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Posts Tagged ‘Media Landscape’

Read About the state of our media! Pew’s 2010 Report

January 29, 2011 Comments off

Old media are trying to imagine the new smaller newsroom of the future in the relic of their old ones. New media are imagining the new newsroom from a blank slate.   Among the critical questions all this will pose: Is there some collaborative model that would allow citizens and journalists to have the best of both worlds and add more capacity here? What ethical values about news will settle in at these sites? Will legacy and new media continue to cooperate more, sharing stories and pooling resources, and if they do, how can one operation vouch for the fairness and accuracy of something they did not produce?

The year ahead will not settle any of these. But the urgency of these questions will become more pronounced. And ultimately the players may be quite different.

“I think the answer may come from places staffed by young people who understand the new technology and its potential and who have a passion for journalism,” said Larry Jinks, the highly regarded former editor and publisher who transformed the San Jose Mercury News a generation ago and who still sits on the board of the McClatchy Company.



The full report and trends by media channel are located directly http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010 

If you have time, might I also suggest browsing through:

1.       Key Findings

2.       Major Trends  

3.       Nielsen’s Media Analysis: www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/specialreports_nielsen.php

4.       List of who owns the top media companies

A few top level snippets of summaries are noted below:

1.       Cable: For the third consecutive year, only digital and cable news saw audiences grow among the key sectors that deliver news. In cable in 2009, those gains were largely captured by one network, Fox, though during the day, a breaking-news time, CNN also gained viewers.

2.       What’s more, the data continue to suggest a clear pattern in how Americans gravitate for news: people are increasingly “on demand” consumers, seeking platforms where they can get the news they want when they want it from a variety of sources rather than have to come at appointed times and to one news organization. Online, Yahoo News is on top with MSNBC and CNN next, AOL and then NY Times.

3.       Newspapers saw print circulation losses accelerate in 2009. In the latest period, September, industry-wide circulation fell 10.6% from a year earlier. That comes on top of losses of 4.6% in 2008. The industry has lost 25.6% in daily circulation since 2000. Those declines, however, pale by comparison to the loss in revenues, which represent a more significant problem.

4.       Audio audiences are more stable. Fully 236 million Americans listened to at least some radio in an average week in the fall of 2009, a number that has been basically static for the past five years, and news/talk/information remains among the most popular formats. NPR’s audience in 2009 rose slightly, up 0.1%, from 2008. But new technology is encroaching on the amount of traditional radio use. More than 4 –in 10 Americans now say they listen to less terrestrial radio due to iPod/MP3 use, and nearly 1in 3 now say they listen to online radio.

What are your thoughts on the media industry? How have the changes and economy impacted your media relations, journalism career? How have you adapted with the changes?

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What is the ROI of a conversation?

October 16, 2010 2 comments

I hope you all don’t mind if I play in the sand box a bit with a bunch of various thoughts.  How do you measure the value of a conversation or multiple ongoing conversations as citizen engagement?  Do you liken it to the cost per minute …of say a cell phone call?  Or by some other standard? Complicated at best, ehhh?

Physically engaging, talking online or offline, and then any resulting future actions are all different forms of engagement. Right? Defining variouls levels of engagement might be a first step.

Although there’s no standized formula quite yet for measuring the ROI of word-of-mouth (WOM) or social marketing, there are some factors to consider.

The seeds have been firmly planted through press coverage, trend reports and media analysis; buzz builders are among us; governement, businesses and marketers are all drinking the word-of-mouth Diet Mt. Dew version. In particular, word-of-mouth or citizen engagement has proven to be a valuable way to reach the over-stimulated, ever-changing, often elusive, yet ready-and-able-to-spend 13- to 25-year-old audience. Media buyers and marketers alike are scrambling to get an aggregated WOM engagement measurement program while it’s hot, but are constantly dealing with one small hiccup.

Nobody is quite sure how much it is valued or what it costs, in resources and time, etc. etc. etc.

“What is the value of a conversation?” is a common and fair question. We do this in the communications industry for example, a discipline marked by numbers and formulas developed to justify media spends so many dollars per column inch.

As 360-degree marketing and communications straddles aggregation of analytics and social behavior, the keepers of the budgetary keys are trying to figure out what to pencil into the value of the elusive word of mouth (WOM) engagement line.

Essentially, online social media listening and offline word of mouth tracking have essentially been two parallel universes.

Similarly, media buying agencies know how to calculate the value of a banner ads, pint column inches, broadcast radio and TV…which in part takes into account the number of eyeballs or ears seeing the ad, whose eyeballs they are, what/where the content is placed.

Is there a standard formula for word-of-mouth? Not yet, but I think we are getting closer in the communications industry.

Methodologies were previously being developed to try to figure out the value of conversations on a CPM basis.  I don’t think that will worked so well. Why? Well how do you measure some of the following components of engaged people based conversations?

Authenticity

Whose word is more valuable — Britney Spears’ or your best friend’s? If one of my colleagues tells me she loved ‘Spanglish,’ but the New York Times tells me it’s more vapid than ‘Daredevil,’ who am I more apt to believe? Depends on your personal lense/frame of reference. The first way to value a word-of-mouth interaction is by considering its relevance to the individual. The more honest, pure and trusted the conversation is, the stronger the impact.  All of these interactions may be valuable, but their interactions are valued differently.

Connectivity

According to research conducted by the Consumer Electronics Association in December 2004, 72 percent of teens wanted what their friends have ( I don’t think that behavior has changed to much over time) So, it’s worth a lot to inspire a conversation between two people who have a lot of friends, isn’t it?

Media buyers ask themselves, if Nike can reach the quarterback of the football team right before practice with a message about a new high-performance cleat, how many banner ads does this equal? Within the word-of-mouth industry, marketers have a range of methods for identifying the most connected, most active, most influential individuals in a group. As an industry, we’re striving to articulate our methods clearly so they can indeed contribute to the valuation of the conversation.

Context

In order for a conversation to make sense, it must be contextually relevant. Think about it, if you’re a teenager hanging out on gaming sites all day long, you’re much more apt to talk to your friends about a new artist with a track in your favorite game than a new sandwich at Burger King. As marketing and communcations professional we are trying to place a value on a conversation, it’s vital to consider where, how and for how long the conversation is taking place. The conversation over time. Are people mentioning the product in passing or raving about it in their blogs? Are they in an environment where a purchasing decision is top-of-mind? Is the content consistent with the context?  How long does the context of a message last?

Medium

If the communicator is the same, are conversations in person still considered more valuable than conversations taking place over the phone, on blogs, in print, in a social network such as this?  Are people generally more engaging face-to-face than they are on the phone?The same could be said of phone conversations vs. online chats. Email endorsements are great, but on the whole are they less of an impact and therefore, less valuable than verbal conversations? Online conversations?

Or are we just getting mired down in to much blah, blah, blah in trying to figure out the $$$ value of an engaging converation?

The industry seems to not have developed a formula to value conversations, until maybe just recently.

I can’t tell you to take three parts authenticity, one part connectivity and 1.5 parts content and multiply it by a $30 CPM to figure out your ROI, but at least we’re closer, as an industry, to figuring out what the formula’s ingredients are. As a whole in the communications industry, we need to pay close attention to: authenticity — who is talking to whom and for what reasons, connectivity — how many conversations actually occur, context — why is a given community talking about your product, and lastly, medium — where are these conversations happening?
As a test, right here …right now what I would like to propose to you all to do  is apply some ROI to this entire debate, and the extended word of mouth converation? How might you do so?

Try to quantify the bottom-line value of each conversation with some new out of the “box” thinking.

Value of time, the number of people engages and the unique referrals or action over time across all social media channels.

For exampl,e if you take a persons “life expereicne value” with some number across the outreach timeframe with some kind of diminishing generations of time and denote it by a depreciated value over time (Generation 0, Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 3, Gen 4 value). this takes into consideration one person’s  LTV across a time continum of some sort…

The WOM inputs are collected/aggregated by some sort of <b>Chatter Box</b> analytics platform.
See the chatter boxes I built to track certain engaged conversational topics using OMGili.com to see what I am generally talking about. http://unlimitedpr.net/BuzzTopics.html

The inputs potentially would be generated by some rate value (i.e the number of people told from Generation 0 to Generation 1, Generation 1 to Generation 2, etc.), which is a measure of reach, as well as generational “value”/purchase/ad rate (the percentage of people who report engaging, doing, or acting, orpurchasing the product or service at each generation). In theory, I could input in to those topics a informational link to materials for the public and watch my buzz metric meter to see if people engage and how many over time,, and track the actual link from Bit.ly as well

The value of each conversation, or “conversation value”, could calculated by combining the life time value ( in my chatter box examples, over 3 days, 7 days or 30 days…or longer monthly, semi annually, annually) and WOM referrals value and dividing this by the number of conversations with the unque number of people who engaged.

The “net present conversation value” would be then computed by subtracting what ever the costs for the marketing/HR/Outreach initiative  were to develop by both direct labor cost and indirect labor costs from the conversation value figure.

You end up with a dollar amount, like $1.20, for example, and this number means that each time a person had a conversation with a new person as part of a marketing/communication or outreach initiative (whether it’s an advocacy or influencer WOM program, or a more traditional event marketing or sampling program) the company made or got an ROI of  $1.20.

The value could be a negative number as well which means the initiative failed to generate a positive ROI. Companies can track this number over time and work to optimize their initiatives in order to increase their engagement or conversation value.

I am thinking out loud btw with all of this…and I have loosely followed this subject with some interest since about 2005 or 2006.

I end with the fact that this rambling what I posted about is not my original thinking.  And, this concept has evolved….of course over time….(no pun intended).

And, indeed there are aggreation social media tools now and what is needed is concept is some algorythm or ap to do it.

I do believe there are finally a couple of firms out there who are doing just that, which I recently came across.

Even with the growing proliferation of online social media and the mobilution conversations, an estimated 80 percent of word of mouth still occurs offline….but there does also appear to be a relatively new mobile-enabled media tracking solution that allows real-time measurement of consumer exposure to any type of brand touchpoint, including word-of-mouth and traditional media.

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Public Relations Resources & Research Guides

August 17, 2010 Comments off

Journals/Magazines

Communication Director Unrestricted Resource Some full text available
European magazine for Corporate Communication and Public Relations.  Published quarterly in English. Available in pdf format.

ABI/INFORM trade & industry ArticleLinker enabled Some full text available
Business, economics: trade and industry periodicals and newsletters. 1971-current. A good source of information on management techniques, corporate strategies, trends, and business conditions.

Business and Company Resource Center bcrc_handout.pdf Some full text available
Includes company profiles, brand information, rankings, investment reports, company histories, chronologies and periodicals. Search this database to find detailed company and industry news and information. Coverage is from 1980 to the present.

Communication Studies: a SAGE Full-Text Collection ArticleLinker enabled Some full text available

Communications journals from Sage Publishing covering Journalism, Public Opinion, Political Communication, Mass Communication, Interpersonal Communication, Cultural Studies / Intercultural Communication, Television / Film Studies, Media Studies, Business Communication, Organizational / Management Communication, Written Communication, Rhetoric, and Literacy Studies.

Web Sites

Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog Unrestricted Resource
PR views, news and tools by Infocom Group. Includes a free white paper library.

Holmes Report Unrestricted Resource
Provides information to Public Relations professionals including case histories

Almanacs & Yearbooks

Nonprofit Almanac
Call Number: REF HD2769.2 .U6 N64 2008 Unrestricted Resource
Urban Institute Press, 2008.  Provides statistics on the nonprofit sector. Chapters: 1. The Nonprofit sector and its place in the national economy ; 2. Wage and employment trends ; 3. Trends in private giving and volunteering ; 4. Financial Trends ; 5. The Size, scope, and finances of public charities.  Includes a glossary and index.

Broadcasting & Cable Yearbook
Call Number: REF DESK TK 6540 .B582 Unrestricted Resource
Industry overview, news items and a directory of radio, TV, and cable operations. Give markets by DMA, city/state and stations by call letter, etc.

Biographical Information

Biography Resource Center + Complete Marquis Who’s Who Some full text available
Biographical information on people worldwide throughout history across all disciplines.

Blogs

Logo Design Love Unrestricted Resource
Blog devoted to logos by David Airey, a self-employed graphic designer.

Communication & Legal Studies: Keep me Posted @ IC Library Unrestricted Resource
Blog of legal, communication, and library news in service to the programs in the Park School of Communications and Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies.

FIR: The Hobson & Holtz Report Unrestricted Resource Resource contains audio
Twice weekly commentary on public relations and technology by Shel Holtz & Neville Hobson.

Colleges & Universities

Knowledge@Wharton Unrestricted Resource
An online business journal from the Wharton School, University of Pennyslvania.   Covers the following topics: Finance and Investment, Leadership and Change, Executive Education, Marketing, Insurance and Pensions, Health Economics, Strategic Management, Real Estate, Law and Public Policy, Human Resources, Business Ethics, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Operations Management, and Managing Technology.  Visitors can subscribe to updates.

Companies

Arbitron Unrestricted Resource
Market research firm that collects data on the radio industry and other media outlets.

Nielsen Unrestricted Resource
Measures audiences for television and other media markets.

NextMark Unrestricted Resource
Buy, sell, and learn about mailing lists. Includes a Directory of Providers.

Consumer Information

Consumer Reports
The current issue is available from 01/01/1988 to present via LexisNexis (no images or graphs).   Other databases have access but may have an embargo (they may lack access to current issues in fulltext).

Charity Navigator Unrestricted Resource Some full text available
An independent charity evaluator. Provides evaluative information about the financial health of over 5,300 of America’s largest charities.

GuideStar.org Unrestricted Resource Some full text available
Searchable database of over 620,000 U.S. nonprofit organizations and trade associations. Requires free registration.

Directories

O’Dwyer’s directory of public relations firms
Call Number: REF HM 263 O37 Unrestricted Resource
Directory of public relations firms and their clients. One can also determine the public relations firm(s) for various companies.

SRDS Media Solutions Some full text available
Access to publications with information about advertising rates and deadlines, editorial or programming content, circulation, links to online media kits, Web sites, audit statements, and other basic information for a variety of advertising media: radio, business magazines, consumer magazines, direct mailings, out-of-home (billboards, airports, etc.) and interactive (Internet). This source is designed for the media buyer, but also is helpful for identifying target audiences.

Television & cable factbook
Call Number: REF TK6540 .T463 Unrestricted Resource
Lists cable and television stations by geographic area. Shows coverage area maps, DMA information including # of households with cable and television. Programming offered by cable companies, etc. 4 volumes. Library retains current edition only.

E-books

New Media, New Influencers and Implications for Public Relations Unrestricted Resource Some full text available
This book is available for download in PDF format (site: lulu.com). It is a research study by the Society for New Communications Research that includes social media case studies and strategies.

Encyclopedias

Encyclopedia of Public Relations
Call Number: REF HD59 .E48 2005 Unrestricted Resource
2 volumes. Covers a wide variety of definitions and essays on various topics.

Encyclopedia of media and politics
Call Number: REF P95.82 .U6 E47 2007 Unrestricted Resource
CQ Press, 2007.

Encyclopedia of political communication
Call Number: REF JA85 .E65 2008 Unrestricted Resource
Sage Publication, 2008.

Handbooks & Guides

Internet Intelligence Index by Fuld & Company Unrestricted Resource
Fuld & Company is a consulting firm that specializes in competitive intelligence. They developed this useful portal to business and industry resources.

Social Media Marketing Examples Unrestricted Resource
This wiki includes: company name, SMM Example, Type of Social Media, Industry, Country, & contributor.

Associated Press (AP) stylebook and briefing on media law
Call Number: REF PN4783 .A83 2008 (43rd ed.) Unrestricted Resource
43rd ed, 2008. Journalism style manual that includes basic media law information.

Handbook of Public Relations
Call Number: REF HD 59.H267 2001 Unrestricted Resource
Includes definitions of the discipline, best practices in a wide variety of contexts, etc.

The Handbook of strategic public relations & integrated communications
Call Number: HM263 .H317 1997 Unrestricted Resource
A handbook on strategic public relations and integrated communications. Covers different industries that use PR and integrated marketing communications.

Jane’s crisis communications handbook
Call Number: HV7936 .P8 F47 2003 Unrestricted Resource
Assists organizations with media relations during a crisis.

The New Handbook of Organizational Communication: Advances in Theory, Research, And Methods
Call Number: REF HD 30.3 .N48 2001 Unrestricted Resource
Coverage of theoretical and methodological issues, context of internal and external environments, patterns of organizational interdependence and communication behavior in organizations.

PR news : top 100 case studies in PR
Call Number: REF HM1221 .P7 2007 Unrestricted Resource
Gives a wide variety of examples about how a company, organization or individual handled a public relations event or program.  See also: PR News Casebook (REF HM263 .P657 1993)

Images

Trademarkia Unrestricted Resource Resource contains images
Non-governmental free search engine for finding United States federally registered trademarks.

Newswires

Bloomberg Unrestricted Resource
Get news, stocks quotes, etc. for both domestic and international markets

CSRwire.com Unrestricted Resource
The leading source of corporate responsibility and sustainability, press releases, reports and news.

News and Wires Services via Yahoo Unrestricted Resource
Links to over 100 wire services from around the world.

PR Newswire Unrestricted Resource
Daily news. Also in LexisNexis: News.

Organizations

Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Unrestricted Resource
Membership organization devoted to advancing the field of public relations. Related to PRSSA the national student chapter.

Primary Sources

American Rhetoric Unrestricted Resource Some full text available Resource contains video Resource contains audio
A database of over 5000 full text, audio, and video versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates and interviews.

Public Records

EDGAR Database (Securities and Exchange Commission) Unrestricted Resource Some full text available
Official SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) documents such as Form 10-K, 10-Q, Proxy statements, registration statements, and merger and acquisition documents.

SEC Info Unrestricted Resource Some full text available
Securities Information from the SEC EDGAR database. Search by Name, Industry, Business, SIC Code, Area Code,Topic, CIK, Accession Number, File Number, Date, ZIP. You may have to join but membership is free.

Publishing

Center for Journal Ranking (CJR) Unrestricted Resource
Provides journal rankings by category or journal title. Registered users are provided full access.

Statistics/Data

Demographics USA
Call Number: REF HF5415.1 .D462 2008 Unrestricted Resource
2008 ed. Zip Edition and County Edition provide key demographic information for marketing.

Technorati Unrestricted Resource
Leading search engine for blogs and social media content.  Publishes the State of the Blogosphere report that analyzes trends in blogging.

MRI+ (MediaMark Reporter) Unrestricted Resource Some full text available
A tool for market research, with information on demographics, product and brand usage. Provides summary tables of key audience and product data from a national sample of adults (18 years an older). To use this database you must create an account using your valid IC email address and create a password. Validate your account through the e-mail they send you. After you login select Mediamark Reporter at the bottom of the page.
Note: MRI is not compatible with Mac platform at this time.

U.S. Census Bureau Unrestricted Resource Some full text available
Social, demographic and economic information. Includes the American FactFinder resource. USA Counties is a subdvision that contains over 6,500 data items.

Video

AdViews (Duke University) Unrestricted Resource Some full text available Resource contains images Resource contains video
Over 1,500 historic TV commercials from the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History in the Duke University Special Collections Library.  As of fall 2009, the majority of advertisements are from the 50s and 60s.  More ads, up to the late 80s will be available by the end of 2009.  Requires iTunes software.

Businessweek Video Library Unrestricted Resource Resource contains video
Interviews with business leaders about technology, investment, management, etc.  Users can create a playlist.  Videos can be browsed or searched.

FORA.tv Unrestricted Resource Resource contains video
Streaming video of lectures in politics, business, technology, the world, and culture, from academics, think tanks, authors, politicians, etc.  Users can sign in to customize the site.

Blinkx Unrestricted Resource Some full text available
Video search engine.

Truveo Unrestricted Resource
Video search engine. Provides tabs for sports, entertainment, music, movies, etc.

Washington Post: Political Ads Database Unrestricted Resource Resource contains video
Political ads for U.S. federal or state gubernatorial issues and races. Searchable by year, type of race, candidate or organization, state, party, issue, character, cue, media outlet, music, narrator gender, and by type.

ComLaw News

source: http://comlaw.wordpress.com

Helpguides
Find books by subject
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Government Agencies & Gov Persons on Twitter

August 8, 2010 9 comments

I posted a list of media, reporters and editors who are on Twitter.  Now, I am posting a list of Government persons and Government agencies on Twitter (& Government Blogs are next).  I imagine that such lists could be used to build a new sort of  media 2.0 list for any small business, media or  PR professional in one place.

As a result, I came across this fabulous list which may be useful to media, PR, communication and public affairs proffessionals and I am reposting it to increase its circulation. It is a fabulous source.  The list  includes people and agencies of the U.S. government, organized according to the executive branch, legislative branch, and related sections.

The original source page changes from time to time so to keep up with those changes Click for RSS updates

Other resources include:

  1. Congresspedia for detailed information on members of Congress.
  2. Congressional140 provides a dynamically updating tweetstream of all of the Congress members twitter updates. Follow @congress140.
  3. GovTwit has a web directory and a Twitter account @GovTwit that encompasses U.S. federal, state, and local as well as International accounts.
  4. TweetCongress has a web directory and Twitter account @TweetCongress for a listing of members. Anyone can add new names there, too.

Notes:

  1. Any people listed, other than members of Congress, do not necessarily represent their agencies.
  2. If any people or agencies are unofficial feeds, they are marked as such.
  3. If you notice anyone or anything missing, you are welcome to edit yourself; else please send a tweet to @ariherzog

Executive Branch (including Cabinet, departments, and agencies)

Legislative Branch: U.S. Senate

  1. Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
  2. Sam Brownback (R-KS) (unofficial)
  3. Tom Coburn (R-OK)
  4. Susan Collins (R-ME)
  5. John Cornyn (R-TX)
  6. James DeMint (R-SC)
  7. Chris Dodd (D-CT)
  8. Richard Durbin (D-IL) (unofficial)
  9. John Ensign (R-NV)
  10. Russ Feingold (D-WI)
  11. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) (unofficial)
  12. Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
  13. Kay Hagan (D-NC)
  14. Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
  15. James Inhofe (R-OK)
  16. Mel Martinez (R-FL)
  17. John McCain (R-AZ), presidential candidate in 2008
  18. Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
  19. Robert Menendez (D-NJ)
  20. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) (unofficial)
  21. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
  22. Ben Nelson (D-NE)
  23. Bill Nelson (D-FL)
  24. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), former NH Governor
  25. Arlen Specter (D-PA)
  26. John Thune (R-SD)
  27. Mark Udall (D-CO)
  28. Tom Udall (D-NM)
  29. David Vitter (R-LA)
  30. Mark Warner (D-VA)
  31. Roger Wicker (R-MS)
  32. Dick Lugar (R-IN)

Legislative Branch: House of Representatives

  1. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI)
  2. Steve Austria (R-OH)
  3. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN)
  4. Gresham Barrett (R-SC)
  5. John Barrow (D-GA)
  6. Joe Barton (R-TX)
  7. Bob Beauprez (R-CO)
  8. Judy Biggert (R-IL)
  9. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL)
  10. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR)
  11. Roy Blunt (R-MO), Minority Whip
  12. John Boehner (R-OH), Minority Leader; also runs GOP Leader
  13. John Boozman (R-AR)
  14. Leonard Boswell (D-IA)
  15. Kevin Brady (R-TX)
  16. Paul Broun (R-GA)
  17. Vern Buchanan (R-FL)
  18. Michael Burgess (R-TX)
  19. Dan Burton (R-IN)
  20. Eric Cantor (R-VA)
  21. Judge John Carter (R-TX)
  22. Mike Castle (R-DE)
  23. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT)
  24. Mike Coffman (R-CO)
  25. Ander Crenshaw (R-FL)
  26. John Culberson (R-TX)
  27. Artur Davis (D-AL)
  28. Keith Ellison (D-MN)
  29. Mary Fallin (R-OK)
  30. Jeff Flake (R-AZ)
  31. John Fleming (R-LA)
  32. Randy Forbes (R-VA)
  33. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE)
  34. Virginia Foxx (R-NC)
  35. Trent Frakes (R-AZ)
  36. Marcia Fudge (D-OH)
  37. Phil Gingrey (R-GA)
  38. Gregg Harper (R-MS)
  39. Dean Heller (R-NV)
  40. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI)
  41. Mike Honda (D-CA)
  42. Duncan Hunter (R-CA)
  43. Bob Inglis (R-SC)
  44. Steve Israel (D-NY)
  45. Darrell Issa (R-CA)
  46. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL)
  47. Lynn Jenkins (R-KS)
  48. Hank Johnson (D-GA)
  49. Jim Jordan (R-OH)
  50. Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH)
  51. Mark Kirk (R-IL)
  52. Randy Kuhl (R-NY)
  53. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), presidential candidate in 2008
  54. Tom Latham (R-IA)
  55. Robert Latta (R-OH)
  56. Chris Lee (R-NY) (unofficial?)
  57. Sandy Levin (D-MI)
  58. Cynthia Loomis (R-WY)
  59. Ben Lujan (D-NM)
  60. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA)
  61. Dan Manzullo (R-IL)
  62. Ken Marchant (R-TX)
  63. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)
  64. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI)
  65. Buck McKeon (R-CA)
  66. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA)
  67. Kendrick Meek (D-FL)
  68. Gregory Meeks (D-NY)
  69. Mike Michaud (D-ME)
  70. Candice Miller (R-MI)
  71. George Miller (D-CA), also runs Educ & Labor Democrats
  72. Harry Mitchell (D-AZ)
  73. Gwen Moore (D-WI)
  74. Glenn Nye (D-VA)
  75. Jim Oberstar (D-MN)
  76. Pete Olson (R-TX)
  77. Frank Pallone (D-NJ)
  78. Erik Paulsen (R-MN)
  79. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Speaker of the House (unofficial)
  80. Mike Pence (R-IN)
  81. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO)
  82. Tom Perriello (D-VA)
  83. Chellie Pingrie (D-ME)
  84. Jared Polis (D-CO)
  85. Tom Price (R-GA)
  86. George Radanovich (R-CA)
  87. Charles Rangel (D-NY)
  88. Dennis Rehberg (R-MT)
  89. Dave Reichert (R-WA)
  90. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)
  91. Tom Rooney (R-FL)
  92. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL)
  93. Peter Roskam (R-IL)
  94. Paul Ryan (R-WI)
  95. Tim Ryan (D-OH)
  96. Aaron Schock (R-IL)
  97. Kurt Schrader (D-OR)
  98. Joe Sestak (D-PA)
  99. Christopher Shays (R-CT)
  100. John Shimkus (R-IL)
  101. Bill Shuster (R-PA)
  102. John Sullivan (R-OK)
  103. Lee Terry (R-NE)
  104. Glenn Thompson (R-PA
  105. Zach Wamp (R-TN)
  106. Joe Wilson (R-SC)
  107. Rob Wittman (R-VA)
  108. John Yarmuth (D-KY)

Former U.S. Legislators

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How Do You Search? What Search Engines Do You Use?

June 7, 2010 2 comments

Does anyone even use a library anymore to do research?  Not finding what you are looking for?  Want to dig a little deeper? Not finding what you are looking for?  Are you aware of all the other search engine options at your disposal?  Take a look at Wikipedia or the Search Engine List or the long standing website called Beaucoup.com ( it  means many in French).    Have you used or experimented with one of the 10 or so new semantic search engines?  They search differntly. 

In August 2009, I created a list of search engines and have provided it as an evergreen resource farther below so that you will be able to search deeper, intead of just “who” is most popular.  I encourage you to play with a few to see which ones you like/dislike in generating the types of results you need.

The point is that you have so many more choices!   

Do you only use Google exclusively? If so, for what? Everything under the sun? (Update, Summer 2011): Now you can search with just your voice as of June 2011, Google released Voice Search) What is your take on this newest way to search for the informaiton you need?Please see my full list below, if you want to experiment with other search options.

(Update Fall 2011): Since so many people are unemployed with the down turn of the US economy. I thought I would post Job Search Engine related websites as well. This of course warrents full post on its own, I imagine

List of Business Directories ( thanks to Mashable.com), http://bit.ly/11nUVm

 To extend your search there are  semantic search engines.   Here is an article on Top 5 Semantic Search Engines  

Explanation of semantic search enging. A semantics search engine attempts to make sense of search results based on context. It automatically identifies the concepts structuring the texts. For instance, if you search for “election” a semantic search engine might retrieve documents containing the words “vote”, “campaigning” and “ballot”, even if the word “election” is not found in the source document. An important part of this process is disambiguation, both of the queries and of the content on the web. What this means is that the search engine — through natural language processing — will know whether you are looking for a car or a big cat when you search for “jaguar”.

When to use semantic search engines

Semantic search has the power to enhance traditional web search, but it will not replace it. A large portion of queries are navigational and semantic search is not a replacement for these. Research queries, on the other hand, will benefit from semantic search.

Semantic search portals

Enterprise semantic search engines

AllPlus- www.allplus.com 

Hakia- Hakia is a general purpose semantic search engine, as opposed to e.g. Powerset and Cognition (below), that search structured corpora (text) like Wikipedia.  Hakia search results are organized in tabs: Web results, credible sites, images and news. Credible sites refer to results from sites that have been vetted by librarians and other information professionals invites by Hakia to identify credible web sites. For some queries (typically popular queries and queries where there is little ambiguity), Hakia produces resumes. These are portals to all kinds of information on the subject. Every resume has an index of links to the information presented on the page for quick reference.  The elements of these resumes will vary according to the nature of the query (e.g. biography, bibliography, timeline etc. for persons, government, economy, culture etc. for countries). Resumes are excellent for researching a topic and are my favorite Hakia feature. Often, Hakia will propose related queries, which is also great for research. For instance, if I search for Barack Obama, Hakia suggest I might be interested in information about Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Democrats, Sarah Palin, John McCain, John Sununu and Joseph R. Biden Jr. as well. For some queries Hakia presents really poor results, but it is still in beta and is improving rapidly. Take a look at our interview with the people behind Hakia.

SenseBot SenseBot is a web search engine that summarizes search results into one concise digest on the topic of your query. The search engine attempts to understand what the result pages are about. For this purpose it uses text mining to analyze Web pages and identify their key semantic concepts. This way SenseBot helps you get a better grasp of what the relevant term is about. In this way you do not have to go through a large number of web pages and comb through results with incomprehensible expert definitions (or any definitions at all). The summary serves as a digest on the topic of your query, blending together the most significant and relevant aspects of the search results. It contains a tag cloud, relating your query to other relevant concepts and a list of sentences believed to define or describe your query. Each sentence is followed by a link to the source. Not all of the summaries are informative or even intelligible, but that is likely to improve; Like Hakia, SenseBot is in beta. This is bleeding edge technology — it’s evolving as we speak. Read a review of SenseBot.

Powerset- Powerseet is at present not a regular web search engine. It works best on smaller, relatively structured corpora.  The technology offers a comprehensive view of such information. You can test it on Wikipedia and Powerset definitely excels at this, structuring the information and presenting it in a way that, for research purposes, is a great improvement on Wikipedia’s own search engine. You can enter keywords, phrases, or simple questions in the search box. On the search results page, Powerset often answers questions directly. My favorite feature is the way it aggregates information from across multiple articles. “Factz” is a box that often appears in the search results and is a set of suggestions for reference queries based on the information available. For instance, when I search for Obama, Powerset offers links to information on what Obama has said about Robert Gates, Middle East, Pakistan, trade and more. Clicking one of these links brings up a box in the search results page with the actual words said by Obama and links to the articles in which the quotes appeared.

DeepDyve- DeepDyve DeepDyve is a powerful, professional research tool available for free for the general public. It is a research engine that lets you access expert content from the “Deep Web”, the part of the Internet that is not indexed by traditional search engines (e.g. databases, journals etc.).

Researchers, students, technical professionals, business users, and other information consumers can search Wikipedia or deep web resources within these categories: Life Sciences and Medical, Physical Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, Business and Finance, Patents, Legal, Clean Technology and Energy, IT and Engineering. Research sites’ search engines often rely on Boolean languages or hard-coded taxonomies, which constitutes a threshold and makes them hard to use (or even inaccessible) to anyone but insiders. DeepDyve is an advanced yet easy interface to these valuable sources of information. Your query can consist of anything from a single word to 25 000 characters. The search results are presented in a complex manner with many advanced options for refining, sorting or saving your search. Despite the complexity, the search results are relatively easy to navigate.

Cognition-Cognition has a search business based on a semantic map, built over the past 24 years, which the company claims is the most comprehensive and complete map of the English language available today. It is used in support of business analytics, machine translation, document search, context search, and much more.

You can use Cognition’s technology to search one of four bodies of information:

Public.Resource.org (currently 1,858 volumes consisting of 675,704 files of federal case law in XHTML format). The release comprises US Supreme Court Decisions and Court of Appeals decisions from 1950 on.

MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online) Abstracts: abstracts for life sciences and biomedical information from an international literature database. It covers the fields of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care, as well as fields with no direct medical connection, such as molecular evolution (currently 18,005,903 files).

The English version of Wikipedia. The complete New English Translation including text and translator notes of the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, John and Mark.  We tested Cognition on Wikipedia. On this huge volume of text, Cognition is especially useful for sorting out meaning in complex queries:

Phrases like “historical houses of worship & historical temples” Meaning: “worker on strike” vs. “strike oil in California”  Classes like “Indian tribes of Latin America” or “diseases of North American trees”

The technology that goes into solving queries like this is impressive and Cognition gives you valuable control over the assigning of meaning and classes in a user friendly way. The presentation of the search results is less than perfect, though, and I wish the cognition team would learn from Hakia or Powerset in this regard.

Cluuz.com-
Claim: doesn’t have one, but its claim could be “It’s about the relationships, stupid”
Notes: Cluuz uses the search results of Yahoo Search Web Service, Microsoft Live Search, Alexa Web Search and the Technorati Search API to provide the results, with their visual representation beings its actual selling point – choose from charts, clusters, flash or lists. Target Language: none specified  added: July 7, 2008

Cuil.com
Claim: “For knowledge, ask Cuil.”
Notes: Started out as the big Google attacker: was launched by former Google employees and is also toting the allegedly biggest index, “three times as many (pages) as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft”; semantically enhanced: search term recommender, related categories, related searched, and really really fast on day 2. The question remains: Wow, How Did Cuil Get So Much Publicity on Day 1?!
Target Language: On day 2, results for German searches were rather lousy added: July 30, 2008

Evri.com
Claim: Search less, understand more
Notes: has the instruction “Find a Person, Product or Thing” in its search field; entering “Cheese” (probably too banal) shows recommendations like “Chuck E. Cheese’s” (restaurant), “I want someone to eat Cheese with me” (film) and “Bubbles and Cheesecake” (band). You cannot search for things they haven’t in their list of persons products or things, so I cannot search for cheese. Choosing one of the suggested searches instead: Joe Biden. The graph Joe Biden shows links to Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, John McCain, New Hampshire and Katie Couric. There is something that looks like it’s to be used for facted seearch and one of the option ins “Joe Biden > cancelling”. This triggers “Joe Biden > cancelling > Mother-in-law”, “Joe Biden > cancelling > two days”, and “Joe Biden > cancelling > appearance” and may more confusing things. I just cannot figure out what to do with Evri?  Target Language: probably best with English added: Oct 6, 2008

Exalead.com
Claim: none
Notes: has advanced, context-sensitive options to refine a search, e.g. by selecting related terms, type of web site , content, language or file format; advances search options include search with similar terms or for phonetic representation; one can also download their exalead desktop to index and search one’s PC – which I didn’t try
Target Language: English, German added: July 7, 2008

Factbites.com
Claim: “where results make sense”
Notes: promises to “read” the content of sites it searchs (rather than search for keywords) and seek out the ones that feature “encyclopedia-style fact-based descriptions” (but doesn’t tell how it does what it does); similarly, results pages present full statements as result preview; makes a confusing distinction between “results from the primary (high quality) database” and others (low-quality results?) though. Target Language: seems to work in English only  added: July 7, 2008

Fazzle.com
Claim: “A Faszinating Feature Rich Search Fest”
Notes: “feature rich” in Fazzle’s context means ‘complex interface’; search operators (AND, OR, Title, etc) can be switched on/off using radio buttons; a number of tabs reading ‘null’ suggest that the interface can be personalized; the enhanced interface is even more difficult to understand
Target Language: not specified  added: July 7, 2008

Grokker
Claim: “One search. Many sources. Broad discovery. Dynamic research”
Notes: searches Yahoo! and Wikipedia; displays search results in either outline view or map view; in the outline view, both clusters and a results list are displayed; allows filtering of results by detail, date, source and domain as well as keyword search within clusters; the map view presents clusters as circles of different sizes; both maps and outlines can be exported
Target Language: English (I think)  added: July 7, 2008

hakia.com
Claim: “A new Semantic Search engine dedicated to quality”
Notes: hakia and I got off on the wrong foot when it suggested Matilda as #1 answer for my question ‘who is the queen of England?’. Turns out this was just a misunderstanding: They did present Queen Elizabeth II as their top quality, i.e. #1 search result – but I mistook their symbol for top quality results as a symbol sponsored content.
Target language: not specified, results seem better in English  added: July 7, 2008

Hoonoh.com
Claim: Tells You Who You Know Who Knows
Notes: a social seach engine that mines data from the social web (e.g. del.icio.us) and the Semantic Web (e.g. revyu.com), not sure exactly, but it seems as if Tom Heath (creator of revyu.com, member of the Linked Data initiative) is working on it; not sure either how the login works (no password required, 11-Sep-2008), but it is supposedly allowing you to filter people by proximity (Friends, Friends of Friends, etc.) and to weight results by experience, expertise and affinity scores
Target Language: none specified
added: July 7, 2008

Kartoo.com
Claim: none
Notes: a meta search engine that displays search results both as a map and as topic folders; the map is created within seconds, yet the flash-based design is a matter of taste and has zero-accessibility written all over it
Target Language: none specified
added: July 7, 2008

Lexxe
Claim: “powered by advanced natural language processing technology”
Notes: presents both clusters and s list of search results, draws strongly on wikipeda (like Powerset), but includes other sources as well, currently (July 2008) in alpha (i.e. not as mature as beta?)
Target Language: English
added: July 7, 2008

Me.Dium Social Search
Claim: “Search what the crowds are surfing”
Notes: say that it “enables users to find relevant information based on the current surfing activity of other people”; the crowds behind Me.dium are the alleged 2 million people who have downloaded the Me.dium Toolbar (July 2008; one can only guess how may of these are really using it); like Hakia and Cluuz, they are using the Yahoo! Search Boss service to accelarate and improve their service
Target Language: doesn’t seem to be relevant
added: July 7, 2008

Metaglossary.com
Claim: “Find meaning, not just links”
Notes: Promises to be now (July 08) “defining over 2,000,000 terms, phrases and acronyms!”; search results page presents key words, related terms, and a preview of definitions; in my test searches, Metaglossary offered consistently more definitions than the define: search operator in Google Target Language: English added: July 7, 2008

mnemo.org (Mnemomap)
Claim: none / maybe “a search engine that tries to replace the search with fun”
Notes: generates a map from the search term that shows synonms, neighbours, tags and translations (but without context, these can be confusing – ‘queen’ was translated into German as ‘Dame’ and ‘Schwuchtel’, i.e. dame and a derogatory term for homosexual males); allows users to edit (and potentially improve) search results by ‘deleting’ unwanted results from the list  Target Language: English (map and search results), German (map only)  added: July 7, 2008

Mooter.com
Claim: “The power of relevance”
Notes: breaks the process of making search relevant down into two steps: first, it presents you with a graph for your search term and asks you to choose one (!) node; then you move on to the search results; the former nodes are now visible as clusters to the left (makes you wonder why they chose to present the graph as interstitial instead of jumping to the clusters plus results list right away – because somebody built a visualization tool and was determined to use it somewhere in Mooter?)  Target Language: not specified, seems to work better with English  added: July 7, 2008

OntoSelect
Claim: “Ontology Search, Selection and Browsing”
Notes: not a semantic search engine as such, but a search tool for the semantic web community, helping them find the right ontology, multilingual labels or top labels for their projects  Target Language: Multilingual added: July 7, 2008

Powerset.com
Claim: “A better way to search and discover information in Wikipedia articles.”
Notes: only searches Wikipedia, shows fact summaries on top of search results pages, promises to find immediate answers to (simple) questions; hype factor is high, in particular after being purchased by Microsoft.
Target Language: English added: July 7, 2008

Pluribo.com
Claim: “Instant summaries of Amazon user reviews.”
Notes: A rather specialized search tool: It claims to be compiling a super-summary of Amazon user reviews, so that you’d only have to read one review instead of having to dig through several dozens of them; hyped after it was discussed on Slashdot; downside: I couldn’t test it as it only works with Amazon electronics, but I couldn’t find one product within Amazon electronics that it could process (July 2008)
Target Language: English (on Amazon.com) added: July 20, 2008

Quintura.com
Claim: “See & Find”
Notes: also calls itself a “visual find engine”; I’d recommend it to everyone who wants to create a tag cloud around a certain topic, e.g. for a presentation or blog entry, as it it creates logo enhanced tag clouds for each search term; not sure how good it is as a search engine Target Language: not specified added: July 7, 2008

Riya.com
Claim: “Visual search”
Notes: another visual search engine; the search index seems to be relatively small and it is not transparent where the searched files and documents are hosted (on the internet in general or actually on Riya?); allows users to search tags AND to add tags to selected items on the results page
Target Language: English (cannot handle German Umlaut) added: July 7, 2008

Searchthetail.com
Claim:Search  Relate  Refine  Discover
Notes: Probably of appeal mainly to Search Engine Optimizers; run by Canadian company useAPI! Search: and “powered by Google” (whatever that means), it allows you to find related search terms that people have used. E.g. “Cupcakes” produces 199 related key words with English langauge settings (e.g. wedding cupcake, birthday cupcakes, cupcakes recipe, cupcakes recipes, etc), but only 10 (including “cupcakes resepti”) with Finnish language settings. Probably also good as a keyword localization tool.  Target Languages: British and American English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Swedisch, Norwegian (as judged by the flags on their website), plus Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese (as judged by the tabs on the bottom) added: Oct 6, 2008

semager.de
Claim: “semantisch suchen” (”searching semantically”)
Notes: The related terms search seems useful, and so does the service “Semantic Business” which includes (but is not limited to) a Keyword API, Brands API, TagCloud API and TextCloud API. The feature “Typos/Tippfehler” might be useful for the definition of hidden labels in a thesaurus. Target Language: German, English; currently (July 2008) working on Spanish Semantics added: July 7, 2008

Swoogle
Claim: “Semantic Web Search”
Notes: a search engine for the semantic community rather than a semantic search engine; searches (for) semantic web ontologies, documents and terms; search results are also available in RDF  Target Language: not specified

Trexy.com
Claim: “Blaze search trails”
Notes: a social search engine with modest capabilities – allows you to follow other people’s search trails, presumably by registering the links that people clicked in their search results; the search results are, however, poorly displayed: my search for “queen” produced five links including “coming soon” and “untitled” and not even a preview of the URL; also only 12 people had searched for “Queen” before – I guess only few search terms reach threshold value on Trexy  Target Language: dominated by English searches  added: July 7, 2008

Ujiko.com
Claim: none – I’d suggest “Beam me away, Uji””
Notes: searches 6 Million web pages, but its selling point is the sci-fi interface; search results are displayed in a circular interface, with what could be keywords or tags appearing in the middle; clicking on any of these terms refines the search; flash overload  Target Language: not specifed (certainly German, French and English)  added: July 7, 2008

virel.de
Claim: Make yourself visible
Notes: A microformats search engine, created by a small German company; it trakcs microformats on the web, but also accepts submissions of microformats providers; allows to search for contacts (hcard) and events (hcalendar)  Target Language: not specifed/relevant; has German and English interface  added: July 7, 2008

The Big ones: Glimpses of the Semantic Web
I don’t really dare to give Yahoo and Google, as they have their own place within this list, but let’s at least mention their current efforts:

Yahoo (actually a directory where all info is hand entered, but because of it long-standing history and sheer depth most think if it as a search engine) In March 2008, Yahoo announced plans to gradually support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN, to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS and to support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. They also announced their support for the OpenSearch specification. Furthermore, the Yahoo! Search Boss webservice might help in particular niche search engines to improve their services – ReadWriteWeb as an interesting article about it.  added: July 7, 2008

Google
In terms of relationship finding, Google sets is rather interesting: Enter apple and pear, and it will suggest cherry, sweet and chocolate. Enter apple and PC, and it will suggest mac, windows and microsoft.
added: July 7, 2008

List of International Search Engines

Accoona
Alleba Alleba: Philippines search engine and highly organized directory of Filipino websites.
Ansearch Ansearch: Australia/NZ/UK/US. Ansearch Ltd is involved in various online media activities, including the Ansearch.com.au search engine and the Soush online media network
Araby Araby: Middle East – Arabic language search engine owned by the Maktoob Group, which owns the world’s largest online Arab community; Maktoob.com. (Arabic only)
Baidu Baidu: China – The Google of China, Baidu is doing what no other Internet company has been able to do: clobbering Google and Yahoo in its home market.
Daum Daum: Korea – Daum is a popular web portal in South Korea which offers many Internet services including search, a popular free web-based e-mail, messaging service, forums, shopping and news.
Guruji Guruji.com: India – an Indian Internet search engine that is focused on providing better search results to Indian consumers, by leveraging proprietary algorithms and data in the Indian context.
Goo goo: Japan – an Internet search engine and web portal based in Japan, which crawls and indexes primarily Japanese language websites. goo is operated by the Japanese telecomm giant NTT.
Miner Miner.hu: Hungary – a vertical search engine for searching blogs, videos and other Hungarian content on the internet. Miner.hu indexes about 129.000 blogs.
Najdi.siNajdi.si Najdi.si: Slovenia – a Slovenian search engine and web portal created by Interseek. It’s the most visited website in Slovenia. It uses a technology created by Interseek written entirely in Java
Naver Naver: Korea – The undisputed number 1 search engine in Korea with over 16 million visitors and 1 billion page views per day.
Onet Onet: Poland – Polish language web portal and search.
Onkosh Onkosh: Middle East – Arabic language search.
Rambler Rambler: Russia -offers proprietary web search (Rambler Search), e-mail, rating and directory, media, ecommerce and other services to the Russian-speaking websurfer.
Rediff Rediff: India – India’s leading internet portal for news, mail, messenger, entertainment, business, mobile, ecommerce, shopping, auctions, search, sports and more.
Sapo SAPO: Portugal – Portuguese language search based in Portugal and focused on Portugal.
Search.CH Search.ch: Switzerland – a search engine and web portal for Switzerland. Founded in 1995 as a regional search engine, later many other services were added: phonebook, SMS service. Acquired by the Swiss Post.
Sesam Sesam: Norway, Sweden – Based in Norway and focused on Norway and Sweden.
Walla (in Hebrew) Walla!: Israel – Search the web in Hebrew with an Israel focus.
Yandex Yandex: Russia – Yandex (Russian: Я́ндекс) is a Russian search engine
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Examples of Good Web 2.0 Newsrooms

March 15, 2010 Comments off

  After my most recent post about newroom 2.0 make over tips, I’d now like to emphasize that there is a legitimate need to change towards the use of social media as part of your communication strategy.

 Therefore, I went looking for good examples of Web 2.0 newsrooms to share with others. It is evident that social media has/is changing how the new-release structure and functionality is performed.    If done correctly, then feasibly, one is able to go farther and cheaper in the social media world.  This  inturn is creating a paradigm shift in power,  transitioning from large conglomerated brands  and shifting over to individuals, services and integration of the business world down to the street level through the new virtualized social landscape.   Therefore, I say jump in and get your feet wet with your own newsroom 2.0, personally.

 Below is a short list for you to take a look at for consideration, for comparison, and for ideas for your own social media enabled newsroom 2.0 planning.  Ultimately, you want to attract, interact and enhance the journalist’s online experience. I understood that there might be many journalists who are not ready for, nor understand 2.0 yet. And, that’s ok. But, here are a few of my suggestions a few business selections and actual news outlets. I really like Scannia’s page. Which one’s do you like best and why? Got another suggestion, post a comment for us to see other good examples and explain why you think they make good Web 2.0 newsrooms.

 Example #1: Topix.com

Example #2 : Scannia

Example #3: Google News

Example #4: AOL News

Example #3: Ford

Example #4: Cisco

Example #4: Accenture

Example #5 : CNN US

 I am looking for a few good government 2.0 newsroom examples as well.

Got a suggestion let me know!

 Stay tuned next for social news release examples.

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Online Newroom 2.0 Makeover Tips

March 4, 2010 2 comments

Do you need an eXtreme MarCom 2.0 makeover for your online news page(s)?  Well, below are some tips for strategic consideration.

Public relations and marketing is all about the conversation and engagement, these days. Right?

And, depending on which camp you are in; communications, marketing or both, you can more effectively enable the “conversation” by shaping opinion, and opening the door towards selling the products, services and information you offer through MarCom 2.0.

MarCom 2.0 offers new ways to do business.  An evolved and matured communications model is continuous communications, strategically integrated across multiple channels. Consider, that if you are not part of where and how the new conversation is taking place then you could be missing huge opportunities with the advent of Now PR and the changing social media landscape.

In putting the cards on the table, I preface this post with the following obvious statements. And, I will never discount or dismiss that:

  1. Face-to face communication and personal relationship building is still very important and relevant.
  2. Research is key to excellent communication, marketing and business success.
  3. Traditional PR ethics, and methods still have significant value.

But, the times and new technologies are forcing us to change how we converse. And, it is time to consider restrategizing how to make use of MarCom 2.0 tools, and Internet enabled audiences by going where the people are located.

Key to your strategic planning questions, “Who are Your 2.0 Influencers?”  (Here is a  semi-relevant article, GovTech’s Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers of 2010).

I assume,  if you are a PR, MarCom, marketing, or communication professional, your goal is to help the media, your constituents and your key influencers to do their job more efficiently to achieve your overall communication and business goals.  More, to the point, shape opinion, create change, win more business and win more clients with consistent continuous integrated communications.

The Internet never sleeps and it transcends all business time zones and media deadlines, 24/7/365, no matter where you are.

Hence, the term Now PR.

An online corporate newsroom with stagnant content and a lack of adequate media “engagement” could be minimizing your ability to sway public opinion, increase awareness about your products and services or simply marginalizing your ability to win new business.

I provide the following analogies purely for contextual consideration (and for some fun):

  1.  Would you still use a scythe, hay rack, horse and a single fixed steel plow blade, harrowing disks to “cultivate and harvest” or would you use a modern combines and ???  Wait, let me make the analogy more relevant to communications.
  2. Would you use a Gutenberg press, telegraph/tele-type, the linotype machine, or the typewriter  to issue your Brand, messaging  or news to those “harvesting” information about your company these days?  My, my, my we sure have come a long way.  We have so many more channels to chose from.  Bull horns are still optional, as well.

If you use one antiquated method, tactic, tool or channel you could be missing the boat. You do not have to swallow the entire elephant at one time. But, I preface, if you are not strategically  instituting incremental changes in moving towards communication 2.0, then you could be presenting your brand, your corporation or your agency as an out dated Linotype machine that it operates at a slow technological pace versus current day new media and other MarCom professionals who require new media formats and newer interactive elements. And, if well planned your Internet newsrooms can serve to meet many MarCom needs.

If you’ve built your online newsroom, and realize that your corporation, small business, organization, agency and/or Brand needs a makeover then the following tips can help in moving you towards making use of some new tools, new standards and evolving new interactive communication best practices to attract media,

Journalists, editors, and new business prospects require the basic nuts and bolts about who you are, what you do and how you do it. Before beginning your strategic communication 2.0 makeover, please make sure that you have the core communication basics covered by incorporating:

  1.  Your public relations/media contacts (who is your key editorial/media voice for your CEO & Company?
  2. Company basic facts
  3. Perspective on the industry/Your target business sectors/events/issues
  4. High resolution images for downloading/use by media (executive images, salient other images)
  5. Updated financial information ( private companies would not do so, but may provide a one pager on percent of growth, general sales/revenues and growth goals and growth direction
  6. Archived news releases by date ( possibly by key words as well)

Here are a some next steps for strategic communication 2.0 planning consideration:

  1.  If you are operating on limited funds, you might consider using some free resources already widely in practice on the Internet and even free open source and multi-platform distribution tools to save money and time (YouTube, Yahoo! News, Google News, Topix.com, bit.ly, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Ping.fim, SlideShare, IM Tools, Tubemogul and many others).
  2. Give your news room “legs” by enabling it to be more virtual, more viral and more mobile. Plan to incorporate Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Multi-media Syndication (MMS), and ShareThis.
  3. Incorporate an advanced search tool for news release archive, executive bios, E-press kits, key words.
  4. Further consider arranging your contacts by your line of business verticals, capability, growth/industry sector. You may want to also provide executive social media bios, consider offering speeches, presentations, a relevant and timely short video snippet, quotes and sector remarks.
  5. Incorporate Technorati’s functionality, it searches, tracks and organizes top blogs by topic and records timely up-to-date links relative to your subject matter/sector (technorati.com/about)
  6. White papers and research findings, and real-time subject/industry buzz metric graphs.
  7. Product and Service information.
  8. Provide an e2.0, email, status update bar, media content update functionality or Twitter alert functionality for media, editors, constituents, and journalists.
  9. E-press kits ( for core lines of business, events, initiatives, issues).
  10. For enhanced SEO/SEM, VSEM/VSEO, strategically build, use and replicate key word meta tags/cloud tags, alt tags and meta descriptions across multiple channels, within your back-end newsroom source code, videos, E-press kits, graphics, speeches, events, blogs and pictures.
  11. Create a multimedia library (High resolution photo library, video library, B-roll library, MP3 files).
  12. Create external links/iconic image links to other key social networks where your business and executives maybe networking (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, LinkedIn).
  13. Seriously consider your Twitter strategy and it’s value to your business.
  14. Link or steam media past, current or related industry coverage by using Digg.com and del.icio.us.
  15. Implement a new press release template, a social media news release (Stay tuned for my next blog post on this topic). This new press release format should enable your intended targets, constituents, and media garner the information, materials, and interactive media from within the news release itself to allow them to more easily create that earned media story more efficiently.

These are just a few thoughts for strategically planning a MarCom 2.0 makeover.

Let me know what you think?

Useful?

Relevant?

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News 2.0 & PR 2.0

January 20, 2010 Comments off

            Old Press, Printing Press, Newpaper Press, Newspapers                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                In This post looks at some reasons why you should consider rebuilding your Internet news pages & pess releases.  In times of crisis, our level of news consciousness is raised, therefore making it a perfect time to look inward and ask how you would apply Web 2.0 to your communication efforts.  The Red Cross effectively demonstrated the value of NOW PR with the Haitian Crisis.  The time is ripe to strategically evaluate, modernize and rebuild your Internet media webpages & Internet news releases from News 1.0 to News 2.0.

Have you noticed that with all the new technology, Web 2.0 and social media capabilities that many (most) Website based ”news” pages for businesses, non profits and government agencies still have just lines and lines and lines of hyperlinks to traditional news release formats that do not inform, do not captivate journalists,  nor engage people into becoming your co-information partners to act. 

These same online news pages do not encourage anyone to return, to use, to publish or to share your news, or your media releases as earned media.  It’s time for new rules, new tools, and new forms of audience engagement.  But, before digging in deeper, I would like to offer a historic perspective to begin, as a frame of reference.

  A Brief Historical Perspective

I am a strong believer in looking back to be able to look forward. It serves well for context in moving forward with strategic planning and forward thinking.  I am now going to  upset the apple cart.  Are your Internet based news releases still following the traditional “papered” press format?  Why? And, how are you communicating news?

Do you know that the industry standard and widely accepted inverted AP style press release format and summary news lead dates back to the progressive era (1860- 1910), as a result of the advent of an emerging new technology and to “fit” telegraph wire transmissions?  (1892: Chicago editor’s “Who or what? How? When? Where?” advice is  use 5W leads)

“Three aspects of the Progressive Era may account for the change in journalism style. First, there was a surge in scientific discoveries, inventions and thought.  Second, the surge in science provoked a corresponding revolution in education. And third, the revolution in education changed not only the general public and its interest in, and thereby its demand for, the facts, but also profoundly changed the journalists who wrote the news.  The changes of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Gilded Age, or Mark Twain’s “Big Barbeque,” followed by the Progressive Era were profound.  Science and invention revolutionized transportation, communication, business, and agriculture.  …College educated, the leaders of the Progressive movement believed, as the universities increasingly taught, that science could be used as a tool for reform, a tool to cure societal ills.  …The newspaper industry as well as the newsroom was feeling the influence of postwar changes; the physical look and content of papers was altered substantially.  Headlines became integrated into the design, simultaneously attracting readers and teasing the news content of a story. The Civil War had broken the editorial stranglehold on the front page. Readers demanded news from the battlefields; official dispatches had been featured prominently, bumping long-winded essays to later pages. While advertising sales supplanted circulation sales as the chief source of income for newspapers, advertisers too lost their monopoly of the front Printing expenses were high, but new presses could print unprecedented numbers of papers, balancing the cost. Press associations, wire services and chains afforded more news coverage. More hard news was becoming the premium.”

If, those of us in the PR, media, journalism, public affairs professions are all jumping on blogs, Twitter and Facebook  but not even updating our 19th and 20th century press and media practices, nor Web 2.0 enabling our own “media store fronts”  are we being counter intuitive?  This could be a major strategic mistep in times of crisis or during a need for immediacy(or Now PR).  Are you still operating in the 1860-1945 era, in theory and in practice?  Hmmm… just how are your media results from your very own Internet news pages?   Do you have any audience engagement on your news pages?

By the late nineteenth century, E.W. Scripps had begun his newspaper chain. Like magazines which were gaining in popularity and competing with newspapers for readership, chains sought to provide specialized papers for the masses. But unlike magazines, chain papers were inexpensive and free from advertiser and special interest control.40 Scripps also realized that a heavy-handed editorial policy would be deadly:  Believe in the people; “vox populi” may not always be vox Dei, but it is the nearest thing we’ve got, and if we follow that, we shall not be far wrong — thus shall  we develop a true and enlightened democracy.41 By the end of the nineteenth century, in other words, a changing audience was controlling a changing newspaper focus.

“That was the beginning of the golden age of American newspaper journalism,” T.H. Watkins wrote in his biography of Harold L. Ickes, one of the more fiery of the Progressives. It was a period that extended from about 1890 to World War II, after which the world of journalism, like every other world, changed forever… The men and women whose names survived that remarkable era are invariably described as “legendary,” and they defined the reporter’s breed for all time.”

Commercial reporters were sought out of the graduating classes of such Ivy league universities as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia, where we let it be known that writers were wanted –– not newspaper professionals, but writers. . . .

 Modern communication integration efforts have to start at “home first”  with your own Internet site.   We have all these technical capabilities. but most of our online news rooms reside firmly planted like an ancient rock going no where, rather a Guttenberg press with no ink, a space ship with no fuel, a hockey team with a stick to drive the puck.  So, there “it” sits, going nowhere.

Therefore, I assert that there is an overwhelming critical need to innovate your Internet media, and Internet press releases no matter if your are a corporation, small business, nonprofit organization or government agency.  

Here is a recent article on one problematic scenario, a lack of  updated technology, specific to government. President Obama said in this article, “that improving the technology used by the government” isn’t about having the fanciest bells and whistles on our websites – it’s about how we use the American people’s hard-earned tax dollars to make government (and business and media) work better for them.”  

Are your news websites and press releases using and applying New 2.0 technology and tool to work for the PEOPLE who need to find you in today’s Web 2.0 enabled era?

This does not mean jumping out there and getting on all the OTHER emerging external “social channels” without a strategic roadmap.   Again, taking care of your own store front first is critical first step.  Once your house is in order, then you can start applying your own news pages and press releases to the other bells and whistles out there-strategically.  Do you realize some news Internet pages do not even have strategic key words built into the back side of their Internet news pages so search engines, journalists and people can find out about your news?   Sorry, I digress.

So, with that said, I encourage communication professionals, CEOs, and leaders to begin planning now for “spring cleaning.”  As I mentioned in previous posts, its all about NOW PR or continuous communications.   But, another element to the news arena is the current media trends.  A new PR modality is evolving.   And, unless you are aware of the media trends and changes you will be literally left  behind blowing smoke into the winds of change.  More to the point, spending LOTS of money with very little results. 

A Brief Perspective on Current Media Trends

(Source: PEW) New patterns in news consumption and a deteriorating economy deepened the emerging cracks in the economic foundation of the media in 2008. In a big news year, most media continued to see audiences shrink. And, how audiences consume media is changing.   

Only two platforms clearly grew: the Internet, where the gains seemed more structural, and cable, where they were more event-specific.  This is an important to take note of.  Here is a brief look at the battering year for the news industry as measured by six key indicators: audience, economics, news investment, ownership and digital trends:

So, in determining the initial steps to restructure, revamp, update and Web 2.0 enable your Internet news pages, press releases  and News 2.0 strategy would entail some planning.

1) Ascertain what strategic function of your new Web 2.0 enabled Webpages will serve, who it will serve and how it will serve your specific target audiences. Is it journalists, Editors, your competitors or the public?  Which public?   If you have to go back and perform updated specific target audience research please do so!

2) Plan/WhiteBoard/ Wiremap what your updated Web 2.0 enabled news rooms should look structurally and functionally when incorporating new functionalities.  If you are a large organization a News 2.0 Camp might be a good idea.

3) Do the same for your Web 2.0 enable press releases as well.  Plan/WhiteBoard/ Wiremap/Revamp the structure of your press releases. Get out of the stone age, and innovate as this is not the early 1900′s.  I think, we are just a tad bit beyond that era now, are we not?    Risk changing, adapting and innovating but strategically.  Dare to develop a new press release standard that is Web 2.0 enabled for the “new wire”

Let’s take a virtual field trip,  after reading this blog post go out and look at how some others are doing it? Let’s compare notes on the good, the bad and the ugly and those who are applying bleeding edge New News.  A strategic blending of Web 2.0, Now PR and social mobility.

Here is an example of the good, Now PR and News 2.0

(Source: Mashable.com) With the widespread adoption of social media in the non-profit sector, people’s ability to act and support communities in need like Haiti has only been increased. There’s no greater example of this than the incredible fundraising job the American Red Cross did with social and mobile channels. With its texting campaign, the American Red Cross raised more than $20 million.  “The speed and quantity with which the American public retweeted and posted to Facebook the need for donations to help with relief efforts in Haiti was (for anything we’ve seen at the Red Cross) unprecedented,” said Wendy Harman, the social media manager at the American Red Cross. “This was the first time I truly felt like people were using these tools to take action for good. They actually texted “Haiti” to 90999, more than 2 million people did it… the impact was huge — that money is providing people with basic needs like water. I have no doubt it wouldn’t have spread so widely without social media.”  Overall, Americans raised more than $200 million to benefit Haiti in only 7 days.  Simply astounding.

What might you include in your new Internet News Room as a Web 2.0  innovation? Ask your employees.  Ask your media contacts how might your Internet News Room better serve them?

Need help? I am available to assist with strategic planning sessions to help get your organization strategically moving towards         PR 2.0. Email me at alicemfisher58 at yahoo dot com, follow on Twitter@unlimitedpr, or join others of us at  unlimitedmarcom.ning.com!

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Video SEO Tips: Strategically Boost Your Search Engine Ranking

January 11, 2010 17 comments

Even with my recent posts on the social media landscape, said landscape continues to morph at warp speed, and we are seeing more and more videos everywhere; on business sites, corporate news pages, personal websites, video hosting sites, mobile devices, social networks, blogs, cell phones, email and postings to video portals, and posting for clients.  The Government even has its very own video channel on YouTube.   

I had to post a video very recently and immediately realized there needed to be a strategy for this MarCom element as well to maximize my external outreach efforts.  So, I went on a little “virtual research trip.” 

According to eMarketer, 63% of Americans currently watch online video, up from 32% in 2007. I am sure this number is much is higher now.  Three years hence, is a life time in the social media world.

My focus is always to look at how the changing landscape can benefit communication and marketing professionals with new media strategies and tools.  To do more with less and to do it cost effectively. Therefore, I am constantly scanning the social media landscape. 

Because many users do not have unlimited web space, either as a paid service, or through an ISP offering, video hosting services are becoming increasingly popular, especially with the explosion in popularity of blogs, forums, and other social media interactive pages.

When posting a video from a business,  public relations, marketing and communication perspective it is imperative to understand how to leverage your social presence through online videos by applying Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO) strategies. 

 You do not want to be the needle in the hay stack that nobody ever finds. You want your target audiences to find you!  With the rise of  our current “Moblution” and Internet hosted Video services, your goal is to ultimately rise to the very top in the top search engines and their respective ranking results.  Clearly, Google is giving preferential treatment to multimedia content in search results, and this is an important factor to know!  I can’t quantify this just yet, but it’s a personal haunch, which I will try to validate with a little more research (so stay tuned & I will update this blog).  But it is my personal opinion that online video is the fastest way to achieve top organic search listings.

Secondly, YouTube alone has more than 52,436,820 unique visitors a day and ranked as the third top Internet site in the US.          But it is also important to know that there are more than 30 other video notable video hosting sites.  And there are indeed many more!

I guestimate that what you/we/I want to accomplish is channel saturation and depth of penetration through syndication across as many video hosting sites as possible.  So, the question begs, how does one syndicate their videos out across various video sharing websites? And, how does one carry out VSEO? 

The end goal is to have your video “optimized” to appear highly ranked in Google’s search results.  Video Syndication Brings Higher Rankings and More Targeted Traffic. Therefore, the idea is to syndicate your video by sending it out across multiple video sharing websites simultaneously to obtain maximum exposure  using specific strategic key words for search term results.   Below are a few useful tips. There may be more, but this will get you started an out of the hay stack, so to speak.

Strategic VSEO Tips:     

  • Place online video presentations on public sites and intranet portals
  • Remotely update videos on video portal websites
  • Enable viral video sharing
  • Integrate comment & rating capabilities
  • Allow for approval-based or automatic requests for video distribution
  • Capture statistics on syndication, viewership, Search Engine Ranking, redistribution performance

 VSEO TIPS:  

  1. Create Relevant, Unique, Informative Videos that speak to your target audiences 
  2. Consider Your Video thumbnails – A video thumbnail is what users see first when they make their decision as to whether or not to view your video or another. Video search engines and video sharing websites use different methods to grab and show the thumbnail for your video. Some engines use the first frame of the video while others, like YouTube, will often take the thumbnail from the exact middle of your video.
  3. Make Your Videos Less Than 5 min. Long – One of the worst things that you can do is to create a long-form video as most users watch videos 3 minutes or less. If you do have a video that is longer than 5 minutes in length, try to break it up into smaller videos and make sure to tag those accordingly.
  4. Sitemaps – For video that is hosted on your own website use of a video site map on your site will help to filter page rank as well as direct search engines where to index your content. Use relevant keywords within the anchor text of all links to the videos that are featured in your video sitemap.
  5. Surrounding HTML -In order to get your video to rank well, you clearly will need to provide the search engines with text based content that is relevant for them to index and rank you for. Ssurround your video content with relevant content (on-page) as well as related links.  Add a text transcript or external captions as text that you publish on the page with the video.
  6. Descriptive Meta Data – Use relevant keywords in your meta data to optimize your video.   Include a keyword rich description of the video within the meta descriptions.
  7. Title - Make sure that you use the relevant keywords in your title as this is likely the first thing that the search engines will use to identify your video. Also try using a catchy or unique title that will not only give attention to your video but convey your theme, product, or brand.
  8. Tags – tag your videos with key phrases that are reflective of the content.
  9. Keyword “video” - Eric Papczun pointed out at the Search Engine Strategies conference in NY this past April, that a lot of people add the word “video” to their search query keyword phrase. As a result, make sure that you add the word “video” to your title, description, meta data, etc.
  10. Optimize your video for Important Key Phrases – You might want to optimize your video for terms users are likely to be searching for. Tag your video with these terms, consider naming the file name of the video with these terms in mind.
  11. Optimize URLs - In the same way that you do this for other web pages, you will want to optimize your URLs so that they to contain information about the video. Also, make sure you only have one video per URL.
  12. Branding – Many of us have found that video marketing is a great tool to help generate brand awareness with your potential customers. Use a watermark throughout your video to help incorporate your brand.  This will help to drive users back to your main site if the video is hosted elsewhere.
  13. Inbound Linking – Link to videos using important keywords in anchor text.
  14. Upload to Video Sharing. Simultaniously upload to video portals (tubemogul & here as a paid service called Hey!Spread) and provide links back to related content and other videos on your Internet site. Here is a list of ways to get your Videos On Video Search & Sharing Sites
  • Miro – Miro converts any media RSS feed into a channel.
  • Video Upload Pro – Software to submit your videos to multiple video sites including Atom Films, Blip.tv, BoFunk, Bolt, ClipShack, EvideoShare, Flurl, Google Video, Guba, Jumpcut, Live Video, Myspace Video, PutFile, Veoh, Vimeo, Yahoo Video, Youtube, and more.
  • HeySpread – Free online tool to send videos to multiple sites
  • TubeMogul  TubeMogul is the hands down the best free tool to submit videos to multiple video sharing sites in one go. Currently supporting Metacafe, MySpace, Yahoo, Revver, AOL Video, DailyMotion, Blip, and BrightCove, TubeMogul does a great job at syndicating your videos out to these video sharing sites with full support for Titles, Tags, and Descriptions and provides analytics for you to track your video views across all of these websites. I highly recommend this free tool.   More about TubeMogel: TubeMogul’s free beta service has been live since November of 2006, and in January 2008, TubeMogul announced the launch of its Premium Products, which include a host of new professional features.  Through its acquisition of Illumenix in October 2008, TubeMogul is also able to offer rich engagement and performance metrics to video sharing sites, content creators and advertisers.  Brett Wilson, Co-founder and CEO, Brett leads the strategic direction for TubeMogul. He spent the first three years of his career as a consultant for Accenture. Next, he founded and led YouCanSave.com, a profitable e-commerce company that obtained over $69 million in revenue and was successfully acquired.

16. Allow Embed Code – Definitely enable sharing and allow users to embed your video code into their own blogs and websites. This will help to create backlinks to your video which can help increase the video search optimization as well as make your video go viral.

17. Encourage Ratings and Reviews - When you encourage users to rate your video, search engines will pay attention to videos that have higher ratings. In addition, videos which get high ratings from users tend to be the same videos that users often mark as favorites and share with other users.

18.  Submit each video sharing site destination URL to Onlywire for social bookmarking

19. Check for your video across listings within specific video search engines and video search sites.

20. Syndicate – Submit your video RSS or MRSS.  Here is a list of where to submit to Video RSS and MRSS Feeds

OTHER NOTES:

The Future: Mobile Video Hosting

A more recent application of the video hosting services is in the mobile web 2.0 arena, where video and other mobile content can be delivered to, and easily accessed by mobile devices. While Internet based video-hosting services such as YouTube ( and many others) have developed means by which video can be watched on mobile devices, mobile-oriented video hosting services is an evolving component of the new Mobilution to come, in rapid succession. So, if I had a crystal ball, I would suggest learning all I could about VSEO strategies inside and out, and then strategize how your futre video productions/hosting and distribution will fit into Mobile Video for Mobile Devices (MVMD) will be developed, deployed and optimized for VSEO…because…..

the future is not for the Internet viewership but with Mobile Devices, where we will be decoupled from the desktop.  A mobile live streaming software called Qik allows the users to upload videos from their cell phones to the internet. Currently videos are stored online and can be shared to various social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and others.  Videos will be stored on the servers and can be watched from both the mobile devices and the website.

I suggest that the future is in the mobile device.  Start strategizing now and begin formating your videos to meet those screen/size/distribution requirements. 

Also, a final note, please dont forget to continuoulsy build upon some of what I have previously posted in my other blog topics. For example, create a Bit.ly link of your video and submit it through Ping.fm and track it through both Bit.ly and strategically distribute through the Twitter Universe as well. Then send your bit.ly linked video through Mobile Marketing Services for distribution via cell phones.

Stay Tuned, as I will next talk about strategically Revamping Your Business Internet Press Rooms and Press Releases!  All the previous posts build upon the Changing Media Landscape, Social Media Landscape and Ultimately Web 2.0 enabling and maximizing your communication and marketing efforts into a creshendo of internal and external reciprocity with continuous communcations, or Now PR.

My Popularity (by popuri.us)

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Integration in a Fragmented Media World

October 12, 2009 3 comments

Like many, we all have our profiles set up in more than a few social networking sites. It could become a time consuming and complex task to keep up and in touch with all your friends and contacts from all these different networks. In my last post, I hinted at how fragmented communications has become. There are now tools that allow you to either post or connect across all the popular networks – Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, GovLoop, Flickr, Friendster, Twitter, AIM, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger,  just to name a few.

Are you a media, marketing, social marketing, public affairs or communications strategist looking for ways to streamline your external communications outreach and increase the depth of your Internet penetration? You can accomplish a more mature communications model that mirrors near ”continuous communications”  out to your target audiences.  And, you can do it across multiple online media channels. There are a few ways in which you can carry out this multi-tasking function.

You can either do it one by one with each individual channel with a single cut and peck-peck-peck method (no please don’t do that)  or you can do it simultaneously across all of your media channels posting from anywhere to everywhere.  

So, tonight, I want to mention a few tools which I personally like using, from an external communications perspective.   These do not require any IT investment except your time in learning how to use them. Really, it’s quiet simple.  They all are free.  Yep, no cost. Nada. I am sure there are similar tools out there and others are sprouting up through the Internet perma-frost even as I am typing this up (copycats, are a nice complement in adding to an already good thing).

I also personally believe these tools can help with more consistency in an organizations external messaging and driving increased awareness in a tough and highly competitive economy. 

The first tool I mention is for pushing/micro-blogging your messages out simultaneously. The second is for shortening your URL links (and making them trackable)  to save space  pointing people where you want to drive your target audience in a 140 character world. And, finally, the third  tool is for generally zooming down to a geographic area and ”listening” to the buzz on the street, real-time. Remember, we have to listen to know what to say in order to resonate with our target audiences ( this is just one tool).

1) Ping.fm. Often it’s the (seemingly) simple applications that turn out to be the most powerful, and the most popular. Simplicity is beautiful.  Ping.fm is a service that allows you to easily update a host of social networking and social media profiles all at once, seeks to resolve the headache of needing to log into multiple accounts to send the same message to different groups of friends and contacts all over the Internet. Ping.fm also has a decent help Wiki for more information. 

Additionally, I like the fact that I can Ping right from my browser toolbar so simply that it makes my just giddy.  While for some, Ping.fm may just be a nice little time-saving utility, for social media and communication professionals, this service may well be THE killer app of our time.   Over the last few years communication patterns have shifted primarily from face-to-face communication to more online communication in email, IM, and other tools.    As more collaboration is being done remotely through technology, there are relatively fewer opportunities for face to face informal conversations. In addition to time constraints or human resource limitations at work due to employee downsizing, drilled down efficiencies can be useful.    To learn a bit more about Ping.fm read what’s on Wikipedia for some general information.

2) I am sure many of you have heard of or used Tinyurl.com. I believe it has the longest shelf life and was the first, dating back to about 2001/2002.  URL shortening is a technique where an individual can  make a web page available under a very short URL  in addition to the original address.   Since the launch of Tinyurl.com about 100 or similar sorts of URL shorteners have been born.  As of Spring 2009, Bit.ly over took Tinyurl’s usage on Twitter.   So I think it is safe to say, it has leading edge staying power.  I personally like Bit.ly because it also allows me to quasi track the results of  my link click through rates in real-time. It has some other good features as well. I came across an article that talks about some of the others, of course each one has its pros anc cons.  For example, tr.im is another one which uses your Twitter account as your login, making it a sure-fire hit if it keeps up the rest of its services as well.  A great one to try, it might surprise you.  And then you have U.nu which creates the smallest URLs of any shortener, with only about 8 characters for each new URL  created(not including the “http://”).  That’s mighty tiny.  The point is, that you have some choices with regards to shortening your long Webpage URLs for all your external communications so you can drive people exactly where you want them to go with a compelling message and then track that link’s click results.   Anyone still hand typing paper press releases anymore and faxing them?  Really, you can do it all with in the blink or wink of an eye, well almost. Now, that’s affordable and near continuous communications.

3)  Visual Trends Map on Twitter topics being discussed or micro-blogged about in real-time. You really can get a pulse of what’s hot and what’s being talked about in specific geographic areas. Just incredible. And, then you can formulate and message and respond using the tools mentioned.

If one thing communications has taught me is that it is a constantly evolving medium. Never static, either in the evolution of the language we use or the medium in which we communicate through.  We started with fire and smoke signals, sticks drawing in the dirt, painting on cave walls, pen and ink, the Gutenberg Press, newspapers,  the telegraph, the LinoType, telephone, Radio, TV, Internet, Cellphones and so on to name just a few media landmarks (not necessarily in exact chrono order). 

Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type in 1452, was deemed ”the most influential man of the millennium.” The first book printed in the colonies was in 1640. The first publisher was Lipincott.   And, Thomas Jefferson was a radical for his defense of Free Speech.  That old press release written in AP style? And, Ivy Lee, a PR genius.  It was created to fit into the evolution of communication by using a new tool with the advent of electronic transmissions across telegraph wires, dating back to the early 1900′s.  And, YES indeedy here we are in 2009  and we are still formatting our press releases the very same way we did 103 years ago.  Why?  Much has changed. Some things have not.

Your organization’s lead news ‘graph of 21 words or less in a 350 word press release should be considered a historical dinosaur (forgive me, being a PR professional, I should know better than to even whisper such).   It begs a few content related communication and distribution upgrades.  No, an extreme makeover.

Is that press release formatted for continuous instant consumption to fit in a 140 character Tweet?  Is it formatted for today’s “telegraph wire” in 2009? And, is that press release just sitting on your Website with a hyperlink to it sitting there percolating on your server going no where, with scads and scads of other press releases from years and years and years  ago?

There are, of course, still some resonating repeating themes from the original press release objective.  And, I encourage you to read the article to see if you can pick out a few?  I will wait, go check that link right there just above this line.

Open, transparent communication?  Hmmmm.   As this post draws to a close highlighting three useful online tools,  it leads me to yet another area for exploration.  Web 2.o enabled social media press rooms and social media press releases, can they still accomplish the Who, What, When, Where and Why in an inverted pyramid format?    Should we?   We we are to achieve open and transparent communications, we may well need to recraft out media relations is formatted, tactically accomplished and transmitted.  

Stay tuned for more.  Are you ready? Are your Website media “rooms” Web 2.0 enabled? Are  your press releases Web 2.0 enabled?

Have we come full circle?  Are we not still saying and wanting the very same things today that were echoed in 1906?  

What is your idea of the best Social Media Press Release for a main stream best practice?  There are some samples out there already floating around and being test driven, talked about and even used.  What do you think? 

Well, until Web 2.0 enabled press releases become mainstream, I hope you will see the potential value at least in the three tools I mentioned tonight to help with some of your organization’s external communication efforts. We may not be able to physically integrate all the media channels, but we can closer to streamlining our external communication efforts using these tools.

Have a good day everyone!

Alice M. Fisher

If you would like strategic advisement or help please contact me via email at alicemfisher58@yahoo.com                       Follow @Unlimitedpr  Twitter                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Resume & Profile: http://bit.ly/3kuiuV

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