The New York Times Hires Their First Ever Social Media Editor. Below is the actual email sent from the head of the newsroom to his staff at the Times regarding the new position. I loved what he said at the very end… “because of course we all need to figure this out together.”

There is no blueprint for the ever changing and evolving new media landscape and world of social media and user generated content. We are all figuring it out as we go. I happen to love that kind of an environment. Whether or not you love it as well, I think it’s pretty clear to all of us that the landscape is changing rapidly and those who fear and resist change will struggle to compete.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: [...]
Date: Tue, May 26, 2009 at 9:00 AM
Subject: [NYT Newsroom] From Jon Landman: Jennifer Preston to be Social Media Editor
To: [...]

To the Newsroom:

One of the bracing things about this topsy-turvy media landscape is that you can wake up one morning and find yourself actually doing something you never thought you’d even think about. Take Jennifer Preston. In 25 years in the news biz, she’s been plenty of things: Reporter (cop shop, City Hall, Albany, etc.), editor (political editor, section editor, administrative editor, etc.) and even circulation marketing manager (at New York Newsday). But still, did she ever think she’d wake up one morning as “social media editor”?

No, she didn’t but yes, she did. That morning was this one.

Jennifer is our first social media editor. What’s that? It’s someone who concentrates full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers.

Think of Twitter. Did you know that The New York Times is No. 2 on the Twitterholic.com Top 100 Twitterholics based on Followers? (Behind Ashton Kutcher but ahead of Ellen DeGeneres.) Don’t care? OK, but the point is that an awful lot of people are finding our work not by coming to our homepage or looking at our newspaper but through alerts and recommendations from their friends and colleagues. So we ought to learn how to reach those people effectively and serve them well. At the same time, more of us are using social networks to find sources, contacts and information. Like this guy.

Jennifer will work closely with editors, reporters, bloggers and others to use social tools to find sources, track trends, and break news as well as to gather it. She will help us get comfortable with the techniques, share best practices and guide us on how to more effectively engage a larger share of the audience on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Digg, and beyond.

A big part of her job will be keeping everyone up to date with the rapid developments taking place on the social media front. She will work closely with social media whizzes in the newsroom and other departments, including Soraya Darabi in marketing, Jake Harris in software and Heather Moore in comment moderation, on how news feeds work and how best to be part of the online conversation. She will also work closely with Dawn Williamson, Derek Gottfrid and others involved in building our own social network, Times People, as we continue to use crowd-sourcing techniques to increase the reach and quality of our work. She will work with Craig Whitney and others to ask and answer the many tricky questions that arise in this context: What is the proper balance between personal and professional? What best practices should we adopt or adapt? How can we do the new stuff in a way that honors the old stuff? Etc.

In a significant way Jennifer will apply the collaborative techniques of social-networking to her own job, because of course we all need to figure this out together.

Jon

I attended a conference about a month ago and heard marketing guru Paul Colligan talk about new media content creation. Tonight I received an email from Paul with a link to the presentation on his YouTube channel. If you have 8 minutes and an interest in better online visibility - this is an excellent presentation. As they say “content is king.” You have to have lots and lots of content flowing in order to continually improve your visibility and positioning. Paul talks about creating the content once and then repurposing it multiple ways to get greater advantage from it.

If you share my belief that online video is an absolute must for law firm marketing programs, then you’ll want to check this out. I had an email yesterday from a video trade group that I belong to. They were recommending a new tool for montage production using still photographs. The company is called Animoto. I flagged the email to come back to because I have such regard for this trade group that anything they recommend has immediate credibility to me.

Today, I opened an account in Animoto. The fact is I do a lot of montages using photograph’s and I have wanted to find an easy to use software to give motion to my still images. I saw an example from Animoto and decided to open an account and try it out. There are various levels of accounts. I chose the business account for $249/yr. I added an all access pass for $25 that will allow me to actually download the videos if I like.

Here’s how it works. You upload your images into the application. You can then drag and arrange them in sequence. Next step is to choose music and then click on create video. Pretty easy. I wanted to show you an example so I just took some of my stock image photo’s and uploaded them into the program. About 5 minutes later I received and email with a link. Here is the video that the system spit out. Oh, by the way, this platform was developed by a group of veterans of the entertainment industry.

Here’s a great interview of Guy Kawasaki by Robert Scoble.  It caught my attention because another of my favorite guru’s Kevin O’Keefe highly recommended it.   Guy talks about his new book, Reality Check.  In the course of the interview he says something really astounding - “I am just so sold on Twitter…I think that Twitter is arguably the most powerful branding mechanism since television.” 

Ustream.TV is catching on like wildfire.  It’s a technology that allows virtually anyone with a $100 webcam to broadcast a live TV show over the Internet.  And that’s exactly what I did for the first time tonight.  You can see the rather rough and raw video at the link below:

Live Video streamed by Ustream

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/legal-marketing-cafe 

Don’t be too critical - I wanted to capture my first attempt so that hopefully we will witness a progression as a better understanding of the interface emerges!

If you’d like to know more about Ustream.TV, check out this 6 minute video with the vision of the two West Point founders.

I’ve been hearing about a web 2.0 site called “Twitter.”  When somebody uses twitter they are said to “tweet.”  I have to tell you that this terminology really didn’t strike me as anything that I would ever be involved in.  However, tonight I signed up for my own twitter account and now I tweet!  As a matter of fact if you go to the calendar page on my website you will be able to follow my twitter account. 

Here’s why I did it.  I continue to study and explore social media and tonight I am listening to a series of videos, one of which is about www.twitter.com.  The forecast is that this is a rapidly growing phenomena and I so I want to understand it. 

Recency often replaces authority.  Google is giving us an in to page one as they continue to change the rules.  How is it affecting media?  When I search for something that is current, I see results on news from places like PR Web.  How do we get there?  We do a press release.  If we want to dominate and play with the big boys we need to write content and do media everyday.  It’s pretty intense.  Twitter will track you as you do that.

I am now set up to syndicate my twitter updates on facebook, my space and my website.  I can simply send a text message and all 3 places will be instantly updated so that anybody that wants to know what I am doing can quickly see that.

Web 2.0 is an exciting arena.  Twitter is just a small part of it.  If you want to try it, go to www.twitter.com and sign up for a free account.

Vivaty is a start-up based in Menlo Park, Calif.  An article in the New York Times today talked about their developing 3-D virtual chat rooms that can be added to web pages and social networking profiles on the sites where they spend most of their Internet time.  They are apparently planning to test the new technology on Facebook this week and then release it in wider form this summer. 

The reason this article captured my attention is because of the following statement:

“…The company plans to make money partly by allowing companies to start their own virtual rooms on their own Web sites, where they can control the decor and their marketing messages.”

One more avenue for interaction on the web.  Why is it important that we evaluate these types of opportunities?  As I continue to conduct both quantitative and qualitative market research on Client Advisory Panel members in law firms throughout the US, I am finding a clear trend.  These participants, who generally represent a firms best clients, are very heavy internet users.  A vast majority spend 2 or more hours on the web daily, and state that they research everything on the web.  Approximately 1/3 of these individuals state that their friends often refer to them as “computer geeks.” 

In light of these findings I believe it is imperative that we continually evaluate new web based marketing opportunities.  Vivaty is simply one of them.

I believe that the Internet will continue to change the way we do business.  I don’t think I’d get much of an argument from anybody on that.  However, when I talk with my clients about strategic marketing initiatives that are web based, I often hear something like this “our clients don’t have computers so that probably wouldn’t work for them.”  I hear it less and less, but I still hear it. 

Well, I believe that the scales have tipped the other way and the majority of our clients do have computers.  That is confirmed to me more and more as I watch the email lists of my clients grow and I look at open and click through rates on emails that we send to clients.  I also see and measure pass along on some of the multimedia emails that we send and the opportunity that provides to grow our databases.

 It is such an exciting time to be a marketer.  Social networking, online video, email, podcasts, screencasts, the list is endless.  Are your clients on the web?  Yes they are - in droves.  If you’re not utilizing web based marketing strategies beyond just having a website, I recommend that you research options and make a few of these strategies part of your 2008 marketing program.

My Space allows members to customize their individual profile and in the process they have an opportunity to learn a great deal about their members.  So it just makes sense that in the very near future My Space advertising will be targeted based on the members profiles - just like we saw foreshadowed in the movie Minority Report a few years ago.

In today’s New York Times there was an article entitled “MySpace to Discuss Latest Efforts to Customize Ads for Members.”  According to the article “MySpace, the Web’s largest social network and one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet, says that after experimenting with technology over the last six months it can tailor ads to the personal information that its 110 million active users leave on their profile pages.”

 Currently when I visit My Space I see mass-market pitches for mortgages, online dating, etc.  But, if the future unfolds as anticipated, we may soon be presented with customized pitches during our online experience.  If and when that happens, the response will undoubtedly increase significantly, but the cost of the advertising will be greater as well.  Sounds like a win win to me!

In 2002 I went to see a Tom Cruise film called Minority Report.  It’s set in the year 2054 and portrays the writer’s vision for the future.  What I found most fascinating about this film was the portrayal of the hero being pitched personalized ads.  I thought to myself “is this what we can expect in the future.  Will I walk down a street and see ads that speak to me, Cindy Speaker?  And will those ads be targeted to my demographic and or psychographic information?”

 Well, imagine my surprise when I opened the New York Times the other day and read that the future I saw in Minority Report is apparently soon to become a reality?

According to David W. Kenny, chairman and chief executive of a company called Digitas, “the plan is to build a global digital ad network that uses offshort labor to create thousands of versions of ads.  Then, using data about consumers and computer algorithms, the network will decide which advertising message to show at which moment to every person who turns on a computer, cellphone or - eventually - a television.  More simply put, the goal is to transform advertising from mass messages and 30-second commercials that people chat about around the water cooler into personalized messages for each potential customer.”

Wow!  I can’t help but ponder how this development can best be utilized by our industry?  How can we deliver personalized ads to our clients, ads that reflect what we’ve learned about them? 

I don’t know the answer to that question but I do have a few recommendations:

1.  Tune in to mobile marketing.  I believe this strategy will be something that will serve our industry well.  We need to pay attention and learn so that when the time comes to embrace mobile marketing we are prepared and able to position our firms as first in the market to use this medium.
2.  Recognize every point of contact with your clients as an opportunity to learn something more about them. 
3.  Put more emphasis on your database.  Record every point of contact so that it becomes the foundation for your future more personalized advertising efforts.