Peoplemeter Results from Emmy New Media Newsletter

From Emmy New Media Newsletter

The early returns from Arbitron’s Personal People Meter tests suggest that the overwhelming majority of TV viewers watch shows when broadcast, and not on DVRs, and that 80% of recorded programming was viewed within 48 hours of broadcast. The research also suggests that DVRs are bringing new viewers to shows and not disrupting the audience that watches during the original broadcast. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113020001206978306.html?mod=home_us_inside_today 

It seems we are all still pretty much real-time in our consumption.  I was suprised.

The arbitron site also has summary results from a Houston People Meter study by coincidence for the locals.

GM use Onstar to tell us about our mileage and driving?

I don’t drive a GM.  But of course I see the commercials and news stories about OnStar.  Typically they read like this:

…arrested Friday evening after police located the dead woman’s missing car through its OnStar electronic tracking system… (snip)

So if you are really in a bad spot, or are dead, OnStar is awesome.  Your personal electronic tracking system.

Why can’t GM turn this into a bigger net positive?  I want a monthly email or personal rss feed with my mileage and vehicle performance.  Maybe allow me to allow them to choose to share the data about my imaginary hummer with the public like flickr does with photos.  We all know that mileage for cars as advertised is wildly off, so why doesn’t GM or another manufacturer be the first to be HONEST and start posting real live data?

Maybe a "monthly best driver" award for people who get the best gas mileage above the rating, and again this is only for people who specifically choose to sign up.  But if OnStar is IN the car, surely it can tell the mileage and report back on starts and stops to determine city/highway and then the actual mileage.  The data is nothing new, but make it a social promotion.  GM should become leaders at encouraging people to get good gas mileage and tout the success stories through this competitive advantage.

It might even help GM become knows as an environmentally friendly company (or not, just saying…)

Another by-product would be there are those people out there who would hack their GM cars to get better gas mileage so then they can have two categories.  Gas mileage for factory and gas mileage for custom eco-hacks of GM cars.  What great PR this would be for them.  People might even take their car in for service complaining of bad gas mileage helping GM improve further.

Just a thought on a rainy day.

Time. Collective Action. Google. Gillmor. Attention.

A discussion of three related topics.  The first is the concept of Google as content provider, the second is the Gillmor focus on an “attention economy” and the third is collective action.  The battle matters for the PR practitioner and social scientist alike because it provides the filters to discern the winners.

Google as Content Provider

Google originally created a valuable brand through buzz from alpha geeks using a minimalist interface that worked.  It worked, it helped us find stuff, because it leveraged something under the radar which was, at the time, hard to game or trick.  That thing was described as page rank which to oversimplify means links to your web site (content) are votes for your site and therefore the site is probably more relevant.  So links about a topic mean this content is good and you probably want it so we (google) will direct you (you) to it.  They provided a service to help us make the best use of our time seeking stuff.

We cared about google because we lack long attention spans and don’t want to waste time going through 5 pages of search results to get to the answer.  We are smart and impatient and want what we want and we want it now.

[Sidebar: that elephant is Lord Ganesh the Remover of Obstacles which just seemed appropriate for this post]

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NYT – Google controls more advertising revenue that MSM

Google Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, Too

<snip> This year, Google will sell $6.1 billion in ads, nearly double what it sold last year, according to Anthony Noto, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. That is more advertising than is sold by any newspaper chain, magazine publisher or television network. By next year, Mr. Noto said, he expects Google to have advertising revenue of $9.5 billion. That would place it fourth among American media companies in total ad sales after Viacom, the News Corporation and the Walt Disney Company, but ahead of giants including NBC Universal and Time Warner.

I can see the suits on Madison Avenue shaking all the way from Texas.  Happy Halloween guys.  The article goes on to talk about some of the potential conflict ahead.

Not content to just suck advertising dollars from Web search, Google is using its windfall to pay for an eclectic range of ambitious projects that have the potential to radically disrupt other industries. Among other things, it is offering to build a free wireless Internet network in San Francisco, plans to scan nearly every book published and is testing a free classified advertising system it calls Google Base.

CNN also covered Google Base in a very no-nonsense manner pounding home the conflict this will cause with Google’s clients like eBay and Craigslist.  Nothing like a good fight on the horizon.

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Social Software Visualization

Cool visualization of social actions.  In this case, an RFID party.

…attendees were handed RFID tags at the door, and their status at the party was tracked throughout the evening, with their location displayed on various screens. (more)