In this issue:

WHAT ROCKERS TEACH US ABOUT THE DISRUPTION
PAUL McCARTNEY FANS MAKE THEIR OWN CONCERT MOVIE
CHANGE YOUR URL TO DOUBLE YOUR TRAFFIC
SALES IS RELATIONSHIPS
QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Why We Should Care When Rock Stars Bypass MTV

BY TERRY HEATON

shakira On Monday, the pop star Shakira debuted her new music video Give It Up To Me via the software Ustream on her Facebook page. 95,000 people watched the unique ten-minute stream and over 500,000 have watched the on-demand version over the last 24 hours.

Facebook is free.

Ustream is free.

Anybody can do this.

Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch points out just a couple of the "wins" for Shakira.

It's also important to note that these viewers were likely more engaged than they would be if they were just staring at the tube. By integrating Ustream into Facebook, Shakira was likely able to gain quite a few new Fans on her Facebook account, which means she's established a long term way to reach out to them.

This is a textbook example of how personal media is disrupting mass media, and there's nothing anybody in the mass media world can do about it. Shakira doesn't need to wait for MTV or VH1 or a hundred different clones to schedule her video. She doesn't need to cut special deals to have the video inserted where the audience will be greatest (and, BTW, who watches MTV anymore anyway?). Shakira - and the host of artists that are sure to follow - can now talk directly with their constituencies in many ways. Shakira has 403,759 followers on Twitter. That's her fan base - connected directly to her and her team via social media.

Okay, Terry, she's a rock star. What does that have to do with local media companies and the future?

Shakira represents the disruption of mass media by personal media. Her brand belongs to her, and she's using the tools of personal media to grow and nurture that brand. She's in charge, not her record company. She's big, and her big numbers impress us, but we are mistaken if we assume that this is only for the big. All around us, talented people with something to do or say are using these same tools to make and deliver their own forms of media. The big disruptor here is that these tools are all free. There is no barrier to entry into the new media, personal media world. Moreover, these people are playing where people are watching, in powerhouse social media enclaves such as Facebook and YouTube. Who needs TV when you can eliminate the bundle and go straight to the goodies?

There are two appropriate responses for local media companies. One, we must be paying attention to what's happening in the personal media world at the local level. Monitoring Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others is absolutely critical, if we wish relevancy in news coverage downstream, for this is where the action is at all levels. In so doing, we're going to find those local people who warrant a wider audience, and we may even find future employees through the process. Two, we absolutely must participate in the world of personal media, and that means enabling the personal brands of our employees and encouraging their participation (not demanding it).

Why not release a big investigating piece via Facebook using Ustream? If that's too much, how about a special franchise, a special interview or some special insight into one of your anchors? Will you scoff if only 100 people watch? How about only ten? Our view is that the size of the gathering - at this point in our development - isn't as important as actually breaking the new ground. This is a growth area. Do not despise the day of small beginnings.

The tough nut for media companies today is that we must drive the car and fix it at the same time. It's understandable that much of our focus must be on the road ahead, but let's not lose sight of the reality that efforts to fix the car, in many cases, cost absolutely nothing. It's just a matter of being Web-centric in our thinking.

Sidebar: Paul McCartney's Fan-Generated Film

BY STEVEN SAFRAN

Terry writes above of how Shakira's album signals an important part of the disruption. Reading it reminded me of a fun purchase I made this week, and it carries the theme along.

During Paul McCartney's summer concert tour, he made stops in New York and Boston, among other cities. His people handed out 75 video cameras to members of the audience and simply asked them to shoot. They could shoot whatever they wanted. The only proviso, it would seem, was "don't just shoot the show, shoot yourself."

(Remember when it took an act of espionage to smuggle in a tape recorder to a concert? Now they're handing out video cameras for crying out loud…)

McCartney's folks took the results of the fan video and put together an 8-minute mini-movie, "Good Evening People." I've seen a lot of concert films and I have to say this one's uniquely fun. It's not a conventional concert movie at all - it's a slice of life of what it's like to be a fan at a show. We see people dancing, families, fans rhapsodizing on their love for Macca -- everything except Paul on stage. And, as these things go, it's a lot of fun.

You can get this little gem if you download McCartney's live album, "Good Evening New York City" on iTunes. Remember for a moment that "album" simply means "collection," and not just "10 songs put together on a disc," and you'll appreciate just how much you can get when you download this: 32 songs from the concert, five videos of his live performances, a slide show, liner notes and the aforementioned fan movie. This is what an album looks like in 2009, and it may be one way to convince people to pay for music again. One other reason to get this? The entire package is $12.99.

But I'm not here to sell the album. What I take away from this is the power of the audience. Remember - there were 75 video cameras floating around the audience. I'm assuming they used Flip cameras (you can see a Flip in one of the shots), so the budget for the film was roughly $11,250. That's simply amazing. Consider what one conventional video camera costs you - let alone the price of a shooter - and you'll see the power these little devices carry.

Imagine putting 75 video cameras on the street in the hands of your audience. What would they produce? Even if each person contributed just once a month, that's 900 videos for your site and your newscast. That's participation. That's taking advantage of the disruption.

Going Beyond the Call Letters Can Spell Success

BY STEVE SAFRAN

Over the years, Terry and I have written quite a bit about how to brand your Website. It's my contention that using call letters (WXXX.com) or TV brands (News22ForYouMetropolis.com) are limiting in many ways. The core of the argument is this: if you were to start something from scratch, how would it look? When newspapers started TV stations, they didn't insist the evening newscast be called "Newspaper Name Tonight." They recognized the need for a brand that worked within the new medium.

nbc la We're finally seeing examples of stations branching out beyond the brand extension obsession, and the early results are in: this is a strategy that works. NBC Local Media has switched the O&O sites to NBCCityname.com (as in NBCLosAngeles.com) and has adjusted the content as well to go beyond what you can find on-air. The result? A doubling of page views in less than a year.

Broadcasting & Cable was kind enough to interview me for an article on this topic. Reporter Michael Malone found some more excellent examples:

yourjax - WCWJ, the CW affiliate in Jacksonville, switched from MyCW17.com to YourJax.com. It put in celebrity-focused content (this is CW after all) and local weather. The result, according to WCWJ's General Manager: page views jumped 150%, ad clicks are up 44% and ad revenue is up significantly.

- Nexstar, which has uniquely branded sites, has seen 12 consecutive quarters of online revenue growth. Nexstar's Chairman/President/CEO Perry Sook says “Our online strategy has been to build community portals that are only associated with our local television stations by the fact that the TV station promotes it as a separate business."

There's the key right there - this is a separate business. We need to look at the Web as though we were starting it from scratch. The counter argument I usually hear is that there is name recognition and goodwill built up in a station's TV brand. In some cases, that's absolutely true. But there's no one-size-fits-all approach here, and we're seeing far more evidence that unique brands work better.

The article points out that the strategy of having Websites drive traffic to your TV newscasts doesn't work. This is absolutely so. We have to stop looking for ways to accomplish the impossible. But it's just plain wrong to think that success online somehow scavenges your TV product. You're not cannibalizing, you're shifting. The notion that this is a zero-sum game is nonsense.

It's never too late to relaunch and rebrand. NBC is showing that you can do this, and the risk pays off. WCWJ has proven people will respond to a "webby" brand that reflects the community, not the station.

As with many computer problems, sometimes the right answer is simply to reboot.

For Online Sales, It's All About Relationships

BY TERRY HEATON

Of all the trends currently percolating in the world of local online revenue, none is more important for local account execs to understand than the growing importance of our relationships with our clients. Every good sales person intuitively knows this already, but the nature of that relationship is changing, and that's what I want to address today.

We know from all the data that local is where its at in terms of advertising growth over the next five years. This is why Google, Yahoo and a host of other pureplay Internet companies are creating applications that enable commerce at the local level. They want a (big) piece of that pie, if not all of it. What these people understand - perhaps even more than we do - is that they lack an existing relationship with local advertisers, and so there's an all-out war underway to find and exploit non-advertiser-originated relationships in the name of helping small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) part with their advertising money.

Who has such a relationship? Well, we know about the Yellow Pages people, but how about companies like American Express? That's right, American Express is leveraging its existing relationships with SMBs to introduce people to companies that are eager to teach businesses how to use the Web to conduct commerce (and take a cut of money spent, of course). This is a booming growth business, and we need to be paying attention, 'lest some outsider come in and hijack our relationships with clients.

We keep this from happening by doing a better job than they do of offering a host of a la carte services that help SMBs do business via the Web. We become consultants, if you will, teaching everything from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to how to use Google Analytics to how to use YouTube to help their business. We don't do this for free, of course; we upsell them these services as a part of our portfolio, because we're no longer just media companies selling advertising; we're multimedia companies that enable commerce, and if that means helping clients use tools that don't belong to us, then so be it. Better for us to be mining that relationship than for outside pureplays to come in a steal it.

"But this isn't my job description," I can hear throughout the land. Perhaps it isn't, but it should be, and it behooves you to study, study, study, until you know as much as the next guy about how everything works online. Or hire us, and we'll come in and teach you everything you'll need to know.

The almost complete lack of understanding about all of this by local merchants is stunning, but it represents perhaps the greatest opportunity for generating serious online revenue at the local level. Somebody needs to teach the community how all this works, and we'd much rather that be a smart local media company than Google.

Quote of the Week:

"There is just not enough advertising to go around for all the sites on the internet. The number of sites and availability of advertising on the internet (and) the availability doubles and triples every year but the amount of real money goes up 10 or 15% a year. The price of it keeps coming down."

Rupert Murdoch

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is why any local portal strategy is doomed, if that's all you've got, for the growth of the local Web overwhelms it. Murdoch is just discovering what Google has known for years.