Unjournalism

Last night I found myself rereading Julio Ojeda-Zapata’s “Twitter Means Business,” a book that does a damn good job of fulfilling the mission laid out in its subtitle, explaining “how microblogging can help or hurt your company.”

Yes, rereading. Not solely for the content, which in large part is a deeper dive into many of the corporate case studies we new-media pundits are often already somewhat familiar with, but for the inspiration.

I happen to know many of the very smart people who contributed to and who are quoted in Julio’s book (bragging: I happen to be one of them), and I remember watching many of these case study scenarios unfold in real life — not knowing they’d be business-book material a few months later.

Some of these people I know very well. Albert Maruggi, who contributed the book’s afterword, is a dear friend and former colleague who lives about eight blocks away from me. Others, I know in that familiar but distant “we’ve met on Twitter” sense. I remember when Jennifer Leggio, who wrote the book’s forward, was asking for help on Twitter while setting up her first WordPress blog.

I remember reading the first TechCrunch post about Comcast and its use of Twitter as a customer service tool the day it was published and thinking, Man, I really dislike Comcast, but that’s awesome. Julio’s “book praise” page is a damn who’s-who of people I’ve befriended, attended conferences with, twittered at and otherwise bumped into — digitally or in the flesh. Hell, even Julio himself is a friend of mine and a person whose work I’ve followed for years.

Something about that closeness to my life, that proximity to what I live and breathe everyday, takes Julio’s book far beyond the realm of ideas. We’re now squarely in the realm of pure inspiration.

Rereading this book, though I’m only a few pages in, inspires me to try harder. To continue to try to new things. To pay more attention to my friends and the things going on around me. To keep my head up and watch for new opportunities rather than keep my head down and plow away at the same old work in the same old way.

Thanks, Julio — and thanks to everyone else who made this book happen.

Tags: reading, social media by Mike Keliher
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Please read this.

Tags: public relations, social media by Mike Keliher
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Yesterday I learned, by way of Krista Neher, of a new tool called TwitterHawk, and I’m disappointed. Not with the creators of the tool, which seems rather well-done, but with the approach the tool takes and, more importantly, the position in which it leaves its users.

TwitterHawk monitors Twitter for messages that match your criteria — say, include the word coffee and come from someone in Minneapolis — and then automatically sends a message from your account to the coffee-mentioner. It’s nice in that it’s smart enough to monitor for more than keywords: TwitterHawk let’s you focus in directing messages at Twitterers from a certain location and even set a rate of messages to send per day (to help alleviate accusations of spamming).

But here’s my problem with it: Even if we grant that the basic, automated monitor-then-respond trick is OK, then what? Let’s look at TwitterHawk’s own example: If someone, within a few miles of your new coffee shop, tweets about coffee, TwitterHawk sees that and responds for you. Great. But in TwitterHawk’s own example, the responder-bot asks a question: “@coffeementioner Have you seen our new Coffee Shop in Queens?”

What if that coffee-tweet writes back to you after seeing the TwitterHawk message? Uh oh! Now you suddenly have to be a human who uses Twitter to actually, you know, talk to people. Why not just do that in the first place, then?! Not only is this likely simply because Twitterers are chatty, but you’re asking a question! That’s great when people are actually communicating with each other, but that’s asking for trouble if you’re relying on an automated system.

Here’s another thing: Unless the person TwitterHawk is talking to for you is already following your account — that is, unless @coffeementioner is already following @newcoffeeshop — it’s pretty unlikely @coffeementioner is going to see the message from @newcoffeeshop. Outside of the realm of Web-minded marketers, bloggers and other digital-egomaniacs, it’s pretty rare for people to be monitoring Twitter for mentions of their name.

And if @coffeementioner does see the message from @newcoffeeshop, it’s likely that she’s going to be curious about this new Twitterer talking to her, and she’s going to go check out @newcoffeeshop’s profile. When she sees the last several tweets from @coffeeshop and notices how many of them are the exact same “Have you seen our new shop?” message to other Twitterers, she’s going to see little value in making a connection with @newcoffeeshop.

So here, conveniently at the bottom of this longer-than-I-intended post, is the bottom line: If the monitoring and messaging done by TwitterHawk is going to have any non-spam value, it’s going to require the user to engage and make connections and be humanly present on Twitter anyway. Why not just start that way?

Tags: social media by Mike Keliher
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The Twin Cities’ ninth Social Media Breakfast took place this morning. Jeff Pulver, the technology anthropologist, was in town, and he took some time to tell the story about how he ended up where he is in life. It’s a great tale the touches on the power of passion, the magic of luck and strength of connections with other people by way of social media.

Some mostly uninteresting photos here. The event was held at Best Buy’s corporate headquarters just outside of Minneapolis. Sorry I didn’t have a tripod — or the chance to get better audio.

Tags: events, social media by Mike Keliher
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Because the bait came from Rick Mahn, I’ll bite. I’ve been tapped to share “five things in social media to be thankful for.” Relevant both for the season and for my intended focus here, so I should be able to turn this lighthearted game of tag into something of substance for you all.

As a rabid consumer of media, as a young PR professional and as a wide-eyed observer of the amazing changes underway in the world of communication, here are five things I’m thankful for in the broad realm of “social media.” If you’re anything like me, you might find yourself thankful for these, as well.

More voices, more reach

Even as recently as, say, five or ten years ago, we had mass media, e-mail, static Web page, phone and face-to-face communication. I know there was a lot more, but nothing compared to what we have now. I have about 1,700 people in my Twitter crowd. Some are robo-spam-bot-devils, but an overwhelming majority are smart, funny, interesting, helpful, insightful people — people I’d likely never have interacted with if it weren’t for the Web as we now know it.

Look at the PR business specifically. A few years ago, PRSA and its publications, PRWeek, O’Dwyer’s and a couple of others dominated the media landscape. Now I can find more information, research, case studies, advice and examples than I can shake an RSS reader at. People like Todd Defren, Jason Falls, Jeremiah Owyang, Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson and so, so many more help me become smarter and do my job better — and have more fun.

Format silos obliterated

I used to watch TV, listen to the radio, read the newspaper, look at Web sites. Now I consume all of that media in all of those ways at the same time. I watch Jason DeRusha’s “Good Question” segments from the local CBS affiliate online, just like I watch Lost, the Daily Show and SNL clips on the Web. Listen to the radio? Yeah, but I read news reports on Minnesota Public Radio’s site at least as often, if not more, and Bob Collins does a great job with the NewsCut blog.

Did I mention the biggest daily newspaper in the state just hired the director of photography from the local NBC TV affiliate? Yeah, that happened. A former Star Tribune editor and publisher decided to start a new kind of media outlet with a non-profit model, and now we have the transmedia creature called MinnPost.com (of which I’m a paying member; yeah, I gave actually U.S. currency). And on the Web, there’s almost no such thing as a silo. Blogs and news sites and YouTube and podcasts and Facebook and Twitter and all that craziness basically mean I can get anything, any way I want it. Opportunities, for creators and consumers, are limitless. Which brings me to…

RSS

As has been documented, I’m a huge fan of RSS. People who produce content and search engines that help me find stuff give me this awesome way to have just about everything I could ever want come right to me. That’s RSS. I get your stuff without needing to visit you to get it. Wild, isn’t it? If you don’t let me read your stuff that way, I’m not going to read your stuff. That’s pretty much how I roll.

But here’s the cool part: Once I am reading your stuff, you’re top of mind, and I’m doing more than just reading passively. I’m commenting on your work. I’m linking to it. I’m talking about how smart you are and how much you contribute to the community. Remember those examples of bloggers and news outlets I mentioned above? I subscribe to their stuff. In my eyes, they all kick ass.

Twitter

I could go on for days about how cool Twitter is. People like Michael Benidt will, with good reason, occasionally throw some water on my fire, which is great. As my seemingly limitless love for Twitter and the people within is challenged or questioned, I occasionally find ways to “do Twitter better,” to get even more out of it. But the point is, Twitter’s awesomeness is so profound I can barely put it in to meaningful words. I’ve tried.

The people

No list of “cool things about social media” would be even good, let alone complete, without mentioning The People. The People create the content I consume, the content that informs me, the content that entertains me. The People consume the content I create (sometimes). The People smile and shake my hand and pat me on the back when we meet in person. The People introduce me to other smart folks.

The People are what It is all about.

I’ll tag Chris Lynn, Ken Kadet, Greg Swan and the team at Idea Peepshow. Topic: Five things about social media you’d be thankful to see change. That is, things you don’t like or could be better. That oughtta make for some good reading.

Photo courtesy of cheeseroc on Flickr

Tags: social media by Mike Keliher
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Albert Maruggi and I have started working with a new client, a brand new Web start-up, and we’re already seeing some folks mentioning the client on blogs and in Twitter conversations. Beyond that, we’ll obviously be working with a Web-savvy crowd, so having a strong presence in these online communities is important.

“Being on Twitter,” then, is a given. When we have four people on the team, both at our firm and at the client company, who are actively monitoring and interacting via Twitter, the challenge is how to work with a single account profile while still conforming to these amorphous norms that “govern” the Twitter community.

The CEO of Client made sure, early on, to sign up for a Twitter account with Client as the username. A good start. The @Client Twitter profile hadn’t been used much yet, though, because building their product, their Web platform, has been the focus of their energy. So we’re basically starting from a blank slate.

However, as individuals, those of us on the “Twitter team” are fairly active Twitterers under our own names. That’s an asset, as we each have a fair amount of rapport and credibility built up. We’ve demonstrated, at least to some extent, that we “get it.” We’re not just swooping in to “do some PR,” “drive some traffic” and move on to the next thing.

It’s a good thing to have so many people interacting on behalf of the client, and we’ll all surely continue to do so under our own names. But for some of our work, we’ll need to operate under the obvious and official @Client profile. The challenge is to make sure the people we’re talking to know who they’re talking to. Personality and identity on Twitter, as is the case just about anywhere, are important.

So how do we plan to handle this? Well, for starters, we want to make it clear that the profile is staffed by a team — even going to far as to change the display name to “Client.com Team.” Additionally, we’ll change the brief bio section to say something to this effect:

Info about Client.com and [the subjects dear to their hearts], from @[ClientCEO], @albertmaruggi and @mjkeliher.

We’ll also make a habit out of signing our tweets with our first name or our initials, so people will know who wrote each one. For example, my tweets might look like this:

Client: Client.com is looking for usability testers. If anyone in the Twin Cities area is interested, let us know. -MJK

I stole that trick from the team that twitters for NPR’s “Bryant Park Project.” All good ideas are made to be stolen, right?

Speaking of which, we’ll round out the tactics for twittering as a team (alliteration!) by using the all important URL field of the Twitter profile to paint a full picture of the twittering team. Laura “Pistachio” Fitton was the first person I saw do this. The URL field of her Twitter profile points to a page on her site that serves one purpose: welcome people who have checked out her Twitter profile and explain a bit about who she is and what she does.

In the case of my client, we’ll have a page that explains, in very personable, conversation language (sadly, a scarcity in the worlds of PR and marketing) who we are and why we’re twittering as @Client. After all of the above, it will hardly be new information, but it is an opportunity to put a little more meat on the bone and offer more detail and color than the miniature Twitter profile section allows.

Have you done anything similar to this? What’s your approach? Any ideas to improve this method? I’m eager to hear some other insights.

“Teamwork” courtesy of DavidBole on Flickr

Tags: Web, public relations, social media by Mike Keliher
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Chris Brogan pointed me to Mitch Joel’s “social media marketing best practices project.” The goals are two-fold:

• Push smart people all across the Web to document their ideas for best practices in social media marketing
• Drum up some link love for Mitch Joel’s blog (and doing so in a creative, compelling way like this demonstrates a social media marketing best practice, no doubt)

Brogan’s chosen best practice is “Learn how to listen. Simple, I know. But it’s a best practice. Here are five tools I use for listening, and here’s my take on listening to Twitter.”

Mitch Joel makes the case for consistency:

Consistency. Be consistent. In everything that you do. Have a consistent username that you use in all of your channels (mine is mitchjoel). Use the same photo, so that you are recognizable in all of these channels. [...] Don’t blast out five pieces of content or join three online social networks and fade away. Choose one, stick with it and keep at it. Be more like the tortoise instead of the hare. Slow and steady wins the race.

I could go on all day with ideas to help enlighten other social media marketers, but Mitch challenges me to pick just one. Brogan took my first idea, listening — the single most important item — so I’m going to go a very different direction and step away from tactical best practices.

My best suggestion: Spend some time getting to know people in “your community,” getting to know what’s important to them, what they talk about, what gets them excited, what you can do for them — without worrying about the return on your investment.

Don’t spend all of your time working without goals, investing time and energy without thinking about some potential return. But don’t spend all of your time thinking about ROI, either. It might be hard, but it’ll be worth it.

And really, working like this — getting to know people as people, without thinking so much about your own goals, without thinking about getting an R on your I — will have a positive ROI. So maybe I can sum up my idea in a more simple statement:

Be selfless and be patient.

(And I’m also instructed to A) point to some other folks who have written well on this subject and B) tag some folks who might be prompted to share some good ideas on the topic, so… Albert Maruggi, Chris Lynn and Jason Falls — consider yourselves tagged. You’re it.)

Photo courtesy of steefnat on Flickr

Tags: marketing, public relations, social media by Mike Keliher
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Chris Brogan asks this morning, “What are your social media tasks?” He asks six specific questions, and rather than leave a monster of a comment on his blog, I’m intentionally fragmenting the conversation (sorry!) and responding in this post.

1) What’s first in your day? What do you do before any other social media task?

First thing is usually to check for Twitter replies. It’s not really the case that this is the most critical, but it’s a quick and easy thing to check first, and Twhirl is usually the quickest app (compared to Outlook and Firefox) to start up in the morning.

2) How do you listen? (example, I use Google Blog Search and Technorati search)

I listen with a huge load of RSS feeds that track Web sites, blogs, Twitter and specific news sites. Also, in a different way, I listen by simply being a part of a particular community. That’s not listening for company/product/client names, but it’s listening to what’s new, what’s hot, what’s important, what’s appropriate, etc.

3) Where do you connect with your communities?

I connect with my communities in various offline places (lunch, coffee shop, office, etc.), but online it’s primarily Twitter and on other people’s blogs. My own blog doesn’t have a huge community, per se — but, for example, Todd Defren and Shel Holtz’s blogs do.

4) How many communities do you visit?

I regularly “visit” two online communities: Twitter and Facebook. “Visiting” those communities is a very different experience, though. Twitter comes to me wherever I am (far better), and Facebook requires me to go there (far worse). Also, while my Facebook crowd reflects one particular community, Twitter really acts as a place to collect activity of so many other communities. It’s a meta-community, or a community community, or whatever post-modernist yuppie phrase you want to use.

For example, I’m not terribly active on Seesmic, but people’s Twitter messages about Seesmic videos occasionally rope me in. There are several people who’s blogs I don’t subscribe to, in an effort to keep my daily reading under control, but I often end up reading individual posts because they’ve started a Twitter discussion.

5) Is your social media use primarily for personal use or business or both?

There is almost no separation between the two. I don’t have a problem with working on the weekends or not spending time with the missus or anything, but there’s little, if any, distinction between Mike of Provident Partners and Mike of the Keliher Clan.

6) What are your goals with using social media?

Honestly, that’s like asking, “What are your goals with waking up the morning?” Seriously. And I don’t say that because I have to “use social media” all day, as soon as I wake up, because it’s my whole life.

I say that because the Web is pervasive in my life, in the best way possible. I’m “on Twitter” for much of the day, and I have many friends there — some, but by no means all, of them I’ve never met in person. I say that because questions in our office rarely go unanswered, thanks to an ignorance-slaying combination of Google and 1,000 Twitter friends. I say that because, even though it doesn’t fit the explanation most people think of when they say “social media,” I think e-mail is one of the biggest social media communication tools we have.

And yes, Chris, I’ll be at the NewComm Forum next week. I hope to have a chance to meet you. I’ll be the guy following Albert Maruggi around with a video camera.

Tags: social media by Mike Keliher
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Bill Sledzik, associate professor at the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Kent State University, writes a guest post at PR Conversations about social media measurement and ROI.

He doesn’t pretend to have all of the answers, but he does a good job of raising and putting into perspective the all-important question: “How effectively does our work generate leads, drive sales, reduce costs? All are bottom-line outcomes, and often difficult to tie back to PR activity—online or off.”

There’s a good discussion over on Bill’s post, so check it out. I’m using it as a launch pad for this post.

Bill poses the challenge of measuring relationships, as opposed to simply measuring outcomes such as “blog mentions” or “press clips” if you’re nasty. The first step toward successful measurement (perhaps obviously) would be to measure toward your objectives. This is especially true for something as complicated and important as relationship measurement.

Don’t simply “measure the relationship” to come up with something like a Relationship Value Index, for example, that is supposed to show how important a particular person or group is to your organization. Instead, if you’re (at the time) concerned with crisis management, it makes sense to judge the people or publics with whom you’ve developed relationships on, say, their ability to pacify a riotous blogosphere. That would include factors like favorability toward your organization, credibility, reach (quality and quantity), ability to generate other posts in response (influence), frequency of activity beyond the post (conversing in comments), etc.

In a different context — such as a product launch — you could judge those same relationships with more emphasis on reach and influence but perhaps less on credibility and conversation.

This brings to back to the headline: Let’s start somewhere. With all this talk of social media tools, tips and tricks, measurement often draws the short straw. It’s easy to get caught up in the complexity of properly, intelligently implementing strategies that put the power of social media to good use. To make measurement possible, we need to begin these strategies with tangible metrics and objectives in mind, another element of many social media efforts that is often lacking.

Anecdotal, case-study measurement is a good start, but it rarely is based in the mindset of comparing results to objectives stated at the outset. It’s one thing to be able to say you’ve earned your keep, but it’s a whole new world to try to measure, analyze, repeat and improve.

What do we want to accomplish with our “social media efforts”? Why are we social-media-fying our news releases? Why am I helping clients podcast their thoughts and insights? What could I ever stand to gain from Facebook? Can I possibly find a meaningful way to measure relationships and connect them to business objectives?

Or can we just keep blogging because it’s cool?

(For the record, there are plenty of folks far smarter than me on the subject of PR measurement. Katie Paine is one. Part of the reason I’m writing is to “think out loud,” as they say. Also, Geoff Livingston has a good collection of social media case studies; some certainly fall into the anecdotal style of “measurement,” but some are more, well, sophisticated, I guess.)

“Measurement” courtesy of thespacesuitcatalyst via Flickr

Tags: measurement, metrics, social media by Mike Keliher
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Looks like a picked a good time to start reading Stowe Boyd’s blog (thanks to continual references from Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson). In a post from about 10 days ago, Stowe writes about Andrew Keen, whom I’ve never heard of. Apparently Andrew doesn’t like new “Web 2.0″ toys and the (debatable) impact their having.

Keen calls the Cluetrain Manifesto — actually, the theses within — “childish.” I might not agree with them all, but I wouldn’t consider them childish or naive, which I think Keen is confusing with “simple and straightforward.”

Keen also draws out the stupid “70 million blogs” stat and refers to the blogosphere (is there a worse word in the world?) as “our own electronic diaries, our own half-informed opinions, our own stupidity and ignorance.” I hate the “70 million” stat as a defense — “Yuh huh! Blogging is to cool!” — and I hate it even more when its used in conjunction with “…but most of them are worthless.”

Yeah, most of them are worthless to most people. But I don’t care about “most of them.” I care that now I can get the scoops and info of TechCrunch, the professional insight and camaraderie for For Immediate Release, and the piles of other great information and entertainment I get from people I never would have heard of were it not for blogging and podcasting. It’s not about 70 million; in my case, it’s about the few dozens blogs and podcast that make up my list of must-read, -see or -hear.

New media are not killing or disintermediating traditional media; they are complementing traditional media. Expertise, authority and power (as they pertain to knowledge and the communication thereof) aren’t determined by ownership of an FCC license or a printing press. They are determined by the respect of others. Narcissistic and informationless blogs won’t earn respect, won’t establish experts, won’t wield power. Good blogs will.

Sweeping generalizations about the value or lack of value of blogs and podcasts won’t get us anywhere. I’m not asking you to give up the newspaper and devote yourself to new media. I ask that people acknowledge the power of giving more people a public voice.

Tags: citizen journalism, new media, social media by Mike Keliher
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