Content Chunking for Channels

Content chunking? A rather clunky phrase we use to describe breaking up your content for a press release or when promoting an important story about your business online. It helps when your building a story for release, to think of where you might be placing that story on various Web channels or how a press release might be broken up into fragments by bloggers or journalists or when “tweeted.”

Pick Up 2.0: These two words used to mean a reporter/journalist/editor at a newspaper/radio/TV got your story and then ran it or called for an interview. It still does, and that’s still important. But today it also means a blogger or regular citizen might send your story over Twitter or via their blog.

The Importance of the Headline: If it was important pre-Social Media then it’s even more important today. As you write a headline today, it’s not just to get the editors attention, you also want it to be “tweetable” on Twitter or a similar network. If its a good story, then be sure it can spread with a kicker headline.

The Content Chunks: Which brings us to the concept of “chunking” in that we have found that a press release or story should be written in a way that it can be broken down into chunks of content. Some blogs may only refer to a paragraph in the release or you may only be able to write a paragraph on some news seeding sites (i.e. newsvine). You may want to have a short bit for a Facebook company or group page or your LinkedIn company page.

The key is to know where you regularly “seed” your content from a press release or story and ensure the content can be adapted to each of the services you use. On average, we’ll “seed” a press release for clients to over 15 different online sources within relevant services. Yes, it adds work and puts ever more onus on the writer of the release, but it can help with SEO and generally getting to more of the right eyeballs wherever they may be in this vast media channel world.

The Biggest Hurdle for Public Relations

One word: Attention.

Basic economic theory states that when you create a wealth of one thing, it creates scarcity of another. In the case of modern day media it’s a wealth of channels and a scarcity of attention. For the most part today, we “snack” on media. We consume when we’ve set aside our attention to watch a movie or a whole TV show or listen to a full broadcast of a radio show.

On the Web we mostly snack. The most effective bloggers have posts no more than 300 words.

Public Relations practitioners have always fought for our attention. But today that’s harder than ever. So many channels. And consumption changes by channel. Twitter is “grazing” while Blogs are a quick bag of crisps and Facebook is a cup of coffee and a cookie.

If the “story” starts as a press release and media advisory, backed by the press kit or background kit, then it will need to break into many little pieces as it goes out into all of the various media channels. Each snippet hopefully getting the right readers attention.

It might follow then that the second biggest hurdle is then getting your audience to act on the information they’ve received.

Social Media Crises: The Hidden Chatter

When we think of and mostly talk about, Social Media crises, we tend to look at the bigger stories; United Breaks Guitars, Motrin Moms, JetBlue. Let’s face it, they’re juicier and hit a broader audience. These stories bring together traditional and social media. But smaller, mostly “hidden” issues can create PR nightmares for a business.

As we experienced with a client today. For obvious reasons I can’t name them, I like having clients and don’t like making a painful issue worse. The issue didn’t get broadcast across Twitter or Plurk or similar microblogging channel. Nor did it wind it’s away through Facebook.

This crisis took place across three “closed” forums. By “closed” I mean that it was in semi-moderated forums focused to a particular topic/industry. Someone posted a topic in a forum, within a short while, others joined in, discussing a product and their feelings about that product. It started only 3 days ago, but by this morning had reached a significant volume and resulted in a large volume of calls to a contact centre and began migrating up to senior management.

We monitor for this client monthly. Which helped. But the challenge of automated Social Media monitoring tools becomes quickly apparent – most of them are locked out of these forums. And this is a huge gap in Social Media monitoring.

Although this issue was “localized” and didn’t hit broadcast Social Media levels, it still caused a drop in sales in just 2 days of 8% and forced a mid-size business to focus many hours of senior management and people resources to contend with it. Fortunately it was kept localized and didn’t seep over into more public forums.

So what are some take-aways for a situation like this?

1. Don’t rely on Google Alerts or basic monitoring services.

2. Find out where “discussions” are going on in closed forums like newsgroups, chats or discussion forums and check in weekly to see what might be going on.

3. A crisis can occur in Social Media in closed loops and cause as much damage as if it hit the more public forums.

4. Engage in these discussions (be open and disclose who you are, trying to pretend your a customer is dangerous) and stay engaged.

5. Often times, these “hidden” sides of Social Media can be of more value than more public forums.

So what do you think? Have you had a similar experience? What steps do you take in this type of issue?

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)

Ethnography & Social Media Marketing Fulfilment

In Western nations as we see the steady increase in immigrants, marketers will have to become increasingly cognizant of ethnographic marketing. Advertising messages will take more research and ads that were easily understood before, may reach less of an audience or cause community anger.

In Social Media, it means deeper considerations when engaging an audience. It’s one thing to provide a Cantonese or Mandarin translation on your static web pages. It’s another to engage a Chinese audience in Social Media. Or Punjabi, Hindu, Ghanaian etc.

We’ve seen the rise of Social Networking sites for Latino Americans already. East Indians in Toronto use the Indian Social Networking site Bigadda more than Facebook in Canada – such knowledge can result in a failed Facebook campaign when your market is using an originating-country social media service. As a recent client of ours found out the hard way.

For longer term engagement, it means retaining staff who speak the language – and ensuring they can adequately communicate issues within the organization. More to the point, ensuring some form of sustainability in Social Media marketing efforts is also critical; these segment markets tend to be very loyal to products they feel value their culture and beliefs.

While a significant amount of acculturation occurs with immigrants, the deeper cultural assimilation and nuanced understanding of the country that have taken up their new lives in doesn’t usually happen until the first generation is born and of an age to be receptive to marketing tactics. So the two considerations we’ve found to be consistent is generation targeted and ensuring inter-organizational support while targeting the right Social Media vehicle.

When The FTC Regulates Honesty in Social Media

It started earlier this year when the FTC announced it was considering passing regulations that bloggers and anyone taking cash to write about products declare they’ve been paid to do so. The vote passed 4-0 yesterday and will take effect Dec 1st; this much we all know.

Here’s what is interesting;

1. Enforcement & Monitoring Challenge: There’s no clear definition of how this will/can be enforced. Through complaints by consumers/businesses? Will they use a monitoring tool? When you think that roughly 150,000 new blog entries are posted each day, that’s about 54,750,000 blog entries a year, give or take a few hundred thousand. The FTC says they’re more likely to go after the advertiser and not the blogger. Not sure how much that will help in enforcement.

2. The Oxymoron of Disclosure: Many bloggers and Social Media practitioners have written many articles about how it’s important to declare if you’re writing posts on behalf of a client or representing a company. Some do, many don’t. In some cases these deceptive bloggers will be “outed” and suffer the consequences. But this is a “social rule” evolved as a general online conduct, it is not a government sanctioned rule. Many get away with it.

3. International Effect: Canadians and Americans share many daily communications. Similarities in language, geographical closeness and almost total trade transparency through NAFTA. We buy and sell and have personal relationships…will the FTC work with the Canadian government to develop similar rules in Canada? Many US products are sold in Canada and vice versa. Take Tim Horton’s coffee; if they pay a Canadian blogger to blog about a new offering that is also available in the U.S. but is undeclared, how will the FTC prosecute Tim Horton’s in Canada for the impact in the USA?

This ruling is one I agree with. I’ve personally seen the dangers of bloggers and eBay sellers promoting HIV tests and medications that are not FDA or Health Canada approved. This produces disastrous results for the deceived consumer who may use such faulty products. The FDA has some recourse, but monitoring is a huge issue. Then there’s the trust issue, but that’s another posting.

What do you think of the FTC ruling?