Business Blogging

I find it frustrating that, over a decade since Blogger.com launched, public relations people are struggling to understand blogs. The same old questions keep popping up: How do you define a blog? What makes bloggers different from journalists? How do we deal with bloggers?

The line separating traditional media websites and blogs has become so blurred that the word ‘blog’ itself is a meaningless label. It’s practically impossible to say categorically what is a blog and what isn’t, because there’s no robust criteria that you can apply to make that differentiation.

Instead of trying to pigeon-hole websites, we need to look at them a little more intelligently and find a way of grouping them that is useful for PR people. Rather than trying to draw a line between journalists and bloggers, it makes more sense to understand that in the current media landscape we’re dealing with a wide range of different influencer types which all have different expectations of how PR people should engage with them.

What are a website’s most important attributes?

What do you need to know about a website in order to start building a relationship with it? I think there are two key questions you have to ask:

• Is the site’s content created by professionals or consumers?
• Does the site have broad appeal or is it focused on a specific niche?

Of course, these questions do not have absolute answers. Many sites sit somewhere in between being professionally produced or being entirely user generated (increasingly we see a combination of the two). Equally, ‘broad appeal’ and ‘niche focus’ are not binary values, but opposite ends of a scale.

We can visualise this by plotting sites onto a chart. If you want to give it a fancy name, we can call it the Online Influencer Engagement Quadrant…

I’ve thrown a few well known websites onto the chart where I think they should fit, but these are just my estimations – your mileage may vary.

Professional vs User Generated Content

At the far right hand side of the horizontal axis, we would place sites which are professionally generated and most likely form part of a broader content distribution network including TV and print (e.g. BBC, The New York Times). On the far left of the same axis are the sites which are entirely based on user generated content with minimal editorial oversight, like discussion forums and social news platforms (e.g. Digg, Reddit).

In between these extremes are all the sites which don’t clearly sit in one camp or the other: Sites which are written by non-professional writers, discussion forums which include some editorial content, editorial sites where there the user comments make a significant contribution to the overall balance of the site, and any other sites which balance professional and user generated content.

Broad vs Narrow Focus

Sites are positioned on the chart’s vertical axis according to the scope of their content. Those which publish content with broad appeal (such as general news) are at the top and those which focus tightly on a specific niche are towards the bottom.

Obviously it will take a little judgement to decide where a site fits best on the vertical scale. For example, Wired is clearly a tech focused site but it is still broader than tech sites such as Mashable or Gizmodo which cover much narrower niches within tech.

What use is all this?

The primary point of doing this is that it lets us, as PR practitioners, start looking at websites in a more constructive way. Once you’ve identified the websites where your target audiences are found, you can think about where those sites fit onto the chart and then use that information to help guide your engagement strategy.

Up at the top of the chart are sites with a broad general interest. While they’re more likely to have a larger audience (BBC News gets as many as 10 million visitors a day) you are probably going to need a really strong story to get any interest from them.

Towards the bottom of the chart the sites are more focused on niche topics, and it’s safe to assume that so long as your story is relevant you will stand a good chance of getting some coverage or instigating a conversation.

Sites which lean towards the right side of the chart are more likely to be staffed by journalists who are used to dealing with PR. Towards the centre they are more likely to be amateur writers who probably do not often get contacted by PR and will need to be handled accordingly. Bear in mind that they will often be running the site in their spare time, making little or no money from it and won’t follow the same processes as a professional media organisation.

Sites on the far left of the chart will be driven entirely by communities rather than journalists and require a completely different approach to traditional media. A good start is to talk to the site admins to get an idea of what kind of partnerships they might be looking for.

Conclusion

This is in no way intended to be a conclusive framework for classifying websites, just a suggestion for how PR execs can stop getting wrapped up in semantics and start looking at sites in a way that has more practical use. If you’ve got any thoughts on how to improve it, drop them in the comments box below.

Ten years ago I was a technology journalist reporting on the rapidly booming, and then rapidly collapsing, internet industry. It was an interesting time – almost overnight the internet went from being an amazing, game changing technology that could seemingly generate massive profits out of thin air, to becoming the stupidest idea in history that only a fool would invest in.

Then, about five years later, everybody realised that the truth was probably somewhere in between these two extremes, and the internet might just be a good idea after all. A few years before the internet boom, bust and bounceback, analyst group Gartner described this behaviour pattern as a “hype cycle” which looks something like this:

I’m starting to wonder if we aren’t following the same path with the social media boom. I’m not arguing that social media doesn’t have a huge amount of potential for brands, but it does sometimes seem like the people who are talking it up the most are often the people who understand it the least.

Perhaps the best indicator that things are starting to get a bit out of hand is that self proclaimed social media experts (who remind me a little of glassy eyed self help gurus) are now a running joke in the industry. The acerbic Sean376 is currently pricking inflated egos all over the social media obsessed PR industry, and I’m seeing ever more articles like “The 5 signs you’re talking to a social media douchebag”. And let’s not forget this gem.

It’s all funny stuff and it cuts a bit close to the bone, which is the sad thing. Just like the web-cowboys in the nineties convinced ignorant company execs that a few pages of HTML would turn their ailing brands into dotcom cash-fountains, social media charlatans are overpromising and under-delivering all over again. Once companies realise that their shiny new Twitter profile isn’t going to make them hundreds of millions overnight, like it did for Dell, then the whole industry tips just a little further towards the Trough of Disillusionment.

Maybe it’s unavoidable, maybe being at the mercy of the hype cycle is the price you pay for working in an interesting industry. My gut feeling is that we’re not close to the peak yet, and my reasoning for this is that we’re only now starting to see significant numbers of brands investing in social media activity.

Based purely on my own speculation, I suspect that over the next 12-18 months we’ll see a rapid increase in businesses focusing on social media marketing, although I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess at what happens after that. Hopefully businesses will get enough value from their early experiments to consider the investment worthwhile, so that a backlash is avoided. But if a lot of companies are left wondering why social media didn’t deliver as promised, we’re all in for a rough time.

Recently I’ve been researching the various tools that are available to help businesses manage their Twitter accounts. We have now reached a point at the agency where we have a number of consultants working collaboratively on Twitter accounts for numerous clients, so we really need to look at using something more sophisticated than TweetDeck.

HootSuite and CoTweet are the two obvious contenders in this area. Both tools provide a browser based console that makes it easier for teams to work together on one or more Twitter accounts, but there are some clear differences which I think make them suitable for different roles.

CoTweet has some good workflow features, which help you to assign responsibilities to team members and stay on top of responding to comments and enquiries. This makes it ideal for organisations which want to use Twitter for customer service and need to respond to a large number of enquiries in a timely fashion.

HootSuite doesn’t have the advanced workflow features of CoTweet, but it does offer an excellent reporting feature which provides detailed analysis of how the Twitter community responds to web links you’ve posted. From a PR and comms perspective this is great stuff. Most people working in the social media space are obsessive about measurement, so this kind of detailed, real-time stats reporting is like gold dust. One small issue is that the detailed stats only work if you use HootSuite’s built in URL shortner, rather than something like bit.ly, but this really isn’t much of a a problem.

Obviously everybody’s going to have their own requirements for these kinds of tools, but after spending some time investigating them both I’m leaning towards HootSuite as the best system for managing PR activity on Twitter.

If you’re looking for a good, free tool to monitor brand mentions in social media, let me hook you up with SocialMention. As well as providing you with real-time search results from a range of social media sources, the site offers on-the-fly sentiment analysis. I’ve looked at several sentiment analysis tools over the years, and in my opinion they’re all next to useless – natural language processing technology just isn’t good enough to do the job yet. But that doesn’t stop people trying to sell sentiment analysis tools to technically illiterate PR people who probably aren’t going to pay too much attention to how well it’s working – so long as the system outputs some nice charts they can show their boss.

That said, SocialMention’s sentiment analysis seems to be as good as you’re likely to find at present, and it’s completely free. The site also provides email alerts, which I’m sure a lot of people will find useful.

There are a couple of caveats: I’ve found the site to be quite flaky at times and I presume it’s still very much under development, so I wouldn’t recommend relying on it for anything critical. Secondly, I don’t know what SocialMention’s business plan is, but I imagine that if it’s going to survive the site will need to start charging for premium reporting tools or something along those lines – so don’t expect it to stay free forever.

Regardless, I think it’s a great site, so I hope they manage to fix the reliability issues and find a way for it to survive as an ongoing service.

I just wanted to flag up a fantastic piece of research we’ve just finished at immediate future that we’re calling “The Truth About Twitter“. After spending a bit of time looking at how brands are using Twitter for PR and marketing campaigns, we decided that there really wasn’t enough good quality research available on what’s really happening in this area.

So, we compiled a list of 140 of the leading UK brands (and a few global brands with a UK presence) that are currently on Twitter and spent a lot of time looking into how they use the channel, including such details as:

• What kind of information they post on Twitter
• What kind of tone they use
• How often they update
• How they’ve customised their Twitter pages
• How long they’ve been on Twitter
• How many followers they have, versus how many people they’re following

The research enabled us to produce a pretty comprehensive report on how brands in all market sectors are using Twitter, what’s working and what people are getting wrong. It’s a pretty hefty report, but it’s well worth a read and you really won’t find anything as detailed as this anywhere else – it’s completely free to download from the company website: http://www.immediatefuture.co.uk/the-truth-about-twitter/

In between all the usual client stuff, I’ve spent an awful lot of time over the past month or so working on a white paper/e-book about how PR and marketing people can incorporate Twitter into their wider communications strategies. I know there’s already quite a lot of stuff out there on this subject, but I’ve tried to create something that goes into a lot more depth and provides practical, usable advice on how you can start making the most of Twitter for your brand/clients. We’re quite proud of it in the office, so I hope other people find it useful.

It’s completely free and you can get a copy from immediate future’s website here: www.immediatefuture.co.uk/twitter-for-pr-and-marketing-professionals/ – all you have to do is send an email to the address listed on that page, and we’ll ping a copy right over to you.

OK, so it turns out that I don’t have time to regularly update this blog in addition to all the stuff I’m doing at immediate future – most of the subjects I would have covered here are now more appropriately discussed over at the company blog. So for now I won’t be doing much here until I can think of some areas of discussion that don’t conflict directly with my company blogging.

In the meantime, why don’t you check out my latest post on measurement in online PR.

I’m going to be posting on my agency’s blog a lot more often from now on, although hopefully I’ll still find time to update here occasionally too. My first post at the immediate future blog looks at the phenomenon of re-tweeting.

One of the biggest changes I’ve had to get my head around during the transition from journalism to PR is that these days I have to produce content in Powerpoint instead of Word. I have to be honest and say that I’m still not so great at producing kick-ass presentations, I’m just used to communicating ideas in big long wordy documents, not slides with fancy diagrams and very little verbiage, but I’m learning all the time and I hope I’m getting better at it.

Anyhow, the point of all this is that I think this is a fantastic example of how to do a presentation with few words (I like it all the more because it’s about space exploration, and I happen to be an geek).

If you’re registered for any of Google’s services and have recently tried searching whilst logged in, you’ve probably noticed a big change in your results – the addition of a few extra icons. These allow you to make use of Google’s newest toy, SearchWiki, and I think they might be the first step in a significant change to the way we use search.

Users of social news services like Digg and Reddit will be used to the concept of marking up and down – if you see a story you like, you mark it up and it rises up the page, if you don’t like a story you can mark it down and it falls lower down the page. Using the wisdom of crowds in this way, social news sites are able to display stories which are more likely to be of interest to the majority 0f their readers, while the less interesting stuff gets relegated to the bottom of the page or discarded entirely. And, of course, what makes it all so much more fun is that everybody can leave their own comments on each story to share with other users, which often results in some lively discussion (or trolling and flamewars, if that’s your bag).

This isn’t exactly what SearchWiki is doing – you can mark up the search results you like and remove the ones you don’t (as well as leaving comments on individual search results), but this will only affect the results you see if you perform the same search in future, it won’t change the results other users see. At least not yet. I’d like to think that this is the first step of a social search experiment that could filter into the mainstream. Imagine the results produced by Google’s increasingly sophisticated algorithm being refined by the collective intelligence of billions of users helping to promote the best results and demote the worst.

Sure, there are a lot of potential problems to think about (the spammers will have a field day trying to figure out how they can abuse this idea) and others have tried before with no great success, but Google already has the momentum and resources needed to make this work.

What makes me think Google is looking in this direction? If you scroll down to the bottom of a results page while you’re logged into Google, you’ll see an option to display ‘all notes for this SearchWiki’ – this will allow you to see how many other SearchWiki users have marked up or down all the search results on that page as well as any comments they have left.

All it needs is a fairly simple option to display your search results so that the ones with lots of votes are at the top of the page, and you’ve pretty much got a functioning social search tool – half Digg, half Google. I’m not promising it’s going to work any better than plain old algorithm based search, but I’ll be really interested to see how it plays out.