One thing is clear from this year’s research: It isn’t your CEO.

Globally, only 38% of informed publics think CEOs are credible spokespeople. That’s down from 50% last year.

On the other hand, trust in a ‘Regular employee’ showed a dramatic rise from 34% last year, to 50% this year. ‘Regular employee’ trailed only academic, technical experts in the company, and person like yourself as the most credible spokesperson your business could put forward. You can view all of this data on slide 21 our global trust presentation.

We’ve been talking about social business here and elsewhere for a while, but for me, no single piece of data has made a more compelling case for social business.

In a world where employees, whether technical experts or regular folks, are a company’s most credible spokespeople, every business simply must understand how to organize and empower employees to interact successfully in social media.

We have some practical thoughts what this means and how to make it happen, but the bottom line is that it’s time to expand social thinking from brand marketing and communications to the whole enterprise. That won’t happen overnight, but as the Trust Barometer shows, it’s important that the journey begin.

Edelman’s London office is hosting a panel discussion on Social Business on the 14th of February. The event will be held at 105 Victoria Street London , SW1E 6QT, 8:30-10:30am.

You can register and find more details here.

Image credit: Lars Plougmann

If you’re a woman interested in blogging and social media, you have your choice of events that cater specifically to you. But so far men have gotten the short end of the stick event-wise. Enter the Modern Media Man Summit.

The M3 Summit is an attempt to give men that space to learn and connect with other “media men” in a setting designed with us in mind. As a blogger and a father, I’ve been looking for an event such as this for quite some time. And with great speakers and an awesome lineup of sessions (including a meet and greet with Cal Ripken, Jr.), M3 promises not to disappoint.

But the M3 Summit represents much more than a great event. I’m hoping this will be a watershed moment for dads online, when brands finally start recognizing the important role that dads play. I’ve stated before that I believe this shift is coming. And as dads get even more connected and have a more cohesive voice online, companies are beginning to recognize that working with dads – not just moms – is in their best interest.

I’ll be speaking about this exact subject at M3, and I’d love to get your ideas and your feedback in person. As if this wasn’t enough to wet your appetite, you can listen to an interview I gave where I chatted with the folks organizing the Summit about some ideas to get this process started.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been wanting to meet some of the amazing men bloggers out there, and connect with other guys making a career out of social media. So let’s all get together in Atlanta on September 9. Modern Media Men: Assemble!

Originally posted on Logic + Emotion.

Several weeks ago I delivered a 16 minute TEDx talk titled “reinventing social media.” Typically I like to frame topics outside of the social media bubble, but in this instance the topic itself and the purpose of the talk was designed to get us all thinking about things a bit differently. You see, businesses, brands and organizations are truly struggling with the disruptive nature of social technologies. In fact, the term “social technologies” is part of the problem—we are all fixated on the technologies and meanwhile the real action lies in harnessing the change brought about by human behavior enabled by technology. I used the simple story of how a colleague shared a book with me. The book itself (media) is not social—the interactions, communications, stories and conversations that involve the book are.

But to say “it’s about people” is too simplistic. Toward the end of the talk, I made my case that in a couple of years it would be unlikely that I would even be talking about “social media.” This thesis based on the belief that “social” translates into the conversion of an organization which requires shifts in culture, technology, process and ultimately behavior. If an organization does not empower its people to behave in a productive and beneficial social manner than can we actually use the word “social” to describe it? If the organization has not begun integrating these changes across several functional groups as opposed to leveraging just one (such as marketing) then is it really taking advantage of some of the changes I discuss in my talk?

I believe that the answer is no. It means that one part of the business is behaving a certain way while the others behave differently. This would be like your head looking at the person’s face who you are having a conversation with while your body is walking away from them in mid conversation. So in order for “social media” to become reinvented, to go with the theme of the TEDx discussion, it has to change (or we need to). And change as we all know always begins with people—so our focus needs to turn here. Hope you like the talk and as always feel free to share your own thoughts.

Originally posted on 6 A.M.

At Edelman’s fourth Annual New Media Academic Summit, we convened a superb group of senior media executives who offered insights into the future of the sector. They included Raju Narisetti, managing editor of the Washington Post; Greg Coleman, president of Huffington Post; Gerard Baker, deputy editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal; Jonah Bloom, CEO and editor in chief of Breaking Media; Mark Lukasiewicz, VP of NBC Digital Media; Mike Oreskes, senior managing editor of the Associated Press; David Carey who has just joined Hearst as President of the Magazine Unit; and Jon Miller, CEO of Digital Media at News Corp.

These media leaders are addressing challenges head-on, and are optimistic about their future. Here are a few of the most important insights:

1. New Readers & Channels—David Carey, Conde Nast group president cited the incremental revenue and readers for its relaunched Gourmet food magazine and Wired’s completely reimaged iPad app (they sold 95,000 digital copies at $4.99 each in June), as only the beginning as people are willing to pay for mobility and engagement. Baker described the iPad as a potential game changer, noting that the WSJ has sold many subscriptions at $208 per year for this platform, and the Washington Post charges $1.99 for iPhone application for a year.
2. New Revenue Options—Bloom believes Media will integrate eCommerce directly into content so “media will sell stuff directly.” So, right beside a book review will be the option to buy the book. Access to the archives, conferences and direct access to journalists via email are also being considered viable premium paid options.
3. The Pay Wall—Narisetti offered a strong defense of the Washington Post policy on free access to content. “Subscription revenue has always been a tiny part of the newspaper business model. We have 30 million unique visitors each month to our site.” Baker went the other direction describing the Wall Street Journal pay model, “In the beginning of the web, there was optimism that we could focus advertising so ad revenues would suffice. Now it is clear that we need other revenue streams.” News Corporation is bringing in paywalls for its British newspapers and Miller emphasized that will keep investing in quality content to get people to pay.
4. Trust in Content—Baker noted that the decline in trust in establishment institutions (business, government) extends to mainstream media. “We often fail to properly represent the views of the majority of our readers.” He quoted Oscar Wilde, “The parts that were original were not true and that which was true was not original.” Jonah Bloom noted that “there is not enough originality in stories being tackled.” Lukasiewicz said that “transparency is the new objectivity. We will have a point of view in stories.” Oreskes took a strong position on “Journalism being distinguished by its higher standards for quality, not by ownership of the printing press.”
5. Narrow-casting—Narisetti wants to get away from the single “front page approach” so that a reader can focus only on specific more narrow interest (politics or sports). “We need multiple front doors to the house, such as PostLocal.com, PostSports.com, PostPolitics.com.” He said that “we link to other sites on stories they break (Politico as example)—we need to offer everything that is relevant.”
6. Value from Conversation—Coleman said that the Huffington Post gets three million comments from its users each month. “Our content model envisages 1/3 from each of bloggers, original reporting and aggregation.” Narisetti added, “Comments may reflect the market’s view but those who comment represent a narrow slice of readers—but we keep comments as open as possible because these are the most engaged readers.”
7. New Measurement for Reporters—Narisetti said, “Newsrooms have never wanted to measure how they are performing—specifically how many readers look at each article. We now do a daily report to 120 editors, with page views, time spent, unique visitors, which photos are preferred—metrics that are key to the business.” He said that his reporters must use meta-data to be sure they use words that “help readers to find your story…people search for Republican Party, not GOP, so use that term in stories.” Bloom added that reporters must be able to market their stories via Twitter and Facebook.
8. Power of Visuals—Oreskes noted that while the AP may have 50 reporters on the coverage of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the most powerful content has been visual. “People remember the pelican photo or the AP photographer donning scuba gear to get unique video.” He quoted Walter Lippmann, media pundit, “The world outside, the pictures in our head.” At our dinner, key note speaker, Tom Cibrowski, Good Morning America Executive Producer, ABC, also mentioned they are rapidly adopted new hi-def video cameras to reporters to report more quickly and cheaply with video.
9. Importance of Local Market Dominance—The Washington Post reaches 45% of Washington area households. You need 30 ads on local TV or 60 ads on cable TV to achieve the same reach as one ad in the Washington Post. Of the 18-34 year olds in the area, 62% use the Washington Post on-line. This is group most easily monetized in advertising. Note that 86% of the Washington Post web traffic comes from outside of the DC area.

Those of us in PR would be wise to adapt our business model to reflect the new demands of immediacy, visualization, conversation and localization.

On May 20, Edelman Montreal co-hosted a Social Media Summit with a leading Canadian law firm and Edelman client, McCarthy Tétrault, titled “Bridging the Gap between Marketing and Legal.” VPs of both marketing communications and legal departments let loose on their concerns and the challenges they face in going digital. The roster of speakers included Edelman’s own Steve Rubel, David Armano, Sylvain Perron and Becca Young and on the legal side, Vanessa Grant and Véronique Wattiez-Larose, expert attorneys from McCarthy Tétrault.

The speakers all worked together to present the full spectrum of social media trends on the rise, case studies of both strong and weak social media programs, an overview of social media tools and tips for how to overcome implementation challenges from both a marketing and legal perspective.

Trends to pay attention to:

Edelman:

To stand out in the stream you need to embrace multiplicity and diversity of messages and stories…you need to hand craft your content and strategy for every single community that you are in – Steve Rubel

One of the trends I am starting to see is the idea of business itself becoming social … this is bigger than public relations, communications…it’s actually a business challenge – David Armano

Key takeaways:

McCarthy Tétrault:

Electronic commerce law doesn’t exist…its employment law, its contract law, its legislation … it’s all the facets of the law which are just addressed differently. – Véronique Wattiez-Larose

Key takeaways:

What to do in the case of Shamu…

Legal needs to be at the table early because they are not ever going to approve the content, or very rarely, what they are going to approve is the set of guidelines and principles and you all imagine the thinking required there is much deeper, more comprehensive – it’s really legal strategy. – Becca Young

The Social Media Summit will be brought to Toronto in the fall. Stay tuned for more great insights.

Maria Huss Edelman Digital, Montreal Follow on twitter @MariaHuss

Stephanie Weinstein Edelman Digital, Montreal Follow on twitter @Edelgirl

Last month, more than 100 academics from around the globe descended upon New York City at Edelman’s fourth annual New Media Academic Summit, hosted by New York University and Syracuse University. In case you weren’t able to make it, the panels and insights are posted on the website and definitely worth checking out.

Between the panels featuring industry leaders, I participated on a panel of new professionals. Our discussion focused on what the industry is like for new professionals and how much our education prepared us for this field. Here are some of the highlights:

New methods of research

More than just new spaces for brands to execute campaigns, the new digital landscape also offers more opportunities for research and analysis of trends, conversations and opportunities. This requires more than an Excel spreadsheet. Being able to compile this data and translating this into actionable business objectives requires a refreshed research education.

Walk the walk, talk the talk

Playing on Facebook and posting on Twitter doesn’t make you a social media expert. It’s important to understand how brands are walking the walk and talking the talk online. New professionals can get this experience by not only witnessing how brands engage their stakeholders online, but by participating in this process. Some of the ways this can be done include blogging on a topic you’re passionate about, interacting with brands on Twitter and immersing yourself in online communities.

Curiosity and creativity

More than ever, the new generation of public relations professionals need to be curious about the landscape and needs to bring a strong creative background when counseling a client. As new tools and platforms rise to popularity fairly often, a sense curiosity about this landscape will drive innovation. In terms of creativity, this skill can be taught – and learned – with time and effort. You might have heard that even though PR entries were up around 30 percent at Cannes Lions, there were few PR winners, and to top it off, an ad agency won the top PR prize. I’m not here to compare the levels of creativity between advertising and public relations, but it’s important for new professionals to develop a creative sense.

The old skills are important, too

My fellow panelists also spoke to the importance of the “old skills”: a strong, journalistic writing background; business acumen to apply public relations efforts with measurable effects on the business; and a deep academic background in social sciences, marketing and finance.

Mashable Live-Streams Social Media Day

Mashable’s Social Media Day, a day to “celebrate the revolution of media becoming social”, brought social media addicts together in meetups around the globe. How did they compensate for the time zone differences? By using Ustream to broadcast several of the meetups as they happened. Unfortunately, Chicago wasn’t one of the streams offered. What’s up, Mashable?

Twitter Moms Care for Content Over Coupons

An important study done by eMarketer that shows moms care about more than getting discounts. They want to read relevant, useful information that they can retweet. Here’s a highlight:

Check-In Apps Make Entertainment Social Again

A new round of social networks is trying to connect users with similar tastes in entertainment. The most popular, GetGlue, allows users to “check-in” to certain activities, such as reading a book, watching a TV program, or drinking a bottle of wine. The aim is to share a history of your offline activities in the hopes of connecting online. These kinds of sites are still growing, but I expect interest from brands to be just around the corner.

Social Networking Makes You Want to Cuddle

In my favorite news of the week, a fascinating study proves that the same chemical is released in the brain when connecting socially online as when falling in love: oxytocin (the “cuddle chemical”). If there was ever a biological reason for companies to enter the social space, here it is.

Posterous On A Mission to Be Your Blog/Photo Sharing Service/Everything

Posterous is making a bold move to get more users from other services. A few days ago, it announced on its blog that it was going to spend 15 days making it easy to switch from 15 different “dying” platforms. Obviously this didn’t sit well with its competitors, some of which went so far as to announce legal action against it.

HP asked Edelman Barcelona for an Influencer Marketing campaign which had the mission to position HP wireless printers as a sexy and fashionable technology to women and families through the previously uninterested lifestyle media and blogs. We also had to present wireless printing technology in a new and exciting way considering that it had been in the market for almost two years.

So we came with the idea of creating a fashion collection made from recycled printer wires and auctioning off the collection for a charity donation. The concept was: “wire is dead, let’s at least reuse it for a good cause”.

This idea helped us to build a memorable story around wireless printers, giving us a great opportunity to engage with top influencers linked with fashion, trends and lifestyle in general such as bloggers that cover these topics, which exist in a large number in Spain.

To reach them we created a list with the top 30 influencers, monitored them during one month and then started to share information. In a first stage, we wanted to create expectations and excitement around the initiative.

To do that, we announced that soon HP would reveal a fashion collection with wires and done by the designer Eugenio Loarce, and to make it more tangible and visual, we also shared pictures of 2 pieces from the collection, as well as a video of the designer explaining the idea and what inspired him to create the pieces.

This first announcement generated posts in 60% of these top 30 blogs, as well as comments and conversations inside these blogs and on social networks such as Facebook, where we also started to seed the information.

Two weeks after, we sent 50 bloggers a really cool physical invitation to the collection launch event. We also contacted 5 of these top 30 blogs and offered them the chance to raffle 5 double free tickets to the event amongst their readers, which also created excitement and buzz around the collection.

80% of the invited bloggers attended the event and posted great articles about the collection and HP’s initiative. After the event we shared with them and other bloggers and journalists the collection, which consisted of 13 pieces, and the party pictures through Flickr. As a result, 90% of the top 30 blogs covered the story, with a total of 60+ posts, and these posts generated 250+ comments.

The pieces were auctioned online through a specialized site (owned by eBay, client), and the money collected went to Bip Bip Foundation, that helps vulnerable groups close the “digital divide” by providing access and training in technology.

“As a founding sponsor of mesh, Edelman was a supporter quite literally within five minutes of being introduced to the idea.” – Stuart MacDonald

For the past five years, Edelman Toronto has successfully partnered in launching and sustaining the mesh brand, Canada’s leading web 2.0 conference. In addition to handling the conference’s traditional and digital media outreach, accreditation, and interview scheduling, for the past two years we have also been live-tweeting and maintaining social media communications throughout the conference.

mesh is a highly anticipated event at Edelman Toronto, and we are so proud to be involved!

Check out these highlights from #mesh10’s keynote speakers:

Media Keynote: Chris Thorpe

Chris Thorpe, Developer Advocate for the Open Platform at The Guardian, took the stage for the first keynote of the day. Thorpe described the “mutualization” of news as the guiding principle of the Guardian’s work in extending their open API to build businesses with the people who use their content.

Society Keynote: Joseph Menn

Next up was Joseph Menn, author of “Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet”, who entertained mesh attendees with his incredible stories of espionage and internet security. Even though some attendees thought Menn’s talk had “idea density too rich with awesomeness to extract nuggets”, here are our top three favourite Menn quotes:

I don’t think I’ve met a top computer security guy yet that hasn’t done something bad as a teenager

…it’s not like the mob’s saying ‘We gotta open an online division

[On his own personal security] In the unlikely event I get wacked, it’ll at least raise awareness

Business Keynote – Scott Thompson

Day Two began with a discussion of the future of money with the President of PayPal, Scott Thompson. Formerly a CTO at Visa, Thompson sees the value in having tech businesses actually be run by people who have hands-on experience in technology. Thompson also stresses the importance of consumer and business partner feedback, saying “if you can measure something, you can improve it.” This seems to have paid off – PayPal serving 84 million consumers internationally in 190 countries!

Marketing/Communications Keynote – Arvind Rajan

{Disclosure: LinkedIn is an Edelman Canada client}

Up next was Arvind Rajan from LinkedIn to talk about making lasting connections in the professional online space. Rajan gave mesh attendees a crash course in LinkedIn job hunting, saying that a filled-out profile, listing interests, and regular updating are the best ways to attract recruiters. Rajan also piqued the crowd’s interest when he said, “It’s fair to say that we’re looking at ways for users to leverage their LinkedIn network further online.” Looks like there’s much more to come from LinkedIn, especially with the opening of a Canadian office!

Melissa Retty Edelman Digital, Toronto Follow on twitter @MelissaRetty

Laura Muirhead Edelman Digital, Toronto Follow on twitter @Lauraroni

A few weeks ago I attended SOBCon in Chicago to participate in a discussion about strategies and tactics for integrating online and offline social marketing. Between the thoughtful breakout discussions, the refreshing panels, and the evening entertainment (social media people love karaoke) I asked attendees “How are you creating value in social media”. We decided to showcase a few responses in a video created by our Edelman Creative production company.

Thanks to everyone that participated including Liz Strauss, David Murray, Lewis Howes, Jason Keath, Julie Roads, Simon Salt, Amber Naslund, Loren Feldman, Lucretia Pruitt, Chris Brogan, Miss Destructo and many more.

Watch the video and tell us…

Image credit: Steve Hall