Ketcheson.net

Back in the saddle after a week on the road.

A couple transit rants that aren’t yet worthy of full blog entries:

Air Canada rant: Folks, you should realize that getting inflight entertainment will convince us to ignore the other annoying elements of your flying experience. One of the reasons we bought our Kia was that it came standard with an MP3 player and heated seats. They thought about what should be “standard” and what should be “options” and focused on what their drivers wanted. These two touches on our Kia were more valuable to us than cruise control and we bought. Air Canada: Think about what matters to your passengers. I’m stuck in a bubble for 5 hours with no power outlet and no Net. The least you could do is get your entertainment right.

And, don’t think we won’t write about our experiences…See here for a great site documenting food quality on airlines (via Brendan Hodgson’s del.icio.us)

OC Transpo hacks: I’ve been reading a lot about the Toronto Transitcamp experiment, where riders get together and creatively think about how to help the TTC improve. This ties nicely into the themes of Wikinomics, and is a big win for the TTC. OC Transpo should learn from the experience, and try to get the ball rolling by Ottawa transit riders to help you do your job better. (See this article from The Star for highlights from Transitcamp)

Transit riders need to do their part, though. I’m not talking about railing against the machine and trying to get your voice heard in the review of the cities transit options (see Friends of the O Train for that). Oh, and I’d link to the City of Ottawa web site where they invite us to submit feedback….IF I COULD FIND IT…..

No, what I’m talking about is more in the spirit of Transitcamp. It’s constructive stuff on how to use the system better. Here’s my opening with a list of Ottawa transit hacks. This is a list to build on, so I hope others pick it up with their own thoughts:

1. When travelling to downtown from Hull, don’t go with the OC Transpo 180/8/105. Take any one of the STO buses heading to Ottawa. You’ll get to the Rideau Centre a lot faster. Same thing going over the bridges in the morning. Pick up an STO bus at King Edward/Rideau or Rideau Centre. You’ll get there in half the time.
2. If you are taking an OC Transpo bus to Hull, the 27 and 40 go a lot faster than the 8/88/180.
3. Need to catch the bus in front of you? Ask the driver to honk the horn. This is the driver signal that someone from the back bus wants to jump on the front bus.
4. Doesn’t help you get there faster, but is still interesting. The little screen beside the driver on most buses will tell you if they are running late or early.
5. The Trip planner on OC Transpo’s website is a good tool, but it does overestimate the time it takes most people to walk. Follow the times only if you are walking with a toddler or have mobility problems.
6. The lost and found service is great (Rideau and Chapel Streets), just give them at least 24 hours before you go to look for your items.
7. All buses with 2-digit numbers will pass by the Rideau Centre at some point.
8. Not really a hack: Somebody needs to do a Google Maps mashup with Ottawa transit data. See here for a Vancouver example I stand corrected. OC Transpo’s website now has a Google Maps mashup. Great stuff.

What else would you add to the list?

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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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Corporate blogging has jumped the shark. This piece from the Economist on blogging CEOs at Davos is proof of that. 

SHOULD chief executives blog? The late adopters had better decide soon, because the World Economic Forum is encouraging blogging by bigwigs as part of its annual meeting this week in Davos, Switzerland.

If a meme ever needed kickstarting it is this one: It is ill-advised for an organization’s first big step into social media to be a CEO blog.

That kind of thinking leads to things like the silly Prince of Wales video-blogging announcement. 

Seth Godin was right when he wrote, back in 2004, that:

Here’s the problem. Blogs work when they are based on:
Candor
Urgency
Timeliness
Pithiness and
Controversy

(maybe Utility if you want six).

Does this sound like a CEO to you?

Short and sweet, folks: If you can’t be at least four of the five things listed above, please don’t bother. People have a choice (4.5 million choices, in fact) and nobody is going to read your blog, link to your blog or quote your blog unless there’s something in it for them.

Organizations would be much better advised to start with brand audits of their social media profile, internal blogs for change management, the development of better tools for employee collaboration, and social-media enabled outreach/engagement activities.

Once you’ve done all that then you can start to think about having the head of your organization blogging.  

Anything else is just window-dressing.

(Update: Here’s the link to Seth’s piece)

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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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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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Didn’t think they had it in them. But, I’ll have to give credit where credit is due.  Steve Rubel and Richard Edelman have some powerful holding lines on the Wal-Mart ‘flog’ issue.

Steve:

As my CEO Richard Edelman explains on his blog, our firm failed to be completely transparent.  I am sorry I could not speak about this sooner. I had no personal role in this project. There is a process in place that I had to let proceed through its course. This is why it took some time. Like Richard says, we are committed to the WOMMA guidelines on transparency.

Richard:

I want to acknowledge our error in failing to be transparent about the identity of the two bloggers from the outset. This is 100% our responsibility and our error; not the client’s.

It doesn’t forgive what happened, but it protects their reputation (for now) and (until they prove otherwise)  lets them continue to speak with authority on the emerging ethics surrounding the corporate use of blogs.
This will not be the last time that the social media ethics of transparency, accountability and “authenticity” will come into contact with the cold, hard realities of the PR business.

I’m sure the folks at Edelman just hope that they aren’t in the thick of it next time.

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Like many other folks, I’m a big fan of Steve Rubel (no link) and his Micropersuasion (no link) site. Generally speaking, he is right on the ball.

But, I’m disappointed with his (and Edelman’s) failure to respond to revelations that their client, Wal-Mart, had set up a fake blog purporting to be an authentic story of several people “Wal-marting across America” in their RV.

I’m not going to pass judgment on Steve. He just needs to follow the advice he freely dished out to Dell:

At a minimum, if Dell were serious about using their blog as “an online meeting place where we welcome our customers around the globe…one at a time” (their words, not mine), then it would have been great if they started with one of their most outspoken critics. A blog interview with Jarvis would have said reams about their willingness to be open to criticism. Instead, the Dell blog reads like a corporate brochure.

Dell could still turn it around if they hurry, but I fear this lack of candor will really set them back. When I read the one2one doctrine, their heart seems like it’s in the right place. Their actions don’t speak that way. Perhaps it might have been better for them to have stayed silent. Cmon Dell. We know you’re bigger than this. Join us. Be real. Walk the talk.

But hey, what do I know? And, who reads me anyway? Check out my technorati.com ranking for proof of that.

This is the blogosphere, though. Links are votes, and votes matter.

Matthew Ingram suggests this hasn’t gained momentum because the A-listers haven’t spoken up.

I’m more of a Zed-lister, myself. But, I’m doing my bit to juice up the critics and will my votes away Micropersuasion by (1) not linking to it in this post and (2) removing him from my blogroll.

If you are annoyed with Edelman and Steve Rubel for not following their own advice, then I’d recommend doing the same.

Here are some links to the words bouncing around the ’sphere:

Jaffe

Deep Jive Interests

PR Squared

Matthew Ingram

Neville Hobson - “The key issue here is what people are saying - in essence, the PR counsellors at Edelman have acted with extremely poor judgment in dressing up something for what it’s not.”

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