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On August 24th, @TylerGray and I attended a networking event hosted by @MediaBistro. This was one of several social media gatherings that our staff has attended over the course of the past several weeks, and we wanted to give you, our reader, a glimpse into what the events were actually like.

The below video is a short look into what the DC online media networking events often look like. We also took the time to interview a few of the interesting people we met at the MediaBistro event. Hopefully their unique jobs and innovate use of social media inspires others to think outside the box. Below is their contact information. If you would like to get featured on The Bivings Report at the next networking event, feel free to tweet @Bivings and let us know.

Thanks for Ruben Muska of Paradigm Companies and Kelly Barrett of the new startup Hy.Ly for sharing their interesting work!

Guerilla and social media marking campaigns all dream of going viral – a la Old Spice Man on a Horse – but some advertising really strikes out. Below is a look at two particularly bad unfortunate ad campaigns that resulted in more bad press than good. Let this be a lesson that for every Old Spice man on a horse, there is also an Aqua Teen Hunger Force bomb scare.

Mafia Wars: Leading to Wars with City Hall

No more than a few weeks ago, the video game maker Zynga was advertising for its Mafia Wars Las Vegas expansion pack.  Allegedly, this company authorized an ad agency to plant fake $25,000 bills on the sidewalks of San Francisco.  The plan was for pedestrians to pick up said bills, and find the address of the Mafia Wars website, where they could get information on Mafia Wars: Las Vegas. However, the City of San Francisco did not take the marketing tactic very well – and reported that the cleanup effort was of great expense to the city.  The San Francisco’s city attorney’s office is now officially investigating the incident.

“The Last Exorcism” and Chatroulette: Two iffy things that did not go great together

Everyone’s favorite random video chat website Chatroulete was seemingly the perfect medium on which to promote the Lionsgate horror film The Last Exorcism.  Its complete anonymity lents itself well to beginning short-lived interactions with strangers.

Playing off of this random notion, the marketing team behind The Last Exorcism decided to show a taped video to those connecting to it on the Chatroulette .  Subsequently, they released a video on their YouTube channel showing the “best of” reactions of those watching the exorcism video. In the clip, a female begins gesturing to remove her clothing, when suddenly her eyes roll back and she screams into the camera before the screen goes black. Meanwhile, the viewer is expected to look at the reactions on the male’s faces – which show notable distress.

While the Chatroulette “social experiment” service is currently down, the videos were released as part of a marketing campaign to drum up excitement for the movie. However, this is not the first YouTube video in this movie’s marketing mix. A few weeks ago, a website called Church of Saint Marks appeared online with supposed “information” on exorcism. Meanwhile, the site actually featured one of the main characters from the movie, Reverend Cotton Marcus of the fictional Saint Marks Church.

 A new DC News Site launched last Sunday– and the local social media scene has been abuzz with the innovation, social media outreach, and hyper local focus seen on the site. The pages of this online portal will function to aggregate news from all over the DC metro area and create a one-stop-shop for DC residents. TBD is owned by the same company that owns POLITICO, but its model of news delivery is decidedly different. The site seamlessly mergers the ‘old media’ video news from WJLA (Channel 7) and News Channel 8 with news reporting and blog posts.

Reaching Out to The Blogging Community

127 local blogs from across the Washington DC metropolitan area have joined together to contribute and publish content though the TBD portal. The neighborhood blog section features stories from TBD staff writers as well as those found on DC-area blogs.  In order to continuously improve their content, the site is also asking for reader feedback (and not just in the comments section). Yet the best part of the new site that if you input your zip code into a handy search bar, TBD will tailor content specifically for you.

In addition to engaging with users on numerous social media platforms, TBD also released several mobile phone applications –allowing readers to get their news on the go. The Bivings Report can assess with high confidence that this new website is an arbiter of great things to come as social media merges with traditional media formals on the web. It features a large amount of white space and is intuitively designed with the end users' experience in mind. 

Google may still command over 60 percent market share when it comes to searches, the Microsoft-owned Bing is making steady headway ever since its introduction in June 2009. However, current data shows that Bing and Yahoo search engines’ share in the marketplace is growing – as the expense of Google. Yet due to its smaller size, Bing is quicker to innovate with new features, like the brand-new taxi cab fare calculator, as well as its intuitive answers and shopping engine. In recent months, Bing has continued adding more features – like integrating Twitter and Facebook status updates into its search results.

The change toward making search sites more user friendly (and more insightful with information) is enhancing the search experience for the average internet user.  To give users an idea of what’s going on around their neighborhoods or in interesting parts of the country, Bing has partnered up with Foursquare to provide geo-location based  information about restaurant specials and user recommendations. Bit by bit, these social media innovations help Bing stand out among its competitors – and woo social media junkies away from Google’s grip. Bing is also the official search engine within Facebook.

Further applications – whether it be the Bing Shopping iPhone app (with bar code scanner) or the Bing Health section – continue enhancing Bing’s search capabilities.  Thus far, Bing commands only 12% of the search engine market share – but its rate of growth suggests that big things may be in its future. If nothing else, Microsoft’s innovative use of social media data (twitter, foursquare, and Facebook) shows its understanding of the power that user-generated content can have on search engine traffic.

For a side by side comparison of the two sites, check out – http://www.bing-vs-google.com/

Have you ever wondered how hierarchical traditional media organizations are finding their place in the new media world? The Bivings Report got to find out just that about PBS’s iconic NewsHour – a program that has been on the air for more than thirty years and whose follows span many generations. This event was a meetup sponsored by DC Media Makers (DCMM) and featured NewsHour’s media coordinator Kate Gardiner.

During the course of the DCMM-sponsored discussion held at the NPR headquarters, a media-savvy audience and Gardiner talked about everything from Facebook fan pages to their preferences for comment management systems on blogs. NewsHour’s unique demographics do not lend themselves perfectly well to the internet age, since the average age of their viewer is over 55. However, this creates an opportunity for Gardiner and her team of online and broadcast journalists to focus on winning over and retaining younger viewers.  The NewsHour program is now posting a larger quantity of online-only content and story exclusives in order to continue engaging with their fan base.

Some interesting statistics about NewsHour’s online outreach:

• Between all of the show and anchors’ Twitter accounts – a tweet is able to reach over 80,000 people
• NewsHour’s Facebook fan base is 60% male, and 40% female (the mathematic opposite of Facebook’s actual gender beak down)
• During the recent BP oil spill, the NewsHour website had more simultaneous viewers than the NewsHour  television broadcast
• Only 31 percent of PBS’s news traffic comes from web referrals
• The May 2010 NewsHour Gulf Leak Meter widget allowed users to estimate how much oil has been spilled into the Gulf Coast, and resulted in millions of page views to the NewsHour site

For Kate Gardiner’s own notes and discussions on the topic, see her blog post at –  http://posterous.kategardiner.com/a-summary-of-my-social-media-engagement-stati

Below is the video we took of various parts of the speech:

On Tuesday July 20^th 2010, NDN hosted a speaker panel titled Advancing Internet Freedom: Tackling Barriers to the Global Free Flow of Information. This event featured Daniel Calingaert and Anita Ramasastry two prominent authorities on the topic of internet censorship and the power of online freedom of speech. During their presentations, both presenters discussed topics ranging from mobile economic opportunities abroad to further US government regulation of internet content.

The NDN forum touched heavily upon the groundwork laid by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s January 2010 speech on internet freedom that was lauded as the first of its kind for a foreign policy decision maker.   Clinton spoke about issues of international censorship over the press and individual media publishers, and warned about the “new information curtain” that is cutting off information to developing nations with totalitarian governments.

Both speakers at the “Advancing Internet Freedom” event discussed the role of domestic and foreign government in regulation and expansion of internet services – particularly as they relate to ordinary citizens.  Echoing Secretary Clinton’s remark that “the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it,” Anita Ramasastry discussed the importance advocating for oppressed peoples through greater access to technology and information.  Subsequently, Daniel Calingaert spoke about the rights of citizens and the importance of not accepting censorship in the name of political stability. Both speakers stressed the empowerment of citizens though the creation and sharing of content on social media and internet websites. 

The London Times is one of the first major global newspapers to begin implementing an internet pay wall for access to its news and editorial content. This bold move by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is part of an overall strategy to move toward a paid online content distribution system, and is aimed at helping to turn a profit for the flailing newspaper publishing industry. Before the launch of this pay wall, The London Times had the 40^th largest newspaper circulation in the world, and the results of  the profit-driven wall could be indicative of what the rest of the newspaper industry can expect to undergo in the coming years.

The paywall restriction went into full effect in early July 2010, and first reported subscriber figures look disappointing. Numbers of readers is down across the board, despite the newspaper’s effort to reach out to new readers. Access to the site currently costs 2£ per week – which is a substantial discount from the paper subscription price.  However, for the week ending July 10^th, reports indicate that overall traffic fell to only 33% of its pr-pay wall level.  The Times supports both standard operating systems and the iPad OS, allowing readers with WiFi connections to read content on the go.

In an August 2006 research reports, The Bivings Group looked at the use of internet by America’s newspapers, and a great deal has changed in the four years since the findings were released.

What this means for The Future of Pay Walls

The pay wall is generating profit, but if page views exponentially decline, then the Times’ online ad revenue will undoubtedly suffer. A market leader in the United States, the Wall Street Journal runs a fiscally profitable pay wall, due in part to the fact that its site content is highly valued across the globe. The London Times may be encountering problems due to having no-cost substitutes Issues with low initial readership may be overcome if the newspaper’s other competitors institute similar pay walls and leave the reader no choice than to pay 2£ per week to read their favorite newspapers.

Before panelists at the 2010 Personal Democracy Forum conference could even begin to debate the role the government should play in “saving” American journalism, a litany of terms needed to be defined.

“Government” was broken down. Do we mean Federal or local government? Does this mean public supported projects or just official mandates? “Journalism” got a little bit further toward being defined – the panelists agreed that it’s not the same as media or news or information.

Of all the terms thrown around, “market value” and “market failure” became the central fighting weapons of this emotional discussion.

Josh Silver of Free Press said the market value of journalism remains high, so the government must play a role in providing for public demand.

Andrew Keen, an advisor to TBG-developed Arts and Labs, doesn’t think there’s room for government in making media decisions.

“We must let the market decide,” he said. “We are living at an exciting time. We have no idea what journalism is. You’ve got to let the market chose.”

In contrast to Keen’s views, the BBC was brought up as a shining example of public-funded journalism that was not market-driven.

“You’d also want to have the royal family in America!" Keen retorted. “The BBC is a complex cultural institution that wouldn’t work in the U.S.”

After the rapid-fire debate moved off the panelists’ table and into the audience, the conversation took many turns, with audience members offering that new media models and young entrepreneurs are worthy of both private market support and public funding.

Silver tried to wrap up his view by standing by his stance that there is still a role for public support.

“There are going to be many ingredients to the solution, and government is one of them,” he said.