by Rob Paterson
April 15, 2008 at 6:35 am · Filed under
Brian Hurlburt, Community
About a week ago I posted about how Brian Hurlburt was making history in a small town in Nova Scotia - where he was becoming the real local newspaper. I had sent the copy to Brian prior to posting and was surprised and how long it took for him to respond.
He called in the evening and told me that it was fine but there was something in his voice - he sounded as if he was in a lot of lot of pain. I asked him how he was and he told me that he had this terrible pain pain in his gut and a fever. Fevers are a very bad sign if they are connected to this kind of pain.
I told him that I would be very pissed off with him if I had to attend his funeral and that these symptons sounded serious. I begged him to go to the hospital - of course this was at night on the weekend.
3 days later his partner phoned me. Brian had an infected bowel that had burst shortly after arriving in hospital. If he had not been there he would have died. It was touch and go and he faces a very long recovery. The site is down because coincidentally, the domain came due last week and he could not deal with it of course.
He called me last night, he is still in hospital. He called to thank me for saving his life.
Paradoxically, hearing his voice last night felt like being at the birth of my children. I had been part of a new life. I was quite overwhelmed by this feeling and have been quite weepy since. In effect, Brian has been reborn. He came so close to death, that everything has changed for him. And I think also for me. Some door has opened.How often do we get a second chance? How often do we get the opportunity to really help as well?
All night I have been wondering at the fragility of existence. Of how the coincidence of my interviewing him for this blog, set up the conditions for his call and hence for a new chance at life.
So I now see that of course saving his life was not me at all - it was you. Without this blog and so without you, I would never have called Brian anyway.
So you too are part of this event. By our connection, we have all brought Brian back to life.
Thank you.
by Rob Paterson
March 31, 2008 at 5:04 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Analytics, Artisanal Economy, Brian Hurlburt, Business Model, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Interview, Long Tail, Marketing, MicroBrand, Personal Branding, Social Media, Social Networking, Trusted Space, WalMart, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, Web Services, Wikinomics, barriers, metadata
Sam Walton’s wife’s deal with Sam when they got married was that he could do whatever he wanted - he wanted to be a retailer - but she would never live in a community that had more than 10,000 people. So his constraint was to build an epochal retail system but in the boonies. Look at what he accomplished with this as a restraint! He also found on his path that being in the boonies also gave him a defence against the huge competitors such as Kmart and Sears. No one took someone who worked in the boonies seriously. That is until it was too late!
My point is that, no matter what you think of WalMart now, that we are predjudiced about the boonies. Smart people in all fields - not the least in Social Media - tend to have a big city bias. We too often over look the boonies and those that live and work there - how could they affect us? We all know that you have to be in the big city to know what is really going on. Of course that is why Warren Buffett is the richest man in the world!
My story today is about a man that you likely have never heard of - who lives and works in a small town that you also may never have heard of. We can never know today if he may become the Sam Walton or the Warren Buffett of media, but my bet is that if he does not then someone like him will be.
My bet is that at the heart of the real social media revolution is that if we do indeed move to a networked world then small communities will be able to stand toe to toe with the big cities.
Meet Brian Hurlburt who lives in Yarmouth Nova Scotia a small port on the southern tip of the province where the high speed ferry comes in from Portland. Brian owns a runs a Web “Something” (Yarmouthcounty.com) that tells the aggregated story of everything that happens in Yarmouth. I call it a web “something” because it is more than a web site - it is closer to the old style of really local newspaper that you might see in a western.
Until Brian, everyone had ignored Yarmouth. The fact that the domain was available told Brian that no one cared. The Province did not care - Yarmouth is off the radar in Halifax. Tourists from the US got off the ferry and drive through town and onto other more exotic places that were better known. (Nothing is really exotic in Atlantic Canada but you know what I mean) The B & B’s were all separated and isolated and could not get their message out. So were all the social groups such as Church groups. Small business struggled to get noticed and worried about maybe a WalMart coming to town. The social capital of Yarmouth was draining away. At some point, it would no longer be a community at all.
So who is Brian Hulrburt? Is he some flash young techhie? No Brian is a regular guy who knew next to nothing about the web. Everything he now knows about how the web works he has learned by trial and error. All the fears that a church or a B & B may have about the web - he has experienced himself.
Fear is the great barrier that we all have of the new. So how Brian learned and how he is - an open and vulnerable man - is an important key to his success in bringing so many parts of his community together online. He can describe what has to be done in language and in a tone that does not judge or appear mysterious.
He also did not try and monetize the site until it was ready. He had faith that if he was able to reach a critical mass that the money would come. So he also did not carry a lot of costs himself. He could not afford to have costs involved that would force him to force the economics before the time was right.
Is this not the Craigslist model?
What he has been able to do is to aggregate the life of Yarmouth online. Aggregation in a safe and trusted place is going to be one of the key value creation processes in a world of infinite content. By not pushing the economics he has built the trust and now “owns” the space.
The underlying metrics are also emerging that will drive an economic model that benefits not just Brian but all those who inhabit the site.
In 2007 the site had 100,000 visits. Not hits, over 1 1/2 million of those, but real visits. Because of the power of aggregation, all those that live on the site have now access to al this traffic that they could never have reached on their own. The local paper reaches about 20-30,000. So Brian is reaching more and at a fraction of the cost of the paper. He also enables a growing interaction between all parties which is not possible in a paper.
This is more than Google Local or Craigslist - this is a personal aggregation that includes a filtering that is part Brian and part the client. It can therefore be trusted more than a simple mechanical aggregation. It will over time therefore have more value than a simple algorithm.
A growing part of what Brian can now offer his family of clients is the kind of measurement that conventional advertising cannot. Brian is becoming expert in analytics.
Here I think is part of the core of the new economic model. Mass Marketing needed a mass market as there was so much leakage. With no precision possible, as in WWII, only area bombing was possible. So what could a small place do like Yarmouth. Their feeble sums of money wouldn’t even be noise in the larger scheme of trying to get noticed. What Brian can offer is precision - the Long Tail in action. A B & B can see exactly who it is reaching online and can adjust to get a better focus and hence result.
This will kill the mass media alternatives. Niche + precision = high return.
For me the lessons that I have gained from looking at Brian are these:
- Niche is where the energy is - the Value will be on the right hand side of the Long Tail
- Aggregation around niche is where the value is - the more personal the better
- Precision about what happens in the aggregated niche is what drives the economics and the return
- Power will shift from the large and diffused to the small and concentrated
I asked Brian “where is it going?” He replied by saying that “The web is changing the world. It is helping us help each other again. We can take charge of our own lives again. I want to be part of this.”
by Rob Paterson
March 27, 2008 at 6:04 am · Filed under
Analytics, Brian Hurlburt, Google, Measurement, Social Media, Video, YouTube
Today Google announce that content providers on YouTube will get real time analytics form those who watch the video. In TV terms - real time personal ratings!(NYT)
In a move to provide better data to its users, YouTube formally announced late Wednesday that it had added a free feature that will show video creators when and where viewers are watching their videos. With this, the company hopes to turn YouTube from an online video site into a place where marketers can test their messages, Tracy Chan, YouTube product manager, said.
This program, called YouTube Insight, provides a detailed view of a video’s popularity, both over time and geographically, broken down by state. (Internationally, YouTube Insight is not as insightful, providing only popularity by country.)
YouTube has provided basic analytical information to creators of videos since its introduction, including the number of views, the viewers’ ratings of the video, and the number of comments left. Advertisers received a slightly more sophisticated summary.
With the Insight information, video creators can dig into the specifics of a video’s performance and find, for example, that it peaks on Fridays in winter months, or it has taken several weeks to get traction — information that can help better promote their work. The information, presented as a color-coded map and a graph of a video’s popularity, is accessible through a link from a video creator’s account page on YouTube. The company will update the data once a day.
What does this mean? How will this accelerate the shift from traditional to social media?
Next week I will be publishing an interview with Brian Hurlburt who is doing a Sam Walton in local news/publishing in Yarmouth Nova Scotia. Brian has become the most important source of what is going on in a small town. One of the most important tools in Brian’s kit bag is measurement. He can show the local B & B, the church group, the activist group, the tourism folks what kind of traction they are getting on the web. They know exactly who is looking at them and how and why. Of course traditional advertising cannot do this.
Brian’s story I think is at the heart of the shift to come and the YouTube announcement fits into this context.
Brian’s experience is telling him that the money will leave the traditional media once there is only an initial base of people online. They will go to the new, even when the pool is not that large because what is there is so clearly measurable.
For isn’t mass media is really a lottery? Even when you win, you may not know enough about what happened. But with highly measurable new media, you can refine and refine until you get exactly what you want.
Now a small business in a small town can have TV ads. Access to the media itself is cheap. Making the video is cheap. With measurement you can tailor the offering to suit you best. Now even large businesses can have video ads that are fully measurable.
Why would you pay a regular TV station or a local newspaper for an offering that costs so much more and where you have no idea what will happen?
I think that we are going to see a major move here. I think that, just as Craigslist gutted Personals, so measurable web-based media will gut the rest of mass advertising. As the money flows so will the attention and the shift to online will accelerate.
The money will move because of measurement and it will move before the masses move to online. There is less time to respond that conventional TV, Radio and Print think.
This is surely why Google are working so hard on Analytics.
