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Archive for March, 2008

Another Social Media Miracle?

08.03.15

One of my highlights of PodCamp Toronto 2008 was meeting Keith Burtis and his lovely fiancee Michelle Miszewski. I was fortunate to play a tiny part in Keith’s social media miracle, I had the pleasure of introducing them during the opening remarks at PodCamp and I’ve stayed in regular contact with Keith since then.

It says a lot about Keith that when he heard about my Boston Marathon cancer research fundraiser, he leapt to help.

Keith is designing and creating a beautiful piece of woodwork that we are auctioning off to the highest bidder.

All of the proceeds from the auction will go to the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation, a world-class cancer research facility in Toronto.

(Please choose “Campbell Family Institute for Breast Cancer Research,” when prompted for who to donate to)

The Piece

The piece Keith is creating will be a significant ornamental piece with four major components.

In keeping with the social media-nature of my fundraising effort, Keith will be blogging with photos of the piece as he creates it. His first post is up now; I’ll post regular updates too.

The Auction

The auction will be held online (friend and fellow PodCamp Toronto organizer Tommy Vallier is creating the auction site for us)

The auction will begin Tuesday, March 25 at 9am.

The auction will end Thursday, March 27 at 9pm.

We’ll notify the winner shortly after 9pm on the 27th.

Tommy and Keith, I can’t thank you enough for this. You guys are amazing!

Fundraising To-Date

As of this Thursday March 13, people have donated over $1,000 to support cancer research through my run. My target is $3,000, so we’re a third of the way there. Hopefully this auction will drive it forward even further.

For now, stay tuned and get ready to bid on March 25th!

Posted in: miscellaneous, social media

Tags: Boston Marathon, cancer, charity, Keith Burtis, Princess Margaret Hospital, social media, Tommy Vallier

2Comments

Reality Check On Twitter

08.03.11

It’s time to stand up and call "bullshit" on people who say Twitter is replacing blogs.

Don’t get me wrong – I love Twitter. I use it more than any other social media tool, I have a lot of connections on there and I get a lot out of it. But it’s not replacing blogs (not yet, anyway).

Time to break out of the bubble, people. Let’s look at this with a bit more perspective.

Sure, many of us in the social media circle use Twitter to fire off quick messages that may remove our perceived need to blog about those topics. We’re in a tiny minority though. The vast majority of people online haven’t even heard of Twitter.

What’s more (let’s be honest) we self-censor a lot less on Twitter than we do on our blogs. That’s not a negative – Twitter’s format lets us share links and thoughts much more easily than blogs do. Still, that means I post links and thoughts on Twitter that I wouldn’t write about here.

Blogs have a massive number of participants, both in terms of owners and readers. I’m talking tens of millions of sites. Despite that, most people don’t even trust blogs yet. To them, blogs are still an emerging technology. Meanwhile, Twitter currently has around 940,000 users in total and many of those accounts are dormant.

Jeremy Pepper wrote a great post about some of the other topics that caused ripples in the social media community this week. He sums it up well:

If we continue to live in our social media worlds, we might be leading in some technology way, but we are also in danger of missing what is happening in the rest of the world – the real world – that might have more of an affect on our products, our clients, our jobs than we want to admit.

We’re way ahead of the curve here, and we need to remember that. Just because we’ve found a shiny new tool that works for us, it doesn’t mean the average person in the street is doing the same thing.

Posted in: Twitter, trends

6Comments

First Impressions of PRX Builder Social Media Release Plugin

08.03.10

There’s lots of interesting stuff going on with social media releases right now. First, we have the news from last week that IABC is sponsoring development of standards for this new format. Business Wire and PR Web have already jumped on-board.

Today, on a different scale, we have a new tool to help practitioners implement social media releases.

Shannon Whitley, a member of the existing social media release working group, today released a WordPress plugin to embed PRX Builder into your WordPress blog.

I’ve only had a short time to play around with this tool, but my first impressions are good.

(Note: this post is a little more down-in-the-reeds than most of my posts. If you aren’t familiar with the social media release, you may want to read The “Social Media Press Release” Debuts, Elements of the Social Media Release, and scan the Social Media Training Wiki page on social media releases)

The Basics

If you haven’t encountered it before, PRX Builder is a tool for creating social media releases. With their interactive multimedia content, social media releases can be daunting. PRX Builder takes that complication away and makes creating social media releases as simple as filling in a form (the only thing it doesn’t do for you is write the content – I’m afraid you still have to do that).

For all the simplicity of creating the actual release, PRX Builder is still intimidating when it comes to the original set-up. The homepage is full of enough talk of APIs and PHP to dissuade non-technical users. There was some integration with MS Office and with WordPress already, but it was somewhat confusing.

Good news: The new plugin removes even that barrier.

Setting up the plugin is no different to installing any other plugin in WordPress.

Using The Plugin

Once you’ve installed the plugin and set up an account (no personal information required), the plugin walks you through nine steps to creating your release.

Isn’t nine a lot? No, because each of those steps is broken down to its basics, making them easy to complete if you’ve done your preparation work for the release. What’s more, you can save and come back to the release at any point.

The icing on the cake: PRX Builder plugin lets you modify

The nine steps:

Start – set up the basic details for the release
Contact – input the contact details for your spokespeople
Text – enter the core content for your release
Categories – optimize the release for search engines (the plugin links to some useful articles) and select categories for it
Links – create links for the “Related Links” section of your release. Again very easy – you can event import them from del.icio.us
Multimedia – link to multimedia content that will be integrated into the release. You can easily import from YouTube and Flickr, but you can use other media forms too
Quotes – attributable quotes for the release
Boilerplate – standard text for the end of the release
Finish – select your release’s template, set a few last options and choose how to distribute your release (PRX Builder integrates with PR Newswire if you want to go that route)

With those nine steps done, you’re done! And you didn’t need to do anything except fill in text fields. Easy, huh?

Screenshots (click to zoom)

A Few Tweaks

I did notice a couple of things that could be tweaked to make the tool more accessible:

Plain language - in general the plugin explains things well, but there are a couple of places that it does fall short, notably the ‘Finish’ screen. The text assumes that users know exactly what’s going on in terms of technical details, which may not be the case. The experience could be improved somewhat by explaining some of the terms, options and processes better.
Support - this plugin is way more complex to use than most of the others I’ve encountered. This is fine, as it’s a complex process and the tool does an admirable job of simplifying it to the point it’s at. Still, more comprehensive support documentation would be useful throughout.
Other wire services - this is as much a call to the wire services as to Shannon Whitley. At present, PR Newswire (along with PRX Builder’s own distribution service) is the only wire service that works with PRX Builder. It would be great to see services like Marketwire and CNW get on board with this.

As I said at the beginning, I haven’t had a chance to play around too much with this tool yet, but it has great potential and I plan to use it more fully at my next opportunity. I’ll report back in at that point.

Have you explored this plugin, PRX Builder? What did you think? What do you think of social media releases in general?

Posted in: 301, how to, smnr, tools

4Comments

Twitter… In Plain English

08.03.06

Ever struggled to explain Twitter to someone? Or, if you’re not using it, wonder why other people rave about it so much?

Twitter describes itself as a tool “for staying in touch and keeping up with friends no matter where you are or what you’re doing.”

That description is true, but not comprehensive or particularly helpful. For a more fulsome explanation, you can check out this guide to Twitter.

Here’s a fantastic new video that explains Twitter in plain language. This should help you understand and explain what all the buzz is about. Enjoy.

Posted in: 101, Twitter

4Comments

IABC Takes The Lead With The Social Media Release

08.03.05

The social media release has taken another step towards the mainstream.

In a move that caused a bit of an online stir this morning, IABC announced that it is taking a lead in the push to develop standards around the social media release. The organization issued both a social media release and a traditional release announcing the news.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of the social media release, it’s a new format for news releases that takes advantage of the linking, multimedia and social media capabilities of the web to make news accessible to reporters, bloggers and the general public (crucially, it’s an additional news release format, not a replacement). Check out the Social Media Training Wiki for more information.

For a summary of where the social media release stands and of today’s news, Shel Holtz wrote a very well thought-out post today. It’s worth checking out Todd Defren’s post for his thoughts too.

A Big Step Forward

When I first read today’s news, my initial reaction (posted on Twitter) was:

Hoping that this is a real step forward for the SMR and that IABC doesn’t swallow and forget it.

I really think this could be the former. This is a giant opportunity to really get some momentum going with the social media release. The evolution of this format has suffered because the working group members, in Defren’s words, “have day jobs.” With the weight of IABC behind the initiative, this is a chance to drive it forward.

Hopes For The Future

What do I hope will come out of IABC’s sponsorship?

1. A clear set of ’standards’ that are open enough to be worked into different companies’ own social media products

The release is a little ambiguous on this. One hand it says:

This specification will ultimately result in a technical architecture for the social media release that can be built into a wide range of content creation and search tools, including blogging platforms, content management systems, and proprietary tools offered by wire services and public relations agencies.

However, it also says:

Many organizations have recently introduced their own versions, employing a variety of standards. IABC seeks to consolidate these disparate efforts and promote a common format for online news distribution.

I think IABC’s (and the existing working group’s) intent is right here – the first paragraph above is pretty clear. I think that any ’standard’ format that is too prescriptive may lead to it being rejected by many companies.

2. Clear communication of what the social media release is and isn’t

I’m not just talking about whether you have comments or not on your release. As far as I’m concerned, a truly useful format would be flexible, just like a broader PR toolkit – you have your options for what you can include with the release, and you pick what’s appropriate.

I’m talking about where the release fits in a wider sense. I would speculate that 98% or more of executives have no idea what the social media release is about or why they should care. A larger working group backed by an industry-wide organization can help to come up with a useful ’social media release 101′ definition that people widely accept and use to approach their bosses.

Alongside that, I’d love to see the group come up with a coherent, acceptable rationale for why this new format is needed (and wanted). This leads me to my third wish…

3. Metrics and case studies

I’ve written before about my frustration over the lack of case studies of social media successes. This is especially true in the case of social media releases. There are a few out there – Geoff Livingston has one on his site, for example. However, more are needed if we’re to convince (a) our colleagues and (b) our superiors/clients that this format is a valuable addition.

Alongside this, I’d love to see some research on what the demand is from the client side. If the release has three targets – reporters, bloggers, public – as today’s release states, it would be great to survey those to get some solid data to back up anecdotal calls for the release.

Realistic Expectations

Much of this is outside the stated scope of the working group. I acknowledge that the group will need to focus and prioritize if they want to achieve anything. It’s also true that we need to know what we want people to buy into before we start convincing people that they should.

However, it could be a big advantage to have hard data to support the working group taking the release in whatever direction they deem appropriate. I’d love to see some indication that the group’s scope can expand over time to address some of these critical components.

On a last note, following a great online conversation with some of the working group members today, one of them invited me to join the group. I was thrilled to accept the invitation, and I look forward to doing my small part to help drive this forward.

I’m thrilled by today’s announcement, and by the potential of getting involved and bringing another perspective to the table. Congratulations to Chris Heuer, Tom Foremski, Todd Defren, Shannon Whitley, Brian Solis and Shel Holtz for getting the social media release to this point.

What about you? What do you think of today’s announcement? Do you think it’s a good thing, or is the corporate sponsorship a hindrance?

Posted in: smnr

2Comments

Enough With Blogger Strategies!

08.03.04

I attended an event recently where I had the pleasure of chatting with a number of executives about social media.

All a-buzz with buzz words

The ‘in’ term seemed to be “blogging strategies” – “we need a blogging strategy for what we’re doing…”

While it wasn’t the time or the place for a lecture on not leaping in too quickly, I squirmed inside every time I heard the term, because I knew they meant it in one of two ways:

We should have a blog for every initiative we do, or
We should be pitching our initiatives to bloggers.

There’s more to social media than blogs

I’m thrilled that these folks, some of whom I already knew and have great respect for, are excited about social media. However, I worry about people launching headlong into ill-advised, poorly thought-out initiatives, getting burned and not coming back for more, just because it’s the ‘in’ thing to do.

Social media is about more than blogging or blogger relations. These are two great tactics, but just as with any other communications project you should take a look at the situation and pick the appropriate tools.

Don’t dive in head-first

To compound the problem of narrowly defining social media, rushing into blogging or blogger relations is a bad idea.

Getting into blogging and blogger relations

There are three basic steps that I think every company looking at both blogging and blogger relations should undertake:

Listen
- Sit back, relax and read. Check out what people are writing about your company, your products and your executives
- Use free tools like Google Blogsearch, BlogPulse and Technorati to track what’s going on
- While you’re doing this, work out who the influencers are
- If you really want to shine, consider creating a media clippings-like product, summarizing online coverage, and circulate it internally
Engage
- Bit by bit, start to comment on posts about your brand. Take it slow to start with – focus on the influencers and expand from there
  Update: Your initial comments shouldn’t be on posts about your brand. Get involved in the wider conversation and build a relationship with bloggers before starting to engage about your brand. If you find they don’t want comments from PR people about their clients, respect that.
- Take care in selecting who to respond to and how to respond
Contribute
- You’ve done the homework, you know the influencers and you know the key topics. Now you can start to reach out and create your own content.
- If you’re getting into blogger relations, check out SHIFT Communications’ blogger relations bookmark. Actually, don’t just check it out. Print it out and use it as your bible. Also, buy a copy of Geoff Livingston’s excellent primer Now Is Gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs.

In reality, I’d recommend additional steps (like considering whether your organization is even ready for this kind of environment), but these three steps are a good start. For more tips on blogger relations, check out Lee Odden’s excellent primer and work through the links at the bottom.

Thinking of steps to success, what advice would you give to organizations looking to get into blogging or blogger relations? What are your favourite resources?

Posted in: blogger relations, blogging

15Comments

Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2008 – Social Media Rising; Word of Mouth Still King

08.03.02

This week I was lucky enough to attend the Canadian launch of Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2008 – Edelman’s ninth annual survey on trust and credibility.

The survey looked at the trust patterns of “opinion elites” in 18 countries – defined as people who:

Are college-educated
Report a household income in the top quartile of their country
Are interested and engaged with the media, business news, and policy affairs.

For the purpose of this post I’ll just refer to “people,” as the term “opinion elites” makes my stomach turn. That’s who I mean, though.

The event was fascinating and gave me a great insight into the report. At the same time I enjoyed some great conversations around my lunch table, including a substantial discussion on social media. Most people only seemed familiar with the buzzwords (they threw the term “blog strategy” around with alarming frequency) so I took the opportunity to do a little social media 101 education.

One notable addition to this year’s survey was the addition of 25-to-34-year-olds for the first time, alongside the usual 35-to-64-year-old group. This gave them a great opportunity to explore how much younger people trust modern online tools like blogs and social networks.

Social Media Take-Aways

A few interesting Internet-related points from the survey:

Social media tools are are making inroads, but are still less trusted than any other information source
- Blogs: Trusted by 26% of 25-34 and 19% of 35-64-year-olds
- Social networks: 25% and 20%
- Video sharing sites: 25% and 19%
Younger people are more likely to talk online about about trusted and distrusted companies than older people
Wikipedia is the second most credible source for young Americans (behind business magazines)
- Blogs, YouTube and social networks are still close to the bottom, higher only than corporate or product advertising
The growing influence of social media is reflected in the names the report gives to the different segments of “elites.” Despite the low trust still currently shown in social media tools, they label the largest segment “social networkers”:
- Social Networkers (39% of “elites”)
  - Frequently share views on companies by word of mouth
  - Seeks company opinions from trusted sources
  - Want companies to listen
- Social Activists (26%)
- Solo Actors (11%)
- Uninvolved (24%)
Bloggers aren’t seen as credible spokespeople – just 4% of people would trust them
- However, bloggers can also fall into other trusted categories like academics, analysts or doctors, in which case their credibility rockets
Social media is more credible as a source of company information in Asian countries.

I’m torn on how to view the evidence here. People don’t seem to be able to decide whether online tools are the next best thing, or are not to be trusted. While the tools are among the least trusted sources, the report shows “social networkers” as the largest segment of influencers. I think the key part is that social media’s influence is rising.

(Note: I don’t have the full report yet; just a 20-page summary. I will hopefully have the full report this week – I will update this post as necessary. Apparently Canada is quite a way behind other countries – the report was launched in January)

Other Take-Aways

Some other interesting points:

“People like me” are still the most trusted sources of information for most people
Trust in the media is at a high point in many countries
- The presenters speculated that this may be due to a growing definition of “the media”
Younger people show higher trust in business in nine of 12 countries
- Canada joined Brazil and Germany as the exceptions
Trust in businesses, media and government is up but trust in NGOs is falling
- Possibly because people are now treating NGOs more like businesses, with greater scrutiny and more pressure for business-like practices
Both age groups strongly trust word of mouth
When it comes to company spokespeople, regular employees are trusted almost twice as much as CEOs (45% compared to 25% in Canada; 23% in the U.S.)
Andrew Coyne, National Editor of Maclean’s Magazine, did more than just engage in some heated debate with other panel members. Some great points from him:
- “Bad writing is essentially false writing because it’s lazy”
- “We’re not in the business of selling you newspapers, we’re in the business of buying your time”
- Admitting failure is a good thing and builds trust.

Action Points

Three main learning points from the presentations, none of which are rocket science:

Use top-down and peer-to-peer tactics in your communications strategies
Engage via word of mouth with influencers
Companies can become leaders by building their reputations and encouraging conversation.

Update: You can download the presentation slides here. (link fixed)

Have you read the report? What’s your take on it, or on the points above?

Posted in: pr, social media, word of mouth

10Comments

What Is RSS?

08.03.01

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) can be confusing if you know little about it. Other people blather on about “subscribing,” “feeds,” “readers” and the like, while you have no idea what they’re talking about.

If this describes you, you’re in the right place.

You can find definitions for “RSS” everywhere. Feedburner has a page on it; What Is RSS? is all about it; Wikipedia has a detailed page about it. The list goes on and on.

They’re all way too complicated.

You probably want to know more than just what RSS is. You also want to know why you should care, right? You’re busy enough already – you need a reason to add yet another thing to your life.

RSS, in really simple language

Here’s a great analogy for RSS, from Ed Lee (edited slightly):

Your web content is like water in a lake. Lots of people want it and you want them to have it.

But, to get it, they need to visit the lake, fill their buckets and then go back to their homes to use it.

RSS enables your audience to create a stream from your lake (where the content is) to their home (where they need the content).

I also like an explanation that Chris Anderson uses (paraphrased) (hat tip – Mitch Joel):