Putting the new rules to work

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For generations, ethical news organizations have had a rule that they will not pay for interviews. Why? Because people who want money for telling their story tend to be willing to tell whatever story the reporter wants to hear, as long as they get their money. It corrupts the entire news-gathering system. Among journalists, it’s called “checkbook journalism,” and it’s usually said with a snarl.

So it’s disturbing to see this article about a “story broker” who’s basically laundering the money so that news organizations can play the “checkbook journalism” game while pretending they’re not. The broker gets a tip, signs an agreement with the “source” for exclusive rights to market him/her to the media, then shops it to the networks, which comfort themselves with the idea that they’re paying “licensing fees” for photos and video. Or perhaps paying the middle man to be a “producer” or “consultant.” Whatever they call it, it’s deceptive and should stain the reputation of any network program that engages in it.

We depend on the media to help us see through the deceptive practices of lobbyists, agents and others who skirt the rules. The last thing we need is for these “watchdogs” to be doing the same thing.

With the Facebook geolocation feature apparently imminent, the conversation has started about how this will affect existing “check-in” services such as Gowalla and FourSquare. But this may be one case in which people are focusing on the wrong fight while the real struggle is already being decided elsewhere.

Cool as the “check-in” services may be, I still don’t see them having a huge impact. At least not by themselves. But location-aware services on handsets (and, of course, GPS units) are now ubiquitous and are guiding purchase decisions every day. I became aware of this just yesterday, when I was in Homewood (a suburb of Birmingham, Ala.) and needed to find a product. I punched up a directory service on my Android and noted that it had already filled in the city and state based on the cell tower serving my phone. (Sure, I could override it if I were looking for something in, say, Nashville. But in this case it saved me some time.)

After I filled in the store I was looking for, it brought up several options that were closer — ads purchased by those businesses, much the way Google adwords offer paid links.

Similar opportunities are available for advertising on hundreds of apps — not just directories, but mapping programs, weather providers, and many others. And yes, Gowalla and FourSquare are part of that mix too, but only a part. Together, these are a huge threat to traditional local media such as daily and community newspapers, Yellow Pages directories, community advertising sheets and potentially even billboards.

Take a few steps back. The picture is larger than it looks.

For those of us who use third-party utilities like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite to post to multiple Social Media accounts, there has always been a tradeoff between convenience and appearance. Hootsuite’s recent upgrade, in addition to making far better use of screen real estate, now allows your Facebook posts from Hootsuite to look just like they do when posted in Facebook.

Until recently, if you posted a link from any of these, you got a Facebook post that looked something like this:

There’s nothing at all wrong with that, but if you’re really looking to attract attention on Facebook, it’s worth noting that a link posted from the Facebook page would show you the headline itself and let you select an image from the page being linked. Here’s an example:

While I don’t normally shill specific applications, I felt this was noteworthy because it resolves an ongoing debate regarding use of third-party utilities for Facebook posts. One other advantage is the ability to track the number of clicks on your post. Like other third-party utilities, Hootsuite converts your link to a short URL on which clicks can be tracked. So at any time, you can see if anybody’s actually gone to the page. Sure, you can do the same thing by using one of the many “short URL” services like bit.ly, but Hootsuite makes it easier. When you look at stats on an individual message, you see something like this:

Finally, this also brings up the question of whether it’s better to use a desktop utility (such as Tweetdeck) or a site such as Hootsuite or Brizzly. This may change from time to time, but I have to note that the more applications you have running on your computer, the more likely they are to crash your machine. Sites can do that too, but rarely. I’ve run Tweetdeck and Seesmic applications on Windows XP, Mac and Linux machines, and honestly, they’ve never been stable. As long as the site does what I want it to, I’m sticking with it.

Here’s some free PR advice from a guy who’s been either a reporter or a public relations professional for 34 years: No matter how much you like a reporter, no matter how charming, how funny, how complimentary, he/she is NOT your buddy. Not if he’s any good. Nothing is “off the record” even if he/she says it is. Nearly every train wreck I’ve seen goes back to the one mistake of assuming the reporter’s job is to make you look good. It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be. If you’re tempted to do something, or say something, that you’re not willing to read on tomorrow’s front page, SHUT UP!!! I’ve seen an auctioneer pull a bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of a desk drawer with a WSJ reporter sitting there. I’ve seen a corporate executive, with a couple of drinks in him, tell a roomful of national reporters about an impending acquisition that wasn’t done yet. (If you don’t, know, the SEC takes a very dim view of this and will happily toss you in the slammer for creating insider trading opportunities.)

Yes, of course, I’m talking about the Gen. Stanley McChrystal comments for Rolling Stone. What was he thinking, drinking or smoking? Your guess is good as mine. But in my experience, a reporter you like a little too much is every bit as seductive and dangerous as a beautiful woman with whom you have no business being alone.

I had the pleasure yesterday of leading a two-hour seminar on “Intermediate Facebook” for the Hoover Chamber of Commerce. We had a full class of about 50, and several attendees — as well as others — requested a copy of the slides. Here they are.

The slides cover a good bit of ground, including:

• Using Notes to leave longer messages
• Integrating and importing blogs
• Advantages and disadvantages of third-party tools (e.g. Tweetdeck, Seesmic)
• Customizing the new privacy settings
• Using lists to see who sees which photos, messages and links
• Creating pages and groups
• Using FBML to customize Facebook pages

We talk a lot about the “New Media Rules,”  but there are some rules that will never change, because they are rooted in human nature. One of the most important old rules is timeless: Know your audience.

With all the excitement over the media options open to us today, it’s easy to focus exclusively on the media we use without paying much attention to such questions as:

• Are we talking to the right people — that is, the people who can buy our products or help our clients? If not, why are we talking? When I see “social media gurus” bragging about their thousands of followers, my first question is, “Who are they?” Some claim they know, but the truth is that hardly anybody with more than a few followers has any idea who they really are. Numbers mean very little if you’re not reaching the right people.
• Are we using the right medium? A while back, I heard about a social media marketing firm that was charging a company substantial fees for posting company news to its Facebook fan page. The fan page had a total of seven fans. They were literally talking to nobody. On the other hand, if you’ve consciously built up a Facebook friends list of people in your industry or customer base, you may have an effective tool for carrying on conversations with people who are important to you, your career, your employer or your client.
• Do we know what we’re after? I subscribe to the “behavioral school” of communications that believes you haven’t communicated until you’ve changed someone’s behavior. It doesn’t matter whether you want people to buy a product, write their congressman or eat less fat. If they do something different as a result of what you’ve communicated, you’ve succeeded.

By all means, learn about the new vehicles available and see how they can work for you. But do yourself a favor and remember that the greatest medium in the world won’t do you any good if you’re talking to the wrong people.

Every group — be it a church, country club, business or political party — has its notions that either don’t hold up well to public scrutiny or are so far out of the mainstream they’re best kept out of sight. Presbyterians downplay their belief in Predestination – the idea that God decides who’s going to Heaven and Hell before we’re even born. Private country clubs don’t call attention to the fact that many don’t allow Jews, blacks or women to join. The list could go on forever. As long as they keep it out of sight, everything’s fine.

I suspect we all have things we say to our trusted friends but otherwise keep to ourselves. That’s not dishonesty or lack of candor. It’s just good sense.

When otherwise private people move into the public limelight, they’re prone to slip and display these jewels to a public that will never understand and accept them. That’s what happened this week to Rand Paul, the Republican Senate candidate and Libertarian theorist who apparently has spent too much time talking to people who think the way he does.

Rand Paul

In a series of interviews — including a grueling 20-minute showdown with liberal MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow — Paul let it slip that he disapproved of the provision in the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 that forbids race discrimination by private businesses. As a Libertarian, Paul pointed out that he doesn’t want government telling private businesses what they can and can’t do, so he disapproved that part of the bill. Battle cries and red flags were raised throughout the world to the left of Paul (which means, nearly all of it), and within 24 hours Paul flipflopped and said he’d have supported the bill. But the damage was done.

Theorists, corporate CEOs and radicals all struggle with the challenge of how to talk in a way that keeps their more unacceptable private ideas out of sight. This happens especially when corporate executives are forced into the public limelight by an event such as an oil spill, a strike or appointment to public office.

BP CEO Tony Hayward stepped into this pile of doodoo recently when he dropped this gem: “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

Fundamentalist pastor Jerry Falwell created his own variation of the mess in March 1980 when, as president of Moral Majority, he described a meeting with President Carter in which he supposedly confronted the President about his support for gay rights. Others in the meeting — including the president of the Southern Baptist Convention — said quickly that the conversation never took place, and Falwell admitted to me the next day in an interview that he’d just learned a hard lesson: that in the political arena, you can’t expect get away with telling great stories that just don’t happen to be true. (I asked if he’d just admitted that politicians have a higher standard of truthfulness than preachers and he just chuckled.)

Even the normally gaffe-free Barack Obama fell into this trap during the 2008 campaign, when he was talking to the Democratic faithful but forgot the rest of the world was listening in. His comment that “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” reflected his own views — and those of the people in the room. But they likely cost him a lot of votes.

There are a lot of lessons for communications professionals in these painful examples, but for this entry, let’s boil it down to two:

1. Don’t let your corporate executives talk to the press without media training. Execs tends to get insulated from the bigger world, because they’re often surrounded by sycophants who got where they are by agreeing with the company line. This lulls them into thinking that the rest of the world will behave like the ones in the world they see. Make sure their media training includes a good dose of practice in putting up with disrespectful reporters who don’t mind asking the “wrong” questions. Reporters love to goad corporate execs into saying something stupid.
2. During a crisis, ignore the conventional wisdom that people need to hear from the top guy and let your most experienced media spokesman handle the press conferences. There’s little point putting your CEO out there when he’s just going to pop off and make a mess of things.

Google Buzz has rolled out a new API that allows third-party applications like TweetDeck, Seesmic and Boxee to read Buzz messages and post to the services.  Now the question is whether it is too late to save Buzz.

Buzz started with a splash, followed by a series of privacy gaffes (Gmail users were members whether they asked to be or not), and since then things have just settled down. My sense of the current status is that all the air has gone out of its sails. Nobody goes to Buzz as a matter of habit like they do with Facebook and Twitter. It just sort of sits there, picking up tweets from Gmail users. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say “I can’t wait to post that on Buzz.”

But third-party applications could change that. The service itself is worth saving. It’s well designed and intuitive, capable of carrying much longer messages than Twitter, and it doesn’t have the Facebook privacy baggage.

Just because you live in Baltimore, that doesn’t mean you want to belong to a group whose only connection is that they all live in that city. Just because you hang your hat in the Lutheran church doesn’t mean you want to join a club of Lutherans. And for that matter, you may not want your Republican mother to know you “like” the ACLU.

And until last month, if you worked really hard at it, you could express those interests and commonalities without being automatically stuck in a group of people you don’t know. But Facebook has just made that impossible. Anything you list in your “Likes” and “Interests” now turns into a link to a page you may well have never visited – and turns you into a follower of that page listed on its site. The only way you can list an interest without linking to somebody’s page is to put it in your bio, where they still allow you to type without linking – for now, at least.

Here’s how Facebook describes the changes in the Facebook Blog:

Now, certain parts of your profile, including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests, will contain “connections.” Instead of just boring text, these connections are actually Pages, so your profile will become immediately more connected to the places, things and experiences that matter to you.

For another perspective, here’s how the very credible Electronic Frontier Foundation interpreted the changes

The issue with Facebook’s latest change is not that they force you to link your interests without permission, but rather that they remove an option to express yourself on the profile without links. As we noted, Facebook users now face a Hobson’s choice between the new Connections and no listed interests at all. As Facebook explains, “If you didn’t connect to any of the suggestions, the sections of your profile to which those suggestions corresponded will now be empty.”

Here are some links to excellent resources that can help you understand the issues and reclaim your privacy:

Consumer Reports: Seven Things to Stop Doing Now on Facebook

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Wired: Facebook’s Gone Rogue