Message from Michael-- February 26, 2007

TICK, TOCK FOR SWEEPS AND CLICK, CLOCK FOR STUDENTS
ARE YOU FEELING SOCIABLE?
I WANT MY NEW MEDIA TV
BUT I DON’T WANT ADVERTISING
TAKING ON A LIFE OF ITS OWN
DO YOU BELIEVE IN PEOPLE?

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TICK, TOCK FOR SWEEPS AND CLICK, CLOCK FOR STUDENTS: All of 72 hours left in the February sweeps, give or take an hour. But here I go for the beating-a-dead-horse award, reminding folks that sweeps don’t end when the sweeps end. On a sweeps related note, Nielsen’s decision to include college dorms in its ratings survey has proven a boon for several programs. Although the numbers don’t break out college students versus other 18 to 24 year olds and although Nielsen, officially, can’t ascribe the boon to the change, the fact is Fox’s American Idol is up between 11% and 22% in the 18 to 24 demographic, as is Fox’s House (up 89%), ABC’s Greys Anatomy (up 62%), and Ugly Betty (up 86%), and NBC’s Office (up 57%), according to Media Life Magazine.

ARE YOU FEELING SOCIABLE? Maybe you better. Advertisers spent more than $350 Million on social network marketing and even though that’s only 2% of total online ad spending, research firm eMarketer predicts that number will jump to $2 Billion by 2010. The second, and possibly the more significant, fact is that a quarter of the respondents to a Massachusetts University survey say they are using social networking as part of their overall marketing strategy. The study focused on Inc magazine’s list of the fastest growing companies. Two thirds say social media was either very or somewhat important. Social media was defined as message boards, blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking and wikis. To show you how strong the impact is, the headline on the university’s study says, “The Hype Is Real.” The study by the university’s Center for Marketing Research says, “the social media revolution is coming to the business world.” Social media will be the topic of a Revolution in Marketing conference being held in Phoenix this week, and the Phoenix Business Journal quotes one participant who says if you’re not using social media to talk to your customers, you’re “already behind the power curve.”Everybody of course focuses on MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. But there are several strong contenders including MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360, AIM Pages, Bebo, Piczo, Friendster; and, of course, there is the business network LinkedIn and there’s ReverbNation which was recently named the best Social Music Network. Need more convincing? How about the fact that MySpace has launched a site dedicated to comic book fans, or that Facebook is creating a social network based TV series with Comcast using content produced by its users. Need more? How about the fact presidential candidate Barack Obama’s people have relaunched his website to operate like a social networking site where people can create profiles, start blogs and form on-site networks; or that academic software maker Blackboard has launched a social-bookmarking service; or that there is a social network and online directory, MerchantCircle, specifically tailored to small businesses, or that HGTV has launched its own social network. Anyway, you get the point. As an aside, I would make the argument that social media is an extension of business’s CRM (Consumer Relationship Management) and what I call, for television, VRM (Viewer Relationship Management).

I WANT MY NEW MEDIA TV: A study by IBM estimates new media sales to grow at nearly five times the rate of traditional media. Sounds like bad news, but the same report says the biggest surge will come from the Internet syndication of professional produced programming. In other words, programming produced by the traditional media. A Reuters’ report on the study says the Internet syndication of traditional media companies’ programming will be a small part of the estimated – get this -- $655 Billion of annual media revenue in 2010. Traditional media will account for $340 Billion of that. As a warning note, the IBM report says the music industry will have lost between $85 Billion and $160 Billion in revenue between 1999 and 2010 because it “dragged its heels” meeting the demand for digital media. Saul Berman, described as IBM’s ‘global media and entertainment strategy leader’ (catchy title, what?), says this is not a matter of going from black and white to color television, this is a matter of changing from “an era of stability to an era of constant change.”

BUT I DON’T WANT ADVERTISING: More and more of those young people being courted by advertisers are turning into “ad avoiders,” according to a joint study by Microsoft and Starcom. The report titled “lifestyles of the ad adverse” says between 10% and 15% of adults 17 to 35 fall into this category. The report says there are ‘passive avoiders’ who simply can’t be bothered with ads and ‘active avoiders’ whose message, as reported by Media Week, is ‘be good or be gone.’ The active avoiders are primarily young, tech-savvy men who consume media with no ads, like DVD’s and satellite radio.

TAKING ON A LIFE OF ITS OWN: Now, this is getting weird. You can actually dial into virtual world, Second Life, from your cell phone. So, you never have to leave home without it. Converse, described in Technology Review as a wireless multimedia networking company, has developed software to do just that. On top of which, Amazon.com is developing a way to bridge into Second Life. Sears has built a virtual home in the Second Life world to promote its designs. And a market research firm, Market Truths, has won a contest to build a “realistic and profitable business model” for use in Second Life. And, folks, you heard it here first. Regular readers of MfM will remember reading our prediction about the growth of Second Life some time back. In a similar vein, media conglomerate Viacom, which is in a copyright battle withYouTube, has announced a deal to provide videos to Joost, the Internet video service created by the founders of Skype and Kazaa and highlighted in a MfM report a month ago. Okay I know this is bragging but at least I’m not trying to sell you my services like some consulting newsletters. Here’s the next big one to watch – Blinkx.com. It is a VIDEO searching site, much better than anything Yahoo or Google has come up with… so far. Click on the site and the ‘wall of video’ that comes up is a fascinating snapshot of the world. Do a search and you can ask the site to display the results in a wall of video format.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN PEOPLE? If you’re like most Americans, the answer is a big maybe. A new Pew Research survey finds that less than half of Americans (45%) say most people can be trusted but half (50%) say, “you can’t be too careful.” I know this isn’t media related, but a) I just find such social trends fascinating and b) it kind of relates to this week’s MfM lead story on social networking. The survey of 2,000 people found young people are less trusting than those who are middle aged or older and that higher educated and higher income people are more trusting than the less educated and the lower income; Whites are more trusting than Blacks or Hispanics; the married are more trusting than the unmarried; and men at 38% are more likely than women at 32% to have a “high level of trust.” The group has been doing this survey for more than four decades and the results have been pretty much the same that whole time. Other interesting findings are that three out of five Americans (59%) believe most people would try to be fair while less than a third (31%) believe they would be taken advantage of. Three out of five (57%) say most of the time people try to be helpful while a little more than a third (35%) believe most people are just looking out for themselves. If you want to read the full report, it’s at http://pewresearch.org/pubs/414/americans-and-social-trust-who-where-and-why. The same group did a survey among Gen Next Americans (18-25 year olds) and found three-quarters of them (75%) believe today’s youth are more likely to have casual sex than young people 20 years ago. As Claude Rains said in Casablanca, I’m shocked, shocked I tell you. On a completely unrelated note, but since I am doing this social trend thing instead of Cocktail Chatter, the M.I.T. Technology Review reports that 216 Million Americans are scientifically illiterate. The “good news” is that the science literacy rate is up from what the report called a pathetic 10% in 1988 to a not much better 28%.

FACT OF THE WEEK: The world Internet population has reached One Billion. According to eMarketer, the U.S. is still the single, largest Internet market in the world with 181.9 Million Internet users in 2006, but the research firm predicts China will overtake the U.S. before the decade is out. The number of Internet users in China is already greater than Japan, Germany and the U.K.

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