Andres Wittermann on international media relations trends

Most (relevant) news still coming from traditional media, says survey

A survey published yesterday by the Pew Research Center (http://people-press.org) shows that 95% of all stories with "new information" published online and offline are still generated by traditional media, eg newspapers.

Interestingly, this research is based on stories generated over six weeks in the region of Baltimore / USA. This city is home of one of the most respected American newspapers, the Baltimore Sun - one of many struggling traditional American media outlets.

The survey evaluated six news threads. 83% of all stories did not contain any new information, but were simply repetitive. Nearly all of the remaining 17% (containing new information) were coming from traditional media.

I find a lot of reference to the fact that many of these stories were local. Blogger Jeff Jarvis is even quoted saying that it is "obvious, that local news generation in the internet is still at its beginning" (NB - my translation of a German quote: http://meedia.de/nc/details/article/zeitungen-setzen-die-themen---immer-noch_100025577.html).

Now that I find really strange. I would have thought that social media are exceptionally strong locally. How should one be able to find global or national news and be the first to transmit them over Twitter or one's blog? If anything I would have thought that what you find MUST be local - at least initially.

Obviously this all does not mean you can neglect what is being published in social media or on the web. Quite the contrary, you should monitor what is being said there. Very often there might be an opportunity or a risk for you or your company that you can spot early boy social media monitoring.

But we seem to be farther away from the stage where the internet is really replacing the job of traditional media: generating relevant news.

In short, the web often breaks the news - but the traditional media are still making them relevant.

Social Networks Around The World

I just found a great map on locally dominating social networks around the globe here.

It shows that Facebook is the number one social network in most countries - but that to find your audience in some countries you need to go beyond that. In Europe the big exceptions are Netherlands (with Hyves), Portugal and Romania (with Hi5), Czech Rep. (with Lidé), Poland (with Nasza-klasa), Hungary (with Iwiw), the Baltics (with One and Orkut), Moldavia (with Odnoklassniki) and Russia, Belarus and Ukraine (all with V Kontakte).

Again, even in the age of globalization you need to think local when you want to reach your audience. Global outreach is certainly easier than ever before - but things are in permanent flow and this map may look different next year.

European Web Innovation - (Nearly) Without Germany And the UK

Today LeWeb announced the entries for the upcoming competition.

OK, this event is taking place in France and therefore has a string focus on this country. But still, I would have hoped to see more entries from main markets like the UK and Germany. From the 30 contestants only 2 are from these countries (Samedi from Germany and Charge Ventures from UK).

So - congratulations to the our Dutch neighbors and to Spain - who both at least were able to enter two interesting candidates.

How Online Trends Research Should Be Like

I just found a report on Google's latest online research tool on TechCrunch.

If you liked Google Trends already, I am sure you will love Google's new Insight for Trends. Especially the new filtering mechanisms and the heat map are really great for a first shot at trends or companies. I was using Google Trends already a lot and always was surprised to see how few marketing experts were aware of it when I mentioned it.

So let's see if Google IfT will change this.

The Age of Commercial Blogging Is Here

I just saw this on the web: Technorati launches an advertising network for blogs and targets IT companies.

This could become really interesting. Recent studies show that increasingly the "internet" is beating traditional marketing in influencing buying decisions. It is not too far-fetched to assume that "internet" translates to communities, blogs and other Web 2.0 platforms.

Technorati is the market leader in blogging search and this means they are ideally positioned as advertising network.Obviously this will mean bloggers are losing their virginity / innocence. They will become adult. Some may become boring even. It will definitely be interesting to see how this will change the blogging culture. I bet that money will "spoil" many of them and blogging will increasingly become lke traditional online media.

Here lies the chance for the traditional media who recently saw themselves increasingly under attack from the Web 2.0. They know how to handle journalistic "freedom" against ads.  Bloggers will have to undergo a cultural shift - and that is never easy.

The Poorer, The Yahoo!

An interesting survey by Hitwise shows that socially struggling people tend to use Yahoo! rather than Google. And the more privileged ones are using Google rather than Yahoo! Don't ask me to explain this.

This certainly explains why Ali Baba is now interested in Yahoo! The power to the people, Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt Euch!

Vitter yourself - Seesmic merges Twitter and video

Yesterday TechCrunch wrote about Loic LeMeur's new company, Seesmic. Here is a good short summary about what this is.

I have not tried it yet, but it sounds interesting. Twitter itself is not that widely spread in Europe yet, but Seesmic may man a jump ahead - and some people may just go for this straight away. It allows interaction between users through their self-generated and professional content. You can upoad your videos from Seesmic to plaforms like Twitter or Youtube, but you can also copy videos (their URL's) from Youtube onto Seesmic and thus generate your own video story.

Loic's vision is to build a new Online TV platform. Seeing how some video portals already can be subscribed to by Tivo and others, Seesmic may jst well be another step towards how IPTV may look like soon - and what challenges traditional TV is going to face.

I would be interested to hear about people's experience with Seesmic and also feedback from some European Twitters - I have the feeling that people only slowly are realizing the value of it.

The Country of Two Speeds - Lithuania

I have just attended a conference on e-marketing in Vilnius, Lithuania. I had never been in any of the Baltic countries,, so it was quite an experience. The city is vast, although there are 'only' half a million people living there. The city is a mix of some socialist-era left-overs and quite Scandinavian-looking buildings and streets. In 2009 this will be Europe's cultural capital and I can only recommend to go there and check yourself what a beautiful city this is.

The conference itself was another experience. There were discussions on if it really makes sense to sell things online, I also learned that in Lithuania there are hardly any online auctions - and in Poland eBay is miles behind a local competitor. On the other side 75% of all Lithuanians are doing their tax declaration online - a figure which puts most of Western European countries to shame (or all?).

The interest is definitely there, some entrepreneurs are quickly developing interesting campaigns and technologies - but it seems to me that there is still a bit to go to convince the whole country of what Web 2.0 really means.

The press was also there, but there is not a very large press landscape in Lithuania. The country still falls into three languages (Lithuanian, Russian and also a bit of Polish), so there still are some language and culture barriers to overcome.

I am already looking forward to the next event and wonder how many  journalists we will see next time.

SAP Changes Growth Strategy

So far Germany's biggest software company (not that there would be many around), SAP, had stayed clear off acquisitions - their main competitor's (Oracle) key strategy to grow fast.

Today SAP announced the acquisition of one of the few left business intelligence (BI) software companies, Business Objects. At a price tag of EURO 4.8b ($6.77b) this does not only mean SAP's biggest acquisition ever - it also means a general shift in growth strategy as the company so far tried to grow organically.

This to me seems to indicate two things:
1) The stock markets are hotter than ever (Germany's tech index, Tecdax, just jumped over 1,000 mark for the first time) and it seems this still will continue for a while
2) The IT and especially the software industry undergoes the fastest change in its history with more companies than ever merging or being acquired by others.

This fast consolidation will certainly mean a big change in culture across the industry. Let's hope customers will benefit from it (and not only shareholders) and that creativity will continue to drive the developments. Most developments which recently changed the world (like the internet) were developed by initially small companies and it would be a shame to see the industry grow big, old, mature and satisfied.

Germans - the new Chinese?

Today there is a great article on TechCrunch covering the German Web 2.0 scene (by Gregor Hochmuth). You can learn a lot about why Web 2.0 took a bit longer to take off there (technical limitations, language etc.) and what German start-ups in that area look like. The key tune of the article is that there are many companies around who are copying other (US) ideas - and that really original ideas are rare.

As you can see in the comments there already, there are some copycats looking / working better than the "original". I for example like Xing also better than LinkedIn (I'm on both).

The problem remains that Germany just does not have the same entrepreneurial spirit and money as let's say Silicon Valley. That becomes obvious to everyone who ever has spent some time on the West Coast (like I did last November).

There also is a nice overview about Original vs. Copy which I pasted in here from Gregor's article: