It’s a simple truth that the vast majority of blog posts such as this one draw on existing news stories and then build on them in some fashion.    Hence the statistic from the Pew Research Center that 95% of stories with ‘new information’ originate from the traditional media, particularly newspapers.

Conducted in the Baltimore Maryland area, researchers found that 83% of stories were ‘repetitive’, with the other 17% that were new coming almost exclusively from what’s termed traditional media.   General interest newspapers were responsible for 48% of ‘new news’, specialist titles generated 13%, TV in the Baltimore area was responsible for 28% of new content, while new media only generated 4%.

It’s a fair point: Our society depends on organisations who have the resources and professionalism to delve into and uncover the stories we all need to know about.   Very few people who work in the digital media space would argue otherwise.   Instead in response to this research I’d say:

For non professional and online media outlets to break almost 1 in 20 news stories is quite high.   And there have been some major ones – for example, here and here

Even if social media doesn’t break news, it does have a role in moving it along and magnifying it considerably.   For example, look at what happened to Eurostar (the train service between London and Paris / Brussels) before Christmas

No one realistically thinks social media will ever replace traditional news gathering outlets, whether they publish in print or online.   But it is a game changer, and the organisations themselves seem to think so as evidenced by Sky News installing Tweetdeck across journalists’ computers.

Social engineering doomed to fail?
One thing that I do question is social engineering to ‘make’ people read newspapers.   True, giving 18 year olds free (print) subscriptions has had some impact in France, but I wonder how successful these sorts of schemes will be long-term.

Paid Content has an article about the (opposition) Labour culture spokesperson in Scotland, Pauline McNeill advocating a similar scheme North of the border.

The article also includes some stats about the mountain Scottish newspapers face, with ‘The Scotsman’, the paper that holds itself up as Scotland’s national quality paper, seeing a circulation drop from 75,402 to a pretty shocking 46,300 since 2002, and The Daily Record (the main tabloid), dropping from 626,646 to 323,01 in the same period.

Image – Swanksalot

Related articles by Zemanta

• Newspapers and Traditional Media Still Produce Most News (marketingpilgrim.com)

A study that shows the limits of social media in helping people discover new content – but also shows the importance of online editorial endorsement  – comes from Knowledge Networks in the US (via Digital Media) .

Viewers were asked how they discover new content and how they decide what to watch, both for TV and online video.   For online video, social media from strangers ranked seventh in terms of recommendations, with verbal word of mouth (41%) and search (32%) coming top.

In other words, even on the Internet people are most likely to be directed to stuff that someone’s told them about face to face.

For regular TV, TV advertising is actually the prime source of content discovery at 46% – who said commercials were dead!  However, social media from strangers only scored 6%.   Meanwhile, just as they are for online videos, verbal recommendations are key in helping people find out about offline TV shows (38%)

Conclusions: Concentrate on online PR, and a search + social media strategy
So is the conclusion that a social media and online engagement strategy is largely a waste of time, and you might as well put your cash into both TV and search ads?  Hardly.

First of all, it’s obvious that even if someone tells you about a great new viral face to face they must have heard or read about it somewhere else.   As always off and online word of mouth have to very much work in tandem.

Secondly, stories or reviews on the Internet ranked highly (27%) in terms of helping people find out about new online videos.   In other words just as you would offline, editorial endorsement online from major blogs and news sources (the lines between the two are blurred anyway) works.

Finally, the Knowledge Networks study shows the effectiveness of search when it comes to helping people discover online video.

However if your social media and search strategy works together then search ends up being even more effective.   That’s shown by an earlier Comscore study that said that people exposed to both what they called “influenced social” and paid search had 233% heavier search behaviour.

Related articles by Zemanta

• comScore and VideoEgg to Measure How Online Ads Impact Offline Purchases (mashable.com)
• Zenith Forecast: In ’09, Only Online Grows (paidcontent.org)
• HuffPo’s tweets and comments to be sponsored (guardian.co.uk)

Bob Knorpp of the Beancast (which I’m on tonight) alerted me to this statement by Yates Buckley of Unit 9, made to coincide with last week’s Creativity and Technology event at London’s Saatchi Gallery:

“If you are a creative and don’t know about technology you’ll be out of a job soon.”

It’s a statement that I imagine touched a lot of raw nerves as it zeroes in on the debate raging in agencies today.  In fact, I’d point to another quote made by Guardian columnist Roy Greenslade the other month that nicely encapsulates it.   Greenslade talked about the fundamental divide between those who think the digital media revolution is transformative, or whether it’s tactical.

Substitute the word marketing in place of journalism here:

The split (in the pro and anti camps) is both philosophical and practical.

“There are those (with whom I agree) who believe that the digital media revolution is in the process of transforming journalism and those (such as Murdoch and most traditional newspaper publishers) who believe the net is merely another platform rather than an instrument of transformation.”

It’s a complex argument, but the truth as always surely lies somewhere in between.

I tell the 20-something execs at Cow that the skills set they’ll need in ten years time is different to the skills set they have now (and we have a responsibility to help them get there).   That’s due to consumers, and so agencies, straddling the old and new media divide, meaning that you still need to know about the old way of doing things while also embracing the new.

Beth Harte in fact expresses it perfectly in her post ‘PR 2.0 will double your workload‘.

Perhaps the voice of sanity in all this comes from Iain Tait of Poke, an agency that’s squarely at the forefront of digital marketing.   Iain talks about the dangers of getting carried away with technology for the sake of it:

“Now that we’ve been invited to the party and have money, influence and power, I worry we are like a bunch of kids with the keys to the sweetshop.   Do we need all that?  People like things that are free and simple – money likes stuff that is slick.   Building big things is fun and impresses people, but it has no value.”

Image – Sammy0716

Metrics company Comscore has come out with a study on global Internet use by hours spent surfing. Surprisingly, Microsoft’s range of websites – in particular Windows Live Messenger – leads, with 15% of time spent online globally.

However at the same time as Australian website Digital Media points out, YouTube and Facebook, arguably the two highest profile players in the social media category, took up almost 10% of the 27 billion global Internet hours people in Sept 09.

Looking at Facebook, its share of hours grew by 193%. It also over-indexes significantly in both Europe (6.6% share vs 5.1% globally), and the Middle East / Africa (where it has 8%).

It’s worth noting that Comscore’s data excluded time spent surfing from a mobile device. If that had been factored in, then Facebook’s share would almost certainly have been higher. According to Facebook’s Director of Mobile, Henri Moissinac, the network now has 65 million mobile users – or 25% of its total reach.

Recently, stats showed that Facebook had reached almost 100 million users in Europe. Though the UK is by far the leading territory with 20+ million plus users, the network showed particularly strong growth in Italy, Germany and Turkey.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The 10 Biggest Social Media Stories This Week (mashable.com)
• How a SA company might just change the mobile app game forever. (techsmart.co.za)