Emerging Media and Technologies

Poor Rolling Stone. Even when they win they lose. They have the hottest news story this morning, which is quite a feat when news cycles are so fast and there’s no shortage of competing stories from the gulf oil spill to the World Cup to worldwide flooding. When news broke about General Stanley McChrystal’s comments critical of President Obama’s administration and the United States’ plan for Afghanistan it was the opportunity for Rolling Stone to prove their relevance and prowess as world events journalists. That is if you could find the story.

I know how much I use my iPhone and how often I check my surf forecast and weather apps, but some recent stats published in the MediaPost Mobile Insider newsletter are worth considering for a moment.

"the iPhone version of GQ magazine is seeing almost the same levels of monthly engagement (65-70 minutes) as the print magazine (80 minutes). Compare those numbers to GQ.com, which gets a measly 10 minutes a month."

Should you or should you not mine the deep social connections between your customers and their friends as a source for finding new customers? This appears to be the next wave of socially-targeted advertising that is happening on the web, and based on a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, with impressive results.

Remember when you got started on Facebook? There was that phase a few months into it where every high-school friend was suddenly back on your radar, whether or not there as any reason to have remembered them in the first place. Waves of old and new faces would wash up on the shore of your in-box. Some of us indiscriminately accepted all. Some others took more time to approve or maybe ignore some of the more hinky ones.

Social Networks right now are merely dumps of nearly infinite connections, powered by XML and RSS. If the robot even thinks there’s a connection, it is programmed to go ahead and make it, hoping that you, the human, will sort it out later.

Brands have long sought to associate themselves with celebrities in the hope that some of the latter’s mojo would rub off on the former. The reasoning might go that if you love William Shatner and he says he loves our cola then you should love it too! Of course, the realities of marketing and advertising make that calculation much more complex and it’s sometimes that you want to associate your brand with the emotions that celebrity stirs and that cuts both ways, often with unpredictable results.