Do you focus on the most popular and ignore the rest in social media?

Too many colleagues, organizations, and companies are keeping their circles of influencers small, believing it is better to invest limited time and resources on the most influential, the most popular, and the most celebrated. Happens in DC all the time. I'm rocking the latest dinner party, parlaying attendees with my wit and banter, when someone snazzier and trendier enters. Immediately I've lost my audience's attention. The idea easily transfers to Twitter.

Other users focus exclusively on networking within their own space, effectively limiting scope and reach by preaching to the choir. If you've invested in running with the A-list, fine; however, that's an old model reminiscent of old PR, of the golf club, the lodge, and the private club.

The Internet created something that not enough social media consultants and coaches support and advise: the ability to expand circles of influencers, to engage with anyone and everyone. Only recently has the Internet become ubiquitous and global in a real way. Previously, the digital divide was a barrier to not just many Americans but quite a few developing nations becoming part of the global conversation.

The value of the Internet is proportional to the number of connected users. It's also living proof of Rule 34. No matter how obscure, vertical, or arcane your material may be, there's an audience for it. Someone will show it love and attention. Online social networks have made all of this even easier to the point where it is becoming less of a potential and more of a promise, an eventuality. In short, there is real value associated with connecting to as many followers and collecting as many "Likes" as is humanly possible. For real effect.

There's also a psychological benefit of large numbers. I have won contracts and business on the power of five-digit followers on Twitter, which is modest compared to most of my peers. However, for someone who only has a couple-hundred followers, 38,000 is a lot and suggests mastery. To be honest, I wonder how long it will take these "less is more" social media consultants to realize that it's not good business to dismiss what the client wants out of hand.

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Kristinn Hrafnsson, spokesperson for WikiLeaks (photo by JD Lasica)

WikiLeaks official criticizes New York Times before international group of journalists

WikiLeaks has changed the role of journalism and "made journalists braver," Kristinn Hrafnsson, the official spokesperson for WikiLeaks, told an international group of journalists assembled in Santiago, Chile, on Thursday.

Braver, that is, with one striking exception: the New York Times.

"The timidity of the New York Times came as a surprise and disappointment to me," Hrafnsson told the assembly of 60 news executives, editors and reporters. "It was not the New York Times of the early 1970s where the Times was willing to take on the Nixon administration by publishing the Pentagon Papers."

It's pretty much a given that Hrafnsson, or any WikiLeaks official, would be arrested if he set foot in the United States. Hrafnsson also is certain that the National Security Agency monitors every email he receives.

After his presentation, I asked Hrafnsson, a veteran journalist from Iceland, why he was singling out the Times for criticism. (I spoke to the same group a few hours later.)

When WikiLeaks released 77,000 Afghan War documents to news organizations in July 2010, the New York Times was accorded the right to publish the scoop on its website. Instead, Hrafnsson said, the Times apparently was so worried about the likely furor over release of the Afghanistan war logs that critical minutes passed, and the Times decided to report the news only after other publications had done so.

"They were deathly afraid of being the first one to post it on the Internet," he said. "They were dead frozen with their finger on the button."

Hrafnsson surmised that the paper feared it would be branded "a traitor" news organization by political figures still incensed over WikiLeaks' earlier release of classified State Department diplomatic cables. Three months later, when the Iraq war logs were released, the Times — unlike the vast majority of overseas media outlets such as The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel, Sweden's SVT and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism — led with a peculiar news angle about Iran's influence in Iraqi affairs. It downplayed the big news: that the U.S. military was routinely turning over captured civilians and Taliban militants to Iraqi government officials for torture.

"There's no doubt in my mind that they did what they did for political reasons," Hrafnsson said.

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9 ideas for taking journalism to a new place

Social media is far more than social marketing, which is why Socialmedia.biz returns regularly to the subject of how social is reshaping the worlds of media and journalism.

I arrived in Santiago, Chile, on Tuesday to take part in a three-day event: first, a gathering of 150 journalism students from major universities in Chile on Tuesday. And today I'm giving the closing talk at a gathering of news executives, editors, reporters and academics from major publications and universities in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Venezuela, the United States and elsewhere, organized by Grupo de Diarios América — the world's biggest online Spanish network with some 50 publications and sites with a reach over 50 million users per month — and held at the headquarters of El Mercurio, Chile's best newspaper.

My colleague Chris Abraham asked me a few months ago to offer my thoughts on where journalism is heading — or ought to be heading — for the benefit of both those entering the profession and those trying to figure out how to navigate these choppy waters. So this seemed like a good way to do that.

Plus, I finally made it down to South America!

The presentation, embedded above and available for download or embedding on SlideShare, offers some ideas about how journalism might be reimagined in an age when more people are embracing the precepts of social media.

Questioning nine fundamental assumptions

I found that the two-day symposium had far too few opportunities for interaction (thankfully, the organizers thoughtfully provided translations for talks in Spanish that were broadcast into a Listen Display Receiver, a nifty mobile device and earpiece), and so I framed the presentation more as a series of questions rather than answers.

Many of the suggestions below — and for the now widely accepted idea that journalism should be thought of as a process, not a finished product — have been discussed by thought leaders in the space for years. It's time to distill some of these ideas and reexamine them through the lens of journalism in South America. Here, then, are nine assumptions by journalists and media organizations, and suggestions on how those assumptions might be reconsidered or reimagined.

1Objectivity is our sacred goal. Yet, users are increasingly turning to transparency as the new yardstick of a news organization's credibility. Is transparency the new objectivity?

2Content is all that matters. While people come for the content, they stay for the conversation. Shouldn't journalists spend more time engaging with users and participating in conversations?

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Look to the Long Tail to recruit brand ambassadors

Well, as regular readers of this blog know, I am a Cluetrainian. This means I put more trust in the value and impact of the online influencer long tail than I do in the impact of the couple of dozen top influencers that most social media consultants and digital PR teams recommend. This is the Internet, an efficient platform allowing easy access to what’s called the network effect: The value of your social network is dependent on the number of others using it.

While it may well be important to have the top 100  influencers on any particular topic following you on Twitter or Facebook, it is not essential. You can make up for it by attracting, retaining, and activating everyone else. In short, anyone who shares her time, talent, and experience online is an important online influencer and potential brand ambassador for my clients.

How do you get lots and lots of people to follow your brand? Don’t know where to start? First, make sure you share your Twitter and Facebook information everywhere your brand exists in the real world or in cyberia. You could spend months and months developing these lists and groups of followers, encouraging folks to retweet your content and so forth.

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Behavioral advertising is the practice of third party sites that track your web surfing behavior as you travel from one website to another, and then serve you relevant ads based on that cross-site surfing behavior. This has serious privacy concerns as information being gathered is being shared across multiple sites.

For years, the industry has tried to self regulate in order to keep the federal government at bay, explained Steven Bennett, lawyer for Jones Day in New York, in a presentation he gave at the CRM Evolution Conference in New York City.

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Why it pays to optimize & make your site more responsive

Maybe the reason why you can't even quite get into the top-five or number-one spot on Google search is because you're not spending enough time or money getting the best Web host and Web server you can afford and then optimizing how you serve your Web pages, especially when your modern content management system is backed by a database.

I have a theory that both where you end up on search results as well as how much money you can make advertising AdWords ads via AdSense depends not merely on SEO or surfing the right trends or even finding the long tail sweet spot, but also on how quick, responsive, reliable, and durable the server that hosts your blog or site is.  The faster the page loads, the better your site will rank on Google search, all other things being equal. Take it to the bank.

When my server was really under-powered and unoptimized, I was averaging $4/day, then after moving stuff around and optimized, it went up to a more reliable $11-25/day. Then, the site started getting more popular from better ranking and then the reliability decreased and the daily take returned to $4-6/day or so.

Now, with more physical RAM in the box and some cloud-based back-up to handle big popularity spikes, I am seeing quite a few $15-$25/day pay-outs.That's only one person's experience, but that's all I got.

What I am going to tell you is not hard science. I might even be recognizing the wrong patterns. And, my sample size is one subject over a long period of time, my blog, Because the Medium is the Message, which is a very big, old, blog with 6,894 posts, 4,631 comments, 4,244 categories, and 14,092 tags — all back-ended by a MySQL database and fortified with WP Super Cache on a dedicated server.

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Look what just popped up on my Twitter profile when I visited via the Web today — you can now share a photo directly through Twitter by uploading your photos to Twitter.com instead of through TwitPic, yfrog, Twitgoo or img.ly. I wonder how this will affect the third-party providers. The image hosting back end is provided by Photobucket, one of the largest photo hosting sites, which is an interesting partnership.

Here's the scoop straight from the source:

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Long blog post short: please be as descriptive as possible when titling your blog posts. In today's decontextualized world of walls, feeds, RSS, e-mail, diggs, reddits, Stumbles, tweets, and retweets, you need to attract your potential reader based only on the appeal of your title and nothing else, especially if you're new to blogging and don't happen to be Seth Godin.

Use up to the 70 characters that Google indexes for each post title but make sure the most important message of the title are nearer the beginning of the title. Don't bury the lead in the post and don't bury the lead in the title, either.

Tweetmeme and other sharing services chop off long titles, so while you can go long, keep your essentials right at the beginning.

A good title is a good habit — here's why

Recently I wrote the post Blog so you can be taken completely out of context in which I discussed how essential it is to make sure each blog post you write needs to be completely self-contained and self-referential. Looking back, I notice I missed the most important part of every blog post: the blog title.

In 2011, with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, retweets, sharing, and RSS via Google Reader, all anyone ever sees is the title of whatever's shared, especially if you're not Beth Kanter, Kami Huyse, Seth Godin, CC Chapman, Shel Israel, Geoff Livingston, Richard Laermer, Olivier Blanchard, Christopher Penn, Chris Brogan or Brian Solis. If you're one of these bloggers, your title is a little less important; however, your name may well be stripped by the confines of a 140-character world, so a good title is a good habit even for our hallowed celebrities since their personal brand doesn't always move as fast as the share.

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Determine what actions you want your fans to take

Custom Facebook tabs can help brand your Facebook page as well as increase "likes" of your page. Custom tabs can also serve as effective landing tabs and can provide ways to offer contests, sell products, promote services and more.

Here are some good examples of Facebook landing tabs, also known as Welcome Pages:

• Dell's Facebook Page
• Diesel's Facebook Page
• Sony Ericsson's Facebook Page
• RedBull's Facebook Page
• Adobe's Facebook Page
• The Social Media Survival Guide Facebook Page
• More Facebook custom tab examples

The idea is to add some form of incentive to encourage visitors to become a fan of your page rather than just visiting and going on their merry way.

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