This Week in Digital – 4/24/2013

A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, communications and marketing in order to keep the wider team up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in their jobs. These are those links.

If you have additional links, sources or ideas that might be helpful, I'd encourage you to add some via a comment below or tag me in Google+. And if you’re on Flipboard, you can get these links in my new This Week in Social Media Magazine.

This week, I've expanded the sections a bit to include a section on content and content marketing. While it gets plenty of play as a buzzword, there's actually much more to this area of the industry, and I thought it deserved its own section.

Industry News

• Last week's terrorism news were all over traditional and social media platforms. One of the most instructive accounts to watch was the @Boston_Police Twitter account, as it led the conversation throughout the crisis. 
• Taiwanese officials are investigating Samsung over allegations that the South Korean company recruited individuals to post negative comments about the HTC phones on the web.
• YouTube weblebrity and all-around sweetheart iJustine is now being represented by the Hollywood agency UTA.
• The Harvard Business Review takes a look at the rise of the digital CMO.
• Online privacy may be an issue for many, but overall, consumers prefer targeted ads over random ads that have nothing to do with their interests. 

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• ComScore has found that trying to track the "digital omnivore" is a challenge as the archetypical individual moves from device to device. Most users are cross-platform device owners that use different media simultaneously.
• New social sites like Pocket, Rdio and others represent a trend in direct one-to-one sharing, thus turning the idea of "social" media on its head. As Christopher Walken would say, "Quite the conundrum."
• A global study by Ipsos has indicated that online content sharing is 25% more popular with women than with men. Other takeaways:

• Globally, 45% of people say they share or like online content that others have shared

• Respondents in Argentina (59%), Turkey (58%) and Mexico (57%) show the strongest tendencies to share others’ content, while those in Poland (18%) and Japan (22%) are the least likely to do so.

• The U.S. comes in as about average (44%).

• The full set of data tables are available directly from Ipsos under the "Detailed Tables" link.

Content

• Here's an exhaustive list of content marketing software companies compiled by Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group.
• Target has a "show don't sell" content strategy
• Digiday goes inside IBM's social content strategy
• The fledgling content site Medium has acquired the journalism startup Matter, which has concentrated on long form journalism.
• Don't try this at home: 5 Publishing Tricks That Brands Should Avoid
• While content marketing gets a lot of play, there's also a lot of frustration around the industry. The Content Marketing Institute takes a look at some of the disillusionment around it.
• Content marketing is much more complex than the casual observer might think. Don't believe me? Here are 12 roles essential to the future of content marketing.
• As we rush to use social platforms as just another mass marketing medium with one-way messages, here's an important reminder: Why Brands Should Be Human on Social Media and a companion piece by Bob Garfield and Doug Levy (authors of Can't Buy Me Like: How Authentic Customer Connections Drive Superior Results - disclosure: cmp.ly/5): Advice for Clueless Brands on Social Media.

Platforms

• Resource for discovering which brands are on social platforms - Vine, Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr.
• And if you're following, here are 10 of the best brands on Vine.
• Twitter's new #music app launched on April 18. Sourced from iTunes, Rdio and Spotify, it allows Twitter to capture and categorize which songs are playing, giving users an opportunity to discover music.
• Twitter launched keyword targeted for ads, so users may see Promoted Tweets based on terms they've used previously.
• The Associated Press's Twitter account was hacked on Tuesday, with fake tweets indicating a terrorist attack on the White House and resulting in a brief stock market plunge. Some are (once again) calling for Twitter to implement a two-factor authentication process such as the ones that Facebook and Google currently offer.
• Late breaking: Twitter has announced it will begin rolling out a two-step authentication solution.
• Qantas has given up Twitter as a PR tool, closing its @QantasMedia outlet and instead focusing its PR efforts on its website and its Twitter efforts on its @QantasAirlines account.
• Google has launched Inactive Account Manager to allow users to determine what to do with their data after they die. Other platforms have not yet implemented such a plan.
• While Facebook still leads overall, Google is making a move in the share of social sign-in tools. 

• Here's a list of the top 10 social network sites by market share of visits. Facebook still leads, with YouTube following.
• Tumblr has launched mobile ads, which are essentially the things that brands were already posting on Tumblr.
• As platforms continue to grow, so do the interactions on them; for example, the volume of fan questions on Facebook has grown over the last year - and just 30% since Q1.

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Legal/Regulatory

• Some states are trying to block companies from monitoring employees' personal social media accounts - but the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) says that financial firms need a way to flag misuse, fraud and other activities that may put investors as risk.

Bookmarks/Read-Watch-Listen Later

• The Harvard Business Review asks, "Are You Listening to Your Most Important Customers?" With the "squeaky wheels" forcing businesses to be reactive and focus on their issues, it's the silent majority in the middle who may not be seen or heard and it’s the uncommunicated needs or desires that should require attention.
• Mentioned above, but worth a standalone note: Can't Buy Me Like: How Authentic Customer Connections Drive Superior Results by Bob Garfield & Doug Levy (disclosure: cmp.ly/5). They were interviewed recently on Six Pixels of Separation #350. Listen in for a great disussion.
• It's not always the big campaigns and gestures that win in social media. Sometimes small things matter.

Commentary

The role of social media in Boston's response: some of the mainstream media gleefully pointed out how sites like Twitter and Reddit got it wrong. Then again, so did CNN. Overall, there's a sense of perspective that social media can be helpful as well as misleading in an environment in which we're all watching the news unfold in front of us.

And we were indeed following along. A report out by the Pew Research Center indicates that 63% of Americans say they followed the story very closely, among the highest interest in any news story in the past decade. This compares to 78% that were following the 9/11 story in the weeks following that disaster. Of course, the way we were following the story was much different: some 80% got the news from TV, but about half got their information online or on a mobile device, with one quarter of them looking at social networks. There's no indication as to whether online/mobile overlap with social networks, but it's interesting to see how heavily we relied on non-traditional media this time.


NOTE: If you'd like a hat with the "B Strong" logo, the proceeds will support The One Fund, established to help the people most affected by the tragic events that occurred on April 15. You can order the hat directly here.
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