At SXSW, Text 100 is leading a discussion on Sunday, March 14th, CrowdControl: Changing the Face of Media or Just Hype? about the new media democracy, citizen journalism and the wisdom of the crowd. Moderated by Text 100’s Joe Kingsbury, our panel hail from the news, content and digital industries and include: Lila King, CNN.com; Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook; Jason Rzepka, MTV; and Pete Cashmore, Mashable.

We’ve all seen the power of social media demonstrated often over the past year. For example, when Iranian citizens used social media to report on post-election activity in June 2009 when international media had limited access. We’ll be taking a closer look at the new level of involvement consumer audiences have exerted through social media including generating content and driving activism that is ultimately changing the face of the media industry.

Let us know what you think about this issue. We may share your comments during the panel.

Do you see this trend replacing current media industry business models and standards? Or is it just Hype?

Odd.  I’m of the opinion that when people wrongly believe you have died, speaking up might actually be a fairly effective means of changing their perceptions.

Here’s the progression as I understand it from Second Life’s birth as the “next big thing,” through to today’s exhumation.

• Second Life launches to great fanfare and hype–>
• Hype starts to fade as (a) companies question the ROI (b) people who loved the game dynamics moved on (c) the press got interested in the next Big Thing –>
• Second Life begins slowly and methodically reinventing itself and sees impressive results in users, time spent on the site, etc….And decides it’s a good idea not to talk about any of this for a long, long time.

The irony for me is in seeing a new media pioneer resort to old-world communications strategies.  When you’ve been in PR long enough, you’ve probably experienced at least a few times working with a white-hot brand.  And you probably rode that wave as far as you possibly could, wringing every ounce of coverage you could out of the attention the media lavished on your client.

But in the age of authenticity, hype is the enemy.  It’s seductive as hell, sure–but 99 times out of a hundred, hype will misrepresent your brand, even while claiming to extol it.

It reminds me of one of my heroes, Bruce Springsteen.  When Springsteen landed on the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week, way back in 1975, the Boss was distraught by the hype because he saw it for what it was: a real threat to building a life-long relationship with his audience. His answer, though, wasn’t to clam up.  It was to go out and bust his butt doing what he did best: play passionate, marathon rock concerts that converted even the most hard-boiled skeptics.  (He did the same thing a decade later when the Born in the USA hype went nuclear.) Eventually, even as the press coverage dropped to “normal” levels, it started to focus more on the music and the concerts, not the phenomenon.

Yes, hype is a dangerous thing.  But so is silence.  The marketplace is littered with companies and brands that couldn’t live up to the original hype. The only real solution is to communicate–consistently, honestly and transparently.  To keep telling your story.

Second Life, welcome back the the land of the living.  Don’t make the mistake of going dark again.

Photo Credit

Many of the experts agreed with the tough challenge facing recent grads. One headhunter working exclusively in filling communications positions throughout the U.S. and Canada told attendees that August through October 2009 was the most difficult year for his firm in more than 30 years of business. The hiring managers in attendance nodded in agreement and you could almost feel the audience mentally bracing themselves for the job search struggle ahead.

I could certainly relate. Only three months prior, I had finished a temporary PR apprenticeship with a Boston firm and was back on the market. Facing that kind of job market, I knew it would require far more to be considered for a job than submitting a cover letter and resume. I decided that I had to treat my job search like a public relations challenge, which it truly was: trying to have my voice heard over a sea of static and competing messages from other candidates.

This kind of mentality allowed me to think strategically about my search. I imagined the challenge of hiring managers – dedicating only a fraction of their time to evaluating candidates, they need material that had an impact and was entertaining to digest – while demonstrating on face value that I understood how to apply PR concepts. I reached out to PR Week and pitched a story about my job search. To my shock, I got it. From there, I created www.burkeswork.com so employers could easily navigate my material and see a personal image of me that was more “real” than a name on a resume.

This is the advice that I give to job seekers since it helped me land two positions in such a poor job market. I believe it is important to understand that ultimately, managers hire people, not resumes, and that creatively crafting an image of competence is equally as important as having the skills for the job.

Ultimately, my search led me to Text 100. What attracted me was their commitment to professional development, global opportunities, flat organization and work/life balance. I think it’s important for employers to understand that candidates prize these attributes almost as much as salary. They want to know explicitly how this job is going to get them to the next step in their career. The problem is that those attributes are the selling points of every hiring manager I’ve met.

Employers should assume that candidates will do their own research. I personally checked out Text 100’s employee reviews and salary information on www.glassdoor.com, watched YouTube videos of global office parties to get a feel for the culture and searched LinkedIn to determine how long employees stuck with the company. It goes to show how much more power candidates have to reference check their potential employers.

I’m pleased to report that my research and personal experience with Text 100 has proven everything I heard in my interview to be true. The culture is tight-knit and collaborative, management and coworkers are amazingly supportive and my career growth is strategically planned. Not all employers will match their true culture to their online presence as well, and it’s illustrated for me how important image management is for both parties in today’s job search.

You can learn more about Text 100’s career openings on our Web site. Yes! We’re hiring.

Photo credit: Tony the Misfit

But while literally finding talent in a digital haystack poses its own set of challenges (and advantages), it’s knowing what type of person you’re looking for in the first place that’s the critical piece of this selection process. Armano refers to a spectrum with deep social media expertise at one end, practical professional experience on the other and a sweet spot somewhere in between. Let’s dig into that.

If you’re looking for someone to lead social media internally or an agency to help, you want to focus on critical thinking skills first. Actually, make that first, second and third. Look for a logical thought process that takes into account your specific goals (the business kind, not just social media), target audiences, where they spend time, the types of interaction they welcome and how your brand fits into that picture. They should examine your organization’s ability to realistically execute, the relevant balance of broadcasting vs. interaction that’s right for the task at hand and how to define success.

Making a compelling case to executives and business functions that don’t care about social media (or think they don’t need to) matters as well; the ability to intelligently defuse skepticism and speak someone else’s language is critical there. And a little gravitas wouldn’t hurt. Little to none of this pertains to tools.

I could go on but the point is there’s a lot to consider when trying to zero in on the right kind of talent. There’s at least as much snake oil as legitimate talent out there as Stephen Baker rightly points out in BusinessWeek. Big followings on Twitter and prolific blogging don’t necessarily translate to an understanding of your business and how social media applies to you specifically. Maybe it doesn’t at all – he or she should be honest about that too.

Whether or not all of this points you to a specific spot on some linear spectrum of talent, I don’t know. But either way, when evaluating a candidate do yourself a favor and peel back the layers with some thoughtful questions – your company’s time and resources will be better off for it.

Joseph Kingsbury

Twitter: @jkingsbury

Photo credit

What’s your take on the trends in 2010?

Is the future of branding as we know it under threat?  Is it possible to build a brand online – or is online brand building simply a defensive strategy?  Does loyalty matter anymore?  Text 100 is bringing together a panel of Europe’s leading brand owners to debate these questions and more.  If you’re in London on Tuesday, January 19, please join us at the Paramount Private Members Club on Level 31 of Centre Point Tower (New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1DD) at 6.30pm.  You’ll hear from:

• Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic and special adviser to Sir Richard Branson
• Brian O’Shaughnessy, Head of global communications, Skype
• Vijay Solanki, Senior Director of digital marketing, Research In Motion (RIM, creators of the Blackberry)
• Cristina Hoole, Marketing and PR Director Europe, LinkedIn
• Aedhmar Hynes, CEO, Text 100 (acting as host and chair)

Confirm your attendance today by emailing Jonas Ruggard: jonas.rugaard@text100.com.  Perhaps you have a question for our panel?  Feel free to send these to Jonas as well.

But don’t just take our word for it. Jeanette Gibson and John Earnhardt from Cisco’s PR team (disclosure: Cisco is a Text 100 client) recently caught up with JD Lasica of the SocialMedia.biz blog to talk about how Cisco uses video. Earnhardt says:

“The return on investment for using video is a no-brainer. If you factor in the cost of the camcorders and training time, the ROI is 4 cents per video view and dropping. The real hurdle is just starting [the process]: getting the camera, teaching people how to get the video up on the Web. The real message is just to go out there and do it.”

Watch Alyssa Weir, a Textie in Rochester, share her thoughts on why video is a great PR tool as well as some of her favorite video blog examples. Lastly, don’t get bogged down with developing an overly-polished video strategy or waiting on professional production. As Earnhardt suggests, just get out there and start experimenting!

The world is looking to Copenhagen where the UN climate conference 2009 is currently taking place. At Text 100 we advise many clients on CSR and social media communications and have therefore been very interested in considering the communications landscape surrounding the conference this year. We want to find out how Web 2.0 and especially the rise of social media has revolutionized the way politicians are communicating their positions, how NGOs are trying to influence the discussions and how COP15 is bringing climate experts to the “blog table” to offer insights into the climate discussion. It is very interesting to take a look behind the scenes and understand how many different stakeholders can stay up to date every minute of  the day.

Prior to the start of COP15 we created an international Text 100 COP15 team with the objective of monitoring the social web including blogs, Twitter, social networks, online forums, YouTube, Flickr etc. and analyzing what we found. The team started its work with the COP15 pre-conference in Barcelona, on 2^nd November. After six busy weeks we have observed the following, topline trends.  We will be pulling together a thorough analysis of our findings in early January.

• NGOs, politicians and journalists are important users of social media today. Interestingly, companies and  industry associations do not seem to be  exploiting the potential of social media.
• Twitter and blogs are the social media tools used most. An interesting example is the twitter wall of Greenpeace on 5th December in Berlin: Greenpeace put a big screen in Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate. At the end of the day, it received 15,000 tweets with the hashtag #savetheclimate. There were people in Germany sending messages to Angela Merkel and what she should focus on. One can see this twitter wall also in the Greenpeace GreenAction blog: http://twitterwall.greenaction.de/. 
•  NGOs leverage social media to inform their members and followers about current activities, to call for action and to report about progress made in Copenhagen. A good example is WWF Climate Blog. 
• Interestingly, social media is mainly used as an information channel. In many cases there aren’t a lot of comments and dialogue that show a vivid discussion about the climate conference. However, a positive example in terms of interaction and dialogue is the Climate Thinkers Blog of the Danish government which invites some of the world’s most renowned climate thinkers to participate in a virtual global climate debate. 
• Prior to the conference, topics discussed in social media were about expectations, attendees and results, as well as practical questions about how to travel to Copenhagen, how to find a hotel etc. With the start of the conference we can see a big shift in the discussion. Now it is more about climate content such as negotiation progress, positions and opinions of different parties as well as news-worthy activities of NGOs.

If you would like to hear more about social media usage at COP15 please listen to the Englisch radio show of Deutsche Welle or read the related article on their Web site.

This all started with Dan Lyons writing a satirical post on his “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs” blog. Like all great inciters, the “fake Steve” fanned the flames of his devoted followers frustrations and proposed the modern-day, virtual version of everyone taking to the streets, torches in hand, to kill the evil network ogre.

Now, though, it seems the real Dan Lyons is inceasingly anxious about the monster he’s created.  “I’m not sure we can stop this thing,” he now writes.

Thing is, mobs have always had a tendency to take on a life of their own (Hmm, what’s the expression…mob mentality…that’s it!). They also tend to burn innocent people at the stake (and without declaring AT&T innocent, this article in the Sunday New York Times is worth a read), and take out a lot of bystanders (in this case, all the people who would really prefer the AT&T network keep working, thankyou-very-much.)

So maybe it’s a good time to re-fresh ourselves on a few fundamentals of communication (not to mention civility). Things like, know your audience.  Make a reasoned argument. Refrain from ad hominem attacks.  Listen. And here’s a zinger: think before you speak (or write, blog, or tweet.)

It makes you reconsider that little, seemingly innocuous word on everyone’s Twitter page: follow.  I have news for you, chokeholders: it wasn’t meant to be taken so literally.  This world is full of people who are a little too willing to follow silly ideas without thinking.  Don’t be one of them.

Maybe Twitter should change that button to “talk to me,” and then we can all try to get back to the fundamental aspiration: constructive dialogue.

While GM likely planned ahead to monitor the flurry of discussion in social media to have a pulse on brand sentiment about this change in leadership and may have even outlined their approach to respond or not respond to top-tier business blogs or comments on the Fast Lane blog, it’s unlikely that they anticipated that a family member’s reaction would captivate social media users and blog headlines. Even more troubling is that this post creates a potential perception problem by suggesting that GM was not being truthful when it announced the resignation and instead fired Henderson after only an eight-month tenure.

Beyond being a great case study for making sure that social media is part of your crisis communications planning process, the incident also underscores the need for a systematic approach to evaluating how your situation will play out, what social media flare ups could occur and the appropriate response.

A useful process that comes to mind here is mind mapping. According to Wikipedia, a mind map is a “diagram used to represent ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged around a central keyword or situation. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and aid in problem solving or decision making. Mindjet, a Text 100 client, makes excellent tools for mind mapping and visual thinking.

By creating a mind map for your crisis communications situation, you can easily evaluate the divergent paths social media could take. For example, the ROUGH start to a mind map for a plant closing could look like this (click on image for a larger view):

By visualizing the crisis, the stakeholders impacted, the initial social media reaction, your strategy and the potential reaction to your response, it’s easy to see where there might be gaps that need to be better addressed.

I’d love your thoughts on this. Do you incorporate social media strategy as part of your crisis communications plans? If so, what is your process? What tools have you found helpful?