RAAK

The end of the word as we know it

Perhaps not entirely scientific, but probably more or less bang on. Ross Dawson made this provocative map charting the extinction of newspapers in various countries.

Britain’s papers face the chop in 2019, only second to the USA who will be paperless in 2017. But France’s rags will only face the music in 2029 and metro South Africa only in 2037. The reason for the difference? Things like the increased cost performance of mobile phones, development of high performance digital paper, changes in print production costs, trends in advertising spend and allocation.

Go direct to your audience

It is of course not just newspaper publishing that is undergoing a massive structural change. In a fantastic in-depth article The Media Briefing makes a number of good points. Publishing is concurrently dying a slow death, and exploding in growth. They quote Clay Shirky who said:

“When a 14-year-old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

And they give some good advice:

So, a major opportunity, or rather necessity, for publishers is to jump the supply chain and build direct-to-consumer relationships. The vertical systems of the past have left many publishers devoid of actual consumer contact, and in a world where consumers are identifiable, trackable, transparent, and easily accessible, publishers must build those relationships. It might sound soft, but relationship is the right word: long-term, stable consumer relationships where the publisher consistently provides value to the end-user is the only form of competitive advantage. This means that you already have the audience before you even make the book, or album, or magazines.

It sounds like they are talking of RAAK’s Social Media Ready program!

Facebook, Facebook and more Facebook

It was reported this week that 1 in 6 pageviews in the UK is now a Facebook pageview.

And judging by the numbers of new features Facebook is developing, that number won’t go down any time soon. Last night they announced Facebook Deals, a service that allows businesses to create specials, which they can give to customers when they check into their venues.

Inside the Facebook user’s head

Another Facebook related study explored why consumers “Like” and follow brands on Facebook. Nearly 40% of Consumers “Like” Companies on Facebook to publicly display their brand affiliation to friends – so called social badging. But the biggest reason – by a small margin – is to get discounts and promotions.

Another study reported that the best time to find people on Facebook are weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.

Domino’s on the money

We’ve written before about how Domino’s has raised profits through the use of Social Media. In the interview they gave us, they mentioned they’ll keep on looking for new ways to engage with their customer.

And sure thing, this week they launched a Farmville-style game that lets you collects points and turn those points into actual product vouchers.

Are you influencer enough to get Klout Perks?

Our favourite influencer measurement tool Klout is dipping their toes into the world of big brands. They’re hooking up with the likes of Disney and Virgin to hand out freebies to people with a high enough Klout score.

Checking-in in Brighton

This Saturday is Foursquare Day in Brighton. The city council has teamed up with the location service to generate awareness of its library services. Given the recent budget cuts, this is a commendable move. Especially as their plan seems to make it more than a gimmick. According to their head of communications:

We hope to go on from this experiment to build location-based services into all our locations whether they are swimming pools, libraries, gyms or events. In fact, we want to embed social media into all our services.

She’s a Blogger and she’s looking good

The fashion industry has been pretty fast to catch on to the influencing power of bloggers. Wessel wrote a splendid overview on which brand is doing what and how can you avoid making mistakes.

Tomorrow we’ll be able to add another cool project to this list. We’ve helped Guided Collective to develop TakeOnTed, a project for Ted Baker where selected bloggers will be live styling some Ted Baker models by only using Twitter. Live, from 18:00 GMT.

Texting is dear

Texting is more expensive than inkjet printing by a factor of 20! In fact a British scientist calculated that texting costs about $749 to send just one megabyte. This makes texting 4 times more expensive than sending data from the Hubble telescope. It would cost you $18,000 to transfer a song via SMS to your iPod.

So what then is the point of text messaging? There is no let up in the millions of SMS messages that are being sent worldwide. Despite its inordinate cost, people love communicating with people they know. That’s why the Reuters of Humanity is Facebook and has 500 million users and counting. That’s the power of social media.

Monetize

Oh shucks, it’s almost the end of our newsletter and we have not said enough about our darling Twitter. Fear not dear RAAKonteur reader.

Twitter’s finally rolling out ads in the timeline. Read this Techcrunch post for more on that. Oh, and Promoted Tweets are now appearing in Google Search too.

Creatives of the week – Chris Milk & Aaron Koblin

Milk & Koblin are the people behind The Johnny Cash Project. But really, we should also credit the 250,000 participants that contributed drawings to this crowdsourced music video slash art project. Read more >>