Leveraging Social Marketing for Business, Sales and Startups

Following on to the post last month on leveraging social networks to build Web traffic, courtesy of YourBusinessChannel, filmed while in the UK with Ecademy, three more short videos have surfaced from our extended interview on the impact that social media tracking and activity can have for companies big and small on the Web - be it through connecting with potential customers, or simply expanding their brand. The three videos are embedded below - proving to me that I sound as tired as I felt, having just completed a five-hour presentation following the San Francisco to London Trip the day before.


Social Marketing Strategies a Boon for Business

Sales Advice for the Social Web


What Can Social Marketing Do for Startups?

Social Media Is Infrastructure: PR, Marketing, Ads Safe

Practically the only thing guaranteed that social media will kill is your free time. Maybe it will kill your real-world social life too, but that's only if you choose to have an intimate relationship with your computer, at the pure neglect of the world outdoors. While it's popular and tempting to say that social media is poised to eliminate core business elements, such as marketing, public relations, or advertising, the truth is that the latest Web tools are simply infrastructure, to be used well. More traditional departments in business, and the third party vendors who provide their services, will need to adapt to a changing world, but they aren't going anywhere.

On Thursday, the refrain that PR, Marketing and Advertising "Suck" was debated in a panel I participated in, featuring Loic Le Meur of Seesmic, Guy Kawasaki of AllTop (as moderator), Steve Patrizi of LinkedIn and Renee Blodgett of Magic Sauce Media.

Loic's experience of having hired and fired an expensive (to him) PR firm in his first years promoting in the Valley, combined with his visibility and success that has largely been self-led, as well as a general sense that quality is missing from much of the industry, has seen him question the entire process. In a detailed blog post, Loic cites bad practices including fake reviews and press releases, and contrasts that with how major Web services, like Twitter and Facebook, have largely relied on word of mouth to bring their message to new users. And it was with this background that we participated in Thursday's discussion.

Guy Kawasaki asked each of us how we could successfully market our products if we had no budget, or a very small one - which fell below a typical retainer for any reputable PR firm. Most of us, myself included, recommended utilizing your personal relationships and network if you had no cost. I also recommended reaching out to second-tier bloggers, who can be your product's biggest advocates. Loic said you should get a community manager for low cost to see what people are saying online and respond quickly.


Tap Into Your Personal Network to Save Money
Much of the conversation was framed in terms of listening to services like Twitter, and blogs. It was debated what constituted spamming on Twitter. Renee said that listening for keywords and reaching out to potential customers was a major part of how her clients found prospects - which I agreed with, but others questioned. I said that sending somebody an unsolicited note on Twitter to gauge interest was just fine the first time, and spam the second time. Meanwhile Steve Patrizi kept asking his board of directors for more money.

For as much fun as I have talking about new and cutting edge applications on this site, I recognize that the actual penetration for many of these tools is very small. While some services have started to go mainstream, many other tools, including traditional public relations and advertising, tools as basic as Google AdWords and customized landing pages, are absolutely necessary, especially as you travel up the approval foodchain in the enterprise - trying to convince C-Level buyers to acquire what could be six-figure products. So I tried to discourage some of the over reliance on social media tools for those companies who are trying to reach all their customers.


This Panel Is Going to "Suck" If I Hear Twitter Two More Times
When change happens, people tend to get nervous. It's a fact of life. When you hear examples of bad behavior, it can be easy to assign an entire industry or group of people all the blame.

It is my belief that smart public relations firms, smart marketers and smart advertising firms will not shrink away from the challenges that come with reaching potential influencers and buyers in new places, which require a breadth of awareness, and rapid responses. Those that embrace tools, and recognize them to not be scary - taking to blogging and tweeting and social networking as quickly as they did e-mail and phone calls, will be leaders for the next five to ten years.


What If You Get Negative Feedback?
Practice "Truth In Marketing"
Do PR firms screw up and do ads get ignored? Absolutely. We can each probably think of many cases where that has been the case. But Web sites didn't put those firms out of business, and neither have blogs. Social media won't do so either, unless these firms and individuals are closing their eyes and pretending the tools don't exist. That Loic and others are thinking about the major changes that are underway in our industry is fantastic. That Loic has been able to listen well and leverage his personal brand to help raise visibility for his products has no doubt been very effective. But saying an entire industry "sucks" or is unnecessary is overdoing it. These are tools to be leveraged, and I look forward to each of these industries growing with these tools and delivering new best practices that benefit us all.

See Also:
Loic Le Meur: PR, Marketing and Advertising suck, now what?
Kosmix Blog: Advertising, PR, and Marketing Suck! Now What?
Down the Avenue: Advertising, Marketing and PR Suck: Now What?
Shari Sax: Is Social Media THE ANSWER when traditional marketing “sucks”?

Videos Courtesy: Shari Sax's YouTube Channel

Do PR, Advertising & Marketing Suck? Find Out In a Week.

Criticism of public relations, advertising and marketing is everywhere. Seesmic's Loic Le Meur has been giving a presentation over the last few months saying that they "suck". And agencies need to adapt quickly to be ready for the changes that are seen in social media, the economy and traditional word of mouth.

Next week, on Thursday August 27th, I will be taking part in a panel with Loic, Guy Kawasaki, Steve Patrizi of LinkedIn and Renee Blodgett of Magic Sauce Media, hosted by the San Francisco American Marketing Association, discussing:

• Is Loic overstating his case?
• Where are the traditional Advertising, PR, and Marketing agencies failing?
• What new tools and methods are being used to bypass the need for traditional agencies?
• What’s next for agencies? What’s next for businesses?

Want to attend?

Ticket Info: SFAMA Members – $35 Non-members – $45
Event Info: SFama.org

For those out of the area, I have it on good word that a UStream video is being prepared as well.

Won't Be Long Before These Future Marketers Major In New Media

Sometimes, it doesn't seem all that long ago that I myself was in college. On other days, it seems like I am talking about somebody else, when looking back on my time at UC Berkeley. With my 10 year graduation anniversary having passed a few months ago, I found myself back on a college campus this afternoon, with the opportunity to speak to a roomful of students at San Francisco State University, focused on a rapidly changing world of Marketing. And what I encountered was a class of future-thinking young adults trying to grok a fast-changing world where social networks are potentially more impactful than traditional media outlets.

Invited to speak by the class' professor, Shari Weiss, I hoped to illustrate my dual role - both in terms of being a technology blogger, but also my real world decade of experience working in public relations and corporate marketing, and how, finally, these two worlds are colliding, as I help companies get a bigger voice in the social media space.


I Don't Go Too Long Without Mentioning Google Reader
The gulf between what was considered "new media" when I was at Cal and what is "new media" today for these students is tremendous.

As I recalled this afternoon, in 1998 I was excited to see my Journalism professor approach how the Internet was affecting reporting and publishing, only to see my excitement dashed when she rolled in a projector and showed us a feel-good documentary on the founding of Yahoo!, featuring Jerry Yang and David Filo. My disappointment in the lack of forethought in this course was so great that I did not attend lecture the remainder of the year, dropping in only on discussion sections and for the final, which I somehow passed.


Initial Feedback on the Discussion Looks Pretty Good
In contrast, the array of topics challenging the students at San Francisco State brought a smile to my face. In quick presentations, teams tried to tackle the future of advertising, the world of Facebook applications, how to utilize Twitter for business, and I saw future topics spanning such sites as YouTube and LinkedIn.


I Swear I Could Have Talked For Hours On This Stuff
Some part of me was jealous, but I also felt a bit like an unofficial teacher's assistant, sitting in on the presentations, and trying not to correct small mistakes or provide answers. It was clear, that for the most part, the students see real potential from these new networks, where others of us are just coming up to speed. As I showed them, you don't have to be a traditional cool company selling to consumers to get new media. But it's becoming a requirement, to act and engage with your customers as peers. That the future marketers and message-shapers of the world are already getting the message bodes well.

I was glad to get the opportunity to drive up to The City and share my position on the changes I have seen, and hope I was able to make an impact. Thanks to Shari for inviting me.

The Marketing 2.0 Revolution: Who Is Driving?

This evening, the San Francisco American Marketing Association put on a panel featuring the just departed from Google Kevin Marks, Jeremiah Owyang, Mark Silva and Robert Scoble. I took notes on the panel and posted them to FriendFeed. These notes are embedded below. The topic was billed as how tech bloggers are pushing the new version of Marketing 2.0, and strayed away from the core topic, bouncing to PR, social media, and how marketers and advertisers can take advantage of these new tools.

In a month, I will be back up here, participating with Guy Kawasaki, Scoble and others, discussing the potential demise of Marketing and PR, hosted by Mark Evans, who just so happens to be the president-elect of the SFAMA and father to triplets.

PR Pitches Promise to Trade Diggs for Coverage

As the blog has gained in visibility, so to have the inbound pitches. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they are horrible - and some are just downright off-topic, and get deleted. But one the more recent trends I've seen is a promise by the PR rep to push the story to Digg "if the review is great". Twice this month, I have received near-identical pitches, ostensibly from two different people at two different PR agencies, ending with the following two lines, after having introduced their new iPhone apps:

"Let me know - I can send promo code right away. If the review is great we will digg it as hell."

Never mind the cookie cutter wrap-up and the substandard English, or even that the pitches have been for less than interesting iPhone applications. Call me snooty or idealistic, but I have a very real problem with the idea that if my review is deemed "great", that the PR team will try and reward me with traffic by manipulating Digg - even if I think they don't have the Digg juice to do it.


An excerpt from one such pitch in early May
I'm not going to stand on a pedestal and make a rant about paid posts, or how bloggers are allowed to curry favor or get bias, but this is a stupid practice I could really live without. Because I'm a nice guy, I won't be outing which agencies, individuals or which products are pitched this way, but I bet some of you reading this have gotten the same template garbage.

Do you really think you're earning bonus points with me because you're Web 2.0 savvy enough to know what Digg is?

If you want to entice me into writing about your product, don't do it with a promise of Diggs. Show me that you know what I usually cover, and that your offer is something my audience wants to know. And please don't send me a link from a top tech blog as evidence that your stuff is awesome, because if somebody else already debuted your story, it's already old. Digg it?

Don't Tempt the Online Mob. They Come Bearing Pitchforks.

There's no need for me to recap Twitter's two-day flub as you've already seen it 40 different places. What's most interesting to me about the entire situation is the rapidity of how the user community turned on the service and its founders in response to what was a relatively minor change that was confusingly and sloppily addressed. The response, which loudly came from all corners, mirrored that of previous blowups, which have also included Facebook and Digg as victims - the first around its terms of service and Beacon, and the second, around its blocking of illegal series of numbers that could unlock DVD region codes. Even Google Reader faced a backlash last year from users who expected a different interpretation of what friends were and who could see what.

See also:

• May 2, 2007: Unpopular Opinion: Digg Revolt Is a Bad Precedent
• December 26, 2007: Google Reader Blinks, and the Mob Wins

Every single case dealt with a Web 2.0 service driven largely by user generated or selected content, where the mob was reacting to changes handed down unilaterally from a seeming all-knowing company, without first communicating potential changes, or accurately foreseeing downstream effects. And in most of the examples (Google Reader being practically the only exception), the service had already chipped into its balance of goodwill, leading to a strained relationship with a vocal minority of users, setting the stage for the much larger backlash that was to come.

Did the services that made mistakes and got roundly slammed deserve the punishment? If you ask the users, the answer is yes. In today's world, the online communities that have been built around these popular products have a sense of entitlement, not just to specific features, but that they will be made a part of the process, spoken with and not just spoken to. And if they feel they have been wronged or lied to, all hell can rain down on the company or the individual bearing the broken message.

To me personally, the change in @replies for Twitter was frustrating and annoying, but what ticked me off was more the way in which it was delivered. As with the company's previous comments about following many users being "disingenuous", this week's move seemed like they were once again telling us of a right way and a wrong way to use their product. That their blog post was backtracked upon and respun as a product issue and then a technical issue made us feel lied to, and the team, despite having what by all means is a very successful product, disappointed us again.

Here's the thing: Before I get slammed (again) for being a FriendFeed apologist and/or Twitter hater... the truth is not so black and white. I think Twitter is great for what it is supposed to do - send short messages and help broadcast information quickly. It is now a utility, like e-mail, and we're all assumed to be there. But I, and many others, continue to get frustrated when we see the system and its people fall short of what is an amazing potential. You can have hundreds of millions of users, but the experience itself is diminishing, and the management seems disconnected, in a way that makes them look like they are in love with the latest celebrities to sign up and less enamored with us rank and file who evangelized their product the last few years, pointing out both the good and the bad as it came.

Similar too are the stories of those previously stabbed by the mob. The Digg fanatics believe strongly in their ability to push favorite items forward, and potentially upset the balance of the new world media. Facebook, once deemed a safe place for friends and family to congregate online, found itself on the wrong side of privacy choices and business. Google Reader wrongly hoped that those you e-mailed in GMail would be fine to share your RSS favorites with. In each case, the users believed in the product, wanted it to succeed, but disagreed strongly with the latest moves, and they would not give up until their voices had been heard and made impact.

Designing new products and services, and adding new features to existing ones, is very difficult to do in public, especially when you are trying to walk the fine line of placating existing users while attracting new ones. Twitter, in a flash point of popularity, is especially vulnerable due to the fact their own product, as also are Digg and Facebook, could be used by users to fight back. Did Twitter or Facebook or Digg lose users permanently due to such heated battles? Probably not for long, but the scars do linger, and the trust factor that might once have been there is gone, or at least damaged enough that the mob will keep their torches at the ready, waiting for the next time they're needed.

The world of product development, on the backs of user content, is changing the way people expect to participate. And when they aren't treated as equals, or they are talked down to, people are taking it very seriously, and there are more platforms for conversation than ever, with more people to reach than ever, so any service who is in this space who expects to make even "small settings updates" should strongly think of their potential impact and be ready in case things start to go wrong - fast.

Inbound Marketing Summit Preso: There Is No Information Overload

There Is No Information Overload: Finding a Signal In the Noise

View more presentations from louisgray.

At 4:25 today in San Francisco, I will be presenting at the Inbound Marketing Summit on tackling the perception of information overload. How can those of us in Marketing, tasked at discovering and participating in microcommunities where our prospects, partners and customers, reside, get a handle on all the data, and find the most relevant bits?

With only 20 minutes, we'll see what we can do. There's no time limit for you to flip through these slides, of course. Go to it.

Creating Social Media Outposts

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


Roll-Your-Own Social Media Campaign: Outposts

I recently started a new job at a software company. One of my responsiblites is creating and launching an effective organic SEO & social media strategy for our customers. Our customer base deals primarily with the auto industry, not the keenest when it comes to marketing on the Internet, much less social web. The majority of our customers spend their advertising dollars on print, TV and radio ads. This strategy for the most part works well, as it's locally targeted to a geographical region.

My main objective with this task is primarily for search engine purposes only. Creating back links and outposts. Brand monitoring is also another objective. This is a roll-your-own strategy tailored for the three objectives I mentioned only. Educational training on social media comes later. These type of clients are salesmen who are on the sales floor all day long trying to move product, and often these clients will have an employee assigned to the Internet division, but that employee usually does not know the first thing about Internet marketing. Their sole task is updating online inventory and responding to Internet requests. These are the employees who will require ongoing training about Internet marketing and more specifically social media marketing, engagement and interaction. More on that on a future post, but lets get started.

Think of outposts as a sort of toll booth. This is the analogy I'm making here. It's pretty much the same in real life. On the Internet there are many toll booths for many destinations. You need to own and operate that toll booth, instead of your competitors.

1. Reserving and creating the brands name online, aka vanity urls.

The first step is creating accounts on the major social networking sites. All I'm concerned with at this point is Twitter , Facebook , MySpace , YouTube and blogging. Blogging for this objective will be using Blogger.com, eventually leading to in house blogs as well as hosted on the brands website using WordPress. I need to reserve the brand's name on these networks for search engine traffic, but equally important is to keep them out of the hands of name squatters and potential competitors. I'm not concerned about the smaller social networks, they can come at a later point if needed.

Why choose Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blogger and YouTube?

Blogger:

• The ability to create dozens of blogs utilizing targeted keywords.
• Easy to use with no learning curve.
• Vanity URLs
• Google juice
• Marketing
• Branded outpost

Self hosted WordPress blogs will eventually be the main informational hub for consumers

Twitter:

• Real time search capabilities.
• An API we can hook into to pull and post data.
• Consumer interaction, engagement & lead generation.
• Broadcasting inventory, specials, etc.
• Vanity URL & tweets are indexable by search engines, Google being the prime target.
• Branded outpost

Facebook:

• The ability to create a public branded fan page & vanity URL
• Public pages are indexed by search engines. Google being the prime target.
• Consumer interaction, engagement & lead generation.
• Rich multimedia environment.
• Branded outpost

MySpace:

• Vanity URL
• Public pages are indexed by search engines, Google being the prime target.
• Multimedia environment, primarily will be used for video/photo purposes only.
• Branded outpost

YouTube:

• Vanity URL
• Distribution hub for videos created in house.
• Ability to create a custom channel.
• Embeddable share options for videos and soc nets.
• Indexable by search engines, great for Google juice.
• Branded outpost

2. Creating consistent brandable outposts.
Now that all these accounts are created, it's time to turn them into outposts. Remember an outpost is used for driving traffic back to your central hub. The hub in this case is the brands website.

• Outposts need to be streamlined and most importantly consistent across the board.
• Corporate contact information, banners, logos and URL name should all be the same.
• Outposts always link back to the central hub.
• Always use targeted keywords in profile information.
• Goal is to achieve uniform omnipresence on all outposts.
• When information is changed on the central hub, it needs to be reflected on the outpost.
• Link back to all your outposts. Always remember main emphasis is on the central hub.
• Encourage following and fans on your outposts and always follow back.
• Keep the outpost fresh with content as often as possible, this is key for search engines.

That's part 1 of this roll-your-own strategy. Outposts are relatively easy to set up and maintain, and are key for organic search traffic. Part 2 will cover maintenance of the outposts and will also dive into brand monitoring.
Image by thetruthabout under Flickr CC

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

You Should Be Using LinkedIn for Demand Generation

LinkedIn can be much more than simply a site to host your online resume, and connect with colleagues. While the site's core mission may be to keep your job history in one place, and to leverage connections you have to find new people, the vast, fast-growing, database can be leveraged for much more. At a time when many companies are cutting back on their marketing and prospecting budgets, LinkedIn presents a significant opportunity to find new targets and stir up business.

In late 2007, I talked about how LinkedIn is an incredible resource for sharp reporters and bloggers. Earlier in the year, I'd also given the company some suggestions to improve, many of which have since been implemented. But there is no question in my mind that most LinkedIn users are not taking advantage of the features that are there now.

Finding Targets By Territory and Vertical

LinkedIn's advanced search offers the ability to search by many different attributes, from the user's location to their title, and industry, not just their current job or school history. If you are a sales account manager, inside sales rep, a researcher, or in marketing, the right set of search combinations can get you a list of people, with titles and companies, giving you a starting point to get calling and e-mailing.

For example, if you own the Los Angeles territory, and want to reach technology VPs in the entertainment industry, enter the Zip Code ("90012"), choose the title of "Vice President of Technology, and the Industry of Entertainment. (See the search here)


The results are sorted by their linkage to you, starting with those you are connected to, and then to those who are connected to your friends. The more connections you have on LinkedIn, the more likely you are to have top matches. And once you have these names and companies, with their titles, it just takes a little Sales 101 to get their phone numbers and e-mail, either through the Web, or by being nice to their office receptionists.

You can see more examples here: (CTOs near Sunnyvale in Computer Hardware or Internet and VPs of Sales near Seattle in Airlines and Aviation)

If you're not sure exactly how targets refer to their industry, do a search first on someone you know, or are connected to, and use them as the template. That person you thought would choose "Entertainment" just might have put themselves in "Motion Pictures and Film" instead.

Finding Contacts by Title and Company

If you already know the company you want to break into, you can do searches on the company and reduce your targets by title. For example, on LinkedIn, you can search for "artist at Pixar" and pitch them the latest animation tool, or "scientist at Sandia" to find out who is keeping watch over our atomic weapons arsenal.

Depending on the query, you can end up with many targets, or you can drill down to the perfect one you need. (Such as the Technorati CEO)

Execute a Friendly Game of Competitive Espionage

Here's one I am particularly fond of. Even in the most cutthroat of environments, you can sometimes make friends with your competitors' staff, be it through trade shows, or other venues where you both need to show up at the same place and play nice. Getting connected to them won't hurt you all that much, especially if you hide your connections from others. But it can especially benefit you if they don't hide their connections, giving you a Rolodex you can walk through, to find both potential partners, and, potentially, naming their entire prospect and customer list by name.

The very best person to link to in this case is your competition's sales territory manager. I've done it. As LinkedIn shows you their latest connections, you can get good insight into which meetings they have held this week, and traded business cards. Or, you can go to their Web site, see listed customer references, and then cross-check those company names against your new friend's LinkedIn list.

It's pure gold. And if the person is high enough up in the chart, you might just want to hit Print on every single one of their LinkedIn connections pages and hand it off to Inside Sales. In fact, connecting to the competition is the primary reason I don't share my connections list. I want access to their business cards, but I don't necessarily want them to have mine.

If you're using LinkedIn in hopes of attracting a new job, or just to keep a PDF copy of your resume handy, that's fine. But if you already have a job, and you want to make it as successful as possible, you should be using the tools right in front of you. Don't be afraid to link up to more people, as it gets you more names as the connections extend and open you new routes of communication and search detail. I've been using LinkedIn for demand generation for years, and if you're in Marketing or Sales, I recommend you do as well.

Who Does Apple Think They Are?

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)


I can't believe it's barely been a month since we were crammed in stores filled with irate last-minute shoppers. If you've forgotten, close your eyes, think back to the few days before Christmas and how brutal the holiday shopping crowd and all the stores are - even the grocery stores.

Now imagine, combining the tiring experience with raining glass. What a nightmare. I would not wish that on my biggest enemy but that is what happened to a couple from Kansas.

Last December, an Apple retail store's glass doors shattered shut from strong Midwestern winds and showered glass all over two shoppers. Luckily, the couple only sustained minor cuts with no major injuries, but the fact remains: Glass. Exploded. On them. In our country where everyone and their pets are quick to yell LAWSUIT, Apple got lucky, as the couple chose not to sue.

Instead, the couple's son wrote to Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson (VP of Apple Retail) about the incident, and the only response they got was a call from Apple Claims in Seattle, to verify that Andrew's parents decided to pass on taking the company to court.

There was nothing from Ron Johnson VP of Apple retail, or his office.
There was no press release from Katie Cotton VP of PR, or her office.
Of course, there was nothing from Steve Jobs (obviously it won't be from the man himself, since he is in no condition to do so) but not even an Out of Office reply?

Unacceptable.
Below is the letter, taken from Gizmodo:

"On Sunday December 21st, my parents were shopping in the Leawood, KS Apple Retail Store. After making their purchases they found a design flaw in the elegant stores of Apple. Glass does not hold up well in Midwest winters As they were leaving the store, a gust of wind caught the front glass door, the door slammed all the way around into the front of the building and shattered all over them. After many apologetic conversations with the employees of the store, they left and my father noticed he had sustained a cut on his hand. To make it home, they had to stop at the local grocery store to get bandages. Upon coming home, my mother discovered she had also sustained cuts.

This all seemed like a lot of trouble and trauma for just adding to the number of Apple products in our family (We have the new Macbook, Macbook Air, 2 iPhones, time capsule, Apple TV, airport extreme, countless iPods, etc.).

THE END RESULT: I emailed this information to Steve Jobs himself, as well as Ron Johnson VP of Apple Retail. My family has not heard from either of them. We did however get a call from an Apple Claims representative in Seattle to make sure my parents didn't keel over on the car ride home and probably trying to find out if we were planning any litigation. My parents took the high road on this one out of respect for the company of Apple which they know I greatly admire. I am an Apple shareholder as well as the Vice-President of the Mac Users Society at my University.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Our family LOVES Apple. We have all been to Cupertino and have seen Steve in person. It's just funny that all Apple did to rectify a retail door shattering on my parents was to make sure we weren't suing. It's ironic that people who get horrible service and whine about it walk out of stores with brand new macbook pros and whatever they cry for. Yet people like my family have taken the high road because we respect companies that give 1st class service to customers and deliver innovative products.

I've Attached a Photo of the Damage to the Store. My heart goes out to all the Apple Employees who braved the cold and stayed until the store closed."

I love Apple, I do. But Apple's course of action - or lack thereof, makes me sick to my stomach. Who does Apple think they are? Have they forgotten why a company succeeds? It is the paying customers. And from the letter, it sounds like Andrew and his parents are loyal Apple customers. To not even extend a written apology from the corporate offices is completely unacceptable - especially since Andrew and his parents handled the incident with class. The least Apple could've done was offered the nice couple a free year of MobileMe, since no one wants to pay for it anyway. Completely unacceptable.

Am I overreacting? What do you think Apple should've done? Do you have any nightmare Apple customer service experiences?

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

Admiring Companies That Don't Blink

It's tempting to run with the mantra that every company must be transparent. With so many ways companies can communicate to us in real-time, we practically expect every single one to respond to our blog posts, our tweets, and our product demands. We find ourselves publicly lauding those developers who show up in our blog comments and promise change. We celebrate those companies whose founders we know on a first-name basis, and whose Twitter handle we have memorized. But there's also a part of us that finds the silence from companies in the tech space who choose not to be as transparent alluring, as it both adds to the mystery in terms of what they have planned, and gives a sense of confidence on their end that they don't have to change their product to match my every whim.

Apple is one of the best examples of a company whose vast wall of silence and secrecy spawns a vast network of rumor-seekers and speculation. Once limited to the dark recesses of the Web, guessing the Cupertino company's next move has practically become an industry tradition. You won't find an official Apple Twitter account. You won't find an official Apple blog either (though the Hot News page is pretty close). And you most definitely won't find an Apple representative in the comments of users' blogs, saying what features they will or won't add to the next release.

You could say the same, on various levels for many companies. What's going on at Google? Despite their many blogs and the ever-present Matt Cutts, it's not all that transparent. Most Google employees don't blog about their at-work exploits, and product development isn't usually that give and take. Microsoft? A different animal altogether. You could argue Microsoft never really understood the Web, and is a full generation behind the true Valley, so maybe they'll get it in the next five years, but they too represent a company that doesn't exactly kowtow to its users.

There are some smaller companies in the Valley that elicit the same kind of respect, because it looks like they are more willing to focus on improving their product than they are shouting down every naysayer, or responding to critics - as tempting as it may be, no doubt. Some of that can come from the founders' previous experiences, if they have grown up in companies where the focus was more on quarterly earnings and shipping product iterations than it was on asking their customer base for product roadmap ideas.

You can see different approaches in terms of how the strong companies respond to criticism, warranted or otherwise. The bad ones will try and shout you down, posting multiple negative comments in response, and might even post on their own blog saying how you are wrong. The good ones might instead say thanks for the advice, or quietly see your input and tuck the advice away for a rainy day.

Some people think I talk too much about Twitter and FriendFeed here, which is fine, but the reason they get so much attention is because we so clearly see their potential, and we use both services a lot. Of course, with high potential comes high expectations, and I have a tendency to want to push them both further faster, whether that makes good business sense or not. You might remember how at the beginning of this month I posted a long item practically begging FriendFeed to work harder at attracting new users. I stated my concerns that too many people were finding the system hard to use. The team could have done a few things - including saying I don't know what I'm talking about, or the reverse, saying I was right and starting to do all I said right away. Instead, Paul Buchheit explained the team's long-term view. His measured, quiet response was respectful and insightful, but didn't blink. My comments and those of others didn't phase him. He and the team quietly kept working. Twitter, in light of recent criticism as to how they've interacted with the developer community, has similar gone back to work and focused on their business. And I respect that. While I'd love to wave a magic wand to push these companies around, or see how closely their plans match my ideas, their focus is to be admired.

Companies like Apple and Google, for the most part, are "above the fray", and don't seemingly need to kowtow to their users in the way that struggling startups or smaller businesses do. So long as both companies, and Microsoft for that matter, continue to push out high-quality products, and grow their business revenues and profits, playing tit for tat on the blogs and Twitter isn't necessary. And they are a special case, in that their mere silence on a topic can stir even more discussion than a clear answer could. If some of the stronger Web 2.0 companies can cross the chasm to that level, thanks to their unceasing focus, then they have made the right choice. I may pound the table for answers, but secretly like it when they don't say a word.

BuzzGain Launches In Beta, Enabling "Do It Yourself PR", Monitoring

Just yesterday morning, we were talking about the friction that can arise between bloggers and Public Relations teams, who in theory should be working together, but often find themselves battling, largely due to a lack of understanding of one's goals, or even if they have the right targets. Today, BuzzGain, a small startup I've been helping to advise since March of 2008, is opening up in beta, with a goal of helping companies' service, communications and product teams work with bloggers and social media in a better way - through improved monitoring and outreach tools.

Most companies these days are waking up to the fact that they are going to have a hard time controlling their message and brand reputation online, with so many voices out there watching and reporting on their every move. Be they competitors, customers or partners, people are talking about you online, on blogs, on Twitter, on FriendFeed, YouTube, Flickr and other sites. BuzzGain is looking to start out by offering a set of robust social media monitoring tools, but also help companies get to the next level, and better understand who has influence, and where conversations are taking place, so they can better listen and learn from those who can offer beneficial relationships.


BuzzGain Shows Blogs Relevant to Your Company
In the ten months I have worked with Mukund Mohan and watched the site grow, it has taken tremendous evolutionary steps forward, growing its data base, and making it easier for corporate or PR teams to run campaigns that follow keywords. With time, it could be that BuzzGain would be operated by PR teams in the way Salesforce.com is run by Sales teams in a wide range of industries. And like Salesforce.com, BuzzGain launches with a real revenue strategy, pricing at $99 a month for companies below $100 million in revenue, and rising to $500 a month to those up to $1 billion in revenue, and $1,000 a month for $1 billion+ companies.


BuzzGain Can Rank Influencers By Authority, Frequency
BuzzGain doesn't operate in isolation. Its data is pulled from popular Web sources, including Technorati, which helps determine sites' influence in terms of external link activity, and Compete.com for estimated traffic. Essentially, as a PR person, if you wanted to find out who the authority was for your company or a set of keywords, you could learn through BuzzGain who mentions those topics most frequently, see how often they do, and whether they reach 500 readers or 500,000.


BuzzGain Can Show Details On Specific Sources
Given the site is in very early beta, there is some work still left to be done when it comes to optimizing the user experience and speeding up time for queries and results, and continued efforts to remove duplication of data, but BuzzGain has developed a one-stop tool for agencies and corporate marketers to get, in a single glance, a barometer for what is happening to their brand on the Web. Mukund and the team call it "Do-It-Yourself PR". The site is currently tracking 150 million different sources of influence, and helps to make some sense of the noise.

You can sign up for the private beta on their Web site, or let me know if you're interested. I just might have some invites and have hopes that these humble beginnings will be the start of something very interesting in the world of PR and brand monitoring.

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DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor to BuzzGain.

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Bloggers and PR Are Not Enemies, But Quality Efforts Are Needed

When it comes to the issue of how bloggers should work with companies' public relations teams, I sit in an interesting intersection. From 9 to 5, I help administer my company's public relations strategy, working on customer announcements, product releases and relations with media, analysts and customers. It's only part of my role, but a significant one - to help raise the company's visibility and awareness in key target publications and communities. But outside of work hours, when it comes to the blog, I often find myself solicited by companies' PR teams who are hoping their announcements will hit a sweet spot for the site and its readers. And the two roles can be very conflicting. At the office, my goal can be for many people to write about one thing. At home, often, if I think others have already covered the story, I'll skip it. But that doesn't make PR the enemy - even as I get press release submissions that I never would have requested, see people set unrealistic embargoes that are clearly broken by someone else, or watch double standards be applied.

Yesterday, Jeremy Toeman of Stage Two Consulting, and a strong blogger in his own right at LiveDigitally, asked if bloggers were simply underutilizing PR people. He, very accurately in my opinion, highlighted how many bloggers are choosing speed over correctness, not checking with PR teams to get background data, or even turning down the opportunity to speak with company representatives to gain quotes and other facts behind the standard release.

Simply stated, a good number of bloggers, many without traditional journalism training, are not taking extra effort needed to make their stories more robust, with company input. Some of that is due to a lack of experience. Some of that is due to a lack of time. Other factors may include a lack of interest, and especially, reward. What many have found, including me, is that the traditional ways bloggers measure themselves, with page views, external links and the number of comments, "likes", Diggs or what have you, are usually not impacted in a positive way through the additional work.

In my comments to Jeremy, I said I do reach out to developers behind a service, especially on longer-lead items, where the company has made a personal effort to reach out to me, instead of just seeing my name on an e-mail list. If, instead, I can tell it's practically a form e-mail, the additional effort to get background data, quotes and an interview is essentially lost, as my story will be just one of many that hit the Web at the same time - so it'd be just as useful to simply get a login to the site and start making screenshots. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb concurred, saying there is "little incentive in terms of pageviews" to do the additional research. Robert Scoble, who does some of the most-direct reporting with videos of entrepreneurs in his work for FastCompany, said there is "not much homework being done, just a lot of repurposing press releases," adding it's not just bloggers who err this way, but many in traditional media as well.

Putting my work/PR hat on, I can see the trends as well. Just a few years ago, the best way to distribute a message was to set up a series of conference calls and analyst visits weeks ahead of a launch, and provide customer references. Now, given the dramatic reduction in media outlets, and rise in people vying for attention, it could be just as effective to send an early version of the press release out and pick a date for folks to write about it. Some will want the executive interviews and customer quotes, but not all. There are just too many stories to be written and not any more hours in the day, and as with bloggers, the media wants to be first. Provide a date, and some will post at midnight Pacific. Others will post at midnight Eastern time, meaning their story lands up to six hours before the official press release and Web site updates.

So yes, things are changing - and with change comes strife.

Not every public relations firm is an expert in dealing with bloggers. Some are waking up to the blogging phenomenon and, guessing at the influencers, are simply adding blogger e-mail addresses to their distribution lists, without taking the time needed to se what it is each blogger covers, learning their focus areas, or personalizing an angle. Others are aggressively hustling the top two to five names and ignoring the second layer - which creates stress for those pursued, and resentment for those who are ignored.

But the issue is a two-way street. Bloggers often want the respect given to traditional media, and want to be counted as journalists, but it is a select few who are leveraging the resources available - taking time to ask questions of the company and getting quotes from executives. Is it because executives aren't trusted? Is it because bloggers don't want to look biased in favor of the company, but instead, neutral? It can't possibly be because they didn't think to ask, or are lazy, or just wanted to get a post out the door before moving on to the next one, right?

On LouisGray.com, there are definitely times when we get the chance to speak to the developers of a service to gain quotes and their take on the news. You saw that with the launches of Plinky and PeopleBrowsr, Scrapplet, Gnip, Glue and many others. You've also seen launches of new products where we've been trading e-mails with the companies for weeks or months, like with Feedly, Toluu and Socialmedian. But we don't do this every time. Sometimes, it's because we never got the chance. Other times, it's because all we got was a press release and a launch date, and not being overly impressed with the product, it didn't seem worth the effort.

For me, much of the traditional public relations activity, owned by a PR firm, is being done by the founders of the companies I talk to themselves. Instead of asking a PR person for help, I'm going straight to Jason Goldberg or Bret Taylor, Caleb Elston or Alex Iskold. The traditional PR function of shaping a message, choosing targets and scheduling interviews is often done solo - but the rules still apply. Bloggers want to get a unique story, and companies want to reach as many people as possible - so yes, there is a conflict.

The solution is for bloggers to understand the goals of the PR firm and company, and for PR firms and companies to understand the goals of the blogger. It would behoove PR firms to learn how to reach out to bloggers as individuals and tailor a message, even if it is a simple feature enhancement or milestone. It would behoove bloggers to go beyond the headlines and try to really understand a product - to kick the tires, providing feedback, positive and negative. Bloggers don't like feeling like a number, and PR people don't like being ignored if they have made an executive available.

As bloggers, taking the time to speak with an executive and getting a customer example or a use case can be not only a good way to get a unique story, but also to get a personal relationship that goes well beyond a press release. Truth is - the more you know about a product, the more likely you are to end up using it yourself anyway.

As PR reps, understand many bloggers have day jobs, and they don't always have the flexibility to answer you in your 9 to 5 window, so you will need to be open for calls at 10 p.m. as much as 10 a.m. Trade e-mails with me at 1 a.m., and you've practically got a partner for life. And do your homework. It's just as important for you to know what it is that I write about as it is for us to know what it is that you do and where you used to work. The blogging community can be your best mouthpiece for getting the message out quickly, and your worst enemy, should you end up ticking them off.

There has got to be a move to quality on the blogging side. I would much rather have longer-length posts from me and the team than quick hits that get out 15 minutes before the next guy. And companies should reward bloggers who take the extra effort by highlighting the reports on their site as they do traditional media reports. But there has also got to be a move toward quality from PR firms, who in stressful times these days, are scrambling to make headway in a very tough environment. PR companies and bloggers could work together as partners to deliver their readers stories that are relevant, sourced, and robust.

Or... we could continue to ignore each other and point fingers, and from that, nobody will grow.

What Social Media Is and What Social Media Is Not

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


This post touches upon what I feel social media is and isn’t. It does not matter what your purpose is for using social media. The key elements are and always will be the same. Your desired outcome is dictated by the basic fundamentals of the core of what social media is. This post touches upon the most important ones. I could have went on and on with this list, but I don't think that was needed to drive home what I'm trying to get across. Please feel free to add to it by leaving your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

What social media is:

1) Conversation: Social media is all about word of mouth. The message you are trying to convey might vary for personal or professional gain. This is the social in social media. Without this, it's just plain old media. Traditional marketing methods are one-way, one-sided. Social media and social marketing is all about two-way communication, never forget this. Marketing in the social web means you must participate, lead and when necessary react to conversation.

2) Commenting: This goes hand in hand with community and conversation. You should actively comment on conversations. If you have an opinion let it be known, otherwise you are a shadow lurking in the background. Comment only when you have something constructive, or positive to add to the conversation. Commenting just for the sake of commenting adds no real value, all it does is add clutter to the conversation. Commenting also reflects on you as the individual or brand, so always beware of that fact. Choose your words wisely, think before you act or react.

3) Community: This is formed from conversation. This is where people are talking. The communities may vary across all the social networks. Go where your existing and potential customers are talking and engage them. It could be on Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and so forth. If your goals are strictly for launching a new product, you should be creating a community around it and for it.

4) Collaboration: Work with anyone, anywhere to achieve a common goal. This should be key to any company, especially when launching a new product. Your customers could be anyone. Who better to solicit feedback and ideas about your product than the ones who are already using it? Going beyond that, the social web allows us to collaborate basically with anyone that's connected to the web. Collaboration fosters creativity and innovation. It would be foolish not to use it. Forget the costly and expensive R&D teams. Collaborate with your employees. Like your customers, they are the ones who know and work with your product day in and day out.

5) Contribution: First and foremost this means being helpful. What you put into social media, is what you will ultimately get out of it. It's really that simple. You need to contribute before you can ask for something in return. On Twitter, re-tweet valuable information from your followers and abroad. Contribute to the conversations going on around you. Every avenue of social media allows you to contribute and participate in someway shape or form. I don't think I need to expand on this any further.

6) Sharing: This aspect is especially true if you are using social media for personal branding. Share your knowledge with others through blogging. Knowledge is power, and by sharing it you, are arming people with power. Share and promote quality content whenever and wherever you find it. The knowledge you share either through blogging or Google Reader is the foundation for what social media is based upon, conversation. Always remember, sharing and self promotion is always a two-way street.

What social media isn’t:

1) Social Media isn’t easy. Anyone can set up a blog, Twitter and Facebook account. That's the easy part. You could teach a child to do that. It's how we use these tools that is the challenge. Social media takes time and plenty of it. It takes commitment and also an understanding of how things works. This is not something you can just jump into and reap the benefits. Like anything else you must crawl before you can walk.

2) Social Media isn’t the end all solution for every business. There are some industries that are very niche or for instance locally based, that social media is just not a viable solution for. Tom's pizza shop down the block could care less about social media. He might have a need for a website, maybe listings in the local Yahoo or Google search, but that's about it.

3) Social media isn’t about list building and Friending hundreds to thousands of people. Social media is about connections, meaningful ones at that.

4) Social media isn’t a "set it and forget it" type of medium. Read #1

5) Social media isn’t a replacment for SEO. It's simply an effective tool that compliments it, but should not relied upon as a total replacement.

6) Social media isn't about ROI (to some extent). If your goal is strictly to make money, you are not going to last to long. Social media is about VOI (Value of investment). Social media is about the conversation. You cant put a price tag on conversation. Instead, you should be measuring the success of the conversations. Currency in social media is valued in the content that is created along with relationships. Both of these elements are needed, not one or the other. The VOI is measuring value of the conversations. How many comments were left? Were they positive? How much buzz is happening on Twitter? How many back-links were generated in the search engines? What bloggers/blogs are talking about us? Did we build brand awareness, create and build customer loyalty? VOI is always measured for the long term and never short term.

I want to close this with a fantastic video by Perry Belcher called the 7 secrets of social media. I have embedded it below. Please take the time and watch the full video. It outlines a lot of what I have talked about in this post today, along with a few other key elements that defines how to successfully get involved with social media.



Image by Jason Vance under Creative Commons License.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

The Best Solution to Embargo Angst? Write Something Else.

As blogging approaches the traditional role of journalism, traditional elements of journalism, including public relations firms, embargoes, briefings, and bias are going to surface, as they have with traditional marketing, media and business for centuries. Today's flare-up, kicked off by one of the best discussion starters on the Web, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, isn't the first time embargoes have been slammed, and it certainly won't be the last time. Back in August, I discussed why I believed the embargo process was both broken, but necessary, and Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb followed on with a great take of his own.

I think the bigger issue is not that embargoes are being broken - which they are by blogs both big and small - but instead, that there are a large number of sites who act like they are the only game in town, and that they must cover every single story.

To those guys, please stop. Seriously.

In the tech blogging sphere, there is a serious echo chamber. While I look forward to banging through my Google Reader feeds every day, I can pretty much bank on seeing the same story, spun a different way, a good dozen or two dozen times by every single tech blog - even if it's clear that they are just reporting that someone else reported the news. If you see a story has been covered already and you have nothing to add - leave it alone.

Given the ease of news distribution, let's now write with the assumption that everybody reading your site is reading a few others as well. If you see a story broken by TechCrunch, or ReadWriteWeb or Mashable or VentureBeat or CenterNetworks, there's no need to pile on and become story number 18 on the topic. Let it go and write about something else - unless you have unique insight, unique quotes or access.

In my day job, I work with press releases and embargoes and reporters on a frequent basis. There is a need to be sure announcements go out when the products and partners are ready, or the customer is ready to take press calls. But Arrington is no doubt right that, as king of the hill, which TechCrunch is, some companies and PR teams are making coverage on the site practically mandatory, and near harassment of him and his team is no doubt occurring.

When trying to get coverage elsewhere, memorably one time in 2006 in Computerworld, I know I aggressively called the feature reporter every few hours until they finally picked up. After berating them for covering a competitor, and not our story, I got hung up on (no doubt deservedly so). I can only imagine being a TechCrunch reporter getting hit over and over by desperate firms, begging for coverage and honoring of their embargo.

A suggestion to those PR teams, please stop. Seriously.

Take your story somewhere else, to one of the many other tech blogs who write well, and will give your company or service its due. There are many new writers who have posts to file, and they want your story - and they will honor your requested embargo.

On this site, when I was running the whole thing myself, and now, with the great team of writers we have here, no embargo has ever been broken. On one occasion, I prematurely posted the Seesmic/Disqus integration news, having forgotten the day it was due, but I promptly deleted and reposted the next day. But one of the major reasons I haven't broken an embargo is because I strive, and ask my cohorts the same, to write things that are new. Cover new stories and new angles and be unique. If it has been covered somewhere else, let it go. We're not TechCrunch, and we're not trying to be.

TechCrunch doesn't have time for stories like Gawkk.com, which we covered last night. They probably aren't interested in stories like the one today on Resume Donkey, or Monday's announcement of Twit Or Fit. TechCrunch also doesn't have the leisure anymore of introducing great new blogs, as we do every month, or highlighting how to better use FriendFeed and Twitter, as we can. That's because they have taken on a new role, as a very real media company, and with their focus on Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo! and other big companies, there's room down at the bottom for us small fry to find the stories that are in the cracks.

It takes a different mentality to find new companies and new angles that nobody else has written before, that doesn't require a PR firm's input or embargo. And it takes strength from the PR firms to turn away from their top target and take the story somewhere else. While I don't think today's missive from Arrington will do just that, it might make some think different about the way they blog and distribute stories.

Social Media Marketing - Who, What, When, Where, Why and How?

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


If you are an individual or small business who is looking to get started with social media marketing, you have your work cut out for you. You must first examine the landscape to see if marketing, using social media is even a viable solution. If your current or potential customers are engaging online, odds are you need to be as well. Before you get started, have you asked the right questions? Done all your homework? Using the five W's, and the occasional H, I decided to put that into the context of social media marketing.

1) Who:

The keyword here is demographics. Who exactly are you trying to market to, single women, generation X'ers, parents etc? What are their household incomes, and can they afford your product? By knowing as much as you can about your customer's profile, you can target your marketing efforts more efficiently, and minimize wasted costs. This is more true with a niche product than anything else.

Advertising budgets are tightening today more then ever. You need to spend that money more wisely and effectively. Consider buying advertising on blogs, as opposed to a traditional and rather costly PPC campaign. First and foremost, search engine traffic is still king, but you can not rely on it solely as your pot of gold. Staying consistent with your marketing efforts in social media by default increases your visibility in search. Play your cards right and you can eventually start to lower the cost ofPPC spending, and in time totally eliminate it.

Don't get me wrong, social media is not the viable and end-all solution for every business. Search engine traffic, whether it's organic or paid always needs to be a top area of focus and never overlooked. The fact of the matter is, when people are looking for something, they resort to search engines first. How will you fare in the search results? Social media is an excellent link building tool, learn some of the SEO basics and be consistent, and you will achieve better search results.

The other part of the who, is who are the influencers? In social media we refer to influencers such as Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan,and Louis Gray. Build relationships and target the specific thought-leaders that are related to your industry. Influencers in their own respect have broad reach and influence over potential buyers. Influential marketing is a gateway, seed it small, and it will grow fast. Remember the name of the game with this is time, forming relationships meaningful at that, takes plenty of it. In addition to influencers, target and focus efforts on the "New Influencers ". These are power social media consumers. These are the prominent bloggers, people who upload the most videos to YouTube, the power diggers and stumblers. They are the most vocal and active on their social networks and so forth. They have to some extent a loyal and large following, and with that comes a certain degree of power and influence. YOU might even be a new influencer, and you don't even know it.

2) What:

What are the tools, mechanisms and channels that you will use? A grassroots marketing campaign will require pulling out all the stops. Starting a blog is mandatory, choosing the platform is next, WordPress or Blogger, self hosted or service hosted? What social networking sites/communities should my business be participating on, Facebook, MySpace, or both? Which is better targeted for my product? Do we need to set up a Twitter account? What will the Twitter account be used for,conversing or broadcasting? Explore and try new channels, podcasting, and creating original video are some examples. Something I touched upon in the beginning was search engine traffic. What is more effective cost wise, time invested in pay per click campaigns, or time invested with human social media efforts, or both? What channels, if any should we spend marketing dollars on, banner/text links on blogs, ads on Youtube, on Facebook, branded audio spots on podcasts ? I'm sure I'm leaving plenty out, but you see where I'm headed on this one. Find use and learn the essential tools that you will require for publishing, promoting and listening.

Consider what amount of time you are willing to commit to your marketing efforts. What are your objectives, a hard sell, creating brand awareness, buzz, or recognition? What markets am I going after? Should I focus on international, domestic or both?

3) When:

The time is now. A majority of smaller and medium sized businesses are not engaging in social media. Are you one of them? Don't hesitate any longer. Your competitors are using it and there is no reason why you shouldn't be too. The traditional and costly marketing methods such as print are becoming less and less effective. Consumers have adapted with the times, so don't get left behind. You can achieve better results with a social media advertising campaign for a fraction of the costs, compared to old school traditional ways of marketing.

4) Where:

Where is the conversation taking place? Where should you respond and engage on, Twitter, your blog, Facebook? Where should you create outposts? Go where the existing and potential user-base is and establish a presence, it's that simple. Never spread yourself too thin, but don't go overboard either, otherwise you end up creating more work than really needs to be done.

5) Why:

The question should read more like why not? Your customers are using it. With the current economic crisis, a recession, and no sign of things getting better, marketing budgets are being slashed. What are your alternatives? I have already talked about some of the positives, such as it's cheaper and more effective than the old school traditional ways of marketing. Social media, because of it's medium, brings globalization to your company's front door. It's easy and anyone can do it, just as long as they are willing to invest their time into it by learning, and participating. Your competitors, especially the ones in the know, are already are using social media. Have you noticed? Social media is about conversation. You want people talking about your product, spreading the word, and creating brand awareness in the process.

6) How:

Social media is not a rush job. It's not about creating a website, Twitter or Facebook account and calling it a day. Don't be fooled or mislead by the hype, the tools are only the facilitators of the message. Yes they are important, but without a basic understanding of how to use them, they are in effect rendered useless and become nothing more than a one way megaphone, with no one listening at the other end.

I will end with a little more food for thought:

• How are we going to participate?
• How are we going to create openness?
• How are we going to create, find and react to the conversation?
• How do we find and create community around our product?

If I gave you the answers to all of these questions, I would have nothing else to write about:)

Image by Leo Reynolds under Creative Commons license.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

We've Only Just Begun to Syndicate Our Content

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

It wasn't too long ago that blogging and pull technology, including RSS, first became popular. If you published new Web site content, and wanted the world to know about it in real time, your delivery and distribution options were very limited.

Publishing content updates was pretty much the same as it is today. You would upload your new pages to the server and hope to see some decent search engine traffic. But you relied more on bookmark traffic, and other means of marketing, such as e-mail, to get people to your site. Important as it is to get new traffic, retention is equally as vital. Quality content, useful products, affordable prices and great customer service, are all factors in keeping people coming back to your site.

The early days of the wild, wild, Web.

In the early days, before Google, search engines took days, and often weeks, to crawl and index new content. There were a lot of hoops to jump through to get listed, and you could be waiting weeks to months for a manual review of your site for inclusion. If you didn't have the patience to wait that long, you always had the option of paying a nice fee for an express review, to get your site approved. But the days when Altavista, Lycos,Yahoo, and a few others reigned supreme were also the days the spammers dominated search results.

Therefore, if you were lucky enough to get indexed in a timely fashion, chances are some spam-related bottom feeder had already beaten you out, leaving your pages buried back in the search results. Because spam was so bad and such a problem, a lot of Webmasters adopted the " If you can't beat them join them " mentality. As a result, the search engines almost became rendered useless for a period of time, because they were filled with nothing but spam, mainly in part due to black hat SEO tactics.

E-mail was the name of the game, and it actually worked.

Newsletters are something I, and many other Webmasters, heavily used to inform our user base of new Web site updates/product offerings and so forth. This was as real time as it got back then. Composing daily and weekly e-mails got to be quite a chore, but proved to be very effective. This of course did not last long.Spammers eventually discovered, and killed e-mail marketing for the rest of us. How many of you have received or reported spam e-mail, or even what you perceived to smell like spam to Spamhaus or Spamcop? Even with these most opt-in compliant e-mail lists, you still have frequent headaches with people reporting your legitimate e-mail as spam. The spam reports are also e-mailed to your Web host, and usually to their abuse dept, which causes more unneeded headaches. For non commercial uses such as notifying small or close groups of people, e-mail is still effective and has its place. And nowadays, marketers who use commerce e-mailing must ensure their lists are opt-in/out, and that their compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. It also takes a significant amount of more e-mail addresses to click and convert. Besides, people are a lot more reluctant to submit their e-mail addresses today than they once were. Even if they do, the chances of them actually seeing the message diminishes greatly thanks to spam filtering, and disposable e-mail addresses.

We have come a long way in a short period of time.

Today we publish and consume more content faster than ever before. WordPress has become the new FrontPage. Web sites are now blogs. e-mail and newsletters have been replaced by RSS. Micro-blogging applications such as Twitter have filled the void in between. Today when new content is created and published, it's usually done on a blog, and syndicated automatically thanks to RSS and the blogging application used. Today when you publish a blog post, it's distributed and found instantly in RSS readers within minutes of being written. Google and other search engines love blogs, because they are constantly publishing new content. Blogs that update frequently often will have more influence and higher rankings in search. Blogs and traditional Web sites get indexed in search engines, but that's where the similarities end, in terms of real time publishing and real time distribution. Blogs are indexed within minutes, but Web sites often take longer, with a lower probability for achieving higher in the search results.

So just what happens after you click the publish button on a blog post?

When you click publish, your blogging software automatically sends a ping alert to special servers maintained by Google Blog Search, Yahoo, VeriSign and others. The ping lets them know that you have recently published new content. Ping servers then alert aggregators, search engines and others to send out bots to crawl the blog for updates. The ping also alerts data miners and text miners that you have updated. Data miners are in the business of metrics, and this data is often sold to and used by corporations. Text miners are the true bottom scrapers, also commonly referred to as "splogs". Splog is short for "spam blog" and is used to describe an auto updating blog, setup to scrape feeds at regular intervals and post them. They exist for the sole purpose of either displaying ads, such as Google’s Adsense or for the purpose of creating search engine traffic, which in turn is used to promote other splogs. Splogs are automatically generated, and there is not much you can do about them nowadays other than report them to the search engines. The next step in the process, which is set in motion seconds after you press publish, is sending the new blog post to aggregators such as feed readers like Google Reader, and sites that pull RSS feeds, such as alltop.com etc. The human redistribution process (sharing, bookmarking, etc) then takes over and the cycle is started all over again. Compared to the old days, all this happens within minutes.

In Closing

Publishers today do not have to worry or spend as much time with the distribution of their content as they did way back when. Time is now spent focusing on producing quality content. Gone are the days of the wild wild Web. We are now using smarter, and more effective tools and publishing methods to get the word out faster than ever before. What's next on the horizon for content syndication?

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Brand Reputation Management Is Not a Monday-Friday Gig

The concept of a workweek starting at 8 a.m. on Monday and concluding at 5 p.m. the following Friday is cute, but not all that realistic in most cases. Whether you're in sales or engineering, marketing or technical support, there seem to always be tasks that need your attention outside of the listed business week in the company handbook. With the rise of the Web and realtime response and discussion across social networks, managing a brand's reputation is absolutely a 24 by 7 operation. Sometimes, as a groundswell takes on your company, or your products, waiting until Monday to react is simply not an option, for the damage will already have been done.

Today's victim is the pain reliever Motrin, who posted a condescending ad that had many parents seeing red. The ad, posted on their main Web site, essentially stated that carrying one's baby in a sling or backpack would cause undue pain, requiring their product. While delivering a need and solution makes sense, they unnecessarily mocked babywearing as being in fashion, and making you appear like a real mom. The condescending ad ignored the reality of needing to go "hands-free" simply to function, fashion be darned. As a father of twins, I may not be a mom, but I often carry one of the kids around in a sling or a baby carrier, whether to do dishes, or just to type without having to go one-handed. And Motrin's ad was misguided. After my wife viewed it, she said she was surprised the ad got through a series of reviews and passed.

(See the video archived on YouTube)

While not incensed as many mothers said they were, and in a household that didn't have Motrin in the medicine cabinet anyway, we discovered the ad through the power of Twitter, which was ablaze with mommybloggers slamming the campaign. (See: #motrinmoms)

On a weekend not dominated by major news, Motrin's brand got stomped on, and waiting around until Monday to pick up the pieces would be too late. After almost a day of getting dissed, the Web site finally went down tonight, either through exceeded demand, or by way of the company's intervention.

When I talk to brand managers about social media, I recommend three clear steps:

1. Understand
2. Observe
3. Act

They need to understand that your brand is at the mercy of its constituents. And you need to be using monitoring tools to rapidly discover and act upon how it is being used or mentioned - no matter what day it is.

Some basics to get started:

• Twitter Search - to see realtime mentions of your brand or keywords.
• TweetBeep - sending alerts of keywords or your brand to e-mail.
• BackType Alerts - to see whenever your brand is mentioned in comments around the Web.
• Google News search - alerts to e-mail for your brand.
• Google Blog search - alerts to e-mail for your brand in blogs.

These alerts will be automatically sent to you around the clock, even if the doors to your office are closed and the lights are off. Be aware of these services, monitor what is being said, and after all this, act. Don't just react, but do so thoughtfully.

And if you were curious to see just how I look wearing a baby carrier, check out the photo on FriendFeed.

See also:
Marketing Mystic: In Motrin moms debacle, the winner is Twitter
The Standard: Motrin learns there's a downside to viral advertising

Recording: Emerging Media Event Panel

As mentioned previously, I had the opportunity on Tuesday morning to participate in a panel on emerging media with Chris Heuer and Tom Foremski, put on by PR Newswire in Santa Clara, conveniently between my home and work. The discussion ranged from how to approach new media targets as old media struggles, to how to leverage tags on social sites like Delicious and Flickr, and some basics on how to track client mentions and their brands on newer services, like FriendFeed. Chris helpfully recorded the conversation, and posted it to his blog on Wednesday.

I have embedded the recording here:


To instead download the 30 megabyte file in MP3 format, do so here. The conversation lasted about an hour, and you should be able to distinguish between the three voices, including mine, on the panel. If you have reaction or questions, feel free to relay them in the comments.