Znetlady: Modern Media

Have Tool. Will Visualize

Ooooh.  We love visualization.  It is, after all, one of the six mega trends* we encourage our clients to live by.   As you might expect, we spend a fair amount of time on ManyEyes. 

ManyEyes allows the entire Internet to upload all kinds of data and turn it into beautiful, elegant and sometimes surprisingly insightful pattern pictures.  Lots of different kinds of patterns available to you as well and all from our friends at IBM. ManyEyes goes one step beyond great visualizations turning them into social media through its rating and discussion features.  The home page at ManyEyes has an up-to-the-minute gallery of visualizations – check them out.

We encourage you to start thinking about how to visualize your stuff – make it more meaningful and you might even surprise yourself about the insight you might see inside your data.  So, to help you get your visualization ideas flowing, here are a few other favorite visualization tools.

Newsmap – visualizing the Google news aggregator.

Amaztype – a typographic visual search of Amazon 

We Feel Fine – a somewhat addictive set of visualizations of feelings from all over the web.

Have tool. Will visualize.

*all six mega trends are: connectivity, personalization, mobility, sharable media, visualization, virtualization.

Original Post: The Modohood: http://modohood.marcominteractive.com/2008/11/have-tool-will.html

Goodbye, Mary: When Social Media Goes Campaign-y

This video is a beeeautiful illustration (satire) of why social media is not "a campaign." 

When you integrate social media you are “socializing” your media.  That means there is more than just “you” involved in it. It means there is some kind of  “we” in it.  It means a relationship (community) begins.  Why waste it?

credits:  video by Scott Blaszak

Original Post:  Enterprise Social Media: http://freshtakes.typepad.com/enterprise_social_media/2008/11/goodbye-mary-wh.html

Social Media Relations: Five Best Principles

This is a series of five posts to help you embark successfully on social media relations.  If you are hoping that you’ve found a quick “best practices” checklist, keep searching.  This is about creating a foundation for practicing social media relations.  Growing a new practice area requires an investment of a bit of time, but the payback is you’ll be exceptional at it.

This series is about best principles.  There are only five of them, they are actually quite simple and they will help you crystallize your social media decisions and practices.

These are article length posts.   They are full of the good (if not always sexy) stuff the professional communicator needs to start effectively practicing social media.  I hope you stick around for a read.  I welcome your comments, questions and ideas – but please speak quietly here.  We’re thinking.

Before moving on to the principles, let me first clarify the importance I assign to best principles over best practices.

Best Practices versus Best Principles

First, best practices are of limited value because they are “local.”  Meaning they only really apply to a specific organization with its own combination of organizational culture, people, needs, budget, resources, and most importantly, its individual specific goals.  Changing any one of these elements to fit your own situation removes a fundamental element that made them successful.   By way of illustrating my point: Spain’s annual Running of the Bulls event works beautifully in Pamplona, but won't transplant very well to Times Square in New York City.  Likely not a good set of best practices to build your next event around.

Best principles are universal.  These are the fundamentals from which appropriate best practices can be derived.  For example, one of the United Nations ten best principles is “business should support the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights.”  How that principle is best implemented will be quite different in each region of the world within each business.

Focusing on best principles means that as media tools change you aren’t out scrambling for new best practices.  Strategies and tactics built on social media best principles will translate when blogs morph into social nets, when social networks move from the web to the mobile phone – or into virtual worlds.  In other words, the platforms won’t matter much – the principles will hold true. 

Working inside of principles mean you create the best practices that fit your organization or situation and thus, have far better success for your efforts.

Although there is no official global body declaring social media best principles, the five I offer here are based on lots of years of experience in new media in the enterprise and have proved to be excellent guideposts in this era of shifting media practices.

Principle 1:  Go For Insight (because spaghetti is messy to clean up)

The most important thing you can do for “doing” social media is to get insight.  It will help you sell yourself - and your management - on exactly what about your communications you need to modernize.

Stop worrying about learning every new tool, site or technology.  Spend your valuable time gaining insights into those you should be using (not because it’s “cool”).   Pick one or two of those social media tools and start using them.  Doing so will lead you pretty quickly to any others that are important to your goals.

So, let’s go about getting social media relations insight with something every communications professional is intimate with – the news media. 

Even if you don’t depend directly on the news media in your practices – it simply stands to reason that whatever changes they are employing it is because their audience behaviors have changed.  Which means by extension your audiences’ behaviors are changing.   If the mass media is doing something differently, shouldn’t we look at it closely?

By following what media is doing you’ll organically be lead to where to start or expand your social media strategies.

With that, here are five key resources to use to help you go for insight.  Picking any one of them will tell you what you need to be doing.  Embracing all five?…a pathway to being an expert.

The Annual The State of the News Media Report
It is 180,000 words of pure wisdom brought to you by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.  The 2008 report is fully, freely available at a dedicated web site and conveniently broken up by media type: newspaper, local versus cable tv, online, magazines, radio, ethnic media, and network tv. An overview gives you the highpoints, and  “A Year in the News” gives you perspective on the important trends in just the last year. There are special reports on the changing newsroom, public attitudes, and the future of advertising.

The repot tells you things like:

“Aggregators like Sphere, Technorati and Newsgator help news sites keep up with the wave of online content that could be helpful links for readers.”

Here are a few other insights I randomly pulled out of the report:

"In 2007, there also are signs that Wikipedia is evolving into a new role: 'news source.'"

“A snapshot study by the Project found the top stories on popular user-driven news sites – Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us – were very different than those of the mainstream media.”

“Fully 95% of the top 100 newspapers included blogs from reporters in March 2007, up from 80% in 2006.”

“User sites like Digg have turned the tables on traditional media by allowing visitors to choose and share what they define as news.”

These few pull quotes alone point to tools that might be important to your communications.

Besides a deep look into the news environment, you can also get some snapshots of the opportunities. It tells you where news holes are.

“News consumers may have had more choices than ever for where to find news in 2007, but that does not mean they had more news to choose from. The news agenda for the year was, in fact, quite narrow, dominated by a few major general topic areas.”

Their chart accompanying this statement:

News Topics by Media Sector:

 

This is one speakes volumes: 

Public Interest versus Media Coverage.

In every case, the public interest outstrips the media coverage of the topic. 

That might be an “ah ha” moment as to the growing importance of alternative methods of getting news.

The PEJ gives you no excuse for not reading their report.  It’s well written, broken into digestible chunks.  You can print by chapter or page, it’s in Spanish, there are executive summaries or you can get a full PDF. 

Packaged insight for free, yet priceless.

Pew Center for the People and the Press
The two resources here you will likely find most relevant in your pursuit of insight is the Center’s People & The Press surveys and the Media Surveys.  These reveal the public’s attitudes toward media, what they are interested in as well as their usage of media.  You have access to the datasets, the surveys, news interest indexes and commentary.

Use it to find trends, news opportunities, those areas readers need information but are not being filled by the mainstream media and most importantly, how readers are getting information and filling news holes.

Valuable insight for the clicking.

“My Friends Could Be Dead”
With the unfolding story of the Virginia Tech shootings dramatically illustrating its thesis, iFocos identifies a dozen sweeping changes to how individuals and society as a whole experience media.

“The 800 reporters from the world’s news organizations who descended upon Blacksburg, Va., on April 16, 2007, to cover the shootings of students at Virginia Tech quickly discovered an inconvenient truth. Though remote, Blacksburg was hardly isolated. Students, educators and citizens reported the horrific events first-hand through long-established digital and social networks. The news reached the outside world well before the television crews found their way to the Blue Ridge. The story unfolded on the Internet and on cell-phones, the personal and preferred means of communication of an always-on generation. The story was in their hands.”

The report is a dramatic example of the growing citizen journalism movement and of how personal media empowers and defines communication in our connected society.

In “My Friends Could be Dead”, iFocos chronicles the Twitter microblogging of freshman Kevin Cupp on that day, which begins: 

“Trapped inside Pamplin, shooter on campus, they won’t let us leave.” 

Kevin is webmaster of the student-run news site Planet Blacksburg, and whose work was used extensively by mainstream media, as well as shared and redistributed throughout the world.

The twelve sweeping media shifts the report identifies and discusses are:
•    Media Catharsis
•    Social Networks: The New Local
•    Contribution Culture
•    Real-time Sociology
•    Derivative Myth Debunked
•    The News Spiral & The Organic Story Arc
•    The Manic Mainstream
•    Responsible Disclosure
•    A Place for News to Happen
•    SnoozePapers
•    Democratization of Media
•    Proliferation of Sources

“My Friends Could be Dead” is a project of iFocos’ Random Acts of Media initiative.  RAM is an emerging image gallery documenting media usage throughout the world.  It is digital ethnographic research collected from a network of global contributors.  RAM uses the research to report on the behaviors of a culture immersed in media.  Insights, observations and reports attached to the images often lead to more comprehensive research. 

iFocos is a media think tank and the organizer of the We Media conferences.  It is in partnership with The Associated Press and The Integrated Media Systems Center at the University of Southern California.

This report is a free PDF and is only 14 pages.

Moving and insightful.

Poynter Online
The Poynter Institute is a school for journalists, future journalists and teachers of journalists.  Their website is a veritable playground of resources giving you insight into news media practices and the technologies and formats they are using.   Plenty of insight into readers is also to be found here.

Just one of those insightful resources is Eyetracking the News: A Study of Print and Online Reading.  This is fascinating stuff from the design side, but more importantly for you, it is a rigorous study of what attracts attention and what doesn’t.  And this is scientific research that helps the pros make decisions about editorial and advertising.

“Do readers follow teasers? How deeply are they reading into the text? In what order do they look at photos, headlines, graphics and info boxes? And how do each of these vary from print to online?”

Check here for more golden insight for you to use in providing both the content and the formats that editors are looking for.  The findings in this report can be applied to your web site, blog or other content formats as well. The report (book) is currently $39 (U.S., reg. $60).

An ongoing feature at Poynter is WebSpeak that helps journalists learn the lingo of online news.  It can help you too – plus get insight into interesting ways to get attention or provide content for the new media landscape.  For example, last March WebSpeak had a segment on slideshows, highlighting a program called Soundslides.  This software program has become a standard tool for journalist-produced audio slides shows that may include interviews, natural sound, narration by a reporter or photographer, and/or music. 

Poynter also sponsors NewsU, an outstanding collection of free online courses (I've taken a few, so speaking from experience).  There are more than 60 of them covering things like insights on visual journalism, multimedia storytelling and ethics.  A new course about to be launched is called Beyond the Inverted Pyramid: Creating Alternative Story Forms - Write, edit and present information that engages time-crunched readers.

That title alone should tell us a thing or two about what journalists and readers are looking for in media today.  Even just a periodic perusal of the offerings at NewsU will provide insight into the shifts in media practices.

Or, follow the NewsU blog.  A recent post is all about Twitter, that seemingly everywhere micoblogging site, and how it is supporting serious journalism. 

Insight for the taking.

Cyberjournalist
This is another rich resource that gathers in one place a variety of commentary, news, tips and tools about Internet journalism specifically.

Cyberjournalist.net has a list of about 350 blogging journalists, a blogger’s code of ethics, a primer on RSS (really simple syndication) and other resources that tell you what journalists are tapping into.  It will even link you to the Cyberjounalist group on Facebook (FB login required).

Online media insight.

Taking the time to gain a little insight will save you social media meltdown, frustration and your sanity.  These resources will give you enormous amounts of it, informing you where to start with your social media relations initiatives.  Maybe more importantly, it will give you the fodder you might need to sell social media into your organization.  Every manager wants to know how “we can do it better” and these resources are huge signposts.

If you go where the media is going, you’ll be supporting your outbound communications strategies while prioritizing the tools you need to bring into your tactics.  And, you’ll be learning about what any audience wants from their media source (that would be you).

Of course you have targeted audiences you want to reach, and there are lots of other insight resources, but this is an excellent place to start, devoid of the noise out there.

Next post covers the best principle “Edit for More, Not Less.”  And watch for the three principles to follow:  Go Where You Will Touch People, Make Everything Shareable, and Everything You Need to Know About Social Media You Learned in Kindergarten.

Note:  I apologize that the comments were unavailable for early readers of this post.  If you are returning I hope you add your thoughts.

Rehabilitating Znetlady

I'm resurrecting this sleeping, archived blog. I've got other blogs.  One is about virtual worlds. One is new - about the liquid beings we call avatars.  One is my observations about new media in action in the marketplace.  Another is a fun collection of quotes heard out in the mediasphere.  And my newest to be launched next week is commentary on organizations embracing collaborative media and its disruptions.

But, Znetlady is me.  It's my quiet place.  My place to sort out the horrible increasing cacophony, this unfathomable urgency surrounding social media.  As more agencies adopt social media as a practice, newcomers vie for a stake in capturing it as a differentiator, professional organizations rush to offer conferences, and as practioners get increasingly strident in the "who gets it/who doesn't" diatribe, I'm retreating to this place.

Social media is finally on the radar for enterprises. Market forces have proved to them it is something with staying power.  They embraced the web.  They'll embrace Web 2.0.  These are my clients - and I feel for them trying to sort through the noise.  Hell, I live and breathe social media and I get the urge to crawl away more-than-periodically rather than deal with managing the noise.

So, I’m returning to my virtual quiet place to rehabilitate my ability to do social media thinking.  I return here to rehabilitate my belief in it.  I return here to think - away from the endless shouting.

Join me if you like.  We'll speak quietly if you don’t mind - and I'm up for long silences so we can think together.

Think of Modern Media as a Product

One of my mantra’s to clients is to “look sideways” to find opportunity.

There is so much modern media that hasn’t made it to the drawing board (or has yet to be discovered) for most organizations.  Based on our modern media presentations and client discussions, many organizations are still in the stage of learning about blogs, podcasts mobile media, social networks and the rest (trust me on this).  You, like so many we talk to, might be seriously considering how to use these tools for your PR or marketing; or you might be one of those organizations that for a whole host of business reasons and hurdles can’t move forward any time soon with the “conversation model.”

Serving your audiences with modern media doesn’t have to be about putting yourself “out there.” Just look sideways and you can find audiences and serve them with modern media - or even create new services within your existing PR or marketing initiatives.  Yes, you can be modern without blogging or putting videos up on YouTube.

A few examples of using an iPod for something besides creating a corporate podcast might better illustrate what I mean by “looking sideways.”

• The recently opened 21C Museum Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky asks guest about their music preferences during the reservation process and a custom music selection is downloaded into each guests’ in-room iPod before they arrive.

• The Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, in partnership with Samsung Electronics and Talpa, recently installed kiosks called “Fuel for Travel” that lets travelers load up their MP3 devices with music, t.v. shows, movies, guides and audio books before boarding their flight.

• Nordiska Kompaniet in cooperation with Ridderheims (fine meat and delicatessen products distributor) has put the iFood terminal in Nordiska Kompaniet’s upscale food hall in Stockholm.  The terminals let visitors purchase and download audio recipes to their iPods.  They purchase the recipes – and of course all the ingredients – while in that all-important “frame of mind” moment.

All three of these put a modern medium to use to extend the brand, engage the modern customer, and  provide a valuable service/solution.  And, it can even be a new revenue stream. 

Try looking at new media as a product.  It might help your organization side-step the hurdles or fears of going ”conversational.” And, it just might wind up changing other perspectives too.

Stop Conversational Marketing

I dislike the term “conversational marketing,” If your new media consultant is using it, please find a new consultant.  If you read it in a trade publication, assume the author is repeating something he/she thought was cool (and then take what they say with a grain of “buzz” salt).

If you are exploring the world of modern media for your public relations or marketing,   I sincerely hope you won’t use “conversational marketing”, or worse, shape your thinking or strategies around it.  In using the term you may sound very “Web 2.0” but you’ll be seriously damaging your thinking, your public relationships, and your efforts toward perfecting a new media strategy.

I’m not putting anybody down here.  I admit we are all searching for words to describe the indescribable - this massive expansion in the reach, methods and pervasiveness of human connectedness and how we successfully respond to it in our businesses.  But this term is just wrong.

It is being used all over the place today to describe a marketing methodology/campaign by which a customer can “talk back” or “participate” with a company.  Mircosoft used the term in 2001 or 2002 to describe their “speech server” which automated and “improved” companies’ telephone customer service through voice recognition.  We all know how well that is going. But, I digress.

Conversational Marketing is an oxymoron.  It implies we are manufacturing human interaction.  It screams a hierarchy in communications. It practically ensures one of us is going to be manipulated in the “conversation.”  And, if your customers hear you refer to your “New PR” or “New Marketing” programs or campaigns as “conversational marketing,” it’s over. 

“Conversational Marketing” is not the way to success with your new media initiatives!

Conversation - Absolutely.  Conversational Marketing - No!

Your modern marketing and communications is about connecting people to each other.  That doesn’t exclude you, but it definitely doesn’t put you or the brand at the center, either.

Friends, your publics don’t need you to structure the “the conversation” nor do they need a contrived invitation from you to “talk back.”   They are doing it all over the place.  The bigger question is are they doing it with you or without you in the conversation?

If you want to get your thinking around the role conversation plays in marketing, read this article published by Accenture, written by Brain A. Johnson and Paul Nunes.  It uses that dreaded term (unfortunately), but in the context of the person engaging in customer conversations rather than as a tactic.  While this article is rooted in 2002 and can’t specifically address the much deeper opportunities (or technologies) we have just 4 years later, its key concept is vital in approaching today’s new(er) media and connected customer: “discussions with customers are in the end “polyogues” - complex sequences of monologues and dialogues among numerous relevant parties.“

A couple of other key concepts from that article:

…”technology enables companies to interact intelligently with customers across time.” (my emphasis)

--“Gaining an understanding of the mechanics of good conversation can help business become more than just good companies - they can also become good company.”

…“ good communication is based on reciprocity.” (emphasis mine)

By way of offering an olive branch to those I may have offended, I do understand that the “conversational marketing”  term is used to attempt to encapsulate all those prophetic truths about marketing and PR found in Cluetrain Manifesto.  But, words shape our thinking as much as our thinking shapes our words.  This term is wrong and the thinking is dangerous. 

Defecting from Google: New Search Tools for Relevant Searches

I’ve had this uneasy feeling for several months now – feeling like something is missing from my relationship with Google.  I admit I’ve been going around Google for quite some time, frequenting other search engines, indeed non-search engines - to find much more relevant results.  Last week I became so disillusioned with Google, I was shocked to find myself making another web site my Firefox home page.

Have you noticed Google isn’t giving us the “best” results anymore, meaning the most relevant to you (they are certainly search-friendly results!)?  Are you left feeling a bit frustrated or empty after trying to locate a really good resource on some topic? 

Or maybe you are frustrated that you are a really good resource on a topic and that Google just doesn’t see you that way?

It seems the most important Thing anyone writes for on the web is Google – not the People who are, in fact, their audience.  And with everyone chasing Google’s secret algorithms, I do wonder if it is the content or Google’s results that are becoming less relevant to me.

Klaus’ post at ConceptBakery  got me to thinking about how I find relevant information, but more importantly, just how many better methods I have for finding what I’m looking for on the Web.  To start, I use specialized wikis, and Wikipedia, the grand dame of wikis.  I create RSS feeds for keywords, search terms or concepts I need to follow.  I subscribe to reliable bloggers.   I use del.icio.us and Blogmarks tag clouds.  I use news aggregators and dedicated news search engines.  I use IceRocket and Technorati (among others) to find blogs on particular subjects.   I frequently use the tags or categories on prolific blogs like Gizmodo and Micropersuasion because I can find and browse posts on a particular topic that point me to sources.  I even use “blog rolls” (lists of other blogs that a blog author reads) to find topic-specific blogs. 

The point is, ‘social search’ is becoming an extremely valuable way to find “human relevant” content.  Of course I still use Google, but other tools are become far more important to me.

I know that there are many people who don’t know how to use the search tools I mentioned and that I can breezily take flight to.  I can leave Google without worrying I’m missing something, but not everyone has the tools or even the knowledge that these tools exist.

Since the primers I post here are among the most read, I have decided to do a few posts on how to use these important - and relevant - tools for search.  Maybe they will help you get unglued from Google as a primary source of search – and discover tools and a whole new world of relevant content.  If you have a great new way to find relevant information, chime in and point us in that direction.

What is a Blog? How Can I Use a Blog?

I am cross-posting this from my Modern Mediasphere blog

Blogs are the every-person’s publishing tool.  The simplest definition of a blog - or weblog - is a personal, topical web site that is frequently updated.  Corporate executives, journalists, marketers, freelancers, advertisers, politicians, and citizens of the world have taken to publishing blogs, moving them from personal journals to a modern influential media form.

Estimates of the current number of blogs might surprise you if you aren’t tuned into the blog-o-sphere. One hundred million worldwide and growing at a rate of about one new blog per second.  Creating a blog is fast, and is as easy as filling out a web form.  But what makes them so alluring – and powerful - is blogs’ social nature, their populist culture, and their immediacy.

In short, blogs are a channel that is totally remodeling the flow of information.

Blogs have a set of features that distinguish them from a traditional web page – but keep in mind these features are not about the technology.  These characteristics turn a simple web page into a social network, a lone voice into an influential one and a local conversation into a global one.

The four features, in particular, that distinguish blogs are:

Posts: A single blog entry is called a post.  Posts are often short, are conversational and time-stamped, displayed with the newest post on top. The time-stamps create a sense of proximity to the writer for the reader.

Syndication:   This is the “motion potion” of blogs.  Blogs are automatically syndicated through a feature called RSS - “Really Simple Syndication.” RSS is a tiny bit of code embedded in the blog that allows readers to subscribe to an automatic “feed” of all blog entries.  As soon as an author posts a blog entry, the post can be "pulled" by the subscriber.  Subscribers receive these posts through software integrated into their web browser or through a separate application called a “news reader.”  RSS also makes it possible for blog content to be distributed automatically onto other web sites or blogs.

Comments:  Each post invites readers to comment via a small web form immediately under the post.  Comments are published with the related blog post. Blog readers can read both the author’s posts and the comments of other readers.  The author is notified when a comment is posted to their blog.  Blog authors may comment back, or enter new posts.  Comments keep the conversation moving forward on that individual blog.

Trackbacks:  The conversation continues among blogs too.  Trackbacks interconnect blogs.  A trackback is a method for one blogger to publish a special type of post directly onto someone else’s blog. It works by entering a post on your own blog, then entering the URL of your post into the trackback feature of another blog.  Your trackback post, and the link to it, is published on that other blog.  Authors are notified when a trackback link is entered into their blog.   Trackbacks intertwine multiple blogs and conversations.

There are a few other common features that categorize and organize blog posts and link blogs or web pages together, but these are the four that have turned the flow of information from broadcast media to conversation commons.

What Does it Mean?

Blogs are at least as significant a development as the printing press was – and more so because of their interconnectedness and social network nature.  It means we – all of us – now hold the keys to the information kingdom.  We no longer rely on mass media for our news, information, or gossip.  It means anyone can publish a globally accessible channel in seconds. 

Blogs are disturbing every form of business communication. Blogs have already had a profound effect on mass media and consumer behaviors.  Traditional TV and print media outlets as well as individual journalists are creating blogs.  Consumers are blogging about everything from politics to mothering; using blogs as a complement to mass media and as a trusted source to check on mass media.  Even executives of Fortune 500 companies have started blogging to ensure their company’s story is told in the worldwide conversation and to personally engage constituents.

Blogs are a communications fact of life.  If you join in, the conversation is happening with you.  If you aren’t involved, it is happening without you and about you.   And, being in the dark is not a good competitive strategy.

What is it Good For?

Understanding the power of blogs requires that you blog.  It isn’t something to simply study.  Try Blogger, Typepad, Bloglines, Blogstream or one of the many other services, and have your blog up and running in less than 5 minutes for free or nearly free.      

In the meantime, here are just a few blogs selected from the 100 million or so.

• The writers of the hit TV show, Grey’s Anatomy, are blogging; talking directly to their fans and offering it as a gathering point for its fans.  It is a fascinating case study.

• General Motors’ Vice Chairman is blogging to engage customers, but also as a way not to leave the last word to mainstream media reports, according its author, Bob Lutz.

• PR agencies like Edelman, Ogilvy and Hill and Knowlton are blogging – mostly about the changing communications landscape.

• 101 Cookbooks, by Heidi Swanson, is a chronicle of a cookbook collection. She is a photographer and cookbook author whose website is a blog – a well-read one, with nearly 700 other sites linking to hers.  She has sponsors, markets her classes and her own recipes, and offers an opt-in newsletter.

• McDonalds' Open for Discussion blog focuses on the company's social responsibility initiatives.

• Charlene Li, a Forrester Research analyst, blogs about how technology is affecting content delivery, media and advertising.

• Major broadcast and print media, like CBS, NBC, Business Week, and The Wall Street Journal to name a few are using blogs as a way to provide additional content. 

• Overheard in New York.  Two New Yorkers have gathered bits of overhead conversations and published them on a blog.  They now have thousands of submissions – and have just published a print book of selected conversations.

Find more at Google Blog Search or Technorati Blog Finder.

So, what are blogs good for?  Almost any type of communication.  The trick here is that this is two-way communication, not a controlled website.  Blogs are both the talking part and the listening part.  Blogs are good for taking part in the marketplace conversation, the political conversation or your industry conversation. 

Here are a few ideas to get you going:

• Publish your newsletter online as a blog.  The syndication feature will build readership, and provide your readers a way to join in.

• Establish your expertise by publishing a blog on a topic you are passionate about.

• Publish industry thought leadership articles to a blog.  Search engines like blogs and this is a way to increase search engine visibility and distribution.  You don’t have to wait for or pitch them to the industry rags.

• Use blogs internally to keep everyone apprised of ongoing projects.

• Create an “ideas” blog on which team members can create an archive of best practices or good ideas.

• Create a citizens blog around a community issue.

• Create a non-public blog to communicate with a client or contractor on the progress of a project – it is easier to organize than email and creates a chronological, time-stamped archive.

• Create a “blog event” by inviting guest experts to post on a specific topic during a particular week or month.

• Create a photo blog on which you publish pictures of a special event, for ongoing team building, an archival history of a project, or a  “behind-the-scenes” peek.

• Use a blog as a pointer to topical resources for your clients or internal teams.

• Market yourself!

From here, it is up to you.  The conversation about how to communicate with audiences has changed.  Audiences find you.  Be where they are - the blogosphere is one of those "places."

Forrester Research: Social Computing Report

Grab the opportunities.

Forrester Research says we are in an “era of social computing” in a report released last month titled, Social Computing: How Networks Erode Institutional Power and What To Do About It, by  Chris Charron, Jaap Favier and Charlene Li.  The thesis of the report is that today institutions - corporations, media, governing bodies, etc. – have less influence over us and individuals have more. 

A quote from the report via Steve Rubel:

“Individuals increasingly take cues from one another rather than from institutional sources like corporations, media outlets, religions, and political bodies. To thrive in an era of Social Computing, companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists.”

Yes. And no.

The “yes” part is what companies have to do to thrive in today’s business environment:  weave in communities, socialize their marketing, and equalize communications rather than sermonize.

The “no” part is individuals have always had more influence on us than institutions, it just wasn’t as visible to us as business people, and the individual’s reach wasn’t wide. 

The significance for business today is that we can hear the influence, see it, follow it, measure it.  And, individuals have access to lots and lots more individuals they can influence due to their ability to communicate and publish via networks.

The significance of social computing is business opportunities, innovation opportunities, marketing opportunities.

Without networks business was largely working in a vacuum, making products and spending enormous amounts of money creating markets for them.  Now, we make products and services that answer market needs and cost less because we have access to markets and to their behaviors.

Access your markets by letting them access you.  “Social computing” are the tools.  Grab the opportunities.

I encourage reading the report, or at least the executive summary if you don’t want to spend the $299 for the full report. In it Forrester pulls together trends in behaviors that have been evolving over the last 15 years and that are now reaching critical mass.

New Media Training Launched

It has been a little quiet here on my blog in recent weeks.  I have missed posting, but we’ve been working diligently on creating a training program for marketing and communications pros on using new media tools.  We are calling it the Modern Mediasphere™ Training Series

These are actual hands-on classes in how to use tools like blogs, tags, social networking, RSS and more.  I found after asking “what is it?” most professionals can see the opportunities. They just don’t have the time to dig around and discover how to use the tools.  So, we are offering classes to bring people up to speed quickly by guiding them through the tools and giving them tips on getting the most from them.

We are offering the training in 11 cities in the U.S.  If you want more information start here.  Yes, we are still offering our seminars, as well.

Now that we’ve launched our training program, I will be back to more regular postings.  Thanks for staying tuned!