Open The Dialogue

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.