The .5 Second News Cycle & Who’s On Second?
Jeff Hunt and I taught Dr. Bill Cunningham’s class at UT B-school tonight. About 60 energetic MBA and law students filled the room, and we had a lively discussion around managing the intangible assets of a corporation, such as people, brand and reputation.
I had the chance to test some new research — “The .5 Second News Cycle: Crisis Management & The Blogosphere” — that I’ve been working on with Byron Crites (a doctoral candidate at UT). Our hypothesis is that corporations are still implementing crisis management principles learned from pre-Internet cases like J&J/Tylenol to manage current crisis situations which are often born and escalate in the blogosphere. The old ways are insufficient so we are thinking about some better approaches. In any case, I’ll write about the research here in the coming weeks and months as we complete version 1.0.
We asked the students a few questions: 100 percent had used Google in the last 24 hours to do research. Only about 10 percent of the students read blogs (or realized they read blogs may be a better way of putting it). Less than 1 percent are bloggers. Less than 1 percent had been on Second Life. I have a feeling that most of the class is working and going to school so that probably does not leave much time for any on-line activities beyond research.
The lack of Second Life experience surprised me so I did some quick research tonight and found a recent post on Hitwise (see chart below). Seems that SL members are getting older — average age is about 35 by my calculations.
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