News

April 30, 2010 | Social Media - Is it techno Crack?

A new study from the University of Maryland finds that students are hooked on social media and cellphones, describing withdrawals in terms similar to those used by drug and alcohol addicts.

The study from the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda, "24 Hours: Unplugged," asked 200 students on the campus to give up all media for a full day and blog on private Web sites about their experience. Student reaction showed addiction like withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety, misery, and being jittery, the authors wrote.

One student wrote that texting and sending instant messages gives him or her "a constant feeling of comfort," without which he or she felt "quite alone and secluded from my life." Another said that he or she feels "like most people these days are in a similar situation; for between having a Blackberry, a laptop, a television, and an iPod, people have become unable to shed their media skin."

Researchers were surprised by the number of students who said they were incredibly addicted to media, Susan D. Moeller, the project director, said in a news release. She is also the center's director and a journalism professor.

"But we noticed that what they wrote at length about was how they hated losing their personal connections," she said. "Going without media meant, in their world, going without their friends and family."

Some psychologists have warned that addiction is a serious issue and that comparisons with addiction should be handled with care. The American Psychiatric Association does not formally recognize "Internet addiction" as a disorder.

Zack Whittaker, a blogger for ZDNet, called the research methodology "pretty rock solid" but takes issue with the way the results have been interpreted by the researchers. Mr. Whittaker said in a blog post that he felt that today "the term 'addiction' is bandied around without thought or conviction."

"I defend to the highest possible level that today's youth are not addicted to social media and networking, the Web, and online media," Mr. Whittaker wrote. "We do spend far more time on Facebook and accessing the Web for leisure use and socializing, but that is part of the natural progression of tertiary, noncompulsory education socialization."

Jill Laster

April 29, 2010 | The shop build continues!

The shop build continues! New pics posted ;) www.facebook.com/CyberElectronik

April 26, 2010 | Happy birthday You Tube!

Hard to believe that the largest online video portal is just out of nappies!

April 22, 2010 | Cyber shop build is well under way!

Check out the pics and the progress on our first shop build.

www.facebook.com/CyberElectronik

We are still on schedule for the May 1st soft launch!

April 19, 2010 | Rolling Stone, acme of counterculture, charges for website

Rolling Stone magazine, the US bible of 1960s counterculture and music that went on to launch some big names in journalism, is to charge for its website. With a new site on Monday, the fortnightly publication, founded in 1967 by Jann Wenner, will become one of the best-known magazines to place a “pay wall” around its content, in an attempt to make money from the web. The move is sure to be closely watched by media industry observers who are divided between those who believe that charging for content is the only way to sustain expensive, high-quality journalism and those who fear that asking readers to pay for online content will drive them straight into the arms of free rivals. The Times will start charging for access to its website in June.

Under the plans, the magazine’s home page, with celebrity news, photographs, blogs, concert footage music previews, and behind the scenes videos from photo shoots, will remain mostly free. But readers wanting full access to the magazine’s latest issue, as well as its entire archive and 43-year’s worth of its famous covers, will have to pay $3.95 (£2.56) for a monthly pass or $29.99 (£19.47). Online subscribers in the US only will automatically get a free print subscription.

“We’re taking control of our digital destiny,” Mr Schwartz told the Associated Press. “This is not, let’s rush to the Web because print isn’t strong. This is our brand’s ability to tap into a new medium,” he added.

Although the magazine, like the rest of the publishing industry, had a lean year in 2009, selling nearly 20 per cent fewer ad pages than the year before, its privately-owned publisher says it is still profitable.

Its print circulation is running at a record 1.5 million, up from 1.3 million in 2000. Despite its association with baby boomer generation, a spokesman for the company says it does not have an ageing readership, claiming that the average age of readers is 30.

The fact remains, however, that Rolling Stone faces stiff competition for the attention of younger music fans from a range of popular websites, such as Pitchfork.com.

The magazine became known for its political coverage in the 1970s, running long and controversial articles by the gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson. Other famous contributors include Tom Wolfe and the photographer Annie Liebowitz.

Having changed its format in the 1990s to appeal to a younger readership, it was criticised for losing some of its radical appeal, but has since returned to its more traditional roots.

Last year it hit the headlines with a critique of Goldman Sachs by Matt Taibbi, who described the bank as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”.

April 16, 2010 | Cyber to open first store location!

Its official! We have inked the deal on our first physical store location on 24th and K St in beautiful Midtown Sacramento! Doors open May 1st~~! Rock n roll!

April 13, 2010 | Businesses Split on Paying for Twitter

The powers that be at Twitter have been vague about how they plan to monetize the service. As marketers have flocked to the microblogging site, Twitter has considered charging for business functionality as one possibility.

According to a survey commissioned by Internet marketing solutions company WebBizIdeas.com, a plurality of business users of Twitter are unsure whether they would pay to use extra business features on the site. About one-quarter said they would.

Defining what those extra features might be as well as how much they would cost could push less decisive business users into one camp or another. Among respondents who said they would pay, most were willing to spend less than $50 per month.

In addition, 8% of all respondents said they would pay for analytics alone, if Twitter offered that service.

Advertising, another possibility for Twitter monetization, may have more appeal. Businesses were largely uninterested in advertising tactics that would increase their follower count, but nearly seven in 10 respondents said pay-for-performance ads would bring the greatest value for them.

While marketers have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon in large numbers, they are still focusing on quantifying their own social media results. If Twitter does roll out paid business services, companies will be sure to think of their own ROI before shelling out.

Web Biz

April 12, 2010 | Social Not a Threat to E-Mail

Businesses show deep concern about how social media is affecting e-mail usage. MarketingSherpa reported that 23% of e-mail marketers thought “competition with social media for recipients’ time and attention” was a challenge for the channel in 2009, and 71% believed it would gain in importance in 2010.

But surveys of Web users indicate their preference for e-mail as a communications medium. More than seven in 10 e-mail users told Windows Live they would rather talk to their friends and family through e-mail than through social networks.

US E-Mail Users Who Prefer E-Mail vs. Social Networks for Online Communication with Friends and Family, January 2010 (% of respondents)

Text messaging, however, was preferred by almost one-half of respondents.

US E-Mail Users Who Prefer E-Mail vs. Text Messaging for Online Communication with Friends and Family, January 2010 (% of respondents)

“With all the focus on social media’s effect on e-mail, the influence of text messaging has been a sideline discussion,” said eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson in the report “Maximizing the E-Mail/Social Media Connection.” “Yet text messaging seems far more likely to pose a challenge.”

In an Accenture study of millennials, a group heavily invested in social media, respondents reported spending more time communicating via e-mail than by social networking. Yet texting took up 3.9 hours a week—1 hour more than social networking, blogging and tweeting combined.

ExactTarget’s “2009 Channel Preference Study” also found e-mail on top, with 57% of US Internet users preferring it for written communication compared with 24% for texting and just 10% for social networking.

MarketingSherpa

April 9, 2010 | Google to Go on Hiring Spree

The media recession is over—at least at Google.

The Web giant is looking to hire over 500 sales people, according to officials, as it looks to continue its momentum in the search business while deepening its strength in burgeoning segments like display advertising, mobile and video. The positions open at the moment range from a strategic partner development manager within the Google TV Advertising group to a display sales operations manager, media and platforms / AdX (Google’s exchange).

Google is also seeking an inventory analyst for YouTube, an account planner, for its automotive vertical (based in Detroit) and an associate for the Google Books and News group.

Beyond sales, Google is seeking candidates in engineering, finance, product management and human resources, among others. The company has already been ramping up its hiring; from Sept. 30 of last year to Dec. 31 Google’s global employee base climbed from 19,665 to 19,835 full-time employees.

According to a Google spokesperson, the staff increases are being driven by a desire to keep the company to moving forward in a rapidly changing digital media marketplace. “We're investing heavily for the long term to maintain and increase the company's pace of innovation,” said the spokesperson. “This means an investment, first, in people.”

Mike Shields, Media Week

April 8, 2010 | Apple May Build a Search Engine to Shield iPhone Data from Google

Data Apple collects about users from its vaunted iPhone is so valuable that the company must build a special search engine just to keep Google from gleaning insight from that data, analysts say.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said there is a 70 percent chance Apple will roll out a mobile search engine tailored for its iPhone within the next five years.

Google is currently the default search engine on the iPhone, which has tens of millions of users. Pairing the leading search engine—65 percent in the United States, more share abroad—with one of the most popular smartphones on the planet made good business sense.

However, Google has increasingly encroached on Apple's mobile turf, offering the Android operating system and several mobile applications.

Google's Nexus One resembles the iPhone so much that Apple sued Nexus One maker HTC for patent infringement. Google took the battle up a notch last November by wooing AdMob, whose in-application ads proved successful on the iPhone, with a $750 million purchase bid.

While that deal has yet to receive regulatory approval, industry experts said it would give Google unprecedented access to the works of Apple's App Store, which Google could use to buoy the Nexus One and future Android devices.

As the search provider for the iPhone, Google also sees what iPhone users are searching for, which can help it tailor software and services for its own mobile smartphones. This competitive advantage has not gone unnoticed by Apple.

Building its own iPhone-centric search engine would help Apple shield Google from its App Store data, Munster said in a March 30 research note.

"We believe Apple could utilize data unavailable to Google, data generated by the company's App Store, to create a mobile centric search engine, which would be a unique offering to Google's search engine," Munster wrote.

Apple lacks the experience and engineering wherewithal to build a large, scalable search engine. There are alternatives to Google such as Microsoft Bing, which was rumored to replace Google on the iPhone. With Google the default search service on Apple's newly released iPad, it seems unlikely that Apple will in fact replace Google with Bing or anything else on the iPhone.

But Munster said Apple could buy a search startup with a Web index, such as Cuil, using its index as the seed for its own search engine. Mobile search startup Taptu would also be a good possibility for Apple because it focuses its index on touch-enabled Websites.

Apple would then have to stimulate enough advertiser interest to make a viable search product work for it.

While Apple excels at marketing new products, it is not a digital advertising provider. The company did buy AdMob rival Quattro Wireless, but the company has yet to reveal what its intentions are for those assets.

Still, Munster said protecting valuable consumer data and not profit would be the point for Apple's mobile search engine.

"The data generated on the iPhone OS platform must become an increasing priority for Apple and we believe the company has the resources to develop its own products in both maps and search in the next five years," Munster said.

He added that Apple could entice enough major advertisers and local resellers like ReachLocal to use the Apple search platform to make a meaningful market place and potentially operate a search product at break even.

IDC analyst Hadley Reynolds added that local search is the initial killer app for mobile, noting that the Quattro ad platform could make for an attractive environment for advertisers, particularly when paired with Taptu's touch-screen approach to search.

Meanwhile, iPhone apps from Google and Bing are still delivering long lists of links, which are hard to deal with in small screen real estate. Moreover, these apps do not have access to the data that Apple has piling up in its iTunes Store and on its devices, Reynolds told eWEEK.

"The next-generation services will be much more touch-enabled than what Google and Bing are offering, and they will take users to sites that offer the most attractive info consumption models to their audiences," Reynolds added.

"Apple is in an inside position to tap into the current pent-up demand for better mobile search, and add a new competitive differentiation from other search providers and device makers."

Clint Boulton, e-Week

April 7, 2010 | To reach your customers, be where they are

Albert Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Still, so many companies continue to market their businesses the same way — traditionally. That’s not to say traditional marketing is dead, though according to Joseph Jaffe, author of “Life After the 30-Second Spot” and “Join the Conversation,” marketers must adapt to the brave new world of the Internet, social media and social networking, consumer-generated content, blogs, videocasts and podcasts by joining in the meaningful conversations that are happening online.

The point is that you can no longer rely on traditional media alone to tell your story. Marketing has to be truly integrated. And quite frankly, marketing has changed. People no longer want to be sold to by companies; they want to be connected and compelled to buy in a more personal and meaningful way.

In “Join the Conversation,” Jaffe writes that today’s consumers are active participants in the advertising process. They are no longer simply silent targets and sitting ducks for one-way communication.

The advertising industry is changing rapidly, yet so many companies seem to have their heads in the sand — especially when it comes to incorporating social media into their marketing mix. They seem to think that if they stick their head in the sand, no one will notice them.

Well, my philosophy is that if you stick your head in the sand, everyone will notice you because you’re sharing your most undesirable end.

Not sure if your customers are really online? Let me share a few statistics with you.

• Facebook: More than 200 million people use Facebook. “If it were a country, it would be the fourth most-populated country in the world,” according to its chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg. Additionally, the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook is women over the age of 55. I can vouch for this statistic, especially after receiving an e-mail from my 65-year-old mother stating that she had just signed up for “Spacebook.”

• Twitter: Twitter grew a massive 1,928 percent in the U.S. from June 2008 to June 2009 — reaching 21 million unique visitors monthly, according to a survey by Compete.com.

• GenerationY: It’s estimated that as of this year, GenY will outnumber baby boomers. More than 96 percent of GenYers have joined a social network, according to Grunwald Associates LLC.

How can you ignore that kind of audience? A lot of companies say “my business is too niche” for Facebook or other social networking sites. My response is, What do you think makes up a nation? A state? A city? It is their communities — large, small and micro. Facebook and other online communities are similar in that they are made up of just that, large, small and micro communities.

Social media is the way we communicate and connect today. In fact, one-third of adults age 30 and older now post to sites such as Facebook and Twitter at least once a week, according to a January report from Forrester Research.

And it’s not just consumers. Merlot Marketing recently conducted a national survey of media professionals’ use of social media tools and found that the most popular social media tools used professionally were Linkedin, at 53.1 percent, blogs, at 51 percent, and Twitter, at almost 47 percent.

Really, what you should be asking yourself is, who isn’t online? Everyone from CEOs and celebrities to the president of the United States of America are online.So the question is, are you?

If it’s your job to communicate and connect with your audience via marketing, why wouldn’t you use social media? If you want different results you need to start doing things differently.

I’ll look forward to seeing your brand online.

Debi Hammond, President and Chief Executive Officer, Merlot Marketing Inc.

April 6, 2010 | Real iPad Sales Nearer to 600K?

Apple is notorious about low-balling its revenue guidance, setting up Wall Street for numbers that blow the doors off resulting expectations; has it done something similar about its iPad sales figures for the opening day? While some analysts had egg on their face over exuberant
sales predictions, one voice Monday raised some interesting questions about Apple’s announcement of 300,000 iPads sold April 3.

Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair told investors Apple’s figure does not include any orders for 3G iPads ordered. Although orders are being accepted, the 3G units won’t be landing on consumers’ doorsteps until later this month.

Another curious omission: A week of pre-sales which happened after Apple announced online orders would be delivered April 12, rather than April 3.

Finally, Apple’s 300,000 number counts only Saturday. Although the Easter weekend closed some retailers, not every store was shuttered. Plus, what about Monday, when the U.S. retail engine returned to full power, Blair asked. The real figure for iPad sales to date is more like 600,000, the analyst said.

So, in effect, Apple’s 300,000 iPad sales figure marks a day when people are more interested in chocolate bunnies and travelling than standing in lines; the figure doesn’t include a week of online sales nor sales of 3G iPads. Did Apple’s publicity machine work too well and drive the hype so high that Cupertino had to find a way to lower expectations?

The last-minute wet blanket seemed to have worked. Some reports duly noted that when the iPhone first went on sales, its first-day numbers were half those of analyst expectations. Another sign of possibly some reality seeping back into the iPad conversation: Apple stock dipped immediately after the company released its first-day iPad sales numbers, but closed up 1 percent at $238.49. We may get some more complete iPad sales figures when Apple releases its first-quarter earnings report April 20.

Ed Sutherland

April 5, 2010 | Longtime Twitter Users Most Vocal

As growth in US traffic to Twitter.com began to flatten toward the end of 2009, the service’s staying power was questioned. Had new users migrated to third-party platforms and mobile usage, or had they simply tired of sending 140-character bursts of information?

Research from social media analytics firm Sysomos supports Twitter’s stickiness. The company examined more than 1 billion tweets over a four-month period and found that 41.6% of the tweet volume in March 2010 came from users who had joined Twitter at least nine months prior.

As recently as December 2009, these percentages were substantially different, with 26% of tweets coming from nine-month veterans and the largest single percentage, 28.9%, coming from users who had joined six to nine months prior.

A posting on the Sysomos blog sums up the significance of this data: “New users are continuing to tweet at a steady pace while the veterans are becoming more and more active.”

Dynamic Logic and Millward Brown reported that, in Q3 2009, 58% of Twitter users surveyed had used the service for less than six months, while another 25% had been using it for 6 to 11 months. This indicates that Twitter usage was still ramping up significantly in mid-to-late 2009, compared with other social media sites such as MySpace and LinkedIn, which had smaller percentages of recent users and much larger portions of longtime users.

Further, a combined 90% of Twitter users said they used Twitter the same or more than six months prior.

These usage patterns suggests a high level of experimentation by new Twitter users, while more experienced users are the most active members of the Twitter community.

Paul Verna, Senior Analyst, eMarketer