In years to come we may regard May 2011 as a milestone moment in marking the progress of digital and social media on how information reaches us.

For those living offgrid or outside the UK here’s a brief summary of events:
-Footballer takes out a ” injunction” (an injunction whose very existence can not even be mentioned) to prevent news getting out of his alleged affair with a TV celebrity Imogen Thomas
-Sources close to the story are alleged to have leaked details via Twitter
-Footballer’s name is mentioned in tweets by more than 75,000 users and many bogus accounts are set up in both his and Thomas’s name
-Media object strongly to the fact that they are unable to name the footballer while it is common knowledge thanks to social media
-A Member of Parliament (MP) names the footballer on May 20, using “Parliamentary Privilege” or the right of MPs to discuss freely what they want. It can then be reported on.

Right now the traditional media, who have a vested interest in the affair, are portraying this as a battle between, on the one hand, press freedom and noble parliamentarians, and on the other, the out of date judiciary and powerful figures in public life.

This is a distraction: the real issue – and the long-lasting learning from this affair – is that we have clear, tangible evidence that traditional media no longer control dissemination of news and information.

We are now to have an investigation and a debate around privacy, fuelled by years of questionable tabloid intrusion into the personal lives of those in the public gaze.

At the same time, Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge has said. “Modern technology is totally out of control.” His comments belie a lack of understanding about the realities of consumer behaviour and the power of social media.

The fact that Lord Judge calls the internet and social media – used by billions across the planet from all social strata “technology” – marks him out as an anachronism. Yet his comments also demonstrate the steep learning curve that he and his colleagues will confront in years to come, as the public take over the primary role of disseminating information.

Here are the learnings which all parties must take to heart in order to strike the right balance in the forthcoming debate:

-digital media is not territorial. Pre-digital, it was possible to prohibit national media from printing or broadcasting within a territory. Injunctions in one territory can not prevent the spread of information to others without the degree of censorship which China and other nations impose.

-social media channels are not “media”. Social media content is the conversation all around us translated into digital form. It is made up of individuals and their connection to others, through real-world relationships or common interest. Injuncting and suing individuals may have legitimate grounding in law, yet, the reality of being able to identify and injunct either a service with tens of millions of users, or those users individually, is as unworkable as preventing file-sharing has proven. It’s as viable as gagging each and every one of us.

-users will continue to create and share information, irrespective of the law. Prior to the advent of digital and social channels, the public had limited control over how they responded to print and broadcast information. Now users themselves create information, often in advance of traditional media (the Egyptian revolution and the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound providing us with just two examples.

Users will also play an increasing role in broadcasting, disseminating and curating information. To those in traditional media, law-making and enforcement this is an inconvenient truth. Yet once we recognise and accept that “technology” has disrupted and changed the relationships between news and individual we can start to have an informed debate about the implications of these behaviours and the actions we need to take.

Picture the Scene

A handful of mobile visionaries, luminaries and hangers-on emerge from a restaurant in Barcelona’s Barrio Gotico on the eve of Mobile World Congress.

Bodies satiated with salted cod and minds satisfied with the cut and thrust of friendly debate, we emerge into the warm night.

It’s been a challenge, but I’ve done my best to neglect email and social networking for the night and instead give my full attention to my fellow diners. Now, I reach for and check for messages on one of my one of my two indispensable smart phones.

“Beware of the pickpockets” a wise friend of mine cautioned. “They’re in the skies as well as in the streets.”

His witty remark struck a chord with me; earlier that evening my mobile network had advised me that I was fast approaching my 10 mb data roaming limit after only a day and a half out of the country. It was painful too, as before setting off I had phoned my operator in the hope of securing the cheapest way possible of using my smartphone abroad.

This is not a personal gripe about the cost of data roaming. Let’s face it, I can afford it and it’s part of the cost of doing business. It’s more a reflection on how this pain point for me is one which will be shared by a growing number of connected customers, and how the industry needs to respond before consumers and their watchdogs take an interest.

Working in digital strategy and services and means that my data consumption habits veer towards the early adopter on the distribution curve. Yet what marks you out as a geek / techno addict one year very rapidly becomes the norm. I suspect that in two years’ time my behaviour will not seem abnormal. Right now I’m seeing “non-techie” friends instinctively use downloadable maps, share experiences in real-time through audio, video and photos or use location and context to enrich social profiles on a real-time basis.

Analyst Mary Meeker, now of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers, has assembled what I believe are set of irrefutable arguments on how and why we are entering the age of seamless mass mobility which has eluded us for the last decade.

Smart devices are affordable and usable. Attractive and often addictive new services are gaining consumer traction, and investments being made in connectivity via WiFi and LTE. This all adds up to a huge future for mobile connected services.

Unless, that is you choose to go abroad.

In the early days of data services, enterprise, not consumer demand drove the thinking of mobile operators, OpCos could be assured of corporate customers who would cover the cost for data roaming.

Yet future demand for network services is going to come overwhelmingly from the consumer segment. That’s the consumers who like cheap short-hop flights, book hotels themselves and who who get withdrawal symptoms after two hours away from FaceBook.

These customers are already developing the habit of sharing richer information at the points of inspiration, curiosity and frustration. In their home markets they’re connected to capped or unlimited data plans and bathed in WiFi at home, college and work.

Yet go across a border, and this feast turns into a famine: data charges must be eked out by the byte.

Operators can create more value if they stand aside.

Fuelled mainly by the threat of action by the EU and the crusading attitude of commissioner Viviane Reding, European operators have moved to greater transparency in data roaming for voice and text.

Yet data charges have been notably absent from the discussion, possibly because consumers have yet to encounter the “bill shock” from data roaming. Perhaps for the first time, this summer’s travellers, armed with smartphones and their social media addiction, may produce a similar same outcry as that €10 three-minute call home did in the middle of last decade.

Through consolidation, many of Europe’s networks are under common ownership, with Vodafone, Telefonica, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom in a position to create attractive packages for their European users. From a commercial and technical standpoint the excuses for high data roaming will prove unsustainable.

Retention is now, more than ever, the metric to which operators pay attention. Offering great value voice and text packages for an assured monthly spend is now an accepted way of keeping customers. Through consumer demand (and the threat of intervention from the EC), voice roaming costs can now be controlled and made transparent with add-on packages.

Data roaming, by contrast is an anachronism, with overbearing charging models driven by the operator’s outdated models of recouping investment costs.

Mobile operators in Europe have a unique opportunity to enjoy the huge rewards from massive upturns in demand for data connectivity. In a united Europe with powerful telcos, this connectivity needs to be as seamless as services it supports. Operators need to ensure they capture that opportunity and deliver services which reflect consumer needs in this decade, not the outmoded commercial relationships and technologies of the last.

Epilogue

As for me, the rest of the trip was spent practicing mobile digital abstinence, holding out on that extra tweet or foursquare check-in until business need demanded it, or at least until I reached the safety of hotel or free public wifi. Photo uploads were banned in favour of side loading, and I didn’t even allow myself to think about sharing that video to my mobile me locker. It may have been a small loss to the world, missing out on the “wall of ham” pictures from the sidestreets. But it was, in every sense, an unwelcome and uncomfortable step back to the days of tyranny in data roaming.

Photo credit: © Chrisharvey | Dreamstime.com

Anyone looking for an example of a radical new idea, simply explained in a narrative and pictorial style should look no further.

Read, view and download from slideshare. The reference view from Mary Meeker, now at Kleiner Perkins

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That first is “If you can’t say anything good, say nothing. The second is “say only good things in writing.” I’m acutely conscious of the number of supposedly private mails which have been posted on the net which are open to misinterpretation or devoid of the context, humour and nuance in which they were conceived. There, but for the grace of God, go I, you and anyone else in this hyper-connected, “mail first ask questions later” digital age.

Yet yesterday the disappointment at The Sound Horizon Towers was so palpable I felt compelled to put words in the ether. After weeks of build up to Apple’s significant announcement, we discovered on Tuesday that – yes – iTunes 10 had “gone social.”

So it was neither streaming, nor subscription, nor the expected cloud-based music service which was bolted onto iTunes. Instead, we got Ping, which Steve Jobs claims will massively unlock the social potential of the 160 million iTunes users.

This shows that the product genius that goes into Apple’s engineering and user experience dominance is lacking in understanding of even the basics of social media. I’m aware that Facebook was an original, and now strangely absent element of the launch, but it’s painfully absent right now and shows no sign of returning. This leaves us with e-mail as the only communication method.

Here’s what’s wrong with Ping as it stands sans SocNet, and how Apple can and should put it right in very short order.

Ping as a menu item, not a contextual feature
Ping sits as a standalone item in the menu, between iTunes Store and my purchased tracks. In short, I have to go to Ping rather than Ping coming to me as a result of my musical activity or my interaction with the music in iTunes 10.

Ping is a standalone feature, not integrated

Remedy: Ensure Ping is available at the track, album and artist level as a contextual menu item and as part of the track display info in my library, and even in the iTunes store. Give customers multiple, redundant ways of accessing the same info.

Ping in iTunes but nowhere else
We’ve always known that Apple is immune to the benefits of “Open,” whether it’s open innovation or opening up its proprietary environments or technologies. But a “closed” approach to social media can’t and won’t work.

Music is highly personal and individual, but music usage and listening also provides a huge element of social capital, which forms the basis of successful services such as LastFM. Being able to broadcast my current and historical listening into my other social media should be a hygiene factor for social music.

In short, people find music through other people, and find other people through music. Nothing about Ping allows me to either connect with friends through music or to find new music through my trusted filter network.

Social networks have become the enabling platforms – the audience and usage is on the networks and via the networks, not destination sites or products. They have earned their usage through allowing third party services access to these platforms.

Remedy: Allow iTunes to export and import playlist / playback info information to key social networks including Facebook and Twitter, and into lifestreaming environments.

Configuring profiles by genre

When setting up Ping I was asked to tick three boxes for “genres” I like. Even the most basic ethnographic studies or analysis of music listening behaviour shows that hardly anyone listens according to the byzantine classifications created by the physical music retail business to allow them to rack and range “product.”

It’s archaic, wrong, smacks of dinosaur label marketing practices and it’s like asking me which of my kids I would save from a burning house first. Turn it off, now.

Apart from that, what about the genres people are passionate about – dubstep, grime, thrashcore et al?

I am a name, not a genre

Remedy: Apple knows what’s in my collection or can do that with a simple permission. Why not sniff my tunes or look at my play count to see what I’m really playing, then connect me to my favourite artist feeds?

Launching without tastemakers

I admire Rick Rubin but he’s not the first person I would turn to. Bottom line, he’s not in my network of trusted filters. Yet he was the only person apart from a Santa Monica-based club DJ who was available for me to follow.

Remedy: Relaunch with influential tastemakers from old and new media who have the potential to be significant to music leaders and followers.

Launching with no acts

So I can follow U2 or Lady Gaga. Being eaten by a bear or a lion?? Come on. Or maybe Yo Yo Ma. I respect all of these performers but I don’t want them in my network.

I know iTunes is more mainstream and aimed at more passive consumers than the early adopting wired music and tech enthusiast. But to launch a service which has only a smattering of artists to follow is not worth the candle.

Remedy: Get to critical mass with artists to follow and open it up to users. Key learning from social networks and successful services is to let users take over.

Verdict: Apple has a reputation for not being first (remember the iPod wasn’t the first digital music player) but for doing it simply and in taking new products, services and behaviours through the early adopters and into the early majority.

Ping is coming late to the social music game but has failed to recognise the fundamental rule: set things up and let the users take over. It feels over-managed, bare and ultimately pointless.

At The Sound Horizon we believe that successful services make use of the three Cs: Content, Context and Community.

Hopefully they’ll roll out features we need and expect in coming iterations which play to the second C – the context, such as:
-real time playback information (what am I listening to right now)
-location based playback
-how it fits with my mood

and the third C, community
-how many of my friends / social network contacts are listening to the track
-whether there are others listening right now
-who near me is listening to this track

Maybe these features are a step too far for Apple’s early majority right now. But as a first step into the world of social music, Ping needs to live up to its punchy name.

For those of you who weren’t there, many of the presentations hosted here on Slideshare speak for themselves.

For me there were two clear trends going on. There’s a significant amount of “Top Down” work going on to work out what the strategy should be. This is coming from the likes of Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND) CEO Richard Titus, sitting astride an empire with 40M uniques a month, who made an impassioned plea for the quality of data to get better in the overall publishing space before the market could mature. AND has a clear strategy for attacking and monetising this space, evidenced later in the day by Teletext Digital MD Neil Johnson’s Metro and Prime location Ipad apps.

At the same time there was some “bottom-up” innovation going on with book publishers getting into the market and experimenting. David Roth-Ey of Harper-Collins provided some great insight (with rare candour in this over-polished business) into how the publisher had contrasting experience with two forays into mobile publishing, one with 100K downloads (SAS survival guide) and Hilary Mantel’s Novel Wolf Hall (less than 1K). Presentation is here

David was clear about his strategy: add value to the book format with richer content, take advantages of the richer elements of the e-pub format as they arrive and= expand to other platforms. It was a clear and realistic strategy, and one of the clearest articulated in the day.

Throughout Camerjam there were a lot of interesting showcases from different news, magazine and book publishers. However it was clear that the iPhone platform had dominated the mindset of most players in the space, with Android trailing behind and Nokia’s OVI environment now getting a few spontaneous mentions. Microsoft’s Peter Bale spoke up for Windows 7 and showed how the slick UI and deep integration into native features will confound those who believe this platform will be an also-ran by this time next year.

It’s clear that ease of development and high usage per user by iPhone users are the most influential factors here, but other key trends falling out of the day were:

-An app is not a strategy. The business needs to move beyond a single platform. As Handmark CEO Paul Reddick commented “it’s like making a TV programme which can only be watched by people with LG TV sets.
-Publishers need to go beyond simply digitising content and making it available. “Raw” Content needs the accompanying social and contextual factors to make a compelling consumer proposition. For more detail view our take on Books 2.0 and the “3Cs Model” of Content, Context and Community

Startups are active in this space and are threatening to destroy the existing models. Maureen Scott of Ether Books laid out her position when opening the day’s debate, arguing that the future of publishing lay in digital and that the days of “analogue consumers” are numbered.

like most content / tech plays this is a five-way football match between those involved in hardware, middleware, OS-driven plays (MSFT and Google), traditional “content 1.0″ companies and the sparky VC-funded (or would be funded) startups in this space.

The next few years will be chaotic and be too much for those brought up in the linear traditional world of dead tree publising. However for those who can transform and cope with the challenge and pace of continual innovation, the future for this industry will be bright.

The challenge now is for the publishing execs outside of the enlightened and converted who were present at Camerjam. They must ready their businesses for the rapid and perpetual nature of change which will become the norm in the connected digital ecosystem

There’s a natural fit with Breakpoint – the founders Scott Lehr, Gary Geller and Michael Nevins have a deep experience of the digital entertainment and media industries. They have a track record of jump-starting businesses and providing the combination of strategy, business development and execution capabilities to corporate and startup clients.

It’s a recognition by both companies that the digital, mobile and entertainment industries are international in scope. But as founding partner Scott Lehr says: “Digital businesses are inherently global, yet always benefit from regional market expertise and presence.”

We agree, and we’re seeing that as the U.S. services market has gone into overdrive, we need to have a partner who understands that market. In return, Breakpoint gets The Sound Horizon’s knowledge and presence in the U.K., Europe and the rapidly developing markets of the Middle East.

We’re looking forward to our collaboration and to working more closely with each others’ clients and on joint projects.

If you’re thinking of going and you’ve not yet decided, we can maybe help you make up your mind. We’re offering our blog subscribers and #books2.0 group members a discount of more than 25% on the entry price. Normal entry is £249 + VAT – through the Sound Horizon and the Books 2.0 group you can get to go for the discounted price of £180 +VAT.

To access this rate go to http://www.camerjam.com/events/m-publishing/tickets/ and enter the promo code “soundpride”

Places are limited so book now to take advantage of this unmissable rate.