In 2011 it is no longer possible to be a top professional journalist without  mastering social media. Here are five reasons why news organizations need to care about the new trends.

Social media is starting to become an integrated part of the work of many news organizations.  Yet many editors and journalists still struggle to see why they should put a lot of effort into understanding the dynamics of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

• Read also: Social networking tips for mainstream media

I gave a speech this week for the annual conference of the European Alliance of News Agencies in Geneva, Switzerland. In preparation for the presentation I compiled this list of five key reasons why social media should matter to news companies:

1. Distribute the content

Social media is all about sharing – and sharing drives traffic. As such Facebook and Twitter can be powerful channels for distributing content.

There are two main reasons for that:

• People tend to trust tips from their friends more than others. Stories shared on Facebook and Twitter therefore have a higher chance of being clicked on.
• People spend much more time on social network sites than on other sites. According to Facebook, the site’s 800 million users spend on average 15 hours per month on the site. By making their content available on these sites, media organizations make it easy for people to share their stories.

Source: Comscore

2. Create engagement

Content without engagement has no – or at least low – value.

Good content creates engagement, emotions and reactions. And social media provides excellent tools to create such engagement.

Most news sites will find that content that creates engagement will have a longer average length of the user sessions. People spend more time on the content and they will move on to more of the other content of the site as well.

The big social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube, provide efficient tools to create engagement and they also provide lots of information about who actually engages with your content. And THAT is valuable information most news organizations would struggle to find on their own.

Journalism used to be a one-way process. Editors selected the news and presented the same stories to a large audience, confident that no other could reach the same audience.

This premise has changed. Today everyone can create a mass communication channel. Journalists do no longer have a monopoly of distributing information.

This fact changes journalism. And it changes people’s expecations of the journalists. It also mean that journalism hasbeen redefined. It is no longe a one-way street. Instead modern journalism is a continueous stream of two-way communication.

3. Pick up news fast

When big news events occur there are no better place to keep track during the first hours than in social media.

In fact social media is a great tool for professional journalists to pick up news. And this seems to be done in at least three different ways:

• Big and live news events. In these situations journalists should immediately start monitoring Twitter to pick up any news from eyewitnesses or other sources. News will typically be distributed in social media first – and then in the traditional media.
• When social media becomes part of the news event itself. We see this happen more and more often, for instance in the uprising in Libya or in the terror attack in Norway. How people use social media during the events – and what role this plays – becomes an important element of the story to be told.
• Monitoring social media for particular areas of interest. This is the everyday use of social media in an editorial organization. Most journalists have an area of expertise. They should systematically monitor what is being said about that area – including the messages from important sources – in social media.

The Twitter photo of the airplane that landed in Hudson River in New York became an iconic symbol of news reporting in the age of Twitter

4. Dialogue with readers

Social media forces us to change our way of thinking – from journalism being a “one-way-communication” to looking at our profession as a two-way dialogue.

Social media is all about sharing – and dialogue. Unfortunately many editors don’t seem to realize this. They look at social media primarily as a  place to distribute content – and don’t reflect on the fact that people want them to share and communicate as well.

In fact sharing is the core of social media. And there is no way we can succeed with a social media strategy if we do not start to share

For editors there are many benefits in starting to talk to readers through social media.

Take the Facebook page of Aftenposten – Norway’s largest newspaper - as an example.  It now has 67.000 followers. Aftenposten has been quite skilled in using the Facebook page not only to distribute content, but to ask for the advice from readers in covering specific stories. For the editorial staff this has turned out to be extremely useful.  (Disclaimer: I work for Media Norge, the owner company of Aftenposten)

5. Build brand value

This is the more overriding reason: How a news company uses social media influences the brand value of the company.

During the meeting of European news agencies I was asked which business opportunities I saw in social media.

I am not sure that is the right focus. At least business models are not the first we should look for. But doing things right in social media is an efficient tool to build brand value over time.

And high brand value always creates business opportunities.

How you dialogue with your readers in social media can strongly influence the perception of your brand – for better or worse. Your task therefore should be to establish brand missionaries,  people who will do anything to promote your brand among their friends and acquaintances.

Summing up

It is in fact becoming more or less impossible to be a professional journalist today without an active attitude towards social media. Yes, Facebook and media brands are to some extent competitors, at least when it comes to catching people’s attention. Yet, social media and traditional media organizations are in position to collaborate much more than before – to the benefit of both parties.

Here are five don’ts and five dos for how media companies should use social media, as suggested by Media Helping Media.

This post has been republished from Media Helping Media under Creative Common Licence. Media Helping Media is an excellent site dedicated to offer free training resources for media in transition states. It is run by David Brewer, an experienced journalist and media strategist.

Traditional media’s attitude to social networking is evolving with varying results. Some harness the opportunities offered, while others refer to ‘social media’ with a condescending ‘and finally’ tone that suggests they are out of touch with their audience.

The five don’ts

1: Don’t appear out of touch

Never refer to social networking as a new phenomenon in your copy, bulletins, studio discussions or in a piece-to-camera and live radio spots. A large part of your audience is using Twitter and Facebook and increasingly turning to them and other sites as their primary sources of information. Your failure to grasp this will lose you credibility.

• Your failure to grasp this will lose you credibility

2: Don’t call it new media or new technology

It’s not new. Using terms such as ‘new media’ makes it sound as though you are ‘old media’ and lagging behind. The term was okay towards the end of the last century, but you should be part of a converged news operation delivering content to whatever platform/device the user turns to in order to access information. If you are, then it is part and parcel of that. If you are not, then you should be.

• If you keep calling it new you will come across as old

3: Don’t leave it to your online team

Or worse still a junior member of staff to manage and monitor. Twitter, Facebook and other social networks should be an integral part of your newsgathering and news dissemination strategy. All your journalists should be using tools such as TweetDeck to monitor what people are saying and to discover stories. Take it seriously or you may soon find you are no longer taken seriously.

• Twitter, Facebook and other social networks should be an integral part of your newsgathering and news dissemination

4: Don’t snigger

Never let presenters refer to stories that involve social networking with that ‘and finally’ tone or that condescending, knowing nod and smile, as if it is all a bit of a joke. It could come across as patronising or (even worse) disconnected, distant and judgemental. Get some of your more connected correspondents (and there are loads around) to educate the studio presenters and some of the less connected producers. Those in the field often get it because they are rubbing shoulders with the audience on a daily basis and understand the significance of the changing audience behaviour; they also know, first hand, how your news organisation is being perceived.

• Don’t take pride in adopting a patronising, disconnected, distant and judgemental tone

5: Don’t miss the story

Remember that the number and speed of tweets on an issue is a story in itself, and you can run that story even before you have been able to verify what is being said with the usual two independent sources. Simply reflecting the activity and taking the time to follow a few tweets in order to sample the diversity of perspectives and opinions will enrich your news coverage. If you ignore this phenomenon you will be ignoring news.

• If you ignore this phenomenon you will be ignoring news

The five dos

1: Tweet your own news as soon as it is verified

Remember you can tweet facts, you don’t need long, complex concepts. Tweet about things that your news organisation can confirm have happened as soon as the confirmation is in. You just need the facts in a short sentence. Subject, verb, object – send. The social network audience feeds off facts (and other stuff), and it is taking those facts to another place (their preferred social networks) where they add their own context and analysis by interacting with their friends (rather than sitting in front of a TV or radio or clicking through your webpages or thumbing through your newspaper/magazine pages). Always add a short URL if the story is supported by an article or audio & video online.

• Tweet your own news as soon as it is verified

2: Take a gift with you

If you are going to gatecrash the social network party offer something that those who tweet will value. Your best offering is facts from stories where you are ‘digging where others don’t’ or in the category of ‘had it not been for you the world would never have known’. They won’t thank you for regurgitating the wires and throwing up a slightly modified version of what is running on 100 sites, broadcast networks or newspapers. Originality is the key. Tweet facts that they can’t get elsewhere. Automate your feeds through to Facebook and Twitter to provide a steady stream of content for social networks to feed off.

• They won’t thank you for regurgitating the wires and throwing up a slightly modified version of what is running on 100 sites

3: Change your tools

Think differently about the way you set up the desktop for your journalists. If they can only surf the net and browse the wires some may limit themselves to that window on the world – and your news offering will reflect that limitation. You need to observer, evaluate and, where appropriate, integrate the social network chatter and make sense of it in a way that informs the public debate and broadens perspectives. Also encourage your journalists to engage in conversations when they find a story, rather than just feed off what is already there.

• You need to integrate the social network chatter into the tools your journalists use

4: Widen your contacts

Start to build up a new contacts file of those hundreds of thousands of (free) stringers who are filing copy (that’s the stuff of headlines) free of charge 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year. (Imagine organising a rota for that — the work flow implications are mind blowing, let alone the staff costs). So enlist those who are tweeting, and don’t always turn to the known voices who may no longer have the connection with changing audience behaviour.

• Enlist those who are tweeting, and don’t always turn to the known and overused experts

5: Embrace, hug and welcome back

Find ways of bringing the social network experience back into your news production process, and not just as a token nod and wink, but as a serious reflection of how both you and the audience are changing. Those tweeting may have taken your facts away with them to their preferred social networking space to discuss with their friends, but in doing so, they and their contacts will add their own value to the growing story. Be sure to invite them back, and find ways of sharing that enhanced understanding and feeding it back into the system so the richness of knowledge and experience and the diversity of perspectives is available for all.

• Social networking is a reflection of how the audience is changing – ignore it at your peril

See how others are doing it

Check out the Facebook sites for CNN, BBC News, the Wall Street Journal and other leading news organisations.
Look at how many followers they have. Check the number of times stories are commented on and discussed in the Facebook environment.

And look at all the automated links offering a direct route back to the media organisation. Next, check their presence on Twitter.

Free social networking tools offer viral dissemination, engage the audience where they want to be engaged, and providing return traffic; it’s a no brainer.

• Free social networking tools offer viral dissemination, engage the audience where they want to be engaged, and providing return traffic.

The ‘broadcast/publish at’ model died years ago. The ‘engage with on our terms’ model is in its death throes. Now it’s about ‘participate in’ and empowerment. Those traditional media organisations that move to this model qucikly may have more chance of surviving.

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Check also out the following resources from Media Helping Media:

• Social media kitbag for journalists
• Top sites for journalists

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This post has been republished from Media Helping Media under Creative Common Licence. Media Helping Media is an excellent site dedicated to offer free training resources for media in transition states. It is run byDavid Brewer, an experienced journalist and media strategist.

I gave a speech for 70 managers in Media Norway. But the audience turned out to be more than 4500. Here is how!

This is a simple and personal story of the power of social media. It explains how a presentation for a small group may reach many more people than the ones who actually attended the original presentation.

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On January 25th I gave a presentation for the managers conference of Media Norway (a Schibsted-controlled company owning four major media houses in Norway).  About 70 people listened to my speech of digital media trends in 2011. To be honest I was quite nervous about this presentation, as the audience was composed of top managers in all the Norwegian media companies I work closely with in my work as editor and senior manager at Media Norway Digital.

But in fact this group of highly competent managers within my own media corporation turned out to be only a small proportion of the total audience for my speech.

Here is why!

My audience was 70 people. They were all top media managers in one of the most technologically advanced markets in the world.

After giving the speech a few people asked me for the slides. To make it easy for them, I decided to upload the presentation slides to Slideshare.

That started the viral distribution! The Slideshare team liked it so much that they decided to feature my presentation the front page of their site. Suddenly a lot of people decided it was worth their time to flip through the presentation.

And then people started spreading my presentation in social media. As for myself, I wrote a blog post elaborating the somewhat scetchy details in the presentation. Even that blog post was shared quite a bit.

The conclusion after 10 days?

• 70 managers attended the presentation
• 270 people – almost four times as many people as those who listened to the speech – downloaded the presentation from Slideshare to their own computer
• More than 120 people spread the ideas in social media, primarily on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. About 20 of them commented on the presentation, mostly on LinkedIn.
• 3900 people have viewed the presentation on Slideshare.net
• 37 web sites have embedded the presentation
• More than 1000 people have read the blog posting on BetaTales.com
• About 20 people I did not know before have asked to connect with me on LinkedIn. I have also received many new followers on Twitter.

The conclusion?

The speech I gave for about 70 of my colleagues ended up with an audience of almost 5000 people.

So far, that is. The viral distribution will probably continue.

I have had similar experiences before. Two years ago I taught seven online journalists at Aftenposten about how they could use Twitter as a tool for journalism. The now out-dated presentation – uploaded both in Norwegian and English – since has been viewed by more than 7000 people.

The physical audience was multiplied by 1000 times!

In April last year I was going to give a presentation at the annual conference of Society of News Design Scandinavia. Unfortunately the conference was cancelled at the last minute due to the vulcano ashes from Iceland which interrupted a lot of air traffic in Europe at the time.

I never had the chance to give the presentation, with an expected audience of 50-60 people, but the slides that I had prepared have been viewed by more than 1000 people on Slideshare.

We are talking about a presentation I never gave!

It is quite amazing, isn’t it?

Of course I realize this is not the most stunning example of the power of viral distribution. However, this is my personal experience, which is what inspire me to continue sharing my content. And that is what matters to me. It is also these types of experiences that make me continue blogging on BetaTales.

For me blogging has been a tremendous learning experience. It has taught me a lot about what what works and what doesn’t work in the digital world. In fact BetaTales has become my private lab, where I can try out a number of things without the risks of doing it on a large commercial site.

And I have learned so much about the power of sharing!

What are my conclusions so far?

Here is the essential one:

The most important driver for creating value in content is engagement!

Really, if your content is not able to inspire engagement, it has no or very low value.

That’s my experience at least!

What do your think?

By the way: Here is the presentation that was embedded on Slideshare:

Localization, platform shifts and continued fragmentation of the content market are some of the digital media trends that will shape 2011.

What are the core forces influencing digital media in 2011?  This question can be approached in a number of different ways.  I have tried to identify five trends or forces that I think will influence or continue to influence the media industry in a particular way in the year to come.

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This article, as many others on BetaTales, was written as preparation for a presentation I gave on digital media. I had the pleasure of talking about digital media trends in 2011 for about 150 communication and marketing professionals at the annual Scandinavian Futures Conference held by the Norwegian market research agency Opinion. As similar presentation was also held for the management conference of Media Norway (see the slides for the presentation above).

None of the trends are new – rather it is an attempt to sum up some of the more powerful ones. And of course: Many more could have been mentioned.

But at least I think any digital media executive should try to analyze how these five forces will influence his/her business in 2011.

The five trends are:

1. New platforms take big parts of media consumption
2. Localization
3. Disaggregation and repackaging of content
4. Everything is social
5. New business models for content

Let us go through them, one by one:

1. Mobility and platform change

E-readers and tablets are about to reach critical mass. On one end of the scale you have dedicated e-readers, like Amazon’s Kindle. Here we are already seeing a dramatic drop in prices; the cheapest Kindle now sell for USD 139. I will not be surprised if we see the cheapest e-readers fall below USD 100 in 2011. That could give these readers a boost in numbers.

On the other end of the scale we have iPad and a long line of Android-based tablets that are about to enter the market. These are multi-purpose devices that satisfy a whole range of needs among users.

Gartner has already estimated that mobile phones will overtake PCs as the dominant web access device worldwide by 2013.

Access to content is therefore no longer a limited good. People will be continuously online and expect to be able to access whatever they need wherever they may be.

As part of this we will start seeing “tablet-only” and “mobile first” media companies, as pointed out by Vadim Lavrusik at Mashable.

Parallell to the emergence of new platforms we see anincreasing number of services and products moving into the cloud. In fact many products become platform agnostic. Users expect that they can access the service on whatever platform or device they use at any given moment.

In the media industry we used to talk about print versus the web – and then we would define how our products would differ on the two platforms.

Not any more. As more platforms emerge and users consume media on several devices during the day, the value of the brand will be more important than the value of the platform-specific product.

Look at some of the most successful digital services out there now, like Facebook, Evernote, Dropbox and Kindle. None of them are platform specific. If you decide to pay for the file sharing service Dropbox, for instance, it will not be because their iPhone app is so awesome. Instead you buy a service with some specific attributes – and use this service on whatever device that is handy right now.  The core benefits of the product, like how many GBs you can store in your account, follow you across platforms. And the convenience of being able to use it on many platforms is actually a core benefit of the product in itself.

We see a very strong trend towards platform agnostic services – where a product is not defined in terms of one platform only, but as a service across all available platforms.

In this area most media companies are dragging behind. Many media executives seem to believe they will be able to sell each platform specific product individually. For instance they want you to pay for an iPad subscription as a different product than the premium level of the web site.

I believe this type of platform specific strategy will fail. Instead the winners will be those who succeed in defining product offerings that are available wherever people choose to access them. As smart phones and tablets become more common, most people will indeed consume media content on several devices during the day.  In this new reality users will expect seamless transfer of product benefits across platforms.

One important point: That products become platform agnostic does not necessarily mean that they have the same attributes on all platforms. In fact I think we are about to see that making digital versions of the printed paper will fail as a business model. Content must be presented according to the specific user situation of each platform, and the traditional broad print bundle may no longer be the core of the digital product.

2. Localization

The rise of smart phones is pushing localization services many steps ahead.

In 2010 we saw the rise of localization networks like Foursquare and Gowalla. At the same time Facebook introduced Facebook Places as its tool to encourage people to tell where they are and Google made clear that location-based coupons would play an important part of its strategy.

In short: It is time for local media sites to watch out as the global giants prepare to move into their territory.

2011 will be the year when we see services based on localization take a big step forward. People will start getting used to content and commercial offers being served according to where they are at any given time. And people will start to depend on these type of services in their everyday life.

The development will be driven by big services like Google and Facebook, which both see great opportunities in the local ad markets.

But also media companies will follow along, creating local news services targeted at users’ location.

An especially creative service using localization information is Ratio Finder. The service uses check-in information from Foursquare – and makes a dynamic map of pubs and clubs with higher than average ratio of female checkins right now.

One interesting question: Who will own the biggest database of location-based offerings in each market? I am convinced those who succeed in building such a database will make lots of money. And I think this market will be defined by the network economy, in which the market leader will have a huge benefit.

A creative example of service based on localization is Ratio Finder: http://www.weeplaces.com/ratiofinder/

3. Disaggregation and repackaging of content

As I see it, most editors seem to underestimate the powerful forces of disaggregation of content in the digital area.

And still disaggregation of content is perhaps the most powerful force influencing the traditional media industry.

What do I mean by disaggregation?

Think back a few years at the typical offering of a traditional media company, be it a newspaper or television company. At the time distribution of news and content was limited by physical restraints. In order to be able to present the news to people in your local target area, you had to package it so that it fit the needs of most of your users. It was “one size fits all”.

In the digital era these physical boundaries are no longer valid. In fact there is no longer an additional cost to speak of to present news to each user according to his/her personal interests.  News can be distributed freely – specialized for the individual user.

So we see that content is being split up into its individual pieces.

And then it is being repackaged. Sometimes it is done by the media companies themselves, but more often other agents have more at stake. Content is being repackaged in all kinds of ways. Some examples:

• Social repackaging. People use services like Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook to receive content recommendations from friends or people they trust. For music playlists on Spotify perform a similar function.
• Repackaging by aggregation. Google News or similar services aggregate content from thousands of sources and present it according to different categories. In this way users can follow all the news on one particular topic of interest without having to look up each content source individually.
• Repackaging by search. Searching for information on Google helps users find exactly what they are looking for.
• Repackaging by human curation.  Huffington Post is in many ways an example of this, where editors summarize and link to stories from many different sources.

The huge challenge for media companies is that the main focus is switching from the edited package as the core of its offering to the individual article or content piece. I believe edited packages still will be important, but they will no longer be the only way people consume news.

For media companies this means that the content structure becomes much more important than before. In fact we can state the following:

Content without metadata has no value!

No value!

And this is a huge challenge for most media companies! In the analogue world they did not have to worry about meta data. In the digital world it has become essential for success.

4. Everything is becoming social

Social media is ingrained in more and more digital services. Therefore it is impossible to talk about digital media trends without mentioning social media.

Facebook has become the new hub for people’s digital life. More than 550 million people now use Facebook – and for many of those it has become the online starting point, replacing photo albums, address books, chats, news services, etc.

While many media companies a couple of years ago tried to build their own social communities, many of them today decide to use Facebook as the social glue around their content. In Norway this trend was illustrated by the demise of the once hugely popular newspaper-owned social network Nettby.

The social aspect of digital life spreads to more and more areas:

• Social shopping is growing, illustrated by services like Groupon and Livingsocial.
• Search is becoming social. Google is experimenting with including results from your Twitter followers and Bing and Facebook has started a partnership to make search more social.
• Social gaming has become a huge industry, as illustrated by the success of Zynga, the creator of the very popular Facebook game Farmville.
• Even ads are becoming social. A good example is Facebook’s new ad format Sponsored Stories, in which your interactions with brands online may show up in ads displayed in your friends’ newsfeed.

5. New business models for content

Almost all media companies now try to find ways to charge users for content. In this regard 2011 will be the year of experiments. The task is extremely difficult, though:

Content is everywhere in the digital world – and no longer scarce.  In addition people expect to be able to share the content they like with their friends.

Does that mean we cannot make users pay for content? No, it does not. But it is extremely important to remember that people rarely pay for just the content. Many other aspects are equally important, such as Unique Convenience and Unique Usefulness.

• Read my article: Five ways to build Unique Value for digital content

I have asked myself why user payment suddenly has so much more important for media companies. I believe there are at least two reasons:

• Media companies need more revenue streams to finance good journalism. This has been even more clear as newspaper readership continues to drop – and banner ads are loosing value by the day. The process has been helped by the financial crisis, which gave media companies a new sense of reality.
• The shift to mobile platforms for media consumptions has changed the rules of the game. People seem to be more willing to pay for content on mobile platforms – and media companies are eager to explore that.

My guess is that most attempts at charging users for content in 2011 will fail. The reason is that media companies need to completely rethink their approach to content in order to succeed. That does take some time.

But failures are what will push us forward. Only by making mistakes we will realize the steps we need to take.

And we will see some success stories. Many of them will be surprising. And they will help the rest of us to identify what really creates Unique Value for our readers. In the long term the experience will also improve the quality of journalism, as we learn more about what our readers truly appreciate and are willing to pay for.

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More to read about digital media trends in 2011

• Trend for 2011: Collaborative story-telling on social media (reportr.net)
• 10 predictions for the news media in 2011 (Mashable)
• Our Bets For Digital Media In 2011 (paidcontent.org)
• Ten newsroom New Year’s resolutions for 2011 (lostremote.com)
• Seven Digital Media Trends of 2011 (socialmediatoday.com)
• My Mix of Social Media Trends 2011 (John Bell)
• Ten digital trends (ClickHere)
• Trends to watch in 2011 (sfnBlog)
• The rise of apps, iPad and Android (Wall Street Journal)

What are the digital trends that will shape the media industry? I asked five digital media experts. Here are their answers.

Everybody in the media industry these days seems to be trying to predict what happens in the digital media space right now. But the more experts you ask, the more different answers you get.

For the record: This is an updated version of the previous blog post “Digital trends that will shape the media industry”. Two more experts have been added to this post.

I put the following question to five recognized digital media experts:

• What are the three most important digital media trends right now that will shape the media industry over the next 3-5 years?

Here are their answers:

Knut-Arne Futsæter is one of Norway’s leading analysts of media trends. As research director at the market research agency TNS Gallup he regurlarly presents the latest research about media habits of the technological sophisticated Norwegian population. TNS Gallup is responsible for the official Internet surveys in Norway.

Futsæter is a very good person to follow on Twitter if you want to catch up on interesting links about what happens in digital media.

Thomas Baekdal is the man behind the well respected and very popular digital media blog Baekdal.com.

Having worked with new media in Denmark for 13 years, Baekdal now spends most of his time on his blog. I do recommend you to follow it, as Baekdal.com in my opinion is one of the most interesting digital media blogs out there.

His background is unusual, with a mix of expertise in design, fashion, media and publishing.

Thomas Crampton used to work for years as a globetrotting newspaper journalist, primarily for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.

He then changed the course of his career – and since 2004 has been passionately involved with digital media. He is now the Asia Pacific director for 360 Digital Influence at Ogilvy – and a frequently used keynote speaker on social media.

I recommend you to follow his excellent blog, in which he often provides very interesting information about social media in Asia.  He also tweets at @thomascrampton.

Grzegorz Piechota is the president of International Newsmedia Marketing Association (INMA) in Europe.

One of the points he makes is how the older generation also will become digital.

“New devices like iPads seem to be much easier for the old generation to understand and to use. (Look at my parents-in-law.)”, he writes.

“Printed media used to think they had problems with the young readers, now watch out as their core readers are going finally to discover digital news, entertainment, communication, geolocation and e-commerce.”

“And you know — at least in developed countries the market of the old is much bigger than the market of the young, and it is going to be bigger and bigger.”

Grzegorz tweets at @forum4editors.

Nic Newman presents himself as a “digital consultant working on the future of journalism”.  For many years he used to work for BBC, first in different editorial positions and then in charge of teams developing major web sites for the broadcasting corporation.

One of his points is how the use of videos create new ways of telling and distributing stories.

“Navigating the world of the web through video led gateways will shake up the old broadcasting elites and open a new wave of innovation on TV, PC, Tablet and mobile”, he writes.

He tweets at @nicnewman.

• Read also: 8 digital media trends that are shaping 2010

It was time to cut the crap: The Spanish news site 20minutos.es decided to make a sincere effort to increase the quality of readers’ contributions. Here is how.

The Schibsted-owned free newspaper 20 Minutos in Spain also has the third largest news site in the country, 20minutos.es.  Now it has launched a major program to increase readers’ contribution on the site. The program is called Eco and is an innovative self-developed framework for integrating readers’ commments and social media into the news stories.

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I recently visited Madrid and met with deputy editor-in-chief for 20minutos.es, Virginia Perez Alonso. She explained to me the philosophy behind Eco, that was launched on November 26th.

- 20minutos.es has a long tradition collaborating with our readers, especially when you compare us to the biggest news sites in Spain, like El Pais and El Mundo, she said.

Watch a short interview with Virginia Perez Alonso in the video above!

- In fact this is an area where we really wish to make a huge difference. We want to show that we understand our readers.

But as many news sites have experienced, building quality in readers’ participation takes a lot of work. Too much of comments are just crap that create noise rather than making real contributions.

20minutos.es set out to change this. They wanted to increase both the amount and quality of readers’ contributions, thinking this would differentiate the site in a positive way for its bigger competitors.

The answer was called Eco.

What is Eco, then?

It is a platform aggregating all readers’ contributions to a story, whether it is on 20minutos.es itself or in social media like Twitter and Facebook.

The total activity around a story is calculated into a Eco measurement. Stories with the most reader activity will then be given visible symbols on the front page of the news site.

Here is how it works:

On the front page

The number of comments each story has received is clearly marked in connection with the subtitle.

Then, if a story reaches a sufficient “ecco”, a measurement for readers’ activity, a special symbol is placed on the story image, indicating that this is a “hot story”.

It looks like what you see on the left. The eco symbol will take on a stronger color the more reader activity is associated with the story. Over time, the editors hope, readers will get used to the meaning of this symbol and look for the stories creating the most readers’ activity.

What happens, then, when readers click on the story?

In the actual article page a set of symbols appear after the lead paragraph.

It looks like this:

The bar both gives the proprietory “eco value” as well as number of comments, Tweets and Facebook likes.

Below the story are the comments and other contributions from readers:

Notice the tab for corrections. Readers are encouraged to report any factual error they might find in the story – and there even is a tab for the responses from the editorial staff.

An essential part of the eco system is that the most liked comments are displayed on the top. That is one of several measures to encourage readers to provide quality contributions.

- For sure this will not be used by every reader. These functions are for the most important of our readers, explains Virginia Perez Alonso.

They currently receive about 300.000 comments each month and expect this number to increase as readers get used to the new eco system.

A major challenge is to get all the journalists to participate. Each journalists gets his/her own user page in the eco system, but to succeed it is also necessary that they in fact participate actively. Convincing all journalists that this is worthwhile will still takes some time, admits Virginia Perez Alonso.

It is still too early to say how the eco system will work out. Yet I was impressed by the massive effort in making readers’ engagement the differentiator from competing sites. 20minutos.es has spent most of its limited development resources for several months on this project and is betting on this making a significant impact on its success.

I hope they will succeed.

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From Copy Economy to Access Economy: The media industry must prepare itself for a future in the cloud, claims a digital future expert.

Media futurist Gerd Leonhard was the keynote speaker of the Future Media Days conference in Oslo, Norway this week. Leonhard is a media strategist and popular keynote speaker on the future of media. He lives in Switzerland and also writes the Mediafuturist blog.

The Future Media Days conference was held for the first time by the New Media Network in Norway. After his speech (you can download his slides here) I made a short video interviw with Leonhard that you can watch above.

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- A tornado is coming for the media industry,  warns Leonhard. He points out how some big mega trends will affect the very essence of how the media companies have been used to running their business.

One of the most important trends is the transformation from a Copy Economy to Access Economy.

Traditionally media business models have been based on selling copies of content: A printed newspaper, a book, a DVD, a music record, even a digital copy of a song.

That model is about to disappear, claims Leonhard. He compares Internet to a giant copy machine. Selling “copies” is a model of the past. Instead the entire world shifts to a world of access.

“If you are in the media industry you better get used to this. It is a whole new industry.”

Gerd Leonhard

We must review our assumptions, says Gerd Leonhard.  Like what is a copy in this new world? How do you define “a copy” when you have unlimited music streamed to you like in Spotify? If we cannot even define a copy, how can we speak of copyright?

Gerd Leonhard’s answer: Access (to the cloud) is the new copy!

We used to live in what can be described as the Broadcast Culture.  It was a disconnected society, based on everybody watching or reading the same content. For the media it was a one way stream of publishing.

Now it has been transformed to the Broadband Culture, which is based on millions of links between people.

“What matters on the Internet is not the noise, it is the trusted connections that you have generated”

The future of the media is not a fight for distribution, it is a fight for attention, says Leonhard.

In the past the media made money through control and scarcity.

“The future of the media is not a fight for distribution, it is a fight for attention.”

What then about media companies’ attempt at putting up paywalls in such an economy, like what The Times is doing.

- The paywall is an attention wall, unless it is so cleverly done that you don’t really notice that you pay, says Leonhard.

“Forcing people to pay cannot possibly be our future!”

Leonhard wasn’t necessarily agains asking users to pay, but underlined how i all depends on how it is done.

- It is very important to make models that keep 95 per cent of the population engaged. Then you can create uppselling options, he said.

Related articles about Gerd Leonhard

• Gerd Leonhard: The Future of IPR and Copyright (presentation at TedX NewStreet London) (slideshare.net)
• The Future of Advertising: Gerd Leonhard at Adtech London 2010 (slideshare.net)
• Gerd Leonhard: The Journalists Formerly Known as the Media: My Advice to the Next Generation ( /Jay Rosen) (mediagazer.com)
• New video: 5 customer engagement trends by Gerd Leonhard (future of marketing) (mediafuturist.com)
• Gerd Leonhard: Hot Trend – Tools To Find Relevant Web Information (gigaom.com)

Newspaper-owned Nettby used to be Norway’s largest online social community. Then came Facebook. Gone were the media companies’ hopes of being the centers of gravity for people’s social activities.

This blog is about digital media trends. That includes trying to look into the future, for instance by identifying 8 digital media trends that are shaping 2010.

Yet the digital media landscape is changing so fast that only one thing can  be stated with certainty: The future will be different from what we are able to predict.

At the peak Nettby had more page views alone than the 10 next web sites in Norway together. But then came Facebook ...

This week brought the news that the once hugely popular social community Nettby in Norway will cease to exist in the beginning of next year. Probably very few of our readers internationally have ever heard of Nettby. Still, stay with me as the story is an interesting example of how the digital landscape has changed within just a couple of years. Certainly it illustrates how what we thought about the future just a short time ago completely failed to materialize.

Let us go back around three years – to 2007. At the time a lot of media companies were starting to discover the power of social media. We were thrilled by how media tycoon Rupert Murdoch two years earlier had bought MySpace.com for no less than 580 million USD. By 2007 Myspace was considered the leading social community site in the world.

In many newspaper companies, especially in small markets like Norway, we were dreaming of creating a big local social network of our own. We hoped that we could be a center of gravity for our readers, helping them connect to each other.  To achieve this we were studying MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and other global social communities that were growing.

I worked for Aftenposten at the time, which is now Norway’s largest newspaper. In our digital development department we strongly believed that we could build a leading social community for Norwegian users.

800.000 Norwegians had a profile on Nettby at the peak

The thinking was similar in other media houses in Norway. And it certainly was not without merit.  In Norway the newspaper Dagbladet already had some success with its social community Blink, which was followed by an even more successful community by the tabloid newspaper VG, namely Nettby.no (launched in September 2006).

In the Norwegian web market media houses have maintained a very strong position. Several newspapers are on the top 10 list of popular web sites among Norwegians. The most popular site is VG.no, which last week had 3,7 million unique visitors – in a market of 4,5 million people. With the possible exception of Aftonbladet.se in Sweden, I doubt that you will find any other newspaper company in the world with such a dominant position in its local market.

VG’s social community Nettby had a broad appeal – and tried to be the social meeting point of all Norwegians online. At the most – in 2008 – it saw 400.000 active users per week and more than 300 million page views. Again: Remember the small size of the Norwegian market!

In 2008 the Schibsted Media Group, which owns VG, valued Nettby at around USD 31 million. Others valued it at up to three times as much.

But then came Facebook.

Slowly Nettby, which had become so popular in Norway, started to loose ground. Norwegians discovered Facebook. They concluded Facebook gave them more benefits in terms of functionality and opportunities of connecting with old friends.

Even though Nettby was supported by the biggest traffic-generating web site in Norway, it was not sufficient. People just decided that they were better served by Facebook – despite all efforts by VG to convince them otherwise.

Social communities are often ruled by the principles of network economics. People tend to gravitate towards the biggest service, as all users are better served by being where everybody else is. When Facebook grew in popularity, people would experience that was the site they would indeed meet all their old friends from school. Today 58 % of Norwegians use Facebook on a regular basis.

Young people were the biggest user groups at Nettby in the end. Source: b2b.vg.no

The last bastion of Nettby were the teenagers. Nettby had its strength among the younger users. However, a social network cannot survive without volume. As Nettby had been loosing users steadily for 20 consecutive months, the board decided the lower limit had been reached. Nettby had to cease to exist – and the users needed to be given time to deinstall all their content.

Currently Nettby sees only 60.000 unique visitors per week, a small portion of what it had at the haydays.

Page views per week in 2010 for some of Norway's largest news sites. Nettby is included in the numbers for VG and the main reason for the dramatic drop.

VG’s decision to close down Nettby was certainly not surprising. In fact, those of us who are working for competitors have betted with each other when VG would make the inevitable outcome public.

Still, the demise of this social community illustrates how hard it is for local players to compete with the global giants, like Facebook. Today very few media houses, however strong their position might be, think that they can build a large general social community in their market. The thinking is very different compared to only 2-3 years back.

Instead we are now discussing how we can connect our services to Facebook by using its social plugins. We want our content to be distributed wherever people are and we fight to have the Facebook pages with the most followers. It is important for us that people engage with our content and discuss it. But no longer do we try to have readers do all the discussions on our sites. Rather we tell them: Please tweet about our content! Blog about it! Share it! Like it on Facebook! Engage! Engage! Engage! Wherever you are!

And having noticed how much our thinking has changed, I have asked myself:

What of all our assumptions today will be proven wrong over the next 2-3 years?

I would love to hear your answer to that question!

For a few weeks I have used iPad for news consumption, daily tasks and fun. It is wonderful. And terrible. Here is why.

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iPad is my first Apple product. As my laptop I have used PCs, while my smartphones have been Nokia at first and now the Android-based HTC Desire. Kindle has been my e-reading device of choice for books. And I have had a strong interest in all the new mobile platforms, especially when it comes to media content.

This summer I became the proud owner of an iPad.  Working with digital strategy for Norway’s largest newspaper, Aftenposten, I had of course tested out iPad for a long time. But testing a device used by many colleagues is nothing near the experience of customizing it for your own personal use. Finally I had my own device that I could set up in exactly the way I wanted it for myself.

And my first discovery was just this: iPad is a personal device – and NOT a family device. Once you start purchasing many apps and customize the tablet with your accounts for mail, Facebook and Twitter it becomes very personal. Not that I have many secrets, but I soon found myself hesitating to let my family members use my iPad. The reason is very simple: Mail and an number of apps are very personal in nature.

+++ What do I love about iPad?

Convenient user situations. I just love how the iPad offers me convenience in consuming media and browsing the web.  Yes, I can bring my laptop with me to the sofa if I like. But I just don’t want to. The laptop is too bulky and too much associated with work. The iPad, however, gives completely different associations.  It is like reading a magazine: Comfortable, relaxing and efficient. Suddenly I find myself doing a lot of my web stuff in the sofa rather than at my desk. I love it.

Efficient cloud services. I love services in the cloud. They help me not to worry about where I store my stuff – and it is always available when I need it. A number of cloud services apps have made iPad a very convenient tool for me. Most important is Box.net. I syncronize all my work documents as well as important private files with Box.net – and now I have very easy access on my iPad. Need to read a report? Before I would print it out at work and bring it home to the sofa. Now I just pick it up on my Box.net app. Another very good cloud app is Kindle. I can now read my book four places: On my Kindle e-reader, on my PC, on my HTC Desire and on my iPad. And they all syncronize smoothly! For this reason alone I haven’t even considered using Apples iBooks app for reading books.

Touching the news. I love not having to use the mouse when navigating. Touching the news is a wonderful experience and a very easy way to move around. In many ways I feel it brings me closer to the content.

Rich media experiences. I love how iPad offers much richer media experiences than any other platform I use. In my opinion using iPad to consume news works just great. Unfortunately most media apps are still first generation, but I am convinced that is about to change very quickly. Already I find it a much nicer way to read news that the typical web experience.  The display of photo and videos is just great!

Efficient and portable. I love how iPad gets started in a couple of seconds after you push the on-button. Compare that to my one-minute-to-start laptop and it becomes amazingly convenient. Suddenly I can check stuff in a few seconds without having to wait for ages. That the iPad is small enough to be truly portable adds to this experience.

Extremely useful.  I love how iPad can be used to solve so many problems. There is always an app for what I need done and there seems to be no limitations of creativity among the thousands of app developers out there. Sure, many of the apps are crap. But there are also numerous apps that are really useful and which help me do my stuff in an extremely easy way. And since it is so easy to pay, I keep buying new apps.

— What do I hate about iPad?

Lack of multitasking. I keep getting irritated of all the times I am being thrown out of a task and have to backtrack through the start page. Take downloading apps, for instance. The procedure itself is simple, but once I click download I am being sent back to the start screen and I have to click on the app store tab once more to get another app. Back and forth. Back and forth. Why? I just don’t get it.  The same goes if I read my mail and click on a link to an interesting article. Safari (an inferior browser) opens – and I have to go via the home screen to get back to my mail. I guess I have been spoiled by my Android smartphone which is so much more user friendly in this regard. Why not make it simple, Apple?

Wrong display of Powerpoint. I use iPad a lot for work. As for millions of users out there, most of my work documents are in Microsoft formats. Not only do I want to read them, but I also need to make changes. But I keep getting into trouble doing this. Graphs in my Powerpoint files frequently get distorted and even working on the Word documents takes some effort to figure out how.  Given the popularity of Powerpoint this is quite a surprise. Why not make it simple, Apple?

No Flash. iPad is great for browsing. I enjoy sitting in the sofa and flip through web pages. But one big hurdle restraints my use: The lack of Flash support. I keep visiting web pages where I cannot do what I want to do. My 14 year son put it very clearly when I asked why he was not more eager to user my iPad: “Isn’t that obvious, dad? It has no Flash! I cannot watch the videos on my skate sites”.  Again: Why not make it simple, Apple?

Useless in the sunshine. I have tried to bring my iPad out in the garden. It is just not a pleasant experience. It becomes very difficult to read at all and if there is any sunshine at all the iPad only works as a mirror. Reading books on the beach? Forget iPad! Use Kindle instead!

Too heavy.  The weight takes away a number of user situations. One typical example: I like to read holding my book in one hand and a coffee cup in another. But holding the iPad in one hand only soon turns into a weighlifting exercise.

Cannot syncronize.  Yes, I know most people have no trouble syncronizing their iPad with iTunes. Yet I am among the users who have been unable to syncronize my iPad to my PC. Each time I try I am being asked to authorize the computer. I do so and iTunes responds that the computer is already authorized. Yet when i continue, I am being asked to authorize again. And so it goes in an eternal loop. Many have described the problem in support forums, yet there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer from Apple. And I keep wondering why I have to syncronize in this way. Why not do it in the cloud as with services like Box.net and Dropbox.com? Why not make it simple, Apple?

Social media is huge in Asia, but very distinct from the Western world in several aspects. Check this video for a quick introduction.

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Thomas Crampton heads Ogilvy‘s team of social media specialists in Asia. A former correspondent for The New York Times and International Herald Tribune, he now is completely dedicated to social media and advicing businesses on how they should communicate with their customers. He is considered a leading expert on social media in Asia.

This video was produced for an internal meeting at Ogilvy and gives a very quick and efficient overview of how social media is being used in Asia. Personally I find it quite fascinating as people in Asia both love all kinds of social media at the same time as there are some very clear differences to the Western world. Did you for instance know that 88 million of the world’s estimated 242 million bloggers live in China?

Three major differences stand out:

Social media is mobile

In Japan there are no less than 75 million mobile Internet users – or 84 % of the population – while Vietnam saw a stunning 846 % growth in mobile Internet users in 2009.  Half of the population in Hong Kong owns a smartphone.

Users pay on social networks

One of the biggest networks, Cyworld, makes about 200 million USD every year in sale of virtual items. Several other local brand social networks also have a high income from virtual goods.

Several strong local brands

QQ.com is used by 376 million people in China

While Facebook is big in other parts of Asia, local brands dominate in markets like China and South Korea.

Check out the video from Thomas. You may also enjoy reading his article “Social networking habits across Asia-Pacific” for additional background.

Other blogs about social media in Asia

• 6 Things About India’s Mobile Landscape (penn-olson.com)
• Facebook scores virtual currency deal in Asia (news.cnet.com)
• Thomas Crampton: Overview: Asia’s Social Media Scene (huffingtonpost.com)

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