Category: Social Media

That’s *our* Liza!

Yesterday K.D. Paine complimented a PR practitioner for delivering a great pitch, here’s a quote:

Liza, get yourself cloned, we need more like you. Can I persuade you to move to Northern New Hampshire?

It turns out that “Liza” is our Liza, a graduate of Clemson’s Communication Studies program and the future professional adviser of the Clemson PRSSA chapter, should it get approved.

I don’t know about cloning, but there’s no way we’re letting Liza move to New Hampshire! Once the PRSSA chapter gets started, Clemson PR students will have a lot to learn from her.

Congratulations, Liza!

The struggle for attention

For a long time, companies have fought for their stakeholders’ attention. The main challenge was for the message to cut through the clutter and get the public’s attention. I’m noticing this dynamic is reversed in social media. Social media users, and bloggers in particular, want companies’ attention. I’ve come across several blog posts lately that deal with getting (or not) enough/appropriate attention from a company. See cases and links below.

So, why is it so important for bloggers to get the attention of companies they blog about? Is it to feel validated? Is it because bloggers are evangelists of the conversation and this is their way of putting pressure on companies to join in? Is it because, as stakeholders, we assume companies should be happy to finally have our attention and we’re disappointed when our expectations are frustrated?

I’ll collect some case studies here that can hopefully teach us something about this need for attention:

Target dismisses blogger Amy Jussel from shapingyouth.org; blog storm ensues, story is picked up by the NY Times.

Saturn comments on blogger’s post; blogosphere celebrates Saturn’s engagement. Story here.

Ike Piggott praises companies reading his blog, such as Citi and Canon.

Blogger advises auto insurance company esurance to let character Erin Esurance play in the social media landscape, esurance responds, but bloggers  won’t take no for an answer.

I’m sure there are many more such examples out there (if you send me links, I’ll add them here) that all speak about this struggle for attention.

What are your thoughts? Why is corporate attention so important to bloggers? Are their expectations reasonable? Will this lead to redesigning the PR function so it can participate in thousands of conversations? How should companies handle requests and pressure for attention? –VERY carefully, suggest the Target and esurance examples, as responses will be published, analyzed, and criticized. Oh and… use a conversational human voice. Any well thought-out, well-written response may be dismissed as a “prepared statement.” “Honest opinions pecked off in a few minutes on a laptop” will do. No mercy out there in the blogosphere.

Edelman Digital Bootcamp hosted by the University of Georgia March 1, 2008

I’m looking forward to this event and I hope PR students and educators from the Southeast will attend:
The University of Georgia is hosting the Edelman Digital Bootcamp for students and educators throughout the Southeast March 1.

Edelman, the world’s leading independent public relations firm, seeks to provide both students and educators hands-on skills integration training about the professional use of new media.

Students will break into teams, and then Edelman practitioners will direct them in a mock campaign. Students will have the opportunity to work one-on-one with Edelman facilitators to research, design and implement a social media solution for the assigned client. This approach will allow students to network with professionals while
gaining valuable hands-on experience.

An additional track will be available to educators, with more of a focus on sharing ideas and encouraging the adoption of new media in more communication curriculums throughout the Southeast.  Educators will have the opportunity to discuss the practicalities of teaching new media, share lesson plans and more.

Social media continues to grow, making this event a valuable opportunity. The registration fee is $20 [correction: $25] for students and includes refreshments and lunch during the event. A casual reception for discussion and networking will conclude the conference.

EdelmanDigitalBootcamp.com, the official Web site for the event, will go live a few weeks before the event and feature online registration information, photos, blog posts and other new media elements.

For more information, please contact Cindy Schnably at schnably@uga.edu or (304) 283-6825.

Conversational Human Voice

Researchers Tom Kelleher and Barbara Miller have created an 11-item measure of the conversational human voice (yes, the Cluetrain Manifesto one). So, if you’d like to measure the conversational human voice of your blog, website, or automated telephone prompters (OK, maybe not this last one), plug the following items in a survey and ask your public to respond:

  1. Invites people to conversation.
  2. Is open to dialogue.
  3. Uses conversation-style communication.
  4. Tries to communicate in a human voice.
  5. Tries to be interesting in communication.
  6. Uses a sense of humor in communication.
  7. Provides links to competitors.
  8. Attempts to make communication enjoyable.
  9. Would admit a mistake.
  10. Provides prompt feedback addressing criticism with a direct but uncritical
    manner.
  11. Treats me and others as human.

The items are published on p. 413 of the article (see full citation & link below). For those who wish to get technical, the authors reported an alpha reliability coefficient of .87 for this scale. Which means that the scale has pretty high internal consistency – or that people who rank high on one item in the scale tend to rank high on the other ones, too. If they didn’t, you’d wonder if the items are measuring different things. OK, enough about that.

But why would I want to measure human voice?

I don’t know, why would you? You tell me in the comments. If you’re trying to fake the human voice and want to use this measure to see if you succeed, well… well, you have bigger problems then. But you might want to perform an experiment to assess the different impacts of different levels of conversational human voice. That’s what the authors tried to do in phase II of their study, but the validity gods weren’t merciful with that part and for that reason I’d rather not write about it. I’ll stick with the good part.

I find it very useful to have a validated scale for measuring human voice, but then, my world here in the ivory tower is a weird, weird one (you might say). What does the real world think? Would you use this scale? When? Why? How?

Article citation:

Kelleher, T., & Miller, B. M. (2006). Organizational blogs and the human voice: Relational Strategies and Relational Outcomes. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), 395-414.

(it’s one of those few academic journals available for free online)

Video: Changing the world with graphs

Here’s a video worth watching, even if a bit long (about 25 mins.).

Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet and Director of Gapminder Foundation, speaking at LeWeb3 conference, Paris, 2007 (video courtesy of Robert Scoble).

Several things to notice in this video:

  • statistical storytelling with amazing graphs (of interest to both students of narrative theory and visual communication or information design)
  • fresh perspective on globalization, economic development, history, and environmental issues
  • the power of software and animated statistical graphs to help tell stories that can change (how we see) the world
  • Rosling’s message to bloggers: use blogging to connect to the whole world instead of reinforcing the homogeneity of the Western world. How do we do this? How do you do this?

http://vpod.tv/leweb3/392157/flash/videoPlayer

Social media and marketing

Shel Israel explains it beautifully:

The essence of social media is that it is humans. Humans connect to humans and they form communities. They own their communities, brands don’t. The perspective of traditional marketing is to take a message and find delivery channels to inseminate into people’s foreheads. This is not social. Social is for a marketing executive to start a blog and ask people why they hate his marketing efforts–then listen–really listen to what people say the way Dell has done and a few others are trying to do.

I can’t wait to share this quote with my PR students. I love it because it explains something that I’ve been thinking about… what happens to cultures and communities when corporate interests intervene (or try to own communities/conversations). This quote explains that one of the things that happens is that the conversation loses its humanity and authenticity. It becomes hollow. It ends.

Silly, what comes to mind is Suze Orman’s line: “People first, then money, then things.” – what a good lesson to teach my PR students!

Related post: The only real social networks are personal ones 

Facebook Beacon timeline & analysis

I love this analysis by Geoff Livingston of what went wrong with Facebook Beacon: They put business before community. Geoff argues this won’t work in social media:

ROI is a by- product of community participation as opposed to hard transactional advertising.

If you haven’t followed the Facebook Beacon controversy, here is a brief & manageable timeline for media snackers:

November 6, 2007: Facebook announces new targeted advertising system, Beacon: AP news; Read/Write Web

Analysts reflect on the business implications & possibilities of Facebook Beacon:

Privacy concerns emerge

Moveon.org starts campaign against Facebook Beacon: Read/Write Web; Moveon.org online petition; Moveon.org Facebook group (65,000 members between Nov. 20 and Dec. 3); For Immediate Release commentary (Shel Holtz & Neville Hobson);

November 28: Facebook makes changes to Beacon: Facebook announcement (ripe for ripping apart in a PR rhetorical analysis!)

The PR nightmare doesn’t end here:

Evolution of Beacon Nov. 6 – Nov. 29 from NY Times B.I.T.S. (hat tip to Jeremiah Owyang who posted this on twitter)

Edits (Dec. 5 & 6):

The big PR question is: Where is Mark Zuckerberg? It started with R. Scoble’s post above but others (note the excellent PR advice in this post), including Shel Israel, are asking the same question.

Todd Defren posts as Fake Mark Zuckerberg and shows what Mark should say. Funny, but great PR advice.

Mark Zuckerberg finally posts on Facebook blog. Shel Israel comments and finds Mark’s statement credible. I think the first paragraph is nice, because it admits they made mistakes. However, what has annoyed me throughout Facebook statements is that they claim to have created Beacon to “help people share information with their friends.” Really? As my students put it: “If I want to share information with my friends, I TELL them.” Beacon is an advertising platform and its goal is to make more money. So, although the first paragraph is OK, the second one is not:

When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends. It had to be lightweight so it wouldn’t get in people’s way as they browsed the web, but also clear enough so people would be able to easily control what they shared. We were excited about Beacon because we believe a lot of information people want to share isn’t on Facebook, and if we found the right balance, Beacon would give people an easy and controlled way to share more of that information with their friends.

But, here’s the change, as a result of user “feedback” (outrage?):

today we’re releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here.

And, OK, this excerpt is good PR:

It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better.

What’s missing is some sort of promise/guarantee that user privacy will be a priority in the future. Instead, Mark’s last paragraph closes the topic. He hopes that:

this new privacy control addresses any remaining issues we’ve heard about from you.

Meaning, that’s it, we’re done, can we drop it now? We’ll see…

Dec. 5: Read/Write Web claims this is the end of the Beacon saga… the blogosphere is tired.