Socialmedia – Page 4 – Movin' Ahead

June 9, 2007June 10, 2007 kenekaplan PodTech, Social Media, Socialmedia

PodTech’s Jeremiah Owyang Helping Demystify New Media Measurement with Eric Peterson of Web Analytics

To paraphrase Jeremiah, “Some companies need to understand ROI before putting resources behind new things.” He admittedly was talking about his friends at Intel during the wonderful Cisco-BPCC Social Media Summit earlier this week.

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In addition to this video interview with Web Analytics, Jeremiah has a fresh post about social media measurement. These are the latest in many months of great work to help people and companies understand what’s important in measuring influence and engagement of new media efforts.

UPDATE: Web Analytics Demystified — sign up and get free samples from Peter’s book…and look around for a free white paper.

The other great source for learning more about case studies and what “pioneering” companies are learning is The Society for New Communications Research. Executive Director Jennifer McClure was inspiring when she stopped to talk to me before leaving the Cisco-BPCC event.

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At Intel, we’re certainly moving ahead — and we’ve learned a lot in the past few years about new/social media. Learning more about measuring return on influence will help do more and keep trying new things.

Know of other great resources, please leave them here. Thanks!

May 13, 2007May 13, 2007 kenekaplan Intel, Marketing, Moore'sLaw, Social Media, Socialmedia, Tech

Good Stories are Gifts

When creating videos with Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, it hit me. We wanted Adam and Jamie — and Carl’s Fine Films — to help us create a series of shorts that would be a gift for fans of Adam and Jamie’s TV show, “Mythbusters.” Something that really captured their scientific know-how, enginuity and funny-bone hitting antics. Something that Intel fans would see as whacky, creative and cool beyond Intel’s bread and butter storytelling antics — citing the wonders of Moore’s Law and how Intel’s chip design and every increasing transistor count keeps impacting the way we live.

My pal “simma down now” Larry said it succinctly: viral not commerical. Give a gift that keeps on giving. In that spirit, we released the three Adam and Jamie videos first on YouTube on May 8.

Then the next day, we played the videos on new laptops at the Centrino Duo and Centrino Pro launch, but this highlights video was created to kick off the presentations to the press and analyst on May 9 in San Francisco.

We tried many new things here, including me posting these videos on videos sites I’ve been learning about (see slideshare foil set). Another thing keeps hitting me. During all of this, I’ve never been more aware of my role of being an Intel employee, a video story director AND a fan living in the real world. It was the fan inside that helped me make the most important decisions, which kept these videos from becoming too commercial. After all, these were for sharing in hope that fans would enjoy and share with others.

May 13, 2007 kenekaplan Marketing, Media, PR, Socialmedia

Exploring Media Myths Uncovers Sound Advice

A communications pro pointed me to a 2006 media research paper by Ketchum. You can get more details inside the slideshare document, but here are a few paragraphs I liked best:

ROCKLAND: What do you consider the best practices for affecting word of mouth through public relations?

MARGARITIS: Focus on cultivating emotional appeal — trust, admiration and respect — and build reputation capital — your workplace and culture, reputation, stewardship, the quality of your products and services, and your integrity and ethics. Your corporate character and value system must take on a more prominent role in storytelling, but it also must be authentic. Find credible ways to get stories out that showcase all of these characteristics, and they should include local stories. It’s about focusing within your organization on cultivating service, and it serves as a way to earning your way to the word-of-mouth channel.

ROCKALND: This probably is the hardest question facing public relations practitioners. We know that influencers generate a great deal of word of mouth. However, not everyone is an influencer, and all conversations are not started by influencers. Maybe it comes back to basics, a good messenger with a “sticky” message at the right time in the right place.

ROCKLAND: How would you advise a company about its media communications as a result of this study’s findings?

MAFFEO: Deploy more personalized communications through diverse communications through diverse communications channels and platforms that effectively communicate your message among target audiences and in a way that best suits the audience and the medium.

SCIBETTA: Develop a highly customized and fragmented media mix. The intersection of new media, traditional media and the human element is the key for creating effective and strategic media relations. It enables companies to engage with consumers while also providing surround sound for their messaging.

SWERLING: Media is not one-size-fits-all. That’s the easy answer. People use different, multi-channel models when considering different types of purchases and issues. And those models are changing at lightening speed as new, technology-based resources become available. As a result, communications must have a thorough understanding of their audiences, and they must stay very current with the media being used by those audiences. The harder answer is that everyone in our own profession needs to be thinking about constantly reinventing what we do. Ours always has been a mass-media-centric business that has focused on building relationships. That models now must accommodate these new and emerging channels. And if communicators don’t build relationships with them, they do so at the risk of their organizations and their career.

April 26, 2007April 27, 2007 kenekaplan Intel, Measurement, Social Media, Socialmedia

Buzz Metrics & Finding Your Audiences

A timely post by Tom Foremski of SiliconValleyWatcher. The next steps are learning how finding, measuring and learn more about people who are interested and actively talking about Intel. We’ll always work to produce good stories and content for our audiences, but we can also always improve our ability to listen. This is how we can get closer to people we care about, and who care about us.

Highlights from Tom’s story:

BuzzLogic, based in San Francisco has developed tools that allow corporations to track conversations across thousands of online sites, blogs, mainstream media and anywhere else online, in almost real-time.

And those tools can also determine how influential a site, a blogger, a writer is. And who they influence. After all, there is no sense in galvanizing a response team to an unfavorable post on a blog if its influence is zero.

BuzzLogic recently moved out of beta and in mid-April launched its BuzzLogic Enterprise service. More than 160 customers, many Fortune 500 companies, collaborated with BuzzLogic in the beta phase to refine the service.

Todd Parsons, the chief product officer explains: “Just because someone is influential within one sector doesn’t mean that they are influential in other areas. Our algorithms can analyze influence and allow companies to focus on those sites that really matter. We can also track the rise and fall in influence of a particular site.”

Email alerts will warn of possible trouble in real-time. But each customer applies their own response. This can include contacting people and also getting involved in the online conversations.

It is a service that could be used in many ways, not just for brand management. It could uncover new types of buzz bubbling up that could provide business opportunities for some companies. And it can also be used to test the effectiveness of a public relations campaign.

Services such as BuzzLogic’s can give organizations an insight into how they are perceived without requiring focus groups. But most organizations don’t yet know what to do with such data and what the appropriate response should be. But they will figure that out over time.

UPDATE: Links to Ads on SiliconValleyWatcher — http://tibco.com/, http://blog.cohnwolfe.com/boomerang/

April 23, 2007April 23, 2007 kenekaplan Media, PodTech, Social Media, Socialmedia, TV

Mainstream and New Media Meet, But at What Cost?

The Virginia Tech killings showed how mainstream and social media, like the social networking site Facebook, are fitting together to cover news that has a broad audience. It also reveals a major divide between those embracing technology and those who are trying to first understand it better. We need both. San Francisco Chronicle writer Joe Garofoli on April 20, 2007 wrote: “The questions and concerns about the boundaries of openness are being raised not just by traditional media fuddy-duddies but by leaders of new media, those who often praise the virtues of a “democratized” media world in which anyone can publish his own writing, video or photos.”

There is a lot of learning ahead of us – ethics, potentially dangerous uses – but there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Rather, many are building on lessons learned from the printing press, birth of radio, TV, cable, Internet and now the people at-large who are media producers and worldwide distributors news, information and babble. Garofoli shows the audience for Fox and CNN on Tuesday, April 17:

The 1.8 million people who watched Fox on Monday, the day the shooting occurred, represented a 115 percent jump in ratings over Fox’s average for the first part of this year.
CNN’s 1.4 million viewers were a ratings jump of 186 percent for that same period. MSNBC.com had 108.8 million page views Tuesday, a record for the site.

Garofoli provides a variety of soundbites that show how different people and professions are looking at this. Reading some of these (pasted below), I get the sense that many people are not watching primetime TV shows like CSI, Law&Order and other crime-themed programs. These shows explore many of the ethical and potentially harmful possibilities that come from a society living with more technology-powered capabilities than ever before. Most of the storylines may seem fear or protectionist-based, but they allow us to explore possibilities.

Jeff Jarvis wrote on his BuzzMachine.com blog, “There is no control point anymore. When anyone and everyone — witnesses, criminals, victims, commentators, officials and journalists — can publish and broadcast as events happen, there is no longer any guarantee that news and society itself can be filtered, packaged, edited, sanitized, polished, secured.”
“It is future shock,” said Micah Sifry, executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, a
New York think-tank that explores the intersections of technology and politics. “The technology has developed so fast that the culture hasn’t caught up with all of it. On one hand, you have the advocates, who want NBC to release all of (Cho’s manifesto). On the other, you have people who are saying, ‘Wait a minute.’ This is a very challenging moment. What works best is an open-networked system. It’s the difference between trusting a few people to make decisions for everyone and trusting many people.”
“Conflicted is the right word,” said Dave Winer, a pioneering blogger and influential figure in new media. “Yes, I realize that it’s unfortunate right now that this guy gets to control the discussion. We hadn’t foreseen this use of the technology because, as utopians, we tend to look for the good stuff. I liked to think I had a balanced view, and could see where bloggers weren’t doing good, but I hadn’t seriously considered our tools used to further such a bad cause.
“The lesson for this week is that the news is everywhere. The news is on Facebook,” said Jennifer Sizemore, editor in chief of MSNBC.com. Like other news outlets, MSNBC turned to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to find students to interview about the Virginia Tech slayings. “I don’t view them as the competition,” said Sizemore. “I see them as enlarging the conversation.”
“In the end, it’s going to get out there,” said Jay Wallace, executive producer for news at Fox News Channel. “Even if every newspaper and cable news channel doesn’t put it out there, somebody will. In those early hours, it is a feeding frenzy. We know that people are flipping around everywhere for news.”

People who are keenly interested will flip through TV, Radio and the Internet, where social media sites offer insight into people’s daily lives. Sometimes people are flipping through all of these at the same time.

We have more people participating than ever, and lots of interesting viewpoints on how we can move ahead in our rapidly changing, technology-driven, new media-filled lives. PodTech’s Rio Pesino talks with a good collection of mainstream and new media pros in this vidoe mashup where he asks, “What’s missing form local media?”

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