Lee Aase | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Signs of Mainstream Media Demise

I know that MSNBC has 168 hours of program time to fill each week, and with its blogs the New York Times editorial board no longer needs to limit itself to commenting on all the news that’s worth printing (because blogs are essentially free), but their hyperventilation yesterday over Sarah Palin more than two weeks after the election is amusing and instructive.

It seems the carnage of a couple of turkeys being slaughtered in the background (after she had issued the traditional gubernatorial pardon of one of their next of kin) was just too much for these scribes’ sensitive souls. MSNBC thought the video needed to be sanitized (for the kids, at least):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8DTSPzU0RI]

Here’s the unedited version, linking directly to the point where MSNBC averted its (and our) eyes. Pretty gruesome, huh? I’m sure MSNBC has never had anything quite so awful on its programs.

I hope they enjoy their berries and nuts for Thanksgiving.

Tim Blair has a good overview of the reactions (the LA Times’ Elizabeth Snead, with her condescension toward Gov. Palin “making little to no sense (as usual),” while Snead herself uses the profound phrase “slaughtered alive” in the next paragraph, is another highlight) and John Hinderaker at Powerline has more good analysis.

A decade ago my now-teenage daughters got first-hand experience with the origin of the phrase, “running around like chickens with their heads cut off” as we helped some farmer friends round up their poultry for slaughter. I guess my girls were more emotionally well-adjusted at 7 and 8 than MSNBC’s David Shuster is today.

It is instructive to see the inordinate attention to the turkeys’ holiday holocaust, especially in light of some “meatier” recent news about mainstream media, such as

The Times cutting its stock dividend and facing ad competition from the Wall Street Journal,
The Associated Press cutting its workforce by 10 percent
The NBC-owned Weather Channel laying off staff

Journalists often lament that the economic woes facing mainstream media have dire implications for our democratic republic, because no one will have resources for serious investigative reporting.

It seems the attention to the Palin poultry proceeding may be a sign that the mainstream media descent into triviality is already well advanced.

Meanwhile, I can’t help but embed this classic clip because of its association of turkeys and mainstream media:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iafzqOCaxA4]

Blogging 119: Managing Multiple Blog Contributors

For many people, blogging is a solo effort; an exercise in self-expression.

But if you’re considering blogging for a business or organization (like our Mayo Clinic News Blog or Podcast Blog, or a global university like SMUG 😉 ) you probably don’t want to have the entire responsibility resting on one person.

You’ll want to get multiple contributors involved.

One way to significantly increase the number of voices represented in your company blog is to, well…capture their voices. And their pictures. Using a video camera. Like the Flip. That’s going to be covered in Blogging 130: Video Blogging.

WordPress (and its hosted service, wordpress.com) is ideally suited to enable lots of people to contribute text for a blog, while still enabling the blog manager (or the management group), to exercise final control.

It does this through its hierarchy of user levels:

Contributors can write posts, but they don’t have authority to hit the “Publish” button. When they are finished, their posts are in the “Pending Review” status, until a higher-level user reviews and approves for publishing. If you were to use WordPress to publish and online newspaper/newsblog, for instance, and wanted to maintain an editorial process that would have articles go through review by an editor, you could have most of your “reporters” be Contributors, so that it would be impossible for one of their posts to be published without that review. Associate Professors at SMUG are in the Contributor role.
Authors have the authority to publish a post and upload files, and can edit their own posts…but not anyone else’s. They can also save their posts as “Pending Review” but if you want to have that two-step process, you should have most users be Contributors. As an author, someone will inevitably hit “Publish” instead of “Save” and have a post published before it has been reviewed. But if you have a blog in which all of the authors are relatively equal and its just a forum for them to publish their thoughts, Author level access is appropriate.
Editors have access to publish, edit or delete any post, page or comment. They can do almost everything an Administrator can do in terms of the day-to-day blog operation, but they can’t add or remove users, for instance.
Administrators have complete control over the blog, including the ability to delete it. When you start your own wordpress.com blog you become its administrator. But you could add me or any other wordpress.com user as a contributor, author or editor. And if you want to become a SMUG Associate Professor, I can add you.

It’s really easy to add new users in different roles. Just click the Users link on the right side of your blog’s dashboard:

And then, at the bottom, add the email address of someone you want to add as a user:

If that address already belongs to a WordPress.com user, he or she will be added in the role you specify.
If not, you’ll be prompted to send an invitation for that person to create a wordpress.com account.

When you click “Invite your Friend” you have an opportunity to tailor the personal message before clicking “Send Invite”

Be sure to check the “Add user to my blog as a contributor” box, and then when that user joins he or she will be in the Contributor role on your blog. You can always promote to a higher level (Author or Editor) once that’s done

It’s that simple. And on WordPress.com, it’s free. On Typepad, you have to pay at least $149.50 a year for similar functionality.

The WordPress.com FAQ offers some further illumination on user roles.

Assignments:

If you haven’t started your WordPress.com blog, do it today. Then, if you need or want to have multiple contributors, go through the steps above to add them.
If you would like to become a SMUG Associate Professor, leave a comment below, and I will add you as a Contributor.

Asking the Right Questions about PR and Social Media

Tomorrow I have an opportunity to discuss social media and how it is changing the practice of public relations with students from the University of St. Thomas’ chapter of the PRSSA.

Jessica Snell, a St. Thomas junior who is in charge of the noon program, sent me a list of questions as a starting point for discussion. If getting the right answers depends on beginning by asking the right questions, I think they’re off to a good start.

We won’t get to all of these in an hour, but if any SMUGgles have interesting answers, perspectives and stories you would like me to share with the students, please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Meanwhile, I’ll start updating this post with some of my answers to those questions.

• In what ways do you feel that the field of public relations is changing due to the use of social media technologies?

– Journalists interacting with PR professionals through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

– It’s not just media relations, but is really public relations.

– HARO as a free alternative to ProfNet

• How are social media technologies being used specifically in the health care field?

Many health care providers have YouTube channels. Here are channels for Mayo Clinic, M.D. Anderson and MUSC. See some of our podcasting and blog offerings in the links below. We also have a Facebook “fan” page.

• What impact do social media technologies have in a crisis communication/issues management? (e.g., beneficial way to get out important info.? harmful rumors spread quickly?)

See this post on Facebook Crisis Communications and this one one Twitter and Facebook “off-label” uses. See the 35W bridge collapse group in Facebook.

• Have social/digital media technologies changed the way you work with journalists?

Absolutely, whether through Facebook and Twitter interactions or through our News Blog.

• Have social/digital media technologies changed the way you communicate with patients?

See our Podcast blog, which lets us share much more in-depth information with patients (and lets them ask questions), and our Facebook page.

• What skills do you believe are important for students to develop for projects that incorporate social media technologies?

– Start and sustain a blog

– Writing

– Shooting and editing video

– Photography

– Basic familiarity with the types of social networking tools

– Interactivity

• How do you recommend keeping up with all of the changes in the digital world? Is important to know about, and participate in every new thing to be a good PR practitioner?

– Like some foul-mouthed broadcasters need a seven-second delay, consider a seven-day or seven-week delay before jumping after every shiny new toy.

– It’s more important to think creatively about how to use new but fairly mainstream technologies instead of being the first to use a hot new tool.

– I would be remiss – given that your tuition at UST is $27,722 – if I failed to urge you to enroll in SMUG.

– Check out my Slideshare slideshows and slidecasts to see some of the presentations I’ve done (some of the slides will be similar to what I presented today) as well as some of the SMUG curriculum.

• What challenges do you believe students should be prepared to address when working on campaigns that incorporate social media technologies?

– FUD – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

– Skepticism about how a social media slingshot can compete with mass media. Remember Goliath. Remember George Allen.
• What ethical challenges have emerged when using social media technologies in a PR context?

– Temptation to comment anonymously or “game” the rankings in Digg or on other social sites. Yield not.

• What is important for young professionals to know about our ability to measure results when using social media technologies as part of PR campaigns?

– Measurement is a significant advantage for social media as compared with mainstream media.

– You can justify based on tangible outcomes, and then have intangibles as icing.

• What is important for young professionals to know about working with clients (or management) when recommending social media strategies?

– See the FUD observation above

– Show examples of mainstream success with social media, from well-established companies and brands. The Blog Council is a group of large companies using social media internally and externally, and here is our Alltop page.

– Keep costs low and show them how easy it can be using free and/or open source solutions.

– Engage front-line employees instead of thinking all communication needs to come from the PR team.

• What types of technologies or applications should students be familiar with (e.g., Facebook, RSS feeds, Digg, Twitter, Ning, Linked In, Technorati, Google Analytics, del.icio.us, YouTube, blogs, podcasts, designing a Web site, etc.)?

All of the above. You need to develop an understanding for each of the kinds of tools, so you can select or recommend the right one for the job. If all you have is a hammer….

• What impact do you believe the Internet and social media technologies are having on how PR, advertising and marketing professionals work together?

• What advice do you have for helping the areas of PR, advertising and marketing work together successfully?

• Please describe a recent project/campaign that you feel illustrates how public relations is impacted by the use of social media technologies.

• What aspects of the project represent a change or shift in PR practice, and what elements remain unchanged from traditional PR practice?

I welcome any other thoughts people may have to share with students from the UST chapter of PRSSA. They would, too.

Yammer 109: Yammering Your Personal Journal

For the last several years I have kept my personal journal in a series of month-based Microsoft Word documents, with a naming convention of 08January.doc, 08 February.doc, etc.

I don’t always do the greatest job of keeping it updated, and of course it’s not searchable. If I want to remember when something happened that I had written about, I have little choice but to open each of the documents and search. And keeping it all in one document was unworkable; I had started with just one file, but found it necessary to later move to the monthly files.

With Yammer’s new Groups feature, I think I have a better solution. I’ve formed a group called Lee Aase’s Journal that is private and not listed in the company directory, and I’m not inviting anyone else to join (and therefore no one can request to join, either.) No one would know the group even existed if I hadn’t written this blog post.

So in essence I have a time-stamped private journal that I can add to quickly and easily. Unlike Twitter, I’m not limited to 140 characters. And if I want to find a particular reflection, I can just search Yammer.

Here’s my first post:

I’ve done some subsequent posts with my current weight, the time it took to run those two miles, and other tidbits of a more personal nature. I’m pretty transparent, but hey, there are limits to personal disclosure!

I’m just starting this “Yammering My Personal Journal” journey, but I think it’s going to be a great way to make journaling part of my daily activity. And not only journaling to get the thoughts out, but to time stamp them and make them easier to retrieve.

I’ve set my journal (and other Yammer groups) as one of my bookmarks in Safari, and I believe that will help me keep journaling front-and-center as a daily (if not more) activity.

I’ll keep you posted as I develop more experience with Yammering to myself.

What do you think of this idea?