Over the past week I’ve literally been in a “Wikipedia War” over an article that I had submitted about the evolving definition and role of the Social Media Agency.

Now, before I explain the course of events I’d like to explain that my rationale for this article was not to plug Ignite, but rather to shed some light on what a social media agency is, how it is different from advertising agencies and PR agencies, and to start a list of “true” social media agencies, including firms like Crayon, Shift, Gold Group and The Social Media Group.

However, probably a month after I created this article the post was flagged and nominated for deletion because it appeared as “spam” and appeared to have a “lack of credible sources ”. After this first warning, I took a hard look at my post and even looked to the current Wikipedia post for “Advertising Agencies” as reference. Surprisingly, the two posts were very similar in nature. A top level view, followed by sources and links to agencies.

So not exactly knowing how to make it appear less like spam, I decided to beef up my sources, add a few more agencies to the list, and try again.

That’s when I got the following message:

“Please familiarize yourself with Wikipedia policy on reliable sources. Blogs are especially mentioned as not reliable sources…...Also, please stop adding links to agencies to the page. Wikipedia is not a link directory – and Wikipedia is not a soapbox for advertising.

As of now, there are no sources whatsoever about Social media agency. And I fail to see the notability of that term, it is used by some blog posts – in blogs that seem to be advertising said agencies. If you want, we can have deletion discussion of the article.”

After this note, I decided to start a deletion discussion of the article – hoping to continue to improve my article and appease this Wikipedia warrior. However, I didn’t get the chance. Despite my rationale and my questions for clarity in my deletion discussion, my article was abruptly deleted. You can no longer find “Social Media Agency” on Wikipedia.

I know that Wikipedia has its own culture. That’s been made even more abundantly clear during this adventure. There’s a growing battle in Wikipedia between the “deletionists” (folks who believe that the bias toward new entries is to delete them unless they can prove their value) and the “inclusionists” (folks who believe server space is cheap and there’s no harm with a definition that only comes up when someone actively searches it). Clearly, I’m an inclusionist. I love the hubris of the deletionist: “I fail to see…” Yes, clearly you do.

Despite what the Wikipedia warrior believes, social media agencies are real. Ford Motor Company just hired one and awarded it their “global social media account.” But according to the Wikipedia warrior, they are writing checks to a fiction.

So I’d like to know your thoughts – do you think there should be a post on Wikipedia covering the “Social Media Agency”? Would you find it helpful and informative, or would you also view it as spam?

Two articles from IgniteSocialMedia.com were featured in a blog collection of articles known as “Everything you could possibly want to know about social media.”  The collection features articles about how to use StumbleUpon, Digg, Sphinn, del.icio.us, Twitter, Facebook, Second Life, “social radio” site Jango, and assorted social networking sites.

The Ignite articles featured were: Using Social Media in a Product Launch and How Target Got it Right on Facebook, while Wal-Mart Got It Wrong.

I haven’t had the chance to read all the articles yet, but it’s a significant collection of material in one place. Check it out here.

When you work in a social media agency, people send you all sorts of comics and stuff.  (For the record, I enjoy that, send me stuff.)  This one happens to come from one of my favorite comics, Pearls Before Swine.  It’s consistently funny.  Enjoy today’s strip.

If you like it, click on the comic to go to the main site so you can become a fan. Maybe if enough of you do that, I won’t get a letter from a lawyer asking me to take it down.  Because that would make me sad.

Have a good weekend.

This morning I was doing some searching on my Feedreader when I stumbled upon a rarity – a blog created by a CEO of a medical center.

Entitled “Running a Hospital”, the blog is hosted on a standard blogger template and is written single handedly by the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Paul Levy.

What really got my attention from this blog was it wasn’t anything of what I would thought a blogging CEO of a hospital would be like. In fact, it was quite an example of one way to effectively blog in the healthcare industry. It was refreshingly random – sometimes talking about serious healthcare issues, sometimes covering lighthearted stories particular to his hospital, and sometimes completely random posts posing a variety of questions or insights.

What is the lesson to be learned here? The ability of social media to tie an emotional connection with an audience.

For instance, in reading these posts, as a reader I come away feeling as if I know something more about the hospital, the staff and volunteers, and Levy’s dedication and passion to his industry. I’m also able to laugh a little, agree or disagree, and overall come away feeling as if I know more about Levy and the Beth Israel Medical System than perhaps even the hospital in my own town.

Levy shows that it is possible for a CEO to enter social media successfully, turn comments on, and communicate authentically and transparently with an audience. While this may not be the right social media approach for every healthcare system, it does shed light on yet another way for hospitals to grow a community of support within its patients and staff. With competitive pressures growing in the healthcare industry, loyalty within these audiences is invaluable.

In my opinion, Levy could and should take his successful venture into social media a few steps further. Here’s just a few of my suggestions:

1. Promote the “Running a Hospital” blog via the main Beth Israel Deaconess website, through marketing materials, and even the traditional press.

2. Establish a branded Beth Israel social network similiar to CarePages or CaringBridge for both patients and staff to communicate and offer support (I’ve touched on this in an earlier post.)

3. Create Beth Israel branded widgets that help patients keep up with medications, appointments, and other pertinent Beth Israel updates and events. Allow these widgets to be integrated with SMS, desktop, or a social network like mentioned above.

- Use a Twitter-like application providing hospital updates for staff and administrators.

Can you think of any more ideas?

I’m speaking tonight at a panel put on by Business Wire.  If you want to come, please do so, and be sure to say hello.  The topic is on social media generally, but more specifically looking at using social media for enhancing your news value. 

Two points come to mind:

1) There is no question in my mind that social media can, and should enhance your news value.   And I had a great example of that yesterday.  But….

2) There is also no question in my mind that most PR folks are looking at social media as if it’s a press release distribution outlet. So they are doing it wrong and not getting enough out of it (mostly because they haven’t put enough into it.)

I spent last week working with the Associated Press on an exclusive for my client, Gilbarco Veeder-Root. They are the world’s largest maker of gas pumps.  Did you see yesterday’s story that you can get Google maps on the Gilbarco pumps?  Thanks to AP, it was everywhere.  From MSNBC and CNN to Yahoo, Engadget and TechCrunch.  The Engadget article as of this writing has 649 Diggs, and made the home page of Digg.  It’s now everywhere.

When I was looking at who to give the exclusive to, I briefly thought about going blogs first.  But AP still has lots of power, and clearly the smart blogs are watching the wires still.  (The story crossed the AP wire at 12:01 a.m. Engadget had it up, with a nice picture, at 7:52 a.m.  Impressive.)

So, for all the TV coverage and other hits, I was personally most excited about the Engadget/TechCrunch hits, because I know how influential they are in spreading news like this over a wide, wide area.  This is just one small, tiny example of social media helping PR.

But…  And this is a big but… Social media tools and sites clearly helped spread the news for me yesterday.  But a PR firm that thinks a hit on Engadget/Digg means you maximized social media is kidding themselves.  I had big news.  Interesting stuff that these folks like to write about.  It spread quickly.  Good for me.  Great for my client, who deserves ALL the praise for this great idea.  They put me in the rare and wonderful position of not having to light up the social media sites on my own, sort of bottom up, because AP did it top down.

A better example of really utilizing social media to spread news is what Joseph Jaffe did selling his book. If you’re a PR person trying to understand this space, read that post.  Too many PR firms think that social media is about press releases on PRweb.com and pitches to key bloggers that they’ve barely read.  I hear that a lot.

Progressive PR folks realize that social media is not an outlet.  It’s a fundamentally different way of speaking.  More natural, yet completely foreign initially.  Like any foreign language, the best way to learn it is immersion.  Try it.  There’s a whole other world out there.

~Jim

This morning I visited YouTube only to be overwhelmed with Oprah in the featured videos area. To be honest, I was quite surprised that my favorite marketing guru Martha Stewart hasn’t attempted this, but in her defense I guess she’s been busy with Marthapedia these days…

Anyway, as I delved further into YouTube, I watched Oprah’s very own “YouTube” introduction that basically announced she will be having a YouTube Oprah channel. Already it has over a million hits and is growing, along with pretty decent hits to the other videos posted to this “channel”, most of which were interesting clips from her YouTube debut where she interviewed the Evolution of Dance guy, YouTube creators, and various other interesting people who got discovered through YouTube.

As I found these clips of moments behind the scenes, in addition to a mix of clips from her interviews on stage – I thought to myself that I would like to include them in this post. But much to my disappointment – all of the videos on her “channel” were disabled from embedding.

Yes, disabled from embedding. Being since this isn’t the first time this has happened to me on YouTube (especially with larger brands) I thought I’d spend a little time dwelling on this fine detail.

Why? Because in every case that I can’t embed a video from YouTube it really makes me question if the brand is ready for social media. It makes me wonder if the creators understand that social media inspires sharing and collaboration and if they know they can benefit from enabling users to own and use their message.

Overall – I really believe Oprah is onto something here – and if she plays her cards right she will have a powerful channel on YouTube. Why? Because of her content. The people that she interviews are top of the line and her topics are always interesting. But I can’t help but to think that this could go a lot further if she allowed her videos to be more easily shared among her community of fans and among entirely new audience segments like me. YouTube gives her a new way to reach past her 4:00 broadcast time – and she needs to capitalize on it from blogs and websites that can easily grab her content.

While the lesson may be small here (allow your videos to be embedded), I hope you will see the benefits of allowing your social media efforts to be shared, grabbed, or mashed. This can result in large returns.

For those of you in the Research Triangle area – our very own Jim Tobin is going to be a featured panelist this Thursday, November 8th at JK’s Restaurant in North Hills for a networking and panel discussion on social media.

As part of Business Wire’s Conference Series Events, Thursday’s event will begin at 6pm with networking and will continue with panelist presentations and audience Q&A. It will be a discussion on topics such as social media trends and tactics, blogging, and search engine optimization.

The event is free to members and $10 for non-members. If I’ve left anything out, you can read more about it here.

Hope you will make it out – and of course ask Jim some really hard questions in the Q&A section :-)

e-Marketer reported last week that "only 7.75%" of online marketing spending was dedicated to social media campaigns.  They even suggest that "Web 2.0 is an also-ran in spending to online ads."

Maybe I’m a "cup is half-full" sort of guy, or maybe my perspective as head of a social media agency makes me biased (it no doubt does), but I was thrilled with this number.  Social media marketing is a very new discipline and companies are just now getting their toes in the water.  In addition, there are many social media marketing tactics that can be tried internally, with little outside cost, but virtually every banner ad has to be paid for.  (For proof of that point, see the post script below.)

The e-Marketer article correctly points out that, "Not every Web 2.0 tactic is appropriate for targeting every Internet user, so marketers could be prioritizing other media in their budgets."

Some have suggested that social media will be the end of advertising as we know it.  Or that social media will fundamentally change public relations and perhaps signal the death knell for the press release.

I don’t agree with this statements.  Social media marketing, and using social media agencies, is another tool in the toolbox for smart marketers.  The new tool no more replaces advertising or PR than a new wrench replaces a screwdriver or a hammer.  But depending on the job you need to do at that moment, you’re pretty happy to have all three options.

The fact that 7.8% of online marketing budgets were dedicated to social media campaigns in July, August and September of 2007 was a pleasant surprise to me.  I got $5 bucks that says that number is 250% higher in Q3 of 2008.  Any takers?

~Jim Tobin

P.S. See in the chart above how marketers report spending 0.0% of their budget on virtual worlds?  First of all, I know that some money was spent on virtual worlds marketing.  But more than that, these same folks in the chart below reporting using virtual worlds for marketing.  If both charts are true, that means that some marketers used virtual worlds, but did not pay to do so.  Evidence that some social media experimentation is happening in house? I suspect so.

This morning I’m sitting at my desk reading the latest social media news on my feed reader – when once again I fall for a social media survey.

You know what I’m talking about – those surveys by advertising agencies or PR firms that announce the “latest social media news” of social media adoption, or announce the “readiness” of marketers to use social media in their marketing plans. And of course, I fall for it every time. This morning it was this article that lured me in with it’s claim that the use of social media tools – such as user comments, blogs, photo sharing and more – on business media web sites, “rose by more than 75 percent in the last 6 months”.

After scouring the article for where these results came from – I found nothing. Was it an oversight? Or was it an attempt to send out another “shocking” survey to get press coverage? After seeing a trend in social media surveys, I’m starting to think it’s the latter.

In fact, I’ve realized that these surveys typically have the following in common:

1) Small sample sizes. A sample size of 100 or 200 (like in this article) does not mean that you can make vast assumptions about marketers as a whole. Give me something significant – then I’ll use your statistics.

2) Sample Bias. My favorite samples are those who survey marketers at emerging media conferences. Isn’t it blatantly obvious that this results in sample bias? No wonder why the results are shocking.

3) Undisclosed Survey Methods. Like the release I read this morning, I was left in the dark regarding the methods used in the survey. I had no idea how many people were interviewed, what survey instruments were used, or who conducted the survey. For all I know the survey was conducted by a poll of the firm’s clients or closest friends. Transparency should apply to research methods just as much as it applies in social media.

So I hope this post will encourage you to use a level of discernment between surveys that are statistically significant and those that are not. Of course my projected 98% is from my own personal experience and was only intended for irony – but I wanted to make the following case: If you are considering working with a social media agency, advertising agency, or PR firm – think long and hard of the value they place on significant research. The last thing you want is the results of your social media campaign to be equally skewed.

Ok, maybe you’ve heard rumblings of Google’s wanting to “out open” Facebook? Well, today, Google announced the release of a set of tools (APIs) that will enable developers to easily create applications (widgets) that will work on any participating network. As of this writing, the list of social network partners include Orkut (of course), Hi5, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Plaxo, Friendster, Oracle and, just announced, MySpace (wow!).

The great thing is that these applications can be written in everyday ol’ javascript and HTML, which can then be used on various sites—unlike Facebook, which requires the use of its own markup language (FBML) and can only be used on that particular site. Whether or not OpenSocial apps reach the same massive number of users as Facebook remains to be seen, but it does show a leveling of the playing field, that’s for sure. Like I said, you build once and you can run your app on any number of networks. Very nice. BTW, here’s an example of what OpenSocial may look like on LinkedIn (from Valleywag).

Here’s an idea: OpenSocial could be a relatively easy way for non-networking sites to integrate some social networking goodness. Contact us, we’d love to talk to you about how this can work.

These two should get a room Google’s announcement comes a week after losing out to Microsoft in a race to invest in Facebook. Next Tuesday, Facebook is set to announce the launching of an ad network that will enable advertisers to target precisely the people they want to reach based on demographic and profile information. Wonder what Google will counter with?