Archive for November, 2008

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WordPressDirect: Spam, Dirty Spam

08.11.28

WordPressDirect creates spam sites Do you have the desire for a blog but not the time, ethics or talent to do so? Try WordPressDirect.

WordPressDirect (it’s a no-follow link, BTW) is a spam blog generator. You pick a theme, plug in a few keywords and let it go to work creating a fake blog for you. It searches YouTube for content to import; it searches Yahoo Answers; it searches other blogs… and it even imports their comments too.

Apparently WordPressDirect now has ten thousand users. Great – like we needed more spam sites.

Here’s how the site describes the process:

“WordPressDirect grabs niche podcast, video and article content plus comments from all over the web and creates a completely unique, high-value website that search engines and visitors absolutely love!”

Reality check: No, visitors won’t love your blog. They’ll hate it, because it’s a spam blog. They’ll think less of you too, because you’re a spammer – you’re stealing other people’s work.

More accurately, as Neville Hobson appropriately put it, WordpressDirect is spam blogging by another name:

“…no need for original content, for your own creativity and opinion, just set this thing up and wait for it to churn out other people’s stuff as you surround “your” content with ads.”

WordPressDirect creates spam sites

WordPressDirect fail I don’t often get worked-up about things on here because, well, I try to stay professional. However, this “service” is just wrong. I’m getting angry just thinking about it. Maybe it’s because I’ve been thinking a lot about ethics recently.

If you don’t have time to write a blog then don’t. Don’t plagiarize other peoples’ work. Don’t steal the results of their efforts.

You know what grade they give kids who copy other peoples’ work in school? They give them a “fail.”

WordPressDirect gets a “fail” from me. So do the people who create spam sites using it.

Thoughts? Am I wrong to be so mad about this?

On more thing – a tip for the chirpy “Emily from Blinking Dot Software”: it’s “Technorati,” not “Technorata.” Oh, and how about not including drunken pictures of employees and your buddy in another video from your press release?

(Hat tip: Mashable)

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Posted in: blogging, tools

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What Are Your Expectations?

08.11.27

expectationsAs I wrote back in February, expectation management is important in all areas of your work:

"A failure to match what people expect with what they get can be disastrous for your brand. Don’t make promises that you can’t keep."

That post was focused on managing and meeting customer expectations, but what about clients and colleagues?

I started working on a new account recently, which got me thinking about the expectations I have of myself, my colleagues and the companies for whom we work.

Six primary expectations come to mind:

  1. Communicate well: Communication can make or break a project. I’d much rather hear a little ‘too much’ about things than not enough.
  2. Be proactive: If you see a need, what can we do to meet it? If you need help, seek it out. If you want to work on something, let me know.
  3. Be accountable: If you’re assigned a task, you’re expected to do it.
  4. Meet deadlines: Every action item has deadlines for a reason. Sometimes it will require working late to meet them.
  5. Work as a team: Celebrate together; hunker down together.
  6. High quality work: If you wouldn’t stake your reputation on it, don’t hand it to me as a final piece of work.

When working with clients it’s equally important and, to a large extent, the same principles apply.

Setting expectations like these at the outset helps to hold everyone accountable. Sometimes you will need to explicitly state them; other times, after working with people for a while, they will understand them implicitly.

Those are some of the key expectations that I like to set, both internally and externally; what are yours?

Posted in: miscellaneous

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4Comments

Top 10 Most Irritating Phrases In PR

08.11.26

Confused guyOxford University recently compiled its list of “top ten irritating phrases,” as reported by The Telegraph (side note: 2703 comments at time of writing!):

  1. At the end of the day
  2. Fairly unique
  3. I personally
  4. At this moment in time
  5. With all due respect
  6. Absolutely
  7. It’s a nightmare
  8. Shouldn’t of
  9. 24/7
  10. It’s not rocket science

It’s true – every one of those phrases is over-used and irritating.

I’d like to add my own top ten from the world of horrendous PR (this is separate, though related, to my little rant about clear writing a little while back). Many of these are just unnecessary adjectives that serve no real function. They’re often used in conjunction with each other for extra horrendousness:

  1. Moving forward
  2. Cutting-edge
  3. Leverage (it’s not a verb, people!)
  4. Viral video/marketing
  5. Utilize
  6. Cost-effective
  7. Innovative
  8. Value-added
  9. Forward-thinking
  10. [insert word here] 2.0

What would you add to the list?

Posted in: writing

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41Comments

What If People Say Bad Things About You?

08.11.25

Steve Rubel did a great Q&A session at last night’s Third Tuesday Toronto meetup. I often find myself disagreeing with Rubel, but I thought most of his answers were right on the money yesterday.

I could write a week’s worth of blog posts on the various issues raised by the session, but I’ll quickly focus on one instead.

My colleague Michael O’Connor Clarke raised an interesting and important question towards the end of the session (which was moderated by Jeremy Wright of B5 Media), and I think Steve missed an opportunity when answering it.

Michael asked:

What’s your response to the people who say, “you’re telling us we should get involved in social media, but what if people start to say bad things about us?”

My response to this (any real-time screw-ups aside):

They already are; you just can’t hear them.

To paraphrase one of Steve’s earlier answers in last night’s session, social media is unlikely to create new issues for your brand (setting screw-ups and over-reactions aside); however it can speed-up existing issues.

If there’s a problem with your brand, people are already saying bad things about you. If you’re not online, they’re just not saying them to you…  because you aren’t listening.

Is the “head in the sand” approach really better?

Posted in: social media

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SearchWiki: Six Implications For Public Relations Professionals

08.11.24

Google recently announced SearchWiki, a way for people to customize their search results by promoting, deleting, adding and commenting on search results. I see six implications of this change for digital public relations and marketing professionals if this becomes a popular feature:

  1. Another place to monitor
  2. Increased customer interaction
  3. Control by the customer
  4. Advantage goes to the existing players
  5. More expensive Adwords
  6. (Unconfirmed) SEO potential

First, though, a few basics for those of you that haven’t heard much about this yet…

What is Google SearchWiki?

giggle Essentially, Google SearchWiki represents the “diggification” of Google that has been discussed on sites like Googlified and Valleywag for a long time now. This, in its own way, turns Google search results into a wiki, where people can promote, relegate and comment on search results for every search term.

At a practical level, SearchWiki means that when you’re logged-in to Google you’ll see three new buttons alongside each of your search results:

  • Promote – moves the item to the top of the list of results
  • Remove – does exactly what it says
  • Comment – lets you leave a public comment about the result

There are also links at the bottom that let people add new sites to the results page, and allow people to see the notes that other people have made about their search results.

Why are they doing this?

I see a couple of reasons why Google has done this (and no, altruism isn’t one of them). Both of them relate to advertising:

  1. People are likely to spend more time on Google now – in the past, success for them was people finding what they were looking for and leaving Google quickly;
  2. People may come to Google (even) more as they can tailor the results for their commonly-used search terms
  3. People will increasingly see their own preferred sites in the search results, making Google Adwords an increasingly important way of getting noticed

Why should PR professionals care?

First, a caveat: I don’t know what proportion of Google users have (and use) a Google account. I suspect it may not be that high, but that’s just a suspicion. If the numbers are low, relatively few people will have access to these features so their impact may be limited.

Should Google SearchWiki take off, it has several important implications for public relations and digital marketing professionals:

  • Another place to monitor – The comments on search results represent another place where people can publicly comment on your brand
  • Increased customer interaction – For companies going beyond simply monitoring online conversations the comments on search results for your brand are yet another place to engage your existing and potential customers.
  • Control by the customer – Assuming SearchWiki becomes popular, it has some important implications for search engine marketers. For those working in good faith to legitimately optimize sites, they may see an increased return on their efforts. However, black-hat SEO people beware – if you somehow manage to ‘game’ the system but your site isn’t relevant, people will be able to simply remove the site from their future results. What’s more, while Google won’t currently use peoples’ voting when determining search results, there also remains the possibility that they will begin to in the future. Given Google’s data-driven nature, I’d be astonished if they don’t eventually do something with that data.
  • Advantage goes to the existing players – As people increasingly tailor their search results, the companies that are already in the game have an increasing advantage. The more results that people promote in their list, the harder it will become to break through into the first page of results.
  • More expensive Adwords – This directly relates to the previous point. The harder that it becomes for companies to break through into the first page of results, the higher demand will be for Google’s ads on those results, and the more expensive the ads for those pages will become.
  • (Unconfirmed) SEO potential: This may open up a whole new aspect to SEO – trying to optimize your SearchWiki comment results. There are just rumours and rumblings about this, though.

Conclusion

If SearchWiki becomes popular, it has some pretty important implications for digital PR and marketing.

I’ve outlined the six areas that I see implications for; what else do you see?

Posted in: Google, public relations, search

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9Comments

I Want This

08.11.22

A little bit of weekend fun – I spotted this on Shel Holtz’s blog today. Suddenly I feel like I’m in the middle of Minority Report:

Screw Second Life; I want this.

Posted in: miscellaneous

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How Rich Is Your Communication In A Conflict?

08.11.20

Two businessmen in conflict Have you ever thought how the different media you use to communicate can give different results? Do you think about the tools you use to communicate with people before selecting which one to use?

Conflict isn’t always a bad thing. Constructive conflict leads to better ideas, better teamwork and better productivity all-round. However, conflict can also become destructive quite easily, and the method of communication used by participants can easily contribute to that.

A colleague mentioned to me today that she wanted to go on a conflict resolution course so she could help clients resolve their internal conflicts more effectively. That made me think back to a paper I wrote a few years ago about the features of different communications media, and how they can influence interpersonal conflicts.

Let’s consider a few different forms of communication and how their characteristics come into play.

Face-to-face

Timing: Synchronous

Cues: Body language, tone of voice, facial expression

Notes: Face-to-face communication is what’s known as a context "rich" form of communication – the other person receives many more cues than just the words being communicated. It’s also synchronous – the other person receives your communication at the same time you send it.

For these reasons, face-to-face is often the best way to communicate in a conflict as it provides the least risk of being misunderstood.

Video-conference/chat

Timing: Synchronous

Cues: Body language, tone of voice, facial expression

Notes: Video-based communication comes a close second to face-to-face conversations when it comes to communicating in a conflict. You get all of the cues that face-to-face provides; the only thing that’s missing is the physical presence in a room which can be beneficial.

Phone

Timing: Synchronous (with the exception of voicemail)

Cues: Tone of voice

Notes: Communication by phone, like face-to-face communication, is (generally) synchronous. Unlike face-to-face conversations, you lose the cues provided by body language and facial expressions when you’re on the phone. This can increase the chance of misunderstandings which can exacerbate conflict, but on the whole phone conversations are a fairly good way to communicate during a conflict.

Instant messenger

Timing: Generally synchronous

Cues: Emoticons

Notes: While IM conversations are generally synchronous, they have little of the richness of face-to-face or telephone conversations. Unless you’re using video chat, you lose all of the visual and tonal cues that those media provide, greatly increasing the likelihood of misunderstandings. You do have the option of using emoticons, but even they can be misinterpreted.

Email

Timing: Asynchronous

Cues: None

Notes: Email, as a communications medium, is quite liable to escalate conflict rather than resolve it. It provides zero clues as to the context behind the words in the message. It’s also asynchronous, meaning that people are more able to let a message sit as they get more worked-up about the content of it over time.

As a conflict resolution medium, email is far from ideal.

Blogs

Timing: Asynchronous

Cues: None

Notes: Blogs rank right down there with email when it comes to interpersonal conflicts. While they can be powerful tools for communicating during an organizational crisis, blog posts and comments are a sub-optimal solution for resolving conflicts between individuals.

Social networks

Timing: Asynchronous

Cues: None

Notes: Right down there with email and blogs; there are many better ways to resolve conflicts than through social networking tools.

Micro-blogs

Timing: Asynchronous

Cues: None

Notes: If there’s one medium that’s worse than email for conflict resolution, it’s micro-blogs. In Twitter’s case, for example, forcing messages into a 140-character limit can force much of the nuance out of messages, exponentially increasing the likelihood of people misunderstanding or misinterpreting them.

Do you overuse email?

When you look at this analysis (albeit of only one aspect of these forms of communication), it’s clear that email really isn’t a good way to communicate when you’re trying to resolve a conflict. Unfortunately, that’s the way a lot of communication is handled nowadays in organizations, leading to conflicts spiralling out of control and becoming destructive.

Sometimes it’s better to walk down the hall or pick up the phone instead of replying to that irritating email. You may find the intended message wasn’t what you thought.

In this light, how do you feel about the way you communicate in a conflict? Do you over-use some of these tools in that kind of situation? What tips would you offer?

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Posted in: miscellaneous

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13 Ways Social Media Can Improve Your Career

08.11.19

I write a lot about how social media can help companies to engage better with their customers. Today, though, I’m taking a different tack and thinking about how social media can improve your career.

Here are twelve thirteen ways that I can certainly say social media has helped my career already, and can help yours too:

Job hunting

1. Expand your network - Social networks like LinkedIN, Facebook and even Twitter are a fantastic way to get to ‘know’ people in your industry but it goes beyond that. Search out their blogs. Find relevant forums. Comment on their work and get to know them. Create your own high-quality, regular content and they will come to you, too.

2. Obtain references - More and more companies nowadays look online when recruiting. If your co-workers, clients or partners are on LinkedIN, ask them to write a recommendation for you. It reflects well on you and, if the recommendation matches the person, it reflects well on them too.

3. Own your online brand – Your homepage may be what Google says it is, and so is your personal brand. I went as far as re-locating this site from a different URL in order to reclaim the top spot when you search for “dave fleet.” What does that matter? Well, when a client recently Googled me when we proposed some social media work for them, they came back saying “you know your stuff” rather than “what do you know?”

4. Find jobs - Most jobs aren’t advertised – they’re filled through networking and recommendations. My job certainly wasn’t advertised – I got to know the team here at Thornley Fallis through social media tools and related events. When the time came for me to move, I already had that connection. Without that, I would likely not be in this job now.

5. Build thought leadership – By creating your own content, you can (over time) develop yourself as a thought leader in your space. (This one could fall under ‘job hunting’ or ‘job performance)

Job Performance

6. Stay on top of industry trends - If you haven’t already, get yourself a Google Reader account and search out the places where people are discussing your industry online. Subscribe to them and read voraciously. My number one tip for agency newbies was to “be a sponge” but that really applies to everyone.

7. Stay on top of breaking news – You can do more than just stay on top of your own job or industry through social media. Pretty much all of the major news outlets have RSS feeds; subscribe to them and set aside time to skim through the latest news each day. Read what’s relevant; discard the rest – the ability to filter out the noise is one of social media’s big benefits. On Twitter, subscribe to feeds like @breakingnewson and any media feeds that you like to stay on top of news by the minute

8. Demonstrate you’re on the leading edge – Whether it’s internally with your boss, co-workers and internal clients, or externally with suppliers, clients and stakeholders, knowing what’s going on will go a long way to improving your reputation. Staying plugged-in helps you get there.

9. Improve your productivity - I subscribe to a couple of hundred sites; I read about 40 on a daily basis (although a couple of them are aggregators). To go to each site individually and search for new content would take most of my day, and catching new posts as they come up throughout the day would be impossible. My RSS reader lets me get through it in a few minutes before work, during the day and in the evening. It’s a huge productivity boost for me.

10. Learn from others – One of the best parts of writing this blog, posting on Twitter, listening to podcasts and all of the other tools out there is that I get to benefit from other peoples’ experience and knowledge. If I’m not sure of an idea I’ll throw it out there for input. When I have an opinion, I let other people challenge it. In the end, I’m that much more sure of what I do and think because of the input of the social media community

11. Improve your writing – When it comes to writing, practice makes perfect. I’m told my writing has improved immeasurably since I started this site (although I still have a way to go). You simply can’t beat the benefit you get from editing your thoughts down to 140 characters for Twitter, or constantly structuring and re-structuring your thoughts as you write blog posts.

12. Become a better editor – In order to have good writing you generally require good editing. With social media, you rarely have someone else to do that for you so you’re forced to teach yourself.

13. Clarify your thoughts – Putting my thoughts, opinions and approaches to problems down on ‘paper,’ as it were, forces you to get your head around them. As a result, you’re more effective when confronted by those issues in your work.

These are just a few of the ways that social media can help you along in your career. What would you add to the list?

Posted in: social media, social networks

Tags: , , , , , , ,

35Comments

Are You Remembering Your Target Audience?

08.11.18

When you come up with a communications plan or a cool new initiative, do you think about your target audience or do you focus on the bright shiny ideas?

Every morning when I get up I switch on CBC News Morning. Every morning for the last few months, without fail, I’m confronted by this ad from Grey Power  in the commercial breaks:

I won’t lie to you – I’d rather pull my teeth out than watch this commercial one more time. However, it’s quite possible that part of the reason for that is because I’m not the target.

It’s all a question of targeting

The commercial above isn’t aimed at me – it plays on a stereotype of young people that, quite frankly, annoys the hell out of me. However, that same stereotype may appeal to the people it targets – the 50+ age demographic (and people who like bad commercials… but I digress…).

Meanwhile, I think this riff on the old Budweiser "wassup" ads is great, but my parents would likely change the channel – they’re not the target audience:

Think: personas

Next time you’re in a brainstorming session or sitting down to write a communications plan, ask yourself:

  • Who are we targeting?
  • How old are they?
  • How educated are they?
  • How connected are they?
  • How much do they earn?
  • What do they care about?
  • Where’s the best place to reach them?
  • Why should they care about you and what you’re doing?

Think about these questions; develop personas for your target audience. Get inside their heads. Give them a name. Develop communications that reflect their wants and needs.

Once you’ve done that, you might be able to target your communications effectively.

Think differently

Since starting my career in public relations I’ve trained myself to stop and think every time I see advertising that I don’t like:

"Am I the target? Who is the target? What might they think of this?"

It’s surprising how often that leads me to view the advertising completely differently.

What do you think?

Posted in: marketing, pr, public relations, strategy

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2Comments

Quality Matters

08.11.17

When you finish a piece of work, are you willing to put your reputation on the line for it?

I hope so, because that’s what happens.

Every time you finish a piece of work, your reputation is on the line. Hand over exceptional work and your reputation will improve. Hand over sloppy work and it will worsen.

errorIt’s like the old line about trust: it takes a long time to build trust, but just one moment to lose it all.

No-one is perfect – we all make mistakes. Still, every time you produce sub-standard work, your reputation suffers. If you produce something that requires additional work from the recipient because you didn’t pay attention to detail, your reputation suffers even more.

This goes for work you pass-on to your manager, as well as to clients.

Proof-read your own writing. Double-check those media contacts. Play devil’s advocate with your strategy.

Don’t expect other people to fix your work for you. Fix it yourself. Make the quality of your work an asset, not a liability. Excel and your reputation will get better, not worse.

Are you willing to stand behind the work you produce?

Posted in: miscellaneous, writing

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