The social media release: the jury's still out

March 8, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

A panel of Todd Defren, Tom Foremski, Brian Solis George Vasquez and Laura Sturaitis, chaired by Chris Heuer tackled How to optimize the social media press release for the future of PR.

Todd Defren pointed out that over 3,000 releases are published everday in the U.S. A fraction of them actually lead to meaningful coverage.

Why perpetuate such a demonstrably unsuccessful vehicle? There is so much good technology out there. Why not incorporate it into a new take on the release?

Five years from now, I’d like to hope that every piece of news that comes out becomes a micro-site in itself that enables every person who cares to engage with it and to discuss it.

George Vasquez believes that the social media release vaults beyond the traditional release to enable communicators to engage directly with their audience without first going through journalists. The press release isn’t going anywhere, but it will morph into something new.Journalists are relying increasingly on search engines. They will also find the information from social media releases this way.

Tom Foremski wonders why the press release hasn’t changed a bit in 25 years. Why doesn’t it take advantage of the tools and technologies of the new media. A huge amount of work goes into press releases, but they are not very useful. “I just wanted to make my life easier. Do other journalists use [the social media release]? I don’t know. I’ve never used one. I’ve never really come across one.”

Laura Sturaitis suggested that the social media release is a foundation document. However, the elements of clear thinking and good writing will remain essential to its success. There are three types of releases: A releases that you are compelled to put out for regulatory purposes. B releases promote products and major announcements. These will continue to be distributed on the wire. C releases tell other stories of interest to specific audiences. These will be distributed in other ways to reach a targeted audience.

Brian Solis argued that the social media release requires people to think about what there story is actually about. “If you have to think about it that hard, you’ll take out all the b-llsh-t from the press release.”

Solis pointed out that there is a difference between a new media release and a social media release. A new media release has links in it. But it doesn’t allow conversation. “I think that a blog post is a killer social media release.” It enables people to find it. It is tagged. It allows conversations. It is searchable.

Todd Defren agrees with the blogging functionality as the essence of the social media release. Whether it is in a social media newsroom. Or in a blog. Or somewhere else.

Tom Foremski questioned the value of the newswires in the era of the RSS feed. RSS allows companies and others to create a relationship with journalists and others that delivers information they are interested in as soon as it is released. What continuing purpose do the wire services?

George Vasquez suggested that the wires will continue to be necessary as “push” mechanisms.

Chris Heur argued that we live in a world of varying technical abilities and personal preferences. There are some journalists who will never want to subscribe to an RSS feed. And we need to use all of the traditional channels of communication, including both wires and personal contact to reach them.

Interestingly, despite the amount of discussion around the social media news release, there is as yet no case study of the successful use of a social media release. It has been used. But most of the anecdotal evidence suggests that the coverage garnered has been due to the novelty of the format, not due to the power of the format itself.

Tom Foremski pointed out that form and content are completely separate in this discussion. Whatever package you use, bad content is unlikely to generate coverage or interest.

Are there social media best practices?

March 8, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

An all star panel of Shel Israel, Giovanni Rodriguez, Debbie Weil, Josh Hallett and John Cass, chaired by Mike Manuel, tackled Best practices for corporate blogging and social media programs.

John Cass led off with a preview of the SNCR’s best practices study. What are the underpinnings of successful corporate blogging?

Culture: The company must have a culture that values feedback and is open to what its customers, clients and employees are telling them
Trust: A company must really trust its employees to behave responsibly.
Training is important. Blogging has its own special culture and conventions. Employees must be provided with training to understand how to do it well.

Josh Hallett focused his initial comments on Blog design. Too many times organizations place their blogs on free or minimum-cost blog platforms. They don’t own their own domain names. This can present problems later. Every corporation should invest in securing their domain name and ensuring that they own their content.

Do corporate bloggers require a lot of technical knowledge? Not really. What they need to remember is that what looks easiest may not be. And so they should seek advice from others with the necessary technical skills.

Shel Israel,advised that it’s time to take some risks. If you take risks, you will make some mistakes. But what’s different and unique for people and corporations who blog is that it allows others to see that the company or organization is composed of humans. Fallible. Forgivable.

How about worst practices? When a blog becomes focused on numbers, it loses its focus on what makes blogs worthwhile: passion and distinctive voice.

Debbie Weil noted that in most conversations about social media, blogs are listed first. And she tied this to their ease of use, broad adoption and the fact that very often the most original ideas appear first on blogs.

Best practices? Confront your fear. Fear of losing control. Fear of criticism. Fear of new technologies.

Embrace experimentation. Be prepared to make some mistakes. If you don’t do that, you won’t learn.

Honesty. Openness. Transparency. It’s not just about blogs. It’s about a new way of doing business that customers are demanding. You need to open your culture – even if it’s just for you employees.

Giovanni Rodriguez talked about the experience of social media in the Bay area. He noted that there is some degree of insularity in the Valley.

Something has happened in the PR world that is quite profound. For years, we have been niched in a small area – media relations. As a result of social media, we have been able to talk to people directly. We’re using different tools that enable that. Blogging has shown that we are ready to speak. But many people have not yet learned how to listen. It requires fine understanding of how to read people and their concerns.

It’s not a world for everyone. Blogging requires a lot of time and commitment. We can’t and shouldn’t expect the entire world to become bloggers. But we should expect people to learn the lessons of conversation that it illustrates.

The five panelists engaged in a free-wheeling discussion of the relationship between marketing, public relations and blogging.

ROI? Shel Israel: What is the ROI of the phone on your desk? Of the Corporate CEO speaking at a conference like this? Of a corporate contribution to Katrina victims?

Giovanni Rodriguez: A recent study shows that the people who are most interested in the potential for blogging and conversations are the CEOs. CFOs seem to be talking a different language. Don’t underestimate the importance of this senior executive appetite for converstion. But to realize the potential, it will be important for PR people to learn to speak a different language to reach the CFOs in terms they can understand and will value.

Is blogging the flavour of the month? Debbie Weil: Blogging is the next generation of interactive Web platform. It defines the new standard.

Shel Israel: We want companies to behave as responsibly as out spouses do. And the tools are there to do that. For those that fail to do this, they will pay a price.

John Cass: Companies will come to blogging from a different starting point. And therefore they’ll go through different stages and focus on different things. A good example of this is Dell. They started out as a company that eschewed blogging. When they launched their first blog, they had a policy on it suggesting that it was not the place to post questions about customers service and individual problems. But once they started blogging and found that customers ignored that policy, they learned from it. And over time they began to loosen up. This points out that companies can try things in steps. They don’t have to be right the first time. They can adjust and they can improve. What counts is that they move forward.

Measuring consumer-generated media

March 8, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

Katie Delahaye Paine led off the afternon with a presentation on New Rulers for a new century: How to measure consumer-generated media.

Why bother? Christian Science Monitor found that information distributed to bloggers generated 3.4 times more traffic than ABC News. Bloggers fit the profile of “influentials.” Blogs have eyeballs.

How to measure blogs? The methodology is similar to traditional media. Measure traffic. Examine content. Analyse.

Another indicators to look at with blogs: The ratio of postings to comments. If you post regularly but generate few comments, you might conclude that your content is not really having impact.

Measure three things:

Outputs: What did you send out?
Outtakes: What did your audience hear and remember?
Outcomes: What did you change? Attitudes? Behaviour?

Steps to perfect measurement:

Define your mission and goals. You have to know what you want to do to know if you did it.
Prioritize your audiences and your needs. Social media is not “one audience.” It’s a variety of groups and individuals with a special interest or perspective on you.
What’s the measure of success? Decide what you want to quantify as an expression of your goals. Sales? Complaints? Reputation? Something else?
Pick a tool and undertake research. Traffic to Web site? Sales? Increase in the conversation index? Share of positioning on key issues? Share of recommendations?
Determine what you are benchmarking against. Previous performance? Competitors?
Analyse results and figure out what it means.
Pick a tool. There are good free tools: Google News/Google blogs. Technorati. Sphere. There are good for-pay tools: Cyberalert. CustomScoop. e-Watch. RSS feeds. Use automated tools to handle the gross aspects of measurement. Monitoring and searching. Use human judgment to interpret.
Analyse the content. The data without analysis has no value. Focus your analysis on issues that will be meaningful or have a direct bearing on the decisions your management must take or the questions they want answered.
Take action

And how about ROI? With blogging, why bother? If it costs you $14.99 to do something – and blogs can be done for virtually no cost – why spend thousands to measure it.

But if you are spending a lot on a social media program, be prepared to spend a lot measuring it’s results.

As I listened to Katie – who is one of THE experts on measurement – I realized just how much work is still to be done in developing broadly accepted measurement indices for social media. It’s still early days. But right now, we seem to be attempting to stretch ill fitting traditional measures to match the new shape of social media. It may look like it’s working. But anyone who’s involved in it knows it’s not comfortable.

See the future through Second Life

March 8, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

I took in Kami Huyse‘s and Linda Zimmer‘s session on Second Life, second chance: Why you should be marketing in the virtual world.

Kami and Linda are in second life. They use it to meet clients. They use it for business.

Linda: Second Life is seriously engaging. If you go into Second Life, you must be willing to engage fully with it. Some companies have gone into Second Life and not delivered. This leads to backlash.

Why is Second Life so engaging? It’s ours. We’ve created it. We’re creating the world. And much of it is shared.

It’s spatial, interactive and persistent. You can move through the world and interact with others and with objects. When we log out, what we have created continues to exist. We can go back and continue where we left off.

BMW is using Second Life successfully. It’s actual property is only sparsely furnished. However, BMW is successfully using this platform to engage online communities. Social network has been pushed into the fore. Building corporate cathedrals is secondary.

IBM has allocated a multi-million budget to explore what Second Life means for collaboration and how new business models may emerge within the 3D Web.

Other companies are exploring Second Life’s potential for low cost prototyping. Starwood Hotels has had success in prototyping its aloft hotel concept. Cisco prototyped their vision of the “connected home” in Second Life.

MTV has developed a Virtual Laguna Second Life environment as a companion for their Laguna Beach series, offering fans of the television show and opportunity to place themselves in the show’s setting.

Second Life is about the future as much as the now. Kami provided a live demonstration. When she signed in, the login page showed that only about 30,000 people were signed in at that time. That’s a fraction of the number of people who have joined Second Life. Much of what we saw was empty rooms, which seems to be one aspect of the experience that drives skepticism.

Kami and Linda showed a series of slides demonstrating that, while the absolute numbers are still low, hours users were signed on is increasingly dramatically. Moreover, users span a broad age range.

Yes, there are limitations to Second Life. Usage is relatively low. The learning curve is steep. It’s still early days. However, the 3D Web has great potential and Second Life will give us insight into how people will interact as social networks become 3D.

For more info, Kami prepared some dedicated del.icio.us resources at http://del.icio.us/kamichat/SLResources.

David Weinberger's got a clue

March 8, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

David Weinberger, one of the four co-authors of the ClueTrain Manifesto, delivered the opening keynote address at the NewComm Forum this morning in Las Vegas.

His topic: Conversations, blogs, wikipedia and the New Authority. Who gets to be an authority?

Broadcast is becoming relatively less important in the face of P2P (many to many) communications. Blogs, Wikis, Tags, Consumer generated content.

User generated content is important. But it’s important for a different reason than has been grabbed onto by a lot of people.

Reality keeps things apart. If you have two things, they must be in their own place and they can’t be in two places at one time. The digital world escapes this constraint.

The characterstics of the digital are not contained by the constraints of the real.

In traditional media, such as the New York Times, there is limited amount of space. Only one front page. And the same front page for everyone who buys the paper.

Take away the constraints of the physical front page and everyone can talk. Everyone can design their own “front page.”

P2P communications are important because they change the basic functions of Control and Authority.

The ancient premise was that the larger the project, the more control you needed. Managers. Managers to manage the managers.

The Web shows us that this premise is false. The Web is a project of enourmous size. And it has been built with zero managers. It was designed to be built without managers. Because if you needed managers, it would not scale.

The Web, on its own, is a “permission-free zone.”

Our business world is still at odds with the model of the Web. The infrastructure, culture and attitudes of most businesses are built around the notion of control.

But the Internet is now undermining the walls that companies have put up around themselves.

The industrial revolution turned markets – which had been based on intimate person to person contact – into marketing – which delivered messages to the masses to convince them of their need for mass-produced products.

Of course, there is really no market for messages. Customers don’t want to receive this constant stream of unsolicited messages. And marketers have been constantly at war with their customers.

This is changing. Markets consist of individuals. Individuals with opinions and a voice. And we’re talking to one another. On flickr. On YouTube. Through blogs. By tagging. Through craigslist.

There are values associated with conversation. We get to talk in our real voice. Conversations are open-ended. They are voluntary. It’s about what we’re interested in, not what the marketers are interested in. And they’re not about something else. There should be no hidden agenda.

Weblogs are at the centre of these conversations.

Weblogs show what we care about. And our interests are diverse. Look at Wikipedia, for example. It has listings on more than 1,500,000 different topics. And growing.

Wikipedia tries to organize all information on a topic on a single page. Blogs link the information that appears on an untold number of different pages authored by different people.

Blogging is not journalism. A blog is a blank piece of paper. It only becomes journalism if you write journalism on it. Most people don’t write this way. And their blogs should not be judged by journalistic standards.

Journalism and blogs have developed a relationship. They borrow from one another. But even more significantly, bloggers are asserting their own judgments about what is important. Bloggers have moved into the editorial function.

Some of this is expressed through popularity engines like Digg. And as this model has taken hold, mainstream media have begun to mirror it on their own sites.

And business is beginning to understand that information shared, linked to, mashed up has greater value than in its initial form.

Blogs are written quickly. By ordinary people. And because they are written quickly, the writing may not be up to professional standards. But because we accept the context of immediacy and the fallibility of the blogger, we accept this quality when we read blogs.

Links are an essential element of successful blogging. Every link from one blog to another is a selfless act of generosity. And this spirit drives the blogosphere.

Blogs do not simplify the world. In fact, they make it more complex by bringing forward true diversity. And in doing this, we organize this complexity in patterns that make sense to us.

Organization is authority. So, in taking control of the content, bloggers have taken on authority that previously was held only by organizations.

Take Britannica and Wikipedia. Britannica’s authority was driven by its authoritative writers and editors. Wikipedia’s authority relies on the judgment of its mass readership and contributors. The transparency of its edits to all readers. The trail of edits. And the presence of warnings in the text of Wikipedia articles that specific articles are subject to argument or not sufficiently researched or stubs. All contribute to the confidence that readers can place in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is interested in having us come to informed beliefs.

And, why do we never see these warnings in traditional media? The drive to be infallible. And ultimately, this is a crucial weakness.

Traditional media are “theirs.” P2P media are “ours.” We’ve never had this before.

This notion transcends ownership. Content, participation and attitude trump ownership. Wikipedia is “ours.” Craigslist is “ours.” YouTube is “ours.” Google is “ours.”

The Web is “ours.” We built it for us. And its driving change.

If you do PR for the Government of Canada, there's a meeting tonight for you

March 7, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

If you live in Canada’s National Capital Region and provide public relations services as a contractor to the Government of Canada, then you will want to attend the special meeting of the Ottawa/Gatineau Chapter of the Canadian Public Relations Society tonight.

The notice of the meeting provides details:

The Government of Canada has issued a request for industry comments (RFIC) for a draft standing offer that would be issued by Public Works and Government Services Canada that would serve as the basic Standing Offer document for a potential new system where PWGSC would offer all departments access to this master standing offer.

This request for industry comments will be available at the meeting for review. We will be drafting a response, as a society, for the deadline of March 12th.

…

To help draft the document, we want to invite our members interested in responding to join us for an evening meeting on Wednesday, March 7th, at 5 p.m. We will be hosting the meeting in the boardroom at Thornley Fallis Communications, and we would welcome all those interested in providing feedback to the process to join us at that time. Please RSVP if possible, but we will welcome anyone who can join us for this session.

WHAT: Special meeting of the chapter membership, CPRS Ottawa-Gatineau WHEN: Wednesday, March 7th, from 5 to 7 p.m. (coffee will be served)

WHERE: Boardroom, Thornley Fallis Communications, Suite 730, 55 Metcalfe St., Ottawa

If you care about the way that the Government of Canada buys public relations services, this is a great chance to be influence the position that will be taken by the local chapter of the CPRS .

Yahoo! Canada issues a call to action for the Canadian SEM/SEO industry

February 28, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

Martin Byrne of Yahoo! Canada issued a call to action on behalf of the Canadian Search Engine Marketing/Optimization (SEM/SEO) industry. Byrne was a panelist at a session on SEM in Toronto this morning along with reps of Google and Microsoft

According to Byrne, Canadians love the Web. We spend more time sitting in front of a computer on the Web than do citizens of any other G7 country. This time is being drained from other media. And the online share of the total Canadian advertising spend has increased from less than 1% five years ago to over 6% this year. Byrne predicts that the Canadian SEM business will rise to approximately $400 million in 2007.

Against this background, he feels that Canadian businesses are missing the boat. Less than 36% of Canadian companies who do online advertising incorporate SEM/SEO in their programs. And they spend less than 18% of their online budgets in this area. Contrast this with the 79% of US online advertisers who engaged in SEM in 2006.

Why this low rate of adoption in Canada? One reason, low awareness. Recent research showed that 47% of online marketing decision makers were unaware that they can target Canadian users through Search Engine Marketing.

Essentially, Canada has been a one provider marketplace until recently. Consequently, there has been a lack of education and promotion of the channel in Canada. There is also a desperate shortage of talent and skills in Search Engine Marketing/Search Engine Optimization. In fact, in Ontario, you cannot obtain formal educational certification in this area.

SEM agencies have had a harder time establishing themselves in Canada. They have long sales cycles, small budgets and limited campaign opportunities. By contrast, the SEM agency business in the US has been expanding rapidly. Byrne warns that if we do not stimulate the industry in Canada, the indigenous companies may not be able establish themselves and the larger US-based companies may simply move into Canada.

Byrne suggests an aggressive action agenda to turn this situation around. SEM Agencies need to get together. Canadian rsearch/case studies must be developed and distributed. Client education channels and opportunities must be created and expanded, especially for small and medium businesse. Standards for policing of traffic quality must be developed. ‘Black hat” vendors should be shut down. And the seach engines need to step up and shepherd the industry to success.

What is Yahoo! Canada doing? They came late to the party with their Canadian platform, but they have launched here now. And they will soon be launching a platform in Quebec. They have located a comprehensive management and client service team in Canada. They are working aggressively to assemble a network of Canadian publishers.

According to Byrne, Yahoo! Canada sees their own success as depending on: supporting SEM education for Canadian businesses, building a stronger SEM industry and growing the SEM business.

All in all, Byrne’s presentation showed that Yahoo! Canada understands the value of being part of and giving to the community. With this approach, watch for them to break out in awareness and profile in the Canadian market this year.

Jason Dailey of Microsoft Canada focused on the adCenter product that Microsoft has just launched in Canada. Dailey suggested that conversion rates for clients using adCenter are increasing substantially. For one client, conversion rates have increased from 1/2 to 1% to 5 to 5 1/2%.

Some search issues: The average time from query to answer is 11 minutes. Nearly 50% of complex queries go unaswered. Only 50% of the web is searchable. And currently search is a destination, not fully integrated into our routine processes. Microsoft is attempting to leverage their platform and technology to expand the number of touchpoints for search capabilities.

Eric Morris from Google Canada pointed to the free tools and services provided by Google. YouTube and Google Video are a great way to generate great traffic for your company. Google Sitemaps provide you with visibility about which of your pages are in the Google Index and how the crawler is finding you. Google Maps provides businesses with a means of being searched geographically by uploading company information through Google Base.

According to Morris, the two most important factors in search engine marketing are targeting and reach. Google provides advertisers with the ability to reach over 85% of Canadians in any month – either through Google sites directly or partner sites.

Google’s contextual advertising appears in Gmail. Google believes that contextually relevant ads in email are useful to users and effective for advertisers. However, Morris did acknowledge in response to a question that, in the aggregate, contextual ads yield a much lower click through rate than on search pages.

Google has added a display advertising program to keyword and contextual ads to provide a full range of advertising opportunities.

Finally Google Analytics provides users with the data they need to understand and fine tune the performance of their sites to achieve their marketing objectives.

Julie Batten of non-linear creations rounded out the morning by focusing on organic search. She presented four tactics in this area.

Social media marketing (SMM) should be used to encourage interaction and information sharing. An example of this done right is the Google Pain Relief letter –
Google sending a letter and headache tablet to a blogger who had complained about the large number of recent changes in Google. An example of social media marketing gone wrong: The Coke Score Flog. Bloggers punished Coke with negative posts about this fake blog.

Link Baiting. An example of a success: How Much is Your Blog Worth? This simple widget generated more than 42,000 links and raised the host blog to # 25 on Technorati.

Personalized search. Search engines now encourage users to create personal profiles so that their home search page can be personalized to reflect their preferences and behaviour. This can be a challenge for marketers. They can respond by incorporating elements that will support users to incorporate the information of most interest into their personal profiles. Include product information, buttons to tag and local information.

RSS marketing. As RSS feeds are attached to more and more current content, the Web usage patterns are changing. Companies should harness this trend by adding RSS feeds to their content.

All in all, this morning’s session provided an interesting contrast between the style and approach of the three major search engines in the Canadian market.

Now, I’m looking forward to Dave’s next session in March, Digital Advertising – What’s Next?