commbasics

The first tenet of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics is "Seek truth and report it." Speculation is not truth. I got into an interesting discussion on journalistic integrity regarding the reporting on Google founder Sergey Brin 's impending divorce and I thought I'd layout my position here for an open discussion.  The story was initially reported by Liz Gannes of www.AllthingsD.com, got picked up by Techmeme and found its way to my eyes through a report by Rob Hof at Forbes that was in my Facebook feed.  I commented that it was not something I consider newsworthy and even Rob seemed apologetic about doing the piece.  (Note: I have known Rob professionally for many years and consider him a preeminent business and tech journalist).   Sergy Brin My comment was followed by several folks who defended the story as being newsworthy.  So I felt I had to actually read the story I didn't want to read and found this in Rob's ...

A while back a company brought us in to give them an idea of what they could do with "this social media thing."  Before we even got to the subject matter of the meeting we did an evaluation of their "website thing" so we could get an idea of whether the other thing would actually work for them.  What we found was a website filled with content that was virtually identical to content in the websites of 5 other companies in their industry, but not competing with them. We pointed this out to the management.  We told them that when their potential customers are looking for a solution to their problem, they would have to choose between a wild guess as to which of the six companies could help them, or just solve the problem themselves. This company's problem was not figuring out the "social media thing." It was figuring out what their story actually was.  In other words, it's a "content thing." Over the past decade, that...

A couple of days ago I talked about boring content and today I saw a post from a friend on a social network recently that was mildly dissing Klout and Linkedin endorsements.  My friend thought they were useless and trivial, a complaint I have heard often.  I can agree with that assessment, after looking at what is identified as their most popular content. But here's the thing: I'm pretty spread throughout the "social-verse." I use Facebook , Linkedin, Twitter , Google+ , Youtube , etc.  I write 6 blogs on various subjects, I have a Klout account and I get endorsements from a lot of people.  My Klout account gives me some insight on what my score is based on.  Most of what I see has to do with conent I consider important: a recent essay on FB, strings of discussion on Linkedin, links to significant articles on technology through Twitter and a handful of persona, humorous observations.  It's not trivial to me and apparent it isn...

Lots of people are wondering what it means for Jeff Bezos to buy the venerable Washington Post Company .  Can he make it profitable again.  I say, that's not the question. there is a historical reality that everyone is ignoring about journalism: it wasn't supposed to be profitable. From the beginning of this country, which was in large part launched by a healthy dose of print journalism , newspapers were money pits.  Their primary goal in life was to support a certain cause.  For example, Joseph Pulitzer was Missouri politician who amassed a significant personal wealth.  He bought an interest in one paper, flipped it quickly to another investor and then used that profit to buy another.  He merged the two papers the St. Louis Post Dispatch supporting Republican causes.  His personal wealth continued to grow so he bought the New York World , which was bleeding cash at the time, and went into a frenzied competition for readers with the N...

There's a change coming to your news feed on Facebook .  Boring content will be relegated to social media purgatory . Users should be happy about this, but companies using the social network to promote their company may be seeing failure in their content marketing . It's been a poorly kept secret that Facebook games its Edgerank algorithm to favor companies that pay to promote content, but some companies have been able to get around paying for play by swamping their feeds with a constant flow of content, that is not only self serving but boring.  Now Facebook is saying if everyone is ignoring your spam, then they aren't going to let it rise in users newsfeed to any level of visibility. That's not just true of companies, though.  The biggest criticism of Facebook is that people posting pictures of what they are eating or thinking is useless.  I've been seeing complaints lately of people saying they aren't seeing posts by friends and family...