Znetlady: Modern Media

Advice to Motrin: Put the Ad Back Up and LEAD

Replace it maybe, but Motrin should have not been so quick to take it down. 

If you have no idea what I’m talking about – see my Harper’s Index style post on the dust up.  In a nutshell, Motrin released an ad that got lots of attention over the weekend while offending some in Motrin’s target market.

If I were advising Motrin, I would have advised them to keep it up, but to jump on the opportunity immediately to lead and manage. Turn it around on a dime into a conversation about 1) what was offensive (content or tone); 2) why; 3) are they addressing an issue for baby wearers correctly – but in the wrong way; 4) are there other issues they should be addressing; ….and here is the big one:

5) LEAD the vocalizers into solutions for Motrin and maybe ultmately into helping Motin shape a better campaign (which might be suitable for carrying forward into print and offline). 

Taking the ad down from the Motrin web site is meaningless from a practical standpoint – the ad is up on YouTube as are the inevitable response videos.  I downloaded a local copy to use in presentations. It’s out there. Taking it down doesn’t mean a thing.

Leave it up and do the postmortem together. Get out of crisis communications stress mode.   Manage and most importantly, lead your customer.  So much more value could be gained from that than taking it down could ever.

Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester believes the conversation wasn’t so robust that it would adversely affect Motrin in searches.  I say that is short-sighted thinking (and a disappointing analysis to read from Forrester) - the equivalent of “we dodged a bullet.”  Motrin didn’t dodge a bullet, they angered some of their customers and, in the perception, betrayed a trust.

What is especially worth noting to all marketers is that the Motrin campaign is being characterized as a “social media campaign.”  But it wasn’t really intended to be.  It was "just" an ad on their web site.  But socialized media certainly turned it into a "social media campaign" - and really fast.

Original post:  http://freshtakes.typepad.com/enterprise_social_media/2008/11/advice-to-motri.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.

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.

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!

The Grok Factor. One Answer To Should My Company/CEO Blog?

Grok - a word Robert Heinlein gifted to our lexicon in his book, Stranger in a Strange Land.  It is such a great word - it expresses something we simply didn’t have a word for until he penned it.  It means understanding something so very completely that it is absorbed into oneself.

Millions and millions and millions of people grok living online.  It is simply a part of them; how they think, live, work, play, socialize, satisfy their curiosity, plan, buy.  “Google” is an everyday concept.  Step back for a moment and look your at own online, and otherwise connected, life habits.

We, as professional communicators and/or executives, who so grok “demographics,” “consumer behavior,” “audiences,” or “shareholder value” are truly facing the biggest shift in our culture since the Industrial Revolution began - and this one is happening a whole lot faster than that one did.

If you can just take a second and let that fact seep into your skin,  you'll agree, yes, that we really do need to go through this exercise of learning new tools.  We have to truly grok this “web thing.”  It is where our opportunities lie.  It is where our business lies.  It is where literacy lies.

You want to be effective.  You want your organization to thrive.  You want to be literate.  So, how do you start really “getting it”?

Blog.

Oh, yes.  I can see that look in your [rolling] eyes - just hang in with me.

You can’t know ice cream until you eat ice cream.  It isn’t more or less like chicken.

It’s impossible to understand a culture until you understand the words it uses, because its words express the concepts that a culture knows.

If you blog, you will understand the culture you are living in right now.  You will “get” Web 2.0 - beyond the “web site.”  You’ll understand social networking.  In a very short time,  you will grok what all the hype and buzz is, and what your colleagues (or I) can’t just tell you.  You’ll get where your opportunities are.

Blog about anything.  Blog about something that interests you - flying, cooking, kids - or blog little nothing thoughts you have - or even your ToDo list.  Audio blog if you hate typing.  Video blog if you love your video camera or, if words fail, create a photoblog (upload photos instead of writing words).  There aren’t any rules.

Just blog something. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck simply learning the mechanics of all these new tools. You won’t get what makes people tick online, and you can’t be effective if you don’t “get” them.  You know that - you wouldn’t be spending time on figuring out “target audiences” if you didn’t.

After that, you can practice with all those new tools you are hearing about -they’ll make absolute, perfect sense.  But until you “get it,” learning a new set of skills will be the awful, hollow chore you probably think it is now.

Robert Heinlein, when asked about the meaning of his book, Stranger in a Strange Land,  replied that he wasn’t “handing out neatly packaged answers to lazy minds.  [...] anyone who takes that book as answers is cheating himself.  It is an invitation to think - not to believe.”

Don’t cheat yourself.  Blog.  Just for a little while.

Tagging – What Is It Good For? – Part 3; Eighteen Ways to Use Tagging in Your Communications and Marketing

So, just what is tagging good for practically?   Hopefully Part 1 and Part 2 laid the groundwork for finally answering this question, discussing how tagging is shifting online searching and is a growing and powerful way to both organize and share web documents.  Now, the next step is putting it to practical use in your communications or marketing.

My last post reviewed specifically how tags work at del.icio.us and Technorati, but those concepts are much the same for all social bookmarking sites and tag search engines.  More and more online services are incorporating tagging. Dating sites like Consumating.com uses tags on dating profiles – you tag your own & others are able to tag your profile.  Evdb.com uses tags for worldwide events and venues. InfoWorld editors tag articles.  Dinnerbuz.com shares favorite restaurants via tags.  43Things.com uses tags for goal setting.  And, Amazon is experimenting with tagging in a concordance feature that shows the 100 most frequently used words (tags) in a book – and by clicking on a tag in the “tag cloud,” Amazon will display the sentences in the book that contain that tag word. 

The point is tagging is for finding and sharing stuff.  It is redefining all types of online search.  And, since search is increasingly important to all of your communications, media relations or marketing efforts, it’s time to start learning about tags, experimenting with them, and incorporating tags into your communications strategies. 

Here’s a start with eighteen practical ways to use tagging. While they will help others find you and streamline how you find important information, you might even find tags help you organize and find your own “stuff.”

• Search on social bookmarking sites for tags related to your organization, brand or industry.  If one exists, subscribe (via RSS) to those tags.  This is an easy way to track what people find valuable in your industry, what people are saying about you – even to spot potential customers, channels or marketing opportunities.  Start at del.icio.us, Blogmarks, Shadows, IceRocket and Technorati.  Also check out Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 (in beta).

• Look closely at the  “related tags” to your most relevant tags.  It’s very likely you will find unexpected perspectives or uses of your brand or content.  Use the insight to develop both tagging and communications strategies. 

• Watch for changes in tag clouds on social bookmarking sites.  See one here.  The size of the tag suggests what’s popular.  Use it to detect trends.  If you look sideways, you might even find some interesting clues for innovations in your markets.

• Tag your existing web content at social bookmarking sites with appropriate tags.  If a tag doesn’t exist, just create one.  Don’t forget to subscribe to it, so you will know what others are tagging with the same tag.  And, do look periodically at how the related “cloud” is developing around your tags.

• If you have a blog, tag your individual blog entries, as well as your entire blog. Check if your blog software supports categories or has other tagging capabilities. IceRocket and Technorati will use your blog category feature to tag your blog entries at those search engines.

• Use a blog as a newsroom and post your press releases and news items – and tag them.  Blogs are an easy way to incorporate tags immediately, as noted above, many popular blog services have category or tagging features that are then used by social bookmarking sites to include in tag searches.

• Use tags to organize your web site’s press releases, articles or media resources.  This is an easy way to guide journalists, analysts, customers, or investors to organizational or topical content that might be overlooked at your web site.  Point them via your web site to the relevant tag link on your chosen social bookmarking site(s) and show them the same content but organized by tags; and don’t be afraid to expand on your own content by adding bookmarks to relevant content on other web sites.

• Ask journalists that cover your industry if they are using tags.   A few are using them as a way to accept pitches as an alternative to email, as are some influential bloggers.  While this practice is not yet widespread, journalists are subscribing via RSS to tags and keywords to research and find story ideas.

• If a favorite journalist is tagging their blog or has a social bookmarking tag, subscribe to it via the RSS feed for that tag.  An easy way to follow what the journalist is interested in, writing about, or following.

• Create a set of “private bookmarks” and advise journalists what your tags are and invite them to subscribe.   When you update your bookmarks or content with tags appropriate to that journalist, they will be notified via RSS.

• Use social bookmarking and tags to create an ongoing “library” for your email (or RSS) newsletter readers. You will be creating a valuable growing resource for your readers – and they can also contribute to the “mind share’ by adding relevant resources.

• Use tags to gather and organize resources for customers, distributors or partners.  These can be public or private tags, but this makes it incredibly easy to organize and share reports, articles, whitepapers, data sheets, industry research, etc. that may be stored all over the web by simply tagging appropriate web pages.  Link to the social tag from your web site, intranet, or extranet.

• Contribute links to existing tags that point to relevant content on your web site or blog.  Do not engage in “tag spam!”

• Use tags on your internal blogs and web-based resources, extending your organization’s “corporate memory.”

• Create special tags for your presentations or training sessions.   We find this especially helpful for our seminar participants.  We gather all the resources discussed. such as web sites, studies, tools, etc. into one easy place for the attendees to reference post-event.  Attendees can also add resources they know of or find later, initiating a community among your attendees. 

• Create a “news aggregation” site relevant to your customers, brand, employees or partners by combining tags and RSS.   Use RSS and tags together to gather, filter and then automatically publish news or content items to a page on your web site, blog or intranet.

• Tag staff and employee profiles on your intranet related to specialized skill-sets or knowledge or experience.  This could be an unexpected boon to training, identifying internal experts, or maximizing internal resources.

• Use tags for your personal bookmarks and research.  Because tags are so much more flexible than browser-based bookmarks, it makes it easy to find relevant resources you might otherwise “lose” in your “Favorites" lists.  You can tag them with more than one tag, allowing you to find content evoked by differing circumstances or needs.  Plus, because they are stored on the web rather than your own computer, you can get to them from anywhere – including mobile devices or someone else’s computer.

There are countless ways to use tagging.  The important thing is just to start using them - your own ideas will soon surface.  I invite you to share your own ideas for using tags here via comments.  I’ll be adding more ideas in other posts - check for them in Categories here; look for the tagging tag!

Check Yourself Against Six of the Signs of PR Atrophy

PR Atrophy Sign 1:  Your PR universe consists of Print, TV, Radio, Web site and Email.

“Make way for a generation of storytellers who get it”: my favorite line from the MediaCenter’s report on the Future of News.  The photo of the young man holding a PSP belies the actual message – that We (that means you) are dead-center, in the middle of that future.   It is swirling all around us.   Look at the way you gather information everyday. 

Somehow, we don’t translate the way we live our lives – running to the Internet for news, recreation, or connection; mobile devices, our condiment of choice; consuming information on-demand, always on, and in an array of formats – into the way we practice the craft of communicator.

The media universe is expanding:  Internet radio, streaming, podcasts, RSS, mobile phone, blogs, citizen journalism, wikis, mobile TV, photoblogs, self-publishing.  Content everywhere.

A little stretching is in order.

PR Atrophy Sign 2:  You believe the Internet is downstream from Mainstream Media (MSM).

July 7, 2005, A  blogger’s entry begins, “The entire London Underground is closed…. Being blamed on a “power surge”…. Curious.” 

Moments later.  “Update.  A bus exploded in Russell Square.” 

And then, “Skynews is reporting '90 casualties' at Aldgate…” 

What has to be the iconic image of the recent London bombings - shown in hundreds, if not thousands of “mainstream” publications and broadcast news - was born of a mobile phone, posted and reposted on moblogs, then to WikiNews. SkyNews, a UK online news site, picked it up and from there it went to the AP, print media and everywhere else in the mediasphere.

Online news sites and blog search engines were overloaded by people in urgent search of the latest news in London that day.

And, the next day the “mainstream” news was filled with stories - and hard-core realization - that citizen journalism is "The Media."

Mainstream media woke up that day. 

Are you awake?

PR Atrophy Sign 3:  You’re sure blogs are a fad and we are experiencing a journalism “bubble.”

The New York Times is melding their online and print newsrooms into a single newsroom staff.

Current TV,  an independent cable and satellite TV channel, is where We are the producers.  It follows the global pulse via Google and produces “Google Current,” a real-time TV view based on what the world is searching for, every half-hour 24/7.  VC2 – viewer-created content -  is an extension of the Current TV studio where anyone can join in and get paid, or simply watch and vote for what goes on TV.

Scoopt, an online service, has launched which sells “on the scene” mobile phone photos to news outlets.

CBS News launches a “build you own newscast” feature on CBSNews.com

I, Reporter is an initiative that teaches news editors how to use citizen reporters, and citizen reporters how to be reporters.

There are currently more than 900,000 blog posts every day.

Cyberjournalist.net lists 341 blogs by journalists, and 19 news sites that produce podcasts.

Steve Gillmor at ZDNet implies trade publications are fading, stating “The insistent voice of the blogosphere is beginning to dominate the conversation between vendors and customers.”

It isn’t froth. The ground is shifting. Get your sea legs.

PR Atrophy Sign 4:  You don’t have a blogging policy.

Delta Airlines, Friendster, Starbucks, WellsFargo, Kmart  have fired employees for blogging.

Your organization could be liable for unlawful termination, or open to Sarbanes-Oxley violations, or even trade disparagement because you and your blogging employees don’t have an understanding of the legal issues.  And, these issues don’t stop at the front door of the corporate offices, they extend to personal, non-work related blogs.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is actively involved in assisting bloggers with knowing and exercising their rights in everything from intellectual property to labor laws related to blogging.

Lines are blurring between internal communication and external communications.

Get moving.

PR Atrophy Sign 5:  Google is your first stop when you research online.

IceRocket, Technorati, Blogdigger, Yahoo’s My Web 2.0, PubSub, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Feedster are just a few of the new generation of search engines, powered by RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and/or tagging.

Whether you know what RSS is or not – you are using it everyday via your online news sites.  RSS powers the connectedness of blogs, search engines and even mainstream media.  It should be powering your own connectedness to journalists, analysts, citizen journalists, your publics.

Tagging is the share-and-search mechanism of this We Generation.  Online content is given context by how each individual viewer or publisher relates to it.   The infinite web is being organized by Everyone into multi-dimensional views of the same content.

Information is finding you.

Lift your head.  There are new channels.

PR Atrophy Sign 6:  You provide media content in Print for Print, video for TV, audio for Radio.

Broadcast radio stations move to all-podcast content.  Newspapers stream video news online. TV broadcasters publish blogs.  Google partners to produce a TV show. Internet radio and broadcast radio embrace “visual radio.” Mobile phones deliver terrestrial radio. Web sites publish for mobile phones. Corporations, newspapers and TV create podcasts for expanded and original content.

All media is multimedia.  All media is multimedia.  All media is multimedia.

Think what I want, when I want it, how I want it. 

“Edit for more, not less.” The Futre of News, The MediaCenter