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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Friday Wrap #54: Vine for Android, internal social benefits, digital-savvy boards, WSJ vs. LinkedIn

Friday Wrap #54

(c) Can Stock Photo
Hardly a week goes by without some big news dominating our attention, making it harder to catch some of the lesser-reported stories that still could be of value for communication professionals. This week, the sacking of the entire Chicago Sun-Times photo desk was at the top of the heap, and the implications of that decision will reverberate for some time. (On the one hand, everybody can shoot photos with their phones and reporters should know how to capture images for the stories they’re reporting; on the other, professional photography does stand out and in the shift to social-visual communication, the move could leave the Sun-Times without the photo assets some of their competitors will be able to bring to bear on platforms like Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr.) but you can find this story just about anywhere. Below are some of the stories that didn’t necessarily gain that level of traction. As always, I collect the stories from which I draw the Wrap contents at my link blog, LinksFromShel.tumblr.com.

Android users can show share Vine videos

I know how much you’ve been jonesing for the ability to shoot and share six-second videos. Thirteen million people have downloaded Twitter’s Vine app for the iPhone, and there is no shortage of posts and articles proclaiming Vine’s utility for marketing and communications. Now, after what seems an interminable wait, the app is available for Android phones with version 4.0 or higher of the operating system. The phone features many of the same features as the iOS version, according to Jessica Hullinger in a FastCompany report, “including the ability to search trending topics, find your friends, and share posts to Twitter.” The Android app also features one new tool not yet part of the iPhone version: zoom. I shot my first Vine video last night at my son’s wedding: my son, daughter and new daughter-in-law dancing at the reception: https://vine.co/v/bLb6ur6UrEJ

Internal social media dramatically improves ability to find information

A study that pitted two demographically similar groups inside one company—one with access to social software and the other without—found that “those who had used the enterprise social networking site had improved their ability to find information by 31%—and to find people who knew the person with information by 71%,” according to Kellogg Insight. The researcher, Paul Leonardi, a professor of communication at Northwestern University with an appointment at the Kellogg School, set a baseline with bot the marketing and operations teams of a major credit card company on the verge of implementing a new internal social network. Once the baseline was set, the social networking software was offered to marketing employees, but not operations. “The size of the improvement came as a surprise to Leonardi,” the article reports, “but he points out that the baseline was woefully low. ‘That 71% really…means that people are just getting up to speed,’ he says.” Leonardi also found that younger workers were generally more skeptical of the tool, most likely because they’re already so accustomed to using public social networks that company-only internal networks raise concerns.

Is your board of directors digital-savvy?

While it may seem that senior leadership is often the least digitally savvy group in the business world, “companies are scrambling to attract senior digital talent to their boards,” according to a Russell Reynolds Associates study reported in Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog. The executive search firm quotes Russell partner Tuck Rickards: “In an increasingly digital environment, boards must command a certain level of digital expertise in order to provide counsel to the CEO and ask the right questions of senior management.” U.S. companies lead their Asian and European competitors in attracting board members who get digital. Of the 300 companies assessed worldwide, 18 had “highly digital” boards, 69 had some digital representation and 210 had no digitally-savvy board members. Almost all of the highly digital boards—88%—were U.S.-based.

Facebook enters file-sharing market

I use both DropBox and YouSendIt to share large files, and there are plenty of competitors in this space. Now, you can add one more to the list of companies vying to provide the platform for sharing files: Facebook. Pipe is a Berlin-based startup’s new app that “melds peer-to-peer technology with your social graph to enable a cutting-edge new way to share files,” Wired‘s Ryan Tate writes. The service lets two friends send files of up to 1GB “by simply dragging and dropping them into Pipe. If one of the friends is offline, Pipe can keep the file in an online locker.”

Wall Street Journal goes head-to-head with LinkedIn

The Wall Street Journal plans to transform into a platform where readers can set up an account and complete a WJ Profile, a digital version of their resumes not unlike those you find on LinkedIn. A mock-up displayed during a presentation showed “space for contact information, work experience, a short bio and educational achievements,” writes Nick Summers in an article on The Next Web. The revamped WSJ will also include a private messaging service and “areas where users can upload their own research, portfolio and blog posts.”

Atlantic Wire offers communicators a lesson in getting attention

When I was in journalism school, one of the first things we learned—in News Writing 101—was the definition of “news.” As I remember it, news was an event or activity that was happening now and affected a lot of people. Social media has redefined news. Writing one report summarizing an event is hardly enough with a public clamoring for the latest, which has led media organizations to provide a steady stream of updates via a variety of channels, ranging from their own pages to tweets. The Atlantic Wire, the news site of Atlantic Media (publishers of the famous magazine) are trying to redefine news yet another way. According to Wire Editor Gabriel Snyder, “We want The Wire to be both monitoring (social conversations) and participating back into that social discussion—and understand that major events, major ideas, major disclosures, is what’s news.” Snyder was interviewed by AdWeek‘s David Taintor, who reports that the strategy is working, with social media now serving as The Wire’s largest driver of traffic. One example: When Time magazine published a cover story characterizing Millennials as the “ME ME ME GENERATION,” the resulting chatter led The Wire to post a rebuttal that went viral, having been viewed more than 200,000 times. Content marketers should pay heed. This is more than culture-jacking, but rather producing great reporting on what’s happening now on topics of interest to our audiences.

Mobile video discovery fueled by social media, not search

Mobile video viewing is surging, and most of the videos people find don’t come from a search. Instead, 67% of users “are getting wind of a new video from social recommendations.” Steve Smith writes in Mobile Marketing Daily that only 41% of mobile video watchers find new streaming media from search and 64% from the video apps themselves, according to a Harris Interactive study conducted for social video community Telly. The mobile video audience is up to 78 million people, or 35% of mobile audiences. “Of the 52 million mobile video watchers who use social recommendations of some kind, most (35 million) are getting the recommendations from their social network connections. In fact, the social networks are responsible for 68% of social recommendations of video, underscoring just how powerful platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can be in this area.”

Struggling with Facebook measurement? Try reach

I routinely hear about the struggles marketers and communicators experience when trying to measure the impact of their Facebook brand pages. “Stop looking for the ultimate, easy-to-understand, and meaningful Facebook metric; you already have it right here,” writes AgoraPulse co-founder Emeric Ernoult, a guest writer on AllFacebook; “it is reach.” He shrugs off a preference for engagement metrics, since the whole point of engagement, he says, is to get more reach. “High viral reach means that you’ve been able to reach your fans’ friends somehow, and high organic reach means that engagement has remained high enough to keep our content on top of the EdgeRank algorithm,” according to Ernoult. “Viral reach can be a great booster for your content. In some instances, a page can reach more people through its fans’ engagement than it can reach its own fans. In other words, the only measurable consequence of engagement is more reach, whether organic, because we remain on our fans’ News Feeds, or viral, because we now appear in the News Feeds of the friends of our fans.”

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