With all the tweets bombarding our Twitter streams, it’s not uncommon to wonder how many people are actually reading your tweets. The answer, according to one new study, may surprise you.A team of researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology recently published an article in the Harvard Business Review that found only 36 percent of tweets are deemed “worth reading.”
via Study: Only 36 Percent of Tweets Are “Worth Reading” – 10,000 Words.
Svitak made a compelling case for social empowerment among “the generation of eye-rollers,” drawing from recent trends, studies and anecdotes from her own life growing up in the thick of a changing social landscape. Only problem is, adults can have a hard time understanding just how beneficial that engagement can be.
via Are Millennials the Most Distracted or Engaged Generation?.
Bing has been reinvented, offering enhanced search results that tap into the power of social media. Microsoft has done this by pulling people out of search results and putting them in their place: A right-hand social column that will eventually include Facebook, Twitter, Google+ Quora and LinkedIn integration, as well as people who may know something about your most recent Bing query. It even offers a way to ask questions on your favorite social network, directly through Bing.
“Sixteen months ago we received the same number of monthly referrals from search as social. Now 40% of traffic comes from social media,” Scott Havens, senior vice president of finance and digital operations at The Atlantic Media Company, said in a phone conversation ahead of his on-stage interview at our Mashable Connect conference in Orlando, Fla. last weekend. “Truly [our writers] are not really thinking about SEO anymore. Now it’s about how we can spin a story so that it goes viral.”
“It’s like old Hollywood right now,” says Sullivan, who now works with Maker Studios. “You get together with all these other people, and you make all the stuff you want to make that the big studios would say no to.”According to Maker Studios’ co-founder, Lisa Nova, the company was founded on the belief that YouTube is the future of entertainment — partly because of advanced tech.“Our belief in the YouTube platform has only been strengthened and supported with technologies like connected TVs that further blur the lines between TV and the Internet,” says Nova. “We see the devices as one in the same, as our content can be seen on both online and through connected TVs.”
You’ve heard the buzz word — curation — being thrown around like it’s a gadget we all know how to work. In reality, good content curation isn’t as simple as pushing a share button. It’s actually a combination of finding great content and following some simple best practices on how to successfully share that content.
Reports on the media habits of Millennials, those “digital natives”, have given some the impression that young people never read newspapers. However, survey evidence stubbornly insists that they do.
For instance, the recent Pew State of the News Media study notes that 23% of people aged 18-24 reported reading a newspaper yesterday. As a Millennial myself, I was slightly skeptical. Were these 18-24 year olds just confused about what a newspaper is? Further evidence confirms the existence of young people looking to print: The New York Times reports that 10% of its hard copy subscribers are aged 18-24, which is on par with the 9% of this age cohort who subscribe digitally.
via Millennials and Print Newspapers: A Surprising Story : Go Figure : NPR.
If the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that people are really into anthropomorphized cats. They’re good for a chuckle, sure, but their popularity gets at the more interesting question of why and how we share online, and what that means for the changing ways in which we engage with all kinds of information, from lolcats to hard news.
Self-described Internet culture connoisseur Ben Huh is probably best known as CEO of Cheezburger, the hub for sites like I Can Has Cheezburger, FAIL blog, and Know Your Meme. He’s also a co-founder and board member of the hyped startup Circa, which bills itself as “news, re-imagined,” but has so far kept quiet about how it’s doing the re-imagining. (The site’s expected to formally launch this summer.) For now, there’s this, from its landing page: “Our vision is to create the best possible news experience by optimizing for truths, encouraging diversity, and empowering readers.”
I caught up with Huh at ROFLCon, an Internet culture conference at MIT, to ask him about his observations on journalism, and where he thinks the industry is headed.
The hype around gamification is fairly new, but the idea has been around for some time. In fact, badges and leader boards could be considered the new sweepstakes and loyalty rewards. And gamification is not just for major consumer brands and their tech-savvy 18-to-34-year-old demographic. There are examples where gamification in marketing has worked spectacularly for 50-year-old rural ranchers. In other words, any audience is up for grabs.
US consumers have embraced tablets at a staggering pace. And one of the major selling points has been their portability. But, interestingly, a Q1 2012 study by Viacom of US tablet owners found that they used their devices at home 74% of the time. That makes sense considering that consumers appeared to be using tablets largely for entertainment purposes, such as playing games, or watching television and movies.
Of those using tablets at home, more than nine in 10 employed the devices in either the living room or bedroom, bolstering the idea that consumers used tablets primarily for fun or relaxation. But three-quarters of respondents were at least somewhat likely to use their tablets in a home office, suggesting that the devices were used for work at least some of the time.