Micro Persuasion

Three Emerging Digital Careers to Watch

About a month ago, I wrote about three career tracks that won't exist in a few years - at least as I see it. Now let's take a look at three emerging digital jobs that will become increasingly important in the years ahead.

The Chief Customer Experience Officer (and those who work for her)

Want to know if a company is a good witch or a bad witch? It's easy. The web knows. Google, the media and online communities are littered with tales of companies that have exemplary products and customer service. However, it's often easier to find those that have been vilified for the opposite. That's the thesis of Pete Blackshaw's forthcoming book - Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000.

Here's an experiment. For fun, enter any company into this special Google search engine I set up and let me know what you find.

Brands are increasingly recognizing that customer experience is everything. They will follow the model that Zappos and others set in optimizing online and offline channels. Digital touch points, for many companies, will be the most critical. Since August 2006, customer experience job listings increased 57%, according to simplyhired. (User experience is directly related and equally important and I believe will increasingly become more integrated with the total customer experience.)

"customer Experience" trends

"customer experience" jobs

Digital Storytellers

Harvard Business Review last month noted that most executives cannot articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of their business in a simple statement. "If they can’t, neither can anyone else," HBR posits. That's not good.

Remember, much of the developed world is coping with The Attention Crash. If a company can't tell pithy, authentic stories in the right places at the right time to the right people, someone else will. For more on this, I highly recommend the book Made to Stick.

Search may change that. Google is downplaying SEO and increasingly rewarding those who create quality content. This includes the pros/media, amateurs and brands. Blended Search - which integrates noteworthy videos, news and images with web results - is winning over users, according to Jupiter Research.

Net, as Jason Calacanis notes, there is a big market for people who know how to create or cultivate compelling content that pulls in people. To that end my employer is starting up Edelman Studios - a virtual content house that will identify online talent and pair them with brands. Many in the Hollywood community, ex-journalists and advertising/PR creatives will orient their careers in such a direction. Don't be left behind. There's plenty of need here.

Super Crunchers

Here's another book recommendation for your summer reading list (sorry, I read a lot so my clients don't have to). It's called Super Crunchers. In the book, the authors explain through case studies how companies that are able to mine through mountains of data and make it work for them usually win. Another great book on this topic is Moneyball, which I have written about before.

The digital space is the most addressable media and marketing platform ever. However, most marketers are not “quants” and data is largely under utilized by many companies.

Data mining and visualization tools reduce risk, make business more efficient and measurable. Great rewards will come to those who know how to dig into data and make sense of it all and can parse that into insights that help companies optimize the dollars they put online. Be that guy or gal.

Those are three emerging careers on my list. What's on yours? The one topic I did not cover is developers, who I suspect will continue to remain in high demand for years to come.

Book Excerpt: Online Marketing Heroes

On March 10 WIley & Sons is going to publish a new book by Michael Miller called Online Marketing Heroes: Interviews with 25 Successful Online Marketing Gurus. The book features interviews with a host of digital marketing experts, including yours truly.

Wiley has graciously approved the posting of the chapter that features an interview with me. It covers my background, thoughts on blogging, PR, digital marketing and my work at Edelman. You can download it here as a PDF.

Sound bites...

* Technology works best when it takes on a do-it-yourself character—and when it becomes free

• Google’s free search has replaced the PR professional’s traditional paid research tools.

• Generation Y is abandoning earlier technology, such as email, in favor of text messaging, instant messaging, and social network communication

• To take advantage of social networking, figure out where you andyour community overlap and how they want to communicate

• Going forward, the concept of community is the common element running through all online media and technologies

2008 Digital Trends Part II: Living Room 2.0

Entertainment, Mac Fan Version by Horrortaxi

This is the second in a series of posts on the big digital trends to watch in 2008. Part I is here.

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For much of the 20th Century, the living room was our virtual social hub - a tangential connection to the broader world around us. The experiences, however, were never really social. However, they felt that way because we all experienced the same events from the same spot in our homes at precisely the same time.

Let's call this era Living Room 1.0. It was marked by dates like December 8, 1941 when 81 million of us flocked to the living room to get closer to the radio to hear FDR's famous "Infamy speech." Years later, as television began to dominate, it was where we "participated" in major global events, such as the Challenger Disaster, the Thrilla in Manila or Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. The living room kindles strong memories (both positive and negative) for anyone 30 or older. And while the technology changed from radio to TVs and later video games, the experiences were really universal.

In the broadband era, however, the living room appears to have lost relevance. Today, the web is where we turn connect with others - and the connections are real, not imagined.

Consider, for example, the big news this week - the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Many of us I bet, unlike days of old, did not participate in this global event from our living rooms. Rather, we did so in real-time with peers on Twitter via a gaggle of connected devices that really can be anywhere - bedrooms, offices, home offices or, above all, our pockets. (Consider too that Bhutto's son and heir apparent is a Facebook user.)

So is the living room as a social hub dying? Hardly. It's quietly undergoing a revival - dare we call it Living Room 2.0. The revolution started with the advent of HDTV, which is now in 13% of US homes and growing - slowly. However, the real magic happens when we connect Internet-enabled devices and services to those sets. Suddenly, the living room becomes social again because it bridges our offline connections (the family) to our online friends around the world.

Right now it's largely the early adopters who are benefiting from the revival of the living room as a social hub. There are very few Robert Scobles of the world who connect Mac Minis to 50" TVs so they can use Dave Winer's Flickr Fan to view photos of their friends in glorious hi-def. This will change, however, as the devices get simpler, cheaper and the benefits are more pronounced.

For example, one of the biggest Living Room 2.0 successes is arguably XBox Live, which is now becoming a social network. (Edelman handles all XBox PR for Microsoft.) They won't be alone. By the end of 2008 every device that already has a place in an home theater set-up will connect not only to the web but, increasingly, to existing social networking platforms like OpenSocial, MySpace, Facebook and others. This means that devices like the Wii, Slingbox, Vudu, TiVo, Apple TV or even your trusty digital cable set-top box will start to allow you to connect with the rest of the world online. And then it will become more mainstream.

So don't reminisce about the days of old when we gathered around the TV or radio and felt a sense of connection to the world at large. What's old is new again. This time your living room is going to get a lot more crowded. Get ready to invite the world over because Living Room 2.0 is going mainstream in 2008.

2008 Digital Trends Part I: Media Battle Advertisers for Eyeballs

Over the next two weeks (like in years past) I am going to post a series of essays on what I see as the big digital trends to watch in 2008. All of these are less about individual sites and technologies. Instead, what I hope to do is connect dots and start a dialogue with you about how technology will impact the media, marketers and consumers in the coming year.

In addition, to be quite honest, this is also my way of getting more disciplined about blogging more often. I really miss posting here regularly (beyond just the links). Further, as much as I love Twitter, it's not a medium that permits thoughtful analysis. As always, I am eager for your feedback. Your input makes me smarter and keeps me motivated.

Here's the first piece in the series...

# # #

For decades media and advertisers have thrived as two peas in a pod; a symbiotic ecosystem that benefits both equally. However, this is all starting to change.

Today, thanks to the web, every brand can become a media company if they put resources behind it. This means that the media and advertisers are increasingly battling each other for your constricting field of attention. In 2008 and beyond this will threaten to undermine the entire notion of ad-supported content and perhaps change the economics of both industries dramatically.

There are several forces at work here that are coming together to form a perfect storm.

For starters, there's the trust picture. Traditional advertising - especially online banners - are not trusted. Recent data from Nielsen shows that consumers put far more weight into individuals. This validates what the Edelman Trust Barometer has revealed over the last several years.

Second, we are seeing a critical mass of consumers using new technologies that let them bypass ads or even ad-supported content altogether. These include blogs, RSS, TiVo, DVRs, iPods, satellite radio and browser ad blockers.

Last but not least, the biggest story is that marketers are becoming a lot more confident online. They are starting to plow a significant portion of their budgets into digital media. As they do, they are investing in creating their own content. These properties leverage the same distribution channels that we, as individual publishers, use - most notably informal word of mouth networks, structured social networks and search engines.

If advertisers start creating their own online content in droves and find they can distribute it efficently, they may elect to bypass the media middleman. And why not? After all, they can build a direct relationship with their customers and achieve greater efficiencies in the process.

Already some of the biggest global brands, including several of our clients, are investing in creating their own content. Wal-Mart for example recently launched the Checkout blog. Dove has seen a lot of success in 2006 and this year with their series of striking videos. (Note: I am a consultant to Unilever but did not work on these videos.)

They aren't alone. Others like Sony and JC Penney are taking a different approach by aggregating content.

The media's challenge is to figure out how to thrive in transition as their big advertisers recognize they can use the web to bypass them. The key for the media is to use their reach to help marketers quickly build scale for their own content. This is no easy feat for businesses that have long fulfilled the producer role. However, they may increasingly need to find a way to balance their own content with advertiser-created offerings they host.

Should the media fail to transition in 2008, it's conceivable that more marketers will go it alone and the media will see their audience and dollars erode.

Study: 25% of Entertainment Will Be Created by Peer Groups

A fascinating new study from Nokia predicts that by 2012 a quarter of all entertainment will be created, edited and shared within peer groups rather than coming out of traditional media.

What's unclear in my mind is where the boundaries are. In other words, what constitute peer content vs. pro content when the lines increasingly blur. Still, this is a big number and there's a lot of money at stake here to those who can create sustainable platforms that enable it all while monetizing.

To that point, TV Week conducted an analysis and found that while it's easy to get attention for your work, making money is a tougher climb. This might keep the figure from going higher than 25%.

Simple Ways to Go "Media Green"

Like lots of people I have become more aware of what I can and should be doing to help the environment. (Thanks, Al.) Now I am taking this to the next level by getting toward what I call a "Media Green" state. Basically, I am converting all the media I consume (and there is a lot of it) into the most environmentally friendly format I can find, without sacrificing too much of the experience.

This is the last big piece of my effort to get more green. I bank and pay bills online. Earlier this year I traded in my small SUV for a very efficient hybrid car. Further, I am more conscious of little things that I really ignored until recently - like turning the thermostat off when I leave the apartment.

In addition, thanks to my extensive use (or maybe that's misuse!) of Gmail and IMAP, I have already moved 100% of my work stuff, like meeting notes and documents, to bits. People are amazed when they come into my apartment or office and see no paper at all. I don't even know how to add the network printer at work! Media was the last frontier.

Here are the three steps I took to go "Media Green" ...

In: Audiobooks | Out: Printed Books

I "read" somewhere in the neighborhood of 40-50 books a year - mostly business, nonfiction and sports. However, nowadays I rarely buy printed books and instead download audiobooks from either Audible.com or iTunes. Now that MP3 players are ubiquitous - and cheap - their selection has grown a lot over the years.

For starters, I love that I can carry several audiobooks with me at once. Try that with bound books. You'll break your back. I keep two or three at all times lined up on my iPhone ready to go.

Second, audiobooks fill tons of unusable time - such as when I am waiting on line at Whole Foods or at the security checkpoint at the airport or when I am driving to client meetings. In addition, if you get an Audible subscription they actually cost less over time than hard copy books. I wish publishers made all of their titles available in audio format. Still, many of the more popular books are available as audiobooks.

If you have an iPhone, it gets more fun. Sometimes when commuting by train into the city I take notes via Gmail IMAP about what I am listening to. Of course, you don't need an iPhone to do this. Audible supports tons of devices, including Palm Treos and more.

My next step is to start storing audiobooks in Gmail or Box.net so that I can access them if I am out of content or space on the iPhone.

In: RSS, IMAP-enabled GMail and the iPhone | Out: Printed Magazines and Newspapers

Years ago I used to read three daily newspapers - the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Newsday, my local paper. I also used to buy dozens of magazines on computers, business and sports. I used to store them in a snazzy rack. Of course, I read lots of trade pubs too - AdAge, AdWeek, PR Week, etc. Now, however, I have almost completely ditched print in favor of reading online. (I just have to cancel a few remaining subscriptions.)

I now subscribe to the RSS feeds for every publication mentioned above plus hundreds of blogs. The beauty of this is that I only subscribe to what I care about and ditch the rest. So, for example, for the Times I subscribe to top news, NY, business, tech, NBA and football feeds but not the movie reviews.

Once I find articles I want to read, I clip them by emailing each into the Gmail Personal Nerve Center using a special email address so they get filtered. Then the articles show up in my "Reading" folder on my iPhone as well as on the desktop and web thanks to the new IMAP features in Gmail. This will work with any modern cell phone that supports IMAP, not just the iPhone.

In: XBox Live, DVR, Apple TV/iTunes/iPhone | Out: DVD Movies

I am not a huge movie buff, but I enjoy a flick every now and then. However, I have found that between the three boxes I have connected to my set - an XBox, cable box w/DVR and an Apple TV - I am more than covered. (This tip is not for hardcore movie fans who love DVD extras.)

XBox Live Marketplace (an Edelman client) is one of my favorite services. They have 350 movies for rental with more added all the time (subscribe to the feeds here). Many of them are in HD. Basically, all you need to do is sign up for an account and rent the movies online via the console. Movies begin to download and after about five minutes you can start watching. The rest of the flick downloads as you watch. After a few days, they expire and no longer work. It's a very elegant system and cheap too.

A lot of people have DVRs these days. Here's how I use mine. I scan the listings online a few weeks in advance and flag the movies I want. Then I record them and keep them stored for a rainy day when I want to watch a movie. I keep a library of about five to ten movies. As a next step, I may add additional storage to my DVR.

Last but not least, I have an iPhone and Apple TV. I purchase movies off of iTunes and download them for later viewing. The selection of movies on iTunes is not that great. XBox Live is better. However, I like the convenience of viewing them on my iPhone when I travel. I even take a cable with me so that I can plug my phone into the hotel TV (this works with iPods too). I may also explore storing movies on Box.net so that I basically increase my iPhone storage, provided wifi is plentiful.

These are just three simple steps I took to go "Media Green." If you have other ideas, leave them in the comments.

The Page View is Officially Dead

As predicted late last year, the page view is officially irrelevant. Nielsen is no longer measuring sites this way thanks to widgets and online video. ComScore needs to follow next. Further, both companies need to open up their auditing process across The Long Tail.

Blog Search is Dead and Google Killed It

Technorati today launched a new look and feel and under the hood improvements that are designed to help searchers find what they're looking for across the live web, not just blogs. David Sifry sums up the changes over on their corporate blog. TechCrunch has more.

The improvements are nice, but I have to admit that I don't use Technorati nearly as much as I used to. Link authority was a good metric a year ago, but it's not nearly as worthwhile today when you consider all of the centers of influence one may wish to search and track. Link authority doesn't tell me who's an influencer on Facebook or which video artists are rising on YouTube. It was great in 2005, ok in 2006 and really has faded from relevance in 2007.

A lot has changed in the last couple of years. Web search engines are getting faster, personalized and thus more comprehensive. As Marissa Mayer indicates, searchers want the most relevant and often the most recent results. All you need to do is look at the daily Google Trends reports and it's apparent just how much timely content and news drives search. This necessitates the integration of live information with more static data.

This is exactly the approach Google is taking with the launch of their universal search algorithm. The next natural step for Google is to add RSS feeds and date sorting to their primary index. I wrote about this two years ago and still believe it is coming - especially now. Play with Google's experimental timeline view and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see where this is all going.

While we still use vertical search engines today to dig through news, blogs, video, etc., their days are numbered. The lines are blurrier. Google News, for example, has lots of blogs. More importantly, the big web search engines are going becoming sophisticated enough to make an educated guess as to what information you're seeking. It won't care if it comes from the live or static web. It will serve up relevance and soon time-stamped sorting.

In short, this means the heyday of dedicated "live web" search engines like Technorati is coming to a close. Technorati's best bet going forward is to hook its technology into engines that can scan the archived web. That's where the world is going and what searchers want.

Google Marries the Static and Live Web

If you haven't heard by now, Google launched a new way to present search results in a more integrated fashion. Instead of forcing you to go to separate search engines to dig the live web - e.g. blogs, news, videos, etc. - they now roll everything up in one set of results. They call it universal search.

What you might have missed, however, from the official word is this nugget. The giant web index that some 60% of online world uses to search is now assembled in real time. This means your search results could change frequently depending on the daily impact of live web content.

Google doesn't say it explicitly, but I suspect that their algorithm favors Wikipedia, news, blog video results now more than they did before. Lots of people won't even notice that Google made changes, but they're there.

The news today is significant. I've written here extensively about Wikipedia's growing impact on brand reputation. Now, with today's change, serious Wikipedia gaps or gaffes may show up more prominently in search results - and change more frequently.

Consider this salatious example that Danny Sullivan spotted in a search for George Washington. I had no idea one of our country's Founding Fathers had such views on a modern age issue like pre-marital sex. I am sure some kid writing a research paper had a good laugh at that one.

But it's no joke. It's in Google so it must be true.

(By the way, Google also has more up its sleeves when it comes to universal services - closer integration between Google Docs and its communications platform.)

ABCNews.com Relaunches with Citizen Journalism

ABCNews.com is marking its tenth anniversary with a bold new redesign that features increased use of video. Beyond the new skin there's not a lot that's new with one key exception - ABC is opening up to contributions from citizen journalists.

According to Michael Clemente, Senior Executive Producer, the new site, which it launched last night, is designed to harness the power of what they call "citizen reporters." Viewers and readers can now help ABC help report the news by feeding in news and leaving comments. The new site also supports video uploads from cell phones and video cameras, some of which will make it on to air.

ABC isn't going as far as the BBC, which allows remixing, or USA Today, which turned its site into a social network. However, it's certainly a step in the right direction. The comments that are streaming in (118 as of this writing) are mixed and mostly focus on the design, not the ability to contribute.

NBA Makes Playoffs Videos Available for Download

The NBA continues to chart new waters when it comes to its use of new media. Rather than aligning with iTunes or Google Video, which it did last year, the league is making all playoff games available for purchase and download right off their Web site. Individual games are $2.99, series cost $12.99 and the entire 2007 playoff package, which runs into June, sells for $79.99. Windows XP or higher is required.

It's refreshing to see content providers go direct to users with their video sales.  However, the downside is I don't believe that you can't watch these videos on a TV (correct me if I am wrong). Still, it's a big deal that the NBA decided not to align with one of the big video stores and instead is going it alone.

HD Video Podcasts Arrive

Webware reports that the Washington Post is now offering a video podcast in high definiton for consumption on TVs. The video podcast was shot in 720p resolution. Webware found the experience less than ideal. Still, as bandwidth and storage increase you can all see where this is heading.

Google Turns Maps Into a Community

O'Reilly Radar has the rundown on big changes at Google Maps. It's becoming a full-fledged community where people can annotate places with photos and videos and share them with the world. Very smart idea and further evidence that builds on my last post. This landscape is ever evolving. Marketers and communicators need to hone in on the watering holes where their audiences hang out - and there will be many of them.

The Battle Between All-You-Can-Eat and A-La-Carte TV

Cory Bergman from Lost Remote is a brave man. He ditched cable and went with an Apple TV a-la-carte solution for a week. The result: he was quite fine, thank you. He found most of what he was looking for, saved some cash and discovered new programming and podcasts in the process. Oh yeah and he didn't watch a single ad!

At home I have a Microsoft Xbox 360 (they're one of our clients) and an Apple TV connected to my Sony HDTV. The content I download off the Internet for the two set top boxes has definitely eaten into my time with cable. The latter cannot be beat for live news and sports - yet. But remember, this is essentially opening day of a nine inning IPTV game. You can imagine all of the possibilities already as audiences start adding Internet-connected set-tops and niche HD content comes in from everywhere - professionals, brands and amateurs.

All of the TV nets, including HD-pure plays like INHD and HDnet that don't have a lot of competition yet, need to seriously wake up. The same goes for the advertisers that fund them. Please, please please read Bob Garfield's Chaos 2.0. He talks about the Long Tail's impact on the economics of media and advertising. Right now, TV is still dominated by it. Things are going to change quickly as people recognize the value of getting their free and paid content over the Internet. They will save more casual viewers money and also allow them to dig deeper into their interests. Every network should be making their goods available on these platforms. Not all are.

Cory's experiment proves that it is totally possible today to go a-la-carte - and we're just getting going. More on this here, here and here. Are you sick of me shaking this stick yet? I cannot be the only person in marketing who sees the collision coming. Maybe there's a "don't look at the train coming at you" philosophy since it's so disruptive and there's a lot of money at stake.

Town Hall Meetings 2.0

JD Lasica asked US presidential candidate Joe Biden a question via a YouTube video. That's not news, but what is news is that Biden responded with his own vid. The use of technology by the campaigns - almost all of them - has been impressive. It gives new meaning to the phrase "town hall meeting."

TV: The Next Great Development Platform

The personal computer was the first great development platform. The PC era ushered in giants like Microsoft, Apple, Sun and others. They all succeeded in creating great software that created operating system software that made computers far easier to use and more powerful. (Microsoft is an Edelman client.)

The computer - whether it is running Windows, Linux or OS X - is still a very robust market to develop for. Moore's Law has no immediate end in sight nor does our appetite for using our computers. Further, the gap between mobile phones and computers are narrowing with announcements like we saw from Microsoft today and Apple's forthcoming iPhone. So, for the purpose of this discussion I am lumping in mobile with computers as a single platform. The future remains bright for computers.

The second great development platform is the programmable web. Lots of businesses developed wonderful tools that work solely in a browser. The specific platforms - HTML, Javascript, Flash, Ajax, etc. - may change. However, the concept remains the same. Developers create web-based applications that, by being always connected, offer considerable advantages and value.

Clearly, with all of the new rich Internet applications coming on board, the Web has tremendous prospects as a dev platform. Further, now that millions of us are on broadband connections and the tools to create software has become democratized, we're just beginning to feel its impact.

Now let me throw a curveball at you. Think about what comes next. What hardware will emerge as a fertile ground where developers will want to plant some software seeds? Is there a piece of hardware that many people own that makes this all economically viable? The answer is yes and that platform is your television.

In 2007, for all but the alpha geeks, the cable and satellite companies determine who earns the right to have a place on your TV deck. That's changing. Attach an Apple TV, an XBox 360, and soon, a Slingcatcher and suddenly your TV can do things it couldn't do before. It can download video podcasts and other content from the Internet on the fly. Software is the magic that makes it happen. Further, if you purchase a Sony set you don't even need a third party box. These TVs have wifi and RSS built right in.

The TV is undergoing a renaissance. In five year's time, 50% of what the most coveted audiences watch on their sets will come off the Internet. However, it goes beyond the changes in video content. Television will run widgets and other connected software applications. These will be different from, yet complementary to what runs on a PC desktop or webtop. That's just the beginning.

Who will create the de-facto OS for your TV? Right now that's anyone's guess. The leaders are all the stalwarts from the PC era - e.g. Microsoft and Apple. And we haven't heard from the leaders who program the web yet. Companies like Google, for example. In addition, there are the companies who make the boxes (the Tivos of the world) and the cable/telcos who re-sell their boxes. These will run software too.

What is certain, though, is that once again TV is a growth business thanks to the Internet and software. And therefore the Golden Age of Television may be a head of us, not in our rear-view mirror.

Rocketboom Seeks Alternate Revenue Steams

Rocketboom, the pioneering video blog, although quite successful is realizing that advertising alone won't sustain its future growth. According to a Marketwatch report by Frank Barnako, Rocketboom's Andrew Baron is exploring other revenue streams, including potentially charging for shows. Further, he views the show as a loss leader that is driving demand for other services like consulting. Baron is producing John Edwards' video blog.

This isn't the last we'll see of this. The problem is there's an economic conundrum. Advertisers want eyeballs and millions of impressions. The startup sites - even the successful ones - can't deliver so they need to explore alternative streams. Video is hardest hit here because it's more expensive to operate.

I've said it before and I will say it again. If you're a Web 2.0 site counting on advertising as your sole source of revenue, don't do it. Advertising is very cyclical. Yes, your overhead is low, but you might be ahead of the curve. The marketer's way of thinking hasn't shifted yet.

So if Rocketboom is facing these issues and it's a big daddy, what about Podtech and Podshow? Could a shakeout be in the works? I hope not. Further, advertising spending is strong now. What's the fallback for these sites?

Online Primetime

MarketingVOX reports that comScore Media Metrix found that 5-8 pm is the primary viewing time for online video. Some 123 million people in the U.S. viewed 7.2 billion videos online in January. Naturally given its two huge properties, Google was the top streaming video site for the month. For more, including charts and graphs, hit the MarketingVOX site.

Watch Live TV on Your Google Home Page

This is really cool and a sign of where things are going. Just add this widget to your personalized Google home page and you can watch live updates from CNN and other networks. LabPixies has a similar widget.

Paparazzi Face Stiff Competition from Camera Phones

The professional paparazzi have for years had a lock on the market for celebrity photos. However, now that we're all armed with camera phones and tools like Flickr and Twitter, the game is changing. They face a lot of competition. Just wait until the image quality starts to get more sophisticated. (Hey Twitter dudes, start supporting MMS so we can upload photos and videos too.)

Exhibit A: Apple CEO Steve Jobs at leisure. He's just enjoying his kid's soccer game and, oh, talking on an iPhone you can't buy yet. Had the snap been higher quality it could have been worth a lot. It is a sign of where things are going. Of course, the privacy implications are massive and some celebs are banning camera phones from key events, like weddings.

The ramifications here are significant for PR. Nothing is hidden anymore. If it's in plain sight, it's game to be hunted. (Via TUAW)