Posts Tagged ‘social media’

I’ve seen it. I’ve suffered from it. I’ll bet many of you reading this have too. I call it… launchitis.

It’s a terrible malady, suffered from by those who toil in the trenches of the social media salt mines. The symptoms include depression, burnout, hair loss (from people tearing it out by the roots), uncontrollable anger, and addiction to Dilbert cartoons.

Here’s how a typical case of Launchitis usually goes:

1. an organization gets super-duper excited about some online social media tool or trend that involves interactivity — Foursquare, communities, bulletin boards, Facebook pages, augmented reality. Yay!
2. They task staff to put the project on the to-do list.
3. Staff get moving. Sometimes they hire consultants to help out.
4. The project creeps. Let’s do THIS TOO! And this! And let’s make it glow in the dark!
5. People start getting tired. Deadlines loom. Sometimes budgets start to get dicey.
6. The project launches with attendant hoopla. Ribbons are cut. News releases go out. Everyone congratulates each other, whether or not it was on time or on budget.
7. The landscape is then suffused with the gentle sound of crickets. Nobody posts in the community. Nobody joins the page. Those who do don’t say much. Nobody checks in.

What’s happened here?

The organization forgot that it’s not enough to launch. It’s easy to believe that  all you have to do is build the tool and it will rise like Frankenstein’s monster and live. But to keep on with that monstrous metaphor, Frankenstein didn’t just assemble the parts — he added electricity. That belief is dangerous to the success of your projects.

If you’re a communicator and you’re tasked with a new project, do yourself — and your organization — a big favour. Write an element into the project charter, the project plan, the communications plan and any other document related to the project that identifies the resources that will be necessary to nurture the product through its early life. That might be a month or two, it might be a year; it might mean part of someone’s job, or hiring a contractor to manage the product.

If it’s blog-related or relies on written content, ensure part of the plan coming up to launch is pre-writing content that will either get finished and posted in the early days; if it’s video-based, have some video ready. You get the idea.

And don’t stop talking about it the whole way through the project. The best way to ensure that your project will survive the launch is to keep people focussed on the fact that the goal is not to LAUNCH something. It’s to BUILD something. Social media sites should not be envisioned in Ray Kinsella mode, as in: “If you build it, they will come.” It’s more like George Burns mode: “I look to the future because that’s where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.”

You should also think about adding in measures in your evaluation plan (you HAVE one of those, RIGHT?) that make it more likely that you’ll nurture the project post-launch.

Preventing the spread of launchitis is a great way to make the likelihood of your social media initiatives succeeding greater. Thinking past the launch is important. Don’t miss out on the chance to scream, just like Dr. Frankenstein, “It’s alive. It’s ALIIIIVE. AAALIIIIIIIVE!!!”

And now for something mostly unrelated to launch-itis, a little LOVE-itis from the J. Geils Band:

A tip of the hat to Ottawa Citizen blogger David Reevely, who inspired the thinking behind this post.

I had a quick chat with Robert Janelle yesterday, who was writing an article for the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce‘s member newsletter about social media for business.

One of the things I talked about was learning from others, and building on their ideas. In folk music, that’s “the folk tradition.” But given that you can’t copyright an idea or a concept, there’s no reason that businesses embarking on a social media initiative — or any sort of communications, for that matter — shouldn’t learn from others.

And case studies can be a powerful way of doing just that. Conveniently enough, there are good people who are compiling lists of case studies online. Some of these lists are in wiki form, so you can easily add your own; others are more conventional sites. Either way, use them. Why not save yourself making the same mistakes others made, and find brand new mistakes to make! As Samuel Beckett so famously put it: No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Here are some places to find useful case studies in social media:

Penn Olson’s 30 social media case studies

Web 2.0 examples in Canada wiki

Peter Kim’s list of over 1000 social media “examples” (the inspiration for Web 2.0 examples in Canada)

Tod Maffin‘s Case Studies Online site

UPDATE: If you prefer your case studies in the live and in person format, and you’re in Ottawa, you should check out Case Study Jam, a little meetup that I’ve been helping to organize with a cast of ones, including Joe Boughner, Amy Boughner, Melanie Bechard, Della Siemens, and Nick Charney. You can get a sense of what a CSJ is like from Robin Browne’s handy-dandy audio playlist!

And one more thing to think about: If you have an example of how your company or a client did something interesting, why not write something up about it and submit it to one of these lists? Sharing is caring.

Photo credit: The Cake Engineer on Flickr, licenced via Creative Commons

We’re coming up on the third Case Study Jam in a week. I’ve been involved in these events since Joe Boughner brought the idea to me and a few other people (Della, Nick, Melanie, and Joe’s wife / co-conspirator Amy), and now that we’ve had a couple under our belt, we’re hitting that gawky adolescent phase, I think.

Case Study Jam is a simple concept. The site describes it like this:

Case Study Jam is a place for communications practitioners to come together and share their stories – successes and failures. How are on-the-ground, front-line folks using social media and, more importantly, how are they integrating these tools into overall communications strategies and practices? Oh, it’s also an online repository of these stories. But more on that later.

The idea for this meetup was to set ourselves apart from events like Third Tuesday, Social Media Breakfast, Ignite, and professional development events organized by IABC, CPRS, Canadian Women in Communications, etc. After all, why do the same thing as something else?

The difference? One, the world-cafeish format. Another, the focus on presentations about failure as well success. And third, a focus on case studies, as opposed to theory and principle.

The first two jams have been successful on a number of counts, I think. People have met there, ideas been exchanged, some interesting presentations made.In fact, there’s talk that the model may start up in a second city soon.

Cheryl Gain of Ottawa Tonite emotes at CSJ1

We’ve also found a number of things that we’re tweaking as we go along. For example, we’re giving presenters more structure to follow in their presentations, and we’ll be pushing for more table hopping and shifting in the upcoming jam to encourage discussion.

But one thing we’ve noted is a certain topping out on attendance.

A week out from Case Study Jam 3 (or should I go with the Super Bowl Roman-Numeral Scheme and make it Case Study Jam III?) and we’ve got about 15 people registered. The room holds quite a few more, and we’d quite naturally like to see a full room. And my competitive spirit looks at more mature events like Third Tuesday or Social Media Breakfast and their full rooms and goes waaahhhh!

A bigger crowd would be great. But So there are a number of things that come to mind as to why we’re not filling our rooms yet.

• We’re new, they’re not.
• We don’t have super giant name speakers
• There’s not an infrastructure behind any one of the organizers pushing attendance from colleagues/clients. It’s organic in the extreme.

I suspect that we may be a little impatient. Or you may think we’re missing something. If so, tell us. Or if you want to make me feel better, why not come by next Thursday? I highly recommend the Lindenhof Apple Fritters for dessert and the conversation for a main course.

Case Study Jam 3 will feature Constable Nathan Hoedemann (right) of the Ottawa Police Service, Theresa Woolridge and Jennifer Jager of Emergency Preparedness Canada, and Dan Blouin of National Defence as they talk about the successes and failures they’ve experienced in their projects, and as always, you get to pick their brains afterward.

See you there?

I don’t often pile on. But I can’t help myself. I have to take a couple of kicks at  Angelo Persichilli’s latest column in the Hill Times.

Angelo Persichilli is the Politics Editor of Corriere Canadese, a national Italian-language newspaper, and a dedicated opinionist, with a column in the Hill Times and in the Toronto Star besides his work for Corriere. And he got himself some significant attention recently when he wrote in the Star that a group of Liberal MPs had met in the bar of the Chateau Laurier to discuss getting Bob Rae into the leadership of the Liberal Party, and Michael Ignatieff out.

The column was roundly criticized for its lack of attribution for quotes, among other things. So reading (thanks to Chris Selley’s National Post column) that according to Persichilli, the Internet and politics means that

a lot of information might reach millions of people unfiltered. While this provides a great opportunity for the truth to reach millions, we may also be flooded by faulty, incomplete and outright wrong information, as well as malicious attack and some plain lies.

This will clog the system making it hard to see the difference between truth and lies and justified and unjustified accusations. Essentially, without the filter of editors, producers, and responsible journalists, what exists now is a jungle of bloggers. There is no doubt that the internet has and will continue to let the truth reach people, the problem is that we no longer know what’s true and what’s not.

Later in the column, Persichilli suggests that

I don’t know how many hits websites of the major political organizations have every day. Given the ease with which people can access them, I hope there are millions. Otherwise I think they should take them down and completely refocus their aim. The only time we hear about them is when they show controversial items that systematically create problems for the image of their own political organization.

I don’t know where to begin with what Persichilli writes and appears to think.

First, his focus is almost entirely on mainstream media vs. bloggers and particuarly those affiliated with the mainstream political parties.

Second, it’s impossible to ignore the irony of Persichilli criticizing bloggers after being roundly castigated for his Star column, which it should be assumed benefited from the “filter of editors, producers, and responsible journalists” he writes about.

I think the great frustration of the last decade in Canadian politics where it meets the internet has been the lack of trailblazers who are using the tools of social media to really make a difference in the process of government. Look, for example, at David Miliband in the UK, who as Foreign Secretary is at the head of a line of dozens of bloggers, both politicians and public servants.

What is needed in Canada’s political scene are places where people put forth thoughtful and reasoned opinions that become the basis of informed discussion. Slagging bloggers won’t do it, nor will uninformed journalism.

What will do it is a commitment by political parties and by individual politicians to begin engaging in conversation, not just continue using social media channels to re-blast the same old messages down a one-way street. What is also needed is a commitment by government to support responsible bloggers within its departments, and a decision to stop blocking the use of social media tools by its employees.What’s happening right now is that social media engagement in much of Canada’s federal government is spasmodic and project-limited, not defined by conversation and engagement.

There are a lot of smart, competent politicians (my MP Paul Dewar, for example, who I think is a diligent and serious-minded parliamentarian) AND public servants here in Ottawa working for the feds (Nick Charney and Colin McKay come to mind), as well as in the provincial and municipal governments. Let’s turn them loose a little bit.

A little while ago I did an interview with with Katfish Hunter and David Schellenberg, hosts of the Morning Startup on LIVE 88.5.

Essentially on personal branding, we touched on Mayor Larry O’Brien’s blog (I don’t like it); the case of www.lowellgreen.ca being purchased by someone who doesn’t think much of local CFRA talk-radio host Lowell Green and Lowell’s outrage (I argue he shoulda bought his own dot-ca), and some issues around branding for indie musicians. Part of the reason we talked about the musicians is that LIVE sponsors the Big Money Shot, a competition for local musicians at their own Live Lounge in the Byward Market.

I’m doing a little thinking about a presentation for indie and roots musicians with the title: “You are your brand / You are not your brand.” If there are people out there with thoughts they’d like to share on this, I’d be happy to hear and respond.

Here’s the file, a 9-meg MP3. Thanks to Archive.org for hosting it: Bob LeDrew on Live 88.5 FM.