Feed Editor Lite 28 Aug 2008 17:09:27 GMT Several websites, including this one, have published articles recently about how journalists are using Pinterest. But none of these offers data-based analyses that measure whether newsrooms are using Pinterest to engage effectively with readers. As a way of measuring engagement, follower counts are a basic metric. But knowing how critical the tweet to retweet ratio is for measuring engagement on Twitter, I sought to apply this principle to Pinterest. I wanted to compare average repin to pin ratios for a variety of local and national news organizations. So, I submitted a request to three newly launched Pinterest monitoring services. I asked each to provide a board-by-board follower comparison and repin ratios for 13 big city dailies, broadcast news and financial publications. My editor and I selected news organizations that were active on Pinterest and represented diversity in audience size, geography, niche and ownership. 30 May 2012 16:47:50 GMT http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/175476/pinterest-analysis-pbs-usa-today-engage-with-readers-most-effectively/ D7B34EE1-872E-4FE1-A251-6E4D4561EFC1 Poynter - May 30, 2012 Times of crisis tend to be times of change and often of great creativity. Warfare, plague, social and economic collapse have all given rise to significant innovation that have resulted in both intended and sometimes unintended results. There is, for example, a well-supported historical argument that links the invention of the printing press directly to the Black Death -- the plague that decimate Europe’s population by upwards of a half, depending on which sources you cite. The argument goes that the literate monks that spent their waking hours before the Black Death hunched over parchment and illuminating holy manuscripts were so lessened in number by the plague that a means had to be found to plug the gap they left. And so we see the first printing press -- and the holy books it produced. And the rest as they say, is history. 30 May 2012 16:26:15 GMT http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/175757/newspapers-muscle-and-innovation.html 0686D43B-A89B-4A00-A131-074636A87DE5 MediaPost - May 30, 2012 Netflix has agreed to change the way it retains information about customers in order to settle a class-action privacy lawsuit, according to court papers filed on Friday. The settlement, which is still awaiting approval, also requires Netflix to pay around $6.75 million to various privacy organizations and up to $2.25 million to the lawyers who sued the company. Netflix said in a February SEC filing that it had agreed to settle the privacy lawsuit for $9 million, but didn't reveal further details at the time. The agreement specifically calls for Netflix to "decouple" former customers' movie-rental history from their personal information by one year after they cancel their accounts. In the past, Netflix allegedly stored the information for up to two years after cancellation. If approved by U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila, the deal will resolve a lawsuit filed in 2011 by former customers who accused Netflix of violating the Video Privacy Protection Act. That law was enacted in 1988, after a Washington newspaper obtained and printed the movie rental records of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. The VPPA bans movie rental services from disclosing customers' records without their written consent. It requires video rental services to destroy users' personal information “as soon as practicable, but no later than one year from the date the information is no longer necessary for the purpose for which it was collected.” 30 May 2012 16:18:46 GMT http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/175728/netflix-to-revise-data-retention-practices.html 1517E59B-516D-4788-AF34-4088C72072E0 MediaPost - May 29, 2012 FOR decades, fans have been able to buy merchandise, like T-shirts and coffee mugs, inspired by their favorite television shows. Now, a show has produced products meant to be practical. Dirty Jobs, on the Discovery Channel cable network, is the inspiration for a line of cleaning products, also named Dirty Jobs, that includes a stain remover, carpet cleaners and hand sanitizers. Get tough on your dirtiest jobs, the package labels urge. The products are being marketed by a new company, My Dirty Jobs, that is licensing the Dirty Jobs name from the Discovery Channel parent, Discovery Communications. Mike Rowe, the host of Dirty Jobs, is involved, too, taking part through his company, MRW Holdings. 30 May 2012 16:16:48 GMT http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/business/media/using-dirty-products-to-clean-up.html?partner=rss&emc=rss 904E05F4-F707-43A5-84E1-7E39F8598DBC NYTimes - May 29, 2012 … And Why Outsiders Are Essential To Disruption Henry Blodget, the founder and chief editor of Business Insider, an online news company based in New York City, is notorious for his role in Wall Street’s dotcom saga, and he is becoming equally notorious for his shakeup of news reporting and traditional roles in journalism. Mr Blodget’s poster boy for the new age of new media is his deputy editor Joe Weisenthal, recently profiled in the New York Times: Joe Weisenthal vs. the 24-Hour News Cycle. The article describes a day in the life of Mr Weisenthal, which starts at 4am and runs to almost 9pm. During that day he will write about 15 posts on Business Insider, and send 150 Tweets, plus engage with readers, and much more. It’s an exhausting schedule even for the 31 year old Mr Weisenthal, who says he sometimes needs to crash for a whole day, unable to do anything but watch TV. 30 May 2012 16:06:21 GMT http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/the-rise-of-the-17-hour-journalist/2284 86462DDF-30A1-4AE9-AD2E-D4A5DB50C58F zdnet - May 29, 2012 Instagrammers are the new brand influencers. In the wake of Facebook’s purchase of the popular photo platform for a cool $1 billion, a growing number of marketers have been trading perks—cash, trips, swag—to a coterie of widely followed smartphone photographers in exchange for snapshots broadcasting products or events. Two weeks ago, for example, Barneys New York hired Anthony Danielle (@takinyerphoto, 166,000+ followers) along with other influential photographers to shoot the launch party for its new Costello Tagliapietra line. The same week Danielle was one of two high-profile Instagram users to snap and share photos promoting Warby Parker’s new summer eyewear, of which they received free samples. Meanwhile, Brian DiFeo (@bridif, 105,000+ followers), a partner of Danielle’s in The Mobile Media Lab—a marketing agency for Instagram, launched in March—was in Miami photographing the Volvo Ocean Race, with expenses covered by the auto brand. Sam Horine (@samhorine, 133,000+ followers) was also there to shoot the event. 30 May 2012 16:04:18 GMT http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/instagrammers-demand-major-brands-140792 0EDF53BE-38D3-4753-B20A-E1F9131272A6 AdWeek - May 30, 2012 Most magazine publishers may be thinking more about survival than launching new titles nowadays. But there is one growth opportunity some still see—teaming up with TV networks on new titles. On Tuesday, HGTV Magazine will officially hit newsstands. The new title is a joint effort of magazine publishing giant Hearst Corp. and Scripps Network Interactive Inc., which owns several cable channels, including HGTV and the Food Network. Like the HGTV channel, the magazine focuses on home and lifestyle, with articles on everything from home decorating to grill maintenance. With magazine advertising revenue down more than 4% in the first quarter, ... 29 May 2012 19:35:36 GMT http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304065704577428272360987282.html?mod=rss_media_marketing 939F7C3B-35CF-49A1-9108-3710CEA4F0BB WSJ - May 28, 2012 In early November, Golden and Sulzberger made the decision together to fire Robinson. Sulzberger retained Richard Edelman, a PR man he had used for crisis-management jobs in the past, in particular the Judith Miller ­contempt-of-court situation in 2005. Edelman’s team decided Robinson should be ushered out immediately, before a new leader was in place, and surmised that the impact of the news would be muted by the sale of the Times’ regional media group, which was just then being finalized. 29 May 2012 19:21:24 GMT http://nymag.com/news/features/new-york-times-2012-6/index4.html 4E071EAF-A7FD-4F4F-BCBB-3D83D5F31B81 NYMag - In the age of 140-character tweets, aggregated blog posts and throwaway slide shows, common sense says you can’t expect the Web generation’s ADD-addled minds to spend more than a few minutes with any sort of content. (They’ve even created their own acronym—“tl;dr,” or “too long; didn’t read”—to justify their disdain for anything longer than three paragraphs.) Yet somehow we’ve found ourselves in a golden age of longform journalism, with everyone from old-school print magazines to digital outlets producing extended articles. And people are actually reading them. So what gives?... 29 May 2012 18:46:51 GMT http://www.adweek.com/news/press/amid-tweets-and-slide-shows-longform-still-thrives-140796 5BB50A65-7F31-4528-A3B9-E334F80F067C AdWeek - May 28, 2012 Individual meetings with Times-Picayune employees, at which they will learn whether they have lost their jobs or will be offered new positions with the new NOLA Media Group, are set to begin in about a week — probably starting Monday, June 4 or Tuesday, June 5, according to sources with knowledge of Advance Publications' plans. Many newsroom employees spent their Memorial Day weekend updating resumes, obtaining copies of their clips, networking by telephone and social media and following job leads in New Orleans and elsewhere. At the meetings, Advance, which owns The Times-Picayune, will reportedly offer severance packages to some employees, while tendering job offers to others. Job descriptions will likely be revised, and those who receive offers to stay will likely have to reapply for the new positions within the newly created NOLA Media Group. Sources also say a number of entirely new people may be hired to contribute content to the company’s online operation, particularly in the fields of sports and entertainment, which are a big part of the plan. Sports editor Doug Tatum and features editor Mark Lorando were among those included in the off-campus meetings held in the middle of the month, when the company’s new publisher, Ricky Mathews, came in to speak to senior officials. 29 May 2012 18:43:45 GMT http://www.bestofneworleans.com/blogofneworleans/archives/2012/05/27/times-picayune-employees-to-learn-their-fates-next-week 1D29E3F5-4DE3-4E4E-86ED-86D0644ACC96 BestofNewOrleans - May 27, 2012 SAN ANGELO, Tex. — Call a reporter at the CBS television station here, and it might be an anchor for the NBC station who calls back. Or it might be the news director who runs both stations’ news operations. The stations here compete for viewers, but they cooperate in gathering the news — maintaining technically separate ownership, but sharing office space, news video and even the scripts written for their nightly news anchors. That is why viewers see the same segments on car accidents, the same interviews with local politicians, the same high school sports highlights. The same kind of sharing takes place in dozens of other cities, from Burlington, Vt., where the Fox and ABC stations sometimes share anchors, to Honolulu, where the NBC and CBS stations broadcast the same morning show. The changes have drawn the ire of critics, who charge that there are fewer and fewer journalists actually covering local news. The agreements behind this sharing are also attracting the attention of another group of viewers — federal regulators. 29 May 2012 18:41:04 GMT http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/business/media/local-tv-stations-cut-costs-by-sharing-news-operations.html?partner=rss&emc=rss E85FDCCB-2BA4-44AE-B6FE-10035F4BC6E6 NYTimes - May 28, 2012 IBM sat down to talk one-on-one with 1,700 CEO’s in 64 countries to discuss changes in how they do business. First, let’s marvel at the logistics behind that. All those busy people. All those languages. All that data. Seriously, I don’t think we appreciate the effort that goes into these things. Now, let’s move on to the results. To the right you see a chart with a surprising message. The CEO’s were asked how they engage with their customers. The top line represents where they are today, the bottom line where they expect to be in 3 to 5 years. Right now, social media came in dead last but it’s expected to climb to the second spot in the coming years. At a glance, I would say that these results relate to B2B companies, but the report doesn’t say one way or the other. I understand B2B being heavily face-to-face. I don’t see it in business to consumer. But again, the study doesn’t specify one or the other so I have to assume it’s a mix. Technology in general came up as the aspect most likely to impact business in the coming year. Their second choice was “People Skills.” It’s not well defined in the report, but I’m sure old school CEO’s are worried that technology is erasing our ability to connect one-on-one. 23 May 2012 15:45:47 GMT http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/05/study-shows-social-media-slowly-replacing-face-to-face-customer-interaction.html 309912BC-F149-47A4-9F65-C9F10190BC43 MarketingPilgrim - May 22, 2012 A whopping 90 percent of consumers now use search engines when researching products or services in their local area, according to BIA/Kelsey. Google began more aggressively serving local results in October 2010 due to the shift and growth in local search commerce by consumers and advertisers. Advertisers in turn have boosted their local marketing investment. Borrell Associates forecasts local advertising will grow to reach $19.9 billion in 2012. Some national brands have already come to realize online visibility has become the most important ingredient in their local marketing mix. Scalable, automated technology can help them overcome slower national competitors and smaller local competitors who lack marketing support, but whether they leverage automation or manually support local stores and offices, national brands should make sure to consider at least five initiatives in any local marketing effort. 23 May 2012 15:47:16 GMT http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2178879/5-Essential-Components-of-Localized-Marketing-Strategy-for-National-Brands 52856573-EC43-433A-AD72-6A00AA84E288 SearchEngineWatch - May 23, 2012 Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Molly Niendorf, content and social media manager for Emma email marketing software. If you work in content, you know that your job involves a lot more than the content you produce. If you write a blog post or publish a webinar or post a YouTube video without a coordinated content strategy in place, your content is no more than the sum of its parts. In fact, it’s probably less. Author of Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson defines content strategy as the practice of planning for the creation, delivery and governance of useful, usable content. It’s a helpful definition, and it’s worth exploring. Useful: does your content support a business objective? Usable: does it actually help a user complete a task or solve a problem? Even just focusing on those two goals goes a long way toward effective content. (By the way, If you haven’t read Content Strategy for the Web, get your hands on it. The second edition just came out. Yay!) You may have a pitch-perfect content strategy in place and a well-oiled content machine (with dutiful content worker bees who deliver the content honey on call) and no competing departmental needs to navigate. (If you do, please call me from utopia.) If your company is on earth, you probably have a working strategy, lots of contingencies to manage and a changing product schedule — and the need to reassess and reformulate your plans often. 23 May 2012 15:40:33 GMT http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/digital-marketing/everything-you-need-to-know-about-content-strategy-you-learned-from-childrens-books/ F156F98E-BDD6-4D2B-895B-761A49845110 SocialMediaExplorer - May 22, 2012 Patch.com, a network of small-town news sites owned by AOL Inc., has emerged at the center of a tug of war over the Internet company's future. The high cost of running the local-news sites has fueled a campaign by dissident investor Starboard Value LP against AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong's strategy of investing heavily in online content. Starboard, which is waging a proxy battle to win several seats on AOL's board at next month's annual meeting, says that Patch should be closed, sold or put into a joint venture, with a partner sharing the cost. Inside AOL, Patch is also a flash point. Arianna Huffington, who took charge of Patch and AOL's other news and entertainment sites after AOL acquired her Huffington Post last year, distanced herself from the business after disagreements over how it should be run. "They wouldn't let Arianna fix it, so she walked away from it," said one media executive familiar with the matter. 23 May 2012 15:31:33 GMT http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303610504577420193866895860.html?mod=rss_media_marketing 5F8BE90C-2361-4B9C-A414-965490C62C48 WSJ.com - May 22, 2012 Facebook shareholders have filed a lawsuit against the social network, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and a number of banks, alleging that crucial information was concealed ahead of Facebook's IPO. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan this morning, charges the defendants with failing to disclose in the critical days leading up to Friday's initial public offering "a severe and pronounced reduction" in forecasts for Facebook's revenue growth, according to Reuters, which cited a law firm for the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs charge that the changes to the forecast by several underwriters of the IPO were only "selectively disclosed" to a small group of preferred investors and not to the investment community at large. "The value of Facebook common stock has declined substantially and plaintiffs and the class have sustained damages as a result," the complaint says, per the Reuters report. Facebook's stock opened Friday priced at $38 and, aside from a slight uptick right at the start, has been trading lower since then. It closed at $31 last night. At the moment, in early trading today, shares are up slightly to around $31.70. A report from well-known Wall Street watcher Henry Blodget, citing a source, posits that a Facebook executive was responsible for telling institutional investors, but not smaller investors, about the reduction in revenue estimates. Speaking on CBS This Morning today, Blodget described the sequence of events regarding the estimates and the failure to fully share material information. "The fact that it was only distributed verbally to a handful of institutions as opposed to all investors is a problem." More to come 23 May 2012 15:29:38 GMT http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57439918-93/facebook-zuckerberg-sued-over-ipo/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title 1A591D27-96D2-4B17-A893-B3DF7DF5EB44 CNet - May 23, 2012 Sometimes the Internet is a creepy place. There are identity thieves, stalkers and people generally trying to take advantage of you. At least that was one of the things that I took away from a privacy conference last week in Seattle, where the word “creepy” slipped into the conversation as a description of everything from location-based services to more cutting edge Internet businesses. But advocates argued that the cure for creepy was to make services relevant and useful — not spammy and invasive. In other words, consumers are willing to share their information — age, gender, location — if there’s a benefit to them. 23 May 2012 15:28:18 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120522/privacy-experts-weigh-in-on-whether-there-is-a-cure-for-creepy-video/ 3181FB39-FEB4-4808-A8D1-E6B138F64FE5 AllThingsD - May 22, 2012 Google has announced a new AdWords feature promising to provide advertisers with more transparency into the ad auction. The ad auction is the process by which Google determines the cost per click (CPC) amount an advertiser will pay for a click on their ad. Every time a query is made on Google, they run an auction. This auction determines the ads that will appear, the ad’s position, and the CPC that is paid. For years advertisers have struggled to understand how the auction process works and have asked for more insights into the auction to help optimize for better performance. Currently Google provides competitive reports at category level (in the Opportunities tab) and impression share data, but now they will offer information to show how advertisers are performing in comparison to other advertisers who compete in the same set of auctions. The new Auction Insights report answers the question about who competes in a given auction. It shows the display URL domain of the advertiser who is your competitor in that auction. The report provides data at the keyword-level and, for now, can only be generated for a single keyword at one time. Data is also only available for keywords that meet a minimum threshold of activity for the specified time period. It provides five different statistics: impression share, average position, overlap rate, position above rate, and top of page percent. 22 May 2012 17:07:08 GMT http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2178493/Google-AdWords-Auction-Insights-Reveals-Who-Youre-Competing-Against 93EDD0D9-ECCE-449B-B153-9E1A85BFD2B3 SearchEngineWatch - May 22, 2012 BOSTON — The head of one of the country’s biggest cable companies voiced his disapproval of the Dish Network’s ad-erasing technology on Monday, aligning himself with television networks that are trying to squash the technology, called Auto Hop. Glenn Britt, the chief executive of Time Warner Cable, said Monday that something like Auto Hop could damage the existing ecosystem of television programming and distribution, which depends in part on advertising revenues and in part on subscriber revenues. “I don’t think we want to destroy one of those revenue streams,” Mr. Britt said at a cable industry conference here. 22 May 2012 16:39:32 GMT http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/time-warner-cable-head-sides-with-tv-networks-over-ad-erasing-technology/ 8462561E-233D-46AA-A8F8-AB3A395CB4F6 NYT - May 21, 2012 In a promotional trailer for ABC's coming drama "666 Park Avenue" set in a Manhattan apartment building, walls swallow people, bright red blood swirls down a sink drain and at one point a terrified looking woman who has just moved in asks her boyfriend: "Are we going to be ok here?" That's a question TV executives may be asking themselves after broadcast networks unveiled a total of about a half dozen similarly dark-tinged dramas last week at the annual TV "upfront" sales presentations for advertisers. Such shows have thrived on cable channels like AMC and FX lately (think "The Walking Dead"). But there is no guarantee the mass audiences that tune into broadcast networks—or their advertisers—will be as enthusiastic. "There is a huge risk in drama," admits Jennifer Salke, president of NBC Entertainment. Three of its 12 new scripted series scheduled for next season possess a kind of eeriness, including "Do No Harm," about a good-looking doctor with a violent alter ego and "Hannibal," about a serial killer. Having lagged behind the other three networks—Walt Disney Co.'s ABC, News Corp .'s Fox and CBS Corp.'s CBS—in recent years, Ms. Salke said NBC was willing to take more chances. "How do you make an original cop or hospital show?" she said. "That's why you find yourself leaning into big ideas that are often complex and dark." But Comcast Corp.'s NBC isn't alone. With the exception of ratings leader CBS, all three major broadcast networks showed up with one or more new dramas bearing a similar sensibility—a roiling human terror that is sometimes uncomfortable, and at other times thrilling. 22 May 2012 16:24:32 GMT http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303879604577412681607801106.html?mod=rss_media_marketing BD7C1778-39D0-456C-911F-D050CA431DC9 WSJ - May 20, 2012 The Guardian's online noticeboard project n0tice has today launched an open journalism toolkit. The site has opened its API and content posted on n0tice can now be integrated into a digital news organisation's content management system. The free toolkit promises a host of features that can be utilised by news sites, including the ability to create crowdmaps based on information posted on n0tice. The Guardian has already done this by using n0tice to crowdmap the Olympic torch relay. There are several other examples, including Britain's best bike rides. 22 May 2012 16:18:34 GMT http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/guardian-n0tice-launches-open-journalism-toolkit/s2/a549336/ 701D8A52-C0D5-4BE3-A357-671C63B09F32 Journalism.co.uk - May 22, 2012 “TV Everywhere” is supposed to let the traditional TV business hang on to the status quo, by promising viewers they can watch whatever they want, whenever they want it. As long as they keep paying for TV. But even if consumers go for that deal, the TV guys need to make sure that advertisers buy in, too. And that won’t happen until the TV guys can get some basic stuff right. Like counting eyeballs, no matter where they watch a show. 22 May 2012 16:14:31 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120522/tv-everywheres-counting-problem/ B0837DE9-50E8-4870-B19D-52F5DC3C0634 AllThingsD - May 22, 2012 Potential victims receive emails, supposedly from Facebook, which read: Hi [email address] We are sending you this email to inform you that we have received an account cancellation request from you. Please follow the link below to confirm or cancel this request. Thanks, The Facebook Team To confirm or cancel this request, follow the link below: Click here 22 May 2012 16:13:14 GMT http://allfacebook.com/warning-malware-poses-as-facebook-account-cancellation-email_b89581 C54DEF6E-034D-4BC7-B165-204B59F0283B AllFacebook - May 22, 2012 Facebook has been quietly rolling out updates to its iPhone application, releasing its new Pages Manager iPhone app for page administrators in the U.S. with no announcement, and tweaking the news feed in the iPhone app to look more like timeline. Pages Manager, which debuted in New Zealand last week, allows page administrators to manage their pages via the Apple mobile devices, functioning just like the Facebook app for users, but adding page-specific features such as access to insights. Ticular Principal Ulrike Ruppelt alerted us that Facebook for the iPhone is prompting users with pages to download “the new Pages Manager” from the App Store. 22 May 2012 16:11:53 GMT http://allfacebook.com/pages-manager-iphone-news-feed_b89596 632398AC-C725-4727-BE15-DB5C55CDC64F AllFacebook - May 22, 2012 In what appears to be a trend in the making, large media companies increasingly are investing in or acquiring independent producers of online video content. Cable TV giant Turner Broadcasting Wednesday struck a strategic partnership with Funny or Die that links the online comedy site’s content with Turner’s TBS and Adult Swim TV properties, along with select Turner digital outlets. Under terms of the deal, Turner will take a 10% stake in Funny or Die, and Turner Digital Sales will also handle all ad sales exclusively for Funny or Die. Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/174918/big-media-finds-online-vid-nothing-to-laugh-at-tu.html#ixzz1vbnP3shH 18 May 2012 15:24:50 GMT http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/174918/big-media-finds-online-vid-nothing-to-laugh-at-tu.html 9302A7F7-C51D-4F75-80F6-758EA01ED191 MediaPost - May 17, 2012 There’s a popular maxim in Silicon Valley: Find your user base and the revenues will come later. For a while, it seemed to be the easiest way for a founder to explain his or her way out of a proper business model. But with Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of the entirely revenue-free Instagram, that adage now carries more weight than ever. Enter Viddy and Socialcam, two of the hottest start-up apps, both of which have the buzz of being the “Instagram for video.” The pair have exploded in popularity over the past few months, with each garnering user bases in the tens of millions seemingly overnight. But the growth of one of these apps is not like the other. Using a combination of fortunate timing, Facebook’s Open Graph influence and a new way of playing the system, Socialcam has effectively gamed Facebook, YouTube and the App Store to keep a strong grip on that ever-so-valuable user base. In the short term, at least, the three-man Socialcam start-up team has discovered a method to beat the 20-plus person outfit that is Viddy. 17 May 2012 15:18:18 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120516/socialcam-facebook-viddy/ 62341994-02E4-4A79-99E1-BA18E9F0CD6A AllThingsD - May 16, 2012 Google Inc. recently tweaked the way its search engine ranks websites, seeking to downplay sites it suspects of artificially boosting their rankings. Now some small businesses say they are scrambling to avoid being relegated to the Internet's junk bin. Among them is Andrew Strauss, the 47-year-old co-owner of San Francisco-based Oh My Dog Supplies LLC. 17 May 2012 15:16:21 GMT http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303505504577406751747002494.html D0A5B5F6-09B1-4C59-8157-DD7C4BF87E0C WSJ - May 16, 2012 In what appears to be a trend in the making, large media companies increasingly are investing in or acquiring independent producers of online video content. Cable TV giant Turner Broadcasting Wednesday struck a strategic partnership with Funny or Die that links the online comedy site’s content with Turner’s TBS and Adult Swim TV properties, along with select Turner digital outlets. Under terms of the deal, Turner will take a 10% stake in Funny or Die, and Turner Digital Sales will also handle all ad sales exclusively for Funny or Die. The deal marked the second time this month that a big, traditional media company invested in an online video producer, and the third time reports had surfaced about such deals being explored. Two weeks ago, Discovery Communications acquired the niche-focused Internet video network Revision3. A few days later, Web giant Google began talks to acquire a stake in YouTube video game content creator Machinima. Executives from both companies touted the partnership’s appeal to advertisers in particular. 17 May 2012 18:42:48 GMT http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/174918/big-media-finds-online-vid-nothing-to-laugh-at-tu.html 4DC3B6A1-F588-4328-8C83-26F6A112FA79 MediaPost - May 17, 2012 Just because something is new doesn't make it good. Ketchum's 2012 Digital Living Index affirms that. A survey of 6,000 people in six countries found that most respondents want technology to be easy to use and/or simplify their lives. More than three-fourths of respondents said they don't think technology is simplifying anything. "There is a 25 percentage point gap—one of the biggest in the study—between what consumers expect from personal technology ... 14 May 2012 15:19:16 GMT http://www.ragan.com/Main/Articles/44863.aspx 7CFE8680-F485-4890-84CB-2A1604926838 Ragan.com - May 10, 2012 Do you remember when phones couldn’t do anything but make phone calls? With every passing month, we’re adding more and more functionality to our mobile phones and it’s good for everybody’s business. Games, shopping, directions, news — we can even have our phones nag us when we forget to do something. About the only thing our phones can’t do is transport us to another location. . . someday. . . someday. In the meantime, it’s apps that are occupying our mobile minutes. 82% of our media time is spent with these mini-programs and there’s no end in sight. comScore put together a list of the top apps and I have to say, I was surprised by a few of them. Take a look. 9 May 2012 17:22:53 GMT http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/05/apps-take-up-4-out-of-every-5-mobile-media-minutes.html 7D14413F-76AC-4C10-AB9A-3B5CA98324AA MarketingPilgrim - May 8, 2012 If you have ever dealt with Google Places in any way you know how it can a maddening experience. As soon as there seems to be a semblance of calm and normality there is a sudden suspension of a listing, or a merge of two listings happens or Google just decides to replace your data with “new” data it dredged up from a data warehouse. Many local marketers and SEO professionals are likely to be cringing right now as they recall a moment from the past when that type of occurrence was all too present. Sorry about that ;-) . Well, Google is at least trying to help businesses with at least 10 locations (considered the low end limit) by introducing a new bulk upload tool. It’s best for you to watch the tutorials that Google has prepared and posted on their Small Business blog First, this tutorial are for those who are new users: 9 May 2012 17:17:14 GMT http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/05/google-places-unveils-new-tool-to-manage-bulk-listings.html 57C64857-4A45-4504-A06D-B2AF490E7EE0 MarketingPilgrim - May 9, 2012 The iPhone has had a great impact on the lives of visually-impaired users. Although the flat-screen lacks buttons and means relying on audio cues, a number of its apps and the accessibility feature provide useful functions and can help the blind find their way around independently. There is an interesting article on The Atlantic about this subject: Blind people use their iPhones slightly different than the sighted because, well, they can’t see what they’re tapping on. So instead of pressing down and opening up an app, they can press anywhere on the screen and hear where their finger is. If it’s where they want to be, they can double-tap to enter. If it isn’t, they’ll flick their finger to the right, to the left, towards the top or the bottom, to navigate themselves. The same for the simple “slide to unlock” command. 9 May 2012 17:12:38 GMT http://www.psfk.com/2012/05/blind-using-the-iphone.html FD510324-ADCF-4AF7-9A8B-002959CFFD85 PSFK - May 9, 2012 If the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that people are really into anthropomorphized cats. They’re good for a chuckle, sure, but their popularity gets at the more interesting question of why and how we share online, and what that means for the changing ways in which we engage with all kinds of information, from lolcats to hard news. Self-described Internet culture connoisseur Ben Huh is probably best known as CEO of Cheezburger, the hub for sites like I Can Has Cheezburger, FAIL blog, and Know Your Meme. He’s also a co-founder and board member of the hyped startup Circa, which bills itself as “news, re-imagined,” but has so far kept quiet about how it’s doing the re-imagining. (The site’s expected to formally launch this summer.) For now, there’s this, from its landing page: “Our vision is to create the best possible news experience by optimizing for truths, encouraging diversity, and empowering readers.” 9 May 2012 16:56:19 GMT http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/05/cheezburgers-ben-huh-says-news-organizations-should-think-like-teenagers-if-they-want-to-survive/ 6C2639C6-596A-4680-A91C-79415C693410 NiemanLab - May 8, 2012 Losses at OWN, Oprah Winfrey’s struggling cable channel, contributed to a lower-than-expected first-quarter profit at Discovery Communications, the media company that owns half of OWN and a dozen cable channels in the United States. The company on Tuesday reported net income in the first quarter of $221 million, or 57 cents a share, down from $305 million, or 74 cents a share, in the same quarter last year. Analysts had expected 60 cents a share. The decline was attributed in part to Discovery’s one-time gain last year when it contributed the Discovery Health channel to its joint venture with Ms. Winfrey for OWN, which was started on Jan. 1, 2011. Excluding the one-time gain, net income would have risen 8.9 percent versus the same quarter last year. 9 May 2012 16:47:10 GMT http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/struggles-at-oprahs-network-drag-down-discoverys-results/ F7C22FE3-D162-401C-B58C-34AF061841B8 NYTimes - May 8, 2012 We weren’t sure about this one at first, but now we have two independent sources confirming that AOL is exploring the sale of its cornerstone technology sites Engadget and TechCrunch. The two would likely be sold together as AOL Tech, possibly including smaller assets like TUAW and Joystiq. The asking price? A hefty $70 million to $100 million. AOL is hoping to make something off the drama of the past couple of years: $70 million would net the struggling Internet company about $10 million profit on what AOL originally paid for both TechCrunch and Engadget’s original parent Weblogs Inc. According to one source, AOL management has been seriously considering the move since early this year. The news also sheds light on why Arianna Huffington was so relaxed about relinquishing responsibility for the division last month, according to reports. Possibly acknowledging that finding a buyer might take time, the company will be evaluating the potential sale over the next six months to a year. That said, we’re told AOL management would prefer to move quicker if the right deal came in the door. 9 May 2012 16:42:22 GMT http://pandodaily.com/2012/05/08/sources-say-aol-seeking-buyers-for-engadget-and-techcrunch-arrington-not-in-the-least-bit-interested/ F649925A-2FFD-4473-B37B-499AE9B5544B PandoDaily - May 8, 2012 Though the business of mobile advertising is often criticized for its low prices and minimal revenue, not to mention the awkwardness of cramming ads on a small screen, Google CFO Patrick Pichette thinks it won’t always be that way. “I am convinced that the margins on mobile have to be higher than on desktop,” Pichette said today, speaking at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Technology Conference in San Francisco. Factors like proximity targeting, local offers and mobile payments should make mobile ads in many categories more valuable, Pichette said. “The premise that mobile has to be a lower CPC [cost per click] because today it’s a lower CPC doesn’t make sense.” Plus, Google got into mobile ahead of its competitors, Pichette claimed, citing its investment in Android. “We decided to go mobile five years ago, not last month,” he said — which could have been a reference to Facebook’s new mobile advertising plans, which only came out in February after it filed to go public. 9 May 2012 16:31:37 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120508/google-cfo-patrick-pichette-i-dont-get-why-people-think-mobile-ads-are-worth-less/ 13A82574-166E-4C6E-A1C9-23B562E66022 AllThingsD - May 8, 2012 Of the many avenues to advertise online, Facebook is one surefire way to get your brand out to a growing public and get people talking. From corporations to personal brands, Facebook presents pages as a way for people to discuss their mutual interests, and the social network allows the owner of the page to see what the chatter is all about. More likes should mean more business, right? This isn’t always the case. Many publicity-seekers will “buy” likes on Facebook to build their credibility as the volume of people who have liked their page grows. But what’s the real reason for having so many likes on your page, or so many fans following you? The ultimate goal is for business to be booming. The problem with buying fans or coercing someone to like your page without actual interest is that a large number of fans doesn’t necessarily equate to profit, especially when you have to pull teeth for them to view your page. Paid fans aren’t interested in buying what you have to offer, and they won’t interact with your fan page — because they simply don’t care. Buying fans should be avoided because it’s a waste of time and money. Although it may make you look more credible, it won’t matter when trying to turn a profit. 9 May 2012 16:29:32 GMT http://allfacebook.com/customers-not-friends_b88297 409F9206-E46E-4481-B0C5-E6094C8B9522 AllFacebook - May 8, 2012 Samantha Swindler, then 27, had been managing editor of the Corbin (Ky.) Times-Tribune for about three years when she asked 20-year-old Adam Sulfridge to report on a corrupt sheriff, Lawrence Hodge, who was involved in trading guns, drugs and favors. At the time, Sulfridge was a local college sophomore “whose only experience was working on his high school newspaper.” Swindler told “60 Minutes”‘ Byron Pitts she hired Sulfridge because, “He was smart, he knew about the community, and he cared about local government.” Sulfridge also had a personal stake in the story: his aunt had overdosed. “My first question was, I wonder if she got her drugs from somebody that the sheriff was protecting.” “Our investigation into the sheriff started with a joke — literally,” Swindler wrote about the reporting last year. “I heard our sportswriter joke about people buying guns out of the back of the sheriff’s barbershop.” Sulfridge wasn’t the first reporter Swindler assigned to the story: “I had to go through three different reporters before I found one who could really work on this with me because it was really hard to find somebody who wanted to do all the research involved,” she said during an interview at her alma mater, Boston University, last year. 8 May 2012 16:23:26 GMT http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/172893/how-2-twentysomething-journalists-brought-down-a-corrupt-kentucky-sheriff/ D6429E3F-A303-4D8A-B1DD-E1EC0033D538 Poynter - May 7, 2012 “If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” the famously intimidating editors of the old City News Bureau in Chicago once barked at rookie reporters and future boldface names like Kurt Vonnegut, Seymour Hersh and Mike Royko. But today, it’s not just mom’s love that news organizations must verify. In their quest to be the most authoritative, most trusted sources of information, they must contend with a fire hose of real and imagined news, analysis, debate, speculation, rumor, opinion and downright fallacy gushing from all manner of sources—veteran journalists, self-styled investigators, guerrilla marketers, politicized talking heads, bloggers, flacks and Hollywood celebrities. All are disseminating content and jockeying for attention by way of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, news sites, blogs, hyperlocal online destinations and what have come to be known as “legacy media,” those newspapers and broadcast outlets that were once the unchallenged arbiters of what was or was not news. 8 May 2012 16:17:48 GMT http://www.adweek.com/news/press/fill-blank-we-trust-140057 09EB5A88-A45D-4AE5-92A4-A0738C70553D AdWeek - May 8, 2012 We have been working on a couple of interesting start-up ideas at Urbane Media that have mushroomed into companies. The idea stage is much safer, in that we can vacillate for hours on end about this and that. It makes us feel good. It is exciting to talk about our ideas. Actually launching your idea is a bit scarier because the stakes are higher. It is no longer just verbal masturbation, you have likely plunked down some dough to get started, either yours or someone else’s. Must Do One of our Must Do Exercises with our companies that we own and operate is to create a new value curve. We spend a lot of time on the following four questions: A New Value Curve 1. Reduce - Which factors should be reduced well below the industry standard 2. Create - Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered 3. Raise - Which factors should be raised well above the industry standard 4. Eliminate - Which of the factors that the industry take for granted should be eliminated 8 May 2012 15:32:26 GMT http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/people-buy-the-why/ A5CB9142-0878-4B74-9ECA-38EF2CEF55BC SocialMediaExplorer - May 8, 2012 The spread of smartphones and mobile Web access has made it more common than ever for people to get information quickly or make plans while on the go. A new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds nearly two-thirds (62%) of U.S. adults, and 86% of smartphone owners, are turning to their devices for “just-in-time” help. Among the activities they are pursuing on their phones in the past 30 days: -Coordinate a meeting or get-together (41%) -Solve an unexpected problem that they or someone else had encountered (35%) -Decide whether to visit a business, such as a restaurant (30%) -Find information to help settle an argument they were having (27%) -Look up a score of a sporting event (23%) -Get up-to-the-minute traffic or public transit information to find the fastest way to get somewhere (20%) 8 May 2012 15:31:05 GMT http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/174095/pew-most-americans-just-in-time-cell-phone-user.html 1FEFE471-6517-4BC2-A937-E02284E773AB MediaPost - May 7, 2012 As an IT community we are still stuck in the past relative to the strategic nature of cloud. Many of us are looking at the adoption of cloud as just another technology, and are leaving the decisions on how to adopt, own, and manage the cloud up to engineers. But acquiring a cloud management platform is not an engineering decision — it’s a strategic one. Do engineers need to be involved? Yes, but your cloud adoption strategy has already failed if you don’t treat cloud as the operational construct that it is. I wrote “Cloud management, what’s the big deal” a little over a year ago and the good news is many more of us now at least acknowledge the need for robust management tools. The problem is, we still think of them as “tools”. Cloud management isn’t just a pretty wrapper that you put on top of virtualization to make it easier to use, and it’s not a few scripts that automate builds or scaling functions. Cloud management is a platform that allows the cloud(s) owner to express their company’s directives and policies effectively and safely onto their myriad technology solutions and across international borders. 7 May 2012 14:34:53 GMT http://gigaom.com/cloud/cloud-is-a-corporate-strategy-not-a-tactical-solution/ D739DC4B-EB36-493E-8831-AEEB0E6C9F94 GigaOm - May 6, 2012 In a move reminiscent of Facebook’s revamped timeline pages, Foursquare rolled out an expanded check-in history page on Friday. Users can now sort through their past locations visited via the Web interface, and can also filter the search history based on who they were with and the type of establishments visited. 7 May 2012 14:19:45 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120504/foursquare-rolls-out-searchable-user-history-pages/ 04B4BC36-ABA3-452B-B6A1-3913CC143CFC AllThingsD - May 4, 2012 Here's that Belgian commercial from an organization called Responsible Young Drivers that urges young people to not text and drive by forcing them to text and drive. Seemingly under the guise of an new official policy, drivers are given a road test to see if they are able to text and drive. Of course, they are not and deliver the "don't text and drive" message all on their own. Here's my question though. The work works on its own. But watch carefully at 1:36. Prior to 1:36, the instructor is wearing his seatbelt. After 1:36, he is wearing his seatbelt. But at 2:14 he is not and goes flying into the dashboard. Why the need for the added (fake) drama? That said, we think the ad is more effective that all those scare tactic, crash-centric ads that don't resonate because it's too easy to realize they are over the top drmatizations that would "never happen to me." 7 May 2012 14:15:24 GMT http://www.adrants.com/2012/05/no-really-we-want-you-to-text-and-drive.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+adrants+%28Adrants%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher 380BE364-743C-41BD-A372-0F110F563FC1 Adrants - May 7, 2012 You see those ads about big companies cleaning up oil spills and ads about huge firms taking steps to “go green.” But do you believe them? Not really. Results from the third annual “Gibbs & Soell Sense & Sustainability Study” show despite news coverage on corporations going green, most consumers are still highly skeptical of corporate commitment to the environment. But they are still intrigued. “Sense & Sustainability” shows only 21 percent of Americans believe corporations are truly good stewards of the Earth. But 71 percent of consumers and 70 percent of executives say they are interested in learning what companies are doing in terms of sustainability. 4 May 2012 15:36:10 GMT http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/not-all-green-news-is-good-news-americans-say_b37457 99237336-49D3-418E-B7DF-59223B422776 MediaBistro - May 3, 2012 LinkedIn just announced that it will be acquiring SlideShare, the site where companies share PowerPoint presentation, videos, and other documents, for $118.75 million — 45 percent in cash and about 55 percent in stock. According to the press release, users have uploaded more than nine million presentations on SlideShare and the site had more than 29 million unique visitors in March. LinkedIn has 161 million members around the world. “Presentations are one of the main ways in which professionals capture and share their experiences and knowledge, which in turn helps shape their professional identity,” said Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO. This, he added, aligns the two companies on a similar mission help LinkedIn members in their professional endeavors. 4 May 2012 15:33:56 GMT http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/linkedin-slideshare_b37469 BF3E5942-FD78-490B-98DB-90FC0648EECA Mediabistro - May 3, 2012 We knew that shares in People’s Daily Online (SHA:603000), China’s government-backed news website, were hot, but apparently they’re a little too hot to handle. The stocks were suspended in morning trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange today after excessive trading had pushed its price up by just over 100 percent from its initial listing at 20 RMB per share last Friday. It is currently at 40.5 RMB, and has now resumed action in the afternoon. 4 May 2012 15:11:57 GMT http://paidcontent.org/2012/05/03/peoples-daily-online-shares-suspended-after-excessive-trading/ 593412B0-0311-4080-B010-60AB434A8CCA PaidContent.org - May 3, 2012 Apple’s sweeping intellectual property battle with Samsung is scheduled for trial this summer, but if the companies want to keep the July 30 court date, they’re going to have to pare down their claims against each other. Judge Lucy Koh of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California this week ordered both companies to reduce the size of the sprawling case to make it more manageable for the jury. Understandable, considering the case involves 16 patents, six trademarks, five “trade dress” claims and antitrust allegations spread across 37 products. 4 May 2012 15:09:19 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120503/judge-to-apple-samsung-wont-you-please-think-of-the-jurors/ EBF38050-944E-4997-BC38-AE33C34E05B1 AllThingsD - May 3, 2012 This video infographic from Florida ad agency MDG Advertising shows how brands can leverage the popular sharing site Pinterest. It reveals that the social site attracts highly coveted markets, as 60% of users are female and 80% are aged 25-54, plus it drives more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined. The video also shows which brands are already taking advantage of the pinboard phenomenon, and how companies can leverage Pinterest for maximum response and referral traffic. You can watch ‘A Marketer’s Guide to Pinterest’ below: 4 May 2012 14:58:17 GMT http://www.psfk.com/2012/05/marketing-guide-pinterest.html FBAADEA2-7D32-4337-B6F7-62A644189F87 PSFK.com - May 4, 2012 IKEA is making its move into the mobile shopping game by piloting a new app in Canada that aims to enhance the customer experience. It brings store information right to their fingertips, enabling them to browse IKEA’s range of furnishings and items, check stock availability and product information. The app also enables customers to create shopping lists that include the product’s location for pick-up, and there is a map to make navigating through the store easier. The IKEA Mobile Shopping app is available for iPhone and Android devices in both French and English. Kerri Molinaro, president of IKEA Canada, said: We recognize that smartphones are changing consumer behavior and our customers are increasingly relying on their mobile phones to get the information they need. Ten per cent of all traffic to the IKEA.com websites in March 2012 was from a mobile, which translates into an annual increase of 250%. 4 May 2012 14:57:08 GMT http://www.psfk.com/2012/05/ikea-shopping-app.html 72DCD9D3-97BF-49C4-8805-7D1BDD32E937 PSFK.com - May 4, 2012 Despite the continuing shift from print to online media over the past several years, most Americans still like to read the newspaper away from their computers. Sixty-six percent (66%) of American Adults say they prefer reading a printed version of the newspaper, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Twenty-eight percent (28%) like reading the online version of their preferred paper instead. (To see survey question wording, click here.) The national survey of 1,000 Adults nationwide was conducted April 27-28, 2012 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology. 2 May 2012 14:41:17 GMT http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/general_lifestyle/april_2012/66_prefer_reading_print_newspaper_to_online_version 671BD944-9759-4453-ABE2-45470C54B0FC asmussenreports.com - April 30, 2012 Brad Ruffino stood in a gravel parking lot just before daybreak Tuesday, waiting for his only means of income. Soon, two SUVs pulled up to the Army Navy Surplus Market, at 1312 N. Tampa St., hauling the latest edition of Tampa Epoch, a newspaper covering homeless issues that is sold by the homeless. Ruffino picked up 20 copies of the May issue, hoping for a better month than the last. "It's been very slow," Ruffino, 55, said. "I made only $4 yesterday. There's good days and bad days." Epoch's new publisher said he and his staff will keep working to ensure the city's homeless have a viable means of earning money. "We want to help people get food, get toiletries, with the papers they sell every month," Steven Sapp said. "That's what brought me aboard to help Bill out." 2 May 2012 14:37:32 GMT http://www2.tbo.com/news/business/2012/may/01/epoch-homeless-newspaper-going-strong-despite-foun-ar-398611/ 65E1718A-B590-4617-BEBD-2144862E9E7E TBO.com - May 1, 2012 We in advertising tend to snub our noses at affiliate marketing and label it something engaged in by scammers who work home alone in their underwear. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. In this Future of Publishing episode, host Oliver Roup of VigLink continues his interview with Bret Grow, Phillip Kidwell, and Gary Warnes. Oliver and the three affiliate marketing experts go in depth about the future of affiliate marketing from the publisher's and advertiser's perspective. It's not anything you should ignore any longer. 2 May 2012 14:30:07 GMT http://www.adrants.com/2012/04/it-might-make-you-yawn-but-you-should.php 014691D7-CEC4-41DC-BF11-166B6D03D33A Adrants - April 30, 2012 “GMA” anchor Robin Roberts, sporting a hoodie for the occasion, spoke with Zuckerberg at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., announcing that users of the social network in the U.S. and U.K. can indicate that they are organ donors in the health and wellness section on their timelines. Those users who are not already organ donors but interested in investigating the option will find links to official organ-donation registries. 2 May 2012 14:28:31 GMT http://allfacebook.com/organ-donation_b87500 79B8B5D0-3E86-4BED-AF47-4C5FC6A34921 AllFacebook - May 1, 2012 At first blush, a Kenneth Cole billboard perched above the West Side Highway looked like an ordinary ad for a red blazer. But the accompanying text—"Shouldn't everyone be well red?" and a less-than-subtle tagline underneath, "Teachers' rights vs. students' rights"—was anything but innocuous. On Monday, the company removed the billboard after it drew the ire of labor leaders and public-education activists, such as Diane Ravitch, who interpreted it as an insulting jibe at teacher rights. An online petition protesting the billboard garnered hundreds of names. 2 May 2012 14:27:07 GMT http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303916904577376573731056932.html 874AA73F-43D6-41F0-B127-8712B9DB38E0 WSJ - April 30, 2012 The same consumers who delight in navigating the iPad still click frustratingly through cable channels to find a basketball game. Their complaint: Why can’t television be more like a tablet? The technology industry is trying to address that question for the millions of customers ready to embrace the next generation of viewing options. In the process it could transform the clunky cable interface, with its thousands of channels and a bricklike remote control, into a series of apps that pop up on the television screen. 2 May 2012 14:25:08 GMT http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/28/business/media/developers-are-working-on-television-apps-but-tv-industry-is-wary.html 8EAB1033-FF9F-4463-BB51-06AAEDE4F2DD NYTimes - April 27, 2012 Last Tuesday, Buzz Bissinger hopped the Amtrak train to Philadelphia from New York, where he had done a bit of publicity for “After Friday Night Lights,” a 12,000-word e-book that had been performing nicely since its release. But when he opened his laptop to check his ranking on Amazon, he found the book was no longer for sale there. “I was stunned,” he said in a phone interview on Friday. “I thought it was some kind of technical difficulty.” (I had noticed a lot of people on Twitter shared his confusion.) Depending on how you define it, he was right. Mr. Bissinger, the best-selling author of multiple books, including “Friday Night Lights,” had written the e-book as a postscript for the popular book about high school football in Texas. “After Friday Night Lights” traces his relationship with Boobie Miles, a running back whose football career was derailed by an injury and who has been on a hard road ever since. 2 May 2012 14:23:15 GMT http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/business/media/byliner-takes-buzz-bissingers-e-book-off-amazon.html?_r=1 86085E19-12B2-4574-AD63-2C0130266044 NYTimes - April 29, 2012 OL on Tuesday launched AOL On, a hub for online video content that will feature 14 content channels and centralize all AOL video in one place. The company made the announcement at the Digital Content NewFront, the equivalent of the television upfronts for online video companies. AOL will launch channels for food, business, entertainment and other topics, hoping to draw millions of viewers and lure the extra advertising dollars one gets for video content. “AOL is a brand company,” CEO Tim Armstrong said in a statement. “With the launch of AOL On we are bringing people closer to the things that matter while helping them discover and share the stories and information that color their lives.” While making the announcement, AOL also unveiled seven original shows, including “Fetching” from Amy Harris (“Sex and the City”) and “Digital Justice,” a weekly reality show about Internet crimes. 25 Apr 2012 16:56:57 GMT http://www.thewrap.com/media/article/aol-launches-online-video-platform-aol-announces-7-new-shows-37271 D85E6090-8A9B-4F7B-A506-6933EE0647B7 TheWrap - April 24, 2012 The coolest thing has been happening lately, and it’s making me feel really special. Suddenly I know people who are in ads. And not just any ad – major, national brands. I feel like I’m brushing with celebrity – and yet, these people aren’t traditional celebrities, they’re bloggers. And they happen to be friends of mine. There is an escalating trend for brands to feature bloggers, mainly parenting/lifestyle bloggers (formerly known as mom bloggers – a term you all know I hate), in print and even some television ads. I think this is insanely cool, and not just because I know these people. It’s cool because it values the blogger as an influencer in a way that they haven’t been, up to now. Bloggers are being asked to make appearances on behalf of brands and to appear in advertisements, and that’s just. plain. cool. Ana Flores Spanglish Baby Coolwhip Ad You may ask, okay, but are these bloggers getting paid for their appearances and ads? To be honest, I haven’t asked them. I am going to assume that, given that the bloggers I’ve seen featured recently are all smart, savvy businesswomen who are running small media empires, that they have found a way to get compensated for their time and likeness in a manner that suits them: financially or otherwise. 25 Apr 2012 16:46:40 GMT http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/media-journalism/are-they-bloggers-or-celebrities/ 55BF235F-B5AF-4F5F-93AB-8217F9E4AEC2 SocialMediaExplorer - April 20, 2012 We already know that click-through rates on online display ads are abysmal. Now a study from the startup Pretarget and ComScore revealed that even when a user clicks on an ad, the correlation between that click and a conversion is virtually nonexistent. Over nine months, Pretarget analyzed more than 260 million ad impressions across the campaigns of 18 advertisers, the company said, and tracked conversions ranging from filling out an online form to downloading software. In the analysis, Pretarget found that the Pearson correlation (a common correlation methodology) between clicks and a conversion was 0.01, the lowest correlation rate among metrics tracked in the study (a 0 result would mean there is absolutely no correlation, while 1.0 would signify the strongest possible correlation.) At the high end of the correlation spectrum for the metrics tracked was what the companies referred to as "ad hover/interaction," or when a web user moves his or her cursor over an ad, thus "engaging" with it. That interaction registered a correlation of 0.49. 25 Apr 2012 16:44:20 GMT http://adage.com/article/digital/click-rates-matter-thought/234330/?utm_source=mediaworks&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=adage EADEAC93-F6B4-4975-A874-95EFB36E33F9 Adage - April 24, 2012 NewspaperDirect has released a major update of PressReader, one of the most popular apps for Android devices. PressReader for Android delivers a highly engaging reading experience of more than 2,000 titles—the world’s widest selection of news media—on Android handsets and tablets. And, unlike other news aggregation apps, which provide just snippets of articles from around the Web, PressReader presents entire publication editions in super-high resolution, just as they were originally printed. The just-released 4.0 version of PressReader for Android sets a new benchmark for news reading apps by including an advanced, integrated rendering engine that delivers high-performance zooming capabilities never seen before on native Android-based apps. Also new is NewspaperDirect’s innovative SmartFlow technology. A simple touch gesture switches from Replica View (preferred by more traditional newspaper readers) to SmartFlow mode, designed for digital natives who value the content of the publication, but want a more fluid presentation of it. SmartFlow presents complete stories and pages in a continuous, engaging flow that maximizes readability and invites exploration of related content. 25 Apr 2012 16:43:00 GMT http://www.editorandpublisher.com/Technology/Article/New-PressReader-App-Brings-High-Resolution-Newspaper-Reading-Experience-To-Android-Tablets 6B2C2E11-B979-49E3-9BF7-42B0D94D8FC1 EditorandPublisher - April 25, 2012 China has stepped up its campaign to clamp down on the Internet, which has emerged as a virtual town square for exchanging information about the Bo Xilai scandal and the nation’s biggest political upheaval in years. The popular Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo on Tuesday deleted the accounts of several users, including that of Li Delin, a senior editor of the Chinese business magazine Capital Week, whose March 19 post helped fuel rumors of a coup in Beijing. The service announced the move to many of its more than 300 million user accounts, thereby turning it into a public lesson in the consequences of rumor mongering. 25 Apr 2012 16:25:42 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120425/china-escalates-crackdown-on-internet-amid-scandal/ 60B2C887-4415-4029-88C7-8A3939317E38 AllThingsD - April 25, 2012 Dove Australia has created the world's first makeover targeted at advertisements instead of women. Created by Ogilvy, the campaign introduces an app that lets Facebook users choose a feel-good message about women's bodies and use Dove's media buy to pump out pithy bits of positivity to the Facebook universe—to counteract those self-esteem-destroying side blurbs that ask if your love handles are overexposed and the like. The video below explains how it works. It makes it sound like an ambush—that the app somehow takes down the old ads and replaces them with yours. That's not the case. The media buy just gives users, on certain page loads, a Dove ad instead of another one. Still, that's a minor point—the Dove inventory will indeed frequently bump other ads. The interactive element is nice, too—simple and smart. And the target will love the app and forward it and rave about it because media is the best scapegoat ever created for self-esteem issues. 25 Apr 2012 16:23:39 GMT http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/dove-lets-women-give-facebook-advertising-makeover-139831 4962F91C-9E77-42C9-A71A-6B2F6EA790B8 AdWeek - April 25, 2012 Big data and the marketing world go together like peanut butter and jelly. Marketers want to present their brands in the most-effective manner possible and always put the right ad in front of the right person. In theory, big data makes that possible at a whole new level. Today’s analytic techniques and technologies can tell marketers not only what campaigns are working, but also where to spend next and — in some cases — the very language to use on their web sites. Here are five companies you’ll likely be hearing a lot more about if you’re not already a user. 24 Apr 2012 15:10:59 GMT http://gigaom.com/cloud/5-companies-turning-your-data-into-dollars/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%3A+Tech%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher 72E9F9E4-3C7A-410E-9421-360C389D35EF GigaOm - April 23, 2012 Until about eight years ago the word “engage” was what snooty people said at the start of their sporting events. You engage to start a fencing match, for instance. (Or I assume so. I know nothing about fencing. I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk will condescendingly scoff at my lack of fencing intelligence, which is fine. But when I think of the word “engage,” I think of some turtle-necked dork with slicked back hair dressed in all black motioning for two awkwardly dressed in all white people with flimsy swords and colander masks to start fighting by saying, “Engage!”) 24 Apr 2012 15:05:02 GMT http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/the-problem-with-engagement/ 7A3D516B-85A5-4D08-802F-AADB1839D4C2 SocialMediaExplorer - April 23, 2012 In 2010, The Boston Globe launched a new website that adapts to the varying screen sizes of all computers and mobile devices. Other news organizations have since been slow to follow suit, but it seems this strategy, called responsive design, is catching on, at least among some major news players. Responsive design: new name, old thinking So, what is responsive design anyway? Ethan Marcotte, a Massachusetts-based independent Web designer and developer who coined the phrase and worked on the Globe site, explained: “Responsive design on a basic level is about using more flexible layout, more flexible page design, and using a little bit of technology called CSS (cascading style sheets) basically to articulate how those designs should reshape themselves to be viewed on smaller or wider screens,” he said. Marcotte said that in the past, websites were only designed for device-specific experiences. Now, responsive design allows all users to have the same experience, no matter the device or screen size they are using. 24 Apr 2012 15:03:18 GMT http://www.editorandpublisher.com/Features/Article/Responsive-Design-Breathes-Life-Into-Mobile-Web FBA3E071-68D3-4BE8-836B-543984554168 EditorandPublisher - April 24, 2012 One valuable rock: An artist's depiction of how a robotic spacecraft would locate an asteroid, capture it, and then bring it back to the lunar orbit. (Credit: Rick Sternbach/Keck Institute for Space Studies ) As people come to terms with the limits of the Earth's natural resources, startup company Planetary Resources is eyeing another source: space. The company, founded by XPrize Foundation CEO Peter Diamandis and aerospace engineer Eric Anderson, will launch at the Museum of Flight in Seattle later today. Its list of advisers includes Google CEO Larry Page, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, filmmaker James Cameron, and the former Microsoft chief software architect and space tourist Charles Simonyi. Other advisers are Google board member and investor Ram Shriram and Ross Perot Jr., son of the former presidential candidate. Planetary Resources' goal is to "expand Earth's resource base" by tapping natural resources in space, according to a media advisory sent out last week. "This company will overlay two critical sectors -- space exploration and natural resources -- to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP. This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of 'natural resources,'" it said. In an interview earlier this month, Diamandis indicated that mining asteroids is the company's main pursuit. And surprisingly, aerospace experts say that extracting resources from asteroids and near-Earth objects is no longer the stuff of science fiction. A study (PDF) released this month by the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory concluded the technology to bring an asteroid near Earth to mine its resources could by done by 2025. It estimates the cost of the first "asteroid capture and return" mission would cost $2.6 billion. 24 Apr 2012 14:59:33 GMT http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57419298-76/asteroid-mining-land-grab-in-space/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title 561BE07D-6E4D-458D-9CDD-B1586D9FD7F3 Cnet - April 24, 2012 Though television may be losing viewers to online video, it has been holding on to advertisers. But with online-video outlets this week making their most organized push yet for ad dollars, that may be starting to change. Early expectations are that TV networks will win an increase in total ad commitments for the fall season in the coming weeks of negotiations with advertisers known as the upfront. Yet, some big marketers, including General Motors Co. GM -2.71% and Samsung Electronic Co.’s mobile arm, say they are planning to shift some of their TV budgets to the Web. 24 Apr 2012 14:57:28 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120423/online-video-turns-up-heat/ B5843804-0206-4876-A1C5-17C04DD9FD52 AllThingsD - April 23, 2012 Most ad agencies live and die by a single metric. Some measure everything about it and all around it. Others ignore it and just hope they get it. It's the fuel that drives the modern advertising business. It's the billable hour. In order to grow profitably, agencies need to hire more people and bill them out at a minimum of 65-75 percent of their day. Unfortunately selling, assigning, and working by the hour and for the hour is not very motivating. And this can cause problems in an agency's culture by killing the inspiration needed to find creative solutions to problems. More and more, agencies are trying to break away from the billable hour's tyranny by seeking alternative revenue sources. For some, that looks like creating startup companies within their own walls. From developing new apps to selling candles and chocolate, agencies are the ones creating a new wave of products in a broad range of markets. Take Pocket Hercules for example, who partnered with a client to launch its own beer in 2008 and has since sold more than 100,000 cases. Or Anomaly, with their own line of women's shaving and skin care products (Eos) that's being sold at Target. These agencies are not just marketing their own products but can also channel their learnings to become better marketers for their clients. After all, what better environment to incubate a new business idea than a place that's built to conceive a brand, develop a strategy, write a message, design packaging, and lay out a go-to-market strategy? If an agency can afford to carve out a few hours a day for skunk works projects, they'll position themselves to bask in the rewards of becoming a launch pad for business ideas. 24 Apr 2012 14:55:46 GMT http://www.adrants.com/2012/04/do-agencies-need-to-create-their-own.php 5EC9CB28-DE26-4A7F-BDF9-62ACEF600FB1 Adrants - April 23, 2012 There are nearly 1 million apps available in the app store and 1 billion of them are being downloaded every month. This makes app discovery a lot more challenging for developers, perhaps an even tougher mountain to climb than creating the app itself. For SEOs, app discovery is juicy new territory to break in to. Here’s a glance at some of the global mobile stats for 2012: * 1.2 billion mobile Web users worldwide * In the US 25 percent of mobile Web users are mobile-only * Smartphones represent 31.8 percent of all handsets shipped since February 2012 * 1 in 4 mobile apps once downloaded, are never used again The app landscape is expanding rapidly, but its current lagging point when compared to non-mobile platforms, is search capability. Mobile marketing is becoming more competitive and to increase app visibility, brands with a mobile strategy should strongly consider implementing optimization strategies for ranking and maintaining a user-base through social media. Here are 4 ways you can break through the gated app stores: 23 Apr 2012 15:12:06 GMT http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2169475/4-Ways-to-Help-Consumers-Discover-Your-Mobile-App 0B75AC3B-D562-4889-9EEE-2E9F92782321 SearchEngineWatch - April 23, 2012 A new study has shown that blogging amongst brands and businesses is in decline as corporations turn to social media to engage with and inform customers. Since 2007, The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has looked at social media usage amongst corporates in the Inc. 500, how that compares to those in the Fortune 500, and to previous years. The latest report, which presents data from 2011, showed that blogging has declined for the first time amongst the Inc. 500, with just 37 percent now using a blog amongst their marketing arsenal, compared to 91 percent who use social media. Facebook is the most popular social network amongst Inc. 500 companies, with 74 percent using it, a fraction ahead of LinkedIn (73 percent), with Twitter (64 percent) rounding out the top three. Both Facebook and Twitter have shown growth within the Inc. 500 in the past three years. 23 Apr 2012 14:59:10 GMT http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/blogging-vs-social-media_b21511 52226F04-ACFA-409E-9053-F5F2B50031C6 AllTwitter - April 23, 2012 Netflix had a crummy 2011. How did the first three months of 2012 go? We’ll find out this afternoon, when the company releases its Q1 numbers. And the easiest way to tell will be by looking at one key metric: The number of U.S. streaming-video customers. Netflix has told investors to expect something between 22.8 million and 23.6 million subscribers. And if the stock veers wildly immediately after the earnings hit the wire today, it’s likely because of that number. If it’s high, then Netflix bulls get some vindication: Turns out that people still like paying $8 a month for all-you-can-eat movies and TV shows, streamed to any device they want, just like CEO Reed Hastings has been saying. If it’s low, then Hastings’ doubters can argue that the loss of high-profile movies from Sony and Disney, and increased competition from the likes of Amazon and Hulu, are big problems that aren’t going away. 23 Apr 2012 14:46:45 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120423/the-one-number-netflix-investors-care-about-today/ E2BB0AF6-979C-4A16-9E39-AB378BBB0C5F AllThingsD - April 23, 2012 It is the police procedural that has network executives scratching their heads this season: The Case of the Disappearing Viewers. Across the television landscape, network and cable, public television and pay cable, English-language and Spanish, viewing for all sorts of prime-time programming is down this spring — chiefly among the most important audience for the business, younger adults. In the four television weeks starting March 19, NBC lost an average of 59,000 viewers (about 3 percent) in that 18-to-49 age category compared with the same period last year, CBS lost 239,000 (8 percent), ABC lost 681,000 (21 percent) and Fox lost 709,000 (20 percent). In the last few weeks, new viewership lows for network series have been recorded nightly among 18- to 49-year-olds, the group that still commands the highest advertising prices. The declines have not discriminated. The bad news has been the same for hits, like ABC’s “Modern Family,” which had its lowest rating for the season (4.0 or about 5.2 million viewers) and less popular shows, like NBC’s “Community,” which descended to 1.3 (about 1.7 million viewers). Several other shows, like “Glee” and “Touch” on Fox, and “Missing” and “Suburgatory” on ABC, all hit their lowest ratings ever last week. 23 Apr 2012 14:51:54 GMT http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/business/media/tv-viewers-are-missing-in-action.html?partner=rss&emc=rss B9FA274D-2A14-46B8-BF34-1127D31F0488 NYTimes - April 22, 2012 The Avon Lady needs to spend more time on Facebook. Avon Products Inc., famous for sending its representatives door to door, is losing traction in the U.S., where many time-stressed consumers are increasingly buying their cosmetics on the Web. Operating profit per representative in the U.S. has plunged 75% over the past decade, according to an analysis by Sanford C. Bernstein. Turning around that decline will be a big item on the long "to do" list for new Chief Executive Sherilyn S. McCoy, who joins the company Monday after 30 years at Johnson & Johnson . Her main tasks will include wrapping up a four-year-old investigation into possible overseas bribery, righting Avon's business in Brazil—its biggest market—after disastrous computer snafus there, and fending off an unsolicited $10 billion takeover offer from privately held Coty Inc. The Makeup of Avon See key dates in the company's history since it was founded in 1886. But the erosion of Avon's base in the U.S. underscores the scale of the turnaround that is needed, a task that analysts and former executives think could take three to five years to complete. 23 Apr 2012 14:50:30 GMT http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303978104577360182622655056.html?mod=rss_media_marketing A74AC34B-D78A-4572-8CA8-4767F258CCB8 WSJ - April 22, 2012 It seems as though there is another report every day or two on which smartphone platform is gaining or losing share. But, for those who just can’t get enough of that sort of thing, Web-tracking firm Chitika now has a site that offers a practically constant glance at such data. Chitika’s data looks not at sales, though, but at share of Web pages being viewed. As a result, it is good for showing active use of various smartphone operating systems, but not for tracking phone sales. Its new Web site looks at the 24 preceding hours of U.S. mobile Web use (on a six-hour delay). 23 Apr 2012 14:47:37 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120421/new-site-tracks-smartphone-market-share-in-near-real-time/ EDC55E5B-304F-4972-9E04-3DE8E061D73F AllThingsD - April 21, 2012 Facebook today released a new set of proposed changes to its terms of service and offered more detailed explanation of its revisions based on user feedback. Since 2009, the social network has taken a unique approach with its “Statements of Rights and Responsibilities,” which is what it calls its terms of service. Before instituting any new policies, the company shares proposed changes with users, who then have a period of time to comment and ask questions. In some cases, Facebook even puts issues up to a vote. Most recently, the company made edits and offered answers to questions related to a draft of a new Statement of Rights and Responsibilities it presented in March. It clarified the following points, among others. 23 Apr 2012 14:49:19 GMT http://www.insidefacebook.com/2012/04/20/facebook-modifies-proposed-changes-to-terms-of-service-provides-explanations-in-response-to-user-feedback/ F1EC58F2-0F7F-46D4-9835-5035AF742ABB AllThingsFacebook - April 20, 2012 Marcia DiStaso, assistant professor of PR at the College of Communications at Penn State University, surveyed 1,300 PR pros and they say 60 percent of Wikipedia entries contain errors about their clients. And because of rules against PRs editing Wikipedia articles, the errors can remain published for an indefinite amount of time. According to information we received via email, DiStaso has been conducting Wikipedia research since 2006 and gathered responses from PR pros across agencies, nonprofit organizations, companies, and other groups. She told ABC News that PRs are only allowed to leave comments and wait for a public response. Ideally, Wikipedia guidelines say that should happen within five days. But nearly a quarter of respondents (24 percent) say they never heard back. More than half of respondents thought the rules should be changed. 23 Apr 2012 15:00:09 GMT http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/research-many-wikipedia-entries-are-wrong-prs-cant-do-much-about-it_b36898 0EA42F6A-B256-4094-A04D-51347530106F MediaBistro - April 20, 2012 Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Seth Grimes, a strategy consultant and industry analyst with Washington, D.C.-based Alta Plana Corporation. Sentiment is a key social attribute – we’re talking feelings, opinions, and emotions, expressed about brands, products, and personalities – but measurement is not yet science. The sentiment-analysis solution space lacks standard definitions, metrics, and methods, and not a few solutions offer only crude, low-grade analytics. The result? Business users are hard-pressed to weigh the many vendor claims they hear, first-and-foremost surrounding accuracy. We know for certain that social-media sentiment analysis is a must-do and that accuracy is a must-have. But does your solution provider (or the providers you’re looking at) do sentiment right? How accurate are their findings compared to competitors’? Will they help you make better business decisions and do a better job engaging your customers and social followers? The answers are not so simple, but I’ll take a shot at them by exploring the angles that can help you improve your social strategy and make informed provider choices. 23 Apr 2012 15:05:53 GMT http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-sentiment-competing-on-accuracy/ 0CB52656-39F1-4BC6-9B47-C23BFF757761 SocialMediaExplorer - April 20, 2012 Parents and their kids play a cat-and-mouse game on Facebook: The former tries to keep tab on the latter, which responds by running faster, prompting the former to do the same. Kids know that their parents are watching and think that ignoring their folks’ friend requests takes care of the problem. Parents realize that they’re being ignored and get desperate. Desperation leads to the kinds of behavior unearthed in a survey by security software maker AVG. * 61 percent of U.S. parents admitted to logging into their teenager’s Facebook account without letting the kids know; * 20 percent of the parents said they’ve encountered explicit messages in their kids’ accounts; * 72 percent say they’ve befriended their teen on Facebook to monitor behavior; * 20 percent suspect their children are accessing pornography or illegal music downloads; * 20 percent suspect their teens of “sexting,” sending nude images of themselves to others; * 20 percent of American parents also suspect their teens of “sexting” via their mobile phones; and * 80 percent of parents believe their teens befriend people online who they’ve never met in person. 23 Apr 2012 15:04:27 GMT http://allfacebook.com/facebook-parents-kids_b86423 0ABBA13A-A2CC-46B8-8B4E-A8695B6B766F AllFacebook - April 18, 2012 I'm a busy guy. Always in a rush. On the move. Places to be. Stuff to do. Got no time. Not for commas. Or complete sentences. Enter MonoSol, a company that makes water-soluble packaging for instant coffee and virtually every other food product you can imagine that gets mixed with a liquid. "The uses in some ways are only constrained by our imagination," MonoSol's Matt Scearce tells Co.Design. The stuff's totally safe to ingest. Drop one in a cup. Add hot water. Bam! You've got coffee. That's a time saver. No more spooning crystals. Or tearing open plastic packets. That should save me about a half-second per serving. At my rate of caffeine consumption, I'll add 12 seconds to each day. Awesome! More time to drink coffee. I think I used a comma back there. I'm slowing down! Time for another cup. 23 Apr 2012 15:03:09 GMT http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/dissolvable-packaging-next-big-thing-food-marketing-139696 CDD2E644-7C0E-4C72-8473-AEE8AA13C548 AdFreak - April 19, 2012 Nice gals finish last. That must be the thinking behind T-Mobile's new ad, which trades its sweet brunette's pink frock for head-to-toe-leather, adding the tagline "No More Mr. Nice Girl." Carly Foulkes, who has starred as the popular pink-clad actress in the T-Mobile ads since 2010, has been called a "DVR-proof pitch personality." The new look comes on the heels of the No. 4 cellphone carrier's loss of more than 800,000 customers following a failed takeover bid by AT&T. T-Mobile, it seems, is seeking to reinvent itself. Even though T-Mobile, which is owned by Deutsche Telekom, is the smallest mobile provider, and still doesn’t carry the iPhone, it's managed to make a big statement with Foulkes as the only recognizable spokesperson for a mobile brand. When the ads first appeared in 2010, the Web buzzed about the actress, searching for "t-mobile spokesperson," "t-mobile commercial woman, "t-mobile girl," and "t-mobile girl name." 23 Apr 2012 15:01:51 GMT http://finance.yahoo.com/news/t-mobile-spokeswoman-gets-a-makeover.html EE01D219-970E-4BEC-A1B9-B1BEDB0AA3C4 YahooFinance - April 19, 2012 New research from Adobe that was based on some 2.5 billion video add impressions offers up some good news for companies looking to boost revenue from their online and mobile distribution content. The study, which is being released at NAB, found that engagement -- measured by completion rates -- for mid-roll video ads hit 87% in online content in the last half of 2011. This was up from 75% in earlier study covering the January to July 2011 time frame. The study also found that mobile users were the most engaged viewers, with a 94% completion rates in mid-roll ads and that the number of ads in professionally produced content now averages about 5.5. The findings are important for companies who have been delivering more online and mobile content but have "struggled to monetize premium content," notes Jeremy Helfant, VP of monetization at Adobe in an interview. 17 Apr 2012 20:22:54 GMT http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/483140-NAB_Adobe_Study_Shows_High_Online_Ad_Engagement.php 093D5CCF-8482-449D-80FD-CEA09C976FED Broadcast and Cable - April 16, 2012 NEW YORK, Apr 16, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Social media is showing signs of connecting with TV viewers as nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of U.S. consumers surveyed recall seeing social media symbols such as Facebook "Likes" while watching television, according to an Accenture /quotes/zigman/565535/quotes/nls/acn ACN +3.47% study. Moreover, one in three viewers (33 percent) have interacted with social media after seeing a social media symbol on their TV screen. Accenture conducted this survey of U.S. television viewers to better understand the public's perception of social media symbols that appear during programming and how effective they are. The survey found that among the 1,000 viewers surveyed, the majority said they had noticed and were also familiar with how to interact with social media symbols while watching TV, including the Facebook "Like" symbol (42 percent), QR codes (28 percent), Twitter Hashtags (18 percent) and Shazam symbols (9 percent). 17 Apr 2012 20:22:07 GMT http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-consumers-receptive-to-social-media-appearing-on-their-tv-screens-according-to-accenture-study-2012-04-16 3803EB5F-50AB-4B9B-9321-B842EBB1C908 MarketWatch - April 16, 2012 The battle over diversity in adland is heating up again in New York. The city’s Office of the Comptroller has asked four holding companies -- Omnicom, Interpublic Group, WPP and Publicis -- to publicly disclose detailed submissions required by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to show just how diverse -- or not -- their workforces are. According to a spokesman for the Comptroller’s office -- which advises funds with investments in the ad companies -- only Interpublic responded. The Office of the Comptroller, headed by John Liu, is taking the fight directly to the shareholders of Omnicom with a shareholder proposal that would require the company to disclose the EEOC filings that annually report a comprehensive breakdown of the company’s workforce by race and gender across all employment categories. The shareholder proposal suggests that this data be presented either in Omnicom’s annual corporate social responsibility (CSR) or sustainability report, beginning this year. 17 Apr 2012 20:21:13 GMT http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/172604/nyc-pressures-omnicom-for-workplace-diversity.html AC9EEF9F-6054-408B-BB90-7B18299770B4 MediaPost - April 16, 2012 A courtroom in San Francisco is hearing opening testimony this week in a case to decide whether Google's Android operating system violates patents to the Java programming language. But a bigger headline waits in the wings. At the heart of this complex patent dispute is an arcane issue of law with the potential to reverberate throughout the software development world: can a company legally copyright a computer programming language, not to mention one that has been so integral to the open-source community? The presiding judge, William Alsup, pushed both companies to clarify their positions on this question, and in pretrial filings last Friday they finally declared whether they believe computing programming languages are copyrightable. Google (PDF) said it does not; Oracle (PDF) said it does. • Court documents: Oracle versus Google The legal intricacies here are, well, intricate. Mind-numbing is more like it. But this has now morphed into a case where it's less about how Java got deployed by Google in Android and more about the legal definition of a computer language. Related stories * Oracle rebuffs Google settlement offer * Google's acquisition of IBM patents may aid its Oracle case * ZDNet: The real history of Java and Android, as told by Google Google is going to argue that Oracle is improperly attempting to claim copyright over an idea rather than its expression. Oracle says it's within its rights and accuses Google of improperly using Java APIs to develop its Android mobile operating system. 17 Apr 2012 20:20:31 GMT http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57414920-93/copyright-conundrum-in-oracle-google-case-is-a-computer-language-fair-game/ 39FF2838-A923-4584-A6C5-BE4D3DF032B1 CNET - April 16, 2012 Hulu Plus is starting to see stronger growth, according to a new report. The online streaming service is slated to announce this week that it has hit 2 million paid subscribers for its Hulu Plus service, according to The New York Times. If that is in fact the case, it would mean that Hulu Plus added 500,000 new subscribers in just the last four months and that its growth is accelerating. "We grew the business 60 percent from 2010 to approximately $420 million in revenue" in 2011, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar said back in January while announcing a milestone of 1.5 million paid subscribers. Related stories * No, Comcast is not breaking the Internet...again * Hulu Plus expands distribution via Android tablets * Win-Win: Hulu's custom clips fight piracy and enable fans That may be impressive, but it's important to point out that Netflix was adding about 1 million subscribers to its streaming service each quarter at its height -- and before it attempted to increase prices on customers. 17 Apr 2012 20:19:37 GMT http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57415068-93/hulu-plus-hits-2-million-subscribers-report-says/ 7AE85EE2-C97D-4FA6-8FF3-570664188B3F CNET - April 16, 2012 In honor of the first anniversary of the program, You Tube has just added monetization options to YouTube Live. This includes the ability to charge a pay-per-view fee and serve up in-stream ads. To make the service even more friendlier, YouTube has added better analytics and free Wirecast software. With Wirecast, you can customize the live feed with multicamera effects, overlays and b-roll right from the computer. YouTube Live is a big step forward for a site that is still mostly known for random, short-form content. With the Live option, partners can invite the world (sort of) to watch a concert, a red carpet, a sporting event, or conference. But why has it taken them so long to move into this arena? They say YouTube Live has been around for a year, but it’s not the first place I think of for live streaming. Not even the second. So YouTube has some ground to make up and monetization could be the key. That, and opening the options up to everyone on the service. 12 Apr 2012 15:06:54 GMT http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/04/youtube-adds-paywall-option-to-live-stream-events.html FB36D447-2BB9-445B-968D-4F3C93B3B1C3 MarketingPilgrim - April 11, 2012 A group of consumers who unsuccessfully sued Facebook for using their names and photos in ads won't have to pay the social networking service's legal bills, a federal judge has ruled. In the ruling, issued this week, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg rejected Facebook's attempt to recoup $700,000 in attorneys' fees for winning a lawsuit about whether it violated California's publicity law. That law says that people have the right to control the commercial use of their names and images and provides for damages of $750 per violation. Seeborg wrote that even though he dismissed the potential class-action lawsuit, he hadn't decided whether Facebook violated the California law. Instead, he tossed the case because the consumers couldn't show that they had the right to bring a case in federal court. Therefore, he said, Facebook didn't prevail in a way that would entitle it to recover its legal bills. "While it may have achieved its 'objective' of a dismissal, the decision in effect was only that plaintiffs had sued in a forum that could not decide their claims, not that the claims failed for a substantive reason," he wrote. The lawsuit -- filed by Robyn Cohen, Shannon Stoller, Christopher Marshall, Bryan Siglock and Debra Lewin -- alleged that Facebook's Friend Finder tool unlawfully used their names and photos in ads without their consent. 12 Apr 2012 14:59:49 GMT http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/172276/facebook-loses-bid-to-recover-legal-fees-from-user.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+online-media-daily+%28MediaPost+%7C+Online+Media+Daily%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher E4904327-63B0-4076-86E4-17D4085EDACF MediaPost - April 12, 2012 On Wednesday night, Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, seemed to be having a lovely time at The Hollywood Reporter’s party at the Four Seasons in Manhattan for the “35 Media Movers Who Matter Most.” And why wouldn’t he? By dint of the alphabet, his name came first in the lustrous roll call, but if the order was based on net profits — $1 billion give or take – he would have come first as well. If he was bothered by Gawker’s coup on Tuesday and Wednesday in publishing a few posts and some purloined video from someone who called himself the Fox Mole, he certainly didn’t show it. “I am the Fox Mole,” he told me, then quickly added. “Who cares? We have nothing to hide.” As it turns out, Fox News, which has a well-deserved reputation for punishing those who describe the network as anything much besides “Fair and Balanced,” already had found the mole. Executives at Fox News who do not speak on the record about personnel matters indicated that they had zeroed in on their man by noon on Wednesday. 12 Apr 2012 14:53:01 GMT http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/fox-quickly-hunts-down-mole-my-that-didnt-take-long/?partner=rss&emc=rss 9B3E174E-F87E-4934-AEDB-28B7ABB20FAF NYTimes - April 12, 2012 LONDON — A high-profile British lawyer who has been closely involved in pursuing the hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids said on Thursday that he planned for the first time to sue on behalf of alleged victims in the United States, the center of Mr. Murdoch’s global media empire. The lawyer, Mark Lewis, confirmed in a telephone interview that he would take legal action on behalf of three people — a well-known sports person, a sports person not in the public eye and an American citizen, none of whom he would further identify. The suits had not yet been filed, he said, but would be pursued with the aid of Norman Siegel, a lawyer who once was director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Mr. Siegel, who has represented many of the families of those killed in the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. “The News of the World had thousands of people they hacked,” Mr. Lewis said, when announcing the suits in an interview with the BBC, referring to the Sunday tabloid that Mr. Murdoch closed down last year as the hacking scandal engulfed it. “Some of them were in America at the time, either traveling or resident there.” 12 Apr 2012 14:52:09 GMT http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/world/europe/mark-lewis-to-sue-in-united-states-in-phone-hacking-scandal.html?partner=rss&emc=rss D73E493E-61E5-4DE8-8547-EE6140D60672 NYTimes - April 12, 2012 The U.S. accused Apple Inc. and five of the nation's largest publishers Wednesday of conspiring to raise e-book prices, in a case that could radically reorder the fast-growing business. In a civil antitrust lawsuit, the Justice Department alleged that CEOs of the publishing companies met regularly in private dining rooms of upscale Manhattan restaurants to discuss how to respond to steep discounting of their e-books by Amazon.com Inc., a practice they disliked. The executives also called and emailed each other to craft a solution to what one of them called "the wretched $9.99 price point," the suit said. The five publishers and Apple hatched an arrangement that lifted the price of many best-selling e-books to $12.99 or $14.99, according to the suit. The publishers then banded together to impose that model on Amazon, the government alleged. 12 Apr 2012 14:38:07 GMT http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304444604577337573054615152.html?mod=rss_media_marketing 268D728F-636A-4A57-8C91-8EB0B94861BF WSJ - April 11, 2012 Verizon Wireless will start charging customers a $30 fee for cellphone upgrades, on top of the price they pay for the new device, as the company looks to supplement its income to cover costs. The change at the biggest U.S. mobile provider follows a fourth-quarter decline in its wireless profit margins, which came under pressure from hefty subsidies it had to pay Apple Inc (AAPL.O) for the popular iPhone. Carriers pay such subsidies because devices like the iPhone help to attract new customers and boost revenue. However, upgrades can be less attractive to operators because despite paying a subsidy for the new device, mobile companies often get no extra revenue from existing customers who switch phones. BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk said that the fees could add up to $1 billion a year and boost the Verizon Wireless profit margin by as much as 150 basis points. In the fourth quarter Verizon Wireless posted a profit margin of 42.2 percent. 12 Apr 2012 14:34:08 GMT http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/11/us-verizonwireless-upgradefee-idUSBRE83A16S20120411?feedType=RSS&feedName=vcMedia&virtualBrandChannel=10109 58322BB2-8C03-4603-989C-4F21CF5F1289 Reuters - April 11, 2012 Award David Cohen on April 11, 2012 3:07 PM A timeline page commissioned by the Israel Anti-Drug Authority was nominated for a Webby Award in the “best use of social media” category, even the profile was removed by Facebook for not representing a real person. McCann Erickson Tel Aviv created the “IADA: Drugs Set Your Timeline” Facebook campaign. The centerpiece of the campaign is a profile for fictional Facebook user Adam Barak, using timeline’s two-column format, with the left-hand column displaying images of Barak under the influence of drugs, and the photos in the right-hand column portraying him as clean and sober. Voting for the Webbys People’s Voice Awards, part of the 16th Annual Webby Awards, is open through April 26. 12 Apr 2012 14:29:05 GMT http://allfacebook.com/facebook-webby-nomination_b85217?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+allfacebook+%28Facebook+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher C1B57896-B35E-4ABA-9CAE-E504D51D955B AllFacebook - April 11, 2012 Spring has sprung. The birds are in the trees, the heavy winter clothes are gone. People are up in their attics or out in their garages piling up their old unwanted junk to sell to their neighbors and to make room for the new junk that they’ll be buying from their neighbors. Why not take this time to take a fresh look at your site and the success of your marketing efforts? Sometimes you can be so deep into the inner workings of your site that you can forget some of the smaller items that you looked at 18 months ago and decided to fix "later," and sometimes you just don’t notice the little things that have crept in over time. Search Yourself For example, when was the last time you actually did some searches for your key terms? Do you see what you expect? 11 Apr 2012 15:55:23 GMT http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2166887/Spring-Cleaning-Your-Website?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sew+%28Search+Engine+Watch%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher C3DF612A-BDAB-4AF0-8264-4F068569F2C7 SearchEngineWatch - April 11, 2012 It’s no secret that most of us put more stock in the recommendations we get from friends than traditional forms of advertising. What’s interesting, though, is that while most consumers also increasingly trust online reviews and ads, trust in paid advertising on television, magazines and newspapers has declined pretty rapidly. The latest data from Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising Survey shows just how dramatic this decline is: while 92% of consumers say they trust word-of-mouth recommendations, less than half trust paid ads in traditional media outlets. The trust in these ads has declined by more than 20% since 2009. Trust in online ads, on the other hand, is up, but still lags behind print and TV. Today, 33% of respondents say that they believe the messages they see in online banner ads. That up from 26% from 2007. When it comes to search ads, 40% of online consumers say they trust them and 36% trust the ads they see on social networking sites. For mobile ads, the numbers are pretty similar: about 33% of respondents trust mobile banner ads and 29% trust mobile phone text ads. Few people, of course, really love online advertising. Having relevant ads makes the experience somewhat more bearable, though. Here, as expected, search ads get the highest relevance rating from Nielsen’s global panel of respondents (42%), followed by video ads (36%), ads on social networks (36%) and then banner ads (33%). According to Nielsen’s global head for advertiser solutions Randall Beard, this shows that “there is still much potential for marketers looking to reach the right audience through advertiser-driven messages.” 11 Apr 2012 15:51:40 GMT http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/10/survey-trust-in-online-ads-grows-while-trust-in-print-and-tv-ads-drops/ 0627E959-5302-4E2A-9C48-5E1803C187E1 TechCrunch - April 10, 2012 Measuring digital marketing efforts typically focuses on impressions, clicks, "likes" and conversions. Those metrics are important, but consider other key measurements for a more robust, well-rounded picture of your marketing campaigns and to determine next steps in driving marketing results. The digital marketing metrics that matter most include: Time You’re spending large amounts of time on your organization's digital marketing efforts, but when was the last time you actually calculated your team’s time allocations? Many marketing departments have never done this, yet it gets to the heart of your productivity. For example, is your team currently overcompensating on social media due to all the buzz, yet not allocating sufficient time to conversion optimization? Is your team allocating any time for longer-term, game-changing initiatives, or instead just working day-to-day? Awareness Have all of your priority audiences heard of you? Have you broken out your target audiences into multiple segments and measured your awareness among each? You may be well known among a certain group (e.g., married women) but completely invisible to another (e.g., single women). These insights should guide the allocation of your awareness-generation efforts. Mission Jim Stengel, former CMO of Procter & Gamble, recently launched a book, Grow, where he explains that companies aligned with a higher purpose fuel greater growth and create more valuable companies. At Patagonia, for example, every decision must pass an environmental impact filter. What's your company's mission? What do you believe in? What do your key audiences feel passionate about? How do you communicate your values, beliefs and passion? Are you tracking, measuring and reporting on your company’s commitment to your mission (such as gallons of oil saved, number of meals donated to the hungry, volunteer hours by staff) to demonstrate purpose. 11 Apr 2012 15:40:16 GMT http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/172138/7-digital-marketing-metrics-that-matter-most.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+online-media-daily+%28MediaPost+%7C+Online+Media+Daily%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher 025D60C0-71E8-479B-A2CF-EB2CD9DBD395 MediaPost - April 11, 2012 NEWPORT NEWS — Christopher Newport University's president condemned the behavior of staffers who hid stacks of the student newspaper April 4 because of a headline about a campus meth lab. In an email to students, faculty and staff Tuesday, Paul Trible said CNU employees took their own initiative to pull The Captain's Log from racks ahead of campus tours for prospective students. The Daily Press reported the incident Tuesday, including the Student Press Law Center's comment that Trible should condemn it because it suppressed free speech. Daily Press introduces Daily Savvy Deals. Sign Up now to receive offers that are 50% off or more! Trible's email said he "expressly condemns" the behavior of those involved in hauling away the newspaper from stands at popular tour stops on campus. "This action was taken by young employees who love CNU and were concerned that a newspaper article would create a bad impression for visiting prospective students," Trible said. He called the behavior inappropriate, and said those involved will be disciplined – but that CNU will not comment again on the personnel issue. Trible noted that when a senior employee was told about the incident, he ordered that the newspapers be found and put back on stands immediately. "The Captain's Log is free to write anything it pleases and CNU fully respects the freedom of the press," Trible said in the email. 11 Apr 2012 15:36:30 GMT http://www.dailypress.com/news/newport-news/dp-nws-cnu-newspaper-folo-20120410,0,141555.story 1477CA04-9822-47C9-9DBB-09F78FE83419 DailyPress - April 10, 2012 Like a moderns day Million Dollar Homepage, a Tumblr blog called Blogrtising has launched. As described on the site, the concept is simple, "Blogrtising is a viral concept where advertisers pay $100 to become permanent contributors on this blog. Once payment is made, they can post what they want (advertising links/videos/photos/...), when they want and as often as they want." Likely, this will go nowhere but it's amusing to see there are still people out there who can milk an original idea to death. 11 Apr 2012 15:32:38 GMT http://www.adrants.com/2012/04/million-dollar-homepage-wannabes-still.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+adrants+%28Adrants%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher A363E6DE-AF2A-4A24-BD98-64E95BF36004 AdRant - April 11, 2012 Maryland could become the first state in the U.S. to prohibit employers from requesting current and prospective employees’ Facebook passwords. Both houses of the state legislature passed a bill to this effect and sent it on to Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, according to The Baltimore Sun. His office staff told the newspaper that he has “hundreds” of bills to go through in addition to the one concerning Facebook passwords. We can only assume that means he might not sign this particular piece of legislation into law right away, unless the media spotlight turns the issue into a priority. Lawmakers in Illinois and California are debating similar legislation, while a federal amendment to the U.S. constitution was shot down in the House of Representatives. It’s possible that the Senate could introduce its own proposal on the matter, either as a bill or another amendment — or even the House might reintroduce the issue in the form of a bill. The issue of employers requesting Facebook passwords has only been gaining visibility since the American Civil Liberties Union wrote a letter condemning a Maryland employer that demanded an employee’s Facebook password in February of 2011. Then a case this year revived the issue when a school demanded that a 12-year-old student surrender a Facebook password and the parents sued. Still more recently, Facebook’s own Privacy Chief Erin Egan posted a note on the site telling users not to surrender their passwords to employers, adding that the social network might take legal action against this practice. Petitions supporting her stance have circulated on the site, amassing significant support. Most likely the password privacy issue will continue to make headlines until a federal law is passed or a U.S. Supreme Court case decides the matter one way or another. 11 Apr 2012 15:33:39 GMT http://allfacebook.com/facebook-passwords-marylan_b85059?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+allfacebook+%28Facebook+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher 6DB78E2D-C4F2-4B2E-9E21-169DD06FDF21 AllFacebook - April 11, 2012 NEW YORK — Apple is on the verge of doing what few others have: change the English language. When you have a boo-boo, you reach for a Band-Aid, not a bandage. When you need to blow your nose, you ask for Kleenex, not tissue. If you decide to look up something online, you Google instead of search for it. And if you want to buy a tablet computer, there’s a good chance there’s only one name you’ll remember. “For the vast majority, the idea of a tablet is really captured by the idea of an iPad,” says Josh Davis, a manager at Abt Electronics in Chicago. “They gave birth to the whole category and brought it to life.” Companies trip over themselves to make their brands household names. But only a few brands become so engrained in the lexicon that they become “genericized” - synonymous with the products themselves. 9 Apr 2012 16:08:53 GMT http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/8/band-aid-kleenex-google-ipad-popular-apple-product/ 9A5D1534-7C7A-42A6-A04A-D99766529424 WashingtonTimes - April 8, 2012 Editor’s Note: This is a guest post written by Mike Schneider, SVP Digital Incubator at Allen & Gerritsen, and co-author of Location-Based Marketing for Dummies. Location-based applications seem to all fall into the same trap of unnatural behavior. You whip out the phone, take 20 steps and then pray that the person behind the counter will know how to give you the deal you deserve. Marketers like Aaron Strout and I have been big proponents of passive check-ins or making location a secondary data point in an app that is part of a user’s natural flow. Boston’s LevelUp has combined location and commerce data to not only give businesses a rich profile of who their customer is, but also a new kind of acquisition and retention program. allen & gerritsen recently got some data from the SCVNGR team and put together this infographic demonstrating some of the behaviors of consumers who are using this new “inverted deals” app. 9 Apr 2012 15:58:17 GMT http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/digital-marketing/inverted-deals/ D10A3C8C-A295-448B-8DBE-33FEB1BE7ADE SocialMediaExplorer - April 6, 2012 Significant effort ends up going into helping key executives of larger brands understand the role that search should play in marketing and how to budget it. Discussions generally end up focusing on how the search strategy should integrate with the other marketing efforts by the business. Integrated marketing continues to be a hot topic, and was the subject of a keynote panel at this year's SES New York. These types of panels are great because they help provide a much deeper perspective on the industry. For search marketers (when I use search marketing I mean SEO and PPC collectively) looking for a quick tidbit, this isn't the type of panel for you. This panel forced you to step back and really assess things at a strategic level. Two major points clearly emerged from this panel: 1. Clear confirmation of the need to view marketing activities as an integrated whole. 2. There remains a huge gap between the way most in the search marketing industry look at their task and the way traditional marketing people do. Dana Todd (SVP, Marketing and Business Development, Performics) moderated the panel, which featured Lars Feely (Group Search Director, Neo@Ogilvy), Brenda Fiala (VP Strategy, Blast Radius), Mark Huffman (Executive Production Manager, Procter & Gamble), and Giovanni Rodriguez (Digital and Social Strategy, Deloitte Consulting LLP). 9 Apr 2012 15:53:17 GMT http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2166526/Integrated-Marketing-Why-Search-Needs-a-Large-Seat-at-the-Table D2811733-7C3E-4A18-996F-E85D6DCA1756 Search Engine Watch - April 9, 2012 Can print publishers hold their own in the unfamiliar world of high-quality TV? Hearst, one of the publishers that have signed on to YouTube’s quality content push, will soon provide some answers with its two forthcoming YouTube channels.... 9 Apr 2012 15:52:05 GMT http://www.adweek.com/news/press/hearst-programs-its-brands-youtube-139457 7C9840AA-55FE-4605-8426-64B2A27A4FE8 AdWeek - April 9, 2012 It's every advertiser's worst nightmare: consumers so distracted by a dizzying array of media choices that they no longer notice the commercials supporting them. And its time might be closer than you think. A recent study found that consumers in their 20s ("digital natives") switch media venues about 27 times per nonworking hour—the equivalent of more than 13 times during a standard half-hour TV show. The study of consumer media habits was commissioned by Time Warner's's Time Inc. and conducted by Boston's Innerscope Research. Though it had only 30 participants, the study offers at least directional insight into a generation that always has a smartphone at arm's length and flips from a big TV set to a smaller tablet screen and back again at a moment's notice. The study's subjects were split evenly between natives and "digital immigrants" (consumers who grew up with old-school technologies, such as TV, radio and print, and adapted to newer ones). Immigrants switched media venues just 17 times per nonworking hour. Put another way, natives switch about 35% more than immigrants. 9 Apr 2012 15:48:45 GMT http://adage.com/article/news/study-young-consumers-switch-media-27-times-hour/234008/ A813BFE3-DC2B-48D2-8138-5DC70E6ABC8C AdAge - April 9, 2012 The Internet of Things could have a mind-boggling 24 billion devices connected by 2020 and that means there will be more than three times the amount of connected devices as people on the planet by that time. So, how will the world power all of these gadgets and machine-driven devices? The answer, beyond plugging all of those devices into the grid, will include farming tiny slices of power when available, from sources like the sun, vibrations, mechanical energy, heat and more. Here’s five ways the Internet of things will be powered: The sun: During the day, when the sun shines down, it’s a relatively passive energy source that largely remains untapped. A couple years ago Peregrine Semiconductor started working with Kansas State University researchers on an energy-harvesting radio that gains power from a board made of solar cells taken from low-end calculators. The rest of the setup (see photo) includes a low-power integrated chip — originally developed for a NASA Mars project — to store the data, and a radio to transmit the data every five seconds. Another more recent innovation is researchers developing organic and polymer-based solar cells that are thinner than spider silk that MIT Tech Review says “can be bent and crumpled and still produce power.” 9 Apr 2012 15:46:53 GMT http://gigaom.com/cleantech/5-ways-to-power-the-internet-of-things/ F70AB0BF-5129-4EC8-8896-604CDD7A351B GigaOm - April 8, 2012 Mike Wallace, the CBS reporter who became one of America’s best-known broadcast journalists as an interrogator of the famous and infamous on “60 Minutes,” died on Saturday. He was 93. On its Web site, CBS said Mr. Wallace died at a care facility in New Canaan, Conn., where he had lived in recent years. Mr. Wallace, who received a pacemaker more than 20 years ago, had a long history of cardiac care and underwent triple bypass heart surgery in January 2008. A reporter with the presence of a performer, Mr. Wallace went head to head with chiefs of state, celebrities and con artists for more than 50 years, living for when “you forget the lights, the cameras, everything else, and you’re really talking to each other,” he said in an interview with The New York Times videotaped in July 2006 and released on his death as part of the online feature “Last Word.” Mr. Wallace created enough such moments to become a paragon of television journalism in the heyday of network news. As he grilled his subjects, he said, he walked “a fine line between sadism and intellectual curiosity.” His success often lay in the questions he hurled, not the answers he received. “Perjury,” he said, in his staccato style, to President Richard M. Nixon’s right-hand man, John D. Ehrlichman, while interviewing him during the Watergate affair. “Plans to audit tax returns for political retaliation. Theft of psychiatric records. Spying by undercover agents. Conspiracy to obstruct justice. All of this by the law-and-order administration of Richard Nixon.” 9 Apr 2012 15:34:05 GMT http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/business/media/mike-wallace-cbs-pioneer-of-60-minutes-dead-at-93.html?partner=rss&emc=rss%3f 390BE6A5-E3BB-4249-8616-0DBBE4D5D861 NYTimes - April 9, 2012 A picture is worth a thousand words right? Then why do we depend so much on writing word after word, sentence after sentence and hope that words alone will communicate the message we want to deliver? In many cases we rely on our words to stand on their own and forget the power of images to reinforce our message or an experience. Over the last year we have seen a number of emerging trends and social applications that have proven just how engaging, fun and effective images can be to audiences. In fact, in many ways this is leaving marketers scrambling to figure out how they might take advantage of the popularity of services like Pinterest and Instagram to increase brand affinity and attract inbound traffic. The biggest barrier? How to communicate and engage with customers almost entirely visually? Let me attempt to provide some ideas that might help you solve your image problem. 3 Apr 2012 20:06:04 GMT http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/digital-marketing/marketing-with-images/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SocialMediaExplorer+%28Social+Media+Explorer%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher 75B49138-7D3E-4CCD-9114-AE7FF7734EF0 SocialMediaExplorer - March 30, 2012 Social media activity for TV shows is primarily used by viewers to keep preferred shows strong. According to a new study from TVGuide.com, 76% of people say the primary reason for their social media activity is to "keep my favorites on the air." This data is up from a 66% level in 2011. TVGuide.com conducted the study in partnership with Social TV Summit. Almost all of those who make comments on social media platforms -- 95% -- post their remarks after watching a show. This is way up from the 70% level a year ago. TVGuide.com now says 40% make comments during a show and 53% before a show. 3 Apr 2012 20:04:10 GMT http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/171674/tv-viewers-use-social-media-to-support-favorite-sh.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mediadailynews+%28MediaPost+%7C+MediaDailyNews%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher 8C584BF0-2922-4757-AC95-9174CEF613E7 MediaPost - April 3, 2012 Link equity salvage is the process of finding and redirecting your site's dead pages, folders, and subdomains that still have links. These are the old and mis-redirected, unredirected or simply deleted sections of your site that webmaster tools doesn't know about since the URLs got axed more than 35 days ago. We're talking about pages that even site crawlers aren't finding, presumably because they don't have any links from the visible pages of your site. And remember, link salvagers, you're not only recovering lost link equity here, but blocking competitive off site link salvage experts from capitalizing on your squandered links. You don't necessarily need to rush off hunting for onsite link salvage opportunities though – especially if your site's only a couple of years old and never had a redesign. If you can say yes to 1-2+ of these criteria then definitely keep reading: 3 Apr 2012 20:01:10 GMT http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2165524/Link-Equity-Salvage-7-Steps-for-Finding-Your-Long-Lost-Links?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sew+%28Search+Engine+Watch%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher E2D4C87B-6E10-409D-8E10-CCAE1FCFF3EE SearchEngineWatch - April 3, 2012 This guest post is written by Alex Kutsishin, Co-Founder & President, FiddleFly Like cautious children learning to swim or ride a bicycle without training wheels, an astounding number of agencies have done little more than dip their collective toes into mobile space waters. Rather than develop ad campaigns tailored specifically for smartphone users, many are content or are resigned to posting staid print and broadcast copy on company websites rather than creating dynamic and interactive copy targeted at savvy, often prosperous mobile phone users. Not only are these agencies failing to fully engage the exploding mobile market, that market's exponential growth threatens to soon render ad industry laggards irrelevant. Extreme? Consider this: Oft-cited figures estimate that mobile devices outnumber desktop computers by a four-to-one ratio. Additionally: 3 Apr 2012 19:58:05 GMT http://www.adrants.com/2012/04/why-agencies-shouldnt-fear-mobile.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+adrants+%28Adrants%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher C3085C5E-3701-4814-B3C5-6DDE10B69378 Adrants - April 2, 2012 You might have heard about the Girls Around Me scandal this weekend, where an app got taken down that correlated Foursquare check-ins with Facebook profiles to show nearby women on a map. The widespread analysis of the matter was that Girls Around Me was creepy, but that people should realize that when they publish their locations online, bad things may happen. Technology writers, in our enthusiastically adopted roles as the white knights of online privacy, urged readers to lock down their Foursquare and Facebook profiles. The situation made me curious about what, exactly, location aggregators are being allowed to do with our location data. It’s one thing to share where you are with your friends, or with what you think is a small audience of early adopters. But what’s more tricky — and can often feel icky — is when that information is exposed in a different context. 3 Apr 2012 19:52:11 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120403/so-what-exactly-can-location-aggregators-do-with-our-foursquare-data/ CE459502-4CAF-4D12-B908-6B69CD2B4954 AllThingsD - April 3, 2012 More fallout from PhoneGate: News Corp. executive James Murdoch is stepping down as chair of British Sky Broadcasting, the U.K. satellite TV company, according to a report from BSkyB’s news service. Both Murdoch and News Corp., which owns 39 percent of BSkyB, continue to be embroiled in the phone-hacking scandal that erupted last summer. News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this Web site. 3 Apr 2012 19:50:44 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120403/james-murdoch-stepping-down-as-bskyb-chairman/ 953901D1-3718-4D0C-B657-BF38A262435F AllThingsD - April 3, 2012 Whether you're a boot-strapped startup on a shoestring budget or a blue chip company with a giant stack of cash in the bank, every company can use free marketing ideas to promote their brand, products, or services. After digging deep into my bag of marketing tactics from over the years, I've pulled together 63 free (or almost free) marketing tips and tactics that any business on the planet can use big or small to generate publicity, buzz, and awareness on the cheap. 1. Author and publish guest posts on high profile or well-trafficked sites in your niche. It's a great way to promote both your brand and your expertise. Free guest blogging communities, like My Blog Guest and Guest Blog It, are a good starting point. 2. Find bloggers to review your products. Use simple query operators, such as "[your product type] + reviews [or] review" (e.g., "lingerie reviews"), to locate promotional review opportunities for your product offerings. You can also use free link building tools from Buzzstream to generate prospecting queries. 3. Similar to leveraging product reviews for free promotion, mine the search results for bloggers who host product giveaways, using simple query operators, such as "[your product type] + giveaway" (e.g., "charm necklace giveaway"). 4. Hold a sweepstakes, contest, or a giveaway on your site, promote it on your site, and on your social media accounts for some free buzz. 5. Pool proprietary data from your organization's niche, industry, or even customer database (get customer consent and anonymize the data, of course) and compile it into a free report, like the HubSpot State of Inbound Marketing Report or the Veracode State of Software Security Report. 6. Leverage social media and social distribution channels to both demonstrate expertise in a subject and to share your content. 7. Make content distribution frictionless by adding social sharing icons site-wide (Facebook, Twitter, Google+). Use a free Wordpress plugin like Sharebar or have a Web dev resource implement developer sharing code, like Facebook's "Like" button code. 8. Answering questions is a great way to build relationships and your expertise while helping others unselfishly market your brand and you can do this on social sites: 9. Answer questions on Google+ 10. Answer questions on Facebook 11. Participate on the Q&A website Quora and build your business. 12. Join relevant or niche-related groups on LinkedIn and answer group questions and post news and event about your organization. 13. Leverage inboxQ to find and answer questions on Twitter. 14. If you're in the clothing, fashion, beauty, entertainment, design, photography, food, jewelry, or a similar lifestyle-niche business, you're a natural fit for image sharing on Pinterest, which can generate great exposure with high quality photos of your products. Here are 56 Ways to Market Your Business on Pinterest. 15. Given that YouTube is the world's second largest search engine, create a YouTube Channel and leverage proven video marketing tactics, like "how-to" style video content and response videos to improve search visibility and potentially drive leads. 16. And make sure you claim your social media profiles with a tool like KnowEm. 17. Join forums that are relevant to your companies niche, join in the conversation and offer insightful and helpful answers to questions. 18. Blog, blog, and blog some more. Give your wisdom and experience away for free. Leverage your blog to build relationships and build brand awareness. 19. Spotlight individual thought leaders: ego bait-type posts are a great way to connect with influencers in your niche, who in turn can help expose you and your company to their audience. 20. Run a big best blogs in your niche type post featuring a bunch of great blogs and bloggers. Again, this is a form of ego-stroking that builds relationships, social engagement and many of participants will help promote the article. Tip: create "best blog" badges that blogs on the list can add to their sites. 21. Run a big group interview - helps you build relationships and brand evangelists within your niche, gets links, social media engagement and you can potentially create a super authoritative document that ranks for a competitive topic. 22. Do individual video interviews on news-makers in your niche via Skype. Post them on YouTube, embed the YouTube code on your site, transcribe the video with a cheap tool like CastingWords, post the transcribed content on your blog for search engines to grab. 23. Run a weekly roundup where you highlight blog posts from around your industry; helps you make friends and valuable connections. Tip: be sure to @ the bloggers on Twitter from your roundup each week. 24. Turn inquisitive emails from clients or notable comment questions from your blog into Q&A type blog content; mention the client or question-asker in the post and link back to their website or social profile (good for relationship building, word of mouth marketing, etc.). 25. Run reviews on and help promote beneficial products or services in your niche (ego-stroking, relationship building). 26. Create an online survey and host it on your blog (you can use Survey Monkey or a free WordPress plugin like WP-Polls to manage results). 27. Then create a follow-up post announcing the results from your survey on the blog, add pretty data charts to your blog post, issue a press release. 28. Respond to all comments on your blog; engaging with your readership and nurturing a community on your blog is a fantastic and low effort way to build your brand and your site's following. 29. Solicit guest posts on your blog and get free user-generated content and make friends in your niche. 30. Sign up to get free media opportunity alerts from HARO (Help Out a Reporter), which will connect you with reporters who need expert insights for their stories. 31. Flipping the HARO idea around, if you've got a bunch of in-house experts, leverage that asset and create an expert's page on your site and offer free expertise to authoritative publications/personalities - many universities have success with this same strategy. 32. Volunteer your company's founders or thought leaders for interviews at other publications and blogs 33. Give a donation to a local organization or a national charity and get exposure on their donors page and potentially a link back to your site. 34. Sponsor an event and get listed as a supporter on their event site. 35. Organize a local Meetup event (if you get someone to sponsor it, it'll probably be free). 36. Speak at a local Meetup event; generate exposure for your company and services and position yourself as a thought leader. 37. Offer a testimonial or endorsement for a vendor or colleague on their website. 38. Ask for a testimonial or endorsement from your clients. It's a free form of proof of concept for your products and helps instill trust, which can lead to more sales. 39. Create a free tool, gadget, widget or app and brand it with your company logo and in some cases embed a hyperlink back to your website to raise the "SEO value" or your own site. Advertise your free tool on your blog, issue a press release, conduct outreach to industry sites that might cover it, look for free tool directories or a free distribution platform like Upload.com to get exposure. 40. Or get even more targeted and build a tool or feature you know a thought leader will love and give it to them for free (make them a brand advocate). 41. Leverage the "Freemium business model" and give away some part of your product functionality for free because "the concept of free" makes people feel like they have nothing to lose. 42. Sell your products and market your business on Craigslist. 43. Join the local chamber of commerce for free brand building and studies show that 63 percent of consumers want to buy from local chamber members. 44. Reward your long-term customers with loyalty discounts (word of mouth marketing, brand advocates). 45. Respond promptly to customer complaints (again, and can't say it enough, word of mouth is the best marketing tool, free or not). 46. Use SlideShare to market to a large audience for free: post presentations, case studies, create how-to-guides, repurpose blog content, etc. The domain strength of SlideShare alone helps your content rank well. 47. Engage with popular blogs in your niche via intelligent comments. Link back to relevant value-add content on your site where applicable. 48. Help influential people in your space promote their own products on your blog and on social media (I guarantee that most will return the favor and help promote your stuff too). 49. Create a free how-to webinar or video. 50. Create awards for your industry, promote it on social media, reach out to everyone nominated for an award, create branded badges for the winners. 51. Partner with related, established but non-competitive companies to co-sponsor webinars, white papers, etc. 52. Create a free newsletter signup on your site and publish a free newsletter each month. Tip: to get fresh content on the cheap, you can repurpose content from your blog, Webinars, turn a white paper into a series of newsletters with a link to download the rest for free, and so on. 53. Offer a series of "free tips" to people who have given you their email address. 54. Offer live chat and live customer support on your website. 55. Market other products, services, upgrades from your company in your thank you emails and pages. 56. Create an affiliate program; determine if it makes the most sense to skip the third party providers or do it yourself. 57. Attend industry conferences and chronicle the conference (live blog sessions, take pictures at events, etc.). 58. Ask employees to link to products/offers from their personal sites and profiles, as links raise the "SEO value" of your website, which can drive higher rankings. 59. Give a discount to people who share your product (tweet, blog, etc.). 60. Build charitable donations into your pricing (percentage of your profit goes to charity). 61. Organize a campaign against a particular injustice in your niche and get free publicity. 62. Think totally outside the box and do stuff like helping others with no expectation of reciprocation, which can cause really cool things to happen for your brand. 63. Read blogs, subscribe to RSS feeds of top marketing blogs and get even more free, or almost free ideas, each day to help market and grow your business on the cheap. This big list is a darn good place to start. (Thanks to my business partner Tom Demers for adding some great suggestions to the list.) Finally, check out the comment thread below. I'm encouraging everyone who reads this article to add more ideas to the list, which hopefully will elicit even more free marketing ideas. 30 Mar 2012 18:52:15 GMT http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2164835/63-Free-or-Almost-Free-Ways-to-Market-Your-Business?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sew+%28Search+Engine+Watch%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher 5F495418-BA3E-4EB2-B541-C09779352C72 SearchEngineWatch - March 30, 2012 Cumberland Packing, the maker of brands like Sweet ‘N Low and In The Raw sugar and stevia, has picked Ammirati as its new agency of record. The Brooklyn, N.Y.-based company replaces Mother, New York, which had been working with Cumberland since January 2010. Cumberland spent nearly $10 million on measured media last year, per Nielsen. The company, whose other brands include Butter Buds, focuses its marketing efforts on Sweet ‘N Low and In The Raw. The agency’s first work is set to break in June. The move came without a review. Agency founder Matthew Ammirati, who lives in New York City’s Brooklyn Heights, has been a fan of the family-owned company, which employs 400 people across from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The president of the eponymous agency and nephew of Ammirati & Puris co-founder Ralph Ammirati says he’s pursued the business run by the Eisenstadt family for the last couple of years. 30 Mar 2012 18:41:10 GMT http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/ammirati-lands-maker-sweet-n-low-139293?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Brandweek-NewsAndFeatures+%28Brandweek+-+News+and+Features%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher 1019C54B-2790-4359-AE42-336CBDFAC5B7 AdWeek - March 30, 2012 Much of the search marketing industry is up in arms over notifications from Google Webmaster Tools warning users that they’ve fallen from Google’s graces and should be on the lookout for “artificial or unnatural links... that could be used to manipulate PageRank”. What began as a ripple back in February has become a tidal wave of discontent and alarm as more report receiving the notices. The hardest hit so far, if you can judge by the buzz on the web, are blog networks like BuildMyRank (which is actually shutting down). It’s unclear whether it’s an algorithmic update or manual penalty, but it’s likely not a coincidence that Google recently discussed the deindexing of web hosting services earlier this month. Where Panda set out to rid the web of mass-produced, low quality content, this latest action from Google seems designed to sniff out unnatural backlink profiles and those responsible. The “unnatural” distinction is an important one, as until now, SEOs and webmasters have largely been discouraged from creating paid links. Especially since the JCPenney debacle, we all know, inside the search industry and out, that buying links is bad, bad news. In a 2008 interview with Eric Enge, Google Web Spam Czar Matt Cutts talked about link building – specifically, how to do it ethically and within Google’s guidelines. In fact, over the years, Cutts has shared link building tips often; see the Google Webmaster Help YouTube channel for examples. Some of the strategies he recommends are original research, creating controversy, and using humor. Still, it’s all about the content. Recent events seem almost a fundamental shift in the way Google perceives inbound links; they’re now saying not only can you not buy them, you can’t try to build at all. Of course, Google is predictably tight-lipped about what it is, exactly, that has relegated the offending sites to the wrist-slap list. That means that, as usual, we can only take best guesses. The theory I think holds the most water is Frank Watson’s, who contributed to this article. It does seem that this round of penalizations and deindexing incidents is the result of Google’s sniffing out large quantities of unnatural anchor text alone. For example, an unnatural link profile for a flower shop might look like: 1,000 links with the brand name as the anchor text; 3,500 links using “buy flowers online”; 5,000 links using “order flowers online,” etc. You would expect more links to use the brand name as anchor text; large quantities of links using very specific, high search volume terms, even more than the name of the business, could be a red flag. This is the kind of profile that might signal a stinker to Google. 28 Mar 2012 18:37:55 GMT http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2164438/Google-Cracking-Down-on-Unnatural-Links-Deindexing-Blog-Networks?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sew+%28Search+Engine+Watch%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher E0E33BB5-D4B0-4BD2-B8B6-B785CC716B63 SearchEngineWatch - March 28, 2012 For almost a month, page administrators have been able to communicate with fans privately by enabling direct messaging in timeline. However, 21 of the 100 largest brand pages have yet to allow this. A closer look reveals industry-specific patterns: * Restaurant chains and fashion designers are most interested in hearing from their customers via Facebook private messages. * Automakers, retailers, cable and telecommunications providers are the least receptive to accepting private messages. In an assessment of 10 of our largest clients’ Facebook pages: * Brands are receiving an average of 2.2 private messages per day for every 100,000 people who have liked a page. Television shows receive a higher-than-average volume of private messages, peaking on the day after a new episode airs. * Consumers send fewer private messages to retailers, but the questions that come in require greater action or specific details. Incoming messages often cover more personal subjects such as “is your new product gluten free?” * From our early observations, most brands will benefit from accepting private messages, since they elicit a response from customers who otherwise may have refrained from contacting the brand. To take advantage of this new capability, brands need a well-qualified response team and established escalation process in place before inviting fans to communicate via private messages. Consumers are catching on quickly and may soon begin to favor brands that put the effort in to accept private messages. Don’t you agree, readers? Take a look at the infographic below and let us know what you think in the comments section. 28 Mar 2012 18:35:35 GMT http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-timeline-messages-2012-03?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+allfacebook+%28Facebook+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher D18737E4-A62D-4385-8D98-258AE59A8A0C AllFacebook - March 28, 2012 For more than three decades, cable TV programmers enjoyed steady ratings gains—mostly at the expense of broadcasters. Inspired efforts like AMC’s Mad Men and FX’s Sons of Anarchy notwithstanding, those steady ratings increases sometimes belied the quality of programming they ran on their channels (sorry, Snooki). But with the cable business finally reaching saturation when it comes to adding new subscribers, and viewers blessed with more on-demand choices than ever, many top cable channels have recently experienced their worst ratings declines ever. As the Wall Street Journal (NSDQ: NWS) was first to notice Monday, ratings across top cable TV networks have taken a big, unexpected hit in the first quarter of this year. Measuring total day ratings performance, 15 of the top 20 basic cable channels experienced ratings drops in the first quarter—a rather unheard of benchmark in recent years, when channels steadily grew their audience as U.S. cable, satellite and telco TV service providers added subscribers. From 2001 to 2011, ad-supported cable’s full-year ratings average increased from a 26.6 rating to a 37.4, according to metrics researcher Nielsen 28 Mar 2012 18:32:48 GMT http://paidcontent.org/article/419-is-cables-long-glorious-ratings-run-finally-over/ 27501FEB-48C5-4E28-B12F-217370EF89F8 PaidContent - March 28, 2012 Arbitron, the largest radio ratings service, has settled a lawsuit in California over how it measures minority audiences, agreeing to pay $400,000 and to abide by certain research methods in tracking black and Latino radio listeners. The agreement, announced on Monday, settles a suit filed last week by the attorney general of California, who was joined by the city attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles. The suit contended that Arbitron undercounted minority audiences in how it recruited people to use its Portable People Meter, an electronic device that it introduced in 2008 to measure radio listening habits. Recalling an earlier lawsuit in New York and New Jersey, the California suit asserted that Arbitron’s method of relying on landline telephones to find users of its metering devices left out many minority households and that stations serving blacks and Latinos suffered lower ratings as a result. Arbitron agreed in the settlement to reach listeners by address and make other steps to represent minority groups. It will also pay $150,000 each to the State of California and the City of Los Angeles, and $100,000 to the City and County of San Francisco. 28 Mar 2012 18:23:40 GMT http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/arbitron-agrees-to-improve-how-it-counts-minority-radio-listeners/ 4FEFAA72-51E0-43BD-A9F5-F53E2F801338 MediaCoder/NYT - March 27, 2012 I’ve written before about my view that no medium innately “deserves” any particular share of ad spend based on the amount of time people spend with it. Nor should the simple matter of audience size be the sole determinant that drives budget allocation. Other variables such as the context of consumption (where and when the medium is accessed, the social setting, the user experiences and the inter-relationship with other media by day part etc.) all go to informing the allocation of media budgets and yielding a higher return on investment. Then there’s the simple fact of how well a given sector does in building and retaining its share. This, of course, is the ultimate determinant of success. In the arena of media sales, its devil take the hindmost and anyone who can achieve a share that is apparently disproportionate to their relative position as a medium (or property) is free to do so -- all credit to them. The notion of proportionality has no place in this particular mix. But even taking into such points into account, I still find it curious radio has -- for the most part -- become an over-looked medium for many brands relative to TV and even to much smaller (but perhaps newer and more shiny) media opportunities, such as social and mobile. 28 Mar 2012 18:12:42 GMT http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/171205/radio-deserving-of-more-attention.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mediadailynews+%28MediaPost+%7C+MediaDailyNews%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher 0AD10AAF-D90A-4145-8935-79317E8F8BCC MediaPost - March 28, 2012 Google is launching a new feature today called Account Activity that will help users gain more insight into their usage of Google services. Available to those who opt in, the utility will offer monthly reports detailing your account activity, like your number of sign-ins, how many emails you sent and received, the browsers you used, the number of Google searches you performed, the number of places you visited on Google Latitude, and a ton of other things that showcase the vast amount of data Google stores on you. The company says that it’s offering the feature, in part, to protect users from unauthorized activity. For example, in the company blog post, Google product manager Andreas Tuerk writes: For example, if you notice sign-ins from countries where you haven’t been or devices you’ve never owned, you can change your password immediately and sign up for the extra level of security provided by 2-step verification. 28 Mar 2012 18:10:20 GMT http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/28/googles-new-account-activity-feature-shows-your-shocking-addition-to-google-services/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher 83B59941-876C-4DAD-AA97-ED0247BC7A8E TechCrunch - March 28, 2012 If the allegations prove true, News Corp. would face a second significant scandal. The company's reputation has already been tarnished when it was revealed last year that reporters at News Corp.-owned News of The World hacked into the voice mail of scores of public workers, celebrities, and Milly Dowler, a teenage girl who had been kidnapped and murdered. The new allegations involves a unit within the News Corp.-owned NDS, which is accused of hiring hackers to crack smartcard codes issued by rivals of News Corp.'s pay-TV service. Smartcards are the equivalent to pass keys. They are inserted into set-top boxes and decrypt the broadcast signals. The hackers allegedly distributed the codes over the Web so viewers could access their competitors' transmissions without paying. One company is said to have been driven out of business as a result. News Corp. and NDS, which was acquired recently by Cisco Systems, have issued denials of wrongdoing. The newspaper reported that Australia's federal police have launched an investigation. 28 Mar 2012 18:08:14 GMT http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57405747-261/news-corp-faces-new-hacking-allegations-involving-pay-tv/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title 0DE35EA1-1062-495A-AD1B-55EF187775D5 Cnet - March 28, 2012 As the mobile app economy grows, the ability for consumers to sort through all the app clutter and actually find the apps they’re looking for is becoming increasingly relevant. And marketers have been looking for ways to target ads through app search stores, the way they’re able to through Web search engines. Appolicious, one of the earliest app discovery engines, thinks it has the answer to both. It’s now taking a Google AdWords-like approach, allowing developers to bid on keywords associated with their apps — for example, a popular music app maker like Rhapsody or Pandora could theoretically bid on the word “music” — Appolicious’s top search results for apps will also include advertised apps associated with keywords. 28 Mar 2012 18:05:27 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120327/more-targeted-app-ads-coming-to-an-app-search-engine-near-you/ 15270C74-1E6B-46E6-9B3C-2FD5594D3E71 AllThingsD - March 27, 2012 One of the most satisfying experiences is having a website take off in popularity. People are linking to you and sharing your stuff, responding to your emails, spending time and leaving comments, and in some cases opening their wallets. It’s a love train of feel-good moments, back-patting, fist bumps and fist pumps. I’ve been lucky enough to be part of this a few times. ghost-town Image by Allie Caulfield But I’ve also been on the other side of the proverbial digital media tracks. In the area where you roll your windows up, put your head down and wait for it to be over. In a ghost town on the web. It happened again on a recent lark of a side project where I didn’t take my own advice and ended up making some stupid mistakes. Fueled (and blinded) by my own idea, I killed my last blog before it truly had a chance to live. Here are the lessons I learned: I made decisions too quickly, and didn’t think about their long-term impact. Fools rush in and I was right behind. It’s best to map out ideas, wireframe concepts, storyboard the user experience and think logically about your approach. I underestimated the amount of resources it would require. Building digital traction takes and patience. I put too much emphasis on launching and not enough on the marathon march that comes after. With a broad market to cover, I quickly became overwhelmed with trying to keep up with posting and coverage was a mile wide and an inch deep. No one was visiting because: 27 Mar 2012 18:56:26 GMT http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/how-i-created-a-web-ghost-town/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SocialMediaExplorer+%28Social+Media+Explorer%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher 1FBE4852-015B-46DF-A525-9866120A12CF SocialMediaExplorer - March 27, 2012 What would you call a comedy about a suicidal depressive who befriends a talking dog, or a bloody horror drama featuring a dysfunctional family living in a haunted house? At FX they’re called hitting the demo. (In this case, with the shows “Wilfred” and “American Horror Story.”) FX, a basic cable channel that is part of News Corporation’s powerful cable division, has consciously carved a niche in the new television landscape — one mainly aimed at young men whom marketers pay a premium to reach — with risky, breakthrough and even occasionally offensive material. And that was before it announced a new show featuring Charlie Sheen. “I tell them, ‘You already spend a fortune on a show that has to do with incest, child abuse, adultery and murder; it’s called the news,’ ” said Lou LaTorre, president of advertising sales at the Fox Cable Networks Group. FX is following a blueprint that is well known within its parent company, News Corporation, which similarly lured younger viewers to its Fox Broadcasting channel in the early years with shows like “Married With Children” and “The Simpsons.” The strategy has helped FX emerge as a significant revenue generator for its parent company on the strength of shows like “Sons of Anarchy” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” Last year was FX’s most-watched year, with an average nightly audience of 1.5 million and a 22 percent lift in viewers ages 18 to 49. In the first quarter of 2012, FX ranked as the 10th most-watched basic cable channel, and the eighth most-watched in the 18-49 category. 27 Mar 2012 18:48:27 GMT http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/business/media/fx-expands-influence-behind-unorthodox-programming.html?partner=rss&emc=rss 08062A5F-38EE-4909-8686-A574CE5D2703 NYTimes - March 27, 2012 IAN VAN KUYK, a Temple University junior studying photojournalism, emerged from class earlier this month with a straightforward assignment: Take pictures at night. Van Kuyk's professor had armed him with a Nikon D40 digital camera and the knowledge that he had the legal right to snap photos anywhere within the public domain. Van Kuyk, 24, ended up getting a crash course on what happens when police don't want to be photographed, he said. He and two of his Point Breeze neighbors say a police officer forced Van Kuyk to the ground, jamming his face into the sidewalk, and handcuffed and arrested him after he began photographing a March 14 traffic stop on his block. "I was within my rights. I wasn't doing anything wrong. The officer began pushing and shoving me," Van Kuyk told the Daily News. "I told him, 'I'm just taking a photo. I'm a photojournalism student.' He got angry. And he just grabbed me and took me to the ground. He kept saying, 'Shut up. Stop resisting.' " Police say Van Kuyk's arrest had nothing to do with his picture-taking. "The officers are fully aware of the First Amendment right to take photographs," Lt. Ray Evers said Monday. The incident has incited the 7,000-member National Press Photographers Association and raised questions about whether all Philly cops are adhering to a memorandum, issued by Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, saying that civilians have a right to record or photograph cops in a public space. His memo followed a Daily News story in September about incidents in which cops wrongly arrested bystanders for using cellphones to record arrests. "The only intent Ian [Van Kuyk] had was to take a picture," said former photojournalist Mickey Osterreicher, an attorney representing the photographers' association. "Did this officer miss the memo or something?" 27 Mar 2012 18:41:01 GMT http://www.philly.com/philly/news/pennsylvania/20120327_DIDN_T_COPS_GET_THE_PHOTOS-OK_MEMO_.html 7B80A4C7-DF96-4E61-AE41-8B186A1426F9 Philly.com - March 27, 2012 After years of touting the superiority of online advertising, Google Inc. is taking a decidedly different approach to promote itself in areas where its rivals dominate. The Internet company is spending big sums on TV, magazine and newspaper ads to promote new services, including its Google+ social network and Chrome Web browser. Google’s ad-spending as a percentage of revenue is now almost on par with rival technology companies such as Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., according to new data. 27 Mar 2012 18:19:04 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120327/once-shunning-ad-promos-google-now-flaunts-itself/ 81F1D2C2-35C1-4B5B-995B-D2FDC7A953BF AllThingsD - March 27, 2012 Consumers’ choices to interact with businesses and nonprofits are very similar on Facebook and via email, according to a new study from engagement marketing firm Constant Contact and market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey. The study of 1,481 U.S. consumers 18 and older found parallels between why consumers like Facebook pages and opt-in to email lists, including a tendency to interact more with local businesses than with national companies. Here are some key findings from the study: 27 Mar 2012 18:12:26 GMT http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-engagement-email-2012-03?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+allfacebook+%28Facebook+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher 69AA8B00-F5FF-4E11-A78E-D050946B0EAA AllThingsFacebook - March 27, 2012 Real-time bidding—think eBay for advertisements—has been a popular way to buy display ad inventory for quite a while. Mostly, that means banner ads across a huge range of sites, and the ad sellers are who you'd expect—Google, Yahoo, etc. Publishers looking to advertise would frequently go to online auctions as a last resort, looking to get back a fraction of their asking price—say, $4 on an ad that would originally have cost the buyer $15. Now, a Forrester Consulting survey, commissioned by RTB market SpotXChange, says the market is on track to grow from $190 million to some $387 million this year, buoyed by the growing popularigy of online video in general and the popularity of the video format among advertisers—it's harder to beat with an ad filter and harder to skip over or tune out than display ads. By 2013, Forrester said, the market should double again, to $667 million. The popularity of the format gets more publishers interested, which drives up volume as well as CPMs; it's also more popular with ad sellers since it's centered around a few popular hubs and can be more directly audience-targeted than traditional my-God-they're-everywhere display ads. 27 Mar 2012 18:09:52 GMT http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/forrester-study-finds-huge-move-real-time-bidding-streaming-pre-roll-inven?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Brandweek-NewsAndFeatures+%28Brandweek+-+News+and+Features%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher 37CA3996-B659-41E8-9FDA-45AAC1A81997 AdWeek - March 27, 2012 While Pinterest is taking many newsrooms by storm, there may still be some editors who are hesitant or unsure about how to go about using the online scrapbooking site. Why not take a page — or in this case a board — from The Wall Street Journal? Recently, the venerable news organization started experimenting with how to use Pinterest and created a Quotes board. Its description partially reads: “Editors are pinning memorable quotes appearing in The Wall Street Journal.” Each pin is an image of a quote from a recent WSJ story shown floating over a column of blurred out text, much like pull-quotes do in an actual story. A short description accompanies each pin, allowing the quote to stand alone. By clicking on an individual quote, readers/pinners are taken to the original story it was published in. “There are so many memorable soundbites out there,” said Brian Aguilar, a social media editor at the news organization who helped come up with the idea for the board. ”This gives you the opportunity to really highlight them and pique people’s interest in a story.” This board can easily be replicated in newsrooms everywhere. I spoke (via email) with Aguilar to learn more about the board’s inspiration, how the images are created, and why the WSJ team isn’t worried about Pinterest and copyright issues. 26 Mar 2012 15:23:00 GMT http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/how-the-wall-street-journal-uses-pinterest_b11829 48788AEC-1716-4A6C-ABBB-1DAE7ACC4525 Mediabistro - March 26, 2012 Wikipedia is highly visible in Google search results, though not nearly as much as Intelligent Positioning reported in February. Even in the case of one-word search queries, Wikipedia results appear on the first page 8 out of 10 times, not 99 percent of the time as IP suggested, according to a new study by Conductor. In Wikipedia in the SERPs, Conductor offered another look at the Wikipedia/Google bias issue. Their findings are similar to those of our recent Search Engine Watch study, though the scope of Conductor’s report is slightly different; where we examined Wikipedia results on Google vs. Bing, they broke queries out into transactional vs. informational. This segmentation allows for a better look into Wikipedia distribution according to how people actually search. Slingshot SEO and SpyFu also threw their hats in the ring; Slingshot in an examination of a slightly larger keyword sample size and SpyFu with a historical look at Wikipedia rankings over the last five years. 26 Mar 2012 15:17:28 GMT http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2163432/3-More-Studies-Examine-Wikipedias-Page-1-Google-Rankings?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sew+%28Search+Engine+Watch%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher FA935B96-B39B-41E8-8EE1-325EE34433F4 SearchEngineWatch - March 26, 2012 Smoyz, an Israeli ad agency, has executed a Pinterest-based campaign (the firm says it’s the first-ever) on behalf of its client Kotex. The firm selected 50 women who posted pictures of things that inspire them — a foodie posting pictures about cooking, for example. Smoyz then hired an artist to paint objects related to those interests in the new Kotex design. The items and a box of Kotex were sent to the Pinterest users as a gift. According to the campaign clip above, the promo was a success because the women shared details with their followers about the gift they received, resulting in more than 2,000 impressions. Adrants says the promo is an example of what will surely be a marketing trend — using the “interest graph.” We wondered if the campaign broke too far from the Kotex product. The Kotex ads currently running here in the U.S. stress the reality of a woman’s period. It’s not about yoga and running through a meadow. (Check it out below.) The Smoyz clip, on the other hand has a woman playing with glitter with the words “Color makes people happy” on the screen. 26 Mar 2012 15:12:18 GMT http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/kotex-uses-pinterest-to-generate-social-media-buzz_b35708 AA634F51-D709-41D7-97DC-998CDDF89442 Mediabistro - March 23, 2012 Did you wake up fresh today, a new start, a blank slate with resources and opportunities... or is today yet another day of living out the narrative you've been engaged in for years? For all of us, it's the latter. We maintain our worldview, our biases, our grudges and our affections. We nurse our grudges and see the very same person (and situation) in the mirror today that we did yesterday. We may have a tiny break, a bit of freshness, but no, there's no complete fresh start available to us. Marketers have been using this persistence to their advantage forever. They sell us a car or a trip or a service that fits the story we tell ourselves. I don't buy it because it's the right thing for everyone, I buy it because it's right for me, the us I invented, the I that's part of the story I've been telling myself for a long time. The socialite walks into the ski shop and buys a $3000 ski jacket she'll wear once. Why? Not because she'll stay warmer in it more than a different jacket, but because that's what someone like her does. It's part of her story. In fact, it's easier for her to buy the jacket than it is to change her story. 26 Mar 2012 15:11:08 GMT http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/ 7DA53E22-637B-45D4-AD5E-11822B0857FC SethGodin - March 24, 2012 Lessons From Millennials on Acting to Innovate Melissa Waggener Zorkin, CEO, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide The hive of creative thinkers, innovators, marketers, entrepreneurs and other collective brain power that “innovate” is mighty enough to give anyone a bit of pause when considering what insight could be offered up that can help frame thinking around the opportunity that exists when creativity, passion and inspiration converge. I have witnessed the role communications and effective brand positioning should play in bringing an idea that becomes an invention and in turn transforms into an innovation once it reaches those who can benefit from it most. “… If you are an innovator you have some level of power because you change the way people live.” But the words, like those above from a participant in recent consumer panels we conducted on how millennials view innovation and its impact, are what struck me as being of the most value to share with anyone considering how to create, build and scale innovative thinking. For our research, we chose to focus on millennials because of the significant role they are playing in not only changing the new ways in which we shop, learn, share and experience innovation in its many forms but in creating them. And they have strong points of view. I’ve distilled down a few observations from reviewing these panel findings and would summarize them as follows: It takes innovation to build a strong brand: Although millennials clearly view brands as being in the business of driving profit, they often linked specific brands (e.g., Apple, Microsoft, Nike, Amazon and Toyota, to name a few) to innovation the most strongly. Your brand can quickly become identified or dismissed by its innovation, or lack thereof. Innovation is all about “me”: Innovation is highly influential to this younger audience in terms of its day-to-day impact and seen as a necessity for societal and technological advancement. However, the overarching perspective of innovation is fairly limited to the individual and taking something to the next level with little expression of a greater worldly context. Innovation scales from wasteful to world-changing: Among this younger audience, everything is innovation and seems to be perceived as a continuum from it being superfluous and wasteful to it being essential to the advancement or betterment of society. Ideally, responsible innovation would be used for societal progress and fulfill needs while being cognizant of the longer-term consequences (societal, environmental, political, etc.). 26 Mar 2012 15:00:27 GMT http://www.psfk.com/2012/03/6-lessons-from-millenials-innovation.html 5C74E156-64D8-4F0E-A754-B67B0733A62D PSFK - March 26, 2012 With the proliferation of social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, graduate school applicants can gain unfiltered insights on graduate school life. With that ease of access through free and increasingly sophisticated technological tools, graduate students say they've charted new routes to understanding the culture and academic merits of prospective institutions without the aid of admissions offices. "If you really want to learn about individual programs, aside from the university as a whole, I think you have to go straight to the current students and alumni," says Rheanne Wirkkala, a client executive at the global public relations company Burson-Marsteller and a 2011 alumna of Yale University's graduate international relations program. 26 Mar 2012 15:41:30 GMT http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/articles/2012/03/26/graduate-school-applicants-use-social-media-to-bypass-admissions-offices 9C85E018-35CE-4900-9A0D-556B4D615B15 USNews - March 26, 2012 Facebook is mounting a strong resistance against the trend of employers and others forcing users of the social networks to surrender their passwords, and the company has found in ally in U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat. Blumenthal told Politico he is working on a bill that would prohibit employers and prospective employers from requesting access to Facebook accounts, comparing the process with polygraph tests, calling it an “unreasonable invasion of privacy,” and saying: I am very deeply troubled by the practices that seem to be spreading voraciously around the country. The coercive element of the request really makes it less than voluntary. The senator told Politico the bill would be ready “in the very near future,” adding that companies have “a lot of ways to find out information” about potential hires, and that his bill would not prevent potential employers from seeking out other online information about applicants that is publicly available. 26 Mar 2012 15:03:03 GMT http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-passwords-fight-2012-03?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+allfacebook+%28Facebook+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher C85BE12D-95E6-4D2E-810E-E64DAA929CC0 AllFacebook - March 23, 2012 Business not using machine learning to augment the products and services will find it difficult to compete in the future according to panelists at GigaOm’s Structure:Data event on Wednesday. Not only will these companies be at a competitive disadvantage at first, it will get worse. Why? Machine learning solutions will only gain more intelligence with additional data and techniques. Currie Boyle, a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, explained how natural language processing and continual machine learning transforms online sellers, allowing them to interact with its customers. “These products help with guided selling on the web across online retail sites. More importantly, they try to understand the unsuccessful transactions to improve machine learning. That can transform clients from being relatively static to human-like; the more it’s used, the more successful for you and others.” The beauty is that such machine learning solutions can help both buyers and sellers in a transaction in ways that weren’t possible just a decade ago. Mok Oh, Chief Scientist at PayPal noted this: “Human loops trying to match buyers and sellers is inefficient. Machine learning makes it scalable and cost-effective to connect them in a world of unstructured data across millions of sites and products.” 21 Mar 2012 16:22:12 GMT http://gigaom.com/2012/03/21/machine-learning-structure-data-2012/ 73B11B06-694A-4C80-B7C8-0AC04DEEACD1 GigaOm - March 21, 2012 Twitter announced today that Promoted Tweets will be appearing in the timelines of mobile app users, even if they don't follow that brand advertiser. The San Francisco-based tech firm has been testing the broader-reach feature on user segments during the last three weeks. As has been the case online since September 2011, if Twitter mobile users share interests with people already following the advertiser, they may now see ads from that brand. They'll see ads from brands they follow as well, which has been the situation for a few months. According to the company, users can delete the ads with a single click. Previously, mobile users had to search using Twitter's mobile app to discover Promoted Tweets if they didn't follow the brand advertiser. Twitter launched mobile distribution for its other key self-service ad unit, Promoted Accounts, last month. 21 Mar 2012 16:21:09 GMT http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2162265/twitters-promoted-tweets-mobile 3F13668F-1D67-47CE-9609-B17D89B0BA0F ClickZ - March 20, 2012 What do you do when your best isn’t good enough? This is the dilemma faced by marketers struggling to meet sales goals. Crain’s BtoB Magazine and Bizo conducted a survey of B2B marketing professionals in the US and what they found was a general case of “we’ve got what we’ve got.” 59% of marketers said that email was the most effective channel for generating sales. This is good because 49% said email took up the majority of their time and resources. Trouble is, 63% of respondents said their current marketing mix wasn’t meeting their needs. We often hear this kind of talk about social media, but email? Could it be that in this day of apps and Facebook, email isn’t as effective as it used to be? I still respond to email solicitations from brands I enjoy, but I have unsubscribed from a large number of lists because I get the same information through social media. Could this be the problem? If emails aren’t filled with exclusive information, information the customer can’t get anywhere else, then what’s the point? Part of the problem lies in those three little letters: R – O – I . An email response is easy to capture and tally, so you can tell at a glance if an email campaign brought in dollars and how many. But it could be that the Facebook brand page is bringing in more dollars, you just don’t know it because it’s harder to quantify. 21 Mar 2012 16:19:49 GMT http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/03/marketers-say-email-is-best-but-could-be-better.html 32D04BA2-DA92-4ACB-983C-CBF7E440BC7F MarketingPilgrim - March 20, 2012 In a sign that legal news is gaining strategic clout, LexisNexis announced it is buying subscription service Law360 for an undisclosed sum. Law360 has been an acquisition target for years for companies like LexisNexis that make a business of selling research and practice management software to lawyers. SEE ALSO: Reed Elsevier Finds Ads Stabilizing In H110 Law360 started in New York in 2004, and now has reporters in six different cities, including Washington and Chicago. The site is a highly paywalled operation that sells access to packages of newsletters, some of which reportedly cost tens of thousands a year. Clients include law firms and companies. In a release, LexisNexis portrayed the acquisition as part of a strategic growth plan in which news is a key ingredient in the package of tools it sells to lawyers. The purchase comes at a time of disruption for the legal industry and for the industries that provide services to it. The financial crisis eliminated both law firms and businesses, and led survivors to scrutinize operation costs. The crunch has also forced firms to be more vigilant about legal research costs which are typically passed on to clients in the same way as fax and photocopy expenses. 21 Mar 2012 16:18:57 GMT http://paidcontent.org/article/419-market-for-legal-news-heats-up-lexisnexis-buys-law360/ 040A9A1B-8BA0-4590-AC5A-30B65A6BA7BD PaidContent.org - March 20, 2012 The Audit Bureau of Circulations is hoping to make its reporting more relevant to an e-reading age with a new set of standards requiring much more detailed reporting of digital magazine sales. ABC’s board of directors has endorsed a new reporting format that would require large consumer magazine publishers to break down digital magazine subscriptions and single-copy sales by platform. Currently they report this info across all platforms, lumped under “digital.” SEE ALSO: Condé Nast Will Give Advertisers More Metrics On Tablet Editions If passed, the new standards would not apply to everyone. Publishers whose digital editions make up more than two percent of circulation and average at least 3,000 copies would be required to break down circulation by platform—web and mobile browser editions, tablet and smartphone apps and multi-platform offers. This data would include the number of unique browsers or devices, total visits and average visit length. (Here’s an example of how a statement would look—PDF.) Publishers would also be required to disclose the number of digital editions sold in bundles. 21 Mar 2012 16:16:06 GMT http://paidcontent.org/article/419-audit-bureau-of-circulations-pushes-for-meaningful-metrics-on-digital-m/ 4ACA3041-5A55-45C0-A589-F276049F9A35 PaidContent.org - March 20, 2012 When people have asked (or complained) about the title to my book No Bullshit Social Media, I’ve answered with this explanation: The world isn’t an end sum game. I don’t need every person interested in social media marketing to buy the book. I need a few thousand and we’ll be just fine. If the word Bullshit offends you, the book isn’t for you. And that’s fine. That attitude is sort of the core tenet of Erika Napoletano’s new book The Power of Unpopular, which I loved, for that and other reasons. Erika tackles the notion that you don’t need to please everyone and it’s okay to be your own person, your own company and have your own attitudes, opinions and stances on the world. And if people don’t like it, screw ‘em. You don’t need everyone to like you. The Power of Unpopular is an awesome look at several businesses who have stood their ground, whether having an attitude, or selling a product the market told everyone else instinctively would not sell. The case studies are more detailed and have more practical take aways for you than most books out there. That alone makes it worth buying. Erika’s attitude — kind of a no bullshit one — is another selling point. I caught up with the fiery redhead last week to chat about it. Be warned: The conversation is not G-rated. And my apologies for the dotted audio issues. We didn’t discover them until the recording was done. You won’t miss much and hopefully they’re not too distracting. 21 Mar 2012 16:11:01 GMT http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/digital-marketing/dont-we-all-just-want-to-be-unpopular/ CB4DE688-C2FB-4595-9DF6-55063A707B77 SocialMediaExplorer - March 21, 2011 Here's one you wouldn't necessarily expect to come out of a big mobile company. Nokia recently filed for a patent with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that would allow a tattoo and a user's phone to communicate. Using haptic feedback, or as Nokia calls it, "a perceivable impulse," users would be alerted to a new call, text message, or e-mail right from the tattoo. Nokia is using magnetic waves to create the effect, and noted in the patent that its technology could be extended to an invisible tattoo for those who don't want to show their phone-friendly ink walking around town. In a more likely scenario, the technology might also be applied to a visible image, sign, or badge. It's important to note that companies attempt to patent creations all the time, and the vast majority of them end up filed away, never to be used again. This one has a high likelihood of receiving that fate. After all, with this implementation, Nokia or one of its partners would have to get into the tattoo business just to get it to work. "In an embodiment, the material is attached to skin using at least one of stamping a ferromagnetic pattern, spraying the ferromagnetic pattern, attaching adhesive tape comprising the ferromagnetic pattern, apply a decal comprising the ferromagnetic pattern, tattooing the ferromagnetic pattern and drawing the ferromagnetic pattern," the company wrote in its patent filing. Ferromagnetism's implementation in this patent makes sense, since it's the strongest type of magnetism and the only one that can actually be felt. 21 Mar 2012 15:56:10 GMT http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-57401446-17/want-a-vibrating-tattoo-that-alerts-you-to-a-call-nokia-does/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title EB64B84C-E765-484D-B155-76895E0B5BD9 Cnet - March 21, 2012 When Justin Bassett interviewed for a new job, he expected the usual questions about experience and references. So he was astonished when the interviewer asked for something else: his Facebook username and password. Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn't see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his login information. Bassett refused and withdrew his application, saying he didn't want to work for a company that would seek such personal information. But as the job market steadily improves, other job candidates are confronting the same question from prospective employers, and some of them cannot afford to say no. 20 Mar 2012 16:24:44 GMT http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/employers-ask-job-seekers-for-facebook-passwords/article_3c760996-aefd-50e1-80a5-085909c7f0d1.html 6B42B7C4-A53A-4D0D-8172-C03967CF71BD STLToday - March 20, 2012 SAN FRANCISCO -- If you use LinkedIn, you've probably told the site where you work, what you do and who you work with. That's a gold mine for hackers, who are increasingly savvy in using that kind of public -- but personal -- information for pinpoint attacks. It's called "spear phishing," and it paid off last year in two especially high-profile security breaches: a Gmail attack that ensnared several top U.S. government officials and a separate attack on RSA, whose SecurID authentication tokens are used by millions. In both cases, the attackers successfully tricked their targets into opening e-mail attachments that appeared to come from trusted sources or colleagues. 19 Mar 2012 16:26:07 GMT http://finance.yahoo.com/news/linkedin-is-a-hacker-s-dream-tool.html CC1E7B93-878D-4544-9A04-4C5D6CD23BE5 YahooFinance - March 16, 2012 The Wall Street Journal (NSDQ: NWS) has embraced video with gusto. The venerable paper is pumping out hours of live news clips and splashing them onto everything from the iPhone to the X-Box. According to Alisa Bowen, General Manager of the Journal’s Digital Network, the paper now has its video on more than 15 different platforms. SEE ALSO: 'WSJ Social' Launched On Facebook With An Eye Towards 'Journal Everywhere' “The growth is exponential,” said Bowen, citing three factors that is causing video to take off. “The devices work, consumers have the bandwidth and advertisers are increasing their budgets.” What this means in practice is that the Journal is showing over four hours a day of live video on devices like the iPad and also using that footage to place clips on platforms like Boxee, Roku and YouTube. 19 Mar 2012 14:50:28 GMT http://paidcontent.org/article/419-newspapers-and-video-slow-and-steady-or-flood-the-zone/ BF2CE3CD-E386-4E7D-8E4B-09FBC179F05F PaidContent.org - March 16, 2012 Nielsen says it is ready to sell what many advertisers have been clamoring for: a system that standardizes ratings for television and online ads. The new system, given the name “cross-platform campaign ratings,” will combine Nielsen’s existing television ratings, which measure the reach and frequency of ads on TV, with Nielsen’s new online campaign ratings, which apply the same measurements to the Web. Until now, the two types of ratings have existed on their own, frustrating companies that want to know how their TV and Web ads do or do not work together. “This is a major breakthrough,” said Steve Hasker, the president for media products and advertiser solutions at Nielsen, in an interview last week. “This measure will show you the reach of your campaign on TV, the reach of your campaign online, and will show you the overlap between the two.” The lack of overlap has posed problems for media buyers in the past. The new system will initially be used by GroupM, the global advertising giant that is a subsidiary of WPP. But the system is not exclusive to GroupM; it will be available to other advertising buyers, Mr. Hasker said. Nielsen started offering TV-like online ratings about six months ago. They have been used for 600 different advertising campaigns to date, according to Mr. Hasker. The new combination, he said, would help advertisers optimize their online-and-TV campaigns. 19 Mar 2012 14:44:07 GMT http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/new-nielsen-ratings-to-measure-tv-and-online-ads-together/?partner=rss&emc=rss 9A8FC0EE-13F1-45FB-A4A7-414498860223 NYT - March 18, 2012 Even though today’s reader wants to find the latest headlines immediately with just a click of a button, Britain’s satirical newspaper Private Eye has stuck by the phrase “hot off the press” for 50 years. The newspaper doesn’t publish online — if you want to read its content, you have to buy the paper. The paper does have a website (private-eye.co.uk), but to read full stories from the latest issue, readers have to buy it at a newsstand or sign up for a subscription. Editor Ian Hislop recently appeared before the Leveson Inquiry, the British government investigation into the press following the phone-hacking scandal at News Corp.’s News of the World tabloid. Hislop told the inquiry team he thought newspaper companies were crazy to give away their products for free on the Web. “I can’t see why journalism, which at its best is a noble craft, should be given away,” he said. Wall Street Journal columnist Brett Arends followed up on Hislop’s comments. Hislop, who has been editor of Private Eye since 1986, said that during the late 1990s, when everyone was rushing to get on the Internet, he decided it was all madness. “Everyone was putting stuff up on the Internet. Everyone said, ‘You’ve got to get (the Eye) up there, you’ve got to get it out there, everyone wants everything for free.’ I just couldn’t understand how it would work,” he said. 19 Mar 2012 14:42:58 GMT http://www.editorandpublisher.com/ASection/Article/The-Future-of-Print-Is---Print 28A2485E-6636-47A2-A6FC-6DA2E91D3A59 EditorandPublisher - March 19, 2012 Can physicists produce insights about language that have eluded linguists and English professors? That possibility was put to the test this week when a team of physicists published a paper drawing on Google's massive collection of scanned books. They claim to have identified universal laws governing the birth, life course and death of words. The paper marks an advance in a new field dubbed "Culturomics": the application of data-crunching to subjects typically considered part of the humanities. Last year a group of social scientists and evolutionary theorists, plus the Google Books team, showed off the kinds of things that could be done with Google's data, which include the contents of five-million-plus books, dating back to 1800. 19 Mar 2012 14:39:16 GMT http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304459804577285610212146258.html F0804A3A-41E4-4AF9-BF5D-84F05BB4FF1B WSJ - March 16, 2012 They say you only have one chance to make a good first impression and this is certainly true for social media. Call it a profile, a brand page or homepage, that single spot on the web has to tell the world what you’re all about in a glance. Big companies like Coca-Cola and Warner Brothers have teams of people who do nothing but handle company branding. They make sure that every graphic, every piece of text and every video associated with the brand conveys the essence of the company. In the case of Coca-Cola, it’s not just about the soda, it’s about happiness, togetherness and world peace. Really. I’m not kidding. For smaller companies or individuals who are the company, consistent branding is even more important. So don’t think you can skip this lesson because you’re a one-man band. This week, three high-profile sites released news related to profiles and branding. 15 Mar 2012 15:28:54 GMT http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/03/brand-management-its-all-about-the-profile.html 433CA6BD-0271-4551-92AB-701161323358 MarketingPilgrim - March 14, 2012 In the latest Women Leaders in PR profile, we talk with Claudia Mejia-Heffner, who was recently named the MD of JeffreyGroup‘s New York office and head of the U.S. Hispanic practice. JeffreyGroup is an independent PR firm specializing in efforts that reach Latin audiences across the Americas. The firm has offices in the U.S. (it’s headquartered in Miami), Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. We talk with Mejia-Heffner about her personal journey across the Americas, reaching Hispanic consumers, and why, for her, “being Hispanic has always been an advantage.” 15 Mar 2012 15:15:00 GMT http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/women-leaders-in-pr-from-nicaragua-to-the-u-s-claudia-mejia-heffner-can-handle-change_b35270 47489842-4858-48B6-8BD6-5A083F976E61 PRNewser - March 14, 2012 Advertisers struggle to be heard through the noise. Customer service reps, on the other hand, can whisper. A few organizations have figured out how to turn customer service into a marketing opportunity and thus a profit center. They figure if they've got your attention, if they're talking to you at a moment when you care a great deal, they can turn that into an opportunity to delight. And being delighted is remarkable and worth talking about. That means that if your organization has a stall, deny and avoid policy when it comes to customer interaction, you will almost certainly be defeated if a competitor comes up with a scalable way to delight. Overseas call centers and online chat handled by untrained workers with no incentives seem like clever ways to cut costs during stressful times. What they actually are is scalable engines of annoyance, time-sucking processeses that raise expectations and then totally dash them. Better to not even have a phone number. (You can't call Google but you don't want to call Adobe--which one generates more animus--the inability to call, or the promise, unfilled, of respect and thoughtful help?) 15 Mar 2012 15:06:13 GMT http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/03/reorganizing-the-economics-and-attitude-of-customer-service.html 0364544F-F929-45D7-9B00-4CE4CD1DBF91 Seth'sBlog - March 14, 2012 LONDON — In what could prove to be one of the most damaging chapters yet in the scandal enveloping Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers in Britain, Scotland Yard arrested a former chief reporter for The News of the World on Wednesday on suspicion of intimidating a witness, the first time the police have raised the specter of witness tampering in the course of their investigations. A police statement said a 51-year-old man had been “arrested by appointment” at a central London police station “on suspicion of intimidation of a witness” and of “encouraging or assisting” a related offense. The statement did not name the man, but former employees of News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, identified him as Neville Thurlbeck, who was fired by News International last summer after 21 years with The News of the World. Mr. Murdoch shut down The News of the World, a Sunday paper, in July amid a wave of revelations about its use of cellphone hacking. Police inquiries have widened to include The Sun, the daily newspaper that is the most profitable and most widely circulated of the Murdoch newspaper titles in Britain, and a broad range of suspected criminal wrongdoing. 15 Mar 2012 14:52:58 GMT http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/world/europe/witness-intimidation-cited-in-hacking-scandal-arrest.html?partner=rss&emc=rss C6968F0B-6AC5-429E-AAA3-DA045D5868D9 NYTimes - March 15, 2012 (Reuters) - If Greg Smith can do it, so can Darth Vader. The scathing resignation letter of the Goldman Sachs executive has inspired a sheaf of online spoofs written on behalf of several imaginary employees. Within hours of the New York Times publishing Smith's letter, in which he calls the investment bank a "toxic" place where managing directors referred to their clients as "muppets", the villain of the popular Hollywood sci-fi epic Star Wars also decided to quit via British satirical website, The Daily Mash. Using many of the same phrases Smith penned in his letter, Darth Vader said he no longer felt at home in the Empire. "The Empire today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about remote strangulation. It just doesn't feel right to me anymore," Darth Vader said in his letter. The spoofs highlight how investment banks such as Goldman Sachs have become household names after the global financial crisis triggered by the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, and how deeply allegations of corporate greed resonate at a time when recession, joblessness and shrinking incomes have become the norm for many across the globe. 15 Mar 2012 14:51:22 GMT http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/15/goldman-spoofs-idUSL4E8EF35120120315?feedType=RSS&feedName=vcMedia&virtualBrandChannel=10109 C1A0B37F-901A-4BED-B616-261121A69666 Reuters - March 15, 2012 Where technology was once only for geeks, now digital gadgets are for everyone, from small children keeping busy at the supermarket to grandparents Skyping their grandkids. We had a chance to talk with Bradford Williams, president of Weber Shandwick‘s North American tech practice, and Heidi Sinclair, president of the firm’s global technology practice, while they’re visiting New York, and they were squarely focused on this intersection between even the highest of technologies and the consumer. “It’s a reversal of the tide of where technology comes from,” said Williams. “Previously, it came from big business. Now, the most dominant technology is coming from the consumer area, like the iPhone and the iPad.” For example, when mobile first caught on 30 years ago, it was a business tool. Today, of course, it’s for everyone. “RFPs that we’ve seen from the last month or two seem hi-tech, but when you dig in, they have apps or some other little piece where the company has to talk to consumers,” said Sinclair, who referenced the “consumerization of IT.” 13 Mar 2012 15:42:51 GMT http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/consumers-push-technology-pr-past-techno-speak_b35143 2C243233-89F5-43CE-A3A8-318C3638143E PRNewser - March 12, 2012 This is not a post where I try to give you the top 5 ways to handle the overflow of data that we are all faced with on a daily basis. In fact, I don’t really even have my own top 5 ways to manage and, more importantly, filter the sheer volume of information that comes my way each day. I try different things at different times and they are effective to varying degrees and for varying lengths of time. i beginning t wonder if it’s just me but I doubt it. What I wonder about is what do you do? Are you still using RSS to handle your information needs? Are you using a tool like Trackur to help manage information flow? I have just started to use Pulse to organize content in a more meaningful way for me. I also use Read It Later to keep track of many things I would LIKE to get to (doesn’t mean I do but I can at least say I tried). So what do you do to stay informed without being buried under an information avalanche? 13 Mar 2012 15:41:33 GMT http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/03/how-do-you-filter-information.html 09E69827-A4CD-45E5-95F1-C040C8EEF3A7 MarketingPilgrim - March 13, 2012 Google's ad Project Re:Brief took four iconic television commercials from the 1960s and 1970s, contacted the original ad executives behind the ads, and brought them to New York to help them re-imagine them for the digital Web. The ads included Coca-Cola, Volvo, Alka-Seltzer and Avis. The television ads that made history appear to connect one person with another. They bring out the human part of the products. Harvey Gabor in 1971 helped create Hilltop, the Coca-Cola commercial that taught the world to sing about its product as the "real thing." He said the song "matched the personality with the brand." Through technology, the re-imagined ad allows the viewer to send a free Coca-Cola across the world and share a little happiness with someone never met. The interactive ad asks the viewer to choose a destination such as Hollywood or Google headquarters, add a message, and send the product. 13 Mar 2012 15:19:07 GMT http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/169999/ad-legends-re-imagine-iconic-tv-messages-for-digit.html 30579E67-51E6-423E-AE81-A96DA1157830 MediaPost - March 12, 2012 LONDON — Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International, was arrested early Tuesday on suspicion of obstruction of justice, according to a person with knowledge of the arrest. Her husband, Charlie, a decades-long friend of Prime Minister David Cameron from their days at Eton, was also arrested, the person said. In a statement, the police said that a total of six people in and outside of London had been arrested on Tuesday as part of Operation Weeting, the criminal investigation into phone hacking and other illegal activities at the News of the World and other newspapers. In the British system, suspects are often arrested, released and charged months later. Following standard procedure, the police did not name the suspects, but said that they had been arrested between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. and were being interrogated at different police stations on suspicion of “conspiracy to pervert the course of justice,” what the British call obstruction of justice. This could relate to activities like destroying e-mails, computers and other evidence, people with knowledge of the investigation said. 13 Mar 2012 15:14:24 GMT http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/world/europe/former-murdoch-editor-is-reported-arrested.html?partner=rss&emc=rss 92F43CA0-4E72-47BA-9148-D8C94AC8E99C NYTimes - March 13, 2012 Posterous, once a blogging service competitive with Tumblr and now a group conversation tool, has been bought by Twitter. The company’s product, Posterous Spaces, will remain up and running. “We’ll give you ample notice before any changes or disruptions to the service and we’ll provide specific instructions for exporting your content to another service,” Posterous told users. Most of Posterous’ employees joined Twitter, where they will be working on “several key initiatives.” As of last September, Posterous told us it had 15 million monthly unique visitors, with three million of its users accessing its products solely through email. Posterous had raised $10 million from backers included Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures, Jafco Ventures and Y Combinator. 13 Mar 2012 15:06:31 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120312/twitter-buys-posterous-its-not-quite-an-acqhire-as-product-wont-be-shut-down/ 9939470B-09EA-40D9-AA38-7328B91294AF AllThingsD - March 12, 2012 Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” system means you end up telling your friends about everything you’re doing, whether they want to know or not. Netflix wants to tie this into its streaming service, but can’t, because of a U.S. privacy law. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who is also a Facebook board member, is backing a bill that would change the law. Right now, it’s tied up in the Senate. But if it passes, don’t expect Netflix subscribers to thank him. They have absolutely no desire to learn what their Facebook pals are watching. That’s the no-doubt-about-it conclusion from a new survey commissioned by Citi analyst Mark Mahaney: He finds that seven out of 10 Netflix subs are “not at all interested” in “seeing what [their] FB friends have watched on Netflix.” Here’s what that looks like in a bar chart: 13 Mar 2012 15:02:40 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120313/please-dont-tell-me-what-youre-watching-on-netflix/ 4D17E7F7-EF5C-4B18-ADF8-F967EDB46891 AllThingsD - March 13, 2012 Take that, Facebook: The second most populous nation in the world begins a trial this week against the social network and 11 other online services for not taking down content that India’s people might consider offensive. India’s laws require Internet companies to remove within 36 hours any material that “seeks to create enmity, hatred and deemed “ethnically objectionable, grossly harmful, defamatory or blasphemous,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Facebook and the other online services have said that when they’re notified of specific things that offend, then removing them is the companies’ responsibility. However, they can’t be held liable for content posted by users and can’t monitor everything that gets posted. One possible outcome of this case might propel India to follow China’s example in blocking citizens’ access to Facebook — that would amount to one third of the world blocking access to the social network. India is the world’s second most populous nation, with 1.22 billion people. China leads with a population of 1.3 billion. 13 Mar 2012 15:00:56 GMT http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-india-trial-2012-03 34075D41-C4F1-46C4-9957-76A3FB8AAB17 AllFacebook - March 12, 2012 An Amazon exec may have goofed by posting a new title to his LinkedIn page that suggests Amazon is planning to create original programming. An Amazon exec posted to his LinkedIn account that he's currently the vice president of original television at Amazon. Amazon may be considering a move into original programming. Netflix already has original shows, including "Lilyhammer," starring Steven Van Zandt. (Credit: Screen shot by Greg Sandoval) Only there is no original TV programming at Amazon, at least not yet. Fortune magazine spotted the Linkedin post from Joe Lewis, a new Amazon hire who is supposed a vice president of production at Amazon Studios. Lewis is a former production exec at 20th Century Fox so it's not the like the janitor was making the claim. Fortune reported that Lewis' new title was removed from his Linkedin page after the magazine called. Amazon did not respond to questions from CNET. If true, it certainly wouldn't come as a surprise. Related stories * Netflix said to be seeking cable TV partner * Netflix: It wants to be HBO, but better * Comcast launches subscription movie service Netflix and Hulu have already begun acquiring original content. Movies and TV shows are hard to acquire and the licensing rights are all locked up in exclusive agreements. Analysts say that there's going to be more of this from online distributors as the lines between cable and . Internet distributors begin to blur. Come to think of it, if Amazon isn't moving into original programming, what was Lewis doing? Wishful thinking? 7 Mar 2012 15:07:50 GMT http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57392240-261/amazon-may-be-mulling-plan-to-create-tv-shows/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title 97BCEE21-2683-4A54-A953-5DE041D50CFC CNet - March 7, 2012 If you have ever been on a bus or train with someone loudly yammering on their cellphone, the appeal of a device that could block their signal is undeniable. Well, the Federal Communications Commission would like to take this opportunity to remind you that such products remain illegal, regardless of their obvious appeal. “In recent days, there have been various press reports about commuters using cellphone jammers to create a ‘quiet zone’ on buses or trains,” Enforcement Bureau Chief Michele Ellison said in a statement. “We caution consumers that it is against the law to use a cell or GPS jammer or any other type of device that blocks, jams, or interferes with authorized communications, as well as to import, advertise, sell, or ship such a device.” The agency said it has undertaken 20 enforcement actions against online retailers in 12 states for illegally marketing such jamming devices. “The FCC Enforcement Bureau has a zero tolerance policy in this area and will take aggressive action against violators,” Ellison said. If only there were a zero tolerance policy against loudly sharing embarrassing personal details with an entire 7 Mar 2012 15:03:22 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120306/jamming-annoying-cell-phone-talkers-remains-illegal-though-appealing/ 7306DFFF-37D3-4D8B-830B-D49BD7DEA530 AllThingsD - March 6, 2012 Four U.S. senators sound a warning on cybersecurity, comparing our time to the days prior to September 11, 2001--the system is blinking red, and we are failing to connect the dots. Again. Editor's note: This op-ed was co-authored by Sens. John D. Rockefeller IV, (D-W.Va.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). In February, these four senators jointly sponsored the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, a bill that has been in the works for more than three years. Every day, rival nations, criminal syndicates and maybe even terrorists probe for weaknesses in our most critical computer networks, seeking to steal data, money, and identities. Even more dangerous is their potential to plant malicious code in industrial control systems that would allow them to seize control of a region's electric grid, crash stock markets, or contaminate water supply with the touch of a key from a world away. It feels like we're back to the days before September 11, 2001. The system is blinking red. Yet, we are failing to connect the dots--again. 7 Mar 2012 14:43:54 GMT http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57391103-83/no-time-to-lose-on-strengthening-cybersecurity 95159F29-C700-49D5-9364-2DF9A85D9533 CNet - March 6, 2012 Labs are all the rage in journalism these days. There’s the Drone Journalism Lab, the Globe Lab, WaPo Labs, the New York Times R&D Lab, and more. Duke University’s newly launched Reporters’ Lab is not building miniature helicopters or magic kitchen tables but the more practical, less sexy tools that make public-affairs journalism cheaper, easier, and faster. Sarah Cohen, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, is director of the center, which formally goes by the title Project for the Advancement of Public Affairs Reporting. 7 Mar 2012 14:42:37 GMT http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/03/reporters-lab-searches-for-ways-to-make-reporting-cheaper-without-cheapening-the-reporting/ 07877AFE-E9B1-4D4E-BDF5-2DF42F7806DD NiemanLab - March 5, 2012 Lawmakers in Massachusetts are considering enacting a shield law that would allow at least some bloggers to protect the identity of their sources. The Free Flow of Information Act would prohibit judges from ordering members of the news media to divulge their sources. The current version of the bill appears to be drafted broadly enough to protect many bloggers, as well as reporters for more traditional media. The prospective law defines news media as entities "in the regular business of news gathering and disseminating news or information to the public by any means." While some judges in Massachusetts have ruled that journalists may protect their sources, that principle is not yet codified. Judges also don't apply the principle consistently, says Robert Ambrogi, executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association. 7 Mar 2012 14:41:10 GMT http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/169467/massachusetts-considers-shield-law-for-journalist.html BEAB1BAD-939F-482B-A3FB-CCE787DF10FF MediaPost - March 6, 2012 Over the last 5 years of helping clients design and build their imagination on the internet, I have come to realize that most don’t know the difference between creativity and skill. In this post I will explain it so you can quit making the same mistakes that so many do. Skill, is the ability to draw or paint a horse. Creativity, is putting a horn on its head and calling it a unicorn. Skill is sculpting clay or stone to make structures. Creativity, is applying those same skills to make buildings that one can only dream of. Skill is sewing felt and foam together. Creativity is giving it character and personality. As you can see, skill and creativity are two different things entirely. Unfortunately, most that hire developers and designers never understand this. Typically, this is how things progress: * Client talks with web designer about their needs. * Designer asks what their vision and design preferences are. * Client usually responds with something very vague and ends conversation by saying, “Just get creative”. * Designer gets creative and shows client. * Client can’t believe what they are looking at. It is in no way what they need or want. * Client says, “Why did you do this?” Designer says, “You said to get creative and didn’t give any direction”. Usually, this process goes on over and over again until both are frustrated and client is out of money. So how do you avoid this type of situation? Well if you are a client always give direction. There is no such thing as to much direction. Spend lots of time researching your design characteristics and needs. Make a scrapbook of design ideas and inspiration that you can talk about with the designer. Show examples, color swatches, and use descriptive language. If you are a designer, learn to communicate with your clients in a way that furthers their design dialog with you. Force them to articulate their ideas and thoughts. Start out of the box with adjectives that describe their vision then get closer until you have nailed down the color of the font. You see, in the end you don’t ever want to hire a creative. You want to hire someone with the skills to bring your creativity to life. 5 Mar 2012 14:52:06 GMT http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/03/cup-of-joe-never-hire-creatives.html BEA875E0-E328-42EA-ADEC-088B9EF0ECDC MarketingPilgrim - March 3, 2012 If you aren’t paying attention to the unfolding Aereo case, you should be. It will have industry-changing consequences — if not now, in the not-so-distant future. Why? For those unfamiliar, Aereo is a New York City-based startup that, at a rate of $12 a month, promises to stream over 20 channels of local, broadcast television to consumers in the New York area. As to how this works? Aereo essentially uses arrays of tiny TV antennas to capture broadcasts over the public airwaves (most networks have been forced by standards to update to high-def) and then transmits the signal to customers, who can rent out their own individual (tiny!) antennas. Of course, that signal is limited, as users are only able to stream one broadcast channel at a time. But, that signal comes streaming over the Web — straight to you — on any of your web-enabled devices. Of course, as exciting as miniature TV antennas in the cloud may sound, the idea didn’t sit well with the major broadcast networks. In theory, Aereo raised $20 million pre-launch from IAC, Barry Diller and others because it expected legal push-back. Last week, the broadcast networks met expectations, filing two lawsuits and an injunction meant to not only prevent Aereo from launching, but also to require it to pay damages for violating the Copyright Act. The broadcasters filing the lawsuit include pretty much every major broadcast TV network one would care to mention. (You can find the lawsuit on Scribd here.) 5 Mar 2012 14:49:20 GMT http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/05/aereo-for-the-win/ F3F20986-1665-4066-84A1-834A3050D0DE TechCrunch - March 5, 2012 PEJ Revenue is just one of the problems facing American newspapers, says a new Project for Excellence in Journalism study. The culture at newspapers, and not just on the editorial side, is as much an impediment to publications finding their way out of the mess they’re in. The study, called “The Search for a New Business Model,” looked at “highly granular” data from 38 newspapers of various sizes. The data was verified through site visits and interviews, then anonymized and shared with executives at seven more companies. The frankness of the newspaper executives is striking. On revenue: • Digital revenue continues to stymie executives. The papers brought in about $1 in digital advertising for every $11 in print. To get to the mythical “crossover point,” at which digital dollars would overtake print, one executive said “was reducing the annual print losses to somewhere between 6% and 8% and growing the digital revenue at a minimum of 30% annually. Another said he thought the rate of digital growth would need to be close to 50%.” One executive fretted about how much time they spent on digital versus what it brought in: “We spend 90% of our time talking about 10% of our revenue,” he told PEJ. 5 Mar 2012 14:44:08 GMT http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/165288/pej-newspaper-are-losing-7-in-print-revenue-for-every-1-in-digital-gained/ 03F0D6E2-48BF-4D07-A6A0-9C661634084F Poynter - March 5, 2012 The ad industry's self-regulatory group Digital Advertising Alliance recently drew praise from some advocates for promising to honor a browser-based do-not-track header. But the news also renewed questions about what "do-not-track" means to ad companies. For many years, the industry has taken the position that companies should not serve targeted ads to people who opt out of behavioral advertising, or collect information for the purpose of ad targeting. The Digital Advertising Alliance also prohibits members from collecting any information about Web users in order to determine their eligibility for employment, credit, health care or insurance. But self-regulatory principles allow companies to track consumers for purposes like analytics, frequency capping and site optimization, even when consumers have opted out of online behavioral targeting. But some advocates say that companies should completely stop gathering data about consumers when they opt out of online ad targeting. On Friday, Federal Trade Commissioner Julie Brill appeared to agree with those advocates. "For me, one of the most critical points is that Do Not Track is not just Do Not Target ... but also, when the consumer so chooses, Do Not Collect," she said in a keynote address at a privacy conference held at Fordham Law School. 5 Mar 2012 14:38:53 GMT http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/169317/ftcs-brill-do-not-track-means-do-not-collect-d.html AE0D91A9-6656-4777-92CE-96CA1E80D0D2 MediaPost - March 2, 2012 If there is one newspaper that has stood apart from the crowd in terms of its eagerness to embrace a digital-media world, it is the Guardian in Britain. The paper was one of the first to make user-generated content — and crowdsourcing — a key part of its business, and it was also one of the first to try to turn itself into a truly open platform for data sharing. Now, in what appears to be a response to the wave of paywall-ism that is sweeping the newspaper industry, editor Alan Rusbridger has launched a new campaign aimed at reinforcing the Guardian’s commitment to “open journalism,” an approach that he says is the only real option for media in the digital era. The centerpiece of the campaign is a great video (embedded below) that reimagines the story of the Three Little Pigs as a modern morality tale, from the opening scene — in which riot police bash in the door of the third little pig’s row house — to the Occupy-style street demonstrations in support of the swine, and ultimately a courtroom battle that sees the pigs admit to destroying their own homes in an attempt to frame the Big Bad Wolf, because they were unable to make their mortgage payments. Throughout the clip there are people commenting on Facebook, posting to Twitter with hashtags and uploading videos. 5 Mar 2012 14:31:35 GMT http://gigaom.com/2012/03/01/guardian-says-open-journalism-is-the-only-way-forward/ E19AF000-AB2F-4945-A4A8-E0E640D3139D GigaOm - March 1, 2012 Every ambitious Internet company wants some of the billions consumers and advertisers spend on TV. It’s an article of faith among the digerati that dollars will follow eyeballs, which means big money for everyone from Facebook to Google to Apple. But that hasn’t happened yet. And it’s possible that even as Web video grows, TV will continue to do just fine. That’s the thesis of Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger, who made his case to investors earlier this week. Two slides from his presentation sum it up well. First, he notes that even though eyeballs have moved away from broadcast TV, ad dollars have not (click to enlarge): 5 Mar 2012 14:30:13 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120303/why-the-web-hasnt-hurt-tv/ AB45C897-71E1-4E4F-9B71-C463AE63A674 AllThingsD - March 3, 2012 Jeff Bewkes gave the new media equivalent of FDR’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” inaugural speech to investors at the Deutsche Bank Media and Telecommunications Conference last week—and he had his TV Everywhere allies behind him. Neil Smit, evp of Comcast (Time Warner’s partner on the TV Everywhere project), emphasized the need for customer retention in a presentation to conference attendees, saying that streaming content is the future. “We’re giving the customers no reason to go anywhere else,” Smit said of the company’s new Xfinity Streamplay service. Comcast made deals with both Disney and the authentication initiative TV Everywhere in order to compete with Netflix, Hulu and other Web-based streaming services. Bewkes urged the investors to start pressuring everyone from cable operators to Nielsen to accept and incorporate TV Everywhere, which allows users to stream video and TV content only if they can prove that they pay for a cable subscription. “[T]alk to them,” he said. “You have tremendous influence.” 5 Mar 2012 14:22:31 GMT http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/new-streaming-services-strain-retain-138689 73462C62-86C3-4B73-9654-A9715BB7109C Adweek - March 5, 2012 Seamless, a favorite resource for connecting restaurants and delivery-dependent diners, built its business helping companies order meals for its workers. But the company is now trying to become a much more consumer-focused business, and it’s now looking to the mounds of data it gathers to try to accelerate the transformation. I recently sat down with Jonathan Zabusky, the CEO of New York-based Seamless, to talk about the company’s first iPad app, which debuted yesterday and shows some of where the company is going. It’s a nicely designed app that relies on gestures and swipes and simple- to-use filters to help consumers figure out what they want to eat. But what’s more interesting is how the company is looking to leverage its growing data to become a bigger resource for consumers, not just for fulfilling quick deliveries but for broader local searches and research. You see hints of that in the iPad app, which presents past orders and lets users find restaurants reviews and ratings. That’s increasingly where Seamless wants to go. Instead of being a simple utility, it ultimately wants to be a Yelp or Citysearch-like destination where it can recommend good food spots and clue people in to the best dishes to try. 1 Mar 2012 16:53:51 GMT http://gigaom.com/2012/02/29/can-seamless-become-a-yelp-competitor/ D52D7CAA-CB29-40E9-AA85-F681CEAE3BCA GigaOm - February 29, 2012 U.S. News and World Report has released its “Best Jobs of 2012? list and among those on the list is PR Specialist. According to the profile of the profession, “The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects public relations specialists employment growth of 22.5 percent between 2010 and 2020. During that time period, an additional 58,200 jobs will need to be filled.” The median annual wage is listed at $52,090. The article does point out that there are some stresses associated with the job, which we’ve written about here and here. But the prospects for the job — the article points out the wide range of industries one can work in (from politics to tech), the content creating, and social media work involved — make it look enticing on paper. PR Specialist is actually ranked number one for creative service jobs ahead of architect and artist/designer. Also on this list of best jobs is event planner, which comes in at number one for the best jobs in business. 1 Mar 2012 16:00:04 GMT http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/pr-lands-on-u-s-news-list-of-best-jobs_b34450 DD2214E7-1011-4D79-8E95-B4EB1C979526 Mediabistro - February 28, 2012 Apple may be tuning up a new streaming-audio format that handle varying degrees of quality. Citing an anonymous source, U.K. news site The Guardian reported yesterday that the format would offer "adaptive streaming" to iCloud users, automatically choosing between low-quality and high-quality sound based on the bandwidth and amount of local storage. Users with lots of bandwidth could listen to a studio-quality recording, while those with minimal bandwidth would get more standard digital quality. The source reportedly told The Guardian that Apple has reached out to a music studio in London to create audio files to tap into the new format. If true, Apple may use the format for its iTunes Match service, which creates a copy of a user's iTunes library in the cloud, then accessible from any iOS device. Using iTunes Match, your entire iTunes library could transform from the default AAC format to high-definition, instantly improving the quality of your music, according to the source. Assuming the source's intel is accurate, the new format may be introduced on March 7 when Apple is expected to unveil the next iPad. 1 Mar 2012 15:42:25 GMT http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57387446-37/apple-reportedly-cooking-up-new-audio-file-format/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20 B0E1A1C8-8248-4A07-8AFF-4B3F5EFFA305 Cnet - February 29, 2012 Facebook’s new design for pages combines the much anticipated timeline with pinning. Log on to your page right now to see a preview, or go to the official page dedicated to the redesign here. Key points about timeline pages, as Facebook’s communications team puts it so eloquently: * Pinned posts keep important stories at the top of a page timeline for up to seven days. * The new admin panel makes it easy for page administrators to track their performance and to respond to private messages from people. * Larger stories, milestones, and page timeline. The new Page design allows Page owners to tell richer stories through bigger photos and milestones that can include a date and other content. 1 Mar 2012 15:11:06 GMT http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-timeline-pages-pinning-2012-02 662286AB-92F3-4E2B-AF23-702EDC16779B AllFacebook - February 29, 2012 Advertising people have long been derided as snake-oil salesmen. Nick Bergus, a writer, multimedia producer and teacher from Iowa, pitched a very different substance to glide into his 15 minutes of fame. The product: a 55-gallon drum of Passion Natural water-based lubricant, available on Amazon for $1,495 with "reasonable" shipping of $20.95. Bergus says he was amused by the offer and posted it on Facebook, adding the copy, "For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life." Soon, his "ad," which was never intended as such, began appearing as a sponsored story in friends' newsfeeds—"meaning Amazon is paying Facebook to highlight my link to a giant tub of personal lubricant," Bergus explains on his blog. Some commenters suggest that with his social-media savvy and creative bent, Bergus knew (or at least hoped) his post would gain sponsored-ad status and help him generate some personal buzz. He hasn't exactly complained about the situation, and he's made quippy Internet in-jokes on the subject with tweets like, "Can you imagine what would have happened if I'd posted the link to the 55-gallon drum of lube on Google+? No one would have seen it." Yup, Google+ is a ghost town—penetrating insight, ace. In a broader sense, his intention is irrelevant. The episode serves notice that to grease the wheels of e-commerce, just about any connection can serve as a come-on and any conversation converted into an ad. Not so long ago, this would have been cause for concern. For now, the vast majority of us have chosen to let it slide. 1 Mar 2012 15:00:30 GMT http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/man-surprised-see-himself-facebook-ad-giant-tub-lube-138629 5BDE5227-5C0F-4E10-9EAD-810BCC656984 AdFreak - February 29, 2012 Time Warner Cable Inc. is stepping again into the highly charged topic of consumption-based pricing for broadband service, giving its customers the option of paying less each month in exchange for a cap on their Internet use. The cable operator so far has rolled out the pricing option only in south Texas markets but says it will offer a similar tiered-billing option in other markets in the future. Under the new pricing plan, consumers will get a $5 reduction in their monthly bill if they accept a cap of five gigabytes monthly. 1 Mar 2012 15:40:45 GMT http://allthingsd.com/20120228/time-warner-cable-offers-internet-service-priced-by-consumption/ F8A22DF2-4E03-42B4-A4BD-04631CA4B386 AllThingsD - February 28, 2012