Grounded In Reality

In the fall of 2003, a group of mostly-young Democrats became a part of American political history and legends of web folklore. They proved for the first time that web-based, user-driven media could create a political campaign. Through one of the first social networking websites, meetup.com, they rallied support for a little known governor from Vermont named Howard Dean.

They became known as the Deaniacs, and through the early stages of the 2004 US Presidential election, they proved that the web is not only a legitimate part of running a political campaign – they made it a necessity. They brought grassroots organizing, fundraising and blogging to the process. They used the web for engaging two way communication and creating online communities, and, in turn, made their candidate a contender.

And so when the countdown to the Danish national elections, which will be held November 13, began last month, my colleague Kristian Levring Madsen and I went on the lookout for the new “Danish” Deaniacs. We’ve spent time searching every corner of the .dk domain during this election for some sign of the next big thing in political communication on the web. The fact that political TV ads are prohibited here in Denmark, and that this is the first election since social networking exploded, and that this election is placed as a kind of opening act for the US Elections next year – all really fuelled our hopes.

(more…)

In addition to being writers, the next wave of pro journalists will also be videographers and audio techs. Today’s half-second news cycle is demanding that reporters evolve into multimedia producers who can publish text, audio, and video on the fly. The old school system of deploying multi-person camera crews to cover news is coming to an end. It’s too clunky and slow. Arming reporters with internet-enabled recording tools is the only way publishers can keep up and cover maximum ground (not to mention scoop the average college kid with a camera phone and moblog widget).

In a sign that publishers are adapting, Reuters and Nokia just completed a cool experiment to illustrate the emergence of mobile reporting. Reuters armed several of its reporters with gadgets that make publishing stories from the field a breeze. The centerpiece of the toolkit is the Nokia N95 smartphone – a video-shooting, photo-snapping, GPS-mapping, web-surfing device that also happens to let users email and make calls. Participating reporters were also given a Bluetooth keyboard to crank out text-heavy articles, as well as a microphone and tripod to assist with A/V production.

Check out this video interview with Google’s Vint Cerf to see the toolkit in action. The quality is a bit jittery, but it’s a good example of where things are headed: instant, raw, behind-the-scenes, and comment-friendly.

Next steps for Reuters and Nokia? They are planning to use the kits to teach journalism students about the importance of mobile reporting. Interesting that Reuters didn’t choose to use a multi-media press release to communicate this story.

I had the opportunity to attend Nielsen Buzzmetrics’ Consumer-Generated Media Summit today in NYC. Pete Blackshaw kicked things off with a great discussion about how much the digital media landscape has evolved over the past year. Key points:

• Word of Mouth remains the most trusted source of influence for consumers who are making purchasing decisions.
• Search continues to have a huge impact on corporate reputation. Influential communities like Wikipedia are “credibility brokers” for companies.
• Consumer-generated video and audio is exploding, largely due to simple editing, publishing, and storage services. Nielsen refers to this as consumer-generated multimedia, or “CGM2.”
• Consumers are increasingly dictating how branded content lives (or dies) online. Nielsen calls this “Consumer Fortified Media.” Fancy term aside, it means that online marketing initiatives aren’t completed until consumers inject their POV via comments and other methods. In other words, consumers “finish the story” by evaluating and amplifying content that marketers produce (e.g. embracing, DIGGing, spoofing, protesting). This reinforces the fact that marketers no longer have complete control of their messages. The Web has created a flat playing field.
• The “wave of consumer emulation” has arrived. More than ever, brands are mirroring how consumers communicate and act. Look no further than the Presidential candidates who are using Web 2.0 to the max: Add the Fred08 widget to your page! Follow John Edwards on Twitter! Get text messages from Hillary! The takeaway: Brands are benefiting by communicating and acting just like consumers. The warning: Consumers spot imitation and exploitation instantly. Authentic messaging remains critical.

The Summit continued with a series of excellent breakout sessions covering healthcare buzz, media & entertainment, advertising & engagement, and defensive branding. There were great insights from attendees, although we’re prohibited from blogging the deets (Nielsen request).

More at Peter Kim’s blog.

——————-
By: Andrew Foote
GCI Group - NY

Over the past week, Dell has been the topic of many conversations in the blogosphere, spurred by a Forrester Groundswell Award and BusinessWeek article discussing the company’s transformation from digital bystander to leader.  In reading these posts, I am incredibly proud of the GCI team that helped make this happen. (NOTE: Dell is a GCI client)

Below are a few highlights from the blogosphere:

• BusinessWeek: Dell Learns to Listen: Jeff Jarvis takes a guest columnist role to discuss his two-year relationship with Dell and an overview of Dell’s social media initiatives. The online version is complete with a 25-minute video of an interview with Michael Dell (also available on Jeff’s blog: BuzzMachine).   He also posted the un-edited version, which notes a very measurable impact of Dell’s programs:

“Thanks to this new relationship, the company learns about issues online before they do in the press or sometimes in-house. They are stanching the flow of bad buzz. By their measure, negative word of mouth in blogs has dropped from 49 to 22 percent. And my Dell Hell posts, which used to come up third on a Google search for the company, are now relegated to second-page search-engine Siberia. ‘That change in perception just doesn’t happen with a press release,’ Menchaca says.”

• Direct2Dell - Dell’s Blog: Lionel Manchaca did an interview with Jeff near the end of the day and posted the vlog that resulted on Direct2Dell.

• Forrester’s Groundswell blog also mentions Dell’s transformation when referencing the Forrester Groundswell Awards that were given out last week.

Company transformation. Dell.
We created this new category to capture the powerful changes happening across all functions at Dell. The Dell Customer Advocate program, which pursues fast resolution of support problems, decreased the negative share of online comments about Dell by 25%. Direct2Dell, Dell’s frank and informative blog, generates 3.5 million page views per month. Ideastorm, Dell’s innovation community, tallied 500,000 votes for over 7,000 ideas and generated a new product, Dell PC’s with Linux pre-installed. And Employee Storm, an internal idea community, has generated 2,700 ideas and seen visits from 22% of Dell’s employees.

• From Geoff Livingston at The Buzz Bin:

Relationships and RELATIONS are about being human — not God. Together as humans we experience life and grow together. Mistakes happen, and good PR can overcome this. Consider Dell’s incredible lesson in admitting wrongs, listening and changing. This week’s BusinessWeek story is a celebration of relations.

• Our own Paul Walker mentioned that he is “really proud of the people and programs mentioned in the article. Thanks, Dell, for letting us be a part of it.” 

On behalf of GCI, I want to give the entire team a big pat on the back! The consistent creativity and innovation in new media waters is something to be extremely proud of.

An interesting new crowd-sourcing site appeared recently, still in Beta, of course, from The Nielsen Company and is (not-so-cleverly) called: Hey! Nielsen.   The site requires that you register to participate and share your opinion, but without registration, you can search through the results of other folks recommendations.  Feels to me like a mix of Digg, IdeaStorm (for Dell, a GCI client), and TV Guide.

There are a couple of things to look at on the site:

• Opinions
  In topics labeled TV, Movies, Music, Personalities, and Internet, members can post opinions about current shows, bands, songs, people, Web sites, etc.  Then the crowd gets to agree or disagree and add additional comments.
• Rankings
  “Each topic (TV show, Movie, etc.) earns a Hey! Nielsen Score, determined by user opinions, comments, and ratings. Calculated daily, the Hey! Nielsen Score also factors in internet buzz via BlogPulse.com.  There is currenlty about a 7-hour avg for updating statistics information.”
• Calendars
  Soon enough this will be the “TV Guide with opinions”…but it will have to launch first.
• Members
  Looking similar to other social networking profiles…and very similar to Digg’s latest ‘profile’ launch, you will be able to click on a member to see which shows, music, etc they like and dont like.  The earlist member date I saw was in May for NatGuy who claims “I’m one of the folks involved in helping to build this site.”  Nielsen lists how many recommendations they have made and lists all their posts.
• Widgets
  What would a site be if you couldnt see if scrolling on your blog? :)  Therefore, they have created a nice scrolling widget for you to keep up with the latest and greatest recommendations on the site.  Hopefully this will become customizable.

Naturally, if you are related to the entertainment industry, this would be an ideal place to gather consumer insights and responses to your content.  However, it would not be an ideal place to promote your entertainment client unless you are extremely open and transparent in your role.

Eventually, Nielsen sees using the information as statistical evidence in each catagory, but personally I think you will need to let the site live for a good amount of time before you can qualify the information collected as valid.  I am also still stuck on the problem of the ‘online demographic’ setting the opinions of a whole set of humans.  I still feel like it is skewed unless mixed with other forms of information collection.

I am interested to see how others respond to the site and the use of the information as statisical analysis.  Would you believe what they say, just because its Nielsen?

Wikipedia, the so called “in-flux” or “open-source” encyclopedia, has become one of the most interesting phenomena in the short and robust history of online media.  Wikipedia is a “.org” and refers to itself loftily as a “project.”  With over 2 million articles in English alone, it is 20 times larger than most traditional encyclopedias and can be found in “approximately 250 languages,” according to the site’s own estimates.  It is by far the biggest and baddest of all wikis out there.

Wikipedia is an example of “collective intelligence” and sometimes also given as an example of Web 2.0.  It has become THE starting point for information on everything from the “John F. Kennedy assassination” to “Cancer” to “Copenhagen.”

Whatsmore, the open nature of the “project” doesn’t seem to have detracted from its credibility.  Studies have shown Wikipedia’s accuracy to be relatively close to that of professionally edited encyclopedias.  But an encyclopedia it is not.  Not in the traditional sense.  Consumers are also increasingly relying on Wikipedia (or are “Googled” towards it) for information on products, brands and services.

This is presenting some serious and interesting challenges for the way companies manage their overall corporate identity.

Case in point: An article in Wired magazine last week profiled a new addition called Wikipedia Scanner. The Wikipedia Scanner allows users to trace the IP addresses of those who make anonymous edits to Wikipedia articles. This salacious little tool is just the kind of thing that can give communications managers nightmares – and in several cases it already has.

The article reported that in a search of 34.4 million anonymous edits on the site, 2.6 million organizations were found to be directly linked to edits related to their own company.  The edits run the gamut - from benign press releases to deletions of entire sections of unflattering material.  The latter has led to the involved companies suddenly being named alongside the CIA and the Vatican (rumors abound about how those two organizations have made heavy edits to their own Wikipedia articles).

In these times where corporate social responsibility and transparency are not only considered important but essential to a company’s good image, it seems natural that the same principles in communications should follow suit.  Wikipedia Scanner is another sign that if companies do not address Web 2.0 media outlets with the same vigilance – and ethics - as other media, that their reputations stand to suffer.

So when you think about “upgrading” your communications strategy, don’t forget to “mind the wiki.”

———-

Brian Woodward
Senior Consultant
GCI Mannov

From being a site virtually nobody had heard about six months ago, Facebook has exploded into everyday life in Norway.

Popularity

For a country with a mere 4.5 million citizens, 300,000 members in the “Norway” network is nothing less than impressive.  As a comparison, the “Denmark” network has 13,000 members and the “Sweden” network has 79,000 members, countries with a population of 5.4 million and 9 million respectively.

In fact, the “Norway” network ranks fourth overall on Facebook, after the Toronto, London, and Vancouver networks, according to a story on Gridskipper July 10th.  Since this data was released, the network has grown with another 20,000 members.

Facebook has grown by some 2,700 percent in Norway over the last few months and keeps growing.  Granted, it has been the rainiest summer ever, but the main reason for Facebook’s popularity is probably the hype and media attention.  A news search on the Norwegian search engine Sesam (http://www.sesam.no/) shows that 1,779 stories have mentioned the phenomena, and although the first story was back in 2005, all but two are from the last year, and a majority of these are from the last four or five months.

In addition, Norwegians are both tech savvy and blessed with good infrastructure. The country had 3.14 million internet users in 2006, according to the CIA World Factbook, a number that is still increasing.  Most of these internet users are on a broadband connection and 98.3 percent of Norwegian households have access to broadband services.

Waterwar outlawed

The Facebook group “Vannkrig 2007″ (translation: Waterwar) was started in March, and urged people to show up in the Vigeland Park in Oslo bringing water guns on July 28. After 12,000 people joined the group, and several thousand stated their intent to show up, the group applied for a permit from the county, which was denied.  Apparently, a wedding the same day does not go well with super-soakers. Still, the group plans to show up, considering it is a public park, which again has prompted reactions from the county.  Security guards and an increased police presence is likely to be in place at the end of the month, in addition to one nervous bride.

So is Facebook here to stay? For now it is…perhaps until the next big thing comes along.

Fredrik Johnsen
GCI Oslo

NY Times posted an article on Sunday called ”Grade-school Girls, Grown-up Gossip“ taht that discussed the influx (and ease) on information available to the children growing up during this Internet Age.

Although the article is predominately focused on how these tweens view the actions of celebrities, there are some facts:

According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the death of Anna Nicole Smith, on Feb. 8, constituted 9 percent of news coverage the week she died (she died midweek). That same week, 8 percent was devoted to the 2008 campaign and 3 percent to the Super Bowl. Pew also found that in the two days following Ms. Smith’s death, “nearly a quarter of the news from all sectors (24 percent) was devoted to this story, and fully half of cable news.”

One of the worst examples of this is that when Anna Nicole’s name is mentioned above, the NYTimes links back to ALL the coverage they produced, obviously contributing significantly to the Pew research.

With that kind of saturation, how is a kid NOT supposed to read about Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton?!?!

It has been 36 hours since the Technorati refresh and my team has been generally pleased with the new, speedy Technorati.  Here are some observations:

• Use search.technorati.com (or s.technorati.com) for a targeted blog-only search and, more importantly, to have the ability to filter by authority.  The authority filter, which has been removed from the general user interface, is a useful tool to narrow down the universe of blog posts to the most influential bloggers.
• The authority filter can also be exposed when using Advanced Search.
• Text and image ads are taking up more real estate—an opportunity for clients to execute smart keyword and banner ad buys, particularly when there is a spike in the news or search volume.
• To perform a keyword search within a select group of blogs: Sign into your Technorati account, create a list of Favorites, and use the search function to find posts (from a pre-defined list of blogs) that contain your keywords.  This is not a new functionality, but I noticed that I can no longer force an RSS feed for this search.  I’ll need to look for a workaround.

Lastly, check out the Technorati Kitchen for new stuff that the Technorati team is cooking up, particularly microformats.

MySpace is in the news again.  The company announced today it will provide data on registered sex offenders who use the site to eight state attorneys general.  It will be interesting to hear what’s reported.  This will surely fuel further debate about teen use of the site and access in public places like schools and libraries.