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Image by Duane Storey via Flickr

If you find yourself in downtown Ottawa tomorrow morning at 7:30 with a hankering for a bagel and some piercing insight on social media and community, stop by the offices of Gowlings at 160 Elgin and join us at the fourth Ottawa Social Media Breakfast.  Now, we’ve been at capacity for over a week, so there are no guarantees that you’ll get in if you haven’t already signed up online.  In the meantime, if you want to assure yourself a ticket for the upcoming breakfasts, swing on over to the sign-up page at http://smbottawa4.eventbrite.com/ and add your email to the waiting list, and we’ll let you know about upcoming breakfasts.  We’ve sold out almost every time, so it’s a good idea to act fast.

You may ask: why do we do this?  Because, as Captain Hammer of Doctor Horrible’s Sing Along Blog says:

It’s not enough to bash in heads,
You have to bash in minds.

We’ve got some exciting things to announce in the next little while, including our new season sponsor - Gowlings Law - and our upcoming speakers.  Stay tuned, and I hope to see you at breakfast tomorrow.

I was asked to do an interview for the Globe’s Report on Business about making the leap from a day job to being your own boss. The money pullquote:

“The hardest thing is the lack of human contact. As much as having to put up with the guy who’s constantly in your office talking about last night’s episode of Rock of Love is annoying, when you spend your days working alone, sometimes you wish that guy would stop by.”

Ryan Anderson, principal, Fat Canary Communications Inc., in Ottawa

I’m not going to lie… I do miss that guy. Read the whole article here.

When I talk to people outside the echo chamber about social media tools like Twitter or Friendfeed, there’s one key element of it that is very hard to get across - community.  Of course, most businesses understand the idea of community as a group of people who share the same interests and can contribute their ideas to a product or service, and that’s completely valid.  But real community - the way we think of our neighbours, our families, our church / theatre group / team, is much more meaningful than just like interests.  It’s not just a business relationship - it’s about helping each other out when it’s needed.

A few weeks ago, I was at BlogWorld Expo with Overlay.TV.  My flight wasn’t until later the day after the conference, so I decided to spend a bit of the day walking around before I took off to the airport.  I decided that I would pick up something for my girlfriend at the Paull Frank store on the strip, and as I was about to pay, I made the horrifying realization that my wallet was no longer in my pocket.  Whether I left it on the counter at the last store I was at, or someone lifted it will remain a mystery, but it was officially gone, along with my money and all my cards.

I cancelled my credit cards without incident, but that wasn’t the problem.  I had no cash, nor access to my cash… and I needed to get to the airport.

I tried talking to the front desk at the hotel I stayed at, but they were no help (side note: up yours, Vegas Hilton) so I turned to Twitter.  I had met Rich Becker the night before at dinner, and, being the only person I knew who lived in Vegas, I messaged him and asked him to call me.  By the time he called, he had seen my Tweet, and generously offered to meet me after work and take me to the airport, thereby saving me a three-hour walk through the desert.

Rich not only picked me up, but gave me money for dinner, apologized for not being able to invite me over for dinner with his family that night, and told me how embarassed he and his wife was that something like this happened in their city.

When I got home, I naturally sent Rich the money he had leant me for dinner, and a week later, I got a message from him saying that it wasn’t necessary, and so he had donated it in my name to a cause that was near and dear to his heart.

Given the kindness that Rich showed me - a complete stranger - in a time of need, the least I can do is to encourage all of you to help a member of the community and donate what you can to the 2008 Arthritis Walk.  It’s an important cause, and one that touches the lives of many people.

It’s important to talk about the business and enterprise benefits of social media, but it’s a nice reminder that community still goes beyond products and services, and connects people.

Last Tuesday, I gave a presentation on Reputation 2.0 - reputation management in a social media environment.  I was asked by a few people to put my slides up online, but since they have no real context without me standing in front of them talking, I figured I would write this to accompany the disembodied Powerpoint.  So, as you read this, just imagine me standing in front of the slides saying it.  Then imagine me extremely charming and eloquent, rather than bleary and uncaffeinated from getting up at 5 to set things up.  Got it?  Perfect.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: reputation media)

It seems like every week I read more stats about the state of the blogosphere, or new data about who’s using the internet.  These numbers are great for making a point, but they don’t really matter, and they often conflict with one another.  The real information lies in between all of these omnibus studies and online surveys that we cite in our presentations, and that is the fact that most people in North America use the internet, and most of those - especially among the younger and more affluent - are in some way involved in social media.

Reputation, and by extension, the protection of that reputation, has been around as long as self-awareness.  Likewise, as long as there have been companies and brands, there has been a need for companies to maintain their reputation.

Reputation management as a formal business function is relatively new, only surfacing in the early 1900s, but little has changed with regard to the basic principles.  At its core, reputation is the sum of actions, and the perception of those actions.  When media was much more scarce than it is now, most of reputation management centred around perception - it was much easier to spin your way out of a bad spot when there a lack of widely distributed media made it much harder for the public to see through a public statement or key message.

Now, however, media has advanced to the point where anyone has the ability to publish their thoughts to the world, whether they are the smaller percentage of creators - bloggers, podcasters and the like, or the much larger percentage of commenters - those who do not necessarily publish their own content, but add to public review sites like Yelp, ePinions or public forums that emerge around products and brands.

This democratization of production and distribution of product reviews has led to a mediascape that makes it exceptionally easy for consumers to see objective and community-edited opinions on products and companies, and makes it virtually impossible for companies to bamboozle its consumers.  For this reason, reputation 2.0 must focus more on changing a company’s actions than changing the perception of those actions.

Managing your reputation online requires three key elements: listening, analysis and influence.

Listen

The first element is one that every company needs to take to heart. Without actively monitoring the myriad public conversations that are happening every minute of every day in blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, public forums and review sites, managing reputation is impossible.  You can’t change what people are saying about you if you don’t even know what that is.

Start with a simple Google blog search, and find out what people are saying about your brand, about your products, about your company or about your employees.  Listening doesn’t have to be complicated right off the bat, and at the point where you require a more complex system, you can always switch to an enterprise solution like Radian6.

But keep in mind that it’s not only blogs you should be listening to.  As I’ve remarked before, many conversations are moving to Twitter or Friendfeed.  People are sharing photos of your brand on Flickr, videos about it on Youtube and possibly even creating Facebook groups - either for or against - and sharing them with their entire social graph.

Analyze

The second step of any monitoring effort is analysis.  What are people saying about your brand or your company?  Is it overwhelmingly positive or negative?  Is there one thing that many people are harping on?  Is it one segment that is talking about it the most?

These are the questions that should shape your analysis, and will eventually shape what you do to improve or maintain your online reputation.  Look for the good and the bad, and try to really understand what is being said, and especially how these conversations affect your business.  Are people being scared away by bad reviews?  Are they coming in droves because of positive buzz?

Secondly, ask yourself how these comments reflect your actual business?  Take a step back, and try to understand the comments in terms of customer experience.  One comment about customer service doesn’t mean you have a customer service problem, but 100 comments certainly suggests it.  The social web provides you with a persistent focus group - don’t ignore what it has to say.

Influence

The final step of effective online reputation management is influence.  Once we understand what is being said, how do we change it if it is negative, or leverage it if it is positive?

To really influence anything online, you first need to be there - the journey of 1000 miles begins with showing up.  This doesn’t mean you have to spend 30 hours a week blogging, but it does mean that you should be active on Twitter, in comments, and it wouldn’t kill you to have a blog to aggregate it all at one place.

Influence also requires participation - which means engaging with detractors or fans, and going beyond just listening to actively soliciting feedback.  Participation means creating content that places your side of the story in public record - hopefully before you have to react to the other sides negative comments.  Admitting mistakes before anyone else jumps on it can often sway the conversation in your favour, rather than requiring your apologies.  Participation is also about creating a network of sympathetic people who will go out of their way to understand you, and who will eventually help defend you against unwarranted attacks.

There’s a lot of talk about “joining the conversation,” and while that sentiment is 100% valid, there’s one aspect of being active in social media that is rarely talked about.  Dell is active in the blogosphere, and has many sites dedicated to listening and participating, but to suggest that they are there simply because they as an organization are passionate about social media would be silly.  By creating so much content, a search for Dell now requires an entire front page of their side of the story, which is obviously positive, rather than a page of someone else’s side of the story, which isn’t always.

Of course, if your reputation is under fire, you likely won’t be able to SEO your way out of it.  Just like spin doesn’t work as well online, it’s very difficult to suppress the truth through search results.  Google is smarter than that, and is objective in a way that human beings can’t be.  Dell improved its reputation by listening to the commentary about its brand, and changing.  It’s a popular sentiment that we’re no longer in control of our brand - the consumer is.  Of course, that’s not true - companies ultimately control their product, and the content that they produce, but the consumer certainly has a louder voice.  But it’s not because the voice is louder that we should be listening to it - it’s because they’re our customers.  This is not a social media revalation - this is a basic principle of business that was somehow forgotten along the way.

The bottom line to this whole presentation is that on the web, you’ll be seen for who you are and for what is said about you.  If you’re not part of that coversation, you’re not in control of your reputation, and that’s a dangerous thing.

A stage manager I worked with once in my theatre days was asked by a director why he was always so calm, when other stage manager spent so much time dealing with crises.  He replied “being able to put out fires is important, but I prefer to keep the candles away from the drapes.”

Take control of your online reputation, and figure out how to keep the candles away from the drapes.  It’s way easier than putting out fires.

Related articles:

• Come hear me jibba-jabba about the internet
• Video and Measurement

Image by b_d_solis via Flickr

It’s been a crazy weekend, which is evidenced by the fact that I’m in Vegas, and back at my hotel before 10:30.  I’ve spent the past three days at Blog World Expo, meeting bloggers, talking about creating and promoting content and generally putting faces to the usernames I see flying past my on Twitter every day.

In all honesty, I’ve never come away from a conference thinking that I learned much.  The only value for me, most of the time, is in meeting new people and the conversations that are had in the hallways.  I did pick up some valuable tidbits during a few of the podcasting sessions, which I admit, I know very little about, but overall the lessons I learned came from outside of the conference programming.

Twitter is an incredibly powerful communications tool.  I’ve known for a long time that it’s useful and fun to use, but this weekend for me, it showed its power as a standalone medium.  With a conference full of people on Twitter we used it to self-organize into parties, to meet each other and to introduce others.  This utility came from widespread use in a small area, which is what makes me think that for Twitter to come out of the blogosphere and truly become mainstream in the same way that text messaging currently is, is not out of the question.

We’re all 1% famous.  It was an odd feeling to introduce myself to so many people not knowing if they would not have a clue who I am, or be tangentially aware of me.  In some cases I was very surprised at who knew me, and others were surprised that I knew them.

There’s a lot of hype in the echo chamber. Yeah - as much as there was some great content, there was also a lot of hype, and a lot of facile advice about how businesses should be implementing these things.  I strongly believe that most businesses can benefit in some way from blogging, but social media will never get past where it is if the counsel we’re giving is out of touch with real business strategy.  Many in the blogosphere have a tendency to put themselves above corporate strategists, assuming that they’re just out of touch.  The reality is that we don’t matter nearly as much as we think we do, and until we can move past “join the conversation”- style cheerleading, social media will simply be unable to make a real mark on business.

That said, I met a lot of great people this weekend, and a lot of people far smarter than I with a lot of great things to say.  I was also introduced to a lot of great services, like Zemanta, which I’m using here.  I hope that I’ll be able to make it for next year, and I especially hope that I’ll get more chances to keep in touch with and meet more people like I did this weekend.

I officially have the geekiest reason to fly to Vegas that most of my friends have ever heard. I’m headed to Blog World Expo this Friday, so if you’re going to be there, be sure to get in touch.  The easiest way to reach me is to ping me on Twitter, or send an email to blog at ryananderson dot ca. I’ll be headed to the Friday night tweetup at the LV Hilton as well, so if you’re a fellow Twitterer, you won’t want to miss it.

Okay, so this is a bit short notice, but if you happen to be down near Preston Street on Tuesday morning, you may want to swing by the Overlay.TV offices and join us for the third Social Media Breakfast.  I’m going to be doing a brief talk on Reputation 2.0, and what companies need to do to protect their rep in an online world.

The details of this week’s breakfast are here, and you can reserve your spot on our EventBrite page.  Right now, our general admission is sold out, but you can put your name on the standby list.

Of course, I must also thank our sponsors, Chicken Farmers of Canada, who graciously agreed to help the event take place by providing breakfast, even though it’s not going to be chicken.  You’ve probably seen them on Parliament Hill on Canada Day, or as the sponsors of Test the Nation a couple of weeks ago.  Either way, you’re most likely familiar with their product, so show your support for their generosity by ordering a chicken sandwich at lunch today.

The breakfast will be at Overlay.TV - 80 Aberdeen Street near Preston and Carling, and starts at 7:30.

See you there!