Never Forget a Password Again

I‘ve seen a couple of posts recently with people discussing various password managers, and I’m a bit suprised. I’ve been using a simple system for years that I figured was pretty common. I have a unique password for every site I visit, and I never forget what it is. I don’t rely on a password manager, so if I jump on a friend’s machine to access the Web, I’m never stuck. Here’s how it works.

1. I start with a short string that I use as the basis for every password–a mix of numbers and letters, but not special characters, since some systems don’t allow them. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, my base string is r7sk9.

2. For every site for which I create a password, I add a unique string derived from the name of the site. If, for example, the site is WordPress, my site string might be “wor”. If you just added those together, you’d have “worr7sk9”. If the site were Bank of America, the password using the same code would be “banr7sk9”.

Simple. But not sufficient if you’re worried about someone unlocking your code, and gaining access to all your accounts. So, you may decide you need some scheme to mix up the code in a way that you still won’t ever forget the code. Fortunately, the choices are endless.

1. You can just mix the site code with your base code by interspersing the letters, so it’s not as obvious if someone ever got one of your passwords. “ban” for bank of america might be a dead giveway. But bra7nsk9 isn’t quite so obvious–I just interspersed the first three letters of the site code into the base code.

2. Instead of using the first few letters of the site for the code, you can use the last few letters backward. Or use the first and last characters. Or some other combination that is not so obvious, but that you can use consistently with every site.

3. Instead of using the actual characters of the site, you can use characters from words that are indicated by the first, or last, letter of the site. IE: A is for apple, B is for banana–so your site code for Amazon might be “app”.

4. If you’re worried about frequently changing your passwords, you can just add a date code into your password. Like “8” in a particular slot if you plan to change your passwords yearly. Or maybe a month code if you want to change it monthly. Whenever you want to change your password, just increment the number. If you’re in the middle of changing all your passwords, and forget what you’ve changed and what you haven’t, no worries, you’re only one number, or one code increment off. You’ll figure it out.

There’s an endless number of schemes you can use to make your code unique for every website you visit, and yet easy for you to never forget. All you have to remember is the formula. A couple of hints:

1. Don’t use special characters. Some sites don’t allow them, and the last thing you want is one scheme for some sites, and another scheme for others, unless of course, you can keep two schemes straight in your head.

2. Try your scheme out with a number of different sites before you commit to it. You may run into trouble if you don’t vet the scheme and then run into a site for which it doesn’t work. The first scheme I tried was tailored for sites with at least two syllables, like Facebook, MySpace, Google. After I commited to it, I started coming across sites with only one syllable, and then I got tripped up. So make a list of 5-10 of the sites you use most often, and make sure your code works consistently in different cases.

3. Come up with a code that has a minimum of 8 characters when you include your site code. While many sites only require six, an increasing number require eight, and again, you want a system that works across all sites.

If you have any additional ideas, I’d love to hear them. As I said, I have a unique password for every site I use, and I never forget it, and never need a reminder.

10 Steps to Build Your Own Social Media A-Team

Over the past few years I’ve been working with a lot of enterprise companies, engaging with marketing teams that want to understand and integrate social media into their marketing programs. One of the first recommendations I make is to develop a social media A-team–a cross-functional team that distributes social media responsibility throughout the organization.

Typically, social media marketing is not “owned” by anyone. In some companies, it’s loosely managed under corporate communications or PR, in others, it’s driven by product managers, research, or customer support. But in most companies, social media initiatives are ad hoc programs operated by whomever happens to have an interest in social media–sometimes it’s just the guy who happens to have a Twitter account.

The challenge, of course, is that social media far transcends one marketing group, or even one business group. Social media issues cut across many areas of operation and management, and the lack of a coordinated team prevents companies from effectively leveraging opportunities, and often paralyzes them in a crisis. When an irate customer is starting a flame-war over the failure of your latest product, it’s not just a PR issue–it’s an engineering issue, a legal issue, a customer service issue too.

So the best way to lay a foundation for managing social media–before you start a needs assessment, or an RFP, or a procurement order for some kind of community platform–is to start a social media A-Team. It’s simple and painless, and costs only the time of the players involved. Here it is in ____ easy steps:

  1. Invite members. Ideally you should have a representative from each major department, in marketing and beyond: PR, marketing, sales, customer service, product development, channel marketing, legal, etc.
  2. Assign a relevant topical domain to each member that they can track in social media. If you’re in sales, you should be tracking competitive dialog, or dialog about your customers. If you’re in legal, track the dialog about legal issues regarding corporate involvement in social media.
  3. Assign a basic list of tasks for each member. Where are people talking about your topic online? What blogs? What communities? What groups on Facebook? What are people saying? What are the issues and trends? What are the opportunities to get involved?
  4. Leverage solutions for tracking social media discussions in each domain online. You can start with Google Alerts and Twitter Search–which allows RSS subscriptions. Your Marketing Engineer will keep track of these tools and provide training on how to set them up during your A-Team meetings. (This, by the way, is exactly the kind of scenario for which we developed SocialRep, so if it’s a big team and a big challenge, ask about our beta. But don’t buy into technology until you’ve started a process.)
  5. Create a space where this information can be easily collected online and shared with your group. Like a Facebook group page, or a space on your Intranet. Make sure it’s secure.
  6. Establish a regular meeting time to gather and discuss what’s been collected. When you start out, weekly face-to-face meetings are ideal. Make it a lunch group. When you’ve established a groove, and everyone knows what they’re up to–maybe after one quarter–move it to monthly.
  7. Use the regular meetings to listen what your team is discovering in the dialog. Start out just by listening and cataloging trends. What’s changing week-to-week? What dialogs are not changing? Where do the memes seem to be starting, and how do they spread?
  8. As you gain a better sense for the dialog driving your market, start to discuss with your team the kinds of opportunities and business objectives that might drive engagement. What kinds of market dialog should you be engaged with? What’s a waste of time, or even a danger to engage with? What kinds of brand attributes do you want to amplify online? How do this relate to the development of specific initiatives or social media policies.
  9. As your A-Team matures, you should assign at least one “SocialRep” for each customer community in your market. The SocialRep’s role is to aggregate and track the issues and dialogs driving conversation in the market, and to manage and coordinate engagement. Who’s responsible for responding to issues in this community? What’s the status of any issue that’s come up? What should the company’s approach to engagement for that community include?
  10. Bring on a “Marketing Engineer” responsible for provisioning the tools that will help your team stay agile. You want someone attached to the marketing department with a strong background in technology. For example, when Google unveils Friend Connect, this is the person who can get it up and running in an hour on your product evangelist’s blog. This is your dedicated engineering voice on your A-team.

I’m sure there are some great, easy ideas I’ve missed. If you have other ways you’re creating a group effort for managing social media across departmental silos, let me know.

Kmart Sponsored Post: Petty Politics Buries Debate

Pelea..fightThis whole debacle doesn’t need another opinion, but just when the fire seemed to be dying down, someone tossed in another bucket of gasoline. And now I want to go meta. If you’ve already been following the whole drama, drop down to the next drop cap.

In case you’re not a Twitter junkie or social media hound, there was a big dustup over the weekend over a sponsored blog post social media guru Chris Brogan wrote for Kmart. Basically, Kmart engaged a company called Izea to contract a group of influential bloggers to create a $500 shopping spree contest for their readers. Chris was given a $500 gift card to shop at Kmart and blog about it, and then invite his readers into a contest for their own $500 gift card.

I saw the original post Brogan wrote for Kmart when he tweeted it, and I was a little bit surprised. It was clearly labeled as a “sponsored post”, and the content of the post also made it clear he was carefully avoiding writing an advertorial. What surprised me was simply that it wasn’t what I expected after reading Chris’ social media blog for so long. A sponsored post for Kmart just didn’t seem to fit with my sense of Chris Brogan’s brand. Oh well. I don’t think anything Brogan did was unethical–he clearly disclosed that the post was sponsored, and he donated his own $500 shopping spree to Toys for Tots.

But over the weekend, I saw some tweets with links to Izea, the company that had facilitated the whole sponsored post campaign. There was a big link on their site touting the Kmart campaign, and its coverage in the media. Shortly after, Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester tweeted a string about the campaign, and the volcano erupted.

Kmart paid Shoemoney $500 resulting in buzz from paid blog post 300+ comments http://snipurl.com/7yi5w “Buying” social media is effective 4:37 AM Dec 13th from web

This may not be a scalable model however, as buying placements could reduce credibility of bloggers, reducing marketing inventory. 4:38 AM Dec 13th from web

Bottom Line: Expect more brands to ‘buy’ bloggers and tweeters as the economy dips, this truly is cost effective marketing 4:39 AM Dec 13th from web

What ensued was a rapid-fire string of tweets, followed by blog posts, followed by tweets referencing blog posts, with lots of incindiary charges and defenses. One commentator charged that Chris had sold his integrity for $500, while others questioned Kmart’s savviness in trying to buy content. And on and on it went. Chris explained his position at length, as did Jeremiah.

What bothers me about this whole drama is not about Chris writing a paid post for Kmart–he was totally transparent about it, which is a lot more than we can say for a lot of other bloggers, and even mainstream media. What bothers me is the way the debate is being carried out. There is an important question at the heart of this debate that professional bloggers need to address.

  • How do we get paid for the value we deliver?
  • How do we maintain the value we’re delivering in ways that don’t compromise our brand?
  • How do maintain our relationship and credibility with our readers?

Unfortunately, Chris was the current case study for this question being asked. Believe me, I know how much that sucks. But as much as the whole debacle may seem personal, we can’t afford to let it stay mired there. A depressing amount of the commentary was focused on decrying critics as “jealous”, or “uninformed”, or even “morons”. Others claimed that the criticism was a thinly veiled attack against Izea and its owner, who launched the controversial payperpost.com a few years ago. And one blogger claimed that Jeremiah doesn’t even have the right to bring up the questions he posed, because as an industry analyst, he’s only supposed to comment on industry trends, not venture into editorial.

When I see people questioning the validity of debate and shooting down critics in personal attacks, I worry about the health of our profession. Sure, it’s all human, and all to be expected. But damn. The whole point about social media is the opportunity for many voices to be heard, for larger dialogs that catalyze the synthesis of ideas. And right here, in our own back yard, we the brave pioneers couldn’t even manage to get to the deeper, substantive questions–questions over the relationship of trust between companies and consumers, between influencers and their communities, between consumers and their peers–questions that mainstream media have been hammering on for generations. We short-circuited the whole debate and chose sides. What a shame.

Image Credit: Paulo Brandão

The “No Shit” List: Resolutions for the Rest of Us

Stating the ObviousHere we are, just a couple of weeks from New Years. Millions of people are diligently working on their resolutions for 2009, millions more will come up with something a few minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve. As someone who has taken resolutions seriously, and also given up for years on the frustrations of constant goal setting, disappointment and readjustment, I’ve whittled my resolutions down to what I call the No Shit Principle.

No Shit is a double entendre. No shit as in “No Duh”, and No Shit as in “no BS”, or, no excuses. And that’s pretty much the long and the short of it. I whittle my resolutions down by two criteria, tasks so blindingly obvious and simple that any idiot could do them, and tasks so important that I can’t allow myself any excuses for not getting them done. Why those criteria? Because life is constantly dominated by Really Important Stuff—tasks that suck down all our energy every day before we crap out and go to bed. But guess what. Half the time the Really Important Stuff isn’t nearly as important as you think it is—it’s really just the stuff you’re comfortable doing because it’s a well-worn path, and it makes you feel productive. So steal a little time back to explore a new path with your own list. No shit. It’s easy.

The “No Duh” List
This list is for simple things that don’t need a lot of thought, either to figure out what needs to be done, or how to do it. This is the kind of stuff that stays on the bottom half of your to-do list forever because you’re always too busy taking care of Really Important Stuff. But everyone needs small victories, because successfully achieving small goals is a huge success factor in tackling and achieving big ones.

Samples from a “No Duh” Social Media List for Marketers

  1. Print out your Google Analytics report weekly and post it above your desk
  2. Set up a Google Alert on your name and your company
  3. Spend 10 minutes using Twitter search to find new people to follow
  4. Use Tweetdeck or PeopleBrowsr to organize your Tweeps
  5. Find an active Facebook Group you’re interested in and start a discussion thread
  6. Find an active forum focused on a hobby you love and post a thread
  7. Answer a question on LinkedIn
  8. Update your profile photo
  9. Find a local Tweetup and go meet real people
  10. Import your feeds into FriendFeed and start a thread

The “No Excuses” List
This is the opposite end of the spectrum, the complex things that take energy to figure out and execute, which is why they never get done. They’re ideals—things you know would make life better, but you never have the time to make them real. So you stay on the treadmill of Really Important Stuff. Now’s the time to figure out what game changers you shouldn’t let linger at any cost.

Samples from a “No Excuses” Social Media List for Marketers

  1. Write an Editorial Calendar for your blog
  2. Search Engine Optimize Your Website, even if you’re on a shoestring.
  3. Deploy a social media monitoring application (Hey, that’s SocialRep.)
  4. Map the social landscape for your business—top blogs, influencers, etc.
  5. Create a social media A-team at your company
  6. Develop a social media marketing plan for your company
  7. Write a strategic social media communications plan and policy
  8. Develop a customer advisory board
  9. Design a video marketing campaign, influencer interviews, or video how-to’s for your product
  10. Start a Tweetup or professional peer meetup

Look at that. A list of 10 blindingly simple things you can do and feel empowered on your way to tackling one or more of the hard things. Now here’s the trick. You’ve got the pump primed with easy things to do right out of the gate, and a daunting list of bigger, but critical challenges. When you’re halfway through the first list, pick an item from the “No BS” list and break it down into “No Duh” tasks that will start you toward the goal. Turns out, there’s a sure-fire “No Duh” routine to do that:

Step 1: Choose the daunting goal.
Step 2: Search the topic on Google
Step 3: Collect 5-10 articles and white papers on the topic
Step 4: Read them. Yeah. Really.
Step 5: Write a list of desired outcomes related to achieving the goal
Step 6: Write a basic plan and task list for getting started.
Step 7: Get started.

Yeah, I know. Rocket science. No shit. So, there’s pretty much no excuse for not tackling the new year with some new energy and interest. What’s your list?

Photo credit: Hryckowian

Countrywide’s Concept of Customer Service

A tribute to everything I hateI hate writing these kinds of posts. But I’m pulling my hair out and I simply can’t believe that companies in this day and age are so manifestly clueless about the impact of customer service on brand.

I’m a customer of Countrywide, who holds my home mortgage. A few months ago, Countrywide had a major security breach, in which whatever security protocols they follow to protect private customer data allowed an employee to make off with the social security numbers, names and financial data of many thousands of customers, including myself. The employee turned around and sold that data to a third party, setting up a nightmare scenario of identity theft for Countrywide’s customers.

Following California law, Countrywide disclosed the security breach and provided me with access to credit-monitoring services through Experian. Not an ideal situation, but at least the law’s got consumers covered and is working as expected. Except, when I go to Experian to sign up for the credit-monitoring services, after filling out a tedious application online that kept having to reload for some unknown reason, I get a sweet message saying “We’re Sorry… We are currently unable to process your request. If you need assistance please email us at membership@experianconsumerdirect.com. Thank you- we appreciate your business!”

Really? If you appreciated my business, you’d provide a direct phone number to someone who could tell me why you can’t process my request. Oh well. So I call Countrywide’s customer service line, the one printed on the notification in which they told me Countrywide had lost my private financial data to a thief. After going through the phone tree, I get a Countrywide service rep who provides me with a phone number to call at Experian to get help. Great!

So. I call the Experian hotline. Five minutes of phone tree crap. Special offer! Press a number! Press another number! Wait while we transfer you! You know, you could do this faster on our website! Someone will be with you soon! Press a number! Press another number! Now hold! Five minutes of hold to the tune of some generic acoustic guitar riff in an endless 3-bar loop. Thank you for holding, someone will be with you soon! Did you know you could do this faster on our website?! More crappy acoustic guitar, and then the master stroke. Thank you for holding, no one is available to assist you now, please call back later! Click.

Now I’m really happy. And when I call Countrywide, they make me even happier. I get a helpful customer service rep who tells me, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do to help you.” Really? Is that the best you can do after you lost the financial data of thousands of customers? You throw it in the lap of Experian, and when they drop the ball, you just throw up your arms and say, “Oh Well!” Except, I didn’t really want to hear that message. So I asked the service rep for her supervisor, and now it gets fun. “My supervisor can’t help you.” I had to ask: is this really customer service? I didn’t ask whether you thought your supervisor could help me, I asked to speak to your supervisor. Again: “My supervisor can’t help you.” And this was Countrywide’s position, putting up stone walls against the customers whose financial data was stolen and sold by their own employee.

What did I expect, you might ask? How about this, considering I’m a customer whose financial data you lost, considering I’m one of the tax payers bailing out your industry and saving your job: “I know that credit monitoring is really important in this situation, and I’m sorry our vendor is not fulfilling their obligation. Let me see if I can find out who is managing that business relationship and see if they know what’s going on.” Or, “Let me see if I can get someone from Experian on the line to help.” Or, “Let me get my supervisor.” My helpful suggestions were not well received by the customer rep, but she did finally relent and put me on hold for another 5 minutes to wait to speak to her supervisor. To her credit, the supervisor was more reasonable, but did nothing more than call the same Experian hotline to go through the same dead end process with me on the line.

I’m still waiting to get this resolved to find out what parting gifts I’ve received on my credit report from the Countrywide theft.

Hello! Countrywide. Anyone home? Why should a post like this ever need to be written?

The Thinking Person’s Social Experience

My friends and frequent business partners at Miner Productions are at it again, driving production on a new social networking community called the Ideas Project, an interactive site featuring videos and threaded discussions on a wide variety of topics anchored by prominent thought leaders. The published content is organized primarily into Themes, People and Technology, with user generated content in the form of Questions, Ideas and threaded comments tied to the published content. There’s some interesting navigation devices used for exploring related ideas and contributors, but it’s really the quality of the thought-leader content that stands out. It’s kind of like a TED-style conference in the sustained format of an online social network.

It’s a cool idea and the content is definitely worth exploring. I’m currently listening to a video by Jerry Michalski on how the Internet represents the development of a “global brain”— check it out. The project was sponsored by Nokia, and developed in partnership with Xigi and Axis 41. As always, great work, Miner. I’m looking forward to our next collaboration.

The Secret to Engineering Better Customers

2022 Magno MagnaDome I‘ve been spending the last week digging through data from our social media scans at SocialRep, paying a lot more attention to what content shows up when someone searches on the web, and why. And I have to say, as a marketer, I’m pretty dismayed. For the 15 years I’ve been involved in marketing, one of the most persistent refrains we hear in business is the need to improve Customer Intimacy. And in the span of that 15 years, I’ve seen technology leveraged in countless ways to improve customer pipeline metrics, visibility, and efficiency, but rarely to build meaningful relationships with customers. My newest case-in-point is search marketing and SEO.

One of the things we do at SocialRep is collect all the user generated content about a customer’s particular industry–collecting and analyzing every conversation on blogs, forums, social networks, wikis, video boards. It doesn’t take long to develop a clear picture of how content is generated to influence consumer traffic, especially the persistent problem of splogs–content posted for no other purpose than to game search traffic.

In the SocialRep system, I’ve discovered that about 70% of the splogs we’re filtering out are posted at Blogspot, a free blog service owned by Google. That’s right. Google. The company whose mission it is to help you cut through the noise and clutter on the Internet also happens to be one the biggest enablers of noise and clutter on the Internet–at least the clutter we’re finding in industries such as automotive, consumer electronics, pharma and consumer and enterprise software.

When you first come across a splog, it looks like a regular blog. But the more splogs you see, the more you start noticing something a little bit “off”. Sometimes you’ll be reading a post and it will suddenly veer into gibberish. Sometimes you’ll notice that every post on the blog is an article written by a different author, with little continuity of topic. Sometimes you’ll notice that the content is blatantly ripped off from BusinessWeek or Wired with no attribution. 

If you look at this garbage as much as you must if you’re really trying to understand the media landscape influencing your market, you start to realize how much time, money and ingenuity marketers are pouring down a dark hole trying to game search algorithms instead of building customer intimacy:

  • There are article syndication services that will take one article you write, and subtly rewrite it dozens of times to post on countless splogs in order to look like original content pointing back to your web site.
  • There are content automation tools that will search the web for content according to keywords you designate, and scrape bits and pieces together from all over the web to generate new “content” for posting on splogs to drive search traffic. Some of these tools are sophisticated enough to preserve certain rules of grammar so that search bots recognize the content as valid.
  • There are systems that automate not only splog posting, but splog generation–creating new splogs on the fly to maximize keywords and link juice.
  • And of course, there are dozens of search marketing gurus who will sell you their secrets to search traffic success using these and countless other technologies and techniques.

Ah ain't long for this whorl I don’t want to sound like some naive idealist, and I don’t want to impugn the entire search marketing industry. I understand how search drives traffic, and I understand the challenges of cutting through the clutter to reach consumers on the internet. In this day and age, it’s imperative that companies understand how to develop effective content for SEO, and that means writing content that’s optimized for search algorithms

But when we reach the point where we’re writing massive amounts of content that’s designed only for computers to read, we’ve reached a tipping point where marketing becomes a parody of itself. In the name of cutting through the clutter, we create more clutter. In the name of building customer relationships, we develop content that customers would never want to read. Instead of putting our resources and creativity into actually connecting with customers, we focus instead on trying to engineer some immaculately efficient engine to boil the ocean and spit out customers ready to buy our product with the least amount of input or effort.

It’s a brilliant pursuit. One that marketers have been striving toward for decades. We’ve done it with advertising. We’ve done it with DM. We’ve done with email marketing, and viral, and search. We’re on a quest for clinical efficiency, but all the while we keep talking about customer intimacy. And then we wonder why consumers themselves are so drawn to social media, drawn inexplicably to connect with other consumers to share experiences that belie all the marketing bullshit their lives are flooded with every moment.

Is Social Media Killing PR? The Webcast.

I gave another in-depth Webcast yesterday at one of BrightTalk’s online summits on social media monitoring and engagement for enterprise marketers. This presentation, “Is Social Media Killing PR?”, is about the strengths and weaknesses of the Public Relations role in Social Media Marketing. The title is a shameless ripoff of Horn Group’s panel of the same name, which I discussed in a recent post. It’s an hour long presentation, but I know that if you’re an enterprise marketer, you’ll find it worthwhile. If you’re not sure about spending the time, fast forward to someplace in the middle and listen for 5 minutes.

PR Still Not Getting Social Media

Photo Credit: tranchis

You would have to be a mummy not to have noticed the ongoing and pervasive conversation about what role public relations firms should play in helping their clients understand and use social media. I won’t go into the details here, except to point you to two recent posts on the subject; check out a response to this week’s event at the Horn Group called “Is Social Media Killing PR?” By Jeremiah Owyang and a post by Christopher Kenton called “The Bursting Media Bubble: Is this the death of Public Relations?” Jeremiah and Christopher are quick to acknowledge the continuing value of public relations but hold PR firm’s toes to the fire when it comes to understanding the fundamentals of social media and engaging the public instead of the media power brokers on behalf of their clients.

Public Relations firm’s inability to understand this paradigm shift was highlighted at the 3rd Annual Society for New Communications Research Symposium where Don Middleberg, CEO of the public relations agency, Middleberg Communications, and Jen McClure, executive director, Society for New Communications Research made the following statement to attendees,

“Managing social media belongs with public relations practitioners since PR professionals are story tellers who understand how to build relationships, collaborate, engage in conversations, understand changing influence patterns, and how to communicate with journalists in the channel of their choice.”

Framing social media as “communicating with journalists in the channel of their choice” is exactly why public relations practitioners are failing to provide leadership in the social media space.

Public relations is organized to maintain relationships with reporters and analysts not with customers directly. Influencing the influencers is so deeply rooted in the DNA of PR firms that it is difficult for them to hear what their own research is telling them. Perhaps that’s why only 5% of the 1850 companies surveyed by MotiveLab last summer trusted their PR firms to help them implement social media programs.

Photo Credit: tranchis

Is Social Media killing PR?

ShatterproofIf you want find the front line on the debate over social media and its impact on marketing and public relations, two posts from late last week are worth reading. The first is a post on Chris Brogan’s blog about “Bob”, an enthusiastic employee at a Fortune 500 who ran afoul of his superiors by engaging customers online in the wake of a direct mail campaign. The post is interesting, but the ensuing debate in the comment thread provides a fascinating look at a number of fault lines companies face over social media–management vs. staff, innovation vs. resistance to change, control vs. collaboration–it’s a veritable cornucopia of management challenges.

I don’t want to rehash the whole discussion here, but I would suggest reading the thread if you’re a marketing manager. It’s a perfect case study on why every company needs an explicit social media policy. Without one, critical decisions over customer engagement that may impact everything from brand equity to employee moral will be left to the kind of petty internal politics that stifle innovation. Whether your policy is a lock-down on social media–which I certainly wouldn’t advocate–or a liberal policy that encourages employees to get involved, there’s really no excuse for allowing a void over social media policy to persist.

The second post worth reading is one by Charles Cooper at CNET, which is a rather dismissive post of a panel held by Horn Group asking whether Social Media is killing PR. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it to the event, so I can’t give a first hand account of the debate, but Cooper’s derision is a good view onto another of the social media fault lines, dividing the true believers from the status quo.

As a tool for communications, social media obviously is of keen interest to public relations types. But let’s dispense with the nonsense about it being a paradigm changer. Maybe that day will arrive, but to date, the cheerleaders have overstated the results.

I had to laugh out loud when I read that. As someone who has worked in corporate marketing for 15 years, as someone who has run agencies serving some of the world’s biggest brands, I’ve worked with many Fortune 500 and Global 2000 marketing executives who have felt the impact of social media first hand, and are struggling mightily to adapt. I’ve seen a major telecom provider lose the loyalty of its developer network to a competitor’s wildly successful forum. I’ve seen one of the world’s biggest consumer electronics manufacturers blow their biggest product launch in years because they ignored consumer dialog that clearly pointed in a different direction. I’ve seen one of the world’s biggest software makers struggle to manage a marketing operation fragmented by aggressive consumer engagement. And I’ve watched one of the world’s biggest automakers leverage consumer engagement to drive product development decisions that delighted their customers.

This is nonsense? Was the wildfire of social media backlash against the pricing of the iPhone, and Apple’s initial lame response, nonsense? How about the social media initiatives leveraged by Barack Obama and netroots progressives to defeat Hillary Clinton’s vaunted PR machinery–led by none other than the head of one of the world’s biggest PR agencies? All nonsense, I’m sure.

Cooper’s dismissive denial of the significance of social media, and of those who have “drunk the Kool-Aid”, is based on a tellingly narrow view of social media’s domain–as if social media represents an upstart movement of arrogant whippersnappers wanting to seize the throne of Media Influence. He derides the bleating PR masses who have bought into this illusion.

What’s more, they are scared stiff of antagonizing the “influencers.” Especially when one or another bloviator from the blogosphere wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and issues a fatwa. But does a relatively small circle of (mostly California-based) bloggers still command the same influence it did a year ago?

The answer is “No”, but not because the A-Listers are losing influence as social media broadens, though that’s probably true. The answer is “No” because the influence of A-Listers was only a phenomenon within the echo chamber of early adopters and media personalities afraid they might lose their status and influence to mere “bloggers”. The real story is the day-to-day dialog among millions of ordinary people in little corners of the internet where they influence the brand impressions and purchase behavior of their peers. Like the 65,000 cyclists that frequent a mountain biker’s forum to share experiences with equipment, warranties and customer service. Or the 91,000 members of a hair dresser’s forum that share information about products and brands, as well as tips and techniques.

These are the real influencers, and the real driving force behind social media, and why it matters significantly to marketers as well as PR folks. Instead of putting the Horn Group’s panel into this broader context, Cooper dismisses the influence of A-Listers and then lauds the influence of one of his mainstream media peers:

Then the predictably prescient Kara Swisher from The Wall Street Journal‘s All Things Digital cut to the core question which–I believe–outweighs all others: If the message is empty, why bother? There is little point in trying to push a lame product or marketing idea. That’s a message some sales and marketing departments don’t want to hear. But in the end, doesn’t everything come back to value?

Again, the answer is “No”, not because value isn’t important, but because there is a long and messy process of discovering and defining value–a process in which good PR plays a role by interacting with, and understanding, the market. Social media is a game changer in this respect, because today, marketers have the opportunity to listen to customers like never before–not through focus groups or surveys, but through real engagement and active listening. Whether PR folks take that opportunity to broaden their focus and listen to consumers, instead of focusing solely on “influencing the influencers”, is a fault line that Cooper nicely illuminates.

One last nit. Cooper is dismissive of Jeremiah Owyang in a way I want to call out.

As I listened to the panelists debate the question, I began to fidget as Forrester Research’s Jeremiah Oywang offered a marketing-heavy spiel on the central role social media should occupy in any effective PR strategy. Oywang is earnest about this stuff so I can’t come down too hard, and yes, social media has its place. Still, it sounded like so much gobbledygook to me.

If saying “Owyang is earnest about gobbledygook” is not coming down too hard, I’d hate to see what Cooper really thinks. The reason not to come down too hard on Owyang is not because he’s “earnest”, but because he’s a professional. Owyang spends more time every day with a larger group of marketing executives and marketing practitioners than anyone I know; he’s one of the hardest working analysts in social or mainstream media. Maybe he didn’t lay things out in a way that Cooper understood, or maybe Cooper isn’t a position to want to understand what Owyang has to say. Owyang wrote his own post about the event. You be the judge.