Ashton Kutcher now has more subscribers on Twitter than any US newspaper except USA Today and Wall Street Journal has for its paper news.
He's closing fast on those two that one. (In the one day since I started writing this blog, he's surpassed the Wall Street Journal).

If you don't think the comparison counts, I wonder how many of his 2 million followers buy or read paper news as regularly as they check Twitter?

How does this flocking behavior work in social media? Kind of like this (RT @aplusk):

Marketers and media companies are troubled and faced with a conundrum. How do you deal with the realities of a depressed economy and falling sales? How can management both meet short-term revenue demands and invest in the future? How do we "disenthrall ourselves" from the models and business demands of the past when we depend on these models for our day-to-day survival? And how can we possibly invest in new strategies and approaches when there is not sufficient budget to support the barest minimum of what we require day-to-day to meet our most basic goals?

 

Steve Nelson recently sent me, and a few other people here at Clear Ink, an article from the New York Times. It tells about a new approach being tested to measure a marketing campaign's effectiveness. The company, IMMI, is providing cell phone service for it's test audience, and in return, the audience doesn't have to do anything. Well almost nothing - they are asked to carry the cell phone around like normal, as it replaces their existing phone. IMMI monitors what these cell phones can hear throughout the day and then match it with whatever marketing they are measuring. They say it isn't listening to your conversation, only the media around you. Very Big Brother-ish if you ask me, but how do you know that your *current* cell phone isn't already doing this already?

Scott Walker (assistant managing editor for Birmingham News and DIY, electronics, tinkerer) has hacked an old newspaper box to display the headlines and news stories from the internet. It's an awesome symbol of the old media/new media struggle. See video of it working, more photos, and a step by step description of how he set it up in his blog post: The digital newstand.

I recently posted a comment to Joe Jaffe's blog about Second Life as he is getting a lot of feedback about the pro's and con's of Second Life. From what I can tell, well-meaning marketers are still feeling it is something of a scam. I guess it is all in how one looks at it. We are quite bullish about 3D worlds in general, as long as one knows what they are getting in to at THIS STAGE OF THE GAME. That part is key:

I want to step in here. I work at a digital marketing agency that is spending quite a bit of time and internal capital on building a practice out of Second Life. It is just one of our practices, the others being more well established digital capabilities. Second Life is an early adopter experiment. It is a place to demonstrate the power of a 3D interface and content without being someone's beta product. If you are a client that needs to demonstrate complex visual models or ideas, it is a great space. If you are a client that wants to create an event but the constituents are narrow and worldwide, it is a great venue. If you want to demonstrate that you are exploring all forms of digital communication, then it is a low cost demonstration. Sun, Sony and others are also working on new 3D environments. But what they are missing is an audience. Second Life has the advantage of having real people constantly pushing the buttons and testing the limits. As far as ROI, the ROI lies in what would the difference be between building the kinds of things (an event, a model, a demo) in the real world vs. a 3D virtual version? Huge. And what is the impact when the right audience can now really "get" the complex idea? Really huge. So change your perspective. This is not a full mass market medium yet. It is a sandbox. A really cool, public sandbox. If you look at it this way (for now anyway), Second Life has all kinds of possibilities for the smart marketer.