In the morning keynote at OMMA Social, Bonin Bough, Director of Digital and Social Media, PepsiCo, explains that part of the beverage giant's approach to opening itself up to innovation is to send an undercover "mini army" of PepsiCo people to Internet and social media related events like Internet Week and SXSW. So next time you're at one of those events and someone's talking up Pepsi or Mountain Dew, you know it's probably a Pepsi plant.

More than Facebook integration and app development, publishers had better be thinking of new and creative ways to differentiate themselves from other publishers. “What we’re not hearing a lot is how publishers differentiate themselves,” commented Josh Jacobs, SVP Brand Advertising Products and Global Marketing, Glam Media. Added Mike Tatum, a Partner at Whiskey Media: “The normalization is killing our industry.” But, isn’t something like Facebook integration a perfect way to differentiate a media brand? Today, perhaps, but not likely tomorrow, said Michael Wolff, author and founder of Newser. To paraphrase Wolff, he said every publisher will soon be …

Is Vanity Fair -- host of the hottest Oscar night party -- really just an event planning business with a publishing business on the side? So suggests Rachelle Hruska, Founder and Editor in Chief of local party and event guide GuestOfAGuest.com -- though she actually credited the thought to someone else. Still, the question hits at the financial troubles facing so many publishers, today. Lockhart Steele, Founder of local blog publisher Curbed.com, admitted that he recently scored a sponsorship deal with Patron tequila thanks to his ability to bolster the deal with a physical event. Not happy with the …

Michael Wolff is a smart guy, but now he's lecturing Shive Singh on the correct meaning of planning and buying online media. Singh just said that its fundamentally all about buying and audience that can develop a "deeper relationship" with a brand. Wolff corrected him, saying that Singh is "missing the point" if he's just looking at the value of the audience. "It doesn't come down to the audience," Wolff said. "It comes down to moving the merchandise." We'll see who gets the last laugh re. this debate when Singh moves over to Pepsi  at the …

According to Newser Founder Michael Wolff, the big rush toward social media traffic may not be all it's cracked up to be. In particular, Wolff alluded to some new "data" showing him that conventional SEO traffic actually may be more valuable in the long run. "SEO traffic is stickier than social media traffic," Wolff said during an OMMA Publish panel discussion. Shiv Singh, the global social lead at Publicis' Razorfish – soon to be the social lead at Pepsi – says he agrees with that view. "It's not about traffic after a certain point. It's about quality …

Finally, A Member Of The Digerati Knocking Twitter (Well, Sort Of) It was Richard Gingras, CEO of Salon Media, talking about the impact social media has on driving traffic to branded content sites like Salon's. "I don't think Twitter even belongs in the same conversation," Gingras said, citing that almost none of Salon's traffic is coming from Twitter, and most of it is coming from Facebook. "It's not a knock against Twitter. It's just a statement of fact," he said. Gingras

A critical statistic that is often overlooked by our industry comes from the Online Publishers Association, according to OMMA Publish chair Steve Smith. And it is all about the share shifts taking place in the types of content people consume online. In particular, Smith noted that the share of time spent online with professionally produced content has declined from 41.3% last year to 35.4% this year. Meanwhile, at the same time, the share of time people spend with user-generated content has jumped from 13.7% to 29.0% this year. "That's a staggering number, and a very important subject," …

The big question: Are consumers actually engaging more with content on newfangled devices like smartphones and tablets? Oh yeah, says Cameron Clayton, VP of Mobile, The Weather Channel. "The iPhone changed everything from an engagement point of view?" To date, the publisher has recorded 10 million downloads, and now sees 5 million unique a month. "The ad story is huge; the paid version is huge," said Clayton. The iPad experience is different, he said. "It's about weekends," when the publisher witnesses a 300-to-400% spike versus the week days. Rick Levine -- VP, Editorial Operations, Conde Nast -- says GQ …

What's the real value of a publisher's iPad investment, today? Beyond usership numbers -- which are still quite modest -- the branding possibilities "can't really be overstated," says Sarah Rotman Epps, Analyst, Consumer Product Strategy, Forrester Research. "Numbers tell part of the story, but not the whole thing." Also of note, the revenue for impression that publishers can charge on something like an iPad is very attractive. More broadly, the future for publishers is "app centric and multiplatform," according to Rotman. "Even browsers are starting to feature apps." Why? Apps allow publishers to deliver this curated experience to users …

When asked about the recent controversy over Gawker Media's Gizmodo's paying for a stolen Apple iPhone G4 prototype, Gawker Publisher Niock Denton had a simple answer for Joe Mandese: "We will do anything -- legal -- for a story." TV execs seem to tie themselves into knots about paying for news content, but in the backend do pay sometimes, Denton says. "Our attitude is it's way better we just say so. What's it cost?"