Digital Future

Digital Future
Users see the Net as a more important info source than traditional media

80- percent of users 17 and older consider the Internet to be an important source of information, says USC's 2008 Digital Future Report ..

 68 percent rated it higher than TV, 63 percent preferred the Net to radio and 63 percent rated it better than newspapers as an info source.

The Digital Future Project also found that the social aspects on online communities is growing at a rapid rate

Membership in online communities has more than doubled in only three years. More than half of online community members (54 percent) log into their community at least once a day, and 71 percent of members said their community is very important or extremely important to them. Fifty-six percent of members reported meeting their online counterparts in person.

More than half - -55 percent -- say they feel as strongly about their online communities as they do about their real-world communities.

Just as the Internet is changing the way we communicate and interact, so it is changing how businesses should interact with their customers and stakeholders. 

The role of PR is shifting.

Find out where your audiences are online and make it easier for them to share ideas with you and with each other.

Making Social Media Content Work For You
Social media does have new rules, but some of the old rules apply too

Executing Social Media was a good conference.  Everyone participated in the sessions, so we got the benefit of some very smart people sharing ideas about what works and what doesn't.

There were two excellent keynotes:

George Wright from Blendtech spoke about how the Will It Blend campaign came about and why it has been so successful. The videos have had over 40 million views and sales are up 5X.

Peter Shankman woke everyone on day two with his energetic keynote about where all this social media sruff might be going.

Being wired and on the grid is a fact of life.  We have no privacy. Someone always has a camera or a laptop switched on and everything you do or say could end up online. What we do have is the ability to control what gets seen or found online.

His prediction is that we are moving towards a world where we have one tool that connects us and it's more about how we live our lives than the tools we use.

How can this be used to advantage by companies? Create PR stunts people will talk about and share.  Since everyone is now a citizen journalist with a camera and the means to publish, give them great content that is worth publishing. 

He did this for Harrah's. 

As a way to promote their new Water Tower, the Harrah's Resort Atlantic City gave away $1 million worth of free hotel rooms in four major East Coast cities, starting in New York.

They had a bevy of beautiful models painted in the Harrah's logo on Wall Street giving away room keys.  And it caused a storm of tweets and images, as well as mainstream media coverage.

LInda Zimmer made a great point in her wrapup - use best principles rather than best practices.  What worked for one company may not be the right stunt or content for yours.  Use the idea, but keep your target audience and end goal in mind..

Example:  If HerRoom.com did a similar stunt to promote the Undie Awards, I am sure they'd get just as much attention and coverage - but a ton of traffic from young Wall Street hot shots would not sell any bras. 

The old rule of the right message to the right audience still applies.  It's just a new channel..

 

Custom Content Is Your Best Bet
Last year 10% of audiences caught their favorite shows online.

Brands are catching on to the idea that they can create custom content and attract the right audience.  Where is this custom content being viewed?  Online. By the end of the year, an estimated 40% of programming will be viewed through the Web, says James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.  Internet advertising in the United States will grow eight times faster than the overall market, surpassing newspapers, cable TV, and broadcast TV by 2012, IDC predicted today. The Yankee Group expects the market to reach $50.3 billion by 2011, double the amount of 2007.

Marketers have found a new way to try to keep viewers from tuning out their ads: offer them online programming created by the marketers themselves, often with help from their advertising agencies, says The New York Times.

One way is to sponsor content that appeals to your audience - National Geographic's Dog Whisperer is virtually owned online by Petco, writes Brandweek.

Some brands are investing in their own channels and shows. What is called Advertorial in print has become advertainment online.

Chivas This is the LIfe has a channel on MSN.

BlendTec has made entertainment out of their product testing with the Will It Blend videos. Now they're doing co-branded content    

Just a year ago MySpace announced branded channels with custom content from National Geographic, The New York Times, Reuters, The Daily Reel, Expert Village, Flow, IGN Entertainment, Octane TV, Kush TV, Ripe TV, VBS TV, and Young Hollywood.

Sites like Kyte and FlexTubeTV allow you to produce your own branded content channel online.  This Is 50, is the online destination site for articet 50 cent.  It's part hip-hop/pop culture blog, part fan community, and part original content destination.

Heavy.com  aims at men ages 18-34, They offer an online dating reality series using partially user-generated content and a show that won a Webby Award for the sports category in Online Film & Video.

I's a no-brainer for travel and tourism sites. eMarketer projects Online travel sales in the U.S. sales will reach nearly $146 billion in 2010, up from nearly $127 billion in 2009 and $110 billion in 2008. Travel bookings surpassed offline bookings in volume for the fitrst time in 2007, according to PhoCusWright.  Any travel or tourism destination that is not using online video is missing a huge opportunity. Video is a major influencer in travel sales.

Have you thought about how you could use online video to build your brand, engage loyal customers and offer content that they want to watch and come back for?

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links for 2008-05-26
InformationWeek - FriendFeed Good example of how the media is moving into Friendfeed. (tags: Journalism Media FriendFeed aggregation informationweek) Is FriendFeed Down? This site says it all. These guys know how to scale. (tags: FriendFeed Fun) YackTrack.com: Home Interesting tool...

Boomers, Gen X Driven to Distraction as Gen Y Just Copes
Over the past several months I have written extensively about The Attention Crash. There are some signs (at least among geeks) that it's worsening. Robert Scoble is, of course, the poster boy. Mike Elgan talks about curing the "Distraction Virus"...