100 Million Americans and Where TV Is Not by Ruth Ann Barrett

What did one video say to the other video?

This evening begins a conference here at University of Oregon in Portland asking What's TV?  It runs through Saturday and gives the academics an opportunity to strut their papers and the Web producers and aggregators like me an opportunity to meet some interesting folks and talk turkey, er, TV. I think I'll write a couple of these numbers on my arm as they should come in handy over cocktails and I don't want to exaggerate.

Source of this information is News at Mediapost's Media Research Brief from the Center for Media Research in which they reference "comScore 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus."

Online video viewing witnessed impressive gains across a variety of measures in 2011, signaling a behavioral shift in how Americans are consuming video content. More than 100 million Americans watched online video content on an average day to close out 2011, representing a 43% increase versus year ago.

In 2011, Americans viewed more online video content than ever before, as evidenced by strong increases across several key viewing metrics. In addition to more daily viewers, the number of video streams jumped 44% to 43.5 billion in December 2011. One of the key behavioral shifts in online video continues to be the increasing adoption of long-form video content viewing, as Americans watch shows and movies on-demand over the Internet. The average number of minutes per video view rose from 5.0 minutes to 5.8 minutes by the end of 2011 with the average viewer watching 239 videos (up 37%).

Ruth Ann Barrett, Digitalsavvyite, Portland, Oregon March 1, 2012.

At the Crux of Google Search - Parochial or Global Citizens?

"But in the Ask Your Target Market’s (AYTM) latest survey, only 16% were fully on board with the idea of personalized search results. 39% said it seems like a good idea, but they still have some concerns about privacy issues. And 45% of respondents disliked the idea, and said they think everyone should see the same results when searching the same word or phrase."  (MediaPost Blogs, Research Brief, Center for Media Research, Jack Loechner, Google Plus Gets Mixed Reviews, February 23, 2012)

A quote attributed to Mark Zuckerberg points to parochial aspect of local on a Web that supports McLuhan's vision of the global village: "A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now that people dying in Africa."

For a cosmopolitan perspective, give a listen to Kwame Appiah's interview, part of the documentary entitled "Examined Life" which draws on a broad range of disciplines, including history, literature, and philosophy—as well as his own experience of life on three continents.

Local search moves us backwards to the days of Yellow Pages and reinforces the over-

commercialization of the Web with the supposed vision that the primary purpose of it is to sell us more stuff and, ideally, to sell us the same stuff that our friends and neighbors buy.  Along with paid search it is sending sustainability ideas and leaders to the bottom of page results at a time when innovation and transformation are key to our survival. 

It's local AND global as we are all interconnected.

Ruth Ann Barrett, Portland, Oregon for now.

Where a Facebook Like Meets Sponsored Stories

You (and me) are more likely to click if the recommendation comes from a friend.  More and more of Web traffic is coming from social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and not from clicks on search results.This has marketers atwitter.

This is why Facebook is giving advertisers new opportunities to take your "likes" and pepper them around your friend network.  Let's take a look at how well integrated this can become by looking at one example: If you want to see the examples more clearly this information is presented here in a Prezi format where you can expand the images to see them more clearly. I also embedded the presentation.

Sometime ago my colleague Betsey, whose opinion I admire, gave a thumbs up to Intel for something she saw, neither of us remember. It may have been in reference to the Creators Project of which Intel is a sponsor.  
At the time I made note of the like, but did not follow the link or at least I don't think I did which points up and important point - we like or don't like who remembers?

That was not the end of Betsey's like.

Later as a follower of "Tell Obama to Cease FDA Ties to Monsanto" on my Facebook News feed I clicked on this photo to be able to read what the image says.

 The click was to this landing page:

Can you see what is on the bottom right hand page?  Yep, Betsey's like of Intel.

Now, I was so excited I started to write this article before I clicked on the link to confirm what it was, and paged back instead. When I page forwarded the link was gone so the software in the background of this placement gives me but one chance and doesn't bother me again with it.

 For all I know I may have another chance at this one, but who knows?

Understanding all of this, however, takes detective work. I'm naming these kind of posts, Social Media Detective - all the questions, and no answers, yet.

Here's the prezi. Click on the > button then wave mouse over word, more,  and then click on full screen all in lower right hand corner to see it easily and in full size. I should be able to reduce its size in my blog, but I could not figure it out and changing the size in HTML did not work. This sort of thing drives me nuts.

Social Media Detective on Prezi

Ruth Ann Barrett, February 13, 2012, Portland, Oregon.

2012 Digital Marketing Advice: SEO and Your Taxonomy

Happy New Year Friends and Colleagues:

Keeping with the theme you must be found before anyone can engage with you on the Web, here is my one piece of advice to carry forward into 2012. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a cornerstone of being found is without a taxonomy a waste of time. Here is the taxonomy we developed for our site, Earthsayers.tv, voices of sustainability. And, yes, sustainability is a whopping big subject, but this only means your taxonomy may be easier to prepare and follow. Call for help so you use a keyword strategy thought 2012 to increase your page rankings on Google and YouTube search.

A taxonomy is a classification system with ordered categories and, if necessary sub-categories.

Here is a good article by Mark Nunney (April 2011) of Wordtracker written for editorial folks and content creators.

Ruth Ann
415-377-1835

What Do Employers See on Your Facebook Page?

Culled from a recent article in Mashable Social Media by Sarah Kessler on How People look at Your Facebook Profile - Literally.  Here's the heat map, red being hot, from the folks at Eye Track Shop.

Sarah's summary is worth memorizing because it's not much different for other kinds of sites as well when it comes to positioning information on the page.

• Profile pictures matter. The site feature that attracted most attention on Klout, Facebook and StumbleUpon was the profile photo.
• Job title garnered more attention than profile photo on LinkedIn. In fact, it got more attention than anything else on the page.
• Who you know gets noticed. Even if for no better reason than their placement on the page, people do look at those little thumbnails of friends that appear on many social profiles. You can see this in the data from the Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Klout profiles.
• Content on top wins. The further something is down a page, the fewer number of people look at it. This was true on both content-focused profiles such as Pinterest and Digg as well as socially focused profiles such as Facebook. On the Twitter and YouTube profiles, the effect was less extreme.

Another story suggests that "Having an active presence on Facebook is certainly a great start for employers looking to attract and communicate with young talent" meaning that for students, that profile picture better be an attractive one.  Facebook is where (many) employers prefer to connect with you, rather than on LinkedIn, according to the research by Potential Park.

Social Media Success Factors

From Selected Insights from booz&co. with Buddy Media study, Campaigns to Capabilities, Social Media and Marketing, 2011. Have a champion, support from above, culture, education, training....

Never has it been so important for marketing professionals to have a firm grasp of Web 2.0 tools and technologies, especially those who have a mission to create a more sustainable future. 81% are looking to measure social media’s impact on advocacy.

Whitepapers are Extremely Influencial

A recent study of B2B technology buyers by Eccolo Media as reported in the October 26th Media Post Research Brief indicates "the influence of all collateral types is on the rise." 

When asked to describe the influence of a white paper on the purchasing decision, 65% of respondents rated them as “very” to “extremely influential” in 2011, as compared to 41% of respondents in the 2010 survey. When asked to compare the perceived influence of content types relative to one another, respondents still seem to regard the white paper as superior to other forms of collateral.

And video and audio keep rising to the top as the Web moves out from under the blanket of text.
Eccolo Media helps technology companies strategize, plan, and develop highly effective marketing content.

While whitepapers have always played a major role in the technical sale  they are also very important in other B2B marketing situations where they may be called a case study, brief or a report. The purpose is to provide more detailed and objective information to the buyer of a more technical or professional nature.  Recently we published one for a client in the health and wellness category targeting chiropractors, physical therapists, and yoga teachers to better understand the anatomy of our approach, Structural ReAlignment Integration (SRI).  In addition to offering it in email and mail the whitepaper works well as an offer in social media, especially on the Facebook fan page and, of course on one's Website.