PR 2.0

The State of PR, Marketing, and Communications: You are the Future

2009-06-08T06:27:00.000-07:00

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Modern Public Relations was born in the early 1900s, although history traces the its roots and origins of practice back to the 17th century. Two years ago, the press release celebrated its 100-year anniversary.

While the communications industry has iterated with every new technological advancement over the last century, including broadcast mediums and Web 1.0, none however, have forced complete transparency prior to the proliferation of the Read/Write Web aka The Social Web aka Web 2.0.

It is this element of fundamental transparency of Social Media combined with its sheer expansiveness and overwhelming potential that is both alarming and inspiring PR professionals everywhere. At the minimum, it’s sparking new dialogue, questions, education, innovation, and also forcing the renaissance of the aging business of PR itself.

While some are already predicting the death of PR, I fundamentally believe that it’s simply the death of PR as we know it. As long as communications professionals want to learn and improve their craft, then we are positioned for evolution. No matter how much we think we know, we’re now equalized as an industry in order to reset, learn, and define and earn an invaluable role within the business cycle – again.

Contrary to popular belief, Social Media isn’t killing PR, but the business of PR IS in a state of paramount crisis. It’s not without merit however. Perhaps up until now, we have been our own worst enemy.

The Social Web, the democratization of content and the wisdom of the crowds is merely amplifying PR’s weaknesses and expediting the declination of a broken business model. As is, many of us are collectively contributing to its perceived insignificance and irrelevance.

But there’s hope and that hope is you...

Our future lies in our ability to shift PR from a business of publicity to a regiment of true “Public” Relations.

Abbreviating "PR" truncates the value of our role in one of the greatest transformations the communications industry has ever witnessed.

As good friend Nicole Jordan told me over dinner in NY recently, “PR stands for Press Release, not Public Relations. When people ask me what I do, I tell them that I’m in integrated communications – public relations today is about much more than press releases and pitching and I am so much more than just a PR person.”

Indeed. Just ask any executive what comes to mind when you say “PR” and note the common misperception shared by many decision makers.

The brutally honest responses, whether you agree or not, will represent more than we’d care to know or acknowledge. The assessments and responses will most likely span from “publicist” to “networker” to “press release” to some fallaciously degrading and sexist stereotypes of what PR people are, how they act, and what they look like. You’ll also summon war stories and bad experiences with PR people and agencies that unfortunately continue to reinforce the current state of PR crisis for the PR industry in general.

There are reasons we are where we are and unfortunately, the PR industry hasn’t hired a crisis communications team to alter or steer perception based on the industry-leading and groundbreaking work, results, and pioneering efforts of many.

Let's be honest. At one point or another, we as communications professionals HAVE contributed to this state of crisis.

Yes, I’m speaking directly to you.

I hold the mirror up as I comb through my professional endeavors.

I too am guilty of hitting send on spam blast emails and broadcasting “messages” at “audiences.” I have also contacted reporters without reading their work. I have been blinded by quantity, not quality. And, I have sacrificed the investment in relationships for the gamble of percentages, hoping to turn big campaigns into measurable pockets of coverage and visibility. My career, in the beginning, was defined by hits and coverage and whether those articles and stories were "on message."

Since the mid 90s and with the dawn of Internet, I’ve dedicated myself to not only reinventing how I practice public relations, but also sharing my experiences, successes, stumbles, and failures with others who care to learn and improve a global industry from the inside out.

To this day, I remain continually, focused on investing in positive, constructive, and highly detailed blueprints on how we, as a communications industry, must embrace the socialization of the Web to transcend the foundation and very essence of PR into a more meaningful, relevant, and lasting renaissance.

I join the ranks of many great and generous public relations and communications professionals who actively invest in its promise and overdue maturation to strengthen its hope and future while playing a role in the unification of those passionate people who are dedicated to its transformation. This is a position of which I'm still firmly rooted and committed.

PR Won’t Change Until It Has To

Social Media symbolizes a crossroads for public relations representing the decision we, as individuals, face in our career. In one direction, we can adopt the transparency and the expertise necessary to genuinely and sincerely connect directly with our customers, peers and the influencers who advise them. In the other direction, we can continue relying on hyperbole and jargon filled press releases for coverage, spamming targets with irrelevant information, maintaining a superficial and shallow knowledge of the products and industries we represent, and maintaining distant and removed relations with those we wish to cover our stories.

In 2007, I shared a heartfelt conversation with my good friend Tom Foremski, where we outlined the state of PR and also what was required in order to lead and also survive the transition to the new era of marketing communications. His observation was best distilled with a blunt and poignant statement, "PR won't change, until it has to.”

As long as PR agencies and consultants are profitable as is, why would they reinvent themselves?

As some of us are learning, not challenging the status quo, especially in this economy, is the most direct path to oblivion...unfortunately, many are learning of the perils of "doing this wrong" through public exposure in a very global town square.

Contemporaneously, other communications professionals or organizations are rushing to capitalize on the new gold rush by adding everything "social" to their menu of services, mission, and experience, misrepresenting the very premise of their ebbing capabilities to masquerade inexperience in an exaggerated cloak of proficiency and expertise. Even in the face of intense competition to own the conversation, agencies are simply folding in new “social” services governed by the same top-down processes that govern day-to-day traditional PR. It’s a survival vs. adaption philosophy.

Hugh MacLeod

United as an industry that is dangerously slow to heed repeated dire warnings and adopt new standards, we will fail. Divided as individuals hungry for education and advancement aligned with those thought leaders and proven practitioners of new communications, we can collectively assemble a new and powerful collective of streetwise revolutionaries who will effectively transform, magnify, and upgrade the infrastructure of PR.

As much as you hear that all of this advice is Marketing 101, the marketing infrastructure is actually designed to function counter-intuitively. Intention and execution are distances separated by reality. We speak through hyperbole, spin, specifications, statements, and top-down messages. We continue to broadcast these disconnected campaigns in an era when our intended recipients have “opted out” of any outreach that pushes an agenda on faceless audiences through unemotional voices without recognizing the people formerly known as the audience (thank you Jay Rosen).

Personal vs. Corporate Branding

Don’t limit your expertise to personal experience with the use of social tools and networks. Your credibility, reputation, and knowledge must represent your command of them in action, both successes and failures in real world b2b, b2c, and p2p (peer to peer) engagement – not simply based on your efforts tied to personal branding. It’s one thing to build a community around you and your online persona, it’s altogether something different and much more complex and sophisticated, to create and inspire an active and passionate community around a product, service, and ultimately a brand.

With the powerful undercurrent of Social Media surrounding our personal and professional activity, we are now brand managers, not only for the companies we represent, but also our personal brands and reputations as well. If you’re not proactively shaping and cultivating it, who is?

We are our own brand managers now, responsible for how our personal brand and reputation as well as those we represent, are perceived, embraced and promoted. We learn through listening and participation. There is no excuse for our complacency as the failure in today’s landscape is public, searchable, and enduring.

Here Come the Social Media Experts

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Traditional PR and marketing is on the endangered species list and this is that moment in time when its fate is in the hands of those who are contributing to its evolution or its demise. The veritable problem is that those who are instrumental in its downfall are oblivious to it. Everything is reactive, based on economics or negative responses that threaten their position in the market.

However, Social Media is not our golden ticket. It is both an opportunity and a privilege.

Applying the old rules and methodologies of communications to the new world of parallel influence only expedites the irrelevance and resentment of public relations and marketers overall.

Some PR teams and agencies are attacking the evolving business of PR by hiring thought leaders and injecting them into an existing infrastructure that’s complicated by years of hurdles, broken lines of communication, politics, and a misaligned hierarchy that prevents the most qualified individuals from leading and participating in successful online engagement for the long term. At best, most everything is viewed as a "campaign."

Other brands and PR teams are also attempting to rally posts, articles and tweets by paying or giving away products in exchange for coverage and good will. The practice has already earned the attention of the FTC and they’re issuing guidelines to ensure that bloggers and now Twitterers disclose the fact that they’re paid, whether with money or products.

Even after highly influential journalists and bloggers such as Chris Anderson and Gina Trapani have published the names of individual PR 'un' professionals and organizations that they consider spammers, we still actively push our messages to anyone and everyone as if we are determined to destroy any hope and potential of success - all in the name of scoring that one hit that will earn accolades and erase all of our wrongs.

Are we not more than publicists, handlers or even worse, spammers?

Why are the most junior people within any organization maintaining direct dialogue with leading influencers within their industry?

PR has entrenched itself in a top-down model that places strategy and direction at the top, management in the middle, and execution at the bottom. In a sense, many organizations are putting its most inexperienced and unseasoned employees on the front lines of PR while guiding them with strategy based on previous experience and/or theory, which may or may not be outdated and ineffective in today’s diverse and potentially perilous communications climate.

Things move too quickly to not combine experience, strategy, and execution in one role.

With the new and pivotal opportunity presented by Social Media, we again, are mistakenly and unfortunately, applying the same methodologies to program planning and engagement.

Social Media didn’t “invent” conversations and it did notunearth online conversations either; nor did it provide, for the first time, platforms for consumers to share their thoughts, opinions, and advice. Online groups and opinion sites existed since Web 1.0. And, before that, bulletin boards and forums hosted online discussions.

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually relatively few “Social Media Experts.”

As I’ve said many times, the ability to master any subject that moves, adapts, transforms, and evolves so quickly is beyond mastering – at least for now. We are, for now, simply its dedicated students.

Even still, several Social Media experts are predominately selling strategy and consulting because right now, everyone is buying it. Unfortunately, they’re helping companies understand the mechanics of Social Media tools and “conversations,” showcasing and promoting capabilities, functionality, and also providing training, but still delegating the execution to more junior marketing professionals, including interns and students. Most of this is rooted in theory as instead of experience.

Again, why would we entrust our most important outreach and engagement to those who most likely have no bearing on the real life needs, pains, challenges, and choices of those we’re hoping to compel? Yet, they are the very teams we’re sending out to represent our brand each and every day. And expert guidance from the top doesn’t translate company-wide unless they’re part of the day-to-day team demonstrating and teaching through example.

So, when a blogstorm or Tweetquake erupts, who’s really to blame?

Do we condemn the less seasoned employees who are simply executing based on “expert” instruction or lack thereof? Do we hold leaders accountable because they’re the masterminds behind most outreach? Or, is executive management liable simply because their expectations are out of synchronicity with reality?

The answer is all of the above.

However, PR and social marketers will point to account managers because of their unattainable and out of touch presumptions. Senior level managers will charge those who fail with incompetence. Those on the front lines will charge their management with leading through ineptitude, but they still sign the checks.

With the radical changes underway in the communications and media spheres, we need to not only retrofit PR and marketing with new techniques and strategies, but reconstruct its entire model for the Social Web, accounting for the complex and elaborate two-way layers of traditional and new influencers and the communities that form around them and the ideas they represent.

We just have to reinvent how we structure, monetize, and capitalize on the opportunities that are ripe for the entire industry of qualified communications professionals.

Relationships Aren’t Built by Copying and Pasting Content

We’re not as far as you’d like to think. Here are two very recent and real examples of pitches that I’ve received:

Dear Brian, I love your blog. I read it all the time. You really are a thought leader on this front. Because of that, I have something that I think is really worth your time. We're launching a new social network for plants where people can share their recommendations and experiences and also comment on each other’s green thumbs. We are also introducing a new plant monitoring application that lets you know via gmail and text when you need to water or feed your plants.

I don’t write about plants. But just because I’ve written about “social networks” doesn’t necessarily mean I would ever cover a social network for plants.

Then there are also those PR people who are moving way too fast for their own benefit:

Hi Liz, I love reading GigaOM. CUT AND PASTE PITCH HERE.

That’s right. I’m not Liz and I don’t yet write for GigaOm. However, every day, I, along with every reporter and blogger out there, receive a significant number of shotgun aka “spray and pray” emails that are produced from pure mail merge factories, , intro text, , . Or, for those who manually create each email, it's the same process. But when we're moving too fast, we tend to slip and forget to change the contact name every now and then.

Slow down.

You’re contributing to the atrophy of our profession. This is exactly the moment when we need to realize that we can offer more to the company we represent and the people we’re trying to reach.

Rather than trying to satisfy quotas, realize that the PR and marketing industries are undergoing an incredible metamorphosis, one that implores a "less is more" strategy, rooted in the connectedness of real people. In the era of the Social Web, a few key posts and articles in the right places, supported by an impassioned community bound by evangelism, success is significantly more profound, and immediately measurable. New PR suddenly starts to pave a clear and effective new path for day-to-day engagement for those who are ready to learn, mature and excel.

PR is So Much More than Media, Analyst and Blogger Relations

Credit: Ghedo

The business of PR slowly evolved away from public interaction and eventually transformed into a mechanism of media, analyst, and blogger relations to instill messages and attempt to manipulate public behavior.

PR = Publicity

This view of PR can be traced all the way back to Edward Bernays in the early 1900s. A nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays’ experimented with Freud’s ideology related to people's unconscious, psychological motivations and how they could be exploited or steered through communications and top-down influence. As a result, PR of today is more aligned with Media, Analyst and Blogger relations and not necessarily “Public” Relations.

Now that the creation and distribution of content has been democratized, everyday people are earning a level of authority that fundamentally works against the current model of current PR.

As described in my book with Deirdre Breakenridge, “Putting the Public Relations,” the Web, heightened with the proliferation of the read/write Web and the impending semantic Web, is forcing the integration of the “Public” back into Public Relations.

Applying the current process of pitch development and distribution has little to no impact on your numbers and your potential to survive the evolution of communications. In fact, this process works against you by alienating you and the brands you represent, closing valuable inroads to reach the very people who can make or break your business.

By simply adding bloggers to your mail merge or your “hit” lists, you are not adapting to the new landscape of influence and engagement, only contributing to its state of crisis. Bloggers are people too, and their in boxes are just as chaotic as those of their journalist counterparts.

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Social Media is bigger than simply integrating a Blogger Relations branch to your PR strategy. It’s an opportunity to engage directly customers and peers who either purchase or recommend the decisions of others. Engaging and inspiring these individuals requires new techniques, methodologies, and an undeniable understanding of who they write for and why they should care about what you represent.

The new world of influence demands customer empathy, evangelism, passion, expertise, and knowledge – everything else is disposable and takes away from your focus and potential.

Doc Searls spotlighted the people who define our audience on the other side of our messaging megaphones to magnify the reality that markets are conversations and that there really is no discernible market for our pitches and messages.

Over the years, my experience with direct engagement has revealed that conversations are also markets - within vertical segments. Traditional word of mouth, at the consumer level, is intensified as impassioned individuals now have access to new mediums that directly and indirectly influence the decisions of their peers in the real world and through their extended communities online.

So how does PR attempt to engage with these new influencers?

Other than pitching at them and broadcasting messages through any and all channels and networks, many PR people attempt to either pose as “users” or offer boilerplate comments and reviews across the blogosphere, in micromedia communities, online groups and social profiles and review sites. This isn’t participation. This is PR of old. It embodies the same spin that defines most press releases along with the disingenuous voices associated with ghost-written executive quotes, contributed articles and now blog posts.

Listen, engage, prioritize, and grow in the communities that affect your development, reputation, relationships and authority as a person and as a professional. It's the only way...

Listening is the fundamental characteristic that separates the experts from the theorists.

The process of actively observing and documenting relevant conversations not only enables the communications team to create an accurate social map of important and relevant networks, but it also produces a more informed and empathetic assembly of sincere, humanized evangelists and ambassadors. This is a critical observation and lesson. We emerge from the process of listening and internalizing in tune and in touch with our markets and the people who define and direct them.

Blasting messages to them now seems trivial and purposeless. Engaging, solving problems, and answering questions, essentially becoming community and customer resources becomes paramount and natural. We participate as consumers and ultimately as the customers we wish to reach. It fuses customer service and influence. As next generation communications professionals, we're walking a tightrope between earning attention and building community, without losing sight of our ultimate goal of propagating our value propositions.

It is the job of any good Public Relations professional to identify and guide influential voices within important online communities.

Transparency Begets Authenticity; Experience Engenders Authority, and Influence

Transparency scares the sh!t out of PR people. This is an industry that has long operated behind the puppet master’s curtain, pulling the strings for spokespeople and varying communications tools to broadcast content at, around, and through the back channel of influence, but never directly connecting with the people who define its audiences.

The democratization of content also dictates the success, “shareability,” and permeation of your story by revealing and refining it through public forums and channels – let the community guide how you approach them.

The Social Web forces you to participate as an individual, not as a marketer and thus requires a new depth of understanding, expertise, knowledge in order to establigh a meaningful relationship between customers, influencers, and the company and products you represent.

Whether you post a comment, write a blog post, upload a video, create a profile on a social network, or establish groups or fan pages, everything is now open to public dissemination, interpretation, and response. Email too, long considered a safe medium for exchanging or presenting information, is now backfiring for PR, fueling bloggers and media to respond with a deep-seeded necessity to seek retribution by posting of original pitches and creating public blacklists that absolutely devastate PR individuals and their standing within their respective industries. While I don’t agree with public humiliation, it is an unfortunate reality that we must contend with while fighting and promoting the ethics of human relationships. Nonetheless, the lesson here is that we are now forced to change how we approach people with our stories. It's for our own good and the overall betterment of our craft.

A New Business Model and Infrastructure for Public Relations

Credit: Pear Biter

At South by Southwest (SXSW) in March 2009, Erin Portman, Karly Hand, Peter Shankman and I participated in a highly anticipated and heavily attended session entitled, “Are PR Agencies Dead?”

Some people would object to the use of “dead” in the title of anything these days. But, is it really a tired discussion in the grand scheme of things? Maybe, it’s stale to those who ping pong the discussion in the echo chamber. But for the rest of the world, it’s a topic that is either new or soon to be introduced into their world.

The controversial session explored whether or not Social Media was killing PR or breathing new life into it. In the end, it’s actually a bit of both. And, along with it, Social Media is forcing the establishment of new business models, staffing infrastructures, and service portfolios.

To be clear, the practice of blindly broadcasting messages through poorly written press releases at audiences is dead. PR is NOT necessarily dead, but without the application of a social tourniquet, it is bleeding to death.

Essentially, this is a matter of livelihood and the evolution of marketing and PR is incredibly poignant to each and every one of us.

At the end of the day, we are now in the business of visibility, influence and perception management. So, we can now put away the white coats associated with spin doctoring. We can remove the blindfolds we wore in every mass blast we sent. And, we can hang up our plaid jackets associated with the snake oil salesmanship we were accused of oozing in every exchange.

We now need to rethink our roles as intermediaries between the companies we represent, authorities, and ultimately the communities that determine our place in the market. In order to persevere and excel, agencies, and the individuals who define them, must act as thought leaders and market makers, serving both sides of the conversation and also the ensuing activity and interaction.

The business model of billing for hours as related to press release writing, account management, news pitching, and traditional counseling is growing increasingly irrelevant in the face of new services and competition that PR never saw coming.

Suddenly we’re competing against interactive, advertising and digital agencies, community management teams, social media agencies, experiential specialists, branding and marketing consultants, or hybrid organizations combining all of the above.

Honestly, up until this point, we weren’t hired or paid, by in large, to connect, advocate, influence or believe, we were rewarded by the placements that result from mass pitching. When you run a campaign around “hits,” then it’s crafted and governed by numbers, not people.

As I mentioned during the panel, the public relations/new media agency that I run no longer bills for press release writing, account management, or standard pitching. These are now functions of more relevant social + traditional outreach and engagement programs. In fact over the last decade, we’ve completely redesigned our services infrastructure to reflect the real world business needs and goals of the companies we represent. It’s not absolutely definitive, but a promising work in progress that is very monetizable now and in the long-term. However, it requires not only new and conclusive services that combine standard communications and new media strategies, but also the associated metrics that justify the newer activity. In order to balance the new programming, we also shifted our billable infrastructure from a top-down agency model to a flat organization consisting of experts in the fields we represent as well as those who are fluent in the tools, channels and supporting cultures that foster influencer and customer interaction. Basically, we detonated the old infrastructure, kept the pieces that have and will always work, and connected everything to the new programs where we’re already seeing value today.

Ctrl-Alt-Del

There is no doubt in my mind that eventually all PR agencies and consultants will follow suit and transform from publicity firms into New Media communications and marketing organizations rich with in house or contracted content producers, digital sociologists, research librarians, community managers, digital architects, connectors, and industry experts/strategists.

But everything hinges on the ability to interpret trends, assess value and metrics, intelligently engage, and ultimately inspire change through proven results.

The function of socializing media within the organization could be relegated to a team of dedicated specialists before its deployed company or agency wide.

Real-Time Responsibilities (fully transparent and disclosed) of a New Media team could include:

Content Producers - Creates content necessary for client/company interaction with customers, peers and influencers, including videos, images, Web pages, blog posts, policies and guidelines, tweets, wikis, comments, online experiences, profiles, etc. In many cases, connectors and industry experts/strategists wear this hat and assign the creation of important content to either content producers, other members on the team with direct experience, or simply produce it themselves.

Digital Sociologists - Observes the cultures, trends, behavior, associated with communities, networks, forums and compares the interactivity around keywords and brands to contribute to engagement strategies, customer service policies and improvements and product modifications.

Digital Ethnographers - Ethnography is the branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures. For those projects where a deep study of online culture and communities is critical, an ethnographer is ideal for documenting a descriptive study of a particular human society. As ethnography is based almost entirely on fieldwork, this role usually lives and interacts with the people who are the subject of study.

Research Librarians - Complements or augments in house or contract sociologists by analyzing relevant keywords used by customers, listening to and documenting conversations by content and sentiment, charting volume and frequency within social networks, identification and analysis of true influencers and tastemakers across media, blogs, and social communities, and presents data and charts for analysis by strategists.

Community Managers - Listens to conversations in social networks, forums, and the blogosphere documented by research librarians or through their own process, assigns relevant dialogue to appropriate team leads, manages the workflow and response status, and in most cases is the first line of response.

Digital or Social Architects - Digital or social architects are responsible for building the online bridges between company brand and consumers via widgets, sites, online dashboards, blogs, social newsrooms, social media releases, wikis, social networks, fan pages, forums, groups, and any other application, platform, or group responsible for hosting content, conversations, and interactivity.

Connectors - Informed individuals and teams that can connect stories to influencers and inspire activity, direction, and conversations. Connectors act based on intelligence, empathy, sincerity and the ability to truly “bridge” a story to someone else in a way that’s specific and compelling to them as an individual and also as it relates to their audience and social graph.

Industry Experts/Strategists - Someone has to act as the conductor to this all star orchestra. Qualified individuals have mastered the art and science of attaching new and traditional media to the bottom line of their business and also possess a deep understanding of and experience with customer empathy, market trends, and the governing technology that connects the people within desired market places.

Yes, I said customer empathy...

As I said in the SXSW panel, which the Los Angeles Times picked up, "Get a little empathy going on. Putting an ear to the virtual ground will tell you everything you need to know -- it's going to affect and influence what you write, how you talk. It's going to make you a little more passionate, a little more believable."

These new, adjoined job functions create a new level of services that complement existing, traditional and necessary communications activities.

- Listening/Monitoring/Documenting – intelligence gathering and trend analysis

- Engagement in the networks and groups where relevant conversations are pervasive and warrant participation

- Content creation

- Conversation management and trafficking

- Influencer and tastemaker identification and networking

- Community management, empowerment, and cultivation

- Event hosting and franchising

- Story development and connectivity to “The Magic Middle” bloggers and Long Tail networks

- Humanizing company and product messaging and redefining the online journey and experience associated with the online presences associated with specific brand/products

The opportunities are limited only by the imagination of those responsible for engendering change from within.

Becoming the People You Want to Reach

In a recent survey conducted by the Institute for PR, most (92% - up from 89% in 2008) of those surveyed believe that blogs and social media influences news coverage in the traditional media (newspapers, magazines, radio and television). It most certainly influences the purchase decisions of customers.

But how do you spark word of mouth across the social web? How do you socialize relevant information across the social graphs of those who define your relevant networks?

Communities won’t react to a press release. Nor will communications professionals galvanize action because of a generic pitch.

They need inspiration and motivation and that can only stem from an interaction that is so compelling and engaging that they’re inspired to act and share. Essentially you have to become the people you wish to reach and excite.

Yes, transparency subjects you to public scrutiny. It also forces you to rethink your approach and the words you share with those you believe are qualified and amenable to hear them. It raises the bar and hopefully inspires a more personal and human interpretation tied to the nuances of the individuals you’re attempting to convince and inspirit.

When we start writing that pitch or crafting the first draft of the press release, we seem to lose touch with our inner consumer in favor of appeasing corporate management. But ultimately who are we writing for?

It’s a delicate line to traverse.

On one side of the equation, you serve the people that ensure you have a job; on the other side, you’re faced with a discerning group of influencers and ultimately people who communicate through experiences, pains and benefits and not hyperbole and innovations.

It’s as simple as this, stop speaking through pitch emails and press releases designed to satisfy the people who most likely don't or won't buy the product or service.

Do you really think that speaking in marketing tongues is what it takes to get someone to pay attention to you - especially in this attention economy?

If you talked to your friends and family the way you pitch reporters and bloggers, you’d get nowhere quickly. In fact, you’d lose face and favor. The same is true for Public Relations. You’re talking to real people, on their terms.

You are the customer.

Try starting with the #twitpitch. Based on the art of MicroPR, if you could summarize the story in 140 characters or less, then you’re well on your way to commanding the escalator pitch, which makes the elevator pitch seem like a luxury.

Yes this technique reverses the traditional inverted pyramid we’re so accustomed to using when writing any marketing material, particularly press releases.

But now, we can say more with less. It’s the poetry and power of brevity - the art of persuasion through sincerity and relevance.

Here’s an interesting story I thought I’d share...

I’m working with a company that set me straight at the beginning of our relationship. While he had heard nothing but wonderful things about my team, he simply said, don’t sell me. I understand that you can get us in the press and the blogosphere and increase the frequency of conversations related to us across social networks. But I need you and your team, to be “us.” We created this product and company with our life’s passion and I don’t need it pitched, I need it shared as a real solution for those with real pain as someone who truly lives and breathes it. I don’t want PR, I need a dedicated team of enthusiasts that not only get it, but represent its incarnation.

His request is not unique.

Our Future and Your Place Within It Rests is in Your Hands

After a decade of sharing new philosophies, techniques, tools, and strategies for evolving how we think about and practice new and traditional communications, it's become quite clear to me that an industry firmly settled in history and process will not change in unison. It will take the influence of globally dispersed beacons representing a new hope for Public Relations who will champion the change from within and also from the outside. These individuals reside in PR, but will also feature the emergence of collaborators and new competitors representing hybrids of Interactive and Web Marketing, Customer Service, Technical and Social Architecture, Digital Sociology and Research, Evangelists, and Community Catalysts.

This higher level of commitment and supporting tactics are the minimum ante to practice Public Relations today and tomorrow – and its minimum will continually increase over time (as it should have all along). Personalized value and genuine, transparent and meaningful conversations is what it takes to forge relationships and continued value, listening, and sustained benefits combined with a lot of YOU, is the emotional investment that nurtures loyalty and referrals.

As mentioned earlier, PR and marketing will not change until it has to...now, there’s no choice. PR is broken, but it is far from dead. The good news is that tomorrow's public relations strategies are already successfully practiced today. The architects of new communications are collaboratively building a bridge to the masses to help navigate a path to education and relevance, defining the future of public relations and socially aware marketing in the process.

Change is imminent and its traction and fate is tied to you.

GapingVoid

If it's one moral that I want you to embody after reading this paper, it's that YOU, and only you, are in control of your career and the ensuing success that you earn and deserve.

You have to become the very people you’re trying to reach in order to effectively create connections and inspire action. Execution is defined by engagement, earned relationships, and the ensuing activity that results from each interaction. You are involved at every point.

If you’re dedicated and resolved to learn, new thinking, case studies, education and insight are now a commodity on the Web. Everyone in this space is willing to help you, so take full advantage of it.

You learn, grow, and excel on your terms.

We ARE becoming the new influencers and therefore we must redesign the communications ecosystem in which we operate and our roles within it in order to change, grow, and thrive.

Welcome to the new standard of Public Relations and Marketing Communications.

How will you contribute to its evolution and practice?

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- You Are Significant
- The Art and Science of Blogger Relations - Updated eBook
- In Social Media, The SEC Protects Investors and Companies by Removing “Relations” from IR
- Twitter Flutters into Mainstream Culture: The New Competition for Attention Starts with You
- The Social OS, The Battle Between Facebook and Twitter is the New Mac vs. PC
- The Domino's Effect
- Can The Statusphere Save Journalism
- The Conversation Index
- Social Media Influences Buying Decisions
- Is Social Media Recession Proof?
- The End of the Innocence
- The Social Effect and Disruption Theory
- Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- I Like You The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation
- The Ties that Bind Us - Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
- Make Tweet Love - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- Are Blogs Losing Their Authority to the Statusphere
- Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals
- Reinventing Crisis Communications for the Social Web
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Is Twitter a Conversation or Broadcast Platform?

2009-06-07T08:35:00.000-07:00

Are we seeing the Twitterverse through rose colored glasses?

In January 2009 I pondered whether or not Twitter was a viable conversation platform. After all, Twitter is one of the darlings of Social Media and it is conversations and the democratization of content that fuel the rapid expansion and adoption of social tools and services.

Just ask any social media "expert" and they'll tell you that you must absolutely establish a Twitter account and commence the process of responding to everyone who Tweets about your company, market, or competition. But the more I observe interaction on social networks, and in the this case Twitter, I believe that sometimes it's effective to also maintain a presence simply by reading, listening, and sharing relevant and timely information without yet having to directly respond to each and every tweet - perhaps replying to only the critical or influential individuals that may need immediate information or direction to steer strategic activity.

Before you react, continue reading. Observations are just that, but there are numbers now surfacing that continue to reinforce my examination.

As Twitter continues to elicit discussions on its cultural and interpersonal impact, in-depth analysis reveals that perhaps Twitter isn't currently a pervasive platform for hosting conversations at all. And as Nielsen suggests, with only a 40% retention rate, it may not be growing as fast as we believe either. As a comparison, during the important stages of defining growth for MySpace and Facebook, retention averaged 70%.

Yet everywhere you turn, Twitter is regarded as the catalyst for people flocking to engage in the proverbial "conversation" that is so vital to fostering vibrant online communities between peers and also brands and consumers.

At a micro level, Twitter is indeed significant. The unique, loyal, and revolutionary culture and behavior it's inducing may well ignite macro reverberations that ultimately effect how we discover, share, and consumer information. In the long-term, it will at the very least, influence human interaction, business services, information dissemination, events, and also media in general.

Just in the past week, Twitter was Time Magazine's cover story "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live." Sports Illustrated also documented how Twitter is "Rapidly Changing the Face of Sports."

This (r)evolution will take time to cross the bell curve of adoption however.

Comscore recently reported that in April, 32 million people around the world visited Twitter.com, sending the micro-community surging past NYTimes.com, Digg, and LinkedIn.

Indeed, statistical exploration indicates Twitter is growing in prominence. But, perhaps its importance, at this moment in time, is more closely aligned with a powerful, new, and seemingly engaging one-way broadcasting ecosystem rather than a two-way dialogue channel we initially suspected.

As observed in a recent Harvard Business Report, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. In correlation, the top 10% of users in other typical social networks account for 30% of all content production. Harvard crystallizes the gravity of this metric though a parallel comparison of Twitter and Wikipedia, "To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits."

The Harvard study also noted that among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is "one." This equates to over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every ~74 days.

According to an analysis of seven million Twitter accounts conducted by Purewire and presented to TechCrunch, 80% of Twitter accounts have fewer than 10 followers and 30% have zero followers.

Purewire documented Twitter activity by number of followers, followings, and Tweets:

Followers
Accounts with 0 followers: 29.4%
Accounts with 1 to 9 followers: 50.9%
Accounts with 10 or more followers: 19.7%

Followings
Accounts following 0 people: 24.4%
Accounts following 1 to 9 people: 43.4%
Accounts following 10 or more people: 32.2%

Tweets
Accounts with 0 Tweets: 37.1%
Accounts with 1 to 9 Tweets: 41.0%
Accounts with more 10 or more Tweets: 21.9%

As TechCrunch notes, 1/4 of all Twitter accounts are not following anybody and more than 1/3 have not posted a single Tweet. Of active accounts, which PureWire defines as those possessing more than 10 followers, 10 followings, and 10 tweets, 63.6% follower more people than they have followers and only 2.8% maintain an equal number of followers and followings.

This is not unlike content production and consumption behavioral patters across the Social Web however. Looking at Forrester's 2008 Technographics data, a vast majority of people are merely spectators with less than one quarter actively publishing any content anywhere.

Forrester also segments online engagement and participation by analyzing the actions of individuals who populate the Social Web. They're labeled as Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, Inactives.

Right now, Twitter and its potential for progress is limited only by the information, direction, and education provided by Twitter itself in order to demonstrate and teach existing and new users how to truly use and take advantage of this new and dynamic information ecosystem. While Twitter's API is empowering third-party developers to create Twitterverse of exciting, useful, and entertaining applications that enhance the Twitter experience, it can not outsource nor rely upon the community to teach the world how to use Twitter. Providing recommendations on people to follow doesn't really help at all.

In the meantime, Twitter will continue to flourish as a rapid-fire broadcast network until people learn how to communicate, understand how to participate and what to contribute, and eventually ease into a collaborative, two-way meaningful dialogue that represents Twitter's greatest promise.

Source

Helpful Posts on PR 2.0:
- Is Twitter Evolving from the Facebook to the Myspace of Microblogs
- Time Spent on Twitter Soars by Over 3,700%, Facebook 700%
- Gazing into The Twitterverse
- This is Not a Sponsored Post: Sponsored Conversations & the FTC
- Reviving the Traditional Press Release
- Twitter, Acquisition vs. Retention
- You Are Significant
- The Art and Science of Blogger Relations - Updated eBook
- In Social Media, The SEC Protects Investors and Companies by Removing “Relations” from IR
- Twitter Flutters into Mainstream Culture: The New Competition for Attention Starts with You
- The Social OS, The Battle Between Facebook and Twitter is the New Mac vs. PC
- The Domino's Effect
- Can The Statusphere Save Journalism
- The Conversation Index
- Social Media Influences Buying Decisions
- Is Social Media Recession Proof?
- The End of the Innocence
- The Social Effect and Disruption Theory
- Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- I Like You The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation
- The Ties that Bind Us - Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
- Make Tweet Love - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- Are Blogs Losing Their Authority to the Statusphere
- Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals
- Reinventing Crisis Communications for the Social Web
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Is Twitter Evolving from the Facebook to the Myspace of Microblogs? Analyzing Twitter trends and demographics

2009-06-04T05:47:00.000-07:00

When I attended TWTRCON in San Francisco and also the 140 Twitter Conference in Mountain View recently, the intent of businesses was perspicuous. Speakers and attendees were on hand to actively share, inquire, and learn about how to increase visibility, engagement, and brand presence on Twitter and other social networks.

Equally paramount was the division of those who believe they’re already successful on Twitter and those who have yet to discern measurable value for the long-term.

The consensus defined engagement as a way to join the conversations that were transpiring around their brands – with or without them. The need to not “miss out” and also attempt to steer perception was critical and pervasive. For the majority, ROI would come later.

In one example of ROI, where the I = investment, @delloutlet reported $1 million in sales directly to the company’s activity on Twitter.

In many other examples of ROI, where the I = involvement, companies including @jetblue, @southwest, @carlsjr, @ciscosystems all reported dramatic increases in customer engagement, which led to the creation of vibrant online communities rich with empowered brand ambassadors.

In the Twitterverse, this is about businesses attempting to get down to business.

At TWTRCON, I received a printed summary of a Twitter trends report published by ThinkTank research and strategy. I found it rather interesting. In fact, it was so interesting, that I decided to retype the data to share with you, with full attribution to its author Robin Boyar of course.

Why is it so interesting?

I believe that this report may signal the end of the innovators and early adopters segment of Twitter adoption and the beginning of the era for the early market majority.

It’s more than a hunch and less than scientific, but I’ve continually observed and documented the Twitter Trending Topics prior to the great race to Twitter’s (ir)relevance leading up to the present. In addition to Twitters incredible growth as reported yesterday, there are scores of hints that the older age groups responsible for Twitter’s rise are now rivaled by an increasingly younger demographic that is responsible for sparking some of these interesting and obvious “mainstream” trends. Remember, when Ashton took on CNN, it created a series of copycat contests that included the likes of Britney Spears, Will Smith, Spencer Pratt and many others who reach a much different market segment. This rush of new users were introduced to Twitter from a much different psychological perspective than how Twitter was initially embraced and utilized by early adopters. Whether they stay or not is an entirely different story however.

Two of many, many recent examples:

Whereas Twitter launched as the Facebook of microblogs or micronetworks, it may now shift into a cultural fusion of Facebook and MySpace. And if this is indeed the case, it will fundamentally change the behavior, interaction, customs, habits, and trends within this highly scrutinized societal microcosm.

Perhaps brands will need to rely on digital anthropologists and sociologists in addition to socially aware marketing strategists in order to effectively navigate the shifting currents on Twitter – today and tomorrow. In the end, it's about capturing and grasping attention and injecting value in order to engender loyalty and empower communities.

Compare these thoughts with your personal observations and the data included in the report below and let me know what you think is unfolding and whether it’s a positive evolution and how it affects your participation – if at all.

This information is from ThinkTank’s “Engaging Users,” a study of Internet, mobile, and social networking users, fielded May 2009. For more information, please contact Robin Boya, robin [at] thinktank8 [dot] com.

Twitter User Summary:
Current Twitter users are early adopters of technology, entertainment and emerging services. They are more likely to use social networks and Internet 2.0 technologies to stay connected and be informed. Most are eager to learn about new products and services. They are loyal users, with 70% likely to continue using Twitter. As such, Twitterers leverage the power of word of mouth and are a valuable audience.

Twitter users are super engaged consumers.
A typical twitterer is a technical or creative professional in their 30s, who tends to adopt new products or trends more quickly than others. Almost all are on other social networks, 2/3 watch online video, read blogs, and play video games. Over half have HDTV, 40% have DVRs, and about 1/3 have smartphones.

Consider it the Oprah effect – most of the U.S. knows about Twitter.
Over ¾ of Internet users are aware of Twitter. While friends (43%) have driven greatest awareness, a whopping 35% heard about Twitter through television. Other sources of awareness include Websites (22%), social networks (18%) and family (17%).

What does Dr. Horrible, coffee, Tom’s Shoes, and a Sony Vaio have in common?
They were all purchased because of Twitter. 40% of Twitter users regularly search for products or services online via Twitter. About 20% follow at least one product or service. Specifically, 12% note they’ve chosen a service or bought a product because of information they got on Twitter.

Is the social networking and Twitter phenomena half empty or half full?
It depends on the user. While 44% believe Twitter has long term value, 52% believe it’s a trend.

Brands beware! Use Twitter wisely!
40% of Twitter users note the way a brand utilizes Twitter affects their perception of the brand. 2/3 of users would use Twitter to communicate good or bad information about a brand.

Make social networkers loyal: cues from Twitter: easy, fast, and well designed.
Social networkers note community and friends as top reasons they’re spending more time on these sites - variety of activities (46%), ease (39%), and speed (30%).

Search and find most popular, multimedia not fully adopted
About 1/2 of all Twitterers are using search and find. Less than 1/4 are updating to blogs, posting photos or posting videos.

Ashton vs. CNN: News actually trumps celebrities.
About 1/2 of Twitterers are interested in news and entertainment. Other popular Twitter themes include politics, products and services, sports, celebrities, and restaurants.

Social networks and Twitter: It’s not just about finding your old prom date.
2/3 of all social networkers use them to connect and communicate. However about 1/4 use them to follow news, play games or professionally network.

Smartphones: A Twitterer’s best friend.
Twitterers are almost twice as likely to own smartphones than Internet users. Top two phones include BlackBerry (15%) and iPhone (10%). Twitter users have advanced mobile behavior: 1/2 take photos, 1/3 go online and 20% play games regularly. About 25% of Twitter users update some type of social networking status regularly via their mobile phone.

Gender:
Male = 55%
Female = 45%

Age
13-17 = 5%
18-24 = -30%
25-34 = 20%
35-49 = +25%
50+ = +20%

Social Networks Visited Weekly
Twitter = 100%
Facebook = +80%
MySpace = +60%
LinkedIn = +20%
Yelp = -10%
Tribe = 5%
Friendster = 5%
Friendfeed = 5%

Search Topics
News = +50%
Entertainment = 50%
Products or Services = +45%
Politics = +45%
Technology = -45%
Celebrities = -45%
Restaurants = +40%
Art and Culture = -40%
Health = +35%
Business = +35%
Sports = +30%
Fashion = -30%

Update:
Time Magazine's cover story this week is, "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live."

Excerpt:
In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.

Helpful Posts on PR 2.0:
- Time Spent on Twitter Soars by Over 3,700%, Facebook 700%
- Gazing into The Twitterverse
- This is Not a Sponsored Post: Sponsored Conversations & the FTC
- Reviving the Traditional Press Release
- Twitter, Acquisition vs. Retention
- You Are Significant
- The Art and Science of Blogger Relations - Updated eBook
- In Social Media, The SEC Protects Investors and Companies by Removing “Relations” from IR
- Twitter Flutters into Mainstream Culture: The New Competition for Attention Starts with You
- The Social OS, The Battle Between Facebook and Twitter is the New Mac vs. PC
- The Domino's Effect
- Can The Statusphere Save Journalism
- The Conversation Index
- Social Media Influences Buying Decisions
- Is Social Media Recession Proof?
- The End of the Innocence
- The Social Effect and Disruption Theory
- Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM
- In the Statusphere, ADD Creates Opportunities for Collaboration and Education
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- I Like You The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation
- The Ties that Bind Us - Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
- Make Tweet Love - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- Are Blogs Losing Their Authority to the Statusphere
- Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals
- Reinventing Crisis Communications for the Social Web
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Time Spent on Twitter Soars by Over 3,700%, Facebook up 700%

2009-06-03T06:58:00.000-07:00

I just read an interesting report published by Nielsen that examines time spent on multiple Social and Micro Networks. The study compares total minutes in April 2009 compared to April 2008. The results are not as much surprising as they are revealing.

According to Nielsen, total minutes spent on social networking sites has increased 83 percent year-over-year.

Twitter, the social media darling that can never seem to satisfy our insatiable appetite for all things orbiting the Twitterverse, experienced extraordinary growth in the last year with total time spent up by over 3,700%. While currently ranked 5th, Twitter's dramatic groundswell is the most notable on the list followed by Tagged.com, a five year old social network that experienced a 1,000% year over year increase in engagement.

Time spent on Facebook, the popular network that now boasts a $10 billion valuation, increased nearly 700 percent year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009.

MySpace clocked in at a very distant second place with just under 5 billion minutes. Out of 10 companies on the list, MySpace is one of the only two that showed a decline in time spent. From 2008 - 2009, time spent on MySpace is down 31% and Gaia Online also saw a 17% reduction.

Other notable entries include My Yearbook (up 105%) and LinkedIn (up 69%). What is unclear to me however, is the inclusion of Blogger and LiveJournal in this report. While technically each serve as a network, the overall usage of the services is related mainly to their publishing aspects and less on their inter-personal connectivity.

Top 10 Social Networking and Blog Sites Ranked by Total Minutes for April 2009 and Their Year-over-Year Percent Growth (U.S., Home and Work)

Nielsen also observed the defining age groups for these popular social networks. Visitors aged 25 to 34 and 35 to 49 were the highest indexing age groups on Facebook, representing 27 percent and 23 percent as more likely to visit the site than the average user, respectively. The highest indexing demographics on Myspace.com, in contrast, were those aged 18 to 24 and 12 to 17.

Perhaps Twitter's surge symbolizes the disparity between popularity and adoption. Yes, the service is on the rise and it's influencing popular culture and how we communicate with each other in the process. But, the real star of this analysis is Facebook.

However, as our attention continues to thin as we're introduced to new content, people, networks, and shiny new apps, even the most popular communities are not infallible.

While attending TWTRCON in San Francisco, I was immersed in dialogue with Steve Rubel, Paul Boutin, and David Berlind. The discussion centered on history versus sociology and psychology, hinging on the idea that any given network's "15-minutes" of fame (read: popularity and importance, not lifespan) translated into roughly five years. Remember the days of Friendster's dominance and MySpace's invulnerability?

If you subscribe to Zuckerberg's Law, then you believe that people will share twice as much information online year over year. His idea suggests that as we embrace the social web as a greater society, our comfort levels will ease and succumb to the activity of our peers, encouraging us to share increasing volumes of personal and professional content online. But, that isn't relegated to just Facebook, that could be true for all social networks.

What if the rate in which popular social networks innovate and earn prominence actually decreased over time instead of hovering at a five year benchmark? The introduction of new and arresting networks and tools is only going to continue to multiply and intensify. We have yet to truly taste mobile networking or find the killer app for the living room. Competition for our attention is escalating and it's just a matter of time until our experimentation officially leads to distributed and uncommitted presences. Perhaps this will lead to a series of strategic acquisitions to prolong prestige, relevance, and stature.

I suggested that the rate in which our attention is focused is both diminishing and extending during this period of increasingly socialized interactivity. Meaning, how we adopt, communicate, share, discover, and observe within social networks is ultimately uncertain and still in the process of definition and documentation. We're writing the book as we go...much of this is so new, we have yet to see the balance, individual adoption and sustainable activity, and long-term effect.

The excitement of having tools that allow us to instantly connect with people who share in passions, interests, and contacts all over the world combined with the psychological impact of this new genre of personal "micro" fame is seductive and not necessarily in alignment with how we will eventually fold these tools and ensuing behavior into our day-to-day cadence.

The reality is that our friends and networks of influence determine our location and participation. This is a competition not for popularity, but for you and your time and loyalty This is indeed, the Social Economy.

Helpful Posts on PR 2.0:
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- This is Not a Sponsored Post: Sponsored Conversations & the FTC
- Reviving the Traditional Press Release
- Twitter, Acquisition vs. Retention
- You Are Significant
- The Art and Science of Blogger Relations - Updated eBook
- In Social Media, The SEC Protects Investors and Companies by Removing “Relations” from IR
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- Can The Statusphere Save Journalism
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- Social Media Influences Buying Decisions
- Is Social Media Recession Proof?
- The End of the Innocence
- The Social Effect and Disruption Theory
- Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM
- In the Statusphere, ADD Creates Opportunities for Collaboration and Education
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- I Like You The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation
- The Ties that Bind Us - Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
- Make Tweet Love - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- Are Blogs Losing Their Authority to the Statusphere
- Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals
- Reinventing Crisis Communications for the Social Web

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Gazing into the Twitterverse

2009-05-27T09:58:00.000-07:00

Twitter connects people through a rich and active exchange of ideas, thoughts, observations, and interests in one, highly collaborative and promising ecosystem. The Twitterverse advances micro interaction and connections through an expanding network of applications, engendering the potential for macro reach and resonance online and IRL (in real life).

Following the recent debut of The Conversation Prism v2.0, Jesse Thomas (@jess3) and I proudly introduce an alpha version of The Twitterverse. While the landscape for Twitter approaches 1,000 different applications, this map visually charts the important tools to help communications, service, marketing, and community professionals more effectively navigate, engage, analyze and measure participation on Twitter.

Please share suggestions, additions, or changes in the Flickr comments section. We'll integrate the feedback into the next rev of the Twitterverse and release formally as a poster and a downloadable high-res graphic.

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- Reviving the Traditional Press Release
- You = Significant
- The Art and Science of Blogger Relations - Updated eBook
- In Social Media, The SEC Protects Investors and Companies by Removing “Relations” from IR
- Twitter Flutters into Mainstream Culture: The New Competition for Attention Starts with You
- The Social OS, The Battle Between Facebook and Twitter is the New Mac vs. PC
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This is Not a Sponsored Post: What You Need to Know About Sponsored Conversations & the FTC

2009-05-26T05:32:00.000-07:00

What follows is the unfiltered version of my latest TechCrunch post, "This is Not a Sponsored Post: Paid Conversations, Credibility & The FTC."

Credit: Kevin Dooley

In the eyes of imaginative and opportunistic advertisers and marketers, bloggers and online influencers are the new celebrities and athletes. Brands are showering them with endorsement deals rich with products, cash, trips, exclusive access to information, and VIP treatment each and every day, creating a new genre of star spokespersons.

Many expert and lifestyle “citizen” bloggers and online weblebrities are creating communities around their persona as they freely and actively share personal and identifiable experiences online, in social networks and also in the real world. Those who can successfully connect their stories to others in and around their peer groups earn trust, visibility and authority – limited only by ambition and ingenuity. They’re rewarded for their presence and ability to point their followers in strategic directions.

These new brand ambassadors are almost the perfect instruments for surreptitiously sparking and cultivating groundswell within desired and vital target markets.

Consumers look to experts and trusted peers for guidance and insight when making decisions.

Who’s to say that the information they’re receiving from their trusted sources is indeed truthful and honest, if they’re unaware that these authorities are actually directly or indirectly compensated for their opinions and insights.

Journalists and reporters on the other hand, most of them anyway, are held to strict editorial guidelines and policies that denounce the practice of receiving products, gifts or compensation in exchange for editorial coverage. There’s at least, a line that separates ethical press from advertorials – whether it’s crossed, is another story.

But in the new online world of citizen influence, there’s no line on the horizon – at least not yet. Driven only by loosely defined and sporadically practiced methodologies that promote at-will disclosure and transparency, many brands, intentionally or deliberately, are blurring a consumer’s ability to discern the distinction between partisan and genuine experiences.

But that’s all about to change. Under new guidelines proposed by the Federal Trade Commission, brands and/or bloggers may be held liable should either the FTC or scorned consumers deem that the actions or claims misguided their decision and/or misrepresented actual performance or efficacy.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, the ability for a consumer to exercise better judgment and common sense is indefensible when a glaring absence of disclosure is pervasive.

Earlier this year, The FTC published recommendations to update its guidelines concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising and public relations. A new set of guidelines, enforceable by the FTC Act, is due soon.

The Guides, 16 C.F.R. Part 255, are designed to assist businesses and others in conforming their endorsement and testimonial advertising practices to the requirements of Section 5 of the FTC Act. The Guides interpret laws administered by the Commission and therefore are advisory in nature. However, proceedings to enforce the requirements of law can be brought under the FTC Act. The Commission would have the responsibility of proving that a particular use of an endorsement or testimonial was deceptive.

In its review of the proposed guidelines, BusinessWeek observed, “The world's more ambitious bloggers like to call themselves 'citizen journalists.' The government is trying to make sure these heralds don't turn into citizen advertisers.”

I disagree with BusinessWeek’s observation and so does the FTC.

In a discussion with Mary Engle, the acting deputy director for the Bureau of Consumer Protection, she articulated, “It’s not about preventing citizen journalists from becoming citizen advertisers, that’s just not true. We’re acting to ensure that bloggers don’t create a bias in the consumer decision-making process. Consumers just need to know that what they’re reading is technically an advertisement.”

Whether the post is compensated with cash or with free product or rewards, the FTC views them equally. Engle observed, “The real test is whether or not the consumer’s impression or decision would change if they knew the post was sponsored.”

It’s about responsibility and credibility.

But honestly, why chance it?

This is about building credibility and earned relationships through engagement and empowerment for both company/product brands and personal brands.

The FTC Guides advise that an advertisement employing a consumer endorsement on a central or key attribute of a product will be interpreted as representing that the endorser’s experience is representative of what consumers will generally achieve.

Even still, the practice of paying bloggers and influencers or providing them with free products not only clouds their ability to share an impartial story, but also risks credibility and trust of brands and influencers among the very people they’re trying to inspire and galvanize.

With or without the new FTC guidelines, the practice of disclosure is not an option when the potential for significantly damaging customer relationships in a very public spotlight is at stake. Unfortunately, it’s not at the forefront of many of our marketing programs.

Free Products are Gifts that Keep on Giving

Ignorance is bliss, until it’s not...

In 2006, Microsoft introduced its Vista operating system to consumers using traditional and new media. In one of the programs, bloggers of varying levels of influence, received Acer Ferrari notebooks to potentially review and share their experiences of the OS and also the notebook. Initially, it wasn’t made clear to these bloggers that disclosure was encouraged. I saw many variations of the packages and letters. Depending on which version a blogger did or didn’t receive, instructions and intentions were also vaguely communicated. What was commonly perceived and understood by other bloggers and ultimately consumers, was that these expensive notebooks were theirs to keep whether or not they shared anything online. To say it created a blogstorm of controversy would be a gross understatement. The lessons learned here served as precedent for those seeking guidance, but didn’t necessarily translate intro industry-wide standards.

Brands view the practice of sending products to bloggers and online influencers as a natural extension of their product PR campaign. In many cases over the years, companies simply didn’t expect to receive product back from reviewers, whether or not they were employed by a publication bound by editorial guidelines against the acceptance of gifts or free products. Bloggers and online influencers, until the recent FTC attention, were viewed no different.

Sending free products, according to the FTC, is viewed as compensation, which translates into an advertisement or paid endorsement. The FTC pays attention to products of "significant" value.

Under the FTC guidelines, disclosure is required in any case where the brand is hopeful of obtaining a published review of the product, when its return, either explicitly or implicitly conveyed, is not expected. This attempts to ensure the protection of all parties against liability or legal action.

Sponsored Posts and Conversations

Whether or not disclosure is evident and forthright, the question really is, whether or not the practice of giving gifts to encourage reviews or outright paying for them is ultimately effective and sound for channeling influence, community building and revenue generation for the long-term.

We’re now talking about outright paying for posts and conversations versus simply sending free product or rewarding them with various incentives and hoping for complimentary posts and discussions in exchange.

A recent report published by Forrester Research defines sponsored conversations as, “A marketing technique in which marketers provide financial or material compensation to bloggers in exchange for their posting blog content about a brand.”

In the report, which is available for $749, Forrester recommends adding sponsored conversations to the corporate marketing toolbox, “Sponsored conversation is controversial; many bloggers believe it threatens bloggers’ reputation for independence. But we think this practice is here to stay. Why? Because bloggers want to get paid and marketers want to pay them.”

According to the FTC guidelines, if there were a financial or other relationship between the advertiser and the endorser that would affect the credibility of the endorsement, that relationship would have to be disclosed under Section 255.5. So, as long as the blogger is clear that the post or conversation is “sponsored,” all guidelines are respected and satisfied.

Wait, what about the brand?

Just because bloggers want to get paid and brands want to pay them, doesn’t make this a no-brainer business practice does it? Or, better yet, does it actually enhance the product/company brand or the personal brand of the blogger in the long run?

Some of the biggest brands in the world are already experimenting with paid posts including, 1-800Flowers, Black&Decker, Cold Stone Creamery, Dell, Disney, MTV, Sears, Sony Pictures, and TiVo. For example, Kmart recently sent several high profile bloggers on $500 shopping sprees in exchange for “sponsored posts” about their experiences.

I suppose, it’s in the way that you use it...

So, let’s examine something of deeper impact and consequence. Every community thrives on interaction rooted in respect and defined by credibility and trust – at least that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

For bloggers to risk or leverage their existing, and more importantly, potential credibility in exchange for blogola is either absurd or simply gratifying and motivating for now. Maybe the bigger picture has yet to come into focus for many bloggers and the act of recognition is enough. And, for brands to either take generations of brand integrity or shape its new and emerging identification on the backs of bloggers who’ll loan their stature and reputation is either brilliantly forward-looking or foolishly shortsighted. In the end, it’s the consumer who holds the power to decide their degree of affinity and affiliation or mutiny and backlash.

Integrity and Reputation vs. Buzz and Google Juice

The more I write about this subject, the clearer my focus. The impending FTC guidelines and whether or not bloggers and brands are at risk of legal punishment isn’t the issue. We just have to deal with it. We can choose as consumers whether or not we want to engage with this content.

The real discussion should center on why a company or blogger should even care to participate. The things we do for money are governed by personal boundaries. As individuals, we define those lines and how clearly we wish to view and abide by them.

If we examine Forrester’s case for sponsored conversations, we’re essentially fueling word of mouth by paying for authorities to share their views about our company or product brand in their domain. This is important. We’re talking about paying for people to write about a company or product on their existing, personally-branded content platform associated with it’s already existing, captive audience. This theoretically sparks Webwide buzz that connects a brand to the community of would be customers who rely upon these personalities and voices in the blogosphere to make informed decisions.

Seems simple enough, except two things are going to prevent this from effectively promoting the sponsoring brand over time – 1) disclosures read like warning signs; 2) There are reports that claim Google is downgrading the PageRank of select blogs or sites that actively publish paid content and violate Google's Guidelines.

Google Software Engineer Matt Cutts recently weighed in on the subject again. He commented on Jeremiah Owyang's blog post on sponsored conversations, "Clear disclosure of sponsorship is critical, and that includes disclosure for search engines. If link in a paid post would affect search engines, that link should not pass PageRank (e.g. by using the nofollow attribute). Google — and other search engines — do take action which can include demoting sites that sell links that pass PageRank, for example."

In a followup post on Matt's blog entitled, Paid posts should not affect search engines, he states, "My bottom-line recommendation is simple: paid posts should not pass PageRank. We do take the subject of paid posts seriously and take action on them."

And, in an interview with Eric Enge, Cutts reminded us that this is about providing disclosure for readers and search engines alike, "Google has made its policies pretty clear on paid posts, about the fact that they should be disclosed not only for humans, but also for machines. Because, it is machine readable disclosure and you are not selling links to past PageRank."

I bet many of you reading this now are responsible for the direction, visibility, and perception of a brand. So as brand managers, you are what the market says you are, tethered by the credibility and stature of the people who collectively voice their thoughts (paid and unpaid.) In the world of pay-per-posts or sponsored conversations, brand association starts to portray a picture of guilt by association, not necessarily the building of strategic brand presence or resonance.

This is a deeper discussion of reputation and trustworthiness versus funding word of mouth buzz and viral marketing. To simply state that “disclosure” alleviates and resolves all risks involved with sponsoring conversations trivializes the discussion.

Brand Ambassadors and Inspired Communities

Whether we like it or not, many new service providers are offering brokered services to facilitate “pay to play” campaigns in Social Media. Concurrently, many brands are also running these programs from within.

Clearly a balance scale exists where integrity and paid buzz are on opposite sides. So the real question is, how do you leverage the laws of perception management in your favor? One way to do so is through traditional, people and solutions-focused public relations.

Identify target bloggers and work genuinely with them on developing a meaningful story that helps and informs their community. This is a necessary program in of itself and it cannot be underestimated. However, if you must pay for sponsored conversations, then consider shifting away from the pay-per-post model of blogger-hosted advertorials and explore other options.

Obviously paid endorsements work when the platform for conveying paid messages is understood and accepted. Celebrities have effectively pushed products in commercials without tarnishing their brand for decades. Essentially, the difference is the forums and networks in which these paid messages appear.

While the value of having a dedicated paid post about your product directly in the influential domain of your target bloggers, look to the existing business of paid endorsements to build and manage a campaign that effectively reaches and compels potential customers without the negative attributes that cling to per-per-posts.

Essentially, hiring or recruiting influential Weblebrities and online experts is not unlike the model for linking real world celebrities to brands through commercials, events, appearances, or other dedicated vehicles to promote the alliance and the story. These campaigns, when concepted and executed properly, effectively link the product/company brand to the celebrity’s persona and prestige to convey a relationship that connects to consumers through aspirations, affinity and emotions.

So in the emerging and highly influential world of Social Media, it only makes sense to create dedicated campaigns and supporting online residences to showcase these strategic alliances and relationships. Essentially, we’re taking the “sponsored conversation” away from the host blogs and moving the potential for influence into a dedicated domain that naturally appeals to customers in ways that complement the behavior and compliance for viewing, interacting with, and potentially absorbing sponsored messages and endoresement. This levels and equalizes the campaign and the ensuing experience, while protecting, shaping, and promoting brands on both sides.

The idea is to create and host a two-way street that still inspires word of mouth and viral marketing, whether it’s funded by cash, rewards, or simply affiliation and recognition. And it just might also offer the best of both worlds, as the blogger or online personality will most likely share their experiences and involvement in their communities anyway.

For example:

Mozy hired iJustine as an official spokesperson airing content on Mozy.com as well as across multiple social networks including YouTube and iJustine branded properties.

Wal-Mart established Elevenmoms, an expert group of independent bloggers who receive free sample products to review and then freely choose which products to review based entirely on their personal opinion and experience.

Graco launched the Graco Nation Ambassador Program, a dedicated community of select Graco fans.

Based on the company’s successful foray into influencer relations with its Flex loaner program, Ford is currently initiating a consumer groundswell for its impending launch of the Ford Fiesta by enlisting every day consumers to share their experiences online and in social networks.

In the end, sponsored conversations will continue to receive funding, as brands remain tempted by low hanging fruit. That’s the reason why it’s called low hanging fruit after all. Anyone can pick it. So, establish a program that harnesses the reach and influence that is rife throughout the social web and incite a more calculated and valuable response.

The FTC is simply striving for truth in advertising. Perhaps in Social Media, there also needs to be a bit more value, dialogue, sincerity, and empowerment in the relationships we invest in and promote whether they’re subsidized with monetary compensation or recognition and affiliation.

The point is that when establishing a paid Social Media campaign, anything that is less than clear, honest, or actively contributing back to the bottom line of the business and/or brand resonance is actually taking away from it.

Marketing Resources for Brand Managers:
SocialMediaClub
Society of New Communications and Research
MarketingSherpa
MarketingProfs
BlogWell
BlogCouncil
Word of Mouth Marketing Association

Helpful Posts on PR 2.0:
- Reviving the Traditional Press Release
- You = Significant
- The Art and Science of Blogger Relations - Updated eBook
- In Social Media, The SEC Protects Investors and Companies by Removing “Relations” from IR
- Twitter Flutters into Mainstream Culture: The New Competition for Attention Starts with You
- The Social OS, The Battle Between Facebook and Twitter is the New Mac vs. PC
- The Domino's Effect
- Can The Statusphere Save Journalism
- The Conversation Index
- Social Media Influences Buying Decisions
- Is Social Media Recession Proof?
- The End of the Innocence
- The Social Effect and Disruption Theory
- Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is Now Available
- Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM
- The Human Network = The Social Economy
- In the Statusphere, ADD Creates Opportunities for Collaboration and Education
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- I Like You The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation
- The Ties that Bind Us - Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
- Make Tweet Love - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- Are Blogs Losing Their Authority to the Statusphere
- Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals
- Reinventing Crisis Communications for the Social Web

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Social Median, or Facebook
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Reviving the Traditional Press Release

2009-05-18T05:25:00.000-07:00

Source

The press release is over 100 years old and for the most part, its evolution wass mostly stagnant for the majority of its lifespan. However, the press release has evolved more in the last decade than it has over the century thanks to the proliferation of the Internet and most notably, the Social Web. The tired and oft disregarded press release is finally tasting reinvention as it transforms to chase the new channels of influence as well as adapt to the rapidly shifting behavior of content discovery, consumption and sharing.

We are witnessing the modernization of an aging communications tool and the distribution networks that connect them to the outside world of influencers and consumers. While the Web is serving as the catalyst for this regeneration, we can also look at innovating the template for traditional press releases as well, starting with the very documents and HTML pages on existing corporate newsrooms that serve as their primary source of PR and corporate presentation.

It’s about time we breathe new life into the press release template.

Over the past few years I have been a vocal supporter and committed practitioner of Social Media Releases (SMR) because they offered the ability to share stories in a more palatable and meaningful format, supported by the media content that helped reporters and bloggers retell the story using the media building blocks that contextually framed it. Social Media Releases also served as a hub for connecting disparate media elements across multiple social networks serving as a frame of reference for distributed videos on YouTube, pictures on Flickr, supporting documentation on DocStoc, market reports and information bookmarked on Delicious, etc. SMRs represent a new and promising opportunity to renew the dialog around improving the foundation for the communication of news, information, and events that left most immune to its overdue potential.

Sometimes in order to embrace innovation we need to blend it with existing methodologies and processes (what we know and how we do it) to eventually propel change, technology and comprehension across the bell curve of adoption.

As you know, I’m a strong proponent for change, where change is merited. It must serve a purpose and not associate with hype or shiny objects. In an online world, where both media and communications are altering how content is produced and distributed, the information we share and how we share it must match the correlating workflow and production processes. At a minimum, they must align with the reader’s persuasion, provide the tools and services they need to retell your story their way (links, video, images, bookmarks, etc.), and also provide a mechanism for inviting feedback, and also encourage sharing through a myriad of services that sends information across the social graphs.

Web 1.0 spurred the modernization of the press release, the first in a series of innovations that continue today and represented the most significant changes to the standard format since the introduction of audio and video news releases (VNRs) serving the broadcast industries.

In 1997, BusinessWire debuted the Smart News Release, which offered businesses ability to integrate links to supporting audio, video, and digital images. BusinessWire also hosted the release online to complement its wire counterpart. According to the company Dell and AMD were among the first adopters of this new release format.

In 2001, PRNewswire released its MultiVu multimedia release (MMR) service, which also offered a branded, stylish online dashboard for businesses to tell their story through text and corresponding media. The first multimedia release published using MultiVu introduced the movie Pearl Harbor and featured stills, clips, and other media files to create a more immersive experience.

Soon thereafter, all existing and also new breeds of wire services, including PRWeb, BusinessWire, MarketWire, among others, debuted online multimedia friendly press release hosting solutions that adapted to the Web’s migration from 1.0 to 2.0.

In 2006, Todd Defren introduced us to the concept of a Social Media Release, which connected online media to social networks. To this day, Todd and I continue to collaborate on the advancement of the Social Media Release in conjunction with many visionaries across the communications and Web marketing communities.

Shortly thereafter, Shannon Whitley developed PRX, the first automated system for building and distributing Social Media Releases.

Last year, PitchEngine launched a dedicated service to empower PR to create, host, and publish branded Social Media Releases and Social Media Newsrooms without the help of developers or Web marketers. I since joined the company as an advisor and stakeholder.

Recently, MindTouch debuted a powerful wiki-based mashup platform and application for automatically creating affordable, custom, and hosted Social Media Releases and Newsrooms for SMBs and enterprise organizations. This was the first service that provided IT and Web marketing with the tools necessary to socialize static releases and newsrooms without changing the hierarchal process of Web site and content management systems.

One of the easiest solutions to deploy and manage online press releases are also the least discussed and most underestimated. Blogs represent some of the most effective platforms for communicating solutions and offering answers to the community of customers and prospects seeking insight. It’s the most profound forum for actively demonstrating expertise and sharing vision and direction consistently over time. Blogs are also an ideal home for sharing news in a format that tells a story in a more human voice. It shouldn’t read as a typical release however. It should capture the essence of what’s new, unique, and worthy of attention and present it in a format that mirrors the story you would ultimately hope to read elsewhere – complete with all of the shareable media content that also speaks to people, their way.

Renovating the Methodologies and Voices for Press Releases

As I said earlier, in order to successfully embrace a new way of communicating news, existing processes and approval cycles must influence the desired evolution – step by step.

Tools, networks and services are facilitating and simplifying the system for creating and distributing new media releases. But most of the time, they start in Microsoft Word or another standard word processor before they’re transmitted to wire and hosting services or published to the existing corporate news page.

Everything starts with the existing template that we use from previous releases, which usually forces us to fill in the blanks in a way that prevents and discourages artistry, ingenuity, value, and believability to flourish. Press releases, in this case, are merely “cookie cutter” productions that usually read as such.

We attack the creation of press releases the wrong way.

First, we have to ask ourselves a question, “Who are we writing for?” In most cases, the answer is not the very influencers or consumers we wish to reach, but the product and management teams that will grant us approval to issue the release. We usually don’t speak the way a press release reads. In fact, I’d argue that we’d never speak to a customer in that language or tenor in real life, so why are press releases less informational and more self-serving...

What if we empathized with the customers we wished to inspire and adapted the story to their channels influence based on the preferences and focus of the authoritative voices that reach them?

It might change the way we approach a blank slate.

And, what if you had to write the headline in 140 characters to convey the value of your news to someone on Twitter? Better yet...what if you distilled the essence into 120 characters encouraging retweets of your story.

It very might modify what and how the rest of the story unfolds.

In order for new media releases to work, they have to receive support representative of an entirely new methodology for communicating stories. It’s not anything new. Corporate executives, spokespersons and marketing and sales professionals have long faced the challenge of refining the value proposition into a compelling elevator or better yet, an escalator pitch.

The idea of the escalator pitch is game changing and powered by the brevity that takes place on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and other micro blogs every minute of every day. It inspires us to embrace brevity and relevance outside of these communities, in the real world, to help people "get" what we do and why they should care.

News flash: New media releases aren’t a new tool to package the same old marketing "speak" that form and enforce the stereotype of existing press releases. They are indeed an opportunity to improve how we, as individuals representing a company that helps real world customers, share our story with them in a way that means something.

The process of humanizing a press release also begets another game changer into the process of writing—answering the above question of to whom we’re hoping to reach. Markets are distributed and supported by mainstream and vertical segments. Not one tool, publication, blog, peer-to-peer network, or story reaches and compels them similarly. Having one press release with a general set of value propositions is necessary but also potentially limiting. Whether or not you address this in your pitch letter to varying representatives of these markets is one thing, but also think about the SEO value of distributing releases targeted directly to various customer groups who are actively looking for information on traditional search engines.

Don’t forget, an Outsell study surfaced the fact that over 51% of IT professionals report that they get their news from press releases discovered in Yahoo and Google business news searches over their top trade journals.

The press release is not simply a function of PR, but an opportunity to tell your story in a way that serves as a catalyst for influence and action, directly and indirectly. The press release thus becomes a social object, capable of sparking conversations, movement, and events.

Breathing New Life into the Existing Template for Press Releases

Improving the narrative, formula and format for press releases is obligatory regardless of supporting mechanisms and technologies. The inclusion of social media elements within the release also fortify stronger cornerstones for improving personal connections and engagement to the release, but also enabling the discoverability and sharing of the content. Having the ability to include videos, pictures, audio, all served from different social networks into one centralized story dashboard, forces us to rethink how and what we share within the story. It introduces a storyboard element that begins well before we write the first word of the release.

We effectively become storytellers and the process of press release writing now transforms into an experiential and technical production, with ROI measured not only in hits, but also release and content views, trackbacks, tweets, mashups, conversations, comments, extended sharing within individual social networks, and also the call to action we integrate into the release. Yes, we can measure and steer experiences now.

Once we move beyond the creative, storyboarding, and production process, we can tackle the creation of the press release. Because everything usually starts with good old-fashioned word processing, I’ve included a new template to visualize these new ideas. Essentially, you can “socialize” a press release simply by integrating all of the content within the release and also by adding “live” links to the content.

Ultimately the release may or may not cross a wire or garner Web visibility through services such as PitchEngine or PRWeb. They will, at the very least, attempt to earn an audience with reporters, bloggers, influencers and also prospective customers via the corporate Web site, online newsroom or via email. The originating template now also serves as a source of an organized story as well as resource for storytellers to grab media in their desired formats and also for consumers to save and share information without sending them to multiple locations.

Regardless of the new media release format you choose, for example, bullets versus prose, do start the release with keyword density in mind to improve its search engine optimization (SEO), which enhances visibility and ranking in search results. In this case, search engines will prefer that the release starts with a headline and also an introductory summary or paragraph whether or not you also include supporting bullets in the body of the release.

Following is an example of a press release document that was socialized to mirror its counterpart that crossed a traditional wire service and also received distribution and online hosting using PitchEngine. I’ve embedded a viewable and downloadable Word and PDF version below via Docstoc. It’s not unlike the Word-based template that many savvy communications professionals were utilizing in Web 1.0. It’s only gained in strength and potency over the years.

Modern Template for Traditional Press Release -

Let’s dissect this example to more effectively explain inherent advantages, design features, and overall structure of the release.

Twitter Pitch

As Stowe Boyd coined it, the TwitPitch or Twitter Pitch, is the ability to communicate the substance of the news release in 120 characters encourages us to think about the story in terms of brevity and relevance and also how what we say might also incite tweets and retweets. I dare you to not change how your release reads after running through this exercise. This is where I usually start the process of writing the entire release and not the reverse.

For those who mastered the art of pitching via email, this exercise shares the lessons learned when crafting a subject line for our messages.

Images

Word processing has significantly evolved over the decades offer desktop publishing capabilities to help communications professions transform static releases into interactive experiences. They now aesthetically mirror their online Social Media Release brethren. Visually telling a story helps place the news in context, making it approachable and potentially immersive.

We amplify value and extendibility of socialized content by linking to the images where they’re hosted as well as connecting to complete photo albums. This offers viewers the ability to reconstruct the story visually and also builds a bridge between the content where it resides as well as establishing an associated storyline with supporting information.

Allow me explain, as this applies to all other social content that potentially resides in the press release. Featuring content from flickr (insert any social content network), for example, the viewer can not only jump to a more immersive set of images, but also users in each respective content network who may find your content, can also click through from the image (or video, audio file, etc.) back to the release. Content should absolutely link back to the host release from each network in order to connect disparate media to the story hub. In the description sections for each piece of content, it’s also wise to include a summary of the news release to help boost Social Media Optimization (SMO) and also frame the story around the material they’re viewing. More on SMO below...

Cross-linking is key to building a hub of social spokes to construct a wheel concentric engagement.

Summary

Providing an encapsulated explanation of the news sets the stage for comprehension and desire to read the remainder of the story. SEO specialists will recommend that writers employ a strategic architecture of keywords (not to be overdone) in order to optimize its performance in search engine results.

When writing press releases, many of the classically trained communications professionals will remember the inverted pyramid style of leading with the most important information. Think of it as making a first impression or as writing the elevator or escalator pitch. Attention is scarce and on the verge of becoming an endangered human characteristic. You have to earn the right to capture and hold attention with each and every release you produce. Make it matter. Answer questions. Solve problems. Direct readers to solutions and beneficial information. Remember, brevity and empathy speak volumes.

Become the customer you want to reach and speak to them as a peer of influence. Don’t try to sell, hype, or deceive readers. In the era of the social Web, customers and influencers now have the ability to equally share the negative attributes of your release as well as the positive, important, and value-added benefits.

Links

Providing helpful, clickable links within the release steer the reader to valuable informational resources and pre-defined experiences only to return to the original release enlightened and knowledgeable. An important note here is to remember that wherever you proactively send your reader, where it can be controlled, should complement your story. Ensure that the destinations are consistent, articulate, easily navigable, and conducive to safeguarding a positive return trip.

Also include links to the traditional or other social media releases should they include varying angles or access to additional information.

Embed Codes

One of the structural assets of a Social Media Release or multimedia release is the seamless capacity to easily grab content (videos, images, audio players, presentations, and many other forms of helpful content) and embed it elsewhere (blog posts, tumblelogs, Web pages, social network profiles, online stories, etc.) without having to recast, record, or shoot new material based on your information. You’re making it easier for influencers to tell a good story to their audiences.

Readers simply cut and paste the embed code you provide in the release into their destination post or page to automatically include the playable/viewable media in their domain. Essentially by simply including the code, you’re making your content and story portable.

Connecting Corporate Profiles Across Social Networks

As we’ve discussed earlier, the ability to link your story to additional pictures, video, and content albums, channels or files residing in other social networks ameliorates or improves the experience to convey significance. It also introduces viewers to your individual corporate profiles in each respective network, allowing them to friend or follow your activity based on their consumption and engagement preferences, setting the foundation for community cultivation within individual and connected networks.

An important lesson here is that releases are typically viewed as isolated events, when in fact they can string together a theme or corporate libretto that is narrated with every new form of content uploaded and shared within each or all of our strategic social networks.

SMO

We briefly discussed the art and science of Social Media Optimization above. But, allow me to further clarify this practice. If you recall the Outsell study that revealed how press releases factor into customer searches for relevant information, we know that behavior is already a precedent. So, if I were to tell you that a social network was actually the second most popular search engine behind Google, optimizing social content would make perfect sense. Well indeed, this is the case.

YouTube performs more keyword searches than many popular, yet traditional search engines. Unlike keyword density exercises in SEO, SMO involves artful and poignant descriptions that feature keywords and also employs the convention of intentional and crowdsourced tagging. Tags are similar to keywords in that they describe the content directly or indirectly. When individuals search for specific content in social networks, it’s a combination of tags and keywords that unearth relevant and associated content.

By providing recommended tags and keywords, we’re also encouraging disseminators of our information to also tag and discuss our story in complementary fashions. Note: You may see “Technorati Tags” in other hosted online Social Media Release services. To put things into perspective, Technorati is the premier blog directory for indexing blogs based on areas of topics and expertise as well enabling information seekers to search keywords that connect results to authoritative blog posts. So, unless the service is hosted on a truly social platform such as a wiki, social network, or blog platform, these Technorati tags that are included in these online press releases today will most likely not appear in Technorati search results. This is one of the many reasons why hosting and managing a corporate blog is important. Just because it’s on the Web, doesn’t make it truly social.

The Social Graph

Connecting this content to the overarching corporate story is how we merge traditional to Social Media. More importantly, when influencers and customers interact with the content, their mere participation offers a reverberating effect that introduces the material to respective social graphs representing first degree friends and followers as well as potentially spreading the story to second and third degree friends of friends and so on – the proverbial social graph.

In other words, when someone bookmarks the news on delicious, “likes” or posts it on Facebook or FriendFeed, shares it on Twitter, that discrete activity is shared within one or multiple networks simultaneously for others to potentially experience. It’s this behavior and peer-to-peer implicit and explicit endorsement that sets the stage for content to potentially become viral. Peer-viewed content is usually trusted and qualified.

Feeds

Subscription feeds help influencers and customers stay up-to-date with your news. Providing RSS feeds for important product or corporate news channels or an all-inclusive OPML file enables people to effortlessly and automatically receive updates within their feed reader of choice.

Social Bookmarks

A note about social bookmarks: earlier, we outlined how people can bookmark or share your content in services such as Delicious or Diigo or in news communities such as Digg or Mixx. In PR, you can also create purpose-built pages dedicated to providing an industry overview that supports your company’s position within the marketplace. With SMO, these pages can also surface in social search to reveal your side of the story.

Issuing releases on the wire and hosting them on Social Media and Web-based news services such as PitchEngine and PRWeb, is only reaching a small percentage of your potential audiences. When we think similarly to the multitude of potential customers who represent different markets, it becomes clear that in order to reach them, we must connect with them directly where they congregate to discover and share information.

In addition to wires and Web services, PR can benefit by creating and linking to corporate profiles on content networks such as Docstoc or Scribd. Uploading related press releases, whitepapers, research papers, customer success stories, etc., combined with strategic SMO, enable people to find your information above others. And like YouTube, copies of this content are also embeddable and downloadable providing the seamless sharing and dissemination of supporting documents such as financial statements or market reports, or perhaps, the press release itself. Imagine hosting a dedicated channel of supportive written documentation.

Call to Action

One of the most compelling attributes of new media releases is the ability to direct focus and activity. Now that we've embraced the notion that the press release can also serve customers directly, why not borrow a page from the worlds of inbound marketing and advertising by integrating a "call to action" in the body of the release. Southwest Airlines experimented with direct links to discounted airfares within the release, recording $1 million in sales directly attributed to the release appearing in search. Many other companies successfully guide and rally customer activity by integrating links to "Buy It Now," "Vote," "Tell Us What You Think," or "Register Here" pages on the Web.

Wire Distribution

While releases are hosted online as they appear in the template, the wire is a different story. The embedded images and logos for social networks can't necessarily cross the "wire," since technically only text can make the journey to news desks. However, integrated links, embed codes, and keywords remain intact.

Note: for contact information, you can also include links to your Facebook or LinkedIn profiles, vcards, or any other form of social contact that effectively reaches you.

Press releases are both a mechanism for refining and distributing news and now also serve as a conduit for connecting influencers and customers to information as well as the people behind the story through social networks. Upgrading the template for the development of press releases improves the foundation for the story and the transparency, authenticity, and believability required to extend it across social networks, online press outlets, and throughout the blogosphere.

Press releases represent a privilege to share our story with others of absolute consequence. They might serve as a required form of communication and disclosure, but releases do not fundamentally guarantee an audience, coverage, nor sharing. It’s our job and our obligation to amplify, extend, and connect our stories to the communities who can benefit from the advancements and innovation that define our business.

How does this change your process for writing and distributing your next press release?

Update: PRESSfeed offers a free browser toolbar to help optimize traditional press releases for SEO.

Helpful Posts on PR 2.0:
- The Evolution of Press Releases
- Social Media Releases, Everything You Wanted to Know
- The Definitive Guide to Social Media Releases
- Reinventing Crisis Communications for the Social Web
- Introducing MicroPR
- You = Significant
- The Art and Science of Blogger Relations - Updated eBook
- In Social Media, The SEC Protects Investors and Companies by Removing “Relations” from IR
- Twitter: Acquisition vs. Retention
- Twitter Flutters into Mainstream Culture: The New Competition for Attention Starts with You
- The Social OS, The Battle Between Facebook and Twitter is the New Mac vs. PC
- The Domino's Effect
- Can The Statusphere Save Journalism
- The Conversation Index
- Social Media Influences Buying Decisions
- Is Social Media Recession Proof?
- The End of the Innocence
- The Social Effect and Disruption Theory
- Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is Now Available
- Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM
- The Human Network = The Social Economy
- In the Statusphere, ADD Creates Opportunities for Collaboration and Education
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- Social Networks Now More Popular than Email; Facebook Surpasses MySpace
- I Like You The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation
- The Ties that Bind Us - Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
- Make Tweet Love - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- Are Blogs Losing Their Authority to the Statusphere
- Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals

Connect with me on:
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Significant

2009-05-13T06:11:00.000-07:00

Credit

I’ve just returned from Next09 in Hamburg and Disruptive Media in Stockholm where I’ve unveiled my new focus for what just may serve as the foundation for one of the next two books I hope to write.

As we are tempted by social networks and the kinship of new friends, followers, and fans, we intentionally or inadvertently, create a new era of personal recognition and attention that extracts an unconditioned human response and consequently shapes an unpredictable personality and behavior over time.

Social networking, common sense, prudence, and direction are not ingrained in our DNA. We all need a little help and advice, now more than ever.

We're becoming important in our own domain and it's blurring the lines of how we interact and behave when we step outside of it. At the same time however, finding comfort beyond of our comfort zones opens our heart and mind to appreciating and ultimately engendering new opportunities. This is how we can create our own destiny and one day, work our way to becoming significant.

Embody the change you wish to symbolize - today.

Be.
Do.
Get.

Determine exactly where, who or what you strive to achieve...

Symbolize and exercise the attributes, responsibilities, and disciplines required to earn and sustain your aspirations...

Earn the very thing you were already becoming as you forced evolution through actions and outlook...

This is very much our moment in which we are empowered to shape how history remembers us.

Nowadays and for the foreseeable future, we are measured by the relationships we perpetuate and judged by the company we keep. Therefore, it’s our obligation to explore the strategies and techniques that help us navigate through the chasms that surround the Social Web. We can only be enlightened through the study of what we think we know, don’t know and what we should know about the rapid evolution of media and the transformation of relationships, self-worth, human interaction, and how what we say, don’t say, share, and consume ultimately affects and defines us.

This is our chance to have a positive effect on the future of media, our culture, and our place within the social ecosystem. While we perceive the social landscape to lay flat, it is very much hierarchical.

This is an opportunity to earn genuine significance through sincere and productive curation, recognition, alignment, and interaction.

I believe we are at the cusp of a personal fusion of separate yet hopelessly intertwined ideologies and methodologies and the connections we forge based on shared interests and passions. This works for and against us as we set the stage for engineering individual and collective significance or irrelevance.

It’s a delicate collision that births a new level of consciousness and awareness, setting the stage for literacy, ethics, and with it, higher education and insight.

The Human Network

How we establish and configure our human network is maturing with the socialization of the Web. Before Web 2.0, we maintained relationships through written correspondence (email and snail mail), instant and text messaging, fax, phone, and in person – but it was typically confined to those contacts with whom we mostly knew or were getting to know.

In the era of the social Web, we are building a human network that transcends geographic boundaries as it expands our reach, connections, potential influence, and exposure to new ideas and principles. Social networks alter the way we think about how we embrace social media – personally and professionally. Our connections are no longer defined, nor are they bound or limited to that of our traditional relations or association. Now, we enjoy the freedom to choose with whom we wish to follow and ultimately connect, creating a framework linked by shared interests, aspirations, and distractions.

We are defining a new era of society and how we ultimately communicate with one another and it’s not only facilitating distributed interaction and globally dispersed contextual networks, but also spotlighting those individuals who can consistently demonstrate expertise, capture attention, and empower their matrix of peers. We are bound by commonalities online, which extends our relevant net beyond relatives and those with whom we have somehow, some way, experienced introduction or sustained contact.

In many ways, we’re fueling a genre of aspiring digital celebrities whose new found sense of Internet fame is measured in connections, the ability to inspire and galvanize action, and the encompassing conversations that extend their work, ideologies, and insights beyond the first degree of their social graph.

However, relationships over time are measured by the mutually beneficial rewards that we experience over time. We invest in each other and harvest the fruits of our collaboration and interconnection.

The Privilege of Participation

The success of any business or career starts with you and is only amplified by how you harness the promise of the social Web to earn prominence and influence online and in the real world.

Those who stop seeking wisdom, answers, direction, or guidance, will find themselves competing against the very people who formerly represented their community of followers and friends.

While in Germany I had the good fortune of spending some time with Andrew Keen, author of the controversial book, ‘The Cult of the Amateur.” Keen and I have corresponded over the years and he’s someone whom I’ve come to respect and admire. He possesses a unique aptness to assume a seemingly adversarial position only to introduce you to credible and ambitious plans to improve the future of media and communications.

In his book, Keen describes social media and the networks and platforms that define it as conduits for nothing more than ignorant egocasting, “They claim to be all about ‘social network’ with others, but in reality they exist so that we can advertise ourselves.”

Indeed, many of us spend far too much time broadcasting and not enough time listening. As Social Media is democratizing the Web, it is also creating opportunities for the emergence of new influencers, mediums, while contributing to a state of informational anarchy. As Keen puts it, “many of us have strong opinions, yet most of us are profoundly uninformed.”

While we’re both excited and enticed by the new found freedom and power associated with sharing our thoughts and observations in social networks, blogs, and micro communities, we’re also seduced and intoxicated by personal recognition and validation. We’re lured into a false sense of hope and the illusion of fame and relevance and it potentially takes us off course from securing the objectives we hope to achieve . Without realization, many of us are not embodying the democratization of content at all, but instead the deconstruction and dissemination of authority and influence in the name of self-expression and freedom of speech.

This is why you are my inspiration and focus. Together, we’re going to leverage the socialization of the Web to build a prominent presence and community for the values, beliefs, and interests for which we stand in cooperation with those who share them.

Indeed, perhaps we should spend less time taking and apply a little more effort into giving and giving back.

Is this really about conversations or is this a channel to share inconsequential information or personal exploits. Truthfully, we have to ask ourselves, at some point, how does that help us?

We give far too much credit to common sense. As discussed with Anders Abrahamsson, sometimes common sense equates to common nonsense.

Very few conversations we witness or join are actually two-way, limited by the technology and culture of existing networks. For example, in Twitter, conversations are disjointed. And in networks where conversations are indeed threaded, time, focus, and attention inhibit follow up.

There’s a responsibility that comes with participating on the Social Web and it is a privilege we must recognize and personify.

Personal Brand vs. Professional Persona

Source

Before we represent our day job as marketers, customer service professionals, artists, advertisers, branding experts, product designers and developers, et al, we ARE individuals and consumers with views and opinions tied together by personality and passion. The Social Web presents us with an opportunity to amplify our unique persona as an individual and also as a representative for an organization. Our perspective, and the way we share it, establishes character, earns trust and respect, builds presence, and attracts crowds of individuals who also maintain loyal communities of followers for each entity, but not equally.

Participation and cultivation are unique to the perceptions we wish to create and fortify. People and brands must grow their presence across the social Web through strategic and dedicated participation, community building, and relationship management – with some allowance for overlap. But attention and relationships are not earned through broadcasting, they’re established through the art and science of unmarketing, curation, empowerment, and individual recognition rooted in sociological, psychological, and human influenced observation as well as through enlightened interaction.

The laws of diminishing attention and our ability to seize it govern the Social Economy. We’re constantly struggling and learning how to discover and in turn, personify our place within the perpetually evolving social universe.

It is the ongoing saga of bridging the distances between who we are, who we want to be, and what we represent and furthermore, manifesting a cohesive and value-added presence outward.

I believe that we create and define our online persona with every status update, tweet, video, picture, review, comment, and post, we share. We’re forging networks through a fusion of traditional relationships and friendships and also contextually - following and friending those whom we admire and respect based on their ideas, vision, and experience. It’s how we share, discover and learn. The nature for how we view and establish relationships is evolving before us and eventually we will change how we interact based on the contextual network we’ve built.

Truth be told, most of your “friends” don’t care about your professional endeavors. Concurrently, your peers and professional contacts are not better off for knowing about your personal exploits.

Customers have choices and they’re always looking for information to help them make decisions. How does this affect what you share online?

Friends, family and casual acquaintances need not know about the brand, products, and services you represent. Instead, they’re driven by personal observations, activities, and updates.

We can’t be one thing to all people and thus a collision and ensuing fallout is imminent.

So, what’s next?

Multiple Personality “Order.”

Take a moment to think of yourself as a content publisher. Hearst, for example, maintains over 200 publications globally each with its own unique view and focus. It’s not unheard of to cultivate communities through the practice of contributing dedicated information and hosting beneficial dialogue within the specific communities that can benefit from the interaction.

Don’t be surprised if eventually, even if for only a short time, we maintain multiple online personas in the networks that are important to us as a consumer and also as a brand ambassador. It’s the only way to accurately and ethically maintain consequential and dedicated presences in professional and personal conversations that don’t negatively impact or jeopardize devoted relationships.

The New Literacy

Credit

Just because we have the tools to publish, doesn’t necessarily mean we have something of relevance to share, nor does it ensure that we have an audience.

It’s our individual responsibility to:

- Provide clarity in a time of social chaos and a concentrated signal through online noise and chatter

- Understand what the Social Web really is and what it means for our personal brand as well as the corporate brand we represent

- Create an online corporate and/or personal brand to excel in any industry – written in an inspirational and easy to digest narrative

- Interpret the shift in content consumption and production in order to leverage it for personal and brand amplification and community building

- Comprehend the cultures defining the most popular social networks and how to engage uniquely and independently within each – if we are welcome and encouraged to do so

- Learn how to become a digital anthropologist, sociologist, and ethnographer to immerse, adapt to, and chart any online community in order to build a brand and fan base that spans across each applicable network

- Grasp the art of cultivating a community around our brand and persona and its corresponding impact on the business and financial bottom line

- Create presence and rally action in social networks and blogs for only those instances that merit it

- Master the technique to measure the reach of your brand and the ROI of focused strategies and tactics

You

Shot at The George Hotel, During Next09

We’re already inundated with an overwhelming array of books and blogs covering Twitter, Facebook, and Social Media in general – and more are on the way. However, very few actually demonstrate how to specifically leverage the platforms and cultures that define the “Conversation Prism” in order to become significant online and IRL (in real life). Many are left confused, misinformed or worse, fictitiously empowered to make a difference.

We share in the quest for motivation and instruction to responsibly and effectively participate in order to build vibrant communities around solutions, commonalities, personality and values. This is how we forge meaningful relationships, enlist and commission catalysts and evangelists, and establish fandoms Web wide to propel ourselves into some form of greatness and notoriety.

The challenge is that only a small percentage of individuals and organizations have figured out how to build visibility online. For many others, this has merely dwindled into a meager popularity contest instead of a quest to achieve personal “and” business success. A significant percentage of total interaction is far from human, and even worse, far from interesting and therefore irrelevant.

Right now Twitter boasts only roughly 20+ million users and roughly 30-40% month-to-month retention rate. Facebook has surged to 200 million users. There are over 100 million blogs published today, with one created every minute of every day. YouTube is hosting roughly 90-100 million online videos. Yet, only a tiny fraction of each community has mastered the art of dialogue and content creation that warrants and supports a sense of community and individual influence. In all reality, many have gamed or manipulated networks to build up followers, and most aren’t quite sure what to even do with them. And for the rest of those content contributors who continue to upload useless, irrelevant, and in many cases, irreverent content, they take away from overall value and promise of the networks they dilute.

Many people are diving into social networks and making missteps in the process. Most don’t realize that everything they do on the social Web collectively builds a “persona” that either builds or takes away from their aspirations and opportunities of reaching new levels.

According to Kevin Donline of The Star Tribune Minneapolis, “Seventy-seven percent of recruiters report using search engines to find background data on candidates. Of that number, 35 percent eliminated a candidate because of what they found online.”

Education company Kaplan, a unit of Washington Post Co., surveyed 500 top colleges. The study found that 10% of admissions officers acknowledged researching social network profiles to evaluate applicants. 38% of the colleges that factor information gathered from the social web revealed that their findings "negatively affected" their views of the applicant, with several admissions officers rejecting students because of the publicly shared content.

Your persona is yours to define, cultivate, nurture, and craft. Ignorance is not bliss. Everything we post and share on the web collectively contributes to a perception, right or wrong, of who we are and what we stand for. And, it is readily discoverable through search engines and in turn, open to interpretation.

Your reputation precedes you.

It's the curation of all of our disparate and distributed social objects that collectively contribute to our reputation and Social Capital.

Perception IS reality. We can’t get carried away. We must open our eyes.

The Social Economy

Shot at Paradise Ridge Winery

The social economy flourishes on the exchange of earning and cashing-in on social capital and also through the selfless acts paying “it” forward to bolster the capital of those who move us.

According to Forrester Research, only 1/3 of all people on the Web produce content – leaving a significant percentage of people who simply read, consume, and share. However, the volume of that percentage increases daily.

The Social Web creates unheard of opportunities for worthy individuals and organizations to establish greatness – much like Hollywood in its heyday. But also like Hollywood, aspirations and dreams aren’t always realized. But still, this about becoming significant, earning prominence through our individual contributions and the recognition of others.

Those with ambition and vision also need help understanding how to leverage the social web to become significant. Even rock stars and celebrities need expert managers. Sometimes we need to be saved from ourselves. Sometimes we need not to learn from mistakes in the public microscope.

Restraint, focus, purpose, hope, and judgment will help us build a more formidable online presence while also improve the caliber of user generated content and media literacy overall.

ROI?

How about ROP?

Yes, we should seek deeper meaning and return on our individual participation from the Social Web.

While many have always found comfort in sharing their views and words, we are also empowering individuals who never might have expressed themselves otherwise.

But almost everyone has, or should have, questions when it comes to individual participation, not just how we as online personalities or brand representative need to think about how to leverage Twitter, Facebook, Ning, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, etc.

If we refocus the conversational lens from a business-to-consumer perspective to a person-to-person consumer connection, we realize that many of the interaction has been less on dialogue and more on blindly launching information across “attention” bows. When we stop and reflect upon conversations as they exist and how they should materialize and thrive, our voice will shift away from broadcasting and promotion to one of empathy. Listeners make the best conversationalists and mastering the art of observation and combining it with attentiveness, consideration, introspection, and the ability to connect answers to questions regulated by the rules of respect and etiquette, we might one day earn influence and the corresponding social capital and intelligence that facilitates the ability to define one’s own destiny.

The future is ours to define and it’s both inspiring and auspicious.

Attention

Credit

Extending the discussion of the Social Economy I reviewed during Next09, I explored the benefits of separating the emphasis of "Me" from Social Media and the advantages of a holistic practice of concerted listening and ongoing observation to shape our participation in the Social Web.

Collectively, we all share the need to discover who we are and why matter to those with whom we wish to connect. But, we should also share a common desire to rise above the noise and establish a formidable and valuable online presence and defined human network that transcends from the online world to the real world.

Why is anyone better off for following or friending us?

As a digital society, we are individually investing in our social capital spurred by unconscious and also deliberate acts that unknowingly convey complacence and fuel an ambition to acquire notoriety and recognition.

Self-importance versus self-awareness...

While we are captivated by the ability to broadcast through the stratosphere and in the process, procure friends and followers, we loose sight of the true opportunity represented by the Social Web. It's not the ability to share what we want, when we want. It's not the rewards of popularity and the illusion of fandom. This is a chance and a means to forge a network of influence based on the expertise and knowledge we amass and share.

Social Capital isn't the currency of The Social Economy after all, it is merely a stature that is representative of what we share, the relationships we earn, and the perception others form based on our participation and contribution in social networks and IRL (in real life).

Attention has officially emerged as the portal to the Social Economy and in order to capture it, we must create or share content so intriguing, relevant, and thoughtful that it forces action and ideally triggers a response.

Content is still king and therefore information and the conversations that support it, symbolize the true currency of the Social Economy.

Twitter, Facebook, TweetDeck, FriendFeed, Seesmic, PeopleBrowsr, Tweetie, et al, have emerged as our attention dashboards. It's where we share, update, consume, and learn. We click away and return based on the content that flows through our timeline. It's the ideas we share, the personality we portray, the stories we tell, the individuals we spotlight, and the dissemination of the things that inspire and teach us that increase our chances of capturing attention to connect and motivate.

DO I HAVE YOUR...

Sometimes we benefit from the art of practicing restraint in order to breathe in the essence of the community we wish to galvanize. The Social Web is not a right, it should be embraced as a privilege. In the end, we earn the attention and the relationships we earn and nurture.

We must transform how we participate and engage online to shift from talking "at" people to investing in the collective consciousness of those communities we wish to influence, foster, and promote.

We must believe we have something to learn.

We must have something of value to share.

It's about the journey we share and not the destination. This is our time to contribute to a more meaningful and mindful future of media and communications and create our own prominence in the process. Our culture and societal values are ours to define - for better or for worse. We must ask ourselves whether or not we take responsibility for the social physics that shape its direction and governance.

Will you seize this opportunity to become significant online and in the real world?

In the end we're measured by our actions and not words. The question is, how do you want to be perceived and remembered?

Shot in Big Sur

Significant by Brian Solis

Publish at Scribd

Helpful Posts on PR 2.0:

- The Art and Science of Blogger Relations - Updated eBook
- In Social Media, The SEC Protects Investors and Companies by Removing “Relations” from IR
- Twitter: Acquisition vs. Retention
- Twitter Flutters into Mainstream Culture: The New Competition for Attention Starts with You
- Online Reputation and Brand Management Starts with Identity
- The Social OS, The Battle Between Facebook and Twitter is the New Mac vs. PC
- The Domino's Effect
- Can The Statusphere Save Journalism
- The Conversation Index
- Social Media Influences Buying Decisions
- Is Social Media Recession Proof?
- The End of the Innocence
- The Social Effect and Disruption Theory
- Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is Now Available
- Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM
- The Human Network = The Social Economy
- In the Statusphere, ADD Creates Opportunities for Collaboration and Education
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- Social Networks Now More Popular than Email; Facebook Surpasses MySpace
- I Like You The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation
- The Ties that Bind Us - Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
- Make Tweet Love - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- The Battle for Your Social Status
- Are Blogs Losing Their Authority to the Statusphere
- Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Social Median, or Facebook
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Twitter Visits Surpass New York Times and Wall Street Journal

2009-05-11T22:09:00.000-07:00

The race to 1,000,000 followers between Ashton Kutcher and CNN followed shortly thereafter by the Oprah Effect and the ensuing celebrity stampede has propelled Twitter beyond two of the world's most prominent media brands.

According to Compete and Quantcast, as documented by PaidContent, Twitter.com soared past the online properties of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

The truth is stranger than fiction...but it is reality.

I believe that Twitter will only continue to distance itself from other top media brands as it continues to seduce new users into the "conversation," facilitating the cultivation of human networks and transforming them into concentric communities that offer a semblance of micro fame, celebrity and authority.

Why?

Twitter and other online lifestreams and timelines such as FriendFeed, Facebook, Chi.mp, and Tumblr, are rapidly evolving into individual attention dashboards, luring us away from bookmarks and RSS feeds in order to discover and share relevant content and updates.

Timelines and News Feeds serve as our centralized attention dashboard and determine what we read, what we say, and who responds simply by the information that continually flows through it. We’re engaged at the point and place of introduction and bound by context and time. Noticeable content sparks curiosity and dictates our next move and subsequently the next moves and reactions of friends and friends of friends (FoFs).

These dashboards are our source of influence, intelligence, entrainment, connections, and distractions. They will only grow more prominent as they adapt to our behavior.

Welcome to the Statusphere...the new ecosystem for sharing, discovering, and publishing updates and micro-sized content that reverberates throughout social networks and syndicated profiles, resulting in a formidable network effect of movement and response. It is the digital curation of relevant content that binds us contextually and through the statusphere we can connect directly to existing contacts, reach new people, and also forge new friendships.

Twitter is however, an opportunity for any media property to connect content to those seeking relevant information. The new era of distribution migrates away from home delivery and assumed destination models and instead proactively distributes stories to individuals where their attention and that of their social graph is fixed. I explore the subject deeper in, "Can the Statusphere Save Journalism."

Update: What's holding our attention on Twitter right now? Click here to find out.

Helpful Posts on PR 2.0:

- "I AM A GEEK!" Unites Geeks to Improve Education in Underprivileged Countries
- Twitter: Acquisition vs. Retention
- Twitter Flutters into Mainstream Culture: The New Competition for Attention Starts with You
- Online Reputation and Brand Management Starts with Identity
- The Social OS, The Battle Between Facebook and Twitter is the New Mac vs. PC
- The Domino's Effect
- Can The Statusphere Save Journalism
- The Conversation Index
- The End of the Innocence
- The Social Effect and Disruption Theory
- Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is Now Available
- Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM
- The Human Network = The Social Economy
- In the Statusphere, ADD Creates Opportunities for Collaboration and Education
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- Social Networks Now More Popular than Email; Facebook Surpasses MySpace
- I Like You The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation
- The Ties that Bind Us - Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
- Make Tweet Love - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- The Battle for Your Social Status
- Are Blogs Losing Their Authority to the Statusphere
- Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Social Median, or Facebook
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"I AM A GEEK!" Unites Geeks to Improve Education in Underprivileged Countries

2009-05-11T06:55:00.000-07:00

If you don't know Shira Lazar, you should. She is by far one of the most intelligent, creative and passionate people that I know and I'm proud to have her as a friend. During Demo09 in March, I had an opportunity to sit with Shira to discuss new ideas and opportunities to collaborate and concentrate those efforts towards something more meaningful than self-promotion.

The lobby at the JW Marriott in Palm Desert was buzzing with the latest news from startups, celebration among those founders who already presented, and anxiety surrounding the entrepreneurs who actively rehearsed their six minute presentations for the next day. Shira couldn't contain her enthusiasm and suddenly as she began to speak, the room went quiet, "I have a great idea and I need your help to make it happen."

The idea was to humanize geek culture and unite some of the most visible and vocal online personalities to have a positive impact on our society in real life (IRL). And that was the beginning of the "I Am a Geek" video which I'm proud to help debut today.

Presented by The Society For Geek Advancement, "I AM A GEEK" brings together some of the biggest personalities and celebrities in the online space to proclaim their geek pride. “I AM A GEEK” also urges viewers and the community to “be the geek who keeps on giving”, and for the launch, has partnered with the non-profit Room To Read, building schools and libraries for children in developing countries around the world.

The video features:

Shaquille O’Neal (The Real Shaq), Steve Wozniak (Apple Co-founder), Kevin Pollak (Actor), Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation), LeVar Burton (Reading Rainbow, Star Trek: The Next Generation), Jason Calacanis (Internet Entrepreneur), Samm Levine (Actor), Felicia Day (Creator of The Guild / Actress), Kevin Rose (Co-Founder Digg, Revision3), Alex Albrecht (Co-Host Diggnation), Leo Laporte (Technology Journalist and Broadcaster), IJustine (Internet Celebrity / Lifecaster), David Karpe (Founder of Tumblr), Veronica Belmont (co-host of Revision3's tech-centric show, Tekzilla,), Sarah Lacy (Sillicon Valley Journalist and Author), Randi Zuckerberg (Marketing Director Facebook), Pete Cashmore (Founder of Mashable), Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos.com), Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library TV), Jonathan Coulton (Famed Singer-Song Writer), Kevin Pereira (The Cable Television Darling), Tay Zonday (YouTube celebrity), Julia Allison (Internet Celebrity, Lifecaster), Julia Roy (Blogger), Marina Orlova (HotForWords, YouTube Internet Celebrity), Shira Lazar (On-air personality, blogger), and yours truly.

Get your Geek Badge.

Give.

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The Art and Science of Blogger Relations - Updated eBook

2009-05-09T12:15:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to announce an updated version of my free ebook, "The Art and Science of Blogger Relations" is now available on Scribd and Docstoc as a free download. For all of you Kindle enthusiasts, it is also available in Amazon's Kindle Store.

The methodologies and tactics required for effective blogger relations will shatter everything you were taught or thought you know about traditional PR. Part "un" common sense, part market expert, part enthusiast, and part customer, together, this guide will help you embody the new techniques and mastery necessary to effectively excel in media, analyst, and blogger relations today and tomorrow - while building long term, meaningful relationships along the way.

eBook-Blogger Relations by Brian Solis

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In Social Media, The SEC Protects Investors and Companies by Removing “Relations” from IR

2009-05-04T04:49:00.000-07:00

What follows is the unedited version of my post on TechCrunch, "Corporate Tweets and the SEC: Sometimes It’s Better To Keep Your Mouth Shut."

Credit: Daniel Y. Go

Last year, I covered the landmark SEC decision to recognize corporate blogs and potentially other forms of Social Media as a recognized form of meeting public disclosure requirements under Regulation FD (Fair Disclosure) – in some cases. It was a significant validation of a widely recognized medium for facilitating information between companies and stakeholders. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, among many others, successfully lobbied over the years for official recognition of blog and the SEC finally took notice.

The real question is, did other public companies and their communications and IR teams take notice?

Just under a year later, all was quiet on the social IR front until recently. Questions are swirling. Initial waves of examples are poised for documentation and analysis. Success stories, mistakes, and lessons are imminent.

While PR, marketing, advertising, branding, HR, and customer service are rapidly adopting participatory methodologies, IR has wisely observed the landscape to ascertain risks and opportunities present within the new SEC guidelines.

It’s time to bring this discussion into the public spotlight again in order to connect IR, PR, and legal in the dialogue that will prompt new policy and regulation to better serve investors, customers, and influencers.

Recently, I hosted a discussion on this very topic at the NewComm Forum in San Francisco. I assembled an expert panel that included those active in covering and defining the world of corporate disclosure in the era of the social web, including: Richard Brewer-Hay of Ebay, Bryan Rhoads of Intel, Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher and ZDNet, and David Gelles of Financial Times.

The experiences and lessons shared in this discussion brought to light the real world internal concerns, challenges, and possibilities for integrating blogs, Twitter, and other social networks into the portfolio of disclosure tools.

In reality, social media is reshaping disclosure and the practice of investor relations. As the social web begets a human voice and genuine transparency, it also raises the risks of meeting and maintaining legal compliance. It’s true, the SEC has recently modified its stance on blogs, but as new social tools continue to innovate and gain traction, a gap may be widening between the ability for companies as well as the SEC to keep pace with a rapidly evolving landscape of social networks and the means to meet investor demand as well as the emerging opportunities for engagement and communication.

Analyzing SEC Guidelines

In last year’s post, I playfully tossed out the idea of killing the press release in favor of new electronic formats and hubs that connect stakeholders, not because I believed that the press release is dead, but because I wished to challenge legal and communications teams to expand their reach to the communities that currently grip the attention of the people they wish to reach – especially when the news is favorable.

According to the SEC, “As we have developed EDGAR to facilitate and promote electronic availability of information, we also have encouraged companies to make their Commission filings and other company information available on their web sites. We believe that company disclosure should be more readily available to investors in a variety of locations and formats to facilitate investor access to that information.”

However, before we get too far ahead of ourselves, the SEC published a 47-page report that outlines the boundaries for sharing information as well as holding companies and their employees liable for the information that they post on blogs, networks, communities, and discussion forums.

If public companies are not proactively analyzing these guidelines and establishing internal policies, frameworks, and penalties, then they are exposed to the dangers that loom in the form of overly enthusiastic employees who are enamored with new and shiny social tools and objects. One wrong, irresponsible, or casual post, comment, tweet, status update, can produce a domino effect of consequences that have yet to establish precedence. While a tweet, for example, may seem harmless, the activity and response sparked by an update could result in repercussions that trigger SEC and shareholder retaliation. Corporate and marketing executives who rely on self-restraint and common sense across the organization aren’t employing common sense at all.

Integrating New Technology with What Works Today

Yes, it’s the company’s responsibility to reach people where they are actively seeking and sharing information, but the SEC also cautions communicators in doing so. Just because blogs, social networks, and micro communities such as Twitter and FriendFeed are the current flavors of our digital generation, their conversational roots and culture do not relinquish companies from their responsibility to share data in a way that complies with federal securities laws. The SEC guidelines clearly state, “While blogs or forums can be informal and conversational in nature, statements made there by the company (or by a person acting on behalf of the company) will not be treated differently from other company statements when it comes to the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws. Employees acting as representatives of the company should be aware of their responsibilities in these forums, which they cannot avoid by purporting to speak in their ‘individual’ capacities.”

As I mentioned in a recent article published in the Financial Times by David Gelles, “If the people doing social media for a company aren't informed enough to do the right thing when using these tools, you're in danger.”

Companies MUST not abandon or sacrifice the bridges and services that already effectively connect information to people today and also comply with SEC regulation. It’s the responsibility of any community-focused organization to use the tools and channels that extend and supplement each other.

While press releases are among the top choice for meeting disclosure, they are not necessarily inexpensive and therefore encourage the exploration of new conduits. Companies report spending $15,000 - $50,000 or more per year on issuing press releases in order to satisfy Reg FD. Traditional and social solutions can also be considered as they are sometimes as or more effective than a traditional press release, especially in a recession where every penny counts. The sometimes-exorbitant costs of meeting disclosure have also fueled the study and technological evolution of corporate blogs, wikis, and social media releases. They represent exciting, modernized possibilities to adapt to and connect with constituencies and influencers in ways that some rely upon in order to make decisions and also process and produce content based on material company information.

This isn’t an ” either or” discussion. The Wall Street Journal reminded us recently that corporate blogs and tweets must keep the SEC in mind. I’d also include that companies must ultimately keep investors and their communities in mind while using the SEC guidelines as the map in which to connect with them according to meeting disclosure requirements.

Playing by the Rules: Amplifying Corporate Reach and Resonance

There’s a difference between mandates and guidelines and it’s your responsibility to understand the nuances in order to comply with Reg FD, while not missing the prospects associated with new and influential online communities.

When you read the SEC guidelines, you’ll quickly realize that they do not provide specific instructions and boundaries that dictate permissible and prohibited procedures and activities. In its current form, direction is gray at best. However, analyzing the guidelines based on the framework implied by the SEC, as it correlates to the culture and interworking of any organization, provides a blueprint for constructing a compliant and most likely, more effective, communications infrastructure.

Companies will need to consider whether and when postings on their Web sites, communities, or networks are “reasonably designed to provide broad, non-exclusionary distribution of the information to the public.”

While the SEC specifically mentions Web sites, forums, and blogs, it does not specifically name popular networks such as Facebook or Twitter – at least not yet. But that does not mean that they are excluded from the potential communications channels companies can use to reach stakeholders today.

The guiding principle is pervasive throughout the document and essentially advises that companies use the tools and services that reach constituents when, where, and how they rely upon receiving timely information, “In order to make information public, it must be disseminated in a manner calculated to reach the securities market place in general through recognized channels of distribution, and public investors must be afforded a reasonable waiting period to react to the information.”

Ebay is one of the widely referenced examples as it relates to disclosure and the Social Web. It also spotlights an instance when an individual employee is at the forefront of traditionally guarded and controlled information production and distribution process. In this case, Chief Blogger and Richard Brewer-Hay maintains a blog and Twitter account where his personal presence is as dominant as his affiliation with eBay.

In January, Ebay released fourth-quarter results and while listening to the earnings call, Richard Brewer-Hay posted live updates to Twitter. The legal team was alerted and after analyzing the medium, possible liabilities, and also associated potential, the team documented a series of 140-character disclosure statements. One tweet reads: "The presentation of this financial information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for GAAP financial measures."

As its “internal reporter,” the company empowers Brewer-Hay to transparently share company activity to shape the brand and inject personality and perspective through a strategic and proactive outbound communications program.

But he’s not alone in his efforts to humanize the corporate voice in and around financial reports, disclosure and earnings obligations through blogs, Twitter, and other social presences.

Johnson and Johnson recently reported, for the first time, minutes from the company’s annual meeting via Twitter.

EMC Corp also uses Twitter to extend the reach for company news, while also tracking the opinions of employees, investors and peers.

Dell publishes Dell Shares, an investor relations blog that complements the company’s blog network dedicated to providing transparency and insight related to corporate activity, technology, and products. In David Gelles’ Financial Times articles, Dell's Vice-President of Investor Relations Lynn A. Tyson acquiesced that she was initially reluctant to start Dell Shares, "One of the challenges on the blogosphere is disclosure. How do you comply with all the disclosure requirements in an environment that could potentially create more risk?"

In May, Intel Corp. will allow shareholders to ask questions via the Web and vote online during its annual meeting. But for now, the company isn’t yet integrating blogs and Twitter for use in investor relations until further research and analysis can provide a solid and meaningful connection between Intel and investors.

The Society of New Communications Research tracks over eighty-one Fortune 500 companies that publish blogs, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Chevron Corp. and General Motors Corp with 20 linking to corporate Twitter accounts (not all are yet utilized however). The SEC also maintains a Twitter presence via SEC Investor Ed and SEC News.

Corporate Twitter Accounts include (partial list):

- Best Buy
- Cisco Systems
- Toys 'R' Us
- Dell
- Johnson & Johnson
- Wells Fargo
- Microsoft
- Time Warner
- FedEx
- New York Life Insurance
- McDonald's
- Oracle
- Google
- Avnet
- Amazon.com
- CBS
- Texas Instruments
- EMC
- Monsanto
- Whole Foods Market
- Rubbermaid
- Symantec

Public Relations

Investor Relations and disclosure aside, every company needs a public presence and voice as it relates to Public Relations, customer relationships, community development, reputation and brand management, and product development.

Bryan Rhoads at Intel shared his experience and lessons so that others can overcome common challenges and hurdles within organizations seeking direction and ROI for social participation, “Start small, do the due diligence and have patience… and be fine with being a change-agent for the following year or two. At Intel, I had many serendipitous relationships and circumstances that allowed us to move forward with external social media. First, we had some pioneers in this space that served as natural allies and examples that we leveraged for a foundational framework. We also approached amiable members of our legal and management teams to build those relationships and to ensure that we had the proper strategy, risk assessments, process, etc. This air cover and due diligence allowed us to undertake a small pilot blog.”

Rhoads also observed, “We took the deliberate approach and philosophy that employees must have direct access to the audience without complicated workflows through PR/Legal. These needed to be “real” employees who had an information dense story to tell. A natural candidate for the pilot was our own IT Department, i.e. to have our own Intel IT managers talk about how they implement Intel technology and also show how we eat our own dog food through a “peer-to-peer” lens to other IT managers facing similar challenges, difficulties, questions, ROI, etc. Our IT@Intel blog pilot was a natural and authentic “in-the-trenches” story that resonated with more than just IT Managers. Its success then made it easier to expand employee blogging and social media in early 2007, where we had the process, the policies and the strategies in place to offer additional blog flavors such as Research, CSR, Technology and Geo blogs in Chinese, Russian, Spanish, etc. All in all, we have over 35 flavors of communities and blogs on intel.com.”

Corporate Voice vs. Individual Personality

Indeed, the SEC is recognizing company-sponsored blogs and networks, which can include CEO blogs and investor relations blogs, among other communities, as official presences in addition to company web sites, “Companies can use these for a variety of purposes, including allowing for the exchange of opinions and ideas between a company’s management or certain other employees and its various stakeholders.94 The open format of blogs makes them an attractive forum for ongoing communications between and among companies and their clients, customers, suppliers, shareholders and other stakeholders. Similar to blogs, electronic shareholder forums can serve as a means for investor to communicate with companies and each other and to provide investor feedback on various issues in a real-time basis, and we have adopted rules to encourage their use.”

These rules raise concerns as to the extent of transparency and humanization of the information shared, requiring a delicate balance between personality and objectivity. Remember, it’s not just what you do say and how, but also what you don’t say that can lead to speculation and movement based on interpretation and speculation.

For example, some eBay followers have noticed a change in tonality in Brewer-Hay’s tweets. But, if it doesn’t expose eBay to legal proceedings and still delivers information in a way people prefer, then so be it.

What’s important to realize is that maintaining a presence on the Social Web is not formulaic, whether it’s PR or IR. The answer lies in what matches existing company culture and also appeals to stakeholders in ways that they favor. The spirit of the Social Web seems to galvanize the presence of a person or persona, but perhaps interim corporate accounts could help ease the foray into uncharted waters for many organizations. This is all driven and steered by community feedback. By not participating or listening to communities across the web however, companies gain nothing in terms of value, advice, or feedback – no matter what stage of participation companies fall within. This is not the time to plug our ears and close our eyes in the hopes that this social fervor will subside.

Creating an Effective Communications Network

A critical theme within the SEC documentation is the stipulation that companies are more likely covered under the Fair Disclosure act if they publish information equally and accurately through a variety of traditional and digital passages. More importantly, companies should create a hub that documents all available mediums to receive information as it’s made public. For example, list all press release services you employ; provide a directory of relevant blogs with URLs and RSS Feeds; list Twitter, FriendFeed, FaceBook or other relevant social network profiles; share podcast links and presences on other audio networks such as iTunes; embed electronic documents and link back to host accounts such as DocStoc and Scribd; and also link to a traditional or social media newsroom if this isn’t already the directory where this information resides.

News and intelligence should not reside in any one place. Concurrently, new channels should not suddenly appear without proper attention and disclosure. The SEC advises the practice of writing and distributing Notice and Access press releases to alert stakeholders to upcoming material announcements and pointing them to the place of distribution. Notice and Access is the SEC’s attempt at helping companies reduce costs associated with traditional press releases, while still utilizing the tools they use today to receive information. Since these releases dramatically reduce the word count, they also minimize the typical expense per release.

The advantages associated with Notice and Access also extend well beyond the financial savings or meeting disclosure. Notice and Access provides a cost-efficient vehicle to condition investors and influencers towards any given format companies choose to prioritize, including corporate blogs and Web sites.

Wherever possible however, the operation of traditional and new media cross pollination enables companies to broadcast information to a distributed compilation of networks that deliver information instantly, serving the appetite for immediacy where people choose to consume news.

Investor Broadcasting vs. Investor Relations

Traditional Investor Relations serves analysts, investors, stakeholders and influencers through a combination of strategic outreach and the ongoing distribution of material information using compliant channels and processes. With the extension of the model to now include social networks and also the experimentation of publicizing personalities in the process, companies are potentially emphasizing the “relations” in IR. This opens up a particular area of focus as maintaining relations with analysts for example, is considered outside the realm of traditional disclosure. Engaging in conversations with investors in the public timeline (statusphere), on Web sites, and in the blogosphere, potentially place companies in jeopardy of backlash and legal action.

In a discussion with several corporate bloggers, social media strategists, and also IR professionals, how and when to engage in social media was a shared concern. While each were divided in their position on corporate brand versus personal brand when distributing information in social networks, they were united on two important fronts that set the tone for any organization exploring and documenting best practices for participation. The first contends with individuals, particularly those of influence, who share glaringly incorrect information that will most likely have a negative impact on trading and value. Every person I spoke with agreed that a public response in these cases is most likely necessary and that the tone of the response should introduce information poignantly and factually without added perspective or personality. In the instances when public discussions bash or question company decisions, news, or value, all were in agreement that these conversations are better left untouched.

As Gelles explained in our discussion, “Companies are using social media to good effect in several ways. Through new dialogues with their customers, some companies are improving their public relations. With opt-in marketing, other companies are generating additional sales.”

Gelles continued, “But when it comes to investor relations, it's not clear how much social media can contribute. The SEC has strict guidelines about disclosures. Regulation Fair Disclosure necessitates that material information distributed through social media be consistent in timing and language with conventional press releases. Moreover, companies so far seem uninterested in using social media to foster new conversations with investors about their stock's valuation. So while companies may be applauded for embracing new communication tools, there is little additional value that social media can bring to investor relations. Even if companies do use social media as an additional method to broadcast earnings or material information, at this point those efforts are more about public perception than investor relations.”

These are monumental times in which new regulation and interactive communication channels are established and shaped as marketing and legal teams reach accords based on their interpretation of Regulation FD, the migration and shift of investor consumption patterns, and the experiences associated with evolving corporate experimentation and participation.

New SEC guidelines are imminent and chances are, they’ll mirror much of what’s already discussed in this article. The lessons shared here indicate that an ambitious program to extend corporate communications combined with a conservative, truthful, and unbiased voice may best serve the function of corporate disclosure and investor relations in the near future. In the end, while companies embrace the social web, its prevailing spirit may actually work against the desire or ability to fully engage in the very conversations that power and define it – at least from any dialogue that involves financial performance or material, undisclosed information.

Helpful Posts on PR 2.0:
- Twitter: Acquisition vs. Retention
- Twitter Flutters into Mainstream Culture: The New Competition for Attention Starts with You
- Online Reputation and Brand Management Starts with Identity
- The Social OS, The Battle Between Facebook and Twitter is the New Mac vs. PC
- The Domino's Effect
- The Conversation Index
- A New Search Engine for Twitter
- Social Media Influences Buying Decisions
- Is Social Media Recession Proof?
- Twitter Traffic Surges to 10 Million
- The End of the Innocence
- The Social Effect and Disruption Theory
- Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is Now Available
- Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM
- The Human Network = The Social Economy
- In the Statusphere, ADD Creates Opportunities for Collaboration and Education
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- Social Networks Now More Popular than Email; Facebook Surpasses MySpace
- I Like You The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation
- The Ties that Bind Us - Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
- Make Tweet Love - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- The Battle for Your Social Status
- Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals

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Sarah Lacy on Putting the Public Back in Public Relations

2009-05-03T09:55:00.000-07:00

Sarah Lacy is an exceptional reporter with a unique flair for cutting through the fluff, extracting the real story, and communicating it with a scrupulous sense of relevance, impact, and vision.

She's an award winning journalist and author of the upcoming book, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0." Lacy has been a reporter in Silicon Valley for a decade, covering everything from the tiniest startups to the largest public companies. She writes for TechCrunch, contributes a biweekly column for BusinessWeek.com called "Valley Girl," and is co-host of Yahoo! Finance's Tech Ticker.

I'm also extremely lucky to call her a good friend.

Sarah took a moment to share her thoughts on my new book with Deirdre Breakenridge, "Putting the Public Back in Public Relations."

What is wrong with PR? Plenty. Every day for the last decade or more, I've received more than fifty unsolicited pitches. Less that 1% ever wind up being articles. That's wasted effort for the person who wrote the release, wasted time for the journalist weeding through it all, and wasted money for the client.

It's now a new gripe, but until ten years ago, it was the only system we had. Now, social media has turned everything on its head. It's changed the way readers consume information, the way reporters find and write about it, and it's about time it change the way PR professionals pitch.

Putting the Public Back in Public Relations gets it all - what's wrong with the old model and the power of the new one. Brian and Deirdre explain in clear detail how it's no longer about pitching, it's about engaging. They explain what that means and hot to do it right. If everyone reads this, my job as a reporter would be a whole lot easier"

Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is written for the those facing the new intersection of all that is rooted in Public Relations including PR, media and analyst relations, customer service, product development, social media, brand and community managers, executive management, HR, journalists, bloggers, marketing, advertising, students, teachers, content publishers, and everyone in between.

The book is now available at Amazon, the Amazon Kindle store, Barnes & Noble, Safari, and bookstores everywhere.

You can read more about the book here.
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Thoughts from other leading voices:

PR has changed forever and Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge are at the forefront of this change. If you think PR is fine and dandy, please buy this book because without it you will be out of business!" - Gary Vaynerchuk

"Putting the Public Back in Public Relations" is a passionate and persuasive case for rewriting the rules of public relations. Authors Solis and Breakenridge expertly combine third-party perspective with case studies and examples to paint a picture of a profession on the brink of reinvention." -- Paul Gillin

"Movers of the message, now hear this: the public on the other end of the transaction isn't waiting around for you to reach it with your pitch. Let Brian Solis explain these things to you, and you will be far, far better off." -- Jay Rosen

Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid) also created an original and brilliantly poignant drawing to commemorate the book's debut.

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Kindle Edition

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Twitter: Acquisition vs. Retention

2009-04-29T08:49:00.000-07:00

Credit

Seems that even the shiniest applications on the Web also face the same growing pains as any product, no matter where it resides on the adoption bell curve.

While many widely speculated the total number of new users who were introduced to Twitter as a result of the now infamous race to 1,000,000 followers, we do know that the number seems to hover between 500,000 and 1.2 million. When compared to the estimated existing user base of ~5 million heading into the race, the final number represents a significant spike in visibility, trials, and subsequent adoption. Irrespective of the exact number, believe that the culture of Twitter is forever influenced as it will with every big event.

Oprah Winfrey's followers have skyrocketed to 691,000 as a result of her televised tweet. She follows 11 people.

Ashton's follower count no longer needs media attention as it seems to be on auto-pilot now. He follows 137.

Robert Scoble made an interesting point recently, "She (Oprah) got at least 300,000 by being on the recommended follower list, not organically."

His point alludes to something we must consider. While the "Oprah Effect" is profound, is Twitter and its experiential value easily discernible by mainstream consumers?

While its traffic spikes appear significant, the true question is, what happens after new users create accounts and explore the service without direction or guidance?

Nielsen is reporting that Twitter's growth may indeed face hurdles based on current numbers that document follow vs. follow through.

According to the report, over 60 percent of new Twitter users fail to return the following month, creating a retention rate of only 40 percent. This isn't an isolated event. Over the last year, Twitter has struggled with user retention, averaging roughly 30 percent carry over from month to month.

Neilsen also explored other popular social networks on their rise to mass adoption.

Facebook and MySpace retention rates were twice as high during their phases of dramatic growth and only continued to escalate to the nearly 70 percent both enjoy today. Keep in mind that Facebook has surpassed 200 million active users.

Whether or not you agree with the results, there are associated realities with its current state, age, appeal, and barriers to adoption.

It's in the way that you use it.

Your experience is defined by those whom you follow.

Indeed, the potential market for "egocasting" is finite. The audience for self-promotion is limited in its patience. An ongoing popularity contest wears even the most persistent. And surely, Twitter is much more than a customer service channel for people to vent about product and service issues only to have companies save the day. The culture needs a supportive ecosystem of people and applications that define and propagate productive interaction. Perhaps Twitter's simplicity was its greatest catalyst and now potentially its most formidable barrier to reach the critical next stage of evolution. Twitter, along with the community, must demonstrate the value of micro updates and dialogue in order to provide long term value and and ensure resilience for all parties. Adding clever, centralized insight, instruction, and information in addition to recommended people to follow will serve as a companion to those new users who will not take the time to read the instructions and use cases that are globally dispersed across the Web.

Helpful Posts on PR 2.0:

- Twitter Flutters into Mainstream Culture: The New Competition for Attention Starts with You
- Online Reputation and Brand Management Starts with Identity
- The Social OS, The Battle Between Facebook and Twitter is the New Mac vs. PC
- The Domino's Effect
- The Conversation Index
- A New Search Engine for Twitter
- Social Media Influences Buying Decisions
- Is Social Media Recession Proof?
- Twitter Traffic Surges to 10 Million
- The End of the Innocence
- The Social Effect and Disruption Theory
- Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is Now Available
- Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM
- The Human Network = The Social Economy
- In the Statusphere, ADD Creates Opportunities for Collaboration and Education
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- Social Networks Now More Popular than Email; Facebook Surpasses MySpace
- I Like You The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation
- The Ties that Bind Us - Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
- Make Tweet Love - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- The Battle for Your Social Status
- Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals
- Is Twitter a Viable Conversation Platform

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140 Characters Conference; Exploring the Disruptive Nature of Twitter

2009-04-28T06:31:00.000-07:00

Twitter represents a technology platform, sustaining ecosystem, and evangelical community that facilitate not only a behavioral transformation in how we communicate and define online relationships, but also represents a fundamental shift in how we listen, share, participate, and learn. For many, Twitter is the catalyst that is inspiring individuals and organizations to discover and observe the real-time conversations and activity that affect perception and influence action. While Social Media has existed well before Twitter, its innovative, instantly gratifying, and seductive spirit is forcing the evolution of networks and applications across the Conversation Prism and the Social Web.

The lessons and experiences that transpire on Twitter humanizes our voice, transforms how we discover and share information, and connects us to an extensive and empowering contextual network that serves as the foundation for education and inspiration.

At the very least, we’re learning that cultivating and sustaining relationships on Twitter is defined less by our ability to merely participate in conversations through unstrung updates and public @’s and instead, prized by the personality, wisdom, and value we invest into each tweet as well as spotlighting notable insights of those we follow.

Our education spans a lifetime as long as we believe we have something to learn.

On June 16 & 17, I’m joining Jeff Pulver to organize and host the 140 Characters Conference (#140Conf) in New York. The conference will explore the effects of Twitter on communications, relationships, celebrity, media, advertising, politics, and social good.

The #140Conf will indeed feature a cast of 140 characters who will individually share their unique experiences, theories, discoveries, and creations in a motivating and rousing forum. We will leave informed, encouraged, and united as we focus on a greater mission of helping and guiding our respective communities to a higher state of social literacy through enriching and meaningful engagement.

This is an exciting time in which we live and we’re truly looking forward to seeing your avatar in real life IRL at the #140Conf.

Register here.

Exhibitors

Please fill out this online form if you are interested in showcasing your product or service at the conference.

Sponsors

There is a limited array of sponsorship opportunities to prominently showcase your brand at the event. Please contact me via email.

Media

We are offering press access to working members of the media. Please visit the press page for further details.

Helpful Posts on PR 2.0:

- Twitter Flutters into Mainstream Culture: The New Competition for Attention Starts with You
- Online Reputation and Brand Management Starts with Identity
- The Social OS, The Battle Between Facebook and Twitter is the New Mac vs. PC
- The Domino's Effect
- The Conversation Index
- A New Search Engine for Twitter
- Social Media Influences Buying Decisions
- Is Social Media Recession Proof?
- Facebook Now 200 Million Strong
- Twitter Traffic Surges to 10 Million
- The End of the Innocence
- The Social Effect and Disruption Theory
- Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is Now Available
- Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM
- The Human Network = The Social Economy
- In the Statusphere, ADD Creates Opportunities for Collaboration and Education
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- Social Networks Now More Popular than Email; Facebook Surpasses MySpace
- I Like You The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation
- The Ties that Bind Us - Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
- Make Tweet Love - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- The Battle for Your Social Status
- Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals
- Is Twitter a Viable Conversation Platform

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The NewComm Forum Spotlights the Unification of Traditional and New Media Communications

2009-04-25T18:27:00.000-07:00

On Monday, I'm joining some of the industry's most visionary and prolific leaders in the hybrid new world of traditional and new media and marketing.

Please visit the NewComm Forum Website for details on the activities, discussions, and people participating over the course of the two day event. If you'd like to attend, enter the code SNCRFRIEND to receive a discount of $100.

Here's my agenda...

Monday, April 27th from 11:15 - 12:30 p.m.

Social Media & Investor Relations – Disclosure & Other Issues

Social media is reshaping disclosure and the practice of investor relations. As the social web begets a human voice and genuine transparency, it also raises the risks of meeting and maintaining legal compliance. The SEC has recently modified its stance on blogs, but as new social tools continue to innovate and gain traction, can companies as well as the SEC, keep pace with a rapidly evolving landscape of social networks in order to meet investor demand as well as the emerging opportunities for engagement and communication?

I've organized an expert panel that includes those active in covering and defining the world of disclosure in the era of the social web:

Richard Brewer-Hay, Ebay
Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher
David Gelles, Financial Times
Bryan Rhoads, Intel

Monday, April 27th from 2:00 - 3:15 p.m.

The New Organization Landscape for Marketing Communications

Who owns social media? Honestly, it’s the wrong question to ask. The truth is that we all are responsible for socializing our role within the organization to cultivate a voice and personality for the brand we represent. In order to compete for prominence in the future, we must first compete for attention where and when it’s captivated. As we transform our individual divisions to collectively humanize our company as well as establish the policies, programs, and new responsibilities for listening and engaging in “twitter time,” we’re actively contributing to a new organizational landscape that redraws the boundaries between sales, service, and marketing communications. We’ll discuss responsibilities, models, reporting, analytics, and opportunities to explore alternative topographies for collaboration and innovation.

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Twitter Flutters into Mainstream Culture: The New Competition for Attention Starts with You

2009-04-23T11:59:00.000-07:00

Source

Following the solo media vs. traditional media race that led Twitter into both relevance and irrelevance, the result is that the carefully guarded community and its unique culture are now permanently altered – for better or for worse.

According to estimates sourced by Engadget Editor-in-Chief Ryan Block, Twitter grew by 1.2 million users simply as a result of the “Oprah-effect.”

TechCrunch's MG Siegler also explored the process for estimating Twitter’s path into the mainstream.

What does 1.2 million new users mean for Twitter?

So, how many new users really joined Twitter as a result of the celebrity-fueled popularity contest?

I’m not sure the answer truly matters. If we explore it from a sociological perspective, I believe that the culture of Twitter has been introduced to a significant event that may indeed shift interaction and behavior overall.

Going into the race, estimates pegged the active userbase anywhere between 5 - 8 million. Now post race and the Oprah-effect, over 1 million people were introduced to the service guided by a “follow me” mentality. This “overnight” expansion represents a potential 10-12% saturation ratio. These new users will participate and build communities around them based on their interpretation of the network as framed by those whom they follow. Remember, we are measured by our last 20 tweets or updates within each social network. Take a look for yourself, www.twitter.com/insertusername

It is what it is. The real question is, what do you want to get out of these connections?

In the end, we are still responsible for creating our own experience within the community and that is one of the true advantages and rewards of Twitter. We foster and cultivate individual ecosystems that bind us contextually.

Competing for Attention

Perhaps what is most interesting and prevalent is the behavior transformation in content consumption that is taking place in “Twitter time” and it's establishing a new world authority. For many of us, we’re migrating away from destinations and potentially RSS readers as well as our primary source of news, relevant information, pleasant distractions, and trending topics. We’re quickly focusing on Twitter, Facebook News Feeds, FriendFeed and the statusphere as our highly curated and personalized attention dashboards.

As content publishers, producers, and creators, we need to acknowledge, understand, and embrace this critical disruption.

Let’s take a look at Twitter as an example. Before the April’s madness of follower contests, Comscore reported that Twitter had experienced a new record of 9.3 million visitors in March, which represented a 131% jump.

As you can see, the growth curve is practically vertical. And, we’re sure to see yet another surge in growth when April numbers are released.

However, Comscore is also observing what I believe to represent the hope and potential future for traditional media.

When they examined the percentage of visitors to Twitter who also visited the top online news brands and compared it to that of the total U.S. Internet audience, they discovered a strong level of overlap. The result is that the average Twitter user was often 2 and 3 times as likely to visit the top online news brands as the average person. For example, while 17 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience visited CNN.com in March, more than double that percentage (38 percent) of Twitter users did so.

Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and active online social interaction breathe new, and measurable, life into great content where it’s hosted, simply by connecting it to the potentially attentive people where and how they are currently engaged.

This is the Statusphere, a new ecosystem for sharing, discovering, and publishing updates and micro-sized content that reverberates throughout social networks and syndicated profiles, resulting in a formidable network effect of viral activity. It is the digital curation of relevant content that binds us contextually and through the statusphere we can connect directly to existing contacts, reach new people, and also forge new friendships through the friends of friends effect (FoFs) in the process.

In order to compete for prominence in the future, we must first compete for attention where and when it’s captivated. While we contribute to the evolution of new media and the supporting cultures within each network, we are responsible for what we contribute and what we gain from the interaction. We earn the relationships we deserve.

Update: comScore released global numbers that show a worldwide surge of 19.1 million visitors in March 2009.

Helpful Posts on PR 2.0:
- Online Reputation and Brand Management Starts with Identity
- The Social OS, The Battle Between Facebook and Twitter is the New Mac vs. PC
- The Domino's Effect
- The Conversation Index
- A New Search Engine for Twitter
- Social Media Influences Buying Decisions
- Is Social Media Recession Proof?
- Facebook Now 200 Million Strong
- Twitter Traffic Surges to 10 Million
- The End of the Innocence
- The Social Effect and Disruption Theory
- Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is Now Available
- Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM
- The Human Network = The Social Economy
- In the Statusphere, ADD Creates Opportunities for Collaboration and Education
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- Social Networks Now More Popular than Email; Facebook Surpasses MySpace
- I Like You The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation
- The Ties that Bind Us - Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
- Make Tweet Love - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- The Battle for Your Social Status
- Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals
- Is Twitter a Viable Conversation Platform

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Online Reputation and Brand Management Starts with Identity

2009-04-21T07:57:00.000-07:00

As I've written over the years, in the era of the Social Web, we are all brand managers. While I spend a significant portion of my time sharing the importance of listening and observing to noteworthy conversations and the enveloping cultures that define relevant online communities. When it comes to participation and engagement however, identity is often an afterthought by most companies.

Knowem is a new service that help businesses take a proactive step to securing their brand and product identities across the Conversation Prism a.k.a. the social Web to expedite their foray into Social Media or to retain the domains as assets for future Social Media programs. Think GoDaddy for Social Networks IDs.

Knowem serves two functions. First, it provides you with the ability to quickly search over 120 popular social networks for the availability of any username. The results and status are immediately displayed next to each network. Second, Knowem helps brand managers secure the available identities through a time-saving service that acquires all available domains for a one time fee of $64.95. For an additional $9.95 per month, they will also continue to monitor new websites and register your username on them as soon as they launch.

I a big believer in creating and participating in the communities where discussions are relevant to your brand and marketplace. Conversations occuring today in one ore more networks will eventually augment or shift altogether as new networks are introduced or existing sites gain favor. Having a service that automatically acquires important usernames as they emerge seems trivial at $9.95 when compared to the investment required to promote a new identity because it wasn't available.

According to the founders, some of the biggest brands in the world have yet to obtain their identities in multiple networks. For example, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Pepsi (NYSE:PEP), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Exxon (NYSE:XOM) and Citigroup (NYSE:C) still show that dozens, and in some cases over 80%, of popular social media websites still list their brand names as available.

Knowem also ran searches for popular celebrities and learned that many have not yet secured their online identity either. Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey's recent exposure in the media for their use of Twitter has spotlighted and sparked celebrity enthusiasm for using social media as a channel for publicity, communication, and TMI. But as of today, their Twitter screen names, @aplusk and @oprah, are still both available on almost 90% of other sites that may prove important in future social media programs.

Brand and reputation management is now a systematic process in our daily routine of listening, learning, and participating. We ARE responsible for our personal brand as well as the corporate brand we represent. Securing that online brand and investing in and cultivating an impeccable and influential reputation is critical to establishing and maintaining a consistent, strategic, and complementary presence from network to network. It's not just about what's popular today, but ultimately engaging where your communities are congregating. Maintaining a portfolio of consistent usernames provides a seamless ability to effectively navigate the Social Web as one cohesive brand, where and when opportunities emerge.

Helpful Posts on PR 2.0:

- The Social OS, The Battle Between Facebook and Twitter is the New Mac vs. PC
- The Domino's Effect
- The Conversation Index
- A New Search Engine for Twitter
- Social Media Influences Buying Decisions
- Can The Statusphere Save Journalism?
- Is Social Media Recession Proof?
- Facebook Now 200 Million Strong
- Twitter Traffic Surges to 10 Million
- The End of the Innocence
- The Social Effect
- Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is Now Available
- Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM
- The Human Network = The Social Economy
- In the Statusphere, ADD Creates Opportunities for Collaboration and Education
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- Social Networks Now More Popular than Email; Facebook Surpasses MySpace
- Are Blogs Losing Authority to the Statusphere?
- I Like You The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation
- The Ties that Bind Us - Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
- Make Tweet Love - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- The Battle for Your Social Status
- Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals
- Is Twitter a Viable Conversation Platform

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The Social OS, The Battle Between Facebook and Twitter is the New Mac vs. PC

2009-04-20T07:25:00.000-07:00

As Twitter and Facebook compete for your attention and social status, there's another story that serves as the undercurrent for something much more important, a fully pervasive and functional social operating system (OS) that serves as a open platform to connect you, your content, updates, and activity to your friends, peers, and followers across your social graph, regardless of network, browser, or device.

Facebook and Twitter have effectively created immersible destinations and ecosystems that facilitate the development and deployment of applications that not only replicate capabilities currently available in traditional software and cloud computing, but also create a new dynamic for social collaboration, interactivity and engagement hosted in each respective network, desktops, and across the social web. Each network boasts a library of thousands of applications that only continues to burgeon.

Unlike the file interoperability between applications that run on Mac and Windows, Twitter and Facebook platforms are proprietary, although Facebook provides a bridge to automatically port tweets into your Facebook personal News Feed for example.

Twitter and the statusphere have become our attention dashboards that serve as our source of news and information as well as hub for communication - more so than email. We're just now beginning to recognize and acknowledge this shift in content consumption and production behavior. The new ecosystem for sharing, discovering, and publishing updates and micro-sized content reverberates throughout social networks and syndicated profiles, resulting in a formidable network effect of activity and interaction. It is the digital curation of relevant content that binds us contextually and through the statusphere we can connect directly to existing contacts, reach new people, and also forge new friendships through the friends of friends effect (FoFs) in the process.

Source

Last year, Facebook rolled out its Connect program to extend the platform and also aggregate your disparate social activity by enabling you to login to participating sites and services using your Facebook credentials.

Facebook Connect is a technical bridge that links your Facebook profile with other online networks to feed your associated activity back to your personal Facebook News Feed. For example, if you’re commenting on a blog hosted on the Moveable Type platform, you can now login with your Facebook details and not only will your comment and link to your Facebook profile appear on the blog, the activity of commenting is also linked back into your activity feed for your friends and colleagues to see. Digg allows Diggers to log on using their centralized Facebook ID and for each story they digg, the activity is documented back on their profile. The idea is to collect and present distributed activity in one focused stream to create a centralized hub for presentation and interactivity between you and those within your social graph. Examples and Facebook Connect partners already number in the hundreds if not thousands.

Twitter, at one point, was and maybe still is a Facebook Connect partner. However, the social platform is also going to connect your identity and distributed activity through its new "Sign in with Twitter" program.

Many networks currently facilitate connectivity between activities. You can send updates from participating communities directly back to Twitter, similar to the Facebook program. While many services related to Twitter require your username and password, your credentials were still guarded at the services level as well as in Twitter's network. Now, your identity is verified at Twitter's gates and will no longer need to reside in multiple locations.

Instead of creating and maintaining multiple identities, eventually you'll only have to manage two - Facebook and Twitter - until, perhaps someday, you only need one.

So, back to the Mac vs. Windows discussion. With its new login system, Twitter is attempting to extend its social OS by also aggregating identity and officially channeling outside activity back into the Twitter timeline, which could ultimately feed into Facebook.

After the failed attempt at acquiring the popular micro community and with mass public attention now on Twitter, Facebook now has an official and formidable competitor in the social OS category. It's userbase is 200 million strong compared to maybe 8 million. But current numbers aren't reflective of the outcome. This is a long and winding road that will traverse numerous grades and hurdles.

Many are focusing on the technical aspects and openness of Twitter's authentication system. I believe that the bigger story resides with the platform and the ability to lure developers, foster innovation, and seamlessly connect users and activity to friends, peers and followers to stimulate new registrations, adoption, consumption and interaction. Facebook and Twitter, and other emerging and existing networks on the periphery in the evolving social landscape, will eventually play host to much more that the proverbial "conversation." They will enable not only a new genre of communication, but also centralized professional and personal collaboration and management.

Helpful Posts on PR 2.0:
- The Race to 1,000,000 Followers Sends Twitter and Social Media into Relevance and Irrelevance
- The Domino's Effect
- The Conversation Index
- A New Search Engine for Twitter
- Social Media Influences Buying Decisions
- Can The Statusphere Save Journalism?
- Is Social Media Recession Proof?
- Facebook Now 200 Million Strong
- Twitter Traffic Surges to 10 Million
- The End of the Innocence
- The Social Effect
- Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is Now Available
- Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM
- The Human Network = The Social Economy
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- Are Blogs Losing Authority to the Statusphere?
- I Like You The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation
- Make Tweet Love - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- Is Twitter a Viable Conversation Platform

Connect with me on:
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Gary Vaynerchuk on Putting the Public Back in Public Relations

2009-04-19T21:22:00.000-07:00

If there's one person who has rocked the Web to create their own destiny, Gary Vaynerchuk would rank among the top of the list. Best known as the host of WineLibraryTV, he is also a world renown motivational speaker as well as the director of operations at Wine Library. He helped the family business grow from $4 million to over $50 million in revenue per year.

Gary is the epitome of the old adage, “If I can do it, anyone can do it." He dedicates most of his time helping every day individuals find their inner Gary Vee.

Vaynerchuck’s fervor, dedication, and perseverance has given way to success that has yet to reveal it’s full potential. WineLibraryTV boasts 80,000 viewers daily, he recently signed a seven-figure 10-book deal, he speaks to audiences all over the world, and he frequently makes appearances on national TV to discuss wine and his vision for humanizing the wine industry.

Gary shared his thoughts on my new book with Deirdre Breakenridge, "Putting the Public Back in Public Relations."

PR has changed forever and Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge are at the forefront of this change. If you think PR is fine and dandy, please buy this book because without it you will be out of business!"

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is written for the those facing the new intersection of all that is rooted in Public Relations including PR, media and analyst relations, customer service, product development, social media, brand and community managers, executive management, HR, journalists, bloggers, marketing, advertising, students, teachers, content publishers, and everyone in between.

The book is now in stock at Amazon, the Amazon Kindle store, Barnes & Noble, Safari, and bookstores everywhere.

You can read more about the book here.
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Thoughts from other leading voices:

"Putting the Public Back in Public Relations" is a passionate and persuasive case for rewriting the rules of public relations. Authors Solis and Breakenridge expertly combine third-party perspective with case studies and examples to paint a picture of a profession on the brink of reinvention." -- Paul Gillin

"Movers of the message, now hear this: the public on the other end of the transaction isn't waiting around for you to reach it with your pitch. Let Brian Solis explain these things to you, and you will be far, far better off." -- Jay Rosen

Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid) also created an original and brilliantly poignant drawing to commemorate the book's debut.

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Kindle Edition

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The Race to 1,000,000 Followers Sends Twitter and Social Media into Relevance and Irrelevance

2009-04-16T17:55:00.000-07:00

Source

Updated...

It started as a simple and seemingly harmless contest. Who would be the first person on Twitter to reach 1,000,000 followers?

This wasn’t yet another follower push open to just anyone on Twitter however, not even the Weblebrities who helped propel the popular micro community to an emerging, iconic pop culture status; it was (and at the moment, still is) a race between the world’s most visible celebrities and prominent media brands.

Ashton Kutcher, a television and movie star who’s also keenly astute and observant to the promise of new media, challenged CNN and its founder, Ted Turner to the race.

It was the match heard round the blogosphere, twitterverse and statusphere.

Shortly thereafter, Britney Spears, Will Smith and a bevy of opportunistic celebrities (and their publicists) and media properties (driven by their PR teams) followed suit. Britney’s team offered chances to win free tickets in exchange for followers. Other celebrities (who shall remain anonymous, DM’d followers to ask for help in spreading the word.)

The competition quickly became a media phenomenon.

Ashton and Twitter Co-Founder Evan Williams appeared on the Oprah show, which celebrated a new genre of media and online celebrity with almost every leading competitor surpassing 1,000,000 followers on the same day. The publicity was enough to inspire Oprah to start tweeting.

Sarah Ross, Ashton Kutcher, TechCrunch50

Initially I questioned the exchange. I couldn’t help but feel as though “we the people” on Twitter were merely viewed as pawns in a personal chess match between the elite.

Think about it. If Twitter had 6-7 million users, we’re talking about 1 in every 6 or so users following one of the contenders.

I threw the question out to Twitter, “How do you feel about the race to 1,000,000?”

The response was almost overwhelming in its volume and vigor, spanning across Twitter and Facebook over the course of several hours.

While the publicity for Twitter and the overall medium that is Social Media is incredible and sprawling, I believe that the purpose and deeper meaning of having 1,000,000 followers on Twitter or any social network, will be lost to the fervor that fuels this “contest” – unless we’re comfortable holding the title of “follower” a.k.a. social pauper. I highly doubt that any brand will view this special achievement of having cultivated 1 million followers as an opportunity to “engage” in “conversations” with their communities. Intention is easily assessable by simply viewing the latest tweets via www.twitter.com/username.

But in Ashton’s case, it’s so much deeper. I believe his intentions are genuine.

Ashton echoes the sentiment of why many of us have invested in Social Media literacy over the years, "Twitter is removing filters between celebrities and fans, big media companies and their customers."

Now that he's won, he’s promised to donate 10,000 mosquito nets to help fight malaria and hopefully there's much more social good to follow. Using social media to build a platform for self-promotion or a top-down distribution channel for propaganda and messages is, in the spirit of the social web, anti-social. To demonstrate that any individual can earn influence for which to wield freely and graciously in the name of social good is symbolic of the true spirit of Social Media.

In his own words, Kutcher so passionately defines what has inspired many of us over the last several years in our work to help cultivate the foundation for social media and the very people powering its evolution, “So why is this significant? This is a huge statement for Social Media. For one person to actually have the ability to broadcast to as many people as a major media network, sort of signifies the turning of the tide from tradition news outlets to social news outlets. With our video cameras on cell phones, picture cams, blogging, twittering, posting, and Facebooking, we actually become the source of the news, the broadcasters of the news, and the consumers of the news…we have the potential on this day to turn the tide…where social media and social news outlets can become as powerful as the major news outlets. We’re doing that with the help of you. It’s sort of power to the people and I like that, a lot.”

We participate on social networks to express ourselves and share a piece of who we are in the real world, online, to forge relationships with people we respect, trust, and admire and it inspires us to share, learn, and grow together. With every tweet and update, we reveal a bit of what we stand for and what moves us, forming a unique social graph that contextually connects us to others in an irreproducible network. It’s unique to each one of us, and it’s both empowering and powerful.

We become media.

We become influencers.

We are the source of the social seismographs that spark reverberating tremors that represent the potential to create a webwide social effect.

We’re shifting into a rapid-fire culture that moves at Twitter time. Attention is a precious commodity and requires a personalized engagement strategy in order to consistently vie for it. The laws of attraction and relationships management are driven by the ability to create compelling content and transparently connect it to the people whom you believe benefit.

Twitter and the statusphere have become our attention dashboards, the new ecosystem for sharing, discovering, and publishing updates and micro-sized content that reverberates throughout social networks and syndicated profiles, resulting in a formidable network effect of activity. It is the digital curation of relevant content that binds us contextually and through the statusphere we can connect directly to existing contacts, reach new people, and also forge new friendships through the friends of friends effect (FoFs) in the process.

Is having one million followers sustainable? Better yet, is it engaging or welcoming? Can you genuinely listen to and converse with a community that rivals the population of small countries?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter...not anymore. If you are a curator of highly relevant information, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, and motivating substance, then you can potentially flourish into a fountain of inspiration that channels content to the beacons and ambassadors who also represent interconnected human networks. It’s how we communicate now.

Dr. Dunbar, theorized that the size of the human brain allows a stable network of about 148 contacts, which has become known as “the Dunbar number.” In Social Networks however, real world relationships have evolved into something altogether different and perhaps more authoritative. Now, individuals can follow and are followed by thousands or (eventually) millions of "friends" across the Conversation Prism. This is a new breed of personal branding and expert and themed curation tethered to a peer network that exemplifies fandom and creates a platform for peer-to-peer influence. And, we may or may not ever know the people who choose to follow our updates or friend us on these popular and emerging networks. Our human network is defined by reach, not just in one community, but through the syndication of multiple social networks.

For Ashton, reaching one million followers represents the potential of socialized media, the future of information discovery and distribution, and the connectedness of contextual human networks. For the others, collecting followers represents the ability to push information to a faceless list of avatars using a new medium. As followers, we’re simply relegated to subscribers and fans, nothing less, nothing more. This is an exchange, however, a lesson that may elude those who focus on numbers, and not people. As "followers," many of us continue to invest in online relationships because we realize rewards and mutual benefits for doing so. If we're merely a number, and if we don't, in the very least, receive a simple but meaningful gesture of a follow-back, then we rely on the shared content to keep us satisfied. Choose your tweets and updates carefully.

The future of Social Media lies with those who can create, cultivate, and empower individuals to produce and share meaningful content and inspire action, foster education, instigate change and build a more media literate society.

UPDATE 1: Ashton links to this post on Twitter.

UPDATE 2: Ashton hits 1 million followers (TechCrunch)

UPDATE 3: Spencer Pratt challenges Ashton to a Twitter race and contributes to a potential shift in Twitter culture.

Attention celebrities, it's not about followers, it's about community. Viewing Twitter as a popularity contest demeans the culture that helped propel it. Many of us learned over three years how to embrace the art of communicating, sharing and empowering others while finding our own cadence on twitter. Now that adoption is flying across the bell curve, we will witness celebrities publicly use and promote it in ways that also condition new users to follow suit. The questions is, will they learn or will their mass and momentum shift the culture of Twitter altogether.

Helpful Posts on PR 2.0:
- The Domino's Effect
- The Conversation Index
- A New Search Engine for Twitter
- Social Media Influences Buying Decisions
- Can The Statusphere Save Journalism?
- Is Social Media Recession Proof?
- Facebook Now 200 Million Strong
- Twitter Traffic Surges to 10 Million
- The End of the Innocence
- The Social Effect
- Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is Now Available
- Twitter and Social Networks Usher in a New Era of Social CRM
- The Human Network = The Social Economy
- In the Statusphere, ADD Creates Opportunities for Collaboration and Education
- Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
- Social Networks Now More Popular than Email; Facebook Surpasses MySpace
- Are Blogs Losing Authority to the Statusphere?
- I Like You The Emerging Culture of Micro Acts of Appreciation
- The Ties that Bind Us - Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
- Make Tweet Love - Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
- The Battle for Your Social Status
- Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals
- Is Twitter a Viable Conversation Platform

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Social Median, or Facebook
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The Domino's Effect

2009-04-14T16:39:00.000-07:00

Domino's brand cultivated over 49 years...damaged in 30 minutes or less.

The latest viral video on the Web today isn't related to an upcoming summer blockbuster, nor the next Chocolate Rain sensation or even the next Obama Girl. Today's social video frenzy is a real time case study of what happens when the employees of a franchise use online video to inadvertently cause a global domino effect that financially and emotionally impacts other franchises, employees, customers as well as bruising the corporate brand overall.

Two employees from an individually owned Domino's store shot and shared a few devastating videos that will appall anyone and everyone who can actually stomach them. Warning: If you like fast food or every question what happens behind the scenes, don't watch these videos.

While those individuals claim that the antics were intended to be a prank and that no food was ever sent to customers, the mere prospect of something like this being potentially plausible was enough to inject doubt into the minds of paying consumers. The content was removed by YouTube, but spending a few minutes on Google or Yahoo Search will unearth a bevy of remixes and collages.

GoodAsYou ran the original videos and in turn, also corresponded with Domino's corporate offices.

Tim McIntyre, Vice President, Communications led the effort to kill the videos wherever possible while investigating the clues that would identify the local store and the offending employees.

Email 1:

Thank you for bringing these to our attention. I don’t have the words to say how repulsed I am by this – other than to say that these two individuals do not represent that 125,000 people in 60 countries who work hard every day to make good food and provide great customer service. I’ve turned this over to our security department. We will find them. There are far too many clues that will allow us to determine their location quite easily.

Regards,

Tim McIntyre
Vice President, Communications
Domino's Pizza, LLC

Email 2:

We just got off the phone with the franchise owner, who was absolutely dumbfounded by this. He has told us that he will be terminating their employment effective immediately. We suggested that he call them and get a written statement from them, asking them to “explain” (to the extent anyone can, really) their actions. We are also seeking legal counsel to see what kind of action we can take against them for damage to the brand.

You are welcome to use anything I’ve sent to you in the past 24 hours. I do want to thank you for bringing this to our attention…I just wish it hadn’t been posted so prominently on your web site…while it was certainly fair game, it does hurt the company and the thousands of people we employ in this country whether it’s intended or not.

Regards,

Tim

Tim McIntyre
Vice President, Communications
Domino's Pizza, LLC

Domino's will surely suffer significant financial losses as a result of these "fake" videos and the tidal wave of public disgust that will surely crash over social networks. Sales will thin similar to the cascading effect that we witnessed during the unfortunate Wendy's chili fiasco.

Domino's is on the right track. By removing the first wave of videos, the company bought itself time to regroup, research, and plan its next moves. As we all know however, the Social Web is a ripe and fertile playground for those seeking and sharing timely and material content, so the video and outlying conversations will escalate before they dissipate. Listening, responding, and reassuring the public that this is an isolated event, using a combination of traditional and social mediums are instrumental in steering perception, slowing the bleeding, assessing damage, and ultimately creating and implementing a sweeping campaign to instill trust in the Domino's brand once again. This must be done at the local and national levels as each franchise is supported by its own locale and geographic community.

Amplifying the voices and the faces of trustworthy employees, customers, and managers can help us convey a believable and sympathetic persona that offers something or someone to connect to for those open to the other side of the story.

Ultimately, this will run it's course. Steering it and limiting the monetary and brand damages is paramount now and in the days and weeks to come. In the end, Domino's has a price to pay for these actions as its employees, whether or not they're trained, managed, or guided, are the ambassadors for the company brand with or without customers present.

Please also read: "Reinventing Crisis Communication for the Social Web."

UPDATE:

The official Domino's response:

Update to our Valued Customers

In the last 24 hours, videos of two of Domino’s Pizza employees appearing inappropriately within one of our franchise restaurants have been circulating online.

Since the videos first surfaced yesterday, the two workers have been identified, fired and the affected franchisee has filed a criminal complaint against them, and there are warrants for their arrest.

The opportunities and freedom of the internet is wonderful. But it also comes with the risk of anyone with a camera and an internet link to cause a lot of damage, as in this case, where a couple of individuals suddenly overshadow the hard work performed by the 125,000 men and women working for Domino’s across the nation and in 60 countries around the world.

We apologize for the actions of these individuals, and thank you for your continued support of Domino’s Pizza.

UPDATE 2:
Domino's is now on Twitter (@dpzinfo) responding to questions regarding The Domino's Effect

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The Conversation Index

2009-04-14T04:31:00.000-07:00

I admire the work of Valeria Maltoni. Over the years, we've shared our individual ideas and vision for discovering, monitoring, and measuring relevant conversations in order to effectively chart the corporate landscape and identify opportunities for mutually beneficial engagement and learning. We've decided to collaborate to weave our experiences and advice into one post that we hope helps you unravel the confusion stemming from value over hype when evaluating Social Media as a channel for presenting, interacting, and observing.

As public relations, communications, and new media marketing professionals, it's our job to identify the communities where our customers, peers, and also influencers communicate with each other in a way that's transparent and frictionless. It's how we build relationships and how we establish our personal and corporate social capital while simultaneously increasing intellectual equity.

Social Networks are magnets for marketers, but the people who define each online community are growing reticent to their hollow attempts at connecting as a means to create or extend a channel for broadcasting messages in a one-to-many hyperbole assault.

True social marketing is not marketing at all. The new era of communications necessitates personalization through a genuine and humanized approach. It fuses marketing, service, sociology, psychology, creativity, sales, and a dedicated practice of transparent Social Customer Relationship Management (sCRM).

Here's why this is hard for companies - internally, the organization of work is still centered around a product or a service, things are seen from the inside out. Sometimes the delivery mechanism of that product is mistaken for the product itself.

For example, newspapers identified their product very closely with paper - thus requiring printing production plants, distribution models, and sponsors (advertising). The infrastructure created around the news to make it a business held it inside a specific model. The job of getting the news today is performed in hundreds of different ways - all vying for our attention. How could news organizations become more agile and relevant in this new context?

Technology Versus Social Sciences

Social media is not governed by the media or technology that facilitate online interaction, contribution, or participation. It is defined by the people, the communities they join, and the parallel cultures and behavior that manifest. Technology and the networks that spawn through constant innovation will continually surface, merge, excel, or vanish. Human nature and the desire to connect, interact, and elevate is perpetual.

The Conversation Prism - (get the poster here)

Using the Conversation Prism , we can visualize and map the shifting landscape of social networks and micro communities to observe and conduct our initial fieldwork through digital anthropology. The process reveals everything, from measurement opportunities to participation strategies to the specific infrastructure changes necessitated by the new proactive and reactive process of engagement in the social Web.

How can organizations learn to participate? Employees are a company's first community. Right now companies tend to manage the flow of information through their internal social networks in the same ways they manage the technology installed on each associate's laptop. Companies can and will get ahead when they learn to educate, engage with, and empower the natural grass roots communities that form around projects. The Conversation Prism can help visualize existing participation.

Listening

The first step is to “listen,” by searching keywords that populate and bind our marketplace. They include our company name, brands, competitors, and other related product and business descriptors. By assessing the volume, frequency and tonality of conversations throughout each network, we can establish The Conversation Index (CI), a benchmark to assess the state of our brand in the Social Web and also serve as a metric of which to compare our future activity to past presence and brand perception

We can not measure what we do not know. We need a baseline that extends across the Social Web, beyond blog posts and Twitter.

Elements necessary to define, identify and capture The Conversation Index:

- Timeframe

- Keywords

- Quantity of mentions vs. competition, total and by channel

- Tonality

- Potential for response, if so, from which department

- Reach of mention within each network (web traffic, subscribers, followers, retweets, linkbacks)

- Action (note that Social Media begets unique programs that drive discernible clickpaths so that you have visibility into measurable activity. Create a dedicated URL for the campaign and use Google or NuConomy analytics - YOU, not the Web team, use link shortneners that provide quantifiable numbers at the point of click such as Bit.ly and Poprl, use BackTweets.com to track the volume of link sharing.)

The Conversation Index is measured first for a baseline and then at regular intervals to draw comparisons and insight. The CI is also helpful to capture sentiment, reactions, visibility, action, and feedback surrounding specific events, leading up to, during, and following the landmark.

Imagine what would happen if everyone in your organization was a brand steward. Have you taught your teams what they should be listening for? People are not merely a company's best assets, they are its best technology. Along with the potential for relevant and valuable content, which is the lifeblood of social media, you need more ears and hearts on the ground.

Social networks can and do extend beyond the company's walls, yet few organizations have learned to recognize, encourage and embrace the talent they already have. The ones that have and do, can measure the results beyond anecdotal evidence.

Presentation

When documenting the results during the listening exercise, it's absolutely critical to capture persuasive and credible criteria in a way that's presentable and incontestable to decision makers. For those without graphic artists at the ready, recording the data above in a spreadsheet and exporting key findings as charts in a visual presentation will establish a compelling case and benchmark for further endeavoring into socialized engagement, as well as the ability to reference past status.

Formalizing the research creates a process that serves as a manageable workflow and procedure for all future aspects of tracking and documenting and reporting the details mined from listening, measurement, perception, and learning.

What are you going to do with all the data? While many companies have good ways to capture historical data through quantitative and qualitative research, the process and discipline do not include action steps beyond the tweaking of a campaign. That's not deep enough. It means that you're not willing to let what you hear and see change the way you do business.

In a nutshell, new marketing means that what you learn does not affect just how you present yourself - it impacts what you bring to the table.

Observation

Communities support each other. Citizens actively help others make decisions, offer suggestions and referrals, proactively share negative experiences, and repeatedly ask question - with or without our participation.

Doc Searls calls this Vendor Relationship Management (VRM). Others refer to it as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). But, as we are quickly learning, "management" and "relationships" are as distant from each other as their intentions. Perhaps it's better stated as Community Relations or better yet, Public Relations.

Either way, we are missing opportunities right now.

Once our target networks are identified and our Conversation Index is documented, we must observe the conversational ecosystem within each network to understand the corresponding culture and behavioral dynamics. This is why new communications in the social economy requires a crash course in social sciences such as Anthropology, Sociology, and Ethnography.

We learn, earn credibility, and procure strategic intelligence through immersion.

The insight that we learn from listening and observing reveals dedicated and intermittent conversation ecosystems that spotlight real world brand perception and the potential for evangelism and also potential crisis. It resets intentions, crystallizes engagement strategies, influences how we adapt our story to each community, it humbles us, and introduces empathy into the process of connecting.

Can you give power to your customers? If your company has a customer Advisory Board, how can you work towards a true democratization of their influence over what you offer? Do you provide a forum for customers not just to tell you what they think, but to teach and share what they know with their peers?

Facilitating a peer community is probably one of the best ways to grow your corporate social capital while simultaneously increasing intellectual equity.

To excel in Social Media, we have to embrace modesty and refrain from the projection of vanity. Negativity is onerous. Unwelcome feedback is grueling to swallow. Whether or not it's right or wrong, it's still real world perception and it impacts our bottom line.

We have to be open.

Let it touch us.

Adapt

Reaction, change, and the practice of listening, hearing, and responding is the art and science of instilling trust and confidence that feed communities and determine the health and prosperity of brand resonance.

Allowing outside stimulus instead of reflecting or disregarding it is the art of embracing and embodying transparency and practicing genuine, unbiased engagement to facilitate meaningful relationships. Otherwise, transparency and engagement are merely yet another buzzword in the quiver of marketing arrows.

Productive and mutually beneficial engagement is powered by effective listening and productive participation that results in measurable and favorable action. It's not only measured by the Conversation Index, but also by the sales, referrals, relationships and ensuing brand loyalty that escalate, and sometimes dip, in reaction to our contribution.

We earn the rewards or consequences we deserve.

So much of this is new to us. However, as marketers we're learning how to excel and succeed in the new age of traditional and new influencers as they wrestle with relevance in the face of newfound opportunity.

Influence IS the ability to listen, learn, engage and inspire measurable actions. It's also the observable progress people make as a result of an engagement with us.

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