DigMediaRev Random Thoughts from the Digital Revolution of Media & Entertainment

The First Cisco Eos-powered Website… for Cisco

It’s pretty standard practice for tech companies to use their own technology.  Commonly called “eating your own dog food,” using your own technology shows confidence in the product, and also allows you to experience exactly what your customers are experiencing.   

Cisco is a big believer in using our own technology, but it’s been a little tough finding the perfect fit for the Cisco Eos social entertainment platform since Eos was built specifically for media & entertainment companies… and last time I checked, Cisco wasn’t an entertainment company.  We do use Eos to power the Cisco Eos Developer Network (sorry, you have to be a customer or registered partner to access) and the Cisco Media Solutions Group’s internal site, but we didn’t have a public instance of an Eos-powered experience from Cisco.

Until now.

Earlier this week Cisco launched “The Video Lounge” – a site that features Cisco videos, and clips from mainstream media that feature Cisco products and solutions.  For example, check out this video from 30 Rock that uses Cisco’s Telepresence technology.  Hilarious.

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Posted by Scott Brown at 01:37PM PST

Digital Media Conference West: the Evolving Media Conversation

Yesterday I had the opportunity to be on a panel at the Digital Media Conference West conference about the interaction between Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

Maybe I’ve been out of the digital media conference circuit for too many months, but I was pleasantly surprised how much the market conversation around social entertainment and digital media has evolved from earlier this year.

Instead of vague “social” conversations about throwing sheep and Axe body wash, people were talking about real, tangible solutions (not just the problems) that media companies are experimenting with to leverage technology and the rise of the empowered consumer.

A couple of themes that I was happy to hear from the conference:

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Posted by Scott Brown at 09:52AM PST

Digital Music Forum West Coverage - Part 1

About a week back, I was spending time on the official web site of TV show. First, I had to register to be able to comment on the TV show blog. Then once I searched deep for any area of community around the content, I found a walled off forums area for TV show discussions. To be able to join the conversation in the forums area of the TV show site, I had to register again - I could not use my earlier blog registration. The thought of having so many separate technology providers on a single site echoes my colleague Scott Brown’s earlier blog post about the cost complexity of media owned web sites. It must be costly to cobble all these different technologies to offer various discrete features like blogs, comments, forums, user profiles, etc. At the time of using this TV show web site, I got frustrated and tweeted about my experience. My friend Steve Jang tweeted back, noted in response above, ‘Frankensteins’! Oh yes, I have heard that term before - in our Cisco Media Solutions Group product videos demonstrating Cisco Eos. In one of the video, Jack, a Chief Digital Officer at a media company, calls his sites ‘frankensteins’ and he makes the switch to Cisco Eos to bring these social features under a unified platform.

It was not the last time during the week I heard the word ‘frankenstein’ in reference to media owned web sites, or heard about the huge cost of social entertainment experiences. Cisco Media Solutions Group sponsored and attended the Digital Music Forum West conference in Los Angeles and there was plenty of further discussion.

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Posted by Chuck Fishman at 03:30PM PST

White Paper and Webinar: “Best Practices for Social Media for Media & Entertainment”

Last week Forrester principal analyst David Card presented research findings on how media companies are using social technologies in the context of their entertainment brands.

David conducted case study interviews with technical, business and content executives from 5 leading media companies to examine how they’re leveraging the social entertainment revolution, and to look for best practices on using this technology to engage online audience/fans.

David’s findings are interesting, if not surprising: like most larger businesses, media companies are mostly still in the experimentation phase; while many now leverage “social” for promotional efforts, few have incorporated it as an integral part of the entertainment experience.

Sorting through the data, and different situations David identified 5 best practices media companies need to consider for social technologies:

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Posted by Scott Brown at 07:32PM PST

5 easy ways to increase consumer engagement on your site

As social media continues to take over the universe it’s absolutely imperative for your web site to be at the center of your online entertainment strategy. I have been hearing an increasing number of questions like. What should an engaging media and entertainment site look like? And how should it be different than other, typical online social environments? In this post, I would like to share with you 5 things we’ve learned from building Eos and the many sites it powers that may help you with your own media and entertainment site.

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Posted by Mike Chen at 01:50PM PST

The Cost of ‘Social’ to Media Companies

There have been a couple public data points (1, 2) recently highlighting the costs some media companies are incurring building their own social media / digital content platforms. 

These disclosure have generated blogosphere reactions from disbelief to ridicule, but there hasn’t been a flood of media companies bragging about their own lower cost, better ROI approach.  The reason is: these cases are not isolated ones; they’re not the only media companies experiencing this dilemma. 

OK, yes, the absolute number of dollars spent varies widely by company, but based off our customer discussions we’re finding that the average company is spending 75-125% of their online, digital revenue on building and maintaining the technology platform to support the revenue.

That’s not a very scalable business model.

But wait, you say, there are 100s of white-label social networking vendors/platforms and destinations out there.  How can media companies possibly be spending this kind of money for something that should be easy to get?

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Posted by Scott Brown at 11:43AM PST

Discussions about the Social Entertainment Experience

Over the next few weeks, members of the Cisco Media Solutions Group team will be out at conferences and hosting seminars, furthering the dialogue about social entertainment strategy. We hope to share that conversation with you.

It’s going to be a busy few weeks.

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Posted by Chuck Fishman at 09:33AM PST

GUEST POST:  Maximizing Digital Media Revenues via Monetization Mix Targeting

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sudhir Kaushik is senior product manager in the Cisco Media Solutions Group‘s Digital Advertising practice.

According to Comscore’s report from January 2009:

• 6.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 356 minutes of video (approximately 6 hours), up 15 percent versus December.

According to PWC Global Entertainment and Media Report (2009), IFPI:

• Digital music now accounts for 25% ($ 3.7 billion) of total music sales.
• Consumers downloaded 1.4 billion units of music in 2008 alone.

Paradoxically, at a time when media consumption (photos, audio & video) is at an all-time high, media companies are struggling with declining revenues as they try to find the right monetization mix. Monetization mix is the set of revenue streams for a media company that work together to achieve company’s objectives. Traditionally, online media revenue has been derived from advertising, commerce and subscriptions.  

1. Online ad revenue is comprised of search, display and/or video ad revenue. Publishers sell     the inventory on the site (either directly or via ad networks) to     advertisers. Advertisers attempt to reach the right audience based on     historical traffic statistics. By doing so, advertisers and publishers     simply replicate the issues plaguing TV today where poor tracking and lack     of data limits the ability to connect with the right audience.
2. Online commerce pioneered by Amazon and eBay consists of consumers buying physical or     digital merchandise either on the company owned stores or other retailers.    With commerce, media companies look for efficient ways to manage catalogs,    create custom storefront experiences and implement recommendation systems.    Average funnel conversion on the store and the average revenue per order     per user are key optimization metrics.
3. Subscriptions are a pricing     strategy to achieve content and user segmentation. The definition of premium     and non-premium content is based on the aggregate of users rather than     specific segments of users.

In the following section, we discuss the key factors that render the traditional “monetization mix” strategies less effective in the digital age.

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Posted by Scott Brown at 09:19AM PST

Bandwidth Conference Highlights Diversity in Artist Online Strategies

At the Bandwidth Digital Music Conference, top band managers talk with moderator Scott Perry about artists who create direct relationships with fans using social and digital media.

The 2009 digital music conference, Bandwidth, just wrapped up at the end of the last week in August in San Francisco.

I was lucky to attend the second day of the two day conference. I also grabbed some video clips following in the post. One of the major conference themes of the day - you heard record labels, managers of top bands, and individual artists all day long proclaim: the artist / band site is the keystone of an online media strategy for music. But if the site is at the center of the strategy - what kind of message goes on the artist site and how do record labels, managers, bands and artists develop their sites?

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Posted by Chuck Fishman at 03:13PM PST

GUEST POST: Dummies’ Guide to Cisco Eos

GUEST POST from CMSG intern Shruti Bhat

As a management intern at CMSG in the summer of 2009, I knew that I would be part of an extremely talented team building Cisco Eos - the next generation social entertainment platform. But as I went in I was thinking– Huh?? What does Cisco Eos actually do?  Both the Engineer and the MBA in me had a lot of questions and when I finally touched all parts of the elephant I was amazed. So here I take a shot at using everyday words to explain a complex product.

What exactly is Cisco Eos?
For media and entertainment companies in music, movies, TV, sports and publishing, who want to create social entertainment experiences through direct to consumer websites, Cisco Eos is an integrated platform that enables accelerated site creation, easy media management, and cross-site analytics,  all in an integrated administrative application. Unlike existing offerings, Cisco Eos has built-in scalability, flexibility and control for enterprises with a portfolio of sites.

Now let’s break this down.
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Posted by Scott Brown at 09:28AM PST

Disappointments in Digital

I heard this great piece on NPR earlier this week on how the promises made around the conversion to digital broadcast TV differ from the reality of today. (Short summary:  the switch to digital created bandwidth for 4 digital channels for every existing analog channel.  Broadcasters promised to fill those additional channels with more original, local content.  That’s not happening.) 

What struck me is that the digital broadcast situation is no different than what ALL media channels are facing in their transition to digital. 

Eli Noam at Columbia University had a great quote in the piece:

“Whenever a new media is starting, there’s always the promise — the hope, really — of content that is local. ... And then reality sets in — cold economic facts — and they tend to change the equation.”

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Posted by Scott Brown at 09:35AM PST

WMG, Cisco Press Conference Video & Recap of the Week

Here’s the full-length video of the Warner Music Group, and Cisco press conference held earlier this week.  It’s not quite the same HD experience the live event had, but it gives you an up close view of John Chambers and Edgar Bronfman, Jr. giving the news.

In case you missed it, here’s the news that was announced.

Thanks to everyone for the tough questions and comments following this event.  I really think the industry dialogue around these new social entertainment experiences took a significant step forward in the last couple of days.

Let me be clear: as a company and as an industry, we’re still in the very early days of the media transition. 

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Posted by Scott Brown at 03:45PM PST

Cisco Eos, Warner Music Group and the ‘Social Entertainment’ Experience

Warner Music Group announced today that they will be using the Cisco Eos software platform more extensively in their direct-to-consumer initiative delivering interactive, high-value experiences for their artists and fans.

As part of this announcement, WMG unveiled new Eos-powered sites for Paramore (BTW: congrats on the Teen Choice Awards!), Trey Songz and Sean Paul (originally launched on Eos in Jan. 2009, and recently redesigned); and said they will deploy approximately another dozen sites this year for for artists such as Jason Castro, Estelle, and Lupe Fiasco.

What WMG is delivering is a social entertainment experience – one that combines the produced / branded content we all love, with social technologies that allow the fans to interact with and around the content they love.

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Posted by Scott Brown at 10:06AM PST

New Digital Media Brands Focus on Curatorial Experience

In a digital world where the audiences for media content are fragmenting and advertising spends are declining, some media brands are unfortunately dying. That’s what recently happened to R&B / Hip Hop leader Vibe Magazine.

Does that mean magazines or the companion web sites for those music publications are any less relevant in today’s environment? Of course not!

But imagine you were just starting a music oriented publishing brand today - starting with a physical magazine would not necessarily be the best vehicle to introduce your content to an audience.

So how are new media brands being built in a digital age?

(Since this blog post first published - we have now learned that the Vibe Magazine brand will relaunch as a digital publishing outfit - read - http://bit.ly/viberelaunch at Wall Street Journal. And that makes sense and speaks to the rest of this post. Read on ...)

Following in the post I examine a recently built media brand that found success with its audience: the Swedish based music site Discobelle.net. The site now attracts about 75,000 unique visitors and registers about 250,000 page views on a monthly basis. As Bjorn Jeffery, one of the co-founders points out, “our blog isn’t really tailored to generate major page views, and that’s not the metric we use to sell our ads.” Point taken, and granted Discobelle.net is not a major magazine publisher. Regardless there are some key takeaways in Discobelle’s path to building a modest and very engaged and targeted media audience.

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Posted by Chuck Fishman at 05:19PM PST

Digital Media and Social Media Research

I’m off for my summer vacation after a very poor decision to work 8 months straight without a break.

I was just reviewing with a colleague all of the various research and overview presentations I assembled during this period. Essentially my hard drive now is a giant cache of research content including many presentations on the digital media and social media landscape across various verticals like music, movies, sports, television, branded entertainment, etc.

A lot of friends ask me what I do with my time at Cisco, and that’s a big part ; assembling presentations that inform our Cisco Media Solutions Group on how media and entertainment industry is evolving given new digital and social media platforms. Obviously these platforms are more popular with consumers than ever before ; For instance regarding social media platforms, I saw this week a chart which illustrates Facebook now topping email as a content sharing tool.

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Posted by Chuck Fishman at 02:08PM PST