Daily Reading 09/22/2008

• How agencies tackle social media

  iMediaConnection has video clips from over a dozen professional marketers and agency professionals discussing the future of social media. One message is clear: this is a sea change in marketing.

  tags: daily_reading, advertising, marketing, social_media

• FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - Google still struggling to conquer outposts

  Google may rule the roost in the US, but not overseas. For example, Yandex, which handles 46 per cent of search queries in Russia, has been preparing since the spring for a listing on the US stock market. Seznam, which controls 63 per cent of Czech searches, has been the subject of a number of buy-out approaches. Google is trying to build its online reputation, but the task is difficult against entrenched rivals.

  tags: search, daily_reading

• Porn passed over as Web users become social: author | Technology | Internet | Reuters

  Social networking sites are the hottest attraction on the Internet, dethroning pornography and highlighting a major change in how people communicate, according to a web guru.

  tags: daily_reading

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Study Finds Rapid Enterprise Adoption of Social Networks New research funded by Awareness finds that Web 2.0 technologies are gaining rapid acceptance in enterprises and being combined with internal systems. I haven't had a chance to read the full report yet, but you can download it here after filling out a short registration form (note, you may get a call from a sales rep later).

Here are highlights from a press release distributed today:

• Employers are starting to allow social media participation more freely in their organizations: The number of organizations that allow social networking for business purposes has increased dramatically to 69 percent in 2008, up from 37 percent last year;
• Employers are finding the benefits of using social media: 63 percent are using social media to build and promote their brand, 61 percent are using it to improve communication and collaboration, and 58 percent re using it to increase consumer engagement;
• 75 percent of employees are already using social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn for business purposes, up 15 percent from 2007;
• Use of internal-facing communities is on the rise with 6 percent of organization already reporting they deployed internal-facing communities, while 33 percent indicate their organization plans to implement internal-facing social media initiatives;
• External-facing communities are increasing: 27 percent of respondents said their companies are planning to deploy external-facing communities while only 13 percent indicated their organizations already have external-facing communities;
• Online communities directed at specific interests and groups of people allow for more targeted marketing techniques and better results so for this reason 37 percent of organizations have specific areas of focus for their communities;

Labels: Awareness, intranets, social_networks

  ¶ 3:19 PM 0 Comments

  Twittering T3PR I'm one of several people Twittering the PRSA's T3PR conference. Great speakers. Here's the stream.

Labels: PR, t3pr, twitter

  ¶ 1:30 PM 0 Comments

  While I Talked, People Twittered Have you ever had an audience comment loudly on what you were speaking about while you were actually speaking? I did this week, and I found the experience to be weird, invigorating and a little bit 
The scene was the New Marketing Boot Camp, a seminar I conducted with Chris Brogan and CrossTech Media. The group was the most tech-savvy I have addressed in some time. About a half-dozen of the members were using Twitter, the short-message microblogging service that inspires a fanatical following.

Sitting down after my presentation, I was able to call up search.twitter.com and read what people had been saying while I talked. Most of them simply summarized points I made, but a few added their opinions, and not all of those opinions were complimentary.

I can tell you that the act of presenting to a group that is actively talking about you requires new skills. Simply knowing that thoughts are being exchanged can be flustering; the tendency is to speak to the people in the room who you know are documenting your talk, hoping to get an inkling of what they’ll say. There's also a certain ego-drive voyeurism that comes from this kind of instant feedback. I found myself wanting to hustle back to my computer to get the online evaluations of what I had just said!

There was a famous story at the South by Southwest Conference last March in which a keynote session was disrupted by negative Twitter messages from some members of the audience. In that case, the speakers were in the difficult position of having those comments actually scroll across a public screen while they were on stage. That was an extreme case, but an increasing number of events are incorporating Twitter conversations into the experience by encouraging attendees to share messages with each other using specific tags or keywords.

Like most new technology developments, there are both good and bad sides to this new form of instant feedback. On the positive side, speakers and conference organizers need as much audience reaction as they can get, and the sooner the better. Having recently waited six months to get audience evaluations from one presentation, I can tell you that the immediacy of the tweeted feedback was wonderful. I was able to use it to get a read quickly on the tech-saviness of the audience and adjust accordingly for the rest of the day. Hopefully, that was a good thing for everyone.

The major downside of this trend that I see is that real-time feedback from a small number of people can force a speaker to unintentionally focus on trying to please that vocal few. This is dangerous if the small but loud group isn’t representative of the majority of listeners. It's human nature to fixate on criticism, and focusing on the comments of a few audience members can throw a presenter off track. The feedback is great, but keep it in perspective.

I’m telling you this because many of you work in the technology industry. You will soon find (if you haven’t already) that attendees to your meetings and events will use tools like Twitter to share their observations. Encourage this. Ask attendees to use Twitter’s hash function (#) to label their messages for your event. Use search.twitter.com to filter their comments and save the search query as an RSS feed so you can collect all this feedback in one stream or even display it on a public screen.

However, Twitter feeds aren’t a replacement for the tried-and-true tactics of feedback forms and post-conference surveys. Real-time impressions can be incomplete and misleading, so take them with a grain of salt. But seek all the feedback you can. Your presentation or event will only be better for it.

Labels: social_networks, twitter

  ¶ 12:56 PM 1 Comments

  How NOT to Cope With Bloggers My passion for journalism keeps me in close touch with the newspaper industry, a business whose perilous decline I've documented through my Newspaper Death Watch blog. A trend has been playing out there recently that is relevant to anyone who is trying to cope with the new influence of citizen publishers on their market.

Nearly every major newspaper company has recently seen blogs spring up that speak to their problems and future. Among them are TellZell (Tribune Co.), McClatchy Watch (The McClatchy Co.) and The Gannett Blog(Gannett Co., Inc.) It's the Gannett example that intrigues me most.

The independent Gannett Blog is written by Jim Hopkins, a former Gannett editor and reporter. It covers all kinds of topics related to Gannett's business and its future. These days, that content includes a lot of speculation about layoffs and cutbacks at a company that recently announced it will cut 1,000 jobs, or about 3% of its workforce.

The Gannett Blog has gone viral in its quest to become a sounding board and information source for employees. Jim Hopkins recently revealed some traffic statistics: 91,000 visits and 189,000 page views in the last 30 days. That's serious blog traffic, and much of it comes from Gannett employees who feel they can't get a straight story from their employer. Gannett Blog has become the virtual watercooler for a company of 46,000 people.

The conundrum for Gannett is what to do about Hopkins. So far, it's chosen a strategy of benign neglect. Tara Connell, Gannett's chief spokesman (and interestingly, a former managing editor at USA Today) has gone almost silent recently as rumors have swirled about layoffs and cutbacks, Hopkins says. Meanwhile, traffic has grown. This recent post has drawn more than 160 comments, many of them from people who identify themselves as Gannett employees. People are now actively trading rumors about layoffs at their individual newspapers, with Gannett blog functioning as the gathering point.

Gannett's strategy is worse than "No comment." Not only has the company not contributed its perspective to the flood of comments, it now barely even responds to Hopkins' requests for information, he says. As the chorus of pleas for guidance from the company grows in volume, Gannett becomes more closed and insular. Gannett didn't respond to my own requests for comment.

Gannett is approaching this problem in the worst way possible. Regardless of its opinion of bloggers and citizen journalists, the fact is that The Gannett Blog is drawing huge attention among the company's own employees, who are the most valuable spokespeople it has. Gannett's failure to respond to the speculation and allegations of this critical constituency has become almost as big a story as the company's business problems.

In the new world of citizen-powered publishing, institutions have fewer places to hide than ever. Silence is an invitation to speculation, and individuals now have the means to state their opinions in a very public way. A better course of action for Gannett would be to respond to the comments posted by Jim Hopkins and his readers. Even if that response is a "no comment," it's at least an acknowledgement that their concerns are being noted.

You might argue that an engagement strategy is risky for a publicly traded company. That's just wrong. Public companies live under all kinds of regulations, but there is nothing to prevent them from acknowledging that they care about and listen to the concerns of their stakeholders. Any comment is better than silence.

One of the great ironies of watching the newspaper industry collapse has been to see the same media icons that have long scolded institutions for their insularity become reclusive and inwardly focused when the spotlight is turned on them. Gannett Blog is exhibit A in how not to handle new influencers.

Labels: blogging, gannett, newspapers

  ¶ 10:02 PM 7 Comments

  Daily Reading 09/08/2008

• Study: 58% Aren't Familiar With Social Networking

  More than half the people surveyed by Synovate said they don't know what social networking is. Perhaps more interesting that a third said they're getting tired of the networks they belong to.
  
  Synovate says it "spoke to" more than 13,000 people globally (we doubt that; this was probably an online survey). While the results aren't statistically valid, there are some interesting international comparisons. The Dutch and Canadians are more active social network users, although the Canadians are losting interest faster. They prefer MySpace to Facebook. The Japanese are losing interest the fastest.

  tags: daily_reading, social_network, research

• destinationCRM.com: A Company Like Me | Diigo

  Paul Greenberg believes that businesses have to develop the same kinds of relationships with customers that customers develop with their friends. This is difficult to do, but in the new customer-empowered world, it's the only way to gain a sustainable edge. Do your customers trust you as much as they trust each other? Is there something you can do to earn that level of trust? Read this thought-provoking article for a very lucid perspective on the changes being brought about by social media.

  tags: daily_reading, crm

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 09/07/2008

• Events Industry: Robust Growth Through 2011

  Events are emerging as the brighit spot of an otherwise dismal media industry. A new white paper sees growth of 5.5 percent annually through 2011, with biggest opportunities overseas.

  tags: daily_reading, events

• Gap Widens in Online Advertising

  Online advertising continues to grow at a 20% annual clip but search is pulling away as the vehicle of choice. Search ads are forecast to represent 42% of overall U.S. online ad spending in 2008, according to eMarketer, up from 40% in 2007.

  tags: daily_reading, google, search, advertising

• Google Chrome is fastest browser

  A variety of independent tests have established that Google's new Chrome browser is the fastest on the market, particularly when running javascript applications.

  tags: daily_reading, google

• Facebook micro-payments total $35 million, VC says

  Facebook may book $35 million in small-dollar virtual gifts this year, or about 10% of its total revenue, estimates venture capitalist Jeremy Liew. This indicates that people are willing to pay good money for items that have no practical value, as long as the sentiment is there. Facebook could be an innovator in creating the kind of micro-payments system that has been unsuccessful in other markets.

  tags: daily_reading, facebook

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 09/05/2008

• 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

  Chris Brogan is THE MAN on Twitter and this list of 50 tips on how to apply Twitter to business will demonstrate why.

  tags: daily_reading, twitter

• A List of Social Media Marketing Examples

  Peter Kim has gathered together the social media activities of nearly 160 brands. You'll find all kinds of great ideas here, and very few of these examples are tech companies. Equally impressive is how many are big brands.

  tags: daily_reading, reference

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Let a Thousand Networks Bloom News that the American Bowling Congress will launch a social network arrived last week, raising the question of whether this social networking thing has gone just a little too far. There are, after all, nearly 2,700 social networks on the Internet according to Go2Web20.net. Facebook and MySpace together command over 85% of social networking traffic, so what’s the point of starting another?

This is just the beginning, folks. The boring job of picking the social network winners is already done, and now the action shifts to the small communities where innovation can really flourish.

I'll give you one example. About two years ago, my wife Dana and I took up geocaching. It’s a global game that uses global positioning satellites (GPS) technology to create a worldwide treasure hunt. Players use handheld GPS receivers to find containers full of trinkets placed by other enthusiasts in locations ranging from city street corners to remote mountaintops. People log their finds on a website and try to make up elaborate clues for others to unravel.

Dana and I became so captivated by this game and the culture that has grown up around it that we decided to write a book about it. In the process of interviewing some of the most active and successful geocachers in the world, we've come upon some remarkable stories.

Geocache hidden in a hollowed-out rock

People have told us that geocaching has brought their families together, introduced them to new friends and reinvigorated their lives. One man credited the game with helping him shed 150 pounds and give up smoking. Several have said it saved their marriages. One disabled war veteran even told me geocaching gave him a reason to live at a time when he was contemplating suicide.

The online street corner for caching enthusiasts is a website called geocaching.com. This is where people can log their discoveries and share their stories. People go there to seek out others and start relationships that may develop online or in one of more than 100 local geocaching clubs around the U.S.

There are probably a couple of million people who love to geocache. That number is a rounding error on MySpace’s member list, but for active geocachers, it’s a lifeline so strong that enthusiasts often put their personal safety in the hands of other geocachers they’ve never even met. It’s a perfect example of a micro community.

There are two points to this story. The first is that small communities tend to be more engaged than large ones. The more time and effort someone has invested in learning a craft, skill or sport, the more passionate he or she is likely to be about it. People at Communispace, a company that manages private communities for corporate customers, tell me that they advise their clients to break up communities into smaller subgroups once their membership surpasses a few hundred. Think of it: No one is particularly passionate about Facebook, but they may be very engaged with communities within Facebook. Small is beautiful.

Secondly, the folks at Geocaching.com didn’t set out to organize an existing community. They created the community. It was almost impossible for people to play the game until a resource existed to coordinate their efforts. This is a great example of the Internet actually enabling special interests to flourish.

Have social networks gone too far? On the contrary, they haven’t gone nearly far enough.

Labels: socialmedia, socialnetworks, web20

  ¶ 4:45 PM 0 Comments

  Cast a Vote for "Down the Avenue" My good friend and PR pro Renee Blodgett is in the finals of the PR Week Blog Competition. The winner is chosen by popular vote and Renee’s creativity and impressive contact list have enabled her to overcome some very large agencies to get this far. Please do her a favor: go to the voting page and click on “Down the Avenue” where it says “Vote Here.” It takes two seconds. Hurry, because the competition ends Friday. And then check out Down the Avenue, because we could all learn a few tricks from it.

Labels: blogculture, contest, PR, prweek, reneeblodgett

  ¶ 4:02 PM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 09/03/2008

• TV's Future Looks Like Web's Present

  Forrester Research says that in the future, TV will look increasingly like the Internet. Most programs will be "delivered on-demand with targeted ad messages based on location and behavior, along with community functions."

  tags: daily_reading, television

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments