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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Friday Wrap #113: News sites suffer from Facebook outage, PR firms reject climate change deniers

Friday Wrap #113: News sites suffer from Facebook outage, PR firms reject climate change deniers

Friday Wrap #113The Friday Wrap (which is what you’re reading) is a curated rundown of news, reports and posts from the past week that, while they didn’t go viral or attract much attention, are still interesting and useful for communications professionals. I select Wrap items from my link blog, which you’re welcome to follow.

News

Facebook outage produces drop in news site traffic—During Facebook’s 20-minute outage last week, traffic to news sites dropped 3% overall and more than 8% from mobile devices. Intriguingly, after the outage began, a 3.5% overall increase in desktop traffic occurred, sparked mostly by a 9% increase in loyal homepage followers going directly to news homepages. “We saw no increases in traffic via other referrers, including Twitter and Google news, during the outage,” according to Chartbeat. Read more

Top PR firms won’t represent climate deniers—An ethical debate has been carried on for years about the wisdom of PR agencies representing tobacco companies. That discussion is now shifting to climate deniers as several of the top 25 PR agencies told The Guardian newspaper they will not work for any entity that rejects the reality of climate change, nor will they undertake campaigns designed to promote blocking carbon pollution regulations. Among these agencies, WPP, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, Weber Shandwick, Text 100 and Finn Partners. The shift could be problematic for some agencies. Edelman, for example, touts programs for reducing its own carbon footprint, but it represents the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies heavily against carbon emission regulations. Read more

McDonald’s faces backlash over Instagram ads—The Instagram ads were supposed to appeal to smartphone-slinging Millennials, getting to try out a new burger. Instead, the ads produced negative comments, mostly complaining about seeing ads from a brand they weren’t following. As Instagram prepares to roll out its advertising platform to everybody, this situation should be worth a look—what kind of images would appeal to users and what will just tick them off. Read more

Wikipedia produces transparency report—Wikipedia has released a report detailing how often it has received government requests for user information, revealing that it is hardly ever asked and even more infrequently complies with requests: It has received a mere 13 requests and has granted none. Read more

MIT introduces a new approach to news—Content marketers take note: MIT Media Lab is preparing to roll out a new news site that introduces a new way to convey news, rich with context instead of relying on hyperlinks readers need to follow in order to get more information. Articles are presented in text blocks arranged in a cross. The story itself is in the vertical bar, with horizontal bars serving as the context stream, “crashing itself into the story and providing background to various points.” The approach follows a trend: Vox uses a similar system of explainer “card stacks” and even Google condenses searches into “bite-sized card explainers, summarizing Wikipedia while saving you a click.” Read more

RIP Justin.TV—In the early days of user-generated content, Justin.TV provided a platform for live video feeds. Several popular figures got started on the platform, which was acquired by Twitch, a site that streams videogame play. Now, with Twitch a rumored takeover target by Google, the company has shut down Justin.TV. Read more

Users can collaborate and message on Pinterest pins—Pinterest has introduced messaging, allowing users to send other members pins with messages. The recipient can add her own messages, launching a conversation, or respond with a message on a new pin of her own. Marketers can use this tool to initiate collaboration with customers. Read more

Hotel backs off policy of fining guests for bad reviews—When the New York Post reported that the Union Street Guest House charged guests $500 for a bad review—a policy posted to its website—the public responded with more than 3,000 bad reviews that Yelp had to remove as inappropriate. The hotel’s owner said the policy was a joke that was never intended to provoke a negative response, nor were staff supposed to act on it. Read more

Trends

Brands getting choosier about their real-time social content—The rush to be clever and relevant during real-time cultural events that led to a torrent of bad tweets and Facebook posts is abating, with some agencies telling clients to publish less. As social matures into a paid media channel you an measure, the newsroom concept that had so many agencies stumbling over themselves is giving way to strategic media buys accompanying a reduced number of Facebook and Twitter updates. Said one marketer, “We’re willing to sacrifice a quantity of low-quality impressions for few quality interactions.” Read more

C-Suite still isn’t warming up to social media—Only half of boardrooms recognize the value of social media, according to a poll of senior marketers. The reasons include an inability to measure the ROI from social media activities, along with “a fear of getting it wrong” in regulated industries. The ways to get them on board: have them start using it, simulate a crisis to enlighten the C-suite about the power of social media, and identify the balance of your website traffic sources to “demonstrate where it is over-reliant and hence vulnerable.” Read more

GQ’s most influential readers will promote your brand (for $100,000)—They’re well known and highly regarded in their fields: a style blogger with 100,000-plus Instagram followers, the guy behind the popular I Wear Cool Socks Tumblr site, and Men Style Pro’s founder and creative director. And they’ll pitch your brand through their own social channels, through content they create for GQ, and in ads. And it’s all yours for $100,000. GQ57—57 elite readers—won’t get compensated by GQ, but their own exposure will get a boost and perhaps some trips. Read more

Radisson Blu rewards customers for sharing travel tips—Following a growing trend in the hotel industry, the Radisson Blu hotel has introduced “Social Eyes,” which will pick the best weekly tip for travel to one of the hotel’s locations. The winning tips will be posted to the new hotel blog, a travel-focused content portal. The winners will get a free night’s stay at the hotel. Read more

Will people “flock to unlock?”—An enhanced Twitter advertising feature is getting a workout from athletic shoe company Puma. Athletes will tweet promotional content, promising Puma will unlock special content only if a goal for retweets is reached. The offer will be made on Twitter cards that accompany the tweets. A graph will plot how close to the goal users are. The reward: an early reveal of a new TV spot. Read more

Research

Instagram beats Facebook for user engagement—Users interacted with brand posts to Instagram twice as much as they did with Facebook brand posts, liking, commenting, and sharing Instagram content 6,932 times per post on average, compared to 2,396 interactions per Facebook post. (Keep in mind that Facebook owns Instagram.) The numbers also show that brands are devoting considerable time to Instagram, even thought it has a considerably smaller audience than Facebook. Brands posted 493,000 times in the second quarter of 2014, up 49% over the same period a year earlier; they posted on Facebook 2.5 million times, up 22% from the second quarter of 2013. Read more

Earned, social media inextricably linked in newsrooms—Over half of journalists participating in an Ogilvy PR survey saw a “strong connection” between earned media coverage and social media amplification, while over 90% believe the impact of a story is connected to the social media reaction it produces. “The blending of social and mainstream media is paving the way for a new paradigm of news generation—crating exciting opportunities for the most savvy and forward-thinking of brands,” according to Ogilvy Media Influence managing director Jennifer Risi. Read more

Image courtesy of Tktktk

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