Grokking Syndication: Media, Publishing & Marketing

On opening day of the Syndicate Conference in NYC this week, there's a panel on how syndication is altering the worlds of media, publishing and marketing. Grokking the Big Picture.

Paul Gillin moderates the panel with David Geller of WhatCounts, Michael Davidson, CEO of Newsvine, Chase Norlin, Founder of Pixsy, Technorati’s Dave Sifry and Eric Elia, VP, Content and Online Services of Brightcove.

We go back to the same ‘ole question, the one we’ve been discussing for years? Is RSS going mainstream and what has to happen before it occurs? Platforms like Vista and having it baked into programs like Outlook will enable more and more people to become exposed to it. Yeah, we know that, but what else?

Part of it is its lack of sex appeal in my opinion and the ongoing issue of poor user interfaces. We need to let people know that they should ‘want and need it.’ Look at TiVo and how many people didn’t know how much they wanted it until they saw it working in action…..RSS is missing that wow element and you can’t really get to the essence of what’s cool about it by reading what it means in a few sentences. It’s experiential.

We’re also now seeing video publishers using RSS as an alert mechanism, says Eric from Brightcove.

Gillin asks the panel, “you’re losing control of your content right?” Sifry responds first, “even if you go back to Web 1.0 and you look at what CNET did in the beginning, there was respect for the user. They didn’t force you through a gate where your only choice is CNET content.”

Your role becomes one of a guide and gaining people’s trust over time, because you’re giving them the best aggregation information that’s out there. Sometimes it is your content and sometimes it may be a competitor’s content. Of paramount importance is being of service to the user.”

Says Eric of Brightcove, “publishers are looking for control of monetization and distribution and there’s a learning curve. It will still take a long time for media companies to really understand that.”

Sifry pipes in with a newly announced customer as an example, “We just announced a multi-picture deal with Paramount Pictures. They want to syndicate the conversation about their pictures to bloggers on their site. Up until today, there has been no way to pull together all the conversations around a particular area or topic and deliver this to an end user.

Basically we can now syndicate everyone’s comments – those who are in the room and those who are on the outside. Now we can pull the two groups together and have an ongoing conversation.”

We turn to full text versus headline text only. Hmmm, is that really the question? Should the publisher decide this? I say it should be the user’s choice. Just because Davidson prefers headlines, it doesn’t mean all of us do. And we should be able to choose what works for us.

Bottom line, its more about the relationship with your readers and the trust you are able to establish over time. Bloggers are having more direct relationships with their readers and retailers are now having more intimate relationships with their customers. It’s not about full text versus summary feeds -- both have their own purpose. When you give control to where the demand is, says Sifry, “a revolution happens and that’s what we’re seeing happening now.”

What is really scarce is our time. The real value is directing people effectively to the right information at the right time in a way that makes sense to them.”If attention is truly scarce, how can we make tools to better manage and share this experience. Adds Sifry, “What I want in advertising is what I want and nothing more. If its directed, it will look less like advertising and more like catalogues that have products and services I really care about.”

While growing and IE7, Yahoo and Vista will move usage from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, RSS is still a very immature format compared to HTML and others.

USAToday.com now has a branded news reader. Perhaps it becomes more about how you syndicate IN comments and information from readers, for the online guys like USAToday.com and others.

Someone suggests that there’s a risk for mainstream media, that their brand can get lost. They’ll no longer be able to distinguish between the NY Times and a regular blogger. Clearly this is not true, at least not today. Whether that changes over time remains to be seen.

I think that people will want to know who they’re reading in the same way they always have and over time, will build trust for certain readers and not others. Authority becomes even more important because each reader has their own agenda.

Media consumers are a lot smarter than ever before. Being able to offer readers the ability to offer their content through email or whatever mechanism they want is increasingly becoming important.

Michael Davidson asks, “Take typical MSNBC reader who feels that they have a good view of the news. Now in the age of RSS, if MSNBC had RSS feeds for every writer on their site, you’re no longer subscribing to MSNBC feed anymore, you’re subscribing to a particular writer you like. This can be dangerous in a way; because we’re starting to view things in a much more granular way, we may miss more serious ‘news’ items.”

I immediately thought of Jon Udell since in many ways, he has become as much of a brand as InfoWorld. At least for some.

Gillin asks the room who reads news through a news reader, and 75% of the room raise their hands. On who goes to the media’s main sites, only about 25% of the room raise their hand.

They also talked about the value of local. You may go to NY Times.com and continue to for your major news, but you also want choices, i.e., local blogs that cover news about regional school boards. This is powerful since we never had access to as much input from so many different sources in the past.

Tag: Syndicate
Tag: Syndicate 2006