The David All Group Welcomes the 10th Addition to its Team

Todd Irons, political communications strategist and Capitol Hill policy veteran, has joined the David All Group as a vice president. Todd is the former deputy communications director at the Republican National Committee (RNC). 

Zarella's Hierarchy of Contagiousness

If you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the title of this post will ring a bell.

I first began to formulate this framework as a model for understanding how ReTweets work. (If you’re interested in my Science of ReTweets study, check out my live webinar Friday)

My hierarchy is a framework for understanding criteria required for an individual to share a piece of content. Each of these criteria has a corresponding action we as marketers can take to increase the contagiousness of our content and ideas. 

Twitter and TV: How Social Media is Helping Out Old Media

Each generation of media has an oedipal relationship with the last. New technologies are born — radio, TV, the Internet — and either kill what came before or render it less relevant. Just so for years, the story of big-network TV has been how it's slowly losing out to cable, video games and the Web.

But a funny thing has been happening with big TV events of late: they have been dramatically and conspicuously not dying.

Facebook Starts Sending Page Admins Weekly Stat Reports

Facebook appears to be adding another level of analytics for Fan Page admins: weekly email reports. A number of page owners forwarded us statistics sent to them on Wednesday from the social network, while we received some of our own for the various Pages we manage. 

A tipster passes along a new Pew Research Center study titled, "Social Networking and Videos Take Off: Internet's Broader Role in Campaign 2008." [Download study as PDF here.]

There are some excellent nuggets in the survey and I would urge others to dig through the report and add them to the comments of this post.

Here are a few that I found in a brief first-read:

The internet is living up to its potential as a major source for news about the presidential campaign. Nearly a quarter of Americans (24%) say they regularly learn something about the campaign from the internet, almost the double the percentage from a comparable point in the 2004 campaign (13%).

Moreover, the internet has now become a leading source of campaign news for young people and the role of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook is a notable part of the story. Fully 42% of those ages 18 to 29 say they regularly learn about the campaign from the internet, the highest percentage for any news source. In January 2004, just 20% of young people said they routinely got campaign news from the internet.

Of note, TV is still on top as the main source for news, but slipping…

Despite the growth of the internet for campaign news, television remains the public’s main source for such information. However, television is not as dominant as at once was: 60% say they get most of their news about the presidential election from television (local, cable and network outlets combined), down from 68% at comparable points in the 2004 and 2000 campaigns.

By this measure, the internet is still a secondary news source. Only 15% of Americans say they get most of their news about the election online, although that figure has more than doubled since 2004 (from 6%).

Overall, 26% of Americans mention the internet either first or second as their main source of election news. Among young people, the internet is eroding television’s advantage as a main source for election news. Six-in-ten of those ages 18 to 29 cite television as their main source for election news, down from 75% four years ago. Over that time, the proportion citing the internet has more than doubled – from 21% to 46%.

Revolution.

The future of TV and radio isn't looking so bright. While the general consensus may hold that TV remains the dominant media, an Edison Media Research/Arbitron report found that TV's lead is actually tenuous:

Consumers age 12 and older were asked to choose the “most essential” medium in their life; 33 percent chose the Internet, just behind television (36 percent), but above radio (17 percent) and newspapers (10 percent); in 2002, the Internet trailed TV on this perception by a significant margin (20 percent vs. 39 percent), and also trailed radio’s 26 percent.

This is hardly surprising to anyone who follows technology news. We've seen smaller studies like this for a while, but when companies like Arbitron start releasing these numbers, it's time for everyone to take notice.

TV is still effective, but if campaigns want to get more bang for the buck, add the web into the mix. According to a Google presentation that I saw today, marketing campaigns are only spending 1 percent of budgets on new media. When web campaigns are linked with earned media, the results surpass TV advertising for a lot less money.

It looks like those of use who work in web-related fields have some job security since the Internet is projected to grow in the near future:

"It is not a stretch to say that the Internet has become just as important as television as an important source of information and entertainment in the lives of Americans,” said Larry Rosin, President, Edison Media Research. “It is entirely possible that the Internet will lead in all positive categories five years from now."