There are many text communication digital methods: e-mail, sms, chat, IM, forum, blog. These methods could be classified by who is writing to whom (1 to 1, 1 to n), by time presence, by privacy vs public exposure, and by many other ways. But the Twitter phenomenon is something apart. It started a lifestream continuum where live conversation became the new mantra. The NOW is the answer and so.....
Goggle - Twitter
Google.com has suddenly become the source for pages — not conversations, not the real time web. Google is the past Twitter is the present. During the Hudson landing Twitter was the first source of information. If you want to know what is going on now on the Internet, you ask Twitter not Google. If you want to know what went on on the Internet, you ask Google if you want the pages but you ask Twitter if you want the feelings.
Facebook - Twitter
Facebook is the old way: other you need to ask permission or you have to give permission. Twitter is a open arena: if you want to start a conversation, just make your account public and go on. Everyone can read it and, if he likes, can re tweet it or @replies at it.
Twitter data
Twitter has become a popular pastime for many who like to update their daily thoughts and activities, as well as for the voyeurs who just enjoy reading the tweets. The last data available show these trends.
Twitter used by company
Some see Twitter as an extension of the marketing department; others view it as a customer service tool, and some say it's best for corporate communications. In 2008, several brands established a Twitter presence, including H&R Block, Southwest Airlines, Jet Blue, Dell, and Home Depot, Ford, Dunkin' Donuts, Whole Foods.
Tesco from UK
Ford
Currently, the firm has about six accounts, including FordDriveOne, the main corporate account; FordDriveGreen, an account focused on environmental technologies; and FordCustService for, well, customer service.
Dunkin' Donuts
Dunkin' Dave tweets
Comcast
ComcastCares
Whole Foods
@wholefoods
Zappos
The firm's CEO Tony Hsieh
Tuesday 13 January 2009
Sunday 4 January 2009
Unbundling Media 03 - internet-overtakes-newspapers-as-news-source
Had to happen. At least in USA.The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as a main source for national and international news.
The Pew Research Center's report shows the inevitable evidence.
But the devil's in the details. "For young people, however, the internet now rivals television as a main source of national and international news. Nearly six-in-ten Americans younger than 30 (59%) say they get most of their national and international news online; an identical percentage cites television."
Here the complete report
Unbundling Media 02: First USA, second UK, next EU Newspapers?
The economic consequences of unbundling media are emerging everywhere. The combined action of economic downturn and online news gathering and distributions is changing the timing of newsparpers industry crisis. The article stress that the advertising downturn is not cyclical but permanent. If so, and I think the author is right, the Unbundling media dilemma will be the core question for any possible economic model dedicated to the newspapers industry.
Wikinomics 02 Who writes Wikipedia?
Henry Blodget, of Silicon Alley Insider, wrote a post on an open question "who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway" but the hard fact still remains here. An article of Aaron Swartz, which changes a general assumption supported by Jmbo Wales, the Wikipedia founder: "Wikipedia was actually written by a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" where "I know all of them and they all know each other". Really, "it's much like any traditional organization."
Aaron Swartz conclusions are quite different and they deserve a careful reading.
Why? In depends if you do the math with the contributions' number or the contributions' lenght: In the first case you have the Wales results, in the second Swartz' findings
"When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content."
The difference between author and editor, perhaps.
Aaron Swartz conclusions are quite different and they deserve a careful reading.
Why? In depends if you do the math with the contributions' number or the contributions' lenght: In the first case you have the Wales results, in the second Swartz' findings
"When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content."
The difference between author and editor, perhaps.
Some questions
1.Is a corporate web site different from a business card?
2.Better; is a corporate web site address different from a corporate street address?
3.Still better; is a corporate web site different from a corporate call centre?
4.Do you meet your customers and your prospects where they are? TV, Street, Events, Mall?
5.Do you invite your customers to visit your corporate headquarters?
6.Do you engage them where their atoms lives are?
7.Do you engage them where their bits lives are? that's the problem.
8.Is the digital (bits) life experience so different from the atom life experience? frankly not.
2.Better; is a corporate web site address different from a corporate street address?
3.Still better; is a corporate web site different from a corporate call centre?
4.Do you meet your customers and your prospects where they are? TV, Street, Events, Mall?
5.Do you invite your customers to visit your corporate headquarters?
6.Do you engage them where their atoms lives are?
7.Do you engage them where their bits lives are? that's the problem.
8.Is the digital (bits) life experience so different from the atom life experience? frankly not.
- If I am chatting, twittering, facebooking, playing, reading a news, writing a post, working and so on, why should I leave my activities and go to your corporate web site more than I should go to your corporate headquarters?
- Most of all; why should you spend money, a lot of, to bring me to your corporate or brand web site?
- I am listening to many sources: news feeds, friends, useful sites, video web site (You Tube yes, but Hulu too), please take your place in the queue;
- I am doing a lot of things: blogging, mailing, facebooking, netlogging, ecc; could you make life better for me?
Some data on Internet user behaviour
The standard web data sheets dedicated to brand managers show the regular suspects: how many users, how many page views, how long were the user visits and so on; how many click-troughs if we are speaking of a banner campaign. But, as someone perhaps said, everything is relative; comparing the user base growth in the last three years period against itself or the Internet user growth (country speaking, worldwide speaking, on age base speaking, etc...) for instance, could bring to very contradictory conclusions. Nevertheless, the real unasked question is: how is my preferred user spending his time on Internet? not which sites is he visiting in order to plan and run an ad campaign but what is he doing on line all the time long.
We are speaking of hour(s)/day Internet usage against seconds/day corporate web site frequentation. With the development of unbundling media and social networking, the Internet
time per user will growth steady but the fraction dedicated to the corporate web sites visit will be still reduced.
On this subject, a very interesting survey, called Digital
Life Digital World, has been conducted by TNS. The authors say: “we try to capture how the internet fits into the lives of residents from sixteen countries across the world. How digital are their lives? How do they use the internet? Is a digital life the same as a social life or does a social life today require a complementary digital life? This study takes a comprehensive look at these issues and offers answers to these questions.” This survey shows some strong trends in Internet usage. According to the report “we spend a third of out leisure time using the internet”, and we are doing it because is fun and social; while people see internet as a medium for sending and receiving messagges, between the first five activities people are doing online, three “are related to information gathering (looking up news and weather, and using search engine to find information)”. Social media and social networking have a central role in internet life of users. The importance of this role will increase in the future following the actual trend.
Unbundling Media 01
The quiet revolution started some time ago but now it is going toward its tipping point.
The unbundling media's best description I came across is Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch (rewiring the world from Edison to Google).
“But the nature of a newspaper, both as a medium for information and as a business, changes when it loses its physical form and shifts to the Internet. It gets read in a different way, and it makes money in a different way. A print newspaper provides an array of content—local stories, national and international reports, news analyses, editorials and opinion columns, photographs, sports scores, stock tables, TV listings, cartoons, and a variety of classified and display advertising— all bundled together into a single product. People subscribe to the bundle, or buy it at a newsstand, and advertisers pay to catch readers' eyes as they thumb through the pages. The publisher's goal is to make the entire package as attractive as possible to a broad set of readers and advertisers. The newspaper as a whole is what matters, and as a product it's worth more than the sum of its parts. When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don't flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else. In many cases, they bypass the newspaper's "front page" altogether, using search engines, feed readers, or headline aggregators like Google News, Digg, and Daylife to leap directly to an individual story. They may not even be aware of which newspaper's site they've arrived at. For the publisher, the newspaper as a whole becomes far less important. What matters are the parts. Each story becomes a separate product standing naked in the marketplace. It lives or dies on its own economic merits.
Because few newspapers, other than specialised ones like the Wall Street Journal, are able to charge anything for their online editions, the success of a story as a product is judged by the advertising revenue it generates. Advertisers no longer have to pay to appear in a bundle. Using sophisticated ad placement services like Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing, they can target their ads to the subject matter of an individual story or even to the particular readers it attracts, and they only pay the publisher a fee when a reader views an ad or, as is increasingly the case, clicks on it. Each ad, moreover, carries a different price, depending on how valuable a viewing or a clickthrough is to the advertiser. A pharmaceutical company will pay a lot for every click on an ad for a new drug, for instance, because every new customer it attracts will generate a lot of sales. Since all page views and ad clickthroughs are meticulously tracked, the publisher knows precisely how many times each ad is seen, how many times it is clicked, and the revenue that each view or clickthrough produces.
The most successful articles, in economic terms, are the ones that not only draw a lot of readers but deal with subjects that attract high-priced ads. And the most successful of all are those that attract a lot of readers who are inclined to click on the high-priced ads. An article about new treatments for depression would, for instance, tend to be especially lucrative, since it would attract expensive drug ads and draw a large number of readers who are interested in new depression treatments and hence likely to click on ads for psychiatric drugs. Articles about saving for retirement or buying a new Car or putting an addition onto a home would also tend to throw off a large profit, for similar reasons. On the other hand, a long investigative article on government corruption or the resurgence of malaria in Africa would be much less likely to produce substantial ad revenues. Even if it attracts a lot of readers, a long shot in itself, it doesn't cover a subject that advertisers want to be associated with or that would produce a lot of valuable clickthroughs. In general, articles on serious and complex subjects, from politics to wars to international affairs, will fail to generate attractive ad revenues.
Such hard journalism also tends to be expensive to produce. A publisher has to assign talented journalists to a long-term reporting effort, which may or may not end in a story, and has to pay their salaries and benefits during that time. The publisher may also have to shell out for a lot of expensive flights and hotel stays, or even set up an overseas bureau. When bundled into a print edition, hard journalism can add considerably to the overall value of a newspaper. Not least, it can raise the prestige of the paper, making it more attractive to subscribers and advertisers. Online, however, most hard journalism becomes difficult to justify economically. Getting a freelance writer to dash off a review of high-definition television sets—or, better yet, getting readers to contribute their own reviews for free—would produce much more attractive returns........
Speaking before the Online Publishing Association in 2006, the head of the New York Times's Web operation, Martin Nisenholtz, summed up the dilemma facing newspapers today. He asked the audience a simple question: "How do we create high-quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don't want to pay at all?" The answer may turn out to be equally simple: we don't. At least one major newspaper, The Times of London, admits that it has already begun training its reporters to craft their stories in ways that lead to higher placements in search engines. Jim Warren, the Chicago Tribune's managing editor, says that "you can't really avoid the fact that page views are increasingly the coin of the realm." As long as algorithms determine the distribution of profits, they will also determine what gets published.
The unbundling of content is not unique to newspapers or other print publications. It's a common feature of most online media. Apple's iTunes store has unbundled music, making it easy to buy by the song rather than the album. Digital video recorders like TiVo and pay-per-view cable services are unbundling television, separating the program from the network and its schedule. Video sites like YouTube go even further, letting viewers watch brief clips rather than sitting through entire shows. Amazon.com has announced plans to unbundle books, selling them by the page. Google provides “snippets” of text from published works through its controversial Book Search service. Podcasting is unbundling radio programs. Wikipedia is unbundling the encyclopedia. The "bundling of the world's computers into a single network," writes Daniel Akst, "is ushering in what may be called the unbundled age."
Economists are quick to applaud the breaking up of media products into their component pieces. In their view, it's how markets should work. Consumers should be able to buy precisely what they want without having to "waste" money on what they don't. The Wall Street Journal celebrates the development, saying it heralds a new era in which we'll no longer have "to pay for detritus to get the good stuff." That's true in many cases, but not in all. Creative works are not like other consumer goods, and the economic efficiency that would be welcomed in most markets may have less salutary effects when applied to the building blocks of culture. It's worth remembering, as well, that the Internet is a very unusual marketplace, where information of all sorts tends to be given away and money is made through indirect means like advertising. Once you fragment both the audience and the advertising in such a market, large investments in the production of certain creative works become much harder for businesses to justify. If the news business is any indication, the "detritus" that ends up being culled from our culture may include products that many of us would define as "the good stuff." What's sacrificed may not be blandness but quality. We may find that the culture of abundance being produced by the World Wide Computer is really just a culture of mediocrity—many miles wide but only a fraction of an inch deep.”
The unbundling media's best description I came across is Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch (rewiring the world from Edison to Google).
“But the nature of a newspaper, both as a medium for information and as a business, changes when it loses its physical form and shifts to the Internet. It gets read in a different way, and it makes money in a different way. A print newspaper provides an array of content—local stories, national and international reports, news analyses, editorials and opinion columns, photographs, sports scores, stock tables, TV listings, cartoons, and a variety of classified and display advertising— all bundled together into a single product. People subscribe to the bundle, or buy it at a newsstand, and advertisers pay to catch readers' eyes as they thumb through the pages. The publisher's goal is to make the entire package as attractive as possible to a broad set of readers and advertisers. The newspaper as a whole is what matters, and as a product it's worth more than the sum of its parts. When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don't flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else. In many cases, they bypass the newspaper's "front page" altogether, using search engines, feed readers, or headline aggregators like Google News, Digg, and Daylife to leap directly to an individual story. They may not even be aware of which newspaper's site they've arrived at. For the publisher, the newspaper as a whole becomes far less important. What matters are the parts. Each story becomes a separate product standing naked in the marketplace. It lives or dies on its own economic merits.
Because few newspapers, other than specialised ones like the Wall Street Journal, are able to charge anything for their online editions, the success of a story as a product is judged by the advertising revenue it generates. Advertisers no longer have to pay to appear in a bundle. Using sophisticated ad placement services like Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing, they can target their ads to the subject matter of an individual story or even to the particular readers it attracts, and they only pay the publisher a fee when a reader views an ad or, as is increasingly the case, clicks on it. Each ad, moreover, carries a different price, depending on how valuable a viewing or a clickthrough is to the advertiser. A pharmaceutical company will pay a lot for every click on an ad for a new drug, for instance, because every new customer it attracts will generate a lot of sales. Since all page views and ad clickthroughs are meticulously tracked, the publisher knows precisely how many times each ad is seen, how many times it is clicked, and the revenue that each view or clickthrough produces.
The most successful articles, in economic terms, are the ones that not only draw a lot of readers but deal with subjects that attract high-priced ads. And the most successful of all are those that attract a lot of readers who are inclined to click on the high-priced ads. An article about new treatments for depression would, for instance, tend to be especially lucrative, since it would attract expensive drug ads and draw a large number of readers who are interested in new depression treatments and hence likely to click on ads for psychiatric drugs. Articles about saving for retirement or buying a new Car or putting an addition onto a home would also tend to throw off a large profit, for similar reasons. On the other hand, a long investigative article on government corruption or the resurgence of malaria in Africa would be much less likely to produce substantial ad revenues. Even if it attracts a lot of readers, a long shot in itself, it doesn't cover a subject that advertisers want to be associated with or that would produce a lot of valuable clickthroughs. In general, articles on serious and complex subjects, from politics to wars to international affairs, will fail to generate attractive ad revenues.
Such hard journalism also tends to be expensive to produce. A publisher has to assign talented journalists to a long-term reporting effort, which may or may not end in a story, and has to pay their salaries and benefits during that time. The publisher may also have to shell out for a lot of expensive flights and hotel stays, or even set up an overseas bureau. When bundled into a print edition, hard journalism can add considerably to the overall value of a newspaper. Not least, it can raise the prestige of the paper, making it more attractive to subscribers and advertisers. Online, however, most hard journalism becomes difficult to justify economically. Getting a freelance writer to dash off a review of high-definition television sets—or, better yet, getting readers to contribute their own reviews for free—would produce much more attractive returns........
Speaking before the Online Publishing Association in 2006, the head of the New York Times's Web operation, Martin Nisenholtz, summed up the dilemma facing newspapers today. He asked the audience a simple question: "How do we create high-quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don't want to pay at all?" The answer may turn out to be equally simple: we don't. At least one major newspaper, The Times of London, admits that it has already begun training its reporters to craft their stories in ways that lead to higher placements in search engines. Jim Warren, the Chicago Tribune's managing editor, says that "you can't really avoid the fact that page views are increasingly the coin of the realm." As long as algorithms determine the distribution of profits, they will also determine what gets published.
The unbundling of content is not unique to newspapers or other print publications. It's a common feature of most online media. Apple's iTunes store has unbundled music, making it easy to buy by the song rather than the album. Digital video recorders like TiVo and pay-per-view cable services are unbundling television, separating the program from the network and its schedule. Video sites like YouTube go even further, letting viewers watch brief clips rather than sitting through entire shows. Amazon.com has announced plans to unbundle books, selling them by the page. Google provides “snippets” of text from published works through its controversial Book Search service. Podcasting is unbundling radio programs. Wikipedia is unbundling the encyclopedia. The "bundling of the world's computers into a single network," writes Daniel Akst, "is ushering in what may be called the unbundled age."
Economists are quick to applaud the breaking up of media products into their component pieces. In their view, it's how markets should work. Consumers should be able to buy precisely what they want without having to "waste" money on what they don't. The Wall Street Journal celebrates the development, saying it heralds a new era in which we'll no longer have "to pay for detritus to get the good stuff." That's true in many cases, but not in all. Creative works are not like other consumer goods, and the economic efficiency that would be welcomed in most markets may have less salutary effects when applied to the building blocks of culture. It's worth remembering, as well, that the Internet is a very unusual marketplace, where information of all sorts tends to be given away and money is made through indirect means like advertising. Once you fragment both the audience and the advertising in such a market, large investments in the production of certain creative works become much harder for businesses to justify. If the news business is any indication, the "detritus" that ends up being culled from our culture may include products that many of us would define as "the good stuff." What's sacrificed may not be blandness but quality. We may find that the culture of abundance being produced by the World Wide Computer is really just a culture of mediocrity—many miles wide but only a fraction of an inch deep.”
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