Chapter 12. The Pro's Use of PR 2.0

When it comes to PR 2.0, levels of acceptance and adoption vary between you and your professional peers. One of the best ways to gauge where you fall on the PR 2.0 spectrum (from the Innovator and Early Adopter to the Late Majority and the Laggard) is to talk to as many professionals as you can and to be socially involved in online communities. You need to hear how your fellow professionals are involved with Web 2.0 resources and PR 2.0 strategies, how they are moving forward using consumer driven new media tools (either strategies for their brands or how they personally are involved in 2.0), and their overall challenges and successes. Everyone has a story to tell, whether it's an experience with blogging, social networking, podcasting, streaming video, or Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Each experience is different, valuable, and will provide you with ideas and new techniques to add to your arsenal of communications strategies.

From the small online start-up, such as Art eXposed (www.getartexposed.com), a small NJ-based company that supports and promotes an online community of artists, and the large public company, such as BMC Software (www.bmc.com), to the practices of the social media gurus, professionals with different skill sets are taking steps to engage their brands in social media. In this chapter, you learn from the personal stories of an Innovator, Jimmy Wales, and from Early Adopters, including long-time consultant and tech guru Steve Lubetkin and Jane Quigley, a technology expert at DigitalGrit, who have been practicing PR 2.0 for years. These professionals are from extremely diverse companies and wide-ranging backgrounds, yet believe and share a common view—you need to understand and engage in social media to reach powerful communities.

Social Media for the Start-Up

Mark Skrobola, artist and founder of Art eXposed, spends at least 50 percent of his day social networking and using social media tools to drive consumers and artists to his online art gallery. When Skrobola first started out, he knew that Art eXposed needed to be a part of MySpace. Registering under his business name, he quickly set up a MySpace page to drive the artist community to his Art eXposed Web site. He started by looking for artists and having them join as his friends. If he liked their artwork, he would not only make them his friends, but also make their friends his friends. The more friends he acquired, the more his extended network grew. How did this affect his business? Skrobola went from signing up three artists on his site in January 2007 to more than 22 artists exhibiting their work (and paying for his online services) in a matter of 4 months. Skrobola finds the MySpace classified ads and blog to be an effective way to communicate to artists and art enthusiasts. MySpace has a great events area and through MySpace, he was able to inform his entire MySpace network about the Art eXposed kick-off event in June 2007.

On the Art eXposed Web site, Skrobola is actively blogging, which helps to increase his page rating in the search engines. He uses Technorati (www.technorati.com) and Feed Burner (www.feedburner.com) to get his site noticed, ultimately leading to more traffic to his blog. Skrobola is working with his artist community to get video demonstrations and interviews uploaded on YouTube.com (to further increase the number of patrons frequenting his site). These videos will also be posted on his blog. "Today everything is visual. Consumers want to feel comfortable about buying high-quality artwork. There's no better way than a good visual image to judge the value of the artist and his work. Video enables you to get very personal with the artist, more so than a traditional portfolio picture or written words on a page."

Engaging the Large Corporation

Whether you are an entrepreneur using social media for your start-up company or you work for a large corporation, today's Web 2.0 audiences are dictating the social media strategies. For example, Ynema Mangum, executive producer of TalkBMC at BMC Software Inc., became actively involved in Web 2.0 when her company launched its public blogging and podcasting channel called TalkBMC (http://talk.bmc.com) in June of 2005. According to Mangum, corporate bloggers were recruited for a variety of reasons: as a result of their activity and quality of content on their internal blogs; because they voiced a demand to blog or be heard; and/or because the producers felt they always had something interesting or unique to say.

Mangum feels that BMC was early on the blogging scene. "There were very few blogging platforms to choose from. We chose Plone (www.plone.org), an open-source content management system that supports blogging. Being a large and proprietary software company, we felt that our choice would give us some early and positive press around embracing open source and also enable us to go outside of our IT organization and be more experimental. No one knew at the time if corporate blogging would 'take' or if it would fail," she explained.

BMC at one time or another had about 20 bloggers. Their roles ranged from individual contributor, to middle manager, to the executive level. The highest blogger titles included BMC's CTO, Chief Architect and Corporate Strategist. Mangum admitted that the list of company bloggers did not include all that many marketing and salespeople but let more technically literate individuals speak. They also made it a point to ask individual contributors to join so people outside BMC would get a feel for the internal culture and the quieter contributions made by the "very brainy people" at BMC.

Similar to the discussion with Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems in Chapter 8, "Social Networking: A Revolution Has Begun," Mangum said that the company's communications department does not typically monitor BMC's blogs. The blogs are reviewed and moderated for comments with profanity and for potential competitor hacking. However, BMC doesn't tell their bloggers what to write about or how to write it. The company does sometimes suggest topics if bloggers appear to be having a block. It is never a requirement; nor do they ever pay anyone to blog or to be interviewed for a podcast.

Mangum feels that blogs have a place in a social media community that is made up of a number of things: wikis, knowledge bases, forums, user groups, blogs, podcasts, videos, discussion threads, and so on. Blogging is one part of a potentially powerful community and it's important to think carefully before launching a new way to communicate with potential prospects, customers, analysts, investors, and generally interested parties. "Fortunately, the communications department at BMC was extremely flexible and open-minded about blogging. In fact, they suggested (and continue to suggest) the first bloggers. They are very involved in our content and I believe they will be deeply involved in the future of social media at BMC," she said.

Blogs have a bright future, she believes. Blogging and social media are changing the way her business communicates with the market. "The future of blogging and how companies use it (versus strictly personal social sites) is going to be different for every organization. The following entry from Mangum's blog lets you experience her frame of reference as she focuses on social media with respect to BMC's audiences.

The Consultant/Guru's Point of View

Mangum is in good company when it comes to passion and involvement in Web 2.0 and social media. Steve L. Lubetkin, APR, Fellow, PRSA, is the managing partner of Lubetkin & Co. LLC, a diversified public relations, Internet broadcasting, and communications consulting practice. The company's Professional Podcasts LLC subsidiary is a leading producer of audio and video podcasts (digital multimedia programs distributed via the Internet) for corporate clients and other organizations. Lubetkin formed the firms in 2004, after successfully managing communications during the completion of the $47 billion Bank of America-Fleet Bank merger. Throughout his career he has held senior executive positions in corporate communications at Bank of America, FleetBoston Financial, and Summit Bank.

Lubetkin is an Early Adopter of social media. He said he got involved in social media after Steve Rubel gave a presentation on blogging to the PRSA National Board of Directors. In January 2005, he started blogging and podcasting the following month. When he realized he had some skills specific to podcasting (having prior experience on the radio as an engineer and news anchor from 1975 to 1979 at stations in Central New Jersey), he focused on selling podcasting services to clients. He's been extremely active in the space since that time.

Lubetkin started using a blogging tool that was offered by his former Internet Service Provider (ISP). Eventually, he realized he needed a more robust tool and switched over to blogger.com. His blog is referred to as "Lubetkin's Other Blog" to distinguish it from his first blog. "I need to be completely up-to-date so that I can advise my clients on the most effective approaches [in social media]," explains Lubetkin. He creates podcasts for his clients as well as for his own account with his work featured in the April 2006 issue of the Philadelphia Business Journal (www.philadelphia.bizjournals.com). In the past couple years he's produced podcasts for NAPL, a trade association for the excellence in graphic communications management (www.napl.org), The American Institute for CPCU (www.aicpcu.org) and PRSA, the Public Relations Society of America, (www.prsa.org), and other organizations including Sun National Bank's Sun Home Loans mortgage subsidiary (www.sunnb.com) and Rutgers University School of Business Administration (http://camden-sbc.rutgers.edu/BusinessCommunity/outlook.htm).

When asked what he thought about the driving force behind social media and PR 2.0, Lubetkin said he believes it's a combination of a consumer driven initiative and better technology. He explained that it wouldn't be feasible, for example, for consumers to produce and upload rich media content like video and audio without enhanced bandwidth, storage, and production technologies (affordable cameras and recorders, affordable software tools). However, Lubetkin feels that there are PR people who are enthusiastic about technology for its own sake. They want to demonstrate that they are on the leading edge. It is in their business interest to push clients into technologies that might or might not be appropriate for that client's business objectives. Lubetkin warns that if the technology doesn't help the client meet their business objectives, maybe it shouldn't be pitched to them.

Of all the social media tools, Lubetkin feels that podcasting is more effective than blogging because blogs suffer from writer fatigue and often an inauthentic voice. "A Chairman may get tired of doing a blog and delegate it to his PR people," states Lubetkin. "Not to mention that you have to leave the negative comments on the blog. That can be difficult." Lubetkin, who is clearly in favor of podcasting, recommends it to his clients because this social media tool enables you to reach a highly mobile audience of people, who will seek out valuable content for listening or watching on their own terms and at the time most convenient to them. Lubetkin also believes that his clients' podcasts get downloaded at a significant enough volume level that makes them happy and meets their expectations. "One client views downloads as the ability to reach a global audience without having their business development experts having to give those many face-to-face presentations," he stated.

Lubetkin believes social media will continue to evolve. The next step is for social sites like MySpace and Facebook to become less of the "walled garden" kind of either-or choice and become a central place for people to link with other people. "Look at Pulse, the new beta site from www.plaxo.com. They are offering to link up all different sites in a single interface. That is probably more efficient than having to log in to multiple sites."

Lubetkin also sees the value of RSS for his clients. He described RSS as a crucial technology because it enables you to collect all the data sources you want to monitor in a single environment where they can be tracked at the keyword level.

Best Practices from the Technology Evangelist

Jane Quigley, Senior Director for DigitalGrit, the full service interactive marketing firm, began exploring and experimenting with social media more than five years ago. "Once RSS feeds really became standardized, I found it was a great way to get news. Now, I have about 183 feeds that I read, some daily, some weekly. Then about three years ago, I started a blog at LiveJournal as an experiment and I was hooked." Today she has three to five blogs that she's working on at any one time, and she also helps other people set up their own blogs. Quigley tried to stay away from any real forays into social networking at first—she started a MySpace, but never used it. She set up a profile on LinkedIn and forgot about it for a long time.

It was late in 2006 when Quigley started getting more involved with social networking services. It started with Twitter (www.twitter.com) first, and then she expanded to other micro-blogs, including Jaiku (www.jaiku.com) and Pownce (www.pownce.com). She started a Tumblr (www.tumblr.com) and began with Facebook right before the platform opened. "That was a revelation for me—the viral nature of the Facebook platform. Now, I'm on 23 social networking platforms. But, I use and heavily contribute to Twitter, Facebook, Pownce, and my blogs daily. I also use wikis professionally and personally as communication and organizational tools," she stated. In addition, Quigley beta-tests software and services (Mac-centric and social networking-focused) and finds that she gets a lot of invites from her social network "friends."

Quigley remembers the first types of resources she started to use to communicate personally and professionally. For her, RSS feeds were first, and then LiveJournal, Blogger, and LinkedIn came next. Getting more involved with social media, she started experimenting with del.icio.us and began commenting on other people's blogs. By 2005, Quigley was really hooked on RSS feeds (especially after Apple incorporated an RSS reader into Safari). "Not only was I exploring my own voice, but I also began talking to my clients about corporate blogging in late 2004—with no takers," she recalled.

Quigley's position at DigitalGrit and her Web 2.0 experience has enabled her to carve out an "Industry Expert" niche. "I'm also an Emerging Technology/Services evangelist—I like to try to adapt new technologies and services to our clients needs before they are in their sightline. Our clients always want to know what's going on with new technology. What is the value proposition for them? And, more importantly, when they really need to start thinking about it." Every time she speaks to her clients, she talks about the new things she's looking at, how she thinks they might be appropriate for their space, and gives them an estimated timeline as to when she thinks it'll become important.

For those looking to get involved in social networking, Quigley recommends the following resources to develop and maintain contacts: LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, IM, Twitter, and Pownce. Her company uses Twitter, IM, and Facebook for status updates, and some project management.

Quigley has a select group of blogs:

• Jane's Tumblr— A collection of links, pictures, and feeds she wants to keep around. For Quigley, it's "a brain-dump kind of thing."
• www.socialdays.com— A blog she started that discusses social networks/media.
• www.settingcontexts.com— A blog focusing on David Allan's GTD productivity system, as well as software services/apps. This blog is Mac-centric.
• www.secondlife.com— With a partner, Quigley has a conference center in Second Life that they rent out to companies looking to explore metaverses without a major initial investment.
• DigitalGrit's corporate blog— With podcasts and an internal wiki.

Quigley believes companies need to realize they do not own their brand anymore. People are using a company's assets and developing their own brand experience, such as making YouTube videos (commercials—positive or negative), developing blogs that hold companies responsible for the customer experience, and creating Facebook groups that try to change new corporate policy. She believes we're all consumers and our experiences are shared, easily and virally, with our networks at large. The example she provided was "Like that '70s hair commercial, 'You tell two friends, and they tell two friend, and so on...' Now, it's just done, uploaded and shared in minutes." Technology and increased bandwidth all have played a part in the drive toward social media. Five years ago it would have been tough—because of bandwidth issues—for YouTube to succeed. Also cameras were more expensive. No camera phones. Now everything and everyone is accessible 24/7.

Quigley cites as a favorite example iLike (www.ilike.com), a Web site that enables users to download and share music. It debuted in October 2006 and had built a community of three million users in seven months. "They were one of the first apps on the Facebook platform and literally had to run around Seattle pulling servers from friends and friends of friends to handle the traffic Facebook generated. After (almost) three months, they were at eight million users and at one point were signing up more than 300,000 users per day. Before Facebook opened up its platform it would have taken much more than a year to get that kind of user base and traffic that took less than three months to build."

Quigley feels that one of the most effective social media tools for both B2B and B2C companies are widgets, which are becoming a major tool in distributing content (and advertising) in a strong, viral manner. New companies are building widgets that can be used to purchase content—from newspapers—even video. People will pay to get exclusive content, or to preview content (TV Shows, and so on) before anyone else. She believes that metaverses (like Second Life) will play a role once they can scale in a larger way (capacity in one place is limited right now). But there's been some great examples of companies using Second Life to gain great success, such as IBM, which uses its space there to hold meetings, corporate events, and so on.

Quigley thinks that what happened in the first 45 days of the Facebook platform has been the turning point. Instead of the "walled garden" approach of Facebook, people are going to be able to share applications, advertising, widgets, and all social networking tools across all platforms and incorporated into the operating system (OS) of choice (or direct from desktops). "People are already aggregating their content so that people who 'follow' across platforms are only getting the same posts once instead of 4 or 5 times. I think the race to monetize Facebook and social networking, in general, will bring new tools, services, and applications that will force transparency and openness of the platform," Quigley explained.

Q&A with a Social Media Innovator

Each professional gets involved in social media in a different way. For Mangum, it was blogging. Lubetkin found the value of podcasting early on, and for Quigley it was her great interest in RSS feeds that started her passion and further experimenting with all types of social media both personally and professionally. One of the most well-known Web 2.0 gurus also had a great deal to say about his start with social media and his innovation that truly changed the way consumers access information on the Internet. In a Q&A with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, he shared his unique perspective and insight into the world of social media.

Q: Have you always been ahead of the curve with technology in the past?

A: Yes, to some extent. I was a very Early Adapter of computers. My mother was a gadget person. We were the first people I knew who had a Betamax, VCR, with the Beta tapes, and we had eight tracks too. My mom, like me, was an Early Adapter of technology and because my uncle owned a computer store, we had computers in the house when I was very young. I was always experimenting with technology.

Q: When and how did you come up with the idea of Wikipedia?

A: I had been watching the growth of the presoftware movement—or open source software as most people know it—for several years when I had first heard of this idea of software that's released under free-license that enables anyone to copy it, redistribute it, modify it. At first, I was skeptical. I thought, that was kind of fun, it's a little hobby for some people. But, it just kept growing and growing, and then I realized that's the main software that really runs the Internet and it's all free software. Volunteers write it and they are the people who had a need to share the software.

Now, we're starting to see some business models merge around this. I thought that this kind of collaborative, public effort of writing software would emerge first because if programmers needed tools to share code with each other, they could write their own tools. They have, for example, a program called CVS, which means Concurrent Versioning System. CVS is where programmers can check out and check in code changes and share codes, so if you and I were working on some software together, I can check out part of it and make some changes and check it back in. You can be working on some different part of it, and then it merges our changes in a useful way. Programmers invented things like that to enable them to pool resources. However, I realized for the rest of us, if you and I wanted to collaborate on a document, our best choice might be just e-mailing back and forth a Word document. That really breaks all facts if you have ever tried to collaborate with eight or ten people by e-mailing around Word documents. It just doesn't work.

My idea is to give people the tools they need to collaborate so that they can do more than just "code." They can build whatever they want. The first concept here was the encyclopedia. It was to allow people to come together. As soon as I had the idea in 1999, I was more than excited. I was obsessed. I found myself in a big hurry because I thought that it was extremely obvious that someone else would implement my idea. It turns out that for two years or so that we struggled with a first version, which was not a success, there wasn't anybody else even close to what we were doing. Then, it was in late 2000 that I stumbled across the wiki editing concept, which I didn't invent. It had been around since 1995, when Ward Cunningham invented the wiki, meaning the Web site that anyone can edit. Ward had invented this small underground phenomenon on the Net, which no one really harnessed for a large-scale project. I launched Wikipedia as a part of a socializing cultural tradition of free software, open source, and the wiki combined.

Q: Did consumers understand the concept of Wikipedia right away, or did it take some time?

A: It did take some time and it didn't all at the same time. From the very early days, the participation and the page views and all those measures doubled almost every three to four months. But, remember, in the beginning the first doubling means that the participation went from 10 people to 20 people and then from 20 to 40 people and so on, but it's hard to say if that's fast or slow. It sounds pretty fast, doubling every three to four months, however, there was a ramp-up period before Wikipedia became "public."

Q: Did you ever think that Wikipedia was going to be as big as it is today?

A: When I was looking at the rankings for referenced Web sites, I thought that Wikipedia could make it into the top 100 or maybe even the top 50 sites. But, now it's in the top 10. I never really thought it would be that big. In a way, it makes a lot of sense because the reason that referenced Web sites are only in the top 50 or couple hundred is because they aren't that good. The idea of having this massive resource available for free makes it no surprise that it's so popular. After all, so many sites have only a small amount of information for free, like Britannica, and most make you pay to get full access to information.

Q: Who inspired you to do what you do today?

A: I would have to say my mom and my grandmother, who owned a private school that I attended when I was young. There were four kids in my grade growing up. It was very informal learning. We had some structured classes, but we also had a lot of free time to explore whatever we wanted. This had a big impact on me, not to mention that in my family there was this huge dedication to the idea of knowledge, education, and learning. My mom and grandmother made knowledge, education, and learning core values for us growing up.

Q: What would you like business professionals and consumers to know about Wikipedia?

A: I guess the main concept of Wikipedia normally is communicated pretty well, although sometimes you'll see major mistakes. But, the Wikipedia community is very passionate about quality, and that's why the Web site is as good as it is. At the same time, it's an open-ended project. Wikipedia is always a work in progress, so there are errors and there are problems. The community tends to sort out the errors and the problems fairly quickly, but obviously, things happen and incorrect entries don't get sorted out as quickly as we would like.

I always suggest that people think of Wikipedia primarily as a starting point. Depending on your purpose, it might be the only source that you need. So, if you just read some news story about an event that happened in Albania and you don't really know where Albania is, or what's going on there, you could access Wikipedia and find out information on the region. This would be a basic summary of the facts. However, for other more in-depth research, you would need to rely on other sources after your initial search for information on Wikipedia. You might read the Wikipedia article, but then follow and read all the sources, and even get a couple books on the topic. Then, you can always take some of the knowledge that you get from all the other sources and go back to check Wikipedia. You can add to it and even fix it, if necessary.

I think when you use Wikipedia you should always take it with a grain of salt. As good as it is, there's always human error. Encyclopedia Britannica is riddled with errors, and even with a very high-quality product, the best work is still the nature of human knowledge. You should never take something as given, but really check up on it.

Q: Do you think that college students are embracing Wikipedia as a resource site?

A: Yes, massively. A college newspaper recently interviewed me. When they first reached out to me they told me about a survey conducted on campus regarding the Web sites students are using, and 90 percent of them are using Wikipedia. They said, 'Does that surprise you?' And I said, 'Yes, I'm surprised the number is so low.' I think it should be 100 percent! Who in college doesn't use Wikipedia? I think that, in general, it's become really huge with most college students. However, with the popularity, there are a few concerns. For example, if students don't do what I recommended earlier because they, too, need to take Wikipedia with a grain of salt, always follow up and check the references. When I was in college, if I had turned in a paper citing Britannica, that would have been very bad. Even in an encyclopedia, you're supposed to be doing your own research. You should go to Britannica to get some background, but then you have to do some real homework. The same goes for Wikipedia. It can be a problem if students think they can cite Wikipedia. They really shouldn't.

On the other hand, I can't think of a better Web site or better tool for college students. I always like to give the example, if you're reading a novel for class and the novel is set in World War II. The novel briefly mentions the battle of Iwo Jima. So, you think, 'Ahhh, I don't quite know what that is. I know the battle was in the South Pacific and it was something important, but I don't quite know the strategic implications or what happened there.' You can go to Wikipedia and read an article on Iwo Jima and then you go back to your novel, which you're reading for literature class, but with a richer understanding and you have a greater knowledge of the background material. It makes you realize the motivation behind the battle so you know why it occurred. That's the perfect use of Wikipedia as opposed to if you were trying to do your thesis on Iwo Jima, I wouldn't recommend starting with a Wikipedia article. In this case you should be doing some original research.

Q: What function does your organization, Wikimedia, serve?

A: The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit, charity, 501C3 organization that owns Wikipedia, Wictionary, Wiki News, and all our other projects. The Foundation survives on donations from the general public. The vast majority of the money we've received has been small donations—$50.00 to $100.00 and €50 to €100. We've seen a significant amount from Japan and from other countries around the world. Last year we had donations from 50 different countries. Wikimedia is very much a grassroots organization, very volunteer driven, and is politically neutral. We try to think of ourselves as something like the Red Cross for information and, we're here to help everybody get the information they need.

Q: What is Wikia?

A: I have a completely separate company, Wikia, which was launched in 2004 to provide community-based wikis inspired by the model of Wikipedia.org—the free, open-source encyclopedia. With respect to the Wikimedia Foundation, it is a nonprofit educational resource with projects that include dictionary, encyclopedias, textbooks, and things like that. However, my company Wikia is all the rest of the library. It could be political advocacy. It could be just fun stuff, such as what we call an uncyclopedia, which is a parody of Wikipedia. The uncyclopedia is very funny. Wikia is also really big in gaming. We have the World of Warcraft Wiki. Players of this huge online game document things in the game and offer each other help along the way, and there are approximately 3,000 different communities. This started toward the end of 2004 and it's been growing faster than Wikipedia did at the same stage of growth. It's really exciting and getting big fast.

Q: What advice would you give communications professionals about negative publicity and social media?

A: I can talk for a long time on this topic because I think it's really, really important. One of the things we see today with Wikipedia is that whatever you type into Google or Yahoo!—you know, any company name and various keywords—the Wikipedia article is probably the second or third link. Sometimes even the first link and sometimes it's even ahead of the official Web site of the company. It's tremendously important to a lot of communications professionals that the Wikipedia article is accurate. But, I think communications professionals have to be very realistic and understand that it has to be neutral and accurate. You can get into a lot of trouble and, in particular, you don't want to have something on behalf of your client that's going to cause any kind of embarrassment. However, if the company in question has some controversies, you have to understand that Wikipedia has to cover those controversies. You can't go to Wikipedia and start blanking out the controversial sections. You're just going to get reverted—it just doesn't work that way.

What I recommend is that all PR professionals do not edit Wikipedia articles directly. Instead what they should do is go to the discussion page. Transparency is something that's really valued by our community. If you show up on the discussion page and identify yourself as a member of an agency and that you have concerns about an article, you're then able to provide the correct information and even links and resources that clear up the miscommunication (if this is the case). If you provide the information, you will have to trust the Wikipedia community to deal with it in the proper fashion. It might take a little bit of time and can be a little frustrating, but in general this method works very well. If it doesn't work, you can always escalate the process by e-mailing Wikipedia directly, where there's a whole team of editors who monitor the incoming e-mail queue and sort out issues and concerns.

I'm personally involved at that level of monitoring. I feel this is a very effective method for correcting errors or for getting some balance in an article. That doesn't mean you're going to ultimately be happy, certainly not if you're looking for a "puff piece." Wikipedia takes an impartial view. So, when you write something and you hype it up a little bit, or you make it seem very favorable, you might use certain words of language that are not appropriate for an encyclopedia. For instance, with the phrase, "XYZ Corporation introduced a new product," you might write, "XYZ Corporation introduced an innovative ground-breaking product." In another forum this might be fine, but it isn't right for Wikipedia; it's not our house style. What's going to happen if you put something like that in Wikipedia? Our people are just going to fix it up.

Q: Does Wikipedia have concerns about companies/PR professionals and self-promotion?

A: Generally, I think communications professionals get it. We do have problems with people doing self-promotions, but this tends to be small businesses—in fact, very small. We also have this problem with bloggers at times, and lot of high school rock and roll bands trying to get in a Wikipedia article. They should go to MySpace where it's acceptable to brag about their music. Or, maybe they should go to YouTube, but certainly this type of article does not belong in Wikipedia because there are no sources and no references. The Wikipedia community will most likely delete an entry if they cannot find multiple, independent reliable sources.

Q: Any final thoughts on social media?

A: There's one phrase that I've heard that I like a lot, which is 'conversational marketing.' The idea is that the Web is a giant conversation; it's just one giant, nonstop conversation, going on in all these different communities. If you understand and respect that, then you should join in the conversations. But, you have to understand that it's very different from a broadcast-oriented world where you control the message and you put your message up. That will still exist and it's still an important tool in marketing. But, conversational marketing is very different. The conversation about your product is no longer just between you and your customers. Now, you actually get to listen to your customers talk to each other. The difficult part—you can't control the conversation; you can participate in it, but you can't control it!

Go Ahead, Get Passionate over Social Media

From the blogging beginnings to first experiences with podcasts and RSS, every professional engages in social media at a different pace. A common notion: You can see how professionals from small companies and large companies to the industry technology experts see the need to use social media and be passionate and "obsess" over it. It might start with a personal test of tools, but certainly translates well into client efforts and unique PR 2.0 strategies for your brands. The convergence of public relations and social media is a powerful proposition and one you need to take seriously. As you venture into social media or become more proficient, you should remember the advice from the experts.

• Blogging is a great start. However, you shouldn't tell your company's bloggers what to write about or how to write it. You can, however, suggest topics if bloggers appear to be having a writer's block.
• Social media, especially blogging, is changing the way businesses communicate with the market. The future of blogging and how companies use it is different for every organization.
• With podcasting you don't have to worry about negative comments. The recommended tool enables you to reach a highly mobile audience, who will seek out valuable content for listening or watching on their own terms and at the most convenient time.
• You can be enthusiastic about technology, but you shouldn't push clients into technologies that might not be appropriate for their business objectives.
• Social media is advancing quickly with a predicted next step for MySpace and Facebook to become less of the "walled garden" kind of either-or choice, and become a central place for people to link with other people. A next generation of social networking sites will offer to link up different sites in a single interface, without having to log in to multiple sites.
• You can listen to your customers talk to one another. The Web is one great big conversation that's nonstop and goes on in all these different communities.
• The social media community is transparent. You must respect the neutral and accurate views of a community and realize that controversy is the nature of the Web and PR 2.0. You can't change the controversy. You, can, however, identify yourself and inject facts and information appropriately.