I’ve been working hard on coming up with a cohesive social media strategy for EnTeam Organization, a non-profit based in St. Louis, MO. If you want to read the full thing, ping me and I’ll be happy to send you a copy.

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Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge have some great advice in PR 2.0: Putting the public back in public relations. I’ve taken it to heart by coming up with my top ten ways to utterly fail at public relations in today’s world of social media.

Read this list to find out how NOT to practice PR 2.0

10. Invest your entire budget on the latest technology so you have nothing left for staff time or training to put the tools to strategic use.

9. Automate as much of your content as possible so you never have to worry about visiting all those different social sites (what was that called again? Tweeter?) this way, all your sales pitches can reach as many people as possible with the click of a button.

8. Never respond to criticism or negative comments (this only stirs up trouble–plus, it’s hard.)

7. Don’t worry if the people following you on different networks are interested in your content. There is power in volume. Surely, someone somewhere will swallow your pitch.

6. Focus on producing as much content as possible at all times. With all your other systems completely automated, this should be no problem.

5. Send as many long press releases to as many recipients as you can. You want to make sure that these press releases include every detail about your products and services as possible. You should also be sure to repeat important points several times. Most people aren’t very smart.

4. Never link to a related company’s web site. That will just boost the competition.

3. Increase your follower count on social networks by setting up automated follow based on as many keywords as you can think of. Granted, you’ll soon be following millions of people, but you won’t be logging onto the actual sites ever anyway, so you don’t have to worry about the clutter. Plus, some of those people are bound to follow you back eventually

2. Measure your success by quantity, not quality. It is more important to get millions of people viewing your sales pitch than a few hundred passionate advocates posting their personal experience with your product/service to their own networks. You don’t want to lose control of your message or let them water down your perfect pitch.

1. Ignore all this social networking stuff online. It’s probably just a fad.

The straight and narrow path to successful public relations on the social web includes making sure everyone knows you are human, not a machine.

If you’re sensing a common theme in this list, you’re right. It seems that many professionals mistake the ease provided by social media as an excuse to mindlessly accumulate followers without putting much thought into it. This is not the case. If anything, social media requires an even more personal touch in order to be effective. People are incredibly adept at spotting mechanical responses. This is why the point is repeated over and over in Solis and Breakenridge’s book. It’s also the underlying theme in Groundswell, a book by Forrester Research execs Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.

Small organizations like this one can put this to practice easily by finding a few key opinion leaders and learning what they want to hear from you. When you can get a sense of what type of information will be useful to your key contacts, you can start to build meaningful relationships and cultivate them.

Ironically, the key to succeeding in our increasingly wired world is making sure everyone knows you’re human.

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Anderson makes a good case for how the explosion of online commerce equalizes opportunity and spreads the wealth

At least once a week I see protesters against universal health care holding huge posters warning of Obama’s socialist agenda (I work right by the White House). Conservative pundits like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck insult Obama by calling him a socialist…and we’re supposed to cringe in terror.

With this in mind, I ask:

How do you think our fair and balanced friends at Fox News would react to Chris Anderson’s view of the socialist state of our collective online futures?

First, let’s be clear. Socialism does not mean fascism or Stalinism. I’m not talking about big-brother State murdering journalists and political dissidents. And while there are many different political systems that adopt their policies as “socialist,” what I mean here is the strict definition of the principle.Wikipedia says it well: “a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with a method of compensation based on the amount of labor expended.”

The 80/20 distribution disappears when online commerce opens up the number of options available for the same cost.

Meanwhile, economist Vilfredo Pareto outlined wealth distribution at the turn of the 18th century with a ratio. He found that about 20 percent of the population owned 80 percent of the wealth. Since Pareto’s time, this ratio has been argued for all levels of modern economic systems. Merchants find that 20 percent of their products account for 80 percent of their sales.

If Anderson is to be believed, that model is dead with the Web.

That’s where socialism comes in. With the even-handed nature of the Web, you and I can decide to Digg an article or not, and that’s what rises to the top.

Digital technology eliminates the need for editorial decisions. All products can be treated equally and filtered for any number of different audiences.

Everyone has an equal opportunity to define the agenda for the day.

It’s a philosophical difference. When all information is treated equally, society is collectively held responsible for sifting through the nonsense. Anderson reflects, “Fundamentally, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is a healthier society than one that simply accepts what it’s told from a narrow range of experts and institutions.” When all information is treated fairly equally, we are required to think for ourselves. We are no longer media consumers, but media critics, analysts, and producers.

Anderson calls this, “The Paradise of Choice.” With the nearly unlimited boundaries of online commerce, choices become close to infinite. And the alternative to this paradise? Having those on top of society (the editors, business owners, political forces) choose for us. I doubt even the staunchest anti-socialism advocates would surrender their freedom of choice.

But the variety isn’t enough. In order to make smart choices, we also need more information about the choices.

And that’s where the power of filters comes in.

Search engines started the filtering process. Google analyzes keywords to bring meaning to a Web page. So that when you search for a term, you are likely to find a page all about that term.

Now social networks pick up where searches left off and filter topics and sources through your own network’s recommendations. Facebook’s new “Live Feed” even filters information using information on the friends with whom you interact the most.

Real-time-web promises to be even smarter–using information about our past actions to define what we are truly looking for in a search and recommending pages we never would have found otherwise.

But as online information grows and is filtered over time, one overriding quality stands out: We are quickly breaking off into many niche markets.

Could this be an element of human nature? To make ourselves feel more significant, we constantly form into small ponds? Anderson argues it is something deeper than that. In clusters, we are more creative and productive. Cities are energetic hubs. In these niches, society seems to group itself naturally.

Perhaps this natural filtering process is our natural way to seek and define our individual identity…not a very socialistic tendency. Whatever the answer, I find strength in the thought that we are moving in the direction of greater collective autonomy and power. Editors can overlook a big story, but millions of users on the Web are less likely to be so neglectful. One must hope that the “collective wisdom” we hear so much about is truly wise and not just a lot of fluff.

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This week I had the distinct honor to interview longtime investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. His office was a love story to journalism of days past. It was filled with piles of boxes, papers, files, notebooks, awards, and books written by him. He even had an old typewriter on top of a filing cabinet. He takes all his notes by hand and only types on the computer when the story is final. No database of contacts, just scribbles on the backs of yellow legal pads.

Newspapers are closing. Does this mean an end to quality information? Not if you believe Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody"

Unsurprisingly, he had a very negative view on the future of the profession to which he has dedicated more than 30 years.

But I’m not so sure I agree with Hersh’s pessimism.

I truly value quality journalism (and in the interest of full disclosure, I am paid to say that). But I’m not so sure that professional journalists are the only ones that can give us quality news. And with dropping circulations, shuttered newspapers, and a widely-held business model going up in flames, we may all be stuck relying on online collaboration to do journalists’ dirty work of keeping politicians honest, businessmen ethical, and communities connected.

Clay Shirky spends 344 pages illustrating what will happen when the masses organize without formal corporations in Here Comes Everybody. Shirky points out that social media is based on very different principles than large organizations.

For one, in social media, collaboration is king.

The most successful social tools are the ones that started small and relied on a community. Through trial and error, and by incredible collaboration, they grew incrementally bigger. Take Linux, which now runs on some 40 percent of the world’s servers. The brainchild of Linus Torvalds, Linux began with an unassuming note on a discussion group. All along the way, Torvalds sought help from a community of developers and promised to implement the best ideas. This collaboration proved to be one of his keys to success.

Steven Colbert teases Craig Newmark for destroying the American newspaper then asks him how he comes up with the idea. Craig's answer is true to Shirky's definition of success for social organization: He put collaboration front and center.

Now, apply that to journalism.

Many analysts blame the rise of Craigslist.org with the decline of the newspaper industry. Craig Newmark started Craigslist with much of the same humble community awareness that went into Linux. He saw people using the Internet as a way to help eachother out, and decided to do the same. Newspapers missed the boat. They put brand and tradition ahead of the community’s needs, and as a result they missed an opportunity to provide a useful tool that could have, in turn, raised their popularity–and their profits.

New Ways to Produce the News

In the new era of social collaboration, Shirky says, quality content can be produced by hundreds of tiny contributions.

Take Wikipedia, a community-created and maintained encyclopedia. Since 2001, this collaborative Web site has been a growing source of information on every topic from asphalt to astrophysics.

And it has the news.

Minutes after the 2005 London bombings, there was a Wikipedia page with a few sentences of what had happened. In the first five hours of the page’s existence, Shirky says, more than a thousand edits were made. Members of the Wikipedia community linked to traditional news outlets, and to phone numbers for people trying to track down loved ones. The page that was never touched by a professional journalist was a hub for vital information. Oh: And it didn’t cost a penny to produce that information or share it with the public.

Powerful Forces

The forces of social media have proven to bring real results. In May of 1992, the Boston Globe published more than 50 cases detailing abusive behavior by Catholic priests, specifically Reverend James R. Porter, who was accused of sexually abusing children in three different Boston parishes. The stories produced outrage, and the church criticized the media coverage as unfair. Despite the scandal, no priests resigned and no legal action resulted.

This online community formed in response to newspaper articles regarding scandal in the Catholic church. Their organized outrage brought real results.

Compare that with a similar scandal in 2002.

Same city. Same newspaper. Same appalling behavior by religious leaders (this time it was Father John Geoghan, a Catholic priest who had abused children at parishes over a 35-year period). The difference? Technology enabled outraged readers to organize and demand action.

When the story broke in the Boston Globe, blogs, e-mail and discussion forums allowed readers to forward the information on to their own networks of friends, parents, and colleagues. An organization of concerned Catholics formed to demand change. And they brought results: about one year after the formation of the group, Cardinal Bernard F. Law, then archbishop of the Boston Diocese, resigned.

In ten years, the technology was developed for communities of like-minded individuals to unite forces. So instead of a newspaper article creating a wave that eventually died away, it created a tidal wave of action around the world. And it brought a powerful institution to its knees.

If online organizations can produce those kinds of results, I wonder:

Could it be that creative collaboration online could produce collective wisdom surpassing that of the professional news industry?

Time will tell.

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Ted Wohlfarth does! Check out my interview with Ted about the organization he founded, EnTeam Organization. You can also find them online at www.enteam.org

Click here for an interview with EnTeam Organization Founder and Executive Director Ted Wohlfarth talks about his inspiration for helping kids score win-win relationships.

Mobile post sent by dawnlisette using Utterli.  Replies.  mp3

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Perhaps one of the reasons I like social media so much is because it seems to go against the very foundation of traditional marketing practices. Reading Forrester Research’s “Groundswell” you almost feel like you’re reading a self-help book for how to be a good friend rather than a book on how to launch a successful social media strategy. Succeeding at social media is all about being authentic, patient, flexible, a good listener, humble, and collaborative (I’m not making this up–that list is lifted straight from the conclusion of the book).

An illustration of my Mad Men avatar making a presentation on how to adapt traditional marketing to social media.

Contrast this with AMC’s portrayal of traditional advertising through their hit series Mad Men and you’ll understand why social media has old-school marketers in a tizzy. Don Draper is the king of advertising at the New York marketing powerhouse at the “Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency.” He knows best and confidently convinces clients of the right strategy, dazzles execs with daring designs, and woos women with his debonaire style and poise.

Don Draper wouldn’t last a minute in today’s social media market. For one, his credibility would be shot as soon as a blogger revealed his dirty little secret that he is able to hide from his clients, colleagues, friends, and even his wife. In the world of social media, often your efforts to hide something make a story blow up as a bigger scandal than if you had let the information go public yourself. Take Digg Founder Kevin Rose’s decision to remove a link to a blog detailing the copyrighted processing key code to HD-DVDs. The community fought back. In a matter of days the code was posted on more than 3,000 sites. The fact that Kevin had removed the link became the news. Kevin gave up, and blogged about his decision. The next day, there were 605 news stories about the incident.

Don would also have to learn that before you can be successful in the world of social technology (what Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff call “the groundswell”), you have to be willing to fail big and keep your plan flexible. It’s important to focus on the relationships and the conversation you are provoking in your community more than on the shiny new tools you are using. You can’t get enamored with new technology without first finding a way that it fits into your overall strategy and meets a specific need of your community.

Why do I get the feeling that Joan would have understood the groundswell better than her male colleagues?

Li and Bernoff recommend working to understand your audience before doing anything to engage them. It is is essential to understand how your targeted audience participate in the groundswell – are they creating content, commenting on existing content, reading content only, or disconnected completely (and note that according to Forrester’s latest research, 18 percent of U.S. internet users want nothing to do with social media). They recommend starting with a POST Method — considering the people you hope to reach, your objectives and how you will measure them, your end-game strategy and then finally, when all other factors have been well determined: the technology.

Also unlike the self-absorbed branding practices of Mad Men’s heyday, the groundswell will see through bullhorn brand broadcasting in an instant. Social marketing has to be more subtle and integrated into a product the people find value in. This explains an increase in product placement on sites, TV shows, movies etc. The groundswell is savvy to the in-your-face marketing that brings Don Draper his glory. If the people sense you are out to sell something, they will go elsewhere. Sites like beinggirl.com do this seamlessly–they sell Tampax and Always in a non-obtrusive manner while providing American pre-teens a space to have real conversations and just be themselves.

Finally, Don would need to understand that part of being successful in the groundswell is not just asking for people’s opinions because you want them to see yours. You have to put the community’s contributions to good use. Bell Canada does this well with their community tool ID-ah! The community allows employees to suggest improvements, then vote for their favorites. The top-voted ideas are then implemented–showing employees that the online community is more than just a place to vent.

So Don, if you or any of your contemporaries are out there, remember that social media marketing is nothing like advertising forty years ago. Today it’s all about provoking great conversation, showing the community you are what you say you are, and truly listening to what others have to say. If you do that, the groundswell will reward you.

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After all, life is more like a flowing stream than a series of blogs splashed in your face, right?

Ok, I’ll stop myself now before going crazy on the “stream” puns here. If you haven’t already heard, lifestreaming is the new blogging.

What is lifestreaming, you ask? It’s a way to pull all that content you’re posting in a million different places (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, oh my!) into one beautiful stream. See a great description from ReadWriteWeb the Wikipedia definition here, and its semi-official blog here.

Please note a special exception: Lifestreaming is NOT lifecasting (see video illustration)…those are two very different beasts. Lifecasting has largely gone out of mode, which I think we can all agree is a great development. People have realized that it is extremely difficult to maintain newsworthy activity every moment of your life.**

**Caveat: iJustine is an exception…people will watch her do just about ANYTHING!

Lifestreaming is about putting the conversation front and center–which after all, is the whole point of social media. Its advocates say it is the wave of the future (I lied, the puns just keep floating to the surface!). Compared to blogging (gulp, yes, I see the hypocrisy) it does feel more natural. You are already sharing links with friends via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and other media, so why not congregate all that content in one happy place?

It's all about the conversation

Just Sept. 8, MediaBistro, the go-to site for journalists to hear inside-industry news, created a lifestream of user content. (See opening post here) I would love major media organizations to do the same. People who write in to newspapers often have incredibly insightful and interesting comments (my favorite example of the people’s collective wit here). This would be a great way to better connect with an audience and let them know that their voices matter.

Another use for lifestreaming is its very streamlined nature. Using tools like Posterous you can pull content from all the sites you regularly visit and then export it back out again. Or if you prefer, you can send your content straight to your lifestream and syphon it off to your favorite spots. See a brilliant graph of this here.

That said, I don’t think we should all abandon the blogging ship (that’s pun # seven, if you’re counting) and take on lifestreaming. I see value in both.

Blogging is better:

• For those who work to focus on a specific topic (like me, I keep my lunch box musings in an entirely separate space)
• For sites that hope to establish the impression of editorial credibility (e.g. my all-time favorite women’s blog)
• For people who want to compartmentalize their lives. You may want to share more personal content with friends on Facebook, but be willing to blast your Twitter followers every few minutes with the latest item to catch your eye. Your blog may be reserved for musings that are truly unique and worthy of extra time. Honestly, that is the way I work, and I’m not sure I’d want to change it.

Am I missing any major points here? Educate me in the comments section below!

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