Tablet Publishing: The Next Frontier in Social Sharing

Posted by matthew on May 4, 2012 in Advertising, Books, Consulting, Social Media | 0 comments

Do you own an iPad? If you don’t, you probably know someone who does. How about a Kindle, or some other tablet? Well, according to Forrester Research, tablets are “rapidly becoming the primary device of choice for millions of people around the world.” By 2016, tablet sales are expected to hit 375 million units, meaning there would be over a quarter of a BILLION tablets in use worldwide. And one-third of those devices will be iPads.

I think this represents a gargantuan opportunity for both traditional content creators and businesses of all kinds. How?

The best way you can turn someone into a loyal, enthusiastic customer is by making sure they understand what you do and/or use your product correctly. I don’t care if that product is a power tool, an IKEA shelf or an annual trade show. I cannot think of a single type of business that would not benefit from publishing their story on a tablet.

If you’ve ever read anything on a tablet, especially an iPad, you know that the ability to embed slide shows, video, music, audio, diagrams, etc., makes the reading experience so much richer. And when that experience is richer and more immersive, not to mention SHAREABLE, it’s more likely to actually get read and, well, shared.

But do the costs of producing that content outweigh the potential return? I might think of it the other way around. Tablet readers tend to be more affluent but, more to the point, they are more predisposed to making purchases online. The opportunity to offset the costs is clearly there, but we have found that those costs can be very low to begin with. For example, do you already produce guides or manuals that never get read? How about your flat four-color marketing materials that might be improved with a little video? Can you envision these materials being published, and EASILY UPDATED, on a tablet?

A few targets that spring immediately to my mind, among countless others, include:

• Interactive how-to guides or manuals (imagine putting up that shelf correctly the FIRST time)
• Cookbooks with video tutorials
• New product presentations
• PR materials
• Media rich brochures

The list is truly endless.
A couple of months back, I mentioned that we would be rolling out a new service that took advantage of both our video production experience and our social media savvy. I firmly believe that tablet publishing is the next frontier and unlike other forms of media creation, it doesn’t have to require enormous investments in time, infrastructure or expertise. We have already begun working with a few clients helping them turn their messages into tablet-ready, media-rich presentations that live in the iBook store. Some are giving the content away for free as a way to build awareness, and others are exploring the possibility of selling their stuff either in the iBook store or Kindle store. Either way, now is the time to think seriously about using the ubiquitous iPad, or other tablets, to connect with your audience and create new audiences. Please contact me for more information by leaving a comment, or send me an email by clicking the arrow beneath my picture at the top right of the page.

What possibilities do you see for yourself or your business?

What is truth?: The controversies around Kony2012 and This American Life

Posted by matthew on Mar 21, 2012 in Culture, Current Affairs, Politics, Social Media | 4 comments

Like just about everyone else with an internet connection, I am aware of both the video and the “controversy” surrounding the video Kony2012. I first saw it posted on a friend’s wall with the comment that her 12-year old son had made HER aware of it.

That is how it started: young people sharing it with other young people until it became one of the most viral videos of all time.

Before I even watched the video, however, I felt a combination of emotions because of what my immediate reaction was to learning of its very existence. My very first thought was, “Who is going to try and poke holes in this video?”

We live in a “Prove it!” age where seemingly everything can be faked and there are competing industries of content creators and content disprovers. I’m not sure what makes me more sad: that our willingness to believe what we see has been decimated by those who would prey on our trusting nature, or that there are so many out there who prey on our trusting nature.

Before I was even finished writing this blog post, another “truth” controversy was unearthed, this time by the producers at American Public Media’s This American Life. A recent episode devoted to Mike Daisey’s one-man show “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”  was their most downloaded episode ever.  Then it was revealed that the actor had taken a few liberties with the facts, throwing big parts of the story into question.

What these two episodes share is the now common tendency to play fast and loose with the truth. Both the Kony video and the “Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” get both stories mostly right, but the liberties taken with some details immediately call into question the whole narrative.

Or do they?

There was a time when it meant something to be a journalist, and there are still legions of ink-stained wretches (can you still say that in a digital age?) who do their damnedest to get it right. But neither Jason Russell nor Mike Daisey are journalists, they’re storytellers. My question is: Can simplifying complicated stories in the service of a larger goal ever be excused? Much of the criticism leveled against both the Kony video and Daisey’s “This American Life” interview had more to do with what screenwriters or authors might term creating a “composite” character. Kony2012 has been accused of, among other things, being oversimplified. Not false, mind you, just oversimplified. Well, as someone once said, complexity is complicated.

Daisey, for his part, recounts an incident where some Chinese Foxconn employees were poisoned due to exposure to a chemical but, in his account, he claimed it happened in one factory in China when it, in fact, happened in a different one. I’m just not sure how this blows up his whole story. With more than a little indignation, Bob Garfield noted in his essay on On the Media, “…facts in and of themselves do not constitute truth. They can be selected and arranged any which way, intentionally or unintentionally, to distort truth and turn it upside down. That is precisely how political consultants earn a living: assembling nominal facts to tell big, fat lies.”

Fair enough, but a lot of this seems like hair splitting to me. No one can deny that Kony is an evil guy. No one can deny that Apple, and every other electronics manufacturer on planet Earth, exploit lax Chinese labor laws and low prices in order to give us the shiny gadgets we all want. Now, because of Daisey and others, they are trying to clean up their act, the way Nike did 15 years ago. And the whole world knows about Joseph Kony.

But it still gnaws at me, this idea of getting things MOSTLY right in the service of another goal. It’s OK as long as you agree with that larger goal, right? But what if you don’t? And where are the ethics?

Nicholas Kristof wrote an OpEd in the New York Times on March 15. Since getting behind the Times’ paywall is becoming less and less of a trivial matter, here is the takeaway:  Kristof, who has probably seen more of mankind’s atrocities than any living journalist, delivered a point-by-point rebuttal to the early Kony backlash.

“It’s true that indignation among Americans won’t by itself stop Kony. Yet I’ve learned over the years that public attention can create an environment in which solutions are more likely.

I asked Anthony Lake, now the executive director of Unicef who was President Clinton’s national security adviser during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, whether a viral video about Rwanda would have made a difference then. “The answer is yes,” he said. He suggested that this kind of public attention would also have helped save more lives in Darfur and in Congo’s warring east.

In 1999, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright paid a brief visit to war-ravaged Sierra Leone and was photographed with a 3-year-old girl whose right arm had been chopped off. The photograph, widely circulated, helped galvanize outside powers to crush the militias. Sierra Leone is now at peace, and that girl is studying in the United States.

I asked Albright, who later led a task force on preventing genocide, what she thinks of the Kony video.

“Shining a light makes a lot of difference,” she said, adding that Kony’s prospects are probably less good now than before the video came out.

The bottom line is: A young man devotes nine years of his life to fight murder, rape and mutilation, he produces a video that goes viral and galvanizes mostly young Americans to show concern for needy villagers abroad — and he’s vilified?

I don’t know if this initiative will make a difference. But if I were a Congolese villager, I would welcome these uncertain efforts over the sneering scorn of do-nothing armchair cynics.”