Infographics are quickly becoming a media and public relations industry buzz word / topic. Why you ask? Two major reasons. As corporations continue to shift into their role as media companies and content curators, they’re realizing the opportunity to package interesting data to the media and consumers in new ways. More importantly, media organizations and editors are now focusing on finding new ways to engage their readership. Infographics happen to solve both of these problems by packaging data in a way that makes it both engaging and easy to read.
A few weeks ago I sat down with Sam Whitmore of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey for Racepoint Group’s video newsletter to discuss how brands and agencies can leverage infographics and why they’re becoming the “new slide shows” for media outlets desperate for engaging content. While Sam cautioned that infographics aren’t B-roll (most media outlets like to play a role in building them), he did pass along some interesting insight into how PR practitioners and marketers can leverage the media’s interest in this new category of content.
For more insight on infographics, along with the latest news and trends in marketing, PR and communications in the technology space subscribe to Racepoint’s “The Point: Tech Edition.
Last night Racepoint Group hosted an event about social media and its return on investment (ROI). As social media continues to become a larger focal point in public relations and marketing campaigns, it’s critical to understand how to articulate it’s value to clients.
Last night’s event centered around a panel discussion with three social media experts: Larry Weber, Chairman of Racepoint Group, Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics and Mike Volpe, VP of Inbound Marketing for HubSpot.
After Larry Weber’s opening remarks, Qualman shared how he first dipped his toe into the digital space by sending a company-wide email instead of the standard hard copy memo. View his story here:
Volpe was up next and shared with the group the origins of his marketing career and the way tracking and reporting on ROI is evolving. Watch him provide tips here:
The evening was full of tremendous ideas and recommendations. The five big takeaways from the panel were:
1) Social media is not about technology. It’s about human interaction. It’s about sharing information and making connections. People who are intimidated by the technology aspect of engaging in social media should not view the applications as a hurdle. It’s simply the current mechanism to maintain relationships and reach out to new people.
2) When it comes to tracking social media, its important to focus not only on the quantitative (number of followers, number of re-postings) but also the qualitative. We need to take into account engagement and tone. Qualman said, “If social media is so trackable, we should just have robots running things. The human element is necessary here.”
3) Everyone and anyone can be a content creator, a publisher, a media property. As we shift away from traditional print and broadcast media, both we and our clients have the opportunity to get innovative and create and distribute our own content. Additionally, content creation should not be isolated to the PR and marketing staff. Volpe shared that, “50% of HubSpot employees have written posts for the HubSpot blog.”
4) Although much of PR and marketing is based in the written word, we need to start thinking more visually. We need to tell stories through pictures and videos. We need to make our content more authentic and dynamic.
5) On a personal level, Volpe stated, “The new resume is what comes up in Google when I type in your name.” As digital and social media continue to play an increasingly vital role in our PR and marketing efforts, we too have a digital and social persona, and that is now what employers are most interested in.
Thank you to Erik Qualman and Mike Volpe for joining us at Racepoint Group last night and providing such pragmatic, realistic, useful and inspiring guidance on the social media ROI frontier. Be sure to follow @equalman and @mvolpe on Twitter for real time updates on their social media adventures. You can also view all the live commentary during the event with the #smroi hashtag here.
Live many other “reviewers,” I recently wrapped-up reading an advanced copy of David Kirkpatrick’s “the facebook Effect” (Simon & Schuster) that is now on newsstands nationwide. The first thought that came to mind in wrapping up was, “that was detailed” followed by “it’s the de-facto Facebook biography from here on out.” It was truly a great read.
I had joked with David awhile ago that he better get better access to Facebook for his book than Steve Levy is getting with Google right now for his book and he undoubtedly delivered. Levy, it seems, would have to live with Larry and Sergey year round to match the access it appears Kirkpatrick got to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The former Fortune scribe, who is also launching his own conference / media company (more on that another day), has always gotten executives to open up and he clearly used that quality to bring some new Facebook stories to light throughout the book.
Others have covered the ins and outs of the book, which really gets at Facebook’s social and cultural significance, but I was most interested in the new rocks he turned over in looking at Facebook’s affect on the media. Here’s a few of the juicy nuggets. Go buy the book for more!
The Sysomos research report entitled “Inside Blog Demographics,” found that the average blogger is age 21 – 35. This particular age demographic represents 53% of the total blogging population.
Given mommy blogger mania, you might think the majority of bloggers are female. Or possibly if you follow numerous technology and gadget blogs, you might think men dominate the blog scene. Well, you’d be right on both counts. According to this report, bloggers are 50.9% female and 49.1% male. Almost a dead even split.
I think the statistics that surprised me most were the location demographics. Only 29.2% of bloggers are located in the United States. Does that seem low to anyone else?
Amongst the 29.2% of American bloggers, the largest percentage hail from California (14.1%), with New York coming in second at 7.1%. No surprise there.
You can view the full country by country break down below:
Did you realize the average blogger was a recent college grad in CA or NY?
While it’s hard not to take pleasure in anyone telling Michael Arrington the way it is, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz’s run-in and f-bomb dropping with Arrington earlier this week at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference undoubtedly made PR folks squeamish.
But it got me thinking. A few year’s ago, you could wrap this one into a case study for how not to fall for a reporter’s baiting. You don’t see on camera that Arrington asked Bartz if her marketing pitch about Yahoo’s strengths relative to rival Google was “BS.” After-all this is what Arrington wanted to get from Bartz. A public, unsavory reaction that could draw more attention to his interview and the conference.
He got it and more, but was it a PR #fail for Yahoo!? While there were those who quickly berated Bartz for her comments as too publicly defensive, rough, knee-jerk and unbuttoned, others were quick to back her comments as “refreshing.”
At the very least her passion for defending Yahoo! bears resemblance to the passionate way Steve Jobs defends Apple. Yes, he’s not dropping f-bombs on camera in public settings, but it is refreshing to see CEO’s so passionate about their company’s position that they respond to questions, without vetting their words through their team and consultants. And the media, traditional or otherwise, love it.
I’m not saying executives should go off their rocker like this more often (not everyone has Jobs or Bartz make-up or power), but sometimes being yourself in the right moment can come across as a positive thing in the social media age. Every company wants and needs to be reputable, believable and trustworthy in the digital age – should executives be any different??
AOL Travel is launching a really cool project over the next several weeks. They are sending a someone undercover to fly on ten major U.S. airline carriers and report back on their experience. Called the mystery flyer, this person is blogging and tweeting their travel experience.
Since airline travel has been such a frustrating experience for many people over the past several years (especially with added fees for almost everything) this is proving to be quite the cool investigative report for AOL. The blog reports and real-time updates through Twitter enables followers to live through the experience and ask questions as the trip progresses.
Be sure to follow this Twitter handle in the upcoming weeks to get a glimpse of the best and worst airlines.
Today and tomorrow the 92nd Street Y in New York City will be home to Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conference. The gathering gets its name from the maximum number of characters allowed in one post on Twitter, affectionately know as a tweet.
Unlike other conferences where presentations can last an hour plus, at the 140 Characters Conference panel discussions are 20 minutes maximum and key note addresses tap out at the 15 minute mark.
“At #140conf NYC we will be taking a hard look at something Jeff Pulver calls “The State of NOW” and the continued effects the worldwide adoption of social communication platforms such as twitter is having on a number of industries including: Celebrity, “The Media”, Advertising, Politics, Education, Music, Television, Comedy, Real Estate, Public Policy and more. The take aways from this event will provide the attending delegates knowledge, perspectives and insights to the next wave of effects Twitter and the real-time internet will have on business in 2010 and beyond.”
Seems broad, no? The list of speakers at the New York City event range broadly in areas of expertise as well. The roster includes:
o Alexis Maybank, Founder of Gilt Groupe
o Anny Curry, NBC’s Today Show
o Bruce Upbin, Managing Editor at Forbes
o David Carr, Reporter & Blogger at New York Times
o Dennis Crowley, co-founder of FourSquare
o MC Hammer, Musician
o Ivanka Trump, The Trump Organization
o Joe Randazzo, Editor of The Onion
o Michael Ian Black, Comedian & Blogger
While it may not seem obvious at first what this motley crew has in common, that’s precisely point. Social media is limitless in its reach. It bridges gaps between types of businesses, country borders and even foreign languages. The 140 Character Conference is proving that individuals can maximize the opportunities provided by this event, without even needing to physically be in the room.
The beauty of this type of conference is that it uses the micro-blogging site Twitter as its starting point, which automatically makes it relevant to anyone on the site. Then the conference added a hashtag (#140conf) making updates from those at the event easily identifiable, and more importantly, searchable. All of the best sound bites, images and videos are being fed directly into your Twitter stream right at your desk.
Here is a small sampling of the expert advice pouring into my Twitter feed this morning:
@acarvin: Carr: you’re standing in line w/ mopes at Starbucks and you look at your Twitter feed and you become calm. Makes sbux tolerable. #140conf @SarahCaminker: Twitter is a human enabled RSS, adds a human element where people are curating their own feed. Via @carr2n #140Conf @LaurynBennett: Having a successful brand = having a consistent voice and message across all your businesses and audiences. @ivankatrump #140conf @JulieSpira: Eric Kuhn @CNN says everyone at CNN is tweeting from the CEO/Pres. down. #140conf @LaurynBennett: “Rule #1: Never forget the brand – your message MUST be in concert with your brand values.” ahthankyouverymuch, @Donny_Deutsch #140conf @JulieSpira: @GavinPurcell says Late night with Jimmy Kimmel has been on tv for 13 months. Started as a daily video blog for 5 months before TV #140conf
Jeff Pulver’s goal with this conference was to “explore the state of now” and you can join in, right this minute, with one simple step: logging into Twitter. Some of the most influential players in media and business are offering free advice and all you have to do is listen.
Mercedes Bunz of The Guardian had an interesting piece last week on how media companies and newspapers are evolving into technology companies. It opened with a poignant quote from New York Times executive editor Bill Keller (even if you don’t necessarily believe it).
“The New York Times is now as much a technology company as a journalism company.”
While we might expect this sentiment from other forward-looking media outlets, the idea that the Times values technology as much as quality journalism is telling. Of course they’re hardly alone. Every traditional media company is examining the technology opportunities that lie in front of them. Bunz’s piece also looks at the success that CNN had with driving engagement and crowd-sourcing through its iPhone application and specifically its iReport button. Wired magazine drew praise at SXSW for its technological interpretation of a digital magazine on the forthcoming iPad. Everywhere you look there seems to be another media company testing a new technology.
While the “media meltdown” hasn’t directly affected public relations and communications agencies quite like it has media companies, the same focus on technology is pressing for the industry. After all, communications, and marketing as a whole, are tied at the hip to the future of the media industry. Just as technology is becoming more and more an integral part of doing good journalism, technology is becoming more and more an integral part of doing good PR. I’m not just talking about run-of-the-mill uses of existing and mainstream social platforms, such as: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. I’m talking about re-envisioning how to reach media and more importantly consumers in the digital age. Much in the way the New York Times has to think about the problem.
These are not only the tools and services that agencies should be looking at from vendors, but the technology that they should be investing in to create on their own.
The agencies and practitioners that will be around for the next technology bubble will be those who can honestly say like Keller (without PR spin), “we’re as much a technology company as we are a communications agency.”
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.
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.
