Inside PR: Intranets and the new face of Facebook

September 29, 2011 • Joseph Thornley • Facebook, GiniDietrich, InsidePR, Intranet, MartinWaxman

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In this week’s Inside PR, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I talk about Intranets and the recent changes to Facebook.

At Thornley Fallis, our Intranet is built around a Wiki to host content, Present.ly to support publishing and linking to content and Windows Live Messenger to enable one to one video calls. We encourage people to use these three tools to divert content from emails (we all suffer from inbox glut) and to channel communications from broad publishing through to one to one communications via video. For us, video is the best communications channel. Unlike email and text, it enables us to read facial expressions, posture and all the physical clues that add nuance to communications.

Martin Waxman points out that we have so many “places to go,” so many channels of communication, that managing these different channels can become a challenge unto itself.

And then there’s Facebook. We received a comment from Liza Butcher, who suggested that, “With the changes made this past week, I believe facebook it is trying to be too many things in one space, and ostracizing generations of people that may not be as tech savvy as others. … Facebook was a place for everyone, and now it is becoming too technical for the masses.”

Gini and Martin talk about their impressions of the most recent Facebook changes. Gini points out that it will be important to decide what you want to include in your timeline. Sharing everything won’t be for everyone. And it’s important to be aware of what the timeline automatically shares so that you can filter out the info you wouldn’t want to see there. Martin suggests that we all should become familiar with the “view activity” panel that will enable us to remove content from our timeline. Other neat features: the cover photo we can add to our Facebook profile and the ability to add “milestones” to fill in our timeline.

As for me. I still can’t be enthused about Facebook’s effort to move us away from the open Internet toward the walled garden of Facebook. Bah. Humbug.

And one final reminder: Inside PR will be recording live from the PRSA International Conference in Orlando on October 16 and 17. We’ll also be interviewing speakers and participants. So, if you’re planning to be there, let us know and we will grab a sound bite with you.

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cross-posted from the Inside PR podcast blog

The Fragmented Social Web: Where have our communities gone?

August 26, 2011 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

I’m looking for case studies and best practices to describe how leading practitioners of social media are tracking conversations about organization and issues across an increasingly fragmented social media landscape.

We’ve come a long way since the early days of blogging. Back then, online conversations thrived in the comments sections of blogs. In the open for all to see. Search engines loved it. Blogging had great “Google juice.” We could publish our content on a personal or corporate blog and watch the comments and trackbacks as people responded. And our content would rise in search engine rankings.

Those were simple and satisfying times. But the online world has moved on.

Today, blogs still exist. But a greater volume of online posting and conversation has moved over to places like Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

So what’s wrong with that?

Many of these conversations aren’t readily visible to us through simple searches. Facebook is a walled garden with privacy controls. Google+ encourages people to post only to defined “circles” of friends. When they do this, their posts are not viewable through search. And Twitter moved in the summer to make its full Twitter stream available only through Bing, not Google, adding to the work we must go through to search for references relevant to us.

And as the conversation has gone onto these social networks, the comments on most public blogs have decreased in volume.

More and more people are using social media – but much of their interaction is fragmented in walled gardens or available only to their friends and circles.

So, what’s a marketer, community manager or corporate reputation manager to do? Do we give up on seeing our community? Do we spend endless hours and resources tracking every conversation everywhere?

How do you find the conversations that matter to you when they are spread across numerous social media and networks? When they are playing peek a boo in the Facebook walled garden or within limited distribution Google Circles?

I’m looking for case studies or interviews with practitioners for a presentation I’m preparing and a companion series of blog posts. If you’re willing to share how you’re dealing with the new fragmented social Web, please let me know. I’d love to feature your case study or tips.

Inside PR: Hanging Out on Google+

July 15, 2011 • Joseph Thornley • Google, GooglePlus, InsidePR

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It’s two weeks since Google+ launched and the Inside PR hosts, Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and I, have been testing it for its strengths and weaknesses. This week we talk about our experience so far.

One of the things that has caught most people’s attention is Google Hangouts, the feature that lets Google+ users set up video conference calls with up to ten users. So we thought that we’d use this feature for our recording. Well, as you’ll hear in this episode, there’s a reason why Google+ is still in the “test” period. Not everything works the way that you’d like it to. We lose Gini part of the way through. But she rejoins us by the end. We also experienced the same problem that Shel Holtz noticed when he and Neville Hobson recorded a special episode of the FIR podcast using Google Hangouts with Camtasia studio. The video recording had several defects – frozen screens and video that lagged behind the audio. Hangouts is quite ready for this use. But we’re hoping that Google will keep improving this feature and we’ll keep testing it. Eventually, I’m sure we’ll be able to produce a video version of Inside PR to accompany the audio version.

Have you ever sat down with a long time partner and said, if we could do it over again, what would we do differently? So far, I think that Google+ is the Social Network that’s doing it over and is doing it right.

For me, Facebook started as a place that suggested we could have private conversations with friends and family. But as Facebook developed its business model, it broke the faith with us on that. Bit by bit, it pushed our information onto public feeds – and it wasn’t always up front about what it was doing and didn’t provide us with easy control over how we could control our information.

Martin has been focused on rebuilding his network on Google+. And he’s found that it feels like the early days of Twitter, before the celebrities invaded it and the network became obsessed with numbers of followers. Martin’s finding that he can connect with his real community of interest on Google+ and have much higher quality conversations than he’s experienced on the other networks.

So far, I’ve had an experience similar to Martin. I’ve found that I share the interests of most of the people who have followed me. And by using the Circles feature to sort people by topic, I can dip into different areas just as I would if I were choosing between sections of a newspaper. A great way to increase the signal to noise ratio.

Martin also finds that a strength of Google+ is the ease with which users can adjust their privacy settings – on a general basis and on a post by post basis. It’s intuitive and clear.

Gini also points out that the Circles approach is different from the asymmetrical following on Twitter and the symmetrical friending on Facebook. And this means that we’ll have to develop a different way of figuring out how to manage ourselves in a way that takes full advantage of the unique properties of Google+

So, that’s our Google+ discussion this week. It’s the biggest thing that’s happened in social media in the past couple years. We’ll continue to test it and share our experiences in future weeks.

And what about you? Are you using Google+? What do you think of it? It’s strengths? Its weaknesses?

Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.

Insights: Another step forward for Radian6 and social media measurement

April 7, 2011 • Joseph Thornley • radian6

Radian6 followed up last week’s announcement of its acquisition by Salesforce with a big product announcement at the Social2011 conference today – the introduction of its Insights platform.

Yes, you read that right. Radian6 is fashioning its newest product as a platform. In doing so, it is eschewing the temptation to try to develop its own proprietary best solution. Instead, Radian6 Insights users will be able to integrate into Radian6 data from measurement apps that they judge are the best and are already using. This is a bold solution. One that I haven’t seen before in the social media measurement space.

In doing this, the folks at Radian6 are acknowledging that, as good as they are and as rapidly as they’ve grown, there are other smart people working on their own innovations. By partnering and integrating with these other innovative services, Radian6 can accelerate its own innovation and grow much more rapidly than it could if it tried to develop its own proprietary solution.

Initially, they are launching with partners that include Klout, OpenAmplify and OpenCalais. And they promise other partners soon.

One more reason I like this. Not only does it promise to add something totally new to the social media analytics mix, but it also signals that Marcel LeBrun and the Radian6 team aren’t folding up their tents and disappearing inside Salesforce. They’re keeping the company intact and continuing to innovate on what they’ve already built.

What’s next?

When he announced Radian6 Insights this morning, LeBrun also indicated that we should expect announcements about the integration of Radian6 with Salesforce at the Dreamforce conference in August. As I said in my post about the acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce, I’m hoping for big things from that announcement.

Finally, a means of measuring the ROI of social media?

April 6, 2011 • Joseph Thornley • PostRank, radian6, ROI, Salesforce, Social2011, socialmediaROI, sysomos

It’s about more than valuation

The big news this past week was the announcement that Salesforce.com would pay $323 million to acquire social media analytics company Radian6. The size of the valuation makes this an acquisition to watch. But what’s even more interesting is the potential it holds to trigger a great leap forward in the evolution of social media monitoring and analysis services.

A fork in the road

As a longtime user of social media monitoring services (Thornley Fallis currently uses Radian6, Sysomos and PostRank), I watched as the companies appeared to take divergent paths.

Sysomos has pushed its analytic tools (including a great keyword mapping tool), appealing to the data miners in our company. At the same time, it used its blog to highlight the insights that could be surfaced through its database.

PostRank has followed a similar path, but with the addition of some nifty APIs that enable other organizations to link directly to its database and build its algorithms into their applications. Both Sysomos and PostRank have placed emphasis is on the data, the database and the analysis. And in doing this, they have gained a loyal user base among social media professionals and analysts.

Radian6 seemed to follow a different path. The first indication of this was the introduction of its Engagement Console about 18 months ago. At that time, Radian6 seemed to shift its focus away from the core analytics tools toward providing tools to enable large organizations to manage their social media interactions.

In this way, I think Radian6 targeted the enterprise. And that brings them into Salesforce’s sweet spot.

Corporations like Dell have pointed to the challenge of scaling social media that stops many enterprises from using it effectively. Radian6 – and most other social media monitoring solutions have focused on providing community managers with tools to identify and manage the most important conversations in social media.

Until now.

Now, the Salesforce – Radian6 deal offers the promise of something truly different – an effective means of measuring the ROI of social media. Through the merger of Radian6 and Salesforce, I think they have the essential building blocks of an end to end service that will enable us to track our social media outreach and connect it to the sales funnel. If it is integrated this way, marketing and sales departments finally will be able to identify which social media activities lead to revenue – and to measure the return on their investment in social media activities. If Salesforce and Radian6 can pull this off, it may well yield a handsome return on the $1/3 billion investment Salesforce just paid for Radian6.

I’m cheering for them to make this work. If they do, a new standard in social media monitoring and measurement will be established and we’ll all benefit from it.

This is bound to be discussed at Social2011

I’ll have a chance to explore this when I participate in a panel on Friday at Social2011, Radian6’s user conference. I’ll be on panel titled “Can you define the ROI of social media?” with some people who know measurement – Katie Paine, Marshall Sponder and Ken Burbary. I’ll be sure to ask them what they think the implications are of the Salesforce-Radian6 deal. And you can be sure I’ll tweet the discussion. (Follow the hashtag #social2011.)

Gini Dietrich and Martin Waxman have views about this too?

Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and I talk about the Salesforce-Radian6 dealon Inside PR episode 248.