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New Hampshire Social Media Breakfast Recap

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During the latest New Hampshire Social Media Breakfast held at Rick’s Pond View and sponsored by CustomScoop, the topic of the morning was focused on Government 2.0 – how utilities and municipalities are using social media to communicate and connect with customers and the public. Some of the speakers of the day included Martin Murray from Public Service of New Hampshire (PSNH) and John Daly of The Boston Police Department who both spoke and shared how their organizations are adopting social media technologies.

I was especially interested in the presentation by Martin Murray who handles media relations for PSNH – better known as @PSNH on Twitter.

With the ice storm that hit on December 11, 2008, the word quickly got out that @PSNH was on Twitter and followers increased by 1,700% as customers were seeking answers and comfort in knowing that others were dealing with similar situations and that @PSNH was listening and responding.

As a customer of PSNH, I was very impressed with the organization’s use of Twitter to communicate with its customers during one of the biggest ice storms in the company’s history. The treacherous storm knocked out power to more than 320,000 residents across the state – including mine – for six very long days.

I also found it interesting that, along with Twitter, PSNH has also adopted other social media tools to engage with and communicate with customers – using Flickr and YouTube to share pictures and videos, as well as setting up a Facebook fan page.

In the video clip below, Martin sums up how the customer experience has changed significantly with PSNH’s adoption of Twitter. Instead of private one-to-one phone conversations with a customer, PSNH is now able to share and include others in those discussions publicly – getting more information out to more people.

PSNH video:

John Daly and The Boston Police Department (BPD), known as @Boston_Police on Twitter, are also not strangers to social media. They were the first city police department to have a blog and with their Text a Tip program, people can text their anonymous tips. It wasn’t until recently that John decided to get the BPD onto Twitter to use it as a public information tool.

Check out the video below where John talks about how they are utilizing Twitter, as well as their plans for integrating it into their 911 Center to use as an early warning detection system – cool stuff!

BPD video:

Both The Boston Police Department and PSNH saw an opportunity to improve communications with the adoption of social media technologies. The results have proved that it is indeed a smart move – doing so has helped both entities to connect with the public and their customers on a more personal level. They can now include customers in the discussions at hand – no other communications method can offer the same results.

P.S. – The next New Hampshire Social Media Breakfast is scheduled for April 17th at 8am.

Christine Perkett and Heather Mosley Talk “PR and Social Media” on Lotame’s Social Media Remix

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Lotame’s (client) “Social Media Remix” on BlogTalkRadio is described as “a show for all the publishers, advertisers, fans, skeptics, employees, and friends of everything and anything that is Social Media.” As mentioned in last Friday’s Persuasive Picks, PerkettPR’s own Christine Perkett and Heather Mosley appeared on the show last week to talk about PR’s role in Social Media and some best practices that are applied when using it for clients.

What do you think? How do you use social media in your promotions? We’d love to hear your stories and anecdotes as well via comment, links, etc. We’ve embedded the BlogTalkRadio player for easy access to the show – Enjoy!

PR, Social Media, Transparency & Good News

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I’ve been having a very lively discussion on Twitter today about PR, social media and where the lines of transparency fall. We asked if a PR firm should run social media entities in social communities. If they do, should they identify themselves in these communities – like Twitter, Facebook, etc. – as the PR firm or as part of the company’s marketing team, or is simply having a company entity sufficient enough to imply that you’re probably talking to the marketing folks (which could include an agency). How transparent is transparent enough? I received a lot of lively – and differing – answers:

PR Company Transparency

My favorite answer, however, was from @tgruber. She said:

@tgruber Transparency Reply

It’s my favorite answer because for me, if I’m interacting with a company’s brand online, it seems obvious that the marketing team would be behind it unless otherwise noted (as in the case of @zappos which is clearly identified as the CEO, Tony Hsieh; or in our case @PerkettPR – where we identify who is behind the Twittering of the brand right in our bio).

But I’m in marketing and PR – so I wanted other viewpoints. If you are interacting with @Lotame (client), for example, do you assume you are talking to the CEO or a marketing executive, or someone else? If a PR firm maintains the account should they say in their bio, for example, “We’re PerkettPR Twittering on behalf of Client.”? If you follow @TJMaxx, @Starbucks, @JetBlue, @LuckyShops or others, does it matter to you who’s behind the social media curtain – as long as they aren’t claiming to be the CEO when they are not?

We’re excited to announce several new clients today and as we continue planning and launching many social media campaigns for them in the coming months, we continue to value and learn from the collective communities and their opinions. That includes you – so what do you think?

Interactive video campaigns begin to emerge

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Back in September Jeremiah Owyang created a post entitled “YouTube Videos Get Interactive: Choose Your Own Adventure” that featured an example of a video that makes use of YouTube’s new annotation functionality. This functionality allows content creators to embed notes, speech bubbles and clickable hotspots into their videos after they have been uploaded to YouTube. While this type of interactivity has been possible with other technologies like Adobe Flash, YouTube is making it extremely easy and accessible for all “YouTuber’s” to integrate into their projects.

Being a social media guy and new media creator, I naturally saw some great potential for using these new features as part of a future client campaign. Coincidentally, the opportunity to do just that came about a few days later for our client TeleMessage and their TeamText campaign – geared toward educating consumers (specifically teens and tweens) about the ability to send text to landline.

The result is a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style video dubbed “Jenny’s Dilemma,” in which the viewer can choose from one of three different endings to the main story. The correct outcome features a call to action that directs the viewer to a landing site for additional information related to the campaign.

Other examples that use the new annotation functionality include a trivia question from Val’s Art Diary (as featured in Jeremiah’s post) and a racy (mildly NSFW) “choose your own adventure” campaign for the Samsung Instinct mobile device called “Follow Your Instinct.”

It should be interesting to see how marketers integrate this new YouTube functionality into their campaigns moving forward. We hope that you’ll take a look at our submission to the interactive video genre, and let us know what you think!

Users gripe, Adobe listens

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Have you ever had an experience using a product that motivated you to tell the world about it? Web designers Erik Frick and Adam Meisel did. Their professional use of Adobe products spawned the creation of a small site called Dear Adobe that could be used as a sounding board to vent their frustrations.

Once launched, news of the site traveled fast, and almost a thousand entries (mostly rants) were posted to the site in the first 24 hours. Inside of 48 hours, Adobe began to take notice with John Nack, Adobe’s Principal Product Manager for Photoshop writing about the site on his blog and actually crafting responses to several of the Dear Adobe rants. In just two weeks time the site exploded to over a million page views and hundreds of new submissions were being added daily.

Dear Adobe

Sites like these are a continued reminder to companies that consumers can have a significant impact on your brand in the online space. Fortunately, Adobe was listening and is now getting involved in responding to the gripes. This was a good first step for them to make, but what else could they do to leverage the situation? Hopefully, Adobe executives are able to see this as an opportunity to take a lesson from Dell’s Ideastorm community and purchase the site to integrate it into Adobe.com. It would be a bold move that would show the Adobe community that they really do care.

Ultimately, what Adobe does with all the rants (aka, valuable information) still remains to be seen. Their product suite has been around for a very long time and has grown to mammoth proportions. The cost of implementing some of the most popular changes might be next to impossible without major re-writes, while others like adjusting their prices (currently the #2 most popular gripe) might be easier to implement.

Takeaways

Put yourself in Adobe’s shoes and reflect on how your own company currently interacts with the online space. What online monitoring processes does your company have in place? Are you prepared to get involved and respond to your customer community when a “Dear YourCompanyName” site suddenly pops up? What is stopping you from boldly implementing your own Dear Adobe?

PerkettPR is now on Alltop

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alltop_badge.jpgAs of this morning we’ve officially been added to the PR section of Alltop.com! For the unfamiliar, here is how they describe their site:

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — “aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, Muslim, celebrity gossip, military, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the headlines of the latest stories from dozens of sites and blogs.

Thanks to Guy and the Alltop Team for including us!

Should Google’s Knol be part of your marketing toolkit?

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Knol - A Unit of KnowledgeAfter a half year of testing, Google publicly launched its Knol service this week and the inter-webs are buzzing about how it will stack up against its similar encyclopedia-like competitors. As you’ll see from the comparison below, Knol is much less restrictive than Wikipedia when it comes to creating content.

Knol vs. Wikipedia

Right out of the gate there are several major differences between Knol and Wikipedia that make publishing information much more accessible. First, anyone can create a “Knol” (page) on any topic, even if its already been written about. It will be common to find multiple pages on the same subject written by different authors. Google doesn’t have a team of moderators to keep content aligned to a specific viewpoint, and multiple perspectives on topics are encouraged.

Each Knol author has complete control over the content they create. It can’t be modified or deleted without the author’s permission. Any subject can be written about as long as it falls under Knols’ Terms of Service and Content Policy. Unlike Wikipedia, self-promotion is acceptable as the content policy states “You may use Knol to create articles for your business or to promote your lawful products or services.”

Once a Knol has been published, readers are free to post comments, assign a rating or write a review on the content. These abilities are clearly missing from Wikipedia and add an extra layer of interaction between the author and the reading community.

The final difference between Knol and Wikipedia lies in the author’s ability to monetize their content. Google AdSense banners can be placed on Knol pages to potentially generate small amounts of income as content becomes popular. One of Google’s biggest hurdles right now is the task of starting a knowledge-base from scratch. Hopefully this type of incentive will be enough to consistently attract writing talent and help build a repository worth returning to.

Google's Knol

The future of Knol

Just as I’ve done above, most articles being written about Knol immediately compare it to Wikipedia. How can you not when it’s the most well-known online information archive in the world? However, Knol really has more in common with HubPages.com and Seth Godin’s Squidoo.com. Both of these sites have the same ability to create un-moderated, monetized content, and Knol could potentially give them a run for their money.

While both Squidoo and HubPages give authors complete control over their content, they have not been widely used as alternatives to Wikipedia. Knol’s clean and professional design could be the just what this type of platform needs to attract businesses who have encountered multiple failed attempts to publish information there. At the same time, this is a double edged sword that could see Knol turning into a glorified business directory. Smart businesses will leverage the expertise they have in their respective verticals and publish high quality content that is not purely a marketing sell sheet.

Regardless, this is an ambitious addition to the Google product line-up, and it should be very interesting to see how it evolves over the next few years. What is your opinion of Knol? Will it survive and flourish or struggle to grow in the shadow of its rivals?

PerkettPR’s Heather Mosley on MyRaganTV.com

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PerkettPR’s own Executive Vice President, Heather Mosley, makes her second appearance on MyRaganTV.com speaking about the adoption of Twitter for business use. Heather originally contributed her views to MyRaganTV on how PR professionals utilize social media tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogs and Twitter as part of their recipe for success, after a speaking engagement at the 2008 Ragan Conference in Chicago. Account Director, Lisa Dilg was also quoted in the article that accompanies the video release. (You can follow Heather on Twitter via @mosleyppr, Lisa via @pprlisa and our agency via @PerkettPR)



Mzinga Acquires Prospero – Come join the conversation!

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Mzinga acquires Prospero

PerkettPR client Mzinga announced today that it is acquiring Prospero, a fellow Massachusetts-based social media platform builder. Both companies excel in the creating white-label social media platforms that allow companies to create feature-rich online communities. This merger clearly places Mzinga in the spotlight as the leader in business oriented social networking. The true question lies in how this will affect other white-label providers in this space.

Notable social media bloggers such as Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang and Scott Monty have already posted on the merger and shared their views on what the future might hold in this space. What is your take on the future of white-label social media platforms or even social media for corporations in general? To help answer that question, leaders from the newly formed Mzinga along with PerkettPR and Topaz Partners will be hosting a Twitter-based Q&A session throughout today (Monday, March 3rd).

Feel free to follow and converse with any of us on Twitter:

Mzinga/Prospero: Aaron Strout, Jim Storer, Colin Browing, and Heather Strout
PerkettPR: Jeff Glasson, Lisa Dilg and our corporate presence
Topaz Partners: Doug Haslam and Sandy Kalik

Additional Reading:

TechCrunch – More Consolidation in the White Label Social Networking Space: Mzinga Acquires Prospero

Mashable – Mzinga Acquires Prospero to Grow Online Community Solutions Sector

ReadWriteWeb – Enterprise Community Provider Mzinga Swallows Prospero

CenterNetworks – Mzinga Raises $32.5 Million and Acquires Prospero Business Social Networking Platform Provider

Aaron Strout, Mzinga – Red Letter Day

Jim Storer, Mzinga – Following the Mzinga/Prospero News

Colin Browning – Social Media: Working Behind The Scenes

Tech PR Gems – What do you do when a social media client has big news?

This event is a great example of social media companies actually putting social media tools to use and engaging in conversation to benefit the community. We look forward to chatting with you. See you in the Twittersphere!

Jeff Pulver’s Social Media Breakfast Tour

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Boston is a great place to be if your job revolves around social media. Each month you can count on multiple events taking place, and all of them are supported by a tight-knit bunch of social media and PR professionals.

One such event is the Social Media Breakfast, which was the brainchild of Boston’s own Bryan Person. Bryan founded the concept of the Social Media Breakfast in 2007 and has successfully organized four events to date. His fifth is scheduled for February 13th in Cambridge, Massachusetts and reservations quickly filled up in a few days. Jeff Pulver also brought his flavor of social media to Boston in 2007 in the form of his “Real-Time Social Networking” event which he started in Tel-Aviv, Israel.

The concept is simple. Take online activities like “tagging” or posting on your friend’s wall and apply them to a real person! Jeff provides small stickers for real-time tagging and Post-It notes for people who want to post to each other’s walls. His first of these events in Bean-town was a well received evening affair at Vox Populi. His second was a mash-up between between Bryan’s SMB concept and his own real-time networking idea. Are you ready to move to Boston yet?

Fortunately for those outside of Boston, Jeff has begun taking the Person/Pulver mash-up on the road as “Breakfast with Pulver (and friends).” Scheduled dates for February include:

A date for San Jose, California is also scheduled for March 17th, but will be specifically for friends attending the Spring 2008 VON.x Conference. Additional events for Chicago, Atlanta, Toronto, Montreal, Nashua, London (UK) and more are being planned for futures dates. A Facebook account is required to get more details on each event and to RSVP.

Employees of PerkettPR will be at Jeff’s Breakfast in Providence on the February 12th as well as Bryan’s Social Media Breakfast in Cambridge on the 13th. I highly recommend attending one or more of the events if you reside in or near any of the cities listed. Its guaranteed to be great time filled with food, fun and networking. Besides, where else can you cover someone with stickies in public and get away with it?!