A recent Hitwise report on Twitter UK is a quick but necessary read.  In it, Robin Goad presents Twitter's meteoric rise in visits and influence in the value chain of UK print news and online news traffic.  Twitter is now bigger than Digg, bigger than Google News, and receives more traffic than UK broadsheet home pages for the Guardian, The Sun and the Telegraph.

More important, in my opinion, is that Twitter is an important traffic generator for news websites.  In February 2009, 10% of Twitter's UK traffic went to news and media websites, and 41% of that traffic went directly to the UK print newspaper sub-category. 

PRs take notice.  Twitter is an increasingly important tool for you to build audiences for your clients, engage with UK journalists on Twitter, and proactively scan for developing stories and real-time story angles.   

The team at Metrica welcomes your examples of how Twitter is transforming your PR strategies and results.  

I spent a few minutes in Metrica's media and audience planning tool, UKPulse to follow a hunch.  A friend was intrigued by the various iPhone apps available but had not downloaded the Carling iPint.  He loves wine and good food and I wondered if a wine iGlass app might be a better fit for iPhonatics like him.  

According to UKPulse data, UK Nokia mobile phone owners are more likely than the average UK citizen to regularly consume wine.  Sony Ericsson, Samsung and Motorola trend below the national average in consuming wine regularly.  Whilst the variance is negligible, the total numbers of owners (and the potential units of wine they potentially consume) has a considerable ripple effect in today's economic climate, the trend towards more home-based entertaining and the growth in online wine sales.  According to a recent industry research report, Britons spent £4.8 billion on wine and its contribution of more than one-third of all alcohol sales is falling due to the 'subprime contagion'. 

Other beverage perferences show some interesting findings.  For example Sony Ericsson owner's favorite beverage is... tea.  And when it comes to lager, Sony Ericsson mobile phone owners are more apt to consume lager than the UK national average, reflecting UKPulse data that Sony Ericsson has a higher ownership in the 18-35 age category, which includes students.   The preference for tea, though, merits further investigation. 

In your opinion, which beverage, mobile app and phone are the perfect (excuse the bad pun)... cup of tea?

The UKPulse team welcomes any feedback or ideas on what media planning questions you would like answered.

In Chicago and San Francisco, The Printed Blog was launched; it is the world's first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated content.  The content can be localised to a neighborhood level, a key point raised in a Richard Bagnall blog post.  For advertisers, this 'hyperlocal' marketing provides more relevant propositions and cost savings than city-wide and regional newspapers.  According to founder Joshua Karp, Chicago could support up to 100 local editions, which benefits the advertisers as well as the readers. He notes in an interview:

"Instead of having one paper where the ads cost $20,000 or more, [we'll have] hundreds of local editions where the ads cost $18... why should you spend thousands of dollars and advertise for an entire city when you can spend tens of dollars and target the specific people who are most likely to buy your product," he said. 

Will this web-to-print approach prove itself?  Will social media migrate further into newspapers?  How might this shift PR planning?  Will a web-to-print blog work?

All of us at Metrica welcome your thoughts.

A recent Pew Research Center for The People & The Press survey of US adults indicates what we all see in ourselves and our media habits... as our thumbs develop calluses from our cellpmobile phones.  Acccording to Pew, 40 percent of Americans obtain their national and international news from the Internet.  The Internet as a news source has surged 16 percent from 2007 - 2008 alone.  For adults younger than 30 years, 59% of them source their news online, the same percentage as for television.  This is a massive shift in a year, since in 2007, 34% of those under 30 sourced their news online and 68% sourced their news from television.  Cell phones/mobiles are mainstreaming our news, as the BBC's Richard Titus mentions in his blog. 

Such figures below also provide more for those such as Roy Greenslade who challenge traditional media to engage differently with the 'restless remote' generation.  In 2010, what do you think the below  BBC (2008) diagram will look like?  Will newspapers have healthier business models through new forms of engagement, content and conversations?  Or, will we, as newspaper audiences, be on the receiving end of lowered credibility and innovation due to commercial pressures and rising cover prices?   How, and to what extent, will the social fabric of our personal consumption of news shift further as print-centric newspapers lose their traction in our daily lives? 

As the BBC diagram reveals, newspapers are not very visible in this survey of how Britons use on-demand media in their daily lives.  Newspapers need to quickly insert themselves into the social fabrics of our lives in new ways and leverage their historical role in how we learn about ourselves, our institutions and the world.   How do you think newspapers can play a more constant news intake role than just in the morning, as noted in the below diagram?

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/img/BBCUXD_user_ecosystem04.jpg

What a statement in a recent Forrester Research report: "People don't trust company blogs.  What you should do about it”.  The post goes on to state that “Consumers trust company blogs less than any other channel” and that blogs come in below newspapers, portals, wikis and even direct mail in the trust department. 

Really? 

Let’s put the research in context.  To begin, these findings were collected in Q2 2008, and much has happened since then.  Influential corporate bloggers such as the BBC’s Robert Peston (“Peston’s Picks”) have surged in readership (and influence) since the economic meltdown.

Second, this societal distrust existed long before Forrester was founded and mirrors the larger citizen deficit and critical eye to media which we now encounter – consumers are critical and apply certain criteria to their increasingly conscious choices about how and where we spend our money, leisure and life choices from coffee to cars. This is the reality of anyone choosing to engage with consumers through various communications vehicles, from direct mail to radio.

Within the Forrester study results are some very positive findings on many of the targeted consumers for our clients.  Those who do trust blogs are 24% more likely to trust consumer product ratings/reviews (84% v. 60%).  Additionally, those who trust company blogs are 32% more likely to trust online content sites such as CNET and nytimes.com (71% v 39%); the same spread exists for print magazines.  A whopping 45% are more likely to trust personal blogs (63% v 18%) and 40% are more likely to trust SNS profiles from a company or brand (58% v 18%) than the US adult online population.

Thus, Forrester's headline creates its own haze of distrust of corporate blogging, and focuses on those who may be resistant and distrustful to more than just media.  If you keep reading, Forrester offers viable solutions to hurdle the “low-trust barrier”. They include:

• Get your employees in the act.  Their insight and impact beyond their desks can elevate trust and attract new follows and fans.  HP and Sun are great examples of having used employees other than corporate comms to drive blog content.  In my opinion, this keeps your content from becoming too narrow by diversifying your base of contributors (and potential readers).
  

• Blog to establish a voice outside that of your press releases.  As Bernhoff notes, blogging solely for the sake of PR does nothing to increase the level of consumer trust and is not easily measured for its bottom line contributions.  A great example of a company that has punched above its weight is New Seasons Market, a family-owned grocer recently subpoenaed by Whole Foods Market (the world’s largest organic grocer) for its email files in a federal lawsuit.  New Seasons Market is using Twitter and other tools to ensure that its voice is heard on a global scale.

So, be critical of snappy headlines such as those chosen by Forrester's Bernoff.  As New Seasons Market is proving to many, corporate blogging does work.  You can be nimble, agile and relevant to your consumers (and critics) in ways not possible last holiday season.    

Source: North American Technographics Media and Marketing Online Survey, Q2 2008

Deep within the Ofcom (the UK's communications regulatory body) website is a research report on, among other things, the impacts of increasing internet usage on national newspaper consumption.  Across seven countries, consumers are spending less time on 'offline' media since acquiring access to the internet.  

National newspaper consumption has eroded, according to Ofcom.  Of those surveyed in seven countries, 32% are reading national newspapers less now that they had access to the Internet.   France, meanwhile, had almost half (47%) of consumers reading national newspapers less.  Only one country, Italy (14%), had consumers reading national newspapers more now than prior to gaining internet access.  Given the downward spiral in national newspaper subscriptions, it can be assumed that the traditional national newspaper base will further erode, due to the growing traction of the Internet, the increasing fragmentation of the media market, the dissemination of free dailies such as the Metro on an international scale, and the consumer pressures on the wallets, regardless of country.

How does this Ofcom survey help to explain current UK media consumption trends at work, even those within our own research?  To begin, the 27% drop in national newspaper consumption from this Ofcom survey dovetails with our recent Media Trends report on the causal effect of online news growth on offline news here in the UK.  Metrica research found that 66% regularly read print newspapers and 26% read the online equivalent, mirroring the Ofcom findings of 65% and 27%, respectively.  However, Metrica research went a few steps further and determined that three quarters of Metrica respondents read the print and Web versions of newspapers, suggesting the influences of increasing choice, convergence and changing economic conditions for consumers and media. 

What does this mean for the erosion of British newspaper readership? If we take the Ofcom survey of 1,000 UK adults (who use the Internet), and apply that to the current UK Internet population estimate of 39 million users, a 27% drop in national newspaper readership audience would translate to more than 1 million Britons engaging less with newspapers, national, regional and local.  Thus, research from regulators such as Ofcom is limited, in that it does not examine the shared newspaper consumption findings from Metrica's research.  Moreover, Ofcom does not distinguish between national, regional and local newspapers, leaving any stakeholder with PR activities somewhat blinded from a comprehensive view of the current newspaper micro-trends. 

Ofcom reports are limited but do provide an international looking glass... a chance to reflect on our own in-country realities and opportunities as well as context, benchmarks, common themes and comparators in international media markets.   

What do you see within these international findings for your own countries and stakeholders?   What might explain the French rejection of national newspapers at a pace far exceeding other countries surveyed?  I welcome your thoughts.

Source: Ofcom (2008)