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
Jonathan Schwartz was a trailblazer in leveraging the Internet as the platform for influencing others with his ideas. As CEO at Sun Microsystems, he was the first Fortune 500 CEO to open up his own blog. It seems fitting then that he’s the first Fortune 200 CEO to resign via Twitter.
His short Haiku tweet (pictured above) illustrates both the good and bad of having visionary leaders at the control of their own digital communications. In one sense, it’s incredibly authentic for his former employees and customers. On the other hand, the communications folks at the newly merged Oracle-Sun are probably less than pleased that Mr. Schwart’z haiku beat an amicable separation statement.
As the Internet continues to push ahead as the leading thought leadership platform for both Internet visionaries (have you seen The Gates Notes?), and those looking to leverage the Internet for more power, the question remains – what role do communicators play? Would Schwartz have benefited from communicators that could contribute, shape context and augment his opinions? Maybe and maybe not (At least up until his last tweet). However, there aren’t too many CEO’s willing and able to take the time and effort needed to build the following that Schwartz did online.
5 comments February 4th, 2010
By Molly Galler
Paul Levy is the CEO of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston, but that is probably not why you recognize his name.
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.
While the medical community is clearly paying attention to the blog (it is currently ranked #11 on the Healthcare100.com blog list), is anyone else?
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.
12 comments February 2nd, 2010
By Molly Galler
If the Associated Press Stylebook is “the bible of the newspaper industry” (as it declares on the front cover), then Twitter’s @FakeAPStyleBook is the bible of comic relief for writers who count on the reference book for definitive answers on grammar and style questions. It is also RaceTalk’s pick this week for #FollowFriday.
With over 60,000 followers @FakeAPStyleBook tweets multiple times a day with satirical writing tips composed in the same style as the original AP Stylebook. For example:
@FakeAPStylebook: “Xerox” is a trademarked name. Use “butt duplicator.”
@FakeAPStylebook: When referring to someone with a Ph.D. as “doctor” immediately follow it with “but, you know, not a REAL doctor.”
@FakeAPStylebook: Use “grandfather” instead of “granddad” because you know better, son. Really.
@FakeAPStylebook: “Et al” is Latin for “those who know Al.” You can shorten long lists of names by leaving out friends of Al.
@FakeAPStylebook: Stories on the success of new media printed in traditional newspapers are no longer allowed out of respect for the dying.
As noted in a piece by John C. Abell for Wired, @FakeAPStylebook often tweets tips related to current events and trends. Abell writes, “The guide is very current, too. For example, be sure that you “Refer to him as ‘President Obama’ when he first appears in an article, ‘Soul Brother Number 1‘ in subsequent mentions.”
@FakeAPStylebook has found an adoring audience on Twitter and recently, a book deal. Lydia Dishman of Fast Company reported on Monday that agent Kate McKean of the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, Inc. has approached the Twitter handle creators, Mark Hale and Ken Lowery, about bringing their humor to book shelves.
Who knew a book deal was only 140 characters away?
3 comments November 20th, 2009
By Kyle Austin
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?
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.
7 comments October 30th, 2009
By Molly Galler
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, the woman behind the Twitter handle @healthythinker, is a health economist, management consultant, the founder of the Health Populi blog and this week’s #Follow Friday recommendation.
Via Twitter, Jane provides her followers with a steady stream of breaking health news, new health study and clinical trial results, her newest Health Populi blog posts, as well as tweets live from industry conferences, trade shows and events. Jane recently tweeted live from the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco, CA.
Over the past few months the nation’s health news had been dominated by President Obama’s plans for healthcare reform. Jane tweets relevant healthcare reform news while also delivering stories from more niche health sectors. Jane is social media savvy and makes great use of linking, @replies, and hash tags. Follow @healthythinker and you will soon find her your primary source of health related news.
3 comments October 16th, 2009
By Kyle Austin
Facebook has been buzzing again in publicly noting that it’s now over 300 million users, and perhaps even more importantly cash flow positive.
The latter of which surprising even those that follow the company daily. Earlier this year Marc Andreessen, who sits on Facebook’s Board of Directors, said the company “would do $500 million in revenues in 2009, up from an estimated $280-$300 million in 2008.”
However, this latest news means that the company could do even better than Andreessen’s predictions for 2009, with eyes on a potential late 2010 or early 2011 IPO.
The one question that remains is if advertising will be the singular revenue stream for the company. Yes, the ads we see on our profile pages and news feeds are lucrative, driving the company’s current revenue growth, but are they missing other opportunities to capitalize on a site that has now outpaced Yahoo! as the second most traffic’d site on the Web (Alexa graph).
Douglas Macmillan of BusinessWeek hypothesises today that Facebook’s users can afford to pay for Facebook’s services and Facebook should charge them.
His basic thesis: Facebook users are no longer college kids with little discretionary income, media companies are planning to charge so why not Facebook and they’re in the unlikely Internet position of having power over their consumer base who are devoted to their product.
Some quick math asserts that Facebook would reach the billions in revenue – Andreessen believes they’ll reach in a few years – in a year’s time by charging only $1 per month to its 300,000,000 active users. To the tune of $3.6 billion in annual revenue. Even if Facebook did it to offset advertising to a percentage of users that didn’t want to be bothered with ads, it’d still be fruitful.
So would users pay? The jury is out on that. I have to believe that there are more creative revenue strategies through engagement points (think of them as frequent flyer miles) or even corporate accounts (brands paying to host their Websites / Fan pages on Facebook). On the other hand the thought of pulling in $3.6 billion by only asking for $1 per month from each user is pretty tempting.
8 comments September 30th, 2009
By Kyle Austin
Earlier this week Advertising Age took a look at how PR heads are shifting towards the center of marketing departments. The role shift at top levels evidence of a larger shift for communications and PR as a whole. The media meltdown, combined with the explosion of social media, has served as the great equalizer for the PR and marketing / advertising industries.
Corporations no longer able to leverage “old media” to reach mass or niche audiences with messages are moving their budgets online to new media channels. Channels that are up for grabs in the agency world. And guess what? PR agencies have the early leg up on owning these channels.
According to the Digital Readiness Report, completed by researcher Tom Smith, PRSA and iPressroom:
Capitalizing on the fact that social media is relationship-based, a top PR characteristic, and that we specialize in creating content, a big part of social media, it’s not that surprising.
However, a troubling stat caught my eye on Mashable earlier this week, given that PR and communications are leading the way with social media. An August 2009 survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education found that 84% of professionals using social media – in a variety of fields – don’t currently measure the ROI of their social media programs.
RED FLAG. No wonder the head of the PRSA is calling out the entire industry to establish measurement standards – Fast. The fallout of Madison Avenue, combined with the digital media evolution, is a huge opportunity for the communications and PR industry. One opportunity that we better get right – with measurement. If we’ve learned one thing from our peers in online advertising, it’s that today, companies pay for measurable ROI. While Google may not have been recession proof, it’s successful because it efficiently provides and measures ROI with its search marketing services. If we hope to move corporate communications where we believe it belongs – into a key component of marketing’s media planning stage, we better make numbers (more than 3) a top priority.
3 comments September 25th, 2009
By Molly Galler
This afternoon on Mashable, a guide to all things social media, writer Ben Parr quoted Facebook engineer Tom Occhino and announced that Facebook will now be adding an @mention capability to its existing status update feature.
Twitter, the originator of the @mention, or @reply, allows its users to mention another member, and that mention is hyperlinked to the user’s profile. This way, if you are following a particular person on Twitter, i.e. @mollygaller, and I mention another user, i.e. @bhaber602, you can click on @bhaber602’s mention in my tweet, and link directly to his Twitter profile. This is a great way to be introduced to other Twitter users whose tweets you may be interested in following.
Although you can already link your Twitter account to your Facebook account and allow your Twitter updates to also appear as your Facebook status, Facebook itself is now going to allow a similar, public conversation feature.
If you wish to mention a Facebook friend in a status update, you will type the @ symbol and then begin to type their name. A drop down list will appear and you can select the friend you wish to mention.
The @mention feature not only works for Facebook friends, but groups and fan pages as well.
Will non-Twitter users care about this new feature? Will the new @mention feature encourage individuals strictly using Facebook to dip their toe into the Twitter pond?
2 comments September 10th, 2009
By Kyle Austin
What if you could filter tweets by location? Find out what other folks in your neighborhood, town or city are up to. Get the latest local news at a seconds notice. Engage with fellow concert goers or relay important information during earthquakes or other natural disasters.
It may not be that far off according to a post from Twitter’s Biz Stone on the Twitter blog:
“We’re gearing up to launch a new feature which makes Twitter truly location-aware. A new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won’t be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.”
Ryan Sarver, who has led local indexing work at both Skyhook Wireless and Blue Trim, is leading the geolocation platform team for Twitter – so they appear to be in good hands. Although Biz notes that folks will need to activate this new feature by choice, because it will be off by default, I’m guessing many people will embrace the feature (especially while traveling) through their Twitterberry or Tweetie apps in the not too distant future.
While Biz is rightly more interested in the social implications of local Twitter functionality, the implications could be big business, if you think it in terms of the growing local, mobile search market. This is good news for marketers, as analysts are predicting that the majority stake of mobile search advertising revenues will be driven locally by 2013. Local, mobile advertising through twitter, could bring more options.
It’s also good news for those searching for new, hyper-local media business models. Jeff Jarvis has been out at the Aspen Institute this week presenting various models for these hyper-local projects and many of the proposals include the use of twitter coupons. As people begin to filter tweets locally, these new hyper-local news organizations will have the opportunity to grow a larger share of the local voice through twitter. Marketers won’t be far behind, in terms of being open to spending marketing dollars in these types of twitter campaigns.
4 comments August 21st, 2009
