Below, you’ll find a collection of videos and links that we think enumerate industry best-practices and useful techniques for developing your business across Web 2.0 and mobile platforms. Have media to share, like audio or video from a conference or lecture, that isn’t on here? Contact us at right and let us know!

At PointAbout, our goal is to mobilize the web. This means providing tools like AppMakr and resources to help you develop a versatile, robust Web-and-mobile-savvy business model. Take a look around, and mobilize yourself!

Understanding The Mobile Pyramid

February 3, 2010

The Mobile Pyramid

We recently released a PDF and PowerPoint slides (feel free to repurpose as long as you credit PointAbout) that describe The Mobile Pyramid. This is how we see the mobile space. While PointAbout focuses on the top of the pyramid, we also help ensure clients have a strategy for all three components. Many people often talk about “mobile,” but really, mobile is comprised of three very distinct components, as evidenced by this pyramid.

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Did Anyone Listen? Has Anyone Watched? How the Pros Measure Online Audio & Video Engagement.

August 10, 2009

PointAbout recently attended the Web Manager’s Roundtable at NPR and captured the following presentation on Analytics & Tracking: How the Pros Measure Online Audio & Video Engagement.

Analytics & Tracking – Web Manager’s Roundtable from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

Here is the audio:

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Digital Media Conference East: Summary

July 1, 2009

Daniel R. Odio from PointAbout was a panelist at the Digital Media Wire’s Digital Media Conference East. Here are links to all the panels, with video and audio.

Keynote & General Session:

Mobile Track:

Video Track:

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PointAbout co-sponsors dcMOMO Event on Mobile Advertising

June 23, 2009

This event was moderated by Grant Allen of Core Capital, with a panel consisting of:

Robert Samuels, Director of Mobile Products, New York Times
Anurag Mehta, SVP, Sales and Business Development, Mobile Posse
Marcus Startzel, Senior Vice President of Sales, Millennial Media

Video of the event:

Audio of the event:

Some facts produced by Grant Allen, the moderator:

· More people have mobile phones than Internet-connected PCs (4 billion)
· SMS penetration ~50% and fully mainstream (82% of users <24 y.o.)

· 82 million Americans can recall seeing advertising on their phone over last 3 mos. (approx. 30% of 270m adult phone users)

· 25% of phone users (65 mm) are accessing the mobile web but 80% of iPhone users are

· 40% of Twitter users use the Internet on their phones (76% if you include WiFi) (Pew)

· Internet Advertising Bureau survey found that 62 percent of agencies, media planners and advertisers believe mobile ad spending will continue to grow and emerge in marketing budgets

· Mobile device is increasingly becoming small, portable PC experience with an Internet browser experience similar to that of 2000/2001 (just diff’t form factor)

· In 2007, eMarketer reports that US advertisers spent $900 million on mobile, and double in 2008 to $1.7 billion

· 21 million iPhones + ~20 million iPod Touches = 40-45million iPod-like devices

· 50,000 apps from iTunes App Store and Nokia, RIM, MSFT and others now w app stores; 1 billion+ app downloads to date

· 70% of people sleep with their mobile phones (Zumobi)

· More than 60 million mobile views per month for New York Times; one of 4 apps pre-loaded on the Palm Pre

· Joseph Porus of Harris Interactive: “”Mobility could be recession-proof and be one of the strongest ways of effectively marketing in tough economic times”

· 35% of mobile advertising campaigns cost less than $10,000 (Forrester)

Transcription of the Event:

dcMOMO Event on Mobile Advertising

Thank you everybody for coming. We had a little metro incident today so for those of you who could not make it, we are videotaping the event. This will be on dcmomo.com just like all of our events are. A couple of announcements before we get started: the digital media wire conference is on Thursday June 25th. It’s an all day event put on by the Potomac Tech Wire, for those of you that know that organization. We are going to be giving away a ticket to that event to whoever can tweet the most tweets with a hash tag dcMOMO by 8 am Wednesday. So you have all day tomorrow to tweet whatever you want. Just use the hash tag dcMOMO. It’s a $500 ticket that we’re giving away. That event is Thursday; it’s at the Ritz Carlton in McLean. It’s going to be an excellent event and it has a mobile panel. It’s on track for mobile content. That’s going to be a very good event. Thanks. So before we get started I’d like to ask Seth to come on up and say hello. He’s our location sponsor for tonight.

I just want to thank you for coming here. We’re very glad to have you. I’m sorry Jason Siegel who’s the head of our interactive group wasn’t able to make it. He’s with one of clients, AMCO, in Florida. They’re having their big franchisee gathering where they celebrate transmission. Were very glad to have you and I’m sorry about the metro. The last time we had this place was overflowing. It was really good. I’m sure it will be great. If you have any questions let me know or Victoria will be floating around as well. Eat drink be mobile, enjoy yourself.

And also this event in the phenomenal wine is provided by our other sponsors who are (5 sponsors that’s about 5 more than we had about 4 months ago so were on a roll and were just getting started. So if you work for a company that might be interested in sponsoring please let us know. It’s less expensive than you might think and it’s international recognition for the sponsorship. So thank you to these great sponsors.

I just wanted to publicly thank you. I haven’t seen you since. Thanks to Point About. They’re an amazing company, amazing organization, amazing everybody. Together as you may have heard we won a Webbie for a best mobile app for information and I can’t even remember the specific tag but it couldn’t have been done without Point About the amazing thing that can be done so quickly. We thank you so much. It was the navigating Washington app for the Obama inauguration.

Alright so without further ado I’d like to introduce our moderator for tonight, Grant Allen. Grant is with core capital partners. I don’t have much of a bio to introduce him but to say that he seems to be everywhere all the time and he knows everyone on the panel so Grant thank you for moderating tonight.

Thank you.

Grant I’ll let you introduce the panelists.

You guys, come on up here. This would be three distinguished panelists we have for the evening. I want to keep things pretty light tonight and have an open and very frank discussion on mobile advertising: where it is, what works, what doesn’t is it really recession proof? Is it the savior for advertising which is a little depressed in the current economic climate, so to speak? Does everybody know about the hash mark?

If you have questions, this is a smaller group so maybe not as important, you can tweet a question hash tag dcMOMO and well enter you for the competition, so get started, and it will show up right on the screen.

And you can win tickets for another event later this week. But before we get kicked off, I just want to introduce everyone down the line. Mark, we’ll start with you.

My name is Marcus Startzel I am with Millennial Media, a Baltimore company. We’re a mobile advertising network based out of Baltimore.

Hello everyone. I’m Anurag Mehta and I’m with Mobile Posse. I’m responsible for sales and development for them. We’re in the mobile advertising business as well. We’re in idle screen play. For those of you who are unfamiliar with idle screen play it’s basically delivering content and advertising messages to the home screen of your phone when your device is not being used. By definition, we’re not part of another experience. We deliver messages equal and often to our service when their device is sitting idle. Messages can be content messages or mobile messages. I’m sure we’ll talk more about that as the evening progresses.

Just to set the record straight, definitionally, I want to make sure people understand that mobile advertising is not just blasting SMSes to your phone. That is one component of it but Mobile Posse is here as a pretty innovative new model in to an always connected device. They’re doing idle screen so when you’re phone is just sitting there. It’s pretty interesting; 70% of people are actually sleeping with their phone either with them or beside them it’s pretty interesting to be getting advertising when you’re not using it but it’s still a device that’s always with you. Mobile advertising is more than SMSing and the banner ads that you see all the time.

Rod Samuels, the director of mobile Product development for the New York Times. Everything from iphone apps to the mobile web, sms, kindle. Anything that isn’t part of the main website.

That’s great. Well I’ve been involved with Mobile for a few years probably not as long as a lot of people in the room. But I’ve always been hearing about the, panacea, brass ring of mobile advertising which is getting zapped with the Starbucks coupon as you walk buy the store thinking of mobile device as something that is very personal very connected and also very targeted through location services. That was back in 2001 and it hasn’t really materialized in the way it was originally promised. It’s been interesting to see mobile advertising as a vehicle mature and get to a point now where you have very rich very capable devices whether it’s the Palm PRE and the iPhone 3Gs to a point where mobile advertising is very timely and a very great medium for connecting with people. So, given the recession we’re in the way advertisers are looking at their spends we’re seeing at mobile advertising doing pretty well so I’m curious to kick things off to see how the Times are viewing mobile advertising as a component of regular advertising and how you guys are faring.

Yeah, it’s hard to say we’re not in some sort of recession but we’ve been having a great year so far in the first couple quarters. Our sales force over the past couple of years, myself working with project marketing managers spent a lot of time educating the sales force in what is mobile iPhone app, mobile website, what the creatives are what it takes to get an advertiser in the agency involved. We help advertisers who don’t have creative who don’t have destination sites, necessarily. We help facilitate all that so we the excuses to not do it in the buying process, sort of easy for them. It’s taken a couple of years now probably I’ve been their three years in our mobile one traffic has really grown tremendously, a hundred times or something since earliest ’07 to 50 times now. With that, advertising agencies realize that they can reach they can buy just the sports section. They can buy just the homepage, they can buy our iPhone apps separately or combined with the mobile web and some of the great destination sites we’ve seen like Land rover, Range rover, basically a catalog of one of the new vehicles the ability to look up dealerships, click-to-call. The sort of sexy walking past of some department stores, Starbucks and getting your phone ringing for a coupon besides the intrusive factor, I think that basically the bread and butter of what we’re used to in advertising whether it’s the print for the 150 years with the NYT or the regular web I think we’re just slowly transitioning into what is the traditional advertising spend and experience. How does that slowly become part of something with a mobile web, and iPhone apps and compelling mediums with better devices that you mentioned as they can expand as the sites that have click to call or will look up a location. There’s a lot of utility in there without disturbing people as they’re walking past a restaurant or a Starbucks.

How many unique views do you have?

It’s between one and two million on the mobile websites every month and one or two million unique on the mobile web and iPhone app is about 600 or 700 thousand a month. 1.8 million downloads of the iPhone app.

Great. From Millennial’s perspective how is the ad network doing in this economy.

It’s interesting. There is a recession going on but I think mobile has always been coming next year. What I would say is that more advertisers are starting to understand that there’s an ability to reach consumers on the mobile phone that they can’t reach another way. There is the intrusiveness of walking by a starbucks and there’s definitely that cliché and other clichés how people would rather lose their wallet than their cell phone. Their car keys are certainly clichéd there. Everyone has a mobile phone. I think the change has been from back when it started that the scale of people that go on the mobile web and get content and enjoy the experience has really blown up recently. The latest number is about 60 million people are browsing the mobile web, not including applications just browsing the mobile websites so 60 million. There are probably 180 million on the internet. It’s getting there pretty fast at a pretty fast rate. I know, Millennial from the ad network perspective, we are a reach-play. We reach 43 million of those 60 million people so we have partners like NYT and Mobile Posse where we go out and have a sales force and advertisers. From an ad perspective, the explosion has really gotten on the other side. Everybody thinks about the iPhone as mobile advertising is the iPhone. It’s certainly a great device that has transformed how people look at mobile advertising but its part of the overall scheme. Over 7 million people have iPhones in a sea of 300 million phones in the US. It’s really high. It can really open up everyone’s eyes to say, Wow, I can run an expanding banner and video ads that go back and forth. The amount of things you can do on a phone today, I don’t think people realize.

To put in a fact, there are 21 million iPhones and then you add on the iPod touches on top of that, that’s 40 million in connected devices walking around and you talk about pervasive Wi-Fi that’s a tremendous amount of targeted advertising in a very small form factor.

I couldn’t agree more. The iPhone has really opened up people’s eyes. The ad buys that have been coming in have been really, it’s been both platforms this year. It hasn’t been all iPhones by any means. Plenty of appetite for the mobile web store.

You mentioned pre-roll and post-roll. I’m curious especially for Mobile Posse; do advertisers even know what these new forms of advertising are? And how much of that education process is that to try to tell people, Mobile advertising is here this is what it is?

We’re in a very unique interesting position. We’re having to educate a lot of brands and advertisers about mobile advertising and then within that we have to educate them about idle screen advertising and what that means to them. I think for the people that are willing to give us the time of day within five minutes we generally get the product across and they see what we’re all about but it’s still early status. A lot of what we do is very evangelical out there educating people about mobile advertising especially the people that haven’t initiated who haven’t done anything in mobile yet. I’ll tell them a little about mobile advertising and then a little about idle screen advertising. The thing that really works for us is the level of engagement we can produce. By definition, we provide information to people while their phones are not being used. We get 18-22% engagement when we look at online, which are half percent or less or the app world which is 1 to 2 % for a good campaign.

When you say engagement you mean click through rates?

It’s from the banners. It’s someone looking at the banners, clicking on it and it going to a full screen ad. That’s 20% which means a fifth of all people that get our ad click on it the instant they get it. Another thing that’s interesting is you can watch our application at any time. When you launch our application all of the advertisings and content messages are stored within it so the person has the ability to go back any time and reengage which, how many times have you driven through a billboard do you think well that’s really interesting but now I’ve drove by it and can’t look at it again. So most advertising points to in TV or broadcast media is very ephemeral. You see it for an instant and it’s gone. You see it on a webpage on a banner but when you go back the next time it’s a different banner. If you give people the opportunity to go back 2 or 3 days later, they can take advantage of an offer or go look at a piece of content that they found interesting.

Has there been any correlation between advertisers who have experienced some form of more traditional form of mobile advertising or someone who has had banners on a site like mine or someone who’s run through Millennial. Have you seen different uptake or their willingness-?

Absolutely. Certainly people who have been initiated, if you will, into the mobile advertising world. It’s an easier time selling to them they’re generally aware of mobile advertising as a medium. They’ve tried it; they’ve had good experience with it in particular. That’s helpful for us cause then we’re only doing incremental education on idle screen advertising. What’s interesting though are often times we’ll talk to advertisers like now we’re running a campaign for the US Navy where they have a website with a clip to call action. So we had a conversation with them and said we can certainly send traffic to your website where people could initiate a click to call action when we can simply provide the user with a full screen ad one click to a call as opposed to two clicks to a call. But they we’re like, we built the website; we want to go to the website. So there’s still some of that.

So would you say that advertisers and publishers are not actually using the native functionality of the phone such as using it as a phone?

Absolutely. I think it’s in the process of sharing that with them and educating them and you know it’s in small steps so it’s just a matter of introducing them and getting them comfortable with the medium and taking small steps from there.

You mentioned click-to-call. What other modes are working? This is an open question.

We really do monthly research on what advertisers should do on our network, millennialmedia.com/research. You can go there and download it. Short registration, only a few sales calls after that.

I promised him half of you guys would download the report. That was a stipulation of participation.

One purpose of downloading is –The numbers change month over month but about half the people use the native phone applications. Another drive to a website and so you’ve got click to call, you’ve got click to video. A lot of people are emailing. We have a lot of entertainment clients. Seen a lot of ads up right now for, Secret Life of the American Teenager. A lot of entertainment focused advertisers. They’ve really been using the click to call certainly click to Google maps click to download. So our business is really broken up to 4 parts. The branding business which is focused to really reach an awesome with demographic targeting and they’re generally measured by metrics-engagement metrics of how many people expend a video ad, how many people click, how many people play the video, how many videos, how deep do they get into the website, and then the performance business. I think the performance folks, traditional advertising -so traditional mobile content advertisers like Thumb Play, Fly Cell, things like that are really pushing the limits of what you can do on a phone, in a good way. They’re definitely taking advantage of that. The absolute biggest area of our performance business is click to data. Just with iPods and iPhones just in the US there are 15 million or something like that. A lot of people have really invested in these iPhone applications and want to distribute them out there cause there are 50,000 apps and if you’re not up on a feature, forget about it. No one knows you’re there. It’s a big area of our business right now. A lot of people are getting their applications noticed but it’s also—

Is iPhone really the latest and greatest? It’s certainly a good device and certainly changed the whole game. But there are 50,000 apps, discoverability is certainly a huge issue and everyone is racing to have an app but are they really good advertising platforms.

I think Rob might be a better person to answer the free versus paid ad. There’s definitely a lot of information and research and done on that by Pinch Media; there’s a lot of good stuff out there. For us, the iPhone is another phone. It’s not about phones, not about a particular audience. For us it’s all about the advertiser. We come up with a plan with them. A lot of times the iPhone is where they end up going because if you invest in an iPhone app, there’s really only one place you can go with that and it’s on the iPhone.

And what’s very interesting is often times when we’re talking to carriers, when we’re talking to advertisers; we talk about how we make feature phones smarter. Everyone in this room I suspect has a smart phone.

Who has a smart phone?

About 80%.

But that’s not representative of the rest of America. We’re a privileged group in that regard. A lot of people still carry flip phones, feature phones, Verizon RAZR and the likes of that. Those people are savvy mobile web users; a lot of them have never visited a mobile web page. They don’t even know they can do it using their phone even though it’s capable. And what we do is proactively deliver content to the screen of their phone which can then support one of the various calls to action that we talked about. So taking them to the New York Times mobile website, letting them know that they can do it just by clicking on an ad drives the awareness and the usage of mobile web. So I know there’s a lot of talk about iPhones and smart devices but at least 30% of the people still have “dumb” devices, if you will. They use their phones primarily for voice and text communication just because they don’t know they can do more with it.

I agree there’s a lot of excitement within every content publisher about iPhone, iPhone, iPhone. I tell people, the blackberry it’s not chopped liver. People have got to be able to read the Times content whether it’s in your native app on the blackberry they don’t have the store front that we’re excited about and used to recently with the iPhone bit. People are going to look at ads in half by mobile web traffic is coming from blackberries. People need to keep their head level and focus on there’s multiple device manufacturers out there that are competing or will continue to compete with the iPhone and people need to support multiple platforms and assume that advertising will continue on both the mobile web and the app world.

How do you think about that strategy? Obviously Apple has a very tight, if not iron clench, on their proprietary iTunes app store and then you have WAP under the spectrum which is kind of dying. How do you deal with that?

Our mobile web traffic continues rock solid, our iPhone app which is growing so well is probably cannibalized iPhones viewing of mobile websites but not Blackberrys going to the mobile website for the vast wrath of other devices so in terms of our sales force there’s packages around the homepage on the website the homepage of the iPhone app articles, we have different packages and if for whatever reason I could probably guess at a few of them but different advertisers want to be in the iPhone app, other advertisers want to be on the mobile web some want to be in both some are buying it as part of a combined, online and mobile buy they want to be in all platforms.

You did say there is some degree of standardization where’s you have 4 ad formats.

Yeah largely 4 ad formats and the largest size are both present on the mobile website and the iPhone app. In the iPhone app it’s a fixed position at the bottom where the content scrolls behind and being that one ad unit on the page, advertisers really like it because there’s nothing else to draw your attention away. There’s the content and the ad content. There’s three different ads, five different ads, whatever readers contending with NYTimes.com, it’s a very exclusive position when you’re on the iPhone or the mobile web or the app and there’s one large banner staring at you there.

In terms of our successful campaigns recently, campaigns that have run, I think it was our books team that sold-there was a launch, I can’t remember the name of the book right now, it was a large publishing house, I think it was Putnam, had a book advertising on the mobile website, not on the iPhone app- and the destination site they provided you could read about the author, you could read off an excerpt of the book you could click off to Barnes and nobles site or Amazon and buy the book. It was everything you wanted to do in terms of the author or the book. You can’t ask for more utility than that.

So you’re a little platform agonistic. We have mobile posse who I’m guessing would rather feature phones be around longer than other ad models, is that a mischaracterization?

Not necessarily. We certainly have applications in smart phones as well. But, as you know, so do 50,000 other people. On the feature phones, it’s a very uncluttered environment. People don’t have many choices. I have my Verizon phone flip phone right here. I can’t enter a web URL to go to. I can only go to those websites that are fed to me through the carrier. There’s no way for me to go to NYT even if I wanted to. However, if you presented a user a headline here that said something about the local train accident, to read more visit NYT click next and it takes you directly to the article. That’s a very new, very different, very useful experience for the person. That’s a value ad. It suddenly becomes compelling ad in an environment where people have too many choices. I think it’s not quite as compelling on a smart phone where one could just go to the NYT website. It’s not to say that we don’t have applications for smart phones, it’s just not the same experience as it is for those people who don’t have smart phones.

How many of your clients are-who’s installing it as an app with which you can configure it and have had a sort of an experience with just plain advertising versus it being mainly an advertising component on the phone?

The consumer value proposition we haven’t really talked much about. It for us is really content. It is subsidized by advertising. So when people get by walking into the service. They might get weather alerts every day for where they are, they might get gas alerts where are the lowest gas prices in my area, they might get sports scores for sporting events for my local teams last night. They get all this content, horoscopes, joke of the day, word of the day a lot of it we do with our partners. A lot of content that we make available to subscribers that define valuable and entertaining. They realize content is made available to them as free as applications are free downloaded. Based on the advertising that comes to them. Many of the ads that come down to them are very offer centric, very informational. It’s not just a brand message. It’s some offer we’re sending to consumers. One of the various calls to action that Marcus talked about which is you can either go click to call, click to web or click to search, you could have an ad that says “Hungry for pizza? Go find a local pizza store!”

There seems to be some sort of trade off. They’re getting a good offer to save money or you guys originally we’re doing discounted rate plans and free minutes to induce people to sign up and have the ads?

Yeah, when we first did a trial, this was 2.5 or 3 years ago now, we offered a onetime incentive as a $5 subsidy to use that application. We’re far from being at a point where there’s enough advertising where you can actually subsidize a rate plan. Now we give people a free service which is they get free content on their device which is generally otherwise not available, certainly not available for free, in exchange to view advertising.

Back to the feature phone versus smart phone question, how does Millennial think about that?

Is there anyone here from the agency? Can you raise your hand please? How about other mobile sites? Mobile content providers? I spent 6 years selling online advertising through advertising.com, mostly performance focused but a lot of brand stuff as well. I never got asked what percentage of my ads were going to be on Macs versus PCs versus laptops versus laptops or are they going to have IE6 versus Google Chrome versus Mac browsers such as Safari. I never got asked that so when I got into the mobile space, there’s a lot of fracture when you talk about this phone versus that phone or the feature phone. At the end of the day, it’s pretty easy to advertise from a mobile perspective. Everybody comes with a different perspective. We’re definitely not device agnostic; we’re all about the advertiser’s role. The big thing that you see is that the largest mobile sites out there other than Yahoo and Google are Facebook and MySpace. People are social networking on their phones. Even my son, who has an LG Lotus which is a QWERTY feature phone, Facebook has some sort of presence there. These big sites are now going away from the iPhone. I don’t know the technology, but they are developing an experience that looks like an application that you can access anywhere. It doesn’t matter what type of phone it is whether it’s an iPhone or my Palm PRE or a different kind of phone. To cut costs, cause it costs a lot of money to develop one of those applications, you’re going to see a generic feature set that will work on all sorts of phones. At the end of the day, it’s all about the consumers and how you can reach them in different ways whether it’s an application on their desktop, if you want to call it that, or on a different site. It’s all about reaching people in a compelling way because, I think one of the things we aren’t talking about is the performance of a mobile ad versus a traditional online ad. The users are so much more engaged. Mobile Posse’s got them with great engagement; I’m sure the NYT has the same thing. From a cost perspective to run a campaign online than a campaign on mobile, you’re probably going to end up getting a lot more efficient reach and a lot more efficient response than you can by going mobile because comparing an online click rate of .04 to a mobile rate of the single digit percents, you have to pay a lot higher CPM to make those be even but mobile is just so much more efficient so when you look at the engagement, it costs so much less to engage a user.

Particularly, perhaps because you’re supporting more of the feature phones, again half the traffic going to our mobile website is out of the top 30 devices there are 16 different Blackberry models. I think it’s been pretty consistent over the past few months so you’re reaching someone who has been entrusted with a corporate Blackberry and it isn’t necessarily the highest executive but it speaks to people on company data plans, corporate Blackberrys and in the city now, corporate iPhones. It’s hard to reach a similar demographic in any way on the web with the people that are highly engaged on the mobile web or on the iPhone but in particular the mobile web skewing to extreme Blackberry usage for us is a fantastic opportunity for our advertisers and I think that’s why we’ve seen so much repeat business.

What’s the delta that you’re seeing between traditional online click media than on the web?

For us, the click-through rates have been enormously high. I don’t know if the sales force will be throwing out specific numbers but among friends and Twitter, it’s been exponentially higher than on NYTimes.com but then again I think we all acknowledge that some of the rates that we’re seeing on the mobile web and iPhone app are because it’s new and people are seeing an ad and being like, “Wow, someone’s advertising up here, that’s interesting” and they click on it to see what it’s all about and what kind of experience, from a consumer standpoint, what can that be like on a phone. So basically, as this experience grows to be greater and greater, I think we’ll see some of these rates drop over time but if there’s also something unique other than being dinged as you’re walking past the Starbucks, maybe it’s by section, maybe it’s by zip code or some GPS targeting, you’re seeing an ad and if it’s interesting to you and compelling and you’re riding in the back of a cab or you’re on the subway or you’re on a bus or you’re walking around town clicking on it being able to do something, request a brochure for a car when you’re not doing anything else essentially, it’s a platform that rolls the best of sitting at a desk with your phone there and your internet and your PC all sort of rolled into one between the click-to-call and the immediacy of it all.

It seems to me there’s also a huge boredom factor of people just breaking out their phone when they’re in transit or when they’re waiting for a friend.

There’s definitely that. There’s a whole continuum of it. I think it has a lot on both extremes where you’re either bored and surfing around the web or you need some sort of phone number and you’re searching around the mobile yellow pages and then you get into the paid search. I think there’s a lot on both extremes.

It’s definitely a vehicle for doing more of the pulled content where you’re going out and reaching for something. It’s great. So just to switch gears for a second, I want to touch on some of the barriers to adoption. It’s been pretty warm and fuzzy, peaches and cream up to this point. Mobile advertising is certainly here but what are the hindrances that are still in place? I’m curious what your thoughts are.

The biggest thing for us is reach. When we go talk to advertisers there’s traditionally been a tennis game and we want to reach millions of subscribers. We can make a very informed argument and have an informed conversation with them. You might reach 40 million people online with .04 or .05 engagement but you can reach half a million subscribers with 30 or 40% engagement essentially gets you there with a much smaller audience. You’re spending a whole lot less than you would online but a lot more from a unit’s economic perspective. And they go, “Yeah, how can I reach 5 million people?” Well, we don’t have 5 million people yet but we had 10,000 two years ago and 50,000 last year and half a million now. So we’re on a growth trend; this is just something that’s going to take a little while to adopt, to get the word out. But often times what you actually get is we just have to have a conversation and convince them—as I lose my voice. I’ll get some water.

In terms of privacy invasion, getting spam, this is one device that I have one number; this is always with me. The last thing I want is to get some random ad blasted at me but we’re past the SMS stage. Is privacy still a concern? The can spam issue?

I think people love to throw carriers under the bus for lots of different reasons.

Well get to that in a minute.

They’ve done a really good job keeping SMS from turning into a spam folder where you can say lots of bad things about them. Who got a spam SMS while we’ve been sitting here? Probably none of us. We probably each got 150 spam in our junk mail folder in Gmail. So I think they’ve done a great job there. From a privacy perspective, I think people sign up for lots of different things. To search on Google maps, you have to install the Google app it’ll ask you “We’re going to have to use your location to make this application work. Are you cool with that?” You check yes and you’ve just subscribed to their terms and conditions and they can reach you based on your location. What I don’t see is anyone reaching out and saying, “Hey, that guy’s passing my client who’s trying to sell Fords” and throwing him a “Hey why don’t you go buy a Ford while you’re passing the lot?” I haven’t seen anyone do that but I think everyone’s mindful of those boundaries. From our perspective, what we’re doing today is nothing different than the New York Times did 150 years ago. There’s content and we want to advertise where the eyeballs are. Now New York Times is a key player in that they own the content. They get the content, they publish it themselves. Now we’re a network so all of our ads show up in either applications that are ad supported or sites that are ad supported so I don’t think that privacy at this point has been a barrier to mobile advertising growth at all.

I don’t think, collectively, I think we’re not involved in things that are going to build a stocker out or surreptitiously provide GPS data to an advertiser. Right now we haven’t done anything in terms of GPS advertising within our iPhone application. I’m sure some point in time we want to create that inventory management nightmare we’ll think about it/ I don’t see privacy issues or people worrying about conducting any e-commerce. On the mobile web and iPhone app. I don’t see too many worries.

I think that’s a good point. I think the things that are holding us back I think is just the education. We’re all up here trying to educate what’s possible on the mobile phone. When I joined Millennial 5 months ago, I had no idea that you could do … on a mobile phone or that you could do behavioral targeting like you do online or you can do any of those things. It’s amazing to me. I think education is a major limiter and its holding things back.

And I think that education is with the entire ecosystem. It’s with consumers, advertisers and other content publishers. There’s gaps all over the place.

From my perspective, we’re permission based advertising solution, by definition. We collect a lot of data from consumers who often do our surveys and based on that we can send targeted information down to subscribers whether its content or advertising messages. Consumers really enjoy that cause its targeted to them; it’s something they asked for. Nobody wakes up and says “I hope I get more ads tomorrow.” But you won’t be offended if you were able to save $2 on dinner based on a coupon we send you. You got the information for free that you were otherwise going to have to. I think what’s interesting is that we have access to a lot of information. You guys have a lot of access to the information from your consumers. None of it is shared and I think consumers benefit from it if you find a way to share information so what’s delivered to subscribers and consumers is more relevant and pertinent to what their interests are or what they may be interested in

I think most people would be okay giving up a little bit of personal data so they don’t get served ads that are, I mean they’re a fact of life, they’re here to stay especially seeing as they’re free. I’m happy to give up a little bit of information to get targeted ads if I’m going to have to see them.

I think most consumers would be if they had much of an education on this. If they understood more what that information is shared for and it was being kept confidential, I think they’d be more open to it.

Back to the question about carriers though. Obviously with location services there are issues that are involved obviously privacy and location debts are very expensive and the technologies that do this, whether its cell tower position or GPS, it’s rather sophisticated at this point. How do they factor into the rest of the advertising you guys are doing? Is it from a revenue perspective? Do they even matter anymore?

For us, they do.

You have to get them pretty loaded in a lot of cases.

Carriers are an enabler for us. They are a means for distribution. Everything we do is off of cable solution to carriers. So off of Verizon’s network, our carrier’s called Daily Scoop. On another, My Extras. Different carriers label it as their own and make it available is as consumers. So yes they are a big enabler for us. That’s not to say we can’t go to consumers directly. We do on the smart phones. But a lot of devices like the feature phone there’s no way to reach the consumers without going through the carriers in particular if you want an application that’s not only free to download but free to use.

So for the rest of you guys, would you rather carriers become dump pipes?

The more people picking up their phones and typing into the URL of a browser the less involved a carrier is. That’s just the way technology works. I got it on the first day, sprint gets to choose when I open the browser, what page I see first. If you open up the browser to PALM PRE it opens up your home screen which is a list of bookmarks and you can customize that however I want. When I bought it at first there was Sprint, ESPN, Facebook and some larger sites. They’re relevant in that they have partnerships with those sites ultimately pull those consumers on deck. I remember back in the day, AOL’s a perfect example. They’re right down the road. AOL owned the pipe and the consumer and once the consumer realized there was life outside the wall garden of the AOL welcome screen and they could just type into the browser, that server became a little bit irrelevant. AOL and Verizon are two different animals all together. Look, what did Microsoft spend? 600 million dollars to buy all of Verizon’s search and all that? I can’t call a $600 million advertising deal irrelevant by any stretch of the imagination. They do hold a lot of keys esp. on the search.

I think depending on the content publisher it means more or less than how much of a business you’ve already built up. Like ESPN, they’ve had a mobile presence, mobile background back when it was all a little mono screen. They have a big entrenched business-somebody like ESPN or CNN who has probably been out on the mobile web for a long time. Prior to 3 years ago, the times had very little of a presence on the mobile web. There was no iPhone app. So, most of our traffic in mobile is coming from our own text messaging programs, Blackberrys, off deck, some other highly trafficked, voyagers, people just typing in the URL on the iPhone app. At least for us, it’s mostly off deck, implying that carrier relationships at least for us are not as important now. We do have relationships with the major carriers here but its I think over time, for those using the smart phone it will probably continue to be less and less relevant. it will be more about typing the URL from the perspective of Microsoft won’t be willing to pay for the search on these devices. That’s sort of a different play on it than from the content publisher perspective. If I can have a site, whether its NYTimes.com or mobile.Ntyimes.com, consumers are going to come to our brand without there being a link there on the Palm PRE portal.

It clearly can’t hurt. Can’t hurt.

You are certainly being held by carriers holding you on deck.

Absolutely.

Does that cost you anything? Do you have to pay for that?

I’ll just speak generically. Most of the carrier relationships at this point, although there are probably some pay for placement ongoing still, most of our relationships revolve around advertising and web share on advertising on the pages that are driven.

It’s the low level guys that are taking a lot of inside deals there.

Being on-deck helps. The data that we see, for every click you are going through on the mobile device, you’re losing half about your audience. Having to go three clicks, four clicks deep into a deck to try to find a content outlet especially one less known than the New York Times, you are going to lose a lot of your audience.

The advertising we’ve received, a lot of it, on their own for the regular website and for our iPhone app from Apple, it’s been indispensible. Clearly they’re driving a lot of downloads from our application: displaying on the side of the times and other places. We were one of two news apps when the launch of the Palm PRE between OEMs and carriers we like to have great relationships with all of them. If a device has a regular browser, regular meaning what we’re used to on a PC, it’s easy with a QWERTY keyboard it’s easy to type in a URL the experience of an on ramp experience in a portal like an AOL welcome screen that paradigm is probably fading.

So, what if you’re publisher not as well known as the NYT, what does the new advertising regime mean for you? Do you think it’s viable even if you don’t have a huge amount of inventory for it to be a valid concern?

Yes, in as much as your regular website gets traffic, you can monetize a regular website publisher X has, having iPhone apps, Blackberry app, Palm app, I think looking for creative ways to build these apps and maintain them in a low cost manner allowing somebody to sort of follow whatever trend there is. Let’s say the iPhone apps are really really hot now and maybe as a total piece of the coolness and advertising ecosystem it’s not going to be so much 6 months or a year from now androids are going to take off and the Pre is going to take off having to build native apps on all these platforms on top of having to maintain a mobile web presence. It’s a large effort. I think its dealing with your presence on all these platforms and maintaining all that the inventory management issues around that and developing your sales force for the competence around selling these different apps and how do you pitch it. Is it across all of these platforms. Is it individually? Is it packaged with a manifestation with your content or online with these apps? I think you have to figure out the right mix based on your demographic and your content. As much as they can survive in an online world, I think they can figure out how to roll some amount of mobile into that.

Do you think you need an app now a days? An app, I use that term very loosely.

I think two to four of the platforms are more relevant than others. I’m not going to name names but you’ll go broke trying- some platforms are easier to develop on than others. Developing for all of them out of the gate, I would suggest to somebody with less resources at their disposal, smaller publisher, probably start off with the iPhone then look to other platforms. There’s a wealth of companies out there facilitating the creation of iPhone apps right now. To try out of the gates to be in mobile I would first probably say mobile web then iPhone app then from there see how you’re doing with the rest of your business then work on some other app platforms. You need to be there on some level in the app form, whether it’s free or paid.

I take a very different perspective. You’re wasting your time building apps. It’s silly. It takes away from your core focus. If you’re objective is to drive traffic to your mobile website or whatever content you have or if you have a call center like 1-800-FLOWERS and you’re trying to drive traffic to your call center focus on doing that. Mobile website as opposed to going out and building apps. There are 50,000 apps out there. There’s literally an app for everything. There are probably 20 apps for everything.

There are apps for things you don’t need.

Absolutely. A lot of these apps get–a lot of the apps get used within the first week or so and then they’re forgotten. I think it’s a lot of effort around build the apps. Rob and I had this conversation earlier and I asked him how much of the advertising and the traffic that they drive to New York Times and the mobile website is by advertising through mobile. And your answer was none of it.

We’re not doing a lot of marketing of our own site.

I think that’s beside the point. There’s ways to drive traffic to mobile websites and mobile content. It’s people’s services that they’re going to be offering without them having to go out and look for apps.

I think people are left with the feeling in the fervor of the apps right now that they can’t be the only one not joining the party.

Absolutely. I think it’s a check the box kind of thing. It’s completely ineffective. You might get 10,000 downloads and you might celebrate that, but what are you going to do with that?

We’re selling those ads in our outfit. We might be an anomaly.

You absolutely are. We’re talking about the second and third people, not someone like the New York Times.

We’ve got Point About to do apps very quickly and easily. Very nice Safari wrappers. You guys can go talk to Daniel.

That’s definitely very interesting. There’s a lot of froth and we see it as venture capitalists; everyone’s got an iPhone app whether it’s crap iFart games to games you’re just never going to make money off of.

The Flashlight Hat.

Flashlight. It’s like a white screen- okay what is this?

It’s got to have utility. We helped Kraft build their iFood app. I don’t know if you’ve seen the app. It’s a great app. It’s the type of app where you can search, “Hey I’m really hungry for something with peanut butter and it will give you a ton of recipes with peanut butter and you can choose what you want to make and you can print out a grocery list and shockingly enough it suggests all Kraft products when you go to the store. You have to pay to get that app, people are downloading it which is a sign that it’s a useful app. I’m sort of in the middle of the app. There are a lot of articles that are like what is the future of the mobile web? Is it all app or is it all wack? At the end of the day it’s all about eyeballs and consumers, from our perspective.

Or, I could say generally, is it just the web on a smaller screen?

Yes, you could. But one dynamic that I don’t think you’ll ever be able to do on the PC is really start to engage the phone devices: the accelerometer, click to call, things you can’t do with a laptop.

I think we’re in a place where a lot of content publishers, a lot of websites are using a sideline mobile site that hasn’t done, hast put as much effort as we have over the past few years in coming up with a site that has recipes, stocks, weather, movie show times and everything that we’ve put into the full New York Times portal formatted for the phone. I think once content publishers change their CMS and that CMS can automatically and dynamically reformat all of your pages and content into a single column view so you’re not pinching and panning and zooming, and dynamically they can switch the page out from having whatever desktop centric tools to having click to call, I think we’ll see sort of a mushroom of mobile web usage and maybe mobile web renaissance and some of the fervor and the apps we’ll subside. Over the next few years, as people are maybe swapping out some of their technology infrastructure for their regular sites. You’ll see the mobile web sort of wake up a little bit more. In the case of our turnout, there is this paradigm we’ve seen with some of the early apps, the ability to do offline particularly in the New York market especially when you’re on the subway when we have virtually no coverage. The apps in the case of us again a bit of an anomaly the ability to read the paper on the iPhone and the articles saved to the device is something right now that in no way does the mobile web allows.

It’s cool. You guys are thinking differently how to repurpose content so it works well on the mobile. You’ve put a lot of investment into iPhone apps and other things to make it more digestible and stickier and to leverage the connectivity of the mobile device. Mobile Posse is doing something that is leveraging a very unique piece of the mobile device. It’s always there. There’s an idle screen that has not been monetized to this point. Then you guys are there kind of capturing a lot of the flow through of the advertising bit and helping to facilitate that process. I’m curious now since we seem to have such a dearth of twitter feeds asking questions if there are any questions from the audience for the future of mobile advertising with any of these particular stories, things I can answer or if you just have general comments on the future of mobile advertising.

I have a question for anyone. A couple of you were talking about the difference between online versus mobile web, click to call, CPM. Will mobile advertising have a professional ability? The metrics that can get the mobile position channel—How is that different from the traditional channels? What are the main differences, if any? How do you think that impact will affect mobile advertising?

Great question. I think the major difference between the mobile web today and the internet we’re used to–when I was with an advertising dot com… advertisers, we would be able to place our pixels, our tracking code on your site after someone buys, optimize or change our media placement based on getting you more consumers so we get that real time feedback saying hey a consumer just bought and would reposition where our ads go. In mobile, it’s not there yet. It’s almost there. It’s a lot more like search was in the early days where we’re passing a bunch of information that climbs at a primary. Clients are understanding there are the different placements that are converting for me then buying back the information so it’s much more of a manual feedback. There are certain companies out that there are heavily invested into getting that back and conversion tracking and certainly its available with iPhone apps and other areas but that I think is the key difference. As far as measurability of the advertising, we are doing a lot of campaigns now; I think it’s 40% of our campaigns that involve an atlas, a double click or some kind of third party ad server that agencies are use to using. I think we got the discrepancies so they’re comparable with online somewhere between 5 to 15% difference with every campaign. That’s kind of what it was online as well. From a measurement standpoint a couple agencies are pushing third party ad serving that’s getting on the screen really missing component is the conversion track which I think as the mobile web matures, it’ll probably become commonplace because there are companies out there that are really trying to get their hands around conversion track. It’s the missing link for the hardcore ROI direct response advertisers…cause there are a lot of people on the mobile web, 60 million people.

Again, to my earlier point, as publishers move, instead of just letting some third party create a mobile site for them and bring it into the regular infrastructure and those phones and phone browser support sort of regular web technologies, I think you’ll get more consistent tracking when more users have the ability to log into to NYTimes.com from their mobile version that you might see on a Blackberry so we have some user data on some register users. Right now we don’t force users to log in on mobile only to use certain features that require the log in. Between sites being richer and being consolidated with regular web infrastructuring I think there will be a long way to-right now though I don’t think I’ve heard much in the ways of, Yeah I would run this campaign but you don’t have the same metrics that I’m used to on the regular web.

Look, people have been trying to compare a TV commercial to an online ad to figure out how many ad impressions equals one thirty second spot. No one’s figured that out yet. People are still spending a lot of money. Mobile is much closer to figuring out how close it is to online than TV to internet. There’s always going to be a little bit of a mobile banner is not the same as an internet banner. I think we’re getting through that stuff. There are certainly a lot of really big brands so when I was at advertising.com there were a lot hardcore DR advertisers when I first started there in 2002. It wasn’t the big brands. The big brands were just starting to push money online. When you look at the advertisers that are advertising in mobile today, you’ve got Coke, maybe not GM anymore, you’ve got Ford, Land rover, McDonalds. Big brands are already taking money and investing it in mobile. I think there’s a little bit less hesitancy. We have an impact, sure, maybe we’ll attract them a little bit differently but we’re growing.

I think there’s some tolerance to not be spot on up front because they understand that it’s such an important medium to be in. our campaigns or some of the recent ones over the past year, SYSCO, Continental, it’s been all over the place from smaller to larger and the feedback hasn’t made it all the way back to me from sales saying yeah were a little bit hesitant because of X, Y and Z track. Occasionally there are questions but just like they are on the regular web.

So these are really name brand things across all verticals. You aren’t seeing a lot of ShamWOW or Teeth Whitening?

No, I’m a fan of the ShamWOW commercials and guy. He has the slapchops. He’s in trouble.

Any other questions?

Rich! What’s up?

[audience question] I think…location based or is it… I’m just curious what other technologies…ad more relevant… I look at my Palm PRE which is revolutionary compared to the phone I had two years ago….web experience. There’s a whole audience that only uses the weather band on their phone. They never use the mobile web. They never go to Weather.com or weather bug. Same is true for news and there are different categories. There are a subset of people that never go on the mobile web, I think it’s like 14% that never go on the PC internet.

I get feedback like that. People will ask for things on the mobile web and I’ll say it’s not quite ready yet and they’ll say you have to get it on the mobile version of the times because I never have time to get it on a PC. I don’t own a PC. They’re just reading on the bus or whatever.

We’ve all heard stats like the iPhone and the trendy dish phone but there are people that are using their iPhone as their sole access to the internet which is transitional to say the least.

In that respect, the technology would be ATT upgrades network cause it sucks. It has DPA across the board.

If you think about it most of the world’s population…

They skip the regular web.

It’s a creepy point.

We’re sitting here looking at—

A lot of worlds are completely leaping past PCs. There are 4 billion phones which is more than connected PCs out there. For a lot of people, when we’re looking at high speed broadbands, it’s going to come here first. One of our companies does high speed LT 4G back haul specifically so they can get high speed trunks into emerging markets and that s a big thesis we’re looking at. I do think you’re going to see mobile advertising-advertising from digital perspective in general hit people on the mobile device which is why it’s exciting to be here looking at emerging models in the US even though mobile, we’re behind the times. Look at Asia.

Smart phone penetration, mobile web usage. You shared a stat with us that of iPhone users, 80% surf the web. I was shocked it was that low. If you have an iPhone, how can you not be using the mobile web? That’s what it’s built for. It’s shockingly low.

That’s a great point. Though I think we’re ahead and behind in mobile advertising, we’re certainly at the forefront. There’s a lot of advertising dollars get spent in the US and because of that there’s a lot of investment and by all of our companies try to figure out how to enable that so they can reach out.

… [audience]

It’s really all over the board. The New York Times would probably have a very different answer. They probably have a $40 CPM. I was on a panel with Craig from the Weather channel and he said $25 CPM for them. But, even if you take those CPMs and multiply them by …rate you’re still going to get a lower effective cost rate. Now you could run a mobile campaign on a cost per basis on much lower CPMs than that but we have our network, thousands of servers and they’re built on premium content phones. 80% of our impressions are on the top 100 sites on the mobile web-all premium content sites. CPMs are dramatically different based on the targeted audience too. If you’re on a demo target of 18 to 24 with a household income of 75K or greater than if you’re after the Southeastern US, you’ll get a higher CPM than someone who’s running all over the US talking on their phone.

Follow up question; do you think it’s more effective to advertise on the mobile web than the web, if you have the choice to do both?

Not biased at all.

Absolutely, it depends on what you’re trying to do: what your product is, what you’re ultimate revenue model is, what you’re trying to do as a company. There are efficient ways to advertise online and there are efficient ways to advertise on mobile. It’s just a matter of finding what works.

I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive by any means. Certainly, people are not going to stop advertising on TV or in newspaper or on radio because of the mobile web. It’s just another way to engage the user.

We sell sometimes phone package for online mobile.

When you sell packages, are you usually buying it all at once?

There are individual packages for the mobile web and the iPhone app. They create a larger package depending on the advertiser. Sometimes the advertiser comes to us and says wow we really want to be in your iPhone app because it’s the NYT iPhone app but many times they’re running in print and online, all at the same time.

I think it’s good to think synergistically about the web and the mobile. We encourage a lot of our companies to think about the mobile web and the mobile experience as an extension of the website to increase stickiness and using that advertising to take back to the web and have a more immersive experience at least today cause frankly the screens bigger, you can add flash where on this you can’t. There are a lot of other things that are still very limiting about this. In concert, if you’re repurposing content in smart ways like some of the better apps are doing, it can really be together a really great combo that overall will drive up your modernization.

I think a lot of businesses are very much experimenting with mobile and don’t really know what next step to take. If a business has an experimental budget of let’s say $25,000 max, what should they do in mobile? Do you have any advice? Should they buy some ads? Should they make an app? What do you suggest for them to get their feet in the door?

I’d say try a little bit of everything. Certainly would not recommend building an app. I think that only gets you so far. With a small budget running an ad campaign with us. See what kind of results you get. I think it’s relatively inexpensive in mobile to run a pilot campaign. You don’t necessarily have to reach millions of subscribers to get statistically relevant data. You can reach a small slice and get very very targeted and meaningful data back. Once you get that information you can make decisions about next steps.

Somebody with a small budget can create a fairly robust small mobile website that they can have on a going forward basis that anyone with a mobile web browser can reach. That might be a good thing for someone with a small budget to work on.

And it depends what you’re objective is. If you’re objective is to have people call you to order a product from you than yeah there’s a way to accomplish that. A lot of website what they do today is capture people’s names and addresses or email addresses. Why build a mobile website to capture people’s addresses? Well there’s other way to do that. So, I think it just depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

I think…is probably your main case from our portfolio is one very fast company that does remote ordering. I don’t know if this is a set up or not but they actually work with Point About but they actually made an iPhone app very efficiently and quickly deploy an iPhone application because they used the Point About thin wrapper for what’s already an iPhone optimized website so it already looks good in a Safari browser and basically puts it in a wrapper and adds some other elements for navigation they can then very quickly get up on the Apple iTunes app store. It is not something that needs to have 20 developers and Ukraine developing a really snazzy iPhone application. That certainly is a route to go and certainly some of the apps have gone through a lot of iterations and development

And you can go completely broke doing it and it can take 6 months if not a year and it can literally kill a start-up. So going the app route is very risky. One of our companies have done that and they have bet the farm in a sense in a very very robust application called my Snaps which is integrated with Facebook, creates all sorts of connectivity and actually has a feature where you can use the native phone-the camera imbedded in the phone-to take pictures of things you like so when you’re out shopping you can see shoes you like uploads it so we’re going to be adding functionality so like Amazon has image recognition technology this will actually be able to tell the shape and size of the products you like and kick back ads based on that type of object and that’s going to be a very neat way to have advertising. It’s very targeted because it’s based on products that people are seeing, sharing with their friends, seeing in the real world so it’s connection of physical to virtual so that’s kind of more of a pushing example. There are different ways you can go about it: from having very cheap tests-and-learn campaigns, working with one of these guys, working with distributive networks, working with one of our partners here working on email blasts and SMS blasts.

I think we have time for probably one more question.

[audience question]

Permission, inventory management, ad operations. Whether it’s through a network or internal ad offs it’s going to be sales cycle, sales pitch, it’s going to complicate things whether you want to buy 20 impressions in the next zip code.

Most advertising doesn’t get bought that way. Starbucks doesn’t care if you go to the location of Connecticut and M Street or whether you go to another location—

–if it’s a national brand.

McDonalds, Starbucks, all these people. They’re not worried about driving people to a particular location; they’re trying to get people to any location.

There will be useful implementations of GPS targeted advertising that I think sometimes that we’re all dodging hamsters or running loose within us possibly creating sometimes these cases that aren’t always there/

Most local ad dollars get spent by the mom and pop carpeting store or local car place. I saw at advertising.com but I think mobile is the same thing. It’s very hard to put together a solution that’s going to hit 43 million people across the US but at the same time help a car dealer advertise to just Annapolis, Maryland because with these services you have to get permission before you can show location based ads which means you have to find enough people in that area who are interested in receiving those apps. If you have a application like Google maps or some of the other where you’re putting in their location on a serious scale-and then the ad off side of it is somewhat of a -

The sale, pitching it is hard. I think overtime the GPS functionality might in the long run get exposed to browsers so there might be the hindrance of it being only an app right now –

There’s an app called Lucky that uses Wi-Fi triangulation. That’s going to become more prevalent. My take on it is that when you think about permission based advertising, it’s going to be implicitly opt in because you’re searching for information. If you’re going off and searching through the Google voice app or going online to search for something, you’re searching because you want to know this information. I want to know where the local cleaners are. I want to get information from the New York Times so I’m exposing myself through that process to the network and therefore I’m asking for targeted advertising because I’m asking for that information.

And depending on the granularity you want it’s already possible. Blackberry’s a different issue because the gateway when you’re browsing sort of a run of the mill phone you’re going through a cell tower and the gateway should be able to inform the advertising system you’re general area even if it’s not down to buzzing you as you’re walking past a particular Starbucks but at least the geography of Macy’s within the New York area or the DC area is running a Men’s Suit sale.

Well I don’t want to keep everyone any longer. Please join me in giving these guys a round of applause.

[applause]

We’ll stick around and I think we have a ton of food up here.

A couple of last minute announcements. We’re taking the summer off then we’re having a big blow out event in September at the Canadian Embassy so if you went to our Finnish embassy event it’s going to be that good or even better with a very well known speaker talking about mobile. Then, lastly, don’t forget digital media conference; send those Tweets out, tell your friends to send those Tweets out-hash-tag dcMOMO.com and a big thank you I know Rob came down from New York just for this event so you’re spending more time travelling than actually attending. Marcus came from Baltimore. Another thank you.

Filed Under Best Practices, Industry Trends · Leave a Comment

Segmenting Users: Pew Research’s 9 Tribes of the Internet

June 13, 2009

PointAbout recently attended an event hosted by the Web Manager’s Roundtable (also with a LinkedIn Group that’s very much worth joining) and captured the following presentation by Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet research foundation. Transcript is below the videos.

Video 1 of 7:

(1 of 7) Lee Rainie of Pew Internet at Web Managers Roundtable from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

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(2 of 7) Lee Rainie of Pew Internet at Web Managers Roundtable from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

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(3 of 7) Lee Rainie of Pew Internet at Web Managers Roundtable from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

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(4 of 7) Lee Rainie of Pew Internet at Web Managers Roundtable from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

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(5 of 7) Lee Rainie of Pew Internet at Web Managers Roundtable from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

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(6 of 7) Lee Rainie of Pew Internet at Web Managers Roundtable from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

Video 7 of 7:

Transcription of the event:

03:06 Chris Testa: Good morning everybody. Good morning.. Welcome to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. My name is Chris Testa. I’m the acting CIO here at the museum. I want to welcome everybody to what I think is going to be a fantastic speech and conversation by Lee Rani. I want to say a few words and welcome the many familiar faces here and new faces.

03:33 Several months ago we hosted the mobile technology event here. I’m glad to see many folks have returned. I want to say a few words about a few activities here at the museum and we’ll get right to the show. In January we talked about the museum on the verge of watching two new special exhibitions. You can see a few of the new highlights here on our home page.

03:53 As you exit the Ruby Theater here after the presentation, you take a right, we have an exhibition called: “State of Deception, The Power of Nazi Propaganda.” It explores the tools and technologies that the Nazi’s used to create a powerful new, dangerous vision for German. It’s an interactive exhibit. I hope that you have time to step through it.

04:16 I also want to spend a few minutes talking about an interactive exhibit that’s up on the next level as you exit the permanent exhibition. We just launched an exhibit called: “From Memory to Action Meeting the Challenge of Genocide Today.” What we try to do is bridge the experience within the physical museum with the online experience. So it traces the history of modern-day Genocide through interactive story telling. We have an interactive table where you can explore the stories, save the stories to a personal card and take that home with you and learn more about the individuals and their narratives. But you can also do some action as well.

What we encourage our visitors to do is to make a pledge towards any Genocide. At this point we have over 10,000 pledges in the physical space and online. I encourage you to visit and give us your feedback and hopefully make a pledge.

05:20 So without further ado, I’m going to ask Julie to come up here and present our speaker. Once again I want to welcome you here and thank you for visiting.

05:37 Julie Perlmutter: Good morning everyone. I hope that you do take the time to visit the museum as the presentation goes on this morning, we’ll be passing tickets to the main exhibition. Just sit in your chairs and we’ll pass them down the isle. So whether you decide to take an hour right after the event or decide that you want to come, this will allow you not to have to make a reservation just to go through the museum. If you have never done it, you really owe it to yourself. It’s a fabulous place.

06:17 Welcome to the Web Managers Round Table, the nine tribes of the Internet with Lee Rani speaking to us today. Before we get on to Lee, I just want to give you a couple of things that are going on with the round table. We launched successfully our Linked In group. So although we still have no website and probably never will we are crawling into the social media space. We will make it a habit to post the presentations on the Linked In group after the event. The Linked In group is not open to the public. There are almost 650 people who joined that site, however that does not mean that does not mean that you get an invitation to come to the Web Managers Round Table.

We opened it up on Linked In so that we could have a public image so that we could find the people that are really doing business here and enterpriser organizations. We select from that group who gets invitations. Together with your personal referrals, those are really the only people who get invitations to the Web Managers Round Table. We are now publicly closed in terms of registration. If a colleague of yours tries to register and they can’t get on, basically write me a note and say: “Hey, so and so referred me to the network,” and then I add them to the list. This really will assure that you always will have a place to come that we won’t fill up too early. So if you just don’t mind cooperating with this, I think that our group will grow stronger and more intelligent as time goes on.

08:07 We are going to post Lee’s presentation after the event and we’re going to post a question: “What is the best thing you learned today?” We are hoping that you all will come. I’d like to see about 100 comments. I know there is at least 100 things that people could say about what they learned today. I’m going to call on Dick Davis. Is he in the room? There is an event that he knows about. Dick, tell us what’s going on at Google.

08:33 Dick Davis: [Inaudible]

10:00 Julie: OK. No discussion, just an announcement. [laughs] I want to take the time to always recognize the people who give us the chow with our chat; the people who not are only the financial leg, the lion chair of the Web Managers Round Table, but also add a tremendous amount of value in terms of their expertise.

10:26 Aquin is the worlds largest creative and marketing technology firm. For over 25 years they have helped organizations hire and find talented professionals on a freelance and try before you’re hired basis. To me they are the postal service of the Internet. Rain or shine they deliver! I can tell you that since the second meeting of the Web Managers Round Table in 2005, they have supported this even rain or shine, every single idea I have ever pitched them. With that kind of enthusiasm I know that they will always transfer that enthusiasm to your organization. So they’re really really a special company for me and I hope they will be for you sometime.

11:15 Rock Creek Strategic Marketing specializes in: branding, integrated marketing, interactive design, new media campaigns, search engine optimization that all deliver a rewarding user experience and help audiences engage with your brand. Scott Johnson who is the founder and President of that organization told me a wonderful story this morning that, as a result of a relationship that he built here in the Web Managers Round Table, that his firm is now engaged in one of the most exciting client engagements in the history of their 24 years. So those things can happen here.

11:56 Iron Works is a project-based consulting firm with one mission: never fail the client. The firm offers expertise to clients nationwide in the practice area of IT strategies, program management, user experience, content management, portal development, business intelligence, and custom application development. They have offices in Virginia, McLean, and Raleigh North Carolina.

12:22 I’m thankful to John Casey who really and I depend on this kind of thing because not everybody can do it. Who can figure out the value of the Web Managers Round Table faster than you can read the time on your cell phone. John Casey was one of those people. A recent story that I heard from one of his colleagues at Iron Works named Scott Warren who paid a visit to the American Chemical Society, ACS. She had never been to the Web Managers Round Table, but at that meeting, ACS took the opportunity and thanked Iron Works for supporting the Web Managers Round Table. She was so thrilled by this kudos that she wrote me which was very nice for her to tell me this. She said: “Don’t forget, please include me on the invitation list.”

13:14 But more important, it’s this story, it’s the story that happened to Scott Johnson, it’s these sorts of relationships that are built from the audience and the service providers and our sponsors that go such a long way when companies decide where they’re going to put their marketing dollars. When they have that kind of ROI, that means that the Web Managers Round Table can continue to exist in its present form. I want to thank you all for that.

14:16 All right. Let’s talk about Lee Rani. He is the Director of the Pew Internet and the American Life Project. To me, he is the rock star of the Internet. That organization is the non-profit, non-partisan fact tank that produces studies on the social impact of the Internet. The project has issued more than 200 stores based on surveys that examine people’s online activities and the Internet’s role in their lives. Lee is a Co-Founder of a series of books about the future of the Internet which is published by Compria Press and based on public surveys. He is currently co-authoring a book with MIT Press and it should come out in 2010. The working title is: “Connected Lives the New Social Network Operating System.” Prior to launching the Pew Internet project, Lee was managing editor of the U.S. News and World Report. He is a graduate of Harvard University and he has a Master’s Degree in Political Science from Long Island University. With no other further ado, Lee Rani.

15:30 Lee Rani: Thanks Julie. It’s an honor for Pew Internet to be here. We have been here a couple of years and it’s starting the honor today is being here at the Holocaust Museum. There are magical things to do here in Washington. I’m a Washington native at this point, but nothing more magically has happened in the Rani family than going through the exhibits here. So thank you Chris for giving us tickets because I’m going to get some.

15:57 Julie said we are a fact tank because we have no operative belief system which is lucky because I have no beliefs, but pew has specifically prohibited us in the terms of our grant from taking positions on policy matters, on technology, on applications, on personalities. We don’t have a dog in this fight. We are meant to generate information that is useful to people like you so Pew thinks this is a home run when I’m talking to audiences like this, but we do it from the bases of our findings and data, not from any sort of underlying agenda that is driving our work or Pew’s interest in this work and certainly anything that’s going on in my head. So thanks and I hope you do find it relevant. I will just start there. I will give you fact one if you wanted to say one thing that you learned.

16:50 I always start my talks with an apology these days after about 18 months ago when I was addressing some wonderful librarians in Pennsylvania. One of the librarians came up to me after my talk and said: “Mr. Rani, I’ve got a great idea for a second career for you.” I said: “Ma’am, I’m an aging baby boomer I don’t need a second career.” She said: “Nevertheless what you could be is a reader of the disclaimers on the drug ads because you talk so fast that it’s hard for people to get to you.” I said: “Ma’am, I’m a New Yorker. I’ve converted to Washington and that’s combining two of the most awful talking cultures in the land.” I’m sorry I have a lot of data in my head so I do talk fast and that’s my apology.

17:35 I also begin by asking a question: who is Tweeting this? There are a handful of people wireless. There’s self service but you can tweet afterwards and we can create a hash tag for this afterwards. For those of you who have been under a rock in the past year, I’ll just go through a little tutorial about what Twitter is. It’s a service where you can post a lot of material about “What Are You Doing?” Some people take that literally and talk about trips to the mall and things that they’ve eaten at a meal, but one of the big values I get as a Twitter user is using it as a filter system where I follow people who tell me stuff they’re reading, what interesting conferences they’re going to and stuff like that.

18:24 So yesterday I posted in response to “What Are You Doing” the fact that I was planning a talk for here and I think that some people might be in the room today because I did Tweet this and there are some people who are following me in the room. There are metrics on Twitter. I’m lame. I’m way at the end of a long tale on Twitter in terms of audience population. I follow 104 people 483 are following me and I filed 314 things. Ashton Kutcher has 1 million people following 2 million people now following him. The White House has over 1.5 million now. So I’m a real piker. Chris Anderson would love me at the long tale end.

19:04 You get to see who is following you and you understand that you are speaking to audience doing this. Those of you who have been here to see me in the past know that I used to start by asking who is blogging this. Now I find that it’s more common that people are Tweeting me live. I’ve had wonderful experiences in that just as I had when I was asking the blogging question. There was somebody who missed a presentation that I was giving and Tweeted: “Wish I was there to see digital research king, Lee Rani at the Interactive Media Association. He always presents great work. I arrive in Atlanta tomorrow. See you all there then.”

19:45 I made sure that a few folks knew exactly what my reputation was. Rock Star is now going to go on my bio. I also had a Lloyd Benson, Dan Quale moment on Twitter which was fabulous. Somebody Tweeted: “Mmm, data. Are marketers using data to drive decision making? Check out this new white paper from E-Vantage and gave a shortened url link to the PDF where that research was done and the response from Joe Rukert was: “You’re no Lee Rani, but you’ll do.”

20:21 And of course I’ve been tweeted in Dutch … Lee Rani [Dutch]. So what do you do when you’re tweeted in a language you don’t know? You pump it into Babel fish or some language translator and here is what this person was saying: “Lee Rani, director incredibly how many words in a sense in a minute huit to pronounce.” So they’re even moaning and groaning and bitching about me in Dutch about how many words I can speak like a New Yorker. Well that’s the background of being Tweeted. Help me out here. If you post an interesting tweet about me, you’ll make my next presentation.

21:06 I’m going to talk today about some of our newest research and some of our newest finding. There is a grand thought that overlays everything that we at Pew Internet see and everything that we talk about in the context of the world. If you think about the modern era as being divided from it’s precursor, there is The Industrial Age including The Industrial Age of media and then The Information Age.

In The Industrial Age information was scarce, expensive, institutionally oriented, and designed for consumption. It took a lot of people and a lot of money and a lot of resources to gather up the most interesting stuff, turning it into stories and then pumping it back out. It’s also not just the function of media companies to do that of course, there is a theory of corporations that says that they are the most efficient way to gather up all of the information that an economic entity needs and then make sure that it’s processed in the right way.

21:55 In the Information Age virtually all the stuff that existed in the Industrial Age is now being turned on its head. Information is abundant, cheap, personally oriented and designed for participation. I can’t underline that last point more loudly. It is the biggest thing about the Internet is that it facilitates conversations and contribution from lots more people in lots more ways and the defining feature of the Internet Age as distinguishing it from the Industrial Age is that people think they are their own media makers and their own media creators. That changes the way they think about the world and certainly changes the way they think about their relationship to big institutions.

22:38 So the asteroid that made the then the now was the arrival of the Internet. I’m just going to give you data from the life of the project. In very late 1999 we did our first survey in March of 2000 and released the results in May of 2000. The adoption of the Internet. Even with that the dramatic difference between then and now shows up in our data. At the time we did our first survey, fewer than half of Americans had access to the Internet. Fewer than 5% (I’m just guessing we didn’t even ask) had access to broadband. They were all on expense accounts. It was really expensive to do and so their businesses paid for it. Half the population owned a cell phone. We didn’t ask the question about wireless activity. It wasn’t even possible. Probably in 2000 it certainly wasn’t in a way that you could talk to the general population about it.

We didn’t ask a question about the cloud. I’m guessing that less than 10% of web users used some mail function or something like that. It was out there, but it wasn’t the norm by any stretch of the imagination. The environment that we were measuring at the dawn of the project was the Internet was a slow stationary connection built around my computer. Stuff was carried around with you or it was housed on your desktop, maybe more importantly.

23:58 2008 we’re just about to release some brand new data so I can’t give you the exact numbers because I’ll step on my own news story on here, but more than 75% of American adults now use the Internet. 94% of American teenagers use the Internet. More than 60% of all Americans have broadband connections at home. That’s important because the conversion experience from dial up to broadband changed the way people acted online, changed the expectations about the role of the Internet in their life as well as what was going on on the Internet. It changed what was somewhat of a novelty in their life.

You remember how you were in your first days as a dial-up user; kind of fun, kind of funky. You did e-mail, you did little games, you looked up news. The dial-up protocols were really annoying and so it was sort of something on the side that was a novelty. Now with broadband at home and broadband at work people think of it as a vital information communications utility. Again, it changes the way they act online and they think about the information universe they’re encountering. 85% of American adults have cell phones now compared to those 50% in 2000.

25:09 There is a wonderful story in today’s New York Times Steve Lorr about Smart Phones coming on and actually having a growing market and that changing the was that people relate to this thing that used to be called the telephone, but now is a really powerful computing device that happens to make phone calls and receive phone calls. More than half of Americans connect to the Internet wirelessly.

We’re still having a bit of trouble inside our universe talking to people about this because when we’re asking about mobile connections we’re asking about not only what’s available on their laptops, we’re actually at the magic moment where very soon, not in this survey, but in one we will do before the end of the year, more than half of computer owners will be laptop users rather than desktop users. So we’re talking to people about mobile connections through their laptops, but we’re also talking now about data functions that are housed in that thing that used to be called the cell phone.

26:07 We’re going to get the things right about talking to people about mobile connectivity so I wouldn’t hang all of my professional reputation on that number. It might be a lot higher, it might be somewhat lower depending on the functions that people use their smart phones for. More than half of Americans now use the cloud and we’re not even capturing that very well. Everybody that uses a social network site, everybody that’s going to go on the Linked In site this afternoon, everybody that has a web mail account, everybody that uses Google docs and things like that, everybody that posts pictures, everybody that uses You Tube and posts on You Tube is a cloud user. It’s really a big thing for a lot of businesses.

I know that some of the firms and organizations and firms in this room are thinking about how to apply cloud functions online. Again, it’s very much tied to that mobile experience. When your stuff is out there somewhere then that means that you can get to it with any connective device that you carry around with you or that you have access to. We’re finding that that is a key demographic for the work that we do in the way that we used to see the conversion from dial-up to broadband was a very dramatic change in peoples relationship to each other and to networking.

We are now seeing that wirelessness or mobility is itself a critical distinguishing factor between those who use the Internet that way as opposed to those who don’t. Wireless users are different users from heavy broadband users. We are now being much more conscious about developing that and baking it into surveys we do because we see that there are differences that arise from that.

27:44 So the Internet arm now has gone from that slow stationary connection built around my computer to an environment that we’re measuring where it’s built outside servers and outside storage and again the changes that come from people’s lives. I’ve been really fast getting through our data, but let me pause here and make sure everybody is still with me. Questions about this core overview data that we have? Excellent! Or you’re cowed. OK.

28:13 In this new environment I describe ten ecosystem changes that are systemic. They don’t apply to everybody and the nine tribes is how I’m going to unpack this idea. There are ten things now that are different about the information and communications environment and change the way that people react to it.

28:30 First is the volume of information. There is wonderful work done by the research firm IDC that talks about information doubling in the next five years. Can you imagine that? Of all the millennium we’ve been through the volume of material that we are going to generate is going to double in the next five years. It’s largely because it’s digital and easy to do and it’s largely because we are now moving to a knowledge and information economy rather than an industrial economy and stuff like that. But there is more of it. That’s a big change in peoples lives particularly when they have access to the more of it.

29:03 The variety of information and information sources increases. What that means is as partly a coping strategy, partly as a celebration strategy, people now gravitate to the things that matter to them. They don’t have to pick from a small number of media sources, from a small number of information sources to pursue work opportunities to interact with each other. They can go to the stuff that they really want.

So that segments all the major media markets in a way that they weren’t segmented before. There is a lot of concern for instance for the purposes of this audience, there is a lot of concern in the political science community that the results of the last election not withstanding, the long term effects of this information exploding and the variety of it increasing is that people will become less engaged with civic material because they have more opportunities to avoid civic and political material.

The people who were casually introduced to political and civic information in the 1960’s and 1970’s when we had three networks, right and we had a small number of newspapers and news magazines and stuff like that. Well those casual people now play games or they go to the hobby material that they want or they go to the social networking communities that matter to them and they are less and less connected to the core political and civic information that defines who we are at least as a political culture. So it’s an interesting change, but it’s a change that is making our lives a lot more complicated.

30:34 The velocity of information speeds up. The people who are twittering this are a prime example of this. Big stories always get reported and everybody learns about them relatively quickly. The velocity of information that matters here is stuff that matters to individual people. It’s their quirky stuff, it’s their particular stuff, it suits their own sensibilities. Now they have a lot more ways of getting new inputs and new information a lot more rapidly than they did before. That’s again changing their relationship to their colleagues and to their communities.

31:03 The time and place to experience media change and enlarge. People can encounter media and can watch TV on their video iPods. They can read their newspapers on the iPods or their laptops and stuff like that and they can do it on their schedule and with their play lists dominating their choices rather than the play lists of the media companies or the media properties pushing it out to them. So they can consume news at different hours of the day, they can listen to music at different hours. Appointment media is becoming less and less important and relevant to people rather than them defining the choices that they make.

31:42 People’s interest for information expands and contracts. So the expansion version of this is that people when they’re really turned on by something have a lot more opportunities to dig more deeply into it. The classic thing that we track, as a matter of fact, tomorrow we’re going to be putting out some brand new data on health searches online.

When people either are newly diagnosed themselves or when a love one is diagnosed, they can go from zero to a million miles an hour overnight and learn everything they want through searches about what’s going on with this condition, what are the recommended treatments, what’s going on in clinical trials, what’s the medical literature show and stuff like that. In effect they can become amateur experts in a relatively short amount of time on something that motivates them. The same thing with anything that turns them on. You can go down more rabbit holes in the Internet than you can even count.

By the same token their vigilance for information contracts in a classic sense of multi-tasking. We have a lot more opportunities to encounter a lot more stuff now and so we have to graze a lot more readily.

Those of you who have seen me over the last year or before know that I am very fond of a notion of a friend of mine in Linda Stone who is a technology consultant out in the valley, who talks about all of us living lives in a state of continuous partial attention where we’ve got our e-mail client on all the time, we’ve got our cell phone on all the time, every device in our life is capable of alerting us and interrupting us and we dare not turn them off because the next input that comes in through them might be really important or really relevant or a lot more interesting than the thing we’re working on right now. So the capacity to be distracted and the capacity to always have your antennae up makes us a little bit more stressed and makes us a little bit more vulnerable to people interrupting us, but that’s a condition of modern life.

33:43 The immersion quality of media are more compelling. Think of the gaming environment or the virtual worlds’ environment. And we ain’t seen nothing yet. The way that they are packing pixels into stuff now, the way that band width is growing, the way that storage is growing, the virtual worlds and the gaming now and the worlds where people are experiencing serious stuff are going to get immersive over time. There is a larger social science community who is wonder if this is going to make us retreat from real life. There is a push back from technology community saying: “This is real life.” This is how people encounter stuff, this is how people learn stuff, this is how they amuse themselves. Don’t sweat it so much because it’s just going to be more interesting and more useful and compelling for people.

34:23 The relevance of information improves. About half of Internet users set up some sort of filtering system that they customize on their own. They get a web page that’s customized for them, they get RSS feeds, they set up alerts. How many people here have set up alerts on their own name. On your institution. On other stuff that really interests you like former boyfriend/girlfriend. [audience laughs] See? You can get a lot more stuff a lot more quickly about this and it is tailored to your interests and your needs.

A wonderful phrase that came from this idea was promulgated by Nicholas Negroponti, the former head of the MIT Media Lab who wrote a wonderful book called “Being Digital in the Mid 90’s” and actually it was 1993 or something like that. He predicted the rise of something he called “The daily me.” Rather than gatekeepers and media properties telling me what they think I might be interested in on any given day, I can now arrange for my own filtering system and my own customization of information so that I can get what I want. There is also a daily “us” version of this where if you care about your company or your hobby group to other groups and stuff like that you can arrange to get these filters acting for you that way. So people are now getting more relevant stuff, but there is some worry that is a thinning out of stuff that they might be interested in if they knew about it, but they just don’t have time for it or they think it’s irrelevant to them or whatever.

35:53 The number of information voices explodes and becomes more findable. That’s content creation. We find now that about half of adults and more than two thirds of teenagers have created stuff that they have put out online. Sometimes it’s just personal information and profile stuff, other times it’s real creations of theirs that they have posted online. This explosion is accompanied by the fact that it’s now a lot more findable on the individual sites and the search functions on Flickr and You Tube are great, but they’re also now findable in the world of Bing as well as the standard Google world.

36:33 Aboding and ventilation are enabled. This is the wisdom of crowds. There are a lot more people now that are facilitated on sites that are represented in this room. You can say: “I like this or I don’t.” “I can forward this or not.” “I think this is a good idea or I think this is a crummy idea.” And people can express their opinions so there is a lot more information packed into the stuff that is generated.

36:54 Social networks are more vivid. We’ve always had social networks, but now we’ve got a phrase for it and businesses built around it and stuff like that and we can see a lot more readily how people are functioning in the real world and who their networks are. That’s really important particularly for organizations like yours because social networks are really the primary ways that people filter information, assess information, screen information, and pass along information. So before I get to the nine tribes I wanted to talk about the general things that this new environment has created. I will stop before I go beyond my ten points. Is everybody still with me?

37:40 OK. So homo-connect-us. It’s a different species of human. What we’re doing here a little bit, but it’s different in the sense that people have different expectations about access to information, availability of information and findability of information. We will go out and measure this in some of surveys in the future. We’re going to do something on e-government this Fall, but I think it’s pretty clear to say that if you walked around to the average person and asked them if they could access material that’s in an encyclopedia. Do you think you can find it relatively easily do you think that you can get to the stuff that you want relatively quickly? Even in an environment of information abundance people think they can. This changes the way people think about access to information and think about what purposes information can serve in their lives. It changes the way people use their time. Sorting through their days and the rhythm of their days are somewhat different because they can access the things that they want at the times they want on the device that they want.

38:48 Their sense of place, distance and presence is changing. It’s changing in both directions. The linkages between those three constants; place distance and presence on one level is becoming de-linked. When you can pick up a cell phone and dial a number and talk to someone on the streets of Tokyo and have a very intimate conversation and almost be in their world. Well you are in their world. The fact that you can be holding a conversation in the lobby here and someone can call you from any place in the world, the idea of: time, distance, and presence is changed.

I see this a lot in my kids lives because their conversations will never end. It doesn’t matter whether they’re physically with someone or not they just keep going on even after they’ve had a meeting. They want to talk and text about it before they have meetings they want to talk and text about it. It’s just the parade never ends. It also means they’re more connected particularly now in the ear of Smart Phones with GPS connections and stuff like that. Where you are and where the stuff around you is is somewhat more relevant. So both things are happening. It’s paradoxical, but it’s true.

40:04 The possibilities of work and play are different. The boundaries that used to exist that were relatively stable and relatively high. You didn’t do much leisure stuff at work and you didn’t do much work stuff at home. How many people live that life now? You’re doing some leisure stuff at work or some home stuff at work and you’re doing lots of work at home I’m sure. So your sense of what you can do and when work is happening is very different. The same thing is happening in learning and play. People’s sense of personal ethic and personal effort has changed.

The book that I’m writing that Julie referred to: “Connected lives” argues that there is a new sensibility that was happening before the Internet and cell phones, but has really been accelerated in this era. It’s defined by people acting as networked individuals rather than people acting in tight bounded, small knit, very important groups, people are now acting in networks to get their needs met, to get emotional support, to get financial stuff. Think about your own lives. You’ve got a bunch of really tight family members and friends who will do a lot for you and who will take a bullet for you. The way that you act in the world is often as a networker. When you have certain needs for network support you go to one group when you have health question you go to another group, when you have a financial question you go to another group, when you have a question about your spiritual life you go to another group. So we’re acting more like networkers.

41:38 There are two things that happen. First of all you get a lot more freedom in the era of small tight bounded groups everybody knew your business. That was potentially stifling and you were deeply known to those people. So there’s freedom now when you don’t have to be dealing only with that group and you can maneuver in various networks in various ways. So that is the upside of networked individuals. The downside is you have to work harder to get your needs met and act in social groups. You have to be an active networker. If you’re passive and a looker, the group leaves you behind or your network doesn’t rely on you or you’re not useful to other people in their social networks and so it withers. So you’ve got to work harder to get your own needs met and to help other people get their needs met. It’s a pretty big sociological change.

42:30 The final thing to say about that is the rewards and challenges of networking for socio, economical, and cultural purposes are also changed in the way people think of stuff. They now think in terms of social networks. One of the things that I want to convince you of here if you’re not already convinced is you have a role in helping people in their social networks. You can be a friend, you can be a node in people’s networks because they now think that institutions and media can help them solve problems in their life or can act in ways that will be useful to them as they are going through their lives as networkers. It’s different from the past where institutions in media were at arms-length for people. They didn’t think of them as actors in their network. Of course they were at times. Media gives you information you need and you pass it along to your network. Institutions help you solve problems and stuff like that, but there is a much more personified sense in people’s lives that the people who create media whether they’re individuals or institutions are acting in my network and can be my friends even if they don’t think of you as their friends.

43:39 So there are four dimensions of interaction that institutions have in particular with people that I just wanted to quickly run through that are more general and then I’ll get to the nine tribes. The first is attention. How do you capture people’s attention in their environment? How do you help them acquire information in this environment? How do you help them pass information once they’ve acquired it? There is a big question. A lot of people are quite skeptical about the information they encounter on the Internet and stuff like that so they rely on their networks and their friends and reliable, trusted brands to help them make sense of the world and to assess the credibility of information. Finally again this new action piece. Information flows now. It doesn’t just stop with me absorbing it and pondering it as a consumer. I can be an actor in the world as a content creator and there are ways for institutions to be thinking about that environment.

44:34 So how do you get peoples attention in this new world? First of all, don’t give up on the stuff that you already do well and the ways that you already function in the world. I think there is a little bit of concern or a little bit of an impotence for people to think: everybody is online, let’s transfer a lot of our traditional functions to the online environment. It’s efficient it serves our needs and we can maybe reduce some costs on our end and why not? Well in some respects people have grown up knowing you in your traditional role and your traditional platforms and you can’t give that up. That’s in some ways a key pathway that you already have established with them. In addition to that, there are ways that these channels interact with each other. It’s not just an either or situation. People are constantly churning through different channels and different relationships to things. So relying on what you’ve already grown up doing is a good way to make sure that you have a shot at their attention.

45:37 In this new environment you offer alerts, updates and feeds. People will sign up for those and that’s a way that you can break through the clutter of their lives. Be available in relevant places. I can’t answer a question that might be on a lot of your minds which is: if I set up a Face Book page, what’s the pay off? What’s the ROI? How many new members am I going to get? How many new contributions am I going to get? What’s the downside and stuff like that? I don’t know. There are some ways that that works for institutions and there are other ways that it’s so lame that you’ll sort of be laughed off the stage and that’s something that you guys are going to have to figure out. As an exercise you need to think through where your traditional audiences are and where are the people who might not be aware of you, where can you get their attention? The first place that means experimenting with being in a variety of places and seeing what the payoff is. It doesn’t mean you have to have a Face Book page and Twitter account and stuff like that in perpetuity, but it might make sense to see what this yields for us. Let’s get into this environment and see what it means and see if we can capture people’s attention that way.

46:44 Probably most importantly the way to capture attention is through people’s networks. There is a little bit different sense that influencer’s now in this new age are different or are added onto traditional influencer’s that we’ve always seen in community life and in the life of groups. A marker of an influencer is someone who has a blog. It’s not that hard. The act of creating it is an act of participation and an act of willingness and that means that person wants to drive a little bit of conversation. That’s influential. Classical political science reckoning of who is an influencer, it was small stuff. It was not necessarily the head of the community newspaper or the TV station or the most prominent business official in town, it’s people who went to vote, people who showed up at meetings, people who give contributions to groups, people who write letters to editors and stuff like that. Those are influencer’s. So setting up the blog is the Internet era age of being at least a more active part of the conversation than those who are lookers. I’m arguing that the way to capture people’s attention is maybe to make yourself available or find out who the influencer’s are that you might want to exploit (in the pejorative sense of the word) or find who can then pass along what is most useful and relevant and interesting about you to the others who are in their network. It’s the validation that that influencer gives to you and your work that makes that person, the influencer’s recommendation matter and stand out and matter to people. “Oh! I actually should pay attention to this because Sally, the neighborhood lady says it’s a good thing to pay attention to.”

48:29 OK. I help to acquire information and be available in the long tale world. Every organization in this room is at the very least a long tale organization. You’re somewhere in the tale there but you’ve got to make sure that you’ve done the search engine optimization right. You’ve got to make sure that you’ve used the right meta tags. God knows how the algorithms are being changed, but making sure you’re giving yourself a shot at being found is important to do. You’ve got to recognize that we’re in a world of distributive publishing rather than relying on main stream media and main stream institutions to mediate you experience for you and tell the world about you. Offer Link Log. Link Log is the currency of the Internet. When you are offering a link you are offering not only a vote of confidence, but you’re saying to that other institution I get it. I get what you’re saying, I like what you’re saying to the people who care about me. With any kind of luck they’ll say: “Oh yeah, I agree and I will return the Link Log.” This is the way that social capital is built or social capital is built on the Internet.

49:38 Participate in conversations about your work. They’re going on all the time now. There are ways for you to find out about them that didn’t exist in the past. Offer yourself up. Human faced institutions cannot be overstated as an important thing. There are ways that you have to put your institutional face on and represent yourself to the world, but there are other ways that it makes sense that there are flesh and blood human beings standing behind the institution that really want to solve problems and really want to help people and have a little bit more human sensibility to them than the “face of god” as the institution.

50:11: How do you help them assess information? You honor the ethics of whatever you do. There is a culture that has been built up in your institution or in your field. You’ve got to make sure that you don’t violate the codes that already existed in your work, but in the new era, transparency and linking and establishing links and archiving everything is a new marker of trust and credibility. We haven’t got data on this, but we hear consistently from lots of Internet users that people that show how they did their work and how they came to the understandings they did and show where it came from, the primary material or the source material that they used get a lot more credibility than the institutions that are sort of “the face of god.” We know it, we’ve filtered it, we’ve edited it, and here is what you need to know about it.

51:01 Another marker is how you aggregate material. I know it’s sometimes not appropriate for jobs and stuff like that, but there are plenty of ways that you can at least think about helping steer people to the other related work because, again it’s not necessarily the case that the institutions represent in this room are the be all, end all, final word on the subjects that they care about.

51:24 The final ethic that has changed in the era of the Internet is that instead of stonewalling when you’ve made a mistake or correcting it on the sly or having a formal mechanism, ask for forgiveness. Everybody knows you’re going to make mistakes. Everybody knows that things aren’t right. Fess up to it. You get more credibility and more trust for having done that than certainly by stonewalling on it or going through some obscure process of trying to sort through the facts.

51:54 How do you assist and act on information? This is the participation side, opportunities for feedback, people love it as long as you give them a sense of their feedback is being listened to. You can’t just absorb it and not react to it. Offer opportunities for remixing and mash ups so that exciting things that are happening are taking government data and certainly the Obama administration is very active now in pushing out lots of data to allow people to create their own stuff off of it.

52:21 Offer opportunities for team building and be open to the wisdom of crowds. The Dan Gilmore, the great technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury and now an independent journalism consultant has this wonderful line saying: “My audience always knows more than I do.” They’re not smarter than he is and their IQ’s maybe aren’t higher, but collectively they’ve got a bigger sense and a broader sense of the world that he cares about and I think that’s a sensibility that makes good sense for you to pay attention to.

52:58 OK so now we’re getting to the Nine Tribes. This comes from a report that we did a couple of months ago called the mobile difference. It’s available on our site www.pewinternet.org and again all of this stuff will be available to the the Linked In posting and as a matter of fact we’re going to post these slide shows live on our site too.

53:19 We did a survey that was actually the second in a series that we did where we asked people about three things. We asked them about the technology assets that they had. Do you have a ell phone? Do you have a lap top? Do you have a digital camera? Do you have a gaming system and stuff like that. So we took an inventory of their gadgets. We then asked them what they did with their gadgets, so their actions. How do you use these gizmo’s that you’ve got in your life. The third thing that we asked about was their attitudes. It turns out that people’s attitudes about the role of technology in their lives, about the function that technology plays for them is very determined by the kind of technology users they are. You could take people who have the exact same technology profile; they’ve got the same stuff in their homes and their purses, but if they like it then they say it makes them feel more productive and it makes them feel more connected and it makes them feel more useful in the world. They are very different in the way they use the technology from those who say: “I really need a break from it every once in a while. I hate being online all the time. It doesn’t really make me more productive because I’m interrupted.

54:26 We asked people what devices were more precious to them. What would they be least likely to give up? How often do their gadgets break. Do their gadgets serve a variety of personal needs in their life like productivity, connection to their community and stuff like that. And we asked them about how much they like being always connected; if they had enough gadgets to have that be a reasonable question. We asked them: Do you like those always being on or do you need a break? Do you like to have time off for quite and contemplation or are you really jazzed by always being online or on the grid in one way, shape or form.

55:06 It turns out there is a nice, clean divider. There are people who are into it and mobile connectivity is making them more into it and there are people who are less into it or don’t do it at all. So in our big sample, about 39% of the adult population are those people we call motivated by mobility. They’ve got the gadgetry, they’ve got the connections that allow for that. There are actually five groups of them. The thing that’s distinguishable about them is that they adore their technology mostly and their attitudes are mostly improving. As I said this is the second time we did this survey and so we could see change over time. We also talked to about half the sample of people we had talked to before so we could actually measure longitudinally what had changed from the last time that we had talked to these same people. We saw this was the group where attitudes were improving. They had more stuff, they loved their mobile connections, and it enhanced the way that they felt about things and the way that they used the world. They are also combined with that mobility, they like content creation. They like the self-expression piece and the fact that they can be contributors to the world.

56:23 61% of Americans are not that much into it. If anything their attitudes about the role of technology in their lives are either the same or gone down. They are not necessarily wild about mobile connectivity in the way that it opens them up, opens other things up to their lives, they are more likely to say that they need breaks, they are more likely to say that things do break on them that are vital and that annoys the hell out of them. In many cases they have lots of technology, but they segment their use of technology. When they’re stable and stationary, that’s the time for technology. When they’re on the move, they don’t want technology in their lives. So there’s this divider between mobility 39% and people who like their stationary media 61%.

57:12 Now I’ll unpack each of these groups. I’ll give you the five groups who are motivated by mobility. The first group is digital collaborators. These are the top of the food chain. These are the people who get all the press attention, all of the cultural energy going to them, they’re buying new iPhone’s today that were released yesterday. They are content creators of every kind. They have broadband in every dimension of their lives. They have smart phone that they move around with. They are wildly enthusiastic about the role of technology in their lives. This is about 8% of the population. In many ways this is the out-sized portion of the population if you think of them as influencer’s. They’re the early adopters. They’re the ones who are paving the way for the rest of us, but they are not a big cohort. It’s a heavily male group. The median age is in the late 30’s, generation X in many respects in part because of resources and wealth and eduction, and in part just because of life stage stuff. They’re into this stuff. They aren’t necessarily the youngest users who are the most wacky for all this kind of stuff. They do have a lot of college education. They are disproportionately likely to have graduated from college, high levels of income, mostly in the labor market, mostly suburban and urban. They have a lot of Internet experience, they’re married.

58:38 They’re one of the most significant continuous predictors of Internet access, availability and usability is being a parent of a minor child. In many cases families have sort of bet that this stuff is important for their kids future. That learning is a prerequisite for success in the future, so they’re into it. They’ve also go knowledge-based jobs and stuff like that in many cases. So think parents when you’re think of this group rather than think college students.

59:10 Strategies for you guys to embrace is you become a node or think about being a node in their network, just get the tools to do the things that they already want. They don’t need a lot of anything else from you although they would love to provide you lots of feedback and stuff like that so offering them opportunities is a good thing.

59:29 Ambivalent networker’s are younger, but they are not the people who are wild about this stuff. If you look at all the metrics of assets and actions they are usually number one or number two in all of those things. For them you just come away with the sense that they’re a little bit burdened by all of this. They want to take a break every once in a while. They’re on line a lot and on their phone’s a lot not because they’re wildly enthusiastic about it, but because they’re a little bit afraid that if they don’t do it people will think they’re out of it or work communication will slip by or something like that so you feel a little bit of burden on their shoulders in the way that they express their attitudes about technology. Highly astute male and the youngest group in our cohort, but it has not nearly the proportion of college graduates as the previous group. They are a lot poorer group; a lot of students in this group and so they’ve got pressures on their lives in other ways. They are not e-mail users. Part of that may be a reflection that they don’t want to be on the grid all of the time, but they don’t want yet another application that they have to manage and be a stewart of and stuff like that. They’re heavy into phone texting.

So for them what you want them to think about is that there is a space in life where they can have a sanctuary. They’re into gaming. That’s one of the artifacts of them being such a young group. So maybe a pathway to enthusiasm in their life would be through the gaming environment. Working is really big with them. That’s another artifact of their being students. These people feel some sense of information overload so helping them navigate to stuff they want is more important for this group than the one we just described; the collaborators.

01:01:27 Media movers are not quite as enthusiastic or not quite as active as the previous two groups, but they’re really into this stuff. They are mostly people who will go out and find other stuff or maybe they’ll take a digital picture with it and share it with others. The key thing about them is they think this world in many respects serves their social needs more than it serves their professional needs. They like the fact that they can gather up material and share it. That’s sort of a social exchange or a building of social capital with them. They share a lot of what they find. They’re the ones that send e-mail links to you all of the time. The top three groups are male, pretty young, racially there is not great distinction among them. They’re not really heavily college educated. They’re relatively well to do, but not like the collaborator group. They’re not very rural. They are the kind of people who record video on their cell phone, they’ve got digital cameras and they’re insistent on showing everything about it to you or posting lots of photo albums and stuff like they. They’re health seekers. They are very interested in getting health information online as opposed to other stuff. So understand to be a node you’re giving them stuff that helps them further their social world and social lives and so helping them make connections and using your material for their social purposes is a pretty interesting thing to do.

01:02:55 Roving nodes are very different in a gender way from those previous three groups. This is women. This is working little league mother in this group. They got their cell phones to help them manage their lives. They’ve got a lot of stuff going on in their lives, they’re working women, they might be taking care of an aging parent, but their cell phone is the central communications device of their life to help them manage the things that they need to do. They love e-mail, they love texting, they love the communications side of this stuff a lot more than they show appreciation for the information side or the content collaboration side because they’re too busy. They can’t blog. They’ve got lives to lead. Again, heavily female, late 30’s, it skews a little bit over indexes into Latino it’s relatively highly college educated group, a lot in the workforce, not very rural, wildly into their cell phones, use Internet all over the place, and what they most express appreciation for is that technology helps them control their lives. So efficiency is what they’re all about. You’re helping them get to the things they want; the transactions they want, as quickly and efficiently as possibly is what they would appreciate. They might like alerts or the capacity to set up alerts and stuff like that. They through cloud stuff since they’re always on the move, allowing them to do a lot of stuff in the cloud is a useful thing for them.

01:04:29 Then 8% of the population we call mobile newbies. These are people who have just gotten their cell phone in the past year or so. They are like zealous. They are like converts. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to them. They’re not really wildly into the Internet, but they love this new world that this new cell phone has opened to them. They again, this is the central piece of technology in their lives. It’s a female group. It’s the oldest motivated by mobility group. It’s a little bit over indexed for minorities, both African Americans and Latinos. It’s not terribly educated. It’s most predominantly high school diploma’s or less than high school. They don’t make a lot of money and stuff like that. They’re not Internet users, but what they like is the new connective and the new sort of “with it” aspect that the cell phone has brought into their lives and that’s why they express the level of enthusiasm that they do. So these are people that are converts and might appreciate from you exposure that other things that technology will do that will help them widen their world. In many cases they don’t understand all the wonderful stuff that’s available to them on the Internet or the wonderful ways that the Internet can serve their interests, but they’re open to that. So thinking about ways that you might introduce yourself to them and introduce how useful you could be to them is the right frame of mind to have with them.

01:05:54 OK. So those are the five motivated by mobility groups. There are five groups that are stationary media majority.

01:06:04 The largest of them by far are old white guys. They’ve been online a long time. They are happy to be at their desk and doing stuff and they think it’s a highly functional life, but think of them as peeking out in 2003. This served all of the basic purposes that it was ever going to serve for them and they haven’t really thought much about the social media revolution. They think the whole thing I did at the beginning about Twitter is lunatic and they’re use of this cell phone is exactly centered in 2004. Make the call, receive the call, case closed. They’re heavily male in their mid 40’s over indexed for white. They’re pretty highly educated. They’ve got a decent amount of resources. A lot of them are in the work force. Not very rural. They’ve got cell phones and they want to make the calls on them. They think it’s ridiculous that you give them a 900 page user manual with lots of other functionality or there’s lots of extra buttons on the damn thing. They don’t want it. They are very happy with what they’ve got. They think it serves purposes in their lives, but again this is a group whose views about the efficacy and the usefulness of technology has stopped growing. They’re fine with it, they don’t wildly object to it, but they’re just not more into it. So what they’re all about is using the traditional stuff in the tradition way in their connections. They might want some help thinking about social media. Helping them understand what it is and how to do it and stuff like that. Maybe some of them will be enthusiastic about it, but don’t set your hearts on it because your hearts will be broken.

01:07:56 Drifting surfers are a really interesting group. They are a high proportion of this stationary media majority. They’ve got a a lot of stuff in their lives, they just don’t show any reason to do more of it or less of it or be wildly embracing of the advantages it can bring to their life. They’re drifting. What’s a better way to say that. They skew female in their mid forties. Racially there are not distinguishing characteristics of them. They’ve got relatively high amounts of income. They are workers and stuff like that. The thing about them is their asset and even their action profile fits a lot of the other groups it’s just that they don’t do it very often. They don’t think that it helps them that much. They are less likely to say that the Internet makes me productive than lots of other groups. The Internet helps me get the things I want done. The Internet gives me access to information. They’re mostly doing online stuff out of obligation or because mildly more efficient that the alternative for gathering information and communication, but they are very likely to report that they love taking breaks from all this stuff because it just feels very burdensome to them. So they don’t want to be force-fed technology. They are the kinds of people that your traditional services and traditional communication methods are most going to appeal to. They are also the people who have had bad experiences with their gadgets and they don’t feel like they have their own skill set to fix their gadgets and very often in their life they don’t have friends who can help them fix their gadgets. So they’ve had a bad time with a cell phone or a computer and it just feels like a hassle rather than something that they can muck around and fix or find somebody who can fix it and then they’ll get on to the next great thing in their lives. They are not happy about information overload. That’s how they experience 4.5 million search results in 1.3 seconds. They are just not happy about this. They are the most skeptical about the content they encounter online. Over time they have gotten feeling more burdened than they were when we talked to them in 2006. They like old traditional media. They love their TV’s, newspapers, magazines, radio programs and they consume those media on those traditional platforms too. It’s the highest male group. It’s an older group in their 50’s. One third, one third, one third between some college and high school. They’re not necessarily highly represented in the workforce. There is a lot more rural representation that other groups and yet you see the technology ownership is relatively high. All of it feels like an obligation. All of it feels like something that somebody is forcing on them that they just don’t want and they need help with their new gadgets. So you need to offer them a shoulder to cry on. Don’t force anything on them and help them navigate who you are and what you are for them through traditional means and by all means be a referral and navigator or filter for them.

01:11:24 Tech indifferent are people who just from day one never really thought much of this stuff and they got it because everybody else has got it and they don’t think terribly much about technology at all. It’s a side light in their life and they’re not into it at all. Mostly female. A little bit over indexed for African Americans, high school or less is the predominant education style. They’re not terribly well off. They have less technology to begin with. They voted with their feet or their pocket books not to have the technology to begin with. But they do have cell phones, but they’re the kind of people who never turn their cell phone on until they have to make a call. They’re the kinds of people who shut their cell phone off after they’ve completed the call. So they don’t see any benefit in technology. Your offering it to them is not very good. Maybe tutorials will help get them by and yet this is a group that I had some sense of a feeling that public places are places that they are more likely to engage technology if they had to. The gun was at their head and stuff like that. This might be a group that you’re thinking about serving by making technology available to them.

01:12:42 The final group is people who are entirely off the net. That’s Aunt Bee from Mayberry. 14% of the population does not have the Internet or a cell phone. So these are folks who are over represented among females. It’s the oldest group. Excuse a little bit to African Americans and Latinos, they have mostly high school educations or less. They’re the least well-off groups of all. Some of them have laptops and desk tops and some of them have actually been Internet users in the past, but the thing broke or never served its purpose or they got a virus or whatever. So it’s not like they have completely disassociated themselves from technology, they have tried it or someone has encouraged them to try it and it’s just not work for them. It’s been more of a hassle than not. Thinking that your traditional services serve them. Maybe some gentle coaching and maybe pairing them us since they’re the oldest group. Maybe thinking about serving them in a tech support and coaching and mentoring method would be the best.

01:13:50 You know what? I’m going to stop there just to make sure I get to all the questions because I know you’ve got some and we’re getting close on time.

Gary: My question for you is about priorities. How do we set priorities to know what’s important?

01:14:34 Priorities are usually driven by needs. So when you ask people about priorities, what they will give you is general answers that are not quite meaningful in the sense that you need to operationalize them. When somebody has been healthy for the past 20 years and then gets diagnosed with a need, their parties change that day. There is a way I think about this in this final slide – thinking that you are there for them when they have a need is probably the right way to think about it. That is not helpful to help you distinguish how you spend your next investment dollar, dollar of investment time and stuff like that. I think you start by thinking who is my cohorts instead of more or less the regulars. Then thinking what their priorities are. That’s the institutional need that you probably ought to think about serving first. Then you think about how do we expand. Where are the logical places for us to be and to build our audience to other places because peoples needs differ so greatly by the moment that they’re in, the circumstances of their culture, the circumstances of their community, the level of urgency of the need. Thinking about audience priorities is probably not as useful a way to think about it as I know lots of you would like to. I think serve your regulars most avidly and make sure that they’re happy. Think about where the next increment of growth or outreach makes sense for you and then figure out how to meet their needs. So in my little 4A’s, I think for the first audience it’s numbers two and three. It would be help them get the information they want in the most timely way. So that’s acquisition of information; making sure it gets to them. And then assessing information. A lot of times people go to websites or ping their networks because they’ve encountered something they don’t quite understand or is new or is alien to them and they’re trying to find some way of measuring it as how important it is in their network or their world. They will ping their network or they will ping their trusted institutions or brands and you helping them figure it out is a good thing to do in the sort of grand strategy that probably applies across all people, all needs, and all classes is helping navigate. You can’t devote enough attention to helping people navigate to the information the want. There is no rule book on this yet. It’s driven by different needs and different life circumstances, but making sure that you think about people and taking them by the hand to get as quickly as they need to be to get to the information they want from you, you’re serving their needs that way. It’s a lame answer that flipped your question 93 degrees but that’s the best I could do.

01:18:07 There is a spread sheet that goes along with all of this data that I can send you that shows you where they fall. In most cases English speaking Latinos are very much absolutely main stream. They look just like Caucasian Americans in almost all of what they do. There is some cultural differences in that they search for different kinds of news. They search for different cultural stuff online, but they’re answer to the question: Do you get news online? They’re very similar to Caucasian Americans. So the best thing for me to do is send you the spread sheet so you can see that they are pretty fully represented throughout all of these things. They don’t necessarily stand out as a group for the “Latino-ness” Latinos are a young cohort so they look more young. What’s driving a lot of their behavior is young behavior as opposed to Latino behavior because it’s generational solidarity that seems to be at work as much as their interest in stuff that draws from their ethnic background.

Can you speak to the revenue potential for iPhone applications?

01:19:30 No. We look at the social impact of the Internet and there are lovely, wonderful, expensive, proprietary firms that provide data on stuff like that. We felt there was a need to provide things to the world on stuff that wasn’t getting studied because it didn’t necessarily have commercial applications. What I can say is that we’ve begun in broad surveys. We’re doing these big surveys of the entire adult population. It’s meant to be represented of everybody who is 18 and older. For the first time in the survey results that we will be releasing in a couple of weeks we’ve begun to find people who will say: “I’ve downloaded an application of one kind or another to my cell phone.” and stuff like that. It’s relatively small, but I’m sure it will grow over time and this is representative of a larger question that we get asked a lot. If I could have the answer I wouldn’t be working for a non-profit. What happens to content in the age when, as Chris Anderson is saying in his new book, “free is the common price.” Will people pay for news if a lot of it is available for free? Will people pay for applications if they can get a good enough version for free? So there is an enormous debate that’s taking place that is classic debate about destructive forces in the economy about where do we set the new boundaries here. We don’t know the answer. Sorry.

01:21:07 From an e-gov persecutive is there any results about how citizens are engaged versus online versus offline. Do they vote? Are they engaged in their community and that sort of thing? Did any of that come through?

01:21:23 We asked them general information on this on government and I will point out – send this group some more information on that. There are a couple of things to say: we’re going to do e-government work in the Fall. So we’ll have a lot more to say in November or December. Peoples expectation have radically shifted, so for pure play information needs now, the majority of people the top of the bell curve, want stuff online and expect it online and preference it if just an information query. If it’s a personal thing – if they’ve got a problem to solve with government or it’s a sensitive matter that they’re seeking information on, they want a human being to deal with. They don’t want to rely on a website. They don’t want to rely on general information. They want specific stuff and frankly they want a human being to say this is what’s going on or this is the way to go. They certainly want the human face of government to be interacting with them. I think the Obama campaign in the first moments of its governing has clearly ratcheted up expectations about transparency. People now want to see the primary stuff. They want to be able to vote on it. Not everybody will do it. As a matter of fact, very few people will take the time to give you comments on regulations or to recommend stuff on Digg or anything like that, but you’ve got to do it because this is now baked into the experience people have with government. We’re beginning to see – actually not it’s a pretty consistent finding – somewhere about 13% and 20% of people who do anything online are participators. We see it in: health, government, politics, news. These are the people who will post on their blog about what you’re doing. They will recommend or post a link on their website or form a group in Face Book or something like that. These are very different people in some respects from traditional civic actors. They are really into tech. They’re kind of quirky in the sensibilities. They are rabid free speech information free people. These are not outliers, but absolutely if you put something behind a wall they will take it as a challenge to go find it or beat the crap out of you in the process. So that’s kind of the sensibilities that we’re seeing.

01:24:15 I’d like your thoughts on the administration’s dialog tools; asking citizens their opinions. Do you think there are any problems due to the ambivalent networkers. What can we do to make sure we get a good cross-section of America?

01:24:46 I would actually caution you at first to think that you’re ever going to get a good cross-section of America. There are wildly varying levels of enthusiasm, motivation and engagement in the public. The unenthusiastic, unengaged, the deeply skeptical, the people who hate the government are never going to be responsive to that. The other dark side of that is people who hate you or hate the government or just generally are nasty human beings will exploit and try to ruin those sites or try to take over the conversation on those sites and stuff like that. I don’t have a troll repellent idea that will work with you. The other way to set your expectations at a better level here is that a lot of the feedback they will give you, you already know. In the wisdom of crowds notion in some respects, you already know what it looks like through your 800 numbers, through your other engagements through your regular numbers and stuff like that. It’s not like opening up new tools automatically opens up lots of new fabulous insights and ideas for innovation and stuff like that. You will see a lot of the same stuff. In some respects the burdens on offering conversation dialogue citizen input is good and healthy and it helped build better feelings about government. As a trained Political Scientists I can tell you what matters to me. I think in some respects the magic of what you get out of that is the aggregation, It’s finding out what the totality of the group – what it’s sensibilities are, what it’s insights are and stuff like that. I think it would be the rare, rare, rare gem if someone says something that opens your eyes in a new way or makes you think you ought to offer this or this is something you ought to pass along to the agency head or the President of the United States. It’s pretty prosaic stuff when you talk to Americans about what they need and their needs aren’t that hard to understand. So I would just set your expectations at that level. Offering these tools and then monitoring them so that they aren’t destroyed is probably the best you can do.

01:27:07 Have you ever compared American data with international data?

01:27:14 The question is a great question. Is there any international comparison on our data? It’s so expensive to do international polling. I would love to get Pew money or any body’s money to do it, but it’s not possible to do. There is a world Internet project that is housed at USC that has some very broad brush material about politics. They might do some e-government stuff. It’s called: “The project for the digital future” at USC. They just released a cross-cultural material that they’ve been gathering for several years a couple of months ago. Americans are special and unique. What little we know about cross cultural work is that Americans have different expectations and different experiences of engagement with government and government experiences. We are outliers in many respects and all for the stuff that you guys care about. They want more transparency. They want more material. They want more transactions and stuff like that. In a lot more cultures, people want to yell at the bureaucrat right in their face or want to have a human encounter mediating their engagement with government.

01:28:33 I’m going to make this the last question because I know we’ve got to go. Let me just go back in the data rather than remember it entirely. What is generally true about health seekers is they come from a variety of places on our user typology spectrum, but once they become health seekers, their notion about technology and their notion about how technology can serve them radically changes. So the healthy 23 year old whose mother gets sick who didn’t ever think that the Internet was a health seeking tool now because rabid to get e-mail alerts and cell phone alerts and access to web pages that are customized. So I’ll have Susana Fox get back to you on that. We have some health data coming out tomorrow that is not tied to our typology, but it shows incredibly high numbers of people getting it. Not necessarily everyday. The chronically ill or care givers for the chronically ill are regular website users particularly with a diagnosis for them or a loved one they all of a sudden dive into the deep end of the pool that couldn’t be predicted if you just looked at their previous Internet experience.

01:30:12 Thank you so much.

01:30:22 Julie Perlmutter: Time just flies when Lee speaks, doesn’t it. So thank you very much Lee and a small token of our appreciation; a Starbucks gift card and there’s one for you too Chris. We’ll just use that applause for our host and our sponsors: Aquin, Iron Works, and Rock Creek Strategic Marketing. The followup will have Lee’s presentation on the Linked In site. If you’re not already on the Linked In site, we’ll make sure that you do receive an invitation to join that. The best thing that I learned is now working is becoming more important so therefore I feel more relevant and if there are now Nine Tribes of the Internet then that brings new relevance to the concept of the pow wow. So some how I’ve got to figure out how to have a web manager’s pow wow. I was always a big pow wow follower and it’s really where tribes come together and they really party like hell if anybody saw the opening of the American Indian museum, it was the biggest pow wow I ever saw. It also is when tribal leaders come together and in a sense we are tribal leaders and they come to discuss the issues of the day. That maybe really what the web managers round table is becoming. Our next event will be the web analytics pow wow. It will be with Jim Stern who is founder of the Web Analytics Association and founder of the E-Metric Summit Worldwide. Jim like Lee speaks once a year to our group. We’re tossing around ideas but we’re looking at the top of SEO internal search and site navigation. The analytics associated with those searches and how they affect your overall content strategy on your website. If you think you may have something to add to be on a panel, please contact me. We are thinking about moderating that kind of event. We are also looking for a venue for this event. You don’t have to have as beautiful a place as this, but if you do have a place that you think you can house us I would really like to know about it. The next event is August 7th.

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