Journalism and Marketing Tools: Focus on Twitter

Hey Rizzn-ites,

This is a broad topic, really. Someone brought it to my attention this evening that I do an awful lot of evangelizing for Twitter amongst my friends and associates, and I haven't really explained it very well to my inner circle.

Essentially, twitter is what is called "Status Micro-blogging." Don't worry. The term didn't make much sense to me either. I remember being in an airport or somewhere and reading a Wired review of the service, and then getting home, and every single feed on my list was talking about how great Twitter was, and how much of a huge hit it was at the SXSW conference, and it's the next big thing.

For someone who's such an avid user of technology, I must admit that whenever I hear that something is the 'next big thing', I get a little queasy in my tummy, and have an immediate desire to distance myself from said technology. Usually, I've learned, it's best to ignore this instinct. The same feeling I had about podcasting, I had about twitter. To me, it seemed destined to fail, especially since it revolved, at least in part, in sending tons of SMS messages to people's mobiles. In a world where text messages can add literally pounds to your phone bill, set aside dollars, I can only imagine how poorly the service is going to do.

As with podcasting, however, I was sorely mistaken in my initial reaction.

I'll describe Twitter from my perspective, which is that of an independent content producer, and how you can do the same as I.

Robert Scoble often describes his usage of Twitter as 'constant chat room.' This isn't far off the mark. What twitter does, is take your friends (who can almost effortlessly create an account), and make it so that any time they send a message to Twitter, it appears in your favorite chatting mechanism, be it IM or SMS on your phone.

Now you've got the overview, let's graduate you to power user.

At first, it's not going to seem like much, especially if you don't spend a lot of time on IM. My best suggestion to you, is if you're not there already, always keep a GMail window open. It's hands down (in my opinion) one of the best email utilities out there, and it allows you easy, unobtrusive access to GTalk. Add twitter functionality to GTalk through the twitter settings interface, and you're hooked up.

There's a couple things you'll want to do right off the bat. First of all, go to your favorite bloggers or new media producers in your niche. For me, it's obviously technology, so I'll use that as an example. I went to the bigger names in tech, like Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, CC Chapman and Steve Rubel, and then added them to my twitter friends. Don't worry if some of them don't add you back (Scoble will, but he'll add just about anyone, so don't think you're all that special!).

Things will start moving a bit faster now. At this point, you'll want to turn off the DING every time there's a new message.

What are you looking for with this? This puts you a step closer to getting your finger on the pulse of your niche. Depending on what that is can mean either connecting with folks who are movers and shakers, or it can mean having that scoop ten minutes sooner than the next blog, which can make or break you on traffic.

You'll also start to notice conversations breaking out on twitter, signified by tweets with @username. If it interests you, you may want to follow that person (you can do this easily now, from within GTalk by typing "follow [username]". Chances are that for every two or three you do that with, you'll gain a follower yourself. Now you're building a platform from which to speak to larger and larger groups.

Before we move on to what you can do with your platform, let's get into the "track" feature. By simply typing "track [keyword]" into twitter, now you'll be alerted anytime anyone on twitter talks about a given keyword. It's a good idea to go ahead and track your all variations of your user name, company name, and given name. Chances are, at some point, someone will talk about you, and you always wanna know when that happens, right?

It's not just for ego-searches, though. I like to be up on all the gPhone news, so I track gPhone. I've found a few juicy rumors to track down that way using this feature. Marshall Kirkpatrick claimed last week that Twitter is responsible for 5 of the last 11 leads he used for ReadWriteWeb.com stories.

The other stuff you'll find is that it's a great platform for broadcasting your message, be it blog or podcast. RSS is your friend, as you know. That's why I suggest you stick your RSS feeds into RSS2Twitter. It reformats your links so that they fit into the character restrictions, and puts a short description of the items in your feed as they pop up.

You'll find, as you grow your Twitter network, that this will be one of the more valuable tools in your box.

It's late. I'm leaving things out, undoubtably, but this gives you a starting point. EMail me with questions (and I know you will!).

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Podcast and New Media Expo: Day 2

Hey folks. I'm still virtually attending the PNME this weekend. You can too, if you head over to rizzn.com/pnme2007.

I'm more or less twittering everything I can about what's going on.

If I get a chance to, I'll try to aggregate my twitters and experiences into some blog posts. Stay tuned to the blog for that.

/rizzn

Want to be part of the Rizzn-ite army? Indoctrination instructions here.

HowTo: Attend (virtually) the Podcast New Media Expo

I'm (virtually) in attendance at the Podcast New Media Expo. Watching the keynotes and hanging out in the chat room is a distant second best to being there. Over the course of the day, I'm going to try to do some legwork on all the ways to attend virtually.

UPDATE: I'm building a little virtual attendance page.

Click here to join.

The UStream link has been moved to that page. If you have more ways to virtually attend, please let me know!

Join me, won't you?

/rizzn

Want to be part of the Rizzn-ite army? Indoctrination instructions here.

Grey Going Technicolor

A lot of my Rizznites out there are involved with my video initiatives, and have already embraced or are considering embracing video solutions for your old media content. For those of you who have not yet made the leap, here's a story about the New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal and their decision to go with video to supplement their other online content:

The New York Times will make the embed code of its video clips available to the public by early fall. This means that many of the paper's videos will be freely used and posted to blogs and Web pages.

This change will be implemented in Q3, according to Diane McNulty, a spokesperson for The New York Times.

Just yesterday, The Washington Post began to offer the code of its clips. Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal opened up it's code.

These big newspapers understand that gaining market share means making their content usable on many platforms, even if there is some degree of risk. There is upside, of course. Through this system, the pre-roll ads that are seen on the site are shared as well and viewed from wherever they are placed.

I think it's terrific that The New York Times is taking a page from YouTube game book of making embed codes available to everyone. After all, a good part of YouTube's success has come from the utility of providing embed code.

Below are links to a clip of comprised of two observers of the success of YouTube: Forrester senior Brian Haven and MIT Professor Henry Jenkins who head the Institute's Media Studies Program. They frame the success of YouTube and the power of sharable video.

The second clip is my interview with Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of Brightcove. I spoke with Jeremy in Boston earlier this year about Dow Jones and its plans to share the embed code.

http://www.youtube.com/v/DuWDnzfI98w
http://www.youtube.com/v/rpSbZAaquUk

If you've not yet made the leap to video, I strongly suggest you call me and see what I can do to help your business cash in on this trend. Give me a call at 903-705-9770.

Want to be part of the Rizzn-ite army? Indoctrination instructions here.

I Was The Guest!

Go check it out: I was on You Are The Guest Podcast. Didn't expect it to be out already, but looks like Bill got it posted before the weekend. I had a great time with him, and of course, I'm going to be doing RizWords with him on Monday. You'll not want to miss either of these shows.

We talked a lot about some of my passions: mostly about New Media and it's impact in social and political terms.

/rizzn

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech - EP35

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech
Episode 35 - download now - subscribe now - iTunes subscribe

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This is a story that really cracks the vernier on Obama's plastic smile. Underneath all that shiny new unspoiled politician lies the heart of... just another backbiting politician:

The Battle to Control Obama's Myspace
By Micah L. Sifry, 05/01/2007 - 11:15pm
In November 2004, Joe Anthony, a paralegal living in Los Angeles, started a unofficial fan page for then-newly-elected Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) on MySpace.com. Inspired by Obama's keynote address at that summer's Democratic convention, Anthony had never been politically active before. "I was just blown away," he told me. He put time into the site every day, answering emails from people wanting to "friend" the page, pointing them to voter registration information, and, once Obama threw his hat into the ring, telling them where to find out more detailed positions taken by the candidate.

By the time of Obama's official campaign announcement in late January, Anthony's Obama profile--which had the valuable url of myspace.com/barackobama--already had more than 30,000 friends, well more than the other contenders. Over the following weeks, it continued to grow at a rapid pace, generating lots of headlines about Obama winning the "MySpaceurl has only about 12,000. And it's under new ownership. Joe Anthony, one of the super volunteers of the Connected Age, has lost control of the page he started to the professionals on Obama's staff.

How all this happened is a complicated tale that is still unfolding, and none of the parties involved--Anthony, the Obama online team, and the MySpace political operation--emerge from this story unscathed. Speaking on background, Obama campaign staffers are spreading word that Anthony just wanted a "big payday." Anthony in turn has posted a missive on his blog (that was originally sent to me as an email) accusing the Obama team of "bullying...[and] rotten and dishonest" behavior. However one parses those accusations (more below), the Obama campaign's reputation as the most net-savvy of 2008 has taken a big hit. And MySpace executives have been forced to take extraordinary action to resolve a dispute between two high-profile users of their invaluable site, one a passionate volunteer with a huge network of friends and the other a frontrunning presidential candidate who has helped make MySpace a new factor in the 2008 contest.

primary." Yesterday, the profile had just over 160,000 friends. Today, that This is more politics than tech, but it caught my attention, and I thought it deserved to be addressed:

Top Hamas official: Kill all Americans (Jerusalem Post)
Sheik Ahmad Bahr, acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, declared during a Friday sermon at a Sudan mosque that America and Israel will be annihilated and called upon Allah to kill Jews and Americans "to the very Last One."

In "Advancing-New-Media" news:

Give bloggers Capitol access

This is the first article in a weekly series, exclusively in The Hill, exploring the recommendations of the Sunlight Foundation’s Open House Project, which advocates online transparency in Congress.

Members of Congress are increasingly turning to bloggers as a way to communicate about public policy. Yet these citizen journalists who cover Congress lack what most mainstream reporters in Washington take for granted: access to the U.S. Capitol.

According to the Sunlight Foundation’s Open House Project, a collaborative and bipartisan effort to increase the House of Representatives’ online transparency, Congress can take several simple steps to improve transparency and foster a new spirit of openness. Giving bloggers credentials to cover Congress would be a groundbreaking way to shed light on the inner workings of government.

The debate over bloggers and online journalists on Capitol Hill isn’t a new one. In recent years, they’ve clashed with congressional press galleries as the Internet has grown in popularity and prominence.

And in what is probably the biggest tech/politics story of the day:

Digg Surrenders to Mob

To say what happened today on Digg was a “user revolt” is an understatement. The Digg team deleted a story that linked to the decryption key for HD DVDs after receiving a take down demand and all hell broke loose. More stories appeared and were deleted, and users posting the stories were suspended.

That just got the Digg community fired up, and soon the entire Digg home page was filled with stories containing the decryption key. The users had taken control of the site, and unless Digg went into wholesale deletion mode and suspended a large portion of their users, there was absolutely nothing they could do to stop it.

Digg CEO Jay Adelson responded on the Digg blog earlier this afternoon but it was clear he did not yet understand the chaos that was coming. The post only added fuel to the fire. Just now, co-founder Kevin Rose posted yet again on the Digg blog, effectively capitulating to the mob’s demands: He says

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Until today, it seems, even Digg didn’t fully understand the power of its community to determine what is “news.” I think the community made their point crystal clear.

Vive La Revolution.

Has Blogging Reached It's Peak?

There's a lot of things I could talk about today. It's definitely been a hellish week for the ol' Mr. Rizzn here. A lot of my stress has been brought on by this guy, but I've gotten my nerdy revenge, with my smooth SEO skills. Doing a Google Search for who is now, I suppose, a declared nemesis of mine, will yield my account of his atrocious behavior at Rank 5. Go me!

It's not been all bad. I'm also at Rank 6 for this Google Search, which is a good thing (I was, but now I'm at 11 and 12).

At any rate, I picked up this story today from ValleyWag for today's RizWords. It all refers back to the State of the Blogosphere release by Technorati recently that noted the end or at least stall of the growth of the blogosphere. There's been a lot of talk as to why this has happened, but no real concrete theories that set well with me and go towards really hitting towards the heart of the issue.

As you real Rizzn-ites know, it's darn hard to create a viable business model that supports the participants in any Indy-Journalism venture. I've attempted to create several such ventures here .. the most recent of course being the Oblong Box network, ModernOpinion and PoddedMeat. Other similar ventures in the past were things like BlipMedia and even my own blog, Rizzn.com, what you are reading right now.

I've never really publicly discussed why these ventures have failed, but I'll bet the intelligent reader can guess: Money.

It comes down to money, and the inability to properly monetize the production process of producing quality online content. Let's go down my list of ventures, and explore the sticking points.

When I started BlipMedia, arguably one of my most successful projects, I was just in the right place at the right time with a good idea. It was a free podcast hosting company, with the added benefit of having instant updates available to the content producers - they didn't need to be in their studio to create podcasts... they could simply call in from anywhere they could find a telephone. This was a novel idea at the time, and that feature combined with there being free unlimited hosting made for an explosive growth on the site.

Unfortunately, then, as now, there was a real problem finding advertisers willing to speculate with their dollars on monetizing such a bleeding edge media. This fact, combined with a devestating hurricane that destroyed our office in Florida, meant we could no longer keep the service alive. If not for that, we might still be around today, and we might be breaking even - as of current, there isn't that many people willing to venture out in the podcasting market to advertise, although this is quickly changing now, thanks to the efforts of companies like TalkShoe, PodTrac, and Blubrry.

After that, I started Oblong Box - and this was the offer I put out to a bevy of writers: Have a free domain name, free hosting, and free design. All you must do is post to the blog. I had worked out a series of monetization deals with companies like Blogitive and PayPerPost that should have subsidized all my expenses, and put us way out on top. Unfortunately, as in the Blip days, Blogitive and PayPerPost were very slow to sign up new advertisers, additionally they created very complex and restrictive posting policies that more or less strangled our financial growth.

As a result, I was unable to pass the cash down to the writers quickly enough to keep them around, and one by one, they ended up dropping off the network, and consequently, we only have a fraction of the writers on the network who still write - those that write simply for writing's sake.

ModernOpinion was based upon the same principals, but with an optimized website and domain status in an aim to get around the restrictive policies that PayPerPost and Blogitive had instituted. Unfortunately, it was not enough, and despite investing hundreds in promotion and advertising on the site, the money was not enough to pay the writers, and much like OblongBox, they lost interest, and stopped writing.

PoddedMeat is a similar story, although technically the company is not dead, simply on hiatus. We tried another bleeding edge technology - video podcasting, right at the start of the video podcast craze that iTunes was attempting (and continues to) fuel.

Again, though, we could not find advertisers that would keep pace with production costs. Simply put, there are no ad agencies out there that can get enough money to subsidize these types of ventures. At it's peak, PoddedMeat's two shows were recieving in excess of 60,000 views/downloads a week. Unfortunately, this was not enough to entice advertisers into making the leap to the new medium.

There are simply not enough ways for the average blogger and podcaster out there to make enough money to justify their habit. As I have seen, only those with a true passion for writing, podcasting, or video podcasting will continue, regardless of what it pays. And, it would appear, there are only around 15 million of these people in the world.

15 million is a large number, though, isn't it? That's still a lot of people, and with that number, someone should be making money.

That's an excellent point, and several people are making money off this. Just not the people who are doing the bulk of the work (i.e. the content producers).

Digg, Google, PayPerPost, Blogitive - these are the people who make a lot of money off these bloggers. However, when it comes time to reward them, they are handed a pittance. As I've said on the show many times, my blog has been here for around 10 years. I've been monetizing it for about half that time, primarily with AdSense, although I've used PayPerPost, Blogitive, BlogAds, and other smaller services ad various points.

AdSense, on my best month, produced around $24.00, shortly after I broke the Christopher Walken story and posted the pictures I took of Suge Knight being hauled off to the hospital after he was shot in the leg. In total, I've recieved about $200 over three years from AdSense.

Blogitive produced me about $600 over five months.

PayPerPost produced me about $200 over two months.

BlogAds produced me about $24 over one year.

I produce consistent quality content and have a significant audience that reads my words, and many of my ventures have grown to the point where actual percentage points of the internet have been exposed to me (at least that's what Alexa says). I have my own wikipedia page, for cryin' out loud!

Despite this, the blogosphere continues to punish me monetarily. I'm stubborn enough to keep coming back.

If you're looking for your reason why the blogosphere is slow to grow, though, that's it.

/rizzn

All of you darn johnny-come-lately's

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re a Johnny-Come-Lately to the blogosphere, in relative terms (to one such as I, who have been blogging since before there was a blogosphere, or even a blogotrapazoid). Very few people, though, can say they are newer to the blogosphere than Jane Hamsher. She’s the creater of firedoglake.com, a blog devoted to the Scooter Libby trial.

The liberal elite are just all a twitter over this trial, while most of the rest of America are ambivalent at best. I, myself, am only slightly interested, having been exposed to the story by NPR, bits of CNN, and now US News and World Report.

The trial is a bore, and as it turns out, it’s strongly looking like Scooter isn’t going to be convicted of anything, and neither is anyone else in the Bush administration – but still that it’s in the headlines at all is doing great things for the anti-Republican, pro-Democrat sentiment, so the media props this story up and keeps it alive for all to see.

What is most interesting to me is the ways they are choosing to do so. It’s like the MSM finally got wind of this whole New Media thing, and now they are in a race to see who can do more New Media-friendly stories. Just the yesterday they launched into this whole spin-off story about how bloggers are being considered real journalists now, and how they are being mistreated by the judicial process (jailed for years without being charged for contempt of court and these sorts of things).

And now US News and World Report is writing about Jane Hamsher like she’s the first blogger to ever recieve press credentials.

Honestly, I don’t mind that stories are written about bloggers – I rather celebrate it. But when quotes like this are published:

“The Hollywood gene kicked in. It's very Shakespearean. There's Dick Cheney, the oily villain sitting there with a sneer on his face. There's Scooter Libby, the loyal soldier. There's the beautiful spy, her dashing ambassador husband, the journalists. It was such a good story. It did become, for a variety of reasons, the signature story of the blogosphere.”

Quotes like that burn my hide a bit. Just because you are a blogger and you’ve been thrown into the MSM doesn’t make you an expert on New Media. Have a bit of a sense of history, woman! The blogosphere was around much longer than you were, and it’ll be here when you’re done grinding your liberal anti-Bush axe.

How about all the old stories that define the blogosphere?

• Memogate
• Kate Moss’s Cocaine Thing
• Christopher Walken for President
• The 2000 Election
• The 2004 Election

I’m just saying. Nobody likes a know-it-all.

/rizzn