Ryan Block and Peter Rojas Launch GDGT
By Kyle Austin
So, what is gdgt? from gdgt on Vimeo.
Add comment July 1st, 2009
Microsoft Wants You to “Bing It” On Internet Explorer
By Ben Haber
As Firefox 3.5 flew past 1 million downloads yesterday Microsoft unsealed a new video commercial taking aim at the popular Internet browser. The video (which is a little strange) touts the benefits of Internet Explorer’s in-private browsing (Firefox does have private browsing).
This video reminded me of another video that Google made a couple weeks ago in Times Square (below) , where they asked people passing by what a browser is. Less then 8 percent of the people surveyed actually knew what a browser was and one of the most popular answers to the question was Google.
According to this chart (below) in May 2009 Firefox had nearly a 48 percent market share – a number that has been steadily increasing. Chrome has also seen its market share increase, but is still only at 5.5 percent. While Internet Explorer still had over 40 percent market share it has seen its numbers continuing to decline, which may explain its new marketing push and (strange) video.
Add comment July 1st, 2009
Techmeme’s Top 20 Sources for June
By Kyle Austin
MG Siegler’s addition to TechCrunch appears to be working out well for Michael Arrington and company. In addition to getting a few stories picked up by CNNMoney, Siegler is also leading TechCrunch in getting stories picked up on Techmeme, the tech industries online daily for the hottest tech news.
According to the final leader board for Techmeme sources for June, TechCrunch was the most often (probable) linked-to source on the aggregation site (8.34%); 4.34% more than the next most probable source. Cnet, the NYT’s, Engadget and VentureBeat round out the top five sources.
Add comment June 30th, 2009
Tweetboard on RaceTalk
By Kyle Austin
If you’re a regular visitor to our site, or maybe even a first time reader, you’ll notice the green tab on the left of the screen, courtesy of Tweetboard.
Tweetboard, launched by 140 Ware within the last week, is a new micro-forum application that allows readers like you to tweet about the content on RaceTalk with other Twitter users.
Once you click on the tab on the left and sign in (allows you to link with your twitter account), you will see tweets by me (kyledaustin) and anyone else that is commenting about RaceTalk, and content on the site. If you post via the board yourself, a short-link back to the corresponding conversation is appended to your tweet, letting your followers know that you’re discussing something here.
In the future Tweetboard hopes to provide funtionality for customized discussions around live streaming content and specific pages / posts on a Website.
I’ve reviewed the service in further detail for marketers and content providers over on Fast Company, but I hope you join the Twitter conversation here using Tweetboard, as you continue to share your feedback and comments on posts and ideas. I think it will spark some good real-time discussions.
Add comment June 30th, 2009
Do You Google it with Bing??
By Kyle Austin
Microsoft is spending a lot of money on marketing Bing and a lot folks actually like the search engine. The problem is, as the “kids” from CollegeHumor note above, Google is a verb in many people’s vocabularies, which means searching on the Web.
Add comment June 29th, 2009
Pitching the Client Business Story…But to Who?
By Kyle Austin
As I’ve mentioned before: despite the digital evolution of media, a positive story in one of the incumbent business outlets (Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, etc.) can still provide major value to companies (at least for now).
However, over the last six months these magazines have seen their ad pages vanish quicker than Alex Rodriguez in October. They’re also seeing massive turnover. Talking Biz News reported over the weekend that 250 business journalism jobs have been lost in 2009 to date (A lot of those coming with the folding of Portfolio). Short story: business outlets and business journalism are being transformed by the “media meltdown.”
The latest findings, from the Magazine Publishers of America, noted that ad pages were down across the board for business magazines Jan – March 2009:
- BusinessWeek - Down 39%
- Fortune - Down 26%
- Forbes - Down 15%
What does this mean to companies looking to get in the editorial pages? Less ad pages means less editorial pages for writers and editors to fill up. It also means (although no one would ever admit it) that large companies with advertising budgets are getting even more of the ear of writers and editors. Yes, there is still a wall between church and state (advertising vs. editorial), but there’s no doubt parts of it are crumbling down.
While their pages vanish, so does some of their readership. Not one of the aforementioned publications reaches over 1 million print subscribers (End of 2008 data) and their online sites compete with established online outlets and new up-and-comers.
- BusinessWeek: 898, 546 print circulation; 3.3 million unique views per month according to ComScore (Compete.com reports 5 million UV’s)
- Fortune: 831, 485 print circulation; 5.9 million UV’s per month through CNNMoney.com according to ComScore
- Forbes 890, 882 print circulation; 4.6 million UV’s per month according to ComScore
How does that compare with online competitors? While ComScore actually has thestreet.com tallying more unique views than Businessweek.com per month, Compete.com has businessweek.com still outpacing thestreet.com (embedded above). Other up-and-coming sites like thebigmoney.com and businessinsider.com tally 260, 295 and 911,373 respectively in UV’s per month according to Compete.
While the disconnect in the numbers from ComScore and Compete makes it hard to validate any of this, no one will argue that free-based, online business outlets are growing in readership, while print business outlets are being forced to shift their content online to a similar-sized audience.
So what does this mean to PR folk pitching client business stories? Do your research and educate your clients on today’s business media landscape. While the big name publications from the early 1900’s still carry clout, they don’t necessarily have the impact / reach that they used to have. The biggest upside in landing a story there may be that other journalists (excluding generation Y’ers) still look up to them; and may be inclined to follow their lead with future stories / follow-ups.
Add comment June 29th, 2009
Nokia Goes with User Created Spot, Spike Lee Declares Death to Agencies
By Kyle Austin
For ad agencies feeling the squeeze of the “media meltdown,” there’s more bad news on Madison Ave. Amateur film makers are getting into the ad creation business and Spike Lee is declaring “who needs agencies?”
This ad embedded above, is something you’d expect from a big house ad agency like Omnicom, but in fact it was created by Hiroki Ono, a 23-year-old film student from Yokohama, Japan. Ono was the winner of a contest put on by Mofilm, a pioneer of short films for mobile and on-line distribution.
Spike Lee, the award-winning filmmaker who served as a judge for the contest sees the user created approach as part of the global innovation shift, which he noted to the Financial Times:
“I watched the final 12 films, the quality is amazing,” he said. “I think that this demonstrates that you can’t dictate where talent is. The same way I feel you don’t have to go to film school to be a filmmaker, you don’t have to be an employee of an advertising agency to make advertising also.”
User created ads and contests have become popular tools for brands and agencies in recent years, given the viral impact they create pre and post-spot, along with the production savings they provide. Doritos, for example, has been extremely successful in using user created ads for the Super Bowl. The transition has also opened the door to advertising focused social networks – like AdHack, which have become open markets for user created ideas and unpolished videos.
However, this move towards consumer friendly, viral videos may not be bad news for all agencies (especially if they have insight in new media). Nokia, itself, recently used London-based enterThe7thChamber, a viral marketing (and seeding) agency, to create this spot below.
3 comments June 26th, 2009
Enterprise 2.0: David vs. Goliath (Part 2 of 2)
By Ben Haber
Contributed by Palmer Reuther
This is the second part of a two-part series focusing on the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. The first part can be seen here.
Despite the scourge of rain that has descended on Massachusetts in the last two weeks, a healthy number of folks made their way to the Westin Hotel at the Waterfront in Boston for Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Described by the organizers as a culmination of the “who’s who of the people defining, strategizing and putting Enterprise 2.0 into practice today,” the conference lived up to its billing as a top tier venue for understanding the tangible components of new workplace technologies.
What is Enterprise 2.0?
“Technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility.”
The vibe at the show reflected a new generation of companies like SocialText, Yakabod and Joyent that look at the current state of enterprise technologies as a hindrance to workforce productivity. But they’re not willing to sit on the sidelines and be constrained by traditional tech tools; they’ve taken steps to leverage new tools as the foundation for a new set of high impact, high productivity technologies for today’s businesses. As Yakabod puts it, “In search of more meaningful work, [the company] decided to shake up the atrophied world of enterprise software—specifically, the catchall category labeled “knowledge management.” Socialtext and Yakabod are all about speed. SocialText’s technology enables faster collaboration, decision making and on the fly course corrections while Yakabod is all about making people more productive at their jobs.
There were a number of other companies exhibiting with similar visions about what’s next in the enterprise. It will be interesting to follow these organizations to see what meaningful technologies bubble to the surface and those that wither against Goliath – the legacy systems.
Add comment June 25th, 2009
Ustream Brings Live Stream to Facebook
By Kyle Austin
A friend chuckled to me the other day that ads on Facebook were going for 60 cent CPM’s. He hadn’t heard that they were actually going for far lower than that in some cases.
Yes, Facebook continues to struggle with providing value and ROI with ad sales on the site; even though they are reaching some of the right folks with targeted ads.
However, as I’ve noted in some recent entries on Channeling Media and here, they are making very steady progress in appealing to marketers on other fronts. Fan and brand pages, check. Vanity URL’s, check.
Yesterday, Facebook took another huge step in appealing to marketers by bringing live video and real-time chat features to its 200 million+ users. To do so, it is launching the Facebook Live Stream Box: a feature that any Website or developer can use to enable Facebook users to connect, share, and post updates in real-time as they watch live streaming events and video. For the time being, the most important place where it can be used? On Facebook.
Ustream which has teamed up in the past with Facebook to support streaming presentations, including a series of recent Jonas Brothers Webcasts (example above) on their Facebook Fan Page, is the first developer to offer (the extension of) their services to artists and brands under this new feature.
They’ll likely have people lining-up to take advantage of it, if the Jonas Brothers trial can be replicated in any way. According to Facebook, the live following of the Jonas brothers Webcasts led to 1.5 million updates – averaging 23,000 posts per minute – and more than 100,000 viewers.
In fact, given the demand they expect and the limited customized players they can build / support at once, Ustream has created an application process for brands and artists. Those that are chosen will have the options of: 1) A free ad-supported version – Partners Only 2) A white-label version, not supported by ads, that will cost $15,000 to develop.
While this may sound like a lot at first (especially for some artists), it’s really a small price for marketers that are used to spending 10’s of millions of dollars on television advertising. Despite some misperceptions, the highly sought after teen to twenty demographic is still watching a lot of TV, and tapping new strategies to reach them within this hybrid of a social network-based, TV experience will continue to grow in importance.
As for Facebook. It has only been able to turn analog dollars into digital dimes to date, but post-analog riches could lie ahead, if this is a sign of things to come.
A variation of this post first appeared on Channeling Media at FastCompany.com
Add comment June 25th, 2009
RaceTalk at Enterprise 2.0 Conference (Part 1 of 2)
By Ben Haber
Written with Jackie Lustig
This week RaceTalk attended the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston to hear from business and IT professionals who want challenge the status quo and lead the charge to Enterprise 2.0. There were some great panel sessions throughout the conference and below is a summary of the discussions that took place.
1. Applying the Social Dimension to the Lockheed Martin Mission
Lockheed Martin (LM) is using social media in order to facilitate collaboration among engineers who tend to work on very narrowly focused products. They said that social media has to bubble up from grassroots and cannot be imposed from top down management. In fact, LM said that the company’s HR department was afraid of social media and wanted to control internal employee communities. Final words of wisdom for the audience were: 1) don’t be afraid of social media and 2) you need to put social media in the context of your company’s mission-critical challenges. When #2 happens, senior executives will support social media adoption. Also, why it’s the 20-somethings who are the digital natives, it’s the 40-somethings who have the deep business experience. You have to put the two together to get the winning combination.
2. The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise
This panel included the traditional unified messaging players (Alcatel-Lucent, IBM) and up-start social messaging companies such as Socialcast. The conclusion was that it’s not an either or situation and that UCS and Social Messaging are different technologies that are converging. Unified messaging is about transactions and connectivity. Social messaging is about relationships and engagement.
There was a really interesting discussion about governance and social media policy. There are two extremes. In one corner are the organizations that want to control and lock down everything. In the other corner are the advocates of sharing is great and we want to share everything. Conclusion: there are no easy answers. It depends on the company culture. Although you want to and should trust employees, it’s risky and total control is impossible. Education is part of the answer.
3. Does Social Media and Marketing Matter?
Great panel including companies that are doing terrific things with social media. All agreed that social media really does matter and is having significant impact on customer service, new product development, sales, corporate reputation, market research, and more. Allstate showed new community that is designed to raise awareness of Allstate brand, increase sales by providing content and stay in touch with customers who had canceled their policies.
JetBlue is a great example as the company has 730,000 followers on Twitter and uses Twitter for real-time monitoring, responding and engaging with customers, pushing out info (e.g., weather alerts) and to humanize JetBlue. This was also the same company that put its CEO on YouTube after delays caused by an ice storm.
One final thought: Its amazing how Enterprise 2.0, which used to be all about gorpy big technologies, is now about all things social media.
Make sure to check back for part two of our look-back at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.
3 comments June 24th, 2009