But as it turned out, Sohaib Athar, a technology manager at Really Virtual, was liveblogging the raid on Osama without realizing what was going on. Twitter was the only medium to capture the action as it was actually happening.

And all this adds up to what Matt Rosoff describes as “Twitter having its CNN Moment” He says:

Remember CNN when the Gulf War started in 1990? Before then, it was watched mostly by obsessive news followers — people in finance and government, political science professors, insomniacs. Then Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and suddenly CNN was everywhere. Even in bars. That’s what’s going to happen with Twitter after tonight’s announcement that U.S. Special Forces killed Osama Bin Laden…

But, even more importantly, when our parents ask us why Twitter is useful, we’ll now be able to point to this example. Rosoff says it beautifully: “Twitter was faster, more accurate, and more entertaining than any other news source out there.”

Here are my notes from some of the highlights of the conference:

Why Use Social Media?
• To be alerted when the organization is mentioned
• To create a dialogue with the public
• To join the conversation and bring credibility
• To increase workforce engagement and knowledge transfer

With social media you cannot control the conversations, you can only hope to control the effect of the message by staying in the conversation

EXTERNAL SOCIAL MEDIA: SUCCESS STORIES

CDC
Last year CDC was actively listening and monitoring to correct misinformation about swine flu. Now, Facebook fans of the CDC page step in to correct misinformation, for example, myths about autism; CDC doesn’t even have to respond.

The FCC
• Participates on a dozen social networks. 650,000 people have engaged with them online in the past year. They’ve fielded over 45,000 comments on their platforms

Building Developer Community / Open Gov
• FCC.gov/developer: build community around data and people engaging with data. Get feedback from developers.
• They crowdsource the data and enable the API for people to build apps from it. (e.g., app people could download to measure their broadband speed.)
• Opened up rulemaking for enlightenment from the public.
• Publish content into HTML and Blogs instead of PDFs
• Restructure the way the gov. shares information online “measure by participation and impact”

Bureau of the Census used Social Media channels to correct myths and respond to controversy.

IRS is leveraging Social Media for recruiting, targeting a younger audience.

FDA leveraged podcasts, videos and mobile phone apps to share their messages about Tobacco – messaging across as many platforms as possible. (65% of Adults need to hear a message 3-5 times before they believe it)

US Airforce
• Significant presence: 150 Facebook accounts, 90 Twitter accounts, 15 flickr accounts. Decentralized: “let the airmen tell the story for them.”
• They have been engaged so long they’re trying to avoid going into a “Sophomore Slump”
• Social Media Team responsibilities:
o Research (identify the “next Facebook”)
o Reputation Management (monitoring, responding, outreach)
o Assessment: Metrics analysis (helps drive strategy)
• Problem: Executives fear that Social Media poses a security risk and is a waste of time Solution: Counter with education, workshops and conferences

US Navy: Best Practices
• 230,000 Facebook Fans
• “Micro Content” – break existing Web content into pieces
• Custom content created for social networks
• Relevant stories from other sources
• Photo of the week – vote for your favorite photo
• Recognition of individual contributors – highlight on a weekly basis.
• Historical events
• Question of the week
• Status update, updated at least weekly
• “Interviews” with top executives – send them 5 questions and post the answers verbatim
• Need a team approach to publishing (for backup)
• Use google calendar for a content calendar
• Spread news out throughout the day, post in AM then in afternoon.
• Sometimes repeat the same messages.
• Make external social media as personal as possible: people want to be a fan of a person, not an agency (from Steve Ressler of Govloop)

Dept. of Labor: Outreach Ideas
• Sec. of Labor blog, video diaries of travels use Facebook to answer email FAQs in 24 hours: use as a customer service tool to better connect with people
• Embed a Flickr URL in press releases, makes pics available to reporters
• Use a FlipCam to do on-the-spot interviews
• Instead of traveling for speeches: record them and put them on YouTube (a 9-minute video got 13,000 views)
• OpEds: Customized 91 OpEds with a link to the speech, special custom flash page with video, map of OpEds, Radio Shows and Print Interviews
• Create “a day in the life of” video series

INTERNAL SOCIAL MEDIA

Success Stories:
• DoD Used and Internal Wiki, “Intellipedia” to develop their social media policy – Someone said “it’s going to take 2 years.” Within 24 hours had 200 subject matter experts collaborating on the document. Within 76 hours had the bulk of the core document finished. After 5 months of reviews the bulk of the core document had not changed.

• Nuclear Regulatory Commission had 3900 collective years of experience leaving the agency every year, needed to capture that knowledge – so they started an Internal Social Network. They are #1 best place to work in Federal government.

• State Department created an internal collaboration platform
o Foreign service officers move every 2 years — needed institutional knowledge
o 12,500 articles on the internal Wiki
o 45,000 pageviews a week (after 3 years)
o Professional Networking: you can identify expertise and link to your content
o Reverse mentoring with millenials
o Beta group of 300…”invite 10 friends

• “NASA@Work” is an internal collaboration tool. When it comes to suggestions about internal business process improvement, they need to plan for resources to move the ideas through the system.

Failures: “If you build it, they may not come”
• Air Force built an internal social network but NO ONE IS USING IT — Demonstrates the importance of a community manager.
• NASA Spacebook is widely considered to be a failure

Choosing a Platform: Evaluate Culture and Objectives
• If you’re going for “discoverability” and want random people to join the community, then it should be more Web based and agile.
• If you need locked-down documents and version control then you’ll want Sharepoint, which has latency issues for remote users.

GovLoop: Best Practices for Building Community
• Building audience and engagement is very difficult
• “Spend as much on community management as on the technology”

Are you still pummeling the public with your ads and messages? Have you noticed that nobody is paying attention?

What people care about most now is what their friends and acquaintances say about your brand. So stop wasting your money on short-lived campaigns or what you hope will be the next “viral video” – even if you garner millions of views on YouTube, you’ll never see it translate into sales. As the saying goes, “Social Media is not a campaign, it’s a commitment.”

In today’s market where you are competing for consumers’ precious attention, you need to cultivate relationships. Those relationships already exist – in your employees’ personal networks. That doesn’t mean every employee needs to blog about how much they love their work. It could be as simple as posting a job opening to their LinkedIn and Facebook Networks. That tells their friends and family “come work at Company X – we’re good people.”

Empower your employees to talk about your brand. They’re your most powerful advocates. Authentic interactions with your employees can go a long way towards building trust in your brand. Paying an agency to Tweet or Blog or Facebook on your behalf betrays that trust.

You have to plant the seeds now for a lush and healthy garden — and stop wasting your money on what seems like a quick and easy fix.

But don’t just take my word for it. Gia Lyons (aka Social Media Evangelista Extraordinaire) presented this at Social Fresh:

Have fortitude, my social media kindred. Refuse to let your stakeholders consider number of HITS a metric (they are “How Idiots Track Success,” according to K.D. Paine). Help them understand the real social media metrics like buzz volume, buzz sentiment and engagement (Mike Manuel, social media genius, can teach you more about metrics). But at the same time, realize that as cool as it is to show how many followers you have on Twitter, how many fans you have on Facebook, and how much buzz you’re generating, at the end of the day, the people who write your paycheck will want to see the impact to the bottom line.

**Speaking of one size fits all…

The daily influx of invites to Webinars and conferences promising to show me the Holy Grail of Social Media Success remind me of the South Park episode about the “Underpants Gnomes” that are stealing Tweek’s underwear. One of my favorite South Park moments is the Gnomes’ business plan:

We all get the endless invitations to paid Webinars claiming to teach us how Social Media will make us successful. The truth they don’t want you to know is that nobody can give you the magic formula to “do social media.” STOP WASTING YOUR MONEY. You just need to figure out how to listen to what people are saying about you, and then how to join the conversation. Yes, there are lots of ways to do this, and it’s not always easy to figure out which way is the right way. It takes some time and effort. There is no quick fix or easy salvation — if anyone suggests you do a “viral video” run the other way – FAST! With all the tools and technologies out there, the task is daunting. But if you go for the quick fix, you may as well use this as your business plan:

• Requests for information / help with products
• Suggestions for product features (e.g., “VIP iPhone app should work on iPod Touch!”)
• General industry questions
• Media inquiries and commentary
• Customers needing some TLC
• Interesting news articles or Tweets to share

Getting Started

Before you start, you’ll need to do a search on your brand to see what kind of mentions it is getting. http://search.twitter.com will find all mentions, which you may want to catalog in your own spreadsheet because it only seems to archive about a month’s worth of data. But you can still find a Tweet using more specific keywords on Google to find tweets, because, much like a diamond, a Tweet is forever! (even if you delete a Tweet from your Twitter stream, it’s going to show up on Google!)

Tools for Tracking Conversations

1. Bit.ly: Bit.ly can be used for shortening any URLs. You can even create custom Bit.ly Urls, but keep track of what you create because Bit.ly won’t track those for you. And beware the inflated Bit.ly stats which do not filter out hits from bots / spiders, etc. More on that here from Hutch Carpenter. And Tac Anderson is a great blogger to follow if you want to keep up on the latest cool tools – he is great filter for the (too much) information that’s out there.
2. Tracking Codes: We use Visual Sciences on our VeriSign.com so if we append an “SL code” to a URL that we send out, and someone visits the VeriSign.com site, we know where they came from. So, the URL we send looks like this: www.verisign.com/industrybriefs?sl=12345. Using these helps us keep track of traffic that we send over from Twitter.

Capturing Sales Leads

Our leads from Twitter were getting lost in the Siebel Sales database becuase we had no way of tracking. The “traditional” way of capturing leads is that a prospective customer fills ut a landing page. We persuaded the Direct Marketing team that people engaging with us on Twitter are in no mind set to fill out a form if they wanted more info, and they are allowing us to fill in the form ourselves, as long as the potential customer approves it. Now that’s progress! Now all we need is our own cool little “Twitter Leads” form. I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going.

Keeping track of Resources

Many of the interactions I mentioned above need to be shared internally with the right people, and then communicated back out. We’re talking a serious time commitment here. But how to show the “higher ups” what resources are necessary? I’ve worked with my colleague (@AllenKelly) to come up with a system that should help us with this. More on this after we try it out for a bit.

Tracking “Micro-Metrics” for Blogs

1. Feedburner allows me to see how many subscribers I have, enable blog subscription via email, and add the “share this” feature for each post. They provide a snippet of code for me to insert into the blog template, and instructions for Moveable Type and Wordpress.

2. Google Analytics offers a myriad of data, but I usually focus on the following data points:

• Percentage of readers arriving through search. If it’s below 30% we need to better optimize the blogs for search: I remind bloggers to focus on the keywords in the post title and body, leverage the “categories.”
• Keywords bringing people to the blogs. This data usually provides a nice ego boost for our bloggers, since the primary keywords bringing traffic to each blog are usually the bloggers’ names. Ideally the top keywords would be industry / product terms. Or simply “VeriSign.”
• Time spent reading posts. Less than a minute means the user found little value in the content. I like to see readers spending at least 2 minutes on each post. One blogger had readers spending about 6 minutes on each post, which I shared with all of our bloggers. Another blogger (jealously?) pointed out “his posts are really long.”
• Referring sites. Is there some site helping you out that you did not know about? Where are users coming from? This will help you tailor your content to appeal to those folks.
• Bounce Rate and Exit rate. A high bounce rate means the content on the page the user landed on was not interesting to them. They came, they saw, they left your domain. Conversely, the exit rate is the measure of how many people left a page, and then went elsewhere on your site – that particular page was not too exciting, but they were interested enough to look further. You should worry about a consistently high bounce rate and consider how to make that landing page a little juicer. This is why it helps to know what keywords people are searching on, and what the referring sites are. There is a nice explanation of these terms on SEOlogs.com.

Coming soon… “Capturing Sales Leads and Tracking Conversations on Twitter”

LinkedIn is like your “business attire” for your professional contacts. Twitter is your “business casual” wear. For example, you can use it to make informal connections with colleagues you meet at conferences to get to know them better. And Facebook is “weekend wear” — flip flops and shorts, meant for your friends and family.

“Well why do I need a Web page?” She asked. I had to think about this one. Did she really need to register a domain name and set up a site, with all these tools at her disposal? The answer is a definite “yes.” I judge a business by the quality of their Web site. Maybe I’m a bit of a snob, with my roots in Web content development, but I usually choose the restaurant or a hotel with a higher quality Web site unless I have a strong reason to do otherwise. I don’t think I’m alone in this. So I explained to her that as a solo practitioner, she needed to establish her professional presence with a Web site. I even suggested “TrainWithJess.com” which she loved.

Then she asked, “why do I need a blog?” So I gave her another analogy. “Your Web site is like your office building, it’s your home base. Your blog is like the landscaping / garden out front that shows that this building is occupied and cared for.” And then, the final question:

“Why do I need Twitter?”
“Twitter serves as a way to meet new prospects and attract them to your manicured blog and professional Web site.”
“Got it.”

That was two months ago, and since then Jessica has created her own Web site, complete with a blog and Twitter feed. She even found some new communities to join, hosted on Ning. I am amazed at how much she learned on her own, and she is already attracting new clients who are finding her Web site via Twitter and Google, and complimenting her on “how professional it looks.”

Jessica is obviously a very smart, ambitious lady, but the fact of the matter is that in a Web 2.0 world, ANYONE can self publish and have a voice on the Web. All it takes is the desire to learn and the willingness to spend some time doing it.

And for you Lab lovers who are looking for a furry friend, why not check your local Lab Rescue?

****

Two young adorable female labs – age 3. Well cared for. Family losing home.
It’s a sad story that’s probably all too common these days. A Northern Virginia family is losing their home and the family dogs aren’t welcome at the new apartment.

Already housebroken, trained, love kids, neutered, up to date on shots. Must stay together!
Contact: Katherine at: kjmorris74[at]yahoo[dot]com

Here is a letter from the owner:
“As many of you know, we are moving in just 2 weeks Unfortunately, I have still not been able to find a good home for Cookie and Coco. We’re not able to take our beloved doggies with us and I’ve been desperately trying to find a home for both of them ‘together’. They were raised together and pine without each other. The Lab rescue have already said that they would probably separate them, so this is my last resort.

Recently I tried to take Coco out in my car alone and she TOTALLY refused to even get into the car without Cookie…..!!!! She absolutely pulled back on her haunches until Cookie was by her side. Both doggies are in great health, have been spayed and have ID chips implanted under the skin.

Cookie turned 3 December 10th and Cookie is my mellow-yellow, and just loves her tummy rubbed. Coco is adorably funny and lives for her “ball”. She also loves the water….. Cookie loves lots of attention.
Both doggies are loyal and love to walk. They have been raised with my 3 kids running around all over the place, and have survived Sammy’s constant hugging and love of ‘dress-up’, so they are fantastic family dogs. This is by far one of the most difficult decisions I have ever had to make, but under the circumstances I have no choice.

Please, Please forward these pics to all you know and help me find a great home for these fabulous doggies. They are just adorable and it’s heartbreaking to let them go. In a perfect world, I hope that we could find someone local so that we can still keep in touch and visit them.

I pray that someone somewhere can help us keep Cookie and Coco together, and love them just as much as we do. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.”

Half of Iran’s population is under 25 and they are not happy with the oppressive regime. They blog about it, most anonymously for fear of imprisonment, but some are bold enough to speak out. I did not realize that Iran is the third largest blogger nation.

Check out this video.

Good stuff! Let Social media bring democracy to the masses, Obama style!

Nortel’s PR Blogger Weighs in On Negative Financial Coverage
PRWeek (11/17/08) Daniels, Chris

One day after Nortel announced a massive third-quarter loss and layoffs of 1,300 employees, new media manager Bo Gowan listed on his Nov. 11 blog links of news articles that, in his opinion, presented “a little more in-depth analysis and commentary that provided some differentiation [from] the typical straight coverage” regarding Nortel’s quarter financials. The Nortel Buzzword blog was introduced earlier in 2008, and Gowan informed PRWeek that Nortel’s business communications team made a deliberate decision to discuss financials, in spite of heightened concerns about disclosure. He noted that 90 percent of the media coverage regarding Nortel’s third quarter concentrated on the numbers, and, with his recent blog post, explained that the telecommunications firm is offering a service to analysts and other interested entities who are seeking different viewpoints. Traffic to Nortel Buzzword supports Gowan’s point, as the amount of visits to the blog rose to unprecedented high! s recently. “If we are going to have an effective blog and have a conversation with people, you have to have that conversation in good times and bad,” Gowan said. “It is very similar to traditional PR: If you talk in the good times, but say no to interviews in the bad times, you lose a little credibility.” He added that this is much more the case with blogs, because they are “such a conscious stream of information.”

Web Link | Return to Headlines

http://blogs.nortel.com/buzzboard/2008/11/11/3q08-financials-news-coverage-round-up/