Archive for June, 2010

How News Brands Use Social Media and Social Gadgets To Connect With Audience

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Photo: www.oweb.com

While everyone depicts the demise of newspapers, the art of news gathering has never been stronger. 

We’ll get this out of the way first, the newspaper industry as a distribution model is in a downward spiral.  Newspaper printing and physical distribution is an expensive proposition and with circulation in decline, the money (advertisers) are moving to greener pastures.   Advertisers are going online where they get broader exposure for cheaper rates with more access to return on investment numbers (analytics, click-throughs, etc).  That puts the traditional newsprint model in serious jeopardy.

News gathering on the other hand, has exploded.  If you consider the amount of content being created across blogging sites, video site (YouTube), podcasts, social networking sites and micro-blogging sites the numbers are astounding.  What’s subject, you might argue, is the quality of the content.  Therein lies the problem, with so much noise (content) out there, it is much harder for traditional content creators to match the velocity (speed and distribution) that news has taken on.  Journalists must fight fire with fire, not a garden hose.  Interestingly enough, journalists had the exposure, the resources and the networks to be able to do exactly what bloggers and other new-age news gatherers are doing today, just not the necessity.  As the early bloggers received much fanfare for regurgitating news found on the web, professional journalists resorted to this as well as a way to get the news out faster, not better.

Now the tides are turning.  Journalists who understand story-telling and fact-finding are now beginning to get necessity.  They are exploring new ways of developing news and planting seeds to better understand news as it happens.  There are some good examples already that I got from Vadim Lavrusik, who writes for Mashable, like the living stories project between Google and NYT’s and the invent of news streams, or news as it happens from sources like Twitter that break news sometimes hours before traditional media taps in.

What’s missing though is the transformation.  Journalists and newspapers are still doing the same things just with shinier toys and fancier widgets.  That’s motion not transformation.  Let’s stretch a bit and see what we could come up with.  How about if….

  • Journalists became masters of their networks. Use Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to manage a network of experts around any topic that might come up.  Have a local chemical spill?  Might help to know that there are 17 local chemical engineers and 7 local retired hazmat experts from the government within 10 miles of the accident.  With all the social networking, no one is connecting the dots locally.  The one who does, will become the modern day tribal leader.
  • News organizations teamed with Gov2.0.  Every government agency is falling over themselves to get up-to-speed in the digital world.  Think of the mashups you could create with the resources of the newspaper and the data of the local government.  If something happens, look who’s sitting on the data streams and information already.
  • Local advertising.  Newspaper sales used to be the only ones in town with access to every local business.  Why they did not offer every local business an enhanced listing on a Yelp type site is beyond me.  There was an opportunity to take over the yellow pages and I believe there still is.  Newspapers will never out Fox, FOX News, however no-one should ever out- St. Louis the St. Louis Post for instance.
  • Location based services – that leads here.  If newspapers were cross matching their data, they would already know what business locations were closest to me and make offers accordingly.  At the same time with just a little effort, they could greatly enhance my profile by simply offering me a profile and providing me a compelling reason to say which types of food, activities and shopping that I enjoy.

 These are just a few ideas that I came up with and I know when enough is enough.  From here, we’ll let the expert take over.  Brian Dresher will be this week’s moderator for the HashtagSocialMedia event.  Brian brings years of managing content distribution and customer acquisition for a news brand and certainly understands necessity as the Manager of Social Media and Digital Partnerships for USAToday.  Brian will help us open up the possibilities of an industry under-siege so you can take these lessons and apply them to your own industry where digital is changing the landscape.  This week’s questions will be:

Topic: How news brands use social media and social gadgets to connect with audience

1.       What role should Twitter and Facebook play in journalists engaging with users?

2.       How do devices like iPad and iPhone influence news consumption?

3.       How will location-based services impact future of news gathering?

Join us for this event Tuesday June 29th at noon eastern.  Follow along using #sm66 from your favorite Twitter client or simply goto our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

Updated post 7/2 to accurately reflect Brian’s role. Thanks again to Brian for leading a great discussion.

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The New Digital Press Release

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

So who are today’s most effective communicators in business?  Yesterday I might have answered with corporate public relations (PR) when they send our their press release over the wire.  Today though, we have bloggers updating posts and getting thousands or tens of thousands of views in a day.   If you simply changed the title from blogger to corporate PR could you get the same effect?

What’s the value of the traditional press release today?  Press releases that are done in the same fashion as they were 5 years ago are a waste of time and precious resource.  People don’t read that way anymore, there are way too many other releases (blogs) that compete for the same timeshare and press releases that are built for the wire or for the corporate press page on the website will never get seen again.

There are many people beginning to catch on to today’s journalistic requirements and only a handful who started the revolution as much as 4 years ago (Todd Defren, Shift Communictions, has this initial social media press release template available).  And the discussion today has shifted a bit further into push vs. pull styles for PR.  The press release of today is more than a spiffed up template though.  The voice of the release is different, the tone, the content, the target and the media by which to express it is different.  Here are some points to consider in the new digital press release:

  1. concise content – It’s not about crafting a story as it is about feeding quality content
  2. no buzzword bingo – content has to be in the language of the audience not the made up language of the company
  3. Targeted to audiences – much like advanced websites provide me content related to my previous viewing and digital ads can be served up ad hoc in seconds, press releases need to have a message targeted to specific audiences.  It’ possible you write 3 intros to the same release with different angles of the content based on the audience who is viewing it.
  4. multi-media – text is boring, video is cool.  Include images, podcasts, videos, schematics, etc to enhance the content.  I believe we are close to having press releases taking the form of all video very soon (no text).
  5. Make it shareable (referring to point #2, see usually I would say extensible) – provide a 140 character summary and shortened URL on the release, add a Facebook “Like” button, create a focused posterous page, etc.

Today’s world is challenging enough that all parts of the orgnaization need to be operating seemlessly.  Having effective press releases is certainly one of those important pieces of the overall pie.  For proper attribute on the topic, I want to give props to Cyndee Woolley for the idea of this topic and for teeing up this week’s moderator Shel Holtz.  Shel wrote the book on corporate conversations (well five of them actually) and has been speaking and writing on the topic for more than a decade.  Shel will lead the discussion with the following questions:

Topic: The New Digital Press Release

Q1:  What value do you see to a social media news release or a social media
newsroom?

Q2: Are there still uses for the traditional news release?

Q3:  How do you combine traditional media relations with social media?

Please join us in the conversation on Tuesday 6/22  noon Eastern by following #sm65 on twitter or by going to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

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Social Media Data Management – Privacy, Security and Retention

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

People in general are jumping on social networks at an amazing rate.  They sign up, add a few photos, post some thoughts, invite friends, take a survey, click on a couple of ads pozing as games and before you know it, that individual has a lot of readily available social information they have volunteered.  Knowingly or not, every click that is made tells more and more about the user.  By joining these networks are you giving up your right to that data?  The privacy camps say its your data and you control it.  The social networks are showing (by their actions) that by signing up and using the site for free, you are effectively paying for use of that social network by providing you data to use.  Whether anonymized of not, that data is extremely valuable to the right advertisers.  Those advertisers have proved they will do about anything to get it.

A few examples: Google states that it does not use your data (search, email, now phone) however their recommendations of people to connect with is eerie.  Facebook uses your data to match advertisers up with.  While they may not give it out (or maybe they do http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/company-news/facebook-shared-personal-data-with-advertisers-without-user-cons/19485873/).  Anyone with a Twitter feed can find out quite a bit about a person if they were capturing those streams and feeding them into a database.

Are you “paying” to use social networks with your data?  Our moderator this week is a highly sought after social media professional who is a long time contributor to this group.  Ken Burbary is the lead digital and social media strategist for Ernst & Young and is moderating this week’s session on social media data privacy and what companies are actually doing with the data.  Ken brings a wealth of knowledge and, working with highly regulated companies, he brings a hands on perspecitve of the topic.  The topic this week is:

Topic:  Social Media Data Management – Privacy, Security and Retention

TOPIC QUESTIONS

Q1)  What customer data do companies collect and use from social media platforms and web sites?

Q2)  How are companies securing and protecting social media data that that they collect?

Q3)  What purposes are companies retaining social media data for? How are they using it?

Please join us this Tuesday 6/15 for a lively conversation on the value of personal data to companies.  The event starts at 12 noon eastern and run for one hour.  As always, the first question will be asked at noon and then every 20 minutes.  Follow along by tracking #sm64 from your favorite Twitter client or simply use our event page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live we look forward it!

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Crisis Management for BP Using Social Media

Monday, June 7th, 2010

“We took a chance on bending the rules a bit on our experiemental deep water drilling platform and kinda got caught.  What’s the big deal? Give us an A for effort?  C’mon, everybody makes mistakes!”

These are the types of musings that  have been entertaining more than 137,000 people on Twitter and millions more on ABC News, CNN, USAToday, Wall Street Journal and more.  Using a fake account, the twitter handle of @BPGlobalPR has been tweeting over-the-top posts that poke fun at BP’s CEO Tony Hayward, his wife and other leutenants at BP as a way to bring attention to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. 

In contrast, the BP corporate twitter handle has 12,000+ followers and is following 51 people.  How did this happen? 

Why would an oil behemoth like BP think they would have to engage through social media in any meaningful way?  In fact why would an electric company, pharmaceutical company, semiconductor company, etc have to worry about developing a social strategy?  This event and @BPGlobalPR should be a wake up call to every company who produces anything.  Some event will happen at some point and your company will get overrun if you are not prepared. 

What should you do, you ask?  Well, that’s what we asked this week’s moderator Gavin Heaton to work through on this week’s chat.  Gavin gets my bid for two awards this week.  He wins for coolest handle: @ServantofChaos and moderates at the oddest local time yet (2am his local time in Australia).  Coolness aside, Gavin brings years of experience in digital marketing and strategy development and has proven to be a goto person for Brands of all types.  Our topic and questions this week will be:

Topic:  Crisis Management for BP Using Social Media

Q1:  How has @BPGlobalPR affected perception and should they have shut it down?

Q2:  How is BP using social media to address the situation and what should they do better?

Q3:  What can other companies learn from this about managing a crisis & the impact of social media?

The event will begin with Q1 at noon eastern followed every 20 minutes with the next questions.  To follow along and add your POV simply track #sm63 via any Twitter client or follow along via our LIVE page.

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