Mike Manuel's "Media Guerrilla" Blog

Soundbite 2.0

mike manuel — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:40:08 +0000

Often it’s the small twists and tweaks to ‘established practices’ that can really take things in a new direction — case in point, I was recently reading your run-of-the-mill-mega-company-internal announcement, however, this one was followed by several supporting points pre-packaged in 140 character tweets with all the shortened links and hashtags served right on top. It was one of those moments where your natural reaction is to just gag on the silver spoon working its way down your throat, but after a closer look at things, it really wasn’t over-the-top-type-stuff that this company had pre-defined, it was actually all fairly basic. It was the type of stuff I might, if I was an employee, just retweet for lack of a stronger opinion on the matter. My takeway was this: framing the company news in snack size chunks was helpful for A) holding attention; B) summarizing the news; and C) enabling people to actually do something with it — quickly, at the point of comprehension. I can’t see this working well for every company, but it’s interesting nonetheless…

On Domain vs Off Domain Strategies

mike manuel — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:42:46 +0000

So I’ve noticed a strange sort of tug-o-war taking shape among those managing social media programs and without going into all the details here, I’ll just say the tugging typically gets down to this question: where should you put your time, energy and money? Should it be with” on-domain” strategies (e.g., brand communities, business blogs, corporate video, etc., basically any sort of effort that folds into a company’s existing website)? Or should it be with “off-domain” strategies (e.g., microblogs, social networks, monitoring projects, etc., basically any sort of third-party platform or service that could be ‘officially’ adopted to help the company participate with the larger web outside its walls). I guess the ’strange’ part is that this split, this tug, really shouldn’t exist at all, because it’s not an either-or situation. The best programs will inevitably be those that strike a balance between how social media is used on-domain to communicate and connect with people, and how it’s used off-domain to accomplish this exact same thing. I think finding the perfect blend between those two experiences is where every marketer ought to be focusing their time, energy and money right now.

Voce Adds Web Dev Team, Forms “Voce Connect”

mike manuel — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:23:19 +0000

So I just ‘broke’ this news over on the Voce Nation, thought I’d share it here too, the short of it is this: 1) Voce has scooped up the entire cnp_studio team, a group of web developers that specialize in social media design and development work; 2) We’ve formed a combined (social media marketing + web development) service team within Voce that’s now called “Voce Connect;” and 3) We’ve been quietly working together for months now, winning a mix of social media marketing and web development projects with some of the biggest consumer and business brands in the world, much of which we’ll be showcasing and sharing on our new company site which we rolled out today too. Our press page has all the details, and I’ll be posting more on this shortly, but suffice to say, it’s a big day for our company and a good measure of how our firm’s thinking about the changing landscape for marketing and communications. There’s much, much more to come.

Machine-Based Sentiment Analysis is Flawed

mike manuel — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:40:17 +0000

So, it’s sad, but kind’a comical too to see how quickly the everyday use of the web for communication is eroding everyone’s grammar and syntax (cough, Twitter). What’s truly tragic, however, is the frigg’n pandemic spread of companies promising machine based linguistic and sentiment analysis services, all of them knowing oh too well that the web has damn-near its own dialect now, be it acronyms (FTW!), abbreviations (RT) or any number of adhoc classifications (#[hashtag]), and maybe more importantly, a growing appetite for unspoken gestures of expression and opinion (be it thumbs, stars, likes, or otherwise), yet, for whatever reason, these companies continue to over-promise mountains of insight and perspective into “how your customers think and feel,” based only on what a bot and an algorithm spits back!? I don’t know, it’s just, uh, flawed. Update: check out Microsyntax.org, this entire organization is diving into the ‘new’ unconventions of communication on the web.

Corporate Social Media Teams Are Growing

mike manuel — Mon, 18 May 2009 16:50:46 +0000

So not that it’s terribly surprising, but the headcount for in-house (corporate) social media teams seems to be growing — very quickly — despite the economy. Two years ago, even in the biggest companies, you had, at best, a collection of quarter-timers, loosely coming together around launches and campaigns. Thereafter, part-time social media/community/online strategists started to take foot, now, shit, most companies have *at least* one dedicated person, with many, many companies having far more. The other observation worth noting here are the organizational models, (err, model), which seems to in a lot of companies boil down to a very lean, very skilled cross-functional strategic team that establishes standards, protocols and practices that are then pushed out to a much larger set of business unit practitioners and regional teams for local implementation. It’s just interesting to see familiar patterns of corporate organization and structure finally taking hold around a new discipline, a sign of the industry’s maturation?

Defining Social Media ‘Expertise’

mike manuel — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:32:07 +0000

I joked (mostly) about social media expert-itis in a previous post, but if you really had to try and dig into what makes someone a “social media expert,” it’s really not that difficult of a thing to deconstruct, I mean, if you just focus on direct experiences. So…uh…that’s what I did. Well, it’s a start at least. Keep in mind, I’m approaching this from a communications consultant’s point of view, in-house folks have some unique skill requirements that I’m skipping here. Also, it bears mentioning, while it’s helpful to try and draw some simple distinctions between what it means to have an understanding of this industry verses real-world know-how and knowledge, let’s be honest, in the end, “expertise” will always be relative to need, so yeah, your mileage will vary, but hopefully this is a start. [cross-posted to Voce Nation]

Social Media Education, an Ongoing Challenge

mike manuel — Tue, 12 May 2009 03:35:27 +0000

I just chewed through Jennifer Leggio’s piece today which analyzes the results from her second ‘Social PR Survey,’ it’s a good read, and while I can’t say much of the findings were terribly surprising, still, there’s some interesting data points for agency folks at all levels. One of the sections touches on agency education and training, something the lion’s share of respondents seemed to oddly dismiss as a ‘non-issue.’ Really? Really!? I’m telling you, based on my own experience, plus what I hear from my peers at other firms, this dismissal is either our industry spinning itself in the worst sort of way, or people are absolutely clueless about what social media training and education efforts really entail (hint: “learning” and “changing”). I’m not convinced we’ve seen enough of either yet. Oh, and one more thing related to all of this: too often this industry points and prods at undergrads and junior staff as needing the most ‘training and education,’ when sadly, in reality, there are some senior folks who could use a kick in the pants too. In fact, I’d argue if the end result of agency training is, well, organizational change, then top down learning is where it all starts.

Voce’s Sponsoring WordCamp SF

mike manuel — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:42:02 +0000

So over on the Voce Nation blog, I just posted the news that we’re sponsoring WordCamp SF (it’s taking place later this month, get on it!) As far as I know, we’re one of the few PR firms to get behind a WordCamp event in this sort of way, at very least, we’re one of the first to get behind the SF event. Regardless, it makes a *ton* of sense for our business right now, both in terms of how we’ve been using WordPress and related tech with clients like eBay, PlayStation, Yahoo!, and others, but maybe more importantly, with publishing and networking platforms like WordPress MU and BuddyPress now gaining momentum, the ways we can bend and stretch these platforms for communication and marketing programs feels at times damn near limitless. Anyway, we have some very cool WordPress-related projects in the works, some of which the team may be sharing at WordCamp, others we’ll be talking about later this summer. Hope to see you there later this month.

2 Tactical Tips for Corporate Video

mike manuel — Tue, 05 May 2009 04:13:19 +0000

Okay, so as a quick follow up to my previous post on video distribution, here’s two tactical tips for companies.

Tip #1: Who has the best embeddable player? I think Viddler does (full disclosure, they’re a Voce partner). I say this less for Viddler’s technical merits (even tho I consider them quite good), and more for the simple fact that the Viddler player can be branded with your corporate logo AND embedded with a custom link back to a site of your choosing (example). And this folks is frigg’n *gold* if you want to squeeze more value (over time) out of all the people discovering and spreading your videos on the web.

Tip #2: How do you maximize the reach (and quantify the metrics) of *all* your video services? Try using TubeMogul. It’s a great service that allows you to centrally upload and then syndicate your videos to all the video sharing sites (e.g., YouTube, Blip.tv, MetaCafe, etc.) The central management and control of your videos from TubeMogul allows you to track all sorts of performance metrics, not only for your videos, but for the video networks you’re using too.

So, net-net, Viddler + ‘other’ video sharing sites + TubeMogul = a pretty powerful combination if you’re serious about milking your online videos for all they’re worth.

3 Ways to Think About Video Distribution

mike manuel — Mon, 04 May 2009 04:29:23 +0000

So video distribution is one of those inevitable parts of any social media program. A lot of people, well, too many people will say YouTube’s the easy fix to all your worries. Man, trust me, it ain’t. Yeah, there’s a place for services like YouTube, but my advice is to think about video distribution three different ways: 1). Think about the player. Which service offers the *best* embeddable player? This is particularly important if you’re producing HD content. 2). Think about the reach. Which services offer the best possible reach for your videos? YouTube’s a frigg’n virtual Times Square, so just ask yourself: is that *really* going to reach my target market? And 3). Think about metrics. Which service offers the best access and insights into the performance and spread of your videos? There’s a lot more to video metrics than a simple tally of views. The thing about this three-way slice is that for a nominal amount of effort, it puts you in a position to use a mix of services to help squeeze more value out of your video investments, and hey, right now, given the trajectory of video use and the web, this is a good thing.