Weekend reading for June 6
Weekend Reading is posted every Friday and represents some of the cooler and interesting mobility, wireless and collaboration news Mobility PR has read throughout the week.
Look behind you TV execs – it’s online TV. According to a new report from Ipsos MediaCT, traditional TV is winning the battle for viewers – for now. Slowly and steadily, PCs are “capturing an increasing amount of screen time among those who download or stream video online” according to the report.
The quarterly tracking study investigating digital video usage and behaviors in the U.S. showed TV watchers are increasingly getting their action from somewhere else, like their PCs.
Are users flocking to other devices such as portable video devices or mobile phones? Not quite yet. Yet.
Mobile spying report: We’re homebodies. Chances are you read about this week’s brouhaha over the study by a group of researchers that tracked mobile phone usage geographically. The study found that nearly half of the people tracked kept calls to a circle of geography no more than six miles wide.
The study was based on cell phone records from a private company, whose name was not disclosed.
Old media still has a fighting chance. Conversation Agent, a favorite blog here at MoPR, linked to a timely presentation by Jeff Jarvis that lays it all out for media professionals. In a nutshell, Jarvis says today news is less about a one-way message to readers than it is about contributing to the conversation. But, it’s also about distributing news via new avenues, such as links and feeds, and finding and participating in existing communities.
Take some time to watch the slideshow – especially pages 28 through 33 - that illustrate nicely how media is morphing into a different beast. The presentation really energized our thinking on how to share our own client’s story and message.
Marketers will do more online ad spending. More than three-quarters of marketers surveyed in a study by Eloqua and reported by eMarketer.com say they will increase their social media spending during the next three years. Seventy-four percent plan to increase their direct e-mail spending while about two-thirds will spend more on mobile texting and SMS.
Nine out of 10 marketers said they would continue to increase their direct online ad budgets. Unfortunately for traditional print media, “55% of respondents said they will probably decrease print ad spending in the next three years.”
eMarketer also projected that advertisers will spend $3.8 billion in mobile messaging advertising in 2011, up from almost $1.5 billion in 2008.
Make a mobile donation. Now there’s an easier way for organizations to accept donations – text message giving. Supporters of an organization’s cause can send a text message from their mobile phone to a specific keyword/short code and their $5 or $10 donation can be applied to their cell phone bill.
Obama vs. McCain Political Website War. Vanity Fair looks at the importance of campaign website design and evaluates our current candidates’ offerings.
Our favorite part of the post was design expert Doug Jaeger’s assessment of Obama’s site and his praises of the candidates’ social networking campaign, including “Obama Everywhere” that illustrates all of the sites Obama links to such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Blackplanet, FaithBase, Digg, Twitter and more.
Hat tip to Read/Write Web for flagging this comparison in Vanity Fair and for its own insightful review of the candidates sites and online images.
