Some more social media tips and experiences from authors
It was nice to wake up to the lovely comment from my client Andrew Smith on my previous post, the hilarious video of Dennis Cass talking to his publicist about using social media to market his book.
Andrew’s right – Twitter in particular and social media in general are such overwhelming and customizable experiences that it’s really bewildering when you first try to get involved and leverage it for business goals. One of the things I really enjoy about working with authors, (aside from the fact that you can count on them to do some of the writing for you – because let’s face it, public relations is about writing compelling copy in exactly the right way – and then tweaking it and repurposing it and coming up with yet another catchy angle that will help you reach another segment of your target audience) – where was I? Oh yes – while authors (not the ones I work with!) may sometimes be a bit off in the EQ department, they’re rarely slouches when it comes to IQ. Read more »
Social media for authors
While still researching my forthcoming post on book social networking sites, I wanted to share this video with you. Thanks to Sarah Caldwell of Princeton University Press for bringing it to my attention. I think it’ll be required viewing for the next new author with whom I start working – just so s/he’ll be forewarned of the phone calls to come.
Talking social media to PR students
This morning I did my first-ever guest lecture/talk at the post-secondary level, to fourth-year public relations students taking one of Dr. DeNel Rehberg Sedo’s courses at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, NS.
DeNel found me via a guest post I’d done on Kimberly Walsh’s East Coast by Choice blog and a comment I’d left on her own blog, where she’d reviewed Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, The Lacuna. She took at look at my blog and got in touch via email to ask me to do a guest lecture to her class. Once we worked out the time and date logistics (since my East Coast sojourn was back in 1973 and I was pretty sure she didn’t have budget to fly me to Halifax), I stopped procrastinating about needing a computer with more juice, bought a refurbished iMac, and mastered Skype for once and for all.
My first test run on Skype taught me a valuable lesson: makeup required for Skype video because even north light produces glare, and I didn’t want to look like a burn victim with unhealed skin grafts (no offense intended). That meant an earlier start for me, but that’s ok – I didn’t want to scare people or rattle myself (although I have to say, the great advantage of doing an in-person talk is that you don’t have to look at yourself while you’re doing it – at least not after the rehearsing-in-front-of-a-mirror segment of the procedure is over).
DeNel and I agreed to try to keep the experience as technologically simple as possible. I emailed her the link to the presentation I planned to use (which I’d found on my friend Allen Gibson’s blog) so she could run the PowerPoint and I could focus on trying to make sense.
Here it is:
About that 24/7 party going on in your computer: the social media timesuck
I came across this interesting analysis of Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace courtesy of boxcarmarketing (and here, if you’d like to follow on Twitter as well/instead).
While I don’t agree entirely with the analysis by Jeremiah Owyang, former Forrester analyst, now Altimeter Group partner, I couldn’t agree with him more when he says Twitter is ‘being treated like a chat room’ by most marketers, ‘not a marketing platform.’ I do think the SWOT portion in particular is less than comprehensive, and I’d like to quibble about the line re ‘Usage by tech savvy, media, and celebs.’
Why quibble about that? (At this point something I’d written got lost between drafts; I’ve tried to reconstruct it in the rest of this paragraph. Just, you know, to make sense!) It’s not that I disagree that – I’m going to call them geeks, not the ‘tech savvy’ because if you own a computer for personal use you’re tech savvy, media and celebs have the largest number of followers, tweet the most and make the greatest use of Twitter. It’s just that I don’t necessarily think they make the best use of Twitter. Most media outlets still automate their tweets, don’t interact with their followers, and don’t get that it’s an interactive medium. Ditto many celebrities. And the geeks – well – again – there’s a lot of navel gazing and infighting amongst Twitter’s earliest adopters and most vehement proponents. And Twitter’s growth isn’t coming from these people; it’s coming from the non-geeks who are beginning to realize social media presents an opportunity. (That’s not quite what I said the first time but it’s what I was trying to say – and where did it go to anyway – between-draft limbo?)
Twitter’s greatest strength is actually the power it gives the user to customize her/his own experience with the medium. Trending topics notwithstanding (you don’t have to even glance at them), what makes it a brilliant platform is the fact that it allows you to listen to and connect with only the interesting people at the party and pay no attention whatsoever to the egregious bores, the time wasters, the hysterics, the gawkers and the ambulance-chasers (no, I don’t mean personal injury lawyers, I mean the people who thrive on fomenting controversy/scandal/gossip). Read more »
Twitter chats – #askdrstu launching Nov. 24, 2009
One of the best (although sometimes the most technologically frustrating) aspects of the Twitter community is the regular chats that take place. Identified by hashtag (#), there’s #litchat (Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays at 4-5 PM EST, with topics like ‘Continuing discussion of THE CRAFT OF WRITING’), #solopr (a forum for solo public relations practitioners to discuss a wide variety of topics, from the joys and sorrows of working alone to media lists, the bane of every PR practitioner’s existence), #agchat and #onthefarm, two chats that focus on the business of agriculture and the realities of farming in the 21st Century. There’s also #journchat, which brings together public relations pros and journalists. As an information exchange and a positive development in creating greater understanding, #journchat may be one of the most exciting chats on Twitter.
To find any of these chats, log on to Twitter and use your search function to search for them by hashtag (on the far right, under your profile you’ll see a search function – type in #solopr or #litchat). Scroll through the tweets and you’ll discover the chat moderator, whom you can then start following, and the regularly scheduled time for the chat.
When Twitter grinds to an almost-halt, the chats can be a frustrating experience. But that doesn’t happen all that often these days, and the wonderful thing about the chats is the commitment the moderators make to ensure they happen on a regular basis. My hat is off to the lovely Kellye Crane, for instance, who not only organizes the #solopr chat every Wednesday from 1-2PM EST, but ensures she’s got a backup if she’s travelling that day so the chat can continue.
New to Twitter as of Tuesday, November 24 is #askdrstu, a series of five scheduled chats led and moderated by Dr. Stuart Clark, author of the award-winning The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began.
Five chats are planned for 2009, on Tuesdays beginning November 24 at 1PM EST (10AM PST, 6PM GMT). Each week the chat will focus on a different popular astronomy topic. The first relates directly to the subject matter of The Sun Kings: “What level of influence does the Sun have on climate change?” Stuart will share what he’s learned from fellow scientists Henrik Svensmark, Mike Lockwood and : Kalevi Mursula in Bruges, where he recently moderated a debate on space weather and its effect on earth’s climate.
The other four chats are scheduled for December 1, 8, 15 and 22. Subjects could/will include topics he explores regularly in his role as a science journalist: ‘What is dark matter?’ ‘What defines a planet?’, and ‘Why isn’t Johannes Kepler better remembered?’
Whether you’re an astronomy buff or neophyte, you’re guaranteed to learn something by participating in the #askdrstu chats.
And if astronomy’s not your cup of tea, check out the hashtags used by the smart, funny people you follow on Twitter and find a chat that does make you want to join the conversation.
Social media could drive a public relations renaissance
So you’re all up to speed on the new rules of engagement for marketing and public relations and how important it is to abandon control of the ‘message’ and engage with your various audiences (the people formerly categorized as ‘stakeholders’ although this term is now out of favour as well, I’m not quite sure why) and the importance of ‘transparency’ and the fact that you’d better get on the social media bandwagon because at the rate things are going, there won’t be many mainstream media outlets left to whom you can tell your corporate story.
That static Web 1.0 web site you spent so much money on two or three years ago is sneered at and in order to maintain your search engine rankings you feel under increasing pressure to add a blog and feed it with content. Then you have to master Twitter to promote your blog and no one will read your media release unless it’s a social media release which means you’ve got to start shooting amateur video you can post on YouTube and you haven’t mastered Facebook and now you’re being told you need to create a Facebook group page and instead of ever being done with this whole business of communicating so you can get on with growing and running your business, you end up feeling like you’re even farther behind than when you started. Read more »
Spacelocker: The social media train wreck
I signed up for Spacelocker last October because I’m naturally curious and because I’ve been involved in social media and social networking for years now. The site didn’t make a lot of sense to me and I think I logged on to it once after joining. Had I remembered my password, I would have closed my account, because its juvenile graphics and navigational difficulties combined with no immediately clear explanation of its value add made it just another site, and one that didn’t seem intended for – or useful to – me.
I’d had the occasional email from them and ignored it. But I was extremely startled the first week in June to suddenly start getting replies to emails I hadn’t sent, from people I’ve never formally added as contacts to my Gmail account (and people I certainly never added to my Spacelocker account as contacts; I don’t think I added anyone there), asking me where they’d met me or politely declining my invitation to join me on Spacelocker. Ahem. An invitation I hadn’t sent.
My first response was to conclude that my Gmail account had been hacked, but that seemed unlikely. I had an appointment, so I quickly dashed off an email via the contact form (the only way you can contact Spacelocker other than by snail mail in London, England), saying I wanted to close my account but that I was quite sure it had been hacked, because everybody and his uncle and their cat and dog had received an ‘invitation’ from me. Read more »
Social media as continuum rather than ladder
Love this post and the explanations as a follow-on to the previous post querying the directionality of the ladder of social media engagement. What makes it particularly good is the correlation of the newly coined terms to the Forrester/Charlene Li Groundswell terms.
Some nice thinking and writing going on here. Kudos to Leigh Duncan-Durst and Live Path.
Using PitchEngine to create your own ‘agency newsroom’
Since the debut of the social media press release (SMPR) in May 2006, I’ve been exploring various options for tapping into the media-rich potential of templated releases.
No Spin PR has been working on a variety of projects since its unlaunch in November 2008, and has been looking at PR 2.0 press release distribution methods as well as the creation of various kinds of social media press releases (SMPRs). Distribution can be an expensive process, especially if clients’ target stakeholders are global.
While the PR Squared template linked to above may represent the industry gold standard, it’s unusable for me as it comes in PDF format. It also doesn’t address the distribution issue.
Enter Pitch Engine. Not only does it supply all the functionality and features of the SMPR template, it makes distribution a snap. With a single click you’ve sent the shortened URL for your hosted release out via Twitter. With another click you’ve shared it with your Facebook friends. One more click and it’s gone out via Friend Feed as well.
Pitch Engine allows you to post your releases either categorized by brand or in simple chronological order. Releases stay live on the site for 30 days. You can also create a newsroom for the individual brands you manage, although that service isn’t free (it’s currently US$50 a month or US$550/year for this feature).
One of the things I like best about the SMPR is its “News Facts” section. I first encountered these when working with UK companies, who used to put them at the bottom of their releases under a “Notes for Editors” heading, sort of the press release equivalent of a footnote. I’m a bit of a demon about citing my sources (except when I forget and think I’ve found something all on my own, which does occasionally happen, but not often) and still write the occasional research paper, so I love this feature. And I’m enjoying the repackaging of a tradition I’ve always found charmingly quaint.
For me the biggest bonus is the ability to create a media newsroom for my company and add my own branding to that portion of the site. It also means potential clients interested in working with No Spin PR can see samples of my work and get a sense of other clients and whether we’d be a good fit. So welcome to the No Spin PR Media Newsroom. Stop by from time to time. There’s a whole lot more where that came from.
Oh – Pitch Engine also tracks the number of times your press release has been viewed. (Although I hope it doesn’t track my own viewing of the releases because I’ve been rather lost in admiration of my own handiwork and would hate to skew the stats.) And you can subscribe to an RSS feed for an individual ‘brand’ or all the releases from a particular newsroom.
Starting at the top of the social media ladder
While the info in this diagram is old (Q2 2007) and it specifically tracks European social media participation rather than global (and it would be nice to see North American figures at least, and then I always like a breakdown between Canada and the US because – well – I don’t like feeling like the overlooked middle child in a large family), the use of the ladder is an interesting visual metaphor. Some of us, myself included, confidently seem to have started at the top of the ladder and are busily running down it now.
Rearranging the information in percentage terms would actually give you a far more accurate visual representation of the progression of social media usage, I think. I know I had been blogging for a good two years before I ever set up a feed reader system for myself, and since I’m considered an alpha flickr user, I was creating content from the very beginning of my involvement with social media. I’d also argue that social media has been in existence for well over a decade now, and that Twitter has its roots in chat, but I’ve already talked about that elsewhere.
I’d be interested to know in the comments if you started blogging before you started seriously reading other blogs or not. I have been known to try to operate machinery without reading the instruction manual too.
Hat tip to United BIT for the diagram and its post on the subject.
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