Social media’s rising influence on how journalists and bloggers collect and report news has been in the spotlight lately; last week, PR Week released a study showing that 70 percent of journalists use social media to assist in reporting, compared to only 41 percent last year. Clearly, journalists are increasingly viewing social media as a reliable, effective source to aid their professional commitment to delivering accurate news.
But what about how journalists use social media in their personal lives? Careers aside, journalists certainly can’t have been immune to the popularity of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social networks primarily used for personal communication. Journalists have an obligation to objectively report the news, so what does that mean for their participation in these interactive, highly visible social networks? Should journalists maintain completely neutral social media profiles to avoid associating their personal views with their professional reporting?
The Washington Post thinks so. After editor Raju Narisetti posted a few tweets hinting at his political opinions, The Post took a public stance on journalists’ use of social media, forcing Narisetti to close his Twitter account and distributing an internal memo not-so-subtly referencing his actions. (See the full leaked memo on PaidContent.)
The Post’s guidelines make some valid points. Journalists do renege some rights they’d have as a private citizen by choosing to represent an objective news organization. And as I mentioned in my post on journalism’s financial history, publications have a democratic obligation to report unbiased news. But when does the quest for objectivity become censorship? As more and more traditional newspapers give way to digital formats, will limiting journalists’ activity in the social media space ultimately stifle that publication’s creativity, growth and evolution?
I’ll leave you with some provocative comments made by Paul Bradshaw at Online Journalism Blog:
“This week a new nail was driven into the coffin of the notion of journalistic objectivity. The culprit? The Washington Post’s leaked social media policy. The policy is aimed at preserving the appearance of objectivity rather than its actual existence. It focuses on what journalists are perceived to be, rather than what they actually do.”
As the founder of Newswise, a company that provides social media monitoring and reporting services for communications professionals, Roger S. Johnson knows his primary market, and he brings that market expertise to his Twitter handle. Roger provides insight on trends in PR and marketing and often passes along compelling studies on the uptake and importance of social media. His profile page reads like a overview of the past week’s most noteworthy traditional and social media news. For anyone looking for updates on interesting, relevant news from the media and PR realms, Roger (@PRwise) is an excellent follow.
In promoting his new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” controversy-prone filmmaker Michael Moore made some interesting statements about the future of newspapers as a profitable business model. Moore claims they “slit their own throats” and attributes the struggles of the medium to corporate greed and stupidity.
Moore blames newspapers’ dependence on advertising sales as a main contributor to the greedy media culture, and he goes on to cite circulation-sponsored models like those in Europe and Japan as more democratic alternatives. He says because these models look to readers as their primary sources of revenue, the newspapers are forced to be more committed to producing high-quality, relevant content for readers.
From a historical perspective, the ad-sponsored model for newspapers stemmed from a democratic mindset. When small newsletters first began springing up around the colonies in the early 1700s, they were funded, of course, through reader purchases. Coming from fifteenth-century Britain, where newspapers were government sponsored and notoriously biased, America’s first journalists passionately held that a for-profit model would ensure a democratic, free press. But as these papers began to grow and evolve, they realized sales alone wouldn’t be able to support much expansion. Not wanting to turn newspapers over to government funding, the advertising-sponsored media model evolved as a revenue stream based on the desire to maintain an independent press.
So advertising was invoked with good intentions, but where does that leave us today? As Moore suggests, are newspapers a failed business experiment merely reaping what they sowed?
With media mogul Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of NewsCorp, recently putting his foot down on charging for newspapers’ online content, the industry may be at a crossroads. But for the now, the future of this storied, historic medium remains uncertain.
Today we’re happy to be announcing a new Friday, guest post feature. Our inaugural guest post was contributed by RaceTalk-reader Tara Miller, who writes about online management degree’s. She welcomes your feedback here and at TaraMillerr00 at yahoo.com. If you’re interested in writing a guest post for RaceTalk please contact us at racetalk at racepointgroup.com.
Even if you do most of your business in the office, having a way to get connected with important information and better monitor your success is extremely useful. These mobile applications can help marketers of all kinds keep in touch, survey consumers, remember important tasks and much more.
Urbanspoon: If you need great place to take out potential clients, buyers or investors, then use this handy app to find something that suits the needs of all the suits in the room.
Salesforce Mobile: This CRM tool allows users to keep client and prospect information on hand. Update your records while you’re stuck in another endless wait on the tarmac at La Guardia.
iTalk: Make taking notes easy with this app that will also help you avoid carpal tunnel. Simply say it aloud and save it to your phone.
Surveyor: If you need to get in touch with and survey your target market, this portable application can make the whole process a little less painful.
Stay in Touch: Easily manage all of your business information with this helpful CRM tool.
Analytics Pro: With this app you can keep tabs on the performance of your websites or blog no matter where you are. Its functionality links you up with your Google Analytics account.
Keynote Remote: Mac users can take advantage of this budget app that turns your iPhone into a remote control, which can be used to go through a Keynote presentation – while taking advantage of the local wi-fi connection.
Remember the Milk: If you need a little help remembering the stuff you need to get done outside of work then try out the mobile version of this app. You’ll be able to keep track of mundane tasks like picking up the milk, as well as personal emails that need responses.
Scribble: Here you’ll find an app that will let you jot down ideas and share your designs with others, whether in person or through an email. Simply draw on the screen of your iPhone, which becomes a bit like a whiteboard. If you want to erase – give it a little shake.
Creative Whack Pack: If you’re experiencing a creative block, break out this application filled with exercises designed to stimulate the right side of your brain.
The Meltwater Social Web Analytics team came round today to tell me about their plans for their service. They are starting out with the confidence and aggression that typified Meltwater’s entry into the ‘traditional’ media monitoring six years back… and they’ve done pretty darn well in that regard.
For speed to market, they are currently white labelling Techrigy’s rather nifty SM2 service (shout out to @aaronnewman), and I understand this will form a ‘base’ or a foundation for their endeavours going forward.
I enjoyed our conversation. In the short hour we had together we covered approaches to quantifying influence, assessing Twitter, semantic analysis approaches to gauging sentiment (aka tone), the growth in the number of Social Web Analytics vendors, the importance of the UI and ‘prettiness’ of charts, and pricing.
We debated my assertion that no one service serves all needs right now, and that a stable of differently capable services (often at different price points) is required. We even had time to chew over how Racepoint Group has achieved such distinct leadership in this field and the prospects for data visualisation.
Data visualisation
Which is a super segue to another couple of interesting videos on my continuing obsession with and search for data visualisation technology and approaches to assist PR consultants in influencing and be influenced more effectively and efficiently.
The AlloSphere space consists of a 3-story cube that is treated with extensive sound absorption material making it one of the largest anechoic chambers in the world. Standing inside this chamber are two 5-meter-radius hemispheres constructed of perforated aluminum that are designed to be optically opaque and acoustically transparent.
There are currently two projectors, soon to be multiple high-resolution video projectors, mounted around the seam between the two hemispheres, approaching eye-limited resolution on the inner surface. The loudspeaker real-time sound synthesis cluster (around 500 individual speaker elements plus sub-woofers) is/will be suspended behind the aluminum screen resulting in 3-D audio. Other clusters include simulation, sensor-array processing, effector-array processing, real-time video processing for motion-capture and visual computing, render-farm/real-time ray-tracing and radiosity cluster, and content and prototyping environments.
Anyway, probably best understood in the video. If anyone has two large hemispheres they no longer want, please let me know @sheldrake.
On a more immediately applicable scale, check out SweetNTweet below. It shows a lovely little application (built with the open source Processing 1.0) in which search keywords are entered and to which Tweets from Twitter gravitate in the form of candy-coloured petals. On reaching their destination they reveal their 140 characters of wisdom and beauty.
Does it really show any promise of helping PR consultants visualise their landscape. Nope, but it’s really quite pretty and might spark something more relevant in your mind!
“You think using Twitter is a social-media strategy. It’s a tactic, a tool, not a strategy.”
Now my post elicited some responses via Twitter (@sheldrake) questioning my definition of the word “strategy”. So for clarity… your social Web strategy is the long-term “how” that follows the “what” of your social Web objectives.
I also agree with number 2 on the Ad Age post… if “every tweet has to be approved by legal” then your organisation is not ready for the social Web let alone little old Twitter. (I’d also argue that you’re most likely not ready to do business in 2009!)
And at number 3, Ochman’s post picks up on the second issue teased out in my post, that of setting clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile. To paraphrase, herein lies the danger that Twitter is adopted for monologue rather than dialogue. But employed wisely as per my last post, with real people on hand to pick up on the conversation, the corporate Twitter profile can be an appropriate flag waver and conversation starter.
Of course, the social Web is about people, and not information technology. So it would be good to see Ad Age adopting so-called pretty URLs that people can understand than the incomprehensible ones they have today.
I’m frequently amazed at the frequency with which I come across people discussing their Twitter Strategy, or their Facebook Strategy. Contrast this with offline terminology… we never talk about a Press Release Strategy or a Features Tracking Strategy.
Twitter and Facebook et al are one of many channels or platforms through which we wish to engage stakeholders in conversation. The strategy, then, is the plan we set ourselves for our use of social media to achieve our business objectives.
The strategy is constructed to meet our objectives and is informed by deep insight into best practice application of social media.
The strategy sets out the framework for our current and future adoption of social Web channels, platforms, services and gizmos. It helps us work out which of these to adopt and how they might work together. It describes the over-arching ethos and policies for social media use, organisation-wide, and clearly articulates how success is to be gauged, month in and month out.
There is no such thing as Twitter Strategy, and if you think there is then you are Twittering for Twitter’s sake and not for business success.
But back to the corporate Twitter profile, by which I mean… @companyname or @brandname.
If I ask you to think about the last conversation you had, what comes to mind? Was it interesting? Did it leave a lasting impression? You will recall the characteristics of the other person or persons.
But it is always people. Try it, although perhaps you don’t need to! Ask everyone you come in to contact with today about the last conversation they had, and see how many of them say “Yes, wow, great chat with brandname at lunch”. They will say “John” or “Jane” but never “Levi” or “Porsche” or “Dell” or “Accenture”.
Does this mean there is no place for @companyname and @brandname?
No!
In many ways, although this is not a bullet proof assertion, Twitter is everything RSS aspired to be (at least for human use). It is simple, universally easy to create and delightfully simple to follow. The corporate Twitter profile is, then, a nifty way for Web-savvy and interested parties to keep abreast of your news.
So, as it stands, this approach is more monologue than the dialogue to which we all aspire, so we can’t stop here.
Now, if you have some passionate social media trained members of your BrandX team, let’s call them @john and @jane, your corporate Twitter profile @brandx should aim to direct followers looking to have a chat with real people such as John and Jane. Each Twitter profile should then refer to and converse with eachother.
This isn’t rocket science; in fact it’s much the same as real life, which of course makes sense when you consider that mankind hasn’t undergone some kind of rapid evolution or psychological metamorphosis just because we have the Web or Skype or Twitter. In the pre-social Web days I might end up talking with John because I was a BrandX customer. The brand brought us together but the conversation, the dialogue, the interaction was person-to-person.
Our colleague RJ Bardsley (@rjbardsley), is live at CTIA this week. Here’s his report from day 2 in Las Vegas.
So it’s Day Two at America’s Most Influential Mobile Show….
…And there is still a ton of cool stuff to take in and take on. My day started shortly after the keynote sitting down for coffee with some of the folks over at Handmark. They’ve had a ton of cool news out lately and at this show they brought the curtain up on some great mobile apps for partners like the Associated Press. Handmark does a number of things, but they’re also the great grand daddy of mobile app stores – they started way back in 2000 when most phones still had cords and the iPod was only a music player that sat gazing longingly across your desk at the cell phone (which was probably the size of a small loaf of bread).
Anyway, my next stop was at a pretty unlikely booth. If you’re a mobile junkie like me, you probably walk right by a lot of those conference booths with all the phone covers and rubber protectors. I mean, really – we’re interested in all the cool apps and gee-wiz electronics on the mobile, not the pocket protector you wrap it in. It’s all about the hi-def video recorder and the new Shape Writer app that revolutionizes the way I enter data into my phone – right? Not so fast. Incipio has some of the coolest iPhone accesories I’ve ever seen. The thing that struck me first and most about this company was that it’s phone covers and hard drive socks looked more like something you might see on project runway or in a museum. There was the cool super hero line, the artistic Japanese wood block line, the executive but stylish line. Before I knew it I was snapping photos like the paparazzi at fashion week. I got the chance to chat with Kari Nishimura, one of the lead designers for Incipio and she explained a little bit about what inspires her and how she knows what will sell. “I was a studio art major in college, but my first love was illustration. A lot of the designs here are stuff that I love to draw…I watch what’s happening in music and pop culture…and I have a good idea of what will sell because I’m pretty close to the demographic we’re targetting.” For more on Kari and Incipio check out their Website.
My last significant stop for the day was with a company called E7. Check this out: E7 wants to reduce waste in the cell phone ecosystem by refurbishing your old phone and sending it back to you so you can use it again. In general this is a very cool idea – except personally, I usually switch phones because I’m lured by the latest shiny gadgets and software. E7 refurbs the battery, the GPS radio, and all the plastic and chrome parts. And, they do all the work in Atlanta, so they’re conforming with the buy American part of the stimulus plan.
INQ Mobile INQ1, currently for sale in the U.K. and Australia, it should arrive in the U.S. later this year.
Courtesy INQ Mobile
Our colleague RJ Bardsley (@rjbardsley), is live at CTIA this week. Here’s his report from day 1 in Las Vegas.
OK – so I don’t want to jinx anything, but the recession didn’t seem to stop the crowds coming out to North America’s premier mobile event. I had the pleasure of walking the floor for a little while with ARM Holdings’ James Bruce, so I was able to get the ARM (a Racepoint client) perspective on quite a lot of cool new things in mobile. While I can’t offer too many details, I will say that Qualcomm has a KILLER netbook that was just about the hottest thing I’ve seen in a while. But Qualcomm wasn’t the only happening company at CTIA; there was cool and exciting news from almost every corner of the mobile ecosystem. Some of the things I found especially compelling include:
The Qualcomm partner pavilion was chock-a-block full of cool stuff. Xandros was there talking about their new Xandros PrestoTM, a full-featured ‘instant on’ solution to power up laptops within seconds.
Another hot up and coming company in the Qualcomm booth was iNQ, a spin off of Hutchinson that is offering a social networking mobile phone that is really quite amazing. Not only does it offer users a fully integrated experience – as in all of your social networks from Facebook to Skype integrated into a single, easy-to-use interface – it also lets you keep open several applications at once. Want one as badly as I do? Too bad, you’ll have to wait – no us carrier for now…
The PR folks over at HTC let me play with a couple new handsets. Besides being incredibly sexy (the phones, not the PR folks) HTC phones also debuted the concept of your Inner Circle. The way it works is that you can set your phone to only deliver email and messages from a select group of people for a set amount of time. So, if you’re at a tradeshow and you don’t want to be bombarded with emails from everyone, you can set your new HTC Magic to only let through emails from your boss, your clients, and maybe your mom.
Big props to Jessica Myers at the Garmin booth for spending time with me to explain the two new-ish Garmin phones, the G60, which bowed last year, and the M20 which launched this year at MWC. The phones are totally built around location, so basically you can find anything or anybody at anytime – want to go to your friend’s house for dinner? Look up his/her contact info in your phone book and presto, the Garmin phones plot out a turn-by-turn route to your friend’s house. Want to talk and get turn-by-turn directions? No problem, just put the phone in it’s dock and you can talk and go with no interruption. Check out Garmin’s phones here.
More to come here later today, and throughout the day over on my Twitter account.
A yawn is never a good way to start a conversation. As the first two posts in this three-part series pointed out, the way you start the conversation is as important as the content (part 1 and part 2).
I’ve not tried to be exhaustive in describing some of the multimedia formats you might adopt in starting your conversation, and the posts to date have covered video, animation and a call-to-action microsite. I wanted to finish with an interactive website employing a game to draw visitors in to the key messages; draw them in to thinking about the issues; excite them about propogating the message.
Just needed to find one I really liked.
Fortunately, I was Haymarket Brand Media’s guest at the Revolution Awards at the Grosvenor, London, on Friday evening (thanks again for inviting me Matthew), and now I don’t need to look any further.
“Judges thought that Honda’s ‘Problem Playground’ campaign was a great way to launch a new car, being both fun and engaging, as well as showing outstanding attention to detail.
A key focus of Honda’s passion for innovative engineering is to benefit the environment, and with this in mind, the car marque wanted to increase the sales oof its Civic Hybrid model.
The campaign focused on increasing traffic to a website that featured a ‘problem playground’, inviting users to solve puzzles. The digital activity aimed to closely associate Honda with the idea of finding cost efficiencies and environmental solutions by inviting users to move the pieces of an online puzzlein order to reveal information.
The campaign delivered 140,000 unique users to the landing page, with consumers spending on average of 2.5 minutes on the site. Those driven to the site spent time with the content, with an average of eight pages being viewed per visit. In total, 5,500 hours were spent on the site.
Judges said there were lots of puzzles for people to solve, with impressive integration of voice-over messages. They concluded that the campaign was an innovative way for the brand to communicate its messages on problem solving and the environment.”
What better way to finish this post but to check out the Cravendale sister site at www.makethetea.com, get the kettle on, make a brew and think about how you’d like to start your conversation in an interesting way.
The 
and the prospects for data visualisation.
