May, 2007 | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

These columns must be mixed up

That’s what I thought at first when I logged on to my Wells Fargo on-line brokerage account today and saw $27.39 as the increase for the day for my aQuantive (AQNT) stock.

“That must be the stock price, not the increase,” I said to myself. “It’s been trading in the 30s. A $27 increase can’t be right.”

Then I read the daily news and found out Microsoft had agreed to purchase aQuantive for $66.50 a share, an 85 percent premium over the previous day’s close. It’s all over the blogs, too: here, and here, and here, and here.
Good for my IRA.

It just goes to show what a BIG deal on-line advertising will be. With Google having announced a deal for DoubleClick, Microsoft needed to buy a seat at the advertising table.

I first bought AQNT stock (but unfortunately only 100 shares) because of trends I had been following in media and advertising. Spending on TV ads is huge, but audiences are getting smaller and people are skipping the commercials. But so far there hasn’t been anywhere near enough on-line ad inventory for current TV advertisers to buy. So I figured companies like aQuantive would have a great long-term opportunity for growth as they figured out how to create advertising opportunities.
In this investment, I was partially taking advice from two money people I respect, and partially going against both. Phil Town in his Rule #1 Investing suggests purchasing single stocks in industries you follow and understand. That I did. This is an area I work in and blog about.
Town says, however, you should look for companies with long track records of earnings, but which are currently trading at a significant discount to projected future earnings. That wasn’t true for AQNT, but the long-term market upside looked too good to wait until this stock got cheap by his standards.
My real financial hero, Dave Ramsey, the get-out-of-debt guru, says you shouldn’t buy single stocks, but instead should invest in mutual funds with a long track record. He rightly points out the examples of Enron and others, in which employees who had all their retirement eggs in the company stock found themselves financially ruined.

So because I like the Town tactic and the Ramsey rule, I just try to, in essence, create my own mutual fund by limiting each individual stock to no more than 10 percent of my IRA. That meant I had to sell Apple because it had gone up enough that it was too big of a part of my portfolio.

Yes, I’ve had my share of losers, too. Nortel hasn’t been great (and that was one that did have accounting problems that whacked the stock.) And then there was the STUPID Tax I paid by falling for a “hot tip” on Pangea Petroleum (PAPO). But because they were small percentages of my account, they were just aggravating, not devastating.

aQuantive isn’t a Peter Lynch 10-bagger for me (although if you had bought it five years ago, it would have been), but having it go up 130 percent in six months, and 78 percent in a day, makes up for some mistakes.

Technorati: aQuantive, Microsoft, Dave Ramsey, Phil Town, Apple

NY Times to Depend on Video Syndication

Even the New York Times realizes that its video success depends on syndicating its video to blogs and other web sites, not in just driving traffic to the nytimes.com site.

That’s the report from Lost Remote. Here are some of Steve Safran’s highlights from Martin Nisenholtz’s presentation:

“We started to create original video for the web – and grew a desk from a handful to 25 people completely integrated into the newsroom.”
Our teams abroad have video cameras. We’re starting to build the full infrastructure.

“Video costs have dropped dramatically. The video we now produce – the majority requires a specialist in the field. This notion that the print reporters would be able to produce videos still hasn’t taken shape yet, but the trend is taking shape.”

“What does it take to get a print reporter to do this? After about a half a day of training, the print reporters do get the basic skills they need.”
“To reach a broader audience, the Times must distribute its video outside of NYTimes.com. We believe we need to go outside the walls to make this work.”

“By this strategy we get to put our video in front of a much bigger audience than we would by (keeping it at) the NYTimes.com.”

“It’s possible that something like AppleTV is going to be the living room’s iPod. That’s going to fundamentally change the way programming takes place and, we’re very early in this, but we’re determined to take a role in this.”

Goal in the next 18 months: “We want to have four to five times more streams generated outside NYTimes.com than inside it.”

“We do believe that in video, brands matter. Content choices are expanding at a dizzying rate. Brands serve as a beacon out there. We think that is one of our differentiators out there. And we think quality matters, too. Good is still good and bad is still bad. I still put my money on the guys in the Times newsroom than on the amateurs. That’s not to say there won’t be good amateur content.”

“The advantages that the new folks on the block have is that they have nothing to protect. Even though the New York Times is 156 years old, we’re still new in video. Failure (in video) is not a step backward for us.”

“Avoid square pegs. Web video is not TV… The whole format is radically changing.”

“The blogosphere is very important for moving video around. These are the new rules of the medium. We’re starting to think of ourselves not only as creators but as programmers as well.”

Technorati: Video, Syndication, New York Times, Lost Remote

Trying out Brightcove

Here’s a link to a channel I set up in Brightcove as I explore various video syndication services. Let’s see how it works.

Technorati: Brightcove, Video, Syndication

The Graduation Speech

As I mentioned earlier, last Saturday I had the great pleasure of attending college graduations for my son, Jake, my brother, Mark, and his wife, April. It was a big day for the Aase family; we’re proud of all of them.

Mark gave one of the student commencement speeches at Concordia University in St. Paul, Minn. He did a great job; none of the platitudes you often hear in graduation speeches, but the straight talk of someone who has had some life experiences, and who has learned from them.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjj5e4U2WLo]

Technorati: Graduation, Speech, Concordia, Mark Aase

Land Lines, Snail Mail and Dead Media

It’s fitting to read this in the Star Tribune on the day the U.S. Postal Service raises the First Class stamp rate to 41 cents.

More than a quarter of young adults have only cell phones, making them the leading edge of a strengthening move away from traditional landline telephones, a federal survey showed Monday.

Overall, the portion of adults with only cell phones grew by more than 2 percentage points in the latter half of last year to nearly 12 percent, an expansion rate that began in the first part of 2006 and was double earlier rates of growth. One in four people aged 18 to 24 had only cell phones, as did 29 percent of those 25 to 29, the study showed. The percentages declined with age after that, with 2 percent of those 65 or older having only cell phones.

We must be young at heart; our family has been sans land line for about a year… ever since we discovered most of our cell phone minutes were consumed by calls from our home land line. We ported the number to a cell for an extra $10 a month, and saved $35 a month by getting rid of the land line.

I wonder whether my kids will ever have a land line. Why would they need one? My daughter and son-in-law each have a cell, but no land line. The only way I can see myself going back is if DSL becomes a strong alternative to cable internet, and when enough video content becomes available through streaming services or downloads. If the phone company’s DSL throws in calling along with the monthly bill for internet, I might take advantage.
It just goes to show that competition beats a regulated monopoly hands down. FedEx and UPS own the package delivery business. Texting and IM are replacing email (especially among young people), which obliterated the fax (as Michael Hyatt has observed), which was the first major challenge to the first class letter. As Hyatt put it, in reflecting on the oddity of receiving a letter which had no email or phone contact included:

I also thought, What a hassle. First, the letter sat in my inbox for several days. Why? Because I assume that anyone who wants a quick answer to something sends an e-mail or leaves a voice mail. About the only letters I get any more are direct mail solicitations or solicitations for charitable contributions. I assume that the only reason these don’t come via e-mail is either the sender doesn’t have my e-mail address or, even if he does, doesn’t want me to regard it as spam.

The only way to reply to this author was to send an actual letter. Talk about “blast from the past.” I probably don’t send more than half a dozen letters a year. Even then, it’s usually because it’s a legal matter that requires this kind of documentation. It’s hard to believe that in 2007, anyone is still sending letters. Snail-mail—at least for most business correspondence—is dead.

People just don’t have the time for an “inquiry-response cycle” that takes weeks. Even faxes are dead. In the 1990s, fax machines were cutting edge technology. Today, they are about as useless as an electric typewriter. I can’t even remember the last time I sent or received a fax. I still subscribe to eFax.com, which allows you to send and receive faxes on your computer, but even that sits idle. In today’s world, even a fax is too much hassle.

E-mail is dramatically shortened the response cycle. Instant messaging is only raising the expectations. People send e-mails and expect a response within hours. In the 90s, when I owned my own company, my partner and I had an unwritten policy that we would respond to everyone within 24 hours. This always impressed our clients. They knew they could count on a quick response. But, by today’s standards, even that wouldn’t cut it. People want answers—and they want them now.

My friend Shel Holtz says with some justification that new media do not kill old media. For example, TV didn’t kill radio: it significantly changed it, and we don’t get long dramas on radio, but radio is still alive and well. This got us into the discussion about whether the death of the 8-track (and then the cassette) disproves his thesis or not. He says the format changed, but it’s still audio.

But what about the fax? Is Michael Hyatt right? Is the fax dead? I remember when it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen, that a document could be sent over telephone wires. But now that many of us don’t have wires for our telephones anymore…

Technorati: Phone, Wireless, Post Office, Fax, Land Line