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.
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.
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.
Jon Meacham Appearing on Charlie Rose, upon the launch of the “new” Newsweek (Last May)
Newsweek’s “intellectually satisfying” new layout may not be working out as planned. Keith Kelley of the New York Post reports today that the Washington Post Company (owners of Newsweek) somewhat hid within their Q4 earnings that Newsweek lost $28.1 million in 2009. Newsweek CEO Tom Ascheim tells Kelly that they expected losses in 2009 and even in 2010 with their lower circulation, but expect to break even by 2011.
We reported last May on the transformation of Newsweek; from a venerable weekly into an Economist-like read for the intellectual elite. As part of the transformation, Ascheim and Meacham laid the groundwork for trimming down its circulation from 3.1 million to 1.2 million. As of January, Newsweek had cut its circulation down to 1.5 million. The circulation cut, which was done to focus on its “core readership,” also laid groundwork for trimming its staffing costs. Newsweek has offered severance to 44 staffers over the last year.
Despite trimming and cover stories such as “The Case for Killing Granny,” “Is Your Baby Racist?” and “Obama is Wrong,” Newsweek struggled with its transition throughout the media meltdown of 2009 (no different than most magazines). According to information from the Magazine Publishers of America the magazine witnessed a 25.9% drop in 2009 ad pages and a $105 million loss in revenue with its print business. Yes, you can blame the gradual circulation change and redesign, but what business could stay in the green with a 30 percent loss in money coming in – no matter how many people you lay off.
Things may turnaround for Newsweek as we continue to come out of the economic tumult (Ascheim notes Q4 was their best), but does the Washington Post Company have the stomach to wait until 2011 to break even? And perhaps more importantly what is their online strategy to offset these losses? Is there a paywall in the future?
Some waking from a coma this week might think the Apple Tablet is able to find the cure to cancer or create world peace due to all of the attention that it’s getting. There are articles popping up left and right telling us all about this new tablet, even though we still don’t have real confirmation that it exists. It’s overshadowing everything, including President Obama’s speech tomorrow – which seems to be a lot more important then Apple’s rumored new device. Has a gadget ever received so much attention before it was launched or confirmed?
Sure, the Apple Tablet sounds cool – I admit, it should be good for newspapers and magazines if it can provide them with a decent revenue model, but it’s not like people are going to need to purchase this product – it’s very much a luxury. First, it will likely be very expensive, just like all of Apple’s products. This means then a very small percentage of the population will actually purchase one. Second, is a tablet the right product for right now? People have been purchasing smaller mobile devices (smart phones), not larger ones. Since the Tablet won’t fit in your pocket, it simply replaces a laptop, or becomes another gadget for the living room.
I understand that people follow Apple’s every move, but this time it seems a bit overdone (how funny would it be if tomorrow’s announcement is about a completely different topic!) Can we please see the Tablet for what it really is: another device Apple wants us to purchase and add to our collection of gadgets so that we can post tweets and brag about which gadgets we have and how cool they are.
I’m not against the Tablet (although the constant talk is getting pretty old at this point), I’m just questioning how it can possible live up to the hype. If it was some other lesser known company that was developing it, there would be a lot of questions brought up instead of people drooling over the chance to see some photo-shopped picture of the device.
So let’s take a step back and see what the Tablet is all about before we credit it with changing the world.
Disclosure: Racepoint Group works with Sony’s eReader division.
While it’s not on par with the drama of Rupert Murdoch’s coup of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal (so 2007), news today that MSNBC is following up its purchase of the breakingnews twitter handle, with the acquisition of breakingnews.com, may be better sign of the state of media as we enter a new decade.
Just ask the folks that now work under Rupert at the Wall Street Journal. It’s no longer about the information provided or the depth of that insight, it’s about who breaks it first. All of that making an operation like breakingnews.com so valuable in the age of real-time search; and entrepreneurs like 19 yr old Michael van Poppel the media moguls of the next decade.
In their release, Charlie Tillinghast, president of msnbc Digital Network noted, “Not everyone wants news surrounded by commentary or features. Hard and fast breaking news is currently an underserved market. With www.breakingnews.com we can now provide the optimal solution.”
Although MSNBC will now work to drive traffic to the breakingnews.com Website, the twitter handle is currently more valuable in-terms of influence. The breakingnews Twitter handle has more than 1.5 million followers, while Quancast reports that breakingnews.com had roughly 67,000 U.S. visitors in November of 2009. Of course, actual terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In his typical fashion, David Carr of the New York Times eloquently sums up in today’s Media Equation column why coverage of business isn’t following the business rebound. Or as he mixes words much better than I, “Business is a Beat Deflated.”
Despite, positive news on the economic front, those that cover business continue to be hit with painful developments, which Carr references:
Last week the Wall Street Journal closed down its Boston office, which had been a long-time staple of deep-dive reporting and investigative journalism. Although they noted that some investigative function will remain, the closing ended Bill Bulkeley’s multi-decade run at the Journal. Bulkeley had been with the Journal for 37 years, covering technology since 1979. He was, up until his exit, the main beat reporter of IBM and EMC, two Fortune 500 staples. (Update: Bill noted to me earlier this week that he was “blindsided” by the closing and was still trying to figure out what was next after 3 decades there).
Fortune announced last week that it will cut back from 25 issues to 18 issues a year. In addition, insiders believe that additional cuts will occur across TIME Inc. magazine properties by the end of the year.
Forbes already announced last week that it will cut a quarter of its staff.
Carr doesn’t mention that his own paper will shed 100 news room jobs by the end of the year.
Carr uses the data to outline his theory that: “While the business of business may be back, the business of covering it with heroic narratives and upbeat glossy spreads most certainly is not. And probably never will be.”
Its hard to argue against and even tougher to explain to clients (especially CEO’s) that have grown accustomed to associating PR success with their appearances on glossy covers. Peter Himler touched on this last week, when looking at Michael Bush’s piece for Ad Age:
“There remains a vast swath of corporate communicators and their bosses in the C-suite for which a Twitterfeed, company blog, YouTube or Facebook page takes a distant backseat to a prominent piece in Business Week or The Journal or an appearance on ‘Today’ or ‘Squawk Box.’ Believe it or not, even a client’s by-line in the world’s most popular (and conversation catalyzing) blog Huffington Post isn’t viewed by many as having the same value as a piece in The New York Times or the New Yorker.”
It’s not going to get any better. As we know, the business of business journalism is broken in the digital age. With business updates by the second, readership for past-tense features are rapidly dwindling. Therefore, ad dollars that still exist, are moving away from the magazines and into new digital channels. However, Carr hits on something much deeper than just the business being broken. He attributes part of the collapse to consumer resentment and being out of date / touch:
“It’s not that the public has lost its appetite for stories about handsome men in three-piece suits who clink whiskey glasses at the end of a long, not-so-hard day while talking smack about their female co-workers. But “Mad Men” pretty much sates that need. The businessman as Colossus is by now a nostalgic impulse.”
It’s a valid argument. Heck, TIME is trying to leverage the resentment as a way to make money on its business coverage (cover above). Unfortunately, that isn’t a good story for TIME’s colleagues at Fortune, the Bill Bulkeley’s of the world or CEO’s looking to get their name in print – or even Google searches. Those that consume business media consume, as Carr notes “hope and aspiration.”
The issue of Fortune on newsstands now, adorned with a digital image of Obama and Google glasses will probably be one of the best-selling issues of the year. Just like this Economist cover probably was. Therefore, when I look back a few weeks ago to Bulkeley telling me in advance of a briefing that he and the WSJ Boston office were kept away from Obama’s cleantech discussion at MIT “because DC owns all Obama coverage,” it was probably a bad sign on a variety of fronts.
There just isn’t much hope in business journalism these days, unless you’re working on cable TV.
Social media is obviously a hot topic for the mainstream media. They see opportunity in using it towards turning their career paths and organizations around, and thus their coverage of it is through the roof.
That said, it was puzzling to hear earlier this year that a survey by PR Week / PRNewswire found that only 22% of journalists were leveraging Twitter for crowd-sourcing, connecting with readers and aggregating their stories on the Web. A separate survey, around the same time, by the TEKgroup found that only 38% of journalists would be interested in receiving corporate news via corporate Twitter handles. Yes, those second numbers seemed promising, but where were the mandates to adopt these strategies – FAST?
Well, perhaps the moves by media organizations like the New York Times, to get serious with social media have paid off.
According to a new survey from Middleberg Communications and the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), 70% of journalists said they use social networks to assist in reporting. Compare that to the 41% that said they used social networks to assist in last year’s “Survey of Media in the Wired World.”
The online survey, which will remain open for a few more weeks, has the responses of 317 journalists to date. Far less than the 2,174 polled by PR Week and PR Newswire in April, so the validity of the findings may be in doubt.
For what it’s worth, The Survey of Media in the Wired World also found that:
69% of journalists go to company Web sites to assist in their reporting
Almost a year after announcing that they would no longer accept most embargoed news, TechCrunch has declared that the embargo is officially dead – at least in their opinion. Michael Arrington argues that since Google and Microsoft are no longer able to hold their embargoes (PaidContent broke Google’s embargo about Sidewiki on Wednesday), the last tree in the forest has fallen, effectively leaving embargoes news on the side of the road for trash day.
The Wall Street Journal has also adopted a similar policy as TechCrunch, only accepting embargoes for exclusives.
One of the more interesting discussions comes in TechCrunch’s comments section, where one reader discusses the value of having multiple outlets reporting on news as opposed to one outlet that is granted an exclusive. In response, Sarah Lacy argues that it’s easier to get news just from one source which explains the popularity of aggregators like Techmeme. However, Techmeme is actually a collection of stories from various sources, effectively making the reader’s point that readers value different sources for information.
In any case, TechCrunch has declared that the embargo is officially dead, so now the big question is how many other outlets will follow suit…
