Deborah Hutton on cover of Jan 2012 issue of Australian Women's Weekly (reprinted from www.mamamia.com.au)

Founder of BubHub Australia and consultant at Edelman’s @trevoryoung wrote an article a few months ago after his trip to BlogWorld  LA 2011 which at the time I read and then mulled over.  It struck a chord but I wasn’t sure why until this week.

In the article he talks about the growth of the blogger and the turning of some bloggers into effective ‘new media mini empires’. The first blogger that came to my mind that epitomises this at the moment is Mia Freedman and her blog MammaMia. She’s got a team of writers. Tick. She gets access and maybe even sounded out / consulted by politicans. She is sought out by traditional media as an expert (in her case on parenting and women’s issues for example). Tick.

But this week I read an article on Mamma Mia which made me think that perhaps if you are a mini media empire blogger like Mia Freedman then perhaps – just perhaps – you need to reassess who actually OWNS the blog.

Mia Freedman. Image reprinted from www.campaignbrief.com)

The article was in response to the nude posing of Deborah Hutton on the cover of Australian Women’s Weekly.  You’ve probably read the article or heard about it as apparently it got broader media covereage due to the response the post created on the blog (I was on leave when this happened with blissfully no access to online). In short on the first post Freedman wrote that she loved the pic of Deborah Hutton who at 50years old had posed nude on AWW and though some ‘minimal’ airbrushing had obviously been done to touch up, it still didn’t take from the fact the whole pic etc was great.

But apparently a majority of Freedmans readers (all 120 of them from what I could see) weren’t happy.  The accused her of being a hypocrite for saying in the past that she was against photo manipulation and now apparently saying it was okay. They  weren’t happy with the fact that she appeared to be giving a free plug to a ‘mate’ and also that she thought it was okay for a woman to pose nude on a magazine and that she seemed to be playing to the fact women are sexual objects. Freedman issued an update then followed up with another posting where she clarified her first blog posting.

Now reading through all of this when the story had died down was interesting.

I read through the comments on the second post (you can read here) and what struck me was the sense that the 271 comments on the second post were from readers who felt some ownership over the blog. Who seemed to feel that they had a right to express their opinion and that their opinion mattered and was valid. Also that they felt that they wanted Freedman to understand their point of view.

But then I read a sentence from Freedman on this second posting:

“In all this discussion over the past week about AWW, I’ve been disappointed and upset that a very small minority of people think it’s ok to attack Deborah Hutton personally. Not on. Not here. No way. I believe we can debate things without being rude or abusive. If you don’t believe that, bugger off. Deborah is a real person who is online reading what is being written. Remember that before you leave a comment – here or anywhere else.”

Now I will admit that I am not sure what these attack comments said maybe they were over the top but  just imagine if you read an opinion piece in The Age and in this article the journalist wrote about Deborah Hutton and then wrote the above paragraphs in her follow up posting. There would be an uproar I think. People would think what the heck is happening to The Age and free speech? They might even think who gives this writer / journalist the authority to write an article and then when it gets disagreed with to say ” do not attack DH, shes’ my mate and I don’t like it. If you do want to attack her you won’t do it here so bugger off”.

Now I know that a blog is different from a news site (though not always as some blogs grew to be key players in this space – think the Huff Post) and that a blogger is different from a journalist (then again not always as some bloggers see themselves as independent journalists depending on what they write about) but with the massive growth and maturing of blogging and the blogsphere can a ‘new media mini empire’blogger really say to their readers (many loyal fans) if you attack the people in my article (friends) then you can bugger off?

Now I’m not critising Freedman here or commenting on the whole DH postings. This is just an example which came to mind which seemed to respond to my initial thoughts about Trevor Young’s article back in December . But to me to seems that if a blogger’s blog matures such as  Freedman has with her blog MammaMia, then that blogger just might want to do some reassessing.

Can they continue to ”act” like a sole blogger writing what they want when they want and more importantly telling readers who don’t agree with them to go elsewhere but at the same time grow their ‘empire’ with a staff of writers and in short most of the paraphenalia of an online news / magazine / lifestyle site?

I’m not sure they can. I think if you are a mini media empire blog like MammaMia then you need to do some reassessing at some point.  You may need to stop seeing the blog as solely (and this word is key) as your ‘personal’ space for expressing your thoughts, obseverations and opinions with you dictating the houserules and instead cede some control and power to your readers. For without them you will never grow and you certainly would not have got where you are today.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Image: Qantas - pic.twitter.com/kWj1KNGs

First up is Qantas  A Touch Of Luxury campaign asking people to post tweets of examples of #qantasluxury in return for winning some luxury PJ’s. In return for this campaign #Qantas Luxury got tweets like this:

@frogspondsrock #QantasLuxury is worthless to me because I will NEVER ever fly with Qantas again #workjoyces

@_robcorr: #QantasLuxury is a hot face towel to help freshen up after sleeping in the terminal because they locked out their staff.

And then there is the Nissan Micraspotting campaign which you can read more about here.

What strikes me most about these two campaigns is not how these two brands could perhaps have done things differently. What strikes me most is the irony of it all.

Those who work in social media know we often need to raise awareness with decision makers and management that social media entails a loss of control for their brand and try and make them understand that they can control what they say about their brand, not what others say about it. Yet, at the same time this week I have read numerous Social Media Lessons articles trying to unpack what happened and how brands  can prevent these ‘social media fails’ happening to them.

It is almost as if for those of us working in social media we are saying social media means a loss of control but on the other hand we are falling back on old communication/ public relations frameworks and trying to find ways that the brand could possibly ‘manage’ or ‘control’ the situation and in turn give brands some semblance of control.

For example this week I gave a presentation on Social Media Campaigns Fails to NFP workers. When I initially compiled the presentation I was thinking of lessons to be learned and thinking perhaps of the reasons the fails happened.

For example the fact Qantas offered a low value prizes to people like  PJ’s is probably not going to entice people to their campaign. Who cares about ‘wasting’ your tweet on entering when all you could win is the possibility of some $10 PJ’s? I started to think the prize should have been something like a 50 first class trip to London, all expenses paid  which would be given away. Im sure with this prize the effect might be different with less sarcastic tweets. People would probably would not ‘waste’ their tweet on a poke at Qantas just in case they might win. [Also there is the obvious issue that conducting a social media campaign so close to public relations disasters was not such a clever thing to do.]

And then I thought that what Qantas needs to do now is say is “sorry tweeps our prize – PJ’s – weren’t really up to scratch and our timing wasn’t great either. We hear you. We’ll go back to the drawing board and come up with something better next time”.

And with Nissan Micraspotting campaign I was thinking that the judging process probably needs to be more transparent. Is a panel choosing the winning entry (if so who is on the panel and what is the criteria being used) or is a lotto system being used?

Afterwards I stopped myself.  Was I doing the opposite of what I sometimes preach? Was I letting a brand think it could have control of its message if it just did X, Y and Z?

Like all stuff up or gaffs you make in interactions with people honesty, humility and humour can often get you out of sticky situations.

What do you think?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/35884557@N00/3723292620/

“What is the Gen Y world? In a word: different. We live with earbuds in our ears, smart phones in our hands, laptops on our knees and think of the once-revolutionary compact disc as that bulky thing Brashs used to sell Spice Girls music on. We poke and sext and tag. If boomers wanted to understand Gen X, they just needed to pop Reality Bites into the VCR. To get a grip on Gen Y, they’d have to cue up a Blu-ray marathon that includes The Social Network, Juno and The Simpsons…” (‘Reality Bites” The Good Weekend,  Joel Meares, Nov 2011).

This is a paragraph in an article today in The Good Weekend by Joel Meares, a self confessed Gen Y that made me go…sigh oh sigh.

As I sit here typing on my iPad, my smartphone next to me listening to music from SoundCloud and updating my Facebook status I’m left thinking deciding who is Gen X and Gen Y is often a lot more complex than the year you were born, whether you have a smart phone or not, the social networks you are on or the job you have.

Currently I am working with a client on a campaign targeting those who have eco-friendly values and leanings. Those who care about green purchasing. This group cannot be defined solely by the year they are born. Indeed people within this group vary across a diverse range of age groups. What binds them as a “consumer group” (if you can even use this term these days) is that broadly speaking – they consider carefully the effect of their purchases on the planet, other people and beings.

I think that while market segmentation of people as “Gen X” and “Gen Y” can be sometimes good as a short hand in a marketing or communication plans in the end it needs to be approached with caution and not with the belief it’s the… holy grail.

People are so dispersed these days – by media use, social network use, price, lifestyle, values, geographical location, family lifecycle, gender, income the list can go on. Perhaps its best if we just think of the people whether they are Gen X, Gen Y or Baby Boomers as the Integrated Generation.

And with that I will return to my social networks and maybe insert a CD of Depeche Mode in the player just to confuse things a little!

Image: www.apple.com

Over the years reports have surfaced that Apple does not have a philanthrophic arm. And according to an article in the New York Time the company does not provide a matching program for charitable giving by its employees like many other Fortune 500 companies.

But perhaps Job’s is America’s most philanthropic man, he just has not advertised this fact? Perhaps while he was dying from pancreatic cancer he was also secretly donating to cancer research, cancer prevention or even cancer treatment and support? Perhaps the odd thing is not that he was not America’s most philanthropic man but that society expected him to be and for him or his PR arm to make this publicly known?

Yes the world has lost one of its great visionaries and inventors but has it lost one of its great philanthropists? That only time can tell – perhaps.

source: www.funeral-arrangements.com.au/

This is something I never really considered before until recently  I was on Facebook and noticed a friend had updated the Facebook profile of her mum – who had died after a long illness – to tell her mum’s Facebook friends that her mum had died and details of the funeral arrangements.

At the time I was struck with the fact that you might have a friend who you are not in regular contact with except by Facebook or Twitter and then one day you login and see a status update from one of their family members, from their account telling you they have died.   Of course hearing the passing of a loved one at any times is tragic but in the past we have been used to the sombreness of the newspaper Obituary section to read these announcements now the fact of seeing the notice via a status update (written by a family member usually) from their Facebook or Twitter account where you may have been used to witty remarks or comments or observations from that person make it feels more ‘real’ and more heart breaking I think.

And so I went Googling and found:

“Twitter has just established a policy for handling the accounts of deceased users. Just as Facebook allows users to request that an account be deleted or memorialized when a friend or loved one has passed on, Twitter users can now get in touch with administrators at the company to either completely delete the account or obtain a permanent backup of the deceased user’s public tweets.” – Mashable.

And there is another interesting article here from Time Business.

I’ve even read in the past that some people are now putting details of what they want done with their digital profiles when they die in their will. But I guess in the end it’s one area none of us really like to put much thought into…