Last week's presentation at the Vancouver High-Tech Communicators' Exchange was a great time: a really engaged audience, provocative and challenging questions, and a razor-sharp co-presenter – mi amigo Kris Krüg. (Catch Dave Olson's amazingly thorough account here.) We took a look at marketing with social media, through the lens of some very successful efforts.

But it's human nature to stare at train wrecks, and it's no surprise that the biggest response came from our look at how you can bomb horribly. I came up with a list of nine routes to social media shame:

1. 

   ©istockphoto.com/xyn06

   Gaming the system: Yes, there's nothing stopping you from trying to rewrite a Wikipedia entry to your advantage... but something like Virgil Griffith's Wikipedia Scanner could make your life a PR misery. (Read about the misadventures of voting-machine-maker Diebold here.) The online world is full of talented people fanatically devoted to exposing online frauds and defending the integrity of the commons; cross them at your peril.
2. Putting on a puppet show: If only those social media sites had comments raving about you or your brand. So why not log in under a false identity (what the online world calls a sock-puppet) and leave those comments yourself? According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey tried it, trashing the competition and boosting his company on Yahoo's message boards. The result: a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation... and a very public humiliation.
3. Flogging: If the sock puppet has a cousin, it's the fake blog, or "flog". Take the All I Want for Xmas is a PSP blog, purportedly written by a guy begging his parents for the Sony gaming console... but in reality the creation of a marketing firm. The blog was designed to become a meme, spreading virally across the Internet, and in a way it did – but not the way anyone at Sony would have wanted. Instead, it was outed on the forums at Something Awful, and the meme's message was that Sony was duping the public.
4. Playing coy: Outright dishonesty isn't the only thing that can trip you up. Wal-Marting Across America was a blog by a middle-aged couple driving their RV across the U.S., camping overnight in Wal-Mart parking lots and telling stories about the wonderful people they met – a remarkable number of whom had glowing things to say about Wal-Mart. None of this was untrue; the couple was genuine, the RV was an RV, and nobody's disputing the stories people were telling. But what the blog didn't mention – anywhere – is that the whole thing was paid for by Wal-Mart itself: from airfares to the RV itself. The blog was outed, the story hit the mainstream media, and both Wal-Mart and their PR firm, Edelman, were left looking very much like they'd tried to pull something sleazy.
5. Forgetting your users: Not every misstep puts egg on your face; sometimes, all that happens is you don't get nearly the results you'd hoped for. The web is still full of organizational blogs, created purely to push out spin, written in market-ese and utterly failing to engage visitors. In other cases, organizations put their own preoccupations front and centre and shove their audiences' to the side. Take this page of McDonald's podcasts. The only featured podcasts are a speech by the CFO and (literally) hours of business analysts' reports. The stuff consumers would be interested in, geared to changing public perceptions of McDonald's as an rapacious behemoth bent on global destruction? Buried far down the page... among shareholders' meetings and earnings conference calls.
   
   The flip side of the nothing-but-spin blog is the nothing-but-nothing blog. CEO bloggers who tell us what they had for breakfast, how their last flight went, what the view's like from their hotel room may be fascinating to themselves, but their readers deserve a lot more. This is an opportunity to offer insights, passion and some thought leadership; please don't pass it up.
6. Acting like you own the place: You may own the servers, the software, the branding – but you don't own the community. Forgetting that, for instance by making big changes without consulting the community or, worse, letting them know why, is a recipe for disaster. Facebook triggered a firestorm recently with its Beacon fiasco; that suggests they may not learn from their mistakes, because they went through a similar debacle in September 2006 when they launched news feeds and minifeeds. In each case, they backed down. Heavy-handed actions can be just as bad. When the Washington Post encountered a flood of abusive comments on one of its blogs, they could have decided to have a moderator approve each comment before publishing it, until the flood subsided. Instead, they temporarily suspended commenting altogether – and endured a week of accusations of censorship and bad faith.
7. Looking down your nose: Oh, Target, Target, Target. Your selection of quality goods is so impressive; your blogger engagement strategy... not so much. In January, a blogger asked Target to explain one of their ads, which she felt was sexually exploitive. Target's PR department replied by email, "Unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets." That garnered them a bunch of ill-will in the blogging world... and some bad press in one of those more traditional media outlets that Target prizes so highly.
8. Letting it slide: Setting up a blog or other social web presence is the easy part. The real work comes in doing the gardening: seeding new content, nurturing the shoots of new community and, when necessary, weeding out abuses. Canadian politician Paul Martin launched a blog that went months without new posts; it became an embarrassment. And you don't have to search too far to find blogs and forums that have become playgrounds for comment spam.
9. Pitching without looking: Engaging with bloggers? Good idea. Firing off impersonal pitches with no idea who you're talking to? Bad idea. For an extreme example, see what happened when a PR firm pitching an upcoming American Idol gimmick included a public relations watchdog site in its mailing list. That's a worst-case scenario; more likely, you'll get a snarky blog post or just plain ignored for your troubles. Blogs are highly personal endeavours, and only a few earn an income for their creators; the rest are labours of love. Treat them that way. My co-presenter, Kris, wisely suggested you read a blog for at least a week, then join its commenting community, and then try pitching the author – in a personal way that relates directly to the blog's focus.

Actually, there's a 10th way to stumble in this space. And that's to let the first nine scare you away from social media.

The fact is, you only have to search Technorati to see that the conversation is already happening: about you, your competitors, or an issue you care about passionately. It goes on with or without your participation.

You can make that participation positive and productive – and avoid pretty much any of those pitfalls I've mentioned – if you start from the right place. Proceed with authenticity and transparency; respect your audience and the community you're engaging; understand that this can be hard work, and dedicate resources accordingly... and even if you do stumble, you'll have friends ready to catch you.

This isn't an exhaustive list – I'd love to know what navigational hazards appear on your map of the social media world.

By the way, here's some of the coverage of our talk in the blogging world:

• Dave's extensive recap
• Greg from TechVibes
• Jacob at Sip of Water
• Rob McMahon at Spilling the Beans
• Monica Hamburg (who's also doing great things at One Degree)
  

I've just installed a nifty new widget on my personal blog. Called the Lijit, it uses Google to allow users to search my blog. Not a huge deal, you say? True enough.

But it does a lot more than that. Users can also search my entire Web 2.0 presence – Flickr photos, del.icio.us bookmarks, LinkedIn contacts and more. They can even search every blog in my blogroll. And I can track what visitors are searching for on my personal profile page, with popular search terms displayed in tag cloud format.

According to Lijit, they want to combine web searches with the filtering process we constantly pursue as we build our personal networks:

In real-life, people seek out advice from friends, co-workers, family, professionals, etc. Content is vetted though these social connections reducing the number of possibilities, and filtering for local relevance. This filtering is complex and it evolves through our entire lives. It is shaped by the experiences we have, the people we know, and the path that we take in life.

Lijit plans to build out the widget's features... including the inevitable financial incentives:

In the very, very near future we plan to give you interesting statistics about what people are searching you for, and who other experts may be that have that information. And, because you worked hard to write, bookmark, and read all that cool stuff we also plan to give you a way to monetize searches people make with your hard earned online ‘stuff’.

Because Lijit uses Google's Custom Search service, it requires you to submit a Gmail username and password (not necessarily – or advisably – your primary account). I felt a little queasy about that, although the site's Attention Trust certification helped that go down a little easier.

Some aspects of the service still aren't really documented. Just what a "Lijit list" is, for example, and what constitutes the "best" and "worst" hits on it, is absolutely cryptic to me; I couldn't find any reference to it in the help files.

That said, Lijit is still in beta. I'll be interested to see how that tag cloud evolves, and what uses people put the site to. Widgets are growing in popularity, so I'll be just as interested to see what other handy little gadgets this one inspires. I'll keep you posted.

Updated: First feature request – I wish you could opt to style Lijit yourself in CSS. Instead, the widget's Javascript snippet brings in a bunch of inline CSS styling of its own... including some that made it too wide for my blog's layout. I've had to rejig the page to accommodate it, which is pretty much the exact opposite of how a well-behaved widget should work.

Political campaigns are supposed to be innovators when it comes to the online world; witness the breakout success of the Howard Dean campaign and the increasing significance of blogs in U.S. politics. 

So whenever an election is underway, it's worth having a look at how campaigns are using the web and the power of online community – and in Canada, the big electoral news right now is the Liberal Party's leadership campaign.

In the past few months, nearly all of the candidates have revamped their web presences. But how well do they measure up on their use of the tools of the social web?

Let’s find out, checking in with the leadership campaign sites of Scott Brison, Stéphane Dion, Ken Dryden, Martha Hall Findlay, Michael Ignatieff, Gerard Kennedy, Bob Rae and Joe Volpe. (And let's add the usual caveat that I've done a lot of work with the New Democratic Party, so consider that as you weigh the following.)

Newsfeeds: Sometimes called RSS feeds or XML feeds, these are the lifeblood of the new web. Most basically, they allow you to read updates from a whole bunch of web sites using a single service or piece of software (called a news aggregator). But their real power comes through their ability to share content with other sites and applications, helping to promote online discussion.

The frontrunners do well here, with Rae, Dion, Ignatieff and Kennedy all having at least two feeds publishing content such as their campaign’s news, blog posts, events and media hits. Brison also boasts multiple feeds – but Volpe, Dryden and Findlay all come up empty.

Aggregation: Sites can also use newsfeeds to bring in and republish content from elsewhere on the web. While aggregation is rapidly gaining ground elsewhere in the web world, it still gets barely a nod from the Liberal leadership candidates.

Ignatieff’s youth site (iggynation.ca) aggregates posts from other blogs, but none of the other candidates do. Dryden’s site has a page called “blog buzz”, but it’s unclear how posts on that page are chosen. Kennedy’s youth site (generationkennedy.ca) has an extensive blogroll of bloggers who have endorsed him, but doesn’t aggregate their posts; ditto Dion’s site, although not all of the blogs he lists are supporters.

Conversation: This is where the social web gets truly social. The discussions that take place in blogs, forums, wikis and other venues provide much of the richness that has made Web 2.0 an enduring phenomenon. But opening your web presence up to those conversations means giving up a lot of control, and in the harsh world of politics, control is a precious commodity.

That hasn’t stopped some of the candidates from jumping on board the Cluetrain, through. Dion’s site allows comments on its news stories; Kennedy has assembled a blogging community that, while supportive, sometimes has some harsh assessments of their candidate’s performance (”his performance in La Belle Province this weekend was embarrassing”); it allows comments, although I couldn’t see that any have been left. Dion’s youth site is a BlogSpot blog, with comments allowed.

But others aren’t as open to user-contributed content. Ignatieff’s blog doesn’t allow comments; Dryden’s blog has lain moribund since Canada Day and doesn’t allow comments either. Martha Hall Findlay has a link to a “debate forum”, but it yields only a “page not available” error. And Brison’s site has nothing but an email link.

Kennedy, Rae, Dion and Ignatieff have created online discussion forums open to all comers (although Rae’s seemed to be having trouble registering new users today). While login difficulties stopped me cold at Rae’s front door, I was able to check out the other candidates’ forums… which are suffering badly from underuse. Dion’s, for example, has fewer than 50 posts on 20 topics, most of them months old.

Overall: Michael Ignatieff’s campaign makes the most obvious use of the social web, particularly on his youth site. I’d give Gerard Kennedy the edge over Stéphane Dion for second place, with Rae a solid fourth. Scott Brison at least has feeds, but no interactivity.

It’s worth noting that the Ignatieff, Dion and Kennedy have chosen their youth sites for the most innovative, interesting features. Given the way web culture skews young, that makes some sense – but it may also be a way of mitigating any political risk from giving up a degree of control over content.

Another note: social web technologies favour the interesting and provocative over the already-established. The web could have been the launch pad for an insurgent candidacy, one built more on ideas and compelling messages than on celebrity and existing hierarchy. Yet the more established candidates are the ones making the most use of them; the would-be giant-killers, like Findlay, make only a token stab at them.

Finally, a lesson for would-be community-builders, political or otherwise. None of the campaigns has what you could really call a thriving online community, outside of the core staff and volunteers. That probably reflects a lack of resources dedicated to encouraging and animating productive, provocative conversations. Short of committing those resources, campaigns might be well advised to focus their energies instead on networking with already-existing communities; blogrolling and aggregation could be the baby steps that lead to something bigger and better down the road.