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As most of you may know, this Sunday is the 82^nd Academy Awards.  While I’m not happy with some of the retro changes (let’s be honest and say that the ten Best Pic nominees could’ve been whittled down to four films, including one that was completely overlooked, The Informant) we’ll see in this weekend’s ceremony, I thought it was worth pointing out some new social media promotion tactics the Academy is trying out this year.

For the first time, the Oscars will broadcast red carpet coverage online, thanks to their partnership with Facebook, and will give users like you a chance to ask your favorite actor a question.  According to their page:

“We know you’re used to seeing stars at the Academy Awards®, but now for the very first time you can get involved! Oscar.com has partnered with Facebook to bring you Oscar.com Live from the Red Carpet, a very special online pre-show that allows you to watch the stars walk the Red Carpet and answer questions from fans like you. Yes, you read that right!

Join hosts Lisa Guerrero and Brett Chukerman as they cover all the action unfolding outside the Kodak Theater. Using your Facebook account, you can send a message to them on the Red Carpet, and they’ll pass along the best questions and comments in real time to the stars that sashay by. But that’s not all! Rico Rodriguez (Manny from the ABC hit comedy Modern Family) will also be on hand to meet and interview fans in attendance, as they experience all the glitz and glamour right from the Red Carpet.”

For viewers who like options and have either Facebook or Twitter log-ins, they can go to APLive and see streaming coverage there as well.   APLive is also making this available on their Facebook page, but users will have to become a fan in order to see the coverage, so it’ll be interesting to see if the 1,373 fans of the page jumps to a significantly higher number over the weekend** (See update).   This streaming event is the first of many for the year-long partnership between APLive and Livestream.

If you really feel like you need more connection to this year’s awards, there are a few iPhone Apps available for download for this (again, let’s be honest) very crowded awards year.   One thing I probably will be checking out this weekend is Adam Shankman’s Twitter feed, one of the two being promoted on Oscar.com.

I don’t want to sound pessimistic or snobby.  There were some great films this year and I’ll take a moment to throw out my top picks for Best Picture:

1. Up (Pixar just knows how to pull at the heartstrings)
2. Inglorious Basterds
3. The Informant (what movie? Netflix it when it comes out later this month)
4. An Education (probably my pick of the year)
5. Honorable Mention: Drag Me to Hell (I’m not being cute here. It really is a great film.)

Update:  We all know the winner’s from last night’s ceremony.  Another Update**: AP Live’s Facebook page now has 7,672 fans.

The Bivings Group has been hard at work developing a new website and online communications strategy for Critical Exposure, the winner of our TBGives philanthropic campaign, which awarded $10,000 of internet consulting to the D.C.-based youth charity.

This week, we were honored with the announcement our efforts have won the Communitas Award for Excellence in Community Service.

We are thrilled to be recognized in the category of Pro Bono work excited to look for ways to expand upon the TBGives campaign in 2010.

We’re looking for a social media expert to join us in our Washington, DC office.  You can view the details and apply for the position here.

To all of our readers, clients, colleagues and friends, we wish you the best this holiday season and a happy 2010.

In our newspaper study, released earlier today, we developed a formula we call the Twitter Interactivity Quotient (or Twitter IQ for short) as a way of measuring how newspapers were using their accounts.   If tweeting, which consists of original tweets, responses to tweets, and retweeting others’ tweets, is viewed as a conversation, then the tweeting is effectively “talking”, while responses and retweets are evidence of “listening”. And, while not every conversation is equally balanced for a variety of good reasons, it seems reasonable to propose that the best conversationalists are those who cultivate balance over time.

Working off that premise, we combined the percentage of replies and retweets (listening) and subtracted it from 50 percent (a perfect balance). We then subtracted that number from 100% and translated it into a real number between .5 and 1.5, establishing “1” as the ideal balance. Accounts registering a .5 only tweet, accounts registering a 1.5 only reply and retweet, but they are equally out of balance in different directions. The Twitter IQ is the difference between an account’s “balance” and “1”. As such, in an ironic flourish, the lower one’s Twitter IQ, the better. The combined Twitter IQ employed in ranking the newspapers’ is simply the sum of the three applicable accounts. Below is a list of the newspapers who had the best aggregate Twitter IQ scores, meaning the three accounts we examined had the best overall balance between listening and talking. Please note that these results should be taken with a grain of salt, as we didn’t look at every single Twitter account for each newspaper.

Here is the list of the specific accounts we looked at that have the best Twitter IQ scores.

See our full rankings of the newspapers in aggregate, and the individual accounts themselves, at the link below.

• Newspaper Twitter IQ Rankings
• Newspaper Accounts Twitter IQ Rankings

Update: We decided to remove the list of the lowest ranking accounts, since it wasn’t our intention to bring negative attention to those with low scores.

Twitter was seemingly everywhere in 2009, with sports stars, celebrities, politicians and journalists using the micro blogging platform to promote everything from themselves to their employers to the issues they advocate for.    After several years of assessing the general online presence of the top 100 U.S. newspapers, this year we decided to produce a study specifically about how newspapers and journalists are utilizing Twitter as a way of promoting their content and interacting with readers. Frankly, this was a daunting task.  There are thousands of newspaper-related Twitter profiles, from official accounts of the paper overall to more personal profiles maintained by individual journalists.  Given the pure volume of accounts, we decided to closely analyze 300 profiles from the top 100 newspapers in the country as a way of getting a sense, in aggregate, of how the media is utilizing Twitter.  Among the things we look at in the study are whether newspapers link to their Twitter accounts from their website, how often, and in what manner, the accounts are updated, and whether newspapers are using their Twitter profiles to interact with readers or to simply promote their site content. While the study isn’t perfect, the results provide a compelling jumping-off point for additional thought and discussion.  Following are some key findings and a link to the full study. Top Line Stats

• We were able to find multiple Twitter accounts for all of the top 100 newspapers using common sense searching techniques. However, only 62% of the newspapers included links to at least one of their accounts from their website. In many cases, these links were buried on the site and difficult to track down. In addition, this means 38% of the newspapers are actively using Twitter, but haven’t yet integrated their presence with their website in even a minimal way.
• 56% of newspapers maintained a directory of their Twitter accounts on their website. This directory from the Los Angeles Times is a good example of the form these listings usually took. Many of these directories were quite extensive, listing dozens of accounts.
• Of the 300 Twitter profiles we looked at in depth, the average account had 17,717 followers and followed back 1,470 other users. However, if you remove the four accounts we looked at that had over 100,000 followers, the average number of followers drops to a much more modest 3,447 users.
• The Twitter profiles of the newspapers send out an average of 11 tweets per day. Tweet frequency varies from 1.1 (The Boston Globe's Big Picture, The Denver Post's Woody Paige, and The Akron Beacon Journal) to 95.5 tweets/day (The Boston Herald).
• 51% of Twitter accounts were updated primarily through Twitter’s web interface. The next most popular method with 28% was Twitterfeed, which is a service that automatically posts updates to Twitter accounts via RSS feeds. The remaining 21% of accounts were updated via a variety of other Twitter tools such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. This indicates that the vast majority of Twitter accounts (around 70%) are updated by staff members as opposed to a simply being an automated feed.

Replies and Retweets While these core statistics are interesting, we wanted to take things further and see how exactly the Twitter accounts were being used. Were the accounts simply linkbots highlighting newspaper content, or were they being used to by the paper to hold a conversation with its readers? Were newspapers simply talking, or were they listening, too? Some key findings on this front:

• Many of the accounts we looked at rarely if ever interacted with other users by replying to tweets. Indeed, 33% of the accounts we looked at replied to users in less than 1% of their tweets. 15% of the accounts we looked at had never replied to another users tweets. This suggests that these papers are rarely reading or reacting to the updates of people they follow.
• On the positive side, 37% of newspaper accounts we looked at replied to users in more than 10% of their tweets. 5% of accounts replied to other Twitter users in over 50% of their tweets.
• Similarly, many of the accounts we looked at rarely retweeted other users. 43% of the accounts we looked at retweeted others in less than 1% of their tweets. 23% of the accounts we looked at never retweeted another user during the time period we considered.
• 16% of the Twitter accounts we looked at retweeted other users in more than 10% of their tweets.

Please also check out this post, which goes into detail about Twitter IQ, our ranking of the level of interactivity of the Twitter accounts. The Full Study The full study is available for download here and is also embedded below for your convenience.  You can also view the back up data for the study at the URLs below:

• Raw data
• Newspaper Twitter IQ Rankings
• Newspaper Accounts Twitter IQ Rankings

We would love for readers to use the data as a jumping off point for additional analysis, and just ask that you reference The Bivings Group in whatever you produce. The Use of Twitter by America's Newspapers

The Bivings Group is proud to announce, after much difficult deliberation, that Critical Exposure has won the TBGives $10,000 web consulting prize.

Critical Exposure uses the art of photography to teach DC youth imperative lessons about art and community leadership. The organization empowers students through documentary photography and encourages them to become advocates for change in their communities.

Congratulations to Critical Exposure, and thank you to all of our other fantastic applicant organizations.

Two panels here at The Bivings Group have pored over more than 50 submissions from fantastic non-profit organizations all over the Washington, D.C. area and narrowed our search down to six finalists.

Due to the heavy competition between all of the applicants and the excellent qualifications of our six finalists, we’ll need one more day of deliberations.

The final winner of the TBGives $10,000 web consulting prize will be notified and announced by close of business on Wednesday. Please check back!