“Press” releases have been declared dead on other occasions. Mary Schmidt did so in September in Lipsticking. Shel Holtz weighed in 3+ years ago with a reasonable call for evolution (…is Dead. Long Live the …). “Press releases generally don’t create either relevance or trust. In the Darwinism of this crowded new media environment, they don’t survive,” declared Josh in Span Society during the post-election crisis in Iran.  Mark Naples of iMedia Connection posted recently on “6 Facts Every Marketer Must Know,” in which he heaps another shovel of dirt on the release based on polls of people who cover marketing for large media outlets. 

For a guy who started out his PR career trying to convince clients that an objective of “getting out 100 press releases this year” wasn’t a good objective, I should be heartened. But I’m not. I am hopeful that while the form has used up most of its nine lives, there are many more miles in this cat. And, I am challenged because of what all this talk about the news release says about our culture.

There are three reasons for my faith that the news release has a few more lives.

First, our writing for the ear and for the eye has been expanded in unprecedented ways in recent years with the advent of text messaging, mini-blogs, online video and the like. But, we haven’t given up on the written word. The value of a news release may come in the complete telling of the story from the client’s perspective all in one place. The fact that it has evolved from being written purely for the eye and now includes video or audio that covers other senses is allowing readers/viewers to experience the subject more fully. The better targeted the communication, the more likely it is to be a part of a story, column, post or on-air piece, for sure, but well-timed and well-executed releases still have value.

Gladwell (Social Media: not changing world)

That said, there is a tipping point coming, even if, as reported by rocker/chairman  Khan Manka, Jr. ,  “Malcolm Gladwell (The New Yorker) basically (has said we are) all full of ourselves if we think for one minute that we’re changing the world in any way.” (Khan wrote of the Strauss Zelnick’s Rooftop Salon recently).

Third, the “market” for these communiques is separating the good from the bad. There are literally hundreds of bloggers and journalists who are now able to push a button and purge all messages from a lousy PR person. There are whole blogs and columns written about what not to do. Beth Kanter delivered a great one recently that contained an admonition agaist “cravat” pitches (her husband’s neckwear at their wedding was described in Esquire – with elegant language – as “last seen around the neck of the Undertaker before his match at Wrestlemania XXV. Unless you can deliver tombstone piledrivers to anyone who scoffs at you, opt for a bow tie.”).  She also noted,  ”My husband didn’t ask me to marry him on our first date.”

And what does all of this say about our culture?

1. We are “uprofessionalizing” news at a rate that amazes me. Whole media outlets are falling by the wayside. Whole TV shows are now being done in Tweet form (TMZ). Journalism is trending toward Drudge’s world view in a Liberty Roundtable quote from 1998  – a nation of 300 million reporters.
2. Rumor, gossip or opinion is taking on the same relevance as news. But, in this stream, journalists from traditional media are finding some good-sized fish, too.
3. Bloggers, for the most part, aren’t coming up with a sustainable business model, so when the economy improves how many of us will find other jobs? In the meantime, traditional media are handing over the keys to covering the news.
4. Developing a new relationship between public relations professionals and new media is presenting a tough value proposition. Some want the relationship building to move beyond appropriate first date behavior quickly so we can get to the good stuff. Fortunately, most humans aren’t that easy. Building relationships takes time and resources well beyond what was required in the old press release culture, and many still remember that old culture too fondly. (How many Virginians does it take to change a light bulb? Three. One to actually change the bulb while the other two talk about how great the old bulb was.)
5. Engagement is difficult in the form of comments, tweets and limited face-to-face. The old model of engagement was a cab ride uptown to do a personal deskside briefing. Technology has brought us closer in many ways, but it’s more ambient closeness and quasi-relationship in some ways. I’m encouraged by how there are places to meet up, but they also are proliferating and straining the resources traditionally dedicated to communications activities in the old one-big-trade-show; four-big-magazines era.

Many of us continue to move at light speed in sorting this out, and the tilting against traditional windmills work is exhausting. So, I still cling just a little to the evolved news release while doing all these other things. Does that make me a bad person?

Photo courtesy of San Jose Library

I’m not proud to say that I have a double standard when it comes to social media and my kids. But I have to admit, I’m a “Do as I say, not as I do” kind of mom.

I have a Twitter account, Facebook page, a LinkedIn profile and spend a lot of my time on the Internet for work. But when my daughter established a Gmail account and her new cell phone had Twitter, MySpace and Facebook apps, I realized I couldn’t take a lassez-faire approach to social media – we had to have one of those awkward, parental discussions.

Not that these are something new. Now that my daughter has entered middle school, we’ve had lots of these discussions, with topics ranging from why she doesn’t want to be a “friend with benefits,” why she can’t send text messages after 10 p.m., why “sexting” is wrong, and the basics of social media safety.

CNN touched upon the topic of young teens engaging in social media in its article “Social Networks and Kids: How Young is Too Young?” The article points to Pew Internet Research report that says 61 percent of teens age 12 to 17 use social networking sites to send messages to friends and that 38 percent of teens 12 to 14 have an online profile of some sort.

By the same token, a U.S. News and World Report article reported that teens and tweens are more active online than most parents realize. According to Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that tracks children’s use of media, 51 percent of teenagers check into social networking sites more than once a day. And while only 2 percent of parents believe their child has posted naked or near-naked photos or videos of themselves or others, 13 percent of teens admitted they’ve done that.

No matter how much parents want to protect their kids, they’re already on the Internet and it’s not long before they setup a Facebook page (if they haven’t already done so). But do these kids realize that once something is posted on the Internet, it never really goes away – and you have no way of knowing who’s going to see it?

You read stories about college students who post images on their Facebook pages of themselves drinking and in various states of dress, only to have them re-emerge during their job search. Or how cyberbullying is not just something you might see on an After School Special – it’s a regular occurrence at some schools.

Both my kids are using social media and I do my best to keep track of what they’re viewing. My 9-year-old goes to the WebKinz and Littlest Pet Shop Web sites to play with her virtual pets and my 11-year-old uses YouTube to watch music videos, now that you can’t watch them on MTV anymore. And when camera crews showed up at my daughter’s elementary school, she called me and said, “Hey Mom, check out Twitter and find out what’s going on.”

My agency talks to companies all the time about the importance of setting up social media policies to educate their employees about how to use social media. By the same token, parents need to share the same information with their kids – and tell them that you want to know if someone posts inappropriate photos of classmates on the Internet or sends them via cell phone. Now, more than ever, parents need to talk to their kids and find out who they’re talking to online.

We teach kids how to drive and the importance of safe sex. Now, we need to teach them how to safely engage in social media.

The fact that twitter users take their personal brand so seriously was exemplified when Chris Brogan mentioned the backlash by excluding individuals from his lists, thus labeling lists “exclusionary by nature“. So besides a thick skin do his users need to grow up? I think this harks back to the follow me – I’ll follow you back mindset on twitter etiquette.

Does the fact that inclusion on a list will add anything to a user as meta-data or perceived relationship by classification? And by taking the control out of the hands of the user on the list does it make this classification more human/real?

What if you feel the classification is wrong or derogatory? I dare refer to those who Chris may have offended by excluding would be happy to not be included on @cspenn’s lists.

So it seems to get on or off lists you have to connect with the creator (which is kind of the point) but what about the ability to collaborate or moderate a list. For example, it seems in my city almost every Twitter user has their own list of local users. The issue being that there is no one with a complete list and this leaves the classification structure fractured.

For me the benefit of being able to list users without following them helps simplify the amount of users in my main feed. I now wonder how this will impact the follow ratio for most accounts – especially business or corporate types. So it might make sense to forget the main feed all together, turn lists private and then build an app that will display only the lists I follow. Thus building a simple taxonomy used to categorize a user based on what I expect them to tweet.

To finish off, lists are a good start at classifying users and simplifying the feed structure but need a lot more work to take a simple classification structure and make it more usable to the whole community. Please share what your recommendations for the obvious next steps for Twitter lists!

Photo: voxefx

 I have lived in several places throughout the east and Midwest, but I spent my formative years (8 to 18) in the garden spot of the Garden State and I have now lived in Richmond, Va., for the past 19 years (my longest stint so far in one city/location). So I have a special interest in the odd fact that New Jersey and Virginia have the only two gubernatorial races in the country this year.

And they are pretty telling races. Historically Democratic “blue” New Jersey has incumbent Jon Corzine running neck-to-neck with Republican Chris Christie, a former U.S. Attorney (who apparently has little respect for copyright law).  The polling difference between the two candidates falls within the statistical margin of error making it’s anyone’s race.

In Virginia, which as a one-term limit state never has an incumbent candidate for governor, Attorney General Bob McDonnell has a commanding double digit lead in the polls over Democrat Creigh Deeds, a long time state politician. A Republican win would end two back-to-back Democratic administrations in a traditionally Republican state.

What national implications should we read into these two races? Has Obama lost sway and, in turn, Democratic candidates? Well, according to the SmartPolitics blog, there’s a far less knee jerk story to all this. To quote the blog “A Smart Politics analysis of historical election returns in the Garden and Old Dominion States finds that the two states have voted in tandem during the last five gubernatorial elections dating back to 1989 - and always electing the party which is not in control of the White House. (If it’s not too late, find a bookie and put all your money on Christie in Jersey!)

From a social media standpoint it is interesting that in Virginia McDonnell has outspent the Democrat Deeds 5-to-1 in social media (a number which far exceeds the Republican spending advantage in traditional media.) As blog site bluevirginia  reports, ”That’s inexcusable…that the McDonnell campaign has blown Creigh’s campaign away in new media.”

But perhaps the most telling statement here is the naïve assumption that social media is the domain of the Democrats. The success of the Obama campaign taught both parties a lesson. If the Democrats want to learn something valuable this November for the 2010 midterm national elections (especially for U.S. House seats), it’s that social media, like liberty, is accessible to all.

by Geoff Livingston

Facebook fan pages have become immensely popular for companies and organizations. They love using pages to communicate with their stakeholders.  The following eight suggestions will optimize your fan page to create the most vibrant community possible (for more tips also be sure to check out Facebook’s best practices page, too):

1) I differ with Facebook right away on function. Don’t split the conversation stream between the organization and “just fans.” You want fans to see each other communicating online.  It’s about fostering a community. To split your updates from fans signals that:

• You are controlling the message,
• Organizational message delivery is the primary reason for the page; and
• The organization doesn’t value fan content or participation as highly as its own

2)  Compelling conversations matter!  That means doing more than just dropping a post, a link or a picture periodically on the page. Comment on fan posts, add value to those posts with additional information, and encourage more.  Make sure people know that humans update the page, and not corporate stiffs.

3) Intelligently integrate other web properties and Facebook applications (including your own Facebook app).  The tabs on top of the page should be intelligently selected with one goal in mind: Enabling your fans to do more and spread the word.  No matter how much the organization thinks it’s own pushing will drive “the message,” in reality, fans need to carry the baton.

Make badges on the columns and tabs that are obvious, make sense and inviting. Ensure these tabs connect easily to applications and to your blog, twitter, MySpace and other accounts and sites. Make sure you don’t over-clutter with every app on earth. Be selective. See Mashable’s top five features of Facebook fan page for more.

4) Pay attention to the statistics: Insights allows you to understand which posts are truly motivating your fans to interact. If they are like Ning users, they love photos and videos! Whatever is working, give them what they want! And while you’re at it cater to your demographics, too.

5) Make your fans feel special.  Reward fans for participating, let them know you are watching and foster further engagement. Make a fan of the week, allow fans to badge their page and site with something that clearly marks them as an extended member of the brand family.  Do things that are unique to your Facebook fan page only, and make sure the fans now that such contests, brick and mortar events, etc. are specially designed for them.

6) Use outside properties to promote the page: So many times people build it and wonder why they don’t come. Use all of your communications properties to build up the Facebook application page, and use the Facebook application page to promote the other properties (as well as opportunities to donate and/or buy product), but be smart. If you place promo in front of conversation on the Facebook fan page, expect a dormant community.

7) Don’t assume your Twitter audience is your Facebook group, too. It’s not. Yes, you’ll have a healthy minority who are on twitter, but the community that participates on Facebook tends to be different than the voiceiferous on twitter.

8) Did I mention that Ning users love photos and videos? So do Facebook users!  Tagging your fans from event photos and videos is just a simple, obvious way to make them feel like they are part of the community. In fact, you should be encouraging them to upload their own photos and videos.

What tips would you add?

Customer service according to The Office (click to play)

Anyway, long story short, his subject complains about a never opened T-Mobile account for which she is being charged.

Segal gets in touch with T-Mobile on her behalf, and the PR team at the phone company “sprang into action.” Segal wonders in the piece why (presumably all) ”companies seem to rouse themselves only after they get a tap on the shoulder from someone in the news media.”  He does a bit of a tap himself around the facts: The customer complained. The company asked for some information. She didn’t provide the information, and the collection firm pushed on.

I have often pushed back on bloggers, Tweeters and Facebook status updaters who perform elaborate public whines or rants over customer service issues that they should have solved themselves. Caveat emptor has never been more appropriate than in the brave new world of the internet, yet many seem to think that it’s possible to fly through life unscathed by the unscrupulous or even dented a little by a bad customer experience.

I am impressed with consumer companies that are facilitating good customer experiences by using social media. Dell was featured in a guest post on Mary Ellen Slayter’s Smart Blog on Social Media recently. Matt Jurmann from Chromatics lists a number of good ones, also, in the form of case studies. Maybe Price and Jaffe have it right in The Best Customer Service is No Service.

Maintaining customer satisfaction has never been more important, as Alison says in her Better Business Bureau video/blog post. As our client notes, “you can’t make all customers satisfied all the time.”  The crying of “wolf” over things that can be resolved with a little conversation, though, is troubling. Social networks have the potential to facilitate the resolution of issues; not just amplifying the whining or the shouting.

A more recent look at the multiplier effect of “badvocates” is Laurie Burkitt’s post on Forbes just this week. She repeats a Weber Shandwick stat, saying that power writers like @dmscott represent 20% of the world’s adult population online and each one reaches an estimated 14 people with his or her critiques. Powerful, most often principled, these critics, though, may be encouraging less sophisticated copycats

What do you think? Are we too quick to resort to the online rant or a call to Mother NYT? Is the age of social media encouraging whining? What is the appropriate role of customer service in the era of such transparency when the first complaint can carry such weight?

Photo courtesy of dotbenjamin

I read a great article by Brian Solis this week about the science of retweets. The article got me thinking about why hospitals don’t use the Twitter retweet function more often.

According to Ed Bennett’s most recent list of hospitals engaging in social media, 297 U.S. hospitals have established Twitter accounts. Yet when you look at these accounts, one thing is readily apparent – most don’t understand the power of the retweet. Instead of using Twitter to engage with the community and to humanize health care, they’re using it as a broadcasting medium to promote their service lines and extend their brand. And when you look at their Twitter stream, more often than not, they’re doing all of the talking.

Why is this? One reason is that not all consultants seem to understand social media and the value it brings to health care . My client shared with me an August 12, 2009 Advisory Board article that pooh-poohed the value of the retweet function saying: “By retweeting…hospitals missed an opportunity to connect the story to a service offering or a call to action. While retweets can be an easy way to boost the number of messages sent to your Twitter following, you’ll want to be selective in order to retain your own voice with your audience, avoid ‘content spam,’ and maximize interest in your specific institution.”

Hospitals that feel this way are never going to harness the power of the social media. Here are five reasons hospitals should retweet more:

1. Give credit where credit is due: If someone says something interesting or compelling, you should retweet it. Not only does this acknowledge the person or the organization for saying something noteworthy, but it also allows you to share it with your followers.  
2. Prove you’re not a robot: Too many hospitals are talking to themselves – sending out information about their service lines and their clinicians, but not listening to what their followers are saying. By retweeting others, you demonstrate that you’re not a robot and are reading the tweets of others and finding what they’re saying is relevant and worth sharing.
3. Develop a closer connection with the community: We all know health care is local, so it’s important for hospitals to show they’re a member of the community they serve. By retweeting area residents or sharing information about things that are happening in their community, you can become a community cheerleader and show that you care about what happens in your community.
4. Serve as a healthcare resource: Hospitals are a major healthcare resource for the community, so it’s important they share health information with their followers. By retweeting healthcare authorities, such as the Centers for Disease Control or the New England Journal for Medicine, you’re sharing important health information with your community and becoming the place people can go to for health care information.
5. Provide consumers with what they want ? health information: While hospitals want to promote their service lines, consumers don’t want to read a steady stream of information about what your doctors are doing or how many times a doctor has performed a specific procedure. You can share this information, but you should also provide consumers with what they want – health information. By retweeting health information and providing links to where people can go to find additional information, you’re providing real value.

Hospitals need to realize that they can’t just talk about themselves – they need to provide information that is relevant to their community and their followers. Retweeting others is a great way to do this.

By Wyatt Wood

Originating from the human desire to share, its obvious that the success of social media is the ability to connect users. A network’s success is determined by how easy it is to connect and share. For example compare Twitter vs Plurk, Facebook vs MySpace, Bing vs Google (perform your own comparison).

Success can be a two-edged sword, if focusing on the wrong metrics can leave the message stale, using return on influence can provide an accurate measurement of message activists.

Micah Baldwin defined influence as “influence is one person influencing one person about one thing” during his presentation at Gnomedex 9.0.

So how do you convert curiosity to increase your influence? Here are 3 simple steps to strengthen your influence within your network:

1. Use strategic reciprocity to entice your network into participation. While value differs between users there is always purpose that defines an engaged user. TGI Friday’s successfully converted customers and potential customers with their campaign for gaining 500,000 fans on Facebook. Allowing for benefits in exchange for an action from the user uses tangible ways measure the engagement.
2. Be consistent with your message and values when the situation is adverse. It’s no surprise that given the success of the Facebook campaign for TGIF that to execute the promise of a free burger could be a challenge. The ability for conversation doesn’t always mean that it will be positive. Nick Cifuentes provides several tough examples of hands on social media crisis management. Given the change in the landscape of communication there is no excuse for not being responsible, but staying traditional while communicating during backlash can perpetuate the damage.
3. Take advantage of opportunities for social validation. This week Facebook extended their share tool, including adding new functionality to count of the number of times the URL has been shared on Facebook. The ease of using the new features helps the silent fan become an extension of the conversation. Touting the new analytics for the share tool, you can now access the information associated with each link shared on Facebook:

• Users share the link on Facebook.
• Users “like” the shared story.
• Users comment on the shared story on Facebook.
• Users click back to your site from the story.

Have you used these concepts or tools to affect your network to convert fans into participants? What metrics are most important to your decision making to determine the return on influence?

Click here to view the embedded video.

There is nothing quite like political controversy cooked up in the land of meat pies, pints and the Queen. The latest controversy is full of contradictions. It is a great mile marker for the ever symbiotic connection between traditional media and social media (and vice versa). And, it is significant for reasons more societal than social. The U.K. has faced immigration issues longer than the States, and things have become a bit more politicized than here. (They actually have two elected member of Parliament who got there on the wings of some pretty severe, if not Fascist views on immigration and immigrants).

From a social viewpoint, this latest controversy underscores how, from a PR perspective, traditional and social media constantly feed one another. Media today mean everyone with credentials and anyone with a keyboard and a following. From a societal viewpoint, it’s more than a little bit scary.

Here’s a little background on the controversy in question (with some background on some of the players). First a quick synopsis: The top-ranked U.K. political talk show (the BBC’s “Question Time” – think more like a snarky health care town hall meeting format than “Meet the Press”) last Thursday had on its show Nick Griffin, leader of British National Party (BNP) whose mission statement reads like a page from a Klu Klux Klan playbook. The show’s producers proceeded to set up Griffin in front of 200 audience questioners who pound him for his views while four normal interviewees stood by to provide stark contrast color commentary. Later, it is revealed the BBC violated its audience “random” selection guidelines to stack the studio crowd against Griffin and even urging them to ask “provocative” questions.

If you watch any of the video clip contained in this post (yes, it is a long one), you can see that Griffin gets lambasted. But the result wasn’t necessarily all bad for the bad guys.  The BBC had 243 complaints that the show was biased against Griffin, compared with 114 complaints about him appearing on it. Coverage was all over the newspapers the following day, some of it fairly positive for Griffin and the BNP, and some of it sounding dire warnings of a growing anti-immigrant base.

The traditional media bottom line: This episode of BBC “Question Time” attracted 8 million viewers, a record viewership for a 30-year-old program. The show was so anticipated that leading U.K. newspapers, The Guardian and The Telegraph, ran live blogs during the show (which complemented the show’s existing method of engaging viewers by crawling their text messages across the screen during the broadcast. The show’s Live Chat had the most participants ever.)  No less than 68,000 blog posts were generated. And Tweets mentioning Nick Griffin’s name skyrocketed.

TwitterScoop graphic:

Like the traditional media coverage, there were a surprising number of positive social media comments about Griffin and the BNP. In fact, the commentary seems disproportionately more favorable than the 6 percent of the vote the BNP garnered in the last elections. All this causing our cross Atlantic allies to ponder if social media can play an Obama campaign-like role in their political process with national elections coming in 2010.

Politics, especially when combined with controversy, is the oil that lubricates traditional media. It sells newspapers, drives viewership and, thereby, generates revenue. It appears social media shares a kindred spirit on the politics and controversy front. Traffic spikes and users engage when these ingredients are in the mix, especially when the message engages or, in this case, scares us enough to capture our attention.

by Geoff Livingston

You may be strong, you may be smart, but if you cannot adapt to rapid change you won’t survive. A rather Darwinistic statement, but a truth that companies and communicators increasing must accept. Communications technology has turned our world upside down (this post owes a special hat tip to Kyle Reis, and the great conversation he had with me that inspired it).

I imagine social media wonks grinning like cheshire cats and traditional communicators groaning. But the observation applies to all. Five years ago Twitter didn’t exist and Facebook was a blip on the map. Where will we be in another five years?

Today’s communications reality: Every decade brings sweeping challenges to the industry, driven by more telecommunications bandwidth and computing power. Consider the following:

• 70s: Broadcast TV dominates, while metro newspapers consolidate to fight off the evening news. Cable TV is born.
• 80s: Personal computing takes off, cable becomes widespread, commercial adoption of the Internet begins
• 90s: The decade of email and Web 1.0 (.com), satellite rivals cable, wireless takes off
• 00s: Web 2.0 rises to the fore, 1.0 community properties like Prodigy, AOL suffer; wireless Internet services blow up. Print pubs start failing en masse, while electronic books become available.

The rate of change accelerates with each new decade. As we conclude this one, we have seen the birth of next generation email (Google Wave), the virtual reality network Second Life (rise and fall, in this case), the beginning of a pitched battle for the mobile Internet between Apple and Google, and Verizon’s recent declaration that it’s done investing in it’s landline business.

We focus on how organizations use these tools to communicate with their stakeholders, but bit and bytes have become so disruptive communicators can no longer afford to turn their backs on media advancements. The only certainty is flux and change.

A core competency for successful communicators and their companies — agencies, for profits and nonprofits alike — must be adaptability. Our media world will continue to move like a river, relentlessly flowing over any barrier until it reaches the see. Now more than ever we must think liquid.