435 Digital - Sally Duros

Brand, reputation and social media

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MzcjC0_Wrk

Edward L. Bernays is said to be “The Father of Spin,” the creator of modern public relations. For his contributions, Bernays is both vilified and honored. He was a masterful manipulator of public image and wrote extensively about his ideas. During his long career, [Bernays lived to be 103] he profoundly affected the minutia of our spending habits in our daily lives while establishing standard practices for the public relations industry.

[Prior to World War 1] The pattern had been for firms to alter their product line or pitch to fit changing consumer tastes; Bernays believed that, approached the right way, consumers themselves could be made to do the adjusting. — Larry Tye in The Father of Spin.

This philosophy — consumers themselves could be made to do the adjusting— is shifting fast for businesses large and small. Customer review tools of the social Web are changing the equation of who is influencing whom. Now, because of services like Yelp, an unhappy knitting circle can gang up on your cafe. One poor hairdresser can cause an exodus from your salon. Or an increase in prices can shutter your dry cleaner. But just as your customers can walk with their feet and talk with their smart phones, you have equally amazing tools to continue the conversation with them after the cash drawer has closed and they have walked out the door.

You have Facebook, Twitter and dozens of other tools to attract potential customers, engage with the happy ones and hear the grumblers in the background and adjust if needed.

As a small business, you have the entire toolbox of social media at your command. And powering those tools is your unique brand, your reputation that you are painstakingly building over time. Branding is not a logo or an image imposed from above. Branding is your promise to deliver what is unique in your offering, whether product or service. Your brand emerges from the inside out.

Be clear on that and you can’t go wrong.

For a great read on navigating this power shift between customers and business, pick up The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk.

What’s my meme?

[media-credit id=2 align=”aligncenter” width=”660″][/media-credit]These are choice days for memes, which Wikipedia defines as

A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.

Continue reading What’s my meme?

Hello it’s me! Buy local

435Digital, Chicago Tribune.

I went for a walk in my old neighborhood the other day. I lived in Chicago’s Lakeview for about ten years. It’s a fun place with plenty of foot traffic, all kinds of shops, ethnic eateries and lots of cafes. It’s a prime destination for Black Friday.

Continue reading Hello it’s me! Buy local

Craig Newmark on using social media for social change

435_Craig-Newmark-for-Craigs-List-doing-good-668x398

In the year 2000 — when I first came across it — Craigslist was an earnest site providing a deceptively simple service — free classified ads online— that was extremely useful to most everyone. Today, Craigslist is the 9th most popular website in the United States. As much as it is loved, it is also vilified. Some blame Craigslist for newspapers’ lost profits and decimation of the revenue model for news. If only it were that simple. If Craigslist hadn’t brought free classifieds online, some other web service would have. Personally, I credit Craig Newmark and Craigslist for setting a kind and gentle tone for the Internet. For him the Internet has always been about social change.

Today Craig can be found on Twitter with nearly 39,000 followers, Facebook with more than 120,000 and on his CraigConnects site. He converses constantly with his followers, chatting about the birds and other wildlife he sees on his deck in San Francisco’s beautiful Cole Valley. Craig’s current focus focus is on craigconnects, which he says is his “initiative to link up everyone on the planet using the Internet to bear witness to good efforts and encourage the same behavior in others.”

He will be speaking at 11 a.m. today at Chicago’s TechWeek at Merchandise Mart.

Q. Do you see the pressure from social media to change the culture of businesses as leading to lasting change or a new type of organization? What would that organization look like?

A. I do see that in large organizations, those with 150 or more people or more, that’s the Dunbar number. Currently, to get ahead in a large hierarchy, you tell your boss what he or she wants to hear, and then she or he tells her or his boss what they want to hear. That means that real company knowledge and possible improvements never make it to the top. However, social media tech can be used by line workers to combine knowledge and improve business businesses. In such situations, the boss has to back this up, and that often proves difficult.

I’m currently seeing the Department of Veterans Affairs using such methods to better serve vets and also provide better return for the taxpayer dollar.

Q. 435 Digital is all about increasing the capacity of smaller and local businesses to operate efficiently online to reach their customers and grow their businesses. What kind of tools do you see developing as an alternative to traditional advertising for local business? What other services do you see emerging?

A. I like the use of social media, where friends can help friends make better product choices, and that includes Twitter, Foursquare, Google+, Facebook, etc. Also, importantly, there are user review systems, like Amazon or Consumer Reports, which help.

The big problem is that sometimes such systems can be gamed, that’s already a problem. I feel that that might only be fixed with lots of reviewers, constant vigilance, and networks of fact-checking.

Q. You like to say trust is the new black, what are your thoughts for how local businesses can best translate the trust they have built on the ground into trust online? Services like Yelp might be part of the answer, but what else do you see?

A. I’d say that organizations just need to be straight with people in all presences, offline and online. Maximum transparency is good, within obvious limits. (There’s always stuff you can’t talk about, like customer private info.)

It helps to speak in plain language, and to get to the point, and then stop.

Q. You recently successfully launched a veteran’s initiative through craigconnects, and community building is another area that you plan to encourage under craigconnects. How do you plan to use the tools of the social web to encourage us to take more responsibility for our communities and neighborhoods. What new tools are you excited about?

A. We’re still planning that, but probably soon two areas:

networks of factchecking so that we can get trustworthy, reliable info.
use of nonprofit rating services to help us select good nonprofits to help and how to find bogus ones to avoid. We’re working with GuideStar, charity Navigator, and GreatNonprofits.org.

Craigslist Founder Will Donate $1 if You Tweet About Squirrels(mashable.com)
When It Comes to Regulating Social Nets, Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark Says ‘Trust Is the New Black’(socialtimes.com)
craigconnects: A Network of Networks(bethkanter.org)
Online Entrepreneur Craig Newmark on Charity, Collaboration and Being Cranky(entrepreneur.com)
#TIME100 Gala Celebrates World’s Most Influential People(mediabistro.com)
A workshop to help you advance your cause(socialmedia.biz)

Community News Matters: SallyDuros.com a top news hub connecting Chicago micro-news sites

I haven’t been doing much work lately with Chicago’s online indy news community but it’s good to see my work and my writings made a difference back in 2009 and beyond. Would that I could afford to do it, I would still be writing about our online news world as it evolves, but I am quite happy to be writing the social media blog for the Chicago Tribune’s 435Digital. And being a part of that evolving world.

As to Chicago’s indy news stream, I wrote then and still believe, there is an enormous need for news providers to come together and figure out a way to make a living. But since I am not officially called a “news” site, I have not recently been involved in any of those efforts. I hope they are going well and look forward to learning more as national efforts like the RJI’s Block by Block evolves.

Thanks for the nod, Chicago Community Trust.

Dear Friends of Community News Matters,

Given your interest in the health of Chicago’s online news ecosystem, I know you’ll want to read a just-released Community News Matters report on the results of groundbreaking research into the links among and between Chicago’s many online news sites.

View the press release at www.cct.org.

The report finds a surprisingly high percentage of the area’s news and information websites are isolated from each other and are not taking advantage of the many ways they can expand their audiences, their influence and their service to the area.

It identifies more than 400 websites providing news and information relevant to Chicagoland residents, from sites of mainstream media to new news sites to sites of government agencies, universities, cultural institutions, foundations and nonprofits.

Using sophisticated network analysis, it identifies which of those sites are playing one or more of five important roles in the local news ecosystem — as “authorities,” “hubs,” “switchboards,” “referrers” and “resources.” Included among the top four sites on one or more of these lists are these 23 sites:

• austintalks.org
• badatsports.com
• blogs.southtownstar.com
• chicago.metblogs.com
• chicagocarless.com
• chicagostorytelling.com
• chicagotribune.com
• communitymediaworkshop.org
• ctatattler.com
• gapersblock.com
• hydeparkprogress.blogspot.com
• macfound.org
• mcachicago.org
• nytimes.com
• outsidetheloopradio.com
• saic.edu
• sallyduros.com
• sbnation.com
• suntimes.com
• thegallerycrawlandsomuchmore.blogspot.com
• transitchicago.com
• uchicago.edu
• windycitizen.com

Hope you find the report interesting and useful!

Vivian Vahlberg
Project Director, Community News Matters
The Chicago Community Trust

Learning to talk: Sally Duros joins 435 Digital

[media-credit name=”435Digital Tribune Media” align=”aligncenter” width=”668″][/media-credit]Writing a blog about learning social media is like writing a blog about learning to talk.

Learning to talk starts with the sense of hearing and the ability to actively listen. By listening to the stream of sounds coming from our environment we start to understand and say words. Over time, we learn to put these words together into complete thoughts that we call sentences. Before too long, we string the sentences together and begin to tell the story of what is happening around us and how we experience it. We meet others and share our stories. This storytelling give-and-take is a lifelong reiterative conversation that forms our identity and self definition. Our ability to engage in this conversation deeply influences our path in the world.

Your business learns social media much like a baby learns to talk. First, you listen online to understand what your name, or brand, means to your customers. The sounds you hear might be pleasant — or not. Either way, what’s certain is your customers are conveying important information. It’s your choice whether or not to understand the sounds and fully engage in this reiterative conversation.

Nobody can decide for you. It’s a straight-forward challenge that smacks at the culture of your organization and the ongoing story that is the interplay of you, your products and your customers. It’s a challenge that asks you to understand how deeply you value customer service — really. The repercussions of your choice will be felt all along your value chain of competitors, collaborators, and suppliers.

To get started in this conversation, you need to understand the tools, tactics and strategies of the evolving social media toolbox so you can choose those that work best for you. But as important as learning the tools, is learning how to talk in the world of social media.

By taking on the 435Digital blog beat, I’ve accepted the challenge of helping us better understand tools like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and the nature of the conversation that accompanies them. As important, I’ll be discussing the cultural change and relational juice that is creating a new online economy based on trust and transparency. It’s exciting to peer around the edges of what “is” to see what is possible.

As to my philosophy, I agree with Gary Vaynerchuk, who says in his book “The Thank You Economy:”

For the record, I dislike the term social media. It is a misnomer that has caused a boatload of confusion. It has led managers, marketers, CEOs and CMOS to think that they can use social networking sites to spread their message the same way they use traditional media platforms like print, radio, television. or outdoor and expect similar results and returns. But what we call social media is not media, nor is it even a platform. It is a massive cultural shift that has profoundly affected the way society uses the greatest platform ever invented: the internet. Unfortunately, when the business world is thinking about marketing via social networking sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Daily Booth, it’s thinking about using social media, so that’s the term I’ll use.

This massive cultural shift is to the Knowledge Age from the Industrial Age. And I think Gary is right, there’s no such thing as a “media buy” in social media. Your online success is determined by the culture of your business and the timbre of conversations and relationships that emerge organically from who you are and what you say and do.

The same is true for me and my work on the 435 Digital blog. As we learn together, let me know how I am doing.

p.s. I love my little Twitter bird. I keep him with me always @SaDuros.

11 Shocking New Social Media Statistics in America(convinceandconvert.com)
Publishers mastering the art of online conversation(blockbyblock.us)
Why I’ll let my daughter shape her own digital identity(gigaom.com)

Brian Solis: What the C-suite can learn from connected consumers

[media-credit name=” for Chicago Tribune 435 Digital.” align=”aligncenter” width=”668″][/media-credit]OK. I’ll admit it. I have a Tiger Beat crush on Brian Solis. That’s because Solis is one of the smartest people around when it comes to social media and its power to reshape our world.

Solis has been in technology public relations since 1991. He began working with message boards, communities and early blogs in the 90s and started his own firm, FutureWorks in 1999. In March 2011, he joined Altimeter Group, a research-based advisory firm that says it offers “pragmatic strategies to help companies thrive with disruptive technologies.”

You can pop in on Solis blog, which includes a series discussing the concepts in his new book, The End of Business as Usual, or catch his insightful TV series, Revolution, on YouTube.

Solis has written perhaps the best book on online marketing for beginners, Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web. The End of Business as Usual is targeted toward emerging leaders, those change agents who want to revitalize the culture of business around customer experience.

Continue reading Brian Solis: What the C-suite can learn from connected consumers

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