Open The Dialogue

• Over on Twitter, MarketingProfs point out a great item from Mack Collier, who suggests that we're all becoming extroverts. And by all, he means, people well beyond the "usual suspects" in the Web 2.0 space. (TB)
• Between this mention on Twitter from Constantin Basturea regarding "complaints" on FOX's "Family Guy" and Doyle Redland's rant on ranters at The Onion (probably NSFW for some of you), I'd say that someone's trying to say a little something-something about complainers on the Internet. (TB)
• Thomson Reuters has issued a new code of conduct for employees of the merged company, some of which touch on blogging. While it's apparently alright to mention you work for T-R on your blog you are restricted from mentioning competitors as well as any conflicts you might have with fellow employees or the company itself. (CT)

Posted by Tom Biro at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wake up, publishers, developers, and PR people. RSS doesn't mean a thing to the "users" of the Internet.

This morning, Adam Ostrow published an awesome essay at Mashable! about RSS and its (mis)use, entitled "RSS Needs An Easy Button," and I seriously couldn't agree more. If I stopped doing all the other great work I get to do at this agency and focused on one part of it, it would be the inclusion of, and education on, RSS to the masses.

When I say the masses, I don't mean those of us probably reading this blog, Mashable!, TechCrunch and a host of others. I mean my mom, my sister, Chris Thilk's family, and those of all of our friends and family who use the Internet regularly but don't have a clue what that little orange (or whatever) icon means and how to use it. To this day, it still continues to fail to work like 99% of the rest of the Internet does when you click on it, and only those who have those RSS links take you to a page explaining RSS and offering a host of feeds and ways to use the feeds manage to take a step towards solving this problem.

Sure, a lot of us are using RSS feeds every day, and we know how powerful it can be and how it truly allows you to scale on a huge level. Every single "boot camp" that our DialogueMedia team does with an MWW Group staffer or a client's PR / marketing team that goes through RSS is met with an "OMIGOSH, howcome I wasn't taught about how to use this in college?" when it's people fresh out of school or "WOW, so I can subscribe to ALL of this content, sort it, and manipulate it this way on my mobile, desktop, or on the Web?" And yet, unless you're running a new versioned browser (and trust me developers, the MASSES are not using IE7 and unfortunately not consistently using Safari or Firefox or one of the others that knows what to "do" with RSS once it's clicked on.

Back in late 2005 I slammed the people behind the "redesign" of the RSS icon to the nifty little square most of us are probably seeing in the address bar right now, and how they were missing the point. Well guess what, nothing has TRULY changed. It's two and a half years later, almost, and what HAS changed? Well, anyone with a new browser is at least greeted with a page showing you that there are ways to use it and it doesn't react by throwing a ton of code up on the page. Other than that, it might work sort of like a multimedia link does, opening up a second piece of software if a feedreader is installed on the computer, or if Outlook were auto-configured to snag feeds when people clicked on them. Oooh. And RSS adoption has moved like molasses that's going slightly downhill rather than on a flat countertop.

At the end of the day, I am not sure what the best "solution" is for this problem - which is widespread, frankly - but I think it's up to a lot of "us" to figure it out. Publishers and developers need to consistently have an "explanation" for what it is on their site, or an easy link, and that should come out of the box with blogging and CMS software. Major publishers need to either better explain how people can get their news and information on their terms. Sites like Yahoo! and AOL's portals do a great job of incorporating RSS use into their "My" pages, but not everyone is sure that that's what they're looking at - great start, but there's more work to do.

This last part begs me to ask the question as to whether publishers and others are lax to move on RSS as a subscriber option because they know that right now, the "masses" are still coming to their site, clicking around, surfing through this and that, and that would all but change significantly. Obviously I don't want to be so cynical about it, but could that be a reason, or will that be a reason of concern once the advent of RSS and its true impact reaches a boardroom somewhere?

From a development standpoint, I'm not sure what needs to be done, exactly, but any way to make it a little less "odd" of a thing on the page - and trust me, having it in the address bar is nice, but people STILL don't know what to do with it - would be my best recommendation.

As far as PR people go, why hasn't RSS gotten its due in every single "tech & lifestyle" section of every single daily newspaper in America, and I'm not talking about in the "ask a question" column? Want to get people to start using it and be able to hold their attention better? Let them know it actually exists in the first place. RSS, in THIS form, isn't SUPPOSED to be invisible, at least not yet. Get it to the point where when you say "RSS," "feeds," or something like that a blank stare isn't the response when you're speaking with people are pretty big Internet users but not super technically savvy. RSS can distribute to my TiVo, power your My Yahoo! page, and make widgets work left and right, but until someone has a clue of what to do with the damn link on some crazy large percentage of pages on the ENTIRE Internet, its usage will never be what it should be.

Posted by Tom Biro at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Tom Biro at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New research from Nuance Care Solutions brings to light a number of interesting statistics on how social media is playing into consumer attitudes:

• 72 percent say they research a company's customer service reputation online prior to making a purchase.


• 74 percent are actually basing their decisions on who to do business with based on what they find.


• 59 percent use social media to express their frustrations with their customer service experiences.


• Only 33 percent say they think companies take complaints voiced online seriously, though a couple brands in particular were singled out as doing a good job along these lines.

This study also identifies the gaping void that exists for companies to pay attention to what's being said about them online and interact there in order to solve problems. Problems are only problems as long as they remain unsolved, and posts with complaints are going to be updated with positive resolutions, but only if someone's listening and reacting.

Along these same lines, Leigh Householder has a good post up on monitoring Twitter as a way to identify brand reputation management issues that might be floated there before being turned into full-fledged posts detailing all the problems someone has with a company.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

• Wired is working on a journalistic stylebook that's specific to online writing, focusing on things like best linking practices and web-specific terminology. Seems like a great idea that's long overdue. (CT)
• The Wall Street Journal gives a "Blog Relations 101" lesson to its readers, but also includes a mention of Twitter, which is where it probably lost a lot of people. [via Todd] (CT)
• Some good corporate blogging tips from Jason Falls. [via John Cass] (CT)
• Greg Verdino correctly identifies the "Ooo...ads...let's go somewhere else" syndrome that seems to afflict a good number of free online platforms as soon as monetization is introduced. (CT)
• More thoughts, this time from Lee Odden, on using SEO as a PR tool. (CT)

Posted by Chris Thilk at 04:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Well ladies and gents, we're already up to Volume 2 of the How Not To Be Annoying On The Internet series, and this time I'm addressing the issue of the search box clearing itself out after you click "Search" on Technorati, versus not clearing itself out on any other Search Engine out there.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I have always found it useful having the contents of the search box still there and it strikes me as odd that it isn't on Technorati. Just my $.02. As for the "annoying," that's just a simple way to round up the myriad frustrations, oddities, and other sorts of things that strike us all on the Web every day, so please don't take it personally, anyone who we might happen to feature here!

Posted by Tom Biro at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm sure everyone who has devised and executed a social media campaign, particularly one involving outreach to writers of blogs and other sites, has been asked to provide some sort of metric to justify such efforts. Often what's asked for are pageviews or visitors or (gulp) impressions.

But here's the story I tell all the time when people ask about my personal site's reach: I get, on MMM, about 800 hits to the site a day. But a good amount of those come in, via searches, to posts I wrote months, if not years ago. So if you're including MMM in your blog outreach plans and you're basing its inclusion on that 800 +/- daily visits, you need to know that not all those 800 people are coming in through the front door.

That means some portion of that overall number of people are not seeing whatever you've just pitched me - yet - though some of them are. Unlike overall visitor numbers we can tell who's hitting the front page. That is one advantage of the web versus traditional metrics like overall circulation - we can see how people move around on a site.

The 1,000+ people who subscribe to my RSS feed, though, definitely are. That's because via the feed they're always seeing the most recent content and updates, and they're seeing them at a time of their choosing, whatever time they've blocked off to catch up on their reading. But I don't think RSS subscriber numbers is something that's often asked for or included when measuring success. This despite the fact that, based on my experience, far more publishers make their RSS subscriber numbers visible on their sites - largely through a FeedBurner chicklet - than make their site visit stats publicly viewable.

The same rings true here on OTD, where the number of people snagging the RSS feed vastly outstrip the number of hits to the site.

Considering there's such a demand for numbers as a means to justify online public relations efforts; and considering there seem to be more publishers who use that FeedBurner number on their sites; and considering that number translates into a higher percentage of the audience that's going to see the successful results of your outreach, I think it's past time to start factoring RSS numbers into the numbers agencies provide to clients.

Now I'll be the first to state that swapping one number for another does little or nothing to address the fact that influence in a particular vertical niche or community held by one person does not always correlate to certain numbers. But aside from anecdotal impressions given by those familiar with the online space there isn't much we can do to back that up. Numbers are always more reassuring since that's how traditional media has always been measured and that's what people are looking for.

So as long as it's numbers being asked for it's incumbent on those of us navigating the online space on behalf of our clients to provide the best ones available. Considering all the factors above it seems to me RSS subscribers is probably one of the better numbers we can provide.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 02:09 PM | Permalink

Accompanied by the level of detail you’d expect from two Forrester analysts, Groundswell lays out case after case of strategies, rationales and insight that show either the groundswell in action or how a yet to be tapped community can be moved to create that groundswell.

The authors begin by laying out why it’s important to know what the groundswell is capable of. After all it’s often made up of customers or employees, two groups that are infinitely more valuable to a business’ success than whomever is occupying the CMO chair this week. These groups have the tools – in the form of message boards, blogs, social networks and more – to influence others either positively or negatively based on their experiences with your brand, product or staff.

From there Bernoff and Li go into tactics to turn existing groundswells to the advantage of the company, and that’s the central tenet of the rest of the book. After explaining what the groundswell can do for or to your business they then provide strategies, advice and tactics on how to know what’s being said, contribute to the conversation in a meaningful manner and energize the people who live in the groundswell.

Each chapter takes a slightly different tack on this, which makes it easy for brand marketers or others to find the section of the most relevance to what they need to accomplish and see what others have done by way of case studies and benefit from the authors’ thinking along these specific lines.

While much of the research that goes into the thinking that drives Groundswell is only alluded to or conveyed via quotes from others at Forrester, Bernoff and Li (and the firm as a whole) also use their Social Technographics Profile as a central – and publicly available – resource. That tool allows you to see, based on Forrester research, whether a particular demographic is filled more with Creators, Critics, Collectors or any of the other distinct groups the firm has identified. This tool informs the vast majority of the book so it’s good to familiarize yourself with the labels it uses and the data behind it in order to get the most out of the book itself.

Groundswell is one of those books that should be included in every corporate communications professional’s Christmas stocking. There may be marketing people out there who still think online engagement with consumers or other groups isn’t worth it but they won’t feel that way after reading the book. Instead they’ll likely be scared into some sort of action.

And that’s why Groundswell also needs to be read by the people lower down the ladder. When someone comes to them saying the company needs to create a Facebook application “NOW!” they need to be able to keep the analytical mindset exemplified by Li and Bernoff and ask simple but hard questions like “But is that where are customers are?” Doing so – and having the data to back up their questions – will save a lot of wasted time and money.

Groundswell is recommended without qualification.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 12:00 PM | Permalink

Okay, here's the first installment of what I hope to make a regular occurrence here at Open the Dialogue, and I'm officially calling it "How Not To Be Annoying On The Internet." [Thanks, Chris!] Of course, HNTBAOTI as an acronym doesn't exactly roll off your tongue, but whatever. We'll be using Flickr Video to offer up sub-90 second videos / screencasts (and yes, that's a GOOD limit to have), and the first volume is one of my personal favorites, turning off the nifty autoplay feature. It's like turning off the keytones on your cellphone 30 seconds after purchasing a new phone, except...well, it's just not on a cellphone.

In any case, without further ado, here we go.

Hope you enjoyed this installment, and we'll hope to bring you more soon!

[ed: and before you ask, I did the screencast using SnapzProX on my iMac, and converted the file down to Web-ready using Apple's QuickTime Pro. The original file version wasn't working on upload but the converted, m4v file, did, so give that a whirl if you're unable to get .mov files working at first.]

Posted by Tom Biro at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

• Forrester's Shar VanBoskirk helpfully reminds us that digital and interactive are not necessarily the same thing, with the latter promising some point of actual engagement and interactivity.
• Also from Forrester comes Josh Bernoff reminding corporate bloggers that it's actually more disingenuous to refuse to even acknowledge you have competitors than it is dangerous to ignore that reality.
• A "Facebook strategy" might not be the best thing for every company - that's just a fact - but that doesn't mean proposals along those lines should be dismissed out of hand since there's still good information to be gleamed from the users there.
• Steve Hall has some informal feedback on new media trust and other related issues based on a panel he attended.
• Between the New York Times confirming my belief that blogging is going to kill me and Time's release of its very first Top 25 Blog Index (translation: a bunch of sites that will now appear on a lot of lists built after someone issues a "let's get this on the blogs" list) I'm losing a lot of my belief that mainstream media can cover the online world effectively and respectfully.
• Get this - the smaller scale and better opportunities for niche audiences to find the content makes online the perfect venue for small scale video series that have niche audience appeal. I'm not poking at Mark Glaser on this but instead that this keeps being forgotten as series are drawn over to TV that have no chance of survival on TV.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apologies to Steven Wright, the source of the quote I used for the title.

I've talked often about John Frost and his passion for Disney and how that's a great example of someone who has built a following just talking about something he loves. Not only that, he's a great brand ambassador for Disney because of that.

It's that passion that's on display as he expresses his love for the "It's a Small World" ride and his displeasure over what's being done to it in the name of reinvention. Read his whole piece here.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's not much that hasn't already been said about the findings from Pew on how young people are getting their news not so much directly from the source but from friends - through the filters of email, social networks and other tools. But with a few days perspective and the appearance of other stories that offer additional insights into similar stories a fuller picture can be painted of the latest water-line we've reached in the evolution of news and community.

Take for instance the increased focus on creating "appealing content" by journalists in the recent PRWeek/PR Newswire Media Survey. Add to that the 73 percent that now say they turn to blogs as part of their research efforts. Even if it is just to "measure sentiment" that's a significant number of writers that new touch base with social media outlets in order to get a sense of what's being said on a topic as they're writing their own stories. And add to that the fact that more journalists are being tasked with re-purpose their stuff for online and you get a feeling that, even if the corporations they work for aren't quite sure of where they need to go, the men and women in the trenches know exactly what they need to survive as both employees and media brands.

One group of writers that won't be working harder are movie critics, an industry that continues to be decimated by cutbacks as movie conversations shift to blogs and fan sites. While there is a bit of a case to be made that the loss of professional critics will hurt smaller movies that need critical praise to survive, I don't think the serious film community is exactly going to be hurt. Plenty of niche sites exist that appeal to this crowd and the better films still make it to mainstream sites.

I wonder, though, if that situation could have been avoided if the professional critics that looked down on fan enthusiasm had instead gotten in the conversation more and engaged with online writers. If they had spent some time building relationships and gotten to know people would that have led to more links back to their reviews, leading to more links back to the sites in general and so on. I don't know if that would have been successful but it certainly would have done a lot to avoid the "critics are out of touch in their ivory towers" attitude that has become pervasive over the course of the last number of years.

You still have surveys showing print publications are more trusted than online sources, though honestly the data isn't sliced and diced enough in this MediaVest survey to show how opinions might vary by age group.

One way some major media companies are attempting to do that is by partnering with niche publishers, most often with advertising or content networks. But these aren't conversational tactics, their branding efforts. That's better than nothing but it's also limiting in some regards because there's still no opportunity for interaction with the people behind the brands.

The Internet is changing how we pull content into our days and how we interact with that content. From the way we research obscure trivia to finding and donating to political campaigns to what we get for our concert ticket money our expectations of content availability to how we think journalists will find information.

There's value in creating your own experience, though there's also some in having an experience defined by so-called experts. But people are, because communications are no longer limited by geography or even niche interest, finding the experts most relevant to them and latching on tightly. And that shift is only going to increase as new technologies develop.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In case anyone was wondering, this chart wonderfully represents why I love the fact that we use wikis internally - and occasionally externally - for collaboration.

Posted by Chris Thilk at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)