Grounded In Reality

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don’t. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don’t know where to start.

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UPDATE:

comScore responds (Techmeme, official press release)

“As part of our efforts to achieve transparency, we have opened our methodology and processes to an evaluation by the Advertising Research Foundation.  We are in the final stages of this evaluation and hope that the results will be publicly released in the near future.”

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The Interactive Advertising Bureau sent an open letter to comScore, Inc. and Nielsen/NetRatings on Friday asking them to submit to an outside audit.  Highlights below:

The discrepancies exist between the audience measurements of comScore and NNR and those of the server logs of the IAB’s own members. Further compounding these differences are the disparities between comScore’s and NNR’s own measurement results. All measurement companies that report audience metrics have a material impact on interactive marketing and decision-making. Therefore, transparency into these methodologies is critical to maintaining advertisers’ confidence in interactive, particularly now, as marketers allocate more budget to the platform.

“To persist in using panels that potentially undercount or ignore the diverse populations that are the future of consumer marketing is to deny marketers the insights they need to build their businesses,” writes IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg in an open letter to Magid M. Abraham, the President and CEO of comScore, Inc., and William Pulver, the President and CEO Nielsen//NetRatings. “And it certainly appears to us as if these audiences are being undercounted or disregarded.”

The revenue model for traditional media needs fresh thinking.  Mentioned in today’s Journal (subscription required), “Papers’ Web Hopes Dim a Bit: Ad Growth Online Slows as Sources for News Burgeon.”  Highlights below:

• Online ad spending for newspapers will likely fall to a percentage in the low 20s this year from 28 percent last year, Borrell Associates estimates.
• Primarily, it seems that marketers need more convincing when it comes to moving their ad dollars online.  A survey of 273 U.S. advertisers last year found that 67 percent of the companies with annual revenue of $500 million or more will dedicate less than $1 million to online ads, according to Jupiter Research.
• Media buyers also indicate marketers are beginning to look beyond traditional journalism sites, realizing many news junkies go elsewhere, too.

More at paidContent.

I’m a Firefox fan and run more than 20 extensions on my browser—several I’m testing, many I can’t live without.  Here are two that have received positive feedback and are typically adopted when recommended to the general Firefox user:

1. All-in-One Gestures: This extension allows you to execute common commands using mouse gestures.  No longer do you need to drag your mouse to the top of the browser to navigate Back, Forward, Reload, Go to Home Page, etc.  This is navigation with  greater ease and minimum movement of your mouse.
2. Cooliris Previews: Just mouse over any link and the Cooliris preview window immediately appears to show you the content.  As tabbed browsing changed the way we surf, this replaces the need for click-through by displaying a full-page preview of any hyperlink.

What’s your top extension?

As one that used to work in a newsroom, the old saying that, “Bad news is good news for us” makes me a bit ill, but it’s true. Problem these days in the 5-second news cycle is that newsrooms aren’t the only places to get information these days. If you go to YouTube and search Virginia Tech Shootings there are a few videos already up and more to follow.  Technorati says that there are over 15,000 blog posts from the incident and there are 444 tags out there on it including videos and photos.  If you have turned on your TV for five seconds in the last day, you couldn’t have missed it … never mind the fact that every famous news person from around the globe made it to tiny Blacksburg ASAP.  Make time to surf the web for 15 minutes and check out what’s going on … Facebook and MySpace I am sure are going to be lit up with this topic over the next few weeks as well.  And when you get home, I know it’s rare to take a second to be thankful for what we have, but stop and think about it. I was numb to all of it in my newsroom days, but these days I say often, “But for the grace of God go I.”  Here’s wishing for no more days like yesterday and that a wonderful college town gets back to where it was.  

I’ve been exploring Twitter, and I came across an interesting application: twittering a TV premiere. During the premiere of FOX’s “Drive” last night, the executive producer and director, Grey Yaitanes, twittered his personal commentary.

There might be something to this for companies to use. If you have an interesting, high-profile person twittering the “inside scoop” on an event or product, people might just tune in.

End of a long week, and I read that researchers are proposing to erase the internet and start over?!?!   Wow.

The Internet May Eventually Be Scrapped

Associated Press writes:

A new network could run parallel with the current Internet and eventually replace it, or perhaps aspects of the research could go into a major overhaul of the existing architecture.

These clean-slate efforts are still in their early stages, though, and aren’t expected to bear fruit for another 10 or 15 years — assuming Congress comes through with funding.

I think we can all agree that we would be much happier without spammers and hackers, but the thought of the internet being ‘wiped clean’ and restructured just gives me an uneasy feeling.

 Anyone been following this?  Opinions?

I’ve been reading a lot lately about social shopping.  What is it?  It’s basically the marriage of shopping and social networking, and it’s getting a big lift from mobile, IM and other emerging digital media technologies.

For teens, in particular, shopping has always been a social activity, and now they have plenty of channels to connect online.  Online communities are popping up right and left that let teens recommend and discover products, build and share shopping lists, create profiles, post photos, tag great finds and more.  Here are some of my favorites:

Kaboodle - You can collect information from anywhere on the Web, put it into a Kaboodle list that you can share with others, and discover other interesting lists from like-minded “Kaboodlers.”  You can also invite friends to help you research, plan and decide what to buy.  I’ve been looking for a new bag, and I like the Lilu Deerie Me Tote recommended by acceptnosubstitute87.  Kaboodle also has a cool poll feature called “Help Me Choose.”

ThisNext - I really like the layout and functionality of ThisNext, which spans a broader audience than just teens.  It’s described as a shopcasting network where you can recommend, share and discover great products.  Users create “shopcast lists” of products that are tagged and searchable on the site.  Shopcasts can be about activities (like travel or cooking) or things (like fashion or food) or lifestyle.  This month’s focus is, “It’s so easy being green.”  I found a great shopcast on “Green Goodies for the Design Set,” including an Edible Indoor Miniature Garden and Recycled Wrapper Wastebasket.

Stylehive - The Stylehive is a global, social bookmarking community focused entirely on products and shopping.  The site follows the latest trends, designers and fashions, and describes itself as a “community that is reshaping the world of retail, design and fashion by changing how we shop.”  More than other social shopping sites, many users are looking to make a name for themselves and gain influence in the fashion world.

Other sites to check out:

• Crowdstorm
• Hawkee
• StyleFeeder
• ShopWiki
• Etsy - for all things handmade
• FiveLimes - for sustainable, local, healthy shopping
• DealBundle
• MyPickList
• GoPowWow
• DesiresIn
• Wists

Personally, I see the value in online social shopping.  I love new stuff, but I really don’t like shopping in the traditional sense.  Malls make me crazy.  I’d rather have someone I trust show me the coolest new thing and where I can get it - quickly and easy.

There’s also a lot of opportunity for marketers in these communities, but at this point, only a handful have jumped on board.  A few companies are advertising on these sites, and some online retailers have formed affiliate relationships, paying a percentage for sales generated.  It would be cool to see a company more intimately involved in the community, either through starting a group, offering their own shopping/product experts or otherwise enhancing the user experience.  Companies should also start identifying the influencers in these communities and engaging them in product design and marketing efforts.

It’ll be interesting to follow these sites this holiday shopping season.

Leo Laporte’s move to Jaiku from Twitter caused both the crash of the Jaiku server (he has more than 4,000 followers, a greater following than Robert Scoble), and put Jaiku on the nanoblogging map.  (I have not heard of Twitter prior to SXSW Interactive 2007, and only heard about Jaiku on TWiT when Leo made the move.)

I’ve been checking out both services, and my initial recommendation is Twitter over Jaiku.  Though I think Jaiku has some very nifty functionalities (it invokes Apple’s userability while Twitter reminds me of a functional PC), I find that for now Jaiku:

• - Lacks instant message (IM) integration / alerts;
• - For the U.S. audience, it is likely to have inconvenient down times since it is based in Helsinki; 
• - Certain American carriers are blocking Jaiku SMS alerts, a bug that the company is working through;
• - Though offering cool Growler and Quicksilver scripts for Mac users is applicable only to a niche Apple market

For my U.S.-centric clients, I would have to recommend Twitter, for now.  That said, the market is young and it is too risky to predict the future of either service—and that of emerging competitors.

If…
5.  If they have not pushed you to rethink online monitoring and crisis management.  The 24-hr news cycle is dead ( NYT: “Mr. Imus is an old-school radio guy caught in a very modern media paradigm.”), long live the .5 second news cycle .

4. If they have not encouraged you to give your customers a voice.  Trust in the corporate authority will likely continue to decline, as peer-to-peer influence increases.

3. If they are clueless about RSS, Wikipedia, or Technorati.  These are basic distribution and search tools that any communicator ought to have an understanding of.

2. If they have not asked you to consider flattening the organization by letting employees collaborate via internal wikis or blogs.  The company culture may not be ready for this but at least be thinking about it.  Keep this in the back of your mind for the day might soon come when Jane in creative or Bob in product design could be ideal candidates for the face of your company.

1. If they have not done Google and Wikipedia searches of your brand and products.  Sometimes the simplest things are easiest to overlook.