Citizen-Generated Media (CGM)

How Your Social Media Capital Can Get You Closer to Your Market

The recent awareness, or lack of, depending upon your company,
of the massive spike in "digital word of mouth" in the
marketplace has led many firms to rush out and "get a blog".

In many cases the conversation goes like this - "We need a
blog, go hire someone and have them start writing good and
clever things about us!"

They have already gotten it wrong in relation to social media.

Social Media is first and foremost created by individual people, not
businesses. Thus the term "social". Businesses are not social
in and of themselves, but require social interaction at key
points to truly grow and flourish. Personality is a requirement
of the most prevalant railroad track in social media today
which is the blog.

These blogs require an identity of a person with a name that
is at least the primary writer, as readers will not necessarily
appreciate a simple company identity  Thes same readers will be
people that want to "talk back" or converse with comments back
to the writer, or keeper of the journal. Entries should not be
made with the typical company pontification or corporate speak,
as no one will read it - at least not for very long. The more
authentic you are in speaking to your circle of friends, the
better response you will receive. This should sound familiar to
your social relationships.

The lines between public relations, advertising and marketing
have been criss-crossing for years. Their new re-defined, yet
watered-down counterparts include "alternative pr, online
advertising and brand marketing". Each of these silos have been
forcibly melded together as the digital social consumer has both
commandeered and mastered the very same toolset used by these
groups today.

Beginning to get the picture?

Well, if you're not, the big risk is that someone else might be
getting (or painting) it for you. If that's the case, you
probably need to act fast as I described above.  So, as an
assistant in your cause to not wrinkle your firm's reputation
in the blogoshere, or perhaps to help fix it if you already
have, I'll be posting a detailed a must-have roadmap for any business to
keep it's social media capital properly budgeted in the next week.

The Digital Grapevines of Business

Blogging is to words as Napster was to music, a transforming technology whose influence and implications will only grow more wide-ranging with time.

Imagine that you are a large corporation engaged in the manufacture and sales of widgets.  Your organizational chart is fairly predictable.  The vast majority of workers make the widgets or supervise those that work on the widget assembly line.  A smaller group of employees work in the field, selling the widgets, and an even smaller group of executives devise the strategies and monitor all the systems that must operate to ensure the efficient production and distribution of the product in a competitive marketplace.  This basic structure is the same whether you manufacture a material product or process something more ephemeral, like information.   In traditional business structures, the information flows primarily in one direction, from the powerful spots on the top of the hierarchy downward.  Enlightened managers may have placed an anonymous suggestion box on the workplace floor, but even that was a recognition that fine-tuning any production process was best accomplished by those that actually participated in it.  By anonymizing the process, the manager was able to cherry-pick the best ideas without disrupting the hierarchy.  The same thing applied to company newsletters and magazines.  They emanated from on high and served such useful purposes as informing the workforce of changes or adaptations, or elevating morale.

Along comes the blog.  Anyone can create one, practically for free.  The early adopters were frequently voices in the wilderness, people with a point of view but no means to broadcast it.  Just as Hollywood first saw television as a threat, and missed its greater significance as an allied technology that could enhance the marketing and distribution of feature films, so too did businesses perceive blogs as annoying usurpations of their “system”.  Employees were fired for serious offenses such as disclosing company secrets or undercutting company campaigns, but just as often got the axe for posting photos of themselves in company uniforms, or for gently criticizing a misguided management policy.
 
As blogs have become more commonplace, resistance to them gradually softened.  To some, they’ve become be a useful tool, not only an expression of muted hostility.  Giant firms like General Motors, IBM, Sun and Microsoft have embraced the blog, and required that senior management operate them for such critical functions as dispute resolution, product liability information, even labor/management negotiations.  Blogs can facilitate internal communications, or act as an avenue for customer feedback.   Their threaded, chronological nature creates a legal record and provides a well of history into which any interested reader can delve.
 
Traditional businesses are hierarchical and don’t usually encourage mid-level initiative.  The web is a lateral series of volitional associations, one almost impossible to monitor or control.  The architecture of the blog has enabled a dialogue, the most appropriate dialogue, to take place, outside the reins of hierarchy and in the spirit of egalitarian information transfer.  The company that refuses to recognize the utility of this because it violated protocol faces the fate of the horse-and-buggy and the typewriter.

Blogging is a digital medium, one more way to tell stories and assess their relevance.  It’s another channel, and for some, a disruptive one. Blogs allow conversations where none could occur before.  They are currently, and will continue to greatly change the way that business is conducted at virtually every level.

We Are All Addicts

Is the Internet a drug?  Does it possess addictive allures that rise to the level of a defined medical condition?  This question is being hotly debated as an ex-IBM employee, fired for discussing a sex act in a chat room from his office computer, argues that he’s sick, not criminally deranged, as reported by Business Week.com.

The Hobgoblin of Inconsistency

Nobody uses Digital Rights Management (DRM) software more than Microsoft, whose Vista operating system is jammed with DRM applications, as is Zune and other spin-offs.  So, a few bloggers’ eyebrows were raised in skepticism when Bill Gates recently gave a speech in Seattle that seemed to endorse the very strategies that DRM was intended to prohibit. A more likely critic was National Public Radio, who ran an interview “Goodbye, VHS. Farewell, Fair Use” More significant than any of these rants is the big dollars Sony had to pony up after a recent court ruling in required the fine after finding that Sony had illegally embedded DRM software on many of their releases.

Succinct Titles Count

In this age of RSS readers when skimming headlines for stories is de rigeur, the effectiveness of the headline takes on increased importance.  ProBlogger Darren Rowse lists a few techniques for punching up your headlines and lead sentences.   He also has advice elsewhere on how to attract more comments on your blog posts.

Business Blog Summit

Today, I attend the Blog Business Summit, a three-day conference in Seattle.

Some of the people that I profile in The Blog Ahead, including conference speaker Robert Scoble, The Search author John Battelle, and Weblogs, Inc. CEO Jason Calacanis, are going to be there, so I’m toting copies of my book to surprise them with.  I must say, this is one business blog that doesn’t bog down like many do.  It mixes aesthetics and information well, and is deep enough to reward someone that spends more than thirty seconds perusing it.  One of the major presenters at the Summit is going to be Ben Edwards, the Director of New Media Communications at IBM.

Blog Entity Reviews

1) Blogworks is the blog for a public relations firm in Michigan, Manning, Selvage and Lee.  They are the agency of record for Fast Lane, a blog by the vice-chairman of General Motors that has done much to repair GM’s battered image (as noted in my new book, The Blog Ahead).  Every business blog has some kind of unique focus, and that of Blogworks is word of mouth marketing and corporate blogging.  It has been around since April, 2005 and covers the most obvious business of the blogosphere, but their bloggers seem to have succumbed to the understandable temptation to lard up their posts with YouTube selections. Perhaps they should consider adopting the name ReBlogworks.

2) The Social Media Club is an example of what occurs when trendiness trumps content. Social media is one of the emerging buzzwords of the last couple of years, but this does not mean that everyone who proclaims themselves to be a part of such social media has something profound to say.  The Social Media Club wants to join the conversation, but has little new to say about it.  So it makes an innocuous plea – join us in the eternal conversation, and make that “us” include non-geeks as well as the usual suspects.  The one intriguing thing they did introduce me to was the New PR Wiki, a proposal to recapture the immediacy and importance of press releases by adapting them to the best practices of new media.  For a slightly less jaundiced view, visit this announcement from Earth Times.org on their first conference, which occurred in Palo Alto on Monday.

3) Social Media Optimization is a pretty narrow field, but it’s a field where the ad dollars congregate.  If you want new takes on things like the impending Google/YouTube marriage, this is one good place to visit.  This blog is short on aesthetics, but long on information and financial projections, maintained by Braveheart Design, a web design and SEO company in New Hampshire.  For an article that argues that social media and e-commerce are beginning to merge into social commerce (“s-commerce”), visit this recent Clickz article by Matthew Nelson.

Yet More Lists

PC Magazine has compiled a list of the top one hundred websites that it terms “undiscovered.”  I must be in the right circles, as I regularly consult over one-third of this list.  Still, it’s a good multi-subject assemblage.  Project Censored compiles lists of stories that the mainstream media either ignored or gave short shrift, “The News That Didn’t Make The News.”

Think Before You Name

This must be satire.  Are there web designers so thick they couldn’t see the problems with these?  Here are the “Ten Unintentionally Worst Company URLs of All Time.”

Net Neutrality and DRM Manifestos

Edward Felten is a Princeton engineering professor who has been very active in evaluating digital rights management schemes.  He has published a ten-page thought paper on the complexities surrounding net neutrality, available for all, of course. It’s called “Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality.”  Also recently made available by Microsoft is a speech that Cory Doctorow gave a couple of years ago to its senior management, entitled “DRM and MSFT: A Product No Customer Wants.”  This is available as a transcript and as a video link.