Twitter and IIA Video Event

June 15th, 2010

I find Twitter great when attending events to share insights but also to act as an always on note taking device.  Previously most of my notes from conferences and seminars either ended up unreadable or got buried on my desk and finally shredded.  Now I have somewhere to revert to,  in order to jog my memory on some noteworthy quote, stat or observation that I heard.

Combine it with the right hash tag and you can always check against other tweets to remind yourself on the bits you could not type fast enough to capture or to correct inaccuracies.

I have, like lots of people, found my blogging has suffered as my twitter activity has grown.  This is a pity as pithy, snappy tweets only give a fragmented, pieces missing view of a someones presentation or discussion.

I have decided to try use the tweets from the last few events I attended to piece together an overview, mainly as there were some resources I wish to test out and use again

The first was Audio Video Culture – Behind the scenes of video and audio.  The event was organized by the IIA Social Media Working Group, of which I am a member.  The idea behind the event was to show how different organizations are using video and also to give some practical advice on equipment and software.  This is the part that I was particularly looking forward to.

RTE kicked off the first session with some interesting stats on their iPlayer usage.  35% of people watch entire shows with an average stream of 18 minutes.  This is impressive when your consider that most people will be viewing it on a poor quality computer screen at a desk which is a completely different experience to that of slouching on a couch.  The speaker did point out that a large screen interface and faster streaming are in the pipeline which fits in with the general consensus that we will be replacing watching downloaded movies on our laptops to the plasma screen stuck to the wall.

Apparently 30 to 50% of their streams are from the international player, something that presents lots of licensing challenges especially as RTE get popular show such as Desperate House Wives before other countries.  Their solution is to remove certain shows.

Next up was Rabo Bank who play a good deal of attention to online video, audio and social media as they have to compete with bricks and mortar banks to build relationships with customers. Aoife Mahon & Gina McCrudden gave some nice examples of video testimonials, webinars and podcasts that they use.  Their podcasts alone have generated a listenership of over 35K while webinars have waiting lists of 300 people at times.  They also integrate other marketing activities into their plans, an example being the Fix Its competition with George Hook on Newstalk being used on the site.

Fred Caballero from Channelship set the scene for his presentation by talking about YouTube being the second search spot after YouTube, which was surprising considering the Google/Facebook supremacy stories but it could be for specific searches.  He also detailed YouTube’s 6.6 billion streams and 75% market share.   In particular I wanted to hear about what tools Fred used.  Below is a list of the particular good ones.

Finally the last presentation was from Donal Rice from the Centre for Excellence in Universal Design.  I have seen Donal present a number of time over a few years and usability has moved from a nice to do to a more structured need to do for some organizations.  His message has also become more commercial from opening points about grey surfers being the fastest growing market to level of normal diversity and disability in the marketplace.

Usability can tend to be associated with disability but some of his points on closed captioning and audio descriptors for YouTube videos related to people whose first language may not be English, working in noisy environment or who need to work in a quiet/silent environment rather than just people who are hard at hearing.

The pitch of increased usability being good for SEO made relative sense (kind of similar to advance tagging) and was creative in trying to enhance the level of usability investment.

These carrot items came just before the stick in terms of quotes from the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability and the Irish Disability Act 2005/Equal Status Act.  These are currently loose but further European legislation is expected where having an accessible website will be similar to buildings needing wheel chair access.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 are fairly detailed in terms of different levels of grading from A to AA but I cannot ever recall a web designer bringing it up with me on client projects.

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Its good to get out of your bubble.

April 6th, 2010
Social media and how different age groups view it can be very personal.  In fact too personal and often you make decisions based upon how you view it rather than how others use it.  Research can help overcome this short coming but talking to and seeing how students use it really brings it home.
In light of this I had the pleasure to judge some submissions made by cert, diploma and degree business course students from the Dublin Business School.  The students were given a project brief from Repak on helping to communicate recycling to different age groups (focusing on the 18-24 segment) and to give an overview of their website properties.

8 groups presented their findings and the calibre was extremely high for students who have very little marketing training.  In addition there was a strong balance of overseas students for whom English was not their first language.  Some of the big takeaways were:

Overall there was a real sence of ease and familarlity with digital content especially video and how they are linked to social media.  This is the space they all use on a daily basis and generating content for them was not seen as a major jump.  They were all very comfortable with the background technical areas like hosting, editing etc and production was fairly seamless.

Here is one of the videos one of the groups produced, based on how you recycle – i.e. with your hands.

The presentations themselves were very well delivered with some groups really going a stage further in terms of the hadn out materials. Below is one folder that one group did up which had a very ecofriendly feels to it and took time to prepare.

Handouts by DBS students for Repak Presentation

Handouts by DBS students for Repak Presentation

In summary lots of relevant video that entertains and links to their lives with plenty of reasons to return.
Plenty to ponder!
Many thanks to Angela OhUiginn, DBS, Rob Reid, Cybercom, Darrell Crowe and Laura Byrne from Repak.

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Posted in Education, Uncategorized, social networking | Comments (1)

Start Stop and Social Media

February 17th, 2010

I started this post a number of weeks ago.  In retrospect it should really have been two separate posts which it will now be but instead of posting it, I let it lie in my drafts folder until I ‘had time’ to think it through properly.  Big no no.  Missing self set blogging deadlines and waiting for free time to post really kills blogging activity. 

Anyway, the deeper I delve into social media the more I see the gaps between traditional PR operations and how people are trying to integrate it into social media. 

Social media poses lots of challenges for PR people, some of which I covered in previous posts.  One I see increasing in importance is the start stop nature of PR.

Start Stop

In media relations a lot of time is in planning, reporting, researching and writing and outside of dealing reactively with media queries and keeping relationships alive the actual contact and engagement time with media can sometimes be a relatively small part (the reliance on email has made this even worse).  Sometimes you can be touch with the same journalists a number of times in a day and then not speak to them for months.  This is not really an issue in traditional media.  The press machinery moves on and contact with a news, sports or business desks have little or no crossover and not being part of the daily debate and process of pulling newspapers together does have a disproportionate bearing on your standing. 

This is somewhat different in the online work.  If you have not blogged or tweeted for a while, people do notice and its up there for all to see.  Try tracking the last time someone has contacted a newsdesk versus the last time someone has responded to a tweet or posted on boards.ie.  This has other implications than the obvious staleness and relevance issues.  A lot of PR people see social media as extension of the media process and only update it when they have a press release or other national newsworthy announcements to make.  This start stop is relatively acceptable for national media but in social media jumping head long into conversations after months of absence can appear odd or worse rude.  Trends, topics, influencers all move at lightning speed online and an absence of a couple of days can make one almost irrelevant.

The obvious answer is that PR people should spend more time online and engage more but social media could suck all the time available as there is a endless source of relevant distractions.  However there are some simple things that people can do to overcome the start stop including:

People naturally go through peaks and troughs of activity but when you leave a community for too long you loose: relevance with others in the network, touch of what is really happening, links and connections with others.  I am always amazed by how quickly online communities innovate and change.  One thing for certain is that being an expert in a platform now does not mean you will be any better than an enthusiastic beginner in a few months time.  The secret lies in managing the time input and building it as a central part of PR programmes.

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Whats in a user name – implications of using mutiple handles.

December 15th, 2009

Will McInnes retweeted a post today by Catherine Pryce on google pulling up tweets as the first entry in its search results. 

Twitter results on Google

While this is not major news it does bring up an intresting area.  For most people when they register on a new social media platform there tends to be a variance on the user names that they use.  Sometimes this is as a result of the name not being available, the name being too long or you want to experiment so you pick a unrelated user name.

This now has a number of implications in that to properly track you need to search under your different user names.  For example my Twitter user name is @eoink as @eoinkennedy was too long.  Search results for eoin kennedy are now unlikley to bring up twitter posts and now that I spend more time twittering than blogging means that there is a split between the results so it appears like two different people.  This is more important for brands who need uniformity on names.

Lessons

  1. Make sure you register your user names accross different platforms.
  2. Ideally unique pick one that you have a realistic chance of getting across different platforms.
  3. User a uniform user name.
  4. Only commit to ones that have longevity as changing probably means rebuilding your network form scratch and losing your ranking (on the likes of www.klout.com) which may become more important in future.

 This will undoubtably bring more attention to people squatting on brand names.  I have heard multiple stories of people approaching Twitter directly (over phone and mail) to get names back with limited success and contacting the person directly, which can have financial implications.  Some people I spoke to who have registered multiple twitter user names have experienced multiple pass word reset requests, indicating a lot of people are now chasing down names they wish to register.  This is tricky if the person has invested time in building a community around that username as they may not be willing to transfer it and also tricky if there is no activity on it as it can be hard to track the owner. 

It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.

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Irish media influence on twitter growing

November 18th, 2009

In preparation for a presentation I am giving at Hotel Website Marketing next week I pulled together a list of Irish media on Twitter and used Klout to some insight into their rankings/influence.  The results were surprising.  The landscape is fairly scattered with individual journalist/media personalities tweeting (some under unusual twitter handles) and some publications/programmes running their own twitter streams.  I expected some of the individual journalists to score high, which they did, but what was surprising was the influence that the generic twitter profiles were getting. 

Media Twitter Chart

Media Twitter Chart

Initially I thought most would fall into the climber category with low influence but high following as most started using their breaking news or equivalent and did not follow many people.  However a good proportion of them scored high in the persona category showing that they are interacting more with the community and that it appears they are being actively managed.

Another interesting observation was that even as I was plotting people their scores where changing rapidly.   Marie Boran from Silicon Republic moved from the connector category to the persona category over the course of a few days.  The list is not a complete list but Rick O’Shea scored highest on the ones I had.  Klout could not find quite a few of the profiles.

Media Twitter Rankings

Media Twitter Rankings

Newstalk Twitter Profile

Newstalk Twitter Profile

Looking at the Newstalk profile alone you get a sense of how active they are.  2,156 tweets, 1,896 followers and following 564 people.  The tweets are a variety of ones from the show and some regular observation/news tweets.  They also respond to other peoples tweets and have a reasonable engagement level.

Overall this picture shows that most Irish media have moved from using Twitter as a purely broadcast tool and are engaging more than ever.  This has a lot of implications for the PR industry and is a very positive trend.  I imagine a lot of stories that end up on the clipplings floor might make their way on to the Twitter streams, something that a lot of companies could be missing out on.  The rule for engaging via Twitter are still evolving but a good starting point is to make sure you are following them.  A sudden influx of DMs and @ comments pointing to press releases would be pretty unwelcome.  I also imagine that the media publications are watching each others activity and that it could get pretty competitive.

Many thanks to Alexia Golez whose list I used as a starting point.  I am sure I have missed plenty but its a good starting point for media people that PR practitioners should probably be following.  The list is below.  Let me know of one that I have ommitted.

Broadcast
 The Holiday Show: @theholidayshow

 RTE News @RTENEWS
 The Last Word: @lstwrd

 RTE Morning Ireland: @morning_ireland

 Newstalk Breakfast Show: @breakfastnt

 Phantom 105.2: @phantom1052

 Dublin’s Q102: @dublinsq102

 RTE Drivetime @drivetimerte
 RTE The Business @thebusinessrte/
 RTE Business @RTEbusiness
 RTE Updates @RTERad1Updates
 RTE Saturday View @Saturdayviewrte
 RTE Sport @rtesport
 RTE Arts @rtearts
 RTE @rte

Radio Personalities
 Ray Foley – Today FM: @rayfoleyshow

 George Hook – Newstalk: @ghook

 Sean Moncrieff – Newstalk: @SeanMoncrieff

 Rick O’Shea – 2fm: @rickoshea

 Ryan Tubridy @tubridyradio1

Publications (Print & Online):
 Analogue Magazine: @analoguemag

 Irish Times: @the_irish_times

 Irish Times Business @IrishTimesBiz

 Irish Independent @IrishIndo

 Irish Examiner @IrishExaminer

 Sunday Business Post @ sundaybusinesspost
 Sunday Independent @SundayIndo
 Sunday Tribune @sundaytribune_
 Sunday World @SundayWorld
 Irish Sentinel – Satirical site: @irishsentinel

 Day and Night Magazine (Irish Independent): @dayandnightmag

 Life and Fitness Magazine: @derryo

 Media Contact: @Mediaflash
Journalists
 Marie Boran – SiliconRepublic: @PixieVonDust

 John Collins – Irish Times: @jaycee001

 Mark Coughlan: @Mark_Coughlan

 Richard Delevan – Guardian: @rdelevan

 Kilian Doyle – Irish Times: @kilian_doyle

 Tadhg Enright – RTE: @tadhgenright

 Shane Hegarty – Irish Times: @shanehegarty

 Harry McGee – Irish Times: @harrymcgee

 Hugh Linehan – Irish Times: @hlinehan

 Mark Little – RTE: @marklittlenews

 Adam Maguire: @adammaguire

 Dick O’Brien – Sunday Business Post: @dickobrien

 Chas Taylor – Irish Times: @ChasTaylor

 Adrian Weckler – Sunday Business Post: @adrianweckler

 Joe Drumgoogle @jdrumgoole

 Ronan Price Independent @ronanprice
 Kathy Foley Sunday Times @kathyfoley

New additions

 Niall Kitson PC Live @niallkitson

 Silicon Republic @siliconrepublic

 Paul Hearns, ComputerScope @Paul_Hearns

 Karlin Lillington, Irish Times @klillington

 Conor Pope, Irish Times @conor_pope

 Ciara O’Brien, Irish Times @ciaraobrien

 John Kennedy, Silicon Republic, @MrJohnFKennedy

 

I use Klout for this exercise but another new tool on the block is the TweetLevel from Edelman.  Some scores differ but give some useful insights.  Both are good for setting bench marks against others and provide a useful roadmap for increasing influence.

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Posted in Irish media, Public Relations, Twitter | Comments (2)

How much klout do you have on twitter?

October 30th, 2009

Stumbled upon a nice Twitter influence/comparision tool called Klout.com. 

Klout -Twitter Influence Tool

Klout -Twitter Influence Tool

How you compare with others on twitter has normally been a manual task of looking at their followers, following, number of tweets, number of @ and general level of engagement.  I did an analysis of some public sector organisations for a presentation to some press offices organised by Public Affairs Ireland and trying to decipher who was more influential was pretty time consuming and manual.  This tool really helps giving a helpful snap shot.  Unfortunately it does not find all twitter users but assume this will improve over time.  When you search under your twitter user name it positions you on an x/y axis looking at influence and audience with the four quadrants covering Casual, Connector, Climber and Personal.  The personal quatrant containing the most active twitter users.

Klout Quadrants

Klout Quadrants

Interestingly I was in the bottom corner and much as I would like to protest its probably a fair reflection on my personal twitter usage and out reach.  I don’t follow everyone who follows me and I do engage with a relatively small pool of people on a regular occasion and I have a moderate rate of tweets.

It also give a text interpretation of the graph.  Mine is below and although I dont agree with it all – ahem! – its indicative.  Interesting to see youself reflected lower than you would expect as in theory everyone would like to be the utimate category but why and how people use twitter is a personal choice on time availability, how much engagement you want and can handle and how wide you wish to be spread among others. 

“You don’t take this Twitter stuff too seriously. People towards the lower left corner are probably very new to social media. Most people in this quadrant tend to engage with a small group of friends that they know in real life. If you’re in the upper right corner, you have succeeded in building a strong audience, but need to engage and be more active to jump to the next level.”

I would like to see all the variables they use but its a useful snap shot when you are looking at improving your twitter profile or trying to get a handle on someone elses influence.

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Could Augmented Reality Be the Answer To Newspaper Woes

October 20th, 2009

Newspaper readership and the ability to translate younger readers into future buyers is a real tricky one for Irish media.  The online habits of younger readers are well documented and last weeks announcement that the online had overtaken TV and other media forms as the most prevalent advertising medium in UK brought sharper attention to the topic. 

Add on to this the heavy investment into the printing presses which compounds the problem for media owners.  The Irish Times spent approx 50 million euro on its printing press while the impressive Independent plant was possibly similar.

Most articles on this topic focus on ploughing investment into the online product.  Most media owners are doing this to some degree but not everyone is online and the investments in the printed press needs to be realised.  Print is not dead and the popularity of freesheet and glossy magazines show they still have a good following even among the more digital native.  The tactile physical and instantly portable nature of print means its still has great following and plenty to offer if it embraces real innovation.

Last weekend I was part of a panel at a creativity conference called ‘Creativity Rising’ in Fitzpatrick Hotel organised by MultiTalent.  The 20 participants came from Spain, Austria and Ireland.  Over the weekend people presented a ‘Work in Progress’ of some initiative they were undertaking in the realm of creativity.  The group then peer reviewed each one and delivered feedback and suggestions.

During one of the breakout session I had a good chat with Humberto Matas from DNX in Madrid.  We spoke abouts some of the challenges facing the print media industry in Spain and Ireland.

Two interesting things emerged from the conversation on how the print industry can translate younger readers into older buyers and not canibalise the entire print industry.  The two areas were

  1. Augmented Reality

Augmented reality is a hot topic at the moment with interesting experiments in Amsterdam with mobile technology.  Check here for an earlier piece I did on AR.  In simple terms augmented reality pulls together multiple layers of data to help present different version of the real world and allow new ways of interacting with it.  One possible use for the print industry is that along side an article there is a symbol/bar code that could be scanned by mobile phone, web camera or event an interactive kiosk.  Once scanned this would pull up a 3D interactive version of the story that younger viewers could manipulate or use to find more information or buy services.  Rather than having all of this originate from online and stay online,  this type iniative would anchor it to the physical newspaper with multiple modes for online interaction. 

 

2. Embedded Video Screens

 Very similar to the moving photos in Harry Potters Daily Prophet US publishers are experimenting with inserting tiny video screen in to magazines and newspapers.  Entertainment Weekly will be distributing 2.7mm thick video screens that are integrated into the magazine.  These rechargable screens can play up to 40 minutes of video.  As video is the choice of younger demographics it has a good chance of attracting younger readers but also offers advertisers much more choice in advertising.  Hopefully it does not become advertising platform alone but rather another editorial outlet.  As the technology evolves and gets thinner it could in theory replace all the colour photos.  Hopefully the recycling industry would catch up so it was unlikely to produce  a waste nightmare but I imagine that short life easily recycled screens and batteries would emerge.

This shows the how the entire media industry is converging.  Print publications becoming web portals becoming social media outlets becoming twitter channels becoming virtual radio and tv stations (with podcasting and YouTube).  In theory the Irish Times would compete with RTE and YouTube only stations.

The next few years will see alot of media changes and its obvious that online will be the key driver.  However there is still life in the print edition but only innovation will save the day.

- new post scripted information -

Just noticed this great video from TED India.  Lots of interesting stuff but fast forward to 8 minutes to see how Six Sence technology can interact with newspapers.

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IGO People Checklist

October 15th, 2009

Most social media from Facebook, Bebo and Twitter caused lots of consternation for organisations especially when their membership mushroomed.  Facebook now claims over 1 million, Bebo over 800,000 and Twitter looking like 26K to 45K depedning on who you read.

Everyone agreed that that they are wonderful platforms but how can organisations take a meaningful role in them was an enigma.  As time passes the fog has lifted here partially as a result of experimentation, new applications emerging and platforms like Facebook taking a deliberate stance by establishing pages for companies and leaving profiles for individuals.  Some of the rules of engagement have come from the community themselves.  Essentially most of these communities jarred with the idea of companies engaging with the fear of over commercialisation.  Now these is an acceptance that if an organisation can deliver value and entertainment then people will give them eyeballs in a pseudo transaction way.

IGO People Website

 

IGO People Website

IGO People

is different.  It was established with the very purpose of creating a medium whereby companies could interact with consumers and indeed a platform where people could group together to create change with an organisation.  For example you have a problem with a mobile provider and getting no where with the company itself, then you can use IGO people to group people together to structure a more cohesive approach.

Like all social media the more you put in, the more you engage, the more you build your network base the better the result.

Below is a lits of some of the ways you could use and enhance your IGO People presence.

Beginner  

 
Intermediate 

 
Advanced 

Any other experience or more ideas please let me know.  Its worth browsing the site for some nice examples by FBD and Vodafone.

 

Eoin 

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Nice job if you can get it – Matt Harding and Cybercom!

October 5th, 2009

At the very well run Cybercom 10th birthday bash in the Sugar Club guest speaker and internet evangalist Matt Harding spoke about his global travels and his infamous dancing videos.

After leaving his job in Australia to travel, a friend of his suggested he record a dance he used to do at peoples desk to get the to go for lunch with him.  The idea being that he dance in front of famous and not famous landmarks in different parts of the word and then merge it into one video collage with a great backing track.  His efforts caught the attention of Stride, a US chewing gum and they paid for him to do the same all over again.  Since then it has grown in popularlity (over 25 million views) and he has undertaken more commercial sponsorship (ie where he had little control over the content and left it to a large film crew – big change from hand held video recorder).  

One has to wonder how much more there is in an iniative like this but the real value lies underneat.  Social media and web platfoms offer the opportunity to have huge peaks over a short period.  Matt is now extending the dance theme with choreographed dances where he teaches different nationalities to do the traditional dance of another country – i.e. teaching the chinese to do Irish dancing.

Some interesting observations on this whole initiative where the is probably more interesting lessons and value:

Matts experience, although probably one in a million, does show that you can make a livilihood out of social media but that route will probably only become clear after you do something special rather than a planned programmes.  Lots of interesting crossovers with the Chris Anderson book Free - the content is free but some brand pay for its development.

I will be interested to see how the next set of videos go and if the more professional edge lessens or increases it popularity.

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Books I Read – No.2 – Free by Chris Anderson

October 1st, 2009

I was asked to review the new book Free by Chris Anderson – Wired Editor and author of the Long Tail for Marketing Age Magazine.  You can find the online version of the article here but you may need a subscription so I have included below also. 

Its great to get a deadline for when you need to read and review a book as I find the books I should read mount up on the good intentions pile.  So after a week of no TV and coffee after putting the baby to date, the results are below.

Free – The Future of a Radical Price – Chris Anderson

 

The Past and Future of a Radical PriceA quick search of Chris Anderson’s book shows up free online versions of the book from abridged audio versions to eBooks, iPhone, limited chapters, to limited time offers for the book which in a way explains much about what this book is about – utilising technology to give away something valuable for free while clawing back revenue in another form.  Equally the book has spawned some long debates about plagiarising sections from Wikipedia which shows how raw and recent this debate is.
At first glance this book can appear quiet scary for a variety of industries whose main business model is now under threat but the deeper message is that free (mainly due to technology) is on a rapid rise and with it come huge changes in business structures but also new opportunities.  Change is a painful process but those that can innovate and change will reap reward while those that don’t could witness the demise of institutions like Encyclopedia Britannica who yielded to Microsoft’s Encarta who in turn were usurped by Wikipedia.
One of the things that make this book easy to read is that it discusses many of the free services and products that we consume on a daily basis without really questioning how they justify their existence from Flickr’s photo sharing service to Ryanair’s free flights to free webmail.  In addition the text is nicely punctuated with case studies explaining how a car be free, where stores in Japan give the physical products away free, how digital video recorders can be given away free through to how subtle changes in free bike schemes can result in one being successful in one city and not another (Dublin City Council may be interested in this one).
The book itself is an engaging and accessible read even if the author does take a purist line while staunchly defending the right of free.  It initially covers the perception and history of the word free and he takes good amount of time to explain the 20th Century versions of free which was perceived as gimmicky in that you paid at some later stage.  Early examples of Jell-O in 1902 being marketed with a free cookery book to the 1903 Gillette giveaways of free razors (you paid for the blades) show that free has a long history.  He contends that in the 21st Century that free really means free especially as things become more digital.  This is large due to the reducing costs of storage, bandwidth and processing power in that technological innovations have reduced so far as to be almost free and unmetreable.  The book is peppered with examples to back up his assertions and point to the cliff fall of transistors cost from ten dollars in 1961 for a single transistor to current price of .000055 cents, a widely discussed implication of Moores Law.  His learning is that “When something halves in price each year, zero is inevitable”.
Much of the book builds on the original thesis that ‘information wants to be free’ by Stewart Brand.  The full version of Brands quote talks about information wanting to be expensive because its valuable but the cost of distributing it has reduced so much that is has relentlessly pushed to it to the free model.
 He takes a fairly uncompromising stance on free in the music, publishing and software industries.  This is even more interesting when you consider his role as Editor of Wired Magazine, an industry that has struggled great with the free expectations of the web.  He contends that the celebrity status of the book will boost his charged speaker and consulting business.  To the Music industry he explains that piracy should not be viewed as the killer of the industry but rather its potential salvation and that record labels need to look at their business in an entirely different way.  Music itself will become the ultimate marketing tool while the economic rewards will come from other associated activities such as touring, merchandising and innovative licensing while CD or digital sales will still generate some income.  This is an uncomfortable message for many artists who have relied on the current CD sales model, which in itself is relatively new.
In looking at the software industry Anderson points to the open source movement versus Microsoft and the protracted stages from Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression through to Acceptance that Microsoft have gone through to the point where some of its products are now offered free.
Free is fairly simplistic term and normally people align it to restricted set of examples.  The book contains a lot of good examples of three different types of free models which he breaks into:
Direct Cross Subsidies, where one aspect is provided free but subsidised by another which generated the revenue.  This covers products and services from free drinks at shows (e.g. casinos), free shipping over a certain amount (Amazon) to free parking at shopping centres.  Many of these models are almost direct opposites to each other but have a built in mechanism to generate revenue by selling something else e.g. free software but selling the hardware (IBM, HP Linux Offering) to giving away hardware and selling software (games consoles sold under the cost price).
Three Party or “Two Sided” Markets where one customer class subsidizes another covers common place offers like free credit cards where merchants charged a fee, access for children being free but adults pay, through to giving away free readers (Adobe) but charging for document writers.

The final category of Freemium is where some customers subsidise another.  This ranges  from the giving away of low quality MP3s but selling high quality box sets (Radiohead and name your price), giving away computer to computer calls but charging for computer to phone (Skype), giving away online games but charging a subscription to do more in the game (Club Penguin) to giving away ad-supported services but selling the ability to remove the ads (Ning).
One would not want to make strategic business decision on the back of Free as the rapid changes that digital is making are still quite new.  However for a thought provoking easy to access analysis of fast moving trends it has a lot of merit.  Change has always been painful, especially when it has financial implications but the one certainty is that Free will bring major changes to most industries and those changes will be more rapid than we have experienced in the past.

ISBN 978-1905211470

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