Open The Dialogue

• Both Jesper Andersen and Farhad Manjoo – the latter in his first column at Slate – engage in the Internet’s favorite pasttime, the questioning of the accuracy of Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” notion.
• Jeremiah Owyang rightly points out that not every company needs to be part of the online conversation. It all depends on the audience the company is trying to reach and the stories they have to tell, but that research needs to be at the forefront of any tactics.
• An interesting diagram on how social media is beginning to invade the enterprise infrastructure.
• David Griner has one of the most common-sensical and persuasive posts on the Internet’s second favorite recent activity, talking about how the conversation has shifted off of blogs and onto things like Twitter and FriendFeed.
• The issue of who owns a company blog when the sole writer leaves is something I have some interest in, and I admire Gia’s take on it.
• PaidContent gets bought by The Guardian and MenuPages gets bought by New York Magazine.

• Chris O’Brien at PBS’ Idea Lab blog takes us through the process of inventing a Second Life presence from scratch, including acclimating an entire team to just what being in a virtual world means to begin with.
• If you’re a talented photographer looking to get some additional exposure, that could come in the form of a deal between the site and Getty Images that will allow the latter to check out the photos on Flickr for potential licensing.
• Google has launched Lively, a new virtual world/visual chat engine that…well…I’m not quite sure. It’s got some cool potential, especially in the ways it can be integrated with the rest of the Web. Adverlab has a good write-up of how it works and what it could all mean.
• The shortening of URLs – something that’s useful when you’re doing things like pasting links on Twitter – may not seem like it needs a lot of functionality, but I’ll admit that what Bit.ly can do appears to be pretty darn useful in terms of tracking histories and such.
• And speaking of Twitter, everyone’s favorite digital media writer/PR commentator Brian Morrisey gets interviewed on The Bad Pitch Blog.
• Fred Wilson questions the actual value of some commonly cited new media stats.
• An interesting case study-let of how Toyota has used social media for a campaign for the Scion. [via JD]
• Now that Google is extending its advertising reach to offline media it’s only natural they would launch a Traditional Media Blog, no?

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.

More than all that, though, is the fact that, as the story says, search has impacted how people expect customer service to react to them. Through search, which often leads to social media like blog posts, communities and forums and other such platforms, people are expecting to get helpful answers immediately and are frustrated with customer service experiences.

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.

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.

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.