This may very well amount to nothing at all but I thought it might be a fun experiment. Tips of the proverbial hat to @fleur_de_lotus for unintentionally giving me the idea .

Tired of trying to come up with witty and engaging text for your bio? Suffering from “About” page writer’s block? Crowdsource your problems away in The Bio Zone – the wiki for the self-promotionally challenged.
photo credit: Haags Uitburo

For someone who gets paid to write digital outreach and marketing strategies that often include advice on how to manage one’s social media properties, I do a pretty poor job of it here at 42 points. SEO best practices are routinely overlooked in favour of feeding my love of clever (at least to me) titles and pithy asides. I go weeks, sometimes months between posts. I don’t bother with tags very often and my categories are pretty useless.

The honest truth? I just can’t be bothered sometimes. This blog was never supposed to be part of some strategic exercise to build a personal brand. I don’t see myself as a thought leader with legions of readers counting on me for unique insights. And, at the end of the day (in the literal sense, not the over used cliche one), I don’t have the energy to put best practices into place. I’d rather play with my kid, or hang out with my wife, or take my dog for a walk, or create the ultimate dynasty in NHL 10’s Be a GM mode.

I get my fill of social media strategy at work.

And I’m not alone here. Just today, I had a conversation on Twitter with a couple of bloggers about the number of posts in our draft queue. The awesomely-awesome Sue Murphy admitted a few months ago to suffering the pains of blogger guilt. Hell, one of the smartest guys I know started his own PR/web/social media consultancy two years ago and he’s doing so well that he still hasn’t finished his website.

It’s hardly confined to social media, of course. I work for a brilliant web shop full of great developers, designers and information architects but our site looks dated and stale (we’re working on it, I promise). We also do amazing custom intranets for clients on SharePoint but our own intranet is brutal.

As lame as it sounds, I think many of us are too busy helping others for a living to really help ourselves.

We’re all quick to judge companies for the web presence they keep but is that ultimately fair? Or maybe that’s why RFPs always ask for work samples…

What say you, loyal reader(s)? How can you make sure you have a decent pair of shoes to wear online?
photo credit: ★keaggy.com

Ugh. Nothing worse than unsolicited advice, right? Well, I guess it’s not entirely unsolicited. This is a post I started mentally writing back when all the colleges and universities were sending a crop of new grads into the world but it wasn’t until yesterday, when Toronto-based PR educator Barry Waite tweeted and asked for advice for new PR grads, that I started actually thinking about how to make this coherent.

Sorry Barry, I need more than 140 characters.

First a disclaimer. I’m probably not the first person a young grad would turn to for advice. Yes, I’ve got social media in my job title but I’m certainly not an expert. I don’t have legions of followers, I don’t have a book deal and I don’t have an iPhone app.

What I do have, though, is 10 years or so of experience working in PR/comms type roles and a career I’m pretty happy with.

You gotta “get” social media. But there is more

There seems to be a lot of pressure on new PR grads these days to “get” social media. With good reason. Social media are radically changing the way that PR, communications, marketing and media relations are done. However, there seems to be a lot of people who are taking that idea to its illogical extreme, trying to find out how to make a career in social media. Recent grads are hanging out their shingles as social media consultants or looking for work as a social media expert.

Yes, I am the “social media guy” at non-linear creations. My experience in social spaces got me in the door here. But it’s my experience in web strategy (as an in-house comms guy who worked on a half dozen web projects in three years) that keeps me relevant and allows me to work as part of an amazing team of web strategists, information architects and user-experience designers. It’s my ability to write integrated digital outreach strategies (that include but are not limited to social media tools) that makes me an asset to our clients.

When I was in talks with NLC before I came on board, I asked that the word “integration” be included in my job title. As a rule, I don’t put much stock in titles but I wanted that to be front and centre when I was introduced to clients because, at its heart, that’s my job. My job isn’t to teach people how to use social media, it’s to help them integrate social media into their overall outreach strategy.

Nobody is hiring a semaphore consultant

Is there a market for social-media-specific training or consulting? Yup. For now. But, at its core, outreach via social media isn’t rocket science. There’s a learning curve, sure, but it’s not that steep. And as these tools and the communities of knowledge around them mature, social-media-specific consulting as a concept is going to sound as insane as fax-machine-specific consulting or press-release-specific consulting.

My job title is “social media integration consultant” but my job is communication. My role is to work with clients to understand their needs and objectives then recommend tools and strategies to help them meet their goals. I come at projects with a social media mindset but I don’t work in isolation and I don’t throw blinders on. Some projects scream out for a social component. Others don’t. It’s my experience as a general communications professional and the insights of the rest of the NLC strategy team that help decide which are which.

So to the PR or comms or marketing grads 2010, I humbly offer you this. Don’t specialize to the point of putting yourself on the path to irrelevance. If you want to work in social media, understand how social media works with traditional outreach channels – those aren’t going away. Don’t just understand your niche, understand how your niche fits in the bigger picture.

At the end of the day, PR, comms and marketing aren’t about the tools, they are about understanding the underlying human behaviours. How people communicate. How people interact. Don’t be a social media specialist or an any other kind of specialist. Be a communicator first.

photo credit: CarbonNYC

So yea, I tweeted my way through an earthquake yesterday afternoon. Well, that’s not entirely true. Despite the claims of some, I didn’t feel the rumble and immediately reach for my iPhone. But I was sitting at my desk when the shaking started and once things subsided I, like many others, immediately flipped over to TweetDeck to find out if anyone else had their world rocked.

As has become the norm, word of the quake spread quickly over Twitter, followed in short order by the requisite deluge of tweets about how Twitter had, once again, kicked the mainstream media’s ass. Among the dozens of tweets of the sort that I saw, I thought Ottawa’s David Hicks did the best job of making the point:

Thanks to the earthquake, I can measure the Speed of News. Twitter: 20 seconds Radio: 20 minutes Television: 35 minutes Newspaper: Tomorrow.

Toronto-based PR guy Dave Fleet repeated the assertion that traditional media got beat as part of his impressively-quick analysis of the social media chatter about the earthquake.

Yesterday afternoon at 1:41pm EDT, a 5.0 magnitude earthquake shook Quebec and Ontario and it looks like people ran to Twitter instead of diving for cover. Once again, social media beat traditional media to the punch (as if this is news nowadays), although mainstream outlets were quick to report the news shortly thereafter.

Hard to argue, really. I was among those collecting and sharing information on Twitter. Thanks to people in my network, I knew where to find information on the quake (interestingly, it was on the US geological site, not the Canadian one. It crashed).  I knew that a lot of workers downtown were evacuated from their buildings, I knew it was felt in Montreal and Toronto… not bad for a few minute’s work.

News or journalism?

So did Twitter “break” the story? Well, people on Twitter probably did, at least for a lot of people. And obviously Twitter played a key role in people sharing their experiences and checking on loved ones. No argument there.

But does that mean Twitter beat the mainstream press? Only if you think news = journalism.

People on Twitter did a great job telling people the bare facts. Those were quickly followed by jokes, reactions and other things that were more entertaining than informing. As it should. Twitter is a network of people. People like to laugh and share stories.

Meanwhile, the “defeated” media were busy doing journalism. Both the Sun and the Citizen have comprehensive quake sections today, with little things like explanations for how earthquakes work; context for the size and scope of the quake and its damage; photo galleries, reader stories; videos etc. The local CBC outlet found an expert who pointed out that the immediate reaction of most, running outside, was maybe not the best approach.

It’s time to stop comparing apples to oranges. Real journalism is more than reporting that something happened. It’s about context. Detail. Depth and breadth. Twitter and other social channels will always be able to beat traditional media to the punch. But that’s only a small part of what goes into journalism.

The mainstream media didn’t get beat yesterday. They did their job.

photo credit: Hamed Saber

“We need a blog!” “We should be on Facebook!” Far too often, these are the first words that set an organization barreling down the road to participation in social media whether or not they’re actually ready. By focusing on the tools instead of the underlying strategy, many organizations have stumbled out of the social gate and ended up face-planting in full view of the curious public.

Not all social channels are created equal. There are varying degrees of risk and different levels of potential reward depending on how you use them. To help you get your head around what your organization can tolerate, this paper poses eight questions you need to ask yourself before you drag your organization down the road to social media participation.

Download the pdf here: Is My Organization Ready for Social Media?

Now the requisite shouts out:

This paper was drafted as part of my employer, non~linear creations‘, thought leadership series. That means it was written on their time, during holes in my billable schedule. It also means that I benefited from the design team’s delicate touch and the marketing team’s backing to get it out there. NLC’s leadership is also letting me make the paper available here for free with no strings attached. As such, if you like what you read and want to talk bid’ness with me, you’ll be talking to me while I wear my snazzy (but totally imaginary) NLC hat.

Next, I want to thank the Geek & Poke crew for generously allowing me to use a few of their hilarious comics to bring a little levity to the paper. As per the standard Creative Commons usage agreements, please remember that while their comics are spot on when it comes to supplementing my arguments, the G&P gang does not specifically endorse me, NLC or any of the points made in the paper.

I also want to give the maddest of props (that’s what the kids say, right?) to the folks who attended Acuity Forums‘ “Executing Social Media” conference in Toronto in March. This paper was adapted from the session I presented there and the feedback I received from the attendees, especially Lakehead University’s Tove Tronslien, went a long way towards bringing this paper to life.

Lastly, a huge thanks to my good buddy Dan Blouin. Dan was subject to the original, far rantier draft, and his input helped make this paper readable and at least semi-coherent.
photo credit: *Zara