Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
Worth Reading: Lukaszewski on Crisis Communication: What Your CEO Should Know About Reputation Risk and Crisis Management
However far I may be able to see, it is because I stand on others’ shoulders. And there’s no set of shoulders that has allowed me to see as far and as well as Jim Lukazewski’s.
Crisis Guru Jim Lukaszewski
I’ve had the good fortune to know and work with Jim for more than 25 years.
Worth Reading, Sept 24, 2012
- Media and quote approvals: There’s been an intriguing series of discussions in the New York Times (and Vanity Fair and elsewhere) about the practice of allowing interview subjects to review quotes due to be used in articles prior to print. The Times covered this aspect of political reporting back in July; David Carr explored it more recently in “The Puppetry of Quotation Approval” and in a follow-up article asking participants in the process to weigh in; and then finally on Sept. 20th, the Times issued a new policy that “forbids after-the-fact quote approval.” From our experience, this is a practice that has become somewhat common in the world of financial and business reporting as well (not just relegated to politics), and it will be interesting to see the effects of the Times’ new policy, if any.
- Distrust in media: A new Gallup poll found that “Americans’ distrust in the media hit a new high this year, with 60% saying they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. Distrust is up from the past few years, when Americans were already more negative about the media than they had been in years prior to 2004.” As Gallup points out, this lack of trust has particular implications during an election year. (via Romenesko)
- Fortune 500 and social media: The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research issued its latest report on the use of social media by the Fortune 500, which it’s done every year since 2008. Adoption and range of use continues to grow in this group, and the annual study provides a good comprehensive look at global business adoption of social media.
- New Pew Internet research: The Pew Internet and American Life Project issued two recent reports of interest, one on smartphone ownership in the United States (they found that “45% of American adults own smartphones”), and one on “Photos and Videos as Social Currency Online.”
- Cultural critique, Gangnam-style: It’s almost impossible to escape the Internet meme of the late summer/early fall – Gangnam Style, a music video by the South Korean artist Psy that’s overtaken the U.S. and much of the world. But The Atlantic provided one of the more interesting cultural insights into the video in the article “Gangnam Style, Dissected: The Subversive Message Within South Korea’s Music Video Sensation.”
Worth Reading, Feb 27, 2012
We’re back from a Presidents Day break last week (and, well, for me from being very under the weather as well).
- Pew Research on Privacy: The Pew Internet and American Life Project released new data on social network users and privacy, “Privacy management on social media sites.” The report notes, ”Profile “pruning” is on the rise. Deleting unwanted friends, comments and photo tags [has grown] in popularity.”
- Pinterest and Copyright: While Pinterest is continuing to grow in adoption, questions about its ability to manage copyright issues are also rising. See: “Is Pinterest a Haven for Copyright Violations?,” “Pinterest’s uneasy relationship with copyright law: what happens next” and “New code lets websites opt-out of Pinterest.”
- Twitter and Rumors: Two interesting pieces on the intersection of Twitter and rumors or misinformation. “Twitter and Death Hoaxes, Alive and Sadly, Well,” from the New York Times; and from The Guardian, a fascinating interactive look at how specific rumors spread on Twitter during the UK riots last year, “Riot rumours: how misinformation spread on Twitter during a time of crisis.”
- New NPR Ethics Handbook: Craig Silverman at Poynter reviewed NPR’s new Ethics Handbook, “NPR handbook offers accuracy tips for all news orgs, including ‘errors are inevitable.’”
- China and Social Media: Nieman Journalism Lab reviewed a fairly new site that draws news from social media within China called Tea Leaf Nation, “Tea Leaf Nation: A look at China through a social media lens.”
- China and Human Rights: This is a worth listening, but if you didn’t hear the This American Life episode in January with Mike Daisey, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” it’s recommended. (Part of the episode is excerpted from Daisey’s live show, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” running in NYC currently at the Public Theater).
Worth Reading, Feb 6, 2012
From Facebook’s IPO to the Komen/Planned Parenthood crisis to the biggest television event of the year, it was a full week.
- Facebook IPO: Facebook finally filed for its IPO last week, one of the most widely read pieces of financial communication in a long time. A helpful summary from The New York Times, “Facebook Filing: The Highlights.”
- Komen for the Cure/Planned Parenthood Crisis: Komen’s decision to halt funding of a Planned Parenthood program that provided breast cancer screenings resulted in a crisis that spread like wildfire and ended with a change in policy and apology from Komen at the end of last week. Good summary by Kivi Leroux Miller, “The Accidental Rebranding of Komen for the Cure;” good media analysis by Jay Rosen, “Interview as Train Wreck: Susan G. Komen Foundation meets Andrea Mitchell;” and a good example from Beth Kanter of the use of Pinterest in protest, “Komen Can Kiss My Mammogram.”
- Pinterest: Speaking of Pinterest, reading lots of analysis and research on this new(ish) social site, including on referral traffic, demographics, its relationship to copyright laws, strong brand examples, and “What Pinterest is Doing That Facebook Isn’t.”
- Super Bowl: The big game by the numbers, from Google and Twitter, which saw record tweet-per-second activity last night.
Worth Reading, Jan 30, 2012
It’s hard to believe, but January 2012 marks the fourth anniversary of this Logos blog, with our first blog post published by my colleague Fred Garcia on January 2nd, 2008.
In the last four years, we’ve all posted at various times, although the overall speed and frequency of the blog has slowed quite a bit in the last two years. All of the usual culprits are part of that reason, but the biggest culprit has been time (or lack thereof). While we’re thankful that the last four years have kept us busy, our blogging has seen a definite downward trend as a result.
Today marks the start of a new weekly series on this blog: “Worth Reading,” a collection of notable reads from the previous week (or so). We’ve had a more sporadic “Worth Reading” series for some time, but this weekly series aims to fill a request expressed to us to more closely follow what we’re keeping up with in quicker, more consumable bites.
- Newspapers & fact-checking: We followed with great interest the continued discussion prompted by Arthur S. Brisbane’s column at the New York Times earlier this month, “Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” In particular, analysis by Lucas Graves at Nieman Journalism Lab, “Digging deeper into The New York Times’ fact-checking faux pas;” Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic, “Why Newspaper’s Often Don’t Call Out Politicians for Lying;” and Gene Lyons at Salon, “Newspapers, truth vigilantes no more” are worth reading, as is a follow-up piece by Brisbane, “Keeping Them Honest.”
- Edelman Trust Barometer: The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer continues Edelman’s research into the state of trust in countries, industries, information sources and spokespeople around the world, with 2012 seeing “the biggest decline in trust in government in Barometer history.” Lots of other relevant data in the full report.
- Facebook research: Two interesting pieces of research on Facebook: “How Journalists Are Using Facebook Subscribe,” a look at the changes since Facebook allowed users to “Subscribe” to public figures’ accounts, including journalists, in September 2011; and “Rethinking Information Diversity in Networks,” with additional analysis on Slate, “The End of the Echo Chamber.”
- Employees and social media: Thoughtful analysis by Shel Holtz on a recent report on employees and social media, “Rejoice! Employee use of social media has tripled!“
- Nonprofits and mobile giving: For nonprofits, Pew Internet’s report on “Real Time Charitable Giving” tracks the increase in giving from mobile phones.
- Twitter and international policy: And finally, lots of discussion at the end of last week about Twitter’s new international policy, including good summary and analysis from Alex Howard on Gov20.GovFresh, “On Twitter, censorship and Internet freedom” (with lots of updates and links to other analysis), and “What Would it Take to Get Twitter Unblocked in China?” on the WSJ.
These weekly updates will be a compendium of various topics that touch on a range of our work, and we look forward to more frequent updates in 2012.
SXSWi Speakers Wrap-Up: Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky by Joi
Clay Shirky, NYU professor and author of Here Comes Everybody, was another highlight of my time in Austin. His talk, “Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data,” touched on a number of themes and was grouped in three parts:
- Buses and Bibles
- Monkeys and Balloons
- Lingerie and Garbage
Part One: Buses and Bibles
Shirky began with a discussion of the inefficiencies of modern cities, and how many of the solutions people present to address the inefficiencies are engineering solutions, but that a new approach treating inefficiencies with information solutions may provide a better alternative. For example, in Canada an approach to congested roads is a ride share network – sharing information about who’s going where when. This approach is better for almost everyone BUT bus companies, who filed suit against the company offering the service.
Key point 1: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Shirky calls that kind of sharing “jackhammer sharing — sharing that’s powerful enough that it actually destroys existing things in the environment.” That kind of sharing “doesn’t happen very often, but it sometimes does around media revolutions.” He connected this idea to Gutenberg and the printing press.
Key point 2: “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity. When things become really abundant, the price goes away. The things that were previously thought of as scarce that are now available to everyone change the world. [E.g. Scribes vs. printing press.] We generally know how to manage scarcity, we don’t know how to manage abundance.”
Part Two: Monkeys and Balloons
This section began with a background on Napster, and Shirky argued that Napster changed the motivation around sharing, which wasn’t a new motivation, more of a bringing back of an old one. Shirky discussed three modes of sharing from the book Why We Cooperate.
Key point 3: There are three different types of sharing: 1. Sharing goods; 2. Sharing services; and 3. Sharing information. Sharing goods is the hardest, sharing services a little easier and sharing information is the easiest of all. “Napster took the world of music, where music was always shared as goods or services, and made it possible to share as information.” We’re programmed to share information – it gives us a positive feeling.
Part Three: Lingerie and Garbage
Here, Shirky gave a number of examples of institutions, groups or initiatives that centered around sharing information that creates a kind of civic value (e.g. Ushahidi, PatientsLikeMe). We now have tools that swing the way we share information with each other.
Key point 4: “Intrinsic motivation and private action was just an accident. Now we can do big things for love, not just private things for love. We’re moving from doing little things for love and big things for money, to doing big things for love.”
On Presenting
Shirky is a master presenter. No tools, no technology, no (visible) notes. Just a man in a three wolf man t-shirt, a well-crafted story and an astute sense of his audience. (I haven’t yet been able to find good video of his talk at SXSW this year, but you can see one of his TED talks here.)
[Note: This post is cross-posted on my personal blog.]
SXSWi Speakers Wrap-Up: danah boyd
I’m back from Austin, slowly catching up in the office and working on synthesizing my thoughts from SXSW Interactive 2010. This was my second time attending, and there were a few things that I did differently and that were different in terms of the conference than in 2009. The SXSW experience contains many different parts, so I thought I’d break them down into more manageable bits versus one big overview post. I’m planning to break the pieces into the following parts, and if meaty enough a particular speaker or discussion might have its own post:
- Part One: Solo Speakers
- Part Two: Panel Discussions
- Part Three: Technology
Part One: Solo Speakers
From my experience last year, I found that I get a lot from the best solo speakers as SXSW, and that panel discussions can be a bit more hit or miss. There were both keynote speakers each day and multiple sessions daily of what they called “featured speakers.” I arrived a bit later than anticipated Friday afternoon and stayed till Tuesday morning, but was able to fit in a lot of content between Saturday — Monday.
danah boyd
Danah Boyd theme chart by jdlasica
danah boyd delivered the Opening Remarks for the conference, and she was someone I was really looking forward to hear speak. She’s with the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Microsoft Research New England, and her research into social media (and youth & teens in particular) is something I’ve shared in both my consulting and teaching work. Her talk at SXSW, “Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity,” centered on a few themes, and what I think she did particularly well was to shed light on the nuance of the debate around privacy online, which too often devolves into two extremes.
I took five pages of notes, but I’ll try to paraphrase what I saw as the main points from her talk:
- Privacy is about control of information flows. When people feel like they don’t have control of their information they feel like their privacy has been violated. This includes the opt-out versus opt-in debate.
- Technologists assume that the most optimized system is the best one, but forget about social values and social rituals. (e.g. discussion of Google Buzz launch)
- Merging worlds. Just because someone puts something online doesn’t mean they want it to be publicized (difference between public and publicity). There’s a security in obscurity – most people online have very few followers. Making something that’s public more public can be a violation of privacy.
- By continuing to argue that privacy is dead, technologists work to make data more public and things public that were never meant to be. We’re seeing a switch to public by default, private through effort.
- With privilege, it’s easy to take for granted things that not everyone gets to experience, and with privilege comes a different value proposition – what one person may gain from publicness, another person may lose. This affects not only groups sometimes thought of as marginalized (immigrants, victims of abuse, LGBT community), but also groups like teachers – they have more to lose by public information online. Public by default isn’t always a democratizer.
Her full unedited talk is available on her site here. I urge you to spend the time reading it, as I’ve captured only a small sliver of a very wise discussion.
[Note: this post is cross-posted on my personal blog.]
Delta/NWA and Flight 253: A Failure to Communicate
Like many people today who are back in the office for the first time since before the holidays, I’ve been spending the day catching up, including going through my Google Reader. I subscribe to a number of corporate blogs, and as I got to the Delta Air Lines blog, I expected to read something – even a short post – about the attempted bombing on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it made its way to Detroit on Christmas Day.
But there was nothing about the incident on the blog, an incident which caused a ripple effect of newly enacted security measures and massive disruptions in international air travel around the world.
I went to the Delta Air Lines website, found the News section of the site and one very short official statement, “Delta Air Lines Issues Statement on Northwest Flight 253.” The official statement described a passenger who “caused a disturbance” on the flight and was restrained. The description of events is vague enough to apply to any number of types of potential “disruptive” activities, and wouldn’t necessarily lead one to believe that an attempted terrorist act had been committed. While directing “additional questions” to law enforcement, the statement goes into no additional detail about what happened, even though some of those details were already being reported by the media.
So, I checked Delta’s Twitter account, to see if additional information or context was being provided there. There’s exactly onetweet specifically about the December 25th attempted bombing:
Now, the Delta Twitter account appears to have sat dormant from June 17th till December 22nd of 2009, when traveler outcry over U.S. domestic travel delays due to various winter storms was reaching a fever pitch. But the one tweet about the 25th simply redirects back to Delta’s website, where no additional statements about the incident have been provided since the 25th. There have been additional tweets on @DeltaAirLines advising travelers to expect delays due to new TSA regulations, but nothing specifically about the incident on the 25th.
I’d guess that there were at least three factors working against Delta’s communication efforts:
- The attempted bombing occurred on Christmas Day, one of the very few days of the year when almost no corporate employees are in the office. But in today’s age, it’s inconceivable that “the world’s largest airline,” a company responsible daily for hundreds of thousands of people’s lives, wouldn’t have some kind of chain of communication in place to deal with an event like this, even on Christmas Day.
- Delta and Northwest have been in the process of merging in the last year, and just in the last week were given government permission to fully complete the merger. There’s some confusion (for an average reader) in the company’s statement, with Delta as the company issuing the statement and the flight branded/operated as a Northwest flight. I can imagine that there’s still confusion in corporate communication operational role clarity as well. I know, as a frequent Delta/Northwest traveler, there has still been confusion on the ground. Again, I can’t imagine that a company of this size and complexity wouldn’t have negotiated a crisis communication response process as part of the merger details.
- From this and other articles, it appears that there’s some behind-the-scenes dissatisfaction between the Delta CEO and the government agencies responsible for airline safety. But “inside baseball” talk isn’t what the average member of the public needs or wants to hear in the aftermath of this kind of event.
Also, what I find unfortunate in this communication situation is that Delta had the two social media channels – its blog and its Twitter account – already established, had an audience eager for more information, and provided only the scant minimum of content or context. What I find particularly disconcerting about the blog is that there have been two posts since the 25th about totally innocuous content, which in the wake of the serious events of the 25th read as even more out of touch. (I imagine they were probably scheduled to post in advance, but again, when crisis happens sometimes the response calls for suspending business-as-usual activities.)
Other companies have used their social media channels in the wake of attempted terrorist attacks despite restrictions on detailed disclosure due to ongoing legal investigation. For example, look at the heartfelt message on the Marriott blog after one of its hotels in Pakistan was the target of an attempted attack in 2007, which lead to the death of a hotel employee and severe injury of another.
Thankfully, Northwest Flight 253 landed safely and disaster was averted, due in large part to the response of the flight crew and other passengers on the flight. But what a lost communication opportunity for the company to provide context, as well as show some humanity and thankfulness, for what in the end was as good an ending as could have been expected.
*Note: I’m a very frequent Delta/Northwest flier, but other than being a long-time customer have no professional ties to the company.
The FDA and Social Media
Today and tomorrow, November 12-13, the FDA is holding a historic public hearing regarding the “Promotion of Food and Drug Administration-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tools.” This is the first time since 1996 that the FDA has examined the role of technology in pharmaceutical and medical device communication and advertising.
The FDA is looking at five questions, as stated in the Federal Register notice about the hearing:
- “For what online communications are manufacturers, packers, or distributors accountable?
- How can manufacturers, packers, or distributors fulfill regulatory requirements (e.g. fair balance, disclosure of indication and risk information, postmarketing submission requirements) in their Internet and social media promotion, particularly when using tools that are associated with space limitations and tools that allow for real-time communications (e.g. microblogs, mobile technology)?
- What parameters should apply to the posting of corrective information on Web sites controlled by third parties?
- When is the use of links appropriate?
- Questions specific to Internet adverse event reporting.”
- Pharma Marketing Blog, John Mack, @pharmaguy
- Med 2.0, Shwen Gwee, @shwen
- PRforPharma, Chris Iafolla, @PRforPharma
- Fabio Gratton, @skypen
- Pharma Strategy Blog, Sally Church, @MaverickNY
- Scott Hensley, @scotthensley
Coca-Cola and Personal vs. Corporate Brands: A Note of History
Coca-Cola Cover of Time, May 15, 1950 (time.com)
I was in Atlanta last week for work (and a little fun), and happened to stay in a hotel across the street from the Georgia Aquarium and the World of Coca-Cola museum. With a little extra time one day, I managed to fit in visits to both.
I’m a reader at museums, so as I was picking my way through the historical information in the various exhibits at the World of Coca-Cola, I came across a cover of Time magazine from the 1950s. There was a note next to the cover, with a little fact stating that the Coca-Cola glass bottle was the “first commercial product” to appear on the cover of the magazine. Time had wanted Robert Woodruff, the charismatic leader of the company for more than 60 years, to appear on the cover, but according to the note at the museum, he declined, saying the company and its product came first.
This fact of history caught my attention because of the way the tensions between corporate and personal brands are being played out online. While the issues are thorny, sometimes (often?) history can be illuminating.
(For more on the subject of personal branding, here are a few blog posts from others I’ve saved on delicious.)
Note: This has been cross-posted on my personal blog.