Recent results from Hitwise (see ReadWrite Web’s March 1 story) confirm that Facebook drives traffic to broadcast news sites, while Google News angles users toward traditional print outlets.  While that may not be shocking, some of the sites that made the top 10 on both sides are surprising.  News aggregators like Yahoo! News and Google News made the top 10 in Facebook traffic, as did disruptors topix and Drudge Report.  On the Google News side, venerable institutions of journalism like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post topped the list, while BBC News and The Huffington Post also placed in the mainstream.  Reuters made the Google News list instead of wire-service competitor The Associated Press likely because of Google’s seven-week suspension of AP content due to a legal dispute that was resolved at the beginning of February.

Does that mean broadcast is still king and Mad Ave can rejoice?  Not quite.  Last week, ABC News cut half its domestic correspondents and closed all its physical bureaus nationwide, except in Washington.  The Los Angeles Times reported this of ABC News’ LA bureau: “The 40-plus staffers were told this week that only a few producers would remain and only two correspondents would be assigned to cover the West, down from a total of six who work out of Dallas, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Many functions that had been done out of the bureau will be handled by a ‘logistics desk’ in New York.”

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With Richard Edelman and Barbera Bates of Eastwick http://twitpic.com/164vwk 6:43 PM Mar 1st via Twitterrific.

It’s tempting to think about user-generated content, peer influence and viral communications as new concepts.  But the reality is that these social concepts have been around for a long time.  When we were sharing the Architecture of Influence concept with Chris Shipley, she pointed out that housewives in the 50’s were coming up with jingles and entering contests — a form of user-generated content.  The product company — whether cereal or dish soap — got creative ideas and very engaged customers, for little cost.  Tupperware and Amway are two other classic examples of the power of word of mouth and peer influence at work.

And don’t forget the classic chain letter.  I remember painstakingly copying letters and sending them on to my friends, for fear of breaking the chain and incurring the wrath of the broken chain letter gods.  “Do not break the chain!”, the letters admonished, always citing examples of the poor sap who got hit by a truck or some other calamity.  Turns out the concept of the chain letter goes back to the Middle Ages, when a letter, purported to be from an Emperor of Rome, made the rounds in various forms.

As anyone with email knows, the chain letter is alive and well.  There are entire web sites devoted to chain letters.  http://chainletters.net/chainletters/ The web has breathed new life into many classic forms of communication.  It’s easier than ever to come up with your own content and share it with friends and colleagues.  Some might argue it’s too easy.  But either way, the sharing culture is firmly entrenched and here to stay.

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Last night Eastwickers could be spotted rubbing elbows with White Hats at a book signing by Financial Times’ reporter Joseph Menn (pictured center).  His newest book, “Fatal Systems Error,” was released Jan. 26, 2010.  Although non-fiction, it reads much like a James Bond novel, featuring heroes Barrett Lyon, the dashing young computer whiz (pictured right), and Andy Crocker, the seasoned UK Serious Organized Crime agent (pictured left).

Menn shared that he is more concerned with the fact that we haven’t had a 911-like cyber-crime event than the looming threat that we might one day.  Instead, he worries that the eCommerce infrastructure is eroding from within, which could cause a more insidious but substantial problem putting our economic base “in deep yogurt.”

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Increasingly, marketing executives are being asked to show how social media strategies drive sales leads. There is ongoing debate as to whether social media has the potential to serve as a lead-gen tool. On the one hand, some experts don’t think social media channels are scalable enough to drive sales: how much bang can you get for your buck, and can you invest the necessary amount of time to make the channels worthwhile? These points need to be taken into consideration when determining how, and to what extent, companies want to leverage social media channels to share information and receive feedback.   On the other hand, as more and more companies track success of their social media strategies, the indication is that business goals – including lead gen – can be supported. According to a recent BtoB article, a Business.com study did find that “purely” social media channels such as microblogs function strongly as lead gen channels, even to the point of helping build databases of prospects. Entrepreneur also covered this debate recently, citing Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell, who points to evidence of national brands using social media to drive sales. For example, Southwest posted Twitter specials resulting in $3 M in sales. The potential shouldn’t be ignored, and best practices are cropping up everywhere to help track success of social media programs. This list of 20 metrics is a great place to start, and this list of metrics focuses specifically on lead gen.    Bottom line: an integrated communications campaign helps increase mindshare, site traffic, and can also have a hand in generating trackable sales leads. And while there still may be many questions about social media lead gen, we may as well have some fun trying to find the answers.

Over the weekend, a molehill has started to become a mountain. Or, in the view of some, a mountain became an even bigger mountain.

SageCircle posted a claim that Forrester Research will restrict its analysts from having personally-branded research blogs, implying that the policy will reduce the risk of analysts building their personal brands before bolting from the firm, taking their audiences with them.

Use of social media has become second nature to many, but one look at the range of comments on the SageCircle post reflects how strongly people still feel about the dichotomy of personal/professional social media usage and the tension around a company’s ownership of a worker’s intellectual property. Cries of Big Brother, paranoia and censorship abound, tempered by other statements that it’s good business practice or simply a matter of whose servers hold the data.

Source: speedy2

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You don’t need to subscribe to TheMediaIsDying Twitter feed to know that thousands of journalists have lost their jobs in 2009.  Publishers’ loss, however, seems to be turning into vendors’ gain.  Companies can now bypass editorial review and hire celebrity journalists to publish on their own outlets.  At the recent CES show, for example, Nvidia hired Stephen Wildstrom, formerly BusinessWeek’s Tech & You columnist, to blog from its booth.  Meanwhile, another former BusinessWeek veteran journalist Steve Hamm accepted a position at IBM.

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Having started my career in journalism, I can relate to how painful it can feel for a reporter to deal with PR people. They can be overly demanding, pitch things that they know nothing about, and on top of that, pitch topics to reporters that are completely NOT relevant to the reporter’s beat – all major no-no’s in the PR industry.

However, there’s something more to working with the media than just doing your basic PR job right. As the landscape has shifted a bit, and we start to deal with entities outside traditional media (such as bloggers and influential customers) it is even MORE important to step it up in the niceness factor with these guys. Not only are you talking to a reporter who could end up writing a story about your company, you also could potentially be talking to the actual end-user who will ultimately buy your product – and well, that’s the bottom line to success.

We’ve all heard these tips before, but I think it is a good reminder to keep these things in mind as you work with reporters, influencers, bloggers, analysts, customers, etc. – these days, it could be anyone!!

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If I see one more quote claiming that all companies should jump into social media because its free…I’m going to poke my eyes out.  So when I read this morning’s post on the Future Changes blog I couldn’t help but share the insight.  The quote below…and the heart of the post succinctly depicts the issue with why people think social media is free…and why it is not.  A distribution channel or channel for engagement is only as good as the content being distributed or shared.  Yes the channels are free…the content…especially the most valuable kind is most likely not.  Thank you Stewart Brand.

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

You know you’ve made it when you’ve been regulated by the government

By Elisabeth Simmons Gettelman

On Monday, the FTC updated its guidelines for advertisers for the first time in almost thirty years. The rules aim to address the new world order and tackle everything from celebrities disclosing when they are paid to endorse a product to mommy bloggers accepting free goods in return for a review. While both have admittedly gotten out of hand lately (Heidi and Spencer, I’m looking at you), it will be interesting to see how everyone ends up interpreting the rather vague statements made in the report.

Eastwick has worked with many a mommy blogger for our clients in the past couple of years and it has been amazing to watch them grow in size and sophistication. We weren’t the only ones to catch on that they’re a powerful demographic, though, and now it seems that there are those admittedly only doing it for the free stuff. I won’t get into politics on company time, but I do look forward to a bit of Darwin’s Theory kicking in. Several of our favorites see it the same way, realizing this will give them some of the credibility they themselves crave among the land of 10,000 silly-named mommy blogs.

We’ll report more on if and how this ruling has affected working with these bloggers, but I think it is important to only work with those that are following these guidelines and wish to hold themselves to some level of journalistic integrity.

Now if only the government could do something about Jon & Kate…