The MoPR Blog

Will Twitter get down to business? Twitter is free for now but will the recent hiring of a Director of Mobile Business Development mean they might start charging or setting up a premium service?

According to Twitter’s blog: “Twitter receives a crushing amount of partnership opportunities on a regular basis—it’s a good problem to have yet until now there has been nobody on staff dedicated solely to business development. Things are changing.”

And, according to Telephony, “Twitter has floated the idea of some pay-per-use, premium services. But it risks losing users to other still-free services such as FriendFeed – not to mention telco-provided SMS.”

It will be interesting to see where this is headed – Twitter needs to eventually start making some cash – just preferably not from us.

The ever changing media landscape. We flinch every time we get a newsfeed about some newspaper or magazine cutting staff, shutting down or scaling back frequency. Though we have no intention of turning Weekend Reading into an obit section for publications, we feel the need to let our readers know about the landscape and how this polar shift affects our industry tremendously.

Newspapers and their current business models are sinking – that’s a given. Some, like The New York Times, are experimenting with alternative ad models, such as putting ads on the cover page. It’s not really that dramatic and has been done, but not with a paper of the Times’ caliber. It gets worse – one pundit claims the Times could no longer exist as a newspaper as early as this spring.

Change is painful but it also brings opportunities. Blogs sprout up everyday. News is getting hyper-localized; information is open and free [which has its advantages and disadvantages] and newer business models are flourishing. News isn’t a commodity anymore with sites like Twitter and its users scooping mainstream media stories. Just this week news about Steve Jobs stepping down and the Hudson plane miracle were both reported on Twitter first – with a dramatic photo directly from the crash scene posted on a Twitter user’s account.

Robert Niles in the Online Journal Review lays out some hard rules on these changes and shifts in media and how the new landscape might look. Here’s one that caught our eye:

The old rule: You can’t cover something in which you are personally involved.
The new rule: Tell your readers how you are involved and how that’s shaped your reporting.

MoPR is a company that works hard to tell its clients’ stories to their audience and this kind of transparency and honesty resonates with us. That’s why we’re increasingly having more open, two-way conversations with reporters and bloggers – and laying all the information on the table so to speak. From there, we let the reporter tell their side.

As the media landscape shrinks – and at the same time expands – we will always be looking for ways to make sure our clients get heard. It’s like a Disneyland ride – we’re cautiously looking at the next turn but we’re also excited about where the industry is headed.

American Idol Text: Fail? Are you on AT&T? Did you get a text on your mobile phone earlier this week promoting the season premiere of American Idol? You weren’t alone.

According to various news sources, the carrier sent the text message to a large portion of its subscriber base – many of whom were not very happy with it.

From The New York Times: “AT&T is defending the text barrage, claiming the messages weren’t spam because they were free, and because customers could opt-out of future ads. The ads were sent to frequent texters and to customers who had voted in the past, AT&T says.”

Social network sites growing on adults. The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8 percent in 2005 to 35 percent now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey.

While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults still make up the bulk of the users of these websites. Adults make up a larger portion of the US population than teens, which is why the 35 percent number represents a larger number of users than the 65 percent of online teens who also use online social networks.

Most, but not all adult social network users are privacy conscious; 60 percent of adult social network users restrict access to their profiles so that only their friends can see it, and 58 percent restrict access to certain content within their profile.

Pumpkin carving by our own Holly Woolard!

Trick or Tweet: Twitter as a terrorist tool? According to a document by the U.S. Army obtained by various media outlets this week, Twitter is being regarded as a possible tool for terrorists. According to the report [the emphasis is ours],

“Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences.”

For example, terrorists [including “radical” vegetarians we presume] could theoretically use Twitter social networking in the U.S. as an operation tool. However, it is unclear whether the same theoretical use would be available to terrorists in other countries and to what extent, says the report.

According to the National Terror Alert there are three possible scenarios using Twitter:

Scenario 1: Using cell phones and a Google maps/Twitter mash-up to plot where they are, terrorists use Twitter to communicate near-real time to update each other about troop movements and plan an ambush.

Scenario 2: The first terrorist has two mobile phones – one for using Twitter and another which is connected to an explosive device or a “suicide vest.” The second terrorist also has two mobile phones – one for Twitter and the other to detonate the bomb. They communicate using Twitter to coordinate the “precise” time for the attack.

Scenario 3: A cyber-terrorist finds the Twitter account of a member of the armed forces. The terrorist gets information about the target and uses it for identity theft, hacking or physical attacks.

On a lighter side, who wants to be a national hero and tell the U.S. Department of Defense about Twitter’s real-time search?

Who let the blogs out? The number of people who read blogs at least once a month has grown 300% in the past four years, and what they read strongly influences their purchase decisions, playing a key role in ushering them to the point of actual purchase, according to a BuzzLogic-sponsored study. “Harnessing the Power of Blogs,” a research study of more than 2,000 online consumers in the U.S., was conducted by JupiterResearch, a Forrester research company.

For frequent blog readers, ads on blogs are on par with sponsored search results, one of the most prevalent and successful forms of advertising on the web – and trust of blog advertising exceeds that of social networking site advertising.

According to the study, blogs are becoming trusted guides, steering users who are seeking very specific information to places of interest online. “Being able to identify where this is taking place across the blogosphere gives us a window into user intent and a means to better target advertising to a qualified audience. This is great news for advertisers looking to maximize value in today’s environment,” said Rob Crumpler, CEO, BuzzLogic.

Maybe we should consider selling ad space?

Mobile video still not quite ready for prime time. According to comScore, Inc., a mere 6.5 million Americans tuned into mobile video in August. Among the top operators in the United States, AT&T claimed the most mobile video viewers, with 4.4 percent of subscribers accessing either programmed or on-demand mobile video.

According to the study, on-demand video was the most popular format, with 3.6 million viewers.  With 1.3 million viewers, amateur videos, such as those on YouTube, represent the most popular type of content, followed by music videos and comedy videos.

Music videos are the top choice for programmed mobile broadcast video users, followed closely by full television shows or films and movie trailers.

The small amount of eyeballs though has a silver lining – younger viewers might be ripe for advertisers.

“At under three percent penetration, the mobile video audience in the United States remains small, but it is composed largely of males between 18 and 34 years old, which could make it attractive to advertisers seeking to reach multi-tasking early-adopters who don’t have time for appointment television,” said Mark Donovan, senior analyst, comScore.

Is the bulletin board on the fridge obsolete? A national survey of 2,252 adults by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that households with a married couple and minor children are more likely than other household types, such as single adults, homes with unrelated adults, or couples without children, to have cell phones and use the internet.

The survey shows that these high rates of technology ownership affect family life. In particular, cell phones allow family members to stay more regularly in touch even when they are not physically together. Moreover, many members of “married with children” households view material online together.

Overall, respondents in the survey see much upside and little downside in the way new technologies have affected the quality of their communications with others.

“Families are becoming networks,” said Prof. Barry Wellman of the University of Toronto and an author of the study. “Each household member can be her own communications hub and that changes things inside and outside the household. Family members are neither isolated individuals nor traditional actors in Fun with Dick and Jane homes. Rather, their households are active sites of the interplay of individual activity and family togetherness.”