Derek DeVries

There was a great example of the importance of Online Reputation Management in the Grand Rapids Press yesterday:

Grandville Officials Surprised to Find Unofficial Facebook Page for City
Published: Tuesday, July 27, 2010, 2:23 AM | Matt Vande Bunte, The Grand Rapids Press

GRANDVILLE — As part of an effort to promote a “road diet” on Chicago Drive SW, Grandville officials looked into creating a Facebook page. But they found out the city already has a presence on the social networking website. Although unofficial, the site looks like what city officials had in mind. “We can’t figure out who’s doing it,” said Matt Butts, assistant city manager. “I was going to reply (to the anonymous page administrator): ‘This looks great. Who are you? Can we work together?’”  (More)

I wouldn’t be surprised if the city found out one of its own employees was managing the page for the organization; they may have their own Skunkworks operating without the knowledge of the administrators.

It’s 2010 – so any organization worth its salt should already have its toes in the social networking water.  At the very least, everyone should go out and reserve the aliases that match your organization so that you have the option to use them later on.

A tool like Namechk can help you with that – it allows you to search multiple social networking platforms for the availability of a particular alias.  From there you can begin monitoring for mentions of your organization, doing the rudimentary task of using your social networking presences as channels to syndicate news about your organization, and move up to higher-eschelon tasks like learning about the forums/environments that your stakeholders inhabit and participating in them.

Wherever I’ve worked, the most innovative work gets done outside the official hierarchy and processes.  It’s unfortunate but true.  For good reason, the leadership of most organizations is risk-averse.  That makes it important to allow the freedom for employees to collaborate across various departments and to give them some leeway in their work duties to pursue the things they believe are important (a principle 3M thrives on).

Some great examples of the value of the skunkworks at Grand Rapids Community College:

• Social Media Engagement:  Though it was never part of my job description, I’ve been following and experimenting with social media on behalf of my organization for years, and it’s now turning into a valuable tool for outreach and information gathering.
• Online Reputation Management: Watching the conversations about things I’m interested in has long been a practice of mine, and I brought it with me to GRCC.  It’s now a core part of my workday and the college relies on the insights we glean from conversations in social media.
• iPhone App:  This project was rejected by the leadership of the college’s IT department, so my friend/colleague (and brilliant programmer) Szymon Machajewski worked on it in his free time.
• Social Media Policy:  No one asked for it, but I felt there was a need for the college to engage employees on the topic of social media, so I drafted guidelines that are currently making their way through the approval process.
• SMS Txt Crisis Messages:  Undertaken by the Distance Learning staff with the exceedingly generous contributions of Doug Kaufman of Cleartxt (the crisis portion of which was later acquired by Rave Wireless), GRCC became the first college in the region (and possibly the state) to offer crisis text messaging waaay back in 2005 – long before the shootings at Virginia Tech that popularized the service among higher education institutions.
• Collaboration With Google Docs: Early adopters at the college like Eric Mullen began using Google Docs and they now serve as the basis for the work GRCC’s Communications Dept. does (using forms/templates to collect data about projects, and shared folders to hold project-related data that can be shared seamlessly).

So to my colleagues Szymon Machajewski, Klaas Kwant, Eric Kunnen, Eric Mullen,  Garrett Brand and Patrick LaPenna – thanks for making work a fulfilling, engaging, challenging experience.  All hail the Skunkworks!

Many organizations are grappling with social media policy guidelines for their employees, including my own.

I tried my hand at writing some, and then refined them by poring over hundreds of other social media policies of other organizations (both in the public and private sector – one great archive is available here at socialmediagovernance.org) and borrowed some of the best suggestions to craft my own set of guidelines that I’m pursuing for approval with the leadership of Grand Rapids Community College.  So for what it’s worth – I’m making them available to everyone in case they’re of assistance:

• GRCC Social Media Guidlines (Draft) by Derek DeVries (.pdf)

What a lot of organizations don’t realize is that their employee conduct policies already cover social media, so it’s not always necessary to create an entirely new policy.  When you’re evaluating how to approach it – there are three simple ideas to keep in mind:

1. Keep it Simple: There’s no need to address every single social networking platform individually, nor to describe every potentially negative behavior – something as simple as a statement reminding employees that the employee handbook/code of conduct applies online to social media may be sufficient.
2. Appeal to Employees’ Good Nature and Common Sense:  Encourage employees to take the view that social media is no different than face-to-face interactions with stakeholders.  If they wouldn’t try to be anonymous, dishonest, or mean in person – they should hold to those same principles online.  Relating to others well is a universal principal in both the digital and analog worlds.
3. Educate, Don’t Pontificate:  Rather than trying to browbeat employees into submission with restrictive Authorized User Agreements, monitoring employee activity online or lengthy rules and restrictions – try to offer friendly advice and take an educational approach.  There are social media case studies virtually every day in the news; use those as “teachable moments” in your employee communications.  (Besides - AUAs and monitoring workstations are irrelevant anyway given that employees can defeat them by using their smartphones to access the Internet.)

A caution to professionals; in the era of Google, asking a question that is easily-answerable with a quick search engine query is increasingly going to reflect poorly on the inquirer.

It means you’re either not tech-savvy enough to instinctively reach for the power of the world’s most powerful information storage-and-retrieval tools, or you’re lazy. Neither looks good to colleagues, clients, or potential employers.

I’ve been unfairly/condescendingly thinking this since the late 1990s because I’ve long been a geek, but now I feel comfortable saying my opinion is the dominant paradigm.  Sorry.

(PS – All of this goes double for Twitter, where your request for information is even more public and archived).

Memes have long been the coin of the realm online, and now the tools are available for the average geek to act on his/her geeky impulses to mash the detritus of pop culture together to create new art forms.  It looks like this:

Sword fights = Cool.  Lightsabres = Cool.  Sword fights + Lightsabres = Nerdgasm.

In the course of my academic and intellectual pursuits (read: goofing around) I ran across an entire subculture of Youtube mashups where digital video artisans (yes, I mean artisans) photoshopped lightsabres into movie swordfights.  The process probably began with the Star Wars kid, and has gone deliciously viral.  Here are my 10 favorites:

1. Count Roogan vs. Inigo Montoya (The Princess Bride)

2. Cap’m Barbosa vs. Cap’m Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl)

3. The Spartans vs. the Hordes of  Xerxes (300)

4. Arwen vs. the Nazgul (Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring)

5. Freddy vs. Jason (Freddy vs. Jason)

6. Deadpool vs. a Room of Thugs (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) – PS – I demand someone photoshop lightsabres over Wolverine’s claws IMMEDIATELY.

7. Indiana Jones vs. Egyptian Thug (Raiders of the Lost Ark)

8. Benjamin Martin vs. British Soldiers (The Patriot) – Incorporates blasters too!  Sweeeeeet.

9. Beatrix Kiddo vs. O-Ren Ishii (Kill Bill)

10. Robin Hood/Little John vs. Prince John’s Thugs (Disney’s Robin Hood)

[Blog Title courtesy the Linkbait Generator]

One of my favorite slideware tools is Prezi; it’s a web-based application that allows one to create a presentation on a huge, open canvas that can be used to make linear presentations or offer users a way to interact with information in their own way.  I thought it might be interesting to use one for biographical/career tool and created a “Presume” – a resume in Prezi.  It lets me include a lot of visual/multimedia content and to really enhance someone’s understanding of my skills and background.

A colleague forwarded me a link to the form that the Grand Rapids Business Journal is using to collect data to create its 2010 “Social Media” list for its venerable “Book of Lists” that rank the relative power/success/prestige of West Michigan companies/organizations based on features like their annual revenue.

Don’t get me wrong, I applaud the GRBJ for going down the difficult road to quantifying the level of influence local institutions have online but it’s a good case study in how the business world misses the point of social media.

In the new era, bigger isn’t better.  Bigger is just bigger (and in many cases, unwieldy).

It doesn’t matter how many followers you have if they’re not engaged.  I’d rather have ten zealots following me than a million apathetic associates who only added me because they were entering a contest to win a flat-panel TV.  Unfortunately organizations whose social media presences are crowded with disconnected freebie-seekers will likely top the list (think: Meijer).

This is West Michigan, so think of it like this: Jesus only had 12 “followers” and look at what he accomplished with them.

Mashable had an intriguing post about the social media activity surrounding the BP Deepwater Horizon Gulf Oil Spill today; chiefly that activity is on the decline. The title asks “Are We Losing Interest in the Oil Spill? [STATS]” The answer, obviously, is yes.

For the public relations world, this new era seems to hint that no matter how bad an organization or individual misbehaves, eventually we’ll talk ourselves out of interest in seeing consequences meted out for that misbehavior.

Where’s the outrage over the mismanagement and systemic problems in the financial industry back when it was Enron, Tyco and Worldcom?  How about more recently over Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Washington Mutual?  Isn’t it likely that the outrage over the next impending financial scandal is already waning?

1. Our Access to Information has Reduced our Attention Span
   There are many studies on attention span that have measured its decline over the past few decades.  It stands to reason that with more accessible information, we have more incentive to move on from one bit to another.  Guided by our reptilian impulses, we move on when something no longer stimulates us.  Tired of depressing photos of pelicans covered in oil? – Just see what
2. We Can’t Process Long Term Costs
   As the frog in the boiling pot aphorism goes – gradual change goes unnoticed.  Even though there are direct costs borne by all of society by industry-wide malfeasance, if they’re paid slowly over time – they go virtually unnoticed.  Pick virtually any large problem; the imperial ambitions of most developed nations, global climate change, the health consequences of our high-fructose diet – and we’ll always opt for short-term gain over long-term benefit.
3. We Only Want to Dwell on the Pleasurable
   As our access to information has sped up, it appears to have dramatically reduced the amount of time we’re willing to tolerate unhappy news.  In fact, that’s frequently the complaint of the news media: that they focus too much on the negative.  ”Where are the happy stories?” people demand – so they crowbar in irrelevant stories about the latest American Idol contestant or the latest viral video of an animal doing something unlikely and adorable.
4. The News Media is Less Capable of Keeping Crises on the Radar
   The budget for most news outlets has not kept pace with the demand to do investigative journalism.  Why bother with a months-long investigation that may or may not prove a local politician was involved in real-estate speculation when you can send a camera crew out to interview the early adopters in line for the next iPhone or publish a poll on how the US public feels about gays in the military?
5. This Has Happened Before
   The public relations case studies for crisis mismanagement often don’t stand up to scrutiny.  Just look at the Exxon Valdez disaster; though the company was guilty of extraordinary negligence – it’s still a viable brand two decades later and the massive $5 billion judgment against the company was whittled down to $507.5 million after years in the courts.  Or take Firestone; that company was guilty of deadly negligence not once but twice and yet it survives today.

I really, really hope I’m wrong about this.

[Thanks again to the Linkbait Generator for the title of the post]

Scandal-plagued BP has resorted to drilling for its own news in the wake of the tidal wave of negative coverage of its Gulf Oil Spill from the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion.  The company has dispatched its “reporters” from its internal newsletter (Tom Seslar and Paula Kolmar) to file reports from the company’s point of view.

As you can see from this hilariously over-the-top bit of fawning praise from Kolmar, the company’s perspective is markedly less critical of the company than the mainstream media:

“Triangles, circles, v-angles: precision shapes at sea executed by shrimping vessels and choreographed by skimming perfectionists to stop any oil from potentially getting close to Alabama’s coast. Though there isn’t oil close to shore, practices and rehearsals occur almost daily in preparation. [...] From the relative comfort of a large square deck with a cold bottle of water always in hand, and an air-conditioned TV room with comfy sofas a level below, I witnessed beauty preparing to face the beast. Miss Jasmine, the most experienced local shrimping vessel, beautifully painted with a colourful dragon streaming along her sides, pulled the folded boom in place. Then gently pulling along her side, another vessel took on a rope from Miss Jasmine. With barely a pause, the two boats moved apart at the same speed, spreading the boom into a v-shape just like birds form in the sky. [...] A ballet at sea as mesmerising as any performance in a concert hall, and worthy of an audience in its own right.”

If you like Kolmar’s work, you can read some of her earlier pieces like “Musical Interlude: How BP is Helping New Orleans Residents Rebuild, Two Years After Katrina.” Another interesting piece I turned up was “Grassroots Success in Colombia: For the past 20 years, BP and Colombia have grown together through good times and bad.” I was also able to find a reference that may have also written for “Oil Mill Gazeteer” the official publication of the International Oil Mill Superintendents Association.

BP has actually been filing their own reports since May 10th, but Seslar’s report appears to be the first one to make it into the public consciousness where it’s being lampooned by Rachel Maddow, BoingBoing, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos and even the Columbia Journalism Review and Wall Street Journal (which acquired a copy of BP’s internal newsletter “Planet BP”).

This phenomena isn’t actually new for an oil company; Chevron engaged in a similar activity – hiring former CNN anchor Gene Randall to favorably report on the company which was packaged into a 60 Minutes-esque newsmagazine piece.

All of this comes at an interesting time, as the fragmentation of the media is collapsing the old business model the news industry has relied on for decades.  As we’re increasingly able to slip into our own insular worlds, surrounded only by media that confirms our notions of the world – I wonder if this strategy will become increasingly effective for reputation management.

Even if the public knows to be skeptical of content directly from BP, there’s an increasing opportunity this content will be picked up by a third party media outlet where “news laundering” can take place (just like money laundering, news laundering attempts to conceal the original source of information in the hopes of making it appear legitimate).

As staff are slashed from budgets, overworked reporters are increasingly leaning on public relations people to supply them with material for their reports as opposed to investigative reporting (which can be an expensive and sometimes fruitless venture – making it antithetical to the healthy bottom line of a profit-driven corporation).  Translation: less news will be told by objective third parties.

The Linkbait Generator suggested this title for a blog post and it was too good to pass up.  Fortunately there actually are a lot of really great examples of Social Media-themed Halloween costumes crafted by some very creative people.  To wit:

1. The “Fail Whale” Costume
2. The Facebook Profile Costume (not to be confused with Jim Halpert’s “Facebook” Costume)
3. The iPhone Costume (and the Blackberry Costume)
4. The Rickroll Costume
5. The MySpace Profile Costume
6. The Youtube Costume
7. The Chris Crocker “Leave Britney Alone” Costume
8. Foursquare Merit Badges

Bonus:

1. The Digg Costume
2. The “You Like This” T-Shirt (also the “Poke” T-Shirt, and “Add to Friends” T-Shirt)