ExactTarget made fairly big news on Tuesday with their acquisition of CoTweet. The email marketing and one-to-one marketing provider acquired the popular Web-based platform that allows companies to manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single dashboard. To date, CoTweet has teamed with brands such as Whole Foods, Starbucks, JetBlue, Ford, Pepsi, Sprint and Coca-Cola to effectively manage global Twitter engagement. So what does an email marketer want with a Twitter platform?
What they originally have planned for the service, may shed some light on that. According the their release, CoTweet will operate in San Francisco as a business unit of ExactTarget and will lead the company’s social media product development. CoTweet co-founder and chief executive Jesse Engle will also lead the San Francisco operation and spearhead the creation and expansion of the company’s social media lab.
“What we’re seeing in the market is organizations are moving quickly to try to capture the potential of social, but are discovering that it’s siloed and not integrated effectively with other forms of digital communications,” said Scott Dorsey, ExactTarget co-founder and chief executive officer. “By combining the power of ExactTarget and CoTweet, we can provide businesses a complete solution to tie together all forms of interactive communications and drive deeper customer engagement online.”
An end-to-end marketing tool, which includes social media functionality could be huge, but initially I would have some fears with an email marketing company (synonymous in some consumers’ eyes with spam), imploring similar tactics with social media. Do they really understand the back and forth engagement between consumers and brands that makes Twitter what it is? It doesn’t sound like Jesse Engle of CoTweet has that fear.
“We see a huge opportunity to build on ExactTarget’s incredible business and customer relationships to help companies drive more measurable value from social media,” said Engle. “As part of ExactTarget, we’ll have the global resources to cement our early lead, rapidly expand our platform and develop the next generation of social media communication tools.”
Perhaps then, they do understand the difference in the social media channel. If it allows for CoTweet to build on their services and offer more real-time measurement and CRM functionality then I’m all for it. If they can apply email measurement and CRM to social, and even mobile, ExactTarget could turn the acquisition into a future leadership position in the holistic Web marketing space.
PitchEngine, the social media release platform, announced on Tuesday that it is partnering with Technorati and MyMediaInfo to develop components for its soon to be released, Pitch™ Platform.
We didn’t have the chance to catch-up with PitchEngine’s CEO Jason Kintzler today, but according to the PitchEngine release, The Pitch Platform (due to be released in beta over the next few weeks) will offer a new kind of “social media relations”. Instead of sending press releases to email addresses, the platform will create a new channel for conversations and sharing content with real people (journalists and consumers).
Technorati will assist in creating the Technorati List (fueled by PitchEngine), which is designed to help organizations and bloggers simplify and expand blogger outreach. MyMediaInfo will assist on the traditional media end with access to 400,000 media members.
With the Pitch Platform, media will be able to follow and filter only the content that matters to them. If they see something they like, they’ll be able to interact privately, one-to-one with the Pitch creator. Media can also pitch story needs to brands and organizations from within the same categories of interest making Pitch a genuine media relations tool.
But do we really need another channel? With more channels than ever before to connect with journalists and brands, will journalists want to open a new channel (even if it is a filter)? We’ve seen the evidence that they’re already using social media for similar purposes. A study released in January found 65 percent of journalists are using social networking sites and 52 percent are using micro-blogging sites like Twitter as part of their news gathering. Add on calls and instant messaging, and that’s a lot of channels to keep track of.
Any new channel will have to offer a lot to get journalists to abandon any of the aforementioned channels. Hopefully we can give you a better idea if this does all that, when we trial the beta offering later this month.
Not only are consumers spending more time than ever before on social networks, they’re also using social networks as a one-stop-shop for news and information. The latest study released by Pew Research Center today found that 75 percent of online news consumers get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites.
However, online news consumption isn’t completely taking over offline (mainly TV and radio) consumption. Instead, consumers are combining both offline and online sources to digest news. In fact, 59 percent of the 2,259 U.S. adults (18+) surveyed, noted they use both sources. Meanwhile, only two percent noted they only use online sources for news and 38 percent of those surveyed still use offline sources as their main news provider each day.
Pew goes onto note that today’s multi-platform news environment is becoming portable, personalized and participatory:
33 percent of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones
28 percent of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them
37 percent of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter
Looking closer at Facebook as a news hub, it will become increasingly important for brands to ensure that their messages and announcements penetrate the social network. This could be through their Facebook fan pages, personal posts, aggregation buttons on corporate blogs or even journalist posts. In addition, news stories with brand and message inclusion should also be scored on if they make “most emailed” lists, are posted to an outlet’s Facebook page (i.e. the New York Times posting a story) or if a reporter personally posts a story to their page (example illustrated above).
Personally, Twitter has been a great crowd-sourcing tool for myself each morning that often beats the morning paper in terms of multiple sources, stories and varying points of view. However, I’ve found myself going to Facebook for the same type of crowd-sourcing recently. With the combination of friends’ updates and news posts from both friends, colleagues, news outlets and clients it becomes a more personal experience. I also find that with more information posted (no character limit), I spend less time clicking through to stories (not necessarily a good thing for media companies).
And that personal experience isn’t only key for myself. Despite all of the online activity, Pew notes that the typical online news consumer routinely uses just a handful of news sites. Most likely because the news and information is overwhelming and consumers opt for sites that they are comfortable with and engage within themselves.
Jon Meacham Appearing on Charlie Rose, upon the launch of the “new” Newsweek (Last May)
Newsweek’s “intellectually satisfying” new layout may not be working out as planned. Keith Kelley of the New York Post reports today that the Washington Post Company (owners of Newsweek) somewhat hid within their Q4 earnings that Newsweek lost $28.1 million in 2009. Newsweek CEO Tom Ascheim tells Kelly that they expected losses in 2009 and even in 2010 with their lower circulation, but expect to break even by 2011.
We reported last May on the transformation of Newsweek; from a venerable weekly into an Economist-like read for the intellectual elite. As part of the transformation, Ascheim and Meacham laid the groundwork for trimming down its circulation from 3.1 million to 1.2 million. As of January, Newsweek had cut its circulation down to 1.5 million. The circulation cut, which was done to focus on its “core readership,” also laid groundwork for trimming its staffing costs. Newsweek has offered severance to 44 staffers over the last year.
Despite trimming and cover stories such as “The Case for Killing Granny,” “Is Your Baby Racist?” and “Obama is Wrong,” Newsweek struggled with its transition throughout the media meltdown of 2009 (no different than most magazines). According to information from the Magazine Publishers of America the magazine witnessed a 25.9% drop in 2009 ad pages and a $105 million loss in revenue with its print business. Yes, you can blame the gradual circulation change and redesign, but what business could stay in the green with a 30 percent loss in money coming in – no matter how many people you lay off.
Things may turnaround for Newsweek as we continue to come out of the economic tumult (Ascheim notes Q4 was their best), but does the Washington Post Company have the stomach to wait until 2011 to break even? And perhaps more importantly what is their online strategy to offset these losses? Is there a paywall in the future?
“Fox News, Fair and Balanced.” Some say, it’s the most biased slogan in all of news. Others would argue that Fox News isthe most believable.
No matter what side of the fence you’re on, it’s tough to argue with the fact that there are more sources than ever before in the age of cable news and digital media, with varying shades of slant sprinkled throughout them.
In fact, a study last year by the PEW Research Center found that nearly 74% of Americans believe news organizations tend to favor one side of story and 60% believe news organizations are politically biased.
One new multi-media startup aiming to address these issues, along with the need for cost-effectively produced web and mobile video content, is Missouri-based Newsy.com. Newsy.com is a online video news site that monitors, analyzes and presents multi-sourced (or unbiased) news in video form for multiple platforms. The service is positioned as a video analyzer, not a video aggregator (such as VideoSift or Dabble.com), which means it employs an editorial staff to assist with the analyzing, sourcing, producing and repackaging rather than simply aggregating the video content.
“Look at the health care issue right now and there are likely 15,000 pieces of news coverage in all forms,” Newsy.com’s Founder and President Jim Spencer noted to me last week. “We sift through all the pieces of coverage and present one multi-sourced video.”
Missouri would seem like a funny home for a video startup to most, but Spencer, a J-school graduate from the University of Missouri, found just what he was looking for in returning to Columbia. A natural partnership with the J-School lowers staff and production costs, while offering two courses to students: An online audience development class, and a global converged news class taught by Newsy.com Vice President of Editorial Pam Maples, who was previously the managing editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
Another cost saver is Newsy.com’s proprietary technology that manually records and captures content. This allows the company’s 22 full and part-time employees, and assisting students, to sift through hours of media in an efficient way. All of this, in addition to the overall production prices being lower in Missouri than San Francisco or New York allows Newsy.com to analyze, produce and distribute news at a discount of as much as 40 percent on the dollar. Or as Spencer notes, “We can now compete with Mumbai.”
The notion of being “smarter and faster” provides several revenue stream options for Spencer, who is a veteran of new media offerings. Formerly the VP of Content and Answers at Ask Jeeves (Ask.com) and the GM of News and Information Programming at AOL, Spencer believes Newsy.com can drive revenue in a variety of ways outside of traditional on-site advertising. Namely, content licensing, branded news casts and revenue shares through syndication.
These revenue streams also apply to mobile video, which Spencer sees as a big opportunity. “There is a demand for short video news analysis on mobile devices,” he noted. The iPhone and its support of high quality video is certainly a driver of that. Last June, YouTube reported a 400% jump in video uploads driven by the release of the iPhone 3G and there’s an equal demand for consuming video on mobile devices. In fact, Newsy.com’s video news app for the iPhone reached number five on the list of free apps in the News category within the iTunes App Store last October (ahead of TIME, Wall Street Journal and Huffington Post apps).
Spencer, who plans to launch a similar video playing app for Android this week sees this growth as validation of Newsy.com’s platform agnostic approach. “It’s an affirmation of our multi-sourced, multi-platform approach. We’re ahead of this trend.”
According to new data released by Nielsen today, global users spent more than five and a half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year.
Facebook continues to show the most global engagement with users spending an average of nearly six hours on the site for December 2009. Twitter on the other hand, wrapped up the calendar year with 579% growth in unique views (UV’s). However, UV’s for the site dropped 5% from November 2009; a possible sign that the company’s hockey stick growth may have peaked.
Looking closer to home, U.S. social media users are also spending more of their free time on social networks with total minutes increasing 210% year-over-year and the average time per person increasing 143% year-over-year in December 2009.
At least it seems to have happened to Rolling Stone. It could be a DNS server issue as Mashable notes, but it does look very similar to the generic hosting service page you get when your site in unpaid.
The site is now updated to an error message, but still no content. Being down for the full day won’t help with Web traffic for the magazine’s Website, which has steadily decreased over the last six months.
It’s safe to say that Kevin Smith, the well known director and producer of cult-classics such as Clerks, is not nuts about Southwest. If you’ve been hiding under a rock and missed last weekend’s (turned this week’s) PR fire drill for SouthWest; Smith was asked off of a Southwest plane with the airline citing their two-seat rule for passengers who don’t safely fit in two seats. Smith, who is also a new media media influencer in every essence of the word, took to social media after that, giving his side of the story.
In a slew of Tweets following the incident, Smith detailed his take on the Southwest policy. Ever since then (now nearly a week after the incident), it has been “he said,” “she said,” between Southwest and a man with 1.6 million Twitter followers.
Such is corporate communications life in the world of new influencers. No matter how social media savvy your PR department and company is (Southwest is pretty savvy), Smith and others don’t walk around with Twitter badges on.
But a funny thing happened as this incident transpired. Southwest did a lot of things to make the bad situation better. They noted to their Twitter followers that they’d be contacting Smith by phone (code: offline). They posted an “apology” on their blog and updated it after talking with Smith (who voiced issues with the language in the post). They did a lot of things right. Smith even took hits from media members noting the incident was hurting his brand more than Southwest’s brand.
What can be learned from the incident? This won’t be the last time a high-profile person (with a large social media platform) is “wronged” by a company. Mistakes will happen and the Twitter-storm will follow. However, if you take the time to gather facts, take the conversation off-line, address it personally, don’t treat the person with the platform any different than another customer and mean what you’re saying – it can be handled.
