An interesting look at Ohio State University Medical Center decides to respond to social media comments and questions.

Social Media Response Flow Chart

Mike Allen shares in interesting report in this morning’s Politico Playbook from the Emerging Media Research Council analyzing social media usage in US Senate elections specifically looking at the Florida Senate race. The draft report outlines three winning social media strategies (which seem pretty much like common sense to me).

• Facebook – “Candidates who update their profile page regularly give fans a reason to return more frequently, resulting
  in higher rates of interaction and larger fan communities.”
• Twitter – “High rates of messaging result in greater absolute numbers of followers and a greater level of follower engagement.”
• YouTube – “The most popular political videos are campaign advertisements and position statements crafted specifically for the Web.”

Paid Content is reporting new advertising growth numbers showing overall advertising spending to go up as much as two percent and online ad spending to grow almost 13 percent and TV spending to go up over four percent. At the same time the study predicts newspaper and magazine to lose about four percent.

At work our office is in an open working environment where all the worker bees sit in  these  nice built-in cubicles which are larger than some offices I’ve had in the past.  In the cubicles besides  the web team members there are some other graphic designers,  writers, photographers, videographers from our creative services department. One downside to these cubicles is every couple of weeks I get a message from someone that the web team is being too loud and interfering with others work or that  it looks like the web team just socializes all the time and doesn’t do any work. Unfortunately, I have to explain that working with technology, working online requires collaboration among workers across disciplines to do our best work.  In fact a recent study pointed to collaboration being one of the top six attributes of high-ranking women in technology.

A collaborative work style is perceived as a critical success factor in high-technology by both technical men and women, and is consistent with a culture that values innovation, which cannot be achieved without extensive collaboration. Collaboration is both a critical source of success but also a great source of career satisfaction.

Collaboration = Socializing = Loudness = Innovation =  Satisfaction

First we had Please Rob Me outlining the best time to burgle your friend’s house from foursquare information.  Now we have the IRS and the Justice Department training their agents on how to use social media to collect useful information about you.

I know this sounds conspiracy theorist, but it’s not. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has actually collected training documents from the feds detailing procedures.

• IRS training material on how to search social media, google streetview to investigate taxpayer’s and their business
• Department of Justice powerpoint slides detailing social media companies data rentention policies and how well they cooperate with investigations (facebook does, twitter doesn’t)

Also, I know that the feds aren’t the only governmental body using what you publish on the Internet against you. I personally know someone who was audited by the Arkansas Department of Revenue because of the professionalism of their web site (I guess we all know who is next after this post).

I built a new web site over the weekend and launched it this morning– CampaignTwit. The site aggregates tweets from Arkansas politicians into a feed and page based on race.  Every race gets a page with all the most recent tweets from each candidate displayed on the page. The site provides context for each tweet displaying it with all the other candidates tweets. You can also tell which campaigns are more active tweeters and how each campaign treats social media– one way or two.

The site is built on Wordpress with all the feeds pulled in using the RSS widget. Wordpress uses iThemes Builder Astro child  theme customized with the builder style manager plug-in.

The day has finally come.  A study from Outsell reports that US advertisers will spend more on digital advertising than on print advertising for the first time this year.

“Of the $368 billion marketers plan to spend this year, 32.5% will go toward digital; 30.3% to print. Digital spending includes e-mail, video advertising, display ads and search marketing.”

The Pew Internet and the American Life Project released their latest study on American’s use of the Internet examining how we use online news today.  The overview of the report sums it up …

In this new multi-platform media environment, people’s relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory. These new metrics stand out:

• Portable : 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
• Personalized : 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
• Participatory : 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

So what does this mean for news and information sites over the next year? How will they change or adapt to meet the needs of the new news consumer?

I spend a lot of time picking on newspapers and websites, but let’s spend some time poking at the TV guys. The BBC gives a nice look at how to report the news on TV. If only our local stations could reach somewhere near this level.