Open The Dialogue

The whole discussion of whether or not social media outlets can effectively be monetized isn’t at all surprising to me. For as long as there has been advertising on blogs and other platforms there’s been a conversation about what it’s value is to the audience, to the advertiser and to the publisher. What does seem to be surprising, to me at least, is that the root cause of this conversation often goes unspoken.

There’s so much hand-wringing over whether or not social media can be monetized because the online media world is the first time actual metrics were demanded to account for an ads success.

Traditional media touted its reach and sold ad inventory based on that reach. But online media had to wait to get paid for the most part until the ads it sold actually performed and then had to justify its methodology for counting visitors, clicks or whatever else it was providing to advertisers.

Even among the biggest, most savvy players, effectively making money on advertising against social media is a tricky proposition. Just look at Google’s problems selling inventory on MySpace’s search functionality, though that effort may be hampered by both the fact that Google caught that deal just as MySpace was beginning to lose it’s luster and the fact that it’s search function stinks (at least it always did for me).

Both Kami Huyse and David Armano have thoughts up on how advertising on social media channels is just as disruptive to the audience as on traditional channels and that’s true. That’s why, as Kami says, effective public relations efforts are more essential than ever. Part of that is through our efforts to position our clients as participants in the conversation, something that is as non-disruptive as possible and even has the potential (if they listen to our guidance and resist the urge to engage in outright marketing) to add value to that community’s conversation.

That’s especially likely true if they drop some of their guarded nature and engage in Jeremiah Owyang’s three “impossible” conversations in an open and honest manner. After all there are a lot of lessons to be learned from the people who have the most problems with your company. If you’re not listening to them and addressing their concerns then you’re effectively writing off them as customers, and that’s something not many companies can afford to do.

And if you or your clients are doing social media wrong or if there’s some sort of inconsistency in efforts there will always be someone there to call you on it.

Yes, social media can be distracting, but that distraction is worth it when you consider that it also creates this sort of ongoing industry conference that everyone can attend because you don’t have to travel and all you need is the ability to sign up at Wordpress.com. Social media turns the entire Internet into a help line, where colleagues can ping each other for advice, help noodling out an issue or just to make each other laugh, just like what often happens at conferences. We’re all attendees and we’re all presenters and all we can hope for is that we make the best impression possible because we respect the opinions of everyone who’s listening to us.

Social media also turns the entire Internet into one big recommendation engine that can drive us to movies, music or other media that we had overlooked, discounted or never heard of. While sites like Netflix, iTunes and others all use our behavior and perceived interests as part of an algorithm, the opinions of those people we respect will always carry more weight because we’re social animals, and we’ll never be able to say “That was an awesome find, thanks for pointing me to it” to a computer and have it say “Glad you liked it!” back to us.

Social media can. It allows for feedback. Feedback for our recommendations, feedback for our ideas, feedback for our opinions and feedback for all our other efforts. Therein lies its power. Not to provide new advertising outlets, but to give us all a voice. The best social media marketers know that and act accordingly.

What Mike Manuel has written here echoes the thinking of myself and others here that a true social media press release focuses on content and not on design. We all have different ideas of how things should be arranged and such, but those are design issues, relegating the discussion to one similar to what you’d have over works of art. The problem is that something that’s beautiful to one pair of eyes is ugly to the next. So there will never be a truly universal social media release format. Indeed even getting an entire internal team to agree on one that’s appropriate for all clients is going to be a significant task.

It’s what our clients say that’s remembered far more than how they said it. That’s why the focus needs to be on putting content on the release page that’s interesting and relevant, points that are easier to agree upon and which have much more value to the end audience.

Based on how I’m seeing my online friends who work in and cover the tech space react, it looks like public relations folks are hitting them up left and right about anything and everything in advance of CES next week.

• Eliot has taken a novel approach in CES coverage, posting his Gmail bucket for this stuff on Flickr
• Andru Edwards is wondering what the heck is up with his email box.
• Jeremy Pepper, who’s not going to CES, is asking people to not use last year’s list.

I know we all want to do a great job for our clients at events like this, but working off canned lists these days isn’t exactly the smartest move, no?

Before we continue on with the news of the day and other good stuff, wanted to give a big shout-out to Josh Hallett, who just announced he will be joining the team at Voce Communications. Josh, I’m sure, will be a great addition to the Voce team and it will be exciting to see the stuff that comes out of there in the future, with him joining such an all-star team Voce already has in place.

Hey Netflix, you should apparently check out this advice being thrown your way by Ronald Patiro, who’s offering up some tips on how the site’s navigation works, and how some people may actually be using it.

Note to non-UI designers – not everyone tests things the way you’d think they would. Go figure.

For the rest of you, this just falls into that batch of content that’s really great for you to keep an eye out to look for, just in case. While it’s in no way, shape or form a “crisis,” it’s the type of thing that gets a company Kudos when a) the writer sees that the company had visited the blog and read it, and b) someone sends a quick note of thanks for the advice, or adds a followup question or two. This doesn’t mean that you have to respond to EVERYTHING, but in the age of I’m-not-calling-customer-service-but-I’m-going-to-blog-it, it’s never a bad thing to be paying attention.