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

CREWE: Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement

For people who are serious about discussing the PR-and-Wikipedia-related matters covered in yesterday's posts, I've created a group on Facebook at the suggestion of John Cass. This was in the context of a discussion on Kevin Dugan's Facebook related to my original open letter. 

Owing to the name, I anticipate that the bulk of the members would be PR folks, but I strongly encourage people of all views to participate because, frankly, that's the only way we'll get closer to the goal.

And what is this goal? This will become clearer over time, but the core idea rests on four pillars:

1. Corporate communicators want to do the right thing.
2. Communicators engaged in ethical practice have a lot to contribute.
3. Current Wikipedia policy does not fully understand #1 and #2, owing to the activities of some bad actors and a general misunderstanding of public relations in general.
4. Accurate Wikipedia entries are in the public interest. 

The group is open. There's not much of a there there yet, but that's where you come in.

And, yes, I realize that there's some philosophy-shear in terms of using a proprietary resource to discuss matters related to an open-source one. This is trumped (if slightly) by the very "PR" consideration of going where most of the interested parties already are and integrating it into people's day-to-day online experience. 

Hoping people support this effort and take it up in the spirit it is intended. 

An Open Letter to Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia

Jimmy,

I’d like to take the opportunity to publicly address an important topic that is long overdue for discussion. I write this, not as a representative of my employer, but as a career communications professional focused on matters related to online communities.

Short version: A truly serious conversation needs to happen about how communications professionals and the Wikipedia community can/must work together. Since recent events have thrown this issue into sharp relief, I’d like us to have an open, constructive and fair discussion about the important issues where public relations and Wikipedia intersect.

As to the long version, consider:

• Wikipedia is on the first page of search results for nearly every company, brand, product, personality, captain-of-industry, etc. This shoulders Wikipedia with a great level of responsibility, whether asked for or otherwise.
• Many entries are derelict, even for important topics and well-known industry bellwethers. Financial data is often years old. Some companies are described as remaining in businesses long divested. A WikiProject for reviving abandoned articles, and a proposal for a similar effort, themselves both appear abandoned.
• You can imagine why a company might consider its entry to be a high priority (perhaps even to the point of distraction) and task its communications staff to "do something", especially if the entry is inaccurate.
• Entreaties on Talk pages—determined as the most appropriate place for a company representative to make his/her case—often go ignored for very long periods while inaccurate information persists. 
• The small concession to PR on the FAQ (that a company can "fix minor errors in spelling, grammar, usage, or fact", etc.) takes a lot for granted and helps neither a PR representative nor Wikipedia. For example, too often, a company representative will “go native” when it comes to separating matters of “fact” from matters upon which reasonable people might disagree. On the other hand, activists (hardly of a neutral point of view) appear to enjoy much more latitude. 

So, while I appreciate and support that Wikipedia must develop and enforce certain rules regarding neutrality and so on, the site is trying to have it both ways. In other words, it's clear that Wikipedia wants to be thought of as an accurate and available resource while 1) the volunteer maintenance of that resource—despite a strong level of dedication—is unable to keep up, and 2) the hands of ethical practitioners—those closest to data—are bound due to the activities of some bad actors.

This is a source of great tension between companies and Wikipedia and I’m not sure how the public is properly served by this state of affairs. Contrary to popular imagination, most corporate communications practitioners want to do the right thing. 

Some initial recommendations to help start discussion:

• When an entry is derelict (duration and definition TBD), a communications representative should be granted greater leeway in editing the entry. The entry can have a notification at the top indicating the derelict status, or even that a communications representative has had a hand in updating it. This will allow visitors to make their own judgments on how to evaluate the entry or even prioritize it in terms of how and when it gets evaluated and/or revised by a neutral party. The choice is between the certainty of an inaccurate entry or the possibility that the entry would not meet NPOV guidelines. Negative attention to bad behavior (or even to mediocre efforts) would mitigate the impact of the latter. 
• We could revive discussion about some guidance you gave in 2006, whereby a company could author a suggested entry, license it under the FDL, post it on its own site, and “notify Wikipedians who are totally independent.” This means less work for volunteers, since it’s almost always easier to react to something rather than write it from scratch. The best corporate communicators should be able to author something reasonably neutral, I'd imagine, with the Wikipedia community serving as an important check-and-balance. 

The next move is yours. I’d welcome further discussion on this topic, with the aim of fairly framing an open and constructive discussion about this matter. 

Thanks and regards,

/pmg

UPDATE 2012-01-04-1100 CT: In one of those "Great Minds Think Alike" type things, Stuart Bruce published his own thoughts about PR and Wikipedia, even referencing the same 2006 post from Jimmy Wales that I referenced above. He was inspired by MP Tom Watson's talk page on the topic. Clearly there's some pent-up discussion here and, I agree, that working with Wikipedia on improving the rules for corporate communications participation should be an international effort. 

UPDATE 2012-01-09-1300 CT: Mr. Wales responds. A lot to think about, so you'll see my reaction delivered in bits on this blog over the next few days. 

PRSA Central Ohio: My Post-speech Thoughts

I recently gave a speech to PRSA's Central Ohio chapter. The topic was how an organization can ease themselves into becoming a social business by looking at the communications tasks that it currently performs and evaluating how social technologies and philosophies can accelerate and improve those tasks in the service of a broad communications strategy.

They managed to capture my post-talk thoughts on the way out the door to the airport. 

My Cachaçagora Project: What I've Learned

Three years ago this month, I started a blog called "Cachaçagora."

Long story short, my wife is from Rio de Janeiro and her mom and stepdad are evangelists for well-made cachaça (pronounced "ka-SHAH-suh"). Distilled from sugarcane juice, cachaça is the national alcoholic beverage of Brazil and the third most-distilled spirit in the world. Of the 1.3 billion liters or so that the country produces among its more than 5,000 distillers of widely varying quality, only a fraction of a percent makes it to the northern hemisphere. (The balance that stays in Brazil amounts to about six or seven liters for every man, woman and child in the country, which perhaps helps explain Carnaval to some of you.)

One day while in Rio, generally relaxing with my laptop and waiting for folks to get ready, something occured to me while I was going through some feeds. It seems that the sole notion of "community" that the majority of Web 2.0 PR/marketing royalty actually understands only extends so far as how they leveraged that community, and the mainstream media interest around same, to make themselves famous. Making the leap from that experience to helping a client manage its own reputation online is a much bigger chasm than many believe. 

I came to the conclusion that blogging about PR and social media alone (which I had done since 2001) was meager gruel with which to feed instinct and understanding about the following:

• Who are these empowered online enthusiasts we're always yammering (small-"y") about?
• What really makes them tick?
• How do they squeeze it between a day job and the rest of, well, life?

So... 90 minutes of messing around with TypePad and GIMP resulted in Cachaçagora, where I try my best to give North American (and global) audiences a sense of the versatility and uniqueness of Brazil's national spirit. There's also a companion Facebook group and Twitter however, commitments being what they are, they only serve as more or less as notification engines. I feature different brands, cocktail recipes and, scarce time permitting, the occasional distillery feature. 

Years later, my presentation "Everything I (Now) Know About PR I Learned from Cachaça" is one of my most popular talks. (It gets even more so if I pass out a sample or two, believe me.) I've delivered this five or six times now. 

The full presentation is a ten-point list. Here are three airplane-bottle-sized samples after the jump.

Friday Five: Improving Your Social Media Policy

From my contribution this week to Edelman Digital's Friday Five newsletter:

I’m often called in to help write or evaluate social media policies for clients across our global network. In addition, I have a folder on my laptop bursting with policies that I’ve found from other companies. I spend a lot of time with these documents in my role, 10 percent of which involves being like the firm’s “Emily Post” of the Web.

Over time, I’ve noticed that there are a number of elements that social media policies tend to miss. Here are five of them.

More over at EdelmanDigital.Com.

Photo Credit: William Couch under Creative Commons.

It Was Too Easy For Me To Walk Away From Quora, At Least For PR

I can see that a service like Quora could have great value to some. I was excited about it when I first joined. That flame burned bright and briefly. 

While I find the piling-on behavior I noticed in the supposed Quora backlash beyond silly, I can constructively discuss why my own brief flurry of activity on Quora stalled.

I'm Busy and Quora Requires Focused Attention

Quora has every potential to be highly addictive. That might be fine if the day job wasn't as demanding as it is and FlourishConf wasn't just around the corner. Also, my wife and child like to see me every so often and my in-laws expect more regular updates to Cachacagora, which I regrettably haven't updated in the new year. Thus, exploring Quora in depth was very easy to push down the task list.

It's also something that can't really be done in the same motion as my routine online activities, like Hootsuite allows me to do with Twitter and Facebook. I don't have to think about those services when I'm, say, reading an article. Just click the bookmarklet, check off some boxes, and away I go. Quora seems to want more than that from me. Would be great if I had time. No 'ffense.

My Advice Has Value

A couple of years ago at a conference, I was onstage discussing strategies for employee education and social media transformation. I playfully said that much of the approach was Edelman-proprietary and had to stay with me, though there were nevertheless plenty of items to fuel a rich discussion. One person in the audience tut-tutted that it "wasn't very Cluetrain" of me to do that. Whatever. That I continue to be held over that particular barrel even after contributing as much as do is something I regard as simply one of life's insoluble quandaries. But I digress...

My point: When I speak in public or otherwise engage in PR consortia, I have to make sure that 1) certain Edelman processes and IP are protected, and 2) the act of satisfying #1 doesn't result in a presentation that is only of limited value to an audience that paid to receive insights. On Quora, I found myself skipping over the potentially meaty questions and giving okay answers to okay questions.

Misapplication of Authority and Expertise Concepts

Robert Scoble is an expert at a great many things and, in a lot of ways, I admire what he's done in terms of raising industry consciousness around the value of online community engagement. That said, he is not a PR expert. As of this writing, however, he's a featured question-answerer in Quora's "Public Relations" category, perhaps owing to authority he's racked up regarding other topics.

Now, you don't have to be an expert to have an opinion about a topic—just ask me about my state's income-tax hike—but it does help if you presume to answer a question about that topic in a forum that claims to prize expertise. 

FAQ: "Finally? Ask Question?"

PR folks are used to crafting FAQ or "frequently asked questions" documents. Sometimes they are exactly that: a list of questions that a organization is used to hearing for which it has ready answers. Just as often, however, the FAQ is written prior to a launch or announcement. In other words, most of the questions haven't been asked at all, let alone frequently. (I call these "Fairly Anticipated Questions.") Most of the time, FAQ documents list the questions that a company wants to be asked. (Or, as I like to say, "Finally? Ask question?")

Quora strikes me as full of gimme-questions. Seems that a lot get ignored, which is a good thing, but such posts are a bit off-putting. 

If I had a client with such interests, it would be intriguing to explore whether a technical marketing or recruiting effort could be executed on Quora, where a series of contributions from a rockstar engineer inspires young technical types to say "I must work with this guy!"

Just spitballing at this point. Will explore more when I'm able to go up-periscope. 

Photo credit: WingedWolf

Slashdot and the Social Web

Credit: Steve Mason

In "Slashdot Struggles to Remain Relevant in the Social Web", ReadWriteWeb asks "Why is Slashdot almost irrelevant to the social media community?" 

I ask:

1. "Is there really a 'social media community', at least as I understand the term?" and
2. "Just because something is online, does it necessarily mean that attention from the 'social media community' always the best—or even a good—measure of success?"

Among the fallacies in the post:

They're comparing apples and snow-tires. Seriously... What exactly does Slashdot have in common with the likes of, say, Digg? On Slashdot, people submit stories that admins select for publication. With Digg, Delicious and so on, the process is a bit more democratic, operating more like a common service first and a news-source second. Slashdot never aimed to be a service, as such.

This miscategorization allows RWW to make the statement that "Slashdot is no longer the powerhouse that it once was." This may be true, but the argument that RWW is framing looks like it was built for no other reason than to needle an iconic Web destination. 

Further, Slashdot has a topic focus and a specific, narrower audience. On the other hand, the focus of the news-memeing sites is pretty much whatever the online zeitgeist wants it to be and, therefore, has a broader appeal. 

To wit: When I noticed this RWW post, one of the day's most popular items on Slashdot had the headline "Dell and HP to Sell Oracle Operating Systems." By contrast, the most-Digged item in the past 24 hours was a parody of the PETA ad featuring Sheryln Chopra in her lingerie. 

Okay... I'm talking to the guys here... Given the choice, which of the two would you recommend to your friends? Is this a reflection on Slashdot? Hardly. It's more a reflection of how the Web in general, and social tools specifically, have been democratized and, therefore, are made to reflect a broader range of interest.

Then there's "death by Excel." I guess I'm supposed to gasp at oh-how-the-mighty-have-fallen when RWW shows me a sloping-down-and-to-the-right graph detailing Slashdot's traffic since March 2007. Context is everything, though. A decade or so ago, Slashdot used to be one of the few places to go for community-based tech news. People who were perhaps more casually interested in tech slogged through stories about Linux kernel upgrades and MySQL patches to get to tidbits about CES or iPods. Today, of course, there's plenty more choice. Sure, Slashdot's traffic has suffered but I argue that it probably has a much more qualified audience.

Was Slashdot slower to introduce Facebook and Twitter integration? Perhaps. Has it "historically favored stories submitted from traditional media, over 'new media'" with the perceived result of making the site "seem behind the times and a bit too closed minded?" Newsflash: The "traditional media" observably still drives a gigantic chunk of the conversation from pretty much all of the Social Web.

Call me a fuddy-duddy, but I actually do read Slashdot, though more out of a personal interest (I'm an open-source software enthusiast) than a professional one. Occasionally, though, the site provides me with information that serves the intersection between the two. 

Once again, the social media digerati are so focused on leaderboards and horseraces that it forgets the real value that social media brings—the ability to serve niche and broad audiences economically. From my perspective, Slashdot does the former admirably well and in ways that RWW's analysis certainly gives lip service to, yet ultimately does not reflect. 

Destroy, Erase, Improve

 

I've lately been interested in how some of the names-you-know in social media have blown up their digital presences in order to refocus, retrench, or reinvent their online identities. 

Some examples: 

• Leah Jones has tweeted her last as @leahjones is now @chicagoleah on Twitter. She explains the move over at the Natiiv blog.
• My colleague Steve Rubel stopped blogging and started "lifestreaming." 
• Going back further, I remember when people made a ridiculously big deal out of when Hugh McLeod killed (and later resurrected) his Twitter account.  

Me? I just kind of got sick of dragging around my technology choices of 2001. In any event, I was already running two blogs on TypePad. Mostly, though, the old blog represented a "me" from a long time ago and starting Where the Fishermen Ain't was a good way to make a clean break. 

All of this is so much more than the nauseating "[x] is dead and [y] killed it" eyeroll-generating crud that many in the social media sphere use as onanistic linkbait. Look forward to more people blowing up their online pasts, for whatever reason, to participate anew.