Deirdre Breakenridge recently posted in her blog the article 'Are You a PR 2.0 Champion?' which created a space for me to reflect upon my own journey in learning about social media and its impact on communications and 'new' PR.

Essentially, she says that because of the way technology and social networking are transforming the art of communication and redefining relationships, the new PR practitioner needs to be a social media expert, a market analyst/expert and also a conversationalist and listener. These I agree and buy into, and you can read more about my thoughts on these issues on 'The Fall of Communication and the Rise of Dialogue in the Web 2.0 Era - Part 3.'

Deirdre also states that the new PR practitioner must also be a web marketer, customer service representative, a relationship marketer and a viral marketer. It is really a convergence of responsibilities brought about by the more intimate conversations with our customers (D2C) due to the blurring of lines between social networking, PR, marketing, all fueled by the push of technology.

How do you know if you are ready to champion for a change to the way we communicate?

Deirdre provides a checklist. Do you:

- actively listen and engage in social networks?
- try new technologies as they’re introduced (set up new  profiles and test various social networking communities)?
- have RSS feeds, and use social media tools including widgets, wikis, podcasts and streaming video?
- have a list of favorite bloggers and also comment on their blogs?
- share interesting blog posts and other news/information with members or your social networking communities?
- blog?
- ask questions so that you better understand social media and also answering questions to help your fellow peers?
- share valuable information to help people to make decisions?

So how did you fare?

For me, I must say that I’m able to put in an unequivocal ‘yes’ to most of the questions, Though I should qualify that the level and degree of involvement in each question are a different matter altogether.

I consider myself new to the social media scene and it’s been such a massive challenge trying to build an understanding from scratch. Oftentimes I feel like a fish out of the water, or one trying to swim upstream.

I’ve a traditional PR background back where I came from, and yes, that includes a heavy emphasis on media relations, speech writing, event management and those kinds of things. And I didn’t really start engaging with social networking until I came to the U.S. for studies because it was my colleagues who urged me to join their Facebook group to keep in touch.

While I didn’t baulk at the idea, it certainly took me a while to get warmed up to it. A few weeks into it, I remember a friend who wrote me on FB asking me what sort of a Facebook account is it without a face… how I’ve grown roots in it since then.

Today, I’m also maintaining a presence on Twitter (and learning how to be a productive tweeter without spamming others!!!), Flickr, LinkedIn, and many other platforms.

We must be prepared to learn and re-learn if we go down the new PR track. It must be a brand new mindset with an attitude towards openness and preparedness for dialogue and community participation.  

With the way the Web and social networking applications are growing today, nothing less will do!

I’m glad I stepped in to learn and get engaged already. I think I am a champion for productive and gradual change.

What about you?

Yesterday evening, I had the unique chance to sit in on a talk by Dan Schawbel, one of America's up and coming voice in the field of personal branding through Web 2.0. Organized by the Boston Salty Legs Career Club at the function room of the Vlora Restaurant (see the registration process above), Dan gave a 50 minute presentation about what it takes to improve our personal branding and in this economy, how Web 2.0 tools could be used to fashion a powerful online identity, and how, in his four-step branding process (discover -> create -> communicate -> maintain) we have a robust roadmap of building our Web 2.0 brand from scratch and setting it on the route towards recognition and success.

Networking's the name of the game! I was so glad to have had the opportunity to befriend Alan Billing and Tim Fitzpatrick. Alan (left of picture) is a go-getting entrepreneur now heading his seventh start-up company while Tim's looking to develop a brand new career out of Web-based writing and communications services in the niche area of chemistry. Me? I've a fire-fighting background but am now reading my Masters in Communication Management, and developing a profound interest in Web 2.0 and social networking. I'm not sure if you can get anymore eclectic than that...

It wasn't a terribly big room, but credit to the organizers, I thought they managed to squeeze about 30 people or so in the room. Here you see the leader of the Boston Salty Legs Career Club, Susan Kang, giving the welcome address. She started off by describing herself as someone who's absolutely crazy over Twitter (of course I paraphrased it... she said it in a more hilarious way, but it's something like that...). Guess tweeting is now the new Cocainof our digital socialization! And on comes Dan Schawbel...

I got to admit. I came because I wanted to hear him for myself. A month ago I'd heard a classmate of mine waxing lyrical about Dan's dynamism and passion about personal branding and Web 2.0 and I wanted to know what the buzz was all about. To be really honest, my interest actually lies more in the repurposing of Web 2.0 for corporate communications and PR, while Dan's expertise is about individual branding. Somehow, as his presentation wore on, I had a niggling sense that there could be a chasm to my expectations. But on hindsight, many of the things that he covered last night seem just as applicable in the organizational context, especially if we see the organizational unit in the light of his personal branding concepts.

Watch a short clip of his talk below...

Some key lessons I picked up?
For one thing, I thoroughly agree when he says that personal branding is as much about how you market yourself to others as it is about how we perceive ourselves to be because the latter is going to define the nature and consistency of the 'narrative' that we present to others. This becomes especially important when we consider the impact of Web 2.0 because, in the ocean of voices all vying for attention (he says, for example, that Technorati counts about 200 million blogs today!!!), unless we have a strong personal brand in cyberspace, we don't even have a foot in the door to the conversations going on (here I'm borrowing a bit from the ideas by Brian Solis, Deirdre Breakenridge and other PR 2.0 evangelists).

And unless we've a consistent narrative or account in the main social networks out there (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc), we won't be able to compete against those with a strong and harmonized digital persona. Often, this begins with something as simple as having a common photo profile in our different social network accounts, or even claiming your own public profiles - yourname.com - where possible (hey, I just changed my LinkedIn profile to www.linkedin.com/in/danielseet). These are all little building blocks and trails that we use to build up a memorable brand identity, one that has traction and sticks!

The earlier two points seem fundamental to me because unless we get involved in the networking and the conversations, and unless we build a brand that people recognize and can trust, we'll never be able to bring our message or our side of the story (as Solis and Breakenridge would prefer it to be called) across to our community. I thought it was also insightful when Dan brought up the point that under natural circumstances, we'd want to be part of the social circle with the largest network (consider the millions on Facebook, or the associations on LinkedIn), but if we're, say part of a lawyer's guild of about 30, then this joining a networking group where we can connect with this 30 would be critical too! Though numbers mean something, the quality of the association and the potential long-term ROI (Return on Investment) must be a part of the consideration too!

I like Dan's personal branding cycle (see image on the left) because of it's scalability in both personal branding and organizational branding as well. Here's a quick review of each phase as it relates to both the individual and the corporation:

Discovery
This is like the intelligence-collection phase where individuals should check out how they want to position themselves on the Web (specific skills or expertise that they want to claim as their own niche territory). Given today's narrowly segmented markets and interests (Chris Anderson's 'Long Tail' - see graphic below), there're opportunities along the tail end of the x-axis where specialized services could be developed to serve a niche community.

For the organization, I would think that stakeholder analysis would fit nicely into the 'Discover' phase because of the parity of the process, where the organization tries to understand the segment of the community it wants to reach, and caters its communications to this specific group of people accordingly.  As Dorie Clark, CEO of Clark Strategic Communications says, it’s always going to be about the target audience and who we're trying to reach, finding out what their main channels of communication are, and being part of the dialogue where they are (read more about her thoughts on PR, communications and the impact of Web 2.0 by clicking here).

Create
After the research in the previous step, now it's time to go develop your 'presence.' This could be an account on Twitter, or Facebook, or creating a blog on the online world. In the offline world, it could also be something like developing name cards with your photo on it, because as Dan puts it, faces are harder to forget while names are easy to misplace. "Even if the name cards produced by your organization does not allow you photo to be inserted," he says, "you can always make a separate one with a picture. [While this may be on your own costs,] you're ultimately responsible for protecting and marketing your own brand." Ditto for organizations, though in the corporate setting, this could mean relooking at the company's website, or its blog, or creating a corporate page on Facebook. Whatever develops a presence!

Communicate
Once the 'channels' have been created, we can then go on to communicate our messages, though I believe some PR 2.0 practitioners would rather see it as the participation in the conversations and dialogues. I don't want to be locked down by semantics here, so I'll just say that the key point moving forward is to identify our community segments we want to engage, find out where they're having their conversations (is it on magazines, or forums, or blogs, etc) and then be part of the conversation. That's the communication we're talking about - and it often requires both a hand in new media as well as traditional media. Often, vehicles from both sides are needed to carry a credible and consistent message in order to get heard. I want to echo (or in the lingua franca of the day, to retweet) Dan's point that building genuine two-way communication requires a long-term strategy of building relationships over time. Great point! So, once again, ditto for organizations.

Maintain
This is probably the most unglamorous part of the job - the housekeeping part, that is... The degree of effort we'll need to sort out our accounts online will be directly proportionate to the number of networks and platforms we're involved in. Most of the time, the data will not update itself. Of course, thank god we have systems like ping.fm that help to bridge a couple of the platforms together, but even then, like the widgets that exist to link Twitter and Facebook, these are just solutions for updating our statuses. Other details will require our painstaking effort to maintain, whether it's the lates certification we've received (for LinkedIn, as an example) or new updates on the corportate blog, where organizations are concerned. I would put this as content management on a personal and corporate scale, and our reputations as thought leaders are on the line. Imagine what people would think if they search for a piece of your information only to call up a website or blog that was last updated on the day it was created???

And a Concluding Thought...
And if I may add another thought to this issue of 'maintenance.' I would also see it as the effort needed to nurture the networks that we're cultivating by keeping up a regular (need not be that often, but at least regular on a sensible basis) level of contact, whether it's that message on Facebook, or a retweet of an interesting message from your Twitter 'follower,' or the effort to make a comment on other people's blogs.

All these activities are tied in to our online (and offline) reputation, and people will sooner or later see through our motives: whether we are engaged participants or just another digital opportunist.

MEDIA CENTER

Find this Useful? Save this article as a PDF Now!

ALERT! To save this post only, remember to click on this article's title (to call it up on an exclusive page) before hitting the PDF button below!

You'll notice the title to this post is basically a retweet (RT) of an entry by BBC Click. If it helps, I actually contemplated this for a while before going ahead to use it to head my blog post. I mean, this is the age of new media right? So why can't a RT serve as a bonafide title? So there... I got this off my chest. Now, back to the original purpose of this post.

Gaining access to a hacker's world: The threat of Botnets!

I found Spencer Kelly's recent article on how he and his colleagues managed to purchase the services of botnet providers from Eastern Europe. Wait a minute. Let's back up a little and talk about what a botnet is.

A botnet derives its name from the term roBOT NETwork, and it is also known as a 'zombie army.' Basically, what it is, is a network of hacked computers (yours and mine are possible targets) that are used to insidiously generate and send spam or viruses, or even flood another network with messages as a denial of service (DoS) attack. According to Answers.com, there is a booming botnet business that sells lists of compromised computers to hackers and spammers, and in this case, it was how BBC Click managed to secure one such 'service provider' to conduct their remote testing.

The dangers of botnets, according to the BBC Click article, are essentially threefold. It starts off with the sending of a Trojan virus to an unprotected computer to do the following:

(1) Logging your keystrokes to 'fish' out anything that may look like security passwords;
(2) Redirecting users to fake shopping sites that no nothing more than record your credit card security details;
(3) Generate and send out SPAM to flood other networks, the worse of which results in the crippling of services (also known as a DoS).

Now I think back to all those times when I received strange emails from friends that lead to nothing, and when I checked back with them, they claimed they didn't send it at all. While we attributed it to a virus attack, now it seems more to me that their systems may have been infiltrated and subverted as botnets. Wow! Talk about it being close...

The Long Tail of Social Networking Media
What really struck me was how the BBC Click team managed to secure a botnet for themselves. Kelly said, "There are many [botnets] available to buy or rent from cyber criminals hiding behind fake usernames and the non-cooperation of authorities across international borders."

Botnets, he says, provide modern organised gangs with what he calls the 'firepower to make and launder vast amounts of money.' Recounting how he managed to buy a botnet from hackers in Russia and the Ukraine after many months of pursuits and a few thousand dollars (now isn't that cheap?), the negotiations started in chatrooms where the hackers advertise their services. The deal was finally sealed through instant messaging applications.

I have absolutely no doubt that radicalized organizations are quickly learning the ropes of the trade, and using this as a means of funneling money to fund their extremist plots and schemes (for more related issues, read Web 2.0 and the Transnational Challenge: A Singaporean Perspective).It is frightening to think how 'open' or freely available social networking platforms are being used in these illegal operations, demonstrating the long-tail of Web 2,0 and social networking.

This will be something governments and the IT industry must work to collectively address. Does this mean more layers of security? While I won't discount this possibility in the future, it seems an unlikely option for now given how it runs counter to the general freedom of use associated with most social networking platforms.

Perhaps the crux is not so much the accessibility as it is the anonymity that it offers users? Maybe this will be something to contenmplate as we cast one eye upon the future with Web 3.0, where accessibility, security and privacy needs are better tackled.

Windows users ought to run through the tips the author provides for securing the computer system towards the end of the article. But what about Mac users (like me)? Well, for now, we'll have to hang on to what NETWORKWORLD says, that because most bot headers target Windows, Macs and Linux systems are statistically safe... It's not much of a comfort, I know, but let's just hang on that for now.

Once again, the bottomline as I covered in an earlier post about the Koobface Malware: Our net security is ultimately our own responsibility, so be careful what we do online. Period.