104 West Partners

Debunking Six Social Media Myths

From the desk of Elaine Schoch...

A colleague shared a great article from Business Week with me the other day that I hadn’t read since it was initially published in February – Debunking Six Social Media Myths. I still think it has some great information on how people view incorporating social media into their programs. It isn’t as simple as starting a Facebook page or Twitter feed, at least not if you want it to be successful. The six myths are noted below but I encourage you to read the full article....

1. Social media is cheap, if not free.
2. Anyone can do it
3. You can make a big splash in a short time
4. You can do it all in-house.
5. If you do something great, people will find it.
6. You can't measure social media marketing results.

Socialnomics: Are You Ready?

From the desk of Elaine Schoch...

I love the information I come across on Twitter and today I hit the jack pot. This short clip really hits home how social media is changing news and how we communicate. I encourage you all to take a peek.

Where did everybody go?

From the Desk of Elaine Schoch...
After a brief heart attack on Friday when I checked my Twitter account and those of a few clients and saw a significant decrease in followers, I scrambled onto Mashable to figure out the issue. Once I could breath, I asked a member of our team - Ben Johnson - to write a blog post about where everyone went.

From the Desk of Ben Johnson...
After Thursday’s clean sweep of spammers and inappropriate accounts, many Twitter users feel as though they lost their best friend or a few 100 followers, whichever sounds worse. For many, including the Ashton Kutchers’ and Perez Hiltons’ of the world, the amount of followers represented their importance in the Twittersphere and pop culture. This has made many ask, “where did everybody go?”

The last six months has been a triumphant but learning stage for Twitter. Between the battle of CNN vs. Ashton Kutcher to be the first to hit one million followers to this week’s recent mass deletion of over 1000 spammers it is evident that Twitter is evolving. But into what?

In June 2009, HubSpot released another State of the Twittersphere which divulged the activity that has drastically accelerated Twitter beyond a niche social media platform. Where a year ago 80% of users had specified a bio in their profile this number dropped to almost by 60% to 24.14% having a bio in their profile this year. While popularity played a large part in growth, the lack of profiles showed how joining was important but that engagement was not. While many joined for different reasons, the power players (Ashton Kucher, Perez Hilton, etc.) are seeing the most from Twitter even if just for a daily ego boost of more followers than the day before. But it’s the corporations that are recognizing the largest benefits. Dell reported earning $3 million from Twitter and many others are using the site as a way to engage with customers beyond that of face-to-face and toll free customer service numbers. So beyond the array of benefits to the power users what does Twitter look like to the average user?

Are you an average Twitter user - according to HubSpot?
·      Tweet .97 times per day
·      Have tweeted 119.34 time in total
·      Following-to-follower ratio of .7738.

What does this information mean to you or is it as informative as knowing that the average family has 2.5 children. While this information might give us a statistical overview of Twitter users, we know that everyone is on for a different reason. Maybe to become a thought leader in an industry, a platform in which to follow news that is relevant to your world, or to actually microblog and answer the question: What are you doing?

So today as we post our current state of mind or retweet someone else’s we at least know that our Twittersphere has gained back an ounce of genuineness even if our follower count is still causing bruised egos. 

Thoughts - 'Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley'

From the desk of Elaine Schoch...

The New York Times did an article Sunday regarding how the PR industry is leveraging social media channels and key social media influencers more to spread the word for its clients rather than traditional media outlets and influencers.

Influencer relations isn’t new – neither is having a social media program – and it’s a program we at 104 West (and many other firms) have leveraged for years for our clients. The point the article was trying to communicate is that the influencers are changing. They’re not the traditional print reporters anymore, but rather social media players with huge Twitter followings, be it analysts like Jeremiah Owyang or Rachel Happe; consultants/bloggers such as Chris Brogan or reporters/bloggers like Pete Cashmore, or even CEO’s such as Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com.

What disturbed me about this article is that it didn’t go into how you have to have an integrated and phased approach to create a successful program, especially for startups. We all know that social media is making the PR industry evolve and at a rapid pace. The information world we knew has changed and the information gatekeepers are changing guard. However, you can’t just rely on social media to do the job, you have to leverage both new and old media to be effective and sustain a presence. While social media can create hype and drive traffic, it alone can’t sustain an ongoing presence among influencers and a brands customers.

Think about it, how are you going to get to my mom who doesn’t have a Facebook page, she doesn’t reads TechCrunch or RWW or even the Wall Street Journal but rather the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and usually catches her local news on NBC each night. However, she would love to play with Wordnik, the site/startup the article referenced (as an ex-English teacher and wannbe crossword puzzle champ this would be the best site for her!). She might be a “nobody” but she is a power player in her little town in TX and can influence buying/user behaviors – not on the scale that Pete Cashmore can, but trust me, she has a big mouth...

The article goes into great detail about hitting the social media influencers and I completely agree but depending on your brand, social media influencers may not be the best ones for you to focus on. You have to know who your influencers are and WHERE they are. They may not be online tweeting or blogging, instead they could be industry analysts who you need to reach to be included in their reports, they may be reporters who write for a weekly industry newsletter. Now granted, more of these players are creating a presence online, particularly in the blogosphere and Twitter but their audience (your customers, i.e. my mom) may be getting the information else where.

While the PR industry is changing and the communication channels are shifting, the industry is still based on forming relationships and telling your clients story to the right people at the right time. It’s our job to know who the right people are and the right timing – that’s never going to change. 

Social Media - The Wild West of PR?

From the desk of Kathryn Marshall…

Although the PR industry is more than 100 years old, the introduction of social media over the last few years has made it feel more like the wild west. Being so new, there are no hard rules (laws) to social media but there is “etiquette;” the rules/laws are still evolving. And just like the wild west, there’s a land grab going on to see who can be first to stake their claim and define the new law of the land. 

I had the luxury of listening to one of social media’s pioneers yesterday – Southwest Airlines – when I attended the PRSA Colorado luncheon. Paula Berg, manager of emerging media at Southwest Airlines shared her trials and tribulations about riding the blogosphere "like a wild horse."

For more than three years, Southwest Airlines has navigated the uncharted territory of social media - first, with its award-winning corporate blog, Nuts About Southwest, later with tools such as Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Paula’s entertaining presentation was framed with real-life case studies that took us through Southwest’s journey of the highs and lows of using social media tools to reach an entirely new demographic, increase sales and create a valuable base of loyal Southwest followers.

One of the things I found interesting was her recommendation that companies start their foray into the social media world during ‘business as usual’ times so they can learn how the tools work and begin building/engaging with their audience. This sounds like a given but some of Southwest’s airline competitors have made the mistake of jumping into social media during a crisis only to find they were far behind the conversation that had started. They had no relationship with the people who were commenting and therefore, no credibility, and they had no practices in place for dealing in this type of environment.

Berg also talked about leveraging their online community for market research. In one instance, Southwest turned to its followers to launch a focus group on whether or not to move away from “open seating” on their flights, a signature differentiator for their airline. This is becoming a common practice among brands leveraging social media and proved extremely successful for Southwest – more than 700 people responded and ultimately  convinced them not to change.

As far as additional tips for success when using social media, Berg recommended:
-    Acting fact when working in online communications (no time for red tape)
-    Engaging openly in conversation
-    Taking the good and the tough feedback to build credibility
-    Engaging an executive sponsor to champion the effort from the top down
-    Building a strong team of social media people who inherently love to put themselves out there so you’re not pulling teeth to get content,
-    Most importantly – show results that demonstrate the power of online communications

Social media may be new, it may feel scary because it is unfamiliar, but it’s only going to grow in importance. So saddle up... 

Millennial Generation Journalists

From the desk of Elaine Schoch...

I used to teach the Introduction to Public Relations course at the University of Colorado in Boulder and I would have one to two courses focused specifically on new media – blogging, RSS feeds, writing for search, basic SEO for PR, etc. - and how businesses needed to incorporate these into their communication tools. It always surprised me how many students didn’t know what an RSS feed was or that they didn’t read blogs. (Although, they did teach me about Facebook and MySpace, so perhaps we’re even.) After explaining what an RSS feed was and what blogs were they all changed their tune to “oh, I know what that is, I read those all the time”. So, when I came across this study by the Society for New Communications Research Symposium comparing "Millennial Generation" journalists (18-29 years old) to more tenured reporters (50-64 years old) it made me think about my students who were striving to become journalists (they were only taking PR to learn about the ‘other side’) and the reporters I would ask to come and speak to my class about how to work with reporters once they got into PR.  

The report delves into how Millennial Generation journalists are adopting new media and social tools more readily and seeing their value, especially in terms of collaborating with their peers and strengthening their relationships with their audiences and the people in the areas they cover. This really isn’t a surprise given the fact that this age group has more or less always lived in the Internet Age. What’s surprising to me is that more tenured reporters aren’t as active. Thinking back to my class as CU the biggest gripe from reporters speaking to the soon-to-be PR pros was not to email/call them too much. I wonder if they’re on Facebook now?

Here are a few keys finding from the report:

• 100% of Millennial respondents (i.e., 18-29 year-olds) believe new media and communications tools are enhancing journalism, versus 40% in the 50-64 demographic.
• 87% of 18-29 year-olds believe bloggers have become important opinion-shapers, versus 60% of 50-64 year-olds
• 87% of 18-29 year-olds confirm that new media and communications enhances the relationship with their audience, versus 42% of 50-64 year-olds
• 48% of all respondents use LinkedIn, and 45% use Facebook to assist in reporting
• 68% of all respondents use blogs to keep up on issues or topics of interest
• 86% of all respondents use company websites, 71% use Wikipedia, and 46% use blogs to research an individual organization 

Sharing the good, the bad and the ugly in the age of transparency

From the desk of Jen Roane...

Last week, The New York Times wrote an interesting piece regarding the transparency blogs are bringing to businesses during these turbulent times (e.g. layoffs). This really isn’t new – we’ve all known blogs are a communications tool helping to usher in a new age of clarity and so we (i.e. businesses) should expect the good, the bad and the ugly to be blogged about.

Before blogs and Web 2.0, it may have seemed easier to “talk” about bad news with key audiences. However, as The New York Times points out, this was a one-sided discussion. The company either issued a vague statement or said nothing at all.  In other words, it was a monologue that was tightly controlled and not interested in feedback.

Since the evolution of the blog and other new mediums, a dialogue has sprung up to replace the more traditional monologue. This is a key foundation of building communities – having a dialogue with audiences from employees to partners to customers. It creates more insightful and ultimately productive relationships.

Figuring out how to have this dialogue and when to have it, is of course critical – even more so with the increasing number and popularity of Web 2.0 applications such as Twitter. But the basic premise is still there; open, honest and timely communication within the community is increasingly important. I’ve heard it cleverly described as the band-aid approach – get it all out in the open, quickly without dragging out the news and any subsequent pain.

This is still something that businesses today are struggling to figure out. How and when do we react? In what form does this conversation start and stop? How do we control the conversation? These are all critical questions. Companies need to take a closer look at why building a true community that involves ALL their key stakeholders will benefit the overall business.

What is Jell-O?

From the desk of Elaine Schoch...

That was a question asked Sunday by Jeremiah Owyang, a Forrester analyst who Keynoted the Thin Air Summit, where I spent my weekend in Denver immersed in new media. Feel free to check out Jeremiah's full presentation, he made it available for all to see.

For me, Jell-O has marshmallows and fruit in it and is something my grandmother used to make for holidays. However, on Sunday, I heard an interesting use for Jell-O or rather an analogy - media is undergoing dramatic changes from shape, size and power. Like Jell-O, media is amorphous and can take many forms. So what does this mean? Something  we’ve all already seen, even our grandmothers who aren’t online but are seeing the newspapers shrink in size and wonder why? Companies no longer control the news, reporters at the New York Times or The Denver Post don’t either, average people who are reading and sharing content now have a say in what is news, what’s important, why and  who should care.

Marshall McLuhan once said: “Medium is the Message”, suggesting that the medium a person gets a particular piece of content/information from affects their understanding of it. This is more true today than ever before given the shift in how and who makes the news.

Sending a press release to a reporter is no longer enough. It has to be optimized for search so it can be found online by reporters and average people alike. However, SEO isn’t enough either – you need multiple channels to spread your news from RSS feeds to Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Facebook and Friend Feed – all of these mediums enable your original content to be repurposed, spread and invoke conversation/participation among its readers. In other words, the more fractured people are in how they get their news, the more places/channels you have to use to distribute your news.

So why should you – a business – care? Long term, word-of-mouth sells more than an advertisement or even an article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal – most business owners (be it small or large) will attest to this. Word-of-mouth in this Web 2.0 world (or Web 3.0, whichever one you’re calling it) is what is making newspapers shrink. The average person is telling their 100+ followers on Twitter about how cool their new iPhone is or complaining about the paint guy at Home Depot making what should have been lavender paint to to egg plant.

The communications mediums have changed but the general principle hasn’t – you have to make information readily available to your audience where THEY go to find it and in a FORM they’ll digest it so it’s easy for them to spread your information. If you’re customers are on Facebook – you should be too. If they’re tweating on Twitter – you should be too. If you don’t know, find out. One easy way is to simply check your incoming web traffic and see what URLs are already bringing people in to your site. This may not help much in terms of your social media footprint but it might shed some light.

Death of the Blog?

From the desk of Patrick Ward...

Writing in Wired this morning, Paul Boutin from Valleywag has proclaimed the death of the blog.  The argument is that blogs have become too unwieldy and impersonal, more like columns by professional columnists.  That’s just crazy!  An upstart group of enterprising writers developed a viable format and now the professionals have come in and commercialized it. Can you believe it!?!

I suspected that this day would come (I don’t want to profess that I saw this coming entirely), principally because the amateur quality to many blogs – including this one perhaps – just begged for the pros.  Follow the money, the sage advice goes. So, as blogs became increasingly popular, then advertisers came in and well…If you demonstrate that a market exists for a product, then, guess what, people will make money off of that market.  And that includes the New York Times Company and the Graham Family.  A recent report by Technorati said that a blog with over 100,000 uniques each month could earn as much as $75,000 per year.  The kiss of death?  Or commercial progress?

Boutin proposes that the heir to the blogosphere is Twitter, principally because it is short form.  Steve Gillmor has been talking a lot about Twitter as the successor to IM, which seems interesting. Personally, I have looked at Twitter as a sort of virtual aside, a web-based ability to comment to your friends in much the same way you might as you walk down the street…”oh, that’s a cool car… I’m getting hungry…that Sequoia presentation was a bit doomsday.” But many -- read Scoble here and Gillmor too -- use it to fire off insightful comments which is clearly where Boutin derives his position.  But I think he’s missing a critical part and one that may sustain the blog too.

Twitter is all about ‘followers.’  And that is just Twitter-slang for a community.  I read Gillmor’s tweets because I like and respect Steve and am eager to hear what he thinks.  The same goes for Arianna Huffington.  I met her at D: All Things Digital last year and we struck up an acquaintance, mainly because she was interested in learning how to rent a place in Denver during the convention.  But she also signed me up for a daily email from the Huffington Post (at least I think she did, because I don’t recall doing it; and I was honored she did and kept it).  Now I really liked her.  We joked about her relationship with Rupert Murdoch and she has that fabulous accent, so now I read her blog.  I don’t always agree with her, but I am part of her community.

The point is that I think the demise of the blog may be exaggerated.  The format is irrelevant.  It’s the community that matters.  It is true that many blogs will grow beyond a conventional definition of a community, but for communities that already exist, such as a software development community or an internal employee community or investors or customers, blogs represent a real and valuable communications platform.  Now, I can hear the derision coming.  “That’s marketing BS and that’s not what true blogging should be.” And the Village Voice is the only real newspaper in New York.  I can appreciate the idealism, but I don’t buy the idea that corporate blogs are a bastardization of the form; they are an expansion on the original idea. And again, the form is incidental.  The community is the thing.

I have written before in this space about communities and will again and again, because I am convinced that communities represent a superior metaphor for how to acquire, nurture and grow customer bases and other stakeholders.  And if the 2004 notion of a blog has transformed into a corporate shell of its original form, so be it.  And if the pioneer bloggers are eschewing the form for others, that’s OK too.  But I doubt anyone is saying: you know I think I’ll stop blogging, because I really am sick of communicating with all those people who valued my opinion. So, invested communities – like company stakeholders – will continue to read corporate and other sorts of vertical blogs as valued resources even if they’re not so cool anymore.

Today, even maps have a social life

From the desk of Matt Otepka...

If the glove box in your car is anything like mine it has dozens of tattered and yellowing road maps for states you haven’t lived in for 10 years or from past road-trips through places that you don’t have any plans to drive back through, at least until a second mortgage isn’t needed to fill up your car. You probably also have random driving directions in the form of recent print outs from Mapquest.com or Google Earth, which got me to thinking – do people still buy maps?

Tens of millions of us have the Web with us right in the car now and even more carry GPS-enabled cell phones – the old Rand McNally atlas is a thing of the past. The great thing about online maps is not only the freshness of location data but also the depth and breadth of additional, relevant information. Traditional maps only show you roads, cities, rivers and maybe denote locations for museums, post offices or state parks. (Snore- today, people want more.) And, if you’re really, really lucky, you might have a map with a legend showing where to find fishing and camping access or where churches or rest stops might be. (A sarcastic whoopee for that!!)

Now, pull the same map up online, and depending on what program you use, you’ll be able to find mountains of relevant information about everything in front of your eyes. You can search, sort and pinpoint places of interest like restaurants, bars, hotels, retail shops, or see traffic and weather patterns or even get street-level views of specific locations.

And thanks to the growth of the mobile web, new Web 2.0 applications and hardware advances in handheld devices, all of this is at our fingertips – whether on a portable laptop or out in the world from our iPhone, BlackBerry or whatever. But what is really exciting, especially as I’m in the process of planning my next road trip, is the integration of social data into maps.

How much more powerful and relevant do maps become when you can look at them in the context of where your friends have been and what they thought of those places and events while they were there? That’s what the web is moving to and there is a new application called Whrrl that does just that. (Full disclosure – Whrrl is a product of a client of ours, Pelago, and I must admit, I fell in love with the application on my last road trip. Goodbye, Rand McNally.)

The social data that apps like Whrrl provide fundamentally changes the notion of a map. It changes it from a navigation tool – something to help you get from point A to point B – into an entirely new social discovery experience.

So the next time you’re taking a road trip or just going to a part of town you don’t know, look at a paper map and then imagine thousands of little dots popping up all over it highlighting places visited by people in your social network. Or, open your cell phone, hop on Whrrl and start discovering new places with the help of the people you know and trust – your friends.