Technology360

The End of Customer Service

The March 24th issue of Time has a feature, "10 Ideas That Are Changing The World," one of which is "The End of Customer Service" by Barbara Kiviat.  This is presented as an inexorable and vaguely positive thing, but I don't know.

A trip (two, actually) to a Maryland Ikea store this past week to buy some furniture for my new apartment sure brought this home.  Ikea has features nice design, inexpensive prices, and great Swedish meatballs with lingonberries for $5.  Well, maybe I should reverse the order of those attributes.  They make it easy for a decorating doofus to match things. 

I swear that every time I go to an Ikea store, which is only about annually, I see fewer employees.  The ones that are left are always very helpful, but sometimes you have to look a bit to find one.  This time, all the check-out lines were self-service.  A single employee worked all the lanes to assist people like me who couldn't find the barcodes and to keep us from scanning both Box 1 and Box 2 when they're part of the same item or you'll pay twice.

I wouldn't be surprised if a few years from now, you'll walk into Ikea and see only customers.  There will be a couple of guards on the way out, Costco style, to check your receipts against your cart, and maybe some people behind the scenes converting dollars into kronor.  Go to the cafeteria and hold your plate under an opening and your dozen meatballs will drop out.  Rotate the plate quickly and you'll get a splat of lingonberries and a blob of mashed potatoes (or is it the other way around?).  Can't find something?  Go to a kiosk and talk with a helpful operator named Bruce or Christine from Bangladesh (unless you're in an Ikea in Germany, in which case they're named Helmut and Helga).  I'd rather they automate their self-service furniture pick up so I don't have to go for the Advil when I get home.

Bringing this back to media a minute... It's probably not too far off the mark to say that self-service is one of the defining characteristics of new media vs. old media.  The legacy media are full service media.  We think about what programs you want and when you want them so you won't have to.  Just turn on your radio and television and sit back.  New media are self-service.  Search for this podcast or that video or that streaming link.  Decide both what you want to consume and whether it's MP3 or Real or Windows Media or QuickTime.  Which of the several players I have do I want to use?  Want to use one of the new IP radios?  Then sometimes be prepared to manually enter the URL of your favorite audio service.  You get the picture.

So we who want to succeed with distributing programming over emerging platform choices need to design those services to make them simulate the full-service environment as much as possible.  --Dennis

The importance of leadership with vision

Consultant Paul Jacobs writes:

... We're often asked why, in the face of declining overall listening to radio, Public Radio continues to thrive?  It's simple - everything about Public Radio programming is long-term.  And they cherish their audience relationships.  They're patient, they nurture their programs, they research their listeners' needs.  ¶  Their conventions and meetings are more frequent, better attended, and more considerate of the values and qualities that contribute to product development, brand building, and audience relationships.  While admittedly they don't suffer under the pressures of Wall Street or profit goals, they are in fact businesses that need to pay bills (with a lot less government support than people think).  The bottom line is that Public Radio succeeds because they think long-term.  ¶  And while Public RadioPublic Radio's core values doesn't have "celebrity" program directors you've heard of, most have been in their local communities for a long time and understand how to connect with the locals.  Additionally, are brilliant, concise, and imbedded in the minds of every person responsible for the creation of programming.  They are the guiding force behind their emotional attachment with their listeners. ...

Link:  JacoBLOG.  --Dennis

The IMA impasse

John Proffitt (the one in Anchorage, not Houston) returned from the Public Media 2008 conference in February and wrote:

... In my (current) view, IMA appears to be at an impasse. We seem to have reached a point where integrated media advocacy has given out, where recommendations and demonstrations fail to move our organizations to meaningful action. ¶  To date, IMA has been effective at putting the online services question on the table within public broadcasting and has done so eloquently and repeatedly. But for all the work completed, no significant sea change has yet arrived. Meanwhile, the house of public TV is on fire, we’re losing audience to a fracturing media world across the board and new players (like Wikipedia and others) have stolen “our” web traffic and possibly our raison d’etre. ...

Link:  Gravity Medium. 

For readers outside of U.S. pubcasting, the IMA is the Integrated Media Association, the organization which encourages work in emerging public media.  I was on its board until resigning last fall to chair NPR's board.  But I think John makes a good point.  I've been a self-appointed nag about new media for nearly a decade and can't really point to much success.  That may just be my own ineffectiveness, but John implies something more widespread it involved.

John's post initiated a very articulate conversation that you shouldn't miss in the comments with consultant Rob Paterson and independent radio producer Stephen Hill, like John, both deep thinkers about this.  Stephen has collected his comments in his blog.  See Calling the game (link: Spatial Relations) and Pack light and bring your values with you (link: Spatial Relations).  In the second, Stephen notes:

... The problem is that mass usage paradigms do not translate into viable business models for niche services.  ¶ All of public broadcasting with the exception of the big NPR news shows and a few others is a niche in the media world. Geographically defined, locally focused services are also another niche in Internet logic. ...

  --Dennis

HD Radio's critics

Kurt Hanson and Mark Ramsey -- others, too -- continue to take shots at HD Radio (see Black Friday for HD Radio in hear2.0).  At its present state of deployment by iBiquity, the CE world and us broadcasters, those shots are probably deserved.  Multicasting was an improvement and there are some neat enhancements in development.  But the HD Radio vision needs revitalizing even before it's reached a single digit percentage of market share.

Revitalizing means rethinking radio along lines that are making its non-transmitter competitors so attractive to so many (or maybe I should say too attractive to too many).  We need to retool HD Radio as an open platform, something that its SMIL mark-up language encourages.  I've written here in the past about one way to do it (apparently to zero effect) that I was calling a many-to-many radio, but I'm sure there are others.  Give each radio station program channels limited only by how much of both kinds of IP they can buy.  Then give each listener the ability to customize channels to his or her preferences and listening habits.  This isn't brain surgery, folks.

Great minds think alike update.  I'd just posted the above when I ran across John Proffitt's very good post, iBiquity: How a closed-source model is killing HD Radio.  Covers much of the same ground as mine, but more thoughtfully.  Link:  Gravity Medium.  --Dennis

Audio makes video come to life

NPR has been combining audio and video on its web site for some time now.  NPR's SVP/GM, Digital Media, Maria Thomas, forwarded to me this afternoon a note from Joe Matazzoni making the point that "outstanding audio makes our video come to life."  Indeed it does.  Check out this video of singer Lizz Wright.  Link: NPR.  Congrats to Ivan Burketh and Neal Tevault for audio and Dave Gilkey for photography and editing.  --Dennis

NPR - The Opportunity

Rob Paterson was the consultant to National Public Radio when it was conducting a series of valuable "New Realities" meetings two years ago, and he's since consulted with other public media organizations.  I was on its board of directors at the time and now Rob has written a post on his blog giving advice to yours truly as the new interim CEO of NPR.  Be sure to read the comments also.  Link:  Robert Paterson's Weblog. 

Also check out three other of Rob's related posts: [1] Making real progress in Public Media - Acknowledging the Innovator's Dilemma.  Link:  Robert Paterson's Weblog. [2] Consultation? Could we do better? Part 1.  Link: Robert Paterson's Weblog. [3] Consultation? Could we do better? Part 2.  Link:  Robert Paterson's Weblog. --Dennis

What's Next for Open Source and Public Media?

I've been consumed with commuting from Idaho to Washington, DC for the past couple of weeks and the run-up to that, so I've been remiss in blogging.  And frankly, I'm even wondering if I can write about radio at all in the next year or so, since some people will try to find meaning and direction for NPR in all that.  So I missed Doc Searls' excellent post in Linux Journal with this title.  At about the time he wrote this, Doc joined Diane Mermigas (below) and Rafat Ali on a panel I moderated at the Public Media 2008 conference in Los Angeles.  Thanks to Todd Mundt, who quotes much of it here, but I'd recommend reading the full text.  Link:  Linux Journal.  Don't miss this one. --Dennis

Public TV Needs Media Need To Join Media Revolution

Diane Mermigas, who participated in a panel I moderated at the Public Media 2008 conference, wrote shortly after that meeting:

Public media has a dilemma. It has been one of the most culturally, intellectually, socially and politically unique entities in the U.S. But it is woefully under-monetized in today’s burgeoning digital world. It doesn’t need to be that way. The powers that be at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Broadcasting and public media outlets can lead change by embracing it. ...

... Many of public media’s identifying factors make it a perfect fit for digital interactive applications within flexible definitions of what constitutes non-commercial media. Some of the key change agents public media can leverage are:

* The elevation of quality niche content
* Building social and community networks around particular topics, crusades and events
* Capitalizing on the participatory nature of interactive media
* Connecting related content providers, consumers and purveyors of commerce
* Advertising and sponsorship migrate into interactive marketing and transactions
* Relevance and personalization almost always mean local
* Smart mobile devices will dominate and make everything-to-go ...

Link:  On Media in MediaPost.  --Dennis

Digital Media: To Survive, Embrace Your Yin and Yang

Diane Mermigas writes:

... Here’s some advice to all. It is for media buyers and sellers gearing up for what they think will be a routine upfront advertising market –even as Google is infusing the market with new ways to buy and sell time. It is for the Internet entrepreneurs stunned by the swift shifts in their paradigms and for the content creators and distributors with new digital links to consumers and the same old legacy cost structures.  ¶  Get hold of your yin and yang.  ¶  There are no quick or easy answers to your problems in an emerging digital market hamstrung by a recession and a credit crunch. You will miss opportunities to build new businesses and value if you fail to understand and embrace the opposing economic, technological and creative forces altering all lives and businesses.  ¶  A first good step would be to accept that the nature of digital interactivity is all about dichotomy. For instance, the open access that makes the distribution of intellectual property a commodity also facilitates illegal pirating and use of copyright content. ...

Link:  On Media in MediaPost.  --Dennis

Social media passé?

Just when so many media companies are trying to implement social components in their online operations, apparently some are saying social media are passé.  In Digital Futures: How Do Companies Get Money To Follow Users?, Diane Mermigas writes:

... Social networks, which sometimes function as unwieldy aggregators of special-interest content and communications, have a general resistance to advertising and e-commerce. But despite the numbers–Facebook, MySpace and YouTube–the medium is considered by some to be passé, according to Ross Levinsohn, the ex-Fox executive and co-founding partner of Velocity Interactive Group. His insights came during an opening-day conversation with Jonathan Miller, a co-founder in Velocity at OMMA Global Expo in Los Angeles on Monday. The new venture-capital fund is not backing any more social networks. It’s focused on whether widgets represent a sustainable viral distribution platform that can grow into a moneymaker. ...

Link: On Media in  MediaPost.  --Dennis

CBS O&Os Get Broadband

Of CBS's 29 O&O TV stations, Will Richmond writes:

... CBS TV Stations drove 89 million video views from their own sites in '07, an average of around 8 million video views/mo from their own sites, a 71% increase over '06. It's gaining an additional 10 million video views/mo through syndication partners. The primary current contributor to syndication is Yahoo, with whom CBS TV Stations partnered in Oct '06. To put this in context, today's WSJ carried the adjacent graphic of select broadcasters' video views. Putting aside CBS TV Stations' 10 million monthly syndication streams, its '07 monthly average traffic would appear to rank it in the top 5, right around Discovery.com.  ¶  In addition, video clips are a big part of CBS TV Stations' success, as it is posting around 520/day and now offers a searchable library of 350K clips.  ¶  Meanwhile the Yahoo deal has been so successful that CBS TV Stations has clearly gotten syndication religion, with several significant announcements planned for the coming weeks. Leess explained how these syndication deals drive unprecedented consumption from out-of-market viewers while also creating valuable ad inventory. For pre-rolls, CBS is getting between $28-75 CPM, with banners fetching $8-18 CPM. Importantly, CBS TV Stations are aggressively bundling on-air/online/broadband packages, having sworn off broadband as a pure "value-add" some time ago.

Link:  Video Nuze.  --Dennis

Change at National Public Radio

Regular readers of this blog will probably know that I've been a long-time public broadcasting exec in the Northwest.  No one much cares if I'm speaking for a medium-sized public radio operation and a small public television operation, so I've not had to be too careful in those instances where I've departed from pointing at news you need to know and offered my own opinions.  But that's changing.

I've been a member of the National Public Radio board of directors since '05 and its chairman since November.  A few days ago I became its interim chief executive officer at the board's request.  So now it's a little different.  Since some people will take this blog as speaking for that great institution, you should know that I'm speaking here in a personal voice.  That's what blogs are about.

I'm not going to comment on the reasons for this change except to say they were multivariate and that much of what's been speculated about this is dead wrong.  Rather, I'd like to continue on the themes I've raised in this blog in the past because I think they inform the future.  I invite the curious reader to visit John Proffitt's excellent list of articles and posts on the subject of this management change.  This is not a coup by Luddite station CEOs who want to stop or slow down effective responses to very types of disruptive change we've been trying to strategically accommodate.  NPR can't and won't do that.

Sure there is a diversity of opinion about disruptive change within public broadcasting.  A small number of people feel that spending a dollar on emerging media is taking it away from core functions.  Another small number of professionals feel that the legacy media are doomed (see, e.g., Jeff Jarvis's post).  Of most concern, though, is that the largest number of people have no position on this at all because they're "up to their asses in alligators" just trying to make this year's budget come out right.  There is no organized opposition, especially at the station management level, to investments in emerging media.

The drawing on the right (click for larger version) is from an old presentation of mine that illustrates what public media are facing today.  Frankly, most of us still think that the traditional flow of content on the left is valid.  But in fact, everyone is able to play every role, including our listeners and viewers -- and they are doing so with very low barriers to entry.  As Gordon Borrell says, "The deer now have guns."  I won't belabor this, but it is now a very different world from the one in which almost all public media managers learned the business.

In a meeting with the NPR staff on Friday, I talked about there being three layers that we need to consider.  At the top is why we're here at all as a non-profit.  There are surely better formulations, but we make people smarter, better citizens, more culturally engaged.  Let's call this the mission layer.  The next layer is what we do.  For NPR it's journalism -- really good journalism -- and other programming.  Let's call that the content layer.  And then there is where we do it.  Historically, that's been over licensed broadcast transmitters, but online distribution is coming on much faster than broadcasting did in its developing years, so we're doing that also along with satellite and mobile distribution.  Let's call this the distribution layer.

So this isn't a battle between the content layer and the emerging media part of the distribution layer any more than it's a battle between the content layer and transmitters.  People now have and are making a wide variety of choices in how they get programming.  We must make it easy for them to access it.  If we make it a contest between layers, our users will lose and ultimately so will we.

I've been asked to keep NPR moving forward, not march in place, in the relatively short time I've been given to lead the company.  That's not a repudiation of its current direction; to the contrary.  In spite of that time constraint, I think that the great people who make public radio happen at stations and at NPR can make real progress in that time -- especially, as Jeff urges, if we seek out and pay attention to what our listeners are telling us directly and by studying how they allocate their attention.

--Dennis Haarsager

Better Than Free + Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

Maybe some regular reader can set me straight, but I swear that recently I linked to Kevin Kelly's terrific piece with this in his blog, The Technium (Kelly was one of the founders of Wired)  However, can't find it, so I either dreamed it or accidentally deleted it.  Seriously, it is the best thing I've read this year as part of this blogging effort and was a core part of a brief presentation that I made to last month's Public Media 2008 conference in L.A.  Now comes Chris Anderson with a lengthy article in Wired that's previewing a new book, FREE, that will be out next year.

Kelly begins by noting:

The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free. ...

He goes on:

... From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free. ...

These eight "generatives," as he calls them ("A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced.") are as follows:

• Immediacy
• Personalization
• Interpretation
• Authenticity
• Accessibility
• Embodiment
• Patronage
• Findability

Link:  The Technium.

Anderson looks at "free" a different way (though if you think advertising, for example, is truly free, think about how much of the cost of the products you buy goes into making you aware of and desire them).  Here's his taxonomy:

• "Freemium" (basic version free, premium version costs you)
• Advertising
• Cross-subsidies (free product entices you to buy something else)
• Zero marginal cost (e.g., online music)
• Gift economy (e.g., open source software)

Link:  Wired.

We can learn from both these guys, but for those of us making the transition from legacy media to emerging forms, I think Kelly's offers especially valuable insights.  --Dennis

Requiem for Old-Time Radio

Jon Fine writes:

... Realities of the music world—the explosion in both expression and availability, first on independent labels and now everywhere, thanks to the Internet—began overtaking commercial radio stations well over 20 years ago. (I feel profoundly sorry for anyone whose musical universe is limited to the shrunken playlists of commercial radio, given the bounty available elsewhere.) There was a complicated blood bond that budding music geeks of the 1970s and '80s formed with radio, which today seems quaint. You loved radio for first opening up a world; you hated it for falling behind what was actually going on. ...

Link:  BusinessWeek.

R.I.P., HD DVD

Back in the early 80s, I bought a Betamax VCR and replaced that with another Betamax VCR before that format bit the dust and VHS won.  I can really pick 'em.  Just over a year ago, I bought a Toshiba HD DVD when Costco dropped the price to $300.  It's now a pretty good upscaling DVD player, but you can buy them for under $100.

Cliff Edwards writes:

... while Toshiba lies vanquished, the Blu-ray camp now faces a slew of technical, business, and marketing challenges in driving consumer adoption of their victorious standard. To an extent, those issues have been just as much to blame as the format war for slowing the adoption of the high-definition successor to the standard DVD format. "Now that the format war is over, it's just dawning on everybody that our work is just beginning," says Andy Parsons, chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association, and a senior vice-president at Pioneer. ...

Link:  BusinessWeek.  --Dennis