The hyperkinetic, ultra-connected Sean Moffitt is looking for bloggers who would like to enter their blogs into a “tournament” of Canadian bloggers.

If you write a blog that deals with digital, tech, online, media, social media, PR, marketing, communications, design, or research, you can enter your blog in the Facebook group that Sean has set up or via the Contact Us link on Buzz Canuck.

Blogs will be matched in pairs for each round, with only the winner of each pair advancing to the next round. The judges will judge two posts submitted by each blogger on five criteria: “overall impact (20%), clarity of thought (20%), did it make me want to think/act differently (20%), did it want me to comment/participate (20%) and originality (20%).”

Sean is aiming for a starting field of 128 blogs. Already, he is half way to that goal. The initial list of entrants reads like a Who’s Who of the Canadian social media scene, including Kate Trgovac, Doug Walker, Bill Sweetman, David Crow, Michelle Sullivan, Marc Snyder, Michel Leblanc, Mitch Joel, David Peralty, Ed Lee, Colin McKay, Collin Douma, Jonathan Dunn, Brendan Hodgson, Leesa Barnes, Dino Demopoulos, Michael Seaton and Eden Spodek.

Sound like a good way to get your blogging juices flowing? For sure.

So, hop over to Buzz Canuck and tell Sean that you want to be entered into Canada’s 1% Army tournament.

Can you help me help a grad student with her research on blogging and social media?

I received the following email:

Hello Mr. Thornley,

My name is Leah and I am a graduate student at xxx University in
yyy and I am writing a research paper about blogging. … My
research is exploring the use of blogging as a useful social facilitator
between the media(community) and organizations. …

I would love to know how you view the use of blogs in terms of importance in
the communication between businesses and corporations and the media. Has it
greatly helped? Some corporations have had some embarrassing mishaps with
the use of blogs (ex. wal-mart), how can this be prevented? Why should
corporations still consider the use of blogs despite their fears? If a
corporation is considering the development of a blog, what things should be
taken into consideration?

If you could provide some insight into any of these questions that would be
wonderful. …

Sincerely,
Leah H.

I saw this post as I was trying to catch up on the 113 unopened emails in my inbox. I didn’t have as much time to answer it as I would like. But I offered some brief comments:

Leah, you ask some very good, but large questions. Proper answers would require a long post to respond to properly. I’m afraid that I have only a few minutes, so some brief points:

1. “…blogging as a useful social facilitator between the media(community) and organizations.” I would not put “media(community)” together. Media has been the traditional intermediary PR practitioners have used to convey messages from the source to interested audiences. Social media allows us to step outside of this paradigm and connect directly with those communities of interest. Traditional media relations will have an ongoing use for reaching mass audiences. But social media allow us to communicate directly with communities built around particular interests.
2. We are still in the early days of the introduction of social media into corporate communications. There have been examples of poorly conceived and badly executed programs. That is inevitable in any process of innovation and discovery. It should not discourage anyone from persevering, because…
3. The adoption of social media is proceeding at a fantastic pace. Last year it was blogging and podcasting. This year, it is Facebook and video blogs. Next year, it will be something else. But they are all adding incrementally to my ability to find and relate to people with whom I feel a bond. This is a primary urge of social animals. Corporations that ignore this will pay a high price. They will lose the opportunity to build a bond between themselves and communities that share an interest in them and their products. This will hand a tremendous competitive opportunity to nimble competitors who understand that we like to do business with companies, products and services with which we identify.
4. Corporations should not consider blogging. People who have a desire to say something and connect with people who care about similar things should blog. Many of these people will be inside corporations. The best corporate blogging strategy is to find these people and encourage and cooperate with them. Ultimately, this approach will allow outsiders to see the real human warmth and personality that resides in the people who work in that corporation.

Ok. That’s the advice I offered between doing the dishes after dinner and putting the kids to bed. I know it’s thin stuff and can be improved upon.

Can you please help Leah? Add your own answers to her questions as comments on this post or trackback to a post on your own blog.

UPDATE: Tris Hussey has offered some great insight and advice on the One by One Media blog.

Mark Ragan sent me another email regarding the removal of the Social Media Club group from MyRagan. (Background to this can be found here, here, here and here.)

I’m posting Mark’s email in full because I believe that the issue of control within commercial social media spaces is important (and because he agreed that I should do so).

Many people gloss over the fact that spaces like Facebook, MySpace or MyRagan are owned by a commercial operator. And that owner can establish the rules to serve his own purposes. The owner can change the rules and apply them as he sees fit. And the licence agreements of many (most?) of these sites transfer ownership of the content I generate to the owner of the site.

Search engines do not index the content on these closed, commercial spaces. So if the owner of the space removes my content, it is gone. Truly gone. (Chris Heuer discovered this the hard way when Mark Ragan deleted the Social Media Club Group and all its content from MyRagan.) On the other hand, if the author of a blog that exists in the open removes or edits that content, it persists in the Google cache and anyone interested in seeing what was there can find it.

Control to establish rules, change them, and apply them. Ownership of content. The ability to edit or remove that content. The ability to grant or withhold access.

That’s a lot of power.

It sounds a lot like the power that owners of traditional media have exercised. And the most respected of those traditional media proprietors are those who do not attempt to impose their own views on the content, but instead concerned themselves with producing the highest quality publication.

In my view, if the owner is “hands off” of the content, the space can thrive and serve its members well.

Here is what Mark has to say in the email he sent to me:

My mother loved that old saw, “Words are cheap.”

Well, I am tired of trading accusations with Chris, and I am nearly certain he feels the same way. So here is what I propose. it’s actually quite a perfect end to his debate.

Judge me by my deeds.

If my critics are correct in their assessment of me, I will:

–Rule MyRagan with an iron hand;

–Stamp out conversation that doesn’t advance the goals of my organization;

–Cram products down the mouths of my vulnerable members;

–Use the site to bludgeon my customers with advertising;

— And generally impede the free flow of information that is not beneficial to me and my company.

I think this is an accurate summation of what has been predicted of me.

Chris said that my reconstituting of the Social Media group came about because I felt threatened by his success at achieving 100 members. Well then, watch me. Several groups will soon approach those numbers. They too are headed by consultants, most of whom are barely known to me. We should be seeing heads roll any day now.

So judge my actions. Here is what I predict:

—That I will never attempt to squeeze economic advantage from MyRagan members through crass advertising, spam e-mails and conversation that always points toward Ragan products;

— That MyRagan members will hardly know I exist. They have already gotten along fabulously without me.

— That conversation will flow unimpeded by the dictates of my commercial enterprise, Ragan Communications.

— That the site will remain pristine with the line between editorial and advertising clearly marked.

— That Ragan will offer up not only a meeeting place for MySpace-type networking, but a place that communicators visit for the best content on the market.

Finally, I predict that Ragan will go on being what it has been for nearly 40 years–an advocate, news source and sometime entertainer for the corporate communications community, an organization that understands its customer better than nearly anyone else and always tries to do the right thing.

Print this out, tape it to the wall, measure me against it.

Then let’s meet back here in a year. OK?

If Mark runs MyRagan in this way, I think that it is unlikely that there will be repeats of the mistakes that were made in the removal of the Social Media Club group.

But there’s just one more thing. Mark suggests that we “meet back here in a year” to assess how he has performed against these measures. A year? Mark, you can expect that your performance against these standards will be monitored and measured daily. That’s the reality. Information sharing and learning now proceeds constantly and virtually instantly. <!–