Unjournalism

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: Bill Sledzik, 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: Andrew Keen, Stowe Boyd, citizen journalism, new media, social media by Mike Keliher
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Brian Solis has another good post on the social media release panel discussion from the NewComm Forum that took place last week. Read it, you should, but here’s a highlight:

It’s a bigger discussion about sharing official news in way that reaches people (which should include bloggers and journalists too) with the information that matters to them, in the ways that they use to digest and in turn share with others through text, links, images, video, bookmarks, tags, etc., while also giving them the ability interact with you directly or indirectly. It also helps new people find the information in different ways. All this, without the BS.

We don’t need focus groups to ask journalists what they want. We already know that most reporters despise the press release - that should come as no shock to people, yet it always seems to.

Brian is one of the many who’s adding some great thoughts to this discussion. The problem with NewComm Forum’s social media release panel? It was only an hour long — should have been a week.

Tags: Brian Solis, NewComm Forum, newcommforum, social media, social media release by Mike Keliher
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Katie Paine gave a good but seemingly basic session on social media measurement. Basic isn’t bad, and I certainly did take away some good ideas. A quick little catchphrase on measurement: The three things to measure are outputs, outtakes and outcomes.

-Outputs: Your communication efforts. Your pitches made, your posts written, your comments left, your videos shared, etc.
-Outtakes: Were your communications “taken”? Messages received, brand seen or experienced?
-Outcomes: Did behavior change? Did the message recipient take an action based on your outputs and his or her outtakes?

She emphasized two key ideas: Don’t collect data if you’re not going to use it; it’s a waste of time and money. Similarly, “data without insight is just trivia.” How true. Also, “you become what you measure.” Regardless of what the true measure of your marketing success is, if you’re measuring clips, you’re going to work myopically toward drumming up clips. If you’re measuring new sales, you’re going to find a way to make new sales and directly prove it was your doing. That last part is my extrapolation of Katie’s idea, but I’m it’s what she was getting at.

Katie’s most significant point is one I whole-heartedly agree with: People think that if they’re forced to measure and report results, they’ll appear to have little value and they’ll get fired. Katie believes quite strongly that the opposite is true. It might be rocky at first, but the only way to show value (or get a sweet job and a $2 million house) is to measure and work toward intelligently established goals. Amen, but in the real world, it’s not always as easy as it sounds.

My boss and personal favorite new-media mogul (“…the same thing we do every night, Pinky: Try to take over the world!”) Albert Maruggi spoke about using new media and the Web in general as “the key to buyers’ hearts,” particularly through the interaction and engagement the Web enables. In the next couple of days, that presentation and all the video interviews in it (with execs and marketers from Sigler Music, Bawls Energy Drinks, Best Buy) will be available at www.providentpartners.net/forum.

As the guy who does the majority of the media relations and other PR work for our clients, I love the idea of, as Albert put it, thinking of your company as a media outlet. Every company has some sort of expertise, information or “edutainment” to share, and things like blogs and podcasts make that sharing easy and powerful.

Plus, this is a fun time to be in PR. Printed publications, even seemingly old-school farming magazines, are putting sound bites on their Web sites. Blogs and podcasts, with their RSS feeds and quick syndication, work like homegrown newswires that boost search engine rankings like nothing you’ve ever seen. News releases are less for “the press” (notice I called it a news release, not a press release – always have) and more for anyone who wants information about what you’re talking about, often the consumers and shoppers themselves.

The last session of the first day was a panel discussion/debate/occasional bark-fest on social media news releases. That gets its own post, as there was a lot of material there.

Tags: NewComm Forum, newcommforum, social media by Mike Keliher
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