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Last week I spoke at the Freelancers' Forum Breakfast Seminar of Boston Women Communicators (BWC). The title of my presentation was: What the Heck Is Social Media and Why Should I Care? The audience was comprised of independent practitioners, agency experts and in-house communicators, primarily of non-profit organizations - all hungry for information on how to use social media for their business. 

One piece of advice I left for the freelancers was to publish a blog instead of trying to get a comprehensive website off the ground. It's easier and cheaper and takes less time. Of course, once the trial phase is over (and there should always be a trial phase!), a blog needs to be maintained and cared for just like a website. However, many BWC freelancers are gifted writers which makes a blog a perfect tool. In my list of links, however, I forgot to include Todd Defren's Beware of the Blabosphere post which includes The 7 Simple Rules of Freelance Blogging. I'd add a point: Blog about your expertise - not your clients.

In case you are a woman, work in communications and live in and around Boston, and this is the first time you read about Boston Women Communicators, read on. BWC was founded in 1994 by Jane Breschard Wilson to provide a forum for women to develop relationships that would help them in business and beyond. It's the "beyond" that strikes me with this organization which I just joined. It's a professional support network for women that embraces young and experienced communicators and brings together corporate communicators, agency folks and sole practitioners as well as entrepreneurs and internal communicators. In addition, it supports women in need with their events. It doesn't have a website (yet) but if you google the name or the founder, you'll find the address for inquiries.  

As an addendum to yesterday's post, here are a couple of excellent posts about external and internal blogs and what to watch out for. The first one is from Marianne Richmond interviewing blogher panelist Megan Belcher on the blogher blog. Blogher is a blogging community for women offering lots of great resources for female bloggers.

Marianne Richmond will moderate the panel "How to Keep Out of Trouble" on day 2 of the Blogher Business Conference 07 to be held in the Big Apple on March 22nd and 23rd. In the interview Megan talks about the legal challenges of blogs and how to weigh the potential risks of blogging against the benefits.

The second terrific blog post is by Katie Paine one of the top communications and marketing measurement luminaries in the country and the founder of the Delahaye Group. In her PR Research 2.0 post Katie describes the growing-up of internal blogs. She cites recent research that shows "significant increase (21%)  in the percentage of internal bloggers saying positive things about their organization as well as a decline in the % of employees saying negative things".
This should help organizations who still worry about internal bad-mouthing.

The Yankee Chapter of IABC offers lots of great programs for people to interact and network. One of the traditional get-togethers is the MetroWest Luncheon series which is organized by Susan Ethier. Usually a small group of corporate and independent practitioners meet for lunch and a lively discussion in a Natick restaurant.

Last week's topic was called "blogging" and sure enough we needed to add on another table. Anything related to social media draws a crowd these days.

Three of the attendees - including me - have a blog. One runs an internal blog for her company and the other blogger had just recently relocated to this area and hosts his neighborhood blog on the Worcester Telegram & Gazette platform.

The reservations about starting a blog - be it for a corporation or by a communications consultant to promote his or her expertise - were loud and clear: "I've got no time!"; "Who would read our/my blog anyway?"; "It takes a lot of time and resources to maintain a blog." Of course - all of these are legitimate considerations. This is why setting up a blog - especially an external corporate blog - requires preparation. One attendee wondered whether there's a Blogs"R"Us where you can get everything you need to start a blog. It sounds like a great idea but the major blog platforms and their (and other) tools are about all we get in terms of help. Everything else corporations or independent practitioners need to figure out for themselves.

A blog is a brand-building tool that can greatly enhance your reputation. It's not the right tool to promote a product as one attendee suggested.  Use it to show your company's expertise and blog about topics that are relevant to your business. A blog also presents another valuable vehicle when you need to communicate. Overall the recent JetBlue crisis was handled well but the company failed to its blog to apologize, explain and move forward.

While the blogosphere is almost saturated, there's still room for corporate blogs as many Fortune 1000 companies have been slow in warming up to blogs. Many of course have severe regulatory and legal issues to deal with. There's also still room for certain expert blogs as some areas are not represented very well in the blogosphere.

Blogs are almost mainstream. However, as the IABC MetroWest Luncheon shows, there are still a lot of questions and misconceptions - and room for education.

This week I got pinged by LinkedIn about some updated profiles of my contacts. I clicked on it and - instead of looking at the updated profile of an ex-colleague - I started watching the trailer of reign over me that popped up when I entered the site. I saw Don Cheadle's face who's acting I like so here I was...lured into the world of video.

With all the hubbub about YouTube showing Oscar videos and then having to pull them off, it makes you wonder why it was such a big deal. Nowadays professional or user-generated videos, video snippets and video links are everywhere. You can't escape them. You might chose not to watch but if you see something that grabs your attention - you will!

It's a simple form of promotion and a very effective one. The idea of proprietary content and ownership looses its significance in the social media world. YouTube videos on The Oscars actually help the Oscars improve their popularity. Does it matter where you watch them?

In this month's Boston Magazine, Greg Lalas writes about recommendation software company ChoiceStream which seems to have the technology to make online recommendations almost perfect even to the point where preferences can be anticipated due to past behavior. Sounds great, uh?

Actually it makes me shiver. Think about it for a minute. You only get what you're interested in. You never stumble upon content that wasn't meant for you.

The article raises the same concern: "Also lost in a world of recommenders is one of life's beautiful quirks: serendipity. The element of surprise. How often have you been surprised by the opening band at a concert, or a book your friend left at your apartment, or a TV show you stumble across while gazing through your 500 channels?" Add to that the many articles you read while flipping through the newspaper or a magazine or the NPR report you listen to just because it talks about something you know nothing about.

We get bombarded with loads of content every day and recommendations make it easier for us to cope with it. They make it easier for us to find the right product, the right job, the right leisure activity. So let's take the time (online and offline) recommenders save us to indulge in the element of surprise!

I've taken a bit of a break over the long weekend from my social media RSS feeds and Google Alerts. Oh my - when I wanted to catch up I was inundated with of posts, discussions and conversations about "social media" and what's right and wrong about it. 

At the Communications 2.0 workshop which I held for the lively Connecticut chapter of IABC last week, the audience was less concerned about which terms I used to describe the new tools and technologies. As one participant put it: "Social media really means a paradigm shift for us communicators." He hit the nail on the head! Marianne Richmond also put this very eloquently in her post on "something different is happening."

The workshop participants were all ready to explore and participate in the opportunities social media provides for communicators. Some were a bit sceptic and there were lots of questions, of course. Some already had experience   implementing certain social media tools and shared their stories freely with the rest.

What struck me was that there was no one among the attendees who refused to see the shift that is taking place. That is definitely a change from a year ago or maybe even six months ago. Social media will become mainstream - not tomorrow, but the day after.

Inspired by Chris Anderson's "Hah" post about "The Top Five Mistakes of Long Tail Criticism", I wondered about my own usage of the Amazons and Netflixes of this world. It's pretty much a combination of short & long tail ordering as I read and watch the blockbusters as much as the hidden gems.

But then - Hah! - I realized that I use one of my favorite devices almost exclusively as a long tail instrument: My iPod!   I don't spend any time on transferring my favorite or the latest & hottest CDs onto the iPod. But I download every (old) song that I've been humming and singing along to for many years. I never bought the album because I only like that one song.

That is why I think the iTunes Store needs to optimize its search engine. Often I can only remember parts of the song, hardly ever the title or the singer/band. PLEASE, iTunes, help me and the other Long Tail users of the iPod to find what were're looking for!

David Meerman Scott asks whether MSM journalists are one-way communicators and wonders about blogging policies at mainstream media outlets. Stevel Rubel tells us that CNET has a policy that requires blogging journalists to respond to comments. Rachel Gross who comments likes the idea that journalists have to defend their arguments or facts to their audience.

Journalists were used to being wooed.  By companies and PR people. In the old days ,"Letters to the Editor" were about the only means of consumer-generated feedback to an article in the paper or a magazine. Unless you were a famous print or broadcast journalist, you didn't need to respond to your readers/viewers. At least not directly. No need to explain why you wrote what you wrote. Now this has changed - especially for blogging journalists.

Blogging journalists are encouraged to engage in a conversation with their readers - and yes, even the PR folks. They might now have to explain and defend their work (as Rachel says). That must hurt. Actively commenting on other people's blogs, as John Cass suggested, must feel strange to many journalists who are not used to reaching out to Jane and John Doe.

If MSM policies include the requirement for blogging journalists to actively engage with the blogosphere, will be we get to the point where journalist comments for comment's sake? That is scary!

Yesterday I attended an IABC luncheon in downtown Boston. The Yankee chapter of IABC is a great organization and very committed to providing forums for members, lapsed members (that's me!) and future members to come together and share thoughts, ideas, strategies and tactics.

A lot of the people I talked to work in internal communications. I asked about the use of social media in their daily work and the primary answer is still: "Well...we've got an intranet". Intranets are great but they offer so much more beyond being a repository of company information.

Here's what companies should consider for their intranets in 2007 (if they haven't done so already):

• Newsfeeds: allow your employees to customize their company news by using RSS
• YouToo can do what YouTube does: incorporate video in your intranet. This doesn't mean that every employee should be able to publish his or her own amateur video on the company site. Use semi-professional video to communicate news on your intranet as it reaches more employees than pure text.
• The same is true for Vodcasts or Podcasts which proof to be a valuable alternative to announcing company news such as a new benefits program, the opening of a new facility or an upcoming tradeshow the company exhibits at.
  
• Consider a blog for internal communications especially if you work in an environment where an external blog faces all kinds of regulatory and legal hurdles that you can't get past. One of the attendees yesterday suggested an Editor's Blog to solicit ideas and content for the employee newsletter. What a great idea!
• If you've got employees in various locations collaborating on writing a publication, a series of white papers or other forms of content, consider offering a wiki as part of the Intranet.
• Multi-cultural global corporations can also benefit from their own social networking component. Intranets usually have an employee directory, often with pictures, and sometimes with an attached skill profile. Why not allow all company experts on a certain topic - no matter where they are located - to form their own little community.
  

If you want to know what makes an intranet a great intranet, check out Jacob Nielsen's Best Intranets of 2007.

Last week NPR ran a series on the shortage of nurses. This leads to nurses being overextended and overworked. One of the nurses who was interviewed mentioned that her boss, the President and CEO of Jordan Hospital has a great way of showing that he cares for his staff. Every once in a while he'd deliver pizzas to the nursing staff at 3 am.

Internal communications can be so easy!