The government doesn't like miscellany

Boing Boing posted a review yesterday of a new book by philosopher, technologist and Web commentator David Weinberger, best known for his book and Web site called The Cluetrain Manifesto. His latest book, subject of the Boing Boing review, is called Everything is Miscellaneous, which looks like required reading for anybody interested in the sociological effects of social media.

According to the review, "Weinberger's thesis is this: historically, we've divided the world into categories, topics, and hierarchies because physical objects need to be in one place or another, they can't be in all the places they might belong. Computers and the Internet turn this on its head: because a computer can "put things" in as many categories as they need to be in, because individuals can classify knowledge, tasks, and objects idiosyncratically, the hierarchy is revealed for what it always was, a convenient expedient masquerading as the True Shape of the Universe."

It's the next part of the review that I found so relevant to our considerations of government in the face of social media and Web 2.0. It says, "It's a powerful idea: from org charts to science, from music to retail theory, from government to education, every field of human endeavor is tinged with hierarchy, and every hierarchy is under assault from the Internet."

Yet more evidence to support the idea that we need to subvert our traditional top-down command and control models when considering the bureacracy in a socially-networked world.

Mass to Grass: Canada's Word of Mouth Marketing Conference

I had the great pleasure of attending the Canadian Marketing Association's first-ever Word of Mouth Marketing Conference in Toronto this week. It was one of those all-too-rare conferences that turned out to far exceed my expectations. Every session was interesting, but some of them were simply phenomenal.

There were a wide variety of speakers, from author Jackie Huba (author of Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force and Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message) to Kyle MacDonald of One Red Paperclip fame to Eric Petersen, Director of Community Relations at Lululemon. There were also speakers from Rogers Publishing, Yahoo! Canada, Ogilvy & Mather, and Cossette Media, among many others.

I have more than a dozen pages of nearly illegible notes, but I manage to glean some interesting statistics on word of mouth marketing and social media from the various presentations. Some of the more salient ones:

• nearly 2/3 of purchasing decisions are made based on word of mouth advertising.
  
• 70% of CEOs say they will use some form of word of mouth marketing in the next year.
  
• more than 48 million users in the United States have created some form of "user-generated content" (USG) on the Internet (everything from writing a blog to uploading a video to YouTube to writing a review on Amazon.com) Although a comparable Canadian statistic isn't available, Internet penetration is higher in Canada than the US and it is known that 58% of Canadians have read or wrote a blog.
  
• 87% of consumers will research a purchase online before buying offline.
  
• only 1% of the population that reads a particular social media channel(forum or bulletin board or other) will participate by actively creating content for it, and only 10% of the audience with interact with that content.

The presentations covered a wide range of subjects relating to word of mouth marketing, and I only attended those sessions that had a particular focus on social media and user-generated content. Here's a few of the bits that caught my attention.

Jackie Huba said that social media allows marketers to connect with customers in new and uniquely interactive ways, and that consumer participation and involvement begets customer loyalty. She also stressed that in today's market "you are your Google results." Joe Thornley wrote a great summary her presentation over on his ProPR blog.

Doug Walker of TBWA (and founder of the World Rock Paper Scissors Society) said that the RPS society was both the dumbest idea he ever had, and the most successful. In his view, the four principles of a successful word of mouth campaign are: authority, mutation (to keep perpsectives fresh and relevant), participation and accretion (one by one, things build mass around a centre of gravity.)

Janet Kestin, Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy & Mather, is behind the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty campaign for Unilever. She talked about the Evolution video, the most successful branded viral film ever: they had so much traffic in the first 24 hours of launch that their server crashed, and had two million hits in two weeks. Within days, the mainstream media were reporting on it, and it has since been viewed by more than 600 milion people. The film alone reinvigorated the Real Beauty campaign and drove up share prices. Kestin, who admits she was a neophyte to social media at the beginning of the campaign, offers the following advice: "if you've done it, do it differently" and "fish where the fish are." She also says be open to the risk, read the wind and timing is everything, and believes that marketing in today's world means chasing interests and passion over demographics.

The last two sessions of the day had some lively interactive debating on the social media and word of mouth marketing. Some quick hits from the panel featuring David Jones of Fleishman-Hillard, Rob Cottingham of Social Signal and Steve Osgoode from HarperCollins:

• Social media is risk. "If you don't have the stones for it, don't bother."
• Web 1.0 was about eyeballs. Web 2.0 is about hands (as in, poised over the keyboard, typing madly.)
• If it makes your boss squirm, you're probably on the right track.
• It doesn't matter whether social media 'belongs' to the PR deparment, the marketing department, communications or the CEO. What's important is that somebody does it, and somebody is participating in a meaningful way. It requires internal champions.
• The value of social media cannot be measured in ROI terms. Expectations cannot be results-driven.
• Sell social media in your organization as something new to try, not the be-all end-all solution.
• Some users, especially those unfamiliar with the platform, might find Second Life tedious and horribly unintuitive. What's far more important than where it is now is what it is capable of being and where it is heading (just like the Internet in 1995 compared to now.)

It was truly an excellent conference. Take a tour around the blogosphere for some other perspectives on the day's festivities: One Degree (and here, too), Scott MacDonald, and Sean from Craphammer had spoken up as of press time.

A blogger code of conduct

Several prominent bloggers have started work on a Blogger Code of Conduct, partly in response to the online bullying experienced by tech blogger and author Kathy Sierra last month. Sierra cancelled a scheduled public speaking engagement and then stopped blogging altogether after comments on and about her blog denigrated to death threats.

The Code of Conduct has been posted to a site called Wikia, so any and all bloggers can contribute to the discussion about the development of the Code. The Code itself calls for a fairly basic set of civil behaviours including taking responsiblity for one's own words, defending others when they are unfairly attacked and not allowing commenters to post anonymously.

While there are many who support the Code, others question the validity of something that is ultimately unenforceable, and complain that it infringes on the right to free speech.

I was personally horrified at the cyber-bullying that happened to Kathy Sierra, and while I've seen some vitriolic comments in the blogosphere, I've never seen anything even remotely that hateful. And while I think the Code is a well-intentioned concept, I don't think it will have any practical or measurable effect on the blogosphere. I expect it will remain largely ignored by the people who most need to heed it.

How not to blog

Even though she's out on language training, Kerry is still thinking about social media and communications! She sent me this earlier in the week:

Over at www.gop.org, the official site of the Republican party, there's a link at the far right hand side of the menu for the official blog. Sounds exciting right, and a great opportunity, since the site itself is really nothing more than a huge opportunity to share information (it's loaded with audio and video), and everything has a "share this" link or an "embed this" link on it.

However, the blog has not been updated since November 2006, before the last election. I'm guessing it's because they fire all their employees shortly after an election. But still, this is insanity. People are running for president and they aren't commenting. They aren't even linking to other bloggers. This is a waste of potential, and I fear it could happen to us if we do an official blog. It isn't someone's job, therefore it slips off the agenda. Or we just pervert press releases and make that our blog.

I think this is a good lesson learned.

If you'd like to contribute something to this blog, feel free to e-mail it to me through our blog mail box: canadiancybrarian (at) gmail (dot) com. (Edited to add: I previously had the wrong e-mail address listed here! My apologies if you tried to send something and it didn't get through.)

More thoughts on social media news releases

Props to the folks over at the Prime Minister’s office, who have gone beyond simply posting video clips on the PM’s official Web site and have now created a YouTube account and started uploading clips of the PM’s speeches. (via CTV journalist and blogger David Akin.)

Ironic that this 'news' broke just as a colleague started looking into doing just this sort of thing. She’s wondering about making video and audio clips available on our own external Web site. Why not? Why not make downloadable clips of designated spokespeople talking, instead of just printed citations? Instead of just getting pick-up in the print media, we can start pushing content out to the broadcast media - not just the big outlets, but think of all those community stations and the local radio shows. And we could do it in multiple languages, not just English and French but Mandarin and Punjabi and other large ethnic concentrations. And since we've already got the clips, why not upload them to YouTube?

And while all that was percolating in my brain, this morning I read this great post by Brendan Hodgson at Hill & Knowlton on the social media newsroom. He calls the newsroom “the pulse of an organization's public-facing website,” a virtual ‘broadcast hub’ that, when done right, “serves as a convenient one-stop resource for journalists (who rely heavily on the internet - and corporate web sites - for timely, useful background information around a company, product or issue), [becoming] a potent vehicle for communicating to all interested audiences the vision and values of an organization.” He goes on to argue for a newsroom that is “a portal of sorts configured to channel content - be it video, audio, text, photos, blogs, podcasts etc. - in a way that creates a significantly richer experience, and which can meaningfully impact the myriad of variables that drive reputation - from the perspectives of accessibility, relevancy, transparency, and context.” (Sorry for the extensive quoting, but I really think Brendan got this bang-on, and I think we are seriously underutilizing the capabilities of our website newsroom.)

I poked around to see if any Canadian government organizations have been using video clips in their public news rooms, but I didn’t find much. Agriculture has some Tony Clement talking about Canada’s new food guide. Know of any others out there?

So, what do you think? Is it time for governments to start offering downloadable audio and video clips? Could a departmental podcast be far behind?

The "social media' press release

There’s some debate right now in the Web 2.0 world of the value of the reinvention of the news release as a “social media news release”. Click through to this example, from Web 2.0 guru PR firm Edelman, to see how the structure is different from a traditional news release: Business More Trusted Than Media and Government in Every Region of the Globe

The social media release takes all the components of the traditionally structured narrative-style news release and breaks them down to the basic building blocks: relevant facts, quotable quotes, standard boilerplate and contact information. It then adds Web 2.0 goodies like multimedia clips, links, folksonomy tags, and even a commenting feature.

Not everyone sees the need to reinvent the wheel. Microsoft’s highly respected Überblogger and social media evangelist Robert Scoble, calls the idea “lame,” initiating a lively debate on the nature and necessity of news releases, both traditional and Web 2.0, in the comment section after his post.

Managing expectations

It’s tempting to get swept up onto the social media bandwagon, but large public organizations such as ours need to evaluate all the outcomes, including managing expectations.

One of the inherent problems of social media as an interactive tool is dealing with the expectations that are created. For example, the Houston Metro blog was a well-intentioned attempt to engage the public in a conversation, but they quickly found out that what they wanted to discuss and what their key public – transit riders themselves – wanted to discuss were completely different issues.

Similarly, John Edwards has demonstrated that he’s cognizant of social media by engaging the public through blogs and YouTube, and the blogosphere has been generally receptive to his approach. However, this post demonstrates that in doing so, he may have set the standard too high and has set a level of expectation that might be unreasonable, or even unattainable.

Trends in government and socia media

There’s been lots of talk about government and social media in the blogosphere this week. For example:

Michael Geist's regular column in the Toronto Star addresses how the government should respond to the user-generated content boom that is driving social media: “Ten years later, the role of government will be to support the enormous economic and cultural potential of user-generated content, while avoiding steps that might impede its growth. It can do so by focusing on the three "C’s" - connectivity, content, and copyright.”

Via Blogging4Business, an article in The Independent criticizing UK Environment Minister David Miliband‘s blog, asserting among other things that it has cost £40,000, or approximately £1 per word.

And speaking of the UK, Ian Ketcheson provides a helpful roundup of government and social media initiatives in the UK, with lots of linky goodness. Especially interesting is this interim report of the government’s Digital Dialogues project, which is exploring the use of interactive communication technologies by the government for citizen engagement. I’m about 1/3 into the paper, and it has a lot of interesting insight. Highly recommended reading!