Cross-promoting your content on various social media sites is a great way to build your audience and drive traffic to your best content. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are the Big 3 of social media marketing and content cross-promotion, but what about Tumblr and Pinterest? These are the two hot social sites that have everyone talking, and they can both be effective tools to expose your content to wider audience.

In Pinterest vs. Tumblr: Which Is Better for Brands, I outline the differences between the two tools as well as the audiences that currently use them. Did you know that Pinterest skews more heavily to a female audience and Tumblr is popular among younger audiences? Clearly, these two sites might not be right for every content publisher, but for some niches, they’re perfect.

Pinterest is a visual social bookmarking site where users save images and videos that they find online on virtual pinboards. Tumblr is more like a multi-media microblogging tool where people publish images, audio, video, quotes, or text in a blog style. Both sites allow sharing and both offer a method for commenting, although Pinterest’s commenting tool is more robust than the one found on Tumblr.

You can use Pinterest to share images from your articles and blog posts that link back to your original content. Create pinboards categorized by the type of content you publish. For example, if you write a blog about state politics, create pinboards for images from events, pinboards for specific political parties, pinboards for areas of government, and so on. Get creative in how you repurpose your content to expose a new audience to it on Pinterest.

On the other hand, Tumblr is handy for publishing multimedia content. For example, you could publish a full article on your website or blog and then share an image, video clip, or quote from that article on Tumblr with a link back to your complete article for people who want to read it. If you publish a podcast, share an audio snippet on Tumblr with a link to the complete podcast for those who want to listen to the entire thing.

It’s important to keep in mind that Pinterest is still very new and you still need to get an invitation to use it. Tumblr has been around for a longer time and already has established its place in the online content and social media world. Both offer great opportunities to spread your content, so request an invite or create a free account and start poking around. Both are easy to use and can be addictive.

You can get all the details about Pinterest vs. Tumblr for brands on the Sprout Social Insights blog, and you can check out my pinboard of brands doing cool things on Pinterest for inspiration. For Tumblr inspiration, SocialFresh put together a list of 60 brands on Tumblr.

The annual Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) Information Industry Summit conference wrapped up last week, and several mobile apps and companies were recognized during the SIIA Previews where early stage content companies and mobile app developers were given an opportunity to present their offerings to a panel of industry leaders.

Mobile App Previews

This year marked the first time SIIA Previews included a separate mobile apps category. Scott Livingston of LexisNexis presented the LexisNexis Legal News app, which was developed by Newstex. You can get all of the details about the presented mobile apps here.

Scott Livingston, LexisNexis

The full list of the apps presented during the Mobile App Previews included:

• Lexis Nexis Legal News (developed by Newstex)
• PR Newswire for iPad (developed by Newstex)
• Dow Jones Investment Banker for iPad
• Pubget for iPad
• Factiva for iPad
• Nexis New Search

Company Previews

The SIIA Previews for content industry companies celebrated its sixth anniversary in 2012. Larry Schwartz, Newstex President and SIIA Previews Chair, was on hand to participate in the sessions and to present the “Most Likely to Succeed” award to BestVendor  — a company that helps business people make smarter and faster purchasing decisions through social recommendations. You can get all the details about the presenting companies here.

Newstex President Larry Schwartz presents "Most Likely to Succeed" Award to BestVendor

The full list of SIIA Previews presenting companies included:

• BestVendor
• Crowd Fusion
• Narrative Science
• Reportlinker
• Praetorian Group
• First Stop Health

You can view videos, see the complete presentations delivered by each company, and read interviews with the preseners on the SIIA conference website. Overall, the SIIA Previews were a success once again. Next year, the 100th preview presentation will be delivered at the 2013 SIIA Conference!

Each month, Nielsen tracks U.S. internet usage as well as the top U.S. web brands. Taking a look at the results of the Nielsen analysis and comparing January 2011 data to December 2011 data, there are a couple of things that stand out. First, internet usage continues to grow. Second, the top online brands are sitting pretty in their leadership places with little threat to their web dominance.

Let’s take a closer look.

First, in January 2011 and December 2011, the top 6 U.S. web brands stayed the same. Of the bottom four U.S. web brands that made up the top 10 list in January 2011 and December 2011, only one brand dropped off the list and was replaced. The others simply shuffled positions. Both top 10 lists are shown below with the number of unique U.S. people who visited each site and the average time per person (hh:mm:ss) spent on each site.

January 2011

1. Google = 153.6 million (1:21:00)
2. Facebook = 135.6 million (7:24:12)
3. Yahoo! = 130.9 (2:20:10)
4. MSN/Windows Live/Bing = 121.0 million (1:26:39)
5. YouTube = 103.9 million (1:21:54)
6. Microsoft = 90.2 million (0:41:53)
7. AOL Media Network = 76.2 million (1:58:31)
8. Wikipedia = 65.7 million (1:15:31)
9. Ask Search Network = 65.5 million (0:10:40
10. Apple = 63.3 million (1:18:48)

December 2011

1. Google = 173.3 million (1:36:42)
2. Facebook = 153.4 (6:51:09)
3. Yahoo! 144.2 million (2:17:14)
4. MSN/Windows Live/Bing = 128.8 million (1:28:20)
5. YouTube = 128.1 (1:37:51)
6. Microsoft = 99.7 million (0:44:43)
7. Amazon = 87.9 million (0:42:10)
8. AOL Media Network = 84.0 million (2:51:19)
9. Apple = 79.1 million (1:08:28)
10. Wikipedia = 74.4 million (0:17:36)

In December 2011, Amazon rose up the charts in dramatic fashion while Ask Search Network dropped out of the top 10 list. It’s important to point out that Amazon naturally sees a lift in traffic in December thanks to the holiday shopping season, so the brand’s dramatic leap to 87.9 million in December 2011 is inflated for those holiday-related visitors. More interesting in these results is the fact that every brand saw an increase in traffic during 2011, but that’s not the case for the amount of time individuals spent on each site.

Every brand on the list saw an increase in time individuals spent on their sites between January 2011 and December 2011 except Facebook, which experienced a decrease in time spent on the site of approximately 33 minutes per person. Of course, Facebook does blow every other site on this list away in terms of the amount of time people spend on the site with nearly twice as much time or more spent on Facebook than any other site in the top 10. Clearly, Facebook is succeeding in keeping visitors engaged, but a 33 minute decrease in time spent on the site is a trend that should be raising some concerns at Facebook.

These ten brands dominated the web among the U.S. internet audience in 2011 with nearly every brand enjoying steady growth in unique visitors and time on each site. That’s not surprising given the steady growth in online internet usage overall in 2011. Take a look at the January 2011 and December 2011 metrics below to see what happened.

• Sessions/Visits per Person: January 2011 = 59; December 2011 = 62
• Domains Visited per Person: January 2011 = 99; December 2011 = 94
• Web Page Views per Person: January 2011 = 2,750; December 2011 = 2,803
• Duration of a Web Page Viewed: January 2011 = 0:00:58; December 2011 = 0:01:00
• Number of People Who Actively Went Online: January 2011 = 197.8 million; December 2011 = 211.9 million
• Number of People Who Had Internet Access: January 2011 = 243.0 million; December 2011 = 273.3 million

According to the numbers above, the number of people who had internet access grew by 12.5% between January 2011 and December 2011, but the number of people who actively went online during that time period only grew by 7.1%. The number of sessions per person went up by 5.1% in 2011. However, the number of web pages viewed per person only increased by 1.9% and the number of domains visited per person actually dropped by 1.9%.

What do you think about the future of the top ten U.S. web brands and the continued growth of internet usage? Is there any chance for other brands to topple Google or Facebook? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: stock.xchng

Despite what might be happening in the lead-up to the 2012 U.S. Presidential election, there is one thing Americans agree on regardless of age, race, gender, or political party. They think 15-seconds is the acceptable amount of time to be required to view an online ad before they can access free content.

According to a poll of a representative sample of Americans, Poll Position found that 54% of Americans think 15-seconds is the sweet spot for online advertisers and publishers to deliver ads without losing content views. Specifically, survey participants were asked, “When you go online to view free content, what do you think is the acceptable duration of an online advertisement you must view before seeing free content?” The breakdown of results is as follows:

• 54% believe 15 seconds is acceptable
• 12% believe 30 seconds is acceptable
• 4% believe 45 seconds is acceptable
• 3% believe 60 seconds is acceptable
• 27% have no opinion

Poll Position cross-tabulated the results by age, gender, race, and political party, and 15 seconds came out on top for every segment of the survey respondent audience (you can see the poll cross-tabs here).

It’s important to point out that 15-seconds was the shortest duration offered as a response to this poll. It’s safe to assume that had 10-seconds, 5-seconds, and 0-seconds been included, the results would be more interesting. However, for authoritative content publishers, the results of this study are important. If you want people to see your content but also want to put a monetization barrier in front of that content, make sure that barrier is one that visitors are willing to accept and wait through.

How many times have you been on a major media site, found a link to a video that looks interesting, clicked on that link, and been presented with a 30-second or 1-minute ad? It happens to me all the time, and you better believe I need to be extraordinarily interested in the video behind that monetization barrier or there is very little chance that I’m going to stick around. The publisher might make some money, but they’ve lost the chance to keep me on the site, further engage me, and improve long-term results.

Of course, major media sites need to make money, and smaller publishers do, too. The trick is finding the right balance between monetization and continued visitor engagement. What’s the opportunity cost of showing that 30-second ad before the clip of the cute kitten playing piano? Would a 15-second commercial deliver better all-around results? These are the questions publishers should be asking.

With that said, the problem falls back on advertisers who prefer to keep costs low and simply repurpose ads from other media. Until advertisers realize that they’ll get a better return on their investment by changing their ad content to match the online audience behaviors related to pre-roll video ads and other barriers to free content, publishers that need to make money from ads will still display those 30-second ads.

What do you think? How long are you willing to watch an online ad before accessing content that you’re lightly interested in? How about content you’re heavily interested in?

Here’s my answer — if I can Google the topic and get the information faster that way than watching a 30-second ad, you better believe I’m not going to watch that ad just to see the content behind it. 5-seconds, I’ll definitely watch it. 10-seconds, I’ll probably watch it. 15-seconds, I might or might not watch it. 30-seconds, I’ll very rarely watch it. More than 30-seconds, forget it.

Image: Flickr

In a new article, marketing speaker and author David Meerman Scott (whose content is syndicated through Newstex) discusses the practice of “buying” content when its “price” is low and re-selling it at a higher price in what he calls content arbitrage. David defines content arbitrage as follows:

“Content arbitrage involves finding information in one place and revealing it in another to take advantage of temporary differences in the knowledge level of people in those two markets.”

To further explain the concept of content arbitrage, imagine you find breaking news in your industry on a blog. You can quickly write about that news on your own blog, add your expert viewpoint and opinion to it, and share it via Twitter, Facebook, and so on. In other words, you used another person’s content as a tool to communicate and support your own opinions and knowledge.

People do this all the time — both online and offline. Whether you’re verbally sharing a piece of news you heard with friends at work and add your opinions into the discussion or you’re sharing online content in a blog post or other social media update and add your opinions to it, you’ve participated in content arbitrage.

David warns there is a catch when it comes to profiting from content arbitrage. He explains, “With all forms of arbitrage, the potential to profit only exists as long as there’s an exploitable difference between simultaneous markets. It’s real-time data.”

When you think about it, isn’t that how news organizations work, particularly 24-hour cable news networks? They all hear about a breaking story either from mutual sources or through each other’s news reports. The content arbitrage profit for these news organizations comes from adding more details using their journalistic resources or spinning the story to appeal to their specific target audiences. For example, when one news organization breaks a story from the White House,  you can guarantee that all news networks will carry that story, but Fox News will put a very different spin to it than MSNBC will. There is an exploitable difference that news organizations use to their advantage.

Most content publisher leverage content arbitrage opportunities, but as David explains in his article, timing and differentiation are key to getting positive results from it.

What do you think about content arbitrage? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: stock.xchng

Forget the Nook, Amazon’s Kindle Fire has already blown that tablet device away with 335% growth in Google search interest during the last quarter of 2011 compared to the Nook’s 150% search interest growth. Fueling growth for both brands was the holiday season, but there is no doubt that the Kindle Fire’s low price tag attracted a lot of buzz and a lot of sales after it debuted.

The Nook isn’t the only tablet feeling pressure from the Kindle Fire. Apple’s dominance won’t be challenged in the near future, and the iPad will stay the market leader. However, it will continually lose market share to new competitors and lower-priced tablet devices. Emarketer estimates that iPad market share will drop from 83% in 2011 to 68% in 2014.

In 2011, 3.9 million Kindle Fire devices were sold compared to 18.6 million iPads. The total tablet market in 2011 reached 65 million units, but market research firm IHS iSuppli expects that number will grow to 287 million units by 2015.

If the Kindle Fire’s early success is any indication, there are plenty of opportunities for non-Apple tablet devices to steal additional market share from the leader. For example, Barclay’s Capital estimates that in 2011, 5.5 million Kindle Fire units were sold (higher than the IHS iSuppli data) and expects that number to increase to 27.8 million in 2014.

With rumored launches of a Kindle Fire device with a larger screen and a Google tablet coming in 2012, the tablet market is wide open to new competition. And with all of that competition comes better products and better prices for consumers.

While tablet device sales continue to skyrocket, advertisers see growing opportunities to leverage the content consumers view on those devices. In fact, Barclay’s estimates that Amazon Kindle Fire content revenues reached $38.5 million in 2011 and could grow to nearly $1 billion in 2012 and over $5 billion by 2014.

It’s a changing world for content publishing, content consumption, and content monetization. To date, it appears that consumers have benefited greatly with better access to the information they want and need anytime they want or need it. The next step in this evolution will undoubtedly include a battle between content publishers and device manufacturers as each party tries to get its fair share of the ROI potential that content consumption via tablets offers. Who do you think will win? Leave a comment and share your prediction.

Image: Brian Sawyer

Newstex is sponsoring CloudCamp Rochester which will be held on March 24, 2012 at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Golisano College of Computing and Informational Sciences, in Rochester, New York.

The goal of CloudCamp is to advance cloud computing in general through open discussions among end users, IT professionals, and vendors. Conference organizer David Kavanagh from Eucalyptus Installation says, “We’re pleased to run the first CloudCamp in Rochester this spring. We’ll be combining the best un-conference style with some must-see speakers from the industry. If you have something to share, put yourself on the schedule in the morning! Come learn and network with the other cloudies in Rochester and the region.”

Newstex vice president of technology Chris Moyer explains, “CloudCamp is a Developers “un-conference”, with headline speakers including Jeff Bar. Everyone that attends also presents, so it’s a great time to find out what your peers are working on. It’s based off of the popular “BarCamp”, with a focus on CloudComputing of all types. CloudCamp is not just about AWS, but all cloud computing in general. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure, IBM Cloud, and Google AppEngine are all expected to have a presence at this conference.”

Speakers at CloudCamp Rochester are being announced, and so far the list includes:

• Jeff Barr, lead evangelist from Amazon Web services who will talk about public crowd infrastructure.
• Greg Dekoenigsberg, vice president of community at Eucalyptus who will discuss private and hybrid cloud infrastructure
• Jim O’Neil, developer advocate from Microsoft, will speak about Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Chris and the team of Newstex developers will be at CloudCamp Rochester. They’ll be giving away some free gifts to the first attendees, so get there early!

You can register for CloudCamp here.

Yes, you read that headline correctly. Today, Advertising Age reports that Ladies Home Journal is leveraging the crowdsourcing trend to create content, but the magazine is going about the process in the opposite way that every other brand and company is doing it.

Instead of just leveraging the crowd to create content on the Ladies Home Journal website, the magazine will republish content in its print magazine that visitors originally publish on its website. The goal of the new strategy is being hyped as an effort to attract a younger audience to a print magazine that’s in a very mature market and has a reputation of being for an older audience.

The new strategy will debut with the March 2012 issue of Ladies Home Journal when the magazine’s editors will curate most of the publication’s content from the posts that visitors publish on DivineCaroline.com (a website owned by the same company that owns Ladies Home Journal, Meredith Corp.). Customer stories from that site, the Ladies Home Journal website, the Ladies Home Journal Facebook page, and “other digital channels” will make up the bulk of the print magazine’s content going forward.

The leadership team behind Ladies Home Journal is confident that the reverse crowdsourcing for content model will be a success, and predicts that other print magazines will follow with similar strategies. However, there is growing speculation outside the walls of the Ladies Home Journal offices about how effective this strategy will actually be. For example, how will the content in the magazine be selected? Is it misleading to say the magazine is written by readers if the editors still choose that content in order to fit their agendas (i.e., selling more subscriptions and attracting advertisers)?

Of course, it’s a business first, so naturally, making money comes first. However, there’s a better argument against the reverse crowdsourcing for content model that the Ladies Home Journal is pursuing. What’s the benefit of buying a magazine with content that’s already been published, discussed, and shared online? What added value does republishing reader content from the website in the magazine deliver to customers who purchase the print magazine?

Only time will tell if this business model holds works. Desperate times often call for desperate measures, and the print media industry is certainly desperate. Let’s wait and see a year from now if the Ladies Home Journal strategy to attract a younger audience to its print publication works or ends up going down in media history as a desperate effort that failed. What do you predict?

Image: Manoj Jacob

This week, Nielsen released its 2011 State of the Media: Consumer Usage Report which offers insights into consumer usage trends across television, mobile, online, and social media. None of the trends that can be determined from this study are shocking. At this point, everyone knows that mobile content and social media are the “it” media these days, but televisions are far from dead yet. Following are some highlights from the report to put some numbers to the state of the media in 2011.

Mobile and Online Consumers

It’s actually amusing to look at the data from the Nielsen study and compare it to how media market share was broken down 10 years ago. The stats from the Nielsen report follow:

• 232 million Americans age 13 and over use mobile phones.
• 211 million Americans are online.
• 192 million Americans use personal computers and laptops at home or work.
• 116 million Americans age 13 and over access the mobile web.

Video Consumption

Video viewing habits have also changed significantly over the past decade. Nielsen reported the following statistics from its study:

• 288 million Americans age 2 and up watch traditional television.
• 143 million Americans age 2 and up watch video on the Internet.
• 111 million Americans age 2 and up watch timeshifted television via DVRs and similar devices.
• 30 million Americans age 2 and up watch video via mobile phones.

 Social Media Access

Computers still reign supreme when it comes to accessing social media sites. The Nielsen study revealed the following breakdown:

• 97% access social media via computers.
• 37% access social media via mobile phones.
• 3% access social media via gaming consoles.
• 3% access social media via iPads.

Nielsen also reports that in 2011, nearly four out of 5 active Internet users visited social networks and blogs.

Smartphone Operating System Market Share

57% of mobile phone owners have standard feature phones while 43% have smartphones. When it comes to buying a smartphone, Android devices are preferred over any other operating system. The Nielsen report provides the following stats:

• Android = 43%
• iPhone = 28%
• RIM BlackBerry = 18%
• Windows Mobile = 7%
• Other = 4%

Mobile Activities

Nielsen broke down the time spent each month on activities by owners of Android devices and reported the following results:

• Texting = 14%
• Browser = 10%
• Dialer = 6%
• Social Networking = 5%
• Email/Instant Messaging = 5%
• Maps/Location = 4%
• Music/Video = 2%
• Camera = 1%
• All Other Apps = 53% (including Facebook, Twitter, eBay Mobile, Barcode Scanner, and all other apps downloaded and used by study respondents)

Another interesting statistic revealed in the report is the number of apps people download to their smartphones. According to the study, app downloaders have an average of 33 apps on their phones.

You can read the complete Nielsen report here. It’s filled with statistics about mobile, online, television, and social media that can help you build your content strategy for 2012.

Image: exacq

Last month, Juniper Research released a report about the rise of geosocial networking and the growth of smartphone adoption. These trends spell big business for mobile content and mobile social media to the tune of 1.3 billion mobile social users by 2016 (up from 650 million in 2011).

The biggest driving force behind the mobile social media growth prediction is the integration of social, local, and mobile experiences. With these trends shaping the way people consume content in the near future, content publishers and brands need to develop strategies for content distribution through varied mobile devices.

As Surajit Agaarwal describes on Technorati, publishers and content distributors need to consider not only the many devices and platforms that end-users can consume content on in the mobile environment but also the context of that content consumption. He mentions the following types of context that can affect the content consumption and mobile social media experiences:

1. Device

People can consume content an a wide variety of mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and so on, and that content could be viewed on a small screen or a large screen. Device options are only going to get more diverse in the future.

2. Location

Mobile social media activities and content consumption can happen from just about anywhere you can imagine. That’s why mobile marketing and geo-targeting are high priorities for businesses these days. It should be important to content publishers, too.

3. Time

People consume content via mobile devices at all hours of the day and night. The trick for publishers and businesses is to publish relevant content targeted to audiences that are online at any given moment.

4. Social Relevance

Mobile social media will be even more heavily affected by what users’ social circles are consuming, liking, sharing, and talking about at any moment in time. Social relevance also includes geo-social influence from people who may or may not be in a user’s social circle but are within the local vicinity of that individual at a given point in time.

5. Personalization

One of the hottest topics for social media and content marketing as we begin 2012 is content personalization. The goal is to deliver content that individuals are most likely to be interested in at a specific moment via their mobile devices using behavioral research and analytics tracking.

6. Attention Spans

People’s attention spans on mobile devices are lower than most other media — including online. For example, in his article on Technorati, Surajit cites a study from the University of Colorado that found college students typically consume less than three paragraphs of text, less than 30 seconds of audio, and less than one minute of video on mobile devices before moving on to different content. That means your content needs to be relevant, personalized, interesting, and device-compatible, or you’ll have almost no chance of getting your complete message across to people.

Keep these trends and insights in mind as you develop and implement your content publishing and marketing strategies in 2012. And if your plan doesn’t already include a mobile social media strategy, develop one now, because 2016 will be here before you know it.

Image: Steve Paine