For those of you who follow sports and even for those of you who don’t, you may have seen the story that Washington Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas has been ” suspended indefinitely” for bringing four handguns to his locker at the Washington, D.C. Verizon Center — as well as allegedly leaving a threatening note for a teammate telling him to “pick one.”

Oh – and to further taint what the NBA would like to be a squeaky-clean image, the dispute with teammate Javaris Crittendon (who allegedly also brandished a LOADED handgun) was over gambling debts.  Nice.  And there’s the oh-too-cute picture of Arenas making a bang-bang gesture is the Wizards team huddle.  Nice.

Until recently, Arenas was literally a poster-boy for the NBA.  He had a blog on NBA.com (gone) as well as his own Twitter account (gonzo as well), which apparently helped him get into hot water.

ABC News, in an article entitled “Did the Twitter ramblings of Washington Wizards’ star point guard Gilbert Arenas cause him to be suspended indefinitely by the NBA?” stated:

It’s certainly starting to look that way and now the hoop star may regret using the social networking tool to speak his mind about the recent off-court incident that has him in hot water.

Clueless

I live and work in Washington, DC, and while quirky and immature, it seems that the NBA and the Washington Wizards have tolerated Arenas’ social media forays — and profited from them as well.  If you tweet and gain hundreds of thousands of followers, you gain more popularity and you — and the NBA — benefit from it. Financially, dude.  More shirts, more hats, more $$$.

Until you say something they don’t like after you do something stupid.  After the story broke, Arenas tweeted:

“i wake up this morning and seen i was the new JOHN WAYNE..lmao media is too funny,”

Peter Vescey of the New York Post broke the gun story.  Arenas then tweeted:

“As for the reporter who broke the story – NY post should eject Peter V FROM WRITNG EVERY AGAIN,”

Hmm.  Seems like Ol’ Gil doesn’t get it.

Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project said that Twitter and other Web sites are a blessing and a curse for professional athletes:

“They have a new way to engage the public, their fans, and new ways to show a playful side of themselves…a way for them to bond even more deeply with their fans. But things that might seem private or more intimate, playful or spontaneous, appealing in one context, all of a sudden when they’re tweeted out to a wide audience, could take on a different context.”

You’re off the mark, Lee.  Tweeting something to a wide audience is not “taking on a different context.”  That statement is like saying that you have been misquoted in your own autobiography.  Plus, it’s hard to be taken out of context in 140 characters.

Double Standard

If the NBA wants their marketable athletes to tweet, let them tweet.  But don’t express horror when they say something that you don’t like, or say something that makes them look dumber than a bag of rocks (hello, handlers).  Moreover, you can’t he “half pregnant” – either let the athletes use Twitter when and how they want or not at all.  ABC notes:

Under the new social media policy, athletes cannot tweet during game time, which includes the 45 minutes before a game starts, half-time and the period after a game that is traditionally used for press conferences and media interviews. Violators can be fined by the league and face additional sanctions by their team. The NFL has similar restrictions on the time periods when players may not use social media.

My point is this:  the NBA WANTS their athletes to find ways to market themselves.  It furthers their reach, their audience and their brand.  The NBA WANTS people like Gilbert Arenas to blog on their platform.  And I tweet all the time at work, in restaurants, wherever.  And it rarely distracts me from what I get paid to do.

Here are some screen shots below that show how the NBA is either a little sloppy or a little clueless:

Gilbert is listed under “NBA Player Blogs.”  Ok.  Cool.  Let me click some more:

“Agent Zero Blog File.”  Wow.  You mean the NBA could have suspended him indefinitely and left his blog up?  Wait — it’s moved:

Doh!

I think that Gilbert Arenas is yet another example of a man-child, pampered athlete whose exploits may have never seen the light of day, save for some investigative reporting by the New York Post. I think that the NBA was happy to have a man-child, pampered athlete use social media — as evidence by the fact that they HOSTED A BLOG FOR HIM.  So presumably, they were ok with him tweeting.

But Gilbert did something irrevocably stupid and then made it worse using his Twitter account.  That was shut down.  Gilbert was no longer a squeaky-clean poster boy, so the NBA shut down his blog (note to Webmaster – “page not found” is stupid and sloppy.  Just link to David Stern’s statement, dammit).

Man-child Tweeting?  Good.  Man-child blogging?  It’s all good, baby.

Idiot bringing four handguns to his workplace over gambling debt and then blaming others?  David Stern to Gilbert: you are SO outta here, baby.

My final point is that when Gilbert was finally facing his indefinite suspension and grand jury investigation, if you let him blog while he was the poster boy, why not let him blog when he is apologizing all over the place?  And why not let him do it on NBA.com?  That would demonstrate openness, transparency and prove that social media is not only ok, it can be a pretty good crisis communications tool.

But you can’t have it both ways, Mr. Stern.

Mark

This post is a bit of an intro to an upcoming contribution to For Immediate Release that will air on Monday, but I have been giving a lot of thought lately to the role of social media in government from the consumer perspective.

Last month, ForSee Research released their annual survey of government Web sites. The good news? Perception of the usability of government Web sites is on the rise. The bad news? Most still fall behind sites in the private sector.

Like the old “Family Feud,” survey said:

• Citizen satisfaction reaches an all­ time high. Satisfaction with e‐gov rates a 75.2 on the ACSI’s 100‐point scale, the highest aggregate score ever recorded by the E‐Gov Index.
• E­gov that satisfies citizens is still the most efficient and cost­ effective channel. The federal government can save overhead costs related to call centers and localized office locations by meeting citizens’ online needs and expectations. Citizens who are highly satisfied with a federal government website are 86% more likely to use the website as a primary resource (as opposed to other, more costly channels), 79% more likely to recommend the website, and 52% more likely to return to the website.
• Functionality remains the top priority for improving federal government websites, in aggregate. Citizens are looking to federal government websites with expectations for features and functions that are not yet being fully met. Functionality, look and feel, and navigation are the top priority elements for a large proportion of sites. In addition, 88% of the subset of sites that measure citizens’ opinions on their search feature found it to be a top priority element. Improvements to these satisfaction drivers will have the largest impact on overall satisfaction with federal government websites, in aggregate, and therefore could increase a citizen’s likelihood to return to the sites, recommend them, and use them as a primary resource.
• Satisfaction increased for all four measured website function categories, but citizens are most satisfied with e­commerce/transaction government websites, which had a notable quarter‐over‐quarter increase from 77.6 to 81.5 as a category, as did career and recruitment websites. These two categories are the smallest, however, so it is important to note that increases were also measured in the much larger portals/department main sites and information/news categories.
• Satisfaction with e­gov is catching up to satisfaction with the private sector. Aggregate citizen satisfaction with e‐gov still lags behind satisfaction with e‐retail and search engines, but e‐gov outperforms online brokerage and online news. At the individual site level, a larger proportion of e‐gov websites score over 80 than do e‐retail websites. Some sites from the Social Security Administration and from Health and Human Services surpass even those of the private sector stalwarts like Netflix and Amazon.

So why is all of this important?  Two BIG reasons.

1. Even with the health care debate raging in Washington, it is reasonable to think that some form of health care reform will pass.  This will move millions of citizens from private sector Web sites to government Web sites.  We have to keep up;  this will not only be new Web properties, but likely an entirely different way of interacting with the federal government.  Think about the point above of citizens carrying out transactions with the government on the Web”  “Citizens are looking to federal government websites with expectations for features and functions that are not yet being fully met.“
2. We are approaching — or at — retirement for baby boomers.   More than ever, this flood of people will be accessing sites like social security and Medicare with questions (and the good news is that the Social Security Administration ranked #1, #2 and #3 in the survey for some of their micro sites).  There will also be an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the “greatest generation” to their offspring — the largest in American history — in the coming years.  Hello, IRS.gov.

My two cents is that “good enough” is not “good enough.”  If the federal government requires, or offers the option to sign up millions of Americans for services, we have to have the absolute, number one, best-in-class, most usable Web sites.  Period.

Disclaimer:  I am Director of New Media for the Securities and Exchange Commission.  This posting in no way reflects the views of the Chairman, the Commissioners or my colleagues at the SEC.  Or probably of the two people who will read it.

Mark

Ok, maybe the title is a bit of an exaggeration, but when listening to Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson’s “For Immediate Release” this morning (congratulations, gentlemen on the FANTASTIC accomplishment of your 500th episode), the topic came up of what is likely to happen in the future of social media.

One of the terrific comments came from a listener who suggested that essentially the future of social media lies with teenagers.  Yep.  Teenagers.  Those snarling, lovable little people.  And when you think about this, this makes tremendous sense:

MOST teens:

• Are on social media sites like MySpace, Facebook and Youtube – and completely comfortable using them;
• Can multitask and Tweet on something like Tweetdeck with multiple windows open;
• Text at an unbelievable speed and volume, while simultaneously publishing to other online meeting places lke the aforementioned Facebook and MySpace; and
• Crave what is next, new and interesting.

Think about it.  In ten years, or less, these teens will be hitting the workplace with an opportunity to make a difference.  At 25, these folks might find themselves in an entry level or even mid-level position and bring with the the habits that they grew up with.  In short, the more that they evolve as consumers of social media and their careers grow in the process, the more we will see integration of these aspects in the workplace.

And as Shel said, “At 30, they’ll probably be managers.”  These now teens (or even tweens) will be in positions to make decisions and influence those both senior and junior to them.

So while I wrote some time ago “How to Sell Social Media to Your Dumb Ass Boss,” this one is a lot simpler. It’s a sticky note with this post:

“Dear Boss:

Please start using social media in many of the ways that I recommend now, because like the factory workers of yesteryear, you can either update your knowledge and skill sets or find yourself on the ash heap of professional development.”

Someday, you might just rule the world.

Mark

Reprinted from a Media Bullseye article I wrote that was published on May 18, 2009.

The Spice Girls are, in my book, perhaps the worst band of the last century (sorry, fans), but I invoke the name of one of their more tortuous songs to talk about measurement.

This article has been bouncing around in my head since the “For Immediate Release” call-in show on April 25, 2009. The guests were Chip Griffin, CEO of CustomScoop (disclosure: a sponsor of The Hobson and Holtz report); and Aaron Weber, Insight Manager at Spiral16. (further disclosure: I am paid to write this article by Media Bullseye, a sister company of Custom Scoop.)
The guests described a variety of topics, including what constitutes good social media measurement and when it gets “creepy,” meaning you might make a Tweet complaining about a product and then hear from either the products’ representatives or perhaps a competitor. At that point, I had not encountered any “creepiness,” aside from a comment on my blog from Comcast after I took on DirecTV.

The lively podcast (and call-in) discussion got me thinking about “what I really, really want” out of a monitoring service. I have blogged and written articles about measurement and the ensuing steps your
can take for online reputation management ad nauseam, but I have a new wrinkle to add to the discussion:

1. Capturing the right information from the right sources is just the first step, but
   adding context to content is the next, critical step that many monitoring services lack; and

2. Those who do offer some sort of analysis of blogs posts, media mentions and not even
   tweets are often “hired guns” who lack the ability to ascertain the nuances that make a mention, positive, negative or neutral, let alone a favorability ranking. You can’t tell me that someone sitting in another office who has 10 other clients can know more about your issues than you.

The Conundrum

• Are those who do monitoring, either inside or outside of organizations, looking at
  the right thing to measure? and

• Are the right people actually doing the measurement?

My answer is: a) sometimes, and b) not really.

My public relations measurement uber-hero is Katie Paine, whose book “Measuring Public Relationships” is still the best read out  there on the topic, and I am going to borrow liberally from her book in order to help make sense of this.

What to look at

There are two types of horrendous monitoring, one worse than the other. The first is a “clips report” simply regurgitating a bunch of stories without providing any frame of reference to what it all means.

Lame.

What is still bad, but marginally better, is measuring “impressions.” Impressions are a made-up number that is still imprecise. Some organizations say it is 2.7 times the circulation number (counting pass-alongs) and some say it is simply the circulation number itself. This concept is fundamentally flawed as well because just because your article appears, it is a not a lock that the number of people
who see a publication = the number of people that you reached. This is at best flawed, and at worst, downright lazy. Still lame.

Non-Lame-ness

Here’s the Katie Paine part that, when I first read it (and then taught it) was one of those serene moments in which the universe makes sense. She offers up a simple way to measure the messages that actually get through to your audiences. Does it matter how many people buy the publication that your earned media piece runs in? Hell, no. But does matter how many people actually saw the message(s) that you were attempting to convey? Hell, yes.

Katie elegantly calls this revelatory statistic “Cost Per Message Communicated,” meaning that when you cut through all of the (lazy) monitoring mumbo-jumbo, the simplest and most precise way to determine the value of the public relations effort you have undertaken is to a) capture the right information an b) measure the messages that were available to your audiences.

I’ll talk more about this in the second article, but what I “really, really want” is a monitoring system (technology AND subject-matter experts) who will:

1. Capture all of the print, radio, television, blog, online news, Twitter and message
   board stuff that is said about my organization or issue;
2. Separate the “wheat from the chaff” and let me know – concisely – what I need to pay attention to; and
3. Help me understand the value of my public relations, public affairs or even crisis communications outbound messaging – not the “thump test” of number of publications or impressions, but how many of my key messages reached their intended audiences.

Sometimes, I feel like the old “Wayne’s World” mantra:  “I’m not worthy….I’m not worthy.”  So big kudos to my pal, David Wescott, a freelance writer for the Business Lexington and blogger extradordinaire, who interviewed me on my day job for Bix Lex – and then blogged about it.

All kidding aside, I am deeply proud of the work that all of us do at the Securities and Exchange Commission to protect investors.  The article touches on the social media aspects of it.

Article is here.

Thanks, David.

Mark