Twitter as the noisiest medium in history (and what to do about it)
As this year 2013 ends, I find out I haven't used Twitter much. Maybe just every three months or so to keep the account kind of active. Have no time. Have no inclination.
Seth Godin puts the supposed importance of Twitter to task -
all that noise making it useless most of the time:
Do you actually believe that Taylor Swift has 33,000,000 million (and counting) people eagerly waiting for her next tweet, ready to click on whatever she links to?
In fact, less than one in a thousand people who 'get' one of her tweets will click. Most of the 33 million won't even read it, making the word 'get' worthy of quotation marks.
So what do we do with this Social media behemoth, which I suspect is fast becoming a wasteland roamed by shameless self-promoters?
You can play at Facebook and Twitter, and make them work. But they will only work if treat them like a cocktail party, as an opportunity to eavesdrop and layer general connection and value and insight.
Labels: social media, twitter
Social Shower curtains: Next up, Social Work Curtains
Yes, how about a
social work curtain? Cue image of a man intently facing the screen at work, and instead of work it is just Facebook that he is gawking at.
Found atLabels: facebook, graphic, social media
Reason #1 behind rise of Social media: The fear of missing out
Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch says that we are obsessed with Twitter updates and Facebook status messages (among other activities related to online obsessions) because '
Social media has made us even more aware of the things we are missing out on'.
FOMO -Fear of Missing Out- is a great motivator of human behavior, and I think a crucial key to understanding social software, and why it works the way it does. Many people have studied the game mechanics that keep people collecting things (points, trophies, check-ins, mayorships, kudos). Others have studied how the neurochemistry that keeps us checking Facebook every five minutes is similar to the neurochemistry fueling addiction.
And,
...You're home alone, but watching your friends status updates tell of a great party happening somewhere. You are aware of more parties than ever before. And, like gym memberships, adding Bergman movies to your Netflix queue and piling up unread copies of the New Yorker, watching these feeds gives you a sense that you're participating, not missing out, even when you are.
Well said.
But, a cynical person will say that we fear missing out because we lead hollow lives, where little we do is of any lasting substance. We work to pay the bills. We seek solace in things others are doing. Social media may be the food for the 'despairing' hordes.
Link Via Kottke.orgLabels: social media
Social Media Mania, Redux
Is the Internet bubble 2.0 about to burst? That I don't know. But, it is amazing that some 10 years back, I was at the India Internet World fair at Pragati Maidan in October 2000 and the bubble had burst. You looked at all those shiny booths of venture-funded startups, the shiny pens and markers they used to hand out, gone dry as soon as one left the arena, you thought the end would never come. But it did. I don't remember a single company from that time surviving now.
You start thinking at how long will an economy based on 140 character tweets, profile pages and populated by free-loading users, mostly young (a major part of Facebook users are below 30, something similar in 2000 when most users of new sites were young people), is going to last.
On Facebook-led mania:
Apparently, Facebook has now grown so big and powerful that nominally rational people are saying outlandishly silly things to reporters, on the record...
On over-reliance on Twitter:
Advanced degrees from top-notch programs, evidence of sustained hard work in pursuit of complex long-term goals—ignore all that! The important thing is whether your job candidates can be clever in less than 140 characters five to 10 times per day. That and their social life.
Labels: social media, trends
Why Google Is Better Than Facebook
Money. One reason why most sellers benefit more from Google than Social Media websites. For every story that you read about Facebook beating Google in terms of Traffic and Time spent, consider the INTENT factor. Why do you use Google? And why do you use Facebook or Twitter?
Recently, SEO Guru Rand Fishkin gave a long
interview to another SEO guru Aaron Wall. This is what Rand had to say on the difference b/w Traffic from Google and that from Facebook, Twitter and other stars in the Social Media galaxy:
(Aaron Wall): I remember you once posted about getting lots of traffic from Facebook & Twitter, but almost 0 sales from it. Does there become a point where search is not the center of the web (in terms of monetization), or are most of these networks sorta only worthwhile from a branding perspective?
(Rand Fishkin): As direct traffic portals, it's hard to imagine a Facebook/Twitter user being as engaged in the buying/researching process as a Google searcher. Those companies may launch products that compete with Google's model or intent, but as they exist today, I don't foresee them being a direct sales channel. They're great for traffic, branding, recognition and ad-revenue model sites, but they're of little threat to marketers concerned with the relevance or value of search disappearing.
Until something better comes along.
Update: Facebook will make $2 Billion from brands and organizations pushing Fan Pages in its Walled Garden.
Labels: google, social media
The Social Media Expert is Dead
There is no such thing as a social media expert. Consider this as my fourth post on the
'Social Media Experts are Bullshit Artists' series. I believe when this
blogger says that there will always be people who have used social media tools to build successful brands and online communities.
But, these guys won't shout from the roofs that they are experts. Because experts know better. Experts are humble people.
Four things that you must know:
1. Social media is new and always evolving: Online users ignore ads. Online users are fickle. They will move on to the next shiny social media toy in a jiffy.
2. There is no 'right way' to use social media: If everyone is using the same
'proven' tools and tactics, where does that leave you?
3. What works for one business may not work for your business: Dell have used Twitter to sell computers. This is not true for every business.
4. Online Community Building is hard: It takes time, personal commitment towards passionate participants, and you must create original, useful content yourself. UGC is over-hyped. Basically, it means impacting lives of users in a positive way.
Soon, there is going to be shakeout in this
'Guru' field and only a handful will manage to learn, adapt and survive for the next hype cycle.
Other posts in this series
DIY Social Media: A Users' GuideIt is Paid Media, Not Social MediaSocial Media Will Be Dead in 2009Labels: DIY, social media
DIY Social Media: A user's Guide to avoiding the snake oil in social media marketing and consulting
Social Media Consulting/Marketing a huge rip
off. Reasons are simple enough. The term social media is itself oxymoronic enough - imagine all the lonely people Twittering furiously, craving for the world's attention.
One,
Internet Marketing is mostly common sense and is basically an extension of simple real world rules - create a great product, give great service and customer experience and spread (& maintain) the word (aka Branding).
Second,
there just too many social media gurus online. Look at your inbox - how many of your Twitter followers aren't Internet marketers, social media gurus (or, success coaches)?
Third, and this is a take on reason#1,
most of these marketers are canny types who are able to sell their services and products more than they will help you sell your product. For example, the social media gurus call themselves gurus because they are angling for speaking gigs, where no one is checking their successes. There are only a few genuine players.
Let us look at some names and no I am not disparaging them. A savvy marketer like Guy Kawasaki will sell more copies of his books on the basis of his carefully nurtured 'reputation' than actually creating a successful startup himself. Similarly, Seth Godin sells more of his books because of his 'reputation' than actually create a great startup himself. These two guys are great guy no doubt and I take their names because these two are sort of role models for your typical Internet Marketer/Consultant.
Those who can't do Teach.
A quick guide to social media bullshitScott Berkun once gave reasons why
social media is all bullshit1. We have always had social networks. Call them families, tribes, clubs, cliques or even towns, cities and nations.
2. The new media does not necessarily destroy the old.
3. (every social media gurus will create an influencer group to build his brand) Social media consultants writing about social media have inherent biases. It’s difficult to take posts like this about social media seriously, as it’s written by someone from a social media consulting firm without an ounce of humility or perspective.
4. ... social media frequently consists of people re-forwarding things they were forwarded that almost none of them appear to have read, as they believe they are rewarded for publishing frequently above all else.
5. More noise than signal ( aka the Personal Branding/Personal Broadcasting overload problem) ... as more people, and corporations, hover right on the gray dividing line between authentic and corporate, or selfish and generous.
6. Be suspicious of technologies claimed to change the world. The problem with the world is rarely the lack of technologies, the problem is us.
7. Always ask “What problem am I trying to solve?”
And the Golden Rule
8. Marketing will not make up for bad products or incompetent services.
You can also watch a video
“Is Social Media Bullshit?” by Jay Neely
here.
Be Savvy about ConsultantsWhat's with all the Jargon? Jargon-creating is marketing tool #1 for all the mba and consultant types. Typically, a consultant (like Forrester) will do a 'survey/study' and then come with labels and charts, lots of them, to sell overpriced reports to their lazy (similarly staffed with overpaid people) clients. Maybe, if the market is big enough, they will also come up with a book as this builds credibility. Later, smaller, me-too firms will copy their terms and sell spectacularly jargon-heavy reports, presentations and wordy Infographics.
For example, look how this Indian consultant
copies Forrester's style to come up with similar user categories. This is something about employee communities online. Somebody sure forgot the water cooler.
One of the key parts of the framework is the 7 types of social roles are lurker, learner, connector, moderator, organizer, teacher, super-user.
The lesson here is: Dense MBA Consultant Jargon designed to impress and confuse corporate clients. Social Media in Enterprise is big business. In 2008, a report Forrester Research said Enterprise 2.0 will become a $4.6 Billion Industry By 2013
Instead, Read this:
A-Z of social media JargonSocial media is expensiveI love this blogger's take on the demands of social media. For example, on corporate blogging he says,
...blogging properly is a full time job in itself (notable exceptions notwithstanding), and a "full time job" is expensive — whether you're paying someone to do it or spending the time to do it yourself.
Social Media in India: ‘New Age’ media trapped in ‘Old-school’ marketing mind-setThe Web Chutney Digital Media Outlook Report 2009 says that most Indian companies use the net for lead generation type activities, less for building brands, servicing customers and building long range relationships.
As a result, the Internet accounts for only 5% of Indian Business's total spends.
Social Media in India: It is all Spam.It is no secret that 95% of all social media activity is spammy in nature. This is more acute in case on India. [See the graphic on top.
Via]
Social Media in India: The Anti Social Media Highlights from trends of social media activity among Indian users from
Pinstorm:
Antisocial Media refers to Lack of online civility, virtual ragging, webcam censorship, VOIP bleeping, Facebook friendstalking, Orkut scrapbombing, Forum flatlining and SMS barraging. It can also mean to include Hi5 hijacking and unscrupulous Twitter following.
How good is a user base as inspiring as this?
Now that we have asked the questions and seen some data, here is a simple guide to mastering the basics of social media, or
How to avoid the social media consultants and save money:
One doesn't build communitiesThere are already communities online - Facebook groups, Orkut groups, Twitter hashtags, Quality Niche blogs with following...one could go on.
Learn Social media tips from people who actually created successful online communitiesPeople like
Matt Haughey, the creator of MetaFilter
From the founders of
WELL, one of the earliest successful online community.
From successful online communities like
TESConnect (for teachers) - over 944,000 members publishing 3,770 posts across 100+ forum topics. Top 3 forums right now are
Entertainment, Opinion and Personal.The example of TESConnect was from Richard Millington, an online community builder who currently working for the United Nations Refugee Agency (tip:
always ask your consultant what he is working at rght now. Look at the URLs provided as examples).
Read Richard's
Feverbee blog from start to finish and you will learn all you need about building online communities. For example, this is a
great resource page with best of community building links
Two great community building guides from Creating Passionate Users blog can be found
here and
here.
You do not need a consultant to start on the Internet.I know I wrote about Seth already in thsi post but the fact remains that he is a smart writer.
In a post titled
Is it too late to catch up?, Seth gives a list of things to consider doing online if this is your first time:
Use gmail to give every person in the organization that can read English an email address.
Use a free website creating tool - to build a page about your company. Start by listing your locations, your people (with addresses) and make it clear you want to hear from people.
Start an email newsletter using Mad Mimi or Mail Chimp. Give the responsibility for the newsletter's creation and performance to one person and offer them a bonus if they exceed metrics in sign ups and in reducing churn.
Start a book group for your top executives and every person who answers the phone, designs a product or interacts with customers. Read a great online media book a week and discuss. It'll take you about a year to catch up.
Offer a small bonus to anyone in the company who starts and runs a blog on any topic. Have them link to your company site, with an explanation that while they work there, they don't speak for you.
Have the president post her (real) email address in every invoice and other communication the company sends out, asking people to write to her with comments or questions.
Start a newsletter for your vendors. Email them regular updates about what you're doing, what's selling and what problems are going on internally that they might be able to help you with.
Do not approve any project that isn't run on Basecamp.
Get a white board and put it in the break room. On it, have someone update: how many people subscribe to the newsletter, how many people visit the website, how many inbound requests come in by phone, how long it takes customer service to answer an email and how often your brand names are showing up on Twitter every day.
Don't have any meetings about your web strategy. Just do stuff. First you have to fail, then you can improve.
(This is my favorite piece of advice)- Refuse to cede the work to consultants. You don't outsource your drill press or your bookkeeping or your product design. If you're going to catch up, you must (all of you) get good at this, and you only accomplish that by doing it.
Personal Branding Blog - Dan Schawbel
Personal Branding -
Google SearchCustomer Evangelism BasicsChurch of the Customer BlogAll about “Citizen Marketers”"Citizen Marketers" makes the case that the distributed, power-sharing nature of social media is a reflection of the ideals of democracy, where liberty, free speech and freedom of association are its ruling principles. As a result, positioning, message delivery and reputation management are in the hands of the populace, where anyone can be a publisher or broadcaster. For tradition-bound managers, the message is simple: Control is out of control. People are creating content about products and services whether companies like it or not. They are the new cultural influencers.
The basics of Employee CommunitiesTo view weekly sales numbers
To participate in discussion forums
To submit questions to senior management
To view status reports for each department
Too see company news
To access other employee portals, such as the benefits portal
Social Media Guidelines -
Google search40 Social Media GuidelinesEnterprise 2.0 A Collection of 50+ Enterprise 2.0 Case Studies and ExamplesThe Elevator Pitch for Enterprise 2.010 ways to measure social media success1. Traffic 2. Interaction 3. Sales 4. Leads 5. Search marketing 6. Brand metrics 7. PR 8. Customer engagement 9. Retention 10. Profits
Social Media Monitoring
This is a favorite of many social media gurus. They will claim to help you monitor your brand online. They will make the social media monitoring more complex than it really is and will push products for which they receive the highest commission,
Whereas the simplest way to do it is have a Google analytics (or Statcounter) account for traffic monitoring and Google Alert-cum-Google blogsearch for your brands/keywords. Both are free, as you very well know.
Social media monitoring & measurement tools listNo social media equivalent of Google Analytics yetThe Dirty Little Secret of Social Media MonitoringCompanies like Radian6, Techrigy, Nielsen and Cymphony are quite busy these days rolling out new partnerships and product features, all aimed at providing more meaningful data and better ways to use it
The dirty little secret or so it seems, is they aren’t all working with the same data sources.
How to look through a SEO serice provider's emailA point-by-point response to an unsolicited letter from yet another SEO rip-offIf you must use a social media consultantHere is a list of seven things you must get your social media consultant/community builder to do for you. If he can't he is useless and a rip-off.
1. Does your consultant come up in location specific search results? If he
doesn't, what good is he to you?
2. Get your consultant to create a b2b blog that gets traffic, tweets and everything.3. Get your consultant to create a forum for your product/s and service/s - with quality content, traffic, memberships and all.
4. Get your consultant to create a great slideshare presentation for your product/service.5. Get your consultant to create a video series for you on Youtube.6. Get your consultant to run a contest on social media sites for your brand.7. Get your consultant to install and configure Google apps/Docs, Yammer for you.Related ReadingsBlogging: Dead or Alive? Personal Branding - The New Link Bait Social Media DeadHow to Search Social MediaLabels: community building, howto, social media, social media marketing
Somebody please settle the blogging 'dead or alive' question
As a blogger I am fine with blogging. But, these damn so-called social media consultants will continue to confuse their corporate clients and keep themselves employed.
In one corner, you have PR guy Steve Rubel arguing '
blogging is over' and urging everyone to
post once and then repost everywhere.
Somebody is sure due for a serious spanking for
shameless spamming and
walled-garden whoring.
In the opposite corner, you have some saner folks, John Bell and Taly Weiss. Taly Weiss has a fashionable trend guidebook out,
trends in 140 characters.
Item no. 37 Says,
"Blogs will continue to flourish as people realize that micro-blogging needs a "home base"."
No wonder many top Twitters are either big bloggers or news website owners.
John Bell
concurs,
"Blogs are not passe. Quite the opposite. They will become a valuable "get more" destination that corporate Twitter handles and Facebook "walls" can point people to. "
You know which
luchador I am going to support.
Labels: blogging, social media
Blogger 1 Twitter 0
Touted as the '
first draft of history', Twitter is also a tower of babel built on 140 characters at a time. Twitter might be a useful tool to break stories, it is useless to make sense as the story develops, because the activity on Twitter deteriorates into tweets, retweets, rants and it becomes a virtual dust-storm of sorts.
It takes human intervention to guide users through that storm of data, through careful curation. In context of the election controversy in Iran, The Economist magazine
praises the work of select bloggers who monitored the internet and helped readers make sense of what is happening in Iran.
The Economist writes,
Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English.
So much so for the demise of blogging, we were being forced to believe.
Labels: blogging, social media, twitter
Swine flu and the uselessness of Twitter during emergencies
Mathew Ingram once said "
Twitter is the first draft of history." Sadly, this first draft is taken for truth on Twitter, multiplied with each Re-tweet.
What is more, in case of emergencies, Tweets become
'the first draft of fear'
- with little or no context, Retweeted over and over, until only nonsense remains.
The Foreign Policy blog explains the
uselessness of Twitter during emergencies:
Unlike basic internet search – which has been already been nicely used by Google to track emerging flu epidemics – Twitter seems to have introduced too much noise into the process: as opposed to search requests which are generally motivated only by a desire to learn more about a given subject, too many Twitter conversations about swine flu seem to be motivated by desires to fit in, do what one's friends do (i.e. tweet about it) or simply gain more popularity.
Labels: social media, twitter
It is Paid Media, not Social Media
For every success like Obama, Susan Boyle or the Battle at Kruger, there are millions of tonnes of social media spam. Social media experts have taken over social media from genuine social media users.
The abundance of cheap server space and mass availability of bandwidth has made sure that advertising remains as pervasive and sometimes deceptive as before.
In the Old Media Age, we all could identify advertising.
In the New Media Age, everything is promotion - Including the medium.
For every genuine Fan page on social networking sites, there are 100 Fan Pages created by overpaid so-called social media experts , populated by
fake fans bribed with freebies, if not money.
For every genuine link posted on Twitter, there are services like Twtad.com that pay users to put links in their accounts.
For every tweet from genuine experts (like Jay Rosen or Dave Winer) or a passenger on a plane that has just crashed, paid hacks at PR firms are tweeting for their celebrity clients. Celebrity Tweeting is worse than Celebrity Blogging.
For every genuine complaint on consumer sites like Mouthshut.com, there are fake reviews on especially created blogs and fake forum accounts by people from so-called Digital Ad Agencies. There are Ad Agencies in India who are experts at pushing down negative reviews.
For every genuine link for tag such as 'bike' there are 100 repeated links to empty pages for the same tag.
For every genuine consumer review at sites like Yelp.com, companies are being pressured to pay for positive reviews.
For every forum post by a genuine young gamer, overpaid interns are posting fake praises for dumb-ass games.
Related:The Confused Person's Guide to Web 2.0Social Media is dead in 2009Labels: social media
Would you like a degree in Facebook, Orkut and Twitter?
And while we are at it, a degree in blogging, podcasting and using Flickr? And be willing to pay $5676 for the course? The Birmingham City University in UK is offering
a course in Social media. Commenting on this course, columnist on Politico website says this on
Twitter,
Is about as brilliant as a degree in email would have been ten years ago.
What do I think? For $5776, I could pay for a couple of online journalists at my startup for local journalism,
Bighow. For $5776, I could have gone ahead with my planned series of free Online Journalism Courses across India, being able to hold at least 6 of such events. The basic course material is already up
here.
Bottomline: nothing like learning by doing. Start learning about social media by registering for a couple of social networking sites and blog daily.
Labels: education, social media
Social Media will be dead in 2009
7 reasons why:
1.
everyone thinks she/he is a social media expert.2. everyone can tweet, re-tweet, NYT on facebook, facebook on NYT, and crosspost something at 22 different social media tools. It goes on ad-nauseum.
3. everyone can kiss the ass of the bigger social media guru, who in turn...
4. everyone can create a top 10 most exciting...kind of posts
5. everyone fervently believes in the two Vs of social media: video, viral
6. everyone is angling for the '
so far safe' jobs at Google, or a cushy consulting job by positioning oneself as an
'expert' on something and recycling stories written by others.
7. very few people are actually starting meaningful startups that really help reporters and chroniclers of the world.
Things will come to pass in 2009 when:1. The internet will choke from all the traffic for video, social networking sites and big companies spamming the social media sites.
2. People will realize that those social media experts are nothing but spammers and snake oil merchants. [Tip: If you it is marketing 2.0 that you want to understand, read
Churchofthecustomer. If you want to understand Community Building, Read
Feverbee. That's all there is to it.]
Most Important of all,
3. We will eventually realize social media is just, well, media.
Labels: social media
simplelist: The only 15 blogs on social media you need to read often
You will find many ranking of blogs in this genre. But, are these rankings of any use? I have read quite a few blogs on the subject for some years now and I have discovered that RSS subscribers and Pagerank are no real indicators of a blog's utility. Both can be manipulated. So many blogs have more than 10,000 RSS subscribers but the content is worth zilch.
There were some blogs that started out with enthusiasm and great content but have now fallen back to rehashing stories from the RSS reader.
Besides, too many of social media blogs are written by self promoters and PR hopefuls.
Result:
there is much noise, less signal.
We have enough news about startups and events. We need analysis.
So, here is a simple, no nonsense list of 15 essential blogs covering the social media scene that you need to read.
1. ReadWriteWeb: http://www.readwriteweb.com/ USP - great theme coverage e.g. semantic apps, future of...
2. Mashable: http://mashable.com/ USP - great ' servicey' lists
3. CenterNetworks: http://www.centernetworks.com/ USP - to know the truth about Jason Calacanis
4. Problogger: http://www.problogger.net/ USP - great guide to blogging and making money online.
5. Chris Brogan: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/ USP - Chris ran one of the all time great series on social media marketing.
6. Webware: http://news.cnet.com/8300-17939_109-2.html USP - Veteran Tech Journalist Rafe Needleman writes on it.
7. Web Strategy by Jeremiah: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog USP - Written by Jeremiah Owyang who works at Forrester Research and covers Social Media really well. You will love those Social Media visiting card type posts.
8. Zac Johnson: http://zacjohnson.com/ USP - Written by a guy who knows a thing or two about affiliate marketing.
9. Andrew Chen: http://andrewchenblog.com/ USP - great How Tos and analysis of social media, social gaming etc...
10. GigaOM: http://gigaom.com/ - USP - useful analysis pieces on the Digital Economy.
11. FeverBee: http://www.feverbee.com/ - USP - great, lean guide to building online communities.
12. The Social Customer Manifesto: http://www.socialcustomer.com/ - USP It will really change how yu think about consumers in this user-led digital economy.
13. Bubblegeneration: http://www.bubblegeneration.com/index.cfm - USP Umair Haque's blog. Umair has now moved to Harvard Business Online and writes here - http://discussionleader.harvardbusiness.org/haque/
14. Nicholas Carr: http:roughtype.com USP Nicholas Carr's blog, the man who never stops questioning and we are all the better for it.
15. Micro Persuasion: http://www.micropersuasion.com/ USP Written by Steve Rubel, a PR blogger. He has been blogging for long.
Downside: sometimes, Steve can be as only PR guys can be - i.e. being a bit too
'pushy' about services and products, which, considering his PR background, probes the boundaries of objectivity.
This is my list. What's in yours?
P.S.: I have omitted many worthy blogs because of their infrequent posting frequency. Jushua Porter's "Bokardo" http://bokardo.com/ is one of them.
Others I have omitted to mention just because I have never found the time to read and I am positive there are hundreds of useful reads that are yet to be discovered.
Labels: blogs, simplelist, social media
The A to Z of New Media
This is a free form notes on 80 things that I have learned about New Media with a teeny weeny look into what works (and at times, what doesn't). I am sure there is a book somewhere in this short list but being a man of a woefully short attention span, I will have to say no.
I am sure I will start with New Media and get myself lost in M is for movies. Meanwhile, read on.
AA-listThe media version of the
‘Superstar Economy’ where a few people tend to dominate the conversation.
The
“Techmeme 250”, (not like the “300”) a group of
‘I will link to you, you link to me in return’ bloggers broadly working in or around San Francisco, whose posts are aggregated by default by aggregators such as Techmeme or Technorati, both of which supposedly boast of some unique ranking algorithm.
Some of these A-listers are genuine pioneers (like
Dave Winer) or excellent commentators (like
Nicholas Carr) who enjoy a following on merit. Other will do everything to ensure that they stay there.
The term also applies to the A-list commentators like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.
Aggregation – a vital play for online news sites because distribution has always been a big play in media.
All Devices strategy – making sure that your content is available on all sorts of devices – Personal computers, handhelds, mobiles...
Adsense – Because it is there.
BBlogging Online publishing was never this easy.
Blog Networks Entities which want to become the next generation of newspapers. Thanks to Google Adsense, some Blog networks are SEO savvy and exist only to rewrite existing news stories and getting on top of Search Engine results.
BloggersPeople like
Robert Scoble (erstwhile Microsoft blogger),
Steve Rubel (PR blogger),
Hugh Mcloed (draws wonderful drawings),
Seth Godin (Marketing),
Guy Kawasaki (of Apple fame),
Matt Cutts (Google blogger),
Darren Rouse (blogging tips), Aaron Wall and Rand Fish (SEO) have built a following largely due to five reasons
1. being among the first,
2. being unique,
3. being useful,
4. being entertaining and
5. having a voice.
Business BloggingBusinesses using blogs to reach out to customers, potential customers, suppliers, media in general and other target groups.
BoardsThe free from discussion forums on topics ranging from Battlestar Galactica to LOLcats on 4chan.
Business model (for news outfits) 1. Non profit trust like The Guardian,
2. Free online content with pay option for exclusive and valuable content (The Economist),
3. Fully ad supported (like most of the blogs),
4. Free daily paper for young readers plus weekly/daily editions with exclusive analysis, stories, special reports,
5. Free news supported by an ad network,
6. Citizen-funded investigative journalism (E.g. spot.us)
CCraigslist.orgThe site that Craig Newmark started and duly sent Newspapers into a deathly downward spiral.
The easy classified business is no more to be taken for granted.
Communities - News sites and other websites exist to serve existing communities – e.g communities of people who hate Obama
Citizen Journalism – start by having a prominently displayed section on your site inviting inputs from citizen reporters, aka users.
Comments for everything – start by having comments for all articles on your web site.
Crowd – another name for users of all the social media sites.
Cabal – a name for a group of users on a social media site working behind the scene, pushing up or down stories they like, mostly used for users of digg.com.
Clones – because it is so easy and cheap to come up with copies of successful web sites.
Celebrities – cover them, because the average adsense clicker is someone with too much free time (jobless?) and does not discriminate towards ads like savvy users such as yourself.
Contrarian – examples of what works are fine but occasionally do something different. If you write a column, look deeper into a story rather than merely rewriting a post.
(The) Cloud: A realm ruled by Google. It is useful in many cases to have all your data on servers elsewhere.
Remember, the machine are looking at everything you have online.
DDel.icio.usIt made Tagging, sharing bookmarks a popular and useful online social activity.
Is your news site as fun to browse as del.icio.us?Digg – pioneering social news site with vote feature.
Presently, decaying under the influence of a select group of smart users (read cabal above)
EEditorsBecause, Citizen Journalists need editors to polish their offerings.
Economy of scale – online vs. print, cost wise.
Earnings – Adsense, banner ads, sponsorships, ads in RSS feeds, ads from ad networks, organizing events…
Economist.com – a site that still manages to get people to pay for a freewheeling content coverage style.
What extra does the economist.com site have?
Useful, unique and entertaining analysis, for starters.
FFreeThe New York Times (nytimes.com) went free. There is money in the archives of News companies. Just tag them appropriately and make them free.
What will users pay for online?Something that is exclusive and offers something new, something that cannot be found elsewhere.
Easier said than done.
Feeds The new reporter has subscribed to hundreds if not thousands of feeds.
Flickr.com For photo sharing.
Also for the fun way the founders interact with the community.
Facebook.com For time wasting.
GGoogle.comBecause, Google is God. The 10-year old wunderkid started with Search – added Adsense/Adwords – making billions of dollars- now, getting into
Cloud-based computing.
Make sure your pages are indexed quickly by Google and displayed prominently for search results.
Also, make sure you use free tools from Google, including alternatives to Microsoft office.
GawkerThe #1 Blog Network.
You can build a formidable online news property if you have a unique voice and a faith in the power of pageviews and pageviews only.
Generation Y – the ‘Always On’ generation.
The Generation, which is yet to join the work force.
The eternal time wasters. The kind that can’t differentiate between Georgia and Georgia.
Go figure.
At some point of time in our lives, we were all Generation this &that.Gadgets Because this is where the adsense and other forms of ad money lie.
HHuffington PostA smart lady has just shown us how to do “celebrity + hype of the moment + aggregation” and ensuring huge pageviews without having original content to show.
HyperlocalBecause everyone is talking about but no one has succeeded at it so far.
E.g. Backfence.com
There are empty towns online everywhere.
Some people are betting on a hybrid model of “online + offline+ events”.
However, this requires people and time.
In short, Money.
IInvestigateGoing for the tough but important stories.
Take the help of citizen reporters.
E.g. Assignment Zero
E.g. Spot.us
Established News Brands can do it posting a basic entry on story and then let citizen journalists and editors take charge.
Jeff Jarvis says –
“(in the future) there will be more news and more reporters.”
JJournalist BrandsJournalists, who adopted New Media tools, went solo and made it big.
Rafat Ali – Paidcontent.org – sold to The Guardian Group for in excess of $30 million.
Om Malik – Has his own flourishing blog network headed by the famous gigaom.com website.
Jeff Jarvis (buzzmachine.com) – one of the most brilliant minds on New Media going around.
KKilobytesBecause it is very important that your web page/mobile page loads AFAP (As Fast As Possible)
KindleThe new e-reader device from Amazon ay be the best alternative to print so far and Amazon can create a Google-competitor if it gets all the major publishers on board and throws in an Ad Network.
LLinkingLinks are the currency of the New Media.
Something that the Associated Press did not understand.
The Long tail – you can cover any obscure topic and someday, yes someday, someone will indeed read that and hopefully, click on the ads.
Live blogging Covering events as they happen.
Last.fm Because, people like sharing their listening preferences.
ListsBecause, people like reading lists and as a result, there are too many silly lists flying around.
Linkbait Because, social news sites like Digg.com have made it possible that you can hope to get page views if your story, and most importantly, the headline is as edgy as possible – make it controversial.
MMicrobloggingBecause, most people do not have the time (and skill) to post more than 160 or so intelligent characters.
Also helps spread interesting new information and links quickly.
Main Stream Media – a term coined by bloggers for all those clueless people in TV and Print media.
Sometimes, used in pejorative sense alluding to shenanigans including ‘vested interests at play, lazy reporting…’
Movies Because, there are far more advertisers in this category than many others.
The Dream Factory never stops working.
MemeImageboards like 4chan.org have made a name for themselves for being responsible for internet fads like Rick Rolling and LOLcats.
Start a meme. Now.
NThe New York Times - along with The Guardian and to a lesser extent, The Washington and some papers in the Scandinavian countries, it has understood the importance of online information.
Proof: it bought About.com way before many of us could get the importance of online advertising for reference content.
The Times has great blogs.
Love the blog by Errol Morris.
The Guardian has a web-first news publishing policy and its ‘Comment is Free’ section is a joy to read.
Network – create a network of partner websites for various topics.
Start with aggregating data from partner sites.
Glam.com may be the way to go but what if everyone starts building his or her own network?
OOpenOpen up your publishing system. Allow others to do stuff with your data.
Give out your API.
Online PoliticsI see Citizen Enthusiasm gone wild.
Others see messiahs in form of Facebook groups, Obama Online, Hillaryisaman.suck and IhateSarnPalin.rant.
“Where is the promise of instant customer service/redressal?”
PPhotos – it is obvious, isn’t it?
Photo profiles/photo essays will be a big thing.
PrintWe still love to read in Print. Craig of the Craigslst fame recently subscribe to the print edition of the New York Times.
Profiles – on all social networking sites.
Let your people create their profiles along with links to your domain on many sites as possible.
Let your people create groups around important/controversial stories on all the social networking sites and spread the link love.
Tip: beware of what you post online. Your future employer, girlfriend, one night stand, wife, kids…will be watching and searching.
QQualityBecause, Quality will out all the easily cloned data on the internet on any given day.
There is too much commoditized data on the internet.
RRatingsSites such as Digg have shown that people like to rate/vote for stuff they like.
(Or what others have liked – they call it ‘homophilly’)
Rob Curley – because, he has done good things with news web sites.
SSocialEverything is so social nowadays.
Social Media – a collective for all those websites where people share news, links, photos, videos, playing lists…start by submitting your stories to as many social news and bookmarking sites as you can – use mass submitters such as the “Share This” icon.
Social Media MarketingSelling your message to people on all sorts of social media sites – starts with actively participating on these sites or employing people who will do.
Some call it “professionally created SPAM”.
Search Engine Marketing – making sure your site pages rank high on search engine result pages – a time consuming process - meta tags, H1 and H2 tags and so on.
Basically, make sure you come up with interesting stuff with appropriate keywords that describe the article are mentioned multiple times on the page
- starting with the headline for the story, and following that up with a summary of the story below the headline, again with the keywords included.
Essential SEO reading list:Seomoz.org, SEObook.com, searchengineland.com, sphinn.comSPAM – the scourge of the Internet.
On Social Media sites, Spam consists of the meaningless and mostly idiotic comments and emailing users links about supposedly Adult content.
Elsewhere, Spam also refers to blogs hosted on blogger.com and other free hosts filled with adsense-ready copied web content.
TTaggingBecause, if used intelligently, Tags give meaning to web content.
Smart news sites are hiring people to tag all their content pages.
TechnoratiA pioneering search engine for blogs – now languishing because there is no money in day-to-day blog content and hope rests on aggregating as much long tail (niche, sub-niche etc.) content as possible.
TechcrunchBecause it proves what my hostel warden used to say - given the right occasion and right location (in this case, the Silicon Valley) a smart lawyer can move in, start covering the umpteenth new web site and make it big.
UURLOr, clean URl, because the collective wisdom of the search experts suggests that Google (and users) understands clean URLs.
http://bighow.com/atozofnewmedia
instead of
http://bighow.com/abcd?src234=atoz
VVideoVideo is big, very very big.
Fuelled by better bandwidth and 3 G mobile networks.
The promise - Videos by citizen reporters, and more how-to do-stuff videos.
WWisdom of the crowdVs. wisdom of a few/one
Question 1. Is the crowd always smarter/better than a group of editors who supposedly have biases?
Question 2. Is a story voted onto the top of Digg.com better than a story currently on the front page of The Guardian or The New York Times? Depends on whom you are asking - It is all so subjective.
Widgets – essentially a few lines of code that help to spread your content onto other sites.
Presently, sites are suffering from a diarrhea of widgets.
Wikis – alternative to blogs where a group of people, in case of media companies, group of reporters can collaborate on a project (story).
Wikipedia – a phenomenon. Despite some controversies about vested interests editing entries, the Wikipedia is a
Gem of the web.WSJ.com Still manages to get people to pay for content about business topics.
What extra does the Wsj.com site have?XX-surfRiding on the coattails of name brands and fads.
Successful blogs and news sites ride on the success of the latest celebrity or web fad.
How? They cover the subject to death.E.g. the hype for Twitter.com
How to X-surf? Make sure you cover the latest sensation as often as possible. Go creative – create widgets for that Application, create photo galleries about exploit of the latest celebrity rising to the top in internet searches.
XSS exploits – most news sites are actually databases.
Hackers and all those who have time to waste are lurking out there to look for security holes in your web site. The more successful your site is, the more danger there is.
In words of the campaign for a popular brand of condoms –
“Play Safe”.YYoutube.comPioneering hassle-free Video hosting.
Fast on its way to becoming a verb.
Great tool for citizen journalists.
Yellow Journalism 2.0More and more unverified, under-researched and biased stories are published online for the sake of pageviews.
ZZ-listBloggers who are on their way up by religiously linking to the so-called A-list blogs.
Ze FrankThe man behind the “Ask a Ninja” videos – showing that funny works (after sex, perhaps) best in online video.
Your turn: what have I missed?
Here is a link to my ugly presentation on
"The A to Z of New Media"Labels: definition, enterprise web 2.0, new media, news 2.0, social media
The Social Media Search Engine, ver 0.5
I took myself a little too seriously this time, wanting to search across a wide plethora of available Social Media options. I just created a spanking new Social Media Search Engine using Google Co-op.
The results aren't something to write home about but at last I am able to get results from some of the top social sites from my list of
50-odd top social media websites.
I like using Google Co-op to build custom search engines for my own work. It saves me time when I am searching for a particular word/topic on some of my favorite web sites.
If only I could master using the APIs, then Social search engine could have been much much better.
The Social Media Search EngineCopy this
code if you want to use this search engine on your blog/site
Labels: social media, social media search
