As I travel from office to office, conference to conference and airport to airport, the obvious adoption of tablet devices has become clearly evident.  Although nowhere as rampant as smart phones, you still can’t help but notice that the usage rates have surpassed analyst expectations.  With that being said, we have always wondered how much money some of the larger players are making from our lust to move to portable information assets, other than our phones.  Barclays’ Douglas Anmuth estimates that Kindle revenue will total $1.7 billion this year and grow to $4.3 billion in 2012.  Note that the revenue here does not just contain numbers from device sales, it also includes revenues gained from app. sales. With Apples iPad device, the numbers are more staggering.  It is estimated that the company will ship 100 million units by the end of 2012, putting our sales estimate for just the device itself somewhere around the $50 billion mark over three years.

Note that in just three months of sales this year, the iPad made Apple $2 billion dollars in revenue from tablet sales and we are still looking for a comprehensive number on what their 30% of all app sales has amounted to.

Interesting tablet related infographics:

Many newspapers have tried to master the use of social media sites with hopes of having the new media positively affect their bottom line, but to date, most newspapers are using sites like Twitter and Facebook, without framing the data to springboard to new heights.  The struggle to monetize or prove the positive shift social media brings a newspaper publisher, doesn’t seem to plague other media sources such as TV.  We say this because CBS has announced that is launching another Twitter inspired television show, called @shhdontellsteve.  This is CBS’ second show of this kind, with their first one, @shitmydadsays, airing last Thursday to 12.5 million viewers.

@shitmydadsays, is a consistent Twitter feed of interesting, yet embarrassing, one liners said by the 73 year old father of Justin Halpern.  Justin currently has 1.7 million followers attributed to his Twitter account.  @shhdontellsteve currently has a little over 15k followers and is a Twitter feed filled with 140 character bits of what ‘roommate’ Steve is doing at all times.

The @shhdontellsteve show will be produced by CBS TV Studios and Katalyst, the Ashton Kutcher’s production company.

WWE Has Social Media Guidelines. Do You? See Our Tips for Business Leaders

Posted by Beverly Crandon on 9/23/10 • Categorized as Business,Social Media

As social media and social networks show no end to their growth and adoption rates (my 70 year old mother just joined Facebook two weeks ago), we consistently preach the need for businesses to be aware and welcoming of the social web, and to also educate their employees on what the companies focus is, on social networks.  Through social media communication and education, employees with high profile positions, or those just mentioning the organization or brand, will communicate and represent you publicly, as a unit.  Furthermore, if you haven’t yet created your social media blueprint for employees, you will be amiss to know that you are falling behind the WWE.  Yes,  you read right, the World Wrestling Entertainment group.

We’ve just learned that the WWE has issued its own set of social media guidelines for its wrestling talent, in hopes to protect the organization and its fighters reputation and personal brand.  Now the WWE may be going too far with their rules as they’ve stated something along the lines of “All talent must have their personal social networking account screened by WWE before being approved for use”.  As business owners and leaders, you do not want to institute guidelines that cause a backlog because you have to read all intended public messages – that defeats the purpose of social media.  However, the WWE is reacting to recent posts on Twitter and videos published by Matt Hardy, one of their fighters (if interested – Matt Hardy story here and the video that upset the WWE here).  So, given the WWE’s steps to embrace, kind of, social media, we thought we would help those of you who haven’t created your blueprint, by getting you started with a few tips.

Tips for business leaders, when creating social media rules of engagement for employees

Determine Your Social Edge: your guidelines should promote the messages you would like your employees to convey to the public about your brand, service, product or industry know how.  It is not enough to list the “what you cannot do’s”, but you must also list the “how you can help us engage socially” items.  The latter will better promote and enhance your organization.

Update Employees On Your Social Edge: your driving message, or some of them anyway if product related, should change and staff should be kept current on what messages you are hoping to relay, given a new product or launch.

Transparency: ensure employees know that if mentioning the brand or company that they should also make known their status or relationship with the company.  The last thing you want is for the social sphere to think you’ve staged users to give your brand praise or a leg up.

Trust Your Employees: you hired them for a reason.  Trust that they would exercise good judgement with the release of your guidelines.  You can never have enough social noise on the Web.  The higher the number of employees representing your brand or service, positively on the Web, the better for you in trying to gain social followers, who hopefully will syndicate your messages.

Reporting Is Your Friend: it is not enough to guide employees in what they can say about your brand, you must also analyse what is being said by the public about your brand.  Recognize where social conversations with customers or potential customers and brand advocates may happen and use these findings when updating Your Social Edge.

Consult Legal: before publishing your guidelines, run them by your legal department, just in case, but be strong in educating them, if needed, on the effectiveness of the social web, if used appropriately.  Guide them in understanding the rules of social engagement.

The debt crisis of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News and their lengthy sale attempts has been in the news quite a bit of late, and today we learn that the open auction scheduled tomorrow for the newspapers, will go on with two bidders.

The auction follows a failed attempt to buy the newspapers earlier this month, when the union refused to come to terms with the potential buyer, regarding wages and proposed pension changes.  Now the newspaper group is going up for auction tomorrow and one of the bids is less than half the value of the deal that fell through just this month.  All this in the wake of learning that the Detroit Daily Newspapers are also going into negotiations with their related union to propose a 12 per cent wage cut.  It will be interesting to see how the Detroit negotiations pan out and if they’ll learn anything about the looming closures the Philadelphia newspaper face if an agreement at auction cannot be met.

The Philadelphia Newspapers LLC group filed for bankruptcy in February 2009.

With condo living booming in urban centres, with no signs of easing up, the demand for tactile and useful online listings sites is ever important and now condo shoppers in Toronto, Canada  have a new source for researching properties and it is called TheRedPin.

TheRedPin is a Toronto based condo listing site that houses newly built and pre-constructed condos.  The site joins the ranks of other popular real estate sites such as Realtor.ca, but with TheRedPin’s niche approach to focusing on condos only, it puts them in a league of their own.  The site is sleek and comes with a clean design, which makes it easy for a user to navigate.   In addition, TheRedPin touts that it is the only site in Canada to offer a custom package of full project and third party information for every new condo in the GTA.

Regardless of the geographical focus of TheRedPin, the site elements and user tools are compelling and something that publishers looking to outfit their real estate web properties may find interesting.

TheRedPin enables users to:

• Access new condo development information in one location, as opposed to fragmentally sourcing multiple builder sites
• Take advantage of its integrated social media elements
• Search for properties by neighbourhood, address, builder name or project name
• Search across thousands of floorplans
• Research the neigbourhood (shopping, daycare, etc…), with a Google Street View glimpse.
• Communicate with builders electronically, through TheRedPin
• Review years of real estate information to ensure your purchase decision is fact and property trend based.

Now with the above praises being said, the site is new, and as a result is lacking some pertinent data across a few of the properties. Their data issue could be caused by the fact that they often depend on builders to update information and if you have been in the business of getting your customer to update data to better outfit the consumer using your site, it is a heck of a lot to manage and maintain.  However, if a builder gets behind TheRedPin project, it could be an easy way for that builder to take advantage of the social media tools the site contains, and build positive online noise for their projects.

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At ad-ition, we watch the newspaper industry not just from a North American perspective, but from a global perspective.  Even though our posts are heavily focused on American and Canadian industries, because of proximity, our goal is  to look at trends internationally – hence today’s post on the newspaper industry in Asia.

The story of abysmal newspaper circulation and revenue results here in North America, although our current reality, has been played beyond belief and has become  old hat.  Newspapers have either closed down all together, undergone huge layoffs, lessened the days of newspaper circulation, or have given up on print and gone fully digital online.  We have even seen newspapers give up their coveted front page to run larger advertisements in hope of charging premium dollars to stop the revenue bleed.  But as we look around the globe, the story, in most cases, is not as grim.  Even in Europe, with the concerns around the EU, we are still expecting to see a 2.2% growth for the newspaper sector, come the close of 2010.  It is Asia however that those in the industry most dazzled.  How have they ensured a strong newsprint society that is still growing, for so long?

The Asian market has been seen as a jewel of uncharted waters for many, because of its population, buying power, and consumer loyalty.  But it is that very same loyalty, in our minds that makes it difficult for outsiders to succeed in Asia or to replicate the scribed successes in another country or continent.

When looking at the Asian market, unlike many others, we see that their sense of loyalty coupled with their sense of culture and tradition has a lot to do with why newspapers in Japan and China, are not feeling the effects of  what some have called ‘the global demise of the printed news’.  Cheng Ming-yan, the chief editor at Apple, the leading tabloid newspaper in China, put it nicely when he said  ”Chinese people are eager to get information from newspapers because, traditionally, that was the way their mother and father spent their leisure time,”.  The obvious love of consuming the printed news is also why Asia has seen a 2.7 per cent increase in print titles this past year, which is way above the norm.  Today, in Hong Kong, newspapers reach almost 80 per cent of adults, in a city of seven million, and its two biggest-selling papers have a daily readership above 1.2 million, according to the World Press Trends 2010 report,  produced by the WAN-IFRA newspaper association.

In most cases where we see an area not hit by the power of online journalism, blogs and social media tools now used to garner news updates, we surmise that they will feel an impact soon, if going according to trends, but we do not see this happening in Asia.  At the most, Asia’s paid for news titles, will continue to feel the revenue impact of free circulation papers, but online will not be the defining culprit.

Although the online sales, auctions and classified footprint is not exactly like newsprint, it is an area that North American newspaper publishers dabble in and face heavy competition from online competitors such as eBay, and as e-shopping is popular here in North America, it is just as popular in the Asian market.  Given the poulation and consumer trends, players such as eBay have also tried to break into the Asian market with no success. At the point of eBay closing its Japanese site, it had only mustered a 3 per cent market share, this in contrast to it’s North American strength .  eBay later learned its lesson and continued its presence elsewhere in Asia  through buying strong local brands, including its purchase of China’s EachNet for $150 million in 2003.

All in all, the Asian newspaper market looks strong, whether reviewing paid or unpaid titles, and we’ve made assumptions that online journalism will not make the jeorpordous impact as we have seen in other areas.  It must be said though that the future for Asian newspapers could go either way, if one takes into consideration that  the Internet penetration rate for Asia is almost 17 per cent lower than the world average. You have to ask yourself; should Internet adoption rates reach the world average, would Asia be in the same situation that so many North American titles have found themselves in.

Interesting facts about the Asian newspaper market:

• The five largest markets for newspapers are: India, with 110 million copies sold daily, China, with 109 million sold daily, Japan (50 million), United States (46 million), and Germany (20 million).
• Sixty-seven of the world’s 100 largest daily newspapers are Asian.
• Global paid-for daily newspaper circulation fell -0.8 per cent in 2009 from a year earlier, to 517 million copies sold, but circulation was up +1 per cent in Asia
• Over five years, global paid-for daily newspaper circulation rose +5.7%. It was up +13% in Asia, and down -10.6% in North America.

Stats taken from Wan-Ifran.org

Imagine a world ‘sans’ of social media and social networks.  No tweeting your greatest find at your local restaurant.  No checking into Foursquare to increase your prowess by becoming mayor of another location.  For some of us, this is next to impossible to imagine, especially if you throw in the dare of no SMS or text messaging allowed. This unfathomable world, lacking digital social means, is now the reality, well for a week at least, for Harrisburg University of Science and Technology students, in Pennsylvania.  Professor Eric Darr posed the question of a life without social networks to his students and is now challenging the entire campus to go a week without their commonly used social tools.  ”Often there are behaviors, habits, ways we use technology that we may ourselves not even be able to articulate because we’re not aware of them,” Darr says. According to the Daily Telegraph in the UK, students who participate on sites such as Facebook do score lower on tests than those who stay away from social networks during exam time.  So, Darr and his campus may see some benefit from the week long test.

The actions of Professor Darr and the Harrisburg campus got us to thinking about just how much social media has taken off and embedded itself in so many of our lives.  Below are some interesting stats, from various sources, covering the convergence of social media.

According to Nielsen, globally, we spent more than five hours on social networking sites in December 2009.  This represents an 82% increase from last year when users spent just over three hours on social networking sites.

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When comparing the top 10 activities of Americans online, Social Networks far outperformed all other areas with a 43% increase.  As a  matter of fact, most areas saw a decline of usage, at the expense of our love of social media.

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Yes, the above shows the obvious young adoption of mobile usage, but the numbers in the other age groups are nothing to ignore.  According to Pew Internet and Research 82% of those 30 to 49 send text messages with their mobile phones and so too do 57% of those aged 50 to 64.

The New York Times announced last week that it will be launching a personal news service application by the end of 2010.

The personalized news app initiative will come out of a relationship formed by the New York Times and Betaworks.   The initiative is being coined News.me, which if you go there today produces a coned type image, but in the meantime Betaworks CEO, John Borthwick, says ““We’re building something wonderful and amazing in the social news space”.

Although the name Betaworks may be new to some of our readers, they have already fueled, by way of partnerships and investments, some strong Web players that most are aware of; ChartBeat, TweetDeck, bit.ly, and SocialFlow for example.  Nonetheless, we’re expecting good things from the Betaworks – New York Times initiative marriage, despite the fact that the concept of a news reader isn’t new.  From our perspective, what makes this partnership exciting is the ‘game’ that the two players are bringing to the table.

As an aside, the New York Times was  a part of the group of investors who bid in Betaworks last round of financing, so to see Betaworks and the Times working together on this initiative seems a natural fit.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Chairman and publisher of the New York Times, stated that the New York Times will no longer be printed in the near future.  Sulzberger made this statement while speaking at the WAN IFRA 9th International News Summit, addressing the need to take risks as publishers.

Although for some, the statement that the largest newspaper in America will soon stop distribution in newsprint, may be daunting and alarming , for others who have been watching not only the newspaper markets, but New York Times financials on its own, would have seen this coming.  The business of printing and distribution on its own is a costly matter and if advertising dollars are decreasing, finding money to cover the printed side of the business becomes extremely difficult.  To put it in perspective, our friends at the Business Insider last year said that given the cost of printing and distribution, it would be cheaper for the New York Times to send each of its subscribers an Amazon Kindle.

Where Sulzberger and the times need to be careful is the business of paywalls.  The New York Times plans to launch a metered paywall at the start of next year – a move that others before them have attempted and failed.  With that being said, if no printed version of the New York Times exists, they may stand a chance at tiering their content, giving those accustom to the full breed of content in print a chance to view it online for a nominal fee.

Although not talked about as much today, the paywall phenomena is still largely brewed behind closed doors at publisher meetings.  For the most part, many publishers (the smart ones anyway) have sat back to see the results of the brave and first to market and so to date, we have seen that Freedom Communications drop their news site paywall and Rupert Murdoch has yet to move all of his titles to a paywall formula as he had  promised to do by the end of the summer.

Undoubtedly, Murdoch has been the biggest champion when it came to the paywall argument, so to see him not follow through as he had touted should cause everyone considering the move to question.  In fact, of recent, we are hearing some rumblings that advertisers and inhouse journalists are speaking negatively about the Time Online paywall.  Rob Lynam, who is the head of press trading at  MEC agency, and whose clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Morrisons and Chanel, says, “We are just not advertising on it. If there’s no traffic on there, there’s no point in advertising on there.” Lynam further went on to say that he has been told by News International insiders that traffic to The Times site has fallen by 90 per cent since the introduction of paywalls.

In addition to negative advertiser reactions to paywalls, Times Online journalists too have complained, as they are being overlooked for fist hand access to stories, as those telling them want to ensure their story is seen.

We’ve mentioned many times before that there are ‘must haves’ that need to be in place before one even thinking about introducing paywalls and the list of ‘must haves’ will cause you to think about how you can differentiate your product from the other “me too” products that exist.

What is your compelling value proposition that will encourage users to pay for access to your news content?