What can the mass media 1 percent learn from the digital 99 percent?

While big media and other critics slam Occupy Wall Street for lacking a cohesive message, the movement continues to just get on with things, including its own media, innovating in the process and providing a case-study for excellence in editorial, production and broadcasting.

If TV execs aren’t taking notes, they would be wise to get out their stenographers, because now’s a great time to mimeograph a digital manifesto for the team.

Original cartoon by Catherine Warren, image from Huffington Post/Getty Image photo, cartoonized by Befunky.

With its four-point approach to media mastery – low cost production, on-the-fly coverage, blast-off transmission and crowd-sourced financing – Digital Occupy mercifully takes no prisoners.

In his article “Innovation and Imitation in Commercial Media,” Middlebury College Associate Professor of Film & Media Culture Jason Mittell writes: “Creating commercially successful mass media involves a delicate balance of offering something familiar along with something new, an alchemy of innovation and imitation.”

But what today’s audiences get is more like the bad chemistry of eyes wide shut. Big media is turning its back on both the news that matters most and the best means to deliver it.

For an excoriating attack on broadcasters’ failure to innovate check out the CNET profile of Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronics Association. A summary of his take on broadcasters: “For decades they haven’t been creative, and they’ve been resistant to changes in technology. And they get a phenomenal amount of money from what they do. For years they’ve basically controlled Congress.”

What’s up with that? Recently, I was at Zuccotti Park, Occupy Montreal, The International Emmy Awards and NBC’s 30 Rock Plaza all in the same few days. The digital divide was as striking as any other.  Today, it seems that the media splits unevenly into the “haves” and the “have apps”.

“What you are seeing is the culmination of social media, citizen journalism and what I call ‘small technology,’ a cell phone and a hotspot,” says Henry James Ferry, who together with Tim Pool launched a primary source of independent media www.theother99.tv on day one of Occupy Wall Street – and hasn’t looked back.

“I don’t think that mass media know what to do with this and I am surprised that they haven’t found a way to take [these productions] and at least package them as their own,” he says. It is not as if this stuff is so new, notes Ferry. But it is far from mainstream. “You’ll know it’s jumped the shark when a big company does it.”

As bloodthirsty audiences, we should be so lucky.

Obviously, when it comes to decentralized movements, digital media is mission-critical. But if media is your core business, isn’t there even more of an imperative to get with the digital program? North American broadcasters with their incessant restructuring are particularly vulnerable to stagnation, with every shuffle their digital brain trusts go back to ground zero.

Meanwhile, as mass media risks continuing to drone on about the uncertain value of digital media, radical media is deploying actual drones to capture current events in real time.

Cleverly making and delivering media from the front lines with their live streams and cells, The Other 99’s Ferry and Pool are currently upping their game with the use of an “AR Drone”, a low observable flying machine with a high-quality wireless web cam easily controlled from the ground with a phone. The Other 99 have tapped Pool’s independent tech team’s DroneStream project for deployment. Sold in orange and green at Toys “R” Us for $298.99, but sadly out of stock right now for Christmas and broadcast networks, these gaming toys (the AR comes from “Alternate Reality”) make ideal electronic newsgathering devices.

The idea for using a drone, says Ferry, happened when early reports suggested that the NYPD closed the airspace above Zuccotti Park. (In mid-November, WCBS and other media companies believed they had been ordered out of the sky in a media blackout designed to prevent choppers from taking aerial shots of the Occupy scene. While high-priced, high-flying media helicopters did turn tail, the NYPD and FAA have since denied this edict and chalked it up to a media misunderstanding.) Now with a toy that flies at 400 feet, and financed by donation, Ferry says he can stay on the right side of the law and FAA regulations, while still delivering powerful aerial coverage at rock-bottom costs.

Another regulatory environment could facilitate a détente between big media and its frenemy, the participatory audience. “Changes to FCC and CRTC guidelines mean no more ‘broadcast standards’,” notes Roger Williams, CEO of Image Media Farm, which specializes in real-time production of massive live events and rents broadcast equipment to news and sports networks. Broadcasters and broadcast technology manufacturers can now look to consumers for best practices in production, editorial and transmission, he says.

At the bleeding edge, these “consumers” are actually the digital revolutionaries, the activists on the front lines of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements who produce on the run and transmit on a shoestring, reaching massive audiences with often with nothing more than a phone.

“When we talk of these so-called revolutionary innovators we are referring to your average Internet ‘addict,’ which these days means most of us,” says Sandra Larriva Henaine, co-author of the new book Revolution 3.0, a series of profiles on the power of the Internet as an agent of change.

We are the digital 99 percent.

“We post interesting images or videos on Facebook, we tweet breaking news on Twitter, we e-mail links to our friends, we download podcasts onto our phones and we prefer getting our news digitally. These are all factors that media outlets these days have had to take into consideration in order to survive,” she says.

While mass media may continue in survivor mode largely kickin’ it old school, digital media is turning to Kickstarter for financing innovation.

An online funding platform for creative projects, “Kickstarter is the ultimate dog and pony show,” according to Christos Sourligas, writer and director of the world’s first feature film shot entirely on the iPhone 4. “Fed-up innovators are tired of waiting around for government or venture-capitalist hand-outs, and have taken to the streets in order to get their messages across. Except that the street has now come to the laptop.”

“The Arab Spring and Occupy movements have shown us that social media and cell phone technology works!” says Sourligas, whose indie movie “Happy Slapping” was shot on iPhones by the actors themselves. Except for sound recording, the only mechanical costs were for the smartphones. The total budget for this 90-minute movie: $250K. “When projected on a big screen, you can’t tell the difference between this film and any other film shot on high-definition cameras that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. And his distribution strategy aims to capture the smartphone audience, with a day-and-date theatrical and mobile content release, following his earlier premiere at the Montreal Film Festival in August.

Fan-funding is also part of Occupy’s advertising. With Loudsauce, a site for crowd-financing TV commercials and other campaigns, movements can underwrite the purchase of expensive airtime. Conceivably, digital revolutionaries can now get their content on air through an ad-buy, if not an editorial window, and supported entirely by audience dollars. When valuable television content becomes advertising we want to watch, big media risks a double by-pass.

Unlike print media, which presents itself in perpetual crisis mode and can always use turmoil as a reason not to innovate, world TV revenues reached a healthy $375.5B in 2010 and are expected to grow to $460.9B by 2014. So if tech is cheap and TV revenues are up, then where is the patently evident R&D?

“One of the best places we go [for digital inspiration] is to talk to recent college grads,” says Tim Gaughan, CBS director of digital news gathering and special events. He notes that CBS’s digital advance has accelerated over the past two years, with “Twitter as the best CBS example of digital media — bringing in audiences, listeners, viewers and adding another screen.” Gaughan says that while CBS does watch Occupy’s use of social media, it is to “monitor the way that protestors are organizing” not for digital competitive intelligence.

Chances are if you are rich, you are not hungry, a maxim that might also apply to big media and its impetus to innovate. Under the sky, the drones, the foreclosed homes, Digital Occupy eats its lunch.

Click here read this article in The Huffington Post.

Follow Catherine Warren on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fantrust

Help me out, here.

When will digital media shareholders, investors and boards look at the case for female leadership on its merits and stop with the painful status quo contortions required to keep women out of top roles?

What’s it going to take when, faced with hard data, these decision makers persist in making limp calls?

Original cartoon by Catherine Warren, image from Huffington Post/Getty Image photo, cartoonized by Befunky.

The facts have been in for a while: women dominate the Internet, represent the lion’s share of consumer spending, and deliver better value to shareholders when at the corporate helm.

Connecting the dots has never been easier!

From cave paintings to Facebook posts, women continue to shape the media landscape. Today, we are the digital evangelists; 92 percent of us pass along information about online deals or finds to others. We own digital fan activity, representing a whopping 71 percent. When it comes to the fastest growing video game sector, social gaming, we make up three-quarters of the audience. And, boy, do we buy: online and off, women account for 85 percent of all consumer purchases.

Yet women hold only three percent of the clout positions in mainstream media. More generally, among communications companies in the Fortune 500, we represent just 15 percent of top executives and only 12 percent of board directors.

To shape-shift the media business model, look no further than the obvious. Women are the forest and the trees, what can’t you see?

In the famous “invisible gorilla” experiment Harvard psychologists proved that as many as 50 percent of viewers will miss something as obvious as a gorilla in the midst of a small group of people. But women in media represent a universe of dancing gorillas somehow overlooked by people on safari looking specifically for gorillas. Willful blindness appears to trump the implausible.

Things might change as more women get into the media investment game. When we met as speakers recently at theInternational Women’s Digital Media Summit, Arianna Huffington told our group that Laurie David was her first investor in The Huffington Post. She also said, “If Lehman Brothers was ‘Lehman Brothers & Sisters’ they would still be around today.”

Arianna Huffington and Catherine Warren, Photo credit: Tori Sutton, Stratford Gazette

Obviously, women don’t provide immunity. As Nell Minow, board member of the corporate watchdog research group GovernanceMetrics International reminds me, “There were women on the boards of Enron, Lehman Brothers, etc. etc.”

Since corporations are people too, it’s no surprise that perceptive investors see them as gendered. Serial angel investor Esther Dyson, whose media investments have included Flickr and del.icio.us, both sold to Yahoo!, says that she looks for “character traits (in the companies I invest in) that tend to be overrepresented in women: good listening skills, self-awareness, good at motivating and developing people, common sense.”

The Internet itself may help more women eventually get ahead, says Nanon de Gaspe Beaubien-Matrick, president of Beehive Holdings, an investment company that funds women-led digital businesses that deliver to a female customer base. “The Internet allows flexibility, it allows people to work from home, to participate [at the executive level] in ways we didn’t have before.” Face time may no longer be the benchmark, she adds, performance will.

But performance measures can cut both ways. How about the board director scorecard? Companies that are doing amazingly well on the backs of hundreds of millions of female consumers, such as Facebook and Zynga, have zero female board members. Since zero is easy to count, many women — from consumers to senior staff and from the mathematically challenged to the whizzes of finance — may take their business elsewhere.

Companies with zero female board members are not just slapping our faces, they persist in slapping the face of logic. That’s because companies with significant female board membership are widely known to outperform their counterparts. Specifically, when comparing Fortune 500 companies with the highest female board representation to the lowest, those with more women on board are the financial superstars. Across the board, these companies deliver better returns: on equity, on sales and on invested capital.

Ultimately, what’s bad for women is bad for business. Let’s shake things up nicely with some reciprocity.

C’mon, guys. What’s up? We are, in order: Good (women deliver bottom line results); Giving (we put out to buy your stuff); and Game (as players and as leaders). So why are you still just not that into us?

Follow Catherine Warren on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fantrust

But what does it take for rights-holders to build out a property that appeals to brands and channel partners for a fan-friendly online success?

Here are FanTrust’s top tips for connecting content creators and rights-holders with distributors and brands.

· Work in parallel with prospective sponsors and distributors before signing your deals

· Determine where you are on the spectrum of commercial versus pure-play content:

• Content only
• Sponsored/underwritten
• Branded entertainment

· Create a premium package for any sponsor:

• Audience (either massive = 50m monthly impressions; or supremely desirable and targeted)
• Content (feature a popular star or popular online genre, such as comedy)
• Distribution destinations (deploy on the brand’s channels as well as relevant destinations and portals)

· Obtain projections for traffic based on similar content for every distribution channel

· To negotiate the best deals with brands and distributors, come to the table with an audience (e.g. via social media or the stars/bands featured in your content)

Sure, fans can be evangelists for your brand, your distribution channel or your content. Fans can friend you on Facebook, critique you on Twitter and mash up your stuff all over YouTube. Fans can help you with your core business, secure second season pick-ups or boost international television sales. Fans can also inspire you take your entertainment business in new digital directions: onto apps and consoles, social networks and social games. Next up: fans will stand up and count for investors.

Soon, fans will be part of your business valuation, M+A strategies and financings. Here are some reasons why, based on some trends FanTrust tracks:

• The average value of a fan is as high as $136 bucks, based on product spending, brand loyalty and willingness to recommend.

• Fans are more likely to remember brand messaging than other audiences, a powerful reason to build a fanbase as part of any campaign. This is especially true when it comes to mobile fans, according to big brands like Marks & Spencer.

• Facebook fans of big brands like Starbucks and McDonalds spend twice as much as other customers.

• The estimated value of Starbucks’ Facebook Audience: $1.8 Billion.

The right number of fans can not only help you to secure deals with brands, broadcasters and distributors, but increasingly fans are part of the investment mix. Producers raising money to finance media properties need more than just great content for the right demographic, they need a baked in fan-base or at the very least accurate projections about audience reach.

For the past ten years FanTrust has seen lots of business models (and many strange bedfellows) — but only recently an increased attention to audiences, and fans in particular.

We’ve witnessed and advanced this steady rise in both television and new media companies valuing their fans, fan relationships and fan communities.

This is an important development in an entertainment industry where audiences have traditionally been seen as amorphous blobs, like ratings or bums on seats. Valuing fans will bring media rights holders, brands and investors closer together, speaking a common language and putting the committed consumer first.

Next time on the FanTrust blog, FanTrust’s top tips for connecting content creators with distributors and brands.

You get what you give. And the best relationship with audiences is based on reciprocity.

“[T]here will never be something that I put before my fans,” said Lady Gaga in September’s Vanity Fair  (always the best issue of the year, the arrival of which is bittersweet as it heralds the last of summer).  “I have a relentless pursuit in me to give everything in me to my fans to make them feel good about themselves. And if you don’t like it, well, then don’t come to the party.”

You’ve gotta love the attitude in her gratitude.

The Lady knows which side her bread is buttered on. “[Y]ou were nominated for five Grammy Awards,” she said when she thanked her little monsters (Gaga fans) on hearing the news from the music academy.

Her shout-out is refreshing at a time when the entertainment industry is still notoriously conflicted about its fans. At its worst, the corporate celebrity complex’ reactions to fandom run the gamut from lawsuits to blocking simple social network activities. The Information Society Law Project of the Yale Law School nicely sums up this profound ambivalence when it comes to fans in a recent article on copyright and Glee.

And with Glee set to rake in up to 19 Emmy Awards on August 29^th, in large part because of its interplay between music and mashups, there is no question that it is time to overhaul the law when it comes to fan tributes.

Even smart animals know the real power an audience wields. Dumb bulls see the cape; smart bulls the matador, but the brainiest bovines acknowledge the spectators. This week, noted George Jonas in the National Post, a brilliant bull made this leap from spectacle to spectator. Right. Into. The. Bleachers. Somehow this bull understood the key thing that makes the bullfight tick: the fans.

True, musicians and the music industry have a better history of acknowledging fans than, say, do TV stars and the television business. But Gaga’s deep respect for her audience may mark a tipping point in the conflicted relationship between entertainment and fans.

From bankrollers to spectators to viral marketers, fans drive entertainment’s perpetual motion machine. And that’s no bull.

With almost as much bad press as Gitmo, our Olympic-Torch-behind-bars, has become a lightening rod for activists, tourists and even the Mayor, who all want to free the flame.

In one of the world’s freest countries, our torch sits behind a chain-link fence. Worse, it rises up from what looks like a construction site, with cement blocks and boards. This is like the proverbial bride who wears curlers at the wedding to look good for the reception. What are we waiting for, Vancouver?

The Dope on the Cauldron

“I have been to Turin and Beijing and never seen anything like this before,” said one tourist to me in passing. “To think I paid to come here and see this,” he added, referring to the Olympic Torch — or “Olympic Toke” as others refer to our spectacular haystack of reefers. As one Facebook post succinctly posted today: “The Olympics are dope, but the fence is lame.”

In an op-ed piece in today’s Vancouver Sun, Microsoft’s corporate VP notes that we’ve reached a social media tipping point for the Games: “Future Olympic Games will see us interacting with our devices simply by gesturing.”

I’d say, if left to our own devices, we’ll happily gesture to authorities right now, overturning bad decisions — such as the imprisonment of the Torch.

At last, bowing from the pressure from mass media, social media and passers-by, VANOC has just cut a peep hole along the length of the fence and opened a viewing platform for visitors and photo ops. I look forward to retaking and reposting earlier photos of my son taken at the Torch-site, which unfortunately evoked escape from Alcatraz.

Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert took his fandom to a new level becoming the primary sponsor of the US Speedskating team for the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. He’s taking donations for athletes and – in yet another form of bank bailout – replacing the team’s original sponsor, the now bankrupt Dutch Bank DSB.

“We must ensure that it is America’s 38-inch thighs on that medal platform,” said Colbert in the official news release. Colbert’s Facebook page includes wacky Olympic sports coverage, video outtakes and a “Skate Expectations Facebook App.”

Inside Facebook is reporting that NBC’s official Olympics page has almost 18,000 fans and includes a widget to watch the games from Facebook. NBC also developed an application, Vancouver Olympics, that currently has more than 60,000 fans and is essentially a video box for NBC content from which users may see Olympics video, photos and news.

To empower fans and get people’s attention, the Associated Press has also set up Twitter and Facebook accounts for the Winter Games. Video and other material from the AP’s Winter Games site can be embedded into other Web sites, including fan’s own Facebook pages.

The AP’s Facebook page is an extension of its online Winter Olympics content venture that will collect online ad revenue from more than 900 news outlets. AP’s content includes schedules, results, photos, videos, news and the ability to share all of it with widgets on other Pages, according to Inside Facebook.

About 120 AP reporters, photographers, editors and videographers will be here in Vancouver to cover the Winter Olympics. Only NBC, which owns the television rights to the Olympics, will have a larger news staff at the event, reports the AP. The news cooperative, now also a fan-friendly cooperative, has covered every Olympics since they were revived in 1896.

As for the IOC Facebook page – in an era of fly-by night corporations, up-start start ups and multi-billion dollar market caps for nascent companies – it’s also great to see some social networking by an organization with a Facebook profile “founded in 1894.”

FanTrust was also just chosen among the top digital businesses that “amazes & inspires“ for 2010 Olympics & fans. In this spirit, we wanted to feature what we know best: the fans.

So, how are active Olympic fans flying their digital freak flags this month? Today we’ll focus on Twitter.

Created by avid sports fans, Twitter-Athletes links to pro-athlete’s and Olympian’s tweets. The creators said the site, which started out “as a weekend (or two) project, [has] taken on a life of its own,” gaining momentum as a result of plugs from ESPN and other sports news outlets. This fan site features the top 10 most popular athletes on Twitter, Shaquille O’Neil has 2.8 Million followers, as well as new additions such as Canadian Olympic snowboarder Mercedes Nicoll, with links to their Twitter pages so that you can follow them too.

Are you a fan of two-time, US Olympic bobsledder Steve Mesler, who as of today has just touched down in Vancouver for his Olympic bid? If so, you can let him know by joining his 27K Twitter followers. Are you a fan of two-timing Tiger Woods? If so, you’ll have to go elsewhere as this site may be the one place he isn’t getting any action.

For more Olympians on Twitter, go straight to http://www.twitter-athletes.com/index.cfm?CatID=243&People=1. If Twitter had sound effects, you could hear the crowd go wild.

“These are going to be the Twitter Olympics,” Director of Media Services for the US Olympic Committee Bob Condron is recently reported to have said.

But fans following favorite athletes on Twitter had a shock last week when skier Lindsey Vonn and speedskater Nick Pearson tweeted that they and other Olympians were banned from posting certain types of content for their fans, including feared one athlete, all photography.

According to the IOC there are some restrictions on content: Olympians cannot have any pictures of the Olympic five rings anywhere on their website, Twitter or Facebook accounts, nor can they post photos of themselves wearing brand names of sponsors who are not official sponsors of the Olympics. The IOC reports that these guidelines are more lenient than for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Vonn and Pearson have since updated their tweets to reflect this new reality.

Meanwhile, in what is turning out to be a five-ring circus, the international media in Vancouver is facing their own sticker shock and awe over the hefty Internet access fees levied by Olympic organizers for reporters and photographers. Citizen journalists and hardcore fans can still cover the events using free wireless in a cafe while wearing Nike shoes.

Generating real world dollars from virtual goods, advertising and sponsorship, social games represent a powerful business model. And with the cost for building a good social game as low as $100K, the margins can be astronomical and the barriers to entry non-existent.

From mature entertainment companies to rank start-ups, from VC’s to analysts, everyone is watching this space – or ignoring it at her peril.

FanTrust’s latest business whitepaper gives you a high-level look at entertainment’s massive growth market and fandom’s new frontier, including:

• Market opportunities
• Monetization tactics
• Fan favorites

Read or download “Socialize Me — FanTrust’s Fast Facts To Help You Tap Today’s Billion Dollar Social Games Sector.”

Even better, digital media fundamentals appear stronger than ever. A recent study reports that people would rather keep Internet, video and voice services in their budgets than any other type of expense, including personal care products, gym memberships and apparel. Bad news for hygiene, but great news for digital media, which environmentally at least, and porn aside, is a pretty clean industry.

In an era of user-generated content and web-only content, what remains unique about BellFunded content is its embedded connection to broadcast and all that television embodies: outstanding productions, unrivalled promotions and unbeatable reach. Couple all of this with TV’s mature business model, high-tech’s entrepreneurial spirit and wrap it all up in the glamour-bubble of entertainment, and there could be no better formula for success. Of course digital media is still in its infancy – with perhaps a century of success ahead before we’d even be considered for a multi-billion dollar bail-out – so, we’re entitled to tweak our formula along the way.

Canada may actually be the true calm in the storm. With our stable equity market and our sound economic policies, we recently ranked as the number one place to build a business, leading as the top country for entrepreneurs and the top ranked for entrepreneurial access to capital. (Unfortunately, the study was helmed by deposed junk bond king Michael Milken.)

Not only is there more money here for entrepreneurs, there is more money for digital media specifically. The Bell Fund’s contribution as Canada’s largest private fund for interactive broadcasting remains unrivalled anywhere in the world. Cable and satellite distributors continue to thrive, subscribers are up and profits are growing, which is good for the convergence kitty. Add to this the new $100M Vanedge Capital fund earmarked for video games and digital entertainment, and there is no doubt that the formidable talent and acumen in our sector will keep us at the top of the heap for years to come.

As consumers of all this digital entrepreneurship, we have also benefited from on-demand-everything and online-all-the-time. Blame it on YouTube, but by 2012 our insatiable appetite for bandwidth might even outstrip corporate greed, our demand exceeding cyberspace’s supply as the Internet unleashes random brownouts and our lifeline is reduced to what the Sunday Times of London calls “an unreliable toy.” So, not only do we have the challenge of defining a credible business model, we are faced with spearheading a conservation agenda, like a developing nation that must contend with the inconvenient truth. Ideally, next-gen digital producers will tackle these two issues in tandem and take us all to the next level.

Over the years we’ve seen digital properties get creatively lush, increasingly rich and fun to play. And we’ve seen the big awards like the Digital Emmy swoop in to acknowledge that new media has finally arrived. New storefronts like iTunes and the rise of virtual goods have opened new gateways to revenues. CNN seems as eager to Tweet as to broadcast, and no doubt monetize the results. New media syndication and licensing now results in real dollars.

After a classic relationship involving playground flirtations (NYT/Amazon), awkward prom dates (BBC/Microsoft), early arranged marriages (AOL/Time Warner) and legal separations (YouTube/Viacom), media and technology seem intent on working things out. And like any couple starting over while still arguing about money they’ll be seeking help.

There is no better bridge across this divide than content producers and rights-holders, each of whom are poised to capitalize on multiple revenue channels and propel new media models forward. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.

Excerpted from “The Last Word” by Catherine Warren, published in How to Make Money with Multi-platform Digital Media, Bell Fund, 2009, also available in French.

Read the Bell Fund press release on the bliki launch