Digital Ketchup Part 2

Day One, Part 2 of the FT Digital Media Conference on Wednesday, as per the trusty Olde Tech iPad 1.0 - in these posts I'm noting any changes of emphasis from the daily mill and what is seen to be the New New Thing - or what I call Digital Ketchup, the thing which, if slathered over your Old Thing, will make it look so appetising today.

Session 5. Profiting from Social Data
It is (finally) being said in fairly mainstream (albeit early mainstream) Conferences like this that there are huge amounts of social data, and it's like a microscope for human behaviour

- social graph
- search
- logged interests etc
- real time behaviour

Its an arms race for statisticians, marketing is the new finance, moving from an art to a science, web analyst and data analyst are high demand roles, tools are still quite complex
etc etc - but you've read that on this blog over the years, you've heard it before, we apologise. So, the snippets I took away were:

- Chad Hurley (yes, that one) bought deli.cio.us as a data analytics sandbox, to analyse the data it already had and to "to create a better experience" - my takeaway is they wanted a big social graph database to play with and it was quicker to buy one

- Chad Hurley (again) on social selection and data analysis and "Beware The Simple Algorithm":

- "hard to find out what we are looking for",
- also need to introduce fuzziness (serendipity, variety)

Others on Data Analysis

- many pieces of straw look like needles
- correlation is often not causation
- hypothesis bias - easy to see what you want to see if not rigorous

But you knew all that, dear reader. And after the social layer comes the Gamify layer, capturing even more data. What has changed is that the company with the most data no longer wins, it's about what data you have. Quantitative has moved to qualitative.

And what is in it for the poor datascraped consumer - why, a Better Service of course. Only problem with this plan is the Customer is increasingly Not Happy (Pew Research, 2/3+ of people do not like Big Data watching them)

6. Technology Innovation Panel
This had the beneft of the irascible Josh Bernoff in fine sceptical form - some soundbites.

- The reason media co's are struggling is that they confuse the customer with the consumer, but now the consumer power is increasing, and media co's domination of distribution channels is reducing - so old ways don't work

- Challenging for media Co's because the device and distribution channels are splintering, (splinternet) all look promising but money and user time is still bounded by iron laws of physics and phinance

There was also BBC Future Media and Pearson on the panel, nothing new there except the foollowing emphasis shifts:

- Pearson - killer device is the browser (back to the future).
- BBC - the Internet is a channel which mainly repeats content from other media (still).

The other echo picked up from the morning is the realisation that the owners of platforms in the New Value Chain are getting into positions os monopoly power, or at least Castles on the Rhine tollbridges:

- If the end device and content is controlled by a company (that'll be Apple then) they have a lot of ower - eg cartoon satirist blocked (Mark FIore) by Apple until he won Pulitzer prize. Media Co power used to comes from content and brand, but they lack connection with viewers because the new media brand is on teh device in their hand and in its Apps store.(because they are conflicted?).
- Facebook is now controlling the social graph, and extracting 30 - 40% rents - but are continually reinventing themselves, so it's not stable

7. Multichannel World Part 1
Not much new here, the song has remained the same. In the UK most people still don't pay anything for content (40% only Pay TV), very static owing to quality of BBC, and people tend to use the 2nd screen for metadata about TV programming - "social TV" is still in its infancy.

So - shaken from the bottle were Big Data, and Social of course...but this afternoon, the realisation that New Monopolists were emerging in the New Media impinged on the party mood.