Interactive congolmerate CBS has announced the launch of "social viewing rooms" today. These rooms combine videos (from CBS) plus chat and polls. So basically if you remember IRC and slap a video window on the side, you have this new concept from CBS. The idea is smart, the longer people remain within the CBS framework, the more ads they can serve up and generate more interaction with their users.

The social media rooms would have more appeal if stars from the shows were in the chats while the shows played live. Currently in the "lounge" are a variety of CBS shows including: soap operas, Survivor, CSI, Beverly Hills 90210 pilot (the original), The Love Boat and Melrose Place. One might think that a show like "The Big Bang Theory" would be perfect for this. I guess people would rather chat about how Kimberly killed the people in the apartment building!

Intel is the initial sponsor for the social media rooms. CBS notes regarding the sponsorship, "the Social Viewing Rooms let technology leaders such as Intel weave its brand into the center of the entertainment experience with a unique combination of user engagement and brand integration."

Hollywood Reporter believes that reality shows stand to benefit the most from these social media rooms. I’d tend to agree as long as the rooms match up with when the shows are on live. If not live, then it’s the same as chatting on IRC or any web-based chat service.

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Apple claims to have sold 200 million TV episodes to date, including one million sold in HD format since the option became available in September. And in customary fashion, the company is looking to expand on those figures with three primary pursuits: more selection, more selection, and more selection still.

Following a summer season chock-full of game-show and reality programming, this fall Apple is making an effort to provide as many dramas and comedies and the like from as many networks as possible for iTunes shoppers. The company now names ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC as HD-friendly within the pages of its storefront.

Everything from CBS’s long-time hit show “CSI: Miami” and its New York-based variant to FOX’s “Prison Break” to NBC’s “The Office” to ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” and “Dirty Sexy Money” is available either at a per-episode price of $2.99 or a season pass running anywhere between $40 and $70. Of course, all shows are available in standard definition, too, for 1/3 less cost per episode.

Ever since Apple introduced the TV option for iTunes consumers, it has had to service increasing demand for increasing amounts of programming titles and studios. And because it has had to contend with the extended removal of NBC programming for much of the last year, its sales have presumably not been as superb as they might have otherwise been. Thus, now that Apple has officially brought the majors on board as both SD- and HD-level participants, consumers are naturally bound to enjoy the comprehensive supply much more so than the gap-ridden experience that came before. Will this boost sales? Very probably.

While it’s not yet certain that HD programming will induce many sales other than the trickle of free, promotional downloads made available on a weekly, if not daily basis, the choice of HD itself is no doubt important to note. On-demand television is still in a stage of relative infancy, so pricing can only be expected to come down as time progresses.

Competition with iTunes will continue to be strong with players like Netflix, but very few distributors - iTunes and Amazon Video on Demand being the most prominent of all - can offer consumers the option to retain episodes and even full seasons of content ahead of their equivalent DVD or Blu-Ray release. This convenience is certainly advantageous to a good number of entertainment seekers who might ordinarily invest in physical media. (It should be said that Netflix’s streaming option will almost definitely have current programming to choose from in the none-too-distant future.)

All told, the iTunes TV store is still very much at a budding stage, and whether it is on the cusp of a boom, it’s difficult to say. But it is clear that Apple and its visual media partners are wasting little time in capitalizing on fresh programming. So it may not be very long before Apple can tout five to ten million HD shows sold. Or, alternatively, one billion TV episodes altogether. Looking at Apple’s release of June figures listing over 5 billion songs sold since the iTunes Store’s inception, that would be a video statistic none too small.

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As we watch the economy do what economies do - have growing pains and adjust to challenges - it becomes ever more apparent that doing things the old way just won’t work anymore. That is true of many of the old ways, especially when it comes to how companies advertise and grow their business.

It is my opinion that the return on investment (ROI) for traditional advertising will continue to shrink, even as companies using traditional advertising methods continue to throw money at ads in hopes that their company will survive these choppy financial seas. Instead of panicking and clinging to the deflating lifeboat of old ideas, now is the time to stand firm and innovate.

Evaluating the Situation

Before a company can find success in branding and marketing through non-traditional means like social media, companies and entrepreneurs need to reevaluate how they define ROI. Sure, there is always investment, but instead of thinking of this investment solely as monetary, also consider the investment you can make in time, staff, creativity, participation, and other less tangible resources. In this economy “investment” could be replaced by innovation, inspiration, involvement, or interaction for a different and fresh form of ROI.

Social media is often accused of taking a “touchy feely” approach to advertising, marketing and brand management. In a sense this is true. The ways of measuring ROI in a social media campaign are much more indirect than a cost based traditional model. In part this is because the cost of social media to grow your company is relatively low and consists mainly of intangible things like proper use of your time.

If the company is large enough, it may entail the cost of hiring someone to manage your social media efforts. If the company is a small to medium business or an entrepreneur or sole proprietor, most will find that after an initial training session with a good social media guide they can use existing staff to manage social media campaigns. This is a huge cost saver that can be carried over into a reduction in traditional advertising expenses as well.

Measuring ROI

One of the most tangible ways to measure ROI is site analytics. If you have a site that is starting a social media campaign, make sure to get a good analytics program installed, like Google Analytics. As you start each campaign, make sure to associate it with tags and key words you can track in your analytics program.

You can do the same for on-site CPM advertising, like the ever popular Google Adsense. By associating each ad block with key words and campaigns, it makes it easier to measure where the money and visitors are coming in from. Coupled with a great stats program like Mint or similar, there is no reason you can’t develop your own in-house ROI study as you embark on your first social media campaign.

Enhancing ROI

One of the many ways to enhance your ROI from social media campaigns is to consider transparency. Since it is very hard to hide behind an image these days (go ahead and Google your company name plus the word “sucks” or “stinks” or other negative connotations and see if anything comes back), the more transparent a company and its top level staff can be without giving away company secrets, the better.

A fantastic example of transparency helping a company’s numbers is that of BuzzAgent. They were so invested in the idea of changing how they approached their brand they did a 90 day experiment that showed measurable gains (and other interesting data) through openness and interaction.

Additional Benefits

If you aren’t sold on the idea of fully embracing social advertising, consider the intangible benefits of a brand campaign as well, including how social media can save you money indirectly. By becoming more involved with your brand and embracing both the negative and the positive (realize you no longer control the conversation about your company) you can stop problems before they start.

By giving your customers access to you through social media and using it to channel everything from customer support to sales and hiring, you will find that you are gaining income and stopping some tradition areas of corporate monetary hemorrhaging. All without spending vast amounts of extra money on ads no one stops to watch, listen to or read anyway outside of Superbowl Sunday. I’d say that’s pretty good indirect ROI, wouldn’t you?

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Source:Mashable!

In another move towards earning more revenue from its huge audience, YouTube has started streaming full-length TV shows that will include advertising. The content, which includes Star Trek, The Young & The Restless, and Beverley Hills 90210 comes through a deal with CBS. Advertising will include familiar formats like pre, mid, and post-roll.

For YouTube, the deal certainly marks further indication that the company is not having a great deal of success in monetizing the user-generated video that dominates the site. While the current lineup of content from CBS may not be especially impressive – no offense Y&R fans – it’s likely just the first of many deals that YouTube will make to bring more professionally produced content to its site that can be more easily monetized.

For CBS, the deal might be seen as yet another sign of a lack of confidence in Joost, the professional video content site where CBS is an investor. Meanwhile, CBS already offers full-length versions of many of its popular shows like CSI on its own website. Ultimately, it would look like YouTube is simply being viewed as another place to distribute content for the media company. CBS also recently did a deal with Slide to distribute video content through Facebook applications.

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The link is live, but I’m not able to see any actual shows going on right now.

Given how awesome on demand TV is, I don’t see this kind of thing being very popular. With one big exception: live broadcasts, which are by definition shown at a certain time and watched by everyone then. Apart from live content, it seems like asynchronous comments are a great way to go, as YouTube, Hulu and Joost have done.

This is part of an ongoing series about government 2.0 written by Dr. Mark Drapeau. To view previous posts in the series click here.

Recently I had the chance to attend an event called “Government 2.0 and Beyond… Harnessing Collective Intelligence,” which was hosted by the Department of Defense’s Information Resources Management College (IRMC). It had all the makings of a public relations boon: High-profile speakers like David Weinberger (who blogged from the event), corporate sponsorship, media coverage, and a new auditorium to show off. Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock, was even there. But what I didn’t see among the people in the room was urgency.

Much lip service was given to welcoming new technologies, openness, information sharing, transparency, and collaboration. But there was no talk of a strategy, a plan, or a roadmap. Frankly, there was no talk of anything concrete in the way of actual progress towards Government 2.0, as the title of the event would lead one to believe. And while I am certain that DOD Deputy CIO David Wennergren was genuine when he spoke about the future of command and control being a more agile system of “focus and converge,” I am also certain that people in my workplace have Dell laptops so old they have time for a power nap during boot up.

This is particularly embarrassing given that one of the speakers, Bruce Klein talked in detail about Cisco Connect, their “next-generation workforce environment” that includes an encyclopedia, feeds, blogs, chat, and virtual meetings. No one discussed why the Department of Defense didn’t have this capability, and no one asked. More embarrassing still, Cisco Connect is very similar in principle to something the government already has – the Intelligence Community-built INTELINK, that I have used and written about before; the word “INTELINK” was never uttered out loud.

As the event was winding down, I heard a line not unfamiliar to me at this point, about everyone in the room being an “agent of change” that had to help. I became a bit frustrated with this and Tweeted the following:

While it’s probably inappropriate to “benchmark our enemies” in a Mashable post, I think it’s safe to say that terrorist and criminal organizations don’t need pep talks in wood-paneled conference rooms to adopt new technologies and gain a competitive edge. In the battle of bloviating versus trial-and-error, who wins?

One of the panelists, the co-author of Wikinomics, Anthony Williams, quipped that “The Ontario Government blocked Facebook, so everyone moved to MySpace. It’s a futile exercise.” Many people in the audience snickered. I don’t know about them, but I still can’t access MySpace or YouTube from my work computer. This is not a complicated multinational treaty negotiation. If everyone is so aware of the problem, why can’t we just… fix it?

To be fair, the government has non-trivial security issues when it comes to information systems – they must function alone and with each other properly, cannot be infiltrated by outsiders, and they must provide trustworthy information (imagine hacking not to plant a computer virus, but rather false intelligence or misleading geographic coordinates). The big takeaway that federal officials had from DEFCON 16 in Las Vegas was that social software has created a “perfect storm” for hackers – lots of new software, largely untested security loopholes, and a changing definition of privacy in society. As part of my Social Software for Security (S3) research project at the National Defense University I am working with government “information assurance” professionals to determine which social technologies are {always, sometimes, never} safe to use with DOD systems.

Unfortunately, all of this is likely discouraging young people – digital natives, or the Gartner-dubbed “Generation V” – from choosing honorable work in public service as a profession, and it is encouraging bright people already in Washington, DC to move on to greener pastures. It may be appropriate that a group named “Foreigner” wrote the song I quoted at the beginning of this article, because from my standpoint “urgency” as it concerns adoption of social technology tools into the defense establishment is thus far largely a foreign concept.

Dr. Mark Drapeau is an Associate Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University in Washington, DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Government.

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Source:Mashable!

After attracting nearly 20 million active users, what does the application formerly known as FunWall on Facebook do for an encore? Add professional content from the likes of CBS, NBC, and Warner Bros, according to The Wall Street Journal. The application’s creator – Slide – has signed a deal with a number of media companies that will allow users of FunSpace to embed clips of various TV shows on their friend’s profiles.

While the deal doesn’t include full-length shows, it will make recommendations based on the number of times a video is posted to people’s profiles. Of course, you could already embed YouTube videos using FunSpace, so plenty of professionally produced copyright content can already find its way onto the service, at least until YouTube deals with it on their end.

Nonetheless, given many user’s penchant for forwarding video clips to friends, FunSpace’s deal with the media companies should make it easier for them to do so, at least within the walls of Facebook. And for the content producers, Slide’s massive reach on Facebook should provide yet another vehicle to monetize their video online.

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Israeli based MyHeritage, recently funded by Accel and Index Ventures is acquiring UK based, Kindo.com a family tree service. The amount of the acquisition is not announced but given Kindo’s performance (according to Google trends) we assume this was not a big operation. We can assume also that part of the recent funding was dedicated to the acquisition.Source:TechCrunch

CBS on Monday announced that Eyemobile for iPhone is available now in the iTunes App store for those users that want to submit photo and video content to the company’s new citizen journalism site, CBSeyemobile.com.

Eyemobile for iPhone lets users upload content from their iPhones and view what others are uploading while on-the-go. If they so choose, users can comment on the uploads, as well.

CBS Eyemobile is a direct competitor to similar services already offered from cable networks. CNN has enjoyed some success with its iReport service and Fox News employs UReport for those looking to make a statement and report on the important issues of the day. And with services like IAMNEWS cropping up, citizen journalism is making progress as a way for traditional news outlets to expand their content and the average person to have a say in what’s being covered.

Social news aggregator socialmedian has released a new feature called Replize that allows users to interact with one another very easily by using the @username format. It’s a smart move because it’s similar to what we’ve seen on other social sites like Twitter and Utterli, and therefor familiar.

The Replize tab manages all replies sent to you by other members. In order to send something to another member, simply include @username in the comments field and it will get sent to that user instantly. Every reply is highlighted in the user’s homepage news feed. You can choose to be notifed via email if that’s what you want. You can also just click the reply link next to a comment and their username will be auto-populated.

You can reply to several members at one time by adding all of ther usernames, i.e. @JohnDoe, @GIJane, @Rizzn, etc. In addition, soon there will be an auto-complete feature for any @username you are following or vice versa. This will ultimately allow users to send replize as tweets on twitter.

The other new feature announced is the ability for users to connect their Flickr account to socialmedian. Obviously, this will be beneficial for mobile users who want to upload their photos and use them within socialmedian. When connecting your Flickr account you will have the option to add all of your photos and favorites or filter them according to keywords (tags).

socialmedian has been very active recently in regards to adding new social features which bodes well for its user base. Allowing them to communicate with one another within their own platform means they don’t have to leave the site as much. It also helps them cultivate a sense of community within socialmedian itself.

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Source:Mashable!

Continuing the trend of mainstream media integrating user-generated content into its programming, CBS has launched EyeMobile for iPhone, allowing its users to submit photos and videos to the company’s citizen journalism site: CBSEyeMobile.com. While several cable networks have launched similar efforts – CNN with iReport and FoxNews with uReport – CBS is the first of the “big three” broadcast networks to get into the game.

In addition to being able to upload content to EyeMobile, the app includes options for viewing content uploaded by others and leaving comments. As for the EyeMobile website, it is very YouTube-esque, allowing you to browse photos and videos by most recent, most viewed, and most commented. The site also allows you to copy and paste code to embed photos and videos elsewhere.

What’s not clear about EyeMobile is how it might integrate with the company’s on-air reporting. Both CNN and Fox News routinely show user-submitted video, while CNN is taking things a step further by utilizing Twitter in its on-air reporting. Of course, CBS has a lot less news coverage than the 24×7 cable networks – 30 minutes every night in addition to The Early Show every morning.

On the other hand, those shows have a much larger audience than most cable programming, so if CBS is serious about pushing citizen journalism, they certainly will have ample opportunity to promote EyeMobile and its new iPhone application. Additionally, with CNET now under the CBS umbrella, they can also reach out to the tech savvy community to encourage users to submit content. In short, all the pieces seem to be there for CBS to execute a big citizen journalism initiative – it’s just a matter of how serious they are about pushing it.

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More importantly, Facebook Connect could end up replacing Facebook’s Beacon service on CBS and elsewhere. Expect more sites not owned by CBS to launch next week.