In this chapter, we study social networks dedicated to multimedia and focused discussions, as well as the phenomenon of URL shorteners and their true value, along with discussing the social media press release and the Social Media Newsroom.
One of the most understated categories of social networks is also one of the most established. Online photo-sharing has evolved over the last decade and has effectively organized people around the viewing and interaction of the image, transforming pictures into social objects. Now social networks are uniting pictures and people to create communities for the sharing and discovery of relevant content that transcends the typical processes of uploading and publishing pictures to share with friends and family.
People are, right now, looking for pictures related to products, companies, and brands, interesting people, places, events, and anything else you can imagine, by using keywords within these photo networks to find, react, utilize, remix, share, and republish.
Some of the more successful companies are already sharing art and customer-focused, exclusive content in communities such as Flickr, Zooomr, Webshots, Photobucket, Facebook Photos, Animoto, or all of the above. Just to give you perspective, Flickr alone receives on average, 30 million unique visitors per month. Facebook, now technically the largest social network for photos, receives more than 1 billion new photos every month.
On the most basic level, these new image channels can publicize and potentially circulate original artwork, previews and glimpses of forthcoming and existing works, behind-the-scenes shots, events, products, screen shots, and beauty shots. Essentially all applicable media should be placed in social communities to benefit influencers, customers, stakeholders, and prospects. Create channels within the photo networks that host pertinent activity and organize the images by albums to help and empower interested parties, who will discover, appreciate, and hopefully interact and share.
The existence of these highly trafficked networks is changing our perception of how we create and distribute corporate artwork. They also broaden the landscape and reach for artists (this is true for all forms of social media as well). It starts with letting go of control in order to effectually galvanize activity around your brand instead.
Prior to the socialization of the Web, copyrights controlled and governed image usage. However, there are benefits to providing access to images and promoting free distribution. As pictures, as well as all forms of media and content, are increasing in pervasiveness as social objects, the advantages and rewards that result from the extended interaction and visibility far outweigh controlled distribution. For that reason, many businesses and artists are adopting the use of Creative Commons licensing over traditional copyrights. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that increases sharing and improves collaboration. The tagline says it all, "Share, Remix, Reuse—Legally."
Creative Commons (CC) promotes the spirit of the Social Web by increasing the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in "the commons"—the body of work that is available to the public—and securely encourages free and legal sharing, use, re-purposing, and remixing. CC tools offer users a simple, standardized way to grant permission to their creative works, benefiting everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions.
JetBlue hosts a public group on Flickr that encourages customers, employees, and fans to post and share their own JetBlue-related shots. At the time of writing, community members have posted 4,800 photos, videos, and drawings—ranging from shots of the plane on the tarmac to photos of the in-flight snacks and panoramas of skylines captured from the air. Sprinkled among the traveler's shots are photos clearly posted by JetBlue marketing teams and employees. Far from appearing like promotional fluff, these photos reveal the human side of the corporate brand, showing staff at corporate events or professional shots from various marketing events (see Figure 6.1).
Members of this Flickr group can comment on one another's photos. And without a doubt, employees and fans are connecting—sharing experiences and building relationships around travel memories and the brand (see http://www.flickr.com/groups/b6/).
Post–Hurricane Katrina, the American Red Cross launched a broad social media initiative to track people's sentiments about Red Cross–related issues and strengthen the organization's relationship with the public. In addition to launching a blog, using WordPress to create disaster portals where affected citizens can find resources, and sending Twitter updates with alerts on shelter locations, the organization is developing an active Flickr community where people can share their photographs. At the time of writing, there are 393 Red Cross Flickr members and 1,627 images have been posted.
The Flickr site is designed to give Red Cross volunteers a place to visually share their unique stories and experiences and connect with others around the country who are passionate about the organization. Communities like this one on Flickr help the Red Cross strengthen its bonds with people who are already active in the organization, as well as increase exposure to its causes and services.
Of course, remember that it's never just about one social media tool. While the Red Cross's Flickr community may be vibrant, they are leveraging multiple social media tools (Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and active brand monitoring across the Web), creating multiple touch points with volunteers and the general public. By cross-referencing updates, available resources, and communities across all these social media points, the Red Cross can increase visibility and drive traffic among its communities (see Figure 6.2, and http://www.flickr.com/groups/americanredcross).
In all of the excitement surrounding social media, we can't ignore many of the online groups and forums that continue to bloom and prosper.
Message boards, discussion boards, and forums served and continue to serve as the foundations for defining and refining the functionality that powers today's social networks and online communities.
And many of the early forums continue to host millions of active and dedicated groups to every topic or interest conceivable—especially brands, industries, and products. Over the years Web 1.0 communities including Yahoo! and Google Groups, Amazon reviews, epinions, and TripAdvisor continue to persevere. These networks, among the many others that exist, enable members to create subgroups to host conversations around areas of interest, as well as collaborate on events, projects, and tasks. Forums and discussion boards represent active interest groups that can benefit from transparent and genuine engagement. To get an idea of the size, shape, and scope of some of the world's most active forums, take a look at http://rankings.big-boards.com.
While Ning and Facebook Groups represent the lion's share of niche networking, there is no shortage of emerging, dynamic, and dedicated 2.0 networks that host discussions around businesses, services, and topics. Just to illustrate this point, Yelp, a community that connects people through their experiences with local businesses, receives over 25 million (and growing) unique visitors per month. If you're a local business owner and not active on Yelp, you're missing tremendous opportunities to steer the perception of your brand while also increasing the base of happy, loyal, and enthusiastic customers and their ensuing referrals.
Similar to Yelp, many other niche networks unify conversations, interests, experiences, and opinions. RateItAll hosts reviews of virtually anything and everything. Trusted Opinion and Minekey not only allow people to share and discuss experiences, but the network also uses intelligent software (recommendation engines) to recommend relevant and matching content and people to you, based on your activity. GetSatisfacton and UserVoice power networks that unearth problems, incidents, encounters, and perspectives of customers to bridge the gap between brands and service.
Other DIY services allow businesses and individuals to set up hosted, customized, and dedicated forums.
As marketers and communicators in the era of socialized media, we're relearning how to summarize what we represent so that we might quickly capture the attention of those we wish to reach.
Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk, Qik, Seesmic, 12seconds, Facebook News Feeds, and all other forms of micromedia communities prosper through a concise economy of language and forethought. The exchange of richer dialogue flourishes through succinctness. This introspective and empathetic form of micromessaging inspires us to embrace and practice incisiveness and relevance outside of Twitter and micromedia, in the real world, to help people connect with what we do and why they should care.
Welcome to the art and science of the escalator pitch. It makes the elevator pitch seem like a luxury now.
As microcommunities are anchored in a finite set of characters or time in which to communicate, the one key word to embody is relevance. Assume you have one shot at getting someone excited about what you're doing, because, technically, you do.
The intrinsic worth of every second and character continues to gain incalculable value.
In the world of text-based microcommunities, sharing important discoveries on the Web is emerging as an art in and of itself. URLs are typically long and often exceed the 140-character limit most services employ. Short URL services are rapidly emerging to help us say more with less, especially when wrapping context around URLs we're hoping to share. Every character counts and some of these services can take even the longest URL strings and automatically condense them to 18 to 20 characters.
Although URL shorteners number in the thousands, a small group of popular solutions includes Bit.Ly, TinyURL, Is.Gd, Cli.gs, and Tr.im.
Toolbars for sharing and condensing links are also emerging, to promote interactivity around a page or site. For example, Digg offers a URL-shortening service that, when clicked, allows people to view the content and also "digg it," find related stories, share it on Facebook, tweet it, and send it via e-mail.
Perhaps one of the most important features of these services isn't just the ability to truncate URLs or host dialogue around them, it's the capacity to reveal the activity and trends behind URL sharing.
Bit.ly, the default URL-shortening service used by Twitter, is one of the more sophisticated shorteners on the market. Its value is in the real-time analytics and semantics introduced into the URL-sharing equation. Every Bit.ly URL offers real-time traffic and referrer data as well as location and metadata to review the volume of traffic and the source where it was clicked. Perhaps its most profound feature is that every URL is forever saved in a central repository and is packaged with a search interface for exploring user-qualified links associated with keywords.
Additionally, if you wanted to measure the volume and quantity of all shortened URLs that point to the same place on Twitter, for instance, Backtweets.com can identify the source URL and the aggregate number of related tweets regardless of the URL shortener used to share it on Twitter.
The use of the press release is over 100 years old. For the most part, it has retained the same form and flavor for most of its lifespan. However, the press release has evolved more in the past decade than it has over the entire previous century, thanks to the proliferation of the Internet and, most notably, the Social Web. The tired and oft-disregarded press release is finally experiencing reinvention as it transforms to chase the new channels of influence, as well as adapt to the rapidly shifting behavior of content discovery, consumption, and sharing.
The Social Media Press Release (SMR) debuted in 2006. It was created by Todd Defren in response to a growing online community of journalists and bloggers speaking out against the old press-release format.
The Social Media Release was our chance to not only invigorate the traditional press release, but also provide visionaries and evangelists with the ability to embrace new tools, media, and narrative voices to tell stories more convincingly to those seeking to gain information, in their own way.
It is an effective tool for packing content and information for online journalists and bloggers, as well as facilitating conversations within the pertinent communities that host the social objects discussed in this chapter. It organizes media content in a more concise and contextualized format and also serves as a host to facilitate dialogue.
Nevertheless, the social media press release is not a miracle pill to cure the ills of poorly written press releases. It is merely a tool and is most effective when combined with a strategic arsenal of online media content, including relevant company blog posts, traditional releases, relationships, and an emerging category of press releases that tell a story.
Social media releases are designed to aggregate disparate content related to a particular story strewn across the Social Web, including videos, pictures, blog posts, tweets, content, and so on. Think of them as social dashboards that provide visitors/readers with the ability to disseminate and share information, as well as the ability to retell the story their own way with content provided in an easy-to-source format. SMRs also serve the purpose of providing new media influ-encers with the information they need to write a full story in one package—without having to carve out the BS of a traditional release or pitch.
News releases can tell the same story in different ways—appealing to specific markets and the users that define them.
In order for new media releases to work, they have to receive support representative of an entirely new methodology for communicating stories. It's not anything new. Corporate executives, spokespersons, and marketing and sales professionals have long faced the challenge of refining the value proposition into a compelling elevator or, better yet, escalator pitch.
The process of humanizing a press release also presents new answers to the question of whom we're hoping to reach. Markets are distributed and supported by mainstream and vertical segments. No one tool, publication, blog, peer-to-peer network, or story reaches and compels them similarly. Having one press release with a general set of value propositions is necessary, but also potentially limiting. Whether or not you address this in your pitch letter to varying representatives of these markets is one thing, but also think about the SEO value of distributing releases targeted directly to various customer groups who are actively looking for information on traditional search engines.
A study conducted by Outsell unearthed the fact that over 51 percent of IT professionals report that they get their news from press releases discovered in Yahoo! and Google business news searches over their top trade journals.
The press release thus becomes a social object, capable of sparking conversations, actions, and events.
The inclusion of social media elements within the release also fortifies the cornerstones for improving personal connections and attention to the release—and also enables the discovery and sharing of content. Having the ability to include videos, pictures, and audio, all served from different social networks into one centralized story dashboard, forces us to rethink how and what we share within the story.
We effectively become storytellers and the process of press release writing now transforms into an experiential and technical production, with ROI measured not only in hits, but also release and content views, trackbacks, tweets, mashups, conversations, comments, extended sharing within individual social networks, and also the call to action that we integrate into the release. Yes, we can now measure and steer experiences.
Once we move beyond the creative, storyboarding, and production process, we can tackle the creation of the press release. Because everything usually starts with good old-fashioned word processing, I've included a template to help users to visualize these new ideas. Essentially, you can "socialize" a press release simply by integrating all of the content within the release and also by adding "live" links to the content.
Ultimately the release may or may not cross a wire or garner Web visibility through services such as PitchEngine or PRWeb. They will, at the very least, attempt to earn an audience with reporters, bloggers, influencers, and also prospective customers via the corporate website, online newsroom, or e-mail. The originating template now also serves as a source of an organized story as well as a resource for storytellers to grab media in their desired formats.
What lies ahead is nothing less than remarkable. The social media release is no longer an "if " or "when." Thousands of SMRs are live and wild in the interactive Web, thanks to the inventive, resourceful, and inspired champions who've helped ensure their vibrancy, effectiveness, and residence as a permanent fixture in the day-to-day toolbox of communications professionals.
After all, it is the new generation of online storytellers and peers who are changing everything. It's forcing the evolution of interaction and connectivity—from PR to media creation and distribution. In the end, whether PR or media professional, citizen, or consumer, we are all contributors to the global democratization of content and information.
The social media newsroom operates on the same premise as the social dashboards, which we review in the next chapter, as well as social media releases. They almost always complement or replace an existing "press room" to reduce redundancy and increase the level of interactivity and the repurposing of corporate media assets.
Social newsrooms help press, analysts, bloggers, conference organizers, and also customers discover, subscribe, and share corporate news, bios, images, video, RSS feeds, bookmarks, blogs, embeddable content, and so on, hosted in a more modern, organized, and dynamic online press room.
In 2009, I worked with Anheuser-Busch to create a hybrid social media newsroom and social dashboard that featured social media releases and exclusive media content dedicated to promoting the company's new commercials debuting during the broadcast of the Super Bowl. While it was originally designed to appeal to reporters covering the Super Bowl and the extravagantly produced commercials that air during the big game, we realized that the value of the behind-the-scenes footage and images we captured during the making of the commercials would also offer value and fulfillment to consumers as well. So we created AB-Extras.com—a social media destination for Bud fans 21 years of age and older to reveal the human element and stories behind the ads (see Figure 6.3).
AB-Extras.com is a unique social platform for the internal PR team at Anheuser-Busch to work more effectively with traditional and digital press and bloggers, using the tools and services that they rely upon to publish and share stories. Through the experience, we learned that the site offered value beyond the reports and blogs covering the company and the advertising created for the game: It also appealed to influencers who actively discuss consumer lifestyle topics, sports, and beer.
AB-Extras.com featured exclusive content using a combination of social tools and networks such as Social Media Releases (SMRs), YouTube, Blip.TV, and Flickr, hosted on a blog platform. It served as an outside, dedicated online newsroom that aggregated and packaged disparate social elements from across the Web in a contextualized storyboard that streamlined the viewing, sourcing, and distribution of relevant information.
The press team at Anheuser-Busch is learning from individual experiences, driven by this new form of engagement, to further evolve its communications methodologies and improve the foundation for building relationships. As the team is listening and internalizing activity, analysis, and feedback, they will also define new policies and amendments to the PR and marketing regiment in order to embrace public conversations through social networks and microcommunities including Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.