so this is mass communication?

Keeping with my online political public relations program of research, this study (with my amazing colleague Dr. Ruthann Weaver Lariscy at UGA) looked at a social media tool new to the 2006 midterm elections.

Kaye D. Sweetser & Ruthann Weaver Lariscy. (2008). Candidates Make Good Friends: An Analysis of Candidates’ Uses of Facebook. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 2, 175-198.

Through content analysis of Facebook wall comments in U.S. House and Senate races during the 2006 midterm election, this study describes young potential voters’ comments (quantity, valence, etc.) through the lens of the dialogic communication theory of public relations. Findings indicate that individuals who wrote on candidate walls perceive themselves on friendly terms with the candidates, overwhelmingly write messages that are shallow and supportive, and are positive in tone. Candidates rarely, if ever, respond to these messages; although the mere use of Facebook is a dialogic feature, researchers conclude campaigns are not using it for two-way symmetrical relationship building.

We have more work coming out from the huge multi-cell survey on the professional application of blogs in the journalism & PR fields. This study, just published in JMCQ, looks at the issue of credibility that professional journalists and public relations practitioners put on blogs, and relates it to use.

Kaye D. Sweetser, Lance V. Porter, Deborah Soun Chung, & Eunseong Kim (2008). Credibility and the use of blogs among professionals in the communication industry. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 85(1), 169-185.

This study examines use, credibility, and impact on the communication industry of blogs as seen by professional journalists and public relations practitioners. Informed by the uses and gratifications perspective and using an online survey, the study used factor analysis to reveal simplistic blog use categorizations as being either interactive or noninteractive. Results also indicate that those who are labeled “high users” in both factors assign more credibility to the medium. Differences between journalism and public relations professionals were examined.

Other studies from this line of research include:

• Uses and Perceptions of Blogs: A Report on Professional Journalists and Journalism Educators
• Blog power: Examining the effects of practitioner blog use on power in public relations

I was very pleased to present a paper, “On the Ballot & in the Loop: The Dialogic Capacity of Candidate Blogs in the 2008 Election,” on behalf of my team of co-authors at AEJMC last week in Chicago. The paper stemmed from a project in my undergraduate public relations research course at UGA.

In this paper, we compared 80 different blogs from gubernatorial, house, senate & presidential candidate blogs during the primary leading up to this November’s election. This paper focused on the female candidates and their use of blogs.

Thanks to Grady doctoral student Kristin English, we have video!

One of the first steps in a PR program’s entry in the world of social media is often monitoring. I found this to be true in much of my research, & well it just makes sense.

So we set up Google alerts, use blog search engines & keep a watchful eye on TweetScan.

Prof. Robert French from Auburn shared an invite with me so I could check out a new service called StartPR. The online service boasts the ability to easily compile all these searches into a single place to streamline social media monitoring. You guessed it - it’s a clip service for the social Web.

I tried it out using a few terms that were niche enough that wouldn’t provide an overload, but big enough to return some hits.

I was very impressed with:

• ease of setting up the search terms
• quickness of returning items
• ability to mark items as read or keep them as unread
• visual display of items — layout, easy to see the date an item was posted & blog source, listing of the search engine through which it was found
• ability to add others in your office to the account so you can all see what is happening (big picture & response)
• ability to assign others particular items for action (tasking)
• place to paste in comments internally (called “notes”)
• built-in response management program to track whether you/your PR folks replied/commented on the post

That last item is really the coolest part — but heck, you might already have a bigger internal system integrated with other media efforts set up for that.

What I didn’t like:

• most of the returns were items that had been caught via Google alerts
• heavy reliance on Google as a source (only other source in my searches was Technorati)
• had to scroll really far down (using Firefox on a Mac) when in the notes section & didn’t immediately see all the options
• ignored non-text social media: nothing from YouTube, Flickr, audio or video etc returned
• ignored social networks: nothing from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc returned

Areas for improvement (i.e., my “wouldn’t it be cool if” list):

• include number of comments (live feed) made on each item returned
• ability to sort items by date, blog, number of comments, those you’ve replied to, etc
• more personalized fields/options in the “notes” area
• integration of metrics (other than frequency of post per day report) into the system
• expand service to cover non-text multimedia (video, audio, images)

All in all, it looks like a neat little tool … but I wouldn’t pay for it (since good old fashion alerts & searches can get you the same information + more) unless they up’ed the ante to add more sophisticated monitoring features.

Note: I was given a free trial of this service from a friend. It was my idea to write the review (no one asked me to). Finally, I have 5 invites available for a free trial of this site up for grabs if you are interested. First come, first served & be sure to give me your e-mail address.

Everyone loves a list … so here is one for you, names in no particular order.

These are the folks I see as the leading scholars in communication fields actively doing research on various forms of social media. That means more than one article. These folks have research programs surrounding social media in communication. 

• Denise Bortree. Though she’s a PR professor, most of her social media research examines how teenage girls present themselves and negotiate identity in social media spaces. 
• Walter Carl. Dr. Word of Mouth, need I say more?
• Tom Johnson and Barbara Kaye. This political communication research duo started looking at the Internet as a political information source in 1998 & have moved into blogs over the past few years. Mostly focusing on use as an information source or credibility, their research is always top-notch. 
• Tom Kelleher. He published what I’m pretty sure was the first piece on social media in PR literature with his blogs as relationship strategy piece in 2006.  And yes, he’s even literally written the text book for online PR. Keep an eye out on Public Relations Review for more of his work. 
• Lance Porter. He started with looking at how simple online tools made public relations practitioners more powerful and promotable in their organizations then went full scale social media with his research. He’s a great bridge of advertising and PR efforts, and has a pretty impressive civilian resume having been the executive director for Internet marketing at Disney.
• Monica Postelnicu. From jibjab to YouTube, a lot of Monica’s work focuses on user-generated viral political videos. She has also looked at the use of MySpace and other social media tools in politics.
• Trent Seltzer. He rocked the AEJMC PR division when his paper on blogs in PR won an award back in the day & has since published articles on social media in PR.
• Mihaela Vorvoreanu. Looking through the lens of usability, Mihaela’s makes recommendations for how organizations can create rich interactive experiences for their publics online. 

Ahhh. There’s nothing better than something provocative with a bit of profanity splashed in, wouldn’t you say? It’s not often that I find a powerpoint that I understand well without the benefit of hearing it presented or find good enough to share with others. Then Todd Defren linked to this one!

 

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I love the simplicity here juxtaposing social media adoption numbers with the usefulness & impact of traditional adverstising.

Even so, I think it is a bit of cyber hyperbole to say that social media is more important than advertising. Or that if you’re not on social media then you are not on the Internet. And, to be fair, sometimes the numbers are actually comparing apples & oranges.

But I get it.

You need to make these big statements to get attention.

But there is a catch. The people who believe these big statements about the dominance of social media are likely already immersed in the technology. Those to whom these broad statements are aimed are likely to discount such grandiose statements.

In the end, though, I’m a sucker for the numbers & it is so simple that it can’t help but be provocative. 

If you haven’t, take a spin through the presentation. It’s worth the time. 

Sixteen-year-old Zac Sunderland set sail two weeks ago, by himself, in hopes of becoming the youngest solo circumnavigator around the world. Don’t worry, he’s calling his mom about twice a day so he’s fine even if he is climbing all the way up the mast during crazy swells and letting the boat sail itself while he sleeps at night. 

He’s basically been raised deeply immersed in the sailing culture, having been brought ‘home’ from the hospital to his parent’s boat then spent many days underway with his family sailing to port after exotic port. 

Zac’s documenting his (hopefully) historic trip on his blog at http://www.zacsunderland.com/blog/. 

Here’s a video from a Ventura County Star photographer covering Zac’s story.


Teen Chases Dream from jen edney on Vimeo.
 

If you have a question for Zac, you can e-mail it to zacsworldadventure@yahoo.com. He’s answering questions in just about every post. 

When social media first started out, it was like the clouds parted & little digital angels started singing for me. I saw all the possibilities of reaching mass amounts of people in a much more personal way. I thought we could push the boundaries of para-social relations with celebrities really becoming our friends & companies having real voices. 

No doubt about it, I bought it.

Everything.

But I’m starting to feel like this viral world where everyone is sharing YouTube videos right & left or making cute little games where you turn yourself into an elf & sing songs has become polluted. 

We need a vaccine to protect us from viral marketing.

It’s mutated. 

And I think it’s going to get a whole lot of people sick on this whole social media craze all the kids are talking about. 

What do I mean?

To put it in one word: ethics. 

Oh! Try this one: responsibility. 

Not buzz enough for you? Okay: transparency. 

More companies are engaging in much more questionable social media campaigns then ever before. Like the big Target Rounders scandal my former student Rosie Siman broke last year and this ‘BMW launch across the Atlantic‘ mock-u-mentary. 

Indeed, it is the latter that got me all spun up this time. This video on CNN brings to light many issues which, quite frankly, damage the credibility of social media:

• Decreasing our ability to be media literate
• Creating an extensive ‘Blair Witch’-like backstory 
• Fake Facebook pages & accepting friends (who may not realize you’re fake in the first place)
• Creating a 30-minute long fake documentary
• Waiting for several weeks (after millions of views) to reveal you’re behind the project

Under the advice of many, I upgraded Wordpress. 

I really only did it to get this comment spam issue under control. Even with my new system of asking my users who want to comment to set up accounts, I still had spam out the whaazoo. See, apparently spammers are people too & they all created accounts for themselves. Then commented as usual. Great.

So. I now have some new fancy plug-ins installed to combat spam. 

I opened up comments again (non-registered users welcome to comment) & I need your help! Can you please comment on this post so that I can see how your REAL comment pops up in comparison to a dumb spammer comment? 

Spammers reading this out there - you are welcome to comment too. I don’t even know why I said that, you probably already have your dumb comment on the clipboard ready to paste into the comment box. 

Comment spam is taking over my blog.

You don’t see it because I have comments moderated. But when I log in to my blog & I have more than 8,000 comments waiting to be moderated — of which only ONE (yes, one) is a real comment — well, we have a problem.

I love your comments & don’t want to turn them off. I like that some posts really become a discussion.

So …. To combat this I’m switching around the way the blog handles comments to see if I can beat the spammers. I know this is going to be a pain for those of you who do like to comment, but it can’t be half as big of a pain as it is for me to wade through all the comment spam.

Here are the changes for commenting on this blog:

• people wishing to make comments must be registered users
• I’ll allow any real, non-spammy person (naughty or nice) to become a registered user
• you must be logged in to comment

I hope you still do comment on the blog - even with these road blocks.

And if you have suggestions for other ways to combat this problem, please register & leave a comment

In the time it took me to write this post (less than 5 minutes), I got 11 more spam comments.