Paul's Web Space 2.1

DNC Convention 2008 Excitement

The DNC Convention has certainly been an interesting event, made even more so by the role I've played in exposing edweek.org's expanded coverage, and by my friend who spoke there.

First, I was Twittering about Edweek's coverage and Campaign K-12 blog using the #DNC08 and #RNC08 hashtags. Leslie Bradshaw sent me a Tweet in response describing the coverage that she was setting up for C-SPAN. Her social media agencies New Media Strategies and JESS3 created this site, picked the blogs, and made C-SPAN video embeddable by bloggers for the first time.

On the bottom of this page, there are local and national blogs, including ours; there is also a page compiling all #RNC08 and #DNC08 tweets, including many from Education Week. Not only are we using blogs and tweets more actively than ever before, but we managed to have our coverage picked up by C-SPAN and Frank Rich in the New York Times.


Then on opening night, my friend Margie Perez spoke at the convention. Margie was great — she talked about the impact of Katrina on her and on New Orleans, the lame response by the Bush Administration, and the help she got from Habitat for Humanity, and her smile was a mile across. She then introduced a video narrated by Jimmy Carter with more about the project. Her blog posts describing the experience are priceless (part 1) (part 2). Another friend, Armand Lione, posted the YouTube video you see above.

An electrifying week, and it's not over yet!

Labels: DNC08, edweek, politics, socialmedia, twitter

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New Blog - Online Marketing for Marketers

Labels: blog, blogging, marketing, seo, socialmedia

   Link: http://blog.onlinemarketingconnect.com/

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Speaking at the Online Marketing Summit

I thought I would drop a quick blog to let people know that I'm speaking at two stops of the Online Marketing Summit Summer Tour 2008 in the next nine days, this week in New Jersey (outside New York), and next week in Waltham, MA (outside Boston). Then I visit with parents and family in Connecticut for my only extended vacation this summer.

I'll be part of the Top Brands panel, and I'll be discussing how we're using social media at edweek.org to engage our readership and extend the reach of our message. I've been told that my panel is mostly Q&A, but if I do have time for remarks, I'll probably give an abbreviated and updated version of my talk at the Digital Velocity conference.

They might not be sold out, but I think they're close — check out the web site, and come on down if you can. It looks like a stellar cast of presenters and respondents; I'll definitely blog more about this after it's over.

Labels: marketing, oms, socialmedia, speaking

   Link: http://www.onlinemarketingsummit.com/

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Interactive Narratives 2.0 Launches

The Online News Association (ONA) has just relaunched Interactive Narratives, a very cool showcase of multimedia storytelling, now with new contribution and rating functionality. Interactive Narratives was originally created by Andrew DiVigal to keep track of interesting multimedia storytelling examples for conference presentations and courses he taught at SFSU and for the Poynter Institute. He started out by creating a database to maintain a list of bookmarks he used in these presentations, then he made this database available to everyone through the original Interactive Narratives site.

When he was hired to be Multimedia Editor at the New York Times, he found he no longer had time to maintain the site all by himself, so he worked with ONA to relaunch Interactive Narratives 2.0. The site now relies on members of its community to both contribute new content, and also to rate, tag, and review all of the content it contains, to make it easier for people to locate what they are looking for, or just to find the best storytelling examples as chosen by the crowd. Site participation is open to all; ONA members are already registered, others need to sign up.

Read more:

• ONA President's Letter - Interactive 2.0 Launches by Jonathan Dube
• Interview on Poynter Online with site founder Andrew DiVigal
• Guidelines for posting content
  

Additional tools and resources:

• Submit Bookmarklet
• Netvibes Universe
• Facebook Fan Page
  

Labels: journalism, multimedia, ONA, socialmedia

   Link: http://www.interactivenarratives.org/

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BlogPotomac - June 13, 2008

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending BlogPotomac at the State Theater in Falls Church, VA, hosted by Geoff Livingston and Debbie Weil. I thought it was a great (un)conference, filled with interesting talks, lively Q&A, and great networking opportunities. On her blog, Debbie recapped the event, linking to varied social media coverage; she also highlighted two of my favorite talks (but all the presentations were interesting).

Dan Beyers, the Local Business Editor for the Washington Post, recently spearheaded the launch of the WashBiz blog. He spoke about local business blogging at a newspaper, and how social media is affecting the Post and the newspaper business in general. (Read the preconference interview with Dan.) Then Maggie Fox, founder and CEO of Social Media Group, one of the world's largest PR agencies helping business navigate the world of Web 2.0, spoke about the impact of social media on traditional PR.

Frank Gruber, gave the post-lunch keynote talk. Frank is principal product manager for AOL in the social networking & platforms group, and is responsible for the recently launched myAOL suite, and spoke about social media efforts underway at AOL. He then led a lively discussion on "Bright, Shiny Objects" — his favorite social media tools, ultimately a fairly comprehensive list of the most interesting and useful social tools available today.



KD Paine is author of "Measuring Public Relationships: The Data-Driven Communicator's Guide to Success" and is the publisher of KDPaine's Measurement Blog and The Measurement Standard. She presented a methodology of measuring engagement in social media, and later sent me numerous presentations and links, most of which are catalogued at her company web site, Measures of Success. In an interview conducted by conference co-chair Debbie Weil, Katie states that measuring engagement goes beyond counting clicks or visits, but rather should seek to determine the quality of the interaction.



Kami Huyse closed BlogPotomac by leading an interesting discussion of ethics in PR and marketing; she posed hypothetical cases involving creating fake campaigns, and discussed a real fake campaign by Coach, astroturf (fake grassroots political movements conducted by lobbyists and trade associations), and even mentioned The War of the Worlds (different media perhaps, but many of the same issues). They opened the State Theater bar for this last speaker, which may have enlivened the conversation.

I also met up with several people I know from the local social media marketing scene; for the first time in person: Chris Abraham, George Brett, Suki Fuller and Helen Mosher. Social Media Swami Shashi Bellamkonda was among a raft of Flickr shutterbugs, Shireen Mitchell, and Jill Foster bent my ear about the BlogHer conference and blogging the Democratic National Convention; Jill also captured many attendees using Utterz.

Labels: blogging, blogpotomac08, marketing, measurement, socialmedia

   Link: http://www.blogpotomac.com/

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Social Rockstar/Now Is Gone/No Personality

I've recently been at total slacker in writing up conferences and events, but I'm starting to make up for that. I'm blogging late Spring events now, and I have a few dusty drafts that I'll drop occasionally while I catch up — as I want endeavor to create a more complete record of interesting happenings I've stumbled upon. (Warning: shameless networking/blog-dropping to ensue.)
On May 16, I caught part of the Social Rockstar Workshop at Busboys & Poets in DC. I met Nick O'Neill, creator of AllFacebook.com and the recently launched Social Times, but unfortunately, I missed his talk; I met Frank Gruber – co-founder of TECH cocktail, a principal product manager for AOL in the social networking & platforms group, and is responsible for the recently launched myAOL suite – and heard him speak about ways organizations can effectively use social media technology; and I saw Justin Thorp, Developer Community Manager at Clearspring Technologies, speak about widgets (we had already met). I also ran into Jonny Goldstein of Jonny's Par-tay (shows on Wednesday's at 9PM ET), and workshop organizers Paul and Kady, who run the DC-area Social Web Meet-up.

Then June kicked off with a DC chapter of Social Media Club book discussion at Barnes & Noble in Clarendon, featuring the authors of Now is Gone, Geoff Livingston and Brian Solis. They spoke and answered questions about PR and blogs and social media, and had a lot to say about thoughtfully engaging the conversation on the Web, rather than indescriminately blasting your message, and how a lot of PR firms don't currently get it (Solis coined the phrase PR 2.0). I met the authors and got them to autograph a copy of their book. I also met Rohit Bhargava, Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy & Marketing at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, and had him autograph his new book Personality Not Included; I had missed a book event at Busboys & Poets the previous evening, but caught the webcast (archives are here, if hard to find).

After the event, at Tandoori dinner and drinks next door, I again ran into Frank Gruber and Nick O'Neill; reconnected with Jennifer Consalvo, Director of Personalization at AOL, and Shashi Bellamkonda, social Media Swami for Network Solutions; met Jared Goralnick of AwayFind and SET Consulting; and met Aaron Brazell of social media business blog TechnoSailor.

Labels: events, networking, social rockstar workshop, socialmedia, widgets

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Job: Online Community Intern at edweek.org

Do you use multiple social networking services, write for a blog, or lead discussions on web forums? How would you like to apply those skills as an intern for an online journalism operation, and gain valuable job experience at the same time?

Edweek.org, a national non-profit news Web site covering K-12 education, seeks an online community intern to help manage our online community and contribute to viral marketing and social networking campaigns on behalf of the organization.

Responsibilities include:

• monitoring comments and forum posts for inappropriate content;
• managing one or more social network profiles or channels;
• performing outreach to bloggers and social bookmarking sites;
• promoting a sense of community through participation and feedback;
• occasional web design or production tasks in support of these activities.

Qualifications: The position requires experience engaging with several social media applications and web communities, good writing and editing ability, basic HTML skill, a strong work ethic, and a highly developed sense of humor. Must be able to meet deadlines and work under pressure. Experience with CSS, graphic or multimedia editing, or blogging or content management system software a plus.

We welcome interns with an interest in social media, journalism/communications, education news and policy, and/or multimedia production. We are metro-accessible, a short walk from the red line in downtown Bethesda.

Please send resume, cover letter and samples/links via e-mail to: WebIntern@epe.org, and tell us where you saw the ad.

Labels: community, edweek, socialmedia, socialnetworks

   Link: http://www.edweek.org/

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Social Media Presentation at Digital Velocity

On March 4, 2008, in New York City, I gave a presentation at the American Business Media conference DIGITAL VELOCITY 2008: Real Experts, Real Applications, Real Time. Here is the combined PowerPoint of my entire panel – Engaging Your Community in a Web 2.0 World (warning - large PDF download).

In my talk, I described social media efforts at edweek.org, including both community features that we are adding to our site, as well as Web 2.0 features that integrate our content more completely with the Web at large. Here is my favorite slide, which attempts to depict the feedback loop created by the social media "conversation":O'Reilly to the rescue (reprise) - the O'Reilly Digital Media Center page "Mac OS X Screenshot Secrets" helped me out when I was creating this presentation on the road, and it comes in handy again helping me to grab my favorite slide from the same presentation and save it as a GIF. Thank you O'Reilly!

Finally, in the Winter/Spring of endless conferences, I just returned from the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans, and next week I attend David Isenberg's Freedom to Connect a mile from my house at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring MD. Look for blog posts covering each of these as soon as I can get them together.

Labels: b2b, media, socialmedia

   Link: http://www.americanbusinessmedia.com/assnfe/ev.asp?ID=122&SNID=1304268107

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We Media Miami

Two weeks ago I attended a pretty cool conference, We Media Miami, with Craig Stone, a colleague from work. There were plenty of interesting sessions, including preplanned large and small breakout sessions, and a closing unconference, but most importantly, there were also many good opportunities for networking. This meeting serves a relatively small group, maybe a couple hundred, but included senior executives from almost every major news media outlet in the US, as well as interesting thinkers in the fields of web technology, social media, social entrepreneurship, the future of media, and future in general.

At the final plenary session, they demonstrated a cool new technology (embedded below) which enables very interactive slide shows that appear like panoramas, courtesy of VUVOX - check their site for more examples. See this and more on the main We Media Miami page a smörgåsbord of event coverage via a dizzying array of social media windows and widgets, such as live on-site blogging and twitter hash tags I tweeted with.



The conference agenda included several panel sessions which were quite interesting, as well as an incomprehensible sidetrack into the area of medical informatics taking up a large chunk in the middle of day one. Highlights among the programmed presentations included: The Power to Change the World, and break-outs Search World, Nonprofit World and News World — I'm sure I missed as many good presentations as I caught.

Following the pre-set agenda was a self-organizing unconference, during which I attended two very interesting sessions - a presentation on the social cloud and OpenSocial by Google Developer Advocate Kevin Marks. The slides are great, but it's a big download; email me if you want the link. That was followed by NewsTrust salon, in which they first described the system (which is like a social bookmarking/tagging site with a serious news criticism component). We then spent several minutes dissecting and reviewing one article as a team on their site.

Finally, the networking opportunities were brilliant as usual, as I was able to connect with folks I was looking to meet, who were looking to meet me, or who just turned out to be cool people. The first night, Craig and I met Mark Blafkin from the Association for Competitive Technology, who travels in some of the same policy circles I do. Then as the conference progressed, I ran into David Cohn, whom I had known through NewAssignment.net; only later did I realize he also worked for NewsTrust. I later met Susan Mernit – recently of Yahoo! Personals, Blogher blogger, and connection via various social networks – who had pinged me on Facebook to meet. Finally, for lunch on the last day, I met Carlen Lea Lesser — who had connected with me via the conference social network. She was looking for insights and information about the education marketplace (arguably my domain, coming from Edweek), and could offer some expertise in social media metrics and ROI - my current obsession. A win-win.

Labels: facebook, media, socialmedia, twitter, wemedia08

   Link: http://www.ifocos.org/we-media-miami-2008

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Social Media Measurement

Social media applications are developing at such a rapid clip that measurement technologies haven't really kept pace. I have the daunting task of determining what success means for the social media efforts underway at edweek.org, and then even more challenging, how to measure it. In my mind, success in our community efforts can be envisioned following a continuum of goals:

1. Traffic. Since we're an advertising-supported media site, for various reasons, a simple increase in traffic represents perhaps the most basic target. More traffic means more ad inventory to sell, and increases our standing with both advertisers and funders. We hope that simply adding social media features such as comments and forums to our site would boost traffic, but the challenge will be to determine how to measure these results.
   
   I intend to analyze our overall traffic to see if there is any increase in growth coincident with the introduction of comments, forums, blogs, etc. to our site. Since we've been introducing these changes over time, however, we'll also need to figure out a way to distinguish traffic trends on parts of our site that include opportunities for community participation from trends in areas little touched by these efforts. We could also hypothesize about how usage patterns might be altered by increasing use of social media, such as perhaps time spent on site, or differences in usage patterns exhibited by readers who have created social network profiles, or who have commented on the site, compared with less active users or simply average traffic patterns.
   
   
2. Engagement. The theory is that community media features and opportunities create more engaged readers, so measuring page views, time spent, and return visits per visitor among community participants would presumably indicate increased engagement with our site. We could also analyze the volume of participation — number of comments/forum posts, etc., both aggregate and per community member, and maybe even undertake to review a selection of the posts, trying to ascertain quality and appropriateness, even attempting to track trends in this area over time.
   
   
3. Impact. This gets even trickier. Our qualitative analysis of community contributions could perhaps demonstrate the effect that our journalism – and the conversations surrounding it – is having on people who care about education policy. We will also attempt to build in feedback systems, so that interesting or provocative comments – or suggestions, leads, and potential sources – would be passed back to reporters and editors. From there, we could try to track the number of times a comment led to a correction or a story idea, and thus actually informed our journalism.
   
   We could also search through forums for people posting follow-up comments indicating that a particular bit of advice helped in the classroom or informed the policy process. This is trickiest, and perhaps least quantitative, but useful both to help us justify this work and demonstrate its impact on the educational enterprise. We intend to identify active participants from the community as well as staff to help us track and utilize quality contributions made by readers.

These ideas cover only the measurement of social media content contributed to our site by our readers. Left untouched (so far) is the impact that will be felt as we engage in the larger conversation on the World Wild Web, via RSS feeds, social networks, widgets, social bookmarks, tagging and the like. Look in a future post for my treatment of the measurement of and ROI related to these efforts, the effects of which are even less well understood at this point.

I realize that this is already way too long, but I also want to pass along quality reference and background material from some of my favorite thinkers in this space.

Beth Kanter has created numerous resource devoted to examining the subject. She hosts a wiki entitled "Social Media Metrics, Measurement, and ROI: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach" which contains numerous links to quality resources, and her presentation at Podcamp Boston:


Beth's Blog also covers this topic extensively:
Why Your Social Media or Social Fundraising Plan Should Include Success Metrics

Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research frequently blogs about social media:
Why Your Social Media Plan should have Success Metrics

Finally, Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs gave a great presentation at the WidgetDevCamp he helped organize and I attended a couple weeks ago, making a strong case for the growing importance of social media and of devising a strategy for utilizing it:

Labels: measurement, metrics, socialmedia, strategy

   Link: http://socialmediametrics.wikispaces.com/

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Social Media Proliferation

I'm going a little crazy with all the different social media systems, accounts, applications, etc., which often seem to overlap with each other. I think this really became obvious when I started using Facebook more, where you can increasingly integrate all kinds of applications (including social media ones).

You post your status on Facebook, but you can also update your Twitter status via a facebook app, and both status statement (can) appear on your Facebook profile. One popular application on Facebook is called Causes, but you can also integrate your Change.org profile (which includes changes, organizations, politicians, etc., all things you can support via separate Facebook applications (Causes or US Politics).

On top of all that, Change.org and Facebook are two of many social networks. I probably don't even remember all of the social networks that I have joined, but of course this includes MySpace and LinkedIn, as well as Tribe, Care2, and the Omidyar Network. Managing all of these is a large time sink, and never really accomplished, and of course managing identity in general becomes ever more challenging base upon all of the aforementioned services and hundreds of others. Is OpenID the answer? I plan to start trying to figure that out soon. A speaker at Digial Media Conference I attended a few weeks ago predicted that one of the major coming trends in new media will be a merger or consolidation of social networks, and I don't know if this means actual combination of operations, or more likely, some networking solution that makes integration even more seamless than that afforded by Facebook apps - which is a very cool major step along the way, and I'm sure is poised to take it even further.

Facebook is the new LinkedIn, and Change.org, and Twitter, and Flixter, and Flickr, and....

Blogged with Flock

Labels: community, facebook, openid, socialmedia, socialnetworks

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