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.
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.
In addition to his post as Chief Executive Officer of a major teaching hospital in a world renowned medical hub, he is also the founder and author of a health care blog called Running a Hospital and is an active Twitter user from the handle @PaulFLevy.
We met with Paul yesterday afternoon to hear about his social media success and naturally, to pick his brain.
Paul began his talk by saying, “All communications from a company should reflect that company’s values.” Agree.
He went on to say that, “At our place, the mission is to treat our patients the way we would want a member of our own family treated.” Agree again. As a side note, Paul continually referred to BIDMC as “our place,” giving a sincere sense of responsibility, community and family to the place he drives into each morning for work.
Given his position on corporate communication, and his company’s mission, in 2006 he decided he’d like to start a blog; a blog that reflected the company’s values and furthered their mission. Thus, Running a Hospital was born.
One of the first blog posts Paul published that caused quite a stir, publically disclosed central line infection rates at the hospital. The hospital staff had set a goal to lower infection rates, and Paul wanted to share their progress. He didn’t ask permission, he just posted it. Does that make you nervous?
The response did something miraculous. Knowing that their success was being publically documented, the medical staff felt an additional resurgence and enthusiasm for meeting their goal. Paul said, “That was the moment I like to say I invented transparency as a management tool.”
Not only did he see the blog as opportunity to motivate and reward his staff, but he had another idea. What if all the other areas hospital also posted their infection rates? Let’s just say, the response was not positive. I believe the word Paul used was “hostile.” No surprise here, as the BIDMC team committed to reducing their rates and sharing their progress, other hospitals felt threatened and exposed. Hello, competitive edge.
While they may have started to position themselves uniquely from the other local hospitals by sharing information on the blog, did it impact their business and revenue?
You bet it did. The Vanguard health system began to send its patients to the BIDMC emergency room instead of a competitor they had long been referring their patients to. This referral shift caused a 10% increase in patient volume. Not too shabby.
You bet. When speaking to reporters at the Boston Globe, New York Times and Wall Street Journal, Paul will frequently begin to tell a story and the reporter will interrupt and say, “I know, I read it on your blog.”
When I asked why he chose to communicate through a blog, Paul asks, “Why wouldn’t I use a tool like this? I can share my point of view with a much larger audience than I ever could via a medium like say, the telephone.” He also goes on to say, “A blog is a lower risk method of communication. There is no risk of being misquoted.” If you are wondering if he really writes each post himself, he says, “I assure you my media team does not write these posts, in fact, I get in trouble for scooping reporters on stories without knowing it! I get the idea to write about something, and I do.”
When asked how patients have responded to the blog, Paul shares that, “Patients seem to enjoy the blog. Several of them have sent me their personal stories and when I ask permission to share the stories via the blog they always say yes. Then they forward it to everyone they know.” I think we’ve all been guilty of that type of family email!
Paul’s social media reach extends far beyond the blog. He is an active Twitter user with over 2,900 followers. He only follows 170 people which he explains are, “people I trust and who I am interested in. Their tweets have become my news stream. Twitter has become my librarian.”
Paul is also an active user of Facebook. In fact, during his talk he encouraged everyone in the room to “friend” him. He shared that he receives comments and messages from employees and friends in their twenties who he would otherwise never hear from via corporate email. He is on Facebook to reach people where they are, via the mode of communication they identify with.
Paul has also worked with his team on pages on the social networking site Grateful Nation. They have an employee challenge to see who can raise the most funds for relief efforts in Haiti. They also have a team running the Boston Marathon and that team has put their fundraising pages on Grateful Nation.
Paul Levy is a man who rather than fear the uncontrollable nature of social media has decided to dive in, learn, create, and share via the myriad of available social media tools and networks.
He has inspired his staff both inside and outside the workplace, he has challenged his competitors, and he has positively impacted his business’ bottom line. Now that’s called running a hospital.
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 Timesproved 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.
The above video has made its way around the PR blogosphere and Twittersphere, with people weighing in on both sides of the debate. First off, I’m a big fan of Jack O’Dwyer. He’s been doing this for 40 years and gets the industry. But as Bill Belichick, painfully proved on an even greater platform last night, even the best can be wrong with their decision making.
Jack makes the argument that PR people should only be dealing with other professionals (i.e. journalists) and not directly with consumers through social media. However, he seems to base this (from what I can get from the video) more on it being unfair for consumers, versus simply knocking its effectiveness. He makes the analogy to a pro-boxer challenging a citizen to a bar room fight to illustrate that. Maybe he wants to take the new FTC guidelines to another level???
If that truly is his argument then he’s really undervaluing the collective knowledge-base of consumers taking part in brand discussions on the Web. He’s also outdated in thinking that PR practitioners are trying to spin consumers through these new channels as they have in the past with journalists. Its a different channel, a different audience and a different voice altogether.
First of all, the majority of bloggers (and I’ll surmise avid Twitter users) are more affluent and and educated than the general population. 75% of bloggers have college degrees and 40% have graduate degrees. But more importantly, which Jack really misses, is they are taking part in a two-way conversation that they want to be a part of.
Razorfish’s recent study noted that 70% of connected consumers have read blogs produced by brands, 40% have friended a brand on Facebook or MySpace and 26% follow brands on Twitter. Consumers want this engagement, the voice, the inside scoop and ultimately the deals. There really isn’t a decision to be made. Your brand is part of social media and you can either try to influence that in a good way or let the discussion go on without out you.
The only argument left is who should own social media. To that argument I revert back to who currently produces content and has experience with reaching different audiences with different messages. Yes, that would be PR folks.
I’ve spent some time the last few days going over the detailed findings of Technorati’s 6th annual State of the Blogosphere report which was released as a five part series last week. Although those at the leading edge of communications and technology are now more apt to talk about Facebook, micro-blogging or the death of blogging, the findings indicate that the state of the blogosphere is still strong, hugely influential and rapidly evolving.
The research was driven by a detailed, Internet survey conducted by Penn, Schoen and Berland Associations from September 4 – 23 among 2, 828 bloggers and data that Technorati has on the 5 million blogs which have registered with it.
In addition it also conducted interviews with leaders in the blogosphere, including: Arianna Huffington, Seth Godin, Steve Rubil and Mattew Ingram and leveraged supplemental data from Lijit which tracked 2.5 million blogs within its network. All of this helps in solidifying the report as the most detailed analysis of the blogosphere, for a sixth straight year.
According to the findings, the vast majority of the blogosphere is still made up of hobbyists (72%), who post relatively frequently (71% of which post at least once a week).
As for the 28% of bloggers that are more than hobbyists?
15% are part-timers that blog to supplement income, but don’t consider it a full time job
9% are self-employed and blog for their own company or organization
4% blog full-time for a company or organization
These findings are intriguing, as the group of “pro” bloggers, blogging full-time, continues to rise. In addition, the numbers probably don’t adequately represent the folks that are corporate blogging for the 16% of Fortune 500 companies active in the blogosphere. They most likely have other job responsibilities outside of blogging.
However, while professional blogging is on the rise, the report also illustrates that the “hobbyists” have a voice. In fact, 45% of the 5 million blogs tracked by Technorati have an authority ranking of at least 1. This makes at least a portion of the 72% of hobbyists (with some following) a growing challenge for brands, who must allocate most of their blog relations time for more influential bloggers.
A challenge that will grow with the media meltdown increasing the number of well known bloggers: in the shape of former journalists exploring new options and reporters at surviving media outlets being encouraged to blog. In fact, 35% of current bloggers worked within traditional media of some form in a previous life. That fact has surprisingly not changed bloggers’ optimism for traditional media in the digital age, with only 31% of bloggers noting they believe newspapers will cease to exist in ten years.
Perhaps the most interesting findings, which I was looking forward to seeing, were the stats on how Twitter has affected blogging. We’ve heard stories of blogging being dead and popular bloggers hanging up their blog for Twitter or live-streams. However, most of the findings indicate that bloggers are simply leveraging Twitter as an additional tool which enhances their blogging experience, reach and distribution. 52% of respondents indicate that they are syndicating their blog through their Twitter handle.
The report does note that Schoen and Berland ran a survey earlier this year in front of the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference which found only 14% of the general public use Twitter. However, when they asked the same question to this group of bloggers, Schoen and Berland found that 73% use Twitter. It may not be surprising that these technologically sound folks are using the service but it is surprising that only 26% said it was cutting into their blogging time.
In addition to Twitter, bloggers are also leveraging improvements with video and mobile technologies. 50% of respondents note that they use video on their blogs and 59% are updating their blog more often from their mobile device. These advances are also assisting bloggers with gaining industry recognition, with 70% noting that blogging has improved their awareness and recognition with their respective spaces.
As Technorati looks into its crystal ball, its no surprise that they believe that blogging will continue expand as its own medium (blogging is media). It’s also not a surprise that they believe it will continue to have an impact on business, technology and politics (as it did with this year’s election, along with the Iranian election). As they note, blogging is driving the “globalization of freedom of speech.” Maybe that’s why more than 70% of 18-24 year respondents noted they’ll be blogging more in the next calendar year.
