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Flickr photo courtesy of Michael CotéWelcome to the Friday Wrap, Holtz Communication’s weekly review of news, posts, and reports that should be on your radar if you’re a communicator. I’m starting a new category for the Wrap this week dealing with the collaborative economy. The implications of this fast-moving trend will affect every communicator sooner or later. All the stories I report on here—and in my weekly podcast—are drawn from items I collect to my link blog, which you’re welcome to follow.

News

NYPD sends commanders to Twitter school—Precinct commanders in the New York Police Department are being required to attend a Twitter course in the wake of a series of online mistakes that have eroded the NYPD’s reputation. The class, taught at John Jay College, included a handout that read, “USE COMMON SENSE.” The department’s deputy commissioner for strategic initiatives believes social media can be a useful tool for the police, and a lot of precinct commanders aren’t regular users. Read more

Brands looking to duplicate Ice Bucket Challenge embrace social activism—You could see this one coming a thousand miles away. Entranced by the $100 million raised for the ALS Association by the viral Ice Bucket Challenge, several brands are launching their own social activism challenges. #StandForSomething is an existing campaign being leveraged by Dr. Martens, which will promote activists’’ progress via native advertising in Rookie Magazine. Rushing onto the bandwagon could backfire, though. According to one expert, artificially attaching a brand to a charitable cause could be seen as tone deaf and even result in a PR debacle.  Read more

Twitter explains random favorites in your timeline—Some Twitter users have noted that tweets favorited by people they follow have been appearing in their timelines. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo explained in a tweet that if you refresh your Twitter timeline twice, Twitter assumes it’s a signal from you that you want fresh content. If there’s nothing new to show you, they show you favorites from your followers in order to keep the feed fresh. Read more

Snapchat lets you follow remote events in real time—Snapchat’s latest update include a section called “Live” that incorporates Our Story into everyone’s feed regardless of location. Our Story allows users to share snaps on a a thread dedicated to a single event. There’s no word on how events will be selected for inclusion in the Our Story section, but expect to see marketers figure out ways to get their events included. Read more

Washington Post launches news aggregator—The Most features links to most-read and most-shared stories from around a dozen websites, including the Post’s. Sponsored by Hundai (for now, anyway), The Most’s content is produced by each publisher’s individual algorithm, with each member site displaying 3-5 headlines in a banner at any given time. Among the publisher partners: Time, Atlantic, The Denver Post, The Houston chronicle, Slate, and New York Public Radio. It’ll be interesting to see if any of the headlines finding their way into The Most come from native ads. Read more

Twitter may embrace an algorithmic feed, like Facebook’s—You don’t see every update from every friend and every brand you’ve liked in your Facebook News Feed. Twitter, on the other hand, shows you everything from everyone you follow. That may not be the case forever, though, as Twitters chief financial officer said the network might adopt Facebook’s approach. The existing feed “isn’t the most relevant experience for a user,” Anthony Noto told The Wall Street Journal. Predictably, longtime Twitter users aren’t happy with the news. Read more

Research

Is word-of-mouth worthless in social media?—Social media and word-of-mouth marketing have been intertwined concepts for years, but a study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology says it could all be a big waste of time. People are more comfortable recommending brands to each other person-to-person; online, they face a perceived social risk (that is, their image and reputation could suffer). As a result, you should focus on stimulating in-real-life word-of-mouth, while focusing digital efforts on professional and expert recommendations and reviews. Color me skeptical, since so many other studies say precisely the opposite, but both recommendations are valid anyway. Read more

Nearly half of marketers can’t measure results from social media—Spending on social media will increase four percentage points to over 13% of total marketing budgets over the next year, and to 21% in five years. Yet according to research from Duke University, only 15% of marketers can quantify the impact of social media, and 40% are able to demonstrate effectiveness qualitatively. That means 85% of marketers don’t know how to measure and 45% are completely clueless. (That’s my conclusion, not Duke’s.) The study points out that marketing in general accounts for 8% of company revenues, which means companies will want more information on the value of their social spends, prompting a projected 7% jump in spending on marketing analytics. Read more

YouTube leads the paid advertising pack when it comes to influencing purchases—YouTube drives both awareness and conversion better than any other online paid advertising platform, according to a new study from AOL Platforms. The reasons, according to the report: Its own search volume, its preferential positioning in Google search results, and the rich, descriptive content consumers find when they get to the video. Read more

Trends

Public comments to FCC overwhelmingly support Net neutrality—The Sunlight Foundation has run more than 800,000 public comments received by the FCC through natural language processing to determine that less than 1 percent opposed Net neutrality. The public comment email address was clearly campaigned, with 60% of comments from organized efforts, though Sunlight says this is a lower percentage than is typical for public comments on highly visible regulatory issues. Be sure to visit the site for an interactive visualization you can use to explore the groups of comments. Read more

Southwest Airlines gets instant payoff from its new listening center—First there was Dell. Gatorade followed shortly afterward, and now it’s getting more and more common for companies to have listening centers for centralized monitoring of social and digital media. Southwest Airlines launched its center, shortly after which the effort identified a tweet from a passenger about a gunman at Los Angeles International Airport. The intelligence led to a call to the airline’s operational staff and spokespeople, who hadn’t heard about the incident yet. Hearing about it first via social media gave Southwest an early start on preparing notices to staff, safety messages, and press statements. Read more

Mobile

Coupon redemption will double thanks to mobile—A traditional coupon requires a lot of clipping and saving and remembering to take with you. The far more frictionless mobile coupon is driving a surge in redemptions that will double in the next three years. More behaviors than just redemptions are changing, such as how consumers search for and store coupons. If you work for a retailer, it may be time to rethink (or consider for the first time) a coupon strategy. Read more

1 billion installs for Facebook Android app—Facebook’s Android app has become the first non-Google app to reach 1 billion installs, and surpasses many of Google’s apps. The much maligned Messenger app—users now need it for messaging, which has been detached from the main Facebook app—has reached half a billion installs. Need any more evidence that social networking is going mobile? Read more

The Collaborative Economy

Daimler buys Uber rival—Traditional businesses are waking up to the need to become part of the collaborative economy. The latest example is German automaker Daimler (owner of Chrysler), which bought mytaxi and RideScout, apps that help users get rides from licensed taxis. RideScout “brings all ground transportation options to the palm of your hand in real time,” according to the app’s site. The acquisitions are part of a strategy to attract younger consumers who don’t necessarily want to own their own car. Daimler already runs the Car2Go car-sharing service. Read more

Sharing economy strengthens emergency response and recovery—The rapid expansion of the collaborative economy (more commonly referred to as the sharing economy) has led many to tap into the trend to improve emergency response and recovery. The idea is to use existing infrastructure so community members can tap into available resources in time of need. Local governments and the US government are taking a closer look at the idea, which was first used when Airbnb users offered their homes to people displaced by Hurricane Sandy and Waze opened access to feedback users were providing about gas stations that were open, while the apartment-hunting site, Walk Score, helped people find housing based on commute time. Read more