Radian6 is telling us something…

Posted on March 31, 2011 | 1 Comment

And that something is that the market needs better tools for mining and extracting insights from the exploding amount of data being shared online. As the saying goes, it’s better to observe ‘animals’ in the wild than in the zoo, and today’s $326 million acquisition by Salesforce further cements the importance of passive, or implicit, data, and companies which can extract value from it.

There are no doubt plenty of naysayers, laughing at the valuation, questioning the uniqueness of Radian6′s technology and pointing accusingly at their balance sheet. They needn’t. Regardless of whether Salesforce got great value or not, or if Radian6 has a unique product in the market, today they achieved a brilliant exit, and did plenty right to pull it off.

Radian6 got into the nascent social monitoring space fast, and built a dominant position. There may be plenty of lookalike products out there, but Radian6 certainly kept up with the market. They got a ton of clients on board by going direct. And importantly, they have always practiced what they preached – something many an agency could learn from. If you’re going to tell your clients to monitor and respond to social mentions, you should probably police your own online reputation fairly enthusiastically, and that’s exactly what Radian6 does. Easy to claim, far harder to execute on. In one of my least prescient moments, it wouldn’t surprise me if Radian6 indeed responded to this very post – that’s how they roll. And good on them for doing so, and for selling at a great price. Ultimately, Radian6 were quick to realize the significance of mining the social web, and doing so for their own business benefit.

And today’s sale really is the tip of the iceberg. It caps a number of industry acquisitions in the last year or so. To name a few:

  • Scoutlabs – acquired by Lithium
  • Demdex – acquired by Adobe
  • Radian6 – acquired by Salesforce

There will be many more. So where will the next Radian6 come from? Since Radian6 launched, much has changed. 2 billion people are now online, and sharing an increasing amount of data. Twitter, the open platform of choice, handles 110m tweets and 10Tb of data per day . There is much we don’t know from buzz and sentiment measures alone. My money is on two main areas:

  1. Social Network Analysis - understanding how 2 billion people are interconnected, and influence the buzz and sentiment that Radian6 measures. I work with clients to do this on a custom basis, but not using self-service tools. Someone will bring that service to market, and create a company more valuable than Radian6.
  2. Computational language analysis – sentiment measurement is, well, sub-par. It’s unclear whether a sentiment analysis would even correctly attribute the sentiment of “sub-par”. The academic world is, however, working hard to improve on this. There were even a number of sessions at the recent SXSW conference dedicated to it, exploring techniques such as Bayesian topic models.

The market wants and needs these powerful tools. Large opportunities exist for those trying to capitalize on a more connected world, and I suspect Radian6 are working hard on developing these new tools as we speak. Just as Christakis and Fowler have brought network analysis to understanding health, the time is right for brands to bring this level of insight to understanding their customers.

Oliver Snoddy

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Remarkable boost to television ratings from new measuring methods

Posted on March 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

We have always known that the number of people watching television programmes is much greater than the simple currency of the overnight ratings but until now it has not been clear by how much.
Finally the official ratings systems have caught up with the viewing of individual programmes on all platforms across seven days from the moment of initial transmission.

According to the first set of Live + 7 figures to be released for the first two months of 2011 the difference is dramatic.
A Question of Sport shown on January 10th attracted an initial audience of 2.14 million but this shot up to no less than 6.6 million when all the figures were included- live, recorded and played back, repeated, and watched on demand.
Top Gear had 5.48 million viewers live on January 30-anumber that nearly doubled to 10.6 million when all viewing over seven days was taken into account.
The same applied to programmes on minority channels with everything from Junior Doctors on BBC Three to Romancing The Stone: The Golden Ages of British Sculpture showing doubled audiences when given the Live + 7 treatment.

The new measures have been created by combining the traditional BARB (Broadcasters’ Audience Research Bureau Board) overnight and time-shifted data with statistics for viewing on other platforms.
Obviously the same must apply to the audiences for commercial channels. Indeed any channels around the developed world.
The only surprise is that work is only starting now on such a vital consolidated figure.
It may help to finally solve where those “missing” television audiences have gone.
They waren’t missing at all. They had just wandered off across the seven days using all the devices that had become available to them.

They are findings that deserve to be shouted from the rooftops.

Further evidence if any is still required that network television really is not dead, or even declining.

Raymond Snoddy

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On The Art of Relaunching TV Programmes

Posted on March 19, 2011 | 1 Comment

Media memories are notoriously short.
It was said of Greg Dyke, former BBC Director General, that he had the attention span of a gnat. It was always about now and the decision that had to be taken that moment.

Next.

Yet there are some enduring truths in such a febrile world and ITV’s breakfast offering Daybreak, despite some recent modest improvements in its ratings, is living proof of one of them.
The most dangerous time for a newspaper, a magazine, a long-running radio or television programme is the moment someone very senior decides it’s time for The Relaunch.
Money will be applied by the bucket-load, columnists/presenters will be sacked/changed and there will be new colours, new set, new page designs as appropriate for the particular media outlet.
Sometimes the relaunch comes when there is a change or editor or owner but usually it comes from a perfectly reasonable desire to improve, to move forward and increase circulation numbers or ratings.
Somewhere in the recesses of industrial collective memory there is the realisation that a relaunch is a dangerous thing to do. There is the tacit acknowledgement that the trick must be to do just enough to attract new customers without alienating the old.
Gentle, gradual, evolutionary change is obviously best.
But then everyone forgets. The excitement of the new and shiny takes over and the millions are spent on new high profile presenters and dramatic hi tech studios.

We are off and running yet again for another relaunch disaster.

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Rupert and Me: Frequently Asked Questions About Rupert Murdoch

Posted on March 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

As Rupert Murdoch approaches his 80th birthday, I look back on many a meeting with the quiet, shy and unassuming great media tycoon

There are some moments in a career you never forget, however long ago – and Rupert Murdoch figures in many of them.

Who could forget arriving at Los Angeles airport on the Murdoch private jet from New York, with more exclusives for the Financial Times than you could shake a stick at, and hopping down the steps to the waiting white Mercedes. Into the back only to find that there is no chauffeur and Murdoch is in fact the driver.

Rarely has a hack moved so fast to get out of the back and into the front alongside the great media tycoon.

Another time when close to the end of an interview – naturally – you put to the chairman of The News Corporation the fact that Robert Maxwell had said that he, Murdoch, had done more than any other human being to undermine journalistic standards in the UK.

The silence is unnaturally long as Murdoch rocks back on his chair as if the question has not been heard and then there is an explosion of laughter and a single word is uttered – “Scumbag”.

But why do you think you are so hated in the UK? “The occasional excesses of The Sun and Wapping,” replied Murdoch instantly.

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Murdoch and the Future of Sky News

Posted on March 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

A recent piece for Mediatel on the Future of Sky News:

Jeremy Hunt has chosen to take the “courageous” route and must hope that it does not come back to bite him. Ultimately Sky News could be brought to its knees within a decade if the Murdoch dynasty tire of paying to keep the loss-maker afloat…

It’s difficult to know whether to laugh or cry at the news that crafty old Rupert Murdoch looks as if he is going to get his way again in a painless and cost-effective way.

Somewhere in New York or Los Angeles he is definitely smiling. Fans of Sky News might not find the cumbersome arrangements now proposed quite so amusing.

First we are going to have the new board full of independent directors and an independent non-executive chairman. Then there’s the corporate governance and editorial committee. Alongside that there will be the 10 year carriage agreement and the seven year – renewable – brands licensing agreement designed to encourage Murdoch to re-commit. On top of that there will be the services Sky will provide for the newly-independent channel for a fee.

But it’s the issue of shareholdings and the corporate structure that will raise most eyebrows.

Obviously News Corporation will continue to hold its present 39.1% stake. The real question is what happens to the rest?

Other shareholders, who will presumably sell off their stakes in BSkyB if the price is right, will be left holding near worthless, publicly-quoted Sky News shares. What conceivable interest will they have in small stakes in a company that will only be brought to breakeven by News Corp paying Danegeld for 10 years?

There is a slight chance of course that Sky News with its independent board might find a magical way of turning a profit but it would be truly remarkable if such a thing happened. It never has in more than 22 years as part of an integrated Sky operation.

So what will the institutions do with this once in a lifetime opportunity? Will they just forget about the shares – leaving Murdoch in potentially just as strong a position as he is now? They could try to sell their stakes but who on earth would they buy.

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The importance of real-time data to marketing and journalism

Posted on March 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

Below is my chapter for soon-to-be-published Abramis book Face the Future: Tools For the Modern Media Age.

People often think that Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, is joking when he says that being a statistician will be the sexy job to have in the next ten years. He goes on to predict that “the ability to take data – to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualise it, to communicate it – that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decade”.

Nowhere is this more relevant than in journalism, and mainstream news organisations have already taken note. From the Guardian’s Data Store, to excellent infographics and data visualisations from The New York Times and theBBC, “data journalism” is a hot topic. The Wikileaks saga may be the best current example of data journalism in action, but journalists are increasingly gaining access to a wide variety of large data sets, from governments, NGOs and whistleblowers alike. They are using this “new” data to create compelling visualisations about military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan (such as in theBBC’s reports on UK military deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq), local incidents of swine flu (the Guardian’s swine flu data in the UK) and the unemployment rate according to demographics (The New York Times’s jobless rate for people like you), to name but a few.

New publishers such as Flowing Data and Visual Complexity are also developing this space. Journalists are both responding to, and helping to shape, an era of unprecedented data availability. We are, however, still at the very early stages of data journalism. Most data journalists would admit that they need to get better at telling compelling stories with data, rather than simply producing innovative and arresting visualisations that may or may not help their audiences understand a subject better. More fundamentally, the rise of “massive, passive” real-time data from almost 2 billion connected individuals around the world points to a new type of data journalism.

Data visualization of scientific collaboration, 2005 to 2009

We are witnessing a rise in massive, passive datasets

Journalists will increasingly gather and process data, in addition to making sense of data made available to them – investigative data journalism if you will. They will also need to be able to predict and represent the mood of the world at a variety of scales. In addition, they will need to leverage tactics for getting their stories distributed across the internet. Journalists will, thus, need to develop many skills. They will need to be entrepreneurial, multi-media storytellers, community builders, bloggers and curators. Some programming skills will also come in handy. Above all else, however, they will need two core capabilities: great editorial and storytelling skills – as they always have – and a new fluency in how real-time data can capture what is really happening in the world. Data journalism is going to be core to the future of journalism as a whole, and real-time data an increasingly important driving force.

Considering marketing alongside journalism

I probably should have started by admitting that I don’t know very much about journalism, not very much at all. As a director of New York ad agency Doremus, I do, however, have a keen interest in the future of marketing. While it may seem perverse to some to consider marketing and journalism alongside one another, I see technology driving them both in a similar direction and the necessary skills of each industry converging on one another. In the future, marketers will need to act more like journalists and vice-versa.

I hope to explain how technology is disrupting advertising and marketing, yet also creating significant new opportunities around “massive, passive” real-time data. Finally, I will make the case that these same ideas and tools are creating significant opportunities for journalism. Organisations such as the BBC, the Guardian and The New York Times may well be leveraging these tools as we speak. Mine can only be an outsider’s view, looking in from the perspective of marketing. First up, how technology is disrupting marketing.

The internet, and technology in general, has had a big impact on marketing, but as the saying goes: “We ‘ain’t seen nothing yet.” Websites, search engines, banner advertisements and more recently apps have caused marketing to restructure and demanded new skills and departments. The internet has brought with it new marketing skills, but hardly the overturning of the overall model. Compared to other industries – music, publishing, film – these impacts have been somewhat limited. The old model is not yet broken, but it is breaking.

The key to Facebook’s success

Facebook didn’t invent real-world online profiles but it has been instrumental in driving a shift from an internet of imagined personas to one that directly reflects our real lives.

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Sometimes it seems as if the internet is wasted on the young

Posted on March 5, 2011 | Leave a comment

Below is my chapter for soon-to-be-published Abramis book Face the Future: Tools For the Modern Media Age.

Sometimes it seems as if the internet is wasted on the young. It is surely the army of superannuated hacks, their souls still haunting Fleet Street pubs, who have the most to gain from the deft application of the latest communications technology to maintain presence and visibility.

It goes without saying that any aspiring journalist of today must be a master of the web and all the latest iterations of social media. They must be able to take multi-tasking in their stride, and as for multi-media, the words, sound and pictures should be like the holy trinity – impossible to separate.

To stand any chance of achieving that most elusive of contemporary states – decently paid media employment – you probably need to have launched your first blog by the age of 12 and have your tweets followed by Stephen Fry. Or that at least is the theory.

In reality, however natural a digital native you are, three significant barriers, almost biblical trials, stand in the way of becoming a professional journalist nowadays. The first is the most bizarre and inexplicable of all: more and more young people want to become journalists at the very time that more and more jobs, money and, above all else fun, are being squeezed out of the trade. The majority of those taking media and journalism courses will not become journalists- at least not in the traditional meaning of the term. They should not despair. The development and encouragement of curiosity, the ability to impose order on apparently unrelated facts, the habit of working accurately to tight deadlines and the pursuit of literacy are desirable and saleable skills elsewhere. The minority who will make it are the ones most determined to do so. Much has changed since the late Bob James, head of training at the then Westminster Press, summed things up with Geordie precision: “Journalism is the worst of jobs – unless you happen to think it is the best.”

Then again perhaps not so much has changed after all.

The second obvious barrier is the fact that for some years now it has become less and less clear who is a journalist and who is not. Old craft and trade union restraints limiting and controlling access to the media now look medieval and have mercifully been swept away by the internet. Openness, freedom and democracy have been well served by the ability of any citizen anywhere in the world to seek, and sometimes find, an audience for their ideas and opinions. But what then is a journalist?

There are two workable attributes or characteristics – one with an idealistic tinge and the other deeply practical. The gathering and checking of facts or images, as part of a journalistic tradition, clearly has something to do with it. Alan Rusbridger, editor-in chief of The Guardian, put it well when he spoke of the importance to society of the provision of “independently verifiable” information. People who collect and verify information, as opposed to merely transmitting unchecked rumours, can call themselves journalists – though their exclusive right to such a title may be disputed.

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Are news organizations doing enough to utilize a real-time, social web?

Posted on February 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

Watching events unfold in the Middle East, I can’t help wonder whether news organizations are innovating enough in the area of breaking news. As I write, anti-Geddafi protests have spread to Tripoli, and Muammar Gaddafi’s son Saif is on state television blaming Arabs, Africans and LSD for the rising unrest. The latter parts of that have come largely from  twitter. Flipping between Sky News, the BBC, Al Jazeera and Twitter, different pictures emerge. Everyone agrees that mass protests are taking place in Tripoli, but has Muammar fled, are the Gaddafi sons squabbling, and have the armed forces defected? It’s very hard to know what to believe as events unfold minute-by-minute.

This is simply the nature of breaking news many would no doubt argue. The role of the news organization is to listen to all possible suggestions across the Internet, compare with their known sources, and construct an accurate picture of reality. I agree wholeheartedly with this, but I also think they should be a) reporting on what is already in the public domain (e.g. on twitter), and b) help people sift through the rumour and heresay by assigning probabilities that the stories are accurate. When a rumour pops up on twitter, what does a news organization do? Check with their key contacts on the ground, check the wires, put some calls in? This creates a real problem, as twitter rolls on, tweet after tweet. The delay may only be 15 mins, but compared to twitter, it’s huge. I want to see news organizations reporting on all this real-time data, and giving a forecast of it’s accuracy. That is real-time news reporting no?

I have every sympathy for how difficult it must be to report on breaking news. It is also incredibly important that news organizations don’t simply report rumour and heresay, and thus amplify potential false truths. In Libya, the situation is compounded by the regime blocking telecommunications and the Internet.

Many news organizations are doing a great job, but are they fully leveraging all the information shared by nearly 2 billion people globally? I suspect not. They need to have tools that can follow real-time data and construct complex network maps, in order to understand who is saying what. They need to assemble groups of people who can act as sensors, right at the very heart of networks relevant to an area of reporting. They need systems for forecasting the likely reliability of online sources, as well as the network topologies that propagating stories form. In short, they need to apply the same reporting rigour, but also in real-time, relying on tools and information systems, as well as people. News organizations need to innovate on top of open information sources such as twitter, so that they can truly offer something better, not simply something easier to digest.

Oliver Snoddy

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Is there any hope for IP?

Posted on February 14, 2011 | Leave a comment

A couple of random thoughts got me thinking about Intellectual Property this afternoon. One was a feature in this week’s Economist about the bright future of 3D printing, and how it could fuel increased innovation and localization. The other was a ‘flashback’ from a book I read a while ago: Total Recall, by Bell and Gemmell. Both resulted in the same question: is there any hope for IP?

3D printing has been around for a while, but costs are falling, and more and more companies are using the process not just for rapid prototyping, but also to do small batch runs. We have been working on a project to utilize real-time prototyping at Doremus, and while it is by no means cheap, it is now practical. There are many advantages to these additive production processes, including energy efficiency, fewer raw materials used, and also the ability to create customization at virtually no incremental cost. Roll forward a number of years, and this also becomes a huge headache for managing IP. If physical products float around the Internet as music and video files do today, how can rights owners protect their IP?

On a completely different note, we are already seeing the exponential rise of ‘massive, passive’ data sets from people around the globe getting online and sharing more and more about their lives. Bell and Gemmell point to a future state where our every waking hour is captured, and available to view back: the age of Total Recall. As far fetched as this may sound, it isn’t such a leap. I can easily see the status updates, photos and holiday videos of today becoming the ongoing stream  of consciousness of the not too distant future. ‘Massive, passive’ data will increasingly be less about a synopsis of a moment, but the entire moment itself.

If our lives are captured in their entirety, as are our friends’, what implications will there be for content and usage rights? If I once watched a film, or heard a piece of music, how could I be expected to pay to see it again, given that it was a recorded life experience? How can you prevent friends from sharing their content and experiences?

The Internet has already had huge implications for content owners – just ask the music industry – but caught in a perfect storm of massively distributed personal recording, 3D printing and the rise of a China less concerned with IP rights, what hope then for the future of IP? Will the value have to be in original experiences, and also accessing your virtual memory?

Oliver Snoddy

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New Year Prediction – Murdoch Will Win Right to Bid For BSkyB

Posted on January 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

As the last Christmas decorations are being removed it’s time for a final seasonal tilt at divining the future.
Before next Christmas Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation will have been given the right to bid for the 61 per cent of BSkyB it does not already own.
Conditions will however be imposed to ensure that Murdoch will not be able to realise the worst fears of his rivals – sweetheart subscription deals for Sky and the News International newspaper of your choice.
Predicting the future has never been an exact science but there is a reasonable trail of logic, instinct and supposition that would take a reasonable person in the direction of such an outcome.
Most of the steps in the chain of argument are so obvious as to amount to truisms.
First, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has absolutely no option but to refer the issue for full investigation by the Competition Commission.
If there ever was any doubt about the matter there can be none now because of pirated prejudices of Business Secretary Vince Cable.
Due process across a decent stretch of time is also the only way of putting matters right given the number of meetings Hunt has had with News Corp luminaries without civil service chaperones and the kind things he has said about the achievements of BSkyB. In retrospect it was a trifle unfortunate that the Culture secretary had said publicly he did not object to such a takeover.
This all happened before the unexploded hand grenade suddenly arrived in his in-tray and before circumstances forced him to become quasi-judicial.
Apart from political perceptions there are many strong reasons why there should be a full investigation. They include the sheer scale of the £8 billion to £9 billion deal and the fact that communications regulator Ofcom believes it should be so.
At the very least there is clearly an arguable case that such a deal should be looked at on grounds that plurality of the media could be threatened.
We should all be grateful to Ofcom for bringing some methodology to examining the issue to help cut through the wails of vested interests on both sides.
Chris Goodall from Enders analysis produced a report looking at the numbers of minutes a day people spent reading newspapers and listening to, or watching, broadcast news.
The Daily Mail accounted for 10.5 per cent of the total less than half the 22 per cent that would be controlled by a News Corp owned BSkyB.
But then on comes the real heavyweight – the BBC – which accounts for no less than 39-percent of all news consumed by Britons.
Such reasoning provides a useful baseline but is a crude counting measure. It mixes up the different media of newspapers, radio and television and does not deal with the subtleties of which news outlets respect basis rules of impartiality and which do not.
Unfortunately for Jeremy Hunt sending the BSkyB takeover to the Competition Commission only buys him six months or so of time – unless he has been promoted to the Business secretary’s job by then.
In most mergers and takeovers the Commission has the final say.
But Cable has left Hunt a final poisoned chalice. Because the initial Ofcom investigation was launched as a public interest issue it is Hunt who will have the final say on the Competition Commission’s verdict.
The Commission is unlikely to block the BSkyB takeover in its entirety. If it did that would cause Hunt a serious dilemma. Can you imagine the political row and cries of fix if the Culture Secretary overturned the express findings of an independent, specialist competition body taking its decisions in the national interest?
Luckily he will probably be spared such a cruel choice.
The arguments for an additional threat to media plurality in the UK beyond that posed already by Rupert Murdoch are actually quite weak.
Murdoch already has effective control of a television service he built from scratch and has also invested hundreds of millions in the UK newspaper industry when not so many people were interested in doing so.
Murdoch will also have to raise, perhaps as much as £9 billion, to complete his purchase.
As for Sky News and plurality of voice, the UK’s first 24 –hour television news channel may be a bit flighty at times but has remained firmly in the UK television news tradition and has never been a mouthpiece for Murdoch interests.
Rupert Murdoch is too big and I don’t like him are not arguments that will cut the mustard at the Commission.
Two factors will worry the Competition Commission as it wrestles with intangibles such as where the public interest lies and what constitutes plurality of voice.
Would total Murdoch control of Sky News change its character- after all we only have two non-stop domestic television news channels in the UK.
And would total control of BSkyB lead to joint Sky-newspaper subscriptions? There is actually little to prevent that happening at the moment if it were a straight commercial deal.
The Competition Commission could limit the use of loss leaders in this way – something that would damage rival publishers – and have the matter monitored by either Ofcom or the Office of Fair Trading.
As for Sky News there is no point seeking voluntary undertakings. Murdoch has a history of overlooking such devices.
The good news is if Murdoch were to turn Sky News into a British version of Fox watch the audience melt. It would be extremely bad for business.
All of which means that before this year is out Culture secretary Hunt will be in the relatively comfortable position of being able to accept a Competition Commission go-ahead for the takeover, complete with any conditions they will recommend.

Raymond Snoddy

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