SMUG Social Media University Global

Facebook, Txt at U of Minn for Crisis Communications

I saw yesterday that the University of Minnesota had developed a text-messaging system for quick notification of students, faculty and staff in the event of a campus emergency. Then today in my list of Facebook groups recently joined by my friends, I saw that they have a Facebook group for the same purpose.

I think this is an excellent use of technology for crisis communications. I’ve written some ideas about how Facebook could be used, and also Twitter. As Dennis McDonald recommends, you need to have multiple means of spreading the word in a crisis, because no one method reaches everyone. It’s great to see that the University of Minnesota has a comprehensive plan like this.

I think the dedicated text-message service is a really good idea, and may be preferable to Twitter for this application, because it will only be used for emergencies. I’m working with a crisis-planning group, and we’re experimenting with Twitter as a first step for a text-messaging system to alert the core crisis team. It’s a great solution for people who are just being introduced to Twitter and who don’t feel a need follow others’ tweets, because they can link their account with their cell phone, follow only the crisis communications Twitter account and have the notifications set to “on.” They will only get a text message in the event of an emergency.

For me, as someone who is already Twittering and following a few dozen people, having my notifications set to “on” would keep my cell phone buzzing all day. So I typically just check in with Twitter once in a while on the web. I want text messages I receive to be higher-priority and worthy of interruptions (especially since I’m paying for them.) But I haven’t found a way to choose which Tweets I get by text, and which just go to the web feed.

Ideally I would like to just have some tweets come by text (such as those from the crisis management account.) Does anyone have a way around this? I have a couple of ideas:

Can I sign up for another account in Twitter and also link to my same cell phone?
Or can I be selective about which tweets on my main account come by txt?

I would appreciate any guidance on this that anyone can offer, because I would like to have Twitter be the text-notification service for our crisis plan (since it’s free.) But if it becomes more widely used among my non-geek colleagues and they start “following” multiple accounts and not just the crisis account, they may end up turning off the text notifications, which would defeat our purpose.

Technorati: Facebook, crisis management, crisis communications, crisis alerts, crisis, Twitter, SMS, Minnesota, Dennis McDonald

Being a Facebook Celebrity

Can you be a celebrity without having any fans?

In Facebook, I guess you can.

(Click the thumbnail to see the full-size screen shot, or better yet, click here to see my Celebrity/Public Figure page, in the Writer category.)

I had originally tried a workaround for the personal/professional Facebook separation by creating a group called Lee Aase’s Professional Contacts. Establishing a brand page for your professional persona looks like it might be a better way. People can become “fans” without being “friends.” You don’t have to approve it. You can put your email address on your Celebrity page.

So if you want to put forth a professional representation of yourself, you can. You can upload videos and photos. You can post links to some of your most significant news coverage or blog posts. And you don’t have to worry about the various applications you’ve installed on your personal profile cluttering your celebrity page.

Seeing that Scoble and Jeremiah have fan/brand pages in the Critic and Writer categories, I decided to give it a shot. I looked at the Facebook Terms of Service and didn’t see any requirement for a certain level of notoriety before someone could be a celebrity. So if two of my Facebook friends, Jeremiah and Scoble, can have both user accounts and celebrity pages, hopefully I won’t run afoul of the TOS with my celebrity page.

IBM: You Won’t Recognize the Ad Industry in 2012

IBM has issued a report that crystallizes and formalizes through survey research what many of us have understood intuitively. It’s called “The end of advertising as we know it.” Duncan Riley pointed it out on TechCrunch late last week, and I’ve just finished reading both the report (get the PDFs of the Executive Summary and the full report here) and the accompanying press release. As the release says:

Traditional advertising players risk major revenue declines as budgets shift rapidly to new, interactive formats, which are expected to grow at nearly five times that of traditional advertising. To survive in this new reality, broadcasters must change their mass audience mind-set to cater to niche consumer segments, and distributors need to deliver targeted, interactive advertising for a range of multimedia devices. Advertising agencies must experiment creatively, become brokers of consumer insights, and guide allocation of advertising dollars amid exploding choices. All players must adapt to a world where advertising inventory is increasingly bought and sold in open exchanges vs. traditional channels.

In a previous post I wrote about PR measurement and blogging, and how because of their ability to give lots of numbers, social media can be over-valued relative to news editorial coverage. Even though I’m a huge social media supporter, I still believe that for most businesses the value of mainstream media news coverage is currently much greater than that of online “buzz.” Social media have engagement value, too, and businesses should be getting involved. But editorial coverage still has huge value.

I believe technology and social trends are much bigger threats to traditional advertising than they are to public relations. I will get into reasons for that in a future post.

But as the IBM report indicates, these next five years will be tumultuous for everyone who has been involved in the “one to many” mass media industry that has pushed messages at consumers for the last 50 years. IBM sums it up best by saying: “The next 5 years will hold more change for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did.”

The IBM report, and its four scenarios of how drastic these changes will be, is well worth reading and pondering for anyone interested in marketing and advertising. I’m betting that the “Ad Marketplace” scenario will best describe the picture in 2012.

Technorati: IBM, Advertising, social media, marketing, PR, public relations

Facebook in Diverse Decades of Life

The Austin American Statesman has a helpful article on Facebook for thirtysomethings (which also applies to those in their 40s and 50s, too.) Hat tip to Mari Smith. It gives a window into the thinking of recent Facebook adopters.

Jeremiah Owyang recently posted a good explanation of “The Social Graph.” I agree with Jeremiah that social networking features may become a greater part of all web sites, but unless someone makes it extremely simple to carry your social networking identity across sites, there will be a gravitation toward the top-tier sites like Facebook and MySpace. That’s why Michael Arrington reports that top leaders and founders of some of the second-tier sites are leaving (or bailing, depending on your perspective.)

The thirtysomethings, fortysomethings and fiftysomethings who will create the critical mass for social networking are not geeks, for the most part. They also seem to be coming to Facebook in large numbers.

As the American Statesman article indicates, these people don’t belong to a ton of social networking sites. They are just now getting into Facebook. Transporting identities isn’t a big deal to them, because they are mostly just starting on their first site. If they find one that is meeting their needs, as Facebook seems to be, they won’t feel the urge to join another one. They can form new groups effortlessly within Facebook. Why go elsewhere?

And now, with Facebook’s Beacon (although it is somewhat controversial), what they do on other sites can find its way into their Facebook news feeds. So that does provide some of that information flow.

For most non-geeks, the issue won’t be “How can I reconcile all of the social networking sites to which I belong?” It will be, “Which one site gives me everything I really need?”

I had dinner with my twentysomething daughter and her husband last night (they met through Facebook), and she asked, “Are people thinking that Facebook is just going to be a fad?” I explained how some believe that thirtysomethings, fortysomethings and fiftysomethings joining Facebook will cause the college crowd to exit to whatever comes next. But I said I don’t think that’s likely, because of how much I see her younger siblings using Facebook, and how they have all of their Homecoming pictures and the like stored there. It’s the world’s biggest photo-sharing service. I don’t see them leaving that, and their friends, to join other sites.

“I just see it as a another way to communicate,” Rachel agreed. “I tell people who want to get in touch with me to ‘Facebook me.’ It’s just like the telephone or the text message.”

Geeks like having interoperability standards between social networking sites. But so far Google’s OpenSocial is just a common language that widget makers can use to make their lives easier in application development.

For everyone else, I think even relatively easy interoperability between sites may be too complicated. I have a bunch of real-life friends who are starting to get into Facebook. Like those mentioned in the American Statesman article, they are starting to see the potiential benefits and usefulness.

What would they have to gain from joining a second social networking site?

Technorati: Facebook, social networking, Jeremiah Owyang, MySpace, OpenSocial, Google, Beacon, TechCrunch, Arrington

Transforming Health Care

For the next couple of days I’m going to be spending much of my time at a symposium hosted by Mayo Clinic (my employer) on transforming health care. It’s called Transformation: A Symposium on Innovative Health Care Delivery. Here’s symposium registration site that gives background on the event, and here’s the blog where several others and I will be writing about the sessions. We have a great roster of speakers, and the discussion should be quite stimulating. I’m hoping many of the participants will have brought laptops so they can contribute to the continuing discussion on the symposium blog, and we’re also planning to eventually have a podcast of the audio from the presentations.

I’ve liveblogged at several other conferences before; this is the first time I will have done it at a Mayo Clinic-sponsored conference. What better one to use as a starting point than a conference on innovation? Most of my posts will likely be at the symposium blog, but as I learn things that might be interesting to readers of this blog I will cross-post here, too.

The good part about being at a conference at work is that I can keep up on some other projects, and step out for meetings when absolutely necessary. The bad part is it can be hard to engage as fully as when I get away.

Technorati: Health care, innovation, symposium, conferences, Mayo Clinic