’s not part of the “big media is dead” story I’ve been following!” How, how did he get that figure? I don’t know. But it’s a good story.

If the total media pie is actually getting bigger, then that’s worth further investigation. Of course, it’s not a new idea. Figures I compiled late last year show that while growth in advertising spend is falling in some segments like Outdoor and Free-to-Air TV, the total pie keeps growing (albeit slowly in segments like newspapers - see chart).

Another interesting data point can be seen in these e-marketer stats which show total TV consumption in the United States has continued to rise despite the boom in online video. One of the theories here is that as we become more sophisticated media consumers, media continues to occupy even more of our everyday lives.

We don’t stop watching TV just because we’ve started micro-blogging on Twitter, for example. Some of us, including yours truly, watch TV AND write Twitter posts.  You can laugh if you like - my family does - but it’s fascinating to realise that instant, real-time conversations are becoming a normal part of the way we consume live events, TV and video streams. The likes of ustream.tv or mobile phone streams on Qik are just the tip of the iceberg.

There’s an old cliche that a rising tide floats all boats. It’s actually not a perfect analogy because it hides from view the very real, game-changing impact of consumer-driven changes to the media business. But what the statistics tell us is that there are more media fortunes to be won than lost in the years to come. And that’s a good story, one that demands more attention regardless of whether you are in the “old” or “new” media business.

If you’re one of my select, loyal readers you might have noticed that I’m tending not to write as frequently on this blog as times past.

My interest in the convergence of media, technology and marketing hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s deepened. What has changed is that my attention is increasingly divided between different forms of social media. And most of my social media time is currently soaked up by Twitter. If you want to follow my twitter musings, check me out at twitter.com/markhjones.

The digital media revolution has arguably hit the entertainment industry harder than those of us in the journalism business. But the technologies and content delivery strategies in question are common to both sectors. And with many non-media companies pursuing various forms of online content delivery, there’s now a lot of people now asking the same questions that media and entertainment folks have been asking for decades.

I sat down with Sony Pictures Television executive VP Jack Ford in Sydney at the VentureOne/AIMIA Commercialising Video conference to talk about digital media convergence.

Watch it here on AFR TV. And kudos to producer Marc Tewksbury for the slick editing.

On Monday I spoke at Jed White & iTechne’s Pubcamp conference in Melbourne on the subject of social capital. I spoke for 10 minutes about what I called “social capital transfer” - the notion that individuals build social capital inside web communities, which in turn builds or depletes the social capital ascribed to their employer.

And when a net-citizen moves jobs, there is social capital transfer that takes place. Understand how this works, and you understand the digital economy.

Have a listen!

Below, the controversial “old vs. new media panel” facilitated by yours truly, pic shot on Ben Barren’s b’berry.

Before Heather finished up at Lenovo, she made a short speech at the annual Make-A-Wish Ball in Sydney. It gives you an idea of her passion for corporate social responsibility, and her ability to get 2,000 people eating dinner to actually pay attention! (Excuse the dodgy camera work - I shot it on a small digital camera.)

We’ve got some exciting news to announce today.

Heather Jones, an awesomely talented communications exec who just happens to be my wife, has started her own corporate communications and social investments consultancy - Filtered Communications.

As Media Connect wrote today (subscribers-only, full copy below), the opportunity came about as a result of a redundancy package. It was good timing - this business idea has been in the works for some time.

The big picture story is that we’re setting up an new entity called Filtered Media Group. I remain director of Filtered Media, our digital media services division. Heather is director of Filtered Communications, a practice focused on corporate communications, social investments and corporate social responsibility.

The idea behind this structure is that it will allow us to focus on our different areas of expertise (and different client bases), while taking advantage of complimentary skills.

It’s early days, so I’ll write more about what we are doing soon. But until then, you can email heather [at] filteredmedia.com.au  and read the Media Connect story below (republished with Media Connect’s kind permission):

Jones takes redundancy, launches business

Tiffany Blatchford, IT Journo / Media Connect

Heather Jones, Lenovo’s former communications director for Australia and New Zealand, will launch her own Corporate Communications and Social Investments consultancy practice, Filtered Communications, following her redundancy earlier this month from the PC maker.

Filtered Communications will operate as a division of Filtered Media, a digital media and social networking consultancy, founded in 2007 by Jones’ husband, technology and business journalist, Mark Jones. The new Filtered Communications arm will “focus on corporate communications and values-based leadership coaching, as well as social investments consulting, for medium to large Australian companies and their internal management teams,” Jones said.

Describing her redundancy from Lenovo as being “of mutual advantage to both parties”, Jones explained she had been keen to pursue new opportunities anyway, and was looking forward to seeing if she could make a go of running her own business.

“I’m very excited about the leadership coaching aspect of my new business. I’ll be helping managers and senior executives identify what makes them personally successful in their leadership roles, and what makes the company successful, then marrying the two together,” said Jones.

Jones also expressed a lot of enthusiasm for social investment consulting because this is “a real moment in time”, when companies are becoming more aware of their corporate social responsibilities.

“Companies are beginning to understand that they have a responsibility to society and the environment, without always knowing how to manage that,” said Jones. “Social investment coaching is about helping companies develop successful corporate social responsibility strategies. I believe passionately in the power of strategic CSR to help build a brand, attract new staff, particularly gen Y’s, who are passionate about social justice issues, while importantly, positively impacting the communities and people the brand serves.”

According to Jones, during the course of her 14-year PR career and personal interests, she has developed firm connections to various NGO’s and philanthropic associations, as well as Australian business leaders, and these contacts will allow her to assist companies to develop their corporate brands, and better understand the charity landscape. She will be “industry-agnostic”, believing corporate communications and CSR skills reach across any industry, but acknowledges technology as her homeland.

When asked what she is most looking forward to about embarking on her new business venture, Jones said it would be the flexibility and autonomy, and being able to apply her skills to focus more intentionally on things she’s most passionate about.

Prior to her comms director role with Lenovo, Jones was the Asia Pacific communications manager for IBM’s PC division, and was instrumental in the management of the acquisition locally of the division by Lenovo back in 2005. She is proud of the progress the company has made in establishing its own presence and identity in the Australian and New Zealand market since that time, and her role in that process.

Jones was one of a number of redundancies made by Lenovo earlier this month. While not willing to give specifics regarding the round of redundancies, a Lenovo spokesperson said: “In an intensely competitive market such as this, Lenovo is focused on fine-tuning operational efficiency in order to keep bringing superior value to our customers. As part of a recent set of initiatives to make the organisation more competitive, some roles in the company have, unfortunately, needed to be phased out.”

When US tech entrepreneur Jason Calacanis flew into Sydney for CeBIT this month, I joined the queue of Aussie journalists who wanted to meet the man who sold a blogging company to AOL for US$25 million (yes, we’d ALL like to do that…).

Here’s the result of our chat - part 1 and part 2 - on the new-look, big-screen tv.afr.com that my colleague at Fairfax Business Media, Marc Tewksbury, has been working on for months (btw, nice work Marc!). You can also watch it over at misaustralia.com.

Facebook CEO Marc Zuckerberg has stressed his desire to keep the company an independent operation.

“You can tell, from our history and what we’ve done, that we really wanted to keep the company independent, by focusing on building and focusing on the long-term,” Zuckerberg told Reuters while in Japan to launch a Japanese language version of Facebook.

Well, he’s right in one sense. You might recall his famous US$1B Yahoo! snub that made the cover of Fast Company.

But really, what else was he going to say? Microsoft is already an investor in the business and he doesn’t want to upset the facebook community (again) by appearing to blatantly chasing the dollar.

I got thinking about this because of a conversation I had with Jason Calacanis this week. He was in Sydney to attend and speak at CeBIT, and I recorded a video interview with him for misaustralia.com (stay tuned for that).

And we got talking about social media business models, as you do with someone like Jason. His point was that the only real way to make big money from social networking is to sell it to a bigger internet player. There’s little money to be made from the ads wrapped around social media - which is what free email services like Yahoo! Mail and Gmail are. You need to take them and dump them into a larger bucket where you can charge for different, higher value services, Jason said.

I don’t completely agree with his assessment because Yahoo! Mail is one of the biggest traffic generators among Yahoo!’s web properties. There has to be a very nice income stream from associated traffic on that site alone.

But yet there is clearly merit in the sell-out idea from Mr Zuckerberg’s selfish perspective. And Jason would know, he made about US$25million from selling Weblogs, Inc. to AOL.

Hey everyone, have you heard of weblin? I came across the service over at mashable and I’ve been playing around with it over the weekend.

No idea what I’m talking about? Think Second Life avatars bust out of the portal and start visiting the real web. Technically speaking, you download a small piece of software, create an avatar which follows you around the web on sites that support weblin, and you chat with people. You can even set your status, or presence, in the same fashion as IM & Skype.

The concept is bizzare, but at the same time makes sense as a logical evolution of what many now think of as the “live web.” At any given moment in time there have to be other people looking at the same web page as you - particularly when you’re on popular blogs, news sites, Google etc. So why not talk about what you’re all looking at? Gives new contextual meaning to the well-worn phrase “social media is all about conversations.”

But so far I’ve only seen one little Aussie flag next to a bunch of weblin avatars that popped up and started walking around at the bottom of the screen while I was using Gmail. (Which, btw, is a really bizzare experience. You’re reading email and there’s all these avatars on your screen. I’m presuming they can’t read my mail… ???)

Anyway, I tried to talk to the Aussie avatar but he disappeared before reading my IM chat. So, I’d like to know if anyone in Australia using weblin? What do you think about it? If not, visit weblin.com, get an avatar and look me up. I’m going by the name of “Ozman.”

Media and tech industry veteran Mark Hollands is the new PANPA chief executive. SMH story here.

For those unfamiliar with PANPA, it’s the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers’ Association - think of any newspaper in the country and there’s a very good chance it’s a PANPA member.

Mark is of course well known for his roles at News Ltd., Gartner and Dow Jones. But of course, we all know the one that made him most famous was regular appearances on The Scoop. Right? Heh.

One of the biggest challenges facing Mark, and PANPA, is the Big Story in the media business - navigating a way through the disruption caused by a boom in online media spending.

But Mark’s seen the media business from just about every angle so he’s an inspired choice. And I’m not just saying that cos we’re mates either :).