Brand Central Station

It seems like about half the PR-related tweets on Twitter are about … you guessed it, Twitter.  Well, Twitter and social media.

But just like bloggers like to write about blogging, it seems Twitterers like to micro-blog about Twitter.  Not that there  isn’t some interesting things to note about the service or those who use it.  Just from today’s traffic, I found the following articles of interest:

Who uses Twitter?  According to this page in Quantcast, 53% of the Tweeps out there are female and more than 70% of them are between the ages of 18 and 49.  Eight in ten Twitter users are white and three out of four make in excess of $30k a year.

Twitter currently ranks in the top 250 sites on the ‘net and reaches over 6.1 million people (uniques) every month who visit an average of eight times per month.

Social Media At Work reports that Twitter has now passed the New York Times in traffic.

And while Google’s mantra is to do good (or at leat not to do evil), there are apparenty a few folks who don’t carry that standard over to their Twitter usage – judging from the subject of this page on DiGorno’s plans to deliver pizzas to influential Tweeps.  As blogger Matt Rhodes points out, it’s a little weird that the “not delivery” pizza is planning on delivering pizza to catch a buzz on Twitter. 

Talk about half-baked.

And finally, there’s this broad look at social media (in general) and Twitter specifically defined as the “best”in social media marketing.  This is an informative article, well worth the read.  And the sites it links to are worth bookmarking in your browser for future use.

Enjoy the weekend.

Ragan.com just published a very user-friendly post about Twitter for those who are intimidated by it.

I’ve also been talking to some self-professed “Twitter experts” who have offered to answer your questions here at Brand Central Station, so if you have a Twitter question, send it to me and we’ll post the answers every Friday.

And don’t forget you can follow Brand Central Station on twitter by clicking our Twitter Feed in the right hand column and adding it to your RSS reader.

Keep on Tweetin’

Astroturfing is bad … and there are plenty of published floggings of PR firms guilty of “over-enthusiastic” shilling for clients.  Enough, in fact, that many PR folks are viewed with disdain by journalists and bloggers.

There’s no doubt that PR firms that plant good reviews on blogs, write letters to the editor in support of their clients, etc. – and don’t identify themselves as agents for their clients are stepping over an ethical line.  But what do you do when you find bloggers (and journalists) who offer to provide positive reviews and/or coverage at a price?

Danny Brown, social media maverick and PR guy, posted an example of this on his weblog yesterday and it deserves further review and comment.

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Online banner ads have been taking a beating.  Not just recently, but over the past few years.  Click-through rates on banner ads stink in the metrics-heavy world of online advertising.  The experts will tell you that search advertising is the place to be.

Then comes a new study, released on Friday afternoon, that draws a connection between click-through rates on paid and organic searches and the presence of display ads for those brands.  According to the study conducted by Specific Media, the results showed a 155% performance improvement by search ads when display ads promoting those brands were running.  The greatest impact on search was in travel and tourism, where exposure to display ads boosted click-throughs by nearly 300%.

Here’s a link to the story that ran on the BtoB Magazine website.

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We don’t often report hard news – but the news of the Tribune Company possibly filing for bankruptcy caught our eye this weekend.  Crain’s Chicago Business relayed a report from the Wall Street Journal – so the buzz machine is in full gear, that’s for sure.  You can read it here.

What impact will a bankruptcy filing have on the Chicago Tribune or LA Times?  It really depends on what kind of filing Zell & Company pursue.  But if anything, this tells us die-hard Cubs fans that Zell is really serious about selling the team and generating the kind of cash he needs to pay $1B in interest and an upcoming $512M debt payment this coming June.

There seems to be a lot of death in the media business lately.  There’s the deathwatch conducted daily via @themediaisdying on Twitter, there’s the whole “Social Media is killing PR” meme and my screed that actually Social Media is killing Journalism.  Now Ken Dardis, blogger at Audio Graphics, weighs in on the death of radio as we knew it.

Ironically, Ken may be the “most right” out of all of us.

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Last year’s New England Patriots went the entire NFL season without a loss.  A perfect 16-0 and then blew it in the Super Bowl.  Not since 1972 has a team gone without a loss in the National Football League.  That team, the Miami Dolphins won the Super Bowl and still sits as the only team to accomplish that feat.

What most people don’t remember, though, was that just four years later there was another perfect season in the NFL.  That year, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers went 0-14, doing the perfect season “in reverse.”  That is also a record that stands unmatched.

Until now.

The lowly Detroit Lions stand a fair chance of running the table for the rest of the season and racking up sixteen losses in a row.  That would put them ahead of the ’76 Bucs (the NFL regular season was stretched from 14 to 16 games a decade or so ago), but leave them far short from the ’76-’77 Tampa Bay franchise record of 26 lost in a row.

But in case you were concerned about the Lions, don’t be.  These guys are truly terrible.  So bad, in fact, that the NFL is now reportedly considering stripping the franchise’s traditional Thanksgiving Day game from the team and awarding it to a pairing that would be more competitive.

While some of us grew up on a holiday tradition of watching the Lions stink it up at Ford Field every Turkey Day since 1934, this is a purely business matter for the league.  The ratings for this past game (against the Tennessee Titans) were off 22% from the year before.  It’s kind of sad when you remember that the 1965 Thanksgiving Day game between the Lions and Baltimore Colts was the first color television broadcast of an NFL game.

Ad Age Global reported that more than 400 “hooligans” crashed Georgina Hobday’s 16th birthday party in Brighton, England after she advertised it on Facebook.  The report in the UK’s Daily Express, said the group of party crashers included a 20-strong gang of thugs known as the Facebook Republican Army.

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Intersting news breaking this week about the use of mobile phones in the US.  Apparently, like much of the rest of the world, a majority of Americans now carry their cell phones with them “at all times” – even inside their homes.  This coming from a study released this week by Knowledge Networks.

In other parts of the world, where the hard wiring required for phones for the past 100 years ran up against ancient buildings, incredibly dense populations or remote locations, mobile phones were often adopted as the appliance of choice for people who wanted to stay in touch.  The distribution of phones in countries like Japan and Germany lead phone companies in those countries to adopt a later, more versatile standard for mobile communications – resulting in an explosion of SMS and other mobile communications streams.

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Giant book publisher, Random House, announced on Monday (11/24/08) that it had digitized an additional 8,000 titles, bringing its electronic library to nearly 15,000 properties.  Although digital books only account for approximately 1% of the publishing market, growth of the segment has taken off due to the agressive sales of the Kindle reader from Amazon.

So, from a consumer’s point of view, what are the advantages of ebooks versus the non-virtual product made of paper, ink and binding glue?  According to Random House, the advantages include:

Portability: You can download several eBooks to your handheld for vacations and business trips.

Convenience: You can download hundreds of eBooks to your computer and create a library specific to your own interests.

Special features: eBooks have searching capabilities that print books do not. You can electronically underline, highlight, and search for specific words and terms.

Cost: eBooks are priced less than their print equivalent.

Instant gratification: eBooks are delivered instantaneously. You can search for an eBook, purchase it, and download it all in a matter minutes or even seconds.

But what about for marketers? 

First off, the ebook format reduces the “friction” associated with self-publishing.  There are plenty of bloggers and other experts who have generated enough content that a little editing is all that’s needed to have a manuscript ready to be turned into an ebook.

On the other hand, though, marketers may find the ebook format offering additional possibilities for clients: mainstream ebooks may start to contain more “product placements” (i.e. mentions of a product along with a bit of detail of how the product is used) or streaming or updatable content to keep them current (via RSS or other syndication technology).

That same kind of updatable content may form the basis for ecatalogs whose content and prices may change based on stock availability.  Social media mechanisms like user feedback and consumer reviews may be built into travel or consumer product ebooks down the road.

The point is this: consumer adoption of these marketable extensions of the ebook depends on one, major thing – the circulation of popular titles in the ebook format.  Random House appears to have made a significant step in that direction.

What do you think?

If you’re going to speak on behalf of a client or your company, you have to make sure nothing gets in the way of your message.  And that includes your fashion sense (or lack thereof).

Tami Kou, the lead media trainer at LaBreche in Minneapolis recently contributed a piece on what to wear (and what not to wear) to PRNews.  Here are a summary of her tips:

• Avoid small-checkered patterned prints. The camera has a difficult time focusing on the print, making it hard for viewers to look at.
• Don’t wear large, flashy or clunky jewelry. Oversized jewelry not only overshadow your message, the noise of it can be picked up on your microphone.
• If you’re wearing a jacket, pull it tight and sit on the back of it. This gives you a much sleeker look and more polished presence.
• Not sure what color to wear? Stay away from white, unless you’re wearing a colored jacket on top. White tends to wash you out. Instead opt for French blue. There’s a reason why it is the backdrop for nearly all presidential debates. That’s because it looks great on all. 

Tami also reminds us:

Television is a visual medium and people are listening with their eyes just as much, if not more so, than they are with their ears. [So,] remember that you’re representing your company’s brand and first impressions count. Make sure that your attire reflects that. If you have a hip and trendy message, then a traditional navy blue suit isn’t the outfit that is going to convey that message. What does your outfit say about you before you utter a word? Are you traditional and conservative or innovative and edgy?

Think this is all a bunch of nonsense?  Just remember how the press obsessed over the wardrobe of candidates Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin during the primaries and election. 

And for men – think back on the number of times some rube in a ball cap and wife beater t-shirt was interviewed on the devastating impact of a flood or hurricane.  Was his message as effective as the golf shirt-wearing state officials or uniform-clad emergency responders?  Which guy gets lampooned on Leno or Conan?

Tami is right when she says people “listen with their eyes” when it comes to television. 

And for those of you who want to be company spokesmen but can’t pull off the clean dress shirt look?  Stick to radio.

Last week was Adweek’s big week.  The big three-o. 

Alison Fahey provided the requisite “look back” editorial to kick the whole thing off.  More impressive was the celebratory web site launched last Monday.  (See it here.)