For the past 20 years, Metzger Associates has been a leader in the art + science of communications. We appreciate your readership, and hope you enjoy our new blog format!

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posted by Doyle

Great coverage (thanks to Jill Thompson at Metzger!) of the Boulder entrepreneur scene by CNBC. All of us at Metzger are proud to be a part of this vibrant and growing community. Take a look!

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posted by Doyle

I recently moderated a panel for CTAM of the Rockies, and our photo ended up in Multichannel News. Thanks again to CTAM for the opportunity, and to my fellow panelists for being so great to work with!

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Metzger’s Creative Director, Carolyn McHale, was recently one of the Top 3 finishers in a national competition to design skier Lindsay Vonn’s helmet for the Olympics. In fact, Carolyn’s design received more votes than any other. You can see the contest and designs here.

In addition, Carolyn got lots of attention from both local and national media—check her out in the NY Times, the Boulder Daily Camera and on KUSA-TV, Denver’s NBC-TV affiliate. It was a fun day in the Metzger office when KUSA showed up to talk to Carolyn, so we shot a little video (and made everyone dress nice, even though we didn’t make it on camera!).

Nice work, Carolyn!

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Recently I shared a conversation with my colleague Lauren (@laurenpreston) about the positions employers are creating as a result of the social media epidemic going on right now. As you can see the number of social media job opportunities are growing by the second.

Social media gigs are being referred to by a variety of titles: Social Media Coordinator, Social Media Manager, Social Media Specialist, Director of Social Engagement, etc. Basically, if you can talk to people, connected to the right people, have a Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn account, you are qualified. Obviously there is more to each job, but with social media being so new, 5-10 years experience is rarely a requirement.

With that said, who better to go for these positions then students fresh out of school? If I just graduated college I’d be all over Andrew Hudson’s Job List looking for social media gigs because I know employers are demanding them. Who wouldn’t enjoy such a fun and exciting JOB (not to be confused with career) out of college where you get to surf the net and talk to people all day? Sounds ideal to me, but I would make sure I had other skills to bring to the table!

What will happen in a few years when social media knowledge is not looked at as a skill/advantage, but as a requirement for most, if not at all, jobs? What will happen to all those people who spent countless hours in front of the computer networking, promoting, tweeting, Facebooking, blogging about their companies and/or product? I’m confident that all the social media positions being created are going to be terminated.

Hear me out…

We all are well aware that social media isn’t going anywhere, and while there are still a lot of people who just don’t “get it”, we are, as Erik Qualman (@equalman) puts it in his video below, in the midst of a “social media revolution.”

However, there is a fine line between being open to social media and letting it define what you do for a living. We have come a long way, but we have a ways to go before we can put social media in its own career category.

We are starting to see a trend with recent college grads — many of them are applying and landing social media gigs and  some are starting their own social media companies that require them to tweet all day like it was their job (but, oh wait…it is.)

If you fall in this category, be aware that once the “I don’t get it” folks catch on, those of you who are “experts” will merely be another “Joe” who knows how to use the internet and social media. You will no longer be special nor have an advantage over the next Average Joe who knows how to re-tweet, create a fan page, upload a YouTube video, etc.

I am not disqualifying the young social media experts out there, because there are many who are amazing at what they do (@Andrewhyde, @PRSarahevans and @ElaineEllis are some of my favorites) but these big timers have prior experiences and skills to back them up should they want/need to change fields. They’ve also been in the game since the beginning of social media.

So if you are interested in diving head first in a social media position I encourage you to go for it, but be sure you get more out of it than the mere pleasure of 10,000+ followers/fans/friends, because at the end of the day when the Average Joe’s of the world catch up to the rest of us, you’ll still need other skills to set you apart.

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One of the best parts about working in an agency is that cool products are always coming your way. One of the projects I’m most excited to work on at Metzger is helping Susan G. Komen for the Cure Denver Affiliate launch their blog. Komen Denver is one of the first Affiliates in the country to have a blog. Every time I go to an event, I am blown away by the survivor stories. These women (and men) are inspiring to say the least. I’m excited to help use the blog to tell their stories and build a community of survivors.

You can check out the Komen Denver blog here and follow them on Twitter @komendenver!

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Trying to manage an online forum, as my colleague Nate Warren noted earlier this month, is like herding cats. It’s no wonder some marketers still hesitate to recommend social media to clients. Under the cover of anonymity, some people will say unbelievable things.

Years of hosting conversations at the two-decade-old online community The Well have given me some insight. Well members post under their real names, but bad behavior still ranges from low-level cluelessness to shocking verbal abuse.

In 2001, I co-hosted a forum (on The Well they’re called conferences) about the 9/11 attacks. It turned into the personal toxic waste dump of a guy I’ll call Sludge, whose capacity to hate people on the Left made Rush Limbaugh look like Mister Rogers.

It looked to us like he spent the whole day flaming people in dozens, if not hundreds, of topics. He could get as ugly talking chiles in the Cooking conference as he did about terrorist-coddling liberals. If you crossed him, he would track you all over the system and, within minutes, spew venom after everything you posted: weather reports, birthday greetings, the cute thing your baby did.

Whole conferences went silent as people took their discussions private to get away from him.

Sludge held particular contempt for women, so I volunteered to draw his fire in the hopes that he would violate the Terms of Service badly enough to get him kicked out. I deleted something of his and came back to a long screed about “Lisa, the Town Skank.” He finally got booted for using his wife’s account to read women-only conferences, looking for dirt about me.

If you still believe what your mom said about names never hurting you, you’ve never read an email so hateful that your hands shake too much to type for a while.

Because I love online community, I’m a firm believer in active forum moderation to control the jerks and keep the conversation beneficial for the greatest number. Here are some recurring problem posters and what to do about them.

The Debate Club President: This person loves a good argument and doesn’t mind a bad one. They sometimes will take a contradictory position that they personally don’t believe, just for sport.
The Problem: Skilled Debate Clubbers keep conversations lively, but clumsy or overtalkative ones can kill a discussion, especially if they turn into Bomb-Throwers or Broken Records (see below).
Manage by: Hosting online discussion like you would a cocktail party, circulating to make sure everyone’s drink is topped off and no one feels left out. If forum participants are used to the moderator chiming in, you will be able to control topic drift or those who monopolize the conversation without looking heavy-handed. As longtime Well host David Gans – who made his bones wrangling Deadheads, never the easiest cats to herd – told me when I started, just be a good host. Create a pleasant space to hang out. Refill the pretzels and empty the ashtrays. Make sure people know you’re there and a lot of little issues will work themselves out.

The Bomb-Thrower: Will lob something incendiary into a discussion just for the fun of it. Truly virulent Bomb-Throwers will slam “breeders” on a parenting forum, refer to prayer on a Christian website as “talking to your invisible friends,” or rant about idiot Boulder liberals on the Daily Camera’s comment threads. They’re like trolls, only they come out from under the bridge more often.
The Problem: Bomb-Throwers are often the first to scream “Censorship!” when moderators try to mitigate the damage they do to a conversation. Classic control freaks, they divert attention by attempting to make you the problem.
Manage by: Setting rules and expectations up front, and enforcing them publicly and fairly. This give you the track record and tools you need to shut these guys down. Start with zero tolerance for name-calling, attacks or slurs, and an eagle eye for topic drift. For the sake of a healthy online community, you may have to remove posts or block users. Brace yourself for the inevitable abuse and just do it. Your rational readers will thank you.

The World’s Foremost Expert on Everything: There’s one of these in every crowd, isn’t there?
The Problem: They’re all on the Internet now, spreading misinformation. Worse: boring.
Manage by: Correct important errors of fact and let your users take care of the rest by either challenging or bozofiltering the World’s Foremost Expert. Some Bozos never understand why people don’t respond anymore. They just keep talking … to nobody. It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

The Broken Record: You’ll be talking about rose gardening until somebody announces that illegal immigrants take all the landscaping jobs. They pop up in a thread about stomach flu at a summer camp to posit that illegal immigrants in the kitchen spread disease. Talking about cars? They’re right there griping about Mexican drivers. It gets old.
Note the similarities between Bomb-Throwers and Broken Records. Every topic on the Internet, from laundry to astrophysics, becomes a referendum on their pet subject.
Manage them by: Routing around them. Turn that eagle eye on drift into a firm rein. “Back to roses, is anybody else having trouble with Japanese beetles?” Again, your clued-in users will reinforce the message by refusing to take the bait.

The Bully: You’ll recognize this guy the first time he responds to someone with, “Shut your piehole, you fat Irish moron.” They snark and call names, and that’s just to warm up. More toxic bullies will dig up personal info about people or stalk them – online and even in person.
The Problem: Testosterone. Anger management. Childhood abandonment issues. Whatever. You’re just an online host, not a psychotherapist.
Manage by: This is the place for heavy-handed hosting. Delete, suspend and ban. In extreme cases like Sludge, who was practiced at skating just inside the lines, you may have to provoke the Bully into violating the user agreement. It makes for an unpleasant couple of days, but it works. Call the police if the bullying moves into meatspace. Life is too short.

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If space is your forte, you don’t want to miss this!  Experts will be discussing how space technology translates to entrepreneurial ventures.

The panel  lineup includes: Burke Fort, director of the 8th Continent Project; Gene Branch,  partner at  Townsend and Townsend and Crew’s Denver office; Steve Murchie, director of the Keiretsu Forum’s Denver chapter; and Paul Jerde, executive director of the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business.

For more informaiton visit www.rockiesventureclub.org.

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Metzger’s new SmartBlog Program, announced earlier this week, was covered today in the Boulder County Business Report. The interest in this new program has been outstanding. Thanks to our friends at the BCBR for their interest and coverage.

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Thanks to The Denver Egotist for the shout-out to Metzger Associates on their site (in a post called “Helping Denver Suck Less: Colorado’s Best PR Firms“).

Despite the economic slump and recent changes to the PR landscape here in town, we are proud to be a part of such a vibrant and talented community. We all push to make each other better — and that certainly doesn’t suck!

Congrats to all on the list, and thanks Egotist!

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