Debbie Weil's BlogWrite for CEOs

Redux: Authentic Vs. Candid

2009-07-10T16:18:00-05:00

Another blast from the past: originally published on July 25, 2003. Interestingly, copywriter Michael Fortin said the same thing recently in a post titled: Don’t Be Transparent, Be Authentic Instead.

In the 2nd anniversary issue of my e-newsletter, WordBiz Report, I included a note to readers that opined:

"Authenticity is key. And by that I mean authentic voice. I often struggle to find just the right tone. When I do, you respond. You even make a purchase. When I lapse into marketing speak, you tend to ignore me. And why not? I don’t respond to sales-y copy either."

To be candid, I didn’t flesh out the topic of authenticity as a full-blown article because I was up against the deadline and ran out of time. Well, along comes WordBiz reader Stan Halse (note: I think this is the same Stan Halse, but I’m not positive) to point out an article on The Power of Self Disclosure, in MarketingProfs.

Author Randy Siegel writes that "Communicating without disclosing self is like trying to play tennis without a ball." You gotta reveal some personal stuff, he’s saying, in order to be a strong communicator.

If I tell you that my dog is sick - or that I’ve procrastinated (more likely) - are you more apt to be swayed by what I write?

There’s a fine line between being authentic and revealing too much personal information. Too much candor is not necessarily interesting.

I see this line crossed all the time in other e-newsletters. Who cares what the editor thought when she rolled out of bed that morning. Unless the editor or publisher is a well-known figure.

Enough rambling… what do you think about being candid and disclosing the self in online business communications?

Cartoon created by Brad Fitzpatrick and used with permission.

Sweets and Tweets: Free Cupcakes, Social Media and Crowdsourcing Almost Everything

2009-06-08T21:08:00-05:00

Update: SOLD OUT! You can now follow us on Twitter at @SweetsandTweets. The next Sweets and Tweets is Thursday July 9, 2009 at Baked & Wired in Georgetown. Genius Rocket is sponsoring. Venture capitalist, entrepreneur and politico Mark Walsh will speak about crowdsourcing almost everything. Space is limited and tickets are ~~going fast~~ gone.

Pictured L to R: Mark Walsh, yours truly and Genius Rocket's Peter LaMotte.

Forrester’s Groundswell Creates a Social Technographic Profile Widget

2009-05-29T17:49:00-05:00

Very cool. Based on the social technographic framework laid out in Groundswell.This is also cool because it illustrates how you can market with useful sharable "content" and sell without (being too obvious about) selling. Note the link to the $749 report you can buy, etc.

Re the FTC and Bloggers: It’s a Brave New World But Old Rules of Disclosure Still Apply

2009-05-28T14:31:00-05:00

Illustration (and caption) below by the talented Ming Zhuang at Medill’s Graduate School of Journalism.

On the one hand, it’s a brave new world where bloggers represent a new and unfettered publishing channel. One that enables us to consume new points of view and smart thinking without the third party filters of an editor or publisher. This is a good thing.

Some of these bloggers have developed a large following and have become influencers in their own right, just as popular columnists for mainstream newspapers can influence public opinion.

This is where the "on the other hand" comes in.

Let me frame up my thoughts with an example.

Supposing you were a fan of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. And supposing you read his recent column, Stranded in Suburbia, about the merits of driving less and in more fuel-efficient cars. Now suppose you found out that Krugman was on the payroll of the Institute of Clean Air Companies. Disclosure: I made up this example. I know nothing about the ICAC and to my knowledge Krugman has no connection with any organizations that might affect his reporting.

Eegads, you’d say. Does Krugman really believe in fuel-efficient cars? Or is he shilling for the ICAC?? You might say: "Hmm… well the column is well written and informative. I guess it doesn’t matter if Krugman received (additional) payment to articulate this POV. It seems in keeping with his other columns."

Now ask yourself this: would it make any difference in your thinking if Krugman clearly disclosed in his column his relationship with the ICAC? Would you prefer that he disclose the connection, or not? Do you, in fact, care about this conflict of interest if the column makes for compelling reading (esp. if you happen to agree with it)?

Bear with me. Now suppose Krugman were a popular blogger who wasn’t bound by journalistic conventions? Would the above scenario be different? Are the rules governing what a blogger writes about and what he or she discloses - or doesn’t - any different? Does it matter whether payment in cash is involved? Or do other types of compensation (travel costs, free product samples) apply equally to what constitutes a conflict of interest?

These are the kinds of questions swirling about in the face of the FTC’s proposed guideline changes for endorsements and testimonials and how they might affect bloggers. Note: more below in my comment about the proposed new guidelines.

Frankly, it’s all pretty confusing. We’re familiar with the saying that pornography is easy to recognize, but difficult to define. But does the same apply to conflict of interest and what bloggers write about?

Yes and no. Conflict of interest is a slippery slope. It may or may not involve disclosure and transparency. I.e. it’s still a conflict of interest whether or not you disclose, right?

The nub of the conflict seems to be payment. Whether or not you are paid, in cash or in kind.

Here’s where it gets murky. To take the stand that editorial content on a blog has to be absolutely pure, borne only of the blogger’s intellect and passion… is naive. It doesn’t work that way. Without an editor intermediary looking over our shoulders, or nudging us with emails and phone calls, what we write about is serendipitous. In my case, it’s what I think is important or what catches my interest. It might, in fact, be influenced by a discussion with a client. (Is that a conflict of interest??)

For another blogger, a post or series of posts could be prompted by an ongoing relationship with a big brand. Power mommy blogger Jessica Smith (aka JessicaKnows) is writing about her experiences driving a Ford Flex for a year. She is completely frank about her relationship with Ford. But is there a conflict of interest? Perhaps. She knows—and her readers know—that she may not be absolutely candid about the car. In reality, it’s a bit awkward to be snarky and critical when the #7 company on the Fortune 500 list has loaned you a car. It’s difficult to be downright critical about something someone has given you, particularly when you have a warm relationship with that entity—which is what Jessica Smith has with Ford (and, as I understand it, Scott Monty). I often find that my relationship with a good client is a combination of business and social. We become very friendly and the line between personal and professional can become a bit blurred. Something to be aware of, of course.

What it really comes down to is the blogger’s credibility. If readers find her to be hugely credible and compelling, they will trust her. In fact, they’ll hang on her every word. And those words are worth LOTS to her sponsors.

Disclosure and transparency (what the FTC is calling for) are mandatory. Beyond that, maybe we’re talking about a new animal - a form of content that is neither purely editorial, nor entirely advertorial. (Advertorial means that the sponsor controls the message, the actual words. And Ford is not doing that.)

And what’s wrong with that? We’ve known for years that the line between editorial and advertising on Web sites is blurred. Why don’t we give that new kind of content in the middle a name? Suggestions?

I’m still teasing out the questions. So I’ll lay them out for you to ponder. And hopefully offer up some answers:

Amateur vs. professional: is this the key question we should be asking about bloggers vs. journalists?

Conflating conflict of interest and disclosure (aren’t these two different things?)

What constitutes payment (cash vs. in kind) and when is it appropriate or required for blogger reviews?

Credibility: if I tweet that I love Zappos do readers assume the online retailer is "paying" me (in shoes or money) to say that?

Finally, is it editorial, advertorial - or something in between - if a blogger is paid (in cash or in kind) to write about it?

Required Reading

FTC Guides Concerning Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertisement

Useful post with commentary about the proposed revised FTC guides by William Slawski

Bloggers, Brands and the New Publishing Paradigm by Stephanie Smirnov* (full disclosure: DeVries PR is my client)

Conflict of interest doesn’t apply to blogs (another reason newspapers are dying) by Penelope Trunk / Brazen Careerist (note: I disagree with many of her assertions but this is very provocative)

Paid to Pitch: Product Reviews by Bloggers Draw Scrutiny - Wall St Journal

Blogola: the FTC Takes on Paid Posts - Business Week

Jessica Smith (aka JessicaKnows) blogs about driving the Ford Flex

FTC to enter social media fray with new guidelines - from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism

* Thanks to Stephanie Smirnov for the links to WSJ and BizWeek.

Redux: Have You Googled Yourself Lately?

2009-05-21T02:33:01-05:00

I’m re-posting an entry I wrote 5 years ago. It still applies. Back then, Googling yourself was a relatively new concept. Now, it’s a truism that Google results are your home page.

Posted May 19, 2004: "Google yourself." That’s today’s pithy two-word tip from personal branding guru William Arruda.

As he puts it: "Being Googled reveals how visible you are on the Web, and visibility (at least among your target audience) is critical to successful personal branding. Your Google results also become useful data points for those who are looking to make decisions about you."

So… I googled him. 24,700 results for Arruda (now 73,600). #1 points to his site.

Then I googled yours truly. 77,900 results (today 143,000). #1 is this blog. Which proves that search engines love blogs. (Update: note that debbieweil.com is a blog AND a site. It’s built on Expression Engine.) This blog (started June 2003) is less than a year old. Whereas my (old) site, WordBiz.com (no longer live), has been up since 1995. I.e. it came up lower in search results.

Here are a few more: Seth Godin: 136,000 results (now 1.77 million). Ralph F. Wilson: 637,000 results (now 944,000). Martin Luther King: 2.48 million results (now 17.6 million). Seamus Heaney (my favorite poet): 76,800 (now 554,000).

Look at the doubling, tripling and exponentially greater increases in search results. Now do you get the explosion of content on the Web that everyone’s talking about?!

Useful Links

Why Google Wants You to Google Yourself (explains why Google wants you to create a "Google profile")

How to Ungoogle Yourself

Create a Google Profile

I googled the phrase Google yourself: 76.2 million results.

Why FriendFeed Is the New Must-Have For Your Social Media Toolbox

2009-05-14T17:35:00-05:00

It's happened overnight. Actually, in the past two weeks, since FriendFeed announced a redesign of their site. Suddenly everybody is subscribing to FriendFeed (I've noticed a significant uptick in new followers) and it's looking like the new "it" tool in the social media toolbox.

Here's why:

1. FriendFeed has made it easier to find and subscribe to other FFers

See the graphic below. It takes a couple of clicks to get to this screen (don't know why they've made it so hard to find). Once you do you can click the Twitter icon, for example, and quickly find out which of your Twitter friends are already using FriendFeed. That's the key, BTW. It's obvious but worth repeating. They have to have a FriendFeed account in order for you to subscribe to theirs. Registration is free.

2. FriendFeed is an aggregator of the most used social media tools

It's about that simple. Once you're following someone on FriendFeed you can see what they're Twittering, posting to their blog, bookmarking on Delicious, submitting to Digg as newsworthy, adding to their YouTube channel, posting to their Flickr photo account, adding to their Facebook page, etc.

3. FriendFeed displays a real-time stream of conversation from your friends

Frankly, it's seductive. New content from your friends, whether from Twitter or Flickr or Delicious, pops up in front of your eyes if you're looking at FriendFeed online. With the new design, you see their comments on your Tweets in a way that makes sense visually.

Caveat: this works because you're allowing all these different services to access your username and password and trade the data back and forth. It's part of what's known as OpenSocial, which is manna for programmers who want to create apps and widgets for Facebook, etc.

Are there privacy risks? No doubt. Is it worth it to access this much information about the friends, colleagues and brands you're most interested in? Maybe.

For now, at least, know that this is the Next New Thing. It's probably worth experimenting with and it's not too hard to jump on the bandwagon.

The Inside Skinny on Washington D.C.’s Top 100 Tech Titans

2009-05-12T19:21:00-05:00

The who's who - and how - of D.C.'s Top 100 Techies is all the buzz in the local tech community: who's on the list, who's not, how wide and/or deep the list is, etc. I was delighted to be named a Tech Titan (see here) but I've been curious... how did editor-at-large Garrett Graff choose 100 noteworthy D.C. techies for the May 2009 issue of Washingtonian?

Below (left to right) are three Tech Titans: Ted Leonsis, Mark Walsh and Jill Foster.

Graff's street cred for compiling such a list is impressive, BTW. He worked for Joe Trippi as Howard Dean's first Webmaster. His first book, The First Campaign (about the digital race for the White House) was reviewed by the New York Times. And he's at work on a second book about the story behind the internationalization of the FBI (based on articles he's written for the magazine here and here.)

Oh and he's 27. Grrr...

Garrett kindly agreed to answer a few questions:

DW: Whose idea was it to create a Tech Titans list for DC?

GMG: We had talked about doing such a list for a while. Who are the people trying to shape the world of technology in greater Washington? We try to do this across a lot of sectors, to give people the knowledge of who they should be watching. As Jack Limpert (long-time Washingtonian editor) says, "You can’t tell the players without a program."

DW: How did you go about it and how long did it take?

GMG: It took about three months to put together. I started with a core of people that are very familiar, names like Ted Leonsis, who were automatic candidates. They're very well connected and influential. What I did was to interview that group and asked them who they considered influential, who did they listen to, who did they pay attention to when they started a new company, who did they invest with.

Then I worked out in ever concentric circles from that group. I probably did about 70 interviews.

DW: Did you have a formula for including the lesser known on the list? For example, if other influencers mentioned their names at least two or three times?

GMG: No, it wasn't a specific number of mentions of anyone that put them on or kept them off the list. There were some people I interviewed who didn't end up making the list themselves.

In researching, interviewing, and reporting the piece, I wasn't looking for a magic threshold of influence. Instead, I focused on the case specifics for each individual and whether there was a compelling reason for that person to appear on the list.

Sometimes people made it on the list because of a single endorsement or conversation and others didn't make the list despite repeated mentions. I won't pretend that it was a highly scientific process, yet it was geared towards producing a list as diverse, wide-ranging, and deep as the tech community here.

(Full disclosure: Garrett did not interview me for the list.)

DW: One of the most interesting things about the list are the five categories you came up with (Entrepreneurs, Industry Leaders, Dealmakers, Politicos and Community and Thought Leaders). They're reflective of how diverse the tech community is here and how diverse working Washington is.

GMG: I didn’t start out with those categories in mind but they evolved over the course of reporting the story. Candidates fit very neatly into one category of another; there was very little overlap.

DW: Shouldn't President Obama be on D.C.'s Tech Titans list?

GMG: We debated that quite a bit...

DW: What surprised you the most in compiling the list?

GMG: I was just amazed at the depth and breadth of the technology sector here. I knew that tech was a big thing going into the piece but I just had no idea how big.

It gave us a ton of (future) story ideas, about companies, ideas and people we should write about in more depth.

Ten years ago, the Washington region was so dominated by AOL, but there's not a single (current) AOL executive on the list. AOL is no longer where the energy is. The talent and money that they lured here has spawned this tremendous network of people and companies and startups.

DW: Were you surprised by the number of Government 2.0 players in town?

GMG: We get so focused on private tech investment but we have all these government CIOS (the DOD has a $38 billion* information technology budget, for example). These are government officials most people have never heard of and they have a tremendous influence on how technology advances based on the spending decisions they make.

DW: Any other comments about compiling the Top Techies?

GMG: One of the funny parts of these lists is that it's vastly more work to compile a list of people than to go out and write an article about a person. You have to so much reporting for each sentence. You end up leaving a tremendous amount on the cutting room floor. This list could have been 200 people. There’s even more depth and breadth that what we were able to capture. We left out green tech and biotech.

DW: I know President Obama is on the cover of the May '09 issue (in much discussed red cutoffs**). But shouldn't the first Blackberry-carrying President also be on D.C.'s Tech Titans list?

GMG: We debated that quite a bit. He certainly has done more to change the perception of government and technology in the last year than anyone else in the world. Ultimately we came down on the side of recognizing the people he's deputized to implement his vision of technology, since he won't be doing it himself.

* Haven't found a link to confirm this but sounds about right.

** Graff, who's worked for the Washingtonian for four years, noted that there has been "a tremendous amount of response to the cover. Thousands of comments by email and phone calls and posted on the website. I've never seen anything like it."

Links to the 100 Tech Titans

I'd love to see the complete list posted with links behind all the names. Has someone done this? Anyone want to volunteer?? Here's the list.

Viral Takes on a New Meaning With Escalating Tweets About Swine Flu

2009-04-30T17:36:00-05:00

It’s not a pandemic yet but you wouldn’t know it from the exponentially growing number of tweets about swine flu and #swineflu and, beginning yesterday, swine flu renamed H1N1. Like many others, I dislike the term "viral" marketing. But there’s an eery aptness to the term this week. This is real time and big time. This is proof of concept for the power and nimbleness of social media - especially Twitter - as a communications strategy.

Ambient awareness ("What are you doing right now?") be damned. There’s much more going on here. Twitterers are trading useful links, like this Q&A about swine flu on CNN.com/Hhealth and a visual reminder to use hand sanitizer. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is/are twittering like mad, @CDCemergency (over 53,000 followers) and @CDCFlu. And take a look at the CDC home page: RSS feeds, email updates, audio/podcasts, video, photos, charts. This is a case study unfolding in real time.

Join Me at BlogWell in NYC on April 29, 2009 for Corporate Blogging Success Stories

2009-04-21T13:10:00-05:00

Update: Yesterday’s BlogWell conference in New York was a huge success. You can read a stream of Tweets about #blogwell. And a great recap on a Squidoo page that parses the event via tweets about the different speakers. One of the highlights was a live performance by comedy duo and Internetainers Rhett and Link. Hilarious. Two Wal-Mart executives sitting near the stage stood up and cheered at the end of their Wal-Mart song. Their Facebook song (which they also performed) has gotten 2.4 million views.

Original Post

I’m delighted to be sponsoring Gas Pedal’s BlogWell conference next week in New York. And I’ll be attending as well. Use "thanksdebbie" as your coupon code when you register and get 10% off.

This half-day conference (1:00 - 5:00 PM at Chelsea Piers) features social media case studies from from GE, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Tyson Foods, Nokia, Johnson & Johnson, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Turner Broadcasting System.

100 lucky attendees will get a copy of my book.

And while we’re on the topic of corporate blogging, take a look at the cool visualization below by VizEdu:

Me 2.0: Over 50? You’re Never Too Old to Be Blogging Your Brand

2009-04-09T11:36:00-05:00

If you're over 40 (or 50, like me), you may think a new book titled Me 2.0 and written by 20-something Dan Schawbel is not for you. Think again. Especially if you're a baby boomer, over 50 and heading into the home stretch of what you hope will be a creative retirement filled with new possibilities.

Dan is young but he's super savvy about a phenomenon called personal branding. The phrase was first used over a decade ago by management guru Tom Peters. If those words set your teeth on edge, bear with me for a moment.

Personal branding these days refers in large part to your digital footprint. How are you showing up on Google? How are you marketing yourself? How are you making yourself stand out online? What if... you're out of work, or you're looking for the next new thing, and you want to get noticed and make yourself stand out from the millions of others who are in the same boat?

Simple. In addition to face-to-face networking, you use every online tactic you can think of, including blogging, Twittering, Facebook, LinkedIn and Slideshare, to create a trail of delicious content for yourself. Dan's terrific new book is filled with specific steps and advice on how to do this. He's packaged them in digestible chapters about Discovering, Creating, Communicating and Maintaining Your Brand.

Fortune's April 13, 2009 cover story, How to Find a Job, includes some of the same tactics, all designed to help you surface and get noticed in today's hidden job market. 90% of vacant positions are not being advertised, according to executive search guru and author David Perry, who's quoted in the article. Also read How I Got the Job in MarketingProfs.

Listen up, folks. Everyone is saying the same thing. "Online" is no longer an extra. It's essential to your professional success, whether you're happily employed (and merely promoting yourself to the higher-ups). Or out of work and looking for a new job.

My advice: read Dan's book.

Useful Link

Q & A with Dan Schawbel by 40-something author David Meerman Scott