Business success on the Web is dependent on mastering not just content but context, according to Shen Tong, founder and president of VFinity, a Web-native workflow management solution.
Achieving success on Web 2.0 is mandatory to avoid becoming obsolete, Tong said during Tuesday’s Super Session, “Social Networking in the 21st Century.”
“When I was running the news center for the student center in Beijing, reporters said my revolution would be televised, and it made the difference,” said Tong, who was a student activist during China’s Tiananmen Square movement and whose best-selling book on the subject, “Almost a Revolution,” is still required reading.
MANAGED WEB
“Now the next revolution will be social networking,” Tong said. “I want to thank NAB for organizing this panel, because it is the most challenging and important question for media business. It refers to massive growing interactivity.”
Tong went on to introduce his concept of the managed Web. Tong proposed that everything — from the Amazon model of users reviewing products and users rating reviews to actual internal production — will become a network of harnessing context tools and tags.
Tong noted that content is no longer limited by access to the airwaves or shelf space. Everyone has access to everything, and the Web is taking the place of libraries, traditional broadcasting and means of distribution.
Now the key is in the filters, he said. Customers desire a self-service, self-correcting mechanism more than a dictated product. Manufacturers need to take note, offering a context-centric strategy with flexible metadata. Customers will dictate valuable content.
“Gatekeepers are dead,” Tong said, stressing people as an integration point of creativity, community and software. “It’s not about how you can protect content, it’s about how easy you can get content to the context aggregate system.”
After Tong demonstrated VFinity’s means of creating “dynamic circles,” Peggy Miles, session moderator and president and founder of Intervox Communications in Alexandria, Va., introduced the executive panelists. They include David Bankston, executive vice president and CTO of Neighborhood America; Cynthia Francis, chief executive officer of Reality Digital; Michael Gordon, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Limelight Networks; Suzanne Stefanac, director of the American Film Institute’s Digital Content Lab; and Rex Wong, CEO of Dave.TV.
The first thing Miles did was project the cell phone-captured CNN.com video of the tragic shooting at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. “News, user-generated, is no longer in the future,” Miles said. “Right now it’s cached video, but the next generation will be live, mobile webcasting on the phone.
As she spoke, someone circled the room with a cell phone, images of which were projected with a minor delay through ComVu.
BUILDING A COMMUNITY
The panel then discussed how the networks are almost instantaneously realizing the value of reaching out to and building the community of potential content providers in the general public. But with the concept of the medium being available to all came the issues of minimizing risks from legal issues such as libel and copyright infringement. This brought up the importance of filters on both the back and front end, but implemented without saying, “my way or no way.”
People now have a digital life that travels conveniently with them, and allows for instantaneous unilateral feedback for strengthening all capabilities.
Building affinity almost more than brands, locking in on a community of interest and the “mash-up” of applications and widgets on Web sites were bantered back and forth as the evolution of long-term collaboration.
“The power of social networking is available to everyone; it is not a threat,” Tong said.
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