Thoughts from Digital Hollywood

My colleague, Eric Forst, was in attendance at last week’s Digital Hollywood event. I asked him to give me a round of the event and insights gleaned and discussed. Below are his thoughts from the conference about Facebook, MySpace, IAC, Ask.com, and user-generated content verses programing.

Facebook is becoming the new living room, a pre-broadcast era place where families meet to gather around the piano and share songs and ideas. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you have an opportunity to experience one of the most compelling areas of the Internet, a place where you can express your individuality and hang with your friends in a meaningful and intimate way. Unlike MySpace, you can only see Facebook pages by invitation and the content tends to be cleaner, more thoughtful and more centered around group identities and ideas, as opposed to the rock and roll party-line that MySpace has become.

At the Digital Hollywood conference last week, Matt Cohler, Facebook’s VP of Strategy said that he thinks of this new media environment as being mostly centered around User Generated Programming, rather than thinking of it User Generated Content. Many at the conference spoke of how Facebook is becoming their primary filter for using the Internet and that they discover most of their new music, books and video via recommendations on friends’ Facebook pages, and rarely surf mainstream media sites. An audience member at one panel said he cringes every time he gets a regular email on his new iPhone, but looks forward to Facebook emails because Facebook formats perfectly on his phone, whereas his regular email is slow and clunky.

The digital structure of the Internet, its very hardware, provides a construct that enables social networks to form organically. It’s why we call algorithmic-based search “organic”, whereas paid search is “managed.” The premise of organic content, like organic search, is that it exists because individual, non-corporate interests are expressed in the form of informational and educational fan-sites, hobby sites, government sites, and discussion forums. (In its purest form, Affiliate Marketing programs are simply where users with similar interests share their traffic.) Sites are non-organic, or managed, if the site publisher is paying to promote the site and drive traffic to it. A recent example is Ask.com, whose recent $100 million ad campaign is largely traditional, managed and corporate, and thus the Ask brand seems inauthentic and less organic. Google grew most its traffic organically, so even though it has become the multi-billion dollar titan of online advertising, the Google brand still seems hip and organic when compared to Ask. The emerging Internet generation is immune to broadcast style, push-style advertising and as such, only companies that master the art of active engagement and conversational marketing will thrive. If Ask’s new universal search is really such a great experience, and perhaps it is, they would be wise to spend more of their budget on online word-of-mouth, and less on TV ads.

Many panels at Digital Hollywood grappled with the new power struggle being waged between mainstream media and empowered, independent content publishers and consumers. Panels topics included: “UGM, Social Networks and Traditional Media: Strategies in Content, Communications and Commerce, Part II;” “Metrics and Analytics around Video, Social Media, P2P and User Generated Media;” and, “The Revolutionized Digital Workflow Experience: Understanding How Information Technology, Broadcast & Entertainment Production Merge.” On panel, after panel, experts from the world of digital entertainment, media and technology spoke of the opportunities presented by Social Media and the power brands gain by communicating through channels that optimize engagement. Jason Oberfest, Managing Director of Product Strategy for latimes.com summarized this well when he explained on one panel how traditional media companies like his have to find new ways to communicate and syndicate their products online, including the leverage of social networks and social media.

Thanks again for the thoughts Eric.

Visible Technologies