My topic today was the “how” behind social media. I went over several different tools, including one of our favorites at Raidious, Radian6. When I got back to my office, I found an email from Radian6 talking about their new product launch which was very exciting, and which I wrote about over on SocialMediaRisk.com. You should check it out – game changer for large enterprise.
If you were in today’s session and you have more questions for me, please email me or leave a comment. Great audience today, really enjoyed the event. Thanks Hoosier PRSA and Indiana Chamber of Commerce!
Recently I had the opportunity to present a workshop at the Social Media Bootcamp presented by the Indiana chapter of the Public Relations Society of America. I was asked to give a session called “Blogging 101” targeted at public relations professionals who are transitioning from sending out media releases to generating blog posts for their clients.
Other speakers were: Kristofer Karol, National Sports Journalism Center; Eric Deckers, Pro Blog Services; and Chad Richards, Firebelly Marketing. My particular session was attended by about 40 public relations and communications folks, most of whom were new to the blogging world. It was a bit of a whirlwind session, packing a lot of information into 90 minutes including a hands-on blogging exercise.
If you are a marketing, communications, or PR professional in Indiana and you’re not already a member, I highly suggest looking into it. The Hoosier chapter of the PRSA are smart folks, real movers and shakers.
If your organization is interested in having me out to speak about blogging or other social media topics at your brown-bag luncheon, conference or event, get in touch and we’ll talk about it.
I have a confession: I work in internet marketing.
I have another confession: I use the AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox.
While this might seem like a stark contradiction in terms–imagine if McDonald’s suddenly began funding PETA–I am totally comfortable with the situation. You see, like everyone else, I was a user first. I had my first email account in 1992, my first website in 1994. I have worked as a Mac administrator, assistant network engineer, voice/video/data network help desk supervisor, and web manager.
Now I pay my rent by working with a company that helps companies and brands market themselves online. Primarily we accomplish this via blogging, social media and video, but many clients also purchase contextual search ads and banner ads on other sites.
I am in fact filtering out a source of revenue for some of the very same companies we call clients.
More often than not sites earn revenue from ads on a per-view basis, not on a per-click basis. In the drive to win hearts and minds, they’re starting with just eyeballs–whether or not a click and/or a conversion actually takes place. Ad blocking extensions negate those views, depriving the site of revenue.
Ken Fisher of ARS Technica recently put forth a plea for the site’s users to stop blocking ads, or at least take out a paid subscription to the site. You can read it for yourself, but the gist of his argument was that ad blocking software destroys media publishing sites that depend on ad revenue to sustain themselves.
This week Matt Asay at CNET News issued a response, stating “It’s not the consumer’s job to figure out a successful business model for the vendor.” His counter-argument was that ad blocking software will simply force media publishing sites to adapt and change how that media is consumed.
Of course, I see both sides. I am a paid subscriber to two of my most frequent reads, Salon and ARS Technica. I see the value in the media they provide, and were they print publications I would gladly purchase them. Most of the other news and opinion I get comes to me via RSS in Google Reader (feel free to follow my feed), thus negating any advertisements.
But with regard to other sites I peruse throughout the day, as Asay so aptly put it, it’s not my job to figure out how they should sustain themselves.
There has been quite a hullaballoo about pay-walls for publishing sites like the New York Times and others, with Stewart Brand often being quoted as saying “Information wants to be free.”
But that’s not the whole quote. At the first Hackers conference in 1984, Brand actually stated that “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
I’m all for pay-walls and subscriptions. If a site has a real value to those readers willing to pay for it, then that site will survive. If not, it won’t. I personally can’t concentrate on the content when your site is a cluttered mess of blinking, resizing, popping-up advertisements.
But unless you’re offering an alternative, don’t try to make it incumbent on me the user to pay your bills.
Congratulations! You’ve taken that first step toward taking your brand into the digital space by bringing a social media team on board.
Now, who are the first people these folks should meet with? The IT department? Marketing? Communications?
Yes.
Maybe this wasn’t the answer you were hoping for, but it’s the right one.
A truly effective media strategy bridges all of these verticals to create not only a clear, consistent online presence for your brand but also a carefully executed communications plan.
Let’s break it down:
IT
Your IT department is not only in charge of making sure your computers and networking function, but also establishing proper usage policies and network safety and integrity. The very nature of social media with its sharing of links, videos and other content on password-protected sites creates a security issue.
IT needs to be involved from the outset to ensure that digital marketing practices adhere to network standards and policies. If your company is blocking sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, your social media plan is already hamstrung.
Marketing
Your marketing team, whether they are internal or external through a PR firm or ad agency, has set branding standards for your company. Social media activities should adhere to these standards, and all planning for digital should involve these parties.
A major goal of marketing campaigns is establishing a clear and consistent brand identity. This identity must be maintained across all verticals in order to maintain its integrity and effectiveness. Getting buy-in from the marketing team from the beginning mitigates surprises down the road.
Communications
Your company communicates information not just via marketing but also via media outlets and, depending on the industry, via public safety and/or crisis communications channels. Like it or not, people expect all official means of communication (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) to be reflective of and responsive to these types of information dissemination.
If you’re only looking at social media as a marketing tool and ignoring the potential utility for crisis communications and customer service, you will probably end up getting burned. Building in these variables into your digital marketing content plan ensures that the public has the opportunity to get critical information in a timely fashion and in via the tools with which they already connect with you.
In the event of a major crisis, your company also has an opportunity to shine by shifting gears and utilizing those channels to assist with public safety and awareness. The recent earthquake in Haiti gave us a good example of the Red Cross and others utilizing Twitter to get out crucial updates in real-time.
So yes, digital marketing is all of these things and more. Fortunately we at Raidious can help.
Wordpress is pretty awesome. I’ve used it on many projects, and we use it quite often at Raidious.
The first time I used the web publishing platform was in 2007, when I launched the RockitBomb podcast. I was impressed with the ease of deployment and the fact that I could do it all without writing any code; so impressed, that I set up a Wordpress installation for every nearly every website on my personal web server. My assumption was that by deploying this easy to use content management and blogging software and inviting collaborators that every site would quickly overflow with regular updates.
As one can probably imagine, this did not happen. Easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use software does not instantly make authors out of contributors, or contributors out of enthusiastic friends. After some time, I inevitably found my installations consolidated. The band site I had built pulling a feed from mySpace, the podcast being combined with my personal site, and other projects simply being shelved.
Easy to deploy, easy to use, and easy to maintain, but it still fails without content. Wordpress, like any other blogging software or content management system, is nothing without humans creating content to fill it, and engaging with the site’s audience.
If you are like many Americans, 2009 was rough year. Numerous industries cut back staff to bare-bones operations and, even less fortunate, some businesses locked their doors permanently. The banking industry is in flux, the automobile industry is still in a deep void, and the hospitality industry could use a break. Every industry was effected by the collapse of the financial markets and most industries aren’t projecting significant growth for a couple years. Yikes!
“All of our major indicators are showing significant improvement… As far as hiring goes, digital and direct marketers are back on a growth trajectory.”
- Jerry Bernhart, principal of Bernhart Associates Executive Search, LLC.
If you are a marketer or product specialist still searching for gainful employment, I would encourage you to switch your thinking to a digital mindset. This industry can be intimidating, but in my opinion it is the industry with the best growth potential and promise. Specifically, look to e-mail marketing service providers: ExtactTarget, Responsys, Contant Contact, etc.
These companies aren’t going to hire Joe-Blow-Marketing-Guy-to-Fill-the-Void because this industry is demanding top talent. With so many people out of a job in 2009, they have their pick of the litter. 2010 is your chance to grab the reins and get comfortable in the digital space because the old rules of submitting your resume and waiting for a e-mail or phone call no longer exist.
See the example of Hire Me, Headblade, when Eric Romer took an unconventional approach to landing a job on the West Coast with HeadBlade, Inc. When Eric found out about an opening as the Marketing Manager for HeadBlade, Inc., he not only submitted a resume, but he took his credentials social: Facebook, Twitter and Blog. 24 hours after getting these sites up and running Eric received an interview from HeadBlade, which ultimately led to HeadBlade hiring him.
It is not essential for everyone to go above and beyond like Eric did for the HeadBlade position, but it doesn’t hurt when trying to get noticed. Times are still tough and it is estimated things will remain tough for awhile. Luckily for enterprising individuals there is a way to land a job in a down time. It is up to you if you want that to be today.
In an interview in Salon, Richard Rosenblatt, founder and chief of Demand Media, defends the company’s content creation approach.
“People want the information and we are providing it,” he said, dismissing charges that Demand-owned sites like EHow are flooding the internet with poorly-produced, unwanted content. This factory approach has been blasted by luminaries such as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Richard McManus of ReadWriteWeb (and even little guys like yours truly) as being content farms, leading to the mass production of the lowest common denominator.
This is the same model that has doomed the major label music industry. Demand Media uses search data to drive the content they produce, determining the value of that content by the dollar value of the clicks it will generate. This is much the same model as the music industry has used for decades, deciding what albums will be released and what they will sound like based on what has sold in the past because they “know what kids want.”
I call it The Nickelback Approach to content production.
Regardless of the time and money spent producing content, is your company content to let a third party be the voice of your brand? A third party who has no interest in your reputation, the quality of your products and services, and who leeches visitors and customers from your site to theirs? A third party who will take ownership of content about you and then happily sell you advertising on relevant pages on their sites?
I didn’t think so.
Don’t let content farms like Demand Media sell your own products back to you. Take charge of your online reputation and the money you spend on search engine optimization. Your hard-earned marketing budget should enable your company to take the lead in getting your message out there.
Sure, it will cost you. But wouldn’t you rather get the credit and the conversions that come from being the experts in your field, rather than letting an outsider fence that expertise for their own profit?
An article in the current New Yorker, “Non-Stop News,” discusses the blinding speed of the news cycle as it exists today, pointing out the fact that President George W. Bush’s administration–while still being responsive to cable and internet news–didn’t have to deal with the likes of Twitter and Facebook.
Political blogs existed and were certainly popular, and indeed some of the largest (Huffington Post, Politico) were formed during Bush’s tenure. But blog readership at that time was determined by subscriptions to RSS feeds, links from other sites, and perhaps references in traditional media. If readers were really astute they might find it on Digg or Reddit.
The landscape is much different for the Obama administration. Now as soon as a blog post is published it’s tweeted and Facebooked instantly. With monitoring tools like Cotweet, Tweetdeck and myriad others, it is possible to respond just as quickly. Journalists tasked with covering the White House are stretched further and expected to produce faster than ever before.
According to the article, every day NBC’s Chuck Todd:
does eight to 16 on-camera interviews
writes the first post on NBC’s blog
appears on the Today Show and/or Morning Joe
churns out eight to 10 tweets or Facebook posts
publishes three to five blog entries, and
co-hosts the one-hour MSNBC newscast “The Daily Rundown.”
Granted, this is the output of one of the most active and astute political reporters out there, and covering the beltway and White House goings-on is one of the biggest jobs in journalism. But for a company, what business is more important than yours?
Who is your organization’s Chuck Todd? And what if you don’t have one?
That one person not only needs to approximate or match that productivity, but coordinate with marketing, communications, IT and often compliance. They need to plan content in advance as well as react to current and unforeseen events and discussions. They need to make certain that all communication across all these digital channels maintains a consistent voice and message. And they need to make sure that all these efforts are measured and analyzed as they relate to conversions and the bottom line.
So who’s it going to be? The intern? The secretary? Or a team of people who can get inside your organization and find out what makes it tick, then work with you to present the best possible image?
In the beginning stages of forming Raidious, we liked to somewhat whimsically ask the question “What if CNN covered your company?” Now we realize the aptness of that question, and how clearly and precisely it describes what we do. And as we’ve found, it also describes exactly what many companies need. Maybe you do too. Get in touch and we’ll talk about it.
By now most everyone has heard about the Conan O’Brien, Jay Leno and NBC “Tonight Show” debacle. It is a messy situation at best and has caused a serious point of contention for the networks late night giants, O’Brien vs. Leno. The late night hosts have, to this point, kept each other out of the conversation and kept their attention focused on the network for causing this ruckus. It is their supporters that are voicing their talk show host preference on the social networks.
Conan supporters, on the other hand, have gone online with vengeance. Within hours people werer posting their support on Twitter, a Facebook fan page “I’m With Coco” and two websites “I’m With Coco” and Save the Conans sprung up with enormous support. Currently, “I’m With Coco” fan page has garnered 358,689 supporters (and growing). That page has also been the epicenter of fan discussions, report postings and rally organizing. Even O’Brien himself has taken to the online space by posting “The Tonight Show” for sale on Craigslist.
NBC is in a very precarious position on how they handle the off-camera late night drama. If Conan does transfer to another station they have the potential to lose all those fans on Facebook. This is a different time from when the same network was deciding between David Letterman or Jay Leno as the “The Tonight Show” host back in 1992. Things will remain on the Internet for many years to come, and even though this will eventually die down and the public outcry will subside, you will still have 300,000+ people proudly supporting Coco long after this is over.
As the old saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The advent of smartphones has fostered the idea of putting brands in the customer’s pocket.
Or has it?
In my usual puttering around the recesses of the web looking for I-don’t-know-what, I ran across the Matchbook Museum–an online gallery of old promotional matchbooks. For those too young to remember the days when physicians endorsed cigarette brands and everybody smoked (or those who haven’t watched Mad Men), it was common for businesses to give out matchbooks imprinted with their logo and some sort of brand message.
In poking around the Matchbook Museum, I found a brand I recognized: Kroger, a supermarket chain located in the Midwest. Their entry in the canon of carcinogen-inhaling enablement can be found here, encouraging customers to “strike a friendship with Kroger” and promoting their “Top Value” coupon stamps.
The idea behind promotional matchbooks was simple: every time a customer went for a match, they were presented with a company’s logo and a brief marketing message. This constant branding exposure implanted that message in their subconscious, much the way billboards, print ads and other traditional media advertising would. Kroger’s message was more warm and fuzzy than most: “Strike a friendship.” In addition to the clever double-entendre (“Strike.” Matches. Get it?), they were more than just a place to buy groceries: they were your friend.
Fast-forward half a century to a time (right now) when even 10-year-olds on the subway have an iPhone, Blackberry or some other digital communication device glued to their hands. Companies are seeking newer and ever more inventive ways to establish personal relationships with consumers. We even use “friend” as a verb, thanks to social sites like MySpace and Facebook.
Nike has updated this model with their “True City” app, which provides hyper-local, real-time information (currently available in six European cities, presumably with American markets to come). The app essentially competes with services like Yelp with crowdsourced information and recommendations on bars, restaurants, music and more–and of course tries to sell Nike shoes and apparel.
The argument of whether or not users want recommendations from an athletic shoe company on the closest place to get the best martinis is almost irrelevant. What they’re attempting is to connect fans of their products by enabling them to share lifestyle tips with each other. Who better to recommend the best chicken wings in your neighborhood than people who like the same shoes you do?
Again, the idea here is simple: put your brand in a customer’s pocket. Just like a grocery store chain has almost nothing to do with smoking a cigarette or lighting the pilot on your stove, an athletic shoe company is hardly related to attending a DJ night at the local nightspot. But the notion that the company is your ally in making your lifestyle choices and altruistically wants to bring like-minded people together–complete with push notifications–is the real power play.
In short, the technology has changed, but the message is the same. Companies are putting their brand in people’s faces at every available opportunity, and we can look to the past for inspiration in building the future of marketing.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=da356656-8de0-474c-a8aa-2047d55fdee1)
317-203-9807. 
Send us an email. Sign up for email![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=19a9411c-4c15-46cb-889b-f2c46cf2b672)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=44855e54-d635-48c5-813d-063a20e5ced3)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=55f73b90-46df-4912-94d9-993d99e52809)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=ece5320c-3bd3-4413-bcbb-901b069b5e97)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=bae67955-5c8d-475a-a11b-0009f301fb1d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=ff5e85f2-7682-40d2-b6b7-6a1494f51871)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=9e4da32f-f25b-483a-8067-477ad161ff39)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=fc85f9c7-1ebf-4b78-b662-c8484bf713f9)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=ebb956cd-9c5b-44dc-9ffc-b73f31db18f3)