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“If you have mastered the blogging paradigm, have made your blog an authority and a reliable source of information, commentary or news in your selected field(/s) of interest, it is about time to “scale yourself up” - Work Less and Look More At The Bigger Picture (= See the Future). ”
(Source: MasterNewMedia, 2006)

Photo credit: Solarseven

I have first thought about newsmastering and newsradars over four years ago, in 2004, when RSS feeds were taking off like wildfire in the early adopter community. As I had been using them for many months already, I had strong feelings against what Robert Scoble was promoting at the time, trumpeting his ability to subscribe and follow to over a thousand different RSS feeds.

Scaling yourself up means transforming your role from one of contributor, writer to one that is more focused on being a filter/collector/aggregator of news from other sources.

Newsmastering is a new and emerging skill that involves gathering, filtering and selecting from the chaos of information that saturates the internet, and delivering the resulting news feed to niche-targeted audiences.

The internet is so vast, that finding what you are looking for is becoming increasingly difficult. Google searches, however well refined, can produce hundreds of thousands of results.

With the amount of news and information arriving to us daily, this is a space that someone will need to fill in any case. The value provided to others by having someone filter and select ahead of them relevant news fitting a specific topic/ theme will increase its value by orders of magnitude in the near future.

And while it takes really no special cognitive skill the process of subscribing to so many feeds, you can easily imagine the result of such an approach. You need more time to scan / browse all feeds, you have less time for inspecting each one item, and as a consequence the quality of information gathering and analysis you can perform goes down with each new feed you add (unless you have unlimited time in your normal days).

If you missed my past writings on the topic of newsmastering, I am just going to provide you with a short refresher intro to what RSS newsmastering and newsradars are all about.

Here the details:

What Is NewsMastering

Newsmastering is the process by which a human being identifies, aggregates, hand-picks, edits and republishes a highly-focused, thematic news via RSS. Newsmastering allows dedicated news editors (newsmasters) to remix and contextualize the existing tsunami of breaking news for very specific audiences in one thousand and more ways.

Can you be more specific?

Sure.

What do print newspapers do? They gather stories from newswire feeds to which they subscribe to and pick up selected stories that fit their readership and rewrite them in their newspaper style and format. Additionally newspaper editors pick up news stories to cover from other newspapers (very much) as well as from their own direct sources, which pass to them specific news tips and pointers.

What I have named “Newsmastering” is a process by which you do something very similar to the above although in a fully virtual newsroom (your computer) and with the speed and efficiency that new media tools can afford you.

So a newsmaster wanting to provide coverage on a specific topic / industry / issue would basically do the following:

1. Research

Search and identify a good number of reliable news and content sources on the very topic of interest - gathering of RSS feed or creation of custom RSS feed for them when not available (Dapper is a good tool to do that but there are other ones too)

2. RSS Feed Creation

Create of a number of RSS feeds based on custom “persistent searches” on the different content areas of the Internet (blogosphere, web, news, directories, forums, social media, etc.) to scan wider and the deeper the Internet for relevant stories on your topic.

3. Aggregation

Aggregate of all the above-created RSS feeds into one “master” raw news feed, in which all content coming from all the RSS feeds you have identified and created is mixed into one chronological stream.

4. Filtering

Filter out duplicate content, spam, news in other languages and other non-relevant or must-be-excluded news content.

5. News Selection and Editing

Select like a DJ the best and most relevant news stories for your readership. Save them a huge amount of browsing time while trying to provide them always with relevant stories from new alternative sources. The editing part may consist only in the fixing of badly formatted stories, titles, or in the minor editing of news descriptions.

6. Syndication - Publishing of Newsradar

Publish, and re-distribute your final product as a content newsradar on a specific topic. Integrate it on your site home page or internal side columns and offer the opportunity for other sites in related fields to also re-use it and include it in their pages.

In summary: Newsmastering is the ability to identify, select, aggregate, filter and distribute/ publish news and information on very specific themes / topics.

What’s The Big Deal? Role / Value of Newsmastering

The key value of newsmastering is in understanding its role not as an opportunity to for easy and indiscriminate syndication of other people’s content but as a missing vital role for the social network to scale its need to make sense of the huge amount of information it creates.

In other words: you and I are under a tsunami of information coming at us. It increases day by day and shows no signs of stopping. The number of interesting sources and blogs we like to follow increases daily and so the time required then to separate what is relevant to us from what is not.

The newsmaster plays a vital role in this information economy. It saves you from having to go out and check all of the relevant news sources that publish news that may interest you. SHe acts as a filter and saves you from reading ten stories from Techcrunch or Mashable when there is only one from each that is relevant to your specific audience.

The unique value that the newsmaster brings into the information economy equation is the more formal acknowledgement and introduction of a human-based news filtering into the news distribution mechanism. The newsmaster helps the system scale, provides higher quality and more relevant content to be accessible by a greater number of people, does the dirty job of categorizing, ordering and separating news according to specific audiences and interests.

My Case

For example, in my case here at Master New Media, I and the other newsmasters in my team work hard at one very specific goal: finding breaking news stories, resources and new tools that are specifically relevant to people who want to be professional web publishers.

When in the news selection session I look at that infinite stream of news in front of my eyes, the only key criteria I have for hand-picking relevant news for my readers is asking myself: how is this story relevant to someone who badly wants to improve its online communication skills? Is this just another cool item, is this something that appeals to me (and not to my readers) or is this story specifically relevant for my readers? If it is, I hand-pick that news and include it for my readers. If not, I’ll use it for something else, but I will not dilute my newsradar focus and quality selection just to have more stuff.

See, that is exactly what Techcrunch and Mashable do. They give you tons of great stuff, but the focus, the thread line that pulls it all together is very, very broad. Whatever falls under web 2.0, social networking, new media and technology they cover.

What would be the benefit for my readers, if I cater to an audience of people who want to learn more about professional web publishing, that I tell them about each new web 2.0 tool that comes out or about the new 5 million dollar financing round that a new social media company has just closed? Unless you are in the business of making business out of other web companies I would not think this stuff would be of much use to you in the real world.

Isn’t Normal Blogging Already A Form Of Newsmastering?

Well, you may say, “but isn’t this what most tech and media bloggers do?”

Most tech and media bloggers try to make as many news into their own stories to gain extra page views, visibility and traffic. They are just echoing the PR news machine. Nothing more.

The exception to this are link posts and link blogs in which straight lists of interesting news stories are shared publicly by an author.

See, you really don’t need to make the story yours if your goal is to gain extra value and credibility to your audience.

Who do you perceive as having a greater command of a topic? Someone who writes a news story for a news company or someone who picks up the best news from all of the authors of all the news companies?

If you are great at finding some the most interesting news in your field, why not make a valuable content resource by publishing / sharing it as an actual news feed? That is what I would call a newsradar.

Think about it. This is an extremely valuable news service you can give to your readers. If they like the news you select for them, they are going to come back to you to get more of them.

What Is A Newsradar

A newsradar is an aggregated set of RSS news feeds on one specific topic.

I have chosen this name to describe the fact that such a feed scans the Internet for relevant, compliant news and as a consequence allows to track and closely monitor any specific topic, product, event, person or brand that gets mentioned on the Internet (even when, the source does not publish an RSS feed.)

You can have a newsradar on just about any topic.

Actually there are a number of companies that have created and used newsradars to enhance the value of the information they provide to their customers. Most do not call them news radars, but what they do is exactky what I have described for you here.

The difficult part in creating effective newsradars is that they require some time to be setup, good knowledge of the field to be covered and personal time by a competent person to maintain them. Rare traits to bring together, believe me. And one more reason why newsmastering is a valuable opportunity for creating a marketing advantage over competitors if you are in the position to do so.

How Can You Create A Newsradar

Anyone can create a newsradar by utilizing any software or web service that allows both the aggregation and manual filtering of multiple RSS feeds into one. This means that not only the service you use must allow you to subscribe easily and mix together any number of different RSS feeds, the same tool must also allow you to play the role of the news jockey who selects, orders, remixes and plays the best and most relevant news coming under his specific area of focus.

There are now very many tools that allow you to do this effectively. I only recommend the ones that I know and have used and in this light I have three basic ones that you can consider using:

a) Google Reader

Google Reader is a web-based RSSreader which allows you to subscribe to all the RSS feeds you want and see them as one stream of news inside your browser. By utilizing Google Reader “Share” function you can create a news RSS feed can be created that will include only the specific news stories you have selected to “share”. This gives you effectively the basic newsmastering ability to choose sources, aggregate and then play the news editor by selecting only the ones to publish in your news stream. Simple, free and easy.

b) BlogBridge

Blogbridge is a great cross-platform open-source RSS feed reader, aggregator and publisher. It can hook up directly to your existing blog publishing system to create a seamless bridge between your news production and your more traditional site publishing chores. BlogBridge has a cool interface, many valuable features and great support. Read more about BlogBridge newsmastering potential and other related newsmastering services such the BlogBridge Feed Library (this remains a cool idea to further cultivate).

c) MySyndicaat

MySyndicaat is the most sophisticated and powerful one though it doesn’t come without its own idyiosyncracies and limitations. Not an easy to use tool, as it requires some getting used to, MySyndicaat has some really powerful functions and it is targeted at professional news publishers who want a powerful and scalable corporate-grade tool to manage all of their news aggregation and republishing. To get a free account you need to contact gianni [at] kipcast (mentioning you have read this news on Robin Good’ site) and provide some good reasons for which they should give you an account (they are not interested anymore in freewheelers and are activately marketing to serious news publishers).

If you want to know more about the tools and techniques that expert newsmasters use check Marjolein Hoekstra of http://cleverclogs.org/CleverClogs (I now realize should have included her in the list of past MasterNewMedia glories in my internship article the other day, as I can’t miss seeing how much Marjolein has picked up from his internship / collaboration experience at MasterNewMedia) and John Tropea of Library Clips blogs who have long surpassed me in their competence and familiarity with such tools.

What Is A Newsmaster

We need something of an entirely new order of magnitude to manage all of this information. Search engines, open directories, and millions of bloggers are not enough.

We need a multi-layered, self-organizing approach that allows the load to be highly distributed and the focus and depth to be guaranteed by the combined result of many highly focused individual efforts.

As Stephen Downes correctly explained: “The layered mechanism works because at no point is the entire weight of the filtering process concentrated in a single individual or a single resource.

The network can and will do the rest.”

The newsmaster is a like a disc-jockey for the news. It manually selects the best and most relevant news stories according to a specific theme / focus.

A newsmaster is anyone who while utilizing automatic RSS aggregation and filtering tools acts a news curator, digest editor in hand-picking and selecting exclusively the stories, coming from external news sources, that are particularly relevant to his audience.

Difference Between Automatic Aggregation and Newsmastering

Automatic aggregation and filtering of news can be applied only to the most basic part of a newsmaster workflow. The real added value is specifically in the ability of the newsmaster to manually pick the very best and most relevant stories for its target audience. This is why newsmastering is so valuable to those publishers who address a very specific market niche and have invested significant time in profiling their audience characteristics, interests and news needs. To republish cool breaking news from a broad spectrum of sources offers little or no value to your reader as most everyone has already identified broad, mainstream news sources which serve reliably that type of content.

Techmeme is an automatic aggregation and filtering web new service which is very popular but which covers a very wide range of technology and media related news while basing its news selection algorhithms more on popularity (which news have more of a news chamber effect) than on originality, relevance (too broad an audience) or inherent information quality. You just need a live human being to do that.

Linkblogs Are A Primitive Form of Newsradars

Link blogs, linkrolls, daily link lists, linkstreams or collected selection of links, a content many bloggers and small web publishers like to put out (especially on weekends) is a primitive form of newsmastering itself.

In many cases small publishers create link blogs because of the limited opportunity they have to give coverage to interesting news and announcements they run into during their news gathering and reading tasks. In order not to waste such relevant content encountered many web publishers put out short blog posts in which they include a short list of titles and links they have run into during their online wanderings. Morale: the interesting news found don’t go lost and can be used as a valuable content asset for the publisher audience.

Newsmastering is just the formalization of the linkblog attitude into a systematic, daily news selection and curation process that allows the publisher to create a highly customized news content stream. Instead of a post containing a bunch of links, you create a news feed, which if updated regularly, can have its own permanent space on your web site.

Want To Know More? Ask!

Of course there is a lot more to say about newsmastering and newsradars.

For example the whole topic of how to identify and create a cool pool of news sources it’s worth a whole discussion, as much as how to create and utilize the power of “persistent searches” to be alerted of breaking news on specific topics and to discover new unknown but relevant sources.

Want to know more? Not clear about some of the aspects of newsmastering? Know of a specific tool that could be helpful to create effective newsradars? Have some great example of newsmastering to show?

In each and every case use the comments section here below and contribute your own ideas and suggestions. I’ll be happy to reply and comment back at every opportunity you give me.

Originally written by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on August 15th 2008 as “What Is Newsmastering And What Are Newsradars? RSS News Aggregation And Re-Publishing For Beginners”

The Future of Media Report 2008, released less than 10 days ago at the Future of Media Summit, is a conceptual framework that enables those interested in the future of media to see with greater clarity the changes, trends and transformations that are revolutionizing the media universe.

What you are witnessing now and for the first time in man’s history is the transformation of companies, markets and even individuals into full media realities. “Today almost every business and social activity is a form of media. ” writes Ross Dawson in this report.

It is in the understanding of how the changes and innovations you and I are seeing today that one can build an effective media strategy for tomorrow. It is by understanding first the value and application of such new media trends, such as social networks or grassroots generated content, that one can best leverage, limit or even outlaw their use if they do not fit, enhance or complement your own communication, marketing and business goals.

It is not by jumping on every single train that comes by whistling that you can ever get to paradise. It is rather by finding where and what appearance your paradise has that you can come to eventually pick up the right train and station to get there.

Standards, Relationships, Connectivity, Interfaces, Content, and Services: these, according to this Future of Media report, are the key fundamental elements at work inside new knowledge economy. If you can ride them somehow, and use them constructively to develop more and better relationships with your own customers, you may be seeding the most fertile seeds for a long, profitable and successful media future.

Here all the details:

Future Of Media Report 2008

by Ross Dawson

We are entering the media economy. The traditional boundaries of the media and entertainment industry have become meaningless. Today almost every business and social activity is a form of media.

An increasing proportion of our social interactions happen across media channels.Every organization is now a media entity, engaged in creating and disseminating messages among its staff, customers, and partners to achieve business objectives.

As the physical economy becomes marginalized and economic value becomes centered on the virtual, media encompasses almost everything.

At the same time, many media organizations are experiencing severe challenges, as content proliferates, audiences change behaviors, advertising revenue erodes, and new competitors emerge. Others are prospering as they tap swiftly growing sectors, leverage amateur content creation, tap the power of social networks, and scale production costs. Meanwhile adjacent industries such as telecom, financial services, mobile phones, consumer electronics, professional services, and even automobile are becoming media participants.

Each year Future Exploration Network runs the Future of Media Summit, linking Silicon Valley and Sydney with video and cross-continental discussions, and launches an accompanying report.

The striking impact of the 2006 and 2007 Future of Media Reports means this year’s report has a lot to live up to. We are confident the new frameworks and ideas we are contributing will again provide substantial value.

Over the last years we have helped many media organizations develop and implement effective strategies. We thrive on helping companies to create the future of media. However it is also exciting to take these issues and conversations into a broader sphere. Welcome to the conversation.

Media: a Growth Market

Media, entertainment, and related industries are positioned at the center of massive global growth.

The current positioning of some media companies in a rapidly changing market means they are not experiencing this upside. Others are doing fabulously well in tapping people’s almost insatiable desire for content and connection. In this report we explore the growth and opportunities available to all participants in the vast landscape which is media.

Future of Media: Strategy Tools

Click to enlarge

Flow Economy Framework

Finite players play within boundaries, infinite players play with boundaries.
(James Carse)

The Flow Economy Framework encompasses all activity based on the flow of information and ideas. The diagram shows its six elements: Standards, Relationships, Connectivity, Interfaces, Content, and Services. All six elements are required to deliver value to customers. Each of these elements can be run as a stand-alone business. However the greatest value is unlocked in how they are combined.

Only a handful of companies have the capacity to play in all six elements of the flow economy, and even then they must rely heavily on alliances. The heart of strategy in the flow economy is in leveraging existing strengths to move into a higher-value strategic position. As the landscape develops, this repositioning is a continuous process.

Three Examples: Strategic Repositioning in the Flow Economy

1. Apple

Apple has proved very effective at repositioning itself across the flow economy. Most prominently, it has used its strong positioning in Interfaces (e.g. iPod, Mac) to shift to Content (iTunes).

It has also built direct Relationships with its iTunes customers whereas before distributors held all customer relationships. Apple’s adoption AAC as the default music encoding Standard on iTunes provided some lock-in as it was a less common though still open standard.

For iPhone it has selected and generated revenue from selected partners for Connectivity (AT&T in the US), and is now taking part of the Service revenue for iPhone apps provided by a broader developer community.

2. British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB)

BSkyB began with part ownership of the satellites providing the Connectivity for TV delivery, creating and buying Content, and using these to create customer Relationships. In the early 1990s it sold its satellite ownership and since then has used the Astra satellites to provide the necessary Connectivity.

Its exclusive live TV Content rights for the FA Premier League since 1992 has been leveraged into strong subscriber growth and many new Relationships. In 2001 BSkyB introduced Sky+, a combination set-top box and digital video recorder, providing an Interface to generate greater revenue and build more entrenched Relationships.

BSkyB is now shifting into new Services including broadband and phone. It is also distributing its Content over new channels including mobile using Sky Anytime.

3. NTT DoCoMo

The flow economy framework is especially relevant to telecoms providers that need to reposition from commoditized Connectivity into higher value spaces.

DoCoMo has distinguished itself by developing Standards including W-CDMA and i-mode, providing it with local market diferentiation and access to international markets.

Its alliances with phone manufacturers allow it to control the Interfaces used by its customers, creating more embedded Relationships. i-mode’s staggering success after its 1999 launch was largely attributable to its model of allowing third-party Content and Services providers access to the system, with just a low margin for DoCoMo.

DoCoMo is now providing financial Services through its DCMX mobile credit cards, and, as other mobile companies, seeking to leverage its existing customer Interfaces to provide search functionality.

Flow Economy Strategy Process - Summary

1) Define Your Space

• What is the “total customer experience” you participate in creating?
• Which elements of the flow economy do you currently provide within this?
• Who provides the other flow economy elements required?
• What is your current relationship with these providers?

2) Redefine Your Space

• What is driving change in the low of information and value in the space?
• How can you redefine the total customer experience?
• What are competitive drivers within each of the low elements required?
• How can you leverage your existing positioning into new sources of revenue or
  value?

3) Reposition

• Build internal capabilities.
• Acquire existing businesses.
• License content or technology.
• Build alliances with complementary firms.
• Outsource business activities.

Scenario Planning for Media

In uncertain times, don’t try to predict the future. Systematically explore possible futures.
(Ross Dawson)

Classic scenario planning is one of the most powerful tools for rigorous long-term strategy development in the media industry. In the face of multiple uncertainties, including technological development, consumer behavior, standards battles, regulation, and many others, a well-designed scenario planning process assists the development of robust business strategies. Generic scenarios are of limited use. Scenarios need to be developed around specific business issues and key decisions. A typical scenario planning process would include:

• Define objectives and key strategic decisions
• Identify driving forces and critical uncertainties
• Select key dimensions
• Create scenario framework
• Develop distinct, plausible, complementary scenarios
• Test existing strategies across scenarios
• Generate new strategic options
• Define a core strategy and contingent responses
• Build strategic responsiveness across the organization

Game Theory: Strategies for Openness

You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.
(Albert Einstein)

The inexorable shift to openness dominates the media strategic landscape today.

All successful platforms provide rich programming interfaces, open standards are swiftly being adopted, data portability is gaining momentum, most content is available on RSS feeds, and controls on intellectual property are being loosened. The extraordinary pace of these trends means that media strategy is becoming more challenging.

New business models are required, competitive responses must be swift, and strategic choices need to be made and implemented in real-time. In this environment game theory is extremely relevant and a valuable strategic tool.

Game theory studies how multi-player situations may evolve as participants respond to each others’ actions. This can be done using mathematical modelling, or more simply as a framework for thinking through strategic options, their impact on the industry landscape, and optimal short and long-term strategies.

More Information

Check out also:

Future Of Media Participation: How And Where We Consume And Participate In Media

Future Of Media Participation: Seven Driving Forces Shaping Media

Full details on the Flow Economy framework and strategy process can befound in Chapter 7 of Living Networks.

Free chapter download from:
www.livingnetworksbook.com

Originally written by Ross Dawson for Future Exploration Network and titled: “Future Of Media Report 2008”

Ross Dawson is a strategy leader, keynote speaker, and bestselling author. He is CEO of consulting firm Advanced Human Technologies, based in Sydney and San Francisco, and Chairman of Future Exploration Network, a global events and consulting firm specializing in the future of business.

What are media going to be like in the years ahead? What are the key changes that will transform them? Which the key driving forces will be behind such changes? To these questions, the work of Ross Dawson and of the Future of Media Summit are trying to provide some valuable answers.

This is the second framework released by Ross Dawson in the lead-up to the Future of Media Summit 2008, which took place this week simultaneously in Silicon Valley and Sydney.

Entitled, “Seven Driving Forces Shaping Media”, this framework contains all of the details on the Seven Driving Forces, including a description, implications, and a visual chart.

The Seven Driving Forces identified are:

1. Increasing media consumption

2. Fragmentation

3. Participation

4. Personalization

5. New revenue models

6. Generational change

7. Increasing bandwidth

Here the details:

7 Driving Forces Shaping Media

1. Increasing Media Consumption

by Ross Dawson

Increasing media consumption Humans are intrinsically media animals. As we get greater access to media and content, we are discovering that our appetite for information and entertainment is virtually insatiable.

It is commonplace for people of all ages to consume multiple media at the same time, with television, internet, newspaper, messaging, and other media frequently overlapping.

Implications: Average total media consumption will exceed waking hours. Most media will be consumed with partial attention. Advertising impact will decrease.

2. Fragmentation

At the same time as we are consuming more media, every existing media channel is being fragmented, and new ones are being added apace.

In the example of television in this chart, we watch ever more television, but the proliferation of new channels means continually less viewer time per channel.

Now that the Internet and mobile are creating an explosion of new channels and content, audiences are being divided into smaller and smaller segments.

Implications: Current mass media markets are ephemeral. Revenues per channel will decrease. In all except a handful of cases, production costs will need to scaled down.

3. Participation

Early talk about consumer-generated media has become a stark reality over the last two years, with an explosion of media participation across blogs, photos, videos, social networks, and more.

The costs of quality content creation are plummeting. Already a large proportion of content available is non-professional, and people’s media activities are increasingly focused on participatory channels such as social networks.

Implications: An ininite supply of content. Increased fragmentation of attention. Pro-Am (professional-amateur) content models will emerge.

4. Personalization

Media is becoming personalized. Ultimately this is about user control, in enabling every possible choice in what, when, and where people consume media, and its formatting, iltering, and presentation. At the same time, real-time information on viewers enables highly targeted advertising based on behaviors, location, and other proile data.

The fate of personalized advertising will depend on how societal attitudes to privacy evolve.

Implications: Users’ expectations for control over their media will increase. Abuse of personalized advertising will create a backlash. Some will opt-out, and others will opt-in if suicient value is created.

5. New Revenue Models

Within the current trend away from subscription and towards ad-supported business models, the way that advertising is sold is dramatically changing. As illustrated, the vast majority of the online players with the greatest reach are advertising networks, not stand-alone sites such as Google or Yahoo! Unbundling sales and content is allowing far greater scalability of content production costs.

The promise of micropayments for content may re-emerge within a decade.

Implications: Advertising aggregation will be central to the media landscape. Media companies will segment and unbundle ad sales and content creation.

6. Generational Change

The chart shows that each generation is fairly consistent in its media consumption patterns, however that each group behaves very diferently.

The average audience age of traditional media such as television and radio continues to increase. Over the medium to long-term, generational change will result in dramatically diferent proiles for media consumption and participation.

Implications: Media channels will be increasingly age-segmented. Advertisers will accelerate their shift to new media outlets. Sharemarket valuations will relect age proiles of audiences.

7. Increasing Bandwidth

In developed countries the Internet has now shifted from dial-up to broadband in the home. A rapid pace of increase in bandwidth will continue indeinitely. It will not be too long before the majority of developed country homes receive over 100Mbps.

At the same time mobile bandwidth is soaring, with a variety of technologies contributing to pervasive high-speed access to content.

Implications: Video on demand anywhere, anytime. Personal clouds will allow music and video collections to be accessed anywhere without local storage. The rationale for allocated media spectrum and infrastructure will fade.

Originally written by Ross Dawson for The Future of Media Summit 08 and first published as “Seven Driving Forces Shaping Media” on July 8th 2008.

Ross Dawson’s yearly Future of Media Summit event is fast approaching (two locations: Silicon Valley and Sidney, Australia), and as in the past, it is being anticipated by the release of a few articles and a key report that set the stage and vision for our highly media-connected future.

The first to be released among these is the Future of the Media Lifecycle framework. This is a fascinating synthesis of where media and our participation with them is going next, as well as being the central framework of the new Future of Media Report 2008. (See also the Future of Media Strategic Framework from 2006 and Key Elements of Media Business Models from 2007).

Next week, right after the Summit, I will also publish here on Master New Media the full Future of Media Report 2008.

Here the details:

Launch of the Future of Media Lifecycle Framework

by Ross Dawson

Genesis of the Framework

The core ideas in this framework were developed when I was running a strategy workshop for the executive team of a media company that has a large portfolio of TV and radio properties. I wanted to move the executives beyond thinking from a broadcasting mindset, and ran them through a session in which we looked at how people would consume media in the future – where they would be, how they would interface with media, and what they would consume.

In essence, creating a person-centered view of how we engage with media.

Thus the working title of the framework began as ‘Future of Media Participation’, looking not just at our media consumption, but also how we contribute.

When the framework was finished it was clear the central aspect was the media lifecycle. As such the diagram has been renamed, however it stems from looking at how and where we consume and participate in media.

The Media Lifecycle

Media has always had a lifecycle, but its nature is changing dramatically. The emerging media lifecycle is driven by how we both consume and create media, feeding a continuous flow of content and engagement

Sea of Content

The vast and ever increasing sea of content comprises not just media in its many forms, including video, audio, music, news, and commentary, but also conversations.

Diffusion of Memes

Memes (units of culture that propagate) diffuse through the media lifecycle. Some are successful in reaching significant or even large audiences. Most are not. Memes’ success is determined by how people receive and act on them. We can consider all of our media experience as the selection of memes from the infinite pool of the sea of content.

Personal Cloud

The most important development in the media lifecycle is the emergence of the ‘personal cloud’. This is where individuals keep all their content stored. This includes both purchased or downloaded media and content, everything they create themselves, and all opinions, ratings, and recommendations. The personal cloud is accessible from anywhere by its owner, and any parts of it can be made available to selected friends or the world at large.

Life Streaming

Most people will capture parts – or in some cases almost all – of their lives in the form of words, photos, video and more. That will be fed into the personal cloud to be accessed or made available at choice.

Personal Cloud Flows with Home

Our personal cloud will increasingly be used for storage of our music, video and other media collections, making it available whenever and wherever we want – we can shift the time and place of media access as we choose. In addition our personal cloud will provide us with uniquely relevant recommendations based on our media preferences.

Precipitation of Participation

From our personal clouds our participation falls back to the sea of content, in the form of our own content, remixes of existing content, and opinions.

HOME and MOBILE

There are two primary spaces for our media participation: home and mobile (i.e. anywhere away from home). In each of these a new configuration of devices, interfaces, and media is emerging at the center of our media participation.

a) HOME

One of our primary venues for media engagement is in the home. One of the most important trends over the last years has been divergence in media consumption patterns among different family members.

The home of the future will be largely designed around media.

Media Center

Media participation in the home will shift to a hub which converges TV, PC, game console, music, and more.

The specifics of how this happens and the winners and losers along the way are highly uncertain, however the convergence is inevitable.

Interfaces

Our media experience at home will be transformed through new interfaces, including voice and gesture recognition, and screens in every room used for a combination of video, Internet, and digital picture frames, on walls, tabletops, and even floors. These will eventually be replaced by video wallpaper on almost every surface.

Home Media

One of the key characteristics of media at home is that simultaneous attention is often given to multiple media.

Richer interfaces including 3D TV, surround screens, and immersive gaming goggles, gloves, and equipment. The media center will be linked to intelligent lighting throughout the house. Home shopping will become a far more engaging and interactive experience.

Home Networks

Home media convergence requires a backbone of connectivity and integration. Current platforms proposed for this include Ethernet, powerline (power cabling), wireless including WiFi, and coax cable. A variety of standards for integration across devices will enable a seamless home media experience.

b) MOBILE

We spend much of our lives out of home: at work, in cars, at airports, eating, meeting friends, in the street. Now this side of our lives is becoming as media-rich as our lives at home.

Handheld

The devices that are small enough to hold in our hands and put in our pockets have long transcended simple mobile phone or organizer functionality, to include camera, email, video and more. They are now converging into true mobile media centers. The winners in this convergence will be from a wide array of current providers.

Portable

In addition to handheld devices, we often carry portable media devices. Newspapers and magazines are a traditional form of portable media.

Laptops – and increasingly ultraportable devices – are already becoming mobile media centers.

Over time printed media will shift to ebook readers and other e-paper devices.

Interfaces

The major constraint on mobile media consumption is the size of the devices we can carry. Video glasses and mobile projectors will create big screen experiences wherever we go. Wireless keyboards, keyboards projected on tabletops, and voice recognition will help us to provide inputs to these devices while we are on the go.

Location-based Media

Increasingly media will be location-specific. Particularly when we are travelling, local alerts for traffic, weather, and airline or train schedule changes are critical. Maps, directions, and local alerts to news or activities will be automatically provided. Those who choose will receive relevant offers from local advertisers.

Outdoor Media

Media will soon be inescapable wherever we go. We can expect video to be everywhere it is allowed, including on all billboards, sidewalks, café tables, buses, and more.

Billboards will present us personalized ads based on our apparent gender, age, and status. Ads will vary depending on the time of day and location.

Increasingly ads will be linked to mobile media content, for example using 2D bar codes and other content. Outdoor media will transcend advertising, increasingly offering content that attracts interest and viewers.

Originally written by Ross Dawson for The Future of Media Summit 08 and first published as “Launch of the Future of Media Lifecycle Framework” on July 6th 2008.

Telecoms: Will they be the owners of all future content distribution channels?

“Traditionally, telecom companies simply offered various types of phone services and connectivity, and moved lots of data around - maintaining and constantly improving pipes & networks was the primary mission.“

Photo credit: Ann Triling

Today, the basic connectivity offerings have become seriously commoditized: prices are dropping towards zero in a ‘feels like free’ way, and due to the ever-increasing P2P action the comfortable old position of being a ‘dump pipe’ is no longer a viable option, no matter which way you look at it.

The bottom line is that there is no way that Content and Services will not end up packaged into those expensive pipes, cables and wireless networks.

But take note of those keywords: PACKAGED and BUNDLED and Feels Like Free.

Here the full story:

The Future of Telecoms

by Gerd Leonhard

Increasingly, the Future of Telecoms is more in the com than in the tele; in facilitating communications based on, around and ‘lubricated’ with Content and Services.

Voice traffic will only be a small and probably diminishing slice of the pie here - similar to how CDs and digital music ‘unit sales’ will make up only a fraction of the future revenues of record labels.

In a networked ecosystem that wants to serve and empower those pesky ‘always-on’ digital natives, telcos and operators have no choice but to branch out into adjacent or even completely alien sectors - if they don’t, other players such as device & handset manufacturers, web portals, social networks and search engines will feel compelled to fill the gaps and push the pipe & network guys further and further down to the bottom of a digital ecosystem that has only just now begun to flourish (remember: only about 2% of the world is on broadband, today - there is a long way to go, yet). Imagine a Facebook Mobile Network, a Samsung Mobile Video Platform, and (of course) a Google eBook Reader?

Content Re-Defined

Clearly, those Web0.0 ‘dumb pipes & walled garden’ concepts are dead and gone - now it is all about what comes through those pipes, not where they come from.

And crucially, content must now be defined in a much broader way: not just as a piece of ‘professionally made’ and bona-fide copyrightable work that is being transmitted but also inclusive of all the surrounding user interactions, attention kernels and clickstreams (oooopps… sorry for the geek speak).

Context becomes very valuable Content, too.

TwitterMusic, Google VidRead, Gone.MTV, Skype.TV, MotoTube…

Media 2.0

For telcos, it’s about time to get into a new game, and it’s called Media2.0 - a vast and mind-boggling opportunity for (pro)aggressive networks to literally leapfrog over some of those incumbent and still future-shocked media companies, giving birth to or simply fueling new disruptors that could very well be the next Viacom, CBS, BBC or Warner Music. Deutsche Telekom, Orange or Telefonica should have bought Last.fm, not CBS!

Now, witness Nokia packaging UMG’s and SonyBMG’s music into their handsets, and sell it together.

Witness Google trying to package ‘free music’ into their Top100.cn search engine in China; witness CBS’s Last.fm API’ing ‘free interactive, on-demand music’ into social networks.

Services such as Last.FM, Pandora, Flickrand Twitter (and there are many others) already make heavy use the telco’s networks to ship and distribute data at an ever increasing pace and volume.

Now, many telecoms and network operators around the world are starting to realize where their future is taking them: Content + ConText+Communications+Services+ Ads2.0.

So let’s plot a few futuristic scenarios:

Twitter may just start to provide pre-loaded content-’links’; users would be able to receive messages with a hot medialink to a file that is pre-loaded somewhere, and instantly stream it via any flash-enabled mobile device. MicroMedia anyone?

A telco (Verizon? SingTel? TMobile?) will buy whatever is left of SonyBMG when Bertelsmann finally drops out of the joint venture; and SK Telecom may well end up buying a majority stake in Warner Music, globally (they do already own 50% of their Korean JV with WMG).

My take is that Music2.0 is likely to coincide with Telco2.0 if the large (but quickly shrinking) music conglomerates and the forever-at-snail-pace music rights organizations keep on playing hard-to get with anyone that has the audacity to want to actually use their music legally.

China Mobile will start ChinaSpace, a social network build around content that is generated entirely by the users (or shall we say Usators).

The New Music Business

Within 18-24 months, a major telecom (Vodafone? Telefonica? NTT?) will announce that they are entering the music business. They will start from scratch, unencumbered with back-catalog, contracts and Music1.0 (;) people and concerns, working with new artists and with those well-known brand name acts that have finally left their labels for good, riffing off the various Music2.0 blue-prints that have been making their way around the Net (including my own humble Music2.0 book I hope;).

This will be fueled by the fact many incumbent record labels (no, not just the major labels and the RIAA) have famously succeeded in being ubiquitously hated by the music fans i.e. the users, their artists, the general public, and - you guessed it - the telecom execs, themselves. Ten years of back-patting and spending 100s of Millions of $ to convince these guys to somehow give the consumers what they really want - no wonder there is serious thirst for revenge here.

Telcos are fed up and will cut their slavish ties to the old major label system in the next 9-18 months.

Flat-rate music offerings will become a standard - and fuel the telcos of tomorrow.

Smarter toll-booths for more traffic.

Other Likely Scenarios

Skype will be sold by eBay to either a major social network (F….k?) or a major telecom, and will come back full circle to how it got started: a powerful network for sharing data the cheapest possible way, be it phone calls or other bits and bytes i.e. content (read: music, film, TV, books…). Skype is where legal P2P will happen, first.

Within 12-18 months, together with Google, one of the leading advertising and communication agencies will strike a deal with a major telco and jointly launch ad-supported and user-generated content services based on an Advertising2.0 approach, completely side-stepping traditional content production and licensing procedures and offering new artists (and out-of-contract acts) yet another way to go direct.

Recommendations for Telcos

So, dear Telcos, Operators and ISPs, here are my 2 cents:

1. Stop worrying about pleasing the incumbent music & media industry players and ‘the studios’- either they will follow your lead and give five billion users what they want, how they want it, or you need to leave them behind as quickly as possible.
2. Play your hand now for it is strong: you have the network, you have the users, you have the billing relationships - you can get the content the way you need it, too!
3. Like the Radio and Broadcasting Industries before you, start by demanding a new, standardized blanket license for full-length, interactive music streaming followed by unlimited downloading of music on digital networks; and while this is being negotiated start making deals with Ad Agencies and Advertisers to prep the Advertising2.0 pipeline.
4. It’s music first and then Film, Video, TV…. $700 Billion of Advertising per year are ready to be traded in this battle for content in return for attention. Seize the day.

More Info

Some sources of inspiration for this Future Story:
IBM Future of Advertising Report
Telco2.0 Two-sided business model
Telco2.0 Blog
Edelmann Trust Report

Originally written by Gerd Leonhard for MediaFuturist and first published on 20th May 2008 as “The Future of Telcos” (PDF)

Gerd Leonhard is a media futurist as well as an author and writer, a media and Internet entrepreneur, a strategic advisor, and a keynote speaker & presenter.

If you want to get a good feel for what he does, you can check out Gerd’s blog MediaFuturist, or watch some videos from the new Media Conversations Future Talks series (to select an episode just click on the book icon / guide button, and go from there). You can also visit his Youtube channel, or subscribe to his video feed.

Photocredits
The Future of Telcos - Content & Service Pipes: Yin Chern Ng
The Future of Telecoms: Tomasz Trojanowski
Content Re-Defined: Kin Hang Norman Chan
Media 2.0: Goran Stojanovic
The New Music Business: Arnlod Turner
Other Likely Scenarios: Hypermania
Recommendations: Yuri Arcurs

Are ebooks going to go mainstream with Amazon becoming a de facto distribution monopoly? Or is a marketplace characterized by many different players and options looming still on the horizon?

Photo credit: Lawgeek

Should book publishers think carefully before jumping on the Kindle bandwagon about who should be in control of their distribution mechanism?

Are there real opportunities for book publishers to be create an approach to eBooks publishing that will open the marketplace to far greater competition as well as extra options to package and deliver content on multiple, diversified eBook platforms?

Content media analyst John Blossom reports from the recent BookExpo America in Los Angeles:

The iPodding of Books: Kindle is the Darling of BookExpo, but the Industry is Nervous

by John Blossom

This year’s BookExpo America in Los Angeles featured much of the usual multi-story ballyhoo of years past, with a thinner crowd and thinning expectations for the book industry in general, though with a few bright exceptions.

One of these exceptions has been Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader, which has become the Pet Rock of the 2008 book industry.

Still inscrutable in terms of its limitations (no PDFs, no general Web content) and as awkward as ever, the Kindle is the darling of book-readers on the go who can’t afford the space, time or trouble of loading multiple books in their overnight bags and pocketbooks (and yes, one of them might be me when I break my el-cheapo mental barriers).

The Kindle is also becoming the darling of traditional media outlets, which have the ability to push print-like materials into a medium that’s unbound from print production limits, enabling them to maximize revenues when a title gains its peak value in a very short period of time.

Kindle Business Profile

AP notes that former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s new book on his experiences in the Bush administration sold out quickly at Amazon in print format but that the book continued to sell briskly in Kindle eBook format, albeit at a lower price.

There’s some question as to exactly how much Amazon really makes on the book sales themselves (the New York Times claims along with others that Amazon takes a bath on each Kindle book sale), but as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos noted that the Kindle is still in its developmental phase it’s likely that book publishers’ existing business models are considered a part of the platform’s developmental cost at this point.

Silicon Valley Insider’s back-of-the envelope model for Kindle sales noted that if the Kindle business scales as quickly as Apple’s iPod/iTunes business scaled it’s possible that Amazon could be enjoying more than USD 740 million in combined Kindle device and content sales by 2010. That’s highly speculative, especially given that there had been more than a decade of well-established consumption of music via online portals before the iPod came along to become a cool fashion tool for content amongst the young.

The Book Publisher View

Book publishers face a far tougher proposition of moving beyond a graying population of book enthusiasts still young enough to value technology as a status symbol towards younger generations that have yet to discover books at all in a big way.

A whole generation of college students is now coming of age that has not ever turned a paper page on a regular basis. So Kindle’s ability to grow rapidly beyond its early adopters into iPod-like growth is still in question.

That may suit book publishers just fine in the short run, given their need to maintain a pricing structure that covers the 99 percent of their sales still done in print. But now that they have locked themselves into a proprietary DRM-secured format for Kindle content they have in essence handed Amazon the keys to the paper mill for electronic content.

Certainly Sony’s eBook platform provides a “Brand X” that will generate the illusion of consumer choice in eBook reading, but with the extensive infrastructure and branding of Amazon people wanting to purchase content rapidly for their eInk-displayed content will have but one real choice.

Lessons Learned from the Music Industry

If in fact eBook sales rise rapidly enough to push Amazon into a position of dictating book industry pricing, then book industry executives may be wondering why they didn’t consider the music industry’s death at the hands of iPod’s proprietary 99-cent downloads as a lesson to have been studied more carefully.

Fortunately the book industry has the opportunity to adapt to these changes in relative slow motion compared to the music industry’s fast-forward realization that Apple had stolen their business model.

In doing so book publishers may want to consider how music companies are learning to benefit more from broader artist management services as a supplementary line of business.

As noted in The New York Times recently Universal Music Classical Artists Management and Productions has been formed as a unit to produce and profit from live performances of music and artist fan items other than CDs.

Thinking of the good fortune my friend David Meerman Scott has had on the speaking circuit in the wake of his runaway hit business book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” (available as a Kindle book also, of course), how much more could his publisher have profited from his management as a speaker as well as from his imprinted word?

Book Publishers Start Developing More Diversified Revenue Channels

At the same time book publishers are becoming smarter about benefiting from the value of book content in pre-print communities as well.

My own relationship with John Wiley & Sons has enabled content from my own forthcoming book “Content Nation” to be posted online and publisher programs such as O’Reilly’s Rough Cuts are well into developing pre-print subscription communities for tech book consumers that act more as knowledge exchanges than peeks at books before publication - artist management for art still in the making, if you will.

So although there are certainly exposures that publishers face via Amazon’s proprietary eBook platform they are already developing more diversified revenue channels to maximize the value of their content.

Kindle’s Future

Future iterations of the Kindle are no doubt going to change the shape of this debate significantly, but for now it’s probably good that the intense interest in Kindles from a relatively narrow band of book readers is probably going to grow more slowly than some would think.

It opens the possibility that book publishers will be able to develop an approach to eBooks that will open the marketplace to far greater competition amongst technology platform providers - and more opportunities for more ways to package and sell content on eBook platforms.

Although the Kindle itself is proprietary it is using the Sprint telecommunications company’s broadband wireless network in the U.S., a strong network with standardized communications technology that could easily accommodate any number of services providing downloads of eBooks and other media.

Enabling any media service to provide subscription or on-demand downloads into any device at a cost lower than typical broadband Internet services via such a network might accelerate a market for competitive platforms before Amazon gets to flood the market with cheaper Kindles at a not-so-distant future point in time.

Here’s hoping that publishers of books and other media jumping in the Kindle bandwagon think carefully about who should be in control of their distribution mechanism before locking themselves into being curators of content proprietary to emerging mobile platforms.

Originally written by John Blossom for Shore and first published on June 2nd 2008 as “The iPodding of Books: Kindle is the Darling of BookExpo, but the Industry is Nervous“.

Sending out newsletters and having them delivered reliably to your list of subscribers has become a greater challenge than I would have ever thought. Problem is, if you don’t devote yourself to it, everything is set for your newsletter to run into trouble. To not run into such issues you really need to proactively do something about it. The negative consequences are blacklisting of your email and your newsletter filtered out by spam filters on your recipient ISP mail server or on their computers.

Photo credit: Ophelia Cherry

I have seen my own newsletters, which contain no spam at all, beaten down by blacklisting servers and spam filters like they contained radioactive substances. I have also seen thousands if not ten of thousands of email subscribers being lost to these same supposed gatekeepers.

It’s a bloodshed, unless you take some proactive action to prevent this from happening.

Anti-spam filters catch every single email arriving to your inbox before it is actually delivered to it and do a full spam check on it before you can even see it.

Such spam filters use a scoring system to classify an email as a legitimate message or as spam. Some of the most popular among these spam filters, such as SpamAssassin, SpamCombat or SpamProbe are designed to look for specific patterns in your email messages and to assign “spamming points” to them when they encounter such pre-defined patterns. These patterns or spam-signatures may actually include anything from the specific words you use in the Subject line of your newsletter to the actual words inside the text, specific phrases, images, to the format (HTML or text-only) you may have chosen for the delivery of your newsletter, and even to the type of colors you may have used.

Depending on the amount of such “spam” patterns these filters find inside your email newsletter, the spam filter will assign a specific score to it. If your overall spam score goes beyond a preset threshold your newsletter is marked as *spam*, the *SPAM* or *JUNK* word is sometimes pre-fixed to the subject line of your newsletter and then sent to your spam bin automatically.

This is why, one of your main concerns if you are an online publisher sending out an email newsletter is to think well ahead of time about these issues and to do everything possible to avoid falling in such possible email spam filter traps.

Here some personal advice and my selected toolkit on how you can prevent your email newsletter from getting trapped inside spam filters and blacklists:

What To Check To Prevent Your Email Newsletter From Being Filtered, Blacklisted Or Marked As Spam

1) Newsletter Subject Line

Edit carefully your email newsletter subject line. This is one of the most sensitive areas. Watch out what you do here. Some no-nos are words in all caps, the word free, lots of white spaces, name or email of recipients, the use of a date. But there is a lot more. The best way to avoid any risk is to have a professional title that doesn’t use any catchy words.

2) Subject Line Capitalization

Capitalizing word initials or worst, whole words inside an email newsletter subject line is sure to get you in some trouble. Avoid capitalization at all costs and you should have no problems with spam filters.

3) Spam-like Content

Avoid utilizing phrases that may appear as spam-like to email spam filters. Sentences like “Click here!” or “Once in a lifetime opportunity!” or simply exaggerating with too many exclamation points!!!!!! can hit the sensitive triggers of many of the popular email spam filters.

4) Text-Based Is Better

Make it look like text. Email newsletters are generally of one of two kinds. Text-based and HTML-based. If you want to increase the spam safety and accessibility of your newsletter text-based is the safest solution. Even if you choose to go the HTML route, make sure you format and layout your newsletter content “to make it look like” it was in fact a text-based one.

Also: Do not send your HTML-based newsletter without a text-delivery option. If your email newsletter is in HTML and it doesn’t automatically switch to text-format for those readers who can’t receive HTML, it will get filtered out.

5) Attachments

Don’t send attachments. Attachments often carry viruses. In defense, they are frequently filtered out proactively. Even if an attachment gets through to your readers, it is a burden to expect them to run it through a virus protection program.

6) BCC

Avoid using BCC distribution to more than a few recipients. If you use lots and lots of recipients inside your Bcc field it is very likely that your email newsletter will be marked as spam. I would say

7) Color Use

Avoid playing with colored text to get your message across. This is a bad practice from all standpoints as, unless you change background, black remains the most legible color on your screen. Red emphasis is highly connotated with tricky marketing schemes and spam email and also other colors like green or blue should be avoided at all costs. If you want to really hit the nerves of major spam filters change the color of your email background and you are in for “national disappearance day”.

Newsletter File Size

Put some real meat inside your newsletters. The file size of your email newsletter does matter to anti-spam filters. Keep message size between 20K and 50K. This is because the majority of spam emails weight-in most of the time at less than 20K.

9) Bad HTML Code

Make sure you are not creating your newsletter by utilizing bad HTML code generated by popular tools such as Microsoft Word. If you create your newsletter in Microsoft Word to then save it as HTML you should be aware that the code generated by MS Word and other tools may be very “unorthodox” and this is one thing that email spam filters really do not like.

10) Use of Trigger Words

Do not use spam trigger words. SiteSell.com, which offers an online publishing system to would-be online entrepreneurs, provides a free email marketing tool called SpamCheck. In their recommendations, SiteSell experts say that you should strongly avoid using evident spam-trigger words such as “free” inside your email newsletter. Using such spam-trigger words in combination with other trigger words such as “trial”, “quote”, “sample”, “access” can really make your newsletter inaccessible to most anyone who uses a spam filter of some kind.

Subject Line Trigger Words Sheet (PDF)

Words and phrases that trigger spam filters

20 Words That Kill - At Least When It Comes to Spam Filters

11) Images

Do not use images inside your newsletter in place of the text. Some publishers may choose to use a large image to display the contents of the whole newsletter as it may contain lots of visuals and graphics. While the intent is laudable the results may often be nothing to tell your friends about. Avoid using large images like wildfire and stay as text-based and humble of image use as possible.

12) Virus Free

Ensure always that your computer as well as your network are virus free. With laptops coming and going from your LAN, friends hooking in, and open wi-fi connections it is wise to have in place tools and procedures to make sure at all times that the stuff you send out is fully virus- and other malware-free. You certainly want to avoid to inadvertently send out a virus you have on your machine together with your own newsletter and name.

13) Removal

Make sure that your newsletter always includes an easy means for your subscribers to easily remove themselves from your distribution list.

Blacklisting

One key critical element that is often overlooked, is the understanding that the server you are using to send your email newsletters plays a vital role in determining whether or not your newsletter will reach its supposed recipients.

The problem stems from the fact that many of the newsletter delivery services out there, have been used by some spammers or other and therefore such servers have become blacklisted. Imagine therefore what happens when you send your email newsletter through them. Among the top priority things you need to do when you evaluate your newsletter delivery service is to see whether they have been blacklisted.

If you have never heard of the word before, “blacklists” are databases of known spammers that ISPs regularly check.

It is possible to be added to a blacklist without being informed by anyone. It takes simply for a recipient in your email list to mark your email as spam to start a process, which can eventually get you fully blacklisted.

Good Things To Do To Prevent Being Blacklisted

1) Double Opt-In

Use always a double-opt-in method for signing-up your newsletter readers. Any other approach is a recipe for trouble.

A few years ago I was not convinced myself of this and let direct opt-in rule only to lose half of my subscribers in a few months once key mail gateways started blacklisting me because of this practice.

The double opt-in approach simply involves the automatic sending of an e-mail to those who sign-up for your newsletter (after they have opted in at you site) asking them to confirm (via a simple click) that yes, you have permission to send them your newsletter in the future.

2) White-Listing

This is as simple to say as it is hard to get it to have an impact on your readers, but if you are persistent and clear enough in your communication with your subscribers you should positively ask them to add your newsletter “From” email address to their address books or to white-list it. Tell readers on your newsletter sign-up page and in your confirmation email, from what “from” line and domain your emails will be sent. Ask them to add this data to their “safe folder”, address book or whitelist of approved email senders.

Also, you can add a blurb at the very top of your newsletter that reads something like this:

“To ensure you will not lose any of my future updates due to a spam filter error please do add xxxxx@xxxxxxx.com to your address book or “safe-senders” list.”

All of these actions will guarantee that your newsletter will not have to pass through your recipient anti-spam filters.

Last but not least. If you hear from subscribers who are not receiving your newsletter, ask them to look in their spam or junk email folders. If they find your newsletter there, ask them to kindly set-up an automatic filter that takes care of sending your newsletter directly inside their inbox.

Has My Newsletter Been Spam Filtered? How Do I Tell?

An easy way to tell whether your email newsletter has been blacklisted or spam-filtered is to look at your “open rate“. This is a metric, that when provided by your newsletter distribution service, allows you to see how many people are actually opening the email containing your newsletter. The average “opening rate” for an email newsletter is 20% to 30%. If the open rate suddenly drops below your standard levels, you probably have a spam filter problem.

Fast declining number of subscribers. If all of a sudden your email subscribers are dropping instead of increasing, while the quality and content selection fo your newsletter has not changed, you can be sure that spam filters and blacklisting have arrived to your party.

High bounce rate is another relevant indicator. Look through your hard bounces, that is email recipients you have not been to reach and dig into the SMTP replies you have received.

Email Newsletter Spam Checking Tools

Here is the best part of this short guide. Find here below my selection of email newsletter spam-checking tools that you can use immediately, and at zero cost, to verify your next ezine issue.

• Spamcheck by SiteSell

• Content Checker by Lyris

• Spamcheck

• Programmer’s Heaven Spam Checker

• MailingCheck - SpamAssassin Spam Checker software

Some great tips to be found also in these articles:

• Tips for Legitimate Senders to Avoid False Positives

How Spam Filters Think

Originally written by Robin Good for Master New Media and first published on May 24th 2008 as “Spam Checking Tools And Tips To Avoid Your Newsletter Being Filtered, Blacklisted Or Marked As Spam”