Social media marketers love words like conversation. Authenticity. Transparency. Interaction. Participation.

But what does that really mean?

It’s all about being yourself.

(Photo Credit: Fresh Webs)

As PR professionals we are constantly pitching media to fight for a our 15 minutes of fame. In a world where there are numerous ways to connect with reporters and media (Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, LinkedIn, etc.), how do you make yourself stand out?

Establish rapport. And mean it. This is the most important part of standing out when initiating conversation. Remember  Dale Carnegie said to "become genuinely interested in other people." This doesn’t mean taking a quick glance at someone’s blog or recent articles and firing off comments like, "hey I like the picture of your dog". It means looking at what they put out there and finding something to really relate to. Rapport is best when it’s real.

Tell a story. Don’t string together a series of related but impersonal paragraphs. You should arouse in the other person an eager want to hear your story, but balance it by making sure you’re not droning on and on about yourself. Make sure that you are being a good listener, encouraging and letting the other person do a great deal of the talking. (More Dale Carnegie)

Have a personality. Rohit Bhargava wrote a whole book on it. Companies and brands fail because they are ordinary and boring. If you present an exciting, enthusiastic, and friendly face - then you’re likely to get a similar reaction in return. If you’re passionate and truly believe in what you’re doing, selling, pitching, or talking about…others will be too.

Overall it’s about being yourself. Blogs, Twitter, and every other Web 2.0 technology only work with the strength of the people in the community behind it.  If users are being fake and not authentic, then these great ways of connecting with others and establishing relationships will become stale.

Twitter will become just another site for spam messages, Facebook will become one big advertisement, and users will be left searching for the next great site that will offer what they’re really looking for: a real genuine person.

The Goodwill Fashionista campaign, for which Livingston Communications designed the social media strategy, took home three AMA-DC M awards last night.  Awards were given for integrated marketing: best consumer/retail campaign, integrated marketing: best campaign on a shoestring budget, and best internet marketing campaign (picture features Fashionista Blogger Em Hall).

Since we published our case study, this campaign has been featured in several prominent news outlets, including CNN, NPR, Dow Jones, American Public Radio, AARP, the Washington Post, and a clean sweep of local broadcast media.  Then there are the speaking engagements.

Congratulations to our friends at Goodwill DC. You did fantastic work and deserve every ounce of this success.  Also congratulations to Catherine Meloy and Brendan Hurley (below) for all of their success. Catherine was inducted into the AMA-DC Hall of Fame yesterday.

I recently had the great pleasure of interviewing BlogPotomac Speaker KD Paine at NewComm Forum. Katie gave us some fantastic insights into her session.

Also, BlogPotomac Co-Chair Debbie Weil recently caught up with KD. Here’s a rerun of Debbie’s interview:

KD Paine is one of the (terrific) speakers we’ve got lined up for BlogPotomac, Washington DC’s premiere social media marketing event coming up on June 13, 2008 (go for it… register here). I snagged her for a quick Q & A to give us a preview of her topic “Measurement and Value.”

Note: In keeping with the unconference format (see here and here) of BlogPotomac, KD and the other speakers will be delivering informal presentations - no PowerPoint - with plenty of time for Q&A with attendees.

Debbie: Tell us briefly about your company KD Paine & Partners.

KD: We provide measurement and evaluation of communications programs – including traditional and social media, internal and external programs. We’ve been doing this stuff for 22 to years, and measuring consumer generated media for 13 years.

We design measurement programs for clients, helping them to define their “dashboards” of things they want to track. We also provide the human element – working with firms like Buzz Logic to provide human coding in order to get social media to an acceptable accuracy level.. We also provide the so-what – connecting the data to actual business outcomes.

Debbie: You’re being called The Queen Of Measurement. But on your Twitter
page you say you prefer
to be called the Goddess Seshat. Who the heck is that?

KD: There actually was a goddess of measurement called Seshat - and in this day and age Queen is just a bit too “command and control” as opposed to a goddess that inspires followers and gives birth to new metrics.

Debbie: I know you’re on the road constantly these days, speaking to
audiences both in the U.S. and abroad. What’s the single most frequent
question you get about measuring the effectiveness of online PR?

KD: What impact does it have on the bottom line. Sure, I can track rank and followers and all kinds of things, but how do I know its worth the effort ?

Debbie: Another BlogPotomac speaker, Kami Watson Huyse, has done a nifty
video interview with you where you outline your Super Six Steps to
Effective PR Measurement. As BlogPotomac is focused on social media, would you change anything
or add to the list?

KD: Not a thing. I think that if everyone started off following those 6 steps, we have a lot more measurement (as opposed to monitoring which is what most people are doing) .

Debbie: Any quick thoughts on some of the new metrics - engagement,
participation, velocity, community - being used to measure the impact
of social media?

KD: Yes I’m a big believer in measuring engagement but I think it has to go way beyond repeat visits, and sentiment and tonality. I think we have to start asking the customers not just are they engaged but do they trust us, are they committed to a long term relationship, are they satisfied with the relationship. That’s why I called my book Measuring Public Relationships.

This Q & A was originally posted on Debbie Weil’s blog.

Ever since I read this article in GigaOm about Xobni, I’ve been excited to try it. It’s finally available to the masses, and it’s a pretty cool little application.

Xobni is “inbox” spelled backwards, and that’s pretty much where your traditional inbox ends. Xobni creates profiles for each person that emails you. These profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information, social connections, threaded conversations, and shared attachments.

One of the nice features of the profile is that it shows you the frequency of your e-mails, ranks users based on how many messages are exchanged (Geoff is my number 1), and shows a chart with the hour of the day that e-mails are most frequently sent, the number of e-mails received vs. e-mails sent and more.

Attachments are easy to find, as are conversations (e-mail threads) between multiple parties. Another great feature is the ability to call a contact directly using Skype and a quickly generated e-mail meeting schedule option which pulls free times from your calendar. You can also compose e-mail directly from Xobni (it will generate a new Outlook message) by clicking on a link in the toolbar profile.

In addition to the handy toolbar on the side of your outlook (which can be minimized if you don’t want to look at stats), there is an analytics program option that reveals even more into your daily, weekly, and monthly email usage. The ability to switch between line and bar graphs is also cool, and the breakdown between hour, date, time, etc.

A daily view of mail traffic can reveal that you see a big increase during the middle of the week.

A weekly view shows steady traffic back and forth, with fluctuations for high-pressure times (around a product launch, large pitching initiative, marketing campaign, etc.). You can view a daily summary of e-mails, including “unique people” (which separates out groups), and sent to received ratios.

There is an easy option to share reports by e-mail, as well as copy, print, and save functions. The tool offers options on how you want to view your email (say, only Monday-Friday), a useful welcome video and support FAQ and contact form.

Buzz Meter: 4 out of 4 Buzz Bees

Positive: For people who don’t like to sort and search through e-mail, this is a handy way to view recent conversations, sent attachments, and networks of relationships. This is an exciting, useful and functional tool that is great for stats geeks and people who want a better way to organize their inbox.

Negative: Xobni is not available for Mac users or those running earlier versions of Outlook. Also, some people may not want another toolbar added to their e-mail (although you can minimize it).

Conclusion: Xobni is a nice tool that is fairly unobtrusive, while allowing stats geeks the ability to fully analyze their e-mail usage. Xobni has the ability to show people how they are using their time, and maybe push them to strive towards a 4-hour work week, e-mail free.

Do you have strategy-envy over the groups that have it together in the digital badlands? You should.

• Zappos takes its shoes the extra mile with more than 250 diligent, twittering staffers, all part of a full-immersion dive into Twitter sanctioned by blogging CEO Tony Hsieh.
• Everyone at the Indianapolis Museum of Art is down with integrated social media, too - even the curators.

[Photo credit: “Envy” by Bright Star]

It’s your job to follow suit & get your own team on board.

Arthur W. Page Society’s “Authentic Enterprise” states that one of the four must-have responsibilities of Chief Communications Officers is to provide “Leadership in enabling the enterprise with ‘new media’ skills and tools.”


The digital lifestyle is one part enterprise ambassador, three parts personal brand. Even if you have one of the mythical blogging CEO’s on your side, and even if your efforts are endorsed by the board, you still need the hands and feet of your organization to take interest and initiative. [Photo credit: “colourful” by partykitten77]

How about setting a mandate for engagement? Really. Don’t forget to be encouraging and provide incentives. Take it one step further with this [draft] of a “personal digital covenant.” (These are initial ideas to simultaneously rally and rein in the faces of your organization. Suggestions for improvement are very welcome.)

Personal Digital Covenant

I choose to support [The Company’s] desire to become more relevant in this digital age. I promise to give my best shot at upholding the following tenants of progressive online engagement, and will encourage my colleagues to do the same:

• I won’t hold us back. Even if I’m fearful or a lazy sack, you have my blessing to try this out, for the sake of all of us. I’ll be honest about my concerns, which I expect you to address. (If you don’t address them, kiss my support good bye.)
• I’ll ramp up. In the spirit of “not holding us back,” I will give this a whirl. If it is my first foray, I’ll sample and ask questions, committing to at least one new space in which I’ll regularly play. Maybe LinkedIn is good enough for now.If I’m feeling frisky, I’ll find friends on Facebook, del.icio.us or Digg something (”and be dugg in return”), and maybe even tweet on Twitter.
• I do not have to be - and will not be - everywhere, all the time. There is real work to be done, obvi. Besides, the novelty of my online know-how will wear thin over time, especially if the bubble bursts or people think I’m screwing around.
• It won’t kill me to read or comment on blogs. I’ve experienced much more pain in my life than setting up a Netvibes account. In fact, if I feel so inclined, I’ll start my own blog on something that I personally care about. Of course I’ll abide by [The Company’s] Blogging Guidelines, which exist to help me blog smarter and cover my tail. If you don’t support my blogging ambitions, I need a new job.
• I’m not the Lord of 2.0 Craft. There will always be people who know more about this stuff, innovate cooler ways to put it into action, and have more digi-friends than me. At best, I will try to learn from them and share what I know with others. At worst, I’ll ignore you and everyone else.

Lindy Dreyer warns us:

Any association that refuses to adapt and leverage their community in this new medium is at risk.”

Your community includes your staff. All aboard.

The echo chamber can wear on more experienced bloggers. Saying the same things over and over again can turn into Chinese water torture. Sharing the same links over and over in multiple networks can be worse (image by wetwebworks).

For me, it’s important to move forward, break new ground, or just perhaps add a new wrinkle to the equation. Ending the Now Is Gone blog was partially a decision to not to repeat the themes of the book over and over again until they were beaten into the ground.

Here on the Buzz Bin, my contributions tend to be much more on latest developments, trends and impact. It is a place to innovate.

Yet at the same time, a recent conversation with PR Squared’s Todd Defren reminded me how important it is to keep newer minds educated, to offer refreshed discussion of old topics. Here is what Todd had to say (note: there is a bonus question on aggregating content/fractured conversations included in the video).

Todd offers a great point. I totally respect those who stay committed to serving the newly indoctrinated. It’s a service that benefits the entire industry. Giving in this sense should be honored.

At the same time, for me the beat marches on. The contributions made through Now Is Gone were extremely substantive in effort and thought. In its wake there’s a desire to focus on the new, and not the old. Perhaps things will change, or new wrinkles will appear. In either case, it’s apparent that the echo chamber may not be for all, but that it still serves a very important role.

This week Qui Diaz will blog on Wednesday, and Larissa Fair will pick up Friday’s post.

Online Marketer’s DJ Francis starts THINKing’s guest blogger series with the ROI of social media. DJ discusses the measurement and worth of social media and its impact on businesses. He says, “Instead of measuring how well we are pushing our message onto potential customers, we should instead gauge our success on the number of conversations listened to, problems resolved, and useful suggestions received from the community of customers we already have.” DJ also states that although social media currently lacks quantitative metrics, qualitative data will prove to be ‘the best type of information in the end.’

Blog Till you Drop! praises New York Pizza, one of the Netherlands fastest growing pizza delivery chains, for their integrated advertising campaign. The campaign revolves around three unique short ‘mafia style’ films that feature flour, tomato sauce, and a pizza delivery boy. Each film proves that ‘New York Pizza makes the best tasting pizza around with an unrivaled passion for the best quality ingredients’.

PRNewser disagrees with the new spokesperson of Bank of America, Comedy Central’s Mo Rocco. The company’s social media campaign, which features the comedian, is not being well-embraced within the web-o-sphere. PRNewser states, “Cute and funny are fine for some campaigns: banking not one of them.”

Jon Greer of Catching Flack states what a temporary news site should include. He discusses forms of proactive releases citing the so-called “Social Media Release.” Jon claims that the “ideal proactive release to go with a temporary news site would have the following: two or three paragraphs of hard news and one key quote, high-level facts and figures and links to lots more background on the web.”

Brand Curve’s Susan Gunelius reviews Volkswagen’s latest ‘ad campaign featuring celebrities of German ascent’ such as Heidi Klum and David Hasselhoff. Susan doesn’t think that the campaign will succeed.

There are times when it becomes necessary to set expectations. Unfortunately, one by-product of social worlds seems to be a certain set of the population believes that because an individual or an entity participates in open conversation that their entire business should be openly accessible. The two — open and accessible — are not synonymous (open access image by Ron Layters).

Think about these things, all of which I have personally experienced or counseled clients on:

• Competitors asking you to write their business plan or shape their value proposition
• Potential clients or just general people who follow you asking you to read their marketing or business plan
• Competitors asking you to review their new social media theory
• An assumption by PR people that you must write about them — and anger when you don’t
• Requests for open sourcing trade secrets
• Friending of spouses through Facebook from contacts you’ve never met or heard of (check out see one teenager’s experiences)…
• Claims of a business conversation from folks you’ve never even talked to on the phone. Nevermind that you have never done business together (See Shel on this).
• Friending and then immediately spamming/DMing with links for review (If you do this, I always delete).
• A new online follower who suddenly demands inordinate amounts of personal attention (see the parasocial phenomena)

Open does not equal access.  Expectations like this are just crazy, both on the personal front as well as the business side.

Sometimes it is best to simply import common sense into the equation.  What doesn’t work in the brick and mortar world in social situations will not likely work online. Just because it’s behind a keyboard doesn’t suddenly make it OK.

These occurrences are certainly the by-products of success. So here is the world’s smallest violin playing a sad, sad song. At the same time, followers and friends should have expectations that such claims and requests will not be met with open arms ("Artistic Violin" by midimen).

Phil Gomes was right. There is too much focus on tactics in the business, currently.  Consider the over-attention blogging receives as opposed to strategy and integrating social media into larger communication plans. But the lack of strategic focus goes beyond social media. It’s an industry problem, and I’d even go so far to say the problem is deeper than just the communications business (image by Metrognme0).

Strategy is not valued as an independent thing. Instead, we try to teach it as part of a profession, or hope that good mentorship will lead young minds into strategic thinking. This is a mistake. Based on many of the people I have met in this business, based on the extreme value placed on a great strategic thinker in agencies, we have failed.

And it’s a failure on the part of our education system. I can just see agency execs as well as communications and PR professors’ fingers twitching on their keyboards in angst. They believe they are doing the right thing.

Systematically, this is a failure.

Strategy is not part of a profession. It’s a way of thinking.

…just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions - Sun Tzu

When you think strategically, you think about how to get from A to Z. You do not think of tactics like blogs or press releases.

The farmer does not think I like this hoe, we should use it. No, he/she thinks I need to yield an 8 megaton crop of tomatoes. Given that my soil factor is X, the climate is this, and these are the external elements and diseases common in this land, what are the right tools to get there?

Applied to communications: Who are my stakeholders and what compels them (research)?  Do we have the ability serve them (can we win)? If so, given my resources, what’s the best way to do that? Which tools should I use, traditional, social or experimental? Is this strategy fluid enough to adapt to changing market situations?

I believe every University education should include a basic course on strategy itself.  Every profession can benefit from strategic thinking, not just communications. Books like the Art of War, Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, and Machiavelli’s The Prince (though I detest its lack of morals) contain the fundamentals with which to begin.

In Now Is Gone, we close with a chapter on strategy “Think Liquid.”  Liquid or water is a basic strategic philosophy outlined in both The Art of War and The Book of Five Rings.  Think Liquid applies this fundamental theory to social media. You can listen to the entire chapter on podcast here.