Over the past two years the internet has been changing from a depository of static information to a vibrant, live conversation.‘ Now referred to as Web 2.0, the live web is a very different place.‘ Instead of using online photo albums we now have Flickr and YouTube.‘ Instead of the Encyclopedia Britannica online, we have Wikipedia. And as Fortune Magazine said, we have blogs – for better or worse.

Web 2.0 has given the average person the power of voice. The barriers to online publishing are gone. Anyone can set up a blog in mere minutes and have their say online. In text, images and video. They can podcast and videocast. They can syndicate their thoughts and ideas in an RSS feed, making their comments visible to the entire world. And unlike print, it won’t disappear in a few weeks or months. It’s there for the duration.

What does this mean for public relations?‘ No longer are we crafting one way messages that we can control. We are not doing media relations anymore – it has indeed become public relations.‘ There is a public conversation going on and as a PR practitioner you need to learn how to be a part of this conversation.

What works in traditional PR does not always work in PR 2.0. Of course the basic rules of communication are still the same, but the online world has its own set of rules.‘

We’re used to looking for a few influencers who reach many individuals,. Now we have to find many influencers who might only be reaching a few individuals, but they’re all connected and in communication with one another.‘

Word of mouth is still the Holy Grail, but now it’s word of mouse and it’s lightning fast.” There is no longer a slow feedback process – once an idea, or meme, takes hold in the blogosphere it will reach millions of like-minded folk in a very short space of time.

Authenticity and transparency are paramount.‘ Some agencies and in-house PR people have learned this lesson the hard way.‘ The Dell Hell debacle need never have happened if their PR department were up to speed on PR 2.0.

What was the PR department at Panasonic thinking when they invented a fake persona for a blogger?‘ And the recent Edelman fiasco with their fake WalMart blogs is a perfect case in point. An agency that was supposedly leading the way in PR 2.0 put both their feet right in the proverbial substance.‘ And it hit the fan, big time.‘ Do a Google search on fake Wal-Mart blog to see the fall out.

Richard Edeleman said he is making sure that his staff gets more training. And that’s the crux of the matter.‘ PR 2.0 is a new discipline.‘ It’s not something you choose to learn, or not.‘ It’s here and it’s here to stay.‘ Your audience is no longer where they were. They are getting their news and information online and you need to learn how to reach them – effectively.

Perhaps some PR firms just didn’t get the memo, comented one blogger.‘‘Perhaps not, since PR 2.0 training is not yet widespread.‘

Only one in four universities in the UK are adapting their courses to reflect advances in social media. In the US, just 28 per cent of PR course content includes modules on blogging and new media techniques.

In other European markets, the trend is’similar, with a minority of university PR and marketing degrees incorporating any online communications elements.

It’s time for a change – it’s way overdue vitally needed.‘

PR 2.0 training resources

Bulldog Reporter Advanced PR Technology in Practice

Expansion Plus

PRSA

IABC

e-consultancy UK

Lewis PR

“

(Via What’s New | Sally Falkow.)

(Via JOHO)

Charles Leadbeater’s new book is all about DIY cultural production: We Think. And he’s put it on the web for download and reader comment.

Google is on the verge of bidding £1bn for Youtube, a business little more than a year old. Wikipedia continues to draw more traffic than much more established media brands, employing hundreds more people. Open source programmes such as Linux insistently chip away at corporate providers of proprietary software. Immersive multi user computer games, such as Second Life, which depend on high levels of user participation and creativity are booming. Craigslist a self help approach to searching for jobs and other useful stuff is eating into the ad revenues of newspapers. Youth magazines such as Smash Hit have been overwhelmed by the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo. What is going on?

We-Think: the power of mass creativity is about what the rise of the likes of Wikipedia and Youtube, Linux and Craigslist means for the way we organise ourselves, not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations. My argument is that these new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a society in which participation will be the key organising idea rather than consumption and work. People want to be players not just spectators, part of the action, not on the sidelines.

With the support of Profile, my publisher, I am releasing the book prior to formal publication next year so that people can comment upon the text, add to it, disagree with it. I hope this open approach to peer review is in itself an experiment in collaborative creativity and will help to create new ways for people to write books and share ideas.

“

(Via DIY Media Weblog.)

“

(Via Influential Interactive Marketing.)

I’ve been hearing whispers that Google will integrate their social network Orkut with the mobile social networking app they acquired
last year, Dodgeball. While it’s not rocket
science to make the connection between the two products (both are social networking), the
reasons to join the two are becoming more compelling… Here are some of them:

1) Social networking has been the biggest thing going in 2006 (MySpace, Facebook,
Bebo, etc). And it looks like mobile will be big next year. So SNS + Mobile seems the
logical sequel.

2) There is also the trend of meta-social networks, like Marc Canter’s PeopleAggregator. It was actually the latest
New Scientist magazine which rang a little bell in my mind about this. An article called

Living Online: This is your space (full article not online yet unfortunately)
concluded by saying that an individual’s identity will be managed by a meta-network,
which we will carry with us ‘in small wireless devices so that our virtual identities
become seamlessly integrated with the real world.’ That online/offline balance is one of
the main things mobile Web has going for it. So meta-SNS + Mobile is another trend I
think we’ll see emerge…

3) Peter Dawson pointed me to Mihai
Parparita’s blog, who has a great post entitled Facebook meets
Dodgeball. In it Mihai writes:

‘…I thought it would be cool to syndicate my Dodgeball check-ins into my Facebook profile, via
their blog (i.e. RSS feed) to notes import feature. It worked pretty well [...] and it’s
sort of neat that these two social networking sites are open even slightly, allowing such
co-mingling of data.’

So co-mingling of SNS data, to borrow Mihai’s neat phrase, is another trend that is
hotting up.

4) Demographics are similar between Orkut and Dodgeball. All evidence points to Dodgeball being used mostly by young people. In Brazil, home to 65-70% of the
Orkut user base, it is mostly 13-30 year olds who use Orkut. And in my recent Top Web Apps in
Brazil post, it was established that Brazil is a sophisticated Web market (at least
in the main cities).

In terms of mobile usage, Brazil is nearly at 100 Million users
according to a recent report:

‘The number of Brazilians owning mobile phones rose to 94.9 million in August, up 2%
from July, according to preliminary figures released Monday by telecommunications
regulator Anatel. Brazilian mobile phone ownership rose more than 20% when compared with
September of 2005, when the number of mobile phones was 78.9 million.’

While obviously Orkut + Dodgeball is not all about Brazil, it’s probably a good pointer to how
complementary the two services are. However I imagine Google will target the US market
first, as they always do.

Summary

While there’s no firm evidence yet that Orkut will merge with Dodgeball, I believe
it’s just a matter of time. John Battelle even kind of predicted it back in May
2005, with this comment: ‘What is Dodgeball? I dunno, but is seems like Orkut + Mobile
done right, I think.’

In any case, the high level trends point to it happening soon: SNS + Mobile; meta-SNS
+ Mobile; Co-mingling of data between SNS; similar demographics.

“

(Via Read/WriteWeb.)

New research from the Keller Fay Group has found that the average American mentions specific brands 56 times during approximately 100 conversations in a week’s time (via advertising age).

Other findings from the research include:

• Positive mentions outnumber negative mentions 6 to 1
• 92% of brand conversations are happening offline, of which 20% happens over phone
• Only 9% of conversations are ‘mostly negative’
• People are more likely to pass along good mentions than bad ones – so good news travels faster than bad news!
• 41% of conversations mention advertising
• 72% of opinions about brands are shared by family members and personal friends, 13% are shared by co-workers and 7% are shared by a professional or expert on the topic
• The Internet (12%), television (7%) and newspapers (5%) are the top three media channels most frequently referenced in brand-related buzz
• Email, instant message and online chat rooms/blogs comprise 6% of word of mouth

It would have been interesting to see how this data correlates with people’s buying stage. While the study shows that most brand related buzz happens offline, people may be in a more advanced buying stage when looking for brand related information using a search engine than when seeing friends and family at a reception or dinner.

When I asked Ed Keller (CEO of the Keller Fay Group and author of ‘The Influentials’) that question at a recent conference, he said that the study did not look at the correlation between online research and face-to-face brand messaging. While the research shows that 92% of brand related buzz happens offline, it could be that the effect of online word of mouth is disproportionately more impactful on buying decisions. The ‘buzzer’ may be in an advanced buying stage when he or she is talking up a brand offline – but the recipient of the brand message may not be as receptive as if he or she were actively looking for brand related information online.

On that very topic, Yahoo! and OMD released a study last week that shows that 62% of buyers use a combination of online and offline sources to gather information before they buy.

It would also have been interesting to see what kind of brands people talk up in different situations. If it is true that most people identify or talk ‘through’ their brands, then the brands they talk up with friends and family would likely be different than the brands they talk up during company gatherings. In fact, people’s need to identify or talk through their brands could explain why so much word of mouth happens offline!

The good news is that offline ‘positive news travels faster than bad news.’ We should not forget, however, that online ‘negative news stays there forever,’ and that the impact of a bad customer review can have long lasting effects on brand purchases (according to the same Yahoo!/OMD study, 25% of people have posted online product reviews). Take my recent bout with Mercedes – which after much deliberation I decided to blog (also here, here, and here). When I wrote the posts, thousands of readers came to view those posts. But now, almost two months later, search engines are still sending over 20 people a day to read those posts – that is 140 people a week! And every now and then, someone will share their horror stories with that same brand in the comment section, or they will comment on how they would never buy a Mercedes Benz again – or in one case, an independent garage owner who had been servicing Mercedes for 20 years shares his story of how he is switching brands because of poor product quality and horrible customer service. So over time, what started out as an individual product rant has become a collection of (mostly disgruntled) customer reviews – nevertheless, something of a real useful service to potential buyers.

So while 92% of word of mouth may travel offline – don’t stop your online word-of-mouth activities just yet – at least not until we understand the true impact on buying behavior!

[Tags: word of mouth wom viral marketing online marketing ed keller]

“

(Via Emergence Marketing.)

Written by Ebrahim Ezzy and edited by Richard
MacManus. Note: there is also a poll at end of this post, which we invite you to participate in.

MySpace is booming in popularity; Facebook is gracing the
headlines again; Bebo is growing
incredibly; Tribe relaunched;
Cyworld, Hive7 and SecondLife are nothing short of a
phenomenon; LinkedIn is becoming ‘People Search‘; ITToolbox
relaunched with a host of social
networking features;’Friendster is now
refueling
itself to enter the market again.

Put simply, social networking is hot and there is plenty of money and
action in the SNS space to prove it.

Short History of Social Networks

Social
Networks have a history almost as long as RSS. Aspects of social networks have long been
present in dating services such as Match and Classmates. The notion of social networking first
formally appeared on the Internet in the late 1990s, with services like FireFly,
eGroups/OneList, ICQ and’Evite’- which allowed groups of people to coordinate
certain kinds of interaction.’

It was not until 2003 that
social networks became truly mainstream – with the advent of Friendster.’Shortly
thereafter,’there was a wave of social networks. Adopting small-world theory,
services like Tribe, Orkut, LinkedIn and Spoke emerged – allowing users to better
organize and expand their recreational and business networks.

Today: ‘Social Network 3.0′

Today, social networks are enormously popular.’The benefits can be seen at the
multiplier level – people mentor each other through the formation of communities; and
they network and inspire each other by example and input. Social networks protect people
from the vastness of cyberspace and offer tools to find each other, organize and share
information, or just keep in touch with friends.

Social networking sites have proliferated in the span of the past year.’While I
don’t have actual numbers, Wiikipedia tells’us that there are at least two hundred
social networks, with scores of new ones appearing each day. While some of these services
focus on teens, others target individual professionals and some aim at organizations like
businesses and graduate schools.

Venture capitalist David Hornik recently wrote about what he calls ‘Social Networks
3.0‘:

‘I believe that we are now in Social Networks 3.0. After a fair bit of excitement and
energy around pure play social networks, it became clear that the building and management
of a social network was not, in and of itself, a compelling consumer experience. In a nod
back to the earliest instantiations of social networking, entrepreneurs have come to
realize that social networks are enablers of other compelling consumer
experiences. Thus, social networks are becoming an important ingredient of all
sorts of consumer experiences…

I believe that social networking will be a crucial element of virtually all
online consumer experiences going forward. And truly compelling online consumer
experiences will always make successful companies.’
(emphasis ours)

Overview of the current Social Networking Space

There are hundreds of emergent social networks, but I’ve shortlisted a few that are
worth keeping an eye on (apart from the obvious ones, like MySpace and
Facebook):

LinkedIn

A’great resource’for finding talented, like-minded, and socially
responsible’people – upon whom you can network for work opportunities, contract
jobs, sales or partnership discussions. There has been some talk
about whether LinkedIn will expand beyond its niche. Co-Founder and Vice President
Marketing at LinkedIn Konstantin Guericke commented
recently that perhaps there is no need for that:

‘LinkedIn has been profitable for the past six months, and revenues are growing very
quickly. I’m not sure who else can say that.’

CollectiveX

CollectiveX is social groupware suitable for a user-group, special-interest group, or
any other like-minded group of people who share similar’goals. It combines certain
team collaboration features – including group emails, shared scheduling,’file
sharing’and bulk email services etc.. This sets it apart from other social networks.
Michael Arrington’s’review
supports my view,’that CollectiveX is social networking ‘the way it should have been
done in the first place.’

PeopleAggregator

PeopleAggregator [disclosure: Richard does work for them] is a meta social
network system, meaning it enables you to connect other social networking services
together. Perhaps the most important aspect of this is the Identity Hub, where you can
login to other systems via PeopleAggregator. Another feature of PeopleAggregator is that
you can import and export your data with relative ease – i.e. it’s an open system, unlike
MySpace for example. This vision is still being built out, but the idea is that
eventually you’ll be able to send messages, create relationships, join or create groups,
and post content between social networks.

Wetpaint

Wetpaint allows you to create free hosted websites, using wiki technology. It
describes itself as a combination of ‘wikis, blogs, and social networks’ and encourages
people to create topic-focused sites. For example check out this wetpaint site devoted to dogs, called
WikiFido.

Multiply

Great for those who like the idea of sharing their lives, but not necessarily every
facet of their lives. So privacy and user control are its main selling points. There is
also a lot of granularity as to how users can define relationships – e.g. husband,
roommate, business contact are some of the options. For more on these types of services,
check out Ken Yarmosh’s R/WW post Smart Social
Networks. Multiply currently claims nearly 3 million registered users.’

Imeem

Allows sharing of’all types of media content – blogs, photos, audio, and video.
In the words of Wikipedia, it ‘has both a social network structure as well as a content
browsing/filtering structure’. In that sense it enables you to create a social network
dynamically and in real time.

Points to Ponder

Does more members in a network make a users life better?

Instead of simply allowing the users to create and manage friendship flow charts,
social networks need to enable them to’do something. Users should be
empowered to control and utilize their social networks in a meaningful and protected
way.

What’s the purpose of social networking?

Several mainstream social networks focus squarely’on numbers‘- page
views, number of members, hits’etc. And there’s nnothing wrong with that, it’s a
valid business approach. But social networks play on our desire to be a part of something
big,’which might never happen…

So social networking’is great, as long as it can serve’its purpose
by’connecting people in a meaningful way -’and for a meaningful
purpose.’

Over time, I believe, people will get tired of the vast and generic theme of
mainstream social networks – and move towards niche or vertical social networks that will
serve their passions and interests.

So, will niche or vertical social networks take off?

Helping match people with content is a worthwhile pursuit. We’re already seeing a new
wave of niche social networks that are building social-enabled sites around
content-oriented channels – e.g. pets,’books, music,’cars, shopping, travel.’

But social networks require a critical mass to thrive. So it will be interesting to
see how the smaller, niche social networks deal with’their much smaller user
bases.

However, due to their focus, they do seem prepared to tackle the potential social
networking bust that lies ahead.

Time for a silver bullet

The value of social networking, in general, is diminished with each new
service entering the field. There’s a need for’some standards in the social
networking space, as it is’difficult to maintain profiles at each social
network.

Many of the fun-seeking’Myspacers may actually be the very same
respectful businessmen at LinkedIn, just with an adjusted profile (and maybe an
adjusted name to go with it). So what we require is a system that connects all social
networks – that a user is a member of – and shares basic functionalities. This would
allow users to choose a system with the features and approach that best suits them.

Or better yet, instead of being confined to one giant centralized social network, we
should move to social groupwares – like CollectiveX and
PeopleAggregator – that enable users to build their own meta social
networks, based on their passions and interests. This way, numerous social networks will
proliferate – each with unique form and function.

Poll

Take Our Poll

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/Time_For_A_Silver_Bullet’;

“

(Via Read/WriteWeb.)

Dave Sifry has another ‘State of the Blogosphere’ report, and this time he quantifies the total number of blog posts per day. That seems like a more impactful measure than just the total number of new blogs created every per day.

Total daily blog postings in February 2005: roughly 500,000. One year later: nearly 1.2 million.

At that rate, it means about 2.5 million postings per day by February 2007.

Pair those numbers now with YouTube; it appears that the number of videos posted to the video-sharing site is tripling every year. Right now, daily video uploads are about 35,000. Based on a four-month trend, daily uploads could be 100,000 by the end of 2006, with some 130 million daily viewings.

That’s a substantial amount of data to follow, categorize and analyze. (It seems, too, that the world could use a Technorati that follows video sharing sites.)

All of this seems to point toward a new job responsibility inside companies whose growth depends on word of mouth: social media analyst.

If a social media analyst could port into Technorati’s data warehouse (or BlogPulse’s) and rely on her imagination and knowledge of company strategies to create her own, real-time dashboard of gauges, maps and charts of what’s being said online, she would probably become the company’s most foremost expert on trends, word of mouth and the democratization of culture.

Update: Stowe Boyd on the idea of a social media analyst:

‘Maybe that’s too remote: all that staring at graphs and so on, like the
foo-foo dust that business intelligence firms peddle. I think it is
more likely that a role analogous to press relations will arise: blog
relations. These folks will keep tabs on Blogpulse and Technorati, to
see what is going down, but they will also maintain and active and
on-going relationship with the major bloggers in their sector.’

It seems like the responsibility of blogger relations could fall under the job duties in PR, customer service, marketing, call centers… A job responsibility like that is not easily painted across every industry.

I see the role of a social media analyst as someone who crunches numbers on all of the data being generated by social media. From that analysis would come guidance on what companies should do.

A social media analyst could also be responsible for quantifying the effects of social media-driven word of mouth on sales.

“

(Via Church of the Customer Blog.)

Wal-Mart has gotten some attention this week with the launch of a social networking brand community site loosely based on social phenomenons like MySpace. The site–called The HUB–School Your Way–focuses on the impending back to school season and coincides with the launch of the store’s school clothing lines. The likenesses to more general MySpace sites, for instance, are only a loose affiliation, however, as the site focuses on the back to school rush and Wal-Mart clothing lines.

Many responses to the release of the School Your Way site is based on Mya Frazier’s scathing review of the site in Advertising Age. Among Frazier’s gripes were the inauthenticity of the kids in videos on the site, the sanitzed and censored replica of MySpace that would not appeal to kids, and the focus around a clothing line that kids just don’t see value in. Considering the strong degree of corporate backlash against Wal-Mart, especially by those that consider the low prices retailer as censors selling lower-quality wares, the response in the blogosphere is not surprising, and several bloggers have continued with Frazier’s line of attack. Particularly, these folks are attacking the idea of trying to copy the success of a major social phenomenon in a watered-down product that only serves to make the brand seem more low-rent instead of ‘cool.’

On the other hand, Seth Godin makes a compelling argument as to why the site may well work–even if it’s not cutting edge in any way, Godin says, doesn’t mean it won’t work because ‘the early adopters out there will push hard,’ but ‘the middle of the market’ is pretty profitable as well. For all the parents out there forbidding MySpace in their house, for kids who don’t feel safe on MySpace after hearing all the news reports of the site’s potential dangers, or for those kids who love the Wal-Mart brand (Frazier’s choice of interview subjects for her story indicates that there are few teens that fall into this category, but she didn’t present the most objective report, either), the site may draw well.

GSD&M, a partner here at the consortium, is Wal-Mart’s ad agency. I’m not sure the involvement of the agency in this project and have not discussed it with them, but I think Seth’s argument is a compelling one that we can’t forget. Just because this doesn’t reach out to the people in the blogosphere or to those of us who are LinkedIn and who have face time on Facebook or who have long been established in MySpace doesn’t mean that there isn’t a strong market out there for the product.

Of course, I’m no advocate for closely monitored censorship, even when it comes to teenagers, so I’m not so crazy about this controlled communication forum (if you aren’t really allowing open communication nor private correspondence on the site, is it really a communication forum?). Wal-Mart’s site may end up being successful, and it may catch a lot of new users uncomfortable with the jungles of MySpace or the more technical social networking sites out there for teens. That sanitized and protected and censored site is appealing to many parents and even teens. For the sake of trickle-down innovation, I hope the site does attract kids to the potential of social networking and encourage other old media companies to continue brainstorming ways to extend their brand into community forums. Let’s just hope that the limits of the Wal-Mart site doesn’t become the norm.

Thanks to C3′s William Uricchio for drawing my attention to the current debate.

“

(Via Convergence Culture Consortium (C3@MIT).)

According to Comscore, and as of March 2006, 23% of US Internet traffic visit Myspace…(see earlier post for some more stats on MySpace)

(via software only)

[Technorati Tags: myspace social networking online advertising stats social media]

“

(Via Emergence Marketing.)

Business Week writes:

Just how big could mobile social networking get? This application’s usage could become ‘as big as online social networking,’ says Dennis Crowley, founder of wireless social network Dodgeball, owned by Google. About 45% of active Web users have been to online social networking sites, according to a recent study by Nielsen/NetRatings. As MySpace expands beyond its core market of teens and young adults, ‘We expect penetration of MySpace mobile to match penetration of cell phones,’ which are owned by 80% of Americans, says Digiaro. Mobile access could become even more prevalent outside of the U.S., where in some cases more people use cell phones than personal computers to surf the Web.

Indeed, it’s the cell phone, rather than the personal computer, that’s the constant companion for today’s hip and socially networked. Why wait till you get home to log onto the PC to tell your 20 closest personal friends about your date? Teens can use a network-friendly cell phone to relay stories, pictures, and videos instantaneously.

“

(Via Emergic.)