Open The Dialogue

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.

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.

As PR practitioners, we’re paying close attention to how the media landscape (digital or otherwise) is evolving.  Usually, this is at a very granular level.  How a key magazine or newspaper folding might affect clients we do work for on a daily basis.  However, as an industry evolves, there is always opportunity to look at how it provides value on a daily basis.

In short, I’ve found this really interesting.  Finding out how new tools and technologies are helping change the face of news/journalism/the media and, most importantly, rise above the din.  There are two instances that I’ve come across in the past week that have stuck out a bit more than others.

• Kudos to NPR for making an automated Twitter account pretty impactful (it almost makes up for the fact that their videos are no longer embeddable but that is an argument I’ll make another day).  Via the Neiman Journalism Lab, they’ve created an experimental account that mines NPR’s archives trying it’s best to deliver contextual news.  This, usually, isn’t breaking stuff – it’s background.  It’s the information that helps us understand why and how current news items are relevant.  How it works:

NPRbackstory uses Google’s Hot Trends data to determine what topics people have suddenly started searching for in large numbers. It uses NPR’s API to search the archives, then uses Yahoo Pipes to create an RSS feed that then gets cycled into the NPRbackstory Twitter account.

The process isn’t perfect but this is a step in the right direction.

• Blogs and micromedia are also a hot-topic in government.  Should Twitter be on Capitol Hill?  Why should my Senator be blogging?  Senator Claire McCaskill takes this issues to task, pretty directly:

I use Twitter because no one can edit me. In a media world driven by an edited sound bite, and a Capitol Hill culture that parses, obfuscates, and works hard at saying nothing, we shouldn’t look down our noses at a few short declarative sentences. While this method of direct communication makes my staff nervous – they think it makes me look less “senatorial” — it is me.  I’m a Midwesterner, and this short simple way of speaking is my native tongue.

I especially enjoy her close.  ”Social media” is about real people, real conversations and our real lives.

Finally, it’s fun. Trust me when I tell you that part of the problem in Washington is that folks there take themselves way too seriously. As I tweet about my college basketball team,  global warming, my kids, reverse mortgages, music, and  tax policy, or as I Tumblr blog about rules of voting on the budget  and my creamed spinach recipe, I’m staying connected, grounded, and I have a smile on my face.

We talk a lot about strategy here on OTD.  How marketing communications and PR work in the setting of a digital world.  We hope that this discussion helps you every single day.

However, nothing great in this world exists without fantastic execution.  When I came across this post from Tim Ferriss last week, I immediately wanted to call attention to it here.  Who are Tim and Ramit and why do they matter for this post?  Tim provides some information on what they both have a background in:

1) Building highly-trafficked blogs in a crowded blogosphere of more than 120 million blogs. More important, both of our blogs are well-known for action-oriented readers (For data on this blog’s readers — that’s you! — check this out).

2) Publishing books that reached The New York Times bestseller lists. Ramit’s experience is fresh and most up-to-date from his last three weeks with I Will Teach You To Be Rich, while I wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been on the New York Times business bestseller list continually for 23 months, since its publication in April of 2007.

Tim sits down with Ramit Sethi and they have an in-depth discussion about the tactical efforts and experiences they’ve both had while writing on the web (and off it).  One of the best videos from the series is where they talk about how to get more readers and build traffic.

There are lots of different ways this question could be answered but I’m especially fond of their approach.  It centers around value and attention.  If you’re trying to get an audience on the web to give you their time, what are you giving them in return?  This is an important lesson to keep in mind while planning campaigns for your clients but, more importantly, when you’re executing them.   The video and some call-out points on my behalf below:

• Common misconception:  that you need a lot of readers.  What’s really important are the type of readers you get.  Ideally, your blog should be a vibrant and passionate community with a positive, engaged evironment.  Without that solid base, no matter how many people it is – whatever you try to build on, won’t be as good.

• You always need to connect what you’re doing online with what’s happening in your world offline.  People exist and communicate in both planes and helping them connect the two is extremely valuable.

• Content is king – what you need to create should be world-class and strive to be the default, definitive resource on that topic on the web.

• For both, their most popular content came much longer before they began focusing on keywords, SEO and technical prowness of being a “problogger.”    Simple calcuation:  time + passion=results.

• They mention personal favorite Andrew Chen as being a great example of someone who doesn’t have a huge audience but is super-influential because of the value he provides.

If you haven’t already, I’d take time out to watch as many of these videos as you can (Ramit collects all the videos here).  They’re real-world, practical advice that you can act on when it’s your turn to start building something meaningful on the web.

Courtesy of Cory, this is a great video that almost everyone should watch – not just if you’re in the marketing communications/PR industry.  Seth talks about how much of modern life is “broken,” containing unnecessary steps and missing critical points or processes.  While he covers wonderful examples about how to avoid this in your life, why does it matter for PR?

Lots of times, while brainstorming campaign ideas, it might be attractive to think of extra steps or elements to differentiate yourself in a noisy sector or from a similar competitor.  Sometimes this is important, but lots of times it isn’t.

Resist the temptation to overcomplicate how you want to reach someone.  Be smart about it, be effective when talking to your audience and – most importantly – don’t add extra steps for someone to do just so it makes your client look good.  That seems counterintuitive to a whole effort behind communicating well and I’m sure Seth would agree.