Category Archives: New Media

Ideas, New Media, Policy

Introduction to Copyright and Fair Use

I can has copyright?

What is copyright and what constitutes fair use? Do I need to register a copyright for my creative work to be protected? How long is a work copyrighted, and when does it enter the public domain? Are there advantages to using creative commons licensing or copyright?

In a recent course I took at the Brooklyn Brainery, our class took these questions head on to discuss the need to protect creative work and limit the exploits of copyright trolls. Sometimes referred to as intellectual property, copyright is a kind of property right (and a Constitutional Right in the US) which protects the use of creative work. Of course creative work is unique compared to other kind of property, so copyright is created whenever it’s “fixed in a tangible form of expression” by its creators, whether it’s a written novel or a music recording. Copyright gives its owners the exclusive right to reproduce the work, derivative works, and public performances of it.

There’s a careful legal balance between protecting the intellectual property rights of their owners and promoting the free expression which is guaranteed as a constitutional right.  For example, in the music recording industry many musicians don’t profit from sales of their recordings after they cede to their labels/distributors ownership to copyright for their work, sometimes waiting years to regain the copyright to their own songs. Likewise the creators of mash-ups and remixes such as Girl Talk make a legal balancing act necessary to avoid infringing on copyrights while using elements of old recordings to create something new.

While media law is a continuously evolving field and largely a matter of interpretation for the judges, over time some precedence has emerged that provides some legal framework. As we learned in our class for general purposes, here’s the four requirements you need to meet for Fair Use of copyrighted works: Continue reading Introduction to Copyright and Fair Use →

Facebook, Search, Social Media

Is Google vs Facebook is a false dichotomy?

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As Facebook’s latest push to highlight Google’s potential privacy concerns was revealed this past week, their rivalry was once again brought to the forefront of the public’s attention. While the two web behemoths continue to compete for ad dollars and offer increasingly similar services, the press plays up their business competition. Yet this news represents larger themes at work about how online businesses impacts the media business in particular, and the wider communications and economic paradigms more generally.

For instance, I keep reading posts that assume as common knowledge that the Google and Facebook are competing for users’ loyalty, but have yet to see evidence that this is true.  Instead I’ve noticed the large overlap of users for both services, albeit for different purposes. As far as many consumers are concerned Google and Facebook serve different functions, with the former used to search for information and the latter for relevant social links and recomendations.

From a consumer’s perspective Google and Facebook serve differing functions, even while they begin to encroach on each others core businesses through their growth. This same story about competition may be written about Microsoft vs Google, vs Apple, or vs Twitter, and so on; conflict drives the news, even if it does not reflect the unique audiences for individual businesses. While each company has different offerings, it’s fully possible for consumers to use both sites together rather than competing.

Of course this news has broader implications for PR professionals everywhere, by reinforcing negative stereotypes of the profession. Because of irresponsible, overly-secretive behavior of individuals at one of PR’s largest agencies, professionals like myself may have our reputations damaged. It’s even worse among the tech businesses, which sometimes see PR as a function only meant to earn press, and these days many startups would rather try going it alone using blogs and social media. At the very least this serves as another example of when PR can cause blowback, rather than how integral it should be in building communications strategy.

It’s my hope that the so-called “PR war” between two of the most popular global web brands will end, and both companies will find a more proactive way to continue building their own audiences. The history of the web has been of evolving and growing use, rather than competition between competing sources (as in print and broadcast media before it) for our attention, and I’d expect this to be the inevitable outcome between Google and Facebook.

Blogs, Ideas, Non-Profit

Blog Action Day 2010: Measuring the impact of Water use

Bottled Water Bar in Chicago's Museum of Science & IndustryWater is one of those things we never notice unless it’s unavailable. Sure I’ve been known brag about my hometown’s great tap water and am known to enjoy tasty beverages made from this resource, but besides the occasional outage I rarely consider it’s impact on my everyday life.  Yet for millions of people, access to clean, safe drinking water is not available, even if the solutions to this basic Human Right are simple.

As long as Water is a finite resource with limited availability to many, we should conserve this natural resource while increasing access to those who deserve our help. When I was writing my Master’s thesis on Energy Conservation (and last year’s Blog Action Day post), I had water in mind as well because it is another resource subject to increasing demand and inefficient use we take for granted in the United States.  Among my findings were that consumers were best encouraged to improve their usage of a resource when they have concrete examples of steps they can take to reduce their consumption (and the tools to measure them).

To better understand this issue, here’s a few ways to measure how we use Water everyday: Continue reading Blog Action Day 2010: Measuring the impact of Water use →

Blogs, Influence, Social Media

This Blog’s for You: How Beer indicates a Changing Marketplace.

When Anheuser-Busch’s sale to InBev was announced, years of branding began to unravel for the King of Beers. The maker of the Great American Lager (their slogan) was a family-owned business based in the American Midwest which had spent decades creating their brand based around nationalism and tradition; they were being purchased by a foreign corporate conglomerate. Almost immediately columnists were writing about how the sale was indicative not of globalization but of the American economic recession.

In spite of how the stories were framed, A-B products Budweiser and Bud Light continue to be the best selling beers in the United States (if not the world). The sale is only the latest consolidation between the world’s largest brewers; in the years prior rivals like Miller and Coors had combined into SABMiller, not to mention A-B’s own acquisitions before their own sale.  The beer business is as complex as any other industry, but major brewers like Anheuser-Busch have relied on a wide national market empowered by mass market advertising to drive up demand for their product.

The rising popularity of Craft Beer parallels the changing media landscape of the past decade; as audiences become fragmented, their consumption choices are changing.  Once mass market advertising for brewers would create print and broadcast ads designed to appeal to the widest audiences where they converged in a limited media market.  Brand loyalty was thought to begin when young adults learned about their products, and like their beers these branding techniques were meant to reach the largest audiences.  However this same target audience no longer converges in the same mass media sources, often turning online to learn about new products across a ever wider range of new media; about the only place this market would still see their ads might be watching the Superbowl, during which only the largest brewers can afford to advertise.

Consumers today have more choices in where they get their media from, especially online, which have opened up opportunities to build niche audiences like those in the craft beer market.  Along with a growing audience of beer lovers, craft breweries have taken to blogs and social media to promote their products.  This audience is passionate about their interest in craft beer, inspiring brand loyalty among those who are reached out to directly by brewers who share their values, not unlike the nationalism appealed to in Budweiser’s branding.  Most importantly this passionate audience of craft beer advocates likes to tell others about the beers they love, usually acting as opinion leaders within their network of friends and thusly growing the market for tasty craft beer every year.

Of course mass marketing still works in many markets; many consumers of Blue Moon (a SAB Miller/Coors product) believe it is a craft beer, and niche beers like A-B’s Michelob brand enjoy limited popularity. But the mass media advertising techinques do not work as well online, as demonstrated by the expensive failure of Bud.tv and other websites.  It has been suggested that beer in America’s national beverage, and as America changes so will it’s tastes.

You can learn more about Beer marketing and the craft beer movement by reading my blog The Brew Noob (on Twitter @BrewNoob).

Blogs, Ideas

Blog Action Day: Changing Minds (and Climate)

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Climate change is a fact, but it’s also a choice. Everyday we make decisions about our energy consumption, most of which will have an effect on global warming. Sometimes these decisions are impacted by policy, but climate change is not inevitable; we can slow and maybe prevent its effects through our own energy conservation choices.

This year’s Blog Action Day is a call to speak out about climate change, but by now most of us know what we should say about global warming. Probably the biggest contribution individuals can make is to turn their attitudes into behavior, at least by adopting energy conservation as a way of life.

In my Master’s thesis I compared different strategies to promoting energy conservation through case studies of three communication campaigns, including We Can Solve It, Flex Your Power, and Energy Star. As an example the above advertisement, from the Flex Your Power program in California (following their energy crisis in 2000), is only one part of a comprehensive social marketing campaign which has successfully reduced total energy consumption by at least 14%. These ads go further than merely providing all the reasons you’d want to save energy, because they give people actions to use in a way which make them seem fun and easy.

Of course no one approach to this issue works with every audience, and energy conservation is only part of the solution to climate change. In the future I’ll be posting more about my original research into energy and communication, but on Blog Action Day I would encourage you to do your own research.  My former professor Matthew Nisbet has studied communication about climate change, which he blogs about extensively, which helped inspire my own study of energy conservation.  Perhaps leading your own study about what you can do would be the best use of your energy today…

Blogs, Mobile

Moving On

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Goodbye DCNo I’m not moving my web address, but in real life from DC to New York City. Following graduation from American University and an internship at New Media Strategies, I’ll be moving to New York City (or Brooklyn rather) to seek employment as a communications professional.

As a long time proponent of location-based media, this move is more than simply a personal transition for me. This last week marks one year since I entered a Youtube video contest sponsored by WMATA (which I went on to win) documenting my commute in celebration of Car-Free Day in Washington, DC. I’ve been preparing for my move by writing a review and tribute to my neighborhood, Glover Park, on my local blog Pedestrian Capable DC, which specializes in transit and local issues.

Of course writing about local interests has been a professional interest of mine long before moving to Washington, DC.  While still a student at Webster University in Saint Louis I established another local blog, Highway 61 Revised, which created original news stories for college audiences within the metro area.  Alongside a team of other young journalists and engaged writers, we created original blog posts, mixtapes, videos, photo essays, and event listings which engaged a local audience of blog readers through its website and social media tie-ins.

I learned about building relationships with local media and other bloggers through my blog, and had a few adventures along the way.  Being a blogger has introduced me to a whole ecosystem of location-based social media that I still use everyday, from the Craigslist postings that helped me move to the marketing opportunities of newer networks like Brightkite and Foursquare.  Without these services I might have had a harder time finding out where to move, much less discovering my own neighborhood through the word-of-mouth recommendations of my neighbors.

As I prepare to move into my new home in New York City, I know I will use location-based social media to discover the landscape once more; reading local blogs and checking consumer-review websites like Yelp are only the beginning. In the meantime I’m still addicted to blog feeds from STL and DC, now augmented by new media in New York City.  I’m looking forward to beginning a new adventure in New York, learning from my experience using location-based social media in order to discover what’s worthwhile and new wherever life takes me.

Continue reading Moving On →

Blogs, Non-Profit, Twitter

Living Classrooms – Learning By Doing

Living Classrooms logoAny company can use online media to connect their brand with their audience, but how does a non-profit grow their organization despite expected declines in charitable contributions?   Even with a limited budget, digital levels the playing field to organic and earned media opportunities for non-profits such as Living Classrooms, a client I had the privilege of consulting for last spring.

Along with a team of classmates at American University, we set about creating a strategic communications plan for Living Classrooms, a non-profit organization serving underprivileged youth in the DC-metro community since founding in 2001.  One of the challenges unique to this client was their difficulty distinguishing not only from a successful parent organization, but also standing out from other non-profits in DC currently struggling for funds, so our team decided branding would become a strategy.  Their hands-on education approach meant almost all of their funding was used towards their programs, and presented a challenge to developing new sources of fundraising. Meeting these budget limitations helped us build a strategy with specific objectives (met through some work on our own part).

As discussed in our presentation (and memo), creating and using a blog and Twitter were critical tactics to meet the campaign’s goals.  These online tools serve an agenda-building relationship with the local news media, which Living Classrooms would try to earn media coverage without using expensive advertising. However social media is not synonymous with free media: even though these platforms are free to use, they require thoughtful and persistent work from dedicated professionals in order to work well.

Any organization can ask someone to Twitter for them, but only a professional can make it relevant for reporters, bloggers, and others who would want to tell Living Classroom’s story.  My role in this process was to build these media tools for them, and to start using these so that Living Classrooms would could model on them; unfortunately they did not have the budget to hire someone to write so my model was key.  While new media levels the playing field, a public communications professional can lift an organization above from the rest, so that a non-profit like Living Classrooms can stand out online.

These tactics also play a critical role in winning and retaining new donors, since they allow Living Classrooms to provide regular updates which demonstrate the value of their donation.  Because Living Classrooms, like so many non-profits, is involved in so many programs donors don’t always know about all the work their donation allows an organization to accomplish everyday.  These regular updates demonstrate the compelling work Living Classrooms does through stories told in words, videos, and pictures in the channels which new donors are likely to discover this cause.  This serves as a compliment to the newsletter and mailer our group designed, often adapting the same material for online use.

We’re still waiting to see which parts of our strategic plan will be used by Living Classrooms this year, so in the meantime please check out the blog I set up to learn more. For a communications professional with a strategic approach, online tools can become a successful tactic for non-profits to  overcome limitations and expand their communication budgets, ultimately changing minds and lives of those most in need of help.

Blogs, Broadcast, YouTube

Digital TV: Convert Now

By now you know the drill: broadcast television is switching from analog to digital signals. There are a few ways to keep receiving television of course: if you get cable or satellite nothing will change, but it you’re still using an antenna signal on an older television you’re going to need a DTV converter box. Fortunately you can get a U.S. Government issued coupon that covers most, if not all of the cost of these new set-top boxes before the transition on Friday June 12th, 2009.

While you probably know all about the Digital Televison transition, chances are you have family members or friends who still aren’t ready, even if they’ve already heard. So the Department of Commerce (partnering with the CEA) consulted with myself, as part of a group of American University students, to get the word out to young people so that we could help those we know prepare for the transition. Using a YouTube video contest, our objective was to strategically reach out to this audience so that they would be ready to help others get equipped in time before the transition. With our sights set on the original February 17th transition date, we were ready to use this contest to target these technology-connecting audiences.

Of course creating buzz with a YouTube contest takes more an announcement and a prize; although our partners had produced an original video and sent out press releases, the contest did not gain traction (or stand out from dozens of others competing on YouTube at any time). So my consulting group needed to do a little more: we created a social media presence for the contest on Facebook and used word-of-mouth marketing to engage potential entrants on YouTube.
We even wrote a script and shot a short video (watch above) mock-entry into the contest to show just how easy it could be to make a qualifying entry. These tactics helped to spur 12 contest entries, 5 videos of which were deemed finalists for the public to vote on the winning entry. More importantly the contest created discussions, both online and offline by contest participants and viewers, about the DTV transition within this target audience.

Ultimately it’s hard for any group to take credit among the myriad of messages supporting the switch, but I’d like to think our tactics contributed an outreach to a key public whose unique role might make the difference. Of course we’ll find out for sure on Friday June 12, 2009 just how many American’s television sets will be left in static.

Facebook, New Media, video, YouTube

New Media, New Video


12for12: The 12 second Tweet on 12seconds.tv

Everyone already knows that putting a video on YouTube might be a good way to get the word out about your campaign. Of course it’s not very easy for yours to stand out, so it’s important to explore the new venues where your message could be seen and heard.

To be sure YouTube is still where it’s at: for most internet users it is the default site to visit when you’re looking for a video, making it the second most popular search engine behind their parent Google. But although YouTube is supported with the largest collection of video in the world, it is not well designed to support productions of high-quality content from the Entertainment industry; their video ubiquity does not equal market dominance in video forever.

Even as YouTube prepares to launch a new video platform for premium content (ie broadcasters and advertising), HULU has begun to establishing itself as a successful haven for broadcast programming and advertising on the internet. In a little over a year HULU has become the #2 video site (behind YouTube of course) with 34 million viewers in February, and is expected to earn at least $120 million in ad revenue for their operating partners – NBC and FOX. And while many platforms for online video have launched in the past few years, HULU is backed with a marketing budget of $50 million from their partners.
Continue reading New Media, New Video →

Blogs, Personal Branding

The Resume Website

a public, pay-per-use internet terminal

I knew it would help to build a website with my resume, but I didn’t realize how much.  Ever since publicly launching this site less than a month ago, I have been humbled by all the positive feedback from colleagues, classmates, prospective employers, and on social networks.

A few have even asked me to help build their own websites, although I haven’t decided how much to charge.  The truth is that almost anyone is able to build a website like this one. I had never learned how to buy a domain name, web hosting, or to set up the website until I tried it for myself.

I am a firm believer that blogs are capable websites for almost any purpose, so I devised my resume website as a WordPress blog (this part is free).  By hosting my own blog (not necessarily free) I needed to set up WordPress in their famous 5-minute installation.  This open-source software gives me the ability to customize by adding features and designs to my blog.  And since this is a blog, it doesn’t take any advanced knowledge of codes or programming to build it; making this website is as simple as writing with a word processor.

While I would be happy to make a few bucks helping my friends build nice looking websites, but I think they might learn some valuable skills by trying it for themselves.  At least a few of my friends have been doing just that on their own websites.   And until this site makes the first page of Google search results for my name, it’s going to take a lot more to make my own name stick out from all the other Matthew Hurst’s of the world.

Building this website has been an ongoing process, helping me to consider how it could be improved by incorporating feedback.  There is almost always a better way to do this work, so I really appreciate all the feedback so far, but I have trouble taking credit; after all it’s just another WordPress blog.