Advocacy Avenue

Every wonder exactly how teenagers spend their time online these days.  I recommend Anastasia Goodstein’s new book, Totally Wired – What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online. This is a well researched book and easy to read. Anastasia has her finger on the pulse of young America… and I mean that literally… just visit her blog, YPulse. 

Similar to teenagers in the past, teens today are developing their identity, figuring out where they fit in and trying to make sense of the world.  Instead of talking on the phone for hours, teenagers now chat online.  Instead of writing a diary, they post entries to their blog. Instead of organizing events at school, they organize them online and in Second Life.

The book also covers topics on cyberbulling, parental control options, and the role of technology in the classroom. 

I recommend this book if you are seeking a glimpse into the world of today’s teen culture. For communications professionals, it will show you the future (Email will not be king, so plan accordingly). If you are a parent, the book will explain a lot and give you a number of concrete recommendations on how to ask the right questions and get more involved in your child’s online activities.

- Kevin

CRM Today has an interesting new article that shows that CEOs of large companies apparently understand the promise of Web 2.0 to change customer relationship management (CRM) in the new future better than middle managers. A surprising and encouraging find! Here’s more from the article:

Web 2.0 has moved from buzzword to reality in many of the world’s
largest corporations, according to a survey of 406 senior executives
worldwide by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The survey found that 79%
of respondents see the collaborative web as a way to boost revenues and
cut costs. Perhaps the most interesting finding is that a full 85% of
C-suite executives see the sharing and collaboration aspects of Web 2.0
as an opportunity to increase revenue and/or margins, versus 75% of
middle management. These findings point to a possible disconnect
between the corner office and the rest of the organization on how to
best incorporate Web 2.0 practices into business.
[...]
In the future, companies expect Web 2.0 methods and tools to be the
single biggest factor changing the ways their company interacts with
customers (according to 68% of executives), or on how employees
interact with each other and the company (49% of survey respondents).

Here at IDI, we agree with these CEOs that Web 2.0 is more opportunity than threat to organizations who seek better, more effective communications with their target audiences.  The opportunity: enlisting your members or customers to become stronger advocates for your brand and for your campaigns. The threat: if your company or non-profit fails to open the door to participation and collaboration with your members or customers, this may come to reflect poorly on your reputation, particularly if your competitors outpace you in taking advantage of the collaborative community building now becoming de rigueur online today.

Happy Friday!

March Madness is in the air, and if you’re a huge college basketball fan like me, you’re most likely gearing up for some bracketology this Sunday night. For those who consider the task a science rather than an art, there ought to be some number-crunching done in the next few days following Selection Sunday.

Now if only organizations were as meticulous with their data… As a data-phile, I often cringe when non-profits (and some for-profits) have no clue about their database outside of how many e-mail addresses are in it or about the traffic to their Web site.

Okay, okay, so data alone shouldn’t drive an effective online campaign strategy, but it should help guide us to the right path, right? Especially in a Web 2.0 world, it is best that even with limited resources, organization acquaint themselves with basic data-crunching on every platform they use (from e-mail marketing to social networking).

I’ve compiled some good resources on what is (or should be) driving data management these days:

• Mark Rovner of Sea Change Strategies and Katya Andresen of Network for Good break down Flint McLaughlin’s formula for e-mail campaign effectiveness. Katya also passed along some great data milestones for e-mail communications.
• Believe it or not, widgets are a god-send to organizations that own platforms without reporting capabilities. Heidi Cohen recently wrote a good intro on these blog blings, and Steve Bridger at NFP 2.0 featured some great case studies on widget uses.
• Testing, testing, testing. I can’t emphasize enough the value of good testing. MarketingSherpa recently release a case study on best tests.

External data management is another aspect of online marketing that is often overlooked. I’ve had some cringe-worthy moments where clients have placed ads in sites that are completely wrong for their target audience. This becomes more important as advertising crosses over to the social networking space. eMarketer released a breakdown on where you can find college kids in the social networking sphere these days.

Wondering how to calculate the ROI of your blog? Charlene Li and Chole Stromberg of Forrester Research have just complete a new report, "The ROI of Blogging: The ‘Why’ And ‘How’ Of External Blogging Accountability."  The report is for sale ($379), but a good summary of the its findings are available on Charlene’s blog (See also her initial post on this topic from last October).

The bottomline: "calculating the ROI is easier than it looks." It involves three steps: identify and measure the benefits, calculate the costs, and adjust for risk.

To demonstrate this methodology, the report includes a case study on GM’s Fastlane blog. It calculates an overall ROI based on benefits, costs and risk. For example:

• it measures the value of press coverage using "advertising equivalence" or how much it would cost for GM to buy an ad in the media property that reported on them
• it calculates the amount of employee time dedicated to the blog to come up with a cost number
• it uses various senarios to identify how risks (e.g. less press coverage over time vs. more press coverage over time) will adjust the final ROI figure 

Charlene does note that this is an ongoing exercise and has a final word of caution:

"This process and framework is not cut and dry, black and white. Rather, it’s highly subjective, requires tremendous judgment, and is open to interpretation. But it is a starting point for an otherwise nebulous activity."

Even if your company or organization does not expect you to measure the value of your blog (or, doesn’t expect it yet), we strongly recommend taking the time to use this new methodolgy to list the benefits, costs and risks of your blogging efforts. You may be pleasantly surprised with what you learn.

- Kevin

I just jogged through the new IPDI study called

The Audience For Political Blogs: New Research On Blog
Readership.

I highly recommend that you check it out. IDI has been a proud sponsor of George Washington University’s Institute of Politics, Democracy and the Internet, most notably at their annual Politics Online Conference. Here in DC, they have stayed on the cutting edge at the crossroads of politics and technology. As we all know, online technology is changing politics. The people who form an important vanguard in this sea change are daily political blog readers according to IPDI’s report. Daily political blog readers tend to get their news from the internet rather tv like most Americans. They tend to be less religious and more partisan than most Americans. Regular political blog readers also tend to be more politically active offline, e.g. making phone calls to politicians, joining issue organizations, attending meetings and rallies, etc.

The bottom line is that the blogs represent a hybrid of both independent media and activism. If you don’t appeal to both, you are unlikely to win with this influential audience. Here are the findings I found most interesting (emphasis not mine):

Daily readers are highly engaged in online political
activity, including forwarding political material to others and contacting
their representatives online. A large proportion said they have forwarded
political news stories (84%), forwarded political e-mail (75%) or forwarded
links to blogs (70%). In addition, a large proportion of daily readers have
also taken political action at the specific suggestion of a political blog,
such as signing an online petition (63%), e-mailing a public official (57%) or
making a political contribution (31%).

Daily readers are more likely than non-readers to say they
make political donations. Of daily readers, 40% said they gave to a state or
local candidate in the past year and 61% gave in the presidential race in 2004.
Of the remaining sample, 26% gave in a local race and 42% gave in 2004. Prior
IPDI research has shown that donors are generally more likely to look at
political blogs.[1]

One of the many skills that online researchers quickly learn to use is the ability to think in terms of search strings.  The importance of knowing how to construct these investigative devices cannot be overstated.  From a sheer time-saving point of view, they are essential.  My general rule of thumb is that if what I’m looking for does not appear in the first or second page of search engine results, then my search string is not good enough.

So what is a search string?  In a nutshell, a search string is a string of text that specifies the data that you are looking for in a given body of content.  Since the amount of data that search engines catalog is unimaginably vast, a well-constructed search string can yield exactly the information you want in a shockingly short amount of time.

The trick to building search strings is knowing what words are related to the topic you want information about and the syntax necessary to tell the search engine exactly how you want it to search for said information.  For example, let’s say that I want information on the classic ColecoVision game "WarGames."  The Google search string I would build to find this information would be

WarGames ColecoVision -Badham

Let’s break this search string down:

WarGames = I want all mentions of the title of the game

ColecoVision = I want all sites that mention WarGames and ColecoVision

-Badham = Since I know that John Badham directed the 1983 film of the same name, I want to filter out all sites that mention Badham and WarGames and ColecoVision

This logic may seem simple (and it is), but the point I wanted to illustrate is that in constructing this search string, I used information I already knew (that WarGames was originally released for the ColecoVision console and that the movie WarGames was directed by John Badham) to use in refining my search.  As you can see from the results of my Google search using this search string, I was able to get exactly what I was looking for.

The rule of thumb for online researchers should be to start specific and work your way out.  Put as much information as you think useful into your search strings to start with.  If the first search doesn’t result in a hit, start broadening the search by removing the more specific text.  With a little practice, you should be getting most of the information you want on the first or second back of search engine results in no time.

Google offers some good help on empowering your searches on that search engine.  I would definitely advise taking a few minutes to read up on it.

Over the past week, one of the hottest stories in the corporate blogosphere has been the dust-up over the allegedly "fake" Wal-Marting Across America blog, run by Washington Post photographer Jim Thresher and his partner Laura St. Claire.  Without getting in to the gritty details, Thresher and St. Claire’s travel expenses and blogging time were paid for by Working Families for Wal-Mart (WFFWM), an organization funded by Edelman, the Chicago-based mega-PR firm one of whose largest clients is Wal-Mart.  This was one of those "ah hah!" moments that inquisitive bloggers intuitively gravitate to, creating a blogswarm that almost always reflects negatively on the parties involved.

So what are the lessons from this episode that organizations seeking to influence the blogosphere can take?

Disclose.  Disclose.  Disclose. Blogs should explain the who, what, when, where, why, and how of their origins and purpose for being in the very first posting.  Bloggers are making money off the medium (just ask Markos), which is a testament to the growing popularity of the blogosphere.  There is nothing inherently wrong with this.  However, bloggers should be sure to disclose and explain such sponsorships up front to avoid accusations of an undisclosed quid pro quo arrangement with their sponsor.

Does it pass the common sense test?  Bloggers are hyper-sensitive to content that smells like PR.  Just reading the unerringly positive postings about Wal-Mart and
its employees would have led one to suspect something fishy.  In the case of the Wal-Marting Across America, the RV that Thresher and St. Claire were driving was plastered with a big "Working Families for Wal-Mart" banner on its side.  The mainstream media had picked up on the Edelman-WFFWM connection as far back as January of this year, so a little Nexis searching would have been all it took for a blogger to dig up this information.

WHOIS fishiness.  One of the first places I go to check the origins of a blog (ones with unique URLs, at least) is the WHOIS database.  The results of a WHOIS search on the URL can often give clues as to who is behind a site.  In the case of Wal-Marting Across America and WFFWM, both sites were registered using the GoDaddy.com domain registrar, which hides the name and contact information of the registering organization.  While the WHOIS search did not turn up a great deal of information, the use of GoDaddy.com suggests that 1) the registrar of the site does not want to be known and 2) they are willing to spend money on GoDaddy’s (albeit inexpensive) services.  When the WHOIS database search does yield contact information, a quick search of Google Maps lets us know if the site is being run out of a home (usually indicating a small, often one-person operation) or an office (indicating that the registrant has money coming in from somewhere to afford office space).  Sometimes, a simple Google search of the registrant’s address or phone number matches up with a sponsoring organization or PR firm.  In addition, Nexis and Google News searches of the registrant’s name sometimes bring up mainstream media stories connecting them to other organizations.

The main point of today’s posting is that bloggers who don’t disclose why they’re blogging on a particular subject or who might be supporting their blogging efforts is playing with fire.  In a blogosphere with literally millions of users, who have a dizzying array of investigative techniques at their fingertips, it’s really only a matter of time before shady blogs get burned.