David Perez is a Chicago based recruiter for Leo Burnett. He convinced his bosses to let him go to the Cannes Film Festival under one condition: he had to wear a webcam attached to his glasses the entire time and do anything (yes, anything) that his Twitter followers request. Thus, David on Demand was born.

So far, he’s had to get a tattoo of the Twitter fail whale, buy balloons for children, pole dance and generally make a fool of himself in public, all the while talking to his Twitter followers.

David (or rather, by the sound of it, David’s PR people) was kind enough to answer a couple of questions before his trip via email:

Q: Tell us a little about how this idea went from a scheme for a free trip to a legitimate ticket to Cannes.

It is widely known that I have always wanted to go to Cannes. So when I learned about this social media adventure, I quickly volunteered and helped sell it into my boss.

David on Demand is a social media experiment that takes living vicariously to the next level. It is created by Leo Burnett and combines three very important elements in modern marketing – spontaneity, creativity and real-time technology. For 24 hours a day, six days straight, I will be your eyes and ears at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

Q: What I like about this PR stunt is that you are not an actor or an intern, but a creative recruiter. How do you think this will help with recruitment?

It will help recruitment tremendously! Cannes is all about creative talent and networking, and I am the guy who can help people connect the dots. Always wanted to work in advertising? I can show the world not at Cannes what it’s really like and my followers can direct me to talk to people they have always looked up to or want to learn from. Or, people can send me a link to their portfolio and it just may end up in front of key decision makers at Cannes.

Q: Do you have a budget for what you can spend on activities people request on Twitter? What do you want to do the most?

I’m hoping that both advertising enthusiasts and inquisitive consumers take the opportunity to Tweet me to attend the most sought after seminars, meet with creative luminaries, and participate in the award ceremonies. But let’s be honest here, I’m sure people will tell me to jump in a fountain or yell something spontaneously in the middle of a speech. And then you’ll have your crazy boundary-pushing requests that I won’t do. I have limits.

But again, I hope people seize the opportunity to tell me to interview people they want to hear and learn from, send them their portfolios so I can check them out, or help me chart his journey at Cannes so I can deliver what’s going on to the folks back home.

Q: Tell us a bit about what technology you’re using to pull this off.

I am sporting web-enabled glasses, a backpack with a mobile live streaming device, around the clock access to my Twitter feed and a dedicated “on-demand” crew. I will be the most connected man at Cannes! I am wearing a backpack that essentially holds six 3G phones connected to 11 antennas that will grab signals and broadcast his experiences live to David on Demand. I am wearing a camera on my glasses that will take and record everything I do for 24 hours a day for six days. The live feed will be sent to Justin.tv for the world to see. The site actually has three channels – the main screen and two additional angles of David on Demand. Viewers will be able to view the different channels and even see what I experienced earlier in the day.

Thanks, Dave!

I love this stunt. David isn’t a paid actor, nor is he an intern. He’s a fearless recruiter and he’s really entertaining to watch! And if a recruiter is willing to pull a bold, attention getting stunt like this, what does it say about the company? Would you want to work someplace like this? I would.

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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Current: A News Project is a data visualization tool launched last month to give editors and writers a new way to determine which stories have the best chance of being read online. Seeing the potential for communicators to leverage this program to better understand the news cycle, I interviewed Current’s creator and my classmate from ITP, Zoe Fraade-Blanar about her project:

Q: What does the Current stream represent in non-technical terms?
A: This particular tool is pulling the top news stories from Google, which does us the favor of condensing them for us into general topics.  And to find out how the human population is responding it’s using the Google Hot Topics tool, surveying the fastest rising searches in the US every hour.  But there’s no reason any Trending Topics data wouldn’t work here – Twitter would be a favorite.

Q: Explain a bit about how using Current helps a journalist determine “news that matters.”

A: Ah, not even the smartest computer algorithm can replace an editor when it comes to placing value on a story.  What it can do is help one balance their soft and hard coverage.  In a world where a struggling editor might choose to raise their traffic by covering every celebrity scandal, Current lets them identify, say, the two that are most likely to give them the same amount of traffic.  Of course, Current is morally neutral – if you wanted to use a tool like this to generate the most sensational newspaper ever, that’s certainly a completely legitimate use as well!

Q: Although you built Current with news editors in mind, what features might be of interest to PR?

A: One of the interesting observations here is that there are two ways for a news item to make it into the interest stream: they can cause a big enough stir that they spawn their own meme, but they can also piggyback off of an existing meme.  For someone with PR in mind, hitching your topic behind a growing meme is a completely legitimate way to get noticed for companies without the resources to spawn their own.  When PR is pinpointed to what people actually want to know, it’s no longer advertising.  That PR turns into real honest-to-goodness relevant information.  Which is a beautiful thing.

Q: How does Current address a gap in the way we currently perceive news?

A: If Current, and projects like it, are successful, they should actually change the way the News sees news.  Right now it seems like there are two extremes – News media that wants to protect the perfect news coverage on some kind of idealistic pedestal, and News media that wants to use News to drive advertising dollars no matter what the content.  There’s a bit of a grey area in the middle as the pedestal people are forced by the economy to prune coverage areas they don’t excel in, and at the same time there exists an inevitable backlash against the more mercenary model, but the idea here is to give them another alternative.  The survival of News as an industry lies somewhere in the middle.

Q: You spent some time working with the New York Times analytic group before you built this project. What changes are you seeing in the way we value news at a technical level?

A: Of course, the real value for a story is how it changes what people think about a topic, but that’s a tough one to quantify (and of course, impossible to monetize).  A more Machiavellian metric would be the amount of conversions it results in for advertisers, one less so would be general clickthroughs, or clickthroughs from the story to another in-site story.

But I think all these miss the point, which is that some of the most important news is the most boring.  The most successful metric will take into account that some of the most necessary stories will be complete flops when measured by the numbers.  Those stories are what keeps the reader’s trust, even if they don’t keep the reader’s interest.  Like the blank whitespace in a drawing, replace too much of it and the whole becomes unreadable.  So perhaps it might be better to judge the traffic of a section as a whole, than on a story-by-story basis.

Thanks so much to Zoe for her time. You can download Current and try it out for yourself.

If you have any ideas on how Current could be a useful communications tool, please leave a comment.

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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I know this post probably means I won’t be working with Apple anytime soon, but I’ve come to terms with that. I’m not buying the next generation iPhone, and here’s why:

1. I can’t place a normal voice call on ATT from the middle of Manhattan, and Steve Jobs wants me to believe I can make a bandwidth hogging video call. It’s impossible right now.

2. iMovie crashes on my Macbook twice a month and it takes hours to render video. I have a hard time believing it will be any easier on a smaller screen with less processing power.

3. The screen is around six inches wide in landscape mode. I can’t type a text message without predictive text coming to the rescue now, so I imagine precision editing will be impossible.

4. HD video and images sound great, but it can sometimes take several minutes to get a 1 megapixel image to upload on ATT, who, incidentally, timed their bandwidth cap announcement to provide a major counter-bummer to the excitement of iPhone week.

I’m sure that many of you will disagree and that Apple will still sell millions of them this month alone. But I won’t be one of the people in line. Instead, I’ll just check another day off my calendar until my ATT contract expires.

UPDATE (7/16): Yeah, I think I was right on this one.

As a communicator, how do you envision using the new features to improve your work flow?

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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Internet genius (a phrase I use with sincerity here) Clay Shirky released his new book this week, titled Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (affiliate link). I have heard Clay speak many times over the last several years on this topic in addition to taking his class at NYU, and there are few people who can explain the social community phenomenon better than he.

Communicators – this book will give you valuable insight into why people share as much information as they do online, provide case studies that explain how and where people connect and educate you about online group behavior.

Here’s Cory Doctorow’s review on Boing Boing, which concludes:

The last chapter of the book is a kind of roadmap for building your own structures for enabling participation, drawn from Clay’s long history of teaching and consulting, and it’s as practical as the rest is theoretical.

Cognitive Surplus continues to prove that Clay Shirky is one of the best thinkers and advocates the net has. It’s a delight to read and will change how you think about the future.

Want to know where Clay copes with information overload? Check out this recent feature from the Atlantic.

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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In my last post, I discussed 10 rewards for companies that are early adopters of social media. There’s another side to this that I want to address separately: the biggest risks companies face when jumping into an unknown community.

Failure
Of course this is the big one, but it’s easily avoided. Failure means that the brand comes in and behaves like it does on other platforms instead of understanding what the community wants. Don’t regurgitate. Innovate.

Mistakes
Or better put, not learning from mistakes. Your brand will make mistakes. But the inability to learn and adapt is where the risk is.

Criticism
Many social networks are communities of friends, whether they know each other in real life or just virtually. To have these trust networks overwhelmed by brands trying to market or sell them products often feels like an invasion of privacy.

Platform Never Gains Popularity
One of the biggest risks in a young social network is that it might not take off in the way you expect. It’s not as much of an issue for individuals. But for companies, there’s a lot of time and effort invested in building a new presence (and integrating that presence across multiple places).

Audience Not Ready
Or rather, your audience isn’t. Maybe the people you care about communicating with aren’t part of this group yet. It’s likely that the demographic makeup of the new platform is not in sync with your brand’s audience.

No strategy
In the rush to be “first,” did you forget to determine your objective for being there in the first place? This happened time and again with Second Life, Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages, which now lay dormant.

Small Audience
A nascent social network consists of people that like to be the first to try something, people that sign in once and then don’t come back, and friends of founders. If you get in too early, you risk spending too much time building relationships with too few people. That time might be better spent on a larger, more established platform.

Measuring ROI
You can’t at first. What you can do, however, is determine what is important to your organization and begin by measuring that. You can help co-create tools that others can use to evaluate what success might look like, as Hubspot has done for Twitter.

Losing Your Star Employee(s)
This is one of those inevitable risks that I think is worth it. We’ve watched some of the brightest early adopters move on from the companies they once championed to other ventures. Giving employees the opportunity to experiment, grow and share your brand socially has the added effect of creating valuable employees that are sought after by your competitors. And sometimes, they will move on.

No Precedent
What are the rules governing your employees’ use of new platforms? Some companies, so eager to be first, forget to set rules for use that their employees can follow, and as a result, end up with more trouble than they anticipated.

What do you think? Are the rewards worth the risks? More important, what are some other big risks companies need to consider?

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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One of the best parts about going to social media conferences is seeing which case studies the “experts” draw from. In the beginning, many pulled from the same four or five case studies (Dell, Starbucks, Blendtec, Comcast…).

Now, the gates have opened up and it’s more interesting, in many cases, to look at the companies who AREN’T using social media. But here’s a short list I put together of the 10 biggest rewards for getting involved with social media early:

Mainstream Media Attention
If your brand is among the first to establish a presence on a new media platform, you can be sure it’s going to generate a bit of mainstream press. Of course this is beneficial, but it can also work against a brand when this is its sole purpose.

Community Goodwill
On most platforms, community members are happy to see the brands they interact with on a daily basis join their community. I have had many positive experiences interacting with @JetBlue on Twitter, so much so that I will look for customer service there before I try a phone call or airport desk.

Reputation
Early adopters earn a reputation as forward thinkers. I haven’t read much about Starbucks actually employing any of the recommendations from MyStarbucksIdea, but their reputation among marketers and PR people is strong based on the establishment of this feedback platform.

Leniency
One brand has to make the first foray, and in doing so, it will probably make some mistakes. Those that aren’t yet participants will seize the opportunity to lambast the brand for its mistake but community members are much more forgiving for those who at least try.

New Communications Channel
In this era of evolving social networks, first mover advantage allows those that jump in to capture the interest and attention of its customers and partners before the competition.

ROI
Determining ROI is a challenge regardless of when one enters a new arena where measurement is still untested. I would argue that the first brands in can help set establish these standards and many others will join.

Thought Leadership
New social media platforms offer a new theme for executives, a new audience for presentations and a new opportunity to communicate directly with stakeholders.

Popularity Within Company
Social media provides those employees who spearhead related programs a more visible role within the company. I’ve seen this take shape in many ways: more face time with the CEO, a more prominent role at events and a seat at the table on initiatives spanning many departments (HR, Legal, Communications, etc.)

Ability to Experiment
With the right attitude, every new social media platform allows companies to experiment with new ways to engage key audiences. Some will work and some won’t, but trying something new before a competitor offers many brand managers to push the envelope.

Fun Party Trick
While this may sound tongue in cheek, do not underestimate the value of being able to say, “You’re not on Foursquare?” or “We used QR Codes in our latest campaign” before the journalists, marketers or competitors know what that actually means.

What would you add/subtract from this list?

Stay tuned for my next post on the 10 Risks for Social Media Early Adopters.

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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I recently spoke to four different start-ups in the social analytics space, all looking for insight into what features are most important for perspective buyers (PR agencies and their clients).

If I still worked at an agency (and had the weight of Fortune 500 companies behind me), here are the features I would insist upon from my vendor:

Client View/Agency View: There should be a way for an account team to share graphs and data with a client without exposing them to the back-end. This is both for convenience and to ensure they don’t mess it up.

Outstanding Support Forums: Strong documentation as well as a community space where developers and users can share best practices and provide feedback. I find Apple phone support utterly useless, but I can often find the answers I’m looking for submitted by other users in their hosted forums off the website.

Dummy Proof Analytics: Ideally, social media analytics software would be set up by a dedicated social media person within the agency. In reality though, it’s set up by entry-level account team members charged with tracking coverage across all mediums. Furthermore, an agency with 50 clients needs a solution that they can customize for every account, and that can be altered without much effort based on a client’s ever-changing needs. Most of the current services do not support this type of interaction with the product.

Minimal Training Investment: See above. There are already a host of tools an agency expects its employees to learn. Adding one to the list should still result in an overall savings of time (and therefore, money). Do not build the software with a front end that requires someone with an advanced degree and years of analytics research.

Real Time Reporting: There are typically two times when PR people need to share reports with clients — at the end of the day/week of a product launch, or the end of the month. Make it easy to deliver analytics based on both these timeframes.

Incredible Spam Filters: Most analytics services will boast about the millions of blogs/Twitter feeds/Facebook fan pages that they source. They neglect to indicate what percentage of those are splogs, Tweetbots or otherwise junk.

Easy Data Export: Yes, I am capable of making a screen capture, but it would be awesome if my expensive software made it easy to export different types of graphs for my report, which is typically built in Microsoft Word. Or export the highlights to an Excel spreadsheet. I don’t need the names and readership of all 5,000 blogs that referenced my client, just the top data points. That’s all the managers often care about, anyway.

Accurate Sentiment Analysis: What some developers don’t understand is that the mom who blogs about her baby might have two readers (grandma and grandpa), but if it mentions the client it goes into a report at the end of the month and gets treated with the same weight as TechCrunch. This is incredibly inefficient. When the client sees that someone has referenced the company negatively, they invest thousands of dollars in billing hours investigating the blog, building a relationship and passing all correspondence up and down the management food chain. This could be avoided with a bit more research invested into creating more accurate sentiment analysis tools.

What else? If you work at for an agency (PR, Marketing, Advertising), what are the features you think are missing from your current product suite?

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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Situation

I wanted to start a new blog to share links, graphics, photos and other interesting nuggets encountered during my endless hours of Internet research, which my wife refers to as “piddling around.”

I created a new scrapblog using Posterous, an upstart blogging platform that was all the rage in social media circles two months ago.

During the next two weeks I added a link or so a day, but didn’t tell anyone about it. You can imagine my surprise then when I checked my Feedburner statistics and saw this:

611 subscribers! Woo-hoo!

Analysis

Then reality set in. Impossible. There’s no way anyone knows about this blog. I started digging through the analytics and discovered that nearly all my subscriptions came from Friendfeed, a popular aggregation tool of social networking sites that was recently acquired by Facebook.

Since I only had about 150 collective views, it was totally impossible that so many people had “subscribed” to my blog. They hadn’t even seen the content! Apparently when I added the new blog to my Friendfeed profile, they were automatically counted as individual subscribers by Feedburner since my new posts appear on my Friendfeed page.

These aren’t actual subscribers. The majority of these users won’t view my blog or my content, as you can see:

Lesson

A little bit of Googling revealed that I’m not the first to discover this discrepancy. But when I talk to clients about measuring social media ROI, I now have a great example of why counting subscribers, comments or page views aren’t valuable metrics. They are all easy to artificially inflate with no effort.

Most social media savvy clients accept this in theory, but continue to have a difficult time selling the concept to management. My hope is that more stories like this will illustrate the value of new metrics. While there is still no standard, the pressure is on for companies like Radian6 and Visible Technologies, now armed with several years of data and statistical samples, to demonstrate their value in 2010.

Have your social media success metrics changed in the last 12 months? If so, how? Please share in the comments.

The below links are referenced in this post:

Aaron’s Posterous blog
Aaron’s Tumblr blog
Friendfeed
Feedburner
Google Results for “Friendfeed AND Feedburner”

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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Soldiers: These are the commenters who enjoy being the first to comment, even if they have nothing to say. Soldiers comments are typically encouraging but lack substance. They include phrases such as, “great post,” “interesting,” and “nice work.” Soldiers are always polite. Their comments are short and serve more of an acknowledgment that they read the post or visited the blog rather than substantive or thought provoking. If your blog had a “like” button, they would probably just click it. Most bloggers, myself included, appreciate these comments. They are at least one form of feedback that people are reading our posts.

Contributors: These are the most sought after types of commenters by most bloggers. This group might not leave a lot of comments around the blogosphere but when they do, they are worth reading. Contributors comments push forward the conversation started by the blog post. They can be both positive and negative, but they add substance to the conversation. These people are most likely to also retweet or otherwise share the post with their online networks.

Link Baiters: Most similar to Soldiers, link baiters objective is to try and build their own site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by creating a new incoming link from your blog. They are selfish, thinking of their own interests before the blogger’s. Link baiters comments are short and often plug something that they’ve written on a similar topic. Many marketers try to behave as contributors but, especially when they start out, end up as link baiters instead.

Trolls: The Wikipedia definition works here: “a troll is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.”

Spammers: Most spammers are actually bots that post off-topic comments on a blog to promote a commercial site, typically a pharma or porn site. Again, I’ll reference Wikipedia for a pretty good definition: It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target. Adding links that point to the spammer’s web site artificially increases the site’s search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer’s commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.

I’d like to consider myself a Contributor, but I often end up as more of a Solider. I want my friends and other bloggers to know that I’ve stopped by to read their posts. However, I often feel short on time and end up just posting a quick sentence or two instead of something more substantive. I’m going to work on that in the next year.

What am I missing? Let’s expand this list. Also let us know what type of commenter you are and why.

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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I hear a lot of people that are looking for jobs discouraged right now. There’s a belief that most companies shut down their HR departments between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

If that’s what most companies do, take advantage of this lull and increasing your own recruiting efforts at a time when your competitors are slowing down.

Even if you don’t want to hire until after the new year, use this time to search for new talent.

• Request resumes
• Conduct preliminary interviews
• Brainstorm new ways to find candidates (Twitter, social networks, professional organizations)

This strategy not only separates your from the competition, but it also encourages job seekers at a time when they need it most.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is not just about timely donations and greenwashing products. It’s about showing your company cares. This might be an excellent way to do it, especially if you’re on this list.

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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