After three years in development and a $25 million investment, your outfit's new wireless media device launches to critical acclaim. It's a modified MP3 player that lets consumers scan other music players within range and automatically copy predefined types of music. It gets even better: the gadget also lets users identify themselves to other users across a coffee shop, subway car, or dance floor. It kicks off a social, business and media phenomena.
Then, one afternoon, as you absent-mindedly calculate your annual bonus, the phone rings. You learn that your company is being sued by a group of deep-pocketed copyright owners and the parents of a teenager who programmed his device to download pornographic audio clips. Your stock plummets like a dead battery, and your investor-relations team goes into overdrive.
Digital media has the ability to thrill, shock, excite, offend, and proliferate as never before. At the same time, more companies -- from phone-service providers to Internet portals to coffee shops -- are depending on media to drive sales. But many are unprepared to contend with the potential political, legal, social, and public relations pitfalls of handling creative content. The debate over content has become a battleground, where the wrong step can inflict heavy damage to your brand -- and the right one can win you new customers.
CONTINUOUS CONFLICT. Not a week passes without news of another skirmish. In the summer of 2005, computer hackers unveiled a hidden sequence in the Grand Theft Auto game that allows players to manipulate characters into performing sex acts. The game was promptly pulled from shelves by Wal-Mart, banned for sale in Australia, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton called for a federal inquiry into the matter.
The latest chapter in the saga was unveiled in late January, as the City of Los Angeles sued the game's manufacturer for alleged violations of the state's business code. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens held a hearing in mid-January, 2006, on "decency" in media, and another on "video content" at the end of January, urging actors, producers and satellite and cable companies to repackage their offerings to avoid legislative and legal action.
On the legal front, the Grokster file-sharing service was shut down in the wake of a June Supreme Court decision. But file sharing continues apace, according to Big Champagne, an Internet monitoring company, with broadband users undeterred by headlines such as ones referring to a grandfather being sued over his grandson's downloads. In the late 90's, the mantra of the technoliterati was, "Content wants to be free"; the cry today is, "I want free content, and will take it."
In the search arena, Google (GOOG) won plaudits for spurning a U.S. government request for users' search records, while at the same time attracting criticism for agreeing to censor its service in China. Meantime, Google's effort to better the world (and drive ad sales) by putting books online was met with a lawsuit from groups representing the very authors and publishers who brought those books to market in the first place.
BOUND TO HAPPEN. On the social networking front, MySpace, purchased by News Corp. (NWS) in July, has attracted attention from media, parents, child safety advocates and law enforcement after police in Port Washington, New York, and Middletown, Conn. investigated allegations of sexual assault among people meeting on MySpace. Hot Topic, a retailer of clothing for teens, now sells a T-shirt emblazed with "MySpace ruined my life" -- viral marketing aimed squarely at a $580 million asset.
These battles will grow more desperate as underlying tensions, driven by innovation, intensify: Silicon Valley will continue finding ways for consumers to use media, content creators will struggle to keep works on a revenue-generating short leash, and politicians and courts will end up in the middle. Risks for content-driven companies -- getting caught in the crossfire of litigation, political ambitions, and consumer backlash -- can no longer be handled on an ad-hoc basis.
Just as the decentralization of computing in the 1980s led to a new role for information-systems professionals, so too is the unleashing of content creating a new discipline: content policy management, encompassing elements of government affairs, legal, security and public relations functions.
THE KEY STEPS. There are five steps for proactively managing content-related issues faced by media-driven companies, be they content producers, content deliverers, hardware vendors, or enablers (programming tools, security, IT infrastructure).
The process starts with assigning a leader to a cross-disciplinary team that includes representation from business development, legal, sales, government affairs, research and development (R&D), strategic planning, information services and public relations.
Next, companies need to inventory all the ways they touch content, now and in the foreseeable future, including how they interact with customers. For example, what level of detail is kept on customers and transactions? Retailers should literally take stock, enablers and hardware companies should peer into the R&D pipeline, and search engines and portals examine their policies for making content available to consumers, for taking advertisements and for data mining.
LAYING PLANS. Third, the team conducts a strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat (SWOT) assessment -- but not in the classic sense. The objective is to conduct the assessment in the context of the content-related transactions related to a company's business, identifying all the touch points, and asking probing, creative questions: Is our content creation process secure?
Are the content-handling devices we are manufacturing compliant with standards for digital rights management systems? Are we aware of everything moving through our digital pipeline? Do we have standards for the types of content we will handle?
Fourth, the team needs to design responses based upon the analysis, creating both proactive and reactive plans to deal with deficiencies, close gaps, and establish uniform policies and procedures. Elements of the plan should face both in and out -- for example, ensuring that the R&D team factors content policy into the earliest phase of research -- or posting for consumers a statement about the protections being offered to parents of children using an Internet service.
POTENT TOOL. Finally, the plan needs to be implemented across the company. It needs to encompass designing the materials and contingencies necessary to educate staff about the corporate content policy, and to provide guidance during times of crisis.
By looking at these issues across the company, in a deliberate fashion, a media-driven company can develop a potent management tool to protect their brand and shareholders. A definitive content policy allows a company to take on the mantle of a responsible corporation, earning goodwill with politicians and the public. And finally, when the equivalent of the next "wardrobe malfunction" occurs -- as it inevitably will -- content policy serves to guide the corporation through the crisis, and prevent the next media frenzy from consuming management's attention and shareholder value.
William Murray, Senior Fellow at the USC Center for the Digital Future, is President of William Murray & Associates, a global media consulting company. He can be contacted at murray@wmurrayassociates.com.
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