TruthyPR

The Modern Internet Success Meme: United Breaks Guitar, Breaks Open Career

Late last night I caught the release of the last of the three songs from Dave Carroll about United Airlines baggage handlers breaking his guitar through negligence.  After a year of fighting with United Airlines customer service, and them refusing to take responsibility, Dave Carroll swore he would write three songs/videos, put them on YouTube, and strive for a million views to shame United Airlines.

His first video garnered nearly 8 million views and media coverage that made his career explode.  The second video did a million views.  The third video should do at least half a million as well.

This is the Modern Internet Success Meme: an underdog of some sort is wronged by a large corporate entity and if done carefully, spins it into public fame.  I don't mean fame among Internet people, but real "Today Show" caliber fame.

The options for the protagonist in these situations are clear:

1. Apologize immediately to defuse it (aka Motrin and Circuit City); or
2. Hope you can paint the victim in a negative light; or
3. Tough it out.

Sometimes these choices are made for you.  In the case of United Airlines, Carroll's year spent dealing with customer service eliminated option #1 for United Airlines, and that plus his innate Canadian niceness (and some savvy PR sense) kept #2 out of United's reach as well.

The best advice I have on this is for PR people to become friendly with their customer service teams.  The escalation path nowadays for support problems is not to the head of support, but to the VP of Communication via the Internet. Customer Service departments should be reporting to Communications, and Communications should be managing them.

For Carroll's part, this is the biggest break he'll ever have.  He's adopted this broken guitar image as his logo.  If you peruse his website you'll see he's for hire to do corporate events and custom write songs as a customer support motivational speaker.  In addition Carroll has tons of fan mail with customer service horror stories that could provide him a lifetime of material. 

If I were managing his career (though he clearly doesn't need much help), I would suggest he take one or two, egregious stories out of his mailbag and write songs about them and do promotional videos to go with each new album release.  He can write 10 new songs that fit his personal musical muse, and 1 or 2 that function as publicity vehicles for the album.  His reach will continue to be tremendous.

Stand up against domestic violence this holiday season - give to La Casa de las Madres

This holiday season I ask you to be thankful for what you have, and give a little kindness to those who are surviving domestic violence. 

I recently reached out to La Casa de las Madres, a San Francisco domestic violence nonprofit that provides intervention and prevention services to women and their children.  All their services are free and confidential, which is shocking when you consider that California cut all domestic violence funding for shelter services this year, right before restoring all but $4 million through an emergency bill.

"What do you need?", I asked their outreach coordinator Walesa Kanarek.

"We are in particular need of hats, gloves, scarves, and writing Journals.  These are items that will create gift bags for our clients in need.  These are clients in need of holiday cheer who are currently in shelter, transitioning out shelter, and clients receiving ongoing services.  You can either focus on one item or create gift bags of all 4 items.  We have a target of 150 gift bags, and have commitments so far only for 35 of them.

We could also use nice tote bags (like clean Trader Joe's bags) or small backpacks to give them these items in.

We need these items in our office by the 12th in order to get them ready for our clients for the holidays."

This is a tough year for everyone, so I'm asking you to help in one of a couple of ways.

If you live in San Francisco and want to contribute one or more hats, gloves, scarves, tote bags, backpacks, or blank writing journals in your possession now, please let me know immediately.  It needs to be at my house by Friday December 11th at noon.  I'll make an exception and come to you if you can collect enough for 5 gift bags worth.

If you do not live in San Francisco please help by making a gift online to La Casa de las Madres.  Please place "grateful" in the "In Honor Of" field so we can track how much we give together.  A gift of $35-$50 should cover a nice gift bag for someone who probably is having a much worse holiday than you are.

Thank you, and remember to be grateful for all the blessings you have this holiday.

Tweets for the last 24 hours

I often tweet out useful little links that aren't worth a full blog post. Here's a summary of the last 24 hours.

• 12:00 Coding Horror: Using analytics to find your visitors screen size and optimize for "The Fold" bit.ly/1AiGbw #

Follow me on Twitter

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

How to keep your analytics tools from overwhelming analytics efforts

If you wanted to get started doing web analytics for your nonprofit fundraising website, you probably went and installed Google Analytics, or maybe you chose SiteCatalyst, or WebTrends, or some other tool.  Then you ran some reports and after thirty days you were awash in data. 

You had Top Content reports that told you which pages were most popular.  Ironically these pages may have been most popular because you promoted them from the homepage, which makes the fact that they were most popular an unfulfilling report about a self-fulfilling event.

The same is true about your Top Referrers report, which told you which websites sent you the most traffic.  Does it surprise you when you got a lot of traffic from CNN.com when you were mentioned there, but only a little when one of your small donors tweeted your latest campaign?

Web analytics projects at organizations go through phases of enthusiasm.  If you recognize the situations mentioned above, you're in the Trough of Disillusionment on the brilliant Gartner Hype Cycle Graph

You may never leave the trough; many web analytics projects don't.  Over and over again I meet nonprofit staff that installed Google Analytics and then got stuck when the reports didn't spit out a single page report with the statement that said, "To make more money, make your homepage half as long!"

Truth be told, any algorithm that gave you such clear advice would be suspect, and lack the gravitas to fight the political battles that made your homepage twice as big as it should be.  Analytics tools report on visits and pageviews.  They do heatmaps and click overlays and tell you all about website activity but never talk about their results.  Reporting on activity instead of results is a standard reaction when you don't have results to report. 

Analytics is a process, not a tool.  That process, by the way, is "Measure, Change, Evaluate".  Repeat forever.  The data presented by your web analytics tool is only useful in the "Measure" and "Evaluate" steps.  You have to "Change" something and re-measure it to make a difference.  There are no analytics tools present in that step.

In my work I see analytics eyeglaze all the time.  One of my colleagues once asked an underling to look into presenting a prospective client with a list of 20 different measurement tools and the data they would generate.  This is a type of consulting sales I like to refer to as the "drowning style", because the consultant keeps throwing data at you until you're drowning in it, and you need to hire him to make sense of it.  See, he's created the problem for which you'll pay him for the solution.  Isn't that clever?

Successful analytics projects are those that measure your online campaign's results in a way that corresponds to your organization's bottom line.  The two diametric examples of this are Southwest Airlines and Dell.  In 2009 I heard social media gurus at both companies talk about how they measure their social media efforts.   The Dell team released a statement saying their Dell Outlet twitter efforts had generated $3 million in sales.  The Southwest rep said, "Our measurement changes daily."

Really?  Why not measure tickets booked through a linked from the Southwest facebook fan page or twitter feed?

The real way to use these tools is part of the three-step process (Measure, Change, Evaluate) that all analytics projects use.  The tools can give you a baseline measurement about the effectiveness of the website and evaluate the changes you make.  This can very cheaply create a culture of continuous improvement for your online presence without having to adopt complicated systems like Six Sigma.

And when something you did takes you a step backwards, undo that change and try again.  Because failure is not an option, it's a requirement.  Try and fail as fast as you can until you find the things that work.

Two masterful PR people in Biblical conflict: The Yes Men vs. US Chamber of Commerce

If you haven't heard of the Yes Men, you've missed some of the best satirist pranksters who walk the Earth.  Lead Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum pranked the US Chamber of Commerce yesterday with a fake press release and a fake press conference at the National Press Club announcing the Chamber was reversing its position on climate change.

Real US Chamber PR person Eric Wohlschlegel apparently got wind of this and ran six blocks to the Press Club and barged in, announced it was a fake news event, grabbed the signin sheet, handed his business cards out to journalists, and stormed out.

Wohlschlegel is brilliant, in my opinion.  It takes a certain amount of guts to bust up a calm, well-run event on your instinct that this is a prank, despite the overwhelming evidence that it was.  What's more he walks right into an inadvertent trap as journalists start trying to get him to answer questions on the US Chamber's actual position on climate change.  He must have realized this was going to become a press conference on climate change in front of a hostile audience, and decided to split.

I admire that ability to think on his feet like that.

Yes Man Bichlbaum is in fine form.  He never breaks character, evades direct questions about who he is from Wohlschlegel, and finally, when confronted by a reporter who says she knows this is a prank, refuses to admit his identity.  As this reporter continues to press him, he again asserts that the US Chamber's position is changing. 

His master stroke however is his quick-on-his-feet answer to this question:

Reporter: "You came in this morning saying you're with the US Chamber of Commerce and you're not.  Who are you?"

Bichlbaum: "Well we represent, I represent the position that the Chamber of Commerce must take, and the inevitable position it must take."

 

What is Google Wave, and do I care?

What is Google Wave?

By now you've heard of Google Wave through one or more ways:

1. You've tried it out with one of the 100,000 beta invites that Google has distributed;
2. You've read one or more articles about it;
3. You've heard one or more of your friends whine to all their friends asking for a Google Wave invite; or
4. You've seen this awesome website named EasierToUnderstandThanWave.com.

Let me gloss over all the hype and detail for a minute.  The hype is silly, and the detail makes things more complicated.  Let me boil it down for you.

Google Wave is just a Threaded Conversation

(and soylent green is people)

Everyone who has tried Wave, including myself, is wincing at this over simplification, but ultimately that's the bottom line.  You already understand Threaded Conversations.  They kind of exist in Gmail, but without the nice indenting that you expect:

 

You also probably recognize them from Outlook:

 

And of course Facebook, where every status message, shared link or video spawns its own conversation:

 

The perfect example of a threaded conversation is seen on the Yahoo! Groups message board for web analytics enthusiasts and looks like this.  When its indented, it's called a "hierarchical threaded conversation":

Note how the indenting makes it instantly easy to see who replied to whom.

Threaded conversation are conversations in which messages are grouped together to make it easy to follow (or ignore) a discussion topic.

What is not a threaded conversation?  TWITTER.  Unless you're using some kind twitter client that joins messages together, every message is not easily linkable with every other message. 

So do I care?

I'll explain why this is great in a second, but in the meantime, do you care?

Yes.  What we've learned over the life of the Internet is that we love to talk.  What the Internet does best is carry conversations.  It's like the First Amendment on steroids.  So a tool that facilitates faster, better, and more conversation will be incredibly important.

Just not yet.

Much like the beginnings of MySpace, Facebook, the Web, and Twitter, you don't care yet.  There's simply not enough users on Google Wave that you're missing out on an audience from a marketing or public relations perspective.

Even for developers, you have to wonder, is there functionality in Google Wave that is awesome?  The answer is YES, but since there aren't very many users around to take advantage of those features yet, you probably will prioritize something else if you have scarce development resources.

Give it time.  My rule of thumb with anything is once there are 25 million users doing something, you have to pay attention from a mass market point of view.  Note that this rule doesn't apply to microniches.  If you're a nonprofit in the business of saving civil war era battlefields from becoming strip malls, 100 people on a civil war history message board is a big deal to you.

Google Wave has, at best, 100,000 users.  That's practically nothing.  If you're a developer you might integrate the product if it gives you significantly awesome functionality that will drive people to try your product, but otherwise you can wait.

If that's all you wanted to know, check out.  Glad I could help.  If you want to more though, keep reading.

So why is this great?

Threaded conversations are significantly easier for readers and participants to follow, and so all things being equal, you want to integrate them into any website that intends to foster community discussion.  Originally this meant finding a programmer to integrate a message board application into your website.  This became easier and easier over time, and now products like Disqus Comments make it almost trivial to add to a website.

However to have a major player like Google come to the table with a easily pluggable conversation module for websites means a couple of amazing things:

The power of Google's user base

The footprint of Google means that you don't have to ask your visitors to register, they probably already have a google account for the purposes of using gmail or some other task.  Much like when you add Facebook Connect to your website, suddenly you have hundreds of million registered users.

The vision of Google's developers

Whatever your critiques of Google's products, they're adding significant features for free.  Google Analytics has singlehandedly introduced web analytics to an entire swath of the web that never would have been able to afford an analytics product before, and it's featureset continues to set the bar ever higher for subscription analytics products.

Google Wave is like a discussion technology taken two iterations beyond the current state of the art.  With features like real-time discussions that update simultaneously across multiple websites, a single interface to bring all your conversations together, and the ability to let a single conversation bridge multiple channels (message boards, instant messenger, and email), Google Wave puts incredible power into a free product that most of the Internet already has a login for.

The ability to push Google Wave into existing user behavior

It's no small surprise that the way Gmail users think of Instant Messenger has changed because of the way Google has integrated it into Gmail's environment.  Once you start chatting through a Google product, you become used to the fact that those conversations are archived and searchable, just like you expect email to be.  In fact if you search Gmail for a word or phrase that appears in a chat and an old email thread, the results for both will be displayed.

Google can take the power of it's Gmail user base and start integrating Google Wave into its functionality.  If they do it well, nobody will even notice until they get the delight of the product doing something helpful for them without asking.

If you need to know more about the blow-by-blow features of Google Wave, head over to Lifehacker and check out their highlight reel of Google Wave features.

In the meantime, chill.  Unless you're a publisher of web-based discussion software, in which case you should get the hammer and break the glass.  Your business just got one-upped by the 800 lb gorilla.

Some changes

A number of changes are coming to my professional blog:

1. I'm slowly moving my Facebook presence from my personal identity to my Facebook Fan page.  If you and I are only peripherally connected and are friends on Facebook, you might get more out of our relationship if you friend my fan page and de-friend me personally.  I promise if something truly momentous happens in my life (kids, cancer, lottery, world series of poker bracelet) I'll announce it on my fan page.
2. A number of the PR/association folks who follow me aren't interested in the nonprofit website measurement work, and vice versa.  So I'll be writing two articles (or more) a week to serve both audiences.
3. I'll be publishing my newsletter on Tuesday mornings, not Monday to give me time to write all this well on Monday.

I've arrived at these decisions after listening and soliciting your valuable feedback.  Please keep it coming!

Experienced web talent available!

Are you looking for someone with fifteen years of experience web development, online strategy, and infrastructure management? Do you want someone whose actually managed a website with more than 11,000 pages of content and eight million pageviews per year? The economic downturn has hit the nonprofit sector hard, and one of my colleagues at the Human Rights Campaign was the latest casualty. She strategized and executed campaigns in all forms of digital media (traditional websites, e-mail campaigns, and social media) and has also got significant experience doing online get out the vote work. If you're interested in interviewing this person formally or informally, drop me a note and I'll introduce you.

Someone you should read: Shayna Englin

I meant to plug this a while ago, but I'm back in DC and catching up with an old colleague, Shayna Englin.  In advance of seeing her, I went to her site and notice she plugged Jason's and my latest article about measuring social media.

I know people just love to cross-promote each other just for the links, so instead of telling you to go read her stuff, let me be more specific: go check out her "Three Things" column.  Roughly each week she summarizes something complex into three concrete things you should understand about a topic.  It's a great way to learn something practical in a very short amount of time.  You can bookmark her category page, or subscribe via RSS or e-mail.  You won't regret it.

A brief interlude

A quick break from all this professionalism to tell you my wife had our second baby last week, "Rivaleah Linda Imber Safdar".  Everyone is doing fine!