Posts about wwgd

Airlines: Imprisonment as a business model

September 28, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Air travel may be the first industry based on a business model of kidnapping and imprisonment. It is the least open industry possible. You are trapped with the airline that controls your home airport or destination. And now, far worse, you are trapped in their planes for three to five hours. And why? Well, yes, we can blame weather and bad air-traffic control for some of this. But the essential reason is that that don’t want to let you loose and lose your fare. So they hold you captive. Amazingly, they are allowed it. And, of course, this yields just the amount of resentment and seething hatred it deserves. So no one thinks positively of the industry or the brands in it. It’s so bad that it’s making clearly inferior competitors — driving for hours, Amtrak, ferchrissakes, and maybe even soon the bus — look better. That’s bad. The entire industry and its relationship with its entire customer base is broken.

The attempted solutions so far are all nonsolutions: Attempts to regulate and limit our imprisonment — to still obviously unacceptable levels — have failed. Attempts to sue airlines into civility have not worked. Even the White House finally recognizes the problem but its solutions are aimed at reducing the flights that are already over subscribed; gee, that helps.

It’s time to turn the thinking around. If, for once, anyone in the industry or the government would think like a customer, the solution would be the reverse of imprisoning us in airplanes until they can take off:

Jets should not be boarded until they have a take-off — and landing — slot.

That leaves us, the passengers, free to walk around in the terminal — and, yes, free to seek competitive means of transport (other airlines, cars, trains) or to go home. In no sane world should we be held in captivity and prevented from that free choice. We would have the services of airports at hand — which, in the long run, would improve because there’d be business to be made there; demand for beers yields supply of beers (the mixed-nut marketplace shifts from the jet to the terminal). The airlines would compete to make us comfortable to keep us at their gates. The jets would not be sitting on runways burning incredible amounts of fuel and producing incredible amounts of carbon for hours on end. Onboard crews would not be stressed dealing with righteously angry customers. People might actually decide to fly more often. Oh, yes, this shifts some of the logistical burden of air travel from taxi and air traffic control to the terminals — fine. It also shifts the pain in this relationship from the powerless customer to the people who are in a position to fix the situation. If the airlines want to imprison us, they still have the tool of the nonrefundable ticket, though the market will in the long-run dictate whether we choose to pay for this discount with the risk of captivity.

It’s hard to imagine an industry — other than prisons themselves — that is less open to openness. It’s much easier to imagine how media, retail, consumer products, and entertainment can spawn Cluetrain companies. But if you simply turn around and ask how customers would run these companies, you will get an answer like mine, not like the industry’s or the government’s. The problem is that, deregulation aside, it’s not a competitive marketplace. It’s worse today than telecom. So it’s not as if one company can break away from the pack and think like its customers; it’s not in control of its relationship with us, end-to-end. How do we get from here to there?

The only thing that is new is our empowerment as customers on the internet. We can coalesce and gang up on the airlines. There is also market pressure. The horrid shoddiness of the mainstream airlines is just what has opened up the market for Eos, Silverjet, et al to offer independent, quality competition and take away the big airlines’ most profitable customers, who are all turning their backs and saying nya-nya-nya to their former wardens as they leave the prison gates. But, of course, that marketplace is limited. It’s a much bigger mess than that. And it won’t be cured until the industry starts thinking like its customers, which will only happen when the customers shout so loudly, now that we can, that the industry can’t help but hear.

In the end, the ability of companies to make a business by telling customers what they cannot do is over. It’s only a question of when and how it is replaced.

: I should add that when I flew to Austin this week to see Dell, my Continental flights were ontime both ways — though I saw a chart yesterday (can’t find it now) showing Continental as the current leader in passenger imprisonment. I was lucky to get a first-class upgrade both ways, which improves one’s outlook.

Cable companies must die

September 11, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Bob Garfield goes properly ballistic against Comcast. We all have our horrible stories of waiting for the cable guy but this is a classic and Bob does a good and anally retentive job of chronicling the horror, the horror. The only thing that would have made it better is if he had recorded it — Bob is, after all, a Big Media Guy — and turned it into YouTube hilarity.

Call me an optimist, but I believe that every company — every industry — that makes its money by screwing its customers is doomed. We, the customers, can now coalesce and gang up on them and show them who’s boss. Yes, I’m thinking Dell Hell and its apparent turnaround. But this works only if the companies live in fear of losing us — that is, if they have competition. And this, of course, is why cable companies, phone companies, insurance companies, power companies, and other monopolies and duopolies — not to mention government — keep thinking they have us by the balls, out of which they can squeeze their money. But I think their day will come. New technologies could kill or at least bring competition into telecommunications. The insurance mess is finally going to get so bad that government will have to step in to fix it. Politicians themselves will have to learn that we can use these new tools to defeat them. The question is how we can speed this process up.

Well, Bob Garfield is an expert in media — as the cohost of On the Media — and also in advertising — as the critic at Ad Age. So I’ll throw the challenge back to you, Bob: How can we set the agenda on our dear communications ball-squeezers? How can we make their lives a living hell, like they make ours? How can we put pressure on those in power to take the power away from these horrible companies? How can we show their would-be competitors that there’s a great opportunity to come in and displace these fat and venal fools?

Let’s invent antiadvertising. Or maybe it’s unadvertising. Or customertising. If they can use media and messaging, so can we.

So, Bob, why don’t you make a commercial — not just a blog post, but a cool and slick ad — telling people why Comcast must die (your words). If it’s good — which, if you make it, it must be — and if it says something people want to hear and say themselves — and we know everyone shares this sentiment — then they will pass it around. Thank you, Google and YouTube. Maybe we can make a contest of it: make commercials against your least favorite companies. Free creative. Free media.

What if customertising takes over and beats advertising? Then we’d all go seek out customerisements and the ones with the fewest screeds out there must be OK.

I hate to be so negative about this. But as you can see in Bob’s screedlog, as we all know, the anger and frustration just build up until you have to scream.

Well, from now on, instead of screaming, expose the fools. Record your entire encounter with the cable company — every phone call, every visit — and use their failures against them. Our day has come. Or is coming.

: LATER: I missed the obvious name — customercials.

WWAD?

August 28, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis

Catching up on email, blogging and life….

Kara Swisher is pleased to be a part of an Amanda Congdon report and so am I. Amanda’s smitted with the catch-question WWGD.

Site or network? Own or join?

August 14, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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I think it’s wonderful that The New York Times did a deal to bring Freakonomics under its wing — hosting it, selling ads on it, promoting it, but not buying it or hiring its creators and not treating it like so much freelance fodder to go through the Times’ editing mill. That’s new. This follows my somewhat similar deal at PrezVid with the Washington Post and another big-media outlet to be named shortly, in which they also leave PrezVid as an independent entity (in this case, we keep our site and URL) but take up some of the content onto their sites.

What I like about this is that we see big-media services starting to act like members of networks. They are beginning to realize that they can’t — and don’t want to — do everything themselves. They are also recognizing that creators want to keep ownership of their creations and so hiring or buying isn’t always the best option.

But so long as these services still want to serve content from their own sites, there will be issues. In my deal, the sites pick the posts they want; if they don’t like something, they just don’t take it. But in the Times’ case, all of Freakonomics is now served under the Times umbrella but without the usual Times process. I think that’s a good thing. But some folks didn’t a few days ago when the Freaks started a discussion speculating about the best ways for terrorists to attack America, something that quite a few commenters and bloggers thought was dangerous and just stupid and unbecoming the Times.

And this leads me to suggest that syndication is still not the best relationship for big services and the new independent players. I’m delighted that there’s marryin’ in the air. But I think the independent guys are better left independent. And the proper relationship, I think, is a network. Imagine, instead, if the Times declared Freakonomics part of its quality blog network. It could sell ads there, telling its advertisers that it had found the best of the blogs just for them. It could direct its readers to lots of great new content. By promoting that content, it also increases its ad value: a virtuous circle. But there remains a distance that defines independence: The blog is free of the worries of what happens under the Times address and brand — though if they go too damned far, they can be dropped. And the Times has a certain deniability — it is clear that this content was not a product of the Times, though, again, if advertisers don’t want to be on that blog, it will be dropped. The further advantage for the big guy is it can grow much bigger much faster by becoming a member and enabler of a much larger network. The Times doesn’t have to create or pay for or host or be responsible for all the best content around. It can find it and help support it and bring that new, larger world to its readers and advertisers.

Be a network more than a site, that’s my advice.

This is what Glam has done, creating an ad network across independent sites and growing hugely, bragging that it is the no. 1 women’s site (service, network?) with 19.1 monthly uniques, growing faster than MySpace and larger than iVillage, AOL Living, and all of Conde Nast combined.

At TechCrunch, Mike Arrington ridicules Glam’s claims, saying: “A minimal amount of research into their business shows that the company is an ad network, not a content site.” With respect, I disagree

I say that’s what makes Glam so smart. As the web becomes more and more distributed — more widgetized with tchotzkes of content and functionality spread everywhere — the idea of measuring size by just measuring a site becomes obsolete. And here’s the fringe benefit: it’s better and cheaper to take your content to the people rather than marketing to bring them to you. This is the essence of CBS’ audience network strategy.

This is, dare I say it, the essence of 3.0: join and enable a network instead of trying to buy content and eyeballs on a site.

WWGD. What would Google do? Google would network.

There are still issues of quality. As both Arrington and VentureBeat point out, a network can grow too big by including junky traffic; that is why networks have gotten less respect and thus lower value.

But now let’s return to the Times and Freakonomics. No junk there. It’s quality, albeit sometimes controversial quality. The Times wouldn’t have embraced it otherwise. Its advertisers and readers know that. So there’s a power in the Times and the Post (which also runs a travel blog network) and a major wire service that’s about to launch a network of its own and other of the big guys growing bigger not by hiring and buying and building but by networking.

And by the way, I’d like to hear the Freakonomics guys explore the power and value of networks vs. closed content systems.

The next portal – or the last portal?

August 4, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Michael Arrington reports that Bear Stearns says Yahoo should get itself a social network because social networks are the next portal. Here is their entire PowerPoint.

It made me want to scream:

Portals are dead, damnit. They are the last vestige of old-media bigthink, of the misguided belief that media can corral us into masses and that we want to be treated like herds. The essential moral to the story of Yahoo’s decline is that it is a portal and portals don’t work. But here’s Bear Sterns looking for the next portal. Arrrggghhh.

You know what I’m going to say: The real question they should be asking is WWGD — what would Google do? I argued when Terry Semel was bounced that Yahoo should blow itself up and become the unportal, enabling anyone anywhere to take anything from Yahoo and put it on their own sites, feeding content — which Google doesn’t have — and advertising all around the web, becoming the great enabler of social interaction via content rather than buying Facebook. I hope Yahoo doesn’t buy Facebook — even though Bear Stearns now says the value is $5-6 billion (versus the $1 billion Mark Zuckerberg quite wisely turned down) — for I fear that like other things Yahoo buys, it would freezedry it in time, stifling innovation by bringing it into that corral.

The next portal? No, Yahoo is the last portal.

WWGD: What has Google done?

May 17, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Today’s announcement that Google is changing its search to integrate video, photos, text, and news with results that used to list just text on web pages is, I think, more significant than it at first seems.

This promotes other media to the exalted rank of text. And it tells publishers that they’d damned well better do the same. This is the mark of true agnosticism coming to media: You should be using whatever media best communicates information in the form the user wants.

Oh, publishers are trying. That was one of the rationales behind the Guardian’s home-page redesign last week: They want to serve video. And those publishers are scrambling to make it. But I think we’re still putting too high a wall around each medium. One thing I’m starting to learn doing the PrezVid blog is that one can use different media strung together to tell a story: text, then an embedded video, then an original video, with links all about. It’s not having text here and video over there and audio up there. It’s about using all the tools appropriately at all times.

So once again, even as we make our own articles, we should be following Google’s example and asking WWGD.

Next, this announcement throws a heavy monkey wrench into many a publisher’s SEO strategy. Until now, you structured your pages and metadata in certain magical ways and — if you were hip — got yourself linked a lot by linking out a lot and — voila — you rose into Google heaven. Now you have to figure out how to put some Google helium into your videos and photos and news headlines — all of which can now appear on the blessed search-result page.

And you also have to figure out what people get when they click on those things: where are your brand, your ads, your links? If you distribute your stuff onto more sites out there — if your video becomes a hit on YouTube and on bloggers’ embeds — does that get it higher on Google? What does this do to destination and portal strategies?

Big media people should be reaching for the gin tonight.

* * *

Make that a double:

For Google’s pages also include maps. They’re local. Very local. Like the ads. Search on Mexican restaurants in Hoboken and you get web pages and the map with listings and much more: details the business can update, reviews, links. As of now, you won’t find an ad for Baja Mexican — but that won’t be long in coming. Look at Google’s FAQ for its local business ads. Here’s how to target to regions and cities.

So if you’re a local newspaper, you ask WWGD and what’s the answer? I’m not sure. But I think you need to have better distributed as widely as possible — across a large network of very local trusted brands (read: neighbors’ blogs) with better advertising performance and service. The more local you are, the better. The better known and trusted you are, the better. The more complete you are, the better. The more searchable you make your world, the better. The more addictive you are, the better. And then you’d better do everything you can to have your ads be found via Google whether they are on your site or others’ because not everybody’s going to come to you just because they used to. (See the smartest media quote of the year.)

* * *

Bartender, another please.

But, of course, this isn’t just about traffic and retail and directory ads. It’s about classifieds. Remember them? See today’s announcement that Boston.com and its former mortal enemy and now partner, Monster.com, are coming out with their joint job channel in June. Says PaidContent: “The move also reflects the increased competition for revenue from online classifieds, as typified by the dozen entities involved in the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, which began as co-branding with Yahoo’s HotJobs, and rival CareerBuilder, owned by Gannett, the Tribune Company, McClatchy and Microsoft, which purchased a minority stake in it earlier this month.”

What it really represents, I say, is not just the further collapse of newspapers’ hold on classifieds but the crumbling of classifieds as a form of advertising itself. The monsters are huddling together for warmth. With better search, we’ll be able to find each other, buyer and seller, without having to go to a centralized marketplace.

It won’t be long before we see classifieds coming up in Google searches. In some ways, we do now. Search for new homes in Tampa and you’ll see ads next to that map.

So WWGD? Well, I think the best opportunity is to target not words but people. If you know that lawyers in New Jersey read this New Jersey law blog, then you have a better chance of reaching people who work in the field. You have a relationship — or rather, that blogger does and you want a relationship with him. If you know that neighbors in Montclair read this blog — and they do — then you have a place to put house and restaurant ads you sell, if you’re in a network with that blogger (who can also sell ads on your pages, by the way). But can you afford to start blogs for every town and job description in your state? Of course, not — especially not now. But it’s in your interest for them to exist. So you need to support them. How? Well, for starters, sell ads for them and promote them and figure out what else you can do for them. That’s what Google would do. Hell, that’s what Google is doing.

: LATER: Matt Law, a veteran of About.com who knows whereof he SEOs, adds in the comments that I rushed past one important impact of this:

It’s not just an issue of getting more of their “multi”media stuff to show up in the listings. They now have to worry about how all this new stuff pushes their regular web page rankings further down the page.

More sand

May 7, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Jason Fry in the Wall Street Journal writes an excellent column summing up the suicidal impulses of the association of Belgian newspapers — and others — who try to shut off Google and think they are still in a position to make media’s rules.

These disputes are about money, of course — the newspaper groups think Google’s making some off their efforts, and they want a piece. But more broadly, Copiepresse objects to the idea that Google and other search engines should set the rules for linking, contending that such standards should be set by copyright laws, not technological standards. That’s a bid to turn back time and declare a do-over on the basics of search engines — a quixotic effort that flies in the face of the reality of how content is consumed today, and one in which Copiepresse has inadvertently lined up against its papers’ own readers.

Whether or not content creators like it, this is the age of fragmentation. In industry after industry, consumers are voting with their feet against old methods of packaging and distributing information. They want to pick and choose what’s of interest to them, without having to pay for or wade through what isn’t. That change, midwived by technology, has shaken or shattered content companies’ business models. It’s made everything they do more risky. And it’s stripped them of power they once enjoyed, forcing them to work with new companies and industries that somehow got to set the rules. Faced with such a situation, it’s understandable that content creators are angry. But the chance to set the ground rules passed some time ago, and it’s high time for content creators to realize that and adjust.

After reviewing the internet-induced upheaval that has struck music and television, he says:

The only surprise would be if newspapers were any different.

In moving online, newspapers have become collections of individual articles, each of which often stands on its own. Once, readers encountered articles by reading the paper a page at a time. Now, such readers are being supplanted by voracious online consumers who get their news in any number of unpredictable ways.

That’s a critical insight I rarely see in print but one that blogs understand because, as Meg Hourihan said in the dawn of blogging, the atomic unit of media is no longer the publication or the section or the page or even the article but the post: the nugget of information, the thought, the notion. That is what is really being disaggregated: the old unit of media itself.

I have no idea how you’re reading this column. Maybe you found it on the Online Journal’s home page or the technology page. Maybe you saw it because it includes Google’s stock symbol, or it hit your newsreader via an RSS feed. Maybe you followed a link from a blog, Google News or Technorati. . . . I can’t control any of that and wouldn’t want to — like any writer, the most-important thing to me is to be read. If the Online Journal started directing readers who followed third-party links to this column to the home page and left them to find their way from there, I’d be furious — because I’d be guaranteed to lose readers who got lost. And if WSJ.com said they were doing that because there were ads on the home page but not on this article, I’d not so gently suggest hiring a competent Web designer instead of suing search engines. . . .

Ultimately, what content creators face isn’t new technology, but a sea change in consumer behavior. Consumers don’t want to go back to watching TV at set times, buying albums or reading newspapers page by page. Trying to make them do so using laws that haven’t kept up with technology will fail. . . . At its heart, the Web is driven by users, not publishers. Whatever pain that causes content creators, opposing that fundamental idea became a revanchist fantasy long ago.

Well said. The problem for the controllers of media is that they still want to be and think they can be in control. But the obvious rule of nature is that we will be in control whenever we can be and we will cede it only unwillingly, only by necessity. So the key is to find out how to succeed by enabling us to do what we want to do. That is what the technology companies — Google, Facebook, et al — do. How can media companies do likewise? WWGD?

At the Murdoch clambake in Monterey, I tried to suggest that the real lesson these media men and women should learn from Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook is that he delivered enabling technology to the people and millions used it. How do we build news so it gets used? How do we succeed at that? How do we exploit Google?