Open The Dialogue

Pew Internet and American Life Project and the Project for Excellence in Journalism released “Understanding the Participatory News Consumer,” on Monday and it has received a ton of attention around the key findings.  Notably, the majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get their daily news, and more than half (59%) are getting news from both online and offline sources on a typical day.

The degree to which Americans are personalizing and filtering this content is especially noteworthy, with highlights collected by MediaBistro including:

• 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
• 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
• 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
• 51% of social networking site users who are also online news consumers say that on a typical day they get news items from people they follow.
• 23% of this cohort follow news organizations or individual journalists on social networking sites.

This fits with the recent Cision report (pdf), which showed how media are using social platforms to publish, promote and distribute what they write (64% use blogs, 60% social networks, and 57% Twitter).  Additionally, a full 89% of media are turning to blogs for their online research, making this process truly cyclical.

With 70% of Americans noting that the amount of news and information available from different sources is overwhelming, I think we will see more and more trends pointing to users testing multiple news sources and filtering for perceived noise.  From a PR perspective, this points to the importance of brands telling a cohesive story over multiple platforms, providing a range of consumer touch points, and as always, creating content that is truly valuable for media and consumers.

Above is the original notepad that inspired IBM’s storied ThinkPad laptop computer line (via Merlin Mann).  Being digital professionals and our worlds moving a mile a minute online – what are some things, as PR professionals and trusted communication counselors, that we can do to help focus ourselves?

Switching from e-mail and phone call and conference room to really helping keep the big picture in mind not just for your team but your clients as well can be helped by simple, daily exercises that will take less time than you think and – hopefully – reward you down the line.

• Talk to every person on your team – what is everyone working on?  Maybe it impacts some of your projects?  Or sharing what you’re doing can help someone think about their work differently or offer different perspective on your own.  This isn’t a formal meeting, this doesn’t have to be face-to-face but it’s important to look up from the grindstone and check-in with your team.

• Double-check a budget or goals/objectives for a program, campaign, etc. – what comes next?  Is what you’re working on the right thing that needs to be done?  Often, when projects are launched into, everyone focuses on the immediate next steps without managing the finish line – doing this will not just help deliver a great product to your client but help you think strategically about the program, campaign or project you’re working on.

• Take 5 minutes to think – as easy as this sounds, you’d be surprised about how few of us do it during the course of a day.  Focus on a new skill or a topic you want to know about, or try to connect ideas between clients and trends.  The small savoring of mental focus might just give you your next big idea!

Want more?  Check out The 99 Percent.  A think tank from the awesome folks at Behance (which inspired this post), it’s a great site that focuses on what happens after your team walks out of that brainstorm – when it’s time to put ideas into action and all the things to take you from point A to B.

As much as constant software updates are a pain, they’re essential in today’s digital world.  If you have a blog on the web and unless you use WordPress.com, TypePad, Tumblr, Posterous or the like – odds are you might have the nagging “update me!” notice hanging around every couple of weeks or months.

Earlier this week, WordPress announced a new security release of their popular publishing software that plugged a pretty serious hole:  one that would’ve allowed someone to gain administrator access pretty easily.  While minor software updates usually sit on the bottom of to-do lists around the web, a few of the more prominent voices were targets of attacks trying to gain access before they upgraded their blogs.

Paul Stamatiou was saved by some extra security plug-ins he has in place (ed note:  What were they?) while Robert Scoble’s blog was actually comprimised.  Robert’s logic for not updating right away is fair but “1/8th” is a risk I’ll take to make sure all of my public publishing systems are secure.

So, if you have some downtime this weekend, take a look around your web and make sure everything is up-to-date.  WordPress has automatic updating features and even if your server isn’t configured to handle that, the regular update process is easy as well.  If you’re in the agency world, the same goes for any client projects you work on as well.

Photo credit: CarbonNYC

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

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.

You don’t need to reach everyone all the time.

The beauty of fragmented media consumption means that omnipresence is important from the perspective of accessibility, not necessarily dominance, of a certain medium.

A while ago, Robert Scoble mentioned he was doing a comparison of FriendFeed vs. Facebook.  I’m assuming he meant their feature sets, user bases, etc. but maybe not specific roles for the communities they cater to.  Essentially, a “which one is better” discussion.  Concerned that he was comparing apples & oranges, I (along w/ Brian Wallace) left a comment on his status about why there is a place for both in this world and why each have their obvious benefits:

Facebook vs. FriendFeed

I point out some intrinsic differences in terms of how each tool relies on its user to generate content, populate it and keep it alive.  The basic argument being that Facebook is a “social utility” in the sense that it is shaped around us generating data about how we move throughout our lives.  I became friends with someone?  That is a data point in addition to how an imported note would be.  FriendFeed doesn’t have the deep social interactions built-in just yet (or maybe never?).  It’s focused on the content we put into it and want to aggregate/broadcast to others.  Facebook has similar features but the audiences and user bases are clearly worlds apart.

One won’t overtake the other and each have a place on the web because there is a very specific audience FriendFeed resonates with and that differs, as a broad assumption, to the audience on Facebook.  My activity on FriendFeed is squarely focused on content ephemera while 95% of the people I’m friends on with Facebook are real relationships I have outside of the web.  As marketers, we should be very cognizant of that.  People can be using these two tools in very distinctly different ways:  they’re not interchangable. 

People consume things differently. Not the same way as the next and certainly not at the same rate as the next. It is key to realize that your audience is now distributed across the social web and there is still tremendous value in someone who might follow you on Twitter but not really care for your blog all that much. Don’t be bummed about the lack of all-encompassing inclusion, it just means the quality of the connection is higher. How someone follows or engages with you usually means that they find that method to be of highest value to them. You want that. You want to be ultimately accessible to the point where every aspect of information changing hands helps your audience.

To close, good insight from Micah Baldwin of Lijit:

“we as online content generators forget our daily voice and wear the voices getting traction. dont be @garyvee; I just want to hear you.”

Photo credit, lynetter.

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.

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.

Because I like to extrapolate (it’s my second favorite thing to do after insinuating) from one vertical to another, this AdAge story on what women want out of the Internet certainly got my interest. It’s certainly filled with some interesting information on current trends of female behavior online and how traditional behaviors might be shifting or changing, all presented via graphics that, if they were static and not interactive, would not be out of place in People Magazine or Entertainment Weekly.

Aside from that, this sort of story could be written on just about any given demographic any given week. That’s how fast things are changing. That’s why blogs and the industry watchers and players who pound them out are so valuable to marketers. If you’re going to try to reach people where they are, then it makes sense to know where that is, no?

The audience, now more than ever, is a constantly moving target. If one tool stops meeting their needs they’ll move on. And the early adopters are never going to sit still long enough for you to get a bead on them.

So while trade mags like AdAge and others serve a great role in terms of providing context and in-depth reporting, for insights on consumer trends I’ll take blogs any day of the week. That’s especially true since those blogs are often written by people who are trying to dissect and analyze the data for themselves, making their perspective all the more relevant to the reader that’s trying to do the same thing.