The Sounding Board

Who's Talking on Twitter?

Preview the New Twitter

If you’ve been on Twitter today you may have seen the new version of the site (#newtwitter). Twitter previewed changes earlier this month and now we get to see the new interface in what they say is a staggered roll out. The big news is that Twitter now sports a wider interface and an expanded right side panel. A great new feature is that Twitter can now handle multimedia assets and you will be able to preview pictures and videos.

The most helpful change, in my opinion, is the search bar is now at the top of the page where it has  more prominent real estate than its previous location buried below trending topics on the right side panel. Some other key changes include:

• Navigation controls: Your profile and messages are now at the top of the page. The timeline of tweets is still on the left side of the page, but now there a sub-sections for @replies or retweets, others’ tweets, your lists and your saved searches. 
• Revamped right side panel: Now you don’t have to scroll so far down the page to view trending topics (you can still select your preferred city) and recommended people to follow. I don’t see it on my screen yet, but you’ll also be able to view threaded conversations and other users’ profiles. 
• Direct messages: Your DM box is now at the top of the page and the overall layout of messages looks much different. Messages are displayed on the left side and look like threaded conversations with a tally of replies.
• Multimedia: You can now click on the arrow button in a tweet to view pictures, videos and replies to your tweets. It remains to be seen if Twitter will partner with any multimedia companies, but I think it’s a sure bet that Twitpic will be integrated into the pane.

But change can be hard. Maybe the “old” Twitter felt very comfortable. However, after a brief preview I think I’ll warm up to the new interface. It’s already starting to feel like a portal with better navigation and aggregation. On the other hand, the right side panel looks very crowded and the timeline of tweets on the left requires a lot of scrolling down the screen. Have you seen the new Twitter and what are your thoughts?

--Pheniece

Meet the Technology Media

Forrester's 2010 Social Technographics Ladder

Over at Forrester analyst and Groundswell and Empowered co-author Josh Bernoff's blog, I caught word that the analyst firm has released the 2010 update to their ladder of social participation in the United States. It's a graphic I've put to use on a number of occasions since it was first introduced to help me think about the adoption of social technologies and how consumers engage at the various rungs of the ladder, so I'm glad to see the update.

The story behind the data is pretty clear. The initial wave of consumers using social technologies in the US has halted. Companies will now need to devise strategies to extend social applications past the early adopters.  This means that you need to understand how your consumers use social media.

 So what do you think? Where do your customers fall on Forrester's Social Technographics Ladder?

-Stephanie

Worth Watching: Journalism in the Age of Data

It's no secret that I love infographics, so you can only imagine how geeked out I was the other night when I stumbled upon Geoff McGhee's video documentary, "Journalism in the Age of Data," the other night thanks to the folks over at GOOD. McGhee is a former New York Times and ABCNews.com staffer, who conducted the interviews that the video is comprised of during his Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University. It's a long video (54 minutes) focused on data visualization as a storytelling medium, and well worth watching, so I highly recommend carving out the time. Here's the video's synopsis:

Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?

You'll learn how our wired world has resulted in an explosion of data, the emerging tools being used to analyze this data, and how data and its presentation are forever changing the face of journalism. And through its interviews, the documentary also introduces us to some of the thought leaders in data visualization, including former IBMers (now Googlers) Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viègas; Ben Fry from Fathom Information Design; Stanford's Jeffrey Heer; Steve Duenes, Matt Ericson and Amanda Cox of The New York Times; Nicholas Felton from Daytum.com and the famed Feltron Report; and Stamen Design founder and creative director Eric Rodenbeck.

It's a great video on a topic I think we'll all be talking more about in the months and years ahead, so take the time to watch it when you have an opportunity.

-Stephanie


Journalism in the Age of Data from geoff mcghee on Vimeo.

Are You Talking or Listening?

Please Sir, May I Have Another Tablet?

This week, TechCrunch is hosting TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. Day one included a “fire-side chat” format with HP Executive Vice President for the Personal Systems Group, Todd Bradley. I can’t determine if hot chocolate and marshmallows were part of this cozy interview, but tablets were definitely part of the discussion. Bradley says that he estimates that in the next few years, tablets will be a $40 billion market. HP has an iPad competitor coming out that’s generating a good deal of buzz. The tablet, currently unnamed, has a competitive edge in the fact it’s bundled with an HP eStation printer.

Part of the larger strategy, Bradley points out, is to broadly use the WebOS, the mobile operating system for Palm phones (he also said that smartphones are a $100 billion market). This will allow a consistent interface from phones to tablets. He added that the main reason HP acquired Palm was for the WebOS, but Palm will not license WebOS, as Google has with the Android platform. And HP isn’t stopping there. Today they closed on a $2.35 billion acquisition of 3PAR, expanding HP’s offerings in the cloud.

So HP is poised to take over the world, one tablet and bundled printer at a time, all while building up a virtualization empire. Bradley’s “predictions” of course seem self-serving and designed to drum up consumer sales. I can see it now: Grandmothers across the country will be able to print pictures of little Johnny while simultaneously watching “CSI,” all from their tablet.

It does appear that tablet growth is not just a one-off observation. Earlier this year, TechCrunch covered predictions by Forrester and IDC that tablet growth would continue and potentially surpass netbooks. Forrester predicts that unit sales of tablets in the U.S. will overtake netbook sales by 2012, and desktop sales by 2015. As a percentage of overall PC sales, tablets will grow from six percent this year to 18 percent in 2012. By 2015, tablets will make up 23 percent of PC sales in the U.S., while desktops will be 18 percent and netbooks will be 17 percent.

What this could mean for marketers is a growing number of companies offering tablets on different platforms. It could mean different “landscapes” to consider for website design and promotional opportunities to provide premium and exclusive tablet content through a company like HP.

With over 3 million iPads sold this year, competing models in the works and a growing number of user-friendly apps, tablets indeed seem ripe for a mass-market explosion. I think it’s nice to have options, but I’m not sure if I want to ride the tablet wave just yet. But if it came bundled with a virtual assistant, I might be persuaded to consider buying one.

--Pheniece

SpeakerBox Tailgate Cook-Off

After a long hiatus, Friday marked the return of the SpeakerBox Cook-Off Competition- tailgate style. With some new faces in the office and football season in full swing, it seemed like the perfect time to battle it out in the kitchen, concocting our favorite tailgating treats.

Adding to the excitement, everyone dressed in gear to support their favorite college team or alma mater. Anticipation grew throughout the morning as mouths watered smelling the crock-pots brewing from the kitchen.

I have heard stories of competitions past, and was definitely not letdown with the spread that was put out. Everything was delicious and the thrill of competition in the air only added to the experience. With both Mary and Pheniece making buffalo-style chicken dips, we not only had a competition but a head-to-head battle of the hot sauce.

While I could have licked every dish clean, at the end of the day there had to be a voting and winners announced. Coming in third place was Laura (pictured above) with her sausage, pepper and onion sandwiches. Second place went to Mary for her buffalo-style chicken dip. And first place went to myself (!) for pulled-pork sandwiches. That’s right, after my first official SpeakerBox cooking competition I remain the undefeated champion – well, until next month at least.

Great job to everyone who participated and I think I speak for everyone when I say I definitely was not hungry for dinner that night.

-- Kathryn

It's Time to Drinkwine!

Calm down…there isn’t a typo on the headline. The post you’re about to read is about wine, yes, but I selfishly also wanted to take the opportunity to put my maiden name up there. (Come on! When will I ever get the chance to do that again?) Yes, my last name was once Drinkwine. (I’ll pause for you to make some jokes. Speakerbox swag will be awarded to the first person that comes up with a comment I’ve never heard before. Good luck with that.)

Toeing the Orange Line

Once upon a time, I used to work in McLean. This was about three years ago, before full-bore construction began on the Tysons rail expansion. Traffic was bad back then, maybe not like today, but in the same ballpark. And the buses were about as reliable as a North Korean nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Considering that public transportation assists just about every aspect of municipal functionality, you might expect the government to open its purse strings every once in a while. Instead, they upped the rider fees. And then they used the added revenue not on service improvements, but on marketing and PR.

Here's the thing, though: Can we really blame Metro for simply conforming to the oldest rule in the successful tycoon's handbook -- in times of trouble, change the easiest thing possible. Sure, it'd be nice if Metrorail trains stopped killing people, but do you have any idea what that would cost? Most of the machinery in those passenger cars came from old Soviet tanks.

No, a nice, jaunty communications campaign was a much more palatable solution. And they did a pretty nice job with it too. "See how far we've come" was the clever headline. And they ran sharp profiles of individual Metro drivers, mechanics, and technicians -- all looking cheerful, industrious, and 68% more customer-focused.

Now I know the marketing game, and I certainly can't begrudge anyone the use of tactics I myself employ. But this isn't a company we're talking about; it's a public-run monopoly. There are serious social implications of Metro's mismanagement, and virtually no comparable service alternatives.

Marketing and PR work best when they're extensions of an improved internal operation, not substitutes for it.

So when I see a cloud of black exhaust being partially concealed by a FastSigns banner that reads "We Now Run on Clean Natural Gas," I can't help but feel the slightest bit aggrieved.

Maybe I just expect a little less hubris for my dollar fifty five. And I'm not only saying that because my bus is late.

-- Jonathan

The Best PR is Transparency

No matter how many times we hear about companies who learned the hard way, many organizations still need to be reminded about the importance of transparency when it comes to PR. The latest mishap was courtesy of Netflix, who on Wednesday hosted a press conference to announce their foray into Canada. The company closed down a street in Toronto, had dozens of onlookers and attracted local media to the event. What is the problem with this, you ask? Well, the onlookers were not in fact the Toronto public showing up to voice their excitement about Netflix in Canada, but rather they were paid “extras.”

The extras, or actors if you will, were paid by Netflix to come to the event and act like they were merely passersby attracted to the flashy launch. The information sheet that was handed out instructed extras to “…behave as members of the public, out and about enjoying their day-to-day life, who happen upon a street event for Netflix and stop by to check it out.”

What really may have crossed the ethical line were the instructions for extras to “…look really excited, particularly if asked by media to do any interviews about the prospect of Netflix in Canada.” Now Netflix is pretty well liked by many and there is a good chance Canadians would have given pretty positive feedback to media on their own. Due to this stunt though, many people feel duped by Netflix and they have lost credibility in the market they are expanding to.

Netflix took to their blog Thursday, saying that it was a mistake and not something they planned and apologized for misleading the public or media. While at least they did not try to cover it up, they would have saved themselves a lot of time and embarrassment had they been upfront to begin with.

Just another reminder as to why honesty is the best policy – especially when it comes to PR.

-- Kathryn

The Importance of NICE - Yes, It Matters

After being gone for most of last week and finally sifting through the last of my RSS feed, I came across the cold-hearted smackdown that Steve Jobs administered to a Long Island University student. While Jobs isn’t known for being overly “pleasant,” this was honestly overkill – the CEO of a multi-billion dollar technology powerhouse deeming it necessary to browbeat a college senior for no apparent reason.

So what does this have to do with PR? Besides the obvious spin that Apple may-or-may not deem appropriate to rectify this issue, it has to do with how your clients communicate with their audiences, whether directly to their consumers or through intermediaries like bloggers, journalists or analysts. Acting like, well, a jackass doesn’t exactly endear you to your audiences.

For Jobs, it doesn’t matter – both of his brands (personal and Apple) are unbelievably powerful and he will stay relevant no matter what he says or whom he says it to. My clients (and yours’ too, probably) don’t exist at the level of Steve Jobs – what they say (and how they say it) dramatically influences how their audiences perceive them. So my advice in this regard? Be nice.

Don’t encourage your client CEOs to be simpering fops – far from it. They need to act knowledgeable and in command of an interview, without acting like overbearing know-it-alls. There’s never room for profanity, unless the occasion calls for it (believe me, you’ll know), but never directed at your audience. And even if the interview takes a turn for the worse, don’t let your client lose his or her cool – stay cordial, stay on message and get off the line as soon as possible.

Oh, and if a college kid emails you at a bad time? Try this – DON’T RESPOND.

--John Terrill

Creative Content Marketing: CAPCON 2010

Also on the CAPCON 2010 agenda was Ardath Albee, B2B Marketing Strategist and author of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. Her session, entitled, “Capturing and Keeping Buyers with Creative Content,” provided some best practices on creating “contagious content” that is so valuable that its readers can’t wait to read more and share it with their friends and colleagues.

Most marketers know how difficult it is to create a steady stream of engaging content, and Ardath offered the following tips to lighten the load:

1. Evaluate existing content first. Create a schedule outlining which pieces can be refreshed and which pieces need to be created from scratch. Tip: Make small updates to old white papers and update the copyright date so resources stay fresh.

2. Plan on five uses for each topic or theme. Use a white paper as a starting point, then create two articles, a how-to-guide and a checklist on the same topic. Or turn Webinars and blog posts into ebooks and bundle the ebooks into a pocket guide. Tip: If you struggle to come up with great content ideas, participate in competitor’s webinars and see what kinds of questions they get. Any topics they they left out of their presentation might make a good blog post.

3. Content should map to buying cycle and answer questions that prospects ask as they go through process. Start with a response to the question – “Why should I care?” Don’t forget to address “What if?” questions later in the buying cycle.

4. Write with best practices in mind.

• Introduce your hook immediately, no long introductions
• Speak to one buyer persona in each piece.
• Create short-form content with just three supporting points
• Write jargon-free. As Ardath says, “I don’t want to see the words ‘robust’ or ‘performance improvement’ anywhere.”
• Use keywords. Your content is only useful if the right people can find it
• Include a strong takeaway, the one idea that the reader will focus on
• And finally, don’t forget a strong call to action. Tell your prospects what you want them to do next.

Consider that MarketingSherpa's Business Technology Benchmark Guide in 2008 found that 80% of B2B technology customers believe they found the vendor, rather than the vendor finding them. Assuming that’s true, contagious content is as important as ever.

-- Katie Hanusik

Getting Started with Lead Nurturing: CAPCON 2010

I had the pleasure of attending Capterra’s Software Marketing Conference, CAPCON 2010. Cari Baldwin, Founder of BlueBird Strategies, led a session on “How to Design and Build a Nurture Flow.”

She started the discussion by addressing why it’s important to nurture your leads. A typical software company’s database is filled with “rotting” long-term leads (70% according to Cari). As a result, 70-90% of leads generated by marketing are never followed-up on by sales. Cari suggests that it’s important for marketing to go “dumpster-diving” in its CRM system to look for leads that need longer-term nurturing.

So what are the other benefits of a lead nurturing program?
• Educate without being annoying.
• Provide opportunities for prospects to reach out to you.
• Let prospects move at their own pace.
• And potentially increase your sales-ready leads by 3x!

So how do you get started?

1. Before you begin, Sales and Marketing need to agree on what constitutes a lead. In fact, Cari recommends that both groups sign an SLA agreement. Marketing needs to provide sales with more valuable leads and sales needs to commit to lead follow-up.

2. Select a Marketing Automation (MA) Platform. It’s tough to do lead nurturing without a MA platform like Marketo, Silverpop, Pardot, Act-On, Manticore or Eloqua. Costs start at $1,200 - $2,500 per month for a low or mid-range solution. Interestingly, only a few in the audience were using this kind of platform; Cari got several questions about the difference between MA as compared to Salesforce or email packages like Constant Contact.

3. Identify the goal of your lead nurturing program. Do you want your prospects to schedule a sales meeting, request a demo or download a white paper?

4. Identify the targets. Understand segmentation, and build a buyer persona to understand the specific needs of your exact target.

5. Understand information requirements. What information does the prospect need to reach the goal?

6. Determine Nurture. How many times should you touch your prospects? To reinforce key messages, Cari suggests conducting 1-2 touches per simple message and 2-3 touches per complicated message. Institute a friendly sales call in the middle of the process. Offer prospects a chance to “Accelerate Me” if they want to hear from you every week. If unsubscribes increase to 1%, consider decreasing the frequency of your touches.

7. Map Content to Buying Stage. Research the primary questions that your prospects might have at each stage of the buying process and create content that addresses those issues. For example, use educational pieces in the early stage, then case studies then product-specific information.

Make your content bite sized – blogs, podcasts and summaries. Note: you may need different content than that used in your demand generation programs.

8. Align messages and content. Write all content before starting the program.

Note: Lead scoring is critical to success. Combine qualification criteria (BANT (budget, authority, need and timeline)) with demographic information and interest criteria (web visits, email opens and clicks, webcasts attended).

9. Build and Execute. About 65-75 percent of nurturing work is done outside of the application. Use progressive profiling – don’t ask for too much personal information up front and don’t require registration for every piece of content. Test your MA platform internally to ensure the process works as planned.

Next on the agenda, Content Marketing.

- Katie Hanusik

COMING TO YOU FROM THE GREAT BEYOND

About two weeks ago now, SBXers spent about an hour on a Ragan’s PR Daily webinar, The basics: how to produce a social media news release. While we here have been integrating elements of social media into our releases where appropriate for a while, we wanted to see what Shel Holtz had to say on the subject…

It is an interesting concept John, nice post. The...

It is an interesting concept John, nice post. The key is going to be whether or not you or me as a PR pro are willing to share our updates crowd source fashion. Vocus already allows you to make changes to your contacts as a user record. I do this all the time, adding social sites, links, photos and interesting articles the contact has written. I also track every engagement I have with a contact in my system. This is the path towards considering Vocus a CRM for PR pros, rather than thinking of it as a big database with a list of contacts.

Be Careful What You Tweet

Despite its use by millions and mass popularity among the media industry, many people still seem skeptical of Twitter’s ability to provide factual and accurate information and continue to view it merely as a social tool for gossip and amateur news reporting. But Mike Wise, a sports reporter with the Washington Post, found out the hard way just how many people rely on Twitter for real, breaking news.

Wise, who talked on his WJFK radio show early last week about being fed up with people using and re-tweeting his information without fact checking or bothering to find the information on their own, decided to do an experiment to see how many people would take a tweet he published for fact. Wanting to prove a point about how unverified information is often picked up and spread on Twitter, Wise purposely tweeted misinformation about the suspension of Steelers quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger. Knowing full well that Roethlisberger would be out for 6 games, he published a tweet implying it would be 5 games.

What Wise believed would happen, did. Numerous outlets including the Miami Herald and the blog ProFootballTalk took his tweet for fact and republished the information. It backfired, however, when Wise’s second tweet acknowledging that the first had been fabricated, did not get sent out. The damage was already done; a known Washington Post journalist, with a Twitter account labeled as such, had knowingly released fake news. While it may not have been published by the Post, Wise’s editors were not happy, and he received a month-long suspension for fabricating information and ultimately received the worst punishment a journalist can receive: lost credibility.

While something the average Joe tweets may not be relied upon by the general twitter public for accuracy, as a Washington Post journalist, whether Wise likes it or not, people believe that when he tweets, the information is credible. People are beginning to look first to Twitter for breaking news from reporters and media organizations, and the power of amateur reporting on Twitter cannot be discredited, as was evidenced last week during the hostage situation at the Discovery Communications building. Discovery employees tweeting about the situation, and even posting photos of the gunman, were the ones who initially broke the story.

-- Kathryn

So what do you think? Was Wise’s punishment for tweeting false information too harsh, or as a journalist, did he get what he deserved?

Open Sourcing the Media Database?

While most publications, both online and print, make it relatively easy to contact their editorial teams by putting their email addresses (if not their phone numbers) online, it’s normally up to us PR folks to figure out who’s working on what beat. This can be especially frustrating if the reporter that has been covering DVD players all of sudden switches gears and focuses solely on cell phones…or worse, mainframes. What makes this even more of a problem is that the number one journalist pet peeve, always and forever is – “Why are you sending me an off-topic pitch?”

A new service from mBlast, however, is looking to make it easier on PR pros to figure out the tangled web of journalist beats. Called MediaSync, it’s essentially “open sourcing” the notion of the media database, a service that Vocus and Cision have effectively locked down. MediaSync’s differentiator is that we, the users, can easily add/edit/remove content, ensuring that it stays up to date as far as contacts go, and also provide notes along the lines of beats, articles and other items that may not normally show up on a larger database like Vocus.

While I don’t think that MediaSync will replace my use of Vocus, it’s certainly a nice complementary service and allows my peers and me to easily share our information on specific outlets or contacts.

So what do you think? Will you be turning to MediaSync as a supplement to the existing services or are you quitting paid-for databases cold turkey?

--John Terrill

Hi there...mine is 22. Check out @StrategicGuy.

Hi there...mine is 22. Check out @StrategicGuy.

Living Under the Influence

 
If you’re like me, you rarely find yourself pausing during the day, raising your arms in the air, and shouting: “I’ve been influenced.”

You don’t do this for a number of reasons. First, because it’s socially off-putting; second, because influence can be a private and conflicting experience; and third, because you don’t always know when it’s happening.

But what about all your retweets, your diggs, and your delicious bookmarks? Aren’t those just the digital versions of your “I’ve been influenced” primal scream?

Klout would like to think so. But I’m not so sure.

First, about Klout: if you haven’t already encountered the product, it’s a Twitter-based application-programming interface attempting to measure influence among Twitterers.

If it worked, it would be a godsend for the PR industry, right? How long have we been searching for a reliable influence metric—we, the professional influencers?

And rest assured, Klout has a sophisticated scoring system that purportedly considers list inclusions, follower/follow ratios, followed back percentages, unique senders, unique retweeters, influence scores of followers, influence scores of retweeters and mentioners, and other various and sundry data points.

Sidebar: should we be concerned that to calculate an influence score, Klout uses the influence scores of your followers and mentioners? Isn’t this begging the question?

Regardless, it’s all very logical and scientific. But ultimately, it’s trying to place quantitative value on something that’s decidedly unquantitative.

Remember, we don’t always know when (or how) we’re being influenced, and on those few occasions we do know, we don’t always tweet it to the masses.

So in any mechanized influence formula, what you’re really measuring is assertion of influence, not real influence. And you’re doing it in a way that can be easily manipulated by that bastion of integrity—the PR industry.

The best we can really say for Klout is that it’s measuring “engagement,” which is something we’ve been measuring for quite a while. So I don’t think it’s a game changer by any stretch of the imagination.

Then again, Klout has 1.5 million dollars in Angel funding, and I can’t seem to raise a dime towards my antisocial networking project, Stalkbook.

In any event, I Klouted myself just now and scored a 5.

A little less influence than a sack of soiled rags, and a little more than the Democratic Party.

Thanks, Internet!

--Jonathan

UPDATE: Leave a comment with your Klout score, and the highest wins a "prize."