This Was News?

OK, I get it; Twitter's all the rage and everything they do or even think about doing gets covered with microscopic detail. However, I was a bit surprised when the whole tech news world basically stopped for a second while Twitter unveiled details that many think will pave the way to an ad-supported business model.

As most anyone who follows tech knows, how Twitter's going to make money has been one of the biggest reasons the platform has stayed in the press -- at least if you don't count Kanye West's most recent apology to Taylor Swift. We've all been waiting for many months, especially after the announcement of several new high-level executives, to see what kind of innovative platform for making money the firm was going to unveil.

This week we got our strongest hints when Twitter unveiled some changes designed to basically keep people on Twitter.com for much longer periods. Most know think they're leaning toward an ad-supported business model -- which leads me to my next big question. "Haven't we been there before?"

It seems Twitter thinks that it will be able to finance itself with ads despite the fact that the increasing glut of inventory has pushed down ad prices significantly. Bottom line: Advertising brings in less money all the time because there are more places to display ads and because reading patterns are becoming much more fragmented.

To be fair, Twitter did unveil several new features on its site, including the ability to include multimedia content, that many see as a move Twitter is making to directly position itself as a Facebook competitor. One big difference I see, however, is Facebook is designed as more of a "walled" garden where you can control who sees the content you distribute. In contrast, Twitter's more of a broadcast platform designed to get your message out to as many as possible. This is illustrated not only in the ability to send messages to followers, but by the fact that retweets are often the primary reason that someone's message gets wide enough distribution for mass attention.

Niall Harbison of The Next Web penned a laudatory piece on the announcement, saying that what at first appears like a Web site upgrade will emerge as something much more meaningful given the role that Twitter now plays in our every day lives.

Time will tell on that prediction, but it seems to me it's going to take more than another ad model for Twitter to reach its full potential.

Economic Downturn Ushers in Continual Career Maintenance

By now, unless you've been living under a rock, most readers here know that we're in the midst of the worst economic downturn in some 30 years – at least from an employment standpoint. While much attention is being paid to new signs that point to recovery, it's important that we all take away lessons from this period that will serve us well for years, and perhaps decades to come. Because I frequently get e-mails from college students and other early-career professionals due to writing I do on other venues, I thought I'd give my take on the current environment, as it relates to the PR profession.

Certainly this downturn was very pronounced in the fact that more jobs have been lost in the last two years than any period in the last 30 years. At the same time, many people saw their cost of living increase, which reduced the power of the wages they were earning. However, what many don't think about is the fact that this loss of wage power is actually a trend that's been in motion some time and may necessitate everyone to think differently about work and their careers.

We all know that the days when you work for one employer for most of your career are nonexistent now and have been for quite some time. Even with that commonplace knowledge, however, most people don't think of a career as something that has to be maintained. In other words, you need to set long-term goals and a number of short-term goals designed to get you from “point A” to “point B.” Realize that establishing yourself in your career is a marathon and not a sprint. You'll also likely suffer setbacks, due to the changing nature of the economy and/or your industry, among other reasons. The most important thing to remember in all this is that if you properly maintain your career, you'll be better prepared for these shifts when they happen.

What does that mean exactly? For starters, keep abreast of changes in your industry. For PR pros, that means continually staying on top of not only media trends, but developments in the social media world. The latter is rapidly changing; for example, MySpace was once considered to be the top dog, but has now become mostly an also-ran unless you're an entertainment specialist. Likewise, knowing how to properly integrate various social-media tools into a cohesive campaign is vitally important as well. I continually tell clients to never assume you know how someone will find you. Some days it might be Google, other days it might be LinkedIn. But if you've got all your social-media elements working in tandem, it really doesn't matter. I regularly use Twitter to drive users to published content online, I post news of all new client developments via both Twitter and LinkedIn and make sure that my LinkedIn profile is up-to-date.

Also, even relatively new professionals need to start thinking about making a name for yourselves. We all know that, in this day and age, a prospective employer will conduct an extensive Web search to see what you've done online – including anything that you've written. Given that, you need to actively manage your information to ensure that a selection of it is available online for employers or prospective clients to easily peruse. Do simple things like including URLs to your online profiles in your e-mail signature. This approach takes all the guess work out of knowing how people will find you online, as that strategy will work as well for people coming in from a search engine as it will going to your Web site or a social-networking site profile directly.

Finally, once you've established a high level of comfort with the basic tactics of the PR business, look to begin specializing in a few industries. The most important thing to remember about career maintenance is you don't want to be like everyone else. Instead, you want to become known for a few things that remain marketable throughout your career. These may change over time, and we'll all have to freshen up on things, but it's a big help if you've become known as a “go to” person within a few industries.

To increase your reputation within an industry, carefully select one or two industry associations to join and become active in them. Personally, I make sure at least one of these are outside the PR/marketing world. I've got nothing against my fellow PR and marketing pros, but in my opinion, networking extensively outside those industries pays bigger dividends, since everyone in the room's not a competitor and you're raising your reputation within an industry from which you hope to draw clients.

Finally, even for those of you who aren't solo practitioners, practice and refine your “elevator pitch.” These days, it's vitally important for people to be able to give a cohesive 30-second answer when someone asks “What do you do?” It's especially important for people in public relations, because very few people know what the heck we do. You never know who you're going to meet or where, so being able to give a clear, concise answer to this question could pay big dividends down the road.

Twitter, Facebook Attacks Show Vulnerabilities of Platform Reliance

Online and printed media outlets, as well as blogs and other social networks, were abuzz last week with news over the apparent cyber-hijacking of Twitter as part of what a blogger claims was an act of orchestrated retaliation.

While the details of the specific attacks have been well chronicled by numerous other outlets, what wasn't written about extensively was how these attacks illustrate perfectly the need to consider not only the demographics and audience that you can reach via social media, but also the technology ramifications of any campaign you launch.

With the increasing reliance on social networks, the Web has made a migration of sorts away from a collection of properties based on uniform standards ratified by international bodies to a few, select properties that, when taken offline by technical issues or some other circumstance, can cause widespread disruption. That's not to say that using Twitter or Facebook for social-media campaigns is a bad thing; however, just as you want your important computer files residing in several places including one site that's remotely managed, you want your social media presence to be planned similarly as well to avoid widespread disruption in the event of outages.

The best way to get around these attacks is to rely on platforms that you exclusively control, but are remotely maintained. Examples can include everything from Web sites to blogs. While one of your hosts may go down at any one time, if you host the different elements of your overall Web presence at different locales/services, the odds of a widespread disruption are lower.

Even if another widespread attack doesn't occur in the future, it will likely pay dividends in the event an Internet backbone provider has a widespread disruption or something similar happens. We sometimes forget that for all the redundancies that were built into the Internet, occasionally all it takes is for an errant backhoe operator to take down a big chunk of the Internet, as has happened in the past.

Just as you plan for conventional disasters at the office, planning for them in your online activity can avoid costly and time-consuming disruptions

WSJ Story Finds Twitter Brings Few Benefits to Financial Pros

According to a new story in The Wall Street Journal examining the impact that Twitter has had on financial advisors who've tried to use the service to build their business, the micro-blogging platform has yet to deliver any major results.

The story is just the latest in a series of articles questioning Twitter's value, its overall strategy and whether it will ever actually be able to deliver the goods when it comes to business development. And it's important to note that while the story mentions that Twitter isn't responsible for bringing the advisors who use it scads of new revenue or clients, it is having tangible benefits for many.

One advisor mentioned in the story, who focuses on individuals with particular interests and successes in charitable giving, has found Twitter to be a valuable way to form relationships with influential figures in the field, such as the heads of well-known foundations.

Another advisor has effectively used Twitter to form relationships with women entrepreneurs, a nice parallel to her goal of developing a financial practice specifically targeted to providing advice to women.

This story is yet another reason that I advise clients that while building their business through Twitter is probably something that would take a long time and might yield relatively few results, Twitter shows great promise when it comes to continually engaging with clients. The main reasons clients leave firms with whom they do business is because they feel the firm doesn't take the relationship seriously enough and is not communicative enough. This is one area where Twitter gives individuals a very easy way to continually work on this thorny issue.

Twitter Increasingly Used to Promote Contests

Much has been made about Twitter and the various uses for the service, ranging from sending out droll updates to friends to businesses using the microblogging service to get a better handle on customer-service issues. Now, a new trend is emerging on the platform, which could play into efforts to develop a business model.

As reported in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, the "buzz-generating" value of Twitter is increasingly being pared with the proven benefits of contests to increase brand awareness. As an example, Moonfruit, a London-based Web-design firm, added 47,000 followers and increased its Web site traffic by 1300 percent by using Twitter to promote a 10th-anniversary contest. The contest used "tweets" as its entry method, with entrants only required to place the #Moonfruit "hashtag" somewhere in the tweet.

As a result of the campaign, Moonfruit says its paying customers have increased by 20 percent and the number of trial users has grown more than three fold. One important thing companies using Twitter to promote contests have found is that while they're great at initially luring people as followers, companies must make a concerted and continual effort to keep them engaged or traffic will fall off precipitously once the promotional period has ended.

Intern's Widely-Read Report Offers Blunt Analysis of Teens' Media Habits

A report authored by a 15-year-old UK intern is getting a lot of attention this week for a blunt analysis of one of the most popular social-networking tools around.

Matthew Robson, who is working this summer for Morgan Stanley's UK offices, authored a candid report detailing the media consumption habits of typical 15-year-olds. The report included information on their favorite television programs, as well as where they spent most of their time online.

Surprisingly, Twitter received very little praise in the report, with Robson saying not only do most teens not read newspapers and dislike ads, but they also have very little use for the popular micro-blogging service.

Robson says teens shy away from Twitter because most use it from cell phones and, unlike e-mail messages, every text message costs money. Robson said teens would rather send texts between friends than use them for updates "that no one is viewing."

He goes on to say that teens have no interest in physical newspapers and would rather consume their news online. He calls banner ads "annoying and pointless" and says that teens prefer to download or stream their music using free sites/services rather than pay for them.

While Robson's report may seem harsh, I think it's one of the best assessments of the media transition I've read. Everyone talks about the popularity of Twitter and iTunes and fails to mention the fact that banner ads remain a relatively ineffective way to finance content. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a delay in finding new, effective forms of financing online content.

Hopefully Robson's report will not only result in watercooler conversation, but some honest analysis of business models across the media and entertainment industry.

Morgan Stanley executives in the UK were so impressed with Robson's report that they immediately circulated it throughout the C suite, which prompted a number of high-level client inquiries.

When It Comes to Social Media, Pick Battlegrounds Carefully

As the "social-media revolution" continues to be chronicled in many major business and technology publications, most of the stories make little distinction between the various players involved, nor to they attempt to make any kind of judgement in regard to which are more likely to have a quantifiable business impact. According to the results of a new study, they should.

A study issued yesterday by A.C. Nielsen & Co. indicates 60 percent of Twitter users leave the service after the first month. Nielsen didn't make full copies of the study available yesterday, but regardless of the reasons for the quick defection, it doesn't pose promise for the social-media darling, which has yet to figure out a business model -- or even debut a viable revenue model.

The euphoria over Twitter isn't really surprising. In most any wave of change that involves a new way to communicate or a new tech-based movement, there's a rush to crown everyone winners rather than worry about things like viable business models. We saw this in the dot-com boom years when it came to e-commerce platforms. Back then, everyone was predicting how no one would go to "brick and mortar" stores and everyone from consumers to businesses would shift the vast majority of their commerce online.

Obviously, there will be some changes that are a result of this period that will stick and become a part of business life. However, the Twitter study shows how important it is to individually evaluate every player involved in a new trend and make separate judgements on their value. So, for example, while Twitter may go on to establish partnerships with a number of consumer-driven companies who like the ability to instantly communicate with their audience, it might not end up having much of an application for companies who are predominantly B2B focused.

As communications consultants, it's our job to help clients sort through the field and make value judgements based on what's suitable for our clients rather than just jumping on the latest bandwagon. Not only is it good for our clients, but it's good for the PR business as a whole as well; in short, everyone benefits from picking a winner.

New Venues Can't Escape Old Business Rules

It seems every day, there's a new story on Twitter or some other new communications tool and their likely impact on the future of marketing and public relations. Pundits and prognosticators writing about what will happen with Twitter should look no further than one of the last new media darlings.

In a report issued this week, Credit Suisse projects that YouTube will lose $470 million this year, while raking in only $240 million in revenue. Since Google ponied up $1.65 billion for YouTube more than two years ago, YouTube doesn't face the same financial pressures of a typical technology company, as long as Google's willing to underwrite YouTube's losses. Still, their progress does speak volumes about what happens when you put a platform ahead of a business model.

PR pros and other communications professionals looking for help in deciding where to place their marketing money and effort would be wise to remember that the notion that you can build an audience first and worry about your business model later generally hasn't worked out too well historically. Just because Twitter's a media darling today doesn't mean it won't be gone at some point in the future.

I was surprised to finally see a negative -- or realistic, depending on your take -- column on Twitter that ran this week on CNET's News.com penned by Charles Cooper. Basically, Cooper said while the rest of the media world may continue to fawn over Twitter, he's going to take a vacation and wait for Twitter's co-founders to finally cement a business model before joining the crowd singing their praises.

Like Cooper, I'm generally advising all my clients to put their time and effort into social media platforms and tools that are based around a solid, quantifiable business model. Quite simply, if the platform you're banking on hasn't figured out how they're going to put money in the bank over the long term, it's not worth the majority of your time and effort at this point.

Twitter may indeed go on to become a true sensation that changes the way we communicate, but it's important to remember it may also become another WebTV; there's $425 million Microsoft would likely love to have back.

Is Twitter the latest media relations tool?

In creating one of the most simplistic social-media platforms out there, Twitter seems to have succeeded at catching its share of the buzz factor. Now, some PR and marketing bloggers are going as far as to call it the latest and greatest media-relations platform.

For the uninitiated, Twitter allows you to send short, simple messages to friends and colleagues. It allows you to "follow" people you choose and allows anyone else on the platform to choose whether or not they wish to "follow" you or anyone else. Unlike LinkedIn and other social-media platforms, the relationships don't have to be reciprocal; in other words, you can follow people without them giving you their permission.

For the past few weeks, a number of listservs and trade publications, including Ragan have been asking is Twitter going to become the defacto tool in media relations. The theory is that as more journalists join the network, they'll send short updates describing the stories they're working on and that will support a wide range of pitching opportunities for PR pros who subscribe to their feeds.

Some have said Twitter is destined to replace the conversations that used to take place between journalists and PR pros at the local watering hole. That's theoretically possible, but as someone who was on the journalism side for 10 years, I never really saw that many journalists hit watering holes eager to shoot the breeze with a PR rep.

That said, there are some well-known journalists using Twitter as an interaction platform, although as expected the list is tech-heavy. However, if Twitter really does foster trusted relationships, then it could become one of the most valuable tools a PR pro uses. And you sure can't say the price isn't right!

Debates Rage About Usefulness of Twitter

At one time, the phrase social media was synonymous with the blogosphere, since that was the first platform that enabled virtually any Web user the opportunity to easily take a message to the masses.

Since that time, however, there have been a lot of new entrants, including twitter, which is basically a Web-based instant messaging tool that allows any twitter user to follow another, with both having the ability to share updates on what they're doing at the moment.

I started checking out twitter after some technology consultants on a listserv sponsored by a professional organization to which I belong asked others if they were using twitter for business development purposes. At the time, it amazed me that twitter would even be considered something that an attorney or legal marketer would use to reach current and prospective clients, although some in the discussion took up the view that every emerging platform generally has an uphill battle to climb in terms of both adoption and acceptance.

Then today, I was spending some time on MyRagan, a social media platform for communications professionals, and noticed a community member there had penned a blog entry also questioning the value of twitter. Add to that, most of the comments on twitter echoed the view that at this point, most of the "buzz" about twitter consists of stories about its usefulness, or lack thereof, and not much about how anyone's using it in the course of their overall communications strategies.

While that's true, the same could be said about the blogosphere in the beginning and it's certainly evolved to be a useful tool in PR programs, especially when it comes to companies that sell directly to consumers. It will be interesting to follow twitter's evolution and see whether it emerges to become much more than a "new fangled" instant messaging platform or something truly beneficial to business.