Twitter is Growing Incidental Journalists

Ever notice when an event features a speaker, that Twitter and other tools of the statusphere become random quote generators? It happened during the inaugural address, the VMAs and the Emmy’s, it even happened during BlogWorld – the list goes on. And it makes perfect sense – event speakers typically focus on presenting some type of takeaway for attendees. In turn, attendees capture the quote, re-broadcast it (hopefully with attribution) and add some context, like a hashtag.

If you’ve ever live-tweeted or updated a status from an event, you understand the human compulsion for quoting a speaker; they’re an authority for that event. But in my opinion, broadcasting quotes makes you part of a group I heard radio host Hugh Hewitt refer to as “incidental journalists.” You’re interested in sharing the news of what’s happening, but through the words of event authorities. Surprise, that makes you a journalist.

Before I moved to Minneapolis, I worked in Central Maine as a beat reporter at the Bangor Daily News, a family-owned newspaper with about 68,000 circulation (at the time). As you might imagine, quotes were everything. I covered a lot (read: hundreds) of municipal council meetings, and even when they weren’t particularly exciting, council members, residents or business owners would offer up quotes that encapsulated the issue being debated. Those quotes often became the meat of a story because they came from real people.

Now that I work in marketing, I’m fascinated when I attend an event – like a monthly Social Media Breakfast presentation (though I missed yesterday’s event) – and I see people reporting great quotes. On laptops or mobile devices, they type quotes into Twitter, and instantly, they’re publishing to their circulations (follower lists) in the hundreds and thousands. While the traditional news model may be changing, journalism isn’t going anywhere.

“I think pickles are cucumbers that sold out. They sold their soul to the devil, and the devil was dill.” – Mitch Hedberg

Filed under: social media, Uncategorized , bangor daily news, journalism, journalist, quotes, Twitter

Can I Get That With a Side of #FAIL?

So try selling this up the chain to a client: “We’re going to do some social media work for you, we don’t have all the answers, so we’re going to learn as we go, and oh yeah, we’ll probably fail.”

What the…?

About five years ago, a supervisor said to me, “Tony, you’re not going to get promoted until you truly screw something up…and then fix it.” That idea couldn’t be more true when it comes to activating ideas in the social media space. You can’t truly optimize your efforts unless you’re qualifying your failures. In other words, when you screw up, you need to have some direction for moving away from your mistake. The social web provides real-time feedback for brands, so the point is not to have the perfect answer right out of the gates, but to be aware enough to realize when your community is pointing you toward the answer you’re seeking.

During the Unsummit a couple weeks ago, I gave a presentation with Arik Hanson of ACH Communications on the importance of failure. I’ve dropped the presentation below, but the basic takeaway is that in the social media and digital space, failing is often the quickest path to finding success for a brand. The same way that a blogger will try different links, different titles, different images or different call-out tweets, a brand can experiment with how it positions itself and its assets or content.

During my presentation with Arik, we shared a couple of brand failures in this space that either didn’t do it fast enough or cheap enough. Of that group, my favorite was the Slurpee – the sugary frozen drink sold exclusively by 7-11. For decades, the Slurpee has represented a bonding experience at the store, where teenagers would grab giant 48-ounce paper cups of blue raspberry goodness for $1.97 and sit on the store curb drinking the sugary mix until their temples pounded from brain freezes. It’s a very real community that 7-11 didn’t need to fabricate, but instead they worked with a NY agency to create a slick, expensive uber-focused social network – Slurpee Nation – where fans could create a profile JUST to talk about how much they love Slurpees, in addition to posting relevant photos and videos. Slurpee Nation now counts 3,000 members, but a large majority have no content on their profiles and all visit the site at the same time (robots?) This idea = fail.

The bottom line is that there are countless case studies of social media successes, but failing is not as prevalent in the conversation. If we’re all going to get better at this, we need to celebrate that sometimes, we suck.

Fail Fast, Fail Cheap: How Errors Make Us Better

View more documents from Tony Saucier.

Filed under: social media , arik hanson, fail, social media, tsauce, unsummit

BWE 09: Video Buffet

While I managed to upload a few videos at Blogworld this past weekend, most of what I recorded came home on my Flip. I’ve already dropped posts about much of what’s below, but take a look for some of the highlights. Just a note, the panel videos are abridged.

The New Celebrity: Moderator Brian Solis, actor Anthony Edwards, choreographer/producer Robin Antin, musical artist Matt Goss and producer Jermaine Dupri. [Link to Original Post]

Shoes4Africa.org: Actor Anthony Edwards is working to help build the first pediatric teaching hospital in Africa. What are you doing?

The Death and Rebirth of Journalism: Moderator Brian Solis, Current TV COO Joanna Drake Earl, CNN anchor Don Lemon, NYU faculty member and blogger Jay Rosen, and radio host Hugh Hewitt. [Link to Original Post]

Thinking Visually: David Armano explains that you don’t have to be a designer to create great visual concepts. [Link to Original Post]

Filed under: blogworld

You Need Geek Cred to Advocate Social Media

Explaining social media to people who don’t necessarily “get it” is becoming more commonplace in working at an agency, so it was timely that Greg Verdino would be giving a presentation on turning skeptics into advocates. Greg is the chief strategy officer at Crayon, a strategic consultancy that offers donuts and pony rides – not really – strategic insights to brands like Coca-Cola, Facebook, Audi and Panasonic.

Greg is all social-ed up with a few different blogs, and profiles on Twitter, Facebook, and Posterous, but he’s quick to point out that it’s a function of what I (and others) like to call “geek cred”; you can’t advocate for social media unless you’re doing it. [Great point - I have a couple blogs and the requisite Twitter handle and Facebook accounts, but I wonder how many agency folks sell this stuff without know what it takes to blog or the like.]

His preso is embedded below, so just a couple of quick points I’ll share. Greg said that in many cases, clients will be resistant to getting involved with social media because of one of four things:

• Ignorance. This is not to say they’re unintelligent, but rather they just don’t have any foundation of experience on which to understand social media.
• Fear. They’ve never done it, they don’t know how they’ll be judged and they’re afraid of making the wrong decision.
• Laziness. They prefer to continue doing it the way they’ve done it, because that’s what has worked (or has been perceived as working) for many years.
• Stuck. They don’t know how to get started, so they become paralyzed.

The key point I thought was so spot-on was that, whatever the cause, this response of hesitation is not new. It was the same way advertisers responded when cable television came to be, and certainly again with the advent of the Internet. The slideshow below has more discussion on the solutions, but Greg’s key points for turning a skeptic to an advocate are that you need to: keep it simple, be clear, be hands-on, and come armed with tangible benefits.

From Skeptic To Advocate

View more documents from Greg Verdino.

GregVerdino.com // Crayonville.com // @GregVerdino

Filed under: blogworld

BWE 09 Celeb Talk – Twitpics, Causes and the Global View

Moderator Brian Solis, Anthony Edwards, Robin Antin, Matt Goss and Jermaine Dupri

[VIDEO COMING LATER.] I’ll admit, I was thoroughly interested to hear Jermaine Dupri and Anthony Edwards talk about social media and how that affects their roles as celebrities – and not surprisingly because they’re famous. What I didn’t expect to hear was that social media makes them a little less famous, and a little less like celebrities. By participating, it desaturates the mystique.

In leading the conversation, moderator Brian Solis talked about a report he helped develop that showed celebrity conversations are tracking between 80-90 percent positive. At the same time, fans are expecting some reciprocity where they’re talking directly to a celebrity and want to hear feedback; they don’t want to be a fan anymore, they want to be a peer.

Edwards made a good analogy of social media as a meal with different courses, so if a celebrity wants to share every minor detail, it’s like “frosting” – fans eat too much and they get sick. But if a celebrity gets it, and they understand it’s about sharing their passion and their causes – “the meat and potatoes” – then they’re respecting the medium.

Filed under: blogworld

Armano: Good Design Helps Us Learn Faster

[VIDEO COMING LATER]. Realizing that David Armano speaks often about good elements of design, I’m not sure I have a benchmark of what is new versus what may be familiar to his followers. I need to think about this stuff before I create a more thoughtful, inspired post on what it means to me, but in the meantime, here’s the great topline ideas I took down from his talk.

David sums up the creation of good design by the four Ms:

• Metaphor. Envisioning a concept as a relevant symbol. (Ex. Web 2.0 is a subway map)
• Model. A complex idea that can be broken down and digested quickly. (Ex. Think a hub and spokes to show you and your relationship to others.
• Mindmapping. A free-form way to capture ideas by drawing circles and connecting lines between like ideas. Kind of like building a network of connected thought bubbles.
• Manifest. Develop the visual that shows how the concept is crystalized. Think Venn diagram – variable A and variable B overlap with you in the middle.

Filed under: blogworld

So you’re blogging – Are you cashing in?

Having been a blogger at Pounded Thumb for a couple years and here on WordPress since….okay, Wednesday, I don’t think much about monetization. But as panel moderator Dave Taylor pointed out, it’s worth considering that your blog is a business. [He has too, it's how he pays his mortgage.]

Now maybe I won’t quit my day job any time soon, but I’m intrigued to learn how my sites may generate revenue – more the mechanics than the cash in hand. So it was during this session that I realized, if you want advertising – whether that’s Google AdSense or affiliate links – you  have to consider which advertisers are going to want space on your site. If you’re sharing funny pictures of cats, it might be pet food manufacturers. But if you write about “things that suck,” missives on things that bug you, you may have your work cut out for you in trying to attract advertisers.

Some popular ad services used by the panel: Kontera, Google AdSense, BlogAds, but there was caution – specifically from Chris Pirillo - about using text link ads.

Other recommendations from Chris [while not the only speaker, he seemed to boil down thoughts succinctly]:

• Be a content DJ. Take what content you already have and re-mix it to create new content, which can generate revenue. It adds up.
• It’s important to have your fingers in all pies. Your blog is the discovery forum for things you want to talk about, but it’s outside channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube which are going to drive the lying share of interest that comes to your site.
• Link your content to your content. Related articles are an easy way to generate more read-through with your existing traffic, and in turn, page views and potentially revenue.
• Think about how you participate. If you’re looking to have more people comment/vote/like your site, ask yourself where you’re participating. Your actions can help spark others to act.

What are your tips for monetizing?

Filed under: blogworld