Social Media | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Looking Back: One Year of Blogging

It was a year ago Monday that I launched this blog with three posts, the first of which alluded to mine being one of 50 million or so. Now Technorati says there are something over 70 million non-spam blogs.

As you look in the archives, you’ll note that my first posts were on July 30, 2006 and then I went dark until September 21. I wasn’t sure it would really be “OK” to have a blog, but then I got the responsibility for New Media as part of my work portfolio, so I decided to really plunge in and learn. Since then I’ve done 212 other posts, or nearly two every three days.

Here are some highlights, themes and lessons learned from my first year of blogging.

I’ve done several book reviews, including The Tipping Point and Blink! by Malcolm Gladwell, Our Iceberg is Melting by John Kotter, I Dare You! by William Danforth, Pyromarketing by Greg Stielstra, Wikinomics and, most recently, Made to Stick. I recommend all of them.

One book I didn’t review, but which has been the concept behind many posts, is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Click here to read my thoughts on GTD.

I’ve blogged, some of them live, several conferences and seminars, including a Ragan conference in Chicago (where I met Jeremiah), the WHPRMS conference for health-care PR and marketing professionals, an Advanced Learning Institute conference in October, and a similar one in April. More recently, a colleague and I attended and presented at a healthcare marketing conference in Orlando, and last week I was on a panel at the Frost & Sullivan Sales & Marketing East 2007 event. Liveblogging is a great way to take notes on presentations, so I can refer to sites mentioned by the presenters. If it helps others, that’s a nice bonus.

I discovered that my blog was a great place to share personal and family highlights, from our Bible Bowl vacation, to my daughter Rachel’s wedding, to our electronic, multimedia Christmas letter.

On the media front, this has been the year of the buyout and layoff, particularly with newspapers. That has lots of implications for people like me who work with news media.
My biggest surprise, though, was a post on a related topic, when Dr. Max Gomez lost his position as the on-air doctor at WNBC. I began to notice that this post was getting visits every day, even several months after I wrote it. Then I noted that my WordPress.com dashboard was telling me that “Dr. Max Gomez” was a phrase people were using to find my blog. I thought, wow, are people searching for Dr. Max Gomez on Technorati? That must be how people are finding it, right?

I was surprised when I did the search in Google and found what you see below:

Somehow my blog post ranked ahead of Wikipedia’s entry on Dr. Max in Google!

I found something similar with my review of John Kotter’s penguin parable. Which just does go to show that blogs are naturally built for search optimization.

Most recently, I’ve been amazed by Facebook, which has led to several other posts.

It’s been a great year of learning, and while I’ve invested some time, the financial cost has been zero.

Where else but the blogosphere can you learn so much at no cost?

I’m looking forward to continuing my education!

Technorati: Blogging, Lessons, Social Media, Book Reviews, GTD

“Cheers” for Medical News

Imagine a medical news community where journalists aren’t bombarded with irrelevant story pitches. Where they don’t receive the dreaded “Did you get my email?” phone follow-ups from PR practitioners. Where journalists have quick and easy access to sources they trust. Where public information officers and PR staff understand each other’s needs and interests, and come together in a common space of mutual respect. “Where everybody knows your name…”
“People say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one…”

Well, I am the only one right now, but I’m dreaming that might change. In an earlier post, I mentioned that I had created a new group in Facebook for Health & Medical Journalists and PIOs. But having listened to part of Made to Stick (highly recommended; my review is forthcoming), I was compelled to change the group’s name to: “Cheers” for Medical News.

Journalists have the Association of Health Care Journalists. PIOs have PIONet through Newswise. These are fine organizations, but they have their limits. Though journalists can be collegial, they naturally compete with each other to get the story first. Likewise PIOs and PR practitioners have an interest in pitching their stories and getting their subject experts featured.

“Cheers” could be the place where individuals from both groups come together to meet. Sometimes it would be a public conversation, much as the ones Norm and Cliff had when they left their bean-counting duties and their appointed postal rounds. Other times journalists working on enterprise stories, and PIOs “pitching” ideas, would be like the countless, nameless others on the show having private conversations at the side tables and in the anteroom.

Journalists are exploring how they can use Facebook, and a group called “Journalists and Facebook” has grown to over 900 members in about a week. Here’s the story behind it. With 31 million members, and growing 1.2 million per week, Facebook has both critical mass and privacy flexibility that could make it a Commons for medical news.

I believe the “Cheers” for Medical News group in Facebook could bridge the gap between news media and public relations by creating a community of mutual respect and trust.To join the group, a person would need to be approved by an administrator, either as a medical center PIO or a journalist. ( I’m looking for other administrators to help approve new members, by the way.)

When a big story is breaking, a discussion of angles and sources could take place out in the open on the discussion board, “around the bar” in the Cheers metaphor. Everyone could chime in. If a reporter is enterprising a story, on the other hand, she might send a private message to PIOs at certain institutions asking for sources.

Likewise, a PIO with an embargoed news release could send a notification and link to the release through Facebook (although EurekAlert works fine for this right now), or could pitch an exclusive to a particular producer or reporter through a Facebook message.

Messages would come by email. If you think someone is spamming you with irrelevant pitches, you could block his messages through your Facebook privacy settings. People who continually behave badly could be banished from the group. The result is you could reclaim the value of email; you would know the messages you get through your Facebook groups and friends would be worthwhile.

Journalists are legitimately frustrated that they are overwhelmed with story pitches from people who don’t take the time to know their beats or what kinds of stories interest them.

Media list companies exist to build distribution and pitching lists for news releases, and often hype their services with phrases like, “We’ll show you how to score big coverage…” as if media relations was some kind of predatory dating game, and we were a bunch of Sam Malones.

Through the web 2.0 service Facebook, people in the health and medical news community can set a higher standard. PIOs and journalists need each other and have mutual interests that could be achieved by coming together in one place:

Journalists who are part of the Cheers commons could also establish their own secret Facebook groups, and could send source queries just to those individuals, quickly and easily. By putting their beats, interests and how they prefer to receive story pitches in their Facebook profiles, they would get more worthwhile story ideas from PIOs.
Academic centers could put their news release distribution lists in Facebook, in a similar secret list. They could even distribute embargoed releases this way, and would be sure that only credentialed journalists would have access. If someone broke an embargo, they could be removed from the list. And unlike PR Newswire and other services, distribution through Facebook would be free. It’s Wikinomics at work.

ProfNet is a good service that enables journalists to cast a wide net, to send out an All Points Bulletin in the search for sources. Facebook would be a way to create more helpful, meaningful relationships.

I know about meaningful relationships formed through Facebook; my daughter met her husband there. They were both in college in Wisconsin, and he was searching for people with an interest in Theology. They met in December 2005, and I walked Rachel down the aisle on December 30, 2006.

We’re not talking anything that meaningful with our version of Cheers. But if there’s interest, we could create a digital health journalism “watering hole,” which would, I think, be a worthwhile thing.

What do you think?

Technorati: Health, Journalism, Medical, Facebook, PIO, PR, Cheers, Association of Health Care Journalists

Fighting Facebook Fears

Craig Coblenz, Director of media sales for Facebook, was the resident thought leader, and Tara Lamberson, VP of Marketing, MindComet, was the moderator of an afternoon breakout, “Balancing Web 2.0 & User Generated Initiatives with Traditional Marketing.”

Facebook is growing 1.2 million users per week, with 31 million active users. Apple, for instance, has a sponsored Apple Students group within Facebook with 417,000+ members.

Top challenges or concerns about Facebook and other sources of consumer generated media cited in the breakouts included:

Losing control of brand messaging (or the perception of it) – risk of negative content and what do you do then?
Do we want competitors to know who our customers are?
Having the staff to monitor, manage and review comments and take action. Finding internal resources passionate about it and not having it be just an another add-on to their “real” work; making it a real job.
Legal concerns – whether HIPAA for patients or in cases in which federal regulations (like Medicare supplement products) limit what a company can say.
Complexity – understanding the customs of the social media to avoid missteps
How many channels – which ones do you join (e.g. Facebook vs. MySpace vs. LinkedIn)
Who takes it over and assumes continuity when the proponent of blogging leaves.

Craig said lots of companies want to be fast followers, not first adopters. They don’t want to be laggards, but they would like someone else to go first.
Some of the suggested solutions that were brainstormed for these challenges included creating a password protected intranet site as a first step to create comfort (or maybe an invitation-only blog on wordpress.com.) By starting small with internal blogs, people become familiar with the concept, and then as comfort builds you can evolve toward where you want to go.
Debby Brannon from TMNG Global recommended Wikinomics as a good resource, which I reviewed here yesterday.

Technorati: Facebook, Marketing, UGC, CGM

Twitter Knitter Dinner

I just got back from a blogger dinner with Jim Long and Dennis McDonald. Jeremiah Owyang organized it but wasn’t able to attend. There was this little matter that he had thought he was traveling to the DC area yesterday, but then realized he wasn’t arriving until late tonight. We’ll have more on that, including an interesting video, in the next few hours.

It should be good, because it was shot by Jim, whose day job is as a videographer for NBC News. We had a really good conversation tonight, and Jim showed us his new venture, craftynation.com, which is a social network for what Jim calls the “Twitter Knitters.”

Speaking of Twitter, Jim’s in love with it, and he regularly tweets about what he’s doing at work. Last week he went on a round-the-globe trip with Defense Secretary Gates. I’ll look forward to following his feed…and Dennis‘.
Dennis recently did a post asking whether Facebook is going down the tubes because it’s new openness has wrecked its simplicity. I understand but don’t share his concern because people decide what applications they want in Facebook, customizing it to their needs. He also is concerned that putting too much original material behind Facebook’s walled garden doesn’t make sense: if he’s going to write something, he wants it to be on his blog where anyone can see it. I told him about the WordPress.com application for Facebook, which solves that problem: you can post to the blog for the wide world, and the fact that you’ve done it shows up in your Facebook news feed. Of course, that’s only for WordPress.com, but eventually applications will be written for other blogging platforms.

Thanks to Jeremiah for introducing us. None of us had met each other before, and none of us had met Jeremiah. It’s the power of new media and social networking that got us together for a truly enjoyable discussion tonight.

I see on Twitter that Jeremiah says he’s hung up in Dallas, with his flight delayed due to thunderstorms. A likely story!

Technorati: blogging, Twitter, NBC, Jim Long, Dennis McDonald, Jeremiah Owyang