Last week I had the opportunity to catch-up with John Markoff, the venerable Times’ technology writer, while he was on a rare trip to the East Coast. In last weeks’ Monday Media Mailbag, I noted that according to Sam Whitmore - Markoff’s following on Twitter has grown from 16 to 505 followers. Therefore it was a good opportunity to get John’s thoughts on Twitter, blogging, new verticals at the Times and his overall thoughts on what is interesting him in the technology space right now.
As Barack Obama accepted the democratic nomination for president last night, other candidates were left wondering how this young, lesser-known candidate leaped above them and secured all of those votes.
Well, the answer might be social networking.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “Obama and his staff relied on a social-networking site, www.my.barackobama.com, to help supporters find one another and to disperse the campaign’s messages to a broad audience. Most campaigns had access to the same technology and didn’t have anywhere near the online-success of Obama.”
Obama’s online success should come as a surprise to anyone, as his Facebook page alone has almost 1.5 million supporters. Obama has also leveraged mobile media, as he announced his vice president via text message. In fact, Obama has a presence on almost every social networking site including Twitter (where he has over 68,000 followers), YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, and Digg.
Then through Obama’s home page, he has his own separate social networking site for his supporters, where people can get together and discuss issues, events, and other topics. If that doesn’t appear to someone, then they can turn to his blog, where there is a plethora of information about the campaign.
With this type of groundwork (which is so easy to do from a computer) it’s no wonder that he has so many young supporters, and may be on his way to the White House in 2009.
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.”
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.
Ah, the Internet. I never managed to turn this around for yesterday, so who’s stopping me from putting it out today? Why wait a week? If only the Philadelphia Inquirer understood that.
In the spirit of the Olympics, an event that not only transcends sport but also the very meaning of competition (Bob Costas is rubbing off on me), it seems appropriate to spotlight the media industry competition that has become a pseudo Shakespearean subplot to the Beijing games.
A wiser man passed along this week that Herbert Hoover once said, “Competition is not only the basis of protection to the consumer, but is the incentive to progress.”
It’s hard to argue against the fact that competition in the technology and media sectors has changed the way the Beijing Games are being covered; leading to a progressive viewing experience that seems to be sitting well with viewers.
“NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall — by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites. In response, NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place. Network executives tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video, while viewers deftly traded new links on blogs and on the Twitter site, redirecting one another to coverage from, say, Germany, or a site with a grainy Spanish-language video stream.”
NBC, obviously concerned that breach could tarnish viewership for its primetime broadcast and alienate advertisers, may have uncovered something about the new media landscape along the way. Early results, including the numbers for the opening ceremony - 34.2 million viewers – indicate that this year’s games are drawing more viewers in the states for an internationally hosted Olympics then ever before. David Carr nicely summed this up in his Media Equation column yesterday:
“You might assume, along with NBC executives, that the jail break of information damaged NBC’s precious choreographed broadcast. You would assume wrongly, by the way. According to Richard Sandomir of The New York Times, the four-hour opening ceremony attracted an average of 34.2 million viewers, the most ever for an opening ceremony not in the United States. I was one of them, in part because as the day wore on, I saw all manner of oohing and ahhing on the Web from bloggers and friends who had peeked in and found themselves awe-struck. By the time the broadcast rolled around, my daughter and I had been nicely primed by the Web fanatics for what was, after all, a kind of epic movie made in real time that was best enjoyed on a big screen with good resolution.”
His insight, underlines another way in which technological competition has transformed the way we watch this Olympics. For me and many others the Beijing games will likely be remembered as the first HD games. For the Torino Olympics NBC produced 50 percent of the events in HD. This year, for the first time, the Olympics are being produced entirely in HD. For borderline Olympic watchers (like me) this makes a huge difference. In Boston, Comcast has dedicated HD Olympic channels that broadcast basketball and soccer 24 hours a day in HD. This weekend, I found myself cultivated by the Brazil vs. New Zealand soccer game in HD and ended up sitting through the Ivory Coast vs. Serbia game after that – only because it was in HD.
Fox Business vs. CNBC: Leave it to Fox Business to create a negative ad campaign around Olympics’ coverage. The somewhat seedy network has bought local airtime to run commercials on CNBC, during their switch-over blocks to Olympic programming, which call out CNBC for dropping its business coverage. Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribunereports that they have bought airtime in local markets including Chicago and New York.
He also reports that commercials go something like this:
“In just a couple of minutes, CNBC is going to drop their business news programming,” the Fox anchor Liz Claman says in commercials that will run on CNBC in Chicago, New York, and other major markets beginning today. “Switch to the Fox Business Network,” she says. “Real business news and no games!”
I have to admit, it’s hard to take your eyes off of Fox Business. Kind of like it’s hard to take your eyes off a train wreck.
Wall Street Journal Vs. Washington Post: Ron Grover, BusinessWeek’s venerable LA Bureau chief became the latest to weigh in on Rupert’s charge to take down the New York Times last week. What got Don to finally address the issue? Here’s what:
“The day after General Motors announced a stunning $15.5 billion quarterly loss, the Journal which Murdoch has controlled for a year, led instead with the more tantalizing story of a federal scientist’s suicide while under investigation in the anthrax case.”
Today’s Journal, interestingly enough, leads with the Georgia and Russia conflict. It also includes a separate page 1 story that analyzes how Vladimir Putin has drawn a line in the sand for the West. Murdoch’s Journal has made political and world news a leading priority in recent months. Even back in late March, Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz detailed how the Journal was making political coverage its business.The percentage of political coverage on the front page of the Journal in the first four months - following Murdoch’s takeover - versus the four months previous to his takeover, jumped from 4.8 to 18 percent.
However, a funny thing has happened along the way as Murdoch continues to set his aim at the New York Times – the subplot with the Washington Post has become more interesting. It’s no secret that Murdoch had a heavy hand in showing Marcus Brauchli the door and now he’s competing as editor-in-chief at the Post in breaking poltical coverage. With Brauchli working closely with Washington Post publisher, and newly anointed media mogul Katharine Graham, it must’ve been a little chilly at this party in Beijing. Here’s hoping they didn’t cross paths.
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:
Twitter.com has once again raised the bar for news reporting, as breaking news is delivered with unsurpassed speed and efficiency. The most recent example was a quick one-word update from Twitter member Caroline (Vixy), who wrote “earthquake” to notify the Twitter community and local followers of the recent earthquake in Los Angeles.
Will Twitter become the next-generation emergency reporting system? Or, as purported by Chris O’Brian, will it be the best newsroom tool of the future?
Do you trust and respond to breaking news on micro-blogging platforms as you would traditional media outlets?
Are you overwhelmed by your social networks? Do you feel there is just not enough time in the day to SuperPoke on Facebook, update your MySpace mood, add your Flickr pics, Plurk and follow fellow Twitterers? Today’s Wall Street Journal profiles “social Web browser” applications that can make your social networks work for you.
Toolbar that runs on left-hand side of Firefox browser (will be on IE in July)
Aggregates friends’ updates on Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and Last.fm
Chat on AIM, GTalk, MSN and Yahoo!
Drag, Drop and Share videos you find on YouTube and MetaCafe and add pics to Flickr
Universally update your profile status
Interactive screen saver and desktop viewer called chirpscreen (Mac only runs viewer)
Aggregates friends’ photo updates on Flickr, Facebook and Twitter
Users can comment and share photos without stopping the screen saver
Gives you live updates on eBay auction items you like
Toolbar that runs on Firefox browser
Aggregates friends’ updates on Facebook, Digg, Pownce, Twitter, del.icio.us, Magnolia, Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, TypePad, Wordpress and Xanga
Check email on AOL, Gmail or Yahoo! Mail
Media MiniBar has a scrollable filmstrip view of photo and video streams from YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, Piczo
Toolbar that runs on top of Firefox and IE browsers
Aggregates friends’ updates to MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg and Twitter (coming soon: YouTube, Bebo, Orkut, LiveJournal, Flickr, Yelp and Flixster)
Any other sites or tools that help simplify your social networking world? Post a comment and give us your suggestions!
I had the opportunity to attend PRSA’s Digital Impact Conference the past few days in New York City, and discovered quite a few new resources that I wanted to pass along, as we all try to identify the best ways to make our digital and social media marks online. Check them out when you get a chance!
SEO / Linking and Ranking Tools
Seodigger.com - Shows how a company ranks for organic search
Market Leap - Add in a URL and see how many links your site has versus competitors, and what their ranks are
Search Rascal - Shows the sites that are ranked for use of one certain word, and how it changes over time
“Link:” on www.Google.com – If you type “link:” immediately followed by a domain name (ex: link:racepointgroup.com) into Google search, the results will show you which and how many sites are linking to that domain name
Twitter
TweetScan - A real-time search engine for Twitter that lets you find the conversations on the topics you want.
Who Should i Follow - Enter in your Twitter username, and this tool will give you suggestions of people you might want to follow.
TweetWheel - A tool that shows you which of your Twitter friends know one another
TwitDer – A Twitter directory that shows you the most popularly followed people on Twitter, and the people that send the most updates
Video
Icyou.com - Healthcare video community that brings you everything from late-breaking medical research videos to exercise tips
Tubemogul - Video analytic tool that shows you when, where and how often videos are being watched, letting you measure how powerful your video marketing campaign is against competitors
RedLasso – Search national and local TV and radio broadcasts and make clips to post to your site
Podcasts
Podscope - Search engine that lets you search podcasts by typing in a phrase of spoken words
Podcast Alley - One of the biggest collections of podcasts on the Internet – features the top 10 podcasts as rated by listeners
