Media Gofer, Inc. monitors and analyzes all online press, network and cable broadcast and social networks to our clients’ specifications. We listen and develop relationships with consumers on their brand’s behalf. We watch the conversation and respond accordingly. Consumers want a conversation. Consumers don’t want to be marketed to… They want to be listened to and social media empowers them so brands must be answerable to them. Social influence is not tweets, likes, re-tweets etc. It’s what peers on social channels think that really matter. Our staff determine what the sentiment is on every media hit we harvest for a client. Algorithms have proven to be notoriously unreliable in terms of sentiment analysis. We believe its the human component that make our service more accurate and valuable.

My excitement is not because of an exciting new social game to play. It was because I saw a potentially more accurate influence measurement alternative to Klout or Peer Index. Klout and Peer index have been the darlings of many marketers lately as they provide a measurement of influence on social channels. They mostly measure how many followers, re-tweets, likes, etc. you have. What I like about Empire Avenue is that the values are determined not just by tweets, likes, youtube views, etc but also by real people. A human component has been added to the formula on Empire Avenue. Players of the game help determine your social influence by being willing to buy shares in your stock. That goes to the heart of what social media is all about, “people being social” and “people” making a decision not just another algorithm.

The jury is out on Empire Avenue and how influential it will be. As of this writing over 25,000 people are playing the game. If @empireave truly goes mainstream then marketers are sure to be as interested in your Empire Avenue share price as your Klout score or Peer index.

But few companies have the resources to cover just the fundamentals of these latest word-of-mouth resources – dedicating staff who learn the social media space, preparing a social media plan, building a presence and monitoring communications to build on positives and address potential reputation-busting negatives.

To stay out of social media is to sacrifice countless development opportunities, but to invest so much capital into education and staff can be risky. Staff time is valuable and hiring individuals can be expensive, so what’s a business to do?

Engage Your Customers (and Future Customers)

Media Gofer is a cost-effective, professional way to manage your media presence on the Web and beyond. Media Gofer monitors and analyzes electronic communications and “media mentions” about your company’s products and services and even your company’s name. Then we tell you how your company is perceived and performing in the world of public opinion.

And we do it the way you would like it done – with people who are experts in the field. Utilizing a proven combination of trained media professionals and proprietary software – elinks – tailored to meet your unique needs. We don’t waste your time with generic search engine aggregators that dump useless links in your email in-box leaving you to sort through the mess.

As your media partner, we offer a suite of services that you tailor to suit your needs:

• Social Media Management
• Active Engagement
• Media Monitoring

Still not convinced? Consider this:

67% of consumers were primarily influenced by word of mouth
(source: Mckinsey/Thompson Lightstone).
70% of Inc. 500 marketers are planning a word of mouth marketing strategy next year
(source: eMarketer).
50% of U.S. and U.K. executives are “highly likely” to buy a product or service based on word of mouth (source: Keller Fay).

Reputation Matters

Consumers are smart, money savvy and want to know about the company and services they use so leveraging every opportunity to get in touch and stay in touch is critical. The back fence and chatting with neighbors while hanging laundry might be gone, but talking about the products people like, and dislike, hasn’t changed at all.

One negative comment in the social media sphere can damage, even destroy, your reputation. Timely response is the best tool to minimize the impact of negative comments about your brand, and active engagement is a cost-effective, rapid-response tool, if you know how to do it right.

The Media Gofer staff becomes your staff in order to greatly increase your brand’s awareness in industry related forums, blogs, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and more. We will work with you to create or enhance the effectiveness of your Facebook page, Twitter page, company blog and other electronic resources to ensure consistent, high-quality communications with your existing customers and those who will be your customers in the future.

Media Gofer listens and develops relationships with consumers on behalf of your brand. We watch the conversation and provide you with intelligence on every comment we make in the social media sphere on your behalf.

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About Media Gofer

Media Gofer offers a scalable social media savvy team working in concert with your PR department to actively engage consumers and businesses in the social media sphere. We promote, advocate, respond and protect the client’s brand in the social media sphere.

With over 40 years of observing and responding to changes and trends in this media industry, our staff members are highly trained specialists who search and archive the media relevant to you. We engage your customers, your competition’s customers and produce social media tailored to increase your brand awareness and loyalty.

Even though we are on the forefront of media technology, we believe more than ever in the importance of personal contact. When you call us with questions, you won’t have to figure out a complicated voicemail system; you’ll talk to a person. We are always just a tweet, email, Facebook comment or phone call away.

The legitimization of citizen journalists

How often do we hear the term “breaking news”? Constantly, right? The truth is… there is no real breaking news these days. Stories are sold to us as” breaking news” for the purpose of keeping us glued to the tube.

Ratings, ratings, ratings…it’s all about ratings. That’s no secret. But the extent of the dissolution of broadcast news is the dirty little secret the networks don’t want you to know. If you did, their ratings might slide. But the truth is today, the cost of delivering a story overrides even ratings value. I learned this while talking with a journalist from a major network’s Asia bureau. This journalist’s description of how a story makes it to broadcast was a little shocking, even to one who has witnessed the demise of print journalism.

How it was versus how it is…from the mouth of this reporter, who spoke to me only on the condition that I’d promise anonymity

This person has been with the network for over 20 years and has watched the Asia bureau shrink from a staff of over 60 in the 80’s to six today. When the student uprising at Tiananmen Square in 1989 erupted, no less than eight crews with five people per crew per network filmed the events to make sure they “got” the story! It was cloak and dagger back then. Sending multiple crews to cover a story was the norm. Camera equipment was given its own plane seat and hotel room. Crews secretly filmed and smuggled tape to London to make the broadcast. Getting the story was everything, and cost of covering the story was not a consideration. It was the kind of stuff that would have made Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite proud.

Today Murrow and Cronkite must be cursing accounting from their graves. We are fed entertainment masquerading as “news”. An important international story like the Tiananmen Square story would likely go uncovered, and here’s why: Broadcast networks, no less than the major newspapers like The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, have closed or consolidated foreign bureaus. But, that’s not the primary reason. Today journalists must “sell” the story to the network, and I don’t mean just selling the story to the managing producer. Today accounting is heavily involved in the process of which stories get reported.

For the purpose of preserving my sources’ anonymity, I will provide my own version of the process as it was described to me. The following scenario, I’ve been reassured, is true for all networks. But first, a little education how the inner workings of broadcast news organizations operate today:

These days a foreign correspondent must submit a minimum of three stories to cover the “one” story they really want to report, and they must pitch the stories to different shows on the network in hopes of their being bought. There’s no one budget for news. If NBC Nightly News, which has its own budget for news, doesn’t pick up the stories maybe the Today show, with its budget, will.

So let’s suppose you have an important breaking story that should be reported — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s comment reported in the Wikileaks documents (“How am I supposed to put pressure on our banker (referring to China)?” To justify the cost of sending a crew, you need to pitch two other story ideas to the network –say, a story on China’s high-speed rail system and another on the aftermath of the earthquakes a couple of years ago. All three stories must be accepted to justify the cost of sending the crew to the region. But by the time the stories are pitched to the editors and scrutinized by accounting and actually bought by a show, the story is no longer “breaking”… it’s yesterday’s news.

That is the shocking reality of news reporting today. News stories are actually bought and sold to various shows within each network. Therefore, important breaking news just doesn’t get reported unless it’s convenient from an accounting point of view (i.e., the crew is already in place).

This explains the rise of the citizen journalist and blogger and their legitimization by the networks. It is through citizen journalists that the networks now get breaking news. The budget just isn’t there anymore to support a real news team.

In the same way the telephone was gradually accepted as a new form of communication as opposed to a fad, so too has social media moved from the realm of a curiosity to an established entity that can be leveraged for achieving important business goals. That is, if you have the knowledge, staff and media plan to make that happen.

While it is true that the landscape of social media is continually changing, there is a foundation of recognizable entities – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube – that are shaping the ways in which consumers utilize these resources. Just as these social media giants are engaging their customers in a conversation about how they do business (e.g. Facebook changing privacy policies when the demand for more, not less, control over personal information came from their users), individual businesses are looking for ways to engage their customers in this non-traditional environment.

Media Gofer provides businesses – bother large and small – with the information and staff they need to develop, manage and leverage a social media presence in the cyber-space marketplace. A media management company with over 40 years of “observing and responding to changes and trends in this media industry,” Media Gofer is “stays on the bleeding edge of technology and marketing trends to provide our clients the solutions today’s interconnected society presents,” according to Jeff Ryan, president and CEO.

“Media Gofer’s core skills of media monitoring and analytics are supported by a scalable social media savvy team working in concert with your PR department to actively engage consumers and businesses in the social media sphere,” Ryan says. “We promote, advocate, respond and protect the client’s brand in an ever changing social media through constant vigilance on behalf of your clients.”

For many media companies software does the monitoring and automatically pushes information that is not necessarily relevant to a business’ needs. At Media Gofer, people not machines, review social media sites and respond to positive and negative comments in support of a client’s brand. This hands-on approach is essential to being nimble when safeguarding a company’s most valuable asset – their reputation.

“Not every business has the financial or human resources to dedicate to social media, that’s why we have developed a comprehensive, cost-effective way for any company of any size to gain the benefits social media has to offer,” Ryan says. “You don’t need to learn how to develop a social media plan, we’ll walk you through the process and seamlessly incorporate your sales, marketing and other communications efforts into the social media sphere to enhance your business goals.”

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About Media Gofer:

Media Gofer has developed a revolutionary approach to brand identity management that combines Internet media via social media monitoring and active engagement with more other forms of media monitoring such as television broadcasts and print media such as newspapers and magazines. Providing timely response to maximize positive spin and minimize the impact of negative comments about your brand is the cost-effective, rapid-response tool Media Gofer offers to businesses of all sizes

The old Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” originates from a Chinese proverb that is one of three in severity, the other two being; “may you come to the attention of powerful people” and “may your wishes be granted”. A mixed bag for sure and strangely poignant in our globally interconnected society.

Last week, the Daily Beast and Newsweek announced the merger and creation of The Newsweek Daily Beast company aka Newsbeast. The evolution of the internet has certainly brought interesting times to us all. Global interconnectedness has put American workers in competition with the whole world. The print business model died with the advent of Craigslist, the meteoric growth of on-line advertising and news sites like the Daily Beast and Huffington Post.

The New York Times published a piece in which the new conglomerate’s chief executive, Stephen Colvin, told the paper that “Newsweek.com will cease to exist after the merger, and anyone who types the URL into their browser will be redirected to TheDailyBeast.com.” The staffers at Newsweek.com learned via the Times article that the merger of the Daily Beast, a two-year old online only news site and the iconic 77-year-old Newsweek magazine meant the end of Newsweek.com and their jobs.

What happened next saw all three proverbs come to light. A team of anonymous Newsweek.com employees launched a Tumblr page, titled “Save Newsweek.com – A Defense of Newsweek.com,” above the subheader, “Why we think it would be a mistake to close the award-winning Website of Newsweek magazine.” Within an hour of the launch of “Save Newsweek.com” over 200 comments were posted in support of Save Newsweek.com. Twitter lit up with thousands of tweets posting supportive comments with a link to the site.

Within hours of the Twitter uproar Tina Brown tweeted: “Woah! Newsweek.com’s superb content will live under its own banner and URLs on the new site. Not shutting down, combining.” The staffers indeed got the attention of an important person with a little help from the twitterverse. Will their wishes be granted? Vanity Fair’s Juli Weiner in her November 15th article on the merger noted; “Colvin’s statement and Brown’s tweet aren’t necessarily incongruous. The former suggests that Newsweek.com’s content will be hosted by DailyBeast.com, and the latter just clarifies that Newsweek.com’s content will differ from Daily Beast fare because its URL will somehow include “Newsweek.” Brown’s tweet… one could infer… Newsweek.com will be redirected to a Newsweek.com section of the Daily Beast. Only time (pardon the pun) will tell.

By Jeff Ryan

The shock felt round the world of journalism arrived in an announcement September10 by New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr:

“We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD.”

According to a report published on October 31 by futurist Ross Dawson, we now have a clearer picture of when that day will come:  The USA will see the end of the daily newspaper in 2017.

This is not the first time Dawson has predicted end times for paper-and-ink news.  In August, Dawson reported Australia would see its last print paper in 2022.
Dawson is globally recognized as a futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, and author. His Newspaper Extinction Time Line of global decline for print newspapers puts the USA at the head of the pack, followed by UK and Canada, with some newspapers lasting until 2040.

It’s not a big stretch to imagine Dawson is wrong on his time line, at least concerning The USA.  I, for one, will be surprised if it takes until 2017, especially if the New York Times decides to stop printing within the next couple of years,  also not a big stretch.

Dawson cites a number of key factors, which could speed things up –  most prominently, advances in technology,  which tend to happen faster than anyone predicts. (Think e-readers and tablets, but also digital paper.)

The end of great investigative journalism died some time ago. When was the last time we picked up a  newspaper to read great reporting the likes of Woodward and Bernstein?  But that is another subject for another post.

The end of the print newspaper is coming, and the question is still when.  One thing for sure: The glory days of the newspaper died in 2008, if not before.

Blog World Started with Keynote speaker Scott Stratten, author of UNmarketing with his message of be AWESOME… because people don’t buy mediocre…they buy AWESOME. Stratten’s message set the tone through the entire conference. Stratten was one of many rock stars of new media I had the pleasure to engage at Blog World.

The event confirmed my belief that the future of journalism is indeed the blogosphere and active engagement in social networks is the future of successful marketing or should I say UNmarketing stategies.

The three day conference in Las Vegas was full of informative new media panel presentations covering Real estate, health care, SEO/ SEM, blogging, crisis communication, social media & ROI and much more.

My favorite panel discussions were “Digital Crisis Communication” that included Scott Monty who heads up the social media function for Ford and has been called “the best corporate social media lead on the planet” and “How to hire a social media agency” which featured David Armano, SVP for Edelman, C.C. Chapman founder of The Advance Guard and Jim Tobin, President of Ignite social media, one of the nation’s first social media agencies. I was impressed with the openness the panelists shared their secrets of success for a host of national brands.

Of course there were lots of parties to attend of which I managed to make it to only a couple. One highlight for me was seeing my first Cirque du Soleil performance, Viva Elvis. I have been to many Broadway shows and Viva Elvis was very reminiscent of the classic Broadway show of song and dance with the addition of gravity defying acrobatics. If you loved Elvis you will love Viva Elvis and if you aren’t an Elvis fan you will love Viva Elvis!

Blog World was an awesome learning experience and I look forward to Blog world 2011!

The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan’s blog, turned 10 years old this week.

Sullivan, editor of “The New Republic 1990-1996, weekly contributor to New York Times Sunday Magazine, Sunday London Times and Atlantic Monthly has a million unique visits to his blog every month. The Daily Dish is among the top 15 blogs on the web.

During the Green revolution in Iran his blog was the #1 visited site in Iran. Why, because he saw “something is going on in Iran” before others saw the train roaring down the tracks. Iranian bloggers reached out to Sullivan sending emails, phone videos and pictures of events as they unfolded.

The Iran Islamic Revolution government was busy trying to shut down the blogs in Iran so Sullivan’s Daily Dish quickly became mission control for news in Iran.

Howard Kurtz, arguably one of the most influential journalists today left The Washington post to become Editor of The Daily Beast. Howard Fineman of Newsweek and Peter Goodman of the New York Times left their posts to join The Huffington Post.

The exodus of mainstream journalists from paper and ink to the web and blogeshere…. is very telling…

The immediacy of the web and the ability for the audience to interact in real time is changing the very nature of what journalists can contribute as pointed out by Sullivan and his Green revolution reporting. Sullivan not only reported the story but facilitated a political movement by the presence of his blog. The Daily Dish became a community, something paper and ink could never accomplish.

The bar is being raised for the blogosphere and it’s about time.

Yes there is a place for serious journalism in America to survive and thrive. The new mainstream is online and no longer one way reporting. It is a conversation.

The encouragement this towering figure in journalism education offered the journalism students in the audience — the future of journalism — was especially telling. Mom and Dad may prefer you look at computers, accounting, premed or law, Schudson told them. But newspaper journalism isn’t the only profession that doesn’t have a business model. Modern dance doesn’t have one. And neither does acting. And yet people do these things. They just have to have the passion.
I spoke with Professor Schudson briefly after his lecture and asked what he thought of the blogosphere as a place for journalists to ply their trade. He sees professional blogging as one of the supplements in his “newspapers on a diet” model. I asked him about Patch.com, the micro local news website recently purchased by AOL. He knew they pay their journalists, but beyond that, he knew little about it. I asked what he thought of social media. To my shock — he said his son suggested he should go online and look at it.
My take on his lecture? It may not be what this MacArthur Fellow wanted me to take away, but as I see it, print newspapers should panic: The future– at least for any business, government agency, or non-profit seeking to convey news of its activities to a target audience – is not in newspapers. It’s online in many different shapes and forms. And that is the bottom line.

Jeff Ryan
President
Media Gofer, Inc.