Social Media

Crowd-sourcing as internal communication tool

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Smart mobs, crowd-sourcing, citizen journalism –have you noticed how these waves of outside influence keep crashing on our shores?

Howard Rheingold, in Smart Mobs, uses a powerful analogy of human intelligence and computers. If you consider thousands of computers in a building as heaters running at full capacity, he says, only a small part of the heat generated is being used to warm the building. The rest of the energy leaks outside. It could easily be distriuted to other parts of the enterprise.

Now consider the ‘leakage’ of intellectual capital in your office every day. Employees arrive at the workplace, power-up, and are left to run, but vast amounts of  knowledge and ideas are untapped. The occasional survey, the large meetings where no one wants to raise their hand only scratch the surface.

Crowd-sourcing (despite books like this on the future of business) as a driver of big ideas, or as an  internal communications / HR function has not taken off. When it has been attempted –in a controlled environment such as focus groups — the costs and time involved make it a very expensive nice-to-have.

So how do you connect the internal circuits of your human resource that occupy the building? I’ve come across voting tools, idea-generation apps and feedback systems. Here are a three:

  • IdeaScale – for community-level conversation tracking
  • ConceptShare – for teams of designers and Creatives to collaborate and generate ideas
  • GetSatisfaction -a tool for customers and employees to gather ‘social knowledge’

Feedback widgets are here –and coming soon to a mobile device near you. Many of them only go so far. Some experts even warn of getting entangled in intellectual property problems. But the big hurdle to consider is motivation. Engagement goes hand in hand with incentives -the old WIFM concept.

My client, Arizona-based GreenNurture has takes the concept of feedback and employee engagement further. Deeper! 

Here’s how it works: In a company that wants to deploy a sustainability program, employees login to a social media-like app, come up with ideas, start comment or conversation threads, make pledges and vote on each others ideas. When hundreds of them start talking to each other, some idea gets refined, tossed out or voted up. The cream rises to the top, so to speak. There’s more granular information, including an assessment tool, deep reports etc –making sure no ‘heat’ is lost.

If you are interested, check the demo here!

Quotes for the week ending 20 March, 2010

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“We subscribe to the Woody Allen theory of social media — 90 percent of social media is just showing up.”

Scot Monty, Ford, on NPR’s Marketplace

“If you look position descriptions for companies that are hiring in their communications department, their marketing department. They’re all looking for social skills.”

Shel Holtz, in the same interview

“If your brainwave is picked as the ultimate green idea …you could win £100,000 for your favourite organisation to spend on its green initiative.”

Marks & Spencer, launching a campaign called ‘Plan A’ that seeks consumer-generated ideas as it seeks to be the ‘most sustainable retailer’ by 2015.

Quotes for the week ending 6 March 2010

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“This may be one of the largest experiments ever conducted on the web.”

Ben Parr, at Mashable, in the introduction of auto-captioning to YouTube videos

“Blogging success is a slow march, not a mad dash.”

Jason Baer, at Convince and Convert, on the 10 key success metrics for a blogging strategy

“The idea that content is king is true, but some people miss out on reading that great content because there is nothing interesting in the headline that represents it.”

Alex Fraiser, in a post about headline techniques for blog posts.

“Every defective part is like a dead body…To figure out what killed it, we need to duplicate the crime.”

John Smith, a member of GM’s Red X team of engineers who study bad auto parts

“So What”, you say? So there are no pilots or even air traffic controllers to guide us, what does this mean? In the Web 2.0 skies, organizations are gliders who must reacting to their current environment.”

Rick Spratley, at the Employee Engagement Network

“We live in an age in which ideas and arguments fly across the globe almost instantly … Assaults on those rights, like “libel tourism,” tell us just how rare, and fragile, they are.”

Editorial in Arizona Republic on foreign nationals suing Americans for libel in foreign and US courts.

Look for ‘Curators Needed’ signs –clues to your next job?

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“The web needs editors,” someone remarked quite aptly when TMI (the acronym for that modern syndrome, Too Much Information) was beginning to drive people nuts.

Today the web needs curators more than editors. Lots of them. Corporate feedback sites are sprouting all over the place, so,

  • Who’s gonna sift through the comment streams for good ideas?
  • Who will prioritize which complaints need to be responded to before it flames out in other places?
  • Who might be the next breed of Principal Investigators –sleuths, rather than project managers– who turn this data into reports? And I mean well-written, business-case reports?

You will! (Or someone in India, if you’re slow to find these opportunities.)

As I continue to write about and support crowd-sourcing and citizen journalism, I come across many hidden ‘help wanted’ signs for curators. Not in Craigslist, but buried deep in the comments of YouTube, Facebook, the 98 heated exchanges at the bottom of the New York Times article etc. The 200-plus tweets and re-tweets with a hash tag (especially the tag #FAIL).

Yeah, I know who has time to read through these? CEO’s do, that’s who. And they are wondering why their marketing and PR teams are not telling them about it, despite all the analytics money being spent. The trouble with analytics and algorithm-generated charts is that they don’t translate into action items. A Curator with the attitude of an analyst) who can also come up with ideas will be hugely valuable in my reading of this trend.

I just recorded a podcast for GreenNurture on what crowd sourcing as an internal communications app might look like, and serendipitously ran into this story by Marc Gunther. Truly timely piece on curated crowd-sourcing by by Genius Rocket. (Wonderful headline, too: “Why 13,956 heads are better than one.”)

Why do I think this is timely and huge? I’ll give you three clues:

1. Feedback sites are big: And there are attempts to tap customer sentiments: http://uservoice.com

2. Customers are talking back. take a look at Mills Advisory Panel –soliciting feedback for General Mills customers. My Starbucks Idea – a great site for tapping into marketing and product ideas. But who’s gonna take all those ideas if it is another company? Take this comment:

“I am a Canadian partner and I have experienced a lot of frustration, confusion and grief since the new teas have been unveiled. The biggest concern is the lack of consistent pricing for tea lattes….”

It goes on with too much detail, possibly revealing too much inside info that would make some VPs cringe.

3. Wikipedia is a back-channel: Lots of  ‘Curators’ Needed’ signs hanging out here. Noisy debates go on in the Talk Pages, and looking at these in your vertical will tip you off to other things.

You get the point. Everyone wants to listen to the customer but there are not enough people who can translate the conversations into actionable knowledge.

Sidebar: If you are interested,in why social media is so ready to gather front-line intelligence within a company, check this podcast I recorded with Derrick Mains recently.

My client, an awesome citizen journalist

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I’ve always been a big promoter of citizen journalism. I’ve trained many people on the fringes of media, and followed all the developments in digital, community-based media. But I never imagined I’d have an opportunity like this –to work with someone at the 2010 Olympics.

As we head into the last day of a social media enriched, much tweeted Olympics (1.1 million Facebook fans) I like to share what I’ve learned from working with what I call an ad-hoc embedded, citizen journalist.

Some background: A few months ago I was been privileged to be asked to put together and work with a social media team at Promontory Club, in Park City, Utah. These amazing communicators –venue and event managers turned content creators/content curators –have begun supporting their PR and marketing efforts via social media.

Sean Smith_VancouverOne team member, the manager of  the Outfitter’s Cabin, Sean Smith was invited to be in Vancouver. He happened to be a former member of the US Olympic ski team, but that didn’t automatically make him a social-media reporter. In a short time, however, he learned how vlogs, micro-blogging, photo-sharing sites and blogs work. We prepped him on how to file stories, knit together these daily reports and create a connection between this global event and Promontory members. No laptop involved!

When I briefed Sean I realized he had three things that would work:

  • Access — he would be in and out of the Olympic village, the venues, and has great rapport with the athletes.
  • Credibility – he had previously worked for a TV station
  • Passion – never to be under-rated, this is what makes social media communication so different

Using a Verizon Droid, Sean has been filing photos, tweeting and sending in content for the blog. Better still, he’s doing interviews with members of the US team, before and sometime immediately after an event.

Such as this report:

So what did I learn from this experience? Here are 6 lessons that would help anyone planning to do something like this with a citizen journalist.

1. Plan your angles and visual shots ahead –when it’s possible. Not all events let you anticipate the terrain. An event such as the Olympics is predictable –and not. You don’t know when and at what time you’ll get one-on-ones with the athletes –and medalists! But you do know where you might base your videos. (Check this sneak preview!) Low angle and long shots of steep inclines, close up of emotions etc. Look out for details that would intrigue.

2. Practice with different lighting conditions. Many events were held at night –not the best for video on a 5 mega pixel camera.

3. Have a backup plan for content uploads. We initially chose Flickr for the photo uploads, but when things didn’t work initially, we had Sean to switch to Twitpic.com, from where we grabbed the photos and moved to Flickr.

4. Keep videos short. I originally wanted to have Sean file 2-minute videos. But we quickly learned that it would require jumping through lots of hoops to get them to YouTube or the blog. Phones do have limitations. So instead of fighting the bandwidth problem, especially when it involves an international mobile roaming, a steady stream of short videos worked well.

5. Cover what the mainstream media isn’t. Having access to the athletes –and not just US athletes– was great. This included the fun side of things —downtown Vancouver, night life, former Olympic stars, even the Queen Latifas of this world. Or this image (right) of that snow needing to be airlifted into a venue!

6. Let new media shake hands with mainstream media. It doesn’t hurt to distribute your story -or the story about your story– through traditional media. Since my client is based in Park City Utah, we localized the international story through several call-ins to an independent TV station, PCTV in Utah. After all Utah has instant Olympic appeal having played host to the Winter Olympics in 2002.

Here are where to find our citizen journalist.

Quotes for the week ending 27 Feb, 2010

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“A severe breach of rules by staff”.

Message by British telecom company, Vodafone, apologizing for an offensive message posted to its Twitter account

“The BBC is the arm of MI-6 … We will settle accounts with them when the time comes.”

Gen. Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, Iran’s chief of police

“the security tracking software has been completely disabled”

Christopher McGinley, Superintendent of the Lower Merion School District in Phiadelphia. One high school was accused of secretly turning on the web-cams of laptops loaned to students to take home.

“Twitter Toppled Toyota!”

Devang Murthy, in Topnews.in

“Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007 … Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second”

Twitter blog, charting the popularity of micro-blogging that created a 1,400% growth spurt last year.

“That Wacky Mahathir!”

Headline of a post by the Hugh Downs School of Communications at ASU, on the statement by Mahathir Mohamed, former PM of Mayalsia (who said earlier this year of the US that “If they can make Avatar, they can make anything.”)

What an inukshuk teaches content creators

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Beyond the visual effect of Bing –especially if you’ve been a Google user out of habit–there’s a lot we could learn from how the search engine treats relevance.

Take for instance its hot-linking parts of this iconic symbol of the Inuits– the inukshuk. It is on one level a way of creating a dynamic home page for searchers surrounded by Olympic-related information.

Embedding links is just a start. But like the inukshuk itself, that I quickly learned is more than a marker, it could sometimes create a ‘window’ to guide someone, and reveal something about the terrain –to suggest a good hunting or fishing area.

So the next time you are tasked with create content, think of it more than a pile of sentences. Stories are more than pyramids, inverted or not. They are windows to deeper knowledge. Like a good search engine, they surround a seeker with context, history and information that could be acted on.

Quotes for the week ending 20 Feb, 2010

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“This award celebrates the fact that, in today’s world, a brave bystander with a cellphone camera can use video-sharing and social networking sites to deliver news.”

Judges for the George Polk Awards in journalism who honored a work produced anonymously, in a new category (videography) the video, of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who was shot during antigovernment protests in Iran. This was the first time in the 61-year history of the awards that an anonymous person was recognized.

“You won’t be set up to follow anyone until you have reviewed the suggestions and clicked..”

Google. in a blog post on the buzz about Buzz. It said the company had heard the feedback –outcry, really– loud and clear about what Gmail users thought of the new social media feature. Google immediately changed the ‘auto-follow’ model to ‘auto-suggest’ and apologized.

“misleading, confusing and disingenuous,”

Plaintiff’s claim against Facebook’s new privacy settings –in a lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco

“My real apology to her will not come in the form of words; it will come from my behavior over time.”

Tiger Woods in his ‘press conference’

“Ask etymologists who work for any common language dictionary … and they will tell you that all dictionaries cannot Prescribe means, but instead only Describe meanings that are already being ascribed through common usage.”

“For those who don’t find that good enough or revealing enough at this point, well,  maybe they have their own issues.”

Michael Wilbon, sports reporter for the Washington Post about, commenting on Tiger’s apology, calling it ‘pretty powerful stuff.’

Russell-Oliver Brooklands, responding to a discussion in Melcrum’s Communicators’ Network (via LinkedIn) about the use of the word “fulsome”

Opt-in meets experience using QR Codes

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Anyone dabbling in communication tends to stoop at the altar of speed and instant gratification. They seem similar, but they are not. Speed of response or implementation is a critical component for some organizations, some industries.

Speed, in today’s world, is a given. If you’re in customer service and you don’t respond fast to an inquiry, you lose a lead. If you don’t respond to a complaint, you risk turning a small hiccup into a major snafu.

Instant gratification is a different animal. We gloss over what it really involves by regarding it with such clicles about ‘delighting the customer’ etc.

But what I am interested in is a hybrid of speed and instant grat. Especially the ability to deliver targeted information to mobile devices, since we are beginning to use our phones not just as lap-top replacements, but as a means to interact with content related to our professional and personal lives.

Custom QR code I created for Public Radius

That’s why I like the idea of Quick Response Codes – QR Codes. I covered it in a recent column for a magazine (IABC’s Communication World).

If it sounds too geeky, it’s not. Actually it’s more user-friendly than a typical bar code. Unlike a bar code you embed it with information that is linked to content you point it to somewhere on a server or blog. That content could be any digital file, such as a PDF, podcast, video or photo album.

If you like to read the article, here’s a link to a PDF

Updated: The QR code on the left is something I created for my company, Public Radius. Many of these codes can be photographed by a cell phone that seamlessly connects the device to content.  Some of  them require an initial download of an app. Some work without it –like a short code.

With so much social media, why a Census Super Bowl spot?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

So many Super Bowl ads, so little attention to go around. I’ve always been saying these ads are a total waste of time. Do you really care if the Clysedales didn’t appear in a spot? (Apparently we do. They polled that question -and created a Wikipedia entry for them. Really!)

So, speaking of polling, I have to say that the $130 million Census campaign –never mind the cost of making the Bowl ad– is worth a second look. Especially with the cost of  running the ad being in the neighborhood of $2.5 million.

“We’re advertising again,” the Census chaps say, observing what we all know that the Bowl is “rare, in that viewers are just as tuned in to see the commercials as the program itself.”

And yes, there’s the media-relations effect: Run the ad, get editorial comment. The famous carrot that says viewers will rush online once they watch the ad, because it that’s how TV –practically on life-support, tethered to the Net –works today.

But after they dispense with the popular wisdom about buzz and multiplier effects (perhaps after so many meetings with its agency, DDB) they note in true Census-boys style that “If just one percent of the folks watching the Super Bowl had their minds changed to mail back a census form they would have otherwise ignored, it helps save the taxpayers between $25-30 million in expensive follow up costs to collect these forms later.”

???

Translation: Watch ads, adjust your attitude toward being asked personal questions, save the country a boatload of cash, help us pay our agency.

I get that, Department of  Census. No need to repeat this point about 3 times in your blog and press releases.

Yes, I mentioned a blog. This is where this campaign  gets interesting because the obscenely expensive ad is supported with richer slices of content, some of which is embedded in social media channels. I like the fact that the Director of the Census is blogging, that there’s a Road Tour Blog and lots of space devoted to answering the questions people ask that make of break a census. The Flash site may be a tad too addy, but it documents stories, a la Story Corps, of ordinary people. The YouTube channel has plenty of video outtakes. The Flickr site has snapshots of an America few of us see every day. This one on left is supposedly at a Lutheran Church in Richmond, California. Thai dancers! The 5,000 fans on Facebook must mean something. and there’s Twitter just in case you miss all other channels.

So with all of this content so well thought out, is the cost of a Super Bowl ad really worth it? I liked the ad, but the greatest ad is not worth being tossed into a space filled with products and services that only seem to lust for eyeballs and water-cooler talk.

There are plenty of other ways to get buzzy, even if that was the objective. As Erik Qualman observes, why not use Facebook and Twitter to GET people to answer those darned 10 simple census questions, and not be entangled in “a $340 million boondoggle“? Because that not feasible, why not use social media to incentivize people to fill out their forms. If the media-as-a-repeater argument is important, why not let 300 million people start something that the media will talk about. (Rather than feed this controversy.)

Why not start with those 2,035 followers on Twitter!

As the character in the ad says at the end (somewhat perplexed) “Absolutely!”