Links for 9 February 2007

Still not sure what this whole blog thing is about? Need to back up and read a little Blog 101? Check out Matthew Ingram’s great article from the Globe and Mail this week: A blog for every occasion.

If you’re a little more blog savvy, you might be interested in this report, via Ketcheson.net, on “splogs” (spam blogs): Pings, Spings, Splogs and the Splogosphere: 2007 Updates

Also via Ian, an update on the Houston Metro blog fiasco (looks like they do ‘get it’ after all! Good for them! It’s still a fascinating case study, especially in the comment section.) And, for a completely different take on transit advocacy and social media, take a look at the Toronto Transit Camp (slogan: Bettering the Better Way) from proponents of the Toronto Transit Commission.

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?

Links for 23 January 2007

Some interesting finds from the blogosphere this week:

"You" are not as cool as you think you are Interesting discussion of the value of user-generated content, including the much-hyped Superbowl ads for Doritos, Chevy and the NFL.

Should we have a chat? From the IABC, a post that questions the value of Web chatting as a communication tool.

Via Maggie at Social Media Group, news that Deloitte has launched a blog for and by employees. It encourages employees to share their personal experiences around the issues of career advancement and work/life balance. After being run internally for 18 months with some success, the blog was launched externally last week. Personally, I think as an organization we’d have more success focusing on this type of blog than on a CEO-authored corporate blog.

And on the subject of CEO blogging, in a recent post Ian Ketcheson opined rather succinctly “It is ill-advised for an organization’s first big step into social media to be a CEO blog,” in response to this Economist.com article on the World Economic Forum’s recommendation that CEOs join the blog bandwagon.

And finally, via BuzzCanuck, an article in Marketing Magazine that looks at trends in Canadian marketing and media: more than 50% of marketers are likely or somewhat likely to use some form of social media in the upcoming year and more than 30% have already “tested the waters.”

Links for 17 January 2007

Canada's 1% Blogging Army
Canadian Marcom blogger Sean Moffitt has pulled together an excellent compilation of more than 150 influential Canadian bloggers. He has also launched a wiki (a collaborative Web site) under the same title. It’s a who’s who of Canadians blogging about marketing, communications, media and culture.

Internal Communications Channels Study
Contains a link to a new Edelman study called "New Frontiers in Employee Communications", as well as a fairly long list of links to other recent studies on corporate use of new media technologies. (Looks like I’ve got a lot of reading skimming to do!)

Friday round-up of social media links

Did you know the Royal Bank of Canada has a blog? In this case, the blog was launched in the wake of an innovation contest sponsored by the bank. RBC says, “The Innovator Blog is your inside source for advice and guidance on the RBC Next Great Innovator Challenge. Visit frequently for tips on teen trends, innovation principles, and general challenge announcements.”

Also interesting, this (via Ketcheson.net) newly launched official blog of the Houston Metropolitan Transit Authority. Note the hostile comments from a small but vocal group and demands for information and responses far beyond the intended scope of the blog, very likely similar in nature to what a Canadian government department with a large contingent of vocal opponents might expect.

From Micropersuation, some interesting statistics on the global blogosphere. Based on research by PR firm Edelman, “74% of Japanese read blogs, followed by 43% in South Korea and 39% in China. In the US, it’s about 27% and its even less in Europe. Blog readership is significantly higher among influencers - people who for instance, contact a political, attend a public meeting etc.” Edelman has come out with a white paper called A Corporate Guide to the Global Blogosphere. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve sacrificed a few trees to print a copy for perusal after I finish the digital dialogues paper.

More interesting links:

The Power 150 - America’s Top Marketing Blogs, as ranked on the basis of Google pagerank, bloglines subscribers, technorati ranking and the blogger’s own opinion.

19% of fastest growing U.S. companies use blogs

And, if you’re in the Ottawa area, on Monday evening there will be a meetup for those with a special interest in social media and public relations. See this post for details.

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!

Links for 02 January 2007

• Have you RSS'd yourself? A must-learn (easy) trick for 2007
  I am a big fan of Debbie Weil’s The Corporate Blogging Book, and in this post she gives a lovely little tutorial on using some common social media tools to monitor the chatter of the Internet. Has some good links, and great explanations in (almost) layperson’s terms.
  
  
• blogging delivers five-fold increase in stormhoek sales in less than two years?
  In addition to being an A-list blogger and clever cartoonist, Hugh McLeod blogs for a small winery called Stormhoek. In the link referenced above, he posts a fascinating summary of his efforts and rewards in the blogosphere in 2006. In a post from last year, he explains how interacting with the blogosphere in 2005 changed Stormhoek’s marketing philosophy, and doubled their sales in just twelve months:
  

  We're talking tens of thousands of cases, here. […] I have been saying this for years, and still not everybody believes me: "Blogs are a good way of making things happen indirectly." No, bloggers and their friends didn't start suddenly descending on supermarkets, buying the wine in large numbers. That's not how it works. What happened is that by interfacing with the blogosphere, it fundementally changed how Stormhoek looked at treating their primary customers (the supermarket chains) and the end-users (the supermarkets'customers).

  
  
• Top 10 Viral Video Moments of 2006
  

Links for December 28-29, 2006

• Politicians parading into social media
  From Shel Isreal, co-author of Naked Conversations: “My hope is that government and elected officials will come en masse to the blogosphere. I'm sure they will come in awkwardly at first, using much of the same rhetoric they use everywhere else. But over time, some of them might learn the real power of social media is not just talking, but listening. In fact, blogging and social media, may be the most blatantly democratic format we've seen come along since the New England-style town meeting.”
  
• Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google
  "Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo! 'Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,' Mr Wales said. 'Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.'"
  
• Social Media is No Mo
  Micropersuation’s Steve Rubel opines that there is no longer a need to distinguish “social” media from all other media: “In 2006 all media went social. Pretty much every newspaper, TV network and publication has wholeheartedly embraced these technologies. Newspapers have comments, RSS feeds, blogs, wikis and other forms of two-way communications… The changes in communications go deeper, however. The media formerly called mainstream also communicates in a far more conversational tone that it did before -- one we use. Meanwhile, the barriers to becoming a member of the fourth estate have been obliterated by these very same technologies.”

Links for December 27, 2006

• The Queen of England’s annual Christmas address is also available for the first time via podcast.
  
• The Power 50: one blogger’s take on “50 brilliantly crazy & enlightened marketing / media bloggers.”
  
• Also from BuzzCanuck, the top 11 word-of-mouth stories of 2006.
  
• You Deserve More Than Time’s Person of the Year. MediaShift’s Mark Glaser gives Time.com eight tips to “give people more power in Time’s own editorial space.”
  
• Via Micropersuation, Newsweek predicts 2007 will be the Year of the Widget: “If 2006 was all about social networks, user-generated content and YouTube, then it’s a fair bet that 2007 will be about further personalizing life online. Already, portals like Google and Yahoo! offer customizable pages. Want to see a calendar, learn a new word-of-the-day and check local windsurfing conditions all from your homepage? No problem, you have thousands of widgets to choose from. And the fact that they’re so intuitive has made the features very popular.”
  
• Also via Micropersuation, America’s New Digital Divide. “…you will find that the majority of the broadband connected population is passive, not active. Despite all of the wonderful advances in technology, publishing and aggregation tools have been adopted only by only a small minority of users. It's this tiny community, more than any other, that is shaping the technology, media, business and even the geopolitical agenda. Our voices, not always the broader populous, is what rings loudest.”

Links for December 21 and 22

• It's Time for Traffic Stats to Die
  "Yahoo's Chief of Insights reflects what Evan Williams and [Steve Rubel] have been saying for awhile now: the page view is indeed dead. He's calling on the industry to develop new metrics that measure this new world more accurately. "
  
• The Million Dollar blog post
  Via Marc Snyder (one of the few primarily French blogs I read), this off-topic but charming idea: "It’s simple. Leave your wish for the world as a comment on this post. For each comment we’re going to have someone donate $1 to charity."
  
• Via Inside the Cubicle (a PR blog):

1. CEO Blogging Guide, a concise list of dos and don’ts on CEO blogging; and
2. 5 Social Media Trends that Will Impact PR, including a discussion on the future of the press release: “The press release turned 100 this year, and the public relations and marketing community started to really talk about how to make it better and improve its usefulness.”

• 10 Social Media Strategies for the Fortune 1000 Corporations (via Ketcheson.net)
  
• Digging Deeper::WSJ Gets Comfortable with Blogs, Wants to Boost Community Interesting in-depth interview with Bill Grueskin, managing editor of WSJ.com about the Journal’s online features, including blogs and their editorial policy on them, citizen journalism and pay vs free content. Should be read in conjunction with a scathing Op-Ed piece that appeared this week in the WSJ called The Blog Mob: "Written by fools to be read by imbeciles."
  
• The Mark Twain Guide to Better Blogging Very clever and well-written. Wouldn’t it be great if Mark Twain were a blogger?
  
• IBM says business must blog

That's it for this week... Happy holidays to our legions of reader(s)!

Links for 19-12-2006

• Global Neighborhoods: the Overview
  Shel Israel is the co-author, with Microsoft’s Robert Scobles, of the seminal corporate blogging book Naked Conversations. He’s just posted the overview of his new book, Global Neighborhoods and is asking for feedback. He says, “Global Neighborhoods looks at the habits of young people to predict the future of business and government. It paints a picture of business and government when a generation that is immersed in social media and immune to traditional marketing and media comes of age.” I suspect this will be a book worth watching out for.
  
• Canadians love blogs
  iMedia Connections released data showing Canadians with the highest level of 'blog visit penetration' (i.e. the highest percentage of people who visited a blog) worldwide in October. Fifty-eight per cent of Canadians visited a blog, followed by 51% of Spaniards and 45% of the French. The US ranked sixth with 36% of the population visiting a blog in October.
  
• Book of lists 2006
  PR Week provides a year-end round-up that includes top 10 PR blunders, 5 brands that rocked, and 5 best-in-class communicators (and some of the worst in each category, too.)
  
• The Social Media Toolbox for PR people
  Via Ketcheson.net (see the original post for a nice compilation of social media 'goodies'), a handy list of social media monitoring, analysis and blogging tools.

Links for 18-12-2006

• CNW Group's media monitoring service broadens its reach to cover more than three million online sources
  "CNW Group has expanded the existing reach of MediaVantage, its online media monitoring service, to cover more than three million blogs. […] With the increasing corporate interest in social media and the influence of blogs, this expanded functionality will be welcomed by public relations professionals tasked with tracking media and online mentions on a daily basis. "
  
• Pentagon PR Blogger Explains Military’s New Media Challenge
  “[T]hat’s the problem for the military, when it comes to new media and bottom-up messaging: How can it join the communications revolution when it can’t organizationally grasp the democratization of media with blogs, online video and podcasting?”
  
• Time Magazine Person of the Year: You. Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.
  

Links for 14-12-2006

• Cognoscenti grab big business by the lapels: Shared passions of social networks are forcing advertisers to innovate from the bottom up
  A Globe and Mail article on social media's impact on marketing and traditional media. It's worth the read, and provides a good overview of why marketers need to be aware of how social media has inverted the traditional marketing model. Note the observations on the new role of branding and focus testing through social media, too.
  
• Ottawa communicators meet to discuss social media
  A review of an October CRPS session on social media - good insight. Be sure to read the comments, too!
  
• Open-Source Spying
  A long but interesting article in the NYT Sunday Magazine (free subscription req’d) on how the CIA and the FBI are finding ways to use blogs and wikis. Hey, if the spy agencies can adopt social media, surely we can too!
  
• The CDC's Second Life
  The US Centre for Disease Control has opened an office to promote health information -- within the virtual world of the online game Second Life. “John [Anderton] first started exploring Second Life last March, and by July he had convinced the powers-that-be at the CDC to let him establish an agency outpost there, which he built with his own virtual hands. John seems to be the CDC's go-to guy for their health communications "Special Forces" missions, having been detailed to work on public health crises like the CDC's response to the anthrax scares, the flu vaccine shortage and setting up new communications offices in various parts of the agency. He currently (at least until next week) is working in the Office of the CDC Director with the charge of exploring how social media can be used to promote public health, and he plans to continue to serve as the CDC's virtual face in Second Life.” Fascinating stuff - can you imagine a virtual tax services office?
  
  

Links for 13-12-2006

• Via BuzzCanuck, some good advice: 11 tips for managing a good blog entry.
  
• MyCBC: Will this new media also get new rules? Interesting post about the new MyCBC, but noteworthy for this priceless advice, which belongs in the footer of every page of our proposal:
  
  "Despite well-intentioned talk about how we should all take more risks, like every other large public institution people spend too much of their day worrying about making sure they follow the right process, go through the proper channels, and cover both their rear ends plus their boss and their boss’s boss. We will have to be willing to, frankly, drop a lot of the rules and structure that was set up with the statement: “We need this extra layer of management/editing/approval just in case.” The “just in case” rules will kill us in this new world. We’ll have to take real risks — occasionally, those risks will lead to mistakes. But it’s the only way we’ll learn."
  
  Amen!

Links for 13-12-06

• SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 Awards
  A who’s who and who’s cool of Web 2.0 (Even though this is almost a year out of date, it’s still got some great basic info and links.)
  
• By Some Measures, Blogging May Be Peaking
  An overview and analysis of blogs and blog citations by uber-blogger Steve Rubel: ” [W]hile blog volume may be peaking (I underscore that we still need more data), online expression is evergreen.”
  
• On measuring influence in the Blogosphere and What does influence mean on the Blogosphere
  A couple of interesting posts on mearsuring the influence of blogs from UMBC, the faculty and students from the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering of University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
  
• Web 2.0 for feds: A few federal agencies have ventured into the virtual realm of wikis, avatars and video sharing known as Web 2.0
  “The [US] government should go further and embrace the change that Web 2.0 represents, said Rajen Sheth, product manager for the enterprise group at new media behemoth Google, which recently acquired YouTube. Sheth said agencies should use Web 2.0 to encourage greater participation in government. The federal government’s success in the virtual realm will depend on timing and good risk management, other industry observers say.” The best information is right at the end of this article, from a US magazine similar to our CIO Government Review.

Links for 11-12-2006

• Government of Canada Web 2.0 session reveals that using the "C-word" is a ticket to hell
  Marcomm blogger and president of market2world communications opines "At present using the C-word, or Communications, is a ticket to hell for innovation on Web 2.0. That word attracts too much top-down authority. Best to get pilots going under the auspices of new technology and leave the C-word out of it." Be sure to read the comments!
  
• Hello Home Office Blog Watchers
  Criticism of the UK's use of old-school media monitoring to monitor blogs.
  
  (both links above via Ketcheson.net)
  
  
• Social Media Metrics
  "Interest in moving into social media is high, but companies don't have a context yet in which to place social media alongside other costs they already understand, like PR and advertising--even if the effective measurement of those other costs remains somewhat tenuous. So they're going to ask a lot of questions about how to measure the value of what they're buying, and they're not going to be satisfied with the answer that measurements in social media are really no better than measurements in traditional media." Another perspective of the social media roundtable I mentioned last week.
  
• Group mentality
  The Globe and Mail's Mathew Ingram on packaged social media tools for businesses.
  
• Social media solutions for Santa Claus Enterprises, Inc.

Links for 08-12-2006

• Marketing Literacy Desperately Needed
  One PR blogger's attempt to differentiate between Buzz marketing, Viral marketing, Influencer marketing, Social media marketing and other current lingo.
  
• Web Strategy: measuring social media
  Results of a roundtable discussion including Social Media Practitioners, Bloggers, Corporate Program Managers, and PR consultants exploring how and why to measure social media.