By: Jimmy Six Bellies

The social Web took another giant leap forward last week with Facebook’s launch of their real-time search tool.

For PR/Marketing peeps, this is big news as the site now provides another conversation and content tracking tool on the world’s largest social network. Status updates, photos, links, notes, videos and pages which you’re a fan of are now searchable up to 30 days prior. The search tool will certainly improve with Facebook’s purchase of Friendfeed and I echo Steve Rubel’s thoughts about the overwhelming potential brewing here (keep an eye out as I would anticipate that Facebook will soon be making their public content sharing tool available to everyone).

Sally Falkow also recently touched on the topic of social search, harping the importance of relevancy within social media and it’s overall impact on search results. Google is amazing and they’re only going to get better. No longer can a company rely on tricking out keywords to impact search results. As Sally notes, “It’s about the relationship, not the technology.” That degree of relevancy and focus on human behaviors and user intent is only going to continue to shine through.

As an example, I want to point out a tidbit of work-related research that some colleagues from CA conducted. Long story short, they created a “Donors Are Sexy” campaign in an attempt to see if they could use particular keywords and “sexy” marketing to try and motivate people to register as organ donors. One of their videos has generated over 32k views, but overall results have shown a lack of registration action prompted by the campaign. In addition, searches around mainstay issue keywords such as “organ donor” and “organ donation” show the videos buried in the results. Why? Relevancy.

From a PR/Marketing perspective, it’s going to continue to be key to develop and craft authentic messages that effectively connect with our target audience and are as relevant as possible to their interests. Progressive search tools will of course help us to continue to seek out key influencers and niche audiences to deliver our messages.

What’s your take? What’s the next step for social search?

-Scott

*Note, I’ll be back in early September. Similar to Dave Fleet, I’m completely unplugging for a bit to take in the sights, sounds and culture of Sweden, Norway and Denmark! Open to any travel tips and must see recos. Cheers.

There is a lot of buzz right now about social media policies. Does your company need one? Not need one? What factors need to be considered in creating a policy?

To start, I’d encourage you to not get hung up on this being just a “social media policy.” Chances are pretty good that your organization already has a host of existing employee policies that provide boundaries and regulate work activity. A social media policy can really be thought of within the larger context of being an overarching “online communications” policy.

If your company is debating putting a policy in place, check out this post from Sharlyn Lauby discussing why you’d want to have a social media policy in the first place. If you’re set on creating a policy but are unsure where to start, I’ve got good news. There’s no need to recreate the wheel. As with so many aspects of social media, collective efforts are helping establish best practices.

I highly recommend checking out the following links to help guide the creation of your own policy:

Dave Fleet – Social Media Policies for Your Company
Dave has put together a couple excellent posts detailing factors that you’ll want to think about addressing in both internal and external policies.

Blog Council – Disclosure Policy

The Blog Council has put together a nice set of guidelines on disclosure and best practices toolkit. These guidelines have been reviewed by numerous Fortune 500 legal departments and are intended for anyone to utilize for their own company.

Corporate Social Media Policy

Sally Falkow identifies links to a range of excellent policy examples.

Mayo Clinic Policy Example

One of my favorite policies. Incredibly well written and easy for any employee to understand.

Jaffe Associates Policy Template

A nice template provided by a D.C. based PR firm.

The Two-Line Social Media Policy

Plain and simple.

Does your company or organization currently have a social media policy in place or are you considering putting one in place?

-Scott

Sally Falkow at Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog wrote a great article titled BtoB Technology Marketers Missing Social Media Opportunities based on a Forrester Research study which discusses how business technology decision-makers use social media tools on the job and how that is quite different than how they use the same tools to market their own products. Read more…

Interesting posting from Social Media Today.

While recent surveys have cast doubt on whether people trust what they read on blogs, many believe that corporate blogs can have an influence on purchasing decisions, particularly if those doing the blogging focus on something other than selling products.

From Social Media Today:

Over the last few months there has been a lot of talk about whether or not blogs can truly help drive decision making power. The information is often conflicting, which may drive your average reader to more and more blogs and articles to come up with the truth in between.

For example, a Forrester survey from Q2 2008 created a lot of buzz when it revealed that “only 16% of people who read company blogs trust them.” What I find most ironic about this is that the survey didn’t generate a large level of interest until it hit the Forrester Groundswell BLOG, which as far as I know, is a company blog that does generate a lot of trust among its readers. You could argue that an analyst firm (who is supposed to rank vendors in an unbiased fashion) isn’t  the same as the companies they are talking about in the survey, but that’s just semantics in my mind. They’re using blogs in the same way that every other business should be using blogs — to serve up expertise that will hopefully drive more people to purchase their products.

I think that to say that a majority of people don’t trust company blogs is probably par for the course, as Forrester’s Bernoff acknowledges when he links to an Edelman article pointing out that people don’t trust companies in general.

Yet that doesn’t mean that blogs can’t ultimately tip someone into making that final purchase.  I think its safe to say that as a rule I don’t trust company blogs, because as someone who has been in marketing for a long while I know that there is often a spin of information involved. I think that your average Internet blog reader knows this as well, but we need to give them a bit more credit. Most savvy readers aren’t relying on one source of information. They may start at the company blog, read some information and then do corresponding searches to corroborate the material. So while they may not trust the blog, it doesn’t mean that the blog was useless — it could have served as the stepping stone toward a purchase. Bernoff acknowledges that “In this case about 80% of those we polled said they did use corporate blogs,” which I think is a pretty good indicator of what I say being true. The readers may not trust them, but clearly they read and rely on them in some fashion.

I would be curious to see if those same people surveyed in the Forrester report trust the main company website over the company blog — do they prefer reading lengthy white papers and collateral docs or do they identify more with information presented in a blog?

A ClickZ article by Enid Burns last October cites another survey, this time by Forrester company JupiterResearch and sponsored by BuzzLogic. The stats are interesting:

“Readership of blogs is on the rise. JupiterResearch noted a 300 percent growth in monthly blog readership in the past four years. Readers look to links and multiple blog sources to extend the conversation: 49 percent of blog readers, defined as someone who reads at least one blog a month, and 71 percent of frequent readers all read more than one blog per session. Multiple blog sources offer more opportunities for consumers to see blog ads. A quarter of readers say they trust ads on a blog, compared to 19 percent who trust ads on social networking sites.”

So while readers may not trust blogs, it certainly seems that they are continuing to read them. Keep in mind though, that the latter survey seems to be talking about blogs in general, not specifically delineating them into company, media or personal blogs, as is evidenced by the stat about ads. I think that most people wouldn’t trust ads on a company blog but if an individual blogger that someone reads and likes endorses a product, yes, by all means the click-throughs and purchases will be higher. I can attest to this on my writing blog, where I have received numerous kickbacks from purchases made on writing materials that I link to as an affialiate. I link to them because I trust the products and believe in them and readers trust my decision which ultimately results in a purchase.

In a blog post last fall, communications expert Sally Falkow points to a stat in the JupiterResearch/BuzzLogic survey that supports this: “50 percent of frequent blog readers say they have taken an action after reading a  blog.”

Hey Everybody,

I just wanted to share some sad and shocking news that I heard with you this morning. So, the rapid decline of newspapers is becoming more real everyday. Check out his article from TIME discussing the possible demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Ever wanted to know what a death sentence feels like? You can get a pretty good idea over at the Seattle Post Intelligencer. On Jan. 9, Steve Swartz, an executive from Hearst, announced in the newsroom that the company was putting the money-losing newspaper, known locally as the

As you might expect of any news broken in an actual newsroom, the whole thing is captured on grainy video. One reporter holds a digital recorder; a photographer snaps away. The executives wear shirtsleeves with ties askew. When Swartz, looking not unlike a man condemned, says, “At the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing the P-I in print,” he has to raise his voice to be heard over unanswered phones and garbled bursts from the police radio.

Check out the rest of the article here.

Yeah, that is pretty sad. I hope they get a buyer. But not really the best market for hope on that buy. So where does that leave the PR Professional. Well, strangely, I also saw this story from Sally Falkow of the Bulldog Reporter discussing what PR Pros will do after newspapers.

If the media is truly dying, what happens to PR?

Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 and co-author of Get Content, Get Customers, spoke at a PRSA Cincinnatti luncheon recently.  His presentation was titled The Present and Future of PR.

Pulizzi says that in a conversation with Forrester Research he heard a prediction that within two years half of all US newspapers will stop production.  If that happens the PR and media relations model will be broken beyond repair.

Who gets to tell the story then? ” If PR’s role is to help manage the information from an organization to its “public”, doesn’t that include the creation of targeted story-telling initiatives like custom magazines, enewsletters, blogs, white papers, etc.?” asks Pulizzi.  And I’d add video.

Check the rest out here.

Have a great weekend,

Will Flavell

Hey Everybody,

When I was a kid, I often fantasized about being a newspaper man. To me they were some of toughest, smartest and most interesting men in the world. True little men taking on corruption, scandal and city hall with the power of the press. As a social media guy these days, I often get sucked in the same “Dying age of the Newspaper” discussion. I’m sure you know it. I just wanted to share with everyone, this article and link that I saw. It is a Website that is being built to save the Rocky Mountain News.

Below is a excerpt from the story that I read on it. It appeared in the Daily Dog and was written by Sally Falkow:

Staffers at Dying Denver Daily Answer the Call: Group Takes Action on the Web to Save the Rocky Mountain News On Dec. 13, a group of staff members from Denver’s Rocky Mountain News gathered at the downtown Denver Press Club and agreed that they would no longer stand idle as their beloved paper careened closer and closer to a dire fate. And they decided to use the Internet — widely credited with hastening the demise of newspapers — to get the job done, the NY Times reports.

The paper, known informally as ‘The Rocky,’ had recently been put up for sale, with the distinct possibility it could close next year. The group of about 30 met for two hours trying to figure out how they could save one of Colorado’s oldest businesses, which has been churning out news here since before the Civil War. “The overall attitude at the meeting was that they weren’t going to sit around and do nothing,” David Milstead, the paper’s finance editor, told Times writer Dan Frosch.

In what staff members said was possibly the first effort of its kind, they decided to start a website, iwantmyrocky.com, so that readers could voice their support for the paper and the Rocky’s own employees could publicly make the case for its survival.

So, please check out the story on the Daily Dog site. And then go visit Iwantmyrocky.com and lets save one of these great papers.

Best,

Will Flavell

Sally Falkow is an acknowledged expert in Internet marketing strategy – blogs, RSS feeds, online news and social media.  She recently posted an article To Blog or not to Blog? That is the Question

According to the 2008 State of the Blogosphere from Technorati, a little more than half the companies in North America do not have a blog.  So that means that just under half do.  Why are they spending their time blogging?

Lynette at the MIndless Babble Blog says that based on the Technorati numbers, blogging should be a part of every business’s marketing or PR strategy:

• 46% of all bloggers are professional bloggers. This may mean that they’re writing a corporate blog, or simply writing about the industry that their company is in, while not necessarily mentioning their company at all.
• This equates to just over 84.5 million bloggers that are, in essence, business bloggers. If your company doesn’t have some kind of blog presence, that’s potentially 84.5 million businesses ahead of you when it comes to reaching your target audience.
• Online sales in 2007 totaled $260 billion. Blogs are known to increase awareness of new products and offers from companies. Less than half are utilizing this, which means that 1 out of 2 companies are losing a large part of $260 billion dollars of online income.

If this is true of companies, how much more should it be part of every ad agency’s new business strategy?

Hey Everybody,

I just read another great article by the unshakable Sally Falkow. It is on how many reporters are following twitter for news stories. She sites the recent LA quake as an example. Also some companies are switching to using twitter more to disseminate news. Dell recently used it in a press conference. She also lists a lot of  reporters who are doing this and provides increased usage stats. Read the story here.

Just sharing some cool Web stuff. Enjoy,

Will Flavell

Just that – broad sweeping accusation that everyone in the PR field is a liar, cheater and snake. Those that are not? Unemployed.

Personally, I am a PR guy and I am not offended by this. We need to get our act together and quit lying. We need to become experts in engaging our publics, not just whitewashing them with half-truths and hoping it sticks.

I just wanted to add that the Bulldog Reporter wrote on this today and they really didn’t have much to say. The ‘Dog article really just gave a lot of quotes. I guess that they are sitting this one out. Anyway, check it our here for more details.

read more | digg story

Nu er det vist ikke en hemmelighed at jeg er stor fan af Twitter - det lille sociale netværks værktøj, som giver en mulighed for at micro-blogge. Men jeg er ikke den eneste, der synes det er en god måde at dele informationer og kontakter.

En hel del journalister har fundet vej til Twitter. Og med god grund, for det er tit her man hører om de nyest beta-versioner af interessante online-værktøjer/applikationer og andet godt.

Harry Hoover har på sin blog THINKing offentliggort en lille liste over journlister der twitter. Det er primært amerikanske journalister, men jeg har da selv tilføjet et par danske i en kommentar til hans indlæg. Herunder blandt andet Kim Elmose fra Politiken.

Måske kender i flere?

Tak til Sally Falkow, som gav mig tippet om listen.

På opfordring af Sally Falkow har jeg lige købt en Olympus WS-210S voice recorder med direkte USB adgang – den styrer

Hør test her

En skam man ikke endnu kan uploade MP3 eller llignende til bloggen endnu.

PS hvis man kan og jeg bare ikke har fundet ud af det endnu – please let me know… for funktionen “Add audio” virker altså ikke hos mig

So, I am at the Media Relations Summit 2008 this week. Today, I got to meet the man, the scobleizer. Robert Scoble, the original Microsoft blogger literaly wrote the book on blogging in a corporate environment and I got to meet him today. He was the keynote speaker and I went to a small breakout presentation featuring him as well.

He was a very nice guy and possibly the most interconnected (on the Web) human on the planet.

I just wanted to share some of the cool new things that he told us about with all of you:

-Scoble currently chooses to view the Web through a program called FriendFeed. He literally shocked the audience when he showed how this program aggregated his blog, social networks, feeds, twitter and much more. He watches thousands of his friends at once. It was totally scifi geeky greatness.

-He also introduced Memes to many of the audience. These are good logs of the top 2,000 or so blogs on a subject. Check out Techmeme.com for a good example. These are pretty cool too.

-He told us about a ton of cool sites and programs. Also check out Qik, Office 2.0 and SlideRocket. There are tons more. Let me know what you think. I would love to discuss with anyone.

Sally Falkow interviewed Scoble and she got some great quotes. Check out the interview at: Sally.

Thanks for reading. Your friend,

William Flavell

Hey everybody,

I am attending the Bulldog Media Relations Summit 2008 right now. I am attending a lecture by Brian Solis and Sally Falkow right now. They are both great and I plan to use many of their facts, images and ideas in future presentations back at my company. I just wanted to send on that they are really good.

Thanks,

William Flavell

Efter den første dag her på Media Relations Summit, kan jeg allerede sige at turen herover ikke har været spildt. Jeg har på den første dag fået så meget viden og inpiration at jeg kunne tage hjem her til morgen og være ganske tilfreds. Men jeg har et par spændende dage endnu…

Første dag var en heldags workshop med titlen “Social Media Strategy for PR” – en workshop som havde som formål at udstyre deltagerne med viden således man efter workshoppen kan lave en social media strategi for sine kunder. Til at lede slagets gang (som tog 8 timer) var Sally Falkow, President & Senior Web Strategist og Doug Hay, Principal & CEO – begge fra Expansion Plus – en Internet marketing strategy virksomhed fra Pasadena i Californien.

Sally Falkow er kendt fra blandt andet sin blog PRoactive, og for sine foredrag om Internet marketing strategi.

På workshoppen blev vi guidet gennem de sociale mediers indtog i USA, herunder det faktum at de traditionelle medier mister indflydelse til de sociale medier. En lille interessant detalje er den, at den måde vi ser TV på har ændret sig markant. For eksempel kunne TV-serien “I love Lucy”, der var den mest sete TV-serie i 50′erne samle næsten 70 procent af de amerikanske seer, men den mest sete serie i 2004-05 (CSI) ikke engang kunne samle 20 procent af seerne. Det viser lidt af de udfordringer de traditionelle medier står over for.

Mere interessant i forhold til de sociale medier er at undersøgelser har vist at aldersgruppen 55+ er den hurtigst voksende gruppe på nettet – den er i dag langt større end de 8-14 årige… Tænk lige over det næste gang du skal finde et medie til din målgruppe.

Listen over interessante nyheder fra workshoppen er lang – jeg vil over de næste uger drypvis komme ind på flere af dem, herunder Social Media Press Release format, brug af SEO, News room, keyword tracking osv.

Og så har jeg også mødt nogle meget interessante mennesker – ikke mindst fra Disney.

 
(image cred)

But shouldn’t it be the other way around, you say?  Not necessarily.  Bulldog Reporter’s Sally Falkow recently spoke with marketing guru Seth Godin, who said:

The main challenge for PR is that the Internet has made the model of pitching the media redundant. The best PR people are those who are counsellors to their clients, not publicity hounds. The way to win now is to represent the new media to your clients, not the other way round.

It’s true that when you really know a certain publication/writer that you can speak to your client with confidence about what will work best for both parties.  In essence, you are pitching the media outlet to your client.  Try that on for size!

Life magazine is no more. Once again. The venerable brand that had been resurrected by Time for the third time in 2004 to serve as a newspaper supplement, is dead. The victim of declining newspaper advertising.

But, there is much more to this story. This is but one visible reminder of the tremendous upheaval underway in how we get news and information. As I blogged about earlier this year, this year is when digital or Internet media overtakes all media as the prime deliverer of news and information.

The impact of this on ad pages, stock prices, and the business climate for mainstream media is effectively told in this story from Dow Jones’ MarketWatch. 

But, my experience is that most of us in the media business are largely ignoring these signs of tremendous change. We don’t really understand them. The whole digital and Internet world is wild, confusing, too technical, out of control and too dominated by young males who have far too much time on their hands and should go back to playing video games, or better yet, go get a job. That’s at least how many of us perceive it. The reality is more and more that everyone, young and old, male and female, rich and poor, is changing how they get news, get insight and understanding of events and people and organizations that interest them, and how they interact with each other and network together.

What I have encountered in just the last few months has been stunning to me. Discovering, for example, in discussion with the CIO of a large university that email doesn’t work to reach students anymore.  Discovering yesterday, in conversation with Sally Falkow of www.press-feed.com that your press release distribution mechanism had better include a built in method of listing on a whole bunch of social media sites. And that there are a lot more than newsvine and digg it.

Sometimes it feels wearying. But the reality is, it doesn’t matter how old you are or how much or how little experience you have in this business, if you are not constantly learning what is going on in the public information environment, you are going to get left behind. And the cost of getting left behind will be high.