Filed under: reader

The Evolving Role of Social Media in News Organizations [LIVE BLOG]

Media Summit 2011


We had a packed house in attendance for this year's Media Summit.

Click here to view this gallery.


For many news organizations developing digital strategies, the conversation has moved beyond questioning whether Twitter and Facebook presences are necessary.

Instead, social media has become a driving force for reporting initiatives and is seen as imperative for content distribution. Now media companies don’t just want to have a presence on the social web — they want to make the most of it.

That’s why some newsrooms have hired social media editors and community managers to guide their approach to social media. Still, these roles greatly differ from organization to organization.

Anthony De Rosa of Reuters, Drake Martinet of AllThingsD, Katie Rogers of The Washington Post and I, on stage at Mashable Media Summit, will attempt to define what a social media editor is and where the role is headed.

We’re bringing the panel to you via the live blog below. Follow along for quotes and commentary from Mashable editors on the ground at the Media Summit.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Goldmund

More About: community, journalism, News, reporting, Social Media

For more Business coverage:

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2011/11/04/social-media-news-live-blog/?utm_source=feedbu...

Crappy Science Teacher 'Reanimates' Goldfish After Dropping In Liquid Nitrogen

liquid-nitrogen-fish.jpg If you haven't already seen it, this is a video of a shitty high school science teacher dropping a goldfish in liquid nitrogen, then returning it to water where it "reanimates" itself. The goldfish survived due to the Leidenfrost Effect, which allowed this REAL scientist to dip his hand in liquid nitrogen and it not break off and shatter (follow that link for more info). So my question is this, Special Ed -- if you believe in science so much, why'd you use a goldfish instead of your own hand? I'll tell you why -- because you're a sissy. ADMIT IT -- ADMIT YOU DON'T EVEN BELIEVE IN SCIENCE! *teacher sobbing* "It's all true -- the drama department was overstaffed!" Hit the jump for the that was entirely unnecessary.

from Geekologie - Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome http://www.geekologie.com/2011/11/crappy-science-teacher-reanimates-goldfi.php

Tomorrow’s Cyberposium 17: Sky’s The Limit in High Tech and New Media

For the past 16 years, Harvard Business School has hosted the Cyberposium, the world’s largest MBA technology conference. Organized entirely by current MBA students and the TechMedia Club, the conference is designed to unite past, present and future business leaders, all while facilitating conversation centered around technology and its impact on business and society.

From CEOs, to analysts, to budding entrepreneurs, the conference draws nearly 1,000 attendees from a variety of backgrounds every year. This year’s theme is “Sky’s The Limit,” encompassing the rapid rate of tech innovation, the growth in cloud computing and the increased valuation of startups. With three keynote speakers, including Brad Smith, president and CEO of Intuit, Katie Mitic, director of platform and mobile marketing for Facebook, and Jack Tretton, the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, there is a lot of be learned on high tech and new media at tomorrow’s event.

On top of the three keynote speakers, there will also be twelve panel discussions focused on four different topics: consumer web, digital media, enterprise and mobile. Panelists include representatives from up-and-coming start-ups like Birchbox, as well as market leaders like Google, and they’ll be touching upon various ideas from the future of online advertising to the evolution of social.

We are specifically looking forward to these panels:

Evolution of Social

Social networking continues to change as user engagement increases and the number of friendships and ancillary web applications explodes. New models such as micro-networks and enterprise-networks are already gaining traction. How will we interact differently with social networks going forward? Which players are best positioned to benefit?

Companies: GroupMe, Highland Capital Partners, Google, Sonar

The Future of Online Advertising

New and powerful online advertising models are opening up. Social advertising is competing with search, web video ads are competing for TV spend and browser tracking is becoming the norm for enhanced targeting. How are advertiser’s mindsets changing and what are the largest near-term opportunities in this ecosystem? What threats will slow future growth?

Companies: Lightbank, Greystripe, Google, Digitas, AOL

Online Video

Web video is becoming mainstream and the trend of cord-cutting has already started. How will traditional studios and cable networks survive the shift without sacrificing revenue? Will cable operators or emerging digital content aggregators ultimately dominate web video distribution? How will web-enabled televisions impact the ecosystem?

Companies: Boxee, Ustream Inc., Sony Network Entertainment, Entreprenuers Roundtable Accelerator, NBC Universal

Mobile Payments

Mobile payments are making the leap from E-Commerce into physical retail. Services like virtual wallets, shopping assistants, mobile self-checkout and dynamic couponing are gaining traction. Which competitors are moving toward critical mass and which aren’t? How will partnerships contribute to a platform’s success and who will extract the most value?

Companies: Intuit Inc., LevelUp, AisleBuyer, Where, MoreMagic

Breakfast and registration kicks off tomorrow at 7:30 a.m., with the first scheduled keynote speaker, Brad Smith, beginning his talk at 8:30. For a full schedule of events, you can click here, or, if you have a question you’d like to ask one of the speakers or panelists before the event, you can do so by visiting the Cyberposium’s Pigeonhole.

BostInno’s own Sliggity will be there for a part of the conference tomorrow conducting interviews, making friends and just being Sliggity. So go say hi, tell him what you’ve learned and give him something to write about.

from BostInnovation.com http://bostinnovation.com/2011/11/04/tomorrow%e2%80%99s-cyberposium-17-sky%e2...

The Future of Social TV at the Mashable Media Summit [LIVE BLOG]

Media Summit 2011


We had a packed house in attendance for this year's Media Summit.

Click here to view this gallery.

Social and digital media have an increasingly strong influence on how people consume content of all types. Nowhere is that more apparent than the world of television, where viewing habits are being deeply impacted by digital. From talking about TV shows on social media sites to consuming online video content to so-called “second-screen” experiences that marry secondary computer- and mobile-based content with what’s being broadcast, media outlets are pursuing social TV strategies in a big way.

Recent studies also indicate a strong correlation between online buzz and TV ratings. Yet, the concept of social TV is still in its infancy and best practices are still emerging. What does the future hold for the television space?

Mashable Entertainment Editor Christina Warren is joined on stage by panelists Alex Iskold, founder and CEO of GetGlue, Jesse Redniss, VP of digital at USA Networks and Tom Thai, VP of marketing and business development at Bluefin Labs.

Join our live blog below to follow the action with Mashable editors!

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, CostinT, iStockphoto, subju



Presenting Sponsor: AT&T


For more Entertainment coverage:

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2011/11/04/the-future-of-social-tv-at-the-mashable-media-...

Google reportedly looking to get into the cable TV business

Google "is considering a plan to offer paid cable-TV services to consumers," the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Google recently hired former cable TV executive Jeremy Stern, who is reportedly leading talks with media companies. But a Google cable TV service is still only a possibility. 

"Google has discussed distributing major TV channels from companies like Walt Disney Co., Time Warner Inc., and Discovery Communications Inc. as part of the video service, though the discussions were exploratory and no final decisions have been made," the Journal wrote.

A cable service would be separate from the Google TV, which is comprised of software and hardware to stream YouTube and other Internet content to the television screen. Google has been known to bring numerous speculative projects to market, too, only to kill them off when they fail. We're still waiting to hear what Google's plans are for SageTV, which Google purchased for its DVR and Slingbox-like capabilities. But given Google's reliance on advertising money, television could be an important market for the company after all. Still, competition will be robust; Apple, which already has its own Apple TV media streaming device, is rumored to be expanding its own push into the television market as well.

Read the comments on this post

from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/11/google-ponders-cable-tv-offering....

New Seed Stage Fund in Boston Debuts From Former Polaris Partner

Raising seed money for consumer startups might be getting a little easier here in Boston. A new seed stage venture capital fund just emerged from former Polaris partner Mike Hirshland. Hirshland left Polaris back in September to start the fund and unveiled Resolute.vc today in a blog post.

I’m thrilled to announce that my new firm, resolute.vc, is incorporated, open for business, and has a live website — the name is the url. Please come learn about us! Much, much more to come…

According to the sleek new site Resolute.vc is looking for “extraordinary entrepreneurs, provide them seed capital, and do whatever we can to help them succeed over the course of their careers.” The new fund will invest as little as $50k and as much as $750k in initial funding. It looks as if they like to be the lead investor in the seed round and no like “headless” rounds. The total size of the fund is also unclear and it looks like it will focus in three cities, San Fran, New York and Boston.

Resolute.vc appears to just be run by Hirshland, but he has lined up a stacked group of advisors and listed a bunch of big names as under “entrepreneur’s roundtable.

Hirshland led Polaris’s investment in notable companies including Automattic (WordPress), Quantcast, Q1 Labs (acquired by IBM), Six Waves/Lolapps, KISSMetrics, Formspring, BlackArrow, Thing Labs (acquired by AOL) and Mail Bypass. Hirshland also sourced Sticky Bits, whose founders went on to restart the company as Turntable.fm.

from BostInnovation.com http://bostinnovation.com/2011/11/04/new-seed-stage-fund-in-boston-debuts-fro...

5 Essential Tips for Managing Your Users’ Social Profile Data

suit image


Vidya Shivkumar is director of products at Janrain and has built and shipped consumer, B2B and B2C products and services for over a decade.

Online behavior tracking has been successfully employed for nearly a decade, but its tools do not uniquely identify users, and rightfully so. Tracking was only designed to group users into audience segments; for example, golden retriever owners who live in San Francisco, CA, or baseball and wine enthusiast females in their 30s who live in Seattle, WA.

Of course, certain laws restrict combining offline data sources with online user behavior tracking. Therefore, how do brands get to know users individually, rather than as one of many in an audience segment?

Require a social network login to access your website. You request permission to access visitors’ social profiles and, when approved, you’ll have an opportunity to build a wealth of knowledge on the individual user. Learn about their hobbies and interests, friends, likes, age, marital status, places visited and alma mater. And the best part is that your users have consciously opted to share this information with you.

Obtaining the user’s social profile data is the first step. The following tips detail how to access rich social profile information, while avoiding some of the challenges associated with data gathering.

  • Social profile data is complex and dynamic. Depending on the particular social network, the data can range from professional affiliations, education history, friends lists, current location and checkins.
  • Social profile data is useful only if actionable. A copious amount of user data is worthless if you are unable to feed it to existing systems such as email marketing tools or content personalization engines.
  • Social profile data is relevant only when combined with other data sources. Social does not have to replace what you already know about your users. The real win is augmenting existing intelligence with this new, valuable social data source.

Let’s also look at five critical considerations for collecting, storing and managing social profile data.


1. Structure and Discipline


Consider hosting data in a flexible and extensible schema. This will ensure that data has rules and constraints placed around it. For example, verify that an email address is unique and accurate, that date of birth follows a consistent format, that zip code and phone number, if mandatory, are present, etc.


2. Multi-Channel Support


According to Nielsen, smartphones make up over 40% of all mobile phones in the U.S., and smartphone owners are three times more likely to access the Internet via their handsets. Brands are catching onto this trend by offering both web and mobile experiences for their users.

Unify user intelligence across multiple devices and channels, for example, mobile devices, networked kiosks, trusted partner sites and campaign landing pages. Future-proof now, so you don’t need to re-architect when the next digital experience arises.


3. Availability, Redundancy and Backup


Like any other user databases, social profile storage systems need to be available 24/7. They should be supported by enterprise-class service-level agreements (SLAs), be backed up so that data is not lost in the event of catastrophic disk failures, and most importantly, be redundant to minimize service interruptions.


4. “Don’t Make the User Think”


Those of us who have conceived of, built and launched a registration system know that screens and workflow are crucial components to data collection. After all, a well-designed interface can make or break your data collection plans. But they take time to build and get right. (My company has estimated that a default workflow for capturing, editing and displaying social data takes up to 19 screens!)

Today, no profile system is complete without a public and a private profile page. Users have come to expect a page in which they can manage their settings for the data they share with your brand. Also, if your site offers community features such as blogs, reviews or comments, users want to be able to manage their public persona via a public profile page. Last but not least, users expect branded interfaces so they know who is managing their data.


5. Third-Party Access


Now let’s look at things to consider when making social data usable and actionable. Most brand marketers want to use social data, at a minimum, to power their targeted email marketing programs. Others want to use the data for onsite personalization, such as serving relevant news articles, displaying merchandise, or even promoting concert tickets relevant a user’s interests.

When you combine social data with legacy or traditional user data, you build a 360-degree perspective about your users. However, not all third-party tools need to know everything in your database to operate effectively. For instance, an email marketing tool may only need access to first and last names, email addresses, interests and zip codes for a segment of mountain climbers in Portland, OR. Thanks to protocols such as OAuth, building such capabilities into a registration system is now possible.

Given that marketers need to be able to customize and change their marketing segments often, this type of segment creation must be easy to set up via a dashboard, and should not require a database administrator, a web programmer and an operations team to roll out.


Visitors to your site are showing up with a wealth of information that you can leverage to improve the onsite experience. The critical element for marketers is to have the right tools in place to request, store and manage users’ social profile data for meaningful purposes. The more ubiquitous these tools become, the more users will demand engagement and personalization on your site.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Truthout.org

More About: behavioral analysis, contributor, data collection, features, social data, Social Media

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2011/11/04/social-data-management/?utm_source=feedburner&...