Planet Forward — Viewer Collaboration TV April 2, 2009

A few nights ago, I had an opportunity to attend the first taping of a new PBS series – Planet Forward. Moderated by former CNN special correspondent Frank Sesno, the show’s theme is to promote a discussion about energy and climate change, but in an innovative twist, starts off the discussion in the online community and then goes to broadcast and then eventually back to online for post-show discussion and critique.

PBS started the ball rolling back in early March with a request to the Planet Forward online community for submissions of questions, ideas, videos, podcasts and even poetry, which were then rated by PBS editors and the online community as most popular and deserving to be included in the show. Winners appear on the show and have an opportunity to debate and pose questions to Sesno and panels of industry experts.

This inaugural show featured Carol Browner, Energy Coordinator for the Obama Admnistration; industry experts L. Hunter Lovins, president of National Capitalism and internationally recognized promoter of sustainable development; Shai Agassi, CEO of Better Place, a company focused on building transportation networks of zero-emission electric vehicles; and Jim Connaughton, Constellation Energy executive vice president, corporate affairs, public and environmental policy and former chairman, White House Environmental Quality for the Bush Administration.

I found the show engaging with its lively mix of average citizens and experts, and extremely informative (for example, I learned the famous DC landmark Ben’s Chili Bowl with a 50s-era menu of cheese fries, shakes and half-smoke sausages uses renewable energy sources to power the restaurant. Cool!)

Planet Forward airs nationally on PBS April 15th. It will be fun to see how this show organically grows when it goes back for online discussion and viewer collaboration after its initial airing.

Some things I’ve learned… February 25, 2009

I’ve been doing more tweeting instead of full out blogging of late, and also have been on the road at seminars and with clients. Time to catch up with an actual blog post that’s more than 140 characters.

Here’s what I’ve learned over the last few weeks:

- Digital vs. traditional. Wave the white flag — no longer a debate. This came up at last week’s MediaPost Digital Marketing in a Downturn panel discussion. Razorfish’s Shiv Singh, VP of Social Media, pronounced the end of this seesaw battle over which is the more important media calling it for both. These days, consumers are watching their traditional media tvs while typing a tweet on their laptop and answering e-mail on their BlackBerry. We live in a multi touchpoint information world and it requires multichannel marketing to reach us these days. (Great multichannel marketing resource – Akin Arikan.)

- Social media is marketing. Social media is communication. Social media is… confusing? Answer: All of the above. I’m still hearing clients repeating a similar theme: “We know we need to so some social media but we’re not sure what we want to do.” And for those organizations that have plunged into social media and have blogs and videos and maybe even a Twitter feed on their sites, I’m hearing a need to sit down and actually plan a better strategy to optimize results.

On both counts I’ll give the same advice: First, go back to basics. Why are you in business? What are the goals of your web site? What does success look to you? Answer these three questions and then see how and where social media fits into your organization’s business plan.

- Twitter has exploded with new users and publicity over the last few weeks. I witnessed this especially in the DC journo community with NBC’s David Gregory, MSNBC’s David Shuster, and Air America’s Ana Marie Cox getting into Twitter a few weeks ago which then generated widespread coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post and Politico. Is Twitter just a fad that will go the way of Second Life? I don’t think so. I hope not anyway. I love the immediacy and variety of information that Twitter offers users and I believe we’re just seeing the beginning of its possibilities – especially with the recent infusion of $35 million of new VC money.

Andrew Sullivan on Watching Old Media Die December 8, 2008

Last night while checking my RSS feeds, I saw this TimesOnline column by one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, about the looming death of print newspapers. Pretty timely given the latest torrent of bad news coming from the world of legacy media companies: Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun, filing for possible bankruptcy this week; The New York Times borrowing up to $225 million against the value of its mid-Manhattan headquarters building; McClatchy looking for a buyer for The Miami Herald; and E.W. Scripps Co. selling the Rocky Mountain News.

UPDATE: (Within a few minutes of going live with this post, I received word that the Tribune Co. is filing for bankruptcy. Another one bites the dust. UPDATE 2: Given the company’s almost $13 billion of debt along with declining local tv and newspaper ad revenues, it’s a tough road ahead for the Tribune Co. )

Sullivan, a blogger since 2000, gives the history of his blog as to why bloggers hold such an economic advantage over these legacy media companies, despite the best efforts of these companies to beef up their websites:

“To give my own example: I started blogging eight years ago. My once quirky blog, born in time to cover the 2000 election campaign, has steadily grown in traffic over the years, but this year, with the election campaign and a media revolution, it went into the stratosphere. In October last year my blog got 3.5m page views; in October this year it had 23m page views. The story of the campaign, in other words, did find a readership (and page views of big online papers soared as well). The growth just didn’t occur in newsprint, and the next generation of readers – those now under 30 – barely knows what a newspaper is.

Now compare my little blog’s traffic with The Baltimore Sun, a big metropolitan paper with a long history and great reputation, featured most recently in the HBO series The Wire. It had 17.5m page views in October; The Dallas Morning News got 12m; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution got 14m. The operation largely run out of my spare room reached many more online readers than some of the biggest and most loss-making papers in the country. The economics are remorseless: as news goes online, the economic model for papers cannot survive. If advertising follows page views, the game will shortly be over.”

Will large newspapers, even if offered online-only, survive? Only time will tell. But I also agree with Sullivan that blogs are not a complete substitute because most blogs don’t have the budgets and staff to do in depth reporting (Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post are notable exceptions), and often rely on traditional media sources to back up an opinion or issue. Add this to the tremendous loss to the public discourse and it will be a sad day indeed, should only a few media companies manage to survive.

Doonesbury and Post-Election Twitterholics November 12, 2008

In case you missed it, yesterday’s Doonesbury cartoon nails how many of us political news junkies are doing post-election, with no more waking up to tweets of the latest swing state polls and head counts at campaign rallies. It feels weird not to have campaigns to follow, or at least until the 2010 senate races heat up!

“It’s the social media tools, stupid…” November 11, 2008

Now that Election Day is over and we have a new President-Elect, another huge winner coming out of Campaign 2008 are the new and ramped-up social media tools that played key campaign roles this election cycle.

Back in 2007, when McCain and Obama first announced their intentions to make a White House run, Twitter was barely a year old, blogging superstars like Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com were unknown and having texting numbers in the millions was pretty much only seen on American Idol.

Fast forward through 50+ primaries and caucuses, two nominating conventions, three presidential debates and one Election Day, and here’s a quick look at some of the highlights:

- Twitter: Barack Obama’s campaign Twitter feed continually ranked #1 in followers. The Obama campaign deftly leveraged Twitter’s ease of use and reach to send out daily tweets to supporters about campaign rallies and posted links to campaign updates and video streams. The McCain/Palin campaign’s use of Twitter was very limited with the campaign not showing a Twitter account as late as September ‘08. But what the official campaign site lacked, McCain supporters created, with their own Twitter feeds of McCain campaign news and videos.

For Election Day, a coalition of volunteers, tech companies and online news outlets banded together to create a real-time vote-monitoring web site called Twitter Vote Report where voters could report via tweets, mobile texting or phone calls on long waits, faulty voting machines, registration problems or if everything was moving smoothly.

- Mobile Texting: Barack Obama’s campaign put mobile texting on steroids. Texting was used to build massive supporter, volunteer and fundraising databases, as well as breaking news rollouts as the Biden Veep pick. Texting keywords like HEALTH or IRAQ would send mobile users periodic updates on the subject of interest and a dozen ringtone downloads from Obama speeches were offered as well. On Election Day, Obama supporters were sent constant text messages about GOTV volunteering needs and contacting friends who hadn’t voted yet. Can you imagine running a campaign now without using mobile texting as a major player in recruiting campaign volunteers, fundraising and votes? I can’t.

- Blogs: With all of those primaries and debates getting major broadcast air time, live-blogging came into its own using tools like CoveritLive to build audience for major media sites such as MSNBC.com and Newsweek.

During the campaign, blogging superstars emerged such as pollmeister Nate Silver, and internationally, blogging experienced explosive growth with the launch of sites such as the Reuters-sponsored Voices Without Votes, an aggregator of the international blogosphere focusing solely on the U.S. presidential race. The site’s tagline: “America votes. The world speaks.”

- Digg: Digg was used by both campaigns to move stories into the national spotlight. Over the Labor Day weekend, for instance, more than 40 stories about Sarah Palin, John McCain’s VP pick, received enough diggs to become popular. The site is also responsible for creating the early buzz and massive online fundraising for former presidential candidate Ron Paul.

- Community Sites: The McCain campaign created its own social networking site called “McCain Space” where supporters could post videos and photos as well as connect in forums. My.Barack.Obama, massively popular with millions of members, gave Obama supporters the online tools to create blogs, find local events and groups and contact undecided voters. In a recent post, Chris Hughes, an Obama staffer, revealed that post-election, the site will not be taken down and will remain up for continued collaboration among community members.

Web Analytics: Time to Get on Board October 27, 2008

Last week I was at the DC eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, the premier marketing conference attracting the best and brightest in web analytic and marketing people in corporations, government agencies, media and everywhere else.

This year’s theme was “Tough Times Call for Tough Measures: Increase the Effectiveness of Every Marketing Dollar” or how to create the most ROI for tight marketing budgets squeezed by the downward economy. While traditional market spend is down, online spend is up as reported in a recent MarketingProfs survey showing 60% of all marketers surveyed said they would be increasing their online budgets while 85% would be reducing their use of traditional marketing vehicles.

Even in light of increased online budgets, your boss wants to know that a dollar spent online will result in three dollars earned. How are they going to know? Web analytics. (WAA definition: Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for understanding and optimizing Web usage.)

Even in revenue-challenged businesses such as the newspaper industry, CEOs are realizing the value of informed business decisions based on web analytic metrics. James Robinson, Director of Web Analytics, The York Times, talked about starting just over a year ago with one person doing web analytics; now they have five staffers and are looking to add two more. They use web analytics to decide on print run numbers, boost subscription revenue, product development, and identification of most-read stories and sections. In a geeky cool move, after big news events such as Governor Sarah Palin’s acceptance address to the GOP convention, Robinson’s staff sends out a one page Web Analytics Bulletin to key personnel, charting online change.

Web analytics is experiencing exponential growth, both in new and improved analytic tools (Goggle Analytics just launched seven new features) along with increased buy-in from company and organizational stakeholders. In a dimmed economy, the future for web analytics and the powerhouse revenue value it can bring to companies and organizations is dazzling. Time to get on board!

Blogging Goes Mainstream… again October 19, 2008

I’ve been a blogger since 2003 and so have used blogs for years as an information bridge between old and new media for searches. What seemed to make perfect sense to me back in 2003, apparently has finally become fully embraced by mainstream media, according to eMarketer senior analyst, Paul Verna.

In his story, Blogging Becomes Mainstream, Paul Verna writes that “blogging has become so pervasive and influential that the lines between blogging and the mainstream media have disappeared,” noting a Technorati-sponsored State of the Blogosphere 2008 survey conducted in July and August 2008 by Decipher. The survey’s comScore Media Metrix blog numbers come in at 77 million unique visitors in the US in August 2008, compared with 75.1 million unique visitors to MySpace and 41 million to Facebook. In July 2008, comScore ranked two blogs — OMG and TMZ — as numbers 1 and 2 in their list of the top 10 entertainment sites.

In an interview with eMarketer, Richard Jalichandra, CEO of Technorati said, ‘Blogs are now mainstream media. We’ve certainly seen that with the number of professional, semiprofessional and passion/enthusiast bloggers who are creating real media experiences. At the same time, you’re also seeing mainstream media come the other direction to add blog content.’

These days, looking at the sites of mainstream media heavyweights such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, you readily see the truth of Jalichandra’s words. Both sites have digitally exploded with in-house blogs [NYT: 63; WaPo: 85] that cover huge readership segments in news, lifestyle and opinion with brand extension to outside blog content via blog rolls and featured blog posts. Mainstream media’s first tentative steps into blogging just a few short years ago have become a stampede — paying dividends in more content variety for readers and higher traffic stats for the company bottom line.

NBC Universal Rebrands Local News Sites October 15, 2008

As reported in today’s MediaPost TVWatch, the WaPo and Adweek, NBCU has redesigned its local TV station Web sites, dropping call letters and/or channel numbers, with the goal of turning the sites into local news portals. The initial roll out includes stations in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and New York.

TVWatch asks the question whether dropping a station’s well known online call letters/numbers (ex: DC’s nbc4.com) is throwing away years of well-earned publicity and local brand familiarity with broadcast and online viewers.

I don’t think so. NBCU is keeping the URL short and catchy – ex: NBCChicago.com – and have a redirect from the old URL to the new one. What NBCU might lose initially in confused viewers, they’ll reap in more traffic to these well designed and information-enriched sites that enjoy the branded look and ease of use of NBC’s home site. I like the change and as a web analytics geek, I look forward to seeing any disclosed metrics on the new sites. Very cool NBCU!

Here’s beta NBCChicago.com:

The Daily Beast October 15, 2008

Tina Brown and Barry Diller’s answer to The Huffington Post and other news aggregators like Drudge — The Daily Beast — makes for slow loading on my iPhone so I’m looking at it on my MacBook. Very magazine slick; lots of luxe looking graphics with an older audience appeal. The Beast hits you right between the eyes on the home page with a dizzying array of story and blog choices, along with a rotating main story billboard to keep things moving. According to Wired, the site plans to remain ad-free for the near future. Will The Daily Beast roar with eyeball traffic? Stay tuned…