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.

Social Entertainment Seminar

On Wednesday, September 30th, Cisco Media Solutions Group is hosting a seminar about online entertainment experiences and the impact social media has on entertainment content. There is limited space so register here. In the seminar, Forrester analyst David Card (bio here / twitter here) will share a recently completed a study on how media companies can best use social technologies to grow their content communities and take advantage of consumers’ new role as active critics, creators and distributors of entertainment and media content. Here’s what the seminar will cover in depth, and we are interested in your feedback on the following bullet points.

• Create new entertainment opportunities by blending social and professional content to reinvent storytelling.

I’m constantly studying specific examples of media and entertainment companies working on new programming, but I’m sure I miss many other great instances. Have you seen great examples of social entertainment content produced media companies? Please share more with us in the comments. You can point us to sites, or article links.

• Prepare for future social web evolutions such as social colonization, social context, and social commerce.

I’m really excited to hear David Card’s definitions and best practices for social colonization and social context. As far as colonization goes, we have noticed that movie web sites do not retain their audiences over time. How do you retain audiences for the long term on an online media property? Look at the three biggest movies of 2008 in the following chart. Movie web site traffic spikes at the time of the theatrical release, falls, then rises again at the time of the DVD release, and then ultimately trails off.

Source: Compete.com / BoxOfficeMojo.com

Since these movies are franchises, that will likely have sequels and a rabid fan base, it’s clear that there’s more that could be done to keep the social colonization of the corresponding web sites. How could social context and commerce also play a part on these types of sites. Your thoughts?

• Learn how other media companies use various social media strategies and technologies to accomplish their business, creative and implementation objectives through case studies.

One thing we’ve noticed on this point is that social media strategy for media and entertainment companies can be costly. For instance, Discovery Communications has spent an estimated $300 million on digital acquisitions over the past three years and yet will do $55 million in digital business in 2009. The big question is how can media companies do what they do well -- produce premium content -- and monetize that content in today’s entertainment landscape which is both social and digital. In the seminar on 9/30, Forrester will share recommendations for growing content and communities.

Continuing the dialogue: Digital Music Forum West Conference

Several members of the Cisco Media Solutions group team will be at the Digital Music Forum West in Los Angeles on October 7th and October 8th. Our very own Senior Director of Media and Entertainment partnerships, Claudia Ceniceros will be speaking on a panel at the forum and Cisco is also sponsoring the event. Digital Music Forum West brings together some of the music industry’s brightest minds -- discussion topics range from internet radio, to the evolution of music blogs, with speakers like the CEO of popular music social network Imeem, the advisor to Warner Music leading the Choruss effort, and the president of MySpace Music.

We really learn a lot from going to digital music conferences : we recently attended the Bandwidth Conference in San Francisco. At Bandwidth, we heard some interesting perspective from record label executives and artist managers on how they do creative digital content development, see more here.

At the Digital Music Forum West, Claudia is on a panel with executives from the Scratch Academy, event marketing site Eventful, artist content syndication enabler ArtistData, and a former EVP of the RIAA. The panel is from 3:45pm – 4:30pm on October 7th and is titled -: DIGITAL MUSIC INNOVATION: What’s Next?.

Here are the questions being asked of Claudia and the panelists. I have inserted some thoughts about each of the questions. What do you think? Are there specific examples you would put to each of these questions -- share with us in the comments.

1) What are the defining characteristics of digital products and services that are attracting loyal fans and users?

Looking at the following chart, you can quickly realize that music fans are very loyal to digital music services that focus around content search. The portals still hold much of the audience attention for music.

You can read more about top online music destinations and social networks over at the Nielsen blog. I love using music discovery services like Last.fm or the Hype Machine. You may use Pandora. However, the data above shows us that easy access to search music content drives web traffic right now and discovery services do not as much. And this Nielsen chart doesn’t take in to account YouTube as a music destination -- which it most certainly is!  Music is key toYouTube – the top 10 Billboard rated songs usually amount to about 25 Million video views a week on YouTube. Universal Music Group YouTube channel is the most viewed channel in YouTube history, with 3.4 billion views over 9,200 clips. Of the top 10 channels on YouTube,  seven are music related including Warner Bros. Records, Soulja Boy, and Disney’s Hollywood Records.  All of this data proves search and access to content is critical to fans. In addition, you also see in research from Ipsos CT that almost 27% of music consumers have no preferred source for acquiring or listening to music.

So as far as winning fans over when it comes to music -- it is clear that there is plenty of opportunity to win a consumer looking for an easy to use music service that has superior search and content access functions.

Yet we do believe discovery is critical to a better media and entertainment experience, and we like to say that ‘content should find you’ instead of the other way around. On the topic of discovery, there are some good white papers at our Cisco Media Solutions Group home page about tools that enable content discovery; one paper about collaborative filtering and another about identity and reputation. And of course, metadata is key component of content to enable discovery -- we also have a white paper about metadata as it relates to web video.

2) What does it take for a new technology or digital service to develop into a profitable business?

It’s about the content not the technology when it comes to music. For consumers, digital media and social media technologies enable music content distribution, music discovery, product development, commerce, promotion and engagement -- but without quality content you can not have a profitable business. For artists and labels, these same technologies facilitate the development of a fan relationship, ‘fananalytics’, advertising solutions, direct marketing and overall customer relationship management.

Trent Reznor made over $1.6M by giving away nine of his 36 new Nine Inch Nails songs away for free and by creating a variety of premium priced bundles for his fans to purchase -- priced from a $300 limited edition box set to $5 for all 36 songs. While he used technology to facilitate the marketing and distribution, he made the revenues because of content innovation, like those premium bundles. Trent also received the email addresses of from everyone who participated, those who did and didn’t purchase his music. Via email he is now able to develop a relationship with his fans and promote his future solo music releases and non-music side projects. And those same tools exist for independent artists who want to capture emails -- services like Bandcamp.mu and ReverbNation.

Meanwhile, Forrester recently posted a report on how new music sales models will impact the industry - here is a chart from that report, an interest take on the windowing of an album release:

3) What needs to happen to open the pocketbooks of investors and create more opportunity for innovation in the digital music space?

We believe that content rights holders like music labels are becoming more innovative with regards to digitally licensing their music content. In the future, a new digital music service could come up with some really interesting ideas of how do new interactive content with music. To get access to the necessary music content for a new idea, it could be as simple as licensing a music catalog via an Application Interface (API) . We have seen so much innovation on college campuses and with consumers regard to digital music, for instance, Napster. If there are more open models to use music content in new interactive ways, the next great innovation may come sooner than we think -- and potentially from a music consumer who has the next great idea.

4) What trends and technologies should we be watching?

We are watching how artist driven communities like http://allseanpaul.com develop over time -- how the artist / fan relationship develops given the social media tools that allow a two way dialogue between artist and fans. Again, it’s about content and how the technologies that facilitate artist to fan relationships enable further commerce, and fan engagement. The myriad of social networking platforms can be used to reach, inform, and engage music fans, and subsequently drive the fans back to the artist’s web site. The blog Hit Singularity offered a nice chart below that illustrates that point. We have also written in the past how Twitter search is an effective tool to find new fans.

But if you have a myriad of platforms your content is going to -- how do you manage content distribution, analytics about the content use, and keep track of fan engagement? We are starting to see technology providers deal with these issues -- unifying content syndication, analytics, and fan engagement for the artists on a single platform. For instance, below look at the Cisco Eos powered web site for the band Paramore. Paramore uses Eos to bring in parts of the fan conversation from Twitter and the mobile photo stream, an they appear back on to the artist site.

Thanks for reading some of the thoughts about the Digital Music Forum West Panel on October 7th, and the Cisco sponsored Forrester Social Entertainement seminar that happens on the 30th of September. We look forward to hearing any related thoughts you may have.