Thursday, September 16, 2010
The Importance of Monitoring the "Webiverse" | Fast Company
It's not uncommon that folks want to know what's being said about them. For businesses, it's becoming more of an obsession and for good reason. While companies won't ever have 100 percent control of their online image, there are certainly various things that organizations can do to participate and track what's going on in the "Webiverse." That's why Internet monitoring tools are becoming increasingly popular within company environments and aid businesses in tracking conversations and comments--whether good or bad--that involve their brand.
Free services such as Google Alerts are widely known, and a must have for every company as it provides users the ability to track what's going on in their industry. Other sites like Social Mention and Hootsuite operate the same way but for social media profiles. In the case of my company, an online textbook marketplace, it is critical for us to ensure that we maintain a stellar Web reputation and remain at the forefront of our industry. Most other companies--regardless of industry--will need to think the same way. Here are six reasons how organizations should go about monitoring conversations online:
1) Keep an eye on the competition.
Every company should have Google Alerts set up not only for new Web content about them, but also for their rivals. Have they launched a new product? Won over a key customer? What are they doing that you're not? Following the opposition is more important than ever and provides additional insight into what's happening in the industry.2) Track key words.
Make a list of key words related to the organization's services and offerings and set up individual searches on those terms. Whether these words show up in a news story or blog post, it's a good practice for companies to monitor this activity.3) Determine who's linking to your site.
From a PR and marketing perspective, businesses should consistently include links to their Web site on any information that's distributed. For organizations that send press releases, this is an easy way to monitor which sites pick up the news.4) Acknowledge customers.
Not only is it good practice to track competitors, but following key customers or partners is equally important. For example, if you receive an update that a prospect was recently acknowledged for something, send them a personal note congratulating them on their accomplishment. It's not only a kind gesture, but it demonstrates that your company monitors their business as well.5) Locate media.
At ValoreBooks, we frequently come across new reports that cover our industry from tracking certain keywords. It's a great idea to research their work and determine if they write about that beat on a consistent basis. If so, have the marketing or PR team make outreach efforts. Perhaps they'll keep your firm in mind the next time they're looking for an expert source for a story and you'll make a new friend.6) Be active.
Set aside some time each day to monitor and review Google Alerts as well as other social media search services. Often companies will sign up for such monitoring services, but fail to actively review each thread when it's received.Using online monitoring tools is advantageous for numerous reasons; it allows companies to stay ahead of the curve as well as provides opportunities to play with the big dogs. The strategies available enable folks to track their professional exposure, company news, competitors, meet new media and industry elements in general. It's now up to these organizations to play an active role in monitoring and participating in their Web presence.
Bobby Brannigan is the founder and CEO of ValoreBooks, a fast-growing online provider of cheap college textbooks. He can be reached at bbrannigan@valorebooks.com.
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Tuesday, September 14, 2010
In Response | American Journalism Review
In Response
Banning unsigned online comments undermines the media’s role as a forum for debate
By Bill Reader
Bill Reader (reader@ohio.edu) is a professor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University.
After a Boston editor received complaints about the potential abuse of anonymity in the reader comments he published, he announced that he would collect the writers' real names and make them public if need be. Editors of some other newspapers announced they would do the same.
Detractors quickly decried the idea as antithetical to the principles of press freedom. One writer called the move a "despotic scheme of government"; another said it was an attempt by "our aristocratical gentry" to silence the voice of the common citizen. In the end, Editor Benjamin Russell abandoned his plan and continued to publish unsigned commentary, much of it heated and vitriolic, in his Massachusetts Centinel.
The year was 1787. The opponents to his "real name" policy were the Anti-Federalists. And the debate was over what became the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
I think a lot about Benjamin Russell these days. Angered by the unquestionably vile comments that some (but hardly most) anonymous posters submit to online forums, many journalists, from editors of rural weeklies to Pulitzer-winning syndicated columnists, have decried anonymous forums. The column by AJR Editor and Senior Vice President Rem Rieder ("No Comment," Summer) arguing that anonymous comments should be banned altogether — as they were recently at the Buffalo News and Pennsylvania's Reading Eagle — very well may represent the majority sentiment among professional journalists.
I see and in many ways share the concerns about abusive anonymous posts. In fact, I embraced Rieder's opinion when I was a few years out of J-school and working at a newspaper that had an anonymous call-in forum that many of my colleagues and I found repugnant. Several years later, I decided to study the issue for my master's thesis. I dived into the literature, hoping to show that the crafters of the First Amendment would not support anonymous comments. Then I read about the Massachusetts Centinel and similar accounts from that period.
The more I researched the history of American news media, the more I realized that our profession's disdain for anonymous commentary is built upon a myth. Anonymity isn't anathema to American democracy; in fact, anonymous speech is exactly what the framers of the First Amendment had in mind. On a philosophical level, anonymity allowed opinions to be considered on their own merits, without regard for who was stating them; on a practical level, it gave people a way to disagree with leaders without getting beaten and/or thrown in jail.
Through much of history, American newspapers honored those principles by publishing anonymous and pseudonymous comments. "Must sign" policies became widespread only in the 1950s and 1960s. Editors argued that requiring signatures would improve the quality of letters to the editor. As one argued in The Masthead in 1968, doing so would likely deter "haters and hollerers from cluttering up the column and scaring off other writers."
Ironically, the "must sign" policies themselves appear to have done the scaring off. A national survey Ohio University conducted in 2003 found that, among people who had never written letters to the editor, more than a third of women and nearly half of non-whites said they would write letters if their names would not be published. That opinion was also expressed by large percentages of city dwellers, people with annual incomes below $25,000, and adults aged 18 to 44. Those are voices that, arguably, were silenced by the "must sign" policies applied to letters to the editor. I believe they will be silenced again if the industry embraces the current campaign to ban anonymous comments online, too.
In an era when the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment does not apply to public employees who point out the mistakes of their superiors, and people can lose their jobs for making statements that somebody might construe as "disrespectful," real people with serious opinions need anonymity to exercise their most basic democratic rights: to dissent, to criticize, to advocate and to debate controversies. If journalists try to silence the "haters and hollerers" by banning anonymous comments online, they also will silence the poor, the vulnerable and the dispossessed. Such a ban would represent a drastic overreaction.
As Rieder points out, anonymity is misused by some, and egregiously so. But anonymity isn't the problem; lack of editing is. There are ways to curb abuses in the forums, whether using high-tech solutions or good old-fashioned editing.
We in the Fourth Estate should be defenders and practi-tioners of the First Amendment. We should temper our professional disdain with a realization that, on the whole, anonymity is the one true cultural equalizer, and that it is what the First Amendment was meant to protect all along.
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“Squeezing humanity through a straw”: The long-term consequences of using metrics in journalism » Nieman Journalism Lab
[Here's C.W. Anderson responding to the same subject Nikki Usher wrote about: the impact of audience data on how news organizations operate. Sort of a debate. —Josh]
One way to think about the growing use of online metrics in newsrooms (a practice that has been going on forever but seems to have finally been noticed of late) is to think about it as part of a general democratization of journalism. And it’s tempting to portray the two sides to the debate as (in this corner!) the young, tech-savvy newsroom manager who is finally listening to the audience, and (in this corner!) the fading fuddy-duddy-cum-elitist more concerned with outdated professional snobbery than with what the audience wants.
Fortunately, actual working journalists rarely truck in such simplistic stereotypes, arguing rightly that there isn’t a binary divide between smart measurement and good journalism. As Washington Post executive producer and head of digital news products Katharine Zaleski told Howard Kurtz:
There’s news we know people should read — because it’s important and originates with our reporting — and that’s our primary function…But we also have to be very aware of what people are searching for out there and want more information on…If we’re not doing that, we’re not doing our jobs.
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