Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

During the South-by-Southwest session,Sources in the Social Media Age, Joe Ciarallo, senior director of PR at salesforce.com, moderated a lively discussion with an all-star panel that included Greg Galant, CEO of Sawhorse Media (the group that brings us Muck Rack), Mike Isaac, senior editor at All Things D, and Edmund Lee, media reporter, Bloomberg.

The result was refreshingly straight talk and a fascinating flood of quotable insights, the highlights of which I’ve broken into categories below...

If you want some light reading for eternity, Google the question “is the media biased.” The question is a staple of both the political right and the socialist left.

Either The Media is partisan against Republicans as part of our obvious liberal agenda, or the Corporate Media insidiously perpetuates the status quo by shutting out dissenting voices and uncomfortable narratives in favor of crony capitalism and entrenched privilege.

Choose your favorite. They’re both idiotic....

Tech site develops predictive platform to monetize traffic surges

In an analytics-obsessed Web climate, everyone is chasing the big story. The problem is, more often than not, big breakout traffic scoops yield attention, eyeballs and notoriety, but very few dollars. Last month, Deadspin broke the story on the Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax, netting the site nearly 4 million pageviews. But as Gawker Media mentioned publicly following the story, the company had no technical solution in place to monetize an unforeseen surge in traffic.

Gawker is not alone. Web publishers have struggled across the board with this, which is why Ars Technica has been hard at work with what could be a viable solution.

At Ars Technica, Condé Nast’s 15-year-old high-brow tech site, Ken Fisher and his small in-house team were lamenting the traffic conundrum when they decided to build a real-time dashboard geared toward examining pageviews with a predictive eye toward recently posted articles that are poised to trend.

"Within two days we found it was working really well," explained Ars editor in chief Fisher. “We were identifying within an hour stories that would go on to do 900,000 views. And these were not pieces you’d hear by title and think, ‘That’s going to be killer.’ One was titled, Quantum Networks May Be More Realistic Than We Thought.”...