Nielsen has come out with its A2 / M2 Three Screen Report for Q4 today, and the findings are pretty interesting. While some may hypothesize that TV viewership is waning as consumers turn online for video, Nielsen is reporting today that the average television viewer watched more than 151 hours of TV per month in Q4, an all-time high. Consumers are watching more video online (2 hours and 53 minutes on average per month in Q4 vs. the 2 hours and 31 minutes recorded in Q3), however the findings seem to indicate that this video watching is occurring in addition to watching more television. In fact, Nielsen found that 31 percent of Internet activity occurs when consumers are also watching television.
Not surprisingly, the 18-24 demographic (key for marketers) are spending the most time online watching video: 5 hours and 3 minutes on average per month. Mobile video watching is also on the rise with the adoption of iPhones and other video-friendly, mobile-Web devices. Nielsen reports that 11 million Americans, an increase of 9% versus the previous quarter, are now watching video on their handheld devices.
In addition, the report spotlights (once again) that 9-5 during weekdays is still primetime for online video. A trend that has media executives scrambling to produce online shows for the “lunch at desk” crowds and marketing executives looking into moving some of their spend away from primetime and into lunchtime (via the Web).
With some big-time celebrities using Twitter the distance between them and their fans is getting smaller and smaller, some by request. While THE_REAL_SHAQ was in a diner last week, he sensed that he had some Twitter followers in the area and invited them over to his table.
The two guys had been following Shaq’s tweets and realized they were close by, so they decided to go and check to see if it was really the multi-million dollar basketball player running his Twitter account. Upon entering the diner they became starstruck and were afraid to stop by his table until Shaq all but dared them to. After saying hi and snapping a couple quick pictures, Shaq called them out for being afraid to approach him.
While Twitter can be a great tool for communicating with people via text, I think this is an example of its even better use, finding people in the real world and connecting with them. Imagine being stuck in the airport because your flight has been delayed or canceled (a very realistic scenario) and being able to form a connection with someone else on that flight via Twitter. While you may be sitting in the same area as them, there is something cool and unique about connecting with them on Twitter first, because following that flight you can still ‘follow’ what that person is up to.
In our wide-ranging discussion, we chat about his thoughts on social media as the future of marketing, Twitter, the Hammertime iphone App,DanceJam (his social dancing network start-up) and his relationship with VC’s and Michael Arrington (an angel investor in DanceJam). Hammer has some interesting thoughts on Arrington’s sabbatical from blogging and the Web, given that he’s had to endure the public spotlight for decades.
Finally, we get into the new reality show he has in the works with A&E – Just announced on Wednesday and not surprisingly called “Hammertime” – which he says will have the feel of an unscripted / real-life version of “The Cosby Show.”
Marshall’s appointment, part of a larger strategic partnership between DEMO and the popular tech blog, broke tonight with a post from Marshall himself on his site and nearly simultaneous posts from Schonfeld and Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb.
The move makes a lot of sense for DEMO, as they were somewhat desperate to get an online editorial partner who could counter the PR onslaught which Michael Arrington and TechCrunch used against them last year. Matt Marshall and some of the bloggers / writers he’s brought to VentureBeat (including Dean Takahashi) will do just that, bringing the conference some needed buzz.
If wrenching up this conference competition wasn’t enough for your Silicon Valley gossip craving, the news brought some attention back to the growing competition between ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch and their differentviews on honoring embargoes. This was brought to light by Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb commenting on Schonfeld’s post with a link to his post on the news (pictured above).
Kirkpatrick, who takes a different stance on the news by focusing on the 13 years of excellent work which outgoing conference organizer Chris Shipley did with DEMO, also discloses within his piece that DEMO is a sponsor of ReadWriteWeb.
More battle lines are drawn…
Perhaps Kirkpatrick sums all of this up best by describing the feud between TechCrunch50 and DEMO:
“It’s all a big nasty Silicon Valley mess, and Silicon Valley is always fairly big and nasty”
The survey, conducted last week (during “Social Media Week”), was given to 200 social media leaders from across the U.S. and Canada – including founders, bloggers, journalists, entrepreneurs and members of the Twitterati – to see what they thought about the future of social media.
When asked the hypothetical question “What social media service would you advise a business pay for?” – 39.6% of respondents indicated that they would advise businesses to pay for Twitter. 21% of respondents indicated that they would say LinkedIn, while only 15.3% said Facebook.
Those results were very different from how respondents answered when looking at the question as an individual user – “Which social media service would you be most likely to pay for?”
Facebook 32.2%
Linkedin 29.7%
Twitter 21.8%
YouTube 13.4%
MySpace 1.5%
Digg 1.5%
With none of these companies currently charging for their services (at least in a social media regard) the answers are pretty fluffy, but the results seem to spotlight some of the real business benefits that social media advisers and corporations are finding on Twitter.
Specific responses included:
“Twitter is the easiest way to communicate, connect, and drive a call to action.”
“Twitter – Instantaneous feedback from and interaction with customers/users.”
“Twitter – The ability to broadcast and give a business a ‘voice’ is powerful marketing.”
“Twitter – It’s the quickest way I’ve seen to spread information virally to a wide scope of people attached in a lot of random ways”
The survey also asked respondents:
“Which corporation has done the best job of using social media?”
Respondents were asked to choose one; these were the most popular choices, ranked accordingly:
1. Zappos
2. Obama (campaign and presidency)
3. CNN
4. Comcast (“Comcast Cares”)
5. Jetblue
6. Dell
7. Burger King
8. NPR
9. New York Times
10. Ford
The list seems pretty close to other top-ten lists we’ve seen for social media, although Starbucks and IBM were noticeably absent. What are your thoughts on AR’s top-ten and some of their purely speculative questioning?
Back in August, I wrote a post about the need to be a bridge, not a roadblock, for Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble and others. The main points I wanted to cover at the time were: “We are all arbiters of the news”and there’s no reason PR practitioners can’t be a part of the groundswell. I also began to hint at ways we can assist the media in today’s 1,440-minute news cycle.
Well, after reading Chris Brogran’s look at the “building block” approach to blogging and catching this tweet (pictured above) by Marshall Kirkpatrick, I’ve been inspired to expand on how PR practitioners can build that bridge (block-by-block) with the media by focusing on these little (technology-related) things.
IM: Dave seems to be on to something by utilizing IM as a reminder tool that breaks through the clutter. I’ve found more and more reporters and journalists (especially bloggers and Web-centric reporters) are including their AIM screen name in their email signatures. Now this doesn’t mean that they are opening the door to being pitched regularly by AIM, but it does give you an additional outlet for pressing matters and updates. I correspond with the guys at Silicon Alley Insider (Dan Frommer and Eric Krangel) a lot via AIM and they’re often appreciative of pre-call updates and messages via IM (that get their attention), often more so than phone updates. Of course, many of the mainstream business reporters are on AIM as well (John Markoff’s use has been chronicled) and in my experience they are often more receptive to instant messages (assuming you’ve built a relationship with them) than direct messages via Twitter (Markoff gave some of his thoughts on Twitter in this Web interview with us last year).
Twitter: Twitter has really become the best avenue for PR folks to become part of the groundswell. It’s activeness has opened a whole new opportunity for PR practitioners to present not only their clients, but themselves as great resources. Simply highlighting tweets that individual reporters would find interesting (based on their beat and what you know about their current focus) is an easy way to further build a relationship with a reporter or put yourself on the map with them for the first time.
Gmail-friendly emails: Saul Hansell of the New York Times highlighted this for everyone in the industry back in November, but it’s certainly worth restating. Reporters are busier than ever and more and more they are relying on email search to find the sources / contacts for stories. In a lot of ways, emails (and AIM, Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook) have replaced adding outlook contacts, which a long time ago replaced rolodexes. Saul’s main point in his post was that a lot of the emails he gets are so weighed down by marketing jargon, he: 1) Can’t understand who the company is and what they do and 2) Could never find them if he was searching his email for a prospective story topic. In order to make sure your client ends up in his (and other reporters’) searches (and eventual stories) you need to be able to simply say who your client is, what they do and what the overall topic / trend is. This can be hard to do when you have clients asking to see what you are pitching (it happens in the beginning of most AOR relationships) but it’s something that we need to speak frankly about and educate our clients and other marketing professionals on. There is a technical art to the email pitch today and it’s a play on SEO, journalism and relationship building – not a “cold call” marketing / sales blast.
Despite the recent follies of the bankers, business remains business and technology marches onwards. And at this years Mobile World Congress the mobile industry is putting the user front and centre in every effort to differentiate one from another.
Smaller. Lighter. Brighter. Faster. Easier. And most of all, as user-friendly as can be.
This colourful image is a bank of Samsung Omnia‘s demonstrating their bright OLED screens. I’d like to show you one of their new devices but photography was not permitted. What a crazy decision. This is a SHOW. There are many journalists and bloggers here and Samsung tells us photography is not allowed… it can only make anyone think that the Samsung team has no idea about social media marketing!
I spotted a marketing innovation from Qualcomm Mediaflo… a technology to stream data to mobile devices predominantly for video applications such as real-time TV. Rather than interrupt viewing with the same adverts for all viewers, one of their latest innovations allows a different set of adverts to be delivered based on rudimentary user segmentation.
For example, their demo differentiated between a fictitious male and female viewer. Here’s a pic I took of an ad running for Red Bull that played on the phone for the ‘male customer’ but not for the ‘female’…
For consumers demanding a higher quality entertainment experience from their mobile devices, LG was delighted to launch the first mobile, the LG Arena, with Dolby Mobile for an all-round superior sound experience.
The picture of the phone below portrays another interesting feature of the phone, cube navigation. This 3D approach is designed to free the user from menu tree hell… can’t comment on how well it achieves this objective however as you’d need to use it in anger.
Giving the consumer easy, always-on, low cost access to the Web is a hot trend, and the blurring of what’s a phone and what’s mobile computing continues. The rapidity with which this trend develops will have ramifications for your marketing mix. These are great first devices for anyone new to the mobile Web, but also serve as a light weight second machine for the more technophilic. They are designed to be low power, typically running for considerably longer between battery recharges.
I’ll leave you with images of three such devices.
The first is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon based on ARM’s Cortex processor (rather than a power hungry Intel… disclosure, ARM is a client). It is shown here in a netbook device running Ubuntu.
The second is a similar device from Texas Instruments, this time using their OMAP chip based on ARM Cortex and running Ubuntu.
And lastly, for those of you who really value mobility, the LG watch cum phone cum music player cum PDA with full touch screen capability a la iPhone could make your Christmas list in 2009.
Whilst the volume of responses to the Influence Scorecard has been amazing and very encouraging, for a topic so closely related to the Social Web, I’ve been astonished at the number of responses by email rather than, well, more socially!
Nevertheless, I’m far from ungrateful of course. Indeed, “Thank you”. And I’d like to take time here to shout out specifically to the following social web analytics specialists for their support, and then I’ve added some reciprocal blog links…
Where you’ve come back with questions, they have been about two aspects in general… definitions and events.
It’s apparent that vocabulary is important. Like all new fields, if we try working with slightly different definitions then innovation and concensus are going to be harder to forge. We’re talking about words like “influence”, “stakeholder”, “engagement”, “dashboard” etc. So whilst I partly anticipated this need in the first post, it looks like this is going to be task 1.
And events. Well, the level of interest from all the corners of expertise we’re bringing together… analytics, PR, social media and business performance management… has been such that we’re going to give ourselves a little more time to work out the when, where and how. Please bear with us though… we are pulling stuff together.
This task will be delayed a few days whilst I attend Mobile World Congress next week with the powerful ARM, ingenious Mozilla and addictive Taptu. If you’re there and fancy meeting up, just twitter #influencescorecard and #mwc and I’ll pick it up.
But my mind won’t be entirely off influence in Barcelona, after all there’s influence through them there devices.
While I’ve seen some minor arguments take place on Twitter, one huge blowup occurred on Wednesday that simply left me in amazement.
A technology reporter for the National Post, David George-Cosh, blew up at April Dunford, a marketing consultant in Toronto. The fight occurred after Mr. George-Cosh was looking to speak with one of Ms. Dunford’s clients for a story, but did not get his calls returned. He preceded to leave her a nasty voice mail that she Twittered about, which drove Mr. George-Cosh to the edge.
He then began a full-fledged Twitter attack on Ms. Dunford, while she did her best to handle the situation calmly and reasonably. Read her first three posts here, here and here, then follow the rest of the conversation in the image below:
Wow.
While we clearly don’t know the particulars about their working relationship, there is one thing I found particularly interesting:
In one of Ms. Dunford’s original tweets, she says Mr. George-Cosh told her that when a reporter calls you jump. While I think that is generally true (because part of PR is helping out reporters too), there are some situations where companies do not want to comment or be included in a story. I have been in this situation and it’s never fun explaining to a reporter why your client is ‘unable’ to speak with them, which can sometimes rub people the wrong way.
Clearly it’s best when reporters and PR people can establish a good working relationship, and I think this event shows that reporters need PR people too, something which can often be overlooked (hello TechCrunch).
And if you’re going to throw a fit, don’t do it on Twitter for everyone to see.
The micropayment and future of newspapers debate continued on Charlie Rose last night. Mort Zuckerman, the billionaire owner of the New York Daily News and editor of the US News & World Report discussed the topic with Charlie, Walter Isaacson (still on the press trail) and Robert Thomson of the Wall Street Journal.
Interesting quote from Thomson:
“Dead trees are definitely not dead. There is no doubt that in the modern age of content relationships, there is an absolute intensity to the relationship between a reader and a newspaper. Given the Web surfing, ad skipping, channel changing consciousness that is out there; the idea of spending 30 minutes with any medium (The only multi-tasking you are doing is drinking a cup of coffee). That does make newspapers unique. If you talk with ad people they are starting to recognize it.”
