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Traditional Media Still Rules!

This article in the NYT yesterday shows that traditional media still leads the blogosphere in breaking news by an average of 2.5 hours.

Since the emergence of blogs, companies have developed paranoia that a blogger can create a crisis faster than you can type "meme". This study states that only 3.5% of the "memes" tracked originated on blogs.

In other words, 96.5% of the time, bloggers are talking about what they read in traditional media. But what is most interesting is how the blogs pick up a meme and propagate it, lengthening the news cycle and keeping attention on a topic well after the traditional media has moved on to the next story.

A couple of caveats about this study: it looks specifically at news (and only online news, not offline publications), and not mentions of brands or companies. The dynamics of how people talk about brands in social media are likely to be different.

That said, it suggests that it may be more important to reach out to bloggers to dampen a meme that is damaging or to give a push to one that is positive, than it is to try to get the bloggers to start the meme in the first place. But with only a 2.5 hour lag, you have to act fast.

The story summarizes a study done at Cornell University -- it's well worth a read!

Posted by Jim Nail on July 14, 2009 at 04:58 PM | Email this post Permalink
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Comments

Jim,

Great post, great interpretation. (No surprise there.) I didn't see this article or report, so thank you very much for blogging about it. This is exactly a question I've been thinking about lately!

Your fan,
Joe

Posted by: Joe Chernov | Jul 14, 2009 5:24:11 PM

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