Q&A for PRSA

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I was privileged to present a virtual seminar this week to the Public Relations Society of America. Some interesting questions came into my mailbox after the program was over, so I thought I’d answer them here.

If you’re at the PRSA International Conference in October, be sure to stop by and say hello. I’ll be giving a presentation on Monday, Oct. 22, as well as sharing the stage with PR legend Larry Weber.

Here are the questions and my responses:


Sarah writes:

I am interested in the standards of new media and wanted to ask you specifically about the emergence of advertising on the new media platforms. Are advertisers gaining traction on these sites? I imagine they are. So then…will the new media have a mechanism for separating edit from ads? More fundamentally, how do I trust that the blogger-citizen-writer is free from advertiser influence?

One phenomenon I discuss in my book is the emergence of a rich set of ethical standards in the blogosphere, the kind of standards that any journalistic organization would be proud of. Basically, deception is considered a high crime, and bloggers who have written for hire have been roundly flogged. There are services that pay for coverage, but as a rule, bloggers are expected to disclose these affiliations.

The question of separating ads from editorial is always a moving target, as it has been in print for many years. I believe advertisers and publishers both know that disguising advertising as editorial is bad news. Standards for how ads appear on a page are evolving, but our perceptions will evolve with them. Just as avid newspaper readers instinctively know how to tell an editorial from an advertorial, I expect the same intuitions will develop online.

Jason comments:
While Facebook is exploding beyond [its origins as a service for students], the core users still base their involvement on personal networks. The majority of my Facebook friends are former students I worked with while a PR manager in academia. Integrating these less than professional interactions with fellow PR pros and even clients makes for pins and needles monitoring.

No matter how many identities you might have, Google ruins your chances of complete separation. Unless you resort to pseudonyms for your interactions, the transparent society in which we surf will forever dangle the threat of exposure if you like to keep your person and persona separate.

Can an executive at, say, Ford, share beer jokes with college buddies on his or her MySpace page? Or manage a personal blog about erotic photography while representing Ford on the company blog?

My questions are:

1. Do you see potential pitfalls of people juggling multiple identities in the online world?
2. Where should professionals draw the line in becoming a social networking participant on a personal basis?
3. HR professionals are already Googling potential job candidates. Should your Facebook/MySpace/etc., profiles be off-limits and how can they be if the information is there and free? 4. How long will it take for the Supreme Court to have to decide what a person’s online world means in terms of their employment?
4. How long will it take for the Supreme Court to have to decide what a person’s online world means in terms of their employment?

Your questions imply that people should expect protection over what they say in a public forum beyond those already afforded by the Constitution. I fundamentally disagree with that. The public Internet is every bit as much a public space as Times Square, the exceptions being that one’s indiscretions on the Internet may potentially be seen by many more people and may also be easily searched, copied and stored. It’s no secret that the Internet is a public resource or that public websites are, well, public. I think it’s foolhardy to assume that what you say on the Internet is private.

This puts a greater burden on the individual to be aware of the risks of their behavior and to be discreet. Personally, I would never say anything on a public website that I wouldn’t want published in a newspaper. But the burden is with individual, not with those who witness a person’s behavior. If you want privacy, pick up the phone, use an anonymous e-mail server or encrypt your messages. But don’t expect the courts to come to your rescue. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking the law, and failing to understand the obvious risks of speaking in a public place should not be an excuse for doing something stupid.

Cindy asks:
When I returned to the office, I immediately tried to go onto Technorati and search for bloggers in the mortgage technology arena, where many of my clients are focused. I found many mentions of mortgage and technology but could not figure out if [the authors] were influential or if they focused in the industry. Is there a better way to go about finding these bloggers? I think I may be too old for this stuff.

I doubt you’re too old, Cindy! It’s more a matter of the search tools being different in this world. I’ll preface my response by saying that all search tools are imperfect. You should use these resources only to give you a general idea of a blogger’s influence.

When you look at the search results in Technorati, you’ll notice a small green label that says “Authority.” This is a ranking that Technorati uses to distinguish the popularity of bloggers. The higher that number, the more links to the bloggers site and, supposedly, the greater the person’s authority. Click on the name of a blogger to see a more complete profile of that person, including his or her ranking among all the blogs that Technorati tracks.

Blogpulse is another site to look at. You can search on a term and then click the “view blog profile” link on the right to learn more about the author. Blogpulse’s database is smaller than Technorati’s, but it has some interesting and unique features.

Here are a couple
of Google tricks. When you type a search term, look at the URLs of the sites in the results. You can often tell by the domain name whether a site is owned by an individual or a business. If a site looks interesting, type “site:sitename.com” into Google to get a list of sites that link to that one. The more links there are, the more popular the site.

You can also use the “site:” operator to find all mentions of a particular search term on a site. So typing “social media site:paulgillin.com” will return a list of all articles on paulgillin.com that mention social media. This is a good way to find out how much a blogger refers to a topic.

Young Influencer

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Gareth Thomas, who head up the interactive division at Brands2Life, a PR agency based in London, sent along this picture and says, “Thought you may find the pic amusing. Think I’ve found your youngest reader! (It’s my daughter Jessica)”

Thanks so much for the snap and the smile, Gareth. Now can you ask Jessica to write an Amazon review? 🙂

Listen to my interview on The Advertising Show this Sunday

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This Sunday, I’ll be a guest on The Advertising Show, America’s only globally distributed weekly program focusing on advertising, media, branding and marketing. I’ll be interviewed on a half hour segment about my book, The New Influencers. The Advertising Show is sponsored by Advertising Age Magazine. You can listen to a live webcast of the interview starting at 5 p.m. E.T (2 p.m. Pacific Time). The show will also be archived and available directly here beginning Monday, August 20th.

The Mass. Registry of Motor Vehicles blogs – badly

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I went online today to learn about renewing my drivers license and was amused to discover that the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles has a ”blog.” I use quotation marks because the website violates nearly every rule of good blogging:

  • There have been only five entries in the last 18 months and only one in the last five months.
  • There is only one link in the most recent entry, and it’s to a press release.
  • There are no tags, comments, blogroll or RSS feed. The lack of comments is a shame because the latest topic – widespread abuse of handicapped parking medallions – seems like something a lot of people would want to talk about.
  • There is no distinctive look or feel. The “blog” is dropped in on the home page like a press release.

To give credit where credit is due, the Registry should be commended for even experimenting with a blog, given that government agencies aren’t inclined to live on the edge. Also, the Registrar does make an effort to bring some personality to her writing, though her comments lack passion. I have to wonder if her posts are approved by the press office before publishing.

All in all, this effort s a good example of why some organizations should avoid the blogosphere.

Google News comments presage a new approach to journalism

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In a move that could serve as a model for the next generation of journalism, Google has announced that it will allow people to comment on stories indexed in the Google News search engine.

A lively debate sprung up on the Internet earlier this year when Jason Calacanis refused to conduct a telephone interview with a Wired editor out of concerns over being misquoted. The on-the-record interview is a staple of journalism, of course, and the idea that a source would want to publish a paper trail of his or her comments goes against the grain of most journalists’ thinking.

However, I think Calacanis had a point. The existing model of journalism, in which a reporter interviews a source and then decides what is relevant about what that source said is based upon outdated assumptions. Until a few years ago, individuals had limited ability to publish. That left the job of deciding what to publish up to the people with access to printing presses. This model is error-prone and shot through with subjective value judgments. If someone was misquoted, which happens more often than a lot of journalists would like to admit, their only recourse was to ask for a correction, which might run days after the original article appeared.

Today, we have a new model. If someone interviews me for a story, I can post my version of the interview on my blog or publish an audio recording. I also think it’s reasonable to ask the publication to link back to my comments or recording. After all, neither of us has anything to hide, right? This new approach to reporting would reduce the chance of error and provide readers with the option of reading a more detailed version of the information presented in the story.

I can’t see anything wrong with this. A reporter’s job is to get the facts, and if an error is made, the original source should have the option to present his or her version of what was said. I believe that over time this is the model of new journalism that will take hold. It will force reporters to pay more attention to accuracy and it will force publications to be more accountable. It also provides a service to readers by adding depth and perspective, if they choose to read it.

I’m sure this idea won’t sit well with a lot of journalists, though. What do you think? Is this the start of the new approach to journalism, and are there downsides I’m not seeing?

Spock does people search

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Spock debuted yesterday and it looks pretty cool. It’s a search engine for people. Queries return only results about people, and the depth of those results is impressive. I searched on my own name and found a listing with my correct age, a biography snipped from LinkedIn, a photo and tags related to my interests and background. I could claim the bio, if I wanted, and add to it, kind of like a public Facebook profile.

A search on “1967 Red Sox” turned up dozens of mini biographies of players and fans from that year, all with similar elements.

In some ways, the service is like ZoomInfo’s People Search feature, but the two sites are oriented very differently. Spock returns only information about people, whereas ZoomInfo is aimed at business research. I think specialized search is going to be a big business and this is an interesting new entry.

Warning: the site was experiencing a lot of technical problems today and was only sporadically available.

Outdoor advertising surges

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These days, it’s sometimes easy to forget that human response to stimuli doesn’t change just because media changes. I thought about that when reading a recent story in MediaPost about the surge of the outdoor advertising business. Over the next four years, it’s expected to grow an average of 13% per year, more than any other conventional media.

The reason? People are more mobile these days. We carry our technology with us and we’re never out of touch, which permits us to be on the road more than ever before. When we’re mobile, we see things like billboards.

And there is technology innovation going on there as well. While passing through New Jersey recently I saw some video billboards that were truly stunning in their clarity and color.

Apple certain he understands the value of this 100-year-old medium. The company spends lavishly on outdoor advertising for its iPods. I suppose it reasons that a lot of target customers can be found standing at bus stops. Good call.

Facebook deserves marketers' attention

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We’re still in the first inning of the social media game, yet the urge to pick winners is strong. Anyone who’s trying to make sense of all the activity right now is being whipsawed. A year ago, MySpace was all the rage, then YouTube took center stage last fall. Early this year, everyone was atwitter about Twitter and now Facebook is growing like kudzu to the applause of investors and the press.

While there will no doubt be other market darlings, I think Facebook is the first of these nascent communities to deserve serious attention from b-to-b marketers. If you haven’t been paying much attention, you might still think of Facebook as the social network for college students. In fact, as recently as last fall, a personal still needed a “.edu” e-mail address to join.

All that changed last late year when Facebook made two critical decisions: it opened membership to anybody who wanted to join and it permitted third-party software developers to build applications specific to the Facebook platform.

The results have been astonishing. Membership has doubled since the first of the year, eclipsing 30 million in early July. What’s more interesting to marketers is that the demographics of this member base are intriguing. As Rodney Rumford points out in this analysis, members over 25 years of age now account for half of Facebook traffic. That’s remarkable when you consider that most of those members couldn’t even get to the site 10 months ago.

An even more telling statistic is audience engagement. According to Comscore, 93% of Facebook members log on at least once a month and 60% use the site daily. Those are impressive figures for even a small community site; for one with 30 million members, they’re mind-blowing.

If you register on both MySpace and Facebook, the differences will whack you in the face. MySpace’s heritage as a music site makes it feel at times like a giant virtual nosh pit. Member pages are festooned with graphics and music plays helter-skelter. In the year I’ve been a MySpace member, I don’t think I’ve received a single message from someone I knew.

In contrast, when I registered for Facebook, I was flooded by invitations to become friends (social network lingo for establishing a connection) with dozens of current and past colleagues. Facebook allows you to monitor some of the activities of your friends, and it’s an impressive display to watch. People I know are busily exchanging software applications to recommend books, movies, travel destination and professional web sites. The Society for New Communications Research, of which I am a member, chose Facebook as the community of choice for its professional members. And I continue to get “friends” request from actual friends almost daily.

If it keeps up this momentum, Facebook has the chance to succeed where earlier professional networks like LinkedIn didn’t. While LinkedIn has some valuable professional networking features, it has the feeling of a software application more than a community. Facebook’s approach to the market is proving to be more effective: it started as a community site and then added networking features. Its roots as a gathering place for college students has helped it to continue to attract the kind of members that marketers want to reach. If it continues to grow at its current rate for another year, it will reach the status among adult professionals that MySpace enjoys among teenagers: you simply have to be there.

This is not to say that Facebook is perfect. Its closed e-mail application doesn’t sit well with people like me, who live in their inboxes. Some of its distinctive metaphors — like writing graffiti on someone’s wall — can be confusing to new members. The process of creating a new group can also be somewhat cumbersome and confusing. And while its applications are impressive, Google still delivers better quality and features overall.

Nevertheless, business marketers should become familiar with Facebook. It has a chance to become the gold standard for professional networks. Even if it fumbles the opportunity, the dynamics of what’s going on there are important to understand.

Update: Maggie Fox just passed along this press release from Comscore, showing Facebook traffic up 270% year-over-year, compared to MySpace’s 72%. Of course, MySpace started from a much higher base and is still the leader overall by a wide margin, but Facebook is closing the gap.

Is second life a massive marketing self-deception?

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Wired has a devastating profile of Second Life today with a title that leaves no question about the magazine’s conclusions: “How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life.”

The gist of the piece is that marketers are marching like lemmings off the Second Life cliff, throwing time and money into building virtual communities that no one visits. The reasons range from the technology limitations of Linden Labs’ servers to a kludgy user interface to the excessive time it takes to find and get to anything in Second Life.

One particularly damning statistic: 85% of people who create avatars have abandoned them, the article says.

I was somewhat relieved to read this piece, because I have been feeling disconnected from the whole Second Life phenomenon. While I created a profile and buzzed around the virtual world for a while, I never got much of a sense that I was part of a bigger group. In fact, I can’t think of a single person who’s told me that he or she spends a significant amount of time in Second Life. If Wired is correct, a lot of people have been engaging in self-deception.

A particularly interesting comment is at the top of the third page of this profile. It proposes that one of the reasons for Second Life’s popularity is that it looks so much like the physical world. This gives marketers a sense of comfort that they don’t have when experimenting with the more effective but less familiar tactics that really do work online. In other words, if we can just recreate familiar surroundings, we’ll be okay.

In reality, I can’t think of a successful virtual reality product that isn’t a computer game. People have been experimenting with online analogies to physical experiences since the earliest days of the Internet. One of the first ambitious business-to-business projects I can remember, in fact, was a virtual tradeshow that had visitors wandering around an exhibit hall floor and looking at products and collateral. I don’t remember who put on the show, but I do remember that the experience was notable for its lack of participants. It was never repeated.

Perhaps virtual worlds to have a future, but this article may go a long way toward ensuring that Second Life doesn’t.

Response to a skeptical review

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IMedia Connection published the first less-than-positive review of The New Influencers today. It’s written by Phil Gomes, a veteran blogger who’s often cited as the first PR professional to practice the craft. In my view, Mr. Gomes’ review can be summed up as follows: New Influencers is a useful, if flawed attempt at putting into context a rapidly changing market in which decisions are frustratingly difficult to make. The book is full of good stories and makes a solid case for why corporations should pay attention to social media. However, it is marred by some factual mistakes and advice that is occasionally off-base. It’s a decent early attempt at putting social media in context, but it needs to be baked more fully.

I would call the review modestly positive, although the headline, “Does ‘Guide To The New Social Media Mis-Guide?’” implies otherwise. I don’t completely agree that the headline accurately represents the review, but I’ve written enough headlines in my time to know that it’s a judgment call and reasonable people disagree.

I have enormous respect for Phil Gomes and don’t quibble with any of the flaws cited in his review. I would like to respond to a few of them, though, if only to point out sources and motivations.

Mr. Gomes notes disapprovingly that I recommended that readers vote for favorable stories about their own companies on Digg.com. He’s right that that was bad advice. Digg was still fairly new when the book was submitted to the publisher last October, and time has demonstrated that my recommendation was misguided. He has a good point.

He takes me to task for using statistics from Alexa and Technorati to validate the significance of trends and the influence of blogs. He notes accurately that Alexa relies upon a limited universe of users of its toolbar to estimate traffic statistics, which skews the results. This is true; however, the Alexa toolbar is used by millions of people, and should give a representative, if not statistically valid view of traffic performance. Alexa is open about the limitations of its approach, and I should have cited this at least in a footnote. However, in the land of the blind, a one-eyed man is king, and Alexa is the best we’ve got.

The same can be said of Technorati, whose blog popularity ranking has been both hailed and reviled. I cited Technorati rankings generously in the book, mainly because it is the measure of popularity that bloggers overwhelmingly told me they use. Blogpulse has a similar ranking, but its universe is much more limited. While Technorati has its flaws, bloggers pay attention to it and I think that has merit.

Mr. Gomes comes away with the impression that I lavished too much attention on the Technorati A-list, thereby downplaying the importance of less prominent bloggers. If this is the impression the book leaves, then I did a terrible job of making my case in Chapter 4, titled “Measures of Influence.” The whole point of that chapter was to emphasize that A-list bloggers are influenced by many others, and that any campaign that focuses exclusively on the A-list is ignoring the sophisticated patterns of influence that work in the blogosphere. As noted in that chapter:

“Most A-list bloggers actually select at least half the items they choose to highlight from tips sent in by their readers, many of whom are small-time players. So the supernodes actually get their energy from satellites of much smaller influence who have their ear… [E]ven small players in the blogosphere can exert an unusually high level of influence depending on who is reading them. It is a modern version of the six-degrees-of-separation model. The blogger without much influence may actually be a link between two bloggers who have significant influence.”

He points out that I incorrectly identified Steve Rubel as head of Edelman‘s new-media consultancy. I stand corrected. I did send Steve an earlier version of that material for his review, but I evidently introduced errors after he had seen the early draft.

Finally, Mr. Gomes chides me for claiming that entertainment and celebrity blogs “don’t generate much cross hyper-linking activity.” In fact, that statement was attributed to a researcher at Nielsen BuzzMetrics in the context of a discussion about patterns of influence. While that doesn’t absolve me of blame, I did not present the statement as being my own.

I offer these comments solely in the spirit of giving my perspective of these issues. In reviews of any kind, perception is reality, and Mr. Gomes’ perception of my misfires are my responsibility to correct, hopefully in a second edition. He says he’d be willing to read it :-).