August 25, 2009: summarized from USA Today -- If you needed any more proof about the ubiquity of social media, take a gander at a fresh new report from Forrester Research.
It concludes that four in five Americans use social media at least once a month, and half participate in social-networking services like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.
But before you dismiss the social-media phenomenon as strictly the province of twentysomethings and teens, consider the greatest increase in social media adoption over the past year has been among adults ages 35 to 54, where participation has grown 60%, Forrester says.
Forrester based its results on responses from nearly 4,500 consumers.
Read more at: http://bit.ly/1DJUyt
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Why Adults Have Fed Twitter’s Growth
August 26, 2009: summarized from The New York Times -- The tech industry has been perplexed by the fact that Twitter has grown extraordinarily quickly even though young people do not tweet nearly as much as their elders do.
Perhaps the most interesting phenomenon to observe is not what teenagers are not doing, but what adults are doing.
A report on the reach of social technologies, published Tuesday by Forrester Research, said that in the last year, young people almost universally used social media. (Only 3 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds do not use social tools online.) These people have been using social media for a long time, though, and they are not driving its growth.
More intriguing is a look at what older adults are doing online. According to Forrester, use of social media among those 35 to 54 jumped 60 percent in the last year. Half of online adults in the United States interact on social networks and more than three-fourths used social media in the last month.
Most of the adults online regularly visit sites with user-generated content, like blogs and Google’s YouTube, Forrester found. Only a quarter actually post stories or upload video, though that is growing with easy-to-use online tools. The number of adults who joined social networks last year grew almost 50 percent from the year before. Today, only 18 percent of online adults do not use social tools, down from 25 percent last year.
There are many reasons that teenagers use Twitter less than adults do, including fundamental differences between what teenagers and adults want online and between Twitter and other sites like Facebook. (I take a deeper look at these reasons in a story in Wednesday’s paper).
But one big reason for the disparity is simple: When Twitter became popular, teenagers already had their favorite Web sites for communicating, so they were not interested in a new one. The people who discovered Twitter were adults who were new to social networking.
Read more at: http://bit.ly/4zCalB
Perhaps the most interesting phenomenon to observe is not what teenagers are not doing, but what adults are doing.
A report on the reach of social technologies, published Tuesday by Forrester Research, said that in the last year, young people almost universally used social media. (Only 3 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds do not use social tools online.) These people have been using social media for a long time, though, and they are not driving its growth.
More intriguing is a look at what older adults are doing online. According to Forrester, use of social media among those 35 to 54 jumped 60 percent in the last year. Half of online adults in the United States interact on social networks and more than three-fourths used social media in the last month.
Most of the adults online regularly visit sites with user-generated content, like blogs and Google’s YouTube, Forrester found. Only a quarter actually post stories or upload video, though that is growing with easy-to-use online tools. The number of adults who joined social networks last year grew almost 50 percent from the year before. Today, only 18 percent of online adults do not use social tools, down from 25 percent last year.
There are many reasons that teenagers use Twitter less than adults do, including fundamental differences between what teenagers and adults want online and between Twitter and other sites like Facebook. (I take a deeper look at these reasons in a story in Wednesday’s paper).
But one big reason for the disparity is simple: When Twitter became popular, teenagers already had their favorite Web sites for communicating, so they were not interested in a new one. The people who discovered Twitter were adults who were new to social networking.
Read more at: http://bit.ly/4zCalB
More Marketers Use Social Networking to Reach Customers
August 26, 2009: summarized from USA Today -- Ford Motor has high hopes for Fiesta, a popular model abroad launching in the U.S. next year. So how does it introduce the subcompact car to Americans? A massive ad blitz on TV? In-house promotions at dealers nationwide?
Nope.
In April, Ford tapped 100 top bloggers and gave them a Fiesta for six months. The catch: Once a month, they're required to upload a video on YouTube about the car, and they're encouraged to talk — no holds barred — about the Fiesta on their blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
"It's extremely important to this company's history," says Scott Monty, whose job as head of social media at Ford was created about a year ago to take advantage of the growing social-networking wave. "It's about culture change and adapting to this ongoing way of communicating. The bloggers are fully free to say what they want."
Social-media services, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and countless other websites, have had a profound effect on how millions of Americans — especially those under 35 — interact with others (or don't), shop and view brands. It's a real-time digital lifestyle, powered by smartphones and netbooks, that often colors what products they purchase, how they view brands and where they spend most of their waking hours.
Marketers have noticed. Social-networking services increasingly are indispensable business tools, says Forrester Research. According to its survey of 1,217 business decision makers worldwide late last year, 95% use social networks to some extent.
And 53% of more than 300 marketers planned to increase social-media marketing spending this year, according to a Forrester presentation in April.
Some of the biggest companies — Ford, Levi Strauss and Chevron, to name a few — are reengineering marketing operations to embrace digital tools to more nimbly brand products, support customers and cash in on the social-media wave. In doing so, they are creating online communities and aggressive outreach programs, and being brutally honest in talking directly to their customers/followers/fans/friends.
"It was an easy call. This is where our customers are," says Megan O'Connor, director of digital marketing at Levi's. The more-than-150-year-old company last month launched a social-media program on Facebook and Twitter along with a larger "Go Forth" traditional marketing campaign. Its goal is to burnish its brand name among young men.
At their core, social networks are fostering a blistering number of personal connections and chatter online. The share of Americans 18 and over online who use a social-networking service more than quadrupled to 35% in 2008 from 8% in 2005, according to Pew Internet & American Life Project.
"It's the modern-day version of knitting — to kill downtime," says Kaitlin Villanova, 26, a social-media strategist in Brooklyn who is an avid iPhone user. "I use social networking to communicate, bank, comparison shop, everything."
Facebook is up to 250 million members, 50 million of whom joined in the past three months. In April, they spent 13.9 billion minutes on Facebook, up 700% from April 2008, says Nielsen NetView.
More than 300,000 businesses — one-third of them small businesses — have a presence on Facebook. Members of its fastest-growing demographic — those 35 and older — have enormous purchasing power, a powerful incentive to marketers.
Twitter has about 40 million users who each day produce a staggering amount of tweets, Twitter's quaint word to describe short messages. Its users spent nearly 300 million minutes on the site in April, 3,712% more than in April 2008, Nielsen says.
Increasingly, consumers don't search for products and services. Rather, services come to their attention via social media, says Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics, a new book that explains how social media have changed how companies do business.
Social-networking-savvy businesses have appointed social-media directors to help:
Add customers quickly. When software maker Intuit built a site for small businesses in late January, it integrated elements of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals. After 12 weeks, it generated more than 1 million visits and helped spike QuickBooks unit shipments 57% in June, year-over-year.
"Social (media) is one of the key trends driving our business," says Kira Wampler, social-media marketing leader at Intuit. "It's more than pure marketing. It's about fast connections with customers and building an ongoing relationship."
National pizza chain Papa John's added 148,000 fans on Nov. 17 through a guerrilla marketing campaign on Facebook. It offered a free medium pizza to anyone who signed up to be its fan on Facebook. The promotion gained it thousands of customers and drove its Web traffic up 253%. It now has more than 300,000 fans and hopes to top 1 million by the end of the year.
Word-of-mouth marketing. Sometimes a company's best advocates are its customers. Just ask Best Buy and MyFICO, the consumer division of Fair Isaac, which invented the FICO credit-risk score used by lenders. They've built specialized online communities where their customers freely evaluate products and services.
Those who visit MyFICO's community website are spending 41% more than other customers, says Lyle Fong, CEO of software Lithium, which helps build online communities for more than 150 companies, including MyFICO.
Nine in 10 consumers trust their peers more than marketers, according to a recent survey of 25,000 by Nielsen.
The Federal Trade Commission is in the process of amending guidelines that would require bloggers to disclose their relationships with marketers whose products they endorse, says Mary Engle, associate director of advertising practices for the FTC.
Enhance customer service. For more than a year, Comcast has pioneered the use of Twitter to talk directly to customers. Its Twitter page, @comcastcares, has 28,000 followers.
Comcast's blueprint for unfettered customer support — no more waiting on hold on the phone — fomented a movement. Software maker Sage North America, to cite another example, routinely receives instant feedback from hundreds of people within an hour on specific products and services. "It is a living, breathing, 24/7 think tank of users and employees," says Ryan Zuk, a company spokesman.
Besides being instant, such feedback is cheap. Typically, companies have relied on third-party focus groups that let them observe the reactions of customers during a two-hour session that can cost $10,000 to $15,000, says Natalie L. Petouhoff, an analyst at Forrester Research.
Lenovo has seen a 20% reduction in call-center activity in the U.S. over six months because nearly 50,000 customers go to its community website for information about laptops.
Speak directly to customers. Blogs, Twitter or Facebook can be an ideal forum for CEOs to offer customers a candid viewpoint.
When a hack attack disabled Twitter's service for hours this month, co-founder Biz Stone gave up-to-the-minute updates on the company's blog.
The Carphone Warehouse, Europe's leading independent retailer of mobile phones and services, has a simple credo: It says, "I'm sorry" when necessary on its Twitter page for customer support.
"There is no gap between the CEO and customer. They now talk directly to each other," says Promise Phelon, CEO of UpMo, a career-management website. "The network is so connected, there's no need for a middleman."
"These customers want honesty, and quickly," says Shiv Singh, who wrote a report on social-media marketing for ad agency Razorfish.
But with rewards come risks.
Reaching out to millions of consumers who thrive online around the clock requires an investment, a different type of thinking and some courage, says Petouhoff. She spent six months on a just-released report on monetization of social-media tools at 20 companies, including Lenovo and Intuit.
Many companies — reflecting the general public's sentiment toward social media — fall into two camps: Those who embrace it and those who eschew it. "Those that don't know how to get their arms around it seem to be held back by worrying about the legal implications of customers helping customers, and about being too honest with customers," Petouhoff says.
Most corporations are still wedded to a traditional marketing approach, based on TV, radio and print ads, says Charlene Li, partner at technology consulting firm Altimeter Group. "Ford and Levi's are at the avant-garde of social-media use, but they are not typical," she says.
A social-media plan is hardly a guarantee of success, Li and others say. While some companies — especially market leaders such as Starbucks and Nike with consumer products — are predisposed to the medium, others aren't. Tightly regulated health care providers, for example, may think twice about making the public's comments readily available on Facebook or Twitter.
"Social media is not the messiah," says Michael Brito, social-media strategist at Intel. "It is one of several tools."
Still, a growing number of marketers can't afford to ignore millions of potential customers who are consuming media in new ways.
Three-fourths of men ages 18 to 34 say they spend most of their time in front of a computer screen vs. 18% in front of a TV screen, according to a survey of 50,000 by AskMen.com, a lifestyle website. Those who don't have a social-media plan don't at their own risk, say marketing experts.
"Companies have no choice. This is where their customers are going," says Shel Israel, author of the forthcoming Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods. "Companies have no choice. This is where their customers are going."
Read more at: http://bit.ly/Hl3On
Nope.
In April, Ford tapped 100 top bloggers and gave them a Fiesta for six months. The catch: Once a month, they're required to upload a video on YouTube about the car, and they're encouraged to talk — no holds barred — about the Fiesta on their blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
"It's extremely important to this company's history," says Scott Monty, whose job as head of social media at Ford was created about a year ago to take advantage of the growing social-networking wave. "It's about culture change and adapting to this ongoing way of communicating. The bloggers are fully free to say what they want."
Social-media services, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and countless other websites, have had a profound effect on how millions of Americans — especially those under 35 — interact with others (or don't), shop and view brands. It's a real-time digital lifestyle, powered by smartphones and netbooks, that often colors what products they purchase, how they view brands and where they spend most of their waking hours.
Marketers have noticed. Social-networking services increasingly are indispensable business tools, says Forrester Research. According to its survey of 1,217 business decision makers worldwide late last year, 95% use social networks to some extent.
And 53% of more than 300 marketers planned to increase social-media marketing spending this year, according to a Forrester presentation in April.
Some of the biggest companies — Ford, Levi Strauss and Chevron, to name a few — are reengineering marketing operations to embrace digital tools to more nimbly brand products, support customers and cash in on the social-media wave. In doing so, they are creating online communities and aggressive outreach programs, and being brutally honest in talking directly to their customers/followers/fans/friends.
"It was an easy call. This is where our customers are," says Megan O'Connor, director of digital marketing at Levi's. The more-than-150-year-old company last month launched a social-media program on Facebook and Twitter along with a larger "Go Forth" traditional marketing campaign. Its goal is to burnish its brand name among young men.
At their core, social networks are fostering a blistering number of personal connections and chatter online. The share of Americans 18 and over online who use a social-networking service more than quadrupled to 35% in 2008 from 8% in 2005, according to Pew Internet & American Life Project.
"It's the modern-day version of knitting — to kill downtime," says Kaitlin Villanova, 26, a social-media strategist in Brooklyn who is an avid iPhone user. "I use social networking to communicate, bank, comparison shop, everything."
Facebook is up to 250 million members, 50 million of whom joined in the past three months. In April, they spent 13.9 billion minutes on Facebook, up 700% from April 2008, says Nielsen NetView.
More than 300,000 businesses — one-third of them small businesses — have a presence on Facebook. Members of its fastest-growing demographic — those 35 and older — have enormous purchasing power, a powerful incentive to marketers.
Twitter has about 40 million users who each day produce a staggering amount of tweets, Twitter's quaint word to describe short messages. Its users spent nearly 300 million minutes on the site in April, 3,712% more than in April 2008, Nielsen says.
Increasingly, consumers don't search for products and services. Rather, services come to their attention via social media, says Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics, a new book that explains how social media have changed how companies do business.
Social-networking-savvy businesses have appointed social-media directors to help:
Add customers quickly. When software maker Intuit built a site for small businesses in late January, it integrated elements of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals. After 12 weeks, it generated more than 1 million visits and helped spike QuickBooks unit shipments 57% in June, year-over-year.
"Social (media) is one of the key trends driving our business," says Kira Wampler, social-media marketing leader at Intuit. "It's more than pure marketing. It's about fast connections with customers and building an ongoing relationship."
National pizza chain Papa John's added 148,000 fans on Nov. 17 through a guerrilla marketing campaign on Facebook. It offered a free medium pizza to anyone who signed up to be its fan on Facebook. The promotion gained it thousands of customers and drove its Web traffic up 253%. It now has more than 300,000 fans and hopes to top 1 million by the end of the year.
Word-of-mouth marketing. Sometimes a company's best advocates are its customers. Just ask Best Buy and MyFICO, the consumer division of Fair Isaac, which invented the FICO credit-risk score used by lenders. They've built specialized online communities where their customers freely evaluate products and services.
Those who visit MyFICO's community website are spending 41% more than other customers, says Lyle Fong, CEO of software Lithium, which helps build online communities for more than 150 companies, including MyFICO.
Nine in 10 consumers trust their peers more than marketers, according to a recent survey of 25,000 by Nielsen.
The Federal Trade Commission is in the process of amending guidelines that would require bloggers to disclose their relationships with marketers whose products they endorse, says Mary Engle, associate director of advertising practices for the FTC.
Enhance customer service. For more than a year, Comcast has pioneered the use of Twitter to talk directly to customers. Its Twitter page, @comcastcares, has 28,000 followers.
Comcast's blueprint for unfettered customer support — no more waiting on hold on the phone — fomented a movement. Software maker Sage North America, to cite another example, routinely receives instant feedback from hundreds of people within an hour on specific products and services. "It is a living, breathing, 24/7 think tank of users and employees," says Ryan Zuk, a company spokesman.
Besides being instant, such feedback is cheap. Typically, companies have relied on third-party focus groups that let them observe the reactions of customers during a two-hour session that can cost $10,000 to $15,000, says Natalie L. Petouhoff, an analyst at Forrester Research.
Lenovo has seen a 20% reduction in call-center activity in the U.S. over six months because nearly 50,000 customers go to its community website for information about laptops.
Speak directly to customers. Blogs, Twitter or Facebook can be an ideal forum for CEOs to offer customers a candid viewpoint.
When a hack attack disabled Twitter's service for hours this month, co-founder Biz Stone gave up-to-the-minute updates on the company's blog.
The Carphone Warehouse, Europe's leading independent retailer of mobile phones and services, has a simple credo: It says, "I'm sorry" when necessary on its Twitter page for customer support.
"There is no gap between the CEO and customer. They now talk directly to each other," says Promise Phelon, CEO of UpMo, a career-management website. "The network is so connected, there's no need for a middleman."
"These customers want honesty, and quickly," says Shiv Singh, who wrote a report on social-media marketing for ad agency Razorfish.
But with rewards come risks.
Reaching out to millions of consumers who thrive online around the clock requires an investment, a different type of thinking and some courage, says Petouhoff. She spent six months on a just-released report on monetization of social-media tools at 20 companies, including Lenovo and Intuit.
Many companies — reflecting the general public's sentiment toward social media — fall into two camps: Those who embrace it and those who eschew it. "Those that don't know how to get their arms around it seem to be held back by worrying about the legal implications of customers helping customers, and about being too honest with customers," Petouhoff says.
Most corporations are still wedded to a traditional marketing approach, based on TV, radio and print ads, says Charlene Li, partner at technology consulting firm Altimeter Group. "Ford and Levi's are at the avant-garde of social-media use, but they are not typical," she says.
A social-media plan is hardly a guarantee of success, Li and others say. While some companies — especially market leaders such as Starbucks and Nike with consumer products — are predisposed to the medium, others aren't. Tightly regulated health care providers, for example, may think twice about making the public's comments readily available on Facebook or Twitter.
"Social media is not the messiah," says Michael Brito, social-media strategist at Intel. "It is one of several tools."
Still, a growing number of marketers can't afford to ignore millions of potential customers who are consuming media in new ways.
Three-fourths of men ages 18 to 34 say they spend most of their time in front of a computer screen vs. 18% in front of a TV screen, according to a survey of 50,000 by AskMen.com, a lifestyle website. Those who don't have a social-media plan don't at their own risk, say marketing experts.
"Companies have no choice. This is where their customers are going," says Shel Israel, author of the forthcoming Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods. "Companies have no choice. This is where their customers are going."
Read more at: http://bit.ly/Hl3On
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Georgia Lottery Awards Website Contract To What's Up Interactive
August 23, 2009: summarized from Atlanta Daybook -- The Georgia Lottery Corp. announced that What's Up Interactive was awarded a contract to provide Web site services for the organization.
"We are pleased to partner with What's Up Interactive and look forward to the Web technology, design, marketing and content development they will provide," said Georgia Lottery President and CEO Margaret DeFrancisco. "Our Web site is a vital tool to keep our players and the public informed and engaged and to ultimately generate dollars for the important educational programs we fund."
What's Up Interactive, a full service interactive marketing agency based in Atlanta, will develop an online marketing strategy and design a fresh, new look for the Georgia Lottery's Web site, which will continue to feature winning numbers, game information, exciting promotions, lottery news and special events. Services will include Web site design and development, search and social media marketing and multimedia like videos and games.
"As a Georgia-based company, we take great pride in our state's lottery and what it has meant to education in Georgia," said Richard Warner, CEO of What's Up Interactive. "Through our partnership, we hope to ultimately contribute to the Georgia Lottery's mission."
More at: http://bit.ly/OvaWV
"We are pleased to partner with What's Up Interactive and look forward to the Web technology, design, marketing and content development they will provide," said Georgia Lottery President and CEO Margaret DeFrancisco. "Our Web site is a vital tool to keep our players and the public informed and engaged and to ultimately generate dollars for the important educational programs we fund."
What's Up Interactive, a full service interactive marketing agency based in Atlanta, will develop an online marketing strategy and design a fresh, new look for the Georgia Lottery's Web site, which will continue to feature winning numbers, game information, exciting promotions, lottery news and special events. Services will include Web site design and development, search and social media marketing and multimedia like videos and games.
"As a Georgia-based company, we take great pride in our state's lottery and what it has meant to education in Georgia," said Richard Warner, CEO of What's Up Interactive. "Through our partnership, we hope to ultimately contribute to the Georgia Lottery's mission."
More at: http://bit.ly/OvaWV
Tip for Web-Savvy Marketers: Get In The Game
August 23, 2009: summarized from tennessean.com -- Singer/songwriter Joe South wasn't thinking about "Super Mario" or "Madden NFL" when he wrote "Games People Play," but he was certainly on target with the line that said people play games "every night and every day now
There's no doubt that computer and video games are entrenched in the American lifestyle.
Don't assume that game playing is limited to boys and young men wearing out their thumbs on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo. The gaming universe actually is almost two-thirds of all online Americans ages 12 to 64.
A study done by Parks Associates, a market research and consulting firm, found that 34 percent of U.S. Internet users play online games weekly. That makes online gaming more popular than social networking and online video.
"Gaming isn't just for kids, and it's not limited to boys and men. For instance, half of women 45 to 54 say they play some sort of electronic game at least once a week," Mike Vorhaus reported in a recent edition of Advertising Age.
Advertisers have taken note of this large number of eyeballs, and many have added "advergaming" to their marketing arsenal. The tactic is working.
A recent Nielsen Games survey found that 36 percent of video game players have acted on advertising they have seen in a game, and 83 percent of Web gamers reported a positive association with companies that sponsor free online games.
"Games remain one of the biggest untapped opportunities for marketers, for the simple fact that they are, indeed, engaging, immersive, interactive and entertaining," said Tim Zuckert, president and CEO of Shift Control Media, a creator of branded games such as those for Coca-Cola's "Happiness Factory."
Advergaming takes many forms. Orbitz puts games in its banner ads, and those games have become a leading source of site traffic for the online travel agency. Magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Redbook have added female-friendly game titles to their Web sites. In addition to customizing games such as mah-jongg, Sudoku or solitaire to promote traffic, they offer game popularity rankings, reviews and leader boards to promote return visits.
Progressive Insurance uses games to drive brand awareness. Progressive's logo is part of the environment in the racing game "Electronic Arts Need for Speed: Undercover" and "2K Sports Major League Baseball."
Tactics for all successful advertising in the game environment include:
Start early: Online video that appears before the game starts gets 85 percent viewership.
Keep it quick: Fifteen-second creative units outperform longer versions.
Product placement: Get your product integrated into the game.
Above all, know your audience and the types of games they play. Then you can build an advergaming strategy and become part of your customers' game life.
More at: http://bit.ly/z2BXG
There's no doubt that computer and video games are entrenched in the American lifestyle.
Don't assume that game playing is limited to boys and young men wearing out their thumbs on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo. The gaming universe actually is almost two-thirds of all online Americans ages 12 to 64.
A study done by Parks Associates, a market research and consulting firm, found that 34 percent of U.S. Internet users play online games weekly. That makes online gaming more popular than social networking and online video.
"Gaming isn't just for kids, and it's not limited to boys and men. For instance, half of women 45 to 54 say they play some sort of electronic game at least once a week," Mike Vorhaus reported in a recent edition of Advertising Age.
Advertisers have taken note of this large number of eyeballs, and many have added "advergaming" to their marketing arsenal. The tactic is working.
A recent Nielsen Games survey found that 36 percent of video game players have acted on advertising they have seen in a game, and 83 percent of Web gamers reported a positive association with companies that sponsor free online games.
"Games remain one of the biggest untapped opportunities for marketers, for the simple fact that they are, indeed, engaging, immersive, interactive and entertaining," said Tim Zuckert, president and CEO of Shift Control Media, a creator of branded games such as those for Coca-Cola's "Happiness Factory."
Advergaming takes many forms. Orbitz puts games in its banner ads, and those games have become a leading source of site traffic for the online travel agency. Magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Redbook have added female-friendly game titles to their Web sites. In addition to customizing games such as mah-jongg, Sudoku or solitaire to promote traffic, they offer game popularity rankings, reviews and leader boards to promote return visits.
Progressive Insurance uses games to drive brand awareness. Progressive's logo is part of the environment in the racing game "Electronic Arts Need for Speed: Undercover" and "2K Sports Major League Baseball."
Tactics for all successful advertising in the game environment include:
Start early: Online video that appears before the game starts gets 85 percent viewership.
Keep it quick: Fifteen-second creative units outperform longer versions.
Product placement: Get your product integrated into the game.
Above all, know your audience and the types of games they play. Then you can build an advergaming strategy and become part of your customers' game life.
More at: http://bit.ly/z2BXG
Social Media Is Dead; Film At 11
LM Comment: Commentary on the future of popular social media sites like Twitter.
August 17, 2009: summarized from InfoWorld -- The death of social media is upon us. How do I know this? I read it on the InterWebs.
Let's start with a report by the BBC about a study of random tweets by Pear Analytics, which shows some 40 percent of all content on Twitter is "pointless babble."
To which the obvious reply: Only 40 percent?
Pear conducted this study by dipping into the tweet stream every 30 minutes over a two-week period, and then placing each tweet into one of six categories. Number two behind "babble" was "conversational" (37.5 percent), as in the "I just had a tuna melt and it sure was yummy"; in the third slot at just under 9 percent were tweets containing useful info or links, followed by self-promotional (6 percent) tweets and spam (4 percent).
Think about it, though. Compared to every other communications channel in your life -- phone conversations, email, SMS texts, newspaper articles, blogs, TV newscasts, political speechifying, and so on -- Twitter's pointless babble ratio isn't that bad. Can you honestly say that almost 10 percent of any of those things contains useful info? (If so, maybe you hang out with smarter people than I do.) And who wouldn't kill for a spam rate of only 4 percent? I'm sure that won't last.
Still, I hear from a lot of Cringesters who say they find Twitter 100 percent pointless. I maintain it's something you have to use for a while before you understand it.
Just today I was talking to an analyst at Forrester who covers CRM and customer service issues. She told me what a lot of people have told me about Twitter: At first she pooh-poohed it, thinking it a stupid waste of time. Then she realized she had to start using Twitter because the companies she's been analyzing all were relying on it for customer service. Now tweeting is an essential part of her day. She doesn't think it's stupid any more.
My sermon to the residents of Cringeville today is, if you don't use social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, you're falling behind. You are at least two steps closer to the junk heap than everyone else who does. You're like the crotchety old folks who refused to use touchtone number pads on their phones because, dammit, a dial was good enough.
Read more at: http://bit.ly/QdeJX
August 17, 2009: summarized from InfoWorld -- The death of social media is upon us. How do I know this? I read it on the InterWebs.
Let's start with a report by the BBC about a study of random tweets by Pear Analytics, which shows some 40 percent of all content on Twitter is "pointless babble."
To which the obvious reply: Only 40 percent?
Pear conducted this study by dipping into the tweet stream every 30 minutes over a two-week period, and then placing each tweet into one of six categories. Number two behind "babble" was "conversational" (37.5 percent), as in the "I just had a tuna melt and it sure was yummy"; in the third slot at just under 9 percent were tweets containing useful info or links, followed by self-promotional (6 percent) tweets and spam (4 percent).
Think about it, though. Compared to every other communications channel in your life -- phone conversations, email, SMS texts, newspaper articles, blogs, TV newscasts, political speechifying, and so on -- Twitter's pointless babble ratio isn't that bad. Can you honestly say that almost 10 percent of any of those things contains useful info? (If so, maybe you hang out with smarter people than I do.) And who wouldn't kill for a spam rate of only 4 percent? I'm sure that won't last.
Still, I hear from a lot of Cringesters who say they find Twitter 100 percent pointless. I maintain it's something you have to use for a while before you understand it.
Just today I was talking to an analyst at Forrester who covers CRM and customer service issues. She told me what a lot of people have told me about Twitter: At first she pooh-poohed it, thinking it a stupid waste of time. Then she realized she had to start using Twitter because the companies she's been analyzing all were relying on it for customer service. Now tweeting is an essential part of her day. She doesn't think it's stupid any more.
My sermon to the residents of Cringeville today is, if you don't use social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, you're falling behind. You are at least two steps closer to the junk heap than everyone else who does. You're like the crotchety old folks who refused to use touchtone number pads on their phones because, dammit, a dial was good enough.
Read more at: http://bit.ly/QdeJX
GTECH G2 Renews Deal With Web Giant Yahoo!
August 24, 2009: summarized from 24-7 Press Release -- GTECH G2 has renewed its deal with internet search and entertainment giant Yahoo! to provide bingo, poker and soft games for another two years.
G2 is the internet gaming division of GTech and is comprised of Boss Media, Finsoft, St Minver and Dynamite Idea. G2 will supply Yahoo with bingo and a selection of games including scratch cards, arcade and number games such as Monopoly and Cluedo.
Yahoo bingo was first launched in 2005 by G2’s customer retention and back office solutions company St Minver for Yahoo UK & Ireland. Yahoo! denied at the time that it had plans to move into real money poker, but launched real money poker in 2007.
Yahoo! will also feature GTech G2’s new ‘instant win’ games channel through St Minver, and launch download poker in addition to its current Flash poker offering.
St Minver will continue managing player liquidity, tournaments, customer service and promotions for Yahoo! and other clients including the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper and Virgin Games.
Read more at: http://bit.ly/9bVvk
G2 is the internet gaming division of GTech and is comprised of Boss Media, Finsoft, St Minver and Dynamite Idea. G2 will supply Yahoo with bingo and a selection of games including scratch cards, arcade and number games such as Monopoly and Cluedo.
Yahoo bingo was first launched in 2005 by G2’s customer retention and back office solutions company St Minver for Yahoo UK & Ireland. Yahoo! denied at the time that it had plans to move into real money poker, but launched real money poker in 2007.
Yahoo! will also feature GTech G2’s new ‘instant win’ games channel through St Minver, and launch download poker in addition to its current Flash poker offering.
St Minver will continue managing player liquidity, tournaments, customer service and promotions for Yahoo! and other clients including the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper and Virgin Games.
Read more at: http://bit.ly/9bVvk
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