ZimmComm – New Media, LLC

August may have been our busiest month ever.

We started out the month with cattle producers in the Sunshine State for the 2011 Cattle Industry Summer Conference. The joint meeting of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) and the Cattlemen’s Beef Board (CBB) in Kissimmee, Florida featured Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain. Click on the photo for a larger version and see the CISC 2011 photo album for more. Posts about the CBB side of the meeting can be found on BeefBoardMeeting.com, where meeting photos, interviews and committee reports going back to 2007 are archived.

We also covered the AgCareers.com 2011 Ag HR Roundtable for the first time. The event was held on the campus of Purdue University and brought together representatives from agribusiness and academia to discuss how to recruit and prepare young people for careers in agriculture.

Another stop this month was in Toledo, Ohio for the CTIC Conservation in Action Tour, which featured a full day of visits in the area around Lake Erie. This rosy sunset over the Maumee River greeted us as we returned from the tour. I really love that photo – click on it for a larger version, and check out the CTIC 2011 tour photo album for more.

The Sturgis Motorcycle rally in South Dakota was definitely a first for us. Chuck covered that for the Renewable Fuels Association, which partners with the Buffalo Chip Campground to promote ethanol. See his photos from Sturgis here. No, he didn’t ride a motorcycle, but he did sleep in a very comfortable RV at the campground – it was an experience!

Without too much of a break, Chuck headed to Kansas City for the NAMA Bootcamp and then to Nashville for the AgChat Agvocacy 2.0 conference.

Cindy’s next two trips sent her from coast to coast. First to the Boehringer-Ingelheim annual swine health seminar in North Carolina. This is the fourth time we have been able to attend this event and it is always fun because it is so family-oriented. They invite their producer and partner clients and their families for a really nice weekend on the Carolina coast. It was a pirate theme this year and all the kids really enjoyed it!

Five days later, Cindy headed to Seattle at the request of the United Soybean Board to attend the U.S. Soybean Export Council’s first Animal Utilization Stakeholders meeting. The weather was glorious in Seattle and as a weird coincidence, Cindy got to attend the wedding of a very close high school friend who lives in Tacoma.

The month wrapped up with the biggest product launch in the 174 year history of John Deere in Indianapolis. Chuck got lots of great photos and video there. The photos have already been viewed over 2600 times and the three videos collectively have been seen almost 10,000 times! Cindy attended the GROWMARK annual meeting in Chicago, then we both got together and headed to Decatur, Illinois for the 2011 Farm Progress Show. Together we uploaded over 600 photos that have been viewed more than 3,000 times.

All totaled, we traveled over 16,000 miles in August, uploaded nearly 4,000 photos, and did more than 400 posts on all four of our websites. We are definitely looking forward to a break from the road and a little R&R on Labor Day before we get back at it in September!

Missouri farmer Kip Cullers proved once again this year that he is the “Super Soybean
Rock Star” by setting yet another world record yield of 160.6 bushels per acre in his contest plot. That beats his old record by about five bushels. This is the third time Kip has set a record and he remains the champion of the world! He is one of only two members in the Missouri Soybean 100 Bushel Club. For those of you not very familiar with soybean farming, an average yield for beans in Missouri is about 40 bushels per acre.

I was thrilled to be able to go and see Kip honored by the governor of Missouri for his accomplishment. His farm is located about 200 miles southwest of ZimmComm World Headquarters, so it was a seven hour round trip, and worth every minute of it. It is always a pleasure to see Kip, his wife Michelle, and their children Noah, Naaman and Narissa. It’s an even greater pleasure to do so at the request of our wonderful client BASF Crop Protection and our very good friend Pat Morrow.

BASF is encouraging people to send congratulations to Kip for his accomplishment on their Facebook page under the Super Soy tab. You can also send congrats by Twitter using the hashtag #supersoy.

View or download photos from Kip’s big announcement here:
Kip Cullers 2010 Soybean Record

This PEW Project For Excellence in Journalism has just issued a report on the state of the news media as they see it. It’s a very negative outlook and seems to overlook what a lot of independent journalists are doing today that is contributing to good quality online news content that is also providing good revenue to those who are doing it. The focus seems to be on “legacy” media companies who are not doing well and just because they didn’t see the changes in technology coming or refused to jump into them and invest in them. Of course, if you combine a bad economy on top of it things just get worse for those companies.

There’s a lot of interesting facts and figures in the report. When it comes to online though, not much is said except to point to it as one of the factors contributing to the problem these companies are facing.

But the rise in the Web ’s news audience in 2008, even at legacy news sites, only added to the crisis in facing journalism.

By all appearances, the limited prospects for online advertising that supports news in 2008 became a settled issue. Even worse, little progress appeared to be made during the year in developing any new revenue models, the biggest challenge the news industry faces in its fight for survival.

New media options are now being invested in by large media companies but it may be too little too late, especially since they can’t seem to figure out a revenue model to support their huge overhead.

Perhaps you’re still wondering if your company or organization should be getting involved in new media. Have you started participating yourself (Facebook, LinkedIn, Blog, YouTube) to become personally familiar with it? It’s kind of hard to evaluate a medium you’re not familiar with.

I just saw some interesting new data on how Inc. 500 companies are making use of social media. Here’s a chart comparing their use in 2007 (green) with 2008 (blue). You can click on the image to see a bigger version of it.

Research Highlights:

The research suggests that companies that are using social media & new media technologies are growing faster than other companies.

The research was done by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research. You can download the study, which I recommend.

Via Podcasting News.

The blogosphere continues to grow and amaze people in marketing. I remember when I first talked about it and some of my friends thought I was crazy to think that anyone would really read blogs, much less consider them as “tools” of communications. Times have changed.

My favorite place to keep up with what’s going on in my new media world is eMarketer. They’ve got a new report out, “The Blogosphere: A Mass Movement From Grass Roots,” which has some interesting information. Here’s a couple of excerpts:

More importantly, by 2012, more than 145 million people—67% of the US Internet population—will be reading blogs at least once a month. That is up from a readership of 94 million in 2007, or 50% of Internet users.

“Furthermore,” adds Mr. Verna, “the rates at which blog readers notice and click on ads suggest that they are a well-primed audience.”

Where are you placing your advertising these days? Same old, Same old or . . . . . .

I haven’t been doing much updating here lately due to the extensive amount of online event coverage projects we’re involved in. In just the last couple weeks that has included the National Agri-Marketing Association Convention, Alltech International Animal Health & Nutrition Symposium and National Association of Farm Broadcasting’s Washington Watch program. During that time I was posting on multiple blogs daily and we started a new concept called Agwired Mobile and AgWired Live TV (using Ustream.tv). Additionally, we’re really incorporating Twitter into the AgWired community and you’ll find my most recent Tweets at the top of the AgWired site.

It’s just a continuing development of the community we’ve developed and our way to be in the online conversation. If you’d like to get a perspective on what that means then you should check out this post on “From the X Degree.” via Teaching Online Journalism

You might want to say that we’re just “early adopters” and that somehow this means that since not everyone in America is doing this or consuming this then perhaps it’s not something your company or news organization should be doing. Tempting if you’re afraid of the future I guess. However, it is the future of journalism and how people will and are consuming news.