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by Chris Brogan

I’m not an early adopter. I really am not. Maybe to some of you, or to some industries, but in the tech world, I’m always the guy showing up a few months or so after the party. I was the 10,000th (ish) user of Twitter. I didn’t get an iPhone until the 3G. And when Google Wave came out, I immediately dismissed it, the way many people dismissed Twitter when it first came out.

And then I saw the light.

I went from a guy who hated Google Wave to telling Kodak’s CMO on stage yesterday that Google Wave would be the one app I’d ask to salvage if I could only save one app running today. So how? Why? What’s that about?

There are two things I’ll do with this post: explain what “the light” is to me on Google Wave, and then talk about this thing we do with new technologies.

The Light

Google Wave has been described as different things from different people. It’s been called a replacement for email (I don’t feel that way, but it’s a replacement for one way that we use email). It’s been called Google Talk on steroids (even less so). It’s been called Google Docs for groups (closer).

Google Wave allows for multi-person collaboration. It’s an easy way to work out plans and ideas and concepts with a group of people. Once you start ( here are my first feelings about Wave), you go from total uncertainty to sharing some tips to wishing it did some things better, to using Google Wave for task management.

I’m using it to propose a new book with Julien, to propose a different book with (can I tell them? You tell me later), to hammer out the details of my new soon-to-be-revealed company, to start a side project with a good friend, and several other collaborative efforts.

The “light” is that this tool is better than email about going back and forth, and also, if you use it well (I’m learning to keep the “blips” at the top as the “gold” stuff, and use the blips below a certain point as the “chatter”), then you’ll see obvious and instant reasons for using it. But if you have no obvious collaboration project to try it on, it doesn’t immediately make sense.

In a way, it’s like being given a new device that not many people have. It’s just not useful. (See the network effect.) So, once you get some collaborators and once you get a project rolling, you’ll immediately see the value.

How We Process New Technologies

We process new technologies the way we consume most everything in our lives: “what’s in it for me?” And from that, we also ask, “Why should I change the way I am?” The “escape velocity” of the status quo is often too high to care about and as such, we don’t really feel the urge to switch.

Why should I check out Twitter? It just looks like people talking about their cats. I’ve got serious work to do.

I joke that there’s this cycle where we write a dismissive post about a tech, and then we write about why we ended up falling in love with it about 30 days. This post is that in a way. I used to really crap on Google Wave, and now here I am praising it.

Should we dismiss tech right off the bat? Probably. Should we revisit again? Yes. I think as business people, it’s just not in our best interest to follow every shiny objects. But should we stay open to reconsidering a technology after a fashion? Absolutely. Without this last part, we close ourselves to potential new improvements to our process flow. Imagine never adopting email. Imagine never getting a cell phone. Communications technologies like this are important, and do change how we do business.

Make sense?

by Darren Rowse

In the last two months I’ve started using Surveys to get in touch with readers more and more.

Those of you who subscribe to the ProBlogger newsletter will know this first hand because late last year you were invited to participate in one – but I’ve also run a couple on my photography blog that have been incredibly useful.

I’ve been running the surveys using SurveyMonkey (it is a little clunky but it is free for smaller surveys and not the most expensive option for larger ones).

I have found running surveys beneficial in a number of ways:

1. Getting in touch with reader needs – this is the most obvious reason to run a survey, they give you real insight into the needs, problems and challenges of your readers. The information I’ve gleaned from surveys in the last two months have provided me with a massive source of post ideas for the coming months!
2. Understanding who your reader is – some of the surveys I’ve been running have asked questions that help me not only identify the needs of readers but also have helped me understand what type of readers I have. I’ve asked questions about experience levels, demographics and other things that help me get a picture of what type of person is reading – again this helps shape not only content but many other aspects of a site.
3. Warm up Your List – up until recently I’d not been sending emails to the ProBlogger newsletter list. Due to time constraints I’d let my email list go cold. Sending out a survey to this ‘cool’ list was one of the best things I’ve ever done – it not only helped me in the above ways – it helped me re-engage with old subscribers in a way that was not about promoting myself or any product but which was all about them, their needs, their challenges and their situation.
4. Build Anticipation – later this month I’m launching another E-book on DPS. As part of the process of creating anticipation of this E-book among my community I’ve been running a simple survey to get readers engaging with me around some of the topics of the E-book. The survey will not only help me make the E-book better, but in the introduction to the survey we’re letting readers know about the upcoming launch – something that plays an important part in building some good buzz and anticipation of the launch.

MUST watch video from Eric Qualman

by David Griner

Today, there was a relatively minor bit of Twitter-related news on the social media hub Mashable.com. It was essentially just an update about how MSNBC is expanding its use of the “@BreakingNews” Twitter feed it bought last month:

Not that big of a deal, right? Except that it soon exploded into a burst of speculation that MSNBC had actually purchased Twitter itself. How could people get so mixed up?

Because Mashable’s Twitter link to the item was one of the most misleading I’ve ever seen:

Personally, I’m pretty sure this was just a case of unfortunate phrasing, and not really an intentional misdirection. But that doesn’t change the fact that people were soon retweeting the headline like a forest fire. Like it or not, a lot of people simply don’t read through links before sharing them, a problem exacerbated by the fact that Mashable has nearly 2 million followers on Twitter.

Here are just a few of the many comments posted by the blog’s readers, who overwhelmingly had more to say about the tweet than about the news itself:

The moral here is pretty clear, and I’m really not trying to beat up on a site as stellar as Mashable. But I think it’s worth taking the time to note that the way you rephrase your headline is just as important as the original phrasing.

Now excuse me while I try to write a Twitter link to this post without implying that I have purchased both Mashable and Twitter.

UPDATE: Response from Mashable’s Adam Ostrow, who wrote the blog post (and headline) at issue:

Hey David – Not sure at what point you saw all this, but here’s what happened and my thinking:

1. Original headline and tweet were both the same with the “Breaking News:” at the start. Typically, when something actually is breaking news, we use “BREAKING:” so I was trying to be (too) cute and reference the name of the brand that the article was about.

2. Quickly noticed a lot of people thought I meant something else, so I changed the headline. However, if MSNBC had bought Twitter, I’d have simply said so (BREAKING: MSNBC Buys Twitter” or something).

3. My thinking was that enough people knew about the @BreakingNews account and the prior MSNBC deal that it wouldn’t lead to mass confusion, but be a clever headline that complimented my story nicely. Clearly, I assumed too much.

4. I agree with you that many people RT before clicking thru – hence, headlines like this one don’t work. Hopefully won’t make the same mistake again 🙂 Thanks for the post.

Big thanks to Adam for taking the time to clarify. Just goes to show that Mashable is, as always, a class act — and that they can be as human as the rest of us.

by Vadim Lavrusik

The news media is experiencing a renaissance. As we end the year, its state in 2009 can be summarized as a year of turmoil, layoffs and cutbacks in an industry desperately seeking to reinvent its business model and content. But despite the thousands of journalism jobs lost, the future has much hope and opportunity for those that are willing to adapt to a changing industry.

Much of that change is happening now. And in the coming year, news organizations will look to approach monetization and content experimentation that is focused on looking at the web in a new way. News () in 2010 will blur the lines between audience and creator more than ever in an era of social media. Below is a look at several trends in content distribution and presentation that we will likely see more of in 2010.

1. Living Stories

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One of the difficulties of the web is being able to really track a story as it develops and creating engaging formats for long-form articles. The article page is often the only thing that a reader sees and not the story in its full context. In 2010, news organizations will design stories that are more suited to the way readers consume online content.

One early sign of this is the recent collaboration between Google (), The New York Times, and The Washington Post on the Living Stories project, an experiment that presents coverage of a specific story or topic in one place, making it easy to navigate the topic and see the timeline of coverage on the story. It also allows you to get a summary of the story and track the conversations taking place. This format contextualizes and personalizes the news.

2. Real-Time News Streams

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Our news consumption has morphed into a collection of streams. Whether it’s from our Twitter () homepage or an RSS reader or a Facebook () feed, we get bites of information that sometimes satisfy us or direct us to places where we can get more information.

The move toward real-time news is increasingly important, and media critics and professors like Jeff Jarvis predict these streams will replace web sites. That change may not come in 2010, but streaming news elements will become a an integral part of traditional news sources. We’re already seeing Twitter streams and other visualizations incorporated into news home pages with updated financial and market information from new sources like Google Finance.

The challenge however, is that journalists need to accept that news breaks through real-time social media platforms like Twitter, said Alfred Hermida, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia School of Journalism.

3. Blogozines

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Another format that takes effort, but can be an engaging alternative to the traditional blog post is the blogozine. This could be great to keep a reader engaged in a long-form story. Though I don’t think we will see the death of simple blog posts, a rich-media and rich-layout approach from blogozines will gain momentum in 2010.

4. Distributed Social News

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This year the social news trend gained momentum with the explosion of Twitter. Moving into 2010, news organizations will further distribute their content across social platforms that allow its users to create a personalized and socialized news stream. Personalized search has emerged in 2009, and 2010 will see more sites integrating applications that allow users to create personalized news streams.

More news organizations are beginning to establish a presence across multiple platforms and social sites, and it’s not just the popular sites like Twitter and Facebook anymore. Newsweek, for example, started a Tumblog because the “format is adapted especially well to magazine journalism, since it encourages a deeper engagement.”

Robert Quigley, social media editor at the Austin American-Statesman, said he thinks news sites will continue to exist for a while, but the “smart news sites will extend their tentacles into the spaces where people are communicating, and talking about news.”

5. News Goes Mobile

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In general, 2010 will see a distinct transformation in the way people consume news as smart phones become ubiquitous. And as more startups enter the market of mobile transactions, news organizations could develop strategies or provide services for transactions to take place on mobile apps.

News companies should be prepared with a mobile-first strategy. Instead of just selling ads to business customers, news organizations can help small businesses develop applications that help them do business in the mobile marketplace, said Steve Buttry, C3 coach at Gazette Communications.

Mathew Ingram, communities editor at The Globe and Mail, said mobile also has great potential to increase the number of content consumers, especially if it is done in a geo-targeted way to reach a local audience. Something that news organizations should also be prepared for is e-readers gaining a larger market and the emergence of the Apple Tablet, which publishers like Wired Magazine are already getting ready for. Meanwhile, Time Inc. and other magazine publishers are looking to create a Hulu for magazines where consumers can purchase and manage digital subscriptions.

6. The Year of Geo-Location

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Geo-location services will be the buzz of 2010, though it’s difficult to predict which services will rise to the top. Geo-tweets could take this space, but companies like Foursquare () and Gowalla (), which combine geo-location with social gaming, are highly addictive and have a lot of potential, especially with an advertising format that serves its users.

Mathilde Piard, social media manager at Cox Newspapers, said there is a lot of potential for news sites to get into the market of events and venue listings. “There are event listings and business directory listings out there but none that are good enough yet,” Piard said, and “Geo-tagging goes hand-in-hand with this stuff.”

Also, imagine the opportunity for news companies to work with advertisers to make ads more relevant to location. Imagine an iPhone app that buzzes when you walk by a bar telling you the daily drink special, Quigley from the Statesman said.

7. Story-Streaming

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New storytellers means new ways of telling stories. We will see more story-streaming with the growing popularity of simple blogging platforms like Posterous () and Tumblr ().

An example of this is a project from Daniel Honigman and Len Kendall called the3six5, which aims to get 365 people – one for each day of the year – to write about something that is happening in the world that day and how it relates to them. Though neither Honigman or Kendall are journalists, the storytelling format of life streaming is what attracted the two to start the project. Honigman said it is an experiment in crowdsourced storytelling.

8. Social TV Online

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2010 will see some big improvements in online video and even greater shifts of viewers moving away from their TVs to watch online as companies like Hulu and others reinvent the space. The coming year could see sites like Hulu () becoming profitable, and even extending to international markets to increase viewership.

We’ve seen TV shows like PBS’s News Hour moving to YouTube, and 2010 will see an increased push for TV to reinvent itself online. One way of doing this is through “social TV.” Hulu, for example, lets Facebook friends watch shows together, and has account, rating, and sharing elements akin to social giant YouTube (). We’ll see social TV take center stage in 2010.

9. Marketers as Producers

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Marketers are also beginning to skip the journalist as a middleman to produce their message and are instead producing it themselves. Mike Sprouse, chief marketing officer at Epic Advertising, started a 28-page monthly (printed) magazine called Winning the Web. The magazine includes commentary and content on emerging trends in online marketing, and is produced by just two people working full-time. It’s distributed to about 3,000 people and is completely free.

Sprouse sees more marketers and other professionals in general moving into the direction of producing content themselves. He said most companies have a blog or a Facebook page, and going into the coming year, more companies will shift to produce content themselves in a “thought leadership” approach.

10. Social News Gaming

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With social gaming sites growing in popularity (Facebook’s Farmville is bigger than Twitter), news media companies will surely experiment with creating their own social news gaming applications. Social gaming is highly addictive and if a news organization were to effectively execute their own game, it could serve as a way to keep news consumers coming back and a way to present stories or information in new ways.

NBC introduced a social media game for its series “Chuck” called Chuck Me Out that lets users gain points for spreading news about the show or getting friends to watch it. The person with the most points by March 8 will have their photo appear on the show or win one of another several prizes. Perhaps a similar concept could be applied to news content in 2010.

by Josh Jones-Dilworth

Josh Jones-Dilworth is the Founder and CEO of Jones-Dilworth, Inc. a PR consultancy focused on bringing early-stage technologies to market. He blogs at joshdilworth.com.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” – Mark Twain

Remember that quote. In 2010 the very best marketers, PR professionals, and social media consultants will put data at the center of everything they do. For anyone unfamiliar with these concepts, just as with social media, data marketing may seem opaque or intimidating at the beginning. The only way you ever learn is by jumping in headfirst — become a data nerd, because data nerds are changing the world.

Your Data Is An Asset

In the near term, learn to think of data as an asset, and be creative. Data shapes conversations and markets. But data doesn’t come to you – organizationally, the gathering, filtering, curation, visualization and publishing of data will in many cases require a reorientation of the marketing function and its relationship to other roles, but it is well worth it.

Using one’s own data to tell a broader category story is one tried and true tactic that will continue to gain popularity. Comscore has done an excellent job of this for years, as have companies like Mint and ZocDoc in more recent memory.

What is happening is that companies large and small are starting to turn on to the idea of the data as an asset – and not only that, but a marketing asset — one that can be used to shape discourse in ways that no number of retweets ever can.

Data Journalism Is the Tip of the Iceberg

Journalism itself if profoundly changing, and becoming more data oriented. The idea of “data journalism” has taken off, and everyone from Y Combinator with their recent RFS, to AOL with their controversial new automation strategy, to the Texas Tribune, which has put their databases front and center, are good indicators of what is to come over the next year.

Even non-profit offerings like This We Know, which is built on open public data, surface important stories and trends that might not have otherwise made their way across an editor’s desk. And if you’re a PR person, the reality of data-driven reporting is going to make or break you.

But it’s not just journalism – it’s advertising, conferences and events, SEO, social media, television, promotions and offers (think Groupon), web and application development, etc. — the vehicles of communication are themselves evolving.

Getting your organization’s data game together is one thing, but understanding the mutating DNA of the marketing channels themselves is even more important.

Privacy, Privacy, Privacy

Facebook’s recent privacy changes are a great example of how privacy issues will take center stage in a data-driven world. Privacy, safety, authenticity and transparency are paramount – but what have become healthy-sounding buzzwords in word-of-mouth marketing circles will be put to the test.

The Twain quote that starts this post says it all – data can be used for good or evil, it can reveal great truths and propagate outstanding lies – which is it going to be? How will users and customers respond? When will government get involved? Who will solidify their brand and who will self-destruct?

Personal privacy, as it relates to data, is an important subject for marketers to consider seriously. The upside of the proliferation of data may be that campaigns are more measurable, strategies are more empirical, and “release early, iterate often” is a reality because social media gives us a massive, real-time focus group at our fingertips.

But, the downside is that data can be darn scary, and for good reason, even despite the legions of early adopters pioneering the concept of personal data as a new form of self-expression. There are lines that should not be crossed, and there are power dynamics already at play that risk tipping the balance too strongly in favor of certain parties.

Despite tepid reviews, Google’s new privacy dashboard is a step in the right direction – the vision is to allow individuals control over their own data. Empowerment and personal freedoms are key concepts in this new world, and they will be debated heavily in 2010, from every angle.

The truth is that he who owns the data, wins. Even though right now government is enthusiastically hopping on the open data bandwagon with great results (and kudos to them for it), over time the gathering and dissemination of data will become a highly-regulated industry.

Realize that any serious company that thinks of data as a core marketing asset likewise needs to think about where it gets that data, and the potential backlash if users or customers feel manipulated or outright fooled. We often talk about authenticity and transparency when it comes to social media best practices – those attitudes must be heightened and extended when it comes to data.

That’s So Meta

Finally, looking beyond data to metadata – that’s where the biggest opportunity lies in the long-run for marketers. Metadata is already here in the form of microformats and the Semantic Web, but it’s still in many ways a frontier.

What is metadata? It’s data that describes data – it’s data that tells us about the data. It is reasonable to expect that new classes of self-describing data will eventually tell us not only what it is, but how to use it, who it is best suited for, what geographies it should be targeted at, and how much inertia it requires to achieve critical mass. Over time, however, marketing will transition from being based on data, to being conceptually inseparable from it. A lot of money is going to made in the process, and huge numbers of jobs will be won and lost. It’s too early to tell exactly how it’s all going to play out, but the groundwork has certainly been laid.

Robert Scoble’s idea of a “Supertweet” is a nearer-term example, and rather compelling – it is the idea that advertising (among other things) can and will be delivered at the metadata level inside of tweets, with the help of clever new data-driven interface elements. The metadata might tell you where a tweet originated, what tweets it is related to, how many times it has been retweeted, or what concepts that tweet is about – but the point is that tweets will become much more rich, and our understanding of their intent and use will be that much more sophisticated.

The core thing to understand about metadata, especially if you’re not technical, is that eventually, marketing will no longer be something that happens based on top of data, and the insights gained therein. It will happen literally inside the data, as a constituent part of it.

This change won’t be fully effected for several years at the earliest, but we’re starting to see concrete examples of how this might work. The imminent arrival of true software-based assistants, for example, will only accelerate metadata assimilation. The efficacy of machine-to-machine marketing will eventually supersede human-to-human and machine-to-human marketing as the primary seat of innovation in our discipline.

Full Disclosure: Siri and ChallengePost are clients of Josh Jones-Dilworth, and are referenced in stories linked to above. ZocDoc is a former client.

Images via Nick Russill and Thomas Hawk.

by Vadim Lavrusik

With the news industry struggling to find new revenue streams that can reshape their broken business model, 2010 will be defined by experiments in news media monetization. This will also include content that is guided more than ever by the audience and ad revenue.

This coming year we will also see the results of news organizations putting pay walls up, as well as new experimental models like accepting Web donations from readers — some of which may prove to be successful. Below are eight emerging news media business trends to look for in 2010.

1. Social Media Monetization

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The coming year will see emerging business models, including social media monetization. And as advertisers become more comfortable with advertising in social media, news companies will look to capture those dollars.

“Twitter display ads,” said Matt Thompson, interim online community manager for the Knight Foundation. “I don’t understand why this hasn’t happened yet.”

Thompson pictures a half-page ad that is actually a Twitter () widget from a retailer’s corporate account. In fact, some news organizations have already experimented with social ads. Robert Quigley, social media editor at the Austin American-Statesman, said they gave Twitter ads a try and have gotten some mixed reactions from followers, but did not lose any of them. The Huffington Post is also going to sell tweets to advertisers.

2. Revenue Beyond Advertising

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But maybe news organizations aren’t cut out to dive into social capital. Paul Bradshaw, course director of the MA Online Journalism program at Birmingham City University, said in 2010 news organizations need to at least adapt to the “measurability, customizability and personalization of advertising.”

“Ad sales departments are even more behind than journalists, so I’d be surprised to see them monetizing social capital,” Bradshaw said.

Some news organizations are already beginning to reshape their structures in a way that erases the line between advertising and editorial division. And online advertising is not predicted to overtake the market share of newspapers until 2015. Perhaps rethinking advertising altogether and looking for additional services, value, or products to sell may be a new approach going into 2010.

Steve Buttry, C3 coach at Gazette Communications, outlines a revenue strategy that calls on news organizations to move beyond just ads and look for revenue in direct transactions, local search and lead generation. “I think the advertising model is breaking down and our future is not in finding new ways to sell eyeballs, but in finding ways to facilitate the local marketplace,” Buttry said.

3. As Publications Fold, Others Become Lean and Mean

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A tweet from Patrick Thornton best summarized how some felt when they learned last Thursday that the very publication that covers the print industry, Editor & Publisher, was closing: “Does anything better symbolize the state of print media right now than the closure of E&P? Yes things are very bad.” It was a shock similar to the announcement of Gourmet Magazine’s folding.

Though advertising is going to stabilize in 2010 and with it some budgets of print publications, the year will see more print publications close shop or go online-only. However, with publications closing others will come to fill some of the gap. In 2009, there were 428 magazines that stopped publishing, while 275 new ones launched. Those that make it through this downturn will be poised to rebuild leaner and meaner –- investing in the future of digital news rather than simply hoping it fades away like a bad trend.

4. Growth in Hyperlocal and Community Models

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With many traditional and regional news organization’s facing cutbacks in staff and in some cases closures, local and community-based models and startups will look to fill the gap in content. In fact, some hyperlocal publication models have done pretty well in comparison to most. This year we have seen the launch of many hyperlocal online news start-ups from the big Texas Tribune to the smaller Oakland Local, often relying on grants or funding from wealthy donors.

Michele McLellan, a news consultant who blogs at the Knight Digital Media Center, said the sites that will succeed going forward are sites that are highly entrepreneurial and community-driven with a tech expertise. The best example she’s seen is that of Oakland Local, which is a blend of building community and a focus on using technology to gather and report news.

David Cohn, founder of community-funded reporting startup Spot.Us, said there is a huge opportunity in hyperlocal news “that if missed is like giving away a golden goose.” However, the problem he said is that traditional news organizations still need to let go of the idea of “big journalism.”

“Whether traditional media companies or small media companies pioneer it – there is a future,” Cohn said.

5. Local Advertising Grows

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Cohn is right. There is a future in hyperlocal, and advertising is a big part of it. According to eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman, “the economic cycle has reached bottom –- at least for the online ad industry.” Hallerman authored a report on 2010 ad spending, projecting a 5.5 percent growth. The highest growth is expected to come in online video with a 34 to 45 percent growth between 2009 and 2014.

And Borrell Associates predict that local online ad growth will continue, and project a 5% growth for 2010. It’s clear why large news organizations like CNN are investing money into local aggregator content sites like Outside.in.

6. Local Advertising Models Emerge

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Some companies are looking to take advantage of the growth in local ad dollars. PaperG is launching a new product called Place Local. Place Local is currently in stealth, but Victor Wong was able to demonstrate the new ad-generating application for us.

The basic idea behind the application is that it automates the ad creation, sales, and management, Wong said. If a local advertiser agrees to place an ad on a site, all you have to do is type in their address and name into Place Local and the application generates an ad to be placed on a site based on content pulled off the web, which can include the logo, picture and even a web review. “In 2010, I think what you’ll see is that everybody is an advertiser,” Wong said.

Fwix, a local news aggregator site available in five different countries, is launching Adwire widgets, which let people embed a content widget that includes text ads within the stream of news headlines (identified as ads) from a specific location.

The ads are also locally targeted. Darian Shirazi, CEO of Fwix, said the the company is sharing Adwire revenue with those who place widgets on their site. Shirazi said they are also releasing a video version too, which will play pre-roll ads.

7. To Charge or Not To Charge?

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Some news organizations that have been tip-toeing around the idea of putting up pay walls will finally take the dive in 2010, and most will see a decrease in traffic, similar to the early results Newsday has seen. The readers that do end up paying for content online will be loyal and few.

However, Cohn from Spot.Us points out that if any pay walls do work, it would be for national brand news organizations. “I am actually cheering [Murdoch] on. Somebody needs to try it so we can stop having the conversation,” he said. “But I don’t think it will be successful for News Corp and I am very confident it would be a disaster for most news organizations.”

Gina Chen, a Ph. D. communications student at Syracuse and blogger on the news industry, said news organizations that put up pay walls may die and flounder and those that don’t will be forced to innovate new ways to make money. Chen said the future for news organizations will have less to do with news than it will be about filtering information and “making life easier for readers.”

“News organizations’ product isn’t news, it’s making sense of a community for readers,” Chen said.

8. The Freemium Model

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Mathew Ingram, communities editor at The Globe and Mail said that if the likes of Rupert Murdoch are able to make a pay wall work and get some money from Bing () for indexing content, he would be losing far more potential value if he were to go with a more open model instead.

Ingram said that a “freemium” model that has free content and value-added content or services that require payment make much more sense.

What other business models are you seeing emerge for news media in 2010? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

by Mollie Vandor

Mollie Vandor is the Product Manager for Ranker.com and Media Director for Girls in Tech LA. You can find her on Twitter and on her blog, where she writes about the web, the world and what it’s like to be a geek chic chick.

Lately it seems like Facebook changes its privacy options more often than most people change their statuses. Late last week, Facebook rolled out yet another set of new privacy settings, replacing regional networks with concentric circles of connections. Before, Facebook’s default privacy settings were largely location-based — people who lived near you, or went to the same college as you, were able to see more information about you. Now, access is all about who you know and who knows them.

The new Facebook publisher privacy controls are a core component of this change. Now, instead of simply posting something to your entire network, you can choose to specify who sees your posts. It’s pretty easy to figure out how to use these changes to your advantage when handling your personal Facebook page — those happy hour pics should probably only get posted to people who are actually your friends. But figuring them out for fan pages is a very different proposition, especially because privacy settings for Fan Pages are still all about location, location, location.

What Are the Fan Page Publisher Privacy Controls?

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The publisher privacy control is the icon that, ironically, looks a little bit like the MySpace logo. You can find it on the publishing area of your Fan Page, right next to the share button. When you hover over it, you should see a prompt that says “Everyone.” This is the default, so if you don’t do anything to change it, your posts will automatically go out to all your fans’ feeds. However, if you click on the privacy control, you can customize your posts so that they only go out to fans who speak a certain language, fans who live in a certain country, or even fans who live in certain cities and states.

You can also create combinations of customizations by sending the post out to people in multiple cities, multiple states or multiple countries. There are some limitations — at the moment it doesn’t appear that you can specify certain cities and states within a country and also share that same post with certain cities and states within another country. You can, however, share with multiple countries at once. Using the controls is pretty easy. The hard part is figuring out why you would want to use them in the first place.

Spread the Good Stuff Out

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There’s a thin line between engaging your Facebook fans and annoying them. Target and time your content correctly, and you’ll get all the clicks you could possibly want. Don’t, and you’ll either miss the boat or make your fans want to throw you overboard. That’s where the privacy controls can really come in handy.

Say you’ve got a great piece of content that you want to promote, and you want it to reach as many of your fans as possible. If your fans are spread out into multiple time zones, you’re going to run into issues trying to time the post for a window when everyone’s likely to be checking Facebook. And you definitely don’t want to post the same piece of content over and over — that’s a recipe for really annoying your fans. Now you can target your posts by time zone, so you don’t waste your best content by throwing it into the feeds of fans who are probably asleep. Just use the publisher privacy controls to roll that good content out region-by-region throughout the day and you’re all set.

Get Tested

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What better way to test the web waters than with a good A/B experiment? Post two different pieces of content to two different (but demographically similar) regions. Once your posts are up, there are plenty of ways to measure engagement and find out which one worked and which didn’t.

Even if a post fails, your Facebook fans will likely be more forgiving than the audiences on most other major social media platforms. Unless it’s outrageously offensive, bad content on Facebook tends to just get swept away in the stream, which makes the publisher privacy controls the perfect way to find out if your fans want to follow you in that new direction you’re contemplating.

Control for Culture

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With 350 million users and 70 different translations, it’s no wonder that Facebook is a whole world unto itself. Your Facebook fans could be coming from any corner of the globe. Unless you’re selling something that everyone in the world is interested in, there are probably some posts that will entice one group to click through and another to click away. That’s the perfect publisher privacy control situation.

First, you should know the demographics of your users. If you don’t, there are plenty of great tools to help you track and triangulate them. Once you do, it’s relatively simple to figure out which regions of fans will want which types of content. By targeting your posts to particular regions, you can avoid offending certain fans. But, more importantly, you can post more content more often. Because you won’t be posting every piece of content to every fan, you can post a higher volume of content, so you get more information into the Facebook stream and more relevant content to each region of your user base. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Take on the Trends

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Let’s face it, what’s cool in California isn’t necessarily blowing up in Burma. The world is a big place, and the World Wide Web is too. While there are some memes that make their way around the globe, there are many trending topics that take off in particular places, or for particular groups of people. And I’m not just talking about the topics people are tweeting about. From major events to sporting matches to local news, there are all sorts of bandwagons your fans could be jumping on. And if the people you want to communicate with are on the bandwagon, shouldn’t you be there too?

Of course, you don’t want to cram content about every single trend into every user’s Facebook feed. That’s why you should use the publisher privacy controls on your Fan Page. Target your post to the place your topic is trending. That way you can jump on all the bandwagons you want, without causing content overload for all your fans.

Conclusion

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When it comes to managing your Fan Page, the publisher privacy controls let you post more content, more intelligently. By targeting your posts to specific people, you can post more often without saturating the streams of all your fans, and you can pinpoint the people who are most likely to respond to and engage with every piece of content you post. Use the new privacy controls to pick the perfect demographic for a particular piece of content, test new types of content, and time your posts for maximum return. Controlling where your content goes helps you better control your brand and build your user base. That’s an awful lot of power for one puny little privacy button.

by Rich Lazzara

How should I feel when I visit your website? What emotions do you want me to have after that experience?

When someone visits your website they are going to make up their mind in a matter of seconds about what the site is all about and more importantly how it makes them feel. We often focus on designing the site for the sake of a “good look” without ever considering what emotions we want to invoke. Those emotions will translate into action, good or bad.

Real World Emotions

Yes you need to have a call to action, whether its sign up for something, buy something, respond to something or inquire for more information but creating an emotion is central to your success. Think along the lines of some real world examples;

Target vs. Walmart
Apple Store vs. Sony Store
Ikea vs. local furniture store

Each of those clearly evoke an emotion that you experience the second you walk in. The question is which emotions do you want to evoke. (click image below to see “Wheel of Emotions”)

Your Website Should Be No Different

When someone visits your site you should have in mind the emotions your looking to have them experience. For this site my focus was for you to experience a professional, smart, modern and inviting design. The emotions I want people to experience are optimism and trust. Once I established these then I could go about designing the site to reinforce those emotions. Lastly is to iterate, get feedback, test and improve, so on that note – give me some honest feedback, how does my website make you feel? What can I improve on?

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