Global Neighbourhoods

Social Media & the Relations Part of PR

                   [Needle-pusher Shel Holtz. Photo by Shel]

I am a recovering publicist.

I have taken the ten-step cure offered by Hype-Enders and I pitch no more.

More seriously I spent over 25 years of my life as a PR practitioner. I conducted myself and the agency I headed with ethics and pride and helped me technology startups build interest and enthusiasm for the products I helped them introduce. There were many who did the same during my tenure in my profession and I find it boring and inaccurate when I see epitaphs hurled at the profession.

Simultaneously, as a writer I get more than a few really bad pitches and emails about subjects that do not interest me. I bristle that I'm pitched by people who seem totally ignorant of what I do and see no problem with wasting my time so that they can bill those minutes to their clients.

There's nothing new about this. PR has always had a lot of bad practitioners. Mst of them untrained rather than unskilled a few of them just plain unethical, but that can be said about just about any field.

It's just not an issue I pay a lot of attention to anymore. But today, several really smart people, some of who are my favorites in social media, such as Shel Holtz, KD Paine and Todd Defren,did a good job of refreshing the old dialog about what PR is, how it should be measured and why its practitioners are or are not needed in this emerging Conversational Era in which social media's importance is on a trajectory to eclipse traditional media, and probably has already done so in most PR categories.

Shel Holtz emphasized that PR is not necessarily evaluated by sales, but it has to move the needle. I jumped in and said that personally I prefer a good conversation, to which he retorted that no one ever paid him to have a good conversation.

Perhaps, but perhaps not.

Shel, of course has to have a better program objective than "nice chats," in his proposals to corporate clients. And KD Paine, generally recognized as the social media measurement goddess needs something more quantifiable than a nice conversation to measure the program.

But how much of the success of a PR program really is the indirect result of precisely that?  When Shel calls up an editor, one he may have known for several years, what is the value of the fact that editor--or analyst, or blogger--remembers having good chat with Shel.

Before he makes the money call and before KD measures the effectiveness of that money call, theree were other conversations, conversations that built relationships between people, relationships that were built so that the money call, that was made for specific, measurable business purposes was even contemplated.

This seems obvious when you read it I bet. It seems obvious to me. The mystery is why the "just a good conversation part" gets so often overlooked and undervalued?

It's why people glibly discount talking about what you had for lunch, when in fact business conversations start with pleasantries like lunch, or weather or local sports. It's why so many of us have found a strong preference for conversational media over broadcast media.

We like good conversations. Sometimes, good conversations lead to big business and sometimes they lay dormant for long periods of time before business rises unexpectedly as a result.

Without good conversations upon which relationships and credibility get built Shel's needle might remain unmoved.

When I was in that business I thought the keyword was relations. Social media had not come along yet and now that its here you can build these relations faster and more often than was previously the case. We are in a conversational era and having conversations with customers is a highly effective way to achieve in possible PR goal that I can think of.

And to me, the ultimate goal of any PR program--including those that support sales--are relationships

To me PR folk have to be good at both ends of a conversation and social media is a tool in which several of them, such as Todd and Shel excel.  The Conversational Era was made for PR people who understand that tools of their business have changed and the results can be--forgive me KD--immeasurable.

Egyptian Terror Spoofers Get Treated Like Terrorists.

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             [Spoofing blogger Mohammed Adel gets himself busted in Egypt]

I have reported previously on Wael Abbas, and Egyptian human rights activist who was the first citizen journalist to ever win a Knight Foundation Award for Journalistic Excellence for his social media posting videos of Egyptian police brutality, election corruption, and harassment of women.

Wael is one of several Egyptian human rights activists that got behind a satirical campaign started by  Mohammed Adel, who uses the blogger ID of "Dead." In support of Palestine during the recent Israel-Gaza conflict, "Dead" formed the "Popular Committee against the Gaza Siege." Several human rights activists and students took posed with plastic weapons in spoof photos for "Operation General Dead," which was intended to spoof terrorism, not be terrorist.

                                 [Photoshop Militant with plastic weapon]

One woman activist posed with a description that she represented the "Military Wing of Photo Shop." Egyptian authorities, as usual, were not amused. "Dead" has been arrested. Facebook was also apparently unamused. Several of the groups satirical photos have been deleted.

              [ Posing like American Black Panthers of the 1960s. Authorities are unamused]

I can see how people may disagree with the politics and even find these photos distasteful. But spoofing Islamic terrorists while residing in Egypt is ballsy to me and represents the free speech which is supposed to be a sacred right in democratic societies.

Open Letter to CEOs: Don't Cut SM Staff.

Dear Chiefs,

These times really suck.

You didn't sign up for meeting after meeting about "cutting once and cutting deep," "non-essential staff" and "bottom line." You get it. When you walk around the company, you see the look in their eyes or how quickly they try to look busy. People are scared and it is your job to decide what members of your team you must do without. Your company's survival depends upon it. Hell, your survival depends upon doing it right.

There are those who will tell you to just look to the bottom line and just eliminate anyone who does not produce in revenue what they are compensated. That would include most people in social media if you look at it simplistically enough.

I'm writing you to tell you that such moves would be painfully short-sighted. They would put your company terribly out of position for the recovery, which will not come soon, but will come inevitably. When that recovery does come, will you be in a better position than your competitor? Will you be in a better position than a new competitive thrust from a start up created by some bright laid off employees?

This is the time to think about the most efficient way to be closest to you customers, to what's left of your company ecosystem. You need to be among the first to detect the nuances of your market and adjust. You need to think about the most efficient way to keep in the conversation. You need to be closest to the young and bright people you will want to hire when the time to build again comes back.

That will not be advertising or brand building. That will not be PR or events. It will be in social media. Social media people cost little budget except their employment packages. They are on the front line where change is going to be first detected. They don't place ads in media where most people who hear or see the message don't matter. They just follow conversations that can make a difference to you.

The same goes for internally in large organizations. You need to be in touch with the team you keep. You need to let those who survive the cuts know how important they are. You need to be able to share information fast an accurately. A monthly newsletter just isn't going to do the job the way a behind-the-firewall community will do it.

Now is the most vital time there ever has been for online collaboration, and the tools of social media are the best there are for doing that. They are two way, not one way. They eliminate travel costs in many cases. They are real time, and oh yes, they are inexpensive.

I could go on and on. Social media is sort of a pet topic of mine. But I know you are pretty busy these days. And you don't need anyone preaching to you. I just wanted to get this word in to the conversation. While a lot of people are telling you how bad today is, you need to execute strategies that make tomorrow more efficient than yesterday.

Hope you pull through this mess and have some fun with you loved ones on the holidays,

Shel

Measuring Influence vs. Popularity

I had an interesting talk with some folk on Twitter this morning about not mistaking popularity with influence. In fact, I find this to be among the most misunderstood issues in measuring social media. Popularity is easy to measure. All you do, is look at the total number of visitors and/or the frequency of visits. You can increase sheer numbers by a few tricks the the SEO crowd will tell you about, or by posting frequently or by extending a conversation cited on TechMeme. You need to be frequent and you need to drop a lot of big names names like "Google," "Apple," or "Obama."

A killer headline for the SEO folks would be "Googling Apple for Obama followers who use Firefox." You'd get a ton of traffic, but would it be relevant to your purposes? And would you be influencing anyone at all.

But numerical totals actually tell you extremely little about influence. People could be coming because they hate what you are saying and want to keep an eye on the opposing side. I follow a couple of political blogs, for example, where I fundamentally and passionately disagree with the authors.

For a very long time, the site was called Naked Conversations, which made good sense since it was started as a place to transparently write a book of the same name. It took s a while to discover that the site name was inflating our traffic. People were going to Google and typing in graphical variations of the keyword "Naked" and this site popped up. The more searches, the more prominent we became in certain circles that were decidedly not influential to business-oriented book buyers.

Let's do a reverse example. Suppose I were a political blogger and I had an audience of just three followers. Those followers were very engaged because they read everything I posted. They commented often. They took what I said and quoted me to other people in other conversations. But there were only three of them. Therefore I would be ranked lower than chopped liver in all the ranking systems. The catch is that those three readers were the President of the US, and the heads of China and Russia.

Influence is extremely difficult to measure. First, there are different influencers by different topics. Second, as much as I cheerlead the power of the conversation, most content continues to be read, absorbed, shared and discussed by people using RSS who do not join our conversations where we can see and count them.

Engagement is one way of assuming influence. If people come back every day and stay for long periods we assume it's engagement. It can also be that people just frgot to close a tab after reading you and walking away.

I have a great deal of respect for a score of bloggers and perhaps two score of Tweeters. I refuse to share there names because, the names steadily change over time. Some of the names invariably are people with very few followers, who address matters such as hiking gardening or the environment. I talk little about them because these are topics that do not interest most of the people I am trying to influence on the topic of social media. When I start writing about something new, such as China, I gain some readers and hopefully influence them, but I also lose some who do not care to read what I have to say on that topic.

So, what's my point? I think there are two:

(1) You need to think, really think, about who you read and which of them truly influence you. Then cross check and see if they are the most popular. Smetimes there will be a direct correlation. Other times not, I would guess.
(2) The best way to influence thers is not to try to be popular. It is to shae what you know and care about. Those who care about the same topics will find you. The best conversations do not need to be held with the largest crowds.

Using Lethal Generosity in Social Media

    

              [Jeremiah Owyang, a pioneer in lethal generosity. Photo by Shel]

It's a term I had  used before, but somehow when I used it at a recent KD Paine & Partners, off-campus client meeting, I saw it jell in the eyes of a few folks in the audience. I call it "lethal generosity," the concept that the most generous members of any social media company are the most credible and influential and as such, they can devastate their competition in the marketplace.

In short, the company whose representative posts the most tips, links, advice, case studies, best practices that followers find useful will always rises to the top, not just in influence but also in search results. The more outbound links you post, the more inbound links you are likely to receive.

One of my favorite illustrations is ancient in social media--over two years old.  Jeremiah Owyang is a senior analyst at Forrester Research and a recognized online community expert. A couple of years back he was at Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a global leader in data storage a category that to many of us is as strategically important to the modern organization as it is conversationally boring.

Yet there is a a very active data storage community. There are people who dedicate their lives to improving data storage and customers who have great passion for the topic. Companies rise and fall on the issue of data storage and protection. I met Jeremiah at a conference where a competitor was on stage talking and he was relegated to listening from the audience. Both Jeremiah and his own boss, Hu Yoshida had moderately successful blogs but neither had captured the hearts and minds of their community.

Jeremiah was working this problem. He had recently sipped social media's Kool Aid and was pondering what he could possibly do in social media that could possibly help HDS.

His answer was to start a wiki. And when he did, he added a stroke of brilliance. Instead of making it an Hitachi Wiki, he opened it to all members of the data storage community, vendors, customers, press, analysts--anyone who cared. Jeremiah welcomed competitors. People came to the wiki and discussed ideas and concerns. They answered each other's questions. Any vendor could jump into any discussion. Hitachi never tried to dominate the conversation, but merely participated just like any other data storage vendor.

I forget what the wiki ws actually called, and could not find it through a quick Google search this morning. It had a generic name with no mention to HDS. But it was usually referred to in conversations. People knew that Hitachi was behind this preemptive act of generosity. Throughout the community, the wiki was called the "Hitachi Wiki."  Hitachi was recognized as  the thought leader.

This is an example of "lethal generosity." Every time a competitor joined into the wiki conversation, it re-enforced Hitachi's leadership. If it did not join in, it was visibly boycotting a place customers found valuable. Lethal.

In social media, the best way to beat your competition is to be more generous with anything that your customer values. In blogs, you are served best by sending people away through links. In Twitter, as Chris Brogan, one of that community's prominent thought leaders advises people to write a dozen times about other subjects for every time a Tweeter talks about his or herself.

This is about as far away from the aging command and control philosophy as you can get. n today's competitive environment, you need to understand that the customer is in control. If you want to win, give the customer what the customer wants. If you do this often enough and credibly enough it will be brutal to your competitors--unless the competitor rises to the occasion and tries to "out-generous" you back.

In either case, the customer wins and that is really what social media is all about.

Social Media & the Road to Ruin

NPR is running a series about the US, called "The Road to Ruin." At any other time in my life, this would be pretty sensationalist for public radio, but it seems to me, to be pretty spot on for the collective feeling of people in the US right now. I spoke at a conference last week, and am pretty much known for being positive in most everything I say, particularly when it comes to social media.

I inserted a slide titled "Social Media and the Recession." I said that there was an elephant in the room, a skinny and ugly elephant and its name was "The Economy," that the people in the room were probably as distracted by economic events as I was and knew they were going home to face words like "cutbacks," and "non-essential." While one person immediately disagreed with me, I saw lots of nodding heads.

These are the most difficult of times. Suddenly and in unison, the American people are in a somber mood. It has nothing to do with terrorism or war. It has to do with loss of jobs and homes and retirement funds. Anyone who has any discretionary funds is not about to spend it on a shiny new car or computer or trip to Vegas or Disneyland.

Our economy has put on the brakes. Spending is stopping. We all know it and we all wonder what it will do to us.

Once the shock has worn out and the reality has worn in, we will start to look at details of what it means to ourselves and our businesses. I am probably among the very few who at this moment is pondering the future of social media and how it emerges through the wormhole of rapid economic compression.

I think that social media will be part of the solution for businesses that survive the coming changes. I think it will be more apart of the everyday lives of everyday people all over the world. I think it is about to become essential, rather than discretionary to both household and enterprise budgets.

Let's look back for a moment. In that last economic depression, certain items flourished. Movies, radio, theater and the arts, books and so one. They cost little and they allowed people to spend some time escaping. It was all passive. When people were not doing that, they were talking to each other, over backyard fences, on street corners and in parks.

Times have changed but people don't as I keep saying. We are pretty much the way we were when we were grunting and gesturing in caves. During these troubled times, more people will have more time on their hands and a great many of them will spend a significant portion of it talking to each other online They will use social media not just to talk, but as a vehicle for creative expression and as a source of entertainment.

That brings us to business--enterprises of all sizes, but particularly global business. I believe there is about to be an enormous reexamination of the cost/benefit of a great number of traditional marketing programs--advertising, PR, conferences, trade shows, dead tree mailings and so on. They will be acknowledged as being even more inefficient in hard times than they have been in good times.

Yet business still needs to talk with customers, prospects, partners etc. They will look for a faster, better, cheaper way and that will bring them to social media. There simply is no more efficient way to talk with customers.

This will also be true for other large institutions. Religious organizations, political organizations, non-profits and so on will go to social media for the same reason old-time politicians went to funerals and Irish wakes--because that's where the people are.

If I can close with a single note in this very pessimistic post, it is that I believe that today, or tomorrow or sometime soon, we will have started along the road--not to ruin as NPR calls it--but to recovery.  It is going to be a long, slow road and it starts in a curvy, windy hazardous stretch, but economies are cyclical and the American economy will recover, as will the global economy that we are currently damaging.

But we will most assuredly recover and we have, we will find that we have entered into the Conversational Age, that Scoble and I predicted at the end of Naked Conversations. In it, people will have greater say and companies will run more efficiently. They will be more agile because social media allows them to talk--and listen--to their constituencies.

Current-Twitter's 'Hack the Debates.'

The tech was ready. But were the Tweeters?

[Al Gore at Current TV-Twitter Reception before Hack the Debate event. More event photos here.]

I had the honor of shaking Al Gore's hand at "Hack the Debates" Friday night, a pioneering joint project of Current TV and Twitter. Gore, along with Joel Hyatt, the former TV pop lawyer are co-founders of Current, a project intended to "democratize television, as Gore put it in his brief remarks. Visitors got to take a brief tour of the extremely digitized brick-and-wood Current TV facility across from ATT Park where the Giants were getting slammed about as badly as polls show McCain was during the debate.

The most interesting part of the tour for me was a bank of perhaps 20 computers, being operated by Adobe people. Adobe provided some of the complex and unproven technology used to hack the debate. Their job was to filter and select Tweeter comments and get "a balanced selection" of them posted onscreen. I had many questions I wanted to ask about this crucial human component, but this was a quickie tour and their was little time to drill down. I'll get back to this part in a minute.

[The Tweet bank, where it was decided whose comments would appear on TV]

There have already been a few reports on Hack the Debate. I thought Pete Cashmore's Mashable piece was the best I've read. I also thought Sarah Lai Stirland's report in Wired.com was pretty much on spot as well. I sat between Sarah and my old friend Tara Hunt in a private room rented by Current for a small group of mostly press & bloggers. We watched the debate on two large flat panel monitors, while tweeting and munching on Mexican finger food and enjoying free adult beverages.

I share all these details to point out that there was a lot of distraction going on. People moving around, and chatting and joking while the next president of the United States debated with the first runner up. I have watched nearly every presidential debate since JFK first took on Richard Nixon. I have missed very few of them and in one case, my vote was changed by what I saw.

But there has always been the issue of who gets to ask the questions -- a panel of broadcast journalists, the League of Women Voters, a hall filled with screen and selected voters?  Until recently, the options were very limited. The questions and/or comments would come from a few carefully selected people and not by the millions who were there to watch and then have their say on election day.

                           [Fun & Distraction during presidential debate]

So, the emergence of Current TV, and Gore's vision of democratizing television--the most top down of all media, to me is significant and promising. It offers the appearance of a way to let, we the people talk to them the candidates. I wrote about my enthusiasm for this project less than a week ago.

My experience with Hack the Debate, is that a small step for television democratization was indeed taken. But it was no giant leap. First, the technology was nearly flawless from a viewer perspective. The only hiccups apparent while view were small and brief. All members of the tech team have proven the concept and that was probably the night's most important challenge.

The problem I felt was in the overall low quality of the comments I saw dart across the screen. Many were cheap shots from anonymous posters. A great portion of them were cheerleading for the candidate of choice. Extremely few, from my perspective enhanced the conversation being held by the candidates. Very few comments checked the facts, the nuances and misleading statements of the contenders. I doubt that comments on the ugliness of John McCain's necktie will change any undecided voter's mind. If there was wisdom in the crowd, it seemed to remain well-hidden.

This was supposed to be about democratization. It appeared more like anarchy to me.

Don't get me wrong. Hack the Debate was a great proof of concept. I am sure the subsequent three debates will each be refined from Friday's experience. But I think it will take four more years to start to nail this down.

What needs to be done. My first thought feels treasonous to most everything that I have said and written about social media, I think that the audience participation needs to be filtered. I think the number of people commenting needs to be a true cross sampling of the American people and I think the rest of us need to do what we have usually done at the debates: watch and listen.

Every idea I have is difficult and sound unrealistic. But maybe it won't be so unrealistic a few years hence. Current TV first of all needs to be an active participant in the debate rather than a hacker. The word alone scares mainstream voters. Here's how I thing it can work

• Limit the people who can Comment to 2000 or 10,000 proportionally representing the American voting population. Perhaps collaborate with a tried and true pollster like Gallup in the selection.
•  
• Refine the selection process. A bank of people filtering in real time are just trying to weed out obscenity and really scary comments. There is no time to search for thoughtful comments and then balance the numbers from each viewpoint. This to me was the weakest point in the process Friday night. It will be hard to fix, but it needs to be fixed. It is extremely difficult to pull pithy comments from the flood of drivel that was served up and then balance partisan perspective.

• Let Tweeters contribute some questions. This require cooperation with the debate producers and both candidates, but that will be a nice big stride toward democratization.
• Only allow people who use their real names and are registered voters to participate.

• Continue the conversation. When the debate was over, have some sort of moderator--Al Gore would be nice. I'd settle for Ariana Huffington or someone more neutral perhaps. Or perhaps strong spokepeople from all perspectives. Let them follow the debate and continue the conversation with voters.

I think the framework exists for a powerful new dynamic in the way we select a president. I think Current and Twitter have the chance to give America more than a quality of commentary that emulates passing notes in a sixth grade class.

FriendFeed & Dividing Personal & Professional Friends

Most people who know me understand that my heart is in Twitterville, but I still find FriendFeed compelling and useful. Unlike Twitter, the overwhelming share of people I subscribe to on FF are people I actually know and/or admire. I plan to keep it that way. I use FriendFeed when I'm in a hurry and just want to see what certain people had to say, quickly. In Twitter, I tend to just hang on the street corner when I have some time to spare.

FreindFeed, like several other sites, did a redesign last week, and I find myself really liking it. It makes FF much more usable and slightly more functional. But there is one feature that nags at me. It shouldn't because I don't have to use it. But I do see it every time I go there. FF allows you to create folders for friend category. This can be useful, if you want to track what your friends have to say on any given topic. But it displays three folders, when you are on your homepage: "Favorites," "Professional" and "Personal."

Why does it bother me so much? Because I am such a believer in blurring the line between business and personal relationships. I believe that we should be transparent, credible, generous in both categories. I believe social media culture contributes to eliminating the differences in language, topics of conversation, apparel and so on. I just hating having to figure out which box to put anyone in so I avoid using any boxes at all friend.

I know this is a minor point, and in no way will it diminish my use of FF. In fact, when working on projects, FF is makes it much easier for me to organize content than does Twitter (where I often ask people to use email so I can manage the content). But I really wish they would move those folder names so that I don't have to think of the nature of my relationship every time I talk to someone.

Xeni Jardin, Big Breast Tea & Losing it in Translation

Xeni Jardin is one of my favorite Twitter contributors. She's an expert of serving up interesting & off-the-wall pearls, often displaying a healthy irreverence. She posted several I liked last night including this one: "@xenijardin REVELATION OF THE DAY: "'boing boing' is popular slang in japanese for large breasts." http://bit.ly/1kU8GB .

For those of you who skipped clicking on that link, it brings you to a Japanese tea package promising that the herb will produce larger breasts. The name of the tea is "Boin Boin."

Obviously, I am not the target demographic, but this not only amused me, it reminded me of a few memorable gaffes when American companies, with American mindsets, first foray into global markets. There's the famous Chevy Nova, that could not fathom why its car sold so badly in Mexico, until someone politely informed them that the car's name meant "no go" in Spanish (Yeah, but it got great mileage).

There's an earlier story that I recall about an American oil company called ESSO, opening up service stations in Japan. They noted, many Japanese people pointing to their new signs and laughing. It took them a while to find out that their name translated into "Asshole" in Japanese. So they became " Exxon." Some people would argue that the new word is universal for the same term.

This sort of stuff becomes more relevant in the social media fuel Conversational Era. Each of us is capable of reaching global audience. Sometimes, as I have painfully learned, our humor simply does not translate. The back of my business card, for example, has a Hugh MacLeod Gaping Void cartoon. The cutline says, "The dream had vanished. Unfortunately, the Lifestyle remained." Most English speaking people look at it an smile or even chortle. In recent times, I've handed the card to Chinese business people who simply stare blankly. The humor doesn't translate.

I wonder how all this will evolve as people in scores of countries get accustomed to speaking to each other over the internet n a regular basis. Will we come to understand each other's humor and language nuances? Are we destined to amuse & offend each other without that being our intention/ Will a word in a blog or banner ad, somehow destroy a market opportunity?

We shall see.

Perp puts camera under skirt: Victim takes his pic. Perp gets busted

I've written many times about the implications of citizen journalists on the streets of the world, particularly with Internet-ready handheld devices. Dave Armon, from PrNewswire, left a comment on my previous post, linking to this remarkable story that had to happen in New York City.

A woman comes out of a subway and is climbing the stairs to the street when she feels a guy is too close behind her. She turns to find him admiring a shot on his handheld device. A passerby tells her he had just taken a shot under her skirt. She uses her cellphone to click his face and send it online to NYPD.

The bad guy gets popped.

This is a new era. Now the streets of the world's urban centers are beginning to replace gun fights with click fights. Citizens have new, faster, better ways to report wrongdoing. Victims have a new deterrent. Yes, there are privacy issues, both in the actions of the perpetrator. The cheap, ubiquitous use of cameras, is being used in all sorts of devious ways.

Just minutes after I Tweeted about this, Klaus Lovgreen sent me this link about a smarmy Dubai official who is about to serve three years. He got caught pacing a hidden cam in a women's washroom.

All of this plays back to my last post, interviewing Charles Brownstein of Homeland Security. Social media, particularly the mobile kind, are going to play an increasingly important role where innocent people and harm's way collide.