Magnosticism

Companies are all over the map in their embrace/avoidance of blogs and other social media. Some, especially tech firms, have given virtually free reign to their employees to launch blogs and talk directly to customers. Others are paralyzed by concerns over governance issues and the possibility that some corporate blogger will disclose something that doesn’t adhere to corporate policy or catches the probing eyes of the SEC.  

Even the experts can’t agree on how to approach corporate blogging. In the true spirit of this new medium, a curriculum of sorts has organically sprung up for social media marketing. Start with Jeremiah Owyang, a Forrester analyst who posted on the “three impossible conversations for corporations” (1. Asking for Feedback; 2. Saying Positive Things about your Competitors; 3. Admitting You Were Wrong.) Good, solid advice for the social media novice. 

David Churbuck retorted that those tips are way too basic to be useful for most corporate marketers, who he believes are past the Blogging 101 stage and are seeking more advanced education:

This corporate blogging stuff isn’t a two headed chicken in the freak tent anymore. This is mainstream baby. Anyone writing posts about “impossible” corporate conversations has to step it up – talk about the serious stuff, like – contravening corporate policy by privately resolving a blogged customer support issue and having the blogger publically state the solution and thereby set a precedent for all future complaints. Let’s get into that one and you’ll earn my respect.

Challenged to provide his own advice (as someone who lives the stuff daily), Churbuck offered a couple of Blogging 201 primers: one on the risks of a no-questions-asked blogger appeasement strategy, the other a broader list of 10 topics that he’d like to see more discussion about:

1. Tool and platforms
2. Pronouns
3. Metrics
4. Rogue SMM
5. How to do SMM/SEO right
6. Going Uplevel
7. Organizational Ownership
8. One vs many
9. Review mechanism and buddy systems
10. The politics of being a know-it-all

The pundit and the practitioner have both agreed to dig into these and other social media marketing topics over the next few months, which is good news for any marketer trying to get his or her arms around this brave new world of “customer engagement.”

Of course, any curriculum would be incomplete without some backround reading: I’ve provided a bit of that with a dusted-off interview I did in 2005 with Lenn Pryor, who created the Channel 9 website for Microsoft in 2004 that serves as a touchstone for current social media marketing.

If it’s December, that can mean only one thing: an endless stream of Top 10 lists. Some interesting tidbits from Nielsen’s look at what it considers the year’s top media, consumer and advertising trends:

• Top TV Program “Buzzed” About Online: My Name Is Earl (No. 10 on the list: Battlestar Gallactica. Battlestar Gallactica???)
• Top US Market for Adults Who Have Read/Contributed to a Blog within the Past Month: Austin
• Top 3 Consumer Packaged Good Sold in US Retail Stores: Carbonated soft drinks ($17.6 billion), Milk ($12.8 billion), Cigarettes ($7.8 billion)
• Top US Advertiser (by US Spending on Traditional Media): Procter & Gamble ($2.6 billion). Question: Why measure just traditional media?

The full list is downloadable here.

Former CMO mag colleague Constantine von Hoffman has a new blog called Business and Networking, which if you knew Con or follow his other online exploits would immediately conclude that he’s playing it way too straight with the name. Anyhoo, he has a nice post today on the evolution of social networking from standalone site to online feature, keying off a post by Wired’s Chris Anderson. Con talks about the folly of businesses jumping on the social networking bandwagon without considering the need to provide good content as a hook for snagging like-minded enthusiasts:

Content/information that is aimed at a specific — not general — market. People already know where to go connect with everyone, now they need a place where they can connect with someone in particular. But don’t throw up a site and say it’s for Left-Handed Truffle makers and expect the Left-Handed Truffle makers to come flocking to you and provide all the content. Saying you’re aimed at a group is not enough. You have to give that group something beyond the ability to share videos, etc. That something is some sort of information.

As I pointed out a few months ago, I agree that the next big social networking movement will be toward niche/special-interest groups, not full-blown, category-owning destination sites like MySpace or Facebook. And as I noted on Con’s post, businesses can succeed as facilitators for users who share common interests, but they can’t force-feed community to their customer base.

The author of the funniest blog on the planet, Fake Steve Jobs, was unmasked today by the New York Times. The writer is Dan Lyons, a former PC Week colleague who’s now a writer/editor with Forbes. Quoth Lyons via the NYT:

“I’m stunned that it’s taken this long,” said Mr. Lyons, 46, when a reporter interrupted his vacation in Maine on Sunday to ask him about Fake Steve. “I have not been that good at keeping it a secret. I’ve been sort of waiting for this call for months.”

Lyons is now getting plenty of buzz for his efforts. Tech bloggers have turned from speculating on who the author was (pre-exposure) to alternately praising Lyons’ wit or castigating his hypocrisy. Me, I’m firmly in the pro-Fake Steve camp; the writing is brilliant, the posts laugh-out-loud funny. I can’t wait to read the book.

Back when I had a corporate job, we used to tell employees, Don’t put anything in an e-mail that you wouldn’t want forwarded to another person. The blog has streamlined that principle: no one has to forward your blog posts, because they’re already there, naked,  for anyone and everyone to see (and possibly take offense to). David Churbuck reminds us of this in a post about his interactions with a journalist; even though he did a phone interview with the reporter, the scribe found a juicier quote from is blog and chose to use that in the upcoming article. David’s conclusion:

Hence, if I continue to blog in the same voice and tone, I can expect to get quoted saying that things bluntly suck or rock, or that  the best use of Second Life is trying to get virtually “laid”, or that X is a moron, Y a frigtard, and Z a knuckle-dragging mouth breather. This gives me pause, particularly since I tend to put a different filter on my spoken utterances in the presence of a reporting reporter. 

The concept of blog as public record also should give pause to nitwits like this guy, who was blogging anonymously (or so he thought) while he was a defendant in a medical malpractice suit. Apparently he was providing a running commentary of the trial:

In his blog, Flea had ridiculed the plaintiff’s case and the plaintiff’s lawyer. He had revealed the defense strategy. He had accused members of the jury of dozing.

Nice strategy. After admitting under questioning that he was the blogger named Flea, the defendant settled the case the next morning - for what the Boston Globe reported to be a “substantial” fee.

We’re just beginning to see the courts address the issue of libel as it relates to blogs. The Media Law Resource Center is keeping a tally.

Libel, slander, disclosure of trade secrets - those are the things that corporate marketers and lawyers freak out about when deciding whether their executives or other employees should launch a blog. Traditionalists will no doubt use any news of blogger lawsuits as proof points against unfettered corporate blogging.

That’s an overreaction. The spontaneity of blogs provides a refreshing departure from heavy-handed oversight from marketers who expect everyone to stay “on message” and from corporate lawyers who see potential lawsuits around every corner. But bloggers - regardless of whether they’re on their own or representing their company’s brand - have to be smart about what they’re saying and how they’re saying it. In other words, don’t expect that no one will notice or care about what your write because it’s “just a blog.” 

David Meerman Scott has just published his latest book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, and was kind enough to include me on his list of acknowledgements. In Blogistan, that means I am required to link back to his post and also publish the list of all the other bloggers to whom he gives a virtual shout out:

As I told David, I look forward to reading the book and will post my thoughts about it here once I’m done.  

Not a new story, but I read this morning that the organizers of this year’s Pan American Games, the Olympics-like competition among countries in the Western Hemisphere, are prohibiting athletes from blogging from the July event in Brazil. These forward-thinking leaders are also strictly limiting the use on the Internet of photographs and video from the games. Given that the Pan Am Games command virtually zero interest in the United States, I can see why these visionaries would take every step to guard against overexposure. To borrow from a true visionary, the Fake Steve Jobs, what a bunch of frigtards.

PayPerPost, apparently eager to cement its status as the scourge of social media, has launched an affiliate program that will pay bloggers to write items that link back to PayPerPost blogs* blog posts via a “Review My Post” badge supplied by PayPerPost. The company has come under fire since launching its business to commercialize the blogosphere by pairing advertisers with bloggers willing to write about particular topics. (The bloggers get paid by the post - but only if the advertiser approves the content.) PayPerPost recently tightened its policy to require bloggers to disclose that they are being compensated for posts, but this new Review My Post program shows that they still don’t get it.

Aside from the obvious ethical issues around being paid to link to someone else’s blog, the progam also raises the prospect of marketers gaming the search engines by paying to drive high volumes of links to their sites. With this new affiliate program, PayPerPost has taken another big steaming dump in the middle of the blogosphere. Theirs is the wrong model for social media - let’s hope they (and their clients) figure that out soon.

For further reading, Jeff Jarvis has a great post about his exchange with PayPerPost CEO Ted Murphy at a conference last month, including his discovery of the Web-based reality show (ack!) that PayPerPost is making about itself.

Nice piece by David Carr on the addictive qualities of blogging and its impact on journalists and journalism. Because blogging is so personal (even if you’re doing it for your employer), Carr reasons that he has become much more engaged with his readers - so much so that he claims he actually called a frequent commenter who was “off the grid,” traveling in Israel and unable to post to Carr’s blog. He calls the interactions “feedback through a firehose,” and adds this point about the lure of the blog:

Tweaking the blog is seductive in a way that a print deadline never is. By the time I am done posting entries, moderating comments and making links, my, has the time flown. I probably should have made some phone calls about next week’s column, but maybe I’ll write about, ah, blogging instead.

I feel the same way. I can noodle around in my blog for hours, researching the right topic, obsessing over my miniscule readership, trying (often failing) to write something thoughtful. It sure beats doing real work.

I do disagree with one quote Carr offers from Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in the graduate interactive telecommunications program at New York University:

“The speed of conversation is a part of what is good about it, but then some of the reflectiveness, the ability for careful summation and expression, is lost.”

Shirky should read more blogs. There are plenty that are deeply reflective and highly expressive. (See my blogroll for several good examples.)

Carr closes on the topic of Web analytics, specifically on their potential negative impact on news judgment. He quotes Jim Brady, executive editor of the Washington Post:

“The best thing about the Web — you have so much information about how people use it — is also the worst thing. You can drive yourself crazy with that stuff. News judgment has to rule the day, and the home page cannot become a popularity contest.”

But as long as page views rule the roost, that’s exactly what the home page is. Publishing bosses will continue to obsess over traffic numbers as long as they continue as the primary revenue driver. And that’s why you’ll continue to see stories about nipple covers paired with news coverage of the hanging of Hussein’s half-brother in Iraq on CNN.com.

Sony is getting killed for the flog it launched to promote its PSP, called All I Want for Xmas is a PSP. [Sony shut down the site over the weekend.] From one of the site’s “authors”:

Consider us your own personal psp hype machine, here to help you wage a holiday assault on ur parents, girl, granny, boss – whoever – so they know what you really want.

Lame! The gamers figured it out quickly and have posted more than 500 flames on the site over the past couple of days. A sample:

This is retarded. As a gamer who is part of Sony’s target audience I’m insulted not just by the integrity of this website, but that this reflects how intelligent Sony’s marketing department thinks I am. Good job turning consumers off your pr0duct.  

Hey Sony - I own a PS1 and PS2. You have cemented me never owning another of your gaming products. Good job!

You guys are so lame! Don’t you see that this guy is trying to pull a LonelyGirl15 with this blog!! It’s obviously some sony suit guy who wants teens to buy a dead console good for nothing, hello, can you say corporate bullsh*t!!!

and my favorite:

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The gamers have also figured out that all references to advertising or marketing are being blocked, so they are adding spacers and symbols (and vertical text) to get their outrage across. Sony and its agency in this campaign, a “consumer activation” firm called Zipatoni, should know better - especially in light of the recent Edelman-WalMart fiasco. Amazingly stupid marketer tricks.