Social Media
Mainstream RSS: Coming Soon To A Screen Near You
By the end of the 1990s, when the Internet population in the U.S. was reaching critical numbers, AOL represented the average user - the inexperienced, not-so-savvy consumer who was interested in going online and who appreciated the ease of using AOL features. Now, the company’s access to millions of subscribers has turned it into the big “equalizer” on the Net. While many companies are trying to figure out RSS (Really Simple Syndication), looking to build business models around it or weave it into their work, AOL is bringing RSS to the average users’ home.
In his July 28th MediaPost article, Gavin O’Malley notes that AOL is partnering with the RSS search engine Feedster to provide its customers with a more customized and visually rich online experience. Surely, there will be an adoption curve among the AOL users. But at last the consumer will gain more control over content choice and the power of online syndication will be unleashed. AOL users who want more from their Web experience and want to select who reaches them will follow the early adopters and soon enough, RSS will become a mainstream application.
You may ask, “What’s the big deal with RSS? Why is a simple syndication tool so intriguing all of a sudden?” In reality, the demand for RSS was brewing at an increasingly higher temperature as marketers were pushing – and almost force feeding – content to their online audiences. The flood of pop-up offerings, e-newsletters and new-feature announcements eroded the end user’s control over a customized online experience. RSS changes all that and could even be considered the TiVo of online media. The difference between the impact of selective viewing on TV and the Internet is that smart online marketers are open to letting their audiences mix their own media. When visitors participate in creating their own content, they are more satisfied with their online experience and stay loyal to the sources that provide them with the flexibility. Imagine your favorite news sources bundled together and delivered to your desktop at a frequency of your choice, solely because you selected them and clicked “yes” to receive them. If you have a Web site or a blog, think of inching up on Google listings as the network of visitors who link to your area and receive updates grows.
Finally, freedom and democracy! The Internet experience is turning from what’s out there to what we make of it. For end users, whose inboxes are saturated with irrelevant messages, RSS helps manage the information overload. For marketers and content providers, RSS means more work to earn the respect of their audiences and hook them in. But there is also the promise of deeper and more solid, steady relationships once they get in front of their key targets. The rewards will not be limited to higher returns on marketing dollars. Analyses of RSS feeds/links and search-engine listings will provide marketers with tangible insights about audience preferences. Content providers will have more direction in producing “hit” pieces that will generate buzz through conversations, email messages and blogs. The transformation of RSS from a high-tech into a mainstream function will benefit consumers and marketers alike.
--Idil Cakim
Director, Knowledge Development
Burson-Marsteller
Posted by Idil Cakim at 07:58 AM | TrackBack
Let’s go orienteering!
Last week I spent three fascinating days in Zaragoza, Spain at Guidewire’s Innovate!Europe 2005, where I learned a ton about what works and what doesn’t for tech start-ups across the European markets. Mårten Mickos’ talk was a terrific distillation of the cultural drivers that help and hurt innovation in embryo. The event was a fiesta of opportunities to observe cultural drivers - a big part of orienteering.
To crib from thesaurus.com, to “orient” means to:
· Familiarize, adapt, locate
· Inform, advise, edify, enlighten, initiate, instruct, prepare
· Affect, apply, connect, refer, unite
· Or, if one is of a sinister mind: distort, angle, bias, influence, point, twist, warp
In my first Guidewire post I talked about how important it is for companies to understand their blogosphere (in my opinion everybody’s blogosphere is a bit different). While I was in Europe, I stopped by Burson’s offices in Paris and Madrid to share what I’ve distilled about corporations and blogging over the last year or so.
My standard advice these days is for companies to take the blogosphere in three steps – evaluate, participate, and create. Some companies should never do more than simply evaluate and monitor their blogosphere. Some may choose to participate via existing blogs, and still fewer may choose to create their own blogs. Many corporations have it backwards though - they want to jump in to creating first. This can backfire; some prominent companies have jumped into the deep end headfirst and suffered for it.
Evaluation – the essential step every corporation must take - is all about orienteering. Companies need to familiarize themselves with their blogosphere. They need to adapt themselves to using an RSS reader and checking it as often as they check their other news sources. They need to locate the key bloggers. They need to map their blogosphere or hire a company, like us or one of several others, to do it for them!
Once they establish the basic lay of the land, companies can be informed, edified, enlightened and instructed by what they find, and in turn they can instruct their peers inside the organization about what they find and where they find it. A great example of this is Andrew Carton, creator of treonauts.com, who I met at Innovate! last week. His site is an invaluable resource not just for Palm, but for anyone who makes or wants to make handhelds.
If the company is shrewd, they will then apply what they learn and see. What they learn from their blogosphere can affect every aspect of their interactions with the public – customer service, sales, public relations, etc. If they’re really shrewd, they’ll establish valuable connections with bloggers as well.
Corporations who have been foolish enough to try to bias, influence or twist have – at least so far - failed, thank heavens.
While there aren’t well-defined maps that companies can easily pick up and apply to the blogosphere, the time and effort to truly orienteer within it is vital. Those who make the effort will find resources for their own businesses that will be truly enlightening.
Posted by Lisa Poulson at 08:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
News by Me-Media
“…Consumers will turn to a more personalized array of media, drawing on information from a variety of sources.”
- Paul Holmes, Holmes Report
I read this quote in Holmes Report’s May 30th issue while preparing for Burson-Marsteller Chicago’s blogging seminar “Midwestern Views on Social Impact and Moneymaking.” It made me think back to the idealist teachings of journalism professor Ben Bagdikian, who spoke about corporate influence in traditional media organizations in his widely popular book, the Media Monopoly. Thanks to the rise of blogs and public discussion forums, media power dynamics are shifting away from what Bagdikian described. Instead, consumers are finding alternatives to institutionalized media voiceswhile clients and agencies fine-tune their tools to analyze the alternative media. No one has yet come up with the perfect model though.
My thoughts were echoed by Dr. Clarke Caywood, from Northwestern University, a fellow panelist at the Burson event. Dr. Caywood suggested that we might be approaching this sphere of irregularity with the wrong tools. He pointed out that studying Internet influencers and their impact on online word-of-mouth was a traditional approach following well-tested academic models. The irregular nature of the blogosphere, Caywood said, may require newer communication models as distinct as the channel itself.
So far, studies about the Internet have focused on the size of the blogger nation. How many people are blogging? How many are reading? What percentages of them are influential? In light of Dr. Caywood’s comments, perhaps we should reverse these questions and find out what e-fluence is from a blogger’s perspective.
Hearing other panelists such as Martha Irvine (a national writer for the AP), Charlie Madigan (senior correspondent and Sunday Perspective editor of the Chicago Tribune) and Chuck Salter (senior writer and Chicago bureau chief of Fast Company) discuss the changing face of journalism and the social impact of blogging, I came up with my own short list of how bloggers garner clout. Bloggers establish themselves as authorities and strengthen their reputation by:
- Being authentic: Unedited writing with a genuine tone is closely linked with credibility in the eyes of blog readers.
- Having an individual voice (i.e., Me-Media): I raised an eyebrow when I heard that Madigan’s blog for the Chicago paper has directed him to write op-ed pieces where he can assert his personal point-of-view as a journalist. This was an interesting hybrid, where an established paper was absorbing an alternative reporting approach while drawing clear boundaries between fact-based reporting and personal remarks. As Madigan noted, the blogosphere possesses a “personal culture,” not to be confused with an institution based in a commercial setting.
- Revealing facts and information otherwise unavailable to the public: The open-diary format of blogs allow a larger community to preview lifestyles and experiences they may not have known otherwise. While some of this information may seem too personal, don’t these accounts resemble the “people stories” on acclaimed TV news programs?
This is the supply side of the equation. What about the demand? Why are increasing numbers of Internet users relying on blog reports as part of their daily media regimen? We are finally becoming comfortable in the virtual village!
As more people turn to the Web to verify the news, seek their online buddies’ opinions and put their two-cents out there, we will have to change our understanding of how information flows in society and what type of knowledge impacts our everyday decisions. Marketers are quick to count industries where word-of-mouth endorsements weigh as much, if not more, than traditional media messages. This list - which includes healthcare, fashion, travel and entertainment - is sure to expand, as boundaries between alternative and traditional media fade and consumers become just as likely to get credible information from blogs as they have from traditional sources. Expertise is shifting to me-media.
--Idil Cakim
Director, Knowledge Development
Burson-Marsteller
Posted by Idil Cakim at 07:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Who Are the Masses? What Do They Want To Hear?
Every day the impact of blogs on corporate communications and corporate reputation becomes clearer. Fortune’s cover in January and BusinessWeek’s cover this week aren’t about the fact that blogs exist; they’re about the impact of blogs on corporate reputation about a paradigm shift that we’re only beginning to understand.
Why are blogs so powerful? Because real people write them and real people read them. As BusinessWeek says in their tips, “PR Truly Means Public Relations.” It means talking to the public, not in a Norma Desmond, “I’m ready for my close up” way, to be sure, but in a way that each corporation must define.
Talking to regular people means saying things that regular people want to hear. This, unfortunately, is a challenge for those of us in the technology business. (If you disagree just think about leveraging paradigmatic shifts to achieve platform independence blah blah blah. . . )
“Disciplined” may not be the first word that comes to mind when you think about a politician, but people in this business know that, in order to succeed in communicating with voters, the message must be very simple, and must be said over and over and over again. This is pure torture for technologists. No matter how in love our CEO, CTO, product manager or even head of sales is with an idea, some other idea comes along and it’s “Hey look, there’s something shiny over there.” And the message is lost.
We have to learn how to tell a story that regular people will understand. And to tell it enough times that it makes sense. Why? Because everyone (consumers, voters, your parents) now knows who we are and where we live –we’re the ones who lost so much of their money back in 2001 and they use all of the stuff we make much more than they did ten years ago. So they’re watching us – and having feelings and opinions about what we do. And many of them are connecting to each other online and sharing those feelings and opinions. (See above.)
In the new world of true “public” relations, only the multilingual will survive. We have to talk to all of our audiences – business partners, regulators, shareholders, end users, CIOs, with the same message and the same story – but translated in a way that they’ll understand.
When I worked at Sun we were lucky enough to have a former USA Today reporter on our staff (here’s a shout out to Mary Smaragdis!). Mary edited every single press release about the Java technology according to USA Today’s rules. No acronyms, no industry buzz words, no technology described in a way that someone’s grandmother wouldn’t understand. This worked. The truth is, just because we understand our own messages doesn’t mean they’re good.
And while we’re at it, let’s cut out the inside baseball. Well, not all of it because it’s fun, but let’s change the ratio. I love a good architecture war as much as the next person, but let’s realize what the rhetoric is, understand its function in our business, and put it in its proper place.
Let’s not try our audiences’ patience so much anymore. If we don’t, we’ll pay for it eventually. Much of what we say and do is incomprehensible to our newly empowered constituents, and we often don’t pay attention to or understand how they perceive our way of doing business. It seems that most Valley leaders didn’t think for a moment that Enron’s egregious abuse of stock options would ever come home to roost here. That was an avoidable mess if there ever was one.
Finally, as I say to every person I media train, “Your audiences do not find you, your company, your products nearly as interesting as you find yourself, your company, your products.” If we can keep this essential truth in mind as we figure out how to describe what matters to us to the people who matter to us, we’ll make a lot of progress!
--Lisa Poulson
Managing Director, Technology Practice
Burson-Marsteller San Francisco
Lisa Poulson is a member of the Guidewire Group Sounding Board.
Posted by Lisa Poulson at 10:40 AM | TrackBack
Searching for Blog Relevance
One computer, coupled with the speed and immediacy of free speech on the Internet, can significantly impact public perceptions. We are no longer discussing if blogs matter but rather, which ones. As bloggers amplify their voices through ever-expanding audience networks, companies are in a hurry to get straight answers on how these new stakeholders affect their reputation and financial assets. The most commonly asked question in communication strategy meetings is, “Who are the most influential bloggers?”
Considering the numerous factors that affect audience interests – such as content, topic, industry and social context – the right answer is, “It depends!”
There is not a standard formula for measuring the influence of blogs on reputation. Traditional Web metrics may not be the best tools to gauge a blog’s power in reaching online audiences. With the exception of a few, most blogs do not garner traffic comparable to mainstream online news sources, growing their audiences through links and referrals instead.
The primary factor to consider when estimating a blog’s influence is relevance. What percentage of employees, investors and customers are regularly reading the given blog? Those blogs that have both a high number of links (a proxy for Web readership) and are identified as relevant by key stakeholders should be put on a communications watch list for postings about the company’s business and industry.
In short, your company needs to effectively track blogs, adjust media plans and integrate alternative communications among existing tactics. Here’s how:
Step One: Check the house inventory and start a list. You may already have some information about your online followers. Are bloggers emailing Webmasters, customer service representatives or PR contacts? Browse through the company Web site log reports. Are Web site visitors being referred to the company site from a blog? Start your watch list with bloggers who are contacting the company and driving traffic to your Web properties.
Step Two: Take online audiences’ pulse. Partner with online buzz-monitoring companies (Intelliseek, BuzzMetrics, v-Fluence) for an in-depth understanding of what online audiences are saying about your brands, products and services. Which blogs are hosting the most extended conversations about your company and its offerings? Note the proportion of conversations stemming from blogs vs. other online public forums. Earmark those blogs that contribute most to the online chatter about your company.
Step Three: Add some weights to the equation. After creating a short list of blogs based on your company Web site referrals and online monitoring research, use specialized search engines (Technorati, BlogPulse) to gauge these blogs’ clout. How many other bloggers link to them? Do they consistently write about a topic relevant to your company’s position? Those blogs with more links and a consistent voice should go to the top of your list.
Learn about the bloggers’ educational and professional backgrounds. According to an Arizona State University study (Economist, April 21st, 2005), “the top bloggers are more likely than top newspaper columnists to have gone to a top university, and far more likely to have an advanced degree, such as a doctorate.” Are the bloggers in your list experts on the topics they write about? If so, their readers will be even more likely to follow their recommendations.
Step Four: Browse online and offline media. Supplement blog search-engine information with news database (Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, Dialog) searches. Are the bloggers on your list cited by any offline or online media sources? Any coverage in mainstream media outlets validates the blogger’s influence.
Step Five: Confirm relevance with your audience. Conduct a survey among your key stakeholders and run your list of relevant blogs by them. Have they heard of these blogs? Do they read these blogs?
Step Six: Measure impact on reputation. When surveying your stakeholders, ask them about their perceptions of the company and what sources they use to form their opinions. Are the blogs you’ve identified treated as credible sources helping to shape your audience’s opinions? Would they be willing to pass along such information to their friends, families and colleagues?
Blogs are vehicles for influential stakeholders who speak up to make a difference in their communities. They carry opinion leaders’ views from computers and wireless devices to in-person conversations. Thanks to blogs, hard-to-find information comes within stakeholders’ reach and turns into sales, votes and investments. Companies can strengthen their foothold online by identifying and tracking those sources that significantly contribute to the buzz on their brands, products and services. Businesses can get a direct view of how public opinion about their initiatives evolves by following blogs relevant to their audiences.
--Idil Cakim
Director, Knowledge Development
Burson-Marsteller
Posted by Idil Cakim at 02:44 PM | TrackBack
Finding Media in the Mirror
Trailing only slightly the efficacy of the Bush Presidency, the future of journalism is among the most hotly debated issues in the digital media world. Traditional newspapers are taking a pummeling from blogs. Virtually every news source in existence is under scrutiny. Does traditional news still matter? Have career journalists grown lazy? What has happened to objectivity? Since my childhood listening to the god-like voice of Walter Cronkite to today’s 40-point-font hysteria of Matt Drudge, the transfiguration of the news industry is staggering.
Amid so much change, where does one go for reliable, objective news?
Essentially, nowhere . . . and everywhere.
If it’s a reliable, objective single source you seek, I wish you the best of luck and hope that your journey to madness is short and relatively painless. Reliability depends on whom you’re talking to – or reading. Some swear by Jon Stewart; others take Rush Limbaugh as gospel. And objectivity? Hunter S. Thompson once said that the only true objective journalism is sports scores and stock market quotes, calling the phrase, “a pompous contradiction in terms.”
Modern journalism is fractured, confusing, blatantly biased and begging to be defined. So where does that leave us, the readers? It leaves us to our own devices and that may not be so dire after all.
As a self-professed media junkie, my habits may be more egregious than others. Until CNN turned into non-stop talking heads (and when exactly did that occur?), I kept the all-news station on throughout the day. I watch local news nearly nightly, read the daily newspaper over breakfast and still turn to the “big guys” when disaster strikes. I subscribe to multiple magazines, from Vanity Fair to National Geographic. And I spend an obscene amount of my day checking my Bloglines feeds at an embarrassing rate, lest I miss the latest Linux rant on Slashdot. In short, I have become my own news network. Driven away from traditional media by bias, ineptitude, and unoriginal thought, I invent my own solution. I read the latest Iraq updates on Al Jazeera, bounce to the nightly news for their take, check in on Drudge for a giggle, then visit a favorite blog or two for any conspiracy theories I might have missed.
By the end of the day, I’m exhausted, wanting to return to the time when these events were spoon-fed to me. Walter, where are you when I need you most?
But should we hearken back to the day when Mr. Cronkite pulled off his glasses, choking back tears to inform us that our president had died? No pundits brayed beside him, no ticker ran below to relay how the stock market was reacting. Then again, no one told us how incomplete the Warren Commission report was or provided a platform for all the witnesses who swore something else was afoot. We had to wait 20 years to hear dissenting voices. Sure, some of us think those voices are all loony. But some of us don’t.
And that’s where we find ourselves in the 21st century – with the luxury of one thousand different voices from which to choose. Rather than demand that the old guard change or the new kids be more responsible, let’s see if we can shift to make room for all of us.
Perhaps the new face of media has turned out to be… our own.
--Carla Thompson, Editor, Guidewire Group Editorial
Posted by Carla Thompson at 08:08 AM | TrackBack
The DEMO@15! Opening Remarks
Welcome to DEMO@15! Fifteen years! It’s almost hard to believe. . .
In that time, we’ve produced twenty DEMO and DEMOmobile Conferences. In fact, this is the21st DEMO event in 15 years. Over the years, nearly fifteen hundred products have been introduced on the DEMO Stage.
DEMO has tremendous reach, and tremendous staying power –through good economic times and terrible ones – because of the great community that has grown up around this event. DEMO really is about the people, and, of course, it is about the products -- products that become the lens through which we get a better glimpse into the trends and ideas that will shape the technology market in the coming months.
Long before these 73 companies came together in the DEMO Class of 2005, the DEMO marketing team was talking about “technology in Bloom.” That idea became the central theme of the marketing. And I have to confess that while I liked the artwork, the colors, and the design, I really didn’t pay close attention to the campaign. I was busy narrowing a field of some 450 companies to 160 finalist, and then down to the 73 that are at DEMO@15!
I’ve often said that in planning DEMO, I don’t begin with an concept of the market and find products to fit it. Rather, I find the best companies and suss out the market trends those products reveal and amplify.
So there is some serendipity in the fact that the 73 products and companies -- in the longer context of the past 15 years – speak to this idea of “technology in bloom.” You see, if there is a unifying idea among these extremely diverse products, it is that of fruition and growth. Whether in the consumer segment or the enterprise market, these products speak to fulfillment of long-held promises.
Think back to the very first DEMO in 1991. Howard Elias, one of our innovator award winners – introduced the very first integrated multimedia PC. Two vendors were showing the PC as a platform for television. These were the harbingers of the digital media revolution. Fifteen years later, a half-dozen companies are here demonstrating that digital media is a powerful, everyday reality.
DEMO 94 was host to a shootout between Novell and Lotus over the desktop application that was then called Groupware. Today, collaboration is simple and accessible, and a part of dozens of applications, from collaborative blogs and wikis to business instant messaging.
Throughout the mid 90s, DEMO attendees saw the first digital cameras and photo editing software. Among our most memorable onstage demos was Kai Kraus’s demo of the photo morphing software called Soap. Now, digital cameras are everywhere, including our mobile phones, and we have companies here who are continue to push the bounds of digital photography.
In 1996, DEMO showed early work in Voice over IP. At DEMO, you’ll see companies that have embraced VoIP. They have tackled the hard problems of messaging and are bringing new sanity to business and consumer telephony.
At DEMO 97, a little company called Hot Office introduced what was arguably the first ASP software. A few attendees that year thought accessing server based software through a browser was a ridiculous idea. A few years later, we struggled to define .NET and Web services and to show meaningful examples of these then-new ideas at work. This week, service-based software is almost a given and Web services are opening new opportunities for businesses of all sizes, but especially smaller enterprises. Delivering enterprise-class functionality at small business prices is leveling the playing field of business in a manner that could profoundly affect how work is organized in the years ahead.
At DEMOmobile 99, Atheros unveiled its WiFi chipset. Two companies at DEMO are advancing the state of the art in WiFi connectivity. As importantly, the ubiquity of WiFi is having a profound affect on the consumer technology experience. Supported by this wireless networking technology and others, long-envisioned ideas around the complex problem of home monitoring and control are a simple reality, ready to implement now.
These are just a few of many examples where the seeds of technologies, planted across the years, that are coming to fruition in the products and services being launched here this week.
But make no mistake: these are not merely iterative products built on old ideas. Certainly, they are evidence that the personal technology market has reached a level of maturity and stability. Yet each of these products is innovative in its own right: innovative in creation of new technology, in the combining of components, in their approach to problems, and in the business models that take them to customers. The 73 products at DEMO this week are here because they move the market forward.
In fact, growth is clearly a theme in these products: The growth and maturity of the consumer market; a return to growth in the business market. Now to be clear: I’m not talking about hot-house growth spurred by artificial light and potent fertilizer – the conditions that allows for a spurt of energy without deep roots.
We are moving into a period of sustained growth because the tough soil and harsh conditions of the past four years have made today’s technology companies stronger. It is interesting to note that nearly half of the companies at DEMO this year – 32 to be precise -- are self- or angel-funded. These are companies that have accomplished the hard task of bringing products to market on the grit, passion and determination that they can create real change.
But no matter the size or funding, all of these companies know the challenges of innovating in a tough market and each has pushed through, developing great ideas, fueling new concepts, and creating real and sustainable value for their customers and themselves. These companies and these products are well-rooted for future success.
And these companies will play a role in the market growth that cuts across technology sectors – business and consumer. You’ve heard me talk before about the blending of work and personal lives. That line continues to blur, at least when it comes to technology. Today, business and consumer technology markets are tightly integrated.
Thre are so many entry points in the market that lead to the purchase of even more productivity enhancing, life-style enhancing products. And you know how quickly one purchase can lead to another, how products justified as a work expense are used as well for your personal enjoyment.
There are, simply put, great things to buy and they are offered in programs and packages and at prices that make them attractive to business and individual consumers. And they are coming to market at a time when consumers and IT Buyers are coming back to the table.
Indeed, I have said about this particular demonstrating class that it may well be the most expensive DEMO I have produced – expensive because there are a lot of products in this class that I simply have to have.
I invite you to visit the DEMO@15! Web site to learn more about these products.
Posted by Chris Shipley at 09:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack