Over the weekend I walked into a restaurant and noticed something really interesting on their wall. Where many individually owned eateries usually hang framed reviews or features from local newspapers, this restaurant had a framed review from Yelp. Specifically, it had the Yelp logo and one of the online reviews, which raved about the restaurant. This immediately made me wonder – what’s more influential these days, a good review on Yelp, or a review in the paper?
I had just returned from my 10-day honeymoon in Hawaii, where my wife and I used three factors to determine where to have our meals:
Two guidebooks from Frommer’s (which were sent to me complementary thanks to a Twitter contest)
Suggestions from locals
Yelp
While Frommer’s was usually reliable, we ended up primarily using Yelp to make these decisions. This is because it provided us with a good idea of how many people went to the restaurant (based on how many reviews it had), how people liked the place (the number of stars) and specific suggestions (in the reviews and quick tips). It also had the website and map right there – basically everything we needed in one place. We read through reviews of each place, which offered great recommendations, and we found most of them to be spot-on.
For us, Yelp reviews were much more influential then a newspaper review. It contained feedback from many different people rather then one reporter, and allowed us to get a a wide range of unbiased feelings about the restaurant. I’m not saying a reporter would lie – but it’s a newspaper article is only based on one person’s perspective (as was Frommer’s) and didn’t always align with our experiences. More and more, as Yelp provided us with more accurate information that Frommer’s), we only used one factor in determining where to dine: Yelp.
So is Yelp more influential then a newspaper review? For me, the answer is yes. If I were to read a great newspaper review of a restaurant, I would still check it out on Yelp before going. Also – with restaurants and businesses now aware of Yelp’s power, they are beginning to focus more and more on their online reputations, often contacting unhappy customers (who write negative review) to fix problems (which they often note in their reviews).
Li (left) will return to Reuters, while Gelles (right) will replace him in the FT’s NYC Bureau
Kenneth Li is headed back to Reuters. Li, the former global correspondent for Reuters, who has served as a media correspondent the last two years at the Financial Times, will take on the role of Editor-in-Charge of Technology, Media and Telecoms for Thomson Reuters.
During his previous time at Reuters, Li reported on Time Warner and Comcast’s takeover of Adelphia and correctly predicted Rupert Murdoch would continue to monetize WSJ.com after announcing he would make it a free site. He also co-founded Reuters popular business-sector blog “MediaFile,” which highlights the intersection of media and technology.
While at the Financial Times, Li worked under media editor Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, who noted to Li via Twitter that the FT will miss him “and not just for his superior suits and peerless coiffure.”
With Li’s departure, the Financial Times will move David Gelles, a technology reporter currently within their San Francisco Bureau, to New York to cover U.S. media.
This week ESPN pulled an article from its website about LeBron James, which has caused quite a commotion. The story, written by Arash Markazi, is about James’ recent adventure in Las Vegas, which includes the line, “The more you hang around James, the more you realize he’s still a child wrapped in a 6-foot-8, 250 pound frame.”
The article was published by ESPN.com then quickly pulled down, but not before search engines and others were able to capture the content. At first, many speculated the James’ business team was behind the spiked article, as a similar situation happened last summer, when someone from James’ camp confiscated a video tape of James’ getting dunked on by a college basketball player. Video of the play was eventually shown when someone else had the move recorded on their personal camera.
ESPN has also received criticism for airing James’ hour-long special, “The Decision,” which blurred the boundary lines between the news organization and James (and was simply done in poor taste). This has also lead many to believe ESPN has a vested interest in James’ reputation, which could be another reason for the spiked article.
ESPN has published a statement in regards to why the article was pulled:
ESPN.com will not be posting the story in any form. We looked into the situation thoroughly and found that Arash did not properly identify himself as a reporter or clearly state his intentions to write a story. As a result, we are not comfortable with the content, even in an edited version, because of the manner in which the story was reported. We’ve been discussing the situation with Arash and he completely understands. To be clear, the decisions to pull the prematurely published story and then not to run it were made completely by ESPN editorial staff without influence from any outside party.
Markazi also released a statement of his own, about his reporting:
I have been in conversations with ESPN.com’s editors and, upon their complete review, understand their decision not to run the story. It is important to note that I stand by the accuracy of the story in its entirety, but should have been clearer in representing my intent to write about the events I observed.
Questions have also been raised about a possible suspension for Markazi.
Even though the NBA hasn’t had a basketball game since June 17th, the league is attracting more attention then any other sport right now, thanks to the 2010 free agent class, which is lead by LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.
While Bosh and Wade have been publicizing their free agent experience over Twitter and YouTube, no one has taken advantage of the media quite like James, who often refers to himself as King James.
Yesterday James launched a Twitter account which has quickly attracted approximately 250,000 followers, despite only have three tweets (none of which reveal anything interesting). James also launched his own website, which appears to be strictly for announcing his free agent decision.
However, in the most ego-stroking move of all, James’ camp has contacted ESPN to arrange for an hour-long special from 9:00pm – 10:00pm ET tomorrow during which he will make his announcement (which is being called “The Decision”). While ESPN will strike ratings gold with this special, it’s also an example of why the network is unable to cover James’ and his buddies without bias. Simply put, ESPN uses this young group of attention-seeking players as much as they use ESPN. This results in large staged events like tomorrow’s news conference, and constant attention to non-stories like James’ elbow “injury” during the playoffs which miraculously disappeared following the Cavs’ loss to the Celtics.
When people across the country sit down at 9:00pm tomorrow to learn where James will sign his next contract, many will do so with a sick feeling in their stomach, knowing that James has been able to use mainstream and social media to manipulate them, and that ESPN is willing to do anything for “The King.” However, the viewers will be there, which is enough to make James happy (as he lives for the attention) and the NBA happy (as it has never received this much attention during the off-season). However following the announcement, there will be one city of people that love James, while the rest of the country criticizes him for his large ego and inability to win just one game in the NBA finals during his first 7 seasons in the league.
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.
The June 19th issue of the Economist features a cover image of President Obama standing on beach in Louisiana, looking down in deep thought and seemingly pondering how the BP oil spill raveled out of control and the negative impact it could have on his upcoming re-election campaign.
However, that’s not what the picture is actually about. A New York Times article reports that the Economist modified the cover image which was shot by a Reuters photographer.
The unaltered image, shot on May 28 by a Reuters photographer, Larry Downing, shows Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard and Charlotte Randolph, a local parish president, standing alongside the president. But in the image that appeared on The Economist’s cover, Admiral Allen and Ms. Randolph had been scrubbed out, replaced by the blue water of the Gulf of Mexico.
Reuters has strict guidelines when it comes to photographer, especially following their 2006 photo scandal when a photographer doctored a picture of an Israeli air raid on Beirut (pictures below).
In an email, Economist deputy editor Emma Duncan told the Times that Admiral Allen was removed by the crop, and that Charlotte Randolph was edited out of the picture because no one knew who she was. Duncan claims that goal was not to isolate President Obama, but to have readers focus on him while the article examines the oil spills damage to business in America, not the President.
As the de facto aggregator and home of what is news in the digital age, Google News plays an integral role in publicly determining the biggest news of the day, hour and minute. For publicists, marketers and brands, it’s also a public viewing area for observing and measuring brand mentions, message penetration, etc. For most stories, a Google News’ alert is the first sign that a piece has gone live.
Those alerts and the homepage layout got a little more personal today, with Google launching “News for You.” News for You allows you to filter and dictate the stream of news headlines you see, based on your interests. Think of it as your Facebook stream and the ability Facebook gives you to tailor the “status updates” and posts you receive from friends. To improve the personalization of the news stream Google is providing an “Edit personalization” box, which allows you to specify your interest in different news categories — Business, Health, Entertainment, Sci-Tech, etc.
In addition to those personalization features, Google is also adding functionality today to share story clusters with other people via email, Buzz, Google Reader, Facebook and Twitter. These news clusters are common around big news and of course product launches, and gives you the ability to quickly see different headlines and views on the same story (like techmeme). After a few years of copying and pasting these news clusters in sharing with colleagues and clients, the addition is music to my ears. To do so today, you can simply select the drop-down menu marked by an arrow on the top-right of each story cluster.
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.
Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter Discussing the McChrystal Mess on MSNBC
Somewhat lost in the full blown media storm around Rolling Stone’s“Runaway General” profile of General McChrystal that ended up costing him his job yesterday, and could be a turning point in President Obama’s attempt to fix the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, was how this all played out behind the scenes. How could someone as bright as McChrystal open the door to this controversy with seemingly no regard for what he was saying to an embedded, freelance reporter with a tape recorder in hand? What was his staff thinking? Was he trying to get fired?
Michael Hastings, the freelance reporter for Rolling Stone who compiled the profile (who is still in Afghanistan BTW), discussed some of those details in an interview with his former news weekly yesterday. And, surprisingly, it only took one email to get access to Gen McChrystal:
“I was Baghdad correspondent for NEWSWEEK for two years, and I left the magazine after covering the elections. I wrote a piece for GQ before Obama took office that raised some serious questions about the direction we were taking in Afghanistan. So it was something I wanted to be writing about. I saw General McChrystal and his new strategy as a way to look at our Afghan policy to see if it’s working or if it’s a totally insane enterprise. I met with editors at Rolling Stone, they seemed into the idea, so I e-mailed McChrystal’s people. I didn’t think I was going to get any access at all. It’s one of those strange journalistic twists. They said yes, come on over to Paris to spend a couple days with us.”
Why McChrystal’s aides and most likely Duncan Boothby, a senior media aide (who has since resigned as well), gave access so easily is puzzling. Surely, McChrystal also weighed-in on the final decision, but why wasn’t there more consideration of the potential risks in opening the door to an outsider who had previously questioned the strategy in Afghanistan? Perhaps, McChrystal, who has never shied away from the spotlight, saw an opportunity to illustrate once and for all that the President’s strategy / lack of support wasn’t working in Afghanistan? McChrystal stunned the White House back in September of 2009 by making his 66-page recommendation for more troops public – noting that the United States could loose the war there if they didn’t get more troops. At the time, he went on 60 Minutes to get his point across.
“McChrystal, an expert on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, has long been thought to be uniquely qualified to lead in Afghanistan. But he is not known for being media savvy. Hastings, who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for two years, according to the magazine, is not well-known within the Defense Department. And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.”
The stanza or graph, truly gives you an inside look at what goes on behind the lines and the balance a beat reporter must take in building relationships and balancing what they put out in print with the effect it will have on their future access, and how it doesn’t really apply when working with a freelance writer (or columnist for that matter). In fact, it was such an inside-baseball look that Politico pulled the graph later in the day, likely because they were scared of the scorn they’d take from fellow reporters on the White House beat.
Whether Hastings was far riskier than a typical beat reporter or not, the biggest mistake made by McChrystal and his staff was not having a cohesive objective going in. Or at least not appearing to. What was their objective for the profile? Why did they let Hastings tag around for a bar crawl in Paris and spend even more down-time with them as Volcanic ash grounded in them in Paris? If you’re going to agree to any interview, and especially to a profile of this magnitude, you better have a cohesive game plan going in that sets clear ground rules for you, your staff and the reporter. Perhaps a commander of General McChrystal’s ilk couldn’t bring himself to fear something as harmless as an embedded, freelance reporter. Unfortunately, in this case, the reporter was more dangerous than the enemy he was battling on the ground in Afghanistan on a daily basis.
On June 1, Brad Stone of the New York Times wrote an almost glowing review of the Pulse news reader on the iPad. A week later his parent company forced Apple to take the application off of iTunes because it allowed users to view New York Times Co. content (nytimes.com and boston.com) within the application. And with that, we have the first debate around monetizing content in the tablet-era.
In essence the New York Times Co. is objecting to Pulse creators (two Stanford graduate students) using the company’s RSS feed on the iPad. Something that has been done for years on all sorts of devices (i.e. Google Reader). The problem it seems in this case is the creators had been so successful with that app that it had risen to number one on the paid, iPad application store for some time and they’ve made more than $40,000 in doing so. Steve Jobs even praised the innovation of the application at Apple’s WWDC, before he received a letter from the Times Co. With their own FREE, iPad app, the Times Co. wants a piece of the pie.
However, while the Times Co. sticks with its current position, Kara Swisher, who sat down with the two creators of the app in the video above, notes in an update that they resubmitted Pulse yesterday without the Times’ RSS feed included and it is now on-sale again on the iTunes store. For the time being, anyways.
