The Sounding Board

June = Digital Media Month in DC

June 2010 is shaping up to be a banner month for digital media-focused events here in the DC region....

First up, Digital Capital Week (DCWEEK), a 10 day festival in Washington, DC focused on technology, innovation and all things digital in our nation's capital. DCWEEK kicks off June 11, and is the brain child of some of DC's finest digital minds, Peter Corbett and the iStrategyLabs team, and Frank Gruber and Jen Consalvo of Shiny Heart Ventures. In case you missed it, the Washington Post did a nice writeup on DCWEEK a couple weeks back.

What I really like about DCWEEK is its collaborative nature. There's still time to get involved by planning and hosting an event, session or party that supports DCWEEK's mission, volunteer as a leader or team member for one of the many projects that will be executed that week, or simply register as an attendee (registration is free, but tickets have been going fast, so I'd recommend signing up soon if you plan on attending!).

The schedule is still coming together, but there are a number of projects I hope to get involved with and several events that caught my eye, including:

• "Social Media Every Day - How News and Media Organizations are Doing the Work", hosted by USA TODAY;
• A special edition of Debbie Weil's Sweets and Tweets, celebrating the DC members of Fast Company's 2010 Most Influential Women in Technology: Sunlight Foundation's Ellen Miller, Shireen Mitchell of Digital Sisters, Women Who Tech's Allyson Kapin, and Debbie Weil herself;
• Social Media Education Connection's "Believers vs. Non-Believers: Social Media in Education Standoff";
• "Social Media for Social Good";
• Ignite DC 4;
• TECH cocktail DC 9; and
• "User-Generated Content: Legal Issues in Social Media".

Beyond Digital Capital Week, the other local event I'm really looking forward to is Digital Media Wire's 7th Annual Digtal Media Conference.  The speakers are yet to be announced for the June 25 event, but they have 15 panels planned, including:

• Top Digital Media Trends
• Mobile Marketing - Is the Long Wait Over?
• Breaking down Social Media
• TV Anywhere, Anytime, On Any Device
• Mobile Apps: The Next Stage
• Social Media Marketing
• The Future of Online Video
• Trends in Mobile Video
• The Power of Twitter - Strategies for Success
• Digital Madmen - The Evolution of Online Advertising
• Opportunities for Social Networking and Mobile Devices
• Reinventing Advertising - New TV Ad Models
• Content in the Cloud
• The Convergence of the Internet & Television
• Legal Issues for Digital Media Companies

C-SPAN's "The Communicators" did a nice wrap-up of last year's Digital Media Conference:


Hope to see many of you at both events!

-Stephanie

(Photo credits: DCWeek; Digital Media Wire)

Forest, Meet the Trees

Photo by Stuck in Customs

April’s been a busy month, so as I was slogging through my backlog of reading, I came across a great post by David Meerman Scott, whose blog I would greatly encourage you to read. The post in question looked at how the “public” in public relations is evolving into meaning “media.” Rather than looking at the media as a way for us to reach our publics, PR professionals are trending to ONLY focus on the media, ignoring directly touching the public altogether.

As the title says, we can’t see the forest for the trees.

Speaking as a media specialist, where my entire job focuses primarily on forming and maintaining relationships with the press, I couldn’t agree more with David’s post. There’s such an emphasis on using social media to connect with journalists that we might forget about its importance to customers and partners. While getting quoted in the Wall Street Journal can do wonders for your positioning in the media, it’s not going to help your client’s bottom line if they’re ignoring potential communities or customers on Twitter and other mediums.

It’s okay to care about the media, just don’t forget your public.

--John Terrill

Local Journalism Shout Outs: Pulitzers at the Post

TMA Recap: A Practical Approach to Building Your Online Brand

Friday’s “Hear From Your Peers” event, hosted by the Technology Marketing Alliance, featured the dynamic duo -- Kelly Harman of TriNet Systems and Jim Ivers of Triumfant. At the “Hear From Your Peers” series, TMA members lead an interactive discussion on topics such as SEO, social media best practices, marketing automation systems or measurement. Both of the presentations on Friday focused on building your online presence with a tight budget.

Kelly, a self-described “word-press groupie” shared her recent experience of revamping the TriNet Web site in under two weeks for less than $2K. She shared her money-saving tips such as using inexpensive WordPress plugins to enhance the site’s functionality and crowd-sourcing the graphic design of various visual elements. (She used 99designs; other attendees mentioned competitor GeniusRocket).

Jim shared his practical approach to SEO. As a one-person SEO team, he spends a little time each day creating and sharing content to boost his company’s rankings. I’ve compiled a few of his best tips below:

1. Beware the shaman – it’s often hard to evaluate who really knows what they’re talking about, especially in an industry that changes as quickly as SEO.
2. Make sure that SEO is a means to an end, not a goal itself.
3. Write with your keywords in mind. Post them by your desk and use them every day. Use your keywords as blog titles.
4. Know what you’re going to do with a Google lead when you get one.
5. Break up pdfs that are longer than 3-4 pages to make them easier to index by search engines.
6. Don’t try so hard at SEO that you overwhelm your site’s design and content.
7. Build traffic to your blog by posting your content on relevant LinkedIn groups.
8. Take a dissenting view. Many initiatives are met with polite applause – stand out by disagreeing.

Do you have any other practical SEO or brand building tips for companies on a budget? Please share.

-  Katie Hanusik

Where is Your Social Media Barista?

As a society, we have grown to expect and appreciate choices. Go into your local Starbucks and you will learn that there are over 87,000 different drink combinations. 87,000! What ever happened to just plain coffee? Instead, we have the option to choose the variety of coffee, the number of espresso shots, the flavor of syrup, the type of milk, whip cream, foam, temperature, etc. With so many choices to make, it’s amazing that any of us actually leave with a coffee-in-hand. But luckily, there is a barista willing to help guide us to a decision that suits our ever-changing moods.

An Earth Day Tribute: Green IT and Government

Happy Earth Day! You may have heard this story before, but the results are impressive enough to warrant repeating. At last week’s Virtualization Forum, hosted by VMware, I had the pleasure of listening to Steve Thamasset, U.S. House of Representatives, HIR Division, share his case study on the Green the Capitol project. You may be familiar with the mission of this program, which aims to reduce energy consumption by 50 percent over ten years; to use only electricity generated by renewable sources; and to dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of the House of Representatives.

Not surprisingly, technology is playing a big role in this program. The House considered virtualization, consolidation and right-sizing of servers to reduce their energy consumption and their physical footprint, since space is at a premium in the Capitol.

After two years, the payoff is clear. With no additional funding beyond yearly lifecycle funds, the House decreased the number of Windows servers from 85 to 8 and the number of Unix servers from 35 to 12. The “server huggers” in the office agreed to give up 180 test servers – and move to a single rack for testing. Energy consumption decreased 70%. Lastly, the IT office was able to offer virtualized servers to members, allowing each congressional office to save money on their IT program with enhanced backup and recovery services.

Now that sounds like something to celebrate.

-  Katie Hanusik

Welcome back, Twilert! (And why you should have Twitter alerts set up for your brand)

Today, one of the email subject lines I was happiest to see in my Inbox was the following: "Twilert is back!"

Not familiar with Twilert? It's a free service that sends you email updates whenever your brand or product - or any keyword you designate, actually - is mentioned on Twitter. Think Google Alerts for Twitter. I'd been using Twilert since my earliest days on Twitter, so when the alerts stopped coming last year, I was pretty bummed.

Where'd they go? Well, according to the email from Twilert today, here's what happened:

Last year Twilert was unfortunately a victim of its own success and hit issues scaling against the demand of the number of users we had. Sadly we had to switch the service off as the funds were not available to build it up at the time.

Since then Twilert has come under new management and the platform has been completely re-built to perform much better and scale efficiently against the Twitter API. We have also developed a more user friendly web interface to help you manage your Twilerts and add new ones really easily.

Good news, and welcome back, Twilert! I'm looking forward to getting my alerts set up again soon.

If you're not currently receiving Twitter alerts delivered to your email when your brand or keywords are mentioned on Twitter (via Twilert, or one of the competing services like TweetBeep, TweetAlarm, or NutshellMail), you're missing a significant opportunity. (Note: I love TweetBeep for their hourly updates, which is as close to real-time as I'm aware of with alerts like this...). Nobody can be on Twitter all day, but everybody wants to know when their company name is mentioned, and in what context. By pushing this information to your email, you're certain to stay on top of these mentions, even on the busiest days.

So, if you're not currently signed up for any Twitter alert services, I highly recommend doing so. And if you are, what is your favorite service? Am I missing any?

-Stephanie

Tweet Your Way Into History

It’s official! I’m famous! Well, me and the millions of other people who have ever Tweeted in their lifetime. The Library of Congress (@librarycongress) announced yesterday that it plans to digitally archive every single Tweet that has crossed the wire. You heard me right – all the billions of 140-charactered messages (equaling to be more than 50 million tweets per day according to the Library of Congress) will be saved on record forever.

When I read this news, I was initially taken back. I’ll admit – I had a stereotypical image of the Library in my head – picturing it to be a dark, spider-web covered building filled with spineless books, over-played cassette tapes, rolled-up, musty newspapers and other (arguably) ancient material. But then I woke up and took a look around. We’re in the digital age, and things aren’t slowing down!

Fast-forward twenty years – could you imagine social media (like Twitter feeds) NOT being included in our nation’s historical records? There would be a lot of blank pages if that were the case! Twitter itself has changed our lives and the way we work. Instead of picking up the phone to pitch a reporter, sometimes a Tweet or direct message does the trick. Want to announce the availability of a new product? Tweet it. Looking for customer feedback? Request it directly. Twitter is intertwined into so many of our actions. The Library is smart to pick up on the trend and record it for years to come.

So the next time you Tweet your customers, colleagues and business partners (and yes, even your favorite bands, athletes, and celebrities), remember you’re going down into history. I’ll see you there!

-Mary Evans

Get Your Geek On: A New Approach to Using Foursquare

Potomac Techwire's Mobile Outlook 2010: Recap

•  Kevin Bertram, CEO of Distributive Networks, the company known for, among other things, the powering of the Obama for America's campaign that began an entirely new way of communicating with publics. 


• Matt Jones, Director of Mobile Strategy and Operations for Gannett Digital, who is responsible for all mobile and wireless initiatives of the Gannett properties, including USAToday. 


• Dan Odio, a friend of mine, and entrepreneur extraordinaire—the co-founder and COO of PointAbout, a company focused on mobilizes brands, allowing companies to connect with users through the phone.


• Maurice Mckenzie, founder and president of YadaHome, a social network designed to help you organize and plan your daily lives and coordinate activities with your friends and family. 


• Michael Sanford, founder and president of Flipside5, a developer of applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The Care and Feeding of Trolls

Image by ElDave

Congratulations – you’ve just set up your client’s very first blog/Twitter account/Facebook page/insert-social-platform-of-the-month. After a careful creation and review process, the first content is posted – and is immediately trashed by several anonymous posters. You try to engage these users in dialogue, striving to understand what about your client makes them so very hateful – they respond only with profanity or silence.

Congratulations again. You’ve just had your first brush with the underbelly of the Internet - trolls.

Associated by the mainstream media with 4chan’s infamous /b/, trolls abuse the anonymous nature of the Internet to, at a basic level, disrupt online communities. From a PR firm’s perspective, these disruptions translate into profanity-laden blog comments, misrepresenting facts against your client/firm or the use of unverifiable “sources” to back up their dubious claims.

Trolling presents a plethora of problems to a burgeoning social media program. First, it’s nearly impossible to tell who a troll is – angry customer, disgruntled employee or bored Internet user? You’ll almost never know. Second, direct confrontation is rarely effective and, as stated above, is usually met with silence, more criticism or profanity, so you can’t tweak your strategy accordingly. Finally, tightening the grips on your social presence often does more harm than good – if you prevent comments, it can look like your client has something to hide.

So what can you do to combat your troll problem?

• Silence – More often than not, trolls are just trying to get a rise out of your client or other, more moderate, posters. By not “feeding” the trolls, you keep them from achieving their end goal and only the most persistent will continue their attacks. 
• Comment Screening – Most blogging platforms allow for some kind of moderation to comments, giving you and your client some control over what user-generated content is posted. This can, however, become a huge timesink for the moderator, especially if you receive comments in bulk. 
• Registration – As above, many blogging platforms also allow you to require some form of registration for comments, removing the capacity for anonymous posters. This move, however, can easily backfire – too much moderation, and you’ll make on-the-fly dialogues too difficult with posters. The abundance of throwaway e-mail addresses, like Gmail and Yahoo, make this an easy requirement for trolls to get around as well

But the best way to fight trolls? Build a positive, online community, one that respects you or your client – if there’s no food for the trolls, they’ll die off or pack up and move elsewhere on the Web.

--John Terrill

Built to Last: The Grateful Dead Marketing Engine

Local Business Award Recognition