AllinaComm

Media monitoring firm, Custom Scoop, has a terrific website called Media Bullseye about all things media, new and otherwise, that a communicator might want to think about. You can subscribe to the Media Bullseye RSS feed if you like, but they have now published the first of what they promise will be a quarterly magazine called Media Bullseye that collects their pick hits from the previous few months on the web site. The first issue focuses on reputation.

You can subscribe via email and they’ll mail you the hard copy, or you can download a pdf of the magazine.

My favorite article in this issue are Establishing Reputation Online and Throwing Out the Social Media Rulebook.

From Jaffe Juice:

Friday Fun - How many social media experts does it take to change a lightbulb?

Let’s see how many responses we can get.

Q. How many social media experts does it take to change a lightbulb?

A. It depends - is it a physical or a virtual lightbulb?
A. Actually I wrote a blog post about it last week…
A. You expect me to answer this in 140 characters or less?
A. A wise crowd
A. The community will decide
A. You’ll need to buy my book to find out…
A. I have no idea but I hope they Qik, uStream or ooVoo it live…

More in the comments (on Jaffe Juice)

Thanks to Amy Phenix and Kim Dutcher who forwarded an email from Jim Bulger who passed along (are you following this?) a link to a report from the California HealthCare Foundation on social media and healthcare.

You can find the report in downloadable pdf form here. Worth a glance to gain a slightly better understanding of how our patients/customers and getting information on which they  make healthcare consumer decisions.

The report also has links to many more useful online resources in the appendices.

ADOTAS, an Internet advertising and media industry publication, reports on four new studies that show advertising in podcasts is three times more effective than online advertising and seven times more effective than TV advertising.

The studies showed embedded advertising in online shows and podcasts were highly effective methods of boosting brand awareness, usage intent and positively impacting brand perceptions across four product categories: TV programming, cars, financial services and digital imaging.

The studies results include:
• Average unaided ad recall of 68%
• Average aided ad recall of 89%
• 73% average increase in likelihood to use/buy vs control group
• 69% having a more favorable view of advertiser due to ad exposure

The whole article is available to read online here.

Still trying to figure what Twitter is all about. You’re not alone. But, while you’re scratching your head, other folks are moving ahead using Twitter.

You haven’t heard of Laura Fitton and her company Pistachio Consulting? Me either, until I read blogger Shel Israel’s recent interview with this communications entrepreneur—a former stay-at-home mom who in the last year went from zero to social media hero.

Fitton’s success is the result of Twitter.

Read the whole article on Ragan.com here.

This clip from the March 17 For Immediate Release podcast discusses a white paper published by Deloitte Consulting entitled “New Media and the 2008 Campaign Season.” The clip and the white paper concisely lay out the business case why companies ignore New Media at their own peril.

 

 Brand in a Web 2.0 world [5:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 New Media and the 2008 Campaign Season: Download

New to wiki’s? Don’t quite understand how they work and why they can make your life easier? Take a look at these links for simple explanations that even a former radio/TV reporter can understand.

http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english - A cute video. Watch this one if your lips move when you read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki - Wikipedia, the granddaddy of all wikis, on what a wiki is.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/what-is-a-wiki - Sitepoint’s article on what a wiki is.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/07/07/what-is-a-wiki.html - A detailed explanation of wikis and what the business applications might be, from O’Reilly, the tech publisher.

Wiki definition from the guy who invented them:
The simplest online database that could possibly work.
-Ward Cunningham

Relax. No one here is as crazed as the folks in the this NY Time story. Still………..

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Read the article here.

The respected science publication Nature gets the whole Web 2.0/social media/new media thing. In addition to fully embracing the technologies of Web 2.0 with blogs, podcasts and such, one of its blogs (Climate Feedback) has an item on whether this democratization of media is good for communicating detailed and technical subjects.

While all of this enables us to reach our audience in new ways – and to communicate science in a more engaging and rapid manner – the scientific community remains divided on whether Web 2.0 is good for science communication.

That’s one of the topics under discussion in this month’s issue of Nature Geoscience (subscription) which features a pair of Commentaries, one by Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS and one by Myles Allen of the University of Oxford, giving their respective opinions on whether blogging is a worthwhile means of communicating science, and specifically climate change.

They conclude that the onus is on us to use the new media, not shy away from it.

• …in an society where science rarely ever makes front page news and gets far too few column inches, blogs provide a forum for some of the best science journalists to communicate more frequently – and in more depth – than they could do otherwise.
• Climate bloggers will get it wrong sometimes, as will journalists. But I would argue that the onus is on scientists to engage, engage and engage rather than shy away…

As communicators, we need to embrace the new media. There’s no putting this genie back in the bottle. I wouldn’t want to even if we could.

Wondering what the real business case is for social media/web 2.0/new media? Australian PR consultants Lee Hopkins and Trevor Cook lay it all out for you in this nice white paper.

 Social Media for Business: Download