Social Media – Page 6

OK! OK! I’ll blog

Do you think people see the term ‘author’ as more established, and ‘writer’ as more wannabe?

I’ve been roundly chided for neglecting my three blogs, but, I tell you, it’s discouraging to forge on in social media activities after this recent survey about Twitter success:

In Part I of “What Gets You Twitter Followers,” Andrew Chapman of Hatmandu.net analyzes the profiles of thousands of Twitterers.

The initial results are not surprising: People who provided a URL, use an avatar, and have a bio or description in their profile have more followers than those who don’t.

But then he began to look at the words used in the Twitters’ profile text. He reports: “The only words in the top 50 or so terms associated with above-average follower counts were: blogger (2323 – remember the average was 1449), artist (1692), girl (1711), fan (1712), author (3681), entrepreneur (2663), director (1683), marketer (2541), expert (4273) and singer (2300).”

What you may have noticed, as I did, is the absence of the word “writer.”

“Although author gets 3681, writer gets only 906 – maybe people see ‘author’ as more established, and writer as more wannabe?” Chapman muses.

The lack of glamour attached to the term “writer” reminded me of a comment made by a literary type I knew in college. We were walking down the street on a cold New England evening after having extricated another friend — an up-and-coming musician — from a crowd of admiring groupies. The aspiring writer was whining.

“It’s not like I can invite people over to my apartment to watch me write,” he fumed.

Now, back to work (blogging on behalf of clients). I promise to resume blogging here on a regular basis. Though if someone were to send a box of chocolates ’round to my dressing room, it might help…

FTC determined to root out payola in the blogosphere

I confess: One of my largest clients manufacturers and sells safety equipment, and I’ve been known to blog (on my own blog) about the importance of having safety equipment in the workplace — without mentioning that I have an association with that company.

By the end of the summer, this sort of unethical behavior will place me squarely in the sights of the Federal Trade Commission. FTC guidelines regulating blogger endorsements are about to go into effect.

According to this story published yesterday by the Associated Press, people using the internet have no idea that the posts they read on blogs are anything less than objective, and that “Many bloggers have accepted perks such as free laptops, trips to Europe, $500 gift cards, or even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post.”

Thousands of dollars for a 200-word post? “Many” bloggers? (I checked the URL to see if I had somehow been redirected to The Onion. I had not.)

But wait! The AP article drivels on:

Savvy consumers often go online for independent consumer reviews of products and services, scouring through comments from everyday Joes and Janes to help them find a gem or shun a lemon.

(Would someone please turn off that loud alarm? I’m trying to write.)

Savvy consumers? No, savvy consumers are consulting Consumer Reports, CNET.com, and the consumer comments posted on Amazon.com and Zappos. The people basing major purchasing decisions on a post from Joe-the-Blogger are not savvy consumers but nincompoops, and, to be blunt, they deserve what they get.

The reaction to the AP story from the blogosphere has included widespread incredulity, particularly from people who actually work in the intersection of blogging and marketing. I particularly liked this summary from James Joyner of Outside the Beltway.

To begin with, what company is going to pay a low-level blogger “thousands of dollars” for a product endorsement? And they will be paying a low-level blogger because top-level bloggers don’t accept payola. They don’t accept it, mind you, not because they are all honest but because the blogosphere is a place where unscrupulous behavior has a way of catching up with you. In spades. Imagine these scenarios:

1. Jane-the-Blogger recommends that people abandon their trusted backup software and switch to new Brand X backup software. People follow her advice, and Brand X Backup corrupts their hard drives. They post angry descriptions of their experiences with Brand X on their own blogs (mentioning Jane’s blog), so that people Googling Jane’s blog find instead a lot of unflattering reports about it. And they post their experiences with Brand X on reputable tech sites, as well. In return for the amount Jane has received from Brand X’s payola department, she’s now forfeited her own blogging credibility, and lost traffic to her blog.

2. Company Z sends Joe-the-Blogger a fancy piece of technology to review and says “go ahead and keep it.” He does. He tries it, is unimpressed, and doesn’t blog about it. The company has achieved…what? I’ve represented clients who do PR campaigns to bloggers, and send out product samples, and they do not waste expensive products on shots in the dark.

While it seems simple for the FTC to require a blogger praising a product to disclose that they have received the product or service for free, or that they receive a percentage when they link to a sales page for the product, the situation gets far more complicated in practice. Try these scenarios:

1. I hear about an interesting new service, call the owner, and write a blog post about it, which generates a lot of buzz. The owner calls me a week later, thanks me, and provides me with some insider tips and connections for a story that I go on to write and sell to a publication for $1,000. Do I go back and amend the original post to reveal this?

2. I attend a conference (for which I pay full fee), and later write a blog post describing the conference and recommend that my readers attend that conference next year. However, I don’t mention in my post that I was a speaker at the conference, and that as a result of my speech I made some important business connections at the conference. Is it possible that the conference, by offering me the speaking opportunity, was in effect “bribing” me to write a positive story about their conference? Should I bring this up in the blog post?

My answer to these questions is, I’m afraid: Oh, good grief.

Full disclosure: Neither the FTC nor the Associated Press offered me any payola to review, respectively, their regulations or their coverage of this story. I endorse neither. They did provide a nice boost to my blog traffic after I was interviewed on KUOW-FM‘s The Conversation yesterday about the new regs. However, I’m almost positive that boost was inadvertent.

Who you gonna call? Ghost bloggers.

I sit down with clients and figure out what they really want to get in return for the time they put in — or the money they spend — on a business blog.

Haunted by your business blog? You know, the one you were going to write posts for two or three times a week, but which hasn’t been updated since — oh dear — Valentine’s Day?

Call me. I’m a ghost blogger.

I sit down with clients and figure out what they really want to get in return for the time they put in — or the money they spend — on a business blog. We start with these questions:

• Is the blog there simply to provide the fresh content required to move the site up in the search engine rankings?

• Is the blog’s purpose more complex? Is it a component of a vigorous, structured search engine optimization (SEO) plan, intended to get important keywords on the site for the search engines to find, and to generate links to and from other strong websites?

Either way, I can usually help. If the business has particular SEO issues (it’s a newcomer in a crowded, competitive field, for instance), I’m likely to recommend that the client work with a professional SEO analyst to make recommendations for keywords. This will focus the blogging effort and can also be applied to the rest of the client’s website.

Once we’ve established the blog’s objectives, I draw up a list of two dozen or more blog topics for the client’s approval, and write a sample blog post or two. (How do I find those topics? Aha! We’re into my secret ghost-blogger voodoo here.)

If the client’s happy with this preliminary work, we then decide if I will coach someone at the business to write the posts, or if they’d prefer to contract with me to write posts for them.

I’ve just completed Phase I of a ghost blogging project (topic list and sample posts) for a client and am hoping they’ll bring me on to write the actual posts. It’s a highly colorful business with dozens of juicy topics. I pride myself on being able to write about nearly anything, but it’s always nice if the subject matter meets you half way.

Speed, transparency, and the long tail

Tomorrow I’ll be talking about PR and social media to another communications class at the University of Washington. This time, it’s an undergraduate class. I’m going to hit many of the points I did in my earlier presentation to students already in the business world, but this time I’m going to attempt to give more context.

So much has changed in the PR world in the past 10 years, it’s hard to know where to begin!

The model of PR in which corporate communicators developed carefully reviewed press releases and distributed them to known contacts in print and broadcast media by mail or fax, is over. Five minutes after a company announces a new product, it’s been Twitter and blogged about. (Example — Amazon released Kindle software for the iPhone last night, and that rocketed to a top spot on Twitter in about two hours. Interestingly, it was being discussed on Twitter even before it had registered on Google News searches.)

Any hope PR folks once had of controlling public perception of the announcement — via their carefully chosen words, or via the sedate reviewing of a friendly news reporter — is a quaint delusion. People are raving and ranting about it on blogs — or pointedly ignoring it — within 24 hours. And good luck to the PR person who tries to spin or puff a product. Her or she risks being reviled right along with the product itself.

Clearly, old-school PR doesn’t work in the current online environment. As anyone who follows Twitter has seen, a new school of PR is emerging to meet the new challenges. It can be successful, if it’s mindful of three characteristics of the social media world:

Speed. If PR wants to be part of the discussion, it needs to get out there, fast. A good PR operation, representing an organization that genuinely has something to contribute to the conversation, can make a splash. That may mean twittering about the city’s inept response to the snowstorm at 4 a.m. (Does your PR person work at 4 a.m.? Let’s hope so.)

Transparency. Successful PR folks have to come to grips with the transparency created by online social media. Many companies tried to hop on the social media bandwagon by making community commenting, or video contests, a part of their marketing campaigns. Often they forgot that they could no longer control the distribution of the resulting comments or videos. In 2006, General Motors’ attempt to harness “viral marketing” for their Chevy Tahoe SUV inspired hundreds of people critical of SUVs to create and then post anti-Tahoe videos. To its credit, General Motors remained cool and the flap eventually died down.

The Long Tail. The days when nearly everyone read the newspaper and families gathered around the TV after dinner to watch the network news are long, long over. Instead, household members are more likely to be getting information individually, from a variety of sources (such as watching a NetFlix video, playing World of Warcraft, reading their favorite blogs, or talking to friends on Facebook). To be successful, PR campaigns will need to focus on these narrower audiences, often with savvier members.

The professor of the class asked me to emphasize the continuing need for strong writing skills in PR. That will be no problem. Sure, you see sloppy writing all over the web. But you don’t see it on highly ranked blogs. If PR people want to draw traffic to their blogs and followers to their Tweets, clear, polished writing is a must.

Way beyond blogs

A year ago, Peggy Sturdivant, a Seattle neighborhood news blogger, invited me to do a joint presentation for a PR class (the PR Certificate program) at the University of Washington.

We’ve been invited back to present again this year, and, as I’m putting together my notes, I’m discovering two things:

1. That the role of blogging in PR (and in several other areas of business and professional communication) has changed fairly dramatically in the past 12 months; what were emerging trends in January 2008 are so established as to be taken for granted today. (More on this to come.)

2. That the way information is presented in a classroom is pretty much light years away from how I communicate online. It’s slow, it’s boring, it’s cumbersome. Classrooms need presenter computers connected to a large-screen TV or projector screen. In reality, they have nothing but whiteboards or a non-functioning setup that theoretically allows a presenter’s computer to be connected to a screen, but which, in reality, never works because some cord is missing or some software isn’t compatible. Sigh.

Anyway, on to the actual presentation.

Most of what I’ll be presenting tonight are short tips that students can explore later by clicking through to these following links on this blog. Tips are likely to include:

1. Online PR has gone way beyond websites and blogging.

Suggested reading:
Barry’s Hurd’s “Social Media Demographics and Analytics 2008-2009” in which Barry comments that “such things as reputation and brand impact will be occurring real-time 24/7.”

2. Fortunately for those of us who do PR, a much more realistic attitude now exists about blogging. It’s been demystified; is no longer viewed as a magic bullet.

Suggested reading:
Darren Rouse’s post on getting fast traffic to a blog.

3. Unfortunately, the new “magic bullet” that CEOs read about in airplane magazines and decide their marcom folks must create immediately is “community.” That’s simple but difficult to create and maintain. Instead, you need to participate in robust existing communities, a behavior that is antithetical to old-school corporate behavior. (“But is has to have our name on it!”)

Suggested reading:
Barry Hurd’s “PR is killing itself and it hurts to laugh”

Chris Pirillo’s YouTube video on creating community.

4. SEO is now the “hot new thing,” a PR essential for blogging and websites.
• Basic SEO is easy.
• More sophisticated SEO is not for amateurs and should always start with analytics before you throw money into implementing SEO.
• Gray-hat (shady) SEO is not as smart as the people telling your company to do it thinks it is. It can, and will, turn around and embarrass you.
• Make sure you understand “social bookmarking” and “tags” of all kinds. You may not need to use them, but you need to know if you need to use them.

Suggested reading:
Boing Boing’s post “Motorola, could you please tell your viral marketer to get out of our comments?”

5. Twitter PR is free and powerful, but not easy. (Hint: It’s not advertising, it’s information.) And, watch how closely it’s linked to blogs. Think of it as a headline for your blog posts or for your comments on other blog posts, plus a way to create the credibility that will bring others to your blog.

Suggested reading:
Sign up for a Twitter account and follow:
• moniguzman (Monica Guzman, writer of the P-I’s big blog)
• hrheingold (Howard Rheingold, social media theorist and professor — you’ll get links to his class materials)
• joehageonline (Joe Hage is putting social media principles into action, right in front of you, in his work as a MarCom director at a major corporation, and then explaining it on his blog)
• UDistFoodBank (excellent use of Twitter by a non-profit)
• chrispirillo (Chris epitomizes the concepts of branding and communication; watch how he uses Twitter to drive traffic)

What’s Twitter, and why I love it

If you work in an environment filled with friendly, fascinating people, where you continually hear about exciting news (local, online, and around the world), and you are encouraged to be witty and playful, then you don’t need Twitter.

However, I work in a cubicle in my house (really — I had a surplus Herman Miller cubicle installed here) and the cats have their limitations as colleagues.

Thus, five or six times a day, I Twitter. I take a look at what people are saying, throw in some of my own teasers, check “@” replies, answer publicly posted questions, and look at private “direct mail” I receive. My Twitter breaks correspond to the pattern I followed when I worked in a traditional office: Greet people on arrival, mid-morning coffee break, lunch, mid-afternoon break, and departure in the evening. The one addition is that I’m likely to check Twitter once or twice in the evening — by which time most of us are talking about what we’re cooking for dinner or what activities we’re up to (shopping, yoga, classes, crafts, dealing with the kids, etc.)

Who, you might ask, are these people I’m Twittering with? Well, unlike the real office where you are usually stuck with a few folks you don’t want to deal with, on Twitter you hear only from the people you want to hear from — you select the individuals you follow.

I’ve selected colleagues from my past jobs in tech, clients and colleagues from my current SEO work, leaders in the Seattle social media and blogging field, some belly dance, yoga, and fitness folks, and — here’s the twist — their friends. This “second tier” of Twitter is where it gets really interesting. I see my friends commenting on other people’s remarks, and I get curious about the other people, who often get curious about me, and the next thing I know we’re exchanging tips on everything from cooking to software. Or meeting in Ballard for lunch.

Twitter is also a great way of keeping up on what’s going on with friends from out of town. This way you don’t end up finding out, months after the fact, that they’ve changed jobs, moved, or split up with their significant others. You pick it up on Twitter, and can jump in with an appropriate private direct message.

I most often use Twitter from a web browser, but there are a variety of third party apps that let you read and post Tweets from a smart phone. (This list includes desktop widgets and smart phone apps.) I use PocketTweets but also use Twinkle, an app that lets me see other Twitter/Twinkle users within 1 mile, 2 miles, 5 miles (you get it) from wherever I am. It’s fun during an event (such as Folklife) or when you’re traveling. Or during a snowstorm, when you want to know what’s open in the neighborhood.

Yes, some people do take Twitter a bit too seriously. Some try to game it as a social networking tool, posting a bunch of marketing messages thinly disguised as clever repartee. (It’s like having a colleague at work suddenly launch into an attempt to recruit you into their religion, or sell you Amway products.) Fortunately, Twitter makes it very easy to “unfollow” these folks. And I do. (I’m not selective about who follows me, but Twitter offers a blocking tool for people who are.)

The competitive types get all excited about Twitter Grader, which ranks your influence within the Twitter community. I don’t know what the grading algorithm is, but I suspect it looks primarily at the quality of your followers (how long they’ve been on Twitter, how often they post, and how many followers they have).

There’s a trend towards merging all your online communications into one dashboard, so you’ll see people having their Tweets appear on their blogs, or on Facebook. That’s too large, and too uncontrolled an audience for me. What happens on Twitter, stays on Twitter, as far as I’m concerned.

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