kenekaplan Media, PR, Social Media

Less Distinction Between Blogs and Mainstream Media

In his New Rules Communications, Tom Foremski looks at Technorati CEO David Sifry’s latest quarterly report on the state of the blogosphere.

The report shows the number of blogs or posts per second — 1.4 blogs and 17 blog posts created per second. But consider the distinction between blogs and mainstream media:

…information not shown in our data but revealed in our own user testing in Q1 2007 indicates that the audience is less and less likely to distinguish a blog from, say, nytimes.com — for a growing base of users, these are all sites for news, information, entertainment, gossip, etc. and not a “blog” or a “MSM site”.

Link to Sifry’s Alerts: The State of the Live Web, April 2007

Two things:

  • If you take a look at the top “blogs” they are all written by media professionals, so do they qualify as blogs? I use a blogging platform to publish, but I don’t think of myself as a blogger–I am a professional journalist.
  • Mr Sifry points out that users distinguish less between mainstream media and blogs–then why is Technorati still making this distinction? It’s all mediasphere…

Tom’s New Rules Communication sponsor http://blog.cohnwolfe.com/boomerang/

kenekaplan Marketing, PR, Social Media, Socialmedia

ROI of Engagement

A link to Paul Dunay‘s blog came my way from friends who hear this a lot — what’s the ROI for podcasting and blogging?  Every day it’s getting easier to answer.  Today we say there’s a price for not doing it.  Tomorrow, we’ll be able to better show the value of engaging people…of alloing people to engage on their own terms and time.

Hightlights from Paul’s post on Calculating ROI on Web 2.0 tools:

But there are ways to calculate return on your Web 2.0 investment. For example, for your blog, first get some highly targeted CPM numbers, such as you would when buying ad placements in any homogeneous community. Second, think about what it would cost to hire a dedicated company to just do WOM advertising for you. Next, think about the relative change in Net Promoter Score (NPS), and how that might be valued. Add these up, and it’s a compelling figure.

Another way to think about it is to start thinking less about ROI and more about Engagement. My theory here is I only care about 2 measurements: conversion events (like a registration, download of podcast, post to a blog or wiki) and the path a customer or prospect takes to get there. That’s all I care about right now. Why you ask? When a customer participates they become more engage and invested in your brand.

kenekaplan Media, PodTech

Everybody is a Vlogger – What Do You like Watching

Thanks Irina.  This advice means more coming from you.  At Intel, we “media train” our experts so they can better uderstand how to share stories with TV and radio reporters.   We encourage them to give details and explain what they mean using visual analogies.  In interivews, tell reporters what excites you and why you think other people are excited, too.

Tricks of the media trade may not feel like tricks becase we all watch TV and videos.  We do learn from good TV and radio journalists…sometimes without even knowing it. Things like:

  • understand what’s important to your audience
  • get to the point
  • ask questions that get people to talk about their passion and expertise

I like looking for style of reporters or documentary makers, figuring out how their style makes me feel and what I like their approach.

There are so many more tips to add, but Irina gets to the point with what she says and shows. Tell only interesting stories and show visuals that serve a purpose. Otherwise, we aren’t offer great reasons for our audience to “stay tuned” for our next story.

What ends up on the TV news cutting room floor — or stuck in the edit bay servers — often works well on the Internet. Does that mean the Internet will allow us to learn more about the world and ourselves? Or does it mean that the Internet will be where we find sub-broadcast quality stuff.

Poor storytelling — or rambling like this blog post — may find an audience but it will be tiny and revolving. Every story is a ticket you give to viewers so they’ll come back for your next story.

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/04/PID_010783/Podtech_VVW_vlogger.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/2601/everybody-is-a-vlogger&totalTime=63000&breadcrumb=11feb22f-918f-4d9b-93ac-b754581d6301]

kenekaplan Intel, PodTech, Tech

Most Promising New Technology — Silicon Photonics

I just returned from seeing amazing scientists get their due!  Tonight in San Jose, Intel’s Silicon Photonics research team and partner research team from the University of California at Santa Barbara received the Most Promising New Technology Award by EE Times.  This is a huge honor awarded by peers in the engineering community. 

Big kudos to Intel’s Mario Paniccia and the hard working research team, and the good natured, super intelligent team at UCSB.

 See all winners of the 2007 EE Times Ace Awards here.

Here is an audio Interview Mario did with PodTech when his team announced the Silicon Laser breakthrough in 2006.

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2006/09/PID_000961/Podtech_Intels_091806_Intel_Mario_Paniccia_silicon_photonics_2006-09-19___home.mp3&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1128/intels-laser-enabled-chips-could-be-silver-bullet&totalTime=544000&breadcrumb=CRparent.1174960243.28]

kenekaplan Politics, Tech

Gore Says Computer Chips Can Save the World!

Gore challenged embedded designers in San Jose, California today.  These Gore quotes are fromNicolas Mokhoff of EE Times .
 
Full story here: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=WMIUXCQHO44DCQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=198702270

–>Former vice president Al Gore made an impassioned plea to embedded designers here to have the courage to answer the call of “the moral imperative of our day”: climate change.

“You have to ask different questions [when designing] that will take advantage of the opportunities presented by the crisis,” he said.

Gore listed three long-term effects on the climate crisis: population, technology and mindset. “For the most part, the effect of population on our climate is balancing itself out over many years, while technology has dramatically accelerated the rate of which the climate has been affected over the past fifty years,” he said. ”Yet the worse culprit is the way we think about the crisis.”

We have “grossly inefficient systems running our energy economy”…”apply the principles of parallel processing to alleviate inefficient computing paradigms.”

“We are very fast becoming less competitive globally because youngsters do not feel engineering is a worthwhile profession to pursue,” said Gore.

“You can make a difference by showing that engineering can change the way the world crisis can be averted–only if we can raise the importance of this endeavor to the wake-up call Sputnik [first space satellite launched by the Soviet Union] had for America in the 1960s,” he said.

“Once the possible threat was understood, President [John F.]Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon was achieved fairly quickly,” he said. “It is a moral imperative that brings the thinking around to do something about a threat–you can play that role every day in your design work and thereby show the next generation of engineers that they can become part of something larger than themselves.
kenekaplan Media, Social Media, Socialmedia

Web 2.0 Ecosystem

I found this first on Todd And then learned more from Down the Avenue (both cool sites!).

Business 2.0’s Erick Schonfeld writes a reflective blog post about the value of Web 2.0 start-ups and as a reference point, incorporates an ecosystem slide that was created by client eSnips‘ CEO Yael Elish recently. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Web20_alexa_value_chart_3

kenekaplan Marketing, PodTech, PR, Social Media, Socialmedia

Top 150 Influencial Marketing Bloggers

Nice to see our friends Jeremiah Owyang and Rohit Bhargava next to each other in the top 40!  Lots of great people on this list are helping many people like me learn a lot.  Thanks!

Here’s the list of 150 most influencial marketing bloggers by Todd And and here’s Todd describing the list, which is now updated live in real time!

kenekaplan Intel, PR, Social Media, Socialmedia

Podcasting Power: Intel’s Innovative Use of Social Media

It’s been about nine months since Bill was interviewed by PodTech’s Jennifer Jones. She’s asked us to give her an update in April. Here’s Bill giving his snapshot of Intel’s Podcasting and new media efforts.

Text from PodTech: Bill Kircos, Consumer and Enterprise Communications Manager of Intel, explains how Intel’s passionate personalities and experts use podcasting to share stories about Intel’s newest technologies. Kircos discusses how social media has recalibrated the perception of Intel’s brand.

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2006/07/PID_000747/Podtech_Podcasting_072006_Marketing_Voices_Bill_Kircus_Intel_PodTech_2006-07-31___home.mp3&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/902/podcasting-power-intel%e2%80%99s-innovative-use-of-social-media&totalTime=834000&breadcrumb=CRparent.1175490677.81]

kenekaplan Media, PodTech, Social Media, Socialmedia, Uncategorized

Gabe Rivera: Founder of Techmeme

Techmeme Founder Gabe Rivera is considered one of the Web’s top fifty most important people. He speaks with PodTech’s Marketing Voices host Jennifer Jones about how Techmeme harnesses the blogosphere to connect users with the biggest stories of the moment. Known as the “go-to” place for technology news, Rivera talks about his role as founder, and what he believes are the sites greatest assets.

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/03/PID_010741/Podtech_Marketing_Voices_Gabe_Rivera.mp3&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/2591/gabe-rivera-founder-of-techmeme&totalTime=408000&breadcrumb=0cc993ba-c48f-469b-a774-6681dfd2084a]

kenekaplan Media, Politics, Social Media, Socialmedia

MSM — Mainstream Media’s on the Move

I was thinkin’ about the swirl.  Then I saw a comment by SiliconValleyWatcher’sTom Foremski, something I’ve read several times before but it hit me anew.  He wrote:

Ken: That’s exactly it, it is about MSM and citizen journalism …and… what I call “smart machine media” in a holy trinity of sorts 🙂

I’m down with that!  These are three engines being driven by people, but people from different positions, perches and allegiance.  Differencesare likely to remain, but they’re all coming together on a level playing field where discussion, sharing and open, honest communication keeps lots of light on the truth.  Sure there is a need for anonymity, but maybe only in the face of true fear, oppression and when it comes to protecting the live(s) of others/many. 

Back to the holy trinity of sorts.  I visited the eBiquity blog, run by the UMBC eBiquity Research Group consisting of faculty and students from the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (CSEE) of University of Maryland, Baltimore County(UMBC), located in Baltimore MD.  This is where I found this good explorationof MSM, or the mainstream media, and how mainstream politicians view and use them along with the blogosphere.   Their conclusion:

MSM is influential and there are selective preferences of each community towards different sources. Some of the sources that are categorized under MSM in the dataset almost have a blog like quality. As people rely on blogs for information and opinions, the indirect influence that MSM sources (and perhaps, its biases) can not be ignored. While blogs and MSM seem to almost have a symbiotic relation, (IMHO) this election season might see a fierce competition between the two.

Many will be watching, and more people than ever will be participating!