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Weblogs
Some Bloggers Welcome FTC Scrutiny for Paid Reviews
When it was reported in 2006 that the FTC would begin forcing word-of-mouth companies -- which paid people to hype products to their peers -- to disclose their marketing campaigns, Brian Clark predicted at the time that these rules would apply to bloggers as well. Now it looks like his prediction is coming true -- and bloggers are taking the...
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MusicShift
The Time is Right for Direct-To-Fan Marketing of Music
As the music industry continues to evolve and search for a sustainable and profitable business model, the direct-to-fan (D2F) approach is making great advances, from artists just starting their career up to superstars with massive fan bases. Artists marketing and selling directly to their audience is not necessarily a new or revolutionary concept -- one can find examples of artists...
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MusicShift
How Bands Can Avoid Making 7 Big SEO Mistakes
There is an entire school of thought, as well as a sizable industry, dedicated to the optimization of websites to show up higher in Google search rankings. Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques vary from simple content changes to tricks that game Google's system, referred to as "black hat" SEO. Optimization can be a complex topic -- read Mark Glaser's article...
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MarketingShift
'Cluetrain Manifesto' Still Relevant 10 Years Later
When The Cluetrain Manifesto appeared on the web in 1999, neither its supporters nor its authors believed it was trying to say anything particularly new. Rather, the 95 theses and the following chapters -- written in almost a stream of consciousness, psychoanalytic style befitting of something labeled a "manifesto" -- were thought to merely point out the obvious to the...
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MusicShift
Five Tips for Musicians to Engage Their Fans Digitally
There was a time when celebrity musicians were positioned as unreachable idols. Those days are long gone; in today's wired marketplace, musicians have to forge a personal relationship with their audience to keep their fans' interest. And for many, that means creating opportunities for fans to have an inside look into all aspects of an artist's life.
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Digging Deeper
Reuters Closes Second Life Bureau, but (Virtual) Life Goes On
The sun shines brightly as I stroll along the curving pier above the water, looking out toward a beautiful island with trees swaying in the wind. There's a looming ampitheater festooned with signs for Thomson Reuters, and a series of concrete buildings that appear ready to hold important meetings. I stride in confidently through the doorway... You might think...
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Digging Deeper
Warning: Dependence on Facebook, Twitter Could Be Hazardous to Your Business
You've probably heard how much the micro-blogging service Twitter can help your business, or that being on social networking site Facebook can boost your company's profile. But what you might not have considered is the potential danger in over-relying on these startups that could go out of business, get bought out, or close your account if you aren't familiar with...
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PoliticalShift
Obama, Congress Enlist 'Direct to Constituent' Communications
Professional communicators are paying close attention to the rise of "direct to consumer" (DTC) communications. This is a phenomenon largely enabled by the rapid proliferation and adoption of online technologies, whereby organizations can communicate directly to the public without filters or mediation from the press. Corporate blogs or advocacy groups' online "action alerts" are just a couple examples. As a...
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MarketingShift
Transparency as a PR Principle, Not a Tactic
We used to say in my profession -- public relations -- that you shouldn't say or write anything that you wouldn't want to turn up on the front page of the New York Times. Now what I like to tell clients instead is: You shouldn't say or write anything that you wouldn't want to turn up in Google search results....
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PoliticalShift
Government 2.0: How Social Media Could Transform Gov PR
It's easy to see governments as nameless, faceless monoliths, something impersonal or, even worse, untrustworthy. Much of that is because government culture remains steeped in traditional ideas about public relations and outreach work, notions that have become archaic in an Internet-enabled, hyper-connected world. Just as private companies are learning to embrace social media to manage brand reputations, governments must adapt...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Nettwerk CEO Terry McBride Puts Fans in Charge of Bands
The people formerly known as the audience (TPFKATA) are doing more than just fact-checking newspaper stories, time-shifting TV shows and capturing breaking news on their cameraphones. They are also helping run their favorite bands, designing and voting on concert T-shirts, mixing studio albums and even voting on which cities should be included in a band's tour. At the vanguard of...
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Social Networking
Dealing with Friend Inflation on Twitter, Digg
It happens several times a day now. Ever since I opened my Twitter account approximately three months ago, the follow alerts have been gradually increasing in frequency to the point that they clutter up my email inbox if I don't clean them out often enough. "Jessica Kositz (jkositz) is now following your updates on Twitter" my latest alert tells me,...
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BookShift
6 Ways Authors Can Succeed by Self-Publishing Books
When most authors write a book, they go the traditional route: pitch it to publishers, wait months for a reply, shop it around, wait some more, go through rewrite, and wait some more... But when blogger Sramana Mitra partnered with Amazon's BookSurge to self-publish her new book, she was taking a different route. For a book about web technology and...
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Digging Deeper
How 'Follower Spam' Infiltrated Twitter -- and How to Stop It
When using the micro-blogging service Twitter, by default you get email notices whenever anyone signs up to "follow" you (when you follow someone on Twitter, their Twitter posts, or "tweets," display on your main Twitter page, along with Tweets from everyone else you follow). A few weeks back, I noticed that I was getting inundated with new followers with names...
more »Digging Deeper
Online Video Ads Finally Find Their Niche
The numbers tell the story of the disconnect between online videos watched and online video ads sold: In December 2007, Americans watched 10 billion online videos, according to comScore. For the entire year of 2007, advertisers spent just $554 million on online video ads, according to Jupiter, while they spent $21 billion on all online ads. So many people are watching online videos, but so few advertisers are trying to reach them.
more »Citizen Journalism
This Reporter Becomes a Participant at an Unconference
Are you going to be part of the problem or part of the solution? That's a question you hear a lot when people complain about something that's gone wrong in our modern world. And there's a lot of hand-wringing about the future of journalism and whether it will survive its painful transition in the digital age. But the conference...
more »Digging Deeper
9 Tips to Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
With search engines ranking as a top traffic driver for many blogs and content sites, optimizing a site for search engine exposure is an increasingly critical component of any online marketing effort. Search engine optimization, or "SEO," means using technical and not-so-technical techniques to make sure that people searching for topics you write about will find your site. Over...
more »Digging Deeper
The Social Press Release: Multimedia, Two-Way, Direct to the Public
Silicon Valley journalist/blogger Tom Foremski had had enough. Two years ago, he wrote a poison pen letter to the PR industry in a blog post titled Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!, in which he exhorted publicists to break down press releases into sections, tag the information and provide links to more sources. "Press releases are nearly useless," he...
more »MediaShift
10 MediaShifting Moments of 2007
As the year 2007 sets in the distance, we can take some time to consider the year that was. I'm not a huge fan of year-end lists, but sometimes they help us get a grip on what transpired -- and ponder what's to come. What's perhaps most amazing about 2007 is that two distinct phenomena -- the iPhone and...
more »Social Networking
The Universal Language of Facebook
It's been just four short years since a college student named Mark Zuckerberg launched a new social network with a very specific target demographic: American Ivy League college students. Since then, the Facebook phenomenon has exceeded everyone's expectations. After opening up accessibility to anyone interested in signing up late last year, growth in the U.S. for the social network has...
more »Digging Deeper
Hype and Backlash for Second Life Miss the Bigger Picture
In May 2006, BusinessWeek ran a cover story on the virtual world Second Life (SL) by Robert Hof called My Virtual Life. The tagline breathlessly said, "A journey into a place in cyberspace where thousands of people have imaginary lives. Some even make a good living. Big advertisers are taking notice." It didn't take long for other mainstream media...
more »Social Networking
Am I Really Worth $300 as a Facebook User?
"I do not plan on being on Facebook too much anymore -- seems like a waste of time & it seems my friends cannot even take a breath without me receiving notification of it. E-mail is better!" That was the note I got from one of my new friends on Facebook who had become obsessed with Facebook, found that...
more »Digging Deeper
MarketWatch Turns 10, But Can It Evolve for Another 10?
As the financial news site MarketWatch celebrates its 10th anniversary next week, the stalwart Web 1.0 company stands on the precipice of change. It has launched a community initiative that lets people comment on stories, rate stories, and compete for points by making market predictions. As part of Dow Jones, MarketWatch will become part of the News Corp. empire...
more »Your Take Roundup
Musicians Should Diversify Income in Post-CD Era
"If you love somebody, set them free." It's an old adage that Sting eventually made popular set to music, but it also applies to recorded music these days. More and more artists are giving away some tracks to help market themselves, either by selling other tracks, going on tour or hawking merchandise. As CD sales go down, and digital...
more »Digging Deeper
6 Maxims for Music Promotion in the Digital Age
Not too long ago, there was an established route for promoting musical talent. The music would go into heavy rotation on the radio and MTV, the artist would play in a record store, and promotion might include an advertisement in a music magazine. But the old formula has been updated with the advent of digital distribution, social networking sites...
more »Your Take
How do you think bands should make money?
With digital distribution and file sharing online, bands have been able to get their music in front of more fans than ever before. But because of file sharing and cheaper downloads, bands also might feel like they can't make as much money by selling music and will often give away some MP3 tracks. In fact, Radiohead recently decided to let...
more »Your Take Roundup
People Will Pay for Niche Content, Ad-Free Newspaper Sites
With the end of the TimesSelect pay service for New York Times editorialists and archives -- and the possible end of the Wall Street Journal Online's paid wall -- I wondered if anyone would pay for content on newspaper sites. Most of the stories there are timely news, meaning they don't hold value for very long, and much of...
more »NewspaperShift
Why WSJ.com Should Open (or Keep) Its Pay Wall
Should he or shouldn't he? Ever since Rupert Murdoch finally wrangled his way into a buyout of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, there has been rampant speculation on whether Murdoch will lift the pay curtain at WSJ.com, making it a free site. While I've begged The New York Times to end their TimesSelect pay wall for op-ed...
more »Digging Deeper
The Problem with Web Measurement, Part 2
With all the web traffic numbers and metrics floating around -- page views, unique visitors, time spent, sessions -- it's a wonder that anyone can agree to a simple advertising sale on a website. Complicating matters is that the advertising world is used to traditional measurement services such as Nielsen's TV ratings that rely on usage by controlled panels of people. Online, those panel-based services can rarely gauge traffic on sites with less than 500,000 unique visitors per month.
more »Digging Deeper
The Problem with Web Measurement, Part 1
On April 19, 2007, the new CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Randall Rothenberg, sent a scathing open letter to the heads of the major web measurement firms, comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings, complaining that they better get their act together: Imagine my surprise when I came to the IAB and discovered that the main audience measurement companies are still...
more »Digging Deeper
Widgets, also known as gadgets or mini-applications, are small software programs or HTML code that people can embed onto social networking pages, blogs or computer desktops. Examples include the iLike music widget for Facebook, the MyBlogLog widget to see a blogger's current audience, and the NPR Addict widget to hear favorite radio shows streamed from your desktop. There are even widgets for mobile phones, including Apple's iPhone.
more »MarketingShift
Marketers Grapple with Giving Teens More Control Online
SAN FRANCISCO -- A curious thing happened at the Hotel Nikko in downtown San Francisco today during the Ypulse Mashup 2007 conference about those wired teens. Yes, a lot of older folks dressed business-casual tried to look hip and decipher what the kids were doing online in social networks, on mobile phones and in virtual worlds. But on numerous...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Business Crowd Considers Web Users in Third Person
SAN FRANCISCO -- Anyone tired of Web 2.0 topics and discussion, and the current venture-capital-fueled hype, would have been advised to stay far away from the Supernova conference here. The conference site bills it as "the only event that assembles the most compelling people and companies from the converging worlds of computing, telecom, and digital media to put decentralization...
more »Digging Deeper
TechDirt Builds Community of Bloggers to Offer Corporate Analysis
In the world of technology research, firms such as Gartner, Forrester Research and JupiterResearch seem to hold all the cards, knowing markets in-depth and charging firms thousands of dollars for a peek inside. Many small and medium companies, especially startups, are often on the outside looking in, not able to afford the high cost of research firms but still...
more »Your Take Roundup
YouTube Video Ads Should Be Relevant, Brief
Video-sharing phenomenon YouTube has built up its online business in classic dot-com fashion: Get the eyeballs first, then figure out how to make money. You can say "Web 2.0" all you want, but this is classic Web 1.0 thinking. So now that Google has sunk $1.65 billion into buying YouTube, those banner ads aren't going to pay the mushrooming...
more »Digging Deeper
'Frienemy' Google Not a Threat (Yet) to Traditional Ad Sales
If you browse through Google's job openings, the dozens of advertising sales positions -- from account manager of Print Ads in Chicago to account manager of Google Television in New York -- you'd think Google was a major media conglomerate that owned TV stations and newspapers. Instead, Google has been trying to take its automated online system for selling...
more »Your Take Roundup
Loosen Copyright Restrictions for the Internet Age
Slowly but surely, the entertainment industry is realizing that it can't use copyright law as a blunt force in the digital age. Take the case of music giant EMI. Not long ago, EMI was fighting music-sharing service Napster and threatening DJ Danger Mouse over the mash-up, The Grey Album. But today the music company announced a plan with Apple...
more »MarketingShift
Bomb Scare Tactics in War for Our Attention
For every tactic the world of marketing and advertising dreams up, we have a counter-technology that will block their attempts to reach us. We zap TV ads with the aid of digital video recorders such as TiVo. We subscribe to satellite radio or listen to podcasts to skip radio commercials. Our web browsers have pop-up ad blockers to put those annoying, blinking ads to rest.
more »MarketingShift
Marketers Get Weak Signal from Users on Cell-Phone Ads
There is an interesting disconnect between the way marketers view advertising on cell phones and what average folks who use cell phones think about those same ads. Marketers, ad agencies, research firms, cell phone makers and carriers are salivating over the prospect of delivering marketing messages to people via their cell phones. But survey after survey shows that people are not quite as excited about it -- in fact, most people consider it an outrage to be bothered by ads on such a personal device.
more »Digging Deeper
Nielsen BuzzMetrics Tries to Measure Buzz in Social Media
Last year was a watershed for social media, with millions of people creating and sharing their own media on sites such as MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr and turning away from traditional one-way media such as TV, radio and newspapers. But for the proprietors of these new media sites, there's one very big problem: How do you make money off that popularity?
more »MarketingShift
'YouTube,' 'Iraq Videos' Searches Lead to MediaShift
Back in January, not long after I launched the MediaShift blog, I wrote a blog post about soldiers in Iraq uploading their videos to YouTube. When I made that post, I included a screen shot from one of the videos, which I casually titled "YouTube soldier." Now, nearly 11 months later, that picture is bringing in the most referred traffic to my blog.
more »Digging Deeper
Pentagon PR Blogger Explains Military's New Media Challenge
The U.S. military is proud of its history and strength as a top-down organization, with a clear chain of command. In fact, you can't talk to anyone in military public affairs (the equivalent of private-sector public relations) without hearing the inevitable phrase "chain of command" in response to a question.
more »Your Take
Wal-Mart 'Flogs' Par for the PR Course
All blogs are not created equal, and many of them are not transparent in their athenticity either. Sometimes we are hoodwinked, we want to believe, but we are deceived by what have become known as "flogs" or fake blogs, bought and paid for by someone else. In the case of our hot topic of the week, it's Edelman PR creating multiple flogs to tout Wal-Mart, including Wal-Marting Across America wherein our two heroes traipse around the country in a RV in praise of Wal-Mart. Surprise, surprise, their trip was funded by Edelman on behalf of Wal-Mart.
more »Digging Deeper
PR People Must Balance Consistent Message with Authenticity
Public relations professionals and journalists often work together, and sometimes they even get along. The goal for the PR person is to represent their product or service well, and make sure it gets positive press coverage. The goal for the journalist is to write a balanced account of the company -- not necessarily all positive or all negative.
more »Tags
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