eastwikkers

A Simple Deception

Another deception is getting play in this New York Times article (as noted in GMSV today). The problem this time is with Wikipedia. In short, a respected editor who used the name Essjay and was supposedly a tenured professor of religion at a private university and an expert in canon law turns out to be a 24-year-old who attended a number of colleges in Kentucky and apparently has no relevant degree.

Most curious, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales initially defended Essjay, accepting the editor’s claim that he’d hidden his identity to protect himself from reprisals for mediating disputes between Wikipedia contributors. According to the NYT article, Wales also stated that the editor “is now, and has always been, an excellent editor with an exemplary track record.” Wales later reversed himself saying that his “past support of Essjay in this matter was fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on,” which really doesn’t at all explain his initial defense or his reversal.

Protecting ourselves by hiding our identity can sometimes be a smart thing to do, and anonymity is often debated in PR. But anonymity is not the same as deception. If I reveal I’ve chosen not to disclose my identity, then it’s up to readers to choose whether or not to take me as credible. I haven’t deceived anyone. Wikipedia’s Essjay lied about his credentials, pretending to have experiences he never had in order to assume a position of authority. The difference is huge, and it’s hard to see what part of this Wales didn’t get immediately.

And what about lying about one’s identity for career advancement? George Eliot? I don’t think so. Actually it’s closer to the fraud perpetrated by Stephen Glass. Essjay was not writing fiction. He was pretending to be an authority on religion, and he used that authority to mediate arguments. Even if Essjay is as knowledgeable about religion as a tenured professor, his readers should have known the truth about what that knowledge was based on.

This deception sits at the heart of social media and our online interactions. How can we ever know that a person or company we encounter on the Internet is honestly represented?  Initially, we can’t. In the offline world, eye contact, a handshake, a feeling we get when we enter a building all help, but even with these, we are often deceived. As more and more of our lives are conducted online, we’ll need to develop new ways of sensing deception, whether through new technology or through social media mechanisms that allow us to get feedback from the crowd – some of these are already emerging (though how can we be sure they are legit?).

The ramifications for PR are clear. Our weapons against a heightened fear of being deceived – and its consequence, cynicism – are more transparency and less hype, a lesson that needs to be passed on to clients as well.

Recommending liberal use of the "a" word*

Hugh MacLeod argues that "public relations is getting social media all wrong," and paraphrases Stowe Boyd: "Please, please, please dont talk about audiences when you are theoretically promoting social media." Boyd is, in turn, paraphrasing Doc Searls. Well, now that you have the family tree, let me make my point.

Boyd offers some good advice:

"Drop the old speak: no more 'audience', no more third-party writing, no more 'wink, wink' complicity in totally false quotes and knowingly working with clients on spin instead of open dialogue. School your clients to do the right thing, not just wrap themselves in a bunch of psychobabble about social interaction with their 'communities' without actually adopting a new mindset."

I differ on only one point. It's a mistake to stop thinking about your audience, and eliminating the word from your vocabulary serves no purpose other than to appease the social media elite. The idea that corporate communications and marketing people are clueless because they use the word "audience" is a popular red herring among anti-traditional communications jihadists. While the dictionary definition of audience might imply one-way communications to a captive and passive group, the concept, properly applied, is a powerful one that is highly relevant in social media strategy. In the corporate world, segmentation allows a company to enable effective communications with its various audiences. These audiences include customers, prospects, shareholders, business partners, employees, developers, journalists, bloggers, securities analysts, industry analysts and other influential groups that the company needs to reach.

Each of these groups has different interests. Securities analysts, for example, are interested almost exclusively in the company's financial performance, and generally don't want to hear about product features or corporate social responsibility. Developers want to know about tools, and the availability of software updates and bug fixes.

By understanding their audience(s), bloggers can engage in more interesting and effective conversations. If I visit the blog of an expert in Service Oriented Architectures and read a post on his experience trying to replace a stolen Blackberry, that might be mildly interesting (OK, it isn't), but would have no value to me. I'd rather learn about the blogger's views on the role of open source in SOA adoption. Unless he is an exceptionally good writer, the blogger who writes about nothing but airports and stolen Blackberries is a narcissist, who has failed to consider his audience, readership, whatever. And I don't care how articulate, funny, or clever a blogger is. If he or she has nothing of interest to say to me, (a disregard for audience), then that blogger and the company are wasting their time and mine.

It's ultimately an argument over semantics. Stowe suggests we use the word "people" instead of audience, which is to me some kind of weird political correctness. And its generic and amorphous, and lead us away from an understanding of who were are trying to communicate with. (Stowe also suggests calling social media users "edgelings," a suggestion I simply can't respond to.)

So my advice is to keep using "audience" to describe a specific group that you want to reach with your communications. It's a useful and well understood term, and as long as you don't actually view your social media as one-way communications to a passive, monolithic audience, you'll be fine. If you do think of your audience this way, you'll wind up saying lame things like "most PR folk are still pretty clueless."

* Portions of this post appeared recently in a post on my personal blog.

Presidential candidate social media at a glance

Apropos of my previous post, Think Progress' NetTrends '08 is a site that has compiled a matrix of all of the social media vehicles currently in use by candidates from both parties. As of today, no Republican candidates are blogging, but this could change. NetTrends '08 is actively soliciting additional links.

I am not familiar with Think Progress, but according to the organization's web site: "Think Progress is a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, ... (which) is a nonpartisan organization. With the blog, CAPAF seeks to provide a forum that advances progressive ideas and policies."

2007: the year of social media in presidential politics

This week Hillary Clinton's blogHILLARY went live, signaling that the social media portion of the 2008 campaign is well underway. Clinton joins Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and ex-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, who both have 2008 campaign blogs. The candidates themselves don't seem to be posting to the blogs. Instead, all three of the blogs take a "community" approach, with posts generally authored by supporters and spokespeople.

We've all seen the power social media has to break a politician. Howard Dean was both made and unmade by the Internet, and Senator Ted Stevens (Democrat, Alaska), not a presidential hopeful, is thus far the politician most mercilessly attacked on the Web, most likely because his ill-conceived "Internet tubes" remarks were about the Internet.

The Democratic Party has demonstrated both a willingness to embrace social media, and the potential to be burned by it. But this year we will see social media-savvy candidates (at least on the Democratic side) backed by social media-savvy advisors, with an awareness of the risks of social media, and blogs and podcasts will have greater influence than ever before in political history.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch reports:

"An online arms race has erupted among Democrats in particular. Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Clinton of New York along with ex-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina are deploying web-based video, social networking and citizen journalism to engage and motivate voters."

It will be interesting to see whether the Republicans can catch up, as they seem to be lagging the Democrats' online lead.  (Full disclosure: I am a Democrat.)

Study finds B2B buyers use and trust emerging media

Ninety-six percent of B2B technology buyers believe that online video and wiki content "have value," and 57 percent felt that blogs were "equally or more credible" than traditional media according to a study done by KnowledgeStorm and Universal McCann.

OMMA Magazine reports (free subscription required) that the study was performed in 2006 and developed from over 13,000 responses. Across the board, respondents indicated emerging media as influential in purchasing decisions, with 57 percent of respondents indicating they were influenced by online video, 53 percent by wikis, 52 percent by blogs, and 27 percent by podcasts.

The data is compelling, though I am suspicious of the claim that wikis influence B2B purchasing decisions, though this is in part due to the fact that I have never made a purchasing decision of any kind based on something I read on a wiki. The survey also said wikis had the second-highest "pass along" factor, with 70 percent of respondents saying they shared wiki content with others, second only to sharing of, you guessed it, online video, with 76 percent indicating that they do so.

The data is interesting, but equally interesting to me, and a bit worrisome, too, is the headline, Marketers Look to Emerging Media. I’m bothered by it because I do not see emerging media as marketing tools, per se, or at least I don’t see social media this way.

Sure, they’re just media, another word for communications channels. And you can use a podcast, for instance, to communicate both executive perspectives and product marketing information, but I see the former as a vastly more effective use of social media than the latter.

Finally, the subhead of the article, "Blogs, podcasts, wikis and online video are key sources of unfiltered data," is also not supported by any data quoted in the article, and I would argue that these media, when used in a pure marketing environment, will quite often be stripped bare of any unfiltered data.

The best application for true social media, which one could argue includes all of the media mentioned in the article, is communications, not marketing. It is the very socialness of social media that makes them so compelling, and it is this characteristic that marketing is so good at crushing.

A personal growth opportunity

Last July I was in Southern California interviewing for a communications position at Disney. (More on that some other time.) I heard Stanley Bing, on NPR I think, talking about his book 100 Bullshit Jobs and How to Get Them, so I bought the book. I didn't get to read much of it at the time, but little did I realize then, the key to my future was in my hands.

I was home sick for a couple of days last week, so I resumed reading the book. I had left off at page 59, "Business Book Author." My epiphany occurred when I reached page 113 and discovered "Executive Vice President, New Media." This is eerily close to my title at Eastwick.

According to Bing,

"Successful new media people are up on all the current bullshit including jargon. Things are 'sticky' or 'platform agnostic,' and new forms of technology appear every day that you need to know about, if only to mention them in random conversation to befuddle people."

I never say "sticky" or "platform agnostic," and I have banned the use of anything "2.0" at the agency, so maybe I'm not really EVP, New Media material. But Bing's book has given me hope that I can grow into the position. Bing, by the way, says he is a senior executive with a bullshit job, which is possibly redundant. His advice: "if a specific piece of bullshit is effective, it's often smart to stay with it."