(c) Can Stock PhotoSeveral reports, studies and news items may have slipped by unnoticed this week in the wake of bigger stories, like Facebook’s response to criticism for allowing offensive material to sneak through its filters. Not to worry! Every time I see an item of value to communicators, I cave it to my link blog at LinksFromShel.tumblr.com. I choose items from this collection to appear in the Friday Wrap, which begins below. If you find an item that should be included, send it to me via email or any other channel where we’re connected.
Photos resonate for newspapers…except one
Instagram has become an important channel for a lot of newspapers in ways communicators should note. “Instagram is so immediate and intimate that it creates this close connection with the user,” says Cory Haik, executive producer for digital news at The Washington Post (quoted in a Poynter piece by Meena Thiruvengadam). The Post’s strategy is to build community. The Chicago Tribune sets a weekly theme, asking users to contribute photos. “While we do post photos from staff photographers from big events, we spend much of our time focusing on weekly themes and showcasing the photos of the people who engage with us,” social media editor Scott Kleinberg said. NBC News and ProPublica are other news organizations making use of photos. But the Chicago Sun-Times apparently doesn’t see much use for the surge in social visual communication. The venerable Windy City publication and its sister suburban properties have eliminated their photography staff, shifting the burden of photos to reporters covering stories. About 30 photographers lost their jobs, according to Lynne Marek, writing for AdAge, who also notes that reporters are being asked to shoot video, as well. In addition to cost-cutting, the rationale is based on “bolstering our reporting capabilities with video and other multimedia elements.”
Companies in controversial sectors are best at digital PR
Companies in controversial business sectors, along with those that have gone through reputational damage, are generally the best at digital corporate communications, according to the 2013 Financial Times Bowen Craggs Index of corporate Web effectiveness. The study, now in its seventh year, found that eight of the 10 top performers fit into one of these categories. “Our research and analysis shows that companies operating in industries with a high-risk of reputation-threatening events use web channels more effectively than other sectors,” according to David Bowen, senior consultant at Bowen Craggs & Co (as reported by Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog. “Banks are the exception—our findings show that despite being hit hard by a series of recent crises, the world biggest banks have yet to master truly effective online communications.” The report also finds that companies are integrating social media alongside other channels.
Senior leaders expect their CEOs to be social
Most executives think their CEOs should actively participate in social media. Improved reputation, better business results and higher levels of employee engagement are the outcomes they envision from a more engaged leader, according to a study from Weber Shandwick that demonstrates “that social media is quickly becoming a critical leadership tool,” according to Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog. “CEOs are now expected to be chief content providers for their companies. Social media is not only an efficient and engaging way to relay information but is also linked in executives’ minds with being a better leader,” said Leslie Gaines-Ross, Weber Shandwick’s chief reputation strategist, in a news release. While the survey reveals no clear reason for participation, the list of reasons shouldn’t surprise anyone: it’s not a standard practice in the region or industry, the CEO sees no return on investment, there is no perceived demand, or it’s just too risky. Most of these categories of resistance start with the CEO him or herself.
Pinterest reveals its business model
The growing importance of images on the Web was bolstered by remarks from Pinterest at its first-ever partner event in New York last week, where co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann insisted the site is not competing with Facebook, twitter or even Instagram. Its competitors, he said, are Google and other search utilities. “While most people use Google for factual answers,” writes Adage‘s Eric Fulwiler, Pinterest is about the search for inspiration, helping people discover the things they love through other people. And with a mission like that, we start to get a clearer sense of how the company’s business model will evolve.” Pinterest will help people discover things they love, which could result in a purchase or other action. “It’s about demand generation instead of demand fulfillment,” Fulwiler says. The evolution Pinterest is tapping, he adds, is from the factual to the inspirational, which positions Pinterest well to tap into the rise of social visual communication. Writes Fulwiler, “Images are the key value getting exchanged around the social web, which has real implications for how we understand and leverage search engine optimization. Search is increasingly tied to social media and content, a trend that has people increasingly talking about not SEO but SAO—social aggregation optimization.”
More than half of companies use internal social media tools
Enterprise computing is becoming a bastion of social media, according to a new study from HR consulting firm Towers Watson, which surveyed companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Instant messaging—a technology that emerged before social media—is the most commonly used social tool, with 77% of respondents saying it played a role in their companies. Streaming audio and video was used in 66% of companies, according to a Technorati report by Adi Gaskell. Employee blogs, employee profiles and social networks also made frequent appearances in the survey results. Consistent with the results of other studies, though, the Towers study found adoption by employees remained low. I have argued repeatedly that the slow uptake of social tools by employees is the result of a focus on deployment instead of adoption.
Reddit emerges as key traffic source for news sites
Here’s good news for content marketers. If they get good really, really good at what they do—especially the brand journalism component—they could end up attracting a lot of visitors to their content from community news site Reddit. That’s the experience in the news media, where a lot of traffic is coming from Reddit. Editors everywhere are seeing Reddit climb precipitously in their rankings of referral sites, according to a Poynter article by Kelly McBride. Some publications are posting their articles to the appropriate subreddit when the content is aligned with that readership’s interests. Says the Denver Post’s Dan Petty, “That’s where the real work comes in—cultivating that reputation with good posts that always aren’t your own. Not unlike Twitter, but even more niche than that.” I don’t know a lot of communicators posting their content to Reddit, but it makes huge sense. The Poynter article includes a list of best practices for news organizations that could be applied to PR and marketing operations without altering a word.
Facebook introduces Verified Pages and Profiles
They’ve been around on Twitter for what seems like forever: Verified Accounts, those seals of authenticity Twitter assigns to profiles of famous or popular people. Now they’re coming to Facebook for both pages and profiles. “This is clearly a straightforward copy of Twitter’s own verified accounts,” writesTechCrunch‘s Darrell Etherington, “and even features a similar, small blue checkmark to indicate that a person or business is indeed the legitimate account holder.” Facebook isn’t revealing its verification process, which has been introduced only to a small group of “prominent public figures (celebrities, journalists, government officials, popular brands and businesses) with large audiences,” according to Facebook.
Why pitch magazines? They’re a dead industry, right?
The dramatic decline in magazine subscriptions a few years ago led far too many pundits to proclaim that the medium was dead, a victim of the shift to digital. Had they dug a little, they would have found the dip was comparable to dips in magazine circulation that occurred during other recessions. When money’s tight, magazine subscriptions are easily dropped. Now that things are improving, magazine readership is on the rise again, with overall readership among adults in the U.S. growing from Spring 2012 to Spring 2013, and digital readership nearly doubling. The total magazine audience grew 3% to 1.2 billion, according to Emma Bazilian writing in Adweek. Food magazines were the fastest-growing categories. Digital readership represents only 1.4% of all magazine readership, but it continues to grow quickly, from 9.2 million in Spring 2012 to 16.9 million in Spring 2013, an 83% increase. ESPN The Magazine reported the biggest digital readership with an audience of nearly 1.1 million. The death of the magazine has clearly been greatly exaggerated.
Penguin links new tech to old product with Storytime Hangout app
Book publisher Penguin’s children’s books have been read by parents at bedtime for years. Parents remain deeply involved in an experiment from the publisher to bring the books not just online, but to make them thoroughly interactive. And Google Hangouts—the video conferencing tool that is the best thing about Google+—is at the heart of the experiment. The Storytime Hangout app “relies on parents—obviously not children—having Google+ accounts,” writes the The Guardian‘s Suart Dredge. “The app uses their computer’s webcam to place them in the story, then overlays masks of the characters on top, with the aim being for kids and parents to act out the story while reading it.” Not a bad way to make an old technology relevant in a new-tech world. Have you given that kind of thinking to how some of your company’s products might be adapted to accommodate the latest technology trends?
HowDo guides are now embeddable
Berlin-based HowDo has offered an app that gave its iOS users a simple means for creating instructional storyboards based on a slideshow of images and a voiceover you record over your phone. The resulting HowDos were available only within the community until it launched recently on the Web with an added feature: You can now use the embed code from each HowDo to incorporate one of the guides into your own blog or website. David Meyer reports for GigaOm that an Android version is also in the works, which will lead to more than the current “tens of thousands” of users. But by making these clever little instruction guides available to anyone who wants to incorporate one, the company’s visibility could explode. In a culture where sharing drives conversation and engagement, creating embeddable content seems a wise move.