Groundswell is so far the best book on social media I’ve ever read. Written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (and recently updated), the book is a must read for anyone who pieces together coherant communications strategies.

My favorite quote — “concentrate on the relationships, not the technologies” — supports the book’s four steps to creating strategies: (1) people, (2) objectives, (3) strategy, and (4) technology. It also sets the stage for a brilliant section on engaging audiences online based on the communications problem you face:

• Awareness (people don’t know about you): Try a viral video, assuming you can come up with a brilliant idea that grabs your audience’s attention.
• Word-of-mouth (you need people to talk to each other): If you want to be hot and have people talking about how hot you are, go with Facebook, Twitter, or other appropriate social networks.
• Complexity (you have complicated problems to communicate): Start blogging to reach multiple sets of customers or explain your complex products or services. As an added bonus, blog posts often get featured in traditional media and web searches favor them.
• Accessibility (your audience members are stubbornly insistent on listening to each other, not you): Create an online community where your audience members can support one another or join one they’ve already created for themselves.

Naturally, when I ran across a video interview of Ms. Li about focusing on online relationships, not technologies, I had to pick it for February 2012 video clip of the month. As an added bonus, the video ends with practical advice for parents raising children in the digital age. Enjoy it below (and read or reread the updated Groundswell if you haven’t already)!

You turn! Do you think concentrating on relationships is good advice? Please share your comments.

Today, every organization is a global brand. Thanks to Web 2.0, people from around the world can access your content, discover and interact with other members of your online communities, and add their own voice to the conversation.

This is exciting but also a little unnerving. How do you relate to people from another culture? What do you say, or not say, to start a conversation off right? Are there cultural taboos you need to be aware of?

Fortunately, a psychologist named Dr. Geert Hofstede set out to answer these types of questions for IBM in the 1970s and his research on cultures and their value systems remains an enormous help in understanding cultural differences. Because even genuinely small cultural mistakes can have enormous consequences, his dimensions of culture framework should be required reading for all social media practitioners.

The dimensions of culture are:

• Power distance: This dimension reflects how a society handles inequalities among people. People in societies with a high power distance (e.g., Malaysia, Guatemala, the Philippines, etc.) accept a hierarchical order where everybody has a place, and the hierarchical order requires no justification. In societies with low power distance (e.g., Austria, Israel, Denmark, etc.), people strive to equalise the distribution of power and demand justification for inequalities of power.
• Individualism vs. collectivism: Societies on the high side of this dimension (e.g., the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, etc.) believe individuals should take care of themselves and their immediate families only. Societies on the low end (e.g., Guatemala, Ecuador, Pakistan, etc.) prefer tightly-knit social frameworks where individuals can expect their relatives or members of a particular in-group to look after them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.
• Uncertainty avoidance: This dimension is about how a society deals with ambiguity. Should people try to control the future or just let it happen? Societies exhibiting strong uncertainty avoidance (e.g., Greece, Portugal, Guatemala, etc.) maintain rigid codes of belief and behaviour and are intolerant of unorthodox behavior and ideas. Societies on the low end maintain a more relaxed attitude and value practice over principles (e.g., Denmark, Jamaica, Singapore, etc.)
• Masculinity vs. femininity: The masculinity side of this dimension (e.g., Japan, Hungary, Venezuela, etc.) represents a preference in society for achievement, heroism, assertiveness, and material reward for success. Society at large is more competitive. Its opposite, femininity (e.g., Norway, Sweden, Costa Rica, etc.), stands for a preference for cooperation, modesty, caring for the weak, and quality of life. Society at large is more consensus-oriented.
• Long-term vs. short-term orientation: This dimension is about a society’s search for virtue. Societies with a short-term orientation (e.g., United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Venezuela, etc.) strive to establish absolute truth. Their people exhibit great respect for traditions, save little for the future, and focus on achieving quick results. Societies with a long-term orientation (e.g., China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc.) believe truth depends on situation, context, and time. Their people adapt traditions quickly to changed conditions, tend to save and invest money, and look to the long term for achieving results.
• Indulgence vs. restraint (the recently added sixth dimension): Societies with high indulgence (e.g., Venezuela, Mexico, El Salvador, etc.) believe in enjoying leisure and allow relatively free gratification of human drives. Societies with high restraint (e.g., Ukraine, Latvia, Egypt, etc.) suppress gratification and live under strict social norms.

Pretty enlightening, huh! When you grow up in a culture, it’s pretty easy to take your norms of behavior for granted and not realize there are so many completely different ways to perceive things. Check out the free online tool at the Geert Hofstede website where you can compare two cultures against each other and learn more.

Which dimension of culture do you think sparks the most cultural misunderstanding?

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” is a Gertrude Stein quote we’ve all heard reminding us things are what they are no matter what you call them.

In the communications world, however, the term “influencer” doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing. One communications practitioner may define and apply the influencer concept in a way worlds apart from a second practitioner, though both are trying to harness influencers to change ideas, motivate new behaviors,  reach potential buyers, etc. one of three ways:

• Communicating to influencers, to increase awareness of a brand or cause within the influencer community
• Communicating through influencers, using influencers to increase awareness of a brand or cause amongst focal groups/target markets
• Communicating with influencers, turning influencers into advocates of the brand or cause

Obviously, strategies to harness influencers would be very different depending on how you intend to tap them, not to mention who you think they are. Nevertheless, the term influencer seems to be thrown around indiscriminately these days as communications practitioners adjust to changes in technology, especially social media.

My personal take on the influencer equation is definitions/contexts generally lump into three broad categories:

• Household names: celebrities, musicians, artists, and politicians who are assumed to drive thought and action of people they have no direct association with.
• Thought leaders: networked, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable people who can ignite passion for your brand or cause in your community (otherwise known as tastemakers, social precincts, opinion leaders, uberinfluencers, 1 percenters [but not in the Occupy Wall Street context], 10 percenters, focusers, etc.) These people personally know the people they influence, although the ties that bind them may be weak.
• Interpersonal influencers: people who focal groups/target markets regularly interact with and who influence their decisions (e.g., neighbors, friends, parents, teachers, coworkers, religious leaders, etc.). These people may live in relative obscurity within their communities. They, however, know well the people they influence and the ties that bind them are strong.

Bottom line? Influencers are not the same, even if communications practitioners refer to them with the same name.

What do you think of influencers? Are they the best route to a focal group/target market? Please share your ideas in the comments section.

A Communications 301 rule of thumb is “information alone doesn’t change behavior.” You might have brilliant left-brained arguments about why people should do something, but if you don’t touch them emotionally, they won’t be swayed.

O.K., maybe they’ll give you a thumbs up, but they won’t act.

Raising awareness is only effective in changing behavior when you have the time and resources to reach the saturation point of “everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows.”

Almost always you do not.

To inspire action, you need to unite an idea with an emotion.  Then you need to make sure people have the necessary tools and community support to carry out your vision.

Success involves the following six principles:

• Personal: People have to have a reason to care about your cause. You need to explain what the cost of failing to act will be on them as individuals and on society as a whole. Make sure to highlight real people and real stories.
• Direct. You have to explain how people can help, tell them what you want them to do and when, and give them the tools they need to do what’s needed easily.
• Transparent. If you share enough information about your cause—that’s personal and direct (see above) and transparent—a community can develop around it. Not only will this community give your supporters a sense of solidarity and connectedness, it can achieve something great that they couldn’t achieve through individual effort.
• Hubbed. To grow your community and spur productive collaboration, you need to cultivate and connect social precincts, enthusiastic, networked, and knowledgeable people who can ignite passion for your cause. Only 3 to 5 percent of your community, these leaders are the hubs connecting and inspiring individuals and settings direction for the collaborative effort.
• Independent. Independence means individuals can have the freedom to choose the task that suits their ability, time, or interest—no matter where they are or whoever else may be posting content at that time. No coordination or pre-existing relationship is required.
• Close-Knit. Remember it’s all about connecting people to your cause, building relationships, and sharing and improving ideas. Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of focusing on technology and forgetting about humanity. The technology you use doesn’t matter as long as it allows your community to create a group identify, a culture of sharing and trust, and appropriate cultural norms.

What do you think about my post above? What do you think about unleashing crowds to create change? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

How can you turn a leaderless communications swarm into a collaborative online community that achieves results? That’s the zillion dollar question for 2012. As my runner up for January 2012 video clip of the month below shows (and anybody who has been following the news knows), self-directed communications swarms fueled many of the top news events of 2011.

While my runner up for video clip of the month above is inspiring, especially on the New Year, my main pick is enlightening. It features Roan Yong, a social collaboration expert from Singapore, on why online collaboration fails and how gamification can help.

Yong argues a leaderless communications swarm is a great starting point, but a leaderless swarm can’t think strategically to solve a problem. To turn collective action into productive collaboration, he says you need to tap and connect the tribal leaders: the 1 percent. To empower them to lead the communications swarm, he argues you need to gamify collaboration. In a blog post Yong wrote about his presentation, he explained:

“To gamify collaboration, we need to make collaborative task visible so that people can have the freedom to choose the task that suits their ability, time, or interest. We need to make collaborators’ strengths and weaknesses visible so that people can form collaboration team with complimentary skill set. And we need to give fair incentives based on contributions.”

Yong also shared his PowerPoint from his presentation online, which (along with his blog post) is also a great read if you don’t have a half hour to absorb the must know information in the video.

Fascinating stuff. Does Yong have “the answer” to leading online communities? Time will tell. Either way, 2012 definitely belongs to organizations and causes that can tap online communities to solve problems.

What do you think of using gamification to make online collaboration work? Do you think communications swarms need a leader to produce results? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

After Tripoli fell to anti-Gaddafi forces last August, I remembered a particularly clairvoyant blog post/radio interview I ran across a couple of months earlier. The blog post/radio interview gave a spot on analysis of how information could be used to empower Libyans to take back their own country.

When I went back to the blog to find out if its author had any new predictions, I found out the Mountain Runner blog was on hiatus because its author had recently become executive director of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (ACPD). I was relieved to learn somebody was at the helm who understood social media’s power to create communications swarms and was presumably on top of implications for foreign publics’ support of U.S. culture, values, policies, and interests.

To my shock and surprise, however, I ran across a tweet and blog post just before Christmas indicating the ACPD was being abolished after 63 years of service. Apparently, due to efforts to balance the federal budget, the ACPD was not reauthorized by Congress and ceased operations on Dec. 16, 2011. So what happened to its visionary executive director? Matt Armstrong was laid off just a little over a week before Christmas.

Ho ho ho!!!

If Congress’s actions really are guided by budget-cutting zeal versus a strategic reorganization of U.S. public diplomacy and strategic communications initiatives (as far as I can find out, the new Integrated Strategic Counterterrorism Communications Initiative has nothing to do with this), we’re in trouble as a country. Today, more than ever people unfriendly to U.S. culture, values, policies, and interests have the potential to take control of the political dialogue across geographic boundaries. All they need is passion, Internet or mobile connectivity, and social media savvy to spread their messages and potentially fuel mass collaboration in instigating change (or wreaking havoc as the case may be).

I, for one, would sleep a lot better knowing Congress had a team advising it on making sure U.S. Government activities that intend to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics break free of conventional wisdom, recognize discontinuity, and react to change.  Until we discover some sort of grand strategy behind Congress’s move, however, we’re left to find comfort in the fact the U.S. Department of State is abandoning its Cold War mindset only now.

Do you think cutting the ACPD was a good cost-cutting measure? Please feel free to challenge my analysis in the comments section.

A dozen or more New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers could get dooced for posting offensive comments on Facebook calling West Indian Day parade-goers in Brooklyn “savages,” “filth,” and “animals.” (Dooced, in case you don’t know, means fired from one’s job as a result of one’s actions on the Internet.)

The New York Times reported last week at least 20 comments maligning parade-goers on a “No More West Indian Day Detail” Facebook page were from NYPD officers. The page, dedicated to the unpleasantness of working during the annual event, disappeared from public view just days after a defence lawyer for a man arrested during the parade found it, but not before the attorney saved all the data.

Almost as disturbing as the hateful speech officers allegedly used is the fact the NYPD may not have an official social media policy. New York Radio Station WNYC 93.9 FM reported Paul Browne, spokesman for the NYPD, could not confirm one existed.

Huh!

You could understand that if we were talking about some rural community but the NYPD? Come on!

While it may be obvious to some that you shouldn’t post anything anywhere online you wouldn’t want your grandmother, boss, or religious leader to read, it isn’t obvious to everyone. Besides spelling out proper employee conduct, a social media policy is a must for empowering your employees to excel in social media on behalf of your institution.

Kim Stephens, writer of the idisaster 2.0 blog, wrote an extremely informative post I could not begin to improve upon on the 36 Items to include in Government Social Media policies. My advice to the NYPD (and any other government entity) is to check out her post and develop one!

A teenager’s snarky, potty-mouthed tweet about Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback contains important Web 2.0 lessons for us all:

1. Anything you write on social media, no matter how small your audience, has the potential to go viral.
2. Trying to control your message behind the scenes is not only futile, it could backfire in a big way.

Check out the CNN video below, my pick for December 2011 video clip of the month, on the latest most-famous tweet in the United States. To recap, Emma Sullivan, an 18-year-old high school student, sent a tweet to her friends (she had around 60 Twitter followers at the time) talking trash about meeting Brownback at a school-sponsored Kansas Youth in Government trip to Topeka.  Her tweet indicated she gave Brownback a piece of her mind, but she actually was just in the audience and didn’t personally meet him. An over zealous aide to Brownback, however, spotted the tweet and had Sullivan’s principal contacted to order Sullivan to write the governor an apology.

Then Sullivan’s older sister called the press, Brownback ended up apologizing to Emma for the “over-reaction” of his staff, and the principal dropped the whole thing. Now Sullivan has almost 16,000 Twitter followers, and Brownback has gone from an object of fun for a few teens to a case study in poor Web 2.0 communications practices.

Brownback’s staff members should never have tried to intimidate an online critic (remember free speech), especially over a tweet virtually no one saw. They could easily have ignored the tweet or engaged with Sullivan on Twitter, acknowledging her right to complain, asking for clarity on her position, and assessing what they could do to make her feel better about her experience. As I wrote in September, engaging with online critics can be an opportunity to build goodwill.

Brownback had a golden opportunity to show he is a class act. Instead, he garnered national derision and comparisons to the beyond-paranoid autocratic rulers of Thailand. He learned the hard way Web 2.0 means, as the ironically geographically relevant saying goes, we are not in Kansas anymore.

Enjoy the CNN video below!

Your turn? What do you think Brownback’s staff should have done?

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.”
—Melody Beattie

Even in tough times like these, we all can count our blessings on Thanksgiving. We can be thankful for our family, the accident of our birth in a nation with abundant food and water, and a roof over our head. We also can be thankful we are not one of the millions of people around the world (nearly 44 million in 2010) forced to flee their homes as a result of armed conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations.

What can these vulnerable people be thankful for?

You!

Yes, a minuscule portion of the taxes you and citizens of other donor countries pay supports the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which protects, houses, feeds, educates, and opens the door to a new life for refugees and people who have been displaced within their own countries. But for just $5 (less than what you might pay for lunch), you can also join the Blue Key Campaign and show your support for the world’s most vulnerable people and the UNHCR staffers who work tirelessly to safeguard their rights and well-being.

For your $5 donation, you get a Blue Key pin or pendant symbolizing our power to help them open the door to a new home and a new future.

I joined the Blue Key Campaign after learning more about it from my friend Shonali Burke who is leading an effort to organize bloggers on behalf of USA for UNHCR (a U.S.-based 501(c)(3) that raises awareness and funds for the Geneva-based UNHCR). She’s asking bloggers to write posts like this one, wear their Blue Key to show their support, spread the word on Facebook and Twitter (using the #bluekey hashtag), and ask everyone they know in the United States to get their own Blue Key for $5.

Getting back to the subject of Thanksgiving…

When the pastor of our church asked my 4-year-old daughter last Sunday what she is thankful for, she answered, “my dog.” She later explained she is thankful loving people rescued him, so we could have him to love. (You can see our dog, a former stray we obtained from Beagle Rescue of Southern Maryland, in the photo above sporting two Blue Keys.)

You can only imagine the depth of gratitude another 4-year-old child would feel for the loving people who helped rescue her mommy or daddy, so she could have them to love.

Just $5 is such a trivial price to pay to open the door to a new life. So spread the gratitude. Share the love. Get your key right away, and ask those at your Thanksgiving table to do the same!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Your turn! Do you have any special Thanksgiving stories or thoughts about the Blue Key Campaign?

Chilling video images surfaced online today showing a campus police officer at the University of California, Davis, calmly pepper spraying the faces of Occupy Wall Street protesters seated quietly in a line with their arms interlocked. The images, captured with cellphones by several onlookers, quickly spread virally across the Internet.

As unsettling as the video images are, the keyword for me in the news event is onlookers plural.

It reminded me of the ridiculous reprimand the Associated Press (AP) gave its staffers earlier this week for sending out breaking news over their Twitter accounts instead of saving it for the company’s traditional wire-service subscribers—even though the news in question was the arrest of AP staffers at the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York.

“In relation to AP staff being taken into custody at the Occupy Wall Street story, we’ve had a breakdown in staff sticking to policies around social media and everyone needs to get with their folks now to tell them to knock it off. We have had staff tweet – BEFORE THE MATERIAL WAS ON THE WIRE – that staff were arrested.”

With multiple people at major news events equipped with cell phones and Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts, the AP faces a losing battle sitting on news until a full story can be written and published on its regular wire.  A “wire first, tweet later” policy is just asking for citizen journalists to scoop the AP, making it a channel for stale news.

I haven’t seen any reports of Associated Press staffers covering the events at UC Davis. If they did, they would have been better served by the advice of the Interchange Project:

“There is nothing wrong with breaking news on Twitter and then sending out additional tweets with links to more info in the future. This doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition. Break the news on Twitter, write a short wire post and then send out another tweet with more info. Simple.”

Simple if you have dealt with reality and are willing to disseminate quickly on social media the best content you and citizen journalists produce.

Not so simple if you forgot breaking news to the public is job one.

Your turn? Do you think people will turn to the AP for news on major events if its stories are stale compared to the tweets, photos, Facebook updates, and videos citizen journalists post to social media? Is sitting on news in hopes of a scoop hours down the line in the best interests of the AP’s audience, the public? 

I hit the Klout jackpot this week. No, my Klout score of 40 isn’t suddenly up. Klout’s Marketing Manager Megan Berry personally left an incredibly insightful comment on my blog. Her comment isn’t gold to me because of the ego boost (O.K., maybe a little). It’s gold because it plainly illustrates the fallacy of Klout’s claim to be “the standard for influence.” Here’s how Berry summarized how Klout scores work:

“1. Influence isn’t about you, it’s about your audience. We believe influence is the ability to drive action. You can tweet, post, blog, and be witty and insightful to your heart’s content, but influence begins when someone takes action on your content. This could be retweeting, commenting, liking, sharing, responding, or doing a handstand of joy (the latter is harder to measure). In reality, you have your audience and connections to thank for your influence. 2. Everyone (and anyone) can help your Klout. Your grandmother liking your Facebook status updates? That’s Klout. Your friend from high school congratulating you on your recent job change? That’s Klout. Your network commenting and discussing your latest blog post? That’s Klout. Whenever someone is influenced by you (and we can measure that), it helps your Klout Score.

“3. Yes, quality and breadth matter. All things being equal, having Barack Obama react to your content means more than if I do. All things being equal, having more people respond to your content raises your Score. The Klout Score is a combination of all of these factors: the number of people you influence, how much you influence them and how influential they are.”

As a communicator with a background in changing people’s ideas and behaviors, her explanation blew me away!

First of all, from a big picture perspective, I suspect Klout and its perk-pushing commercial customers envision social networks very differently from me. As I’ve written about many times, social networks are enabling swarms, self-organizing communities, to form around a common interest and fuel mass collaboration (a disruptive technology shift for the field of communications and just about every other business function). Klout and its commercial customers, however, seem to see social networks as just another communications channel for distributing messages.

More specifically, here’s the problem I have with Berry’s logic:

Klout measures influence by output, rather than outgrowths or outcomes. The examples Berry cite demonstrating your influence in the eyes of Klout—people “retweeting, commenting, liking, sharing, responding” to your content—are all outputs and have no relationship to whether your target audience received your message (outgrowth) and acted upon it in the way you wanted (outcome). To Berry’s credit, she does admit it’s hard to measure whether somebody does a handstand of joy after reading your content. But just because measuring outgrowths and outcomes is hard, doesn’t elevate the importance of outputs. After all, should people who tweet or post Facebook updates all day at work have high Klout? Or does that really diminish their reputation and influence?

Information alone does not change ideas or influence action. The examples Berry cite demonstrating your influence in the eyes of Klout—people “retweeting, commenting, liking, sharing, responding” to your content—also have little impact on changing ideas or influencing action, especially if your desired outcome costs a lot of money or has a high risk. To effect meaningful change, your messages need to give people a sense of self efficacy or invoke social pressure/community norms among other things. In other words, you need a passionate swarm united around a common interest. The examples Berry sites—“your grandmother liking your Facebook status” or “your friend from high school congratulating you on your recent job change”—have nothing to do with this.

Klout doesn’t consider context and passion. Berry says President Obama reacting to your content means more than her reaction, implying interacting with people with high Klout raises your own. Klout, however, doesn’t seem to measure how relevant your message is to your audience. President Obama couldn’t influence me on hiring a chauffeur (like he would try) because I am not in the market for one. These days, context is king. For context to be meaningful from a business perspective, your messages need to have a business-relevant purpose that a swarm will rally around. In other words, no context + no passion = no influence.

Klout doesn’t consider the strong-tie phenomena. The New Yorker Staff Writer Malcolm Gladwell sparked a firestorm of criticism when he claimed—wrongly—revolutions won’t be tweeted because online communities have weak ties. While Gladwell underestimated the power of passion and common interest to bind strangers together online, his point about weak ties is still valid and applicable to Klout. Strong ties bind a college student sharing updates on Facebook with his small close-knit circle of friends.  Weak ties, however, bind his roommate who shares on Facebook (or Twitter) with 500+ people he wouldn’t recognize if he passed on the street. Klout seems to treat all network ties as equal, thereby creating dubious influence measures. Obviously, the teenager with strong ties would have better luck convincing his online friends to use a designated driver before a night on the town. In other words, low or no passion + potential resistance = strong ties as a must.

As far as I am concerned, businesses who rely on Klout to disseminate messages (or products as Klout perks) risk wasting time on “provide and pray,” what a recent Harvard Business Review called the worst social media practice:

“Leaders and managers provide access to a social technology, and then pray that a community forms and that community interactions somehow lead to business value. In most cases, adoption never really materializes; communities may form, but their activity is not considered valuable to the organization. ”

Axe hair jell anyone (see video below)?

What do you think of Klout scores? Do you think outputs, strong ties, passion, or purpose matter?

A thought-provoking exchange in the comments on Danny Brown’s marketing blog recently caught my eye, inspiring my pick for November 2011 video clip of the month. From Brown:

“@RichBecker Sweet Lord, seriously, mate? A professor grades based on Klout? How screwed up is that?

“You nailed it with the dehumanization of the online (and, to a degree, offline) populace, mate. By encouraging people to only connect with “influencers”, as decreed by Klout and their screwy algorithm, we’re essentially creating the equivalent of the Aryan nation dream from 60 years ago.

“Sad times indeed.”

His comment was in response to one from Rich Becker, author of the CopyWrite, Ink blog and writing, editing, and social media professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.  A ton of negative blog posts have been written about Klout this week after the influence metrics service released a new algorithm, causing many users’ scores to drop 15 or more points (mine personally dropped 16) and some heavy Facebook users’ scores to rise. Many are complaining the new algorithm rewards people for posting mindless information on Facebook or ignoring everybody with low Klout scores on Twitter. From Becker:

“Danny,

“I find myself growing more concerned about Klout, especially in the way some people use it. The real advent of social media is that it allowed people to connect, especially those who would not otherwise connect.

“With scoring systems like Klout, which is taken more seriously than I ever imagined it would be, it disrupts those early benefits by reinforcing a new tier of elitism and disconnect. This is especially true with the new algorithm because engaging with people who have lower scores can lower a score. (Not that I care, but some people do).

“I know most people dismiss is outright, and I certainly wish I could. But the truth is that this service is being applied in the worst possible way by a growing number of people. I’ve read articles of otherwise respectable companies that do look at Klout scores for hiring purposes. I’ve seen people (people we know) alter their network accounts to earn better scores by ignoring people with lower scores or unfollowing them outright. And just yesterday, learned about a professor who bases a portion of his students’ grade on their Klout score. This wasn’t just a random professor or story. It was in the Wall Street Journal.

“I’ve never been a fan of Klout, but mostly because it overreaches in selling its own relevance. But lately, it has become much harder to not think of the system (not the people who work there) as truly evil in how it elevates vanity. This really presents a problem for me because, on one hand, I’m not really an anti-anything kind of person. But on the other, this does have some tangible and negative ramifications because it dehumanizes people. When I look at how Klout it used, I always get the feeling at this is a great wrongness that needs to be keep in check or could be adopting in any number of ways I’ve mentioned above.

“Thanks for continuing to cover it. I often have mixed feelings about whether or not I want to risk giving them more exposure.

“All my best, Rich”

I did a little Googling after reading the exchange and found more on the professor grading based on Klout. The marketing professor, Scott Galloway of New York University (NYU) Leonard N. Stern School of Business (@profgalloway) on Twitter, is shown in minute 3:18 of my video clip of the month threatening to publicly humiliate his students with the lowest Klout scores. A post on NYU Stern’s website elaborates, noting the top five students in his Brand Strategy class at mid-semester won an all expenses paid trip to Shanghai, China, to participate in a social media clinic.  The top students at mid-semester were Keren Mizrahi, on Twitter as @KerenRM; Johanna Pesso, on Twitter as @JohannaP83; Ari Wolfe, on Twitter as @Eflow03; Asha Shivaji, on Twitter as @AshaLS; and Dorottya Csegezi, on Twitter as @doroteee.

I checked today’s Klout scores (Nov. 1, 2011) for Professor Galloway and his trip winners. All of them except one has a higher Klout score than Professor Galloway. The Klout score of the one exception is just one point lower. Their Klout score rankings today are:

• Asha Shivaji: 54
• Ari Wolfe: 52
• Keren Mizrahi: 51
• Dorottya Csegezi: 50
• Professor Scott Galloway: 48
• Johanna Pesso: 47

I find it ironic that the star students of a professor who designed a course on the importance of showing “how important you are” (NYU post quotes) are likely to always outshine him under Klout’s new algorithm.  I can’t be the only one who thinks it’s crazy to believe graduate students have more influence than their marketing professor (especially one at a major university).

To rise above his star students under Klout’s new algorithm, however, Professor Galloway must choose to converse exclusively online with people with top Klout scores, ignoring many of his students and certainly most new ones. He also might consider talking about puppies and what he eats for lunch every day on Facebook. Neither option is very professorial, at least in my book.

What a funny (or sad) twist of fate.

Enjoy the video below (with the NYU class at minute 3:18).

What are your thoughts? Do you think professors should grade based on Klout? How much weight do you put into Klout and the other scoring systems?

What do public officials and narco gangs have in common? Usually nothing. But in Mexico, both have rallied against citizens’ attempts to use social media to warn others about cartel checkpoints, shootouts, grenade attacks, and other public safety concerns.

Narco gangs see social media as a threat to their hold on power, while public officials complain the new technologies spread rumors. In fact, several Mexican states are considering laws criminalizing the sowing of “panic” on social networking sites.

This paradox endangers ordinary Mexicans who often cannot turn to the traditional media for information on which “no-go zones” to avoid to stay safe. In many parts of the country, especially in the north, media outlets have implemented a self-imposed blackout of coverage of drug violence.

With public safety information hard to come by, difficult to verify, and dangerous to pass along, what should ordinary Mexicans do? Can social media-empowered citizen journalists make a difference? Should they try? To explore this issue, I turned to Patrice Cloutier, a Canadian public servant specializing in emergency management and crisis communications and author of the Crisis Comms Command blog. His answers to my questions suggest the possibility of a Mexican revolution—where ordinary citizens band together to use social media (like the “Arab Spring”) to liberate themselves from tyranny (according to the BorderlandBeat blog, some Mexican villages have been successful at doing just that).

Q: How can Mexicans living in areas with narco gangs best use social media to keep themselves and their communities safe?

A: Social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, and SMS text message, are invaluable tools for fostering community safety. As alerting tools, they can let residents know when cartel activity has been detected in a neighbourhood, village, or area. But they must be twinned with a kind of “neighbourhood watch” organization to get actual eyeballs watching the streets.

Social media also can serve as a support mechanism for communities impacted by cartel violence. It enables online communities to coalesce rapidly to speed recovery efforts (e.g., donations, volunteer coordination, support for victims’ families, etc.).

Q: How can the risks and dangers inherent in using social networks to crowdsource public safety be minimized?

A: It’s hard for us to imagine what life must be like in Mexican communities facing bloody drug cartel violence. We live in very safe communities. In Mexico, drug violence has killed some 40,000 people in the past five years, many of them innocent civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Communities live under fear, police corruption, and brutality, and the distinction between good and bad guys is not always clear. Yet a few brave souls who recognize the value of crowdsourcing crime information are risking their personal security to help communities combat the cartel scourge. Many Mexicans, however, are afraid to join them because they know anonymity is hard to preserve on social networking sites.

To protect themselves and their communities, Mexicans need to use intermediaries to sanitize the provenance of crime reports, working with reputable nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for support. Promoting the resulting crowdsourced maps and wikis would add extra protection by making the information as ubiquitous as possible, reducing the temptation of drug cartels to target civilians because the information would still be widely accessible despite retributions.

Q: What are the best ways public officials can prevent false rumors from creating chaos?

A: The only way public officials can prevent the spread of false information online is to be on the same social networking sites where rumours are spread. That means constantly monitoring social networking sites and having a strong online presence to correct online rumours. This might not be enough, however, when local or state officials themselves lack credibility because they are in the pay of cartels or are just inept. In such cases, whatever they say will likely be ignored.

At the same time, encouraging as many citizens as possible to crowdsource public safety information enables social media’s “self-correction” factor to take effect. People who spread false rumours and incorrect information on purpose will be quickly shunned and marginalized. Nobody will listen to them moving forward. But, as I mentioned before, before crowdsourcing can gain critical mass, Mexicans need access to intermediaries to sanitize the provenance of reports and reputable NGOs to help validate information.

Q: When does using social media to promote public safety become too dangerous?

A: It’s already dangerous for Mexican journalists and citizens to point fingers at the cartels, no matter what communications platform they use to do it. Just this week the United Nations named Mexico the fifth most dangerous place in the world for journalists.

I believe, however, social networks are the most powerful tool Mexicans have to fight drug cartels short of picking up guns and setting up village militias to confront them. The power is in the cloud and in the crowd. You can not shut up the whole population once, to paraphrase crowdsourcing guru Clay Shirkey, you reach the level of shared awareness where “everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows.”

Mexicans have shown themselves to be a very resilient people. I am confident they will survive the current crisis too. With the help of intermediaries and NGOs, they can harness the power of social networks to band together to rid their communities of drug cartels. A new horizon for Mexico is within their reach.

Personal note to Patrice:  Thank you for doing this! You’ve provided extremely invaluable information!

Disclosure: Some of my former employers and clients work in the anti-corruption arena.

Your turn? What do you think ordinary Mexicans should do to protect themselves and their loved ones from bloody narco gang violence?

Every now and then one of my posts hits the search engine jackpot.

To my dismay, my first post to garner a large amount of search engine traffic was about Twitter and pornography. Because a lot of people typing the keywords “Twitter” and “pornography into search engines arrived at that post, it quickly became one of the top 10 most popular posts of all time on my website. It maintained this ranking for months despite getting minimal views and tweets from my regular readers when I first wrote  it.

In the last two months, two newer posts have hit the search engine jackpot:

• Future is in Creating Strategies, Not Copying Tactics has been getting one to 10 views a day from people searching using “Alice in Wonderland” and “Cheshire cat” or “cat” as keywords.
• Video Clip of the Month: Context, Not Content, is King has been getting one to 10 views a day from people typing in some combination of “content,” “content,” “king,” and “social media.”

Obviously, the people who land on the “context is king” post have an interest in social media and my blog, while those who arrive at the post on strategies because they’re interested in Alice in Wonderland may not.  The lesson here? Search engine optimization (SEO)—making your site the best it can be, so you can get traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines—is a powerful tool.

I’m a big fan of Search Engine Land, an amazing blog with the latest SEO news, research and analysis, commentary and expert advice. I also love the Hubspot blog for its research-based tips and useful information on SEO copywriting and other inbound marketing topics (both sites are all white hat by the way).

After all, it’s much better to win the SEO jackpot on purpose with posts searchers want to see, not by accident with posts they don’t.

Almost a year and a half ago I wrote that “we are on the verge of a massive shift in the way we communicate and inspire action.” Last February, as I watched jubilant Egyptians celebrate the resignation of their 82-year-old former president, I asserted that paradigm shift had arrived.

Today, as I read news articles mocking the Occupy Wall Street protests spreading from Lower Manhattan to hundreds of cities and towns, I realize how many still aren’t visualizing the new paradigm: a self-directed (i.e., leaderless) communications swarm flowing in infinite directions and loops—but in a synchronized way.

A “news” article in the Washington Post asks:

“Can a leaderless group that relies on consensus find a way for so many people to agree on what comes next? Can it offer not only objections but also solutions? Can a radical protest evolve into a mainstream movement for change?”

Leaderless group? Consensus? We’re talking swarms. What we’re witnessing is ideas buzzing in patterns similar to those of bees. Bees use their “humming” to instinctively move in synchronous swarms when they are building a new nest or hive. These self-organized swarms use a bottom-up approach where very simple interactions between individuals develop into complex group movements.

Mobile technology combined with real-time web applications, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare, creates a buzz similar to the humming of these swarms. This buzz empowers people to align around a common interest, become inspired, and take action—nearly instantaneously and in unison without prior planning or forethought.

Swarms don’t need a leader. They don’t rely on consensus.

The New York Times Editorial Board gets at least the common interest inspiring the Occupy Wall Street protests:

“As the Occupy Wall Street protests spread from Lower Manhattan to Washington and other cities, the chattering classes keep complaining that the marchers lack a clear message and specific policy prescriptions. The message — and the solutions — should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention since the economy went into a recession that continues to sock the middle class while the rich have recovered and prospered. The problem is that no one in Washington has been listening.

“At this point, protest is the message: income inequality is grinding down that middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and threatening to create a permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people. On one level, the protesters, most of them young, are giving voice to a generation of lost opportunity.”

More journalists, politicians, and nonprofits need to take the Occupy Wall Street protests seriously, lack of common objectives and specific policy prescriptions or not. In the words of Geoff Livingston, whose blog posts are famous for applying timeless strategic principles to social media and Web 2.0 communications:

“Though dismissed, an opportunity is being missed with Occupy Wall Street. Nonprofits seeking to resolve issues of poverty and financial inequality should be leading the charge. Democrats who would naturally gravitate towards this series of issues — especially given tax debates of late — are avoiding Occupy Wall Street. Violence has tuned up the issue to new levels.

“The end result? More steam with bigger and more widespread protests.

“Conservative “anti-capitalism, socialist” spin isn’t going to make this one go away. Like the Arab Spring, like the Tea Party, like the angered Greeks, there is too much pain. No communications plan can fly in the face of a stakeholder groundswell centered on real problems. Occupy Wall Street is shaping the national debate.”

After all, would a swarm of bees need to be following a single leader, perhaps in a formation similar to geese, before you would take it seriously?

What do you think about Occupy Wall Street or social media-fueled swarms?