360DigitalInfluence

This week’s social media controversy is brought to you by: Youtube. 

Mashable broke the story earlier in the week, noting that thousands of videos that feature copyrighted Warner music have been silenced on the video sharing site, literally, by muting the audio tracks.  A message below the videos reads : “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled.”

This is move is being positioned a compromise, the other solution being the full removal of the video itself.  It’s there’s anything we’ve learned in witnessing the growing pains of Youtube it’s that music licensing is a pretty complex swamp.  This post is in no way an attempt to untangle the legal implications.  However, one thing is clear, music is a big part of Youtube, bigger than you may think on a video sharing site. continue reading

President-elect Barack Obama wasted little time in answering critics who wondered if the campaign’s innovative use of social media would translate into a tech-friendly administration. In an effort to continue the spirit “mybarackobama”, where users were able to create their own profiles and content, the Obama-Biden team has launched Change.gov.

The site was created by the “Obama-Biden Transition Project”, aimed to educating those interested in the critical next 75 days: the time between now and the inauguration.   Visitors to the site are able to learn about Obama’s policy, read the blog, and submit thier own content about the campaign and Election Day.

I checked out the technology agenda page and found a quote that would suggest a future social media-friendly White House:

“An Obama presidency will use cutting-edge technologies to reverse this [closed] dynamic, creating a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America’s citizens.”

Historians remind us this transitional period is a time that’s not without consequence. The Bay of Pigs and Black Hawk Down disaster occurred during the Eisenhower-Kennedy and Bush 41- Clinton transitions, respectively.   It’s encouraging to see the launch of Change.gov and it’s even more promising to read an agenda that hints at a willingness for a more transparent, collaborative government.   Read more on the Change.gov site here:

CNN - Obama launches official transition Web site

“Barack Obama had a formidable online presence during his quest for the White House, and he is once again turning to the Internet to communicate with the American public as president-elect.”

Web Pro News - Obama’s Change.gov Goes Live

“you gotta admit that’s a new and transformational approach to the highest office in the land.”

Personal Democracy Forum - Transition Site Echoes Campaign Pledge of Open Government, By the People

 ”The content itself echoes the campaign’s language about creating a more open, more participatory federal government.”

Kaitlyn has done a great job of explaining Twitter, what it can be used for and how to use it in her past two blog posts. In Twitter: Edition 101, she provides a great example of what Twitter can to do enhance communication and generate conversation around a specific event, topic, brand. And in Twitter: Edition 102, she shows what can happen when a company is not really listening (to social media).

But for the companies that ARE listening, what next?

There are about a zillion posts out there on the “Ideas on Using Twitter“, etc. Our goal now, is to boil this great insight down to identify the overall best practices for Twitter.

This post has been broken down into the do’s and don’t’s of Twittering in an effort to establish a base set of best practices. Similar to the development of our Blogger Code of Ethics, I will look to you (Twitterers and corporates alike) to get your feedback to help build these guidelines.

Twitter Do’s - Starting Out:

DO see what other businesses are doing on Twitter

Customer Relations - @ComcastCares

Product Discounts/e-Commerce Updates - @DellOutlet

Event Coverage - @Lenovo2008

Current Events/Headlines - @BarackObama

DO use Twitter search engines for keyword searches around brands, products and topic of interest. Tools like Summize (or Twitter Search - same site) and TweetScan allow you to do a keyword search within conversations on Twitter.

DO follow Twitterers with similar interests to establish a brand presence within conversation (See Valerie Maltoni’s post)

Twitter Do’s - Building a Community:

DO use Twitter to start a conversation

“Talk to people about THEIR interests, too. I know this doesn’t sell more widgets, but it shows us you’re human.” - Chris Brogan

DO be dedicated to Twitter. Chris Brogan recommends having more than one employee on Twitter so ensure an ongoing presence. (@BaskinRobbins could have continued to grow their presence on Twitter, but instead lasted only 1 month)

DO ask questions and get feedback from your followers

DO engage consumers in co-creation and get constructive insights for future company developments or publications

DO follow the Blogger Code of Ethics within all things social media, David Armano sums it up beautifully in his post:

• Be transparent in your reason d’Tweet (Let your followers know your about - Customer Service, Product Discounts, etc)
• Respect other Twitterers (Know when to participate and when to listen)
• Think before you direct message (Will your direct message be seen as helpful or intrusive?)
• Make sure your message directly relates to those you are reaching out to
• Provide value to your followers (Whether it’s free product or valuable advice, something that gives you credibility and reiterates the value you see in your followers)

DO spread the word about your participation on Twitter - include your Twitter handle in your email signature, send out your Twitter URL, http://twitter.com/USERNAME (mine is http://twitter.com/KFoster926), to co-workers, peers and even customers (if relevant)

Twitter DON’T'S:

DON’T use Twitter to push ads or brand messaging. Don’t just Tweet but also follow others to join in or start a conversation. As @CatchUpLady says,

“[It's] annoying when a person or brand blatantly uses Twitter as a channel to push a msg, not a conversation tool.”

DON’T use Twitter to tell your everyday tasks, make sure your Tweets are resourceful, entertaining and/or valuable to your followers

DON’T be boring! (Havi Brooks puts it best on her recent post,

“If you try to talk about what you’re doing (unless what you happen to be doing is boxing a poodle while stilt-walking with your poodle-booter troupe), you will almost certainly be boring. And the first rule of Twitter is ‘Do not be boring’!”

DON’T panic if you are “Twitter-Jacked“, where other Twitterers use your identity within their Twitter handles, instead contact the Twitterers and find out their reasoning before taking action (they could turn out to be your biggest fans)

DON’T I REPEAT - DO NOT Tweet anything about clients, co-workers, friends, etc. that you would not want them to see - this is a good way to burn bridges and lose customers (not to mention make a bad name for yourself)
Helpful Links:

Below are a few thoughts from colleagues and Twitter peers on the Best Practices of Twitter. Their thoughts and insights helped to develop this first round of best practice:

Harvi Brooks - Fluent Self
http://www.fluentself.com/blog/stuff/twitter-demystified-the-great-debunking-begins/

Valeria Maltoni - Conversation Agent
http://www.conversationagent.com/2008/08/business-uses-for-twitter.html

Chris Brogan
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/

David Armano - Logic + Emotion
http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2008/08/guidelines-for.html

Jeremiah Owyang - Web Strategy
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/08/18/web-strategy-the-evolution-of-brands-on-twitter/

Social Media Club
http://www.socialmediaclub.org/2008/08/26/social-media-now-082608/

Tweets from the following:

CatchUpLady @KFoster926 Tweet *and* follow. Annoying when a person or brand blatantly uses Twitter as a channel to push a msg, not a conversation tool 11:45 AM August 26, 2008 from web in reply to KFoster926

rcaggiano @KFoster926 use it to chat, listen, post interesting links, drive traffic & be witty. do NOT use it to document boring details of your day. 06:45 PM August 25, 2008 from web in reply to KFoster926

Orbret @KFoster926 Value can come from content you found that someone else didn’t have the time to find but enjoys. Random comments aren’t useful 03:59 PM August 25, 2008 from web in reply to KFoster926

Here are some active marketing/social media Twitter handles for you to follow:

@socialmediaclub

@guykawasaki

@Scobleizer

@armano

@TechCrunch

@Mashable

What are your thoughts? What other best practices should be added to this list? Share your do’s and don’t by commenting on this post.

Your feedback could warrant a Twitter Best Practices: Round 2, so stay tuned.

I am reading the initial tweets out of Beijing about the opening ceremonies - calligraphy writing dancers - and for the first time in many years,  I am actually excited to watch the Olympics. Part of it is that we have a team there helping the athletes blog and vlog about their experience, part of it is the myriad of ways we can now follow the stories and the action, part of it is that I am a fan of China.

I am a fan of the country, not the government, so, don’t get started down that path. I had the good fortune of visiting to work with our global 360 ° Digital Influence team in China last year. I was in Beijing and Hong Kong. The energy amongst the people was terrific. Lots of optimism, energy and lots of conversations. The innovation in social media is terrific and China Web 2.0 Review remains one of my favorite blogs.

As you all tune in to the TV coverage this weekend, check out  our aggregation of athletes who are blogging their experience. Their stories are what drives this experience for me. Government policies may be damned  but the passion, drive and effort of these athletes is the story I must see.

Also check out the blogs of some of our team and Lenovo, you will hear some interesting behind the scenes observations:

David Churbuck

Rohit Bhargava

Kaitlyn Wilkins

Earlier this week I attended The Health Blogosphere: What It Means for Policy Debates and Journalism at the Kaiser Family Foundation. The panel discussion included a variety of health policy bloggers and media analysts –Wall Street Journal, Cato Institute, The American Prospect, the Senior Advisor on National Health Reform to Senator Edward Kennedy, and Project for Excellence in Journalism – but what I found most interesting was the keynote address by HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt. His experiences as the first cabinet officer to author an official blog, and the approach he has taken, provides some interesting insights for those of us working to increase government’s role in social media.

1. The impact of first-hand experience – While a long-time fan of the web and how it could impact public policy debates, it was through his involvement in last year’s HHS Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog (shameless plug–coordinated by Ogilvy PR) that the Secretary decided to wade out further into the waters of the blogosphere.

2. Compromise could make it happen – Moderated commenting can ease agency concerns, while having minimal affect on the conversation. The Secretary noted that to-date, only three comments have been censored out of the approximately 600-700 that have been submitted; I bet you weren’t expecting that ratio.

3. No response? Don’t take it personally – Secretary Leavitt’s job description reads “As Secretary, he leads the Nation’s efforts in protecting the health of all Americans and providing essential human services to those in need.” (And I thought I was busy…) While you may not see many responses to comments, the Secretary made it clear that he is reading them.

Yes, there are plenty of obstacles left ahead. But if the era of web 1.0 Government is over, and social media is redefining advocacy and politics, could 01.21.09 be more that just someone’s first day on the job?
If you are interested in learning more about the briefing, the webcast is available.

Imagine waking up one day in the future, firing up your Facebook account and learning that one of your friends has decided to run for President. Not a joke announcement like so many faux relationship statuses or parodies like Stephen Colbert’s presidential run, but a legitimate presidential campaign in its infancy. Maybe the candidate was an old friend from college, an overachieving history major who headed to law school and then fell out of touch. And now, in between your tagged photos and status updates is an invitation to join your friend’s group: March to the White House in 2020.

During a Q&A session at the recent Converging Campaigns event (covered in a previous post), a panelist wondered when America would see its first candidate with an actual Facebook profile. Not a profile manufactured for the purposes of a campaign tool but someone who built and maintained a Facebook profile and then subsequently decided to make a run for the White House.

Certainly none of the candidates in the 2008 election spent their college days tagging friends and updating the ‘where I’ve been’ application. However, at some point in the next few years or decades, there will be a candidate who had a presence on Facebook long before he or she ever considered running for office.

I’m not as myopic as to assume that years down the road there won’t be an application several derivatives away from our present-day Facebook, but no matter the tool, the personal narratives we create for ourselves via social media today will stretch long into the future.

No longer will a candidate have the luxury of misremembering a dangerous helicopter landing under sniper fire or lay awake at night praying those incriminating photos don’t surface. That content will live online — tagged, posted, and ready to be shared.

Regardless of what may live in the dusty archives of news footage or what an old professor remembers, social networking sites will not allow future political candidates to stroll far from reality; the uber-social Facebook-like applications acting as the biggest sticklers for truth.

I wonder who is currently Facebook friends with a future US president? Looking at my newsfeed from over the weekend, I’m not holding out much hope for my network…

If you had your ear to the “ground” this summer, you may have picked up on something bubbling among bloggers, especially mom bloggers. In short, they’re pissed.

Blogger outreach has proliferated in the last year as firms and clients of all shapes and sizes see the value of exposing bloggers and their audiences to new campaigns and products. However, there are a finite number of influential bloggers out there — so as you might have guessed, the big dogs in the “momosphere” and beyond are getting solicited by agencies again and again and again and again and again and again… (I think you get my point).

At the BlogHer Conference in July this topic came up for discussion during the “State of the Momosphere” panel. One of the big take aways was that mom bloggers did not feel that agencies reaching out to them were respecting, or in some cases even acknowledging, their influence, audience and powerful voice. Upon returning from BlogHer, many participants used their own blogs to sound off and share their opinions on the practice of blogger outreach — from (truly horrible) pitch letters to the lack of outreach to bloggers of color.

As we regularly read many of these blogs, and several of us in the 360 Digital Influence group are bloggers ourselves, we quickly a) became (yes) embarrassed and b) agreed that something needed to change. Alison had an insightful interview with Chris Jordan of Notes from the Trenches last week, and hearing Chris’ experiences first hand convinced us that the solution to this growing problem was not something we could create on our own. Navigating through this issue is something that will benefit agency-blogger relationships externally, and also help us at Ogilvy codify an internal procedure for conducting blogger outreach.

Below we’ve identified some basic tenets of blogger outreach that we at 360 Digital Influence abide by when contacting bloggers on behalf of our clients. We want you (bloggers, friends at other agencies, colleagues at OgilvyPR) to share your experiences. Within the comments of this post, tell us about being reached out to as a blogger, conducting blogger outreach for your clients, add to our Code of Ethics, take away from the Code, tell us if you think the Code is nonsense — this is a chance for us to get it all out on the table. In two weeks we’ll take everyone’s feedback, refine it, and repost popular topics of debate and an evolved Code of Ethics for further discussion. Let’s have an ongoing conversation about what does and doesn’t work when it comes to blogger outreach and try to arrive at a better place.

Ogilvy PR’s Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics

• We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.

• We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea for every social media campaign.

• We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.

• Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.

• If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.

• We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.

• In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.

• We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an alternate point of contact.

• We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.

• You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)

• If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our Do Not Contact list — which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy PR agency.

• If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.

• Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.

While you don’t need to use your name in commenting, please identify yourself as a blogger and/or as an agency representative. Also, feel free to repost the current draft of the Code of Ethics on your own blog and solicit feedback from your readers (just give us a link back so we can follow the conversation too!). If you have any questions, or want to share an opinion privately, please feel free to contact me at kaitlyn.wilkins@ogilvypr.com and Alison Byrne Fields at alison.byrnefields@ogilvypr.com

I consider Wikipedia to be a great social media experiment.   The whole notion of a wiki is about community collaboration.   “Truth” is defined by the collective.   Narrow, self-serving content doesn’t stand a chance.

Believe in your own experiment, Jimmy.   Let us in.   Expect the best of us and most of us will meet your standard.   The rest will fall by the wayside as your army of editors uphold the truth.

Ok, I set myself up for the jokes with that headline. Once it’s out of your system, read on.  

Rohit Bhargava on our team had a great essay this past week as a guest blogger on Strumpette (ok, it’s a post but a very well thought out one with a solid POV - you might consider that an “essay”). I am thrilled that he was “covered” by Amanda without being skewered. More importantly, he very clearly states my hope for how social media can change marketing and communications.  

Here is a brief exceprt and I encourage you to read the whole thing which is also on his own blog.  

“This is the intersection (of) personal blogging and enterprise blogging: where authentically sharing personalities online is allowing deeper connections between individuals and others, as well as organizations and their customers. It is this fact that is representing a shift in the entire PR industry. It is not about just conducting media relations, it is about starting a dialogue. You can’t have a real dialogue without a personality. Over the next year, I believe we will start to see more organizations (and individuals) struggle with where to fit their personalities into a field of communications that has become over-regulated and overly fearful about revealing too much truth.”

How do you best reach policymakers on the Hill? Communicators (especially those who once worked in Congress) have long been suspicious of the effectiveness of email. In the post 9-11 world, regular mail has been problematic. Faxes - well, these just seem silly - something left over from the movie “Brazil.”

Today’s Washington Post talks about email waves driven by advocacy groups almost as if it were spam. But shouldn’t voters have a reliable way to communicate with lawmakers and demonstrate the common position of a group? I would set aside the issue of groups falsifying supporters. That’s clearly no good. And even in the electronic age there are several ways to limit this from happening.

Instead of coming up with ways to shut out email, Congress could spend some time working with the advocacy “facilitators” to come up with a model that works for all parties. Congresspeople should have the right to judge what is relevant to them and their constituents and needn’t pay attention to those things outside that criteria. But once the issue passes that filter, it is in their best interests to know where business, voters and special interests stand on the issues.

According to Jeffrey Birnbaum:

“Now we know that these efforts are working well. According to the Capitol Advantage study, six of the 10 leading companies that run Web sites that send e-mails for interest groups failed to deliver even half of those e-mails through their systems.

That is a big disappointment. After all, aren’t public officials supposed to be open to the public?”

What if we came up with a new model that aggregates email on an issue into an easy to read (and reliable) data dashboard for lawmakers? Somewhere, there must be a solution. The public must not be lumped in with the spammers. Thoughts?