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Brixton Impact Hub has been operating on a trial basis since April.

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Rebekah Ford is an interactive designer and developer. She's lived in Brixton for 20 years, and until recently was commuting out of the area for work. She's now set up shop locally working from Brixton's newly launched communal workspace along with other tech, creative and social enterprise start-ups.

"I had no idea there were so many tech-related people living in the area," Ford said. "I've never felt local to the area. I've worked in lots of different spaces, such as people's offices and at home, but just being around people with a collaborative mind-set will be a massive benefit to my business."

Brixton Impact Hub has been operating on a trial basis since April. It will fully open its doors in mid-May, and already 50 entrepreneurs have expressed interest in joining. Funded by Lambeth council, the Hub sits within Lambeth Town Hall, and aims to offer an affordable base for local entrepreneurs.

With links to 50 other Hubs throughout the world, the first Impact Hub was launched in Islington in 2005; Brixton Impact Hub will draw on their experience to help young businesses get off the ground.

"Since I've started taking part in collaborative spaces, I've doubled the amount of work I've had," Ford said. "Entrepreneur meet-ups with people in suits, who were not like me, were intimidating, but if you're in a communal environment where you're all bringing all your skills to the table you know you're on to a winner."

Limited local impact

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, founder of Design Warm, a consultancy specialising in the Internet of Things, agrees. "I think it's really smart," she said. "There are a lot of people coming into Brixton at the weekends, but the amount of impact they're having locally is fairly limited. I think there are a lot of creative people in Brixton who could be putting value into the area."

Like Ford, Deschamps-Sonsino is moving her business to Brixton. She's been based in Shoreditch for four years, but cited the expensive rent and commute as major factors in her move. "People are moving south of river," she said. "There is value in being in east London, but it's not worth the cost involved."

Lambeth has second highest number of London startups

These two examples of tech business moving to Brixton come at a time when Lambeth council is encouraging entrepreneurship among its residents. Already there has been a host of events to help locals understand how to start a business or expand into new markets.

A Tech City event in November, for example, highlighted routes to funding and encouraged residents to think about how they could be more technically creative. And perhaps these sorts of events have been working, because according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, Lambeth has one of the highest number of business startups, second only to Westminster city council, with 4,255 businesses launching in the borough in 2012.

An emphasis on tech and entrepreneurship in the area, though, comes at a time when Brixton is changing, housing prices are increasing, and middle-class residents are moving in. Along with that, some of Lambeth's existing residents are falling behind, with 15% not having online access; among social housing tenants, the proportion without access is is 40%.

Thousands of residents need help getting online

This also comes at a time when the government wants to make the internet its primary way of communicating with benefit claimants, including accessing the universal credit system. For Lambeth residents to do this, an estimated 27,500 of them will need support getting online, and of those about 23,300 will need an hour of basic support. The remaining 4,200 will require a minimum of five hours of training, with a quarter of those potentially needing up to 15 or 20 hours of help.

So what is Lambeth council doing to help these people? It's decided to launch Digi-buddies, a scheme using volunteers with strong IT skills, to help these residents understand the internet. Several councils across the country have launched similar schemes: Peterborough has a Fibre to the Future programme and Merthyr Tydfil has a programme called Get Merthyr Tydfil Online.

'I don't have time for the internet'

But not everyone is welcoming digital inclusion. Tony Benest, who has owned and run the Brixton Wholefoods shop for 30 years, said: "I'm too busy to learn about the internet. I work 70, 80 or 90 hours a week, every week, and I don't have time." He said the council's emphasis on entrepreneurship is a "desperate measure to get people into work, and if the cost of living continues to rise, and the wages in the area are staying rock bottom, there's a much bigger issue that needs to be addressed".

Referring to the programmes introduced by Lambeth to help residents as "pet projects", Benest added that he was more concerned about the empty shop next door, which is being advertised for twice his rent. "When my rent comes up for review in a few years, I don't know what the area will be. Brixton seems to be taking off and basically leaving a great many people behind or kicking them out altogether."
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Is Brixton London's next tech hipster hub?

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Rebekah Ford is an interactive designer and developer. She's lived in Brixton for 20 years, and until recently was commuting out of the area for work. She's now set up shop locally working from Brixton's newly launched communal workspace along with other tech, creative and social enterprise start-ups.

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For years, the London licensed cab driver's badge was worn with pride. Up to five gruelling years spent scootering around the capital learning "the knowledge", plus a full medical, meant the black hackney was driven by the cream of drivers. But now there is insurgency on the block. The digital revolution that has changed so many industries is sweeping the taxi business, possibly putting the very future of the famous vehicle so loved by tourists and Londoners alike under threat.

Next month, London's black-taxi drivers are planning a mass protest in the capital against Californian technology company Uber, which is leading the changes in the way people hail cabs. Uber - like several other entrants to the lucrative cab business - allows people to use an application on their phones to see where the closest car is to them and then book it after agreeing a set fare, which is paid by credit card. No cash changes hands, and Uber even discourages passengers from tipping their drivers.

The encroachment of smartphone technology on the capital's taxi operations is being looked at by the licensing authority, Transport for London. In a statement, it said: "We've seen no evidence to suggest that Uber London Ltd are not fit and proper to hold a London private hire operators' licence, but no final decisions have been made while Uber's operating model is still under investigation."

Taxis and minicabs are regulated differently in London. Black cabs, allowed to use bus lanes and to pick up passengers who hail them in the street, are more tightly regulated and their fares are metered. Minicab drivers work under a lighter touch and have fewer privileges, but still must be licensed and registered.

The new cabs being "facilitated" by Uber - which says it is not a cab firm but an enabling "platform" - are, according to the Licensed Taxi Drivers' Association, being allowed to straddle both while only meeting the licensing criteria for minicabs: they are classified as a minicab service but can use a charging system more like metering, even though there isn't a meter inside the car.

London cabbies aren't alone in their protest against technology that undermines their business with just a phone and a satnav. Uber has run into opposition in 15 of the 100 cities worldwide in which it operates - in the UK that includes Manchester. There have been protests and even court cases against it in Brussels, Toronto, Paris, Berlin and New York, plus several other US cities.

Jo Bertram, general manager of Uber in the UK and Ireland, said the service was so popular that the average wait for a cab was around five minutes. "Seven during the tube strike," she added.

She was more coy on how many cars and drivers were registered to its "platform". "Our clients are giving us very encouraging feedback and we're seeing fantastic growth," Bertram said. "The private hire industry hasn't been shaken up in a decade or more. The laws governing it were written in 1988, before smartphones were even invented. All our drivers are independent operators, but clients can rate their driver at the end of a journey, so we make sure the right people are out there and the right price is charged at the end of each journey. "

The idea is very simple - if you want a taxi, you look at the app on your phone, see where the nearest car is and order it. You can then watch the little icon on screen as it approaches. The payment is taken from the registered credit card.

Nicko Williamson runs Bounce, another app-driven taxi firm. "We don't want to put the black cabs out of business. It's an iconic thing. You can hail them, and that's really important for Londoners. Will drivers stop aspiring to be a black cabbie? I don't think that's going to happen any time yet. There's still a demand, but we work on a commission model with our drivers - straight 20%. They can log on and off when they want, and we find loads of people want to be drivers. We have a fixed upfront price and our overheads are lower, without the minicab office and telephone operators.

"A lot of people don't realise how big this market is. There are 65,000 mini cabs in London. But it has been very inefficient. A driver who picks someone up in central London and drops them off out in the sticks is driving back empty. That's wasted mileage, higher pollution, higher congestion and no money earned. The app system allows that cab to be booked immediately by someone in the area."

Passengers can also be sent a photograph of the driver and the car's registration number. The whole journey is recorded on an emailed receipt. But while people can request a fare quote, the journey cost is calculated, says the LTDA, by a metering system even if the meter is not actually inside the car.

London cabbies are plotting their survival. The June protest will attract enough drivers to cause serious congestion in central London, said the LTDA's general secretary, Steve McNamara. "We're not asking for Uber to be banned. If everyone else has to follow the rules, why shouldn't they?"
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Uber: the smartphone app that is driving London cabbies to distraction

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For years, the London licensed cab driver's badge was worn with pride. Up to five gruelling years spent scootering around the capital learning "the knowledge", plus a full medical, meant the black hackney was driven by the cream of drivers. But now there is insurgency on the block.

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Wallace and Grommit to teach kids to code

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Wallace and Grommit to teach kids to code

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Idle hands are the devil's playthings, and those hands look particularly evil when they have 14 fingers or the heads of chickens.

Earlier today, Old Spice posed a simple question on Twitter:

How many fingers am I holding up?

- Old Spice (@OldSpice) May 8, 2014

The answers came flooding in, and the team at Wieden + Kennedy has been busy ever since, whipping up Photoshopped images of some of the more peculiar replies.

Check some of them out below, and give Old Spice a hand for another inspired time-waster.

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Old Spice Lets Its Fingers Do the Walking in Real-Time Twitter Campaign

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Idle hands are the devil's playthings, and those hands look particularly evil when they have 14 fingers or the heads of chickens.Earlier today, Old Spice posed a simple question on Twitter:How many fingers am I holding up?

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This Bentley movie shot and edited entirely on iPhones & iPads

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This Bentley movie shot and edited entirely on iPhones & iPads

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Jackie Chan Bentley Mulsanne HD New Great Commercial Carjam

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Austin Reza http://reza.la/ New Rolls Royce Wraith Coupe HD Sexy First Commercial Sexy 2015 Carjam

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Intelligent Details, a short documentary film commissioned by Bentley Motors, introduces Luc Donckerwolke, Director of Design, and SangYup Lee, Head of Exterior Design. Filmed in the Bentley Mulsanne in New York, Intelligent Details focuses on what inspires Luc and SangYup in their roles as design leaders for Bentley Motors.

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The first apartment designed live on Pinterest

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The first apartment designed live on Pinterest

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APT CB2  - The first real apartment designed live on Pinterest

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Visit the apartment: http://cb2.com/APTCB2 5 Rooms, 5 Days, 5 Guest Pinners, and you. From Wednesday, May 7th to Friday, May 11th help design the first real apartment live on Pinterest by liking your favorite Pins, and have a chance to win your dream room worth $5,000!

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Forrester research: CEO's favour digital bolt-ons vs. digital transformation

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Forrester research: CEO's favour digital bolt-ons vs. digital transformation

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A large proportion of CEOs are failing to grasp the importance of integrating digital into their business strategies from the ground up, with many still favouring a 'bolt-on' approach, according to Forrester.

In its the State of Digital Business 2014 report, which polled 1,591 senior business leaders in the UK and US during November 2013 to January 2014, Forrester revealed some major disconnects between the marketing and technology sides of businesses, with responses signalling a "digital strategy execution crisis".

Although 74 per cent of executives report that that their company has a digital strategy there is a "wide disparity" between strategies according to the report.

Companies like Burberry score highly for demonstrating that its digital strategy is central to its business transformation, yet others regard digital strategy only in terms of adding a new mobile app to their existing business or developing a social media presence - approaches which Forrester categorizes as 'bolt-on".

Digital strategy is no yet business strategy: (source: Forrester)

It has attributed the bolt-on approach within certain companies to their failure in uniting marketing and technology management on a common path. In all but the largest firms, CEOs are most likely to set the digital strategy for the business, but as company size increases, the CMO plays a more significant role. Yet despite their involvement, few CEOs set a clear vision for digital. In firms with more than 250 employees, just 21 per cent of CEOs set a clear vision for digital - a figure which is even worse in larger companies which have between 1,000 and 10,000 employees, where it drops to 17 per cent, leaving a level of "uncertainty" among executives, according to Forrester. Meanwhile the report has predicted that education and social services will be the "next big industry" to go digital. Awareness of the digital "threat" in education and social services is high with 83 per cent of executives in this sector expecting digital to disrupt their organisation in 2014, according to the report. Key takeaways from NIgel Fenwick - author of the report: A Bolt-On Digital strategy will Not Be enough In 2015 and beyond:While marketing has been the principal driver of digital initiatives up to 2014, going forward firms must take a more comprehensive approach to digital transformation and avoid simply bolting digital onto the existing business. CMOs Must Partner with CIOs To Transform Toward a Digital Business: Digital business requires both digital customer experience and digital operational excellence. Without the CIO as a digital partner, chief marketing officers (CMOs) will tend to approach digital as a bolt-on approach to customer engagement. CIOs must embrace digital as a core technology imperative: CIOs must shift their focus toward systems that support the firm's ability to win, serve, and retain customers. Digital technologies are central to this shift. The ability of the technology management team to embrace digital will shape the future of the CIO.

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CEOs favour 'bolt-on' digital strategies over digital 'transformation', says Forrester study

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A large proportion of CEOs are failing to grasp the importance of integrating digital into their business strategies from the ground up, with many still favouring a 'bolt-on' approach, according to Forrester.

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15 Insane Things That Correlate With Each Other

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Why do these things correlate? These 15 correlations will blow your mind. (Is this headline sensationalist enough for you to click on it yet?)

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Betting a marketing future on building apps & services

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Betting a marketing future on building apps & services

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Most readers of this blog know I wear two hats. I write this blog - a labor of love - but I'm also the co-founder and CTO of a marketing software company, ion interactive. However, I rarely write about my company here, because (a) I prefer to use this space to explore bigger themes in our industry, and (b) I assume that you're here for those bigger themes too.

So over six years of writing this blog, with hundreds of posts, you can count on one hand - even if you're missing a finger or two - the number of chiefmartec.com posts that talk about what we're doing at ion interactive. They've been rare exceptions when I felt that what was happening with our company truly reflected a bigger industry theme.

This post is one of those rare exceptions. And it's a big one.

Last month, we announced we were pivoting our company to focus on the emerging space of "marketing apps." Even if you aren't a customer of ours, and never become one, you're going to want to understand what marketing apps are and why we made this move.

The short version: as part of marketing's evolution from communications to experiences, marketing will increasingly be about building "apps" - lightweight, interactive web and mobile touchpoints that have functionality, logic, and flow.

Instead of flooding audiences with more and more static content to be passively consumed, we will provide them with "microservices" that help them acquire the information they want in more effective and engaging ways. Think microservices instead of microsites.

Marketing apps can be things like wizards, configurators, calculators, assessment tools, contests, interactive white papers, games, quizzes, surveys, guided tours, portals, social hubs, diagnostics, workbooks, galleries, utilities, sweepstakes, learning exercises - any kind of digital experience that actively engages prospects in a helpful or entertaining way.

There are five reasons why I believe a massive wave of marketing apps is coming:

1. The cacophony of content has become deafening - it's asymptotically impossible to break through the noise with one more white paper, infographic, webinar, or ebook.

2. The burden on prospects to absorb all that passive content has become too heavy.

3. Fill-out-a-form-to-get-an-asset lead generation tactics have become stale - and due to way too much shlock on the other side of submit buttons, prospects are increasingly skeptical of taking the bait.

4. The value of data from expressed behavioral characteristics of prospects - to feed internal analytics and external personalization - strongly incentivizes marketers to pursue genuine engagement over artificial conversion.

5. The shift in the buyer's journey, away from dialogues with salespeople to more self-service research and evaluation in digital channels, now puts the onus on marketing to provide more consultative and useful interactions. There's a widening gap here today.

We can address these challenges by advancing from an oversimplified content-oriented worldview to a richer service-oriented worldview with marketing apps. I propose that is actually the next wave of content marketing.

The 4th Wave of Content Marketing

Content marketing has become the heart of modern marketing. In the age of search and social, information is more valuable than advertising in connecting with prospects and building relationships along the buyer's journey.

Of course, that assumes (1) that people can find your information, (2) that they are intrigued to consume it, and (3) that they will absorb it in a way that positively affects their propensity to buy and their lifetime value as a customer.

Those constraints have turned content marketing into an arms race.

In the first wave of that race, everyone simply published text-based content to the web. The focus was predominantly on search engine optimization (SEO), vying to have pages highly ranked by the Almighty Google on different keyword phrases. Early adopters won a first mover advantage with these techniques, securing prized "first page positions" in search engine results. But as more and more companies published more and more pages - often geared more towards search indexing bots than human beings - the efficacy of these tactics declined.

The second wave was a Renaissance of Creativity, as rich content overtook plain text - videos, infographics, custom illustrations, slide decks, better typography, beautifully designed ebooks, hi-res photography, CSS3 and HTML5 visual effects, etc. While the emotional impact of this content wasn't as perceptible to search engines, it resonated far more powerfully with real people. Rich content won distribution by impressing people enough that they would share it socially on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and so on.

At first, such rich content was extremely effective - because it popped like a volcano out of a sea of endless text. But then everybody piled on, cranking out infographics and colorful "definitive guides" with wild abandon. Average quality dropped. Now, even an asset that is well produced is often doomed to a momentary blip in social activity before a dozen new pieces of competitive content devour its earned attention like ravenous piranha.

The burden of this flood of content, however, is perhaps most viscerally felt by prospects and customers. There's just too much to consume! It takes time and effort to read an ebook and to try to make sense of it in your own context. Every week, dozens of new reports, white papers, articles, webinars, blog posts, and newsletters fly at prospects. Just perusing them takes time. A prospect can only distill a tiny fraction into knowledge and learning that is absorbed and retained - and it's hard work.
It's like showing up for your first day of school, and the teacher locks you in the library with ten thousand books and says, "Good luck, kid - there'll be a final exam in 8 months."
The third wave of content marketing, which aims to algorithmically filter this deluge into a drinkable glass of water, is personalization. By looking at historical correlations between characteristics of your different prospects and characteristics of your catalog of content, personalization software can predict which specific pieces of content are "best" to serve up to any new prospect. You automatically winnow the right content for your audience.

At least that's the theory. There are four fairly big caveats to personalization though:

1. You need enough data about new prospects to meaningfully make an inference about which content is right for them.

2. When you create new content, you need to either (a) manually guess how it maps to prospect characteristics; (b) have software try to infer that mapping, although with creative assets, the accuracy of that can be dubious; or (c) expose a large sample of all kinds of prospects to it to experimentally learn with whom and how well it resonates.

3. As things change in your market - your products and positioning, your customers' preferences and expectations, your competitors' moves - the relevance of your data from past prospects and previous pieces of content (and therefore the accuracy of predictions you make with it) deteriorates with time.

4. Even in the best circumstances, a prediction is still just a probabilistic guess - if you have an algorithm that is 80% accurate, which would be amazing, it still means that for 1 out of 5 prospects, you're going to guess wrong. What's your recovery?

You're that poor school kid locked in the library. A kindly librarian shuffles over and says, "Ah, you're wearing a blue shirt. Another student who wore a blue shirt two years ago only read these 12 books. So I think they should get you through the exam..."
While personalization can be a powerful tool in content marketing - especially when it's applied to create pleasant surprises of serendipity - it's not a panacea.

Now, I believe we're on the cusp of a fourth wave of content marketing, a more interactive approach to matching the right content to the right prospects and making that content more engaging to consume - a new era of marketing apps. But before we discuss the theory driving this fourth wave, let's look at a real example of a marketing app...

The Anatomy of a Marketing App

Let's dissect a real marketing app to understand how it works. The following is an annotated walk-through of an actual marketing app that my company uses in our own marketing - a quiz-like game to get prospects intrigued about the potential of creative A/B testing:

Want to try this app yourself? Click here to take the quiz.

Compare and contrast this with traditional content marketing tactics. We might have offered visitors a white paper or a case study ebook about A/B testing and asked them to fill out a lead generation form before giving it to them. It could have been a great paper or ebook, beautifully designed, but most wouldn't have bothered to fill out the form - and therefore would have received no meaningful impression of our brand and no sample of our value proposition.

Even those who did "convert" to download such an asset - a pretty weak interpretation of conversion when you think about it - many would only give it a quick glance. They wouldn't absorb the information. They'd get too busy with other things competing for their attention to really study the document and learn from it.

The interactive marketing app version of this content, however, has three big advantages:

1. Gets more people meaningfully engaged with our brand, immediately.

2. Communicates our ideas in a memorable way that is easier and faster to absorb.

3. Ultimately generates more - and more enthusiastic - leads for us.

This is just one example of many, many different kinds of marketing apps that you can employ. So let's step back again and consider what makes marketing apps like this so effective.

Inspiration for Marketing: Great Teachers and Salespeople

We know that more responsibility of the buyer's journey is shifting from sales to marketing, as prospects increasingly use digital channels to research and evaluate purchases on their own before they ever want to hear from a salesperson.

We also know that a lot of our responsibility comes down to educating prospects. I don't mean "educating" as in old school "fluff and FUD to persuade them we're best" - I mean legitimately helping them understand the subject that they're interested in, by sharing valuable knowledge and experience. Such education is our goal with really great content marketing. That's how we build trust and brand loyalty.

We know these two things are true.

Yet ironically, for all the innovation we've seen in marketing in recent years, there are two sources of inspiration for better digital marketing that have been relatively untapped:

1. The ways in which really great salespeople build rapport with prospects.

2. The ways in which really great teachers educate their students.

Great salespeople have real dialogues with their prospects. They don't just blindly spew material at people. They ask questions. Then they ask more questions. And then, maybe, as they start to understand the real needs of the customer, they provide relevant information that will help move the buyer forward. They are wary of making quick assumptions. They don't guess. They ask. They give prospects choices and pay close attention to which ones they select. They interactively discuss useful configurations and calculations.

Great teachers engage students with interactive learning. There has been tremendous progress in modern education, from decades of research, that recognizes the benefits of active, experiential learning over purely passive, didactic learning. Great teachers don't just drop a pile of books on a student's desk or make them sit through hours of droning lectures. They incorporate constructivist learning techniques, in the right doses, to make the material they're teaching come alive in the minds of their students.

Great salespeople and great teachers are the inspiration behind marketing apps. We can create interactive content that flows more like a sales dialogue than a marketing monologue and that teaches through active learning experiences.

Innovation at the Intersection of Media, Messages, and Mechanisms

We can combine that inspiration with the incredible creative freedom that the digital environment gives us.

The image at the top of this post, shown on a smaller scale to the right, illustrates that most marketing innovation has revolved around the interplay between messages ( what we say) and media ( where and how our messages appear). The classic phrase "the medium is the message" sums up that intersection.

But there is an important third pillar to this model: mechanisms ( how it behaves). In traditional TV, print, and radio - purely passive media - there were few options for mechanisms (other than change the channel or flip the page).

Digital media, however, has nearly unlimited possibilities for interactive mechanisms. That's why this whole field was called "interactive" when it got started. Yet for most digital marketing, we've been stuck in a rut with a handful of mechanisms: click a link, navigate a menu, fill out a form, press a submit button.

The most imaginative mechanism that has revolutionized marketing in the past several years has been "sharing" - giving our visitors the ability to easily distribute our content, with their own commentary, across social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. That was a phenomenal innovation in marketing mechanisms.

But there's so much more that's possible yet.

Smartphone apps have illuminated those possibilities - and raised expectations that digital touchpoints could offer functional benefits to prospects and customers. But the explosion of new customer engagement mechanisms that have been pioneered by such apps don't have to be limited to iOS and Android. The same concepts can be applied to responsive web apps that are universally accessible. As noted in Accenture's latest report on major technology trends in 2014, From Digitally Disrupted to Digital Disrupter:
In the consumer world, application development has become the province of a new generation of developers eager to strike gold by creating the next Angry Birds or Evernote app for the mobile phone - applications that are smaller and simpler to use. That development approach is now moving into the enterprise, creating new applications for mobile, Web, and desktop platforms alike. The more quickly businesses can create and launch new applications in today's turbulent markets, the better they can innovate, collaborate, improve customer experiences, and enrich personal interactions.
The state of front-end web technology has advanced tremendously, just in the past couple of years, and makes it technically feasible to create incredibly rich, interactive web apps that look and feel and act like native apps. But these responsive web apps have a number of advantages:

No need for users to install anything - downloading a smartphone app is, frankly, like a "firewall" to engagement: you must overcome issues with trust and clutter that cause users to resist installing a native app. Responsive web apps can be seamlessly inserted anywhere into the buyer's journey without any barriers of permission.

Universal accessibility on any device - responsive web apps work across phones, tablets, laptops. The same app works everywhere - no need to deal with different versions for iOS vs. Android.

Deploy different apps for different circumstances - you don't have to boil everything down to one app. You can create as many different apps as you like to target different needs for different audiences at different stages of the buyer's journey.

100% control over the publishing process - you don't need AppStore approval to deploy a responsive web app into the world. No expensive time delays or bottlenecks with those processes. Publish an app whenever you want. And remove it from the market whenever you want too (there's nothing for users to uninstall).

The opportunities for innovation with responsive web marketing apps - this creative intersection of media, messages, and mechanisms - are tantalizing. But how do you build and deploy them? That leads me into what we're doing at my company...

Our pivot to be the world's best marketing apps platform

Everything I've described up to this point is not specific my company. (Okay, I used an example of a marketing app from my company, but that's just because it was handy and, I humbly think, kind of cool.)

Marketing apps are emerging across the industry. In fact, in my latest marketing technology landscape, I highlighted a whole cluster of "marketing apps" vendors.

Technically, you don't need a vendor to build a marketing app. In its bones, it's just a web development project. You could have your IT department or your agency build one from scratch for you. But it takes a while to build them from scratch. You have to wait until developer resources are available. It can be expensive if you're hiring an outside provider to build it. You get bogged down into issues of hosting it, maintaining it, dealing with change requests that come up three months later, etc.

In other words, one of the things that has held back development of bespoke marketing apps is that their cost has often exceeded their perceived benefit.

But a growing number of software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors are changing the economics of marketing apps - making them much more accessible to more marketing teams with fewer resources required.

There are SaaS products for very specific marketing apps. For instance, if you want to run a poll with your prospects - which is a kind of marketing app, albeit a simple and cliché one - you can use SurveyMonkey or Polldaddy. If you want to run a sweepstakes app, you might sign up with Kontest or Rafflecopter. Increasingly, many of these vendors are expanding their repertoires to offer "a collection of marketing apps in one box" - such as SnapApp, Wishpond, and Woobox.

I have a lot of respect for these competitors. Our vision, however, is quite different.

We believe that the real potential of marketing apps isn't pre-canned polls, quizzes, or contests. The bigger opportunity is to give marketers the power to create highly customized marketing apps that are hand-tailored dialogues and teaching experiences unique to their business and audience.

To enable this, we've developed a web-based marketing app studio that lets non-technical marketers design and deploy almost any kind of lightweight marketing app by assembling multi-step "flows" of rich web content that are governed by simple rules. It's a way to let non-programmers "program" a wide variety of interactive digital experiences - combining the creative freedom of a responsive web design environment with the functionality of a logic engine and a toolkit of functional app components.

It's the marketing apps equivalent of a Lego set (with a bunch of ready-made designs to get you started).

We were uniquely positioned to develop this product because we've spent the past seven years providing "flow"-oriented software for producing advanced, multi-step landing pages. This was a natural evolution of our platform - but a revolutionary way of rethinking what marketers can do with it.

I'd love to tell you more about our platform, of course, but you can visit ion interactive for more details. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I appreciate that you're here for ideas that are bigger than any one company.

I believe marketing apps are a very big idea - a key part of marketing's progression from being in the business of communications to being in the business of customer experiences.

We've bet our whole company on it.

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Why we bet our whole company on marketing apps

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Most readers of this blog know I wear two hats. I write this blog - a labor of love - but I'm also the co-founder and CTO of a marketing software company, ion interactive.

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The rise of e-commerce and its risk to retail

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The rise of e-commerce and its risk to retail

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To many in the eCommerce word, Marc Andreessen's word is gospel. His track record speaks for itself. Before the age of 35 - he had founded and sold two companies (Netscape and Loudcloud) that sold for a combined $5.6 billion. Then, on top of that he started Andreessen-Horowitz, an investment company that invested early in companies like Twitter, Foursquare, Pinterest and Skype amongst others. To say he has his finger on the pulse of what's happening is somewhat of an understatement.

So when he pronounced that "traditional retail is dead"; then it was time for all of us to sit up and take notice.

"Retail guys are going to go out of business and eCommerce will become the place everyone buys. You are not going to have a choice," he said in an interview with Sarah Lacey of PandoDaily. "We're still pre-death of retail, and we're already seeing a huge wave of growth. The best in class are going to get better and better. We [at Andreessen-Horowitz] view this as a long-term opportunity."

Andreessen is better placed than most to comment on the future of eCommerce companies. In recent years he has invested in online retailers like ShoeDazzle, Zulily and Fab as well as being a board member at eBay.

"Retail chains are a fundamentally implausible economic structure if there's a viable alternative," said Andreessen. "You combine the fixed cost of real estate with inventory, and it puts every retailer in a highly-leveraged position. Few can survive a decline of 20 to 30 percent in revenues. It just doesn't make any sense for all this stuff to sit on shelves. There is fundamentally a better model."

I'd bet on the pure plays in eCommerce," he said. "Software eats retail. My core theory is that the best software companies will win at retail, so it'll become increasingly important for these companies to have the best software programmers in the world."

Andreessen's theory is basically that the notion of "shopping for leisure" is fast coming to an end. The idea of going to a shopping mall or high street to browse and pick up a few items is fading. This is borne out by the fact that in 2013, there were more shopping malls torn down in the US than actually built. Andreessen's belief in the future of eCommerce is that for the last 30 to 40 years, retailers have tried to make the shopping experience fun and comfortable." But what is more comfortable than shopping while tucked up in bed with one eye on your favourite TV show?" asked Andreessen.

This slowdown in retail in general was echoed by someone who would be seen as entrenched in the old bricks-and-mortar regime of traditional retail - Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. December is usually a boom month for Starbucks - with city centres full of tired shoppers, Starbucks is usually there to capitalise. But last December (2013), Starbucks' results were down. Way down.

"The large slowdown we saw in the month of December in traffic was very broad-based," said Schultz in an interview with Jeff Macke of Yahoo Finance. "It wasn't unique to any particular region. It wasn't unique to any particular day-part or product set or product line. There was just fewer people out there shopping, and so fewer people for us to capture and provide some great experiences in our stores."

Now we will look at two traditional retail companies; one of whom is embracing the changes thrown up by the eCommerce revolution and one of whom is struggling with the transition.
Wal-Mart
The biggest traditional retailer in the world would seem like an odd place to start when looking at companies that are well placed to profit from the eCommerce revolution, but strangely enough, the company started by Sam Walton in 1962 has become a digital-centric company in the last few years - a move that has started to pay dividends. For years, Wal-Mart allowed its sales to be cannibalised by the likes of Amazon. Until 2011, the company's website was a joke, especially inside the likes of Amazon, who viewed Wal-Mart executives as dinosaurs.

Sri Subramaniam, was an executive involved in the overhaul of the site and he described how archaic the system was in an interview with Fast Company.

"If you used Walmart.com's old search engine to check out 'smartphones,' you'd get links to a couple of cell-phone chargers, not the iPhone. A 'cotton socks' query returned results for cotton candy and balls of yarn."

Wal-Mart turned to Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajamaran, who ran Kosmix - a search intelligence company who overhauled the website and grew conversions from 'visitors' to 'buyers' by 15 percent in under 10 months.

The overhaul team and Kosmix (which Wal-Mart purchased for $300 million) became known as 'Wal-Mart Labs' and quickly rolled out products like ShopyCat, which scans your friends' profiles to identify interesting gift ideas from their stream of likes, comments, and status updates. Shopycat then seeks out an appropriate gift for such a stoner/thinker from Walmart's product database.

WalmartLabs has also created projects that just get customers to think differently about Walmart and eCommerce, including "Get on the Shelf", an online contest for people to submit their own inventions to go on sale at Walmart. According to Fast Company "Get on the Shelf was a social marketing blockbuster, garnering more than 4,000 submissions, over one million votes, and news hits in small towns across America."

Wal-Mart still has a ways to go before it fulfils its potential as an eCommerce company, but their management are finally starting to wake up to the threat of eCommerce retailers to the old Wal-Mart model. Now though, instead of being the butt of the joke, Wal-Mart are hitting back.

"It's fun to see them trying to be us," said Walmart.com CEO Joel Anderson when talking about Amazon's plans for same-day delivery in certain US cities. "We have more than 4,000 forward-deployed fulfilment centres and we're already doing shipments from some of them. Some people call them stores."
JC Penney
With more than 1,000 stores in prime locations in malls across the US, JC Penney used to be seen as the department store for middle-income families, especially for men's and women's clothing, children's toys, and home goods.

But by 2010, the company was struggling. Losing ground to online retailers, the company turned to Ron Johnson, the man credited with leading Apple's retail growth since 2000. It was Johnson who implemented the all-white stores and was a strong advocate of Apple's rigid pricing scheme.

He wanted the Apple's products to be the same price online and in retail store so as to prevent the growing problem of 'showrooming' where customers examined a product in a store, but then went home and bought it online for a cheaper price than the store where they carried out their research.

JC Penney wanted to join the eCommerce revolution, so it did the most obvious thing in the book - it turned to a former Apple executive and hoped that that in itself would be enough. It wasn't. Not by a long shot. 17 months after being hired, with sales plummeting and losses mounting, Johnson was fired.

A large part of JC Penney's appeal was due to its innovative ways of using coupons and promotions to get customers in the door. This combined with the fact that the store applied massive discounts to a lot of its stock. Johnson decided to change the whole ethos of the store from the get-go. He eliminated the use of coupons and the seemingly indiscriminate use of discounts across the store in favour of one clear-cut, low price from the beginning.

When Johnson's reign began, six out of every ten items bought in a JC Penney store were discounted. Some items had 25 percent off, others had 75% off. Johnson saw this as a massive problem. His contempt for the practice was obvious from the outset.

"Customers come into the store, they looked at the new merchandise, and they looked at the prices," he said. "They liked the merchandise, but didn't like the price, and so they didn't buy. As a result, this new merchandise sits on the shelves. The first markdown takes place after six weeks, and only then does the merchandise begin to move. So for six weeks, not much happens. You're wasting your real estate and capital. We're not going to play this game. Why not sell at $50 right away?

For most eCommerce retailers, this is a message that would make sense. Online stores like sunglasses retailer Warby Parker have a set price for their glasses and customers like this openness and clarity. But there is a vast difference between a savvy online shopper and the type of customer who goes to a department store looking for a bargain.

"There's a thrill involved in finding an item on a sale rail in just your size when there's only one left," said Jim Aisner of Harvard Business School. "I thought people were just tired of coupons and all this stuff," Johnson told Businessweek. "The reality is all of the couponing we did, there were a certain part of the customers that loved that. They gravitated to stores that competed that way. So our core customer, I think, was much more dependent and enjoyed coupons more than I understood."
Overview
Johnson's tale was one that all traditional retailers that are considering a move into eCommerce should be cognisant of. Simply imposing an eCommerce mentality onto a company isn't enough. You need to respect and consider what made the company a viable traditional model and then carry that into the online sphere.

Perhaps the most informative point to be gained from Johnson's experience was revealed when a Businessweek reporter asked him why he didn't try out new pricing strategies on a limited test basis. Johnson shot down the idea, responding, "We didn't test at Apple."

This arrogance was perhaps the main reason Johnson failed. Just because a model suited one company, it is not necessarily guaranteed to fit every company. Marc Andreessen may well be right, retail as we know it may well be dying, but eCommerce will probably complement, as opposed to supplant traditional retail.

"Multi-channel retailing" is one of those horrible jargony management phrases that crop up in boring business books and is spouted about as the future of retailing. (Surely whoever came up with the concept that was meant to save retailing would know the importance of branding and would have came up with a better name than the insomnia curing multi-channel retailing?)

Whatever it is called, it basically means that your online presence should match your traditional presence. Customers shouldn't prefer your store or your website, both should work together. Mark Cuban, like Marc Andreessen, is one of the world's top tech investors. Probably most famous for being the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks, he summed up the one lesson any eCommerce retailer should be following.

"Make your product easier to buy than your competition," he said. "Or you will find your customers buying from them, not you."

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The Rise of eCommerce and the Risk to Retail

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To many in the eCommerce word, Marc Andreessen's word is gospel. His track record speaks for itself. Before the age of 35 - he had founded and sold two companies (Netscape and Loudcloud) that sold for a combined $5.6 billion.

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Bain research: mobile payments next logical step for banks

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Bain research: mobile payments next logical step for banks

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A vision of the future from those most likely to invent it

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A vision of the future from those most likely to invent it

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What far-off technology will be commonplace in a decade?

"Implantable chips that monitor the number of steps we take, hours we sleep, all of our vital signs, blood chemistry and beyond. The chip data will be used to adjust our medications, offer suggestions to change our behavior and automatically send an ambulance -- self-driving, of course."

What technology will seem antiquated in a decade?

"Your charger. All of our devices should be able to wirelessly charge. Wireless power will also be a necessity in developing countries."

Smartphones. Instead, people will wear computers in the form of contact lenses, bracelets or clothing and "walk up to any wall and instantly have full access to all of your cloud data and services."

What is the next issue to undergo a sea change in social acceptance?

What is tech's role in reducing income inequality?

Graphic by Jennifer Daniel and Shan Carter

Claire Cain Miller writes about tech for The Upshot, a New York Times venture that presents news, analysis and graphics about politics and policy. Chi Birmingham is an illustrator.

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A Vision of the Future From Those Likely to Invent It

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What far-off technology will be commonplace in a decade? "Implantable chips that monitor the number of steps we take, hours we sleep, all of our vital signs, blood chemistry and beyond. The chip data will be used to adjust our medications, offer suggestions to change our behavior and automatically send an ambulance -- self-driving, of course."

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Brands assessing implications of Google EU ruling

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Brands assessing implications of Google EU ruling

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BRUSSELS: Online publishers and brands are considering the implications of a ruling by the European Court of Justice that requires internet giant Google to amend some search results if requested by individuals.

While the particular case referred to a Spanish doctor's wish to have removed a link to a newspaper report from 16 years ago that outlined his debt problems, the effects are likely to be far reaching as the ruling effectively brings search engines within the confines of European data protection laws rather than treating them as neutral intermediaries.

Most obviously, search engines could be swamped by European citizens demanding the removal of links to personal data deemed to be "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant".

The Financial Times noted, however, that the ruling could also apply to searches on social media and include the deletion of links to bad reviews.

James Thomlinson, partner and managing director at international PR agency Bell Pottinger Wired, told Marketing the ruling created a messy situation for the entire communications industry.

"The lack of clarity from the ECJ on relevancy of results and whether or not this ruling applies to individuals in companies -- or even an entire brand's reputation -- will have lawyers up and down the country rubbing their hands in glee," he said.

Marketing Week suggested the ruling was "another step towards the greater anonymisation of online data" and said brands would have to look at adapting their targeting models.

Imminent new EU data protection legislation could also mean marketers will soon have to ask consumers to opt in to their data being used for marketing purposes. Currently they have to opt out, something they are far less likely to do.

As their options for remaining anonymous grow, Marketing Week said it made sense for marketers to "future-proof" themselves against this trend.

Data sourced from Financial Times, Marketing, Marketing Week; additional content by Warc staff

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Brands assess Google legal ruling | WARC

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BRUSSELS: Online publishers and brands are considering the implications of a ruling by the European Court of Justice that requires internet giant Google to amend some search results if requested by individuals.

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Jelly, Quora, Yahoo (sometimes to absurd ends), and others have looked to question-and-answer services as a way to boost user engagement and advance conversations. Now another player could be entering the fray: Pinterest has confirmed to us it is testing out a new Q&A feature, too.

"We're always gathering feedback from Pinners to make Pins more useful," a spokesperson tells us. "We're currently testing the ability to ask and answer questions in a more structured way on Pins, with a small group of Pinners. We don't have any additional details to share at this time, but we'll keep you posted."

The feature was first pointed out to us by Tom Waddington - a UK-based developer and designer who has been known to spot other upcoming social network developments by looking behind the scenes.

In a blog post, he writes that he got his first hint of it while digging through the Pinterest analytics for Cut Out + Keep, a craft tutorial community that he co-founded, and noticing a new option called "Questions."

It linked only to a blank page with a Questions tab:

But it tipped him off to look through Pinterest's code to see what else was there. "I took a look through the code, and found a whole load of references to a feature that looks almost ready for release," he writes.

There is code in there for users ask questions about the pins that they are viewing, and code for the original Pinner to get a notification to answer the question. Among the 100 or so references to Questions is code for Questions to appear on the web site, as well as iOS and Android apps.

(It's not clear whether that "original" will be the person you follow who posted something, the very first person to pin something to Pinterest, or even the originator of the image in question - eg, Who will answer my questions about pickling rainbow chard: my friend Jacqueline, her connection Mattie, or theyummybits.com?)

And it looks like Pinterest will try to detect whether a user is asking a question rather than simply commenting, and will be prompted to confirm that is indeed what it is. "All the usual functions to delete, report and like/unlike questions are present in the code," he writes.

Of course, it's not a given that just because you can use social networks or any website to answer questions, you will. Facebook had high hopes for its own Questions feature, which lasted for all of two years before it started to shut most of the functionality down. Google Answers also been retired. It will be worth watching how new app Jelly - perhaps a closer comparison to Pinterest's Q&A ethos, given the visual anchor - will develop longer term with user traction.

On the other hand, what's interesting about a Q&A feature is that it is one more way, in addition to basic comments, that users will be able to put more text into a site that has been largely built around images.

It will also encourage people to engage more with the content - engagement being one of the key metrics for social media sites to demonstrate how attentive their monthly active users really are.

It also helps pin down (pun!) and make more useful something that people have already been doing on the site informally: asking questions through the comments section. If you are a brand, this could end up being a golden opportunity to connect with customers. It's the more open-ended counterpart compared to some of the other features like Guided Search, which "steers" you in certain directions as it focuses your searches on the site.

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Ask Pinterest Anything? Site Tests Q&A Feature

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Jelly, Quora, Yahoo (sometimes to absurd ends), and others have looked to question-and-answer services as a way to boost user engagement and advance conversations. Now another player could be entering the fray: Pinterest has confirmed to us it is testing out a new Q&A feature, too. "We're...

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There are few things that can galvanize the news world's attention like a change in leadership atop The New York Times. Jill Abramson's ouster yesterday afternoon probably reduced American newsroom productivity enough to skew this quarter's GDP numbers.

We don't typically write about intra-newsroom politics at Nieman Lab, leaving that to Manhattan's very capable cadre of media reporters. But Abramson's removal and Dean Baquet's ascent has apparently inspired someone inside the Times to leak one of the most remarkable documents I've seen in my years running the Lab, to Myles Tanzer at BuzzFeed. It's the full report of the newsroom innovation team that was given six full months to ask big questions about the Times' digital strategy. (A summary version of it was leaked last week, but this is the big kahuna.)

And that is something we're interested in here - one of the world's leading news organizations, giving itself a rigorous self-examination. I've spoken with multiple digital-savvy Times staffers in recent days who described the report with words like "transformative" and "incredibly important" and "a big big moment for the future of the Times." One admitted crying while reading it because it surfaced so many issues about Times culture that digital types have been struggling to overcome for years.

I confess I didn't feel anything quite so revelatory when I read last week's leaked version - which read like an indoor-voice summary, expected and designed to be leaked to the broader world. This fuller version is quite different - it's raw. (Or at least as raw as digital strategy documents can get.) You can sense the frayed nerves and the frustration at a newsroom that is, for all its digital successes, still in many ways oriented toward an old model. It's journalists turning their own reporting skills on themselves.

When last week's version was sent out to the newsroom, a joint Abramson/Baquet memo (their last together?) expressed support for its findings. ("The masthead embraces the committee's key recommendations.") But I have to say, reading that memo and then the full report, it still feels like there's a big gap between leadership and the digital troops. Some of that could, understandably, be management's desire not to air its dirtiest laundry in a newsroom-wide memo. But the tone of the memo is we're almost there! The tone of the report is these people don't realize how far away we are.

Our media reporter friends are still chasing down why Jill Abramson was fired, and I'm sure in the coming days and weeks, our knowledge of that will grow clearer. The earliest reporting, at least, doesn't seem to suggest lack of digital vision as a leading significant factor. Baquet had made his biggest marks as an excellent reporter, editor, and manager, not as an online innovator. A big leadership change can sometimes lead to a report like this being put on the shelf; let's hope that doesn't happen here.

As bad as this report makes parts of the Times' culture seem, there are two significant reasons for optimism.

First: So much of the digital work of The New York Times is so damned good, despite all the roadblocks detailed here. Take those barriers away and think what they could do.

And second: While it was a group effort - full list on page 3 here - the leader of this committee was Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the publisher's son and a potential heir to the throne, either when his father retires in a few years or sometime thereafter. His involvement in this report shows that he understands the issues facing the institution. That speaks well for the Times' future.

I asked our three wonderful Nieman Lab staffers - Justin Ellis, Caroline O'Donovan, and Joseph Lichterman - to read through the report and pick out the most important highlights. Those are below.

They will be of interest to Times watchers, of course, but it's much more important that they reach a broader audience. I doubt there is a newsroom in the world that wouldn't benefit from understanding the cultural issues laid out below.

If you have time, read the full report. If not, this'll do in a pinch. (Note: Since originally publishing this piece, I've swapped out the BuzzFeed leaked version of the report for Mashable's more complete and less zine-like copy.)

The value of the homepage is decreasing. "Only a third of our readers ever visit it. And those who do visit are spending less time: page views and minutes spent per reader dropped by double-digit percentages last year." The Times must do a better job encouraging sharing of content: "But at The Times, discovery, promotion and engagement have been pushed to the margins, typically left to our business-side colleagues or handed to small teams in the newsroom. The business side still has a major role to play, but the newsroom needs to claim its seat at the table because packaging, promoting and sharing our journalism requires editorial oversight." (p. 23-25)

Michael Wertheim, former head of promotion at Upworthy, turned down a business-side job leading audience development. "He explained that for anyone in that role to succeed, the newsroom needed to be fully committed to working with the business side to grow our audience" (p. 25)

There are about 14.7 million articles in the Times' archives dating back to 1851. The Times needs to do a better job of resurfacing archival content. The report cites Gawker repackaging a 161-year-old Times story on Solomon Northup timed with the release of 12 Years A Slave. "We can be both a daily newsletter and a library - offering news every day, as well as providing context, relevance and timeless works of journalism." (p. 28)

The report proposes restructuring arts and culture stories that remain relevant long after they are initially published into guides for readers. They give an example of a reader wanting to find the Times' initial review of the play Wicked. "The best opportunities are in areas where The Times has comprehensive coverage, where information doesn't need to be updated regularly, and where competitors haven't saturated the market." They view museums, books, and theater as the best options for that. Travel and music would be more difficult, the report says. These guides should supplement, not replace current pages. (p. 29)

The Times must be willing to experiment more in terms of how it presents its content: "We must push back against our perfectionist impulses. Though our journalism always needs to be polished, our other efforts can have some rough edges as we look for new ways to reach our readers." (p. 31)

Andrew Phelps (full disclosure: a former Nieman Lab staffer) made a Flipboard magazine of the Times' best obits from 2013 on a whim. It became the best-read collection ever on Flipboard. Why wasn't the Times doing stuff like that on its own platforms, the report wondered. (p. 33)

The product and design teams are developing a collections format, and they should further consider tools to make it easier for journalists, and maybe even readers, to create collections and repackage the content. The R&D department and the new products team have built a "widget-like tool that any reporter or editor could use to drag and drop stories and photos" into a collection. Ultimately this could be something the reader even uses. (p. 34)

They experimented by repackaging old content in new formats with a collection of videos related to love on Valentine's Day and a collection of stories by Nick Kristof on sex trafficking. "The result? Both were huge hits, exclusively because our readers shared them on social." The Kristof collection page and the articles in it totaled 468,106 pageviews over six days. "Very few articles from a typical day's paper will garner this much traffic in a month." Readers spent an average of 2 minutes and 35 seconds on a Kristof story from 1996, for example. (p. 34-35)

The Times' dialect quiz was the most popular piece of content in the paper's history with more than 21 million pageviews - but projects like that and Snow Fall are not easily replicable. "We have a tendency to pour resources into big one-time projects and work through the one-time fixes needed to create them and overlook the less glamorous work of creating tools, templates and permanent fixes that cumulatively can have a bigger impact by saving our digital journalists time and elevating the whole report. We greatly undervalue replicability." They point out that competitors like Vox and BuzzFeed view innovating with their platforms as a key function and allow them to create products like BuzzFeed's quizzes - incredibly popular, but also easy to create over and over again. "We are focused on building tools to create Snow Falls every day, and getting them as close to reporters as possible," said Quartz editor Kevin Delaney. "I'd rather have a Snow Fall builder than a Snow Fall." (p. 36)

The Times is planning on creating a section of the homepage that uses reader patterns to customize a list of content that readers missed but would most likely want to see. It's being planned for the newly redesigned website and iPhone app. "Though all readers would see the same top news stories, the other articles we show them would be customized to reflect what they haven't seen." But in order to accomplish this, the newsroom must clarify how much personalization it wants on the website and on the apps; it'll be difficult to move forward without knowing that. (p. 37-38)

The report suggests creating a "follow" button that would allow readers to easily follow certain topics or columnists. What they choose to follow could be sent to a "Following Inbox." They could also have alerts sent to their phone or email. Before the website redesign, the only way readers could get notified of favorites was by email. The feature had 338,000 users and "unusually high engagement rates" even though it was hard to find and laborious to sign up for. (p. 39)

The Times is woefully behind in its tagging and structured data practices. It considered improving its tagging efforts in 2010, but the paper decided not to pursue it. "Without better tagging, we are hamstrung in our ability to allow readers to follow developing stories, discover nearby restaurants that we have reviewed or even have our photos show up on search engines." (p. 41)

Recipes were never tagged by ingredients and cooking time. Because of that, "we floundered about for 15 years trying to figure out how to create a useful recipe database." They spent "a huge sum to retroactively structure the data." Structured data problems prohibit the Times from automating the sale of photos and keep Times stories from doing as well in search rankings as they should. (p. 41)

It took seven years for the Times to begin to tag stories "September 11." They need to do a better job tagging articles together and follow a single topic or news event. "We never made a tag for Benghazi, and I wish we had because the story just won't die," Kristi Reilly of the archive, metadata, and search team said. The report cites The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Circa as outlets who the Times could emulate. (p. 41-42)

In a section addressing promotion of New York Times content - essentially, social media distribution - the report's authors survey the techniques of "competitors" and compare them to the Times' strategy. For example, at ProPublica, "that bastion of old-school journalism values," reporters have to submit 5 possible tweets when they file stories, and editors have a meeting regarding social strategy for every story package. Reuters employs two people solely to search for underperforming stories to repackage and republish. (p. 43)

The report advises that simple steps can be taken to lessen the loss of traffic to competitors: "Just adding structured data, for example, immediately increased traffic to our recipes from search engines by 52 percent." (p. 44)

The report points to organizational problems inside the company that contribute to lagging social media promotion and traffic. "Our Twitter account is run by the newsroom. Our Facebook is run by the business side," they write. (p. 45)

In addition, while many in the newsroom are under the impression that the social media team exists to promote their work, that team was in fact originally conceived of as a primarily information gathering body. (p. 45)

Their response? "Our approach would be to create an 'impact toolbox' and train an editor on each desk to use it. The toolbox would provide strategy, tactics and templates for increasing the reach of an article before and after it's published. Over time, the editor could teach others." (p. 47)

The report invests some time in highlighting the independent social media self-promotion efforts by Times reporters and staffers that have been effective. The authors specifically mention KJ Dell'Antonia, Gina Kolata, C.J. Chivers, Nick Kristof, Nick Bilton, David Carr, Charles Duhigg, and more. (p. 47)

Specifically, they point to the fact that many of their best social staffers learned those skills through the book publishing process, not in the newsroom. Their research included an experiment in identifying social influencers, both in the newsroom and outside it, prior to a story being published. The result of their experiment - getting Ashton Kutcher, who has 15.9 million followers, to retweet a Times story - was considered a success. (p. 48)

The report also singles out comments as a place where the Times nominally attempts to interact with readers. While the Times takes pride in its ability to encourage discourse while maintaining the brand by moderating its comments, the report suggests this level of engagement may not be sufficient. "Only a fraction of stories are opened for comments," they write. "Only one percent of readers write comments and only three percent of readers read comments. Our trusted-commenter system, which we hoped would increase engagement, includes just a few hundred readers." (p. 49)

The report suggests the Times consider expanding further into live events. They highlight the success media brands such as The Atlantic and The New Yorker have had with their festivals and conferences. They stress that there is enormous opportunity for both revenue and engagement in the events space for the Times. "There is no reason that the space filled by TED Talks, with tickets costing $7,500, could not have been created by the Times. 'One of our biggest concerns is that someone like The Times will start a real conference program,' said a TED executive." (p. 53)

The merging of platforms and publishers has garnered some attention in the media space lately, and the report's authors do not neglect that conversation. They look at what organizations that allow users to create content on their sites are doing, and question how the Times could develop a strategy without diluting its brand. They suggest that the Times' audience is full of educated and interesting people who could easily pen valuable content that might find enthusiasm from readers in the digital space. A new push to expand products around opinion reflects this consideration. (p. 52)

Interestingly, the report mentions that what readers see as innovation at the Times - graphics and interactives - is not reflected internally, in terms of workflow, organization, strategy, and recruitment. (p. 57)

For example, the Times fails to fully take advantage of opportunities to learn about its audience, not doing "things that our competitors do, like ask readers whether they would be willing to be contacted by reporters or if they are willing to share some basic information about their hometown, alma mater and industry so we can send them articles about those topics." (p. 54)

The leadership of the recently fired Jill Abramson is briefly mentioned, including "the significant improvement in relations between news and business under the leadership of Jill, Mark and Arthur." The authors write: "Embracing Reader Experience as an extension of the newsroom is also the next logical step in Jill's longstanding goal of creating a newsroom with fully integrated print and digital operations, since these departments have skills to build on our digital successes." (p. 61)

"The very first step," the authors write about the need for more collaboration, "should be a deliberate push to abandon our current metaphors of choice - 'The Wall' and 'Church and State' - which project an enduring need for division. Increased collaboration, done right, does not present any threat to our values of journalistic independence." (p. 61)

The report calls for increased communication and cooperation between the sections of the company they call "Reader Experience" and the newsroom. In the report, Reader Experience refers to R&D, product, technology, analytics and design. (p. 63)

Those departments are not tiny: roughly 30 people in analytics, 30 in digital design, 120 in product, and a whopping 445 in technology, with around two dozen teams of engineers. (p. 63)

Specifically, they praise the recently released Cooking vertical and the NYT Now app, which were spearheaded by Sam Sifton and Alex MacCallum and Cliff Levy and Ben French, respectively. (Other individuals mentioned include James Robinson, Aron Pilhofer, Danielle Rhoades Ha, Kelly Alfieri, and Brian Hamman.) (p. 66)

There have been significant obstacles to this kind of cooperation, however. "People say to me, 'You can't let anyone know I'm talking to you about this; it has to be under the radar,' said a leader in one Reader Experience department. 'Everyone is a little paranoid about being seen as too close to the business side.'" (p.64)

The report also describes a developer who quit after being denied a request to have developers attend brown bag lunches along with editorial staffers. This sort of rejection can make recruitment of top developers and designers a challenge. (p. 68)

The report proposed creating a newsroom strategy team to take some of the strategy work off the masthead: "The core function would be ensuring the masthead is apprised of competitors' strategies, changing technology and shifting reader behavior. The team would track projects around the company that affect our digital report, ensuring the newsroom is at the table when we need to be." (p. 71)

Even the Times, with all its staffing and other resources - its R&D lab, its mobile team, its editors focused on issues around design, digital, or new initiatives - feels like it doesn't have the time or power to get outside of the day-to-day grind of making a newspaper to think about its future. Even the mobile group doesn't have time to look at how the Times can use new technologies, the report says. "That helps explain why it took a group removed from the daily flow of the newsroom - NYT Now - to fundamentally rethink our mobile presentation." (p. 72)

"Another [desk head] suggested that the relentless work of assembling the world's best news report can also be a 'form of laziness, because it is work that is comfortable and familiar to us, that we know how to do. And it allows us to avoid the truly hard work and bigger questions about our present and our future: What shall we become. How must we change?'" (p. 72)

"'We've abdicated completely the role of strategy,' said one masthead editor. 'We just don't do strategy. The newsroom is really being dragged behind the galloping horse of the business side.'" (p. 72)

Rival publications talk to one another and share intel. New York magazine's Adam Moss said "I talk to [Nick] Denton all the time. We both talk to Jacob [Weisberg]. We're constantly telling each other what's working, what we've experimented with...About half the choices I make come about because someone from another site tells me something worked, and so we adopt it." (p. 73)

While the business side strategy team is already doing some of that work - they provided an 80-page transcript of interviews about social strategy from talking with other media companies and competitors - the masthead is disconnected from strategy talks: "In recent months, the masthead has been left out of several important studies that will affect the newsroom, including marketing-led exploration of our audience development efforts and a detailed assessment of our...capabilities and needs. In both cases our senior leaders were unaware that these conversations were happening, despite the newsroom's growing interest in both subjects." (p. 74)

The Times, like many newspapers, does not like failure. It usually doesn't like to talk about it, in public or in private. "For example, our mobile app, 'The Scoop,' and our international home page have failed to gain traction with readers, yet we still devote resources to them. We ended the Booming blog but kept its newsletter going. These ghost operations distract time, energy and resources that could be used for new projects. At the same time, we haven't tried to wring insights from these efforts. 'There were no metrics, no target, no goals to hit and no period of re-evaluation after the launch,' said a digital platforms editor, about our international home page." (p. 75)

The point of the strategy team would be to help prioritize issues that need to be fixed, as well as being able to lend a voice to problems that staff are reluctant to talk openly about. One of the biggest problems is the Times' CMS, according to the report. "But desks and producers spend countless hours on one-time fixes to the platform, rather than permanent solutions, even when it is clear the problems will emerge again and again. One senior member of the news desk said that leaders would be 'horrified' if they understood the situation." (p. 76)

One problem within the Times is consolidating innovation and experiments to a few desks, namely graphics, interactive news, social, and design. The result of this has been that individual staffers and desks, like the news desk, have not had the permission or tools to experiment on their own. The proposed strategy group would help desks work on individual experiments and find ways to replicate that elsewhere in the company. (p. 77)

In the triangle of business side, Reader Experience, and newsroom, the newsroom is often seen as defensive or risk averse. "One reason for our caution is that the newsroom tends to view questions through the lens of worst-case scenarios," the report puts it. "And the newsroom has historically reacted defensively by watering down or blocking changes, prompting a phrase that echoes almost daily around the business side: 'The newsroom would never allow that.'" (p. 78)

The big question: How can the Times become more digital while still maintaining a print presence, and what has to change? "That means aggressively questioning many of our print-based traditions and their demands on our time, and determining which can be abandoned to free up resources for digital work." (p. 82)

A big tension at the Times is what it means to be digital-first, and how the newspaper can get there. Senior editor for digital operations Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman apparently set off a bomb in the form of an email that questioned if the paper was doing enough to prepare for the future. This may not sound revolutionary, but the paper, he argued, needs to focus on digital-first reporting that later flows into a print product. "Years of private complaints around the building suddenly had a very public forum." (p. 83)

On the Michael Sam story, which was brought to the Times and ESPN, the report says the Times "package was well-executed and memorable, but some of our more digitally focused competitors got more traffic from the story than we did. If we had more of a digital-first approach, we would have developed in advance an hour-by-hour plan to expand our package of related content in order to keep readers on our site longer, and attract new ones. We should have been thinking as hard about 'second hour' stories as we do about 'second day' stories." (p. 84)

The Times' publishing schedule is out of sync with digital: "For example, the vast majority of our content is still published late in the evening, but our digital traffic is busiest early in the morning. We aim ambitious stories for Sunday because it is our largest print readership, but weekends are slowest online. Each desk labors over section fronts, but pays little attention to promoting its work on social media." (p. 86)

Why they leave: They asked 5 people who worked on digital for the Times what led them to leave - Soraya Darabi, Alice DuBois, Jonathan Ellis, Liz Heron, and Zach Wise. None said they regretted leaving. Some quotes: "I looked around the organization and saw the plum jobs - even ones with explicitly digital mandates - going to people with little experience in digital. Meanwhile, journalists with excellent digital credentials were stuck moving stories around on section fronts." (p. 88)

"When it takes 20 months to build one thing, your skill set becomes less about innovation and more about navigating bureaucracy. That means the longer you stay, the more you're doubling down on staying even longer. But if there's no leadership role to aspire to, staying too long becomes risky." (p. 88)

The Times doesn't offer much of a career path for people working on the digital side in the newsroom. And many staffers feel like their skills are either undervalued, or misunderstood. One larger problem for the Times is that there is a shortage of people in senior positions who understand digital news, which also leaves the paper not knowing who should be promoted on the digital side, the report says. "The reason producers, platform editors and developers feel dissatisfied is that they want to play creative roles, not serves roles that involve administering and fixing. It would be like reporters coming here hoping to write features but instead we ask them to spend their days editing wire stories into briefs." (p. 89)

There seems to be agreement from editors, reporters, desk editors and more that the Times spends too much time thinking about Page One. This quote from a Washington reporter helps paint a picture: "Our internal fixation on it can be unhealthy, disproportionate and ultimately counterproductive. Just think about how many points in our day are still oriented around A1 - from the 10 a.m. meeting to the summaries that reporters file in the early afternoon to the editing time that goes into those summaries to the moment the verdict is rendered at 4:30. In Washington, there's even an email that goes out to the entire bureau alerting everyone which six stories made it. That doesn't sound to me like a newsroom that's thinking enough about the web." (p. 90)

On the hiring front, the report says the Times can't simply assume people want to work for the paper. While ambitious journalists are drawn to the Times, digital talent wants the chance to create something new and experiment. "We can't pitch ourselves as a great Internet success story, selling potential hires on the satisfaction of helping transform a world-class, mission-driven organization." (p. 91)

But the report also stresses that the paper needs a broader array of digital talent, not just reporters and editors, but "technologists, user experience designers, product managers, data analysts," among them. The Times also needs to do better hiring the digitally-inclined into leadership positions rather than waiting to promote from within, the report says. When the Times promoted Aron Pilhofer and Steve Duenes to associate managing editor positions, both improved the hiring efforts on the digital side, the report says. (p. 91)

On finding and developing digital talent, the report has a variety of recommendations for things inside and outside the building, including finding ways to empower the current staff to do more, identifying the top digital talent in the newsroom and giving them opportunities. But the Times also needs to "accept that digital talent is in high demand. To hire digital talent will take more money, more persuasion and more freedom once they are within The Times - even when candidates might strike us as young or less accomplished." Another idea? Make a big splash: "Make a star hire," because top digital talent can help bring in similar-minded people. (p. 96)

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The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key documents of this media age

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There are few things that can galvanize the news world's attention like a change in leadership atop The New York Times. Jill Abramson's ouster yesterday afternoon probably reduced American newsroom productivity enough to skew this quarter's GDP numbers. We don't typically write about intra-newsroom politics at Nieman Lab, leaving that to Manhattan's very capable cadre of media reporters.

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Twitter experimenting with Mute function

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Twitter experimenting with Mute function

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One of the most-requested features for Twitter's mobile apps may be on the cusp of arriving. Some users of the company's iOS and Android clients are now seeing an option to mute accounts that they follow, preventing another user's tweets and retweets from appearing in their timeline. The user remains muted until you manually unmute them. In essence, then, the mute feature works as a kind of stealth unfollow - you won't be seeing another person's tweets, but they won't know that.

Muting is said to be among the most popular features in Tweetdeck, the business-class Twitter client that the company acquired in 2011. And there are good reasons why. Sometimes you feel pressure to follow someone for work or social reasons even though their tweets exasperate you. Sometimes a person is live-tweeting an event you could not care less about. Sometimes you're afraid that someone will spoil a TV show you plan to watch later.

Third-party Twitter clients have long supported muting. Tweetbot, for example, lets you mute accounts for various lengths of time - a day, a week, a month, or forever. It also lets you mute entire apps, so that (for example) you never have to see another Foursquare check-in on Twitter ever again. Twitter's experiment doesn't take muting quite that far. But assuming it rolls out to all users, the official Twitter mute button will be a welcome arrival to the service.
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Twitter is experimenting with a mute feature in its mobile apps

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One of the most-requested features for Twitter's mobile apps may be on the cusp of arriving. Some users of the company's iOS and Android clients are now seeing an option to mute accounts that they follow, preventing another user's tweets and retweets from appearing in their timeline.