Michael Tchong of Ubercool does a nice job of looking at the measurement of social media/micro-blogging phenom Twitter for a recent issue of the OldTimers Newsletter.
Actual tracking of specific post is not covered but you can check out TwitClicks, one of the better URL shortener services that offer some of the basics you’d find and some hooks into Twitter’s API. More…
On another subject…Twitterer’s Narcissists?
I suspect Marshall McLuhan would agree.
Story in AdAge by Abbey Klassen. Amazing that in 2009 this is still being written about….the comments even more telling. Here’s mine:
Wow. It’s great that this issue is being raised. However, this is nothing new. Same story since the Web 1.0 days as this could have been written over 10 years ago…actually, I did in the Lilypad white paper!
The twist today is that too many so-called online “marketers” either protesth too much (like the effect of branding but want to pay like performance) AND/OR opt for the easy way out and fallback on search – a FUD mentality. The former is solved by better media-side negotiating and the latter by training and education.
It is called branding and it’s about way more than measuring clicks.
Since I’m in Chicago, this caught my eye and is fascinating on many levels.
Real-estate magnate Sam Zell shared some shockers and made plenty of good points about the challenges of re-invention of Tribune’s business model in an interview with Conde Nast Editor-in-Chief, Joanne Lipman (11/12/08 at Quadrangle Group’s Foursquare media conference).
While Zell comes off as flippant and even obnoxious at times (although he was more on the defense during this “interview”), Lipman brings the sense of journalist entitlement that has contributed to the mess in her own way with a string of petty jabs. Alot of this seems like common-sense business and despite zero experience in media, Zell makes alot of sense.
Many monopoly or duopoly industries get dysfunctional (kind of like Detroit’s Big 3) that complacency abounds. In ad sales this amounted to an “order taking” culture and not so surpringly minimal incentives. Why not,? There was no downside to pursing that stratgy. Meanwhile, the editorial side was allowed to pursue high-minded goals that are not very measureable and/or have little impact on revenue, e.g. Pulitzer Prizes.
Online it is an audience and advertiser free-for-all; ultimately, this will resolve itslef in a Joseph-Strumpeter-creative-destruction sort of way.
Is it advertising or PR? How do you measure it? I spent this Wednesday contemplating that while attending the event held in SF’s Presidio. Disappointed by the lack of on-stage decorum but oh well.
Still many questions linger about measurement…fewer answers. Of note:
Hmmmm…
…well, you know the rest.
Great piece by Shelly Palmer in the Jack Meyer’s Report on innuendo and rhetoric against facts in the online media world.
Several great examples of journalism and big media failing terribly to get it right – makes you wonder. Journalism and the Media are notoriously unaccountable for getting it wrong.
With the “cat out of the bag” on user-generated content, Journalism is up in arms.
Traffic and truth online are not necessarily related (really?).
Curiously, the M-word is not mentioned though. Online, the network effect of memes on reality is only becoming more powerful. With the proliferation of broadband Internet and software tools, faux news like the image of Sarah Palin with a machine gun and the viral ad (by Gatorade) of the the ballgirl leaping 1o’ straight up for a catch are only going to accelerate.
More troubling is that more recent example about Governor Palin and CNN support the notion of journalist and media bias – in the Bernard Goldberg sense of the word.
New York Times covers “podbusting”…kind of like-hard-coding programming and advertising together.
Dario Spina of MTV says, “That’s the idea here; we want to blur the lines between the commercial breaks and the entertainment content.”
Considering this does make it harder to skip entire commercial breaks via DVR and the new Nielsen c-ratings for commercial viewership (as opposed to the legacy programming-focused approach) makes alot of sense!
