Hendrickson says, “Twitter is not a numbers game”

This week I was joined by over 1250 publishing colleagues in the Big Apple at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference. One session in particular that stood out for me was a workshop called “Twitter Scorecards for Publishers”, hosted by Mike Hendrickson of O’Reilly. Most publishers in the workshop were still struggling to define where Twitter fits in their business. 1/3^rd of the room identified Twitter as a “new tool” for their company. In usual workshop fashion, we audience members were put to work; assembled into small groups and amongst many other questions, asked to answer this: what do we want to measure in Twitter. Suggestions offered were: Followers, Friends, Total Retweets, Follower/Follow Ratio, Followed Back %, @ Mention Count, List Count, List Followers Count, Unique Retweeters, Unique Messages Retweeted, Follower Retweet %, Unique @ Senders, Follower Mention %, Inbound Messages Per Outbound Message and Update Count. Read the rest of this entry »

“I would start reading mags again”, said one Twitter user, when Martha Stewart asked about new media trends and eReaders

Today a Twitter friend, Stuart Foster threw out a statement that we see pretty much every day here in Mequodaland. On this particular day however, it lead me down a rabbit hole of finding other Twitter users who think that digital is “the way to go”; whether it be a digital reader, blogs, or anything else. What turned up was a very interesting dialog starting with Martha Stewart (@MarthaStewart on Twitter) on December 12th, where she reached out to her Twitter followers and asked them a series of questions about digital readers, and their preference for a reading platform. Not surprisingly, Stewart got back hundreds of responses to this question: “How many of you will read magazines on an electronic tablet (interactive-full color) within two years? three years?” Read the rest of this entry »

Google is rolling out Real-Time Search, which means it’s time to put your game face on if you want to stay at the top of your search engine rankings

Real-Time Search is getting ready to be rolled out by Google, and we can’t say it’s going to effect your current landing page rankings, but it’s certainly going to push you down the list unless you start producing more newsworthy content. In this new feature, (which you can see in Google’s video below), searchers will see “real-time” results, coming from social networks like Twitter and Facebook, plus blogs and news services. Amit Singhal says on the Google Blog, “Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we’re announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.” Read the rest of this entry »

Create a series of webinar, audio conferences or webcasts to boost your information product catalog in 2010

Are you cooking up new ideas for revenue opportunities in 2010? Many publishers are building budgets and setting goals for next year, trying to think of creative ways to market their products, enrich their current product catalog, and finding ways to spend less and make more. One of the more profitable products that you can offer your audience comes in the form of a digital event – either a webinar, live webcast or audio conference. We’ve put together a 90-minute program of our own to help guide your digital event production along. If you’ve been considering launching an audio, webinar, or webcast program, this seminar is for you. Read the rest of this entry »