A live, scrolling feed of tweets posted about the campaign
McCain and Obama's latest tweets
Hot topics (currently Tina Fey, SNL, VoteForTheMILF, Bill Clinton, Katie Couric, Bush, GOP)
If Twitter creates more of these types of sites, it would be great to see them offer some degree of personalization to people who would like to start their own groups. For example Ruder Finn could have a landing page on Twitter where all employees could go and see tweets from across the company and the globe.
Other potential uses for Twitter groups include
Corporate watchdog groups
Music artists
Politicians
Families
Events
Alumni associations
Celebrity gossip
Non-profit causes
And many more. I hope Twitter continues to evolve to include these types of features, which could be very useful for corporations (and that they offer to pay me for these great ideas!)
**UPDATE 1**
While we're on election coverage, C-SPAN, known for mind-numbing coverage of all things Congressional, has pulled an about-face with a ridiculously awesome election site: http://debatehub.c-span.org/. Here's a review: Gizmodo (thanks Simon).
This is a shining example of how an organization, one notorious for lack of technology, can make effective use of web 2.0.
I've tynted on it here and found many of the insights are self-apparent to PR folks who work in the digital space on a daily basis. The most interesting information I've seen that would be relevant for this blog doesn't even come from Technorati:
Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the Blogosphere. In fact, 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs
(Technorati cites the Bivings Group, which does not readily have that information available, and looks rather spammy.)
Additional nuggets include:
30% of bloggers have been approached to be brand advocates
69% of corporate bloggers are also personal bloggers
The survey has received criticism in years past, and for good reason - Technorati's methodology seems flawed, and even then, the "insights" only confirm what most people would already guess is going on in the blogosphere.
Granted, analyzing the "active blogosphere" is a tough job. Technorati defines it as:
The ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation.
This convergence is without a doubt happening in the blogosphere, and our clients and journalist contacts confirm it on a daily basis. But as we've seen with many Ruder Finn clients, algorithm-based analytics are often insufficient when you're measuring something that is supposed to take into account "conversation." If you rely just on Technorati's numbers, you can end up sending an energy company to Treehugger or a Republican presidential campaign to Huffington Post.
Yikes! Not a good idea.
That's why the concept of an "authority" ranking is so attractive. It gives the impression that there is some judge out there who can abort the calculations and say "Really? 30% of blog postings are in Japanese? Maybe they're spam." But unfortunately, Technorati's authority ranking does a bad job of capturing subjective input, relying on inbound links instead.
It would be great to see some truly revolutionary advancement in this field.
Have you seen any cutting edge blog measuring technology? How do you measure "conversation" and "authority?"
Think of the last 20 emails in your personal email inbox.
Is there anything in there you wouldn't post publicly? Is there anything in there that could be considered illegal (besides offers to assist in Nigerian wire transfers)?
Well, Sarah Palin's email was broken into Tuesday night, and hackers posted screenshots of her Yahoo! inbox and address book on Wikileaks.
Now, Palin has been accused of using personal email to conduct state business, possibly with the intention of avoiding Alaskan freedom of information laws. And while I would agree that the hack is a gross invasion of privacy, it's gotten me to thinking about exactly how open people actually want to be when they trumpet transparency.
As we saw with the Facebook Beacon debacle, people only want to share information about themselves when they have great control over exactly what is shared. The same rules, however, can't apply for elected officials, who constantly balance their personal and public lives (sort of like celebrities at LAX). Wikileaks forces us to balance our voyeuristic desires with the right to know of wrongdoing, and the cowardice of anonymous snitching.
Chances are you'll never do anything that would land you on Wikileaks, however, here are three instances when we all might question the value of digital transparency on an everyday basis:
Fundrace - Thanks to Web 2.0 and disclosure laws, I remember spending hours on Fundrace searching for friends, family and coworkers in 2004 to see who donated to campaigns. A quick spin through Silicon Valley donations this year shows some interesting results, including some that your corporate communications department might not want to be publicly associated with you company. For example, I find it scary how easily you can get the name and address of the only guy at Facebook who gave to a Republican campaign.
LinkedIn - The New York Times recently explored using LinkedIn as a career safety net. The article appeared the same day that I speculated a client of ours was about to leave their job because their LinkedIn network increased dramatically (they did leave). Does this type of transparency help or hinder your career?
Business is Personal - probably a more poignant question that my opening one would be to ask the opposite: would you want your work inbox posted publicly? Palin may have tried to escape the limelight by going to Yahoo!, but do you let your Yahoo! get into Outlook?
The gist is that pajama bloggers and traditional media are converging. As hobby blogs become more professional, traditional media are learning how to use the Internet to overcome the obsolescence of their delivery mechanism with NYT and WSJ as shining examples (although with the Wall Street Journal's online redesign isn't so "shining").
He also criticizes TV as being one-way, which is rough for business viewers, who prefer to interact (like on Mad Money?). Although, with CNN's increasing use of Twitter, that might be changing.
As big banks fail and stocks tumble, there is a sense of doom and gloom here in New York. Uncertainties about our financial future and the health of the economy have me wondering about America's leadership in many areas, and that feeling was exacerbated yesterday during a presentation from Jean-Michel Dumont, Ruder Finn's Managing Director of North Asia.
Reviewing Ruder Finn Asia's history and experiences over the last eight months, it became clear that China has been positioned to demand attention. This was made most apparent when considering that the world's top banks are in China, and particularly when considering that they have been somewhat insulated from the sub-prime lending that has taken down Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers.
China's leadership is apparent in Internet usage as well. All the statistics I've seen seem to confirm this. China is adopting the Internet at rates much faster than the U.S. and being much more active in using it. In the most recent issue of MOVE! magazine, Barry Diller, Chaiman and CEO of IAC is quoted as saying:
"Chinese people seem to be way ahead of Americans in living a digital life."
But before you click through to read the article, let's play a digital trends numbers game (stick your guesses in the comments section):
The first time I considered that Twitter might be useful was back in April, when James Karl Buck tweeted his way out of Egyptian jail (CNN).
Pretty useful!
I also think it will be useful in feeding these blog posts to RF Darius, and some of my colleagues tweet (especially intheUK), and a couple of my clients tweet, but I'm not sure how useful any of them have found it to be.
Below are five categories in which I think Twitter was/is/will be most useful:
Breaking News: During the last Los Angeles earthquake in July, a tweet beat the AP by 12 minutes to break the news. Not sure how useful (safe) it is to Twitter in an earthquake or a hurricane, but airlines like SouthWest and JetBluehave usefully pointed followers to their dedicated Hurricane Ike pages. AA, Virgin America, and Delta seem to still be testing it out (United, Northwest, and US Airways don't have Twitter pages to speak of yet).
Content Quest: The staff over at PR Week occasionally pings their followers for leads (especially during summer). Judging from the "@" replies, Twitter = useful. CNN's Don Lemon, and Rick Sanchez have used Twitter on air and shared viewer feedback. Sanchez even did a whole show using social networks (or are they social media....or social utilities?) to tell the news. Not sure this will be a lasting trend, but it seems to be a useful outlet for opinionated people.
Feeding: Not only does this blog have a feed to Twitter, so do NYT, WSJ, and the FT, among many others and their reporters. Following them on Twitter can sometimes be more convenient than using a feed reader. Especially when you get instant updates to your phone.
Bragging Rights: not to get political, but according to Twitterholic, Barack Obama has the most followed Twitter account with over 70,000 followers. John McCain, not so much.
Customer Service: Comcast, has a customer service guy who seems pretty on the ball with responding to questions/complaints, but this tweetimplies a stressful life for him.
As corporations and their PR departments adopt new communication tools more rapidly, will they get ahead of themselves?
I think there's real potential for senior executives to be thought leaders on Twitter (Zappos.com), but BusinessWeek thinks that Twitter + corporations = creepy and distractive. BusinessWeekdid get some use out of Twitter when they rewrote their "Beyond Blogs" article, but there are a few other companies out there that seem to be quite confused: eTrade, Pepsi, Dell.
Will Twitter ever be used successfully as a corporate communications platform?
Will Yammer become Twitter's LinkedIn to Facebook?
Chances are, your CEO doesn't have one of today's most popular communications tools, a 博客. But don't despair, almost no CEOs, corporate representatives or journalists in China have one - a blog, that is.
But as for corporations, they are rarely seen in the Chinese blogosphere. Ruder Finn's New York offices were recently graced by some colleagues from our China offices, who provided some interesting views on blogging trends and what kind of impact PR will have on that.
I was impressed with their techno-fluency, as I had assumed the Great Firewall of China would have all but quashed any kind of meaningful online conversation or influence that PR could have on it. As BusinessWeek put it a while ago, the Chinese agencies responsible for Internet censorship employ almost twice as many people as the CIA.
Those agencies have reportedly closed internet shops, monitored usage, arrested bloggers, intercepted emails and texts, deleted online commentary, and blocked companies from entering the market. My colleagues, for example, were particularly disappointed about Wikipedia and iTunes being banned in China, although both seem to have been unblocked at least partially during the Olympics.
The Olympics have shed light on democracy in China, but China has a long way to go before corporations adopt blogging there. However, there are some good signs:
Traffic jam: With China's Internet using population (253,000,000) approaching that of the entire population of the US (303,000,000), there's clearly a huge market to be tapped, and with their top blogs receiving thousands of comments, there is a great interest in the possibilities.
Forums: Popularity of forums like douban (EN (sorta)) have become credible sources of information for product reviews, opening at least some gates for corporations looking to engage consumers in conversations.
Work-arounds: From a political standpoint, euphemisms for blocked words, videos, podcasts, and moblogging have offered Chinese netizens some greater freedoms due the difficulty of censoring such channels.
So, as Beijing Olympic memories fade and the Paralympics wind down, it will be interesting to see whether the world will continue to pressure China to open up. Do you think that PR professionals in China will be able to keep up with the changing trends?
To quickly summarize what happened: Google News, an automatic news aggregator, found an undated article from South Florida Sun-Sentinel and assigned it a current date of September 8, 2008. The article was actually from 2002 and was about the bankruptcy of United Airlines. This "news" was picked up as a current story by Google News and then by an individual working as a "third party content provider" for Bloomberg. So this old story ended up being posted on the Bloomberg network as current news. The sequence of events culminated in massive stock sell-off, stock drop from $12 to $3, and even an explanation from Google News. (See the Washington Post story with a minute by minute coverage of the chain reaction)
There are many angles and questions in this happening that are interesting to point out:
Top destinations do get a chunk of their content from third parties and obviously their standards do not often match that of the destination. Destinations should be aware how the content is being generated much like retail operations should be aware how its products are being manufactured. Also, often the differences and labels are unclear between in-house content, partner content, sponsored content, etc... This makes the situation even more complex.
Google really has to work out the kinks in this technology. Today's announcement of "Google to Digitize Newspaper Archives" was quite untimely. Its alerts service already produces many false leads and backdated results so this technology problem should be fixed.
Social media marketers and digital PR experts have been saying that in this age one person can bring down a brand. Well, this was a close call....
My colleague Yan's recent post on blog commenters got me to thinking about Lithuanian politics, corruption, and corporate blogging.
Allow me to explain...
Comments, to me, are like mini letters to the editor. They empower readers and can often be more beneficial than the content on which they reflect. They drive blogging, provide it with power, and foster online conversation. They're democracy in action!
That was my impression, at least until I worked on a political campaign in Lithuania. Tracking news about my candidates on the popular Delfi news portal, stories often received thousands of comments. I quickly learned that those comments usually come from hired goons who lambaste their targets within seconds of a story's posting.
This was frustrating (to say the least) for high-powered politicians who tracked stories about themselves. What would you do if your competition was out there destroying your image via an unbiased news source? Would you lock yourself in your office for the rest of the day trying vainly to respond to every vile word (like a politician I knew did)?
This is not a healthy or effective solution. There are several "-bilities" to consider when responding (or not) to trolls and cases of flaming online:
Credibility - There are websites out there that allow voting/rating on comments to varying degrees, among them, NYT, YouTube, and Digg. Until this is a widespread means of filtering out irrelevant comments, remember that comments can come from anywhere.
Ignorability - Is bad publicity is better than no publicity? Evaluate whether responding to an incendiary attack will really quell any disputes. Sometimes ignoring can be the best policy.
Meet up (ability) - Other times, ignoring an issue will make it worse. Consider engaging legitimate commenters, as Andrew Revkin, author of NYT blog Dot Earth recently did.
Googleability - Fight fire with content by increasing the amount of Googleable news about yourself. From a PR perspective, this is what you should be doing anyway.
Surely, there are many more avenues to consider.
What do you do when your CEO wants to pull a Rahodeb?
In addition to the ever-growing list of blogger conferences (BlogHer, BlogWorld, Gnomedex, New Media Expo, SOBcon, etc...), there is an interesting trend where loyal commenters dedicated to a certain blog want to get together as well. Certain blogs inspire such loyalty and sense of community that loyal users want to meet each other. Another contributing factor is that blogs tend to cover a certain niche topic so chances are the commenters have a lot in common to discuss. This is just another sign that the top-tier blogs are now established brands that inspire tremendous loyalty both online and offline. Daily Kos (Netroots Nation), Gawker, Jezebel, and Media Bistro all have regular meetups.
If anyone wants to understand a blog then researching the writers is no longer enough. It is also important to know the commenters and their reactions. The writers cater to them and in the case of Gawker Media, even get bonuses by the number of comments generated.
One of my favorite websites, WorldChanging.org recently questioned the nature of the omnipresent Olympic "medal count." The argument is definitely valid. It makes sense for larger and populous countries to be at the top since they have a larger pool of athletes. How can smaller countries compete? If introducing more equitable metrics into this picture such as "Olympic medals per million people" an interesting picture emerged. In this case, the new top-3 are Bahamas, Jamaica, and Iceland. So Bahamas for example got 6.5 medals for every million citizens while the U.S. got 1 medal for every 3 million citizens.
Anyway, this got me thinking about web analytics and traffic expectations. Everyone wants to know what success looks like. This is kind of reminiscent of "how many medals should we expect" or "how many medals per million people to expect." In that case the questions would be how competitive are our athletes and programs? What has the recent performance been like? In the case of a web program the questions would be: what is the target user universe? How compelling is the content/web offering? What is the launch plan? Marketing plan? Viral features? There are a lot of factors here and many of them are difficult to predict.
One key factor here is trying to research and assess performance of similar web properties or web initiatives. The good news is this type of research has gotten a lot easier to conduct with recent Google products: Google AdPlanner and the trending feature (Visitors > Benchmarking) of Google Web Analytics. Both have very robust data sets (Google's data mining of web activity probably plays a large role here). These tools have made competitive research much easier and it is a key factor of figuring out success benchmarks. If there were only similar tools to predict Olympic medal success by country which take demographics into account...
Chances are, your CEO doesn't have one of today's most popular communications tools, a 博客. But don't despair, almost no CEOs, corporate representatives or journalists in China have one - a blog, that is.
