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Social media: Are you asking the right questions?

August 18th 2010 Posted at Media Tech, Practical PR, Social Media Trends, Web Content
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As with any new technology, some organizations have been quite aggressive in their utilization of social media, while others have opted to sit back and watch.

With each passing month, however, these tools are moving further into the mainstream. As social media platforms continue to refine themselves and prove their value, most organizations have stopped asking whether to use them and begun to ask how and why.

These are good questions, and very appropriate ones to ask of any informational campaign. No one buys an ad, creates a PR campaign or issues a press release without having some general goals and expectations — or they shouldn’t, at any rate.

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are so free and easy to use that it can be tempting to dive right in without establishing goals for both content and ROI. It can be easy to forget that your organization’s name and reputation are riding along with every Tweet and post.

Goals and standards don’t have to be all that complicated. Maybe your goal is simply to establish a presence on Facebook and LinkedIn. Nothing wrong with that. But take a minute to consider how your target audience will react to that presence, and what kind of image you want to project.

Do your customers want to see a new sales message from your company everytime they log on to the computer? Probably not. Do they want to know who is celebrating a birthday today at your office? I doubt it. Would they appreciate some helpful information every few days or so with some insight into your industry? Probably.

Asking questions before diving into a new medium is important, and it’s important to ask the right ones. Jay Baer’s Convince & Convert blog is a great source of information on social media trends. In this post he addresses “The 8 Wrong Questions” many PR firms are asking themselves.

Navigating Facebook’s new privacy settings

July 16th 2010 Posted at Social Media Trends
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For companies and organizations of all kinds, PR and marketing often boils down to a simple quest to add value. There are traditional ways to achieve this, and there are newer tools like social media. Understanding how to make social media work for your organization can be a process of trial and error. That’s why I encourage clients to “look under the hood” and make sure they understand how to make a platform like Facebook work the way they need it to.

There’s been a lot of confusion over Facebook’s privacy controls since they underwent a major change a couple of months ago. The changes have made it easier to customize the content you upload to this massively popular platform, but they can be difficult to understand.

Here’s a video that takes you through the process with a helpful and non-technical approach.

Are you ready for PR 3.0?

June 29th 2010 Posted at Practical PR
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PR isn’t what it used to be. Fifteen or 20 years ago, public relations was a shmoozy world of ex-journalists pitching stories to their former colleagues at the newspaper or TV station.

That model blew apart with the advent of search engines, YouTube and the 24-hour news cycle. Now, things are changing again as social media, IPhones and blogs impact the way information is exchanged.

Are you ready for a world where local newspaper coverage is decided not by editors, but by website hits? Where one individual impacts thousands of buying decisions with a simple click on Facebook?

Third-generation PR has put dozens of new tools at your disposal. Will you take advantage or them, or let your competitors try them out first?

McKerley Communications offers customized seminars for organizations of all shapes and sizes on PR 3.0. We’ll show you how to:

  • Use PR as a tool to build value in your organization
  • Transform an ordinary press release into a call to action
  • Deal effectively with controversial issues
  • Form alliances to spread your message and build community ties
  • Take advantage of internal as well as external PR opportunities
  • Work proactively with broadcast and print journalists
  • Unlock the power of social media platforms

This seminar can be presented for groups of any size. It can also be tailored as a coaching session for executive staff or even a one-on-one session. To schedule this seminar for your organization, use this form.

Not easy to choose sides in YouTube-Viacom fight

June 23rd 2010 Posted at Media Tech, Social Media Trends, Web Content
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Lawyers for YouTube are no doubt uploading celebration videos tonight following a federal judge’s decision to dismiss a $1 billion copyright lawsuit filed by Viacom.

Viacom claims that YouTube (owned by Google) owes much of its success, profitability and traffic to copyright-protected material uploaded, more or less, accidentally on purpose.

YouTube disagrees, saying it has followed both the letter and the spirit of the  Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA allows sites like YouTube to contain copyrighted materials uploaded by third-party users as long as the materials are removed when the owners object.

Court documents released in the case reveal smarmy behavior on both sides. Memos and e-mails from YouTube staffers suggest that efforts have been made to encourage or tolerate the proliferation of protected movie or TV clips. For their part, Viacom officials seem to have withheld DMCA objections to certain materials in order to have a bigger “smoking gun” to present in court.

The 3-year-old lawsuit was dismissed Wednesday by a judge in the Southern District of New York, who found YouTube and Google have operated within the bounds of the DMCA. An appeal is forthcoming, of course, and the issues will most likely wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court.

It’s hard to pick a rooting interest in this battle of Goliaths. Most will likely tend to side with YouTube, in the hope that materials they want to see will continue to be available. But it’s easy to see Viacom’s point of view, and the significant bearing this case could have for all kinds of creative work.

Objectively, it’s tough to put Obama at the top of the class

June 19th 2010 Posted at Practical PR, Uncategorized
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To me, the tit for tat between the left and right over President Obama’s performance is usually quite pointless. Not to mention boring and hypocritical.

The day President Bush left office, Democrats and Republicans basically exchanged roles, with each side taking on the tactics of the other. Supporters of the party now on the outside have no problem spewing out the same kind of mean and angry rhetoric their opponents did when Bush was in charge, whether the issue at hand is really the president’s fault or not.

In an almost unbelievable op-ed column being passed around this week, a conservative was making the case that Obama isn’t respected overseas. This from the same kind of guy who no doubt was tearing his hair out screaming “Who cares what the Europeans think?” when the same kind of comments were being made about Bush. Turnabout is fair play, I guess.

Obama’s supporters, for their part, are doing their best to put a good spin on a performance that, like Bush’s, is looking pretty shaky.

So how is Obama doing, really? Falling a bit short, I would say. Getting his health care package passed looks good, but beyond that there’s not much. He has a lot on his plate, no doubt about that, but so did Bush. Even the most ardent Obama supporter would have to admit they’d like to have seem more progress by now in Afghanistan and Iraq. And, while the spill certainly wasn’t his fault (just as 911 and Katrina weren’t Bush’s fault), it’s undeniable that his response to it isn’t winning a lot of hearts and minds.

Tough to give him anything higher than a B minus right now. What do you think?

NBA’s display of greatness also highlights its shortcomings

June 18th 2010 Posted at Practical PR, Sports
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Where image and perception are concerned, no professional sports league suffers like the NBA.  The league and its players have more stereotypes than a John Grisham novel. The players are overpaid, pampered thugs who don’t care about teamwork and seldom give 100 percent. Teams coddle superstars and encourage individual play over winning and defense. The league rigs games with lousy officiating and favors superstars in making calls.

True or not — and there’s absolutely no question that these perceptions are WAY overblown — the league fails to succeed the way it really should, considering how popular basketball is in the United States.

For a lot of fans, the NBA is not an enjoyable game to watch. It lacks the purity of a college or high school game, where it’s easier to see players share the ball and execute sets. To each his own, of course. But what these fans don’t see is that the athletic ability of NBA players makes it impossible to run the same kind of plays, and exploit the kind of mismatches you see in college, high school, or in the women’s game. The players are so big, so fast and so athletic that they simply cover too much ground. What you see, then, is a game based on floor spacing and one-on-one moves. Fundamentals matter a lot less than raw athletic ability and quick decision-making. Superstars with elite skills rise to the top.

If you don’t like the NBA, that’s fine. But the idea that they don’t play defense at the pro level died a long time ago. Still, that doesn’t mean the league doesn’t have other issues.

I was absolutely stunned by last night’s game seven between the Lakers and the Celtics. To me, it was the best NBA game I’ve watched in years, if not the best of all time. Why? The effort level was so incredibly high, and so obvious, on the part of both teams. In the Lakers’ 83-79 victory, we saw what can happen when all 10 players on the court hold nothing back.

The superstars in last night’s game, Kobe Bryant for the Lakers and Paul Pierce for the Celtics, were absolutely neutralized by pure effort. The only problem with such a great game is that it raises questions about why we don’t see it more often.

Other issues were raised in last night’s game, including some related to officiating. It was obvious that players were allowed to be much more physical than usual.

A game like last night’s classic ought to work wonders for the NBA’s popularity. But the problem is that when fans tune in to watch next season they won’t be seeing the same kind of basketball — at least not until game seven rolls around.

IT industry think tank weighs risks, rewards of social media

June 13th 2010 Posted at Media Tech, Social Media Trends, Uncategorized
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Nothing says a new technology has “arrived” like seeing it disected for its pros and cons by an industry think tank trusted by 86,000 companies in 160 countries.

ISACA (the Information Systems Auditing and Control Association)  is an organization that has been around since 1969. It is considered the gold standard when it comes to approving new uses of technology by companies with extensive IT operations. If you’re a company with hundreds or thousands of employees logged into your network, these are the guys you trust to look at new ideas and make recommendations regarding safety and effectiveness.

In its white paper on the subject, the ISACA’s verdict is, essentially, that social media’s tremendous potential makes it worth the risks involved.

ISACA breaks down the risks into six catetories:

  1. Possible introduction of viruses and malware.
  2. The possibility that wrongdoers could create a fraudulent or hijacked corporate presence for you.
  3. The possibility that content posted by you, your employees or others could raise content rights issues.
  4. The possibility that by raising your company’s profile and appearing more interactive, you might raise customer service expectations to an unreasonable level.
  5. Loss or exposure of confidential data.
  6. Assorted concerns about personal use of social media by employees on company equipment.

To address each of the five risk areas, ISACA recommends establishing firm company guidelines and take steps to monitor activities. Ongoing education is critical.

Companies recognize the benefits of keeping customer expectations as low as possible, and are still very concerned about workers wasting time on the job.

To me, risk areas four and six are the most interesting, because they raise issues a lot of us believed or at least hoped that most companies had put behind them in this day and age.  On the contrary, they acknowledges that companies recognize the benefits of keeping customer expectations as low as possible, and are still very concerned about workers wasting time on the job.

The report’s conclusion:

“The use of social media is becoming a dominant force that has far-ranging implications for enterprises and individuals alike. While this emerging communication technology offers great opportunities to interact with customers and business partners in new and exciting ways, there are significant risks to those who adopt this technology without a clear strategy that addresses both the benefits and the risks. There are also significant risks and potential opportunity costs for those who think that ignoring this revolution in communication is the appropriate way to avoid the risks it presents. The only viable approach is for each enterprise to engage all relevant stakeholders and to establish a strategy and associated policies that address the pertinent issues.”

For creative content, outsourcing is the smart choice

June 8th 2010 Posted at Business Writing, Creative Media, Practical PR, Web Content
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Chances are, you are capable of writing this sentence just about as well as I can. Maybe better. But the fact is that I am the writer, not you, and this tells us something.

Posting a blog does not a good writer make. But if writing isn’t your profession, you might not share my confidence in getting a message across, and you probably don’t have nearly the same track record in doing so. At the very least, you have other pressing duties that are either more important, or more closely aligned to your skill set.

Becoming a better, more confident writer is a great goal for any professional, because it makes you a  better communicator. How do you do that? By writing, of course. But there are many times when a job is too layered, too personal, or too esoteric to leave it to chance. In today’s marketplace, it’s more important than ever to involve third-party professionals in your strategic plan for communications, and trust them to create content for you.

Why? Information overload, and the resulting demand on your audience’s time. There is way too much stuff out there to digest. When someone arrives at your message, it needs to resonate. Clarity, accuracy and consistentcy in style have got to be there. And, above all, you’ve got to hammer your point home with no chance for it to be misunderstood.

I remember a sophomore journalism class in basic news reporting when I tried to get fancy with one of those Wall Street Journal or “nut” leads that buried the key piece of information in the third paragraph. In those days, professors smoked in class and cussed like sailors. My teacher looked at my paper, slowly lit another Marlboro, blew a big drag of it in my face and yelled, “What the f**** is this?”

Your obsession over details or your emotions regarding the project will get in the way, and this will show in the written piece.

The point is that a trained writer knows how to adapt style, tone and voice to the intended audience. A professional who’s covered everything from the Swan Ball to the night booking room at the Metro Jail is going to bring a valuable perspective to your written content. But experience doesn’t have to come from journalism. Any writer with a track record for pleasing both editors and readers brings plenty to the table.

You, the owner/manager/investor, are too close to be objective. Your obsession over details or your emotions regarding the project will get in the way, and this will show in the written piece. To you, your stuff is critically important, because it will impact sales and potentially the survival of your business or organization. The seasoned writer understand this but also knows readers want an article that flows well, explains concepts in an accessible way, and doesn’t bog down in technical details.

Outsourcing creative content brings cost-savings as well. What is your time worth? Answer that question before you consider what budgeting for a professional writer is really going to cost.

There are other, more technical matters to consider. A good writer uses active voice and dynamic language that entices readers into going farther into the piece than they might otherwise. A writer who understand search engine optimization (SEO) is going to consult with you about key words and phrases that Google and Yahoo! spiders like. He’ll also discuss your own industry lingo, including phrases you like to see and those you don’t.

 Most importantly, a writer is a good partner to have. A good one will listen to your story as long as you’re willing to go on. He’ll ask questions and make suggestions. He’ll be open to revisions and provide you with copy that’s clean and meets your deadline.

The best reason of all I can give you for outsourcing content is the simple fact that there are so many high quality professionals out there working independently these days.

I remember an old line Joe Namath or one of those other great pros like to use on sports writers when they irritated him. “Most of us learned to write in elementary school,” he’d say, “but then we moved on to something else.”

You’ve moved on to something else. Chances are also high that you’re pretty good at it, and that one of your talents is making choices that are best for your company. Outsourcing creative material is the right choice, every time.

Going to the mall with friends — all of them

June 6th 2010 Posted at Media Tech, Social Media Trends, Uncategorized, Web Content
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To say the Internet has altered the way we do things over the past decade and a half or so is an understatement, something akin to saying World War II was a big news story. It’s changed the way we access information, sure. But even more so it’s changed the way we shop, learn about new trends and decide what movies and books we might want to read, just for starters.

It’s difficult to imagine buying a new or used car without taking a look at the Web to see what people are saying about the models you’re considering. I doubt that any of us can say that our opinions about current events or politics aren’t shaped, at least to some degree, on commentary we find online.

A camera on the fitting room wall allows friends to provide immediate input on whether those jeans make you look fat.

Sites like Amazon.com and Netflix owe much of their popularity to user-generated content that helps us decide whether a product is something we might like. User reviews on books, movies and products are tremendously valuable in helping us make buying decisions. It doesn’t really matter that we have no idea who is posting the reviews — if there are enough of them we can be reasonably confident that they are trustworthy.

But that sort of thing is actually pretty old technology. Social media has made it possible to get quick feedback, not just from dozens of anonymous reviewers, but from the people whose opinions we really care about. 

One of the latest innovations comes from Diesel jeans, which is experimenting with technology that allows users to log in to Facebook from inside a fitting room. A gadget on the wall with a camera allows your friends to see you in the jeans and provide immediate input on whether they make you look fat.

Cameras in a fitting room may sound like a horrible idea to most of us, but it illustrates two undeniable trends: first, that today’s under-30 generation have very little fear of technology; and second, that information is going to keep flying at us from different and unexpected locations, like the fitting room wall of a clothing store.

The challenge ahead is to find the right tools to help users sort out the information they want to see vs. the stuff they don’t. I have lots of female friends on Facebook, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to help them pick out blue jeans.

Technology that helps sort through this information are called “curator” applications, for lack of a better term. Facebook has curator features, but most people don’t delve into the control panel enough to know how to use them. I’m guessing that fitting room cameras will give them a nudge in that direction.

14 jokes for computer geeks

June 2nd 2010 Posted at Media Tech, Social Media Trends, Uncategorized, Web Content
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From Pingdom, here’s a collection of jokes. Chances are, if you understand most of these, you are a computer geek.

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history – with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

A doctor, a civil engineer and a programmer are discussing whose profession is the oldest.
“Surely medicine is the oldest profession,” says the doctor. “God took a rib from Adam and created Eve and if this isn’t medicine I’ll be…”
The civil engineer breaks in:
“But before that He created the heavens and the earth from chaos. Now that’s civil engineering to me.”
The programmer thinks a bit and then says:
“And who do you think created chaos?”

If it weren’t for C, we’d all be programming in BASI and OBOL.

“I’m not interrupting you, I’m putting our conversation in full-duplex mode.”
- Antone Roundy

There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

In a world without fences and walls, who needs Gates and Windows?

Two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, “So what’ll it be?”
The first string says, “I think I’ll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu”
“Please excuse my friend,” the second string says. “He isn’t null-terminated.”

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Q: How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. It’s a hardware problem.

Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes.

Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft… and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurling down the highway.

An SQL statement walks into a bar and sees two tables. It approaches, and asks “may I join you?”

Q: Why is it that programmers always confuse Halloween with Christmas?
A: Because 31 OCT = 25 DEC.

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