Grounded In Reality

The raise of digital media has presented more opportunities for the digital media team to consult on both Web site content and technical (SEO) optimization. To that end, I believe that the new version of Google Analytics will further break down the IT and marketing silos; and both Webmaster and PR professional will be held to higher standards of what works and what doesn’t for online content.

I recommend your spending 5 minutes to watch this features overview video to appreciate how easy it is now for the executive to measure ROI.

Thereafter, send your client an e-mail to discuss embedding the Google Analytics script on their site.  Fair warning: Don’t get too obsessed checking those Web metrics.

Social technographics®–a coin termed by Charlene Li at Forrester Research in a new report about how companies should start thinking about their media campaigns by understanding their audiences rather than beginning by considering the different digital channels and technologies available.

Like all things PR: hello common sense! I mean in a social setting, surely, you wouldn’t talk about the same things, or even use the same language while speaking with your parents as you would with your friends, right? Then why do the same with a media campaign?

It’s interesting to see how the communication strategy roadmap is constantly morphing. In school I was taught, don’t start thinking with the execution. First, think about what you want to achieve and then about what you want to say in order to achive the goal. Now, with the exploding societal effect of Web 2.0, you first start thinking about who your niche audiences are, and then you decide what you want to say to them and finally the how you’d do it.

Just as Steve Rubel mentions, it’s fascinating to see how applicable and appropriate this breakdown of communication strategy can be for a PR professional. Advertising is all nice and entertaining like during the Super Bowl half-time. But, it’s not about engaging your preferred audiences in a conversation as only PR professionals are trained to do.

The tricky/challenging part of this approach however, is that there is no one “right” way of achieving and measuring success. Although personally, I think this, by itself, is a reward on the job! How exciting is it that with a smart and thought out new media campaign we can impact not only perception of our audiences, but also the way they interact and experience these brands!

This constantly changing social technographics® landscape pushes us to think differently not only of the message and the product but also helps us to factor in how our key audiences will use these messages.

A call to action is no longer as simple as “please respond to this email.” It’s more like please respond to this email, post it on your blog, then add a widget about it to your social networking page and then finally discuss it with your family over the dinner table! (or not!)

Happy explorations!

On the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal, I’m told that, ” You’re a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well.” (Techmeme link.)  Highlights from the article:

• About 7% of all searches are for a person’s name, estimates search engine Ask.com.
• More than 80% of executive recruiters said they routinely use search engines to learn more about candidates, according to a recent survey by executive networking firm ExecuNet.
• Nearly 40% of individuals have used search engines to look up friends or acquaintances with whom they’d lost touch, according to a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Microsoft Corp.’s MSN unit.

In terms of people search tools, Spock (glowing review by O’Reilly) and ZoomInfo will eat Google’s lunch if it doesn’t care to focus on vertical, people search results.

For working professionals, it is worth asking if your clients (current and potential)  expect to see their name and/or business appear in Google.  If not, why not?  If so, here six easy, inexpensive (many free) ways to quickly establish an online presence: Start a blog, create a Squidoo lens, upload Flickr photos, create a professional LinkedIn profile (yes, it shows up in Google), register a unique domain, and optimize your Web site. (In case you’re wondering, I’ve walked the talk for a nonprofit that I’m volunteering with.)

For my PR brethren, which keywords do/should your clients (high profile individuals and brand) own, and how much time and resource is spent working towards that goal?

In terms of naming a child, I find it rather short sighted for parents to overly concern themselves with the Google results  of their child’s name.  Must be the fear of Google in the air.

Addendum: Fortunately for me, if you are a headhunting “Wilson Tan” on Google, I’m #11 and #13 associated with Paul’s post and my post on this GCI Digital Media blog.  Not too shabby though certainly room for improvement to find myself online.

The hardest thing in life is to make time for the things you want to do.

I have two daughters, and I do everything in my power to be home with them for dinner as many nights a week as humanly possible. But sometimes, I have to travel for work and can’t be home. Sometimes, my wife and I have a charity or something we are involved in and can’t be home.

Such is life in the big city, but I do the best I can.

Blogging is like dinner with my girls - you need to commit to it and stick with it as much as you can on a daily basis.

“There are going to be days where you don’t have time to blog.”  I dont think that’s a fair excuse.  The way the blogosphere is set-up, you can blog from your PDA or mobile phone. So as you sit on the plane waiting to take off or on the train on the way home, you can find two minutes to jot down a few notes to keep your page up-to-date.

Now, while you might be able to get away with the lack of blogging on a personal site, if you have a corporate or company blog, you most certainly cannot slack off.

Perfect example of what can happen when you do slack off is Jeffery Chodorow’s blog. Chodorow is a restauranteur who was getting a bad rap in his mind from the New York food critics and took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to speak his peace and announce his blog, chod-o-blog.

When it came out on February 21st, his blog was off and running. He had 157 comments on his first post. That’s a pretty good start by any standards. One week later he updated with a new post:

I apologize for the delay in posting my new blog entry. This has been an overwhelming week given the reaction to the NY Times ad and dealing with all of the subsequent press inquiries.I will be updating the blog shortly.

Since that note, he posted twice on March 1 and once on March 13, with only 17 comments total in those posts.

Chodorow spent a lot of money on the ad in the New York Times, then he was off to a rousing start blogging and had viewers. But because he hasn’t really posted in a timely basis, it’s going to be very hard for him to recapture that mass audience and buzz that he had.

In many situations, blogs are a one-man show, and it’s more difficult than having a group blog like we do with our Digital Media team here in this space. Problem is the masses don’t care. You can’t do blogging half way, it just won’t work. If you want to reach an audience and keep them, you have to commit to giving them a few minutes of your time on a regular basis. In my mind, that means a minimum of three times a week. It doesn’t have to be a novel, but more novel ideas and thoughts.

In the end, I take the time to have dinner with my family, and it’s something my children will do with their children someday. If you think about it, don’t we and our clients want our consumers and customers to pass our messages and thoughts to their kids and sell their products or brands? 

In this day and age, you do this at the ‘digital dinner table.’  It’s worth a few minutes a couple of times a week…

I’m a Heroes fan and, in my recent talks with students, have cited NBC’s embrace of digital media as a prime example of traditional media “exposing” itself by providing a 360-experience that taps into the fan network.  What’s neat about Heroes?

• Heroes Rewind: Free, full online videos available five hours after broadcast; entire season is posted online for free (ad free!)
• Commentary: Full-length cast commentary for each episode
• Novels: Online graphic novel (PDF and Flash) that runs concurrent with the broadcast; new characters are introduced and plot lines intertwined and enriched
• Blogs by director Greg Beaman and most the popular character, Hiro (each post gets hundreds of comments, not bad for a fictitious blog)
• Wiki that captures episode guides, mythology, art, trivia, predictions and speculations, etc.
• Theories: User submitted videos about what happens next in the storyline; available as a widget.  (Top Five Theories)
• On the go: Heroes on your mobile device

Kudos to NBC for generating this rich, engaging content.  As it matures, I trust that the layout and navigation will get cleaner and slicker.  I’m eager to see and learn from the upcoming NBC Social Network.

###

UPDATE:  USA Today posted a blog entry saying ‘When bloggers are silenced, the world must speak for them.’  The article focuses on Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman’s jailing for blogging about attacks he witnessed by Muslims on Coptic Christian establishments and the extremist views taught at Al-Azhar University in Cairo.

 ###

Everyone is reading blogs these days. In one way, shape or form, we all read blogs of all different shapes and sizes.

From American Idol to ESPN, there are millions of blogs with many different levels of authority. But why?

The blogosphere is getting interesting in the area of covering world events. Newspapers, television stations, and radio stations all have blogs of what’s going on in the world as it happens.

In the New York Times yesterday, a great article ran on Matthew Lee, a blogger that covers the United Nations and has credentials to go to everything and anything about the United Nations.

It begs the question, why does Lee get credentials and since he does, who else should have them? It’s a very fine line that is going to be defined as time goes on.

From my past life at USA Today, I covered sporting events, and there’s not enough room half the time to accommodate the working media. When USA Today went online - we could’t get credentials to most of the major sporting events - now there’s not a major event that isn’t covered by the online news sites.

How and where can you even begin to draw the line if you start letting bloggers get credentials? And who decides which bloggers are credible and which aren’t?

The line is fuzzy for now, but over time, it will hopefully get defined.

AP published an interesting article about new social networking sites that target Hispanic youth - a group that’s heavily online (67% of 18-27 year olds) and coveted by marketers. 

These social networks include:

• ElHood.com: bilingual site featuring the latest in Latin music
• Quepasa.com : robust online community featuring news, entertainment, shopping and more
• MiGente.com : site targeting English-speaking Latinos with news, online dating, Monster job searches and professional networking
• Hi5.com : global social networking site available in multiple languages
• Vostu.com : a new alternative to Facebook.com targeting Hispanic high school and college students.

Additionally, MySpace launched a Spanish-language site for U.S. Hispanics and a pan-regional site for Latin Americans.  One of the big questions is - can these smaller social networks compete with the MySpace giant?  Many experts say yes, and I tend to agree.  The Hispanic market is largely untapped, and many of these smaller sites will succeed by focusing on a niche segment of that market.

These emerging social networks present tremendous opportunity for companies trying to connect with young, Hispanic customers in a meaningful way.  And for now, the cost of entry is really low compared to MySpace and Facebook, whose advertising and sponsorship deals have shot through the roof.

If you know me, I have probably told you that I think everyone should have one…and I do.  But this morning, as I go to read my morning paper (AKA my Google Homepage) it has this funny letter in front of it?  An i.  But why?

I did the ususal to find out what the creative decoration of ‘Google’ meant by scrolling across it — nothing.  So, I close out of my personalized page and go to the main page to scroll across it — nothing.  What next? Google’s blog, where of course, I find the answer:

For a while now, we Googlers have used a bit of shorthand to refer to the Personalized Homepage — a name that connotes interactivity, the Internet, and personalization all at once. Please meet iGoogle, the new name for the Google Personalized Homepage.

Not a fan.  The lowercase “i” is WAY overused.  More than ‘that’s hot’…more than ‘duh’, ’sych’ and ‘dude’ all combined.  IMHO, Unless you are in a deal with Apple and required to start your products with an “i”, then DON’T DO IT. (anyone else feel this strongly?)

– I digress –

There is some interesting news following the name change (if you can get past it).  You get more capabilities and they come in the form of a photo gadget, a “GoogleGram” greeting card-style gadget, a YouTube video channel gadget, and a free-form gadget.  Create your own.

The photo one should be popular, based on the popularity of photo slideshows on MySpace. This will definitely consume some of my time today, but it will have to wait until this afternoon.  In the mean time, someone else should send me a GoogleGram!