While on route to the airport this morning, I attempted to browse the daily newspaper, which was provided by the car service to aid me in passing the rush hour traffic related delays.  In picking up the newspaper, I was immediately aware of a dynamic shift – and no – it wasn’t because the leading front cover story was riveting and captivating, it was because of the header content the daily newspaper decided to give real estate to.  On the cover of my daily newspaper was a call out to those seeking relationship advice, to join a noon hour chat with what was the newspapers contracted relationship specialist.  Have newspapers forgotten what their edge is?  Has the rise of social media and digital information sources confused them?  It’s no secret that even though there are a slew of pure play web news source competitors, the general public still refers to their newspaper as a great source for deep local information that puts them in touch with their community or city at large.  No one is saying that including fun content about everyday living is a no no, but it is not front cover worthy.  It’s the same as in advertising.  We wouldn’t lead with the B or C value proposition and tag line.  We would lead with the A message, considering we have only seconds to engage you and leave you with a sense of what our brand represents.  Today’s showing of the newspaper reminded me of a tabloid or as some would say ‘rag’ magazine and there are plenty of those around and as a result, there is no need for the daily newspaper to transform to one too.

Competition should make us think smarter and do better.  If competition has you applying “me too” strategies to your media properties, you are not really competing for market dominance, you are just merely existing.

In commemoration of Porche reaching 1 million fans, they’ve designed a special vehicle to celebrate the occasion. The  911 GT3 R Hybrid, seen below, has been decaled with the names of their Facebook fans, and you’ll even be able to search for your name on the ‘Thank You’ site, provided you were one of the early Porsche fans and apart of the 1 million.

Porsche claims that the time they took to achieve the 1 million fan milestone was the fastest in Facebook history. For interest sake, they are now at 1.3 million fans and quickly growing.

Ahh… a sigh of relief as I sit down to my glass of wine – an earned treat after babysitting my niece this Valentine’s evening.  But as I sip on this glass of wine I cannot help but marvel at some of my nieces four-year old commentary on the evening, television shows and life in general.  Like most of you who are around children that age, you walk away often times in awe of their innocent wit and banter.  But more now than ever,  I am also  awed by the new found digital aptitude in children, five years and younger.   An example in youngster digital aptitude can be seen in today’s episode of four year old niece banter, which went like this ” Auntie Bev. Can I play with your iPad?  I want to colour and play the matching game and then we can play Netfilx.”  When I said that I did not know how to turn on the iPad and get to the games she wanted (yes, that includes Netflix – and please don’t be confused – it is the Netflix you know that streams movies – my niece just equates it to a game because she ‘games’ on my iPad), she turned to me, grabbed the iPad, and while sitting down in a ‘there there’ kind of manner said ” Don’t worry auntie Bev.  I will show you” – and she did.  She was even able to select her genre in Netflix, as she remembered our last time together, hankering around with the iPad.

Now with my niece being the first of her generation in our family, you can imagine that she is extremely spoiled and has every doll known to mankind, but what is interesting is that she has no interest in dolls, but is more attracted to all things digital  - computers, iPad’s, smart phones and the like.  She’s got more than just the basic child like fascination centred on the pretty back light – she is actually working, browsing, learning and maneuvering the tool, even better than one of her parents can (not saying which one).  It is no wonder that in conversation with a New York City elementary school teacher last week, she mentioned that she and her colleagues were in the middle of  going through training on how to use the iPad in the classroom, to further their lesson plans.

This truly digital age of children, we are bringing up, makes me think that the paper and mill factories could have reason for concern.

Random yet relevant thoughts:

• I mean could you imagine if it became a standard for every child to have an iPad or a similar like tablet.
• All lessons would be facilitated on the tablet
• Books would be provided in e-reader format – hopefully giving students a break on price points
• Home sick – no worries, let’s stream the lesson via an app. created for the remote teacher to student relationship.  One app., accessible by all, but schools have their own channel, shared by the teachers on staff

Now I get what the naysayers are shouting, the traditional art forms of handwriting and arts and crafts can’t be outdone by the digital world and I agree, but no reason why we can’t treat those as we do gym class.  And yes – I did just refer to ‘handwriting’ as if it was a thing of the past.

With the many applications of social media, we are glad to see the folks at HyperCities included in the mix – more specifically their use of their archiving project to preserve the going-on’s in Cairo, over the past month.  In a nutshell, the HyperCities project can be explained by this “hypercities is a collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment”.  If you take a look at the HyperCities Egypt project you will find current Tweets and historic ones, all filtered through the use of event related hashtags.  The Tweets are geniously placed on an intensely local map, allowing users from all throughout the world to visualize the impact of the people’s movement against Mubarak’s position.

The HyperCities project is the brain child of three UCLA Digital Humanities collaborative members; Todd Presner, Yoh Kawano, and David Shepard.  The project, although providing a thorough view on Cairo, is still in its beta stages, so searches in less talked about cities and on less talked about topics, may result in errors.  Regardless, the project itself has a ton of promise and provides another ingenious way for the public to access archives, chronicling monumental times in history.

We’ve seen traditional media adopt social media in many ways – some wholeheartedly and some with just a proverbial toe in the water.  Either way, we take notice to all and measure results.  The most recent one we’re reviewing is NBC’s ‘The 20′ campaign.  Two  of NBS local television news stations (New York and Washington D.C.) are taking part in the networks test that incorporates news found on Twitter, with their organically found news content.  They plan to follow 20 local news influencers on Twitter and use content and stories tweeted by ‘The 20′.  We don’t, by any means, think that these two NBC stations are the first to incorporate social media content into their published news segments, but they are the first to make it into it’s own special segment with a solid group of local contributors.

In the end, the concept is a good one, as it gets the station the hyper-local content they all pine for, for free.  Using content from ‘The 20′, also builds a level of authenticity and realness to the news hour, as if done properly, viewers should walk away with a sense of true and unbiased content that means something to their neighbour and in turn, them.

The New York stations list of 20 include handles such as @NYCityMama, @moneyries and @thecajunboy.  How was this cast of characters selected you ask “Our editors select the 20 people worth following in your community right now. We identify them based on social media metrics and the local news trending at this moment” – this was found on the NBC New York site. Based on the selection process, the sense is that ‘The 20′ could change, as trends change.  At any rate, NBC’s ‘The 20′ is a campaign worth watching.

Now that it has been a few days post Super Bowl, the stats are coming in.  The stats on viewership, viewer sentiment on brands and social and sharing activities around the Super Bowl.  The folks at AddThis have shared their data gathered from users, syndicating Super Bowl related content, via AddThis tools.

When it comes to sharing highlights from the Super Bowl, Audi came out as the top brand and somehow Glee managed to make the list….   When it came to per cent increase in share, post the Super Bowl, Pepsi and it’s Pepsi Max product, showed the greatest gain.

It’s not that I am a huge fan of late night television, well … actually I am…, but regardless that reality  is not the driving force behind this post.  The driver is our recognition and realization that  Jimmy Fallon, in our opinion, is the first late night host to master what we call, ‘in-show social media integration’, which, ironically, follows the same principles we apply to business branding and social strategies.  Fallon’s brilliance in integration was something we took for granted in watching the show for the past year or so, but it was not until we took in an episode of Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, and noticed his programmers shameful attempt of integrating social tools that we then truly realized that the same way we have only a few consumer goods brands mastering social media branding, is the same way we have only a few television personalities who, standalone, have figured it out.

On a post we published in December, we listed commentary and observations on the ’2010 Twitter Top Trends List’ that the social network had released and one  of our called out realizations was that Jimmy Fallon’s Late Night #Hashtag game, made it on to the top 10 list.  Specifically, it was Fallon’s hashtag #slapyourself that earned him entry on the top 10.  Regardless of how silly some of the hashtags may be, it works for him, being a comedian, and he and his staff have obviously realized this and have maximized the games popularity as their calling card to gain global awareness for the show and it’s host.  Through initiatives such as the Late Night #Hashtag Game, Jimmy Fallon has now amassed over 3.1 million followers, as opposed to Leno’s 125 thousand followers. In addition to the obvious disparity in follower numbers, the two hosts also have some distinguishable, game-changing differences in their social approach:

Jay Leno was late to social sphere and did not get to using social tools to build hype around planned guests, past shows or even off show chatter with fans.  Jimmy Fallon did all of this, even though he was no early adopter by any means, he got in there at the right time, when none of this like-peers were participating.

Jay Leno does what many of our consumer brands do, he places social icons on screen, asking users to simply “follow at”.  If you were a part of our ‘Social Media Branding that Works‘ webcast, you will see that this type of social integration is practically useless.  Providing icons, breeds the question “Why?”  and he action of ‘lost interest’. You cannot ask someone to blindly follow you, and this applies to all areas of life, unless you give them more insight on as to why they should follow.  Jimmy Fallon, took to applying an entertaining integration strategy, through the use of his #Hashtag Game and it worked.  Viewers and evidently their followers, get involved with the Fallon brand on Twitter because they are asked to participate and share their witty one liners in response to his #Hashtag Game.

Conversation, conversation, conversation – Jay Leno has none!  Reviewing Twitter posts on both of the late night celebrity profiles, you definitely got a sense that one was more ‘real’ than the other.  Leno’s posts looked like they could have published by his press team, where as there was a sense of realness, and conversation with followers on the Jimmy Fallon Twitter handle.

What Fallon and team have done is not specific to just late night television or individual personalities. The business of effectively using social tools, social integration, and open and honest social conversation, are the same concepts consumer brands should be taking, but instead, we see many applying the Jay Leno methodology of awkwardly injecting social decal, with no strategic social call to action.

Late Nigh Television … Comedy, however you class Jimmy Fallon, there is a lot that brands can learn from his social initiatives.  As an aside, at the time of writing this, Fallon’s most recent hashtag (#worstpickuplines), was trending world wide.