THINKing

Build The Twittering Journalist List

As a means to help PR people keep up with journalists and media outlets utilizing the social media microblogging application Twitter, My Creative Team has begun this wiki. The list initially was compiled here from information provided by Red66, CNET, Poynter, as well as Twitter keyword searches on terms such as “journalist” and “reporter“. Additionally, we found some Twitter accounts to be very helpful references, including @reportingon and @usnews.

Christian Bogh had the idea for a wiki, and he is the first to have asked to join as a writer to help update the list. Invitation sent, Christian. Drop me a note if you want to help compile the list.

With this wiki now online, we look forward to having others contribute to the list. I’ve broken the list into sections, one for media people and one for media outlets. If you make additions, please keep them in alphabetical order. Thanks.

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Smaller Newspapers Still Thriving?

Although a recent MediaPost Headline Says Smaller Newspapers Still Thriving the facts in their own story just don’t bear that out. The story says,

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, comparing October 2006-March 2007 to the same six-month period a year earlier, the total Sunday circulation of newspapers with circulations less than 20,000 was down a modest 2.7% compared to 4.6% for newspapers overall, and an average decline of 7% at 12 leading metro dailies, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe.

If my business were down 2.7%, I don’t believe any business writer in his right mind would say that we were thriving. Am I missing something here?

In other newspaper news:

Blogs Surpass Newspapers In Google Popularity - (thanks for the heads up from a Steve Rubel Tweet)

Livin’ on a Prayer: Site Offers Wishes for Newspaper Industry 

The Hastings Star Gazette Is Doing Just Fine, Thank You Very Much!

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The Tangible Brand

As marketers, we typically spend a lot of time on the intangibles of a brand, or building the emotional connection to a product or service through communications. The tangible expressions of a brand - the product or service itself, customer service, the retail environment - often don’t match up to what we’re trying to communicate. If we want to build a successful brand, we must differentiate the product, service or corporation in an attractive, meaningful and compelling way using tangible and intangible attributes.

Land Rover seems to get this.  MediaPost’s Marketing Daily reports that Land Rover is tweaking its annual G4 challenge to make the brand more tangible, more about the experience.  Finbar McFall, VP/marketing at Irvine, Calif.-based Land Rover North America says, 

“We have two forms of communications, and one of them is 3D, which is the experiential side of the brand. And it’s especially important for Land Rover. Nothing sells these cars more than people driving them and showing off their capabilities. The spirit of adventure is at the hub of what we do, and this is the best way of showing off the adventure, and this is the best way.”

Are you making your brand tangible? Tell me how.

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Twittering Journalists: The List

OK, I’m making it easier for you to get the regularly updated list of journalists who are twittering. Instead of having to read previous posts and do a cut and paste, I’ve compiled the Twittering Journalists List in Word format for you. If you want to know when an update is available, subscribe to this post’s comments. Each time I revise the list, I’ll comment and you can download the updated list.

If you have additions, please drop us a note or comment on this post.

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Personal Branding

In our increasingly interconnected, digital world, your personal brand becomes more important because it is hanging out there naked for anyone to see via Google and all the other search engines, as well as social media sites. A brand rests on truth, not on a thin veneer of calculated actions. So, like any good brand, you must nurture and maintain your reputation.

To that end, I’ve written a white paper on personal branding that you can download for free. Please let me know what you think of it.

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Junta42 Top Blogs

Thanks to you, we have made the Junta42 list of top marketing blogs again. We rank number 37 on the list. You can help us move up the list by visiting Junta42 and voting, or giving us a “hitch” as they call it. This requires registering, but I’d truly appreciate your effort and support.

While we are on the subject of honors and awards, we still need your vote for the Blogger’s Choice Award. THINKing is the number one blog in the marketing category and we need help to stay there.

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Social Media’s Value

As DJ Francis pointed out in his THINKing guest posting, many marketers are having a hard time coming to grips with what - if any - ROI comes from social media involvement. PR people, as our sister site points out, understand that it’s all about dialogue.

Listening to - and interacting with - your customer is a good thing for a company to do.  Because, guess what? Everyone else is listening online and asking questions about your brand. Word-of-mouth as an influencing factor ranks highest in every marketing-oriented survey I’ve ever seen. When I worked on the NC Tourism account, all of our research pointed out the power of personal referrals to get family and friends to visit our beautiful state. The internet and social media have amplified that power and have made it searchable.

A recent report says that affluent audiences in particular are “listening” very closely to what others have to say online about a company’s customer service.  According to MediaPost,

As social media usage becomes more ubiquitous, says the summary report, affluent consumers are using social media channels to share their personal customer service experiences and learn about others’ care experiences when making purchase decisions.

If your organization is going to survive, it must be actively involved in building and monitoring community online. Says Lynda Kate Smith, vice president, Care Business, Nuance Enterprise Division,

“With consumers increasingly using social media to share feedback on their care experiences, it has become increasingly difficult for businesses to ignore or hide from bad experiences.”

There’s your ROI.

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The ROI Of Social Media

This is the first in our guest blogger series. Today’s post comes from DJ Francis, Online Marketer.

Marketers know that social media is impacting their business, but no one knows exactly how much. In what ways is social media changing business, how is this new medium different, and can we measure it? Should we even try? In short, what is the worth of social media?

• Listening: Social media offers infinite market research, branding, and listening opportunities. I dare you to search for “[Your brand] sucks” and see what you find. Listening – a simple yet often over-looked aspect of human life – may be the Web 2.0 killer app and smart companies are catching on.

TNS/Cymfony found that “Revolutionaries” – companies that focused on listening rather than selling – “have a more sophisticated approach to creating strong relationships with consumers and as a result are gaining a competitive edge,” said Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer Jim Nail. (Bill Green at MakeTheLogoBigger has some more great insights.)

• Responding: Social media gives marketers the chance to give quick feedback and break down unnecessary walls. Businesses are using twitter to quickly solve customer’s problems or connect straight to the CEO (try @Zappos or @ComcastCares). I have also had success reaching VIPs through LinkedIn questions – it is amazing the number of higher-ups who gladly answer queries on the site.

So how does this change business?

First, it means that business success will increasingly be more merit-based rather than on spin or sheer advertising dollars. But marketers will also need to be ready to change their strategy to adapt to this new medium. This involves less top-down thinking and a different consideration of what makes a site profitable.

When I heard AOL had bought Bebo I cringed just thinking about the energetic startup in the clutches of a Web 1.0 holdover. From The Economist: “The non sequitur is to assume that the new service will be a revenue-generating business in its own right.” But the service could be amazingly valuable if marketers used it as a listening mechanism.

Second, expect customer behavior to change as social media changes from a destination to a platform. Marc Andreessen, one of the creators of Netscape and all-around Web wunderkind, said it best in an interview with ZDNet on April 25, 2008:

“It’s been this cliché in the industry that email is used by old people like you and me, and then instant messaging is used by kids. Well, it turns out instant messaging was used by kids 5 years ago…It turns out that kids – real kids – today are communicating primarily through social networks.”

Has your business changed its strategy because of this? ‘Nuff said.

The Gist

In most instances, when marketers talk about measurement or ROI of social media, they are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. You can’t apply a Web 1.0 gestalt in a world where the audience cannot only respond, but can also generate more content than any single company.

Instead of measuring how well we are pushing our message onto potential customers, we should instead gauge our success on the number of conversations listened to, problems resolved, and useful suggestions received from the community of customers we already have.

One day, we may be able to get quantitative metrics on social media (the folks at Forrester Research are on the right path). While we have to settle for qualitative data right now, I believe that this will prove the best type of information in the end.

Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, said in AdWeek that “The other risk is that in the zeal to track, marketers and agencies will lose sight of the need to trust that getting closer to customers is a worthy goal in and of itself.”

Marketers seem obsessed with assigning value to interactions on social media sites. But real success comes when you value the interaction itself.

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