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The Syllabus MBA 604 - Marketing through New Media - Fall 2006 other course pages welcome | course | case | roundtable | bistro | reports project list this page schedule at a glance | Saturday skills | reading night by night Saturday | Thursday Sat Oct 21 Thurs Oct 26 | Nov 2 | Nov 9 | Nov 16 | Nov 30 | Dec 7 | Dec 14 Sat Dec 16

This is a good page to bookmark.

The links on this syllabus will take you on divergent paths. I don't expect any of you to read -- or to need -- all of it. However, if you're going to progress towards the course objectives, I do expect all of you to read -- and to need -- much of it. It's up to you to balance your learning style against these resources.

Schedule at a Glance

There are no rules here. We're trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison

Look at the affiliate program that TweakHeadz Labs has with ZZounds via the forum at Studio-Central.com and with Amazon at Tweak's Bookstore for Creative People.

three primary roles for media.

The first is an introduction model, where the consumer is initially made aware of a product or service. Supplementing this introductory model are unique sponsorship and partnership elements.

The second category is response-oriented media.

The third role of media will be reminders.

===

"Acting small gets you big... All the attributes of a successful small company--the attention to detail, the willingness to work with individuals, the ability to be authentic, the fact that you don't have policies, the fact that you're willing to interact with the world as the world comes to you--are the things that the market now demands." - Seth Godin, comments taken from "Across The Sound," podcast, episode #47 (Celebrity SethMatch)

participatory media - We Media

Saturday Skills

I expect that you have the basic webmaking skills and FrontPage prototyping skills from MBA 504/600. Now you need to consolidate the fine points and move on to more complicated stuff.

On Saturdays from nine to noon, I will provide troubleshooting in basic laptop hardware and hands-on tutorials in software applications, especially FrontPage, WS_FTP, PaintShop Pro, and Movie Maker.

Gizmos, Inc.'s, Toolkit: Webmaking section has info on HTML tables, styles, JavaScript, and Java applets.

At the same time, I'll work with you on these skills:

Reading

Port 80 News Desk

This annotated list of URLs will take you to sites that have current news stories. Their archives are terrific for recent events and most of them have search features.

Port 80 Reference Desk

This annotated list of URLs will take you to sites that have articles about marketing topics that you should explore.

news web sites

Media Post - register (it's free) and sign up for newsletters, especially Online Spin and Research Briefs

For the sites below, I recommend that you get the RSS feed sent directly to your mailbox. By reading the headlines every day, you can get a quick overview of what's going on. Then go to the web sites and read only the articles that interest you.

Use an RSS feed aggregator like SharpReader or get an email client like Thunderbird (the one I use) that has an RSS reader built in.

NewsFactor Network's E-Commerce Times | RSS

Wired News | RSS

Internet.com's ClickZ | RSS

If you're going to follow only one feed, I highly recommend ClickZ, now part of the Internet.com group. It's as close as this course comes to a textbook. The list on ClickZ's left-side nav bar has three dozen topics from affiliate marketing to start-up marketing. You should read some regularly.

Other feeds that I subscribe to:

BoingBoing | RSS - "A directory of wonderful things"

Techdirt | RSS - "We make your company smarter."

Metafilter | RSS - community blog - life online

Slashdot | RSS - "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."

Night-by-Night

October 21

Remixing Culture: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig
by Richard Koman
O'Reilly Network, February 24, 2005

Now when you say the word writing, for those of us over the age of 15, our conception of writing is writing with text, and in fact our tradition protects the right to write with text and to draw upon other people's writings with text quite substantially. People can review my book and quote my words in reviewing my book, criticize me, do whatever they want, and that's protected by a tradition of fair use that has taken hundreds of years to develop but is now pretty strong.

But if you think about the ways kids under 15 using digital technology think about writing--you know, writing with text is just one way to write, and not even the most interesting way to write. The more interesting ways are increasingly to use images and sound and video to express ideas. Well, all of those ways of writing under the law as it's understood right now are basically illegal unless you secure permission from the author up front. So the same act of creativity in some sense, you know, taking, creating, mixing out of what other people do, is legal in the text world and illegal in the digital media world. And the struggle is to get people to recognize that there's no good reason for the rules to be so radically different between the two contexts, and that we ought to be encouraging a wider range of creativity using digital media--both because there are many people who would be extraordinarily talented in exploiting those types of creativity, and also because it would really spur growth in collective literacy about how media itself functions and how it has its effect.

Information as bits instead of atoms. The implications are revolutionary.

Are you ready for the future?

Futurists Pick Top Tech Trends
by Joanna Glasner
Wired News, October 25, 2005

Simplicity ...

Mobile socialization ...

IT revolution of 2006: ...

"We see the convergence of a whole stack of IT trends," said Pearson, who's gearing up for what he calls "the 2006 IT explosion." Basically, the explosion will consist of a number of technologies: better screens, improved location technology and highly sophisticated gaming consoles that provide a hub for home entertainment.

Pearson expects 2006 to be a good year for gadget sellers.

Computers as theater. For marketing, the Web is more than better paper. It's an opportunity for interactive community-building.

Incunabula (in-cu-NAB-u-la, from the Latin for cradle): the 50 years of books after Gutenberg's first. The Web sites we have now are the Internet's incunabula.

What gives marketing a bad name?

Marketing - mass marketing, billboards, laugh tracks, junk mail, telemarketing

According to many in an organization -- mostly in the finance and production departments -- marketing "gives away the profits". This tension between marketing and the rest of the organization comes from marketing feeling the downward pressure on prices most keenly and the rest of the organization feeling the upward pressure on costs.

eMarketing - pop-ups, adware, spam

marketing department-centric organizations that pretend they're customer-centric organizations

new  the future: Robin Sloan's EPIC 2014 (8 min. Flash movie). Thought-provoking; well worth the time.

Pizza Palace - superior customer service? or scary times we live in?

ZeroKnowledge.com

I am not a piece of your inventory.

The company has shifted to marketing to ISPs instead of their previous marketing to individuals. - Home page from January 2001 at Archive.org.

Freedom.net

What gives planning a bad name?

Adobe's Warnock awarded Lovelace Medal
by John Oates
The Reigster, May 14, 2004

Yesterday evening Dr John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe, was awarded the British Computer Society's Ada Lovelace Medal by BCS president Professor Wendy Hall CBE.

The prize is given to individuals for making a significant contribution to the advancement, or the understanding, of Information Systems. Ada Lovelace is remembered as one of the first women to make an impact on computing. She was assistant to Charles Babbage and began corresponding with him on maths and logic when she was just seventeen. ...

Warnock also had some advice for software startups today: "There was no great planning in what we did, the company evolved. You have to follow the river - it's the same now. There is no magic formula, but don't hire MBAs."

What Your Company Can Learn From Google
by Melanie Warner
Business 2.0, June 2004

When Omid Kordestani showed up for his new job as head of sales at Google in May 1999, the place was a mess. Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, ages 25 and 26, were working out of a cramped, disheveled office in Palo Alto. Their "business plan" wasn't much more than a series of notes scribbled on a whiteboard. Nearly all 12 employees had Ph.D.s in engineering or computer science, but nobody had a clue how the sophisticated search engine technology they were building was supposed to generate any money. The first MBA hired and the only guy pictured on Google's website wearing a tie, Iranian-born Kordestani was the startup's adult supervision.

A former sales executive at Netscape, he was charged with devising a coherent business model and five-year revenue plan for a duo who never expected to need such things. "Sergey and Larry never really wanted to start a company," explains Jeff Ullman, a former computer science professor at Stanford University and a member of Google's technical advisory board. "They had hoped to sell Google to Yahoo for $1 million, but Yahoo wasn't willing to pay that much. So they launched the company as a last resort."

Funny how things turn out.

to do

At the Bistro, post a Weather Report message for today's class, October 21

Subscribe to email newsletters and RSS feeds

At the Roundtable, start reading for the Future of Marketing topic

the logo and color scheme for your marketing

profile of three customers - composite stereotypes

research questions for marketing research - price sensitivity

find trade show for December presentation

October 26

6 - 7 PM

Introduction to the case

7 - 7:30 PM

Introduction to E-Commerce

How do you make money online?

Commerce is selling with people. E-commerce is selling with content. Your content will sell better with an opinion and an attitude.

The nature of the Internet

There ain't none.

The Internet is a built environment. It has no essential "nature" or irreducible way of being. It is what we make it. We can change it. We can leave it open and stupid like it was ten years ago. We can make it closed and smart like many corporate intranets are now.

Learn more about the hot issue of net neutrality

a broader view

Belize Cave Tubing info here! - Customer Service Department

For those who book ahead I will be there to meet you, I wear a jeans cap with a red mark on the front and back. I also have a sign marked "Reggie's CAVE TUBING NOW" or just ask for "Reggie the cave tuber", we usually arrive back to the dock 2:30 to 3:00 pm that's long before the ships tour.

brought to you by Reggie's Tours hosted at GnxOnline.com. WhoIs?

older version: http://web.archive.org/web/20021208191633/www.regtour.com/rt1.html

African Markets

What about the rest of the world? Limits of the Internet

Media Lab Asia's World Computer - developing rural wireless networks and building speech interfaces to make information more accessible to illiterate people

A computer for the illiterate, for communities, for everyone. Language, electrical power, literacy, and personal wealth are some of the problems that prevent participation in the digital revolution. We are creating computers that transcend these barriers to bring digital services to everyone. The design goal of the world computer is a locally localized, grassroots interface.

First Monday is an online journal that regularly has articles about the Internet in developing countries. I went to the site's search page, entered "Africa", and copied the first half-dozen results here, some dating back to 1997.

Overcoming Regulatory and Technological Challenges To Bring Internet Access To a Sparsely Populated, Remote Area

The Information and Communications Unit of the CSIR (Mikomtek) did just that in a project in Manguzi, a rural community in South Africa's KwaZulu Natal province.

Creating Virtual Learning Communities in Africa: Challenges and Prospects

The most ambitious distance education initiative on the continent to date is the African Virtual University (AVU) Project. Harasim, 1993.

Power to the People: The Role of Electronic Media in Promoting Democracy in Africa
by Dana Ott

A scatterplot of the regression line for the Africa region presented in Kedzie (1996) shows a strong cluster of data points at the lower end of the scale - meaning that countries with less interconnectivity tend to be less democratic.

Africa Connected
by Martin Hall

The novel Neuromancer offered racialised representations of Africans free from spatial ties to Africa, while Mala Mala offers the Internet tourist Africa's wilderness free from sequential time.

Creating an African Virtual Community College: Issues and Challenges

This paper proposes the establishment of an African Virtual Community College (AVCC) which uses the power of information communications technologies to overcome the financial, physical and informational barriers preventing increased access to higher education in several African countries. AVCC will utilize new technologies as the central media of its educational and training programs. This paper outlines the assumptions underpinning the AVCC model, its components and its advantages over existing educational models.

The Internet in Sierra Leone: The Way Forward?
by John Abdul Kargbo

In Sierra Leone, the Internet has been launched by Sierra Leone Telecommunications Limited (SIERRATEL), the country's main telecommunications provider.

Disruptive Technologies

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
J. Schumpeter, 1942

Business leaders usually visualize a market economy in the context of how capitalism administers existing structures, whereas the wiser approach is to understand how it creates and destroys them.

How important is the Internet?

diffusion chart

value and branding

No Logo opening paragraphs -- read this for a roundtable assignment, too

intangibles charts (intangibles.zip 325 KB)

7:30 - 7:50

The Four P's on the Web

Gizmos, Inc., The Four P's on the Web

open marketing

7:50 - 8:10

break!

8:10 - 9

Marketing Research: problems and opportunities

Wikipedia's marketing research and market segment

Market Research Roundtable

Ricci Street Port 80 Lighthouse Searching section: Steps in the Marketing Research Process

9 - 10 PM

Server Logs

large enterprise

Nabisco's CandyStand.com

Candy Stand Traffic Report on my desktop

Web analytics

Web analytics

The assessment of a variety of data, including Web traffic, Web-based transactions, Web server performance, usability studies, user submitted information and related sources to help create a generalized understanding of the visitor experience online.

server logs: where do they get collected?

What does an entry look like?

http://tolearn.net/coreskills.htm Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; MSIE 3.02; Update a; Windows 95) spc-isp-ott-uas-10-36.sprint.ca - - [29/Nov/1998:11:36:32 -0500] GET /marketing/images/courselogol.gif HTTP/1.0 200 13083

How does it read?

It tells me the page you're coming from, the browser and the operating system you're using, your ISP, the date and time, and the specific file you're requesting, in this case a .gif. The gif is 200 pixels high and 13 KB in size.

Learn more Site Metrics terminology

Web Analytics Association

WebTrends

September 2003 stats

March 2005 stats

hypothesis testing of web site design by analyzing server logs

assessing needs in order to develop the hypotheses
gathering log info
organizing with Web Trends
analyzing
interpreting
displaying
distributing

Google's free analytics service

Several examples of how marketing people use server logs:

What Should You Measure? Part 1: E-Commerce Metrics
by Melaney Smith
ClickZ, April 22, 2003

Jeff Antisdel is VP of marketing and business development director for FurnitureFind.com, a build-to-order furniture e-tailer with stores both online and off-. Jeff focuses on clickstream analysis and its relationship to sales.

"I spend about an hour each morning with my daily sales reports. I start with revenue, looking at strengths and weaknesses in daily sales," said Antisdel. "Then, I work backwards to evaluate the clickstream behavior that relates to those sales: how the customer got to our site, interacted with our site, and ultimately concluded with a purchase."

to do

At the Bistro, post a Weather Report message for tonight's class - Thursday, October 26

Roundtable

Market Research -- due November 2

Marketing Research Problem -- due November 9

The Future of Marketing -- due November 16

Subscribe to email newsletters and RSS feeds

the logo and color scheme for your marketing

profile of three or more customers - composite stereotypes

research questions for marketing research - price sensitivity

find trade show for December presentation

November 2

Synacor gets financing to expand Internet business
by Fred O. Williams
Buffalo News, October 24, 2006

What will the Internet in your car look like? DashPC (uses frames; click on Pictures).

Got Logos - take-it-or-leave-it logos for $25

The Walled Garden Syndrome
by Dana Blankenhorn
A-clue.com, April 19, 2004

Publishers have figured out something important about information. The value of information depends in large part on its scarcity. So while information wants to be free, the people who create information instinctively resist the necessity.

Strategy

The Strategy Pyramid
by Tim Berry
MPlans.com, March 23, 2004

The Strategy Pyramid places strategy at the top, supported by tactics in the middle, and programs at the base. Strategy means nothing without tactics and programs to make it real.

What Tim Berry calls tactics and programs, I'm calling techniques and features. The techniques are the methods we will use to implement the features (what). Some of them will be based on policies (why) and they will all proceed from strategy decisions. The key questions for you now are how and when.

The Net is a communications medium where the target audience controls their immediate and distant destiny. Mass marketers have decidedly not got their heads around this one yet, for they still practice "shove-it-down-your-throat" creative and strategic campaigns.
-- Larry Chase, Web Digest for Marketers

Scratchophone - Alari Thierry's "final term project as a business management student." The first ever public demonstration took place last year at the Urban Music Festival at Earl's Court, London.

We're a Hit in Manila! Now What?
by Joanna Glasner
Wired News, March 31, 2005

Sites shouldn't be surprised that they're getting attention from far-flung locales. International exposure is part of doing business on the web.

"When you put up a website, your audience is the world," Moore said. "You have to pick what segment of the audience you want to reach but realize that everybody's going to have the opportunity to view."

Eventually, Moore expects websites will be able to generate profits from online advertising in most of the world. For now, however, advertising-based business models work in only a handful of countries.

Currently, Moore said his firm finds that websites can profitably sell advertising in nine countries besides the United States: the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Australia, Canada, South Korea and Japan.

ManiaTV: MTV for the Web?
by Associated Press
Wired News, April 24, 2005

ManiaTV.com had 1 million viewers in February and has been doubling its audience each month, Massey said. He won't disclose monthly revenues but says monthly expenses are roughly $500,000 for the 65-employee outfit with about 125 "campus maniacs" (students who earn stipends to spread the word at 300 U.S. colleges) and representatives in seven U.S. cities. He says he expects to turn a profit in 12 months, unless ManiaTV spends more on investment and growth.

The advisory board includes director John Singleton, Forbes Publisher Rich Karlgaard and eBags co-founder Jon Nordmark, who credits Massey with getting ManiaTV off the ground for just $2 million of the $5 million raised.

Massey trademarked the ManiaTV name some seven years ago, but waited to launch the venture until technology for showing videos online improved and until there were 20 million broadband users, the same number of cable subscribers when MTV was launched more than 20 years ago.

Still, ManiaTV faces competition from the slew of music channels on regular television, and online powerhouses like Yahoo are boosting entertainment offerings.

MP3Tunes.com

thought experiment from
Everything Bad Is Good For You
by Steven Johnson

Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: videogames were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries—and then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they’re all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:

Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new 'libraries' that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.

Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia—a condition didn’t even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers.

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today’s generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to "follow the plot" instead of learning to lead.

Strategies
Design / development process

Tell the customers' story. Tell the company's story.

One model of marketing: here's our product, now let's go find a customer.

Another model of marketing: here's our customer, now let's go find a product.

In Peter Drucker's view, successful companies do only two things: market according to the second model and innovate as the customers change. Thus, there is nothing more important than listening to and observing customers.

Key concepts

pre-production, production, post-production

audience, usability, prototyping

storyboards, flowcharts, mock-ups, outlines, and site maps

production values; look and feel

2D and 3D design; interface design

interactivity design; information design/architecture

Storyboards Inc.

What decisions do you need to make?

Gizmos, Inc.'s Kiln - the development process

Port 80 Lighthouse's Design Guides

Best Bet: Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton's Web Style Guide

The site map will be like an outline. It will use boxes and lines to account for all the parts and features (content) and their relation to each other (structure). The colors, shapes, and sizes of the boxes and lines can communicate a lot of information easily.

The prototype will mock up representative pages of the web. You should include a home page (or index page or gateway page) as well as several pages from the interior of your web. It won't have most of the functionality of the eventual real web site, but it will be necessary and sufficient to let you (content and structure) and the web design folks (code, graphics, usability) form a productive team.

Cingular logo specs: proto into pro

Escaping Flatland from Envisioning Information
by Edward Tufte
Graphics Press, 1990

Even though we navigate daily through a perceptual world of three spatial dimensions and reason occasionally about higher dimensional arenas with mathematical ease, the world portrayed on our information displays is caught up in the two-dimensionality of the endless flatlands of paper and video screen. All communication between the readers of an image and the makers of an image must now take place on a two-dimensional surface. Escaping this flatland is the essential task of envisioning information -- for all the interesting worlds (physical, biological, imaginary, human) that we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariate in nature. Not flatlands.

This chapter outlines a variety of design strategies that sharpen the information resolution, the resolving power, of paper and video screen. In particular, these methods work to increase (1) the number of dimensions that can be represented on plane surfaces and (2) the data density (amount of information per unit area).

ProductionHUB

The leading online resource and industry directory for film, television, video and digital media production. Developed as a tool for people to locate production products, services and professionals.

Univ of Minnesota / Duluth's Web Design References

ColorMatch 5K (IE only, no Firefox)

Evan Williams' Ten Rules for Web Startups

strategy

How do the site's features address the objectives in the marketing plan?

This is the most important question to answer. Your answer will discuss some of the same ideas as will the presentation of the prototype web for your final presentation. There, you will talk more about the visual design. Here, you will talk about the features such as catalog, shopping cart, check-out system, etc. In the process, you should try to answer several other questions about content and usability.

content

You have a lot of information and activity on your site. How is it arranged?

What's on the site? What's not on the site?
Why are the parts arranged that way?
Explain the central metaphor or theme or organizing principle.
How scalable and extensible is the design?

usability

How does that organizing principle relate to the user (or users)?
What will the user use the site for? Present a typical scenario.
How will the user navigate? Present a typical session.

What's next?
How does the site address privacy, security, help, searching, and timeliness?

trade-offs

What does the site not do that you wanted it to and why?
What does the site do that you did not want it to and why?

Strategies
Marketing Information

Port 80

Dock's Marketing Information

Lighthouse's Marketing Research

Dock's Marketing Metrics

Pop Music Buyers

Best Bets

market research - stats for you to use in your marketing plans

Pew Internet & American Life Project's Reports

Center for Media Research's Media Post

InternetRetailer.com

The Online Music Market: Own vs. Rent ~ Will Consumers Buy Into It? (TOC)

Online Publishers Association's Generational Media Study (250K .pdf)
September 21, 2004 (see page 11 - Top Media of Choice)

Big Champagne

 BigChampagne is the leading provider of information about popular entertainment online. Our focus is on the world’s most popular "download" communities, file sharing networks. These are the download "sites" (actually networks) first made famous by Napster and now including clients like Limewire, Bearshare, KaZaA, Morpheus, and hundreds of others.

BigChampagne was founded in 2000 as a technology-driven market research and marketing consulting firm, specializing in peer-to-peer (P2P) technology.

BigChampagne's commitment is to develop measurement technologies and marketing strategies for these new networks, recognizing the extraordinary opportunity that P2P architecture offers all content creators in improving distribution, customer profiling and true permission-based marketing.

BigChampagne's market research data is ... strictly behavioral rather than self-reported. Unlike survey and focus group data, the information we gather and report is strictly and passively observed.

When we did the Boxtops exercise, we wondered, "Who's responsible?" Are the web site designers and the box designers even in the same department? What's the decision-making process like?

After we answered those personnel and process questions, we'd come to another set of questions, the important ones:

For strategy and policies, what are the implications of information about metrics, demographics, and competitors?

What facts (numbers, percentages, authoritative speculation -- ok, call them factoids) can we find about our:

> market demographics (who, where, how much they're spending now)
> market needs, gaps
> market trends (driving / restraining forces)
> predictions about market growth (or shrinkage)

What facts etc. can't we find or afford but would need to have for a real investor? How much budget would you need to take it to the next level?

Also, let's talk about the process of finding the information that we did find. What keywords (search terms) worked best?

You will not find a neat package of stats for exactly what you are looking for. You will find little pieces, you will have to make inferences, you will have to extrapolate. For example, if Tina can find a national stat for how many Americans regularly get her kind of massages, then she can take the percentage of Americans who live in WNY and multiply to get how many people in WNY who regularly get her kind of massages.

As long as you cite your sources, explain your math, and suggest a degree of confidence, you are free to do a lot of inferring.

It's easier to find the resources than to find the time to keep up.

There are lots of web sites where print publications put their archives. The publication can often afford the expensive studies that you can't. Then the publication's writers and editors use a factoid from one of the studies. The one you're looking for may be in an article on a different topic, so you want to search body text, not just headlines.

If you find an interesting article quoting or originally written by a news services such as AP, Reuters, Wired, etc., go to that service's site to search.

Don't  forget the College library's resources.

The Ringtone Riddle
How Ringtones' Success Has Led Labels To Verge of a Misstep on Music Pricing
by Jason Fry
Wall Street Joural, November 21, 2005

Is $2.49 the new 99 cents?

The recording industry seems to think so -- or at least desperately wants that to be true. That's what downloading a song to your cellphone will cost if you use Sprint's Music Store. $2.49 is the standard, commonly accepted price for ringtones from a variety of wireless carriers. And it's hardly a secret that key players in the recording industry now regret having let Apple Computer set the per-song price for digital downloads at 99 cents, and are seeking higher prices.

Both in numbers and buzz, ringtones are a big deal now. According to the Yankee Group, ringtones will probably be a $500 million business in the U.S. this year and a multibillion-dollar business globally. That makes them the third most-popular wireless application behind talk and text-messaging. This spring, Yankee Group found about one-third of U.S. consumers had at least tried to download a ringtone; when asked what wireless service they'd spend money on each month if they additional cash, 13-17-year-olds chose ringtones above all else, and ringtones were the #2 choice among those 18-24. And there's a lot of innovation around ringtones, from ringbacks (ringtones your callers hear) to artists creating exclusive content for the market or using ringtones to promote music before it hits the street.

But all that buzz has led the recording industry and the wireless carriers to a dangerous fantasy: Since people will pay $2.49 to download a snippet of a song, there's no reason they won't pay that much to download the whole thing. It's an enticing prospect, but one based on the idea that ringtones and downloads are similar. They're not; customers don't see them the same way and won't pay the same price for them, and no amount of wishful thinking will make them change their minds.

Many of these links go to Larry Chase's Web Digest For Marketers, which will get you started and give you some search terms for exploring more on your own.

Models
Online Advertising

Webby Awards

ads: Internet Advertising Competition

commercials: YouTube's TV commercials

concepts (pitches) and storyboards

corp video: Tailored Tunes

promotional video: Garden of Earthly Delights

Impact's Trade Show Displays

AdverBlog: advertising and new media marketing

MSN Advertising - 2006 Winners

EyeBlaster's ad gallery

A Brief History of Computers, As Seen in Old TV Ads

filling 2D space

brochures and posters - best bet: Google Images

others:

All Posters

old British posters

Polish movie posters

Shoshkeles

Media

Online ad (including Banner, Pop-up, Interstitial, or eye blaster not created in rich media format)

Rich media Online ad (using Flash or similar technology)

Email message (ad delivered via email)

Online Newsletter campaign

Microsite/landing page (web site used in advertising process)

Interactive application (executable file delivered online)

Integrated ad campaign (campaign using two or more of the above online media)

to do

Make one of each of these ad sizes and exchange them with your classmates for use on their web sites.

Tools
Essential Software

proprietary CRM systems: Marketing on the Web (CRM)

five essential software tools for marketing

If you can use one example of each of these types of software, then you'll be able to pick up another more easily.

desktop publishing (DTP): The Paper Mill Store's free templates

non-linear video editors: Windows Movie Maker

SWiSHzone.com - sample from Tanya Fish last fall: commercial

If you find Movie Maker constricting, you might want to step up to Ulead's Video Studio. You can get a 30-day trial version, and then step up again to Ulead's MediaStudio Pro, also available in a 30-day free trial. Those two trials will get you to the end of the course, at least.

download Audacity

who needs a review session?

FPage, PaintShop Pro, Movie Maker -- Saturday, November 11, 18?

Workshop
Market Research Agenda

logos + slogans

toilet manufacturer's slogan: "When it comes to #2, we are #1."

Buffalo tattoo shop slogan: "Get pricked by a pro."

ongoing R/D agenda
competitive analysis
demographic segments
customer profiles
survey instruments (questionnaires, focus group scenarios)

Ricci Street Port 80 Lighthouse's Primary Research: Define the Problem

Integration
by Dana Blankenhorn
A-Clue.com, April 24, 2006

The Web is all about interaction. It's not about content. It's about community. It's about scaling intimacy. It's about building databases that move toward one another - registration, content, traffic - so people get in deep quick and stay deep. That's where the loyalty lies, not in what you do for them but what you can get them to do for one another.

Hot or Not? (available via paid archive only)
by Jessica Yadegaran
Buffalo News, November 17, 2005

More casual than online dating, the feature is a way for like-minded hotties to meet up. Today, the Meet Me service, which costs $6 a month, boasts 600,000 members. At least one marriage is reported to the site every day, Hong says.

The site's motto is "fun, clean and real," so they've avoided pop-ups and have enlisted thousands of volunteers to moderate the site and keep it free of nudity and other questionable content.

Mobile TV and Video Attracting a High Percentage of the Coveted Young Adult and Male Audience, According to Telephia
Wednesday March 22, 9:00 am ET

LeapFrog's Wild Ride
by Josh McHugh
Wired, November 2005

Derek is perched on a chair in a Kid Lab at LeapFrog Enterprises. His sneakers swing back and forth a few inches above the carpet as he stares intently at an oversize pen, turning it in his hands, giving it careful consideration. The lanky 11-year-old is the only person in the room, but he's hardly alone. A pair of video cameras track his movements, and four microphones record his every murmur and sigh. Behind a one-way mirror, two child development experts, a producer, and a journalist are watching anxiously. We're here to see what Derek does with a gadget LeapFrog calls the Fly. ...

One ironclad technique for achieving this: what Marggraff calls the seven-second rule. While studying children for the LeapPad, Marggraff decided to test their patience. Surreptitiously working the chronograph on his watch during conversations with kids (and later adults), he deduced that the human attention span, regardless of age, is composed of blocks roughly 10 seconds long. Further testing in the LeapFrog Kid Labs (where parents bring 2,500 children each year to try out products, usually in exchange for $25 gift certificates to retailers like Target) refined this measurement to seven seconds. ...

Thanks to Jim Marggraff, the company's resident inventor, LeapFrog leads the world in play-based learning. In 1999, after three years of development, Marggraff unveiled the LeapPad, a product that is essentially a cross between a talking book and an educational videogame console. Winner of Toy of the Year from the Toy Manufacturers of America, it was the best-selling toy in the US in 2001 and 2002, and was knocked from the top spot in 2003 only by the books and cartridges sold separately for the device. Powered by the LeapPad and its accessories, LeapFrog's sales soared from $160 million in 2000 to $680 million in 2003. It was the fastest-growing toy company in history. ...

LeapPad's once-torrid sales cooled off last year, as the company's main competitors - Hasbro, VTech, Mattel - came to market with a raft of new learning toys. Complicating matters, LeapFrog has been embattled lately, facing operational disarray left over from its run of explosive growth and an internal scandal. Meantime, it has poured the better part of $100 million into making the Fly. The result: a management shuffle, a net loss for 2004, a cratering stock price, and angry stockholders. No wonder all eyes are on Derek. If he doesn't take to the Fly, LeapFrog could croak. ...

The next thing I notice, because Marggraff is getting ready to show off his newest toy, is his enthusiasm. He pushes aside some books and a talking electronic globe to begin what must be his thousandth personal demo of the Fly. I can't help but feel a little energized as well. ...

Marggraff spent three years flying back and forth between Oakland and Stockholm, trying to persuade Anoto to license its technology to LeapFrog. Competing for an exclusive-rights deal against a group led by Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr (who wanted to make similar adjustments to the pen in hopes of creating a new PDA), Marggraff finally convinced Anoto to choose LeapFrog and codevelop the voice box and computer-in-a-pen chipset his design required. LeapFrog and Anoto won't reveal exactly how much they spent building the Fly, but sources estimate that together they put in more than $100 million, with LeapFrog bearing most of the financial burden.

skills

What are these skills worth? Here's an unsolicited email I received a couple of years ago, spelling mistakes and all.

Subj: ~Beautiful, Custom Websites $349 Complete!!
Date: 5/2/02 12:12:39 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From: c379sc3@caramail.com
To: doug@tolearn.net

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If you have received this in error or would like to be removed from our list, mailto:csprom@yahoo.com?subject=Remove__me

Congratulations, you just got promoted!

Job Description

In your new job as manager of online marketing, aka webmaster, this is what you should consider in order to make good decisions and solve problems well:

Compare this list of the concerns of an online marketer with Internet Retailer's vendor list, organized by the needs of online marketers.

information architecture

especially content (digital assets) and creativity; look and feel of the site
metrics and ROI
content development: site design and writing
content management: who updates what when?
content publishing: free or fee?
partnering (affiliate marketing)

product

visual design of catalog (merchandising)
interactivity design
converting web site traffic (the funnel or yield model)
advertising, promoting: driving web site traffic
B2B and B2C email

brand

brand mgmt
PR, news
investor relations
financial disclosure
merchant accounts
media buying; agency relations

customer

social capital

external customer service (public web site), accessibility, community building (buzz; viral mkting)

viral marketing

As recently as May 2001, the two Stanford students who started Google were still explaining everything to everyone as they had been doing for years. Google's address at the time was http://google.stanford.edu/ (no longer active).

Today, Google is recognized as the search engine leader. Google.com is one of the most visited sites on the Web. How long did that take, with no traditional advertising and promotion? You don't count it in years from May 2001, you count it in months.

Same story with Napster and note how fast millions of folks switched to KaZaA, all by word of mouse. How do the accountants count that?

Social capital is very fragile. eBay could turn into a ghost town in a matter of days or weeks if they made a bad decision about how to treat their customers, who do all the work, after all.

corporate culture

internal customer service (intranet), accessibility, sales and customer rep training, community building

information

about others

research, competitive intelligence or market intelligence; market conditions

about us

analyzing visitor and customer data

smarter marketing; research for staying on the cutting/leading edge

policies

security, privacy, liability, ownership, taxation, acceptable usage, compliance

accessibility: esp. handicapped, international, and different devices like PDAs and cell phones

back-end

production and maintenance of code to enable all the above

to do

At the Bistro, post a Weather Report message for tonight's class - November 2

Roundtable

Market Research -- due November 2

Marketing Research Problem -- due November 9

The Future of Marketing -- due November 16

November 9

who needs a review session?

FPage, PaintShop Pro, Movie Maker -- Saturday, November 11, 10 AM

A strong brand position means the brand has a unique, credible, sustainable, and valued place in the customer's mind. It revolves around a benefit that helps your product or service stand apart from the competition.

-- Scott Davis, Brand Asset Management

extend your brand with Free Download Manager

Corporate Video's Extreme Makeover (not available online)
by Marco Greenberg, pres. of Reel Biography
Media Post's Video Insider, November 6, 2006

WITH THE EXPLOSION IN INTERNET video--news and entertainment, video ads, and 100 million user-generated video clips pouring onto YouTube--has the time arrived for the much-maligned corporate video to get an "extreme makeover"?

Or. as Peter Himler of Flatiron Communications observes, "why aren't corporate communications folks embracing digital video to the degree that their marketing communications counterparts have?"

Most corporations, despite the alluring and virtually instant platforms to create their own media, are not yet rushing to have their CEOs blog - let alone video blog or video podcast or create compelling on-demand video. While there are many notable exceptions on the blogging front -- including CEOs from Dell, GM etc., constraints on time, concerns about over exposure, approval from legal, identifying resources to produce, questions regarding moderating comments and not wanting to get "burned" -- as was the case in early examples of corporate blog -- are just some of the reasons most are taking a pass on new media and new apps for video.

While the time to be more "out there" with corporate video is coming more slowly than one would like, currently we're seeing more modest signs of change.

Steven Levy of Newsweek perceptively describes on Beet.TV how amateurs might once again take a back seat to a more professional approach to video production -- "unlike blogs where anyone can sit around in their pajamas in a dimly lit room... vlogging involves a lot more elements -- compelling content, production value and relevancy."

While vlogging might be a bit too avant-garde for most corporate types, how about a walking and talking executive in the bio section of Web sites, or turning the standard "about us" section of a Web site from clichéd text into an "ultimate video elevator pitch" that enables key audiences (e.g. investors/media etc) to truly get your differentiators? Similarly, for both internal and external communications, rather than an impersonal memo via e-mail, how about viewing your company's executive online talking about the latest events -- an extension of what Sun Microsystems' chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, recently requested from the SEC: that it allow him to post official company news for investors on his blog.

Here are three future applications of new corporate video to look out for:

Online recruiting: Companies such as law firms are starting to realize the power of branded video in capturing their story in order to recruit the very best attorneys.

Two-Way marketing: www.expotv.com is a platform for user-generated content in which consumers post video clips on experiences that they have had with a product -- what the company's CEO calls the start of two-way marketing. Look for companies to increasingly get in on this act.

From the desktop: A Toronto based start-up, www.mDialogue.com, will be using Webcams to create a world in which every executive and/or analyst is empowered to be their own producer/editor of content, and within minutes will distribute it, for example over a corporate Intranet.

It is high time for corporate communications executives to see video as more than a staid corporate video, infomercial or VNR (video news release designed for possible placement in an increasingly less popular medium: television), and instead see it for what it has become: a new communications and branding vehicle delivered over the Internet, produced with substance, and with the authentic conversational style and brevity that Internet viewing demands.

Be A Local Hero
by Dana Blankenhorn
blog, October 27, 2006

Finally, watch the money fly in.

Americans very much want to support American-made right now. And people in every state want to support producers in their state. If your price point is low, if your quality is good, if your advertising is quirky, you've got a business.

Abundance vs. Scarcity
by Dana Blankenhorn
blog, October 27, 2006

Trouble is, [the economics of scarcity] doesn't work anymore. The Internet provides too much abundance for it to work. And thus we have business model problems. Intractable ones. You can't turn a scarcity-based business model into one based on abundance. It's impossible.

Scarcity business models give the power to the intermediary who represents the seller.
Abundance business models give the power to the intermediary who represents the buyer.

Digital Freedom Campaign

The Digital Freedom Campaign holds as its core value the recognition that new technologies are essential to the creativity and innovation that have allowed this nation to thrive. Digital technology enables anyone and everyone to be an artist and an innovator - to produce music, to create cutting edge films and videos, and to reach new audiences. For consumers, it allows individuals the ability to enjoy these new works when they want, where they want, how they want and to participate in the process. These are basic freedoms that must be protected and nurtured. The Digital Freedom campaign is dedicated to defending the rights of artists, innovators, creators and consumers to use lawful technology free of unreasonable government restrictions and without fear of costly lawsuits.

Sony's EULA | EFF's commentary

If your house gets burgled, you have to delete all your music from your laptop when you get home. That's because the EULA says that your rights to any copies terminate as soon as you no longer possess the original CD.

You can't keep your music on any computers at work. The EULA only gives you the right to put copies on a "personal home computer system owned by you."

If you move out of the country, you have to delete all your music. The EULA specifically forbids "export" outside the country where you reside.

Seth Godin's Liar's Blog

Successful marketers don’t tell the truth. They don’t talk about features or even benefits. Instead, they tell a story. A story we want to believe.

This is a book about doing what consumers demand — painting vivid pictures that they choose to believe. Every organization — from nonprofits to car companies, from political campaigns
to wine glass blowers—must understand that the rules have changed again. In an economy where the richest have an infinite number of choices (and no time to make them), every organization is a marketer and all marketing is about telling stories.

Marketers succeed when they tell us a story that fits our worldview, a story that we intuitively embrace and the share with our friends.

The One-Channel Universe
by Shelly Palmer
Online Spin, November 10, 2005 (free reg req)

Last week we lived in a 1,000-channel universe. ... This week we began the transition to a one-channel universe, and we're going to like it much better. The one channel you are going to watch is "your channel," and the other channels will soon cease to matter. In an on-demand video universe, programs become the choices, not channels. The concept of channels ceases to exist (as does the concepts of time, lead-in and lead-out). You will have thousands of choices instead of hundreds, and you will be able to get them when you want them. Sounds great, doesn't it?

There's only one problem. In order to find what you want, you need to be an "engaged viewer." That means that you become your own program director. You also have to become your own video engineer and time manager. In a one-channel universe, you are responsible for picking your programming from a list of programs that may or may not interest you. ... Then you have to program your viewing environment. Is it a cable set-top box, a media center computer, a good old-fashioned PC with a broadband connection? You're the video engineer; you must do the work.

Marketing Webs: Structural Parts

Quick tour of a Web site of a company that you can use as a model for your web, good or bad, especially any ecommerce features such as catalog, shopping cart, and customer service areas. The experience of using the site. Some of the features, you may want to emulate. Other features, maybe not.

How does this company make money?
How does the site contribute to the organization's revenue?

Ricci Street is a customer service site. It supports the main function of face-to-face education.

Is Ricci Street more like a textbook: static, frozen? Or more like a classroom: dynamic, evolving?

Critique form (not to fill out -- just to give you ideas about what to look for)

Community B2B's B2B Fundamentals

How do they make money online? Well, in theory ....

Look at some business models.

Business to Business (B2B)

Forbes magazine Best of The Web B2B Directory

Business to Consumer (B2C)

Consumer to Consumer (C2C) | learn more about peer-to-peer

Exchanges and Marketplaces (B2B)

structural parts

The Online Store

Which parts will your online store have?

benchmark web sites

what structural parts do they have? which do they have in common?

devices - cell phones and PDAs - palmOne | Best Buy

music blogs - Blogcritics.org

music stores - digital delivery - MusicNet, pressplay, BMG Music Service, Lycos Rhapsody, iMusic, eMusic

music stores - mass retail - selection from full list of legal sites - New World Record - BuyMusicHereINDIEgo, a division of Synergy Media

big 5 investors relations - EMI Group

C2C community benchmark - eBay

C2C music community - Sonic Garden

B2C retail  - Amazon

B2B services  - Covisint

microsites - Wikipedia's definition - Cheerios.com

Who are these folks? Search the WhoIs database by typing in the domain name. (Shift-click to have it open in a new browser window so you don't lose this one.)

Marketing Webs: Models

Your competitors' webs

Spring 2006: send me yours

etree.org | ShowFootage | Griffin Technology | MobiRadio | Indie-Music.Com | indiemusic.com | indiego.com

how is the "home page" or "landing page" real estate used?

interior page real estate - compare to landing pages

example: BtoBOnline

logo, slogan and other branding

content: words, images

navigation areas - onsite and offsite

structural and decorative graphics

space ads - 3rd party and self

text boxes and forms to collect information

Marketing Webs: Tools

FTP, printer, copier, laminator

still camera, video camera, webcam

production values; look and feel

video production tips: lighting and sound

Workshop
print publications - filling 2D space

catalogs, brochures, posters, banners, billboards, t-shirts, mugs, space ads, packaging

displays

tables and backdrops

integrated with digital

to do

Weather report for tonight, Thursday, November 9

Roundtables

market research agenda - Roundtable topic due ASAP

storyboards for videos - we will discuss in the fourth hour next week, November 16

November 16

After tonight, we're almost halfway through this course and three-quarters of the way through the 600/604 sequence.

Price elasticity - research problem definitions - Bistro forum

Example for Broken Chain Music

What will independent artists and independent-music listeners pay for BCM's web-based services? Will they buy a yearly subscription as well as pay per song?

Artist Yearly Fee of $ 79 / 99 / 129 and a Listener Yearly Fee of $ 19 / 29 / 39?

How much resistance would there be to paying $ .10 / .20 / .30 per song and $ .65 / .75 / .85 per collection (10 songs of a similar theme) for downloads?

Who Are The Real Pirates? (sub req, so I'm putting the whole article below)
by Shelly Palmer
MediaPost, November 17, 2005

WE HEAR THE CONTENT INDUSTRY and rights holders complaining about piracy everyday: file sharing, physical piracy, theft-of-services, derivative works, etc. But has anyone stopped to think about how many times consumers are asked to pay for the same content? Computer files may be the final form factor, but that is not stopping media companies from extracting every last bit of value from each file. Because most media is delivered through walled gardens or physical copies, even files can be resold. For example: first you pay 99¢ to purchase a song on iTunes. Then you pay $2.49 to download a portion of that song as a ringtone. You can then pay $1.99 to use a portion of that song as a ringback tone--and $1.99 on iTunes to purchase a download of the video for that song. Next comes a charge of $1.49--for a still image of the artist to use as wallpaper on your mobile device. You would rather download it for free from the Internet, but you can't get it into your phone. (Some people actually take a picture of the computer screen with their cell phone cameras to avoid this charge, but not many.)

You may pay $14.99 for the DVD of the movie that features that song and, if you are truly out of your mind, you will pay $19.99 for the CD of the album that includes that song. Then you will pay $3.95 to watch the pay-per-view or video-on-demand version of the movie--and another $6.95 for the HD VOD concert that features the same song.

If the media company has its way, you will pay $12.95 per month for the subscription to HBO that will broadcast the movie and the concert on the cable company's linear and VOD channels. Ultimately, part of your basic cable or satellite package will go to pay a per-subscriber fee to Music Choice, where you will hear the song. You may also pay $12.95 per month to a satellite radio company where you can hear the song and, if Apple continues its world dominance over the personal music player world, you will ultimately purchase a co-branded iPod with the complete collected works of this artist (including this same song) for about $200.

How many times can you sell the same master file? There doesn't seem to be any limit. You just have to keep the walls in the walled gardens up and keep the formats incompatible.

How many times will you buy the same master file? That question is being answered every day on P2P networks, via email and podcasts. Obviously, some consumers are willing to pay for the convenience of not having to bother converting their own files to be used in all of their devices. But there are far more consumers who would rather not pay for the same thing over and over again. Is there a middle ground? I doubt it, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Audiolicious

A Windows program that lets you turn any RSS feed into a podcast. It uses text-to-speech to convert the feed's webpages into MP3 files.

Media on the Move: How to Measure In- and Out-of-Home Media Consumption
by Linda Dupree and John Bosarge
AC Nielsen's Consumer Insight Magazine, Winter 2004

“Project Apollo” is the working title for a new marketing information service being explored by Arbitron and VNU in collaboration with Procter & Gamble. Conceived as a breakthrough service for the next century, Project Apollo would collect and connect three types of data via a single source: multi-media message exposure, brand recognition and preference, and actual purchase behavior.

What differentiates Project Apollo from current offerings are the synchronized data source (all information comes from a single panel of consumers who have agreed to participate in this program), the granularity of the data, the direct link of media information to purchase behavior or intent, the first-ever total view of media consumption—in and out of the home—and an ROI metric powerful enough to satisfy the most demanding CEO.

Trends in the marketing mix: The proportions for advertising and trade have reversed in last quarter-century because power has moved from manufacturers to retailers.

Aggressive List Management

At ALM, we’re focused on providing top-notch list management and marketing services for over 260 business and consumer lists covering a wide array of industries. Since 1983, Aggressive List Management has excelled at generating list profits for our clients. From database consultation to the development of innovative list marketing idea and promotions, we are dedicated to provide superior, individualized services.

Whether you’re interested in purchasing a list or looking for ways to maximize the profitability of your own data, our website is here to help you gather the information necessary to make your direct marketing decisions today!

How much can you make by letting ALM sell your customers' personal info?

Tuned In: Online Music Community Subscribers

Subscribers to an online music community featuring independent artists ...

Now you can reach subscribers to an online digital music community! These consumers pay anywhere from $9.00 to $19.99 a month to gain access to a diverse catalog of over 500,000 music downloads in a variety of genres from top independent labels. It is the only internet music service to focus on independent artists.

So what online music community could this be? Do a Google search for < 500,000 music downloads $19.99 $9.99 >. Looks to me like eMusic.com. So then what do ALM's numbers tell us about eMusic's annual revenue and their customer profile?

The Cycles Of Our Time
by Dana Blankenthorn
A-Clue, May 2, 2005

Some falls are permanent. They last a lifetime. It took 25 years for stocks to get back to where they were in 1929, and by then it was a different set of stocks. Japan is still waiting to return to its 1987 peak, and there again you'll be in different stocks. Texas has an opportunity to grow with new technology, but it's a new generation that must seize the day.

While some falls are permanent, others are temporary. I actually saw several small recessions while covering technology. There was the "waiting for Windows" period of the late 1980s, when Japanese companies were able to time the pace of change and grab market share. The "multimedia" craze of the early 1990s actually became a crash, which no one noticed because the Internet boom came right behind it. But if you were in the CD-ROM business, you noticed. It may have even killed you.

Was the dot-bomb permanent? No, it was very temporary. But what has happened is that growth then moved, into cellular, and Americans failed there. The last wave was an American lake. The current age is dominated by Scandinavia, Korea, and (increasingly) Taiwan, China, India, all of Southeast Asia. The U.S. tech economy lost its dynamism, because Americans forgot that dynamism was based on competition. Politicians thought they could grant permanent concessions, to the Bells, to their cellular stepchildren. What they proved (and it's ironic that this was done under Republicans) is that economic policy should never be made in Washington. Don't pick winners. Instead, guarantee a competitive environment, reinforce the competition when needed, and let the market handle the rest.

Why hasn't this policy failure been noticed?

Mission statement and copyright policy
Fading Ways Music

The CopyLeft notice (on the right) means that if a fan copies a CD to give to a friend, they are not breaking the law. Even if they upload an MP3 and share it with other web users they are not breaking the law as long as they are not making any money out of distributing the artists' work. Contrary to what the RIAA and the majors are claiming, home taping in the 70s and the CD burning of today is not what's hurting music - what's hurting music is the fact that ClearChannel-style corporations are broadcasting crap music to such a high percentage of the population that people are giving up on buying music, because they are NOT HEARING ANYTHING THEY LIKE on the airwaves of today.

as long as they are not making any money out of distributing the artists' work

the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

Strategy
Marketing Web Features: Content

concepts: sticky, magnetic

content library: things to see, read, hear, get

functionality: things to do

company-generated content

user-generated content

Why Organizations Think Of Web Content Like They Think Of Invoices
by Gerry McGovern
April 2003

Embedded deep within the psychic of the traditional organization is the view of content as an historical record. This view sees content as describing an event that has occurred. However, Web content is a driver of the event. Web content is action-oriented. That's the big shift and many organizations have not grasped it.

Over the years, I have often wondered why organizations place such little value on content. Many public websites are a mess; intranets are even worse. And organizations don't really care, because deep down they don't value content.

Organizations don't place much value on content because they don't see content as having much value. Most managers come from the school where actions speak louder than words. Words are okay but when you want to get the job done you have to act.

Words and numbers are not the act; they are rather a record of the act. An invoice is a record of the sale. It is not the sale. It comes after the sale. That's where the Web is different. If commerce is selling with people, then ecommerce is selling with content.

On the Web, words are no longer some passive historical record of an event. They are a potential driver of the event.

If commerce is selling with people, then ecommerce is selling with content.

What features do web sites have? Who supplies that feature or makes the software to enable it? Is it done by the site's owners or by third parties? Are the features worth the effort (cost / benefit; business case)?

Blogs Will Change Your Business
by Stephen Baker and Heather Green
Business Week, May 2, 2005

Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blog