Ketcheson.net

I’m not a big liveblogger, but since Joe couldn’t make it today I thought I’d put up some notes from this morning’s keynote.

Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman PR firm took the stage this morning in conversation with Stuart Macdonald.

Key points:

1) PR shouldn’t be characterized as spin

Tries to make a distinction between political spin and PR. Argues that things like the Swift Boat controversy are basically malpractice.

Used to be the “tail and dog” story: here are the messages, here is ad campaign, get us a good story.

“Today, we are at the table at the inception of the idea, sometimes driving the strategy.”

When best used, it creates a runway of trust.

Today we are talking to communities, not just the consumer.

We are a broad spectrum vehicle, whereas advertising is a narrow spectrum field.

“Baseline of trust” is essential, and without trust advertising is useless.

2) On control

“Need to persuade companies to give up control of the message”

Very fact of dissonance is okay, because it gives you credibility

There is a trade off between control and credibility. You need to find the right balance.

3) Are clients getting it?

They are, because they have to.

Points to the Dove “real beauty” campaign as an example of getting it.
Need a real issue, needs to be allowed to be “in the conversation”, and “let go”

4) How important is MSM coverage?

Clients are happy when it does spin into mainstream media.

But, community efforts (like work they have done for MS society) are valuable

5) How do you define success in social media world (and make money…)

“For PR people, to do ad equivalence is, to me, something I find inadequate. It is really fallacious, because the power of free media is so much more than that of personal media, whether it is the vox populi in the blogosphere or the mainstream media conveying its view, those things are really that much more powerful.”

6) On Edelman missteps

“Most important thing to understand: We took this as a challenge to educate everyone in our company about standards of blogosphere, about how we should proceed in terms of quality of information and transparency of the disseminator. Without that, we will miss this great opportunity. We cannot be seen as going back to spin or any other kind of artifice. “

Need to identify source of funds, the purpose of our activities, and whether we are being paid.

Lay out ground rules.

7) Are there new ground rules for interacting with social media folks?

a) Believes that PR people need to have a higher standard than before for their content because we are sending direct to end users.

b) Reiterate importance of explaining source of info, create credible place to find info

Give example of http://lowermanhattan.info, which they have created as a central place for information.

Critical tool is the “living press kit”, where people can share their opinions as well.

8) On ghostblogging

“A little dicey”

Prefers exchange of creative ideas, and insist there is a real voice.

Rejects ghost blogging as a practice.

9) Line between PR/advertising blurring?

Definitely blurring. If there is news, then PR should “lead the dance”, if no news, then advertising lead.

10) On Corporate Responsibility - Advice for C-level execs?

Corp responsibility is a reason why companies are rising in Edelman’s trust barometer.

Biz needs to be transparent about motives when they are undertaking “good cause” stuff.

Shell on “paradox of transparency” - Need to be transparent from being.
(Yeah, I’m skeptical…)

11) On the Wal-mart controversy

Everyone at Edelman needs to embrace social media. Our job at the centre is to educate our people, address best practices, provide gound rules.

Is okay with being the pioneer and getting flak for not being perfect.

Doesn’t orient to control, orients toward experimentation.

12) What happens when you lose control of conversation?

“Let the humour run its course”

“Be seen as having tolerance for dissent and discussion”

“Putting the fist down will multiply your problems”

13) All this sounds hard, much harder than pushing out press releases.

Convinced that virtuous circle for PR business is to charge more, say you can do more, pay your people better, and make them do these more conversational interactions.

Doing this properly gets you a seat at the table.

Real credibility can come from this, and it is so powerful it can’t be bought.

14) Would you every advise against doing something?

Even if it is controversial, you can’t ignore the conversations.

15) CEO blogging? What do you recommend?

“It is a thin space”

Only modest success in getting CEOs to blog. Not necessarily good at conversation.
Own experience is that it is incredibly gratifying, and a wonderful bully pulpit.

Example of Robert Scoble is very instructive. He built this unbelievable following as he was seen as more real than the boss. Mid-levels may be best place to start. If you do, let them criticize you. This freedom of action is important for the company and their reputation.

“Let the mid-levels talk”

16) On “spin”

“It has no place in our company. It originates in political PR “

“The single thing that undermines future of our business and potential of our industry.”

  
i) Make your stories visual

ii) Don’t be defeated by a setback.  If you are not falling, you are not skiing well.

iii) Don’t let clients say, “here is your little box”.  All clients are struggling with new set of conditions.  Be bold. Assert yourself.

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I glitched up a post a few days back with a list of Canadian provincial/territorial blog lists.  I’ve had a few requests, so here is the (partial) list. 

I know Blogs Canada does something similar, but it feels a little “web 1.0″ (Sigh. Did I actually write that?). That is to say that it feels a lot like a boring, static directory, while the sites I’m looking for are more of an ‘aggregation’ coming out of the region with a little of a hands-on feel that in many cases uses RSS to aggregate recent posts. 

Please help me grow this list by sharing any better or more complete lists. Hey, if you can make OPMLs or custom Google Searches, even better!

BC Bloggers

Alberta Blogs

SaskBlogs Aggregator

Manitoba Blogs

Ontario Blogs

Quebec

New Brunswick

PEI

Nova Scotia 

Newfoundland and Labrador Blog Roll

Authentic Yukon blogs

NWT

Nunavut Blogs!

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(The only link in this post is to the World Economic Forum “blog” - http://wef.typepad.com/blog)

CAUTION…rant ahead…..

Am I the only one out there cynical about this??? Gimme a break. This is Davos! It’s the World Economic Forum, for cryin’ out loud.

All the good conversations are in hotel suites, on the slopes, or under the Chatham House rule. I have to admire the effort that the organizers seem to be putting into social media enabling this thing. But, c’mon, give me a break. This is the forum where the world’s elite get invited to talk about whatever it is the world’s elite talk about. Apparently this year its blogging. (A development which I’m sure many will view as unabashedly positive)

All this may make Davos seem more accessible but I can’t help but be extremely cynical. The talk doesn’t jive with the purpose of the event. It is not a democratic, consultative event. It was never meant to be. It is a gathering of elites to discuss Big Issues.

Messy things like “conversations”, “openness”, “authenticity”, and “transparency” confuse me, they muddy the brand, they don’t resonate with the event’s public persona, and they just serve to make CEO blogs seem like silly, spare-time hobbies of executives trying to look younger.

Credit where it is due, though. It’s really smart from a PR point of view: this gets Davos in the news, it makes it look hip and in-touch. Kudos to the folks who came up with this approach and convinced the “A-list” to throw their hats in. etc.

But, personally, I don’t get it, and I find the A-list support for it to be sycophantic. Smart people like Jeff Jarvis, Debbie Weil, John Batelle, and Arianna Huffington are fawning over themselves, rather embarrassingly from where I sit.

Maybe I just took too many political economy classes led by profs who railed against the Trilateral Commission.

At the end of the day, I’m cynical and cranky…too cranky to even put a link in this post.

In my opinion, nobody deserves one.

(I will tag though: davos07)

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I guess these would be my prognostications for the evolution of “social media” in 2007, written from a Canadian perspective.

First, I believe that 2007 will be the year that real money starts moves into the social media space, with corporations, governments, and organizations of all stripes finding ways to embed social media in their monitoring, outreach, and other PR functions.

The roll-out of “real” initiatives that embed social media will result in a degree of cynicism from purists and a feeling of hangover from those who were drunk on the promise of “pure” social media in 2006.  Mesh 2007 will include way too much navel gazing and concern that the principles of authenticity, transparency, etc. have somehow been compromised by the desire of large organizations to use these new tools to engage in conversations with their stakeholders.  

From where I sit, this is a natural movement that we have been through countless times before in the arrival of the introduction of new social software, whether it was the first spam sent over ARPANET; changes in multiplayer gaming that led from MUDs/MOOs to commercial spaces like Ultimate Online; or even the obsession with online retail in the dot com boom of the 1990s, which represented the first wave of commercialization on the Web.

Face it, when Internet tools hit a certain level of acceptance and legitimacy within organization, money starts to move in, real initiatives start rolling out, and the medium changes.  For good or otherwise, this is what will happen. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again.

While I’m not too troubled by the changes that will accompany greater corporate and institutional involvement, it is important to emphasize that the underlying values and ethics  (articulated to a certain degree in the WOMMA ethics code  will remain. Organizations will still need to recognize that deceptive practices are dumb, and will (1) be found out, (2) be sharply criticized, and (3) and will do more brand damage than you suspect.

Even though social media will look much different a year from now, flogs, astrotufing and other deceptive practices will still be inexcusable.

I do think, however, that a bigger concern in 2007 be the sharp spike in social media spam (note to self: we need a new term for this). Organizations, legit and otherwise, will realize that the attention shift brought on by social media represents an opportunity to make some serious cash through deceptive practices.  This will dramatically reduce the effectiveness of aggregated content, and will start to drive us all crazy.

What will this look like?

• Tag spam on technorati, del.icious and other social bookmarking sites
• Lawsuits from brand owners over the use of their trademarks in tags.  What would Verizon think of the Verizonmath tag? Or a campaign to tag blog posts and stories with the Verizonsucks tag?
• Youtube spam, which will consist of the false naming of videos to generate views and the use of tricks to artificially inflate views.  
• Growing concern over pay-per-post blog posts 
• Growing concern over Digg gaming and pay-per-digg

We will also see a social media backlash. MSM journalists who were annoyed with the rapid rise of social media and the endless questioning over their own value in the face of the growing influence of bloggers, will revel in these articles and will report excessively on all of this negativity in excruciating detail.

At the same time, social media will start to look a lot like other media and there will be a lot of head-scratching and existential discussion over what really is different. This has already started among thought leaders in this space. A recent post by John Battelle on related issues is required reading. I subscribe to his perspectives around the move from “packaged goods” media to “conversational media”.

I predict there will be growing demand for enterprise-level social media tools (blogging platforms, enterprise wikis, etc.), as organizations realize that they are paying gazillions of dollars for IT tools that are proprietary, expensive to implement, and actually not that good.  I’ve felt this for awhile, and The Economist has given this feeling some strong validation.

I also predict that somewhere in Canada, a Cabinet Minister will start blogging. No inside information there, just a gut feeling.

And, somewhere in Canada, a blogstorm will lead to the resignation of a Cabinet Minister. Again, just intuition.

RSS will continue its steady, but persistent spread. The breakthroughs on consumer side will be modest, with the inclusion of RSS in IE7 doing little to drive adoption (sorry, Joe). The big breakthroughs will be in number of organizations that start publishing in RSS and improvements in web-based services that are driven by RSS but which don’t require users to actually know what it is.   What will that look like? Pre-rolled Netvibes tabs, sites like Wikio, and enterprise-level blog monitoring and analysis tools.

That’s it. Those are my thoughts for the next twelve months in the world of social media.  Should be an interesting ride!

That’s most likely it for me for 2006. Have a great holiday, everyone. 
 

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Whew. Verizon has finally conceded that they messed up. I’m really glad, because it was starting to get painful.

As George Vaccaro says in his blog, this recognition came about after “the collective laughter of hundreds of thousands of people.”

Wow. Verizon, as you sit down to launch your big Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing blog in the coming weeks, you should really think about the lessons learned out of all this.

Just to remind us all, here is what Verizon said a few months ago about their blog “engagement” strategy:

Verizon Communications has announced plans to launch a blog by year’s end to create an “all issues on the table” dialogue with its customers. The blog will be staffed with a 24-hour response team, according to Verizon’s senior vice president of marketing and brand management, Jerri DeVard. At last month’s MIXX Conference in New York, DeVard said that her company had been “asleep at the wheel a bit” with regards to online marketing and social networking. She added that personalization and experimentation will continue to drive Verizon’s marketing efforts going forward.

This whole thing could have been avoided (or at least severely minimized) with a well-placed e-mail or phone call.

Where was this crack squad of 24-hour responders? I’m thinking they got the tense wrong on that “had been asleep at the wheel” sentence.

Might just be me, but I would bet that Ms. DeVard has some explaining to do.

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A picture speaks a thousand words. This chart, the results of a simple Blogpulse.com search, compares the relative impact of the two issues, showing how theyhave produced the three highest spikes in Verizon’s profile over the last two months.

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As social media practitioners begin to make the business case within organizations about the importance of monitoring, analysing, and reacting to issues arising in the blogosphere, they are invariably confronted with The Question.

The Question comes in many forms, but the most common version is the blunt one from the experienced and skeptical veteran: “Why should I care about this blog?” It is usually followed up by: “Who reads this anyway? It’s just idle chatter and not serious news.”

These are tough questions that pose a big challenge to the blogevangelist.

In fact, this issue has been talked about a lot lately, particularly in the context of social media measurement. It was one topic of a recent Factiva-sponsored roundtable, which was very nicely written up by Jeremiah Owyang and Jeremy Pepper, among others. These folks are diving nicely into the measurement question, and I highly recommend a detour their way.

From my point of view, properly dealing with The Question is one of the biggest challenges facing social media practitioners within a conservative organization. Coming up with a good answer will go a long way toward increasing your credibility within your organization, and in preparing your team for the first time it needs to react to an emerging blogstorm.

The Question is easy to answer when you are dealing with the mainstream media. The mainstream media is nice and easy and linear. Folks get the significance a story appearing in The Globe and Mail or the New York Times. We all just automatically understand that a Globe columnist or editorial has a high level of authority and influence in the public environment, and that a breaking story in a mainstream newspaper will have a downstream influence that will lead to follow-up coverage in other papers.

At the same time, the authority of a mainstream media outlet is very stable: the same group of people get the Globe delivered every day, and the readership of a columnist will be more or less stable. Leading Canadian columnists like John Ibbitson or Don Martin have a predictable level of influence.

The landscape of the ’sphere is much different. It is jagged, contoured, slippery, and treacherous.

The influence of a blogger is incredibly tricky to measure, with the importance of an individual post depending as much on how the rest of the ’sphere reacts as on the blogger’s personal influence. The influence of an A-lister’s post varies widely depending on the kind of “link juice” they get from the rest of the ’sphere. At the same time, a Z-lister can quickly rise in influence if they can create a meme with the high pickup that can shoot it with a mad virulence across the Net.

A case in point is the emerging blogstorm that is hitting Verizon as I write this. On Thursday, someone named “georgevaccaro” create a blog called VerizonMath. In it, he details a bizarre serious of conversations he has had with Verizon revolving around the per KB charges he incurred while accessing data on his phone during a trip to Canada. He was quoted a rate of “.002 cents per KB”, when in fact the customer service representatives had actually meant “.002 dollars per KB.” On his blog, he documents his interactions with the company, posts up a (very funny) audio file of his phone conversation, and he also uploaded a copy of the same phone call to Youtube.

This has spread with the typical speed of a hot blogstorm. His blog has pulled in more than 20K hits, the Youtube video has upwards of 45K views, and the blog has been linked to by more than 300 other blogs. This is going to get much worse before it gets better, and the image it has created of Verizon customer service couldn’t be much more negative.

For the PR practitioner who “gets” social media, the significance of this rapidly spreading meme is self-evident. But, how do you communicate that fact within your organization? How do you convince your management that this blog, from someone your management team has never heard of, and over a measly $72 in charges, is doing significant damage to your brand?

Here are a few tips and analytical lenses that jump to mind. This is a work-in-progress, so I’d be curious for other metrics.

• Know your baseline. Understand your starting point. Is your organization regularly criticized or praised for its activities? Or, do your customers/stakeholders generate very little commentary about your organization? Understanding how far an event or issue is deviating from the norm will help you to contextualize for management.

• Know your influencers. Eric Kintz at HP has done some great work talking about the importance of influencers and understanding how memes spread across the Net. What I would add is that organizations need to know who their influencers are and track them closely. Who writes about you everday? Who is being linked to most by the community of bloggers who track your issues? Whose posts about your organization are more likely to get picked up by the A-list in your space? Know who these folks are, read their blogs religiously, and pay attention to what they are paying attention to. It is most likely that emerging storms will show up here first.

• Understand that influence is not static – As mentioned above, we are all used to the significance of a column in the Globe and Mail. It has a static influence that is easy to digest. It is much harder in the world of social media to communicate the fact that on any given day a post from an unknown person can become the most influential force acting on your brand, far outstripping the power of your regular influencers. Your management team may only grasp this after they have been hit by a blogstorm. Hopefully, you can preempt this by providing some education and case study examples before this happens.
  

• Understand how memes spread. Social media is all about the network and its ability to rapidly spread ideas and memes. The pickup of an issue by a key social bookmarking site (Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc.) results in traffic spikes several orders of magnitude above the norm. You need to communicate to your managers the significance of these spikes, and move quickly to react when one of these spikes interacts with your brand or your issues.

• Work with the numbers you have. We are a long way away from high-quality social media measurement. This is largely to do with the fact that we are measuring influence and not traffic. Measuring influence involves measuring the number of links, the amount of pick-up on other blogs, and the number of instances when a story crosses over into the mainstream media. In response to this challenge my tendency is to gather as much information as I can find: everything from the number of Youtube video views, the number of other blogs that have picked it up, and document instances when the story jumps to the A-list or crosses the media barrier and jumps to mainstream publications. The job of a good analyst is to put these numbers together to create the most accurate picture possible, acknowledge that you are dealing with incomplete numbers, and move on to recommended actions.

• Don’t be afraid to downplay significance – In the long-run, communicating the significance of something like VerizonMath (a significant issue) is probably harder than communicating the triviality of a lesser issue. We all have a tendency to want to increase the significance of a budding blogstorm in order to increase our own credibility as social media watchers. Resist the urge. If you can effectively communicate that the issue in question is actually only a minor blip, you have done more for your credibility than if you start ringing alarm bells. (Note to Verizon – You shouldn’t downplay the significance of VerizonMath)

Does this jive with your reality? Anything else to add or link to? I’d be curious to hear other examples from social media practitioners who’ve faced this question in their own environments.

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Linking in the name of science:

Acephalous: Measuring The Speed of Meme: An Experiment in which You Will Participate, Or Else…

The author has a script that will measure the progression of this meme through the blogosphere via Technorati. 

Link to it on your own blog to help complete the picture

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Over the last few days I’ve been conducting a little experiment. (See here for the orginal post). In a post that ostensibly talked about a neat new tool called HitTail I also included some very hot keywords (Bleenks, Peekvid) that have been generating a lot of my organic search results.

I’ve been fascinated for a long-time about how ideas and memes spread online, and was curious to see if I could grow my blog by just simply pandering to hot keyword search terms.

I’m sure that this is a thought that jumps to mind for many organizations as they look to make a move into social media.

So, did it work?

Here’s my conclusion: Measured against old web metrics my little experiment was wildly successful. But, once you poke under the hood and evaluate it against social media criteria it is very clearly a big flop.

So, what made it look successful?

By standard Internet traffic metrics this was a resounding success: I had a 1100% spike in traffic in the 24 hours after the post. In the six days prior to the post I averaged about 15 visitors per day (good thing I have a day job). I pulled in 177 visitors on Monday, thanks mainly to a refer from Stumbleupon which started hitting my site early Monday afternoon. Traffic remains high on Tuesday.

But, these traffic stats are pretty much useless.

When we stop to measure the success of this experiment against measurement and analysis criteria suited to social media the results are underwhelming.

Lets turn this into a learning experience. Why was it a failure? And, what are the lessons for organizations that are starting to think about using social media?

• The metrics of social media are different. Those traffic metrics may work for a 1990s-era marketing-driven shopping site. But, they don’t hold any water in the world of social media. Measurement and analysis criteria for social media needs to assess the long-term impact of your messages and the degree to which they establish lasting connection with your audience, and can demonstrate your ability to build and maintain credibility, influence, and authority.
• You need to connect with your core audience. My visitors are usually concentrated in the Ottawa area, and most come to the site directly based on a personal or professional relationship. This post didn’t speak to them. It didn’t build upon the relationship and conversations that we have been having (either offline or online).
• You need to create a reason for people to come back. This didn’t. Although my traffic soared, I didn’t gain RSS subscribers. In fact, I lost 2 subscribers. Sorry. Hope you come back again. I’m really curious to know why you left!
• Think carefully about how you grow your audience. Proof that I didn’t? Nobody linked to the post in a meaningful way. I was shamelessly trying to draw traffic through keywords. Very spammy. I didn’t say anything terribly insightful or new.
• It is your network that will grow your traffic. Those people who have linked to me in the past are mainly Canadian PR and communications bloggers. They already know this stuff and they ignored it. Had it been a good post they would likely have linked to it and done much of the hard work of growing my audience for me.
• Nobody really cared. Readers came and went, and nobody was moved enough to comment. The pandering post didn’t strike a chord. It didn’t spark a conversation. It didn’t open the door to ideas. It didn’t engage with the reader.

Social media success is not about hits. It comes from building on your existing relationships, making contributions to your community/network, increasing your influence through demonstrations of thought leadership, speaking with an engaging and “authentic” voice (although that is becoming an overused and often disingenuous cliché), and by ultimately creating compelling content.

Organizations thinking about moving in this direction need to ask themselves whether they are up to this challenge.

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HitTail is a very cool new tool, put out by Connors Communications. It moves the next step beyond Google Analytics, showing you in real time the search hits that are coming to your site and offering suggestions for how to increase traffic.

Here is some free advertising for Hittail. It’s a remarkably boring PR video for a very cool tool.

So, what have I learned?

Bleenks. Bleenks. Bleenks.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote this short blurb on Bleenks:

Forget BitTorrent. Bleenks is the next chapter in the copyright battles. Bleenks, like Peekvid.com, challenges copyright models by using a form of steganography to hide copyrighted content in video sharing sites. Watch for more of this.

Well, apparently this has become one of the most common ways that people find my site.

The obvious lesson? If you want traffic you should write about the next generation copyright buster. (Heck, lets really pander to the “wise” crowd: bleenks, peekvid, TV fusion)

The bigger lesson is that real-time analytic tools like Hittail, and its ability to make suggestions based on your keyword traffic, help bloggers better understand the reasons people come to their site, and generate content that will get them coming back. This is reader feedback par excellence.

Stay tuned: I’ll let you know what kind of traffic this post gets. I’m not afraid of sharing my (pitifully low) numbers in the name of science.

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