Over the River

The next morning came early. I was moderating a panel at 9:00 so I got into Kendal just after 8:00. I wandered around a bit taking pictures and talking with people and before I knew it I was running to make it to the panel before it started. (I made it with time to spare.)

Disruptive Practices
The panel was on Disruptive Practices. The first presenter was my old college chum Jim Cypher. Jim is doing media art through Somerville Community Access Television and is also the operations manager at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum.

Cypher showed a handful of videos that he’s created. Most of them were around vaguely (and is some cases explicitly) political themes. They included no narrative or interpretation and left it to the viewer to draw whatever conclusions they saw fit. The content itself was conceptual and generally repetitive but effective (if blunt) in conveying meaning withing the interpretive limits mentioned above.

Following the videos Cypher did a brief presentation on the idea behind disruptive mixing and mashups. One interesting point that he raised (and which all of the panelists did in one way or another) was around identity and the use of anonymity for creating this type of content. My own feelings on identity as ambivalent. Sometimes I feel that social media content and communication should always be done under ones own name and identity; but I also understand that there are times and cases where that can’t happen. In those cases, maintaining a persistent alter ego seems like the appropriate thing to do.

The next panelist was Jay Critchley. Jay is a visual/conceptual artist and his videos and presentation were mind boggling. Critchley incorporates his ideas on a regular basis. Establishing corporations allows him access and freedom that he might not receive as an individual.

He showed a handful of projects that he’s worked on that certainly deserved to be called disruptive. One was his submission to the Army Corps of Engineers for the development of Nantucket Sound. It included remaking the island as Martucket Eyeland and featured some outlandish ideas and suggestions for improvement. Now lots of people might come up with interesting ideas like this, but Jay takes it a step further. Not only does he have the ideas, he also develops them and has incorporated several companies to promote his ideas and bring them to whatever degree of fruition they might achieve.

Another one of his projects was the Old Glory Condom Corporation. Started as the realization of an idea first presented at an exhibition at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT in 1989, Old Glory Condoms went on to market condoms with a trademark incorporated the US flag and a condom. This led to the trademark’s initial rejection – a decision that did not stand.

During his presentation Critchley also aired video to illustrate ways that people are engaging with content in new ways. One example he used was a group of singers covering the Oreo cookie jingle. As I watched and thought about the idea of disruptive media and its application, I wondered how easily it might be co-opted. Unintentionally, the next speakers provided a hint.

Next up were Ben Mako Hill and Elizabeth Stark. He is at the Media Lab and she Harvard Law (which I mistakenly referred to as HBS and was quickly corrected. They discussed different – and often controversial – approaches to copyright: reformist (which aims to make current system work), Utopian (which seeks a new approach that builds on what is already in place) and transgressive (which rejects current thinking on copyright and encourages actions that challenge the current system).

They discussed the fact that copyright was essentially focused on the rights of the creator paid little attention to the rights of content users. The transgressive model seeks to challenge this thinking and is represented through the growing “pirate politics” that has emerged in various forms around the world. The most recognized example has been Sweden there the Torrent site PirateBay has spawned a full-blown political movement.

They also cited a case in France where Aziz Ridouan, a high school student has become a visible and outspoken advocate for piracy. Ridouan gained prominence by voicing his opinions of copyright laws during a press conference of the French equivalent of the RIAA.

One interesting point that came up during discussions of his situation touches on the issue of co-opting ideas and individuals for commercial or political gain. In the case of Ridouan, there have been questions as to the part of the Socialist party in his becoming the public voice for transgressive copyright thinking in France. While neither Hill nor Stark supported or refuted the claim, it did raise the issues (in my mind at least) of transparency and authenticity.

The only other issue that I wondered about during this discussion (and during several points during the conference) is the fact that many people (at least in the online communities that I spend time in) try to justify piracy by citing the poor quality of many copyrighted films, TV shows and music. I’m never clear on why – if the content is so bad – people want it in the first place whether it is free or not.

Reproducing Images
The next session I attended was Reproducing Images. Let me admit right here that I thought it was going to have something to do with Flickr and how images are shared. It wasn’t. It had more to do with how images can be used to convey meaning beyond their content and how content consumers have understood and interpreted visual information. While much of what was being discussed was interested it wasn’t what I was expecting. It was also highly academic and so was not, in the end, an especially interesting session for me.

Brand Strategy and Consumption Practices
I next was moderating the session Brand Strategy and Consumption Practices. This was absolutely fascinating to me – and not for the reasons I had assumed. I was imagining a discussion of how brand is conveyed and how it is changing. What was discussed instead was how brand is understood and can be studied in the current media environment. Because I was moderating the session I was unable to take notes as I now wish I had been able.

Zvezdan Vukanovic, the senior advisor for media analytics for the Government of Montenegro started off with a discussion of the interactive television and its role as a brand building tool. How can one really define interactivity with so formal a media channel as television – and how interactive can television as a channel really be?

Interactivity in the cases he described seemed to be limited to the ability to access increasingly discreet content pools (enabled by the fragmentation of the channel), the ability to get additional and deeper content on topics (or brands) of interest and to interact with brands through games, etc. His content was interesting but it described only a very limited form of brand interactivity.

One area that he touched on briefly though was the idea of peer-to-peer interactivity through enhanced television service and how this could give rise to user-defined branding. I think that this is something that happens naturally among people through unmediated channels and interactions but wondered how this type of thing would work in a medium like television where advertising and sponsors are so central to the content. Would they feel comfortable paying for a communications channel that could be harmful to their brands?

Andrew Feldstein, a doctoral candidate at Pace University went next. He discussed the ways in which consumers co-opt brands and build communities around shared experience. These communities, he pointed out, were originally started around tangible brands. What has been the impact, he wondered, of the divorce of the physical from the brand? And how do you validate, view and interpret what is essentially a nameless/faceless brand community?

Answering this question is at the root of the research he is doing. How can one measure and understand the attitudes of a brand community without a tangible good or a physical community? To do this, Feldstein has developed some deep analytic tools and has begun applying them to discreet communities that share some attributes (in this case, the negative attitudes toward Microsoft Vista within both the Macintosh and Ubuntu communities) but are, as it turns out, dramatically different in the underlying reasons for their shared opinions.

The complexity of his methodology – and the clarity and implications of his findings – were fascinating. As someone involved in marketing, I’d never seen so much information about the attitudes of brand communities distilled and presented. By Feldstein’s own admission, this work is still at a very early stage. I’m looking forward to hearing more about it though as I try to understand (and help clients understand) how brand communities operate in the online environment.

The sessions final presenters were Masahiko Kambe and Yuichi Washida, both of the Japanese advertising agency Hakuhodo. (Washida is also a research affiliate at CMS.) Their topic was word of mouth (WOM) and how a more developed understanding of the concept could be achieved and whether messages in word of mouth communication could be effectively controlled.

As was the case with Feldstein, Kambe and Washida based their comments on extremely deep and comprehensive research. They looked at two classes of WOM – common WOM (which is essentially people sharing commonly-known information about a brand) and gap WOM (which involves people with greater amounts of information sharing it in a way that increases their audiences understanding).

The research they presented was around the impact of WOM (in Japan) on the Toyota Yaris brand. They measured the impact of various media types (print, TV and online advertising; newspaper and magazine articles; etc) on common and gap WOM and found (one surprisingly) that different media types had different effects on WOM activity.

They also looked at how increasing the frequency of exposure to these media types would impact WOM and found that in some cases increases made the communication less effective. Given the general interest in WOM, I am hoping to get my hands on their detailed findings when I am able. As is the case with understanding the behavior of brand communities online, this research on the channels that influence WOM and their effectiveness was fascinating.

Of the sessions I participated in during the first part of the day, the one on brand consumption was the most interesting and the one who’s lessons I most want to understand and apply to my own work. I was disappointed by the image session but that had more to do with my expectations rather than the content that was presented. All-in-all, a good and thought-provoking set of sessions and information.

Technorati Tags: MIT, MiT5, Media in Transition, Disruption, Jim Cypher, Jay Critchley, Ben Mako Hill, Elizabeth Stark, Brand Strategy, Brand Communities, Zvezdan Vukanovic, Andrew Feldstein, Masahiko Kambe, Yuichi Washida

A few weeks ago I wrote about some people’s wrong-headed desire to drag users back to specific Web sites rather than freeing content to live where people are already spending their time. I understand that given the way people are measured and evaluated the current approach may make sense - but it won’t forever.

I was talking to a woman the other day about this - she’s smart and well versed in the ideas of social media - and her take was that people are used to going to places to get the things they need or want. If you want food, you go to the market; if need shoes, you go to a shoe store, etc. (Of course for most things you can also just find them online, but even then, you tend to end up at a site that sells certain kinds of things.) Technology has made it possible though for the things we want to be available where we are.

You see it a lot with music - if you’re using Pandora or Peel you can click right to iTunes or Amazon to make a purchase. Google has made a science out of presenting people with what they might want wherever they go; and there are certainly plenty of services that allow people to create customer start pages, feeds or portals. The idea of providing content - even it through a user-defined space - still, in some ways, speaks to control. “If you want this, ask for it” “Here is the set of things we think you ought to have,” etc. But that’s not the same as creating content and releasing into the wild to see where it takes root and who gravitates to it.

This is what millions of people are doing every day with services like YouTube and Flickr. Sure, the content starts off on a given site, but people can take it from there and use it where they will. And even on the sites themselves, you can see what people are attracted to and respond to. It’s not perfect, but it allows content to be free and its use be flexible. (This raises issues of rights and ownership which approaches like Creative Commons seek to address.)

In any case, the bottom line is that information and content ought to be viewed independently of the entity that creates it. This doesn’t mean you take no credit or abrogate responsibility for things, only that it be allowed to leave the nest. It all gets down to content, control and choice around consumption.

Very few people agree with me on this. Even people who like and get social media see the value in content residing at some fixed address. Of course you need that, even if only as a staging area; but we need to move away from the fixed address concept as much as we can. It’s the next step in social media and one that we need to be thinking about and preparing to take.

The flipside of this coin is that the freedom to create and consume content will be co-opted. While PR people that get social media seem to be in the minority, there are an increasing number who seem to be thinking about it as a shiny new (and exploitable) channel for reaching their audiences.

Despite some stellar screw-ups, it seems that there are people who look at these cases and say to themselves, “I see what they did wrong,” instead of “how can I do that right?” The channels that are available through social media can’t become tools for manipulation. When found out (and it will be found out) it only gives everyone involved a black eye. So naked manipulation is out.

What about influence - manipulations cute cousin? I suppose it’s a step in the right direction; but it’s still built on the foundation of “us” and “them.” What prompted this whole digressive post was a post by Melvin Yuan a few weeks ago where he wrote about Ogilvy PR and the idea of 360 Degree Digital Influence. At the time, in a comment on his blog, I wondered if influence was too much of a one-way concept to describe how we ought to be communicating.

What I am more comfortable with is the idea that we (and by extension our clients) advocate for ideas and issues through transparent engagement with the community; that we share ideas (and content supporting them) in an unfettered way to see where they come to rest; that we bring ideas to communities that we believe will benefit from the information and that in all cases we openly support these ideas using the tools at hand.

Social media has lots of cool bells and whistles, that for sure. But we can’t get so caught up in the cool tools that we ignore the fact that these tools can represent an opportunity to communicate in new and more open ways. And we can’t support, condone or reward attempts to misuse this technology to create a false sense community, conversation or engagement.

Technorati Tags: social media, public relations, PR, communication, manipulation, influence, content, information

I read about Citizendium earlier today and was excited to see that they are insisting that all contributors use their real names.

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a “citizens’ compendium of
everything,” is an experimental new wiki project. The project, started
by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding
“gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real
names.

Main Page - Citizendium, the Citizens’ Compendium

Wikipedia’s failure to do this has had two consequences that I can think of - the first is that determining the validity of content relies on the judgment of editors who themselves may not be who they claim. The second is that Wikipedia, in the name of preserving objectivity, has erected rules about who can and cannot be counted as part of the community. Congressional staffers? Out. PR people? Out.

But if everyone has to be upfront and honest about who they are, that decreases the likelihood that spurious information will make it onto the site and allow people with knowledge but a perceived agenda (which frankly everyone has to one degree or another) to share what they know.

I certainly hope that the Citizendium will truly be worthy of its name and goals and will allow everyone willing to abide by the community standards to be an active and accepted participant in the conversation.

What is happening here and elsewhere is important and everyone needs to have a voice - but they also need to be willing to stand behind what they say.

technorati tags:Citizendium, Wikipedia, identity, transparency, social media

Blogged with Flock

I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive. I like browsing around and checking out things I’ve never seen before. I came across it a while ago but didn’t use it until there was a thread on Digg that included a discussion on the supposed rise of advertising in movie theaters prior to the start of a film. I doubted that this was a new phenomenon and posted a link to examples from the 30s, 40s and 50s.

So I was pretty excited when I heard that Brewster Kahle was going to be speaking at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Kahle came in and described his vision of universal access to all knowledge. He believes that universal access is in our grasp – from both a cost and technical perspective; but he wondered how we can make this content useful and we can provide the access well?

He started with a discussion of several media types.

Books – The US Library of Congress has about 26 million books. To store them all would require about 28 terabytes. So, for about $60,000 in storage space you could get all of the words in the Library of Congress – indexed, searchable, online. Digital books have all sort of new and interesting possibilities. He passed around a One Laptop per Child $100 laptop to show how digital books could be made available. The quality was impressive.

But sometimes a physical book is still really nice. (I ought to say here that I am a pretty active reader and collector of books myself so I’m still a big fan of the existing form factor.) Digitizing books doesn’t have to remove them from the physical realm. Kahle went on to show several examples of books-on-demand. Including a van that allows people to print a 100 page book for about $1. He passed several examples of on-demand books and they looked and felt terrific. According to Kahle, the cost for a university to shelve a book is about $3 and the cost to build a library works out to about $30 per book.

To get the books online in the first place, the Internet Archive first tried sending them to other parts of the world for manual scanning. They found it made more sense to bring the scanners to the books rather than the other way around. So they looked into a book scanning robot. At the end of the day though it worked at roughly the same pace as a person and needed to have someone there to monitor its performance. Scratch that one. The Internet Archive has created its own scanning system that works out to about ten cents per page. It scans, digitizes the text and creates a PDF of the page. These systems are in a number of libraries around the country – including the BPL here in Boston.

To scan a typical book with this system costs about $30; so the scan the entire Library of Congress would cost almost $800M. Not a small cost, but at least it is a one-time cost.

Audio – There have been approximately 2-3M commercial recordings made (from wax cylinders to CD) and this is an area that is heavily litigated. Where could the Internet Archive start? With those areas that are not part of the commercial music industry – folk and indigenous music for example. They offer the Internet Archive is making is free hosting and bandwidth forever for anything that ought to be in a library. – so where could we start? Many areas that are not a part of the music industry – folk, etc. IA is offering free hosting and bandwidth for anything that belongs in the library.

One group of artists that came on board are those that allow their fans to tape and share concerts. There are now more than 2,000 bands represented and the collection includes every concert played by the Grateful Dead.

Overall, the audio archive has about 100,000 items in 1000 collections.

Video – So far, there have been between 150-200k feature films. A few 1000 are up now in the Archive. Besides feature films, there are many other things that are a part of the collection. These include news, sports, ephemera and the Prelinger Archives. All of these films have value and needed a centralized home – Kahle believes that the Internet Archive should function as the shelves of the Internet.

This collection also features a TV archive. They are recording 20 channels from around the world around the clock. Most of this content is not available – only the 9/11 collection is at this point.

Overall, the video collection includes about 50,000 videos and approximately one million hours of television.

Software – There have been about 50,000 pieces of packaged software made. Archiving this is a challenge due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Internet Archive has a three year window to collect as much software as possible before they face the restrictions of the DMCA. Kahle pointed out that the gaming community is doing a much better job of preserving and developing emulators for many titles than anyone else.

Web – The Internet Archive started collecting the Web in 1996. Not just the homepage but all public content, every two months. (This is the Way Back Machine).

People use this all the time with the site collection receiving 300-500 hits per second.

After describing the various collections and the Archives capabilities, Kahle turned to the reason and philosophy behind the Archives. It’s not just about preserving content, but also about creating services that make use of that content and that’s where collective intelligence can play a role.

One of the important lessons for the Internet Archive is the one taught by the library at Alexandria – don’t have only one copy of anything and don’t keep everything in one place. Their solution is to work with international libraries that share the commitment to universal access and to sharing their collections with each other. The goal is to house large, petabyte scale collections in facilities around the world

The Internet Archive’s collections are stored in Alexandria 2 – a massive set of open source storage systems..

Sister sites, like the European Archive in Amsterdam, allows the Archive to avoid faults – both physical and political. It is interesting to see that the their collection of audio recordings “cannot be displayed in your jurisdiction.”

This led to the question – should content be public or private? Should these collections be create through open or proprietary methods? Some content has already gone proprietary – the law, for example. Even though the law is public information, the digital collections (through Lexis for example) are proprietary. There had, famously, been an attempt to create a proprietary map of the human genome; but in this case the public sphere stepped in and created an open version of the map.

According to Kahle, Google is trying to do the same thing with a number of its projects. Their goal is to capture all of the knowledge and to put it under perpetual restriction. Despite the potential limitations Google may place on use, many libraries are participating in what is essentially a private and proprietary program.

As digitized content comes under new forms of control – whether through Google or Corbis – what role will libraries perform and what services will they no lover be able to offer? These are questions that people in the public sector need to consider and answer together. If the content of libraries fall under private control, libraries as they are understood today risk perishing, suggested Kahle.

This makes it critical that open and public collections be created – to preserve open and free access to information.

Kahle finished by describing a couple of projects where he thought collective intelligence could be used to help achieve the goals of the Archive. These included human powered “universal OCR” and “universal translation” applications.

The event was good. Very interesting for me personally and it raised questions for me about the changing nature of freedom and control that all of us face whether we realize it or not.

Technorati Tags: MIT, CCI, Center for Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, universal access, open source, libraries, books, audio, video, software, Web, content, Google, Corbis, European Archive, OCR, television, Grateful Dead, music, Wayback Machine, Boston Public Library, OLPC

I’ve had a enough conversations with corporate communications-type people recently to be convinced that they are missing a big part of the social media idea. For some reason, many of them love the concept of social media - as long as it drives people to their sites. Trying to convince them to make their content portable and easily integrated into popular social media channels seems - for many - to be a foreign concept.

Sure, they’re cool with putting a video up onto YouTube, but for many the measure of success is still traffic. It’s almost as if they’d prefer the 10,000 visitors that are measurable to 50,000 domainless impacts. To a certain extent, I can understand their position - their performance is often being measured by the wrong metrics and as long as that’s the case they have no incentive to change.

Part of the issue is the continuing fixation with “messages.” If you can get people to a site, you are assured of spoon-feeding them exactly what you want. It may make them sick and they might go and throw it up someplace else, but at least you know they ate your dog food.

The idea of giving up control, sharing engagable information and allowing it to become a part of a natural conversation is not something businesses are used to; but it’s what needs to happen if businesses what to take advantage of social media.

Technorati Tags: social media, marketing, communications, corporate communications, site traffic, measurable, conversations

Last night I attended a social media panel put on by the PRSA chapter in Boston. I went in part to hear the content; but also to meet John Cass and to say hello to a few folks I’ve met at various events over time. All in all it was a successful event on all fronts.

• John Cass – moderator, PR Communications
• Paul Gillin – 23 years of tech reporting, author of The New Influencers, PaulGillin.com
• Todd Defren – Shift Communications, PR Squared
• Todd Van Hoosear – Topaz partners, Tech PR Gems

John started by providing an overview of the major trends in social media and Web 2.0. He pointed out that this is really all about individuals having the ability to create and contribute content in a wide variety or forms and formats – blogs, podcasts, video, MySpace, etc. As more and more people participate and create content, the nature of communication is changing – it isn’t a one way street any more and that means that the audience is gaining power. John pointed to the example of Vince Ferrari, whose blog on attempting to cancel his AOL account was the online equivalent to the shot heard round the world. The bottom line is that the world of communication has changed and that PR people need to learn to apply their skills in new ways to be effective for their clients.

Each of the panelists was then asked to describe how they had become involved with social media.

Gillin got interested in social media while at TechTarget. His blog, which had been languishing with minimal readership, suddenly saw a huge spike – first hundreds then thousands of readers – because a couple of influential bloggers linked to a post he did following an open source event. This was more readers than many of the articles which appeared in some of the traditional online outlets he had worked with. This led him to realize that through social media (or personal publishing) one person – or a group of people – can made a difference.

He thinks that this new reality makes PR more difficult. In the past there was a limited pool of people that mattered. When the Web came along that pool grew, but only incrementally. With social media there are hundreds or even thousands of people that matter and the role of relationships – and the role of PR – is changing as a result.

Defren helped create the social media press release after Tom Foremski’s, Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die! post. He recognized that PR people need to rethink the way they consider, create and convey the news and that the traditional press release was not effective for social media.

Van Hoosear was a marketing guy going to his boss saying: blog, blog, blog – and was told to do it himself. At the time blogs were viewed as a new communication medium – not a destination in themselves. But the growth and readership is there and now Van Hoosear is expanding beyond blogs to podcasts and vidcasts. His blog has become a way to share what he has learned about social media PR.

One of the things he has learned is that social media has made PR more challenging in some respects; but more effective if done right. Much of the focus now is on identifying influencers and understanding how to reach them. The traditional ideas about static messages and target audiences don’t work in the world of social media. Now the focus needs to be on the conversation. People need to get over the idea of controlling the message; now they need to be thinking about how to start and sustain a conversation.

Each panelist was next asked to share their thoughts on how to make the Web more effective for social media.

Gillin started by pointing out the importance of search engine optimization and of making a site truly informational so that it is viewed as a destination for people.

Defren talked about the idea of the “microchunked” document. Something that people can take from a site or release and put it to work where and how they need it. Content chunks should be able to function as blog posts and as the starting point for conversation.

Van Hoosear felt that the social media press release provided a model for making Web sites more effective. Things like tagging, adding video, posting it to MySpace, etc. People will find and use the content if it is good enough and strong enough.

Cass next asked Defren to provide additional detail on the social media press release

He outline four elements that need to be considered and included to create a successful social media press release:

• Accuracy – the core news facts need to be included in an accessible format. It doesn’t need to be in the boxes and bullets of the template but that can make it easier for its content to be pulled apart and repurposed
• Context – provide links to relevant past coverage; people will search it out themselves so make it easier for them; use services like del.icio.us to provide a collection of relevant links (with appropriate context and explanation); tag it for Technorati
• Build community – create opportunities for people to provide commentary and share the content - add RSS, add DIGG links, use Del.icio.us, etc.
• Be findable – provide contact info and submit the news everywhere so that bloggers and other social media influencers can find it where they spend their time

A member of the audience said that she sees lots of clients that don’t understand the differences between key words and tags.

Defren explained tags are more relevant for social media and blogs and that key words tend to be more important for search engines.

Cass next asked the panelists to explain how one might find blogs and new influencers.

Gillin said that there are some 300 directories now that people can use and the they ought be be having alerts delivered via RSS. Doing this will help locate the key blogs. Finding the influencers though is more interesting. The top bloggers are influenced by other bloggers and most of them link to other influencers. Reading and following the links will help create a view of influence.

Defren suggested that “freshness” be used as a parameter for evaluating content, as well as authority (based on the number of links to and from a specific blog).

Van Hoosear finds the idea of authority to be very interesting; it can be abused to create flogs and slogs by raising authority artificially. Once a potential influencer has been found they still need to be evaluated in terms of their reach, their receptivity, how relevant they are and their reputation.

Gillin provided a bit of a social media reality check by explaining that he’d had trouble finding bloggers for a whole host of areas: architecture, construction, oil and gas, etc. The fact is that most industries are not yet represented in the world of social media.

After some conversation of the differences between different types of search and HTML vs. XML, Cass asked the panel to discuss other types of social media . . .

Gillin cited engadget as a very useful blog that many people might not recognize as a blog, tripadvisor as a tool for people to share their experiences and Will it blend? – a great site for those seeking a blender. All of these point to the writable Web where it is easy, cheap and simple to publish. What is important is that people are able to create and share things for others to consume and use. While you might not be able to control the message any more, you can be a part of the community.
Defren explained that one thing PR people need to focus on is selecting the right medium for communicating with a community.

Van Hoosear echoed this point and described people wanting to use things like Second Life whether it makes sense or not. He suggested a series of stages people ought to consider when they are thinking about social media. The first is simply to monitor what is happening in a relevant community. Once you understand that, you can join the conversation, start talking to others, comment on content, etc. Next begin to start conversations and create communities. Finally, one can begin to optimize visibility online (SEO, press room, etc.). Just saying “hello” is a good place to start.

The panel was then asked to describe what makes for a good blog.

Gillin said it was important to stay focused, post often, be interesting and transparent and to connect and cross links with others. Defren pointed out that many of the top bloggers aggregate other people’s content and wondered how that squared with Paul’s description. Paul explained that most of the top bloggers had established themselves by doing all of those things first; but that many of them then began aggregating and commenting on other content.

Another member of the audience raised the issue of authenticity and how to respond when clients ask for someone to ghost write blogs.

Defren is opposed to writing on behalf of clients while Van Hoosear has done it in the past. When doing so though transparency is critical. He suggests that it is OK to help with a general corporate blog but not a personal blog or as an individual at the company. He also said that you can never misrepresent the blog or yourself as a blogger. Gillin felt that there is a perception that a blog has to be written by an individual; but that that isn’t the case. Many blogs are written by multiple people – Channel 9 at Microsoft and Benetton are good examples of this.

The panel was asked to describe some things to avoid:

Defren warned against being a a drive by commentator; and also the importance of being honest about who you are and who you are working for. The key to social media starts with good listening and being part of the conversation. He also recommended against starting a relationship that you weren’t going to be able to maintain. Gillin’s advice was not to quit. Even if you stop blogging your content will remain. He also suggested that people think about what they say and post. Van Hoosear echoed the message of not quitting.

John’s final question to the panel was on corporate blog policies and whether they mattered.

According to Gillin Microsoft’s blogging policy is two words: “Be Smart.” At Harvard Business School, on the other hand, the policy is more than 2000 words. He recommended that people check out Charlene Li’s blog at Forrester for more examples of corporate blogging policies.

Defren thought it was important for there to be rules – especially for public companies. He liked Microsoft’s. Companies shouldn’t try to prohibit blogging because it will happen on way or another. If companies want the conversations to happen they should encourage people to be blogging.

While there was also a Q&A session I haven’t included it in this summary. The core of the event was excellent and it reinforced many things that I already believe to be true – that the nature of PR – especially for the tech industry has changed radically, that social media is fast replacing the traditional media as the primary vehicle for communication, that the ideas and approaches of traditional PR will soon reach the end of their useful lives and that all of us that practice PR need to do all we can to recognize, understand and embrace these changes. It is an exciting time.

For another perspective on the evening, check out Ponderings and Wanderings.

Technorati Tags: PRSA, Boston, social media, blogging, PR, communications, podcast, Paul Gillin, Todd Defren, Todd Van Hoosear, John Cass, social media press release, Charlene Li

There is so much great stuff going on out there that I’m falling behind in my posting.  Just from yesterday I have three things I need to write about.

The first was a really good meeting with Shawn Broderick of TrustPlus.  We met in Natick yesterday morning and had a good conversation about trust, reputation, identity and eBay.  I have to get my thoughts together on that one.

The second is Justin Kirkby’s survey on connected marketing.  John Cass mentioned it in a post the other day and I went to check it out.  Basically Justin wrote the book on connected marketing and he wanted people to provide feedback on the predictions he made on the topic way back in 2005.  Some of them were on target while others either haven’t come to pass.  One of his predictions was that marketers would hyper-localize (not his term) their search for - and targeting of - influencers geographically.  I think that what’s happening in virtual communities - and understanding and reaching the influencers there - has become much more important.

The last this is last night’s MIT Communication Forum on Remixing Shakespeare.  This was a really interesting event on the ways the Bard has been used, abused, modified and repurposed from his own day through today and beyond.  Summarizing it will be no small task as much of the content was video-based.

Of course on top of all of this there is that little thing called work . . .

It will take me a few days, but thankfully I am on vacation next week and should be able to give these topics some attention.

Technorati Tags: TrustPlus, Justin Kirkby, Connected Marketing, John Cass, MIT Communications Forum, Remixing Shakespeare