Cision's Jay Krall on NASA eEducation Island in Second Life
The media hype around Second Life, a virtual world in which goods and land are exchanged for real money, began to fade awhile back. But it continues to serve as a breeding ground for all sorts of innovative applications of social technologies.
NOTE: This is a joint po
st by Matt Batt and Heidi Sullivan. It is cross-posted on Story Assistant and CisionBlog.
Pipeline Media Relations President & CEO Matt Batt and I did a free Cision Social Media Webinar earlier this month titled Twitter 101, and we received more great questions than we could answer about engaging in Twitter on behalf of a company, organization or brand. In an occasional series of posts, we’ll be answering some of those questions over the coming weeks. Here are some questions and answers about Twitter Account Set-up and Twitter Handles.
Twitter Account Set-up
Emily: If you are tweeting for a non-profit that really needs to get their brand out there, do you still think it is better to use a photo or is it better to use the logo?
Matt: Logic (and others) might tell you to use your logo for branding purposes but the reality is that on Twitter and in life, people like talking with people. For this reason, I would suggest that you use a photo of the individual representing your non-profit on Twitter. If there are multiple people managing the profile, I would try and customize your background (see next question) to reflect the pictures and individual profile names for each and/or I would switch out the photo each time someone new is managing the profile. Ironically, here is a great example of this from Cision.
Tim, Megan, Mark, Amy, Sara: Do you have any tips on making compelling Twitter backgrounds? Read it all..
Social bookmarking sites, lifestreaming, social networks and file sharing sites all consist of content created, shared and 
discussed by the masses. Clearly social media. But what about blogs? Some blogs are looking more and more like traditional media outlets and visa versa. So why are blogs considered social media?
Community. Successful blogs exist not only on their homepage, but across the social web as a part of a community. Before you argue, I realize that many traditional news sites also have great communities. I would say that those active sites are also social media – and probably have writers and editors who are engaged in those communities. Check out this post from Mack Collier at the Viral Garden. Mack says that successful blogs aren’t successful solely because of great content, but because their bloggers are actively involved in social media.
Mack writes that ”being active in the blogosphere and on social sites IMPROVES the quality of the content you create on your blog! It gives you a better idea of what your readers are looking for, AND it exposes you to other viewpoints, which helps you solidify and strengthen your own thoughts. And as this is happening, you are also exposing your blog to other people, by interacting with them in their space.” Read it all..
Photo courtesty texas_mustang via Flickr
As British furniture retailer Habitat learned this week, there’s nothing like a misuse of Twitter for promotional purposes to bring the wrath of the social media punditocracy upon yourself. Thousands of blog posts and news articles have discussed the company’s use of hashtags related to the protests in Iran to make its promotional messages appear for Twitter users searching those tags on TwitterSearch. To the company’s credit, it apologized this week.
Photo courtesty of Fabiola Medeiro via Flickr
Nielsen Online data cited in Editor & Publisher recently about the time spent on the 30 American newspaper Web sites with the highest volumes of traffic confirms an exciting trend: newspapers that are embracing social content on their sites are continuing to attract more mindshare, even as time spent on some newspaper sites falls dramatically. (Cision uses Nielsen data in our CisionPoint platform).
Vadim Lavrusik wrote a great article last week on Mashable, 10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media. 
With new positions being created at traditional media outlets for social media coordinators and editors, universities have started incorporating social media best practices into their curricula. Lavrusik himself is a new media student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
If all of the up-and-coming journalists are learning how to best utilize social media, PR professionals will need to learn Web 2.0 skills as well to effectively communicate with the media. So I started thinking… if I was teaching a social media class to public relations students, what would those skills and lessons be? I started writing a blog post on the topic and here’s what surprised me: I created the exact same list for PR students as the list Lavrusik compiled for J-school students. As the media industry changes, so does the PR industry — and there are fewer and fewer differences in the set of skills required to work as a journalist or a media relations pro.
I highly recommend a click-through to the article to read each lesson in more detail, but here are the titles of the 10 lessons: Read it all..
Photo courtesty spudballoo via Flickr
With all the talk lately about Twitter’s growth and the land grab for Facebook URLs, an important conversation channel for PR and marketing professionals may be getting overlooked: social bookmarking and news sharing sites. These sites, where users share interesting articles, photos and videos they find on the Web, offer great opportunities for outreach for those willing to participate organically by submitting their blog posts and news releases as part of a larger mix of compelling content. We’ve discussed the importance of engaging that way before, and can’t stress it enough. Read it all..
We’ve all heard the battle cry of networkers (all together now): “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” At the surface, that may seem disheartening – no matter how much expertise you have, if you don’t have great connections, you won’t go anywhere. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find that through networking you will not only build connections, but continue to learn about your industry as well.
Social Media Club of Chicago members listen to a panel at the group's May 2009 event.
CisionBlog has spent a lot of time discussing how social media, a struggling economy and shifts in the media landscape are changing the world of public relations more rapidly than ever before. How can any busy PR professional stay on top of it all? Of course, reading magazines, blogs and other articles on the industry is a great place to start. But networking with others in your industry can do even more. You can take what you’ve learned from reading, experiences or school and discuss the concepts that are changing our industry. You can share stories and learn from how others handled a similar situation. You’ll develop connections that can help you in your career development, whether it’s finding your next job or learning more about your current position from others. Here are three ways to start making those valuable connections: Read it all..
It has been widely reported that the Federal Communications Commission has more than 4,000 phone operators at the ready to help people who can’t get TV reception today because they were not prepared for the transition to digital television. Now, like a lot of media pundits discussing the transition today, in your head you may be typecasting those left behind by the switch as elderly, late adopters of technology, or simply out of touch. After all, public service announcements on television have been warning us about the transition (which was originally scheduled for February and delayed until today) for more than a year. Perhaps you would expect that people tech-savvy enough to be engaging on social networks like Twitter will probably be aware of it.
You’d be surprised.
Photo courtesy Frames-of-Mind via Flickr
Starting on Saturday at 12:01 a.m., Facebook users will be able to change the URLs for their profiles and pages, which have until now been identified by randomly assigned strings of numbers, to more personalized names. The goal, according to a post on the Facebook Blog that has attracted more than 30,000 comments, is to make user profiles more findable in search engines. “Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web,” the blog post says. But as brands have dealt with domain squatting and Twitter squatting, will this option give cybersquatters yet another target?
To mitigate concerns about people snatching up brand names for their URLs, Facebook says users may not immediately be able to register a personalized URL if they have created a new page after May 31 or a new profile after June 9 (more info on the difference between pages and profiles here). But that doesn’t address the fact that millions of users will each get one crack at a URL of their choice for their own profiles. Unless you have notified Facebook of your trademarked name using this form, it is essentially up for grabs. Whereas previously the URL for your Facebook profile was something like http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789, you can get up on Saturday morning and change it to http://www.facebook.com/anycompanyyouwant, as long as the name’s owner has not already claimed it by notifying Facebook of its trademark protection. For brands with profiles or pages, it’s not a bad idea to grab your username this weekend.
