Sabtu, 04 Februari 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Reuters productizes social media through Social Pulse

Posted: 03 Feb 2012 11:30 AM PST

Think of Reuters Social Pulse as a social-media weapon for the C-suite set. That’s because the newly debuted dashboard is designed to make the world of social media less of a shiny toy and more of a daily intelligence tool.

Even as it tries to branch out to reach broader audiences through its news service, Reuters knows its core market is the business set — managers, officers, decision makers. Information is the core of Reuters’ business (even more so Thomson Reuters’) and Social Pulse is their newest attempt at creating a product that can merge their editorial vision and data proficiency. 

“We think of this as a lab. We’ll see what people are engaging with.”

Social Pulse mines things like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Klout (we’ll get to that in a moment) to provide concise summaries of news, conversation and sentiment analysis as it pertains to leading companies. The proposed value proposition is in turning those social outputs — which haven’t always reached the corner office as much as the newsroom — into a refined and polished product, said Alex Leo, director of news product for Reuters Digital. “We wanted a social page that was more than trending topics, which are often ‘Rihanna nude,’ which isn’t something our audience necessary cares about,” Leo told me.

Social Pulse breaks down into three big components: the Hit List, a stock sentiment module, and the Reuters & Klout 50, a ranking of CEOs based on their social activity. The Hit List scans the followers of Reuters Twitter accounts (both official and personal) as well as their journalists to find which stories are getting the most mentions and aggregates the top news. (They use Percolate, the same company that makes Counterparties, the Felix Salmon/Ryan McCarthy joint, possible.) The stock sentiment tool, which tracks the mood around specific companies in parallel to changes in their stock price, is powered by a service called WiseWindow. Leo called WiseWindow’s approach to sentiment analysis more nuanced than most, thanks to a combination of keyword tracking, language processing, and predictive modeling. “They can tell the difference between you calling Mitt Romney mean, which is negative, and saying ‘Taylor Swift plays a mean guitar,’ which is positive,” she said.

And then there’s the Reuters & Klout 50, which resembles a yearbook of the most socially active CEOs in the country, featuring names like Twitter’s Dick Costolo, Oprah, Mark Cuban, Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti, and Gawker’s Nick Denton, among others. On a daily basis the rankings will shift among a pre-set list of 100 CEOs, winnowed down to 50 based on their Klout. It’s like the CEO equivalent of NFL power rankings or Mediaite’s Power Grid, but based purely on social media acumen. Reuters hopes that competitive spirit will make it catnip for business leaders. It could also be a motivator, Leo said: “There are so many people and so many executives who have their toe in Twitter,” she said. “Some of them are using the social web effectively, and some are not.” (One would hope a CEO would be motivated primarily by factors other than an urge to out-Klout Kevin Rose, but who knows.)

Just as a marketplace developed around aggregating disparate news feeds, a new one is forming for services that can coalesce the raw noise of social networks. Like any good media company, Reuters has tried to be diligent in using the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and now of course YouTube to bring its journalism to new audiences and expand their brand. Social Pulse is an experiment in finding new ways to use these systems as more than just communication channels either in reporting or as solo products, Leo said. “We think of this as a lab. We’ll see what people are engaging with,” she said. “It doesn’t end here — if things are really popular on Social Pulse they will be added elsewhere.”

It also represents a way of bringing all of the company’s various social strands together into one hub. That is, other than Reuters one-man social-media hub Anthony De Rosa. The Reuters social media editor will also have a presence on the site offering up links, liveblogs and more, because, as Leo joked, “You can’t have a social part of Reuters without having Anthony be a part of it.” The man is, after all, the “undisputed king of Tumblr” — take that, Cats with Bread! — but there’s a reason the likes of De Rosa and Salmon have risen to prominence at Reuters: They represent a kind of bridge between what the media company was and what they’d like to become. Social Pulse appears to be another step in that, a way of amplifying and enhancing Reuters journalism for both their core and new audience.

“I wanted to make the Anthonys of the world happy and the wealth managers of the world happy, and everyone else in between excited,” Leo said. 

Pew data: Facebook has room for passives as well as actives

Posted: 03 Feb 2012 08:30 AM PST

If it’s so much better to give than receive, why are some Facebook users sitting on their hands?

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a new report today that suggests Facebook users are not a uniformly active bunch. According to the study, the typical Facebook user gets more friend requests than she sends, is tagged in photos more than she tags, and has posts Liked more often than she Likes herself.

But wait — shouldn’t it all even out? After all, every friend request has a requester and a requestee. If a typical user is skews passive on Facebook, where’s all the action coming from?

The answer: a collection of “power users” who, according to the report, are becoming specialists of a sort. You know that friend who only posts tons of photos, or the one who goes on a Liking spree, or the one who seems to rack up an inordinate amount of friends? Yup, they’re doing the work for the rest of us. Even on a flat platform, behavior still moves toward a division of labor:

A proportion of Facebook participants — ranging between 20% and 30% of users depending on the type of activity — were power users who performed these same activities at a much higher rate; daily or more than weekly.

Essentially, in the funny parlance you could only get in a report about Facebook: “People are liked more than they like.” Some data:

Facebook users in our sample on average contributed about four comments for every status update that they made. On average, users make nine status updates per month and contribute 21 comments. Some 33% of Facebook users here updated their status at least once per week. Still, half of our sample made no status updates in the month of our analysis.

Discussion of social media circles around the word “engagement” — but even for many users of social networks, the experience is more about taking-it-all-in than about response and conversation. For a news industry with a long history of one-way communication, that might be a little…comforting? Facebook’s value, at least to media and other companies looking to tap into audiences, is that it’s a super-broad platform built for content and transactional activity. A link is posted; it’s rewarded with a like. A question is asked; it elicits comments. The Pew survey paints a picture where that action is less than reliable:

A third of our sample (33%) used the like button at least once per week during this month, and 37% had content they contributed liked by a friend at least once per week. However, the majority of Facebook users neither liked content, nor was their content liked by others, in our month of observation.

If Facebook activity disproportionately relies on a subset of power users with busy hands, that’s an opening for news outlets or individual journalists to fill that need. The conversation is far more distributed than it was pre-Internet, but it’s still not evenly distributed.

Pew says that Facebook comment-leaving is a bit more reciprocal than some other kinds of Facebook behavior:

More than half our sample (55%) commented on a friend's content at least once in the month, and 51% received comments from a friend. A large segment of users, a little over 20%, contributed or received a comment every day. The average of 21 comments given on friends' content was nearly identical to the average of 20 that were received. Again, there are some extreme users as well, about 5% of our sample contributed and received over 100 comments in the month of our observation.

Pew’s data is based on a sample of 269 Facebook users, initially identified through a random phone survey, but who then allowed Pew to track their trails on the site. While its findings may give a (slight) challenge to the idea that Facebook is a heavily engaged network where everyone’s sharing all the time, the report still found big, enticing numbers for any publishing looking to reach a big audience: The median user in their sample is within two degrees of separation (friends of friends) of 31,170 people on Facebook. (For one uber-connected user, that number was 7,821,772.) We already know Facebook is growing as a top referrer to many news sites, so what’s clear from this report is that they need to keep it up. If power users are the straw that stirs the drink on Facebook, then it’s more important than ever for journalists and media companies play an active role.

Meh button by Ken Murphy used under a Creative Commons license.

This Week in Review: Twitter’s censorship compromise, and Facebook files with big numbers

Posted: 03 Feb 2012 07:00 AM PST

Twitter spells out its censorship policy: Just a couple of weeks after the SOPA/PIPA fight came to a head, Twitter pushed the discussion about online censorship a bit further when it announced late last week a new policy for censoring tweets: When Twitter gets requests from governments to block tweets containing what they deem illegal speech, its new policy will allow it to block those tweets only to readers within that country, leaving it visible to the rest of the world. Twitter will send notice that it’s blocked a tweet to the censorship watchdog Chilling Effects.

As the Guardian and The New York Times noted, much of the initial response among Twitter users consisted of complaints about censorship and the chilling of free speech in countries with oppressive regimes. The policy had critics elsewhere, too: BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin said “it’s hard to see this as anything but a huge setback and disappointment,” and the international group Reporters Without Borders sent an open letter to Twitter questioning the policy and urging the company to reconsider. And later, BoingBoing’s Rob Beschizza pointed out that even though Twitter implied that it had already been blocking tweets at the request of governments (which would have made the new policy a reduction in censorship), it’s never actually done so — only in response to legal challenges on copyright issues.

But perhaps surprisingly, Twitter had far more defenders than critics among media observers. O’Reilly correspondent Alex Howard put together the most comprehensive roundup of opinions on the subject, praising Twitter himself for “sticking up for users where it can.” Two free-speech advocates, Mike Masnick of TechDirt and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jillian York, made similar arguments: When a government is demanding censorship, Twitter can either refuse and be blocked entirely in that country, or it can comply. Twitter, they said, has chosen the latter in as limited and transparent fashion as possible.

Others, like The Next Web’s Nancy Messieh, commended Twitter for shifting the censorship focus to the government — as Reuters’ Paul Smalera argued, the gray box noting that a tweet has been censored in a certain country is a black mark for that government, not Twitter. The broadest argument in Twitter’s defense came from sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who, in addition to these arguments, also praised Twitter for its transparency and for allowing users an easy way to circumvent censorship.

Still others weren’t firmly on either side regarding the policy itself, but pointed to larger issues surrounding it. Media prof C.W. Anderson said that while Twitter did the best it could under the circumstances but showed it doesn’t have any values that override its place as a business: “non-market values are, in the long run, incompatible with the logic of the market, and what Twitter is trying to do now is reconcile what it believes with what the market needs it to do.” Tech pioneer Dave Winer called for people to learn to be able to organize themselves outside of Twitter’s infrastructure and the possibly of censorship.

In a pair of thoughtful posts, GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram advised caution in trusting Twitter, recognizing that like Google and Facebook, it’s a business whose interests might not align with our own. The EFF’s York and Eva Galperin encouraged users and observers to keep a close eye on Twitter in order to keep them accountable for adhering to their professed beliefs.

Facebook goes public: Facebook’s much-anticipated filing for a public stock offering came on Wednesday, and The New York Times and Danny Sullivan at Marketing Land have the best quick-hit summaries of the S-1 document. The big numbers are mind-bogglingly big: 845 million monthly active users, $5 billion in stock, $3.71 billion in revenue last year, $1 billion in profit. Of that revenue, 85% came from advertising, and 12% came from the social gaming giant Zynga alone. (All Things D has the background on that relationship.) And when you average it out, Facebook’s only getting $4.39 in revenue per active user.

Aside from the numbers, among the other items of interest from the filings was its risk assessment — as summarized by Mashable, it sees slowing expected growth, difficulty in making money off of mobile access, competition from the likes of Google and Twitter, and global government censorship as some of its main risk factors. There’s also Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to shareholders, annotated with delightful snark by Wired’s Tim Carmody, which includes the explanation of a company code Zuckerberg calls “The Hacker Way.” Forbes’ Andy Greenberg made one of the first of what’s sure to be many comparisons between The Hacker Way and Google’s “Don’t Be Evil.” GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram took note of the grandiosity of Zuckerberg’s stated mission to rewire the world.

Two main questions emerged in commentary on the filing: How much is Facebook really worth? And what happens to Facebook now? To the first question, as The New York Times pointed out on the eve of Facebook’s filing, the company’s massive net worth is a stark indicator of the booming value of personal data collected online. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum took the opposite tack, wondering why Facebook gets so little money out of each of its hundreds of millions of users before concluding that “Facebook is still a young business figuring out how to sell ads and figuring it how aggressive it can get without ticking off users.”

To the second question, Mathew Ingram noted that going public is usually a way for tech companies to get the financing they need to build up for some major growth — something Facebook has already done. So, he asked, is this just an attempt for Facebook’s employees and backers to cash out, and the end of the company’s most productive growth phase? Leaning on tech entrepreneurship leader John Battelle, Wired’s Tim Carmody and Mike Isaac reasoned that Facebook is mature enough already that in order to attain the growth it’s promising, it needs to be in the midst of some massive changes as a company. A couple of guesses at some of those specific changes: More ads and purchases of tech companies (Fast Company) and a big ramp-up in mobile ads (Marketing Land).

Murdoch’s candor amid scandal: The phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has continued to spread (rather quietly here in the States, but much more prominently in the U.K.), and it may have turned yet another corner with the arrest last weekend of four journalists from News Corp.’s Sun, significantly deepening the scandal beyond the now-defunct News of the World, where it began.

News Corp. has also turned over an enormous new trove of data which, along with the arrests, could begin to seriously threaten News Corp.’s other British newspapers, including the Times, according to the Guardian’s Nick Davies. British j-prof Roy Greenslade reported that many Sun staffers are worried that they may not be part of News Corp. much longer.

In the midst of all this, Murdoch’s feisty Twitter account continues unfettered, prompting praise from The New York Times’ David Carr for his refreshing candor. Mathew Ingram agreed that this “sources go direct” approach should be viewed as a boon, not a challenge, to serious journalism. The AP’s Jonathan Stray had perhaps the best summation of the relationship between sources using their own platforms and journalism: “When they want you to know, sources will go direct. When they don’t… that’s journalism.”

Reading roundup: It was a relatively quiet week outside of the big Twitter and Facebook stories, but there were still some cool nuggets to be found:

— Facebook’s relatively new Twitter-like Subscribe feature continues to draw complaints of rampant spam. Those criticisms have been led by Jim Romenesko, but this week the New York Daily News and Slate’s Katherine Goldstein chimed in, voicing concerns in particular about inappropriate comments directed toward women. Meanwhile, Mashable’s Todd Wasserman said Subscribe is ruining the News Feed.

— Big news in the journalism-academy world: Columbia and Stanford are teaming up to create a new Institute for Media Innovation, thanks to a $30 million gift from longtime Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown.

— Jay Rosen posted an inspiring interview with the Chicago Tribune’s Tracy Samantha Schmidt, gleaning some useful insights on how to nurture an innovative and entrepreneurial spirit within a large organization, rather than a startup.

— Megan Garber of The Atlantic presented the results of a Hot or Not-style study that determined what type of Twitter content people like. Here’s what they don’t like: Old news, Twitter jargon, personal details, negativity, and lack of context.

Rupert Murdoch photo by David Shankbone and original Twitter bird by Matt Hamm used under a Creative Commons license.
di