Lies My Social Media Guru told Me

Posted on May 2, 2011 by rgeller

I am starting a series of posts that aim to refute common social media myths. One of the most persistent ones is that mainstream media doesn’t matter anymore, and its corollary: anyone can be a publisher these days and take their stories directly to the people via social networks and media.

Certainly there are some elements of truth to the above statements. Mainstream media has changed, and arguably has less influence in today’s multi-tasking, short attention span, media-saturated world. And it is also true that anyone can start a blog or sign up for Twitter and start publishing to anyone who cares to tune in.

But it would be a mistake to write off traditional media, and assume that you can have the same impact by creating your own social media channels alone. The folly of this type of thinking is illustrated by a post I read today on Social Business: Tech PR – Your Company Blog is not a Media Outlet and Never Will be.

Kate Schackei refers to recent Amazon cloud outage to make her point, and says:

As for your blog, maybe you’re widely read and maybe you’re not. Certainly many cloud customers knew to go to Amazon’s blog to see what was going on with the outage. But what impact did the blog have beyond the existing customer base? What impact would a post there have on the vast swath of potential cloud users who do not have the early adopter mindset – and may even be watching for problems now to determine whether the cloud is safer than it sounds? Nada. Those people went to read the New York Times blog, the Wall Street Journal article, or corresponding stories on ZDnet, ComputerWorld, Forbes, or Fortune. And you know what was said there? “Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.”

Blogging is important; but so is inviting questions from people who hunt for hot stories and bedrock truth for a living. And to get in that kitchen, you have to be prepared to take the heat. To imagine that your company blog takes the place of availability and openness with the press is to take a dangerously insular view of your audience and community. Which works, I guess, as long as you don’t want them to grow.

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Time Says Reputation is Dead on Wall Street (and Dying across Corporate America)

Posted on April 29, 2011 by rgeller

Most people agree that it is important for a company to have a good reputation. There is a value that can be ascribed to reputation that is very real – both intangible, i.e., related to the perceptions of a company, that is its brand – and a hard, dollars and cents, value too. I wrote about this back in 2007, and cited research that showed that a company’s reputation can have a measurable impact on its stock price.

Yet an article in the New York Times DealBook yesterday argued that corporate reputations are becoming increasingly irrelevant. It said that Wall Street is leading a trend in which size and tech rule the day, and people and corporate reputations – well, they just don’t matter as much anymore.

I share a few key excerpts below. I do not completely agree, of course (and would be surprised if anyone in the field of PR does) but it is interesting reading, and writer Steven Davidoff makes some excellent points – what do you think?

Reputation is dead on Wall Street…Why does reputation no longer matter?

The reason is unfortunate and partly attributable to why we got into the financial crisis. People simply don’t matter as much on Wall Street as they used to. Instead size and technology carry the day.

Today’s Wall Street is not the Wall Street of 1907

Until the 1980s… Wall Street was made up of traditional partnerships. These were small groups of investment bankers [who] put their individual reputations on the line, because there were so few of them.

But this began to change in the 1980s. Trading markets became much more sophisticated, and trading and brokerage became the investment banks’ primary business. This is a technology game. The better the technology, the better the trading and brokerage operation. Individuals became less important.

The growth of more complex capital markets and a global economy also created much larger financial institutions… These banks could use their assets and position to compete in the market for finance and trading.

These trends have become omnipresent in corporate America generally as it too has exponentially grown. And when these companies failed or otherwise committed a wrongdoing, their size allowed their reputation to be ignored. After all, it wasn’t the executive’s fault that the bad event happened. It was just the economy or other external factors.

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Bye Bye, BlackBerry

Posted on April 26, 2011 by rgeller

It was with mixed emotions that I laid down my BlackBerry and picked up a DroidX. Canstock3776700

Bye bye, BrickBreaker. Bye bye, Blackberry Messenger.

The move was driven by equal parts device envy and the need to be on the cutting edge of communications that comes with my tech PR job – it was both a left brain and right brain decision. OK, what the the heck, the cool and fun factors too, if I were to be totally honest, after all aren’t most buying decisions, driven by emotion?

In short, some of the same reasons that compelled me to ditch whatever I was using before, a couple of years ago, and get my first BlackBerry. I had related at the time (in a January 2009 blog post) how I had gotten tired of staring at the top of my (now ex) wife’s head as she pecked away at the cute BlackBerry chicklet keyboard.

The BlackBerry was the power communications tool of high powered professionals, and, damn, I wanted (and needed) one too. Perhaps the head staring and device gap were symbols of how our marriage had eroded; perhaps my jumping on the BlackBerry bandwagon at the time was a way to get closer. At any rate, that did not work and we separated and are headed for divorce.

Strangely, my ex wife and me remain very friendly, which is hard for many people to understand. She got an iPhone not too long ago. As I sit with her sometimes, over meals, or with friends on the train, and watch the tops of their heads as they play with their iPhones and Droids, it has been hard to not get caught up in the excitement about the latest generation of smart phones.

All the slapping,pinching and tickling. The brushing, stroking the gestures – there are some definite, sexual overtones going on with these devices (or is it just me, am I a little warped? C’mon, you know the answer to that!).  They are fetishes, an obsession. All the sensory, multi-media experience they deliver, the easy online and email access, packed in one cool little device.

BlackBerry was the thing to have not too long ago. RIM somehow missed the boat on a sea change in tech, the franchise is not lost, but well on its way, at least in my opinion – just like Palm lost its way, and others before it.

I truly enjoyed BlackBerry over the years, and valued its utility. I will likely miss BrickBreaker, which I got severely addicted too. I will no doubt miss the operating environment that I got very used to as I strive to master the DroidX and its tricky multi-touch screen navigation.

But not so much, the DroidX seems like a wonderful device.

Bye bye, BlackBerry

Posted in Fun Stuff, PR Tech | 1 Comment

Damn, We are Good (and Stressed!!) – The Demands of the PR Profession

Posted on April 21, 2011 by rgeller

There’s been much buzz and many tweets about an article today in Ragan’s PR Daily.  It references a study by CareerCast that says that PR is the second most stressful field – ranking after commercial airline pilot (the most stressful), but ahead of others including emergency room workers.

This is not terribly surprising to me. I find PR to be a rewarding profession, and I enjoy the fast pace. However, it is a service business, assuming that you work for an agency. You have multiple bosses and many people to please: clients, agency management, team members, and of course the infuencers and media that you do your best to get attention from every day.

The story kind of reminded me of a post that I wrote for Fusion PR forum awhile back. Here is an excerpt:

The reputation of PR is not helped by the fact that many people outside the profession simply do not understand what it is about.

When you think about it, it is simply amazing that we go out there and get the job done every day, considering the many skills that the average PR person who manages accounts is expected to master. He or she must be a word smith; a storyteller; a good conversationalist; a salesperson; a customer support person; a marketing strategist; a manager and resource coordinator; an MC of sorts, to facilitate interviews and press events; and a media specialist.

Posted in Current Affairs, PR | 1 Comment

Online Privacy Fears: Does FOMO trump TMI?

Posted on April 15, 2011 by rgeller

The Journal had a big What They Know article series about the growing market for information about online personal info and activities; it cast the vendors that serve the market in a pretty dark light. Earlier this year, TIME magazine ran a similar piece. And, just yesterday, the NY Times had a story How to Fix (or Kill) Web Data about You.

What all of these stories have in common is that they send an alarm about online users’ vulnerabilities regarding personal information and privacy. And, if in the process, the most influential of media knock the vendors who serve the industry down a few pegs – well, isn’t that the point?

I am not saying it is not a valid issue, by all means look at how a VPN can protect your data from being accessed by snoopers. Or why not reject all tracking cookies when you visit a website. Indeed there are information providers who take things too far, but there are also those who play by all of the rules. They abide by applicable online privacy and marketing information rules and regulations and offer a valuable service to the marketing and PR industries.

I can’t help but thinking, too, that most people really do not concern themselves much with the issues raised.  An article in Sunday’s Times discussed social networks and the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) – basically, the angst one gets about missing out on fun while reading others’ social media updates. Ironically, FOMO can compel us to share more, not less.

It must not just be FOMO bot other human impulses that compel us to tweet, blog, Facebook, etc. My point is, in a world where we wear our activities, thoughts and opinions on our online sleeves, do people seem to care much about guarding online privacy? Are the media’s concerns overstated?

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Black and Bloomberg (Video Killed the Education Czar)

Posted on April 11, 2011 by rgeller

Bloomberg's embattled pick for schools chief, Cathleen Black, was removed from the position last week. In the end, it seems the empress had no clothes – or at least not everything needed to convince others (and herself) that she could do a good job as New York City schools chancellor.

I don't wish any ill will to Bloomberg or Ms. Black. The whole episode must be an embarrassment for both.

But I do like to riff on topics related to PR and communciations, and to spot and call out irony when I see it, and this episode was rife.

I think it is ironic that someone who comes from the media world was undone by the media spot lights. If it wasn't video and media training that doomed her appointment, it played a role, and showed how unprepared she was, according to this New York Times article excerpt:

Ms. Black struggled to grasp the complexities of the city’s budget process, despite intensive tutorial sessions that began on the day of her appointment and, according to advisers, never really stopped.

When her staff sought to prepare her for television interviews, through mock question-and-answer sessions, she tripped over basic facts and figures, including the process for deciding which schools to close…. Aides decided she was largely unfit for such high-profile appearances and all but ruled them out.

Ms. Black clearly could have used some more media training, she does not appear to be a very sympathetic figure, based on excerpts from the Times article Black Admits Being Ill Prepared:

A day after her surprise ouster as New York City’s top education official, Cathleen P. Black acknowledged that she was ill-prepared for the demands and visibility of running the nation’s largest public school system..

Although she endured stinging criticism of her management style and public statements as chancellor, she said that she was particularly irritated by unflattering snapshots of herself that appeared in the New York City news media.  “The worst pictures!” she complained.

…in an interview with Fortune magazine, her first since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg urged her to step down as schools chancellor on Thursday, Ms. Black also suggested that gender might have played a role in her rocky reception over the last three months.

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Study Identifies “Popularity Curves” for Online News

Posted on April 6, 2011 by rgeller

As I mentioned in my last post, I interviewed Jure Leskovec of Stanford University regarding new research methods that are shedding light on how news spreads online. The resulting insights should be of great interest to anyone in the field of communications – and the new methods open up doors to further research and understanding.

In this second post in the series, I explore the team’s methods and some of the first conclusions they reached. The researchers looked to nature – more specifically, the field of genetic evolution – for inspiration, and leveraged vast quantities of near real-time information from the Web.

“We developed an algorithm inspired by genetic sequences,” said Jure. ” It allows us to track the dynamics of info on a large scale.”

One of their breakthroughs was to focus on identifying short textual phrases – i.e. quotes – and explore how these are shared and mutate over time. This gave them discrete units of information, often associated with news stories; snippets that get repeated more or less intact, and that can be tracked “in the wild.”

Examples included Sarah Palin’s famous “lipstick on a pig” remark, from the 2008 presidential election, and an Obama quote regarding the the stimulus bill: “I will sign this law into legislation shortly…”

They used Web data as a vast Petri dish for their experiments. The methods are a significant advance over traditional techniques of studying media – which typically marshaled teams of people to pour over hard copies, annotate and highlight the topics of interest.

Their test bed is called MemeTracker (see the website and related research paper).  By tracking mentions of the quotes among 90 million articles from 1.6M mainstream media websites and blogs, they learned how various quotes spread, and variables that affected this.

The team checked their results against intuition and noted the role of obvious factors that influence how “catchy” news is. E.g. they explored the roles of recency (“new” is inherently interesting), imitation (some will mention the news simply because it is hot, and others are buzzing about it) and novelty. Further, they determined that different types of sites exert varying degrees of influence, and that collective actions (e.g., the herd mentality) and personal networks can play roles in how news spreads.

By categorizing the websites (as newspaper, news agency,TV station or blog aggregator) they learned about the influence of each.

“Memetracker showed phrases have different patterns of temporal variation,” Jure said.

Six different types of popularity curves emerged, that were a function of what types of site first mentioned the quoted phrase.

Please see the graphs below, from the paper “Patterns of Temporal Variation in Online Media.” As Jure explained to me in this excerpt of the interview:

Cluster C1 is typical – everyone is sort of there at same time. With cluster C3 there is a very quick uprise then slower decay, this is something generated by news agencies; A is on top earliest, B (bloggers) the latest. With C6, there is a spike, then it slowly dies off – this is generated by bloggers. With C4, bloggers are late – with, C5 bloggers are early.

Q: So is this a function of who broke the news first, rather than the type of info?

Exactly – we tried to argue that is a function of who, not what. The theory finds six patterns, and we found same ones on Twitter, so the results are robust; depending on when different media types appear in discourse, it forms a different shape

The results begged all kinds of questions, and made me wonder how PR people and social media specialists can use this understanding to improve their campaigns. I will take a deeper dive and explore the latest research in my next and final article in the series.

Jure

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New Research Sheds Light on How News Spreads Online

Posted on March 31, 2011 by rgeller

Breakthrough Identifies Roles of Influencers and Paves the way for Further Study

A story in the New York Times recently caught my attention. The simple title Why Some Twitter Posts Catch on and Others Don’t, seemed to promise an article that would finally answer the question that plagues most PR people at one time or another; namely, “why does one client or news item seem to get more attention and sharing than others?” (Of course, this question is usually followed by “how can I ensure that my news gets the most sharing and exposure?”).

Interest in these types of questions led me to the field of memetics years ago. Memetics is the science that seeks to explain how ideas spread.  It says that the heartiest units of information, or “memes,” catch on, and are passed along from person to person (helping to define and shape cutlure); while the weaker ones are quickly discarded and forgotten. Call it information Darwinism, if you will.

However, after reading several books on memetics, and struggling with how to apply the theory, I concluded that it is more of a soft than a hard science (or a pseudo science, some say). I have written a number of blog posts on related topics (see my Interview with Doug Rushkoff and Memes Gone Wild).

The TImes article cited above offered some very useful information, and led me down a path that helped me better understand advances in the study of how information spreads across social networks. I interviewed Jure Leskovec of Stanford, one of the researchers behind a paper quoted in the article.

Below, I share some excerpts from the Times article that I found to be interesting, and, in a series of posts over the next few days will blog more about what I learned from the interview with Jure.

…researchers at Cornell and a few other universities like Stanford are finding patterns in the way information catches on in cyberspace…

The structure of a social network … can have more influence than the size of a group, researchers say…

An earlier Stanford study found that bloggers, over time, had more influence than mainstream publications in areas like technology or entertainment.

…the way information spreads online is often more complicated than viral transmission, in which one person passes a link to, say, a YouTube video directly to another person. As with political topics, people often wait until a number of friends or trusted sources have promoted an idea before promulgating it themselves.

…Content from news agencies tended to spike and gain the most attention immediately, while news that started on blogs or was picked up by bloggers often experienced several peaks or rebounds in popularity as time wore on.

Professor Leskovec says the studies provide a quantitative way to predict which stories will hold attention and which will fade rapidly, based on who covers the material first. In a few years, he says, “we will be at the stage where marketers will be more mathematical and less intuition-driven…”

Clearly, this was a topic that begged further exploration. I wanted to understand (and help my readers better understand) how online influence works, who is most influential for different types of news (with tech being the area that is nearest and dearest), and what we can learn to help us get the best possible visibility for our news.

Stay tuned and read the next in my series for more on this.

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CTIA Wrap: AT&T Steals Thunder, Proving Peril of Launching News at Shows

Posted on March 24, 2011 by rgeller

I just wrapped up attendance at the CTIA show in Orlando. It was two action-packed days, filled with client, media and analyst meetings.

CTIA is one of the few mega tech shows left., and it was great to walk the show floor and experience the energy and excitement. The sheer size of the Orange County Convention Center and number of exhibitors meant lots of walking and made it a challenge to get to everything on my list.

As I walked into the show on Tuesday, I was amazed to see a space carved out in the middle for CNBC, with lights, cameras and Jim Cramer blaring.  He and his panel were of course focused on the big news: the AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile (see below for more on this).

In my conversations, comparisons were inevitably made with CTIA shows past. One exhibitor crassly noted the "booth babe index" (actually, he used a cruder term, but I will spare you) as evidence that the show is back, after a couple of down years.

The show also proved the dangers of holding on to big news for release at an event like CTIA.  We know it is tempting, because the world is watching, and there is more press coverage focused on the industry at these times.

Yet shows are the opposite of a slow news day. so there is more competition for the headline and readers. And, as big and impressive as your news is, there is always much larger news that can come along and eclipse it.

As was reported in yesterday's Wall Street Journal article Sprint CEO Blasts AT&T Deal:

AT&T's surprise deal forced attendees across the conference to compete for attention. Samsung Electronics Co., for example, picked the CTIA conference to launch two new tablet computers.


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Times Profiles Press Secretary, Recalls his Classic Media Burn: “You are a hack!”

Posted on March 21, 2011 by rgeller

The New York Times recently profiled Jay Carney, Obama's new press secretary. The article covered Carney's background, and how world events have thrust him into the hot seat without much of a honeymoon period.

The job of a press secretary is a far stretch from the tech PR world that I inhabit, still I found that it was interesting to read about is background, and similarities and differences with Robert Gibbs those and others in the role previously,

Jay Carney was formerly a journalist, and covered politics before becoming the communications director for Joe Biden. The article explores how he fits into the administration, points out the benefits of having direct access to the chief executive when you are handling media relations, and of being a strategic advisor as well as a press representative.  It says:

But among the reporters who cover the White House, the question is whether Mr. Carney’s connections are the right ones. He does not report directly to the president as many other press secretaries have, but to the White House communications director, Dan Pfeiffer . Some are concerned that he will never have the access Mr. Gibbs enjoyed as a hybrid counselor-spokesman, a rarity among modern press secretaries.

The reporter does repeat some cliches related to media relations – e.g. it implies that you are at a disadvantage in media relations if you are not a rabid partisan, and also says press secretaries are bland obfuscators:

Mr. Carney took over from Mr. Gibbs in mid-February, and so far has avoided stepping into controversy. He has been quickly expanding his fluency in the blandspeak that all press secretaries must master.

On the other hand, it was interesting reading about Carney's burn of a Washington Post Columnist:

Dana Milbank, a Washington Post columnist, recalled an e-mail he received from Mr. Carney while he was working for Mr. Biden. The subject line was “You are a hack.” The e-mail continued, “Fabrication is a legitimate tool — for fiction. You should try it; it suits you.”

Who out there in PR has not been sorely tempted to deliver a line like that?

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