Flack's Revenge

Chasing the Viral Holy Grail

As I said in my post Rethinking the PR Pitch and Campaign:

What this boils down to is that the objective for your next campaign might not be to snag that briefing, series or briefings, or exclusive...

I also posed several questions, one of which related to the types of content you have or that can be generated to support the campaign.

Here, many people go down a rat hole that I call the viral trap.   Everyone wants to chase the holy grail of the You Tube video or viral Web site that catches on and spreads like wildfire.   Of course, precious few do go viral and become wildly popular.

Here it helps to remember some basic laws of marketing, business and also some cold realities that dictate how ideas catch on and spread.

First, as I have blogged previously, it is well near impossible to predict in advance what will become a hit.  Research has proved this.  There are complex systems involved, people are unpredictable, etc. etc.  That does not mean that you cannot boost the odds of going viral, and that there aren't common elements to popular content.  It just means that, all things being equal, it is still hard to predict what will rise to the top.

Second, your content probably does not need to go viral to call the campaign a success.   Assuming you are interested in some business result and not just trying to entertain a lot of people, the laws of ROI say that the return - in terms of increased traffic, name recognition, Web site registrations, sales, however you measure it -  has to be greater than the investment.

What you do need to do is consider the audience you are targetting.  You hopefully will have some kind of mechanism to monitor the progress and success of the campaign.  And you do need to consider what types of content or Web destination will be interesting enough to become popular amonst your target audience and help you achieve your business results even without any viral explosion.

Welcome to the Machine

I delivered a seminar to the Fusion PR staff last week, and re-played at this session the by-now-famous video by KSU Professor Michael Wesch, the Machine is Us (above), as part of a crash course in the power of Web 2.0 for some of our newer staff.   The video is both a beautiful and hypnotic work, and within a few short minutes helps viewers understand what all the excitement is about.

Take a look at this if you haven't seen it already, trust me,  you will enjoy it as have countless others (it rises to the top of the search results when you plug the phrase "Web 2.0" into YouTube).

And, as reports emerged earlier this week (see ValleyWag) of how Wikipedia scooped NBC in getting key details of Tim Russert's death online hours before the network, I am reminded of how eerily efficient a communications mechanism this new Web has become.  Sure, this has implications for PR, as I often blog about, but goes well beyond this field and other communications fields to have a dramatic effect on society at large.

This new Web is equal parts crystal ball (see my post on crowd sourcing news and prediction markets) and the collective subconscious (Wikipedia definition) that Jung said unite's Mankind - the subconscious made real in software code, routers communications networks, driven by the people who use it, reflecting their thoughts, predictions and obsessions.

A $588B Hole in My Day

Can't we all just get along?

Well, according to CIO Insight - which reported the results of a study by Basex - just getting along, or collaborating by email, IM, and blogging is creating  a great big sucking sound of lost American worker productivity to the tune of $588B.

I alluded to this dilemma a bit in my post Blogging's a Big Time Sink, so Why Blog?

It's hard to argue with the numbers and it would seem to make sense that all these ostensible improvements enabled by better (and more) forms of collaboration come with a big down side.

On the other hand, perhaps there are productivity gains that offset the losses - see my post The Google and Web 2.o Productivity Dividends.

Finally, and as the report acknowledges, this all ties back to information explosion and attention diffusion.  As I said in my end of year post: "The companies that can figure out how to help people make sense out of info - to gather info, sift and separate the good from the bad - and do this well - will be successful."

Some thoughts on 2007 and what lies ahead

As the year comes to an end I thought I would share some fairly random (but hopefully coherent and interesting) observations and ramblings that have been on my mind.

The fractionalization of media and information continued unabated in 2007.

It would be great to believe that the bounty of social media threw off more light than heat, and resulted in a truly efficient and rational marketplace of ideas - one in which the worthy stories received sufficient attention and benefited from crowdsourced reportage, and in which stories that might not have previously had a chance were aired.

Some of that may have happened, but there was an awful lot of "heat" thrown off as well.  We have a reality in which it is hard to find the winners.

With democratization of media, the vaunted fourth estate is eroding as a separate and esteemed institution.

It is true that more people than ever can have their voices heard, but the flip side and unavoidable reality it that there is so much din; who is really listening and can they hear you above the noise?

Thus, people and companies who seek to make news and promote issues, products and services have a hard time figuring out the impact of their messages when attention is so divided.

What, really, is the value of a minor mention these days even if it is in a major traditional media property or blog? 

 

It seems that in this attention driven economy, the attention rich got richer and vice versa.  The "big" stories received outsized coverage and attention while everyone else fought over the remaining crumbs.

 

Perhaps then, the winners were information consumers?  In some ways yes, although it is arguably getting harder rather than easier to find the right information and vet sources.

 

It will be interesting to see what comes out of this Petri dish in the coming months and years.

 

The companies that can figure out how to help people make sense out of info - to gather info, sift and separate the good from the bad - and do this well - will be successful.  Indeed, we have seen the rise of meta sites like Digg, TechMeme, StumbeUpon and PopURLS, among others.

 

I also feel that we are in the early years of the rise of social networks as the killer application - a space that which will continue to grow, eventually subsuming other areas like media, search, marketing and even make headway in the enterprise, giving rise to social applications.

Three New Tools to Build Blog Moxie

There are a couple of tools I have started working with that seem to have lots of potential.

One is a sharing widget from MadKast.  Seems to be an easy way to add viral and social components to your blog - via the nifty the green icon that you now see at the top of my posts, which enables easy sharing via email or social bookmarking / meta news sites.

Please, I encourage you to feel free to Share Away! (and let me know how you like it and if it is not working for any reason).

Another is BlogCatalog. Originally just another directory of blogs, they have recently added social networking features that make it easy to connect with other bloggers and build site traffic.

They're doing some interesting things in the area of blogging for causes, see the  Bloggers Unite in Acts of Kindness video.

I have signed up, am exploring functionality, and will likely be writing more about it.

One other thing, with all the buzz over social media releases and meatball sundaes, I have (admittedly belatedly) updated my news radar, which you see to the left.

I produce my news radar using MySyndicaat, which makes the process of adding news to your site extremely easy.

Social Media Impact on Tech Journalism Report, SMR Revisited

The full details of the recent survey are now available at the Fusion Forum blog.

It includes a write-up on the results, methods, survey questions, and a link to the actual survey data on Survey Monkey.

One thing we regrettably did not query journalists on was their views on social media releases (having said that, respondents had ample opportunity to mention this in the free form comments sections and none did).

Indeed, an article in CNN Money just yesterday (Web 2.0 Reinvents the Press Release) seems to breathe new life into the concept of a Web 2.0 press release.  It cites the success of PRWeb in getting the word out online over larger rivals like PR Newswire and Businesswire, and attributes this to their use of SEO techniques and a Web 2.0 friendly / integrated approach.

I have in general been skeptical on the concept of a social media release (see my post Web 2.0 Press Release: An Oxymoron?)

However, perhaps it merits further consideration.  I'd love to hear your thoughts.  I'll be blogging more about this in the coming days and weeks.

Enterprise 2.0 and ROI

The Presto Vivace blog called out the 7/27 Information Week article Business Value Of Web 2.0 Tools Hard To Measure yesterday.   The post and article cited a Forrester Group survey of enterprise IT managers that showed lack of hard ROI for Web 2.0 technologies.

I expand a bit here on my comment on the Presto Vivace blog.

I am not surprised by the study. First off, Web 2.0 itself is an amorphous concept - many could and do debate what it is and which technologies it encompasses. Second, it is just technology while it is the application of technology that is important and can lead to quantifiable benefits. I bet if they were to look into specific areas where Web 2.o technologies are well-integrated into applications that support lines of business, they would see a return. Finally, it is true that many of the benefits that Web 2.0 delivers - improved collaboration, organization and discoverability of info - are soft and hard to measure.

This reminded me of my days selling Lotus Notes groupware solutions in the 90's, and sales force automation systems before that.  Although most of the benefits were considered to be soft, many studies documented improvements and ROI over the long term for organizations that did better jobs of implementing these systems, and managing knowledge and info.

When it comes to blogging, it would seem on the face that it is a big time sink and thus a productivity drain, at least for the short term.  Looking outside the sphere of IT and technology projects, there are some hard returns that come with communicating more effectively and openly as some forward looking executives and organizations are starting to do using blogging and related technologies.  See my post From Madmen to PR's Holy Grail, and of course Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's popular book Naked Conversations.

(I am of course not saying that blogging in and of itself is a panacea or recipe for effective PR, just that it is increasingly a tool that can be part of the communications mix).

Also, I touched upon some related areas in my January post Google and Web 2.0 Productivity Dividends.

Memes Gone Wild: What's YOUR Media Appetite?

From a PR person’s standpoint, it just doesn’t get any better.

I have long held a fascination with memetics, the science that purports to study how ideas and culture propagate.  According to the Wikipedia definition: "In his book The Selfish Gene (1976), the ethologist Richard Dawkins coined the ... term "meme" to describe a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture." 

After all, if one can truly understand how memes work, isn’t that one step closer to understanding how buzz happens, and to making buzz happen? 

Since digging into this and reading books by Seth Godin (Unleashing the Ideavirus), Richard Brodie (Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme) and Susan Blackmore (The Meme Machine), all great reads, I have since come to believe that memetics is more of a pseudoscience than a real science.  There's lots of reasons for this, some of which were explained in my post: Welcome to the New, User Generated Non stop Media Whipsaw.

At any rate, while perusing my daily does of RSS feeds I happened on this “meme” that was started by Jeremiah Owyang, in his post My Media consumption Diet:  "I’m hoping to start this meme, that others will join in and share their media consumption diet, in hopes, that we’ll start to learn how they get information or be entertained. I’ve sort of mixed up mediums, and media types, but after some thought, that’s the best way to organize it."

He goes on to list his media preferences in the following categories: Web, Music, TV, Communication, Movies, Magazines, Books, Newspapers and tagged others to do the same. 

From a myopic PR perspective it does not get any better – to start a trend that might wind up with everyone wearing their media consumption habits on their blog sleeves. 

It is Pay it Forward meets chain letters meets self absorbed blogging culture.  From another perspective, it shows some of the benefits and implications of user generated content. 

I checked on Technorati and over 1000 people have responded. You can sort by authority to see what the high authority influentials are reading, and how they like to get information.

 

 

 

.

Antisocial networking revisited

Won't you please join my (insert social networking site) network?

I am convinced that, before long we will all be one big writhing mass of social networkers, spending countless hours doing whatever people do on these sites.

The allure is jut too great, the peer pressure too strong.  Come join my network.  Together we can find better jobs, make business connections or get sales leads.  We can figure out how to leverage each other without the awkwardness of making small talk with strangers at in-person networking events, or figuring out what to do with the toothpick when you're done with the hors d'oeuvre .

I started with casual IM and text messaging, progressed to heavy RSS usage and then blogging, the gateway drug to social networking.  Peer pressure is pushing me over the edge, offering the lure that is simply too tough to resist, and proving to me the power of these sites.

Well, I know I haven't suddenly gotten more popular, so perhaps it's the phase of the moon but I have gotten a ton of these invitations recently and I reckon it is time to reconsider my decidedly anti-social networking stance. 

Stay tuned, I'll share my experiences, especially as they relate to Web 2.0 and PR tech, perhaps causing you to reconsider your invitation!

Improving the Online Signal to Noise Ratio: Rumors of the Internet-driven Death of Culture are Highly Exaggerated

I first learned about signal to noise ratio when I was back in engineering school.  I decided to pursue an electrical engineering education through my love of music, which manifest itself in years of piano lessons and a fascination with top-of-the-line audio gear.

I learned that in recorded music, "signal" is the part you want to hear, and noise is all the other unintended stuff.  In the days of vinyl records and magnetic audio tape this generally meant background hiss, and the snap crackle and pop sounds caused by record scratches.   In audio technology, the goal was always to boost signal and reduce noise, or improve S / N, ratio hence the introduction of Dolby and DBX noise reduction systems.

I thought of this while reading an ironic post on the AlwaysOn blog. It is ironic because the author contributes to the very issue he rants about - excessive online noise and shrill opinion.  Moreover he voices his opinions through the very medium that he complains about.

In an AlwaysOn blog post titled: "Mindles Crap: Blogs, Vlogs, etc." David Scott Lewis writes about a NY Times article that references a book in which the author deplores the user generated content and blogging crazes and blames these trends on nothing less than "killing our culture."

I tend not to be a flamer but this was too good to resist, and were the information from less reputable sources I would probably let it go.

Scott Lewis writes:

It's a great article and guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of many Web 2.0 / Second Life / Digg /YouTube /Twitter /MySpace / Facebook / StumbleUpon Jihadists -- the fanatics and extremists and self-anointed elitists of everything Web 2.0.  "Fools" would be an appropriate synonym.

The article in the Times is titled, "The Cult of the Amateur" and is based upon the  book by Andrew Keen with the same name and with the sub-title, "How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture."

I don't consider myself a "Web 2.0 Jihadist," although as a communications professional I am intrigued by the implications and effects (both positive and negative) of Web 2.0 on public discourse and information.

Scott Lewis continues:

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.”  This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

For one thing, Mr. Keen says, “history has proven that the crowd is not often very wise,” embracing unwise ideas like “slavery, infanticide, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, Britney Spears.” The crowd created the tech bubble of the 1990s, just as it created the disastrous Tulipmania that swept the Netherlands in the 17th century.

Uh, OK - so we sometimes get it wrong.  The folly of crowds is the flip side of the wisdom of crowds. However tulip mania was hundreds of years ago and the dot bomb preceded Web 2.0. I am really not sure what he is trying to say here. Why not argue against democracy itself?  Scott Lewis derides "self appointed elitists" but this passage smacks of elitism. It seems obviously slanted to favor the heretofore information gatekeepers, e.g. research organizations, historians and MSM.

Although crowds are not always necessarily wiser, Web 2.0 gives us more dots to connect, by empowering almost anyone to contribute to a topic, and more people to participate in connecting the dots. In this way it can perhaps even mitigate mob mentality and bubbles.

Because Web 2.0 celebrates the “noble amateur” over the expert, and because many search engines and Web sites tout popularity rather than reliability, Mr. Keen notes, it’s easy for misinformation and rumors to proliferate in cyberspace.

Disinformation is the flip side of freeing up information flow. Would Scott Lewis and Keen prefer to put the lid on free and easy exchange of info? All but the densest of us – e.g. the ones who actually respond to email Spam – know that you must consider the source, not just on the Web but especially there.

People turn to those whose opinions and information they have learned to trust and respect, even if not among the traditional information gatekeepers. And the better search engines, certainly Google included, factor credibility in their rankings. Other sites, like TechMeme do a good job of filtering out the noise.

For that matter, as Mr. Keen points out, the idea of objectivity is becoming increasingly passé in the relativistic realm of the Web, where bloggers cherry-pick information and promote speculation and spin as fact. Whereas historians and journalists traditionally strived to deliver the best available truth possible, many bloggers revel in their own subjectivity, and many Web 2.0 users simply use the Net, in Mr. Keen’s words, to confirm their “own partisan views and link to others with the same ideologies.

This is an absolute hoot and I am not sure if Scott Lewis / Keen are being serious here.  It seems like the point is that history and journalism were the bastions of pristine and unbiased information before the blogosphere came along.

True, the new world of unmediated media sometimes throws off more heat than light, and ill- informed opinions can see the light of day and occasionally dominate debate.

At the same time, let’s not forget the potential of these new tools to "out" misinformed posers and enable debate, collaboration, and the furtherance of discussion and evolution of ideas.

The rest is a bit rambling as Lewis expands on his analysis of the Keen and NY Times piece with some additional  own ideas. And here we actually find some common ground.

I started this post with a discussion of S / N ratios and an interesting area that is ripe for further development is how to boost the S / N ratio on the Web.  How do we filter out the noise, evaluate information, and a source’s reputation and credibility?

Scott discusses some of the techniques used by scholarly research databases, for example ISI's Web of Science makes it possible to consider the influence and credibility of a source by allowing users to track and analyze author citation histories (I mentioned this in my post Power Searching for PR Professionals). There are some other ideas worth consideration presented as well.

And then there are times when, absolutely, you just need to put that mouse down and go and get a professional opinion. David Carr relates in a June NY Times piece (Call the Doctor) in a much less bombastic way his own experiences with illness, and how in trying to do some research about a controversial drug online, threw in the towel and went back to his doctors, because he found "everything, except insight" online.  He closes: "This Wednesday, I will see my endocrinologist. We will chat for a few minutes... and no doubt he'll smile when I entertain him with all that I have learned on the Web. Then after he tells me what he thinks, I will follow my doctor's order."