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Edge Content

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Non-threatening ways to get your company started with social media

As organizations seek to expand their communication efforts to include social media, they often find themselves facing the same hurdles that were faced and ultimately overcome by earlier adopters. Efforts to introduce social media have been hamstrung by questions of time commitment, IT issues, and legal concerns.

Usually, blogs are the tactic that face these obstacles (although I have also heard of other challenges, such as a legal objection to the construction of a special-purpose Facebook page). The assumption that blogs must be the company’s point of entry into social media is most likely based on the fact that blogs were the first social media tool. By the time other tools, like Twitter, came along, tens of millions of blogs already populated the Web and companies from Sun Microsystems to McDonald’s were already showing results from their blogging efforts.

While there are plenty of good reasons for a company to blog, there’s no rule that says blogs must kick off a company’s foray into social media. In fact, if you start with something that isn’t threatening to the lawyers or likely to raise much concern among IT staff, the successful implementation of smaller, less flashy tools can pave the way for more involved engagement.

If your company hasn’t touched social media yet, consider starting with these approaches:

• For your external communications, add a “share this” link to every article or page
• For internal communication, add a rating-and-comment feature to every page

Share this

People increasingly use aggregation tools to find interestithe websites of media outlets like The New York Times or CNN. (Max Kalehoff says he visits the Times site only to read particular blogs.) Democratized content sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and NewsVine —where the users determine what’s important rather than a gatekeeper—are also growing in popularity. Even in the world of search, it’s not unusual to hear someone suggest that they get more targeted results by searching Delicious or Furl than Google.

It’s altogether possible that a reader will submit a news item or press release from your website to one of these services. It’s far more likely, though, if you make it easy by giving them the utility to submit with just two clicks (one to open the “share this” box, the other to submit). Consider the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A search of Digg produces several pages of results, most of which are less than flattering with headlines like “FDA’s handling of proposed cancer drug defies compassion” and “Shame on the FDA.” There is, however, a link to an FDA press release about the formation of a nanotechnology task force. The press release itself features no links at all. A “share this” link would certainly lead far more people to do so—people to whom it might never occur to share at all without the nudge.

In fact, if all of the FDA’s press releases contained “Share This” links, it’s likely that more positive material would find its way to Digg, Delicious, and other sites where they would be visible to people who would otherwise never see it, providing some balance to content submitted by the agency’s critics.

It’s important for organizations to get their messages out to where people are spending their time and consuming their information (which is not your dot-com website).

Rate-and-comment

Most intranets are hard to navigate and contain content of questionable value. The simple act of letting employees comment on and rate a page can make good content easier to find and increase the usefulness of a lot of that material.

A simple YouTube-like five-star rating system serves a number of purposes. It gets employees accustomed to interacting. It provides an at-a-glance indication of how valuable other employees have found a page (assuming it has amassed enough votes). And a “highest-rated pages” listing can help direct employees to useful content (as opposed to most-viewed).

Enabling comments on pages lets employees enhance the content with their own experiences and observations. Consider the page containing the travel policy. An employee might add a comment noting that his expense report was kicked back multiple times because currency conversions were wrong, then directing employees to the right resource for calcuating conversions.

In both the external and internal cases, the value of social media should become evident in relatively short order and serve as a basis for introducing those blogs, Facebook pages, and other tools that help organizations engage in dialogues with their publics.

Friday, May 04, 2007

It’s time for business to free their web videos

David Kiley, writing in BusinessWeek’s “Brand New Day” blog, likes the way Shell Oilteased him from a snort commercial on MSNBC to the company’s website where he watched an appealing nine-minute video. The tease approach has been effective before: Remember Nike’s cliffhangere commercials that required a visit to the website to see how they ended? But there are other ways to seed a video.

Business usually takes a while to catch up to the rest of the web, but I’m surprised that companies haven’t embraced YouTube’s embed model. If Kiley liked this video so much, why wouldn’t Shell let him show it on his blog where he was talking about it? Why force people to decide whether they should follow the link or just skip it? If the video were right there on Kiley’s blog with a big “play’ button in the center, far more visitors would be inclined to click and watch.

I suppose some lawyers—and even some marketers—would oppose the idea that the company’s content should be allowed to reside on the edge. After all, your video could appear next to an ad for a competitor’s product or even wind up side-by-side with some truly unsavory or objectionable content.

Ultimately, though, organizations are going to have to give in to the notion of edge content, which lets people experience your content wherever they happen to find it; consumers will be increasingly unlikely to want to make a special visit to your website. Widgets are one sign of the growing recognition of the importance of the edge. (Did you see that eBay now offers an embedded widget that lets you display any current auction on a web page? take a look at the demo blog to see how it works.)

Between RSS feeds, widgets, and embedded video, content is moving steadily to the edge. Companies like Shell would do well to consider freeing their own content to be offered and viewed wherever people want it, exposing those videos to a far bigger audience than the one that will make a deliberate trip to the corporate website.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Social media and traditional press releases from the edge

My presentation at IABC’s international conference in June is on “edge” content. While most of you probably are familiar with the notion, it’s an alien concept to most people I talk to.

I use several examples when I talk about content on the edge and how it applies to the work of organizational communicators. One example is the classified advertising service EdgeIO. Under the old model, you sent your classified ad to a newspaper because the newspaper’s reach exceeded that which you could achieve with a 3x5-inch index card tacked to a community bulletin board in a supermarket.

Along comes the web and the process stays exactly the same. Whether you use eBay or Craig’s List, you still send your content for publishing in a central location. EdgeIO changes that model by letting you publish to your venue—your blog. With so many people publishing on their own, the content exists on the edge. By adding an EdgeIO tag to your used car, your vacation rental, or your casting call for that great video podcast you’re going to produce, EdgeIO finds your listing and adds it. You don’t have to send them anything.

Microformats work the same way. When Neville Hobson, Joseph Jaffe, and I had our geek dinner in New York last June, I created a listing using microformat tags and it appeared automatically in a calendar of upcoming events over at the Technorati Kitchen.

Still, these examples are a bit confounding for the typical communicator. Now there’s an example that will be easy to explain. Shannon Whitley, the guy behind PRX Builder (a site that lets you use a wizard to build a social media press release) has introduced FetchWire. I think Shannon pitched me about it; I’ve had a note to self on my desk for a while reminding me to blog about FetchWire. So I went and took a look this afternoon and thought, “Edge content for press releases.”

That’s the idea. FetchWire touts its value proposition this way: “Post a news release to your blog. We’ll fetch it and display it.”

so you have a blog. You want to distribute a press release. Post the release to your blog (presumably a social media press release, of course), adding the appropriate tags. The tags can link to your blog post or your RSS (or Atom) feed. The folks at FetchWire insist that people are subscribing to the service’s feed through the use of keywords; they provide a TagBuilder tool to make sure you add the keywords to your post that people are using in their subscriptions.

The Discussion Tracker lets you see who has posted a blog item about the press release you “distributed” through FetchWire. This clearly is an opportunity to get spammed via blogs: Nearly all the tracker items listed under one press release were links to online pharmacies.

Still, the interface is clean, the categories make sense,

I have no idea how many people actually subscribe or whether FetchWire stands a chance of turning the wire service model on its head. But it’s a simple example of edge content I can use in my presentation. And, I believe it’s further evidence that there’s a future in edge content that offers communicators a real advantage.

I sense a “10 list” on the horizon: “10 uses of edge content for communicators.” Watch for it.

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Microformats go mainstream

I reported here earlier this month that Technorati was experimenting with microformats, the tags you can add to content like events or contacts so they can be found, collected, and categorized by sites that aggregate such content. Microformats are part of a larger trend called “edge” content that I find exciting. As more people create their own content on their own sites, it makes sense to use this content “on the edge” instead of the old model, which had people submitting their content for publication in a central place. Newspaper classified advertising—and their online equivalents like eBay and Craig’s List—are examples of the latter. Edgeio is an example of the former.

Still, this remains pretty geeky stujff, but perhaps not for much longer. Niall Kennedy reports that Yahoo! is embracing microformats. Yahoo! Local is supporting the hcard, hreview, and hcal markup—tags that let sites list contacts, reviews (of restaurants, for example), and events listed on blogs andsites from across the web.

According to the Yahoo Local|Maps blog:

We believe in giving you more control over your data and the user experience on Yahoo! Local. With our microformat support, we’ve opened up new data and new possibilities for the developer community to build upon, to make tools that will be genuinely useful to all our users.

With Yahoo! adopting microformats, Google can’t be far behind and edge content may become mainstream sooner than I expected.