Kate was on Cyber Village Radio with Host Rob Thrasher last week talking.
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I’ll be on HubSpotTV this Friday as a guest. We’ll spend a few minutes talking about digital activism before diving into a week of news.
You can either view online or, even better, if you’re in Cambridge, come on down to HubSpot (see site for details). There’ll be food from Lansdowne Pub as well!
Please join Anya and I on Permission TV this Thursday (2 July) at 3pm.
Panelists:
Gradon Tripp, Founder of Social Media for Social Change
Joe Waters, Director of Cause Marketing for Boston Medical Center
Ken George, New Media Production Manager for WBUR
Brian Halligan, CEO and Co-Founder of HubSpot
Kate Brodock, Founder and Principal of Other Side Group (Moderator)
Case Studies:
Sam Vaghar, Managing Director of Millenium Campus Network
Julie Soforenko, Marketing and Outreach Coordinator of ACCION USA
We’ve included a decent clip of the general discussion, followed by a full transcript.
Note: This transcript was recorded in real-time and is therefore an incomplete record of the panel discussion. Which is to say that this is the jist of what was said. Before attributing any quotes, please first seek permission from the speaker.
Q: Please introduce yourself and answer the question, “What is your definition of social media?”
Joe Waters: I’m the director of cause marketing of Boston Medical Center – and we do a lot of “between non- and for-profit” partnerships, like Project (RED). We partner with many for-profits (point of sale or percentage of sale programs, generally) — a lot of that to raise money for the medical center. One big event, Halloweentown, is put together with iParty, and has been a big fundraiser and very attractive to the what we call “the four-legged four-armed monster” — mothers with kids. I write a blog on cause marketing, as well.
Social media to me is (1) two-way communication (I like sites that talk back to you, like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs), and (2) user-generated work. We’re seeing the idea of someone sitting in an office and generating content going away.
Ken George: Public radio, online production manager for WBUR. Thank you for pledging to your local radio station. I recognize that pledging is a particular type of fundraising, and I’ve been working on pushing WBUR toward social media in the past year. What Obama did with social media to engage and mobilize was great, and I’d like to see public radio do that, too. We have monthly social media gatherings at the station. It’s important to break down the walls between the customers and us. I think a key part of the definition of social media is Creating Value.
Gradon Tripp: I’m in business development at Firstgiving. We use the tools of social media to raise money for non-profits. I think there’s a lot of nonsense out there about social media. I think it’s the just new tool of communication, like a telephone.
Brian Halligan: HubSpot is an inbound marketing company. The tried and true marketing techniques don’t change much across the for- to non-profit spectrum, and you and I are getting better and better at blocking out traditional, interruption-based marketing messages. The old rules are broken and getting more and more broken.
My co-student at MIT created a blog in the early days and was very smart about engaging others. And this helped develop my theory that marketing needs to move from outbound – interrupting you – to inbound. I think of social media as interactive, two-way, many-to-many. It’s great for marketers because you can really lower your marketing costs.
Q: Why did you start using social media, and what’s the process of bringing people onboard?
Brian: When we first started using social media, we initially researched for the idea of our company by checking on the social mediasphere. Blogs, emails, etc. are all important channels to be used, and social media is one of them. And we measure over time the conversation rate for each channel, including social media. Step 1 is creating remarkable content, such as a blog. You want to optimize the blog title, short and sweet, for both Google and concise sharing, such as on Twitter. You almost need to be a professional title writer for social media. Then step 2 is to market it through all the channels.
Joe: We have to be a proactive, progressive fundraising operation – our customers don’t make enough to be our main source of donations, so we have to widen our net. Getting into social media was the next step, and we always want to be ahead of what our partner companies are doing, and now that they’re getting into social media, we can help them with our expertise, helping with the audience, the tools, building a presence, and when they see us as an organization that’s helping add value, that makes a difference when of the many nonprofits they work with, one of them is helping them achieve their marketing goals. It helps us stand out, compared to a nonprofit they work with who they don’t hear from except for once a year when planning the annual fundraiser.
Ken: My eureka moment came when we got comments through some Flickr pictures. It has taken me a good 6 months to demystify social media, and it was scary at first given our prestigious brand, which we’re rather protective of. As a journalistic organization, WBUR is concerned with brand and appearance issues, like avoiding biases.
The goal is to demystify social media to the WBUR folks, and getting our listeners into the building has been a large part of that. Our progress has been in fits and starts, but I think we’re out in front of the comparable public radio stations out there.
Gradon: We have tweetups – take a word, at the letters T-W, and it’s a twitter word. But many of them are just having a beer. So I wrote a blog post, “Let’s have a social media fundraiser.” And this one event that was supposed to just raise a few thousand dollars turned into a $20K fundraiser. Our most recent event raised $30K — half cash and half in-kind donations.
Q: How do you convert followers into volunteers or funders? Followers into doers?
Gradon: You ply them with alcohol. Our fundraising events aren’t different – raffles, silent auctions, alcohol. We had a successful event, advertised as $45 for an open bar in NYC, where that’s a cheap night out. After 90 minutes of that, we bring out the raffle tickets. Things like that – raffle tickets, silent auctions – are the tried-and-true tools of fundraising, and it’s not like social media is going to replace that.
Everyone asks, “What’s in it for me?” We teamed up with content producers who thought we were doing good work and asked them to point back to us, in the channels we work in.
Joe: On twitter, you’re getting a lot of branding and marketing people as early and heavy adopters, and so as a non-profit guy you can have conversations with them about what they’re doing, what their clients are up to, and even looking at collaboration. And a nonprofit talking to a for-profit PR director — that’s an easy and productive connection to make.
Brian: There are several types of content we push out through twitter: blog articles, webinars, video
Joe: Is twitter the death of blogging? Or does blogging fade as Twitter grows?
Brian: Everyone wants to be a publisher. If you create interesting blog content, that works for both social media tools and Google.
Kate: And HubSpot has great video spots.
Ken: Some parts of fundraising, pitching for pledges, doesn’t work as well on social media, since public radio-style pledge drives tend to be very direct appeals, which doesn’t translate as well to social media. But the visits to the station are very powerful.
Gradon: Ken does something subtle — a week before a pledge drive, he’ll ask followers to respond, “Just say hi.” I.e., If you like WBUR, let us know.” Which helps prime the pump. Very clever.
Q: Local vs. National scale efforts in new media, what say you?
Brian: It’s about your product – can it be scaled nationally? If so, social media works, because it too scales nationally. But if you’re a local business with local services, it doesn’t quite work.
The Facebook search bar is one of the most used search engines, and I think it will grow to be a way to find local services. But slicing and dicing down to your neighborhood is still tough. Far more benefit taking something small and expanding nationally.
Gradon: We’re seeing charities raise money online where only a small portion of donors are in the state of the services rendered. The rest live elsewhere.
Q: What is value of using social media to get information, feedback, to avoid mistakes? Research value?
Gradon: I don’t think one should be afraid of making social media mistakes. Jump in.
Brian: It’s a great way to get Beta feedback quickly. Obama’s campaign was great at that market testing.
Joe: I was listening to Blue State Digital talking about social media – they’re the ones who did Obama’s web campaign – and they’re very nice about it, but said that email is the killer app because everyone still reads their email. It’s a better way to reach people, and it’s more actionable.
Gradon: Social media is a tool in the toolbox. Still, the largest response rate is from email.
Brian: At HupSpot, we track a metric called reach. The social media side of our marketing list is growing. I think when someone wants to communicate, you’ll need to tap email as WELL as twitter, facebook, etc.
Joe: Zappos is a great example of doing more of having a logo online, giving the logo purpose and personality. But it is labor-intensive.
Q: What are 1 or 2 really important things for the audience to take away about how to use social media?
Ken: At WBUR, it requires a bunch of people to believe in it and carry the torch. The other crucial thing is consistency. Someone in my organization wants a blog, I give them that, and they post perhaps once a month. It is a time investment, which is something that many don’t realize.
Brian: When my parents watched TV in the ‘70s, they watched the ads. A bit by bit, through TiVo, the remote, Internet content, that interruption-based marketing model has melted. We’re starting to see more and more Fortune 500 companies grow through expertise in the social media and Internet space. You can see it in the quick churn rate of Fortune 500 companies, how many new ones there are every year. My advice is to just get on with it.
Gradon: You get in, you do it, you don’t question yourself, and if you believe in yourself, you’re figure it out and thrive.
Joe: You need to be really into social media, or you need to find someone in your organization who is. You know the book, “He’s Just Not That Into You”? It’s like that.
Kate: A lot of companies try to restrict who can blog or communicate about the company’s activities.
Brian: I think it’s dead wrong to keep employees from blogging. If you were to rank all the marketing efforts of your organization, let’s say there are 15, and if you replace the worst one replace it with a blog, and I guarantee in 6 months, you’ll have a new bottom ROI marketing initiative that is not the blog.
Gradon: Sometimes it’s Steve the mail guy who IS one of the best faces of the company.
Kate: If you can draw parallels between problems like blogging on company time with how companies have dealt with other issues, like personal email, personal phone use, etc., it’s not really that different. To prevent employees from blogging when blocking personal email isn’t done seems misguided.
Q&A
Q: Isn’t spam an issue? Having your audience feel like you’re selling to them?
Brian: Well, with Twitter you can choose who you follow.
Joe: The twittersphere really sniffs out sincerity quickly.
Gradon: Zappos doesn’t ask you to buy shoes. Instead, it’s a balance between demonstrating personality and providing value.
Joe: It’s about presenting yourself as a progressive, thought leader in the industry.
Kate: It’s about value. It’s not marketing. It’s linked to who you are, and it’s where people go to get information.
Julie: How do balance your personality on twitter vs. expertising yourself?
Gradon: Chris Brogan is a thought leader in social media. He writes more blog posts in a week than I write in a month, and a lot of the time it’s, “I had an idea, here it is.” You get a mix of “if you run a company, here’s what you should be doing” and “It’s Wednesday and that means spaghetti day.”
Ken: I’ve struggled with how to balance my personality Ken George with WBUR. It works best when it’s blurred, but it’s a challenge.
Brian: They’re real currency and social currency. And if you have 5 minutes with Chris Brogan, you shouldn’t ask him for money, you should ask him to link to you on his blog. You’ll get way more out of it.
Q: I work for AIDS Action Committee. We’ve found it difficult to make the conversation two-way. How can we do this better?
Gradon: Before you ask a question to your audience, you have to answer them. Talking to people. If you are the thought leader in the Boston AIDS community, think about what you have to offer.
Joe: One of the things we’ve talked about at BMC is, “What are our issues to talk about?” Health insurance, because people worry about that. Emergency services, because people are fascinated with it – think about the success of ER. For the 2 or 3 things trending in your area, get talking about it if you’re not.
Q: Have you every used a controversial blog posting to spur discussion?
Gradon: My philosophy is to let others be negative, to be bigger and better than that. When I’m negative, it’ll be about a small thing about a site’s layout and then I’ll compliment the site for its content and mission. One time we had an item make it on Digg, and that brought a lot of negative trolls. Digg is full of those. And we let them have their way on the message boards and soon they left. It was easier not to engage.
Brian: I would suggest being polarizing. We did well on Digg at the beginning of HupSpot by posting polarizing articles about Google and Apple. … Or think of it this way: If someone makes a negative comment on your site, use it as a way to show what great customer service you have.
Ken: Occasionally people cross a line, and you do need to set standards about what will be censored. We moderate after comments are posted, and that works for us.
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This past Thursday, the New Marketing Special Interest Group of TiE Boston put on an event that focused on how to think about and handle your marketing in a down economy. I’ve offered below a summary of the panel talk.
As I mentioned at the end of the event, I encourage anyone with questions left unanswered to start a discussion in the comments section.
Anything [in brackets] are either additions by myself (I tried to keep them very limited, and most of them are to keep you on track) and anything in italics are some key points that came through in the comments.
Key take aways:
- It isn’t all about new media. It’s about creating the most effective marketing program which will involve components of new media alongside components of digital media and traditional media.
- There was a large emphasis on doing your research. Find out where your customers are, how you solve their problems, and how to communicate that to them. You’ll get the most effective marketing campaigns if you do that process right.
- New media allows you to use many inexpensive tools to reach your customer. You don’t need to have a huge budget to accomplish a lot using Web2.0 tools. It’s applicable in both the B2C and the B2B space.
- The new form of marketing encourages engaging with your customer, and much of this is done online. Start conversations and join in discussions. At the very least, know where your brand is online and how it’s being portrayed.
- Nurturing current customers is very helpful in an economy like this, and can be leveraged to your benefit.
- Measurement of any any marketing program is not only incredibly important, but also very helpful when thinking about future marketing campaigns.
Marketing in a Down Economy: How to get the most out of your marketing spend
Panelists:
Moderator, Douglas Banks, Editor of Mass High Tech
Altaf Shaikh, Founder & CEO, List Engage, Inc
Ameeta Soni, Senior Vice President of Marketing & Business Development, VFA Inc
Praveen Ramanathan, Founder & Managing Partner, Ayantek
Bob Collins, VP of New Media Strategy, SHIFT Communications
Discussion [Please note, this is not verbatim, and has been shortened to provide you with the up-front value]
Question: What are just a few words of wisdom that you have for looking at the current economy?
Altaf: Realize you’re in a down economy and face it. Look at your marketing spend and move forward.
Bob: There’s been a fundamental reset in the economy, but it’s also social and cultural. The way in which people are engaging in conversations is online. Develop content that attracts people to the brand. Remember that people don’t want to be marketed to.
Question: Customer and clients are probably flattening spending or spending less. As marketers, how do you adjust your message or engage customers when that’s an issue?
Ameeta: We’ve adjusted our marketing spend, it’s going to be higher, and we’ve got new hires. Now’s the time to gain mind-share and market-share. We certainly do new media, but we also do a lot of everything else.
Altaf: Try to understand what’s hurting your customers and clients, and adjust your services appropriately. This isn’t the time to cut spending. Marketing is muscle. To build a relationship over time, and then reduce your communications when times are tough is not the right mentality. Stay top of mind so when they’re ready to buy, you’re there. Look at your spend, see where you can best nurture these relationships. 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of customers, go for them.
Bob: You don’t need to be everywhere, just where your customers are and your prospects are. Figure out where are your customers gathering at, and focus there. Is what you’re offering useful to my potential customer? What’s the value to the end customer? Budgets come back, be accommodating and flexible, but do it in a way that you’re adjusting your scope, identifying what’s the most valuable immediately and focusing on that. Also, remember there are many different inexpensive tools out there.
Praveen: Your best customers will come from the ones you nurture the most. In any industry, it’s always more difficult to go out and find new customers, rather than nurturing your current ones… where can your marketing spend be most useful? Leverage existing relationships. You can control this through your marketing mix (new programs vs existing programs, offline vs digital, etc). It’s not just about new media, look at the entire picture, and the whole span of marketing program.
Ameeta: Lead nurturing works very well. There are some very good marketing automation systems that you can use to get the right content figured out. Track what your marketing programs are doing and really figure out how to allocate your resources on the most successful programs.
Bob: The closer you can get to the executive team, the stronger the relatinoship will be.
Altaf: Marketing automation system does very well.. you can track programs fully with a good CRM program.
Praveen: How do you invest? It’s about finding the appropriate individual and contacting them directly. Don’t downplay the value and effect of offline channels.
Bob: Where your customers are, what value-add can you provide. What’s resonating and what’s not?
Altaf: There are a variety of software solutions out there for all sorts of companies, big and small.
Question: What about product portfolios? Cutting products? Adjusting pricing? What are you hearing about? Something’s getting cut, what’s it going to be?
Bob: Expand your offering to fit the immediate business problems of your customers, diversify your portfolio and focus minimally on the long-term. Developing partnerships is also a way to go for some people.
Praveen: Figure out what your differentation strategy is. Look at your product mix, find where your customers are, and figure out how to channel your marketing to align with those needs. What do you customers want? Understand their voice and the process they go through to select a product. Target that.
Ameeta: Continually revisit your assumptions every six months or a year… where do you need to tweek or shift?
Altad: Diversification is a Catch 22. Some sectors are doing well, some are not. Luckily we were diversified: retail needs us, but we’re also not letting the financial sector go away. Who do you want to stick with? But diversification may take a lot of resources and expertise.
Bob: [On diversification] You can’t just go after the new shiny object and showcase an expertise you don’t have. Look at what your capabilities are and what can you offer that you haven’t shown your current or potential clients.
Praveen: In B2B, you really focus on an industry that’s not so mass market, so the way you structure your marketing plans can be very different. [Case study for B2B] One of our clients offered a collaboration tools to all of its Tier One customers to really develop that relationship. They can share information on new products that haven’t even been produced. That will pay itself off in leaps and bounds in this economy because you’re providing them access to info that they can use to build next generation of products [while developing stronger, long-lasting relationships.]
Bob: That process is also invaluable to you because you understand better what’s important on the ground floor.
Ameeta: Partnerships can really help. New markets take time and effort, so look for complimentary marketing.
Question: Branding and market share. When you have a down economy, you can be a turtle, or you can buy yourself market share. We all know you should do the latter, but how? Do you identify new partners and markets? What are some new strategies?
Ameeta: Just as you go back to customers first, and similarly partners, check who you’ve engaged with in the last year or so and gotten traction from, and decide if you can approach them first. Can you introduce new product or get into a new market together. Find out what you can do more easily.
Altaf: The common philosophy is t just try to keep the lights on and get through 2009… but for others, this is the time to do more prospecting. There are great data modelling tools you can use to look at your customers and identify what makes them great, then see if you can find more like them. Develop a strategy to go after these folks. Branding isn’t enough. You can’t expect your message is going to stick in such an economy. When your list [of prospects] is wrong, nothing else matters. So identify customer segment well.
Ameta: Go after your customers in the most inexpensive and creative ways. Using things like guerrilla marketing and new media can give small companies a great presence on the web.
Bob: Develop education [content] for your client base and potential client base. Do a series on interviewing an expert in field to showcase the benefit of your product. Do it with a regular camera, get it up, get it out there. Develop content. Find experts in your company to develop that expertise. It doesn’t need to be an eBook, but make sure it’s spreadable and sharable.
Altaf: A lot of companies think branding means spending a lot of money. [Case study for inexpensive branding programs] Disney was given a huge budget, and instead hired seven bloggers, gave them exclusive access to behind-the-scenes information to blog about before “launch” and then let them spread the information along. [If anyone has any direct links to this case study, please pass them along]. You don’t need a huge budget for this type of marketing.
Bob: Yes, they spent their time creating valuable content.
Praveen: New media can play a really good part in this process. One thing new media does is levels the playing field. It doesn’t matter if you’re huge or teensy. It gives you a leg up if you do it correctly within a small company.
Bob: Even print editions are getting online, sometimes more of the value is coming from comments section, which allows for conversation.
Q: Even within small companies there may be different views. Give a two sentence description and what value you provide, be as clear as possibile, for when your describing. In an entrepreneurial environment, with some people seeing things differently, is it that they’re defining the problems differently? How can you manage the different veiwpoints in-house? Assuming the brand is strong external, what if internal brand isn’t so strong? [Combination of moderator question and question from the audience]
Praveen: We’re all in the business of providing value: you define the need, and how you fulfill it. It’s such a fundamental question to answer. When you communicate that externally, it needs to come from a very defined set of people. Twitter is a prime example of this… many companies have dedicated professionals. This is more of a business strategy discussion.
Bob: IBM is a good example of this: there are so many services, but they do a really good job of keeping the same brand across this.
Praveen: What new media does is it creates the challenge of “guerilla marketing”…. other individuals can take your brand name into channels and do what they will with it. Understand who those people are outside the company [whether they're users, ex-users, competitors etc] and how they’re communicating the brand.
Bob: It’s not a broadcast. You can get an amazing amount done without having a blog or website or anything, just by engaging in conversation online.
Ak: If you’re small, and lucky enough to have a customer or two, ask them why they worked with you. Take that information and use it.
Ameeta: Your customers can sell for you.
Question: Your customers ask about ROI, prove it to us. What do you say?
Bob: Sales, at the end of the day, is the ultimate ROI, but along the way, you evaluate what you need to measure. Make your goals, and determine how to measure them in the beginnging.
Altaf: Analytics and ROI are very useful and important. What do you attribute the sale to? Matchback analysis [simply put, figuring out where the end sale "came from"] is a tricky subject. What can help you or go a long way? If you can cookie your prospects (1st or 3rd party), and you know where they’re going, you can get a lot of information. That’s the type of ROI that I would take back to C-level executives: “These are channels that are helping towards the sale.”
Praveen: Think about it as entire marketing channel advertising. How can you build compaigns that cut across these tools? Which tool is required for particular campaign?
Bob: Get access to clients analytics. Not necessarily about where you think you want to go.
Praveen: You want to be careful, attribution across different channels is almost a pipedream. Connecting the activities in your campaign across a given period of time is great, but it’s difficult to do over the long-term.
Ameeta: Sometime time gets stretched over 6-9 months. Profile your ideal customera and figure our how you’re going to reach them. If you get that down, you’re going to get better ROI because you’re reaching the right people.
Bob: What’s the big critical barrier to get into the B2B space? Your customers are not asking questions about you. [Client case study] We recommended that every quarter, their client company round-up their customers, and they have conversations every quarter with them. All they did in their reports was tell the story about the engagement with the customer and what the critical factors were to reaching them.
Question: I want to hit new media, digital media (email marketing, webmarketing) and traditional media. How are can these be used most efficiently?
Altaf: When people think of email marketing, they think of batch and blast. What this means is that it’s on your timetable, not their timetable. There are many missed opportunities in this approach. We like to think of “drip marketing automation“. When someone signs up, do you have a process that goes out, and engages them with a further “nurture series” to follow up on what they’ve proved to be interested in [instead of simply hitting them with the next "batch"]. If you give them a 30-day trial, nurture that 30-days! It gives you much better open rates, an d great ROI.
Ameeta: Email marketing needs to be part of a concerted portfolio and broken out to what people are interested in. Webinars work well…. for initial interest. You need to break it out to get real, lasting interest. We don’t just do something that’s pure new media or digital…. it’s a mix. If we do a direct mailing, we spend a lot of time developing the right list and we’ve had huge success rates by doing that.
Praveen: I like to think of Social Media Optimization. It’s a channel in it’s own right. Create your brand in various social media channels, connect the information across the board with their partners. Look beyond personal networking, and think about company networking. Build link pages. These pages can drive traffic to your site. Invest the time to build branded pages across platforms and increase the number of linked pages coming into your site. Use new media as a platform to humanize your product so consumers can connect with you.
Bob: Have an opportunity to have a real engagement and conversation around issues. 1) Listen! Do searches, read converastions, then engage. 2) Anything you’re doing from a traditional standpoint, see if you can socialize it. Get it out there.. It’s not about broadcasting! It’s about honest conversation.
Altaf: A lot of companies put their best material behind lock and key. Realize what you can give away for free. [reference to World Wide Rave, by David Meerman Scott]
Question from audience: What do you do if the decision-makers don’t embrace the new media technology?
Bob: Tell them that their buyers are online. Google likes Web2.0, influence it.
Praveen: [BU Case Study] BU was finding their normal marketing channels (radio, newspaper) saturated with every other business school in the area. So they took out an ad that directed readers to their online services, and offered there a series of testimonials from several prominent BU MBA graduates as a “discussion.” It was wildly successful.
Kate: Connect the concept to marketing. Many people think of new media as a separate, new thing and that scares them. When you relate it directly to marketing (it is marketing!) and communicate as a new tool set to enhance marketing, people start to get it more.
What were some of your takeaways? Was anything left unanswered for you? How does your company deal with marketing in a down economy?
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Anya and I are very pleased to announce that we will be heading the newly formed Boston Chapter of Girls in Tech.
“Girls in Tech is a social network enterprise focused on the engagement, education and empowerment of like-minded, professional, intelligent and influential women in technology. As young women with the capacity to inspire, we made it our personal desire and passion to create and sustain an organization that focuses on the collaboration, promotion, growth and success of women in the technology sector.”
“Girls in Tech aims to offer a variety of resources and tools for women to supplement and further enhance their professional careers and aspirations in technology. Some of these resources include, educational workshops and lectures, networking functions, round table discussions, conferences, social engagements, and recruitment events.”
So far, GiT has been a wild success in its existing San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City chapters. Along with the Boston Chapter, new chapters were open in Austin, Portland, and London.
We feel that the Boston technology scene would be a perfect one for a group like this, and we’re excited to be a part of it.
We’ll be announcing our advisory team soon, as well as the relaunch of the GiT website to include all new chapters. In the meantime, please email me at kate@othersidegroup.com for more information or join or Facebook Group!
What are citizen journalists’ roles in documenting conflict and are those roles becoming more important?
Led by Patrick Meier, a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, I’m happy to report that we’ve just completed the first of (hopefully) several case studies that attempt to answer this question more concretely.
Supported by Humanity United, the project seeks to explore the changing role and impact of information communication technology in crisis early warning and humanitarian response. The eventual goal is to identify ways in which citizen journalists and new communications tools can work more effectively in crisis situations.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBiCK-ybYpw[/youtube]
Patrick did a really good job of writing up the methodology at his blog, so I’m going to leave wheel inventing up to him.
The exciting thing for me was to see the way in which new media tools were being used by citizen journalists, specifically how much more effective they seemed to be in disseminating on-the-ground, real-time information than the mainstream media was. The effects of efforts like Ushahidi also contain incredibly valuable information for future research.
Our preliminary findings:
- Mainstream media reported actual death count before citizen journalists; however, on many accounts, mainstream media did not report on incidents leading to actual deaths, i.e., early warning signs;
- Citizen journalist reports and Ushahidi reports did not overlap geographically with mainstream media reports;
- Citizen journalists tended to report as soon as violence started, well before mainstream media;
- The number of comments on citizen journalist blogs increased during the 30-day period, or during particular periods of violence;
- The comment section was also used as a medium for real-time updating;
- Many citizen journalist bloggers used real-time updates sent to them via SMS, primarily from rural areas;
- Citizen journalism reports declined after the launch of Ushahidi;
- Ushahidi reports document an important number of violent events not reported by the mainstream media and citizen journalists;
- Contrary to news media and citizen journalist reports, Ushahidi data always had specific location information;
- Ushahidi reports also covered a wider geographical area than both mainstream news and citizen journalist bloggers.
For further information on our project’s methodology and sources, please see this short powerpoint presentation (pdf) which we have also uploaded on Slideshare. For more on crisis mapping, please see this page.
Some follow up questions that we identified as being interesting off-shoots of this project are:
- What was the role of SMS messaging in the overall information chain? How does it differ across the country (rural vs urban) and what are some of the most effective ways that this medium was (or could be) used?
- What was the role of blogs in mainstream media information gathering? Were they a resource? What about Human Rights organizations? If so, is there anything we can learn about how to make that information more effective in terms of crisis response?
- Can efforts such as Ushahidi be replicated in other areas, or have there been similar efforts?
We hope to refine the process as we move forward, and with that being said, we’d love feedback as possible on both methodology and analysis, as well as the visualization. We’re looking to clean the whole package up moving forward, so this would be very helpful.
Our next case study will be Georgia. Please contact me if you’re interested in joining the team.
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In a recent interview with blogger Tony Pierce as he moves positions from LAist to LA Times, I noticed that he gave a good amount of props to traditional newspapers/journalists, commenting that “they have the best writers, they are the ones actually gathering news, and they have the best photographers, and the tightest infrastructure. They’re doomed for success as long as they stop fighting the inevitable.” I couldn’t agree more. Reputable journalists are, for the most part, trained to dig up info, research stories and give us the best of their findings, biased or not. It’s the facts.
Which leads to the question of which is better? I used to disregard bloggers (this was some time ago, as I now have two of them!), chocking them up to people who just wanted to vent and throw out unsubstantiated claims. That was pretty naïve on my part. But we’ll go ahead and chock that up to inexperience and elitism… a common occurrence for someone in their early twenties who had degrees in History and Political Science.
Moving ahead, it started to become common that, while searching for info in graduate school, blogs were among Google’s first finds. So I started reading them…. with a grain of salt of course. And back to the issue of biases, yeah, blogs are full of them. They’re mostly opinion of facts.
So we end up with facts versus opinions. And again, which is better? Well, I’m proud to say my views have changed and I consider both better. I’ll always read a newspaper or magazine for a set purpose, harvesting for facts and information on what’s happening today, being aware of biases, and trying to par it down to data. That’s fine. And because of my training, I look at as many sides of the issue that I can (yes, I’m Middle-of-the-Road on politics).
But this is where blogs come in with an attribute that forces this process on people who wouldn’t otherwise go through it. Because of the vast amount of information online, it’s close to impossible to do a search on a particular topic without finding a blog or a blogesque quality to it. Even the big newspapers online have comments offered by bloggers (or just plain commenters).
The opinions are out there, and in your face. And it’s great. You almost can’t avoid reading an opinion contrasting your own views, and that’s what needs to be happening. One of the biggest downfalls I see in people is being unflinchingly dogmatic.
So slowly, the blogging world is chipping away at this. And I say keep it up.
I’ve been grading Entrepreneurship papers this past week (yes, I’m a TA for that too), and I’ve noticed a few things that I think directly apply to marketing. The end goal of the class (and for anyone who’s completing and moving forward with a business plan) is to present their own business plan (or that of their groups in most cases) to actual Venture Capitalists who will critique and then choose the top few. So the assignments thus far have been gearing everyone up for that moment.
What are the most important features of a business plan? Is this product/service/idea realistic, able to to make money, and doable given how the plan has described it? It’s very important that you communicate these things to possible funders so that they’re nodding their heads up and down by the end of the presentation.
Actually, by the end of the first two minutes. And that’s the other key. Past the first two or three minutes, if they aren’t convinced, it doesn’t matter what’s in the rest of your presentation. They’re done.
The same applies to marketers. If you can’t tell the consumer why they need you in the first few moments (or seconds!), they aren’t going to listen. I’ve recently gotten a few marketing emails (”from trusted partners” of various marketing listserves), and those that are effective I can open up and read everything in fewer than 10 seconds and I have no scrolling to do. Those that aren’t effective are those that explain away what they’re doing, and I never even get to the point before I close the email.
On that note, I’m going to stop because this probably applies to blogs also!
I think I wrote in my other blog about one of my current Teaching Assistant positions… it’s for Joey Reiman of BrightHouse. BrightHouse works with companies of all sizes to help them capture (or re-capture) their “Master Idea.” Part of what this entails is a focus on the true ethos of a company. As Joey often says, traditional advertising and/or marketing companies tend to focus on tactics or strategy, especially when dealing with internal branding (which , by default, directly effects what your external brand portrays). BrightHouse goes right to the core of the company, starting with the culture and digging right down into the real company ethos (the deepest level you can reach).
The reason I’m bringing this up is not necessarily to talk about BrightHouse, but more to talk about the process they use to achieve their results. Are you ready for this? It’s thinking. No joke. They literally take a significant amount of time thinking and brainstorming. BrightHouse assembles panel-like sessions from its cadre of enormously influential people in various fields (usually they are matched according to the industry of the client company, however, there is also an effort to get thinkers from outside the field to add a new view).
And what do they do at the end? They sell their idea to the company. There’s not a campaign, or a poster design, or a new commercial. Just an idea.
It’s a beautiful thing. To me, thinking is the most crucial action in life (aright, perhaps involuntary actions like… I dunno, breathing, might be more crucial, you get me though). Thinking is what separates the men from boys. You can’t act effectively without thinking. And the more you can broaden your thought process in general, the more effective and diverse your thinking will be when it’s needed the most (execution).
There should be more thinking in the world as far as I’m concerned. So pick up a book, or ask your coworker what her hobbies are (and then ask her about those), or watch a pigeon in the park, or a kids cartoon. Something. Anything. Get the juices flowing.
Aright, I feel like I just preached the power of thinking. I did preach the power of thinking. I’m allowed one soap-box entry a month, how about that? Then I’ll stop and be funny next time.
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