Flack's Revenge

Social networking and micro-blogging offer are an immediacy that cannot be rivaled by blogs.
E.g., Twitter forces you to frame your thoughts in 140 characters or less.  It is all about NOW.  Similarly, your Facebook status needs to be updated pretty regularly for anyone to care.

Tweets are much more ephemeral than blog posts.  You need to find a way to pay attention or you will miss them (tools like TweetDeck and Twhirl can help you manage Twitter streams). And, unlike blogs, repeating thoughts verbatim – your own, or of others via retweets – is not frowned upon.

With Facebook updates and Twitter you know very quickly if your missives strike a nerve or not.

It can be a real rush, to post an update and have it resonate across your networks and see what people respond to.

On the other hand, perhaps they are not responding.  You may have too few followers and need to work on building your networks.  Or, maybe you are not posting things that are interesting, or writing in a way that grabs attention.

On that last point, it helps to think in terms of headline writing, or writing subject lines for emails that draw responses, and applying some of the same principles (see my post Writing Headlines that POP!)

You can also watch what others are posting and responding to and take note.   What tweets grab your attention?  Which ones drive hordes of replies and retweets?  What Facebook updates cause many to write on the person’s wall?

That is why these forums are great labs for attention, and for sharpening your skills.   If you are in the communications business, as I am, it is good to study these things.

One quick anecdote, I had an amusing exchange with my sister on Facebook.  She poked fun at one of my updates, and then my sister in-law chimed in.  I replied through wall-to-wall exchanges that I would change my status because the whole thing was getting irritating.

My sister chimed in “don’t change, we love the gregarious Bob!”  I honestly had no idea how many people were watching my Facebook updates or wall.  So I was a little surprised when people I ran into in different walks of life shortly thereafter – family, friends, colleagues – started calling me Gregarious Bob.

Eerie and wild, this world of blogging, micro-blogging social networking.  It is a little like being a kid in a candy store if you work in communications.

Social media presents traditional PR folks with a topsy turvy kind of world.

Web hits used to be dismissed as cheap and less impressive than “real ink” on a printed page.  Similarly, local media results were often looked down upon when compared with national and international coverage.

These days it is the Web hit that many prefer.   It is not just the publication that counts of course, but getting into Google’s index, and living there for future reference.   At the same time, coverage in local publications can often be the drivers of online conversations outside the area and rise to the surface for certain search terms.

I thought of this while reading an article in the Sunday NY Times (These Days, No Reporting Behind a Nation’s Back) which covered the changing nature of the foreign correspondent’s audience:

It is a momentous, overlooked shift in the world: Foreign correspondents no longer cover one place for the exclusive benefit of readers somewhere else.  In the Internet age, we cover each place for the benefit of all places…

Also, targeting your audiences takes on a different meaning in the online world.   E.g., during a new business pitch last week the client talked about the importance of the channel to their sales efforts.

In tech PR, communicating with the channel used to mean campaigns and content tailored for and targeted to the publications that are read by system integrators, distributors and VARs.  There aren’t many of these left.

I pointed out that today it all comes together online.  You don’t necessarily need special materials or campaigns targeted to the channel.  We can now communicate directly with a range of audiences over the Web, including the channel.  Sure, you can do a channel announcement and send it out, but channel folks can also of course have access to other materials about you – materials you generate or otherwise.

So getting through to resellers takes on a different shape.  It can mean optimizing your content for placement in search engines and social media based on the tech key words that the resellers care about, the vendors and trends they are following, and by making sure you are publishing materials that hit the hot buttons of your channel.

This brings up another important point.

Since the Web can be a great big meat grinder for all your content, it is important to periodically take the pulse of your brand in terms of how people might see it online.

I’ll be blogging more about this topic in the coming days.

I have been thinking for some time that the Social Web is driving some pretty radical changes in how we consider and measure Web influence.

At a basic level, I think we need to distinguish between traditional measures of Web reach and activity and measures that connote authority.  Apart from measurement, it is clear that the nature of influence is changing.   This should be a big deal for you, especially if you are in tech PR .   You are late to the game if you are only waking up to this now as the tech crowd were early adopters in social media and continue to push the envelope.

Blogs, micro blogs and social networks have spawned new communities and influencers.  The technology user is becoming increasingly vocal through various types of social media.  These changes are having a profound effect on how people get their information and make decisions.

Just this week, we learned a number of things:

On Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel blogged that Twitter search traffic is poised to eclipse Google blog search traffic.  He includes some nice charts and data and said:

The search engine landscape is quietly under going a major revolution.
There are two major forces at work here: our growing hunger for
real-time information and the coming convergence of search and social
networking. The latter adds a much needed layer of trust to traditional
search that helps us qualify sources.

Earlier this week my good friend and Handshake 2.0 blogger Anne Giles Clelland pointed out the Washington Post article (TechCrunch/Brian Solis byline), which posed the question: Are Blogs Losing their Authority to the Statusphere?  It discusses the waning influence of blogs (as measured by Technorati, for example) and discusses why this might be:

It goes back to the definition of authority. Links from blogs are no
longer the only measurable game in town. Potentially valuable linkbacks
are increasingly shared in micro communities and social networks such
as Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed and they are detouring attention
and time away from formal blog responses.

Finally, on the Between the Lines ZDnet blog, Sam Diaz posted the results of a poll about the implications that the growth of Facebook and Twitter referrals compared to Google has for marketing dollars, and wrote:

Armed with data from Hitwise,
a Web analysis firm, Advertising Age noted that Facebook is starting to
generate more traffic than Google search for some larger Web sites – a
shift that could impact the distribution of marketing dollars and
campaigns as the “social Web” continues to disrupt more traditional Web
surfing habits… companies large and small – and the marketing/advertising/PR
firms that represent them – should take note. It’s no longer enough to
just have a Web site and expect that potential customers will find you.
The companies that participate in social media and understand how it’s
changed the way people communicate, interact and share information with
each other are the companies that will form long-lasting relationships
with customers.

Clearly, seismic shifts in Web influence are taking place and PR folks and marketers need to understand what this means and plan accordingly.

I am not making predictions or highly exaggerating reports of the demise of RSS, just “planting seeds” as the hilarious (and unfortunately deceased) comedian Bill Hicks might say.

I fell in love with RSS years ago because it provides a way to get updates directly from websites without waiting for a search engine to index fresh content.  OPML gave me a way to easily load tons of RSS channels into my news reader, and my news reader let me filter the flood of information.

However these days it seems like my newsreader gets gummed up with so many feeds.  The search engines are doing a pretty effective job of indexing content and provide a variety of alerts.  They inevitably cast a much wider net, and make the practice of searching and loading individual RSS channels now seem slow and backwards.  Loading channels in bulk does not remove the need to do some selection and quality control, so you still need to comb through lists of feeds.

Social news sites help you scan lists of stories and sources and identify the hot topics.

I am starting to think that RSS is not adding much value these days.  It just creates a redundant set of content that needs to be indexed, content which in many cases is just a snapshot of what can be found by visiting the the actual Web page.

I realize that RSS is part of the larger Web 2.0 ecosystem, and some things might “break” without it.  Just thought I’d put this thought out there and see if anyone agrees, and (if so) get dialog going about what can or should be done to remedy the situation.