You must have a lot of Facebook friends or something because you turned in a handy whooping against your colleague Yuki Noguchi.

Mandalit del Barco – 89%
Yuki Noguchi – 11%

I’m still a little surprised Douali Xaykaothao exited the competition as early as she did. Still, I can see the appeal of Mandalit del Barco. Lots of syllables but rolls of the tongue easily. Sounds exotic and comfortable at the same time. And most important, it’s not Andrew Miller. (He’s a great guy, though.)

Unfortunately, there’s no prize to be awarded. Just pride, I suppose. And what the hell, if you’re ever in Minneapolis, I’ll buy you lunch.

[photo by Mark Finkenstaedt via npr.org]

Ofeibea Quist-Arcton – 11%
Mandalit del Barco – 88%

Yuki Noguchi – 43%
Douali Xaykaothao – 23%

My favorite, Douali Xaykaothao, falls to the mighty Yuki Noguchi — indeed, formidable competition — and it appears some Facebook campaigning on the part of her friends put Mandalit del Barco well over the top in her match-up with Ofeibea Quist-Arcton. She seems to be a strong favorite heading into the final round, but with such intense competition (tongue planted firmly in cheek), one never knows what might happen.

So here we are. Cast your vote in the final round to determine, once and for all, who has the Best Name in Public Radio. Voting will Thursday, May 17, at 2 p.m.

UPDATE: Voting is now closed. See the results here.

Round 2 voting just closed, and we’re left with just four remaining competitors for the Best Name in Public Radio championship. Ladies and gentlemen, here are your Final Four:

Ofeibea Quist-Arcton – 50%
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson – 38%

Audie Cornish – 33%
Yuki Noguchi – 54%

Douali Xaykaothao – 44%
Lakshmi Singh – 43%

Neda Ulaby – 31%
Mandalit del Barco – 68%

To be honest, no surprises there, really. What a shoot-out between Lakshmi and Douali, though! Just five votes separated them.

Again, based on random numbers generated in Excel, here are the match-ups for the semi-final round. Voting for round 3, the Final Four, starts right now and will close at Tuesday, May 15, at noon Central. Go get ‘em!

Monday we kicked off a light-hearted bracket-style competition to find the best name in public radio — and there’s plenty of stiff competition. The results from the Sweet Sixteen are in, and we’re ready to kick off round two of the voting. Here’s how the first round shook out.

Yuki Noguchi - 68%
Lynne Rossetto Kasper - 21%

Ofeibea Quist-Arcton - 64%
Zorba Paster - 24%

Lourdes Garcia-Navarro - 35%
Lakshmi Singh - 54%

Audie Cornish - 55%
Quil Lawrence - 34%

Mandalit del Barco - 60%
Sonari Glinton - 37%

Neda Ulaby - 46%
Kai Ryssdal - 44%

Sylvia Poggioli - 42%
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson - 48%

Nell Greenfieldboyce - 28%
Douali Xaykaothao - 62%

Nothing against the winners, but I’m particularly sad to see Quil Lawrence, Sonari Glinton and Kai Ryssdal defeated. But in the interest of moving forward, here are the match-ups for round 2. Voting will close at 4 p.m. on Friday, May 11. Go get ‘em!

UPDATE: Voting for this round is now closed. Check out the Final Four here.

Stijn Debrouwere (right) is down in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, thinking great thoughts about the future of media. (Photo: Flickr.com)

Every once in a while — OK, pretty often, actually — I run across something so smart it makes me wish I’d written it. I ran across such an item by a guy I’d never heard of on a site I’d never heard of. But I expect I’ll be hearing more about him in the future.

Stijn Debrouwere lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he creates information architecture for the local newspaper and TV station. And he recently posted on his blog a long item about the many information sources that are replacing traditional journalism.

It’s worth a read, but I’ll highlight a few of his key points. Some of these bullet points are direct quotes and some are my paraphases.

• People used to read about music because that was one of the few ways you could explore music in the pre-Web era. With services like Spotify and Rdio, you don’t need to read about new music — you can discover it immediately, with no intermediary.
• Follow the right people and organizations on Facebook and Twitter, and you’ll find out what’s happening close to you, straight from the source. LocalWiki, Pinwheel, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare clearly do not replace a good local newspaper, but they offer a combo that is increasingly becoming good enough.
• Quora looks like a simple Q&A site, but it’s also a reinvention of the ask-an-expert column you can find in almost any newspaper and magazine.
• There are organizations and websites everywhere that are taking over newspapers’ role as tastemaker and watchdog and forum. These disruptors don’t replace investigative reporting, but they replace the other 95% of what made professional news organizations important.

“This is not sharing cat pictures, this is stuff that matters,” he writes. “People can read the health section in their newspaper and get drip-fed badly researched advice about how to live a healthy life, or they can visit the NIH or the Mayo Clinic online, or create an account on one of the many bulletin boards about anything from fitness to dealing with cancer.”

The traditional media haven’t found the right ways to get people to pay for news and media online, but these other sites have. It’s not journalism as we’ve known it, but it’s information that matters in people’s lives.

While the traditional media cry in their beer, Debrouwere writes, the rest of the Web world is “having a party on the other side of the river with their not-really-reporting and sort-of-journalism and maybe-media.”

Journalists are slowly realizing that their competition isn’t just other online news sites and services; it’s every other thing that is competing for people’s time, attention and money online.

I’ve been reading these essays on the future of journalism for at least five years. I’ve read dozens, maybe hundreds of them. Debrouwere’s is one of the clearest and smartest I’ve seen. If you’re at all interested in how people get and use information (and most people reading this blog are), it’s worth a look.

A silly little game, of course, but it’s inspired by an undeniable reality: Public-radio personalities have the greatest names in the history of nomenclature. Names like Lakshmi Singh, Sonari Glinton and Yuki Noguchi, though exceptional at rolling off the tongue and perking up the ears, seem practically pedestrian by public radio’s standards.

There’s even a wonderful parody of a Billy Joel song celebrating the phenomenon of awesome NPR names.

So it’s well established that these names, as a group, are second to none. But whose name reigns supreme as a god among mere mortals? If we were to hold a name-based Celebrity Deathmatch (no violence needed), which would be the last name standing?

Let’s find out. Over the coming weeks, we’ll stage an entirely unscientific bracket-style competition, based on your votes. Based on an equally unscientific method (my preference, with some input from colleagues who listen to as much public radio as I do), here are your sweet sixteen:

• Audie Cornish
• Mandalit del Barco
• Lourdes Garcia-Navarro
• Sonari Glinton
• Nell Greenfieldboyce
• Quil Lawrence
• Yuki Noguchi
• Zorba Paster
• Sylvia Poggioli
• Ofeibea Quist-Arcton
• Lynne Rossetto Kasper
• Kai Ryssdal
• Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson
• Lakshmi Singh
• Neda Ulaby
• Douali Xaykaothao

Whew. Trying saying that five times fast.

I created a bracket based on random number generation in Microsoft Excel. We have a great set of match-ups. Get voting with the form below! (If you’re having trouble seeing the form as it’s embedded, visit it directly here.)

This is why the Internet was invented.

NOTE: Voting for this first round closed May 9 at 10 a.m. Central. See the results and place your votes for round-two here.

* – This includes on-air staff of National Public Radio, Public Radio International and American Public Media.

All of us are beyond excited about the Fast Horse Summer Internship Campaign voting that’s happening this week, but there’s another contest I’ve been keeping my eye on – NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction.

For those of you unfamiliar with the challenge, let me give you the briefest of overviews: A professional author gives aspiring writers a starting sentence. The challenge? To create a compelling short story that can be read in three minutes. That translates to about 600 words if you’re wondering. This season’s author is Luis  Alberto Urrea, the award-winning author of 13 books, including “The Devil’s Highway,” “The Hummingbird’s Daughter” and his most recent release, “Queen of America.”

He kicked off the contest with this humdinger of a sentence: “She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.”  Just imagine the possibilities! While I aspire to have time to sit down and draft an entry one of these days, I simply get giddy when the station begins reading the top contenders. It’s user generated content as its best. Some humorous, some dark, some heartfelt. The stories captivate you, often leaving you to ponder a setting, a topic, a meaning… NPR must know it has a gem.

In its eighth installment, the contest is wildly popular, drawing more than 6,000 submissions this go-round. That’s a lot to cull through, but man oh man, do they find the crème de la crème. I’ll leave you with a couple of my favorites. If you have a spare three minutes, I promise they’re worth the read.

Rid Yourself Of This Pest Today!

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This Time Will Be Better

Amelia

We were absolutely delighted to see a number of our clients receive recognition in the 2012 “Best of the Twin Cities” issue of City Pages magazine. In our business, we get to know our clients pretty well, and so we take a more-than-casual rooting interest in awards like these.

We’ve seen our clients sweat, worry and exult over their businesses (and done a few of those things ourselves). So it’s a sweet feeling to see their inspiration — and perspiration — recognized by the public and the media.

Congratulations to:

The Bachelor Farmer, Best Restaurant. “The talented team at the Bachelor Farmer, assembled by brothers and co-owners Eric and Andrew Dayton, is bringing the simple sophistication of clean flavors and complex textures — like sour and chewy dried cherries, creamy and earthy duck liver pâté, and ripe, salty pistachios — and making them a huge part of this re-imagined smorgasbord experience.”

Tilia, Best New Restaurant. “For a restaurant that feels as comfortable as a worn-in pair of clogs, the food is fantastically refined and a shoe-in for best new restaurant.”

Steven Joel Brown, Best Chef. “Brown radiates ideas, opinions, and stories, and fortunately that quality translates to each meticulously crafted plate of the new brand of comfort food he serves.”

Marvel Bar, Best Cocktails. “A good cocktail should be an experience. At Marvel Bar, it starts with an unmarked side entrance around the corner from its sister business, the Bachelor Farmer, followed by a basement hallway, and, finally, a purple door.”

The Olivetto (Marvel Bar), Best Contemporary Cocktail. “Nothing is more exciting than trying an entirely new cocktail concept for the first time. One of these firsts is the Olivetto at Marvel Bar, a cocktail unlike anything we’ve ever seen or heard of.”

Minnesota Beatle Project Vol. 3, Best Local Music Compilation. “The last thing the world needs is another tired Beatles compilation. But right from the start, the Minnesota Beatle Project has been anything but a boring, predictable undertaking.”

And, finally:

Jana Shortal, Best TV Newscaster. OK, Jana’s not actually a client, but you’re damn right we’re claiming her. Not only did we bond with her during her recent, hilarious stint as emcee of the Minnesota PRSA Classics, she also did a classic report on one of our actual clients’ products, the fabulous SweeTango apple. As City Pages put it: “A September report she filed on Minnesota’s new SweeTango apple was rife with puns and bad jokes. Shortal described the apple as such: ‘For real, y’all, the SweeTango is an apple love child, born of a 20-year breeding between Papa Honeycrisp and Mama Zestar.’ The piece ends with Shortal taking a big messy bite and deadpanning flatly, mouth full of apple, ‘It’s like a tango in my mouth.’ ”

Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms can be tremendously powerful and inexpensive communication tools. But getting the most out of them requires some smart thinking in advance.

The best approach: Be targeted and strategic. Have a plan – don’t just throw out random content. And be prepared to commit at least a modest amount of staff time to the effort.

Joel Bergstrom

The Greater Minneapolis Crisis Nursery, which fights child abuse and offers assistance to parents in crisis, recently decided to step up its social media efforts. But a lot of thought went into the effort, said Joel Bergstrom, the crisis nursery’s development and communications director.

“There’s a common wisdom that says you have to be present in social media,” Bergstrom said. “But if you’re not doing it well, it doesn’t help you – and it may hurt you.”

First step for the nursery: open a Twitter account. Twitter has become primarily a news and promotion service. It’s less about establishing a personal connection – that role has been taken by Facebook – and more about broadcasting a message to an interested audience that will help spread it.

The nursery decided to launch its Twitter account in April, because it’s Child Abuse Prevention Month. April also includes Volunteer Appreciation Week, and it’s the month the nursery was established in 1983.

Bergstrom and other staff members planned a news budget for Twitter, much as media outlets plan their stories. They also chose organizations to follow on Twitter, and to target with their own tweets.

The planning paid off immediately. In the first week the nursery’s Twitter account was active, the nursery put out a tweet thanking a group of volunteers from UPS. UPS retweeted to its 15,000 followers. More important, it was also retweeted to 10,000 additional followers by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, an influential nonprofit focused on issues of children’s well-being. It’s no coincidence that the Casey family happens to have founded UPS – and the foundation could be expected to notice a positive tweet about the company.

In its second week, the crisis nursery Twitter feed thanked another crew of volunteers from Yoplait. That resulted in a retweet from Yoplait to its 20,000 followers.

Bergstrom’s advice to other nonprofits interested in Twitter.

• Check out nonprofit peers on Twitter – see who’s doing it well and who’s not.
• Think about how you can use Twitter to connect with your constituency and others interested in your mission.
• Make sure the content you’re putting out is consistent with your key messages.
• Stay engaged – you can’t put it on autopilot.

That last point is important. Social media require a time commitment. It needn’t be huge – Bergstrom says the nursery staff spends a couple of hours a day monitoring and interacting on social media. But once you join the conversation on social media, you have to stick with it.

“We don’t have the resources to make a huge splash in this,” Bergstrom said. “Some corporations have an entire department dedicated to it. But it’s all about getting your name and message to people you otherwise might not have been able to reach.”

This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com.

My wife and I would divvy up the haul and plop down for an evening’s read. The fare ranged from the Economist to Sports Illustrated, from the New Republic to Entertainment Weekly.

Now, we come home and open up our laptops. The other day, I counted up the magazines we don’t get any more. I got up to 40 without even trying very hard. We’re down to about eight or 10 that actually arrive regularly in our mailbox.

Despite that, I’m reasonably bullish on the future of magazines. In today’s media world, they offer a unique experience. They invite relaxation and settling in. They don’t demand to be consumed immediately and in total; you can pick them up and put them down several times. They have a tactile element that feeds another sense. They add character to a coffee table.

The magazine industry agrees with me. According to various industry sources, magazine readership is up about 13 percent over the last 10 years, even though circulation has declined about 10 percent.

Magazine ad revenue is up about 24 percent over the last decade. That’s somewhat deceptive, because it’s actually dipped from its peak in 2007, before the Great Recession hit. But magazine ad revenue has begun to recover its losses, unlike newspapers — which have lost more than half of their ad dollars in the last five years, and have posted nothing but uninterrupted quarterly declines in that time.

One surprise hit in the magazine world is Game Informer, which originates in the North Loop neighborhood of downtown Minneapolis. Like the industry it covers, Game Informer has grown like crazy. It’s now the fifth-largest magazine, up there with long-established heavyweights like Ladies’ Home Journal and Reader’s Digest.

Some magazine niches will do better than others. The struggles of the weekly news magazines have been well-chronicled; they’ve all been reinvented and redesigned several times in recent years, and their future is cloudy.

But niche publications serving intensely interested audiences should continue to thrive. Among the magazines I still subscribe to are several serving the classic-car hobby. I don’t own a classic car, but I love looking at what my wife calls “old-car porn,” and I don’t get the same pleasure scrolling through online hobbyist sites.

My wife, in fact, is editor-in-chief of another Minneapolis-based magazine: American Craft, which moved here from New York a couple years ago and publishes content aimed at makers, sellers and collectors of fine artisan craftwork. It, too, appears to be thriving.

The explosion of tablet readers is just getting under way, and that has the potential to change the dynamics of the magazine business yet again. But that’s an entirely different topic that I’m not going to tackle here.

We may not get as many magazines at our house as we once did, but we still enjoy and value those that we do receive, and I don’t see us ever giving them up entirely. And I think a lot of other Americans feel that way. Magazines that provide interesting, absorbing content, attractively packaged, should stand a good chance of surviving the ongoing upheaval in the modern media world.

This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com.