Wrapped Peanuts characters photo courtesy of Sarah JoyThe Friday Wrap is my weekly collection of news stories, posts, studies, and reports designed to help organizational communicators stay current on the trends and technology that affect their jobs. These may be items that flew under the radar while other stories grabbed big headlines. As always, I collect material from which I select Wrap stories (as well as stories to report on the For Immediate Release podcast) on my link blog, which you’re welcome to follow.

News

Altimeter Group acquired by Prophet—The Altimeter Group, founded by former Forrester exec Charlene Li, has been acquired by Prophet Brand Strategy, a brand and marketing strategy consultancy. According to Li, Prophet will invest in Altimeter’s research agenda; the company will continue to publish open (that is, free) research. Li also says Altimeter will maintain its independence, identified as Altimeter, a Prophet company. Read more

Sysomos acquires Expion—If one acquisition isn’t enough for you, here’s another: social media monitoring giant Sysomos has acquired Expion, the social media management system. All this smells like consolidation to me. Read more

Twitter gets more boring—The creativity behind a lot of the backgrounds users added to their Twitter pages made for some spectacular variety. At the very least (as in my case), it allowed users to display information that didn’t fit anywhere else on their Twitter profiles. Kiss those backgrounds goodbye. The backgrounds and the images used in them have been removed, most likely to make room for ads. All is homogenous and white now. Read more

Facebook can’t challenge search warrants—That’s the conclusion of a New York state appeals court, which said the social network has no legal standing to challenge search warrants on behalf of its customers. The ruling upheld a lower court decision and dealt a blow to efforts to expand Internet privacy. Read more

Lead generation comes to SlideShare—Maybe this will get more brands using SlideShare: LinkedIn, which owns the presentation sharing platform, is adding the ability to require people to complete a form before they can download a presentation or view it in full. SlideShare contains a wealth of great information and produces ridiculous results compared to blog posts and other original content. Create something great, and potential customers will give you their contact information just to be able to get their hands on it. Read more

Twitter targets live events—If it’s information on what’s happening right now where news is breaking that you want, Twitter wins. Based on that breaking-news supremacy, Twitter has introduced tools to help advertisers reach audiences who are participating via the messaging service in real-time events. A dashboard provides an overview of current and upcoming events; clicking through provides deeper levels of insight to help marketers craft the perfect message for the audience following the event. Read more

Could Symphony be Wall Street’s platform for collusion?—That’s the question New York’s top financial regulator is asking about the social network being built as a tool to improve the way banks communicate with each other. The company is a spin-off of software originally developed by Goldman Sachs, but Anthony J. Albanese worries that it “could make it easier for traders to conspire to manipulate prices and commit misdeeds.” The head of the New York Department of Financial Services asked for clarification in a letter to Symphony that noted some traders have been caught using chat rooms to conspire to manipulate benchmark prices. Read more

Marketers can license GoPro videos—GoPro Licensing is making hundreds of high-quality GoPro videos available to marketers for commercial use, sort of a stock-photo model. The user-generated videos are from amateur and professional videographers with whom GoPro has struck deals. The cost to marketers is a minimum of $1,000, depending on how the videos will be used. Read more

Who’s excited about another new social network?—You couldn’t wait to get an invitation to Ello. So when was the last time you visited? Now Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, is introducing TPO.com, a new social network (ad-free, like Ello) similar to Twitter (“but better,” says Wales, who predicts it will be “massive”). Operated by mobile network The People’s Operator (of which Wales is chairman), TPO.com will be designed to simplify the process of making donations. The idea is to unite people around causes they care about. That sounds nice, but will it satisfy peoples’ social networking needs enough to get them to abandon their current networks of choice? Read more

Slack integrates with Google Calendar—I freaking love Slack, the mobile-first collaborative tool that has become the fastest-growing enterprise software in history, with more than half a million users. It just got better. Now you can add Google Calendar reminders inside Slack channels. Just…awesome. Read more

Trends

Newspapers back away from live video—Given the ability to broadcast live over the web, a number of newspapers thought they had found a way to deliver news and information just like TV news operations. It hasn’t worked out well, and now these media outlets are focusing on recorded video rather than live streams. The Wall Street Journal, for example, has canceled three of its live programs and replaced its WSJ Live logo with one that says WSJ Video. The New York Times and The Washington Post are two other papers that have scaled back live programming in favor of slicker on-demand video. Read more

Starbucks: Your new source of New York Times articles—Anxious to get its content into readers’ hands, The New York Times is exploring a variety of third-party platforms that can be used to deliver Times content. Facebook’s Instant Articles and the recently announced Apple News have been joined by Starbucks. Using the coffee chain’s mobile app, members of Starbucks’ loyalty program will get some Times articles free. According to Times CEO Mark Thompson, “This is another in a series of arrangements we have made recently in order to ensure that The Times continues to expand the reach of our journalism to new and interesting pools of readers.” Read more

What’s the future of news?—The latest entry in the future-of-news prediction sweepstakes comes from Ezra Klein, previously of The Washington Post and currently one of the movers and shakers at news-explainer site Vox.com. His vision: “Within three years, it will be normal for news organizations of even modest scale to be publishing to some combination of their own websites, a separate mobile app, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, Snapchat, RSS, Facebook Video, Twitter Video, YouTube, Flipboard, and at least one or two major players yet to be named. The biggest publishers will be publishing to all of these simultaneously.” While that will expose content to large audiences, it will also force content into third-party formats. That’s too bad, because Vox’s card stacks and other innovations will go unseen, Klein says. For organizations engaged in media relations, knowing where news is headed can help in crafting the perfect pitch to the right outlets. Read more

Social media makes your travel day easier at airports—Athens International Airport is the latest to adopt social media to keep passengers up to date. Its new service, ATH Messenger, lets you enter your flight number in order to get live flight information via Facebook Messenger. London City Airport is using Twitter to deliver real-time flight updates once you’ve tweeted your flight number to @DXBupdates. Other airports have launched (or are planning) similar initiatives. The latest Airport IT Trends Survey found 30% of airports are using social media to improve customer relations. Read more

Print is still not dead—I have always maintained that new media don’t kill old media. Old media adapts. In some cases, old media just thrives. Print may be finding its level, but some print vehicles never had to; they never lost their audience. And in one instance, that audience is young, the very people who are supposed to be abandoning print for digital. Alternative Press was launched in 1985 as a photocopied music fanzine. Today it has over 225,000 subscribers and its sales are healthy. It’s the number two music magazine (behind Rolling Stone) and it has retained its demographic of younger readers. Read more

Mobile and Wearables

YouTube app now shows vertical videos in full-screen mode—On the last episode of The Hobson & Holtz Report, I argued that you have a new decision to make when producing a video: horizontal (which has been the default forever) or vertical? Now, YouTube has announced portrait-mode videos will display in full screen on its Android app. You may not like it, but the preference for vertical video is gaining ground. Read more

Horror director crafts a Snapchat murder mystery—Eli Roth, the filmmaker behind the gruesome Hostel franchise, will host a murder mystery on Snapchat this Sunday. Some social media influencers will be invited to a party, where they will be (fictitiously) killed off (shades of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None”). When the party ends, viewers will have 24 hours to sift through clues to find the killer. Read more

Research

Earned media is more important than ever—The lines between earned, owned, paid, and social media may be blurring, but a new study has highlighted the growing importance of the “earned” part of the equation. An Ogilvy PR survey of reporters, editors, and producers found that earned media wields more influence over purchasing decisions and business outcomes than other types. Part of the reason is that traditional news media are still the most trusted source of news, so having those outlets tell your story brings credibility with it. Sixty-five percent of journalists said the more the media covers a company, the more credible the company becomes. Don’t expect media relations to vanish from PR’s list of services any time soon. Read more

A miniscule number of marketers think their content marketing strategies are working—How miniscule? Try 2%. That’s the result of a new study from the CMO Council, which found only 2% of marketers think their content marketing is highly effective. Lower your expectations and more marketers—44%—say their efforts are moderately effective, but 20% say they’re not, and a third are somewhere in between. The problem, according to CMO Executive Director Donovan Neale-May, is that most marketers are producing self-serving content that isn’t relevant to the customer. Read more

Victoria’s Secret does social media best—An analysis of 50 major brands’ social media efforts found only Victoria’s Secret earning top scores across all eight social media platforms. The study by Spredfast examined activity on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tumblr, and Google+. Criteria included audience size, response time, volume, and engagement. While Victoria’s Secret does have a lot of followers, engagement is huge among a core audience. Other top performers included Mercedes-Benz, MTV, and the NBA. As to why these 50 brands were selected, your guess is as good as mine. Read more

Business success doesn’t flow naturally from great customer service—An analysis of business performance among the best and worst-performing customer service providers revealed that great customer service alone doesn’t translate into great financial performance—at least, not when stock performance is the metric. Revenue growth could be a more worthwhile metric, since “competing companies that have different scores on consumer service rankings (very high or very low) find that their revenue growth now correlates with customer experience.” Read more