“Now Is Gone” is a finished project. It is done, and we set out to do what we wanted to do.

We’re locking closing the door, but this site will remain available (see comments). It’s important to know exactly what this site was about, and how it stands as a testament to the strengths and weaknesses of Social Media. Now Is Gone started as a way for Geoff Livingston to share the epiphanies he had with regards to the changing communications landscape. He went through some fairly distinct phases. I call them:

1. Blissful Ignorance
2. Holy Cow, What Just Happened?
3. Where’s The Map?
4. Who Else Can Benefit?
5. Where Are the Pitfalls?
6. How Do I Use This Stuff?
7. Moving On

Essentially, it’s the same sense of discovery we all experience when faced with something new. Having worked in the marketing and communications arts for years, Geoff knew the questions and fears that those just hearing about blogs and vlogs and YouTube and wikis might have. “Now Is Gone” was the product of his desire to pick up executives and communicators arriving at step 3, and shepherd them on through step 7.

So, why end it at all? Because, quite frankly, there are only so many introductory lessons. Sure, if you want advanced applications with regards to certain communities or specific technologies, then you can plumb the depths of complexity to your curiosity’s content. “Now Is Gone” provided the grounding one needs to take those first steps into the Brave New World, and then decide where to go from there.

Frankly, it was an important project even if it is a product of its time. Too many of the pioneers in the space we call Social Media or Social Marketing have moved beyond this first outpost. They chase the bleeding edge, and are mining the riches in very small niches. They are too far down the rabbit hole to be of any real assistance to the businessman whose company finally gives the green light, and says “Bob, I need you to figure out this blogging stuff. And I need it by the next department meeting.”

This “Now Is Gone” blog was to be a resource providing new case studies, research, anecdotes, and insights that might extend the life of the source material in the book. In that regard, it was a success. Those who come across this site through various links will still find some good - albeit very basic - advice. If you want more meat and more depth, go elsewhere with our blessing.

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So this is the Postscript — and true to the spirit of the evolving conversation, Geoff was wise enough to let someone else have the last word. If that doesn’t capture the essence, I don’t know what does. For all involved from alpha to omega, thanks. Look us up sometime. Thanks to Social Media, we’re not hard to find.

Last month, I ranted about how Social Media is not a commodity — not an easy bundle of off-the-shelf “solutions.”

Well, our friend David Armano over at Logic+Emotion has the same idea, and provides us with this picture that replaces my thousand words. Enjoy:

(In an effort to provide a place for the Social Media Curious to dip their first toe, Ike continues a series of articles aimed at those who are looking for very basic context.)

You’re Listening. NOW What?

At the most basic level, your participation in Social Media needs to include monitoring and listening. If you don’t know what’s being said about you, you’ll never have a chance to correct misperceptions or outright lies. Being functionally deaf makes you blind in targeting future efforts.

For those organizations that fail to even listen, the top hesitation is the fear of finding “bad news,” and not knowing how to deal with it. Given the flood of information that you might find about yourself, it’s easier to play the ostrich and pretend it doesn’t exist. While that might make you sleep a little easier, your shareholders and stakeholders might see things differently. So how exactly do you prioritize these potential “reputation threats” as they circulate?

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you use monitoring tools to find a knock against your company in a blog or public forum. Aside from simple traffic statistics and site popularity, here are a few measures of “viral-ness” you can use to determine which ones are capable of becoming a big problem down the road.

Viral Triggers, A through G

1. Authority/assertion
   The message must give you the feeling that you now know something important that will truly affect future decisions.
2. Brevity
   No one wants to read a manifesto, Dr. Kaczynski. If the negative message is too long, the average reader won’t want to be the one to foist it upon his whole network.
3. Clarity
   A well-crafted message, to go viral, must be unambiguous. There can be no question about where the author stands.
4. Detail
   The position must be rooted in incontrovertible fact. A random message that “Dell sucks” doesn’t carry the weight of “Having used your product for 9 years…”.
5. Emotion
   How well-written is the message? Does it make you feel as though you could be just as passionate for simply passing it along?
6. Focus
   The message must be about one thing, and one thing only. If it makes a reader mentally wander he’ll be less likely to feel compelled to pass it along.
7. Gossip
   One reason people like to pass on juicy little tidbits is the rush of knowing that you knew something before (almost) any of your friends did. This places you in a position of esteem and authority within your circle.

A quick glance can usually knock a couple of these factors out for a particular instance, and you can move on. If you see a message that hits six out of seven flags, you may want to do an internet search for an unusual string within the message, to see if this is already moving and where.

If you see one that hits all seven warning triggers, you probably need to put it in the hands of whomever would handle your reactive messaging. A direct response might be in order, unless it comes off looking like an attack. But you need to be prepared for the likelihood that many people will see this attack on your brand and reputation.

As with all things in Social Media, your mileage will always vary. This tool is not scientific — but will empower you to concentrate your time on the messages that matter. It beats getting caught in the paralysis of analysis, or wasting resources on issues that will never materialize as real reputational threats.

(Ike Pigott regularly writes at Occam’s RazR)

“Video is the wave of the future for business! We’ve got to get some viral videos up and running! Customers love video!”

Simmer down. Now that it’s out of your system, lets look at what it takes to incorporate video into your overall communications strategy.

I worked in television for 16 years — a dozen of that on-air as a reporter. Being a “teevee reporter” isn’t rocket science, but it’s not as easy as you might think. However, there are a number of influences out there that might make you think the leap to video is a piece of cake:

• The equipment is cheaper
• The distribution channels are cheaper than free
• The editing can be done on a home PC
• The quality bar has been lowered by streaming video standards

All of that points to a no-brainer, but video can easily blow up in your face if you don’t know what you’re doing. And believe me, you don’t have to know anything about the subject matter to know when someone is making horrible television.

“American kids know television the way French kids know wine.”

- Lorne Michaels, Producer

Any idiot can grab a camera and shoot some video, even attempt to narrate it. The real skill is the weaving of those words and pictures in ways that simultaneously reinforce each other and amplify the communication. You can pack a lot of impact in a little piece of video if you know what you’re doing. It’s a language — one you have to study for a long time before you understand the nuances. Or, you can hire someone to tell your story for you.

Before you get to that point, and succumb to the You-Need-Videos Siren, please run down the following checklist:

1. Do you know precisely what you want to communicate with a video? (If you’re lucky, the viewer leaves remembering one thing. Just one. Try to say too many things and you say nothing at all.)
2. How are you going to use the video? (If you’re only going to the web, a lower-budget format might be acceptable. If you have designs on using it for something else, the quality will bite you.)
3. Who is doing your editing? (Great video and great content can be rendered useless in the hands of a ham-fisted editor.)
4. Is the tone of the video right for your intended message?
5. Will anyone care? (If you don’t know why anyone will care, then you don’t have a message worth delivering.)
6. How does this fit in the overall communications plan? (Will the video enhance other efforts already underway? Or will it overshadow/undermine?)
7. Do you have a sufficient budget to hire the right people, or get the right training?

If there are any red flags, then just say no. Bad video can kill off any good momentum in your other online pursuits.

(Ike Pigott is an Emmy Award-winning writer, who regularly posts at Occam’s RazR)

The title says it all.

Maybe a blog isn’t right for your company.  Maybe you don’t have anyone in-house who can step up and be the voice for the firm, the agent of engagement.  But you do need a blog policy, pronto.

Cisco is now in hot water because one of its employees was running an anonymous blog tracking so-called “patent trolls.” When a site is official and transparent, there is no confusion about loyalties or the source of information.  When employees are engaging in underground behavior, their actions can be tied back to you down the road.  That applies to sites they run, administer, or even participate in commenting.

Sun, Yahoo, IBM, and many other companies have publicly available policies.  There are many other resources available to help you craft one.

You may never have a corporate blog.  But you have employees who do, and they comment on things that interest them.  A clear policy can be the firewall that keeps your corporate interests out of the flames.

(Ike Pigott regularly writes at Occam’s RazR)

“God gave you two ears and only one mouth for a reason.”

I admit, I heard that more times than I would care to mention. But the truth behind the sentiment applies to Social Media (and the marketing thereof.) I’m willing to bet that more than 90% of the discussion about new media tools centers around the various means of pushing or publishing your message. In reality, the biggest value we derive comes from listening.

I have a friend who uses 18 different tools to monitor conversations in the blogworld alone. They range from simple Google News Alerts to arcane engines with names that probably will be forgotten. I won’t bore you with a list, because ultimately you are the one who has to decide at what level and depth you want to pay attention to the discussion.

Instead, I am going to shill for a great little tool that helps you stay on top of conversations in progress. (I mean “shill” strictly in the amateur sense. I get no money, and I don’t know the people behind it, so it’s a clean endorsement.) It’s called “Commentful,” available as a service from Blogflux.

Commentful works best in Firefox, where a plugin automates everything. Whenever I come across a comment stream I want to track, I just right-click on Add to Commentful. The url is added to my watchlist, and I get an alert at the bottom of the browser anytime there is an update in those comment streams. I tend to track all threads where I have left a comment, and even track a few where I don’t. The beauty (for me) is getting a heads-up within minutes of a new comment.

If you’re like me (a communicator with a deep crisis communications streak) you’ll see the value instantly. If not, you can still impress those in the conversation with your attention to detail and promptness to respond. Many times, it’s not just what you say, but when you say it.

Do a Google search for “Social Media” today and you get 66,200,000 hits.

“Social Media Marketing” nets you 24,000,000

“Social Media Expert” gets you even more: 86,600,000.

That should tell you something.

If you’re reading this, and looking at what social media can do for your outreach or your business, then you need to be careful.  Ask some tough questions.  Ask for case studies.  Ask for evidence.  Ask for proof of experience.  Because there are a lot of people talking about getting results in social media, and the ones who show up the highest in the Google searches might just be better at marketing themselves than they are any clients.

It’s hard to outshine someone who has 40 hours a week to promote themselves.

(Ike Pigott regularly writes at Occam’s RazR) 

“Hello. Social Media Marketplace, how can I help you?”

“Yes, I’d like a bushel of blogs, four cartons of community, and does that come with the comments?”

If Social Media could be purchased in that fashion, you would not want it.

This issue comes to mind, because of a nice lunch conversation I had with a friend. He’s a successful attorney - and by successful, I mean the sort who has personally won the appeal (and freedom) of three innocent men who were on death row. He doesn’t have a household name, but is very well-known in certain circles, and is asked to lecture on capital punishment around the U.S.

My friend has three-and-a-half manuscripts sitting around, unpublished. He’s had discussions with literary agents and book editors that haven’t gone much of anywhere. In past days, you had good material, and the agents came to you to help promote it. But now the tables have turned, and you have to have some type of promotable platform before the agent will take up your cause. “Platform?” My friend was told he needed some type of online presence, like a blog, that had at least 1,000 visitors a day.

Metric Myopia

1,000 visitors a day. Now, that’s a completely arbitrary number, and it is completely disconnected from reality. I could register his name as a website, and load it with spam-links and search-engine keywords and build up that kind of traffic. (I could also do it in a real stealthy way, so it wouldn’t look like a spam-blog.) But that’s not the measurement that matters. In fact, we really aren’t yet sure what measurement ought to matter.

Web measurement has changed radically in the last few years. People used to talk about “hits”, but that hit on the server might be a request for an image. Put 10 pictures on a web page, and earn 11 hits. So then we started looking at “page views,” which gets skewed by bad site design. A well-structured site makes it easy for you to find what you want, where a bad one can boost traffic by making you click around. (Or, just add a “splash page”, and watch the page-view count go up.)

Then we migrated to “unique visitors.” We can record all of the other stats, but keep them bundled together by visitor. This requires dropping a little “cookie”, or a bit of code in the browser that will help us identify this unique visitor if they come back later. Uniques aren’t perfect, because they don’t track people who use different computers, and many people are blocking the use of cookies for security reasons. But at least we’re narrowing the information to some useful numbers.

Ghosts in the Machine

Let’s get back to my friend’s dilemma. He’s been told he needs a blog with 1,000 hits per day. What if he had one person who visited, printed out his page, and then made 1,000 copies he distributed to everyone in his office? That would have the same influence, but my friend doesn’t get credit for it. This isn’t a new issue - print publications have tried for decades to determine how much pass-around certain magazines get before hitting the trash heap. How do we account for those “ghosts,” those users who are influenced by the content without leaving a trace on the website?

That’s what happens with RSS subscriptions. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) takes the information out of the browser, and frees it up to travel through a number of different paths. It can come directly to a special reader. Outlook and other e-mail programs can subscribe to RSS feeds as well. You can subscribe to the updates directly through e-mail. Those who subscribe get the newly updated information pushed straight to them, in a format of their own choosing, for consumption at the time and place of their convenience.

If you’re trying to connect with other people, catching them at the time and place of their choosing puts you in a wonderful position. You are never interrupting, and odds are, you will likely not be interrupted.

Measuring the Measures

Now, riddle me this: would you rather have 100 people visit your website, or have 20 subscribe? If you want a quick snapshot that sounds good, 100 visitors looks more impressive. But over time, those 20 subscribers will have way more impressions, and are more likely to be influenced by what you have to share. Those 20 subscribers are more likely to share what you have to say with others of like mind, and even convert a few to subscriber status as well.

If your interest is in selling a general product, or getting the attention of as many eyeballs as possible, page views and hits may be the best measure of your success. If you’re trying to promote something like a book - something that requires a little more financial and emotional investment from the buyer - you’re more likely to track your influence by the number of subscribers. Those are the people who’ve already indicated they don’t want to miss what you have to say… and they will be the people who might just pay for a few of those words.

Conversion Issues

I wish there was an easy way to convert between the currency, and say that a site with X number of visitors will have Y number of subscribers. It doesn’t work like that. I write regularly over at Occam’s RazR. On a typical day, I have 40-50 people who actually visit the website. Occasionally, I break 100. Sometimes I don’t break double-figures. But that’s been the pattern for more than a year now. What has changed is my subscriber count. According to Feedburner, I had just 45 subscribers last July. Eight months later, I am in the low 200’s with a steady pattern of growth (225 as of today.)

My audience (communicators of various stripes) might be considered a little more tech-savvy than most, and more inclined to subscribe. Given a choice between subscription audiences, a less tech-friendly group would lean more on familiar options like e-mail subscriptions. (Out of my 225, only 15 or so are e-mail. Very much an anomaly.) Your mileage may vary. And it will.

A Free Market

And that is precisely why you should be wary of those who want to sell you Social Media like it is a commodity. There is no baseline for exchange rates. There is no common currency. You have to decide what sort of measurement matters to you, and cultivate in that direction. The market is totally free - free for you to define, free for you to dissect, free for you to develop. Just beware those who have already put a price tag on what they offer you, particularly if you haven’t yet decided your goal.

(Ike Pigott frequently writes at Occam’s RazR.)

There are literally thousands of blog posts out there telling you how to take your first steps in Social Media. Those first hurdles are so important to clear. But have you ever looked at the setup on the track after the high hurdles are run? It’s not the first hurdles that trip up the athletes — it is the last ones. When you’re tired, when you’re in a groove, and when you think you know everything at high speed, that’s when your trailing foot comes low and trips you up.

If you are exploring the use of Social Media in your company and have any thought of bringing executives or a CEO on board, be as prepared for the end of the race as for the starter’s pistol. What could be worse than trying to reign in a superior who doesn’t realize he’s getting strategically sloppy?

Set Expectations

There’s a reason why coaches tend to have played the games they now teach. They know what it’s like to make decisions in the heat of the moment. They understand the pressures, the distractions, and the demands. There’s also a reason you don’t see many player-coaches anymore. The speed of the game makes it almost impossible to see the entire arena as X’s and O’s. You lose your strategic edge, and the perspective of the whole picture.

If you’re the Social Media coach or evangelist for your organization, set the expectations that there are dangers that come with familiarity. Your CEO who is hesitant to touch the interface at first may not be as thoughtful when the mechanics of blogging become second-nature. The power of instant publishing can be intoxicating, and “drunk bloggers” can lead to unhappy accidents.

Build a Firewall

The very first firewall is technical. Those who are unsure about the mechanics are looking at each entry several times before it “goes live.” Before you set up your system, stress the importance of an editorial function. Yes, the CEO will have the final say, but it’s foolish to give him every say. Make sure there is a Jiminy Cricket built into the plan, someone who can ask the crucial question: “Are you sure this is how you want it to sound?”

Examples

I’ve been part of an online journalism community for nearly ten years. A few months ago, I was promoted to become one of a small number of moderators. A couple of us are still active “members” of the discussions, and we are very careful not to participate in ways that could be construed as abusive. If I take issue with someone’s argument, they shouldn’t feel as though I might abuse my Mod Powers. I’m very cognizant of my capacity to lose my temper.

My solution? Before posting, I change both the color and the font of everything I wrote. It takes just a few swipes and clicks, but it forces me to look at everything one more time. It is my self-enforced firewall to ensure I don’t click too fast and bare thoughts that shouldn’t be shared.

This topic actually stems from a discussion I had with Geoff Livingston. Geoff has had one hell of a year; writing and publishing a book, spearheading the content for two top-rated marketing blogs, scoring Social Media victories for his clients, and running a lot of traditional communications counsel through his firm. He’s been through quite a bit, but that’s not an excuse for losing his cool.

Geoff’s let his temper get the best of him, reading too much into things that were not intended. He said some things and acted out, and will be the first to tell you that’s not representative of what he wants to be. He’s now taking a few days off to re-fresh and re-center, and will back to the grind next week. He knows I’m writing this — we talked about it — and there’s value in sharing it. If it can happen to Geoff, it can happen to me, and it can happen to you or your CEO who blogs.

Build the firewalls now, because the most dangerous hurdles are closer to the end.

(Ike Pigott can be regularly found at Occam’s RazR.)

When it comes to what we call Social Media, “community” is the coin of the realm. It’s also a very fickle thing to define, because the ideas, memes, and dreams that knit a community together can be made of very different material. And we’re heading for an even larger generation gap, because the notion of “friend” is becoming more slippery too.

It used to be that a group of friends was easy to spot because of affinity for clothing. Matching bowling shirts and funny-horned lodge hats made things too easy. There are still communities like that online and they won’t go away any time soon — but they might not be the communities you need to reach. A former co-worker on mine stayed with AOL for years simply because she was tied to a genealogy forum there. Too much of her internet identity was tied to being a part of that group, even though her membership there was costing an additional $20/month.

Future communities are going to be even harder to engage, because the incoming generation of the web-enabled isn’t platform dependent. They use browsers, IM, cell-phones, Xboxes, and whatever else comes down the pike to stay connected. And they don’t always use the same network; like birds and bees, they are prone to random migrations. When a few influentials leave and critical mass is reached, the others quickly follow them to the next point.

Down the rabbit hole

From the individual perspective, it gets even more tangled. The community is no longer a single entity. A person connected to one group through a set of common contacts might not belong to several joint communities. The clusters are not neat, and rather look more like synapses randomly anchored to neurons across the way. It’s a spaghetti map, and it’s messy. It’s fickle. In some instances, the prevailing factor might be the time of day a subset of users might be free to congregate or chat online.

It’s an awful lot to log and chart. Some are trying, by aggregating and quantifying “influence” across networks and platforms. They may yet succeed, but you don’t have to chase them down that rabbit hole. The best way to engage the community you need online is to create it. Don’t follow the crowd, be the hub that attracts a crowd. It’s done by sharing and adding value without strings. It might be money-saving tips or advice — or even better, a vehicle that allows your biggest fans to do it for you. It might be special offers or information that isn’t shared anywhere else. Give your potential advocates a reason to come to you, and they will. And they’ll drag their friends.

If this sounds scary, it should. Not everyone is equipped to get in and get their hands dirty and make Social Media work as it can. You’re better off not jumping in until you know what you want to accomplish, because embarrassing early stumbles can cripple your corporate reputation and become a new obstacle.

(Ike Pigott writes regularly at Occam’s RazR)