Ben LaMothe
I am a web and social media strategist with Jacksonville, Florida-based advertising and marketing consultancy Renaissance Creative, and a postgraduate student at City University London, where I am currently writing a dissertation about how mobile phone applications impact the ways news is distributed and consumed. I am based in Jacksonville, Florida.
My immediate background is in journalism. However more recently I have begun to work in the fields of social media marketing, community management, media blogging and web development. I previously worked as a web and social media specialist with corporate PR and marketing consultancy Glasshouse Partnership, where my primary role was devising web, social media and blogging strategy for corporate and individual clients.
I have also worked as a social media consultant for United Business Media, and as a web intern with Telegraph.co.uk, where I assisted in the re-launch of their blogs.
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The internet is growing up. And with that, a cottage industry of web developers and coders was born. While it isn't universal yet that everyone has a web site, many people do have outposts online, whether it's a web site, blog or social profile.
But just as websites become more common, questions are being raised about their long-term future.
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by Ben LaMothe
16 April 2010 08:55am
7 comments
Believe me when I say you've never used a web application quite like pearltrees. With this application, you can literally map your personal web. Take all of the bookmarks scattered across your web browser, assign them a category and you've got a pearltree. It's a new way of seeing the web. Think of it as Web 2.5.
Pearltrees was the darling of the 2009 LeWeb conference, which included
a keynote and product demonstration by pearltrees CEO Patrice Lamothe
(no relation). During the presentation, he showed this video
explaining how pearltrees works.
I met Patrice while in Paris at the LeWeb
conference. A few months have passed and
pearltrees has continued to grow. I decided to find out what has
changed and how the application has grown since its unveiling at LeWeb...
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by Ben LaMothe
11 February 2010 11:20am
1 comment
Big newspapers are joining Twitter at an alarming rate, in part because it offers another avenue for story ideas and scoops. Some newspaper execs are also trying to find a way to make money from Twitter.
This is a tricky area, because the people who use Twitter have shown that they are not fans of spam, or anything remotely resembling spam, and will take swift action (unfollow, possibly report the account) if it is suspected.
For big newspapers, which often have big debt loads and vastly diverse audiences, using Twitter as an advertising platform is challenging. But for small and medium-sized titles, an opportunity exists.
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by Ben LaMothe
18 January 2010 09:36am
7 comments
Last week while working on a campaign for a client, some new research rolled in showing that only 53% of Britons know the name of their MP. This revelation spurned chatter in the office about the implications of this in terms of personal branding.
Are MPs also brands? And if so, does it matter that there's such low brand-recognition amongst the target audience (read: constituents)?
Some of these questions were answered following an interaction with an MP, whom I presented the findings to via Twitter.
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by Ben LaMothe
07 December 2009 10:05am
8 comments
It's a subject that turns the stomachs of most journalists. After all in journalism, "marketing" and "branding" are dirty words. But given the media fall out as a backdrop for the global recession, it's time that newspapers, and the journalists who write for them, realise that the masthead of their paper is a brand.
Knowing what people think and feel when they see your newspaper's brand is more important than ever.
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by Ben LaMothe
16 November 2009 11:36am
3 comments
Facebook's growth, it seems, is limited only by the scope of Mark Zuckerberg's ambition. It began as a social networking site trying to keep up with MySpace, but Facebook is now circling its own orbit.
All that's stopping Facebook from becoming the pre-eminent news publisher for its 300m users is Zuckerberg's desire to do it.
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by Ben LaMothe
12 October 2009 10:18am
7 comments
Earlier this week I came across a link to Trendsmap.com. On the surface, it's just another program that incorporates a function of Twitter into creating another service. But spend a few minutes with the site and you will quickly realise it is so much more.
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by Ben LaMothe
28 September 2009 08:58am
1 comment
With the death of the News Corporation title thelondonpaper last week, chatter about pay walls has increased. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has already said that most, if not all, News Corp. titles will have a pay wall in place soon enough.
In anticipation of that, The Times has launched an ad campaign on the Tube that promotes what they see as their unique brand of news.
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by Ben LaMothe
21 September 2009 10:21am
2 comments
Back in July I wrote about the planned re-branding of The Economist. It was a risky move because The Economist is a magazine with a sterling reputation and an affluent readership. Two months on, the full strategy behind the re-branding has appeared online.
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by Ben LaMothe
09 September 2009 10:29am
1 comment
Journalism on the web requires a new way of thinking. As editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek.com, John A. Byrne is responsible for guiding the BusinessWeek brand on the web.
In this exclusive interview Byrne, who was previously editor-in-chief of Fast Company and is the author of eight books, talks at length about BusinessWeek's strategy for engaging readers and managing BusinessWeek's web brand.
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by Ben LaMothe
28 August 2009 12:07pm
7 comments
