Ponderings and Wanderings

I have been a proponent of the social media press release (SMPR) and the social media newsroom (SMNR). These efforts by Todd Defren and others have pulled together into a package much of what online communications folks have been saying for awhile. Over at my agency we have even managed a fair number of tests and implementations. In these implementations a common roadblock has been the lack of the clear understandings of the underlying technical requirements.

Many others have stated that an SMPR or SMNR must be built out using blogging technologies. Blog technologies enable the RSS feeds, XML formatting, tagging, commenting and many other functions. They also enable search engine optimization in manners expected of social media search engines such as Technorati, Bloglines and others.

This said, I have found the technical teams that implement the strategies sometimes prefer to hack up an existing CMS to force it to fit a blogging and SMPR/SMNR framework. This has resulted in less than optimal performance. This lack of performance is then blamed on the idea of an SMPR itself. In reality, had the efforts been built out within a dedicated package the performance would have been satisfactory.

Take away – build out a dedicated SMNR site within a blogging CMS such as Movable Type or WordPress. We have found that the hosted TypePad environment is also customizable for the solution. Using such technologies allows us to focus time, energy (and budget) on the content rather than transforming a non-blogging CMS do what others provide right out of the box.

I was recently chatting with folks and I was saying that maps are actually quite easy to create. The following is a set I created with Google My Maps in less than 8 minutes. This certainly is nothing fancy. It is meant to demonstrate that with available tools and some forethought that maps may be embed into every site with very little (if any) tech involvement. Design would help for the labels, but this is not high end design. Just someone with some basic design skills could then make this very snazzy.

If I can do this in a few minutes then there is no reason every “contact us” and address page on every site could not have at least a simple map. This map is also now in the Google Maps search directory. Who knows, someone may find this little guy someday and then they can comment on my selections.

KML File: Open this file to view the Map in Google Earth. This was automatically created for me along with the map.

A link to the map. Click here to open a link to the map in a Web browser.

And here is the embedded map. When I created this I selected this size. You could make it any size to fit your design.

View Larger Map

For my current work at an interactive agency and throughout my communications agency work I have been counseling public relations teams on the use of press release wire services to enhance outreach directly towards target audiences. Recently I have been asked as to the value of these wires versus a company’s RSS feeds.

Somewhat towards this end, several nice reports have come out recently on the influence of bloggers and company social media. Brodeur, Arketi and Bulldog Reporter/TEK Group.

However, I would love to see some direct feedback from the media (traditional and non-traditional journalists) as to their preferences in how they receive company news. I put together this survey rather than waiting for my agency, or another to ask some straight forward questions. (more…)

A communications industry publisher who certainly “gets” social media and the impacts of the online world upon public relations is Ragan Communications. My Ragan is a great social network for communications professionals and something I wish the PRSA had created. Ragan.com is a solid site and the companion set of email newsletters are well formatted, nicely targeted and always seem to have good articles. I have found the Communication + Technology Insider to be a great idea generator and in general one of the better forward thinking publications.

All of these publications show how a trade publisher once solidly in the print world can adapt to the online marketplace. They certainly continue to sell and distribute print version of their newsletters. It seems though that the high quality free content drives more people towards their conferences, workshops research, training and other expert deliverables.

So, what do you think of the Ragan “world”?

As widgets become easier and easier to create they are being used for everything imaginable. What is a widget? A widget is a short bit of code someone provides so that you can place special functionality on your Web site. This is nothing new. However, the popularity of blogging and social networks has led to an explosion of widgets. Just as web page builders, Blogger and MySpace have removed the requirement for anyknowledge of HTML, widgets make it easy to add features without any programming knowledge.

Help me reach my goal!

Debbie Weil brings up some great points on why companies should consider transferring a newsletter into a blog format. She brings up several points including:

• HTML email newsletter layout takes more time than posting to a blog.
• Email is passive. The blog encourages comments and responses
• Blogs support email and RSS feeds – the option is left to the reader.

In addition I have found:

• Email newsletters are increasingly be deleted without being read. Readers of RSS feeds are can opt-in to read items at their leisure without filling up their email accounts.
• Email newsletters are prone to be getting caught in spam filters. RSS feeds from a blog do not get caught in these filters.
• Blogs offer a built in archive, categories and other functions that can require customizations in newsletter software.
• There are many resources to help you promote a blog. Newsletters are much more reliant on word-of-mouth.
• Blogs eliminate the hassles of email distribution and any associated costs.
• Blogs provide a home for you to attract additional readers to an always available archive.
• Blogs encourage more frequent short postings than the less frequent e-newsletter.

WordBiz Report Article

Over at work, we are routinely asked to provide a stategy where a non-profit can recive donations via SMS.  This is cerainly easily and rapidly impemented via the existing technology.  The roadblock is that the carriers end up pulling away 30% - 45% of the donation.  This instanly makes this channel a non-vaiable option for every group we have reviewed thiis outlet.

Amnesty International appears to have taken another appraoch.  They are partnering with  a Working Assests to provide co-branded service — Amnesty Wireless.  Amnesty International then recives 10% of charges without addtional overhead.  This is certainly a more creative model.  It will be interesting to see how many people actually sign up for the service powered by the Nationwide Sprint PCS Network. 

In any case, this is probably the start of a trend in this saturated commodity market for cell phone services to enable affinity programs similar to those we find with credit cards.

Gizmodo Article

Gizmodo is clearly again on the top of things with this important news.  K Fed has his own search engine!  For some reason I think this is going a bit in the direction of over targeting your search engine. Then again this is a neat example of a way for PRODEGE to promote its services and a much better way for K Fed to provide his fan(s) a better site than the average celebrity.

Gizmodo Article 

The recent PRSA Boston dinner event discussing social media and the Social Media Press Release (SMPR) was definitely one of the better PRSA events I have attended. The conversations to be had were quite wonderful and the chicken was actually quite good as well. 

Moderator:

• John Cass, Society for New Communications Research, PR Communications,

Panelists:

• Todd Defren, Shift Communications, PR Squared

• Paul Gillin, Social Media and the Open Enterprise

• Todd van Hoosear, Topaz Partners, Tech PR Gems

The focus of this evening’s event was how social media may be utilized or addressed by the PR field.  It certainly became clear right away that this group of attendees was highly interested in the entire subject because social media is already seen not as becoming a legitimate practice but is already an established requirement for public relations.  The issue is then not one of acceptance, but is instead an issue of PR training and practices.  PR training and experience have been focused on communications with a limited pool of contacts.  The mainstay of these communications has been the press release and its distribution to journalists and the secondary access to the release by the public.  Now, the public relations field is being faced with the fact that they must take the lead in two-way communications with a much larger set of participants.  Social media is really putting “public relations” back into PR.  Customer service, marketing, product design is all being packaged into social media and PR is at the forefront of this change.  It is now a matter of how quickly the PR industry can adapt. As Paul Gillin pointed out, the mechanics of influence of personal publishing have existed since we have had BBS’s and the start of the Web.  The difference now with social media and blogging is that it is so simple.  As Paul is sure to delve into greater depth in his soon to released book, PR once had 50 journalists that mattered, and then with the first onset of the Web maybe another 100.  This was still a manageable number of one-on-one conversations.  Now in the Web 2.0 world it is nearly impossible to maintain as close relationships with the hundreds if not thousands of influencers who matter.  Since we cannot talk one-on-one with each these “New Influencers” (Paul’s title) it is important that we enable their conversations with easy access to clear and transparent information straight from the source. An interesting point in breaking out of the traditional PR mindset was raised by Todd Van Hoosear.  Todd point out it is not about “audiences” anymore. He defined audiences are a Web 1.0 term to enable us to classify people into buckets.  Instead we should be talking about engaging people and stop the PR command and control model where we do everything we can along the chain to manage the message.  Instead the new PR emphasis should be to start the message and then participate in the conversations.  It is this involvement, rather than control, to lead to influence.  

Make Your Site More Effective for Social Media and Bloggers 

Beginning to get your readers involved can be straightforward but begins with the hardest step of all – your acceptance of a view that encourages reuse of your message and materials. Rather, than trying to control every person who uses your imagery, releases, audio and video, make it easy for them to spread the word on your behalf.  No doubt, some of the uses of this material may disturb you.  Think instead of these as opportunities to participate in a conversation and to integrate feedback throughout your organization. Get started with:  

1. Optimize for search engines (Google and Yahoo)
2. Move from a strictly informational model to one where you provide useful content/materialsa.      And the traditional press release does not fit the mold for the new model. Instead choose a vehicle where all the assets you want to provide are available immediately to all parties. 

SMPR

There has been a lot of online discussion on the social media press release. It was interesting that this evening’s audience was very acceptant almost as fact that the traditional press release is inadequate to the task for media relations in the Web 2.0 world.   

Even without the format of the SMPR the suggestion was made to “spice up” and improve the releases by simply reading the releases and turning them into podcasts. Such simple audio file provides materials for podcasters and other uses.  Why do this now? Because according to a recent PEW Internet study 12% of internet users state they listen to podcasts.  This means that podcasts are being adopted quickly.  This is especially true for the consumer electronics, entertainment and other high tech fields. The social media press release was presented to fulfill the following points to compliment traditional media efforts with the ability to provide the content and materials to those thousands of new journalists who you could never directly contact yet who are going to talk about you no matter what you do.   This format aims to:

• Ensure accuracy
• Democratize access
• Embrace context
• Build community
• Be findable

For more information on the SMPR just go to Technorati and search on ”social media press release” and I will post related links shortly. 

Conversation Progression 

As the event moved to questions, the topic of control was reopened. Todd van Hooser reinforced that you can never control a conversation, but you can enable people to be more likely to use your information if it is readily available.  If not, then they will create their own messages.  Todd outlined a nice progression for these conversations:

1. Listen (monitor) – read what is being said but do not respond.
2. Join conversations – Simply state you are here as a resource should someone desire to have your opinion.  Do not hide who you are and NEVER lie. (Nothing new here – this is what PR folks have always done).
3. Start or create conversations and communities – This can be on another site or your own and do not have to be formal.  Often the informal conversations are the best.
4. Optimize visibility – Now that you have a willing group of participants ask them to spread the word for you while you continue to make it easy for others to participate. 

Blog Entries

As the evening ended, some of the last questions focused on blog content.  It was interesting that all the panelists agreed that a company staff member should author all of its own blog posts.  This was stressed so that transparency is maintained while providing details and authenticity available only from a staff member.  I and others found this extremely interesting for a PR audience.  PR is founded on partnerships to assist in the authoring of message and conversations.  I have found myself and my colleagues to at times be more transparent, knowledgeable and tied to a client’s mission than those who hire me. I think that indeed when properly integrated PR professionals can in fact represent the company and provide blogging services.  Yes, transparency must be maintained.  Then not only can we adapt to the needs of social media and blogging, but we must as PR professionals grow into this model to support our clients who will otherwise never participate in conversations – let alone start them. 

Further links:

• Check out another attendee’s take on this event on Over the River.

Many companies setup up a corporate blog to release news, announcements, press releases and other information in a fairly straight forward and factual manner.  This is indeed a fabulous use of blogging technology to take advantage of RSS, subscriptions, tags, comments and other features to distribute the content and encourage conversations.  However, I have found the companies whose blogs contain such content are usually disappointed as to the reaction, acceptance and conversations sparked by their efforts.   Such companies should not be surprised at the sometimes lackluster performance of such efforts.  While they are using a new vehicle, they have not changed the content that is being delivered to appeal to the expectations of most blog readers.   No doubt, this format will attract those who have always been interested in the company’s news.  However, such efforts rarely attract new vibrant discussions with a community of new contacts.  To prompt the two-way dialogs with new people companies have to step beyond their comfort zones and not just present information in a new and attractive manner, but more to deliver new insights in a personal and engaging manner.  Sometimes the substance of the information may be exactly the same.  It is the relaying of the information in a manner more like a discussion prompted by an individual that promotes interest and participation.   Yes, companies may need to start with a more traditional model.  Then if they truly desire a two-way conversation they will have to rapidly move towards a less formal blog model.