One has to have trust, have patience, and find your gold nuggets where you can…amazingly, Shaping Youth has become ’small but mighty’ by representing the ‘massive middle’ trying to deconstruct all sides with analysis that’s mainstream and centrist vs. special interest group-driven. (of course that also explains why we’re broke and seeking funding! heehee)

I’ll check out the Rising Voices report! Thanks! Best, Amy

The point is if credibility can only accrue to ‘organisations’ an not ‘individuals’?

Blogging is powerful primarily because you get the choice to choose whom you want to read, a voice. This is not something traditional media can boast of, more so when they’re trying to reach out to almost everyone out there!

Rising Voices recently released a very interesting guide/report titled “An Introduction to Citizen Media” and the change it is bringing in its wake.

Brava to Kaitlyn for her insight on how corp. marketers could handle the blogosphere better…Look at the instance of Jott.com, for example…when they had some transcription glitches reflecting poorly on their product in the blogosphere, and someone even posted a “misjott” social media hub with hilarious examples of ‘misjotted’ voicemails…

Instead of dismissing blogger concerns or getting huffy and defensive, the CEO of Jott went ON the rogue site, left a warm, human, response along the lines of ‘hey, folks, we hear ya, we’re working on this and only in beta, so by all means hit us with your best shot so we can LEARN from it and improve our messaging and performance’ —

Voila! Case closed…Brilliant customer service, corporate PR, and kudos and praise poured in from new media hubs, both for the application itself, and the CEO’s handling of the glitches.

Now, since I’m not in PR…I have a question for YOU all…is it better to reframe/address skewed contexts of our org (Shaping Youth) or ignore it altogether and just let it run its course?

I tried the latter after the original post was hijacked into the ‘one ad’ vs. larger objectification sphere. But by leaving it uncorrected, it showed up as UGC opinion-poll banter making it appear it was all much ado about nothing…How can orgs guard against this without sounding defensive? Is there a way to protect a brand from misinformed minutiae other than ignoring it? Being a little guy, we could use some PR guidance here!

What was missing at Target was a “customer service policy” - everyone is a potential customer, professional journalists, bloggers, vendors, service providers…everyone who comes into contact with any employee of Target should be considered a potential customer - which is why the response from press relations was so odd.

Having visited buyers at both Wal-Mart and Target many times, I find it odd that the “customer first” attitude evidenced by those departments hasn’t made it over to P.R.

LOL- some days it’s really bad to be having a bad day…you could end up in the NY Times!

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/09/10/facebook-
sponsored-group-analysis-target-vs-wal-mart/

Perhaps the right hand should be talking to the left in this case!