Vanity post: It's all about me

Chris Marritt (shown here), a British journalist turned PR guy, writes a blog about the journey from Hack to Flack. Each month he profiles someone who's made a similar career move and this month I'm the guy.

Also, here's an interview Sean Moffitt of the Buzz Cannuck blog did with me earlier this month.

My Social Media New Year's Resolutions

It's that time of year. Here are my five Social Media New Year's Resolutions for 2008:

1) Master Twitter. I tried Twitter several months ago, but didn't get much out of it. But everybody is still talking about it (everybody, at least, in the social media marketing bubble). Maybe I wasn't using it right. Used properly, they say, it's more than a "What am I doing tool" and more of a "What am I thinking" tool with great potential for business networking and personal branding. Jaiku is said to be the better microblogging tool, but Twitter is where the people are, and in this world, the size of the social graph is most of what counts.

2) Live a Second Life. With a new job, a social media practice to build and two small kids, I haven't found the time needed to invest in Second Life. But I know I need to spend some time there. Second Life is no longer quite as "hot" as it was a year or so ago. (More than one person has quipped that the fact that Canada Post is now there means the Second Life phenomenon is over). But virtual worlds are here to stay, and hugely relevant for marketers. If Second Life isn't the killer world, somebody will come along and invent a better one.

3) Communitize. I know that's not a word. But in addition to writing my own blog, I will be more active in commenting on other blogs and podcasts.

4) Get Veritas more plugged in. Most of my Veritas colleagues are on Facebook. A few are regulars at Third Tuesday gatherings. Most of them read blogs and some of them even write them. But I'd like to help my colleagues get more tapped into the social media tools that have made me smarter and more productive in this new world. Tools like Google Reader and Del.icio.us. And if I master Twitter, maybe they will too.

5) Get myself less plugged in. The future of social networking isn't on computers, but on wireless devices. I need to use these tools less often on my laptop and more often on my Blackberry.

So those are mine. What am I missing? And more importantly, what are your Social Media resolutions?

Another take on the Social Media Release

We had the pleasure this week of launching another Social Media Release (SMR), this time to mark NutriSystem's arrival in the Canadian market.

Meanwhile, Craig McGill, a British journalist and author, challenged some of the assumptions about SMRs, based on the one we created for com.motion's launch. He had some very kind words to say about what Veritas/com.motion is doing over here on this side of the pond, but also raised some questions about the medium.

Here's my thoughts on the issues he raises. Craig writes:

1) Most journalists don’t have time to sit and sift through all of that detail. There’s three videos there, survey results, highlights and a traditional press release. If the journalist is interested, what they want is the story quickly so they’ll rip the traditional release, play about with it a little, give it a new intro and move on. The journalist expects all the main points to be in that press release, making the rest a little
superfluous.

My experience as a journalist was little different. Yes, journalists need to be able to access the key facts fast. But I always appreciated it when I had an array of background materials to help me in putting my story together. Even if 99 per cent of it was irrelevant, the other 1 per cent could save me time and make my story stronger. Not only that, but I think the bullet-point facts in an SMR allow journalists to access the key facts even faster than a traditional press release written in paragraph form.

2) If this is sent as a URL link in an email, 9/10 (at least)
journalists won’t even click on it, based on my experience.

This remains to be seen. While I think Craig's 90-per-cent estimate of non-link-clickers is too high, it's reasonable to assume that there are dinosaurs in every newsroom who won't open links. Some may still prefer to get press releases by fax. That's why, when pitching journalists we don't know, we tend to cut and paste the traditional press release into the body of the e-mail in addition to providing them with the SMR link. It's a different issue with blogger relations. They tend to favour links and to shun cut-and-paste jobs.

3) How long is a press release like that going to take to get pulled together? Unless you have a large team ready to do each release - writing, editing, production - with fairly decent kit it’s going to take a considerable amount of time, which is time not spent on other clients.

SMRs take time. So do traditional press releases. But if they add value for our clients, then it's time well spent.

4) What’s the approval process going to be like? It can take days for clients to approve a couple of pars and it can take weeks for a final release to be approved. What will they be like with video? Will there be notes saying ‘take out 2:28 until 2:56 but definitely keep in 3:45-4:01′?

Not every SMR needs to have an interview. Sometimes video can be incorporated in other ways, such as a television commercial or a product demo. And in my experience the length of the approvals process depends more on the client -- and whether there are lawyers involved -- than on the medium of the release.

5) If you want the audio to be useful to TV crews make it available in a decent format for download, not YouTube Flash.

Agreed. This video is not suitable for TV, but designed for bloggers. By hosting videos on YouTube it is easy for bloggers to embed, as David Jones did here with one of the videos we produced for com.motion's launch.

6) On that note, where’s the audio for the radio stations and podcasts? I know I go on and on about this, but you have to think standalone audio as well as video.

Point taken. An MP3 file for podcasts would have been a good idea, particularly for the launch of a social media division.

David concludes by writing that what he likes most about SMRs is that they show that public relations is PR not MR (media relations):

For a journalist what is on the site is probably too much, but for someone looking into the topic it’s fantastic if they have the time to sit and read/watch it all.

Agreed. SMRs have three targets: journalists, bloggers and customers/consumers. The best SMRs are the ones that balance these interests and prioritize them according to each communications initiative.

This year's hottest Christmas toy will surprise you

Forget what you've heard about the hottest toy this Christmas being the Barbie Girls MP3 Player, the Transformers Movie Ultimate Bumblebee or even Guitar Hero 3.

According to toysrus.ca, the hottest toy this Christmas is an 8-pack of alkaline batteries. Really. Think of all those little kids who will wake up on Christmas morning wondering if there will be alkaline batteries under their tree, or if they'll be the one who will have to return to school in the new year and watch enviously as the other kids roll their batteries around, engage in battery sword play and put on battery puppet shows.

This screen grab -- captured just a few minutes ago -- is just too funny.


mcarthur (at) veritascanada.com

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The is isn't on Facebook

A couple weeks back, I reported that the much-hated "is" on Facebook's status line was going to disappear so awkward sentences like "Keith is loving Burrito Boyz" could be replaced by the much more sensible "Keith loves Burrito Boyz."

Problem is the is still was. But now it's not. Thanks to Rich Bloom for pointing out the change that will shake the social graph to its core.


mcarthur (at) veritascanada.com

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Lessons in social media from a horse on a stick

When I arrived at Veritas, with a mission to spread the social media gospel within the organization as well as outside, I began writing a weekly e-mail to my colleagues which I uncreatively called "Social Media 101." I churned out two of them before I got sidetracked by other things. I hope this blog is now providing my colleagues with a bit of 101. (Inside message to fellow Veritasians: If you mention that you read this post, I'll buy you a Sambuca shot at Friday's Christmas party).

Now Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo of Vancouver's Capulet Communications have written a 101-type ebook, which they call Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook. You can buy it for $30 here, but Darren was kind enough to send me a copy.

I haven't had much time with it, but after a quick scan on the subway ride home, there are a few things I really like about it.

First, it looks like it has some great case studies -- both the obvious and some more obscure ones.

Second, it is surprisingly up to date (there's a long entry on Facebook Beacon).

Third, they specify that the social media techniques in their book don't apply to kids under 16. That's important, because I find that a lot of marketers still think of social media as something specifically intended for kids under 16. And that's just wrong. In com.motion's recent social media poll, we found that 71 per cent of Canadians 18 and up have used social media tools. Predicatably, the number was much higher (93 per cent) for those aged 18 to 34, but still surprisingly high (49 per cent) for those aged 55 and up.

(Daren and Julie's book would probably make a nice companion to com.motion's Social Media training seminars. Contact me for more information on those.)

Finally, check out Daren and Julie's promotional video in which a horse on a stick (I think it's a horse) says -- and I quote -- "this books sounds very interesting. Maybe we should buy it. Maybe for some of our friends at Christmas. Mmmm. yes. Because nothing says Christmas like Social Media Marketing."

Happy holidays.



mcarthur (at) veritascanada.com

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A press release you can't send through snail mail

I've written a handful of press releases since I arrived at Veritas. I must have read thousands of press releases as a reporter -- out of hundreds of thousands that I received through e-mail, fax and even good old fashioned snail mail.

Much has been written about the press release lately -- from Tom Foremski's call for the death of press releases to Shift Communication's proposed template for a "social media release" for the world of social communications.

As part of com.motion's launch last week, we quietly "released" our first Social Media Release (shown here). We have others in development for clients which will be released in the coming weeks. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, we tried to adapt what we saw as the best practices in the design and functionality of other pioneering Social Media Release efforts. (Our biggest tinker was to move "contact information" to the bottom of the release in an effort to improve search engine optimization.) The idea is to host a press release on the Web, but make it easier for a reporter/blogger/consumer to access the facts and quotes they are looking for, while supplementing it with multimedia tools like video and images and social media tools like social bookmarking and the ability for bloggers, reporters and/or consumers to leave comments.

As blogger and a former reporter, I believe Social Media Releases have tremendous potential to reach both groups, as well as to serve as an additional marker on the Web for consumers. It is a product we strongly recommend to clients who have big announcements and are looking to maximize coverage in the mainstream press and on blogs. As you can see from all the coverage we received over com.motion's launch, it certainly worked for us.

mcarthur (at) veritascanada.com

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Facebook fumble: How can the poster child for social media conversations be so bad at it?

Back when I was working as a reporter, I was struck by the fact that the companies with the strongest brands are sometimes the worst at public relations. I won't name names, but suffice to say that some of Canada's most iconic brands are among them.

The most recent (non-Canadian) example is Facebook, which had come out of nowhere in the past 12 months to establish itself as one of the English speaking world's most loved brands. No exaggeration.

It's also no exaggeration to say that the Facebook folks are precariously close to losing all that good faith.

In an online piece yesterday Josh Quittner, the former editor of Business 2.0 magazine, warned that Facebook is being harmed "perhaps to a terminal degree" by "enormously bad PR." He writes:

For a social media company, these folks don’t understand the first thing about communication; they have alienated the press by being arrogant, aloof and dishonest. Their idea of press relations is sending a stupid message to a What’s New at Facebook Group that directs you to another website for a canned statement. ... Facebook has turned all the people who rooted for it into a lynch mob. In the space of a month, it’s gone from media darling to devil.

His harsh words relate to Facebook's PR efforts around its Beacon advertising program, which allows Facebook advertisers to send users' personal data -- like what books or movies they order -- to their friends.

Also yesterday, Robert Scoble (author of Naked Conversations), dumped blog criticism on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for his turtle act around Beacon:

I don’t see ONE SINGLE INTERVIEW that Mark Zuckerberg, or top executives at Facebook, have given ANYONE. Hell, don’t like me or other bloggers? Then give a press conference with professional press. ANYTHING would be better than the way that Facebook is handling this.

It appears that Zuckerberg may have got the message. For the first time in 15 months, Zuckerberg posted today to the Facebook blog. (Interestingly, his last post was also an apology).

Here's what he wrote today:

We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. ... It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I'm not proud of the way we've handled this situation and I know we can do better.

He took responsibility, apologized and announced that Facebook has released a privacy control that allows users to turn off Beacon altogether. This may be a case of too much, too late. Zuckerberg failed to follow one of the primary rules in crisis management: Apologize because it's the right thing to do, not because you have to. By waiting too long (until he had to), he may actually have had to make greater concessions than if had been able to get ahead of the crisis early on.

Facebook is the poster child for social media, conversation marketing and online communities. But while it facilitates and enables those communities, it is surprisingly ignorant in how to converse in them.

mcarthur (at) veritascanada.com

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