Social Cache.
A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

Share this with the next person you meet who says, “I don’t get Twitter!”.

The folks at Twitter have put together a fine deck of slides for businesses who are still struggling with how to use the Twitter platform. The same insights can be used for personal tweeting too but I prefer to see Twitter as a very effective business tool. Below is one of the slides that explains you don’t even need a Twitter account if you want to listen to what people are saying about your brand. The slides are a must read for all businesses or business owners. Download the PDF here.

Aardvark Founders. Pic: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

I have written here often of how technology only shortens the distance between people on the social web. In other words, using social web tools to communicate with friends and family is an extension of our social activities offline. As I write this on July 5th, I recall yesterday seeing tens of thousands gathered on bridges in downtown Portland, alongside the lake in Lake Oswego and milling around in Tigard, Or, to watch the firework displays commemorating Independence Day. Families with kids, couples and teens all very comfortable with each other for a few hours; it is very natural for us to gather with strangers and witness a familiar event.

Opening a browser on a computer or a mobile device today means participation in the social web. Not just because of one’s involvement in social networks but also by letting your friends or family know of your geo-location by allowing a mobile device app to broadcast your whereabouts for instance. Emailing and texting friends, tweeting and updating your Facebook status all let those following you know of your involvement on the social web every day.

This is of course very familiar to us, we surf the web in our own familiar ways using social networking tools, yet companies that wish to harness the power to advertise to this web of millions of people have been stymied for some time, stuck in social media channels wondering how to budge these masses even a quarter of an inch closer to their products. The web and those using it don’t ever stop moving but you can’t simply plant a billboard alongside this viral highway – the billboard’s message will remain right there where it was positioned, as we all go about our daily electronic sojourns.

Rob Glazer of Real. Pic: Kevin P. Casey for the The New York Times

I recently discovered two articles in the Business section of the June 28th 09 edition of the New York Times. The articles cover two companies and their products – one is RealNetworks, a familiar face in technology, the other a new company called Aardvark. Real is featured for launching new technology for hardware devices and Aardvark for creating a social web service that helps you reach hundreds of your online friends and peer group for answers to any of your questions. Real brings us technology based on the premise that the company thinks we need their product and Aardvark brings us technology that embraces the social web by connecting us easily with people we trust to answer our questions. [I used Aardvark yesterday to ask a question of my followers - "who uses online music subscriptions, which one is better and why?" and I received 6 great responses, even one from a friend in Sweden who urged me to use a service called Spotify.] It works.

Aardvark doesn’t bother all of my 1700+ Facebook friends either. As the NYT article points out –
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Portland Bike Art Pic by PortlandGround.com

Recently Josh Catone wrote an article on Mashable entitled ‘Why NPR is the Future of Mainstream Media.’ In it he points out how NPR has been adjusting and preparing for the coming digital landscape that will affect news media – radio, TV and newspapers. To avoid the fate of other news media, NPR has embraced the triangulation of local content, social media [in its true form] and ubiquitous access.

Local: Catone quotes new NPR CEO Vivian Schiller – “To me, local is the big play, because local commercial radio has abandoned the local market. Local newspapers are withering or sometimes dying. The big national media companies, including excellent ones like The New York Times, cannot afford to be covering every single community. So that leaves a big, gaping hole to serve Americans’ local coverage,” she told mediabistro.com in April.

The Social Web: Catone points out that “NPR’s Twitter account has over 780,000 followers, making it one of the top 25 on the social network (and third among news organizations behind only the New York Times and CNN). Their Facebook Page has over 400,000 fans.”

The tools now available for social web activity give news media of all stripes a way to connect, communicate and share information with their audience, attracting new listeners and retaining existing ones. NPR has taken this all the way with blogs, podcasts and mobile apps. Here in Portland, OPB Music is one of the few stations that focuses on local music and music from the Pacific Northwest. Given Portland’s rich and diverse music population there is never a shortage of great new music yet you will be hard pressed to find it on any local commercial stations. And as the audience for music fractures and spreads far and wide across the internet, online radio will be the biggest winner.

Even the face of music concerts is changing – as bands perform house parties or shows in other spontaneous locations local mainstream media should be jumping all over it working with local bloggers to bring access to live streams or reviews. Yet so far they haven’t, it’s been left to local alternative outlets such as OPB Music or local alternative newspapers like the Willamette Week or the Portland Mercury to cover. Even the New York Times has belatedly jumped in on local music activities with an article entitled ‘Indie Rockers, 90210.’

There appears to be no end to the bleeding for local mainstream radio and TV – revenues are set to plunge 15% according to this report. On the other hand NPR’s audience continues to grow. They had 23.6 million people tuning in weekly at the end of ‘08.

In a strange twist, in what I presume is a response to the obvious downturn in advertising revenues, Portland radio station 94.7FM KNRK recently laid off one of its more popular radio personalities, Tara Dublin. Byron Beck a local reporter, and himself the victim of layoffs at the Willamette Week, broke the news. It appears that Dublin does have a local fan base – her ‘Save Tara’ Facebook page is garnering support from her fans. Those fans are complaining that 94.7 won’t let them leave comments in support of Dublin on the station’s forums. If true, that is bad social web practice. There is also the opposite view – Save Tara? Save Us From Not Having Tara on the Air – that is not as negative as it sounds; people are pointing out that if commercial radio continues its decline why would Dublin want to go down with the ship? This is the social web in action – people listening and joining the conversation; NPR understands this and embraces it.

Mobile Ubiquity: It is not just the success of the very popular iPhone that now gives people far-ranging mobile internet access from handheld devices, but the new, faster iPhone S does make it even easier and is a significant driver of mobile web traffic. RIM’s Blackberry, the Google Android device and the new Palm Pre are all in the race to be the web access mobile device of choice too.

Catone mentions Happn.in a new site that tracks trends locally on Twitter in 52 different metro areas around the world. This is a very useful tool and as Twitter search begins to be a popular way for people to find trending events and news, hyper-local will be incredibly important – searching for local events and news at the zipcode level is getting easier and easier. All local media outlets need to take note.

Related articles:

SEO and SEM Will Be Dead As You Know It in 6 Months
Authenticity and Authority on the Social Web
Hyper-Local News and Portland’s Hillsdale District

David Lynch and his team have traveled 20,000 miles across the USA over 70 days and come back with interviews with hundreds of people. It is called Interview Project and you can see a preview at that link at the moment with the whole thing launching on June 1st.