Global Neighbourhoods

Enterprise Social Media Normalizes

Way, way back in the good old days of 2005, before we had FaceBook and Twitter; YouTube, Digg or Yelp, it was big news when a big company blogged. During the time, Robert Scoble and I were researching Naked Conversations, the world was astounded when individuals at General Motors, Microsoft and Sun Micro became the among the first pioneers to slip social media inside corporate gates.

In 2005, the barriers to enterprise social media activity of any kind were formidable. There was legal and the fear of negative comments; we were clueless on what to measure or how to measure. There were bosses with arms folded and heads moving side-to-side at the thought of employees, on company time, writing about the work they did and posting it without filters or reviews by superior; without running it past the twin command and control towers of PR and legal.

What a quaint social media universe it was way back then all of five years ago when there were less than 8 million people in the world using the primitive tools of social media.

I was reminded about these very recent good old days last night as I watched  a panel discussion at IT Executive Forum, produced by Tatyana Kanzaveli, as part of her excellent continuing series. The panelists: Lasandra Brill of Cisco; Tony "Frosty" Welch of HP, Mike Brito of Intel; and Sumaya Kazi of Sun Micro are among the top social professionals in their respective organizations.

None of them were the first to bring social media into their organizations They are not the sometimes forgotten risk-takers who so recently risked termination by being the first to inject this new, transparent, conversational communications into cultures and systems that were not designed for openness.

Each of them is highly professional and knowledgeable. They do what they do with at least as much job security as anyone else in a corporation has these days. They answered questions with ease, expertise and occasional humor on the usual gambit of questions regarding measurement and management, training and process. To some degree, each of these four players in these four prominent tech enterprises takes a different approach, but for the most part it has become a matter of nuance.

They still have to fight for budget--and there is still no box to accommodate the functionality of their social media teams in their respective org charts.

But what was most important to me is that there is no longer a question as to whether or not social media will continue in the enterprise. Social media is now generally recognized as necessary for a modern entity. The corporation has become conversational and the pioneer phase of this happening seems to sometime in recent months silently drawn to a close.

Systems are now in placed. Social media training, encouragement and coaching seems to now be part of the workplace environment. And using the tools of social media to just do one' job is not only now acceptable, it has become expected.

Social media is normalizing. The fact that a company now has a blog or tweets or has a Facebook account is about as newsworthy as the fact that it allows employees to use email or telephones without someone screening what they say.

Social media will still astound from time to time as it did when Janis Krums shot a photo of that plane on the Hudson or when the Iran election was ostensibly hijacked.

But in the day-to-day workplace environment using social media tools is becoming routine and about as newsworthy as receiving email. Social media is normalizing and as it does so it is becoming less controversial and more valuable.

And as far as I am concerned this is a very good thing.

Time for Twitter to Ditch Trending Topics

Last week Jeff Jarvis tweeted the other day that it is time for Twitter to discontinue 'Trending Topics,' that list of what people in Twitter are most following. I could not agree more.

The feature takes up a lot of space, which is Twitter's greatest constraint and could be used for better things.

There was a time when Trending Topics was helpful. "People are pretty much clueless when they first get onto Twitter," Ev Williams has said and he was right of course. The feature was first offered last year in an effort to help people find interesting topics of conversation and it worked well in accomplishing that for a short while.

But now people are less clueless. Nw, when they join the friends they have help guide them along and assist them in finding new colleagues. They can easily discover topics that interest them and join neighborhoods based on those topics.

But Trending Topics, has become all-too-often a list cluttered and dominated by banalities, contests and silliness that is of no interest or use to a great many people, particularly those of us who use Twitter for business, or to learn about events in the world; nor is not useful for actually meeting new people with whom you share common interests.

Trending topics is easy to game. Just create a quiz, invite people to discuss pet peeves or a sex-related topic; be a movie star who dies under questionable circumstances and it will push subjects like the Iran Election right into oblivion.

Obviously, there are more people who like the topics that are making the list than those who do not--or the list would not have picked up the TV Guide quality that it has assumed. But it seems to me that it is bring broadcast media technique to a social media venue.

This may seem like a trivial topic, but it is not. There was a time when thinkers had great vision for television. NBC pioneer David Sarnoff envisioned bringing opera and symphony into America's living rooms. News pioneer Edward R. Murrow thought that the distribution of news on television  would level abuses by tyrants and corrupt public officials. Educators dreamed of using television to educate the masses.

And we ended up with American Idol.

Twitter is the fastest growing computer-based technology in history. There is no end to that growth trend in site. It has the potential of letting each of us find others who share our interests and passions without intermediation by bosses, government, advertisers or anyone.

Twitter can be perceived in more ways than the blind men saw the elephant.

"We become what we measure," my friend KD Paine, the social media measurement expert often says. My belief is that if Twitter focuses on measuring Trending Topics, it will become something far less than it could become.

Why I empathize with Prof. Gates

The last time I was hurt by an anti-Jewish comment, I was 13-years-old and attending Boy Scout Camp.  I've experienced occasional anti-Semitic comments since then, but they didn't much get into me. This one did. The epitaphs were hurled at me by my counselor, in front of about a dozen other Scouts.He was someone who was supposed to teach and inspire me, someone I was supposed to trust.

It happened 51 years ago, but I remember the scene as if it were yesterday. It no longer hurts and enrages as it it once did, but I still see the incident with indelible clarity. If there is one experience that enlightened me to how racism and prejudice works, it was that moment in 1958.

Being Jewish subjects me to a lot less than I would face if I had been born black.   I look, sound and dress like a great many American white Christians. The last 50 years of immigration by people who do not look so "acceptable," to the exclusions my parents--two European Jewish immigrants, experienced in an earlier America. Bashing has turned away from us and toward blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs; ostensibly gay people, the ragged, the physically deformed and other people who look, well diffferent than some Americans think Americans should look like.

I'm not talking about the overt hatred of cults in white hoods. I'm talking about everyday slights invoked by everyday people, most of whom will insist they don't have a prejudicial bone in their body; eople who are above all that because they voted for Barack Obama.

It is important to consider that you do not have to be a racist to make a racial assumptions. You don't have to be mean spirited when you make a comment that hurts someone along racial or ethnic lines. You don't have to hate black people to be nervous when you see a couple of black people wearing gang colors on an isolated street.

Humans have a natural tendency to trust people who look and feel like ourselves and to mistrust any group of "others." The more "others" there are the more nervous we get. Some would have us build walls at our borders to keep "others" out.

Take a look at the guy wearing handcuffs in the above picture.  He's Prof. Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard scholar, personal friend of the President of the United States, a 58-year-old black man who needs a cane to assist his walking. How many moments of his life are filled with Boy Scout Camp memories. How many times in his life was he hurt or excluded for no other reason than his blackness?   Some of his Boy Scout camp memories are old, some more recent. One occurred last week. It occurred when he was tired and grateful to be in the comfort and privacy of his own home.

Professor Gates flew home from China, a long, long flight to Boston. He met a limo driver, who probably by coincidence was also black. They drove about 30 minutes to the scholar's home in Cambridge and after all this travel and time, after customs and bag checks and airports and Memorial Drive traffic, the damned front door was stuck. Gates went around, got in through the back and still could not unstick the door. He came back, shouldered the front door and got in.

A neighbor watched all this. She did not see her neighbor, the Harvard professor and a Town Car driver. She saw two black men breaking into a house in her neighborhood and she called the police.

By the time, Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley arrived on the scene, the driver was gone and Prof. Gates was finally at home. I would assume Gates would be irritated by any uninvited person rapping on his front door at that moment and at that time.A cop who thought he might be a burglar would be high on the list of possible irritations.

By all accounts, Gates showed ID that he lived in the house where he was found. It is generally perceived that at this point he behaved in a way that Sgt. Crowley found offensive. Gates was ordered outside his own home and got louder. Crowley hand-cuffed him and charged him--not with attempted burglary but with unruly conduct.

I have read multiple accounts of this incident. In every case, I get to this point and wonder: Why didn't Crowley just say, "sorry, I was just doing my job, shake Gates' hand and be on his way?"

For those who argue that Gates was the offending party; that he should have just done what he was told; that we don't have the right in the United States to talk back to a police officer who is giving us a tough time when we are not breaking any laws, I disagree.

America to me, is not a place where people are supposed to be ordered out of their homes, handcuffed and dragged to a police station where they get finger printed, mug shots taken and perhaps placed in holding cells.

Take race out of this. Let this be you. How would you have responded if you were in Gates position? Once the cop knew you belonged in the house, would you not expect him to just go away?

Now, add color to this incident. Try to imagine the number of Boy Scout Camp memories flooded into Prof. Gates mind when Officer Crowley ordered him to step outside even after the recognizing that Gates was no burglar.

Should Gates have been more obsequious? Well, of course he should have. It would have saved him and his friend Barack Obama a good deal of angst and embarrassment. Obama's "stupidity" quote was obviously the unwisest utterance of both his campaign and his tenure so far. It will be used against him in the coming months and for a long time to come.

But to me, it is an accurate--if inappropriate-- statement and one that popped out because he too has a life filled with great successes interspersed by Boy Scout camp moments. It seems to me that Obama's was a very human gaffe. As a supporter,  I regret the moment; as an admirer, it confirms to me that our buttoned-down,  president remains a very human guy, who can relate to how his friend felt.

I need to emphasize that a creditable case has been made that Sgt. Crowley is no racist. He has lead departmental Affirmative Action trainings.  Black police officers vouch for him. This is all may be true, but that does not stop the incident from having deeply racial overtones. As Prof. Gates has said "Race is part of my portfolio." You cannot review this incident with adding color to the nuance.

On Twitter several people have posted that they've examined the facts and conclude this was not a racial incident. I cannot help but notice that every one of these posts came from white men. I've suggested several times such posters go ask a black person if he or she considers the incident to be racist. If they do not know a black person, pick a Muslem or Hindu. If they do not have any minority members to ask, perhaps they should examine themselves and how qualified they are to judge this incident.

Blatant Ku Klux Klan type behavior may be a thing of the past. Most people seem to think that now that we have a black president, we Americans are past are centuries long history of racial discrimination. We are not. Even good people make racial, ethnic and appearance assumptions.Somewhere today, a black or Muslim or Sikh child will feel what I felt long ago in Boy Scout camp.

Even the best of us harbor some stereotyping moments. One of them happened last week on a quiet sde street in Cambridge, Massachuesetts.

Why I don't like the Amazon-Zappos Deal

[Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. Photo by laughingsquid.com. ]

Amazon.com, world's largest retailer, announced yesterday that it will acquire Zappos.com, the Internet's largest merchant of shoes and accessories. At the time of the announcement, that stock was valued at $807 million. The market apparently liked the the announcement. By closing time, the value of the stock was up to about $900 million.

When I interviewed Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh for my Twitterville chapter on retailing, he told me how the company formed because the founder could not find the shoes he wanted while shopping in a San Francisco mall; how the company went from making "nearly nothing" in 1998 to passing $1 billion in gross merchandise sales in 2008.

That's a good story, and in that light Amazon.com and Zappos are fellow travelers.

In 1995, Amazon's first full year, it was discounted by a large brick and mortar bookstore executive who said his company lost more money to shoplifters than it did to Amazon. Now, Amazon is the world's largest retailer and is on track to gross $20 billion in sales in the current fiscal year.

But then there are certain places where the two companies are very different. The one that makes me cold to the deal is culture.

Tony Hsieh told me that an essential component to the Zappos strategy was to build a customer-service focused culture that just happens to sell shoes and accessories. He moved Zappos from San Francisco to Las Vegas to build a less technical and more service-oriented culture.

It's the focus on culture that brought Zappos into social media and particularly Twitter, where it has become the wrld's tweetingest retailer and perhaps the most loyal base of online customers. When I asked on Twitter if anyone had a negative customer experience with Zappos, I was told to "stop picking on those guys. They do a great job all the time."

Amazon too, has loyal customers. I'm one of them. But it is not a particularly Conversational Corporation like Zappos. It provides superior service, but it's culture seems to focus on efficiency, not customer service. You just don't see many Amazon employees chatting online about their favorite sports teams or recent rock concert experiences.

You can argue, and rightfully so, that these are tough times for retailers and efficiency is what is needed more that transparent conversations. You can argue that Amazon has created the world's best-oiled retail machine and I cannot argue with you.

But something there is that loves the friendliness, even the occasional gabbiness of the Zappos guys. Something there is that loves the accessibility of Tony Hsieh who tweets abundantly himself, while it probably never occurred to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to tweet r blog or do a YouTube clip on what Amazon looks like inside.

One of the most difficult aspects of mergers is the consolidation of cultures. Companies, quite simply do things differently. Acquiring companies look for ways to make things more efficient and I will be pleasantly surprised if Zappos is allowed to keep the culture and style and focus on service that made it a billion dollar entity after 10 years of independence.

 

Braiding Businssweek

About a week ago, traditional publishing giant McGraw Hill announced it wanted to sell or spin BusinessWeek, one of the most venerable of all American business publications. The news, I am told, stunned most of the editors and reporters still there.

So far, almost no one has pointed to a possible acquirer and almost everyone close to the matter believes BusinessWeek is going to have to change business models if it is to survive. So far, at least two well-known BusinessWeek writers have suggested possible solutions. Design writer Bruce Nussbaum suggested two new models; the first being sort of an ongoing forum on selected business topics and the second by Stephen Baker, who covers social media suggests converting a portion of the publication into a wiki.

In 2005, while I was writing Naked Conversations, Baker really irked me by implying that somehow journalistic standards for blogging were inferior to those required to write for BusinessWeek. For a while I nursed an idea of taking him on in my book, until on the third or fourth revision of the book, I realized that Baker had a valid point.

As a blogger, I often post content on one draft. As readers remind me, I often miss obvious and blatant typos. I have no editor questioning and filtering what I have to say. I have no colleagues sharing an anecdote or insight that will make my story better. When writing books, I undergo much more editorial scrutiny, but even there, it is not the hard-nosed, Devil's Advocate style of a quality news editor who has general authority over the content provider.

This is true, not just for me. It is true for most social media writers who provide original content. Few of us are parts of a team and only a tiny handful of online social publications have our copy scrutinized and challenged by editors.

Yet, in recent years, we are the ones who are finding--and telling--an increasing portion of the world's stories. A 19-year-old, Dutch kid named Casper Oppenhuis de Jong, tweeted the first news of the Szechuan Earthquake to the west, where traditional media picked it up; Janis Krums was just trying to get to New Jersey, when a plane landed on the Hudson River when he took a TwitPic of a plane landing. The increasing role of people with cameras and connected devices in Mumbai, Gaza and Tehran have driven the point home with drama and flair in the last year. Traditional media have turned to people on the streets of the world to get the information of the world and share it with subscribers.

And yet there is an ambivalence about it, I imagine at places like BusinessWeek. We on the streets are unknown factors. We do not always report with accuracy. Sometimes, as is the case currently in Iran, we won't even reveal who we are or what sources we have. Many, like Casper or Janis, had no plans to contribute to citizen journalism. Casper was in a bookstore so he could Skype home to his folks in Amsterdam. Janis parked in New Jersey because it was cheaper than driving into Manhattan. And yet they both changed the information the world needed--and wanted.

Stephen Baker, talks about the "last 5%," that extra effort many elite publications take with pride to get the precise words that make a story more accurate and polished. He's right. Very few social media writers have time, desire or talent to do that.

The world will not be a better place, however, if the salvation of BusinessWeek is in snipping off that last 5% of quality. And the world will not be a better place if the extremely talented team that is BusinessWeek succumbs to the extreme challenges that traditional media organizations face today.

It seems to me that most people see the value of both the disciplines of old media and the speed and breadth of new media. It seems to me that the news organization of the future will need to braid these two camps of traditional and citizen journalists into something that emerges into something new and different; something that does not yet exist but needs to; something that can cut the costs of printing inefficiencies while increasing the speed in which information is distributed.

This new, "braided" BusinessWeek, would of course move to online only. It would abandon the antiquated concept of news being released once weekly. It would do almost everything that the organization is already doing at BusinessWeek.com, but it would become a much more social platform, incorporating functionality from independent blogs, tweets, YouTube and podcasts.

In my [undetailed] vision for an braided BusinessWeek, the organization would use content submitted by social media people. It would not be instantly published. Editors would revise, challenge and polish. The news would be posted as quickly as possible.

There would also be some form of revenue sharing. Instead of just giving a blogger a stringer's pittance, the social media person and the publication would revenue share any advertising. BusinessWeek would cover local business news and offer advertising to local and regional advertisers.

I hope it's not too late for BusinessWeek. If it is, I hope some other publication will look at this concept of braiding traditional and citizen journalism in a social media venue as an enduring solution to an chronic problem.

SM Global Report: Richard Edelman

Edelman PR is the world's largest independent PR agency, but I'm not really one to be impressed by the largeness of an organization. PR Week has voted Edelman the best large PR agency in the world, three out of the last four years, but I hold trade rags commending industry luminaries suspiciously.

What impresses me the most about Edelman PR is that it seems to be an agency of innovation and big ideas, more than other large agencies I have known. It was the first PR firm to conduct media tours. It set up the first-ever online crisis management service. It was the first Western PR firm in China, and perhaps most impressive to me, is it established trust as the key measurement for PR strategy.

What also has impressed me is Richard Edelman and the thought leadership he has demonstrated in the complex and nuanced area of social media and its impact on the PR industry. He was early to the blogosphere, and he led his own staff to become among the most social media active of all agencies. He also has been an undoubted influence on the heads of large companies, NGOs and even small countries in understanding and embracing social media.

I asked Richard his thoughts on social media and particularly the impact it is having on PR agencies and their images.

1. You recently posted a blog that disagreed with a NY Times piece about Silicon Valley PR practices in the social media era, saying that it used old, false stereotypes. Please summarize your bones of contention.

The NY Times article had an important lesson for communicators, who must recognize that the winnowing of mainstream media will require a different approach to PR. But the idea that PR folks can circumvent both MSM reporters and key bloggers by whispering in the ears of influencers is patently false. So was the characterization of PR executives (especially females in PR) as reliant on relationships to achieve results for clients. Classic stereotypes of PR executives can be summarized as evil spin room denizens as in the movie “Wag the Dog” or superficial party people with megaphones. Both of these canards must be refuted and resisted.

2. It does bode a couple of interesting questions. Here’s PR, which can be defined in many ways, but usually image has something to do with it. Why do you think PR has so many problems with its own image?

The PR industry has image issues because it allows itself to be defined by its least common denominators, from celebrity publicists to Silicon Valley relationship masters. In fact, what we do is more important than ever before. The dispersion of authority, lack of trust in institutions, rise of stakeholder society, need to connect to broader group of influencers are tectonic plates moving. We are pushing the concept of Public Engagement, with action tied to communication, to our corporate clients.

3. How do you feel social media has changed the role of the PR practitioner?

Social media has allowed PR people to have more personal and more continuous connection to stakeholders. The mainstream media news hole has allowed only episodic coverage of companies and has been focused most often on the CEO. Now we can bring a more true-to-life picture of companies, with consumer-generated views of products, blog posts from corporate researchers, and discussions around important issues (ethically sourced product etc.)

4. Let’s go back a few years. You were, without dispute, the earliest prominent member of the PR community to whole-heartedly embrace social media. You started blogging in 2004 and you also started advocating that PR practitioners adapt to the changes that had started to occur. What did you see at that time that convinced you it would be wise to jump in?

I must give all of the credit to my cousin, Linda Stone, / formerly of Microsoft, whose pioneering work on “continuous partial attention” best describes my teen-aged kids. She listened over lunch after my middle child’s Bat Mitzvah, where I carried on about the new role of civil society, the rise of empowered employees and consumers.

She walked me over to the PC, sat me down, and pointed to early bloggers such as Dan Gillmor. In short, she pushed me to get into the game. It is my weekly appointment with the community; what will be new and interesting.

5. So you were early in incorporating social media into your personal brand. How did that impact the Edelman brand, and for that matter, the Edelman business practice? How often is social media a factor today in Edelman being selected, vs. 2004? 

My blog, and the 40 others that are featured at Edelman.com, have made us the most popular web site of any company in the communications sector (yes, ahead of Ogilvy, McCann and other giants).

My blog is the leveling element in conversations with potential employees or when I visit companies on new business calls. We don’t have to talk about baseball or golf; we can make a connection on topics in my blog. Social media is a key reason why Edelman is selected by prospective clients; we have also persuaded our clients to be much more open in their communications with the world as control and credibility are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

6. What are the constants for the PR practitioner? What professional skills have remained the same since you started in PR? What's changed?

A PR person must be more broadly knowledgeable and technically proficient. The opportunity to offer advice to the C-suite has never been greater, but we have to earn that position every day by being connected to new voices of employees, consumers, civil society and social influencers. There is a tendency to become narrow and deep, to know your industry top to bottom. That is not sufficient; it is not as if health care or technology exist in a vacuum. There will be pressures on privacy, IP, payment modality, fairness of compensation, green policy; we must offer insight on these and more.

7. Is there any sort of business--any size, any sector-- that can afford to ignore social media in its communications practices?

I thought that the financial services industry could ignore social media, as it was so heavily covered by mainstream media.
I was wrong, particularly as government has become enmeshed in the sector through the bailout last fall. Health care companies are overcoming their fear of regulatory intervention in order to participate in the conversation on diseases and drug treatment.

8. Would you advise young people to go into either PR or corporate communications in this day and age? Why or why not?

A career in public relations should hold great appeal to students graduating from college. The secular trend towards PR and away from advertising has enabled the industry to withstand the present recession in much better condition than in 2001-3. The basics of the job, from writing to media relations, remain the same. But the additional responsibilities, from connecting with new influencers to conversing with social media to creating programs that change policy for corporations, are truly exciting and important.

9. Here's an easy one for you: What's the future of media? Does traditional media continue to wane until it hits the vanishing point? Does social media continue to ascend in importance?  Do the two media categories eventually merge and become "just media?"

I had breakfast last week with Jim Warren, until a year ago the editor of the Chicago Tribune. He told me that the Hartford Courant had reduced its newsroom from 400 reporters to 150 reporters in the past six years; the Tribune is down by nearly 50%. Local papers are becoming hyper-local but even that is no protection against incursions by ESPN (note launch of their new Chicago and LA sports web product).

The local TV news outlets are under terrific pressure as key advertisers in auto, banking and retail evaporate. It is clear we will have five national newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, NY Times, Financial Times, perhaps the Washington Post. Network news will gradually ebb, as the average viewer today is 65 years old.

The consumption of media has not diminished; it is the mix that has changed. The average person sees or reads eight sources of media on a given day, according to the Pew Foundation. So there will be more demand for immediate, short form content, delivered on all three screens (TV, PC, mobile). Social media will fill a hole by offering  personal experience, deep knowledge of sector and opinion.

10. Additional comments?

I am happy to be part of an independent, family-owned business that gives me the ability to speak freely about issues in our industry.

Twitterville excerpt: Introduction

NOTE: With permission from my publisher, Portfolio, I am posting Twitterville's entire Introduction as it will appear when the book is published on Sept. 3. I certainly hope you like it.

INTRODUCTION

James Buck Gets Out of Jail and Inspires This Book

James Buck’s tweet was but a single word: “Arrested.”

That tweet would get him out of jail, and inspire me to write Twitterville. But neither of us knew that at 9:33 AM on April 10, 2008, when Buck was in the backseat of a police car and being taken to a holding cell in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla, Egypt. 

Buck was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in photojournalism. He had come to Mahalla to photograph the food strikes in this manufacturing-agricultural city of four hundred thousand. 

Days earlier, the streets had turned violent. Fires were started, and people got hurt. Police clubbed and arrested several protesters. On April 10, Buck took a cautious approach. He stayed back from the crowds, using a telephoto lens to capture his story. 

He got busted anyway. 

I knew something about Egyptian police. In 2007 I had interviewed Wael Abbas
(@WaelAbbas), as part of my Social Media Global Reports blog post series. Abbas is an Egyptian citizen journalist who kept posting videos on YouTube of uncharged “suspects” being tortured in Egyptian police stations similar to the one where Buck was heading.*

It was when I saw the word “arrested” on Twitter that I realized how much bigger this new social media communications tool had become—more than I had previously thought possible. I didn’t know James Buck. I didn’t follow him on Twitter
until that one-word post. I didn’t even know that I connected
with him.

When a “tweeter,” as someone who posts on Twitter is called, reads something posted by another tweeter and thinks that it’s worth repeating, he or she adds the letters RT and posts it again. Someone else may then read it, and repeat the process. This is called retweeting and it is the essential process that makes word often travel so far and fast on Twitter. 

Retweeting is an important part of Twitter’s magic: you may follow—or be followed by—just a small handful of people. Yet even if only one person follows you, through just a few degrees of separation you are connected to the growing millions of people who tweet all over the world. 

James Buck was a new tweeter. He only had a few followers; as I already mentioned, I wasn’t one of them. But a friend of his retweeted the “arrested” post and added a brief explanation. A friend of mine saw that and retweeted it. I was four steps removed from Buck. I saw the post about thirty minutes after he had posted from the police car.

A few weeks earlier, while saying good-byes to friends in Berkeley, one had turned Buck on to Twitter. Th e friend thought it might be good to have on his Blackberry in case some emergency popped up.

While Buck sat in the cell, the one-word message he sent to Berkeley friends via Twitter kept moving. For some reason, the Egyptian police let him keep his Blackberry and he kept tweeting. His small personal network kept retweeting. Word spread on Twitter. Someone contacted the U.S. State Department, which swung
into uncharacteristically quick action. 

Within twenty-four hours, Buck’s government had intervened. He was released from jail and was about to be driven to the airport where he would receive a free trip home. Before he stepped into the car, he stopped to type in another
single-word message, or tweet as they are universally called.
The message said “Free.” 

This changed my personal view of Twitter. Until then it was something fun to use, occasionally useful for business purposes. Tweeting had landed me some paid speaking engagements. I had friends who lived in other countries and it was a faster, easier way to keep in touch. 

But the James Buck incident took my breath away. I realized that this Twitter phenomenon had bigger implications than I had understood. I started paying closer attention and taking notes. 

Dramatic Moments 

I began to notice that now and then Twitter has very dramatic moments. In the coming months, this would include a Dutch student in a bookstore in South China who would report the first deadly rumble of the Szechuan earthquake. A team of surgeons in Detroit tweeting real-time progress to medical professionals at a Las Vegas conference as a robotic device removed a tumor from a patient. A young entrepreneur on a ferry on the Hudson River, witnessing a passenger jet skid to a halt nearby, then start to sink. 

And it would be easy to have written a book just about those moments of life and death. There are enough of them that unfolded, and there will undoubtedly be many more.

But drama is not the entire story.

Much of the time, Twitter is just about everyday people discussing everyday things. Increasingly, it has become a highly effective tool of business communication. This book chiefly focuses on telling you how people use Twitter to get closer to customers and constituents.

Twitter is also about stumbling into old acquaintances. On the day that James Buck typed in "arrested," I was sitting comfortably at home, having crossed paths with an old friend on Twitter. We were sending little spoonfuls of conversation to each other, details of jobs and travel, pets and grandchildren, catching up on the past thirty years since we’d lost each other.

Equally, Twitter is about meeting new people who are relevant to you, in business or whatever else interests you. You can find them easily, start a simple conversation and watch how quickly and deeply it can develop. 

Ultimately, this is a book about what Twitter can do for you. I’m
going to tell you what others have done and are doing and my hope
is that it will give you a few interesting or useful ideas. 

Telephone Metaphor 

As Chris Brogan, one of Twitterville’s most respected pioneer-champions, likes to say, “It’s very much like a telephone.” He’s right, and the telephone is a good starting point, but it seems to me that Twitter is more than that. 

Brogan maintains that Twitter, like the phone, is a personal communications tool. And you can use it to conduct any conversation you choose to discuss. 

Those conversations, however, are usually private on the phone. You can talk privately in Twitter through a feature called direct message, or DM. Yet in most cases, Twitter works best when it is public and anyone can see what you are saying, so that anyone can respond to what you say or retweet it. 

Twitter is also superior to a telephone for meeting new people. When a stranger calls you on the telephone, it is usually to try to sell you something you don’t want. The practice got so out of hand on the telephone that laws have been created to constrain telephone peddlers. 

But on Twitter, meeting strangers can be both enjoyable and valuable. If you meet someone you’d prefer to avoid, there are filters and functions that work relatively well at keeping that person away from you. It is almost always an easier experience than receiving a cold call. 

People use Twitter for personal or business reasons. Many of us find we cannot help but mix the two together, just like many folks do on the phone or face-to-face.

I’ve been asked why any employer in her right mind would allow workers to tweet on company time. The answer is simple, and again it’s like using a telephone at work or, for that matter, e-mail or a fax: you use Twitter to communicate. The topic is up to you. 

The Blog Metaphor 

Twitter is as much like a blog as it is like a telephone, except that you need to picture a very small blog post. In fact, Twitter is the leading software in a category called microblogging. You publish what you have to say, and people respond if they wish. You publish to one person or to the whole world, and people respond in the same manner. 

Space is limited to just 140 characters; therefore, messages must cut to the chase. Shorthand necessarily becomes part of tweeted language; it’s more egalitarian than full-size blogs because people respond in equal length and equal placement on Twitter pages or “tweetstreams.” The constraints of size lead to speedy conversation. Twitter moves faster than any blog. 

There are several books that will tell you how to use Twitter and why you should. This book does a little of both, but neither is my central focus. I share with you the stories of people using Twitter in the home office and in the global enterprise. People tweet to raise money for causes; to make government more responsive; to find and distribute news; to build personal or business networks; or to just
kill a little time with people you enjoy. 

I believe that many of us learn best from other people’s stories. If I tell you about someone who has used Twitter to improve his personal brand or to get more customers into a coffee house or to shop in one market over another, my hope is you will read one of these stories and adapt Twitter to whatever it is you do.

Twitter is a pretty simple tool. Most people can pick up the mechanics just by fiddling with Twitter for a few minutes. Once you start talking with people, they tend to be pretty generous in helping newcomers fi nd their way around. Before you know it, you’ll be helping others who have followed you into Twitterville. 

A Tool for All Seasons 

I am beginning this book in the toughest economic climate since the 1930s. I hope that we will have entered better times before you start reading it. 

I could argue that Twitter is ideally suited for tough times. At a time when economic constraints are causing most businesses to make painful cuts, they still must interface with customers; Twitter is the most efficient and effective way to do it this side of a face-to- face meeting.
 
It’s not just customers, it’s your entire business ecosystem—your prospects, partners, employees, investors, analysts, and media. You’ll probably find many of them are already in Twitterville when you arrive, already having conversations relevant to your business. The sooner you join the conversations, the faster you may get out from under the business pressures you are facing.

But when you think about it, Twitter is not just a tool for tough times, but for all times. Th ere is no economic situation in which businesses do not need to interact with constituents. Th ere are very few instances when the most economic way of doing it is not the wisest course to take. 

Good-bye, Broadcast. Hello, Conversation

We live in an era when what used to be considered best practices are not so good as they used to be. Methods that have been in place for years, refined and optimized over time, just aren’t getting the results they used to. Among them are customer support, traditional marketing, and product research. 

My previous book, Naked Conversations, coauthored with Robert Scoble, assailed the excesses of marketing. In 2006 that seemed a revolutionary idea to some. Now it seems pretty obvious. Marketing programs are too expensive, and they produce diminishing results. 

Twitterville examines the inefficiency of traditional marketing. It argues the case for using social media instead of ads. It argues that from a business perspective, Twitter is the most effective tool yet delivered into the growing arsenal of social media tools. 

But Twitter alone is limited. It is too shallow in its constrained space. It is not visual. It is limited in its ability to conduct safe transactions or hear someone’s voice. A carpenter building a home would have to use a hammer—but not just a hammer. This book shares numerous stories of how Twitter works best with other social media tools, particularly blogs. 

When considering Twitter, this book advises you to consider an entire toolset, which in fact can lead to an entirely new way to conduct your business.

In Naked Conversations, Scoble and I predicted the death of a so-called Broadcast Era, and the birth of a new Conversational Era. Twitterville looks upon the three years between books as a transformational time. This transformation has accelerated during this recession because businesses now understand that they need to explore new avenues. Those avenues seem to converge on Twitterville’s Main Street. 

The Generosity of Crowds 

I have often written about social media being built on a “cult of generosity.” Tweeters have been more than a little generous with me in the process of writing this book. 

As I started each chapter, I posted on Twitter what I was covering, and requested people tell me good stories on the various topics explored in each chapter. My cup overflowed with results. I received several hundred suggestions. Tweeters generated about three-fourths of the stories reported in Twitterville. The process I
used is called crowd sourcing, which I find to be better for research than anything else, including Google.

In Google you enter a keyword, and a “spider” crawls all over the Internet’s data to give you results. That’s a pretty remarkable process. But by crowd sourcing in Twitterville, I got people I know and trust to give me information, insights, and specific examples, which this book shares with you. 

The way in which I wrote this book confirmed to me my very best thoughts about Twitter. Twitterville has its darker streets, as I will discuss, but it is dominated and culturally shaped by a cult of generosity. The people who are most generous in Twitterville are among its most influential members. 

Why Call It “Twitterville”? 

I am not sure whether or not I was the first to coin the term “Twitterville.” I came up with it after Laura Fitton  described her “Twitter Village” in a very thoughtful blog post in January 2008. I had not previously heard the term, and I’ve been using it ever since. 

Twitterville connotes a certain homey, small-town feel, a place where you meet people you know as you stroll down familiar streets. These are people with whom you share common friends, interests, and ethics. When you meet a stranger here, chances are you have mutual friends or interests. 

While Twitterville has millions of people in it, and is growing faster than the world’s largest megalopolises, it still feels cozy to most of its residents and visitors. It still feels safe for the most part. This is due, in my opinion, to Twitterville’s most important characteristic, something I have named Global Neighborhoods. The con-
cept came to me several years ago, while I was having coffee with Charlene Li, who wrote the foreword to this book.

She told me geography is becoming irrelevant because of social media. 

For Charlene it seemed to be a throwaway thought. But for me, it was a very large idea. It gave me the sense of global neighborhoods, which became the name of my blog and has been my central focus since ccompleting Naked Conversations. 

Through social media, society is being rearranged very fundamentally and at a faster rate than many people realize. Until the Conversational Era came along, people were constrained by geography. We really could not get to know people we did not encounter face-to-face.

When you think about that, you realize that each of us has been denied access to billions of people, many of whom share similar passions and interests, some of whom can help us, some of whom we can help. 

By no means have the barriers disappeared. Everybody simply cannot know everybody else on the planet. But the barriers between people have been lowered through social media. Doors have been opened. Restrictions are being reduced as people start discovering there are others like themselves all over the world. It has   potential to reverse the combination of suspicion and ignorance that peo-
ple of one culture feel about people of another. 

We no longer need airplanes to meet new people who are  physically far away from us. We can now go online and visit a virtual place to do this. That place may not be tangible or even real.  But the people you meet there are real, and so are the relationships you form there—and Twitterville will hopefully show you their
value. 

In her foreword, Charlene Li writes that Twitter is “a conversation,” a reference to The Cluetrain Manifesto, the fountainhead book of the social media revolution. She is right, of course. Markets are conversations, Cluetrain taught us. Twitterville is a marketplace, and the conversations are meaningful to a growing number of businesses. 

So I fully agree, but I see something even more promising. Twitter lets us behave online more closely to how we do in the tangible world than anything that has ever preceded it. And we find neighborhoods that suit us. If we love to talk about politics, we can find many neighborhoods where everyone cares about just that. The same with hummingbirds, cooking, sports, or needlepoint. You can find a neighborhood where you can hang out to learn and share and chat about the topic.
You can join as many or as few as you like. These are global neighborhoods, yet they are small and personal and cozy at the same time that they make your world far bigger.

I hope you enjoy reading Twitterville as much as I have enjoyed writing it. 

 —Shel Israel
 January 21, 2009

The emergence of 'Braided Journalism'

[ Flight 1549 lands on the Hudson, a fine Braided Journalism moment. Photo by Janis Krums]

As I've mentioned, my favorite Twitterville chapter is called "Braided Journalism." The chapter covers Twitter's role in Mumbai, Gaza, the Szechwan Earthquake, the landing of US Air Flight 1549 on the Hudson, the video recorded New Year's Day BART shooting and a good many other instances where citizen and traditional journalism have converged in social media spaces.

The book was locked up on June 12, the day of the Iran Elections, an incident which showed how fast new events eclipse the old in this category. The concluding point of the chapter is that traditional and citizen journalism are converging. "We have become the feet on the streets of the world when news breaks," I wrote.

Yet, most reasonable people realize the world will not be a better place, if the discipline, ethics and professionalism of traditional media disappears. I may no longer see a purpose for a daily newspaper delivered to my door by a fossil burning vehicle, but I most certainly see a value for the New York Times and its long-established standards for excellence. I look at the former Christian Science Monitor, whose slow death as a tangible newspaper was followed by the welcomed excellence of the CSMonitor.com which has risen like a phoenix from the newspaper's ashes.

This thing that I call braided journalism seems to be emerging everywhere in a variety of forms styles and focuses.

One of my favorites has little to do with events of the scope and importance of say Iran or Mumbai. Take for example, girl's basketball. A former NBA sports reporter grew passionate about his sport finding it less tainted than even boys sports. So he started a blog site called Hoopgurlz as a citizen journalism project. He got some sponsorship and then ESPN acquired it where it is now flourishing as is he, I assume.

Some laid off Baltimore Sun reporters regrouped and started BaltimoreBrew, a sponsored blog dedicated to "stirring up news and views," and has started getting sponsorship to allow them to do work the Baltimore Sun apparently can no longer afford to do. On a global level, ProPublica, established in part by ex-LA Times reporters is a volunteer network of investigative reporters who were concerned that the kind of digging that made journalism different and superior to the fluff that fills so many surviving news columns, was becoming a luxury during tough economic times. There news is often the stuff the Pulitzers should be made of such as their recent look at nurses whose criminal records go undetected.

The NY Times, has taken a different route and weaves the locals on the street with pro journalists with something called "The Local." It is breaking new ground with a braided journalism experiment covering two largely ignored Brooklyn neighborhoods, giving the type of hometown, dig-under-the-fingernails coverage he every community deserves.

I could not go very far in any direction related to braided journalism, without stumbling across the Miami-based Knight Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to the betterment of journalism, started in 1950 with some of the considerable profits gleaned by the formerly venerable Knight-Ridder newspaper empire.

Since 1950, the Knight Foundation, "dedicated to excellence in journalism," has helped in the education of over 100,000 journalists and has contributed north of $1 billion toward the betterment of information quality at the community level. 

In recent years more and more of Knight's efforts have gone toward projects that are based online. There's little doubt their efforts will change. They seem to be in a catbird position for the emergence of a new generation of Web-based media that will incorporate new media with time-established ethics and practices.

This is an area of emerging interest to me, and I think importance to how people will get their information in the coming decades. I will revisit some of the organizations mentioned here and I would love to hear from you if you can point to evidence of convergence between traditional and citizen journalism in social media venues.

I am always on the outlook for a next book possibility and Braided Journalism is among those that captures my personal passion. Bt whether it becomes a book or not, depends on what I find and to an almost equal degree, what people tell me here and on Twitter.

Is there a trend back to blogging? How will it impact Twitter?

                      [Robert Scoble returns to blogging. Photo by Shel]

Robert Scoble has declared that he is going to start blogging more these days, after having spent most of his posting time at Friendfeed and Twitter. I have often followed Robert's lead on social media and in collaborating with him a few times, I have learned just how transparent one can be, while remaining professional.

This time, I was about 10 days ahead of Scoble. I started blogging about 10 days ago and hope to post a few times weekly--if not more, and I am enjoying it a great deal. As much as I obviously like Twitterville and tweeting, for it' speed in generating conversations, it simply is too constrained for expressing a single thought in great depth.

When I tweeted Scoble's intentions, Liza at A Maui Blog said she too was planning to get more active on her blog and  San Francisco futurist Chris Saad announced he had registered BlogsareBack.com [although someone else seems to be using the URL right now].

So, is this a trend? Will there be a sudden resurgence of blogging?  Will Scoble and I and Liza be part of an long parade of recovering Tweeters who abandon tweeting and return to the long view of the blogosphere?

Well, I do think that blogging is about to enjoy a long steady resurgence. There is a need for the magazine writing style of blogging. But I do not believe it will be at the expense of Twitter and Friendfeed. In fact, social media tools work best when used with combinations of other social media tools including YouTube and podcasting.

When something new is introduced, it goes through a high-visibility fad period in its evolution. This has been true long before social media--with almost any innovation. When the fad dies, there is usually a sharp taper off for a while, which usually is followed, by a long, steady, less-hyped resurgence.

Blogging is well past its fad level and now the return to it--if there really is a return emerging--well be longer and steadier and less hyped. There will come a time when people will tire about speaking about Twitter, just like has happened with blogs, email, television, telephones, and trains for that matter.

But the products have endured and remain useful. I do not think the return to blogging will impact Twitter very much at all. I think that Twitter will continue o evolve rapidly and relentlessly for years to come.

But at some point people will just use it, like they use email. I think that's what starting to happen with blogs. I thinks that's eventually wat will happen with Twitter.

RackSpace downtime, competitive response & lethal generosity

Rackspace is a leading hosting service. It is sponsors Scobleizer's new video show Building 43, which I think has been a venue where Robert has done some of his best work so far.

Just after July 4 weekend, the hosting service experienced a brief downtime caused by a faulty "bus duct," whatever that is. The point is that a significant number of users were incapacitated by the crash.

Rackspace went into immediate action using what I would call the social media playbook, if there were actually such a thing. They used there blog, having Eric Johnson a senior web developer explain clearly what had happened, what the company was doing about it and apologizing for the inconvenience. Meanwhile via FriendFeed and Twitter Scoble was doing what he does best and he was doing it with equal transparency. Rackspace customers chimed in, nearly unanimously expressing loyalty and faith in their hosting company.

Of course major competitors noticed. When a hosting service goes down, there are obvious opportunities. There are unhappy and frightened customers. One competitor, Online Tech of Minneapolis took two days until it posted a blog intended to hijack Rackspace customers with an "easy transition plan" from Rackspace to them. The company boasted that unlike Rackspace, it had never experienced customer downtime. It brought the message into Twitterville and posted a couple of follow blogs.

That is a predictable approach. It comes from a traditional marketing approach based on military strategies. When you see your opponent has a weakness, attack it with extreme prejudice. Take more ground.

But the day before Online Tech posted its blog assault, another competitor ServInt posted this blog by Reed Caldwell, CEO , which takes an entirely different approach, one I find better-suited for the new conversational marketplace  rather than the commercial gladiator approach used Online Tech.

Caldwell, stated that his competitor had been "communicative, forthright and responsive to its customers. He said ServInt stands behind Rackspace and advised customers to do the same.

The conversations heated up in Twitterville, and Friendfeed where Scoble pointed to most of the blog posts and dozens of hosting service customers had joined in. The sentiment was nearly unanimous for Rackspace and particularly ServInt, whose CEO revealed himself to be a class act leading a classy culture.

There may have been a defection or two to Online Tech, but I could find no reports of it. But in the court of Twitterville opinion, the were the clear losers.

ServInt's approach falls into something that I call in Twitterville, lethal generosity. The companies that are most generous to their marketplaces--including competitors--become thought leaders. Those that take more combative approaches become thought followers. Which would you prefer as your vendor?

There are other twists. A tech company should never, NEVER, boast that it hasn't suffered downtime. When one does, it is as sure as the night follows the day, that company will stumble, because in the end all parts break. When it happens to Online Tech, it will have few friends. ServInt conversely will have friends and credibility going for it.

Times have changed. Companies who learn to put their markets before themselves, and happy users before themselves are likely to profit greatly from that generosity. It is one of those difficult to measure issues--but there is an ROI on generosity and Servint is likely to enjoy that return in coming months and perhaps years.

Blame Drew's Cancer for this Blog Post

Most of us have had an experience involving someone we love and cancer. Even when the beast is defeated there simply nothing funny about cancer. About 13% of all people who died in 2007 were taken by cancer.

In the US in 2008, some 11 million people were afflicted by cancer. Drew Olanoff, 29, a Philadelphia-raised developer became one of them, when a lump on his neck turned out to be lymphoma, one of the most treatable of all cancers when caught in early phases. Except Drew's cancer was detected in Stage 3, which is not an early phase. It had first appeared on his neck but had spread into his chest and abdomen.

It meant Drew would have to cancel plans to move to Los Angeles where he had just been hired as online communities director for mobile text pioneer GOGII. Instead, he moved in with his mom in Swedesboro, NJ where he immediately began chemo treatment and neulasta shots every 2 weeks.  He has completed 4, and has 5 to go. 

Drew is a self-admitted geek, known and popular in the Web 2.0 community and long active, particularly in social media and Twitter. Like many people with cancer and other chronic and threatening diseases, Drew turned to social media for support.

What is different for Drew is his injection of humor. He created a Twitter hashtag called #BlameDrewsCancer. Read through that list of thousands of tags, and I'm wagering you will have no choice but to smile if not bursting out laughing. Then you stop and think, "Wait, I'm laughing about some guy's cancer."

Your entertainment helps Drew. It supports and encourages him to fight the fight he has to face. He knows he is not alone. He knows people are on his side.

Drew started what has become a Twitter meme, by blaming his cancer on his missing keys or yet another loss by his beloved Phillies. Soon others joined in. Among them is cancer survivor Lance Armstrong who blamed Drew's cancer for a sore shoulder. This has led to Drew's increasing involvement in LIVESTRONG, Armstrong's online cancer-fighting community.

Drew has guest blogged at LIVESTRONG. When people blame Drew's cancer at LIVESTRONG they are requested to donate a dollar per complaint. Drew is searching for a corporate sponsor to match the funds.

Here are my questions for Drew and his answers.

Q1 When you first noticed you had a lump, what was your initial response? When you showed it to your mom, what was her response? How did the doctor break the news of cancer to you?

I first noticed I had a lump a week or two before I left San Francisco.  I took pictures of it and my mom's response was "it could be anything."  I already knew I was coming home to visit before I headed off to LA and GOGII, so it seemed reasonable.  When I got the diagnosis, the doctor called me into the office.  I knew it wasn't good.  He was direct, and scheduled my first chemo treatment right then and there.

Q2 What were your first thoughts when you discovered you had cancer?

"Dammit."  Probably because I knew deep down something was not right.  Because of the tests and the feedback from the doctor and surgeon, I knew it was a probability.  (Lymphoma of some type, Hodgkin's being the easier to treat of the two)  When I got "the call" I broke down.  Both of my parents were there at the time, luckily.

Q3 What made you decide to turn to social media?  Were you aware of other people in social media with cancer?

I always feel like I want to share.  Not because I want attention, but this is my chosen profession.  If I'm going to share something funny, great, or sad ... then I better keep things real.  And this was as real as it got. I have a lot of friends on Twitter and various other social networks ... even if I haven't met them in person.   I wasn't aware of that many people who were that public.  In retrospect I was wrong.

Q4 How did you get the idea for #BlameDrewsCancer?

I started blaming things on my cancer a week before I was diagnosed officially.   The doctor had said it looks like a lymphoma so I took that as my diagnosis. I blamed things on my cancer, and my mom's initial response was "You don't know that its cancer," to which I'd respond "Yes, I do."  I wanted to turn it into a site since I'm a geek.  Ran it by my longtime mentor Micki Krimmel and she said "Do it."  So I called Mike Demers whom I worked with for a long time in Seattle, and not only one of my best friends, but a Hodgkins survivor.  He said yes immediately and built what you see today.

Q5 What has #BlameDrewsCancer done for you? What about social media in general?

For me, it has allowed me to talk about cancer in a way that not many people can.  Cancer scares people, and rightfully so. But there are things that can be done, and are being done. You see it every day with LIVESTRONG and other foundations.   What it does for social media is prove the medium even more.

Q6 What are some of your favorite anecdotes from #BlameDrewsCancer?

Blaming my cancer for Nickelback still makes me laugh.  But when I woke up to Lance Armstrong blaming my cancer for his shoulder injury, I knew that I struck a chord.   An unintended chord as far as reach, but a chord none the less.  I've also woken up to people blaming my cancer for the death of loved ones.  Difficult, but real.  

Q7 Can you share with me some comments--pro or negative, the hashtag has caused.

Zero negative whatsoever.  Do I know that things can be misused either for spam or nastiness?  Yes.  It's a part of the territory.  But I'd say that 99% of the tweets come from the heart or the funny part of the heart and that's a wonderful thing.

Q8 What advice do you have for other people with serious or chronic diseases and using social media?

Reach out.  You're not alone.  If ONE person comes back to you with a sign of support, or an offer of friendship, you've won and the disease has lost.

Q9 How did you become affiliated with LIVESTRONG and Lance Armstrong? How much money have you raised? Just how does it work and how do people contribute?

The day that we launched the site, LIVESTRONG's CEO and community team reached out to me.  They asked me if I needed support, needed anything ... and asked me how I was feeling.  It meant a lot.   To date, we've raised $600 solely for LIVESTRONG, but have raised over $3,000 for the American Cancer Society and $500 for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. 

People can donate directly to LIVESTRONG via a link on http://www.BlameDrewsCancer.com or through our Facebook Cause Page.  http://bit.ly/bdcfb - The support has been amazing.  But I won't rest until I find sponsors to donate $1 for each unique blamer to LIVESTRONG.

Q10 additional comments?

Cancer picked the wrong people to mess with. 

Welcome BurrellesLuce, my new site sponsor

You may notice a new icon on my blog sidebar, to your right. It has the icon of my new sponsor, BurrellesLuce, a leading monitoring, measurement and contacts service for communications professionals. If you click through and register, you may win a new Kindle, a giveaway item that I wouldn't mind winning myself.

BurrellesLuce decided to give Global Neighbourhoods a try for a few months to raise awareness of its online services. It is a non-exclusive relationship and I have room for more icons in that sidebar.

Why I chose Five Star as my Speaker Bureau

Just about every author I’ve shared notes with see a cart horse relationship between writing books and speaking. Most of us do better on the fame side of the fame-fortune continuum but we need both speaking and books to make a decent living.

My author friends who do the best financially from speaking engagements, invariably use speaker agents. Until a few weeks ago I have not followed suit, although I was aware that I was not doing well on the paid-speaking circuit as several of my peers.

This is because the speaking agents and bureaus I’ve spoke with have not made me comfortable on three simple areas. I want to feel like anyone representing me understands who I am, what I talk about and can help find audiences that want to hear what I have to say in the style I deliver it.

The first agent I ever spoke to was right after Naked Conversations was published. I suspected we had a mismatch when he advised me that he would not use the title of the book in pitching on my behalf. “Naked,” he advised me, would turn off some of the corporate audiences that he would sell me too.

Other agencies have told me how great the agencies were.  Others could not fathom that I was not a technology speaker and so on. My conversations with other bureaus got less frequent and shorter, until I decided to go my own route.

I didn’t do badly, but with a new book, I thought I would give it another try. I actually found two that understood social media and even Twitter.  One was in Boston and represented several of the most respected social media speaker authors, people I look up to, but that agency failed to convince me that they understood where and when I was unique versus another name on the list.

About then I asked for recommendations on Twitter.  I have obvious faith in Twitterville and I have always trusted the opinions of people I know more than Google searches or what organizations say about themselves on a website.

So when Wallace Wilson recommended Steve Gardner, CEO of Five Star Speakers in Kansas City, I paid attention. When Wallace said he had actually used Five Star, I paid closer attention and when I discovered that Steve actually tweeted I started getting downright optimistic.

Steve has spent well over two hours talking with me on the phone. We have exchanged over 30 emails. We have discussed aspects of our personal life. During all that Steve convinced me that he knows who I am, what I have to say and why people might want to hear it.

I share all this because some of you may need to retain an agent or a consultant. Others of you may be consultants. I thought it might be useful or interesting to share the process and what factors got me to decide to go with Steve and Five Star.

One other note. My "turning pro" does not eliminate the selected free speaking engagements that I have done. I love speaking to the social media community itself. I have just completed a new book and I want to talk about it. Instead, it vastly expands the audiences that I hope to reach.

In fact, there are several ways it may be easier for me to participate in community events, by getting me to cities and venues, where sponsorship might not otherwise be available.

Iran, Twitter & Braided Journalism

I completed final proofing of Twitterville on June 12. Many authors, myself included, love to conclude a book with a demonstration of some form of Big Picture vision. Mine was a final chapter that explained how on Twitter, we can easily form global neighborhoods-virtual spaces where people all over the world can come together to share information, ideas and passion on any particular subject.

Twitterville concludes that these global neighborhoods lets people in different places and of different cultures talk directly with intermediation of governments, media or employers. When we do that we start to notice our similarities and can find them more compelling than our differences.

It was supposed to be a big thought, a vision of instances that would happen far into the future. But on June 12, in Iran, a country that I knew little about an election was held. By the next morning results of 30 million ballots had been allegedly hand-counted and the incumbent anti-West, pro-terrorist regime declared itself a winner by an overwhelming majority.

The speed and the count defied credibility. Details revealing some districts had counted more than 100 percent of the registered voters led to questions. Unopened ballot boxes photographed in libraries led to expressions of disbelief, spurred by protests from defeated candidates, respected clerics and reasonable people everywhere.

Those who had hoped to see change; who believed they lived in a country that provided them a choice at the ballot box felt they had been robbed of that choice and they took to the streets do demonstrate their disbelief, which soon erupted into outrage.

For the most part, traditional press was hamstrung. It was not that they were shirking responsibilities, but years of budget cuts had thinned the ranks of stringers, correspondents and reporters for mainstream media. Plus the Iran government plays games with journalist visas. Worse when government "requests" are ignored, the leaders of this republic responded by detentions, expulsions, and occasional arrests and perhaps charges of disruption or spying both of which can result in being slowly hanged to death [they raise you by the neck, so that you strangle, rather than just drop you through a trap door so your neck quickly breaks].

This onerous and successful suppression of traditional journalism has worked in many countries all over the world. When certain governments kick the press off a story, it almost always means ugly things are going to happen; unarmed people will suffer, voices for change will be silenced.

But this time there was some new force coming into play; something that had not occurred before. The voices of people on the streets could now be heard on Twitter, where people who supported them could amplify what they had to say by retweeting. Twitter became the voice of the street. It also worked in tandem with YouTube and Flickr to serve as the eyes.

These video not only showed us smoking guns of evidence, it showed us the victim of these smoking guns, such as the sniper killing of Neda Agha-Soltan a 26-year-old student. Twitter filled the void created by the traditional media's inability to report the news and it did it in a grassroots, ad hoc manner that made many news organizations wince.

First off was the issue of sourcing. It was dangerous to Iranian tweeters to identify them. On Twitter, we just agreed to not post names. Many of us also changed our own addresses o appear as if we were in Iran, and we encouraged authentic Iranian Tweeters to say they were from elsewhere--to confuse government investigators.

For the press, who is disciplined to at least attempt some level of objectivity this was a problem. While as a Tweeter I get to say what I think, a professional journalist is trained not to do that, but to attribute a quote to a  credible source.

But second, was the issue of factual credibility. As had been the case in events like Mumbai, the Schezuan Earthquake and Gaza-Israel, there was a huge amount of misinformation being circulated. It was hard to verify and during the days when the story was moving rapidly from streets, to rooftops; from embassies to hospitals and was a definite challenge to determine what was actually happening and to do so with reasonable speed.

For me the Internet posted photos and videos were the verifiers. For the press, posting such content without knowing who took these visual renderings was a challenge.

But the press had been locked out for the most part. They could go talk to some Iranian now sequestered in the safety of a Western university or they could trust the story emanating from the streets of Iran.

After a few days of confusion, much of the press turned to Twitter and social media to report the story. They added some professional vetting that discounted many of the early stories that were seemingly manufactured to overstate an otherwise credible case.

Twitter came first. It told a story that the word is likely to have otherwise overlooked. Tweeters were the feet on the street who wrote the story. They were the videographer and photographers and these citizen journalist did so at great personal risk--as have professional journalist been doing for centuries.

The longer, deeper, more balanced and accurate stories were written by the great traditional institutions such as The New York and Los Angeles Times.

But something new has been happening ever since the China Quake when much of the Western press first learned about a tremor that killed 50,000 people because a Dutch teenager named Casper Oppenhuis de Jong was an eyewitness with WiFi access. The press went with the unknown guy whose feet happened to be on the street and at that point, the strands between citizen and traditional journalism began to intertwine.

This evolved into a full-fledged braiding of traditional and social media by the time Janis Krums used an iPhone to photograph US Air 1549 landing near his passenger ferry on the Hudson River.

By the time Iran erupted, it was becoming clear that to get some stories there needs to be a convergence of of these two reporting systems. In Iran, traditional media started to bend some of its rigid and perhaps outdated rules, simply because they would not have participated in a story that held great interest to many people all over the world.

There are many things that can be said about Iran. There are also many disparaging comments any of us can make bout social and traditional media. But it is becoming clear that we are moving in a direction in which journalism braids, and in so doing people who care can find out more news about events in more places--large and small than has previously been the case.

For a very long time, media institutions have looked disdainfully, even contemptuously on social media coverage. There are more of those days behind us, it seems to me, than there are in front of us.

Events of the last years have varied greatly. But the strands of braided journalism are growing stronger and broader with each passing event.

Using YouTube to Crash UA's reputation

The frustrating part of writing a book like Twitterville is that great stories keep happening after the book gets locked up and before it gets to the bookshelf. I wrote an entire chapter about users taking control, talked about classics like Motrin Moms and Pepsi's offensive suicide ads, but perhaps my favorite was about David Alston, the Radian6 marketing executive who Tweeted that U-Haul had treated his wife rudely and discovered a global community of unhappy former U-Haul customers.

Today David sent me a link to the above YouTube clip, which had over 120,000 views in its first 36 hours. If you skipped it, it depicts Dave Carroll and the Sons of Maxwell, singing a clever ballad about how United Airlines freight handlers broke his guitar and took a year before refusing to make good.

In days of yore, Carroll and other customers who felt they were poorly treated had little or no recourse. But now, as HistoryBlitz, one of the 1200 commenters noted: "YouTube is the Consumer's Weapon."  He or she is absolutely right, but it is not just YouTube. People are using Twitter, blogs, Facebook, Flickr and podcasts to fight back. [BTW, I could not find a single defender of UA among those 1200 comments.]

Suddenly companies that do not apologize for poor customer treatment and play odds that most customers have neither the wherewithal nor the patience to litigate will just fade away.

They're wrong of course. Companies that do not understand that individuals can use social media to raise concern, ire and awareness. Companies that continue to ignore this, I predict, are the ones that will fade away and sooner than they may think.

Help me with my Social Media Global Report

Since 2005, I have used this blog to post interviews on people who are using social media to change their businesses and lives. So far, I've interviewed over 400 people in 38 countries. The diversity has been enormous--from CEOs of Global 100 companies to people fighting for human rights in countries' that abuse them. I've talked to students, government workers and people passionate about non profits.

At the core of my work has been the Social Media Global Report [SM Global Report]. When work there emerges into specific projects, like Twitterville, I move the conversation over to the new category.

Thanks to the completion of the book, and to BurrellesLuce coming on as a site sponsor, I am reinvigorating my SM Global Report. I am looking for new stories that are useful and interesting to people who are exploring social media. I am looking for stories with business or human angles. Yes, I like to write about prominent people, but equally so, I like to find the stories, that no one has previously told. For example, in Twitterville, one of my favorites is the story of United Linen, a restaurant laundry service in Bartlesville, Okla--a company born in the Great Depression, and using social media to get closer with customers in the current recession.

Please help me. Tell me your stories or stories that interest you. Leave a comment here, or send me email at shelisrael1@gmail.com. Let me share your best social media stories.

Three Reasons why PR folk should love Social Media

    [KD Paine contemplating the measure of a conversation. Photo by Shel]

Yesterday, I wrote about the difficulties of measuring a conversation, thus creating a measurement issue for PR people who use social media, a practice to which I think they have no choice in embracing.

My pal KD Paine the measurement maven, has done a good job of refuting some of the issues I raised yesterday. Years ago she and I had a chasm of philosophical differences between us. Now, it's just a few silly feet of cyberspace. We both understand that the entire communications industry is in a transformational phase, and that professional PR people need to adapt to the challenge for change and the clients they serve need to understand that the rules have changed to adapt into the Conversational Era that is replacing the Broadcast Era.

From my perspective--that of a recovering publicist turned social media champion--the smart PR people should embrace this new direction as a Golden Era.
There are many reasons why. Here are a few:

1.  The best PR people have never been one-directional broadcasters.

The most successful PR folk have never just smiled and dialed, have never just used a blanket pitch to extol virtues of a client. Instead, they have read editors before they called them, have found reasons to have conversations with their industry analysts when they were not pitching, have worked hard to become sources of information, rather than mere conduits of it. The best PR people have traditionally been unsung industry experts. They have been able to educate their clients on why some people prefer competitors about subtle but perhaps significant changes in the marketplace and perhaps what should be done about it.

2. You can now join the conversation as yourself

During my lengthy tenure as a PR practitioner, I sometimes found it difficult to remain the voice behind the ear of the actual spokesperson. I often knew as much as the spokesperson, better understood the needs of the person being presented too and felt I could add more value to hat was happening in the room than being the person delegated to carrying the paper press kits of that era.

Now, some of the best--and most popular--blogs are written by communications industry professionals. PR people pervade many Twitter neighborhoods. Their are many of them to be found at Facebook, even YouTube and Flickr.

PR people now are allowed to have their own voice. Speak from their personal perspective. They can talk with passion about their clients, so long as they are transparent about their perspective. Through conversations they can build actual relationships with people that make a difference--BEFORE there is a need to pitch.

It makes it much easier to have the conversation, my friend Shel Holtz talked about yesterday--the one that moves the needle for your client, the one that keeps you retained and compensated.

3. Social Media provides an infinity of potential PR "hits."

In days of traditional media, each PR client had a small cluster of relevant newspapers, broadcast, influencers to pitch and visit. Now we are the media. Each of us, through social media, can influence a market and very often one of us does.

Jessica Gottlieb didn't like an ad series produced by Motrin. Christine Lu felt the same way about a Pepsi ad. Both stopped campaigns with a few tweets. Every day, people on Twitter influence what others buy, watch, listen to; where they travel to; what they wear or drive; who they vote for and what they encourage their kids to do via social media.

A PR person can join these conversations and influence how the relationships people have with clients. The need to reach audiences through mass media intermediaries seems to diminish every day. And the ability to serve as a catalyst between client and customer grows strong by inverse proportion.

The key to these three  points is that you need to be a good conversationalist. You need to listen well and you need to find interesting and useful tidbits to bring to social media other than "NuCo announces yet another widget to add to your blog."

If you have the misfortune to be a PR pro and be a crappy conversationalist. If that's the case, then you will probably do crappy work in social media or for that matter any other channel you choose to use.

   

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.

Back into the Sandbox

It has been a little over three weeks since I finished proofing Twitterville and sent it off to my publisher for the last time before I see the thing in hard cover.

Since then, I have been kicking back more than I usually do, playing in my garden, with my wife, dog, cat and a few friends who I've missed during the reclusive process I require to write a book. It's nice to get out.

It's also scary, when I wrap up a project that took so much time and attention. There is a feeling that I have touched the top of a mountain and have stepped into a vacuum, a bubble where my work and focus have been excluded.

But I have a great number activities coming up. And for a three-week rest period, there has been a lot of planning and thing and doing.

First, I am going to do everything I can, and go everywhere that time and budget allows me to promote Twitterville. I feel good about the book. I think the stories I've told about the incredible people I've met in Twitterville are stories worth telling and sharing.

I'm planning a big party sometime in August. I have begun to invite people who are my close friends and people who are in the book. My friend Tatyana Kanzaveli has agreed to produce it for me and we are currently raising sponsorship, which we of course need before we can open the floodgates to the public. So far, Network Solutions and Intuit have kicked in, so we are well on our way. I'll tell you more about that when I have more to tell and I hope that will be soon.

Next, I am thrilled, THRILLED to announce that BurrellesLuce, the media planning, monitoring and measurement service for social media, online and print has signed up to sponsor this blogsite starting July 15, and I have agreed to pst at least once weekly--thus the title of this post.

This bog has served me as a sandbox, I play in it, try things out and watch how they develop.  I allow myself to stray and wander to cover whatever interests me.

Since 2005, the core focus for me in this sandbox has been social media and how it is changing the lives of people and the structures of institutions. Essentially, what I do is I talk to people about how social media changes their work, play and cultures.

Over these past few years I have interviewed more than 400 people in 38 countries about how they use social media. A majority of these interviews have been in the section called the Social Media Global Report. Projects that start there have resulted in two hardcover books, Naked Conversations, Twitterville; The Conversational Conversations, a Dow Jones, eBook and contributions to BusinessWeek.com, as well as FastCompany.TV.

For a while, I'm going to play in the sandbox, interviewing people about social media. I am looking for interesting and useful stories. I am happy to hear any that you think are useful and interesting.  am particularly interested in hearing those that are unique; that stretch the boundaries of social media. I am more interested in the human element, but I remain primarily a business writer. Please email me or leave a comment hear if you know someone or something you think I should cover.

I'm a sucker for a good story, so please tell me one.

At some point, a subject will come along that may lead to my next book. I certainly hope so and I am always searching for my next book. I will pursue a subject for a while and see if it fits for that topic, then either leap into it or move away.

For the past several months I have been talking to my friend Tom Stitt about a subject that has his passion and which invokes great interest on my part--the role of social media in healthcare. It's a great subject, and there are more than enough stories about cool people in healthcare who are changing the medical practice, respecting patient choices. There are also people like ePatientDave and Drew Olanoff who are using social media to share ideas and information and support.

But ultimately, I realized that a book we were going to call Conversational Healthcare, was not one I should help write. This subject greatly interests me, and I will write about healthcare and social media many times in the coming months. But it does not grab my passion as does another subject. Tom is continuing with the project and I have agreed to write the forward to his book which nw has a new working title.

What did grab my attention and my passion over the past few weeks is the role that Twitter has played in shedding light on the dark awfulness that has followed the Iran Election and I have little doubt that the hours I have spent following that story will be part of  my next book.

If it had not been for Twitter, Flickr and YouTube the world would not know and probably not care about what as happened there. Social media let people everywhere hear and see what has been happening to a people who were fooled into thinking they were part of a democracy when they were not. People bypassed governments and traditional media to inform each other. Truth in Iran keeps bypassing those who would suppress it via handheld devices and it is a fundamental change in how people connect.

This story has my passion. Iran itself may not be my next book, but it is likely to be a component. It seems a direct descendant of stories I covered in Twitterville including Mumbai, Israeli-Gaza, Janis Krums and US Air 1549 on the Hudson.

At this point, the likely focus of my new book will be an extension of what I call "Braided Journalism," the title of my favorite Twitterville Chapter. It is the idea that news requires both the efforts of traditional news-gathering organizations as well as the feet on the streets of the world being covered by people with connected devices in their hands.

I am in no great hurry to start the next book. There is still a great deal of time and effort needed in support of Twitterville. But for a while, much of my focus will be directed at the points where traditional and citizen journalism converge and intertwine to make something entirely new and perhaps, better.

It's nice to be playing in the sandbox again.