Why the media doesn’t get Twitter

Wm Morris · 4.06.09 · 3 Comments 

I find it interesting that the mainstream media doesn’t seem to understand Twitter (and I’m being reductive here — obviously some MSMers get it). In particular, I’m amused that the words inane and superficial tend to come up a lot (or even if those exact words aren’t used, the impression of what Twitter is always seems to head in that direction).

The media doesn’t get Twitter because it obsesses over the contents of the tweets (and in many cases because the commentator has only experienced Twitter as the content of the tweets). This is a completely understandable mistake to make. But it misses what Twitter is — or at least the Twitter I know. I’m sure that there are parts of Twitter that are completely inane.

The comeback from many of us who use Twitter tends to be: it’s all about the conversation and the community. I agree, but also think that it’s a bit more complex than that. After all, there are much better platforms for having meaningful conversations — FriendFeed, e-mail lists, blogs with threaded comments, and web forums all provide a better way of managing the flow of conversation.

In addition, the business press has gotten all hot and bothered lately with the idea of real-time search. I think that’s an intriguing direction, but except for certain topic areas, it’s not quite there yet.

Here’s what Twitter really is: a stream of triggers. It’s not so much the content of individual tweets that matters as the effect a tweet has on a reader. Or to put it another way — each tweet is an invitation.

Each tweet provides one or more of the following:

  • A link to click on
  • A reminder to do something related to your life or job
  • An opportunity to ask a question
  • A recommendation
  • An amusing tidbit to brighten your day
  • Another piece of info about a person that may become an important part of your personal network
  • An invitation to interact, to reply ,or re-tweet, or direct message, or comment on a blog, or donate, or take a survey, etc.

A lot of the negative reaction to Twitter follows from the platform itself. In particular, the 140 character limit and the fact that the platform name itself suggests a certain superficiality. And really, it’s interesting how much of the reporting/commenting on Twitter revolves around the name* and the character limit as if that really said it all about what happen on Twitter. There is an immediate negative reaction to the idea that anything could be communicated in that amount of space.

I say the focus on content — on what’s being communicated, the story being told — is understandable, and it is. But let’s be clear that when it comes to print journalism (as well as TV/radio), the obsession with content, on a certain method of storytelling and how that is defined as good or important or successful is a product of its own set of (not 140 character) limits.

On the one hand, you have the content creators — the reporters, editors, producers — who tend to measure the success of content for how well it would communicate with/appeal to an ideal reader/viewer.

On the other hand, you have the sales and marketing people, where the measure of success is ratings and ad rates — e.g. the response of the readers/viewers in aggregate.

Neither measure of success necessarily has a whole lot of meaning to the real flesh-and-blood individuals who are consuming the content. Certainly, news stories and advertisements can be triggers, invitations, calls to action. That’s the whole Faustian bargain of the old business model, right? The ads are meant to influence behavior but are tolerated because they subsidize an informed citizenry, the two sets of triggers living side-by-side, not holding hands, of course, but always twinned.

Twitter is also a medium for delivering content, but by focusing solely on the nature of that content, the meaning of each individual message, you miss out on why the content — whether you think it is inane or not — is important to those who create and consume it. Simply put, Twitter affects your day (or night).

With Twitter, you choose who you follow — you choose who you allow to send triggers your way. And in return you create triggers, some that are calculated to speak to all of your followers, some a sub-set (hashtags!) and some to just one person. And you choose when to dip in and out of the flow of triggers, and how they are delivered to you — mobile, web, widget, app, feed reader, etc.

So, of course, the mainstream media doesn’t get it. Just like they didn’t get blogs at first. The audience isn’t only talking back, it’s going off on its own and creating networks of people that enrich each others lives. Sometimes that expresses itself in superficial and inane ways, but here we get to the real genius of Twitter: every trigger, every invitation has to happen in 140 characters or less. Which means that skimming, processing, reading, in short, consuming a call to action takes very little time at all. Not every tweet is a hit for every Twitter user. But if you get the right collection of people you follow, enough are that, corny as it is, your life is better because of it. And really, that’s what all human interaction should be about.

* And I can’t help but note that the riffing off of the name and the claims of superficiality are a bit rich when they come from the nattering nabobs of the chattering classes (yep, I’m not afraid to smugly combine alliterative insults).

Categories: Journalism, Social Media | Tags: ,

A method for composing stories/pitches/releases (or: throwing off the shackles of Microsoft Word)

Wm Morris · 4.02.09 · 1 Comment 

A few weeks ago I realized that the current system our office had for information management for our stories, pitches, news releases, event announcements, etc. just wasn’t working. I was tired of formatting issues cropping up as I moved content between platforms. I was worried about how much was stored in the e-mail in-boxes of me and my co-workers rather than on our share drive. And I was beginning to understand that engagement with social media — even on a straitlaced, low-frequency scale (which I’m not necessarily happy about, but we’re doing the best we can with a small shop) — meant that viewing content as A News Release or A Magazine Story wasn’t going to work.

Here’s the solution I came up with the help of one of my co-workers:

  1. Everything is now a story — we don’t think of content by what platform it’s going to be featured on/in.
  2. Any story, no matter how big or small or important or whatever other adjective you want to apply to it, gets a text file created about it (in Notepad) as soon as we know about it. This text file is placed in a Stories folder on our department’s shared rive. The filename consists of a status tag, key words, and a month. The status tags are a = active, t = tickler, z = archived e.g. a_NewStoryMethod_April09.txt. The idea here is that stories with the same status will group together.
  3. The text file is set up with three basic areas separated by a few hyphens as a visual divider. The areas are: Publishing , Story and Source.
    • In the Publishing area we list the platforms we think this story should be published too. This includes News release, Web site, faculty/staff newsletter, student newsletter, alumni newsletter, alumni magazine, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and more. When we publish to those areas, it gets noted next to the platform. Sometimes that’s a date and URL. Sometimes it’s just a date posted. Sometimes it’s a reference to an edition. Whatever makes sense so we can look it up later if we need to. If we’re sure this story isn’t going to be represented in one of those areas, that tag gets deleted.
    • In the Story area we have a bunch of different content fields. How many all depends on the story, but the possible fields so far are: Photos, Video, Headline, Subhed, Excerpt/Summary (1-2 paragraphs), Story (with a lead paragraph and as many paragraphs as the story demands — in some cases this may be Bullet Points or the Who/What/When/Where of an event listing rather than Story), Quotes (with notations about approvals or needs), and Boilerplate. For photos or video we copy and paste the file path to where those photos or videos are located. And these fields change depending on the nature of the story. Basically we dump them all in the template and then remove when we’re sure we don’t have to worry about that field.
    • In the Source area we dump everything that we get as raw sources — the text of e-mails, resumes, the results of Q&As, transcripts of tape-recorded interviews — with a note on where that info came from.
  4. Obviously this is just the source product. If we need to create a formal news release in Microsoft Word complete with letterhead then we do that and it’s housed in the News Releases folder just like ones created before this new system. And created isn’t the right word — it’s assembled from the pieces — the quotes, the explanatory paragraphs, the lead, the boilerplate. And for our alumni magazine, we’ll use this as a source and plug in quotes, but probably rewrite the lead and headline so it’s more feature-like. In addition, for pitching the media, I may rewrite the excerpt/summary to make it more relevant to the targeted publication. And when translating the headline for posting to Twitter, I may make it more colloquial. But the point is this the story source from whence all other pitches, stories, news briefs, releases, Flickr set summaries, etc. etc. flow.
  5. This could all change and we could ditch the system next week and it really only works well if everybody who is generating and disseminating content buys in to it. One cool thing is that it allows me to outsource some of dissemination work to a co-worker. And conversely, if a co-worker has a Story that was featured in, say, the faculty/staff newsletter and we decide to elevate it to the alumni magazine or a pitch, I know where to go first to get up to speed on what info we already have.

Hopefully my explanation is fairly clear. If not, I’ve uploaded a sample content_template that may help.

We’ve used this process for three stories so far, and so far I think it’s fantastic. I love not having to worry about formatting issues when I copy and paste*. I like that when I go to post an affiliated Flickr set or a Facebook note, I can pick and choose the language and details I want to add (and then modify if needed for tone and length). I find it soothing to not compose in Word.

Now there are a couple of downsides to this method. First, there’s no spellcheck**. Second, you have to remember to turn off word wrap when you copy and paste from Notepad — otherwise you end up with weird line breaks. I’d love to use Gedit (which I use at home on my Ubuntu box), but we’re a Windows XP shop at work. At some point, I’ll check out other text editors for Windows (anybody have suggestions?). But for now, Notepad is working just fine. It’s pretty sweet how quickly files open and save and close — and how small they are even if I’ve dumped several pages of stuff in to the Source section.

Keep in mind that there’s only four of us in our department, and we don’t publish a ton of content so this may not work for other college pr and marketing offices, but so far it has been a very positive change. And really, the key message of this post is not the method, but rather this: with a million places to publish, you better have some way of storing all the bits and pieces of content you need to tell your stories. And e-mail isn’t it. And a formal news release archive with nicely formatted MS Word docs isn’t it, either.

* Seriously — have you ever seen the crazy html code that MS Word creates when you try to copy and paste in to a CMS like Dreamweaver, WordPress or an e-newsletter service? Or even just in to an e-mail. It’s so annoying.

** I believe there are text editors with spellcheck. I’m looking into it and will post a comment if I find anything interesting to report.

Categories: Media Relations, PR, Social Media, Technology | Tags: , , , ,

Why LinkedIn should support academic CVs

Wm Morris · 3.16.09 · Comment 

David Erickson’s Slideshare presentation Expert Positioning Using LinkedIn spurred me to write up some thoughts I’ve been having regarding LinkedIn and academia. I’ll develop this further, but the basic idea is this: LinkedIn needs to come up with a way to better support the presentation of academic CVs, and in particular, those massive lists of papers, presentations, book reviews, etc. that form the key research core of an academic CV.

LinkedIn currently does a decent job of helping its users present positions with a company and affiliations with professional organizations and other groups. What it doesn’t do so well is support anyone whose work consists of and professional identity is built out of lists of works. That includes, not only academics, but also actors, directors, artists, freelance writers, authors, etc.

I don’t have any amazing solution for how this should be implemented. I only dabble a bit UI and I’m not a graphic designer so no mock ups. But at the very least there could be a tab that displays The List of Stuff, and most importantly, any such solution should be able to automatically parse and tag discreet items in a CV/resume and allow for that data to be downloaded. I realize that pulling out data is not what LinkedIn is going to naturally support, but I think it’s in their best interest to do so.

Here’s what’s in it for them:

1. LinkedIn is pitching reporters on the idea that it is a great place to find experts. I don’t doubt that reporters are using it. But it’ll be even more valuable when one of the key group of experts — academics — embrace it more fully and especially when the information they present is as rich as their CV.

2. Faculty members (as well as freelancers and actors and directors, etc.) tend to be highly connected individuals, in part, exactly because of the List of Works they are involved in. Their projects aren’t confined to work colleagues and consultants.

3. Faculty members bring in students and that’s a userbase that LinkedIn is, I would assume, hoping to attract because they’ll soon be in need of the services that LinkedIn provides (and because they tend to be active social media users and activity among a few people in a network can increase activity across the network thus proving and increasing the value of the platform the activity is taking place on).

And here’s why, if LinkedIn better supports academic CVs, faculty members should actively participate in LinkedIn (especially if the solution makes it easy to manage CV-related data):

1. Currently, faculty members rely on

a) individual bio pages/Web spaces provided by their academic institution — these may or may not be kept up by academic support or by the academics themselves

b) faculty experts databases created by the institution’s PR offices

c) their own website or blog that they maintain (either paying for hosting of using free hosting)

d) minimal presences in directories of organizations they may be affiliated with

None of those solutions is ideal. In some, they don’t have control of their data and what is presented in others, they have control, but may not have the time to keep things up-to-date or to provide nice design and stable hosting solutions. Let’s be honest there are a lot of ugly, out-of-date faculty pages out there.

LinkedIn provides a professional space and is about as stable of a social media company as you can get these days.

2. A university pr office has limited resources — certain faculty are going to get privileged when it comes to media inquiries and those inquiries are almost always mediated. I realize that many faculty prefer not to work with the media, but I strongly believe academics (and really all of us) are going to increasingly find themselves needing to take charge of their own promotion and interaction with the public sphere rather than relying so much on the security of their individual institutions. I’ll talk more about that in another post. Also see Gideon Burton’s Academic Evolution blog for more on faculty taking charge of their research and online presences.

I know some faculty hate having to screen media inquiries and make the pr office do it, but that only adds time to the process. Obviously whatever solution LinkedIn were to come up with, another thing they’d need to figure out is settings and ways to regulate inquiries. This is something I need to think about more and may post on in the future.

3. Even faculty experts who become stars for the college, sometimes find they aren’t getting the calls they were because the reporter or editor who loved them has left and taken his or her rolodex. If faculty use LinkedIn in great numbers and journalists respond to this by managing more of their experts with it, it’ll become much each easier to pass on experts (and to discover them in the first place).

4. LinkedIn is a fantastic way to stay connected to the work of former students, research assistants, etc. This will be even more true, esp. for those in the sciences, if it better supports papers, presentations, etc. Imagine being able to go through your list of old papers and have a name of a grad student pop out at you — someone you haven’t thought of in awhile — and be able to click on their name and bring up their LinkedIn profile and catch up on the interesting research they’re doing.

Now, if all the above were to happen, what’s in it for higher ed pr pros? What if this leads to more reporters cutting us out of the picture?

I say it’d be great if it does. I don’t know that it’d necessarily stop the calls, but if it does then that’s time that we can put in to training faculty on how to work with the media. It’s time that we can put in to other pitches. It’s time we can spend on monitoring and metrics. And it’s time that we don’t have to spend updating our experts databases.

I don’t handle that many faculty experts calls in my current position, but I know how much time they can take up. I don’t want to shift that time entirely over to the faculty, but honestly a lot of what happens is matchmaking that could take less time if the right reporter was getting to the right faculty member in the right way. I think LinkedIn is potentially a powerful platform for doing that, but it’s not there yet.

Categories: Education, Social Media | Tags: ,

What do we mean by authenticity?

Wm Morris · 3.02.09 · Comment 

Social media gurus tell us that social media privileges authenticity. We PR people are told that if we want to engage, we need to do so with an authentic voice. And we tell our CEOs and such that if they are going to blog or tweet or, heck, communicate with anyone other than other CEOs then they need to be real about it.

This call for authenticity is entirely understandable. The language of work has been horribly abused and calcified (and yet has been absurdly prone to faddishness e.g. buzz words) ever since managerial capitalism ascended in the mid 20th century.

But what do we really mean by authenticity?

In my experience, what is generally meant is a mix of informal (conversational) grammar and syntax, hip vocabulary and pop cultural references, strong undercurrents of irony and self-deprecation (but with doses of sincerity) all combined with an opinionated, knowing approach to whatever field is being discussed. It is the lingua franca of educated Gen Xers. It is best represented these days by Twitter, I think, (previously blogging) but it has its roots in the bulletin boards, usenet groups, listservs, etc. of the early (rather libertarian in tone) years of the Internet. Thus, authentic discourse is strongly anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchal, anti-ignorance, and anti-consumerist (or at least anti-mindless consumerism — it’s hip to what’s cool, though).

To be authentic is to mix the expert with the personal. It’s not the wholly personal — there must be some level of skillz exhibited; otherwise, it’s merely a puerile discourse of self-indulgent display (c.f. the incomprehensible entirely ungrammatical ramblings of MySpace comments), and I don’t believe that most marketers, social media gurus etc. value stuff that’s wholly puerile. After all, the authentic can only gain social currency when it shows that it provides something of value — either it’s entertaining or informative or interesting or preferably all three.

So what happens when this type of authenticity becomes the status quo?

Perhaps it never will considering how slow corporations and other organizations are slow to embrace it or how ham-fisted the results often are when they do. And perhaps authenticity is a broad enough concept to encompass and value a range of discourses. But it’s not entirely clear to me that the authentic voice as it is presently constituted is going to last and going to appeal to multiple generations even though it’s the mode of discourse I (being one of those educated, blogging Gen Xers) feel most comfortable working in.

(And perhaps what comes next is some sort of neo-formalism. If so, I’m screwed.)

Categories: Social Media | Tags: , , , , ,

Welcome to morris.wm

Wm Morris · 2.28.09 · Comment 

The tag line for this blog is: where pr, higher ed, media, technology and culture collide. That verb is a bit strong, perhaps. But as anyone who works in higher education knows, media (especially social media) and technology are having a disruptive impact on the life of the university and are challenging and transforming educational culture. And, of course, because of this and because of the changing landscape of how our audiences consume and share information, it’s also having an impact on higher ed pr.

The good news is that it’s an exciting time to be telling the stories of our colleges and universities. And higher education pr/marketing is transforming in interesting ways. Anybody remember mailing out news releases? I’ve only been in the business nine years, and my day-to-day work has changed dramatically over that time (even as the basic need of a well-crafted message via the right medium for the intended audience remains the same).

What I intend to do with morris.wm is provide minor examples, anecdotes, speculations and analyses of where the nouns mentioned in the tag line intersect. My hope is that posts will be short but useful, infrequent but regular (most likely 1-2 per week) , and heavily rooted in the why and the what if more than the how. Your comments are welcome.

Categories: Announcements | Tags:

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