Ketcheson.net

As is always the case at conferences, the lunchtime and hallway conferences at Mesh have been as interesting as what’s on stage.

I haven’t followed the Payperpost controversy very closely over the last while, but I found myself sitting at lunch in conversation with Ted Murphy, the founder of Payperpost.com.

PayPerPost.com, for those who don’t know, is a company that pays bloggers to write positive (or at least not negative) reviews about their products.

Yesterday at the conference, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch referred to Ted as “the most evil person in the room.”

There are a lot of people who agree with Mike, with bucketloads of venom having been spat at Ted by A-list bloggers and journalists over the last year or so.

I tried to keep an open mind, and not jump to the Dr. Evil perspective, but it wasn’t easy.

Ted’s a strong debater, and his arguments are tricky to counter. Fundamentally, I understood his position to be:

1. Our bloggers disclose, so that makes us better citizens than most marketers/journalists/bloggers
2. Bloggers’ authority is everything, so if they betray their audience’s trust they will suffer. Therefore, they are self-policed and will behave themselves.
3. We are just facilitating transactions that are already going on, and, hey, we are actually making it possible for bloggers to make money.
4. Either (a) readers are smart and they know what is advertising and what isn’t; or (b) the distinction between advertising and regular content is a false one.

The issue with PayPerPost, in my mind, is that it sends us back to the philosophical underpinnings of journalism. The Church and State separation of advertising and content is one of the key principles of journalism, and the muddying of those waters is very troubling for many people.

As we worked our way through the debate, I was trying to understand why I react so viscerally and negatively to Ted’s pitch, and the PayPerPost model.

Finally, it dawned on me why I seriously dislike what they are doing: The company is built on a model that creates a Tragedy of the Commons situation, in which the activities of each individual participant, while containing benefit for each participant, actually harm everyone in the aggregate.

The term Tragedy of the Commons was coined by Garrett Hardin almost 30 years ago when he wrote, that “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. “

So, what Commons are we ruining?

It is the marketplace of ideas, the arena of public discourse.

Let’s spin this out in an example…
There is an emerging public debate about the economic, environmental and health benefits of using bottled water.
Let’s consider an organization that promotes the use of bottled water. Let’s suppose they offer opportunities on PayPerPost for bloggers to advocate in support of bottled water.

While individual users do disclose that they are paid for what they write, every new post, thread or discussion pollutes the marketplace of ideas with insincere, inauthentic content in which the incentives of the writer are skewed in favour of the bottled water organization.

Every new post reduces the value of discourse, and fundamentally results in a buying-off of the realm of public discussion. Every new post closes off a part of the space of authentic ideas, in which competing interests are fought out in a realm that is (at least occasionally) rooted in something other than crass financial interests, or at least moderated and interpreted by actors by groups that can articulate the interests that are involved.
Yes, I agree with Ted that there may be worse offenders. And, yes, journalists and marketers are not always angels.
But, to bring this back to the original Tragedy of the Commons discussion — in which the addition of every new cow brought some immediate value to the farmer but reduced the long-term well-being of everyone — in my mind PayPerPost is the company camped out at the edge of the field selling cows.

Postscript: I thought I was being all creative, unique, and insightful by linking this PayPerPost to the Tragedy of the Commons. Alas, nothing is ever really new on the Internet. When I got back to Google I realized that I’m not the first to do so. Pete Brackshaw of ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com got there a year ago, and BusinessWeek took a similar angle with a piece called “Polluting the Blogosphere”

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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 often hear this in the chats after my social media presentations:

I work in PR/Communication for a large, risk-averse department/organization that does a lot of outreach and consultation.

Part of our outreach program involves ‘webcasts’ targeted to our core audience (youth, business, partners, employees, etc.)

We spend a lot of money on webcasts.

Our audiences aren’t really that big, particularly given the cost and headaches.

Our senior managers love webcasts.

Webcasts are shiny and make it seem like our organization is very tech-savvy and with it.

I’ve heard of Youtube.

It is shinier and newer.

I’ve noticed that videos about our organization, uploaded by our stakeholders, and with very low production value get ten times the audience that our webcasts do.

What should we do?

My first instinct, and I think the instinct of many organizations, is to gravitate toward promoting mash-ups or contests that encourage users to submit videos as part of some new (and very shiny) campaign, or some other interesting little marketing exercise. (If I weren’t so lazy and jaded I’d insert the obligatory link to some ill-conceived mash-up contest on Youtube).

This approach is wrong.

For the risk-averse organization, with a button-down brand, this won’t get past the first meeting with your senior managers. I can guarantee that at this phase of adoption your organization isn’t ready for this kind of remixing of its brand. Or, in the case of a government department, user-generated mashups will never really be appropriate.

So, does this mean there is no value in posting videos to Youtube?

Nope.

Why do we do webcasts?

Traditional PR primarily serves the media. Why? Economies of scale. In Canada, five phone calls to the right media outlets can get your message out to most major media in the country. We want to reach Canadians, and this is the most effective way to do it.

One scrum, quick press conference, or afternoon of interviews and you have reached most Canadians. The flaw in this approach is that the outcome is a quick mainstream media blip with a sound bite and a backdrop, interpreted as the media want to interpret it, and all sliced up into a 90 second spot.

This is a blunt tool approach that doesn’t work well for targeting an engaged niche audience. They are left wanting. But, it has been one of the few tools available to us.

Webcasts are seen by many PR practitioners (in government anyway) as a way to reach an engaged niche through the in-depth video broadcast. They get 90 uninterrupted minutes of their issue, spilling crumbs on their keyboard while they learn about grain subsidies, a climate change education for kids, or a panel on economic development in Atlantic Canada (These are all made up examples, No government communicators were harmed in the writing of this post).

It is really the television model applied to the Web. The webcast is a new, temporary “channel” for your event. You advertise the channel, either through a press release or other broadcast format; build momentum for the day of the webcast; and hope that the people show up. Afterwards, you archive the webcast and hope that people continue to trickle in to view it. And, six months from now you hope your numbers are good for your wrap-up report.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate webcasts. They have had some success because they have been the best tool we’ve got for reaching an engaged niche with video over the web.

We take this success with a few lumps, though:

• Live broadcasts via the Web are expensive and complicated. We need to hire outside contractors, and pay through the nose for the production and the pipes.

• Scheduling is tricky because of time zones, and many people just can’t make it at that time.

• Technology usually fails for at least a small portion of those who want to see it

• Interactivity is limited to those on the line at the time

What changes with Youtube?

First and foremost: By moving away from expensive, real-time webcasts you have reduced your distribution costs dramatically. Immediately you have freed up resources to produce more and more compelling content. For those of you who have done webcasts, you will know that this means you have just freed up a very large percentage of your budget.

Now, we still have the problem of getting people to view our video and, depending on the level of consultation you are seeking, to interact with us and each other.

Let’s circle back. As I mentioned a couple of screens ago: “Traditional PR serves the media” because that has been the most cost-effective path to large audiences.

This all changes with “social media.” Those people we have been thinking of as our stakeholders or our “target audience” become a new distribution channel. They can help us get out our message and draw traffic to our content.

Instead of relying on a couple of dozen journalists locked up in a stuffy press conference room for 20 minutes, you have the chance to get your message out to the 500 people who care passionately about your organization’s activities, and you can draw on them to spread the word to the people in their networks via their blogs, podcasts, e-mail forwards, word of mouth pitches, etc.

You will build on the “brand audit” you’ve done of your organization, and the identification you did of the bloggers, podcasters, youtubers, and taggers that are engaged with your issues. (You have already done this, right?) With this understanding you will be aware of the ways in which your organization is being praised, criticized, mocked, etc. online, and you can gauge the strategic risks and opportunities of the outreach program.

At this point, you are ready to consider contacting your key influencers and let them know about your video and how it fits into your campaign.

The webcast pitch is a tough one: “Please be at your computer on Tuesday at 11:00 Eastern time for 30 minutes to watch a broadcast about our program. We’ll be in front of an audience of 50 people in Sudbury, and webcasting to the rest of the country. You can ask questions through a moderator. We’ll take 10 questions. You need to test your browser ahead of time. You and your colleagues will need to crowd around a PC, or all sit at your own PC. We hope your connection is fast. Don’t spill your coffee. You can watch it in the archives after, but won’t be able to ask questions.”

The Youtube pitch is much easier: “This video is the first in a series of videos that will talk about our program. Just click the link to watch it. Got comments? Post them in the comments field. Embed the video in your blog and talk about it. Heck, do your own video response if you want. We are listening, and we will come back with another video addressing some of the issues we hear. We’ve saved so much money by not webcasting that we are actually going to do a whole series of videos. This is the first of ten videos we plan.”

Compelling, eh?

What could possibly go wrong?

OK. I am not suggesting that caution be picked up and tossed into the next available breeze.

This has to fit with the strategic goals of your outreach program. The medium of choice has to align with the content, messages, and audiences involved. Basic PR stuff.

And, you may have some other very specific concerns to address, such as translation, or have accessibility restrictions that require you transcribe each video. Figure out a way to deal with these issues. But, keep in mind that you still have some coin left over from all that money you saved when you abandoned the expensive webcasts.

But what if we fail, you ask? You very well might, at first. But, that is good, and it is healthy. These efforts will cost you little, and they have the potential to create entirely new opportunities to reach your audiences. My advice on dealing with failure? Experiment. Sandbox. Pilot. Beta. Alpha. Whatever you want to call it, take a small, controlled risk up front and start to get your feet wet. Don’t kill the webcasts: just do both for a little while. Take some of your videos, and post them to Youtube. Cross-post them to your website as well. See what happens.

If you are scared of criticism and this feels too risky you can mitigate your risk to a certain extent by disabling comments on the video. Be prepared to take criticism, though. Consider it a natural part of the consultation and outreach that you are going through. Not everyone will love you. And, don’t forget that one of the most important goals of any outreach/consultation activity is to improve the extent to which you are listening to your stakholders anyway.
Like any good consultation you need to set some boundaries up front, pay close attention to the directions the conversations are going, and recognize that consultation requires constant gardening.

Pick the weeds, water the plants, and reap the harvest.

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P.S. Sorry for the absence of links in this post. Most of these thoughts have been inspired by materials I have read and tagged here.

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Over the last few weeks I’ve been trying to step back and look at the bigger picture around Web 2.0 / “social media” trends. I’ve been trying to get a better perspective on what all this means and where it is going.

The results are these 8 questions, a mixed bag of all the questions that I feel need to be answered or dealt with.

1 - Anti-social media: When can we stop using the term social media?

Please. Please. Please.

I’ve been following many of the discussions around the semantics of the term, and I have been unimpressed. Nothing has broken out for me and grabbed my attention.
We need a new term, and it should not be centred on media. And, while we are at it, the social piece isn’t that helpful either.

First, on social: Yes, we spend a lot of time interacting with others via trackbacks, links, shared networks, etc. But how social are we really being when we go to the basement to do it? Mainstream media production may not be very social, but its consumption can be. While “social media” production may be interactive, the consumption is invariably a solitary activity.

Now, on media:

The innovations that we are talking about involve changes in the consumption, production, sharing, mashing up, filtering, aggregation, disaggregation, tagging, atomization, intermediation, disintermediation, redisintermediation, and antiredisintermediationability of information. (Ok, I made the last one up).

This may be social, or it may be anti-social. It may be mainstream, or it may be microstream. It may be for mass consumption, microconsumption, or may be destroyed without every being consumed (i.e. an intermediary on the way to a new product, such as a Yahoo! Pipes building block). Anyway, “social media” is not the right term for this.

There are large swaths of innovation going on that will have an influence on PR/Communications that have no business being burdened with the word media. These include :

• Social networking – There is no ‘media’ connection to what happens with Meetups.
• Data-sharing - An organization posts up proprietary data and encourages people to mash it up, or a third-party combines various sets of data in a new and innovative way (i.e. MLS listings combined with Google Maps and census data).
• Wikipedia - It is a real stretch to call Wikipedia a social medium. It is a collaborative knowledge management repository.
• Rapid meme spreading and ad-hoc collaboration are characteristics of these new phenomenon that don’t really relate to the term “media”.

The other beef I have with the term “social media” is that it discounts the impact of the mainstream media. Much of what we call social media are just simply blog pickup of mainstream media stories. This is an interesting phenomenon, in that the blogosphere can amplify certain ideas that originate in the mainstream media. But, please, don’t suggest that the MSM is still not influential.
More reading on this:
http://www.socialmediaclub.org/2007/02/28/what-is-social-media-no-really-wtf
http://scobleizer.com/2007/02/16/what-is-social-media
http://blog.experiencecurve.com/archives/what-is-social-media
http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2007/02/scoble_asks_wha.html

2 - Online video: Why does search suck?

When will Gootube videos get meaningful search? I want to full-text search the words/music in these videos. I want to tag the videos, I want to see everyone else’s tags, etc. C’mon, Google. You are the kings of findabilty. Make it happen.

3 - Metrics: When will we know blog readership numbers?

Some company that does quantitative metrics for mainstream media needs to step up and work on providing audited blog readership numbers. I am getting sick and tired of having no answer to the “Well, how many people read these blogs anyway?” question. My current response that “Small Dead Animals is important because 600 other blogs link there” is pretty weak and becomes great fodder for cynics.

Has anyone linked subscriber numbers to inbound link counts? More specifically, one could seek out a correlation between Feedburner subscriber numbers for feeds that have enabled the Awareness API Reference to inbound link references. The end-result (theoretically) would be a prediction of readership based on the number of inbound links a site receives. Is this a valid relationship?

4 - Media mix: Is there a detailed analysis of how the mix of media consumed by North Americans is changing?

I rest many of my statements about how these tools are changing the media landscape on the assumption that the mix of media being consumed by Canadians is moving away from radio/tv/print to online. I see it in my media consumption, and in the consumption of my friends. But, I want to know if there are any good stats out there to show this? (I’m sure I’d find it if I looked at Pew Internet long enough).

5 - Influence: To what extent are social media REALLY affecting the trajectory of news?

We spend so much time talking about the exceptions (Kryptonite locks, Gomery inquiry, Dell, Dean scream, Jetblue, etc.) that we ignore the fact that the trajectory of most media stories are unaffected. And, the impact on most brands is negligible.

While I absolutely still believe in the long-term impact of all this, what I want to know is how to communicate the significance of “social media” in the 90% of cases when brand impact is minimal.

Do blogs have influence? This was a question put to me by several very experienced journalists at a dinner party a couple of weeks ago, and I’m afraid I didn’t have any good answers. They just don’t see influence of blogs in day-to-day coverage of Canadian issues. Most of the arguments that I trot out in favour of blog influence are based on isolated cases used to prove a general rule. What I want to know is: Out of 100 news items to hit the wire, how many had their trajectory affected by “social media”?

More reading:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/02/22/my-media-consumption-diet/
http://sambrook.typepad.com/sacredfacts/2007/02/so_where_does_t.html
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/_file_directory_/papers/344.pdf
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2007/02/17/measuring-influence-using-inlinks/
http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/2006/10/the_end_of_infl.html

6 - Wikis: Am I the only one who gets frustrated?

Am I the only one who starts playing around with wiki software and then quickly gets annoyed with clunky interfaces? Although I like the ideas of wikis, and I get Wikipedia, I find wikis incredibly frustrating to edit and I generally give up in frustration.

Am I the only person who thinks that a behind the firewall wiki seem like a good idea that would just never get adopted? Yes, I know about Wikipatterns.com. But, I still just can’t envision my colleagues ever using a wiki. And, in a bureaucratic and tech-averse work environment, I’d get laughed out of the room for suggesting it.

7 -Innovation 1 : When can we experiment?

When will risk-averse IT/web gatekeepers realize that if they don’t let people experiment with new web-based tools in the open, then people will just go behind their back in the hopes that they can corporate acceptance and then confront the-powers-that-be with a tool that has gained widespread acceptance and the gatekeepers are powerless to stop? Oops. Sorry. That was rhetorical.
More reading:
http://theobvious.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/the_100_guarant.html

8 - Innovation 2 : Does easy failure lead to success?

Who said that one of the secrets of success of blogs is that they can fail so easily? The premise is that one of the secrets of “social media” tools (for lack of a better term) is that they require so little funds and time to start, resulting in the ability to fail with no risk and result in rapid, evolutionary iterations that lead to long-term success. This is in contrast to large-scale, “moon shot” style IT projects that must succeed, and thus have minimal capacity to evolve and adapt. I can’t find the reference to this quote.

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I’ve been staring at my version of the Feedburner statistics module in Netvibes for a couple of weeks now, trying to decide what to do with my new sandbox of data.

The Netvibes module shows you the number of subscribers for any Feedburner feeds that have enabled the Awareness API, and brings these numbers together in a handy-dandy little Netvibes module.

I couple of weeks ago I grabbed all the Feedburner feeds in my OPML file, threw the feed names into a spreadsheet and then whipped up my own customized list of subscriber stats for the feeds I read.

This module makes it possible for you to pull together the subscriber numbers for any Feedburner feed that has enabled the Awareness API.  I have a pretty little picture on my Netvibes dashboard of the subscriber details for a good chunck of my OPML file as well as my own feed.

I was going to be cheeky and post everyone’s stats up, but I figured that would be bad form, and besides, it may discourage people from leaving their numbers public. (For the record, and in the interests of transparency, I have less than 100 subscribers.  OK. Fine. I have 19 subscribers. Satisfied? But, they are 19 really important subscribers.)

Here are some observations based on the stats from 21 feeds surveyed.

• The average number of subscribers per feed is around 10,000, once you exclude TechCrunch (287,850 subscribers).
• Below TechCrunch, we have John Batelle, Steve Rubel and Solution Watch in the next tier of bloggers, each pulling in five digit subscriber levels.
• Paul Kedrosky, MediaGuerilla, Publishing 2.0, Debbie Weil occupy a third-tier, with each registering four digit subscriber levels.
• Based on my sample, it seems rare for members of the Canadian PR and Web2.0 crowd to hit 1000 subscribers. Among my little sample, Paul Kedrosky and Darren Barefoot are the only ones to break 1,000 subscribers.
• About half of the feedburner feeds I checked have the Awareness API turned on.

Send your OPML files to me (ian at ketcheson dot com) and I’ll add to this analysis.  As I continue to think through how one would do “social media analysis” I want to explore plotting subscriber numbers to technorati rankings, numbers of comments on a blog, and “blogs that link” to try and find out if there are any interesting correlations.

I won’t publish exact subscriber numbers, unless bloggers I name provide consent.  TechCrunch is a different story as they have openly discussed numbers here.

I’d also be interested to know if anyone has generated more in-depth research or published results around Feedburner statistics.

For the record, here are the feeds in my (very non-representative) sample:

http://canuckflack.com
http://benmetcalfe.com
http://www.blogwriteforceos.com
http://darrenbarefoot.com
http://www.deepjiveinterests.com
http://battellemedia.com
http://evans.blogware.com
http://Mathewingram.com/work
http://www.mediaguerrilla.com
http://www.micropersuasion.com
http://www.newcommreview.com
http://paul.kedrosky.com
http://profectio.com
http://publishing2.com
http://www.readwriteweb.com
http://www.solutionwatch.com
http://www.techcrunch.com
http://net-savvy.com/executive
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog
http://ketcheson.net

(If you object to your feed being in my sample, then just turn off the Awareness API)

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News of the Wajid Khan defection to the Conservative Party of Canada was added to Mr. Khan’s Wikipedia entry at 10:15 am.

This was three minutes before the first online pickup of Canadian Press coverage confirming the move (according to Google News).

And, to top if off, blogger Stephen Taylor is taking credit for breaking the story in the first place.

Which begs the question for any organization: What tools are you using for your media monitoring? 

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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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