HotHouse content director Ray Welling talks to Rebecca Lieb, US vice president for digital research and publishing company Econsultancy. She is also author of the business best-seller “The Truth About Search Engine Optimization”. Rebecca talks about universal search, the importance of fresh online content, and why companies today need to “think like an editor” to gain new business.
Listen to the podcast below.
HotHouse managing director Simon van Wyk talks to Justin Kirby, founder of Yooster, Australia’s pioneering word of mouth marketing agency. Justin is also founder and CEO of Digital Media Communications, one of UK’s pioneer digital agencies. He discusses the ins and outs of word of mouth marketing, why social media is a misnomer, and the seductive but ultimately counterproductive nature of viral campaigns.
Listen to the podcast below.
HotHouse managing director Simon van Wyk talks to Scott Rhodie, digital PR and social media expert and head of HotHouse’s new social media agency, House Party. Scott discusses the importance of blogger engagement and issues around measuring the success of social media campaigns.
Listen to the podcast below.
HotHouse content director Ray Welling talks to Tony Surtees, a former Yahoo US vice president and participant in the Federal Government’s 2020 Summit who is currently founder and chief executive of iPRIME, the online arm of the PRIME media network. Tony explains the ups and downs of multi-tasking in the digital era, why local is the new global, how to measure sentiment online, and why today’s economy is like a bunch of small pieces of paper.
Listen to the podcast below.
Back in the 1980s, when the development of personal computers and desktop publishing software made it easy to change page layouts without expensive typesetting, it was said that anyone could become a publisher. Yes, it did increase the flexibility and reduce the cost of putting out a publication, but you still had to sell enough copies to pay the printer, the truck driver and the distributor – there was still a sizable cost risk for independent publishers.
But today, with the advent of the Internet and free blogging tools, the phrase “everyone’s a publisher” has now come to fruition. Millions of individuals and small independent publishers create their own news, comment and videos to share with friends, family and the rest of the world.
Not surprisingly, this has had a devastating effect on traditional media outlets. With people splitting their time between TV, radio, magazines, newspapers and now millions of websites (not to mention the reduced spare time all these self-publishers have to consume media), TV audiences are splintered, radio is slumping, and print circulations are steadily dropping. Newspapers have been particularly affected as one of their major sources of revenue – classified advertising – migrates to the web at a cracking pace.
Australia - hanging onto eyeballs
But, as with the global financial crisis, the situation for the traditional media is not as bad in Australia as it is in the rest of the developed world. Consumption of traditional media and associated revenue, while dropping across the board, hasn’t fallen off a cliff the way it has in the US and Europe, with newspaper and magazine closures tossing more than 25,000 journalists out of work in the past two years.
And while media proprietors in those countries decry the rise of the Internet, Australian media companies are making the transition to integrating their online and offline presences with a fair degree of success. Take a look at these traffic figures for page impressions (PIs) on Australian media websites, compiled recently by News Limited:
Network PIs June 2008; PIs June 2009; Change
Fairfax 593,081,202 745,199,109 +26%
News 377,282,786 510,713,402 +35%
NineMSN 378,976,447 465,449,832 +23%
That’s nearly 2 billion page impressions per month to the top three media web portals, up more than 30% from 12 months ago. And while I have my own questions about the measures used to compile these numbers, and the revenue from those impressive statistics still doesn’t compare to the rivers of gold from their traditional activities, at least the Australian media giants are maintaining some semblance of reader loyalty.
So what’s different about the Australian market? I asked Andrew Jaspan, former editor of The Age, when interviewing him for our most recent HotHouse podcast.
Andrew puts it down to geography. Our continental isolation historically kept publications from outside our borders gaining a foothold in Australia, while the distance between our major cities limited our choices for local news.
Simon van Wyk talks to Andrew Jaspan, former editor-in-chief of The Age, about the future of online content and why Australian media moguls are better positioned than their American and European counterparts to make the transition from traditional media to online. He says, “There’s never been a more exciting time to be a journalist… with convergence you can do everything - writing, audio and video.”
Listen to the podcast below.
Although the Internet is renown for embracing new ideas, chewing them up, spitting them out and moving on to the next one, a few concepts keep coming back, albeit in new forms.
The most resilient of these is the concept of communities. They’re in vogue again, for exactly the same reasons they have been in vogue in the past – the concept of community aptly describes the nature and the potential of the online environment.
A couple of years ago, I was asked to write a piece for the “My Five” column in the Australian Literary Review, where people write about five books that have influenced them in their career. The first book I listed was Net Gain: Expanding markets through virtual communities.
Net Gain was one of the first books that put Internet communities into a business context: not surprising, since authors John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong were both McKinsey&Company consultants. They argued that the web is used for three basic purposes – to find content, to interact and to complete transactions – and they correctly predicted online communities would grow around these purposes.
The book was strongly criticised by purists when it was published; they said that on the Internet there was commerce and there was community and never the twain shall meet. Not long after this, of course, eBay appeared. eBay is the textbook example of the type of virtual communities predicted by Hagel and Armstrong: a vibrant, self‐regulated community where people barter and sell, and make friends (and dollars) along the way.
They also forecast the disintermediation of industries such as travel, describing a future that looks a lot like travel sites such as Zuji, Wotif and TripAdvisor.
Simon van Wyk talks to information architecture, strategy and social media expert Stephen Collins about online brand communities and how community strategies need to transcend marketing and become integrated with overall business strategies.
“It’s not a technology thing – less than 10% of this is about the technology,” Stephen says. “What’s much more important is the grass roots effort to turn communities that already exist informally into cohesive brand communities.”
Listen to the podcast below.
Simon van Wyk talks to Australian online advertising expert David Holmes, managing director of APAC Digital, about the present and the future of ad networks and exchanges. David says that despite the increasing use of technology to achieve targeting goals, “Using salespeople adds value to the process of selling online advertising.” He talks to Simon about the difference between difference kinds of ad networks and defines common but confusing acronyms. Listen to the podcast below.
Simon van Wyk talks to Australian cross-media specialist Christy Dena director of Universe Creation 101 and a lecturer and researcher at The University of Sydney about the evolution of 360-degree marketing in the digital era.
Christy says, “I’m passionate about all types of creative practice, especially those that traverse media platforms.” She talks to Simon about marketing across a range of media and bringing them all together for best effect. Listen to the podcast below.
