Posts Tagged ‘@blogtillyoudrop’

Pass this to 10 friends, or else

July 28 2009

The chain email you just received from your Grandmother will not go away anytime soon, unless she gets on Facebook.

Since the dawn of email came the dawn of chain emails. Helpful chain emails debunk myths, share myths, pictures, stories, jokes, political rants, nasty gossip and more. However, the dawn of Facebook changes all that.

Instead of long emails forwarded so many times you have scroll to page 5 for the actual content, we have quick-hitting, truncated bursts of information. “Become a fan” takes care of just about anything fit for chain email.

Do you want to protest the amount of special sauce on a Big Mac? No problem. Start a group of People Against Big Mac Sauce, start sharing and build a fan base.

Mashable’s Adam Ostrow shared the results of an AddToAny analysis of its own data. Disclosure: The company presumably has some interest in shared content via social media. They’ve made it their business. Still the results are easy to believe when taken at face value. AddToAny’s database should be the topic of another email. Owning that data, seeing those trends sounds like a gold mine to me.

We didn't start the fire.

Facebook leads all comers with 24% of the “shared” content on the web. Harnessing that word-of-mouth opportunity could obviously be a coup for mainstream and guerilla marketers alike.

Email and Twitter finish ten points down, but the three account for just under half of all shared content on the web. The long-tail includes Yahoo that beats MySpace that beats MSN that beats Delicious that beats Digg that surprisingly beats Google. Well, it surprised me.

Lolly’s Blog Till You Drop! blog claims work-related emails account for 99% of her inbox. Though I still see a fair number of FW: FW: RE: FW: RE: FW: Funny Pictures From Redneck Picnic-type chain emails, I will admit a decline.

A while back our client needed a little design work for a new web app called Start-a-Fire. Check it out here. The chain email found a new home in this app and it’s easy to see a demographic easily engaged by this online social media tool.

In the end, email itself appears to be losing ground. Reply to social media via SMS. Tweets post to facebook. Tasks set by me or co-workers arrive as text messages. Sharing skips right past inboxes to phones. If there was/is value in chain email, it’s lost on me.

Is email on the way out the door? It’s not hard to imagine.

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Are 140 Enough?

May 18 2009

Keep your eye on a promising event coming to Southbank, London Wednesday. We recommend you follow the event here, and here, or here (Lolly always has something to say). The premise of the event is to bring together a diverse group of online personalities to discuss the impact of microblogging on mainstream media, pr, etc. If it lives up to the billing you should be able to follow the event in real-time from the comfort of your laptop.

photo courtesy: media140.com

photo courtesy: media140.com

These are some of the questions expected to be answered: Will professionals and amateurs alike provide an unfiltered, real-time account of news events? Are 140 characters enough? Will anyone be listening? Since our invitation to participate on a panel was lost in the mail, we summarized our answers below.

Yes. Amateurs and pros already committed to microblogging as a new news medium. In the 90’s a upper level journalism course titled, “The Death of Newspapers”, predicted today’s reality. Where newspapers failed, microblogging seems poised to grow and grow and grow. However, the demon that will kill all but the strongest newspapers–a solid revenue model–threatens to undo microblogging before it reaches full potential.

Microblogging fails to serve as an information destination. One hundred forty characters is a narrowcast that only gives one perspective to filter and process in real-time. Brevity does play a role in bringing topics, events and issues to the forefront just as above-the-fold headlines have done for years. Maybe that’s enough, for now, but there is danger in limiting your world view to those you follow.

Listeners, watchers, and readers supply the fuel for news media coverage, because they pay the bills. The advertising model used over the course of a traditional news cycle remains largely unchanged and no one seems to have an answer. If news becomes bifurcated and readership dispersed, advertisers have an opportunity to pounce. People may be listening in fewer numbers to more sources, but this presents some very real opportunities for the savvy direct marketer to deliver ads with surgical precision.

VLG believes direct marketing will play a huge role in the delivery of ads to these information cliques. Readers gravitate toward the news they want to hear and the issues they care about, which leaves the door open to one-to-one and one-to-several marketing. Microblogging feels a lot like another step in the evolutionary life of news media. We’re trying to take the next on the Dialog Marketing front.

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