But my job is not done.

My big BlogHer epiphany came to me late at night when I was showing my friend my RIDONCKULOUS (sp?) bag of swag.

Image from Table for Five

At registration, everyone at the conference got an environmentally-friendly @Gettington bag (one of my favorite sponsors, by the way) filled with goodies. Normally I would bury my head inside and go through everything to see what new things I had, but I didn’t because there were just too many things in there.

After breakfast my plan was to sit down with my laptop somewhere but my breakfast buddy, a two-time conference attendee, led the way to the expo space and crazyness ensued. We didn’t get in right away because the space didn’t open until 10am, but as soon as we did I learned why all the attendees were so eager to burst through the doors…..

Now, this is just an approximation, but there were a SHIT TON of brands and booths at the expo. And they all had the coolest swag to give away, lots of great prize drawings, decked-out booths, and things to keep everyone entertained and very happy for hours. There were brands there that I wouldn’t have immediately linked up with women bloggers, but it simply came down to the fact women are THE decision-makers. Admit it, dudes.

At one point I saw a woman carrying three big totes around, but this is not a story about hoarding…  I know she will review her goodies and blog about some of the products and brands. Hence, this epiphany is about just how so very much coveted the female blogger population is.  I’ve read many of the  studies that reveal that women dominate social media, read posts about “mommy blogging” — here is one I really enjoyed, published in 2008…  Insight much? — I even wrote a research paper for graduate school about BlogHer! But only in retrospect did it hit me that Texas might want to let women bloggers have the “Don’t Mess With…” tag line.

And for any brands that have yet to do their research in order to figure out how to best reach women bloggers or that still think that is not a segment of the blogger population that they need to or should be interested in building relationships with… you are so very wrong. I have now confirmed it.

Also… attend BlogHer — you will stand corrected and will be perplexed.

Image credits: Table for Five, BlogHer

August 7, 2010 5:49pm update: I’m sitting in the Grand Ballroom listening to the closing conference keynote, featuring “Need to Know” PBS anchor Alison Stewart moderating a panel with: Marie Wilson, Founder and President of The White House Project, author and activist Gloria Feldt from Heartfeldt Politics, and P. Simran Sethi, Emmy Award-winning journalist, blogger and environmentalist. The topic of the panel is: “Use your voice, your platform, and your power.” Gloria Feldt just said that she was not prepared for the amount of swag she got at her first BlogHer conference. Her epiphany back then was… “Yes. Women have a voice. Marketers understand that… but do we?”

*Gloria hits nail on the head*

Check out the closing keynote live blog.

Also, check out @katebuckjr’s picture of her own bag with ridiculous amounts of swag. Dang!! Right??

I know that it takes times to “see the light” when it comes to new products and services. But since pretty much everything offered on the Web is in constant beta state, if we, the users, don’t do things “Nero-style” and give companies a brutally honest thumbs up or down verdict sooner rather than later, then we miss out on the opportunity to shape the products and services that will later come to shape our reality (Twitter, FTW). So here are my two cents. I am an inbox Nazi. I delete and respond to emails in the constant pursuit of the zero-inbox utopia. Seriously, I’m pretty sure the way to finally reach Enlightenment is through an empty inbox. I ADORE Gmail and email is my top priority. I couldn’t believe that in an effort to force themselves into the social network market, Google would put a “Buzz” link right under my sacred “inbox” link and then tell me that I have more than 100 things to look at when it has taken me all day to respond to 5 emails. Talk about a lack of research and understanding of your publics. So essentially, I have been forced to ignore Buzz. To me it seemed to fall under the “fruit flies buzz around” rather than the “word-of-mouth” definition of the word. I resent this. My friends online are bright people and I just called them fruit flies because Google put out a half-assed product. My affair with Google is intimate. I collaborate using Google Docs, I organize my life with Google Calendars, and I read and learn from the blogs I subscribe to on Google Reader.  My affair with Facebook and Twitter is a little more scandalous and public. For Google to just go balls to the wall with Google Buzz is unacceptable and a huge disservice to their brand and certainly to the rest of us. February 11, 2010 UPDATE: Thanks to Aaron Brazell (@technosailor) for a solid post on Why Google Buzz is the wrong product for Google to try to shove down our throats and for the key to turning it off:

I enabled Buzz on my Gmail account and then promptly disabled it (you too can disable it, if it’s already turned on for you, by clicking on the “turn off Buzz” link in the footer of your Gmail account).

Before going to sleep tonight I thought I’d look around Craigslist to see if there were any new postings for housing in Washington, DC… Had I known that I was going to run into this, I would’ve just gone to bed:

Talk about opportunistic …

While tons of people are stuck at home, tons of others are stranded due to the airports closing, and others are straight-up homeless; some cold-hearted schmuck is trying to make $400 A DAY off others’ misery??? Let me guess, you haven’t done a single thing to try to help the Haiti relief efforts either have you? Or maybe you’re selling “Help Haiti” T-shirt on some Web site I have yet to stumble upon?

This is NOT how you use free internet sites people.

To the person whose identity I protected, although enterprising readers might probably be able to figure it out if they wanted to — I’m glad your apartment building is safe, because if all this snow wasn’t in my way, I’d probably consider stopping by while you’re watching a movie in your home theater, snug like a bug under your 500 count sheet set… to tell you, in person, that this is not cool.

This weekend, I read a few articles on public relations research that got me thinking (I think that’s what my professors were going for ) The general consensus is that public relations research is often limited to the evaluation of the products of short-term communication programs when what it should be doing is evaluating the products, processes, and the outcomes of both short- and long-term programs (Grunig & Grunig, 2001; Michaelson & Macleod; 2007). Of course, this statement assumes that organizations are conducting research in the first place…

Social media ROI has been an ongoing debate ever since those who were dabbling in the space realized that they needed to come up with something measurable in order to convince reluctant executives that social media was a worthwhile investment of their organizations’ time and resources. Unfortunately, number of page views, clicks, conversions, tweets, mentions, fans, blog posts, etc. are all examples of products, not processes, not outcomes, and not necessarily long-term.

Processes refer to things like relationship-building and outcomes refers to the quality of those relationships (Grunig, & Grunig, 2001).

A few days ago, my friend @AlanWeinkrantz tweeted:

The types of data we are used to capturing are numbers; we need to capture conversations and more importantly, streams.

I couldn’t agree more. I also think that words like “measurement” and “metrics” are stifling. I agree with scholars and think “research” and “evaluation” are a better fit. The idea is that organizations are conducting investigation that is purposeful, systematic and rigorous in nature and that they will use the results of said investigation to evaluate strategies and tactics.

So I’m sorry for using “measurement” to title this post. Dang SEO keywords, rankings, and the very vicious circle I’m trying to argue against.

To clarify, I don’t think measuring products is a waste of time. I think we need to pay more attention to the processes and outcomes dimensions of social media research and evaluation. If we conceptualize social media as what lies at the heart of the Web 2.0 phenomenon – user collaboration, networking, sharing, and interaction; then it makes sense that in addition to counting the number of “X”, we research the quality of what is being said about our organizations’ efforts, programs and campaigns. Because quality is in the eye of the beholder, interpretative, and subjective in nature; the key is to know who you are, what you’re looking for and what you will do when you find it.

Super Bowl XLIV is in just a couple of hours… I’m SO VERY MUCH looking forward to Brand Bowl. The companies that spent gazillions of dollars on those commercials are going to get all sorts of ratings charts, bar graphs, and spreadsheets with numbers on them in the morning. The numbers will be huge and the companies may decide to buy ads in next year’s Super Bowl… But the kind of qualitative feedback they will get from listening to viewer’s *actual* conversations might make them reevaluate their approach (think Pepsi).

REFERENCES

Grunig, J. E., & Grunig, L. A. (2001). Guidelinesfor Formative and Evaluative Research in Public Affairs: A Report for the Department of Energy Office of Science. Department of Communication University of Maryland.

Michaelson, D., & Macleod, S. (2007). The Application of “Best Practices” in Public Relations Measurement and Evaluation Systems. Public Relations Journal. 1 (1).

Image credit: http://futureperfectpublishing.com/2009/02/

We discussed the difference between the terms “stakeholders” and “publics” and agreed that stakeholders are those who are affected by what the organization does and have stakes in the results of those actions. Publics are not only affected by organizations’ actions, they also have the potential to become involved in those actions and to influence organizations that way. This concept of publics comes from the Situational Theory of Publics, developed by University of Maryland Professor James E. Grunig (yay Maryland).

The idea behind this theory is that individual members of the public exercise problem recognition, constraint recognition and level of involvement with organizations to different degrees. The publics who exercise these three factors to the greatest extent are considered “active publics.” Active publics seek and process information to a greater extent and, should they ever decide to coalesce, these publics have the potential to affect an organization. According to the theory, it would be wise for organizations to dedicate their resources to those who will affect them the most.

That makes sense.

Then, Obama came up. He has been criticized for campaigning for the Democratic Senate candidate in Massachusetts, where a republican was about to (and did) take Kennedy’s senate seat, and not being in Haiti, where an earthquake had just shattered the nation and where help was still taking time to get on its way. My professor spoke about public opinion — a prime example of what happens when publics coalesce. She said the Obama administration was catching so much flack from its publics because it failed to recognize that they were very much active and — here is where I had to chime in — active publics can create problems for organizations, which is why organizations have to keep a close eye on them and make sure their needs are met.

Enter social media. I see publics as SOLUTIONS, instead.

When news about Haiti broke on Twitter I witnessed IMMEDIATE response. People like Danny Brown started to raise funds through 12for12k, people like Ed Shahzade were making sure that everyone trying to help and donate had their facts right. On Monday, I also found out all about CrisisCamp, which extended to 12 cities in only two weeks.

Publics can be a problem if they allow themselves to be that way. Regardless of what was happening in American politics and what Obama should or shouldn’t have been doing… what I saw coming from social media were SOLUTIONS.

If publics are the solution and organizations empower them to be so… more people win.

Flickr user Just Sarah

Christmas came early for those of us — in fact, most of us, according to a November 16, 2009 article on Read Write Web — who use TweetDeck as oru third-party Twitter client of choice. This week, TweetDeck released a series of several updates including Twitter lists, geolocation, more Facebook support, and brand new LinkedIn support. A great article on Read Write Web covers the most significant changes in the new version of Tweetdeck. Here, I will discuss some implications and considerations for those of us who plan on continuing to use TweetDeck now that it has been cranked up to 11.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace integration

Because Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are now integrated, those who know that most of their friends and followers are shared across networks should consider NOT updating Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with the same thing. TweetDeck is now TRULY a deck, so use it as such. Instead of finding thinking of using the new TweetDeck as a shortcut to cross-posting the same thing all over the place, think of how to tailor your message accordingly to where people are going to care to read about it. If it’s work-related, Link it in, and so on and so forth.

Now that you can easily access your Twitter lists AND your TweetDeck groups, be smart about how you build them. TweetDeck groups aren’t public, so save your “cool people I tweet with all the time” list for a TweetDeck group and use Twitter lists, which are public, with a little more purpose in mind. Use them to add value and become a point of reference.

The new TweetDeck lets you write on the wall of the Facebook Pages with the same ease with which you tweet. This means that you can be more proactive and engaging with your fans on Facebook. Time to be more consistent about showing fans some love, as opposed to only updating the page every time you need something from them.

Should you choose to activate the Facebook news updates column on the new TweetDeck, be strategic about it. I don’t check Facebook as often as I do Twitter and when I do, I tend to see what a few number of my friends are up to  — I write a few witty wall posts, comment on pictures and then I’m off. Now, I’m using TweetDeck to try to catch what some of my new friends or old friends whom I have lost a bit of touch with are up to. In other words, I’m using it to maintain relationships that I may be giving less attention to simply because I’m not on Facebook as much and when I am, I default to commenting on the walls of friends with who I interact more often.

LinkedIn updates come in with less frequency than everything else, so why not activate that on the new TweetDeck? It’s information that I rarely, if ever, was paying attention to. Now, I can tell who is on the move and maybe some opportunities to connect people or connect with people will arise. I haven’t gotten there by using LinkedIn yet but maybe the new TweetDeck will make all the difference in that world.

More updates

TweetDeck’s new profile view includes geolocation; your bio; your link; and followers, following, tweets, and lists information. Don’t set your geolocation as “global” or “wherever the wind blows,” because that tells me nothing and it won’t help you make local connections — and the potential to scaling things back to local is where social media eventually wins and rules above everything else. Also, make sure your link actually goes somewhere, because it is now featured more prominently on your profile view and I might just click on it.

The infamous retweet function is opt-in on the new TweetDeck. All I have to say about that it… you guys are smarter and now your users better than Twitter. And, thank you.

Final Thoughts

TweetDeck, if you’re reading this, Flickr integration would be the cherry on top

February 8, 2010 Update: TweetDeck is now allows you to view Flickr, YouTube and Posterous media within the client.

Watch a video of the features in TweetDeck’s latest version below.

Your turn. How is the new TweetDeck fulfilling your every need? Or is it still coming up short?

More screen shots of the new TweetDeck here.