Business Storytelling

Banishing the Blogger Backlash

Earlier this week, New York City passed a law recognizing what most of us in the media industry already know—bloggers are journalists too. Until Mayor Bloomberg announced the new rules on March 2nd, access to city hall press conferences and similar events sponsored by the city were restricted to members of traditional media only. According to Norman Siegel, an attorney who filed the lawsuit resulting in the ruling on behalf of several bloggers; "Online journalists will now be considered as 21st century journalists and be treated equally to print, television and radio journalists."

Reading MediaBistro’s article on the news, I couldn’t help but wonder what took the Big Apple so long? The days when the majority of Americans turned to traditional platforms for breaking news updates are long gone. With the proliferation of smartphones and other devices, we’ve become increasingly reliant on non-conventional sources for the most up-to-date information. In fact, according to a new report out this week from Pew Research, 92 percent of Americans get their news from a combination of platforms, including traditional print, mobile and online. Only seven percent of those surveyed reported getting their news from a single platform, and those respondents pinpointed the Web or local TV news as their go-to source for information.

The Pew report further found that Americans view consuming the news as a social process; 75 percent of people who reported accessing their news online read it via an e-mail forward or post on a social network site, and 52 percent shared links with their social networks via email, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. For those of us in the industry, this finding too should come as no surprise. We know that a blog comment or retweet from an industry influencer can be just as compelling as a feature article in a traditional print publication. In many cases, the ROI resulting from coverage in a social media channel is more actionable, as it can be traced in real-time throughout the duration of its relevancy.

So, while New York’s City Hall is admittedly a bit late in their recognition of the bloggers’ legitimacy, the announcement is nonetheless an industry milestone. By granting non-traditional journalists the same access afforded to members of conventional media, the ruling enables New Yorkers to receive their news via the preferred combination of platforms. As the media industry continues to undergo rapid changes, I’m betting we’ll see other government institutions and organizations alike follow New York’s lead and banish the blogger backlash.

--Contributed by Kate Finigan. Follow her @PRKateFin

Social Media Not So Sweet

This time of year, it’s hard to walk two steps without bumping into an eager group of Girl Scouts selling their delicious cookies.  Even if you bring your own lunch to work, it’s inevitable that a box (or 15) will creep into the office at the start of Spring.  What started over 80 years ago in the personal kitchens and ovens of the members has since evolved from the traditional door-to-door promotion of the cookies to now include viral campaigns and online marketing techniques. 

This year, not only are the Girl Scouts on every street corner, but their national organization, Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA), is turning to social media sites, such as Twitter, Myspace, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube, to help gain exposure for the organization and with the hopes of increasing cookies sales (which were shockingly down in 2009). 

This is a relatively new form of interacting for the scouts, and while the organization is embracing these techniques, individual scouts are prohibited from doing so.  In fact, during last year’s cookie season, there was a huge controversy when one of the Girl Scouts tried selling the cookies online.  To read about this, check out the New York Times article, “Girl Scouts Battle With One of Their Own.”

Video Killed the College Essay

When I applied to college, I took the standardized SAT test, filled out application after application and hoped that I had participated in enough extracurricular activities to make me stand out above my peers. While I strove to make my applications unique and interesting, the thought never crossed my mind to think outside the box with the actual format of my application. Today, high school seniors are almost required to be extra creative, especially if they want to get into some of the nation’s top schools. With tuition prices and competition increasing, it’s getting harder and harder to differentiate one 4.0 student from another. 

According to the Boston Globe, “Tufts University this year has become the first selective college in the nation to encourage applicants to submit videos about themselves.” While this supplement was optional to applicants, over 1,000 high school seniors chose to submit the one-minute videos, accounting for approximately 6 percent of all of the applications.

Lee Coffin, Tufts’ dean of admissions, explained that these videos give the students an opportunity to show their creativity, aside from standardized tests and writing assignments. She said that they help admissions answer the question, “What spark do they bring to the class [of 2014]?” Academic record, standardized tests and extracurricular activities will still play major role in the admissions process, but this supplement gives students the opportunity to show their true colors.

Coffin told the New York Times, “At heart, this is all about a conversation between a kid and an admissions officer. You see their floppy hair and their messy bedrooms and you get a sense of who they are. We have a lot of information about applicants, but the videos let them share their voice.”

James Fay, a fellow Greenough colleague’s younger brother, applied to Tufts this year and submitted the video below:

 

Going for Gold and Green at the Vancouver Winter Olympics

When I found out the 2010 Winter Olympics were going to be held in Vancouver, British Columbia (B.C.), I was eager to see how the Vancouver Olympic Committee (VANOC) was going to infuse the province’s environmentally-conscious mindset and innovative design style into the various venues.

From the beginning there were a number of aspects of the VANOC plans that impressed me, but what stuck with me – and something developers and corporate executives should pay close attention to – is how everything, from the materials for the speed skating rink’s roof to the compost bins in the cafeterias, was designed to maximize visual impact, while reducing the negative impact on the environment.

All you have to do is go to the official Vancouver 2010 site and you’ll immediately see that VANOC has a laundry list of information on the eco-initiatives for the 2010 Winter Games. This site includes helpful resources such as interactive sustainability videos (in English and French, of course), links to government and third-party energy assessments, and even a carbon offset calculator you can use to see how you can reduce your carbon footprint at the games or at home.

The Tweet Is Mightier Than The Sword

Twitter is changing the customer service game -- big time. This weekend, film director Kevin Smith proved that 140 characters can pack a powerful punch when you're dealing with a customer service complaint. Smith was flying Southwest from Oakland, CA to Burbank when he was apparently asked to leave the plane because of his large size. According to Smith, a captain and flight attendant decided he was a "safety risk," so crew members asked him to disembark and booked him on a different flight.
 
What those Southwest employees might not have guessed was that in his hands, Smith had the power to start a full-on social media war against the airline. With more than a million Twitter followers, Smith has a loud voice in the social media stratosphere, and he made it heard this weekend.  Within minutes of being removed from the plane, Smith started Tweeting: "Dear @SouthwestAir I know I'm fat, but was Captain Laysath really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated?" It got nastier as Smith got angrier. To their credit, Southwest started responding immediately. They have more than a million Twitter followers themselves, and likely understand the power of Smith's anti-Southwest Tweets.  Here's what they started with: "@ThatKevinSmith hey Kevin! I'm so sorry for your experience tonight! Hopefully we can make things right, please follow so we may DM!"
 
It seems that apologetic Tweet (and several others like it that followed) wasn't enough to calm Smith's anger. @SouthwestAir Tweeted that they left Smith voicemails to apologize -- Smith Tweeted back that he never got a call. Some of Smith's followers said they didn't think Southwest would be apologizing at all if Smith didn't have such a strong Twitter following. "They're only apologizing because Smith has a platform to express his displeasure," Tweeted @3rdVentureBro.

What’s the Buzz About?

This week, Google introduced a new service called Google Buzz, a way for users of its Gmail service to share updates, photos and videos. The New York Times reported that Buzz’s functionality will be very similar to Web sites like Facebook and Twitter, making it a direct competitor to the top two social networking sites.

To get a better sense of what Google is offering, I decided to check out the Buzz for myself. It was very easy to get started because the program allowed me to automatically follow the people I email and chat with the most on Gmail. That right there was the high point. However, a Facebook rep recently said, “The people that you email and chat with the most may not be your closest friends or the people that you want to share and connect with." Touché.

The search feature is rather lackluster. Unlike Facebook and Twitter that have advanced search options to easily find new “friends” and “followers,” Buzz only allows you to search for people by name or email address, making it really difficult to make new connections.

The format is also a bit of a downer – the “Buzz” is a series of status messages that followers can “like” and comment on. Remind you of Facebook’s news feed? Users can also alert their friends to conversations by posting a comment with an @reply to their Gmail email address. Remind you of Twitter?

I personally don’t think we need another venue to post pictures and share information, I think Facebook and Twitter do the trick – and do it better. But don’t take my word for it, try it out Buzz for yourself and send along your feedback!

Contributed by Jena Coletti.  Follow her @jmcoletti

Fumble in the Ad Zone?

(Full disclosure: As a former New Orleanian and proud member of Who Dat nation, I watched the Super Bowl on Sunday evening in the hopes of seeing the Saints win. And they did- yay!)

For a lot of people, though, interest in Super Bowl ads is what drives them to tune in on the first Sunday in February. Brands pay as much as $2.5 million for 30 seconds of airtime, and consumers expect to be wowed by the content. Traditionally, a large portion of the appeal of Super Bowl ads lay in the fact that consumers were viewing the material for the first time when it aired during the big game. But social media has started to change this. This year, for example, advertisers used a variety of social media channels to debut their ads and test out audiences responses prior to Sunday’s event. Mashable has a great round up post here.

What The [*&%$] Do I Blog About?

Last week my colleague Catharine offered insights on how to start measuring the impact of your company's social media program.  So, in the spirit of providing best practices for online business strategies, I thought I'd offer a few of my own tips on blogging.  After all, if your company wants to participate in social media, you should definitely have a blog.  Now I don't consider myself an expert blogger, and I don't even have my own blog, but that's the point -- you don't have to be a lifelong blogger to start a successful blog.  You just have to write about what you know, write often, and listen to your readers. 

Here are basic tips for those that are starting out:

1) Write about what you know:

Last week I read a great blog entry from client Harvest Power in which a member of the finance team wanted to give perspective on how the organic waste industry and public awareness of recycling organic waste is evolving.  She is transparent about the fact that she knows investing, but doesn't witness a whole lot of what her company does in the field.  So she stuck to what she knows -- simple examples of organic waste recycling from her day-to-day life.  She offered an excellent anecdote about a friend's company:

"She has a recycling bin of course (a generously over-sized one), but the only trash bin she gets is a tiny, soup can-sized bin that fits on her desk.  And recycling bins are at every corner and in every room, but trash bins are only in the kitchen.  And there’s no trash collection service, so every day she needs to empty her trash bin into the kitchen one."
 
The author told me that she didn't know what to write about, so she just wrote what was familiar to her.  And I think that is they key: if you write about your own interests, that enthusiasm will shine through in the blog, and your writing will naturally become more compelling.  Try it.
 

2) Invite others:

Don't let all the blogging fall on your shoulders.  Readers want to see conversation and activity, and hear other people's opinions too.  So two immediate suggestions include:

• Conduct interviews and post them on your blog (always great when you don't know what to write about).  You can talk to customers, luminaries, friends, anyone that has something interesting to say that is relevant to your business.  Here is an example from our own blog.
• Invite guest bloggers: if you don't have a blog idea, see if someone else in your company or circle of friends/colleagues does -- a fresh voice can always attract new readers.

The more people that inhabit your blog, the larger the conversation.  So go ahead: share, invite, co-author, collaborate.

Looking Ahead

I’ve become desensitized to social media statistics.  “Mind blowing” reports don’t really seem to faze me anymore, Twitter’s and Facebook’s growth has become a given and the more frequently marketers use the word “organic” (I’m guilty), the more I think of shopping at Whole Foods.  Reports on the proliferation and adoption of social media platforms have become part of my daily news intake.  Twitter has become my news feed and until the population of Facebook overtakes that of another country, I will continue to observe social media growth with little fanfare. 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that these statistics aren’t groundbreaking.  It’s just that the escalation of social media usage has become somewhat predictable.  Facebook has 40% more users than six months ago, Twitter now has 75 million accounts and the average number of tweets per day is 27.3 million worldwide.  As we spend more and more time in front of screens each day, access the Web on our smartphones and converse through status updates, it seems inevitable that social media will eventually become a fundamental form of communication, even more so than it is now.

But at what point does this happen and how will it affect the public relations industry?  We work and strategize to decide if and how clients should enter the social sphere.  If the current growth persists will we eventually operate in an environment where our concern is no longer if and how companies should get involved but how and where they should?  When social media is an integral part of every marketing mix how will that change the conversation and the role that PR plays in it?

We're all pretty immature, here...

I've been thinking a lot about social media measurement lately - for a number of related reasons: social media is playing a bigger and bigger role in marketing every hour; I'm spending more of my time doing social media work for clients and they want things measured; and since I'm doing more of this type of work, I have a personal desire to know it's valuable.
 
Social media, social platforms, social marketing - whatever you call it, it's still evolving.  But it's not just the platforms, tools and their applications that are evolving; we're evolving too - in how we interact, how we think, how we understand the world around us.  And how do you measure evolution?  You can't, really, except in hindsight, because you don't always know where you're going.

Brian Solis has an interesting post on how quickly and how broadly the business world is changing - "The Evolution of Social Media and Business."

Tempering enthusiasm for and commitment to social media with the realism of one who knows the pace of organizational change, one of the clients I've been working with has said insightfully, "We'll crawl before we walk, walk before we jog, jog before we sprint."

I think this parallel to human development is an apt metaphor for social media measurement because it indicates different thresholds of accomplishments for different stages of an evolution.  With an infant or toddler, each word, each step, each new motor skill is a major accomplishment.  Even if your goal was for your child to be an Olympic miler, you wouldn't use quarter-mile splits as a yardstick from the get-go.