Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

On Hols

I'm off with my family for our summer hols around the West coast of France.  We'll be relaxing on the beautiful Île de Ré before trundling around the Loire Valley.  I am looking forward to traditional French gastronomic delights, some family fun, as well as a little digital down time.  I'll be back in back in action on the 1st of September.  Au revoir mes amis modernes!

Don't Ask What The Semantic Web Can Do For You...

When I saw Sir TBL speak a few weeks ago, the first question he was asked was, "Why has the semantic web taken so long to appear?".  His answer was that there are still major challenges such as generic data browsers and sufficient linked open data - but we're getting there.  However, Jon Udell, MS guru and self-confessed 'leading-edge alpha geek', describes how its crucial component will not be scientists of TBL's stature but people like you and I : "We’ll get there, I hope, but let’s not conflate means with ends. During the initial P2P craze we acted as if the P2P web was a goal. Today we see that it’s one of many architectural styles. We use it where appropriate, in concert with other styles, and we’re a bit clearer — I hope — that the killer apps are the ones people make when living and working in a networked world that includes the possibility of P2P.  So it will go with the semantic web, I predict. At the moment it seems like a goal, a grand challenge. And of course it is. But the killer apps will be those that people make when using — and here’s a twist, when creating — the semantic web.  That’s a key distinction. Users of the P2P web don’t, for the most part, build its enabling infrastructure. But users of the semantic web will. Yes, networked computers will weave the basic fabric of linked data. But we’ll need to do the context assembly that makes the semantic web useful to us."

TV's Strategy - Don't Become Music Industry

The music industry (RIP) showed the TV industry how not to face up to the complications of a networked world.  As a result, TV is taking a much more progressive stance when it comes to P2P.  Which might help cut down on the legal bills, but doesn't make it any easier to find the answers.  A few proactively milk the cash cow while it's still around.  Some recognise the world is changing but cling onto the past.  Others desperately want to make sense of the new landscape but find their legacy is too weighty.  A brave few throw caution to the wind and see what pans out.  And occasionally someone chucks away the rulebook and makes a splash - albeit a small one.  However, writing in Machinist, Denise Caruso highlights that the industry is still falling into the trap of transferring offline business models when it comes to online video: "Typical. Apply traditional media business model to online medium, wait a year or two, then kill the market (or watch it asphyxiate) for not meeting your irrational expectations. Do we really have to do this again? What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? Yes, that's it."  The accusation is that for all its good intentions, TV is still an industry talking to itself and not to the individuals who make up increasingly influential P2P markets. "It might help if more people in the industry considered consumers to be stakeholders, too.  For a group that's as obsessed with the "new new thing" as the advertising industry, it might try applying more of its prodigious creativity to finding a new business model for supporting online media that puts consumers first. We have an awful lot of choices these days, and we don't like getting kicked to the curb."

The Wire Shows How Modern TV Works

The Guardian's Charles Arthur sums up the Torrent-driven dilemma facing modern TV : "It's a tough reality for TV production companies to face, but video filesharing is as much a fact of life as its musical cousin, and it can have an even more brutal fallout: people grab the episode online and then don't watch it when it "officially" reaches their country, which means that audiences and advertising are down on what would be expected. That could, in theory, feed back into fewer TV programmes, or lower budgets.  Although there is a counter-argument, which is the "filesharing encourages people to buy the real thing" one. Now, many people think that's rubbish. But there may be a data point in its favour. It's this: The Wire, the much-feted programme that nobody watches, is all over the filesharing networks. Yet the DVDs from the four previously aired series are firmly in the top 10 DVD Bestsellers at Amazon. How does that work, then? Either all those folk haven't heard of filesharing for video (possible), or they want the extras that the filesharing networks can't give them. Or they want the quality."