by Rob Cottingham | Apr 20, 2009 | Blogging, Social Media, Social Signal
Social media should be a no-brainer. After all, it’s all about conversation and relationships – and in fact our conversational instincts can serve us well in blogging, podcasting, social networking and other social media channels.
Instinct alone, however, won’t suffice. You need skills, knowledge and experience to succeed in social media – from tech chops, to the unique demands of various social media venues, to the social nuances of dealing with conflict between online antagonists.
You can develop those social media muscles with training (self-directed or with a teacher), by watching others and – most important – through practice.
And “practice” in more than one sense: learning involves making mistakes, sometimes big ones. Those can be hard enough to swallow if you’re communicating as an individual, although you’ll find a lot of people willing to cut some slack for teh n00bs.
But when you’re out there on behalf of your organization, there may be more at stake. People are less forgiving of institutions than individuals, and depending on your organization’s profile, the damage to its reputation could be significant.
That’s where your blog comes in. Smaller in scale, more manageable in scope and simpler in concept than more ambitious social media projects, your blog can be the perfect place to build your skills and experience – and those of your embryonic social media team.
Here are some of the ways you can make your blog serve as a training platform as well as a conversational communications channel:
- Go in prepared. Yes, it’s a training ground – but it’s also happening in the full light of day. So before you begin, give yourself a grounding in blogging by reading other blogs, commenting on them, and seeing what appeals to you and what doesn’t. Consider blogging behind closed doors for a little while before going public, and you’ll not only start settling into a consistent voice, but you’ll have a solid body of posts to show the world.
- The same applies to team members. They don’t have to be seasoned hands, but be sure they know some of the basics before you give them the keys. (And by “the basics”, I mean about blogging generally … but also about your blog’s goals, tone, policies and culture.)
- Assemble your blogging team with some thought to the future. Choose folks you’d like to develop as potential social media team members, and let them try on different roles – from writers to community animators to editorial managers – and discover their strengths. And if you’d like to try someone on for size and see how they adapt, bring them on as a guest blogger for a little while.
- Set learning goals and milestones for yourself and your team, and take them seriously. Plan a curriculum that includes self-guided study, practical experience and – if you have the budget – formal training. And think strategically. What skills do you need not just as a blogger, but as a manager and strategist? Learn about analytics, conversions and calls to action.
- Look to the future: what kind of social media initiative will your organization likely want to pursue? Draft your blog’s roadmap in a way that will take you in helpful directions, anticipating and honing the skills that will serve you well when the time comes – by adding the odd video or audio clip if a podcast is in your future, for instance.
- Look for overlap. Think about your organization’s training needs; where do they map onto some of the skills you and your team members can develop through the blog?
- Build a peer social network on Twitter, LinkedIn or other services, and ask questions. There’s a strong sense of community among social media types, and asking for help with a technical issue or a pointer to a resource will almost always get you – if not the definitive answer – a solid starting point.
- Share what you learn among your team, and broaden it to your organization. Holding lunch and learns, lightning sessions or monthly seminars can help spread the knowledge about tools and strategies. Alternatively, social bookmarking, a wiki or an internal blog can let you organize your collective expertise and share that blog or podcast you just discovered.
- Offer training opportunities to the rest of your organization. An internal internship on your blog could help a customer care rep learn more about engagement, a marketing manager get a handle on social media culture, or your ED’s speechwriter brush up her conversational chops.
Here’s how you’ll know you’re creating a high-value training platform:
- You have a clear picture in your head of exactly what skills and knowledge your team has, where you need to improve, and where individual members’ strengths lie.
- Blogging, blog monitoring and other social media activities are faster and easier, because they’re becoming second nature.
- Team members’ performance assessments show improvements in areas related to their social media activities, such as facilitation, collaboration and communication.
- You and your team members start trying out new skills, because you’ve mastered the old ones.
- You’ve developed a network of people – peers, mentors, prospective new hires – you can count on for sharing ideas, knowledge and support.
by Rob Cottingham | Apr 10, 2009 | How to..., Social Signal
Not to sound like a telemarketer, but can I have half a minute of your time?
How about if it does wonders to increase your profile?
Here’s how I want you to spend those 30 seconds. Open up your presentation file and click on your title slide – the one with your contact info.
Add two words at the bottom – like this:
Twitter: robcottingham
(Make sure you add your Twitter user name instead of “robcottingham”. Otherwise you’ll find this tip works marvellously for me, not so well for you.)
Save the file, and you’re done. If this took less than 30 seconds, use your remaining time to ask, “Okay – so what did that accomplish?”
Here’s the answer. More and more events have a backchannel operating on Twitter: an online conversation among audience members about the presentation they’re attending. They ask questions, offer comments, quibble and praise.
And if they have your Twitter ID, chances are good they’ll mention it. Suddenly, your Twitter presence – and the buzz about your speech – will be shared with their networks, and a lot of those people will share your audience members’ interest in your topic.
Give it a try. And let me know how it works for you.
(And if you’ve had a little experience with Twitter backchannels, try the public speaking ninja maneuver of checking in with the backchannel while you’re speaking, and addressing a few tweets from the podium.)
by Rob Cottingham | Apr 9, 2009 | Blogging, Social Media, Social Signal
When you’re talking about yourself, your brand or your organization, you may have first-person credibility… but you also have a pretty obvious conflict of interest. Add that to the growing distrust of advertising and public relations – in fact, of institutional communications generally – and you have a challenge.
These days, your audience is putting much more trust in their personal networks: their friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. When they hear a personal message from someone they know, it punches through in a way that organizational communications can’t.
Blogging can help connect you to the power of those personal networks. It gives you a vehicle for bringing content to your audience in a way that makes it easy – sometimes even irresistible – to pass along to the people they know.
But here’s the thing: they often don’t just pass your message along. Your readers aren’t automatons; they’re active participants in a conversation, and they’ll transform your content – sometimes in ways you never anticipated.
And you don’t get to pick which messages get disseminated and which don’t; a blog’s audience chooses those for themselves. The content that gets sent around is the stuff they find compelling – the message they’re motivated to run with.
If you think that sounds like you’re giving up a lot of control, you aren’t wrong. But what you lose in control, you gain in power and reach. The unexpected twists that can drive a traditionally-minded brand manager wingy are exactly what lend the weight of personal authenticity – and engagement – to the results.
Here’s how to enable your readers to be effective, motivated messengers on your behalf:
- The readers who are most likely to bring your message (or, rather, their take on it) into the world are the ones who feel some level of personal investment in your organization or brand. It won’t be hard to recognize them; on your blog and on others, they’ll be the ones sticking up for and encouraging others to check you out. Build relationships with them.
- Your critics are also worth talking to, at least the reasonable ones, and not just to keep them from saying “That organization wouldn’t even reply to me.” Whether they have good-faith complaints about you, or their beef with you comes from a misunderstanding, talking with them can be the first step toward building a positive relationship.
- Don’t waste too much time trying to offer content that will “go viral” – that is, turn into one of those memes that flashes across the web like a wildfire across dry prairie. Instead, concentrate on offering great content: engaging stories, unique perspectives, entertainment or practical information.
- Make it easy for your readers to tell your story. Include logos, photos and video and audio clips… along with permission to not just reuse, but remix them as they please; the Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution license is your friend. Even easier, adding a single snippet of code to your blog template will generate one-click links that let users share your posts with every major content-sharing site on the web. (Here’s an alternate service for the same kind of one-click sharing.)
- Offer full-text news feeds (aka RSS feeds) from your site, so your readers can get whole blog posts in their newsreaders. Many of them, especially power users, have set up workflows to let them quickly share posts in Google Reader or similar services with their friends.
- There may come a time when you wouldn’t just like your readers to pass your content along – you need it. Go right ahead and ask them; be transparent about what you’re hoping to achieve, and suggest ways they can most effectively deliver the goods. Just be sure your tone makes it clear that you’re asking for help and making suggestions, not giving orders.
- Be ready for unexpected, even hostile uses of your content (especially if you work in a contentious or competitive arena). Greet them graciously as part of the conversation without making a huge deal about them, and they likely won’t overshadow your message.
- Choose messages and content that people will want to convey. News releases, talking points and marketing-speak won’t work with any but your most dyed-in-the-wool supporters (and you should in fact have a separate strategy for working with them). You’ll get a lot more traction with engaging, compelling content that gives readers and their friends some kind of value.
- Include calls to action in your content – the kind you can track, like a landing page with an URL keyed to a particular blog post. The results will give you clear metrics… and if you’ve chosen a call to action with tangible value, a simple way to calculate ROI.
- Measure your reach by tracking searches on Google, Technorati, Twitter and other services. Get a baseline for the metrics that count for you, and then monitor what’s working and what isn’t. Experiment, watch and learn, and you’ll find your viral reach growing.
You’ll know you’re getting value when:
- You see your content reinforcing your brand and messages – not on your site, but in the blogs and social media streams of your readers.
- You see that content being reproduced by people you weren’t aware of before.
by Rob Cottingham | Apr 8, 2009 | Online Community, Social Signal
Visit most news sites, and you’ll find some of the web’s most pointless, thoughtless and mean-spirited conversations unfolding in the comment threads. Angry, bitter, hateful people seem drawn to the comment form at the bottom of news stories like flies to a landfill.
That’s been the case now for years, but the industry is finally waking up to it… in fits and starts. Exhibit A: Sunday’s column by Jack Knox of the Victoria Times-Colonist:
[A]t least the letters page insists on accountability, and doesn’t allow anonymous sniping by those who hide behind pseudonyms. At least the letters page, while encouraging a broad range of opinion, demands writers demonstrate at least a passing acquaintance with fact. At least the letters page demands that we add more to the debate than “Bummer.”
…Having swallowed an electronic laxative, the world has become afflicted with digital diarrhea.
Lovely.
The column goes on to level charges familiar to anyone with a copy of the Official Curmudgeon’s List of Complaints about the Internet, 2008 Edition (Now With Facebook and Twitter!): people post whatever comes to mind without thinking about it, blogs are inane, it’s just a stream of drivel… (And at that point the column pretty much vanishes into territory already richly mined by people who haven’t noticed – or would rather not acknowledge – there’s both quality and crap to be found in social media, just like in journalism.)
But Knox isn’t wrong about the low quality of online comments on news sites, even if he does seem to confuse them with social media more generally. They’re often godawful, and his example, drawn from a CBC news story’s comments, is near to my heart. From a post I wrote last year:
Drop by any CBC News story on, say, a crime, and by far the most common comments are people who have nothing to add except anger and demands for vengeance. Oh, and off-the-cuff diagnoses like “he’s clearly a sociopath.”
Where Knox goes wrong is thinking that thoughtlessness necessarily goes hand-in-hand with online comments… and in writing them off as a lost cause. Yes, the culture of user comments on news stories is often poisonous – but that doesn’t put them beyond hope.
Instead of throwing up their hands, several news outlets are rolling up their sleeves and grappling with the challenge.
The Tyee, for example, made a series of changes last year that improved the tone and quality of comments there. And The Globe and Mail‘s community editor, Matthew Ingram, has been very public in sharing his thoughts and ideas on upgrading the conversation on their site. Check out, for example, this blog post on the role of anonymity and accountability.
One big reason sites like The Globe and Mail and The Tyee are making progress? They actually devote resources – not just technological features, but people’s time – to making commenting work. And people, of course, are the crucial ingredient in a successful online community: setting the tone, drawing out positive contributions, redirecting negative behaviour and spurring productive conversation.
That’s not to say either the Globe’s or the Tyee’s community is without its challenges. But diving in and experimenting, innovating and animating is getting them further down the road to healthy conversations than all the complaining in the world.
Which is a point I would have made on the Times-Colonist article… if it allowed comments.
by Rob Cottingham | Mar 25, 2009 | Blogging, Social Signal
Not every story fits in a few neat paragraphs – especially stories that are still unfolding. Maybe you’re taking on a major advocacy project. Adding a green roof to your office building. Or tracking an intern’s apprenticeship in the skills and culture of your industry.
Either way, you have a story that can engage readers over an extended period: weeks, months or even years. And when it’s a story that reinforces your brand and engages readers, you have something with the potential for real value… if you can tell it to them.
But telling that story through traditional channels can be difficult. Advertising is expensive, and it’s a major commitment to devote an extended ad buy to one story; news media, while they may cover you from time to time, almost certainly won’t broadcast every development – and there’s no guarantee they won’t lost interest.
A blog, on the other hand, lets you tell an extended story easily. Devoted readers can follow every development via RSS; others can check in from time to time. And if your story is a compelling one, you can build an audience over time – people joining you halfway through can experience it from the beginning, thanks to your blog’s archives.
Commenting allows readers to become part of the story, whether it’s by cheering from the sidelines, as active participants with offers of help and support, or as story-tellers in their own right, inspired by your tale. That’s the kind of engagement traditional media can’t offer.
Here’s how to put extended story-telling to work on behalf of your organization and your brand:
- Tell the right story. You’re looking for something aligned with your brand (which doesn’t have mean a story about your brand itself, but rather a story that reflects its underlying attributes and values). You want something that’s interesting to your readers, and can sustain that interest over time. And you want a story that you can tell well – where you have ongoing access to the people involved, so you’re delivering first-hand information to your readers.
- Look for concrete details. Any good storyteller looks for those nuggets of tangible, sensory detail: the way snow squeaks under a construction worker’s boots in extreme cold, the tangy aroma of cilantro hitting a frying pan, the papery-thin skin of an elderly woman’s hand clasping yours. Used judiciously, they can bring a story to life.
- Use photos, audio and video. They can often tell your story more efficiently and more evocatively than text. The right sound or image can quickly engage a reader’s senses and emotions, and impart a sense of immediacy and shared experience – especially when we’re seeing people’s faces and hearing their voices.
- Stories are ultimately about people. Find the people behind your story, and let us hear their voices. A choice sentence quoted from someone at the heart of the story can do much more for you than paragraph after paragraph of factoids or statistics. Pair it with a photo, and you can deliver something with real power. And don’t feel like you have to bring in someone new in each post; seeing how someone’s situation and perspective change over time can be one of the most engaging parts of a story.
- Stories are also about conflict. What are the opposing forces in this story? Who are we cheering for… and against? The “villain” doesn’t have to be a person or organization; often, we’re fighting against time, a natural disaster, illness or a social condition.
- Identify your theme. Usually a particular story speaks to some deeper idea… hopefully, one that has a lot to do with your brand or mission. That theme should help keep you on track as you tell your story… as well as helping you find echoes of your theme on other blogs that can open up opportunities for engagement and conversation with them.
- Welcome the new reader. You want to build your audience over time – so it shouldn’t be hard for someone to get up to speed on your story. That might be hopeless with, say, Lost… but you can include a sidebar with an overview of the story so far, linking to a more detailed summary page. And consider offering an occasional “the story so far” post.
- Involve your readers in the story. Can they suggest something – a name for a new building? Can they collect questions to pose to the people at the centre of the story? Encourage conversations about the story in your blog’s comments, and keep those conversations going with your replies. And if your readers can have an impact on the story’s outcome – by raising funds, for example, or lending some volunteer labour for an afternoon – find a way to make that possible.
And here are three ways to tell when your storytelling is building toward a happy ending for you and your organization:
- Your story’s audience is building over time, enhancing this channel and extending your reach.
- Your readers begin talking about the story and the underlying brand values, on your blog and elsewhere in the social web.
- Other channels – including the news media – pick up on the story.
by Rob Cottingham | Mar 25, 2009 | Blogging, Social Signal
Some blog comments are easy to deal with. They praise you to the heavens, share a related story or gently offer a different perspective… that is, they’re a positive part of the conversation. You thank, you respond (or they’re comment spam, in which case you report them to Mollom or Akismet and then delete) and the circle of life continues.
But other comments are hard. They get your back up. They seem to question not just your argument but your integrity. The more you read them, the clearer it becomes that they were written by evil, evil people. And with your fight-or-flight mechanism firmly in gear, you write a blistering reply…
…Maybe there’s a better way. Negotiation ninja and friend of the show David Eaves knows a lot about understanding and resolving conflict. And he brought that insight to bear on the thorny issue of online commenting in a presentation in February at a Northern Voice panel. (Jessi covered the panel here.)
David has lots of great advice and insight to offer, such as this:
[A] key lesson that came to me while developing the presentation is that most blogs, social media projects, and online projects in general, really need a social contract – or as Skirky describes it, a bargain – that the organizer and the community agree to. Often such contracts (or bargains) are strongly implied, but I believe it is occasionally helpful to make them explicit – particularly on blogs or projects that deal with contentious (politics) or complicated (many open source projects) issues.
(I’ve resisted the urge to leave a venomous comment on his blog post just to see how he handles it.)
If you missed his presentation, here’s your chance to glean a little of David’s thinking on the subject: he’s posted it to Slideshare.
Enjoy. And by all means, comment.
Dealing with Difficult Blog Comments
View more presentations from David Eaves.
