To cover this event live, we will have pictures and notes. If you would like to tweet about this event, please use the hash tag #95800.

(pictures courtesy of and © Manolis Kounelakis)

—

To us, there were a few key takeaways from the panel. Before going into the detailed notes, here are some points we found interesting:

• It is our duty as consumers of social media to be aware of the associated privacy risks of this medium
• People will tend to give away private/personal information if they have something to gain
  • ‘Good’ example – let Amazon store your purchasing history so that they can recommend
  • ‘Bad’ example – employees giving employers access to their personal email account
• Companies are relying less on “gut-feeling” decisions, and more on quantitative analysis to determine what customers want
• The platforms for performing these quantitative analyses are converging.
• Rich real time tools (e.g., Foursquare) enhance communication in one sense, but pose a threat to privacy (e.g., Please Rob Me)
• Making personal data portable from one application/platform to another could be a way to maintain some level of privacy
• Regarding privacy issues in social media, there are associated moral, legal, and business strategic questions. Unfortunately, the corresponding answers to these questions often conflict.
• Social Web has the potential to finally create bottom-up change in organizations – this is exciting to some and scary to others.
• For now, privacy is dead. But do you think the benefits outweigh the costs?

—

Below are our LIVE notes on the event (courtesy of Haris):

Gene Connors, Partner, Reed Smith
Companies should not try to control – this is a losing battle!
“If we’re not talking together, you are talking about me”
Companies should encourage social media engagement and transparency – many companies are doing this, employing some sort of policy

From a practical legal standpoint on maintaining privacy – keep educating ourselves on how we can avoid compromising our private information
e.g., facebook applications grab your information – know what you’re getting into!
Beware of hidden and unhidden cookies on websites

Companies intentionally looking for your information – studying when a person is most likely to give away compromising information
Usually giving away private information happens when people feel they have something to gain from it

In the end, whose responsibilities is it? Individual, legal, etc…
Would love to have a law that warns users before giving away private information

If so many sites should depends on trustworthiness – what is our duty? Spread the story! Social media can be a powerful force to do this.

There is no constitutionally recognized right to privacy in most states.

Even if we had a way of preventing privacy infringements, you won’t stop the scam artists – which was the same before the digital age.

Horror stories are what create laws – banking and other corporate abuses have added more regulation.
Same could happen with privacy.
Expecting on the regulatory side you’ll see a lot more big brother.
We should police ourselves, because otherwise others will police us.

On the topic of whether social web shift will happen top-down or bottum-up…
Maybe the bottom need to convince the top of the benefits and necessity.

Sean Ammirati, COO, ReadWriteWeb
Interested in real time nature of social web
Twitter was interesting 2 years ago, but now we’re even getting richer real time experiences (e.g., Foursquare)
Google buying Aardvark is testimony to this -> ask a question, route the question to the right person
Privacy implications – PleaseRobMe.com

Shocking rate of growth of blippy.com – broadcasts purchasing decisions. No trick, totally transparent!
What can we draw from this? People have different sensitivities to information privacy.

You should know what you want to keep private and what you don’t.
Hard to believe that the law will beat the scam artists – the community should do this.

The online battle for identity – google, facebook
Facebook connect has better authentication than openID
This battle is not getting enough attention – but one big player will most likely win
One thing that could help – make personal data portable

Mike Smith, Assoc. Professor IT and Marketing, CMU
How will organizations adapt to social media?
What will differentiate companies is not whether they will go into social media, but how they will leverage this medium to learn more about their customers
Companies don’t make “gut feel decisions” – they use quantitative tools to predict what you’ll buy and suggest it to you

As far as privacy issues, who owns this information is an interesting question. On one hand, most people would be comfortable giving some information to amazon to get better recommendations. However, some information like bank account information is something users would not like to shared.

In online privacy, there are three kinds of questions: Moral, legal, and business strategic.
Often the answers to these questions are not the same!

People are bad at evaluating low-probability, high-risk situations – giving away private information is such a case.

Rob Howard, Founder and CTO, Telligent
Personal identifiable information -> scary how much information can be mined!
For companies, put a human face on itself and foster community engagement.
Proctor & Gamble example – communicate better to consumers, but also improve internal company communication.
Challenge is not digitizing information, but finding relevant information – Amazon has done an excellent job in this!
Integration of different information systems is a trend – can collect different forms of information (analytics, engagement, etc) under one platform.

A resume is nothing these days – always searches people you’ll meet, and find their online face.

Measuring effectiveness of online campaigns:
1) Listen
Get feedback, measure engagement
2) User Type Analysis
Break down users into categories – who comments, creates content, consumes content, etc.
These types can shift – ‘askers’ can become ‘influencers’
3) Engagement
Social Media can give even more fine grained information on enagement
Can find out more demographic information and preferences

The tools for measurement are converging.

Some organizations base their culture around keeping information in – hard to create a top down cultural shift in the age of social media. Will this change happen bottom up?

Tim Stanton, Sr. Acct. Exec. LinkedIn
Key question – how to use social media
Organizations will continue to wrestle with social media
Still believes we are in early phases of social media

Q: Broadening or deepening scope of social media influence?
Both – important to spread out, but don’t spread too thin.

At LinkedIn, the community drives the content – that is how they deliver relevant information, which makes the community willing to provide them with information. LinkedIn has built their brand on this.

It’s hard to maintain privacy, even without online life. Sounds like privacy is hard to achieve today.
For professional reasons, getting found is very important!

—

Many thanks to Heinz College for hosting this panel, and especially to my professor Ari Lightman for organizing this event. Please check twitter hashtag #95800 for tweets related to this panel, and for general discussions within our social media class.

On December 21st, 2009, I took the photo below at Times Square, New York City . In it, we see the two giants side by side, promoting themselves on large TV screens in one of the most action-packed spots in the world.

© Haris Krijestorac

Google and Yahoo are lucrative largely because of the need to be prominent on the Internet. While their advertising themselves on Times doesn’t quite refute this premise, it does lead one to ask what is better: Being number 1 on Google or Yahoo, or being on Times Square?

Although facilitated by technology, the concept of advertising on Times Square shares many qualities of traditional one-way advertising and lacks those of interactive marketing. Interestingly, this photo suggests that the more traditional physical medium is better in this case. It shows us that even the giants of the Internet can not avoid marketing in the physical world.

This question is relevant not only to the giants of the Internet, but to all Internet marketers. What will happen to digital and physical marketing venues in the future remains to be seen. But in an age in which both venues are still thriving, companies are asking themselves how to partition their marketing efforts between these two venues.

This is a complex issue with many twists and turns… So now, perhaps more than ever, we’d love to hear some opinions and relevant experiences from readers!

• When is it better to sell your brand or idea in the digital arena, and when should your marketing remain in the physical world?
• In general, how should the physical and digital media interact?
• How will the answers to these questions change in the future?

• The Media May Change, but the Fundamentals Remain the Same by Ed Barr
• The Role of Peer Influence in Marketing on Online Social Networks by Rajiv Garg, Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang

We would like to send out special thanks to Janna White and Stacey Thornberry from IABC for being our editorial advisors and for supporting us along the way.

Apart from this newsletter, IABC offers an incredible variety of articles, resources, contacts, and other services in the field of business communication. Apart from the Student Connection e-Newsletter, there are other opportunities for students to be editors of a publication or even publish their own work.

To learn more about the IABC, you can check their membership benefits!

Within the three days during which the poll was open, we got a total of 131 respondents. It is noteworthy that since we got these largely through our own connections, there is some bias in the sample of this poll (as with all polls). Most respondents were most likely Generation Y students, pursuing either an undergraduate or graduate degree. Most were probably Internet and technology literate. They are all or nearly all facebook users, as facebook was the main vehicle through which we obtained respondents. However, most were probably not regular users of other social networking tools such as twitter.

We asked the following five questions and obtained the following results, which we will comment upon later:

Question 1 – Single choice

Question 2 – Single choice

Question 3 – Single choice

Question 4 – Single choice

Question 5 – Multiple choice

One of the trademarks of social media is the increased ability for customers and companies to directly communicate. About half of our respondents found it ’somewhat important’ to communicate with companies whose products they liked. Only 16% found it ‘very important’, while 26% saw it as outright ‘unimportant’. There are several ways of interacting with companies through social media. Communication with companies, especially when it’s a two-way conversation, can lead to beneficial interactions in which both customers and companies learn about the needs, desires, and abilities of each other.

The fact that more people did not find it even more important to communicate could be an indication either of concerns about interactive communication, or of doubt over the effectiveness of such methods. This is reflected by the fact that the majority of respondents were concerned about privacy issues and the effectiveness of interactive communicative methods, as per question 5. One key factor that is harder to measure is the fact that even our educated and Internet savvy sector of the population is still not used to this form of communication! They are still using more primitive methods, although newer and more effective ones are available to them.

One promising result in terms of the benefits of social media is that most people at least saw a company’s openness towards customer communication as positive. Social media is a crucial vehicle for companies to come out in the open and communicate openly. Whether through facebook groups and pages, twitter, or blogs, the number of companies communicating in an interactive arena has increased. If people are seeing this as a good thing, then it will put pressure on companies to enter this arena.

A classic paradigm in the field of psychology dictates that people will be more willing to express feedback if it is negative. We wanted to test this paradigm on public interactive venues. While our results from questions 3 and 4 do show that the old paradigm remains true, the results are give more insight than just this. Although about half of respondents would update their facebook status to express positive feedback on a product or service, more than half of these people would prefer that this update be visible only to their friends. In other words, for some reason, people did not want their feedback getting out to the company or its potential customers. This could be attributed to the aforementioned privacy concerns with this kind of exposure, as well as with the fact that in our culture people are not yet accustomed this this kind of open interactive communication.

In line with the old paradigm, 64% of respondants said they would prefer to express their negative feedback in an open interactive venue, rather than in a private venue such as an email or a phone call. This indicates that customers recognize the benefits of public communication at some level. They realize that saying some things out in the open can lead to positive interactions between them and other customers or the company, or at least spread the word of their complaint more effectively. Companies should take this is a cue not only to listen to customers who communicate through this venue, but to interact with them and react to their concerns.

It is interesting that while our respondents saw openness to customer communication as a positive trait in a company, not many of them found it ‘very important’ to communicate with them. If we were to conduct this same survey several years from, the main change would probably be an increase in this statistic.

The fact that the use of interactive communicative methods and tools has exploded over the past several years has not only been a result of clever uses in technology. The means to create interactive communicative platforms existed years before the rise of these tools. Their use, however, resulted from a need for people to make increasingly complex choices. We are bombarded with information every day, but we need a way to filter out the useful stuff from everything else. With all the products out there, we want a way to find out which one is just right for us.

Like all significant changes, it will takes our culture time to adapt to all this. We think it’s worth the wait.

—

P.S. If you want to give us more data, feel free to take our survey =).

The exponential web team will be covering this event with our live notes and streaming photos, which can both be found below.

Live Notes

Courtesy of Haris Krijestorac

Panelists -
Live
Cara Weiser Keithley, MAM 2004, Marketing and Communications Strategist and Gov 2.0 Practitioner, carakeithley.com
Stacey Monk, MAM 2000, CEO and Co-Founder, Epic Change
Darren Tome, MISM 2005, Technical Product Manager, Local Integrated Media, NBC Universal

Online
Nathaniel McNamara, SocialFeet
Glenn Pasewicz, MSPPM 1993, Public Policy Analyst, Pennsylvania House of Representatives

Darren Tome

NBC):
Target 24-44 year olds who don’t just ‘live’ in a city, but go out and experience it!
e.g., nbcnewyork.com
New social features:
So My City – Sound Off: Like a twitter for a city.
Mood of the City: Crowd-source emotion of a city. How does a story/gallery/video make you feel? There are some issues – some issues will have views that are polarized. Sometimes NBC needs to shut it down.
Overall, these social features have significantly increased the attention towards

Stacey Monk

(Founder, Epic Change)
Their goal is to amplify visibility and impact of people who are creating change in their own communities.
Company started with no money! Took part in America’s Giving Challenge by the Case Foundation. Had to work hard, reach out to every social media for change venue possible.

#tweetsgiving – share what you are thankful for. Number 1 trending topic around thanksgiving! Great example of how a small company can make a big impact through the power of the Internet. Getting ready for Tweetsgiving 2009!

Challenge of cross-culture online collaboration. It’s hard to run a democratically organized online social media event, because there are different levels of internet access around the world. Tanzanian school boy @gideon_gidori was helped find his voice through twitter!

Glenn Pasewicz

(Pennsylvania House of Representatives)
Most of his work has been in the public health sphere. Does ’systems projects’.
House and senate have facebook pages and twitter accounts, but in the day-to-day work they are not part of what they do.
Has set up wikis for collaboration, but it is not catching on.
Why is social media not used? One thing is the generational gap. Furthermore, legislature is not a fast, real-time thing. Instead, it is more of a process. Therefore the means of communications related to it mirror this process, and communication is done largely internally and through emails and face-to-face.

Cara Keithley

(Social Media Evangelist, works for State government, professor at Franklin University)
Will discuss how to harness social media to internally foster change in higher education and government.
Both government and higher education needs leaders and innovators to help them adapt to changes of social media.
If you want to change an organization, you don’t need “permission” – you need to do your research and share your opinion intelligently. Focus on the organization’s strategic goals.
Social Media allows people to be more ‘discriminate shoppers’ when it comes to looking for a University or school. Therefore schools should join the conversation, engage potential students, answer their questions.
She claims she has identified many opportunities and fostered relationships through social media.
Tools are transient – don’t focus on them! Instead, focus on the innovations that need to take place.
(Note: all slides are on SlideShare)

Nathanial McNamara

(SocialFeet)
Social Media traffic going up 20% per month for the top 25 sites in the U.S.
It won’t just be facebook and twitter, but the overall landscape will change.
Spoke about ‘activity screen’ interfaces.

Comments from panelists on measurement of social media results:
At NBC, users are tracked throughout the entire sessions. Not just click through and page views, but resulting actions.
Measurements for a social media movement can be different than for a website. See how many mentions, who mentions you. How the people you’re working for/with respond will surely be noticed.
“Measurements can tell you whatever you want, and you can make them say whatever you want” – You’ll know if it’s working!

Live Photos

Courtesy of Manolis Kounelakis

1) Crowdsourcing of ideas using Facebook

Carnegie Mellon University / Heinz College

Looking for some ideas? Ask the students. That’s what Heinz College did in search for a title for a new faculty video series. Not only did the students feel like participating in the decision but they also felt like taking a peek at what the school is rolling out.

From the Heinz College Facebook Fan Page

2) Course Videos on Youtube

MIT OpenCourseWare

As part of the OpenCourseWare project, MIT’s youtube channel has hundreds of videos from a variety of courses. Anyone can watch full lectures from subjects like Computer Science, Chemistry, Linear Algebra or even Philosophy of Love and Black Holes. It is impressive to think that MIT is providing the world with top-class course material completely free of charge. And there is no better way to promote this initiative than to upload some part of this material on Youtube, the largest video site in the world (1 billion views per day, as Youtube proudly claimed last week).

3) Amplifying class discussion with Twitter

The University of Texas at Dallas

Last Spring, Monica Rankin, a History professor at UTD, decided to use twitter to improve the way students could interact with each other during class. In a class of 90 students taking place in a large auditorium, the discussion is usually concentrated among few students while the rest of them run the risk of losing interest. Twitter turned out to be an effective solution. In her own words: “I wanted to find a way to incorporate more student-centered learning techniques and involve the students more fully into the material… Twitter’s texting and internet options seemed to offer more students the opportunity to participate”. By using their laptop or cellphone, students tweeted comments and ideas related to the readings assigned for each lecture. With a different hashtag every week, the discussion was kept organized. The Professor also used Tweetdeck and a projector to stream the conversation live during the class. The outcome was very encouraging. “Overall, I think the twitter experiment was successful primarily because it encouraged students to engage who otherwise would not”, Monika Rankin explains. You can learn more for this experiment by watching the video below. You can also read her detailed analysis here.

Like many of my fellow students, when I’m working on an assignment that requires some research, Wikipedia is often the first place I’ll go for an overview of a topic. More often than not, I do so under the pretense of a disclaimer that Wikipedia can not be cited as a source. As a result, Wikipedia is often not seen as an acceptable academic source.

In spite of this, we still keep coming back to Wikipedia for an overview of the topic. I and my fellow students often have to find another source that restates information that Wikipedia has already given us, a gesture that I can’t help but find to be often unnecessary. To be clear, I am not 100% confident that Wikipedia should indeed be treated as a valid academic source; However, I do believe that the currently prevailing viewpoint on Wikipedia’s lack of validity has become accepted too much as fact, and that the topic needs to be challenged more.

Wisdom of the Crowds vs. ‘Expert Knowledge’

With Wikipedia, the masses have the power both to acquire and spread knowledge

Accepting the Encyclopedia as more reliable is the easy move, simply because we are used to this standard. However, since the tides are shifting towards wisdom of crowds and digitization, people in academia should begin to question the logic behind the implied assumption behind accepting the Encyclopedia and not Wikipedia. After all, in spite of digitized versions of the traditional encyclopedia that are out there, many people still use Wikipedia as their source for knowledge.

Google Knol: A Middle Road?

An interesting project that in some ways manifests the idea of balancing wisdom of masses and expertise is Google Knol. While Google sought to fuse the strengths of the Encyclopedia and the wiki, their idea never gained the popularity of either. This idea was implemented by requiring more barriers to entry for editing and creating articles than Wikipedia had.

Since I don’t personally use knol, I don’t deny that there may be some niche market for it. Nevertheless, I feel that the Knol case shows that given that much of our information is acquired digitally, most people prefer to hear from many people that are somewhat like themselves rather than from a much smaller group of supposed ‘experts’.

Wikipedia and Democracy

On a broader level, I believe that the question of Wikipedia’s validity raises parallel questions on the nature of democracy in the digital age. The digitization of information has in many ways made knowledge more accessible to masses, both in terms of acquiring it and spreading it. For a long time, many cultures have accepted democracy as the best practical approach to deciding what is right or true. Again, it is a difficult question whether this is truly the best practical approach – but something we often neglect to acknowledge is that it is most likely not the ideal theoretical approach. When we distance ourselves from the concept of democracy we have become so accustomed to, we might see that the fact that most people think something doesn’t necessarily make it true.

Are You Ready??

Latest Pictures from Flickr – Click to Start

Latest Tweets

Due to today’s rapidly evolving online distribution channels and interactive marketing techniques, record companies are in a position to leverage these changes by staying ahead of, and not merely following the latest marketing trends. In light of this, the marketing initiatives of record companies should be based on extrapolations of current trends in the music industry, and they should produce a marketing mix that is based around around future changes in the industry.

The fundamental assumption of the following hypothetical marketing plan is that there are two possible doctrines record companies can follow. The first is that they should attempt to gain control, for example through direct legal regulation, of the influence of technology and particularly the Internet on music consumption. This marketing plan, however, suggests the alternative. Record companies should and in fact can compete under these changing conditions. This view has been supported by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who claims: “You’ll never stop [piracy]. So what you have to do is compete with it”. Disrupting the natural forces that are shifting music consumption is difficult and costly. Attempts to counter these trends have been met with almost no success, and will become even more cumbersome as technology advances.

The following is an overview of the marketing mix (under the framework of the traditional 4 P’s) that music distributors are beginning to emulate. Each of the four elements in this mix reinforces the others in that it agrees with and substantiates this assumption.

Product

In order to market its music, it is important for companies to look at extrapolations of current trends of music as a product. The ‘Long Tail Effect’ has caused the culture of music consumption, as well as that of many other products, to be transformed from one characterized by a monopoly of hits to one in which hits emerge within niches. This has transformed the definition of a ‘hit’, and ‘hits’ under their older definition are dying out. Contemporary ‘hit’ equivalents are falling under the umbrella of ‘mainstream music’. American examples of these artists from my own teenage years would Britney Spears, The Backstreet Boys, and ‘NSync.

Music with such generic appeal is now inherently targeted towards the lowest common denominator of consumers. Our current culture of hits within niches really leaves room for no other characterization of ‘hits’ under their older definition. The waning interest in the Grammy awards ceremonies, a hits-driven music event, is a visible manifestation of this trend. In fact, the current music industry has already begun to adjust to this trend, as boy bands and female teen pop singer stars are either becoming less prominent or are evolving into niche artists. Justin Timberlake, for example, managed to remain popular through alienating his previous fan base, abandoning his pretty-boy, boy-band image in favor of one of greater maturity.

In signing new artists, record companies must account for our transforming definition of hits. Instead of asking ‘how many people will buy this’, they should focus on artists that have the potential to effectively penetrate a niche. If I look back at the bands I have been enjoyed through my years, most were liked only by a small but definable niche among my social network. I personally listen to some of the most obscure ethnic music that someone of my age would listen to. Nevertheless, I have found a bond among my fellow ethnic friends to whom I have introduced my collection and who have likewise shared theirs with me. In many ways, we enjoy being defined as part of this musical niche in the same way that we enjoy being part of a social group. In my generation, I don’t believe that there has been a supergroup that has taken everyone by storm for a long period of time – as was the case with Led Zeppelin and The Beatles.

Music in its ‘physical’ form will not die out in the foreseeable future, but is likely to decay in popularity over time. Some member of my own generation still prefer CD and even vinyl format. The purchasing and collecting of music in these now almost ‘primitive’ forms is even ingrained in the culture of some music scenes, such as the New York underground punk scene. I still buy CDs because I consider the packing, artwork, and lyrics to be an essential component of the product and artistic statement. Although MP3 technology and downloading has increased the exposure of music in our everyday live, I would argue that it has done so while decreasing the enjoyment of music in general. In the 70s, the mere dropping of the needle on a record player was an experience! Torrents, large hard drives, and iPods have all contributed to the current over-saturation of music, which in turn has decreased the enjoyment per unit of exposure to music. Some agree and will continue to do buy music in CD and vinyl form. Record companies should cater to these valuable customers by maintaining and inventing new benefits of the physical copy – namely appropriate artwork, and perhaps bonuses such as stickers. Furthermore, they can ‘version’ products to add exclusive bonuses, such as additional artwork, to their physical copies for devout fans.

Generation Records in NYC: A cult venue for punk and hardcore CD's and Vinyl

Price

The combination of improved means of distribution, the placing of means of production in the hands of consumers, and the Internet’s facilitation of information transparency has allowed consumers to experience the pleasure of choice. More products are being produced, they are being distributed to their target markets more effectively, and consumers are able to easily view their options in terms of product as well as price.

The trend of providing choice has existed before the advent of the Internet; however, the Internet has greatly accelerated this trend and made it more visible. A less contemporary example of providing choice is that of product catalogs. Consumption increased when consumers gained the option of selecting from a large inventory of goods, as opposed to being restricted by the physical space of a store.

Although the music industry has begun to accommodate this level of choice through its distribution, it has not given enough attention to the factor of choice over price. With the current free downloading methods available such as BitTorrent, consumers have the power to choose any price to pay for their music – including 0! Fighting this would require a difficult clampdown on these methodologies on the part of record companies. Instead of resisting, they can indeed use this trend to its advantage.

To give users more freedom to choose their price, record companies can use this momentum in their favor by adopting a ‘pay what you want’ system for digital products. Consumers have shown that granting them the power of choice results in their increased willingness to pay. Downloading music for free can be seen as a form of rebellion from the pricing confines of the current record industry. The success of Radiohead’s distribution of their latest album, ‘In Rainbows’, under such a pricing methodology is a testimony to this statement. Although no official numbers were released about sales, the band claimed that it they made more money within a few months of selling ‘In Rainbows’ under the ‘pay what you want’ framework than they made selling their previous album.

English alt-rockers Radiohead: known, among other things, for their progressive pricing and marketing strategies

Promotion

Because the means of distribution is shifting towards the Internet, EMI should synchronize its promotional strategies by making them Internet-based as well. Furthermore, it should exploit the interactive marketing means that the Internet provides.

With the means of music production falling into the hands of consumers, the Internet has empowered these consumers to interact with music in new ways. Innovative viral marketing strategies can create new sales opportunities in addition to a better brand image. A recent example of a music marketing strategy that exploited this fact was Radiohead’s ‘Nude Remix Competition’. In this contest, Radiohead’s label sold the individual instrument tracks of their song ‘Nude’ as songs. In return, they created a forum on their website in which people could post remixes of the song that they construct from these instrument tracks. Fans could stream and rate these remixes, turning it into a competition. Part of the fun was, of course, that Radiohead themselves would be listening to these tracks, and it gave small producers a rare chance to show their talents to a band they admire. EMI should look to implement strategies that similarly engage consumers while encouraging them to buy a product or market an existing product.

Place

As previously discussed, the Internet is increasingly becoming the prominent medium through which music is obtained. Instead of resisting this omnipotent force, record companies must focus their own distribution on Internet channels.

Music consumers are increasingly being helped in finding their niche through Pandora and other music recommendation systems. Record companies should therefore partner with and establish their presence within these systems to facilitate direct song purchases (either physically or digitally).

Conclusion: The next steps for Record Companies

Record companies now have the opportunity to distinguish themselves as innovators within the music industry. They must use their analyses of the current trends of the music industry to look ahead and see what is next. Marketing strategies should work with and leverage this foresight.

“It’s always day 1. There’s always more invention in the future. Always more customer innovation. New ways to obsess over customers.”

There is a significant difference in saying “We can do more” and saying what Bezos said. Amazon’s founder’s words can be attributed to a super-optimistic 16-year old boy. I believe his words tell us a lot about how Amazon is managed. I was wondering if this visionary aura is transferred to all the levels of the organization. At the recent career fair in Carnegie Mellon University, I went over to the Amazon booth and asked them about this. The HR employee told me that in fact this aura is flowing in both ways; top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top. You can argue that there was no chance of getting an answer like “Naah, only Bezos feels like that…”. In any case, it’s great to hear that well-established companies are hunting vigorously for new innovations.

Bezos’ words struck me as very encouraging and inspiring to anybody seeking to create and innovate in the web. Being among those who don’t believe in the “we have seen everything” doctrine, I was reassured by the fact that Bezos came out and said what he did. Who knows whether a new thing like Twitter is designed ideally? Google Wave, for example, will fundamentally reinvent the way we interact with email. That’s big! And since ExponentialWeb is just starting out, I am looking forward to keeping up to date with the wave of new, big things happening out there. Cheers!