The Steve Rubel Stream

Insights on emerging technologies and trends.
Steve Rubel
Steve Rubel (bio) is SVP, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, a division of Edelman - the world's largest independent PR firm.

He is charged with helping clients identify emerging technologies and trends that can be applied in marketing communications programs. Rubel also explores these topics on his site, a monthly Forbes.com column and in a bi-weekly AdAge column. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook as well.

Steve can be reached via email at steverubel@gmail.com.

Note: Everything posted on this site is Steve's personal opinion. It does not represent the views of Edelman or its clients.

               

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Bringing the Stream to Facebook

I am making a slight shift in my content strategy. My Posterous-powered site will continue to feature insights, observations and essays about emerging technologies. It will include any content - text, photos, videos - where some degree of depth is required. This includes my AdAge and Forbes columns. I have also renamed it the Steve Rubel Stream to better reflect its mission.

Now I am also adding a Facebook Page that will feature everything that's posted here plus exclusive content for those of you who opt in and become a fan. It's very similar to how I approach Twitter - which also features links that I don't always share elsewhere. The difference is that the new Facebook Page will sit in between what I do here and Twitter and hopefully spark a rich discussion from a broader group of people who don't necessarily read blogs or use Twitter. 

Please become a fan today. My initial post asks for input on the pros/cons of creating different content for each social network. As always, if you have thoughts on how I can evolve this I am all ears.


Filed under  content   Facebook   social networking   streams  
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Posted 20 days ago

BNO Breaking News Service is Now on Facebook

BNO Breaking News, a service that first made its name on Twitter and was later acquired by MSNBC, is now on Facebook. It just started to syndicate updates into my news feed about Former Vice President Dick Cheney's heart episode. It's great to see this service make its way to Facebook where we can also comment on status updates in line. Hopefully millions more will discover BNO Breaking News as more see Facebook as a source of news.


Filed under  Facebook   journalism   streams  
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Posted 26 days ago

Presentation: Communicating in the Age of Streams

Last week during the launch of Seesmic Look in New York, I gave a presentation on communicating in the age of streams. You can watch the video here or below (if for some reason the embedded video doesn't go direct to my part of the talk, simply scroll to the 1:24:04 minute mark). My slides can be found here. I have embedded them below as well with the YouTube video too.

A quick summary ...

All of us - whether you're a stay at home mom or an executive - are going to have to cope with the firehose. There's more information coming at us than we can handle. Information will scale. Human attention is finite. This presents a major challenges to those of us who are in the attention business. It's like 25 lanes of traffic trying to squeeze into the Lincoln Tunnel all it once. Your marketing campaign is just one bus.

To mitigate this ongoing trend of streams, communicators will need to: 1) be as ubiquitous as possible, 2) adopt multiple messages, stories and formats and 3) make sure you allow your employees to get out there - in other words, use the force, don't fight it.

More in the embedded media below.

Filed under  attention   attention crash   events   Lifestreaming   marketing   PR   presentations   streams   video  
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Posted 1 month ago

Email Newsletter Subs Trump RSS - Study

An unsurprising study out of Hubspot this morning reveals that email subscribers to many blogs factor in 12x larger than those who read through RSS. I am not seeing this in my own stats however. Only 1.5% of you read site feed via email. Still, I keep thinking about where RSS reading is going these days. I love the technology but have begun to explore other opt

Borrowing a page from Matt Cutts, for January I am trying a 30-day challenge - to reduce my use of RSS. I am trying to only dip into Google Reader as a data warehouse. I am finding that email newsletters, Gmail filtering and Twitter lists/Listimonkey maybe all I need. It simplifies my streams.

Anybody else seeing a shift to email newsletters? E-marketer reports that companies are increasingly integrating email and social media.

Filed under  blogs   email   RSS   stats   streams  
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Posted 2 months ago

Video: Engaging Employees in the Age of Streams

Pete Cashmore from Mashable calls 2010 the year of digital distraction - and he's spot on. The deluge of information is only going to increase, which is going to make reaching people harder than ever. Mark Evans recommends focusing on quality not quantity - which is something I have started to do.

While so much attention focuses on just what the Attention Crash means for consumers and marketers, there's another story looming. Companies will also need to fight the internal and external noise just to engage their own workforce.

Earlier this month I spoke at the Edelman Change and Employee Engagement Summit on this topic. I offered three potential solutions, which are summarized here, In addition, you can see more in this nine minute excerpt from my talk. 

Has your company changed the way it communicates with you?

Filed under  attention   attention crash   Edelman   employee engagement   PR   streams   video  
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Posted 2 months ago

As the Decade Closes, Has RSS Faded Too?


The decade is coming to an end. And with it, so has the era of feeds too faded - though you can argue it never got off the ground. Even with real-time technologies like pubsubhubbub, RSS today feels slow and it's clear its best days are behind it. Feed reading, like blogging, feels "very 2005." I wasn't convinced until recently, however.

Until a few weeks ago, this die-hard techie was clinging to Google Reader like a disco maniac might his eight-tracks. I felt like the last hold out; the guy still dancing to the Bee Gees when everyone else had gone punk - and maybe I was. 

Now, however, slowly but surely I am moving more of my consumption out of RSS and into the Twitter stream. Twitter, not blogs, long ago became the focal point for reading and conversing around news for many. So it's natural, as this report on Read Write Web indicates, that most of us who were even using RSS readers to begin with have ditched them and have moved to tracking news in the stream instead. And we're not alone. According to Forrester, eight percent of US online adults post and read updates on Twitter at least monthly.

Personally, this is something I resisted for three reasons: a) I like full text feeds, b) there was a lack of organization/lists and c) Twitter remains very dependent on "now," making saving and digesting information at a later date in a Tivo-like way all the more difficult. That all changed with the advent of Twitter lists. 

Nowadays I am bringing it all into Gmail, which other than my corporate email account is my sole productivity and social Ginsu Knife. I already publish to my Posterous-powered lifestream site via email. Couple that with Twitgether, a full-blown real-time Gmail Twitter client, NutshellMail for tracking social network interactions like replies and Listimonkey to bring me Twitter lists every hour via email (pictured above), my Google Reader is starting to get lonely.

How about you? Are there any die-hard RSS users out there who have not succumb to the stream?
Filed under  Gmail   RSS   streams   Twitter  
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Posted 2 months ago

Search the Live Web with Two Simple Bookmarklets


I have become addicted to Google's new real-time search feature. It's an incredible window onto the world's psyche. However, it's somewhat lacking in one small way.

By default, Google doesn't serve up real-time results for most searches. It only does so for topics that are in the news or the conversation zeitgeist. For example, as of this writing, a search for the phrase "Google" doesn't turn up any real-time results. Compare this with any of the terms listed on Google Trends, all of which will automatically feature real-time results. 

If you want to easily access Google real-time results for any query, all you need is two simple bookmarklets.

The first bookmarklet once triggered will reveal the latest status updates from Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook and others. If you select text on a page it will automatically pull it into a query. If you don't select any text, the bookmarklet will pop up a box for you to enter a query.
javascript:x=escape(getSelection());if(!x)%7Bvoid(x=prompt('%20-%20Google%20Real-time%20Updates:',''))%7D;window.location='http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=en&tbo=1&output=search&tbs=mbl:1&q='+x
The second bookmarklet is broader - it pulls in all real-time results from blogs, news sources and Twitter and like the one above will work on pre-selected text or a new query.
javascript:x=escape(getSelection());if(!x)%7Bvoid(x=prompt('%20-%20Google%20Real-time%20Search:',''))%7D;window.location='http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=en&tbo=1&tbs=rltm:1&q='+x
Both bookmarklets should work in various browsers. I tested them in Safari and Firefox. All you need to do is create a bookmark with the precise URL listed above. (For some reason I can't get javascript code to link properly on Posterous, otherwise I wold have done so.)
Filed under  bookmarklets   google   lifehacks   real-time web   realtime   streams  
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Posted 3 months ago

How to Bring Back the Old Facebook Feed

On Facebook a lot of my friends are lamenting last week's switch to the new new news feed. (It's now split: the news feed shows trends from friends while the live feed is real-time.) Personally, I like the change. You can pick one. You're not forced.

Still, if you want the old Facebook back, you can get it- sorta - via this tip which a friend left on my wall...
"To get the "old facebook" back. On your main screen, on your left hand side click 'more' then click and drag 'status update' to the top of the list. Then refresh your page and it should be back to normal."
Easy enough.
Filed under  Facebook   lifehacks   streams   tips  
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Posted 4 months ago

Study: Streams and Feeds are a Mess

Jakob Nielsen studies the usability of RSS feeds and social network streams for professionals and finds that ...

"Users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks."

Some of this is easily fixable, however ...

"As the satisfaction ratings indicate, we have a long way to go to improve the usability of social network messaging and RSS feeds.

The problems start with something as simple as the choice of username. For example, the United States Department of Education's Twitter ID was 'usedgov,' which sounded to users like 'used government' and was off-putting. Logos were often bad as well, particularly in the small rendering that some services offer. Users depend on the ability to scan down a stream to pick out logos and user names, but this basic need was often thwarted."

This is why email in business isn't dying anytime soon. For consumers, however, things might be different.

Filed under  RSS   social networking   streams   usability  
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Posted 5 months ago

Stats: Bit.ly Surpasses TinyURL in Traffic

Short URL services are a key part of the infrastructure that powers the Age of the Stream. Think of them like railroad tracks. 

TinyURL was king for awhile. But then Twitter ditched it for Bit.ly back in May. Just how much impact did this switch have? A big one.

Traffic stats are only one way to measure the reach of such services. Link shrinking technology is built into the Twitter UI as well as the giant ecosystem of apps that power users interact with. So, in some ways, the total reach of TinyURL and Bit.ly sites are actually meaningless since the figures are significantly lower than they are actually used. 

Still, what's unmistakable is that Bit.ly is rocking TinyURLs world thanks to the switch.

For more, see the images below, which where pulled from Compete.com and Google Trends.

   
Click here to download:
Stats_Bit.ly_Surpasses_TinyURL.zip (49 KB)

Filed under  Bit.ly   stats   streams   Twitter  
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Posted 6 months ago
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