PR Communications

Over Zealous Moderator Vs. Deleting Spam

I’m wondering if I’m an over zealous moderator or protecting my community when it comes to spam? As the moderator for the AMA Boston LinkedIn Group I monitor discussions posts every day. Many of the posts are simply a few lines of descriptive text with a link to a blog post. I often either delete the posting, or ask the person who posted to repost with additional content within the discussion post on the AMA Boston LinkedIn discussions site.

My goal as moderator of the group is to create an active community within the AMA Boston LinkedIn Group, rather than having members simply spam the site to drive traffic to their own site.

I've lost regular contributors because I've asked writers not to post a just few lines of text with a link. Yet when I've asked members what they think of the site the members have told me they appreciate a high level of moderation.

When looking at other linkedin groups, it appears making a posting with just a link to another blog is a fairly standard practice. I'm wondering if I'm being too restrictive in the forum, as I've seen a drop off in valuable posts. I've been taking additional steps to engage the community and add content, but I'm wondering if it would be better to allow some of these linking posts as long as the content is okay?

In today's world maybe we just cannot expect people to want to post content in a community without drawing those people to their own site. What do you think?

Five Social Media Insights On Disclosure, Competition & Social Media Guidelines

After writing my post about David Chao, the WebEx employee who wrote a personal blog post with a review of a competitor's product without disclosing their connection with WebEx directly in the post, I thought I'd ping a few colleagues in social media land to get their opinion on the David Chao's approach in the hope that community persuasion might cause a change of heart.

In addition to the original review, David Chao did not publish a comment placed on his blog by Kevin Micalizzi of Dimdim, a competitor; Kevin had clarified some incorrect information published by David Chao about Dimdim use of Amazon.com's services.

Susan Getgood

I asked Susan Getgood, a long time colleague from the AMA about the incident, here's Susan's reply:

Your questions:

Should David have revealed his connection with WebEx in his post?

Should David have written the post?

What do you think of David’s reaction to Kevin’s comment clarifying some facts on David’s original post?

How can companies prepare employees for conducting blogger relations?

My take:

Should you write a post about a competitor? It depends. If the competitor is in the news, and you have something constructive to add to the discussion, a post might be warranted. Should you review a competitor’s product? In the context of a clearly labeled piece that also discusses your own product, sure. Happens all the time. Standard marketing practice.

In a blog post purporting to be objective opinion? Without clear attribution of your own interest in the matter? Absolutely not.

To answer your specific questions, David Chao should not have written a purportedly objective review of DimDim; as an employee of WebEx, he has a stake in the game. There’s no way he can be objective. Further, anything he writes about DimDim, or any other competitor, should have the clear disclosure that he is a WebEx employee. The reaction of deleting the DimDim comment simply compounds the ethical problem.

What can companies do? Employees who are participating in social media, whether personally or on behalf of their companies, should be given simple guidelines on how to engage when mentioning their employer, company products or job. At a minimum, these guidelines should include disclosure of a blogger’s material interests and business relationships.

Bottom line, it is about blogging with integrity. As we stated in the Blog with Integrity (blogwithintegrity.com) pledge:

"I disclose my material relationships, policies and business practices. My readers will know the difference between editorial, advertorial, and advertising, should I choose to have it. If I do sponsored or paid posts, they are clearly marked."

A further point about integrity. Another element of integrity is welcoming “respectful disagreement with my own ideas.” (Blog with Integrity pledge). Sounds like that isn’t happening here either.

David Meerman Scott

I asked David Meerman Scott to comment and in a comment on my blog David stated the following:

John,

I agree that it is okay to write a blog post about a competitor, but I do not think that it is okay to do a negative online  Review of a competitors product. You and I both write books but I would never dream of writing a negative review of a book that competes with one of mine - would you?

However, I think it is a "worst practice" to delete the comments that come in from representatives of the company that you just dinged. That's just wrong.

The biggest problem with this sort of behavior is that the negative aspects of it (you writing about it for example) far outweigh the positives (a few people thinking that a product is not good).

DISCLOSURE -- I am personal friends with and have written about Steve Chazin who works at DimDim.

Cheers, David

Michael Gartenberg

Michael Gartenberg had this to say on one of my questions about social media guidelines.


John: How can companies prepare employees who are using social media?

Michael: In the age of social media, the rules are different. The same way companies are mindful of employee conduct when they're in public representing their firm, they need to instill the same sense of conduct, ethics and behavior when they're online. As personal brands co-mingle with corporate brands disclosure and transparency of affiliations become even more important.

Neville Hobson

Neville Hobson gave his answers in an audio response.

John: Should David have revealed his connection with WebEx in his post?

Neville: The connection with WebEx is a material fact that could influcence your opinion about what was written in the review. Probably is he just did not think about it. However, it is a problem that two weeks have passed and he has not revealed his connection.

John: Should David have written the post?

Neville: I don't see an issue with writing the review, but without the disclosure there's a problem.

John: How can companies prepare employees for using social media?

Neville: Depends on the product, the market, the angle you are writing. So long as the review is open.

Neville: You need to educate those employees, be clear on goals. Also think about the support does the employee receives and need. The framework for social media activity has to be viable for employees. Provide some guidelines for all employees and help to set the boundaries for all employees.

Neville has followed up with a discussion on the FIR podcast

BL Ochman

BL Ochman was kind enough to give me some answers.

John: Should David have revealed his connection with WebEx in his post?

BL: Of course he should have he's damaged not only his credibility in that post, but his overall credibility. His action demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the Internet Age. Full disclosure is a much better policy. Having provided it, he could make his case. I, and other people I have come to trust, always include client identification even in Tweets. I've worked hard to build my reputation as a straight shooter, I wouldn't compromise it.
 
John: Should David have written the post?

BL: Sure, if credibility and honesty don't matter to him. No, if they do!

John: What do you think of David’s reaction to Kevin’s comment clarifying some facts on David’s original post?

BL: It was a kneejerk reaction. He needs to think before he speaks or writes from now on. The Internet is forever, what happens online stays online.

John: How can companies prepare employees for conducting blogger relations?

BL: IBM and Sun and many other companies have policies that basically say "don't be a jerk", "don't give away company secrets," give away intelligence, not intellectual property.

Every company should talk to employees, offer them assistance in getting started, and encourage them to be open and honest.  If a company doesn't trust its employees to blog, they may need to make changes in their hiring and training policies. Cashiers in stores are the employees who customers meet, yet many companies hire and continue to employ lackluster people who make it clear they'd rather be somewhere else.

Companies need to think about who's out front, and put a lot of training and trust and rewards to those employees.

Sure there are some bad people in the world, but for most of us, if you treat us with respect, pay us a decent wage, and give us good working conditions, it shows.

John: The synopsis from these five communications professionals is that disclosure is important, and that social media guidelines can be a good resource for employees to understand how to navigate the waters of social media.

Update: I’ve been in touch with David Chao via email. He tells me that Kevin Micalizzi’s comment was never published, and that after Kevin posted his blog post on the Dimdim blog, he decided to do nothing. David has also discovered that the information he wrote about Dimdim’s servers was incorrect, he based his post on a ReadWriteWeb post, but as of this time he has not updated his blog post.

10/11 Update: David Chao has updated his blog, giving a disclosure about his employment with Cicso, he published Kevin's comments, and updated the original post.

Pitching PR & Digital Marketing Rationally

Confused.com, a UK car insurance pricing comparison site, as reported by PR Week, recently paid several losing PR agencies a fee for the ideas those agencies pitched them during their account pitching process.

Mark Pinsent wrote a post describing the incident in the UK, and his thoughts about the whole PR pitch process in his post, "Stop the PR pitch madness." Mark as the title of the post describes believes PR agencies should not pitch ideas to clients.

I had three reactions.

One, I was thinking that if the expectation in the industry is that client expect you to pitch them with ideas. Maybe every agency should just work on one pitch, though you might have alternative ideas for different verticals. Instead of working on the ideas, agencies could work on incrementally improving the same pitch over time.

You could start the pitch off by stating that you don't give ideas away for free.

Two, many of the interactive agencies I’ve worked at will provide digital marketing ideas, but where those agencies were most successful was to pitch for an assessment of the client’s marketplace before coming up with any ideas. And we were paid for the assessments.

Three, one of my landlords had a reputation for paying his bills on time without hassle. One of the vendors told me he was a pleasure to do business with, and every time he called or left a message even for a minor issue, the vendor would jump to make sure he was extremely satisfied. Some would even say, paying bills early is bad business, but for that landlord he always had good service from his vendors.

I'm wondering if the practice of paying the losing agencies a fee for their ideas is very similar to the story about the landlord. Confused.com gets a reputation as a client that's worth working for because the company has proven it values your advice and work. I'm sure the next time Confused.com asks for bids people will be falling over themselves with good ideas, because confused.com has demonstrated the company plays more than straight with you. To me this is a great public relations strategy, one that extends the company's reputation in the PR world. I am sure Confused.com can expect great service from any PR agency that wins their business, plus, as this discussion proves the effort so out of character has put Confused.com at the center of conversation in the PR industry.

Either way, if you are in the marketing and communications business I'd heartily recommend reading Mark Pinsent's post and the more than 30 responses from communications professionals in the industry.

Cisco WebEx Blogger Deletes Competitor's Comment

David Chao the author of a personal blog about web conferencing recently wrote a post reviewing Dimdim, a web conferencing company based here in Massachusetts. His review was not all that positive, and in addition, David did not reveal his affiliation with Cisco/WebEx in his post about Dimdim, Webex is a competitor to Dimdim. According to David's linkedin.com profile he is the Manager for North America/Canada Sales within WebEx's Collaboration Software Group.

Kevin Micalizzi, Dimdim's Online Community Manager, responded to David's post in the comment section of the post, but the comment was removed several hours later. Apparently David Chao had a few of his facts wrong about Dimdim. David had suggested that Dimdim's reliance on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing infrastructure was a risk to customers. However, as Kevin Micalizzi details in his blog post on the Dimdim blog, Dimdim does not use Amazon.com's service, Dimdim uses their own servers.

I wrote a post about standards in social media yesterday and while at the #IceSocial tweet up I organized last night. Kevin Micalizzi, the Community Manager from Dimdim, the featured guest speaker at the event, told me about David Chao's post and how his comment had been removed from David’s post. 

Writing about competitors is perfectly acceptable in blogging and social media. I think the Boeing blog has done a good job of defending their airplane technology against AirBus on the Boeing blog. Yes the bias is there, but Randy at Boeing is very open about his role at Boeing and that he is a competitor to Airbus. I think the blog articles about differences in competitive strategy between the two aeronautical companies on the Boeing blog bring passion to the blog, and I've enjoyed reading many of the posts. Funnily enough I had referenced Ian Lurie’s post about bad business blogging practices in relation to the Boeing blog’s competitor content strategy in an earlier post.

In checking out David Chao’s blog, he looks like an experienced blogger; therefore I'm sure he has made a slight oversight in not revealing he is a WebEx employee in his post. Though David does provide a prominent link to his LinkedIn.com profile, where you can easily determine he is a WebEx employee.

I also hope the deletion of Kevin's comment clarifying some errors in David's original post was an oversight, and that we will see a reposting of the comment, and a good response from David.

10/11 Update: David Chao has updated his blog, giving a disclosure about his employment with Cicso, he published Kevin's comments, and updated the original post.

OmniSocial Launched By Mzinga

Mzinga, the Burlington, MA based social software provider announced the launch of its new OmniSocial

product today. I took some time this afternoon to chat with Jody Petruzziello, VP, Products and Eve Sangenito, VP Marketing.
Mzinga has been working worked towards building one platform for social networking and social learning and innovation, by combining the company’s social networking and learning platforms together.

I asked a few questions about how the company enables its clients to gather ideas and discuss those ideas within the OmniSocial.

Apparently it is possible for a company to have training modules available within the OmniSocial platform, which can we used by community members, who in turn can make recommendations and give ideas based on course work. In addition any ideas generated will go through a workflow process for triage and response, so that duplicate ideas can be categorized, and a response given to all those people who came up with the same idea.

The company is working on putting together some social learning case study examples for me, and when I know more I hope to post those as well.

Community Participation Calendar

How can you plan for community participation? In some ways you cannot as your audience's participation is dependent upon their good will. However, you can plan for what you intend to do and how you connect with community members.

There's a joke about community managers that illustrates this point:

How Many Community Managers Does It Take To Screw In A Light Bulb?

@SingularityDsgn  An infinite number. They don't screw in light bulbs. They try to create an environment that allows other people to screw in bulbs.

I've often used online editorial calendars for websites and social media, and I've even used this term when managing communities. But the term "participation calendar" comes from an entry about planning community content on Linkedin.com. Mariam Cook answered a question there, and in her answer she used the term (log into linkedin required).

Essentially the concept is to make plans to create content and engagement with your community over a period of time.

The process of creating content may also engage community members. You might interview members of your community, or reach out to community members to write a post.

I recently went through the process of encouraging the creation of unique content on the AMA Boston Linkedin Group. I posted a request for a marketing case study related to tourism in the forum, and also reached out to community members who worked in the tourism industry. The outreach produced a great case study about ArtsBoston.org (access to AMA Boston LinkedIn Group required), which in turn generated several comments.

The participation calendar is about creating content, and may involve your community manager conducting outreach to audience members for them to create the content or to respond to published writing.

When creating content, you also have to realize that your community is at different stages in participation within a community, they may be a newbie or an old timer, so you have to create content, and conduct outreach to different types of community members to provide the sort of value that helps with retention and active participation.

Why Social Media Growth Has Muddied The Waters For Community Standards

Policing and community
Originally uploaded by Toban Black.

Bloggers have developed community standards and etiquette in how to deal with one another. If you send a trackback to another blogger, you should always reference their blog in your post, no ghost blogging as it lacks authenticity. Many of these community standards appear to be changing.

In writing today's post I'm not really thinking about what standards have changed, or if they should have changed, rather I'd like to address the question of why those standards change over time. Here's my quick take:

1) The social media community is bigger. With the growth in the community, it is tougher to get a sense of today's standards, and with more people there's less agreement about standards.

2) A number of well known personalities have made a name for themselves using a different set of standards. Their popularity and support of a different set of community standards changes the landscape.

3) The risks of not taking part in social media are greater today. Yet the demands on time are just the same. Dropping old standards, such as no ghost blogging, means companies that are coming into social media are able to remain competitive.

In my six years in blogging, I've had the good fortunate to come to know many PR and communications writers, more by accident than design, my blog is called PR Communications, which may give the impression that I'm a PR person by profession. I'm not. I do think public relations is the right strategy and approach for online marketing.

Traditional PR people were always people people, they knew how to build relationships and pitch the right journalists with a story that was valuable to the journalist because the journalist's audience would want to read their story.

When I first started blogging I quickly learned how a community of bloggers is able to police themselves and the wider communications community. The community's combined will appeared to have more power than any of the professional organizations I'd ever belonged too. I believe this is because bloggers are a vocal bunch and if they see something they think is wrong they will tell you so, in contrast many professional organizations are slower to react to lapses in community standards.

The other big factor is how the eco-system of the web works. People use search engines to search for information about brands, people, companies and community values. A small but significant community of bloggers can easily swamp the search engine results with a discussion about a topic because the criterion for achieving top rankings includes:

1) Keywords your audience is searching for in search engines.
2) An indexable site in a search engine.
3) Links from websites that include keywords your audience is searching for in search engines.

Professional organizations in only have one site, and typically community discussion is within a site, a community of active bloggers who own their own content is much more likely to participate and have an opinion. WOMMA has probably been the best example of a professional organization that really does help set and maintain community standards. Yet WOMMA is an organization that was born after the growth of social media, and so many of its members are already active in social media and familiar with the concept of participation.

Acceptance of Community standards in recent years did appear to be stronger. I knew most people in the PR and communications blogging community and we helped one another take stumbling steps into this new world of social media, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes not. But on the whole social media has helped with develop and maintain community standards. Social media conversations about standards give people examples of what to do and what not to do, and the consequences if you don't follow the standards for reputation and profits.

Basically business bloggers have helped round out basic business values.

In recent months, I'm finding that social media standards are changing, and some of the things that many community members would not have dreamed doing a few years ago may be common practice today, with little or no comment from the community.

Social media has crossed the chasm and into the mainstream, all the indicators demonstrate this transition, I believe we are going through a tremendous growth spurt in the use of social media for business. The 2008 election was a big catalyst for this change; the election legitimized social media marketing for many people. Having a Presidential town hall debate on YouTube has to have a big influence on public perceptions about social media.

The growth is good, and what the early pioneers wished for, but with the growth comes less agreement about community standards, even opposition to some of those standards, and the realization that entry into social media for many companies just will not happen unless existing standards are changed. I’m curious to see if standards maintenance will fragment even more, or with greater community cohesion and understanding of the value of standards because of experience whether there will be more agreement about community standards or less?

How To Get Your Hands Dirty With Social Media Principles

Niall Cook recently published a blog post about his agency's new social media principles. I had a few questions about the mechanics of the management of the principles.

Always curious about looking under the hood, I was very interested to read about Hill & Knowlton's 24/7 email hotline. I was wondering who is responsible for answering the email. What's the process in place for triage?

Niall writes that employees have to click a link to demonstrate they have read the principles. Clicking a link doesn't necessarily mean someone has actually read, or if they have, understood the content you've presented. Any plans for workshops or online courses?

Gaining Customer Insights Using Semantic Technologies For Response, Engagement & Innovation

Last night I moderated a panel discussion about semantic technologies for the Boston Product Managers Association. Christine Connors, Sean Martin and Mike Spataro were on the panel, and many audience members participated with questions, comments and insights.
 
The biggest takeaways for me were in defining how web semantic technologies can be split into two camps; little "s" and big "S".

Semantics is all about the process of understanding words. I might define the semantic web as the process of building a website that describes content in a format so that technology can read that data and immediately understand the meaning of that content for another use. In addition web semantics includes technology that is able grab content and give you an easy way to develop an understanding of the meaning of content on a website.

Machines unlike humans don't understand the context of words, with a language there are so many different combinations you can create that the meaning of a sentence is meaningless to a machine without understanding the context of the content.

For example, I might say I am trail blazing in the world of technology, but to a machine that may mean I'm building a trail, putting out a fire or leading the way to the future of technology. Context is everything in language, you either have to provide an explanation of the context of content when you publish a website, or have a mechanism for understanding the context over time. Human intervention is needed in both circumstances. You can have to have someone describe published web content's meaning in a format that's agreed upon prior to a technology capturing the data from a website, or have a model for what content means supported by people once data is captured from a website.

Little "s" web technologies capture and filters data with no description or understanding of the data provided after the capture process. The process of understanding the meaning of that data starts once data capture has happened. People have to intervene to provide the content and meaning for language on the web.

While big "S" web technologies provide a framework for describing data on a web page when the data on the website is published. If data is read or captured, because the data's semantic meaning has already been described, you don't have to go through the process of understanding the meaning of the data.

Currently the semantic web is embryonic webmasters have not built websites with semantic data. The next stage for the web is building big "S" websites where the data is already described within an agreed upon standard. Although one of the panelists, Sean Martin, CEO of Cambridge Semantics, a semantic consulting and semantic middleware provider, believes that in the last year we are just starting to see some useful implementations of big “S” semantic web projects.

One important insight I gained tonight was that data that is gathered and defined using little "s" web technologies could then be used for data manipulation by big "S" technologies.

Mike Spataro works for Visible Technologies, a social media monitoring and research company. Visible uses text analysis and natural language processing to capture content in social media, identify content, and enable Visible Technology clients to use their technology to interpret the meaning of content through an intuitive process. Visible Technologies captures data, and asks clients about the context of the data captured, over time the process is repeated, each new webpage of data builds the library of meaning, clients teach the Visible semantic machine what's relevant to them and what’s not.

The technology goes one step more, and can route opportunities found in social media to individuals within the enterprise. Basically visible technologies has built a technology to mirror the process of monitoring, triage and response developed by early pioneers in the social media engagement industry such as Dell, Microsoft, Comcast or IBM. In fact the social media monitoring industry and the CRM industry are converging. An opportunity found within social media can now be responded to by a company employee, but if a company has existing knowledge of a customer within their CRM, that customer data can be tied to the triaged information found by monitoring social media.

As companies build more websites with semantic metadata describing the context and meaning of the data, companies like Visible Technologies will be able to combine information caught using little "s" technology with big "S" technology. I suspect few customers will take the time to describe the context of a complaint, but a customer might spend the time on describing their overall background and identity, especially if such semantic data helps with search engine rankings, or in providing data to other semantic engines.

Sean Martin was amazing during the discussion he provided a clear explanation of how semantic technologies work; as he is in Boston I hope we can collaborate in the future and put on some more events together.  Christine Connors, Principal of TriviumRLG LLC, a Semantic Technologies consulting company gave us a lot of working examples especially as she has used semantic technologies in her prior roles at Raytheon, Intuit and Dow Jones, I very much appreciate her driving up from New York to be on the panel.

Several audience members contributed questions, comments and ideas. In addition to asking the panel questions, I also opened up those same questions to the audience, and a number of audience members described their experiences using semantic technologies for product development. Not only did the semantic technologies help with the development of a product, but the process of using semantic technologies helped them manage projects, and also made it easier to switch from vendors within a software project because the structure of their data is described using open semantic standards.

Lastly, both Sean and Christine commented on the announcements by Google that semantic data will be considered by the search engine for search results. Sean suggested that Google could be a significant driver in the adoption of building semantic data using open semantic standards for the purpose of getting an edge in search engine optimization. With my background in SEO I have an additional reason to continue exploring the future of the semantic web.

Designing A Creative Brief

When working with creative people, non-creative people sometimes find it difficult to explain what they want. By writing down exactly what you desire from a creative perspective, you will make the process of creating content, any content, much simpler and reduce the need for change orders.

From experience I know it takes discipline to write a creative brief and often internal and external clients think that creative people should have the communications skills to probe for information so that the creative person creates what the client wants based on a conversation.

Some creative people can do this and some don't, but creating a creative brief is not really about the creative person's communications skills it’s more about the client setting down their thoughts within a disciplined process.

The very act of going through that creative brief development process will mean the client will be able to better articulate what they really want and the creative person will have a easy roadmap to follow.

I’ve found this from experience, when I don’t write a creative brief, I’m stumbling through understanding what I need, but by sitting down and setting pen to paper I crystallize what’s in my imagination into concrete ideas that can be used to create something.

This creative brief process parallels the development of a marketing plan. The very act and the structure of marketing planning ensure that you will not miss any nuances by writing the process down. Creative briefs are similar, the act of writing ensures you capture what you need to convey to your creative team.

In addition, you also have to understand that what you think you might have communicated to your creative team may not have been actually been conveyed accurately. To save on time, resources and consternation it is important to write a creative brief and ask the creative team to come back to you with brief overview of what they think you want.

I thought I’d give you some examples of creative briefs developed by marketers around the web, here are three examples:

Sample One (from Adcracker)

Client/Client contact information:

Project:

Prepared by:

1 Background / Overview:

2 What is the objective, the purpose of the ad?

3) Target audience: who are we talking to?

4) What's the single most important thing to say

5) What are the supporting rational and emotional 'reasons to believe and buy?'

6) What else will assist creative development?

7) Schedule: What do we need from the creative team? When do we need it?



Sample Two (from smilycat)

[Project Name] Creative Brief

Summary

Current Situation

Proposal

Target Audiences

Goals

Requirements

Promotion / Communication Plan

Timing

Project Sponsor

Stakeholders

Sample Three (from Jacob Cass, no relation)

What does your business do?

What are the goals? Why?

Who is the target market?

What copy (text) and pictures are needed?

What are the specifications?

Have you got a benchmark in mind?

What Is Your Budget?

What is the time scale / deadline?