Social Media

Googling as ‘due diligence.’ Ever done it?

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments


The folks at Harvard Business Review have a case they want
you to crack.

It’s called called "We Googled You" and is right up your street! It involves googling a potential employee as a background
check, and coming up with search results that could cost the candidate the job.

I think it’s a good what-if scenario not just from an HR
perspective, but about due diligence and reputation systems in the digital age.
What we ‘know’ based on search results, may not often be the complete picture.
Digital breadcrumbs that people leave behind may be skewed by the algorithm.
Would you do business or not with an organization based on its reputation you
find online?

We know that the blogosphere sometimes
gets it wrong; the posts remain, even after the facts have been disproved.

Back to the case study. A fictitious Mimi
Brewster, is googled after the interview, and her dossier turns up with
something no candidate would present at an interview. Problem? Or reality in the digital age?

The case study is open to anyone, and closes tomorrow, June 15th.

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John McCain’s ‘Pacemaker’ — it’s not what you think!

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

At the ValleyPRBlog, we’ve gained some valuable insights about keywords, tags and headlines for tracking, newsreaders, and search.

This story, in Fast Company caught
my attention because the headline unwittingly combined two words that
always signify one thing: age. But the Fast Talk story on "John McCain’s Pacemaker"
was actually about advertising –by Russ Scriefer, McCain’s media
director. He makes an interesting observation about using traditional
and new media to tell an unfolding story:

Thirty-second ads are still going to be the way
you’re going to communicate your message with the most voters, faster
and more efficiently. But other methods of communication are beginning
to supplement television. Now you need to do television plus the Web,
television plus bloggers, television plus social networking, so it all
becomes part of a bigger piece.

This guy’s deep into social media. He’s talking of using unedited
bloggers, and an integrated media to ‘pace’ the campaign. Now it gets
me thinking. Did he, in fact, craft that headline?

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What could Photosynth do for you?

/ Angelo Fernando / 3 Comments

Don’t miss checking out Photosynth, an idea in Microsoft’s Live Labs. You need to download a small app first to work with IE or Firefox.

It’s hard to describe how the technology works. I enjoyed being able to fly through Trafalgar Square,
in way that’s actually smoother, and easier than Second Life. 

But it makes me wonder: If you could zoom in to a Coca-Cola logo on a T-shirt, in a vendor’s display rack, in the vast pigeon-filled piazza of St. Mark’s in Venice (you must sign into Photosynth for this), imagine what this could do elsewhere. Not just for brands (though brand managers would sure like that!) but for organizations trying to create experiences out of the collage of images that could be filed with details.

1. Obvious one: Tourism marketing for travel agents, countries,
states and cities. Get people to submit holiday photos, and turn them
into citizen photo-journalists.

2. Art galleries: Deploy street teams with digital cameras to cover
a topic or art form and mash-up their work into composite experience.

3. Colleges: Stitch together thousands of images out there of
campuses, schools, dorms, pubs and places of interest now in the hands
of alumni. Create a multi-perspective virtual tour that belongs to
them, literally.

4. Mega-events: Political conventions, the Olympics, Street marches
and other crowd-magnets. Wouldn’t it be a great way preserve a
historical record right down to the wording on the buttons, street
signs and posters? Boggles the mind to think what Woodstock would have looked like with this kind of coverage.

This is the outer edge of social media.

There’s a similar use of 3D modeling and digital images in Google’s StreetView,
but it doesn’t involve citizens’ input. We don’t know how Microsoft
will do with Photosynth. But the concept is definitely exciting.

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“Everything is Miscellaneous”

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Weinberger
I just picked up "Everything is Miscellaneous" (David Weinberger) and an odd image popped into my mind: Jimmy Wales hanging out at the Library of Congress.

I had mentally dismissed this double spread ad for Conde Nast
–or so I thought. Excuse my wanting to deconstruct the ad to make a
point. The context and scale of the photograph adds to the incongruity
of the founder of Wikipedia
perched on a railing in one corner of the Library. Its magnificient
cathedral-like arches, and everything else in balance create a great
metaphor. You just know that this guy is here to quietly turn things on
his head –in a good way, mind you.

I know why that image came to mind. The jacket cover of Miscellaneous has a blurb from Mr. Wales lovingly complaining:


"Just when I thought I understood the world, David Wenberger turns it upside down – and rightside up again."

Sure, it’s one of those sweeping ‘advance praise for’ comments you’ve
seen on many other jacket blurbs heaping praise on a new book about the
digital economy.

But it’s hard to exaggerate this book’s analysis. Weinberger, who co-authored The Cluetrain Manifesto,
notes that the card catalog system gives us a ‘narrow slit’ to look
through the world of books, but ‘imperfect classification’ in the
digital world, is paradoxically richer. He’s referring of course to
tags and links that create this thing called ‘social knowing’ (the term
‘social media’ isn’t in the index) by showing us connections, and
putting bits of knowledge into context.

Which is exactly what the book does, drawing on centuries of historical
precedents, to make that point of miscellany over and over again.

 

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Communicators prefer MySpace over other social networks.

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Curious about the results of the survey on Social Networks ?

Of the nine social networks, MySpace has the most users. 32.1% consider themselves ‘Active Users.’
An equally high number, 25% are ‘Occasional Users.’

MyRagan and FaceBook nearly tie for second place –12% and 12.5%, respectively.

But…

More respondents claim to be ‘Occasional Users’ of LinkedIn (25%) than any other by a large margin.
In the open ended question, two respondents named Plaxo, and Zaadz as networks they use. (Plaxo, incidentally, is not a social network, per se, but a way to manage an online contact database.)

What does this tell us? My interpretation of these results:

1. For sure, we are experiencing social network overload, and people
are trying out many services, but eventually settle for one.
2. People seem comfortable being occasional users.
3. All these networks expecting us to make them our home page, or the first thing we check when we are online, are dreaming!
4. Communicators will abandon you if you don’t add value, and offer the same old, same old.

Note: This was a survey posted on the Friday before the
Labor Day weekend. Poor timing, I admit. But instead of wrapping it up
in one week, as I did in previous surveys, I kept it open for two. We
had much more respondents this time. Thanks for participating.

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Watching YouTube videos tops Social Media behaviors

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Here are the results of the Social Media Survey I conducted
for ValleyPRBlog, a weekly snapshot survey on key preferences of PR
practitioners, marketers, ad agency folk, communicators, bloggers and a few
geeks.

First take a guess. What do you think people like you soend more time on?
Listening to a podcast, commenting on a blog, or checking an RSS feed? Having had to
explain what an RSS feed was about twice a week, I would have guessed it
was blogs. Wrong!

When online, over the past 10 days:

52% checked their RSS`feeds (14% said they had no time for this)

48% left a comment ion someone’s blog (29% said they had no time for this)

48% linked to, commented on, or forwarded a link to a video
on YouTube

38% posted to own/organization’s blog (14% said they had no time for this)

52% chatted with someone using IM -same as those checking
RSS (14% had no time for this)

20% created a wiki (15% had no time for this)

Only 14% sent a trackback to a blog (67% said it didn’t interest them)

33% listened to a podcast (same number didn’t have time for this)

And the top behavior…

72% watched a video on YouTube (19% said they had no time for this)

 

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Search Engine usage results

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Last Friday I took a snap survey about how readers of this blog and ValleyPRblog use search engines.

Interesting results, as always. Meaning, you get to know the different ways people use something we take for granted.

  • 60 Percent use a search engine from a tool-bar they have installed on their browser.
  • When using search, 75 Percent Always click on Natural Search results first (12 Percent said never!)
  • Only 7 Percent first click on Paid results first (60 Percent never go there first)
  • Interestingly, 57 Percent click on Natural and Paid results ‘Sometimes’ (of the choices Always, Sometimes, and never)
  • 38 Percent Always scroll down to the bottom of the page to view the results (50 Percent do it Sometimes, 12 Percent Never go there; 50 Percent do it sometimes.
  • 44 Percent are darn persistent, and Always click on the next page of results

What might this mean? Remember this was not a scientifically selected sample. But they were random, no doubt, and more importantly, people like you, probably.

I used to work at an interactive marketing agency, and the thinking at that time was that clients were putting way too much money on Paid Search, and neglecting finding ways to get high ranking on the Natural results. Natural (or ‘Organic‘ Search) is the industry term for getting the search engine web crawlers or ‘spiders’ to rank your web site on the left side of a results page.

Translated into marketing, this means spending a lot more time with optimizing those pages on your site so that they are Google and Yahoo friendly.

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