News & Opinion

By Kevin Allen I once read somewhere that strong relationships boil down to whether you find the same things funny. Simplified? Sure. But could relationships also be built on whether you like the same words? FavoriteWords.com is a niche social networking site that connects people through their—you guessed it—favorite words. There’s no doubt that words are powerful things, but the people behind Favorite Words are taking it a step further. The site’s About section explains: What is the purpose of this, you ask? Certainly it helps to build your vocabulary and it surely is a fun exercise, especially if you have a fondness for words, but the purpose ofFavorite Words is a bit more complicated and somewhat simpler than that. You see, words have power, and when you collect your own favorite words, they can evoke feelings and memories that you associate with them; they can also improve your creativity or even show you the way in your life and career. The words on your list need only “ring a bell inside you” to warrant being put on your list. The site was created by Shavkat Karimov, a self-described “serial web entrepreneur.” His vision for the site is pretty lofty, claiming that compiling your favorite words can have therapeutic value, self-development value and social value. Karimov is looking to help people “understand themselves better, heal themselves in a harmless way, and find their matches for life, friendship, or business in a simple yet efficient way.” To use one of my favorite words: nice.

By Kurt Wagner For a taste of who uses the image-based social network We Heart It, look no further than Facebook. A simple Graph Search query for "People who work at We Heart It" returns hundreds of results, many of them young females with titles like "Boss," "Heartbreaker," and even "Chief Executive Officer," all claiming to work at the 2-year-old startup. This list is not the actual staff roster from the San Francisco-based social network. In fact, We Heart It has only 18 employees. Instead, these are the platform's loyal users, and the counterfeit job titles somewhat baffle, but ultimately please, the startup's actual CEO, Ranah Edelin. "It's one of the proof points about how special this community and service really are," says Edelin. "We've never done anything to prompt or ask anybody to do that. They just are finding outlets to say that 'We Heart It is my favorite service.'" If you aren't familiar with We Heart It, there's a relatively good reason. The company didn't share a single press release until last June, when it announced 20 million monthly active users and $8 million in funding. That monthly actives number is up to 25 million, and the Pinterest look-alike is adding well over one million new users each month. We Heart It isn't simply collecting users, however. The social network is collecting the most coveted users available to social media platforms: the ever-important, mobile-savvy teenagers. Roughly 80% of We Heart It's monthly users are under the age of 24 Roughly 80% of We Heart It's monthly users are under the age of 24, and the same percentage of the platform's activity comes from users on mobile devices. Pinterest's demographic is very much the opposite. Roughly 80% of Pinterest users are overthe age of 24. (Pinterest has similar mobile usage — more than 75%, according to a spokesperson.)   And with teenagers reportedly leaving other larger social networks like Facebook behind, We Heart It hopes to be there to catch them. "Because [Facebook] is so large, it cannot be cool to the younger demographic that thrives on finding places to call their own, that are cool" says Edelin. "[Places] that their mother, grandmother, uncle and everybody else aren't on. That's not Facebook's fault, that's just human nature." This younger user base, and the types of content that come with it, are what separate We Heart It and Pinterest, two otherwise similar platforms, says Edelin. We Heart It works and feels like a younger, artsier Pinterest, where images of beautiful celebrities and peaceful sunsets replace the wedding dresses and home cooked masterpieces synonymous with the more established network. Board member Alex Rosen of IDG Ventures describes the images as "positive and inspirational," and indeed many of the photos have text overlay containing motivational messages and quotes. "This is very different from product-oriented, quasi-catalogue [images] that you get on Pinterest," he says. The platforms do have a few other differences. Instead of a profile page and Pin Boards, We Heart It users have a "canvas" and "collections." We Heart It users can only "Heart" photos, which automatically adds the photo to their canvas. Comments are not allowed to ensure no bullying or negativity occurs, says Edelin. We Heart It users can tag photos; Pinterest users add descriptions only.   A We Heart It user image. IMAGE: WE HEART IT We Heart It was incorporated in the United States in 2011, but the original site was built after a designer in Brazil started collecting images that inspired his work back in 2007. By the time the company officially formed, it was not alone in the realm of image-based social networks. Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram were all relevant, but that didn't dissuade Rosen from showing interest in We Heart It. In fact, it inspired him. "Frankly, this entire market didn't exist eight years ago [or] 10 years ago," he says. "There are opportunities for half a dozen to a dozen billion dollar outcomes, and the fact that there were some already out there didn't discourage us, if anything it encouraged us." We Heart It is in the process of making the next step in the company's expansion. It announced its first round of formal partnerships in December, and now has a half dozen partners including publications like Teen Vogue and Lucky. These relationships are not financially-driven, but they do demonstrate that We Heart It is commanding outside interest from other brands. Edelin also says that We Heart It will look to take an additional round of funding, possibly in 2014. With a growing audience, a slew of new partnerships, and the potential for more investors on the way, perhaps We Heart It will have room to make some of its "employees" on Facebook a real job offer.

By Andrew Hutchinson Creating high quality content will be a major focus for brands in 2014. Strengthening your online presence will rely on it, and for many businesses this poses a new challenge, a new element to factor into their strategic planning. But creating engaging, quality content needn't be a daunting task. Yes, it takes additional time, in research and planning, and skill, in writing, but people within your business have vast experience in their respective fields and your company has diverse interests and stories through its staff and affiliations. You just need to work out how to find and share these elements in an engaging way, and one which allow you to showcase your brand’s expertise and reinforce your company values. In one of my previous posts I noted some tips on writing shareable content. One of those notes was ‘quality content is what your clients want to read, not what you want to tell them’. This is an important point in creating great content, but there are a few other elements to consider which will also help you create better brand stories. 1. Your content doesn’t necessarily have to be about your company’s products and services. In a recent article on Coca Cola’s corporate website revamp, Coke’s Group Director of Digital Communications and Social Media Ashley Brown noted that half the website’s content has nothing to do with the brand. The focus is on story, in alignment with strategy. Dove’s ‘Real Beauty Sketches’ ad campaign is a premium example of this. Whilst not mentioning products, this content underlines the mission of the business. This feeds better relationships with the brand - and social media is all about building relationships. Strong stories that reinforce the aims and values of your company have the potential to establish an emotional connection with your audience, which will, in turn, maximise the reach potential of your content. Establishing the humanity of your business, the link betweeen your brand and the reader's daily life, is a key element of story-based content. 2. Does the content align with your brand’s strategic goals and values? You need to have a strategic plan for social media, measureable goals for achievement. Once these are established, any and all content you create needs to be cross-checked against them to ensure it fits into the overall strategy. Maybe you choose to do a story about the company’s sponsorship of a local sports team. Maybe you focus on the benefits your brand has delivered to a community. Whatever it is, once you have an idea down, you need to ensure the desired results align with, and reinforce, your strategic objectives. And worth confirming the content doesn’t conflict with your company values, particularly if they’re public knowledge. 3. Does the content inform and offer a new angle on a topic? Here’s a more challenging one, and one which you may need help with. Finding a unique angle can be difficult, but it'll ensure your content is more compelling and shareable. One thing to keep in mind is no one can tell your story. Every person has something unique to say. This also relates to your brand – no one else has the same experience as your company. Can you find a way to present a story that offers something new and, ideally, something with heart? A pulse, is what I call it. When I’m reading content, the thing that really gets me is when something comes alive. It has a pulse, a passion that the writer has been able to translate. It’s often when you can tell this is something the writer genuinely cares about. Then it has that pulse, that human factor, and you can connect with it on a deeper level. This is probably the most challenging aspect of creating great content, and one which may require the assistance of a professional writer. 4. Attention to detail is the difference between good and great This is always a risky one to put in because everyone makes mistakes, misses a word, forgets to turn off their LinkedIn activity broadcasts before overhauling their profile. Anytime I note this, I always double check everything I've written to make sure I haven’t slipped up when I’m making a point of it (and normally I have) but this is universally true. Attention to detail elevates your work to the next level. It may take longer, it may be a pain to check and re-check, but it will shine through in the end. Everyone makes mistakes, but as long as you can press save and honestly know you’ve done all you can to ensure it’s the best it can be, then you’re on the right track. 5. Is this something you would want to read and, more importantly, share with your followers and connections? No doubt most of you are like me and you read through 20-30 articles each morning, staying on top of industry news as well as other items of personal interest. As you do this, think about how many of those articles you feel a compulsion to share. Think about why you want to share them. Consciously think over what makes the content you share ‘shareable’, then apply those findings to your work. Does your content stack up? Can it be more shareable? There’s no definitive guide to what will and won’t be shared, and as noted, there are professional services that can assist in writing and planning, but hopefully these points will help you expand your thinking on how you approach the challenge of content creation and give you a better idea of the direction you want to take for your brand.  

By Steven Shattuck Serendipitous giving happens all the time, but occasionally social media fuels a philanthropic goldrush that even the most carefully planned and executed campaign could not have delivered. As the polar vortex and a dire forecast descended upon the Midwest last week, Peter Dunn, a personal finance expert based out of Carmel, Indiana, had an idea. “I was talking to (my son) about staying warm this week. I said some people won't be able to stay warm, and then my mind started racing from there.” Knowing a lot of snow was on the way, he took to Twitter and sent out a simple challenge: I'm donating $100 per inch of snow tomorrow (airport measure) to @WheelerMission. Who will join me? Any $$ per inch would be great. — Peter Dunn (@PeteThePlanner) January 4, 2014 Within minutes, the tweet went viral and the pledges started pouring in from businesses and individuals: @PeteThePlanner In for $4/inch. We've been complaining about no hot water for a couple days, but that's nothing compared to being outside. — Jessi (@jessirunkel) January 4, 2014 Love what you're doing here @PeteThePlanner! Put SKB down for $50 an inch.@WheelerMission does good work plus their our neighbors :) — Sun King Brewing (@SunKingBrewing) January 4, 2014 As the snow piled up, so did the pledge total, fueling even more giving: Oh man. What a day. Btw, we're now at $2185/inch of snow to @WheelerMission to help our community's homeless during this harsh weather. — Peter Dunn (@PeteThePlanner) January 5, 2014 All told, Twitter users pledged $3,700 per inch of snow. By the time the weather system passed, Indy-metro had racked up 11.4 inches, equating to over $41,000 in pledges. With this money, Wheeler Mission estimates it can deliver about 18,222 meals. For nonprofits, there are a few lessons to take away: 1. Stay Aware When a social media firestorm (good or bad) erupts around your, you want to become aware as soon as possible. It’s important to check your accounts daily, if not hourly, and set up alerts for brand mentions. Users might not always tag your or use your username in a mention. Even though it happened on a Sunday, Wheeler Mission stayed on top of the tweets and made sure to thank supporters. It’s likely that the results would have been diminished had they remained silent during the impromptu campaign. 2. Leverage Influencers The responsibilities of fundraising do not have to fall solely on the shoulders of staff members, board members and formal volunteers. Dunn chose Wheeler because they “epitomize ‘troops on the ground.’ They do what everyone else talks about.” Chances are, your nonprofit has donors that feel the same way about you, and who are active on social media. Identify and leverage them during campaigns, and keep them in mind when brainstorming creative ways to raise funds. You don’t have to do it alone! 3. Fundraise Creatively Appeal letters, silent auctions, annual galas and capital campaigns are all great ways to tried-and-test ways to raise money, but nonprofits shouldn’t feel limited to these traditional forms of fundraising. Try running a few experimental online campaigns every once in awhile. You might be surprised what works! Donors want to give in creative ways, especially through channels that puts their philanthropy on display. Have you seen nonprofits using Twitter in creative ways, or a group of influential donors fundraise on their own? Let me know in the comments below!

By Matt Wilson The Canadian government is ditching the traditional press release for an entirely different format designed for the Internet age. “The media and stakeholders will get a fresh approach from Canadian Government departments and agencies,” Kim McKinnon of the Communications Community Office wrote in an official blog post. “Two or three paragraphs of short, crisp text will allow them to scan quickly for the key messages of the announcement. The new format also offers quick access to key facts and additional resources.” The post includes a link to an example of the government’s new release format. After some brief introductory paragraphs, the release goes into “quick facts” bullet points, followed by a quote, and some links. Government communicators will be encouraged to “repurpose the quick facts and quotes for Facebook and Twitter posts,” according to McKinnon’s post. The new release format coincides with the recent launch of the government of Canada’s newsroom website. The Canadian government isn’t quite taking the advice of Coca-Cola’s Ashley Brown, who hasadvocated for the death of the press release altogether in favor of brand journalism initiatives. Its press releases are evolving, not going out the window. After all, McKinnon’s blog post is titled, “The press release is dead. Long live the press release.” Still, it’s a major step. What do you think of the Canadian government’s push for a “more digital-friendly product”?

by John Greathouse How much will social media fame cost you in 2014? At $6,800, it is probably cheaper than you thought. This money will buy you a million Twitter followers, a million YouTube views and 20,000 likes on Facebook. As a bonus, you’ll also enjoy a robust number of Pinterest, Tumbler and Instagram followers and still have room in your budget for 250 comments on your blog and about 100,000 views on Vimeo. What a bargain. Social norming is powerful. If something is popular, society tends to place a higher value on it. If an article has numerous social shares (i.e., tweets, Likes, etc.), then it must merit attention. If a celebrity, politician or musician has a huge Twitter or Facebook following, they must likewise be worthy of further investigation. This reality encourages some high-profile individuals to manipulate their social media standing by acquiring fake followers. Many of the spurious accounts are “bots”, user profiles automatically created in mass, with no human behind their fictitious personas. The good folks at WhoIsHostingThis? were inspired by my Celebrities With (Allegedly) The Most Fake Twitter Followers article to create an infographic that explores the benefits and risks of faking one’s social media persona. The Cost Of Fake Fame Perhaps the relatively low cost of faking a following is part of the problem. If you buy in bulk, the price of 1,000 Twitter followers is about $1.75. This is about half as much as 1,000 YouTube views, which will cost you $3.10. On the expensive end of the scale are Facebook likes, which will set you back about $35 per thousand. Thus, if you purchased all of the social media “juice” shown at left, it would only cost you about, $6,804. Certainly a large sum for an individual looking to impress their friends, but less than a typical Saturday night bar tab for an A-list celebrity. According to this Forbes article, prolific blogger Steve Farnsworth has the highest percentage of “good” (95% non-fake) Twitter followers among public relations professionals. This is a remarkable percentage, especially given that Steve has over 110,000 followers. To put this into perspective, I have less than 8,000 Twitter followers, yet 3% are classified as “fake” by StatusPeople’s online forensic tool. I reached out to Steve and asked him how he is able to maintain such a robust number of authentic followers. He responded with this: “ Throughout the year I review my Twitter followers looking for bots, accounts that have been abandoned, or that are tweeting links with viruses and I remove them. This causes the number of followers to drop too, but that’s a good thing. The social media industrial complex is fraught with digital marketers and consultants who puff up their abilities and accomplishments. I tell my clients to be honest in their marketing, and in turn strive to walk the talk. So, I manage my social media presences and audience. We live in an electronic fishbowl where tens of thousands people can tell tens of thousands of their friends that you or your brand are bamboozling them in nanoseconds.” Not surprisingly, Steve’s tagline for his PR firm is“Content Is The Currency Of The Social Web.” Content matters, not puffery.

By Alex Goldman There was a time when leaving negative reviews of a business on the internet was a no risk proposition. If a company burned you, or even if you were a competitor leaving a fake review, the business couldn't really do anything about it. That appears, however slowly, to be changing Yesterday, the Washington Times reported that a Virginia court has ruled that Yelp must turn over the real identities of several reviewers. The owner of a carpet cleaning company filed the suit, saying that the reviews in question were not left by real customers. Yelp's lawyers argued that Joe Hadeed, the company's owner, failed to prove that the reviews were fake, but the court said Virginia had a different standard of proof than other parts of the country, and ordered yelp to comply. It's well established that bad online reviews have a profound effect on a company's bottom line. Recently there have been a handful of lawsuits against online reviewers. A few companies have even started building a "non-disparagement clause" into their contracts, although this has been met with its own negative backlash. I worked for a moving company for a few years in New York City, and I saw first hand how capricious and arbitrary bad reviews on Yelp could affect a business. The company's owner, a friend of mine, would try desperately to reach out to reviewers, and even refund jobs just to get people to alter negative reviews. At the same time, there should be a space for people to be able to leave honest reviews if they had a bad experience. The bar to get negative reviews removed (or even to get the identities of reviewers) should be higher than those exhibited in this Virginia case. So is there a good solution? This may be difficult to implement, but I've always wondered why there can't be some kind of "proof of purchase" requirement for reviews. Amazon could easily remove the ability to review an item if it has no record that the user purchased it. Or Yelp could build a system where before a customer could leave a review, the business would have to issue a code that would then be entered into Yelp as proof that the customer had actually used its services. The business could even put the code on its receipts. Maybe I'm falling into the "innovation fixes everything" trap, and neither of my ideas is foolproof. But until something gives on either side, I see lawsuits like this continuing, and if this recent ruling is any indication, leaving online reviews is starting to feel like downloading on LimeWire did in 2004. You're likely to fly under the radar, but some company might just choose you at random and try to make an example of you.

By Kevin Allen If you received some Snapchat spam over the weekend you’re not alone. (Though if you’re over 30 and using the service, you probably are alone.) The company has apologized for the spam in a blog post. Team Snapchat writes: “We’ve heard some complaints over the weekend about an increase in Snap Spam on our service. We want to apologize for any unwanted Snaps and let you know our team is working on resolving the issue. As far as we know, this is unrelated to the Find Friends issue we experienced over the holidays. “While we expect to minimize spam, it is the consequence of a quickly growing service. To help prevent spam from entering your feed, you can adjust your settings to determine who can send you Snaps. We recommend ‘Only My Friends’:)” The spam problem comes on the heels of a data breach the company suffered last month in which 4.6 million user names and phone numbers were compromised. Some observers think this could spell trouble for the service, which should probably start making money soon.  

By Danny Groner PR pros are always looking to improve themselves, and one area everyone can improve upon is how we give presentations and deliver our messages. Too often, people give talks instead of presentations, full of valuable information, but short on the skills that it takes to keep an audience attuned. It's hard—and it's time that we accepted that we can gain wisdom from others who have mastered the art of visual storytelling. Just think about all of those times you sat in on someone else's presentation and found it to be slow and boring. That's because people will find something else to look at when they need to. Once you've lost them, it's extremely difficult to gain back their trust, and their focus. Only a select group of people can cover the ground they wish to in a meaningful and compelling manner. The first rule you should remember is that your audience can read faster than you can speak. What this means is that if you put text on the screen, they will read ahead, get the gist of your point, and be craving the next slide well before you're ready to toggle over. In the interim, there will be seconds periods when people will sit staring and waiting for you to get out of their way. You become a roadblock in that instance, not their instructor. Avoid this predicament by limiting the amount of text you put on the screen and keeping people engaged with you. If they look past you at your slides, video, or live visual aids, you are rendered less useful to them than you should be. Rely on yourself. If you prepare and go in with the right strategy and confidence level, you will emerge as their educator. Finding ways to work in visual aids can be tricky, though. For example, a video can be effective to showcase testimonials or a history of the topic at hand, but it should never replace the one-on-one interaction you have with your audience. People will gain a tremendous amount from watching a well-cut video, yet you are the one who they have come to see and listen to. It takes a special variety of dynamic visual aid on top of great public speaking to make a presentation worthwhile. Of course, presentations aren't the only area where visual storytelling takes place. When it comes to making artwork that you'll be putting out into the world, without an instructor beside it to describe and help illuminate it, you'll want to run the proofs by someone outside your company for real feedback. Research is crucial for a good campaign or ad, and the same can be said for photography or video that you make yourself. These unbiased critiques will bring you a perspective you lack, as you sometimes will be too close to the material to be able to see certain things. Through speaking to others, and seeing how they approach similar projects, you can improve over time. If you get started now, you'll look back a few months from now and recognize how far you've come.