Twitter, Sky News and the Death of Interweb Browsing (and Reuters, and traditional PR and web advertising)
Last week, Sky News appointed a ‘Twitter Reporter.’ According to Sky’s press release, Ruth Barnett will take up her new news desk on March 16th and will “dedicate her time scouring the Twittersphere for news stories on a daily basis and feeding back relevant stories to the rest of the Sky News team.”
Good on you Sky. Whilst other parts of the mainstream media are suggesting that the use of a ‘dedicated’ Twitter-follower misses the point, I’m more interested in what it says about the way people (news desks included) are now using the web to get their daily doses of content.
Yesterday, Sky News used wire services like Reuters to pick off (and ratify) their breaking stories, whilst we, the media-loving public, got our information from Sky News.
Today, we’re taking our feeds from the World Wide Interweb, and not from Sky News. Further, we’re getting these news hits from normal people like ourselves – via services like Twitter, not news reporters.
If you doubt me, then check out a couple of slides we’ve been using in C&M training sessions lately:
That’s right, all the data shows that browsing as we knew it is dead.
A quick synopsis:
- The world’s top 40 web sites are either tools, web services, or social networking sites (eg, Google, FaceBook, Twitter)
- In the UK, 10% of all traffic goes to social networking sites (and this number is rising)
- These services are social in nature. They are driven by people, not advertising, news desks, or traditional editorial
- Other people’s recommendations are now the #1 influencer of our web browsing habits
- We no longer ‘browse’ the web using traditional media outlets as our guide. Instead, we search, blog, micro-blog, bookmark, and share… and we take our steers from other people who do the same (as does Google – this is precisely how PageRank works)
In this context, Sky’s Twitter Reporter makes perfect sense. It’s a great move. Every reporter should be using Twitter to get a handle on what’s happening in the world.
More to the point, Reuters should be worried, and we should all be thinking about the value of traditional web marketing and PR techniques. Twitter, Facebook, blogging and social tools like delicious and Stumbleupon give a new purpose to ordinary people: we’re all information power-brokers now…. So, if you want to influence your people, you’d better start influencing their people using these kinds of services.
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Doug - Velocity, B2B Marketing
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