President Obama’s Reddit AMA Wednesday was an important moment for the intersection of politics and Internet culture. But for Reddit, the event serves as the site’s coming-out party to mainstream Internet users.

via Reddit Rising: Community Site Just Had Its Coming-Out Party.

But the hackers who planted fake news stories on Reuters’s website earlier this month weren’t doing it for fun. Reuters was caught in the middle of an “intensifying conflict in cyberspace between supporters and opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,” in the words of one of its reporters, as hackers attempted to co-opt the news agency’s credibility in order to support government forces in the Syrian national conflict.

via Hijacking the news: how hackers are manipulating the press from the inside out | The Verge.

What was the last thing you shared on the web? There’s a good chance it was either a photo or a video. And increasingly, that shareable content is originating from brands.Companies are quickly learning that visual media is one of the most effective ways to share their stories. In a study of the top 10 brands on Facebook, users liked photos twice as often as text updates. And they shared videos 12 times more than photo and text posts combined.

via For Brand Engagement, Visuals Rule [INFOGRAPHIC].

Content 4.0 is here.That’s content worth paying for — and consumers are buying lots of it.For the preceding decade, content has been available for free online, both legally and illegally. So why are people buying it now?Because technology is making content more convenient, attractive, relevant and emotional. From iTunes to Amazon, from Netflix to the New York Times, the signs of Content 4.0 are everywhere.

via INFOGRAPHIC: Content 4.0 And IGNITION – Business Insider.

Traditional agencies may be slow to adapt to social outreach due to their sheer size, says Michael Litman, senior social strategist at AnalogFolk. The larger an agency gets, the more processes and layers it encounters, and thus, it becomes harder to adapt and change alongside industry trends and client needs.

“You can compare a traditional media agency to an oil tanker and a boutique agency to a small dinghy,” says Litman. “Both have their benefits and drawbacks. Oil tankers are safer, been around longer and have a greater amount of resources at their disposal. But moving them is pretty tough and needs a lot of people. Boutique agencies are nimble, adaptable, have few layers of hierarchy and are more likely to experiment and iterate.”

Still, traditional agencies have been creating conversations since first opening their doors, although they’re not presumed to be on the pulse of social media strategy. It’s simply that the mediums of communication have evolved, from print and television to include social media. And while that’s a big consideration, it doesn’t change the fact that effective messages make a splash, no matter the delivery method. So don’t necessarily assume that traditional marketing firms can’t also approach social media effectively — it’s likely they’ve been talking to customers for a long time.

via Does Size Matter? The Pros and Cons of Boutique Media Agencies.

As it turns out, the ones who do it well are rare and far less visible because – like good programmers – their work is a lot harder to notice. Good marketing is a product of the same inputs as good code; long hours, sweating the details, and the judicious application of experience doing it the right way.

via Brooklyn Hacker • What A Hacker Learns After A Year In Marketing.

Viewers are not the customer of the TV networks—advertisers are.

For a long time, those two groups had similar goals, though. Advertisers wanted lots of viewers and viewers wanted shows that lots of them wanted to watch. So the TV networks used ratings as a proxy for advertiser happiness and there wasn’t much of a problem.

The same thing was true for newspapers. More local readers meant local advertisers were happy.

via Seth’s Blog: The difficult challenge of media alignment.

Everyone is talking about content. Googling the phrase “content strategy” retrieves almost 50 million results — a clear indicator that interest in content is very much in the zeitgeist. By the time you read this, I expect that number will have grown even higher.

But I also suspect that the substance of the talk would be quite different if content were truly respected. I believe this because the way we talk about content is beginning to sound a lot like the way we talk about money.

via Content: A Blessing, A Bubble, A Burden | Smashing Magazine.

Interactive data visualizations are an exciting way to engage and inform large audiences. They enable users to focus on interesting parts and details, to customize the content and even the graphical form, and to explore large amounts of data. At their best, they facilitate a playful experience that is way more engaging than static infographics or videos.Here are several ideas and concepts of interaction design for data visualizations, using 11 examples from the web.

via Interaction Design for Data Visualizations | Visual.ly Blog.