PR & Wikipedia

I read a research article written by DiStaso and Messner named “Forced Transparency: Corporate Image on Wikipedia and What it Means for Public Relations” which is about what PR practitioners should do since any one can edit and change the content of their companies on Wikipedia. This article analyzed the framing of 10 Fortune 500 companies on Wikipedia between 2006 and 2010. There are really some helpful tips for PR persons about dealing with Wikipedia.

Nowadays, since social media have been more and more important for increasing companies’ success, public relations persons need to regard social media as an important tool to conducting two-way communication with their customers, monitoring market environment, and enhancing issues managements.

Since the collaboratively edited information on social media circumvents traditional media gatekeepers, public relations persons get more challenges— they need to pay more attention to the “forced transparency” about their companies on Wikipedia and make the monitoring of Wikipedia in their social media plans. As DiStaso and Messner said, “Simply knowing about what content is on a company page will provide public relations practitioners with an understanding of what the general public knows about their organization.”

Besides monitoring the content about their organizations on Wikipedia, DiStaso and Messner also give some advises about how to create and change the content about their companies on Wikipedia. As DiStaso and Messner suggest—“Monitoring Wikipedia articles and engaging in the discussions over how the article will be shaped should be a daily task for public relations practitioners”. 

Resource:

DiStaso, M. W. & Messner, M. (2010). Forced Transparency: Corporate image on Wikipedia and What It Means for Public Relations. Public Relations Journal, 4(2). 

Some pieces of thoughts on social media

During this week, I read several articles and blogs about how companies treat or respond to the messages toward their brands on social media and I got some ideas about the attitudes of some companies to social media.

One article’s name is “Brands respond to just 5 percent of Facebook wall posts” and it is posted on Oct. 18 2011. In this article, the author mentioned according to two recent study, most customer gripes on Twitter do not receive responses and brand s do not respond to 95 percent of questions posted their Facebook walls. Another article named “70% of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter” which was posted on Oct.12 2011 also mentioned the same problem. From my point of view, companies may already know the important influence of social media on their brands, however they do not pay enough attention to their social media or they do not know how to use social media effectively to increase their growth.

A blog named “ How many tweets does it take to impress the CEO?” explains that CEOs of companies does not pay much attention to the number of one tweet being retweeted. What they concern is how much this tweet help to stimulates  conversations. We can know from this post that the number of how many people retweet your tweet is not that vital these days although it is also an important element for measuring. Engagement is the key. To get people talking about the topic and your brand is more impartment than just retweeting your tweet without thinking and involving.

And I also read a blog mentioned the three big companies do pay their attention to the social media to get their customers’ feedback and increase their brand success. This makes me think that maybe big companies have already noticed the importance of social media and this is really a good model for other brands and companies.

Resources: 

Brands respond to just 5 percent of Facebook wall posts

http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/9800.aspx

70% of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter

http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-monitoring/70-of-companies-ignore-customer-complaints-on-twitter/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

How Many Tweets Dose It Take To Impress The CEO?

http://www.pr-squared.com/index.php/2011/10/how-many-tweets-does-it-take-to-impress-the-ceo#comment-53580

How Top Brands Measure Social Media Success

http://www.pr-squared.com/index.php/2011/10/how-top-brands-measure-social-media-success#comment-53575

Crisis Management

To be honest, crisis management is one of my most interested areas in Public Relations. When I was in my undergraduate, I took one PR fundamental class in my third year and I got to know some basic knowledge about crisis management from that class. It was at that time I became fantasied in this part and paid my attention to the information and news about it.

 

One incident happened in China at that time was about food healthy and this incident made me feel more about the importance of public relations, especially the crisis management for companies to save their enterprise images. On July 2008, a report revealed that a famous Chinese dairy company added melamine—a kind of industry raw material -- to the origin milk to make the mixed milk meeting the requirements of food examination. Additionally, with the developing of this event, many Chinese big and famous dairy companies were revealed having done the same thing for many years. The public didn’t believe these brands any more. At that moment, to rebuild the enterprise image is the first important thing. But I do not think the PR agencies did a good job for these brands because till now, the Chinese public still do not rebuild their trust to these dairy companies.

 

By chance, a few days ago, there was a guest in another class also talking about crisis management. He thinks that crisis management is such an important part in Public relations that he holds the opinion that the whole PR developing direction will be separated into two big orientations—social networking and crisis management. There is no doubt that future communication’s developing direction is to be faster, more transparent, more directly and to more people. In this kind of background, crisis management gets more challenges. PR companies and persons need to react more quickly and be more skilled.

Weibo & Twitter III

This time I want to talk about the activities Weibo conducts to inspire their users to use it more often. From my point of view, Weibo does quite a good job in its diffusion to Chinese netizens as well as famous foreigners who want to keep and improve their Chinese marketings. Meanwhile, Weibo invents several smart little things which are different from its origin—Twitter to keep its users’ passions on tweeting and encourage its customers to get involved into activities conducted by official Weibo.

The first smart invention I want to mention is Weibo badge. Weibo badge is a kind of award Weibo system giving to the accounts which meet different requirements set by the official system. Some of the requirements are about the number or content of your tweets. For example, you can get a certain badge if you tweet original tweets continually in seven days (Figure 1). And some of the requirements are more like a kind of advertisements for certain brands, companies and organizations. For example, you can get a corresponding badge if you link your Weibo account to your MSN account (Figure 2). There are also some badges for Weibo official activies. For example, you can get a certain badge if you share music in the Weibo Music Box (Figure 3). Till now, there has been 49 Weibo badges for users to collect (Figure 4).

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

You may have noticed this: for every Weibo badge, there are several attributes, like “remaining days for collecting this badge”, “the number of this badge issued”, “to which group this badge issued”, “the rarity level of this badge”, “valid date” and so on. It makes using Weibo like playing games. And you need to finish various game tasks.

There is no doubt that this is really a good way to inspire users to tweet more often and spend more time on Weibo since quite many people have the habit to gather badges. It may sound stupid that trying so hard to increase your number of tweets or retweets or comments just because you want to get a virtual award, but such many users like it and spend time on it. Figure 5 is a Weibo account which has collected such many badges.

Figure 5

Personal branding

One of several useful functions for social media such as Facebook and Twitter is to “position and brand yourself”. According the reading material of “Twitter Revolution: Chapter15—Chapter 16”, there are kinds of ways to manage your personal branding through social media successfully. For example, “Please don’t publish a new blog post, and tweet, a boring tweet like: here’s the link. Give your followers a compelling reason to click on your link and check out your blog”.

I quite agree with the idea by good managing and marketing yourself though social media, you could build a nice personal brand and get very well benefit. Such as the several accounts with the special stars on Weibo (I mentioned this in another blg post)—by tweets very often, they get themselves famous though social media. But I’m sure we will lose some kinds of privacy at the same time. With the development of our modern technology, we are losing our privacies little by little.

I can still remember one viewpoint from a guest for another class. He said it is impossible to keep our privacy well since we live in this modern society unless we throw way our cell phones and credit cards. It is kind of a joke but it is true.

I got the idea that Facebook has added a new function named “Timeline” from another blog. By using timeline, you can add your photos which you think are important in your lifetime to make a “life-line” on Facebook. This is a wonderful and also helpful invention. But also, it will reveal our privacies, again. Advertisers should love this invention since they can make their ads more personalized. But once you put your photos there, you anticipate others to see them, don’t you?

Topic Monitoring assignment

Last week I got an assignment to choose a topic and monitor different meida's reporters on this topic. Since it is relationed to the social media, I think I can share it here.

I’m an international student and football game is not as popular in the United States as in my home country—China. To open my eyes and experience different cultures, I started to pay attention to football games after I came here. As far as I know, Miami Dolphins is really a good football team and did quite well in the past football matches. However, in this season, it seems that there is something wrong with Dolphins— they didn’t do very well in the games. On Sep.25, as Miami Dolphins lost to Cleveland Browns by one point, Dolphins’ score was 0-3 at that moment in this football season. This score makes me feel quite interesting about how Dolphins will play in the future games and how PR persons working for Miami Dolphins will do to motivate fans and save the image of Dolphins. So from Sep.26 to Oct.9, during these two weeks, I focused on news and information on Miami Dolphins.

The story I want to mention is a story posted on Oct.3 2011 on the website of Miami Herald just after Miami Dolphins failed to San Diego Chargers 16-26 on Oct.2. The title of this story is “Miami Dolphins fall to 0-4 after losing to San Diego Chargers” and the subhead is “Chad Henne’s day ended early because of a shoulder injury, and at day’s end the Dolphins felt the sting of an 0-4 start to the season”. In this story, the reporter focused on the injury of Chad Henne and made his opinion on why Miami Dolphins lost again after interviewing several team members including Chad Henne.

All of the Miami Dolphins official website, official Facebook and official Twitter have the reports or tweets about the story.For example, in the Miami Dolphins official Twitter, there is one post —“The Dolphins fall to the Chargers 26-16” on Oct.2.There are also posts in Dolphins official Facebook about the story. What’s more, in facebook, there is also much information about how to get free tickets and other events.

Since Miami Dolphins did not do well in the past four games, I think the PR persons who work for Dolphins should focus on how to re-build the good image of Miami Dolphins and make their fans feel more confident for their future. Maybe feature stories of team members is one of the good choices. However, the most effective way to re-build good image is to win the next game.

Weibo & Twitter II

OK, this is my second post for the comparison between Twitter and the Chinese version twitter—Weibo. This time I want to talk about the verified system of these two social media.

I have mentioned before that I also concern about the reliability and accuracy of the information from social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. One of reasons is you do not know who is the person posting the information—as we all know, the anonymous internet generate the population who can speak out things they will never talk in the face to face conversations without any worry, including lies. This makes people using social media kind of difficult to figure out which is right and which is wrong. On Twitter, users always tend to retweet the posts which are breaking news. But sometimes these breaking news are not true.

But if we know who the person is posting the news, things can go differently. At least, we can give the account more credibility. I think this is one of the reasons that Twitter and Weibo start the verified system. Of course, there are other reasons—for example, to avoid other accounts pretend to be the right famous person or organization.

I notice that on Twitter, all the verified accounts have a blue check mark after their account names, no better the famous person or the organization. For example, the Figure 1 is Lady Gaga’s account (famous person) and Figure 2 is Time’s account (famous organization).

Figure 1

Figure 2

But for Weibo, there is a more detailed classify for person and organization. For famous person, there is a red “V” after his/her account which means has been verified. For organization, the “V” is blue. And there is a special red star for the person who is not famous in the real world but has written certain number of tweets on Weibo. This is a kind of encouragement for Weibo users to tweet often. The figure 3 is a famous person’s account. Figure 4 is an organization and Figure 5 is an example of the special red srar.

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Who is a Journalist?

By reading the article “Who is A Journalist?” written by Erika Fry, I got the fact that three reporters were arrested along with other protestors by the New York Police in the Occupy Well Street protest. The reason for their being arrested is they did not have the press credential issued by the DCPI which is the only evidence used by the NYPD to identify who is or is not a journalist. What’s more, it took quite long time for the three reporters to be released since they did not have the credential to prove they are journalists.

For these three reporters, the reason why they don't have credentials is not they do not want to apply.It is because they do not meet the application requirements. "To get this credential, you must submit an application and six published clips that prove you have covered breaking or spot news in the past."

I think using the DCPI-issued credential as the only evidence to identify a journalist is kind of problematic, especially when many of the reporters cannot get the credentials. And the way NYPD dealing with the release process of the three reporters also has some problems. It took such long time to release the reporters just because of the credential problem, even after the police knew they were reporters. I think the NYPD can find out other ways to identify journalists besides the DCPI-issued credential. They need add other things as evidences to solve this problem.

From my point of view, both the NYPD and the online media need PR help. And maybe the NYPD need it more. I think the NYPD need to explain to the public why they needs the credential and let the public know they have make their efforts to upgrade the credential system to meet the developing social media, such as the reforms to the system in 2000. On the other side, the online media also need PR help to let the government office know they really need special concern—like special requirements of credential for the online media reporters.


Resource:
Who is a Journalist?
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/whos_a_journalist_1.php

Social Network Sites

According to Boyd and Ellison (2008), social network sites are “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.”

There is a figure showing the timeline of launch dates of several major social networking sites in Boyd and Ellison’s research paper “Social Networking Sites: Deinition, History, and Scholarship” (2008). And they mentioned the relaunch of QQ—a Chinese instant messaging service in 2006.

Actually before QQ set up its SNS, there was another famous Chinese SNS launched in Dec.2005—Xiaonei. And now its name has been changed to Renren. At the beginning, Xiaonei set high school and college students as its target audience. It tried to provide a platform for students to keep in touch even after their graduation. At that time, users can only use their real personal profile and school email address to set up an account. I can still remember clearly that I set up my Xiaonei account in the summer of year 2006 after I graduated from high school. And I have kept this account for 5 years. I think maybe it tried to replicate Classmates.com.

However, with the launch and development of Facebook, Xiaonei started to change its style closer to Facebook. It extended the scope of its target audiences and opened to all of netizens. And in 2009, its name was changed to Renren.  Now it is one of Chinese famous SNSs.

Resource:

Boyd, D., & Ellison, N. (2008). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210-230.

Where Am I? I don’t Want to Tell You

In one of my classes this week, a professor asked us whether we use foursquare. And most of my classmates responded as they don’t use it or don’t like use it. Then the professor wandered why. Answers were like “I want to keep my private” or “It is weird to show where you are all the time”. I was not familiar with foursquare before that class, so I searched it though internet after that class and got the basic idea about what is foursquare and how does it work.

According to Wikipedia, foursquare is a location based social networking website based on hardware and mobile devices. “Users check-in at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application by running the application and selecting from a list of venues that the application locates nearby.” Simply to say, it is a social networking website that allows you to show where you are timely.

Well, from my point of view, I don’t like use this kind of social networking tools which base on the technology of tracking locations. I’m not sure whether facebook and twitter have this kind of function, but I’m quite sure Renren and Weibo have the function to show your current location with your every tweet. But I never use it. The reason for my dislike may sound stupid. I really think it is noisy as well as useless to point out where you are with your tweet. If you really really want your friends know where you are, you can call them or text them. There is no need for you to show your location to everybody. I know it becomes more and more difficult for us to keep our private in this modern life, but I really want to try as much as I can… It seems I’m trying to give myself over-protection.:)

But I’m sure this kind of location-based social networking websites should be very useful for marketing and advertizing. For examples, supermarkets and department stores can send discount information and advertisements to people who point out their locations nearby.