The Other Drummer

An interesting discussion on the future of newspapers (and news) involving one of my favorite bloggers, Jeff Jarvis. Worth the time if you have 26 minutes to spare.

I agree that newspapers probably won’t be around (much) in five years, but I think news will be thriving; format is largely irrelevant.

The only reason newspapers got as huge as they did was because they were essentially a monopoly: they controlled the presses so they controlled the information. The Internet has changed that. And I believe it’s a good thing.

The one thing newspapers (as an institution) were (are) good for is preserving journalism. There’s a difference between newspapers and journalism. One well-deserved criticism of blogging and other online activities is that often the quality suffers (or is flat-out inaccurate) because it isn’t held up against journalistic standards.

It will be interesting to watch the transition institutional news dissolves into news as an entrepreneurial venture and community effort.

What do you think the future of news will be?

In case you hadn’t heard, Facebook is providing a nice, easy way for you to “like” everything on the web, not just the stuff you come across in Facebook. When you see the little, familiar thumbs up icon on sites and click it, it posts a link from the post back to your Facebook profile so all your friends can see that you liked it.

You can also see the other people who “liked” it as well.

This morning it struck me: this could be the beginning of how Facebook reinvents advertising on the web. Facebook doesn’t want to just sell ads on Facebook –  it wants to be the de facto ad provider for the entire web, making it billions of dollars and a serious competitor to Google.

Here’s how it could do just that.

The Short Version
Facebook creates an ad network similar to Google’s AdSense where anyone can make room for ads on their site for Facebook to populate. The owner of the site gets paid each time someone clicks one of the ads. Those ads are selected not just by the content of the site (ala Google), but also based on the profile information of the people who have “liked” that site, creating a much more relevant, targeted ad system.

Shortly, Facebook will have the capability to create an ad network based on the following:

Content
(site you’re on)
+ Demographic data
(age, gender, education, location, etc. from your FB profile)
+ Psychographic data
(your “liked” sites, your FB groups, FB Pages you’re a fan of, your friends, etc.)
= Holy Grail of marketing opportunities

For Example
Let’s say you run a, uh, yoga site. You install the “like” functionality and a snippet of code allowing Facebook to run ads on your site. Your readers start “liking” your stuff, sharing it with their friends on Facebook. Sweet! You’re getting free publicity for your site! Yay social media!

All the while, Facebook is doing some crazy algorithmic ninja stuff in the background, looking at the Facebook profiles of all the people who “liked” your site to determine patterns, trends and correlation.

Interesting. It finds that 68% of people who “liked” your yoga site also “liked” sites about rock climbing (or belong to rock climbing groups, are fans of rock climbing pages, have mentioned “rock climbing” in their status updates).

All this happens continuously and near-instantly. Presto! Facebook sticks an ad for rock climbing equipment on the side of your yoga site.

Google would never know that. They would have just had ads for yoga mats.

OK. Good start. With even that much, Facebook is already creating ads infinitely more targeted than Google. Now let’s start getting really crazy.

Location Aware
Facebook knows your current location. You gave it to them when you filled out your profile. Instead of showing you an ad for rock climbing equipment, maybe it shows ads for rock climbing gyms in your area.

Cha-ching. It’s just cornered a lucrative market Google is scrambling to get into.

Target the Individual
If I’m logged into Facebook – or even have the cookie they check for – ads could be generated based on my FB profile information. Every ad I’d see on nearly every site I’d visit would be tailored specifically to me. I’d never see another irrelevant ad.

That’s good for advertisers, Facebook and me.

Heck, want to get really Minority Reportish? Ads could be customized with educational information, (“Come back to BYU and get a Masters Degree”), my name (“David, picture yourself driving a BMW M6″) or even information about my family and friends (“Michael’s birthday is coming up…”).

And it does it without sharing your private data with third parties.

Customize More than the Ads – Customize the Web
Entire sites could be themed based on individual’s Facebook information. You recently became a fan of Avatar? When you visit Best Buy the entire site is skinned in an Avatar theme.

All Best Buy would have to do is pick the top ten movies (or video games, or music albums, etc.) and create themes for each of them. If a visitor to the site has “liked’ something having to do with Avatar elsewhere on the web, or is a fan of the movie’s Facebook page, Best Buy will present that theme based on the available data from Facebook.

Conclusion
Google presents ads based on what we’re looking at. It tries to gather as much information about you as possible to generate more targeted ads. It’s obviously a good model – they generate billions of dollars a year doing it.

Facebook already has all the information about you. They just need the content and distribution model.

Image courtesy of here.

There are a number of atom services (dealing with tangible things as opposed to digital services which are decidedly less tangible) which have hooks into your social media profiles. You can have your Facebook profile automatically updated when you rate a movie on Netflix , designate a credit card to automatically tweet your purchases (note: not good around the holidays) and even a scale which will broadcast your weight to all your Twitter followers.

Seems like libraries could do something similar to promote their services.

Tell My Friends

I just reserved Pride & Prejudice & Zombies (“The classic regency romance – now with ultraviolent zombie mayhem!”) at my local library, seen above. As I reserved it, it occurred to me that I’d love to have the option of linking my library account to my social networks.

Anytime I reserve a book, check out a book, return a book or want to comment on a book (What? There’s no comment system on the library website?) it could update my status for me. My friends could weigh in on my choices, make recommendations and, perhaps most importantly, be exposed to new titles and new reasons to visit the library.

Build a Community

Commenting on titles would be a huge way to build a virtual community around the library. By including a rating system the library could harness a tremendous amount of data to use in the promotion of its books – show the most checked out books, the highest rated books, the most requested books, etc. It gives people a starting point when looking for a good read.

Monetization Opportunity

Of course, if everyone is looking at the Top 10 Most Requested Books there won’t be enough copies to go around – waiting lists can be weeks if not months long for certain titles. Don’t want to wait? Buy the book through the library’s Amazon affiliate link and the library gets a small cut of the sale price, generating revenue.

Plus, when you’re done with the book you can donate it to the library and either have any late fees erased or get to cut in line for the next hot title.

Or, for a small monthly fee, you can have priority access to the Top Ten Titles while those who are more patient can save their money and wait until everyone else has had their turn.

But none of this is possible unless you enable patrons to give you the information you need to better serve them.

What do you think? Viable? Would you do it? Give me some feedback in the comments.

Image courtesy of here.

I have seen this ad for Toshiba laptops for what feels like the last two years. It’s in every publication I read. Like a creepy girl in middle school who won’t take a hint, it keeps showing up everywhere I go.

And it never changes.

The same woman floating in the midst of orbiting stuff on a red background.

I get the impression Toshiba spent millions on a media buy then, as an afterthought, realized they need to create an actual ad.

Reminds me of that line in Jurassic Park. “Your [account executives] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should!”

Thank you Jeff Goldblum. Truer words about advertising have never been spoken.

And now this thing is running around in the wild like a less cuddly velociraptor, jumping out at unsuspecting people, breeding and creating more little versions of the same ad which grow up to be full spreads in other publications like Good Housekeeping and Bass Fisherman Quarterly.

Hopefully the ad won’t have two terrible sequels.

Mr. Goldblum image courtesy of here.

Google and Microsoft,

You have more money than you know what to do with – literally billions sitting around. (As of the end of 2009 Microsoft has $9.4 billion and Google has $10 billion.) So how about you put a little more effort into making your products a more visually pleasing?

And by “more visually appealing” what I mean is “less ugly.”

I’ll even tell you how to do it: buy away designers from Apple and UX gurus from Adaptive Path.

Offer them $250,000 per year and the final word on how your products should look. Give them the ability to do what they do best and get out of their way.

Then take the committee of engineers, middle managers and their spouses who have been making those decisions, and put them to work doing something useful like cleaning staplers or minding their own business.

Lord Vader image via here.