A Cutting Edge Focus on Social Media for Business was the thrust of this week’s Ottawa Network event, but while each of the presenters offered useful insights on the abrupt paradigm shifts in customer and media engagement driven by Web 2.0, what struck me was that no matter how much some things change, they remain the same.

Chris Biber, president and CEO of SearchingWorks, started off the evening by reiterating that social media, be it Twitter, Youtube or a blog, is simply another set of tools in the marketing toolbox, while marketing itself is simply the “consistent application of common sense.”

It all begins of course, by taking the time to research and understand your customers. Who are they? Where are they? What interests them? And what are their needs and expectations? The same basic foundation that’s always been a requisite for an effective marketing program. The difference now, of course, being that social media allows for a much more candid and informal two-way flow of communication between company and customer.

But this is a conversation that cannot be dominated by a “me, me, me” approach. While companies and brands can make themselves part of the conversation and attempt to direct it, they can’t expect to control it. Nor will their audience respond favourably to anything that is blatantly self-serving or promotional.

Rick Radko, president of R-Cubed, drawing on his software-engineering background, took a different perspective and focused on the application of social media as an internal, rather than external, communications tool set. From online tools for document sharing and collaboration, to wikis, Rick talked about how “Enterprise 2.0″ is becoming the norm for organizations with teleworkers and remote offices, to keep staff in touch and part of a common corporate culture.

In particular, Rick touched on using a wiki to keep staff informed on everything from new corporate directives, to who down the hall is offering to car pool. It’s the digitization of that ubiquitous cork board that adorns staff lunch rooms everywhere, plastered with pushpins and dead-tree notices.

Lastly, Natasha D’Souza, founder of Virtual EyeSee, talked about the distinctions between the social media release, versus the traditional news release, an example of which she offered for a recent Mother’s Day event she held. As her example illustrates, the social media release tends to be less formal and directly addresses the intended audience. It also moves up the contact information and incorporates multimedia elements to support it, from pictures, to video and links to other relevant sources of information.

Two things in particular struck me about the structure of a social media release and how she used it.

First, is the volume of supporting content that can be added, in terms of pictures, video, links and so forth. In the good ol’ days of tree slaying, a comprehensive package such as this was called a media kit. Is the social media release, in its fully realized form, in many ways not simply the digitization of this traditional public relations tool? (Editor’s note: Actually, long before the term “social media release” was ever coined, savvy PR practitioners have been offering their contacts multimedia-rich content. And we’ve been hosting or delivering that content via electronic channels for decades. The web has made it easier for practitioners to do it all themselves but there are still some media formats — broadcast-quality b-roll, for example — that you probably don’t want to host yourself.)

The second point came when one attendee asked Natasha how she distributed this social media release. And this is where another classic and intrinsic element of marketing and PR came in. She researched the influential bloggers in the Ottawa area who would be interested in her Mother’s Day event and contacted them to pitch the event and direct them to her release. Proving once again that they’ve yet to come up with a social media tool that is a suitable substitute for hard work and old-fashioned solicitation.

Technorati Tags: public relations, marketing, social media, blogging, Twitter, wiki, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0

BBC technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, posts an interesting piece on the dot.life blog about the slating of the new BlackBerry Storm by English comedian, Stephen Fry. No, this wasn’t part of a stand-up routine, but rather a series of messages on Twitter, where Fry apparently has a following of thousands.

I note Fry’s comment at the end of the post, essentially stating that he thought one of the results of the Net and social networking has been to make everyone more equal in their influence. But has this truly been the case?

Certainly in Fry’s case it is partially true, but while his newfound influence in the field of gadgets and consumer technology can be attributed in part to the social networking revolution, it is also true that he is a man who had a considerable public profile before the Internet was even considered a medium of any significance.

The web and its associated technologies have certainly given a voice to millions, but in terms of real influence, the masses still invariably turn to those who have commanded attention beyond the four walls of the internet.  Of course there are some exceptions to the rule, but the notion that we all have equal influence is generally only as true online as it is in the world at large.

Technorati Tags: social media, Internet, BBC, Stephen Fry, BlackBerry Storm

All right, just to make sure everyone is caught up and on the same page now, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did not have a heart attack over the weekend.

But all it took was a bogus posting to CNN’s online citizen journalism portal to demonstrate once again just how viral the web can be and and sucker punch Apple’s stock price. This has sparked plenty of commentary and navel gazing today about the risks of allowing average citizens to break so-called “news” without their scoop first being subjected to scrutiny and third-party verification. Check out Scott Karp’s take on how this was a failure of open systems and Matthew Ingram on how this was not a failure of citizen journalism.

This incident does reinforce the importance of trusted and reliable sources to bring us news and information that has in some way been confirmed and verified. The fact that CNN’s citizen journalism site, iReport, allows such misinformation to be uploaded and broadcast to the world, should serve as a wake-up call that content that’s been judged in some way is more important now than ever.

Sure, the nature of the web allowed this false report to be corrected as quickly as it was initially broadcast. But that’s irrelevant. For a period of time, those who were paying attention believed the CEO of a major publicly traded company was in a potentially life-threatening condition, with the hit to Apple’s stock price only the most obvious example of the chaos that can quickly ensure from such misinformation. As Karp says, such uncensored citizen journalism is an open invitation to those with malicious intentions to manipulate the public for their own ends. And the intent doesn’t have to be malicious for damage to be done. Someone with the most honourable of intentions can do similar harm simply by being wrong.

Of course, there should be a distinction made between eye-witness news – such as providing an account as a bystander or participant, or capturing on video a disaster or other dramatic event –and broadcasting unconfirmed rumours or outright lies. Even in this always-on world, we still need gatekeepers of some sort to make that judgment call.

Technorati Tags: citizen journalism, media, Steve Jobs, Apple, news reporting

Is it surrealist to blog about blogging? It’s not my intention, but should this post turn into an Escher-esque experience, I’ll ask you to please bear with me.

There has been considerable media coverage in recent days about corporate blogging and blogging as it pertains to B2B marketing. Forrester, a well respected technology analyst firm, recently released a study analyzing the role of blogs in b2b marketing and survey results that indicate, “The number of business-to-business (B2B) firms that started blogging in 2007 plummeted compared with 2006 as corporate bloggers ran into roadblocks stemming from a misalignment between invested effort and expected returns. Rather than cross blogging off of the marketing communication list, B2B marketers would do better to embrace one of the four strategies prominently used by bloggers to attract readers, build conversations, and engage community members in sharing their experiences with their online peers.

Four Blog Strategies Produce Community Marketing Value

Strategy One: Be A Conversation Starter, Not A Spoiler

Strategy Two: Make Blog Content Entertaining, Easy To Digest And To Use

Strategy Three: Connect The Dots Between Events And Community Involvement

Strategy Four: Invite Thought Leaders, But Coach Them On Community Etiquette”

According to The Leading Edge, a PR technology trends blog, “infrequent and boring content” is what ails the high tech companies that responded to the survey. This blog has some interesting statistics from the study and I would encourage you to visit the link above to find out more.

The bottom line is that blogging, like any other marketing activity, should adhere to best practices. Those companies that are not deriving value from this particular communication channel are probably not meeting all of the challenges inherent with utilizing a new method of communication to reach customers, influencers and prospects. Since blogging was the “hot, new thing,” you would be hard pressed to find a company that hasn’t at least considered hopping on the bandwagon and starting its own blog. Those that are likely to be successful, though, are the ones that carefully considered the reasoning behind the blog, the objectives that the companies were hoping to accomplish by starting their blogs, and how this channel could support their full range of marketing activities.

Coming up with fresh, intelligent, conversation-starting blog posts with regularity can be challenging, to be sure, but whether the effort and potential return on investment are worthwhile is a question that each company must answer for itself before diving headlong into blogging.

Technorati Tags: blogging, public relations

One of this morning’s newsletters directed me to a fellow blogger’s post on all of the silly reasons you don’t need PR. The post was written with the blogger’s tongue firmly in cheek and had me chuckling, but I’m sorry to report that, silly as they may seem in this context, we hear these points all too frequently as arguments against the business case for engaging with a PR company like ours.

Today on MediaBistro, I was directed to a piece on Portfolio’s web site that talks about WashingtonPost.com’s tinkering with its links on several microsites to enable instant pop-ups of additional data on mouse rollover that doesn’t necessitate leaving the site. This is nothing new to those of us familiar with WordPress blogs as the Snap feature currently used on this site and others does the same thing. Some grumblings in the media about the glut of interactive content on online news sites fly in the face of the theory I introduced yesterday in my post about online news and the process being the product. Is this indicative of a widespread dislike for too much dynamic content or a holdover of viewing the new media with old media sensibilities, the very point of the Buzz Machine article that spawned yesterday’s post?

I read an interesting blog post today at Buzz Machine on the changing nature of the media. The post illustrates that news, unlike in the print-only days, has mutated online such that it’s a collaborative endeavour best summed up by the following Marshall McLuhan-esque line from the article, “In print, the process leads to a product. Online, the process is the product.”

The post has a number of charts and diagrams to help illustrate this point and it did get me thinking with the axiom that with online media, the process is the product. Indeed, since I began my career in media relations close to a decade ago, generating media coverage has changed considerably. It used to be that this was a clearly defined process and that once the article had been published, that was that. Now, with the organic nature of the web, a variety of other voices can be added to the piece in the form of comments, opinions, corrections, links, and any other range of inputs.

Well-known technology blogger Om Malik stated a month ago, “I have often said that the real value of blogs lies in the intelligence embedded in the comments.” and perhaps it is fair to extend this to online news as well - the news isn’t in the news itself in the traditional sense, but in the conversations that it starts and the resultant collaborative coverage as a whole. If indeed this is true, the challenge then becomes managing one’s brand and messaging as other inputs raise their voices and add to the conversation.

Technorati Tags: Om Malik, Buzz Machine, Online news

In case you missed any of these posts the first time around, here’s a roundup of everything we published this month.

Francis
India a challenging but promising market, entrepreneurs hear
inmedia’s “Team iPhone” triggers productivity crash
It’s easy building green

Danny
Do social networking sites play a role in B2B PR?
Tools are great, but they can’t do PR!
Checking out the Scottish Technology Showcase
Top business mags embrace social networking

Linda
Bulldog Reporter weighs in about online newsrooms
Best practices for your online newsroom
Providing the media with the tools they need to cover your company
Database maintenance
Components of an integrated PR program: Media monitoring

Jill
When and how to inquire about editorial calendar opportunities

inmedia
Not all journalists are angry
Major publisher of technology media titles declares bankruptcy

Peter Kemball
2008 Canadian budget a boon for entrepreneurs

Technorati Tags: public relations, PR, media relations, B2B PR, B2B public relations, online newsrooms, press center, iPhone, social networks, 2008 Canadian budget, Ziff Davis bankruptcy

Since writing my last post about social networking and PR, I have learned about recent social networking tie-ins involving two of the world’s leading business publications, Fast Company and Business Week.

Fast Company kicked things off earlier this month, with company president, Edward Sussman, stating that it was “the first major media website to tackle the following problem: Can a business publication blend journalism and online community to create something better than either by itself?”

And then there was this week’s news that Business Week is partnering up with LinkedIn, the popular networking site for business professionals.

Both deals show a keen interest on the part of major media to broaden their horizons to include social networking. Great to see this kind of positive response from the top tier of the media sector.

Technorati Tags: social networking, social networks, social media, business media, business magazines, business publications, journalism, online community, Fast Company, Business Week

Supported by the recent news of AOL’s acquisition of popular social networking site Bebo for $850 million, it is clear that the phenomenon continues to be considered an influential and valuable market segment.

And there is little doubt that social networking represents a significant new marketing channel for consumer-oriented products companies. Indeed, there are already many strategies and approaches out there advising on just such a topic, and viral marketing has never been so popular as a result.

But what does it mean for the B2B sector? Are social networking strategies an important PR component for companies selling enterprise software solutions or new server technology?

Well, we’re probably not talking Facebook or Bebo here. As far as I’m aware, these sites don’t yet host large groups of CIOs swapping tales of ROI and disaster recovery strategies.

But social networking extends beyond the realm of those well-known sites, and there are networks catering to members holding virtually every job description known to humankind.

Still, although such networks do present opportunities for PR professionals, any strategy to target them should be carefully considered. You can’t join a networking group and then start spamming everyone with your news releases… well, I suppose you can, but you won’t be in the group for very long!

A consumer product company will seek to generate excitement and interest for its products among social networkers in its target demographic, and a B2B vendor must seek to do the same. And in doing so to a (usually) well-educated and (almost always) sceptical audience, the approach and method must be well thought out.

As with contributions to conventional media outlets, companies seeking to influence such networks must present value to the audience and should not embark on blatant pitches for business. Providing relevant, interesting and thought provoking content is key.

Social networking is all about sharing - and this philosophy must be upheld by those seeking to take advantage of it.

Technorati Tags: social networking, social networks, public relations, PR, B2B public relations, B2b PR