San Francisco's Union SquareI have been somewhat preoccupied the last few days preparing for a networking and business development trip to San Francisco and Silicon Valley this upcoming week. Among my meetings, I am looking forward to Charlene Li's blogger meet-up on Tuesday March 25 atthe21st Amendment.And in the spirit of social networking, drop me a line if you would like to connect -
dangtech2000 AT yahoo DOT comNevertheless, write I must and I wanted to use this entry to follow up on two recent posts - one about CBS and their Facebook strategy and the other about the future of the Associated Press.CBS March MadnessWhat do the figures 1.4 billion and 122 have in common? Well the former is the number of dollars the outplacement company Challenger Gray & Christmas, Inc. (sounds like the name of a firm from a Dickens novel) estimates the NCAA "March Madness" basketball tournament could cost the nation's employers over the 15 days of the event. (For which I jokingly ask the firm Challenger Gray and Christmas - where is your sense of Christmas?) Their reasoning can be found here.Meanwhile the very helpful PR folks at CBS Sports reported there were 1,751,956 unique visitors to the NCAA March Madness on Demand video player for the first day of the first round of the tournament, a 122 percent increase over 2007 figures. They attribute this jump in part to their decision to drop registration requirements for the player and enabling non-CBS properties to take advantage of it.So you decide whether social media is good for corporate America - lower productivity or (as Challenger Gray & Christmas CEO John Challenger points out) higher employee morale. Let's face it, the tournament connects people in new and more personal ways and facilitates good natured smack talk at the water cooler. Either way, it's good business for CBS and a validation of their social networking strategy. And now this...The Associated PressConcerning my AP posting, I got some feedback from Sue Cross,Senior Vice President of Global New Media and U.S. Print and Broadcast Markets.I was looking at how technology was impacting traditional media including the AP.It was interesting to get her perspective. It seems news consumption is not declining, only changing. It's not less news, but a proliferation of opinion.The Internet has not replaced the AP, but has allowed it to enter new channels.And as Sue wrote me:AP is creating a common industry standard for coding news content for online use -- attaching metadata or tags that make searches more productive. Similar to how the AP Stylebook created a common writing style guide for the news industry, this AP "content enrichment" adds value to the industry by enabling newspapers and broadcasters to share a common metadata standard in addition to their own local tags. A tag or metadata is information that is not visible to the end reader, but can be read by computers to tell what a story, photo or video is about, and then categorize and enable searching of elements within it.AP also is opening up its full database of English language content to U.S. newspaper members, and providing them with tools to help mine the database for news about topics, companies and people of local interest. This will exponentially increase the amount of content beyond what AP members currently get via satellite delivery, though satellite feeds of top national and state news will continue as well.The result is that newspapers can publish stories with more details and references from other parts of the country and the world. They can customize more. They can identify new audiences and make stories more relevant.For PR professionals, it means the world of news just got more complex. Readers have more sources of news, but it makes it more difficult to sift through the available information.It therefore makes it more challenging to gain readers' attention. I know social media is about personalization and letting users find their own way. But at the same time, we are expected to be tour guides and direct them to where we would like them go. I liken this inherent tension to raising children. You can provide structure, direction, discipline but ultimately they have minds of their own. And the more you direct them, the less they will listen. But ignore them and you lose a tremendous opportunity to engage them and see the world in an entirely different way.Let me get back to you.Technorati Tags: AP;Associated Press;Sue Cross;March Madness;NCAA Basketball Tournament;CBS;CBS Sports;Challenger Gray & Christmas;AP Stylebook;Save to del.icio.us
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