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"Don Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Co. joined his daughter,\u00A0Laura O&amp;#8217;Shaughnessy, CEO, SocialCode, and her husband,\u00A0Tim O\u2019Shaughnessy, Co-founder and CEO, LivingSocial, to talk about the growth and opportunities in social media.\u00A0Walter Isaacson, President and CEO, The Aspen Institute, moderated.\u00A0\n[cnnmoney-iframe\u00A0src=&amp;#8221;http://fora.tv/program_landing_frameview?id=16163&amp;#038;type=clip&amp;#038;autoplay=0&amp;#038;#8243; w=614 h=384]\nBelow is an unedited transcript:\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0That was Don Graham, all of you all know, chairman and CEO of the Washington Post Company.\u00A0 Many distinguishing characteristics.\u00A0 Was there early on at Facebook, but as a young guy coming out of college, first went to Vietnam, which was unusual, I think in &amp;#8217;67, &amp;#8217;68 for somebody &amp;#8212; and then joined the Washington, D.C. police force.\u00A0 So, when it comes to the notion of connecting journalism, technology, and service, nobody better than Don Graham.\u00A0 Thank you, Don, for being here.\u00A0 (Applause.)\nMORE:\u00A0Don Graham: Why a paywall won&amp;#8217;t work for the Post\nLaura O&amp;#8217;Shaughnessy and Tim O&amp;#8217;Shaughnessy, just so you&amp;#8217;ll know the joke about the family panel, Laura is the daughter of Don Graham.\u00A0 They both worked for Steve Case I think, met at Revolution, married, and then started complementary businesses in a way.\u00A0 Right?\u00A0 Yours is basically a way to help businesses monetize on Facebook and social networks?\nLAURA O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0That&amp;#8217;s right.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0Is that the short form of it?\u00A0 And then LivingSocial, as everybody knows, is sort of a cross between a social network and a coupon and merchandising system.\nLet me start with you, Don, what did you learn from Facebook that applies to the business of newspapers?\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0Well, thank you, Walter.\u00A0 We wanted to applaud the people at Fortune who, only the Fortune Brainstorm TECH conference of all leading tech conferences has seen fit to reach out to the newspaper industry for technology advice.\u00A0 (Laughter.)\u00A0 And we think that was very far-sighted.\u00A0 (Laughter.)\nThis is well enough known that Fortune has actually written about it.\u00A0 I&amp;#8217;m met Mark, I think, in January of 2005, it might have been late 2004.\u00A0 And I&amp;#8217;ve just learned a ton from the guy.\u00A0 I mean, I am lucky to have Laura&amp;#8217;s one of four kids I&amp;#8217;ve got, all of whom in one way or another, technology plays a huge role in their lives.\u00A0 I&amp;#8217;ve had built-in tech advisors.\nFollow here for all #FortuneTech coverage.\nOf course, you know, I&amp;#8217;ve had to explain to them, they wanted to read Greek history and whatnot.\u00A0 I had to explain to them that this Internet thing really had potential.\u00A0 But once it got going.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0But I&amp;#8217;ve watched on the Washington Post, I now have basically my personalized page that learns what I want and gives me things.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0Yeah.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0I also have used Trove, which is a wonderful way of aggregating the type of stories I want based on my interests, including I can put in New Orleans renovations or jazz music and get everything.\u00A0 All of those are social networking functions that you&amp;#8217;ve tried to add to the paper.\u00A0 How does that work?\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0And the biggest of all is Washington Post \n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\tWPO\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t Social Reader on Facebook \n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\tFB\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t, which over 25 million people have downloaded since last September.\nYou know, news companies have to become much smarter about technology.\u00A0 And we have to start, as everybody does, with readers, with users.\u00A0 And it is plain that users want something different than companies like ours are giving them.\u00A0 I love WashingtonPost.com, I was present at its creation, I&amp;#8217;m crazy about it.\u00A0 We&amp;#8217;ve got great people working on it, we&amp;#8217;ve got great stories today.\u00A0 And the family tech people, obviously, also include Katharine Weymouth, my niece, the publisher of the Washington Post, but somebody had to buy the store, so she&amp;#8217;s home.\nAnd we do.\u00A0 We&amp;#8217;ve stared Social Reader, which because I think social news will be a part of what people want from a news site in the future.\u00A0 We started Trove and Personal Post because I think personalization is clearly something people want with their news site in the future.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0You and Katharine Weymouth, the now publisher, right?\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0Right.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0You are among the most fervent that charging money for content won&amp;#8217;t work.\u00A0 Why?\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0Well, we&amp;#8217;re not fervent, but it just fit into our circumstances.\u00A0 The New York Times or Wall Street Journal, very intelligently, can say we&amp;#8217;re going to charge, but we&amp;#8217;re not going to charge you if you subscribe to the newspaper, and you can subscribe to the Wall Street Journal here in Aspen, or pretty much anyplace in the country.\nThe Washington Post circulates in print only around Washington, D.C., but way over 90 percent &amp;#8212; I think over 95 percent of our Internet audience is outside Washington, D.C.\u00A0 We can&amp;#8217;t offer you that print or online choice.\u00A0 So, the pay model would work very differently for us.\nAnd, you know, so circumstances have made it so we are the one great news site, stemming from a company with a big news room, that&amp;#8217;s free at this point, and we&amp;#8217;re going to try to make something of that.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0Laura, you&amp;#8217;ve tried to figure out for companies how the eyeballs that they get on Facebook and other social networks can be used to their economic advantage.\u00A0 What have you figured out in that regard?\nLAURA O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0So we work with Fortune 500 brands to help them create these really targeted communities, and then reach out to engage those communities and then convert them to whatever action they find most valuable.\u00A0 So, whether it&amp;#8217;s watch a video about my new car or sign up for my credit card or whatever that happens to be.\nAnd what we found out is when you build up these targeted groups, it pays off enormously down the road.\u00A0 So, people build up these fan communities that are really made up of their core audience and converting those guys downstream to those deeper actions is five times more efficient than trying to target an ad to somebody who has never really joined the group.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0When you say it&amp;#8217;s five times more efficient, first of all, how do you know?\nLAURA O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0So we track every step in a conversion probe when we&amp;#8217;re running a campaign to elicit those downstream actions.\u00A0 So, we can very easily measure the conversion rate for random person who&amp;#8217;s not a fan of the page and a fan.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0Now, in terms of CPMs, cost per thousand, let&amp;#8217;s compare what I guess I&amp;#8217;ll say Katharine does, because Don does it all, but the CPMs per the imprint of a page on the Washington Post versus how much it would cost for you to try to cause somebody to do something.\u00A0 What&amp;#8217;s the most efficient advertising model?\nLAURA O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0We don&amp;#8217;t really compare the two types of advertising.\u00A0 They&amp;#8217;re really different.\u00A0 When you&amp;#8217;re doing a homepage ticker for the Post, it&amp;#8217;s this elaborate, interactive experience.\u00A0 And at this time, neither Facebook nor Twitter nor LinkedIn has that type of advertising experience.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0Yeah, about how that $100,000 is spent to launch a new carbonated beverage &amp;#8212;\nLAURA O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0Right.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0It depends on what you want to do.\u00A0 If you want to buy an ad in tomorrow&amp;#8217;s Washington Post, you want to buy an ad to sell shoes, you will sell a lot of shoes.\u00A0 That&amp;#8217;s why Macy&amp;#8217;s will have an ad in tomorrow&amp;#8217;s Post, that&amp;#8217;s why Bloomingdale&amp;#8217;s will have an ad in tomorrow&amp;#8217;s Post.\u00A0 But if you&amp;#8217;ve heard Sheryl Sandberg or Dave Fisher, or Caroline talk about the effectiveness of advertising on Facebook in the last two years, you&amp;#8217;ve heard them tell the story about American Express and Small Business Saturday.\u00A0 About how Amex decided that they wanted to build their reputation with small business, and they wanted to turn the Saturday after Thanksgiving into Small Business Saturday where people would use their American Express cards at small businesses.\nTheir agency called Laura I think on November 7th, 2010, and said we promised Ken Chenault a million fans for Small Business Saturday and we have 35,000?\nLAURA O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0There was a tiny number.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0And she turned it into the fastest-growing fan page in the history of Facebook.\u00A0 You&amp;#8217;ve heard that story a million times, but SocialCode&amp;#8217;s at the center of that story.\u00A0 And if you&amp;#8217;d like to know how to turn your large brand into a Facebook power house, talk to her.\u00A0 (Laughter.)\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0A million fans, how does that translate into money for American Express?\nLAURA O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0Well, since that campaign, we&amp;#8217;ve worked with American Express very closely on their social media effort and their different agencies on their social media effort.\u00A0 And their goals are very different.\u00A0 That particular campaign is group oriented at consumers to try to educate them about their small business effort.\u00A0 And we worked with them to understand about the deals that they can get at these small businesses at different times.\nThere are some of these communities that are targeted at small business communities, and so we&amp;#8217;re working with them kind of in all these different kind of goals that they have for these different communities.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0Tim, in some ways, you&amp;#8217;re in quite an established business, which is coupons basically or discounts.\u00A0 But you&amp;#8217;ve transformed it by connecting it to social networks.\u00A0 How does that work?\nTIM O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0Sure.\u00A0 So, I think, first off, I think you should spend your 100 grand on your carbonated beverage with me.\u00A0 (Laughter.)\nLAURA O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0We&amp;#8217;re all going to fight for it.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0We were talking about synergies in companies like Time Warner where each of the divisions &amp;#8212; but I love it was in the family.\n(Crosstalk.)\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0You were so successful with that, Walter, we&amp;#8217;ve modeled ourselves after you.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0Yeah, the family model of anti-synergy.\nTIM O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0Yeah.\u00A0 You know, I think that local businesses have been trying to figure out how can I have a measureable, trackable way to do advertising?\u00A0 And that&amp;#8217;s what we came along to be able to do.\u00A0 You work with us, it&amp;#8217;s a no-risk environment where you know exactly how much you&amp;#8217;re going to go pay to get customers to walk through your door, and that&amp;#8217;s a really hard problem to solve.\nAnd if you take the brand itself, you know, LivingSocial, a definition of it would probably be something like things you do in real life with your friends.\u00A0 And that&amp;#8217;s what we really want to be about, and we want to bring value to you from a financial perspective, we want to make your life more convenient, we want to let you do things that you couldn&amp;#8217;t have done before.\u00A0 So, there certainly is an element of price and discounts, but for example, it&amp;#8217;s how can you change how people interact with their local communities and how can you change how they interact with local commerce?\u00A0 And how can you connect communications through commerce? \u00A0And I think that&amp;#8217;s the larger goal.\nSo, people think of us as daily deals, but an interesting stat is over 25 percent of our revenue at this point in time is from non-daily-deals products.\u00A0 So, we&amp;#8217;ve been able to evolve to that.\u00A0 And of that, a reasonable percentage of it is actually full press.\u00A0 So, when you think about &amp;#8212; and how has that happened?\u00A0 You know, you really leverage the social component.\u00A0 You provide experiences &amp;#8212; people want to go out to eat with multiple folks.\u00A0 And Facebook, Twitter, the various social networks are really an accelerant for us.\u00A0 So, we would exist without them, but when you want to try and aggregate a lot of people in a hurry, boy, they&amp;#8217;re very, very helpful to actually be able to go and do that.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0You know, you&amp;#8217;ve mentioned that being local and local community.\u00A0 And I was a little surprised when you, Don, said that 90 percent of your Internet readership is very non-local.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0More than.\u00A0 More than.\u00A0 Because people are interested &amp;#8212; you know, we&amp;#8217;re the principal news source in the capital of the free world.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0But the social web as well as the Internet has never really conquered local.\u00A0 Is that going to be the next wave?\nTIM O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0Yes.\u00A0 I mean, if you look at the size of the marketplace, we have two areas that we are attacking.\u00A0 Consumers look at us as a commerce site that they buy something through.\u00A0 Merchants look at us as an advertising mechanism, and those are each two huge markets.\u00A0 And there hasn&amp;#8217;t really been able to be an aggregation of consumers on a local level in a way where you can have a transaction-oriented business.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0I&amp;#8217;ll do an ad for Tim.\u00A0 Tim started off running a company that had nothing to do with the business he&amp;#8217;s in now, but many of you used his products.\u00A0 He built a Facebook app-building company originally called The Hungry Machine that built the virtual bookshelf on Facebook, which I used extensively, and then built the pick your five, the largest application then in the history of Facebook.\u00A0 That allowed him to get a whole lot of e-mails and local identifiers for people.\u00A0 And he then built LivingSocial, to a great extent, on Facebook.\nThe three of us were having dinner one night, and Tim said, &amp;#8220;You know, if I didn&amp;#8217;t have my hands full, I would try to start an advertising agency to help people use Facebook because we&amp;#8217;ve had the people in to advise us who are supposedly the best in the business and they don\u2019t know anything at all.\u00A0 We know more than they do.&amp;#8221;\u00A0 So Laura and I said, &amp;#8220;That sounds like a good idea.&amp;#8221;\u00A0 (Laughter.)\u00A0 And with some consulting help and some help from another part of our own company where we were extensively buying ads on Facebook, you know, we got into the business and it&amp;#8217;s proven to be a sensational business.\nLAURA O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0Yeah.\u00A0 And I would also say on social media, it&amp;#8217;s a little bit of a different play, but there are some very successful local outcomes where like we worked with a retail store to target people within a 25-mile radius of their store and offer them a coupon, and it actually drives people into the store.\u00A0 So, it&amp;#8217;s a different product, but it can be incredibly successful and a way to hone in.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0And the shift of media from being computer-based to being mobile, GPS-based.\u00A0 How does that affect you?\nLAURA O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0Yes.\u00A0 I think we&amp;#8217;re just starting to see the beginning of it.\u00A0 As you know, Twitter and Facebook have just started to roll out some mobile products, and they&amp;#8217;re just working incredibly well for clients.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0Before I go to the audience, one last question that you&amp;#8217;re on the board of Facebook.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0I am.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0You&amp;#8217;ve created apps based on Facebook.\u00A0 And like so many companies, you depend on the kindness, in some ways, of Facebook.\u00A0 Are you worried that there can be a conflict as there was for a while with Zynga and others when you&amp;#8217;re building on the Facebook platform?\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0Oh, sure.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0I want to see if I can get dissent within the family where you&amp;#8217;re defending it and they aren&amp;#8217;t.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0Half the people in this audience have built apps on Facebook, and Facebook &amp;#8212; the fabulous thing about Facebook, and for developers the frustrating thing, is that Facebook changes so fast, but that&amp;#8217;s part of Facebook&amp;#8217;s personality.\u00A0 And if you want to develop on Facebook, you have to be content with that.\nSocial Reader &amp;#8212;\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0Wait, is that like building a building on shifting sands?\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0You&amp;#8217;ve got to be good.\u00A0 Social Reader, which I love and use every day has been fascinating.\u00A0 There&amp;#8217;s a guy in this audience who will be talking later today, Ben Elowitz, from a company &amp;#8212; an entertainment-focused media company called Wetpaint.\u00A0 Ben has used our app and his own Facebook apps to become, in no time, in a year and a half, he is on his way to being the number-one entertainment site on the Web.\u00A0 Entirely from his sophistication in building on Facebook.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0But didn&amp;#8217;t Facebook recently change a trending stories box that pulled the rug out from under you?\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0It changed things, and we have to be smart enough to adapt to that, period.\u00A0 You know, how else in the world are you going to address a billion people a day?\u00A0 And if the price is you have to be smart enough to adapt to changing circumstances, you do.\nNow, Walter, we have a question for you.\u00A0 Your book on Steve Jobs probably has 100 percent penetration in this audience.\u00A0 And I heard Mark over several years &amp;#8212; I mean, Steve Jobs meant an enormous amount of the education of Mark Zuckerberg, and Mark will talk about that till the cows come home.\u00A0 But tell us the other side of that.\u00A0 What was Steve&amp;#8217;s first impressions of Facebook?\u00A0 How did the Mark-Steve relationship work from Steve&amp;#8217;s point of view?\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0Yeah.\u00A0 Well, I asked Jobs a year ago when he was quite ill who he really admired in the Valley.\u00A0 The first name off his lips was Mark.\u00A0 A, because mark was trying to build a great company, not just cash in on a product.\u00A0 But, secondly, because he had an intuitive feel for how to always be passionate about that product and do things that cause you to be on shifting sand.\u00A0 Which is, oh, I can make trending stories, that will help our users more even if it does undermine something older that we had.\u00A0 He&amp;#8217;s willing to cannibalize the older things.\nAnd so he felt a great kinship, I think, to Mark Zuckerberg.\u00A0 And the odd thing, and I&amp;#8217;m not sure if it&amp;#8217;s in my book, but Steve never cracked the code on social media.\u00A0 There are very few people in this room who can probably remember Ping, which was a musical social media site done on the iTunes platform.\u00A0 I asked him why he hadn&amp;#8217;t been able to crack the code.\u00A0 And he said, &amp;#8220;Maybe because Mark did it so well and there isn&amp;#8217;t a need for a whole lot of social networks, and Facebook has got it licked.&amp;#8221;\nAnyway, we&amp;#8217;re not here to talk about that.\u00A0 Way in the back there.\nQUESTION: \u00A0Tim, I&amp;#8217;m curious.\u00A0 Last year, you obviously didn&amp;#8217;t want to talk about IPOs in the past.\u00A0 But you did mention, I think I wrote about it, you said one of the things LinkedIn had just gone public, and you said that LinkedIn has seen a massive spike in traffic and users after the IPO and that kind of intrigued you that an IPO could be a customer acquisition vehicle.\u00A0 I&amp;#8217;m curious, since then, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon have all had IPOS who have arguably hurt the companies from a PR perspective.\u00A0 Have you changed your mind?\u00A0 Does going public potentially hurt LivingSocial from a customer acquisition perspective because IPOs are no longer considered a wonderful thing right now for most these companies?\nTIM O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0I think that when you look at an IPO from a branding perspective and turn it into a branding event, if you&amp;#8217;re thoughtful and are clear in the goals that you&amp;#8217;re trying to accomplish and feel strong about the business metrics of your business, it absolutely can be a positive thing for you.\nSo, you&amp;#8217;re always going to have in a limited data set of three or four companies, you&amp;#8217;re always going to be able to point to people that have done it well or people that have done it poorly.\u00A0 And I think that if you execute your plan well, you absolutely can have it be a positive branding event.\u00A0 And I think the passage of time over the last several decades has shown that that is absolutely the case for a lot of companies out there.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0The conversation in this room has flitted around IPOs, but it&amp;#8217;s really focused on founders.\u00A0 LivingSocial has become the amazing company it is and has a great future because of him, if I can do a commercial for my son-in-law.\u00A0 (Laughter.)\u00A0 I have no financial interest in it, but a company like &amp;#8212; you know, an IPO is an event of what?\u00A0 Six months.\u00A0 The management of a company by a founder, in this case, can be something that goes on for years and decades. \u00A0And in assessing a company like LivingSocial, you really want to assess him.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0Now, reading between the lines of that, it means that when you do go public, it&amp;#8217;s good to have a class-B stock or something to keep the founder in power, something the Washington Post company does, something Facebook does, and something I assume LivingSocial will do.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0No, something the New York Times does, something lots of tech companies &amp;#8212;\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0Aspen Institute is going to do that when we go public.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0Well, I advise it.\nLAURA O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0Good idea.\u00A0 (Laughter.)\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0But should there be those type of class-B stocks?\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0Well, investors can assess companies with A and B stock like they assess anything.\u00A0 You know, if you buy a share of Google, you&amp;#8217;re betting on the business judgment of Larry and Sergey.\u00A0 To date, that&amp;#8217;s been pretty good.\nQUESTION: \u00A0I have two questions.\u00A0 The first one, Don, I want to know more about the Social Reader.\u00A0 You know, can any newspaper company do it?\u00A0 How come only the Washington Post does it, and you&amp;#8217;re on the board.\u00A0 What are the benefits if the Washington Post besides audience?\u00A0 You know, how come Arthur Sulzberger doesn&amp;#8217;t do it?\u00A0 Number one.\nNumber two, I&amp;#8217;m interested in you guys.\u00A0 How do you work together?\u00A0 Do you have family summits?\u00A0 Do you have Sunday morning sit-downs where you talk about business?\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0Well, in answer to the second, the fourth very powerful member, who for some reason was not invited to the panel, is their one-year-old son, Peter.\u00A0 And he has a lot to say and he&amp;#8217;d have liked to join the panel and talked about trucks and trains.\nQUESTION: \u00A0But do you formally get together?\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0No.\u00A0 We get together around Peter, mostly.\u00A0 But, yeah, we talk absolutely all the time.\u00A0 If you&amp;#8217;re my age and living in this world and trying to understand technology, you better talk to people in their 20s and 30s.\u00A0 You know, I happen to have the advantage of association.\u00A0 I&amp;#8217;d be crazy not to talk.\nLAURA O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0Well, I think we should flip that around, too, and just say that I think as people recognize, from my perspective, Don&amp;#8217;s one of the best business minds in the country, and we&amp;#8217;re so lucky to be able to kind of pick his brain on a huge matter.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0So to go to Social Reader, and edit me as I talk, but I think most of you in this room, I would assume that most people have used social news products on Facebook and we&amp;#8217;re not the only newspaper doing this.\u00A0 The Guardian in the U.K. got off the ground, but they didn&amp;#8217;t build it themselves, they used an app-building company that&amp;#8217;s very good and has also built for several others.\nThere are plenty of other social readers, but we thought it was interesting because there is a subset of people, it isn&amp;#8217;t everybody, it certainly isn&amp;#8217;t most people my age, who say, gee, Laura read that story, Tim read that story, that means I&amp;#8217;m that much more interested in it.\u00A0 And I think that&amp;#8217;s truer of younger people than of people my age.\nSo, we tried &amp;#8212; we have a very good tech team at WaPo Labs and we have a very good core newspaper, you know, news stories to build around.\u00A0 And we reached out to partners like Wetpaint, but also like Reuters and AP and like the Hindustan Times because it suddenly turned out 15 percent of our readers were in India although we had no Indian news on the site.\nYeah, what I read on Social Reader is completely different from what Tim reads or Laura reads or somebody else would read.\u00A0 Social will be a part &amp;#8212; only a part, but I would say a rather important part &amp;#8212; of news sites in the future.\u00A0 You&amp;#8217;d be crazy to build a news site today without a social component.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0And you&amp;#8217;re building Trove that doesn&amp;#8217;t fully have a social component.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0Trove, which Walter uses and Tim uses and I use every day, is a personalized news aggregator.\u00A0 I love it.\u00A0 It was also built by WaPo Labs and the Trove software is the core of Social Reader.\u00A0 Social Reader tries to figure out what you are interested in and feed you stories based on what your friends are reading and based on your own interests.\u00A0 So, it feeds me lots of stories about electoral politics and the Washington Nationals and feeds Tim stories about the Minnesota Twins, which he keeps up this ridiculous interest in, God knows why.\u00A0 (Laughter.)\nERIC MACK: \u00A0Eric Mack from CNET.\u00A0 I&amp;#8217;d just like to hear a little bit more about how mobile figures into all of this.\u00A0 Apps and everything are great, but there&amp;#8217;s a huge demographic shift coming in the coming decade, and I&amp;#8217;d just like to hear more about how mobile figures into how you do social and your business models.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0The guy with the most sophisticated mobile app is right here.\nTIM O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0We&amp;#8217;ve got about 25 percent of our purchases actually come through mobile devices at this point in time.\u00A0 So, it has moved from the nominal to substantive part of our business.\u00A0 And we wish it were more, and we think if we did a better job it would be more.\u00A0 But I think when you look at where the advertising is going to be driven from and where do the dollars that fund that development look like, there are giant inefficiencies that exist in the market, which means that there&amp;#8217;s huge opportunity.\nSo, one of the things, we did an internal research study, and we went and we looked at a bunch of small businesses that were out there.\u00A0 And we found that less than 1 percent of them had a mobile-enabled website.\u00A0 So, if you&amp;#8217;re the local baker, whatever, you go to their site on your iPhone and it&amp;#8217;s got some Flash there that doesn&amp;#8217;t show up, it&amp;#8217;s a miserable experience, not optimized for what you&amp;#8217;re trying to do.\nNow, if you actually go and look at what percentage of searches for those companies are actually coming from a mobile device, it&amp;#8217;s between about 15 and 40 percent depending on the category.\u00A0 And I&amp;#8217;m sure there are some very smart people from Google who can provide more insight on that, but 1 percent of small businesses have a mobile-enabled site, and yet 15 to 40 percent of the traffic to it is coming from a mobile search.\u00A0 It&amp;#8217;s a huge inefficiency, it&amp;#8217;s a huge area that&amp;#8217;s going to be monetized over the next couple of years when people start to figure out what&amp;#8217;s a good mousetrap in order to connect those.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0Wow, that&amp;#8217;s fascinating.\nTIM O&amp;#8217;SHAUGHNESSY: \u00A0So I think that&amp;#8217;s an area that we focus on.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0And watch the Washington Post in the next six months for two dramatic iterations of our mobile site.\u00A0 Shailesh Prakash, the new VP of IT at the Post is a star.\u00A0 And labs team is working with him on something new and something different in Post Mobile.\nMIGUEL HELFT: \u00A0Miguel Helft with Fortune.\u00A0 Don, with Social Reader and similar apps, especially in the early days, sharing kind of went from I choose to share something to this sort of over sharing, every story I read was being shared with everybody else. \u00A0And a lot of people were turned off by that, it was overwhelming.\u00A0 Did you guys fine-tune that?\u00A0 Did you find the right balance between letting me know who I want to know what they&amp;#8217;re reading and overwhelming me with social information?\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0Now, I&amp;#8217;m 67 and I didn&amp;#8217;t start out saying I want people to know what I read and I want to know what other people are reading.\u00A0 But once I started trying it, I found it was fascinating.\u00A0 I found I was more interested in a tech story if Tim was reading it or if Mark was reading it or if my friends at Facebook were reading it.\nAnd, yes, to the reaction you focused on, Miguel, we and Facebook want to make it very, very clear that everyone knows that if they sign onto Social Reader, everything they read will be shared with their friends.\u00A0 That&amp;#8217;s what our permissions box says in so many words.\u00A0 That&amp;#8217;s important.\u00A0 We want to be transparent, we want to be understood, but there are a lot of people now who are perfectly happy to share what they read.\u00A0 And if Walter&amp;#8217;s reading a news story, honestly, it&amp;#8217;ll make that story of greater interest to me.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0Thank you.\u00A0 Our last question.\nQUESTION: \u00A0Hi, this is mostly for Don.\u00A0 I just wanted to hear your take on the issues of the news filter bubble with regard to social in general and in particular with regard to Social Reader.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0I&amp;#8217;m sorry, are you asking &amp;#8212; how is your question different to Miguel&amp;#8217;s?\nQUESTION: \u00A0I&amp;#8217;m sorry?\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0News filter bubble.\nQUESTION: \u00A0News filter bubble.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0Explain.\nQUESTION: \u00A0People living in a social world where they get personalized news, end up getting only news that is filtered for their interests and don&amp;#8217;t get the breadth of news.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0You know, to build a great news site in the future, you&amp;#8217;re going to have to be an amazing technologist.\u00A0 And companies like the Washington Post are going to have to try like mad.\u00A0 We start out with great content.\u00A0 And you&amp;#8217;re right, if all you see is news related to preferences you&amp;#8217;ve expressed and there&amp;#8217;s an earthquake in Japan and you haven&amp;#8217;t expressed an interest in either Japan or earthquakes, you&amp;#8217;re still going to want to know there was an earthquake in Japan, and we&amp;#8217;d better tell you.\nSo, a site that works for you better be a mix of the crucial news stories of the day plus the ones that seem like they&amp;#8217;d be of great interest to you.\nNow, there hasn&amp;#8217;t been enough credit given to me, frankly.\u00A0 I&amp;#8217;m in my 42nd year at the Post.\u00A0 And one speaker after another has gotten up and talked about how wonderful the political climate in Washington is and how well the city and the government are working.\u00A0 (Laughter.)\u00A0 But it is the quality of distress with this city that&amp;#8217;s expressed throughout this conference, it&amp;#8217;s a big news story right now.\u00A0 On the front page of the Post today, there&amp;#8217;s a story by a reporter named Lori Montgomery.\u00A0 You want to know what&amp;#8217;s going on in Washington as we walk up to the fiscal cliff, read her.\u00A0 This is about the second day after the Patty Murray speech about going over the fiscal cliff as a political tactic, and there&amp;#8217;s a fantastic story about Josh Partlow, a heartbreaking story about what it feels like in Afghanistan as the U.S. prepares to leave and what that feels like to a bunch of Afghans who have been hit by it both ways.\nWe&amp;#8217;ve got to find a way of conveying that content to people who like it and also to people who might like it if they took a shot.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0Let me use your question to just wrap this up with a word of praise to the family on stage here.\u00A0 Because the answer to your question is that people who are in media have to come from a core set of values.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0Yes.\nWALTER ISAACSON: \u00A0A core set of values that isn&amp;#8217;t just how many eyeballs and how fast can I use a Twitter feed in order to get a trending story using the words &amp;#8220;Justin&amp;#8221; and &amp;#8220;Bieber&amp;#8221; close to one another.\nThere is no family I know, starting with Mrs. Graham to a granddaughter here who have cared more about having that person in Afghanistan who may not have been captured by your preferences and your social reader, but that&amp;#8217;s an awesome story, so is &amp;#8212; I mean, the whole front page.\u00A0 I go to the Washington Post front page or WashingtonPost.com every day, every morning when I wake up.\u00A0 And it&amp;#8217;s because of the basic values that we&amp;#8217;re not there just to cater to whatever is new and fashionable, but we care about reporting and journalism because it plays a role.\u00A0 Thank you all for being here.\nDON GRAHAM: \u00A0Thank you.\u00A0 (Applause.)"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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