First, there are blog search engines like Google Blog Search, Technorati, BlogPUlse and IceRocket. Each lets you subscribe to RSS feeds for specific searches (which I highly recommend); you can also sign up for email alerts in order to get an email when any new content matches your searches.

For social networks, unless you pay a service to collect this information for you, you’ll need to visit the networks to search each one individually; they tend to be walled gardens.

There’s a wide range of social media monitoring services, from very inexpensive to six or seven figures. The best collection I know of information on these services was put together by Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Half of Web sites will become content driven? Who is the source again?

This is from Meveo, which used to be Podshow, a company that distributes both professional and consumer-created multimedia. It’s run by Adam Curry, host of the Daily Source Code podcast (and former MTV veejay) and Ron Bloom.

We are using Wordpress’ CMS when creating SEO compliant website creation. How good is the blog tool?

It’s excellent, among the best blogging software out there, and constantly improving. In fact, it’s primarily a blogging application that some people (like you) use for content management. If you’re mainly looking for a content management tool that also happens to serve as a blogging platform, I’d look more toward something like Expression Engine. WordPress’ popularity is aided by the huge community of developers creating modules and plugins that enhance its functionality.

What kind of software allows users to rate the content on your site.  I would love to add this to my site, but I’m not sure where to start vis-a-vis software/applications.

One of the easiest tools to use to add ratings and reviews comes from JS-KIT. Depending on the platform you use, you can find other options; your content management system may actually already offer these features; they may just need to be turned on.

How does a company do a podcast?

The steps can be as simple as this:

1. Record a digital audio file.
2. Get an account at LibSyn.
3. Create a LibSyn blog that will be the home to your podcast. They have commercial accounts for companies.
4. Upload your file to LibSyn.
5. Write about your episode on the blog and publish it.

Of course, it gets a lot more complicated than that (although simple enough to have resulted in the production of some 50,000 or more independent podcasts. There are a lot of great resources to help you get up to speed on podcasting. May I suggest the book, ”How to Do Everything with Podcasting,” which (ahem) I co-wrote with my podcasting co-host, Neville Hobson.

This answer, by the way, is focused on audio podcasting. Video podcasting is a whole different kettle of fish.

Which 2-3 social media are the best to learn from?

If I understand your question correctly, you’re asking which ones you should spend time with in order to get a solid handle on how they work. If that’s the case, I’d recommend that you…

• Start reading some blogs that talk about your personal interests or your profession
• Get a Facebook account and a LinkedIn account, and begin networking
• Get a Twitter account and start participating in the conversations there

Of course, there are dozens—hudreds—of other ways to connect, and each could be more or less in tune with your own preferences for engagement. But these three will give you a good introduction to the space.

Can you address how this works from a headcount point of view—12 people from Comcast searching the web for complaints? What were the free monitoring tools?

The Comcast customer service team uses the search function built into Twitter to find messages that include the company name. To find blog posts, use the tools I listed in the question above on how to build buzz.

Don’t worry about the number. First of all, you’re not likely to have as many people talking about your company as Comcast has. Second, keep in mind that every complaint addressed proactively is one that isn’t coming into the customer service call center!

Could you please compare and contrast Twitter vs Linked In?

They’re pretty similar—and worlds apart. They both let you build networks—Twitter is meant to let you communicate with just about anybody, while LinkedIn is aimed at business professionals. Beyond that, though, they’re completely different. On LinkedIn, you create a profile that includes your resume. By linking to someone, you automatically link to everyone in their network, and then everyone in their networks, and (in the words of the commercial) so on, and so on, and so on—up to six degrees of separation. Now you can search your entire network based on a variety of criteria, such as companies at which people worked, titles, job skills, education, and the like. You can also pose questions to your network, join groups (for example, I belong to a group of former Mattel employees and another group of IABC members. I can message these folks, look at information about companies, and a lot more.

Linked in has a New User Starter Guide.

On Twitter, I can send a message of 140 characters or less that is received by other Twitter users who have chosen to “follow” me; I see the messages (called “tweets") of the people I have elected to follow. I can send a tweet directly to another person by starting with their account name and the @ symbol—to reach me (with your tweet visible to anybody else), you’d start your message with @shel. I can see all the messages that have been sent to me using this technique by viewing my “replies.” You can also send me a direct message—d shel—which only I will see.

Here’s a good Twitter primer.

What is the impact of a social media program on the marketing/communications staff? Seems like managing and responding would be a fulltime job.

That depends on how you use it. First, consider that social media could replace some of the other communication work you do. A number of business leaders, for instance, have found that blogging results in fewer phone calls and conference calls, and less email. Monitoring, once you get it set up, shouldn’t take too much time, unless you work for a large organization, in which case you probably should contract with a service to do much of it for you.

It also depends on how engaged your stakeholders will be. If you’re getting hundreds of comments to every blog post, for example, yes, you’ll need someone moderating those comments. Southwest Airlines actually had to hire additional staff to handle it. Not every company is Southwest, though, and most organizations find that they don’t need to bring new people on board.

What’s more, I’d be willing to bet you have employees who are already enthusiastic users of social media who would be happy to lend a hand.

Connecting to the Net in 1992

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Listening to the panel at Inside PR recall their most embarrassing experiences, one popped into my mind. It wasn’t a PR gaffe, nor was it particularly embarrassing (at least, not to me), but it fits in the mold of the stories Terry, David, and Martin were sharing.

This goes back to about 1992. Remember, graphical web browsers had not yet been introduced and people still got online with modems and dial-up connections. I was one of the speakers at a series of workshops Lexis-Nexis sponsored to introduce communicators to the world of online communication. Craig Jolley, who handled marketing to the profession for Lexis-Nexis, was at every one of these workshops, while I traded (and sometimes shared) the stage with other early adopters like Pete Shinbach and Geri Cartwright.

Craig and I were set to present the workshop, titled “Communicating in the Wired World,” to the IABC chapter in Spokane. Craig’s staff had booked the event at the Ridpath Hotel. The contract called for a phone line at the lectern with a direct connection so Craig could dial into his Lexis-Nexis account.

About an hour before the workshop began, Craig and I went downstairs to the meeting room to make sure everything was working. Craig opened his 1992-era laptop and plugged the RJ-11 jack into the modem, then dialed out. We waited to hear the familiar dial tone and modem-coupling sound, but at first, there was nothing but silence. Then a voice crackled over the speaker:
“Operator, can I help you?”

We found the AV tech and explained that we had requested a direct line. “Right,” he said, “and that’s how you get a direct line.”

Patiently, Craig explained how a modem works. He unfolded the contract and pointed to the section that listed the requirement. Then he said (and I can still hear it today, 16 years later), “Over 100 people will arrive here in 45 minutes expecting to see an online demonstration that we can’t deliver without a direct line. And at Lexis-Nexis, we have two floors of lawyers with nothing much to do who would love to to make your life miserable over this.”

By now, there were two or three technicians huddling over what to do. Ultimately, one of them made a quick run to a local Radio Shack and came back with a couple hundred feet of RJ-11 cable, which they ran from the laptop on stage out of the presentation room, down the hall, and into a closet where a fax machine was set up. They disconnected the fax machine from the wall and plugged in the cable connected to the laptop. Then they taped the whole mess to the carpet while explaining that this was the only direct line in the hotel that didn’t require operator assistance.

Craig and I heard that wonderful dial tone just as the first audience members arrived.

Now, as I connect my laptop to the Net via wireless broadband using my built-in EVDO, I have to marvel at how far we’ve come in so short a time.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

A salvage plan for Detroit’s Big Three

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The Big 3 U.S. automakers—GM, Ford, and Chrysler—want the $25 billion federal legislators are hesitantly dangling in front of them. Today, Democratic leaders insisted that the trio spell out their plans for spending the $25 billion (which presumably won’t include additional private jets).

My advice to these companies: Go considerably further than a spending plan.

On his “60 Minutes” interview this past Sunday, President-Elect Barack Obama said he supported a bailout but wouldn’t sign a blank check. He’d want to see a plan for revitalizing the industry.

I do—reluctantly—support a bailout. The impact of 3 million or so people joining the ranks of the unemployed (and this would come from GM’s failure alone) would be devastating at a time when the economy can ill-afford such a hit. But that would be preferable to handing over $25 billion that would be spent on the same old same old, leading us right back to this point in another year or two.

A genuine turnaround in the industry, though, would result in repayment of the loans with interest, as Chrysler did when it was bailed out back in 1979.

The U.S. auto industry is riddled with problems. As much improved as American cars are from their sorry state 30 years ago, Japan and Korea (among others) have kept pace and continue to churn out generally better products. The power of the United Auto Workers has led to pension and retiree medical obligations that would be unthinkable in just about any other industry, creating a crushing financial burden. Huge bureaucracy and massive infrastructure make major changes slow and tedious, like the shift to more fuel-efficient engines. And these problems just scratch the surface

All of which makes the public skeptical that the industry will produce any ROI from its $25 billion investment.

So here’s what GM, Ford, and Chrysler need to do:

Get together and create a vision for the reborn U.S. auto industry, a road map for how they’ll get there, and a plan showing how the bailout will serve as the catalyst for achieving the vision.

This plan should be presented in simple social website. Extravagant design and bells and whistles aren’t necessary, just a clear articulation of the vision and the plan. In addition to initial feedback through comments and other crowdsourcing channels, the Big Three should plan a 72 hour public jam, just like those put on by IBM, to tap into the collective wisdom and surface more ideas that will lead to a revised vision and plan that now belongs to the American people as much as it does to the automakers. It’s very difficult to oppose a plan you helped create.

Legislators, meanwhile, would watch this transparent exercise unfold in public, with public involvement. That is, the voting public will have had a hand in developing the plan. It’s not easy to reject your voters’ efforts.

The final step is to institutionalize the means by which progress would be subject to public oversight, including an industry website chronicling each step and providing the means for continued engagement between industry and public.

The Big Three have a real opportunity to do something amazing. Dramatic change is not just a good idea; it’s a requirement. Ford and GM already understand the value of engaging their customers. Now it’s time to bring these factors to bear on a major reinvention of the industry.

With GM proclaiming it could run out of cash by the end of the year, time is short. With survival hanging in the balance, I bet they could do it.

FIR Cut: Perspectives on the BNP members list leak

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• The fallout from leaking BNP member list on the internet

Download the file here (MP3, 5.10Mb; length 11:02), or sign up for the RSS feed to get this cut segment and all future ones automatically.

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #399: November 20, 2008

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Content summary: Next Thursday’s show and listener contributions; about ‘Tactical Transparency’; update on Chuck Hester interview; follow-up discussion: what to learn from the speed and scale of the Motrin storm; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; Dan York reports on social media convergence in Minneapolis, and more; News That Fits - interesting new sites: New Media for Internal Corporate Communicators, Common Craft Explainer Network, MicroPR Personalizes Public Relations; listeners’ comments discussion; and more.

Listen to FIR now:

Get FIR:

• Download the MP3 file (27.6Mb, 60:16)
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• Get the show at iTunes

Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report for November 20, 2008: A 60-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #399 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

So, until Monday November 24…

Ten changes that could save print newspapers

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You can say a lot of things about News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, but “stupid” isn’t one of them. In a talk at Australia’s Boyer Lecture, Murdoch said the future of newspapers is bright. His prediction is based on the movement of newspapers from print to the web: “I like the look and feel of newsprint as much as anyone,” Murdoch said, “but our real business isn’t printing on dead trees. It’s giving our readers great journalism and great judgement.”

He’s right, of course, but this does not mean that print newspapers will vanish altogether. They will—like all old media faced with the benefits introduced by new media—evolve to focus on their strengths.

Still, it seems that every time a newspaper folds, somebody will assert that it’s one more nail in the coffin of the print newspaper business. Plenty of newspapers will go out of business before the industry figures out its new model. Nobody knows yet what that model will be (or the industry would already have adopted it), but I can make a few suggestions:

Collectible

Many of the daily newspapers produced the day after the U.S. presidential election sold out as people snatched them up as collector’s items. Many are now available on eBay, some at pretty respectable prices. The collectibility of newspapers is something to which the industry should pay more attention. You won’t get a front-page story of the magnititude of the election of the country’s first black president every day, nor does the sell-out of Obama victory editions is not a sign that the newspaper industry is healthy. But people do like to collect things, and I’ve never heard a single story of somebody printing out a page from a newspaper website in order to put it in a scrapbook or a collectibles box.

But that doesn’t mean the idea of collectibility doesn’t have merit. A story doesn’t need to be collectible for every reader every day, but if a story is collectible for as few as 15 or 20 different readers each day, a lot of people will pick up the newspaper to see if there’s anything worth saving.

I grew up in the west San Fernando Valley where a daily called the Green Sheet arrived on our doorstep every day, along with the metropolitan Herald Examiner. The Green Sheet was a thick paper, mainly because they’d print any civic-oriented content they received. The publicity chairman from a Boy Scout troop, for example, could send an article with a list of every award won by every Scout at a Court of Honor—along with a picture—and know it would get printed. And the families of every kid listed clipped those stories for inclusion in their scrapbooks. Newspapers would do well to return to this type of content.

No doubt there are plenty of other stories people might want to save. Ideas?

Local focus

The big news as of this moment is the announcement by U.S. Democrats that the Big Three automakers must submit a plan detailing how they’ll spend $25 billion in bailout money before the loans are approved. I searched this at Google News and found 728 news articles. Clicking through them, they were all more or less the same. In today’s news enviornment, do we really need a reporter from every daily newspaper writing the same story?

What would happen to the face of newspapers if all those journalistic resources were refocused on local coverage? This could include stories unique to the region covered by the newspaper’s distribution, but also the local angle on major national or international news?

People in Richmond, Virginia don’t need a local daily newspaper to fill them in on wildfires in California—they get that on channels from Twitter to CNN. But where else can they learn about the dry cleaner down the street that suddenly closed shop or the dispute over a zoning ordinance? While some of this may, indeed, appear somewhere on the web, nowhere is it packaged neatly and concisely for local consumption.

And here’s the business model: If more and more people grab the newspaper because of the unique local angle (and the other benefits covered below), local advertisers will be more inclined to spend some money. Henry’s Tavern isn’t well served buying a Google adword or a banner on websites, but knowing that local residents read the regional newspaper, the owners of the pub could find it very worthwhile to put a localized ad in a paper people read for its local coverage.

More columns

Most journalists—especially those who have degrees in journalism—make a sincere effort to be objective when reporting news. It’s a noble goal at which everyone falls short. One of the side effects of objective reporting is a flat, dull writing style. Fewer news reports and more personal columns in which professional writers can apply their own voices and opinions will draw more readers. Yes, you can get personal opinions on blogs (and a bazillion other online channels), but it’s still easier to read lengthy content in paper than it is on the screen, regardless of the generation into which you were born. Thoughtful, substantive columns still have a place in print, and newspapers would be well-served to produce more of them.

Local voices

My daily newspaper, the Contra Costa Times, increasingly publishes content from local residents who are not staff members or even trained journalists. They run the gamut from very personal reminiscences to observations on local issues.

Unfortunately, these only appear in the “Time Out” section. More local voices throughout the newspaper would improve the local appeal, so long as it’s easy to distinguish these voices from the professional reporting of the newspaper staff.

Free

The San Francisco Examiner, is free. It’s distributed from vending racks and in BART stations; riding BART in the afternoon, you see half the people on the train, earbuds jammed into their ears, leafing through the Examiner. The newspaper’s income is entirely based on advertising.

This isn’t a new model—it’s just new for the mainstream press. The alternative press has been giving its content away for free for decades, relying solely on ads to pay the bills. This model could work for metropolitan dailies, even for home delivery. One of my first jobs out of college was serving as assistant editor-photographer-sports editor-news reporter for a weekly community newspaper that was delivered free to everyone in the community. The more revenue accrues from advertising, the easier it would be for publishers to give the paper away.

Refrigerator journalism

The best-selling magazines—almost all of them women’s magazines—understand the concept of “refrigerator journalism,” a term coined by University of Missouri journalism professor Don Ranly. This is anything you want to cut out and stick on a refrigerator, and nearly always comes in the form of lists: Six ways to a better sex life, nine holiday decorating tips, eight five-minute recipes your family will love, five great getaways for under $100. There’s so much content in newspapers that could be reduced to style of reporting that it’s a wonder so few newspapers have adopted it—and there’s plenty of content that could be supplemented with the clip-and-stick sidebar. The more people find content they do want on their refrigerators (or office bulletin boards), the more likely they will be to take a daily look through the newspaper for useful items.

A total package

As I mentioned earlier, a lot of great content is available online. The problem is aggregating it. HP’s Tabbloid is a wonderful idea, but it will only produce content from feeds I’m already familiar with. The serendipitous discovery of an article about the opening of a new European bakery down the street is less likely on the Web than it is while paging through a concise, linear package that was put together with a sharp focus on the interests of the local community. I want to know, when I pick up that local newspaper, that spending 15 minutes with it will give me everything I really need to know. Of course it won’t, and I’ll need to go online to supplement what the print newspaper provided, but hell, even the Net doesn’t give me everything.

Smaller newspapers

By smaller, I don’t mean less content, although print newspapers inevitably will have fewer pages. I’m talking about the actual footprint of the newspaper, its dimensions. The San Francisco Examiner has it about right—a tabloid-sized newspaper that’s easy to read if you’re standing up on a packed BART train on your way home.

Quality

Newsprint is too think and nobody likes ink on their fingers (other than die-hard journalists and printers). If publishers upped the quality a notch or two, reading that tangible document would be a more pleasurable experience.

Online connection

These print newspapers will also have websites, and should think more about how the print and online properties integrate than what separates them. How can publishers turn readers into members of a community that involves both the tactile print and ethereal online experience? What’s more, newspapers can leap out ahead of other industries by developing a true mobile strategy that does more than just repurpose the website content, but rather takes real advantage of the mobile phone’s limitations and capabilities.

These are just my 10 ideas for print newspaper adaptation in the digital world. What else could the industry do to make some form of their print product viable and desirable? Thoughts?

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Why there will be no attention crash

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The Motrin incident (USA Today article) that unfolded over the weekend reinforces a fundamental dimension of the entire social media phenomenon: If people care enough about something, they’ll make the time to engage in the communities and conversations where people are talking about it.

This is nothing unique to social media. A typical person, in addition to the hours he or she devotes to work, will hit the links for 18 holes with friends, get out to a PTA meeting, go to church on Sunday, attend a neighborhood activist meeting, take a night class, attend a chapter meeting of their professional association, chat with family on the phone, chat some more with neighbors over the backyard fence, and go out to a sports bar to watch a ballgame with the gang.

While some people try to cram too much activity into too little time, they deal with it by missing a meeting or skipping church one Sunday to sleep in a few extra hours. They don’t crash. That is, they don’t just stop all their activities. But for some reason, there’s a pervasive belief among many that this is exactly what’s going to happen in the online space. As Steve Rubel put it in a post back on June 11 last year:

We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.

Steve added this past April…

By 2009, the Radicati Group predicts that we’ll spend 41% of our time managing email. Now add to that the IMs, documents, Facebook pokes, RSS feeds, Twitter tweets and text messages coming at us and we’re officially way oversubscribed...Unfortunately, the problem will not abate. Human attention is finite. It doesn’t scale. Worse, the pace of change today is so rapid there’s a huge need to stay digitally savvy.

While email overload certainly is an issue, it doesn’t plague people who simply don’t use it, which includes a huge slice of those under, say, 25 years old. My daughter, who’s nearly 20, doesn’t list email among the tools she uses, and when I remind her that I know she has an email account because I use it to send her email, she responds, “I know. That’s why I have an email account.”

As we move to other channels, email is taking a back seat. The vast majority of email I receive is made up of mostly newsletters to which I subscribe. If I don’t have time to read them, I don’t read them. Those that look interesting get shoved into a folder I open when I have time, mostly on planes. But much of my interpersonal communication has shifted elsewhere, including Twitter, Facebook, and Skype IM, each of which is more effective than email at what I’m using them for. I other words, I’m reallocating my attention to better channels. And I’m not alone.

Nobody is forced to respond to Facebook pokes any more than they’re required to avail themselves of every conversation at a cocktail party. (I have never sent one or responded to one, and I don’t feel like my Facebook experience has been diminished one iota.) RSS feeds allow you to consume more information in less time—not the other way around—and text messages take a lot less time than email (a quick question gets a quick answer and I’m done).

People will avail themselves of the communities and tools that interest them, fuel their interests, feed their passions...just as the MotrinMoms did. Many of those participating in that conversation may have felt like they already had plenty of information coming their way, but I doubt any of them felt that keeping up with the hashtag and blog posts and YouTube videos was an additional burden weighing them down.

Anybody who feels compelled to engage with everything all the time probably is dealing more with a personal addiction issue than a simple excess of inputs. (In case you hadn’t heard, China has codified Internet Addiction Disorder as a legitimate diagnosis.)

Just as we make time for the interactions and communities that satisfy and define us in the real world, we’ll do the same online as the Net becomes the new commons. I just don’t believe there’s any great attention crash on the horizon.