Have too many Facebook friends? Do you know how to filter out “friends” that you don’t want to follow so closely without offending them? Nicholas Carlson in his recent post for Silicon Alley Insider provides an eight step approach to do just that. You can read his entire article “How to Filter out Facebook “Friends” “ here.
Is NPR the Future of News Media
June 29, 2009 By
In Josh Catone’s recent article in Mashable “Why NPR is the Future of Mainstrem Media“, he describes how National Public Radio (NPR) “is starting to look like they have the future of news all figured out. Or at least, they appear to doing a lot better at it than the rest of the traditional media.”
Catone reports that NPR now has 23.6 million people ” tuning into its broadcasts each week. In fact, NPR’s ratings have increased steadily since 2000, and they’ve managed to hold on to much of their 2008 election coverage listenership bump (with over 26 million people tuning in each week so far in 2009), unlike many of their mainstream media counterparts.”
Why has NPR been so effective at building its audience while the majority of media outlets are losing their audience? According to Catone the reason for its success lies in its three prong approach: a focus on local; a focus on social media; and a focus on obiquitous access.
By focusing on what is happening locally, NPR fulfills a need that has been abandoned by most media. Catone reports, “Focusing on local information is a very smart approach for two reasons. One, because as Schiller says, it fills a gap in coverage, and two, because many people feel that delivering and aggregating hyperlocal content will be an important part of the future of media. In 2007, Alex Iskold, the CEO of semantic web application company AdaptiveBlue, predicted the rise of hyperlocal information, indicating that extremely targeted local advertising could be the path forward for the ad industry.”
NPR has also built its audience by building a strong social media presence. NPR’s Twitter account has more than 780,00 followers and NPR has more than 400,000 FaceBook fans. In addition, NPR has more than 650 podcasts, nearly 20 blogs, as well as their own social community.
According to Catone:
Perhaps the most important aspect of NPR’s approach to new media, is that they have an organizational level commitment to allowing listeners and readers to access their content on their own terms. Schiller, who prior to joining NPR at the start of this year was the SVP-GM of The New York Times web site, told mediabisto.com that NPR aims to bring people access to content “online, mobile, whatever people want, podcasts — you name it — so that you have that same sense of the NPR experience wherever you are. As far as NPR.org — sure, I want the traffic to increase, but to me the ultimate goal is not just bringing people to this walled garden that is NPR.org.”
NPR’s ability to build its audience is certainly impressive especially at a time when so many media outlets are going under. What lessons can your organization learn from NPR’s success?
How to Pitch to Angel Investors
June 28, 2009 By
In Brent Bowers recent New York Times article “In Pitching to Angel Investors, Preparation Tops Zeal”, Bowers’ writes, “For entrepreneurs hoping to land start-up capital from angel investors, here’s what two recent studies found: Don’t get carried away when you pitch your product because the investors may lose interest faster than you can say “almost unlimited market.”
In Bowers’ article he cites Jeffrey Sohl, the director of the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire, estimate that there are 260, 500 active angel investors in the United States and they constitute the “largest source of seed and start-up capital for entrepreneurs.”
photo credit: e³°°°Bowers points out that:
Even last year, as the recession gathered force, these angels spent $19.2 billion on more than 55,000 ventures, he said, though that was down from $26 billion in 2007. The average investment for each deal last year was $346,500.
By contrast, venture capitalists made only 440 investments in start-ups last year, putting the bulk of their money in later stages of a company’s growth in deals that averaged $7.5 million, Mr. Sohl said. “Angels provide the seed and start-up funding that turns acorns into trees like Starbucks, FedEx, Amazon and Google,” Mr. Sohl said.
Two reports studying angel investors and cited in the Bowers’ article both agree that what angel investors are looking for “is evidence of a market opportunity with growth potential, a strong management team and an exit strategy, including a list of possible acquirers, since the eventual sale of the companies they invest in is how they make money.”
The article lists the following tips gleaned from the two angel investor reports:
¶Memorize an “elevator pitch” for your product and its potential in 90 seconds or less. It will bolster your confidence, and you can recycle it to win over customers, vendors and employees.
¶Consider hiring a speech coach, but only one familiar with angel investors’ thinking.
¶Attend “pitching contests” that many business schools and angel groups sponsor.
¶In presentations, be upbeat but realistic in your profit and revenue projections. Better yet, draw up optimistic, middle-ground and pessimistic projections to show how carefully you have thought them through.
What tips do you have in securing funding from angel investors?
Best Business Books via Business Week
June 22, 2009 By
How is your summer reading going? Have you started? Today Business Week Online published “Reading List” an article chronicling a list of business book recommendations from a “bevy of prominent professors and business professionals and asked them about their favorite books, business or otherwise. Browse around and discover what made those books inspirational, instructive, or influential in their thinking and their careers. What would they advise you to read if you had the chance to ask them?”
Business Week’s list of books was compiled from 38 professors and business professional across the country.
photo credit: dottorpeni
Here’s a partial list of the recommended books:
Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management
Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance
The Economics of Industrial Innovation
What books would you recommend and why?
Charlene Li on Future of Social Networks
June 16, 2009 By
SXSW09: The Future Of Social Networks
View more OpenOffice presentations from Charlene Li.
Need to Organize Your Tweeps?
June 9, 2009 By
How many followers do you have on Twitter now? How many are you following? Do you know who you are following or who is following you? What causes some of your followers to stop following you? Josh Catone writes today in “10 Twitter Tools to Organize Your Tweeps” in Mashable that if you are like many of us, “You’ve followed so many people, it’s hard to keep up, and it’s probably time to do a little housekeeping.”
photo credit: Nils Geylen
Here are Josh’s “10 Twitter Tools” to check out:
1. Twitter Grader – Using a detailed 5 piece algorithm, Twitter Grader assigns every users you run through its system a grade from 1-100. Using this tool you can investigate how engaged the people you’re following are and that can help you decide if you want to keep following them.
2. Twinfluence – Twinfluence is a scientific approach to measuring the influence of Twitter users. It’s another set of metrics you can use to help you figure out who you want to follow.
3. Tweetcloud – One of the most important factors when deciding whether you want to follow a Twitter user is what sort of content they tweet about. If someone tweets mostly about topics you don’t care about, they might not be the best person for you to follow. Tweetcloud creates a tag cloud of a person’s tweets to give you a bird’s eye view of the type of things they tweet about.
4. Twitter Karma – Twitter Karma is a great app that lets you sort through all of your follows and see who’s not following you in return, who you have a mutual follow/follow-back relationship with, and who is following you that you’re not following back.
5. Friend or Follow – Friend or Follow does essentially the same thing as Twitter Karma, helping you figure out who your friends, follows, and fans are on Twitter. The difference is in the presentation, and it might be a little easier to use for those with a large number of follows or followers.
6. Qwitter – Once you’ve done your initial cleaning, Qwitter is a nice app that will update you via email whenever someone stops following you. It will even let you know what you tweeted that caused them to stop following you, which could be useful (if you lose five followers every time you tweet about your cat, for example, that might be a hint to stop talking so much about your cat if you want to retain followers).
7. Nest.Unclutterer – Nest.Unclutterer will automatically block Twitter users who are following more than a certain number of people or who have been inactive for a certain number of days. You can specify those thresholds and white list certain tweeps so that they are exempt from the cleaning. Nest.Unclutterer is actually less about who you’re following, and more about making sure people following you are actually friends you want to be associated with.
8. Twitoria – Twitoria scans through your Twitter account and finds anyone who has been inactive for the past week, two weeks, month, two months, six months, or year.
9. TweetSum – TweetSum digests all your new followers, rates them using what they call the DBI (”Douche Bag Index”), a number that supposedly weeds out Twitter users likely to be annoying, and then lets you easily follow them back or categorize them as tweeps you don’t want to follow. You can see a list of recent tweets for each new follower as well, which is helpful.
10. Tweepler – Tweepler is a new follower management application that lets you make quick, one click decisions about whether to follow people back or drop them into an ignore pile (out of sight, out of mind). In addition to being able to view recent tweets, Tweepler gives helpful stats about new followers, such as average tweets per day.
What are you using to organize your tweeps?
Pharma and Social Media; Can They Coexist
May 8, 2009 By
For nearly five years (2003-2008) I was the Public Relations counsel for a provider of predictive analytics and reporting software solutions that counted many of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies as its customers. My client’s software enabled life science and pharmaceutical researchers and analysts in drug discovery, development and clinical trials to more efficiently and accurately mine their data and utilize predictive analytics for their analysis. The work these researchers and analysts are doing is exciting and newsworthy.
However, there were many obstacles we ran into in getting the news out about the progress and innovation these researchers were achieving. The biggest hurdle was not with the individual researchers and analysts, but instead with the pharmaceutical companies’ corporate public relations and legal departments. So this week I was intrigued to see on Twitter that the April issue of Pharma Marketing News was “all about pharma & social media.”
photo credit: Sebastian Bergmann
John Mack sets the stage for the issue by writing in the article “Social Media Opportunity or Nightmare” :
“Michelangelo’s nightmarish painting Last Judgement includes the image of a poor soul being dragged down to Hell by the devil’s agents. That image often comes to mind when I hear proponents of social media trying to persuade pharma marketers to just “dip their toe” in the social media waters. The other image I see is a shark lurking just below the water’s surface!”
Mack went on to argue:
“Many pharma marketers within drug companies and within agencies that work for drug companies are trying to move the needle forward to develop guidelines that the industry can follow. So far, however, they have left patients, physicians and other stakeholders out of the discussion. They have forgotten that patient empowerment built the very social networks that they wish to engage in. Personally, I believe pharmaceutical companies need to become truly patient-centric companies BEFORE they can even consider engaging in social media.”
Mack’s article reminded me of Jeremy Owyang’s blog “Troubled, Some Pharmaceuticals Turn a Blind Eye to the Blogosphere” from June 14, 2008 . In Owyang’s blog he reports:
“While this may not hold true for every pharmaceutical company, I recently met one who had banned it’s employees from monitoring blogs, social media and the online conversation.
[Why did this pharma company ban their employees to monitor blogs? If a patient complained about a treatment or medicine having ill-effects, then the pharma would would be liable to take action]. Responding to every customer can be very, very costly, considering how many people may be talking about medicines, often anonymously in online forums.”
It’s exciting to see that the pharmaceutical industry is now realizing it needs to be discussing and establishing guidelines for social media. Will pharma and social media be able to coexist? What do you think?