How not to do social media

Kudos to the City of St. John’s for adopting a great way to build strong effective relationships with citizens.

"It's important that we communicate with people in ways that they want to be communicated to, and it's about getting the message out to the broadest range of people that we can," Coun. Danny Breen told Monday evening's council meeting.

Spot on, Danny!

But unless the City has its claims already staked to the most common or likely variations on the City’s identity at both Twitter and Facebook, the smartarse brigade will be there ahead of them.

That’s why you wait to unveil your strategy rather than say we are going to be doing this in a while.

AFAIK, @cityoflegends is available as of this moment.

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Twitterpating

1.  For those of you interested in social media trends, consider a post by Gerald Baron at Crisisblogger on the future of Twitter. Baron links to two different points of view:  one that Twitter will die, the other that it won’t.  Both offer food for thought and Baron gives his own perspective.  He thinks Twitter itself may fade but the concept will continue in other forms and through other software.

As Baron puts it:

What Twitter brought was the integration of various forms of instant communication including micro-blogging, text messaging, seamless distribution via web, email, text, etc. It has proven to be a highly effective means of instant communication with groups of people with whom you wish to communicate, or to audiences who have an intense desire to know what you have to say or track your every move (ala Ashton Kutcher). But, as I predicted, that functionality of exceptionally easy and fast distribution of messages to “friends” or people who connect via a network is rapidly be adopted in a variety of ways.

2.   In the same spirit, consider this New York Times article from last August – linked here previously – that indicated twitter is actually popular among an older demographic than the under-25s most people might assume are heavily into sending messages of no more than 140 characters.

3.   One of the reasons you’ll find Twitter feeds on the Haiti crisis linked in the right-hand nav bar is that it does give the opportunity to get some near real-time information from Haiti via reporters on the ground. There are tons of ways of getting that information, but here is just one more for you to chose among. if you look at the ones chosen, you can also see the radically different styles of the individuals writing. That adds a flavour to the coverage that doesn’t necessarily come across another way.

4.  You of the characteristics you can also see in the feed that these individuals are also having conversations with folks who may or may not be readers/viewers. Some are offering feedback on the coverage. Others are asking questions about what is going on in Haiti. Some of this stuff wouldn’t get reported otherwise.

5.  In the larger sense what you are seeing in near-real time feeds is a whole new form of information gathering and dissemination. Conventional news media are letting their people on the ground do much more than bang out copy and file it.  They are offering a way for the audience to become more directly connected with the news event.  In another sense, the audience is becoming connected not just to the event but to the news organization and the reporter in a way that simply wasn’t possible previously.  There are a raft of implications and there could be a whole blog/conversation devoted just to the many permutations of what this may do to the face of reporting. For now let’s just take it in as the whole thing unfolds.

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The Leading Edge Olds

The success of Twitter isn’t being driven by teenagers or even twentysomethings.

It’s being driven by adults.

The public nature of Twitter is particularly sensitive for the under-18 set, whether because they want to hide what they are doing from their parents or, more often, because their parents restrict their interaction with strangers on the Web.

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Live-blogging a trial

Anyone interested in the trial of Ottawa mayor Larry O’Brien on charges he conspired to keep an opponent out of the last mayoral race can follow the thing via twitter, e-mail, text message or someone’s live-blogging, thanks to a court ruling.

Judge J. Douglas Cunningham accepted an application by the Ottawa Citizen,  but  -oddly enough - rejected an application by CBC that would have allowed streaming of live audio and video.

The broadcaster offered no explanation of why it waited until the last moment to bring a motion in a trial it has known about for 14 months and did not even meet the minimum of 15 days notice for such motions.

The ruling is the first in the country, apparently. Cunningham also warned that his ruling applied only to this trial.  He said other concerns might be raised in a jury trial about such open communication.

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Authentic

No sweat to tell the difference between a public relations professional who knows how to use the tools to do the job compared with well, the opposite.

On the opposite side, we have this ham-fisted piece of nonsense from the company doing advertising for the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador. Incidentally, the ham-fist is not the billboard on the Gardiner.

Then compare it to Joseph Thornley's personal pictures from a recent holiday in Prince Edward Island. Sure he used it as a means to talk about how easily he uploaded the great photos to his blog and to Flickr, but what he is telling is a simple story of someone who went to the Island, had a great time, took gorgeous pictures and then uploaded them to the Internet complete with geotags.

I uploaded about 100 pictures of the attractions and historic areas of Charlottetown, North Rustico Harbour (the epitome of a Canadian east coast village), the beaches and cliffs of Prince Edward Island Park (look for the picture of the fox that trotted right up to our car while holding a rabbit in its mouth) and, of course, Green Gables (if you’re the parent of a girl, you’ll know what that is.)

I uploaded photos from my flickr page directly to PlanetEye. It was simple. Took about 2 minutes for each batch of 20 to 25 pictures. And then the geotagging worked perfectly. I simply dragged and dropped my photos onto a map in the location where I’d taken them.

The difference between the two approaches is a simple word: authentic. Thornley's experience carries with it all the credibility of someone who has actually been there and done it. There's a story to be told here and the pictures are part of the whole thing.

Now theoretically, he could be working for the PEI tourism department or the software companies he mentions but nothing on the site would suggest he is. Ethically he'd be obliged to disclose such a connection and base don a number of factors, including the fact he doesn't comment on the issue, it's a reasonable assumption that he isn't. Note that one of Thornley's viewers chides him about the software developer.

Even after a suspicious mind has gone to that point and returned, you come back to the integrity and the sincerity of the post.

His last line, which will be seen by thousands in exactly the demographic Islanders are looking to hit, says it all:

If you’re interested in an unspoiled place for a summer vacation, take a look at Charlottetown on PlanetEye or at my Charlottetown photo set on Flickr .

A simple call to action - for you marketers out there - and the links are left in it so you can act, just as Thornley would have wanted.

Compare that to the other thing. There was a conventional media story in the billboard. The thing would have to be pitched and worked to get coverage.

A n Internet search turned up this story online, albeit in a media trade publication. There's another mention, again from a trade publication that focus es on the agency and not the client. The Telly had a picture on July 11. Notice this story appeared the very same day as the release, suggesting it was organized ahead of time.

There might be other stuff but it sure as heck isn't turning up online where the video and the story of the billboard had a chance to go truly viral.

If handled properly.

And that's the catch.

This was a potentially hot new media story, completely with daily blog posts about the development, complete with amateur video done by the creators as they were doing it. Three weeks worth of material is stuff most blogs would kill for, especially stuff as compelling as that. When you combine the story inherent in the billboard production with the authentic flavour of a local artist hired to complete the work you have a truly delightful tale that tells itself.

And seriously, except in a world where agency self-stroking is the goal, the trade pubs that showed up in the search are useless to accomplishing the client goal of boosting the number of people who don't usually come this way headed to the farthest eastern airports in the country.

It's not like the record on this over the past couple of years has been anything to write home about, although plenty has been written and spoken at home about it.

Throwing more cash into tourism advertising isn't necessarily the way to go in a highly competitive market at a time when it's tough to get people to travel.

Being genuinely creative in your approach - being authentic - sure can make a difference. As the great advertising persuader put it, authenticity helps break through the wall of cynicism about advertising generally.

It's easy to talk about authenticity, but sometimes it's pretty obvious that some people don't get what the word means.

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The impact of new media

Update: link to fleetstreetpr.com fixed.

New media can be used for niceness or evil, to paraphrase Maxwell Smart.

How you interpret this example from Ontario's election campaign on a "Goodness" scale depends on which partisan side you take.

The one thing everyone will agree on is that new media had an impact - an apology was issued - even if it is a transient one.

From the other side, there are examples like this one poking at John Tory's Liberal counterpart Dalton McGuinty.

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In defence of blogs

Who'd-a-thunk it?

The bastion of the mainstream print media in Newfoundland and Labrador leaps to the defence of blogs, specifically the political blogs in the province.

Well, parts of it were more like damning with faint praise.

And those were the parts that tried to discuss blogs generally while really talking about specific types of blogs and not really getting it right anyways.

Ah well, let's save the discussion of blogs and the conventional news media for another post.

For now, let's just note that this editorial - as thankful as bloggers are to see it - was really about an ongoing pissing match between the Telegram and an apparently very frustrated former Telegram reporter who now works cranking out another newspaper from offices on Harbour Drive.

Still, it's fun to read the two offering views on new media. It almost makes for a Sally Field at the Oscars kinda moment.

Well, not exactly.

But you get the idea.

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