Lifestyle celebrity Sandra Lee was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. She chose to have a double mastectomy. That is a painful decision many women face. And as a woman that commands a public forum, she is sharing her experience to help other women and raise awareness of the disease.
This isn’t the first time a celebrity has publicly addressed personal struggles with breast cancer. But rarely is the public given such an intimate look at the experience. Sandra Lee’s unvarnished updates about the process—from pensive, brave photographs of her recuperating in her hospital room to serious images of her at home—put a human face on a difficult process.
New York Post’s “Page Six” column is one of many media outlets that has been following her progress, but she has reached her largest audience by publishing the photographs on her Facebook page. A benefit of social media is that it allows individuals to tell their personal stories to the public directly, without any intermediary. So Ms. Lee can keep ownership of her story, telling it day by day and ensuring it is told accurately. Even maintaining that level of control, sharing so personal a story in such an honest fashion is incredibly brave. We salute her choice.
After enduring an online firestorm, Starbucks has stopped encouraging its baristas to write “Race Together” on coffee cups.
Starbucks is planning several steps as part of the “Race Together” initiative that promise to substantially benefit minority groups. But by leading with the slogan, the company has prompted heated criticism.
One issue that is increasingly incensing the online community is when consumers feel they are not represented within the senior-level staff of the brands they are loyal to. And with this campaign, Starbucks unfortunately highlighted that issue. As the New York Times’ Sydney Ember observed, “Many have pointed out that the company’s leadership is predominantly white, while many of its baristas are members of minorities.”
This controversy reinforces the importance of authenticity in public relations initiatives. We don’t doubt that CEO Howard Schultz’s heart is in the right place with this campaign. And we support his efforts to encourage discussion and the economic components of the campaign. But if he is going to associate the Starbucks brand with such a serious social issue, he should have preceded that slogan with action…including perhaps a seriously substantive movement to diversify Starbucks’s leadership.
If you want to learn how to become an Internet celebrity, please continue reading. If you don’t care about becoming a celebrity but want to learn more about how social media works, same thing. If you work in business, traditional media, the non-profit world or politics and your goal is to reach as many people as possible in the most persuasive, cost-effective way, New York Magazine has provided you with an essential resource.
“The Weird Wide World of Internet Celebrity,”New York‘s informative guide, is a step-by-step, how-they-did it view of how (mostly) ordinary people have used social media to deliver a message, attract huge audiences and sometimes monetize that visibility. The cover story features several different people who have become famous (and often well-paid) by using mostly free or low-cost Internet tools to entertain or educate vast audiences. Most are teenagers or in their 20s.
It is a definitive guide to how social media works in terms of publishing original content and attracting audiences. Equally important, it illustrates why millions of teenagers and other consumers have turned away from traditional media outlets and replaced them with the Internet and their smart phones.
Many people continue to be on a learning curve regarding how social media works, why it is so popular and what the social media culture responds most enthusiastically to. If you are one, you won’t be after digesting this useful guide.
In January we shared some tips for publishing and editing pages on Wikipedia. Now the popular crowd-sourced encyclopedia may soon enact a significant change to the disclosure it requires from its editors.
The Wikimedia Foundation “is proposing an amendment to the online encyclopedia’s terms of use that would address further undisclosed paid editing,” writes PRWeek’s Diana Bradley, who spoke with the foundation about the proposal:
The purpose of the proposal is to provide clear guidance on how editors can disclose potential conflicts in compliance with Wikipedia’s existing prohibitions on deception, misrepresentation, and fraud, according to Jay Walsh, communications consultant and adviser to the Foundation.
The amendment would also inform users about the potential legal ramifications of undisclosed paid editing and about existing community policies that may go above and beyond this baseline requirement, he explained.
Writing for Forbes, Michael Humphrey calls the amendment a “notable, and I think noble, attempt to fight back the practice of glossing entries with slanted versions of reality” and “the kind of transparency that be a model for many content companies.”
Moving forward
Contributing to Wikipedia “to serve the interests of a paying client while concealing the paid affiliation has led to situations that the community considers problematic,” according to the amendment’s introduction. The practice is only one of many issues the online encyclopedia faces. Some organizations have noted the huge gender gap among Wikipedia’s contributors. “Today’s bunch are 90% male and mostly from rich countries,” according to a recent article in The Economist. The Atlantic Cities’ Emily Badger examines a study that highlights similar problems, writing that “Wikipedia has a geography of its own, and in many ways, it’s a biased reflection of the real world.”
The amendment shows a maturation of Wikipedia’s platform, as it tries to evolve and adapt to the online encyclopedia’s growing popularity and impact. It’s also part of a broader trend toward developing interlinked online identities that facilitate more transparency and honesty, albeit less online privacy. William Beutler of the firm Beutler Ink tells PRWeek: “I do not think Wikipedia’s rules have been clear in the past, so any move that can be made by the Foundation or the community itself to clarify rules of engagement to editors or interested outsiders is a good thing.”
If you scroll through this blog’s archives, you’ll find many different examples of how being authentic is central to successful online reputation management. But there are few better examples of the value of authenticity than Gary Vaynerchuk.
If you’ve read David Segal’s recent New York Times piece—or any of the countless other profiles on Vaynerchuk —you know the remarkable story of his rise from the savvy social media manager/über marketer for a New Jersey wine retailer to one of the top branding and social media thought leaders. In today’s climate, where building a personal brand has become an almost universal concern, we can all benefit by looking at the strategies and tools that have fueled his success. Loud, brash and profane, Vaynerchuk’s personality doesn’t appeal to everyone. But he doesn’t try to.
Uncompromising authenticity has been at the heart of his approach since his breakout video blog, Wine Library TV, which Segal describes as “Mr. Vaynerchuk sitting at a table in his office, demystifying chardonnays, rieslings and other wines by describing them in terms that any mook could understand.” The blog not only presents Vaynerchuk as an unvarnished, passionate and accessible wine enthusiast, but also demonstrates his shrewd understanding of his medium. “My high quality content definitely factored in, but that might not have mattered had I not also made native content—authentic content perfectly crafted for that particular new platform, YouTube,” he reflects.
Early Adopter of Twitter
As an early adopter of Twitter, Vaynerchuk has harnessed it with a similar combination of candidness and insight. “It was the platform that came most naturally to me, because it was perfectly suited for small bursts of quickfire conversation and idea exchanges,” he writes in his latest book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World. Vaynerchuk understands that the platform is about more than just “microblogging.” It’s about engaging directly—or, as he puts it, “creating context.”
“Twitter is the cocktail party of the Internet—a place where listening well has tremendous benefits,” he observes in Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. And listen he does. “About 90 percent of Mr. Vaynerchuk’s tweets are direct replies to people who have written to or about him,” Segal points out in the Times. “I always say that our success wasn’t due to my hundreds of online videos about wine that went viral,” Vaynerchuk wrote in an Entrepreneur article, “but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward, making connections and building relationships,”
Content Is King
Vaynerchuk also emphasizes the importance of creating content. Arecent Forbes article went so far as to call it “the cost of entry to relevance in today’s society” and encouraged people to create as much as possible. “It literally doesn’t matter what you do, if you’re not producing content, you basically don’t exist,” he has declared. Vaynerchuk’s characteristic hyperbole aside, this argument has resonance when it comes to online reputation management.
If you don’t publish content that provides accurate and appropriate information about yourself, your company, area of expertise or organization, you are not just losing an opportunity to build your brand—you are endangering it, essentially relinquishing control of your online image anyone else who decides to post content about you. Bringing together engagement and authenticity as well as content and context, Vaynerchuk’s approach highlights some valuable tools and strategies for managing one’s reputation online. G.E.’s Linda Boff may sum it up best. “When I think about Gary, I think about scrappiness before anything else,” she tells Segal in his Times piece. “He lives his own life out loud.”
As Lizzie Widdicombe’s recent New Yorker article about Vice Media illustrates, YouTube has become the most important social media platform for reaching teens, 20- and 30-somethings.
It is also a major communications outlet for mainstream companies like Toyota, whose YouTube channel has attracted over 47 million views.
YouTube is even being used by conservative financial industry firms as a way to share documentary-style videos about how they benefit the world…in part to warm up frustrated consumers. So if you lead a business, political or philanthropic organization, The Woman With 1 Billion Clicks, Jenna Marbles, Amy O’Leary’s New York Times Style article, is illuminating.
Jenna Marbles is a 26 year old comedian who creates low-tech, self-deprecating, profane videos that teen-age girls find hilarious. Her viewers include future deciders of American political races, major purchasers of consumer goods, and our next workforce. If that audience is important to you or your organization, watching a couple of her videos is a good way to gain more insight into it…and into social media.
Authenticity has emerged as an important online trait.
“We live in an age when people are moved less by spectacle and more by what they consider to be actuality—what feels real,” Michael Drew writes on the Huffington Post. Andrew Potter, author of The Authenticity Hoax, takes it one step further, attributing our quest for authenticity to “a world increasingly dominated by the fake.”
While the new emphasis on it may be a reaction to factors like the ambiguity of reality television and the ubiquity of plastic surgery life, concern for it can be found in all areas of contemporary life. It could have been a factor in the selection of the new pope, who’s been called “humble, authentic and credible.”
The Struggle for Truth
Authenticity is certainly a desired trait, but it is also an elusive one. As described by Muhlenberg College professor Jeff Pooley: “The best way to sell yourself is to not appear to be selling yourself.” Meghan Daum explores this issue further in an LA Times opinion piece on authenticity in politics, distinguishing the dictionary definition from what she calls “aw, shucks authenticity.” The key takeaway? Trying to be authentic, strictly speaking, isn’t really authentic at all.
Entrepreneur and author Seth Godin offers a more useful definition. “Authenticity, for me, is doing what you promise, not ‘being who you are,’” he says. “As the Internet and a connected culture places a higher premium on authenticity (because if you’re inconsistent, you’re going to get caught) it’s easy to confuse authentic behavior with an existential crisis,” he adds.
Coming off a lackluster quarter and a leveraged buyout deal, veteran computer company Dell is undergoing a period of transition.
It all started with “Dell lies. Dell sucks,” a 2005 blog post by journalist Jeff Jarvis that launched a massive fleet of likeminded complaints about the company’s products and service. While such viral outrage is a regular occurrence today, back then it was a new phenomenon. Dell was not ready, and the damage took its toll, from poor customer service scores to declines in market share and profits. Such an impact marked the end of not just Dell’s dominance as a computer maker, but also of the traditional ways in which companies communicate with their customers and the public.
Public relations, Jarvis asserted in a follow-up post, “can no longer be about the press and publicity” but “must be about a new relationship with the public, with the public in charge.” He also wrote an open letter to Dell, delivering a crucial wake-up call: “Today, when you lose a customer, you don’t lose just that customer, you risk losing that customer’s friends. And thanks to the internet and blogs and consumer rate-and-review services, your customers have lots and lots of friends all around the world.”
From Worst to First
Dell didn’t respond to Jarvis’ letter right away, but it did start taking his advice to heart. In a 2007 BusinessWeek piece Jarvis acknowledged the company’s turnaround: “In the age of customers empowered by blogs and social media, Dell has leapt from worst to first.” Less than a year after Jarvis’ letter imploring the company to start blogging, Dell did just that, launching Direct2Dell. “Chief blogger Lionel Menchaca gave the company a frank and credible human voice,” Jarvis wrote. Dell’s innovative IdeaStorm, a website “created to give a direct voice to our customers,” followed, and its massive Social Media Command Center is a more recent addition to the arsenal. The company’s own “Dell Social Media Timeline”.
Such efforts have earned the company an enduring reputation for large-scale social media savvy. On the New York Times’ small business blog Melinda F. Emerson recently described Dell as “one of the first big companies to strike a good balance among public relations, listening and selling on social media.” Dell’s founder and CEO, Michael Dell, was also recently ranked among “The Most Influential Execs on the Web” by Reuters and Klout.
Leveraging Expertise
Given that reputation, it’s not surprising that Dell plans to start offering its own Social Media Services for businesses and brands. “Customers regularly request our support to build and scale their own social efforts based on what they have seen us doing in this sphere,” Quintos explains to Ad Age. It sounds like a promising direction, but Forbes’ Haydn Shaughnessy says some old habits are holding the company back. Dell “does good social media but is yet to embrace the disruption to its management culture that social brings,” Shaughnessy writes. “Crack this and its reputation will improve no end.”
