While The Huffington Post’s online plans seem to be more towards building a 24-hour online news network  in the CNN mode, both news organizations are building their programming by aggregating the talent and followings of their journalists.

All of this means that it’s more important than ever for journalists to keep personal branding  in mind. If this idea conjures up feelings of panic and a bad episode of Mad Men, think of branding as answering two questions: “What makes me unique as a journalist?” and “Why should people spend time reading my work and connecting with me?”

Because like it or not, news organizations will remain in the hunt for new revenue streams and a big part of that search will be looking at staff journalists to be  potential media stars in order to build audience and advertisers for their online and offline products.

Since then, media companies have upped their game to tie-ins and contests on Facebook, broadcast personalities have their own twitter feeds, and show blogs have improved light years in content. And even with with every major news network having rolled out iPhone, iPad and Android apps, I still hadn’t seen one with a feature that effectively encouraged active participation.

Until now.

MSNBC released the new free iPad app for “The Rachel Maddow Show” in mid-January, and even if you’re not a fan of the show, it’s so worth checking out for its smart integration of social media features. The app opens with a strong push towards video with a top slide show of spotlighted clips and below, broadcasts organized by air date along with with transcripts that let you search by keywords.

Where this app rates far above other media iPad apps and fully embraces the idea of community is in Twitter integration features. Click on the Watch Party tab and viewers can follow @maddow’s real-time tweets during the show as well read what other viewers and guests are saying on the #maddow hashtag. They’ve added another show account — @MaddowApp — to act as a feed curator and those tweets favorited by @MaddowApp  show up highlighted in a yellow box.

Coincidentally, as I was working on this post over the weekend, I caught Twitter newbie Howard Stern’s (@HowardStern) real-time Twitter commentary during HBO’s Saturday airing of his movie, “Private Parts”.

I’ve seen the whole movie, and parts of it again probably half a dozen times on cable, but being able to read his commentary and be connected to a global party of people hanging out on their couches on a Saturday afternoon made me flip on HBO. Online buzz quickly spread about Stern’s tweeting and “Howard Stern” vaulted to a top trending topic on Twitter. Not bad for a newbie, eh?

Both the Maddow Show app and Stern’s tweeting are great examples of how to build fan loyalty and appointment broadcast viewership, and at the same time, give something back of real value to their fans.

I finally had some time to poke around the site and here’s some thoughts about what I found:

Overall Usefulness: If you are any kind of information junkie, tech expert or just like to challenge yourself when it comes to answering questions, Quora is your kind of site. Because of the topics and people I follow, my Quora feed is heavy on tech, marketing, and social media. But you can type into Quora’s search bar virtually any topic and get a question page about it. Here’s a screenshot of Quora’s page served when you type in “airplanes”

This topic page’s questions range from the basic “What law of physics allows an airplane to fly?” to the curious “Can an Airbus A380 fly upside down?” (Short answer: no) The people answering this topic’s questions are self-identified airline pilots, fighter pilots, and aerospace engineers. Not too shabby.

I’ve been working on a project involving content curation and have been looking for new content curation tools. I was familiar with Scoop.it and Storify but wanted to know what else is out there. I typed in “best content curation tools” into the search bar and immediately got a pop-up reminder that the query has to be in the form of a question. O-kay. Jeopardy rules here. “What are the best content curation tools?” generated this page of search results:

I clicked on the “What are the best content curation tools for daily use” link which had 22 answers with some great advice on tools including mysynidcaat.com, Pinboard and curated.by. Thanks!

Beyond feeding your inner information geek, I can see Quora’s usefulness for companies in brand monitoring, responding to customer service issues and keeping an eye on the competition. In the news industry, journalists and news operations are starting to use Quora to find stories and sources.

Quora Quirks: The site loading time was slow at times. The notification follower feature has a maddening way of disappearing when you click on a new follow, forcing you to have to start over again.

Not a quirk but a query I have with the site is the rating of answers up or down with the idea, in Quora’s words, so that the “best ones can rise to the top of the page and make it better.” But will this make it more of a popularity contest with those people with big followings getting more votes because of their notoriety, rather than for a necessarily good answer?

Fun Quotient:  Addicting. Because of the wide range of available information and tech superstars like Steve Case, Robert Scoble, and David Armano, not to mention Hollywood celeb Ashton Kutcher, answering questions, Quora can become habit-forming. As I paged through the bios of experts, I kept thinking of that great scene in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” where Woody, waiting in line for a movie, angrily rants about a clueless movie patron who’s loudly discussing media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s work. Woody ends up pulling out the Marshall McLuhan from behind a movie poster to put the hapless guy in his place. Quora is, in a way, like having your own virtual community of Marshall McLuhans to help you find information.

So these are my early thoughts about Quora. What do others think about the Quora experience? Love to hear what you have to say in the comments.

1. Consumer content curation. If 2010 was the year of companies curating content, 2011 will be companies asking themselves if they are “in the stream” of their consumers. This means companies will need to seriously up their content quality in order to not get filtered out by consumers now much more selective on what they will read and share.

2. Niche location. Location based services (LBS) like FourSquare and Gowalla got big buzz this year, though I have to say I didn’t find FourSquare all that useful for me this year. It was fun to see what and where my friends were up to, but business clients reported mixed results. Niche geo-location services like Xtify segment LBS reach into targeted interest groups such as foodies and bargain shoppers.

3. Gamification and Social Gaming. FarmVille partners with McDonalds, and in 2011 Schwab says we’ll be seeing more brand integration into existing gaming platforms and brands creating their own games.

4. Social Commerce. Crowd-buying Groupon was a big hit this year and Facebook Commerce, where the NBA and Amazon have recently planted sites, will continue to grow. I agree with Schwab that companies just pushing people to their Facebook site to snag a coupon is not compelling and to me, very last year. Will more companies take a deeper dive into Facebook Commerce? As with most things Facebook, I wouldn’t bet against it.

5. QR Codes. Saving the best one for last because the geek girl in me absolutely loves these matrix barcodes of information. So fun to aim my iPhone’s NeoReader app at a QR and see what goodies are hidden inside. Though QR codes have been huge in Japan for some time, in the ramp up to the holiday season I’ve seen more and more QR use here in the U.S.  Recently I’ve zapped QRs in Sephora’s 2010 holiday catalog and watched YouTube videos featuring Sephora lipsticks and perfumes and scored 120 Thanksgiving recipes from a QR in The Washington Post.  Sears has added QRs to their holiday Wish Book and Target features QRs in their toy catalog. Want your own QR? Check out uQR.me.

Newsletters? How old school. Why go to the time and expense when you’ve got real-time social media?

Because the simple truth is that for most of us living in this age of social media, we’re still spending huge chunks of time reading and sharing our email messages.

Take a look at this chart from the recent eMarketer article, Email Still Tops Facebook for Keeping in Touch:

With the exception of the 18-24 demo group, when it came to sharing content, email won over Facebook and even the phone by big percentages, especially as the groups skewed older.

Why? Partly because of familiarity and ease of use, especially with the older demo groups; partly because email can be targeted and timed to a specific group of responders, and according to Morgan Stewart, CEO of Trendline Interactive, consumers enjoy the control email offers to engage on their own schedule, rather than the brand’s.

As a side note, Stewart reports an interesting point regarding Neilsen’s recent findings of email use decreasing between June 2009 – June 2010. He interviewed Neilsen’s Vice President of Media Analytics and was told that Neilsen ‘only tracks emails accessed through a website.’ Therefore, accessing email via a popular desktop client such as Outlook, MacMail or Thunderbird would not count as an email session for Neilsen’s reporting purposes.

Burtis writes about how conventional online wisdom is to differentiate between online traffic and bricks and mortar foot traffic and why this is outdated thinking these days.

““People coming to your website is the same as people walking into the front door of your business! … Let me ask you this,’ “If you owned a small shop in the middle of town and someone walked through your front door would you greet them or ignore them?”

Such a great image! And he’s right. Behind every one of those clicks that we’re carefully measuring on our one-dimensional web analytics spread sheets and dashboards, there is a living, breathing human being who needs more information or is ready to buy the latest product but first needs to connect with a company in some manner, before taking a conversion action.

We humans need and crave interaction. It’s just how we’re wired. It’s the social in social media when executed well and a major reason why US web users are spending 36 per cent of their online time visiting or communicating across social networks and blogs.

Given our DNA and SEO algorithms favoring social site content, it’s time to banish “the website as an online brochure” meme and ramp up conversions by adding to websites some human connections such as a Facebook fan page, blog, product reviews, a customer service rep Twitter feed or a live chat “Have a question? Talk with Lisa, our business account representative.”

Add some humans to your site and give your business more opportunities to say to customers, “How can I help you?”

Who’s Doing What?

Read the whole article, but here are two excerpts of examples of mobile advertising campaigns:

HBO, for instance, was looking to drive awareness and purchases of a pay-per-view telecast for the Mayweather-Marquez fight with Hispanic prospects. The network prompted consumers to text “pelea” (“fight”) to a short code for a chance to win a signed boxing glove. Those who texted received an SMS message inviting them to join the HBO Mobile VIP club. An impressive 12.9 percent of consumers clicked the link in the text and nearly 70 percent of those that did opted into the VIP club. This left HBO with a valuable database of loyalists who can be reached again.

Target is using mobile coupons to drive sales and build loyalty. Consumers can “opt in” by registering at the company’s online or mobile Web sites, or by texting the word “coupons” to 827438. Coupons, which will be issued on a monthly basis, can be redeemed right at checkout, no scissors required. The move follows a new Yankee Group report stating that 73 percent of mobile subscribers wish to receive mobile coupons.

]]> http://cupofbuzz.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/mobile-advertising-whos-doing-what/feed/ 0 lwestell http://cupofbuzz.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/pepto-bismols-facebook-campaign/ http://cupofbuzz.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/pepto-bismols-facebook-campaign/#comments Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:49:31 +0000 lwestell http://cupofbuzz.wordpress.com/?p=792 Continue reading →]]> Timed for the long July 4th weekend and tied into sponsorship of the famous Nathan’s hot dog eating contest, Procter & Gamble’s Pepto Bismol launched a four-day advertising blitz to introduce its official Facebook page. The campaign started on July 1 with a series of five Facebook ads served to U.S. Facebook users’ homepage.

As a result of the ads, fan base numbers quickly increased from around 500 at the start of the Facebook page launch on June 25th, to 42,672 at the time of this post, a sizeable return for an ad buy estimated around $100,000.

P&G spokesperson Elizabeth Ming told ClickZ’s Christopher Heine, that “P&G was developing plans to keep the new audience engaged.” ”Once we have our fan base, we hope to continue to provide value to the people who ‘like’ Pepto, she said.”

It will be interesting to watch the next steps in P&G’s strategy, but I’m thinking they missed out on big opportunities with this initial Facebook page roll out to add greater return and stronger audience brand loyalty and engagement by lack of a few content features. Serving up comments from fans; (click here to see the love Pepto Bismol Canada’s Facebook page fans have for the pink stuff)  showing real-time results on featured polls; streaming Nathan’s event photos and including special purchase offers would have gone a long way in giving this page more appeal and upped its engagement level right out of the box.

]]> http://cupofbuzz.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/pepto-bismols-facebook-campaign/feed/ 0 lwestell Pepto Bismol http://cupofbuzz.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/building-communities/ http://cupofbuzz.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/building-communities/#comments Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:48:51 +0000 lwestell http://cupofbuzz.wordpress.com/?p=778 Continue reading →]]> I was invited last week to the Gov 2.0 Expo, which showcased recent Web 2.0 initiatives across government and municipal sectors and was a wonderful opportunity for both public and private workers in all things digital to exchange ideas and war stories from the trenches of their departments and organizations.

For my work with clients, I came to the conference interested to learn more about how people were building online and offline communities. Communities are all about relationship building, a vital tool not only needed throughout government agencies but in the B2B and B2C worlds as well. One workshop I attended, Building Online Communities for Citizen Engagement, presented by Judith Freeman, New Organizing Institute and Cammie Croft, Department of Energy opened with this Derek Sivers video, Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy which teaches some great community-building lessons about leadership, risk, momentum, tipping points and follower success.

]]> http://cupofbuzz.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/building-communities/feed/ 0 lwestell Red Community puzzle http://cupofbuzz.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/crossing-the-generational-web-2-0-divide/ http://cupofbuzz.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/crossing-the-generational-web-2-0-divide/#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 16:51:27 +0000 lwestell http://cupofbuzz.wordpress.com/?p=736 Continue reading →]]> On GovLoop a few weeks ago, there was intense reader interest and great comments surrounding this post by Andrew Krzmarzick: Are Civil Servants Too Old and Selfish for Government 2.0? In his piece, Krzmarzick, in response to Stephen Dale’s earlier blog post, ” Are Civil Servants made for Social Media?”, ponders this question, “So between these two proposed issues – government employees nearing retirement who don’t get (and don’t want to get!) social media and an entrenched bureaucratic culture that’s wired to hoard vs. wired to share information – are we fighting an uphill battle?

One thought-provoking blog post sparked yet another, (don’t you just love it?!) and Nina Ilnyckyj, a Gen Y government worker in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada put up a post, “Is butting heads necessary to incite change?” She writes about feeling frustrated trying to incite change into her organization and offers some valuable insights she learned from the process:

- Timing is important in actioning the next move in the battle. Sometimes it’s just not the right time. I have a collection of little battles, so I should press pause on one if it’s not the right time, and focus my energies on another.

- Cheerleaders are critical for success and sanity. Seek support from other colleagues and change agents. It tends to work better when a few (or more) people have your back. It works really well to lead change acting by proxy, rather than acting alone.

By way of continuing the conversation, Nina’s boss, Robin Farr, a Gen X-er, blogged a response, “The old dog, the kid and some new tricks” where she talked about the two different generational approaches to change, describing it as radical vs. realistic change.

“There are days when I feel like an old dog. A fuddy-duddy. (Yes, I actually said ‘fuddy-duddy.’Like I said, I’m feeling old.) Because despite my revolutionary bent, there are young people in our organization, Nina included, that are revolutionaries on a whole other level. They have a tendency to be radical revolutionaries while I’m more of a realistic revolutionary.”

The more things change – having your boss talk about you to the world on a blog – the more things stay the same – generational divide. As a Baby Boomer working generally with Boomers and Gen X executives on Web 2.0 efforts in a variety of workplaces, I can say that yes, there can definitely be some generational push back when it comes to putting in place web 2.0 projects and initiatives across departments, but so often it’s coming from a place of fear, misinformation and lack of knowledge, rather than just because someone younger thinks it’s a good idea. Especially with Boomers, we’re the generation of self-improvement and reinvention (see Botox, spas and Madonna) and it’s not hopeless to get us to embrace change.

A few ideas to throw into the effecting change conversation that I’ve learned along the way from working with clients and from my management coaching toolbox:

Practice active listening. When you’re sitting at a conference table and tensions are running high, instead of half-listening to the next speaker and formulating what you are going to say next, practice active listening. Defer your immediate judgment and take in – including body language – what the other person is saying. Reflect what has been said by offering feedback such as “What I’m hearing is…” and “Sounds like you are saying…”

Conflict isn’t always a bad thing. In the workplace, we try to avoid ruffling feathers, rocking the boat and all those other cliches. Our primitive, “lizard” brains are basically hardwired to avoid conflict. But the truth is successful conflict negotiation and resolution can be an opportunity to bring diverse teams together because they ARE able to have intense conversations and constructive fights while maintaining the rules of respect and focusing on common goals and a positive outcome.

Different working styles: The wired to hoard vs. share debate. I’m probably a bit unique in this department as I’ve always been a huge fan of a collaborative working style. I recently did some volunteer work with the CrisisCamp Haiti DC group, and working with volunteers in their 20s and 30s where we collaborated on tech skills and figured out together on the best ways to build digital platforms to promote information put a huge grin on my face all day.

However, not everyone is comfortable with collaboration and for many older workers, it’s often because it’s something they frankly haven’t experienced much in their many years of top-down, turf-wars work experience. I’ve found when collaboration is needed for a particular web 2.0 initiative, focusing on how it fits into the organization’s overall business strategy, frequent how-we’re-doing communication updates, as well as having as necessary, one-to-one conversations with wary participants goes a long way into creating a successful outcome.

]]> http://cupofbuzz.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/crossing-the-generational-web-2-0-divide/feed/ 0 lwestell communcation