If you listened to Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey Tech Edit focus on the AP a few weeks back (newsletter should be coming out soon), you heard Sam and I talk about the lack of an AP presence in the Twittosphere. Following-up that conversation Sam posted a revised list of those reporters that are on Twitter and what their usage patterns look like. The most interesting take away from this updated list were the twitterers that have seen a drastic jump in their followers:
“With rare exception, everyone’s following spiked, some dramatically. Among the turbocharged Twitterers: Leo Laporte (3,045 to 53,185), John C. Dvorak (6,357 to 28,456), Natali del Conte (130 to 3,671) and Peter Shankman (1,115 to 5,449). New York Times reporter John Markoff no longer privatizes his Twitter feed, and grew his following from 16 followers to 505 since Apr. 21. NYT colleague Brad Stone recently launched an unprotected feed, which has 207 followers. Walt Mossberg Tweeted 25 times since we last looked; his following grew from 51 to 654.”
Will be interesting to see Sam follow these stats throughout the year.
One is wondering if we will soon see the reporters at the WSJ in Twitter land. Of course in this context, I’m not talking about the daily Journal, but rather Down Jones’ new lifestyle magazine. The magazine will debut as an insert in the Saturday Journalon September 6 and will be distributed quarterly. Early reports on the magazine have it centering its coverage on “modern wealth.” So far, according to MediaWeek, the first launch for the Rupert led Dow Jones corp. is going well. They apparently have 51 advertisers in their first issue, with 19 of those being high-luxury advertisers that have not called the pages of the Journal home before.
This is certainly another vehicle which Murdoch can use to assault the Times as he goes after the title of “The Nation’s paper of record.” In fact as “Moe” at Gawker notes, the New York Times has monopolized high-luxury advertisers in the land of major dailies (10 percent of their ad revenue). However, Moe also notes that the buzz in the newsroom between folks that have contributed to the inaugural issue, and those who haven’t, makes the debut sound like a giant fluff piece.
Here’s hoping the “fluff” on what executives are doing with “modern wealth” sold some advertising and the new WSJ will find its true calling quickly to engage readers. As Moe also notes on Gawker:
“Stories that rely not only on the Journal’s matchless access to captains of industry, but a long-waning commitment to nuance and humor and the seemingly superfluous but telling detail (and um, length) — would get better play in a lifestyle magazine format.”
So you monitor Twitter feeds, Google feeds, what’s going on Digg and in the blogoshere - all to stay current on what people are saying about your brand and to make sure you kill any fire drills before they become bigger in scope. But how do you turn something that could be really bad into something that could be really good?
Or as Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins says “Live the Chinese cliche of turning danger into opportunity.” Well you have to be creative, and apparently those folks over at EA have their creative juices flowing.
Last August a YouTube user named Levinator25 posted a video online of a glitch in Tiger Woods 2008. The apparent glitch allowed the virtual Tiger to take a shot in the middle of a water hazard as effortlessly as he would on land.
Well those creative folks over at EA monitor YouTube. They apparently heard the chatter around the glitch with serious gamers and it wasn’t lost on them. So nearly a year later as EA made Tiger Woods 2009 demos available online in advance of the game hitting the shelves, they cleverly tied the glitch into their marketing campaign.
In the YouTube video posted on Tuesday and specifically addressed to Levinator25, EA notes:
“Levinator25, you seem to think your Jesus Shot Video was a glitch in the Game. It’s not a Glitch. He’s just that good.”
A few weeks ago the blogswere alive with chatter about a call between Steve Jobs and New York Times columnist Joe Nocera. If you didn’t catch the run-in, I can paraphrase by saying, Nocera picked up the phone and heard this from Mr. Jobs:
“You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.”
At the time, I was trying to track down Nocera for a Q&A session and I didn’t get to include his recollection of the call for my post. I finally tracked down Nocera - back from drinking rosé under a walnut tree - and he kindly agreed to answer my questions on his run-in with Jobs, the media industry and his blog.
RaceTalk: So Joe, I guess I have to ask you first if the call from Steve Jobs caught you completely off-guard?
Joe Nocera: It most certainly did catch me off guard. This is the fifth column I’ve written about Apple since starting my column three and a half years ago, and it is the first time Jobs has called me–and the first words out of his mouth also took me by surprise, to say the least. It’s not every day a CEO of a major corporation calls you a slime bucket!
RaceTalk: Some are blaming you for letting him talk off the record and spin another story - in the form of an ambush call. In my mind it seems to be a flawed PR strategy and one that is going to alienate every reporter they view as neutral or friendly. It also doesn’t read well when played back in a column like yours. As for his opening remark to you, when was the last time the two of you spoke? During your Fortune days? In reading your stories earlier this year and late last year on the iPhone and backdating scandal it doesn’t appear like you chatted?
JN: I don’t know what an “ambush call” really means. Certainly, if he was trying to talk me out of writing the column, it didn’t work. If he was trying to keep me from saying he had another bout with cancer, well, I wasn’t going to say that anyway: my own reporting suggested that that hadn’t happen. I think he was trying to turn a potential adversary into a potential ally–by whispering in my ear, he would somehow be co-opting me, and in-so-doing, turn the argument I was going to make in my column in his favor. But I strongly disagree with his central belief–that he and only he has a right to know about his health. So while I listened respectfully–and made several attempts after the call to get part of it on the record–he didn’t sway my views. I’ve answered some of this already, but to be clear: I never spoke to Jobs either while at Fortune or at the New York Times (until a few weeks ago). At Fortune, I edited several stories about him, but it was always the reporter–and sometimes John Huey–who spoke to him. I did write a story about him in 1986, for Esquire, which is reprinting in my new book, Good Guys and Bad Guys. I spend a week with him as he was starting up NeXT, and he was incredibly accessible, even though he wasn’t selling anything. It was an amazing experience, but one that I’ll never have again–and I doubt any other journalist will either. Jobs now only makes himself available when he has a new product to peddle.
RaceTalk: You recently launched your new blog on the New York Times Website, which you have named “Executive Suite.” Can you talk about what your hope is for the new blog and how it will assist in keeping the dialogue going with your readers?
JN: The blog does several things: it allows me to write shorter pieces in which I can throw out ideas or comments without having to fully develop them as I have to do with the column. It allows me to comment much more than once a week, too, which is nice because there are often points I want to make about something in the news, but have no forum to make them. Now I do. And I think it does wonders for my dialogue with readers. Before the blog, readers had to send email comments to me directly–and I would wind up having 100 conversations a week that were two-way only. Now they can comment on the blog, and readers can interact with each other. It makes for a much better debate and discussion, and I’m enjoying reading all the comments–even the ones that aren’t very nice to me!
RaceTalk: What is your overall thought on the changing media landscape? Do you fear that someday “America’s paper of record” will only be available online?
JN: Someday, some newspaper will go online only, but it won’t be the New York Times–not for a very long time. There is still a lot of loyalty to the paper version of the Times, and it still generates a lot more advertising than the online paper, despite the shrinking ads in all newspapers. What’s really happening here is that there is a melding of the Website and the newspaper, as the Times becomes increasingly “platform agnostic”. The point is to get the best stories in print as quickly as possible–and that matters a lot more than whether they appear online or in the newspaper.
RaceTalk: A few weeks ago I was at Fortune Brainstorm: TECH, with some of your former colleagues, and one of the big general themes was a change in corporate thinking around utilizing customers to shape where the business is going. Michael Dell spoke about what they are doing with Dell’s IdeaStorm and the “My Starbucks Idea” example was tossed around. What’s your thought on corporate willingness to exchange in this new type of discussion and what have you heard from CEO’s on this potential change?
JN: I haven’t really heard much from other CEO’s about this kind of discussion–then again, I haven’t really asked. I’ll start looking into it. Thanks for the blog tip!
You hold an event to gather key stakeholders together, say a couple of dozen, and you want to maximise the positive networking such an event should catalyse. You’re also aware of a few potential personality clashes. But how many one-to-one relationships are you actually trying to manage here?
It turns out, your relationship with each of them included, that there’s 300 relationships in that room! Wow, and compared to the big ‘World Wide Web’, or the even bigger ‘World’ come to that, this is a relatively insignificant number of people.
Let’s go a step further. Say that there’s just five critical issues facing your industry, each of which has just three positions, say “for”, “against” and “no position”, then each stakeholder can have one of 243 combinations of points of view.
To complete this picture, imagine now communicating the dynamic of this group in a report back to your boss say. How do you represent 300 relationships and 243 combinations of positions? Moreover, how do you portray the network evolving year-to-year, month-to-month, hour-by-hour?
Welcome to the world of data visualisation.
Digesting data
Information technology has made the collation and manipulation of masses of data relatively mundane. When you’re looking to manipulate data in a specific way, the machine can chunk through it pretty quickly and answer your defined and closed questions:
What were the sales in week 39?
How much did we invest in PR last year?
In our last market research, how did our perceived value for money rate versus the competition?
But what if you don’t know what you’re looking for? How do you decipher the mass of data? How do you see what’s going on so you can learn and respond appropriately? How can you answer undefined and open questions such as:
What’s the buzz amongst our customers?
Who or what is exerting most influence?
What trends should we know about?
Who’s most likely to have started this rumour?
Who should we add to our list of key contacts / influencers?
Gathering the data is, of course, no mean feat. But the rise of the social Web presents the broadest and deepest pool marketers have ever had to swim in, and I cover this topic in The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 (which, to my surprise, is being downloaded over 500 times a week!). Of course, there is also the little issue of who owns this information, which this article about the Social Graph on Read Write Web covers succinctly.
The next biggest challenge to spotting patterns and trends is simply that the data has more dimensions than we can cope with. Take your computer screen… two dimensional. Add some nifty mathematics and you can represent three dimensions. Change it over (compressed) time, and you can “see” four dimensions… but that’s about the best we can achieve.
So now we have two new battles on our hands.
The first is presenting data brilliantly in the three or four dimensions we can deal with. And the second is building in some intelligence so that we’re more than likely looking at the right combination of three or four dimensions amongst the dozens or hundreds represented in the data set.
Great visualisations
One of the fascinating outcomes of this new branch of public relations is the value non-geeks can literally “see” in it. There’s a reason someone coined the term “a picture paints a thousand words”. Perhaps “a data visualisation renders a million influences” will trip off the tongue in the future?! How cool is it to ’see’ a meme?
And it’s not coincidental that some visualisations are beautiful; not that I’m about to author a treatise on beauty, but heuristically it makes sense that we’re more likely to find the interpretation of something that looks good easier than something that looks a mess.
I’ll leave you with some visualisations, with hyperlinks to the source should you, like me, become entranced by visualisation.
Peter Shankman, the creator of the much talked about HARO (Help A Reporter Out) service has been a feel good media story. Guy starts a free service to help reporters find sources. Guy sends the list to PR folks for free so they can get their clients mentioned as sources. Guy grows the list on his own to over 23,000 to compete with paid service from Profnet. Guy signs on advertisers to keep it free for users and gets “way over $100 CPM’s,” as advertisers reach a very targeted group. Everybody wins. What’s not to love about this story? Capitalism at its very best.
Unfortunately, fairy tales don’t usually last forever.
This morning while scanning some Twitter updates my colleague stumbled across this:
and then this:
My first thought - Maybe Hamilton Nolan is right and this is some sort of cult. Folks what are we thinking? I realize Peter does use shock value, he did agree to get tasered after all. But his use of the word “lynching” and all the connotations that come with the word is totally uncalled for and wrong. Now I obviously don’t know the race of the PR person that he is referring to and despite our name, we don’t usually get into racial discussions on our blog. If the PR person happens to be white - then perhaps it’s nothing more then an egregious error in judgement. If the PR person happens to black his use of the word is unconscionable. Either way, the use of the word that brings back images of one of the most despicable acts in our Nation’s history is wrong.
There’s obviously some comparisons that can be made here to the recent incident involving Golf Channel host Kelly Tilghman and her use of the word “lynch” in referring to Tiger Woods. Her use of the word in context was “young players who wanted to challenge Tiger Woods should lynch him in a back alley.” Tiger’s race, being an issue on the tour since he first set foot on it, made the remark a punishable offense and the network rightly suspended her for two weeks.
Since I started this post Shankman has updated his Twitter feed and let everyone know that the PR person has sent him a heartfelt apology:
At the very least Shankman owes everyone a heartfelt apology of his own for the consistent use of the word.
Everyone within the media industry likes to speculate on the “death of newspapers.” However, sometimes TV news outlets get placed into the conversation as an additional dying medium. Local news outlets certainly have had issues in maintaining viewership during the Internet age. However, if you plan to reach the masses with news (or a message) - national network television - remains the best place to target multiple demographics. At least that is what the numbers say. Pew Research Center’s biannual survey on news consumption, released Sunday, found that the largest group (46%) of news consumers still turn to their televisions (almost solely) for news.
Although Internet news consumption continues to grow it still represents the smallest group of news consumers (13%). This group is also the youngest demographic of news consumers, with a median age of 35; 17 years younger then the median average of the group reliant on TV news. The study does echo the general shift towards online consumption and away from print news outlets. 34 percent of those surveyed stated they had read a newspaper the day before - down from 40 percent in 2006. Meanwhile, 25 percent of those surveyed noted they go to the Internet for news at least three times each week - up from 18 percent two years ago.
In addition, another statistic that is always interesting to look at within the biannual Pew research are the “Believability Ratings.” Mediabistro nicely highlights the findings here and I’ve embedded below as well.
Not that surprisingly, the CNN brand carries credibility with viewers - scoring the top believability rating. However, I am surprised that it was graded higher by TV viewers than 60 Minutes. Although the study notes that almost every outlet has had its credibility marks decline over the last decade - these two aforementioned outlets have managed to stay relevant in most people’s eyes. Not so relevant is Katie Couric and CBS, who fell below Fox News in the ratings.
NBC News won the believability battle between the three major networks; another feather in its cap as it basks in the glow of its Olympic ratings triumph. Bill Carter and Richard Sandomir further illustrated just how successful the games have been for NBC, in today’s NYT’s:
The Games have drawn an average audience of about 30 million a night on NBC itself, millions more on NBC’s cable channels, 30 million unique visitors to NBC’s Olympics Web site, 6.3 million shared videos from the coverage streamed on the site and an ultimate profit that network executives project will surpass $100 million.
A successful multi-channel (digital and television) initiative - NBC may have figured “it” out.
Michael Arrington has chimed in, again, on if he sees a purpose for PR practitioners in today’s digital landscape. His post, which follows a post by Edelman’s PR guru Steve Rubel on his Micro Persuasion blog, brings attention to what PR’s true value is in this new digital age. In reading Steve’s post which I commented on here (#18), I formulated several counter opinions to Arrington’s post that I wanted to share on our blog.
First off, Michael is right. We (PR folks) are busy. The economy doesn’t seem to be slowing down business and we are very strategic in the clients that we bring on-board.
At Fortune Brainstorm TECH I ran into Steve’s colleague and big-boss Richard Edelman and we had a great conversation on the excitement around the changes in the PR space right now and what lies ahead; which continued via his blog and ours after the conference.
We both somewhat agreed with the a few points that Michael and Steve raise in their posts on a PR shift away from pure product publicity. For instance, companies like Facebook, Google and Dell don’t need our help building publicity for new products (any announcement they make will be greatly publicized).
However, today’s global landscape - where brand interaction occurs 24 hours a day - creates new opportunities for PR agencies to assist companies like these in building digital and physical communities of key stakeholders in support of specific campaign goals and issues. In essence, PR professionals must become part of client’s brand management/reputation teams (through our interaction with Google, blogs and other social communities), while also assisting our clients with building their own content. Every company is a media company. That’s where we can really assist in truly defining each company’s brand, moral purpose and corporate mission.
In addition, as David Carr eloquently noted in his Media Equation column on Monday, “We are all arbiters of the news.” Yes, reporters have always enjoyed the thrill of chasing a scoop. This hasn’t changed since the inception of newspapers. The change is that today they go to Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, Mashable and other online destinations to find the scoop or subject to cover.
There’s no reason we, as PR professionals, can’t be part of this “groundswell.” Rubel uses the example of Robert Scoble, as a blogger who finds joy in uncovering companies without the assistance of PR executives. However, while Robert may attest that PR practitioners are useless as he comes down from a high reporting a PR-less story; he also values PR folk that are informative and in-the-know.
When I ran into Robert at Fortune Brainstorm: TECH in Half Moon Bay, CA I knew he had a trip planned out to Boston. How? Because I follow his blog and his Dopplr feed. So I offered him the opportunity to connect with a group of start-ups that have sprung out of MIT - during his visit. Robert is a busy guy and he doesn’t have time to go through thousands of non-relevant emails. However, when I provided him with an opportunity to create more value during a scheduled visit to Boston for a speaking gig – he jumped on the opportunity. We can be a bridge not a roadblock.
While Racepoint may be at the forefront of understanding how to cultivate and manage these relationships with bloggers in new ways (mail-merges are dead), I think there is larger industry shift towards understanding this still fairly new communications’ vehicle. I’d argue with Arrington’s assertion that “Most PR people don’t read blogs and certainly don’t understand them.” Yes, I work within a forward thinking agency where everyone unconditionally does both, but I can’t lie and say we’re the only ones. The Larry Weber’s and Richard Edelman’s of the world know where this digital age is going - and the bus has already left the station.
Steve Rubel is right in asserting “We need to stop spamming,” and understand what will be most relevant to each individual blogger and journalist. We also need to practice what we preach and start using all the new communication tools that are available - Twitter, QIK, FriendFeed, Digg, etc. We need to invest smartly in technology that will allow us to become nimble content providers along with other technology that will accurately monitor what the influencers on the Internet and the mobile web are saying.
Finally, Arrington’s advice to start-ups on when to hire an agency is just flat out wrong. “First off, don’t hire PR help until the volume of inbound requests by press are simply too much to handle without help,” he says.
It’s tough for me to think of a case where inbound requests have become too much to handle internally, without any proactive PR efforts. Sling Media, Cuil, etc - would never have been household names without PR campaigns. The first launch of a product for a start-up can be one of the most critical PR points in the life-cycle of the business and I don’t know too many entrepreneurs or VC’s (with an interest in the start-ups’ success) that want to leave successful launches to the chance of in-bound inquiries.
Yes, start-ups need to have their product and business processes far enough along for PR to be successful. However, if everyone just waited around for in-bound requests to come in before starting proactive PR efforts - they’d have little chance to compete for space in an evolving tech news cycle that spends much of its time covering Apple and Facebook in every angle possible. In order to increase your valuation you need people to see your product and eventually know your brand. Without incorporating communcations’ efforts into core business plans this is increasingly difficult (especially in today’s fragmented media landscape).
If social media is on your radar, you’re obviously familiar with Mashable and its founder Pete Cashmore. The blogging network, designed to cover Web 2.0 and launched by Cashmore in 2005, brings in an estimated $166,000 in monthly revenue through sponsorships and advertising. Racepoint Group was in attendance (with more then 400 others) at Mashable’s SummerMash Boston tour stop on Tuesday at the Roxy and had the chance to sit down with Cashmore.
Here is a piece of the interview that my colleague and RaceTalk correspondent Erik Milster had with him:
Although Cashmore wasn’t willing to fully disclose what’s in the pipeline for the rest of this year and moving into next year, it’s clear that the site will continue to be a must read for those involved in Web 2.0 and social media. According to Compete.com, in July the site nearly hit 1 million unique visitors - falling just short - with 977,328.
Jonathan Kash of the Fluent Simplicity blog has put together one of the best and most comprehensive Twitter contact lists to date – the Twitter Brand Index.
The Twitter Brand Index is constantly being updated and lists numerous organizations, media outlets, events, technology companies, politicians and government agencies, social networks, people, etc. that have created accounts and post updates to Twitter.com.
Here is a small sampling of some of the companies and people included on the list:
Goodbye DKNY: In my interview with David Kirkpatrick (or DKNY as some of his Fortune colleagues call him), leading up to Brainstorm:TECH, we touched on the leave he’s going on for his upcoming book The Facebook Effect. Last Friday Kirkpatrick published his final Fast Forward column, ending its 6 and a half year run. In talking with David, he will be back at Fortune in a year or so (He’s aiming for September of next year with his book). However, he’ll be more of a “free agent” as he says, or editor-at-large. He’ll also have his byline on a new column - which is yet to be decided.
If it’s goodbye to David, then who are we saying hello to at Fortune? Who should we look to - to take the baton and lead the Fortune brand in its technology and business coverage?
Hello Michael V. Copeland: Although he doesn’t have the influence or clout of DKNY in the mainstream media - Michael V. Copeland, a senior editor-at-large at Fortune, is the best bet to really anchor the feature technology coverage. He penned the cover story on Tesla in the most recent Fortune (technology special for Brainstorm:TECH) and has taken over Josh Quittner’s former role by penning tech columns for each issue of the magazine.
Hello Adam Lashinsky: As far as stepping into David’s shoes as the next big Fortune “Brand,” one should look no further then Adam Lashinsky. Lashinsky proved that he’s seasoned speaker and moderator at Brainstorm:TECH.
He hosted one of the most talked about panels of the event in moderating the blogger showdown between Kara Swisher, Robert Scoble and Om Malik. While moderating, Lashinsky managed to steal the show at times (not an easy chore with this group), and even got the last laugh when responding to Scoble’s assertion that the reader participation in fact-checking his blog makes sure that his stories are told accurately:
“In the old school, we like to get it right the first time,” quipped Lashinsky.
Even Om Malik noticed that Lashinksy had a true stage presence:
“Fortune senior writer Adam Lashinsky, who is missing his calling as a television anchor by being just a scribe, was a witty host, also trying to press our buttons.”
Lashinsky already makes regular appearances on Fox News and the Fox Business Network and one would expect more of the same in the future - along with more work on video segments for CNNMoney.com. In addition, Lashinsky’s focus on the finance behind technology - especially on the West Coast, make him a natural to cover the big financial stories (Ala the WSJ) on Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Apple without DKNY around.
Goodbye to the Joe Nocera and Steve Jobs on-the-record Debate: After I wrote about it last week, Joe took time out of his vacation to clear it up on his blog. Hope to hear more from him now that he is “officially” back from vacation.
Goodbye and Hello to Claire Cain Miller: Claire Miller became the second high-profile exit from the Bulingame office of Forbes over the last month, when word broke last week that she has officially joined the New York Times San Francisco bureau as a VC reporter. Earlier this month Erika Brown, who also covered San Francisco based VC’s and tech companies out of the Burlingame office, left Forbes to join VC firm Matrix Patrners as Director of Marketing and Business Development. Forbes takes a lot of heat from the VC’s and start-ups that I talk to regularly - for not devoting enough coverage to technology companies on the rise, as well as a lack of feature stories on trends happening in the tech space. These two latest exits are not going to help them increase coverage there. On the bright side, Miller has a pretty good introduction into the VC social circle with Brown.
