According to a Pew Research Centre study, print and radio continue to fade as a news source for people while online sources grow and television maintains its dominance. The study identifies a group it calls “Integrators” as a growing segment of media consumers who:
“…get the news from both traditional sources and the internet, are a more engaged, sophisticated and demographically sought-after audience segment than those who mostly rely on traditional news sources.
See the study here.
But how many people are going to end up disliking this tool?
With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube’s Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed. Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find.
With the Democratic presidential nomination finally wrapping up, the post-mortems on the nomination campaign are starting. Check out the New York Times on lessons of the campaign so far. And here’s a look at Bill Clinton’s impact on the campaign – hint: “YouTube moments” haven’t been flattering to Bill.
Ross Dawson on the impact search engine optimization is having on journalism.
This link is from April but it’s still important: how the Pentagon is using validators to shore up positive public opinion.
Reuters reports that an online poll sponsored by We Media/Zogby Interactive has 64 percent of Americans dissatisfied with the quality of journalism in their communities. Nearly half of the respondents said their primary source of news and information is the Internet, up from 40 percent just a year ago. Here’s the twist:
Howard Finberg, of the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, said the public often doesn’t understand that the sources they are accessing online such as Google News and Yahoo News pull stories from newspapers, television, wire services and other media sources. “It’s delivered in a non-traditional form, that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t traditional journalism underneath it,” he explained.
Meanwhile, Edelman Public Relations has published its 2008 “Trust Barometer” (this link goes to a PDF) which reports survey results indicate that blogs, video sites like You Tube and social media like Facebook as the least used and least credible sources for information about businesses. So what do people find credible on the Internet: increasingly, it’s Wikipedia.
This is a terrific exchange between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Debating at its best! (Clip linked from Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic)
1. The Year in Media Errors and Corrections – from Regret the Error
2. Voters prefer candidates who explain, don’t attack – New York Times
3. The future of media and advertising – from Business Pundit
4. Presidential candidates’ e-mail strategies – from the Washington Post
5. How did baseball handle the release of the steroid report? – from ESPN
This article in The New Yorker has absolutely nothing that is obviously about communications, but it is one of the most fascinating pieces I have read in a long time. In a way, it is about communications though: the power of simple, straightforward – even obvious – communication.
“In the Keystone Initiative’s first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated hundred and seventy-five million dollars in costs and more than fifteen hundred lives. The successes have been sustained for almost four years—all because of a stupid little checklist.”
Click here for the whole article by Atul Gawande.
Jason is looking for some help with a catchy slogan. How about: “Chuck Norris Approved“?
I saw in the news today that actor who played Mr. Whipple (“Please don’t squeeze the Charmin”) passed away. It got me thinking about great marketing slogans of the past. Think about it – can you name the companies behind these slogans?
“Don’t leave home without it.”
“It keeps going and going and going.”
“We bring good things to life.”
All say something — something about the product, and something about what they are trying to be. That’s what a slogan is all about.
I’m trying to come up with a catchy slogan right now — and it’s like squeezing blood from a stone. Something catchy, short, meaningful, andable to encapsulate a huge concept in less than 10 words. I’d rather write a speech!
If you want to think some more about slogans, check out the chapter “Be the Message” in Words that Work. It will help you drill down to the absolute core message a slogan should be.
Andrea Southcott, one of the finest advertising and marketing professionals I have ever met, has some sage advice on getting your marketing message out.
Getting heard in a society bombarded with noise from all sorts of media has become one of the leading challenges of all communicators today. There’s a multiplicity of communications channels that we have to contend with:
- Traditional media in the form of newspapers, television news and radio talk shows
- New media channels on the Internet including online-only news sites, blogs, email, news aggregators, and discussion forums
- Social media that ranges from good old-fashioned word-of-mouth to Facebook-style networks
- Traditional advertising in the form of 30-second TV commercials, billboards, print ads
- New advertising techniques in forms that don’t even appear to be advertising or that are tailored to individual interests (for more on the changing nature of advertising, see IBM’s new report, “The end of advertising as we know it“)
We ignore any of these channels at our peril and Andrea’s column in the Globe and Mail is a nice introduction to the principles we must keep in mind while getting our messages across.
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