By Ben Haber
Today Racepoint Group is launching a new offering – Racepoint Labs – to help companies, communities, causes and countries leverage the power of social media. To mark this launch we sat down with W2 founder Larry Weber, to get his thoughts on what this means for the overall digital marketing landscape.
Racepoint Launches Racepoint Labs from Kyle Austin on Vimeo.
26 comments March 10th, 2010
By Kyle Austin
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:
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.
6 comments March 1st, 2010
By Kyle Austin
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.
1 comment February 20th, 2010
By Molly Galler
Yesterday afternoon, Ryan Seacrest, the host of FOX’s reality television singing competition American Idol announced via his blog that FOX would allow the recently cast Top 24 contestants to use Facebook, Twitter and MySpace during the competition.
He wrote, “In a testament to the undeniable influence of social media in today’s day in age, American Idol producers and network executives, after nine seasons have finally agreed to allow contestants to maintain social networking profiles on Twitter, Facebook and Myspace. In previous seasons, all social networking was banned, and any pre-existing profiles were deleted prior to the start of live shows. While we’re still unaware of the exact ‘rules of engagement’ for these profiles, considering they were all custom-made by FOX, we can imagine producers have established ground rules for what’s kosher to be discussed on Twitter and elsewhere.”
RaceTalk has previously reported the NBA and the NFL putting restrictions on athletes using social media close to game time, and it seems FOX will follow their lead with this new crop of contestants.
While it is unclear what exactly the ground rules are, FOX has created each contestant’s social media profile themselves, taking control before the contestants even begin pushing out information into the social media universe.
While I respect FOX’s attempt to keep up with the demand for a social media presence, creating profiles for the contestants and providing guidelines for what they can discuss seems to defeat the purpose of following their personal accounts. Why not just have a general American Idol profile and push out general, non-spoiler updates?
When the phone lines are open, I’d like to cast a vote for authenticity, please.
4 comments February 19th, 2010
By Kyle Austin
Live-blogging has become an important aspect of launching products and services at media events. The 1440-minute news cycle is influenced on a tweet-by-tweet basis and if you can maximize “live buzz” the chances of your news sticking around for more than a Hollywood-minute are pretty good.
Apple has mastered the craft of creating venues for live-blogging. They set up venues with stadium style seating and fast connections, while always saving the biggest piece of news for last. This creates the need to hang on every word, sentence and slide they present.
Despite Apple’s polish though; live-blogging has struggled to become enjoyable to follow for tech fanboys. In fact, mainstream publications like the New York Times proved again yesterday that they don’t quite get what readers are looking for in a live-blog. Namely, speed and visuals.
That said, tech blogs used yesterday’s event as a coming out party to illustrate that they’ve come a long way since the live-blogging of 2006. Today, live-blogging produces several high-quality photos a minute and real-time updates. There were probably too many live-blogs to count yesterday, but I happened to stumble across a few of the best as Leo Laporte and Ustream managed to loose me with their inconsistent audio. Here’s my thoughts on the best:
#1: gdgt: Ryan Block kept my attention the best. His posts appeared to be faster than anyone else that I saw and picture updates were seamless. Or as Nick Bilton of the Times’ Bits Blog called their posting “like an Olympic diver; not even a splash.” It sounds like Ryan may have had the Rackspace hosting guys working a little overtime to make it happen.
#2: Gizmodo: Jason Chen and Brian Lam took the live-blogging on in tandem, which was unique. True to their nature their sarcasm was a little stronger than engadget’s or gdgt’s and their pictures were just about the same. However, it appeared that Gizmodo may have been better prepared for the lighting than engadget.
#3: engadget: Joshua Topolsky, who pals around with Jimmy Fallon in his spare time, did almost as well, although he did seem to lag behind Ryan on speed of posting information. He was on pace with posting pictures but they appeared to be of slightly less quality and darker than Gizmodo’s (may have been his angle). Topolsky stayed focused on bits of information and direct quotes from Jobs’ himself. Engadget’s servers also appeared to be less prepared as the site struggled with traffic.
4 comments January 28th, 2010
