Good reads for Feb. 8, 2010

by drm on February 8, 2010

Welcome to the new week.

First, a handful of posts that look at the employment numbers from last week. Then a couple of interesting media focused reads. And finally, The Super Bowl ads, because you’ve got to be current and up to date.

The Big Picture turns to pictures to put some perspective on the employment numbers: A collection of 10 charts that show show bad the job situation has been, how it has leveled off and where some of the bright spots are.

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If we need credit to ease up to help drive new job creation, then we’ll need banks to start behaving differently. Business Insider shows, in 13 slides, how the bank market is consolidating, reducing lending to businesses and consumers and increasing purchase of government securities.

One of the interesting wrinkles in the overall employment picture is how resilient the market for college-educated workers has been. Americans with a BA or higher have just a 4% unemployment rate. (via BusinessInsider)

Jeff Jarivs has spent time with a lot of local media people over the past couple of weeks and published an important post that synthesizes a lot of what he’s been hearing and puts it in the context of the deep experience he has with Internet media. The conclusion: Don’t sell scarcity, sell service and results. The thinking is very compelling and important to read.

In the context of Jarvis’ comments, Barry Ritholtz’s dissection of the economics of his recently published, well-reviewed book is very instructive. The book doesn’t make you money; the footprint that the book gives you can create the overall value of your personal brand. But you’d better have a strategy for making money off that personal brand.

If you don’t have that kind of strategy and you write, you’ll find yourself in the position of working for virtually nothing, as Tony Silber of Folio: strongly observes.

The last little media tidbit: Josh Bernoff writes about Forrester’s recent decision to require its analysts to blog on Forrester’s platform and not build a personal digital footprint that competes with the corporate brand. It’s an interesting problem. If the economic value of content is diminishing because of the Internet dynamics, and people who have skill at writing need to be more distributed in how they earn a living, then can media enterprises — even high value enterprises like Forrester — reasonably demand exclusivity in terms of digital footprint?

And, finally, here are all the Super Bowl ads.

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They’re not Wired…they’re Connected

by drm on February 5, 2010

The Pew Research survey on Internet usage paints a brilliant picture of Internet usage, particularly by the Millenials (Gen Y and younger.) Fast Company has a good summary here.

For those of us out of the Gen Y bracket, there’s an important matter of language and connotation. When we say Internet, we think of wires and computers.

Today’s teen — the true information consumer of the future — doesn’t think about the Web or the Internet. They think about Connectedness. And they are device agnostic and place agnostic. They are in the connected stream.

That semantic difference — Wiredness vs. Connectedness — is everything.

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Good reads for Feb. 5 2010

by drm on February 5, 2010

Sorry for the two-day absence on the Good Reads. (I just know there are a handful of you who look forward to these short summaries to fill out your day!) I’ve been traveling and working on preparing materials for our quarterly Board meeting next week, so haven’t been filtering things the way I usually do.

Here’s some of the things around the web that have stuck with me over the past couple of days:

The reliable CalculatedRisk takes today’s employment numbers and surrounds them with context and easy-to-digest charts. Click through and enjoy. 6B46D15D-2F69-4C41-A636-D1F3F1E18872.jpg

Alan Patrick gave a thoughtful presentation this week about the role of Social Media in the Enterprise. He cuts through a lot of the froth and looks at how social media tools can drive value in three areas: revenue creation, cost reduction and capital reduction. (via BroadStuff)

Mortgage bankers have been meeting in Washington this week and the dialogue has been interesting. There’s capital in the market to fund the private mortgage securitizations; the caution relates to external regulatory and policy factors. On balance, good signs for the regular and jumbo mortgage markets next year. (via HousingWire)

Interesting paper about the effect of the recession on “Consumption inequality” and “Income inequality.” Moral: Declining asset values reduce consumption, so the decline in housing values has affected consumption by the higher income quintiles to a higher degree. Of course, this reality is offset by the fact that the jobs shed by the economy have been concentrated in less skilled labor pools. (via Economist’s View)

The FriendFinder IPO just couldn’t happen. (via PaidContent)

Is Consumer social media a bad business? Alan Patrick reflects on the views of Bo Peabody. (via Broadstuff)

Research data from Nielsen that looks at how we consume TV content over the Internet. The current model is using the web as a solitary time-shifter. How will it change? (via NielsenWire)

Take a trip to the Mall of the future. A good exploration of how the technologies we currently have will be integrated in the retail experience. Prompts many thoughts about local, media, marketing and context. (via RetailTrafficMag)

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What drives quality of life and how do you assess the circumstances of the middle class?

If quality of life relates to access to sufficient food and shelter to ensure good health, then an overwhelming plurality of American’s have good quality of life.

If quality of life improves when you have access to devices that reduce the time and labor required to maintain your living conditions, and if your circumstances provide tools and devices to make your leisure time more productive, then your average American is living in an era of unparalleled quality.

A9F958C7-9361-4575-9123-4DF561F937F6.jpgThe chart to the right forms the basis of an argument by W. Michael Cox of AOLNews that suggesting that the American Middle Class is oppressed ignores the remarkable penetration of devices that save time, create connections and entertain in the average American’s life.

My inner technophile loves the chart for the increasing speed of adoption cycles. Note also that the advent of microelectronics has accelerated the adoption of devices that connect people to information and each other. We are in the middle of a second great information revolution, of as much consequence as the proliferation of the popular press in the 18th Century.

But, electronic media is often called the opiate of the masses.

Perhaps Cox believes that unlimited access to media offsets an unsettling shift in income distribution over the past 20 years.

As the Huffington Post reports:

Beginning in the economic expansion of the early 1990s, Saez argues, the economy began to favor the top tiers American earners, but much of the country missed was left behind. “The top 1 percent incomes captured half of the overall economic growth over the period 1993-2007,” Saes writes.

D62CC536-85BC-4776-B19C-72CEA924C4AF.jpgYes, all these devices cost less, and the average American consumer can afford more cool devices.

But when 60% of the population makes 40% of the income, that creates a wide swath of people who have no safety net, and who more often than not are borrowing just to keep up.

30CA12BE-0AD4-4459-AA49-DBE96343F455.jpgThe question of the state of the Middle Class isn’t as simple as questions of food and shelter. It isn’t as easy to define as the access people have to electronic devices.

The state of the middle class is captured in how secure they feel in the world that they experience. The proliferation of media causes dissonance: Images of luxury clash with the reality of daily struggles. No one thing captures the state of the middle class. When Obama talks about rescuing people from their struggles, he is capturing a key element of the zeitgeist. His weakness is his disposition to using the tools of government as the primary release of stress.

The greater question I find myself coming up against again and again is whether leadership can change the culture of a country, can shift values and redeploy the spirit of the citizenship to advance the greater interests of all.

Yesterday, I ran into a retired economist. We talked briefly about the current economic and political situation. His final comment:

Capitalism is an economic system driven by greed. When every part of the system is looking to maximize profits, there has to be suffering. You can’t have everybody be winners. There have to be losers. We lost sight of that.

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An underlying premise of social networking is the authenticity and credibility of your social graph. When people who you have networked with digitally recommend information, experience or products, you are likely to lend their recommendations more credibility than someone you don’t know. Facebook and Twitter make this kind of socially-curated content sharing incredibly convenient to do.

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MINOnline shares recent data from Hitwise that shows just how much impact content sharing has. The chart to the left shows the share of click-thrus to news and media sites from Google News and Facebook. Since May, Facebook has increased its share of upstream click-thrus significantly against Google News.

Some of the phenomenon is driven by scale: Google News has about 63 million visits a month, compared to 2.7 billion for Facebook. But more of the phenomenon is driven by the way people use Facebook; according to the company, more than 3.5 million pieces of content — web links, news stories, blog posts, etc. — are shared by Facebook users each week. People are filtering content, and are looking for content filtered by the members of their social graph.

This trend underscores the opportunities for marketers and media brands.

For a marketer, when a consumer has elected to include your brand in their social graph, they will be receptive to shared content. An effective content-marketing program, which attempts to educate, enlighten and entertain consumers about your brand is an effective way to increase awareness and drive web traffic.

For a media brand, the concept of curating content becomes an important component of your strategy for connecting with an audience. People have a large appetite for content; the increase in the proportion of content that they are accessing through trusted connections suggest that people are looking into their social graph to ensure a good content experience. When a consumer includes a media brand in their social graph, they are inviting that brand to help guide their exploration of good content. It doesn’t all have to be original. It does all have to be useful and relevant to the brand experience.

This shift toward accessing content through curated networks will only increase in the future. Media and marketing brands have an opportunity to increase their brand footprint if they become active and useful participants in the phenomenon.

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I’m running a workshop at Carl Landau’s Niche Media Conference in Tempe, AZ this morning.  The focus is on providing a content for niche media brands to think about social media and their business goals.

Here’s the workbook at I’m using for the presentation.  I’ll post later about the session and talk about some of the specific data points that I shared.

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There’s been a lot of data points over the past month or so pointing to the economic power of women. Two generations of workplace advancement and educational commitment have put women in the singular position of having more opportunity for independence, advancement and earnings than at any other time in our nation’s history.

A CitiGroup unit, Women & Co., released an edifying study today that examines how these strides in economic status have influenced the way that successful women think about the obligations and opportunities of money.

Not surprisingly, as women gain more control over money, they are talking about it more and more.

Women’s rising financial influence is also breaking down the long-standing taboo of talking about money. As revealed in 2008, money is the #1 topic between mothers and daughters. This year’s results find that 91% of women are talking about finances with family members. These conversations are now extending outside the family, as well. The majority of women, over two-thirds, believe that in the wake of the economic downturn, talking about money is much more socially acceptable.

Financial success and knowledge is a responsibility; 84% of mothers are using the financial crisis to teach their children lessons, and 64% of all women are sharing their financial values with others.

The image is compelling: The most valuable lesson a woman can give her children is the lesson of financial independence. This is lightyears away from the image of a mother preparing her daughter to be the best wife she can be.

I’m struck by a disconnect in our social dialogue, though. If women are comfortable with talking about money and feel like sharing knowledge about money is a responsibility, why is there so little sensible discussion about how to make our nation more fiscally responsible on the national stage?

Could it have anything to do with the fact that Congress and the media is dominated by men? And that for men, Money (with a capital M) is a validation of power and authority, something that is highly self-reflecting? That last observation isn’t a statistical fact, just an impression, but still….

(Disclosure: My wife’s firm, TMG Brand Communications, is the public relations representative for Women & Co.)

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