Steve Dempsey

A scrapbook of thoughts on Media &tc.

[steevill]

How Facebook Joins users to businesses in three easy steps. From a TechCrunch article on Facebook and search.

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Vee Urgh

Commuting is going to get ugly.

what fresh hell is this pic.twitter.com/B7H0oxwgWe

— Adam Khan (@Khanoisseur) April 6, 2016

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Nice one Jessica Lvingston. 

1. Make something people want. 2. Stay focused. 3. Don’t worry about being a woman. 4. Measure your growth. 5. Know if you’re default alive. 6. Keep expenses low. 7. Fundraising gets harder.

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Excellent talk from Esquire’s David Granger on the power of the past and the value of a legacy. 

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The site is the Archive

This

journalism news in a nutshell : breaking news is mobile alerts, everyone reads and watches through social sites, your site is the archive.

— emily bell (@emilybell) March 24, 2015

Interesting call. Not sure if I fully agree with the archive analogy. But it's an excellent reframing exercise for journalists to reconsider how many readers interact with content on their sites. What analogy would I use? I think news sites function more like a version of both short term and long term memory, to which readers and commentators on social sites can refer - if they wish to do so. And it's worth remembering that there is an audience that's not following breaking news on social media. Bless them.

[steevill]

The excellent Amy O'Leary talks about how online habits are formed and what that means for news outlets at Narrative Arc Conference, Boston University, 2012.

[sarahmarshall3]

Image by Mark Hakansson on Flickr.

It’s a little over a year since I left my role as technology editor at Journalism.co.uk, reporting on innovation in the digital news industry, so I thought I’d reflect on what I learned during the two-and-a-half years I spent there.

Although I’d done a...

[steevill]

Bit of work required to get the next generation of Facebookers onboard with the social media giant. Overwhelming sense of meh from these kids. I wonder if they're representative?

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Brilliant TED talk by Jacek Utko a Polish designer who made some of Eastern Europe's newspapers more visually compelling and increased circulation. I've long thought that there's an argument for designers to be given more of a role in the honing of print publications on the shelves and online.

[steevill]

Sweet vintage ad (sarcastic pun intended) from Domino, which is still making a feature about the lack of Calories in sugar today. Go on. Have a few spoons of sugar. Your doctor will thank you.

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Ben says...

Here's a great presentation from Andreessen Horowitz's Benedict Evans on how the growth of mobile and the growth in technology are one and the same.

Mobile Is Eating the World from a16z

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Newspapers are old news

Here's a chart featured in a  Nieman Journalism Lab on Millenials and media. They used data from Comscore to rank 15 representative news sites by the percentage of their unique visitors who are 18 to 34.

It's interesting that so many of the heavy hitters aren't legacy news outlets. And if you think that's indicative of shifting media sands, check out this tweet from Guy Adams of the Daily Mail.

Just gave talk to son's class about my job. Me: "Can anyone tell me what a newspaper is?" Child: "something old people read."

— Guy Adams (@guyadams) October 21, 2014

[steevill]

"I just want to enjoy the commercial. I want to get the thing. We know the product is going to stink. We know that because we live in the world, and we know that everything stinks. We all believe, 'Hey, maybe this one won't stink.' We are a hopeful species. Stupid but hopeful. But we're happy in that moment between the commercial and the purchase. And I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-won earnings to buy useless, low-quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy."

Jerry Seinfeld on Advertising

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'ello 'ello

So there's a new social network. How 2009 can you get?

Here's ello's manifesto:

Your social network is owned by advertisers.

Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold.

We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.

We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate — but a place to connect, create and celebrate life.

You are not a product.

Little bit over the top isn't it? And then there's this rather obvious point.

If you hate advertising enough to pay for a social network without any, why wouldn't you just run ad block on Facebook?

— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) September 28, 2014

But not everything is as it seems. Here's some snippets from Ello's Privacy policy. 

"We may create anonymous records by excluding information (such as your name) that makes the data personally identifiable to you. We may use or share this anonymous data for any purpose".

"We may share your personal information with third parties under several circumstances, including (1) if you tell us it is OK to do so (2) if we believe that we need to do so by law (3) if we contract with a third party service provider to offer services for you — for example, with a credit card processing company if you decide to buy something through Ello.

Ello does not have any affiliated companies right now. But if we do in the future, we may share information with them, too."

Doesn't really sound like an anti-Facebook to me. 

[steevill]

There are no Absolutes

Convertro (a division of Aol Platforms) released a survey recently on the effectiveness of advertising on social networks. The approach was to We break out the different phases  in the path to purchase to show how different social networks performed at different points.; from first exposure to a brand, through to the final online message that seals the deal. They also accounted for a singular exposures to brands that led to a conversion. They found that YouTube led the way in making initial introductions and driving final sales. You can download the report for yourself. Here’s what some of their findings looked like.

I interviewed Convertro’s Jeff Zwelling for the Sunday Business Post about the survey. I wasn’t convinced of the value of this approach, so I asked him whether the focus on percentages rather than absolute values of conversions for each network gives the sense that all networks are equal, and whether it would have have been more instructive to give numbers rather than percentages? Here’s what he said:

I actually disagree with the latter point. The goal of the report is to provide qualitative guidance to marketers on what we’re seeing in terms of how social channels affect the purchase funnel that consumers go through. Using absolute numbers would provide a look at which channels saw the most activity across touch points, which would obviously skew towards more populated services such as Facebook and Twitter. As a marketer, you’re really interested in the former to understand how your social ad investments can go further.

Fair point, I think. That said, I’d still like to see the absolute numbers. 

[steevill]

Rebel Rebel

It seems like modern youths are confounding their seniors, like never before. Here's a graph from a Guardian article that states 16- to 24-year-olds are watching just 27 hours of TV news a year, compared to an average of 115 hours.  

While these changing media consumption habits are bad news for news outlets, they're even more confusing for brands trying to sell to 16 to 24 year olds. Here's a quote from a New York Times article about how marketers are struggling to get to grips with millenials. 

“Our whole consumer model is based on the baby boom,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist for Mesirow Financial. Now, the coming generation is “setting up a whole new consumer model.” Perhaps the biggest change is that today’s young adults — in part because they came of age in a harsher economic climate, in part because they have many more choices — are putting off major life decisions as well as the big purchases that typically go with them. As a result, their consumer behavior is unpredictable. “They’ve learned to live life in a different way,” Ms. Swonk said.

Personally, I find it gratifying that teenage and post-teen rebellion, which used to be confined to dressing outlandishly, has matured into undermining marketers, and manufacturers from the media to car makers.