As social media has grown in acceptance within companies over the past few years, one debate never seems to go away – whether agencies should be involved in social media communications, or whether the only way to maintain an “authentic voice” is for companies to undertake it all themselves.

Agencies can help

Not surprisingly (given that I work for a PR agency), I sit in the camp that says that agencies have a significant role to play for many companies. For sure, companies can do some or all of these things themselves, but there’s no reason agencies can’t help without compromising the company’s efforts.

Here are 15 different activities an agency can undertake – legitimately and effectively – to help companies engage in social media.

Getting started

1. Baseline audits

One of the first steps in any communications initiative should be an online audit to both understand the current environment and to set a baseline for measuring results of future activities.

2. Audience research

Alongside an initial audit, learning to understand your target audiences is a foundational piece of a communications strategy, be it online or offline.

3. Corporate policies

Whether your company is engaged in social media or not, it is important to set boundaries around social media. If you are engaging in proactive outreach online, it becomes a somewhat  more involved process covering more areas (for a quick start, check out this ebook on corporate social media policies)

4. Workflow processes

What happens when you spot an issue? When someone asks a question? When someone discusses your company with other people? When someone criticizes you? Who is involved in the response? What will you (and won’t you) respond to?

These are the kinds of questions you need to consider before the occasion arises, and which experienced agencies have encountered often enough to help you answer.

5. Social media training

While it doesn’t take much expertise to send a tweet, the norms of communicating in social media channels can require education and explanation. Social media can require a bit of a departure from the way companies have traditionally communicated. It doesn’t mean anarchy, but traditional “messaging” approaches don’t fly so well in these informal channels. Agencies can help to transfer the necessary knowledge around this to clients new to the social media realm.

6. Social media scoping

You don’t need to be everywhere online. Twitter and Facebook might not be the right places – perhaps your audience is primarily hangs out on forums or message boards. An agency can help to scope-out the right places for your company to establish a presence online.

Strategic planning

7. Strategic development

Agencies can bring together a wide variety of communications experiences and expertise that make them well placed to assist with or lead the strategic development process for social media for their clients.

8. Campaign ideas

Right now my perspective of the ideal approach to social media is a foundational long-term strategypaired with well thought-out campaigns that provide spikes in attention and engagement. As above, agencies can bring together creative minds to design those campaigns.

9. Campaign extension

Unfortunately, PR is still often at a point where it is called-in last minute to support other initiatives, whether it’s announcing something that’s already decided or supporting a marketing/advertising program. At those points, it can be difficult to come up with anything effective that benefits the organization. Agencies aren’t a silver bullet, but again they can contribute ideas.

Execution

10. Ongoing monitoring

Monitoring can be very resource-intensive, especially if your company has a significant footprint online or in peoples’ minds. Agencies are well placed to help deal with this pressure.

11. Online engagement

This is one area that I’ll rarely recommend the agency take on. It’s a lot of work and requires a thorough understanding of the online environment, but it’s something that (in most cases) should be done in-house. It allows for shorter approvals processes (important in a fast-moving conversation) and a more authentic voice.

Still, sometimes companies either can’t or aren’t ready to take this on. It may be resource issues, uncertainty over the medium, trust issues or a variety of other legitimate reasons, but there are times when an agency can undertake this work, as long as it’s transparent. It’s not ideal, but it’s possible, with the goal that, over time, the company will in-source this work.

Regardless, agencies can help to advise companies on their outreach – be it advice wording and norms or on whether in fact to engage or not with specific people.

12. Influencer outreach

I used to call this “blogger outreach” but online influencers are so much broader than just bloggers nowadays. Just as agencies undertake media relations activities in traditional public relations, so they can also reach out to online influencers in the new form PR has taken.

13. Issues management

If your company is interesting and matters to people, they will talk about you. That talk won’t always be positive. Sometimes it’s something you’ve done; sometimes it’s something about your product; sometimes it’s “news.” The list goes on. Regardless, monitoring for issues, identifying them early and coming up with suitable responses isn’t easy.

Full-service

14. Design and creative

More often than not, you’ll need some kind of design work done for your social media properties. Maybe it’s a Twitter background; maybe it’s a Facebook page or YouTube channel design; maybe it’s something more involved such as a stand-alone site. Either way, a full-service agency can help if you don’t have the in-house resources to undertake this work.

15. Development

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and their ilk are tremendously powerful sites, and they may well be where your audience hangs out. Still, there are times when they just may not suffice, or where you want to build on top of the platform they provide – Facebook or mobile apps, for example.

What do you think? Are there other areas I’m missing?

Posted in: pr, public relations, social media

Building legitimate social equity requires slowly shifting the perceptions of others. Building social equity, and understanding how to use it, is fundamental to maximizing revenue through social media.

Three phases to maximizing revenue through social media

These are not steps. When you’ve spent enough time focusing on awareness, your social equity will reach a level that will allow you to create engagement-type campaigns that will be successful. If you try launching engagement-type campaigns without building your social equity to a sufficient level, your campaigns will not be successful – and should be an indicator that you need to focus on awareness & build your social equity.

It’s also important to note that having enough social equity to successfully move to the next phase doesn’t mean that attention should be completely removed from the previous phase. (i.e. If you move from awareness to engagement; you should still continue awareness efforts. If you stop your awareness effort you risk decreasing your social equity.) 

 

Awareness (Social Equity Required: Low)

 

The first phase of maximizing revenue using social media is establishing a presence and earning a reputation. Before you get started you’ll need to define some goals, and define what groups of people you want to build a relationship with.

Once you’ve defined those things; you can decide what social media channels you’d like to participate in. Depending on your goals and your audience, you might end up choosing several channels. These posts can help you make your decision for companies or for individuals.

Many larger brands want to bypass this phase and jump into engagement; the reason usually is that they’ve built up substantial lists of users via other media. Often these brands blanket-invite anyone who’s interacted with them in the past to join them in their new campaign. The biggest problem with doing this is that you’re not qualifying your audience. Ideally, you’d target users who already participate in some social media channels & are informed about how to participate on the channels you’re inviting them to. These active users have the best chance of becoming advocates for you. (Adversely, if you invite users who aren’t interested in participating – you could end up with a bunch of ‘dead’ accounts following you. This can have negative repercussions for you and your community for several reasons. I’ll cover this in more detail in an upcoming post called “Social Media Deadfall, Dangers of The Unfocused.”)

So once you have goals & defined the channels you want to create a presence on; you can begin establishing your presence and earning the reputation you want. There are two reasons people join communities – for value or for fun. (Usually some combination of the two; but it’s proven helpful if you plot where you’d like to be on the spectrum between value & fun.)

This might be helpful; here are some high-level social activities. They extend across value-providing users and fun-providing users because the actives are basically the same; it’s the intention that sways toward one or the other.

Value
Provide helpful links/ information/ assets/ tools
Spark insightful/ relevant conversations
Create targeted original content

Fun
Provide entertaining links/ information/ assets/ tools
Spark insightful/ relevant conversations
Create targeted original content

Once you’ve established your presence and have developed your reputation; you can begin engaging your community in a different way. (There are benchmarks that indicate when it’s time to begin engagement-type campaigns; but it’s often different for every community. The best option is to ask your community if they’re ready for an engagement campaign, and gauge the response.)

Engagement (Social Equity Required: Medium)

 

For engagement campaigns to be successful through social media, a social equity foundation is required. I realize ’success’ is defined differently by different people; here’s my definition: To have a successful social media engagement campaign the campaign needs to be directed at qualified users, achieve predefined goals, and increase encourage long term communication.

I’ve been describing engagement campaigns as marketing roller-coasters. Done right, they can create a spike in community participation but once the campaign is over the participation level will likely fall back down to levels prior the campaign. — Of course, there are campaigns that show a spike in community participation which never go back to previous levels. There are also campaigns that cause community participation to fall well below pre-campaign levels after the campaign is done. — The hope is that community participation will permanently increase incrementally with each engagement campaign run. To achieve this; post-campaign analysis should always be comprehensive.

There are many tools and techniques for moving from engagement to social commerce. Determining when it’s appropriate to integrate social commerce into your community depends on the actions you want your community to do. If the cost of introducing social commerce to your community outweighs the potential revenue it can produce; you need to grow your community before investing.

 

Social Commerce     (Social Equity Required: High)

 

Reviews: A great way to begin to integrate an aspect of social commerce into your community is to provide a product/ service review tool that can integrate with your e-commerce or catalog site. Not only would this give your users the ability to actively endorse you; it would also allow those participants to connect to users who are interested in similar products/ services. (i.e. If I submit a review via Facebook on my new Mac laptop, people reading that review might contact me through my Facebook profile asking follow-up questions. These connections are often the point of joining communities.)

Shopping: The obvious integration option is allowing your community to preview products/ services through the site they’ve been participating on. Systems like Payvment mash-up the social network and the e-commerce website. (video demo) However, you can integrate shopping behavior with your community by making compelling exclusive offers to either visit your e-commerce site, or visit your store.

Sharing: An inherent benefit of social mediums is that sharing functionalities are usually built-in. Getting a qualified, engaged community to share products/ services they’re interested in is usually an easy task. The key to sharing is understanding how the user likes to share & how much control they like to have over sharing. Ensure they have the controls they need to share. (i.e. Many users like to select specific people to share with, rather than posting something to everyone. Many users like to include a personal message, rather than having a standard description included.)

Pricing: If you’re asking members of your community to leave the site and shop, whether it be on a different site, or in-store, exclusive pricing is a fantastic way to achieve it. In addition to getting users to shop through the channel you want; a byproduct of offering exclusive pricing is that you’ll get customers who aren’t yet members joining to get the exclusive pricing. Tip: A great way to ensure quality members is to identify social KPI and make exclusive pricing available to members who help achieve those metrics. (i.e. If you want guest blog posts, make an exclusive available to those who offer them. You can even make offers cumulative or loyalty-based.)

Registration: If you’re asking members to go to your e-commerce platform to do their shopping; offer an express registration to make things simpler for community members. Facebook Connect, and several OpenID methods are easy to integrate. Even if you don’t use a social media platform that allows easy registration; there are always innovative ideas to create an express registration. For instance a social application called Hippopost allows users to send customized postcards, greeting cards, playing cards, etc, to friends. This requires personal information, which can be collected and automatically transfered to an e-commerce platform for express registration.
Tip: Amazon, PayPal, and Google offer checkout options that might help community members checkout faster.

There’s been a lot of talk about social commerce taking over e-commerce. I don’t think that’ll happen; but I do think it represents a massive opportunity to increase revenue. This post represents a framework describing how to maximize revenue through social commerce.

After a hit pre­sen­ta­tion at The CMO [Chief Mar­ket­ing Offi­cer] Club Sum­mit in San Fran­cisco on how to kick ass on Twit­ter, I asked Guy Kawasaki if he could go over his top three “must do” tips for busi­nesses that want to get engaged on Twit­ter. One of his tips is to respond to every­one who @ replies you on Twit­ter. That is really good advice, but I must admit that I’m really bad at reply­ing back to all the peo­ple who @ reply me. Most of it has to do with the fact that I don’t want to just say “Thanks for acknowl­edg­ing me.” I’d want to add some value. And one of my rules on Twit­ter is that all tweets have to make sense and have sub­stance within them­selves (read: “My per­sonal Twit­ter pol­icy. What’s yours?”.

My two ques­tions for Socialmedia.biz readers:

1. Do you respond to every­one who @ replies you? And if you do, do you say some­thing of sub­stance that would be of value to your other fol­low­ers? Or do you just sim­ply pub­licly say, “Thank you”? Or, do you send a direct mes­sage instead and say, “Thank you”?

2. I brought up the sub­ject of Twit­ter actu­ally being lame traf­fic in that the time peo­ple spend on your blog from Twit­ter traf­fic is very low com­pared to other traf­fic. Kawasaki skirted the ques­tion, but I was hop­ing Socialmedia.biz read­ers could answer the ques­tion. Have you had sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences with Twit­ter traf­fic? And do you think that the focus on Twit­ter traf­fic is just every­one jump­ing on the Twit­ter band­wagon with­out any­one stop­ping to ana­lyze the value of that traffic?

via socialmedia.biz

Media and Publishing: New Social Tools Worth Noting

By Dave Evans, ClickZ, Nov 11, 2009

A couple of weeks ago, following the announcements about the shuttering of Condé Nast’s “Gourmet,” along with five other properties in the past year, Ad Age gave credit to Meredith Publishing for its adoption of a digital strategy in comparison with Condé Nast’s relative lack of one. In this column, I’ll discuss tools I’ve had the opportunity to work with recently, with a particular focus on publishing and media.

As a disclosure, I worked with Meredith Publishing in 2005 and 2006 on the development of its digital strategy. Meredith, building around the efforts of Senior Social Media Manager Laura Pinneke (formerly with Target) has implemented solutions across 20 magazine properties built primarily on the Pluck platform. In addition — put this under the “no sleep for the weary” heading — the publisher continues to evaluate and implement other tools from companies such as Ripple6 and Lithium.

Since its acquisition by Demand Media, Pluck has added some great new capabilities to its already strong platform. Customers — in this case, publishers — can offer core capabilities such as persona-based accounts with blogs, photo sharing, and the usual functions. This is now combined with newer features such as floating personas; hover over the author or commenter on a post and that person’s mini-profile will appear. Another feature: the ability to create extensions (widgets) using a variety of external software development languages including not just JavaScript, but also PHP, C#, and more. This gives Pluck clients, like NFL.com, a powerful range of options for designing and implementing a social media application platform that encourages member interaction and participation.

Around the corner from Pluck in my hometown of Austin, TX, is Powered. It provides a publisher’s platform as well: take a look at iVillage, for example, and its iLearn community. It’s full of the kinds of activities that bind active families (moms, in particular) to the online community. This element was missing in the case of “Gourmet.” While an exceptional print product, as online continues to press its relevance into the daily lives of media consumers (think smart handsets and netbooks here), the lack of a participative, digital expression for a media property is a strike against it, if not a guaranteed “out.” Kudos to iVillage for building this capability into its platform.

MTV’s Latin American programs have recently launched on another platform I’ve been involved with since 2005. Based in Buenos Aires, Looppa provides a community platform with a unique feature that’s important when “sub-communities” are a part of the design and business requirements. Consider the language, location, and cultural issues around multinational community implementations: Looppa provides a built-in community integration that connects distinct communities through a larger Web across multiple properties. This provides an intimate experience inside the smaller communities — think Facebook groups here — while still wrapping the entire experience in a larger platform and community. MTV’s Guarida Azul, launched at the end of September, has quickly broken the 100,000 registered member mark with strong participation and content sharing, based on the use of Looppa tools.

I was talking with Belo Interactive President Dave Ellett (former CEO of Powered) last week about Blastoff, an affiliate program launched about two months ago. As an innovation point, Dave noted that Blastoff is potentially useful for publishers on multiple fronts. I’ve included it here because it’s a great example on two distinct points. First, Blastoff offers some well thought out hooks for publishers: news and information channels, advertising opportunities that lead into the affiliate mall, and an in-road into a new online demographic for Belo in particular. Second, it’s an example of innovative thinking that’s required to stay ahead. What do a newspaper publisher and an affiliate marketer have in common? Offhand, I don’t know, but I do know this: Dave Ellett will dig in and figure it out, and Belo will beat its competitors to the punch as a result. Dave works hard to convert what he finds into a competitive advantage in the context of his business. That’s a best practice worth noting.

Tying the above together is one of the strategic points offered by blogger Jeff Jarvis: “Take yourself to them.” In the case of Powered’s iVillage and Belo’s look at Blastoff, for example, the publishers are taking the content that they have and moving it out to where there customers are. This is an essential practice when building powerful social applications.

In simple terms, it comes down to “fishing where the fish are” rather than simply hoping they’ll decide to hang around your boat. (They won’t.) A strong Web presence is a building block, but by itself, isn’t sufficient for marketing (online) to highly connected customers. A community built around your brand might be part of the answer, but your brand is generally not enough. The smart (and too often missing) aspect is to add the social applications available through, for example, the Pluck platform, and then tie them into Facebook and Twitter. Alternately, build around the connected communities built on Looppa or the integrated content offered by Powered. In the end, there are a number of ways to create an engaging experience. Here’s a quick summary:

1. Define your digital strategy. It’s no longer an option. Include participative elements and avoid building another purely outbound “social” channel.

2. Look for the points of participation: your focus should be on creating a participative platform and clearly establishing the end user policies. Install curation tools (for example, Bazaarvoice, and let your end users judge the content as they identify and share “quality” with each other.

3. Pay attention to what is getting voted up versus voted down, and move in the direction of “up.” Within your organization, take the specific steps required to convert a “top-down, we’ll do the talking” orientation into something more “customer-driven, we’re all here to learn and serve.”

Combine these basic points with continuous learning and experimentation to bring new technology into the planning process today and you’re on your way. As a publisher, that’s got to have a pleasant ring to it.

via clickz.com

Sometimes, we overcomplicate things by being worried about the technology part of it. Twitter and Facebook and blogs and mobile apps aren’t all that fancy. They’re just an unknown, and so people are worrying how they’ll do what they know how to do by other means with these new tools. Yes, it takes some new understanding, but at the end of the day, marketing hasn’t changed a lot. Think about the Four P’s of Marketing:

Product

Depending on your product, you might want to think about these kinds of alignment questions:

• How does it share? – In software, this means adding features like “post this to Facebook.” In physical products and businesses, it might mean giving consideration to how the real-world experience can spread via the online tools. For instance, if I’m Steve Wright over at Jay Peak, I’m going to want to have a bunch of “rental” Flip cameras or Kodak’s Zi8 camera on hand, plus some simple instructions for YouTube tagging and Flickr groups.
• How do we collaborate? – In software, look at the difference between Flickr and Picasa. In the real world, determine if there’s some way to extend relationships between users. To keep with my ski resort example, I might throw together a Ning site, and invite EVERY guest to join a social network around their experience.

Price

With social software, maybe there’s a chance for “invite a friend and you both save X” kinds of pricing options. “10% off if you fan our Facebook page.” There are all kinds of ways to think about how you can align social tools to pricing. Woot.com made a great integration with Twitter. So did Dell Bargain Outlet. Your blog can have specials of the day or week posted there. There are tons of ways price aligns with social software.

Place (distribution)

Look how easy the social web makes cause marketing. Take blogging software, make a post about the cause, throw a ChipIn widget on there, and you’ve got the basics for a charity fundraising experience (technology-wise). Distribution is the web’s best talent. You can put things everywhere. You can build a simple presence framework and move information to where it’s needed. Place is the easiest of the Four P’s to align to the social media world. Make sense?

Promotion

The social web is the talk of the town because of promotion. It’s free and easy, right? Heh. Most people accidentally promote in very damaging ways. They haven’t learned how to promote without being “that guy”. But it’s true that these tools are the best tools for promotion ever.

Through my Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter outposts, I get thousands of new readers and prospective clients every week. Thousands. I make new relationships that I wouldn’t have had before the land of blogging and all the other social tools. I use YouTube and I can podcast and I can make photos on Flickr. There are tons of ways to use these tools to promote and build community opportunities.

What’s Old is New Again

I lined up all the old fashioned marketing “Four P’s” to how social software can interact. I didn’t exactly lay out step-by-step plans, but maybe you can infer a bit from what we started with. You’ll notice something. The tools aren’t all that spectacular and amazing, except that they make performing certain tasks simpler than it used to be. Instead, the potential and the wonderment are all inside the human part of the equation.

What’s exciting about how social media and social software aligns with marketing is that there are new opportunities that far surpass the old methods for marketing, and that’s where the magic truly hides. Marketers do have to understand the tools, but more so, here’s a quick list of what else needs to be understood:

• From bullhorn to phone – Your message is no longer to be shouted, but to be socialized.
• From theater on the stage to theater in the round – Marketing is human again. Don’t stay “on message.” Stay connected to people.
• From millions, to the right 10,000 – Mass never worked well. It just did well enough. Find relationships that yield.
• From campaign to community – You’re in it for the long haul. Build awareness, reputation, and trust by being there.
• From exclusion to “one of us” – Your customers (b2b or otherwise) want to be included in the whole experience, not just to buy.

Truth be told, there are a dozen more things we could talk about in that list. But let’s start with those. You get the starting point. It looks easy, until the boss starts yelling at you for numbers and fast. Farmers can’t rush crops. You can’t join a gym a week before a wedding and drop five sizes. This is re-inventing stuff, not rehashing the old stuff with new line items.

You with me? What else do we have to cover here?

via chrisbrogan.com

Social media is not a silver bullet or panacea that will magically provide the answers to all of your personal or business needs. Rather, social media can be a valuable and interesting way to augment, enhance and jump-start your communications, marketing and sales efforts. By effectively using some of the tools (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), social media can bolster your strategic and tactical arsenal.

In response to B.L. Ochman’s post in AdAge about the 10 things social media can’t do, here’s a quick summary of nine things that social media can do:

1. Improve customer service – It wasn’t that long ago that customer service involved calling a 1-800 number (ultra-frustrating) or perhaps writing a letter, which, if you were really lucky, generated a response. Today, customers can talk publicly about a company’s product and service. And if a company is smart/savvy, they can quickly respond, and turn a negative into a positive or, at least, a neutral.

2. Build stronger relationships with existing customers – Everyone likes to feel the love, including customers who constantly want to be shown they’ve selected the right product, service, supplier, vendor, and that their loyalty is appreciated and recognized. Social media helps companies meet the needs of customers – whether it turning a complaint into a solution or listening to their feedback to make improvements.

3. Attract new customers – If you’ve got an active social media strategy that provides value, it’s another way that potential customers can discover and learn more about what you do and offer. On a growing basis, consumers are turning to social media for information and recommendations so it’s important to be where consumers are.

4. Generate feedback/ideas on how to improve existing products and services, and inspire new products and services – There’s nothing like getting real-time feedback about you’re doing right or wrong, or could be doing better or differently. Consumers are no qualms about telling anybody and everybody what they think, and much of it can be constructive.

5. Build and enhance your brand – Plain and simple, social media is another marketing tool that can be used to drive awareness about your brand – whether you’re a long-time entity such as Ford or a start-up with no marketing budget but a kick-ass service.

6. Connect with industry peers – One of the reasons that conferences and meet-ups are still alive and well in a digital age is that connecting with people is an inherent part of who we are and have we behave. We have a need and desire to connect with other people, and social media is another vehicle to make that happen.

7. Communicate with employees, suppliers and investors – Often lost in the shuffle is the fact that in addition to having conversations with consumers, social media also lets companies connect with other constituents such as employees, suppliers and investors. It provides them with information about what’s happening and what things mean.

8. Do research – One of social media’s low-profile “killer apps” is the ability to quickly and efficiently conduct real-time research.

9. Do good – Social media has been embraced as a tool to support, promote and drive good causes, charitable activities and philanthropic efforts.

The Newspaper Bailout

Posted on September 21, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized |

I don’t think anyone would deny that good journalism is both disciplined and increasingly not the domain of newspapers and broadcast media, but I find it interesting that the President would specifically latch on to the notion of a newspaper bailout by the Federal government as a potentially necessary step to combat the blogosphere.

“I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” he said.

Jeff Yablon: With all respect . . .

[From Obama open to newspaper bailout bill - The Hill's Blog Briefing Room]

If one is going to use fact checking and story context as the criteria for determining good journalism, then the traditional print and broadcast media are culpable.

Let’s start with what brought down Dan Rather, the fake Bush national guard stories (which were of course exposed by a blog) and move on to the impressively expanding NY Times corrections page, which featured perhaps the most ironic mother of all corrections, the Walter Cronkite obituary, but I thought the Charlton Heston obituary was even more noteworthy because the NY Times managed to not only get a raft of meaningful details wrong but also Heston’s name and age.

The supposedly platinum standard for journalism, the NY Times, which is subject to a growing number of blogs that track their errors, and I don’t hear the President complaining about the most linked to content in the NYTimes, the op-ed pages which feature the chronically error filled Krugman and Dowd columns… all opinion, intensely partisan opinion.

I could also go on and on about how editors at major newspapers tweak headlines and selectively edit stories to give them the inappropriate or partisan context, something the President himself acknowledged but pointed to only in reference to blogs. Take,. for example, the SF Chronicle’s coverage of the Mayo Clinic’s statements on President Obama’s healthcare bill, which the Chronicle used one quote praising a change in the Medicare payment policy as a proxy for overarching endorsement of the President’s plans, completely omitting the first half of the statement that said the proposals “failed to help create higher-quality, more affordable health care for patients, in fact it will do the opposite”.

When I emailed Ms. Lochhead about this she responded (promptly I should add) that “the dual Mayo references were thought to be confusing so the first was omitted. I agree this is misleading and I’m trying to get it fixed”. As of today that article has not been edited to reflect the entirety of the Mayo Clinic statement on the healthcare reform proposals.

In the final analysis I fail to see how the Federal government extending anything that could be construed as a bailout to newspaper companies could be considered appropriate or ethical. An independent media is certainly not ensured when the Federal government rescues media companies that are failing because of changes in consumer behavior and perhaps equally because of dismay and disgust at the partisan bias that newspapers and news magazines have displayed (I mean really, how many Time magazine covers featuring President Obama will they publish… I thought only Oprah Magazine could be counted on for such predictable covers?).

UPDATE: Today I learned that the Washington Post, the President’s hometown newspaper, ran 960 corrections in 2008 and still has a backlog of “hundreds, some dating to 2004″ in the queue… so much for the President’s claim that only the blogosphere lacks “serious fact checking”.

via jeffnolan.com

Why the mainstream media is dying

Every once in a while you get to see a mainstream outlet cover a story right alongside a blog, so you can put them up against each other and see why one was so much better than the other. This week TechCrunch and the New York Times (photo) provided just such a lesson.

The issue was a company called Zynga, which makes online games, like FarmVille, that have become incredibly popular on Facebook among people who are missing parts of their brains. On Oct. 31 TechCrunch broke a big story called “Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell” about how Zynga was making money by selling scam ads — the kind that trick kids and other frigtards into signing up for useless subscriptions to stuff they don’t want.

Arrington packaged his story with a video of himself taking on Anu Shukla, CEO of one of the scam-ad distributors, at a conference. He also ran an “insider’s confession” piece by a former scammer explaining how these guys operate. He followed with a story about how Zynga CEO Mark Pincus had acknowledged the problem and said Zynga would stop running those ads, and another story about how Anu Shukla had been pushed out of her company, and another story about Shukla’s replacement admitting that the company had, indeed, been running scammy ads. On Friday Arrington capped it off with a coup: he dug up a video clip from earlier this year in which Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, told a laughing audience of scumbag developers about all the scumbaggy things he had done to generate revenue with his games.

After all this, we woke up Saturday to find a story in the New York Times, also about Zynga (and other Facebook game companies) with the headline, “Virtual Goods Start Bringing Real Paydays.” The Times put two reporters on the knob-polisher, and somehow they managed to interview Pincus, and to quote him — and yet they included not a single word about the scammy ads. Not. A. Fucking. Word. The piece could not have been nicer if it had been written by Zynga’s PR people themselves. Gist: Virtual goods, stupid idea, people play, some spend money, VCs love it, isn’t this great.

Ahem.

So: they walked into this shit-storm and somehow, by some miracle, managed not to notice the fecal matter flying all around them. It’s like covering a football game that took place in the middle of the blizzard and neglecting to mention the weather.

Now, maybe they did all the reporting before Arrington’s stuff broke. In which case they should have gone back and updated their info. Or maybe, just maybe, Zynga’s PR people teed up a Times story as a kind of rebuttal to what Arrington was reporting. Either way, that’s what ended up happening: Zynga used the Times to deflect the bad shit flying at them from Arrington. They need good press because they’re hoping to cash out by going public next year. That story in the Times will be worth millions. Many millions.

Meanwhile, Arrington, still digging, blasted again on Saturday night, reporting that sleazy ads had popped up again on Zynga, despite promises that they would be taken down.

Um, New York Times? If you guys are still wondering why people are dropping their subscriptions and getting their news from blogs instead of you — this is why.

And to all those people who go around wringing their hands and saying what are we going to do when the “real newspapers” all die and we have to get our news from Gawker and HuffPo and TechCrunch? Friends, I think we’re going to be just fine.

Part of it is the form of the media itself. If you’re a reporter at the Times, you get one story, and a fixed number of inches, and you’re smothered by layers of editors. At TechCrunch it’s one guy who can get his teeth into something and there’s no limit on how many articles he can do.

What really cracks me up is how often I still hear people say that bloggers are mere “aggregators” and the “real journalism” gets done at places like the Times.

Because time after time, blogs are simply beating the shit out of the newspapers. They’re the ones who still dare to go for the throat, while their counterparts at big newspapers just keep reaching for the shrimp cocktail.

As for the newspapers: Faced with their own demise, fearful of losing even more advertising, newspapers have made the huge mistake of becoming ever more timid, more cautious, more in bed with the companies they cover.

It’s the exact opposite of what they should be doing. The truth is, if newspapers want to survive they should go back to doing what they started out doing — muckraking, stirring the shit, calling bullshit.

The other truth is, when these papers are dead, they will not be missed.

A growing number of children are flouting minimum-age requirements on social-networking sites such as Facebook.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Facebook, MySpace require users to be 13, but the sites can’t really enforce it
• Study found 38 percent of kids ages 12 to 14 have online profiles
• One Georgia parent allows kids to use networking sites, but with rules, supervision
• Expert: Kids’ social networking use is “pretty harmless”

(CNN) — Status updates, photo tagging and FarmVille aren’t just for adults or even teenagers anymore.

Researchers say a growing number of children are flouting age requirements on sites such as Facebook and MySpace, or using social-networking sites designed just for them.

Facebook and MySpace require users to be at least 13. But they have no practical way to verify ages, and many young users pretend to be older when signing up.

Some scientists worry that pre-adolescent use of the sites, which some therapists have linked to Internet addiction among adults, could be damaging to children’s relationships and brains.

But many other experts say there’s not any solid research to back that up and that most children seem to use social-media sites in moderation, and in positive ways.

“For the most part, although there’s so much press about all the bad things they’re doing, much of what they do on these sites is stuff they would be doing anyway,” said Kaveri Subrahmanyam, a professor of psychology at California State University-Los Angeles.

Video: Too young for Facebook?

RELATED TOPICS

• Facebook Inc.
• MySpace Inc.
• Children’s Health

In two surveys reported this year by Pew Internet Research — of 700 and 935 teens, respectively — 38 percent of respondents ages 12 to 14 said they had an online profile of some sort.

Sixty-one percent of those in the study, ages 12 to 17, said they use social-networking sites to send messages to friends, and 42 percent said they do so every day.

The data in the study was from 2006, so it’s not a stretch to assume those numbers are higher this year. Research on younger children is limited, but anecdotal evidence shows that many of them are also logging on.

CNN iReport: How much do you let your kids reveal on social networking sites?

“Of course they are,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher at Pew and one of the report’s authors. “They’re using them because that’s where their social world is. Because there’s no effective way to age-verify … children very quickly realize, ‘I just say I’m 14 years old, and they’ll let me use this.’ “

Marc Bigbie, a software salesman who lives near Savannah, Georgia, said he has three children — 14, 12 and 11 — who all have accounts on at least one social-networking site.

His oldest daughter, then 11, was the first in the family to create an account, on MySpace. And it was without her parents’ permission.

“It was kind of a negative thing at first,” he said. “We kind of took it away from her. But, finally, we said, ‘You can have it, but we need the password so we can be on there at any time.’ “

Since then, all three of the kids have gotten Facebook accounts, with their parents even agreeing to fudge their ages.

Bigbie said he makes sure his children’s accounts are set to provide as little personal information as possible, and they allow their activity to be seen only by confirmed friends. He and his wife monitor the pages to make sure they know the friends that their children have added.

He said the oldest daughter is the only one who uses the account almost every day, while the younger children log on briefly every now and then.

In the past couple of years, some scientists have voiced concerns that children are spending too much on these sites and that such online socializing could have lasting negative effects as they mature.

“My fear is that these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment,” Susan Greenfield, an Oxford University neurocientist and director of Britain’s Royal Institution, told London’s Daily Mail in February.

“I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitized and easier [online] screen dialogues,” she said.

Other scientists criticized Greenfield’s comments, calling them speculation, not science.

Subrahmaynam said a study of high school students showed that in most cases, the people they interact with most often online are people they also socialize with in person.

Children today have spent their whole lives on computers, and their brains are better adapted than those of adults to integrate online activities with their offline lives, she said.

“You’ll always have the small minority of kids who are not using it appropriately,” she said. “I do think you’re going to have a few people that are doing things that kids probably couldn’t do with telephones a generation ago.

“But we don’t want to get swept away by the general fear. It’s here, and it’s pretty harmless.”

Many parents also worry that younger users of social sites could be targets for online predators. While there are some concerns that kids aren’t mature enough to make good decisions about their privacy, Subrahmaynam and Lenhart said most are savvy enough by their early teens to know what, and who, to avoid. Younger children, they say, need more parental supervision.

Alternately, a growing number of networking sites are geared specifically toward younger users. Sites such as Disney’s Club Penguin — mainly a game site, but with limited social functions — WebKinz and Whyville feature more restricted and supervised networking.

Such kids-oriented sites are “sort of a training ground” for future use of mainstream social networks, Lenhart said.

Children as young as 5 have accounts at KidSwirl, a kids’ social-networking site patterned loosely on Facebook, said creator Toby Clark.

Clark said the average user spends about five minutes on the site per visit — far less than Facebook’s average of more than 20 minutes.

He said he limits the amount of time his two children, 9 and 6, spend on the site, but that any parent who bans their children from such sites isn’t facing the facts.

“The reality is that we’re a technology-driven generation,” said Clark, who launched the site in February and said it has about 10,000 users. “That’s not going to change.”

So what long-term effect will social networking have on children? Scientists say it may be hard to know for sure.

“We’ve lost the control group,” Subrahmanyam said. “How do you find a group of kids that are not using the computer?”

via edition.cnn.com