Web 2.0 Basics for PR

updated 11/20/08

By David M. Freedman
about the author

The Internet is the new prime time. More people now depend on the Internet for news and entertainment than on any other medium.1 From a public relations standpoint, it’s no longer a question of whether your clients, prospects, referral sources, colleagues, employees, and job applicants are spending much time online. It’s a question of how you find them and appeal to them online.

What’s fueled this groundswell shift from traditional media is new technology that has made the World Wide Web more collaborative and participatory. This new tech includes social networking websites, wikis, blogs, forums, and tools that let users publish, review, rate, rank, tag, and share content, all without web programming skills or HTML knowledge.

Symbolically at least, the Internet revolution began in 2004 when the term Web 2.0 was coined.2 Now in 2008, the term used to describe what people are doing online is “the Web 2.0 conversation.”

According to comScore, a majority of U.S. American adults who were online in 2007 participated in the Web 2.0 conversation by:

Participating in social networking websites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Biznik, hi5, and Plaxo. (FriendFeed and Twhirl aggregate social net activities into a "lifestream.")

Blogging (setting up a blog is easy using free services such as Blogger and WordPress; or cheap services with premium features, like TypePad)

Micro-blogging (even easier with Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce, and fidj.it). See Twitter sidebar in right margin.

Commenting on other people's blogs, which can generate extended dialog, relationships, and even communities (caution: habit-forming)

Contributing information to Wikipedia; reviewing books on Amazon.com

Interacting in affinity-group forums and networks (you can create your own with Google Groups, Meetup, and Ning)

Using wikis to collaborate with colleagues, clients, or any membership group, thanks to simple, free wiki-building tools like Wikispaces, WetPaint, PBwiki, and Google Sites

Reviewing, rating, forwarding, sharing, social bookmarking, and tagging3 online content with tools such as Digg, Delicious (formerly del.icio.us), BookmarkG, and Yahoo! Buzz.

Publishing original, rich content such as articles, white papers, photos, and videos, either on their own websites or blogs; or on community media sites such as Newsvine, EyeMobile, iReport, Flickr, Photobucket, and YouTube.

Enterprise-generated content
As traditional news media audiences shrink and online audiences grow, a curious thing is happening. For-profit corporations are hiring many of the reporters and editors who are being laid off by newspapers (and to a lesser extent by magazines, radio, and TV news organizations). These corporations are publishing informative, “rich” content (as opposed to self-serving, promotional content) on their corporate websites, thus becoming a fast-growing source of news, information, and sometimes entertainment too. Larry Weber, social media marketing pioneer, calls it "enterprise-generated content" (not to be confused with "branded content"). Audiences reward such corporate websites by linking to them, sharing their content via e-mail and social networking sites, blogging about it, forming communities around it, and disseminating it virally. In that way, rich content published by corporations becomes “hyper-syndicated,” embedded in the conversation.

Perspective: we still live offline
Web 2.0 evangelists and buzz-meisters might lead you to believe that traditional media are doomed and you should focus your PR strategy on social media. That may be true someday in some industries, but not yet. Before you invest in a social media campaign, integrate it into your strategic marketing plan.

Engage
You can begin participating in the Web 2.0 conversation by publishing informative content on your website or blog. Don't neglect to use plug-in tools like "digg this" and "share this" so that visitors can hyper-syndicate your content for you.

But you don’t need your own website or a blog to participate and have your ideas hyper-syndicated. You can post thoughtful comments on other people’s blogs, forums, online communities, and professional networking sites like LinkedIn. In some cases your comments will be commented on, shared, referred to, discussed, and virally disseminated. Providing your e-mail address with your comments offers opportunities for audience members to contact you. Providing your website URL (which some blogs allow) invites people to visit your website and may improve your site’s search-engine ranking.

You don’t have to plunge in head-first to join the Web 2.0 conversation. Start by listening to the conversation, and discover what your clients and customer are talking passionately about. Read a few industry- or profession-related blogs each week (search for blogs on Technorati, Icerocket, or BlogPulse), and look for opportunities to contribute comments. Join a professional networking site like LinkedIn, and participate (don’t just wait for something to happen). Don’t be surprised if you have fun with it and find it necessary to impose limits on the time you spend networking online. Post a "widget" like one of these on the bio page of your website:

View my profile on LinkedIn                View David M. Freedman's profile on LinkedIn

Diplomacy
Monitor what is being said about you and your firm on blogs and the Wikipedia especially (use monitoring tools like Google Alerts and Factiva). If you find inaccurate information or defamatory claims, be careful how you respond. Work quickly and diplomatically to correct factual errors, but approach the process as a collaboration, in which you are a participant rather than an enforcer. If you threaten, or try to take control of the conversation, you will be overwhelmed by indignant, irreverent, intentionally disruptive hordes, and your efforts will backfire. Remember, opinions are usually protected by the First Amendment.

Above all, your contributions to the Web 2.0 conversation should be authentic. Don't pretend to be someone you're not, and don't use a surrogate to convey your message for you in an attempt to appear unbiased. Wal-Mart and Whole Foods were pilloried in the blogosphere and business press for publishing disingenuous content (see sidebar at right).

On the horizon: Web 3.0
Web 3.0 technology is already being developed. See "The Web 3.0 Pipeline, Part 1: the Semantic Web."


Footnotes

1. Gian Fulgoni, executive chairman & founder of
comScore, June 18, 2008 (Web Content 2008 Conference, Chicago, produced by Duo Consulting).

2. The term is popularly attributed to Tim O’Reilly, publisher of books and producer of conferences on computer technology.

3. Also known as social tagging or folksonomy.


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SIDEBAR
Social Media Marketing Trend


44% of Inc. 500 companies say social media marketing strategy is "very important" in 2008.

That's up from 25% in 2007.

39% of Inc. 500 companies have blogs (compared to 11.6% of Fortune 500 companies).

Those are some of the results of a Univ. of Massachusetts marketing study on use of social media in corporations, which focuses on the 500 fastest-growing private U.S. companies compiled annually by Inc. magazine.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David M. Freedman has worked as a financial, legal, and technical journalist since 1978. He has been a media relations consultant and website content developer since 1999. He won a Your Honor Award for public relations from the Legal Marketing Association. (more)

 


© 2008 David M. Freedman, Chicago/Northbrook, IL
847-204-6848
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SIDEBAR
Inauthentic Conversations Embarrass Wal-Mart & Whole Foods

In 2006, a Business Week article revealed that a travel blog featuring a couple called Laura and Jim, who traveled the country by RV and camped in Wal-Mart parking lots (with a strong pro-Wal-Mart editorial slant), was funded by Wal-Mart through its PR firm Edelman. Embarrassing at best.

O
ver a period of a few years ending in 2006, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey wrote messages on financial discussion boards (including Yahoo! Finance) in which he disguised his identity and praised Whole Foods, and sometimes bashed its competitors. That may not have violated U.S. securities laws (the SEC probed it), but it created a serious public relations challenge for Whole Foods.

The lesson: Be authentic in blogs and chat rooms, as well as all media relations.
David M. Freedman: Financial, Legal & Technology Writer


about Digg





about ShareThis
DEFINITION: WEB 2.0

Web 2.0 is more collaborative and “user-generated” than the previous version of the World Wide Web. In the early days, content flowed mainly one way: from websites to users. Web 2.0, also called the social Web, enables non-tech users to create content and form communities of content creators. Content now flows every which way and back again—it’s a conversation.
© 2008 David M. Freedman

 

BEST WEB 2.0 BLOGS

CMS Wire
Duo Consulting
CNET Biz News
Mashable
Folio e-Media


TWITTER: HUH?

What's so cool about Twitter? It is a micro-blogging tool, a streamlined social network, and IM substitute, and it's optimized for mobile phone users, among other useful features. PC World published a good article, "How to 'Get Twitter'." Also, Amy Webb evangelizes persuasively in her article.



WEB 3.0 PIPELINE

The "semantic web" is the most prominent of the new Internet technologies, but there are a few others. Read about them (in layman's terms) in this article.