PR Communications

FIR Live Blogger Relations Show About Gary Varynerchuk Pitch Email

Today I was on a panel discussion at the For Immediate Release BlogTalkRadio Live program with Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, Gary Varynerchuk, Connie Reech, Connie Bensen and Kaitlyn Wilkins discussing Gary Varynerchuk's email about his new upcoming book. I'd written a post describing the email as a bad pitch, and Gary had responded.

At the beginning of the discussion, I gave an overview of how I saw the pitch email, here's the overview.

1) Did not know Gary before I received the pitch email, though had seen him in social media. No comments or other connections between us.

2) If you are going to pitch someone it pays to read blogger’s or journalist's stuff before contacting them. You can personalize the email.

3) The email pitch did not even talk about the contents of the book, the email seemed to be pitching traffic rather than the book. I may have been interested in getting a review copy if I'm been asked, but I wasn't.

Crisis Communications - Gary's Good Engagement Strategy

1) Engaged all of the people who commented on the post. That's good.

2) Apologized for the email, I very much appreciated that effort.

Aftermath

1) I heard reports of other bloggers getting the same or very similar emails. So while engagement was good, no change in behavior. I will continue to provide constructive criticism of Gary.

Lastly, I Recommended The Following

a) Use media relations tactics that are much more likely to work.

b) Don't ruin your reputation in the world of blogging and social media.

c) Don't ruin your credibility in providing social media branding advice.

Gary followed up with his thoughts about the pitch. I thought he did a great job of explaining why he thought his pitch could have been better, and he would not have recommended this strategy to companies. He also explained that he wanted to get the word out about his book, and connect with as many people as possible. But that he did not have a lot of time because he is very busy. While I can sympathize with Gary about being busy, any parent will understand the trials of juggling so much in their life I still think companies should attempt to personalize their posts by reading each blogger or journalist's material. Gary suggested that most public relations people only spend a short time doing this. While that's a good point, I think taking that extra step can help to alleviate bad pitches. I brought up the issue of large companies having to do pitches and hiring the staff to conduct outreach.

My impression after talking with Gary directly over the telephone is someone who is very passionate about what they do, so much so that they sometimes take a tumble in the world of social media through a misstep but someone who will be right back at connecting with people again tomorrow.

Connie Bensen gave her perspective on her comment and thoughts about the follow up from Gary. Connie had a few concerns about some aspects of the pitch, but on the whole she thought it was good because the pitch offered to help her.

Kaitlyn Wilkins was appearing for John Bell (John was stuck on an airplane) she discussed the blogger relations approach of Ogilvy with their blogger relations strategy from two years ago. Kaitlyn would not have recommended the approach Gary's colleague used. She recommended that Gary use a video in the future.

Connie Reech also could not recommend Gary's approach, and suggested Gary use some alternative tactics.

While Neville Hobson strongly recommended Gary and people not use this approach.

Several people called in, including Krishna De from Ireland and Paull Young from New York.

Krishna provided some perspective about the pitch. She looked at the intent of the pitch rather than the execution. Krishna also wrote a great follow up post, one that you should review as she provided some good advice about blogger outreach strategies.

Paull Young can in with another perspective, he recommends to clients to reduce their traditional outreach strategies, and rather use dialogue and good content as a blogger relations strategy. Shel Holtz and I discussed the issue of blogger relations three years ago in relations to a Click.TV pitch on my old blogsurvey blog at Backbone Media, where Shel and I discussed the definition of blogger relations, I’d suggested blogger relations was not media relations. However, that discussion got me off my curmudgeon horse to accept the reality that there are two definitions for blogger relations.

This discussion reminded me of my attempts at blogger relations with the Corporate Blogging Survey 2005, where the outreach program to ask people to participate in the survey resulted in a snafu on our part, here’s a post “Connecting With Bloggers To Review Your Product,” about the incident with links to more posts on blogger relations.

The show was a great conversation, my thanks to all the participants and especially Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz for continuing to host a great discussion about public relations.

Building A More Open Culture At BBBS Through Social Media

Surprising results from my recent post on social media strategy and technology at Big Brothers, Big Sisters of MA Bay, the post sparked collaboration among several different regional chapters, and is helping to enhance the culture of openness within the organization.

In chatting with Tim Smith about my initial post regarding the BBBS of MA Bay wanting the community to help answer some questions about social media strategy and technology, Tim gave me the following update:

Tim is working on putting together the list of resources and ideas generated by my blog post and also LinkedIn question. He is working on a follow up plan for everyone; determining if he needs to follow up with individuals and companies to schedule follow ups where necessary. One issue for BBBS of MA Bay is that during these economic times they really need help with pro bono work, so that's one question Tim will be asking folks how they can help BBBS.

My original post has also sparked a conversation among several regional BBBS chapters.  BBBS MA Bay and BBBS SEPA are building on these initial conversations and have formed a loose confederation on the topic of social media strategy and technology.   Each regional organization is at a different place, thinking about strategy, building a committee or even experimenting with social media.

Those chapters involved have set a goal to develop a methodology that permits other affiliate, non-affiliate community and youth serving organizations to view the progress of their work, learn from and eventually become part of the discussion.    The chapters are also developing working groups to make the best use of talent and expertise across the loose federation.  More on the study groups as they develop.  Tim will be influencing core technology, media production, community development and experience engineering themes.

Tim then told me that because of the external postings, there have been a lot of internal BBBS agency conversations.  His agency is new to the ethos of social media's open and collaborative problem solving and resourcing approach.  Some wonder about the best boundaries for community efforts like this.  My post was an exercise in letting outsiders see inside of BBBS MA Bay's social media work. Interestingly, the post encouraged other people to announce themselves who had been working on social media issues within his and other agencies. The post has helped to accelerate the process of transparency, the direction of the projects, pacing and helped start greater partnerships across agencies and within.

For the BBBS of MA Bay the process is helping to further open communication between departments. Social media cuts across the organization, and the open discussion externally affects those internal departments encouraging them to be more open about sharing information, collaborating, and learning from each other.   Tim and others at the agency are excited that the social media work enables them to expand relationship and community development practices for both the organizational and mentoring missions of the chapter.

Social Media Maturity Index: Finding Social Media Engagement Leaders

Develop a blog, start a Facebook fan page, create a Second Life Island; all efforts in building a social media infrastructure that can be used to engage customers and community. Yet, launching a social media website is no indicator that a company will build a thriving engagement strategy. Rather how a company engages customer and community using social media is more important than what technologies they deploy. You might be able to rattle off a list of companies that have a blog, but it is much tougher to identify the companies that have a successful engagement strategy. Jon Garfunkel & I have developed a social media maturity index to make it easier to identify social media engagement leaders. Working with Jon Garfunkel, we took my original ideas, influenced by others, about a social media engagement rating system and developed the social media maturity index. Interestingly, Jon took our same discussion and has his own take on the model, The Open Community Enablement Model (oCEM).

This index can be used to determine the best practitioners in the industry regardless of the size of the company, and as a consequence the community can learn from those leader’s efforts.

One innovation suggested by Jon Garfunkel was changing the existing three point scale of my ranking system to a five point scale for evaluating social media leaders. John suggested we use the Capability Maturity Model’s process for evaluating the level of engagement. I think the maturity index rating should scale from 1 = no involvement, to 5 = heavily involved with engaging customers or deploying social media technology for engagement.

1 Listening
2 Receive Feedback
3 Problem & innovation response
4 Acknowledging & Demonstrating Action
5 Knowledge management

1 Listening – Describes the level of social media monitoring conducted by a company. Integrated into a monitoring system, has a triage system been developed by a company to sort and pass on information within the company?

1 = No monitoring is being conducted.
2 = Limited monitoring is being conducted, maybe at the level of free tools such as Google or Technorati.
3 = A formal monitoring system has been developed and deployed, the monitoring system feeds a triage system that passes information onto people who will respond to opportunities discovered within social media.
5 = Sophisticated routing of opportunities

2 Receive Feedback – A company is ready to receive and accept feedback from customers over the web. Here the customers will use the company’s mechanisms for sending feedback.

1 = No formal mechanism has been made available for customers to give feedback to a company.
3 = Customer feedback is welcomed by a company, however the mechanism is primitive, there has been the embryonic development of a feedback system, and there is a workflow process for who will take action on customer feedback.
5 = Sophisticated web 2.0 tools for customer feedback are being deployed that allow for the aggregation and sifting through of customer feedback, for example, bazaarvoice’s feedback system and salesforce.com’s idea engine.

3 Problem & Innovation Response – Does a company conduct outreach within social media to engage customers and community?

1 = A company does not allow or encourage a response using social media.
3 = Engagement happens on a limited basis, perhaps on the company’s blog or within social media networks, the company is taking a web 1.0 stance in a web 2.0 world. Responses are restricted to thought leadership rather than innovation management or customer support.
5 = Extensive engagement occurs on company social media websites. A company conducts outreach to their community beyond the goal of thought leadership or responding to controversial issues. Goals such as innovation management and customer support are pursued through a response strategy.

4 Acknowledgment & Demonstrating Action – This rating determines the extent to which a company will acknowledge receipt of ideas, and criticism, and how the company demonstrates it is taking action. To achieve a high maturity level a company will have both the processes in place for acknowledging, demonstrating receipt of ideas and taking action, and also deploying a company infrastructure for handling innovation management and customer support issues.

1 = A company may be active on social media and respond to customer feedback, but there is no acknowledgment and demonstration of the actions that will be taken based on customer feedback and suggestions.
2 = System for implementing innovation management embryonic, it is possible to take action based upon feedback but the mechanism is organic.
5 = A process has been developed for acknowledging feedback. When needed, resources and people are committed to taking action. To acknowledge receipt of feedback and ideas, whether a decision is taken to act or not, the decision results are published within social media for public consumption.

5 Knowledge Management - Knowledge Management is the process of recognizing useful information and publishing it in an open, searchable forum. A social media technology is deployed that enables customers and community to contribute and build a resource.

1 = No process or tools are used for building useful knowledge
3 = Off the shelf tools, bookmarking tools like del.ici.us, or wikis are used to collect useful information.
5 = Purpose built tools for knowledge management, active management and moderation of those tools.

Please let us know what you think of the index, and if we should add something or edit the description?

Big Brothers Big Sisters Of Mass Bay Wants Your Social Media Advice

I met Tim Smith, a business executive at Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) here in Massachusetts at a Social Media Breakfast here in Boston. He told me about his hopes and plans for using social media at Big Brothers Big Sisters. He wants to create a support and learning community online, and at the same time broaden the range of conversation points within social media, increase mentoring activity levels and measure that activity using social media. He wanted help in developing a social media strategy for his organization. While Tim already has a lot of good ideas, he is curious if the community can help him to refine his ideas about strategy and technology tools.

In order to help with strategy and technology suggestions I think it would be important to get a sense of the audience for BBBS’s social media efforts. Tim told me BBBS has six primary audiences, Parents, Children (little), Alumni parents & mentors, Current Mentors (big) and collateral service providers (mental health professionals).

If we defined the BBBS roles in a social network they would be called Big, Little, Parent, Match Support, Collateral Service Provider (mental health prof.), and there would be five different relationship levels: Family, Match (Friendship), Affinity Group, Community, Inter Community,....Universe.

To be successful Tim will need to develop two social networks, one, a secure social networking application for children to correspond with other kids and mentors. In addition parents will need to be able to oversee their child’s use of any social network, and BBBS will need to be able to moderate content. And two, Tim wants to develop a public facing social media community for mentors, and perhaps parents and mentor alumni. Both social networks may be integrated into the same system; there would be different levels of access for participants.

The public platform will have to rely on platform security that self-polices itself, or has agency moderation. The private platform will provide greater access control, but a finer inside-community control to ensure the safety of children and families. Lastly, to ensure privacy and keep children safe there is a need for the development of guidelines for the use of social media communities by all parties. 

The Internet/Social Media risks the project will most aggressively manage would be against:
-Unauthorized adults having Internet contact with youth on public or private platforms
-Unauthorized release of youth private identifying information in platforms we sponsor or control.
-Unauthorized release of private identifying volunteer, parent, or collateral contact information on platforms we sponsor or control.

Additional social network needs in terms of security access levels, the relationship between members, and their role include:

-A volunteer needs to be capable of having a private match-level messaging session with his Little Brother or Match Support.
-Volunteers, Moms, and Youth need to be capable of having community-level, and invited community sub-group public discussions.
-Match Support needs to be capable of having public conversations with the community
-User profile information needs to be private, disclosed with owner/grantor release event for information.
-Youth cannot provide profile information access outside of friendship or match-level relations.( e.g. Mom, Volunteer, Case Worker, Match Support).

Tim wants the social network to help with the process of recording mentorship activity, through a history of a relationship, and as a means of promoting the benefits of mentoring to potential mentors.  He believes that it is important to reward people within the social network on the basis of activity, and wanted help and discussion around what would reward participants. 

Developing a strategy of documenting mentorship activity in social media both as a means to recording the history of a relationship; and as a means of promoting the idea of mentoring is sensible.  I also like the idea of rewarding people based on activity, though I think we should discuss the differences between people in reward systems. Different people want different rewards, and you may have to develop different systems for different people.

Some technology ideas Tim has gathered include: “A simple case storyboard might show a volunteer texting a messaging server after each outing either from his mobile or from a service like Joopz.  A hosted calendar would be updated by the message transaction.” Tim thought that by making it easy to self-document he would help to sustain the mentor relationships and encourage more participation from potential mentors. As participants document their outings, BBBS would be able to “passively and affordably track outing frequency,” such outings would be rewarded with recognition point systems. With services like twitter and socialtoo BBBS will be able to add gather more feedback from surveys and generate greater awareness of what matches are up to "in the wild" out in the community.

Tim is asking the community what technology platforms should Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) of Massachusetts buy, rent or develop to meet their needs?

Update: 2/17/09 8:00pm - Taking the list of social networking platforms developed by Jeremiah Owyang I'm going down the list and contacting each company to see if they have any suggesitons or ideas about the big brothers big sisters post I made today.

Update: 2/18/09 3:30pm - Posted a question about BBBS on linkedin, so far I have received two private answers and one public answer. 

Frantic Newsrooms Lead The Way On Convergence

Newsrooms are in a process of converging mediums to shared resources. Companies can learn much from this convergence in their efforts to build a social media communications triage center.

Where once public relations, marketing and customer support were dispirit, companies may learn from the newsroom convergence and bring once separate departments together.

Dell has already taken these steps, in January 2008 - Dell’s Corporate Communications team become “Communities, Conversations and Communications.” The Dell Community Forums and Online Community Outreach are brought in with the Communications team. Customer service, corporate communications, and elements of product management come together in one department.

I am not sure which industry was the first to converge, the corporate world or journalism, but my sense is that the world of journalism has a better movement for the process of convergence. Why, because journalism deals with stories and different medium, while different departments in companies are dealing with communications, customer support and product management. Journalists have an advantage over companies in the world of convergence they share a profession. Companies have more cultural barriers to overcome, the distinction between professions, even if all converging professions serve the same customer.

Recently I was looking at the discussion around the Kent State converged newsroom, and effort to bring together all different media in one room. I was thinking that just as journalism can learn from companies’ use of semantic technologies does the converged newsroom give companies a roadmap for bringing all communications elements together in a company? What are your thoughts on this parallel convergence of media across industries?

Dell Drives The Social Media CRM Market

I’ve been speaking with the folks at both Radian6 and Visible Technologies in recent days, to follow up on earlier work I’d completed on a Dell case study for SNCR.org in the case of Visible Technologies, and a response from my linkedin inquiry on social CRM from Radian6 about the pace of change in the social media analysis tool market.

I believe Dell is driving the pace of development in the media monitoring tool industry through its drive for an understanding of the voice of the customer, and how Dell responds to customer opportunities in social media. (If you think of other brands or other vendors that are at the forefront I’d be glad to hear your opinion.)

I first interviewed Richard Binhammer at Dell for Joseph Jaffe's book, and discovered that Dell was developing an infrastructure for social media customer service using a lot of manual tools. Then in December of 2007 I interviewed Richard again and he told me about his work with Visible Technologies and the TruCast product.

The TruCast product enables brands to listen to customers but also builds a workflow process for assigning customer opportunities to people within a company. You can respond to a customer within the TruCast product. I was amazed by the sophistication of the product and its integration with customer management workflow processes.

Richard then met with the folks at Radian6, I believe one of the first meetings was probably at the SNCR conference in California, and liked their product because of the speed at which the product displayed social media opportunities.  It was my understanding for Dell it was critical to display opportunities as quickly as possible, in case the company had to respond rather than wait for any triaging process and placement of content on a social media website by a technology. In addition Ricard’s preference at Dell was for using social media tools for writing comments and other interactions rather than using a technology tool to place content. The one disadvantage with the Radian6 product would be that you might have to do extra work to track any content that was placed in social media. I do understand that TruCast has since updated their system to allow the user to find opportunities but also work within the workflow process and that Dell is using both Radian6 & TruCast.

Over the last six months Radian6 has also developed a number of CRM features that mean companies are able to find opportunities, triage the social media opportunity, and then send the incident to someone within a company to deal with. There is some integration with salesforce.com. You can send data to salesforce.com, but really CRM management still exists within the Radian6 tool. Dell drove a lot of the development of these features at Radian6 just as they did with Visible Technologies.

I suspect we are still in the early days of media monitoring/CRM integration, and that companies like Visible and Radian6 will either integrate their tools with CRM vendors, get purchased, or the CRM vendors will think about developing their own monitoring tools.

What’s interesting to me is that the customer, in this case Dell is driving the pace of development in the industry. The tool vendors really need to anticipate what customers will want next. I think customers require better integration with existing CRM packages.

I also see that tool vendors will open up more opportunities with customers by demonstrating how companies can use their products for sales 2.0 relationship building. With sales 2.0 a marketing and sales team uses social media monitoring tools to gather intelligence on companies and a customer buying group, so any intelligence gathered in social media about a customer influences the buying process from the sales pitch team, but there is an opportunity for a vendor to conduct a dialogue with a customer that means that a customer learns and builds relationships with a vendor through social media. What would be interesting is to develop other web 3.0 tools that enable a company to develop usable intelligence on a customer. Perhaps identifying what communities are most important to a client’s buying group.

Finally, as the leader in the industry I have a question for Dell, (Richard Binhammer most likely) what do you see is the future for these tools?

Will Ford & Auto Industry Be The Web 2.0 Turnaround Story Of 2009?

Roxanne Darling beat me to the punch line with this post, "How Ford Can Ramp Up It’s Social Media Turnaround Story of 2009."

In February 2007 I wrote the blog post, "Is Dell The Biggest Blogging Story of 2007?" The post discussed the potential of Dell through its use of social media and strategy to become the biggest corporate story about a company using social media to effectively engage its community and customers. I think Dell was the story for 2007, and 2008. SNCR.org even gave Dell honors by naming Dell brand of the year.

I really was thinking ahead to 2009, and while I cannot honestly say that Ford, General Motors or Chrysler are at this point conducting themselves in social media to the extent that Dell was in late 2006 and 2007. I like Roxanne Darling hope Ford and its American competitors will be able to claim awards and the mantel of the biggest social media turnaround story of 2009.

Dell had it easy compared to the American car industry. While Dell struggled with poor customer service perception, the big three have an ingrained poor reputation in the American market. Not just individual car companies, or brands, but American car companies in general. Dell never had to fight against Americans perceiving American computers were worse in quality than every other country's machines. Yet, that perception is the biggest problem Ford, GM and Chrysler face today.

Roxanne Darling shares my passion for social media, and my hopefulness that an American car manufacturer will use social media to tell its turnaround story to the community. What’s personally interesting about Roxanne's post is that she reveals that her Father is an ex-Vice President of Marketing for Ford, and her whole family worked in the industry.

I don't claim a similar heritage. My Mother's family is British. However, my maternal Grandfather, and Great Uncles worked for Crossley Motors in the 1920's and 30's, working on the construction of buses, locomotives and possibly aeroplanes. I have been a long time car industry watcher on social media for General Motors, Ford and a whole chapter in my book on corporate blogging about the auto industry.

In her article, Roxanne Darling suggests that social media can be used to address some of the obstacles Ford Motor company faces.

1) Financials.
2) Cultural insensitivity.
3) Time.

Will there be enough time to change community perceptions about Ford and American car manufacturers in general. Though I also think it is about the car companies developing a different line of vehicles to compete.

Roxanne suggests social media can address these issues in the following ways:

1) Give Scott Monty more money.
2) Inform the public of what Ford is doing.
3) Get control of the brand back from the agency.

And in detail:

1. Production: Get rid of the high-priced video production team and inject some humanity into the production.
2. Message: It’s off the mark. Here is how I would change it.
3. Conversation: it still barely exists. Here is how I would change it.
4. Distribution: Ford, you are not using video anywhere near to its advantage. Here is how to ramp it up.
5. Speed: Use live-streaming as much as possible, as people don’t like to wait.

The Dell turnaround story with social media worked because Dell focused on changing structural issues as well as using social media to communicate directly with customers. Dell improved customer service and updated its product line. At the same time through micro interactions on blogs and other social media technologies Dell changed people's minds one by one. Structural issues are critical for success whether you are Dell, Ford, GM or Chrysler. But just as social media rapidly brought down Dell in the Dell Hell storm, once the structural issue had started to be addressed; social media helped Dell to turnaround quickly.

Here's my take on what Ford and other American car manufacturers can do with social media to help make selves the social media turnaround story of 2009:

1) Listen: Use social media for listening.
2) Engagement: Engage customers when they have problems. Acknowledge their issues and demonstrate that you are going to either do something about their issues, or why you cannot.
3) Triage Infrastructure: Develop a company infrastructure for triaging social media conversations about Ford and other American car manufacturers. If the dealer network is a problem where customer service issues are not dealt with by Ford directly. Either help dealers build the infrastructure, or build that infrastructure and pass on the customer support issues to dealers. Make sure any customer issues are resolved.
4) Measurement: Measure sentiment about Ford, the American car industry, and brands. Report on the current of sentiment in social media in the same way you report on sales and profits by quarter. Like Dell your goal should be to move the negative rating lower. Once you start changing perceptions in social media there should be a knock on effect with traditional media, as my article on intermedia issues indicates, “Making Sense Of Intermedia Agenda-Setting For Social Media Marketing.”

A number of people don't agree with the Government’s auto bailout and think that it would be better for the American car manufacturers to go into bankruptcy. I don't personally agree with them. But I was thinking that there may be something that everyone who is a user and advocate for social media can agree upon, bailout aside. The plan and path for Ford and other car manufacturers need to take to succeed.

1) Structural reform (Ford looks well on the way here)
2) Use social media to communicate with customers for listening, and resolving issues and in so doing telling the new story through action.

Dell succeeded because the company understood the power of public relations and connecting with people in their customer community. The company also understood it was important to connect with social media influential people on the web and in person. Ford and the other car manufacturers have to get social media enthusiasts on their side; you can do that by structural reform, but also by enabling your social media managers to build the same sort of infrastructure Dell built and connect with your customers directly. Then reach out to the community and don’t be afraid about revealing all the facts about where you failed and succeeded. That transparency will help you to become the social media turnaround story of 2009.

Conversation Over Appearance: Finding Social Media Engagement Leaders

Company engagement using social media is not just the appearance of activity, rather that which is most important in a good social media marketing program; monitoring, dialogue, outreach and action. As a consequence I suggest industry observers should rank companies on how they use rather than if they use social media.

Over 60 companies in the Fortune 500 run a corporate blog according to the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki, a project I organize as a community volunteer where the community counts the number of blogs in the Fortune 500 and asks bloggers to write reviews. The number of companies in the Fortune 500 with a corporate blog is around 13%. 30 or so reviews of the f500 blogs listed on the wiki have been published. Looking across the reviews bloggers judged that engagement and outreach were the factors that rated lower than other success factors for f500 blogs. Companies might feature their blog on the main corporate website, but a number of Fortune 500 companies did not have a good outreach strategy to their blogging community, or even interact with customers on the comment section on their own corporate blog.

How a company develops an outreach strategy, putting the resources in place and implementing an effective feedback and outreach campaign is the most important aspect of marketing using social media. How companies engage and conduct a dialogue with their community is still a new concept to businesses, executives either don't know how to conduct an outreach strategy within a social media community, or are aware but have not committed sufficient resources to make the engagement successful. Really the medium of social media is not really important; rather it is the strategy you use to connect with customers. I've been thinking it would good to develop a new rating system for the use of social media by companies based on their ability to listen and engage customers, the strategy of engagement, listening and action if you will. That system can be used to determine the best practitioners in the industry, whether they be small or large companies, and the whole community can learn from their efforts.

Here’s my first attempt at the new social media engagement rating system.

1 Listen
1a Monitoring
1b Feedback

2 Action, Acknowledge & Demonstrate
2a Conduct dialogue
2b Resolve problems

Each factor would be rated on a scale of 1-3 as follows:

1a Monitoring – We review and estimate the level of active monitoring of the wider community by a company using social media. Has a triage system been developed by the company to sort and pass on information within the company?

1 = No monitoring is being conducted.
2 = Limited monitoring is being conducted from free tools such as Google or Technorati, to limited use of paid services monitoring, but monitoring restricted to brand monitoring.
3 = Monitoring resources are heavily deployed, and a formal monitoring system developed and deployed, one that uses a triage system to pass information onto people who need to act on the information gathered.

1b Feedback – Is it possible to give feedback to a company on their website?

1 = No ability to give feedback to a company on their site.
2 = Feedback welcomed by a company but the mechanism for sending feedback is primitive, some embryonic development of a feedback system within the company emailed primitive web 1.0 system. Feedback passed onto people.
3 = Sophisticated web 2.0 tools used. For example, bazaarvoice’s feedback system or  salesforce.com’s idea engine.

2a Dialogue & Engagement – Determining a company’s ability to engage and its level of engagement with customers and the wider community.

1 = No engagement
2 = Engagement happens, but on a limited basis; just on a company blog or within social media networks, the company is taking a web 1.0 stance in a web 2.0 world. Or a company is using social media just for thought leadership rather than innovation management or customer support.
3 = Extensive engagement happening on company social media sites, outreach to community through technologies is being conducted by the company, and outreach when it happens occurs beyond the goal of thought leadership for controversial issues, innovation management and customer support.

2b Problems are resolved using social media through action - Reviews the extent of the infrastructure within a company for handling innovation, customer support issues, ideas and suggestions where the company deals with the consequences of engagement.

1 = No mechanism for resolving problems. A company may even be active on social media but only reacts rather than taking action.
2 = System of response embryonic and when problems are resolved an organic approach is taken.
3 = Resources and people have been committed to taking action, and a process has been developed. When action is taken, those actions are published on social media for public consumption whether the action taken agrees with requests and suggestions or not.

This was my first attempt at the corporate social media engagement rating system. Let me know what you think and if I should add something or edit the description? Do you think the scale is big enough, perhaps instead of 1-3 we use 1-5 for example?

Here’s a Google Document Spreadsheet of the three companies rated using the Social Media Engagement System.

Inspiration for the additional development of this rating system comes from a post written by Elizabeth Albrycht, "Don't Become A "Walking Dead" Brand: Listen, Acknowledge, Demonstrate.” And my accompanying post, “Fortune 500 Companies That Demonstrate Their Crossing Of The Blogging Cultural Divide.”

Making Sense Of Intermedia Agenda-Setting For Social Media Marketing

Last week at a Tweet up organized for the Research Symposium for the Society of New Communications Research in Boston I chatted with Mihaela Vorvoreanu, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Communications at Clemson University in South Carolina and a research fellow with the society. We discussed the concept of agenda setting* in the press.

Basically the theory suggests that while the press may have little influence on the publics attitudes, the press does influence what the public discusses and thinks about because of the issues covered in the media.

The theory of agenda setting has four components:

1. Media Agenda - issues discussed in the media (newspapers, television, radio)
2. Public Agenda - issues discussed and personally relevant to members of the public
3. Policy Agenda - issues that policy makers consider important (legislators)
4. Corporate Agenda - issues that big business and corporations consider important (corporate)

However, with the advent of social media, I was wondering how the public who use social media fit into this list? If social media is used by the public to discuss issues that are personally relevant, then surely what is discovered in social media is all about the public agenda. Mihaela Vorvoreanu introduced me to another theory: intermedia agenda-setting, the process of one medium influencing the importance of issues within another medium, for example there is research that demonstrates the press is being influenced by blogs, and research that blogs being influenced by the press. A lot of research has been conducted to find correlations between political campaign news releases, political advertising and blogs. Apparently there is even some correlation between media agenda setting and the agenda developed on campaign blogs, often times the media agenda influenced the campaign blog agenda. A good article to read about the concept of intermedia agenda setting is "Intermedia Agenda Setting in Television, Advertising, and Blogs During the 2004 Election," by Kaye D. Sweetser; Guy J. Golan ; Wayne Wanta in Mass Communication and Society 2008.

A story covered by the Boston Globe about a Mother and a stroller that were hit by a police car illustrates the power of social media to set the agenda for the public and the press. A woman was crossing the street the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, pushing her child in a stroller, when a police car hit the Mother and knocked her child and stroller down in the street. The initial short article in the Boston Globe reported everyone was okay. However, there was a great deal of discussion in blogs and in a local discussion group for mothers about the incident. Eventually, in an online forum called JP Moms several members of the public were critical of the woman for not coming forward to give her side of the story. A friend of the woman posted on the site and asked the community to consider the privacy of the families involved. At that point the Boston Globe reporter who had originally reported the incident in the initial story started investigating the story in more detail, and produced an objective piece that gave the background details to the story that no member of the public had investigated, “What happened on Seaverns Avenue?.”

I thought the article laid to rest any doubts about the status of the Police officer involved in the car accident and the position of the family involved. The Globe story focused on the facts, what happened in the car accident, what the victim had to say about the accident, that members of the public posted critical statements of the victim in online communities, and how one of the victim’s friends defended the family online. I checked with the reporter, David Abel, and he stated the “hysteria,” surrounding the story drew the Globe’s interest and he wrote the Seaverns article. The second Globe story was about the hysteria that developed online surrounding the accident. I think this is an example of intermedia agenda-setting. Through investigative and objective reporting of the facts, David Abel’s story dispelled any misconceptions about what happened with the victim, and left the reader to make their own conclusions about those people who had been critical of the victim.

A company may use the agenda-setting and intermedia agenda-setting theories to understand how the media and now social media can set the agenda for issue discussion among customers and the wider community.

One example of the social media influencing the media agenda would be the case of Dell. Customers using social media gathered around a blogger called Jeff Jarvis and his blog, BuzzMachine over the issue of problems with customer service. Jeff wrote a series of blog posts about Dell. He had experienced problems with his Dell laptop, and was not satisfied with the response given to him when he contacted Dell customer service. He wrote about his issues with Dell on his blog. Those posts generated a lot of comments, and blog posts from other Dell customers. Jeff’s posts about his problems with Dell customer service and the subsequent agreement by other customers using social media became known as, “Dell Hell,” and the term came to describe Dell’s problems with customer service and their lack of response to customer’s who asked questions through their blogs and forms of social media. Due to the volume of discussion generated in social media about Dell customer support the story spread to traditional media, from newspapers to television.

In July of 2006 Dell conducted an analysis of bloggers and assigned a sentiment rating to each blog post, the company discovered 49% of posts about Dell were negative using their own rating system. If a significant percentage of opinion among bloggers and social media was that Dell had poor customer service, the only way to change that opinion was to take action by resolving structural issues related to customer support and product development. While Dell takes every effort to respond to every customer who had a support issue, if a customer uses social media, and has a complaint, Dell’s social media outreach strategy means that the customer will receive a connection from a Dell employee through social media. The individual who had described their problem in social media has their issue resolved and the wider community learns about the resolution through social media. Over an 18 month period Dell tracked a reduction in negative sentiment in the blogosphere down to 22%.

This public response in social media on the part of Dell is why I was thinking intermedia agenda-setting is a good model to consider for how to describe the burgeoning social media monitoring, outreach and response process among companies.

Without the public’s use of social media the “Dell Hell” incident and the raising of the issue of customer service might never have happened. Dell realized that people were reporting their problems within social media, and in aggregate their concerns were a PR if not brand headache for Dell. At its height of Dell’s negative sentiment the press agenda had turned to discussing Dell customer and public affairs issues, once the press took up the story, Dell’s bad PR escalated, affecting stock and sales. What’s interesting about the Dell story to me is that the intermedia agenda-setting theory explains what happened with Dell. (1) Crisis highlighted in social media, which spreads to the media, and back to social media, (2) Dell responds in social media and action, (3) the new story about Dell is how the company changed.

What I like about agenda setting is that the theory is a way to demonstrate the importance of social media for a company’s reputation and brand. All too often I’ve been questioned by business executives on the value of conducting a dialogue with an individual blogger, however focusing on an individual blogger relationship misses the point about the reality of social media: community! Bloggers and other social media communities are just that; communities of people. We have to think beyond the influence of an individual blogger, rather that the blogger is connected to an entire community of people who through their writings set the agenda within social media.

I think the agenda-setting model is a helpful model to describe what happens within communities and media, one that can give company’s pause for thought about what to do about monitoring and response within social media. Should a company get involved with monitoring and response? As a marketer I’d argue using social media to talk and listen too your customers makes sense if that’s the medium they use. I’d be interested to see if the intermedia agenda-setting model is a tool for demonstrating to business executives why getting involved with social media is a good idea. Social media can influence the press, and the press social media, which in turn can set the agenda for coverage of a company’s brand. An audience will not read the discussion in the press or social media and necessarily change their perception about a company, but surely the coverage about a company will affect the perception of a company’s brand.

The press itself can use the idea of intermedia agenda-setting to give support to using online media monitoring tools for the development of stories that report on issues that are important to a community. If the public discourse in social media were more widely considered by the Press perhaps the model for the press room of the future would change, where the press agenda as to what is covered includes news that's most relevant to the community in social media. Many stories may break news but does that story have legs and require further in-depth reporting? I’d suggest one idea for the newsroom of tomorrow will be to use some of the online media mining tools developed for corporations to determine the stories that are of most interest to a community. The press would use monitoring tools to determine both what is developing, and what becomes relevant and important to the community, through, references, links and comments. Those news stories that pick up steam quickly will be the agenda items for the press to investigate in greater detail, just as the Seaverns Avenue story in the Boston Globe was a story that the reporter decided to investigate because of how the community discussion unfolded within social media. Armed with the knowledge that the public is discussing a story the press will then investigate details no one else is reporting. The press is already being influenced by the issues that are highlighted in social media; the use of monitoring tools would give the media the ability to recognize what stories are important to the community within social media at an earlier stage.

* “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media,” by Maxwell E. McCombs & Donald L. Shaw in Public Opinion Quarterly, 1972, XXXVI, 2.

A PR Strategy Not Social Media Tactics Won The Presidential Election 2008

Understanding audience’s concerns was critical to the success of the Obama campaign.

I’ve been struggling with what to write about this week in regards to the election and the Obama campaign. Then I realized it was a simple matter of thinking about how public relations strategy influenced the political campaign, a theme I’ve consistently used in this blog.

Public relations strategy to me is all about the process of identifying what is top of mind in a community and relating your brand, product, organization or campaign to what is most relevant to your community. That process is really all about listening to your audience and making what you have today relevant to their concerns.

In that light I thought I’d describe how the Obama campaign first rose to prominence, won the nomination and the election.

Lessons From The Campaign Trail

Concerns change with time & audience. For Barack Obama the start of the campaign was about connecting with those in the Democratic base who were dissatisfied with the Iraq War and had the desire for change. Once the nomination was secured, his strategy changed to connecting with voters over their concerns about the economy, especially in the last few months.

Offer change without risk. In the last few days of the election the Obama campaign gained further by suggesting change was possible yet at the same time demonstrating that change would involve a steady hand at the ship of state.

McCain’s Strategy

John McCain also attempted to tap into the country worries about the economy; his call for a halt to the campaign was an attempt to demonstrate to the American people he thought the economy was much more important than even the election. This tactic did not help McCain’s campaign once the consensus in Washington DC broke down and it took a long time to broker a deal both Congressional Democrats and Republican could agree upon.

New Social Media Tactics Were Important For Obama’s Rise To Prominence

While Kennedy’s election heralded the Television era in Presidential politics. I think the Howard Dean campaign in 2004 demonstrated to political campaigners the importance of using social media during the 2008 election. The 2008 Obama campaign showed that social media tools that empower supporters can help candidates gain money and build a powerful political organization for organizing. A vital lesson from the 2008 campaign trail is not a public relations strategy, but the use of social media as a public relations tactic. The Obama campaign used social media to empower people, giving groups of individuals who did not have a voice the power to organize in a way that was difficult to achieve just a few short years ago. Without the use of social media it would have been much tougher for Obama to organize new donors and a political organization beyond the existing political infrastructure within the Democratic Party.

Strategy Took Barack Obama To The White House

I think the use of social media tactics gave Obama the opportunity to compete, but it was his skillful use of political or public relations strategy to the right audience at the right time that got him to the White House.