Open The Dialogue

Time to turn all these open tabs in Google Chrome into fun links for you!  As always, we’re sharing these on Twitter and FriendFeed.

• Vanity metrics vs. Actionable metrics – Eric Ries talks about really making measurement work and solving problems, not just finding numbers that don’t mean a whole lot.  For example, you have 5 billion page views?  Great.  Why?  How?

• Human Motivation & Your Brand – I’m glad more people are looking at the psychology behind marketing.  It helps us do our jobs better and more effectively.  There are reasons behind why people share things on Facebook.  Match these needs up first with your objectives and then go from there.

• Want to slap a Creative Commons license on your Facebook content?  There’s an app for that.

• The GOOG is riding the Wave and re-thinking how we communicate on the web.  It makes sense, things like IM and e-mail are relatively archaic.  OR:  is this the “Google Operating System”?

• More legal fun.  Can you copyright a tweet?  Maybe.

• State of the Hispanic blogosphere report 2009.  Spain leads the pack.

• Be there before the sale.  Why are we still using the word “campaigns” if this world is supposed to be built on long-term, sustained relationships?

• Some Wikipedia-foo on interpersonal ties (via dave):

In mathematical sociology, interpersonal ties are defined as information-carrying connections between people. Interpersonal ties, generally, come in three varieties: strong, weak, or absent. Weak social ties, it is argued, are responsible for the majority of the embeddedness and structure of social networks in society as well as the transmission of information through these networks. Specifically, more novel information flows to individuals through weak rather than strong ties. Because our close friends tend to move in the same circles that we do, the information they receive overlaps considerably with what we already know. Acquaintances, by contrast, know people that we do not, and thus receive more novel information.

• The Grey Lady hired a “social media editor” to be a guiding light for their journalists on the web.  The cynics (myself included) were loud on this one.  Thankfully, David Kaplan took some time to give Jennifer Preston some solid advice.

• Facebook crosses 60mm monthly U.S. users but fewer people over 55 are using the site on a regular basis.

• GigaOm throws their hat into the premium content ring with GigaOm Pro:  ”created to address the gap that exists in real-time expert industry analysis on emerging technology markets.”  Seems moderately attractive for only $79.  See also ReadWriteWeb’s Guide to Community Management & TechCrunch’s trend reporting.

Susan Getgood is the founder of GetGood Strategic Marketing, advising organizations on integrated social media outreach and internet marketing strategies. She also leads corporate workshops on social media and blogger relations. She is a frequent speaker at social media and public relations conferences around the country, including New Comm Forum, BlogHer ‘09 and Mom 2.0 Summit. Her blog, Marketing Roadmaps, is an analysis of current trends, best practices and campaign mishaps. You can also follow her on Twitter at @sgetgood. – AB

Journalists are third-part observers. It is their job to report and analyze the news. Generally, they are paid employees of a media property, online or off. A set of norms for engagement between public relations professionals and journalists has evolved over the years, and the parties know the rules.

Bloggers, especially personal bloggers, are individuals writing about their lives and things they are care about. Politics. Their families. The environment. Hobbies. They write about their passions, not your products. However, bloggers are increasingly influential both with each other and with an audience of readers. They are also your customers. These are two good reasons for a company to reach out to them with news and special promotions.

But, as we’ve learned over the past few years, it is not a good idea to reach out to bloggers using the same techniques we use to contact journalists. News pitches, the lifeblood of the reporter, generally aren’t as effective as stories that relate the product to the blogger’s life and interests. We often use the term relevance to refer to this aspect of the process, but I think it needs to be more than just relevant. Your story needs to add value to the blog; you give the blogger (or tweeter) something relevant to her interests that she wants to pass on because it is just that good.

The other thing that is a bit different from working with journalists is the relationship. While we may be friendly with journalists, there’s an arm’s length component that stems from those norms I mentioned earlier. It isn’t the same thing with the blogger. Your customer.

I described it to someone yesterday that journalists are often looking for the reason to mistrust what you say. What aren’t you telling them? Your customer, on the other hand, is looking for reasons to like you. Tell me why this is good. Why I should use it for my family. There is an inherent trust in the relationship that we must be doubly careful not to abuse with poor pitches, spam and other relationship stupidities.

Now, I’m pretty sure the folks at MWW know better so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on the mechanics. You don’t need me to tell you not to use mail merge software to spam large lists of bloggers pulled from databases. That you need to read the blogs over time, and especially just before you send a pitch. That you don’t welsh on offers for review product. That you don’t ask bloggers to write. And so on.

What we need to focus on is building stories that put our products into the blogger’s context, not expect him to fashion his blog posts around our needs. That’s how we’ll do excellent blogger relations.

Two additional pieces of advice. First, bloggers don’t need it to be new, just relevant. That opens up all sorts of possibilities for your brands. Don’t limit your blogger outreach to product launches and special promotions. Think about how you can be reaching out all the time in appropriate ways.

Second, PR people usually get the need for honesty, transparency and clarity in these relationships. That’s one element that is totally consistent with the journalistic model. Where sometimes they have trouble with blogger relations is incorporating the passion, in speaking to the emotions of the customer, not just about features. Ad people get this, but they can’t resist the hype. Find the balance.

[I’ve used the term blogger, but we are really referring to any customer actively engaged as a creator in social media – blogs, Twitter, social networks like Facebook etc.]

[Editor: Check back soon to read an interview with Susan about social media, some best case studies and her advice to women and new PR practitioners.)

Jesse Thomas and Brian Solis chart the different applications that help utilize Twitter for all its different uses.  These are all applications that exist due to Twitter and are appropriately visualized to be in its “gravity well”.  According to Solis’ post:

. . . this map visually charts the important tools to help communications, service, marketing, and community professionals more effectively navigate, engage, analyze and measure participation on Twitter.

The layout looks promising and I would suggest that proximity of the applications to the center of the twitterverse also mean something, perhaps popularity based on number of users for the application.  Click on the image for the full size version.

Twitterverse by Jesse Thomas and Brian Solis

Elisa Camahort Page is one of the co-founders of the women blogging organization, BlogHer, along with Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins. Elisa has been a marketing executive for 18 years in Silicon Valley, and currently leads all events, marketing and public relations for BlogHer.

Prior to BlogHer, Elisa ran Worker Bees, a marketing consultancy company. Elisa can be found on several blog, including: Worker Bees Blog, where she writes about marketing, social media, customer service and web 2.0 initiatives; Healthy Concerns, where she writes about health 2.0 and healthcare from the patient’s point of view; and Elisa’s Green Scene, a collection of green news in areas from design to cooking to politics.

In addition to the BlogHer events, Elisa is also a frequent speaker, having made recent appearances at SXSW and Fem2.0.

-AB

DM: BlogHer’s fourth annual conference is coming up in less than two months. What’s new on the agenda that attendees can look forward to?

ECP: Every year we try to mix it up, so there are indeed new topics on the agenda, such as:
• A travelblogging session
• Sessions around healthcare and medblogging
• A mini-writing workshop from Katie Orenstein of the Op-Ed Project
• An ongoing Geek Lab with presentations, tutorials and the opportunity to just informally connect and hack solutions all day long

When creating the schedule for the conference, what are your goals? What do you hope bloggers get out of the conference?

Our goal is truly to have something for everyone, to feature new, fresh, diverse voices, and to highlight the true diversity and quality to be found at every corner of the blogosphere. We hope bloggers walk away from every session with something they want to do, to try, to talk about, to tell someone about or to share.

Last year, the New York Times story became a bit of a scandal, but I was intrigued by the title of the piece, “Blogging’s Glass Ceiling.” Do you think BlogHer and women have broken a ceiling by blogging? If so, how?

Blogging provides the opportunity for every person to have their own personal platform to use as they wish. Some people use it purely for personal expression and connecting with friends and family. Others use it to promote their ideas and their work. Still others want to parlay their blogs into businesses. Blogging is just the tool. A very accessible and powerful tool. It’s your intent that defines what you can do with it. So yes, many women have had breakthrough facilitated, even precipitated by their blogs! Still others have simply discovered they are not alone with whatever issues they’re dealing with. It’s all good.

What do you think is the biggest barrier for women bloggers or for women who want to become bloggers?

Well, again, it entirely depends on what they want to achieve. There is certainly no barrier to get started. Many tools are even free, so you could start a blog on the computers at your local library. From there, this question could be answered many different ways. Certainly there are more blogs than ever, so finding a way to stand out is a challenge for us all. Often the best blogs reflect a lot of work on the part of the blogger, so our time-impoverished lives are another challenge. The biggest barrier is probably misconceptions about how much it costs, or how hard it is, or how scary the Internet is. To which I always just say: Start a blog and give it a shot. You’ve got to do it to get it sometimes! Certainly true with Twitter

Why do you think it’s important for the companies to get involved with BlogHer?

Because BlogHer is the leading participatory news, entertainment and information network for women online today. The women in our network are hard to find via other channels, and yet they are your customers…and influencing your customers. We now reach over 14MM unique visitors per month…most of whom report being influenced by blogs to make purchases. As a commercial power, women bloggers are hard to beat! BlogHer is deeply invested and engaged in this community. We are part of this community. We know what makes this community tick. That being said, we also have business and professional journalism in our backgrounds, so we are out there figuring out the best practices for this blogger outreach. It’s a great combination of broad reach, deep engagement and best practices!

Women bloggers are mostly known for mommybloggers, because of their influence in the family and buying power. Do you see any other up-and-coming niches of women?

I don’t know if I agree that women bloggers are mostly known for mommybloggers. I would agree that consumer companies certainly recognize that buying power. But the media and political infrastructure pays a lot more attention to other segments of the blogosphere. What I see is that many women hate to be nichified at all. At BlogHer we don’t silo a woman’s interest. Our conference and our web community cover every topic under the sun…and women can hop from commenting about politics to commenting about parenting. We encourage companies to see that women who blog are influential and powerful consumers, whether they’re mom, aunts, grandmothers, sisters, daughters…

Graduation day is right around the corner for many public relations students. If you were professors at the University of BlogHer, what would be your closing remarks to your students?

It’s our mantra regarding best practices:

• Ask, don’t tell
• Listen before speaking
• Be transparent and fully disclose
• Forget about “the A-List”, find YOUR A-List, the bloggers out there who already care about the same values you care about and products or services you represent
Remember, we’re doing fine out here in the blogosphere without you. We’re building trusted community and finding empowerment. What are you doing to be trustworthy? How can you empower us?

Everyone talks about the A-list mommybloggers, like Heather Armstrong at Dooce, but who are three up-and-coming women bloggers that you think we should keep on our RSS feed so we can say “we knew them when…”?

There isn’t one blogosphere, there are many. There are three, four, ten up-and-coming women who blog in every blogging topic there is. I couldn’t possibly choose just three

Spending your days and weeks inside the social media marketing world can get pretty exhaustive.  Lots of people talk about lots of different things but, often, usually the same thing.

It’s important to pause once in a while and find some new things to read.  New voices help break up monotony and often, will give you new ideas.  You’ll learn about things that might not be directly related to PR, communications or marketing and you’ll be able to make new connections and solutions.  With summer upon us, here are some of my recommended readings that you might enjoy:

• Jack Cheng writes about ideas, making them happen and living a smarter & happier life.  Check out his post on permanence.

• 147xxx – ever wonder what the Starbucks barista is thinking when you order?

• The Awl – one of the better new blogs.  Edited by Alex Balk & Choire Sicha.  From their about section:  ”a website that zippily surveyed a wealth of resonant, weird, important, frightening, amusing bits of news and ideas.”

• Arts & Letters Daily – essays on philosophy, aesthetics, literature, language, ideas, criticism, culture, history, music, art, trends, breakthroughs, dispute and gossip.  Phew.

• BuzzFeed – we’ve linked to them before but they’re a great place to go turn your brain off for a bit and catch up on what people are takling about on the web.

What are some of your favorite blogs that are outside of the PR world?

Photo credit, pieromoltedo.

What is it with social networking tools deciding to make changes without the consent or opinion of their user base? Facebook has done it a number of times, once when they introduced the news feed and then again with the most recent redesign.

Now, Twitter is the latest of the social media tools to fall prey to its users.

Earlier this week, #fixreplies became a top trending topic on Twitter, thanks to the latest “update” to the service where Twitter has stopped automatically displaying “@ replies “directed to people you don’t follow. Previously, Twitter users had the ability to choose one of two settings:

1) Turn on “@ replies” from members the user follows directed to members whom the user doesn’t follow

2) To turn those “tweets” off (since they may not be of relevance to them personally)

To Twitter, this was merely an update to its “settings,” but to its users it was removing a capability that some viewed as a way to find other “Twitterers” that they might be interested in following. By doing this, it stopped a method of communication between its users. This is something you never want to do as a communication tool so of course, there was a bit of backlash from users.

So, what did Twitter do? It listened to its users and took the feedback to heart. While at first its communication may have been a bit unclear, it has since made up for it.

Here’s the latest on the whole thing – a post from Twitter’s company blog apologizing and explaining it all from start to finish and how they reacted along the way. Twitter was transparent with their communication, stating where they may have made a mistake and what issues were resolved. A necessary and excellent move, in my opinion – and likely also the rest of the community’s.

And for those of you that don’t have time to read through the entire post, here’s a key take away from the post:

“We’re still listening, reading tweets, gathering feedback, and working on more efficient ways of doing so. Thanks to everyone for the feedback and for using Twitter.”

How can companies prevent this moving forward? Is it always going to be trial and error? Is this type of strategy to be expected? Mashable.com writes about preventative measures that can be taken to avoid user backlash here.

Companies need to be proactive BEFORE the changes occur. They should also be proactive about getting feedback ahead of time by utilizing testers or something like a focus group. Odds are, the responses you get ahead of time will give you insight into what you will be in store for once the changes take place. This also gives you the opportunity to stop a problem before it has a chance to bubble up into something much bigger.

Overall, there seems to be no permanent repercussion from the trial, error and apologize method, but will it stay that way forever? It’s likely. I know that if these companies continue to be transparent and let me know they are listening – I’ll keep coming back for more.

Let us know what you think.

Also, here are some additional thoughts on the issue from the community:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10239517-36.html?tag=mncol;txt
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10240163-36.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheSocial
http://mashable.com/2009/05/14/twitter-screwed-up/

Jeff Jarvis recently did a great interview with Business Week’s Senior Editor Diane Brady on what executives need to know about social media. Take a look:

For more from Jeff, visit his website, BuzzMachine, or follow him on Twitter.

Some can’t-miss stuff from the past month (as always, we’re sharing these on our FriendFeed & Twitter):

• Mack gets serious about community building and lays out why no one is paying attention to yours.

• The FTC is reviewing the mommy-blogger & brand relationship this summer, trying to guidelines for endorsements & testimonials.

• CubeTree launched yesterday.  The internal comms. sector is heating up.  We’re keeping an eye out for early returns on how it stacks up against services like ClearSpace & SocialText.

• Geoff Livingston has a great post over on The Buzz Bin about what’s really valuable to a community.  He highlights a week where he didn’t have any great blog posts but the photos he put on Flickr for SOBcon ended up being super-popular.  Great lessons:  don’t always “follow the herd,” do what you do best and – most importantly – make sure other people find it useful.

• David Armano talks about developing trust & attention.  Information overload makes you dedicate more attention to people and sources that you trust.  As a marketer, it’s important to focus on this relationship.

• Journalists on Twitter (via Rex).

• Chris Brogan somehow opened up my head and did a post on social media and the sales cycle.  He argues that social media is most valuable during the awareness process.  I disagree.

• Facebook introduces “Post Quality Score” for Pages.  It measures “how engaging your content is to Facebook users.”  This is definitely a step in the right direction for analytics on Pages which have been notoriously weak.  Although, it also seems like a trend.  Tumblr is trying to leverage all the content in their community by providing their own version of analytics.  While pretty-looking, at this point in time, it’s a bit self-serving.

• PBS ups its video game and puts all of its shows on the web (note:  PBS is an MWW client).

• Like podcasts?  Like social media?  Here are a few to subscribe to.

When it comes to sentiment monitoring, you are left with only two options: “do-without” or “do with what’s available”.  But realistically, “doing without” is not an option for companies and organizations in the digital era, especially when the speed and volume of communication can be overwhelming and the risk of ignoring the conversation is enormous.   However, what is available is not that great either.  I have a lot of concerns with currently available services and the claims many of these services make.   I know from my own experience  in doing qualitative research, specifically framing analysis of text which is far beyond what is required for comparatively simple sentiment monitoring of an issue, organization or brand, that content analysis is a messy business.

I  tested Twitrratr, a website which promises that it “can distinguish negative from positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic.”  The results were mixed.

For example: a search of “Obama” returned this tweet as being negative towards him because of the word “problem”:

“obama does get it. he understands the basic problems tha americans have while mccain is very out of touch”.

The search also returned this tweet as being positive towards Obama simply because it contained the word “good”:

“palin asks a really good quesion: what do all these radicals and terrorists see in obama?”

Twitrratr is only matching up flagged keywords and categorizing the tweets accordingly but quite oblivious as to what those keywords are actually referring in the context of the conversation. Content analysis is extremely difficult and the methodology required can be different from project to project and even evolve within a given project based on the results being generated.  Sentiment/Attitude/Tonality, all virtually analogous, is just one of the dimensions that falls under the content analysis umbrella.  At least the service is free. Companies such as Scout Labs, Sysomos, and Wise Window all offer products that supposedly overcome this, but my experience of the first two has been less than satisfactory.

My main problem is that while these companies promise 80-90% accuracy when compared to human coders, there is no independent verification of these claims.  Add to that pressures to sign up to lengthy contracts, you end up getting the eerie feeling of being at a used car dealership.

Unfortunately, this problem will continue to plague sentiment monitoring for the foreseeable future whether for blogs, micromedia or otherwise. What is needed is advanced  algorithms that can gauge sentiment from a contextual basis. As it is, this nascent technology can be describe as the “best solution available”, but whether it meets any objective standards is another question all together.

As PR professionals, we spends countless hours, days, weeks and sometimes months working on a campaign for our clients that we hope will be a smash success, a break-through, a needle-pusher in their objectives. We never know for sure what’s going to be popular with the media, with bloggers and with consumers, but we do our best to make an engaging campaign with unique, creative elements, like microsites, blogs, podcasts, blogger campaigns and traditional events and media outreach.

In the month’s leading up to the biggest floral holiday of the year, Mother’s Day, MWW Group’s 1-800-FLOWERS.COM account team and Dialogue Media have worked together to create an integrated traditional and digital media campaign called Spot a Mom. We created a microsite featuring gift ideas for different kinds of moms, utilized our Facebook and Twitter page, and reached out to mommybloggers in the effort to raise awareness about Spot a Mom and 1-800-FLOWERS.COM as the go-to resource for flowers on Mother’s Day. 1-800-FLOWERS.COM’s Facebook fans quadrupled and the Twitter followers jumped from a little over 400 to more than 900 in just six weeks. Nearly 50% of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM’s online conversation actually happened via Twitter, showing the power of social networking in brand awareness. MWW Group’s blogger outreach has yielded more than 60 blog hits, in addition to the conversation through word-of-mouth.

Today, we were pleased to see AdAge publish an analysis of our campaign versus Teleflora, focusing on how each campaign readied each company in anticipation of Mother’s Day.

According to reporter Antony Young, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM rated high on most categories, including social media, online, website and mobile, winning 4 out of a total of 5 stars, compared to Teleflora’s 2.5 stars.

Young says, “1-800-Flower wins my bouquet for best media strategy. In almost all categories we evaluated, it delivered a comprehensive and creative solution. Clearly, they had a bigger budget, but they did more than just out-voice Teleflora, they outplayed them. Its communications came across as well integrated — every part of the plan seemed to build off all the other parts. It used digital not only to drive traffic to their site, but play a role in building the brand. Its social media strategy was well-executed and scalable. Teleflora had some high points — notably its TV creative, magazines and well targeted online programs. But as a challenger brand in the category, it needed to be much better than just solid to compete.”

Kudos to the 1-800-FLOWERS.COM team!