News You Can Use

No less than the Grey Lady of Journalism opines:

About 30 percent of adults in the United States get their news on Facebook, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. The fortunes of a news site, in short, can rise or fall depending on how it performs in Facebook’s News Feed.

It comes from an article on the impact of social on the traditional news world.  (Tip of the hat to the daily PRSA Issues and Trends newsletter -- are you a member? You should be.)

By the way, the study link -- that's to a Pew Research piece we referenced a couple of weeks ago regarding the way we use social to get our news, but I was more focused on the items further down the page.  NYT was all about the very first graphic.

So if the NYT is concerned that the gateway to the public is social, why oh why are you not doing the same?

Gets Worse From Here

An interesting take and a use of a favorite analogy regarding the North Carolina scandal in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education.  The authors, from nearby South Carolina, bemoan the inevitable nature of cheating driven by the desire of boards of trustees, high paying donors and upper administrators to bask in the reflected glory of athletes at Good Ole U.  The trio of authors opine:

The real problem is that, as the days pass and this latest scandal fades, coaches, players, tutors, and administrators will most likely go back to business as usual, and college-sports fans across the country will tune in to ESPN’s College GameDay and savor the sweet smell and taste of their big-time college-sports sausage, all the while ignoring the discarded athletes, as well as higher education’s integrity, that have been ground up in the process.

Ah yes, welcome to the sausage factory.

I call Dr. BS on two parts of this.  First, it didn't take the Athletic-Entertainment Complex to cause this type of activity.  Anyone remember when Louisiana Gov. Huey Long dragooned trains into the service of transporting his Fighting Tigers of LSU around the South?  Didn't think so.  BTW, that was the 1930s for the kids these days.

Second, while Disney/ESPN didn't cause all this, the incredible amounts of money flowing are exacerbating it.

About a decade and a half ago when the first thoughts of a national championship in football begat the BCS and today's playoff, I turned to friends and said:

You thought the hundred thousand dollar free throw was something?  Try the million dollar game.

I think I was off by an order of magnitude.  Anyone who thinks whole administrations won't compromise themselves for the incredible piles of cash available is naive.

Remember, we -- the collective of fans, college athletics and university administrators -- have done this to ourselves by demanding the "ultimate" title game.

Free Speech Isn't Free

Let's add a direct athletics chapter to the "say it social, pay a penalty at work" book.  The Big 12 fined Baylor's SID, Heath Nielsen, for comments made on his Twitter account related to the BU-West Virginia game.

Very notable in this:  it was also what he retweeted.

I know many in the game who will forward a link or retweet and then claim, oh, I was just sending along someone else's comments.  No, by forwarding you just ENDORSED those comments.

Having vented myself on radio as a color analyst, I know there is a fine line between accurate reporting of questionable calls and "undermining" officials.

Kevin Trahan of SB Nation makes another key point.  Fining the Iowa State AD for his video comments was one thing, handing out a $1,000 fine to an SID . . . you might as well add another 0 to that so you could get a sense of what that means to the underpaid and overworked in that field.

Sure, Big 12 is trying to send a message.  Here's one: don't do it on the backs of the people who make your machine run.

Auto Post is the Deebil?

No surprise to this space, but always reassuring to see data that backs up the idea that automatic cross posting is a bad idea.  This info graphic, courtesy of today's PRSA email, talks about a dramatic negative impact upon your social media.

#4: Auto-posting to Facebook decreases likes and comments by 70%.

OK.  My cognitive dissonance meter went off.  How did they know that?  What's the source?  They cite a Hubspot study.

A little back tracking, and like many stats, this one is a little old.  A 2012 study from Digital Buzz Blog is the source.  In that infographic, Inside Facebook is the source.

Inside Facebook (we're now at Sept. 2011) cites a study by Applum that was really looking into what happen when you used Tweet Deck or Hoot Suite.  That study link is a 404 now, but an editor's note revealed a little more.  Seems this was focused on the mechanics of auto-posting as they noted that EdgeRank/Facebook had a whitelist of OK sources to auto-post from.

At the end of the string, the repeated stat was more about how it was reposted (from an aggregator program) than what was reposted automatically.

Certainly, point four above fits my view of the social world.  What started me down the chase was what happens when Facebook is very deliberately your secondary audience?  For example, football recruits live in Twitter.  That content is of interest to adults following the program who may be predominantly Facebook demo.  Do you really care at that point if the interaction drops?

This needs more current study.  In a world where our regular information from brands is routinely unseen without "boost", the real devil in these details lies within that Facebook issue.