London, 19 July 2011

It is thus that social media rumors and hoaxes start. Someone invents a story on a lark (or in this case, a pigeon), and soon what began as a joke gains followers en masse til it is believed true. Before you know it scores of guileless American tourists are fanning out through London asking where they can buy copies of The Great Love Tweets of William Shakespeare.

There’s a lesson or two herein, and given enough coffee and nicotine I will try to sort out it or them:

1. Information begets information. The more we tweet, blog, follow, like and comment, the more and the faster social media propagates, ad infinitum. If you could print and stack all this content it would, like one of those Facebook user statistics, reach from here to Mars.
2. Social media has a gnat’s lifespan. Our hunger for new content instantly pushes aside the old. One moment Blake Lively is ubiquitous, then Bret Favre, Tony Weiner and now Voicemailhackingate. It doesn’t matter that nothing ever disappears on the Internet. Most of whatever causes a stir there is soon supplanted and forgotten.
3. What will social media’s legacy be? Five centuries hence, when archaeologists dig up the great servers of our time and peruse the trillions of communications recorded, how will they rank it among civilization’s great achievements — between the hula hoop and the pet rock? Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, as directed by the powers that be and know, we blog and tweet anon. In days of yore, writers kept skulls on their desks as a reminder of the transience of life and follies of mankind. For me, my father’s old telegraph key — a remnant from the day when “ham radio” was the social media du jour — has the same effect.

Sometimes even the most market-savvy companies need a refresher course in PR 101. Case in point: the recent network crash of Amazon’s cloud computing service, which affected hundreds of companies, including Foursquare, Quora, Hootsuite, and Reddit. By relying 100 percent on social media to communicate with press and customers–turning a blind eye to direct inquiries from the former and urgent appeals for help from the latter–Amazon managed to outrage both. In the end, its obtuse handling of all concerned might have done more damage to the company’s reputation than the network failure itself.

You might have expected this Web 2.0 giant, which in general does such a superb job understanding and responding to its customers’ needs and interests, to be on top of engagement with the media, too. What happened was the opposite. While engineers worked around the clock to fix data center issues, the communications team did the unthinkable: It ignored request after request for comment from media, instead staying in touch via general updates posted on the company blog.

Long after its systems failures are forgotten, people will remember how Amazon stonewalled the press. Before shaking your head in judgment, however, consider that any number of companies–perhaps even yours–today could be setting themselves up to repeat these blunders with the media. For that, credit the rise of social media not just as a key tool in communications programs, but as their replacement.

Social media has upended many aspects of corporate communications, requiring rapid response time, direct and public interactions, and a constant content stream. It is a revolution in perspective, and companies that continue to rely on the megaphone-style model of mass press releases and dogged adherence to top-down quarterly plans are already being left behind by the world of sharing, tweeting, and organic search.

But what online engagement offers in the form of flexibility and direct contact, it can lack in actual openness and accessibility. Feeling empowered by the ability to speak to “their” people, corporate kings can use new media to make a huge mistake, ignoring the trained questioners whose content–be it for major publications or smaller blogs–is every bit as integral to online reputation as any in-house update to the company Web site.

Although social media represents a major evolution in communications, it is not–as many companies, notably those from the ranks of technology, assume–a substitute for the fundamentals of public relations. Particularly in times of crisis, people want a human face and voice, not a blog or a tweet. Corporate leadership must step forward, acknowledge the problem, take responsibility, provide full disclosure, and outline progress on resolving the crisis. Communications departments must provide regular updates to media and ensure access in or as close to real time as possible.

As other businesses contend with the transition into new and social media, the tale of the online retailing giant that “froze on mute” offers several key takeaways:

• The “choice” between old and new media is false. Old media is becoming new media; your blog post might show up in search results well below a relevant article from The Wall Street Journal.
• Content might be king, but some of it won’t be yours. Talking to your audience directly matters, but the dirty truth of information overload is that people actually like having filters, as long as those curating and commenting intermediaries have earned some trust. Good journalists–wherever and however they publish–are here to stay and ignored at your company’s peril.
• Good improv isn’t improv; bad improv becomes legendary. Online media’s natural informality doesn’t mean it should be approached carelessly. Quite the contrary–only highly skilled, highly trained communicators can be ready to act on a story or a crisis in real time. And the alternatives–from poor responses to none at all–can live in infamy via links and archives forever.

Online engagement tools are invaluable in the hands of professionals who understand their value as a supplement to–not a substitute for–traditional communications. Rapid news development, viral commentary, and the instant availability of hundreds or thousands of versions of a story have expanded and deepened the need for top-level public relations skills. The best corporate communicators will dive into new media armed with a PR expert’s sense of openness and accessibility. Anything less will be a crisis in the making.

Monetizer (left), Curator (right)

The job’s highlight came in June: covering the annual convention of the Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives Association (PRSA) held in a Motel 6 or Holiday Inn outside Cleveland. Because most pharmaceutical sales reps of that era seemed to be former high school and college athletes dreaming of bygone glory, presentations tended to begin and end with Vince Lombardi anecdotes and quotes.  [When I die and go to hell, the punishment for my sins will be a front row seat at Eternity's motivational festival.]  Since the motel had a decent swimming pool, I alternated between listening to the positive thinking palaver indoors and working on my tan while I typed up story notes. Yes, Virginia, that is what trade reporters really do at such events.

I made sure to catch the last day’s Vince Lombardi Paean delivered by a Wayne Dyer knockoff named Dwayne hired out of Poughkeepsie. With the final “leaders aren’t born, they are made” homage to the old ball coach, the audience leapt to their feet and cheered. The group’s president, a college linebacker gone to flab, rushed toward the stage to open the Q&A session.

“Dwayne,” he panted earnestly, “can you example what you were talking about?”

In that moment, as if the Archangel Michael himself reached down from the heavens and touched me, I knew my life’s mission, or one of them anyway.  I stretched an arm into the aisle and grabbed the mic from president Flubadub.

“Excuse me, Flubs, but did you just use ‘example’ as a verb?”

I’ve been on a tear ever since, outing pompous, inflated and/or inappropriate use of language. It’s a never ending job in the tech sector, where The Word is ruled by experts in verbal inflation.

My current peeves: “curate” as a catch-all verb and “monetization” for making money.

I’m not the first to pick on the expanded use of curate as verb.  The New York Times did the best job back in 2009, noting how those who like “to curate” are indulging in a harmless form of self-inflation. Since then, use of “curate” as a verb has expanded to include any kind of managerial function, e.g., the act of selecting, commenting on and regurgitating somebody else’s news in a blog –which somehow seems a tad removed from the original function of a curator as caretaker of the soul, or of a museum.  Nonetheless, the blogosphere is rife with self-styled curators.

On another front, merely making money from a product simply won’t do anymore. One must “monetize” it.  Again, the blogosphere overflows with advice on how to “monetize” social media.  In the telecom sector there’s a movement to “monetize bandwidth.”  Translation: Make a buck.

“Monetization” sounds so phony that I was surprised to find it’s an actual word dating from the late 19th century. But its specific meaning is to legalize or coin an object as money — not profit from.

In all fairness, what appears strange to me may seem normal to many others.  Those that like to curate and monetize might be right in asserting that I’m over-educationalized and given to pedanting. I’ll mull that while I curate the barn stalls and daydream of monetizing what I muck there.

To illustrate the point. . .

Recently our own Kate Schackai posted a blog on Customer Think, a well-known site that showcases thousands of blogs yearly by experts in customer relations, marketing and social media. Her topic: the need for a different measure of social media’s impact based on KPIs versus the usual ROI formulas. The editor informed Kate that he selected her blog as one of the week’s “10 Best” to be featured in the Customer Think enewsletter sent to more than 100,000 subscribers. Concurrently, a comment on Kate’s blog posted on an article in Ad Age generated the highest-ever number of visits to our web site. None of this surprised me. She’d created great content. I can cite five reasons for the immense appeal and success of this post and its re-publication:

1. Hot Topic. Nearly every major company investing heavily in social media faces increases scrutiny from corporate financial types demanding proof of ROI. Contrary to popular notions that social media is “free,” this endeavor of course places extensive new resource demands on companies. Now that the gold rush fever of social media has died down, bean counters naturally want accountability. Kate’s blog hit on an issue that is top of mind with everyone.
2. Authoritative Voice. The author did a deep dive into the subject, backed by extensive research. Readers knew from the start and throughout that this was not a sales pitch or wandering point of view, but rather, a studied, carefully reasoned examination of the topic. She spoke with authority.
3. Solution. This was neither the usual “throw up your hands” study of social media pointing to the impossibility of applying old metrics to a new field, nor the obverse: that accurate measurement of social media hinges on applying obstruse mathematical formulas. Kate offered an accessible, common sense approach to measuring social media via KPIs. Readers came away with immediately usable “to do’s.”
4. “Carrier Grade.” The blog stood out as a professionally written piece. Artful and well-crafted, the blog informed and entertained. Editors know good from humdrum.
5. Popularity. The same applies to readers. For all the above reasons, this blog resonated with the public. As of today, it has logged 984 “reads.”

In contrast to this example, I cite the current tendency of many companies to view social media as a quota-based mission elevating quantity over quality.  This “content factory” thinking commonly takes two forms:

1. The Un-Managed Subject Matter Expert. SMEs with a fixed point of view but little skill in presenting it churn out poorly written blog posts. The company publishes them as is, just to have fresh content up on its site. Dead giveaways: (1) the piece is a reverse engineered sales pitch that presents the company’s own product or service as an objective argument or solution; (2) you know this for a fact when multiple page links in the blog land on other corporate sales pitches.
2. The Outsourced or Canned Blog. The company hires an outside firm to produce short daily posts, typically a rewrite of current news with a corporate plug at the end. Inexpensive and prolific, such services provide a mechanized and largely hands-off method of churning out great volumes of content. Nobody’s fooled. Site visitors see some slight variation of stories they’ve already read at the source, and click right through.

As you look ahead to 2011, consider the following random thoughts:

• GigaOM reports that 90 percent of the world’s data was created fresh in the just the past two years. At some point, all of this data transits a network and is viewed by someone.
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, once said that he sees most daily news and information as “noise,” and as a result rarely bases an important decision on any of it.

Today’s immense volume of data totals one exabyte — a million terabytes. Think of it as your competition for mind share.

Your social media and PR: Is it just more noise, or does it have that rare quality that keeps people tuned in and coming back for more?

1. The Hook. The lead you just finished reading is classic reader bait. Worked, didn’t it? Three reasons why: (1) It addressed your need; (2) It succinctly told you what you’re about to read; and (3) It promised results. Writing a great lead is the hardest and most critical part of anything you write. Of the hours spent writing a blog, at least half that time should be committed to creating and refining the lead.
2. The Image. When you’re not working or sleeping you’re likely watching television or surfing the ‘Net — i.e., absorbing images. Man has loved visual representation since the first Neanderthal took carbon cinder to cave wall. Pictures tell a story. Finding the right image that complements your blog and “says it all” to the reader is second in importance only to crafting the hook.
3. How To’s. We’re all looking for direction, guidance, help. We want it in simple, structured, listed format so that when we click out of the post we can do exactly what we’ve just been told to do. This blog is a classic “how to.” You don’t have to turn every blog into a set of bullets, but don’t neglect them, either — readers love lists.
4. Proof. There’s a lot of “expert advice” out there. How can you be sure that the author knows what he’s talking about and that what he says to do actually works? Only through evidence. Example: We’re a PR firm. We’re in the business of changing outcomes for clients. Ergo we always showcase our Results.
5. Close the Sale. Most blogs peter out and die at the end because the writer doesn’t know how or when to stop. It’s simple, really: End where you began. Summarize your key points and provide a “call to action” that gets the reader off his arse and doing what you’ve just recommended.

Got all that? Great writing is great selling. You have to knock on a lot of doors, look in the customer’s eye, tell them what they’re dying to hear, then barge into the living room and get their signature on the contract, in this case, an agreement to read what you’ve created all the way to the end. It’s about the hook (lead), the image (visual story), the list (how to’s), the quals (proof), and finally, the close.

And yes, in case you were wondering, I began my career as a door-to-door salesman. I was 18 years old, sold bibles and encyclopedias, and was damned good at it. That’s the gospel truth. Now go to our Contact page and “sign here” for a free consultation.

Blog sprawl, as I call it, isn’t so much of a problem for small companies with a handful of regular bloggers who write on a few topics. But for Fortune 500 companies with multiple lines of businesses and dozens of bloggers, what begins with a few entries can over time turn into an unnavigable array of blogs hidden in the equivalent of cross-streets, back alleys and hen tracks.

Common examples of blog sprawl:

• Click on “blogs,” assuming you’ll be taken to multiple blogs, and in fact you find a single blogshack packed floor to ceiling with bloggers crawling over one another — it’s really only one blog.
• Look for “Company News” and it’s stuck in the corporate News Room, not in a blog at all. If the visitor’s aim is to follow company announcements, he or she must subscribe and receive them by email.  A simple RSS feed? — fugedaboutit.
• Seek out a great thought leadership commentary by the CEO and unless it went live that day it’s likely stuffed into a folder by month,  next to blogs by engineers and marketers who also posted then.

There are simple fixes you can undertake with your web consultant — be sure to grab him or her as this will involve re-architecting site navigation:

1. Home Page — If you have more than one blogger, it’s legitimate to promote “Blogs” on the home page with a link to your blog site. It’s misleading and confusing to say “blogs” on your home page then link to what’s really just multiple posts for one blog.
2. Segmentation — Create separate sections for each category of blog you plan to run: CEO Blog, Engineering Blog, Marketing Blog, whatever.  Categorize videos the same way — by topic and subject matter expert.  Do not throw all videos into one master “Video” section.
3. News — Make your company news a blog to help Google readily find your latest updated “news posts.”  Make it available by RSS so readers can sign up for the feed.

That’s for starters.  Follow these simple pointers and you’re well on your way to making blog posts as easy to find and follow as streets that run North-South or East West. More to come from Kate later, I’m sure.

Only a handful of blogs become must-reads, and a broader but still selective group can climb to the top of Google search results. Why do so many languish instead on page 10?  For many reasons, but among the most critical is a total failure to understand the concept of key phrases — how they relate to searches, how they’re selected, and how they’re used. If you want any kind of audience for your blog, here’s what you need to know:

1. Key phrases are search terms. When someone searches on Google, the search behemoth responds with the results of a complex algorithm. Many factors are taken into account — domain age, # of pages indexed, etc. — but one of the most important is whether and how often that search term shows up in your content.  That’s what a key phrase is.  Therefore:
2. It pays to know how people are searching. Good key phrases don’t just come out of the ether — or out of a meeting with the marketing department. In fact, finding them is a lot like panning for gold. A good SEO specialist will start with the universe of phrases that accurately describe your products and services, then filter them based on search volume data. That research tells you what your audience is out there looking for so you can provide it.
3. It pays to outsmart your competition. At the same time, you don’t need to ram your head against a brick wall of competition just because a term has good volume.  Research will also tell you how many pages compete for ranking on a phrase; if that number is too big, forget about it.  Balance search volume against competition and be opportunistic — look for a solid niche that your competitors haven’t found yet.
4. Blogging without key phrases — or with bad ones — is a waste of time. You can write a stellar, entertaining post every day of the week and twice on Sunday, but hundreds of great posts without key phrases do not give Google much to work with. If you want relevant, interested, potential customers to find you, you have to send up a flare by writing with good key phrases. Preferably often.
5. Search behavior changes; your key phrases will have to change, too. Search research is feedback about how your market is evolving. Terms change, rankings change, and you may find, as you develop site credibility with Google, that phrases that were overly competitive for you before are now within reach.  Revisit your phrase research every six months, tweak, play, and correct.  The data is constructive criticism.

The key is to remember why you’re reading this information here — because blogging is now the basis of real public relations. But blogging without good key phrases is like talking incessantly in a sound-proof room; if you want to relate to your public, you have to start by listening. Get to know your current and future audience through the data, and use the technical tools at your disposal — starting with key phrases — to help them discover that what they need is simple: you.

Kate Schackai is the newest member of the Crawford PR team.  She specializes in blog consulting and online marketing.

Whether it’s a blog, a tweet, a byline, a letter to the editor, a guest editorial, a lofty “viewpoint” piece or just a blog comment, we’re talking about one thing: opinion. People like it strong. They want you to be, dare I say the word, opinionated. It means you believe in something.

The popular social media practice of “following” or “recommending” others, regardless of whether it reflects sincere interest, means the opposite. If you profess to admire everything, you likely have a firm opinion on — and believe in — nothing.  You’re not fooling anybody.

There’s a great line from an old Jason Robards movie, The Ballad of Cable Hogue. It’s the final scene. Hogue, played by Robards, is a scabby reprobate who’s just redeemed himself by saving the heroine and fighting off the bad guys — a fight that’s cost him his life. At a loss for anything else to say but the cold hard truth, the girl delivers this simple eulogy, “Lord, he wasn’t a bad man. . .and he wasn’t a good man — but by God, he was a man.”

Go ahead — stand for something, even if it means being controversial. Often that’s the only honest course. If when the end comes you haven’t made a few deserving enemies, you probably didn’t amount to much.

In the effort to differentiate a niche, tech and telecom companies sometimes stray so far into the realm of EngineerSpeak that they become completely unintelligible. Sometimes, as in the case of the phone company that thought it was a gyp, the end result is plain ludicrous. But it’s not so funny when revenue dries up because customers can’t figure out what the heck you do.

Never forget this basic rule of Marketing and PR 101: Customers don’t want to learn a special lexicon in order to buy a product or service. If you can’t speak their language, they’ll find somebody who does.

Recently I came across a company that builds private fiber networks. Because these door-to-door, high-speed networks bypass the communications “traffic jam” of the public network, they’re the best thing going for financial services institutions, social media companies — or any outfit that cannot tolerate delays.

But could the company convey any of this in plain English? Afraid not.

Not content to say they provide fiber optic networks, a concept whose implications everybody understands by now, the company decided it was much better to call their services, “high bandwidth connectivity solutions.”

And it wasn’t enough to point out that fiber optic lines are fast. So the company dug deeper into its bag of technical jargon and opted for “low latency.”

Put it all together: They offer “low latency high bandwidth connectivity solutions.”

High low what? Sounds like some sort of telecom poker game. I don’t get it, at least not at first blush. And I suspect that many prospective customers don’t either. That’s a pity. This is a great company with an outstanding product.

Always communicate in the simplest possible terms. The company that mistakes technical terminology for sophistication is a dupe gypping itself out of potential business.

It’s about mass market trends, our willing gullibility, and then blogs.

The lone dweeb strolling along Pennsylvania Avenue blabbing into his cell phone. . .that was around 1992. At the time there were 13 million cell phones total in the U.S. (Go look it up yourself — I had a long night.) He was the wave of the future, of course. Now every man, woman, child and canary owns a mobile device, maybe two or three. These chattering, thumb-sore, squinty-eyed souls might be mobile but they’re still wired — the invisible umbilicus between mobile handset and brain is every bit as binding as any land line. So they talk, type, play games, watch miniature videos or whatever, just because it’s there and they can’t help themselves. It’s a cheap, legal addiction and those who indulge willingly put this monkey on their backs.

Switching gears. Does any of the above remind you of. . .your blog? What about your corporate blog, or for that matter, the company’s entire approach to social media programs?

There are probably as many blogs now, or more, than even mobile devices. (Look that up, too.) Companies blog and do other social media because it’s expected. For the most part, a canary tweets better and makes more sense. Doesn’t have to be that way, though.

Had a recent chat with social media marketing pro Kate Schackai at Design Plymouth, which helps Northeast businesses get up, running and stay on track with social media marketing. A few (but not all) pointers she offered so that your blog works for you and not vice versa:

1. Have a plan. Your blog should be a Google magnet, a hub of dynamic content for current readers, and provide a wealth of accessible information for potential clients.
2. Know your “key words.” Do key word research (better yet, have it done by an expert) so that key words appearing in social media fit your company and audience.
3. Optimize content. Plug those key phrases into the blog to attract the right eyeballs to your site.
4. Be Anti-Copernican. Use the blog as the center of content releases — articles, videos and podcasts. The sun and planets should revolve around your web site.
5. Easy content navigation. Use high-level titles and pick tags that capture important niche concepts. Avoid date-based archives (who knows, cares or wants to scroll through what you posted last September?), and get rid of any duplicate categories or tags.
6. Use integrated applications to push blog content to social media platforms.  NetworkedBlogs, TwitterFeed, Feedburner, Aweber, etc.

Hm. Just realized I’m neglecting or have violated at least half this list of rules. What an idiot. Better have Kate fix it, but meantime I see the dog left his bluetooth on the kitchen counter and it’s ringing like mad. That “Lassie, Come Home” ring tone really gets up my nose.

“Rover, c’mere, dammit!”