I thought it was much more likely that he had simply made a mistake, and replied to a tweet from the young lady in Washington state instead of sending a direct message with his photo. It’s a difference between typing “@” before her username instead of “d “ – which made the photo link visible to his 45,000 followers, and by extension, to the world.

Following his mistake, we now know Rep. Weiner broke just about every rule of PR and crisis management – making up a story about being hacked, denying that he had sent the picture and evading the question of whether the photo was of him. I thought the low point was when he berated ABC News’ Jonathan Karl for “not understand(ing) how social networks work.”

Monday we learned that the simple explanation was in fact the right one. As The Hill reported:

“Once I realized I had posted it to Twitter I panicked, I took it down, and said that I had been hacked,” Weiner said at a press conference in New York. “To be clear the picture was of me and I sent it.”

In actuality, Weiner had committed one of the classic errors of the micro-blogging platform: tweeting a message that was intended to be sent as a direct message. Direct messages are private messages that can only be sent to a user to one of their followers.

This outcome, especially when considered in light of a similar issue involving former Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre (OK, he played for the Vikings, too) and the allegations of his “sexting” a female sideline reporter when he played a season with the New York Jets, provides a fitting illustration of a principle I’ve found myself regularly mentioning in presentations, and which I am now codifying as my 38th Thesis:

Social media raise the cost of bad behavior because they make it more likely misdeeds will be discovered.

By the account of Jenn Sterger, the photos Brett Favre allegedly sent her via text message were at least as explicit as Rep. Weiner’s. But we’re still saying “allegedly” in the Favre case, partly because the photos were sent via SMS instead of on a social network like Twitter. And her revelation came about two years after the alleged incident. The first news story about the Weiner tweet, by contrast, showed up within just a few hours.

Twitter is much more powerful as a communication vehicle than text messaging is because tweets can be discovered and spread by anyone, and because for regular tweets (as opposed to direct messages), there are no intended “recipients.”

But the same tools that can be so beneficial when used for good can have devastating effects when mishandled. The Favre sexting controversy took two months to be resolved,  with the NFL commissioner finally settling on a $50,000 fine. The Weiner case took 10 days from tweet to tearful confession.

Of course there were various differences between these two examples, and it isn’t my point to go through these fine distinctions. I just think it’s interesting to see how rapidly the Weiner case developed, and to consider how social media accelerated his decline. Two weeks ago tomorrow he was being mentioned as a leading candidate for mayor of New York. Today he has many of his party members in Congress urging him to resign.

In my presentations I have often suggested that users should apply the “front page” test to all of their online postings. As we’ve seen recently with Rep. Weiner, sometimes those postings really do make the front page.

What do you think? What are the social media lessons you take from this case study?

From everything I’ve heard, the social health unconference in March was fantastic, which is what led Hugh and the SXSW gang to go for the full-day health track.

My problem with SXSW is the timing; it’s always around the first week of Minnesota’s high school basketball tournament, and I have a son who will be lacing ‘em up for the Austin Packers for the next three years. Depending on the date for the health track, I may be able to attend, but it’s questionable.

Which makes me, I guess, a good Advisory Board member, since people serving in that role can’t be speakers or panelists.

So…I look forward to seeing lots of good panel proposals, and helping in some way to shape the event. And even if I can’t attend, I’ll definitely be following the Twitter conversation.

I’m keeping this post brief because I want to get it out as quickly as I can: the submission process for panels ends tomorrow, July 9.

Go to the SXSW Panel Picker to submit your panel today.

And I DO mean TODAY!

Or tomorrow.

No later.

Thanks to Reed Smith and Tom Stitt, co-chairs for the health track, for nominating me to the Advisory Board.

I thought it was the way Google had chosen to announce the city selected for its super-fast fiber community project. And with the mania and hoopla surrounding this contest, I could envision city managers taking one look at their search screens this morning and heading to the window for a leap.

If they waited about 30 seconds, though, some additional links were added to the screen:

Which took you to this post on the Google Blog explaining what it was all about. Or at least calming the panic among city officials whose fiber fantasies had been crushed.

Google has a long tradition of April Fools jokes; given the timing relating to the Google Fiber contest, this is probably on of its better efforts.

Social media are not the panacea for all that ails the relationship between organizations and their customers or other stakeholders.

If you treat people badly, they now have not only the opportunity to take the story public, which they always had, but also the ability to tell the story themselves instead of having to rely on third parties like the news media to spread the word.

And of course, as we saw this year in the case of Dave Carroll’s spat with United Airlines, sometimes the story can both go viral and lead to mainstream news media coverage.

The basic story, if you haven’t heard, is told in this United Breaks Guitars video. The customer service representative could have kept the video from being made by simply agreeing to Mr. Carroll’s request for $1,200 in flight vouchers to reimburse his expense for fixing is $3,500 Taylor guitar. It would have cost United nothing in cash, but when Ms. Irlwig said “no” he said something to the effect, “Fine, I will just make a series of three YouTube videos with my story.” Here’s the second installment. If you haven’t watched both of those, take a minute to do so now. I’ll wait.

OK, now that you’re back, here are a few lessons or observations from this saga:

1. This video didn’t happen because United had a YouTube channel. One of the fears some people have about engaging in social media is, “What if people say bad things about us?” But this video wasn’t posted to the United channel: it was on the SonsofMaxwell channel, which belonged to Mr. Carroll’s band.
2. This video resonated, which is why it went viral. Anyone who has traveled by air extensively likely has some kind of horror story about poor customer service. If the video didn’t fit built-in perceptions, it wouldn’t have gotten anything like this attention.
3. Treating the customer right is the solution. After nine months of haggling, Mr. Carroll was just looking for a way to recover what he had spent on guitar repairs. From his perspective, flight vouchers would have been almost as good as cash, as it would at least let him pay less out of pocket for future travel. If Ms. Irlwig agrees, the video doesn’t happen.

Social media can provide great listening tools to alert you to a problem that could blow up into a PR nightmare. But they don’t do any good if you don’t act based on what you hear. In this case, Mr. Carroll was right in Ms. Irlwig’s ear. No complicated listening tools needed. If you’re not going to do the right thing for your customers, social listening tools will be of little value.

As Amy Mengel put it at the time, the secret to avoiding a YouTube crisis is: “Don’t suck so much in the first place!“

Twitter chats are an amazing way to bring together people for a focused conversation on a particular topic or surrounding an event, such as a conference or Webinar.

There’s no need for the people involved to know each other before the chat, and in many cases the chats can be great ways to connect with people who have common interests. For example, I frequently join the #hcsm chat for people interested in using social media in healthcare, and occasionally join the #hcmktg chat related to healthcare marketing.

For Mayo Clinic, we use a #mayoradio Twitter chat to gather questions from outside our local area for our Medical Edge Weekend radio program, and have done several joint chats with Mary Brophy Marcus (@BrophyMarcUSAT) from USA Today, inviting readers to discuss the topics of her stories with a Mayo Clinic specialist. We’re now using #MayoUSAToday as the hashtag for these discussions.

In 3 Steps to Joining or Leading a Twitter Chat, I take you step by step through the process of joining a Twitter chat. But first, here are some of the reasons you might want to participate. I’ll use the #MayoUSAToday chat as an example:

1. Public discussion that spreads as it continues. When a new person joins the discussion by including #MayoUSAToday in a tweet, it spreads the word about the chat to her Twitter followers. Any of her followers who retweet or reply to her tweet extend the reach still further.
2. Broad geographic reach. Speaking of extending the reach, the beauty of a Twitter chat is it can be worldwide. Some diseases or conditions just aren’t common enough to build a critical mass for discussion locally, no matter how metropolitan the location. Getting people together physically is tough, but with Twitter you can gather people with common interests virtually without them having to leave the comfort of wherever they use their computer. And of course with iPhones, Blackberries or Androids people can join the chat from wherever they are: I did a recent chat from O”Hare airport in Chicago.
3. No need to raise your hand. Unlike an in-person meeting, you don’t need to be recognized by the moderator to ask you question or make your comment. Just include the #MayoUSAToday tag in your tweet, and you’re part of the conversation. If you use the tag to interject your marketing messages into a discussion, you won’t last long in the chat (or in Twitter). Users will report you as a “hashtag spammer” (a term that is part of a Twitter lexicon I plan to publish) and your account will be suspended. But if you’re a real person who just wants to join the conversation without hijacking it for pecuniary reasons, you’ll find people in Twitter quite friendly and open.
4. Wallflowers welcome. It’s fine to just lurk and listen. You can just click the #MayoUSAToday link, for instance, and watch what others are saying. But more importantly, a Twitter chat can be a great tool to get discussion from the whole audience at a conference, instead of just those who are most verbose and comfortable speaking in public. So when I do a presentation, I generally create a hashtag that enables everyone to comment or ask questions. This can help make sure we hear from the introverts, whose ideas may not otherwise get as much consideration as they deserve, which leads to the final point…
5. No time limits. Many if not most Twitter chats have a set time during which people have agreed to gather. The #MayoUSAToday chats are scheduled to run for one hour, during which time our Mayo Clinic subject experts are online to answer questions tweeted by USA Today readers and others drawn into the conversation (see Benefit #1 above.) But the time expiring doesn’t mean you can’t continue to tweet using the hashtag, and the conversation can continue on at a slower pace.  So if someone tweets with a #MayoUSAToday tag three hours after the scheduled chat ends, it just means the question probably won’t be answered right away, as it would during the one-hour window. This also obviously applies to conferences and other in-person meetings; just because people have gone home doesn’t mean the conversation has to end.

In 3 Steps to Joining or Leading a Twitter chat, I will take you step-by-step into joining the #MayoUSAToday chat, and you can use the same pattern to join other chats (or set up one of your own.)

But there doesn’t seem to be a file type limitation. I did a 1:25 video yammercast (17 MB) yesterday and it worked well. I interviewed myself via Flip and then sent the QuickTime file via Yammer to one of my work teams.

It did take them a couple of minutes to download, so when you yammercast a larger file you may want to be sure to include some significant text in the Yammer post, so that in case the recipients don’t download the video they would still get the main point of the communication.

Keith included a helpful link to the Yammer blog that gives more detail on the file-sharing feature.

Yammer has built a lean, efficient platform for sharing. I like how photos that can be suitably displayed through the Yammer interface are embedded in posts, but larger, more complicated audio and video files can just be downloaded to be seen or heard in QuickTime or Windows Media Player.

If you want to share video with the world, YouTube is your great choice. But if you want to confine the distribution to your company, or to a work group within your company, try a yammercast.

Jessica Snell, a St. Thomas junior who is in charge of the noon program, sent me a list of questions as a starting point for discussion. If getting the right answers depends on beginning by asking the right questions, I think they’re off to a good start.

We won’t get to all of these in an hour, but if any SMUGgles have interesting answers, perspectives and stories you would like me to share with the students, please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Meanwhile, I’ll start updating this post with some of my answers to those questions.

• In what ways do you feel that the field of public relations is changing due to the use of social media technologies?

- Journalists interacting with PR professionals through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

- It’s not just media relations, but is really public relations.

- HARO as a free alternative to ProfNet

• How are social media technologies being used specifically in the health care field?

Many health care providers have YouTube channels. Here are channels for Mayo Clinic, M.D. Anderson and MUSC. See some of our podcasting and blog offerings in the links below. We also have a Facebook “fan” page.

• What impact do social media technologies have in a crisis communication/issues management? (e.g., beneficial way to get out important info.? harmful rumors spread quickly?)

See this post on Facebook Crisis Communications and this one one Twitter and Facebook “off-label” uses. See the 35W bridge collapse group in Facebook.

• Have social/digital media technologies changed the way you work with journalists?

Absolutely, whether through Facebook and Twitter interactions or through our News Blog.

• Have social/digital media technologies changed the way you communicate with patients?

See our Podcast blog, which lets us share much more in-depth information with patients (and lets them ask questions), and our Facebook page.

• What skills do you believe are important for students to develop for projects that incorporate social media technologies?

- Start and sustain a blog

- Writing

- Shooting and editing video

- Photography

- Basic familiarity with the types of social networking tools

- Interactivity

• How do you recommend keeping up with all of the changes in the digital world? Is important to know about, and participate in every new thing to be a good PR practitioner?

- Like some foul-mouthed broadcasters need a seven-second delay, consider a seven-day or seven-week delay before jumping after every shiny new toy.

- It’s more important to think creatively about how to use new but fairly mainstream technologies instead of being the first to use a hot new tool.

- I would be remiss – given that your tuition at UST is $27,722 – if I failed to urge you to enroll in SMUG.

- Check out my Slideshare slideshows and slidecasts to see some of the presentations I’ve done (some of the slides will be similar to what I presented today) as well as some of the SMUG curriculum.

• What challenges do you believe students should be prepared to address when working on campaigns that incorporate social media technologies?

- FUD – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

- Skepticism about how a social media slingshot can compete with mass media. Remember Goliath. Remember George Allen.
• What ethical challenges have emerged when using social media technologies in a PR context?

- Temptation to comment anonymously or “game” the rankings in Digg or on other social sites. Yield not.

• What is important for young professionals to know about our ability to measure results when using social media technologies as part of PR campaigns?

- Measurement is a significant advantage for social media as compared with mainstream media.

- You can justify based on tangible outcomes, and then have intangibles as icing.

• What is important for young professionals to know about working with clients (or management) when recommending social media strategies?

- See the FUD observation above

- Show examples of mainstream success with social media, from well-established companies and brands. The Blog Council is a group of large companies using social media internally and externally, and here is our Alltop page.

- Keep costs low and show them how easy it can be using free and/or open source solutions.

- Engage front-line employees instead of thinking all communication needs to come from the PR team.

• What types of technologies or applications should students be familiar with (e.g., Facebook, RSS feeds, Digg, Twitter, Ning, Linked In, Technorati, Google Analytics, del.icio.us, YouTube, blogs, podcasts, designing a Web site, etc.)?

All of the above. You need to develop an understanding for each of the kinds of tools, so you can select or recommend the right one for the job. If all you have is a hammer….

• What impact do you believe the Internet and social media technologies are having on how PR, advertising and marketing professionals work together?

• What advice do you have for helping the areas of PR, advertising and marketing work together successfully?

• Please describe a recent project/campaign that you feel illustrates how public relations is impacted by the use of social media technologies.

• What aspects of the project represent a change or shift in PR practice, and what elements remain unchanged from traditional PR practice?

I welcome any other thoughts people may have to share with students from the UST chapter of PRSSA. They would, too.

In YouTube, you have the choice of sharing either with the whole world or with a group of up to 25 of your YouTube friends. There’s really no intermediate option.

In Facebook you can make the sharing much more widespread without sharing with the world. And you can “tag” your video with the names of your Facebook friends who are featured, which makes it likely that they and their friends will see it, because it will show up in their news feeds.

It’s also possible to share videos just with members of a group, whether its members are all friends of yours or not. So, for example, I uploaded some videos of my daughter’s volleyball team to a group I had created as an on-line “booster” club.

Here’s a video screencast for Facebook 109, demonstrating how you can upload a video to your personal Facebook profile:

Advantages of Facebook for Video Sharing:

1. If Facebook users see and like your video, it’s really easy for them to share it with their Facebook friends (assuming you’ve allowed either Everyone or Friends of Friends to have access).
2. As mentioned above (and as demonstrated in the screencast) you can limit who can see your video much more precisely. For example, you could customize the sharing so only friends can see, except those who are on your “Work Friends” list.
3. Given Facebook’s popularity for photo sharing, it’s nice to be able to share both photos and videos on the same site.
4. Users can comment on your videos, but they use their real names instead of relatively anonymous YouTube user IDs. This makes it more likely those commenting will behave themselves, and will reduce the potential crudity factor.
5. The quality of the player is really good, especially with the new H.264 encoding.

Some disadvantages of using Facebook instead of YouTube:

1. You can’t embed the Facebook player in your blog. People can only see the video on Facebook. This makes your content less portable. For instance, the screencast above was uploaded to my YouTube account and then embedded here. You could embed it in your blog if you’d like.
2. You don’t get traffic figures on how many people are watching your video.
3. People who aren’t in Facebook can’t see your video (at least I think not). If you don’t have a Facebook profile, please click this link and let us know in the comments whether you could see the video I uploaded during the tutorial. So if you want to share a video and don’t particularly care who sees it (and want it to be seen as widely as possible), YouTube is your best choice.

It isn’t, of course, an either/or proposition. You can upload videos to both YouTube and Facebook, but that’s double the work, double the upload time. An alternative is to upload your videos to YouTube, and then post the link to your video on your Facebook profile, page or group.

Assignments:

1. Create a video file. If you need help in how to create a video file, check out these posts about the Flip.
2. Upload the file to the SMUG group in Facebook.
3. Share the video link with some Facebook friends (as you saw in the screencast), or post it to your Facebook profile.

I first saw this news in my WordPress dashboard as I was writing a post last night, and went to install the WordPress application, which is supposed to display the most recent posts from my blog. Note: it didn’t work in my Safari browser, but it did in Firefox and IE. Hopefully either the WordPress gang or LinkedIn are listening like Yammer and will figure out and fix the Safari problem.

Here’s what it looks like when you add the WordPress application:

All you do is paste in your URL, and hit “Save”

And the widget (which you can drag toward the top of your LinkedIn profile) looks like what you see above. Another great reason to have a WordPress blog, huh?

I think this is a huge development. My friend Jeremiah thinks it could mean the end of the intranet.

It’s important because by opening the platform as Facebook did, LinkedIn is saying “we don’t have all the smartest programmers in the world, and we sure can’t afford to pay them. So we will provide an opportunity for others to enhance the usefulness of our site, and connect their sites and services to ours.”

Jeremiah’s point is similar: many (if not most) corporate intranets are missing the consumer-grade social networking features users have come to expect on the Internet. (Isn’t it funny that consumer-grade means higher quality on the Internet, while “business” or “professional” grade is clunkier? But that’s a topic for another post.)

Especially in today’s economic climate, corporate IT departments aren’t going to be able to afford hiring enough programmers to recreate that same level of social networking funtionality (or to put it another way, to “reinvent the wheel.”)

Open source (like WordPress) and Software as a Service (Saas – like Yammer or Salesforce.com) solutions will be smart ways for organizations to get world-class user experience for employees at significantly lower costs.

If someone else has already developed and polished a fantastic user experience, and if you can get it for free or at an extremely reasonable cost, why wouldn’t you take advantage of it? Why not deploy your programmers to create the links and safeguards that tie these world-class applications together?

Jeremiah thinks his yet-to-be-born kids won’t have any concept of a corporate intranet. I’m not so sure about that, but I’m casting my vote with him. He’s a Forrester analyst, after all. (You can cast YOUR vote below!)

But certainly there are some data elements and resources that your corporate IT department is currently paying boatloads to store and back up, that you could instead have outside your firewall. My blog, for example, is out on the Internet for all to see anyway. And Flickr photo streams or other resources could be “cloudsourced,” which would have the benefit of creating more links to your corporate or professional sites.

The LinkedIn announcement suggests that it could be the major hub for integrating this information. And as more applications are developed and security is proven (and as the economic climate puts more pressure on corporate IT to deliver more services for less), even more highly confidential data could be integrated in a hub like LinkedIn.

What do you think? Is Jeremiah right? (No, not Jeremiah Wright…that’s again another topic.)

Cast your vote below, and add your thoughts about this topic in the comments!

[polldaddy poll=1055581]

I still think a blog can be useful for general reference. I often use the SMUG blog in that way. I vaguely remember that I’ve written about something here, and use the search box at right to find the information, often including links to relevant external Web sites.

But that post was written in the pre-Twitter, pre-Yammer era. I think these micro-blogging tools can be even better for this general reference function than a full-blown blog is.

If you haven’t experienced GTD, read these posts to learn about it. The basic idea is that you need to get information out of your head and into a a reliable external system so you can access it when you need it. And a key element is general reference: information that you don’t need to act upon right then, but that may be helpful for the future.

Many people who use GTD have a general reference e-mail folder, where they store messages that aren’t actionable. That’s great to a point.

But if you do that, you’re the only one who has access to that folder, and you don’t have access to the same kinds of information from your co-workers’ general reference e-mail folders. And if the information is really worthwhile, it’s likely several of you have stored it for reference. That’s duplicative and wasteful.

To some extent, Twitter could be used in the same way I’m suggesting for Yammer. But I think Yammer is particularly well-suited as a way for companies (and eventually groups within companies) to create a common, searchable knowledge base.

It’s all made possible through tags. Once you’ve joined Yammer, it’s simple to create new posts (and they aren’t limited to 140 characters, as Twitter is.) But the interface doesn’t encourage rambling. Yammers are likely to be relatively concise.

When you happen upon some information you want to be able to remember, all you need to do is update Yammer with an appropriately tagged post that also carries the information you wish to recall.

Tagging is simple: you just put a # in front of the key word. So one-word tags might be #SMUG, #blogs, #travel or anything else that is meaningful for you, or that you think you or others might use as search terms to find the information.

But you don’t need to limit yourself to a single word, or a single tag. To create multi-word tags you just use hyphens to connect the words, so you could tag a post like this:

#Lee-Aase writes a great #blog called #SMUG that gives lots of helpful tips about #social-media and lets you get practical experience using the tools. It’s at http://social-media-university-global.org/ #university #global #new-media #youtube #podcasting #how-to #tutorials

Then, when you or anyone in your company wants to find that information, just search on any of the tagged words or phrases.

You could use the same method to create a list of #cancer-blogs. Or #business-columnists. Or #fax-numbers.

But the best part is you aren’t doing it alone; your co-workers can add to the list as they come across helpful information. So I could Yammer something like this:

Had a nice visit last week with #helen-chickering, a #medical-reporter for #NBC-News-Channel, last week in North Carolina. She is particularly interested in topic A, topic B and topic C. Her contact info is: …

And my colleagues could do the same about their interactions. Then we all benefit from what we each individually Yammer.

Some other potential yammers:

#blogs #social-media-team #patterson-marc Here is a post someone did about what makes Mayo Clinic different http://takingnote.tcf.org/2008/10/what-makes-the.html

#media-relations Who is the best reporter at the #new-york-times to approach about a #cancer story?

#media-relations #blogs The #Wall-Street-Journal Health Blog is at http://blogs.wsj.com/health/

As users Yammer back and forth on the site and via e-mail, Yammer then becomes a rich repository of information. And people can just read the e-mail message and then delete if they don’t wish to respond, knowing they can search Yammer to find the information if they need to retrieve it later.

So with Yammer, or a service like it, each user can in essence builds a handy general reference file system without significant additional effort. But by building individual systems in the same place, everyone benefits from everyone else’s contributions.

And if you set it up right, it can be as easy as the e-mail you’re already using.

More on setting it up right in Yammer 105.