Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

This video came to my attention last month when University of Alabama instructor Meg Lamme showed it while speaking to the Alabama PRSA chapter. I thought it was worth passing along.

Social Media Revolution

It’s easy to get riled at the Los Angeles Times’ guidelines for editorial employees posting on social media sites. After all, people who communicate for a living rarely take kindly to being told to watch what they say.

But Assistant Managing Editor Henry Fuhrmann, in a memo to employees, makes a good point. Here’s what he said, according to Editor & Publisher: “Your professional life and your personal life are intertwined in the online world, just as they are offline. Attempts, for instance, to distinguish your high school friends from your professional associates are fine, but in all spaces one should adhere to the principle that as an editorial employee you are responsible for maintaining The Times’ credibility.”

He also points out that even such things as who you accept as friends can have an impact on your career. For example, if an unidentified source were seen on a reporter’s friend list, people might connect the dots.

Programmers like to cite (and, I suspect, frequently ignore) a principle based on the notion that “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It’s been attributed to Mark Twain, and while it’s not clear that the quip was really Twain’s, it sure sounds like him. Philosopher Abraham Kaplan and Psychologist Abraham Maslow, among others, have stated it various ways as a principle.

My version is this:

Hammer Syndrome: When you have a new hammer, everything looks like a nail.

In my 33+ year career, I’ve seen lots of hammers. Tools that would change everything forever. And honestly, many of them did. There was television. Offset type. The Xerox machine. Word processing. Spreadsheets. Desktop publishing.  Email. The Web. More recently, we’ve seen a lot of excitement about social media, especially Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. There are thousands more.

For me, the biggest — and the one I felt would change my life forever — was word processing. I started my career writing on 8.5 x 11 paper (we used blank newsprint because it was cheap and we used it by the ton), using a manual Royal typewriter. If you wanted to go back and change a paragraph, you had to type the whole thing again. With word processing, I knew that I’d be able to write that great novel I always fantasized about, because I wouldn’t be bound by the paper. Anybody could.

Sure enough, word processing changed my life, but only incrementally. I still write by thinking through what I have to say and finding the right words. Word now puts a squiggly line under words it thinks I’m misspelling or misusing (it’s wrong about half the time), but it doesn’t have any ideas. I have to come up with those on my own.

Another technology we thought would change everything was desktop publishing. The earliest Macintosh with a program called “Ready, Set, Go!” was so exciting I fought tooth and nail to get IT approval and purchase one. Within a few years, everybody turned into a designer, and most of them were terrible. Over time, we all figured out that the software didn’t come with talent and training. Design is still best left to designers, who know how to use the tools.

Over the years, I’ve added a couple of corollaries that have helped me keep perspective:

Corollary 1: Even if it won’t drive a screw, a hammer’s a great tool. It doesn’t have to do everything well. Just something.

Corollary 2: A new tool generally calls for new skills. You still need to know what kind of nail to use, where to use it, what kind of wood it works best with, and (for that matter) whether a nail is what you need. A screw or bottle of glue may well be better.

Corollary 3: A new tool (if it’s a good one) generally enables you to do things faster or more easily. It rarely enables you to do things you couldn’t do before.

It’s a good idea to keep these things in mind as we seek applications of the new social media tools. They open exciting new possibilities, primarily because they are being widely adopted. But they’re still evolving, and they won’t replace the established tools. And as I’ve pointed out a couple of other times recently, they won’t change the fundamentals. We still need sound strategies and objectives, clear messages, well-defined audiences and careful media selection.

Put the new hammer in your box. Learn how to use it well. But keep the drill and screwdriver handy.

Almost every day lately, I hear people who seem to think Twitter and Facebook are public relations strategies.

They’re not. They’re tools. Exciting tools, but tools nonetheless.

I enjoy spending my Saturdays making furniture and other stuff out of wood. Naturally, I love a new tool, and there are some great ones out there. But no matter how many gadgets I have, there are some basic principles of woodworking. The species of wood selected must be suitable for the job. The cuts must be square or perfectly angled. The surfaces must be flat. The parts must fit together. The measurements must be precise. An error of 1/8 of an inch at the beginning of a project can ruin the entire piece.

Imagine how silly it would be if I equated my biscuit joiner with a set of plans for a new coffee table.

Yet, I see people doing that all the time. They say, “We’re doing Social Media,” by which they usually mean that they have a Twitter and Facebook account and post things occasionally. But post what? To whom? How often? What role does it post play in your overall program? Are your Facebook friends or your Twitter followers candidates buy your company’s products? Can they help you get where you need to go? If not, what’s the point? How do you reach larger, more important audiences?

Taking it a step further, do you have a set of well-defined messages that are tied in to your company’s corporate objectives? We’re barely scratching the surface here. But until you know what you need to accomplish, whose cooperation you need to accomplish it, and what you need to say to them to move you toward your goal, you may as well shut down your Facebook and Twitter accounts and save your time.

I read and hear a lot of comments pitting Twitter against Facebook, as if the two were somehow comparable.

The golden rule of social media is to use what is most useful to you. Outside that context, it doesn’t matter that Twitter is dominated by a small minority of registered users, or that it has a higher dropout rate than Facebook. It doesn’t matter that Facebook allows for more meaningful conversations but offers little opportunity to reach out beyond your user base.

Besides, with tools like TweetDeck that can let you post to both Twitter and Facebook at the same time, who cares?

But at the risk of annoying all the old timers, let me lay out the big difference for newbies: Facebook is for making and connecting with friends. Twitter is for reaching a wider audience based on specific interests (and search terms) and pointing to something long enough to be meaningful, such as a blog or web site. Carrying on a coherent conversation that others can follow as well is almost impossible on Twitter. Broadening your audience is just as difficult in Facebook.

OK, that doesn’t even scratch the surface. But if there’s anything we know about today’s media, it is that people digest things in small bites. So that’s today’s nibble. We’ll talk more in the next few days.

Howard Kurtz has a great column on the fuss over the Washington Post’s attempts to balance the newspaper’s brand and reputation with the desire of its reporters to post on Twitter, Facebook and other social media. But while most of the column was devoted to the controversy, I thought his personal principles for Tweeting were worth passing along:

a) Don’t say something that makes you look like a blithering idiot.

b) Don’t appear to be in the pocket of Democrats or Republicans (or birthers or truthers).

c) Stick to subjects on which you actually have a clue.

d) Refrain from boring people with the minutiae of your daily life.

e) Don’t say anything you couldn’t defend as fair analysis in print or on the air.

Just days after slashing its domestic payroll, MySpace announced approximately 300 layoffs outside the United States, bringing the total workforce from 1,950 to 1,150. The company has seen advertising revenues drop sharply as more users have moved to Facebook, which has positioned itself as the dominant site for personal and business networking.

I don’t do causes, but because of www.overcoffeemedia.com’s focus on media, I cannot avoid encouraging solidarity with the people in Iran who are seeking to communicate with each other and the world about what is happening in their country.

We must never forget that open communication within a society always supports freedom in the long run, whereas suppression serves tyranny. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians are protesting peacefully to demand that their votes be properly counted. In response, the government has shut down foreign reporting and sought to block access to networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. CNN Story.

There is, of course, precious little we can do. But one step I am taking is changing my time zone on Twitter and other social networks to GMT+03:30 (to match the Tehran time zone). What’s the point? One way the Iranian government hackers are seeking to block Iranians’ communications via Twitter, Facebook and other social networks is by searching for users that appear to be inside of Iran, and the time zone is a major tool they are using.

Do I think it will help? Not really, but some smart people believe that doing so may help provide “cover” for Iranians using the Internet to communicate with each other and to smuggle accounts, photos and videos to the world. If nothing else, I’ll be letting them know they have one more friend. Think of it as an online equivalent to the wonderful scene from the movie, V for Vendetta, when the masses don masks to make the hero impossible to identify.

Finally, there is one other step we can take on Twitter. When you see a credible tweet pointing to an information feed from Iran, consider retweeting it. Yes, I know it’ll use bandwidth and annoy some people. And of course, it could result in some of my own Internet communications being blocked for a while. But hopefully it’s just for a few days, and it just might help keep the information flowing.

My footnote in this morning’s post got me curious about how Facebook’s increased use for business networking has affected LinkedIn. While LinkedIn trumpeted its higher growth rate in 2007 and 2008, I haven’t seen anything from them this year. Meanwhile, a Nielsen article earlier this month reported that users are spending far more time on Facebook than any other social networking site.

This report is interesting because it focuses not on the number of users but rather how much time they spend on the site. By that yardstick, Facebook is by far the king of the hill, with users in April spending more than 13.8 billion minutes on the site. LinkedIn users were spending only 202 million minutes. And in terms of year-to-year growth, Facebook use was up 699 percent, versus LinkedIn’s 69 percent.

Twitter was up the most in percentage terms (3,712 percent), but that’s because it is earlier in its life cycle.

Numbers of users don’t really tell us much about social networks, because the tendency is for people to try them out and remain members even if they never log on.

MySpace announced it is laying off approximately 400 of its employees to reduce what executive Owen Van Natta called “bloated” staffing levels.

As MySpace begins to fall behind in the competition with Facebook for active users, two factors seem to be hampering the company. First, its roots are in music and entertainment, and much of the Social Media frenzy focuses more on networking and personal connections. Second, MySpace  has fallen behind Facebook and Twitter in developing compelling applications for handheld units. Increasingly, tweets and Facebook updates are coming from iPhones and Blackberries, and MySpace simply isn’t competitive in that regard.

I can’t prove it at this point, but I believe Facebook has also eclipsed LinkedIn as the dominant business networking tool.