Where the Fishermen Ain't -- Phil Gomes' Thoughts on PR, Social Media, and Online Communities

Additional Thought on the SEC's Social Media Guidance

Post-publication, I had an additional thought about the SEC's recent "Netflix Patch" with regard to fair disclosure of material information on social media.

It's easy for folks to look at this announcement as the death of the wire services. But here's one thing those services offer that, say, an IR blog or a corporate Facebook account does not: data integrity. You transmit that earnings announcement on a wire service and, short of an additional transmission, you can't really modify what you've said--that toothpaste has left the tube. You put up a Tweet, it can be deleted. A Facebook post can be modified. It takes more sophistication than the average investor has to determine what occurred to the original post. There isn't a lot of confidence, then, that what you saw was the same thing that someone else did.

This highly important point is relegated to the second-to-the-last paragraph in an eight-paragraph announcement from BusinessWire.

Still, I don't really expect this advantage to last very long. Just as we have certificate authorities for domain validation and such, I could see something similar for certifying the reliability and permanence of content on a company's owned and social Web presences.

 

My Comments on News of the NYPD's Social Media Policy

I have a post up at Edelman.Com about the news of the NYPD's social media policy.

From the piece, called "The Thin Blue (Digital) Line":

A balance must be achieved here. One could argue that we have a very strong incentive to know as much as we possibly can about those we pay to protect us. So, we should want members of law enforcement to be online as much as is practical, so long as it doesn’t interfere with their duties or compromise loved ones. A policy, if too-broadly drawn, may have a chilling effect at precisely the time when citizens desire more transparency from their government.

What Does the SEC Social Media Disclosure Ruling Mean for Investor Relations?

Had the great fortune of working with Jeff Zilka and Rich Myers from Edelman's Financial Communications and Investor Relations team on this analysis of the SEC's recent decision about social media and material disclosure.

From the article:

On April 2, 2013 (a date perhaps chosen to avoid a misunderstanding), the SEC issued clarification about social media’s role in disclosure. This was in response to a controversial Facebook post by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who posted the achievement of a business milestone on Facebook. This sparked renewed debate about the topic of what constitutes “disclosure” on the social Web.

The intersection of online citizenship, corporate communications, and regulatory pressures represents the most exciting area of our industry today.

Featured in The New York Times Regarding Employee Online Behavior

I'm featured in a virtual roundtable this week in The New York Times' "Room for Debate". The topic is a favorite of mine: employee online behavior.

From my contribution:

Business in the information age is, in large part, governed by Industrial Age rules intended to restrain J.D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and so on — bit-and-byte realities wrestling with concrete and steel legacies. It will prove interesting to see these laws and policies applied to corporate social media governance.

I'm also joined by my good friend Daliah Saper, who writes:

Even if a company did not create a “don’t act stupid” policy, it could easily fire or discipline its employees for posting inappropriate photos to Facebook or disclosing proprietary information on Twitter. Employees, in turn, should know that their conduct in public – including social media accounts visible to outsiders – can expose them to career repercussions.

Interviewed at Vice's Motherboard Blog

Given the attention around BP and Wikipedia, I struck up a correspondence with Brian Merchant at Vice. The result is this interview, which covers a wide range of topics relevant to Wikipedia, corporate communications, online reputation and, of course, CREWE.

The following quote pretty much encapsulates where my head has been at for the past several months:

I think the PR industry in general needs to attain a visceral understanding of hacker and open-source culture if it is going to continue to be meaningful in an always-on, hierarchy-averse, release-early-release-often world.

Look for more thinking from me in this vein.

On Google Reader: No, My Inbound Twitter Feeds Are *Not* An RSS Substitute

In the wake of Google's shuttering of its beloved Reader service for RSS aggregation, I'm reading some posts rehashing the idea that simply following the right people or sources on Twitter is a better way to go. 

I disagree. 

Let's put aside the fact that we're not talking about a mutually exclusive choice and there's room for both in one's information-consumption workflow. I'm not saying that Twitter is useless as an information source or that a well-managed Tweetdeck won't provide great value. 

Many of the sources that I rely on to stay out front actually do not use Twitter. The reason why I'm at all successful in what I do is that I try to ignore the majority of the social media punditocracy as much as professional responsibility will allow. Nevertheless, I must follow that group in any case, owing to said responsibilities. So, in that small but important slice of my media diet, relying on Twitter as a replacement for RSS would lower the signal-to-noise ratio to unacceptable levels. It would mean, for example, that my ability to contextualize information would almost totally evaporate during SxSW.  

My point of view on many online-related matters tend to be unique and grounded in communications principles that many forget in the rush to be seen as "getting it". I'm told this is often why people seek my counsel. Using Twitter as an RSS replacement is more than just "media snacking"--it's an empty-calorie diet. 

Sure, I can instead opt to focus on the somewhat less-cacophanous Twitter streams of media outlets, reporters, and so on. Even then, though, that's noisy. Social media, at least for me, is not "just another channel"; it's a means by which I can pay less attention to figuring out what I need to pay attention to.

Granted, my needs are unusual. In my role, I am called upon to parachute into clients representing diverse industries: automotive, energy, technology, packaging, consumer goods, business services, and many others... on a light week. I don't need to know everything @nytimestech has to say, but if it matters enough to someone that they'll spend more than 140 characters on it, it is very likely to matter to me. 

So, I'm exploring alternatives, of course.

Curious that Orkut is stil ticking, especially given that its holdout markets in India and Brazil are moving away from it. Also, it's worth noting Google Reader's contribution to BuzzFeed's traffic relative to Google+. 

It will be interesting to see what services will capitalize on this, serving a relatively small but highly vocal group of power users. 

Dan Edelman: 1920 - 2013

A sad day, but... Wow... What a rich, full, incredible, inspiring life.

I remember the first meeting I had with Dan in 2006, talking about WWII, California wines, Vincent Price, etc. He briefly lamented he had to give up handball sometime in his 70s, which I found both funny and, even in my 30s, enviable.

I wanted to record the discussion for earSHOT, which was the Edelman podcast that I briefly hosted.

"Phil... You think we can just talk?", he asked.

I scribbled notes like a madman. Fascinating discussion. I will never forget it. 

I shot this photo during the celebration of the firm's 60th Anniversary. Captured a moment for me that I couldn't quite describe at the time.

Thoughts and prayers are with the Edelman family.

More On Netflix & The SEC

The folks at ComplianceX appear to agree with me:

The post on Facebook was available immediately to over 200,000 subscribers to Hastings’ Facebook account. It is also not clear how many of these subscribers are Netflix investors or equity analysts. It is clear however that posting on Facebook removes any advantage for the equity analysts and professional traders who monitor the press releases closely.

If the SEC goes forward with this action against Netflix, it will signal that they are trying to restrict, not expand the sources that investors have for obtaining information about companies. This is exactly the opposite of what they should be doing.

See my previous post on this topic for context.

Photo Credit: ebayink

Thoughts on the Netflix SEC "Facebook" Notice

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings posted the following on the company's Facebook page in July and it recently earned him the ire of the Securities & Exchange Commision:

Netflix monthly viewing exceeded 1 billion hours for the first time ever in June.

I'm no expert in securities law, but it seems to me that the case for materiality here is fairly weak.

An analyst mentions in the related Reuters piece that this post caused the stock to go up from $70 to $80 that day, so of course it was "material". I see at least three things wrong with this argument.

• First, if the market's reactions were, alone, the test for materiality, then no one would say anything, anywhere, ever, about their business aside from turgid press releases and regulatory filings.
• Second, I suppose any analysts who are crying foul are doing so because A) they were caught not paying attention, or B) the information was not disclosed in a less public and slightly more ephemeral forum that analysts tend to access... like, say, an earnings call, for example.
• Third, the fact that Netflix was about to breach the billion-hour-per-month mark should not have come as any surprise to anyone who reads the very public, no-Facebook-account-required Netflix blog. 

What this drives home is the fact that the regulatory agencies still run things based on rules meant to restrain the likes of Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and the like. Any adaptations and modernizations have amounted to just so many crufty, hastily applied patches.

Some smart commentary on this is available at AllThingsD.

Photo Credit: Silence99

Transparency and Humility, Defined

Dan Primack's must-read "Term Sheet" newsletter today pointed me to Bessemer Ventures' "Anti-Portfolio" page--a list of venture opportunities with spectacular exits that the firm, for whatever reason, decided to pass on. It's chock-full of names you know, going back decades.

Whatever the reason, we would like to honor these companies--our "anti-portfolio"--whose phenomenal success inspires us in our ongoing endeavors to build growing businesses. Or, to put it another way: if we had invested in any of these companies, we might not still be working.

Photo Credit: San Diego Air & Space Museum