Surely You Can’t Be Serious: Actor Leslie Nielsen Dies

Leslie Nielsen, whose longtime career as a dramatic actor took a sudden turn into comedy with spoofs such as “Airplane!” and “The Naked Gun,” has died at the age of 84.

Many of my memories of comedy films growing up featured Nielsen. He was definitely one of a kind. He pulled off straight faced comedic lines better than almost anyone I can remember.

RIP Lt. Frank Drebin!

From CNN:

The Canadian-born Nielsen’s career reached back into the early days of television, when he made frequent appearances on live drama series like “Goodyear Playhouse.”

He played the earnest starship captain in the 1956 science-fiction classic “Forbidden Planet” and made regular appearances on a wide range of TV dramas into the 1970s, including “Hawaii Five-O.”

He also played the captain of an overturned ocean liner in the 1972 disaster movie, “The Poseidon Adventure.”

Much of that changed in 1980, when he was cast as a doctor aboard an endangered jetliner in the gag-a-minute disaster-movie parody “Airplane!”

Nielsen’s deadpan response to the question “Surely, you can’t be serious?” with “I am serious — and don’t call me Shirley” helped launch a second career.

The film’s producers went on to cast him in their short-lived television series “Police Squad!”

He reprised that show’s bumbling lead character, Lt. Frank Drebin, a decade later in three “Naked Gun” movies, in which he shared the screen with O.J. Simpson and Priscilla Presley.

Average Teen Texts More Than 3,000 Times Monthly

…and I thought I texted a lot! According to recent studies, the average teenager sends over 3,000 texts per month.

From Mashable:

According to a new study from Nielsen, our society has gone mad with texting, data usage and app downloads. Nielsen analyzed the mobile data habits of over 60,000 mobile subscribers and surveyed over 3,000 teens during April, May and June of this year. The numbers they came up with are astounding.

Credit: The Nielsen Company

The number of texts being sent is on the rise, especially among teenagers age 13 to 17. According to Nielsen, the average teenager now sends 3,339 texts per month.

There’s more, though: teen females send an incredible 4,050 text per month, while teen males send an average of 2,539 texts. Teens are sending 8 percent more texts than they were this time last year.

 

Brooks & Dunn to Break Up

Wow! I’m shocked!

Country music duo Brooks & Dunn announced today that they will break up after a farewell tour next year.

From Reuters:

Singer/guitarists Kix Brooks, 54, and Ronnie Dunn, 56, said in a statement that “it’s just time” for the split, which surprised music industry observers.

“After 20 years of making music and riding this trail together, we have agreed as a duo that it’s time call it a day,” they said.

“This ride has been everything and more than we could ever have dreamed…. We owe it all to you, the fans. If you hear rumors, don’t believe them, it’s just time.”

Dates have yet to be announced for next year’s concert outing, dubbed The Last Rodeo Tour. It will be preceded next month by a hits record, “#1 … and then some.”

Brooks & Dunn first hit the charts in 1991, and went on to become the biggest-selling duo in country music history. They sold 22.3 million albums in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks retail sales.

Time Spent On Social Networking Sites Doubles

The latest figures from Nielsen Online show that the number of minutes spent on social networking sites in the United States has almost doubled over the past year.

From Reuters:

Nielsen Online, which measures Web traffic, said the number of minutes on social networks in the United States rose 83 percent in April from the same month a year ago, but found users were quick to move on and sites could quickly fall from favor.

Nielsen Online spokesman Jon Gibs said a major trend had been the continuing popularity of Facebook, which has more than 200 million active members and has become so mainstream it now hosts Pope Benedict and a list of world leaders.

The total number of minutes spent on Facebook surged 700 percent year-on-year to 13.9 billion in April this year from 1.7 billion a year ago, making it the No. 1 social networking site for the fourth consecutive month.

News Corp’s MySpace was second most popular but the number of minutes spent on this site fell 31 percent to 4.97 billion from 7.3 billion a year ago, although it remained the top social networking site when ranked by video streams.

Blogger, Tagged.com and Twitter.com came third, fourth and fifth respectively, with the number of minutes spent on Twitter — that lets people send 140-character messages or Tweets — rocketing 3,712 percent in April from a year ago.

How You Can Influence Bloggers

Great piece on Social Media Explorer from this weekend by Jason Falls. Most people know that reaching out to bloggers is a great way to build your brand and develop a sizable online presence quickly. But most bloggers tend to be a group skeptical of your run of the mill press release. Falls gives some examples of what PR professionals (such as myself) can do to specifically target the right bloggers (such as myself).

From Social Media Explorer:

I gave a talk to the local Blugrass Chapter of PRSA today inspired by my PRSA International session with Heidi Sullivan and Jay Krall from Cision entitled, “Not All Blogs Are Created Equal.” While the PRSA International version was more robust and contained some great insights and information from Heidi and Jay, it was an hour-long presentation I had to fit in 30 minutes.

What follows is the presentation I gave, focused on how to find relevant blogs for outreach, how to differentiate between them for prioritization and some pointers on blogger outreach from my perspective.

The simple fact of the matter is that, at least for now, there is no one tool, website or service that can help public relations professional identify blogs for their outreach. Technorati is a good place to start, but is essentially a search engine with no organization in results. Hunting for authority numbers through search results and not being able to organize them using that parameter makes most people wonder if there’s anyone inside the big green box focused on improvements or innovation at all. In their defense, they aren’t there to serve PR people trying to target blogs, though. Google Blog Search is helpful, but prioritizes on Google’s relevance scale, often burying significant blogs in results because their latest content isn’t less than an hour old. I’ve also found that a regular Google search often helps. If you’re looking for the top blogs in education, search for “Education Top Blogs.” Someone’s probably posted a list at some  point.

Once you have your list of blogs you want to target, you may want to find ways to differentiate among them. The default answer is normally those with the highest traffic, but there’s really no good way to find out how much traffic someone else’s website gets. The three tools you can use for free to make an educated guess are Alexa, Compete and Quantcast. Alexa and Compete, however offer vague numbers based on people savvy enough to download and install Alexa and Compete browser tools, so the numbers are skewed to tech geeks and, like Nielsen or Arbitron traditional metrics, are small samples of the total data out there. In short, I’m not confident those numbers are altogether relevant. As a follow up though, I promise to dive into Alexa and Compete a bit more thoroughly soon.

Quantcast is by far the most useful traffic tool, even offering demographics, geographics and more, but it only offers information for bloggers who insert Quantcast tracking code on their sites. AngelaMaiers.com, for instance, doesn’t show up in Quantcast. That could be because Angela doesn’t know about Quantcast or it could be because she doesn’t want the public to have access to such telling metrics about her blog. Either way, it’s a crap shoot to get this kind of information since bloggers have to opt-in to use it.

So then you’re left with other relevance metrics to determine which blogs are better. Number of RSS subscribers, quantity and quality of comments, number of bookmarks or in-bound links are all relevant numbers to look for when researching blogs. I would also argue that number of Twitter followers could be used as a comparison. If a lot of people follow a certain blogger, that’s one measure of his or her influence.

Check out the presentation and supplement the information with your best practices, thoughts and insights. Maybe our ideas will inspire Postrank, Technorati or someone else to build a tool that makes blogger outreach research easier. Until then, it’s roll up our sleeves and work it.

10 Ways to Track Your Online Reputation

Marketers can monitor online reputation with DIY tools such as blog search engines, but more sophisticated approaches are available for marketers willing to spend. I found this posting on Mashable which offers its take on 10 tracking services, including Buzzlogic, which can discover, engage and assess influencers in a specific industry; and Radian6, which tracks key words on blogs and other sites.

From Mashable:

Reputation management is essential to both individuals and companies. The more popular your brand is, the more critical it will be to keep tabs on it and the more time it will consume out of your day. If you work at a startup and no one has heard of your brand, or if you’re an individual who has just started blogging, these tools are still useful to you.

If, on the other hand, you’re brand new to social media and aren’t known by many people, then these free tools might be a better place to start.

You should consider paid services if you are unable to manage and keep your pulse on your online reputation. Also, paid services help you analyze and understand the magnitude and sentiment of conversations around your brand, which would take you even longer if you did it manually. Services start out at a minimal price of $1 for individual bloggers and shoot up over $100,000 for large enterprises. If you are considering using a paid service, select the one that best matches your current situation and scale up as your requirements grow.

I recommend the top ten vendors listed below (in no specific order):

---

1. Buzzlogic

---

Buzzlogic offers the “BuzzLogic Insights” application, where you can discover, engage and assess influencers in your industry. You get a collaborative dashboard, which provides you with insight into whose blogging about you and allows you to share this data within your company. There are also watch lists for tracking specific bloggers, blogger profile lists, and social maps (see who links to who).

They divide their services into two major buckets: marketers and PR people. Marketers gain product feedback, understand brand perception and receive monthly readership statistics. PR people are able to build relationships with influential bloggers, discover new influencers and track products that matter to them.

---

2. Radian6

---

Radian6 offers a solution, where you can setup certain keywords to monitor on a dashboard, automatically track the keywords on blogs, image sharing sites and microblogging sites, and then have it report back to you with an analysis of the results. Data is captured in real-time as discovered and delivered to dashboard analysis widgets.

The solution covers all forms of social media including blogs, top video and image sharing sites, forums, opinion sites, mainstream online media and emerging media like Twitter. Conversational dynamics are constantly tallied to track the viral nature of each post.

---

3. TNS Cymfony

---

TNS Cymfony offers the Orchestra Platform, which is built on a Natural Language Processing engine that automatically identifies, classifies, qualifies and benchmarks important people, places, companies and topics for you.

The platform is able to decipher between different media sources, such as traditional media and social media. Cymfony’s differentiation is that their engine dissects articles, paragraphs and sentences to determine who and what is being talked about, whether something or someone is a key focus or a passing reference, and how the various entities mentioned relate to one another.

---

4. Nielsen

---

Nielsen offers Buzzmetrics, which will supply you with key brand health metrics and consumer commentary from all consumer-generated media. They also have ThreatTracker, which alerts of real-time online reputation threats and gives you a scorecard to show you how you’re doing relative to the competition.

Nielsen has a very strong brand name as the world’s leading provider of marketing information, audience measurement, and media products and services. Pete Blackshaw, father of consumer-generated media, is one of the leaders in charge of this powerful service.

American TV Use Soars Past 8 Hours a Day

Despite the growth on online video, Americans watch an average of 8 hours and 18 minutes of television each day, according to a study from Nielsen. That’s up substantially from a decade ago, before Internet video was part of the culture, when Americans watched an average of 7 hours and 15 minutes each day.

I’m guilty of a couple hours a day myself, but not as much as when I was younger. With the kids, I’ve also found that I don’t come close to the 8 hours a day which is the American average.

From the Associated Press:

Despite the ability to watch video on computers and cell phones, Americans are viewing more television than ever.

Nielsen Media Research said Monday the average American watches 142 hours of TV in a month. Last season the typical home had a television on for eight hours and 18 minutes each day. That’s up an hour per day from just 10 years ago.

And the older you are, the more TV you watch. Nielsen said Americans aged 65 and up watch more than 196 hours per month.

Americans are also watching more video on the Internet and mobile devices, although Nielsen said cell phone viewing is mostly a guy thing.

Text Messaging Takes Off in the United States

See! I’m not the only one who likes to send text messages, rather than talking on the phone.

According to Nielsen Mobile, American cell phone users are sending more text messages than they are making phone calls nowadays.

From CNET:

For the second quarter of 2008, U.S. mobile subscribers sent and received on average 357 text messages per month, compared with making and receiving 204 phone calls a month, according to Nielsen. The new statistic is a clear indication that Americans have jumped onto the SMS text bandwagon.

In the first quarter of 2006, Americans sent and received 65 text messages per month. The number of messages sent and received today has increased 450 percent. But even though people are texting more, it doesn’t mean that they’ve stopped talking on the phone. According to Nielsen, the number of phone calls that people make and receive each month has remained relatively flat over the past two years.

The wireless industry’s trade association, CTIA, recently noted the explosion in texting in its own report. It recently reported that for the month of June, American cell phone subscribers sent about 75 billion SMS text messages, averaging about 2.5 billion messages per day. This represents an increase of 160 percent over the 28.8 billion messages reported in June 2007.

The surge in text messaging is being driven by teens 13 to 17 years old, who on average send and receive about 1,742 text messages a month. Teens also talk on the phone, but at a much lower rate, only making and receiving about 231 calls per month. The report even suggests that tweens or kids under the age of 12 are also heavy text users, averaging about 428 messages per month.

Over the past two years, the cost of sending and receiving text messages  has gone up 100 percent with individual text messages costing approximately 20 cents per message. Carriers are now offering unlimited  texting plans on cell phones that cost an additional $20 a month, which makes sending texts more affordable for heavy texters, like me!

Michael Phelps and Sarah Palin Help to Boost SNL Ratings

It seemed with all the buzz around the season premier of Saturday Night Live that you had to expect the episode would draw great ratings. Now, all we need is Barack Obama and John McCain to appear and, hell, maybe have a debate on the show. Or at least SNL actors playing their roles!!

From Reuters:

With a little help from Tina Fey doubling as Sarah Palin and from guest host Michael Phelps, “Saturday Night Live” logged its best season premiere since 2001.

It was also the most-watched “SNL” for any date since December 17, 2002, when former vice president Al Gore was the guest host and jam band Phish was the musical guest.

“SNL” averaged a 7.4 household rating/18 share in the top 55 “metered” markets, Nielsen Media Research said Sunday. Saturday’s program was up 64 percent compared to last year’s season premiere on September 29. The top market was Baltimore, the hometown of Olympics hero Phelps.

From Trendhunter Magazine:

The combined power of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin and guest host Michael Phelps has earned Saturday Night Live its best season premier since 2001.

It seems there is just no stopping the mania of Sarah Palin. Even though celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Matt Damon have explicitly attacked her, everyone else seems captivated by the former beauty pageant queen.