Smartphone App-etite

As of January 2014, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 58 percent American adults had smartphones. For the 18-29 group, that figure was 83 percent — higher than any other age group, according to Pew. According to comScore, 174 million people in the United States owned smartphones as of August 2014, up 3 percent from May 2014. As the number of smartphone users grows, the appetite for entertainment and social media on these devices also is growing, according to Nielsen. In fact, time spent using smartphones now surpasses web usage on computers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy, according to Nielsen.

As such, smartphone users are demanding more smartphone apps and more mobile-friendly websites. “Apps make up the lion’s share of time spent using smartphones,” Nielsen says, “led by the growth in time spent using apps for entertainment and media.” Among the smartphone app leaders in the United States are Facebook, YouTube and Google, comScore reports. Not surprisingly, global revenue for smartphone apps is projected to rise from $22.5 billion in 2014 to $29.4 billion in 2015, according to Statista. That’s in tandem with a predicted rise in global smartphone shipments from 1.24 billion in 2014 to 1.8 billion in 2018, according to IDC. With the app market exploding, smartphone consumers are sending a clear message that they expect mass media to keep pace with the delivery of mobile-ready content. In fact, it’s been argued that mobile is the seventh mass media channel, and apps represent the eighth. They’re giving traditional channels such as TV and radio a run for their money.

Sources

http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/mobile-technology-fact-sheet/

http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Reports-August-2014-US-Smartphone-Subscriber-Market-Share

http://www.nielsen.com/content/corporate/us/en/insights/news/2014/how-smartphones-are-changing-consumers-daily-routines-around-the-globe.html

http://www.statista.com/statistics/276595/global-smartphone-and-tablet-app-revenues-forecast/

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24857114

http://www.flurry.com/bid/63381/Smartphone-Apps-in-Europe-The-8th-Mass-Market-Media-Channel#.VEQt0t6NUlI

In Mass Media We Do Not Trust?

A new Gallup poll indicates Americans’ trust of mass media has returned to its previous all-time low of 40 percent. Why the drop? Gallup offers this possible explanation: “As the media expand into new domains of news reporting via social media networks and new mobile technology, Americans may be growing disenchanted with what they consider ‘mainstream’ news as they seek out their own personal veins of getting information.”

Although Gallup doesn’t identify any of those outside-the-mainstream veins, one of them certainly is blogs. According to an infographic posted on Social Media Today, 23 percent of time on the Internet is spent on blogs, and 77 percent of Internet users read blogs. As noted in the infographic, news blogs now are rivals to mainstream media outlets. Technology — in this case, blogs — has made mass media more democratic. “Instead of a limited number of ‘trusted’ and ‘objective’ news sources, like the familiar network anchors, we now have an almost limitless number of outlets on the Internet and TV. In fact, anyone can publish a blog or tweet,” Rory O’Connor, director of the Digital Resource Center at Stony Brook University’s Center for News Literacy, wrote in a New York Times blog post. Blogging has allowed anyone with computer access to become a storyteller and to bypass traditional mass media, with trust being put in the hands in more and more people outside the “mainstream.”

Sources

http://www.gallup.com/poll/176042/trust-mass-media-returns-time-low.aspx

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/blogconomy-blogging-stats-infographic

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/guest-post-practical-tools-for-teaching-news-literacy/

The Twitter Revolution

Perhaps more than any other technological advancement, social media network Twitter has helped feed our increasing desire for short, quick bursts of information. The micro-blogging service delivers news, opinions, jokes, inspirational quotes and other information in 140-character snippets, at a rate of about 6,000 tweets per second.

One major benefit of Twitter is that it enables journalists and everyday folks to “break” news. For example, Twitter users were first to report the death of singer Whitney Houston and the Boston Marathon bombings, according to Mashable. “Twitter has revolutionized global news delivery and consumption,” Mashable noted. Indeed, millions of people around the world now turn to Twitter as a primary source of news, especially when a major news event has taken place. Many of us have come to view Twitter as a go-to news source, in a vein similar to that of cable news network CNN.

It’s worth noting, though, that not everyone is part of the news revolution fostered by Twitter: According to the Pew Research Center, just 19 percent of online adults in the United States used Twitter as of January 2014, compared with 71 percent of online adults in the United States who used Facebook as of September 2013. Furthermore, according to Pew, just half of Twitter users in the United States get news from the micro-blogging site. Still, the power of Twitter to help change our expectations of how information is delivered — quickly and succinctly — is undeniable.

Sources

http://www.internetlivestats.com/twitter-statistics/

http://mashable.com/2013/10/31/twitter-news/

http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fact-sheet/

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-media-is-reshaping-news/

Why Social Media Matters to Communicators

There’s no escaping the fact that we live in a social media universe. The granddaddy of social media networks, Facebook, had 1.32 billion monthly active users as of June 30, 2014. Meanwhile, video network YouTube racks up more than 1 billion unique visitors each month, and micro-blogging site Twitter boasts 271 million active users each month. These numbers demonstrate that any modern-day communicator who avoids social media is missing out on a gigantic venue for reaching out to his or her target audience; far too many people pick up information through social media for communicators to give short shrift to platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

But as blogger Brian Reid points out, it’s not enough to merely have a Twitter account (or a Facebook or YouTube account, for that matter). “It’s not even enough to post things every once in a while or click the tweet button on your favorite webpage,” Reid writes. “The modern communicator needs to know how to engage. How to have conversations. How to share and curate and credit. It used to be enough to know, in theory, how these tools worked. No longer.” Yes, the basic mechanics of posting on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are vital for a communicator, but it’s even more critical for a communicator to understand how to interact with other users on these networks; how to artfully create Facebook posts, YouTube videos and tweets; and how to play around with what works well and to abandon what does not work well. Without those skills, what’s the point of a modern communicator being on these platforms?

Sources

https://about.twitter.com/company

http://blog.wcgworld.com/2012/05/the-10-skills-modern-communicators-have-or-need-to-get

http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/5-styles-of-youtube-videos/

https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html

The Power of Blogging

With the advent of blogging, everybody in the world who has an Internet-connected computer or mobile device can communicate news, opinions, advice or information to the rest of the world. Blogging is an especially powerful tool for professional communicators — from news reporters to corporate marketers to solo entrepreneurs. Blogging continues to grow in popularity, with the number of blogs rising from 36 million around the world in 2006 to more than 181 million blogs in 2011, according to Nielsen. The blogosphere has kept expanding since then.

Although blogging is within easy reach of millions of people around the world, we are not born to be bloggers. To excel at blogging, a communicator must learn how to use a blogging platform such as WordPress, Blogger or Tumblr. The work is not done when a blog is set up, though. A blogger must know how to write compelling posts; craft web-friendly headlines; edit a post to catch spelling errors, grammar goofs and other mistakes; upload and edit images; upload and edit videos; and insert hyperlinks. Equipped with this knowledge, the modern-day communicator can head down the path toward being a top-notch blogger.

Sources

http://lifehacker.com/5878847/which-blogging-platform-should-i-use

http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2012/buzz-in-the-blogosphere-millions-more-bloggers-and-blog-readers.html

https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/41379?hl=en

Image courtesy of janefriedman.com

The Smartphone as a Communication Tool

For modern-day communicators, the smartphone represents an all-in-one communication tool that enables on-the-fly social media posting, email messaging, text messaging, picture taking, video recording, audio recording and other tasks. Journalists, in particular, can benefit from the ability to do mobile reporting via a smartphone. For instance, reporter Neal Augenstein of radio station WTOP in Washington, D.C., covers news employing just one tool: his iPhone. “Being able to record and edit audio and video, take and edit pictures, write Web stories, and do social networking on a single device has revolutionized my job,” Augenstein told the Poynter Institute.

While it’s smart for a communicator like Neal Augenstein to embrace the smartphone, the tool can’t do the work automatically. A communicator must learn, for instance, how to properly record audio and video, and how to properly take photos. Furthermore, the smartphone communicator must be trained how to effectively and quickly write effective Facebook posts, tweets and other social media messages, particularly given the brief nature of these messages.

Sources

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/11/what-ive-learned-3-years-after-ditching-radio-recording-gear-for-an-iphone314

http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/digital-strategies/200418/5-ways-journalists-can-use-smartphone-apps-for-reporting/

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/195707/wtop-mojo-pioneer-donates-iphone-to-the-newseum/