DygiScape

TSA ‘Evolution of Security’ Blog

In case you haven’t heard, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) now has a blog that is intended to let you share your concerns with them and stay updated to changing events and policy. I heard this earlier this week, but I thought it was a hoax, like Fake Steve Jobs, so I didn’t bother to share. Until… More »

Tags: Blogging, Government, internet, PR, social media

10 Win-Wins for Social Media Adoption In Your Organization

I enjoy the discussion about social media, so you’d expect I was exhilarated when I read Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption and How You Can Respond. It inspired me to share my insight as to how social media could benefit an organization, whether it’s large or small.

Social Media is used to describe the genre of blogs, micro-blogging, social news, social networking and other Web 2.0 variations found on the Internet. You can read my non-whitepaper on Social Media, if you’d like. Compared to traditional media (e-mail, print, television), consumers have a choice and it offers unparalleled communication mediums for anyone.

For anyone who’s even just a little curious about Social Media, I aim to list 10 win-wins for both your business and consumer. I know there are more mutually benefitting reasons, but I wanted to really hit on the big ones that count.

10 Win-Wins for Social Media Adoption within Your Organization:

1. Communicate with Customers, not to.
   Participating with consumers will help you not only appear to be on their side, you will be, by listening and advocating their concerns. A lot of companies who genuinely care about consumers are rewarded with highly-engaged, viral, and let’s be frank — high margin — customers. Although, companies who failed at social media (read: misleading PR, Wal-Mart) have been at the mercy of their consumers who can see right though to the PR snakes. Ultimately, if you want to listen to your customers, being accessible to consumers is key to gain their trust and honest feedback and social media allows you to build new relationships with users.
2. Learn More About and Define Your Audience
   A lot of companies can often reach out to an untapped demographic via social media — and further, allows any demographic to learn more about your products and services. Being social in social media allows you be dynamic and adapt with your varying audiences. This is mutually beneficial, because consumers can identify themselves with a company who supports their ideals and passions; while the company can reach disrupt their competitor’s online territory silently.
3. Earn Trust and Better Control Your PR Communications
   The biggest misconception is that a company controls their reputation on the Internet –which is anything but true. Traditional public relations, doesn’t work in a progressive world. If you gain trust by building strong relationships with industry leaders (and consumers) you can better project what you want to project without appearing insincere or (even worse) misleading. When you have a track record of being honest and upfront with your consumers, they will reward you by listening and even spreading the word.
4. Build your Internal and External Social Media Strength
   In many businesses, the ideology that is preached, “Treat your employees well and they will treat your customers even better.” The same characteristics can be made internally at your organization. If you reward the internal talents, they can bleed outward to other external social media interactions. Likewise, the additional benefits for internal/external social media, would be the growth of ideas and the free-flowing exchange of information from engineers to directors to CEOs (not necessarily in that order).
5. Traditional Media is Changing, You Need to Be Ready
   As consumers turn on their computer and check e-mail when they wake up, the TV get’s turned on less, the newspaper gets picked up less, and they gain more power as a consumer when they specifically choose their sources of information. Any media organization will tell you that their Web site has more traffic than ever; which leaves traditional media being served with even less desire compared to 20 years ago. Being accessible in both traditional and progressive social media allows the company to embrace all the needs of their customers.
6. Cost-Effective
   It’s relatively cost effective to participate in social media on the Internet, because it’s underpinnings are to be human — be social. To be social, you just need to facilitate communication and embrace the fine art of it. Blog software is practically free, Web servers are cheap, and your social media ambassadors are the ones found blogging all day (where you walk by and think they are just surfing the Web…). This benefits consumers because their words aren’t collated in expensive data collection, such as administrative fees in market research surveys. Literally, an organization can obtain more ROI if they invest themselves into Social Media than traditional media.
7. It’s Alright to Mess Up, Consumers Will Forgive You
   In traditional media, companies are more often than not being talked about negatively in some form of a scandal or another. In social media, the tone of the discussion is more neutral — if not positive — than traditional media. Embracing this allows companies to try new things and be dynamic with their products and services. While this privilege is great to have, it wouldn’t be too prudent to be caught with your pants down too much.
8. (Smaller Organizations) Can Now Have an Industry-sized Voice
   No more does a smaller organization have to waste resources with PR publication services; they can disrupt their industry with a breakthrough product or service easily with social media. Not only does social media attract consumers, it falls within earshot of industry insider’s who are waiting to root for your company. Likewise, this fosters more free enterprise, and more targeted advertising to be spent, if you reach the right people searching for your industry’s keywords (See: Google AdWords).
9. Exploit the Heck Out of the Pareto Principle
   The Pareto principle is the 80/20 rule (also varied as the 90-9-1 theory) that describes the participation inequality. This theory holds true for any News or broadcast-like entity who wants to enter Social Media with a bang! Essentially, embracing exploiting this rule to your advantage will bring incredible results. Look at Digg, Propeller or Reddit. All their content is created by mostly a minority of users to serve the majority. Really this benefits consumers because it allows competitive free voice so your users are competing for attention on your Web property, thus raising engagement.
10. Using the Right Tools Will Help You Better Prepare for More Information
    When your organization uses the right tools (RSS, for example) your ingraining the very essentials to Social Media success. Further, when you facilitate an online Wiki, you are rewarding employees for building content with their name attributed to their contributions and people get to see their work grow. When people begin to change their thought process (even just a little), you can build amazing ideas with everyone’s contributions. Ideally, a successful company in social media would be strong internally as well as externally; and would be a mash pit of rock-solid ideas that benefit the company and the consumer.

Feel free to mull this over and share your concerns about Social Media in your organization in the comments to me and I’ll see if I (or anyone else) can help you out. Continue this conversation about social media, and write your own response and link to my entry! Do it… now!

Tags: business, Company, customer service, PR, social media

Wikipedia and Corporate Participation

It should come to no surprise that when companies have their pages in Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia edited by people, that their communications departments have a chance to play, too.

Wikiscanner, made by Virgil Griffith, has enabled a way for users to research the history and activity of the edits made to various articles, including the IP addresses who edited them.

Wired’s Threat Level ran the story and let their readers find rather interesting edits made among many companies for their financial interests. NY Times has now raised their eyebrow to this questionable activity, too. Maybe soon, Wikipedia will be taken more seriously.

Can’t we all just get along?

I’m probably the last person that would be defending Exxon or the MPAA for editing their own pages, but these companies have a corporate responsibility to play fair when it comes to user-generated communications. While at face value, they are “correcting wrong information,” their own financial and/or political interests end up corrupting Wikipedia. If you don’t like what someone has to say, participate in the talk section.

However, users shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that a company’s IP automatically means the edit is just propaganda. All information has to be questioned and verified, not just a company. Maybe there was more to a story than a former contributor once thought, this is where a company’s comm. department can help fill in the blanks and confusion.

If a company’s PR team is sweating, there’s really no need to. Just behave and understand that Wikipedia is a fully-disclosed entity, since that preserves the quality in their content. Maybe it’s been said before, but your own Wikipedia page should be read as if it was from an encyclopedia, not an advertisement. Using superlatives are the easiest sign that flags bias. However, using them in conjunction with quoted material is generally acceptable.

Is it just me, or do you think PR folks sometimes don’t understand the Web?

Tags: communications, corporate responsibility, honesty, PR, wikipedia

Sprint’s Waitless Video Campaign

Funny thing, I was stumbled into Sprint’s Waitless campaign. The marketing genius behind this was pretty creative, but I still don’t see how they make money. Maybe that’s the secret.

I think this is the best form of advertising for Sprint. Considering that I am either bitching about traffic or stuck on hold when I need to fix a billing error with them; this video takes the cake.

Oh, how I wished I could be the stunt driver in this commercial. But a Kia?!!

Tags: cell phones, funny videos, PR

Leveraging Piracy for Viral Marketing

If it weren’t for IRC, FTPs and our favorite — KaZaA, would we know about how great Adobe Photoshop is? The $700 professional photo-editing application was (and is) widely available on piracy networks. Same for the beta copies of Windows Vista and formerly XP. What if software companies embraced early adopters instead of fighting them?

I know I used Photoshop when I was younger, and I assure you I couldn’t afford it at the time. Since I became “hooked” on the Adobe and Macromedia series of software applications, I used it all the time and recommend it to friends and family. In turn, my momentary loss of a sale turned into prospects and sales simply because I used the software.

What if a software company released their software to the seeders on a pirate network? No cracks or keygens needed, just a private release for that network. For example, a special copy of that favorite graphics program just for The Pirate Bay. Allow the folks to spread it, use it will in turn recommend it. This can potentially spread the buzz about that product by enabling the influencers to use it, without them paying a dime.

The business folk might ask how to monetize it. This can be a tough choice, but you can limit certain features of the software and prompt them to upgrade to a full license. This can lead to potential sales as people require more heavy duty uses of the program. Another option is embedding an optional advertisement window into the software. Nothing intrusive or would upset a user, but something balance the “free” user out so you can churn some dough.

This might not be feasible for large software corporations like Microsoft or Adobe, but perhaps the lower-tiered ones have a chance to get their software out there, in front of the people to spread the word. I know that I’d try a program that was meant to be free versus one that isn’t.

A very timely blog entry from CrunchGear explains the history and the aspects of piracy in simple terms. Is this something that the “elite” lost their domination of? Are simple users (aka, n00bs) getting into it? This is probably the biggest fear the RIAA and MPAA have is when the average person is ripping, seeding, and burning seamlessly. Oh, wait — that was years ago.

That said, I discourage software piracy, but I do support companies embracing their “threats” and finding innovative solutions for them. This can happen with software, music, games or even movies. Just think if that hot new movie you downloaded was sponsored by Verizon?

What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

[tags]warez, software, appz, gamez, movies, solutions, business, piracy, consumers[/tags]

Tags: music, P2P, PR, Software, Torrent, videos

Bold Moves

I like what Ford is doing a lot. They are interacting with their consumers. I came across an intriguing advertisement online about their “Bold Moves” campaign and I clicked it, and watched the video. Candid video of some execs in a board room that admits their failures and is looking to turn the company around.

My favorite section on their site is the “Ford Responds”. They take questions sent in, and someone representing Ford responds back - publicly, honestly, and actually good responses in my view. They don’t censor their questions thereby allowing anyone to submit negative or positively-biased questions. I think that’s awesome, and definitely takes guts for a huge company to do.

Take a look yourself.

[tags]Ford, Corporate, Cars, Automotive, Autos, Internet, Blogging, Customer, Feedback[/tags]

Tags: Blogging, internet, online advertising, PR