ChasNote

Turns out he actually listens to soft rock.

Now that radio measurement firm Arbitron has replaced its self-reported paper diaries with Portable People Meters that actually track listening behavior (as Nielsen did for TV ratings in 1987), it’s finding that we listen to the embarrassing stuff more often than we’d like to admit. Ratings for classical stations are nearly 11% lower than previously reported, and men make up 16% more of the soft-rock audience than they did when they had to acknowledge it in writing. More at NY Times.

Eleven percent here, 16% there — it adds up to a big gap between what we do and what we tell pollster we do.

Newspapers have lost 7 million subscribers in the past 25 years, while online newspapers have picked up 30 million readers in the past five. See? The Internet’s not all bad! (Though you might argue that email’s mostly bad, since 90% of emails sent each day are spam.)

(Thanks, @emilyquestions!)

From a summary of a recent PostRank study published at Read/Write Web:

“The big picture is that total engagement with online content is growing while on-site engagement is declining in significance as off-site engagement like link sharing on social networks grows.”

In other words, more people are doing something with the content they read (commenting, sharing, voting), but they’re doing it on the large social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Digg rather than in the comments fields on the sites where the content originates.

August 2009 Comscore data for unique US visitors to “social networking” sites. Graphic from USA Today. ???? ?????

We’re now spending 17% of our online time with social networking sites, up from 6% last August. From Read/Write Web:

“According to new figures from Nielsen, the amount of time spent surfing social networking and blogging sites had tripled since last year, suggesting ‘a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used,’ says Jon Gibs, VP of media and agency insights at the company’s online division….”

As a result:

“Even as companies decreased their overall ad expenditures, they increased their spend on top social networks and blogs — up 119% from last year. ($108 million in August 2009 up from $49 million in August 2008). And when broken down by category, the increases are even more dramatic. The entertainment industry, for example, has increased spending by 812% year-over-year on social network sites and the travel industry increased spending by 364%.”

(Thanks, Dave!)

That’s according to Adify sales data assembled as a Chart of the Day at SAI. No surprises in the composition of the top 3. It’s interesting, though, to see the categories that are experiencing a post-recession bounce: tech, food and real estate.

Josh Bernoff summarizes topline findings from Forrester’s 3rd annual social-media audience study, The Broad Reach of Social Technologies.

Two things stand out for me.

1. More than 80% of the US internet population is at least consuming content created by or distributed by social media platforms.

2. Nearly a quarter of the US internet population actively creates (blogs or publishes into services such as Twitter) or actively curates (a group Forrester calls “Collectors” who help aggregate or re-organize content via platforms like Digg).

Both are staggeringly big populations.

“We no longer search for news, the news finds us.”

More and more, that statement appears to be true. Twitter gets more traffic from Facebook than Google. VC blogger Fred Wilson sees the same. And for PC Mag, it’s Digg over Google.

More on the above quote plus a universe of social media stats in 4 minutes:

(Thanks, Mac!)

Last week I conducted a highly unscientific experiment to see which of my social graphs — my Facebook friends or my Twitter followers — drives more traffic to content here on ChasNote. My conclusion: Twitter. As far as I can tell, there are three main reasons. One, the one-way follow relationships of Twitter drives different behavior than the two-way friendships of Facebook. Two, the platforms encourage their users to interact with them in different ways, and we tend to do what we’re told. Three, the impact of doing those things (how we interact with each service) touches more people when you do it in Twitter.

I have a few more connections in Facebook (around 800) than I do in Twitter (around 700), close enough for unscientific experiments. On Friday I posted a link to one story in my Facebook newsfeed, and another I tweeted out in Twitter.

The Facebook-promoted story was Bugs Bunny Stars in Retro Comic Advertorials, which is about as close to a “broad appeal” as I get, pictures of Bugs Bunny and all. The Twitter-promoted story was If Twitter Community Had 100 Members, an infographic illustrating Twitter usage patterns. Less mainstream, but also highly relevant to other Twitter users.

Well, one of my Facebook pals left a comment (her family once starred in an advertorial, just like Bugs), but only a dozen or so of them clicked over to ChasNote. Google Analytics attributes 12 pageviews to Facebook.com.

The infographic about Twitter usage struck a chord with my Twitter followers. Four of them, one with 300 followers, two with 2000 followers and one (David Armano) with 19,000 followers, re-tweeted the story. Eight of Armano’s followers, with 1300 more followers, collectively, re-tweeted it again. So immediately the “reach” of my Twitter campaign jumped to around 27,000, almost 40 times the 700 I started with. And the Twitter crew clicked over to ChasNote in much greater numbers: More than 359 450 of those 27,000 (updated 8/5), or a 1.7% click-through rate. (Assuming the 210 pageviews listed as “direct” are mostly Twitter readers that use an app like TweetDeck or Twitteriffic.)

In raw numbers, Twitter crushed Facebook. (Though the click-through rate among my Facebook friends, at 2.5%, was twice that of fifty percent higher than that among the Twitter folks; maybe that’s because most who saw the link in Twitter don’t know me, or maybe Facebook’s percentage benefited from the math of small numbers).

There are a variety of reasons I’m connected with people in Facebook — we went to school together, or we work together or we’re related to each other. In all cases, though, it’s because we know each other and like each other and want to keep tabs on each others’ lives. It’s friendship on some level, and it’s two directional. The Twitter dynamics are different. Of the 700 or so people who follow me, I know a handful. Maybe more if I took the time to visit my followers’ profile pages to find out the real names behind some handles I don’t recognize. But the point is, we’re not connected because we’re friends or want to become friends; they’ve subscribed to my feed because they see some kind of value in what I post to Twitter. Since I don’t use Twitter to talk about what I’m having for lunch (I mostly post links to articles I’m reading to stay smart on marketing and the technologies that facilitate marketing), the value they must see is CONTENT value — links to stuff worth reading — not a social value. The Twitter relationship, at least for followers of ChasNote, is all about the links I send out, so it makes sense that my Twitter followers are more likely (than my Facebook pals, who might just like it that we’re pals) to click on links I tweet.

Another reason Twitter works better as traffic-driver to web content is that Twitter’s limited functionality doesn’t give followers much choice. If you like something you see in Twitter, you re-tweet it. That’s all you can do, really. In Facebook, I can post a comment or click the “I like it” button — or I can forward the link to my own Facebook friends (the equivalent of re-tweeting), but that’s the hardest of the options Facebook presents, so I’ve never actually done it, and I bet I’m far from alone.

That gets to the final point: Impact. When I do what Facebook encourages me to do, comment or “like” something, it shares my appreciation with a small group of others — the “publisher” of that link (ie, my friend) and the other individuals who, like me, posted a comment on that piece of content. When I do what Twitter wants me do, hit the re-tweet button, I’m sharing my appreciation (and the link) with everyone who follows me in Twitter. When four of my Facebook friends like what I post, I’m still sharing that post with only 800 friends; when four of my Twitter followers like something, the posted link is put in front of (in this case) another 27,000 people.

Back in May, when I posted that I was leaving FM for Digg, three friends shared the link with their Facebook communities. One was my cousin (1300 friends), one was a co-worker (1200 friends) and the other was a friend from college (325 friends) — say 2800 individuals across those three social graphs. I tweeted the link to my 700 followers, too, but no one re-tweeted it. Yet Twitter still drove more readers to the full story at ChasNote: 122 visits from Twitter versus 110 from Facebook. Less than 4% of the Facebookers who may have seen the link clicked on it; 17% of the Twitterers who may have seen it clicked on it. In this case, Twitter and Facebook ran a tie based on raw numbers, but Twitter clobbered Facebook in percentage terms.

Full story at Ad Age.