The Key To Social Media Marketing? Focus, Focus Focus

When it comes to social media marketing, small to medium-sized businesses often make the mistake of dedicating boundless resources trying to be all things to all people.

“Don’t overstretch yourselves trying to do everything, you’ll just get exhausted,” panelist Scott Gerber of Young Entrepreneur Council directed the crowd.

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Why 'Tweeting Like Crazy' Doesn't Always Boost The Bottom Line

“I’ve been tweeting like crazy, and my business still isn’t booming!” Heard that before? It’s a common mistake made by many small to medium-sized businesses – you tweet every hour and update Facebook every 10 minutes; you’re on LinkedIn, Foursquare, Pinterest AND Quora. All this social media is bound to yield results, right? Wrong.

Social media is just part of the marketing equation. All three panelists agree that a business’s social media efforts must be meaningful and purposeful, or else they can become a useless and time-draining exercise.

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Social Media Breathes New Life Into Branded Content

Branded content (is) a strategy that lends itself perfectly to social media. In early August, for example, General Mills teamed up with AOL to launch its new site Live Better America. Lifestyle articles from AOL’s Huffington Post and recipes from General Mills pepper the sponsored site, which aims to create conversations about healthy living. Readers engage and spread the word through social media: tweeting, pinning and discussing things they’ve seen there. And who is most often featured somewhere in the conversation? Why, General Mills, of course. This is an example in which branded marketing has made a perfect transition into social media marketing.

If you’re thinking about diving into the creative world of branded content and social media, it might be a good idea to keep these pointers in mind:

Develop a voice. You don’t mess around with your logo, so be focused in creating a pitch-perfect social media presence.

Embrace the nuances. Consumers are smart, so branded content should be subtle.

Be seen at all the right parties. Where your content is published matters. Be sure to research the sites and outlets your customers frequent and respect.

Get it out there. This is where social media is your best friend. Get a real distribution plan for your branded content and execute it well — in some cases, you may even want to consider using a content distribution platform.

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‘Just the facts’ isn’t good enough for journalists anymore, says Tow Center’s journalism manifesto

Of the dozens of assertions in a wide-ranging “manifesto” about the altered state of journalism from Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, this one stands out:

Journalists are not merely purveyors of facts.

The authors can foresee a world where 90 percent of news reports are written by computer algorithms that convert data into narrative structures and where many newsworthy events are first described by connected citizens rather than journalists.

The result:

The journalist has not been replaced but displaced, moved higher up the editorial chain from the production of initial observations to a role that emphasizes verification and interpretation.

Working between the crowd and the algorithm in the information ecosystem is where a journalist is able to have most effect, by serving as an investigator, a translator, a storyteller.

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Why old media stocks are on top today

Big media companies were supposed to die outright along with the old tube TV set. At least that was the thinking a few years ago as up-and-comers Netflix (NFLX) and Hulu let you bypass commercials, and Facebook (FB) and YouTube made it possible to create and share your own material. Given that, the recent performance of old- vs. new-media stocks might surprise you. This year the legacy players have shot up 34%, more than twice the gain of the S&P 500. Yet Facebook has fallen 45% since it went public in May. Why are the old guys ahead?

In short, Americans still like to watch television, especially live sporting events and buzzed-about series. Average time in front of the TV is up since 2003, from 2.6 hours a day to 2.8, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. What's more, even as more consumers watch shows online, traditional media are finding ways to earn money off that shift by creating live streaming tools and cutting deals with Netflix and Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500). Social media firms, on the other hand, are still struggling to figure out a profitable business model.

To cash in on the majority of Americans who still watch TV, favor broadcasters with must-have content. Traditional broadcast networks are thought of as the industry laggards: too dependent on ads, audiences shrinking. CBS (CBS, Fortune 500), a true pure play, is off 13% since the start of a disappointing fall TV season. But therein lies an opportunity. CBS leads its peers in potential syndication deals and has nine of the top 20 shows.

"The value of broadcast is enormous," says David Bank, equity research analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

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Old Media, New Tricks: R&D

the seven-year-old New York Times R&D Lab acts as a tech startup of sorts inside the New York Times Co. With 20 staffers, the lab’s mix of crazy smart technologists, programmers, designers and business brains are charged with the Sisyphean task of developing tech innovations and new business models to help the struggling Times weather an uncertain future.

(A project called) Ricochet appears to hold the greatest marketing potential. The program allows brands to buy ad space around articles relevant to their messages that can be then distributed via a unique URL. The highly targeted program could potentially revolutionize now-imprecise ad exchange audience targeting.

Following the Times’ lead, the Washington Post Co. last fall launched WaPo Labs, which also focuses on emerging technologies. The Philadelphia Media Network, publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, this year launched the Project Liberty Digital Incubator with a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation. Meanwhile, the incubator project infuriated members of the Newspaper Guild union, as it coincided with the March layoff of 19 staffers plus 21 buyouts.

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10 Twitter Power Tips That Guarantee More Retweets

Retweets are the backbone of the Twitter network. Thanks to the ripple effect, a retweet allows any user’s message to be seen by any and everybody – theoretically at least, your single tweet could reach 140+ million people.

Here are 10 Twitter power tips that will get you a ton more retweets.

Have a short and sensible username – Twitter allows a maximum of 15 characters for usernames but the longer yours is, the more awkward it is for people to retweet your messages, particularly if they’re long and you’re being retweeted by second (and third, and fourth) generations of users who prefer the old style retweet. You can change your username at any time. If it’s more than 10 characters, I’d seriously think about it.

Leave enough space to allow people to retweet you easily. Twitter vets rarely use the new-style retweet. If they have to edit your long tweet to be able to retweet you, most won’t bother, and those that do risk botching your magnificent prose. It’s worth memorising your Magic Retweet Number. But if you’re lazy, always leave at least 20 characters at the end of every tweet.

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Google’s Internet Service Might Actually Bring the U.S. Up to Speed

Google’s effort to install a blazingly fast, gigabit-per-second fiber Internet service in the two-state metropolis of Kansas City—a speed 100 times faster than the national average—is a radical new business direction for the company, and perhaps provides an unorthodox model for how to rewire parts of the United States. If Google’s business model for actually getting fiber built pans out, it may usher in a new era for privately built broadband.

Compared to many countries, the United States has slow and patchy Internet service. While a few areas enjoy very fast service, overall the United States ranks 24th worldwide in speed, with consumers receiving an average of 11.6-megabits-per-second download speeds.

The entry of superfast Internet may aid local entrepreneurship. An effort called Homes for Hackers is trying to get Kansas City homeowners with Google Fiber service to give free rooms to developers for three months, and a collection of local startups is betting the service will attract new companies.

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8 social-media changes since the 2008 elections

A week after the 2012 elections, here's a look at some of the changes in the social- and digital-media landscape in the U.S. since 2008. Here are eight developments worth noting:

1. Facebook: 2008 was, indeed, a long time ago. At the end of that August, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his service had crossed 100 million users, a far cry from the billion milestone it would hit within four years.

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GIF': The Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year

In a move sure to delight BuzzFeed fans, the Oxford American Dictionary has announced that 2012's word of the year is "GIF." GIFs, a longstanding part of internet meme culture, are simple, jerkily animated images. "The GIF, a compressed file format for images that can be used to create simple, looping animations, turned 25 this year, but like so many other relics of the 80s, it has never been trendier," explains Katherine Martin, Head of the U.S. Dictionaries Program, at the Oxford Dictionaries blog.

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Prime-time TV's shrinking picture

This fall, 38% of young-adult prime-time viewing on the major networks (and 23% of all viewing) consists of previously recorded shows, Nielsen says. That's up from nearly zero a decade ago.

"This year has really sort of been the tipping point that we've been expecting," says Leslie Moonves, chairman of CBS Corp., which owns CBS, Showtime and half of CW. Increasingly, "overnight ratings don't mean anything."

Nearly two months into the new TV season, ratings for three of the four big networks are down 10% to 30% from last fall. One cause for alarm is that overall TV usage by young adults ages 18 to 24 is down 9% since this time last year, more than any other age bracket.

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Retweeting Without Reading? Yeah, It’s Happening– and It Affects Journalism Strategy on Twitter

Your assumptions are probably right when you notice a weirdly fast retweet, or see a RT of something that you already recognize as not true: Zarrella’s study implies many people tweet a link without even clicking on that link. Forget about “RT are not endorsements.” RTs may not even be an acknowledgement that a particular link was clicked, let alone read.

In other words, almost one in every five tweets generates more retweets than clicks. This suggests many people pass on a link without looking at it, and perhaps even worse, vetting it.

A blind retweet may be helpful for pushing your brand out there (which, true indeed, can be a fair goal—see more below), but it may not be helpful for the prime goal of journalism: informing the public.

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The New Algorithm of Web Marketing

Publishers and broadcasters have long tried to offer advertisers the right audience for their products. Want to sell pick-ups to people who like sports? Buy ads at halftime during a football game. Selling luggage or airline tickets? Buy ads in the travel section of a newspaper or Web site.

In digital advertising, that formula is being increasingly tested by fast-paced, algorithmic bidding systems that target individual consumers rather than the aggregate audience publishers serve up. In the world of “programmatic buying” technologies, context matters less than tracking those consumers wherever they go. And that kind of buying is the reason that shoe ad follows you whether you’re on Weather.com or on a local news blog.

That shift is punishing traditional online publishers, like newspaper, broadcast and magazine sites, who are receiving a much lower percentage of ad dollars as marketers use programmatic buying across a much broader canvas.

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Video games are behind the latest fad in management

As video games have grown from an obscure hobby to a $67 billion industry, management theorists have begun to return the favour. Video games now have the dubious honour of having inspired their own management craze. Called “gamification”, it aims to take principles from video games and apply them to serious tasks. The latest book on the subject, “For the Win”, comes from Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, from the Wharton Business School and the New York Law School respectively.

Some video-game designers are opposed to the idea on principle, arguing that gamification is really a cover for cynically exploiting human psychology for profit.

Messrs Werbach and Hunter accept much of this criticism. Indeed, they go out of their way to warn aspiring gamifiers of the many pitfalls they face. Trying to enliven boring, unskilled work is risky, they say: presenting cutesy badges to call-centre staff can easily come across as patronising rather than motivating. Workers already toil for a reward—money—and will be suspicious of attempts to introduce a new form of compensation that costs their bosses nothing. The authors cite psychological experiments suggesting that intrinsic rewards (the enjoyment of a task for its own sake) are the best motivators, whereas extrinsic rewards, such as badges, levels, points or even in some circumstances money, can be counter-productive.

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Newspapers versus Google

In Germany politicians are considering a bill to extend copyright protection to excerpts of newspaper articles appearing in search engines’ results, thus enabling publishers to collect payment for them. Google is the main target: some German newspaper executives say it benefits from showcasing their material in search results on its news aggregator, Google News. A similar bill has been proposed in Italy. French newspapers want the same. On October 29th President François Hollande warned Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, that if French newspapers’ demands for compensation are not met by year-end, France may pass a law akin to the German one. Austrian and Swiss publishers are thinking along similar lines.

Giving away the headline and first sentence of an article supposedly dissuades readers from clicking through to the newspaper’s website to read the entire story.

Newspapers are also claiming that copyright law is on their side. America’s laws are more relaxed than most of Europe’s, so search engines’ use of some material from articles qualifies there as “fair use”. But in Belgium a group of newspapers sued Google for news copyright infringement and won. The company is appealing against the ruling but is likely to have to pay some damages.

The real issue behind all this, however, is the decline of traditional media. In France not a single national newspaper is profitable, despite around €1.2 billion ($1.54 billion) in direct and indirect government subsidies, according to Olivier Fleurot, the boss of MSLGROUP, a communications firm, and a former chief executive at the Financial Times, part-owner of The Economist. In 2011 newspaper advertising globally amounted to $76 billion, down 41% since 2007, according to the World Association of Newspapers. Only 2.2% of newspapers’ advertising revenues last year came from digital platforms, and even these are vulnerable to ad-blocking software.

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TV Usage Of 'TV' Continues To Erode

The amount of time Americans spend watching “TV” via a traditional television set continues to decline, according to the latest edition of Nielsen’s quarterly Cross Platform Report. While television remains the overwhelming means most people use to watch “television,” usage of the medium declined 1.7% over the past year, according to the second-quarter 2012 report. While still minuscule in total time spent watching TV, mobile phones were the fastest-growing means of watching television over the past year. All other sources were either flat (the Internet) or declined (DVD/Blu-Ray, video game platforms) in terms of TV usage.

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E-Books Finally Get Traction in Japan

The Japanese are avid readers; the country’s publishing industry generated $22.5 billion in revenue last year, according to the Japan Book Publishers Association. A decade ago, long before the Kindle revolutionized the publishing world in the U.S., Japanese authors were writing novels using text messaging and readers were catching up on their favorite novels and manga comics on their mobile phones.

“People don’t want to buy the machines because there’s not very much content, and publishers aren’t keen to invest in the content because there aren’t many e-readers,” says Hamish Macaskill, managing director of English Agency Japan, a Tokyo literary agency.

Finally, though, Japan’s e-reader dark ages may be ending. EPUB 3.0, the latest open-standard software for digital readers developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum, an electronic publishing trade group, can display Japanese text vertically. That’s unlocked the door for some newcomers to the e-reader market, allowing them to use the same standards they use elsewhere rather than technology exclusive to Japan.

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Wireless Charging

Madison Square Garden, Starbucks, Delta Air Lines Sky Clubs, and other venues are starting to embed charging stations into tables and bars as a service for their customers and for the cachet of providing a cutting-edge technology. The charging time is comparable to wired connections. Problem is, there isn't yet a common standard, so enabled phones won't work with every charging surface.

The first North American cars with Qi built in could come out in mid-2013.

To hedge their bets, some automakers and other companies are testing multiple standards. Others are embedding several technologies into their gear. The ultimate winning standard of wireless charging may not emerge until at least 2014.

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Electronic copyright laws are bugging readers—and authors

Cracking the digital-rights management (DRM) that secures works that are distributed electronically, such as e-books and films, is illegal in many countries. But it can be tempting when rules seem unfair or arbitrary. Calibre, a free software programme, can be fitted with a third-party plug-in to strip the DRM from proprietary e-book formats. It has over 11m users. Other more furtive means are available too. David Price, head of piracy intelligence at NetNames, a brand-protection firm, says no DRM system has yet remained uncracked.

Cory Doctorow, a blogger and author (who gives his books away free on the internet) says “rotten lawmaking” has set market terms that nobody wants—including many authors and publishers, who would prefer a more open system. In July Macmillan was the first book publisher of the “Big Six” to free its science fiction and fantasy e-book range from DRM. It termed the restrictions on copying and moving content a “constant annoyance”, for readers. In August Harvard Business Review Press launched an outlet for e-books, also DRM-free. In October sales of the “Humble eBook Bundle”, a package of no-locks books for which consumers paid whatever they wanted (and chose how to split it between the author and a charity), was a big success. The average price paid was a record $14. Consumers seem to reward authors who trust them with their content.

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The merger of two big publishers shows the book business’s challenges

In only three years the page has turned for electronic books; American publishers generated $2.1 billion in revenues from them last year, up by more than 3,200% from 2008, according to BookStats, which tracks the industry. In theory e-books offer better margins, because they are cheaper to produce. But publishers fret that customers will soon expect to pay less for all books. That won’t be so good for profits.

And an even greater threat than Amazon looms. According to Claudio Aspesi, an analyst at Sanford C Bernstein, a bank, the march of Penguin and others into digital formats could make them more vulnerable to piracy. E-books are easy to share by e-mail and speedy to steal: it can take around four seconds to download a pirated version of “The Help”, a novel about servants, but over three hours to download the film. If piracy hits publishing like it hit music, profits could evaporate, he says. Here’s hoping for a happier ending.

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