Path is an impossibly beautiful social-network and app for the iPhone and Android; it’s the sort of software one daydreams about creating, replete with delightful surprises and deeply-considered design. Quite apart from its many visual flourishes, some of its nicest touches reflect enormous…
Thanks to Poynter, and Some Notes
Thanks to everyone who stopped by today’s Poynter chat about Tumblr for journalists (and more thanks to Mallary and Joe for having me!)
BEST PRACTICES
The Tumblr community very much rewards authenticity, originality and social graces. I always reduce this to:
- Be Engaging: Have interesting things to say, and don’t talk simply about yourself. Respond to other Tumblr users, ask questions, etc. Remember that Tumblr is a visual medium (more than half of the 25 million things posted on Tumblr each day are pictures), so look for compelling images to tell your story whenever possible.
- Be Social: Tumblr is above all a social sharing platform. Use this space to show off your best stuff, encourage others to share it with their followers, reblog posts from other Tumblrs that you think your followers will enjoy.
- Be Yourself: No publication has to fundamentally change who they are to connect with people on Tumblr. The audience responds most to a personal, peer-to-peer connection with you; embrace that.
THE COMMUNITY
More than 105 million people worldwide see Tumblr blogs every month (43 million U.S.). Tumblr currently serves 13.3 billion pageviews every month; this time last year that was less than 2 billion. RIght now there are 35 million Tumblr blogs; at the current rate (nearly 3 million new blogs every month) we expect to have more than 70 million Tumblr blogs by this time next year. Those Tumblr bloggers are creating more than 45 million new posts every day.Top 10 US DMAs and monthly unique users of Tumblr blogs, October 2011:
New York: 5.2 million
Los Angeles: 4.3 million
San Fran/Oakland: 3.7 million
Washington, DC: 1.9 million
Chicago: 1.8 million
Philadelphia: 1.7 million
Atlanta: 1.6 million
Seattle: 1.5 million
Boston: 1.4 million
Dallas: 1.3 millionTop 10 US states and monthly unique users of Tumblr blogs, October 2011:
California: 10 million
New York: 4.4 million
Texas: 3.6 million
Florida: 3.1 million
Illinois: 2.1 million
Pennsylvania: 2 million
New Jersey: 2 million
Georgia: 1.9 million
Washington: 1.7 million
Virginia: 1.6 million
Ohio: 1.5 million
USE CASES
Washington Post Innovations
This is the best example of a Tumblr blog stitched into the fabric of the publication’s existing Website. The Post’s Innovations Tumblr blog has all the community and sharing functionality of a Tumblr blog, and it carries the navigation, look and feel, and advertising of a traditional Washingtonpost.com pagehttp://on.washingtonpost.com/
T Magazine
One of our favorite things about the T magazine Tumblr is that it’s big. Very, very big; the pictures are the star here, and they’re shown off in a way that’s hard to do on many traditional Websites. Nice voice, clean look, compelling images.http://tmagazine.tumblr.com/GQ
GQ launched in November with a Tumblr blog that has quickly become one of the best, most original and most talked-about of the media Tumblrs.Best uses: GQ uses the ‘ask’ feature better than anyone we’ve seen to create a real dialogue with readershttp://gq.tumblr.comCNN Money Tech
The idea of this really nice group Tumblr blog is that in every newsroom reporters email interesting tidbits and commentary around; this in essence puts the Tumblr audience on that email chain:http://cnnmoneytech.tumblr.comProPublica: Officials Say the Darndest Things
The problem for ProPublica was that as a non-profit news org, they had to be careful to not be seen as opinionated or partisan on Tumblr. The solution is this unique Tumblr blog of quotes from public officials that takes advantage of Tumblr’s community and content distribution features. http://officialssay.tumblr.comThe Gun: CJ Chivers
Excellent example of a journalist providing really great reporting from his individual Tumblr blog: http://cjchivers.comFind an incomplete list of media outlets and journalists here; please email additions to me.
THEMES
Art She Said: A project from Ann Taylor; when the promotion ended Tumblr users were allowed to install the theme from the project on their own Tumblr bloghttp://www.tumblr.com/theme/18357API
Guardian SXSW coverageUses the Tumblr API to pull in posts from multiple Tumblr bloggers in a single space on the Guardian’s website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/sxsw-2011-live-coverage
Twine is the simplest possible way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing. A durable 2.5” square provides WiFi connectivity, internal and external sensors, and two AAA batteries that keep it running for months. A simple web app allows to you quickly set up your Twine with human-friendly rules — no programming needed. And if you’re more adventurous, you can connect your own sensors and use HTTP to have Twine send data to your own app.
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| — | Twine : Listen to your world, talk to the Internet by Supermechanical — Kickstarter (via slantback) |
fuckers
I understand why Facebook is doing this, but at this rate, they are going to be heading towards oblivion. The closed wall approach to the Internet is doomed to failure. Need more proof? Try Prodigy, AOL, et al.
As for me, screw Facebook. My community is on Tumblr and Twitter and other places I love like Ex.fm. So no, Facebook, I will not post links on my wall to my content on my blog. I will simply not use Facebook.
Ditto, I find myself contributing less and less content to Facebook.
This was a feature I had yet to implement for a client. Now they are forced to do the updates by hand. Not using Facebook when you are trying to sell something does not seem to be an option these days.
![thedailywhat:
Marketing Stunt of the Day: Aaron Shapiro, CEO of digital agency HUGE, recently penned a business book about the importance of adapting to the digital age to avoid commercial collapse.
To make the results of failing to take Users Not Customers to heart more tangible, Shapiro hired erstwhile book peddlers who experienced firsthand the consequences of not heeding his advice: Former Borders employees.
On his site, Shapiro writes:
From Tuesday, November 1 to Thursday, November 3, a group of former Borders employees will be operating a mobile bookstore at multiple locations throughout Manhattan to emphasize the importance of the lessons taught in my book, the only one they’re selling.
After liquidating its remaining 399 stores, Borders laid off some 11,000 employees. Shapiro believes it didn’t have to end this way for Ann Arbor-based retailer.
Shapiro says Borders waited too long to launch its online book-selling business, and once it had, did everything wrong. By early 2011, hardcopy sales via Borders.com “accounted for less than 3 percent of Borders’ revenue.” To compare, nearly half of all retail purchases currently conducted in the US is “either influenced by or transacted on the Internet,” according to Forrester Research.
Businesses must prioritize online customers — or “users” — “above all else,” says Shapiro. “They must research the needs of their users and then use these insights to guide everything from product development to marketing, sales, and customer service.”
[a.shapiro / adfreak / thanks angeline!]](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lu7fjj6X761qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
Marketing Stunt of the Day: Aaron Shapiro, CEO of digital agency HUGE, recently penned a business book about the importance of adapting to the digital age to avoid commercial collapse.
To make the results of failing to take Users Not Customers to heart more tangible, Shapiro hired erstwhile book peddlers who experienced firsthand the consequences of not heeding his advice: Former Borders employees.
On his site, Shapiro writes:
From Tuesday, November 1 to Thursday, November 3, a group of former Borders employees will be operating a mobile bookstore at multiple locations throughout Manhattan to emphasize the importance of the lessons taught in my book, the only one they’re selling.
After liquidating its remaining 399 stores, Borders laid off some 11,000 employees. Shapiro believes it didn’t have to end this way for Ann Arbor-based retailer.
Shapiro says Borders waited too long to launch its online book-selling business, and once it had, did everything wrong. By early 2011, hardcopy sales via Borders.com “accounted for less than 3 percent of Borders’ revenue.” To compare, nearly half of all retail purchases currently conducted in the US is “either influenced by or transacted on the Internet,” according to Forrester Research.
Businesses must prioritize online customers — or “users” — “above all else,” says Shapiro. “They must research the needs of their users and then use these insights to guide everything from product development to marketing, sales, and customer service.”
Jobs usually had little interest in public self-analysis, but every so often he’d drop a clue to what made him tick. Once he recalled for me some of the long summers of his youth. I’m a big believer in boredom,” he told me. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, he explained, and “out of…
If two people buy the same product for the same reason but have no way they could reference each other, they are not part of the same market. That is, if I sell an oscilloscope for monitoring heartbeats to a doctor in Boston and the identical product for the same purpose to a doctor in Zaire, and these two doctors have no reasonable basis for communicating with each other, then I am dealing in two different markets….
The reason for this is simply leverage [emphasis added]. No company can afford to pay for every marketing contact made. Every program must rely on some ongoing chain-reaction effects – what is usually called word of mouth. The more self-referencing the market and the more tightly bounded its communications channels, the greater the opportunity for such effects.
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Why Geoffrey Moore believed in monolithic markets - Term Sheet Emphasis mine, for what are probably obvious reasons. (via pieratt) |
