Social Media University, Global (SMUG)
Suus Non Ut Difficile • Home of the SMUGgles
Steve Rubel of Edelman has a very useful blog, Micro Persuasion, aimed at exploring “how social media is transforming marketing, media and public relations.” Today he has a helpful post on Technorati and how to use it to track discussion of topics that are most interesting to you.
I subscribe to Steve’s RSS feed, and would recommend it for anyone interested in social media.
Technorati: RSS, Blogs, Technorati, Social Media
Thanks to Shel Holtz for pointing out this article in the Charlotte Observer about the growth of PR firms, and how companies are moving their spending from advertising to PR because it’s becoming harder, with fragmented audiences, TiVo and the like, to use traditional advertising to get messages across.
Shel made the good point in his For Immediate Release podcast that the growth of traditional PR vs. advertising may be one reason why PR firms have been slow to adopt social media…just as they were slow to implement the internet. When times are relatively good for your basic service, it probably makes sense to focus on the “bread and butter.”
Still, it’s important to learn some of these newer methods, because times change and the media landscape is changing rapidly. I heard an interesting tidbit at a recent meeting, that in 1965 it was possible to buy 3 ads on network TV and reach 85 percent of households. Today that max (except on Super Bowl Sunday) is something like 15 percent. And I believe Pew found that network newscasts are down 50 percent in audience since the launch of CNN.
With radically democratized content production and distribution with virtually no barriers to entry, the audiences will continue to break into smaller segments.
That’s where social media come in, as a way of aggregating niches of people who share interests. They (we) will point each other to things we find useful. And it means audiences are no longer passive consumers, but also a content contributors.
Technorati: Public Relations, New Media, Advertising
Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders blog is part of my blogroll because it was part of the chain of blogs that led me to read Getting Things Done, by David Allen.
Merlin is also a great source for Mac-based geeky implementation tips for GTD, and helped me find Ethan Schoonover’s Kinkless system.
Merlin was recently at David’s home in Ojai, and recorded an interview with David (although I’m not sure who interviewed whom) and will be distributing the conversation over the next several weeks as a podcast.
The first segment, on Procrastination, is available now.
Technorati: GTD, Productivity, Procrastination
Constantin Basturea has established The NewPR Wiki, and now has a roster of a few dozen contributors who have helped to build it into a strong resource, full of links to information on everything from Anti-Astroturfing and Blogging (Business, Non-Profit and otherwise) to White Papers and Wikis (and even White Papers about Wikis).
One page I’m looking forward to exploring is the one on Social Media Optimization, which is the human side to Search Engine Optimization.
There’s lots of good information about more traditional PR topics, such as PR Measurement, too. This is one to bookmark in Del.icio.us. In fact, if you use that social bookmarking site, you’ll see this already is in the first page of search results when you search for “PR.”
This is also the place where you can read the show notes for Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson’s PR + Technology podcast, “For Immediate Release.”
Technorati: Public Relations, Social Media, Podcasting
Jeff Jarvis has an insightful analysis of how and why he thinks Google’s purchase of YouTube makes sense.
YouTube made the new TV social. It enabled people to recommend the good – or at least amusing — stuff not just by their clicks and ratings but also by their actions: YouTube allowed us to put good videos up on our blogs. YouTube enabled us to become network programmers.
I believe that the serving of 100 million videos is the least valuable service that YouTube provides. Serving all those videos was an important and insightful step in the process of exploding television as we knew it and handing its power to the people. But I believe the end of that process will have us serving videos from wherever — from Google or our own blogs and servers or via peer-to-peer technology that vastly reduces the cost of distribution.
Part of the beauty of YouTube is that people can create their own channels, and recommend videos to friends, and there is a way of helping people find the good stuff. As Jarvis says, the combination of smart algorithms honed by social bookmarking has promise to make this new world of a million-plus video channels work.
“Five hundred channels, and nothing worth watching.” That’s the old saying about cable TV and the Dish. Jarvis thinks this Google-YouTube marriage may be able to keep people from saying the same thing about exploded TV (registration required, but worth it).