I, Monkeyboy

Traditional Communications Disrupted: Bigger, Faster, Riskier.
The rise of social technologies over the last few years has impacted the corporate communications department the first and often most severe.  From angry bloggers to ratings and reviews these departments were some of the first to respond, and take ownership.  In fact, Altimeter’s Research (figure 6.3) indicates that 30% of Corporate Social Strategists report to Corp Comm, 41% report to Marketing, where Corp Comm may reside under.  Despite this adoption, these departments have undergone three major changes.

• Nearly all Employees are ‘Corporate Representatives’. Both a blessing and a curse, now traditional corporate spokespersons are spread to any employee who participates in social communications –even if they don’t ‘officially’ represent the company.  Furthermore, we found in a recent survey that the average enterprise corporation has a whopping 178 social media accounts globally, the amount of communication touch points has drastically increased.  To make matters more complicated, the blur between personal and work usage of social accounts like Twitter and Facebook confused communication professionals and employees alike.
• Companies Must Respond Faster to Customer Woes in Public. Forever gone is the days of sweeping customer complaints under the carpet, as in an easily findable ‘Google world’ corporations must address customers in public as many watch on.  Furthermore we see that the speed required to respond increase, as minor issues can escalate to larger issues within a number of hours.  Business communications is no longer limited to 9-5, but now a watchful eye has to be put in place, we see an increase of outsourcing to agencies that offer brand monitoring, community management, and real-time response increase.
• Comunication Crises On The Rise. Lastly, our recent research peering into 50 case examples has found that social media crises are on the rise year to year (see data).  Ironically, we’ve segmented this by mentions of corporations in multiple ‘mainstream’ media rags, as those get the attention of executives and beyond.  Why this increase?  The media love to stick-it-to-the-man by telling stories of single consumers bucking a big nasty corporation, and with the pile-on-effect from social media these stories glean heavy traffic and comments.

Three Actionable Imperatives for Corporate Communications Groups
I’ve peered into many a corporate communications departments as I spend time with the world’s largest corporations and have found a trend among the most savvy.   I’ve seen three clear trends which we’ve articulated in our latest report on Social Business Readiness (slides too), which you should download and distribute today, among them are:

1. Relinquish Mindset of Control, Instead Usher ‘Enablement’. In business school, we were taught to foster message control and encourage all corporate representatives to stay on message.  Yet today, as multiple business units from support, sales, HR and beyond participate in social technologies, communication is spread to the edges of the company –not just from executive comms.  As a result, corporate communications groups have changed their mindset to safely enabling business units to communicate, based on pre-set parameters they put in place through governance, coordination, and workflow.
2. Roll out Enterprise Workflows,  Education Programs at Four Levels. We’ve found that savvy corporations have detailed workflows, one insurance company I’ve worked with has multiple workflows in place, including sample language in which employees should respond.  Beyond creating these workflows, they must be distributed throughout the enterprise through education programs, and drilled.  We’ve found savvy corporations have up to four types of education programs spanning: Executive team, social media team, business stakeholder teams, and finally all associates.  Even if the mandate is set in place rank and file employees will not respond in social –they must be educated this is the case.
3. Host Mock Crises Across the Enterprise Today. Lastly, we’ve found a few savvy corporations working with agency partners have setup mock fire drills where they approach a week long crises in a number of hours in private.  Not only does this test the mettle of the organization it provides useful training so companies can respond faster, in a more coordinated approach.  We should expect compliance programs to eventually require corporations get ‘social-crises-ready’, I know of two brands that have already gone through this.

That’s my perspective on what I’m seeing in this space, would love to hear from you, what are savvy corporate communications departments doing today?

Google+ circles have been rolled into chat across all Google sites, including Gmail, iGoogle, Orkut, the Google Talk client, and even third-party apps. Previously, Google Chat was based on email addresses and was a part of Gmail. When Google+ launched, it had the same email-based chat widget that Gmail has. Now, anyone in your circles who has circled you back will appear in chat.

The chat list still shows your most recent contacts, rather than your full list, and you can use the search box to find people who don't appear. According to Google+ support documents, the chat relationships you had before this update are preserved and take priority. For example, your existing block list still applies. The order of contacts might appear differently in different places, but this Google+-enabled chat now applies across the board.

Sponsor

Now that circles are the main organizing principle of Google Chat, Google+ takes on a primary social role across important Google properties. Even in Orkut, Google's other social network, Google+ connections are now the way chat works. It's a small but significant step toward Google+ being the social layer underlying all Google sites.

Learn more in Google+ help.

Do you use Google Chat to talk with your friends and colleagues?

A project lead by some of the most-respected leaders of the Internet has secured $240,000 in funding to build a prototype system for both expert and peer review of all the content on the web, sentence by sentence. Called Hypothes.is, the project is lead by early search engine innovator and climate change activist Dan Whaley and backed by advisors from John Perry Barlow of the EFF to Garret Camp of StumbleUpon to Kaliya Hamlin of the Internet Identity Workshop to Nate Oostendorp of Slashdot, and many more.

We wrote about the Hypothes.is fundraising effort on Kickstarter last month. That effort succeeded, including with a large matching pledge by cleantech and web venture capitalist Sunil Paul. And so Hypothes.is will be built. What do people want out of it and does it stand a chance to change the web? Opinions differ.

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Hypothes.is is planned as a peer review system to check, verify and critique content all over the Web - and beyond. "Improving the credibility of the information we consume is humanity's grandest challenge," Whaley says. I can't help but suspect that Whaley's work on climate issues, which are challenging to understand, deeply contentious and of the utmost importance to humanity's future, played a role in his coming to feel this way.

Topic experts will be enlisted in addition to crowdsourcing, a reputation system, browser plug-ins and APIs are on the roadmap and all the data will be stored at the Internet Archive.

It sounds like Google's ill-fated Sidewiki project and countless other startups that have sought to enable annotation of distributed web content, but it also sounds a lot more sophisticated.

Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, is one of the project's advisors and it's not hard to imagine something like this shipping as an optional plug-in for every browser. Google acquired contextual-search plug-in Apture this month and said that functionality like that, highlight a word anywhere to learn a lot more about it, would be baked into the Chrome browser as soon as possible. Why not bake in something like Q&A site Quora, where answers to questions are voted up and down by users and topics are easy to track over time, into every browser regarding every sentence on every web page?

Topic experts could be invited to participate the way that Google did with that Wikipedia-killer project no one even remembers, Knol, but they could also be discovered Quora-like by tracking which users of Hypothes.is got answers voted up the most in reviewing content on a topic in multiple instances.

Expertise may be a subjective matter, though, and is often deeply swayed by persistent participation. Just showing up. Wikipedia, for example, is alleged by some not to be the world's finest, neutrally written encyclopedia, but rather a domain dominated by pushy know-it-all youngsters who bully their way into describing the world in a particular way.

Hypothes.is offers a list of twelve principles that indicate it's already looking out for concerns like this. Those principles include the following:

• Open source, open standards.To the extent practical.
  
• Work everywhere. Without consent.
  
• Non profit. Sustained by social enterprise.
  
• Neutral. Favor no ideological or political positions.
  
• 100% community moderated. Bottoms up, not top down.
  
• Merit based. Influence based on track record.
  
• Pseudonymous. Credibility without public identity.
  
• International. By design.
  
• Transparent and audit-able. In systems. In governance.
  
• Think long-term. Infrastructure for 100 years? Or longer?
  
• Many formats, many contexts. HTML, PDF, video, books. News, blogs scientific articles, legislation, regulations, Terms of Service, etc.
  
• Work with the best. Remain humble.
  

If this works, it sounds great. Imagine having a channel in StumbleUpon that just serves up pages from around the web that have been validated by experts in marine biology, for example.

I can't help but think there will be an enormous user experience challenges, too, though. Most people in the world don't know what a browser is, they Google for Facebook and they fall for phishing and spam often enough to make such tactics extremely profitable. Maybe something like Hypothes.is could help with all that, but it will probably be a challenge to get a critical mass of engagement, too, across the unbounded expanse of content on the web.

How will unpopular opinions fair? That's another question I've got.

None the less, I'm really excited to see how this project unfolds. I've reserved my Hypothes.is username already, so that my reviews of content can appear under my usual handle. Hypothes.is says it aims to have a prototype available early next year.


Discuss

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Kevin Magee, Director of Sales at Expion, a client of Social Media Explorer.

Social and compliance might seem like two words that don’t go together, but for global organizations, maintaining a sense of order amidst the social media chaos is a must. We previously discussed the mistakes that companies need to avoid in order to “be social” – but now comes the implementation. Now, it’s time to move within the organization and get social integrated as seamlessly as possible.

You’ve heard it said before, it’s best to keep things simple. So how do you integrate social media in a global organization with 50,000 employees and keep it simple?  I can share what I’ve seen as the necessary steps for success and you might just recognize a pattern: integrate social as you would any critical component of your organization:

1. Get your social policy here.

Seriously, here are 4 companies that post their social policies (that is mighty social of them, wouldn’t you say?)

• IBM
• Intel
• Best Buy
• Coca-Cola

Image by Brewcaster via Flickr

Don’t step outside of this process, since there needs to be a framework for “how to be social” within the organization. This guide should include how to play (the platforms, and the decorum), what to say and what not to say, as well as what kinds of communication each employee is responsible for. There also need to be clear lines regarding what constitutes personal vs. company social activity; this is particularly important for employees with consumer-facing public and private personas.

Also key to note is that this social media policy document must be able to evolve. Social media platforms change their terms of service (TOS) constantly, and consumers are always finding new channels to communicate with and about the brands they love (or hate). Corporate can and should definitely dictate the guidelines for the health of the business overall, but flexibility should be built in.

2. Get your senior execs on board from the onset.

If they are not in the boat, the boat won’t sail. Ever. How many successful corporate-wide ventures have succeeded without the support, direction and encouragement of your senior leadership team?

You may need to make it easy on the senior execs to gain their buy-in, however. That could mean working with marketing and customer service staff to create a draft of the social media policy first, then submitting to senior staff for approval. It could also mean creating mock campaigns, vetting social media management software, and even pulling research and data to support the position that the course of action you’re suggesting is the most effective, efficient option.

3. Train and then train some more.

Your employees know social – one in every six minutes online is spent on social media – but they may not know how you want them to play, at least on the company time, brand and dime. You have to tell them (by creating a social media policy) and you have to show them.

Global organizations likely have the full range of education in terms of employees – from high school grads to MBAs – all with varying degrees of knowledge of social media protocols, etiquette and comfort. Your high school grads may be much more comfortable in social media than your business MBAs, for example, and that’s OK. The goal is to recognize the varying skill levels and deliver training that is specific to the roles each associate will play within your newly “social” organization.

4. Let your company’s voice sing in social.

To me, the most effective social media marketing campaigns – at least the ones that have been viral and memorable – are the ones that have real personality. Deep inside that massive, global organization is a personality, and customers already see it in your more traditional marketing efforts. Why not use it for social too?

If you’re known for supreme customer service, deliver that message. Are your products the best, or are they fighting for respect? Are you an incredible value compared to your competition? Find that social voice that is consistent with your existing message, and then let it sing. (And this is why the marketing team should own social leadership internally – not IT, not legal and certainly not finance. They’re already crafting, planning, staging and executing your message today, so they’ll naturally be able to understand how to craft that message and voice for social).

 5. Stop thinking like a big brand and go small.

To be really effective at social, you need to learn what your community wants – not just blast things out to them – and developing social listening and engagement skills takes practice. A simple ratio would be this: Make 80% of the company’s social content about things your target audience is interested in, and the remaining 20% of can be promotional.

Simple ratio, yes … a bit more difficult for the marketing team (which I just championed) to execute, because they’re programmed to promote (I think it’s in their DNA). So who do you turn to for guidance? The staff that typically interfaces with consumers directly. For some companies, it’s the call center employees, for others, its customer service; in the case of a restaurant chain, it’s the servers, bartenders and managers that are on the front lines. Bottom line is, you need input from the employees that aren’t feeding from the corporate food trough on a daily basis – they actually live the product and the company message.

From them, you’ll learn that some topics and subjects may not work in terms of driving consumer response or engagement across multiple social channels. Facebook, for example, decides what users see in the newsfeed based on how they interact with various types of content. If they don’t interact with your brand, then you won’t be visible to them in a crowded newsfeed. Similarly, if you are not interesting to your Twitter followers, well, they are not going to read what you are tweeting, they won’t retweet, share with friends or otherwise respond.

As I said before, the employees on the front

lines understand this best. In our experience, it’s the local guys who really get it! We have data that shows a 10x multiple on fan engagement for local pages vs. a brand’s corporate page. That is worth repeating: TEN TIMES the engagement!

So don’t shy from social because it’s unique and your organization is too large. Beat your competition and stick with what it is that you do best: it’s the process, baby.

About the Guest Author:  Kevin Magee is the Director of Sales for Expion and has been instrumental in helping the company grow its client base. He brings nearly two decades of enterprise sales, management and marketing experience to the team, including P&L responsibility and strategic development. Expion’s  software manages thousands of business profiles on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and beyond.  Its centralized platform empowers customers to localize and align their social marketing efforts.

This guest post is by Jon Morrow of boostblogtraffic.com.

Ever look at those snazzy movie trailers Hollywood puts out for their latest blockbusters and wonder how you could make one of your own?

Maybe you’re starting a new blog, and you want to launch with a bang. Or maybe you’re coming out with a new book, and you want to create some prelaunch buzz. Or maybe you’re even launching a new online course, and you want to build anticipation up to a fevered pitch in preparation for launch day.

Whatever the case, creating a trailer seems like a good way to do it. There’s only one problem:

You can’t possibly afford it, right?

Image copyright Deklofenak - Fotolia.com

These aren’t folks aren’t exactly begging for work, either. If you want a great trailer, you have to hire the best, and the best comes at a premium price.

So, you’re screwed, right? I mean, maybe you could scrounge around in the couch cushions to find a few bucks, but that’s not going to get you very far, now is it?

Actually … you might be surprised.

How I created a jaw-dropping movie trailer for under $50

Yep, it’s true. The movie trailer I created for my blog launch only cost me a grand total of … wait for it…

$34 US.

Granted, I already had a copy of Adobe After Effects, which saved a few thousand bucks. I’m also an exceptionally geeky dude, so I figured out how to do all the necessary work on my own.

But it’s easier than you might think.

You see, I bought this template from VideoHive for $20. It’s basically a ready-made movie trailer, where all you have to do is fill in the text.

From there, I bought this music for $14, which was actually recommended by the designer who created the After Effects template. So I bought a license, added it to the trailer, and then exported the whole thing to a movie file.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

Don’t believe me?

Well then, let’s take a step-by-step walk-through of how to do it for yourself.

Step one: choose your Adobe After Effects template

Before you do anything else, head on over to VideoHive and browse through the trailers. There are several ways to do it:

1. Just type “trailer” in the search box, and then look through everything that comes up.
2. Browse category by category, starting with “After Effects Project Files,” and then drilling down to exactly what you want.
3. Click “After Effects Project Files,” and then sort by “Sales,” showing you all the most popular templates on the site.

The third option is my personal preference, because it allows you to familiarize yourself with all the different types of templates and start thinking about what might work for you. When I first started working on my trailer, I spent hours and hours looking through them, dreaming about what I could do, and it took me weeks to finally settle on one.

The reason I finally chose Ivory is because it has an epic feel, but it’s not an overly complicated trailer, so it was really easy to modify. All I had to do was change the text, slip in my own videos, and it was ready to go.

That’s important, because if you’re doing it yourself, you should know Adobe After Affects is one of the most complicated pieces of consumer software in existence. I’m a technical dude, and it still took me hours to figure out how to change the text. If I’d used anything more complicated, I probably would have been tinkering with it for weeks.

That’s not to say you can’t use a more complicated template, of course. If you do, you probably just want to hire a professional to edit it for you, which we’ll get to in a minute.

But if you do want to do it yourself, stick to the ones with quotes. You can find them by searching for “quotes” or “text.”

Whatever you decide though, you’ll soon discover that none of the templates come with music. They often provide recommendations, but you have to license and integrate it on your own.

Let’s talk about that next…

Step two: license the music for your trailer

There are lots of different places you can license music online, but most or all of the templates on VideoHive use music from another site in the Envato network, AudioJungle. You can use any music you want, of course, but the selection at AudioJungle really is quite awesome, and the licenses allow for trailers (I’m not a lawyer, so consult one, if there’s any doubt).

You can search it the same ways you searched VideoHive, and if you’re looking for a few hours to kill, it’s a good way to do it, but you could also argue it’s a waste of time. Here’s why:

Changing the music will skyrocket the cost.

The majority of the templates are created with a certain piece of music in mind. The animation changes with music, and key ideas pop up at just the right time to create a dramatic effect. If you change the music, everything will be out of sync, and so you will have to redo the timing of the animation.

Unless you’re an Adobe After Effects guru, that means hiring a pro to do it for you, and I would guess the change of music, along with the necessary changes to the animation, would cost you anywhere between $500-$1,000. If you’re working on a big product launch, it might be worth it, but for a blog or book or any other project where you’re not making lots of money, you probably want to keep it cheap.

It’s up to you, but my advice: stick with the music the template creator recommends.

From there, all you have to do is…

Step three: assemble and render your movie trailer

Here, you have to make a decision, and it will dramatically affect the cost of your trailer, as well as the time it takes you to create. You can either:

1. Assemble and render your movie trailer all by yourself.
2. Pay a professional to render and assemble it for you.

As I mentioned earlier, I decided to do myself, but … well … I’m a weirdo. I actually enjoy learning new software and tinkering with it days on end, and so the 20+ hours it took me was, in a word, fun, where most normal people would’ve already turned their computer into a flying projectile.

Maybe you’re a weirdo too, though. If you are, you can absolutely do it. Buy or borrow a copy of Adobe After Affects, pray your computer is powerful enough to run it (hint: 4 GB of RAM, bare minimum), Google up some After Effects tutorials, and start working.

On the other hand, maybe you would rather be water boarded than try to do it yourself. If that’s the case, cough up a few more bucks, and hire a pro.

It’s not as expensive as you might think.

Most of the uber-talented designers on VideoHive will put everything together for you for $250-$500. You don’t get any changes to the template, and they are probably not going to do multiple revisions, but if you hand over your text, music, and any photos or videos, they’ll put them in and send you a completed trailer.

If that’s too much money, you can also go the cheapskate route and post the job on a freelance site like oDesk. You can probably get it done by somebody in India, China, or Eastern Europe for $100 or less.

And if you think about it, that’s still pretty cheap. Sure, it’s a lot more at than the skimpy $34 I shelled out, but it’s also a lot cheaper than the $50,000 or more Hollywood movie studios spend.

It also makes you look like a rockstar. So if that’s all that’s standing in your way, don’t cheap out, here. Save up a few hundred bucks, and get yourself a nice trailer for your launch.

It’s totally worth it

No, you probably won’t pick up 1740 subscribers in a week like I did, because that takes some killer connections, but what if you get a couple hundred? Or what if it convinces a major TV or radio show to interview you? Or what if it sells just one more copy of your $500 course?

You don’t have to blow the doors off for your trailer to pay for itself. Truth be told, you can probably screw about 90% of it up, and it will still beat any other type of launch lead in you could do.

Next week, I’ll have another post here on ProBlogger giving you some strategies on how to get the most out of your trailer. In the meantime, start digging through VideoHive, get some different ideas rattling around in your head, and let your subconscious do its work.

All the technical tomfoolery in the world is no substitute for creativity. And really, that’s what we’re doing here. We’re packaging up our ideas into a 30-180 second trailer, but the strength of that trailer isn’t the animation or the music or even the video itself. It’s the ideas.

So get thinking.

Be creative.

And more than anything, believe in yourself. Yes, you might be an upstart blogger, scrounging around the couch cushions to pay for your trailer, but you can do this.

And you know what I think?

It’s gonna be huge.

Jon Morrow is also on a mission to help good writers get traffic they deserve. If you’re one of them, check out his upcoming blog about (surprise!) blogging.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Everything You Need to Know About Creating a Jaw-Dropping Movie Trailer on the Cheap