A presentation I did in front of the North Carolina Association of Government Information.

1. Information Overload Tools for Interactive Communications

2. Social Media Conversations taking place online. Vertical Communications – One to many Horizontal Communications – Individuals communicating Friends or strangers, next door or across the globe, people are connecting by their involvement or interest in something.

3. Traditional Communications Print Email Static web sites Press releases One Way Communications

4. Communicating through Social Media - Blogs - Chat rooms - Discussion boards - RSS - Instant Messenger - Virtual Reality Two-way Communications The media no longer owns the audience

5. The Internet is Infinitely Scalable Publishing & Broadcasting Platform Text Audio Video

6. Why is this Important? These discussions can and will become branding issues. Google: 82% of 1 st pages have blog/discussion posts. Yahoo: 63% of 1 st pages have blog/discussion posts.

7. Everyone is Communicating - 1 out of every 5 adults will comment online - 80% of all consumers read online recommendations - 75% do online research before making a decision - 1 out of every 30 comments online is an employee discussing the company or organization they work for (Jupiter Research)

8. Online Communication Tools

9. Blogs Short for weblog is an online publishing engine and journal. - Business, academic & personal - 100 million+ blogs - 120,000 new blogs created today - 1.4 new blogs every second - 1.5 million blog posts today - Adult blog usage grew 163% in 2006 Blogger.com Wordpress.org Livejournal.com

10. Podcasting Automatic delivery of audio media via RSS - University lectures - PR Releases - Press conferences - News, music and comedy Updates automatically for users Allows for users to listen to what they want when they want. iTunes.com Podcast.net ipodder.org

11. RSS Really Simple Syndication - Family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. Feedburner.com

12. RSS Readers Google Reader, Bloglines, Pageflakes

13. Social Networks Web sites that bring together users based on interests, friends, etc. - Share - Communicate - Find Facebook.com MySpace.com LinkedIn.com

14. Wiki’s Web sites that allow users to collaborate and edit online - Project management - Version control - Total transparency - Everyone is responsible not one person Wikipedia.org Wikispaces.com Wiki.org

15. Social Bookmarking Allows users to share links, information snippets, articles and resources - Recommendations - Comments - Ratings - Tagging for clustering and searching Del.icio.us Digg.com Stumbleupon.com

16. Video Create, upload and share videos online - No bandwidth issues - Comments - Ratings - Embed on other web sites Youtube.com Metacafe.com AOL.com

17. Where do we Start?

18. Begin by Listening Where are your target audience communicating? Where do they congregate? What are they talking about? Issues, Questions What is important to them? Threat or Opportunity?

19. Monitor

21. Social Media is Growing Up - Communications through social networks - Students, friends and family - Introduced to the victims

22. Control – It’s time to accept we don’t have it - Power to the people! - Don’t be afraid of it, embrace it. - Pretending it is not there will not make it go away. - Your own focus groups

23. Reaching out to Social Community - Understand the environment you are in. - Ingratiate yourself into the conversation - Be transparent - Be open and honest

24. Impressions/click-through’s. Purchases and/or leads. Customer behavior. Blogosphere. Chat rooms/message boards. Immediate feedback Tracking and Analytics

25. Where does the target market congregate? What kind of message will resonate best? Online, offline, internal and/or external. The medium is the facilitator not the differentiator. Pick the campaign , not the medium

27. Thank You Questions [email_address]