Geoff Livingston's Blog

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Posts Tagged ‘social media’

Post Mortem: Examining CitizenGulf

Posted on: August 31st, 2010 by Geoff Livingston 3 Comments

Per last week’s post, the CitizenGulf Day of Action some good numbers and created a mindful way for people to take action in the face of the oil spill. As the entire process was largely open sourced, I’d like to share my analysis of the marketing experience, too. It is my hope that by sharing this information, other individuals and non-profits that are considering developing events can garner best practices for their own efforts.

The value of participating as a volunteer in #CitizenGulf was threefold:

1) Provide a mindful way for people to respond to BP and the Obama Administration’s collective mishandling of the situation
2) Help fishing families get on their feet and perhaps find a new future via education
3) The experience garnered running a series of concurrent national meet-ups

We met the first two objectives fairly well. By my estimate, we got at least 1000 people to take actions online or in person, and helped at least eight kids get into the After School Assembly program with $10,000 in funds raised (final tallies from Citizen Effect pending).

There are a couple of general themes that are important to note. Initially, we had larger fundraising expectations, but several challenges arose — namely BP’s role in and responsibility for the disaster, and timing — that made it clear this wasn’t going to happen as early as August 4th.

The Issue: As angry as people were, the oil spill was an issue they felt BP should handle, and if not, then the Obama Administration. It was very hard getting people to act and support this issue, especially with the dying media attention, and BP claims that the oil was gone.

Others felt the fishermen didn’t deserve a break. In the Gulf, one event organizer was encouraged not to have an event because it would hurt local tourism business. Add in the horrible disaster that occurred in Pakistan, and this effort became a very tough sell. This effort moved to become much more of an education initiative for the public.

Timing: We put the events together, from beginning to end in five weeks and two days. The actual events opened on August 1, with a 24 day ramp. This shows tremendous activism can occur using social tools in a quick timeline, if need warrants.

In this case with the oil spill rapidly leaving the national media and the minds of U.S. citizens and with the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on August 28th, we felt that the window of action was a limited one.

Timing also worked against us. August is a slow month, and organizers only had weeks to get the word out. I am sure we lost some cities because of this. It also put enormous strain on the national effort. Mistakes happened as a result. I believe in the cause enough to do this and have no regrets, but I will think three times before doing a series of meet-ups with so little time. Six months would be ideal.

Overall It Was a Success

Twitter Activity the Week of CitizenGulf Events

In my mind, the effort was a success, primarily because enough local leaders really ran with this, and so many people took action. The effort succeeded because most of us involved in organizing events kept going no matter what. People showed their true characters, and the success of CitizenGulf was a collective win as a result. To honor those who worked hard, and made a big difference with little steps, I’d like to offer the positives before the challenges.

Positive Lessons

Citizen Philanthropy: This effort was an initiative based in empowering citizens to act, and they did. Given the nature of the oil spill, providing mindful action for concerned citizens was a challenge, and one we felt compelled to offer after our fact finding mission. Clearly, as tough as an issue as it was, others felt the same. The 1000 plus people who took action, and 400 plus who donated are the big winners.

Social Media Works: We had no budget, and no paid staff other than the time that Citizen Effect dedicated to the effort. Everyone else volunteered, and all the tools and design were provided for free. The whole effort was done on a shoe string, and was possible because free social tools empower activism.

Crowdsourcing on a National Level: We took a hands-off approach to local events encouraging people to become creative and make the events their own. The Tar Ball took off in Houston and DC had a date auction. In North Carolina, Rob Blackwell created a song! DC’s Jess3 contributed an EventBrite landing page. Chicago and LA had concerts, and New York featured a movie. It was awesome to see the creativity!

Citizen Journalism: The citizen journalism last June was an incredible success, driving incredible awareness about the plight of the fishing families, prompting people to ask us what was next, and if they could get involved. I wouldn’t hesitate to do this again as a means of open research, sharing knowledge and driving interest.

New Relationships: Whenever you do something like that involves mass action and face-to-face interaction, you create all sorts of new relationships for others as well as yourself. I think anyone who invested serious time in CitizenGulf is already seeing the intangible benefits this week in their online networks.

Believing: Sometimes when something as bad as the oil spill occurs, the lying, the malfeasance, and the inept governance that oversaw the effort, people stop believing. Ironically, Obama’s campaign promise of, “Yes, We Can,” while it may not hold true for his administration, did come true for CitizenGulf. I think most people believe that even with a simple registration or even a tweet they made a difference. And for eight kids they did. It’s important that people see this and know it, because believing your actions matter is the antithesis of the growing lack of empathy we are seeing in society today.

Challenges

Twitter Activity the Week Prior to CitizenGulf Events

Some of the challenges were external and beyond our control, and some were internal and provide an opportunity for learning. As one of the public leadership points of contact for CitizenGulf, and arguably the most visible, I want to state now that these are my opinions, and also from my standpoint, the internal challenges are my responsibility. I share these simply to offer lessons learned for staging events of this magnitude.

Crowdsourcing on the Executive Level: We put together a dream team of volunteers to lead the effort on the fly. Yet, at times this was hard for all parties.

Because the effort was discussed orally, and expectations were not put in writing so everyone understood their roles, we had some branding and promotion issues that made CitizenGulf less visible than it could have been. Also, this lack of clarity caused our effort to become more complicated than necessary, and I received feedback from local organizers that they did not understand calls-to-action, etc. Again, I see these errors as my fault, and I apologize for any problems this caused.

With a group managed movement like this, Memorandums of Understanding should be deployed so that everything is in writing and roles clearly defined. It also may be worthwhile to have a smaller team, with clearer executive roles.

The Local Cause: Because we picked a charity that only worked within eight parishes of Louisiana and because it was religious, we had some more explaining to do. Our fact finding mission showed that Catholic Charities of New Orleans was doing the most work with fishermen, but I think it was a stretch for some people, and it could have been better explained.

Pepsi Refresh: As part of putting together the dream team, we added a Pepsi Refresh contest to the calls-to-action. But the contest entry did not read like a CitizenGulf effort, and didn’t integrate well. Plus an ensuing controversy the week the contest opened about Pepsi Refresh’s Gulf initiative pretty much submarined this call to action right out of the gates.

Posterous: Posterous was generally a good blogging platform, but had significant DNS attacks the week of the event launch which stymied momentum. Posterous does not currently let you use its code on your own server. If we had made the decision to use WordPress on our own server, we would not have had such an issue. We had 18 business days to market the event and lost roughly two to Posterous issues. As you can see, relying on a platform outside of your control can have its downside.

Conclusion

As you can see there were more positives than negatives, and because of the outstanding way some local leaders took on the crowdsourcing challenge, a successful movement was built in a short period of time. Most importantly, people were provided with and took up mindful actions to build a positive result in the wake of BP and the Obama Administration’s combined mismanagement of the oil spill disaster.

As a whole, I see fundraising via social media as a secondary result, not a primary goal (See May interview where I stated this). For the amount of time spent, there are better primary ways to raise money. Movements like this are better for education, and to empower citizen philanthropists to act. That being said, we still helped out eight to ten children this year, and that’s a very powerful statement.

Personally, I feel like I could easily replicate and improve the citizengulf movement building process. If I had a budget and more lead time, the results would be extremely potent in comparison. The #citizengulf experience was invaluable in that sense.

Finally, I have so much more respect for Amanda Rose and the incredible job she did with Twestival. To do this three times with the level of success she has had is simply astounding.

Thank you to everyone who participated. I think we made the interwebs a better place this Summer with the CitizenGulf initiative and we made a real difference for children who were impacted by this disaster.

Citizen Effect will continue the CitizenGulf Project. You can create your own initiative to benefit Gulf kids, or you can still give if you’d like. Here’s the donation page.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The Role of Social Media Policy

Posted on: August 29th, 2010 by Geoff Livingston 3 Comments

The following is draft material for my next book, Welcome to the Fifth Estate (the follow up to Now Is Gone, which is almost out of print). Comments may be used in the final edition. You can download the first drafted chapter of the new edition — Welcome to the Fifth Estate — for free.

The organizational social media policy becomes a critical document for employees. It defines what is safe to do, what the organization frowns upon, and how employees can navigate their day-to-day responsibilities while maintaining a social presence.

A social media policy is a living document reflecting management’s ethos about how much latitude the organization encourages with online public conversations. As an organization becomes comfortable with social media and its interactions with the Fifth Estate over time, the policy will likely encourage more transparency and authenticity. It will also reflect lessons learned, some of them painful, but necessary experiences on the path towards more extended networked communications.

There are several best practices documents that have already been created on what should be included in such a document. Consider Cision’s and Society of New Communications Research (SNCR)‘s best practice recommendations.

These are good starting points, but also keep in mind that your culture is unique. That means you may have special qualities that you want to show, or regulations that prevent you from talking openly (SEC, HIPPA, government clearance, client/case confidentiality, etc.). Or your organization may be conservative with its social media out of the gate, and that’s OK, too.

The Social Media Governance site published a list of open social media policies representing almost every type of organization imaginable, from Cisco to the New Zealand State Services Commission. Your organization may want to review them to see which ones work for you and your type of business or nonprofit. In fact, you may find that several parts of the different policies may work, and you will decide to take pieces of them. Simply provide attribution, like the American Red Cross did with it’s social media policy for personal communications.

Just remember that almost all of your employees are members of the Fifth Estate themselves. To not enable access in any form only encourages anonymous postings and veiled remarks. After all, to truly become visible in social media you must at least to some extent participate with the Fifth Estate as a community member.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Thank You, #CitizenGulf

Posted on: August 26th, 2010 by Geoff Livingston 3 Comments

Yesterday’s national day of CitizenGulf events ranged from the first Social Media Club event in Fredericksburg, VA to a big get together in Honolulu, Hawaii. With tickets starting at $10 a pop, it looks like 400 people came together and raised roughly $10,000 (preliminary estimate) benefiting at least eight children of fishing families in the Catholic Charities of New Orleans After School Program.

Considering that this whole effort is volunteer based on literally no budget and named after a hashtag, I am just stunned. Two months ago, four of us were heading down to the Gulf on a fact finding mission with no idea about what we would find. And two months later we had this incredible day of action, thanks to you.

Next week I’ll provide a post mortem analysis of what did and did not work about the campaign from my perspective. Today and this weekend are all about cherishing the action so many of us have taken towards a positive, mindful result after the oil spill. With BP and Obama responsible for and promising everything, and often falling short, this is not the easiest cause to take on, but a very important one. Taking mindful steps — instead of staying angry and letting the Gulf suffer — are acts of compassion.

There are so many of us who participated, from the more than 750 people who tweeted to the more than 400 people who attended our 20 events. Jeff Dolan even made a tribute music video! I know of at least 60 blog posts written about the Day of Action. It’s impossible to thank everyone, so please forgive me if I’ve forgotten you.

First, let me thank Dan Morrison and May Yu of Citizen Effect, and Jill Foster of LiveYourTalk. It’s amazing how far this crazy little trip went. And Dan, did you think the fajitas at Lauriol Plaza would turn into this?

Eric Johnson at El Studio deserves a huge thanks for designing our Posterous blog, and for his work migrating the site. Thank you to my long term cohort on cause based action Andy Sternberg for his hard work and running the LA event.

Thank you to Sloane Berrent and Taylor Davidson for letting us co-promote with Gulf Coast Benefits. I can’t wait to see what you do next. And a huge thanks to Social Media Club co-founders Kristie Wells and Chris Heuer for believing in CitizenGulf and making it an official Club event.

Thank you to David Bazea and Citrix Online for donating your organizing software and phone services. Michael Ivey, thank you for donating RT2Give set-up. And thanks to iShake for donating proceeds from iPhone application sales.

I want to give a special thanks to a few city captains who just took CitizenGulf on and made it theirs. Gloria Bell (Philly), Kami Huyse and Grace Rodriguez (Houston), Richard Laermer (who helped me co-organize NYC), Heidi Massey (Chicago), and last, but not least Andi Narvaez (DC, our top fundraiser). Each of these cities raised $1000 or more! Also, I owe a personal thank you to Kelly Mitchell (Honolulu), Todd Van Hoosear (Boston), Alex de Carvalho (Miami), Heather Coleman (Fredericksburg), and “Calamity Jen,” Jennifer Navarete, and Colleen Pence (San Antonio) for organizing their cities! Thank you to all of our other city organizers for going the distance.

And finally, as co-organizer of the New York City event, I’d like to thank my committee of outreach kings and queens. Thank you to Damien Basile, Anna Curran, Erica Grigg (Carbon Outreach), Nicole D’Alonzo, Howard Greenstein, and our special guest Eric Proulx! CitizenGulf would not have been the same with New York!

Again, if I missed you, please forgive me. Thanks so much!

Citizen Effect will continue the CitizenGulf Project. You can create your own initiative to benefit Gulf kids, or you can still give if you’d like. Here’s the donation page.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Becoming the Fifth Estate

Posted on: August 21st, 2010 by Geoff Livingston 1 Comment

In the past, media relations operations in organizations took a top down messaging approach towards communications. Only assigned spokespeople could talk to the media or in public on behalf of a company or nonprofit. Advertising and other forms of public outreach were the domain of the communications staff.

Now, online social networks create a world exists where mass media approaches no longer work. These approaches increasingly fall on deaf ears. With less traditional media and more disparate sources, stakeholders increasingly resist the usual corporate communications efforts. As Greg Verdino has so well stated in his new book MicroMarketing, it’s an era of micromedia, which in turn requires micromarketing.

Many, many organizations have tried to engage in social media over the past five years with mixed to poor results. Invariably, the inability to embrace conversational marketing necessary for social success roots itself in cultural processes from the past.

Industrial era structures and their departments with almost absolute domain over their subject areas cripple online efforts. Consider legal and executive approvals, command and control methods towards communications, IT department controls over Internet usage and software. By the time, an organization offers an approved communication with its stakeholders (if it even gets out of the enterprise), the effort offers little relevance or conversation that interests Fifth Estate members.

To be effective, an organization has to transform its culture to nimbly participate in social media communities. It has to undergo several changes, the first of which is to change its approach towards communicating. A top down messaging approach does not work.

Instead, an organization needs to become a community member, literally a part of the Fifth Estate. It may be tough for executives and communicators to swallow this concept. But in reality, while an organization may seem like it doesn’t need to take this step to be successful, the Fifth Estate already exists within its walls! As the Air Force so aptly puts it, every Airman Is a Communicator. The sooner companies and nonprofits embrace social, not just as a communications tool, but as a factual reality that permeates its very culture.

This community-centric approach to communicating in social networks involves a commitment to having real conversations, creating social media policy across the organization so that online conversations can occur freely, and developing an embedded journalistic approach towards providing information. By building relationships with individual members of the community, and offering factual, quality and relevant information, organizations become intrinsic members of the Fifth Estate.

Get Networked!

Consider how the American Red Cross (ARC) approached its effort to evolve emergency social data communications during a crisis (full disclosure: I worked on this project). Rather than issue a press release, ARC’s executive and communications team asked 150 community members to participate in a conference in person, and thousands participated virtually. It published blog posts and research to provide information in advance of the conference, and is taking community input on a wiki and through roundtables to evolve emergency responders approaches to social media requests for help.

While this effort is still in process, it’s an example of embracing and becoming a part of the Fifth Estate. ARC participates within a larger conversational ecosystem.

But to get there, ARC had to more than just have the right attitude. It has evolved its culture significantly over several years (In fact, the organization’s social media successes were featured as a case study in my last book, Now Is Gone).

My business partner Beth Kanter calls this cultural shift becoming Networked. Instead of simply launching a campaign or an initiative, turning the focus inwards and examining cultural barriers first can yield much greater success. Optimizing processes, creating policies, and allocating resources to better approach social media creates the roadmap to becoming an effective networked member of the Fifth Estate.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Shiny Object Syndrome: Don’t Fondle the Hammer

Posted on: July 25th, 2010 by Geoff Livingston 7 Comments

The following is draft material for the second edition of Now Is Gone, which is almost out of print. Comments may be used in the final edition. You can download the first drafted chapter of the new edition — Welcome to the Fifth Estate — for free.

When seeking to inspire a conversation about one’s initiative — whether it’s product, cause or simply education — the first instinct drives one to reach for the hot tool of the day. Since the first Now Is Gone was written, this has shifted from blogs to Facebook/Twitter to widgets and applications to iPhone apps to now geolocation networks FoursSquare and Gowalla, as well as Facebook again (thank you, Open Graph).

First dubbed Shiny Object Syndrome by PR Squared Blogger Todd Defren in 2005, this phenomenon plagues organizations, companies and individuals to adapt the latest social communications tool. It’s often based on peer pressure, buzz, or a desire to be one of the first. The issue belies strategic approaches to social communications.

Ace social technology analyst Jeremiah Owyang has in time called the phenomena “Fondling the Hammer.” Web strategists oft focus on the tool rather than their strategic approach. While we have a general strategy towards creating a great conversation, we need to best understand how to participate within that community, create an approach that will work with it, rather than just run to the shelf an pick up the latest power tool.

Unfortunately, while in the short term placating a need to play with the newest communications toy, Shiny Object Syndrome can create terrific wastes of money. That in turn, can create terrible consequences for organizations, executives and communicators alike.

In Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff‘s classic book Groundswell the home run statement, “concentrate on the relationships, not the technologies.” The community drives social media, not social media in their many technological forms. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff also note that Shiny Object Syndrome can become a major barrier to success in their fourth chapter.

Getting beyond Shiny Object Syndrome requires the lead communicator to STOP! Then go back to the master communications plan. As unsexy as it is, a blog or a widget may still be your most powerful tool. A healthy evaluation of social media tools should reveal the tools stakeholders and their influencers are using, a critical determinant as these are the relationships you seek to forge.

Popularity: 2% [?]

From Branded Content Publishing to Networks (Madonna vs. Lady Gaga)

Posted on: April 30th, 2010 by Geoff Livingston 10 Comments

A written narrative of my #NextLevel Hawaii Keynote…

There’s nothing worse than performing before an empty venue. Yet isn’t that what most nonprofits and companies do on the social web?

The rush to play with new tools in this scary Brave New World has been the focus. We’ve seen the many, many successes, and yet organizations find they rarely succeed.

Then they blame the media forms. You can hear them now, “FourSquare, Facebook, Twitter, Gowalla, YouTube or blogs [take your pick] don’t work! And don’t even start with the Augmented Reality conversation! This isn’t what was promised in the New York Times. We were told this was where people met!”

The truth of the matter is simple: Companies and nonprofits alike are hitting a real wall with social media. They’ve established their beachheads. They’ve built their Facebook and Twitter and X accounts. They might have even gotten a few thousand followers. But the results have been lackluster for most.

These are the things I hear when I talk with the disenchanted, “Click throughs are minimal. There are no tangible leads, donations or sales. No one follows us.”

When I look at their social outposts, the reason why is invariably obvious: Organizations don’t talk with people!!! Instead they play with their social media tools like they were press releases. They content publish like social media was a PR feed, controlling the message and trying to look good. That’s not what social media enables.

Social is about conversations within a larger ecosystem. And big business has come to play, yet when companies and nonprofits have done so they have rebelled. Executives and communicators alike don’t want to invest the time to be successful or allow for uncontrolled conversations.

Organizations insist on publishing hard pitches to deliver ROI. And brand control is of the ultimate essence. While this can happen (ROI and branding, not control) in social media, these objectives are all by-products of building a networked community through long term, sustainable relationships that are nurtured with real conversations! Social media is still organic!

So what’s an organization to do? Stop content publishing, stop pushing your spiel. Start talking, practice the law of natural attraction, bring your network to you by becoming part of the larger ecosystem. It’s what Dell and LiveStrong and so many other successes have done.

When you let go of the postured brand control methods of mass media communications, and become a contributing part of ecosystems, things start to happen. You see organizations entrenched within larger conversations. People start paying attention, and a community starts to take hold.

This kind of thinking — that your nonprofit or company is part of something bigger — is a huge breakthrough for most executives and communicators. Manish Mehta, Vice President of Community at Dell, likened it to Nicolas Copernicus’ 16th century breakthrough that displaced the Earth as the Center of the Universe.

When nonprofits and companies get over themselves and all of their contrived communications — like an awkward young adult finding themselves — they are able to focus on the big picture, and participate online in meaningful ways. They can add social to their larger communications mix as a real means to begin conversations with stakeholders. Whether that’s for fundraising/sales, community relations/customer service or volunteers/community loyalty, it really can happen on the social web.

Madonna vs. Lady Gaga

Let’s analyze a couple of stars that all of us can identify with… Madonna and Lady Gaga. The storied brand and the networked phenomena.

Madonna is an unmatched branding genius. She is able to transform and reinvent herself decade after decade and stay relevant. Her 2008 album Hard Candy was a #1 bestseller, the seventh of her 27 year career.

Yet Madonna is not a huge social media success. The branding doesn’t translate. Why? I think you need go no further than her community page, which reads: “Please note that posting Madonna unreleased material (including photos, audio and video) to your profile is not allowed. Doing so could result in the immediate termination of your membership with Icon.”

Madonna is in control, Madonna is messaging at you. And her image is complete, her content quality secure. And no one really wants to talk about her in conversational media forms, and given how she has controlled her community, is it any wonder? Prince has made similar strategic errors on the social web.

The there’s the current phenom, Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga plays the networked game, encouraging her Little Monsters in real dialogue on Twitter and elsewhere. She empowers them too, letting them take her content and repurpose it anyway they want to. Recording at a show? Post it online, no problem ( a la the Grateful Dead’s long-time community embracement). She has done everything in the face of the recording industry’s usual command and control approaches to marketing artists.

As Jackie Huba’s fantastic case study points out, Lady Gaga has built a magnificent global network of Little Monsters. Summarizing Jackie’s post in bullets, Lady Gaga has done that methodically:

Chris Brogan

Both artists are brilliant writers. They both get the stark, wild sexy imagery that captivates us all. I think it’s fair to say that while Lady Gaga doesn’t have the brand track record of Madonna, she understands branding very well.

Yet only one owns the most viewed YouTube video in history, quickly approaching 200 million views: Lady Gaga. Is it any wonder that her first six singles, good or bad, like them or hate them, have gone straight to #1? Lady Gaga has transcended 20th century marketing to become the ultimate brand of the 21st century.

I think you get the point. Getting a packed room to listen within social channels requires a networked approach, an ecosystem ethos that caters to your community. It’s not just a flash flood either. It takes consistency, a commitment to keep delivering a larger conversational experience over time.

Unlike Madonna or other command and control organizations, it’s about making it easy for people to embrace the brand and run with it. Keep finding ways to enthrall your community, starting with the most important influencers who are the trusted voices in the community all the way down to the lurker who bookmarks content religiously.

We all have to deliver return on investment in some fashion. Measurement remains crucial. But remember, campaigns end while networks live on. When your community doesn’t respond, don’t pound home your sales message. Find out why. Look at your conversation (is it compelling and ecosystem centric?), your calls-to-action, your integration into other marketing channels. Because the problem — and the answer — is not the network, and it’s not the social media tool of choice.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Six Things To Change In Buzz

Posted on: February 15th, 2010 by Geoff Livingston 21 Comments

My professional opinion on Buzz aside, as a user I find it to be a frustrating experience (image by tifa). Perhaps I’ve become spoiled with other networks, but Buzz strikes me as the Hyundai of social networks. Rather than just complain, I’d like to offer some suggestions. Here are six things I’d like to see changed in Buzz, all of which have been submitted to the Buzz team.

1) The background is killing me. There’s so much white space in Buzz, that I find it hard to read. Google’s patented look yes, but it does not lend itself to a friendly web screen presence… And since there are no real Buzz clients yet, please allow me to inject some customization and color. My old man eyes need it.

2) Can’t say it any better than this: It’s new and clunky. Make Buzz fluid, please.

3) Don’t forward commented posts. A fellow who shall not be named posted eight photos of a young lady’s derriere yesterday. I commented on the post to this effect: “She’s beautiful, yes, but this photoset indicates stalking.” Next thing you know this fellow’s post is in all of my follower’s feeds, and the ladies were not happy about it. I unfollowed said person simply because I cannot afford to anger my user base with someone else’s online behavior.

4) Give users the option to decouple email: Buzz makes Gmail a bacon haven, and that’s not good. I get too much email, and more socnet email is not what I want. Nor do I want notifications in my email desktop. Making people figure out a GMail filter is not cool, either. Generally speaking on Gmail and Buzz together, Boo!

5) Hasten the apps process: I think not having desktop or mobile clients out the gate was a mistake. Did Google strike with an element of surprise? Yes, it did. Does its service suffer for it? Why, yes, it does.

6) Similarly, publish a FAQ. Why do I have to search for all of the ways to integrate Buzz into my social media. Google should be doing everything it can to make the experience easier on users.

What would like to see changed about Buzz?

Popularity: 26% [?]

What’s Coming Next?

Posted on: January 20th, 2010 by Geoff Livingston 1 Comment

Shashi Bellakonda, Daria Stegman and Shonali Burke

Last week the Washington, DC chapter of IABC held an event on the past and future decade in online media. Daria Steigman moderated the panel, which included John Taylor, Sprint; Shashi Bellmakonda, Network Solutions; Torod Neptune, Waggener Edstrom; and Paul Sherman, Potomac Techwire.

The first conversation was fascinating, discussing which media properties mattered most, new or old. Instead of the usual black and white debate, Sherman noted that it really was a question of the stakeholder and the media forms they prefer. Neptune also noted that influence was determined media outlet by media outlet, not by traditional or new form. This matches the larger trend of confluence we are seeing between new and old media forms in the current marketplace.

All of the panelists agreed that organizational culture still continues to be the biggest barrier to success in social. It became apparent that determining how (or if) to embrace social needs to be a much more thought out process for organizations, particularly those with conservative cultures.

Both Sprint’s Taylor and Bellamkonda noted the important impact that mobile was making. Taylor added that the industry broke a record with mobile fundraising for Haiti. Shashi added that anyone could communicate using mobile, and noted Twitter as a primary example, as well as its importance to companies.

Corporate social responsibility campaigns are also becoming an important part of online communications for companies. Taylor noted Pepsi’s $20 million online giving program that replaced its traditional Super Bowl ads.

Later in questions and answers, the NBA’s suspension of Gilbert Arenas was noted, in particular, whether or not the league had a right to stifle Agent Zero’s tweeting. Bellamkonda noted that if its illegal, employees cannot be talking about it. Panelists all agreed that the NBA had to act to protect the Bullets, er Wizards, image.

Also of note, IABC-DC President Shonali Burke celebrated her birthday at the event. She used social tools to make her 40th a fundraising endeavor for Kids with Cameras.

Popularity: 15% [?]

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