NBC isn’t hopping on the iPad bandwagon, according to recent reports. The media giant known for popular shows like “The Office” and “30 Rock” reportedly told Apple it won’t be making any of its online shows iPad-compatible anytime soon. And they’re not alone. Sources cited by The New York Post’s Claire Atkinson say that Time Warner and several other “large media companies” are forgoing what they claim is an expensive reformatting of their video libraries. But is conversion expense the real reason why some media companies are eschewing the Apple iPad craze? Or is the fact that the ad dollars just aren’t there yet to make it worth their while? Sponsor That some media companies aren’t “iPad-ready” isn’t new information by any means, but the fact that it’s being rehashed, re-reported and re-analyzed is notable, especially now following Google’s newfound partnership with Adobe, whose Flash plugin stills powers much of the video on the Web today. With support for Flash in both the upcoming Google TV platform as well as in Google’s Android mobile operating system (an OS that’s now outselling Apple’s iPhone), Google is making it clear, that for the being, the Web still needs Flash. And media companies like NBC and Time Warner are along for the ride. Why reconvert videos for iPad when Android may dominate? Why waste time on a “iDevice” support when ad dollars associated with streaming media barely impact the bottom line? These are the very questions major media companies are now considering as we speak. Streaming Ads Don’t Pay Some TV and video is available for free on the iPad today, but it’s still more limited that what you would find on the Web in general. ABC has an iPad app, but that’s not surprising considering that the Disney-owned property has Jobs as its largest shareholder. CBS has an iPad-friendly site, but only a few shows available, and media-filled sites like CNN, Fox News, ESPN.com and others offer varying degrees of iPad-readiness. But NBC won’t be following these early adopters, it appears. There’s a very telling quote about this issue from NBC Universal’s President and CEO Jeff Zucker, delivered in January . Speaking about tech advances, the iPad in particular, he said: “We believe in ubiquitous distribution of our content and the fact is consumers want to engage with our content wherever they are…As long as we get paid for that content, we don’t really care where it’s displayed or where it’s used.” “Get paid ,” he said. Streaming video sites, even the NBC Universal creation Hulu.com , have been struggling to make that a reality. Although Hulu finally reached profitability this year, the numbers aren’t anywhere near what traditional TV advertising brings in. Hulu’s revenue topped $100 million in 2009, according to Hulu chief Jason Kilar. To put that in perspective, a 30-second national broadcast TV commercial makes more than 3 times that, even by the most conservative estimates. Too Expensive to Convert? But is there any truth to the claims of conversion being “too expensive?” Open web zealots will tell you that’s a bunch of “FUD” – conversion costs are minimal and there are plenty of other solutions out there for ditching Flash and moving to HTML5, the upcoming web standard that supports plugin-free video viewing. In reality, while HTML5-enabled video streams are possible today, large media publishers are still waiting for video platform providers to catch up to the capabilities Adobe’s Flash currently offers, including rich analytics, advertising and engagement tracking and more. That’s just around the corner, though. For example, video platform provider Brightcove will be on par with Flash by year-end, according to their published roadmap . However, the expense of conversion is not necessarily as “trivial” as Apple CEO Steve Jobs has made it seem. The truth, said Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire, is that “it depends.” As he told us earlier , publishers that use homegrown video solutions will have more expenses associated with the creation of HTML5 websites, but for customers using platform solutions (like his, of course), the transition is much easier. But Flash and HTML5 will co-exist for years, he said. It’s not a matter of ditching one for the other. That means companies offering an iPad-compatible website must maintain it separately and there is some cost involved with that, minimal as it may be. But Conversion Cost Isn’t the Problem Here: NBC & Others Just Want to Make Money Last month, The New York Times reported that NBC execs were showing off a mock-up of an iPad/iPhone-compatible mobile website that offered full episodes of popular shows, ready for streaming. At the last minute, however, the company decided to block iPad viewing of these shows. At present, only clips and the short-form “webisodes” play on the iPhone or iPad. The fact that NBC had already gone so far as to build a mock-up of an iPad-friendly site makes the whole “it’s too expensive” argument questionable, at least in this case. So let’s get real about this for a minute. NBC isn’t a great network these days. In fact, it hasn’t been “must-see TV” since “Friends” or maybe even the “Seinfeld” era. Olympics coverage notwithstanding, the network trailed others during the past season, losing out to FOX and CBS, both of whom were riding high of the return of the sitcom and reality programming.

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First off, you do not need a PR firm. The retainer is usually not worth it, especially for a young, growing startup because your product is still drastically changing and because your conversion rates are probably very low. As a startup that is looking to innovate in your industry, it usually does not make any sense for you to allow someone else to communicate your vision. PR firms do not always get it. Even with stellar communication skills, only you and your core team really understand the message and the vision. Sponsor Danny Wong is the co-founder and lead evangelist of Blank Label , a provider of custom dress shirts. He has been featured in publications like ReadWriteWeb, FastCompany, ABCNews, FoxNews, BusinessWeek and more. He is also a 19-year-old evangelist and rockstar studying full-time at Bentley University. If you are a first-timer at PR, start small so you do not burn any important bridges (but be aware that every bridge counts). Start pitching to small blogs and websites in your niche and occasionally take a shot at medium-sized blogs. Once you start feeling more comfortable with your email pitch , and are making decent traction with small blogs and websites, move onto pitching to medium-sized sites. Then, as you gain experience, and learn a bit more about tailoring your pitch to specific authors, you can move onto mass-media outlets that can really increase your exposure because of their tremendous reach. Here are some pieces of advice that will get you featured more often. Speak Their Language and be Concise As in all communications practices, you want to make sure that your audience can understand what you are saying without thinking too much. Do not foolishly use inner-office jargon that no one else understands. Not to insult journalists, but pitch as if you were addressing a 14-year-old. Seriously. This manner of communication should be the same for everyone you talk to about your brand. You are not condescending them this way; you are allowing them to easily digest your message. Make Some Friends Sometimes it’s good to build a relationship with a reporter before pitching them. In our digital age, this is much easier to do too since we have Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for interacting with new people. In fact, you can also leverage your secondary network (your network’s network) to get in contact with writers. Knowing people that know people is a great way to get your foot in the door. Always be Reading Keep an eye out for relatable content or news, and pitch writers with a fresh angle since they are obviously interested in related subjects. Or, provide meaningful commentary (typically best with email) that can help kick-start your relationship with the writer through intellectual dialogue. Indirectly Target Reporters Sometimes it’s not ideal to pitch directly to reporters. It might be better to target media outlets that the influentials are reading. If you know that Om Malik reads some small-time tech blog, you might want to get featured on that blog to get Om Malik’s eyes on you without directly contacting him. When you finally do contact him, you will have higher visibility in his overflooded inbox because he has heard of you before. Do Something Different No one wants to talk about something that’s been done before. What’s your angle that makes you so special? Sure, you can do something similar to big businesses, but make sure there’s also something distinctly different about what you do. Always be innovating and let people know that! Do a Giveaway Blogs and medium-sized websites love this. You are offering value to them and their readers because you are giving something away for free that the publisher and the audience does not have to pay for. This also serves as free publicity for you, so everyone wins. The publisher gets a new piece of content, the audience gets a free prize, and you get some eyes on your product and website. NOTE: This typically does not work on bigger publications or mass-media outlets because they are looking for newsworthy content, or sponsored posts. Be Part of a Movement Being part of a movement validates what you’re doing as a business, and sometimes gives reporters more newsworthy content than just a solo feature of you because they can profile other businesses within the same space that are doing awesome things. Have an Actionable Conclusion to Your Pitch Do not just pitch your story and hope the recipient will email or call. Ask them their thoughts on the pitch, or prompt them to reply via email or call to further discuss the story. Be Patient, but Persistent This is very important. Sometimes it takes a while for a journalist to get back to you, and sometimes they forget to reply. I tend to follow up one to two weeks after emailing a journalist to see if they received my email and their thoughts on it. I’ve closed many more stories this way rather than trying to let my first email do all of the work. Even after you’ve had an interview or a briefing, it is important to follow up with your media contact until the story is live because it doesn’t count unless the public sees it! One recent media hit took a month from initial pitch before being published live, and I’ve been nurturing one media lead I have had since December of 2009! Do you have any other wisdoms on how startups can power their media relations? Feel free to add your tips in the comments below. Discuss

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The Web has hit a point where tracking pageviews is useless for startups. There was a time when all you needed to succeed on the Internet were lots and lots of eyeballs, and the best way of measuring those eyeballs was by tracking pageviews (measuring exactly which pages on a website are viewed by individual visitors). The dot-com crash showed us that the eyeball-based business model was a failure. Sponsor Since then, startups have moved toward direct monetization strategies such as subscriptions and virtual goods – and these businesses using these strategies require very different metrics than an advertising-based business would. Make no mistake, pageviews were valuable metric once, but their time has passed. Guest author Tim Trefren is one of the founders of Mixpanel, a real-time Web analytics service that helps companies understand how users interact with Web applications. He writes about analytics at the company blog . For startups that sell something, metrics like average revenue per user (ARPU) and customer lifetime value (CLV) are vastly more valuable than detailed pageview tracking. It doesn’t make any sense to focus on pageviews (an approximation for value) when you can measure the real thing directly. There’s also a clear pattern in the direction the Web is heading – toward interaction and responsiveness, and away from separate pages. If you’re going for incredible user experience, on-page interactions are your bread and butter. Can you imagine what a drag it would be if the page reloaded every time you commented or ‘Liked’ something on Facebook? It would be awful. This trend further devalues the pageview as a valid metric. If you have a highly interactive Web application that spans only a few pages, there’s not a whole lot of value in seeing how many times those pages were loaded. Much more valuable information can be found by tracking the parts of your application that your users are interacting with the most. The benefits here are twofold: You can directly measure the things that are important to you, and you gain unparalleled insight into how people actually use your application. If Not Pageviews, Then What? When you’re deciding how to incorporate analytics into your strategy, the most important thing is that you are gathering actionable data. By this I mean that you have to be able to use the information you gather to make a decision and take action . If you’re not going to use it to make a decision, it’s a waste of time to even look at it. With this in mind, there are a few areas we should focus on: split testing, interaction tracking, conversion funnel analysis, and click tracking. These methods will give you the information you need to both improve your conversion rates and your understanding of user behavior. Just a few years back, your only options were to roll your own analytics or to pay tons of money to a giant company like Omniture. This left startups in a tough spot, one many startup founders still encounter today: it’s difficult to justify putting a lot of development time into analytics when it’s not your main product, and it’s hard for a small company to work with a large sales organization. Luckily, the analytics landscape is changing. Many new companies are sprouting up to handle every aspect of your analytics, freeing you from the need to develop your own internal tools. Split testing Split testing involves creating different versions of your site and measuring how the changes affect user behavior. Your changes can be as small as a different call to action or as large as a complete redesign. With this data in hand, you can make changes to your website to massively improve your conversion rates. What companies do it? Google Website Optimizer is a free multivariate testing solution. It makes it possible to change a number of different things and determine the optimal combination of changes. Conversion funnel analysis Funnel analysis is a way of measuring conversion rates across multiple steps of user acquisition. For example, you can measure the rate at which visitors from the front page go to the pricing page, and then how many continue on to actually create an account. This is an incredibly important concept to understand, and can be applied to many aspects of your application. What companies do it? Mixpanel (my company) is a freemium service that provides funnel analysis and segmentation. Google Analytics has a feature called Funnel Visualization that provides basic pageview-based funnel tracking. KISSmetrics is a new company with a funnel analysis product in closed beta. Click tracking Click tracking is a great way to measure how effective your website is. Every click a visitor makes is recorded, so you know which links and buttons are receiving attention. There are a number of ways to report this data, but the most popular is to overlay an image of your website with a heatmap of all of the clicks. If your users aren’t performing as you expect, you can try changing the page and continuing the test. What products do it? ClickTale is a freemium service that can generate click heatmaps and movies of single visitor sessions. CrazyEgg is a paid service that can generate a few different reports for your visitor click activity, including heatmaps. Event tracking Event tracking is a way of measuring exactly what users are doing on your site. Things like invites sent, videos played, and user signups all count as events. This functionality will grow more and more important as the Web grows more interactive. What companies do it? Kontagent is a freemium service that is focused on Facebook applications. It can track Facebook-specific events like invites and notifications, among other things. Google Analytics recently added basic event tracking to complement its pageview based service. Measure Relevancy, Not Your Ego Ultimately, analytics are crucial to online success. If you want to improve your startup, you’ve got to be measuring it. It’s critical to measure the right things, though – the things that are actually important to your business, not things merely appeal to your ego. It can be mesmerizing to watch the unique visitor count go up day-over-day, but this is a dangerous diversion. The era of eyeballs equaling success is long past, so you should instead be measuring the things that are truly relevant to your business. If you’re not measuring your visitors yet, I urge you to get your toes wet – track something small. The conversion rates for the buttons on your front page would be a great place to start. Is the pageview really dead? What other companies and services are available to help companies move beyond a pageview-centric mindset? Let us know in the comments Photo by Iva Villi . Discuss

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Over the past several months, Facebook has been testing and rolling out new features for Facebook Credits – a virtual currency that collected and exchanged users’ real-world money for on-site credits that could be used in many of the site’s applications and social games. Since its launch in May 2009, the system has rapidly evolved, and Facebook has now revealed their exact revenue split with game and app developers who integrate Credits. In a blog post today, product marketer Deborah Liu wrote , “Facebook will collect 30 percent of currency spent by users… We are committed to investing heavily in the ecosystem and will explore a number of ways to improve the program and increase conversion and net revenue.” Sponsor This 30% cut is the same percentage that Apple’s App Store takes from developers who submit paid apps and games for users of iPod and iPhone devices, and also the same percentage adopted by the Kindle Store. Many of Facebook’s most-used apps are partners in the closed beta for Facebook Credits, including Crowdstar, Playdom, Playfish, RockYou, 6waves and Zynga – makers of the infamous, popular and lucrative game Farmville. Also, since last week, some users have been allowed to buy credits using Paypal, making the system even more viable for casual online gaming and social apps. This option has been rolled out so far to a small percentage of users and will be seen by more users within the next few weeks. If the Credits program can be successfully rolled out for all users and applications, developers and Facebook are looking at a huge influx of cash – and users risk spending a lot more than just time on the site. “By providing a single, cross-application currency,” wrote Liu, “our goal is to making transactions simpler for users, leading to a higher conversion rate for developers. “Specifically, our early testing has shown that users paying with Facebook Credits are significantly more likely to complete a purchase than the average Facebook user .” This fact will surely please Facebook’s investors – but what are the implications for Facebook users themselves? Are users being manipulated unethically by an enormous and powerful marketing machine into spending more time – and now, more money – on applications of little real value? Or has Facebook simply found yet another way to make an honest buck on the Internet? Let us know your thoughts and opinions in the comments. Discuss

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