Magazine Publishers Association Digital Awards

A number of months ago, I met with fellow Newhouse / Syracuse alumnus Howard Polskin of the Magazine Publishers Association. We had gotten hooked up with each other via another fellow Newhouse alum Howard Sholkin a few weeks earlier, to talk shop and do a little bit of networking. We had a great conversation, talking about the media business in general, and the direction it’s going in.

During our chat, Howard mentioned that the MPA was in the process of planning for their third annual Digital Awards luncheon at the fifth “Magazines 24/7 Digital Conference” in March, and asked me if I’d be interested as acting as a judge for the competition. The MPA Digital Awards honor excellence and innovation of magazine brands on all digital platforms in 12 categories.

I told him that I’d be honored to be part of the distinguished group.

Anyway, the Conference was a big success, and the awards were announced a little over a week ago (yeah, I’m a bit behind – been busy), so I thought I’d share the news with you as well, if you hadn’t heard. Kate Maxwell, Senior Editor at Condé Nast Traveler, presented the awards to the winners at the Marriott Marquis New York on March 3^rd.

And the winners are…

WEBSITES OF THE YEAR
The “Website of the Year” category recognizes excellence and innovation in content, design, functionality and usability in four subcategories.

Website of the Year: News, Business & Finance: Wired.com
Website of the Year: Entertainment & Sports: SI.com
Website of the Year: Enthusiast: Architectural Record
Website of the Year: Service & Lifestyle: Epicurious.com

MAGAZINE BLOG OF THE YEAR

Winner: Entertainment Weekly “PopWatch”

BEST ONLINE VIDEO – STANDALONE

Winner: National Geographic Magazine “Searching for the Snow Leopard”

BEST ONLINE VIDEO – SERIES

Winner: National Geographic Magazine “Fast Lane to the Future”

BEST PODCAST SERIES

Winner: The Campaign Trail on NewYorker.com

BEST WEB-ONLY TOOL

Winner: Parenting and Babytalk “Child Health Guide”

BEST ONLINE COMMUNITY

Winner: Epicurious.com

BEST MOBILE STRATEGY

Winner: InStyle Mobile

BEST MAGAZINE E-STORE

Winner: WIRED Store

via the Magazine Publishers of America

L33T Techy Grandma Video

Found this yesterday... I have a feeling it'll go viral, unintentionally(?).



What is it? It's a church-produced (allegedly? seems legit...) ad featuring a tech-jargon-dropping grandma. Strangely enough, a lot of what she's talking about makes no technical sense. However, it's a great concept for how-to videos, since, if 'grandma' can understand it, so could 'anyone'.

BTW, "l33t" is hacker-speak for "leet" or "elite", which is a status term that us old-skool geeks used to use when we were working BBS and rockin' 14.4K baud modems.

Enjoy!

Online Video Keeps Growing...

NYTimes.com said Friday it has launched a new platform that will bring more video to more sections of the site. Videos will be presented in hi-def and made available to the home page, articles, blogs, and the site's video library in an effort to make video a central part of The New York Times' (overall) strategy of moving more digital.

The Grey Lady’s site’s new vid platform will display videos in 16x9 widescreen (woot for letterbox!) format, and more robust search so users can more easily find the videos they’re looking for. More importantly (for survival, and social media geeks like myself), each video will now feature share tools (!), which will allow viewers to share the videos on sites like Digg, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This is another extension of the Times’ digital social media strategy like TimesPeople, which rolled out recently.

NYTimes.com already produces about a good deal of videos from journalists like David Pogue (Personal Tech) and Mark Bittman (Dining), which happen to be my favorite sections. With the announcement of the enhancement of its video offerings, it appears that video will become an integral part of its new strategy to keep current. I'm sure additional mainstream media outlets will be following suit.

Interestingly enough, the topic of online video has been popping up (not pop-ups – I hate those) all over the place lately. Ipsos Media released a study on Monday that found that the popularity of online video is moving beyond the early adopters/geeks and growing significantly among women and older consumers. As Anchorman Ron Burgundy once said, that’s kind of a big deal. The study found that about 54% of female Internet users ages 12+ have viewed streaming video online in the past 30 days, up from 45% a year ago -- nearly equal to the 58% of men who have streamed online video in the same time period. In the grown-up category, Ipsos reports that 60% of adults 35-54 have recently streamed online video, up from 49% in 2007.

In addition, I had lunch last week with Eric Wright (SVP, Marketing & Business Development) from DS Simon Productions, whose firm conducted a survey of some 200 “web influencers” about this very subject just recently. They're poised to make aggressive moves in this area, and I can see why.

According to the survey, a full 65% of online media sites now use video, and 77% of online media sites project the use of video to increase over the next year. I believe that this will be an ongoing trend, as broadband use becomes more prevalent, both nation- and worldwide.

About 45% of TV stations use outside video for their Web sites, while two-thirds of radio stations, newspapers, magazines and bloggers use outside video on their Web sites. Of course, the strongest interest in sourced video content comes from ‘web media’, which I imagine like a ‘hyper-local’ television affiliate, with limited resources to create their own video content. However, they all have broadband access, and can download from an FTP site (or otherwise). The advancing usage of digital editing works for both parties: online outlets can produce professional-quality video packages at their desktops, and traditional media has regular access to the technology to download video directly to edit bays -- this was a problem back when I was in the TV biz, actually.

New York Times

Rick Sanchez, the Carson Daly of CNN

Wanted to share with you an interesting use of social media by the mainstream media, if you haven't caught it yet…

So, with my current employment situation coupled with current events and my usual media appetite, I’ve been watching a lot of television and catching up on a lot of current events. Mostly news and informational stuff, like the news cablers, documentaries, the blogosphere, and reading the Economist again (really!).

Anyway, CNN’s Rick Sanchez has fascinated me for a long time. Some background: Sanchez used to work at WSVN (FOX, my old employer) and launched the "if-it-bleeds-it-leads" tabloid-TV style that spread over the affiliates of the FOX network and beyond.

So, I’ve been watching his 3-4pm newscast for most of the summer, and I’ve been noticing how he’s been sneaking in little bits of social media each week. Sanchez, a big Twitter fan, has been integrating Facebook, Twitter and SMS into his broadcasts in a fast-paced, FOX-like style. They’ve replaced the news ticker with SMS content, and Rick’s always checking his Twitter and Facebook pages for instant viewer feedback. The play-out should be interesting; particularly how FOX's NewsCorp responds since MySpace is a NewsCorp entity, but not in the right user demographic. As multiple news events have come to bear (market meltdown, presidential election, etc.), these tools’ usage have been become even more pronounced.

Now, he’s hosting a show that may be news television's first integrated social media broadcast. I've been watching it mature as CNN has rolled it out over the past few weeks – it has very interesting potential (and implications) for mainstream media as well as PR folks like myself.

So I Tweeted about it.

And then I tipped Gawker off to it. They wrote about it, actually (how meta!). Perhaps CNN will pick up the story (or this one), like my Charmin project.

So what does this mean to marketers?

This is a great example of Digital media integrating with mainstream media (my original haunt), and my gut says the prognosis is good. The broadcast numbers have not been released yet, but Sanchez's Twitter account has exploded with followers. This program is a good demonstration of the utilization of the technology in a very early version. As the technologies mature, and usage goes widespread, MSM programming can take advantage of the interactive conversation for the benefit of digital marketers’ clients and their public relations initiatives.

As I've said many times before, Digital teams will also need to educate their colleagues on what this emerging media are and best practices to work with them, and embrace for themselves. Personnel that are able to do so across disciplines (Consumer, Healthcare, Corporate) will be invaluable to growing an overall firm's capabilities and insight. It's a technology I'm currently thinking about how to apply to future projects. Digital media, like the technology powering it, is constantly maturing, which will allow the drivers of Digital teams, to not only round out PR programs, but also to make PR firms more innovative and to grow the industry as a whole.

Here's another bit that'll "really bake your noodle", as the Oracle would say... How'd you find yourself reading this piece? Twitter? Facebook? :)

UPDATE: Steve Rubel (MicroPersuasion) has picked up on Sanchez too...

and CV Monologues

Gossip Girls

Just wanted to share this oldie but goodie with y'all...

He Also Eats More Than They Do

PR girl #1: I love your outfit today!
PR girl #2: You know, I was walking down the street, and this homeless man in a box told me that "Purple is the color of royalty."
PR girl #1: Don't joke about that. I could be joining him, if my apartment doesn't come through.
PR girl #2: At least he lives in Manhattan.

--Office, 53rd & Broadway


Overheard by: Roger Resnicoff

Overheard in New York

New York Rulez

'Nuff said. At least until after dinner.

Richard Florida and The Creative Class Exchange

Jezebel

As Long As There's No Hanging Chads...

CNN is reporting that there is such a high turnout for voting in NH that they're running low on ballots...

Iowa Caucus a couple of days ago had record numbers of voters too... Are we in a voting renaissance? Are people that pissed off? It's about time!

CNN

Who's Watching You?

Scoble mentioned on his blog today a term that I've never heard before, but have referred to often in usually inelegant terms: Granual Privacy Controls.

Whereas I realize the story that the term came up in is what he's discussing (Google Reader privacy), I started thinking more about the big-picture implications of privacy in regards to the term.

I've started a somewhat successful Facebook community at my company. One of the strongest privacy features that Facebook offers in this case is its options concerning who can view what particular content on your profile. While some people (not including myself) like to post pics of themselves in bikinis or doing keg stands, they don't want their Managing Director to see them. Don't get me wrong -- I really support the posting of bikini and keg stand shots, and enjoy them immensely, so y'all keep posting them. But I digress...

ANYWAY, people really do like to keep tabs on what others are doing -- the Facebook Newsfeed is a good example. I can actually track friends' movements, moods, etc., and it's fun and engaging. That said, some folks don't want people to know, and Facebook gives them the option of doing as such. As people get more involved in online communities, social networking services that don’t have Granular Privacy Controls will increasingly piss off users and chase them away.

It makes you think a bit about where all your 'assumed privacy' falls. For instance, I tend to ignore Google ads and banner ads... It's just a thing of mine (which is baaad, because sometimes I'm involved in producing them). I'm a big fan of Gmail, and in general, I ignore the ads on the page which allow me to use Gmail for free. But do people realize that the (possibly very personal) email that was sent to me (and I replied to) has been scanned by a service that picks up keywords in the content and then provides marketing information to show me things that "I may be interested in", based on that (personal?) content? Most people don't think about that.

Scobleizer

Okay, this is just CREEPY...

Saw this on boingboing... Some are very fitting, and some are just disturbing in a Wes Craveny sorta way... Photos of celebrities and celebutantes who've had their eyes replaced with smaller versions of their mouths. Photoshop Fun.

Freaking News via boingboing.

Universal Translator and the Tower of Babel

There's a lot of news in the spirit of Star Trek in my life this week. I recently received the Star Trek movie boxed set in the mail, which I had found on some closeout site for $30 and free shipping. How could I resist? I'll talk about my favorite, ST II: The Wrath of Khan some other time.

Anyway, this led to a number of conversations with people, about such topics as "It's the 21st Century, where's my flying car?!" and a great show on the History Channel called, "How William Shatner Changed the World".

So when I saw this piece on TechCrunch, I was sort of amazed by the possibilities. Apparently, Google Talk is adding a new translation bot for chat, which will provide translation from English to Chinese. The bot can be used as a direct look up tool, or in an actual group chat on-the-fly.

Can you imagine what a powerful tool this can be in the worlds of commerce and communications? It's a direct, real-time way of communicating with ANYONE, once the service can crunch the language. I'm no linguist, but I'd estimate that Chinese is much more difficult to translate than any of the Latin-based languages.

Bring on the Vulcans.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/19/google-talk-gets-one-step-closer-to-the-ultimate-babel-fish/