Palin vs. Conan vs. Cowell a media buzz showdown

As you may know this week was bustling with gossip and headlines surrounding a few big names. NBC pushed Conan O'Brien's Tonight Show back so Leno could have his old spot, which Conan subsequently walked away from. Simon Cowell is leaving American Idol after this season. And the lovely Sarah Palin is joining Fox News as an analyst.

After a week of big headlines filled with even bigger names, our team was curious to see which name stole the spotlight when it came to online buzz. Before I run the numbers I am going to take a guess and rank them.

1. Conan
2. Palin
3. Cowell

Drum roll please.

What do you know, I was right! Conan was the most referenced celebrity in articles indexed this week, Palin was a close second, and Simon Cowell, well just couldn't keep up.

All three contestants were trending topics this week on twitter, but only two were fortunate enough to be covered by mashable. Here is an analysis of twitter stats on the the news of Cowell leaving Idol. Conan was just too easy though, his letter to the people was an enormous hit, and his most recent shenanigans have the internet world abuzz. And I really just don't have much to say about Sarah, other than she looks pretty feisty in the above picture.

Once thing is clear though when looking at the crazy amount of content (well over a thousand items) surrounding these people, publishers love drama!

Content Evangelism, or, Why Big Media Should Pay Its Readers

Tonight I emailed someone I follow on an un-named social network. It felt a little bit creepy and a little bit exciting, much like friending a not-quite-mutual acquaintance on Facebook once felt. I have been following this person for over a year, and almost all of their posts resonated with me because we share a similar aesthetic sense of what it means for something to be well-done, or successfully designed, or generally pleasing to the senses.

So why, after nearly a year of asymmetric loyalty (web voyeurism, almost) did I reach out today? The answer is relatively simple, but it tells a complex story about how media trends are changing. I wanted to know where this person found the inspiration for their posts, many of which contain fantastic photos seemingly culled from a vast repository of design-oriented source material that I can't find, despite what I consider relatively exhaustive searches.

What's more, I'm convinced that any sources this person returns to me will be of a higher quality and have a higher degree of relevance than the results of a continued search on my own (I'll follow up and let you know if that's true). While I often preach the benefits of social curation, and Pinyadda's design places this act at the very center of our user experience, this struck me as a particularly tangible example of how and why this type of connection is important.

I'll be adding all the sources I receive to our index (and tagging them under the 'Design' topic) so that all of our users can enjoy them. I'm willing to bet that most of these sites will have content whose quality far outpaces the quantity of their audience. And hereinlies the beauty of content-specific aggregation: other users will be able to find them and follow them, without having to beg and plead with their followers in a creepy, email-based way. Good content finding its audience is what we're all about, and I'm proud to be part of a company that's trying every day to make that vision a reality.

The story, then, has two morals:

1) Social curation is incredibly valuable. By following this un-named design maven (who may not even know I consider them as such) I was privy to hundreds, nay thousands, of awesome articles, posts, photos and music that more accurately matched my tastes and preferences than any publication or blog, no matter how niche-focused, might have. This isn't to say I don't like niche blogs (I do, a lot), but instead that humans like me will almost always do better at finding the stuff I like.

2) Good content will find a way to find its audience. I truly believe that the end result of the disruption we're seeing in the media industry will be a complete eradication of barriers to distribution and the ultimate triumph of content. I think that Pinyadda and others like us can play a huge role in helping consumers and producers of content find each other. If we provide readers with the tools to find the content they want and then make it easy for them to share it with each other, we can create viral marketing and distribution loops that move faster and wider than all the trucks in the history of newspapers ever could.

This is what big media doesn't seem to understand, and it's the beauty of the web we're helping to build: when people find great content, they want to support it, evangelize it, and help it be found by others. It's not a chore or a burden but a real feeling of goodness that comes with adding value to other people's daily lives, if only in small, small ways. Instead of trying to find ways to trick me into paying for their content, big media should be trying to find ways for me to pay it forward.

Do you have any blogs or publications you find yourself evangelizing, even by accident? I bet you do, and I'd love to hear about every one of them in the comments.

How much has Yemen blown up in the press? (Hint: A lot!)

Jog your memory from before Christmas when Yemen landed on the terror radar -- was it in there? Geography buffs knew it was a country in Southwest Asia, but the majority of us couldn't have spit out any other facts about the place. Other than the obscure Friend's reference when Chandler bought a plane ticket to Yemen to run away from Janice, I certainly couldn't tell you anything.

So, exactly how much has Yemen blown up in the press? Let's visit the Pinyadda index and find out.

In the last 6 months ending on Christmas Eve, Yemen was the topic of 1,524 articles. Not bad. In the 19 days following Christmas Eve, Yemen was the topic of over 2,200 articles.

Woah, hold up, let's do the math: 60 percent of all Yemen focused articles were published in the last 3 weeks.

What Domino's Could Learn From Sean Ellis

Dear Dominos,

Thanks for reiterating the critical feedback you received from customers in a $75mm ad campaign and subsequently not making the necessary changes to satisfy your customers taste buds. It's a great example of how not to go about finding product market fit.

When I first saw Domino's video ad (no, not the one from a few months ago where employees blew snot rockets on some very unlucky customers' food) I gave immediate props for taking on their “harshest critics” and was interested (and hungry) enough to place an order for delivery. Result 1: Domino’s counts a $16 incremental sale, directly attributable to the campaign. The delivery smell quickly brought me back to my late-night, freshman fifteen and I was as excited as ever to try the new recipe. A few bites later, and the verdict: slightly spicier sauce, maybe less-greasy cheese and the same tasteless, cardboard crust. Domino's ad campaign had tricked me into believing they had actually made a good pizza, but upon taste instead lived up to being a “sad excuse for real pizza.” Just about everyone I’ve asked has voiced similar sentiments. Result 2: Let down customer.

Where does this seem to leave Domino’s? In the short run their execs may clap for any incremental sales (Result 1). But in the long run some of those incremental sales may turn out to be forever lost customers, like me (Result 2). And as for measuring how viral the campaign was… well, let’s just say customers liking the product seems to have been an overlooked but critical element.

The campaign shines a nice spotlight on one of my favorite learnings from Sean Ellis and core to what we’re focusing on here at Pinyadda: the importance of the customer in achieving product/market fit. If customers were more involved and engaged in creating and taste testing with the chefs to create the new Domino’s recipe, I bet we’d see different results – like brand enthusiasts (“hey I helped create the new recipe!") and a product that lives up to the new branding (“wow this is yummy enough that I want my friends to try!”).

And so ensues Pinyadda’s 2010 focus – the customer.

After months of ramping up features and then stripping them down to minimum viable product, Pinyadda is focusing on achieving product/market fit. We want to test our hypotheses of what the product is, what problem it solves, and who is using it. So our focus is iterating on who exactly our customer is and how we can build the product to best meet this customer’s needs.

As part of this effort we were recently brainstorming homepage language across a spectrum of market segments (we’ll then move to A/B testing these). We ended up with 5 sets of taglines, each set emphasizing different Pinyadda value propositions. Check them out below:

Set 1: RSS readers aren’t meeting the needs of their most prolific users.

• Better than your RSS reader.
  
• The smarter, social RSS reader.
  

Set 2: Popular information sharing platforms contain non-threaded conversations, suffer from information overload, are too hard to organize/filter, and have character limits.

• The easiest way to find and share articles and blog posts.
  
• The news you want from people you trust.

Set 3: It’s getting more and more difficult to find the news and information that’s most interesting to me personally on the web.

• Your personalized information assistant: articles and blog posts delivered just for you.
  
• Spend less time finding news, and more time reading news.

Set 4: News is meant to be discussed, but emailing links to people clutters inboxes and takes too much effort.

• A better way to send and receive links.
  
• A separate inbox for discussing links.
  

Set 5: I wish there were one place to see and discuss what’s happening in my industry instead of subscribing to loads of newsletters, trade publications and large portals.

• Free, real-time news on your industry.
• Recommended industry news from peers and colleagues you trust.

Did we miss anything? How do you use Pinyadda?

(As we strive for product/market fit over the next several months you can be assured we are listening intimately. We will be building the product – from taglines to new features – in tandem.)

Avatar vs. Titanic; An Epic World Wide Web Battle

Webatar (noun, adjective; web-a-tar): The enormous online presence surrounding the buzz of Avatar. Originally derived from Avatar, with roots in the World Wide Web.

There is no question James Cameron's new movie will eventually outlast Titanic's reign, and for one simple reason: the Internet. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a sucker for that last scene, "Don't let go, Jack!" (so emotional). However, a lot has changed since 1997. Google was a year old, Facebook didn't exist, Twitter - uh, nope. I was using AOL on a dial up connection to talk to my 7th grade girlfriend. But enough about the memories.

After reading Mashable's latest post on Avatar it amazes me that Titanic made as much money as it did in the first place with minimal use of the Web and social media. I won't repeat how important social media was for Avatar; instead, I am going to run some hard numbers from Pinyadda's index to prove my point.

From when the trailer debuted on August 20th until its release on Decemeber 18th, 55 posts and articles were published from the top social media blogs and newspapers. From after it's release through today, 63 additional posts and articles were published.

There are of course many more publishers out there than the handful above, so we pulled data from every single site we index to emphasize the point more dramatically:


From August 20th through Avatar's release, 149 articles and blog posts were published. Post launch, a whopping 1,215. That's over 8 times the amount of content.

While I wish I could run Titanic's numbers, unfortunately Pinyadda wasn't around in '97. Regardless, without the proliferation of the WWW and social media, I am willing to bet we would see the inverse of what we see above, with more posts and articles published leading up to the movie's release than after it hit theaters.

Please post your comments, hypotheses, and theories below. I love a good debate.

P.S. I can't even keep up while writing this - Mashable has already published another piece on Avatar, and it complements this post quite nicely.

TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat: Who Publishes the Most about Twitter?

Rolling Stone recently published the Top 100 Albums of the Decade. To my surprise, not one but two Bruce Springsteen albums made the top 25 (The Rising at 15 and Magic at 24). Now, as blasphemous as this sounds coming from a Jersey man, there is no way that Magic belongs in top 100 of the decade or even the top 100 of 2007.

Why is Bruce so blatantly overrepresented in this countdown? The only answer is that Bruce Springsteen is important to the Rolling Stone business. When Bruce does well, Rolling Stone sells more magazines/ad space. This got me thinking about social media...

What about Twitter? Which of the four major tech blogs (TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat) publishes the most content about Twitter? For this, I took a quick look at our Pinyadda index from November and formulated the following chart (click image to enlarge):

Twitter-centric Posts as % of all Posts:
TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat

As you can see, TechCrunch is far and wide the most prolific of the publications, producing approximately 2 times the amount of content as Mashable, 4.5 times the amount as ReadWriteWeb and 3.3 times the amount as VentureBeat.

Scanning titles and various meta-data for 'twitter', it appears that only 7.8% of TechCrunch's articles are about Twitter. Compare that the the 8.6% for VentureBeat, 15.1% for ReadWriteWeb and a whopping 20.7% for Mashable.

Yes, one-fifth of Mashable's content for the month of November was Twitter-centric. Imagine, if you will, that Twitter's popularity wanes (gasp!). What is Mashable to do? Produce less content? Unlikely. Fill the gaping content hole with other content? Likely.

Product Trends of 2010

From a product standpoint, it's hard to deny that 2009 has been the year of the Twitter explosion. For better or worse, the simple microblogging service has changed the way we think about social media, ingrained the phrase "real-time" in all of our brains, and left our centuries-old grammatical traditions rotting in the attic, sacrificed in the name of 140-character uber-brevity.

Twitter, with its revolutionary open platform, has also forever changed the way web applications think about their data and the possibilities that come from sharing it, instead of hoarding it. The implications of this are vast and I suspect will be long-standing. Many have and will continue to wonder if this decision will have positive or negative effects on Twitter's revenue model, and perhaps only time will tell. But it has made it nearly impossible to create a product strategy that doesn't involve an API.

Though this may be the most important product influence to come from Twitter, there are a few more that I suspect will make their way into many of the new entries into the consumer internet market next year. To be sure, Twitter isn't the only thing to cause these trends, but it's almost certainly the most important. Without further ado, here are the things I expect to see in profusion over the coming year:

- The dominance of the stream. While we may have already seen the stream format of content consumption take the wheel, 2010 will be the year it achieves total domination. In recent months we've seen stream-based models mosey their way into almost every corner of the internet, even penetrating the veritable Fort Knox of Google search results pages. With new services springing up on this model left and right and more and more people getting comfortable with their format and aesthetics, I wouldn't be surprised if more than one major media outlet (read newspaper) moved entirely toward a stream-based interface. And I think they'd all be smart to adopt some version of it - the box and column layout of print never translated well to the web.

- Asymmetric social connections. It used to be simple: I'm your friend, so you're my friend, right? Wrong. Twitter and every other social media service have brought us into the era of one-to-many communication - the "follow" model. I can follow you, you don't have to follow me. While at first glance it seems to make relationships less meaningful, it can often make them more useful. From location services to music streaming, asymmetric connections are making all kinds of social services easier to engage with and more valuable.

- Stackable networking. This is the phenomenon I like to think about as 'everyone plays nice with everyone else,' and it's almost - dare I say it? - web socialism. But the web has always been a symbiotic culture, of sorts, and the emergence of open data platforms and the adoption of a few open (err, mostly open, thanks FB) protocols is ultimately something that creates more value for everyone. Sure, some of these companies are probably bleeding value by outsourcing their networks, in a sense, but if that's the case they probably aren't going to make it anyways. The community of applications gets more powerful and more efficient, and ultimately the users are the ones that win. All in all it's a good trend and one we'll see continue in 2010.

- Privately created, publicly available curations. Twitter Lists is the easiest example to cite here, but there are tons of other examples of this phenomenon: music blogs and services like blip.fm and last.fm, product wish lists like those we find on Amazon and now others, and the thousands of lists of books, movies - almost anything you can imagine. I think we'll see lots of ways to curate and then publish personalized content materialize in 2010, and we hope Pinyadda's a big part of that trend. By giving our users a unique way to discover content from all over web and easily share what they've found, we hope that we might make the process of consuming content on the web just a little more enjoyable and social in 2010.

What do you think about the future of the consumer internet? Are we destined for a fundamental shift in the way we experience the web, or just a continuation of the trends we've already seen? And what will come of Twitter? Leave your predictions in the comments.