Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Tapping into the herd through social media has been a goal for investors for some time.  Collective Intellect (founded in 2005 for this sole purpose) and Dow Jones Insights are listening platforms that specialize in this area.  Late last year Stocktwits became the first Twitter based service based on investment discussion and has been driving change in the way that many day traders discuss and evaluate stocks.   But if there was any question about social media having a measurable impact on trading, that has been quashed with the latest announcement that StreamBase Systems is integrating Twitter with its Complex Event Processing (CEP) platform for money managers and traders.

"Users of StreamBase's Twitter adapter can combine Twitter with market data and build data management applications, says StreamBase CTO Richard Tibbetts. In particular, Twitter can be used as a crowd sourcing tool to help gauge people's sentiment towards a particular event or stock. "It's really useful for sentiment analysis, which traders can then use to help them make trading decisions," he adds. Nasir Zubairi, former product manager for algorithmic trading and FX E-commerce, RBS, points out that as Twitter continues to gain sweeping adoption across the globe, it will increasingly become a key medium to convey information to the financial world too."

Now the question becomes: What impact will this have on stock values? 

Will more information make the markets more efficient? The lightening speed of information transfer on Twitter will allow traders to price in news more quickly.  Case in point, both Michael Jackson's passing and civil unrest in Iran were all over Twitter before there was any news coverage that would appear in a trader's feed from Bloomberg or Reuters. 

Or will misinformation and group think lead to more volatility?  If traders act on the earliest rumors the impact on market value of stocks becomes self reinforcing and may amplify the natural tendency of the market to bubble and bust.

Regardless of the answer, it is guaranteed that day traders not plugged into social media will be at a disadvantage.

Thanks to Fang-Lu Lin for the link.

Russ Hopkinson

Recently, an AdAge commentary piece suggested (in short) that news organizations must hurry up and adapt to aggregation as news consumers want more content and don't care where they get it.

News Outlets Must Accept That Consumers Want More Content Faster -- and Don't Care Who Creates It

I would beg to differ. Trying to be all things to all people is what got media companies into this mess. And for upstart companies - and digital marketing clients out there - it's important to understand that when it comes to content, it's trust that keeps readers coming back.

Right now, brands have the unique opportunity to grab this ring and win their consumer's trust via content in this market.

Neil Patrick Harris will be hosting the Tony Awards and one of the reasons he was chosen was because of his work on the web: Dr. Horrible Sing-Along Blog. He plays a super-villan in this low-budget yet professional, Internet-only musical production. If you missed it, you can view the first season on Hulu. It crashed the site, shot to the top of the iTunes video chart its first week and garnered quite a (cult) following. Marta Strickland told us why it was so ingenious in an earlier post back in July.

Rumor (according to i09) has it that it may become a full-length movie. Is Hollywood on its way to using more content produced for the web?  It's not a bad idea as they seem to be running out of old TV shows.
 
They should follow in one European city's path. Upload Cinema is a film club that takes the best web films to the big screen. Every first Monday of the month at 9:30 P.M. a fresh program of Internet shorts is screened at a movie theater in Amsterdam. This probably has more legs as a local draw in more artsy, nouveau communities. Think Park City for the Sundance Film Festival. Or Traverse City, Michigan for their annual film festival. But I have yet to hear of any North American cities truly partaking in such a source. If we've overlooked any, please share here.
 
Hollywood seems to be stuck in time though. MTV.com wrote about how although the Web is faster for breaking entertainment news, trade pubs get a better rap -- even though they sometimes break the same stories without giving any credit to their Web competitors.

So just as major entertainment pubs view film blogs as not as credible, polished and noteworthy, do they view web-based content the same way?
 
Like newspapers, Hollywood is not adapting quickly enough to the web influence on movies and it may be to their detriment. I'm sure the democratization of cinema is frightening because the king entertainment city has had a strong hold for so long. But if the big movie houses don't collaborate with the Web at all -- or wait too long to do so -- they just might get blogged out of business.

Kari Jo Girarde
Sarah Jo Sautter
 

Good News! Twitter search to focus on relevancy. Bad News... is it doesn't matter.

The blogosphere has a fascination with rooting for the underdog. A wanting for the new kid on the block to take out the older, established, seasoned, and extremely profitable bully. The new kid we're talking about here is Twitter and the bully is, obviously, Google.

Santosh Jayaram, Twitter VP of Operations, has ambitious plans to index web pages linked to from Tweets. This would add additional context and relevancy to Twitter search results. I love the idea and can see the value of such a move, but I'm growing wary of are those in those in "The Industry" suggesting Twitter will somehow leap the reigning champ. Before I get in to why Twitter will have a difficult time competing with Google, here's a short list of recent "Google Killers": MySpace, Facebook, Wikia Search, Cuil, Wolfram's Alpha.

Okay, so why does Twitter have zero chance of defeating Google?

1. The current Twitter search engine doesn't work well
If Yahoo or MSN told me they developed the secret sauce to beat Google at it's own game, after laughing hysterically, I would be interested in what they had say because they, at a minimum, have fully functioning search engines. Twitter Search, in its current state, appears to be a basic full-text search engine that comes standard in most database servers. Twitter has a long road ahead!

2. No one needs Twitter
I have a Twitter account and I enjoy the service. It's a fun service that has recently received very good publicity, but no one needs Twitter. We need to find directions. We need to find highly relevant information. Google has proven to be the best available solution for filling this need.

3. People don't search they "Google it"
Old habits are hard to break. Yahoo has been able to retain a respectable share of search not because they deliver the best search results but because they've retained a loyal following from their days as the leading search engine. It will take some time before we associate Twitter with Search.

4. Twitter should set their sights on Facebook first
Facebook is far superior to Twitter in terms of execution and technology. Facebook Lexicon ( http://facebook.com/lexicon/new) provides sentiment analysis, trended keywords and topics, keyword associations, pulse, and geography information based on keywords in profiles and search behavior. It's similar Google Insights for Search (http://google.com/insights/search/) but on steroids! Twitter will need to face, no pun intended, this battle before taking on Google.

5. Whatever Twitter can do Google can do better
Google currently has the ability to index social network content including Tweets. I don't believe it will be very difficult for Google to bake Tweet relevancy, ranking, reputation, and authority into their algorithms. Additionally, Google has developed the most efficient advertising platform in the world. Combining the two equals a world of hurt for those competing in the search space.

6. Finally, see the image located at the top of this article.

Damon Henry

Today I searched for a "Social Media Expert" on Google. The results? 84 million. The same staggering numbers surfaced while searching on Twitter or Facebook. Lately, anyone that has a profile on Social Media seems to call themselves a Social Media Expert.

The phenomenon of social networks has officially begun the free fall from their Tipping Point. Talk about mass market appeal - Twitter was even featured on The Today Show last week. Millions of new users are wandering aimlessly on-line trying to uncover: what can social media do for me? And social media experts, or those that claim they are, are ready to sell them.

It brings to mind images of the snake oil peddler from old Western movies - the traveling salesman who claims to hold the remedy for all one's ails. Is today's economy producing a legion of PT Barnums looking for the suckers who weren't early adopters of social media? How can marketers interested in entering the social media world protect themselves from fast-talking wanna-bes and instead find a trusted consultant?

This week's On The Media (NPR Show) has an interesting look at the net's "mid-life crisis" - discussing outmoded routers, anonymity, and viruses, among other things. I found it most fascinating that in all of the discussion of where the net's at currently, where it's been and where it's headed that there was no mention of the single-most used application used when dealing with the internet - the web browser.

Yes, of all the tools that need to be standardized on the web, browsers have had the most attempts at regulation via the W3C but, yet, still prove the most irksome. Likewise, they exemplify the problems that OTM focuses on - they're outmoded (IE6 still proves to be a major player though it's not two versions behind) and they open up users to Trojans and other malware via their poor coding (again, IE6). I wonder if OTM requires some kind of metaphor to make this point clear. For me, I describe the difference in web browsers as if looking out four windows and seeing four completely different versions of the same view. (though others have more colorful methods of describing this troublesome topic)

Listen to OTM's story here:http://onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/03/13/06.

Mike White

Despite the irony of integrating wind power into a meter-cranking, electricity-vaporizing location like Times Square, another company, Japanese printing manufacturer Ricoh, is about to follow up on Coca Cola's eco-billboard debut with a wind-powered billboard of its own.

In a time when some companies are either cutting back on or shifting their marketing investment from offline to online marketing, it's nice to see a company like Ricoh doing something innovative and ecologically conscious in the digital out-of-home space.

Ricoh's wind-powered digital billboard is scheduled to launch sometime in the next few weeks at 42nd and 7th Ave. The project will be powered WePOWER wind turbine technology (video demo), including 16 wind turbines and 64 solar panels.

How much juice are they saving? A Mediaweek article estimates "about 18 tons of carbon per year and about $12,000 to $15,000 a month in electricity." I'm not sure what the cost of building and installing this type of an eco-advertising spectacle amounts to, but surely saving $12,000-15,000 on electricity alone is a decent ROI.

For full story, including an interview with WePOWER's CEO about the future of "windvertising," see: "Ricoh to Launch First Wind-Powered Ad" on MediaWeek.

Stephanie Jorgl

So I am clicking through the TV channels hoping to watch the news. I click through 10 or so channels and turn the TV off, annoyed. This never seems to happen when LOST is on. LOST actually makes TV better.

What is it that's bugging me? The list is lengthy so I'll stick with my top gripe. It seems to me that everything is referred to as BREAKING NEWS, even when BREAKING NEWS has a subhead that reads "Gourmet Meals on a Budget". Is this really news that deserves a bold, bright red, ALL CAPS level of attention?

Imagine being able to swap out some of the content that we've all learned over time to ignore for something intriguing. Content that made it onto the screen because the masses, not the networks, decided it should. Imagine being a participant beyond voting for American Idol contestants with your phone.

Mike Elgan of Datamation had these suggestions for How Social Media Can Save TV News:

1. Instead of using "tickers" and peripheral space to promote programs and other stale "news," they should instead turn this over to live running commentary.
2. Hire a small team to monitor Twitter and other social media sites 24/7 looking for breaking news, which always appears there first.
3. Fire all opinion-show anchors.
4. Go ahead and cover your career-making, inside-the-beltway stories, but spend at least half the show summarizing a very large number of stories that are getting traction on social media.
5. Never let news anchors choose viewer comments.

This probably wouldn't help much with my BREAKING NEWS gripe but might improve everything that surrounds it.

Jason Randall

Staying in line with the Extra Homepage concept - linking blog and other coverage to stories as they are posted - the NYTimes has raised the bar on coverage of big political speeches with their interactive viewer of last night's address to a joint session of congress by President Obama.

Combining the footage with a timeline and analysis from around the web scrolling in time with the footage - this is how good analysis of this kind of event can be in almost real time. In the age of PVRs, why not wait a few hours and watch when the analysts and fact checkers can watch right along with you? Whether you watched the speech live or not, whether you twittered through it, whether you're a policy wonk or rabid politico or not it makes for some compelling content.

Alex Churchill

Have you ever watched streaming content on Hulu.com?  It's okay if you haven't but these days you're increasingly likely to be in the minority.

Hulu's great Superbowl ad with Alec Baldwin promises streaming TV and movie content to "your mobile computing devices".  However, one application that truly broke new ground for Hulu's distribution model, Boxee (see http://www.boxee.tv) is now no longer going to feature any Hulu content, at the request of Hulu's content partners (i.e., NBC, Fox, et. al.).

Boxee's blog post about the situation came out today and can be found here:
http://blog.boxee.tv/2009/02/18/the-hulu-situation/

Hulu's own related blog post can be found online here:
http://blog.hulu.com/

I am not a senior strategist/media expert at Organic by any means, but do find the situation fascinating for a few reasons.....