News

The new age of internet journalism began this week as the legendary Rolling Stone magazine became one the first well known magazines to start charging people to view content on their website. This came as quite a shock to many, that a magazine known as a leader in counter-culture and that at times has been quite controversial,has decided to do this.

The new site they launched this week, full of new features including “Rolling Stone All Access” which, if you pay, allows you to view the whole of the Rolling Stone archives. I have to say that is pretty cool, a number of greats have written for the magazine in the past including Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs and P.J. O’Rourke. And the covers (remember the Britney Spears one?)are a talking point by themselves. Of course nothing comes for free, so why shouldn’t we have to pay a bit to view it?

However with the new site, although a lot of the basic stuff from the homepage, like celebrity news, photographs, previews will remain free, if you want to read full features from the current issue, you will have to pay to do so.
The decision for Rolling Stone to do this, hasn’t gone unnoticed. Media insiders have been divided for months about whether charging for content is to only way to sustain expensive, high -quality journalism or whether it will just make readers turn to free rivals instead. I suppose only time will tell if it will be beneficial for Rolling Stone or not. At the moment, I’m inclined to think that people would just go elsewhere. I know I would, unless I knew there was no way I could read that information anywhere else. But surely people will find a way of cheating the system and making it accessible for everyone?

The Times has also announced that they will start charging for access to their site in June. Again, I’m really not sure that will work because people will just go and get their news free, elsewhere, won’t they? You can pick up a free paper on the tube, so why would you bother paying to view it online? Their argument is that the free news just won’t be of the same quality of journalism, because they won’t be able to pay their writers as much. They do have a point, the Metro isn’t the greatest journalism ever and The Evening Standard is going rapidly downhill. But they are also promising lots of exciting extras for those who pay to view the site, to try and entice you.

So what do you think, will you pay?

Ok seriously. You turn your head for two seconds and there it is: another product from Google. As it happens, I was thinking about creating an entry based on an article I read about Googling v Binging when BUZZ, out of seemingly nowhere, pops up. Following the Tweets and FB comments along the way, the biggest questions seem to be ‘What is it?’ and ‘Are you going to use it?’

Upon its release and my discovery of said release, Buzz had not been activated on my Gmail account, but within about an hour it was (upping my Google paranoia). Since then (it’s been three days) the majority of posts I’ve seen have come from Mashable. Mashable and I are really developing quite a relationship, I’d say. Good old Pete. I commented on a couple of their posts, read a bunch of the articles about Buzz that they have posted, read a couple more articles from other sources and have basically been sitting on the topic for a couple of days.

I must admit that I’m starting to feel anxiety over the pressure to ‘get’ new products and understand their usefulness. This anxiety is greatly reduced as I read comments on FB status and within Twitter – my personal fave at the moment is from John_Cleese: ‘Do not, I repeat, do not, confuse me with this Buzz stuff’. You said it, John. First reviews indicate that it doesn’t integrate with FB, as Twitter does, and as AOL is starting to as well. However, Buzz does integrate with Twitter so your Twitter posts can automatically go out to your Buzz contacts, but that’s not 100% integration so you still have to have both accounts. The question remains, why would I start using Buzz when I already have Twitter? Because it’s integrated into my gmail? Well…hmmm. I’m already annoyed that the few responses to comments I have made have gone directly into my email (you can set up a filter and that won’t happen, but I think messages should, by default, land in a separate location. This makes me want to treat Buzz like email, or IM. And, as if to illustrate this, when I posted ‘Why would I use Buzz over Twitter?’ the response I got was from a friend (who doesn’t use Twitter) saying ‘So we can talk like this now, too’. I had to explain that if she wanted to talk, we could IM through gmail, email through gmail, or even speak through gmail, but that Buzz was meant for a different purpose. The purpose that Twitter has already established, I think. Why didn’t Google just BUY Twitter? Furthermore? Visually, Buzz is messy. Following Mashable means that I have to scroll, forever, to get to other posts from my other contacts. On top of Mashable’s posts, I also see all of the 458 comments on said post. Seriously? No thanks.

Interestingly, while Twitter’s inception was based on the question ‘What are you doing?’, it seems to have evolved into ‘What’s going on?’. That seems to be where it’s most useful. Not to digress TOO much, but this morning, from the window of my hotel room, I could see a massive plume of smoke (that was precipitated by a huge flame) and wondered if it was a fire or if I was seeing things, again. Within 10 minutes of noting it, Newyorkology retweeted a post that there had been a transformer explosion, causing a fire in the exact location where I had seen the smoke (and fire). Further proof I can be as nosy (and lazy) as I want from the couch of the hotel room.

All this to say that if Twitter can deliver that to me – faster than a Domino’s pizza? Why would I switch to Buzz. Just so I could start saying “I’m going to Buzz that”, I guess. I never have been a fan of the Twitter usage of the word ‘Tweet’.

So, Rage Against The Machine has snatched UK’s beloved Christmas number one spot from X-Factor winner Joe McElderry.

When Jon and Tracy Morter organised a Facebook group last month their sole aim was to end the monopoly Simon Cowell and his X-Factor buddies had on the coveted UK Christmas single. What it turned out to be was something slightly bigger.

For those of you who somehow missed this story. Jon and Tracy Morter are a couple from Essex who started a Facebook group called “Rage Against The Machine For Christmas Number 1” because they were “fed up” with X-Factor’s four-year chart dominance during festive season.

“Fed up of Simon Cowell’s latest karaoke act being Christmas No 1? Me too … So who’s up for a mass-purchase of the track ‘KILLING IN THE NAME’ from December 13^th as a protest to the X Factor monotony?”. With these words, the battle began.

The idea was to encourage ‘real music’ fans to buy American rock-rappers Rage Against the Machine’s expletive-filled 1992 single “Killing in the Name Of” in the lead up to Christmas in order to beat McElderry’s “The Climb” to the Christmas number one spot.

So, why did they choose a 17 year-old song with the words “’F— YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME” repeated 17 times over a more appropriately-angled, perhaps family-friendly, song for the festive period?

“It’s a rallying cry,” Mr Morter told NME.COM. “It’s been taken on by thousands in the group as a defiance to Simon Cowell’s ‘music machine’.”

“We picked a song that was controversial and has a strong message, and it just seems to have captured everyone’s imagination,” Mrs Morter added.

When he first heard of the campaign, Cowell labeled it as “stupid” and “cynical” and claimed it was specifically directed at him. In the end though, Cowell was gracious in defeat and called Jon and Tracy personally to congratulate them on a “well-deserved win” and a “great fight”.

A great fight it was.

In the beginning, no one really expected them to actually pull this thing off. How could two, relatively average, people from the small town of South Woodham Ferrers in Essex possibly defeat the multi-million dollar empire of music mogul Cowell?

The thing is, this little Facebook group struck a cord with people. It was time to make a stand. It was time stick it to ‘the man’.

What this campaign demonstrated was, by using social media as the medium the ‘little guy’ can make a real difference in this world. When enough people get together and are motivated to really give something a shake, anything is possible.

“The campaign behind RATM is interesting in its own right. If only because, once again, it demonstrates the power — if it can be called that — of the emergent internet radicalism,” writes Phil BC at A Very Public Sociologist.

“With very little time and cost, people are able to register their protest/opposition without the rigmarole of standing in the rain, listening to boring speeches, and beating off the desperate efforts of Trot paper sellers.”

Captain Jako at Frank Owen’s Paintbrush has a similar view on the campaign, “It once again points to the democratic potential of the internet. A grassroots effort coordinated over social networking sites and with zilch budget has proved more effective than the largely traditional marketing techniques used by wealthy industry bigwigs like Simon Cowell to get even more money out of UK consumers.”

Just five years ago, a campaign like Jon and Tracy Morter’s was almost impossible to achieve. However, in Facebook, Twitter and other social media websites, society now has a very real vehicle for change.

Forty is the new Twenty, Fifty is the new Thirty, and so on. This year is seeing an unmistakable and much needed change in the perception towards the aged and ageing. Last week in The New York Times Magazine’s 9th Annual Year in Ideas, alongside Massively Collaborative Mathematics (Using a blog and blog comments to solve complicated equations…where was Google Wave when they needed it!), and The Google Algorithm as Extinction Model (Google, saving the world, once again) was a short piece entitled The Myth of the Deficient Older Person.

The tides are finally turning for older employees, perhaps too late for the thousands who have recently found themselves laid off and brushed off in the interview process (ask my father, who spent two years searching for an upper management position in technology. He recently retired instead). One more reason I’m glad the tides are turning? I’m tired of hearing my friends complaining about their parents being on Facebook. I doubt they’ll be part of the set who spends half their day updating their status while their bosses look on. IStrategy Networks reported that the month of August saw a 25% percent jump in users over 55. You can’t help but think that a huge chunk of a valuable workforce is wasting its talents on Facebook (not that mine aren’t)…

It’s a word I have dismissed from my vocabulary (and now, apparently, my spelling as well). It’s a subject that crops up every once in a while. This past week I caught a FB status update of a friend of mine. She mentioned that she’s getting ready to read the Privacy Act, she actually followed ‘Privacy Act’ with ’2001′, which is good because I was thinking ‘Isn’t that a Tom Clancy book’? The comments following her post quickly cleared up that silliness (I’m quite the spy/action book reader, truth be told) and I moved on. Almost within the same surfing breath, I came across an interesting piece on expectation of privacy.

The post quotes and comments on Google, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt’s ideas and beliefs on privacy, and FB. There’s some pretty interesting stuff in there. For me, I’m not so young that I don’t recall a life pre-internet and ‘letting my stuff all hang out’ (virtually speaking), but I’m not so old that I freak out every time I happen to search something on Google or order something online. There is something Eric Schmidt says that speaks to people like me: ‘”If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”…I don’t have any secrets. By design really. Well, not many of them. Of course, this comes from a girl who thought about doing a one woman comedy show on her love life. So I might not fall within the privacy-concerned median. Of course, there is something else he says, directly following that sends just a little shiver up my occasional-downloaded-pirated-movie self: “But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.”

It’s an interesting read. Thought provoking?

As Internet Marketing consultants, we spend a noticeable amount of time advising clients on how best ot use social media for marketing and branding purposes. Plenty of blog posts in our industry have documented the dangers of this–we virtually advise companies to let their employees build an online following in order to achieve a commerical goal; however, many companies let employees use personal accounts, tied to their personalities, avatars and non-commerical email addresses. If and when an employee and a business part ways, these social media accounts often leave with the individual. Bloggers involved in online marketing have covered this pretty well; however, there is another question  involved in social media brand building, and that is one of personal self control.

In a recent piece about the “outing” of the famous anonymous blogger Belle de Jour, Paul Carr at Techcrunch stated that “blogging is is, by nature, an egotistical activity”. In the past, Carr has also pontificated on how all forms of expression within social media, including activity on Facebook and Twitter, are egocentric activities. They are addictive, even to the less egocentric user. Once heavily involved in an online community which prompts a person to share details, photographs, opionions, etc, many people simply fall in love with the sound of their own fingernails tapping away on their keyboards.

For commercially-focused social media, this is dangerous. It takes a lot of self control to maintain professionalism in an online environment where personality-driven sharing is the norm, in-fighting is rampant and people are encouraged to be as open as possible. Combine this with the fact that simply blogging and tweeting about hard-line, corporate subjects ends up reading like a stream of press releases. Which doesn’t exactly invite readers and followers. If someone is to combine the benefits of social media usage with commercial success, they must be able to interact as humans without devolving into using their accounts to further their personal agendas.

It sounds simple enough, and yet people fail to keep their egos at bay when representing a brand all the time. Even when the brand is something close to the blogger or twitterer’s heart, it is important to keep a check on how your personality is influencing what you write and how you view the service. Is the service becoming an outlet for your own politics, posteuring or personal whims and fancies?

There is a balance to be struck between caring enough about the content you put online and caring to the extent that commercial ventures become infused with your personality. As an individual, it is not necessarily good for you to invest your entire life in an online sharing manner, such as Twitter. As a businessperson, you risk alienating an audience that sees your professionalism slip into egotism.

Google’s much-publicised efforts to turn YouTube into a profitable entity may be nearing an end with the company announcing that 1080p full resolution HD videos are on their way.

Earlier this year Credit Suisse analyst, Spencer Wang said that he believed Google was on course to lose $470.6 million this year mainly because of YouTube’s inability to generate revenue from advertising.

Surely YouTube’s irresistable global presence is enough to make Google an absurd amount of cash via advertisements? Apparently not.

According to the advertising experts, it is YouTube’s video quality that is holding it back in the advertising world.

At a recent press conference that hosted some of the leading minds in advertising, CEO of marketing giant GroupM Interaction, Rob Norman, put it bluntly when he described the technical quality of YouTube, and sites like it, as “complete crap”.

Media agency executive Robert Davis of OgilvyInteractive viewed it similarly, saying, “If somebody put that on TV looking that way, they’d be fired…Why is that acceptable online?”

Last week YouTube blogged the news that should change all that.

“We’re excited to say that support for watching 1080p HD videos in full resolution is on its way. Starting next week, YouTube’s HD mode will add support for viewing videos in 720p or 1080p, depending on the resolution of the original source, up from our maximum output of 720p today.

As resolution of consumer cameras increases, we want to make sure YouTube is the best home on the web to showcase your content. For viewers with big monitors and a fast computer, try switching to 1080p to get the most out of the fullscreen experience.”

While YouTube’s announcement focus’s on the benefits for its users, there is no doubt they will be licking their lips at what the change will mean for them.

Advertisers have applauded YouTube’s latest move. After hearing the announcement, Mr Davis told Beet TV that “this is very good news for the industry”.

“As the visual experience becomes more satisfying, the greater the interactive potential becomes for brands ready to play in the content space. For years, we have been forced to build interactive experience around severely limited, technologically inferior video. Not any more.”

So YouTube has given advertisers what they’ve asked for. Now, can they turn this phenomenon into the cash cow it probably deserves to be?

Check out one of YouTube’s full HD videos below

Or click through and watch the Official Toy Story 3 Teaser Trailer in HD

On Friday www.AllFacebook.com reported that Facebook has now surpassed 325 million users, in fact, more users than the United States has citizens (304 million as of the 2008 census reports). Facebook itself reports that over 70% of its users are outside the US, not surprising when you consider that only approximately 21% of US citizens have a passport and in my own personal experience I have found travel to be the quickest way to make new friends and Facebook the best way to keep up with those new friends and the ones I have stateside.

The United Kingdom gained the most new users of any European country last month, with 1.98 million new people using the site. It continues to be the single largest country for Facebook on the continent, with 22.6 million monthly active users. Behind the three Scandinavian countries mentioned, it has the fourth-highest-penetration rate, at 36.9%. Meanwhile, France and Italy both grew by more than a million users, with Turkey, Spain and Germany close behind.

Meanwhile Facebook gained more than 2 million new people across Latin America and the Caribbean in September to reach 35.4 million monthly active users.

Facebook also reports that its fastest growing demographic is in users over 35, and Istrategylabs.com reports that in the 6 month period ending July 4th, 2009 Facebook saw a 513% growth in 55+ year old users. Being a hair’s breath away from 38 myself, I’ve found in the last year and a half I have had a decreasing amount of conversations with friends who claim they are ‘too old for Facebook’, and of those who have joined of late, they certainly get their Facebook on in your average day. I suppose the question becomes where’s the ceiling? I guess we’ll see.

After months of planning – the greatest part of which was debating the best type of coffee machine to install: Dura – I’m pleased to say we’ve brought together an exciting group of people to make up our More Digital team.

Between online marketing and branding, business innovation through technology, and some of the best commentators in social media, we have the right mix of expertise to make a difference to our clients. We want to keep the news fresh and meaningful, and use our knowledge to help you build on your marketing strategy.

This blog will be all about ideas that can become a practical part of how you engage with your customers.

We look forward to chatting!

Sarah Daly