After the conference re:publica in Berlin the Twitter hype has been reaching Germany, too. The number of users is rising faster than before and some days ago the first German Twitter charts (based on the number of followers) have been published. But this week two occurrences also showed to PR people that they should care about Twitter:
The Comcast-story showed that Twitter monitoring (and reacting on relevant Tweets) could be very reasonable (via). It is obvious, that Twitter can be used as an early stage warning system for organizations - in other words: If you talk about blog monitoring you should include Twitter monitoring, e.g. based on keyword searches. Even more since the story spreat from Twitter to blogs to mass media.
The second story concerns identity: Yesterday many German Twitterati and Bloggers reported a Hamburg based newspaper (Hamburger Morgenpost - MoPo) started to use Twitter. But today, we learned: It is a fake account. Someone grabbed the account www.twitter.com/mopo and uses it as a tool of guerilla communication - including the logo of MoPo and a link to the official website. The background is a conflict between the publisher and the editorial staff of MoPo.
The MoPo story shows four things to me:
Twitter can be used in campainging very well,
information may spread very quick - not only within Twitter but also within further channels,
many users trust their first and quick impression (concerning identity and content),
and a similar story might happen to nearly every company which hasn’t registered an account with its name (and this problem doesn’t concern only Twitter). Ehm, I refrain from registering Twitter accounts for any company.
I have to admit: These cognitions aren’t new at all - but concerning services of the social web it would be useful if PR people won’t forget them…
If you wish to do so you can follow me on Twitter here. Without any fake.
When I started this blog some months ago I’ve been providing some content in English, too. To be honest, nearly no one read these posts. It seemd that my German readers didn’t appreciate that - plus I haven’t been connected to an international community. So I stopped writing English posts. Some months later I started to use Twitter - in English and in order to communicate with an international community. I works quite well (luckily my readers excuse my stutter). But now, two persons have been motivating me to give English posts another try.
During Euroblog conference several talks during coffee breaks lead to the insight that many discussions concerning Public Relations in different countries are limited because of language. So Neville Hobson suggested to some academic bloggers to contribute something like a monthly update in English. I like this idea (even though it’s more painful for me to write and for my visitors to read). But my Portuguese collegue Bruno Amaral has been exemplary and just started blogging in English some days ago and he provides an English feed, too. So it’s up to me now to follow his good example.
While Bruno is using Yahoo Pipes I discovered an even more simple way for my WordPress.com blog to create an extra feed for a category: You just have to get the URL of the category and then you add /feed/. So it looks like:
If you like to, just grab this feed please - and hopefully everything will work. (I do not provide an “only German” feed since I think German subscribers would cope with some English posts.)
Since I’m not concerned very much in feed statistics and since I’m not using Feedburner this kind of feed is fine for me. And I’m quite enthused to subscribe to any category of a WordPress.com blog in that simple way since there are several blogs with one or two categories I’m especially interested in.
Concerning “Das Textdepot” I’m not sure yet if I should provide mainly wrap-ups on discussions on Public Relations in Germany in English or to join conversations taking place in English. So far, I preferred to bring some international discussions into the German PR blogosphere. A typical situation to ask the readers: What would you like to read in English in this blog?
This new online magazine could boost the state of the art in corporate publishing: Frankfurt Fair published a new E-Journal on their business portal productpilot.com some days ago. The journal is far beyond newsletters or typical online magazines. IMHO the journal has the look and feel of interactive Web-TV. It combines website, Flash animation, audio, video, text, PowerPoint and photos. Very nice: There is a presenter guiding the users like a TV moderator. The only defect: some may critizise it’s one-way communications. But it’s a magazine, and I think it adresses managers as the main public of the portal very well.
I’m not happy with it, but in the next time I will moderate comments. There were too many spam comments here fooling successfully the spam filter. Hope for your understanding.
Btw.: Nearly all spam comments have concerned one specific posting. Does anyone know if wordpress.com allows to close comments on a pre-defined posting?
Just stumpled on TopTenSources - a tool that allows you to start your top ten bloglist on a topic you can define yourself. TopTenSources will aggregate it and offers a feed with your sources. Also, you can integrate a widget on your blog with the newest posts of your top ten list. Personally, I prefer to integrate feeds like these into my Netvibes desktop. My collegue Robert French from Auburn University started about a year ago a list with academic PR blogs. Some days ago he added this blog. Thank you for the honour - it’s a good motivation to write more English posts
No more excuses: This morning I was asked by two people to join Twitter within an hour. And after a diner talk with Neville and Martin in Ghent and skyping with Klaus Eck on it today, I finally joined the community.
Still, I have to learn to get along with this new way of microblogging (Wikipedia). But Klaus’ idea of using Twitter in classroom really sounds interesting. Maybe Twitter can help to find new ways in collaboration with a group of students: Perhaps a student is working on his thesis and stumples upon an interesting source and he/she likes to share or he/she has just a short question within his/her network. I can imagine that I will also use it in a similar way together with colleagues and other people within my network. Like a kind of loose group chat.
And maybe there will be new possibilities for PR, too. Wolfgang and Klaus are working hard on creating ideas on it, yet
Back from Euroblog 2007 Conference there are quite a lot of impressions which may have influence on my work within the next months. Here I’d like to share some of them and several links to interesting posts on the conference and the study.
For all who had not the possibility to stay at Ghent or to read the results (pdf) of the Euroblog 2007 survey, Philippe Borremans did an interview with the three researchers to get a first impression on the findings and the challenges for PR now.
On the one hand one like me working on Social Media and PR could be lucky with results like these. Since they mean that our students of Online-PR look into a bright future (hey, keep on bloggin’, folks!). On the other hand some of the results seem quite surprising. For me it’s remarkable that one in two of the answering PR professionals says he/she uses RSS and only 7% admits to never reading weblogs. Quite surprising to me too: 20% claim to use professional services to do blog monitoring. Concerning these (and the other results of the study) we should remember that it is not representative and there are more of 40% of the respondents working in the fields of consulting or IT as Swaran Sandhu pointed out during his presentation. Another two factors may influence the results: The social desireableness (people tend to answer what they think they are expected to answer) and the snowball system which was used to recruit participants. However (and to avoid misunderstandings): The Euroblog Survey is a great project of research giving a lot of important insights and it’s one of the few independent ones.
The whitepaper on the business value of blogging (pdf) published by Lewis PR should be seen in contrast to that. Of course, the agency likes to prove their knowledge and this is ablolutely ok. I take it as a good sign for the PR industry that more and more agencies rely on PR theory and participate in the basic discussion. On the conference the agency presented a four step guide to corporate blogging. This is a very interesting approach we will have to discuss upon within the next time. During the conference there has been some discussion on the outsourcing of corporate blogging. IMHO this is only possible with blogs on a project basis (e.g. during a fair) but not with an enduring corporate blog.
The third important topic of the conference to me was Secondlife. I liked Neville Hobson’s keynote on this very much. He pointed out that the media landscape is changing very fast today and a company collecting some experiences within SL or similar communities may have an advantage. But at the same time Neville doesn’t hype SL - even since he has his office there
Finally I like to provide a link to the presentation Daniel Koempel and I held on the conference. We gave an impression on the qualitative research my students and I did in the last semester: We had a look at projects and strategies of 15 companies in Germany using the Social Web in PR. On the conference we presented some results concerning BASF, BMW, Ikea and Siemens.
It was a very enjoyable conference - thanks a lot for the invitation to Ansgar, Philip and Swaran and thanks to the PR students in Ghent organizing the event. They did a great job!
Update: Martin Oetting did some Liveblogging (in German): here, here, here, and here.
A good idea: PR-Newswire (PRN), the leading distributor of press releases in the US is integrating the “technorati this” button into each press release. This allows everyone to get the buzz on a release just with one click.
“What this deal represents is the growing respectability of Social Media. PRN is the grandaddy of Establishment newswires. This deal sends one more, strong and clarion signal to Corporate America that the voice of the people cannot be ignored.”
I agree. But on the other hand: Doesn’t this deal divide classical media and social media? Personally, I’d prefer a search showing me both - the buzz within blogs _and within online newspapers or magazines. This would be really transparent. But it wouldn’t work with technorati - I suppose, we would need a fusion of Google BlogSearch and Google News.
Together with my students I had the opportunity to play a bit with Edelman’s Storycrafter, a CMS helping to build Social Media News Releases. Beside playing and giving feedback to Edelman we published our first SMNR with StoryCrafter. Additionally we published a hand-made SMNR for comparison. The hand-made way is quite flexible but it wouldn’t be useful to manage a bunch of SMNR.
If you like to have more information on the StoryCrafter itself please refer to Robert French whose students also played with it. Over there I gave some impressions in German.
This week Edelman announced a new CMS called StoryCrafter, a tool “for helping companies produce and deploy social media news releases” (Edelman). Robert French at Auburn University had the possibility to test it together with his students. Wolfgang Lünenbürger-Reidenbach (responsible for online conversations at Edelman Germany) made a similar offer to my students and me. We are looking forward to learn more about it. It sounds great to have a ready to use system helping you to incorporate features like trackbacks, social bookmarking, multimedia and so on.
What I didn’t understand yet: How should a new CMS behave to the CMS which is alive at companies yet? In my eyes it would be very helpful to build up newsrooms on existing corporate websites with all the features of a SMNR (also regarding SEO for the company’s website this would be reasonable). So I hope the devolopers of established CMS will adress this problem.
On the other hand I still see some general problems with the SMNR. Most of them have been adressed by Robert today:
“First, and foremost, the problems with releases today has little, if anything, to do with how they are delivered, nor how they are formatted. Period. The problem with releases today is, first of all, the writing of said releases. Next, the problem with releases is that way too many are being released. They don’t contain actual news. “
These aren’t any questions concerning a technical tool like a CMS, these are problems in the education of many PR practitioners. A third problem: We don’t know anything about the acceptance of a bullet pointed news release amongst bloggers and other citizens of the Socialweb. As far as I know there hasn’t been any research on this question yet.
Personally I like the idea of deconstucting a news release into some bullet points and some quotes. Without any flowery phrases. This makes it transparent to everyone if you really have news to tell. But to me it seems uncertain if bloggers like releases like these. And it is also uncertain if US-bloggers have different preferences like German or French have. So, for the moment I would suggest to work always with a typical press release and a deconstructed news release for social media at the same time like Spiralfrog does. This could help to collect some more experience with both models. And we should start research on these questions. Until then it seems to be quite early to set up a business model on SMNRs.
In the last two weeks Siemens had several communication thrills: The BenQ bankruptcy, the discussion on management board salaries, and the CEO-Blog of Klaus Kleinfeld. Comments of this internal blog have been published in German press. This further enforced the discussion on the plans to raise the management board salaries. Meanwhile these plans are history, today Kleinfeld announced the money will be part of a fund for Ex-staff of BenQ. From a PR point of view there’s still to consider the future of the CEO blog.
To give my two cents in this discussion: I totally agree with the position (two Germanposts) that it’s hard to divide internal and external communications. Articles of a internal magazine as well as posts of a internal blog may get public within minutes. But a main question at the moment is, whether Siemens really wants to establish a dialogue with its employees or even the public. If yes, the CEO blog should be continued and it would be worth thinking about opening the blog to everyone. If the blog in contrast would be closed many people would see this as a signal of command/control-PR and litte interest in dialogue. Especially in Change Communications this could be dangerous.
I’m courious how the story will continue.
Update (Oct. 06,2006): Wolfgang Lünenbürger-Reidenbach is up to date - seems like the blog will be contiuned, comments are still open and they don’t moderate them. Great!
SAP plans to adopt the Social Media Release within the next weeks. This is a result of a discussion with international PR-Managers of SAP I was invited to. In a presentation I tried to wrap up the changes within the Web and especially the challenges of the Socialweb for Business Communication. In the discussion we especially talked on network building and transparency (and here) as rising PR challenges, but also on the fact that internal and external communications today hardly can be divided. The internal blog of Siemens-CEO Klaus Kleinfeld seems to prove this – a lot of comments out of the blog concerning management salaries have been published by the Germanpress and have been discussed in the Blogosphere within the last days.
SAP especially seems to be concerned in relationship building. Yet, they have a large developers’ community online, and they also work on their relations with customers – and with bloggers. Some weeks ago they invited Bloggers to a Press Conference. Not everyone liked the way they did it (here is another view), but I think it was a start and every company still has to learn in the field of blogger relationships (and in the Socialweb at all). So, to me it seems consequent when Bill Wohl, Head of the SAP Global Communications Product & Technology Group, motivated his team to adopt the Social Media Release. A first draft should be published for discussion within the Blogosphere in the next weeks.
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