Social Media

Virtually Farming For Public Relations or How Not To Game The System

Let’s say you’re BP. You are nearly fifty days into what could be the worst environmental disaster in United States history. Ouch, that’s going to be a heck of a public relations nightmare, isn’t it? But, wait, here’s an idea! Why not invite all those connected Facebook users who live along the Gulf coast to play a game to raise awareness about the environment!

Volunteers could “check in” at locations via Foursquare and unlock badges for their volunteer efforts. Or they could earn patches of the ocean as rewards — similar to the (Lil) Green Patch game on Facebook that empowers users to fight global warming.

That’s just the kind of strategy companies and organizations need to be pursuing to win public relations battles in this social-networking era. (Source)

Yes, because while you’re looking out on the shore and see the oil on the horizon threatening your family’s future and your community’s economy and environment FarmVille will solve the problem.

I’m sorry, but if I were living in Louisiana and BP sent me an invite to “check in” and unlock badges or get myself a patch of the ocean as a reward I’d tell them where to virtually stick it.

Social gaming is pretty darn big as anyone with a Facebook account and a million invites to Mafia Wars will tell you. With applications like Foursquare and Gowalla providing virtual merit badges for physically roaming about town, there are opportunities for businesses to really turn online interest into offline activity in new and exciting ways (insert “ooohhhh” and “aaahhhh” here).

Social gaming requires a certain level of buy in and effort by the users, usually for little reward other than bragging points. It is the companies who help create real world reasons to play that capitalize best off of this.

Richmond has already experienced a few local examples of businesses utilizing Foursquare successfully. Westpark Beer & Wine hosted a Foursquare Swarm Badge party in March, filling the store with over 50 customers who enjoyed a wine tasting and received a 10% discount through the end of Spring just by showing their Swarm Badge. Many local businesses are already rewarding Foursquare users all sorts of discounts and freebies not just for Mayors but just for checking in.

National brands such as Starbucks have also started offering rewards. Pepsi has developed it’s own application, Pepsi Loot, that tells you where to find the closest delicious Pepsi and rewards you for checking into Pepsi serving establishments with free music to enjoy while partaking of your delicious cola.

What makes these attempts successful are the REAL rewards given for virtual efforts. Foursquare just gives you badges that look neat on your phone and maybe profile. Foursquare + businesses = free stuff that make you really want to play more because, hey, who doesn’t like free stuff?

Companies aren’t just getting on board with location based games. Zynga, the folks you should blame for FarmVille and Mafia Wars, have teamed up with 7-11to provide packaging for your hot dogs that include codes to get you stuff for Zynga games. Not only that, but 10% of the United States spends their time playing FarmVille. Yes, that’s right, your grandmother and at least two of your cousins are playing FarmVille.

There’s gold in them there virtual hills for businesses and organizations who can wisely invest in the medium.

It’s a matter of finding your niche and utilizing it properly. But also working the measure into your already existing Public Relations strategy (or nightmare depending on what’s happening).

If you’re, say, Roundup and you want to spread your brand’s name, latching onto something like FarmVille might be a smart play:

But Roundup isn’t faced with an environmental disaster that will take years to measure the full results of.

If you’re BP, is this a wise investment? Do you really take your money and personnel and image and buy into a game when public opinion right now is that you aren’t doing enough to stop the spill? That you aren’t taking it seriously?

That’s thousands of dollars BP could and should be putting into clean-up costs, measures to help small businesses in the effected area, local charities that will be directly impacted by the catastrophe. Real world investments that are the kind of public relations BP needs to be “buying” right now.

Look at Nestle, a small chocolate company you may have heard of. They got into a bit of bad publicity that they handled very poorly on Facebook when an organized Greenpeace effort to give them grief over its use of palm oil succeeded mainly because Nestle’s social media presence acted like jerks. What did Nestle do to help their image? They didn’t invite folks to plant virtual trees in their farm. They didn’t ask people to volunteer to go to the rain forest and replant trees they had a hand in cutting down in exchange for virtual badges or plots of forest to claim as their own. No. They partnered with The Forest Trust and began work on changing the way they do business to be more environmentally conscious in the future. They developed a strategy that created real world results for their efforts.

BP’s trying to buy forgiveness. And you don’t get that with virtual rewards that rely upon the efforts of those you are trying to win over. You get that by actually investing in the physical things that play directly into the results you want to see. You spend your time and money focusing on the communities directly impacted by the disaster. Because no matter how bad this spill gets, Facebook, FarmVille, Foursquare? They’ll still be there. But will the Gulf Coast?

Twittered Out

One night everyone and their grandmother heard about this thing called Twitter and started joining it. Twitter was pretty nifty, a nice little tool where you could shoot a short message from your computer or phone and let folks know what you were up to.

But Twitter’s open API invites third party applications that have made it not only easier to tweet but allow you to tweet just about anything: blog posts, currently listening to, whether or not you washed your hands after you flushed the toilet, and on and on.

And this is where Twitter lost me.

Twitter is a nice tool to supplement an online presence. These days, most everyone has a blog or Facebook profile, and Twitter provides a simple extension to the content you might put on those pages. It was a way to add filler to your virtual content, thoughts between the conversations and rants.

But now it’s more than that. It’s a social network summary itself, an aggregate of every piece of Web 2.0 that someone might be a part of and that’s where it gets overwhelming, not just for me but maybe for Twitter’s servers as well since it’s been down more often than not this last week.

Twitter doesn’t strike me as serving well as a funnel of information about people. There are other applications more suited for that, something like Friendfeed, but even then, there are times when too much information just turns me off to a service or even a friend.

There have been a couple instances of my no longer following someone on Twitter because of some plug in that tweet what they were listening to. Every three to four minutes a new tweet would pop up with the new song they were listening to. And, like a stereo turned way too loud at a party, it drowned out everyone else.

I’m almost at that point with some people who use TwitterFeed, a service I myself use that updates your Twitter feed every time you add a blog post. This is OK, except sometimes people blog a lot. And the same people I follow on Twitter I more than likely am following through my own RSS reader or on an aggregator somewhere. So instead of informing me of things, again I’m overwhelmed.

Twitter struck me as an odd application at first and then I started to get it as a way to fill in the gaps

But now it’s so much more. Too much more. And at a certain point it’s going to turn people off.

People want more out of Twitter and they have third party applications which can provide it, but maybe Twitter really can’t handle such things. So sites like Plurk, which looks like a souped up Twitter that does everything a blog might do, are going to become appealing alternatives. But maybe this is people trying to turn Twitter into something it was created to be the alternative of: a blog.

Web 2.0: The Sleep Of Reason

Part I

The life of the mind in the age of Web 2.0 suffers, in many ways, from an increase in credulity and an associated flight from expertise. Bloggers are called “citizen journalists”; alternatives to Western medicine are increasingly popular, though we can thank our stars there is no discernable “citizen surgeon” movement; millions of Americans are believers in Biblical inerrancy—the belief that every word in the Bible is both true and the literal word of God, something that, among other things, pits faith against carbon dating; and, scientific truths on such matters as medical research, accepted by all mainstream scientists, are rejected by substantial numbers of citizens and many in politics.

…

Human beings learn, essentially, in only two ways. They learn from experience—the oldest and earliest type of learning—and they learn from people who know more than they do. The second kind of learning comes from either personal contact with living people—teachers, gurus, etc.—or through interaction with the human record, that vast assemblage of texts, images, and symbolic representations that have come to us from the past and is being added to in the present. It is this latter way of learning that is under threat in the realm of digital resources.

Part II

The flight from expertise is accompanied by the opposite of expertise—the phenomenon that Andrew Keen has called, in his new book of the same name, “the cult of the amateur.” This cult, says Keen, “worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone—even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us—can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves.” He is referring to the impulse behind Web 2.0, but his words have a wider resonance—a world in which everyone is an expert in a world devoid of expertise.

Interesting reading. I hope to have more thoughts once I have time to digest this.

RTD: Politics and MySpace

The Times-Dispatch has some brief thoughts on politicians using MySpace for campaigning:

Young people use MySpace and Facebook principally to reach out to their friends, make new friends, find dates, arrange parties and share photos and music.

You can bet that office seekers, who are likely in the well-over-30-plus demographic, will be trying to find common ground with the young people they’re eager to interest in their candidacy.

Eh. As I’ve said a couple times before, I don’t think it’s going to work, especially given MySpace’s reputation among many adults as a playground for children and old men chasing after them.

But is it a way to reach young voters? I don’t think so. Just because you’re showing how hip you are to the current trends does not mean kids are going to be motivatved to support you. I think it’s another means for young activists to show their support and help keep them motivated, but I don’t think you’ll see it getting new voters out to the polls.

UPDATE: Seems Time.com touched on this a bit in mid-July:

Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, which tracks politics and technology, is skeptical. “Because the age difference between the candidates and the users on those networks is so great, the analogy would be a 45-year-old arriving at a frat party,” says Rasiej, who served as a chief technology advisor for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign. “Any campaign that tries these sites will come across as fabricated.” The real power of these social networking sites, he says, will come only when a candidate “actually uses MySpace and authentically networks through it. You won’t see that until today’s young people start running for office and naturally turning to sites like MySpace.”

In the meantime, candidates are grabbing for any online youth credibility they can. In some cases, that credibility comes from the candidates’ own kids. Ned Lamont’s daughter, Emily, runs his MySpace profile for her coursework as a Harvard sophomore. Twenty-year-old August Ritter also oversees the MySpace and Facebook profiles for his dad, Bill Ritter, a Democrat in Colorado’s gubernatorial race.

August isn’t worried about his dad’s lack of hands-on participation. He believes it’s enough that his online profiles even exist. “Young people don’t see campaigns investing in them; it’s the perception that they’re not worth the campaigns’ money,” August says. “When young people see that we are making an effort to communicate with them, they appreciate that we understand that their vote matters.”

My initial thought is, wait, you can run a MySpace page as coursework at Harvard? Second thought is, who would name their kid August?

Now, more seriously, I think that if used wisely, perhaps there is a way to tap into a bit of youth activism, sure. Especially if it’s family of the candidate running the site and not just some staffer. But does that translate to votes? Or are they just using different means to tap into the same people who are already motivated?

On a broader scale, does an interactive internet presence really do anything for a candidate? Blogs have begun to play larger roles since the 2004 cycle and this year will really shows whether or not netroots activism really works. MySpace and other networking sites are just extensions of that, other tools at the netroots activist’s disposal. The difference is the potential target audience. People that use MySpace and Facebook are primarily 15-25 year olds, a demographic that rarely determines the outcome of elections (which is a sad fact in and of itself). Blogs, on the other hand, have no set age demographic and are a lot more inviting to people seeking information on a candidate or campaign. They also go a lot farther in lending themselves to the “echo chamber” that drives some of the larger stories and get more traditional media attention.

Could having a MySpace presence hurt a candidate? Potentially. By using MySpace you associate yourself with MySpace’s public image baggage. I’m sure MySpace loves campaigns using their site, it gives them a bit more credibility and standing. Perhaps it does more for MySpace than the candidates themselves in that respect.

Times-Dispatch on Blogging

“The audience just has to realize that a blog is more akin to the op-ed page of their newspaper as opposed to the front page,” Kenney said.

Well, earlier this week a happy little e-mail floats into my inbox from the Richmond Times Dispatch asking if I’d like to be interviewed about Virginia bloggers. And I figure, sure, why not. Besides, it’s probably a blanket e-mail and I’ll just get lost in the crowd.

Well, I wasn’t. Todays article in the Times Dispatch:

Blogging is easier than sending e-mails to your friends about that new restaurant you checked out last weekend, and it’s cheaper than making long-distance phone calls to your college-student brother in California. You don’t have to be a computer geek to blog. All you need is a computer, a modem and a few thoughts to share.

And blogs are like snowflakes: No two are the same. One blogger may be careful to include research and diverse points of view in his posts. Another will be tantamount to verbal diarrhea, “like a tabloid, all splash and trash,” Richmond blogger Jason Kenney, 26, said.

Heh, while I didn’t use the term “verbal diarrhea”, I wish I had.

Some bloggers believe the medium will overtake mainstream media (“MSM”) in the near future, rendering obsolete most newspapers and TV news. Others disagree, arguing there’s room – and need – for blogs and traditional news media.

“I think what people need to keep in mind is that blogs are not true journalism,” Walters said.

VCU professor Jeff South, who teaches classes in media ethics and in communications technology, said most blogs don’t contain any original reporting; rather, bloggers rely on mainstream media for fodder.

“Blogs tend to be so anti-establishment and anti-mainstream media, and yet they really need the mainstream media to feed off of,” he said. “In this brave new world of new media, the good news is that everyone can participate, and the bad news is that everyone can participate.”

It’s difficult to say whether blogs are an important part of communications, South added, because they vary so widely.

“Blogs can be very amateurish, unethical hack jobs, and blogs can be highly professional, authoritative journalism,” South said.

There is a gray area, though. Recently, some newspapers and TV news outlets have caught on to the blogging trend, adding staff-written blogs to their Web site or even inviting readers to create their own blogs. For example, The Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record has more than a dozen blogs written by staffers that include the behind-the-scenes details of local news stories.

“The audience just has to realize that a blog is more akin to the op-ed page of their newspaper as opposed to the front page,” Kenney said.

Check out the article for more.

Now, for the sake of total disclosure or what not, I give to you my full response to Ms. Akin’s questions:

> Name, age, job (if you want to tell us):
Name: Jason Kenney
Age: 26
Job: Currently a full-time student at VCU and I work part time shipping and receiving at Virginia Book Company. I started blogging as a receptionist for a lawfirm in downtown DC.

> Blog site:
J’s Notes (http://jsnotes.blogspot.com)

> How long have you been blogging?
Since August of 2001.

> Why did you decide to blog?
I decided to blog in order to have a central location for friends and family to get information on me as people began to grow up and on in life.

> Does your blog have a theme?
I wouldn’t say there’s a unifying theme to J’s Notes–it’s just a bunch of random links and news mixed with a bit of personal information and opinions. For a while there was a focus on politics and news in particular, especially with covering events in downtown DC (IMF and anti-war protests). But it has come back to just links and occasional updates on the life and times of me.

> How often do you blog?
I try to update J’s Notes daily, though sometimes I miss while other times I end up tossing up ten or more posts in a day. Depends on having the time and my mood, really.

> Is the site for your friends and family, or do others read? Do they respond to your posts?
With the content being a lot of links and news, the potential audience is anyone, but it currently entertains my friends and family. There was a time when the audience was wider than that, pulling in assorted bloggers and random readers, but after I took some time off from blogging in 2004 that audience moved on.

> Do you regularly read other peoples’ blogs? How many?
I usually check out about a dozen or so blogs every day, ranging from family blogs to news and link blogs where I get some of my content (since blogging really turns out to be a lot of shared information anyway). Daily must reads include Instapundit (http://www.instapundit.com), Commonwealth Watch (http://commonwealthwatch.blogspot.com/), The Beat (http://www.comicon.com/thebeat/) and others.

> What is the “future of blogs”? And how do you think they fit in to the world of “information dissemination” (for lack of a better term)?
I think the “future of blogs” is going to look a lot like the present, only used by a wider market. For example, there has been a large push lately to see blogs used more in the business sector for customer support, news, insights and such, and I think you’ll start to see more of that as the internet continues to evolve. And while some news bloggers believe that blogs are the future and that the mainstream media (MSM to some) is a dinosaur, I don’t agree. I think you may see an increased used of blogs by journalists, but only for them to have forums for their own thoughts. News blogs need the structured, reviewed, and editorially overseen MSM in order to survive–or rather, fulfil their purpose.

As for “information dissemination” I think blogs have a limited place in filling that need, mainly because of the bias of the blogger as well as the audience. This relates greatly to your next question:

> Is a blog a valid source of information, or more just a place to unload your thoughts?
Like any source of information, validity is entirely dependent on the filter of your source. Some bloggers are more akin to an encyclopedia, taking their time on their presentation of information through research and patience and presenting a thoughtful post that covers all the bases. Others are much like a tabloid, all splash and trash with unfounded statements, citation of questionable sources, and contradictions every other post (or even within a post).

Most, thankfully, fall between these two categories. However, mistaking one for the other is not really the issue since your average internet savvy person can distinguish between them (though there are still those who believe “anything on the internet is true”, a concept which will ideally pass like “anything seen on television is true”).

With that said, blogs represent many different areas of interest, from politics to programming to random links to gaming, and so on. To an extent they provide information to their audience in as much as they provide what information they WANT to share. The internet is a great service where people can find out nearly everything about anything with the click of a mouse. But it also leads to people purposefully (though perhaps not consciously) selectively educating themselves. An internet user can choose to only visit certain sites for all of the information they want or need on a particular topic, never having to even entertain the notion of other ideas existing.

It’s a trap some blogs fall into and feed. Many bloggers associate their sites with those of like minded bloggers or news sources, linking to them, sharing information from them, and then redirecting their audience to those other sites. This bias turns
most blogs into nothing more than journals of opinion, even when they link to news articles or information from objective sources. It is their decision to share some of this information over others that creates their slant.

Their audience may believe this and swear by it, getting their information only from this source and never entertaining alternative news, views or even the truth. As I said, the internet provides people the means of finding the information they want to find, the stuff that they want to hear, and they can just keep coming back, never having to deal with those other sites that don’t speak their language.

This also limits the effectiveness of a blog spreading information because their audience ends up containing only like minded individuals, a situation where they are simply preaching to the choir any time they have a thought or even an actual news event or fact that should perhaps get more attention and coverage.

After looking over my response I realize that I’ve taken a fairly negative view of blogs when that’s not really how I feel. Blogs are great supplemental information to the world. Whether in providing more through observations on a political view or a book or how something works, Blogs can help to educate their audience on many things they might not find out otherwise. The danger exists of a reader falling into the trap of what Cass Sustein called “Daily Me” in Republic.com, but that is not a problem with Blogs. The audience just has to realize that a blog is more akin to the oped page of their news paper as opposed to the front page.

With that said, I’ve always been under the impression that blogs in and of themselves aren’t too entirely revolutionary. There have been many means for sharing personal information available on the web since it’s mainstream birth. Forums, websites, chat rooms, mailing lists, they’re all there. What is revolutionary about blogs is the system behind them, the publishing software like Blogger or MoveableType, because they make the quick and easy sharing of information as simple as pushing a button.

But blogs are really no different than journals or diaries, like what you find at LiveJournal. It’s all about how one uses them.

Also, the article opens with talking about a Matt Walters. I think I know that guy from high school…

UPDATE: The Virginia Blogosphere comments:

Commonwealth Watch – Hopefully they’ll do a follow-up or two on political blogs.
One Man’s Trash – It’s not a terribly good article, seeing that its focus seems to be largely on bloggers found in an around VCU.
Commonwealth Conservative

And I can’t argue with that. A more thurough article would have been nice, covering not only the big guns of Virginia blogging, but Virginia bloggers on the national scene, like Meryl Yourish and others. But I get the feeling that this was done in three or four days (since I was e-mailed on Wednesday). Maybe there will be a political follow-up, especially with state elections around the corner.

UPDATE 2: The Matt Walters in the article IS the same Matt Walters I hung out with for a bit back in high school. Small world. Yeah, yeah, I’m only an hour away from my high school, but still.