Social Cache.
A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

Portland Bike Art Pic by PortlandGround.com

Recently Josh Catone wrote an article on Mashable entitled ‘Why NPR is the Future of Mainstream Media.’ In it he points out how NPR has been adjusting and preparing for the coming digital landscape that will affect news media – radio, TV and newspapers. To avoid the fate of other news media, NPR has embraced the triangulation of local content, social media [in its true form] and ubiquitous access.

Local: Catone quotes new NPR CEO Vivian Schiller – “To me, local is the big play, because local commercial radio has abandoned the local market. Local newspapers are withering or sometimes dying. The big national media companies, including excellent ones like The New York Times, cannot afford to be covering every single community. So that leaves a big, gaping hole to serve Americans’ local coverage,” she told mediabistro.com in April.

The Social Web: Catone points out that “NPR’s Twitter account has over 780,000 followers, making it one of the top 25 on the social network (and third among news organizations behind only the New York Times and CNN). Their Facebook Page has over 400,000 fans.”

The tools now available for social web activity give news media of all stripes a way to connect, communicate and share information with their audience, attracting new listeners and retaining existing ones. NPR has taken this all the way with blogs, podcasts and mobile apps. Here in Portland, OPB Music is one of the few stations that focuses on local music and music from the Pacific Northwest. Given Portland’s rich and diverse music population there is never a shortage of great new music yet you will be hard pressed to find it on any local commercial stations. And as the audience for music fractures and spreads far and wide across the internet, online radio will be the biggest winner.

Even the face of music concerts is changing – as bands perform house parties or shows in other spontaneous locations local mainstream media should be jumping all over it working with local bloggers to bring access to live streams or reviews. Yet so far they haven’t, it’s been left to local alternative outlets such as OPB Music or local alternative newspapers like the Willamette Week or the Portland Mercury to cover. Even the New York Times has belatedly jumped in on local music activities with an article entitled ‘Indie Rockers, 90210.’

There appears to be no end to the bleeding for local mainstream radio and TV – revenues are set to plunge 15% according to this report. On the other hand NPR’s audience continues to grow. They had 23.6 million people tuning in weekly at the end of ‘08.

In a strange twist, in what I presume is a response to the obvious downturn in advertising revenues, Portland radio station 94.7FM KNRK recently laid off one of its more popular radio personalities, Tara Dublin. Byron Beck a local reporter, and himself the victim of layoffs at the Willamette Week, broke the news. It appears that Dublin does have a local fan base – her ‘Save Tara’ Facebook page is garnering support from her fans. Those fans are complaining that 94.7 won’t let them leave comments in support of Dublin on the station’s forums. If true, that is bad social web practice. There is also the opposite view – Save Tara? Save Us From Not Having Tara on the Air – that is not as negative as it sounds; people are pointing out that if commercial radio continues its decline why would Dublin want to go down with the ship? This is the social web in action – people listening and joining the conversation; NPR understands this and embraces it.

Mobile Ubiquity: It is not just the success of the very popular iPhone that now gives people far-ranging mobile internet access from handheld devices, but the new, faster iPhone S does make it even easier and is a significant driver of mobile web traffic. RIM’s Blackberry, the Google Android device and the new Palm Pre are all in the race to be the web access mobile device of choice too.

Catone mentions Happn.in a new site that tracks trends locally on Twitter in 52 different metro areas around the world. This is a very useful tool and as Twitter search begins to be a popular way for people to find trending events and news, hyper-local will be incredibly important – searching for local events and news at the zipcode level is getting easier and easier. All local media outlets need to take note.

Related articles:

SEO and SEM Will Be Dead As You Know It in 6 Months
Authenticity and Authority on the Social Web
Hyper-Local News and Portland’s Hillsdale District

Palm execs went out of their way at CES to point out that the Palm Pre is not an iPhone killer.

Check out the high-quality Palm Pre presentation video at CES here.

Red is the new black? Nope – less is the new black

Everywhere one looked recently on the blogosphere, especially social media blogs, the ever-so-informed pundits were banging out their year end lists around mid-December and by today the 2009 predictions/trends/forecasts lists were rapidly turning from a flurry to a blizzard. [US-based bloggers, especially on the East coast, are panicking as the clock ticks down to Midnight.] So I give thanks for two forecast contrarians – Ana Andjelic and Fred Wilson.

Ana Andjelic runs the I Love Marketing blog where she posted ‘The Problem With Forecasts.’ When a post begins like this: “The end of the year is known for releasing “best of” / “worst of” lists, forecasts, & trends that will “shape” the next year. While I heart lists, it’s the trends that I found real dumb. And no, I am not alone in this. Predictions usually go from plain ridiculous to rather obvious and to those that are there for shock value – “blogging is dead”, “podcasting is dead” that no one but Armano really takes seriously.” You know you’re in for a fun read. She’s spot on.

From there I linked to Fred Wilson’s A VC blog where he posted not a forecast list but a wish list of what he’d like to see happen in 2009. Two interesting wishes are 1. a $1.50 gas tax which I agree with and 2. a request of Apple – “I just want Apple to come out with an aggressively priced touch screen mobile computer that can be used to read books, blogs, watch movies, listen to music, and work as a home remote too. This is a huge opportunity for them and others too.”

And by the way, I found both these blogs via Twitter which I have been using more and more as a business tool lately – finding I can’t live without it these days..

So, having written the above I will now throw caution to the wind and present you with a 2009 forecast that is only marginally tongue in cheek. Here’s my baker’s dozen:

Malcolm is thinking about a new book

01. Malcolm Gladwell will publish another book.
02. The New York Times print edition will continue to arrive on my doorstep.
03. It will be cold and wet when I arrive at the Oregon Coast tomorrow.
04. “Feels free” will take a hold. [I've been waiting for this since my time at Intel in 2000.]
05. The CD business will continue to shrink but the music business will grow.
06. Art will be smaller, leaner, cleaner.
07. Consumer products will be simpler – see the Flip.
08. Socially conscious projects such as public housing will thrive under Obama.
09. Blogs will not die.
10. Twitter will see a huge growth spurt and continue to have growing pains.
11. U2’s new album will be as boring as the last 3 or 4 have been but will sell millions.
12. The rich will continue to cut back on their mistresses.
13. And finally, less is the new black.

Got your own 2009 trends, forecasts or wishes list? Post it in the comments section…

Best Buy wins the third party sales slot. That gives you 970 more stores to find one in stock, or not.

I was reading a report today from ComScore Media Metrix about how American and European mobile users are accessing maps from their mobile devices. No surprise that the iPhone is the leading device in the USA with the Nokia N95 and N70 leading the way in Europe. More interesting was the data on Mode of Transport Intended to be Used when Accessing Maps. As you’ll see in the grid below USA mobile users lead the way in use whilst driving in the car, come last in using their devices whilst traveling on public transport and last again in use whilst working out. Whatever the data means it does point to the fact that we drive more and use public transport less than our European counterparts. Or perhaps it’s a demographic issue?

Once the mainstream media and the more hysterical tech blogs have got over the fact that the success of the iPhone 3G launch caused Apple’s servers to be overloaded, we can sit back and take stock.

I own the iPhone v.1 and I’m currently happy without 3G access so I remain content with my device. One reason for staying put with the original model is that the new software update from Apple brings some rather cool new applications [or Apps in the vernacular,] that improve the original phone’s productivity.

I chose a couple of productivity apps, Zenbe, a list sharing tool and Jott, a voice to text tool. I got AirMe for uploading my iPhone pictures up to my Flickr account and added MPG and Spend [no link available, tsk, tsk] so if I care I can track my miles per gallon in the Element and set budgets for my gourmand extravaganzas. These apps all perform well without G3 and most were free. One app that fell into the epic fail bucket was Reqall. Couldn’t sign up on the iPhone and couldn’t load the web site either. Fail! Turns out that Jott does the same stuff anyway.

The most interesting app of all is Loopt which enables users to broadcast their whereabouts and send a status of a broad set of services and find interesting locations and reviews nearby. This could be the next breakout social networking platform as it works best from the phone [mobiles, not just the iPhone] and is simple to update ala Twitter. In fact it has a Twitter plug-in so you can post once and hit Twitter too. Follow me on Twitter here.

One problem though – Loopt could be a predators dream. In fact Loopt’s Be Safe page spells out in no uncertain terms that you need to control who has access to your location.

Anyway, here’s my thinking behind the title of this post. David Griner wrote a post entitled Are Blogs Still Good Places for Conversation? which at first glance I took as simply a Google bait tactic. The answer would seem to be “of course they are.” He raises a good point but I still believe a good, well written blog is the place for conversation. Twitter, a micro-blog, is not. I use my Twitter account to drive traffic back to my blog where the conversation can really open up. After all Twitter only allows 140 characters so truncated updates are the norm, which is fine. If I follow Marshall Kirkpatrick on Twitter I get up-to-the-minute breaking tech news from him but I prefer to read his blog at Read Write Web for a more in-depth review. On both my blogs, the other being Pampelmoose, I enjoy reading comments that can often be longer than the original post – something that is impossible with Twitter.

Joining the conversation and being invited in are two things I have stressed when it comes to advising our clients on their forays into social media advertising. A blog is the right venue for extending conversations, not a micro-blog. By all means post links to your original content stories to Twitter so that interested followers can link to your blog. Be sure to use FriendFeed to share your blog posts with others, use Tumblr too for the same reason, but understand that many of the social networking arenas, Twitter, Loopt even Facebook, are way ahead of the general online populations’ capacity to juggle all of them, and those folks not partaking in every widget, bell and whistle are your customers too.

Run a blog, embrace radical transparency, get invited in to communities that might enjoy your products and join the conversation. But whatever you decide to do, don’t do this – OHSU Director’s Blog. If you don’t immediately see why feel free to ask me.