Will "Print" outlive "desktop"?

"Print will be around longer than the desktop," New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. told a group of media professionals Thursday morning.

Interesting point of view — I don't think anyone is really arguing against the idea that "mobile" (including tablets) is the future of "computers." (A report from Enders Analysis today talks about mobile devices accounting for 50% of time spent online in the UK, and tablet shipments overtaking PC sales.) The "PC" is clearly in decline as mobile is growing.

But the same story has been accepted to be true of print for a good few years now — pring has been in decline while "digital" was a growth story. So its a thought-provoking question - which one will last longer — "old" physical print, or "old" digital?

To be honest, I wouldn't like to bet against the long-term future of print. But then again, is its future going to be just as much of a "speciality" as a personal computer?

Twitter, TV and the One Direction effect

Around this time last year, we did a fun little project around pancake-related tweets on pancake day. The biggest driver of tweets over time was a hashtag game, around #replacebandnameswithhashtags.

But the biggest driver of activity was this relatively innocuous tweet;

Pancake day is wanna of my favourite days of the year !!!! Come to me !

— Louis Tomlinson (@Louis_Tomlinson) February 12, 2013

The impact was pretty clear; a massive spike in activity as it was retweeted and replied to;

(The secondary spike a short while later was the result of his girlfriend also tweeting about pancakes.)

I've been doing a few projects around tracking Twitter mentions and conversations around various topics, and it has become something of a joke – if there is a massive, inexplicable spike in tweets, the first thing to check is whether one of One Direction happened to say something related. And I'd say that as often as not, if no other explanation is apparent, then that is what it turns out to be. We call it the One Direction effect.

Another topic I've been watching (along with many others) is the interaction between Twitter and television. Just over a year ago, a Twitter spokesman said that 40% of tweets were about television during peak TV hours – a huge volume.

What would happen if the two collided? This week, we found out, thanks to SecondSync's analysis. They tweeted;

#GrahamNorton hits Monday's #socialTV top spot thanks to a tweet from @NiallOfficial... http://t.co/ZDKlvRkODE pic.twitter.com/mxMkEO1cIY

— SecondSync (@SecondSync) March 4, 2014

So, how much of a difference did it make?

This much.

To put that into context, in last week's round up they also mentioned the Graham Norton show;

The top show on Friday night’s leaderboard was the final episode of the current series of The Graham Norton Show, which attracted 16,551 tweets, the most it has recorded for an episode in 2014. The most popular guest on the show was Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, mentioned in over 5,600 tweets, while a peak of 506 TPM was reached in reaction to Ellie Goulding’s live performance. Overall, 75,646 tweets have been recorded for the eight episodes broadcast in this series.

So, the most tweeted about programme on a Friday night generated sixteen thousand tweets. But a single tweet from a One Directioner alone (during a repeat – not the live broadcast) generated nearly fourteen thousand – in a very intense burst.

This is their analysis of twitter volume over time – for a particularly popular (in Twitter-terms) episode of a popular show, in its original broadcast.

Note the difference in scales to the chart above.

Television gets a lot of attention when it comes to discussion of Twitter and their share price/market value.

Funny how One Direction don't get as much attention. I wonder what would happen if they started posting exclusively to Facebook?

"No more real than it is real-time"

Last Sunday, an American Footballer ¹ announced that he was gay.

Like last month when the first Premier League footballer came out (five months after retiring from the game), this caused a stir in the news.

But an interesting angle was pointed out in AdAge about the reaction from the advertising world – where "real time" is the latest buzz, vocal brands and real-time advertisers had nothing to say.

Too sensitive a topic? Perhaps. But more likely that 'real time advertising' isn't really the 'real time', 'agile', 'always-on' approach that its being pitched as. Instead, its just a case of forward planning – maybe some quick photoshop work or some fast-working video production.

The commenters on the article don't seem to agree – consensus seems to be that commenting on the story would have been inappropriate. For example;

"Brands, in general, are not weighing in on slow-burning issues that culminate in RT moments (laws affecting same-sex marriage, for example)."

However, a little searching reveals this to be a bad example.

Forbes has a slideshow of some outdoor advertising. Mashable has a story about Microsoft and Amazon having some videos. Chevrolet are running some pro-gay marriage ads over the Winter Olympics, and Business Insider has an article – including plenty of social media examples.

I think the issue is that brands are weighing in on these slow-burning issues. But only the slow-burning issues. (Maybe 'social media' still isn't ready for fireworks.)

Apparently brands have already been in touch with Sam about sponsorship deals – so maybe its that they are looking to make a stronger statement than merely tweeting about their support.

Maybe its just that I'm not paying close attention to the kinds of brands who are tweeting their support or posting about it to their Facebook pages – I am, after all, neither American nor an American Football fan (and haven't been spending much time on Twitter or Facebook this last week or two), so I'm taking it on faith that AdAge's writer, editors and commenters would have noticed if it were a false premise.

But the feeling I get is that this is an example of where 'real time' is falling short. Right now, its about either preparing for moments of planned spontaneity, or looking for the technology that will detect the stories that meet certain key brand-related criteria (read: use the right keywords.)

The point where 'real time' becomes 'real' still seems some way off yet.

1. That is, a player of American Football. Not an *actual* footballer. ↩

Chromecast coming to the UK soon?

Talking about the future (or lack of) for Smart TV, I said;

Today, a typical household might have;

• TV (well, probably a couple — but ignoring secondary screens for the moment to try to simplify the picture…)
• TV service (cable/satellite/terrestrial) - probably a separate set-top box (given that over half of the UK pays for subscription TV service.)
• PVR (eg. Sky+/V+) for recording broadcast TV - two thirds of the UK have one (probably built into the TV set top box, or possibly as a separate VCR-like box — probably not built into the TV.)
• DVD player/Blu-Ray player for watching pre-recorded films/video.
• Games console (55% of households) — mainly for playing games, but often used to access online video services.
• Some sort of dedicated 'Internet video' device (might be an Apple TV, Now TV, Roku etc. Might be a connected PC. Might even be more than one.)

Those last two are somewhat different to the others. 98% of UK households have a television set, and if you have a TV then you have some sort of TV service (whether free or paid.) If you have a PVR, then its probably come from your TV service provider, bundled with the package.

DVD/Blu-Ray players are another 'must-have' – whether its a low end DVD player, cheap enough to throw in with your supermarket shop, or a high end, high definition player to watch your favourite films in the best possible quality.

But games consoles – while popular – aren't for everyone. If you aren't interested in games, you probably don't have one in your house, and if you do you probably aren't too interested in the 'additional' features it offers – like watching online video.

Finally, the 'internet video device'. If you are interested in streaming films, setting up a Netflix subscription etc. then you're probably interested enough to get something to let you watch it on the big screen. But that's not 'mainstream' – if you're not interested in gadgets, you're probably not interested in finding the best box for your requirements. And even if you are, you might not be sufficiently motivated to go and spend the best part of £100 (or, to put it another way, more than a Blu-Ray player).

Which is what makes Google's Chromecast such an interesting device. At just $35 in the US (about £21 equivalent), it plugs into your TV (and a power supply), connects to your home wifi network, and lets you stream video from your smartphone/tablet to your TV screen.¹

And its UK launch is rumoured to be soon

For YouTube and Netflix, this is probably going to be great news (they are already supported in the US, and both go for a general strategy of ubiquitous availability.) Whether the UK's TV players will be bringing iPlayer, ITV Player and 4OD (especially the BBC) is what will be the make or break.

…Which leaves Sky. Their Now TV) box is just £9.99, and is being marketed as a way to access Sky's (subscription) TV services without a satellite dish. But it also has apps for iPlayer, 4OD, Spotify, Vimeo and a number of other online services – Netflix and YouTube conspicuous by their absence.

The thing is, these are two very similar pieces of technology with clearly very different functionality; one for putting online video on your TV, the other for giving you TV through online video. And while the price is low enough to make getting both quite affordable, there is the issue of having 2 spare HDMI sockets in your TV set.

But, for those not interested in shelling out for a Smart TV or sticking a games console into their living rooms, this should be an interesting and cheap way to get some online video onto their TV screen.

1. At least, thats the illusion. In practice, the mobile device just tells the Chromecast what video to stream and where to pull it from – the phone doesn't actually do the work, which means its free to find the next video you want to watch. ↩

"Social TV" measurement

Last week, I mentioned an announcement of a partnership between Twitter and GfK (a research firm) in providing an "offical" measurement of TV-related conversations on Twitter. This comes on the back of similar partnerships with Nielsen (for the US) and Kantar (for the UK.)

This is an area that I've been watching for a while — a couple of years ago, I did some analysis at work around online mentions of TV programmes, comparing volumes of mentions to TV audience sizes. I then spent a fair amount of time prototyping and then building my own little Twitter-tracking application which would plug into TV listings to create an ongoing measurement of TV programme mentions on Twitter. I ended up shelving the project for a number of reasons — not least because a company called SecondSync were doing something very similar (but as a proper business, rather than just a coding hobbyist project.)

What has been clear to anyone paying attention to the world of television is that a few different trends were all colliding;

The rise of social media. People talking to one another online about (among other things) television.

Twitter — the ideal platform for this kind of conversation for a number of reasons;

• Public — most tweets are visible to anyone who wants to see them (as opposed to Facebook's 'semi-private' nature — much of what happens on Facebook is only visible within limited social circles, either to friends of the poster, or 'friends of friends.')
• Searchable — put a keyword into Twitter's search, and you can see anyone's tweets mentioning that keyword. Hashtags make this very easy to do, encouraging public content to become part of a public conversation.
• APIs — Its reasonably easy to plug into Twitter's data feeds and automate the searching process. Which means that its fairly straightforward to count mentions of keywords and see the volumes of mentions.
• Real-time: Twitter's design focusses on what is happening right now (as opposed to "interesting things your friends have shared", which has been Facebook's focus — with a lot of their innovation revolving around figuring out the most "interesting" stuff to put at the top of your news feed.
• Marketing — Twitter have made a concerted push to position themselves as the de facto platform to talk about television. (Zeebox were looking like they might replace them because they were focussed on just talking about TV, but I don't think the idea of only talking about TV has really caught on.) And, as this analysis by my colleague Mat Morrison shows, Twitter gets a lot of news/media attention for its size.

So, despite a much bigger audience, Facebook has been kind of left out of the "social TV" conversation — we don't really know what other people are talking about, we don't know the scale of conversations around particular topics, but we do know that while Twitter can be viewed as a network of conversations tied together by common hashtags, there is no way to connect a conversation I'm having on Facebook with that of, say, a teenager in Taunton or a mother in Middlesex that happen to be about the same thing, at the same time. Unless we have mutual friends, those other conversations might as well be happening on MySpace, as far as my experience is concerned.

Last Thursday, Facebook made an announcement;

Today we’re announcing an international partnership with SecondSync, a social TV analytics specialist, intended to help clients understand how people are using Facebook to talk about topics such as TV.
[…]
The first output from this partnership will be a forthcoming white paper, Watching with Friends, showing how different types of people use Facebook to talk about TV across a range of programs in the US, UK and Australia.

Interesting for a number of reasons;

• Apparently Facbeook have been privately sharing some numbers with TV networks in the US, but this is the first time we will get a proper look at what is being talked about on Facebook – not brands being 'talked about', but 'natural' conversations. (There was a very limited tool some years ago that was apparently hacked together in Facebook's early days, but seems to have long since been forgotten.)
• The fact that its beng done by a firm used to doing it on Twitter would suggest that there should be a degree of comparability between the figures. At the very least, it should give us an idea of the difference between programmes that are talked about on Twitter, Facebook – or both. In other words, we start getting a proper idea of 'social TV' – not just 'Twitter TV'.
• The fact that its being done by a firm based in the UK should be good news for those of us in the UK media industry.
• The fact that its also being done outside of the UK indicates that SecondSync have been developing their business/technology. Which is nice to hear (although a little frustrating on a personal level…)
• Some visibility into Facebook conversations should give us (that is, researchers/media types) some better idea of what is actually going on, outside of our own circles or brand pages we are involved in.
• Which, in turn, should tell us a bit more about TV audiences and viewing behaviours.

Twitter and GfK announce TV measurement partnership →

Twitter and GfK have announced a partnership to "introduce GfK Twitter TV Ratings in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. The new service will provide insights into the frequency and reach of messages from Twitter users associated with television programs and campaigns."

Those watching the "social TV" industry will recall the deal Nielsen announced with Twitter at the end of 2012 (I wrote about the deal and implications of this kind of measurement for my work website at the time.)

And those wondering why the UK wasn't included in the deal may want to cast their mind back to last August, when a similar partnership between Twitter and Kantar (with SecondSync providing data) was announced.

The big question from my point of view is about how this "reach" measurement is being measured.

Will it be based on inflated counts that assume that every follower sees every tweet, and doesn't account for the fact that people might follow more than one person who tweets about a programme?

Or will it be based on actual data from Twitter, who presumably have the ability to know how many people actually see each tweet (given that they have to do the work of putting it in front of them.)

Sadly, I'm expecting the former…

Smartphone OS market share - Kantar Worldpanel data →

On one hand, its useful to know how market share is changing for the different smartphone operating systems.

On the other though, its hard to draw any sort of meaning out of change in market share without knowing what the change in the market size is. I know that there are more smartphones than 12 months ago, and that Apple's share has declined. But does that mean that Apple is selling more phones? Or the same amount of phones in a growing market?

Today's Twitter

So, how many tweets does one need to be considered a social media expert?

— Jason Kottke (@jkottke) October 10, 2013

Twitter is looking for a new "Media Evangelist" — officially titled "Head of News and Journalism", NBC News Chief Vivian Schiller is currently the favourite for the position. But an opinion piece by Ruth Bazinet on Medium says that she is the wrong person for the job.

Why? Because of her Twitter profile.

But it lacks the most important element that should be ringing alarm bells at Twitter HQ —a significant number of tweets. How can someone who has tweeted less than 1,200 times have the practical, hands-on knowledge of the platform required to evangelize it to other news media professionals? Twitter needs a veteran, someone who is an expert not only about the platform itself, but who also understands how people, including other journalists, are using it.

In short, the view is that Twitter is heavily reliant on "power users" — those who are tweeting dozens of times a day.

I think thats a view that misses the point of what Twitter is and where its heading. Maybe three or four years ago, when Twitter was a social network for the bloggers, journalists and technorati, it would have seemed a more valid point; but today, Twitter is something different. It has changed.

Most obviously, it is bigger. "Power users" today don't have follower counts in the tens of thousands any more — at the time of writing, there are 839 Twitter users with more than 2 million followers (with Mohammed Morsi just about to cross the mark.)

The best way of summing up this change probably comes from Twitter itself — at the top of their "About Twitter" page is the big, bold sentence;

The fastest, simplest way to stay close to everything you care about.

Below that;

An information network.
Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest stories, ideas, opinions and news about what you find interesting. Simply find the accounts you find most compelling and follow the conversations.

View fullsize

Compare that to what it said a couple of years ago;

Twitter is a real-time information network powered by people all around the world that lets you share and discover what's happening now.

Note the differences; out with "share", in with "follow." Out with "powered by people all around the world", and in with "latest stories, ideas, opinions and news".

View fullsize

Those screengrabs come from this blog post at Harvard Business Review, talking about a study on how people's Twitter usage changes when they get more followers;

We had two hypotheses as to why they do post. One is that they like to share information with world, that they want to reach others. This is an intrinsic motivation. They enjoy the act of contributing. The second hypothesis is that posting is self-promotional, a way to attract followers to be able to earn higher status on the platform. Judging by how people behaved once they achieved popularity—they posted far less content—we believe the second hypothesis is probably the primary motivation. If the primary motivation were to share with the world, most people would not slow down posting just because they were popular. But most people did slow down as they gained followers.

So I don't think the role of Twitter's "Head of News and Journalism" is going to be about showing journalists how they can talk to their audiences; its in showing news organisations how they can use Twitter to broaden their audiences.

It isn't about showing editors how they can "listen" to what their readers are saying; its about showing them what they can learn from the data coming from Twitter.

In other words, its going to be showing news organisations how to move forwards from the "old Twitter" world that Ruth Bazinet's article seems to be talking about, and towards the "new Twitter" that it is becoming, where Twitter isn't a platform for "engaging" or "interacting", but a platform for distribution.

Old Twitter wanted to be the internet's watering hole, where everyone came together to talk. New Twitter wants to be the internet's front page; Google will tell you what you want to know, but Twitter will tell you what you didn't know you wanted to know. Discovery, rather than Search. Ultimately, thats not really a change in what Twitter wants to be — but it is a slightly different way of becoming it.

I should probably note that I'm not particularly in favour of this shift that is going on (or rather, has already happened.) I like old Twitter, where it felt like the place where interesting things on the Web were happening, and it was small enough to feel like a community — where a celebrity making a typo or grammatical error wasn't seen as an invitation for hundreds of people to correct them. But… its probably just a natural consequence of Twitter's need over time to grow its user base and develop its business. If they had decided against advertising as a core business model, perhaps it would be a very different story today.

But thats a whole other story…

(Thanks to Mat Morrison for pointing out the change in Twitter's description to me.)

[Edit 18:10, 11/10/13 - added screengrabs]

"To a Boy of the 1970s, the Line Between Comic Books and Real Life People Was Hopelessly Blurred" →

(via DaringFireball.net)

I love this.

You have to understand that to a boy of the 1970s, the line between comic books and real life people was hopelessly blurred. Was Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, real or fake? Fake? Well, then, how about Evel Knievel jumping over busses on his motorcycle? Oh, he was real. The Superman ads said, “You will believe a man can fly,” and Fonzie started jukeboxes by simply hitting them, and Elvis Presley wore capes, and Nolan Ryan threw pitches 102 mph, and Roger Staubach (who they called Captain America) kept bringing the Cowboys back from certain defeat, and Muhammad Ali let George Foreman tire himself out by leaning against the ropes and taking every punch he could throw. What was real anyway?

It never occurred to me that before television, children probably didn't live in a world where reality and fiction were so confusingly intertwined.

It reminds me of a quote I heard (can't remember or find a source) along the lines that "The magic of Disneyworld wasn't in making people believe that it was real, but making them believe that the rest of the world wasn't just an illusion."