Valeria Maltoni’s request on Twitter for examples of engaging detractors was the stimulus I needed to finish writing a short case study, Negative Product Review Revised after Company Founder Engages with Critic. (Click on the title to download the free PDF.)

What the case study can’t convey is the series of rapid-fire exchanges with an understandably upset client, Aruni Gunasegaram of Babble Soft, when her new software product received a seriously snarky review by Jennifer Laycock, author of The Lactivist, an influential blog in the market Aruni hoped to reach. Her first email came in while I was at dinner with friends. I started to ignore the flashing red light on my Blackberry but was glad I checked when I found Aruni’s message alerting me to the criticism and asking, “What do I do?”

To her credit, Aruni not only asked for advice, she followed it. She did not respond in anger, but did her homework and learned something about Jennifer, her blog, and her readers. When Aruni did add a comment to The Lactivist, it was well received. She and Jennifer also exchanged e-mails, establishing the basis for a relationship.

Several months later Aruni started her own blog, entrepreMusings, and she and Jennifer follow each other on Twitter now. And to show what a small world it is, I had dinner with Jennifer last month at BloggerSocial08 in New York. We shared a laugh over how the situation had unfolded and how the former critic had become an ally.

Here’s the summary of the Case Study:

Company
Babble Soft, provider of Web and mobile software for parents of newborns

Challenge
A press release for a new product launch was picked up by an influential blogger who wrote a very negative review.

Solution
Every Dot Connects worked with Babble Soft on a strategy to engage the blogger in constructive conversation.

Success
The blogger apologized for the tone of the review and continued to interact with Babble Soft founder via her blog, email and, later, on Twitter and other social networks.

If you’d like to read more, including the guidelines I drafted for engaging with blogger critics, download the PDF: Case Study: Negative Product Review Revised after Company Founder Engages with Critic

So many online friends will be in Austin for SXSW, and I had planned on being there every day and meeting up with as many of them as possible. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend much of the conference, but there’s one place you can be sure to find me on Monday night — at the Conversation Starters event the Social Media Club of Austin is co-sponsoring. Here’s the scoop:

__________________________

Federated Media and Dell, along with Bulldog Solutions, The Conversation Group, and Social Media Club Austin, cordially invite you to join us for an evening of “Conversation Starters” at the Iron Cactus on Monday, March 10, from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m.

Over drinks and appetizers, you’ll have a chance to share ideas with a number of people who have volunteered to start conversations: Shel Israel, Robert Scoble, Jeremiah Owyang, Charlene Li, Chris Heuer, Mack Collier and Lionel Menchaca, as well as several Federated Media authors.

Space is limited, so please register and print out your confirmation.

NOTE: YOU MUST BE A SXSWi BADGEHOLDER TO ATTEND.

__________________________

Hope to see you there!

That’s right. I am officially a Par-tay girl–or I will be on Wednesday night, when I join host Jonny Goldstein for a video conversation on Jonny’s Par-tay. I’ll be appearing with Susan Reynolds to talk about the Frozen Pea Fund and how online connections can become a vibrant community.

Check out the show info and find out how you can be part of the conversation.

Mark your calendar: Wednesday, February 13, 9:00 pm EST

One of the best things I did last year was to participate in the The Age of Conversation, a collaborative e-book. Editors Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton have announced they’re up to a sequel–and this time you get to vote on the topic.

But wait–there’s more! You also have the opportunity to be a collaborator. If you want to be an author for The Age of Conversation’s kissing cousin (the 2008 version), e-mail Drew and say you’re in.

He will be providing a lot more detail in a week or so — but for now, here are some basic rules for authorship:

• You will sign over all rights to your chapter
• You understand that all proceeds of the book will be donated to Variety, the Children’s Charity
• You will promote the book, throughout the process, on your blog if you have one
• You’ll embrace the cooperative, collaborative spirit that defined Age of Conversation
• You’ll honor deadlines so Drew does not have to be a nag
• You’ll honor word counts so Gavin doesn’t have to be a nag

What’s the topic for 2008? Drew says, “In the true spirit of collaboration, we’re going to decide together. Your choices are …”

• Marketing Manifesto
• Why Don’t People Get It?
• My Marketing Tragedy (and what I learned)

The only way to vote is via this SurveyMonkey survey: Click Here to take survey

You DO NOT need to be an author or potential author to vote.

The survey will close on January 31st, so help get out the vote.

At one point in my Navy career, I had a crusty but wise boss who was big on the phrase “spirit and intent.”

He and I often had thoughtful conversations examining various difficult situations that would arise at our seagoing command.  When it came time to do the right thing at the end of the decision-making process, he would often say, “Let’s think about the true spirit and intent of this instruction (or directive or thorny concept….”) 

At that point, we’d take off our more linear, more lawyer-y, more follow-the-rules hats and we’d don our philosopher’s hats.  We’d think about the gut instinct, the spirit and intent, behind whatever rules had been broken or that we were considering breaking.

The correct answer to our question was usually right there, sitting next to our better angels.  The trick was learning to listen to our heads and guts, then following through on the decision.

Let’s apply “spirit and intent” of what I’d call common courtesy to behavior and cultural expectations in online communities. 

When in doubt about how to behave, what to blog about, how to respond to insult, when to market oneself and when to avoid marketing, think about the spirit and intent of social networking.  In a word, it is trust.

• We often don’t meet face-to-face, so we must trust that people are who they say they are online, and that we aren’t seeing astroturfing.  Honesty and transparency is perhaps a bigger deal online than anywhere else.  Most famously egregious example of not being upfront: Wal-Mart’s happy bloggers, who were actually an Edelman PR campaign.
• We trust that people understand that it’s OK to occasionally market oneself (we all loft links back to our blogs over the Twitter transom) but only when that’s not all that one brings to the conversation.  As long as Guy Kawasaki and others post (or especially auto-post) a lot of stuff from their personal sites/projects, they will be resentfully perceived as just doing marketing, not conversing. Kawasaki’s answer is that he gets a ton of traffic to his site from these Twitter announcements,  but that’s not the spirit and intent of online communities.
• We trust that our personal email address books will not be given out willy-nilly in the effort to increase someone’s social network.
• And, duh, we trust that we won’t find ourselves part of a Facebook ad program without knowing about it or being able to get out of it.

It’s a constant process to figure all of this out.  For example, I’ve always fully credited the photographer by name when I use flickr pics with a Creative Commons license, but I’ve never included a link back to the photographer’s particular photostream page.  Just in the last day or so, I’ve decided that this was an oversight on my part, so I’m going to go back and add a link to each photo on each of my travel blogs.  It’ll take me awhile, but it’s within the spirit and intent of what I consider “fair use,” even though no one has told me to do it to fulfill the attribution requirement of a CC license. 

Spirit and intent.  Not just the black & white written rules, or pronouncements from the “experts,” but spirit and intent.  Sure, it’s often fuzzy and may not come with ROI stats or bar graphs, but that’s why you have two sides to your brain.

Thanks very much for a life lesson, Captain Ted Hill, Jr. (US Navy, retired)

Technorati tags:  online etiquette, social media, spirit and intent, online culture, manners, Netiquette

Greetings, Every Dot Connects readers; I’m Sheila and I’m going to be working with Connie Reece, Mike Chapman and all the Reece & Company folks, doing advocacy and training with organizations and individuals who want to connect using social media/networking tools.

I’m a writer, so Connie very kindly handed me some keys to this blog and invited me to write about social media topics.

Here’s the first item at bat: keeping a civil tongue in our head, even when it’s difficult.

Now, I do have two kids and I’ve been a teacher, so it’s easy for me to fall into my schoolmarm tone and wag fingers.  I try to resist, I assure you!

Today, however, I’ve been following a little bloggy/Twittery dust-up that illustrates why we really must think before we write or tweet or shoot video online, or we may undercut the power of our argument.

Quick summary:  A tech columnist for Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, Mathew Ingram, writes about photographer Lane Hartwell, who was angry about one of her images being used in a YouTube video without credit back to her.

Hartwell blogs that she tried to go low-key, was ignored, and then got lawyers involved.

Ingram blogs that she’s wrongly interpreting copyright and fair use law.

OK, pretty civil so far. 

Then we go to Ingram’s post and start reading the comments, including many from a person named Shelley, who strongly supports Lane Hartwell.  Lots of back and forth, but the bloggy bunker-buster was this comment exchange between TechCrunch co-editor Michael Arrington and Ingram:

Arrington:  “Shelley, Lane’s attorney is abusing the DMCA for his/her own goals. And copyright has nothing to do with ‘giving credit.’ It has to do with being forced to license work unless it falls under fair use, which this clearly does. Mathew is right, you are wrong. But since Lane is a woman, it really doesn’t matter what she did as far as you are concerned. She’s a woman, so she’s right.”

(two comments from Shelley and Ingram, and then….)

Ingram back to Arrington:  “Thanks for the support, Mike — but let’s not bring Lane being a woman into the discussion because a) I don’t think it’s relevant, and b)
Shelley hasn’t brought it up. I’d like to keep this focused on the copyright issue.”

Arrington:  “actually, Mathew, I’ll do whatever the fuck I feel like, and you can decide to censor comments or not. Shelley is and always has been a fascist around these issues. If you’re on her team (poliically) (sic) she’ll support you to the death. Not on her team and she’ll find a way to take you out at the knees. People ignore her rather than call her on it.”

Ingram:  “So if you have a beef with Shelley, why use my comments — on a completely unrelated topic — to take it up with her? I don’t see why my blog and anyone reading it has to be dragged into whatever past issues you and Shelley have. I’m not going to censor your comment, but I fail to see why you felt it necessary to bring sexism into it when Shelley never even mentioned anything about that aspect of it.”

Arrington: “oh please. sucking up to Shelley will get you nowhere.”

Well.

For the rest of the day, I watched assorted hullabaloo about this on blogs and Twitter.  Eric Rice did a Seesmic video about community response to sexism and such online behavior by Arrington, then Arrington responded with a frustrated tweet and a blog post, then Dave Winer complained about Eric Rice and it was all very interesting.

Except it was pathetic.  Time for some Grown-Up Pills.  Take two and call me when you’re over yourself.

Hey, newsflash, you don’t drop the F-bomb and call someone a fascist, then a few hours later (when the community is all good and riled up) act like everyone is out to get you and it’s so unfair.

You think before you speak or write.  You enter into civil discourse and reasonably measured disagreement, both online and off.  You do not allow the marvelous screen-lit anonymity of the computer to turn you into a passive-aggressive pop-off.  If you do lose your temper and screw up, you step up and apologize, then we all move on.

There’s no question that fair use and copyright issues are indeed difficult, with valid points on either side….so let’s hear them, please, intelligently and reasonably stated.

Update 18 Dec 07:  The LawGeek blog has a well-written, cogent discussion of copyright and fair use, with interesting questions in the comments.  (Hat tip to Dwight Silverman at TechBlog.)

Technorati tags: social media, blogging, photo copyright, Lane Hartwell, Michael Arrington, Mathew Ingram

Today I had the privilege of presenting at a writing workshop for the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) in San Antonio. Most of the 40+ attendees had no experience with social media or were in the very early stages of discussing how it might fit within their corporate communications strategy.

I promised to share my slides with the attendees and offer them here, although they may not make much sense to those who weren’t in the session.

Thank you to the organizers for inviting me and for the attendees who participated … and those with their eyes rolled back in their heads because they were trying to absorb a lot of new information at once. I hope you got something out of it.

A couple of weeks ago I spent a delightful hour on the phone with Anna Farmery, a business coach, speaker and blogger from the U.K., who interviewed me for her podcast. We got so carried away, she had to split the interview into two parts, each about 25 minutes long.

Anna writes The Engaging Brand, a Top 25 Marketing Blog and #93 on the Ad Age Power 150.

Here are the links to the podcast, hosted on the Blubrry network, along with the show descriptions:

Conversational Marketing: Part 1
Connie talks about how she built a distinctive personal brand and also what is conversational marketing and how we start to think about measuring the effectiveness.

Conversational Marketing: Part 2
Connie talks us through how people are using conversational marketing to engage with consumers and employees, tells us her thoughts on the echo chamber and provides tips on how to write with a conversational style.

I’d love to hear your thoughts — please leave a comment here or on Blubrry or The Engaging Brand blog.

Shelley Ryan from Marketing Profs attended our social media workshop at Dell last week, and she writes this morning that all of the speakers, moi included, were “simply irrepressible.” (Gee, thanks, Shelley. Now I have a Robert Palmer earworm running through my head …)

“Do you need to have extrovert DNA to be a successful marketer in social media?” Shelley asked in her post, What Is It About Social Media People? “Seems so!” she answered.

Is it that most of us who are social media evangelists are extroverts? Or are we simply passionate about what we do for a living?

As Lewis Green notes in the comments to Shelley’s post, it doesn’t hurt to be an extrovert.

But what’s your take? Can an introvert succeed at social media? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Yesterday I posted an update to my post, Got the Munchies? Have a Media Snack. I tagged Drew McLellan after the fact, when I discovered his recent post about providing a steady stream of snack-sized messages.

Now I’m tagging yet another person–one who, I’m sure, will make an interesting contribution on the topic–Valeria Maltoni, the Conversation Agent.

Drew and Valeria are two marketing conversationalists on my drastically shortened list of RSS feeds. They make me think.

And this topic made me think. When it comes to media consumption, are we becoming a snack culture? If so, how do we respond? Chris Webb has previously written about the Snack Culture and its effect on his industry, publishing.

I look forward to Drew and Valeria continuing the conversation … and how about you? What’s your take on media snackers?