My post ("Googling as due diligence") made me wonder how often we communicators use Search as due diligence. Now you can tell us!
As in previous one-minute surveys, we’ll report the results at ValleyPRBlog (Don’t worry, you won’t be asked for personal information!)
Alan, our hopes soar as we await your release.
Alan, a BBC correspondent, was kidnapped more than three months ago.
What an exciting time to be in! Marketing, Advertising, PR and Technology used to behave like distant cousins in the same room, casting awkward glances at one another, with no common topic to get a conversation started.
In strode Social Media, and the blabbering doesn’t seem to subside! This thing we call social media (was it all ‘anti-social media before then?) is now the catchall, and the lingua franca for all groups.
Marketing used to obsess about ROI, targeting, media moments, and eyeballs; Ad folk were passionate and touchy whenever the word ‘branding’ popped up; the geeks who felt they were the only ones who truly understood measurement gleefully sprinkled acronyms and buzzwords like CTRs, stickyness, and media conversion in their sentenses.
Suddenly we’ve forgotten our differences and have stopped insulting each other at
the panel discussion table. We’re attending un-conferences about ‘engagement,’ user generated content, and the other ROI –Return on Inspiation.
This blog has always about integration, collaboration, and innovation at the edges.
If you’ve been following the controversy over the 2012 Olympics logo, you’ll see a familiar pattern.
Many new logos, and brand names even, seem odd and –as Londoners complain– say nothing about them.
I have a strong opinion about this one. I think it’s not very inspiring. Vibrant, yes. But hey, I don’t live in London, and it’s easy to be critical when you’re not privy to the brief or the marketing context.
But beyond branding issues, it’s turning out to be a PR nightmare –with the organizers seeming to not want to listen to the protests.
I like the fact that they are now at least asking people to create and submit a logo design.
They welcome user generated content, with ‘downloadable ‘templates’ backed up by a huge section on the use of and removal of content. Yes, they will moderate comments, they say!
In defense of the edgy (or odd) logo, it appears to be in sync with their objectives:
As for what will happen when a logo isn’t working in isolation and has more context, this is how ordinary people are adapting it, and sending it off, not to the IOC site, but to Flickr.
And for a hilarious look at what might be taking place at Wolff Olins, the brand consultancy that came up with the logo, click here.
Do marketing and PR work in silos? Still? Whatever happened to our love affair with integrated marketing?
Jonah Bloom of Advertising Age has an interesting take on the convergence/divergence thing:
"Ad execs are also becoming more PR-like "listening to
influential consumers before crafting messages and are trying to
facilitate word-of-mouth programs — two tactics some PR practitioners
see as inherent to their discipline. "
At the same time,
"many companies’ PR executives, who once massaged other people’s
messages and left most content creation to the marketing department,
are now building and populating websites, social networks, message
boards, blogs, vlogs and podcasts. They’re no longer just
intermediaries; today they’re becoming media and message originators,
too."
But –and there a huge but– both don’t
share the same view about giving up control, even they have similar
communication and marketing goals. Marketers are more likely to give up
control than PR folk, he says.
Agree? Or violently disagree?
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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
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.
Hoipolloireport 
