When Mass Marketing Dies

From Seth Godin's Meatball Mondae (#2):

"The Meatball Sundae is an idea that's possibly even bigger than that one. When mass marketing dies, the future of the companies that embrace this approach dies too."

The bodies are already piling up: the recording industry, the movie industry, broadcast TV, radio, newspapers, are just the beginning.

A recent Wall Street Journal story (Wal-Mart Era Wanes Amid Big Shifts in Retail) offers evidence of how the giant retailer is losing ground in a rapidly evolving marketplace:

"[T]he Internet is transforming the retail definition of scale. The once-stunning compilation of 142,000 items found in a Wal-Mart supercenter doesn't seem so vast alongside the millions of products available on the Internet. At the same time, the cost of creating and sustaining a national brand is rising because of media fragmentation. Niche brands, created by Internet word of mouth, are winning shelf space and sapping profits required to fund big brands' advertising. Manufacturers such as Apple Inc. and Phillips-Van Heusen Corp., lacking the retail distribution or presentation they crave, are opening their own stores. One result is that retail giants hold less sway over their customers -- and over their suppliers."

Godin's insightful point is that it will take more than a change in marketing tools or strategy to adapt to the new business ecosystem. Companies have to actually evolve, not just change their stories.

The Wisdom of Penis-Obsessed Crowds

I subscribe to Yahoo's Most Emailed News RSS feed because it constitutes a reader-edited newspaper. I figure any story readers will actually take the time to email to someone is probably worth a glance. But sometimes the mix of stories is more interesting than the stories themselves.

For instance, over the last couple of days a theme has emerged. Consider the #3 story:

Woman sets fire to ex-husband's penis - Yahoo! News: "A woman set fire to her ex-husband's penis as he sat naked watching television and drinking vodka, Moscow police said Wednesday."

And here's the #5 story:

British dwarf's penis gets stuck to hoover - Yahoo! News "A dwarf performer at the Edinburgh fringe festival had to be rushed to hospital after his penis got stuck to a vacuum cleaner during an act that went horribly awry."

So maybe Yahoo needs a Penis News feed...

It's interesting to compare the stories on the Most Emailed feed with those on the Most Viewed feed. For instance, as I write this, the #1 Most Emailed story is about how moose burps contribute to global warming. Contrast that with the #1 Most Viewed story, about the latest efforts to detect signs of life in the Utah coal mine disaster.

If there's a common quality to the Most Emailed stories, it's that they are generally of an off-beat, if not outright upbeat nature. So on a collective basis it appears that readers filter out the most depressing or disturbing stories in favor of those that are the most entertaining. And why not -- bad news isn't difficult to find.

For Cities, Is Bigger Better?

Mhari Saito's article from NewsVOA.com describes an interesting application of Smallification:

The plan sounds simple, but Mayor Jay Williams says it's actually pretty radical. "I know for mayors, there are these magical round numbers," he says, "100,000 sounds great and somehow puts you in a different category, but why not be a city of 80 or 85,000 that offers a quality of life that allows you to compete?"

Outsourcing has brought greater efficiency to many companies by allowing them to concentrate on core capabilities. Similarly, there is mass migration underway among large corporations toward service-oriented architecture, a concept that deconstructs monolithic enterprise applications into smaller, stand-alone chunks of functionality. These chunks can be easily shared and reused across the enterprise to create "mash-up" applications.

The common theme here is the recognition that going smaller made more sense -- and ultimately more money -- in a networked, globalized marketplace. Mayor Williams' plans, as reported in Saito's article, reflect an understanding of the kind of evolution that large entities must undergo in order to survive the economic realities of a world that bears little resemblance to world that existed when the Rust Belt thrived

In a globalized, information-driven economy, where geographic location is irrelevant, quality of life is the only issue that really matters. When information workers can do their jobs anywhere, the decision about where to live will be based entirely on the livability of cities and individual communities. In that decision, size is little more than an aesthetic consideration.

Thanks to Ed Morrison's post on Brewed Fresh Daily for the pointer to the NewsVOA.com article.

Why SOA -- or something like it -- is important

Lev Gonick is the VP of Information Services for Case Western Reserve University and serves on the board of the OneCleveland initiative.

In a recent blog post on the the future of my favorite Rust Belt city, Gonick offers this assessment of how the digital world we thought we knew is in the midst of a massive upheaval:

For this generation, empowered by pervasive access, the internet has moved beyond a network of computers. It is, not to sound a cliché, a network of people. All over the world, more than 1 billion people are becoming empowered consumers, co-creating, collaborating, communicating and creating a global web 2.0. It took 15 years to reach the first billion internet users. The next billion to be connected to the Net will take only half as long and the impact will be powerful. Are we ready? This is a generation for whom email is passé, creating web pages are what your mother or father did, dial up is the equivalent for them as the horse and buggy for people of my generation. There are nearly 100,000 podcasts in iTunes. YouTube has over 100 million videos watched daily representing more than 60% of all videos watched on line. There are more than 60 million blogs with over 1.3 million entries and another 100,000 new bloggers being added to the rank of the self authoring voices on the web. Myspace has over 100 million accounts, and Flickr, the web 2.0 community's archive of community photographs has more than 4 million users.

The word "agility" gets tossed around so much in the discussion of SOA that it has lost its meaning. That's too bad, since the ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world will be an ever more important survival skill for any business. Anyone with a stake in the development and application of software will do well to keep that in mind. Maintaining the status quo is a tar pit.

Can the music industry sue its way to profit? - Los Angeles Times

The LA Times recently ran a fascinating op-ed series that pitted Radio and Internet Newsletter publisher Kurt Hansen against Jay Rosenthal, a partner with the Washington DC law firm Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe, an attorney for the Recording Artists' Coalition, and a member of the board for SoundExchange.

The final installment in the series, Can the music industry sue its way to profit?, deals with the pending massive increase in royalties to be levied on Internet broadcasters. Rosenthal's latest contribution includes this glaring example of the industry's obstinate refusal to acknowledge its utter cluelessness and obsolescence:

And now the question is why we don't allow webcasters to do the same thing as Napster and Grokster, but without protest. We should just back off. We should allow them to use the music without payment, perhaps calling it a form of "fair use" or rationalize it as promotion—which will surely result in an explosion of music sales or increased touring revenue or loads of merchandise sales or whatever.

The entire series is well worth reading.