Seat 1A: New Economy

I'm Alan Nelson. By trade I'm a Partner at ; for an avocational bio , for a vocational one . This site is my personal , is a hobby, and is not affiliated with CRA or its clients.

It's updated frequently, travel permitting. The most recent entries are at the top of the page, and older content is organized by category and date in the . If you'd like to contact me I'd welcome the note; you may do so at alan.

l.nelson [at] gmail [dot] com.

In 2004 I gave a speech on new media to the annual meeting of the Associated Press Managing Editors.

I've had the prepared remarks for some time, but this past weekend I came across a DVD of my comments. New Mac-enabled powers in hand, I've put the address online , and it runs about 30 minutes.
If you choose to watch the video note that it should stream from the site, meaning you shouldn't need to download it prior to viewing (although it might take a minute for the first bit to download and for an image to show on your screen).

You might, however, need Quicktime viewer -- which is free, powerful, and something you should have anyway. You can get it here.
It's always a strange thing, watching yourself.

Seeing this I take away three things from my 2004 self: Lose weight (in progress), get more sleep (doing much better), and speak more slowly (perhaps a lost cause).
LOOK CLOSELY at this screen capture I made of this morning's front page (click the pic for a bigger view). Notice anything?

I did: Three podcasts and a blog on the law. Of course, the content has to be good -- I've not yet listened to the podcasts, although the (subscription may be required) is substantive and appropriately bloggy -- but this is great to see from the Journal.
Last year I gave a speech to the ( ).

The theme of the day was The Newsroom of the Future, and I spoke about how the Internet was changing journalism (with blogs as a case in point). One point I tried to make was that in a connected world newspapers needed to focus on truly being editors -- professionals that (1) know their audience better than anyone else, (2) know the news (and more likely, some element of the news) better than anyone else, and (3) connect those two things by scanning the world and surfacing issues relevant to their audience. This is not how most news sources typically act: They're much more like brokers, treating news as a commodity that they simply pass from source to consumer.

As I said then:

facts with an interest in quality, to someone who “serves” the reader information and ideas.

So where is the value for the newsroom of the future?
instead offering a deep, detailed level of local coverage that’s unrivaled and that readers value highly.

the wire services don’t provide.
consultant, and less of an information broker ..

. offering not just news.
Regardless, you’re absolutely going to have to find a new way to add new value.

My performance was well-received, but the reaction to the content was (as I'd expect) mixed: Some enthusiasm, some energy, some suspicion. A year later, when you review how many papers are using the connectivity the web affords, most still aren't getting it right. While many certainly have said We gotta do this blog thing, many made an equally superficial attempt, usually launching blogs that were simply web-based versions of traditional print features, or blogs that were simply links to items in non-newspaper blogs (there's nothing wrong with link-based blogs, but there are that do a better job).

I think the Journal's got it right. They seem to appreciate that blogs and podcasts are unique mediums , and rather than fitting existing content in to a new channel, they've made an appropriate match (admittedly, I judge the podcasts by their titles).
That content appears to be specific expertise, even counsel, that plays well to where the Journal would be credible as an editor of the world -- specific financial topics -- and that is relevant to its readers.

Finally, the blog seems a real blog: Full entries, first person, comments (not essential, but nice if we're trying to engage readers), frequent updates, permalinks, and trackbacks.
So, good for the Journal. They continue to lead the way online.

Let's remember that the Journal was one of the first papers to have a pay-for-full-access online version, which many derided at the time. They're now in the black. In the Q A of the APME speech I suggested that it would be strategic for papers to charge not only for the full online version, but to charge significantly more for the full print version.

This was taken by several folks as heresy, but in keeping with the logic of the , you are what you charge. Start charging three bucks a paper and it forces the question: What are we doing to make the paper worth three bucks?
A final note: While the law blog is the only WSJ blog to date, it sits in the blogs.

wsj.com domain -- here's hoping there are more Journal blogs to follow.
I'M INCREASINGLY CONVINCED that Google is one of the best-managed, highest-potential companies in the United States.

I have no proof other than , the most powerful of which is my impression that everything the company does leaves me satisfied and impressed.
The is just what I would want, and more. is just what I would want, and more.

is just what I would want, and more. is just what I would want, and more ..

. and on it goes (although, admittedly, I outgrew pretty quickly, but it's right for its intended market). And these services get better all the time.

Other things I like: , which takes some spot-on management wisdom Druker started writing about in 1959 and uses it to grow a dot com that works. More: . Simple without being simplistic; clear without being superficial .

.. it's probably the best on-line representation of a company's About facts in the world.

Finally, their pervasive sense of intelligent fun. Take as examples , and .
It's tough to make money in the dot com world, but I think Google's going to do just fine.

Full disclosures: Google isn't a client, but I do own the stock. And even at its , I plan to buy more.

* Scheduled post, written earlier.

Q: Why are people so uncomfortable with ? And ?

And, well, ?
A: Because these systems operate on the alien logic of , which sacrifices perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale.
A: Exactly.

Our brains aren't wired to think in terms of statistics and probability. We want to know whether an encyclopedia entry is right or wrong. We want to know that there's a wise hand (ideally human) guiding Google's results.

We want to trust what we read.
When professionals--editors, academics, journalists--are running the show, we at least know that it's someone's job to look out for such things as accuracy. But now we're depending more and more on systems These probabilistic systems aren't perfect, but they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers.

They're designed to scale, and to improve with size. And is the price of such efficiency at the macroscale.
The comments are worth reading, too.

But don’t get hung up on the particulars. I’m not a hardware engineer, and I’m sure the details could be picked apart. I’m simply trying to The point I’m trying to make is that some type of device is coming.

It may be five years away or it could be next year. For all I know, it is in development now. Regardless, when it arrives, the publishing world as you and I know it will change dramatically.

I think he's right. That said, the high touch nature of books will always keep them in demand, for it's part of what makes a book a book. Michael draws some comparisons to what iPods have done to music, but prior to the iPod the delivery mechanism wasn't part of the passion: nobody equated their Beatles music with the turntable on which it played.

(If anything, the iPod has reversed the field: now the iPod, with it's wonderful tactile qualities, is part of the thing to which people are loyal, and the high touch nature of the thing has brought balance to the high tech qualities of digital music.)
There are many other high touch, tactile qualities of books that people love: How they look on a shelf; the ability to look at a set of books and make a casual choice to pick one over another, thumb through it, and replace it; the ease with which you may pass the book on to another person; and not least of all, the ability to shove them in bags, pockets, briefcases ..

. nearly anywhere without much concern for their well-being. (John Naisbitt of Megatrends fame is here I first read about high tech / high touch; .

A great example: we've been able to have digital readouts in cars for years, but most still have analog dials. Why? We love the high touch experience of watching them sweep as we accelerate.

)
Digital books are going to happen, but I think they'll be more focused as a Google-able research base. For every-day reading, most of us will still favor paper.
* This is a scheduled post, written a day or two ago.
ONE REASON TO LIKE CONTINENTAL AIRLINES: They offer free wifi in many of their frequent flier clubs. Unfortunately I don't often fly Continental, but they share a number of clubs with Northwest, which I frequently fly, and as a result I get to surf for free from time to time.

It's a great example of the right way to leverage a technology: take a killer-app and satisfy a customer longing for free. Of course, Continental's practice has also prompted a response: .

And that's the wrong way to leverage technology: to take a killer-app that satisfies a customer longing for free and replace it with a (slower, weaker) fee-based alternative.

Want to make it worse: do so for reasons that, frankly, lack narrative fidelity.

At stake is a sizable chunk of revenue that Massport receives from its pay-per-use , which is operated by a commercial provider called . Massport did not respond to queries about the current sum, but the Boston Globe percent of annual gross revenues, which could exceed $1 million annually.

Hmmm. Wonder if that has anything to do with it.
Talk about the spin zone.

I mean, here I sit, typing this in a Continental club at O'Hare international, one of the busiest airports on Earth. If there's a place anywhere on the planet with more wifi-enabled security, safety, and logistical equipment than O'Hare, I'd be shocked.
And yet here I type, happily, with the infrastructure streaming past me, not a boo about safety or an unacceptable potential risk.

on how brands are changing in the Web-enabled world. Read it all, but for my purposes there are two key sections:

Brands, if they're doing their job right, stand for qualities we understand, such as reliability or value, and they make it easier to Brands help us order a chaotic world of variety. When in doubt, we buy what we know.

space effect. That chaotic world is getting more chaotic by the day as our choices expand with Amazon's inventory and Google's reach. The problem is we can only recall so many brands, and down there in the niches the Nikes and Apples may not be of much help.

the same time there's been a parallel explosion of information about those abundant products. That information, ranging from product reviews to rank by bestselling , also helps us choose wisely. In a sense, information is increasingly serving the same role as a brand, bringing order and structure to a chaotic marketplace.

More importantly, information can scale with massive variety in the way that brands can't. So what does this mean for brands?
The short answer is radical change.

A quick headline for that change: brands are shifting from being about things to being about customer experience.
That's part one. Part two:

probably won't be companies at all.

They'll be the customers themselves.
demand down the Long Tail. Some of those filters are trusted aggregators, from Amazon to Google, which use smart software to help you find the good stuff.

But others are individual tastemakers, from to to to simple mavens with .
Likewise for the fact that Instapundit bought that camera. Or that Jon It's the , multiplied by a million niches.

So, in a Long Tail market, the brands that matter most are the tastemakers. These are the filters you trust, who point you to the niche (or mainstream) stuff you wouldn't have found on your own.

OK--two things here.

First, I agree with both points. That said, brands have not just (or even primarily) served a function of easing consumer choice by helping us categorize and understand product qualities and benefits. Rather, very strong brands draw their strength forging a para-social relationship between the consumer and the brand in which the consumer projects the qualities of the brand onto him or herself.

Great brands are strong because consumers believe that using that brand's products shapes their own identity in a favorable way. Here's an exercise to illustrate: think of comparisons of brand people rather than comparisons of brand products. Pay attention to why types of images and feelings pop into your head as you do:

iPod people vs.

Every other type of MP3 player people

The world's strongest brands are strong not primarily because they say something about the nature of their products, but primarily because they say something about the people who buy their products. In that, brands don't ease consumer choice by helping us categorize and understand product qualities and benefits as much as they ease choice by helping us categorize and understand ourselves (even helping us shape and define ourselves).
Second point: on filters -- yes.

The tastemaker shapes the brand. But this is nothing new: it's the dynamic behind product endorsement, and has been around since the first really popular caveman endorsed his buddy's brand of wall paint ( Grog paint only with Brog's paints! ).

Brands in England have been using --almost a thousand years. But the right tastemaker using your product helps your brand not just because I trust that tastemaker, but because the tastemaker feeds into and strengthens the identity attributes I want to project upon myself. Nobody's wearing because they think she has great taste or a critical eye for quality clothing: they're wearing it because they want to be like Jessica Simpson.

The Internet is absolutely commoditizing products and services, and the vast array of information about brands is tossing nearly every brand out there in a sea of sameness. And they're all facing the same challenge: differentiate, or be forced to compete solely (and nearly impossibly) on price. But doing so successfully isn't just about becoming more customer centric, nor is it just about having tastemakers endorsing the brand -- it's also (and in many cases primarily) about creating a sense of identity for the buyer that's clear, palatable, and affirming of the view they want of themselves and their world.

In this the ability to shape intangible benefits and experiences as part of a branding strategy will be more important than ever. iPods are iPods not just because they work well, but because they make the user look and feel cool. And for that, they're willing to pay.

I've been reviewing recently, and along the way was struck by this passage (written by ):

A couple of months later, we hired a Chief Operating Officer to manage our growth. On purpose he was a counter-cultural figure in the company: fear.

fear.

That's gotta be one of the best personality descriptions written.
That passage comes from a section David pens about deadlines, and how they do and don't motivate people in the Internet economy. (scroll about a third of the way down the page, or just do a find for cracking wall ).

provides a nice example of a leader using (in this case) his blog to offer an authentic and candid response to a customer problem / potential corp. reputation issue. Read the whole post, but here's a snippet:

the option of an automatically-renewing subscription, because many subscriber prefer those, especially with credit card billing (the only checks I write these days are to renew magazine subscriptions, which always seems like an anachronistic hassle), but quick, simple and painless.

No .
Right now, it's automatically-renewing subscription or not). This week, I'll start Transparency is the key.

Yep.
I (along with my Command Post cohort ) was recently named an honorable mention on the . It's always nice to be recognized, especially for something that's fun (and even if I personally don't know that I qualify to be called one of the key players who are influencing the adoption of open media and proving the impact it is already having on the technology industry, journalism, and marketing ).

So thanks to the folks at , and to the brilliant (because he is, not because he recognized us) at .
And if you're not using Technorati, you're behind the curve. , type your company's name into the search field, and see what comes up .

..
[T]his was all about selling his op-eds as a compilation.

He needed something—what did he call it? Oh yeah, a literary license to draw attention to the fact that he's completely out of new ideas. No Lexus here.

No Olive tree here. No Golden Straightjacket or Electronic Herd or Super-Empowered Individual. Just Flat.

Just 469 pages of Flat. Thank God he was smart enough not to put flat in his index, because his publisher would have been forced to list every frickin' page in the book! And in doing so, the company only would have revealed what a pathetic effort this volume really is.

I wonder how he really feels. And if you're not familiar with , . After all, disconnectedness defines danger :

Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder.

These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.

David Lidsky at WCBS-FM in Boston, a format where:

The station expands the playlist from about 400-500 songs to 1,200, goes from one format to having elements of about 10 formats, cuts down turning off your car radio in favor of whatever you just downloaded.

It was okay, but if I was supposed to be getting the feeling of listening to someone's iPod, it was probably the iPod of a friend with incredibly obvious, middle-of-the-road taste. It also inspired an idea.

If commercial FM radio really wants to become relevant again, maybe did 20 years ago when it faced extinction because of FM. Personality ..

. Not celebrity DJs like XM and Sirius are hiring, but real people who love music, have eclectic taste and have the ability to find and break new bands and songs, the way DJs used to.
While David notes that the move by WCBS is meant to market against iPods and satellite radio, I'd also toss in streaming radio .

.. and it's here that David can find the personality he's searching for.

In particular, I'll offer two words that should be music to your ears if you love eclectic, contemporary music and the type of personality David describes above: .
Free, streaming, high-quality ..

. simply the best there is. Update: A little context here -- this past weekend I participated on and moderated a panel about blogs for the PR Seminar, an annual gathering of the business world's leading PR and corporate communication professionals.

I'll likely post more about the event later, but I'll note now that the other panel members were , , and , all of whom were extremely thoughtful, provocative, and engaging.
As the panel began, we were introduced by our host, Jon Iwata, who heads corporate communication for IBM (and, not incidentally, is one of the most intelligent and apparently talented corp comm leads I've come across). As Jon made his introduction, I snapped this shot with my Treo phone, and posted it via email to Seat 1A.

Then, later in the panel, as John Hinderaker was telling his story of Pepsi's recent experiences with blogs at , I made the point that PR leads need to appreciate that their constituency is no longer just editors and journalists: it's the populace at large.
The question isn't whether bloggers are journalists ..

. it's whether journalists are journalists, because in the Internet age, every person with a computer (or in my case, cell phone), in every audience and on every street, is now a point of distribution for a story. And if you're in the business of building and protecting corporate reputation, the job gets significantly more complex and broad-based as a result (which is why, in this world, transparency is always the best policy).

As I made that point, Dave Weinberger pulled Seat 1A up on the projection screen, and the audience was able to see that I was, in essence, reporting from the stage of the event, while participating in the panel, in real time, with a phone, for the entire connected world to see.
They grasped the point.
reporting from nonjournalists, in which the reporter is just whoever happens to be on the scene, and online, when news happens.

Given the ubiquity of digital cameras, cell phones, and wireless Internet access, that's likely to become more common, making the kind of distributed newsgathering seen during the Indian Ocean tsunami the norm, not the beyond opinion journalism into firsthand reporting. On my own from places like Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. My correspondents are than in the modern sense of people with good hair and a microphone.

NetFlix has a nice gift promotion going: --1 to 12 months--online. If you're not yet familiar with it's a service Kate and I have come to love. Unlimited DVD rentals per month for a small fee, delivered right to your door via the US Mail.

We don't watch an enormous number of movies, but we do like being able to kick back on a Saturday afternoon or Wednesday night and watch something compelling ...

and with NetFlix you always have something compelling on hand. There are no late fees, and you may watch as many flix as you like (but may only have three at a time). When you're done with a film, you pop the DVD in it's return envelope and drop it in the mail, postage pre-paid, and another film you've ordered will show up within two days.

Between NetFlix and TiVo, we've managed to nearly eliminate traditional commercial television (and its advertising) from our lives. We also spend less time, but more quality time, in front of the tube ..

. all in all, good things, both.