The Dangers of Inauthenticity

Is inauthenticty a word? Maybe in the spirit of Stephen Colbert, it is now. We need something for the opposite of authenticity. That's the word. Here's an example.

I caught on SA a news story from the US about a high school 'scared straight' stunt where students were told their classmates had died, only to discover later that it was a deception intended to 'shock' them about the realities of drunken driving.

Quote from the article:

On a Monday morning last month, highway patrol officers visited 20 classrooms at El Camino High School to announce some horrible news: Several students had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend.

Oceanside Unified Schools Superintendent Larry Perondi discusses the DUI program as a student looks on.

Classmates wept. Some became hysterical.

A few hours and many tears later, though, the pain turned to fury when the teenagers learned that it was all a hoax, a scared-straight exercise designed by school officials to dramatize the consequences of drinking and driving.

As seniors prepare for graduation parties Friday, school officials in the largely prosperous San Diego, California, suburb are defending themselves against allegations that they went too far.

At school assemblies, some students held posters that read, "Death is real. Don't play with our emotions."

Michelle de Gracia, 16, was in physics class when an officer announced that her missing classmate David, a popular basketball player, had died instantly after being rear-ended by a drunken driver. She said she felt nauseated but was too stunned to cry.

"They got the shock they wanted," she said.

Some of her classmates became extremely upset, prompting the teacher to tell them immediately that it was all staged.

"People started yelling at the teacher," she said. "It was pretty hectic."

Others, including many who heard the news of the 26 deaths between classes, were left in the dark until the missing students reappeared hours later.

"You feel betrayed by your teachers and administrators, these people you trust," said 15-year-old Carolyn Magos.

On one hand, I applaud the school for teaching their students to distrust authority figures and question the veracity of what they are told. Not that high school students need much encouragement in that area, but it's always a good lesson to reinforce. So bravo to the administrators for that.

But there's something even more deeply disturbing here that relates to my job. I realize I haven't blogged about work recently, but I'm going to start doing it again, so bear with me.

Manipulation is something that is so ingrained into so many people for so many reasons that it can become justifiable to them in instances like this. The administration's argument, that the ends outweigh the means, is faulty. I could post statistics that show being honest and straightforward with kids (and people) is the best way to influence their behavior. I could post a rant about schools manipulating their students (as soon as you're born, they make you feel small.) But instead consider it from the side of authentic communications, in which my company has become a major thought leader.

The fact of the matter is the old model of manipulate and obfuscate doesn't work. At some point your deception will be discovered, and the ends do not justify the means. Ever. Some marketers view the public as children to be manipulated. Traditionally, this thinking may work. It may get headlines. But like the student response to this deception, is the backlash worth it? If the administrators had instead sat down and shown them something equally shocking but not deceptive, for example, photos of DUI victims that you can easily find online, they would have achieved their goals without the need for lies and without the inevitable negative backlash and loss of trust.

The quote by the girl at the end really sums up the risks and dangers of inauthenticity: "You feel betrayed by your teachers and administrators, these people you trust."

The Morning After: Cigarettes and Coffee

It's cigarettes and coffee time following the Iowa primaries. So what happened?

Obama and Huckabee. Big upset for Clinton who came in 3rd (although she was within spitting distance of 2nd.) Ron Paul grabbed about 10% of the vote.

What does this have to do with what I discussed yesterday? Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins on Mashable has a good (albeit a little hyperbolic) summary of the evening's successes. Money quotes:

Patrick Ruffini’s Twitter efforts once again proved that using Twitter for major event coverage will give you a substantial lead over anything the mainstream news can do with their efforts, and for substantially less money invested...

Somehow, without even turning on any cable news networks, I was able to get minute by minute coverage of the caucus results from actual primary sources with a high degree of accuracy and interesting analysis. [Emphasis his]

While I don't agree with his overly-optimistic report of Ross Perot wannabe Ron Paul's less-than-impressive 10% turnout despite his fundraising record and the large volume of noise about him online. It seems there might be some snakes on Paul's plane after all.

But Obama's success is something else altogether. Obama has married an extremely diverse new media campaign with a traditional media campaign - and this seems to be the formula for success. Despite the heavy emphasis on new media by the Democrats in 2004 with efforts on Daily Kos, it was not enough to tackle the (then) dinosaur-like Republicans who relied almost exclusively on traditional media in that campaign. Contrast that with Paul, who has worked almost exclusively with new media in this campaign and reaped a surprisingly small reward for doing so.

While Mashable declared that traditional media was "on notice," clearly that's a little premature of a declaration to make. I wouldn't go as far as Drama 2.0 and say "so what?" but I will say that exclusive reliance on new media isn't going to win anything, at least not at the moment. Drama 2.0 makes a very good point:

But on the whole, [traditional media] usually does a more-than-adequate job of providing an accurate who, what, where, when, why and how for major events. For the vast majority of average Americans, that’s good enough.

I recognize that he's referring to Hopkins' remark about the success of Twitter, and I'm extrapolating a little to associate that with the overall success of the various kinds of media, but my point is that you simply cannot - yet - have an exclusively new media campaign and expect to "win." We're still in a time of change, and although we'd like to imagine that our work in the fishbowl is the most important work, we're as reliant on our traditional counterparts as they are on us.

I don't want to seem like I'm coming down on new media relations because I'm not. I'm simply trying to be practical in my approach to what I do. This relates primarily to expectations: Ron Paul supporters were expecting his record-breaking fundraising to translate to a from-behind major win at the polls. People expected the buzz around Snakes on a Plane and Serenity online to translate into major ticket sales. Clients expect to be able to throw a "viral" video, the definition of which no one can ever agree upon, onto YouTube and get a million hits (and sell a million units) just because it's there. They expect that a "viral" video game they created will be loved by the online gaming community despite a shitty concept executed in a farty manner.

That, if anything, is the lesson here. Obama has one hell of a campaign staff and my guess is that if they can keep this up, it will take him all the way to the White House. He also has a very optimistic message of hope, and that always helps - you have to make sure the product you're selling isn't awful.

The rest of the primary season will be very interesting indeed!

Primary Decisions

I don't have anything to offer the blogosphere that hasn't been offered by all manner of punditry both political and social, but I do feel that today's Iowa Caucuses will act as a sort of litmus test for the practical applicaiton of social media into a broader context. David Wescott's post that just came through my feed reader does a good job capturing the zeitgeist of the blogosphere and some of the different kinds of opinions and predictions floating around out there as the frozen midwesterners head to the polls. (His point about campaign finance reform and campaigns "resembl[ing] telethons more every day" is also a very strong one, and worth considering among the more political Puppeteers.)

The primaries for me will be a put-up-or-shut-up scenario about some of the more wild predictions those of us in the new marketing / new media community have been throwing around lately. CC Chapman recently referred to the New Marketing community as a "fishbowl," and running through my Twitter stream that seems quite approrpriate - it is often the same people saying many of the same things to each other. This ties back to my 2008 predictions - I feel we're starting to reach the summit in our development of this space, and the application of our theories to the wider world is the next logical step. We need to take care we don't construct our fishbowl-cum-tower too high, or we risk not seeing what's on the ground anymore.

To that point, the first real litmus test kicks off in a few hours. Will the Andrew Ryan-like Ron Paul's Libertarian views and Internet-driven fundraising record really make him a viable candidate? Long Tail he may be (tip to the previously-linked Chris Anderson and Newsweek), but the actual viability of this model outside of a few already-connected companies, artists, consumers and politicians is what's on the line. Will Paul's fundraising and online popularity equate to votes, or will it be so many Snakes On A Plane?

That is, frankly, what interests me about this race. If we really are challenging the old way of thinking as much as, well, we'd like to think - how does it play in the Midwest, and how much does it actually affect the bottom line - be it votes or units sold?

My prediction: tomorrow morning our little fishbowl will be a very interesting place.

It's The End of the Year As We Know It

I planned to do a spoof "top 10" list but it kind of fell by the wayside as I've been out and enjoying London, so instead I'll do a serious predictions for 2008 post mixed with some reflections on 2007. It's been a hell of a year; I had no idea I'd end up living in London when 2007 dawned. We took a vacation to Spain, I've sorted out some problems in my life and started tackling new ones. I haven't really lost much weight but I haven't gained any either, which I'll accept for the time being. Last year, I was in the midst of launching Windows Vista - two words that still cause my team to tremble in fear - and was looking with hopeful eyes towards the new year, writing poetry of questionable quality and not a hell of a lot else.

Now I'm certainly less stressed out, although I feel my career has taken an interesting turn. The odometer turned to 29 this year and it's time to figure out what the hell I want to do with my life. Do I really want to continue in marketing? Or try my hand at something else? I admit that my enthusiasm from marketing comes partially from the subject matter - clients, accounts or products I find interesting or I care about. When you take that part of the equation away it becomes very rote and dull. I realize that's kind of whiny, but I also realize that I'm getting to the point in my career where I can start to choose the kinds of things I want to work on and the kinds of jobs where I really fit. That doesn't mean anything for the short term, but it certainly gives me a perspective on my destination when we move back to the States.

So with that out of the way, here's my predictions for the new year, covering the areas of my expertise in no particular order:

• New Marketing has reached an apex. This is already evident: bloggers are either repeating common-sense statements or simply regurgitating nearly verbatim what they hear elsewhere. Which isn't to say there isn't a lot to do in this field yet, but the concept of "new, awesome ideas" is and will rapidly be replaced by merchandising and productizing these concepts instead. This is fueled in no small part by what I was bitching about here - PR people know they need to be on Facebook or want to make a viral video, so new marketing is going to become more of a factory than a workshop to accommodate those demands.
  
• In traditional gaming, the industry is going to either stagnate for a while or continue its slow but steady decline. The wildcard: D&D 4th Edition. From what I've heard (very little, admittedly) the changes sound interesting - and I personally can vouch from the last overhaul that having $500 worth of the "old version" doesn't mean you won't eventually upgrade to the "new version." This will undoubedly keep mass market RPGs afloat for a little while, while Indie RPGs will continue to do as well as can be expected. Companies like Green Ronin will step up and take a piece of the pie (full disclosure: I used to play board games with one of the owners of Green Ronin on occasion). There will be no one "must-have" collectible game.
  
• Video games: rather than speculate on what console is going to win (full disclosure: it's been more than a year since I worked on the Xbox 360 account, but I should still mention that I worked on it), I'm more interested in what interesting games are coming out. Grand Theft Auto 4 looks pretty solid, but all the "big" games for each platform have already been released. Well, except for whatever the next Metal Gear and Final Fantasy happen to be on the PS3 but somehow I doubt they're really going to have that big of an impact. I played some good games this year, but none of them inspired me to say "holy shit that was awesome" when I put down the controller. BioShock did while I was playing it, but not at the end. I admit I haven't played Drake's Fortune, Mass Effect, Mario Galaxy or Assassin's Creed yet - but somehow I doubt I'm going to have that experience with any of those games either. And I expect next year will be the same. Kind of sad, really.
  
  Except that Empire: Total War will be out and as formulaic as the series is it will consume a large amount of my time.
  
• The US Presidential Election. Who the fuck knows? I know who I hope will win, but otherwise it's anyone's game at this point. 2008 will certainly be interesting in this regard.

So there's my predictions. Now I have a writing prompt for December 30, 2008. That's forward thinking!

To My PR Colleagues

Dear PR Colleagues,

We've got to talk. Our relationship is starting to change, and we need to figure out where it's going. I will say right up front that I don't want to break up with you and I think that we've laid the groundwork for a really good friendship here - so hear me out before coming to conclusions.

Lately you've been making a lot of requests and you haven't been listening to me very well. I think it's great that you realize what I can do and the importance it has to the field currently known as public relations. It's awesome that your clients have heard of the Internet and want to be engaged on Facebook. It shows that you're listening to me and that's good, but I don't think you're necessarily listening beyond the first few bits.

Engaging online means a lot more than making a website or a 'viral' video (note: please stop using that term, OK? I don't call you 'stooges,' so I don't think it's too much to ask that you don't call strategies 'viral' when you're referring to outcomes.) You have to do a little research first. When I ask you what people are saying about you online right now and you look at me with that blank, doe-eyed expression and wonder what that has to do with creating the next Subservient Chicken for your clients, it's very endearing and cute the first time but it's frustrating as hell the 100th time.

Let's face it: creating a 'vibrant, online community around our client's light sour cream' (full disclosure: that is a made-up example) may look great on your Powerpoint presentation to your clients in the pitch, but let's be realistic - just because you promised your client the moon doesn't mean us hard-working chumps down here can deliver, especially if we didn't have any input from the git-go. Because 'vibrant online communities' are great and all, but is your cutesy micro-site, a few emails to bloggers and creating a Facebook page going to create hundreds of threads of conversation where light sour cream enthusiasts come out of the woodwork to sing the praises of your product? Probably not.

What you have to realize is that the kind of 'vibrant, online communities' you're talking about on the Internet are created not around specific products but around people's hobbies and interests. People don't go online looking for communities about things they buy (unless that thing happens to be their hobby - I'll give you that). They go online looking for communities about things they enjoy - movies, cooking, television, games, books, politics. This is the lesson so many people have to learn, and an increasingly desolate landscape of $30,000 Second Life islands devoid of life except for furries doing inappropriate things, forgotten Facebook groups and forums with less than 10 registered users means that people continue to learn the hard way.

You don't have to learn the hard way - just hear me out! Remember that doe-eyed look? You have to know what people are saying about you and where! Maybe instead of creating a 'vibrant, online community' about your particular brand of light sour cream you seek out an existing 'vibrant, online community' about cooking where several users have mentioned your sour cream (I did some Google-Fu just now and found at least two that fit that description) - and talk to them instead? Don't whack them over the head with your PR-ness either. You'll scare them and probably piss them off. Why don't you simply offer your information, offer yourself as a resource and see what happens?

We can't keep going on like this, PR people. Something's got to give in this relationship. I know I don't say this very often, but in this instance I'm right, OK? All I need you to do is listen.

And seriously stooges, stop calling them viral videos!

Those Who Get It (And Those Who Don't)

Last night was my first real introduction to my London office, where we all gathered for the 40th birthday of Edelman in the UK. Richard Edelman, whom I'd never met, gave a great presentation about the future of PR, which he referred to not necessarily as 'public relations' but as 'public relationships' - as good as way as any to codify where our industry is headed as online and new media begins to achieve greater and greater footholds, like it or not. It's refreshing to see the upper management at my company 'get it.' I also got to meet some people I've only known by name thusfar like David Brain, our European CEO (who also blogs.)

It was timely that on the heels of that presentation the Beautiful Competition sent me this article that made the rounds a few days ago while I was in transit, about a Quorum of Twelve (nerd alert) 'Corporate Bloggers' who got together to, in their words:

"Deliver a responsible and effective corporate message, but we need to do it in the complicated environment of the blogosphere. We have to speak for a corporation, but never sound 'corporate.' And we have to learn to do it live, and in real-time."

I don't take quite as dim (or to poach a term from the Beautiful Competition, obvious) view as Mashable did of the whole thing, but suffice to say my proverbial monocle fell out of my eye when I saw one of my former clients listed on the Quorum roll-call (ain't sayin' who.)

The optimist in me wants to think that the 'Blog Council' is what it appears on the surface - an effort to become responsible in the new marketing age. But the pessimist realist in me thinks it's more along the lines of what Mashable thinks it is: an attempt to try to control the so-called signal.

Not that there isn't a place for a unified corporate blogging code of ethics; far from it. In fact, an open declaration of transparency would give corporate bloggers a degree of accountability that they currently lack, except through the efforts of attentive online watchdogs.

But I suspect greatly that some of the other aspects of the council relate to some of the things I heard about last night - namely a token effort to participate in online 'conversation' that turns into something more one way. I'm willing to shelve my early opinions, as always, but I'm very curious to see where this is all headed.

Not a Blogroll, a Read-roll

My blogroll is seriously out of date. I don't really use it as the one-stop shop control panel I used to when reading other people's blogs. In fact, it's become an artifact of a web 1.0 world. I do my reading through Google Reader now, and only in some rare instances do I go look at the content on the blog itself (for example, when I'm commenting on a post.)

So here's my read-roll - the blogs I've got in my Google Reader. If your blog isn't in here, it may be because a) I don't know your blog, and you should leave me a comment; b) for some reason (Magner, I'm looking at you) your RSS doesn't work right and I still have to read your blog on your site; c) you haven't updated in ages and I took you off my roll.

As of this morning, I read 80 feeds. They are all listed below, with the reasons why I read them. Note: Links go to blogs, not to RSS feeds.

• A Soviet Poster A Day. Your daily dose of vintage Soviet propaganda.
  
• Leah In Chicago|Accidentally Jewish. A coworker's blog who concentrates mainly on the journey of someone converting to Judaism, which is good for my religious curiosity.
  
• An American In London. An American Ex-Pat blog, written by a great writer who helped me figure some stuff out about my move. Very well-written posts.
  
• Anacrusis. A daily, 101-word story. A great way to creatively kick off my day.
  
• Become What You Behold. My friend Roger's blog, mostly discussing scholarly things.
  
• Brandon's Shared Items. Brandon's list of Shared items from his Google Reader. (Not a blog.)
  
• Boing Boing. General geek interest site, and one of 5 or so blogs everyone should read.
  
• Bokardo: Social Web Design. Run by a chap named Joshua Porter. I'm not sure when I added this blog to my Reader, but his thoughts on designing for social spaces are interesting and offer a different perspective from how I typically see the web (and web "spaces.")
  
• Brandon's Hodgepodge. Friend and former co-worker Brandon Gribin's blog. He's in Israel right now and posts cool pictures taken with his iPhone.
  
• Brother Magneto's Xbox 360 Blog. A feed of my accomplishments on Xbox Live. One of the killer Web 2.0 features of the 360 that the other consoles don't have. Now if only they didn't break so much...
  
• CC Chapman's Blog. CC Chapman's personal blog. CC's podcast is the only one I listen to regularly.
  
• Cheap Eats In London. One of my most recent adds, so I can figure out where the hell I'm going to eat without breaking my bank in the UK.
  
• Chris's Invincible Super Blog. One of a handful of comic blogs I regularly read, and definitely one of the most entertaining.
  
• Copy, Right? I'm a big fan of cover songs and this blog is one of the best places to find new ones.
  
• Cover Freak. The other great cover song blog out there, it updates less regularly but has some pretty kickass songs on it.
  
• Dave's Long Box. Dave's blog has a great premise: he reviews old backissues from his collection. I've found some pretty interesting stuff through reading his posts.
  
• Dennis Detwiller's Blog. Game designer and author, Dennis' blog is another recent addition but so far has yielded free Delta Green fiction - what's not to love?
  
• Digital Hive. The blog for Digitas, a group that my company's east coast team works with. They really dig into a lot of the technical specifics of new marketing.
  
• Doodle A Day. Fellow Alliterate Stan!'s experiment in posting one doodle a day. Updated daily with a funny, usually gaming-related picture.
  
• Dthon. Fellow Alliterate Scott's personal blog.
  
• DuncanRiley.com. Duncan is one of the founders of Gooruze, a social networking site geared specifically towards new marketers. This is his personal blog.
  
• Fallon Planning. A blog discussing branding issues in the online space, but often goes far beyond to broader issues in new marketing.
  
• Fallout 3: A Post-Nuclear Blog. News and commentary on Fallout 3, from a community perspective.
  
• Francesco Explains It All. Blog of writer/cartoonist Francesco Marciuliano. Topics are all over the place, but are typically funny, good reads.
  
• Gamerscore Blog. I like to keep up to date on what my former clients are up to, mostly because I'm a big fan of the Xbox 360.
  
• Gibson Blog. William S. Gibson's blog, makes for interesting reading. I'm always curious to read author blogs and see how similar they are to how the author writes books.
  
• Grand Text Auto. A great blog about game writing and gaming as an art form.
  
• Grubb Street. Fellow Alliterate Jeff's personal blog, and probably my main source for voting information in local elections.
  
• Grumpy Gamer. Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame's personal blog, updated infrequently but contains interesting analysis of the current state of video gaming when he does write.
  
• isleepnow. My friend Angela's personal blog. I wish she'd update with more original content (hint, hint.)
  
• HorsesAss. Local liberal political blog.
  
• I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER. LOLCats. What more do you need to know?
  
• It's Not a Lecture. David Wescott's blog about online conversations. Often looks at politics, which I believe really led the "new marketing" revolution back in the FreeRepublic.com days.
  
• Jane in Progress. Occasionally I entertain the notion that I could be a screenwriter. Jane, who as written for some of my favorite shows, keeps a great blog about doing just that, geared at newbies.
  
• Jericho Blog: The Salty Scoop. It's no secret I like CBS' "Jericho" a lot, so it should come as no surprise that I subscribe to the producers' blog.
  
• Kotaku. I don't always read it, but Kotaku keeps me up to speed on gaming news when I do. If only they didn't post so much...
  
• Laughing Squid. I found Laughing Squid during the dark times Vista outreach days and really enjoy reading it. It's an eclectic mix of art and various pieces of strangeness.
  
• Lifehacker. Run by some of the same people who run Boing Boing, Lifehacker is a great mix of helpful living tips and odd pieces of gadget-related news.
  
• LOLTHULHU. LOLCats + The Cthulhu Mythos.
  
• Londonist. Gothamist's London branch, and my main source for London news at the moment.
  
• Magazine Death Pool. Seth turned me on to this one - a blog devoted to recording magazines that go out of business, primarily as new media is replacing old media.
  
• MAKE Magazine. The print version of Lifehacker.
  
• Managing the Gray - Marketing for the New Media Professional. CC Chapman's podcast, which Seth originally linked me to once upon a time.
  
• Mashable! Social networking news with commentary. Updates several times a day.
  
• Media Guerrilla. Mike Manuel's new marketing blog. Quality rather than quantity is the keyword for this blog. Mike doesn't update often but his posts are extremely well-thought-out and offer good insights.
  
• My Old Kentucky Blog. One of my favorite music blogs, and another good place to find covers from time to time.
  
• Nothing good can come of this... Despite its pessimistic name, Jon's personal blog is a good way to keep up on what's going on in his life.
  
• Ober Dicta. Seth's personal blog and one of the key inspirations for whipping the Puppet Show in shape.
  
• Paleo-Future. This blog has an awesome premise: a retrospective look at old visions for the future.
  
• Passive-Aggressive Notes. A good humor blog to help me keep things in perspective.
  
• Penny Arcade. I read it for the comics, and Gabe and Tycho are pretty fucking funny.
  
• Permuted Press. Permuted Press publishes zombie novels and this is their blog. I watch it so I'm aware when they open submissions again. Not that I'm waiting for that for any reason or anything.
  
• Play This Thing! I know a couple of the people involved in this blog, but I read it because Play This Thing! is a nice roundup of (mostly) casual-type games online.
  
• Post-Apocalypse UK News. A blog devoted entirely to post-apocalyptic movie and entertainment news. You can see the appeal for me.
  
• Robin D. Laws' Livejournal. Personal LJ for Robin Laws.
  
• Roleplaying Tips 2.0. Online e-zine published with RSS about - yup - roleplaying tips. It usually has some excellent content - I found the "five room dungeon" template here.
  
• Seattlest. Gothamist's Seattle version, one which will probably drop off my read-roll once I'm in London.
  
• Seth Godin's Blog. Despite the fact that he looks like the logo from "You Don't Know Jack" and he's a shameless self-promoter, Seth Godin's blog is a must-read for new marketing folks.
  
• Seth's Shared Items: Seth's Google Reader feed.
  
• Simon Says. A blog penned by my future London colleague Simon Collister. New Marketing with a UK twist.
  
• Slog. The Stranger's Blog, and my second main source for Seattle news.
  
• Something Awful. The frontpage feed (there's a frontpage?)
  
• Strange Maps. Another quirky favorite, this blog - as its name implies - aggregates strange and unusual maps.
  
• Techno//Marketer. Matt Dickman's new marketing blog. I found this one through Gooruze and have found it pretty insightful.
  
• Escapist Magazine. I actually get two feeds from this, but Escapist Magazine is a decent read for gaming - and is the current home of Yahtzee's awesome video reviews of games.
  
• The Fate of the Artist. Eddie Campbell, illustrator of From Hell and writer/illustrator of many fine comics, blogs here.
  
• The Long Tail. Chris Anderson's blog about the changing nature of business, from the perspective of the theory presented in his book "The Long Tail."
  
• The Marketing Blagger. Andy Bargery is a new marketing consultant in London. I found this through the London blogger's meetup (even though I am not there to attend one yet) and it's a good read in its own right.
  
• The Monkey King. Wolfgang Baur's LJ. Wolf's Kobold Quarterly and his patronage project are two interesting things going on in the gaming world at the moment.
  
• The Pirate's Dilemma. Blog for the book/project "The Pirate's Dilemma" about how 'open source culture' is reinventing capitalism. One of my current must-reads.
  
• The Total War Center Forum Front Page News Feed. RSS feed of the news that hits the Total War Center forums, mostly mod updates and news about Empire: Total War, the next game in the series.
  
• Twenty Sided. Geeky gaming blog, but always a pleasure to read.
  
• Web Strategy by Jeremiah. Jeremiah Owyang's blog. Tends to me a little more brand-centric, but ultimately everything blends in new marketing anyway. Updates regularly with great content.
  
• XKCD. This webcomic has become a blogosphere favorite, and I admit I read it regularly.
  
• Your Daily Awesome. Something awesome, usually every day. Like Boing Boing but less pretentious and better quality.

And there you go. That post took me a week to write. If I missed you (specifically your shared items feed - I love those), drop me a line and I'll add you to my read-roll.

Who Watches the Gurus?

I read on Mashable the other day about Gooruze, a "Digg for Marketers." Intrigued, I checked out the site which isn't so much Digg for Marketers as it is a specific Linked In / Facebook combination for New Marketers. I'm a little wary of new social networks - I'm on MySpace and Facebook and that's it - but I thought I'd give this one a try and I'm not sorry I did.

Gooruze has a lot of good things going for it. Pretty standard fare like your own blog and the ability to comment and rate other people's content, but you can contribute in three main different ways: asking a brief question to the community, writing an article for the community, and sharing news with the community. All of these can be commented on, and there's an entire Groups feature I haven't even begun to delve into yet. The interface is still a little wonky, but considering the site just launched on Wednesday the 17th I'm not surprised it's still in a 1.0 UI phase.

The value I'm taking away for Gooruze is threefold. On the most selfish level, participating in conversations there has affirmed a lot of my thoughts and feelings on blogger engagement and "PR 2.0." It has also lead me to a lot of blogs I probably wouldn't have discovered before and given me a lot more reading material and food for thought. And third, it's the closest to any kind of professional organization and network I've joined, and seems far more valuable than any "association" you join and pay monthly dues to so you can sit around and sip cocktails in some hotel ballroom every sixty days. Which is to say, it's the kind of networking and collegiate atmosphere I'm looking for.

I predict use of the site is going to explode and then level off with the good content starting to simmer to the top. I've encouraged my coworkers to give it a try, it certainly seems like a good thing to get into, even more so if you can get in on or near the ground floor.

Viral is Not a Strategy, It is an Outcome

"We want you to make a viral video!"

If I hear this one more time, I think I'm going to slap someone.

To paraphrase Me2: viral is not a strategy, it is an outcome. You don't make viral videos, you make videos that become viral. You may want them to become viral, but there's no magical spell/potion/Harry Potter wand that turns a viral video into the next LOLcat.

That is all.

It's All About the Content, Baby

A big buzz-term in the Web 2.0 community is "user-created content." By this, people are typically referring to things that online communities create themselves that demonstrate their passion towards something. This blog post is an example of "user-created content."

The New Marketing people were quick to seize on this, and "user-created content" quickly became something quite desirable within New Marketing circles. In this slightly more cynical case, the content they're referring to is something that users have created to show their loyalty to or excitement about a brand or product. A good example would be the "PG version" of the 300 trailer that came out right before the movie. The YouTube video (embedded below) has more than 4.5 million views, and while the users did basically overdub the source material a few times, it was enormously popular, and New Line played along because it's basically free advertising (a trick many companies haven't quite figured out yet.)

I was thinking today about the push towards user-created content, and I think it's a great goal, it's something that's exceptionally hard to create organically unless you specifically give the community tools to do so. But even if you were to allow users to create their own car commercial and share it (as GM did a couple of years ago), will all that have the same effect as one humorous video that's an overdub of the official trailer? It's hard to tell. There's a reason there aren't more Lewis Blacks, Dave Attells and Jon Stewarts out there: doing something funny and relevant, with a wide audience appeal, isn't easy. Empowering community members to do so is great, but one shouldn't expect each video created to be another "300 PG."

Rather, I think New Marketing should focus more on user-chosen content. Empower me to take the things I want and put them in my own space. This blog is a fine example: the content you see on the right nav is either static (the blogroll) or chosen (Google Reader, my Gamertag and its accompanying RSS feed) content. Facebook is an even better example; the entire site is at its heart a colossal crisscross of RSS feeds all picking from and talking to each other. Aside from blog posts and "wall writing" (Facebook's comments), most of the rest of the content there is generated by RSS, and the user chooses what, if anything, is displayed on their page.

The iGoogle landing page is much the same way. It's now so infinitely customizable that there are website contests devoted entirely to who has the best iGoogle landing page. That's powerful stuff, and I suspect we're only beginning to tap the potential of user-chosen content.

That's my thought for a Sunday after a busy weekend.

How Not To Do Blogger Outreach, With Translation of PR Nonsense

I have never been contacted by a PR firm to get me to cover something on this blog, but some of my blogging coworkers have. One of my coworkers was recently contacted, although we're a little unclear as to why - he basically blogs about marketing and PR like I do, so the closest we can figure is these guys created a list of "communications/marketing blogs" and spammed them with the same form email, inserting their names and nothing else. Remember when I talked about individual communication? This is the opposite of that. The exchange that follows is priceless. Note that all names have been removed, as have all references to the company and product to protect the innocent.

Hey there [blogging coworker],

I have been bursting to tell you about [product] but I have been under embargo until the big press conference in New York this morning. Well, since the embargo has been lifted, both you and I are free to talk or write about [product] until we’re blue in the face, so here’s what [product] is …
[IRRELEVANT PRODUCT INFORMATION
If you’re as excited about [product] as I am and think it will appeal to the [coworker's blog] community [note: my coworker's blog does not have a "community"], I hope you’ll take a few minutes to let your audience know all about it.
Either way, we’re also letting bloggers into our private preview in a few weeks, so that you can have a sneak peek right before [product] opens to the public – but you’ll need to reserve your spot.
So let me know if you’d like to be added to our private preview list, and feel free to ping me if you have any questions.

Cheers,

[PR guy]

[PR guy's contact information]
P.S. If you want to learn more before checking out the social media release, here’s the official Press Release.

[press release pasted]

Um, yeah. So my coworker really doesn't have a "community" (as much as I love you Puppeteers, you're not a community either - not by the new marketing definition of the term anyway). And until he received this, he'd never heard of the product and "bursting at the seams" comes off as so disingenuous and fake it's not even funny (or rather, it is!) My coworker also figured out that the PR guy who sent this added him as a "friend" on Facebook about a half-hour before this email was sent, and did a little detective work to trace this back to an interactive PR company. So my coworker responds with:

Hey [PR guy] -- sure, would love to check out the preview, thanks for the invite. Not sure if I'll blog about this soon but I am interested in what you are doing.

FYI, I don't mind the e-mail, but might be better next time to send a private message via Facebook, since that is where you found me, instead of pinging my public e-mail address. If I didn't figure out who you were and who you work for, I might have felt "spammed" :-)

Best,

[Coworker]

Now here's where things take a turn for the strange. PR guy comes back with:

I see where you're coming from. I must admit that that is an issue I deal with because I try to maintain a "list" two which I send "pitches" and I am trying figure out the best way to make this happen so that folks like [NAMEDROP OF FAMOUS NEW MARKETING GUY THIS GUY ACTUALLY WORKS FOR] and you don't feel SPAMMED, but message you indeed were! I cannot deny that -- my only defense is that I only "spam" bloggers, who are public folks, anyway, and I try to be a little bit neighborly about it :)

Thanks for getting back to me, however!

[PR guy]

Well intentioned, but I'm guessing this fellow didn't ace writing class. My coworker sends me:

Okay, help me out -- what the fuck is he saying, that spamming bloggers is cool?

So I have a little fun with this. Here's my translation:

I see where you're coming from.

[Oops, you caught me.]

I must admit that that is an issue I deal with because I try to maintain a "list" two which

[Twin Acres Community College Education ahoy!]

I send "pitches" and I am trying figure out the best way to make this happen so that folks like [GUY] and you don't feel SPAMMED,

[I also spend a lot of time on 4chan, and I have no real clue what I’m doing as far as blogger engagement goes.]

but message you indeed were!

[This just doesn’t make sense. “Message” is not a verb as used here, and even if it was this still isn’t grammatically correct.]

I cannot deny that -- my only defense is that I only "spam" bloggers, who are public folks, anyway, and I try to be a little bit neighborly about it :)
[Fuck off, spamming a big old list of people I made up is easier than writing them all, but it’s OK because your email is out there publicly so I’m really little more than a spambot farming email addresses, but that’s OK too because I at least personalized the email with your name and created some folksy language that the Bush administration wouldn’t even use.]

Thanks for getting back to me, however!
[Eat it.]

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how not to do blogger engagement. I hope you had a good chuckle at least - we did.

The Life Toxic

After my last series of posts, I had a reader ask me a very good question: how do you deal with a toxic community? A community so entrenched in its negativity that anything you say or do with them will be turned around, thrown in your face or used against you?

Do such places exist? Are there really people out there who devote a good deal of their time online to complaining, albeit passionately, about something? Yes, there are. I've seen several varieties of these kinds of communities in my time. Here are a few off the top of my head. I've kept things general and intentionally not linked to anything, and none of these examples represent any of my current clients:

• A blog by an ex-employee of a company that claims insider information of wrongdoing, but offers no hard evidence. Any press release made by the company is dissected and twisted by the blogger, who claims to want "open discussion" - but blocks the company's IP addresses from viewing the blog, thus shutting out the institution they claim to want to change.
  
• A forum devoted entirely to how biased and unfair the moderators on another, much larger forum are, populated largely by people kicked off the larger forum for breaking rules.
  
• A blog devoted entirely to how biased one particular moderator on a forum is - with daily updates of the moderator's posts and moderating decisions, often deriding the moderator for his "stupidity" and bias.
  
• A forum created by a "clan" or group of gamers who were annoyed enough at the game company's decisions to change their game that they created their own forum where they could openly criticize nearly every decision the company made.
  
• A blog whose writers posts news neutrally, but then offer consistently negative commentary which is echoed by the community members, with comments often numbering in the dozens to the hundreds on each post.

Also, since I'm getting a lot of traffic from Fallout communities following my use of Fallout as an example, I need to clarify that none of those examples are a Fallout community.

So to my reader's question - how do you engage with a community like this? The short answer is, you don't. Period. Sometimes, there is no strategic advantage to engaging with a community so toxic and hostile that they have the time, effort and inclination to do nothing but be negative on the Internet, especially towards a company or a product. While it's true that there are companies out there that certainly deserve ire, consider the kind of person who would make a blog only to post about how awful a game company (rather than, say, a political figure) is and then update it constantly, regardless of whether anyone aside from a small number of like-minded individuals actually read it. That's the kind of mindset you're dealing with.

But rarely do communities get this bad, and a little research will typically be more than enough warning to avoid a truly toxic community. Note to fellow PR stooges: this is why you can't just do "parachute bloggerism" and expect results. You send your email to the wrong community, and they're really going to make you regret it. So step one is avoiding communities like this.

Step two is realizing that not all community members out there are this way. Nine times out of ten, there are other outlets for discussing a passion, be they blogs, Facebook groups, forums, Listserves or something else. Find those communities instead, and engage there. The toxic community members will either close themselves off further - in which case you lose nothing - or take an interest in engaging you outside of their comfort zone, on another site, where you have at least gained their attention. That's progress.

Step two and a half is what happens if there isn't another place to engage. This is not an either-or situation, and the image above comes from one of my favorite Star Trek references: the Kobayashi Maru, or the "unwinnable scenario." In Star Trek, a Starfleet cadet is introduced to a simulation where they are forced to choose between rescuing a ship in the Klingon Neutral Zone and destroying their own ship and killing their crew, or ignoring the ship's distress call and abandoning the people aboard to certain death. Kirk was the only cadet to ever pass the test (as of Star Trek II anyway) by coming up with a unique solution: he reprogrammed the simulator to let him win. The lesson of the Kobayashi Maru is that there's typically another solution to any seemingly dualistic problem - and in this instance, you have to fiddle with the community a bit to win.

I don't mean hacking into the toxic forums. Rather, create your own community. Not for the control over its members, but for the initial control over its content. This can be as simple as starting a blog where you have well-defined rules about low-content, hostile comments and delete such as necessary. Or it can be the creation of a forum where you start driving conversation, and let things evolve naturally on their own. Or - and I don't mean to bandwagon here - a Facebook or Gather discussion group was made for this sort of thing, and they're not that hard to create.

The best way to deal with a toxic community is to simply remove it from the equation. I don't mean ignore it, because often times a company's harshest critics can provide it with some of the best feedback. But there's also no reason to set yourself up for failure when engaging with a community that tends to be toxic. The fact of the matter is, it's just not worth it. Sure, there may be more of them than there are of your positive community when you first begin engaging - but that demographic will change over time. And the payoff is worth it.

Note: Thanks to Mike Reed's famous Flame Warriors for the picture above. Support his work, it's seriously awesome.

The Value of Engagement: Appendix

Brother None made a really good comment challenging something I said in my third post (and the Fallout 3 blog gave me a nice shout out too.) He raises an exceptionally good point, one I'd like to talk about here. Money quote:

The example of how to do modern community management and PR "right" is BioShock, and going strong at 1.5 million sales, it's shown to have worked...

And there's there real puzzling bit. How is Bethesda doing it "right"? They're doing exactly, and I do mean exactly, what you advice PR people not to do in your first posts. They made their press packets, they sent them out, and they're getting their hyped-up posts, on over a 100 sites and magazines that I've seen.

It's all cut and jib stuff. In the meantime, the community FAQ is the only bit of real interaction given, and it was indirect and slowed down, and failed to create any significant buzz anywhere (it had only about 400 posts on their forum, compared to, say, the 800+ posts on NMA's preview).

The bolded bit is the important one, and upon further reflection I think he's right, or very nearly so.

2K did do some of same kinds of things with BioShock, at least in the very beginning. It had a showing at E32006, which kind of kickstarted the campaign, and there were articles in magazines. But otherwise, I think Brother None's point stands. Through a function of writing a post at three separate times and trying to reign in thoughts that are evolving, I didn't articulate exactly what I wanted to say in the third post, so let me make an addendum.

Bethesda is doing some things right. They still have a year or more develop their program, and the "20 community questions" is a step in the right direction, but thusfar their interest has been in engaging traditional media rather than engaging the community on an individual level. And, as BN notes, that could end up being an Achilles' heel as the chatter in the community becomes more negative.

I'd rather not dwell on what they're doing wrong, but instead make some (free - my agency might kill me for this) suggestions about what they can do to improve.

• Engage transparently on their forums. A lot. A community manager should spend 60% - 80% of his time engaging with the community. Even if he isn't answering questions about Fallout 3, he can be talking to fans about things. Post-nuke books and movies. Wasteland. Shared experiences. Favorite beers. These are the kinds of things that show you're not a PR stooge, you're a person.
  
• Engage on other sites. Yes this is hard because you won't be in your own playground anymore, but make accounts on Duck and Cover and NMA. Roll up your sleeves and get into the discussion. Be ready to be called names - this takes a thick skin - but get in there and do eet.
  
• Here's a novel one and Brother None will no doubt enjoy this. Offer to do some guest posts on the Fallout 3 blog. It can't hurt.
  
• Set up a Fallout 3 Twitter. Twitter is now so popular that the White House has a Twitter you can follow. Whether you'd want to is up to you, but you can do it. It's easy, and it's a good way to stay in touch.

That's not a comprehensive list, but this isn't a new business pitch either so I can't give away too much for free.

It's going to be very interesting to see how this develops over the next few months. I'm definitely going to revisit it from time to time, not only because it's a topic of personal interest but it's a very interesting test case.

The Value of Engagement, Part Three: Taking It To the Community

For context, see my first post about the value of both listening and talking to the community and how it differs from traditional PR, and my second on how engaging with blogs is only the first step in online marketing. I concluded with this:

I have said before we need to figure out "how" to do this - frankly, we know how. It's a challenge dealing with individuals, but that's how you have to do it. It really is throwing out the old rules of engagement (to use CC Chapman's description) and not so much writing a new process as dealing with things on an individual level. You can no longer spam a press release to 500 people, get 100 hits and call it a success. But one good post on a forum related to your target audience, where 500 interested and passionate individuals might see it - now you're cooking with gas.

Engagement of individuals is where this industry is heading, and this is especially important to agencies. I've thought more about what I was asked that initially sparked this entire train of thought. While engaging with blogs is within our area of expertise, engaging with so-called "top tier" blogs isn't much different than engaging with a magazine. By "top tier," I mean the blogs that have grown to begin replacing print media - the Engadgets of the online world. I do not mean this in a negative way; it's the natural progression of things, and a PR professional would be a fool to ignore them. In fact, I've seen people in my agency on the traditional PR side begin taking ownership of outreach to these blogs and relationships with the bloggers/reporters there - which makes perfect sense as well, because talking to these bloggers is a lot more like talking to traditional media, except things happen in "Internet time," something that really requires an entire post of its own to explain.

But going back to the main thrust of the two previous posts, the underlying "thesis" here if you will, its actual individual engagement with community members that offers the potential for the most value. When a blog like Engadget covers something, dozens if not hundreds of other blogs pick it up - and the news often gets posted to specific forums dedicated to whatever the item is. For example, if Engadget covers a new cellphone it's a shoe-in that cellphone enthusiast forums are going to pick up on the post.

So why go on those forums to talk to the community members there, if they're already getting their news (or if you've got an online agency sending them news?) What's the value in that? The answer to that question is what I've been trying to set up - that the value, although somewhat immeasurable by "traditional" means (hits, key message playback, and so forth) lies in the emotional attachment to the brand and the feeling of investment created in the community by such interaction.

What ho! says the traditional marketer? Isn't this also an opportunity to control our message, to disseminate and throttle and control information as well?

Well sure, I suppose. But there's an underlying disparity in how the traditional marketer views information flow and how the new marketers (should) view information flow.

• Traditional Marketing Wisdom: Engagement is how we control information, revealing only what we want and when we want and not worrying about transparency.
  
• New Marketing Wisdom: Engagement is about transparently providing context to information, whether that information has been released by "us" or not.

Transparency has been a major point of discussion in the marketing blogosphere in the past, and something I've weighed in on myself. But "context" is word I've been thinking more about recently. Context implies framing information in a certain way, but in a transparent world context is the next logical step in the sharing process (the "opinion" of the Opinions section, to steal from my first post.) I realize "context" comes close to "influencing information," but that's not the way in which I'm using it. Context should be providing more information to make the information that's out there make sense.

So how does this work exactly? From my own personal experience at WizKids, it involves someone (me) watching forums, answering questions, recognizing when the community may have missed something or simply doesn't understand what you've said for whatever reason, and then trying to address it. But from a professional standpoint I'd like to look at what was originally going to be a couple of examples from the video game world, but has since kind of melded into one big example. Transparency declaration: the examples involve a game that is due to be released on the Xbox 360. I have not worked on the Xbox 360 account officially since the end of June, and the last billable work I did on the account was long before that, but I needed to say it anyway just so there's no confusion.

The game is Fallout 3, and (transparency again) it is a franchise I have been involved with for 10+ years if you count chatting on the Wasteland forums on Prodigy. I wrote the original Fallout PnP back in college, I worked on the d20 Modern translation that will never see the light of day, and I've been involved with the community from a fan's perspective since 1999 at least. And I've posted before about Fallout and the various things Bethesda was and wasn't doing to engage with the community, including the "Community 20 Questions" in that last post.

Engagement. Engagement never changes. Bethesda runs a pretty tight ship on their own site, and they have been focusing the lion's share of their engagement efforts thusfar on both traditional gaming media like Game Informer magazine and gaming-related websites like IGN, Kotaku and so forth. Fallout has a really active fan community - No Mutants Allowed and Duck and Cover being the two largest and most active - that even before Fallout 3 were announced, some eight years after the last Fallout game shipped, were still receiving dozens of posts a day on their forums. Let that sink in: eight years since the last product shipped, and the community was still more active than a good deal of communities dedicated to current games / products. How's that for a dedicated and invested fanbase?

Bethesda's engagement efforts, though, did not include that fanbase - at least initially. The reason they gave, and this is not a bad reason, is that they wanted to focus more on gaming sites and magazines. A company with limited resources needs to choose its battles, and the gaming press can have a major impact on how well your game sells, especially when you're investing a "metric shitton" (official measurement) of money into producing a game. You need to make a profit, so your game needs to sell to a wide audience.

OK, cool, and Bethesda has said they plan to engage with the community at a later date. The "20 Community Questions" were asked and answered. And Bethesda asked the fans themselves "what do you want to see us do to interact with the community moving forward?" But in the midst of all this, some community members decided that the promised future outreach wasn't enough and secured an interview with Pete Hines of Bethesda at the games convention in Leipzig. They did this by "becoming" members of two European gaming sites, and then publishing their interview / demo impressions on No Mutants Allowed, which the Fallout 3 blog reported on as well (along with many other outlets too numerous to link to here.)

The language used in the post on the Fallout 3 blog is telling: the two reporters / community members were "intrepid ninjas," and their operation was, in the words of Fallout community manager Matt "Gstaff" Grandstaff, "Very sneaky indeed." It's important to note that Brother None, in announcing the interview, doesn't use language to denote that he was being sneaky at all - but he does note (quite importantly) that while he and the other community member were allowed into a demo, a NMA member who registered as a member of NMA was not.

There's a lot of things to learn here, not the least of which is: in an information vacuum, community members can go to great lengths to get information being kept from them - and to actively seek out engagement with company representatives. Brother None and the NMA crew were certainly within their rights to do this, just as Bethesda is within their rights to react to it in any way they choose (and it seems that the interview kind of forced Bethesda's hand on community interaction, which in my opinion is not a bad thing - see an interview with Pete Hines about community for more information.) Another thing that one must keep in mind is that even members of the most traditional media can be bloggers, and what appears on a personal blog is not subject to the same standards as a press site, let alone a traditional media publication. Rather than rattle off a list, I will simply mention that to my knowledge no blogger or community member has been successfully sued for libel or slander over something written on the Internet (feel free to correct me in the comments if I'm wrong, and I'll update.) Even though a community member may be a reporter (or in my case, a marketing stooge) they're still community members with opinions, passions and a love for the product.

It's clear that Bethesda is doing a lot of things right insofar as community interaction. Proof positive of this is their dedicated Fallout Community Manager, Matt "Gstaff" Grandstaff. One of the most impressive online gaming-related campaigns I've seen recently was the frenzy whipped up by 2K for BioShock, and I'm not the only one: the Hollywood Reporter did a great article on it. Money quote, as quoted on the Fallout 3 blog:

“As with, say, science fiction movies or other genres that are considered ‘cool,’ fans tend to look at marketers as ‘clueless suits’ who hype everything,” says Bass. “We knew we needed to be careful to do things in a way that was cool … not to build hype but to build buzz. Especially when we started marketing the game two years before it was finished. I mean, how do you go out on the E3 floor and say you’ve got one of the greatest games ever made when there’s nothing for anyone to see or play?”

Rather than label “BioShock” as “the next big thing,” Bass decided to create a Web site into which he could keep releasing assets to show — not to tell — how good the game would be.

Bass makes a very important distinction between hype and buzz, and one that will probably be the subject of a future post. Hype is something that builds expectations. Buzz is something that builds awareness. And the tricky thing about expectations, especially in the gaming space, is that they're very easy to create and very hard to live up to. When you create buzz, you accomplish your goal (selling more units) while still keeping the trust of the community because expectations aren't out of control. By all counts, BioShock was a great success and even though there were some hiccups around launch time they seem to have been ironed out and the community is that much stronger for it.

Neither Fallout 3 nor BioShock would be driving the kind of buzz they're driving (and drove) simply by engaging with blogs. Both stores - one evolving, one almost over - are examples of interacting with the community as individuals, and the "value" is clear. You can begin to win over a negative community, and you can create the kind of buzz that turns a hard-to-sell game into a success.

I will be the first to admit that this strategy won't work in all cases. If you're selling dishwasher soap, chances are there isn't an invested community out there interested in discussing dishwasher soap. But there very likely is a community out there that's passionate about some aspect of your product (maybe your soap is good for the environment, or fights germs better than other soaps), and finding those communities is the key.

Which brings me to the end of this series of posts. I've thought of some other things I want to talk about, but they will be more appropriate in other places.

And if you read this far, I'll give you a cookie.

The Value of Engagement, Part Two

For context, catch up with The Value of Engagement Part One.

So in the last post, I alluded to engaging with blogs as not the destination, but the first step in online marketing. So where does it go from there? What's at the end of the river, and where does the rabbit hole lead? More literary references and mixed metaphors?

This isn't comprehensive by any means, but if the Internet is the next evolution of media then the Opinions page really is the precursor to online conversation, whether that conversation is taking place on a forum, in a newsgroup or in a blog post's comments section. The analogy isn't perfect; you could make the case that the Talmud is an extremely long community dialog between Torah scholars, for example. And it's true that newsgroups predated actual news websites by several years. But even in those mediums discussion had a logical starting point, whether it was an interpretation of the book of Genesis or early discussions (with spoilers!) of Return of the Jedi.

Of course, I was a little late to the party by Usenet standards, rolling into the party at 1990 or so when I first dialed into Prodigy (my 2400-baud modem was too fast for the phone lines in the area, so we had to dial it at 1200 baud.) It's also worth noting that I beat the Long September by almost three years, but more and more that's no longer a point of pride as a point of "oh Christ, I'm old!"

BBSes followed soon after, but Prodigy was my first real taste in real-time online conversations, and not coincidentally I was discussing games online with other gamers. My game of choice was Wasteland, still one of my favorite RPGs, and what made discussion on Prodigy awesome was that a representative from Interplay occasionally signed on to discuss the game with us. I still remember that first taste of online marketing - if you can call talking with fans of a 2-year-old game marketing - and how inclusive it feels when a company representative is talking to you directly.

That's the taste I tried to bring to WizKids when I engaged fans on the forums there. Sure I was the guy who dropped hints about new characters in coming sets to "chum the waters" and get them excited about what was next, but there's also a certain value to being able to interact directly with a company representative. One of WizKids more mercenary brand managers rightly called it an "added value," and I absolutely believe this is true when broken down into its simplest (IE, Business 1.0) form - online interaction is adding value to the end user experience.

OK, online interaction? What the hell is that? Let's do a step-by-step:

1. Get on the Internet and find sites related to what you're talking about / selling / marketing / whatever. This is also the time to figure out things like how often people on those sites are talking. You want to make sure, at least at first, that you're hitting the most active sites. Ideally these should be sites created by the company, but we all know it's not a perfect world.
2. Create an account if necessary, then start interacting.

Easy peasy. Maybe what I didn't say is more important. Note these not-steps:

-1: Email the blogger without an introduction sending a press release.
-2. Spam a forum with a press release or announcement with a zero-post-count account (one you just created just for that purpose, and you'll never use again.)

These seem really really obvious to me, but for the 99% of traditional marketers out there, they want to wring their hands and go [DRAMATIZATION] "why? Why must I do this? If I have to spend all this time actually interacting with my customers, when will I have the time to create workback schedules and smarm up with reporters? When will I have the time to flood my coworkers inboxes with step by step accounts of the useless old marketing strategies we used today?"

I kid, but there is actually a massive debate occurring in new marketing circles about this very topic right now. A few weeks ago, a popular and "influential" blogger in England named Tom Coates, who runs PlasticBag.org, was outreached to by a PR rep to sell something even though Coates didn't want to be solicited for anything. Coates himself blogs about social media, and attacked the problem from a social media angle - by creating a post and a now-famous Flickr image to make it very clear what happened and his stance on further solicitation. This was really the opening salvo of the debate.

Edel-colleague Simon Collister in our London office made an excellent post about this topic the other day, and weighed in with the following opinion - one I agree with 110%:

So... [two penneth alert] for me the issue is two-fold: it's retrospectively about how the PR industry is missing the point about the social web and going forward how PR can engage with the online environment properly.

Firstly, the PR industry misses the point with the social web/live web/blogosphere/whatever because it is far too process driven. PR people are ever used to writing a release, creating a media list and blanket mailing it out. This is partly the problem at the heart of Tom's predicament... [snip]

However, working in an online social environment the PR industry needs to abandon process and adapt to working in a networked world of individuals. This invokes real effort, spontaneity, trust, genuine dialogue with real people. It's the stuff PR should have been about from day One but which got lost in the world of mass communications.

It would mean that PR people would know who Tom is and know not to appraoch him. Tom is vociferous about not receiving press releases from people/companies/etc but other bloggers aren't.

But it also means more than just pitching bloggers which is really a glorified version of media relations, but media relations done properly.

PR done in the real way of the social web will - and I say 'will' because we haven't got there yet - mean companies (both PR and clients) being social. That way there will be no crow-barring of bloggers and social networks into horrible mass marketing campaigns. The social worth of an organisation will be there for people to choose to engage with from the outset.

The problem is, of course, that this requires giving over control of the campaign to the 'crowd' and that is a huge wrench for most marketing and PR types. This means that their beloved 'process' is taken over by other people - YIKES!

Simon hit it out of the park with this by articulating something I've felt and attempted to implement for a long time. It's an uphill battle, because we're literally fighting decades of tradition - lazy tradition, the worst kind. The kind of tradition that doesn't want to change. The kind that says "this is the way it's always worked for us in the past, why should we do anything differently? Or my favorite label for it, dinosaur tradition.

Frankly Coates' case was just the beginning. This July at the BlogHer conference (a conclave of women bloggers, mostly but not exclusively mothers) the women there voiced this opinion, and last week as I was composing this post professional colleague Kaitlin Wilkins posted the "Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics" at Ogilvy PR's blog (source: link from a coworker on Friday.) They label the below as "take one," and I agree there needs to be some refinements (but I work for the competition, so others' mileage may vary!) but the code as it stands is:

• We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.
  
• We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea for every social media campaign.
  
• We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.
  
• Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.
  
• If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.
  
• We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.
  
• In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.
  
• We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an alternate point of contact.
  
• We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.
  
• You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)
  
• If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our Do Not Contact list – which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy PR agency.
  
• If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.
  
• Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.

Overall, I agree with what they're trying to do here and think this serves as a fine reference point for conversation (and others agree - see Jeremiah Owyang's post for more.) I'm not sure this goes far enough to address the point Simon so elegantly made in his post:

[W]orking in an online social environment the PR industry needs to abandon process and adapt to working in a networked world of individuals. This invokes real effort, spontaneity, trust, genuine dialogue with real people. It's the stuff PR should have been about from day One but which got lost in the world of mass communications.

The Code still treats online PR as a process rather than working in a social network of individuals. In a network - in the "real world" - there are simply things that don't fit into a structured set of rules, into a process.

I have said before we need to figure out "how" to do this - frankly, we know how. It's a challenge dealing with individuals, but that's how you have to do it. It really is throwing out the old rules of engagement (to use CC Chapman's description) and not so much writing a new process as dealing with things on an individual level. You can no longer spam a press release to 500 people, get 100 hits and call it a success. But one good post on a forum related to your target audience, where 500 interested and passionate individuals might see it - now you're cooking with gas.

Next post: the rights and the wrongs of community interaction, from a couple of case studies in (what else?) games.

The Value Of Engagement

I had an interesting discussion yesterday with a coworker who asked a common question when dealing with the folks here in EIS: "what value are you adding?" If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that, I'd have a lot of dollars.

But underlying that question is a sentiment that lies at the heart of both PR today and specifically what I do, and where I think we need to go from here. We (meaning, the New Marketing folk) have trained the traditional marketers to see the Internet as something of which they need to be aware, and in which they need to participate. That's good, but it's only the first step on a long road and unfortunately it seems that more and more, traditional PR practitioners see it as the destination rather than that first step.

The traditional PR "comfort zone" modus operandi is this:

1. Examine product or service and create a catchy strategy for getting people exited about it.
2. Call or write or email (aka, "pitch") magazine or newspaper with catchy product idea. This can be a clever press release, a press kit that may or may not relate to the product itself, or a "product sample" that the reporter can play with and then choose to keep. Or a combination thereof.
3. Set up an interview with the reporter, where the PR person prepares the company's spokesperson with a series of questions the reporter could ask, the important things the spokesperson needs to talk about, and a little bio about the reporter that details what the reporter likes and dislikes.
4. After the interview, the reporter writes the story, and PR provides them with images, answers follow-up questions, and so forth.

I realize I squeezed a lot of traditional PR know-how into four sentences and obviously glossed over some things, but if you reduce the total to four main components, it would look something like that.

Traditional PR people like that because it's safe and controlled (to a certain degree), but more importantly they can measure the value in such a thing. Another way of saying "what's the value" is "what's the ROI" (return on investment.) That's a marketing and advertising term that bled its way into PR after people realized the importance of our industry, and advertising and marketing people started migrating over to PR jobs. ROI can best be expressed by an equation:

ROI = ((X*Y)^Z)/A, where X is the number of stories about a product, Y is the tone of those stories measured on a standard scale, Z is the circulation numbers of the publications, and A is the "investment" in time and resources (AKA $$$) spend on securing the coverage.

There's a reason people like this method: it's quantifiable, it's trackable, and in the end you can present hard numbers to a superior (or an auditor) and say "look at what we did with our budget!"

Author's Note: I was not a PR or business major, so I'm sure someone who studied this stuff will correct me on the formula and definitions above - but the spirit of it is correct.

So when faced with the Internet and "the blogosphere," it's not surprising to see traditional PR people looking for something sane and familiar. They see blogs and think: "blog = news outlet, blogger = reporter" and want to engage and measure appropriately. Several times I have run into the question, "why are we planning on outreaching to this blog when this other, completely unrelated blog has a much higher readership?"

Here's the thing: this really is the first step in a much larger process, and "success" should not be measured by the number of stories appearing on blogs and the total readership of those blogs. Why? Because that isn't where the interesting things are happening on the Internet. Sure, you should try to get bloggers to write about your stuff, but what's really interesting is in the comments sections in the blogs, and on the forums and newsgroups and email lists where real people are sharing their opinions of the product. The real measure of success isn't stories, it's sales, and you can have all the great stories in the world - but it ain't the reporters who are going to line up to buy your product. It's the people doing the commenting, the people engaged in the conversations.

Here's another way to look at it: when I was a tyke, I read two sections of the newspaper every morning, the comics and the Opinions page. The comics because they're funny, and they were still publishing Calvin and Hobbes back then. And the Opinions page because it was the most interesting section of the newspaper. Who wants to read the news, when you can read what people think about the news? What gives you more insight into your community (I use that term here to indicate "the town in which you live") - news about your town, or what the people in town think about the news about your town?

Of course, a lot of bloggers put their own opinions into stories, which is good - and it's one of the things that differentiates them from traditional news sources. Just like in literary studies, there's kind of an unwritten rule in blogging: if you're quoting a source (say, an article you picked up somewhere else or a song you're posting), then you should write at least as many lines discussing the quote, if not double the number of lines. It's a rule I haven't always followed, but it's one I try to follow as best I can, and many other bloggers do too.

But like the Opinion pages of yore, the most interesting perspective of the online community is in their discussion of goings-on. At WizKids, I used the community's reactions to identify short-term problems but also long-term trends, which we could then use to adjust our overall strategy. It's definitely an investment in time, but it's one that companies would do well to invest in more often.

UPDATE: Next post in series: the current debate about how to engage bloggers, and why it doesn't go far enough.

16 Observations on Social Design

I grabbed this off Leah's Twitter stream: the 16 Observations on Social Design by Joshua Porter, on his blog Bokardo. It's a good read, and these are good things to remember whenever you're interacting with people (specifically in groups, IE forums) online. #16 is probably my favorite: "Because life in not deterministic, we cannot always predict human behavior."

Anyone who doesn't believe this should sit by and watch months worth of carefully-laid plans about an announcement start to crumble as the community picks up on something you never dreamed they'd care about, and turn your positive announcement into something that's going to make you pull a "long weekend" shift. HeroClix fans, I'm looking at you.

Link Roundup

I hate doing this, but I've got so many cool links stacking up that I am going to put them all into one post without much commentary. If it sounds interesting to you, check it out.

• Via Lifehacker, the 7 Habits of Highly Successful Freelancers. Work on your craft every day: I cannot stress this enough.
  
• Via Lifehacker, Keep Windows XP Running for the Long Haul. I appreciate simple tips like this to keep my machine in working order.
  
• At The Long Tail, Why I Gave Up On Second Life. SL was, until earlier this summer, the flavor de jour of social media and New Marketing. But perhaps the Emperor has no clothes? One of my favorite thinkers about the online space, Chris Anderson, weighs in.
  
• Via Lifehacker, Eight Foods You Should Eat Every Day. I'm trying to be more healthy - shouldn't you?
  
• Via BoingBoing, Is It Fucked Up? If So, What to Do. BB was posting a lot of flowcharts last week, this one was the funniest.
  
• On Simonsays (a blog run by a coworker at Edelman), Public Relations and Public Relationships. An excellent discussion of how PR should be engaging bloggers - in Simon's own words, "about how the PR industry is missing the point about the social web and going forward how PR can engage with the online environment properly."
  
• On Web Strategy by Jeremiah, the The 3 Spheres of Web Strategy and the Skills Required. Oddly enough, I seem to be inside that middle sweet spot. Perhaps that's more rare than I think it is.
  
• Via BoingBoing, Opus Being Censored. What is this, the Reagan 80s?
  
• On the Slog, a Greek restaurant recommendation I'll be trying the next time I'm in Greenlake. Always on the lookout for good Greek.
  

That's all folks. Until the next time my Starred Items pile up in my Google Reader.

My New Car, or How I Became a Community-Based Corporate Shill

In the war of "my giant money-grubbing corporation is better than your giant money-grubbing corporation," many of my peers have taken sides. Some like Apple. Some like DC (comics for you noobs out there.) Some like WotC and the d20 system (RPGs, noobs.) Some like Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

This is what new marketing people dream about when we sleep, when we're not dreaming of Great Cthulhu that is. Community members so attached to a product they paid money for that they will go out, for free, and advertise that product. They'll tell their friends and write about it in their blogs. It's the online equivelant of wearing a brand on your t-shirt, or your favorite NASCAR racer's jacket with his corporate sponsors' logos all over it - you're paying to do a company's work for it.

I used to think I was better than that. Above it. I'm on the inside, right? I ought to know better?

Yeah, well, then I got a new car. My brand-spanking-new, a little more than 100 miles on it Toyota Prius. And boy howdy do I love it and you're going to hear about it.

We decided on the Prius at the culmination of a six-month car search. We had the following criteria for a new car:

• Low road noise. Our old car was a real rattletrap, especially above 40 MPH or on rough roads.
  
• Good gas mileage. Even if it meant paying more, I'd rather that money was going to a company that was trying to innovate gas-saving technology rather than an oil company. Also, fuck you Dick Cheney.
  
• A comfortable ride. I'm a big, tall guy. My lower back starts hurting when I'm crammed into most car seats.
  
• Red. This was actually Liz's preference; I could care less what color a car is.

So we test-drove five or six different cars that fit those criteria and also fit into our budget. I'd been impressed with Audis in the past, and we had a nice test-drive of an A4, but the mileage wasn't great and the frankly it wasn't as comfortable as the Prius. The Civic was far too small. The Jetta was also uncomfortable. And the Mini doesn't have a backseat to speak of.

But the Prius was an advanced winner almost from the beginning. The car is really roomy - surprisingly roomy, actually. The backseat is bigger than the Taurus I rode in when my parents were out last month. It feels like a midsized car, and it handles exceptionally well. Not quite as good as the Audi, but that's not really a surprise. For its price and size, it was more than enough.

And yeah, it's a hybrid and it gets great gas mileage. I test-drove a Prius back in 2001 for a magazine article, and at the time the car seemed more of a gimmick than an automobile - like a Go-Kart, Liz said. I agree. This feels like a real car. It's great to ride in, the gas mileage is superb, and I'll get a tax credit for it this year. Not too shabby.

So look out people: I'm now a Prius evangelist. If you're around me for any length of time, prepare for my spiel on how awesome this car is. You've been warned.

Also - pictures here.