Message From Michael -- March 3, 2008

SWEEPS

GENIE GETS OUT OF THE BOTTLE

REPORTS OF MY DEATH ARE GREATLY EXAGERRATED

I BELIEVE IN UNARMED TRUTH AND UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

I’M GONNA WAIT TILL THE MIDNIGHT HOUR

APOLLO KNOCKED OUT

FACTOID OF THE WEEK

COCKTAIL CHATTER


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SWEEPS: Okay, all you news directors and marketing managers, it’s over. All right, just for three months. You know what that means. Get ready for May.

GENIE GETS OUT OF THE BOTTLE: That’s how a federal judge described his own decision allowing an international whistleblower site which says it provides “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis” to continue operation The judge’s decision was a reversal of his previous stance shutting down the site after numerous free speech groups protested. The site, wikileaks.org, provides a wiki-like forum for posting information but using ‘advanced cryptographic methods’ to maintain anonymity. The site is registered to an Australian living in Kenya and its advisory board is made up of Chinese dissidents, journalists and mathematicians. The lawsuit was filed by a Swiss bank, which the Wikileaks site contends, runs a Cayman Islands operation for tax evasion and money laundering purposes. The case is being cited as a major test of First Amendment rights in the Internet era. And it’s not over yet. More motions are due this month with another hearing set in May. On the flip side of this, I should note a libel suit filed late last year against ‘citizen journalism’ site iBrattleboro after a comment was posted on the site alleging a sexual affair between a volunteer and a board member at a local medical services organization. The latest posting by the Citizen Media Law Project indicates the lawsuit is still pending.

REPORTS OF MY DEATH ARE GREATLY EXAGERRATED: The two major social networking sites might want to take a page from Mark Twain. Depending on which publication you read (from The Hollywood Reporter to BusinessWeek and others), social networks are either… “hitting a plateau… cooling off… slowing down… waning or even slumping.” How true it is depends on how you look at the numbers supplied by the two leading online research firms. According to comScore, for example, MySpace is showing ‘only’ an 11.6% year-to-year growth in unique visitors and is actually down 10.4% in amount of time spent on the site. The comScore report says Facebook is up 78.6% in terms of visitors (which observers somehow cite as low) and up ‘just’ 1.1% in time spent. According to HitWise, the numbers are reversed although the overall effect is the same. It says the market share of visits for Facebook is down 27% from its peak (of course, that peak happened over the Christmas holidays and the drop is when college kids are back at school) although the time spent on Facebook is up 73% year to year. The BusinessWeek article notes that advertising on social networking sites is growing fast, but at the same time it says the “MySpace Generation” may be getting annoyed with ads and a bit bored with profile pages, and that may account for some of the leveling off. In a similar vein, The Hollywood Reporter quotes the head of research for Hitwise who says part of the reason for the ‘slowdown’ may be “user fatigue” and concern about privacy and advertising issues.

Despite this, Forrester Research predicts that marketers are likely to continue shifting money into social media. The report says word of mouth, blogging and social networking will “withstand tightened budgets.” The website Chief Marketer ran an interview with Shiv Singha, director of global strategic initiatives at Avenue A/ Razorfish who says consumers will continue to spend more time on social networking sites and that social media will continue to influence marketing decisions. A slightly different take comes from Promo Magazine which argues that social media is more important as a way to gain consumer insights rather than drive a viral marketing message. Citing a study by TNS Media Intelligence, the report notes an interesting dichotomy between the early adopters of social media who believe in the former and the late-comers who believe in the latter.

I BELIEVE IN UNARMED TRUTH AND UNCONDITIONAL LOVE: Excuse me appropriating another quote, but when Martin Luther King said this, he probably wasn’t thinking about social networking as we know it today. But a little noted part of the 2008 Digital Future Project by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication reports that 15% of U.S. Internet users are members of an ‘online community’ and nearly all of them (94%) said the Internet helped inform them about social causes. So, in that vein, let me note the phenomenon known as micro-loans where you lend a small amount of money to a would-be business person in, usually, a third world country. It can be a farmer in Cambodia, a cook in Nicaragua or an embroiderer in Pakistan. You lend them a small amount (often around $25) towards their goal (which usually is a modest amount – rarely over $1,000) and they repay you. The two most famous are Kiva.Org which won a ringing endorsement from former President Bill Clinton and the Grameen Trust founded by Muhammad Yunus who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. But there are others – Microplace.com which is actually run by eBay and Opportunity International founded by a former Bristol Myers executive and which focuses on women entrepreneurs. The reported default rate is less than one percent.

I’M GONNA WAIT TILL THE MIDNIGHT HOUR: That’s when singer Wilson Pickett was waiting for his love to shine but, according to Nielsen Media, some viewers are waiting till Midnight for their shows to shine. The company’s latest report finds that DVR use has actually increased TV viewing, with a five percent increase in viewing from 11:00 p.m. to Midnight and seven percent of the viewers playing back their recorded programs then. In effect, the traditional ‘prime time’ viewing period of 8:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. is expanding. The report shows most viewers prefer to watch news, sports and movies live, while dramas like House, Heroes and Gray’s Anatomy are time shifted along with, to a lesser degree, talk shows like Oprah, soap operas and reality TV shows.

Meanwhile, on a very much related note, Nielsen Online reports that the ONLINE video ‘prime time’ is 12 Noon to 2:00 p.m. for people who want to watch network TV shows during their lunch hour while ONLINE ‘prime time’ is 11:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. on the weekends for people who want to watch User Generated Content video. And on a related note to the related note, Nielsen also says that three-quarters (73%) of ‘active Web users” watched streaming video in December, a figure that represents 116.7 Million unique viewers.

APOLLO KNOCKED OUT: And it wasn’t Rocky Balboa that did it. No, instead, it was Nielsen and Arbitron that announced they are dropping their Project Apollo joint venture to measure the buying and radio and television habits of people. The reason – very simple. Too few people willing to be part of a survey which had multiple agendas, and too few clients willing to pay for the expensive results. In a similar vein, the New York Times notes that Nielsen has had to scale back on another plan to track Web usage along with TV usage. Again – the same reason. Despite that, Nielsen is pressing ahead with its A2/M2 (Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement) plan, but that has meant the company needs to develop more consumer panels (16) compared to five panels 10 years ago.

FACTOID OF THE WEEK: According to the latest data, people who use the Internet at work are spending one full day out of their work week online. The figure represents a 70% increase since this measurement was started in 2001. Okay, I can’t help it. It seems I’ve always got a second factoid of the week. This week, it’s a report by Forrester Research titled The End of the Music Industry as we know it that predicts that half of all music sold in the U.S. will be digital by the year 2011 and that sales of digitally downloaded music will pass CD sales a year later in 2012.

COCKTAIL CHATTER: Gaming company Emotiv is releasing a ‘neuroheadset’ which lets people play a video game using only their thoughts. A demonstration bombed though when wireless interference caused the system to misfire. A solicitation for user-generated content by The Weather Channel for ‘green-ette’ segments building up to Earth Day on April 22nd has drawn thousands of submissions. Two persons have been arrested in Hunan, Cha, for posting ‘scandalous’ naked photos of Hong Kong pop stars on the Internet. An 18-year-old New Zealand computer programmer has been arrested as part of an international cyber crime network which hacked into more than a million computers. For those observant readers who wondered what “Australian clean clothes” in the middle of last week’s Cocktail Chatter segment meant, researchers at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, have found a way for clothes to clean themselves by coating the fibers in titanium dioxide nanocrystals which break down food and dirt in sunlight. In the edit process, I edited out the facts, but now you know.

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