Team Manning was hunkered down for a week in and near the Moscone Center, the site of the American Bar Association’s Annual Meeting.  Mitch, Mike and Doug spent long days and nights shooting, editing and posting video clips to the group’s primary communications site www.ABANow.org.

Photo by Phil Coblentz

Our team was kept busy with quick turnarounds of video content such as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, new ABA president Stephen Zack and David Boies, the attorney who successfully challenged California’s ban on same-sex marriages. It was a fascinating time to be in San Francisco considering this ban was overturned while the meeting was occurring. Not that we had a great sense of what was going on outside of our edit room. Our late night work schedule limited our opportunities to get to see the city. So while there were few cable car rides, we were able to have some amazing Chinese take out.

The upside of all this hard work is the traffic to ABANow.org skyrocketed during this event. This clearly establishes ABANow as THE source for news of the ABA’s two yearly meetings. The number of visitors was nearly 6 times greater than a year ago at the 2009 meeting when ABANow was launched. And the number of visitors for the 2010 Annual meeting was nearly double that of the group’s midyear meeting in February.

To prove they were actually there, Mitch and Mike took advantage of their one day off to shoot this little travelogue of Mike in San Fran.

Mike is Cinematic from Mitch McLachlan on Vimeo.

But next trip here are a couple of the places recommended by fellow Manning staffers:

• Curtis’s recommendation was the Toronado with more than 80 beers on tap
• Amy’s recommendation was the Slanted Door for the view of the bay and amazing Vietnamese food

Illustration by Matt Hamm

Recently, Social Times cited a study showing that 50% of companies entering social media have no plan.  It’s sort of like going on a road trip without a GPS. It could be an interesting ride, but it may not get you where you need to go.

Social media are simply tools that facilitate conversations between individuals. What social media you deploy and how you deploy it should really be driven by the goals and needs of your business.

Rather than saying, “We need to be on Facebook,” what you need to be saying is, “Who am I trying to engage and why? What are their needs and interests? What are they saying online and how can I contribute to the conversation?”

There’s a huge misconception that companies need to be on every popular form of social media. You’re told you need a blog, Twitter profile, Facebook page, LinkedIn group, Digg profile, YouTube channel, Flickr account and don’t forget Foursquare! But are your customers there? And do you have the resources to engage and respond to your customers regularly on all of these platforms? If not, you’re better off doing nothing, than doing any of these options poorly.

When we redesigned our website, we decided to change our web strategy to encourage greater participation of all Manning employees and clients in our site. We wanted to engage our customers, potential customers and peers in more meaningful way and carefully chose social media that we thought would be most interesting and relevant to their needs. We have a WordPress blog to provide extended commentary about our industry, technology and how our work relates to both. We have a Twitter feed as a quick way to make work-related comments, link sharing, or musings. And we use Tumblr to share various types of media including quotes, images, graphics and video. And we’ve integrated all three of these social media tools into our site. We’ve also provided commenting and social sharing capabilities throughout the Manning site.

However, we chose not to have a Manning Facebook page. The reason for this is simple. For now, we do not believe our clients and peers choose to engage with us through Facebook. This could change, but for now we’ve decided to allocate our resources to the social media that allows us to engage and share our thought processes most effectively.

Registration Screen from the Times

Not to continue beating a dead horse, or to steal Patrick’s thunder by continuing to rift on the fading glory that is the Newspaper, but there’s been a pretty interesting experiment that’s being going on across the pond that has the potential to change the way we access news online. I’m talking about The Times’ (of London) institution of a pay-for-content scheme, or paywall.

As of July 2, 2010 only The Times’ homepage is available to the public. Attempting to click through to any full story results in an automatic redirect to the registration screen shown above. Current costs are £1 for a daily pass or for a trial month’s worth of access, and could potentially go up over time.

Granted, this is not the first  time a major news publication has instituted a paywall – The New York Times has said they’ll charge frequent users a flat fee for online content starting in 2011, and The Wall Street Journal has had a successful paywall in place for nearly a decade. However, many see it as the first big test of a major web player moving from a completely open platform to a 100% paid content model.

What interests us here at Manning, however, isn’t the seemingly catastrophic failure of the paywall in the past month (Times has reportedly lost somewhere between 66% to 90% of their daily viewers), but what happened before a fee was ever put in place. 5 weeks before The Times started charging for their content, they instituted a mandatory registration for all viewers. There was no fee involved at that time, users just needed to provide their name, email and create a password before being redirected to the desired article. And yet users fled in droves – 58% of the Times’ daily users left when confronted with the registration screen, even though they weren’t asked for payment.

Alexia rankings show the sudden plunge of The Times visitors

I can’t speak for the rest of Manning, but I know I’d have been one of that 58%. I am so used to having information at my fingertips and instantly accessible that mandatory registration for anything is enough to turn me off. And I do mean anything – I’ve walked away from everything from discount travel tickets to video game sites because of registration requirements. For example, one of my favorite news aggregator sites Stumbleupon.com recently changed their homepage to require registration before you could start “stumbling” or browsing their content – moving away from the 100% open model that they’d started with. I used to be a semi-serious stumbler, visiting the site almost daily. Now I never go, and though I miss some of their features (excellent organizational structure!!) I don’t see the services they provide as being unique enough to justify my registering. I just browse other, slightly less organized aggregators instead.

It is this type of cagey user attitude that we urge all our clients to consider the impact of a permissions wall carefully – paid or not. The Wall Street Journal gets away with it because they are a recognized source of highly specialized industry information that cannot be attained elsewhere. For smaller, less established sites even the simplest of registration forms will act as a drop point that costs the site users both on a daily and long term basis.

As part of the celebration, we were treated to the presentation of the flags by a full Color Guard and a spontaneous singing of the Marine Corps Hymn (Did you ever hear the last verse? Hilarious!). We were also joined by representatives from the Semper Fi Fund, the Wounded Warrior Regiment and Andrew Tibby, a local Iraqi vet who had received grants from the Semper Fi Fund.

Aligned with the The Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund, the group’s goal is to raise $1 million in gifts for injured soldiers around the nation. The Glenview Marines asked us to help them design a website that could be used as a fundraising tool – something that provided some background about their group and their cause; showcased the good works of The Semper Fi Fund and streamlined the gifting process.

From left to right: Jess Hara, Jim Baisley (Glenview Marines), Sara Ammuler (Semper Fi Fund), Andrew Tibby (Marine vet), Srgt. Ray Gozen (Wounded Warrior Regiment), Doug Manning

The result was GlenviewMarines.com, a slick website that emphasizes the Glenview Marines’ commitment to the Marine motto “Semper Fidelis,” or Always Faithful. Doug summed up our feelings by saying, “It’s an honor to be able to contribute to the treatment, aid and support of injured servicemen and women.”

To date, the Glenview Marines have raise just under a quarter of a million dollars and are as gung-ho as ever to hit their million-dollar mark. As one WWII vet told me with a wink, “It’s a heck of a mountain to climb, but at least no one’s shooting at us this time!”

We’ll keep you updated about progress of the Glenview Marines campaign, and invite our friends, clients and colleagues to visit the site and help support our injured troops.

Youtube's new Vuvuzela-izer. Also, a kitten in a hat.

All this attention means vuvuzela vendors are enjoying a huge windfall. One grocery store — in England no less! — has already sold over 40,000 at £2 a piece; their briskest sales measured one horn sold every two seconds so far. Vuvuzela producers are struggling to keep up with overwhelming demand, churning out an amazing 20,000 a day. These sorts of numbers show what happens when a product, idea or brand go viral – immediate, global exposure which translate into amazing opportunities for growth.

What is especially important to notice is the vital role the internet, and it’s social media features, have played in building up the vuvuzela hype. Emerging communication tools (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Mobile web and apps) have been particularly well leveraged to spread vuvuzela fever and build it into something more than just a traditional African horn. It has become THE symbol of the World Cup. This is every brand builder’s dream and shows, once and for all, that if we want to grow and communicate online, it is no longer possible to ignore these marketing tools. We have to develop an overall online strategy that takes these traffic sources into account or risk losing out on being the next Big Thing.

During an interview with CNBC, Zell was asked about the future of the newspaper business. What is his visionary prediction? PDFs. That’s right–the staggering problem of remaining profitable in the newspaper industry could be solved if only we could figure out a way to deliver PDF versions of publications.

“going forward, it’s going to require all kinds of different approaches, including probably most significant, the elimination of home delivery and the replacement of it by PDFs.”

To be fair, no one has really figured out a good way monetize online news.  Print circulation and ad dollars continue to drop as a majority of readers now get their news from the web. But my guess is that the solution is not going to be simply digitizing news content in PDF form.

The reasons that newspapers are struggling to remain relevant are pretty obvious:

1. Slow to React – By the time a story gets to the printed page, it’s not news anymore. In 2010, news can be broken almost instantaneously through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Who wants to wait until the next morning for this information?
2. Static Content – Once a paper goes to press, it cannot be updated. A story cannot evolve over time, even if the facts do.
3. No Multimedia – The best online news sources include audio, video and interactive graphics. None of this is possible on the printed page. (with a few exceptions)
4. No User Participation – Sure, you can write a letter to the editor and hope it gets published. But that’s about as close as you’ll come.

So let’s think about how the mighty PDF will solve these problems:

1. Slow to React – The process for producing a PDF is essentially the same as it would be for the printed version. You’d only be knocking off the time spent at the press and delivery.
2. Static Content – A PDF may be digital, but it’s still static content. The only way to update would be to send a new version.
3. No Multimedia – It is possible to embed multimedia in a PDF. But I hope your inbox doesn’t have a file size limit, because those would be some biiiig files.
4. No User Participation – I have yet to see a PDF that allowed user comments.

Verdict? The PDF will save print journalis….errrrrrr … this is about the dumbest thing you could propose as the chairman of a newspaper empire. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by these comments considering how crappy the design and usability of www.chicagotribune.com are. (And the Tribune’s attempt at an iPhone app (iTunes link) was also a spectacular failure.) This is clearly not a group with good prospects for surviving in the digital age. (Don’t worry Trib– the New York Times has a similarly firm grasp of these technologies.)

So what do you do if you want to maintain relevance in this changing media landscape? You embrace the possibilities that this new technology provides to  give your readers added value. Case in point: www.abanow.org

Watch Zell’s comments on CNBC:

There's a reason you don't see packaging like this.

If you’ve ever been backcountry camping, you know that it’s always a bad idea to draw your drinking water from a static source. Sure, that pond may have water in it. But when you’re parched from a day of hiking, would you rather quench your thirst from the algae-covered (and probably bacteria-filled) stagnant pond, or from a swift-moving mountain stream? The choice should be obvious.

In the past, most websites were like the pond – static pools of water. They may have looked pretty at first, but they tended to stagnate quickly. As the content grew more and more outdated, the site became about as appealing as a drink from that algae-covered water. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that when it comes to browsing the web, people’s preferences are no different—they want their content fresh.

Some of the web’s leading thinkers see the evolution of content ‘streams’ as the future of media consumption. Gone by the wayside, they predict, will be the notion of viewers making the online journey to visit a static site. Instead, our news thirst will be quenched by a series of content streams that the user may draw from at his or her leisure.

If you think this sounds like foolish dreaming about some future web utopia, you’d be wrong. This transformation has been going on right under your nose, and we’ve already begun to see this evolution in services Twitter, Facebook and Google Finance. And one of our own clients, the American Bar Association, has already been publishing stream-based content for almost a year on their ABANow site.

Have you observed a change in the way you consume web content?

A week before attending the event, I purchased a Canon 7D, one of three HDSLR models.  In the 15 years that I’ve worked as a shooter/editor, I have never purchased a professional grade camera.  I have always borrowed or rented, and this is the first time I’ve seen a camera produce this quality below $2000.  As with any camera, it has it’s pros and cons.  If you’re shooting a wedding or event and need to record segments longer than 20 minutes, this is not the camera to rely on.  Also, not to be forgotten, it is a still camera.  Most of the people purchasing this camera will do so because of the video capability, but it’s a wonderful still camera for recreational and professional shoots.  By just looking at the camera, it doesn’t look that much different than a regular digital SLR, but the technology packed inside of it is being put to use on television programs and motion pictures.  It has the ability to change lenses like other SLR’s, which is one of the major reasons why so many are putting it to use.  With standard video or HD cameras we are usually seeing everything in focus.  Right out of the box, the HDSLRs offer the ability to put only your intended subject in focus, while softening the rest.  This depth of field offers a look that we usually only see on tv, film, or commercial work.  As an example, if you look at the camera picture adjacent this entry, the front of the lens and the background is out of focus, while the main body of the camera is in focus.

When you have a moment, take a look at some of the incredible work created with this camera technology.  Soon after the camera came out, Manning Productions put it to use in capturing hand movements and artistic elements for a Snowflake Workshop.

CNN's iPhone App gives users access to mobile video.

Overall video is now one-third of all consumer Internet traffic, and will approach 40% by the end of this year. Cisco predicts that video will account for more than 90% of all Internet traffic in just 4 years.  A Pew Research report backs up those numbers. Pew’s survey shows 69% of all adult Internet users watch video online.  While there is a big jump in comedy clips, the number of people watching educational videos nearly doubled since 2007.  We are seeing online video move beyond skateboarding tricks and cats playing the piano to thoroughly embrace serious communications.

This is not the University of Arizona Mascot. It's just a Devil. And the Facebook logo. Make of it what you will...

Facebook is trying to take over the world/the internet/your life! Or at least, that’s the impression someone might get by perusing blogs, news aggregators and general web industry water cooler discussions.  With the implementation of their “Instant Personalization” feature, Facebook basically drew back the curtain on the amount of personal data they’re willing to share with other sites. Couple this with the brouhaha over their almost constant mis-steps and backtracking with regards to their privacy policies and it’s almost like Facebook can do no right.

On one hand, I understand their goals—Facebook is a free site that is sitting on an internet gold mine. All of the data that users blithely enter leave marketing and analytic folk drooling and is a great way to monetize an otherwise money-bleeding site (Ads can only do so much, after all). Additionally, the Instant Personalization feature seems like a well intentioned idea—enter your data once, in Facebook, and then let it do the heavy lifting to help some of our favorite sites (ie: Pandora and Yelp) provide us with a better user experience.

But while their goals maybe noble—or at least, not evil—most web denizens seem to feel like they’ve gone too far. In the past week, blogs have exploded with anti-Facebook sentiments. Some bemoan the ever increasing loss of privacy (this post contains an interesting infographic on the shift and this one discusses how hard it is to actually keep your profile private) while others discuss Facebook’s assertion that the age of privacy is over.  Facebook says this commotion is all a product of journalists stoking a non-existent fire, but a growing trend on Google shows people asking how to delete their Facebook account and protests have sprung up urging users unfamiliar with the issues at hand to kill their Facebook accounts.

Regardless if we’re moving towards a more open society or if Facebook is overstepping their corporate bounds, the discussions engendered about the role of social media is an interesting one. We here at Manning promote the use of Facebook for our clients as a tool to open untapped lanes of communication with their clients. We also love it as a means to promote events and keep people up to date with what is going on with the company.  However, in light of Facebook’s recent actions – including censoring inter-profile private messages—the onus is on us to be vigilant and make sure that the trade offs we’re encouraging our clients to make are worth the benefits offered from a Facebook profile. Since we here at Manning take your privacy seriously, you can be sure that we will be monitoring this closely for a while to come.