The Media Business and its Disruptions

Discovering Social Networks

Last June, 68% of adults were using the Internet according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Conversely, 22% of Americans were not only not using the Internet, but did not even live in Internet connected home. These truly disconnected Americans have remained stable over the past three years.

There are many dichotomies in the Internet community.

·        84% of those age 18-29 connect while 74% of those 65 and older do not.

·        89% of college graduates connect while 71% of those without high school diplomas do not.

·        83% of parents with young children connect while 40% of those without children do not.

When we follow the connected online, we find their interests and behaviors become individualized. Digital media is hardly a uniform thing. It is a mosaic of communities. It is no longer household viewing. It is individualized networks. It is no longer neighborhoods. It is dispersed networks. For those that play, the Internet is creating broader and stronger social ties. The discipline of sociology is now being applied to understand what is happening. Each person’s circle of family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances is called a social network. Email is the empowering ingredient. Without active email, as social networks grow the frequency of contacts declines. With active email, as social networks grow the frequency of email contact remains constant while the frequency of in-person and phone contacts increase. Email enhances communications, while other Internet dimensions empower consumers with knowledge tools. These include the increasingly popular find-it-yourself search engines, websites, blogs, and the more dynamic social networks. Broader and stronger social ties in tandem with everyone’s increased access to information sources are converting the age old adage “ask a friend” into “ask a knowledgeable friend”. This is becoming a pervasive approach to decision making among the connected. When questions about illness, finance, jobs, votes, or purchases come up, 81% of Americans ask for help from at least one frequent contact, and 46% ask for help from one or more, less frequent contacts within their social network.

Many have said that the Internet as a medium will be different than television, just as television was different from radio. Digital video and consumer generated media have both been examples to date. However, the power of individualized networks and the growth of social networks are starting to provide the unifying force. The popularity of online industry communities, clubs, consumer gatherings like epinions.com, and highly focused nano-communities are examples of this force at work. The Internet has not only converted media from mass to individual, but it has switched its direction from push to pull, where you find, take, and build what you want. Even more fundamental, the Internet is changing communications and communities. Yet digital media needs some thought. What is really happening? American culture is segmenting, and the concordant cultures of communications and communities are splitting into the connected the not connected; and within the connected, Americans are becoming a patchwork of interwoven tight knit communities across many micro areas. Following history, this new American culture is becoming a global phenomenon.

Of course nothing is really ever new new. Understanding social networks has been a science since August Comte first hypothesized them in the 1840s as interconnections of social actors. In the 1960s, the idea was pushed forward with the evolution of the “small world” theories. Today, the physicists and mathematicians are driving the theory and analyses of social networks into computational models of channels through which ideas, values, friendships, esteem, money, sales, disease, or almost anything can flow. The math behind Google’s PageRank is a simple example that tabulates site citations of sites to discern importance and ultimately relevance to the searcher. BuzzMetrics and other firms are working on ways to tap into the Internet “rumors and buzz” to understand the consumer moods of the moment. While the heavy lifting is being worked on in academia and the serious sciences like epidemiology, the time is increasingly right to consider social network analyses in media. The ever fun science of media measurement with all its yapping about engagement could certainly use it on the vast mass of networked Internet data to improve the targeting and tracking of consumer mindsets.

The Importance of Mavens

Every once in a while Walt Disney teaches us something important. His notion that “it is a small world after all” turns out to not only be true, but a key ingredient to smart marketing.

Stanley Milgram discovered in his now famous 1967 small world experiment in that two random

US

citizens are connected by an average chain of six acquaintances.

Since Milgram’s ground breaking experiment, refinements from a bevy of researchers have empirically proven that the small world phenomenon is real. While debate still surrounds whether the "whole world" is a small world, there is uniform agreement that there are many small worlds within the whole. Popular examples are mathematicians and actors. Mathematicians created the Erdős number to have fun describing their distance from Paul Erdős through shared publications. Elsewhere, three movie fans created the parlor game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. The fun here is to figure out how many movie connections away (the distance) any actor or actress is from performing with Kevin Bacon. The fun of these games is finding who the hyper-connected people are. Research shows that while many people are six connections away from anyone else, it also shows that there are a few highly connected people out there.

What makes the small world phenomenon meaningful is that certain types of individuals can be as influential as mass media under the right conditions. In the midst of our social networks, there are select people we think of when we need expert help. In turn our experts gravitate to a handful of uber-experts, who appear to know everything about a specific topic. These select few are Mavens. When Mavens speak, people listen. And when Mavens express opinions that “stick” as particularly meaningful, hyper-connected people get the message out, and mass opinions change.

Connectivity is speeding up and morphing with the inventions of email and now blogging, but the fundamental influence of Mavens remain. BuzzMetrics tracks the evolution and impact of opinions in the blogosphere. In a white paper on trans fats, BuzzMetrics illustrates the importance of Mavens with sticky messages. They report how the topic of trans fats evolved from an esoteric subject into a national health craze with no appreciable news coverage, convincing Frito Lay to remove these common artificial fats from their snack foods in less than a year.

Not surprisingly, marketers have been trying to pin down these influencers for some time. However as Feick and Price pointed out in 1987, “targeting mavens with communications may be difficult.” Much research has found mavens to be active media consumers, avidly consuming all media that touches their topics of interest; yet challenging to describe with no discernable geo-demographic characteristics.

Marketers know the value of mavens and have set traps to collect them. Examples abound but mostly involve phone numbers and websites providing free expert information on products and product areas, delving into the art, science, and market pricing for specific topics. After finding the mavens with info-honeypots, marketers try to empanel them. Quality CRM databases identify the mavens and treat them with special care. Intuitive marketers are less formal. They connect with mavens by building them into their social networks. In all cases, marketers check new ideas with their mavens before investing. Clever marketers then leverage their mavens with free merchandise to diffuse new products and positioning to the public before launching advertising and promotions. In the case of new products, marketers also spend excessive attention on early adopters to maintain positive word of mouth.

Online researchers would do well to take note. Instead of using statistically meaningless quota samples, they would provide value in trapping and reporting on category mavens and other important influencers like connectors. These new research panels, like well managed CRM databases, could easily evolve into new high-impact personal media channels. Imagine the value of ready made word of mouth media channels, or better yet auction them off like Google, track their impact with BuzzMetrics, and discover the value.

Disruption in Television

You can feel the tremors. A major earthquake is about to disrupt television as we know it.

This year, the piping companies are working hard to replace the old platforms of broadcast, cable, and satellite with Internet portals. Verizon and SBC Communications made major investments to build Internet TV portals. Comcast recently reacted by telling Wall Street about its own Internet TV portal under development and to be fully stocked with programs, movies, interactive features, and a new fangled television search engine. Then Comcast created more buzz with hints of partnership talks with Google and interests in buying AOL’s Internet portal.

Meanwhile, the content companies are trying to break free of the pipe companies. ESPN is leading the charge with its own major Internet portal, branded magazines, radio shows, podcasting, branded phones and services, games alliance (with Electronic Arts,) events with the X-Games and ESPY Award, and Zone restaurants. Change is so prevalent that even the Tiffany Network (CBS) announced a strategic initiative to in its own words “bypass cable”. It is working on an online service for people to watch as an alternative to the evening news.

And of course, Apple is shattering the mold again. While everyone talks, Apple launched its much anticipated video iPod in a content alliance with Disney. You can now watch “Desperate Housewives” and “Lost” for $1.99 an episode. Maybe tomorrow, Pixar and possibly Disney movies will be $3.99 each. It will be a matter of days, before video podcasting takes off. And the latest report has Sony smartly out maneuvering Matsushita (Panasonic and friends) in its next generation DVD fight. Which vision is clairvoyant? Who will buy DVDs at the store, when they can download and watch on their iPod or anywhere in the house through their iMac or Microsoft Media Server?

As content becomes pipe independent, Lifestyle Internet portals like MySpace with social networking at their core will start disrupting the traditional TV portals currently under construction. It is a vision thing. Content and packaging are changing. Viewing is about time, place, and involvement. Essentially, media is becoming personal. Will people be attracted to CBS or some cool news center that speaks to them? If you expect CBS will win, think about what is happening with blogs and you may change your mind. Les Moonves will have to think beyond CNN to keep CBS branded news alive in the long-term. The same goes for all types of television. Interestingly, the niche cable networks are best positioned to win if they move fast. ESPN understands.

If we come back to our monthly topic of measurement, this fun discussion of disruption hits home hard. People-meters measure channel frequencies of “piped” tuning to television sets. The next generation A/P meter is more flexible, measuring content as long as it is wired to the meter. Yet everything we have been talking about involves throwing away the pipe. The Personal People Meter (PPM) is mobile, but requires ambient audio. While this clearly would not capture the earphone prone iPod devices, it certainly casts a wider net. Besides the nasty little requirement of sample cooperation, the PPM concept makes a huge assumption. It requires all content to be coded with audio signatures. This means both programming and commercials. If games and movies are in scope, then they need continuous signatures too. Despite all the fanfare, the PPM crowd is still struggling to get basic television cooperation. The Internet oriented folk of course think these measurement techniques are wrong-headed. They believe that tracking technologies should be designed to monitor interactive communications. Yet, they face similar challenges. Clickstream tracking requires website cooperation and struggles with offline content.

This is why media research is fun!

Maybe the answer is outside the box. Content owners are becoming paranoid about who is using what and how many times. Serious money is being lost through copyright infringements, from file sharing to piracy, and much more is at risk as videos follow music into the digital ether. Maybe media researchers should partner with the Digital Rights Management companies and consortiums to develop technologies that monitor and follow the content and its usage.