Andrew Douglas B2B journalist, turned PR man, specializing in new media.

Twitter “Contributors” could bridge personality gap for business

I've been cooling on Twitter recently. Maybe it's because the monstrous amount of work I've been trying to beat back with a stick has kept me pretty focused on being billable.

Nonetheless, I still see the marketing value of Twitter. It helps clients engage with customers and it provides a channel in which to promote content.

But many businesses can't get their minds wrapped around how to fit Twitter into a corporate straight-jacket for three reasons:

1. Who's got enough time in their day to take on the task of tweeting enough to maintain credibility and to develop a following?
2. Does the corporation want individual employees developing a following of their own on Twitter -- only to take those eyeballs with them should they leave?
3. How can a Twitter experiment succeed without letting the person tweeting develop some personality? [see my previous post: B2B’s big hurdle: Developing a personality in social media]  It's tough to get someone to follow some lame Twitter feed where all they do is post links to dry-as-toast news releases.

Twitter might have come up with an answer. Twitter Contributors will flag which individual contributes a tweet to a corporate Twitter feed. It looks like it will be offered in a premium business package but I think it will be worth the investment.

This seems like an elegant way to answer some of the concerns businesses have about handing off the Twitter reins to staff. They could have a number of employees -- say a bunch of sales reps from a specific region -- contributing to one Twitter feed.

Say the feed is www.twitter.com/AcmeSouthwest. Each tweet from Bill the sales rep from the southwest region will have his name attached. Same with another rep from the region, Mary.

Followers would get the benefit of hearing a variety of voices and perspectives. Employees who are motivated to tweet could carry more of the Twitter load -- and see more of the upside. And employees would be able to develop some personality in a more controlled environment.

Stay tuned. Twitter Contributors hasn't been rolled out yet but it's coming soon.

I have seen the future… and it looks a lot like the web?

Time Warner has unveiled it's prototype e-reader. It looks kind of like Amazon's Kindle, except more web-like. Users can poke around pages to activate video, sort pictures, create their own table of contents, and other neat stuff.

I suppose it's cool but man, it looks demanding on the reader. I might be old school but when it comes to magazines, I'm happy to place my valuable reading time in the hands of a good editor. I prefer letting them sort through all the week's news and choose the best tidbits for me to know. I have plenty of opportunity elsewhere in my life to pick and choose exactly which fruit I want to eat. When I buy a magazine, I like coming to a table with food prepared and the table set, ready for me to tuck in.

I wonder if I had one of these fancy tablets from Time Warner if I'd spend most of my time poking and proding the darn thing instead of reading. When I want a web experience, I'll fire up the web.

This is very un-techie of me to say but sometimes the best tools are ones that have limited capabilities. Take my three-year-old iPod Nano. By and large, Apple resisted the temptation to pimp it up with too many bells and whistles. I know you can get an iPod Touch with plenty of extras built in but for my purposes, which is mainly listening to podcasts during my walk home, the iPod Nano is perfect.

Magazines are simple. Sometimes simplicity is good.

B2B’s big hurdle: Developing a personality in social media

Know what doesn't work in social media? Twitter or blog posts by nameless corporations. And that's going to be the biggest hurdle for people like me who do B2B public relations.

Andy Kleinschmidt

The rules of successful social media engagement -- frequent updates, transparency, engagement with other users, personality -- don't mesh with corporate PR 1.0. Old-school PR is about futzing over news releases and trying to micromanage how every word in each key message is written and repeated. It's often about playing defense.

It's hard to enter into a rapid-fire, engaging conversation when you've got to steer every phrase through five levels of approvals.

Compare that to my favourite people on Twitter. They give me small glimpses into their personal lives. I don't want to know what breakfast cereal they ate but I do want to trust the individuals who feed me my news and to trust someone I need to know a little about them.

I've taken a short clip of an interview I did with Andy Kleinschmidt, an extension educator at Ohio State University Extension based in Van Wert County, Ohio. Kleinschmidt is right into social media. He's on Twitter, he blogs and he's on Facebook.

"People would like to connect not only with some good information but with an expert that they trust, someone they can put a face too," he says. "I have a picture on my blog but I think I have to go much more transparent, much more next level and really put myself out there in videos and that type of thing."

Interview with Andy Kleinschmidt (1:38)

Some organizations are starting to get it. Take the Ohio Farm Bureau. They have a corporate Twitter account but add the initials of the writer to tweets. And you can see a short bio of each person on their Twitter page (see picture below, right).

Don't think this doesn't apply to you if you're not in the agriculture industry. The same rules around social media apply everywhere.

Successful corporations will allow their front-line people to step out in social media. Sure there's risk but it's either that or become completely irrelevant.

Treat your career like a business

Social media has give you the keys -- and the responsibility -- to manage your career. Your future hinges on your ability to build your personal brand.

Check out this piece of wisdom from Seth Godin, author of Tribes, on his blog:

Everyone is a journalist, of course, but just a few do it for a living. Everyone is a freelancer, or, at the very least, always looking for the next gig. Everyone with a credit card can do the purchasing, they just expense it.

If the only reason you're only wearing one hat is because you've always only worn one hat, that's not a good reason.

The previous generation got their 30-year pin and retired with a pension. That's not the world we live in now. I don't know many people my age -- other than bureaucrats and teachers -- who believe they'll be with their current employer until they retire.

A neighbour of ours wears multiple hats. He has a steady paycheck but he's not resting on his laurels. Stuart Robertson is a freelance web designer and consultant, the web manager for the University of Guelph and a member of the faculty in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Guelph-Humber. He's not moonlighting either. He's upfront with his employer about his other gigs.

Social media tools like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, and open-source blogging software like Wordpress, give you the ability to market yourself. What would you have done 10 years ago? I guess you could have tried to get published and then move to the speaking circuit but that was a tough, long road. Now social media tools allow anyone to build their personal brand. You can start with an audience of one and build it from there.

Since we've started blogging and tweeting, my wife Anne Douglas and I have picked up a paying speaking engagement. We're feeling inspired to try recording video for our blogs and investing even more money to drive traffic to our sites.

Granted, we're communications professionals and justify our obsession with new media as a way to learn the ropes for our clients. But if you believe Valarie Willis, guest blogger on TomPeters.com, everyone is going to have to get their hands dirty:

Even people inside organizations today should view their work and career as if they owned them. How differently would we act if we approached our work with an entrepreneurial spirit? Would you go after new skills, would you promote yourself more, would you find new projects to associate yourself with?

Talent is still key, work doesn't get done without the right talent in place. Today, however, the way organizations obtain the talent they need is changing. Talent will be brought in for projects, short and long term, and then released, and the cycle will start all over again.

I've been a pure entrepreneur relying on our small business to pay the mortgage. At other times I've been a wage slave, happy to have someone else worry about making sure salaries get paid. If Willis is right, the future might be more like the former, with "talent" being brought in on a case-by-case basis... or not.

So saddle up, it's time to treat your treat career like a business.

Use Skype for better quotes. Countdown to A.K.

I'm interviewing a fellow ag geek tonight. I can't wait.

If I wasn't totally jazzed for this interview already, I got totally pumped after we hammered out the time for our call. This was his next question:

What is your preference: telephone, Skype, Google Talk?

Man, this guy is wired. And it meshes with a blog post I read this morning from my former colleague and reluctant geek, Lee Hart. I love his memories of communication on the farm back in the day.

I emailed back that I'd prefer Skype because I have an account setup already and, to tell you the truth, I hadn't heard of Google Talk.

I use Skype whenever I do an interview for a story or news release. I make the call through my computer, using a headset with a boom mic, and record the call on my Mac using $69 software called WireTap Studio.

Skype is easy to use. Just download the software from the website, create a user profile, and start calling. You can call another Skype user for free. There is a small charge to call a landline from Skype. It varies depending where you call but to make a call to a number in North America costs only 2 cents a minute.

If you're in journalism or public relations and want to start getting better quotes, use Skype and record the audio.

Andy Kleinschmidt

Now back to my interview. It's with Andy Kleinschmidt, an extension educator at Ohio State University Extension based in Van Wert County, Ohio. He's harvesting corn plots so we had to set the interview after 9 p.m.

He captured this piece of gold on Twitter the other day:

"YouTube is the new fact sheet."

More than anything I've heard over the past few months this quote captures the new communications opportunities. I'm more convinced than ever that we have to integrate audio and video in almost everything we do -- including boring fact sheets and manuals.

Kleinschmidt is right into social media. He's on Twitter, he blogs, and he's on Facebook. In a short email conversation he talked about "evergreen" websites and how they don't generate nearly as much ROI as social media. Bang on.

I sent him an email to get him thinking but I need your help to beef up my interview. Email questions for me to ask this geeked-up extension dude. I know he's on the cutting edge of business-to-business social media and that we can all learn a lot.

Here are my questions to get the ball rolling:

What type of farmer do you think you’re reaching or do producers who surf the web come from all demographics?

What tools have worked and which ones haven’t?

What posts generate the most feedback?

The interview is set for Nov 3 at 9 p.m. so email your questions early.

Web can’t make emotional connection for marketers

I had a chat with someone over the weekend who works for a major non-profit organization — one that spends a lot of money on marketing each year.

They use a number of marketing channels, including TV, print, web, celebrity endorsements and door-to-door sales. The best return on investment comes from door-to-door sales. They’re salary based, not commission, although the pavement pounders do have sales targets to keep them motivated. Celebrity endorsements come in a close second to door-to-door.

My friend said that the marketing department decided to cut a big chunk of their TV spend recently. That’s because the web numbers were so strong and they felt online could pick up the slack. Of course, it’s much easier to judge the returns from the web and much harder to pinpoint how much is generated by TV.

But when the TV spend fell, so did the web numbers. He felt that the web is excellent at converting people from “shoppers” into “buyers” but that it’s much harder to make an emotional connection with someone on the web. It looks like TV and the web were working hand in hand, with TV being the conduit to the web. Without TV driving people to the web site, revenue dried up.

But really, how viable is TV anyway? First off, the TV audience is so fragmented. Secondly, at least in my household, we never watch live TV anymore. We even wait 45 minutes before joining Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday nights. By the end of the third period we’ve usually caught up to live TV by skipping all the commercial breaks using our digital video recorder.

Life is getting complicated for marketers who wish to make an emotional connection between consumers and their brand. TV might not cut it anymore but the web and its small-screen platform that encourages people’s short attention span ain’t workin’ either. Where do you find a mass audience these days?

These are fascinating times.

Netbooks offer powerful portability

The desktop is the lumbering, 360-pound offensive lineman. It's strong but overkill for most jobs outside of the most graphic or video-heavy assignments.

The mobile is the 5'10" quarterback trying to break into the NFL. It's agile and compact but just too small to be a realistic workhorse in all situations. It's good for reading tweets and other short blasts of information on the fly but not a good tool for consuming longer updates.

The laptop is the overpaid and aging wide receiver. It's pricey, overweight and doesn't really fit anywhere.

The netbook is the fresh, just-drafted superstar. It could change the franchise for the next 10 years.

Cheap, powerful mobile computing in a tight space -- like between your belly and the steering wheel or on an airplane's meal table -- has arrived. And with some off-the-shelf accessories you can use the same computer for your regular office computer.

Mary's HP netbook

Mary Feldskov is doing some project work for us in the Guelph office of McCormick. Yesterday she parked herself at her desk, pulled her teeny tiny HP computer out of her purse and started to work. It weighs 3 pounds -- about the size and weight of a hardcover book.

At 10 inches the screen is small compared to a desktop or laptop but giant compared to a mobile. Most of the major manufacturers sell a netbook souped up with all the gadgets including webcam, wifi and HD-quality screen. Some have regular-sized keyboards but others are only 90% of a regular keyboard. As Peter Gredig, content manager at Farms.com, pointed out to me the other day, buy a wireless USB stick and for $30 a month you can get the Internet basically anywhere.

They're pretty good under the hood. Here are the stats, as compared to a standard HP laptop on sale at Staples.

Sure some things are missing -- like a CD drive -- and the netbooks don't have the power of a laptop. But most of us don't use the full capability of our computers anyway.

That's my laptop on the left, but it shows how I work off two screens and a normal keyboard and mouse at the office. You could do the same thing with a netbook.

For a few bucks you can buy some cords to work off a large screen, mouse and keyboard when you're back at the office.

I've seen the future and it is good.

Anti atrazine goes viral

As they say in hockey just before the gloves come off... It is ON!

The fight to prove the safety of cosmetic pesticides is virtually lost. And the regulatory, science-backed system that approved all those products to begin with has been called into question. In Ontario, where I live, the provincial government has instituted a ban on cosmetic pesticides, basically thumbing its nose at the feds who regulate -- and have approved -- their use.

Now the guns have been turned on agriculture. I hope it's a fair fight.

The Environmental Protection Agency is taking a close look at atrazine, one of the oldest and most effective chemicals used in conventional agriculture. This news came across my desk in an article by Patrick Gallagher in the October 20, 2009 issue of the Ontario Farmer.

During the new evaluation the EPA said it would consider the potential for atrazine to cause cancer as well as non-cancer health effects. The agency will review a number of new studies that have been done since 2003 that indicate that atrazine may have some potential for causing birth defects, low birth weights and premature births.

I needn't say the obvious -- that only a fool would support the use of a chemical if it was known to cause cancer when used properly. If atrazine is proven by unbiased scientists to be deadly then of course it must be pulled from the marketplace.

But my fear is that there will be plenty of spin to future pesticide research and overwhelming pressure to come up with damning evidence that the risk of pesticides far outweighs any benefit. The pressure may come not only from the pro organic-agriculture front but also from anti-capitalism wing nuts.

The debate is already all over Twitter. Check out these tweets I pulled off TweetDeck just by searching on the word "pesticide" the other evening. They came within 19 minutes of each other:

Pesticides Exposure Linked to Suicidal Thoughts http://digg.com/u1Esnd

Pesticides Destroying 60 Percent of Honeybees http://bit.ly/VvnE7

Pesticide industry cheers EPA testing roll-back http://is.gd/4wAc7 #Pesticides

40% of US children have dangerous OP pesticides exposure http://is.gd/4wAST #Pesticides

Organizations that represent the industry better get out there fast. The debate is happening now. Farmers, consumers, communications people like me -- we all want a balanced discussion. That will take arming us all with facts.

And the key messages can no longer rely on the hackneyed "our world-leading, super-safe regulatory system will protect the population..." That's not enough. Look at how many people aren't getting an H1N1 flu shot this season because they distrust the vaccine -- a government tested, approved and promoted shot meant to save the population from sickness.

This isn't the time for more dry fact sheets that only the choir will ever read. Get your farmer face on and defend yourself. This debate is happening in the trenches. It's time to get dirty.

Pure profit: $830,000 in two weeks selling seed potatoes

Warning: Real potato farmers should stop reading here. This might ruin your week.

A San Francisco-based company just cleared $830,000 US in two weeks by selling seed potatoes. The potatoes are virtual but the money is very, very real.

Zynga is a developer of apps for Facebook and the iPhone. One of their biggest hits is... get this... a game about farming. Farmville lets users own and manage a virtual farm. Apparently it's very addictive. At least, the 20 million users who are currently playing the game must think so.

A screen capture of the Farmville game on Facebook

The game is free to play. The way the company makes money is through micropayments. People can spend real dollars buying tractors and things like seed, such as this special new potato that was released. The micropayments are small and allow players to improve their farms without having to earn the extras through normal play. This from a game strategy website:

For people who don't want to waste time waiting for the crop to grow, farm coins can be purchased with real-world cash using a PayPal account or credit card. The cost is currently 7,500 coins or 25 farm cash for $5; 15,800 coins or 55 farm cash for $10; 33,300 coins or 115 farm cash for $20; or 70,600 coins or 240 farm cash for $40. Players can also earn free farm cash or coins by taking part in special offers or questionnaires.

I've blogged about micropayments before. I've already purchased apps for my BlackBerry, such as the Nat Decants app that allows me to go to a wine store, choose a wine, and find recipes to match. That application cost me $3.

An editor of a major trade newspaper was telling me that micropayments could be the future of journalism. It's not hard to imagine a tiny Visa and MasterCard icon beside the headline on a publication's website. The only way to read the whole story would be to click one of the icons and have 25 cents charged to your card. Log-in once in the morning and stayed logged in, securely, all day.

Sure 25 cents ain't much. But multiply that by 100 readers. That's a day's wage right there.

Okay potato farmer. Unplug your ears. And if you were listening after all, just remember that all these virtual farm game players probably eat a lot of REAL french fries.

Refreshing farm business story on CBC’s The House

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's show on national politics, The House, is not the place I expected to hear a balanced and informative farm business story. But that's what we got on Saturday morning. The only downside is that they buried the lead.

The CBC is best at "retweeting" news releases from the left-leaning National Farmers Union, especially with stories emanating from the mother ship in downtown Toronto. Generally those stories bemoan the loss of the family farm and sell hard on organic agriculture. They don't usually cover agriculture from a business perspective.

The first half of the story focused on the boogeyman that is foreign ownership of farmland even though, "there are only a few examples of foreign investor ownership of Canadian farmland, mostly in the West and Quebec." The one example they gave is Hancock Agricultural Investments Group of Boston, owned by Canadian insurance giant Manulife, that paid $60,000 per acre of producing land when it bought a cranberry farm in Quebec's Eastern Townships.

The story piqued my interest particularly when it turned to interest rates and what their inevitable rise will do to agricultural in Canada.

And then, the bomb dropped.

It came during an interview with George Brinkman, the oft-quoted ag economist from the University of Guelph. "There is a strong parallel to the conditions in agriculture and the conditions in the US housing market just prior to the crash," he said.

Now THAT'S a quote.

Brinkman says that land prices are extremely high as compared to the value of the agriculture production.

High land prices and low incomes. Sound familiar? Brinkman says Canadian farmers invest four times as much capital per dollar earned as compared to US farmers. "There is a strong parallel to the conditions in agriculture and the conditions in the United States housing market just prior to the crash. The numbers have a lot of similarities. And the risk then is that we could have a serious correction in land values. As that occurs it works it's way through the whole agricultural sector."

His advice to farmers: Reduce debt load now, before interest rates climb.

My advice to the CBC: Keep writing farm business stories. It's a fascinating industry full of big business and family stories. And it's only going to get more interesting as the economy continues to evolve. You did a nice job on this one, even though you buried the lead a little. Keep it up.