The Spin Cycle, 7/9

A round-up of recent happenings in the world of PR, marketing, and other things I find interesting.

Twitter and LinkedIn Split Up: Believe me, my friends, Twitter is doing you a favor by no longer letting your cross-post your tweets onto LinkedIn. Sure, some of what you post on Twitter is relevant to a professional networking site. But a lot of it isn't, and it annoys your LinkedIn connections.

GM and Facebook Might Get Back Together: Am I missing something here? Yes, I realize that GM's announcement that it was ditching Facebook ads was blamed in part for Facebook's lackluster IPO. But is GM really such a trendsetter that it alone can arrest Facebook's slide? The larger problem for Facebook is if companies like GM discover they can get just as much value by utilizing free content on Facebook. Then what does the social network do?

NBC Tells Its Friends It's Dumping Ann Curry: In a rather cynical take on PR, Adele Cehrs praises NBC for minimizing the damage of pushing Ann Curry off The Today Show by allowing rumors about her departure and stories blaming her for the show's ratings tumble to leak out.

NBC made the news regarding Curry’s removal work to its benefit by using the trickle effect. The trickle effect is a strategy in which information is released in small doses over time to reduce the overall backlash of a negative announcement.

Certainly, the slow, steady divulgence of information, done deliberately, is a good strategy for preparing publics, internal and external, for bad news. But leaking information designed to portray a single, identifiable individual in a bad light is downright mean, not to mention unethical. I'm not naive in thinking it's not done a lot. But it isn't the kind of public relations I want to practice.

The Spin Cycle, 7/2

A round-up of recent happenings in the world of PR, marketing, and other things I find interesting.

Dewey Beats Truman: The erroneous reporting by Fox and CNN that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down the Affordable Care Act has provoked a justifiable backlash about media chest-pounding over getting scoops, particularly when said scoop is now measured by mere seconds:

But worrying about being first on reporting something that is handed to you and everyone else? By 24 seconds? To borrow the Gail Collinsism, I think I speak for everyone when I say, it's really not important.

Worse than that, it's dangerous. The health care decision is a complicated piece of business. It's worth taking the time required to fully understand it before reporting on it. It's that rush to be first or almost first that leads to world-class mistakes like CNN and Fox News made this morning, when they reported the health care law had been overturned.

Twitter Does Mobile Right: Twitter says most of its ad revenues comes from its mobile platform, in contrast to rival Facebook which has struggled to offer users a compelling mobile experience, let alone generate significant ad revenues there. The simplicity of Twitter no doubt sets a lower bar for creating a good mobile experience, but unlike Facebook, I find using Twitter's mobile interface to be more user-friendly than its web platform.

I Don't Like You Like That: The great Brian Solis reminds marketers that a "like" on Facebook is not a license to drown your followers in boring content. It's not an "opt-in":

The difference between Like and other direct response triggers is that the Like is an act of fleeting value that must be earned over and over again. Often, it’s an “in the moment” action that expresses affinity, interest, alignment, and sometimes endorsement. And as an expression, Likes are a form of social currency and their value goes up and down with each engagement.

In other words, you have to earn that "like" each and every time you post something on Facebook.

Bad for Hacks, Good for Flacks: An Australian publicist finds herself in hot water over an online article in which she notes that recent newspaper downsizing is good for the public relations industry. Know what? She's right. The only problem is she comes off as callous toward so many people losing their jobs, and her thoughts more properly belonged in a trade publication, or as a presentation at a PR conference. Know your audience.

Makes me want to eat mor chikin

Chick-Fil-A, or at least the local franchises here in Pittsburgh, do an excellent job of engaging followers on Facebook, and the picture below is a good example:

As every Chick-Fil-A junkie knows, the restaurant is closed Sundays, owing to its founding family's strongly held religious beliefs. Some customers find it endearing, others frustrating, which the graphic addresses. The company turns this simple fact of its business into an inside joke that it encourages its customers to share with one another. It also speaks to the shared experience of every frustrated Chick-Fil-A devotee who ever drove past one of its restaurants in vain on the Lord's Day.

Of course, by posting this, I open myself to teasing by friends who already think I'm obsessed with Chick-Fil-A. But the brands that inspire that kind of devotion are precisely the ones that, if they do it right, can reap the greatest returns from social media, because they are kind of brands that people want to talk about it, that people want to engage with even if there is no immediate benefit. (Like a coupon, for example.) My hat goes off to the folks who get it right.

The Spin Cycle, 6/18

A round-up of recent happenings in the world of PR, marketing, and other things I find interesting.

Digital Dads: In a victory for gender equality, men now also have a patronizing label that marketers have affixed to them to describe their online habits. This caught my eye:

Though digitally savvy dads embrace the good things that come with new technologies, they're also more acutely aware that too much digital tethering can be bad for their kids. Six in 10 Digital Dads (and half of Average Joes) make it a point to limit the amount of time their kids spend online. Forty-two percent of Digital Dads and 31 percent of Average Joes shoo their children outside to play.

How about limiting the amount of time the Dads spend on their devices? My wife and I love our devices but we love our kids more, and we've had to set ground rules for ourselves to ensure we aren't checking our Facebook status when our daughter is telling us about her day at kindergarten, or our son is asking to play "Star Wars." My wife is convinced that this generation of children will grow up resenting their parents' attachment to technology.

Why Are Reporters Always Picking on Us? Christopher Parente is mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore from journalists who gripe about bad pitches and other nasty PR habits without acknowledging their own foibles. I hear ya, Chris. And certainly we need to point out, publicly when necessary, when news outlets misrepresent our clients and employers, and we need to use all the tools at our disposal to tell our story directly to our target audience. But I can live with the abuse of journalists, even if they refuse to admit they need me most of the time as much as I need them. At least in my market, I'm better paid, and there's a good chance my job will still exist five years from now.

Pass the Grain of Salt, Please: The recent study that defended the efficacy of Facebook ads was funded in part by Facebook -- no big deal, organizations fund research all the time to test their product -- but also involved more or less self-selected respondents. It doesn't mean the results are worthless, just qualified.

The Spin Cycle, 6/11

A round-up of recent happenings in the world of PR, marketing, and other things I find interesting.

Measure This: I haven't had time to sink my teeth into this, but measurement guru KDPaine presents a broad set of industry-wide standards for measuring traditional media. The woman knows her stuff, ladies and gentlemen.

You Liked What Now? The New York Times explains that your "likes" on Facebook can show up, unbeknownst to you, in ads for the product in question. Remember, it's the data, stupid.

A Little Birdie Told Me They Like Your Product: Since it's become hip to bash Facebook advertising, it's only logical that someone decides Twitter is the logical alternative. One thing that makes sense -- people seem to go on Twitter for a broader range of purposes, making it more likely they will engage with a product.

Mad Men Season Five Finale: Just because...

What's the big deal?

Before it was cool to bash Facebook's profitability, Groupon was the hip tech company everyone loved to hate, given its questionable revenue base and easily replicated business model.

Groupon's stock is less than half what it was worth when it made its IPO in November, and despite a recent rally, its prospects remain shaky in this amateur anaylst's opinion. I need look no further than my own inbox, which is daily filled with no less than five deal-of-the-day emails of one variety or another, including Groupon. Recently I used a Groupon to buy a membership to Angie's List, which triggered a subscription to Angie's List own daily deal emails. Among Groupon's other competitors in my inbox: Amazon (offering local deals), Living Social, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's version.

I've purchased deals from Groupon and Living Social, and my experience with one was not substantially different from the other. And therein lies the rub: My satisfaction as a consumer with a daily deal depends almost entirely on the business for which I am purchasing the deal. For example if I buy a Groupon for a restaurant, my experience is determined by the restaurant, just as it would be if I had decided to eat there on a whim. My wife and I had a fantastic experience after using a Groupon to book a room at the Omni Bedford Springs Resort. Our reaction was "We can't wait to come back here and stay again" not "We can't wait to buy another Groupon."

In other words, from what I've gathered, there is no real brand experience offered by any of the major daily deal players, which means that there is no reason for me to choose one over another -- save for the sole variable, which business being promoted in that day's deal. That would seem to be an incentive for companies like Groupon and Living Social to try to strike exclusive arrangements with the businesses that have offered the most popular deals. And that is an incentive for Groupon and the like to steward the businesses that participate, offering them best-practice advice on how to get deal redeemers to repeat as customers.

The challenge for Groupon, and Living Social for that matter, is that they are known only for one thing -- offering daily deals. If they can't differentiate they service they offer from their competitors, than the default reputations of those competitors -- Amazon, Angie's List, your local newspaper -- may just be what sways consumers to purchase those deals instead.

The Spin Cycle, 5/28

A round-up of recent happenings in the world of PR, marketing, and other things I find interesting.

Is Facebook advertising overrated, or is GM dumb? People are still parsing GM's decision to drop advertising from Facebook, and it's an interesting story about the power of brands. Facebook may have a shaky reputation this week, but the fact that many people reflexively dismissed GM's decision demonstrates how strong Facebook's brand is, and how weak GM's continues to be.

Is GM dumb, part 2: I might have grouped this item into the same broad category as the item above, until this jumped out at me: Ford has more than 1.5 million “likes” on its Facebook page, vs. fewer than 400,000 for GM. The problem is that a lot of PR and advertising measurement experts regard a "like" as a poor measure of engagement, and even harder to quantify is how a "like" translates into sales. Everything we do as strategic communicators is supposed to help our organizations or clients meet their business objectives. That's the ultimate measure by which we should judge the efforts of GM, or Ford, or any other company on Facebook or in any other medium.

Google + is down, Pinterest is up: It seems almost too easy to beat up on Google +, but it's too much fun to resist. Google keeps trying to tell people that numbers lie and its dismal user stats don't show the private circle sharing going on beneath the surface. (That sounds dirty.) That's great, but it doesn't diminish my frustration when I go on the network and find the same two people always posting stuff. Pinterest is zooming ahead of it, and maybe it's time for Google, without abandoning Google + as an alternative to Facebook, emphasize its true niche, which is an intra-organizational networking and conferencing tool.

Never forget: What struck me about this collection of letters to and from brothers who fought on separate fronts in World War II was the letter from Bob Dininger's friend to Bob's parents, describing his death at Okinawa:

I won't attempt to say that he died for the American way of life, freedom, etc. and these things that are written about by people who don't do the fighting and thus don't know what they're talking about. What I will say is that he died bravely, and quickly, which is the best way for a soldier to die, if he has to die at all.

Enjoy your day off.

Silence is golden. Just ask Netflix

Dave Copeland explores Faceboo's less-is-more PR strategy, which seems to be shared by a lot of other tech companies who find that playing hard to get with the media yields dividends -- or at least, does no harm, which is often just as good. My gripe, as always, is that a lot of people seem to conflate public relations and media relations -- the latter is a tool of the former; they are not interchangable. The fact that you spurn traditional news media coverage is not evidence that you don't do public relations. My first boss always said one of the tough parts about being in public relations is that often your greatest achievements are the stories that don't run.

Besides, with almost 1 billion users and growing, how much has Facebook really needed the traditional media, which has been bleeding readers, viewers, and listeners for decades? The real question is whether Mr. Zuckerberg can continue to dodge the fourth estate now that he has taken his company public and tripped over a hurdle or two along the way. Dave's article notes the coy strategy employed by Apple's Steve Jobs, who could speak directly to Apple's cultish fans even before social media and other forms of audience-centric communications were so dominant. Can Facebook, which has engendered far less affection than Apple, pull this off?

For his sake, let's hope Zuckerberg has learned the lesson of Reed Hastings, and follows the advice of Bart Simpson: If you don't know what to say, keep your fool mouth shut, and at least you won't make things worse.

Greed. for lack of a better word, is good

"The illusion has become real, and the more real it becomes, the more desperate they want it." Gordon Gekko in "Wall Street"

It was hard not to think of the great film Wall Street this week with news that Facebook "stumbled out of the gate" as one scribe referred to its stock losing value after its stratospheric IPO. Critics of modern capitalism often note that a company's true value, the worth of the goods or services it produces, is often disconnected from its value as an investment to real-world Gordon Gekkos.

But those of us in the business of perception understood what Gekko was talking about when he noted that perception becomes reality, and people respond accordingly. Nothing about Facebook itself -- the social networking site, that is -- is different now than it was before the IPO. As far as I know they haven't launched one of their notorious redesigns or changed their privacy policy, or anything that impacts the user. Sure, some analysts tried to pin Facebook's slide on diminished ad revenues, failure to generate ads on its mobile products, or news that GM planned to drop paid ads from Facebook. But the true culprits appear to be an excessive number of shares issued by Facebook, along with possible misdeeds by its underwriters and bungling by NASDAQ.

Some critics felt Facebook was overvalued from the get-go, and looked at its meager first-day returns as a natural correction. Facebook is as dominant a social network as it was last week, but perhaps no one wants to buy into the illusion that it can remain that way forever.

How Much is Enough?
Wall Street — MOVIECLIPS.com

Share this on Facebook

I was going to save this thoughtful critique in Forbes of Facebook's advertising model for The Spin Cycle, but given Facebook's massive IPO this afternoon, it seemed particularly pertinent.

Us PR/marketing types are still figuring out how to measure the impact of social media. Hell, some of us are still figuring out the best way to measure the impact of traditional media, so it's no surprise that there is fierce debate over the value of a "like" (which conventional wisdom now says is not terribly valuable) versus a "share" (which conventional wisdom now says is the coin of the realm):

Lazerow’s company helps “advertisers succeed on Facebook and other major social networks” and claims to have developed a way of measuring social KPIs, or key performance indicators. According to Lazerow, data from his clients show that “every share on Facebook generates an average of $2.10 in incremental sales.”

Really? It’s hard enough to get exact numbers on conventional key word campaigns that are aimed at driving the purchase of specific products, since other factors can contribute to a boost in sales. And Facebook shares aren’t necessarily product focused. Indeed, because content on a company’s Facebook page strives to be “engaging” it’s often not about products at all. At best, shares of these posts help create a warm and fuzzy feeling about a company that, at some point in the future, might turn into a sale. (There’s that word again.)

For the sake of argument, let's postulate that there is a causal relationship between shares on Facebook and sales. Whether or not the content is product-centric is irrelevant; if it has built trust in the brand that spurs a consumer to action, then Facebook has done its job for the seller. The problem for Facebook is if this sharing comes from content on a brand's free Facebook page, as opposed to one of its paid ads. This free content is where GM plans to focus its Facebook efforts, the company announced this week.

The writer of the Forbes article does not take for granted that sharing has concrete value, and questions why it is desirable given that people's Facebook friends may be very different from themselves -- and thus not part of the brand's target audience. Many of us have assumed that sharing is a 21st century equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising, but the people we actually interact with in the real world may have a lot more in common with us than the people we are friends with on Facebook. I'm not quite that skeptical -- after all, our Facebook friends likely share at least some demographic similarities to us -- but it is an argument worth pondering. There are people I'm friends with on Facebook whose taste in restaurants, or music, or baby strollers I could care not one whit about.

The Spin Cycle, 5/13

A round-up of recent happenings in the world of PR, marketing, and other things I find interesting.

The Yelpification of Foursquare: Foursquare just may become relevant again -- was it ever truly relevant? -- with its new Explore feature, which gives users personalized recommendations for restaurants and other venues. I've never used explore but I am a heavy user of Foursquare, though it reaps me few benefits. I've redeemed a handful of check-in specials, and we've used it effectively at work to hype events. Foursquare users who cross-post their check-ins to Facebook, Twitter, and, God forbid, LinkedIn probably do the service no favors by friends and followers who find these status updates annoying.

RIM's lame flashmob: The maker of the Blackberry tries to employ another fading relic of the digital age to get some attention and poke a stick at Apple: a flash mob, and a lousy one at that. Really, a flashmob? People are still doing those? It raises the question, what if someone attempts a PR stunt in the forest and no one notices except for PR bloggers? It's always so cute when someone updates their Facebook status with a Blackberry, like people who still use AOL email addresses.

Is Facebook 2012 the same as AOL 2001?: Speaking of the Internet graveyard, my friend and former colleague Dave Copeland wonders if the Facebook juggernaut is headed for the same kind of fall as America Online, which once stood astride the digital world like a colossus. Certainly Facebook can't take its success for granted. It's a service that millions use but, in my experience, few actually love. In that way, it's the Microsoft of social networking, another rather foreboding comparison. One key difference between AOL and Facebook is that while the former tried to offer users a unique way of experiencing the Internet and the web, those are open systems to which numerous competitors, regional and national, offered access. Facebook offers features that, as of now, haven't been replicated all in one place, and is closed to nonmembers. If you want to be part of Facebook, you have to be part of Facebook.

The Chronicle of Higher Education Stands By Its Woman, Until it Doesn't: Higher education's leading trade publication finds itself in a crisis-control mode after ditching a conservative blogger who take a broadside at black studies. I don't offer any comment as to whether the publication was in the right or in the wrong. That would pose a severe conflict of interest for me and my employer. I will say that it is always fascinating to see the tables turned on a news outlet, which is used to asking the questions, not answering them.

The medium is still the message

Some drowsy, end-of-the-day thoughts on a Nielson survey of consumers worldwide: What struck me about this survey is that a greater percentage of respondents said they trust information found on "owned media" such as company web sites than in paid advertising. So think about it: People are more likely to believe what they read on the Coca-Cola web site, for example, than what they see and hear on Coke's TV commercials -- even though the source of the information is exactly the same, Coca-Cola.

Not surprising that the media influences the reliability of the message. As the survey also shows, trust varies depending on the type of paid advertising, whether print or broadcast, or even by type of print, magazing or newspaper. Nonetheless, it should remind us, even in the age of social media, that our actual web sites are very important. Remember when people were talking about whether they could use a Facebook page to replace their web site? Facebook's constant tinkering and fluctuating privacy controls put that talk to a rest, and I always thought the issue was overblown.

I suspect one of the reasons that companies' web sites fare better than their paid ads is that the smart organizations use their web sites not just to sell but to tell a story, and to share their values -- or better yet, show those values in action. I found myself coming back to the concept of brand journalism: using the tools at your disposal (in this case, your web site) to provide your audience with value that is independent of your product or service but which builds trust in your brand.

Utility is an important concept. People can't really use advertising, per se, but they use the Internet all the time. They use it to buy shoes and schedule dinner reservations. They use to download music and surreptitiously watch the NCAA tournament at work. So even if they have conditioned themselves to be skeptical of what they read online, the medium has inherent usefulness, while much of paid advertising is found in media that are purely for entertainment. (Note the Nielson survey shows that trust in online advertising is growing.)

So utility is another key to building an effective web site. Is it useful to your audience, not just the content but the experience? One of the things that my university web team has done over the past few months has been to simplify the online form that prospective students use to request information. We're tracking submissions, before and after, and thus far the results are promising.

Bottom line, audiences are increasingly likely, simply by default, to find your web site credible. What are you doing to enhance that credibility and cultivate it to grow your brand?

It's the data, stupid

There's an old saying about playing poker: If you look around the table and can't tell who the sucker is, then it's probably you.

This seems appropriate as we consider Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all the other free-of-charge diversions that we have on our smartphones -- at least if that smartphone happens to be an iPhone or Android, as David Carr notes in his rumination on Instagram and its recent acquisition by Facebook. Carr wonders how any of these companies are going to turn a profit as they need to invest more and more of their energies into mobile, given how fleeting our attention is on our devices and how little ad space there is.

As an aside, and as one of the commentators on his post notes, Carr may not quite understand the appearl of Instagram, nor how people use it. But the broader question he poses is a legitimate one: How can free social media applications, even those that are immensely popular, survive if they can't rely on advertising, the traditional business model for low-cost or no-cost content providers?

Part of the answer, of course, is that the traditional business model for media companies is dying, as the New York Times so aptly demonstrates with its online subscription system. The challenge that traditional media companies like the Times face in exacting sufficient advertising revenues from online content also afflicts social media like Twitter -- with a crucial difference being the legacy and infrastructure costs borne by old media, which must continue to produce its own content, as opposed to sites like Twitter and Facebook, which need only provide a platform.

As this article from last week's Wall Street Journal makes clear, Facebook, its sanctioned apps, and other mobile apps are not just interested in putting ads in front of you: They are trying to glean as much data about you as possible in order to customize those ads to the highest degree possible, thus making it more likely that they will grab your attention.

A professor at Robert Morris University, where I work, researches the use of nanoparticles to treat cancer. The idea is that instead of using chemotherapy, which attacks the entire body in order to destroy cancerous cells, the nanoparticles can be injected into the body and guide themselves directly to the tumor, delivering the cancer medicine without damaging the rest of the body.


Traditional advertsing, on television, radio, and in print newspapers, is like chemotherapy. What advertisers will be able to do with the data they can glean from the information all of us share on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you name it, is like nanotechnology. A lot more efficient and not nearly as messy.

Now, there a host of legal and ethical question raised by this, which the Wall Street Journal tackles in its article. And even the most gargantuan of social networks needs to find a way to generate outside revenues to survive, since, as the mainstream news media has discovered, once you give something away to people online, it's not easy to get them to pay for it later on.
But to evaluate social media's prospects on mobile platforms simply in terms of the amount of physical space available to place an ad seems, I'm sorry to say, hopelessly outdated. Facebook and the like are not giving away anything. They are selling a very valuable commodity.

We have met the suckers, and they are us.

Why all the haters?

Figures I decide to join Instagram the day Facebook buys it. Of course, it was the publicity from the Facebook sale that prompted me to finally try it after hearing so many raves and seeing all those sepia-toned photos on Facebook.

I would never place any bets on a company's goodwill or its business sense, but I suspect Instagram will do just fine under Facebook. (Talk about predictions sure to go wrong.) More and more people will learn about it, and it's going to make people want to share more and more photos on Facebook. That's reason enough for Facebook to want to see it prosper.

Everything new is old again

I've paid far too little attention to the recent Facebook changes, given that I'm not only a regular Facebook user but a PR/marketing professional. Like a lot of people, I'm annoyed by what often appears to be change for change's sake on the part of the Facebook.

Then again, I'm not Facebook's customer, and neither is any other individual user -- just like I'm not the customer of the traditional media I consume, like The New York Times. Facebook's customers are its advertisers, and the people like you and me who use it to post pictures of our kids and let their friends know that they are watching Dancing with the Stars are the product. Facebook is selling our attention to its advertisers. Social media may seem revolutionary, but its business model -- Farmville aside -- is not really so different.

So as my boss astutely hypothesized, each of Facebook's changes, however grating to users, are likely done with an eye to increasing the site's value to advertisers. Sure, some are meant to enhance the user experience, particularly in the face of fierce competition from Google +. Facebook can't afford to lose us, but let's face it: most of us aren't walking away, at least not yet. We've simply invested too much time poking each other.

Is cool overrated?

I'm digging out from under some old emails to myself, including this article from the Daily Beast about the symbiotic relationship developing between Twitter and big-name news organizations. But this is what really piqued my interest:

He [Twitter co-founder Biz Stone] is diplomatic when I ask whether Facebook’s moment has passed. “People could say, ‘Facebook’s not cool anymore. I think the Facebook guys would say, ‘Great, we’re not a fad anymore, we’re part of people’s lives.’ I don’t know that you want to be cool. That’s just a burden.”

I think Stone's analysis is dead-on, and I think that is where Facebook is heading. That's why it has that make-Facebook-your-homepage-feature, and why it has introduced a slew of tools to try to be the one-stop social networking stop. It's the same play that Google has made, trying to marry search with email with cloud computing, and why Google is so desperate to find a social networking tool to compete with Facebook.

Look at Apple. For a long time, it was the cool brand -- and headed toward oblivion. Yes, Apple is still cool, but that isn't what put it back on top again. A lot of Apple's success has to do with creating an indispensible device, the iPod, which has no real rivals when it comes to downloading and playing digital music. Certainly, paring down its personal computer product line, and enhancing the design of the Mac hardware and simplicity of the Mac OS, have played a big role. But I'm convinced that Mac's market share is growing because people fell in love with their iPods and iPhones, and figure they might as well own a computer as elegant and easy-to-use as these devices. The iPod has always had a cool factor, but that only carried it so far.

Checking you out when you check in

The New York Times recently explored the gap between businesses and consumers when it comes to the use of location-based social media services, which have been embraced by the former but largely ignored by the latter:

Data about a person’s physical location would be immensely valuable to marketers and retailers, say analysts. But sharing information about where you are can seem creepy or, worse, dangerous, as the Web site Please Rob Me showed earlier this year when it demonstrated how easy it would be for potential thieves to use social networks to find homes whose occupants were away.


Meanwhile, the upside of the transaction is unclear to many people, said Melissa Parrish, an analyst at Forrester Research. None of the efforts so far have reached the “sweet spot of coolness and utility” that will get people to share their data, she said. (link)

I have a few thoughts. Yes, the creepiness factor is one problem. I'm a fairly avid user of Foursquare, but I don't often link my activity there to Facebook and Twitter, because I don't necessarily want to share my location, particularly when I'm out with my family, with the whole world. Recently I vacationed at Disney World, where I checked in a few times. I soon had friend requests on Foursquare from total strangers. That's fine on Twitter, where I share little personal information and don't often use the location feature. On Foursquare it is off-putting.

Also, as the article notes, there doesn't appear to yet be enough value to checking in on Foursquare and its rivals. I actually think too few businesses are making use of Foursquare to offer specials and reward customer loyalty. Often, I only check in to see if such benefits are available, and the fewer I find, the less likely I become to make regular use of the service.

Finally, I think social media burnout may be at play. There's only so much time in the day to fiddle around with social media, even if it is to briefly check in somewhere with your mobile device. How many services can people keep up with? That may be where Facebook Places has an advantage over stand-alone services, since legions of people and organizations already use Facebook. (Though privacy concerns give people pause here.) To entice customers tired of keeping track of their profiles on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., business and social media services are going to have to offer a real return on users' time -- besides the thrill of being mayor of the mall.*


*All that said, we are active on Foursquare at Robert Morris University, where I work, but alas we are ahead of our students at this point.

A far-flung empire

TheVanBlog gets it right on the money over whether an organization's web site is more valuable than its Facebook page. To me, it's something of a straw man argument, because I simply don't see too many businesses or other organizations deciding to cast away their web site in favor of social media, for all the reasons enumerated by TheVanBlog:

Social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are perfect examples of outposts. They are extensions of your online presence.

Outposts can be taken away. They can be overrun militarily. They can be removed by the country you’re seeking diplomacy with. They can fail to generate enough business to keep going.

Your online outposts can be taken away too. Facebook can remove Pages anytime they want. Twitter could delete old tweets. LinkedIn could cease business. You never have complete control over your online outposts and you are always limited in what you can do by the sites in question.

However, some marketing campaigns can be executed wholly in social media. A lot of movie studios now seem to be creating Facebook pages rather than web sites to promote new releases, which makes perfect sense. It's far less labor intensive to create and maintain a Facebook presence than a web site that you won't be able to use again anyway.

And, depending on the level of engagement you are seeking, Facebook and other social media outlets allow you to segregate your audiences more finely than web sites alone permit. Think of a brand that is active on Facebook, like Chick-fil-A. If I'm a customer who simply wants to find out about new menu items, special promotions, etc., I really don't need to ever go to the company's web site, which can cater instead to investors, franchisees, the news media and the general public. (Though Chick-fil-A appears to have a very customer-friendly web site, no surprise given the premium they appear to place on customer service in their stores.) For customers, it's far more convenient for them to follow a Facebook group, since they are on Facebook anyway, then to take the extra, deliberate step of seeking out the web site.

TheVanBlog post also hints at reasons not to try to create a customized social networking site, something which seems to tempt many organizations, less so now that Facebook has really taken hold. My alma mater, Westminster College, has its own alumni social networking site (in addition to being on Facebook). I haven't bothered to check it out since I initially signed up. It's just one more password to remember, one more web site to visit. It's simply not worth the hassle.

Next I'll show you my vinyl collection

Blogging seems positively quaint in the age of Twitter and Facebook, but Mike Sansone says that blogging should be the foundation of your social media outreach, and he makes a powerful argument:

I'm all for Twitter and Facebook... and Slideshare and Flickr and Foursquare too. They are fruits of the Social Media tree, extra rooms in our Social Media storehouse. We can really branch out and connect from those places. We can throw rice against a wall and see what sticks. Brainstorm. Even improve our findability.

But the foundation of what we do and think, what we believe, and the most important inventory we have online is that space we call "blog" and the content or conversations that live and endure there (link).

Now, he's overstating the case. Blogs are not indispensible, but for most organizations, a powerful web site is, and the point is still the same: Facebook and Twitter are great for sharing content, but not so great for creating content. I manage a blog for my employer, and it wouldn't get any traffic at all were it not for Twitter and Facebook. But neither of those outlets would let us tell some of the great stories we've produced on the blog. As for this blog, I get more comments on Facebook when I link to a post than I actually get on the blog, but that's fine. If my Facebook friends see that what I've posted is interesting enough for others to discuss, they will be more likely to click on the link.

If blogging is retro, then print is positively paleolithic, yet Joe Pulizzi thinks it's about to mount a comeback. I think he may be on to something. One of his most interesting points is that as fewer organizations rely on printed magazines and newsletters, those that remain are more likely to stand out and grab your attention. Print also is a way to reach people who aren't yet engaged to the point that they are friending you on Facebook, following your Twitter feed, or even opening your email newsletter. It's a way of waving your hands in front of their face to get their attention -- assuming you've created a good product. It's a conversation starter.

And let's not underestimate the visceral appeal of holding a magazine, book or newspaper in your hand. You don't have to be a Luddite to appreciate it. I'm an iPhone junkie, but on Saturdays, I refuse to use my Wall Street Journal app for fear of ruining the experience of reading the weekend edition when it arrives in the mail. Many colleges and universities have weighed the pros and cons of ditching their print alumni magazines in favor of all digital, and some that do end up regreting it. Maybe it's just tradition they are holding onto, but if it's done well, with detailed storytelling and fetching artwork, a magazine has few rivals when it comes to getting your message across.

Cult brands, Facebook and Sarah Palin

I don't plan to spend much time discussing politics on this blog. If you want evidence of my political beliefs, it's not hard to find. But political campaigns and policy debates often provide useful public relations and marketing case studies, and Sarah Palin's decision to scrub her Facebook page of negative comments is one example.

Let me state a bias up front: I'm no fan of Sarah Palin. Furthermore, I'm an advocate of online transparency who recently has counseled his own employer to let stand harshly negative comments on a Facebook page. That said, from the point of view of enhancing her brand, Palin is probably smart to stifle dissent on her Facebook page.

Think of Palin as a cult brand, with a relatively small but highly devoted following -- much like Apple was in the 1990s. Every cult brand eventually faces the same dilemma: Continue to cater exclusively to a small but loyal customer base, or try to branch out and risk alienating your original customers. Apple solved this dilemma with the iPod. The company created a device consistent with its brand -- favoring ease of use and elegance of design -- without requiring iPod buyers to switch to the Macintosh computer operating system.

But a politician as divisive and radical as Palin doesn't have an equivalent option. She can't lurch to the center without alienating her rabid right-wing followers. Instead, she needs to convince mainstream Americans -- for lack of a better term -- that their values are actually not so different from her values, or from those of her devotees. Hence Palin's "Mama Grizzlies" metaphor; she's appealing to motherhood, one of the most common values Americans share.

Allowing her critics to skewer her on Facebook isn't going to help Palin broaden her appeal. Some of those comments may actually remind people there are good reasons not to like Palin. And from Palin's perspective, responding to all those negative comments, which her followers are bound to do, is not a good use of their time. She'd much rather have them reading her books, listening to her speeches, and supporting the candidates she endorses. Facebook is a one-way channel for Palin, and while that may contradict the ethos of social media, it seems to be working quite well for her. Bottom line, the only people she alienates by deleting negative comments are people she'll never win over anyway.

The problem with this strategy is that it may limit what Palin can achieve. It's perfect for someone who wants to be a political kingmaker, reliably delivering votes for the candidates of her choosing. What she's saying is, "I'm the head of a private club. Anyone can join, but only on my terms, and on the terms of the other members." That is not a winning message for a presidential candidate.