2009 Resolutions Revisited

So about this time last year I created a list of five social media wishes for Social Media over the coming 12 months, as the year now draws to a close I thought I should review them and make some new ones.

The 2009 ones were mainly:

1) That I never have to sit through a presentation on digital that uses Kryptonite, Dell Hell or Wal-Mart as a proof point on how iccky the web can be, surely we dig up examples that are slightly newer?*

2) That I never have to see a blog post entitled PR/Blogging/Advertising is dead again meme. Really ppl find something better to link bait with in ‘09.

3) To see some case studies with actual ROI attached to them. Thus far I think I’ve seen two – Dell claiming a $1 million in sales via Twitter and HP’s month of the Dragon blogger outreach.  I know that digital engagement is more valuable than attributing figures to it might suggest but as the credit crunches, clients are increasingly to demand that we show them the money

4) That we stop over hyping what social media actually is, as John Jantsch says “Social media is a tool, not a religion‘

5) To see digital become an integrated part of what a PR person does, not an activity that is punted out to a separate silo of experts. Making everyone tick off the list of 51 things every PR person should know would be a bloody good start.

I did fairly well on number one, but then again I didn’t attend that many presentations but I know people that did and despaired that the same old clichés were still being trotted out. I even create an eponymous law about it.

The meme involved in two moved on, people stopped declaring things dead and instead started fighting about which discipline should own social media, there was a nice debate held by NMK in April about online versus traditional PR which came out of a twitter discussion, Drew has a very nice summary of it over here.

On to three, there is a still a lack of hard numbers attached to social media case studies. I know it’s a hangover from PR being difficult to measure but we really do need to address this if social media is ever to gain credibility. Personally I’ve been pushing this slide deck to everyone who mentions ROI as I think it’s a damn good starting point.

I do think that we have stopped over hyping what social media can achieve, and we’re also coming to a realisation about just how incredibly useful it can in certain situations, the recent Eurostar snafu being a good example of what a can be achieved on the fly. How much improved the outcome might have been if there was already decent monitoring and a response policy in place can only be guessed at.

Finally, integration of digital into the remit of the normal PR person’s bag of tricks. From a personal perspective it’s happening at PN Towers but this year has seen other agencies spin out dedicated digital shops so perhaps there is still some way to go on this front.

As for my Social Media wishes for 2010, that will be another post in the next couple of weeks.

If any one is interested in my  personal resolutions they mainly involve this , more of this and this , hopefully doing this in the summer and this  in the autumn, and the odd bit of this on grass as well as on sand. Oh and blogging more, mebbe. And world domination.Natch.

Have a happy Christmas people!

Human nature and social media

It’s been a rather Twitter-tastic couple of weeks here at PN towers. First there was all the brouhaha over the PR Week Twitter article for which we’d done the number crunching. It  made for a rather exciting Thursday as well as providing a nice opportunity to practise some online crisis skills, not that we actually regarded it as a crisis, more of an anusing playground spat. Anyway part of the afternoon was devoted to  tracking mentions and then gently pointing out wherethe fuller side of the story could be found. Personally, the most amusing part is how some of those comments haven’t yet made  it past the moderation finger of some our esteemed industry colleagues, so much for the PR industry changing and being more open to dialogue hey chaps…;-)

Then there was our Twiter event yesterday. Those of us inside the bubble do tend to forget that while Twitter has crept into the mainstream conciousness, a lot of ppl still have no idea what it is or how to use is, either personally or for a brand. So being nice ppl we tried to help out – Mr Nee has posted a lovely overview over at Silent in Flames that I need add little too. Apart from that I did indeed do a geeky squeee at the back of the room when I realised we’d trended and a reminder that  you can get the slides here  and there’s also the Porter Novelli guide to everything Twitter for your reading and critiquing pleasure. 

There’s also a couple of Twitter related client projects going on, more of which at some point soon I hope.

Anyway to the point, the final question at the session yesterday was a doozey. Forgive the paraphrase but it was along the lines of – is it a change in how humans wish to communicate that is driving the development of applications such as Twitter, or are the applications changing the way in which we communicate?  

The feeling of the panel was no, it isn’t. People have been interacting with each other and the media for as long as both have existed – think about the popularity of letters to the editor and radio phone-ins, as we have developed new ways to share they’ve been adopted and pushed to their limits. Did you know that during the 19th century, after the introduction of the penny post, there were between nine and 12 deliveries a day in London, making it perfectly possible to arrange to meet a friend for lunch purely through the exchange of letters. Obviously the Royal Mail has slowed somewhat but we’ve developed more ways in which to communicate which fill the gap. 

So if it’s not the need to communicat that is changing, what is? I think it is people’s expectation levels – apparently the youth of today* get frustrated by the slowness of email, far preferring instant messaging.  Even some of us older folk get annoyed by not being able to get hold of someone, especially after you’ve tried their work number, email (at least two accounts), IM, twitter, mobile number (VM and text messages left) and even left a message on theirFacebook  wall. We feel the need to apologise or to explain if we are not availble for the majority of the time, something which has changed in my lifetime when you never called anyone at home before six in evening or much after half eight.

I guess the major question is what next? How could we possibly be more connected than we already are?  Although the more interesting question might be, if civilisation is only two meals from anarchy, are we also one major outage from a return to letter writing?

 

 

*I would check this with my nephew but it’s still daylight so he’s not awake yet.

What kind of blogger are you?

If you are a blogger that is, if not then feel free to move on to more interesting posts – I particularly recommend the one about the Rollerblading Dwarfs.  However if you are a blogger then we, that is me and my employer Porter Novelli, would greatly appreciate three minutes of your time to explain your blogging raison d’etre and motivation by taking a short survey.

Mat Morrison explains in a lot more detail about why we’re so interested in this but the brief summary is that…

…we do the world (and ourselves) as much of a disservice by lumping together a bunch of web sites based on the fact that they share a similar technology as we do if we can only lump all fiction, non-fiction, reference, text-books, guidebooks and manuals together as “books.” We need a better classification.

We need to distinguish between different types of blogger quickly and easily, and that it would help to have some kind of shared language with which we can do this.

It will help when formulating plans and approaches. For example, and off the top of my head, right now one can probably approach journalist bloggers as though they were journalists, while it’s probably not worth approaching someone who’s mainly a CEO blogger.

As is our PN want, we shall share the results and as much of the data we gather as possible and will happily take on any thoughts you may have on the subject as they are bound to be better than ours.

And while I’m plugging work related stuff, if you don’t fancy taking the survey on blogging you could pop over to the PN Big Christmas Wish and make a wish, which might just come true.