Mr web reports that two leading US media analysts have this week announced the formation of a new non-profit institute, iFOCOS, the Institute for the Connected Society. iFOCOS aims to bring thought leaders together to better ‘understand and use the new expanding media and to create better-informed global citizens’.<br>
The goal is to drive innovation around a new definition of ‘media’ which includes traditional and new forms such as social media.
This is doomed to failure. Social media uses channels for communications but can use many channels.
The channels can be a blog, IM, email, Bulletin board, SMS etc. The key here is that using a specific medium the blogger (or other social media channel user) is at the nexus of a group of other people.
Just focusing on the 'media' part of the deal will only offer part of the solution.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Monetising blogs
This item from Reuters set me thinking. The article says:
If an author can turn a blog into a book, so too can a company, or a consultancy. The book can be an e-book, printed book, wiki etc.
Bloggers are scoring rich paydays by turning their online diaries into books, but some publishers say the craze could fizzle out with a glut of new titles destined to yield disappointing sales. Penguin became the latest to jump on the bandwagon when it bought "La Petite Anglaise", the memoirs of Catherine Sanderson, who was fired by her company because of her blog, in one of the more hotly discussed acquisitions this week at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
If an author can turn a blog into a book, so too can a company, or a consultancy. The book can be an e-book, printed book, wiki etc.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Online politics - a book reviewed
David Meerman Scott has been looking at an online book:
As the 2006 political season moves into the home stretch, my friend Colin Delany editor in chief at epolitics.com has released a terrific new free e-book Online Politics 101: The Tools and Tactics of Online Advocacy to help campaigns useful ideas on how to spread the word on the Web. Colin totally gets the online political world and helped me to understand it enough to include some case studies in my upcoming book The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Colin's ebook shows how to use the Internet to promote candidates, shape public opinion, motivate supporters and raise money. Read the press release here.So much is shifting sands but we have to find out what we can.
Online Politics 101: The Tools and Tactics of Online Advocacy, looks comprehensively at the online organizing methods that work today -- including cutting-edge applications such as MySpace, viral marketing, text messaging and video distribution.
Doc Searle on BT
He Says:
There's a buncha high-level IT blather (by quotees, not by Gordon, who's doing the quoting) about ROI and "global networked IT services", and about BT now being in a position to compete with Google... but that's just a red herring sandwich.
There's a buncha high-level IT blather (by quotees, not by Gordon, who's doing the quoting) about ROI and "global networked IT services", and about BT now being in a position to compete with Google... but that's just a red herring sandwich.
| The real story is that a major carrier is finally starting to grok, at the top, that the main benefits to incumbency are not just ownership of the pipes. There are countless creative things that an incumbent carrier — with existing relationships with customers, with "plant" all over the place, with science and business advantages out the wazoo — can do to make money, other than just by creating false (or any other kind of) scarcities in the backbone and the last mile (or acre, in the case of wireless). |
HSBC goes mobile
From ITPro: Financial services giant HSBC has become the first bank to offer customers mobile banking facilities.
It will start inviting customers to join the new service, developed in conjunction with mobile banking specialist Monilink, Monitise and LINK, immediately.
email Statistics
US email marketing company MailerMailer released its Email Marketing Metrics Report this week, revealing practices to help businesses increase returns from their email campaigns.
Key factors highlighted in the report include the use of shorter subject lines, personalisation of emails, and targeted, well-managed lists. Campaigns using these strategies achieved higher then average open and click rates.
An interestin view of email 'marketing' from e-consultancy
Google to buy YouTube for $1.6bn
Michael Arrington has reported a rumour that Google “may be in the final stages” of a US$1.6 billion deal for video sharing site YouTube.
If the rumour is true and the deal goes through it could be another coup for Google, though it might yet turn out to be a big headache for the search giant.
Source: e-consultancy
User generated content on Sky
Mark Sweney at the Guardian got this story:
Al Gore knows a thing or two about PR and this is a great brand extension.
I wait the time when a Public Relations practitioner mashes user generated content and sells it to Sky.....
Sky is making its first major move into the booming user-generated content market with a deal to bring Al Gore's Current TV, the channel made up of viewer-created clips, to the UK and Ireland.It is the first deal Current TV, branded "the TV network created by the people who watch it", has made outside the US since launching last year.
Al Gore knows a thing or two about PR and this is a great brand extension.
Finding out about search
Who is talking about searching and what's new. It matters in PR. Relying on one or two serach engines has its downside. These resources my be useful:
- Search resources
- Ask Jeeves Blog
- Goobile
- Google Adwords API Blog
- Google Blog (Official)
- Google Blogoscope
- Google Video Blog
- Inside Google
- Inside Google Adsense
- Inside Google Adwords
- JenSense
- Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo
- John Battelle's Searchblog
- MSN AdCenter Blog
- MSN Search Blog
- Search Engine Blog
- Search Engine Journal
- Search Engine Watch
- Search Engine Watch Blog
- SEO by the Sea
- SEO Roundtable
- Unofficial Google Blog
- Valleywag
- Xooglers
- Yahoo Search Blog
SEO + Social Media = winner
Search engine marketing firm Spannerworks today launched its Social Media division with services to help brand and media owners implement effective strategy in this area reports e-Consultancy.
With Anthony Mayfield, Head of Content & Media, at Spannerworks involved it will be a really powerful player.
Social media is being positioned as Spannerworks’ third division, joining to its existing paid and natural search marketing specialist teams.
As well as offering research, analysis, training and consultancy services it is making serious investments in developing new software and content services to help brands engage with social media.
With Anthony Mayfield, Head of Content & Media, at Spannerworks involved it will be a really powerful player.
Social media is being positioned as Spannerworks’ third division, joining to its existing paid and natural search marketing specialist teams.
As well as offering research, analysis, training and consultancy services it is making serious investments in developing new software and content services to help brands engage with social media.
PodShow and BT gang up
"A few week back, BT confirmed that they have closely tied themselves with US podcast aggregator, PodShow, so closely in fact, that they've stuck BT at the front of PodShow domain to form BTPodShow," says Digital Lifestyle.
BT aren't making the service exclusive to only their network - their normal approach to try and encourage people to subscribe to their DSL service. BTPodShow will in fact be open to anyone in the UK.
Yet more channels for the practitioner. But this one is really cool.
BT aren't making the service exclusive to only their network - their normal approach to try and encourage people to subscribe to their DSL service. BTPodShow will in fact be open to anyone in the UK.
Yet more channels for the practitioner. But this one is really cool.
Social impacts of social media
Mark Vernon at Guradian Unlimited has an interesting article about online social habits.
There is no doubt we need more reserach into the social significance of social media.There is a new verb: "to friend". It is what happens when people link up on websites such as MySpace. It differs markedly from "to befriend" which involves getting to know someone. To friend is just to connect.
As Danah Boyd, a social media researcher for Yahoo, has said: people do not think of meeting their online friends - they only think of connecting, for all sorts of different reasons. Michael Bugeja author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age, makes a different distinction: "Friending really appeals to the ego, where friendships appeal to the conscience."
Sociologist Sherry Turkle, in New Scientist, expressed her worries that online living is transforming human psychology by deskilling us from being able to be alone, and managing and containing our emotions. We are developing new intimacies with machines that lead to new dependencies - a wired social existence, "a tethered self". Conversation becomes merely sharing gossip, photos or profiles, not, on the whole, the deeper aspects of commitment, community and politics.
Second Life gets voice
With the unveiling of its 'million minutes' promotion on Wednesday, Vivox is now enabling Second Life users to speak to each other via their phones.
That's a big step for Second Life, as the 3D virtual world does not have a default voice feature, as does There, from Makena Technologies. And that's because Linden Lab, the publisher of Second Life, has so far chosen not to integrate voice directly into the software.
C|Net gives the low down.
A Web TV broadcast gizmo
Always On reports on a new online TV technology:
This may be a very handy way for PR practitioners to create their own TV channels.
Itiva Digital Media has created a platform for broadcasting video and live content over the Internet that addresses industry concern over bandwidth management. Itiva’s patented technology, called Quantum Transport™, delivers high definition, full screen, rich media content to millions of viewers in a secure, cost effective manner. Itiva’s broadband broadcast technology breaks content into individual Web pages (called quanta) and sends them over the Internet to be re-assembled at viewers’ computers. Itiva provides a breathtaking video experience on the Web at lower costs for content publishers, ISPs and the consumer.It is quick and I would like to experiment more.
This may be a very handy way for PR practitioners to create their own TV channels.
Polling tool
Polldaddy, the online poll tool RRW has been testing has just launched as a public beta.
It simple but handy.
It has one of the best designs I've come across in a while, with functionality to match. Not only does it make it simple to create polls to include on your blog or website, but you can deliver them via widget and RSS feed as well - essential in this day and age. I think polls are are an excellent - and easy - way to bring more interactivity into websites, which is why I wanted to bring this to your attention.
It simple but handy.
New Planning TV and Radio advertising tool
The Guardian reports on a new planning tool for the advertising industry.
Until now, advertisers and their media agencies have had to rely on separate audience measurement tools - such as Barb and Rajar - that don't take into account that consumers are often using multiple media simultaneously and in different ways. Now there is a new advertising campaign planning tool from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.
"Before, all the standard industry measurement tools have been limited to individual media, such as TV or radio - this new tool pulls them all together," said Jim Marshall, the chairman of the Media Futures Group at the IPA.
Called the Touchpoints integrated planning database, the new tool has taken almost three years and more than £1m to develop.
Just in time for the podcasting revolution, I wonder how practical it will be for social media?
How bloggers should behave towards companies
Mike Manuel says;
This is a two way street for practitioners who are both bloggers and who also pitch to bloggers and it has huge implications for in-hose and agency practitioners who face calls from the blogging community.
There is an emerging crop of "citizen journalists" that have developed an unrealistic sense of entitlement and have ceased asking and are now demanding, at least in some cases, the same level of access and information from companies that has long been the exclusive privilege of mainstream journalists.It is worth reading his complete post.
This is a two way street for practitioners who are both bloggers and who also pitch to bloggers and it has huge implications for in-hose and agency practitioners who face calls from the blogging community.
Financial Reporting - using Blogs?
CEO Jonathan Schwartz has sent a letter to SEC Chairman Christopher Cox asking permission to disclose news about Sun Microsystems on the technology company's web site and on his blog, says Red Herring.
Mr. Schwartz made the intention known on his company blog, including the text of the letter he sent to Mr. Cox, on Monday in a posting.
The news would be a major shift in the way business news is distributed.
In order to make sure investors get important information about public companies at the same time, companies are required under so-called “Regulation Full Disclosure” guidelines to distribute such information via press releases and conference calls.
This now brings financial PR right into the heart of social media.
Mr. Schwartz made the intention known on his company blog, including the text of the letter he sent to Mr. Cox, on Monday in a posting.
The news would be a major shift in the way business news is distributed.
In order to make sure investors get important information about public companies at the same time, companies are required under so-called “Regulation Full Disclosure” guidelines to distribute such information via press releases and conference calls.
This now brings financial PR right into the heart of social media.
Podcasting is growing - Fast
Frank Barnako tells us.
Feedburner reports the number of subscribers to podcasts, for which his company is managing feeds, is growing 20-30% a month.Rick Klau, vice president, business development, said that at the beginning of the year Feedburner had 1 million subscriptions to podcasts it helped deliver. That number has now grown to 5 million subscribers for 71,000 podcasts. For you math fans, that means the average podcast has ... ta da!!! ... 70 subscribers.
MySpace silver flirters
More than Half of MySpace Visitors are Now Age 35 or Older, as the site’s demographic composition continues to shift.
Analysis reveals that significant age differences exist between the user bases of these sites.
Visitors to MySpace.com and Friendster.com generally skew older, with people age 25 and older comprising 68 and 71 percent of their user bases, respectively.
The data are interesting for PR people who are involved in social media and for practitioners who have not yet realised how broad the demographic is.
Analysis reveals that significant age differences exist between the user bases of these sites.
Visitors to MySpace.com and Friendster.com generally skew older, with people age 25 and older comprising 68 and 71 percent of their user bases, respectively.
The data are interesting for PR people who are involved in social media and for practitioners who have not yet realised how broad the demographic is.
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