It took a recession, but resumes finally are receiving renewed scrutiny. The ability to embellish and obscure shrinks when one out of every six workers is under or unemployed. More than ever, recruiters want to see accomplishments, not responsibilities; numbers, not adverbs.
Certain professions have it easier than others. If you’re a lobbyist, you cite legislation passed or defeated. If you’re a fundraiser, you count dollars raised. If you’re a political operative, you record a win-loss record.
Alas, if you’re a social media consultant, you probably shun such metrics. Sure, you’ve helped clients tweet and blog, but who among us hasn’t? Sure, you have 10 years of experience, but what have you achieved?
For instance, does your resume refer to “viral videos”? Sounds impressive, right? Well, how many views have these sensations attracted? Have you supported a Web site redesign? How much did that bolster traffic, and how many unique monthly visitors did that result in?
Did you manage an e-mail list? How many people subscribed to it, and how many joined under your watch? Did you conduct blogger outreach? Name five bloggers you’ve successfully pitched.
Did you execute search engine optimization? By what percentages did that drive up organic traffic and referral traffic, and how many negative and positive stories did you navigate in and out of the top 10 search results?
To be sure, numbers don’t paint a perfect picture. They omit client satisfaction, can elevate quantity to the detriment of quality, and can be massaged.
Moreover, numbers are only a means to an end. So, you doubled the audience for your podcast? Nice! Now tell us how this affected the bottom line. Did it engender a 30% bump in donations? A 50% jump in e-commerce sales? A 100% spike in membership?
Taking these extra steps requires extra work. Yet those confident in their CVs should embrace this charge. After all, there’s nothing like cold hard data to reveal that the common claim, “increased significantly,” in fact was a trivial 8% uptick.
Indeed, like the SAT, numbers serve a crucial purpose: They constitute a uniform, relatively transparent credential. As such, they help to address perhaps the biggest complaint about social media: How to measure its return on investment.
Everyone these days wants a blog. Blogs are known to be the most frequently updated—and thus most visited—facet of Web sites, and often form the crux of an organization’s online impact. Few, however, realize just how time-consuming and difficult blogging is.
Indeed, running a blogging consists not only in penning posts, but also in corralling them from colleagues and possibly guest contributors, editing them, and promoting them—not to mention moderating and responding to comments. As such, when considering a group blog for your organization, the following questions may facilitate a decision.
1. How many people on your staff can write well? Poor prose is a big turnoff, and crafting snappy paragraphs is a lot harder than banging out 140 characters apiece on Twitter. Put another way, anyone can swing a baseball bat; very few can hit pitches.
2. Do these people know how to write for the Web? Richard Posner and Gary Becker are two highly esteemed and well-published professors at the University of Chicago. But their joint blog—bogged down with long paragraphs and utterly devoid of links, pictures and blockquotes—is a textbook example of why online writing demands more than copying and pasting its offline counterpart.
3. Will managers give these people sufficient time to blog? Securing buy-in at the leadership level is critical. Otherwise, blogging will be treated as a distraction from “real work.”
4. Can these people each commit to X posts per month? One of the biggest reasons for failure in the blogosphere is infrequent posting. To be sure, a solid weekly post can be just as good as daily content, but unless you’re Sergey Brin, you’ll never build an audience by blogging sporadically.
5. Is there a blogger (either on staff or whom you can hire) who can serve as the editor? Not only do editors edit—correcting grammar, adding hyperlinks and pictures where appropriate, suggesting broader themes—and solicit content, they’re also responsible for the blog’s direction, consistency, and visibility. A blog without an editor is like a ship without a captain.*
6. Will the blog’s editor have the connections and standing throughout the organization to request and obtain content? If your editor is off site or lacks the respect of her peers, her ability to do her job will be compromised.
7. Will every post require approval by the C suite? If an executive or lawyer must vet everything, then a blog is more trouble than it’s worth.
On the other hand, a second set of eyes on anything for publication always is healthy—but within reason. The Cato Institute, which each day assigns a different staffer to approve each post, has found a happy medium between paranoia and prescience.
8. What niche will the blog exploit? In other words, why will people want to read it? If the niche is already occupied, how will your blog be better?
For these reasons, many blogs are stillborn. As with any project, a blog needs a strategic plan and ample resources. If you start with these boxes checked, the resultscanwell repay the effort.
By now, it’s a cliché that Twitter has real-world value. Yet if you really want to appreciate both the usefulness and hipness of microblogging, try participating in a social media conference where live Tweeting is not only encouraged, the Tweets also are displayed on JumboTrons flanking the on-stage speaker.
Such was the case earlier this week at the Open Government and Innovations Conference. Held at the Convention Center in Washington, DC, the two-day conference brought together 700 “gov 2.0” types from the federal government and the consulting community that supports it. As such, not only did most attendees pack a Twitter-appified PDA; many also toted laptops or netbooks.
To meet such demand, the conference organizers established a hash tag—a unique series of characters (e.g., “ogi”), prefaced by a hash symbol (#)—to group together all #ogi Tweets. Tags, of course, are nothing new; what was new (at least for me) were the two JumboTrons that showcased, in real time on a 3×2 grid, each #ogi Tweet, coupled with the Tweeter’s headshot and user name.
Initially, this setup was overwhelming. With so many things competing for attention—the speaker, his PowerPoint presentation, Twitter, the JumboTrons, the legs of the blonde two tables over—distraction was easy. Yet as the conference proceeded, information overload gave way to information empowerment.
How? Instead of indulging our inner ADD, participants stayed focused. At the same time we typed, we listened. At the same time we listened, we read. Multitasking was not optional.
Yes, of course, such juggling can be dizzying. It’s not for everyone, and it’s not for philosophy seminars. But social media isn’t philosophy, especially for those of us who do it for a living. And when we attend a conference on a subject with which we’re already familiar, we learn not only from the speakers but also from our peers.
For instance, after a panel on how to make the federal acquisitions process more transparent, I carried out a Tweeted conversation, with Jaime Gracia, on how to make RFP responses public. When I wanted to attend multiple panels that were taking place simultaneously, the #ogi tag allowed me to be in two places at once. When questions were being solicited for Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, even though my colleague, Steve Radick, was back in McLean, his tagged Tweet appeared on the JumboTron and soon made its way to Kundra.
The beauty of this live Tweet showcase is its combination of transcriptions with punditry; that is, while some record what’s being said, others prefer to add their own thoughts. Put another way, a live Tweet showcase crowdsources note-taking. The best notes are re-Tweeted, the best note-takers are followed, and, in the end, there’s a digital trail, complete with headshots and links, of contacts made, water cooler gossip, enlightened dialogue, and everything in-between.
Addendum (7/27/2009): Ludo Van Vooren notes that the software used for the live Tweet showcase is called TwitterCamp.
Addendum (8/11/2009): Here’s another innovation from the OGI conference: The first-ever TweetBook, a compilation of hashgtagged tweets (in this case, #OGI). Don’t miss the pull-tweet on page 45.
In his Pulitzer-winning biography, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, Barton Gellman recounts a conversation between former vice president Dan Quayle and newly sworn-in VP Dick Cheney:
“Dick, you know, you’re going to be doing a lot of this international traveling, you’re going to be doing all this political fundraising,” Quayle [said]. “I mean, this is what vice presidents do. We’ve all done it. You go back and look at what I did, or what Gore did.”
Cheney did that thing he does with one raised eyebrow, a smile on just the left side of his face.
“I have a different understanding with the president,” he said.
What exactly what was this “different understanding”? Gellman captures it perfectly in another reported nugget:
Days after [Hurricane Katrina] had passed, when he finally returned to Washington from Crawford, [President] Bush assembled his senior staff in the Oval Office. He was going to form a cabinet-level task force, he said.
“I asked Dick if he’d be interested in spearheading this,” Bush announced. “Let’s just say I didn’t get the most positive response.” Bush nodded ironically toward the vice president, putting on a show for the others: Card, Rove, Bartlett, Condi Rice. His expression, the tone of voice, had a hint of edge. Can you believe this guy?. . . .
“Will you at least go do a fact-finding trip for us?” Bush asked.
“That’ll probably be the extent of it, Mr. President, unless you order otherwise,” Cheney replied.
Leave aside for the moment whether you like or agree with Cheney. Can’t we all appreciate the sui generis power he wielded? The consequence-free autonomy? The chutzpah? Consider:
• He maneuvered the search committee he was leading to select a vice presidential candidate for then-Governor Bush such that he himself became the running mate—while maintaining a treasure trove of personal information about his would-be competitors.
• He, rather than the president, issued the order to shoot down the unknown jetliner racing toward Washington on 9/11.
• He unilaterally exempted his office from the presidential order that requires executive branch personnel either to submit periodic reports on the classified information held in their offices, or to allow National Archives staff to conduct in-office inspections.
• He, rather than the president, ordered the CIA to withhold information about a secret counterrrorism program from Congress.
Others have written at length about Cheney’s predilection for secrecy and executive power. But what fascinates me is Cheney’s psychology. He doesn’t care what you think. He’s a millionaire in his 60s who’s survived four heart attacks. He does what he wants, when he wants, and lets the chips fall where they may (for instance, a 13% approval rating upon leaving office).
There’s something wondrous, if not necessarily wonderful, about that.
The staple of public relations is the press release. It’s been around forever; follows generally agreed guidelines for format, content, and length; and still succeeds in its objective to publicize the item in question.
And yet, bound by stale conventions that suffocate originality and don’t play well with multimedia, the press release has become obsolete. It’s not that there’s no longer a need to announce big news formally. It’s that there’s a better way to do it than drafting 400 words of boilerplate.
Rather, both companies self-publish blog posts. They do so, I suspect, not because blogs are hipper, but because they’re more genuine, more personal, and more flexible than their old media counterparts. Instead of a flack ghostwriting quotes for a CEO, the individual(s) who managed the project can craft a first-person narrative recounting the project’s past, present and future with pictures and videos and links. Then, as other bloggers pick up the post, “two days later, BusinessWeek calls,” as Donna Sokolsky Burke, of Spark PR, puts it.
The press release is dead. Long live the press release.
Addendum (9/29/2009): Google recently celebrated its 11th birthday. To honor the occasion, the Next Web dug up Google’s first release, dated June 7, 1999.
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Let me explain. For the most part, I Twittered halfheartedly and sporadically (usually when captive on the metro). For months, I didn’t know how to check replies—or even understand the concept of “re-Tweeting” (RT). I used only Twitter.com, rather than experimenting with any of the dozens of programs that inject Twitter with steroids. In sum, I viewed Twitter the same way I view picture taking: I’d rather be doing the things being Tweeted or photographed, i.e., living rather than recording.
What changed this attitude (which, please note, prevailed over my personal account but not those of clients)? The light bulb was a Tweet I stumbled upon by Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang. His advice: Tweet “what’s important to me” instead of “what am I doing.” This pearl caused me to rethink micro-blogging.
I was stunned when I saw the recent exchange between Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly [link added]. The one where she said, “I don’t really like to think of it as a murder. It was terminating Tiller in the 203rd trimester.”
This is the kind of rhetoric we ask you to stand against today.
To honor the legacy of Dr. George Tiller, and as a symbol of your commitment to furthering his pro-choice values, NARAL Pro-Choice America recently launched the “Trust Women” wristband campaign. Donate today and get your “Trust Women” wristbands.
Since you’re reading this blog, this sort of missive likely is familiar: An advocacy group uses a current cause celebre to gin up donations. (Incidentally, Coulter inspired a similar campaign two years ago when she called then-presidential candidate, John Edwards, a “faggot.”) Such ad hoc initiatives tend to be especially effective (even if their ability to counteract the given evil is questionable).
Yet as critical as they are, fund-raising e-mails today seem all-too common. By the same token, the opportunity to engage your members as activists rather than donors is all-too uncommon. Indeed, the ability to see its supporters as more than ATMs was one of several tactics that distinguished the Obama e-campaign from its peers. As Tim Dickinson observed in Rolling Stone,
Before long, the campaign had transformed hundreds of thousands of online donors into street-level activists. “Obama didn’t just take their money,” says Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s campaign manager in 2000. “He gave them seats at the table and allowed them to become players.”
As such, it seems that NARAL’s e-mail would have more been more powerful as an action alert. Instead of hitting people up for money in this still-dismal economy, the organization could have asked us to contact Fox News and/or our local affiliates, and request that Coulter’s contract be cancelled or that O’Reilly issue a clarification.
The resulting buzz might even have spurred some donations.
Would you hire this self-described Internet strategist? He rarely blogs, doesn’t much tweet, and uses YouTube for quick and dirty videos filmed with a Flip camera.
No? Would your mind change if you knew he were a veteran of Microsoft and Yahoo, whom the Washington Postdescribed as “one of the elder statesmen in the … class of online political operatives”? What if NationalJournal.com credited him with expanding the Republican National Committee’s e-mail list from 1.8 million to 12 million, and “dramatically improving the party’s social media outreach”? His name: Cyrus Krohn.
What about this guru? He, too, rarely tweets, much less blogs, and enjoys only 285 Facebook friends. Yet he’s spent the past two and a half years building, from scratch, what the Politico ranks as the fourth best e-mail list in politics. Last year, PoliticsOnline and the World E-Democracy Forum named him one of the “Top 10 Changing the World of Internet and Politics.” His name: David Kralik.
Finally, while our third executive is active on Twitter, he has only 271 followers. He suspended his personal blog more than a year ago, and only rarely comments on the blog he helped found, RedState. His day job? Executive Vice President at Edelman, the largest independent pr firm, where he runs the digital public affairs practice and his clients include Wal-Mart and the American Petroleum Institute. His name: Michael Krempasky.
Clearly, these guys are major players in digital media. They speak at conferences, command sizable salaries, and boast enviable records of accomplishment.
Yet their efforts at personal branding—their own PR—are relatively lackluster. They’re behind-the-scenes operators, who keep their heads down. They’ll give a quote to a reporter, but client work is their priority.
And yet, if these folks were job searching, today’s recruiters no doubt would advise them to raise their own profile—to beef up their LinkedIn page, optimize the search engine results for their names, and start publishing thought-leadership pieces.
This advice is well taken, but perhaps overdispensed. Even if you work in digital media, you need not have 500 Facebook friends, as David All asks of his potential employees. While understanding the medium requires engaging it, you’d do just as wellto help a client gain 10,000 Twitter followers than attain this feat for yourself. As Sean Hackbarth can attest, even being a well-connected blogger with nine years of experience does not guarantee gainful employment.
Put another way, Show me what you’ve done for others, and I’ll discern who are.
In my first op-ed in a while, I answer this question today at PRWeek (online). Here’s the text:
Clients often ask, What is new media? To answer this, I like to step back and ask, What is public relations?
Public relations is the practice of improving public perception. In a word, it’s promotion. A corollary of this is strategizing: What media should you use to get your message out?
New media is simply one of these outlets; specifically—and appropriately—it’s the newest outlet. But instead of developing relationships with producers on TV and radio shows, or editors and reporters at newspapers and magazines, we new media folk work with online sources: bloggers, podcasters, Web masters, news aggregators.
Our old media colleagues spend their days on the phone with journalists, meeting them for coffee, drafting press releases, crafting pitches, and compiling media lists. In essence, we do the same thing, but with a different vocabulary and under different rules.
The first difference is that reporters write articles because they’re required to do so; it’s their job. By contrast, bloggers blog because they want to; it’s what they do—believe it or not—for fun.
Second, whereas reporters carry business cards, have a business phone number, and are typically always accessible via BlackBerry, bloggers rarely list their phone numbers, let alone their addresses, and often work in the early morning or at night. In fact, many of Matt Drudge’s best sources—even his West Coast editor—never talk with him on the phone; their entire relationship revolves around e-mail.
Third, anything a reporter writes—even the idea to pursue a story—is signed-off and then vetted by at least one editor. By contrast, bloggers write what pops into their mind. Similarly, there are no officially observed rules regarding “off the record” or “on background.” Unlike Judy Miller, bloggers are not going to go to jail to protect you as a confidential source, and it’s as easy as copying and pasting for a blogger to publish what you thought was private correspondence.
Finally, while reporters have long relied on PR people, bloggers tend to be skeptical of us. The reason: While it’s common to spam a hundred reporters with a press release, this is a cardinal sin within the blogosphere. A press release clutters a blogger’s inbox, which, again, is personal rather than one his paycheck requires him to monitor. A release is usually irrelevant, and the lack of personalization, especially if he’s CCed, or worse, BCCed, is insulting.
In fact, if you send a high-profile blogger a press release, you may very well find your e-mail address being made public as a result—which, of course, subjects you to real spammers. What’s worse, they may threaten to blacklist members of your firm.
None of this is to paint bloggers with a bad brush. I think the world of these people, and, in fact, am one myself. But in order to get the results you want, it behooves you to treat bloggers on their terms, rather than your own.
After much procrastination, I just published my first post at K Street Cafe, a blog “where experts from a variety of backgrounds share new and novel ways technology, the Internet and social media are being used to shape public policies.” Many thanks to the Adfero Group for devoting its stellar resources to the blog, and for allowing me to contribute. (My next post, inspired by Bill Beutler, will focus on the use and abuse of Wikipedia.)
In the continuing debate over new media vs. old media—what’s online vs. what’s offline—the sub-debate about advertising is instructive.
On one hand, online ads are vulnerable to the tyranny of choice. The metrics can be overwhelming, the jargon can be off-putting and success can be mistaken for failure. Moreover, unlike traditional ad buys, online campaigns demand continuous monitoring and fine-tuning.
On the other hand, if you’re tired of one-off shots in the dark—where your one-page spread for life insurance runs opposite to an article on video games, or your spot for an SUV runs in the middle of a segment on high gas prices—then online ads may be right for your organization. Here’s why:
1. Cost. Online ads are cheap—cheaper than their print and broadcast counterparts. Rather than pay for exposure, you pay only when your ad is actually clicked on.
2. Targeting. Online ads allow you to reach niche demographics. Rather than throwing your ad in front of a general audience, you can narrowly tailor your target search criteria.
3. Flexibility. Online ads can be changed on the fly. Rather than getting one chance to craft the perfect ad, you can optimize your creative as conditions warrant for maximum performance.
4. Measurement. Online ads come with reams of statistics. Rather than rely on word of mouth or voluntary disclosure to ascertain your ad’s success, you can get the unfiltered data first hand.
Okay, I’m sold, you say, but where do I begin? Which programs should I use? Since the Web’s sweet spot in its customizability, I tend to prefer do-it-yourself (DIY) platforms over fixed buys. Of the various DIY options, here are the two I consider to be the best (runners-up include LinkedIn and MySpace):
1. Google. As you might conjecture, Google offers not only the biggest audience but also the Internet’s most sophisticated ad program. Its ability to track “conversions”—that is, how many people who click on your ads go on to execute a desired action, like clicking a “donate” or “subscribe” button—is priceless.
The difficulty, however, lies in the learning curve to master Google’s algorithm, which penalizes ads whose copy does not painstakingly correspond with both the text of the Web page it is linked to and the search phrases for which it is configured to display. Compounding these challenges are decisions on whether to display your ads wherever Google ads appear or just on Google.com, and how much to bid on each search term. Happily, Google’s help files are excellent, and the company offers a toll-free phone number where staffers will answer your questions patiently and proficiently. In fact, given two weeks’ notice, Google will optimize your campaign for free.
Conclusion: Google ads can be as frustrating for beginners as it is potent for experts. If you’re willing to invest the time and have a place for advertising in your long-range plans, then go for it—you might just be the next Eric Frenchman.
2. Facebook. While some have criticized Facebook ads as a “failure” and lackluster, they offer unparalleled microtargeting in ways that would make Karl Rove salivate, and they couldn’t be easier to create, change, or evaluate. Want to reach single women in Seattle who are older than 21 and work at Microsoft? Go ahead—there are 160 of them on Facebook, and your ads will only appear in front of this demographic, thus ensuring that not a single set of eyeballs goes to waste.
The downside: Facebookers are predominantly young. Of the socnet’s 35.8 million users in the United States, 14.7 million are 21 or younger, and 27 million are 30 or younger.
Conclusion: For its simplicity and deep data, Facebook is both a beginner’s tool and a marketer’s dream.
To borrow a line from Tom Friedman, the Internet has flattened the field of advertising, pulling back the curtain on this one-time specialty and allowing us Web flacks to add another quiver to our advocacy arrow. We should do so not because the quiver is newfangled, but because it’s effective.
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