Tonight Techcrunch announced that it had integrated via a Wordpress plugin, an implementation of Facebook connect.

What does it do? It allows you to sign in super easy with your name and Facebook password, and then leave a comment. Facebook automatically includes a pic from Facebook as an avatar as well as your name, linked to your Facebook profile.

What’s the implications of this?

If your a commenter and blogger:

…like me I’d be weary.

I want people to come to my blog, not my Facebook profile. Facebook is after all designed and best used with real friends.

Secondly, I’ll loose the chance of scoring a bit of Google juice via the link to my blog. The Facebook comment’s links have nofollow attributes (I guess implemented on the Techcrunch side), meaning they can’t pass on PageRank, not to your blog and not even to your Facebook profile.

If your Facebook:

I’d be pretty dissapointed that were not getting all that PageRank form all those comments with links. Still, its an opportunity to cement Facebook as an identity repository standard.

If your a Facebook user: (Like me)

Well the downside is your much more likely to be found by people that find you interesting and that you don’t know. If your egotistical and accept all those invitations, in no time your Facebook experience will be boring. Facebook works best with real friends.

But it also an opportunity to show your friends how clever you are with no extra effort. Your comments go straight to your Friendfeed. They also might just think your an opinionated twirp, or really not interested what you think of the Springbok rugby team.

If your Techcrunch (or an implementing site):

Excellent. This is great marketing. All the people leaving comments are effectively word of mouth marketeers for your blog. The comments will appear in hundreds of Friendfeeds. A marketing dream come true. And you don’t loose any Pagerank to pages you don’t want to. Bonus.

Advertisers are increasingly realising the power of social media like blogs and Twitter, and they want in on the action. Said Techcrunch yesterday:

“Like much-criticized PayPerPost for blogs, German/UK startup Be-A-Mapgpie will pay you to insert advertisements into your Twitter stream.

Advertisers pay on a cost-per-thousand-impression basis, and the ads are promised to be delivered to relevant audiences based on keywords. That means Be-A-Magpie will analyze the content of your Twitter messages to see if there is a match to particular advertisers.”

Be-A-Mapgpie does not disclose that a Tweet is an ad either, except for adding a #magpie hashtag into the post. To be fair, any explanation will eat into Twitter’s limited 140 character numbers and the possibilities of creative copy writing for the add.

I have already blogged about undisclosed payment for blog posts. It’s a no no. Social media directness, it’s emmediacy its connection to individuals gives it immense credibility. But undisclosed payment for endorsements can destroy social media’s credibility.

Of course all links inside Twitter have nofollow tags. So there’s no transfer of valuable Google Pagerank happening here (unlike with blogs that are great for transferring linkjuice). It’s pure advertising dressed up as recommendation.

Now ZuluZulu would be surprised if Twitter is not considering inserting ads into Twitter stream as an option to monetise their service. They are in a better position to differentiate between Tweets and ads than a third party, since they could do so in their interface presentation.

Be-A-Mapgpie, allows users to monetise their Tweet stream. How a Twitter user’s followers will view this remains to be seen.

The CEO of Be-A-Mapgpie Jan Schulz-Hofen, responded to some of the criticism on Techcrunch. It’s an interesting response so you can read it in full below. But it’s also interesting to note how tech companies as a matter of course are ready to respond directly in the blogosphere to comments about their companies. There’s another lesson for PR in that.

Jan Schulz-Hofen – November 24th, 2008 at 1:33 am PST

Dear Mike,

thanks for writing about Magpie and for sharing your feedback.

There has been quite some discussion about it lately with both negative and positive comments. We’ve tried to stay in the loop and we’ve learned a lot. After all, we’re still a very young company, but we’ve built a follower base of 600,000+ tweeps in only a month. So there are some people liking it.

Three major points have been addressed in yesterday’s update to Magpie:

- Pre-approval of ads. Tweeps can now pre-approve whether they want to air a specific magpie-tweet or not. Thus, users can move from mere ads to personal endorsements, if they like.

- Customizing the disclaimer. Mike, you also mention that ads weren’t clearly marked as such. We started by using #magpie as a disclaimer to both tell followers that this is not the Twitterer’s own tweet and to build our own brand a little. We’re allowing users now to use their own disclaimer like “ad” or “sponsored”. However, a lot of people (not referring to advertisers here) were asking to omit the disclaimer. We believe that, combined with pre-approval, this may as well be a way to go.

- Less frequent ads. We’ve always let people choose their tweet/ad-ratio but we didn’t allow really low amounts of ads. But as some people earn more than €50 (~ $63) per tweet, they’d be happy to have them come in less frequently. You can now choose to have as few ad 1 ad per 200 tweets.

I recognize that you don’t like the service as it is. I would love if you elaborated more on your objections, as this is the way we can improve the service.

In the end of the day, we believe that you don’t break your follower’s trust as you assumed before, Mike. Just as you, a lot of people are using Twitter to really provide a service to their followers. They’re breaking news, telling us what’s going on or are just making us laugh. As a blogger you can put up ads and be rewarded for what you do. As a Twitterer you should be as well, we think.

Again, I would love to hear more about why you don’t like Magpie and what we can do better!

Thanks again, kind regards,

Jan
CEO Magpie & Friends Ltd.

Last Friday I gave a talk to a large UK PR agency about social media. I told them they (PR) were (or should be) much better placed to engage people through social media than traditional advertising agencies.

The Wikipedia definition of PR is -

“Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its publics. Public relations – often referred to as PR – gains an organization or individual exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment. Because public relations places exposure in credible third-party outlets, it offers a third-party legitimacy that advertising does not have. Common activities include speaking at conferences, working with the press, and employee communication.”

Social media is all about communication. The so-called conversation. Tools like blogs, micro-blogging (like Twitter) LinkedIn, YouTube and social networks are a heaven sent for communicators.

PR people should have an instinctive feel for this brave new world.

Press releases have always attempted to be more ‘content like’. They had to be newsworthy and authentic to make it into the media. To achieve word of mouth the message had to truly interesting. Good communication with a businesses’ “publics” have always been more like talking – a conversation – than shouting (advertising).

Sponsorship – also a PR preserve – can be seen a form of ‘content funding’.

One has to look no further than Barack Obama’s recent election campaign to see how social media can be used for things that look a lot like PR. The NY times enthused:

“But by using interactive Web 2.0 tools, Mr. Obama’s campaign changed the way politicians organize supporters, advertise to voters, defend against attacks and communicate with constituents.”

Mind you PR have not done too badly of late. Some of the decline in media spend, away from TV, radio and print has in fact shifted to PR. And PR is often rightly seen as a cheaper way of getting your message out.

Why? As less and less advertising occupies column space in the press, hard pressed editors with less and less staff are looking for easy copy to fill their pages. PR releases have found some fertile soil.

Can PR rest on its laurels? This PR renaissance could be short lived. Without advertising, many magazine titles, papers and even TV channels will cease to exist (at least in their current form) and the available column inches with them.

There are skeptics. During my talk I was either told that the blogs and the like are not as popular in the UK as the US. And the Brits have an enduring love affair with newspapers was another retort.

But just today the Media Guardian reported:

Two of the biggest regional newspaper publishers, Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press, issued interim reports last week detailing how their advertising revenue was crumbling faster than they had expected. They each recorded falls in property advertising of almost 50%, against a general ad slump of over 20% and 15% respectively since the end of June. Trinity Mirror has closed 44 local titles because of the advertising downturn and the switch to the web, where profits are harder to come by.

Dear (of the NUJ) thinks further cuts will damage the industry, and expects more titles to close in the months ahead. “It’s a false economy to make such deep cuts. I think the cuts are already deep but I can see more on the horizon. The warning signs coming out of a number of companies about their ad revenue makes it clear to me that there will be further cuts. The problem a lot of companies are creating for themselves is that, post-recession, many of them will not be in a position to take advantage of the opportunities because they will have lost so many readers and advertisers because of cuts [to staff].”

Dear’s assessment tallies with that of Richards, who thinks the worst could be yet to come for consumer titles in general.”

The closing of local newspapers and many consumer titles will hit PR hard.

In the same Guardian Rupert Murdoch was quoted as saying that journalism will not die. But he added:

“Our real business isn’t printing on dead trees. It’s giving our readers great journalism and great judgment.”

“At a time when new printing technology was making other papers around the world more efficient, newspapers in Britain were forced to rely on a technology that had not changed much since Gutenberg’s Bible. The costs were destroying hundreds of jobs and crippling what is now the world’s most vibrant newspaper market…”

Echoing the impact of social technologies that Li & Bernoff describe so eloquently in their Groundswell book he says:

“Today editors are losing this power. The internet, for example, provides access to thousands of new sources that cover things an editor might ignore. And if you aren’t satisfied with that, you can start up your own blog and cover and comment on the news yourself.”

ZuluZulu thinks blogging is the PR tool par excellence.

It is an easy to use, powerful and flexible platform for companies with a complexity problem to conduct their brand PR (PR that shifts products) efforts. It allows a company to speak to customers in the middle of the funnel.

But so to does almost all corporate public relations (PR that builds reputations) benefit from using a blog. (Corporate public relations are almost always complex in nature.)

You can see the whole presentation I gave here:

russell brand!!!

Originally uploaded by rinoa_88

What to do if your in a crisis and your irate customers have been enabled by social technologies? What to do when a groundswell of negative public opinion gathers ominously on forums blogs and the like?

Blog your way out of it!

In this Monday’s Media Guardian Digital veteran Steve Bowbrick argues the BBC could and should have reacted through a “response blog” to the forore thats broken out around a Russel Brand & Jonathan Ross broadcast.

Bowbrick says the blog should have come from the managers who authorised the broadcast.

Consultant Martin Belam also took issue with the BBC on his blog:

One of the joys of having the web as a corporate communication channel is that it is very flexible and can be very, very dynamic. Not all businesses take full advantage of that, though. The BBC has not been very nimble in its response to the Brand / Ross / Sachs sex scandal, and this has been especially true on the web.

At lunchtime today, even as the Corporation announced the suspension of Ross and Brand, if you visited /programmes on bbc.co.uk it was the smirking face of Ross that greeted you.

Bellan points out that as bad is the fact that Russel Brand has a BBC blog. But it was not used to talk to the audience. An opportunity missed. If there’s anything worse than not having a blog to engage your customers, it’s having one and not using it.

“Brand’s BBC blog hadn’t been updated since October 15th, before the offensive episode of the programme was even transmitted.”

“I’m sure the BBC’s press officers have been frantically working with the national newspapers all day trying to influence what will be in tomorrow’s headlines. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Licence Fee payers will have visited all of these places on bbc.co.uk, and got the firm impression that the BBC wasn’t reacting to the crisis at all. In service design terms, the Radio 2 homepage, Russell Brand blog & show pages, and the search engine results are all ‘touch points’ that failed today to deliver the right user experience.”

The BBC still has some way to go before its geared up to be as interactively engaged with its audience as technology now allows it to be. Said Danny Rodgers in a separate article:

As arguably the second-highest-profile institution in this country after the government, the BBC faces a uniquely complex PR challenge. Given this, even some senior executives at the corporation admit privately that the PR operation is not fit for purpose.

ZuluZulu’s bet is that the BBC PR team did not even think about using blogs as part of their job. The new role of online PR still has not dawned on the erstwhile spin-meisters.

In an earlier post I wrote about how Public Relations (PR) is finally waking up to the power of blogging. The Media Guardian just this week claimed that PR is finding the ‘blogosphere’ the ‘perfect environment’.

In the Guardian one reason advanced – by Katy Howell (partner at Immediate Future) – as to why PR should get into blogging is that “only PR understand a crisis”.

According to Howell PR needs to both proactive – building a conversation with bloggers and other “taste makers”, as well as be flexible enough to be able to react to crisis.

She points to Pizzahut’s name change to Pastahut and that the blogosphere was not impressed by this – they saw it as a publicity stunt. They could have engaged bloggers by sending them menus, and including them in the conversation before they announced it Howell says.

A great idea.

Dell did much the same when they endured the Dell Hell media fire storm.

If you don’t yet know about it here is the story. A couple of years ago, media professor and commentator Jeff Jarvis blogged about his frustration with Dell’s customer support. He wrote Michael Dell, Dell’s founder an open letter on his blog.

The bottom line is that a low-price coupon may have gotten me to buy a Dell, but your product was a lemon and your customer service was appalling.

I shipped back my computer today and only — only — because I wrote an email to you, Mr. George, did I manage to get a refund. I’m typing this on an Apple Powerbook. I also have bought two more Apples for our home.

But you didn’t just lose three PC sales and me as a customer.

Today, when you lose a customer, you don’t lose just that customer, you risk losing that customer’s friends. And thanks to the internet and blogs and consumer rate-and-review services, your customers have lots and lots of friends all around the world.

I blog. And I shared the story of my Dell travails here. The topic resonated with hundreds more people. Go read the many comments here and here. Too busy? Then have an intern or an MBA do it for you.

And then have them read all the many posts of other bloggers who pointed to my posts and shared their dissatisfaction with your products, service, and brand and, in many cases, announced that they were no longer going to buy your name…

Ouch!

But Dell responded brilliantly. By sending technicians to reach out to complaining bloggers and solve their problems, they earned a positive buzz from the blogs in return.

Bloggers do post about brands spontaneously. And the correct engagement can prod them into action. (Unlike paying for posts which is in my opinion not real word of mouth.)

Technorati’s recent survey shows that bloggers do post about brands a lot.

But besides a crisis and being proactive there are much more PR agencies can do with blogs.

Lexis PR’s head of digital Chris Cook says in the same Guardian article:

“We believe PR is the natural home for the production of branded content. PR is about generating compelling stories that secure endorsement from third parties and drive conversation and engagement with brands. Good branded content should follow the same rules.”

Mmmm… Chris appears to be saying that just like advertising is becoming more content like, so is PR. Perhaps ad agencies and PR agencies are converging on the same territory? Content.

According to the Guardian this approach is demonstrated by the work of another PR firm, Onlinefire. Onlinefire is engaging football fans with an widget (a little application) – with links to personalised Football stories – for BBC Radio 5 live.

The widget has by all accounts been a success. It has been distributed to football sites and blogs such as clubfanzine.com, which has driven twice as many referrals to 5 Live as from bbc.co.uk itself.

The take home here is that PR companies can create awareness via content as well as any ad agency.

But have another look at Chris Cook’s definition of PR:

“PR is about generating compelling stories that secure endorsement from third parties and drive conversation and engagement with brands.”

This generation of compelling stories may have been correct in the past, but seems slightly at odds with current thinking on how companies can best communicate and have a conversation with their customers today.

To appreciate how best to engage customers its important not only to use blogs. It’s important for PR officers or those responsible for public relations in business to start blogging themselves.

That was the other thing that Dell did to escape from Dell Hell. Jeff Jarvis later wrote about Dell’s conversion to the conversation for BusinessWeek:

“Dell started its Direct2Dell blog, where it quickly had to deal with a burning-battery issue and where chief blogger Lionel Menchaca gave the company a frank and credible human voice. Last February, Michael Dell launched IdeaStorm.com, asking customers to tell the company what to do.
…
Dell blogger Menchaca has led the charge in convincing bloggers that “real people are here to listen,” and so he diligently responds and links to critics, and holds up his end of the conversation. “You can’t fake it,” he says. Dell’s team is stanching the flow of bad buzz.”

But as I posted previously, engaging customers directly through business blogs is very different from doing a press release.You can’t fake it. And neither can you be economical with the truth. That is something old PR will have to get used to. “Generating compelling stories” – especially ones that are not authentic – is old hat.

“That change in perception just doesn’t happen with a press release,” Menchaca says.

PS:

Apparently the Guardian got bits of their story wrong. According to Onlinefire’s blog:

The widget was developed by award winning design agency clock. We were brought in to take their awesome widget out to the masses, which we have done with aplomb, if we do say so ourselves – generating more than 1.5 million downloads since launch.

“Public relations firms are beginning to get in on the digital marketing act, seeing the business of inspiring bloggers to write about their brands as natural, if somewhat different, extension of traditional PR skills.”

The Media Guardian published another special insert on Internet Advertising yesterday and the above quote comes from an article (not yet online) about how PR is finding the ‘blogosphere’ the ‘perfect environment’.

Technorati recently published figures in their annual state of blogosphere survey claiming that this inspiring of bloggers is not too subtle -

“…one in three bloggers has been approached to be a brand advocate. Of those, more than six in ten were offered payments of some kind.”

These propositions are likely to be attractive to bloggers. Anybody that has done the maths would know its very difficult (it requires hundreds of thousands of pageviews) to make money from blogging via advertising with effective cost per thousands (eCPMs) of $2 to $10.

And there are companies now offering brands paid for ‘word of mouth’ opportunities with services like PayPerPost.

And this is not only about word of mouth. PayPerPost essentially pay bloggers to write about and importantly link to websites or products. The amount they also pay depends on a blog’s Google PageRank and traffic. In case you don’t know, blogs tend to have great PageRank.

Now, as any good journalist will instinctively know, any blogger that writes about a product for dosh and who does not declare this – if caught out – would ruin their blogs reputation as a credible source of information and probably damage the brand of the product they are reviewing at the same time.

PayPerPost publishes a code of bloggers ethics that includes a commitment to disclosure. But they do demand to read and approve a post before they pay.

Since paid for blog posts are not that different from advertorials (and is therefore not real word of mouth) the real value of using this method of promotion must lie in the transfer of PageRank from the blog to the product page more than anything else.

It’s been a few months since Automattic announced that they will release a set of plugins (BuddyPress) that will transform Wordpress MU into an open source social networking engine.

Completion of the first public iteration of the plugins is set for the end of the year.

Now the first mock-ups of the Wordpress MU Buddypress enabled Home page have appeared. And it looks promising.

Wordpress’s look, feel and functionality is almost fully customisable, but this mock-up is a good visual guide of the power these new plug-ins will introduce to Wordpress. Note the sitewide activity feed. Ideal for smaller social networks (Each individual member also can have an activity feed, similar to Facebook’s newsfeed).

You can join in the discussion about the Buddypress mock-up.

When Time magazine reported that more people visit Facebook than porn sites a lot of people sat up and took notice. (It was actually for the segment 18 – 24, older folks still have a greater penchant for flesh than Poking it seems – if only just.)

But according to Technorati’s latest State of the Blogosphere report 2008 blogs have more visitors than Facebook or MySpace in the US. (MySpace is still considerably larger than Facebook in the US.)

Citing comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008):

* Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
* Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million

Would this be true internationally? It certainly seems that way.

According to Universal McCann (March 2008) 346 million people word wide read blogs. Although I’m not sure if this is a per monthly figure.

Globally Facebook is bigger than MySpace. Facebook had 123.9 million unique visitors and 50.6 billion page views worldwide in May 2008, according to the research firm ComScore. MySpace, meanwhile, had 114.6 million unique visitors and 45.4 billion page views.

An important question. How do advertisers reach all those thousands of users on thousands of blogs? The web is still not shaping up to be like traditional media (where everybody uses a few media channels), and it probably never will.

Thinking of starting a blog? First ask yourself would your organisation or company benefit from having a blog? Yes?

OK. But do you have what it takes?

Do you really want to engage in a dialogue with your customers?

Most companies when they engage in PR forget that their customers are people. If you have a business blog your readers and want to engage with another person.

As Forrester Research’s Li and Bernoff (writers of the book The Groundswell ) says:

‘…blogging is personal and requires much effort.’

I surely can attest to that. The best bloggers are the ones with the biggest drive to want to say something.

Not only should you have somebody in your organisation that wants to blog. Your company should ask itself if you have somebody that knows enough about the your business, and that is senior enough to engage truthfully and give a voice to the blog?

Giving the job to a junior PR staffer often won’t do. Your readers will see through the inevitable shallow marketese they will produce. Jacob Nielsen’s research has shown that the web has spawned an environment which is intensely allergic to marketing speak.

Blogs are the pinnacle of this culture of straight talk. If your company blogger is a minnow chances are they won’t sound authoritative or believable.They will not feel confident to talk straight.

Some companies have CEO’s or senior executives that are quite opinionated about the area in which your company operates. Perfect.

Sometimes companies have several complex products. In these companies senior designers or product managers are well placed to blog about the product with passion and intimate knowledge.

Blogging is more than writing. You have to listen to whats out there on the net. Visit related blogs and social sites like YouTube and Flickr, and see what is the current conversation in the area that you operate. Good bloggers have to be a bit of a news junkie – at least in respect of your area of expertise.

Your blogs must have comments. It has to, otherwise its not part of the conversation people have come to expect. These comments need to be monitored and responded to.

Lastly, you have to be honest. People expect genuine opinions. Which is why having a junior person or a person far removed from the product in an organisation, be responsible for blogging, is setting yourself for failure. Without authority it’s very difficult to be honest.

Responding honestly, even about a failure, boosts your blog and companies’ credibility.