AR&D Reinventing Local Media

We’re finally past the point where people have (largely) stopped arguing over whether Twitter is journalism, and we’re now Tweeting in big numbers. I’ve said for some time that Twitter is an excellent marketing tool, but that we can’t look at it strictly as a device for driving traffic. We can also learn a few more things about how people consume information — and even how we write.

Twitter forces us to use an extreme economy of writing. Now, we’re not about to switch to 140-character scripts, but we can think of script-writing in terms of Twitter in this respect: is every word necessary?

Writes Josh Catone at Mashable:

These limits can be seen as a burden, or they can force you to think creatively about your content. If you only have 140 characters to work with, for example, you have to work extra hard to pack as much information as you can into each tweet while maintaining a voice consistent with your brand’s other copy.

Right on. We have to ask ourselves: Does each word add to the understanding of the story? Have we chosen our words carefully? With Twitter, we have no choice. It’s an excellent cure for logorrhea.

Twitter reminds us that people talk about the news in real time. I strongly recommend visiting twitpipe to get a view of just how much conversation about news is happening. Twitter is not all about “what I had for lunch.” Go to twitpipe, enter a keyword from the news, and watch the river flow. What do we learn? That we need to be a part of this river. The continuous news model that we preach feeds this desire. Tweeters (and webbies in general) don’t wait for the whole story. As I watch twitpipe today, I see a blast of tweets about the various Apple announcements.

There’s another good reason to use twitpipe (or the many sites and programs that do similar things). We constantly wonder what people are talking about in our community. Enter some search terms and you’ll see whether your guess is on the mark. This is real-time eavesdropping.

Josh also points out that Twitter is an excellent case of the importance of knowing your audience. My tweets are aimed at the people I think are following me (mostly TV and tech types). I try to offer helpful links and advice, mixed with my own strange sense of humor. My feed would be unsuccessful if I were to post my favorite recipes. If I were a chef, on the other hand, that’s exactly what I’d do because my followers would expect that. Know your audience, and use your expertise.

My other takeaway from years of using Twitter is the importance of links. The most helpful tweets are those that both summarize a story and link to it. That way I have a choice. We don’t link out enough. We need to. TV news websites are designed to be “sticky,” but the web doesn’t care about “stickiness.” What matters is being the right place to start. People will opt in to your Twitter feed when they believe you’re a trusted source of continuous, multi-platform information.

I am more than my brain now. That is – my operating system requires more than my grey matter will provide. I need help. I need my operating system. I’ve occasionally come across this idea from various bloggers, most recently Sam Harrelson(via Steve Rubel). And I think it’s a great exercise to see just how much I’ve come to depend on computing.

I don’t think this is scary, mind you. Steve 2.0 can do a lot more than the previous iteration. The biggest upgrades are to my memory (now backed up in more than one place) and to my communications abilities. Still there are flaws in the system. This past week, we saw outages at Facebook and Twitter. Both of these are tied to my OS. The outages didn’t crash my system, but they sure slowed it down.

Here’s the exercise: imagine yourself as a computer. At the source is your brain – it’s the processor and (hopefully) the memory. Others do this as a “My OS” outline, but I think the computer analogy is more apt. Your brain has part of your OS. Leaving it out is like saying “my OS doesn’t need a kernel.”

Now, draw. Here is Steve 2.0:

At the center is my brain. It’s the processor and the traffic cop for the rest of the information. There was a time when the map would end there. (OK, maybe there would be a straight line to my TV.) Now, I’ve outsourced much of the brain’s responsibility.

I have my head in the clouds; MobileMe, Google, Facebook and Twitter are all part of “cloud computing.” (I argue that Facebook and Twitter are 1/2 cloud, hence the circle and cloud in the schematic.) They are my memory, my search and recall and my communications cores. They also have the nice benefit of backing up my grey matter memory. If I forget a phone number, MobileMe has it and feeds it to me. Mac Mail and GMail (A cloud) contribute to the communications schematic, but they are less important in this iteration than they were before.

Part of my visual memory, pictures, is also in the clouds as well as stored locally. For visual recall, iPhoto keeps track of the images – not just the pictures themselves, but also data about the pictures, including who is in them and where and when they were taken.

My eyes are critical to see the world and take in data. Online, browsers provide windows for the eyes. (Although not always – Tweetdeck, for example, is its own program and requires no browser.) As for presenting information to others, talking won’t always do. That’s why I have MS Office.

I’m pretty Open Source (MS Office aside). People can change me with their input and, hopefully, do so for the better. I can’t get a full rewrite (nor, sadly, upgrade the hardware) but I can learn better now.

I rely on lots of other programs, but none are at my core. Photoshop is great, but its primary task is to manipulate images. That’s a secondary function. I can run plenty of fun, secondary programs and routines; they’re just not mission-critical.

Try this out for yourself. No rules. I’m sure I’ve left out stuff you could argue should be there. Embrace your inner android.

I give Nielsen a lot of credit on this. On Wednesday, I wrote about a study Nielsen had released about Twitter Users. What the study found was that Twitter has a pretty low return rate. They reported that only 30 – 40% of people who signed up for the service returned to twitter.com within the following month.

The report raised a big question in my mind and, indeed, among many Twitter users: did Nielsen account for the people who use Twitter “client” apps, such as Tweetdeck and other third-party ways of posting and receiving “tweets?” You can use Twitter without visiting twitter.com, once you’ve signed up. I interviewed David Martin at Nielsen, who said the study had, indeed, only focused on Twitter.com. He agreed that studying the third-party apps would be useful, and surmized they wouldn’t make an overall difference on the usage rates. Martin told me he thought such a study would be interesting “in the future.”

On Thursday, “the future” arrived. Nielsen crunched the numbers.

… as an update, we went beyond just Twitter.com, adding in more than 30 websites and applications that feed into the Twitter community including: TweetDeck, TwitPic, Twitstat, Hootsuite, EasyTweets, Tumblr, and many others.

The results verified our initial findings: about 60 percent of people on Twitter end up abandoning the service after a month. The year-long retention curve looks very much the same as the one for just Twitter.com.

Good for Nielsen for responding so quickly to the concerns. The Twitterati are passionate about their service, and will stand up for it ferociously at times. The study of this topic isn’t going to end, either. In an email today, Martin wrote “we will monitor data from the coming months to see if recent exposure will change  (the retention rate).”

Best of all, Martin wasn’t afraid to look people in the eye, as it were. Here’s his explanation which he posted on YouTube, in which he thanks the audience for its feedback. This is how business is done in the 2.0 world. You listen, you act, you respond immediately.

I blog a lot less than I used to. For years, I posted at least four entries a day at Lost Remote. I felt compelled to do so, and felt I’d be letting the community down if I didn’t. Now, I blog less. What I do more is engage in social media. And I’m starting to feel that social media is to 2009 what blogging was to 1999. It’s an act of rebellion, in the sense that it mystifies those who don’t do it. Social Networking causes endless debate, just as blogging used to. You hear all the same negativity about it that you used to hear about blogs: “It’s for egomaniacs who want to detail the minutia of their lives.” And it causes debate about that old red herring: “Is this journalism?”

Twitter, for example, is freeing. You’re limited to 140 characters. And no matter how much you want to expound, you can’t. One or two lines is all you really need anyway. It’s great practice for TV journos who need to keep things tight. In TV, every word matters. On Twitter, every letter does. Facebook is where you can expand a little, but not much, on the articles that interest you. And only those who are interested enough in you to follow you get the updates. So you try like hell to find stories that you think will interest your friends. This is the micro vs macro world, and I love micro audiences.

A few people may share your blog entry. But a larger percent will share your Tweets and FB entries. And there’s something that feels wonderful when people “RT” you.

I also realize that not everyone is interested in reading 500 words from me every day. So a quick one-liner along with a good article is a great filter. It’s what blogging aims to be – meta-reporting.

So I blog less and use social media more now. While we encourage everyone at stations to blog, we equally (if not more so) encourage the use of social media. Blogging is a gathering, but social media is a cocktail party.

The inauguration was an event that was truly worldwide, and the Web was seriously stressed with traffic. The broadband video traffic pushed the Web to its limits, and many people experienced slowdowns – or even outages – as they tried to watch video. Wrote James Klatell at CBSNews.com:

“We here at CBSNews.com experienced streaming difficulties due to an unusually high number of requests…Clicking around to some of the other major news outlets, they seemed to be having similar issues. CNN.com had a note posted for potential viewers who came to see the historic moment. “You made it!” the message read. “However, so did everyone else.” The only thing to do? Wait in a line online.”

Depending on where you were and when you tried to log in, you may have struck out entirely. Mike Wendland of the Detroit Free Press found trying to watch video a maddening experience:

“I tried them all – Freep.com, MSNBC, Fox, ABC, CNN, the New York Times, CSpan and others – and without exception, they all failed. After about eight minutes into the speech, I had sporadic luck with the Washington Post stream, which, despite hiccups, delivered the only available live stream I could find on my Comcast broadband connection. Judging by the running commentary on chat rooms form others who couldn’t get the video streams, my experience was the norm.”

But those who did get through set records. CNN heavily promoted its coverage on Facebook. It wound up with traffic triple its previous record. According to C|Net, as of 1 pm EST, 18.8 million viewers had tuned in to the live feed, with 1.3 million concurrent live streams watching President Obama’s inaugural address. The numbers stretched CNN to its limit. Many visiting the live feed were put into a digital queue and had to wait for a “space” to open up.

The CNN Facebook Application paid off in promotional value as well. As of 1:15 PM EST, 600,000 “status messages” had been set using the app. An average of 4,000 status updates were set every minute. Millions of Facebookers checked in during the inauguration. CNN got plenty of facetime on Facebook.

Mogulus broke a company record, with 105,000 concurrent users and more than 1 million total users. Twitter was running at four-five times its normal rate. I experienced slowness updating with it, and I wasn’t alone.

Akamai notes that Tuesday was not a record day for Web traffic. Election Day, 2008 holds that honor. In fact, Inauguration Day traffic barely makes the top five. But alas – all that video…

It’s not surprising that the inauguration put such a stress on the system. To use the cliche, this was a “perfect storm” of demand. It peaked at Noon ET – prime time for the Web. It was video-driven, and was an event with international interest. Remember that much of our audience was at work, and because we were providing so much information online, we were doing the first job of journalism: informing.

So does this mean that video doesn’t work online? That the Web will never support a big video-driven event? Hardly. It only proves two things:

1. The enormous demand for online video
2. The woeful state of broadband in the U.S.

The pipes will get bigger and faster. The demand will grow. The infrastructure will support the Big Events. In the meantime, “normal” Web video traffic is supported very well. In the meantime, it’s good to see media outlets embracing complimentary technologies like Twitter and CoverItLive to supplement their TV coverage.