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May
11
A Brooklyn High School’s Take on Social Media
Filed Under Misc., Social Media | 1 Comment
A teacher friend of mine invited me to come speak about careers in social media at Acorn High School for Social Justice in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn last week. When he first brought it up, I politely declined. You see, I live in Brooklyn and grew up around New York City so when someone says “Bushwick” to you, you generally politely decline due to the amount of times you’ve heard the word connected to “fatal stabbing” or “drive-by shooting” on the local news.
I eventually started thinking about it more realistically since I will be leaving the city at some point and no longer have access to the kind of diversity that I imagined I would encounter at the school. Secondly, I’m also genuinely interested in what high school kids think about the Internet and social networks. Either way, I was pretty sure it would make a good story some day.
Upon arriving at the school I realized that most of my prejudices were completely false. The school was a refurbished six-story theater building on Broadway in Brooklyn, flanked by the J and Z above ground subway lines and a McDonalds. When you walk in you have to check in with an armed security guard but I’m told this is pretty standard practice in a lot of high schools around the country these days. Once beyond the checkpoint, it was like pretty much any high school you’ve been to except, in my opinion, significantly nicer. It was not only cleaner than the over-priced New England boarding school that I attended, but there appeared to be a greater emphasis on global education when you looked at what was posted around the hallways.
The school has also employed the first “executive principle,” which is a program designed to get proven successful principles to take difficult assignments. The program pays these principles a bonus of $25k a year if they commit to at least three years to turning these more challenging schools around. This doesn’t sound like a lot of money to me when you consider the 700+ students whose lives can be changed drastically by receiving a good education. In the case of Acorn High School, Karen Watts started as the executive principle in January and the school looked pretty good to me in my limited time there.
I presented to three classes and tried to use video as much as possible since I vaguely remember career days and how much fun it is to be talked at for three straight periods. Since the theme was “Working in Social Media,” I used examples of some consumer generated content from past campaigns and a viral video we did recently. Working off a version of a deck I used at a recent tech tradeshow, I went through the changes that are occurring in PR in a Web 2.0 world and new media channels, like Google, are changing the way people define media. All in all, I think I bored them a little and I would definitely change a few things up if I could do it again.
However, it was probably more of an education for me than it was for them. By asking some questions and surveying the room a couple times, I learned some things that came as a bit of a surprise to me. For example, most of the kids had no idea what blogs were and didn’t read them, although many admitted to blogging on social networking sites.
Also, as expected, mobile is huge. The only thing that surprised me was the brands that they had affinity for. Maybe I’m too caught up in a world of people obsessed with their iPhones but these kids generally dismissed the iPhone as being too expensive and universally loved the T-Mobile/Danger’s Sidekick. While no one knew what Twitter was, they became very interested once they found out that they could Twitter from their phones and receive updates via SMS. It’s obviously going to be important for any new communications technology to be easily ported over to a mobile platform for the next generation of users. This also goes for blogs…if they can’t be easily read through a phone then they may lose this age group when they all get jobs in a few years.
Overall, I loved the concept of career day and I wish it was a bigger part of my high school education. When I was 17 and graduating from high school, I had no idea what I wanted to study and very little exposure to careers outside of my parents. I was psychology major for a year and then an english major, which sort of led me into PR in a roundabout way. Regardless, it’s an exercise that helps both the students and professionals get more in touch with what the other one is thinking. Definitely take advantage of the opportunity if it comes your way.
May
11
Reaching the Silent Majority
Filed Under PR, WOM | Leave a Comment
In social media PR, you often find yourself targeting the most influential people within a demographic. Influence can be measured many different ways but it generally comes down to people that are vocal and reach a certain group of people in a meaningful way. Often we look for people who blog and have a lot of people who link to them or, when we’re diving another level deeper, we’re looking for commenters who have a degree of credibility in the places they post their encapsulated opinions.
But not everyone is looking for connectors.
With some of the frenzy about social media and Web 2.0 coming back down to earth, there are some companies and organizations that are realizing that the people they really want to target aren’t the most vocal but instead the most silent.
In many online circles that encourage interactions, people who just watch and read content without posting or contributing are called “lurkers.” In the early days of the Internet and digest mailing lists, people would look at the amount of subscribers on a list then the amount of people that were posting and then call out the people who were merely lurking. It was equivalent of “leeches” on file sharing sites.
As much as most people in this field will make a case for the value of connectors, it isn’t hard to come up with examples of companies that would be afraid of them. One of the biggest spenders in public affairs PR is the US Army and one of their main objectives is recruitment. Do you think the Army is trying to reach people that are extremely vocal and blog? Probably not. What about Apple? As the company continues to grow rapidly, they will probably turn towards recruiting and, given their secretive nature, I doubt they’ll be looking for message board loud mouths in their R&D department. These are PR challenges.
To it’s credit, reach marketers and advertisers already do this pretty well. Most of their media is push or one way so anyone who comes across it basically takes away the same value, whether or not you have a participatory personality. Of course there are several downsides to this as well, since you’re probably paying for a lot of marketing that isn’t reaching the right people and your message is most likely becoming diluted.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers on this one but it’s a challenge that social media marketers need to become aware of. It’s fine to track the most active people online but you can’t completely discount the silent majority.
May
7
The PR Practitioner Guide to Wikipedia
Filed Under Emerging Media, Ethics, PR, Social Media | Leave a Comment
Geoff Livingston surfaced the topic of marketers’ tumultuous relationship with Wikipedia a while back so I’ve been tinkering with this post for a while. Considering how the next major Wikipedia/PR snafu is due any minute now, I figured this might be as good a time as any to share a few of the things I learned this year about existing as a PR practitioner in the dangerous nerd jungle that is Wikipedia.
First of all, contrary to what some social media purists think, everyone belongs in Wikipedia. This includes PR people, internal employees, disgruntled customers, academics and anyone else you can think of.
The Wikipedia rule that scare most people away is the conflict of interest (COI) section of the guidelines. The most important passage is as follows:
A Wikipedia conflict of interest (COI) is an incompatibility between the aim of Wikipedia, which is to produce a neutral, reliably sourced encyclopedia, and the aims of an individual editor.
COI editing involves contributing to Wikipedia in order to promote your own interests or those of other individuals, companies, or groups. Where an editor must forgo advancing the aims of Wikipedia in order to advance outside interests, that editor stands in a conflict of interest.
COI edits are strongly discouraged. When they cause disruption to the encyclopedia in the opinion of an uninvolved administrator, they may lead to accounts being blocked and embarrassment for the individuals and groups who were being promoted.
While I think everyone agrees that Wikipedia should not be used to “advance outside interests,” the real gray area is in the neutrality. Put simply, neutrality is rare amongst Wikipedia editors. The kind of people that actively write and edit the articles you find in Wikipedia are generally enthusiasts who have a distinct point of view and are able to mask it with varying degrees of success. As a brand participating in Wikipedia, you have to be very careful to not interject your point of view and preserve a very high level of transparency but there is still some content that you are probably the best person in the world to edit. If the number of employees is incorrect or your stake in investments is misrepresented, I firmly believe that you are in the right to edit it.
Ok, so these are all grand principles, which PR bloggers are all great at pontificating about, but how exactly do you do it? In my opinion there are a few rules that brands can follow to participate organically in Wikipedia:
- Create a profile - Your user profile is your best tool to promote complete transparency. Say exactly who you are, who you work for and what exactly you plan on doing in Wikipedia. Maybe you won’t be editing but you will be contacting editors so it’s still important that it is clear who exactly you are. This goes for both PR agencies and client side representatives. Anonymous edits hold very little weight and are usually overwritten within days.
- Know your editors - Chances are that you’re only monitoring a few Wikipedia entries and you are more than likely to come across editors who participate in more than one article. These editors have Talk pages and this is generally the best way to engage with them directly but keep in mind that Talk pages are public so you shouldn’t call them out or expose them in any way that might make them defensive.
- Know your Sandbox - For some reason, very few marketers seem to know about the Sandbox in Wikipedia. The Sandbox basically has all the functionality of a normal Wikipedia page except that it doesn’t get published to the community. It’s a place to work on entries and get an article up to the guidelines without risking the violation of any policies. You can still flag your articles to get help from other members of the community and, ultimately, get other more established editors to finish them and publish them without raising COI suspicion.
- Know the language - If you can learn basic HTML, you can learn most of the important codes and rules of Wikipedia. There are many ways to flag articles to get the attention of other editors if something is wrong. There are also fairly strict formatting and content rules that you should be aware of before doing any editing.
- Don’t just stick to your brand - If you work for a dishwasher detergent company, I’m sure you’re an expert on more than just your detergent. Don’t be afraid to tell the world about what you know about different dishwashing technologies and the environmental impact of different kinds of detergent. The more you contribute, the less you will be suspected of astroturfing.
- Only edit articles relating to your brand as a last resort - Sure, if there is a factual error on a Wikipedia page about your CEO then I believe you have a right to correct it but that doesn’t mean that jumping in and making an edit is the best way. Try contacting the creator of the article on his or her Talk page to make a correction or flag the article for an inaccuracy. There are people policing Wikipedia for every possible flag and, if you flag something, they will generally find it and act surprisingly quickly.
Although I don’t think this justifies it’s own rule, it should go without saying that Wikipedia should never ever be used as an SEO tool. Yes, Wikipedia is one of the most valuable properties to Google but if you start manipulating the links on your Wikipedia article to move search rankings, you’re really doing a disservice to both organic search and social media as a whole. You might get away with it but if you don’t you will feel the wrath of a lot of people.
That said, Wikipedia is not the playground of purity that social media pundits would like you to believe it is. It’s a sector of media that brands have a right to participate in as long as they understand the rules and leave everything they know about PR and advertising at the door.
May
6
Finding the Sweet Spot
Filed Under Emerging Media | Leave a Comment
So maybe you’ve noticed that there haven’t been many blog posts the past couple weeks. Very astute of you. Yes, I have been writing less, which has mostly been due to being busy and traveling. I’ve also been conducting a little experiment.
Now, you see, I’ve only been doing this little experiment in blogging since October of last year. At first my goal was to write every day, regardless of whether or not I had anything really interesting to say that day. It was a learning process. The blog didn’t have much of a theme and personal stuff got wedged in with the business stuff. Then I lightened up and decided that I would only really write if I came across something really interesting and I would keep the personal stuff out of it (and post it over on my Tumblr blog called Intermumbles).
Then, of course, I got really busy. Unlike many PR bloggers, I work at a large PR firm across many large accounts. Put simply, client work comes ahead of blogging.
So, guilt has set in. I’m a bad blogger. I still check my blog stats almost every day and wait for the traffic to drop and all the RSS subscribers to go away.
But they didn’t. In fact, I saw some of my largest increases in RSS subscribers and some of the steadiest traffic in the weeks that I didn’t blog at all.
The blog experiment has taught me another important lesson (apart from the fact that whatever you write about someone will eventually be found by them no matter how small you think you are). That lesson is that the amount of people that pay attention has very little to do with how often you write. In the past month, while the volume of the blog has significantly slowed down, RSS subscriptions have gone up 30%.
What does this mean? Well, it answers the question that every client always asks when they’re considering blogging…how often do I have to blog?? The answer is that you don’t really know until you get started. I’m not saying that I would have less traffic or subscribers if I blogged every day but in an on-demand media world you don’t need to fear dead air.
Apr
17
Thoughts from InnoTech
Filed Under Social Media | 1 Comment
Just finished my panel at InnoTech in Portland a few hours ago and it went really well. I’m glad I got there early to gauge the audience a little because it turned out that they were much more social media savvy than I originally thought. I got to drop a lot of the setup stuff I was going to do and get to the case studies right away.
It was also interesting to see how attentive people are at these regional events compared to the larger conferences. I’m sure a lot of these people have blogs and Twitter accounts but when the speakers were speaking it seemed to be a common rule of respect that just about everyone closed their laptops and listened. After seeing people browsing Facebook and playing online Scrabble during some SXSW panels, it was a welcome relief. I think there should be some sort of flag system for people that are live blogging and the rest of the people should be forced to shut their laptops during sessions like this. Isn’t that the reason this isn’t a webinar to begin with?
Getting back to my panel…I wish I did this sort of thing more often. Blogging is often like preaching to the choir but when you actually get in front of a group of marketers and answer their questions you really get a sense how people really feel about social media being integrated into wider marketing plans. Most of the questions I got were related to the ethics of pitching bloggers and offering them things like sponsored trips and, of course, measurement. Two somewhat foggy areas that definitely warrant more discussion in these kinds of settings.
I’d also like to offer quick kudos to April Karnes of Northwest Airlines and Emily Peressini of Razorfish. Emily had to jump in after a last minute cancellation and deal with a few annoying technical problems. Razorfish is doing some great work with Northwest and just watching their presentation made me want to fly their airline. How come I never get seats that cool?
Enjoying another couple days of Portland before heading back to the land that isn’t afraid to be rude.
Apr
7
Twitter Warning
Filed Under Emerging Media, PR | Leave a Comment
After discovering Tweetscan and their amazingly useful RSS feeds recently, I’ve been thinking about writing a post about how Twitter can be used in a crisis communications scenario. Then along comes Michael Arrington and his scrappy little blog, TechCrunch, and suddenly the issue is everywhere. Ok, you win this time Mr. Arrington but your dominance over Point Oh! will be short lived. Mark my words.
Anyway…what Arrington brought to light in his post last night was how Comcast officially responded to his complaint within 20 minutes of his first Twitter message going out about his connection problems in his home. Certainly it didn’t hurt to have Jeff Jarvis and others pick up on the story but still…20 minutes is a pretty amazing response time in the face of a potential crisis. If Comcast sits on this issue overnight, on a Sunday no less, they would probably wake to find a TechCrunch post about how awful their support is but instead hundreds of thousands of people are reading about how quick they were to respond.
So obviously this is underscored by the fact that Comcast has customer service issues. As single tweet by Arrington may not have popped up on the radar for Comcast but the hundreds of people that quickly chimed in with their own customer service horror stories certainly created enough chatter for Comcast’s monitoring program to spring into action.
As I’ve said previously, Twitter is often dismissed as a fringe technology that has limited appeal but in crisis communications it’s more important to find out who is talking about your issue than how many people are talking about it. By subscribing to your key crisis terms in Tweetscan’s RSS feeds can do is alert you to a potential problem well before it hits the mainstream, which is the best case scenario in any crisis situation.
Apr
4
Users are Defining Emerging Social Media Platforms
Filed Under Social Media, Web Phenomenon | 1 Comment
Although almost universally dismissed when it began to catch on, few can dismiss Twitter as anything less than a phenomenon now. Yes, like a lot of content on the Internet, you have to do some digging to find the good stuff but most experienced Twitter users claim that the larger conversation happening in their friend circle is more organic and unique than just about anything happening online.
After weeding out some of the ranters a couple weeks ago, I’m having a much easier time managing Twitter and can stay up-to-date with most of the people I follow pretty easily. While I find the Twitter site fairly useless, except to read the profiles of other Twitterers, software like Twhirl and my new IM client Digsby make it easier for me to follow people and send off a quick tweet without stopping what I’m doing.
What’s becoming clear with the rise of Twitter is that being an agnostic platform is one of the keys to growth in the Web 2.0 world. With social networking, it was the flexibility that took people from Friendster to MySpace and then streamlined functionality is what eventually drove them to Facebook. Web 2.0 took a cue from that development and focused on delivering streamlined tools but the one’s that really took off are the open technologies that didn’t try to dictate how end users interact with their service. This can definitely be said for the social bookmarking technologies and is probably, at least tangentially, responsible for the rise of Gmail.
Jeremiah Owyang is an example of this with Twitter. He uses Twitter as a social computer and states that it has many benefits over technologies like Google:
While Google is great for finding information and websites, it’s NOT great for getting opinion, hearing nuance, or telling me relational information. With Twitter, I can ask information about opinions, and receive responses from real people (many I know, most I don’t) that often have first hand experience with the question at hand.
Pamela Seiple says that Twitter is her favorite social media tool. She compiled a list of uses for Twitter, describing as a source of timely news and insight:
Many of the people I follow on Twitter are active social media players - bloggers, PR professionals, tech-enthusiasts. Therefore, the tinyurl’s they share are usually useful for me to check out. My logic is, if the people I interact with and respect on Twitter think something is important and worth a click, chances are I will, too!
The truth is that Twitter is a lot of different things to different people and, while many people were repelled by their “What are you doing?” tagline, there are probably just as many people who have redefined what the purpose of Twitter is and are using it on their own terms.
(”History of My Blog” cartoon by Hugh MacLeod)
Mar
30
Today I installed WordPress 2.5 for this blog and, while I did hit a couple roadblocks writing new content for the upcoming week, I have to say that this is yet another big step forward for blogging. More specifically, WordPress is now one of the most powerful technology tools that just about any mild Web savvy consumer could master in a second.
As much as everyone loves to talk about what a joke the concept of Web 2.0 is, it is the simplification of design and interface that Web 2.0 has inspired that is the driving force behind the development of platforms like WordPress 2.5.
When we show a new CMS to a client we try to explain to them how it is as simple to use as Microsoft Word but, to be perfectly honest, WordPress is now easier to use than Word. In fact, I would love to have a “view” option in Word that gave me basic WYSIWYG functionality, a visible auto-save and basic media management tools without cluttering my screen with hundreds of features I don’t use.
Plus, none of this came at the cost of the more advanced tools for the real geeks and old time bloggers. Sure, password protecting your posts and changing authors now requires a little scrolling but power users probably weren’t using the Web interface anyway.
Yes, there is a new version of one of the most important social media properties on the planet. It’s not loaded with more features, it just does want you want it to a lot more easily. Detractors be damned, Web 2.0 is making a lot of things better.
Mar
30
Mark Cuban: One of Us
Filed Under PR | Leave a Comment
After running into some problems with giving bloggers access to the Dallas Maverick’s locker room, Mark Cuban has decided that he is opening up the locker room to any blogger who he feels can write. The move comes after several “real” journalists were blocked from the locker room after a ban on giving blogger’s media credentials. The NBA has now stated that bloggers can’t be banned from locker rooms in this day and age.
Of course, now that the ban is lifted and potentially everyone will be given access, there are yet even more moans from the traditional media establishment, like this one from Mike Fannin of the Kansas City Star:
With all due respect for the potential journalism talent in the middle school ranks, this rebuttal smacks with the tartness of sour grapes. Is this really the standard the NBA wants to set for blogging?
Yes, Mike, we only want bloggers who are from newspapers. That way we can ensure that there is no change in point of view and we maintain exactly the same standard of journalism that is currently driving sports enthusiasts to blogs instead of the incredibly intuitive Kansas City Star sports site.
Although I’m not sure it will really work, what Cuban is doing is probably a sign of things to come and it’s certainly fun to watch it unfold on his blog, where he’s taking submissions from anyone who has a blog and wants access. As the influential media expands beyond print and television, organizations are going to have to find ways to accommodate larger numbers of journalists. I think anyone who’s watched a post-game press conference would welcome some fresh questions.
Mar
21
Measuring the Awesomeness of Jimmy Page’s Stairway to Heaven Guitar Solo
Filed Under Advertising, Measurement, PR | Leave a Comment
One of the greatest guitar solos of all time is Jimmy Page’s masterpiece on Stairway to Heaven. Right after Robert Plant sings “your stairway lies on the whispering wind,” Page launches into an epic solo that, at the time, extended the song well beyond the limit of any airtime that radio stations could give it (this would later be amended). Yes, the solo is awesome but how do we measure how awesome it is?
For starters, let’s look at engagement. The average guitar solo is about 15-20 seconds so, if you count the 12-string strumming part, the Stairway solo is easily over a minute, making the solo 3-4 times more awesome than your average guitar solo.
Let’s not forget about impressions either. Stairway has been a AOR staple since November 1971 and often appears near the top of the list on Classic Rock Greatest Hits of All-Time countdowns. According to Wikipedia, it is the most requested song of all time on FM radio despite never being released as a single. Don’t forget about all the amateur guitarists playing this song in Guitar Centers all around the country at this very moment either. Yeah, they may be annoying people but those are impressions too.
Then, of course, there’s Page’s use of the double-neck guitar. Sure he probably didn’t use the double-neck in the studio but it’s still implied in the overall awesomeness quotient due to the live performances. Using the ad equivilency model, I think that makes all these numbers worth 1.75 more than other guitar solos by the same measurement. Keep in mind that this formula doesn’t apply to the five-neck guitar that the guy from Cheap Trick uses. After three, each additional neck begins to count against you.
Ok, this is obviously stupid, right?
The parallel hit me while reading the excellent Brains on Fire post in response to an Ad Week interview with Alex Bogusky of Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Bogusky was quoted as saying:
We are so lucky to be in a creative field at a time when the economy is running on creativity. Yet we are still inculcated to mistrust the concept of creativity. We may be perfectly positioned, but we spend our time trying to add scientific processes to our strategies and scientific testing to our work. Why do we distrust something that is so easy for us all to identify and identify with?
It still amazes me when I hear clients that are really drawn to a creative idea, have the budget to do it but can’t justify it unless they can measure quantifiable results. If this approach was taken to any other creative discipline I would be amazed if any creativity survived. Not to mention, it’s probably at the root of many consumers’ disdain for marketing.
In a world where singles had to be under five minutes long (it would’ve been shorter if not for Dylan, btw), how would Jimmy Page have made a case for his epic guitar solo in Stairway to Heaven? More importantly, if it was omitted, how would it have affected the legacy of Led Zeppelin?
The fact is that attaching your brand to a creative idea makes you look more intelligent, inventive and creates an actual connection with another human being that goes one level deeper than an overused emotional trigger. Good design, writing (you know sometimes words have two meanings) and compelling interactivity can only be measured on the most basic levels but the real value is far more obvious. Not all that glitters is gold, but some of it is.
So when will this new day dawn for those who stand long? Hard to tell. Interactive platforms are certainly expanding the canvass for creativity, as I learned when I visited the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley this week, but there is still a ways to go before everyone can climb the stairway over quantifiability. Perhaps only then will our shadows be taller than our souls.
(ed note: forgive me for this self indulgence…at least I didn’t use every line from the song, as I originally intended)