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.

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:

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.

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:

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?

It’s going to be a busy few weeks.

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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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?

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.
(Read more below)