The latest political drama to hit cinemas is The Ides of March (based on a play based on truth) adapted for the screen by the ever-relevant George Clooney and starring the newly ubiquitous Ryan Gosling, as the “country’s greatest media mind” behind the campaign of a presidential candidate (played by Clooney).

The film’s themes are provocative for those of us in the business of PR, as they reflect many ingredients of effective reputation management:  one part media relations, one part crisis, and a helping of ethics on the side. In the film, Gosling’s character is a media relations superstar, tasked with maintaining the high profile reputation of a potential future president, yet grappling with a possible sacrifice of values.

No one would argue that reputation management can be a sneaky game especially in politics, but these days, flaws are harder to sweep under the rug. On the other side of the silver screen, everyone from corporations to students are realizing that it’s not just the media at the helm of their reputations – it’s social media. We know the examples: Nestle ran into trouble, as did Urban Outfitters. The political world is almost too obvious, with the downfalls of Anthony Weiner and Chris Lee as examples.  Hollywood itself isn’t exempt – what’s the most buzzed-about topic related to the affair rumors facing Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore? Tweeting habits.

Though the film doesn’t address social media specifically, it recognizes the power of public relations on an individual and broader level, presenting a compelling narrative on ethics and the role of reputation and media. It does a particularly good job of examining the lengths that those in the highest echelons of politics go to in order to maintain that critical, yet fragile, sphere of influence.

But today, the approach by many lately has been the opposite of the underhandedness in Ides – it is openness over exclusivity, transparency over bureaucracy. Whether in Hollywood or in Washington, we’re all learning hard and fast that the person with just about as much power as that scrappy reporter from the Times, might just be your Facebook friend.

fhamid General Corporate Facebook, Ides of March, Nestle, Twitter, Urban Outfitters

It’s hard to believe that five years ago there was no twitter.    In a society where we are uber-connected, but task saturated and inundated with content, the simple 140 character format provides the ability to make a statement…quickly.  If its beauty is simplicity, its relevance stems from the access it gives us to celebrities, luminaries and thought leaders outside our normal sphere of influence.  You can follow Ashton, Queen Noor, the White House and Bill Gates.  It provides a feeling of equality and accessibility to all.

The other key to twitter’s success, in my opinion, has been its authenticity.  It’s why characters like Captain Morgan never took off…and why parody twitter handles need to be defined as such. 

Twitter’s unprecedented success lies in its adherence, thus far, to a simple formula – trust + relevance = action. It applies to pretty much every business – and in this case, the millions of people who opened, and use their accounts is the kind of action most brands only dream of.

Yesterday, twitter changed its approach to promoted tweets.  Getting a promoted tweet from a brand or cause I follow is one thing.    Yes, making it stick to the top of my timeline might be a little annoying – but if I’m following you, I’ve pretty much invited your marketing.   But inserting unwelcome, promoted tweets from whomever the twitter algorithm thinks I should hear from seems like crossing the line.  It violates the trust twitter has worked so hard to build – and puts those tweets into the same category as spam.  Will people do the equivalent of an inbox “delete all?”  Too soon to say. 

No doubt many brands will be rushing to get in on the action, and fill twitter’s coffers to access a new marketing channel that might prove to be effective.  But at what price to twitter’s reputation?

cwinters Social Media Ashton Kutcher, Bill Gates, Promoted tweets, Queen Noor, Twitter, White House

In the aftermath of the raid on Bin Laden’s compound, fascinating accounts of what transpired in Pakistan are circulating in the media. One of the most interesting is the New York Times’ piece on how social media once again broke the news while TV anchors only previewed what might be coming. While TV viewers waited, people’s emotions flooded the digital sphere instantaneously, all across the country. Whether the news was right or wrong, it was out there in a big way.

Twitter, which has been at the center of the “Arab Spring” protests across the Middle East, saw its highest rate of posts ever, according to the Times, with an average of 3,440 tweets per second in a less than two-hour time span Sunday evening. And Facebook had more than five million mentions of Bin Laden in the U.S. alone. These two outlets simply cannot be ignored by anyone involved with news cycles – and basically that means almost everyone on the planet.

Many people question whether Twitter and Facebook have a place among the journalism elite.

If you have any doubt, listen to this. According to the Huffington Post, a former defense department official tweeted first, at 10:45 pm.

I’d say that’s journalism in today’s era. Reliably sourced, fast out of the gate and clearly for attribution.
As the team leader for the Reuters Airline, Aerospace and Defense team during 9/11, this phenomenon was a sharp contrast to what happened in the news media a decade ago. On that fateful day in September, TV broke the news with pictures of airplanes flying into the Twin Towers. Our journalists scrambled to cover the impending devastation by calling everyone we knew, running down to Ground Zero, sourcing headlines carefully and refraining from printing anything speculative about what had happened. While our newsroom in a Chicago skyscraper was evacuated due to fears it was also targeted, we hastily grabbed laptops and other reporting tools we’d need to write the story from another location.

Today, all we would need are our cell phones and it is highly possible we wouldn’t have been the first to report what happened.

Kathy Fieweger is on Twitter. You can follow her at @KatFieweger.

kfieweger Social Media Journalism, New York Times Social Media, Osama Bin Laden, Reuters, Twitter

Corporate sponsorship isn’t just for stadiums and celebrity charity events anymore as The Wall Street Journal details in its aptly titled article, “Here, Tweeting is a Class Requirement.”

The piece discusses how several consumer products companies – including Sprint, Levi Strauss and Fox Sports Net – are sponsoring college and graduate classes in return for fresh thinking about their online marketing efforts.

This concept is a definite win-win for everyone involved. The students, charged with developing and executing social media and PR campaigns on behalf of the sponsors, get a chance to learn first-hand about the goals and objectives of these marquee brands, while the companies get fresh ideas from Generation Y on how to leverage social media vehicles like Facebook and Twitter to engage with target audiences.

Presumably, the companies benefit from the insights of a generation who has grown up with the Internet and for whom social networking is a vital part of their daily lives. Students get a break from lectures and term papers while serving as valuable brand ambassadors, who will likely develop into loyal customers.

And while corporate challenges have been integrated into b-school curriculum for years, these examples take corporate sponsorship to a new level and show how integral online initiatives have become for marketers and communications pros alike.

And perhaps, even more importantly, the partnerships present the leaders of tomorrow with tangible, real world experience to build their resumes.

skenney Social Media Facebook, Fox Sports Net, Generation Y, Levi Strauss, Sprint, Twitter

Remember when AOL was the “IT Boy” of technology and corporate America?

Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks were sighing as they heard the AOL version of the Intel jingle – a chirpy pronouncement that You’ve Got Mail. We all watched the “finishing” bar as we loaded ourselves onto the World Wide Web.

AOL was a game changer….they were our source for online news and information, Our e-mail carrier. Our shopping portal. Our Internet North Star.

Then came Google. CNN.com. Amazon.com. Facebook. Twitter.

Like an ex who hasn’t gotten the hint, AOL has trailed behind tech’s new “cool kids” looking for an opportunity to get back into the group. They haven’t gone away, but they haven’t been all that relevant, either.

AOL’s newest bet is on news, with the planned acquisition of the Huffington Post.

Despite lots of celebratory quotes to the contrary, I think AOL and HuffPo make strange bedfellows. The AOL business has been in decline for a decade, in large part because it doesn’t provide anything that is unique or presents a real POV. It aggregates the same content you can find just about everywhere else.

HuffPo, on the contrary, is largely known for its political clout and leanings of Ms. Huffington, and as a platform where citizen journalists can make an impact. It’s like the Amazon.com of content. There is a lot of stuff, but you can tailor it for you.

No doubt this deal will be great for the wallets of the original HuffPo founders and investors. But what about HuffPo’s reputation (and Ms. Huffington’s – known for her clear political POV and voice, which she acknowledges will not be part of her AOL platform/role.) The question of the day – will HuffPo help AOL get its groove back, or will HuffPo’s reputation take a hit as it becomes AOL-ized?

cwinters General Corporate AOL, Arianna Huffington, Facebook, Google, Huffington Post, Internet, Twitter

Now that MWW Group is independent again, it gives us the opportunity to once again become entirely independent in our thought. To serve only one master….our clients. And to rediscover and re-connect with the truly provocative edge that made us successful to begin with. While January often brings the regroup, reset and refresh conversations to an organization, the new year for MWW Group is NEW with a capital N. E. W.

In this self reflection, and analysis of the landscape in which we operate, it is always refreshing, (and OK, maybe a little bit reassuring) to uncover other sources who agree with the counsel you’ve been giving. Take this blog about the Four Keys to Influence, which was written with a social media spin. It tracks with what we’ve been saying at MWW Group long before we Tweeted, GroupOned or otherwise became digitally engaged.

One of the big questions clients always ask is how to be more influential with their key audiences…whether an employee communications program; a new product launch; a reputation management program or a public affairs initiative…it all boils down to influence. Or does it?

The funny thing about influence is that it really all boils down to relevance….what does it mean to me…and why should I care? Because the other elements of influence – trustworthiness, authenticity, authority, connection…are all predicated on relevance.

The world is a crowded, chaotic, noisy place. More and more, we have the ability curate our own content, customize our own stories and filter out what is not important to us. This is, after all, the TiVO generation. Relevance is the point of entry – without it, you aren’t just lacking influence…you are invisible.

I’d love your thoughts on what it takes for a company or a brand to be relevant to you…

cwinters General Corporate GroupOn, Influence, Relevance, Social Media, TiVO, Twitter

This week marked World Aids Day – a time when various organizations work to remind us that despite red ribbons, celebrity studded charity balls and the good work of organizations who search for cures, advocate for prevention and tend to the needs of people living with HIV, the AIDS epidemic is still very much an epidemic.

Alicia Key’s charity “Keep a Child Alive” recruited a dozen celebrities, including the immensely popular and digilicous Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Usher and more who “sacrificed” their digital lives until they raised $1 million on donations. In theory, a social media pledge campaign for a million dollars should be easy to accomplish. Lady Gaga – just one of their celebrity participants – has 7 million followers, and she is asking them to text a $10 donation. Usher and others are driving people to the campaign website where you can read the last tweet and testaments of the celebrities and pledge. If a fraction of the followers of these celebrities gave $1 dollar, a million dollars would be a walk in the park.

So why would this campaign only have raised $160,000 in its first day, the time when they would have expected to raise the most. At this point, I have to question if they’ve even covered their campaign expenses to build the website and the campaign.

On paper, this is a PR person’s dream campaign. It has a great website. It is provocative. It is clever. Why isn’t it working?

Pundits are suggesting that the $10 donation minimum is too high. Or that the problem is that the celebrities are not tweeting to drum up ongoing support. That may be part of the issue. But I’d suggest it is something even more basic — celebrity endorsement is no longer a guarantee of campaign success. Celebrities sign on to too many causes, too many issues and too many endorsements for their endorsement to be meaningful. Followers don’t equal influence. Just because people digitally follow you doesn’t mean that they are willing to reach in their wallets. People love the glimpse into celebrity lives that social media provides, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into changing behavior.

So what should Keep a Child Alive do now? Certainly they can’t expect these celebrities to be digitally dead indefinitely?

One idea might be to ask these celebrities to put their money where their tweets are…and make personal donations to help drive up the kitty. Another would be to offer people who donate something more valuable to them than unlocking Ryan Seacrest from twitter limbo. (Has anyone even noticed that these celebrities aren’t tweeting?). Maybe a donation should qualify you to win a celebrity encounter. Perhaps anyone who donates via text could download a file that makes one of these celebrities their voicemail message (Hey it’s Usher, leave a message for shorty – we’re too busy fighting AIDS to answer your call.)

But they need to do something, or their campaign is going to be as digitally dead as their celebrities. And no one will even notice.

cwinters General Corporate, Social Media Alicia Keys, Celebrity Endorsements, Keep a Child Alive, Twitter

One of our latest posts focused on the resurrection, both football and reputation-wise, of Michael Vick, the quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles. In keeping with a sports theme, this past week saw some heated debate about reputation on the baseball diamond and specifically the vote for Felix Hernandez as the American League Cy Young Award winner.

Despite a mediocre 13-12 win-loss record, albeit for the lowly Seattle Mariners in the less classy American League West, Hernandez bested CC Sabathia of the New York Yankees who had 21 wins and David Price of the Tampa Bay Rays with a 19-6 record both of whom do battle in the powerhouse American League East. It used to be that wins and/or strikeouts made a pitcher’s reputation and secured the prestigious and lucrative Cy Young Award but not anymore.

Commentators pointed to how Mr. Hernandez fared despite the low run production of the Mariners, they pointed to his quality starts, and even his impressive record against the strong American League East teams. ESPN, the masters of useless sports statistics, speculated about whether a pitcher with a losing record could win the Cy Young and trotted out something called Wins Above Replacement to analyze deserving pitchers of the past with so-so records.

As new math is rewriting what makes reputations in sports, advanced algorithms are also having an impact on who’s hot and who’s not in the world of social media. This past week at the Web 2.0 Summit, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams was asked how the company determines what users to suggest for the “who to follow” section. Williams stated that Twitter uses a reputation score that the company’s ‘science and math people’ have come up with that delves into a user’s Tweeting activities and interactions. While Williams did not go into specifics of the math involved, he did hint that in time, the reputational number crunching methodology could be made public.

Perhaps sports and social media could be of help in evolving the reputational analytics of corporations and executives. Can corporate social responsibility, sustainability and employee satisfaction come to the fore such as quality starts and wins above replacement have in baseball? Will quarterly earnings and share price go the way of wins? And can Twitter’s ‘science and math’ guys put together an algorithm for determining what companies and corporate leaders to follow?

rtauberman General Corporate Cy Young, Evan Williams, Felix Hernandez, MLB, Social Media, Twitter

Can you remember life before Twitter? What began as a forum for 20-somethings to share the most mundane aspects of their lives has morphed into a 140 character Jack of all trades.

People win things on Twitter. We have the Twitter Diet. Twitter Dating (Flitter), Twitter Job Hunting and networking. It’s changed customer service. Social media has started movements for positive change..and pulled off great hoaxes. It’s fundamentally altered Crisis Management (anyone remember little things like Dominoes? Miracle on the Hudson?). It’s even changed the dictionary.

Is there anything Twitter can’t do?

By its very nature, Twitter has captured the hearts and minds of those of us with very short attention spans that are bound to move on to something else. The very appeal of Twitter is the authentic, brief snapshots that a Tweet can give you. Who didn’t love knowing what Ashton & Demi were having for dinner? Or the ability to get their seat changed away from a smelly neighbor on an airplane by simply Tweeting. Or being the first to touch Shaq?

But now that the Twitter-verse is so massive, much of that authentic, spontaneous fun has been replaced by “stuff” that varies in from super interesting and compelling to super-boring. Really, does anyone care that you checked in at Starbucks? Or that you Tweeted about similar things 40 or 50 times over the course of the day?

This is not to say that Twitter, or social media for that matter, are going away. Quite to the contrary. Like Pashminas and Uggs, which enjoyed a massive popularity for a season or two when you just couldn’t get them, then settled in to “wardrobe staple” status, Twitter is here to stay. But as a communications tool, interest in Twitter is already changing from the frenzied client requests to one on a list of “to do’s” – A Twitter strategy is like having a website, issuing a news release or getting to your beat reporters….a must do. But not something that gives you “extra credit” on the communications scorecard.

cwinters Social Media Dominoes, Miracle on the Hudson, Pashminas, Twitter, Uggs