OCTOBER 9, 2009

Here’s a look at what’s news-worthy in the social media space this week:

Today on YouTube’s official blog, CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley announced that the video sharing site serves well over a billion views a day. In his post, Chad takes a nostalgic look back at the three years since YouTube was acquired by Google.

Yesterday Twitter encountered a problem that caused many users’ timelines to be delayed. While nothing like early August’s denial of service meltdown, the event was certainly an inconvenience. For a few hours in the early afternoon, Twitter users were not able to see real time updates in their stream, but luckily search and the ability to update were functioning properly.

This week Chris Brogan hosted the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston. The conference featured some great speakers including Valeria Maltoni from Conversation Agent. Valeria says when people ask her what is the most effective form of marketing, her answer is valuable content. You can view her presentation here.

President Obama has been in the social media spotlight as of late. The announcement that the President had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize took 3 of Twitter’s 10 trending topics this morning. Twitter users are congratulating, expressing concern, and commenting on the news.

SNL’s infamous skit mocking the President’s accomplishments this past Saturday has also brought him to the forefront of social media this week. The video has been SNL’s first viral success of the year from online viewers on Hulu and NBC.com.

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SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

The National Football League has announced that they are limiting the use of social media and social networks throughout the season. These limitations will fall on “players, coaches, league officials, and even the media”, and are meant to prevent play-by-play reporting of the games. The NFL’s reasoning behind this new rule stems from their longstanding policy of requiring accounts of a game to be sufficiently time-delayed so that official, authorized accounts are given exclusive reporting rights. While this policy certainly has precedence in the NFL’s history, does it make sense in today’s environment, where information is treated as a stream of unfiltered live updates? As Brian Solis points out, at the very least, the NFL will inevitably run into enormous difficulties when trying to enforce these rules. Sometimes, simply updating an old policy may not be the best solution to a fundamental shift in the way audiences get updates and information. Instead, it’s likely that the NFL will be forced in the near future to reexamine its entire approach to reporting on games.

For more examples of organizations that have struggled with implementing Twitter policies, check out Mashable’s list of Twitter trends (look for #4).

Technorati has been floundering for a while now, having lost its leadership position in blog indexing and searching to Google. Recently, the site sent emails to a number of its bloggers announcing its next phase of evolution: creating original content. By getting bloggers to write original articles for the site, Technorati could position itself as a reputable blog with a comprehensive list of topics. However, this move does signal a major change in focus - one that seems to fully concede blog indexing and search functions to Google and others. It looks like Technorati has revamped its business model, but how will it pan out?

A report this month from web security company ScanSafe stated that there was a 20% increase in employers blocking their workers’ access to social networks, bringing the total to 76%. This means that social networks are blocked more often than categories like online shopping, weapons, alcohol, sports, and webmail. Additionally,  increases across the board lead ScanSafe to suggest that the economic climate has spurred employers to look for ways to promote productivity. Mashable writer Jennifer Van Grove also thinks it’s quite possible that with the rise of phishing and spam connected to social networks, companies are afraid of security breaches. Can social media and real-time interaction continue to grow in tandem with companies cracking down on social media usage during work hours?

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SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

I’ve been seeing some interesting examples lately of companies using Twitter to increase engagement with customers and make their products better. Here are two I really liked:

1. Kodak’s crowdsourcing.  Kodak has a pocket videocamera currently called the Zi8, which is similar to the Flip videocamera. Kodak wanted a new name for the camera, and apparently wasn’t happy with what it came up with internally. So, it turned to “the crowd” for ideas. The contest: submit a new name for the camera via Twitter or the company’s blog, and if your name is chosen, you get a trip to CES 2010 in Vegas to see the camera revealed. Another 100 people chosen at random from those that submitted entries will get free cameras too. I love this promotion - it got people thinking about the product, and judging from what I saw, inspired a lot of really creative entries. (I submitted 6 myself - Kodak, when do we find out who won?). I also have been enjoying tweets from Jeffrey Hayzlett, Kodak’s CMO, who allows his followers a fascinating glimpse into what he does all day long. I like hearing about his meetings, and guessing at the strategic directions Kodak is taking, as described briefly in 140 characters. 

2. Fox’s “Tweetpeats”. Tomorrow night, Fox is re-airing an episodes of one of its TV shows, “Glee”. “Glee” is a new show for Fox whose pilot aired once last spring and again last night.  The Friday airing will be a little different - it will feature cast tweets across the screen as the show airs.  The tweets will answer fan questions and offer behind-the-scenes commentary on the episode. I think this is brilliant - it gets viewers involved, it generates interest in a new show, and it adapts to the new multi-tasking reality of how we enjoy our entertainment these days.

I love seeing the creative ways companies are using Twitter to engage in conversation about their brands. Nice work, Fox and Kodak.

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AUGUST 31, 2009

Cross posted on Solutions for Power, the Network Solutions blog.

Last month, Dallas Lawrence, Vice President of Digital Media at Levick Strategic Communications, and I spoke on a panel for lawyers sponsored by Grow Smart Business.

Our topic that morning: “Social Networking for Law Firms 102,” and specifically how lawyers can help clients use social media in times of crisis to get their messages out proactively. The crowd was made up mostly of lawyers and law firm marketing professionals, and while we did talk about crisis communications, some of the discussion also centered around how law firms can use their own social media – websites, topic-specific blogs, and even Twitter accounts, to attract clients and manage their own reputations.

As Dallas recommended, using keywords and search engine optimization on each page of a law firm website can help generate business simply by including strategic descriptions of practice areas and attorney expertise. Dallas also recommends that law firm HR departments “friend” their attorneys, so that they can see how the firm is being represented on social networks. We talked about some of the key points to consider when advising clients how to use social media to protect their reputation in a crisis:

(1) have a social media presence and a crisis plan in place in advance of the crisis;

(2) be willing to respond, engage, apologize, reassure and explain, for as long as it takes;

(3) don’t forget to engage your employees, who can become brand messengers; and

(4) use all of the tools (social and traditional) at your disposal to amplify your message.

Here are some other points that were raised on our panel:

Generally, bloggers write about what they are passionate about.

Helping clients engage in dialogue with social media on topics of shared interest can be very rewarding for both parties.

There are many tools available to clients trying to monitor what’s being said about them online. Google Alerts, BackTweet, Tweetdeck, and Tweetbeep are examples of free social media monitoring tools that can help track client names and issues, and provide instant notification of relevant discussions. Social media is also an excellent way to research jury pools and community opinion on issues related to litigation. There is no one tool that provides a silver bullet for communication today – clients need to be engaged in traditional media as well as different kinds of social media in order to reach their intended audiences.

Many thanks to Steptoe & Johnson LLP for hosting the panel.

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AUGUST 28, 2009

Today, I was driving to work when a state trooper rammed into my car from behind, because he was on the cell phone and not paying attention. He gave me a ticket for “Failure to control speed to avoid a crash.” FML.

That’s just a sample of the funny tidbits you’ll get at the site fmylife.com. What does the f stand for? Well I can’t really tell you without getting fired, but I’m sure you get the point (and if I am fired for writing this it would probably be an FML.)

The site collects stories and anecdotes from users that illustrate their bad luck and misfortune. The stories are usually comical, in a “I’m glad that didn’t happen to me” sense.

Is your life not so unfortunate? Then maybe you should submit a story to MyLifeIsG, a site that shares the opposite, stories of fortunate events, or general “I’m pimp” tales.

What if you life isn’t G or unfortunate? Don’t worry, there’s a site for you too. It’s called My Life Is Average.

I’ve noticed that the latest in humor sites involve various sharing of personal events. Whether it’s that drunk dial you made last weekend (Texts From Last Night), or a note with a not-so-hidden subtext (Passive Aggressive Notes), or an embarrassing moment involving your parents and Facebook (Oh Crap. My Parents Joined Facebook), it seems like every moment of our lives is worthy of inclusion on some internet meme site.

So what exactly are these sites saying about our pop culture today? First, the limits of what we consider private and public are being stretched to new lengths. Social networking introduced the idea that details about ourselves should be open and shared. Now even our less graceful moments can be shared, as long as they are funny to somebody else.

Does that also mean our sense of what we consider decent and indecent for public consumption is changing? I’m not entirely sure.

I don’t have all the dots connected on this yet but there’s clearly a trend with the rise of these types of internet meme sites.

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AUGUST 25, 2009

Last night I saw “District 9“  in the theater. Normally I would never consider paying $9.50 to see an alien movie, but I had heard that it was pretty good. When I was asked who said it was good, I couldn’t come up with any names. I knew that multiple people had said they liked it, but I couldn’t remember who! :\

Today I was on Facebook and realized that a few of my Facebook friends had also seen the movie and had noted that it was worth seeing. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t have actual conversations with anyone about the movie - I only blindly trusted their Facebook statuses as movie reviews.

The power of social media is AMAZING. Peer reviews are what we trust, and social media allows us to share our opinions to anyone who wants to listen. My “District 9″ experience reinforced that power for me.

Timemagazine and Mashable have also written about the effect social media has on box office revenue. When “Bruno” opened, it did well… until the bad tweets about the movie flooded Twitter. Time speculated that the negative reviews on Twitter contributed to the movie’s downward spiral after its premiere on July 10. Mashable thinks that Twitter had the opposite effect on “District 9″ - it was a trending topic and garnered mostly positive buzz. Both movies made over 14 million dollars on opening night. On the second day, “Bruno”’s take fell to 8.7 million, while “District” made 12.6 million dollars!

I’m glad I listened to my friends on Facebook even though I couldn’t remember which ones. It was an unexpected hit for a moviegoer like me. Usually, I go for historical dramas and chick flicks, so if not for the unsolicited reviews my online buddies posted, I would not have had the chance to enjoy this sci-fi thriller!

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AUGUST 19, 2009

Earlier this month, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin weighed in on the health reform debate in a Facebook note. Among other things, she said:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

And, a week beforehand, an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily said this:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

The problem is that neither of these accusations is true. Palin’s assertion has been deemed “false” by The New York Times, the Atlantic, CNN and the Associated Press. Politfact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking arm of the St. Petersburg Times, called the claim a “sci-fi scenario not based in reality”. And, of course, anyone who’s read Hawking’s wonderful A Brief History of Time knows that the physicist is, in fact, British, has lived in Britain his whole life, and is an enrollee in Britain’s National Health Service.

What I’m quickly finding, though, is that the truth content of people’s claims in this volatile debate doesn’t matter much. The “death panel” meme has quickly rocketed around the community of activists opposing Democratic health care reforms and has become the rallying cry for that group. I’ve gotten no less than five chain e-mails from relatives making that claim in the last week. If reform were to fail in Congress this fall, “death panels” would be high on my list of reasons why. And more than one person has made the Stephen Hawking claim to me in private conversation - think of it as a high-brow version of the “death panel”.

As someone who has followed the health reform debate very closely, I am completely, utterly baffled by this. There are many good reasons (reasons not based on lies) to oppose the specific plans Democrats have outlined on how to reform the US health care system. I don’t agree with almost any of them, but disagreement is OK. Being ill-informed on basic facts is not.

I always thought that the internet and the availability of a wealth of information at anyone’s fingers would end the kind of mendacious punditry you see on display here. After all, anyone can very quickly determine that there are no “death panels” in any of the reform bills before Congress. But I think there’s a parallel problem - the internet makes it very difficult for news consumers to separate reliable reporting from rumors and hearsay.

As consumers, we sometimes rely on “signals” to tell us when something is of value - which is why, for instance, banks used to be operated in big, majestic, safe-looking buildings. Signals in the TV news business include attractive anchors, fancy graphics, a busy-looking newsroom behind the anchor - all things that assure us that the source we’re watching is reputable and responsible. But on the internet, the signals of quality information are easy to replicate and in some cases are removed entirely by the medium (as in Facebook, which puts all user information, including notes, in the same format).

I truthfully don’t know what can be done about this problem, and I suspect that even the President’s media advisers don’t either. They’ve created a FAQ-style website to fight some of the more outlandish claims, but I’m not sure sites like these can possibly act fast enough to rebut these rumors that travel through e-mail chains and watercooler conversations. And even if it were possible to rebut the rumors, one by one, to each person who heard them, there’s no guarantee they’d end up changing anyone’s minds. One thing’s for sure - it’ll be very disappointing for everyone if we allow falsehoods to determine the shape of public debate.

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AUGUST 14, 2009

One big news item this week was Facebook’s acquisition of the popular life streaming service Friendfeed, a move that many speculate will aid Facebook in challenging Twitter. One of the most important services that Friendfeed offers is the smooth integration of activities on other social sites into one stream - something that Facebook’s newsfeed currently does with less refinement. Additionally, Friendfeed has a real-time search function that can be immensely valuable when it is paired with Facebook’s enormous userbase. Mashable asks if this move could be the “Twitter-killer”, as Facebook has been obviously building up their newsfeed to match Twitter’s relevance and immediacy. It’s a possibility, but as Brian Solis noted recently in this blog post, one possibility is that multiple networks can coexist, as users define how each fits into their lifestyle and serves a particular need.

In other Facebook news:

Facebook launches real-time search
Facebook is working on a “Lite” version of its site

A recent study by the Association of National Advertisers states that 66 percent of marketers have now used social media in some capacity in 2009. This is a significant increase since the same survey in 2007 revealed that the number was only 20 percent. Top sites being used by marketers are (in order): Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn. One interesting finding from this report was that Twitter was being used more often by business-to-business marketers (70%) than business-to-consumer marketers (48%). One reason for this could be the fact that Twitter naturally encourages dialogue among people with similar backgrounds. Link sharing is particularly active among members who build up a following based on topics with professional interest.

Twitter made an announcement this week that it will be beginning phase one of Project Retweet. The project will make the retweet an actual supported feature of the site (like Twitter search or @ replies). In other words, retweets will now show up as a unique element on the Twitter homepage, and have an interface that outside developers can creatively work with to add retweet elements to their sites or programs. The direction that Twitter team has decided to go with this suggests that they value the efficient and personal nature of disseminating information that retweeting brings to the service (not to mention that retweeting is a feature that Facebook and other social networks don’t have much of a handle on yet).

However, Project Retweet will also herald some changes that have caused some concerns. Mashable writer Jennifer Van Grove points out that the new proposed format for retweeting will simply publish the original tweet in friends’ timelines with your twitter handle listed underneath as a supporter. This could have the effect of making the retweet seem less personal, as users are unable to endorse the tweet with a their own short comments. As Twitter rolls out more components of Project Retweet, it will be interesting to see how the community reacts and adapts to the change. After all, changes like this and the introduction of “mentions” back in the day were all products of the Twitter team observing unique ways its users were using the service.

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AUGUST 12, 2009

I just returned from two weeks out of the country. For me, this meant two weeks of not being at my laptop 24/7, tethered to the internet, repeating my endless cycle of checking work email-personal email-Twitter-Facebook-Google Reader-personal blog-book blog-and so on.

For the record: I survived. Of course, I did have my Blackberry, and added international coverage before I left, so I was able to check work and personal email pretty regularly. But there were times when I was able to log on via computer (thanks to overpriced hotel internet service and some kind woman in Paris, also named Gayle, whose wireless network was blissfully unsecure). And when I did log on, the first and often only place I checked? Facebook.

For me, Facebook was the perfect lifeline to the outside world. It was via Facebook that I was able to partake in the collective grieving over the untimely death of John Hughes. I sat in my dark hotel room watching this montage of Hughes movies set to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” and felt grateful that I was able to share my sadness in his death by linking to the video and hearing what others thought.

It was via Facebook that I kept up with where my friends were, how their respective vacations were going, and what was going on at the office.

It was via Facebook that I got a recommendation for this amazing bakery in Paris that I never would have found otherwise.

It struck me that my transcontinental addiction to Facebook only underscores that social networking has profoundly changed how we live, and specifically how we define our individual communities and sense of belonging. Too many days off of Facebook and I feel out of it and disconnected.  A few years ago, I remember fearing that mass media disintegration - brought about by the internet, video streaming and iPods - was in fact threatening common experience and the sense of societal belonging that comes from experiencing events simultaneously with others.  That fear is now gone, replaced by the knowledge that social networks are in fact doing the opposite: they are redefining, and strengthening, our personal communities and in fact facilitating shared experiences.

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AUGUST 7, 2009

Last week, Bill Ives pointed out an interesting debate by Stanford University on whether web video and television should converge and offer content across both mediums seamlessly. In light of some related developments, such as the proposal of a “TV Everywhere” payment model in March, and the increasing value of online advertisements that run alongside episodes, I think this debate really hits on an important issue in the growth of online media consumption. Now that the audience watches shows both on their TVs and online, will the lines between these two mediums blur? The Stanford representatives theorized:

With the convergence of media, we expect the emergence of appliances that will be able to display some sort of standardized media format. These devices will most likely vary in size, intended placement (living room, kitchen, bedroom), and functionality, but will have the common capability of being able to interpret the given converged media format. […] [T]hese information appliances will be able to provide a richer environment for viewing and interaction.

The idea of having fully integrated multimedia appliances in your home is very appealing. I currently watch a lot of shows on my TV through my cable provider, but I also watch some shows on official network pages online and download shows to watch on a computer hooked up to the TV. I would definitely enjoy the opportunity to easily watch a video from a TV, computer, or handheld device in any room of the house. It would also be convenient to have a universal format for video content that I can store and share (at least within my household) with no difficulty. However, the biggest challenge in this vision is developing an effective payment scheme that leaves both consumers and media/cable companies satisfied.

When “TV Everywhere” was first proposed, watchdog group Public Knowledge issued a statement criticizing the model, pointing out that the internet already operates on the fundamental concept of offering accessible, open content. “TV Everywhere”, as proposed by Comcast and Time Warner, aims to make cable TV content available both on TV and online - essentially asking users to subscribe to a cable package if they want the convenience of viewing premium cable content online. It is clear that the reasoning behind this plan helps preserve the revenue that cable companies earn by offering content in packages, as well as the relationship between cable companies and cable networks. With such a closed distribution method, cable companies hope to maintain control over who can see their content. This is definitely a model that conflicts with current video distribution models online like Hulu, which encourage sharing and discussion.

There is a great deal of tension among cable providers and content distributors right now, especially in the face of the current recession. After reading about the TV/online video debate, I really think that this struggle to figure out a good way to make money will greatly affect the way we consume our video in 5-10 years.

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