A map of the Washoe Fire created by Bryce Leinan.

Society is increasingly entangled online, which means we are frequently connecting with one another in ways we would not have done in person prior to the Internet.

It’s clear that online social media have transformed societies in recent years; anyone who’s been paying attention to news coverage has noticed how online media is frequently driven by citizens.

The recent Washoe Drive Fire in Reno drove this point home for Washoe County residents. Arguably, the most popular sources of information were TV news and social networks. (A serious nod goes to KOLO/Channel 8 for its ongoing coverage running live for hours and responding directly to citizens on air from their social networks.) Courtesy of the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office, the #washoefire hashtag on Twitter exploded much like the fire did in real life.

While RGJ.com had coverage with quality multimedia, it was frequently late to the game in getting out information. At any given moment during the fire RGJ.com showed “Updates” and “Breaking News” that were often a half hour old or more – even though news was literally breaking by the minute. In addition, we at ThisisReno were linking to their website content before they were posting to their own social networks.

The point is that news agencies treat news and information as one and the same: proprietary. They frequently pretend as if other news outlets don’t exist. It’s a necessary part of being a competitive business enterprise.

Read the rest of this post at This Is Reno.

Earlier this year

A few notes: Information presented in this interview was gleaned from a number of sources. The first was a story by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which had compiled records on the top water users in Las Vegas. You may read it here.

The second is a series in the Las Vegas Sun called “For Want of Water.”

The third was my article from 2003 on Professor Dale Devitt , who studies water conservation in southern Nevada. It originally appeared in Silver & Blue magazine and may be read online here.

The fourth was SNWA’s water-use facts, outlined here.

Listen to the interview below. Comments are always welcome.

No longer will naysayers have much evidence for the argument that the bulk of those attempting to work-at-home via Google Adsense ethos reside in a social-media dream world. Rather, a new form of site monetization has emerged: litigation.

Despite what the RIAA learned, copyright infringement represents a new fork in the road for potential pro-bloggers. Having a popular blog post pirated is something to be encouraged,while niceties will become a thing of the past.

Rather than having an actual audience for your blog, you merely need for someone else you copy your work. From there, a potential goldmine is yours.

Wired tells all.

The verdict is in. Despite my informal experiment just over a year ago that drew roughly the same conclusions, researchers presented on Monday research results that found the following:

“Drawing a huge following on Twitter does not necessarily mean that your tweets will have much influence. It turns out that some noncelebrities with meager followings have the greatest ability to start discussions and spread ideas.”

Such a result punches holes in the hype surrounding high Twitter follower numbers; in other words, something else – newsworthiness, perhaps – generates viral retweets and influences discussions on Twitter, not the number of people following your account.

A prediction: These numbers would be much different if the same research was conducted on tweets from November 2009. The reason is because large numbers of followers potentially became even more meaningless once Twitter created lists – the ability to merely read the tweets of a much smaller subset of your followers.

This was the reason I deleted my personal Twitter account around the same time; with my current account, I have customized lists I read regularly while the main Twitter stream is more easily ignored. (Be honest, you probably do the same.)

The results of this study nevertheless continuse to support the notion that social media hype should continue to be viewed with skepticism.

Thanks to Nevada Writer for sending me the article today discussing the research results.

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Despite the snake oil pedaled by social media evangelists, it is extremely difficult even in the best of times for small businesses to succeed in the long term. With that in mind, before launching a stellar enterprise, here are six points to consider before jumping into the fray of small-business independence:

1. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. One small music shop in a relatively small town gets most of its income in lessons and lesson room rentals, an income base that is more stable than just retail sales. Diversify your income stream with more than one business, part-time work or even full-time work.
2. Focus on your relevant audiences diligently; pay less attention to ‘the general public.’
3. Think out of the box for promotions and beware the time drain of social media; while cheap monetarily, time is money and S.M. will suck the life out of you time-wise. Word-of-mouth is effective but achieving — and sustaining — good W.O.M. is another matter entirely.
4. Design your own identity and collateral at your own risk; just because you have M.S. Publisher, or Photoshop, doesn’t mean your ideas will translate effectively. I teach, work full time and consult on these topics for a living and I still hire out design work and strategically outsource many other services I could do myself.
5. Have a good CRM system in place. Most small businesses fail in doing this, if they even know what it is.
6. Set boundaries with customers; if you don’t, it will come back to haunt you and cost you money, time and perhaps worst of all, reputation.

Personally, in this economy, unless you have a solid business plan, tremendous market potential, little up-front investment, significant enough profit margins for your living standards, and solid contingency plans, I would proceed with caution.

Consider the time and money investment versus working an 8-5 job. Which, in your heart, feels most realistic and settling? THAT one is your answer to whether you should start a small business.

Good luck.

It’s been a bad week for the social media gurus. First Mark Schaefer called them out collectively, and some individually, for constant backslapping and creating, inadvertently or not, a country club atmosphere where eveything is fine and cozy.

Sadly, he’s correct. And the pseudo gurus were none-too-quick to jump in with defenses of their own. My favorites were the ones who saw fit to establish their own credibility by outlining years of experience and other credentials. It was as if to say their words were somehow more credible simply because what they can verify on paper, which ignores that even the youngest and least experienced of all are sometimes the best teachers.

The dialogue below the original post is fascinating. Perhaps the larger issue raised is how social media handles popularity. If this interpretation of original research into the so-called “wisdom of crowds” is correct, essentially a small few are actually creating the most ingested content around the Web.

What that means for social media is that, as ever, despite its perceived democratic nature, social media, like life,  is a game of winners and losers. We saw this with the Twitter Vote Report. A small few controlled the content of the larger stream, “empowered” (the chosen word of the chief “data sweeper”) to admit or delete on a whim.

The consequence of the minority of so-called “thought leaders” is the natural outflow of the majority being followers. One special example came up just yesterday. Marketing guru Seth Godin publicly announced his new project, a presumed social media dialogue maker he calls “Brands in Public.”

“Brands in Public” is code for “Brands in Seth Godin’s Paws for a Price.” Essentially he believes that since Amazon or Maytag don’t have a blog that he can find, he will pirate content from said brands in order to provide a forum for others to bash, or praise, the brands. The companies then have an opportunity to pay him $400 a month to be in charge of these pages.

Godin’s own words:

“If your brand wants to be in charge of developing this page, it will cost you $400 a month. And once you take the page over, the left hand column belongs to you. You can post responses, highlight blog posts, run contests or quizzes. You can publicly have your say right next to the constant stream of information about your brand (information that’s currently all over the web–and information you can’t “take down” or censor). You can respond, lead and organize. If a crisis hits, your page will be there, ready for you to speak up. If your fans are delighted, your page makes it easy for them to chime in and speak up on sites around the web.”

The shocker of this endeavor is that it was announced around the same time that Google announced Sidewiki, which is very similar in concept. Now users with Google accounts can go to any Web page and comment on it. A Google sidebar is added to the page where you may partake in a discussion about the page.

This is exactly what Ike Pigott did – to Seth Godin, who does not allow his readers to comment on his blog. In addition to two posts about the issue, Pigott started a discussion about Godin’s post on a Sidewiki and even invited others to see how long it would take Godin to notice.

The issue is not so much that this stuff happens; such endeavors are expected. The problem is that when people of Godin’s status do it, they too frequently get the mindless cheerleader crowd chiming in (Edit: The link that was here was deleted. The writer said she was being sarcastic about supporting Godin.) with nary a thought to the questionable ethical or even legal principles of such efforts.

If the wisdom of crowds exists, social media is not the place to find it.

Michael Jackson image from TMZ

This has been a long time coming. Although people have had in their pockets the means to transmit breaking news for at least a decade, increased social networking – particularly Twitter, Facebook and Youtube—has finally garnered enough traction to spread information to the masses.

Three events just this year have set the stage for this.

1. The crash landing of the plane into the Hudson River, which was first broken visually on Twitter
2. The death of Neda in Iran, which went viral globally after being posted on Youtube, and
3. Michael Jackson’s death just hours ago, which was first reported by TMZ and spread like wildfire within minutes on Twitter.

The traditional news media, although generally doing admirably in the social media arena, cannot be in all places at once, especially with shrinking newsroom personnel. Ordinary people on the ground, and non-traditional media–such as blogs, video sites and Twitter—are inherently in better positions to document events as they happen.

The role of journalism should focus now on sorting through rumor and innuendo in breaking stories, providing context and objectivity after the fact and it should emphasize feature and more lengthy exposes like the stunning series published this week by the St. Petersburg Times.

Journalists and newsrooms should no longer put resources in trying to break news especially when there is so much competition surrounding them. A part of me hopes I am wrong about this, but a significant era of journalism is over.

[EDIT 6/25/09: Mashable has a great comment on this subject:

"Social media’s role in rapidly distributing globally-significant news like this will likely be analysed in great depth over the coming weeks. It’s notable that despite early news reports of Michael’s passing on blogs, the timing of the tributes coincided with confirmation by the LA Times – for the most critical information, it seems, we continue to trust mainstream news the most."

In addition, I should amend my original statements. Contrary to my post title, it's not that jounalists will no longer break hard news, but that their role has been changing rapidly to the point where more of the hard news is being broken by less traditional media outlets--such as blogs--and ordinary citizens. Though journalism's role is shifting, it nevertheless remains critical to society.]

[Edit 6/26/09: Bad Pitch Blog posted this statement today : "...We’re doing a point counterpoint – 250 words each on why the Michael Jackson Internet frenzy spells the death of mainstream media and the rise of TMZ and other emerging news outlets." Thought it was relevant to what I posted above yesterday as well as all of the comments below. I'm looking forward to it.]

[Edit 6/26/09: Based on the comments below, I have changed the post's title and deleted a later reference to hard news. The previous title was: "It's official: Journalists no longer break hard news." The new title I think more accurately reflects what I was originally try to convey.]

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If you are not aggressively monitoring your own and your organization’s online presence, you are not only missing big-time opportunities, you are also potentially enabling damage toward reputations that might otherwise be avoided.

Here’s why: What is said about you online is more critical now than ever before because with social media it is far easier for anyone to attack you anonymously and even impersonate you without your consent. Anonymous attacks are commonplace on news sites because news media outlets take laissez faire approaches to anonymous reader comments in order to gain more online advertising revenue.

Impersonations are happening all over the Internet and on Twitter in particular to the point that one led to a high-profile lawsuit recently and the emergence of a new feature on Twitter: verified accounts. Examples of fake Twitter accounts: here, here and here. See what happened to U.S. Representative Dean Heller (R-Nev.) this past week. A Reno blogger for months was tweeting as if he were Heller and few knew it was occurring. The fake Heller garnered more than 500 followers. Heller’s communications personnel should have been all over this from the beginning.

Prior to social media, online mock sites were common but far more intensive to execute. A Twitter account takes seconds to create and followers will arrive within moments.

This is why it is important for people, especially those in the public eye, to monitor online content. I add strategic, relevant keywords to Google Alerts and the alerts are sent to me daily. I also use my RSS feed in the same manner. I know within moments or hours when certain terms show up in Twitter, on various websites and I even receive updates written by certain contributors to news sites and blogs.

When something libelous or illegal appears — for the record, criticism or harsh opinions are neither, and if something is true, it is not defamation and therefore perfectly appropriate to be published — or somebody takes your work and uses it for their own purposes without appropriate attribution, you have an option to take action.

This is where take-down notices come in. These are often sent by legal personnel and have a threatening tone, which is why such notices should be vetted by public relations personnel rather than the other way around. I know of a number of experiences where people requested take-downs or sent cease and desist letters that did so with such antagonism, it only exacerbated their problems unnecessarily.

Here is a simple, and to me an obvious, way to avoid escalating the situation – and paying attorney fees.

Last week one of my blog’s posts was swiped and republished on what appeared to be a spam blog, a subaccount of a larger series of blogs under one domain. I quickly did a database search for the site’s owner and sent him the following email. I have added my comments as to why I wrote it the way I did. His response and the outcome are outlined below.

Dear (name of site owner):

I respectfully request that these two posts either be removed from this site or proper credit and link-backs be given to the original source: my blog (http://thegoodthebadthespin.com/2009/06/18/sotomayor-and-sexism-npr-gets-it-right/).

[Two links to the plagiarised content were inserted here.]

Note two points: one, I presented options for a resolution, but I kept them to a minimum. Also, I outlined the problem and the resolution in just one sentence.

It is clear that the writing was taken directly off of my site with only minor (and perhaps automated) rewrites. It clearly states that the material on my site is copyrighted, just like [your own sites] are. While I am happy to have my material appear elsewhere, common etiquette suggests that at the least a link and credit be given to the original source.

I point here to the fact that both of our sites have appropriate copyright information as well as imply the obvious: 1. It’s not that big of a deal to me that my material appears elsewhere, but that 2. I am asking for credit and a link.

[Your site] appears to be an incredibly valuable resource, one that I would be happy to promote in any other instance.

This is one of the most important parts of the email – genuinely validating the site owner’s own work. This appeals, hopefully, to a mutual sense of purpose in what we both do.

I appreciate in advance your immediate attention to this matter.

Nothing gets to me more than messages that ask for something but do not put into the request a time element. Also, this statement is written in an active voice, is firm but does not come across as too demanding.

Respectfully,

Bob Conrad
(775) 636.7959
www.conradcommunications.com

An important point with this notice is not what’s here but what’s not. Nowhere do I make a threat, nowhere do I have an antagonistic or even boastful tone, nor do I attempt to force the person to do anything. My language is generally neutral instead of negative. Instead, I (hopefully) calmly outline the problem and offer choices for solutions.

Now, had I been ignored, or treated poorly in return, there’s plenty of other options to entertain, including playing hardball. That wasn’t necessary because here was the result: The site owner replied within hours (he’s across the globe), acknowledged the site was a spam subaccount and wrote this:

Thanks for being more polite than many!

Contrast this situation to what Tim Ferriss faced with his book, The Four Hour Work Week, and a message sent by, you guessed it, an attorney.

Strategic reputation management requires two things: 1. technical know-how (being on the cutting edge of technology to know where problems can arise), and 2. strategic messaging. Tone, style and choice of words can make a problem better or worse. Too often people without either of these skills enter into zones where they ignorantly act on impulse and with knee jerk reactions.  Such approaches, absent experienced council, almost certainly lead to more trouble.

On Monday we began the journey on how to launch an effective grassroots political campaign. You may read part I here and part II is here. Here are the final steps for a successful campaign!

5. Play the victim. If your antagonist is evil (and by default, he is), you must, by default, be good. When he does something wrong, you are automatically the better person. The best way to convey this is to consistently portray yourself as the victim. Have you ever been criticized? Ignored? Been given the stink eye on a street corner? Then you are a victim. This too is now part of your platform and your victim-hood is usually the fault of your opponents in some way, shape or form. Nothing is more powerful, and can begin you on your path of speaking to the millions who also feel victimized, than being physically and mentally damaged by things like Big Government, bureaucracy, Mexicans, the North Vietnamese and the price of gas.

6. Gain third-party endorsements. This is a time-tested principle, but what experts don’t want you to know is that the best people to tell your story are those who are just like you are and believe the same things that you do. Picking somebody who appears both knowledgeable and on your side is the best person to tell your story for you. If you cannot find a credible third-party endorsement you merely have to cite them in your materials (and quote them regularly) to show that you and that person are on the same page. If necessary, take their statements out of context when it suits your needs and makes you look better.

7. Refuse to answer questions. By now, if you have followed these steps in order, you should be generating some attention. This is good, but some key points remain, and the most important one is to not answer questions. Remember, your campaign is about what THEY are doing wrong. It has nothing to do with YOU. If pressed about what YOU believe, always defer to the issue you are concerned about –what THEY are doing wrong and how corrupt THEY are. If pressed further, saying “no comment” almost always stifles further questions and ensures that you will be viewed with a higher level of integrity. It also says to your questioners, “My knowledge is too important to share with you at this time.” People like that.

8. Shoot the messengers. If you do not like questions that you receive about your platform – or just don’t like ANY particular question – and they won’t stop asking them, remember that the person asking the question is most likely in bed with your enemy in some way, shape or form simply because they have to nerve to challenge you. These people are not on your side and should be crushed without mercy (think Stalin). At any given opportunity, be sure to let your true supporters know just how wrong it is that people such as members of the News Media Elite dare to question and criticize. By doing so, these people are showing that they, too, are part of the problem and not The Solution. The Solution, in fact, happens to be you.

9. Appear unintelligent. Finally, the last point for success in this series is the importance of appearing like the rest. Nothing gravitates the masses toward their master if he comes across as just one of the guys who just happens to have The Answer. If you speak their language, and dress like a commoner, they will like you. Remember, it was Mark Twain who said that if you consider the average intelligence of people, you will realize that 50 percent are even dumber. You must always use this to your advantage.

Good luck!