A few weeks ago, I was interviewed on CNN by Josh Levs on one small facet of BP Oil's disaster -- online communications.

Immediately following the interview, I wanted to do a follow-up post. And I was overwhelmed by the amount of potentially relevant links as the story continued to unfold. But this AP article in Sunday's news makes me assume the point I wanted to make is still worth posting.

BP Lost PR Control Before the Oil Spilled.

Here's an excerpt from the interview to underscore my point.

LEVS: So in terms of web strategy, companies all over the world are watching this. What does a company do when it's at the center of a crisis and people are expressing outrage online? What is the strategy? What do you do?

DUGAN: The first thing they need to do is listen. Hopefully they've been doing that before the crisis actually takes place.

The other thing that BP really missed the boat on unfortunately is they weren't very active in social media prior to this. They had two of the four profiles established that you mentioned between Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, but they really had not used them.

And you can't flip a switch like that, and expect to get traction with an audience. As you can see, you know, Greenpeace has been out there participating online for years, and they have a number of folks following them. And it's very easy for them to engage with people whereas it's not for BP, because they waited until this problem happened.

LEVS: This is interesting. You mentioned before we went to air, what a lot of companies do these days,they put information out there online and they hope people will go there and find it. And you're saying what companies really need to do, it's not broadcasting, what you really need to do is engage. What's that about?

DUGAN: Correct, yes. If they had been participating prior to this, they would have established communication with a lot of folks, and would not be trying to do so for the first time. They could engage with them when this happened. It's a very polarizing situation. And people need to express their emotions. Right now, they're using social media to broadcast.
----

Is the site BP's built out to address the situation robust and well-intended? Yes.

Is the search campaign they've conducted crisis/search 101 and not the devil's work? Yes.

Would a Facebook page, Twitter stream or other social sites have dramatically altered the situation? CEO Tony Hayward's actions make this a moot point. And to be clear, as the AP article notes, the PR effort won't alter the situation. The leak must be fixed.

My point is that trying to create a conversation after disaster strikes is not going to happen. It's not as if you can have a set of "dark" social media profiles and turn them on when this happens. It takes time to earn engagement. If BP had a social media presence and CEO Tony Hayward magically did not polarize the situation and make it BP against everyone...BP may have had an audience that would be helping them get the information out and help tell their factual, no-spin story. Instead it's BP against the government, activists, the media, and citizens. And that won't change anytime soon.

cover the earth uploaded by sansumbrella

I recently altered my Creative Commons copyright as it pertains to Social Media Explorer. I switched from an open, share and share alike copyright to a non-commercial, share and share alike copyright. While this might seem like a minor alteration that has little implication on anything, I wanted to share with you the agonizing (literally) decision because it has implications on how you might consider applying copyright to your own publishing.

The free and open world of social media advocated by the purists is kind of a, “just share, it’ll be okay,” mentality. Open source, open copyright, don’t be stingy, etc., mantras have created this vast universe of free flowing content and gladness that is the blogosphere. I’ve benefited from the share and share alike movement greatly.

But the more you learn about the implications of that approach to your content, the more you see the disadvantages. When you openly allow people to use or reposition your content, you expose yourself to two major business risks: damaging your branding and damaging your search value.

Damaging Your Branding

It’s bad enough that my friend Michael Stelzner named his site Social Media Examiner (awfully close to my blog name) and that I guest posted there a few times to help him get some early content. I’ve now been cited as the author of “Social Media Examiner” on a number of occasions (Doesn’t offend me. I love Mike and Examiner.) and even had one person ask me why I changed the design of my blog away from the eye-catching jungle theme (which I never had … that’s Mike’s site). But when sites like Social Media Today (a great resource, by the way) literally pull the entirety of your content and publish it as if you were authoring it for them, the attribution waters become very murky.

Social Media Today aggregates great blog posts on the world of social media from around the web. If I’m not mistaken, they do so with each author’s permission and with respect to their respective copyrights. They have always had my permission to do so and have respected my copyright. And I do like the site because it pulls together good posts I may not have found on my own. I do believe there is some original content there, but scrolling down their posts recently, I found that most of their recent posts were repositioned from elsewhere.

However, as Social Media Today’s audience has grown, so has the mistaken attribution that I write for Social Media Today. While I did reach out to them several years ago to ask how to be featured on their site and sought their active use of my blog posts, none of my content there has ever been exclusive or even written for their audience. I write for Social Media Explorer — my blog. If SMT wants to use that content, until now, they’ve been welcome to it.

While I certainly don’t feel as if being associated with Social Media Today is a bad thing, I am concerned that the lack of clarity in who authors what for them takes away from each author’s independent and respective blog, website, business and brand. Sure, it’s a trade-off. Up and coming authors get increased name recognition and exposure, some inbound links and enhanced credibility. But there comes a point where the brand confusion can be problematic. I’ve reached that point … good or bad.

Damaging  Your Search Value

Perhaps the bigger problem here is that sites like Social Media Today reposition the same content. While I don’t consider myself to be an SEO expert and duplicate content penalties from the search engines can be circumvented in various ways, simple logic tells you the same content on two different sites consistently can cause problems.

I first noticed the problem with Tweets and inbound links. My post of the day would be tweeted with a link. Awesome! Someone was sharing my content. But the link would point to the post on Social Media Today. Not awesome! I deserve that web traffic on my site.

Then I noticed references to my material linked from other blogs and websites. Awesome! Someone took a further step and said, “Jason’s content is good enough, I’m going to link to it from my content.” But the links pointed to the post on Social Media Today. Not Awesome! I earned that inbound link. It should come to me.

The big kicker was when I began doing some searches for keywords I’d targeted and found that the Social Media Today content was competing with my own for actual Search Results, not just components of good SEO value. This is when I realized having my content there was hurting me. Social Media Today has a big enough audience and is a credible enough website that the same content on it can feasibly beat out Social Media Explorer for the same search term, though the content, author, etc., is all identical. Not good.

Selfish vs. Selfless

I realize there’s a thick layer of self-serving attitude underlying all this. The social media purists will be critical of me for being selfish and wanting to horde my content. But the business value of what I sacrifice when doing so is large enough for me to want and need to do so.

This decision is 100-percent pro-Social Media Explorer and has nothing to do with being anti-Social Media Today. I love what SMT does, fully endorse and support their efforts. But also feel that the reasoning above is good grounds to now ask them not to use my content. They are a commercial venture, so my copyright would now prohibit them from reusing Social Media Explorer posts.

How This Effects You

If you haven’t already, you certainly should walk through the Creative Commons licensing exercise to determine what type of copyright to apply to your own material. But know that it’s not a determination you should take lightly or in haste. Think about the possibility that a perfectly fine and upstanding effort, like Social Media Today, may want to use your content. Does SEO value mean that much to you? Will you want to protect your brand from confusion with others?

Know and understand that you can say, “Anyone can have it and alter it!” but you can also say, “Anyone can have it but you can’t alter it.” You can also say they can have it if they’re non-commercial but not if they’re a commercial entity. Or you can say, “It’s mine … all mine! Bwahahahaha!”

In all seriousness, though, copyright is an important issue to consider for your content. It’s also important to know the benefits of being open, the benefits of being closed and the challenges of each as well. Hopefully my recent change can help you at least think your copyright through.

What Say You?

Am I right or wrong here? Is being also published at Social Media Today of greater benefit to me? Have I made a sound decision? What would you do in similar circumstances? What copyright do you apply to your content and why?

The comments, as always, are yours.

(NOTE: After writing this, I discovered Social Media Today now allows authors with registered SMT accounts to control the feeds sent to SMT for publication. This was not always the case and doesn’t change my decision. I have removed my feed from my profile page there.)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Copyright Law and Public Domain Explained (brighthub.com)
• Copyright Refresher – If You Blog You Need to Know This Stuff (realestate.about.com)

I am old enough to remember watching a black and white television as a kid. No, I am not talking about black and white movies on a color television, I am referring to a television with no color. When I grew up, color television was not groundbreaking, but it was still an upgrade from the technology of black and white sets. Color was optional. This was really a buzz kill when watching The Wizard of Oz the 1 time a year CBS aired it – Kansas and Oz both looked like California. Steadily black and white television went away. Now color television is an assumption – an expectation. Sure people talk about how vivid the color is because pixels or mirrors or yellow, but they don’t brag about the fact that the television just has color.

Social media and technology are similar. Once upon a time (like 3 years ago), just having a blog was noteworthy. Not so long ago just being on Facebook or Twitter was fascinating to people. It was experimental. It was new. It was fascinating that real people could really talk to one another. However we are quickly moving from an initial experimentation, past fascination to a time where social technologies are an expectation. Just being there is no longer enough to raise a lot of eyebrows. Being there is like color television – an expectation.

Now, we are starting to ask “why?” when a company lacks a social presence on the web. Businesses with no social presence look more and more like black and white television every day. Meanwhile, our fascination with just having colors on a television is being replaced with actually paying attention to the shows that are on it. A couple of years ago, if your company decided to actually talk to customers publicly on the web, people would talk about how innovative your firm was. Now, not being there is what people talk about. Seems crazy, but the world is evolving very rapidly these days, and those that can not adapt will struggle.

Every disruptive new technology changed the market simply through its mere introduction and adoption. The car killed the buggy whip. The telephone killed the telegraph. Early adopters who figure out new applications for new technology often reap rewards, but once everyone adopts it is not an advantage in and of itself. It is just another expectation. My first sales job required me and my colleagues to use pay phones frequently. When I got a cell phone, it made me faster than them… for a while. Then they caught on, and it became an expectation. The same is now true with smart phones and mobile devices that empower us to be productive anytime, anywhere. It becomes an expectation, and the playing field levels. Results were driven by the adoption of technology, but really had more to do with just being good at sales. Technology can drive efficiency, but it requires effectiveness to create real results.

I am not smart enough to claim to know what platforms will be most successful 2 years from now, nor am I dumb enough to lie about it. There is still a significant amount of experimentation going on in the space, driving continued fascination for me and others. What I do know is that regardless of where you do it, openly engaging with people is becoming an expectation. Get over your apprehension. Do some experimentation. Move beyond fascination, and get busy with going far beyond the new level of expectation.

Bottom line: Figure out how technology can improve your processes and empower your people. Use it to be more efficient with things and more effective with people. Make it easy for people talk about the amazing things you do for your customers, and not just the fact that you are using technology.

One of my goals for 2010 is to run 1,000 miles. Another is to complete my first marathon. Both – no surprise – are requiring me to run far and run often. When I chose these goals I assumed that the hardest part would be finding the strength to push ahead as the distance steadily increased through my training program. Surprisingly that is not really the case. What I am discovering as I cover longer distances, steadily build my endurance, and become a stronger runner is that the hardest part is simply taking the first stride.

It is the same challenge, day after day. Get up and go or sit on the sidelines. 100% up to me. If it is the morning, do I hit the snooze bar 10 times or get out of bed, lace up my shoes, rub the sleep from my eyes, and go. If it is the evening, do I put the kids to sleep and plop down in front of the television or do I head out the front door and run. One decision. One small step. One choice that will determine my fate. If I say yes. If I take one simple stride, all that follow come very easily. It all starts with the decision to take the first step.

Why is this so? I suppose one could look to Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of motion which says that “every body will persist in its state of rest or of uniform motion (constant velocity) in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed on it.”

It is always easier to do nothing. To find an excuse not to run. To put it off until tomorrow. To make the decision not to move. Getting yourself in motion requires you to exert considerable force. However once you have taken that one tiny step to overcome inertia, it is incredibly easy to keep going.

Whether you want to run a marathon, improve your community, learn to play guitar, start your own business, create a blog, write a book, go back to school, find a new job, spend more time playing with your kids, whatever… realize that you are probably just one little step away from making it happen. Just one step can change everything.

It’s just one step. Take it.

Isaac Newton, The Principia, A new translation by I.B. Cohen and A. Whitman, University of California press, Berkeley 1999.

Image R.E.D. by sling@flickr.com

You don’t get very far in talking about social media for business without running into a discussion about content. Companies need to provide informative, entertaining and engaging content to their audiences to attract visits to company blogs, websites, Facebook pages and more.

The deeper you get into understanding the various benefits of engaging your audiences with great content (enhanced online reputation, conversational market share, search engine ranking improvement and increased lead or sales generation to name a few) you begin to not only produce the content, but distribute and promote it accordingly. Everyone wants more eyeballs.

Because relatively few businesses have crossed the threshold from just blogging to developing content strategies, I see a big opportunity for content providers and promoters in the coming years. The easier brands can provide content (even if they, themselves, don’t create it) and distribute it, driving links, eyeballs and the like, the more successful they’ll be in the social realm.

This opens the door for a couple different types of companies or service providers. First, professional blogging services (I hate calling them ghost blogging services for reasons you can see in this 2009 post about the topic) and free-lance web content providers should see a boon in the need for their services in the next few years. Second, larger scale content distribution companies like wire-services should see a bit of an increase in volume as well.

But then there’s a unique opportunity for a company that combines both content creation and distribution to step in and do something neat.

Enter NewsUSA and its newest offering, Social Syndication, which is advertising on Social Media Explorer this month. NewsUSA has been a content provider and distributor in the traditional media world for some time. You hire them to take your press release or company news, turn it into an editorial/advertorial piece and they use a network of copyright-free distribution channels to get that article placed in newspapers, magazines and more. And there are a lot of those publications out there looking to fill their pages with interesting content without having to pay for it.

The copyright-free syndication houses like NewsUSA were doing good corporate blogging before blogging existed. Sell trophies, like Plaquemaker Plus? News USA can craft a useful article likely to get picked up by publications looking for such like, “Tips To Plan A Fun Family Reunion” and insert the suggestion you get trophies for the kids. It’s advertorial, but it’s non-obtrusive and provides value to the audience beyond just “buy our trophies.”

With NewsUSA’s new Social Syndication effort, they’re taking the traditional distribution model and applying it to social channels. And believe me, while Huffington Post and Mashable aren’t the types of websites that would use copyright free, syndicated content, there are TONS of sites out there that will. As more companies get into the “gotta have fresh content” mode, I think you’ll start to see the trend of using copyright free content expand into the brand world.

One recent client project NewsUSA shared with me resulted in 156 social and online placements, 127 inbound links to the syndicated story (placed on CopyrightFreeContent.com) and two inbound links to the client’s website. The story also generated over 100 links and references from Twitter users. Now, none of these numbers are eye-popping, but as the company builds trust and provides value to the social news communities, plus more companies and websites turn to syndication services for useful content, NewsUSA is looking at the tip of a big iceberg. And not one that will sink the ship.

One piece of Social Syndication that I offered NewsUSA feedback on was their activity in posting the content to the social news and bookmarking sites. While there’s great potential to increase the exposure and reach of their client’s work there, I felt like they still had some work to do in order to make that piece work better for them. But make no mistake about it, NewsUSA is on the right path and is a company to watch.

On the flip side of the syndication argument is the fact that inbound links from sites that use syndicated content may not be as valuable as those from the Huffington Posts of the world. I would never say NewsUSA is a single solution to distributing content or driving inbound links. But as their network grows, they will be able to reasonably guarantee a turnkey number of links based on the sites that grow to trust their content.

Debate the merits of advertorial all you want. When companies want content, they want content that is going to help them. And there will always be sites out there hungry enough for content to publish advertorial. When the brands looking for content see they can use a NewsUSA to provide such for their blogs, sites, outposts and more, PLUS distribute it around the web for even more value in exposure, SEO and more, the content creation and syndication companies are going to see customers.

How would you polish the content solution and syndication business? What do companies like NewsUSA have to do to convince your brand or company they are worth the investment? The comments are yours.

NOTE: For those of you who might be new to Social Media Explorer, I do have advertisers like NewsUSA from time-to-time, but because my audience trusts me, I have some very particular requirements to allow them to be brought to your attention. For more on my advertising policy, see this page on Advertising Relevancy.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Basics Of Content Syndication (slideshare.net)
• With Help From NewsUSA, Use Social Media To Keep Your Brand Relevant (prweb.com)

 

Starbucks’ Chris Abruzzo, VP of Brand, Content and Online, did double duty during Internet Week NY speaking at CM Summit and the Mashable/CNN event. As you’ll see in this video, Starbucks is using social media to invert the way it goes to market for product launches.

Many folks participating in social media would probably agree that Starbucks’ is an expert when it comes to its use of social media. But my favorite part of Abruzzo’s presentation is at the beginning when he shrugs off the hard-earned descriptor. 

“I’m here to be the practical example guy. We [Starbucks] really don’t know very much. We know very little about this whole space. We know more than we knew a few years ago. But we still really don’t know very much. But we do know Starbucks very, very, well and that has been the source of everything we’ve done.”

“It’s the Brand, Stupid”
Working with clients, it becomes very clear very quickly how much they understand their brand. They know what differentiates them from competitors and they know what their focus must be to succeed – regardless of what tactics are chosen to realize marketing goals. You can’t take this for granted. It’s an important point.

Abruzzo’s humble clarification is refreshing. It reminds me of something Josh Hallett said in passing at a conference I presented at in 2007 (UGA Connect). No one is a social media expert. Not Chris Brogan, not Steve Rubel, not you and not me. Not even brands as well-established in social media as Starbucks.

Some professionals have been participating in social media longer and helping their internal/external clients create strategies and execute plans with results at the end of the rainbow. But they’ve made mistakes, they’ve done test and learn projects (maybe even well-intended crash and burn projects) and they’ve built out from it. And they’ve shared their findings like Abruzzo.

Social Media Expert and Other Obscenities
There’s a lot of baggage, angst and content created around the term social media expert. Some of it’s understandable. Some of it’s elitist. Some of it’s a defensive move to keep the competition out of their billable hours.

I like Abruzzo’s approach and Hallett’s approach. There are no experts. And I’ll throw in a quote from Yoda, “Do or do not. There is no try.” So here’s to doing it.

Cross-posted to my work blog, Social Study.