Below is a copy of a post from Steve Rubel's site http://www.steverubel.com/. 

Ketchum is partnering with Google for access to a wide variety of their online and live webinar programs.  This includes insights into their new developments such as Rubel notes below.  Let me know if you want specific connection with Google around this new resource.

Robert

Either last Sunday's NY Times Magazine is looking for controversy where there's none by poking the web's hottest social network just to be contrarian, or they've got a powerful crystal ball. What do you think, is Facebook a fad that's peaked and is soon to fade, or is the NYT merely muckraking? Take a look for yourself: NY TImes Mag

The NYTimes in an editorial Saturday advocates that Washington should pass legislation that would prohibit Internet service providers from blocking or discriminating against content.  I agree! Let's keep the internet from becoming a battleground of competing interests only dictated by money - let's keep it open to all ideas.  Here's the url: http://tinyurl.com/m93do4

Two recent Dutch research studies:
1) Dutch people in their 20s do not blog.

http://tinyurl.com/mvzync
In Maureen Dowd's OpEd in the NYTimes this morning she supports the disclosure of cyberbully Rosemary Port's take down of Liskula Cohen.  Cohen had sued and the NY State Supreme Court required the disclosure by Google of who the anonymous blogger was.

I agree with Dowd's assertion that "anonymity with universality is a dangerous combo". Broadcasting one's opinion without the courage of associating your name with it has always been a temptation to slander, long before the internet took root.  In the past, it was repeating malicious gossip without attribution.  It matters who said it.  Even that is only one component of credibility. Minjeong Kang is a Syracuse grad student doing a project with Ketchum's research department to study credibilty in social media. She plans to study three components: who said it, the media channel itself, and the content of the message all contribute to credibility. But without the who identified, in my view, there is no credibility.

According to TechCrunch, Twitter is finally embracing RTing, a community-driven initiative to help virally spread great Tweets. It's called Project Retweet.

From Mashable:

We thought that online video usage growing by 53 percent was impressive back in May. New numbers released today from Nielsen really put that growth into perspective though.

According to the information and media company, online video usage continued to see strong month-over-month and year-over-year growth. In fact, online video is still ballooning at a current rate of 31% per year in the US. That translates to 11.2 billion total streams in July alone.

That’s nearly double the population of the entire world. Let that sink in for a moment: two videos for every person on the planet, and all of these views were generated just inside the US.

That isn’t the only eye-popping number to come out of Nielsen today, either. There were 135.9 million unique viewers of online video in the last month. If you do the math, that means that the average viewer watched 82.4 streams in July. The numbers also indicate that the average viewer watched online video for 211 minutes during the month.

As a guest from Pleon Amsterdam, I will be in the Ketchum New York office for three months to do research on my PhD. I love how the people in the office are so focused on new media, so I will try to post regularly on topics ranging from Pleon, communication in the Netherlands, and my big passion: NYPD communication.

To start with the first: now I haven’t been in the Amsterdam office for a year (I am on a sabbatical), but I know everyone at Pleon Amsterdam is very excited about the merger. The people at the office all have an international mindset, and we like to see the global picture. I started at the company before it was even Pleon,  and when it was still very ‘Dutch’.  So much has changed in the past five years!

No, I don't really think print is dead. I mean, this Alchemist post this week proves it, no? And given that my TiVo is busting at the seams right now, I don't think TV is dead right? Well, maybe from an advertising perspective.

An interesting piece in The Atlantic states, however, that not only is the 30-second advertising in crisis, but so is content. While we use Hulu and the like to catch up on shows, outside of things like Dr. Horrible, nobody's watching original content that's long-form on the Internet... yet.

I couldn't be more excited for Fall TV, and most of it is on the mainstream networks. ABC has Flash Forward and V. NBC has Community and Day One. Fox has Glee.

If a new media person like me is still excited about the big networks, can it really be dead?

LinkedIn just hit 45 million users--small compared to Facebook's 250 million, but still, pretty sizeable. I've had an account for years, but haven't used it in forever. Back when the economy was good, I did have a lot of recruiters emailing me through it.

Is anybody out there in Ketchum land still using the service?

It should be no surprise by now that PR professionals are leading the way (ahead of their marketing and advertising peers) as companies and brands make their way into the social web, as a new study shows (here's the press release). Earning attention from online media, bloggers and consumers plays to the DNA of PR people, who are all about making their clients' stories relevant where conversations and interest already exist. PR people are also taking the helm when it comes to internal organizing around digital media--from the creation of companies' social media polcies, to the formation of cross-departmental social media coucils, to employee training in social media engagement, to the monitoring, measurement, reporting on, and responding to, online conversations. Digital is blurring the lines between communications disciplines, but it continues to be PR's to own.

Great piece in The New York Times this past weekend in the “On Language” column.  It’s all about how the word fail went from verb to an interjection word.

Apparently, it started about six years ago, at least according to Urbandictionary.com. FAILblog obviously has popularized it, and on Twitter, it’s hard to go a minute without seeing SOMEONE say it. An expert quoted in the Times claims the financial crisis helped make it mainstream—I’d say ordinary people using it to characterize bad things that happen to them (along with the term FML—*uck my life) are the ones largely responsible for this.

The really interesting part of the article was about how companies are now getting branded with fail on Twitter: #MSNBCfail, #FoxNewsfail, #AmazonFail, etc.

Apparently, traditional media is not dead. (For the record, I never said that. I just said a lot of them were going to go away.)

The Seattle Times, according to The New York Times (which is having trouble keeping afloat these days), has turned a profit, due in small part to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer going belly-up.

Of course, there are other factors at play. P-I (which operates as a Web site now only) and the Times are sharing operational costs. The Times focuses on "time consumering investigative work," something most blogs don't spend a ton on--mostly because people prefer to read shorter, quick bites on the Web. Or maybe that's just me.

I really enjoy reading the paper in the morning, on my way in from Hoboken to NYC, so believe me, I don't want to see newspapers go away. I'd, of course, rather be reading them on a Kindle, but well, Amazon charges too much for subscription fees. But it's nice to see one newspaper "gets it" and knows how to adapt in this new era.

Our New York office has little screens in the elevators with content provided by a company called Captivate (note - I absolutely love this name. It's catchy for what it is, while simultaneously acknowledging that you are a 100% captive audience). It's distracting enough for the 8 seconds you're on that elevator (other note - how long is the ride to the 4th floor? I have absolutely no idea. I feel like you completely lose sense of how much time has passed in an elevator), and it provides a place to train your eyes so you don't have to deal with strangers.

Some helpful do's/don'ts about blogging -- from a personal conversation with Charlene Li

1.       Give the blog focus to achieve engagement. (examples include “social media trends” or “best practices in PR”)  Craft a menu of content categories to guide those who post.  (examples include “the pitch process,” “media trends,” “brainstorming approaches”)

2.       Consider a “chief blogger” to set the tone for other bloggers.