Hello!

We have just launched our new Eastwick Agency Blog. We will no longer be blogging on the eastwikkers blog.

It’s just a little over two years since Eastwick, under the social media leadership of Giovanni Rodriguez, launched eastwikkers. We’re really excited about building on our two years’ agency blogging experience with our new blog. We’ve got a new look, a new format, and more bloggers than ever.

You can subscribe to our new blog via Feedburner, or our RSS feed. If you’re already subscribed to eastwikkers through Feedburner, there’s no need to change anything. We will change the feed address to point to the new blog.

Thank you for reading eastwikkers. We look forward to continuing the dialogue over at the new place. We’re still rolling up the tarps and working on the landscaping, but please come take a look, and let me know what you think.

Joel

According to a new Zogby poll (thanks to The Future of News for the post):

“The vast majority of American voters believe media bias is alive and well – 83% of likely voters said the media is biased in one direction or another, while just 11% believe the media doesn’t take political sides.”

And no wonder. News programming today often makes little distinction between news reporting and commentary, and the journalist is often as important as the news itself.

But distinctions matter. Journalism can never be truly “unbiased.” By the time we read any news article or watch any news segment, even the most “objective” news has been run through a series of bias filters. Each news department selects which stories to cover and which reporters to cover it. Each reporter selects which aspects of a story to focus on and which details of all possible details to include in the story. And editors make selective changes to fit a variety of criteria.

But recognizing this inherent bias, doesn’t mean we should stop insisting on some objectivity. Journalists can still choose to report mainly on the who, what, when, where, and why, and refrain from subjective assessment. They can still do their best to be fair and cover both sides of an issue, reporting that some people disagree about reported facts, and quoting the subjective assessments of people on multiple sides of an issue. And news programs (and bloggers who report the news) can still make a clear distinction between news reports and commentary.

This distinction is an important one for me because it goes to the issue of trust. With the blurring of the distinction between reporting and commentary, to trust the news, we must place more trust in the news organization (with all its corporate influences), which can then lead to an abuse of that trust in the form of completely subjective reporting that serves only the bias. If we can’t trust the organizations, then we’re left only with individuals – whether reporters, commentators, or bloggers – and many of these have little credibility beyond zeal. Stephen Colbert’s incredible humor and influence come from playing off this so perfectly, and the fact that some people don’t recognize the Colbert irony is a testament to what they are not recognizing in actual news programming.

And it’s a good reminder for PR pros. While subjective assessment (”the leader in…”) certainly has its place, hype-free objective reporting encourages trust and ultimately coverage.

While I’d like to think the Zogby poll indicates healthy skepticism, I fear it indicates growing cynicism about an environment in which persuasiveness comes all too often from celebrity and the amount of noise one makes.

Our former colleague Giovanni Rodriguez worries that “community” is under stress from commercial interests that would abuse the label. “A fair number of people in my world have wondered if marketers are using the word to whitewash their commercial interests.”

I say, take heart. Unlike fabricated labels such as “Web 2.0,” “community” is a real word with some clear definitions. Web 2.0 was coined to refer to a new generation of web-based services and tools, including social networking sites, wikis, and folksonomies, but was quickly adopted as a catch phrase referring to all sorts of things, including websites, businesses, business models, even completely unrelated technologies. And since few actually knew what it meant and investment dollars poured in, little could be done to stop the flood.

But “community” means something generally understood, and if folks start using it for something that isn’t in the spirit of a community, readers will more easily detect it. At the same time, it’s important not to force this broad term to mean only one type of online community. Perhaps we need to keep a modifier in front of it – something more specific and informative than “online” – so we preserve usefulness of the general term and encourage other types of communities, online and off.

Another word feeling the stress is “green.” Although we can all agree that one definition of “green” is “environmentally sound or beneficial,” agreeing on what is environmentally sound or beneficial is far more difficult—which means “green” can end up meaning just about anything.

We may well have reached a tipping point with support for environmental issues. Tim Dyson is hopeful. Hollywood has gone green. Evangelicals have gone green. And PRWeek is holding its first-ever green conference in San Francisco because “Corporations are going green like never before.” But that may also mean that many other companies will soon turn green with envy and start spending the green to convince everyone they too are going green. So while we may finally be planting the right garden, there will still likely be plenty of weeding to do.

Another deception is getting play in this New York Times article (as noted in GMSV today). The problem this time is with Wikipedia. In short, a respected editor who used the name Essjay and was supposedly a tenured professor of religion at a private university and an expert in canon law turns out to be a 24-year-old who attended a number of colleges in Kentucky and apparently has no relevant degree.

Most curious, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales initially defended Essjay, accepting the editor’s claim that he’d hidden his identity to protect himself from reprisals for mediating disputes between Wikipedia contributors. According to the NYT article, Wales also stated that the editor “is now, and has always been, an excellent editor with an exemplary track record.” Wales later reversed himself saying that his “past support of Essjay in this matter was fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on,” which really doesn’t at all explain his initial defense or his reversal.

Protecting ourselves by hiding our identity can sometimes be a smart thing to do, and anonymity is often debated in PR. But anonymity is not the same as deception. If I reveal I’ve chosen not to disclose my identity, then it’s up to readers to choose whether or not to take me as credible. I haven’t deceived anyone. Wikipedia’s Essjay lied about his credentials, pretending to have experiences he never had in order to assume a position of authority. The difference is huge, and it’s hard to see what part of this Wales didn’t get immediately.

And what about lying about one’s identity for career advancement? George Eliot? I don’t think so. Actually it’s closer to the fraud perpetrated by Stephen Glass. Essjay was not writing fiction. He was pretending to be an authority on religion, and he used that authority to mediate arguments. Even if Essjay is as knowledgeable about religion as a tenured professor, his readers should have known the truth about what that knowledge was based on.

This deception sits at the heart of social media and our online interactions. How can we ever know that a person or company we encounter on the Internet is honestly represented?  Initially, we can’t. In the offline world, eye contact, a handshake, a feeling we get when we enter a building all help, but even with these, we are often deceived. As more and more of our lives are conducted online, we’ll need to develop new ways of sensing deception, whether through new technology or through social media mechanisms that allow us to get feedback from the crowd – some of these are already emerging (though how can we be sure they are legit?).

The ramifications for PR are clear. Our weapons against a heightened fear of being deceived – and its consequence, cynicism – are more transparency and less hype, a lesson that needs to be passed on to clients as well.

Hugh MacLeod argues that “public relations is getting social media all wrong,” and paraphrases Stowe Boyd: “Please, please, please dont talk about audiences when you are theoretically promoting social media.” Boyd is, in turn, paraphrasing Doc Searls. Well, now that you have the family tree, let me make my point.

Boyd offers some good advice:

“Drop the old speak: no more ‘audience’, no more third-party writing, no more ‘wink, wink’ complicity in totally false quotes and knowingly working with clients on spin instead of open dialogue. School your clients to do the right thing, not just wrap themselves in a bunch of psychobabble about social interaction with their ‘communities’ without actually adopting a new mindset.”

I differ on only one point. It’s a mistake to stop thinking about your audience, and eliminating the word from your vocabulary serves no purpose other than to appease the social media elite. The idea that corporate communications and marketing people are clueless because they use the word “audience” is a popular red herring among anti-traditional communications jihadists. While the dictionary definition of audience might imply one-way communications to a captive and passive group, the concept, properly applied, is a powerful one that is highly relevant in social media strategy. In the corporate world, segmentation allows a company to enable effective communications with its various audiences. These audiences include customers, prospects, shareholders, business partners, employees, developers, journalists, bloggers, securities analysts, industry analysts and other influential groups that the company needs to reach.

Each of these groups has different interests. Securities analysts, for example, are interested almost exclusively in the company’s financial performance, and generally don’t want to hear about product features or corporate social responsibility. Developers want to know about tools, and the availability of software updates and bug fixes.

By understanding their audience(s), bloggers can engage in more interesting and effective conversations. If I visit the blog of an expert in Service Oriented Architectures and read a post on his experience trying to replace a stolen Blackberry, that might be mildly interesting (OK, it isn’t), but would have no value to me. I’d rather learn about the blogger’s views on the role of open source in SOA adoption. Unless he is an exceptionally good writer, the blogger who writes about nothing but airports and stolen Blackberries is a narcissist, who has failed to consider his audience, readership, whatever. And I don’t care how articulate, funny, or clever a blogger is. If he or she has nothing of interest to say to me, (a disregard for audience), then that blogger and the company are wasting their time and mine.

It’s ultimately an argument over semantics. Stowe suggests we use the word “people” instead of audience, which is to me some kind of weird political correctness. And its generic and amorphous, and lead us away from an understanding of who were are trying to communicate with. (Stowe also suggests calling social media users “edgelings,” a suggestion I simply can’t respond to.)

So my advice is to keep using “audience” to describe a specific group that you want to reach with your communications. It’s a useful and well understood term, and as long as you don’t actually view your social media as one-way communications to a passive, monolithic audience, you’ll be fine. If you do think of your audience this way, you’ll wind up saying lame things like “most PR folk are still pretty clueless.”

* Portions of this post appeared recently in a post on my personal blog.

In the Real Thing, Seth Godin discusses authenticity and concludes:

“Consumers are begging to be sold on the authentic. The easiest way to do that, of course, is to be authentic. And yet, ever since they replaced the sugar in Coke with corn syrup, who knows any more… Being inauthentic is tricky, unpredictable and often wrong. But it also works.

The fact is, most of the people want to be fooled, just about all of the time.”

While I reacted angrily to this, I also know there’s truth there. Still, it’s at odds with the evolution of the Internet — with the rise of social media and the propensity for exposing the inauthentic. So maybe the problem is with the words “most” and “just about all.” Maybe it should be “a lot” of people and “a lot of the time.” Which still leaves a lot of people using a lot of their time to search for and even demand authenticity.

And then there’s John Murrell at GMSV writing on Viacom’s plan to release copyrighted content on Joost and reassuring us that: “The Internet will never become television — the television will become the Internet.” Why? Perhaps because the Internet is where we go to break down the machinery used to fool us.

Writes Murrell: “The reason YouTube, and back in the day, Napster, have become popular, is because they give the people what they want. The big media companies are not giving the people what they want: they’re giving them what they, the companies, think they should have. People will laugh at Google and YouTube thinking that this is a big letdown for them and a huge boost for Joost, and in the short term they’re right. I still think that Viacom and others are fighting a battle that cannot be won. The Internet will never become television — the television will become the Internet.”

But this is only partly true too. More likely, the Internet and television will merge into a completely new beast where there will continue to be plenty of opportunities to be duped, stupefied, and generally fooled by corporate-, government-, and individual-generated content, and as many opportunities or more to engage in wholly authentic conversations on a grand scale. (We’ve always had the ability to have conversations on a local scale and have meetings, socials, and conferences that seek out the authentic.) The truth is, a lot of people are willing to watch just about anything in order to avoid doing anything (especially after a long day at an exhausting or unfulfilling job with little to come home to) and are more than willing to be spoon-fed whatever someone else creates for them, including a comforting veneer of authenticity from celebrities, politicians, and talking-head experts. And this is unlikely to change until there are fundamental economic changes that are nowhere in sight.

As we continue to increase opportunities for authentic conversations, we will get more participation from those who would not or could not participate in other forms. Greater participation will result in more value, and the general volume of these conversations will grow louder and more influential (if they don’t degenerate into shrill attacks designed to create controversy and more ad revenue). This is all great but it’s not the whole story.

So what happens when the youngest children today have the choice of spending their entire lives engaged in authentic conversations or accepting whatever is fed to them, wherever it comes from? Watching my children and their elementary school peers use social media sites to get more information about their favorite Japanese anime, I suspect that they, just as we, will do both, at times demanding authenticity and truth, at other times absorbing, and even enjoying, the experiences that others create — whether they are authentic or not.

When was the last time you got an unsolicited apology from a company you do business with? I received a stunning e-mail yesterday from JetBlue Airways that demonstrates the kind of candor, clear acceptance of responsibility, and authenticity missing from so much business communications today. Here’s an excerpt:

"Words cannot express how truly sorry we are for the anxiety, frustration and inconvenience that we caused. This is especially saddening because JetBlue was founded on the promise of bringing humanity back to air travel and making the experience of flying happier and easier for everyone who chooses to fly with us. We know we failed to deliver on this promise last week."

The letter is signed by JetBlue founder and CEO David Neeleman, and also appears on JetBlue’s web site on Neeleman’s "flight log."

Even more impressive is that the company has outlined plans to fix the problems it has acknowledged, with a Customer Bill of Rights.

After disparaging them for their behavior during the snowstorm, I’m back in JetBlue’s camp.

Apropos of my previous post, Think Progress’ NetTrends ‘08 is a site that has compiled a matrix of all of the social media vehicles currently in use by candidates from both parties. As of today, no Republican candidates are blogging, but this could change. NetTrends ‘08 is actively soliciting additional links.

I am not familiar with Think Progress, but according to the organization’s web site: "Think Progress is a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, … (which) is a nonpartisan organization. With the blog, CAPAF seeks to provide a forum that advances progressive ideas and policies."

This week Hillary Clinton’s blogHILLARY went live, signaling that the social media portion of the 2008 campaign is well underway. Clinton joins Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and ex-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, who both have 2008 campaign blogs. The candidates themselves don’t seem to be posting to the blogs. Instead, all three of the blogs take a "community" approach, with posts generally authored by supporters and spokespeople.

We’ve all seen the power social media has to break a politician. Howard Dean was both made and unmade by the Internet, and Senator Ted Stevens (Democrat, Alaska), not a presidential hopeful, is thus far the politician most mercilessly attacked on the Web, most likely because his ill-conceived "Internet tubes" remarks were about the Internet.

The Democratic Party has demonstrated both a willingness to embrace social media, and the potential to be burned by it. But this year we will see social media-savvy candidates (at least on the Democratic side) backed by social media-savvy advisors, with an awareness of the risks of social media, and blogs and podcasts will have greater influence than ever before in political history.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch reports:

"An online arms race has erupted among Democrats in particular. Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Clinton of New York along with ex-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina are deploying web-based video, social networking and citizen journalism to engage and motivate voters."

It will be interesting to see whether the Republicans can catch up, as they seem to be lagging the Democrats’ online lead.  (Full disclosure: I am a Democrat.)

With the proliferation of the 2.0 phenomenon, ZDNet’s Phil Waineright wonders "is that a dot or a point between the two figures? Or is the punctuation silent?" If you’re interested, you can see the results of a poll Wainewright did on the topic.

My suggestion? Don’t say it at all. One of my first official acts as Eastwick’s social media czar was to ban agency use of "2.0" unless specifically directed by clients to use it. Here is a portion of an internal Eastwick memo on the subject:

"We will not use these expressions in client communications, new business proposals etc., as they are worn out and annoying. The only exception to this policy will be use of a "2.0" term at the explicit request of a client, or when an RFP specifically calls for it. In addition to being trite, the meaning of these terms is unclear, so their use tends to interfere with effective communications."