THINKing

Hidden Gems

OK, I’ll admit it: since Labor Day is approaching I’m taking the lazy way out today and dredging up some excellent old posts that for some reason didn’t get any traction. Have a great holiday.

Fighting For The Middle Ground

Tell Me A Story

I Spy: Top 7 Links For Online PR Espionage

Customer Diss-Service

Your Personal Brand

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Talk To Me, Don’t Pitch Me

Hey lazy PR people! Now that I have your attention, don’t send off-target information for inclusion in this blog, OK? Just like Valeria Maltoni at Conversation Agent, I get too many press releases from lazy PR people who can’t take the time to figure out what it is that I write about. To them, I’m just another name on the distribution list. Blast away with the shotgun and you are bound to hit something.

Come to think of it, I don’t really want press releases. Send me a short email with your idea for THINKing. I’ll read it, I promise. And if it is on-target, I’ll do something with it. Same holds true for people wanting to do guest commentary for THINKing.

Any PR people - lazy or otherwise - with a different idea? Tell me.

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The More Things Change, The More They Remain The Same

As the marketing world morphs daily under the influence of new technology, we elders in the business sit back and marvel at how things have changed. Just last night I was talking with Dave Ruggerio and Randy Seeds of Synergy Studios about the pace of technological advance.  We all reminisced about how we used to do things in our first jobs.

For me, the oldest in the group, I remembered using a Royal manual typewriter in my first job as a reporter. Cut and paste was a true manual affair then. You took a straight edge, tore a paragraph out of your story and taped the new paragraph in. Then, you took the story to the typesetter.  In those days, Randy says corporate logos were hand drawn with India ink.

But here’s the point of all this. Technology may have changed, bringing us blogs and social media, but people haven’t changed since we came out of the trees and onto the African plains.

Marketers need to remember that no matter what vehicle you are using to deliver your message, you should set strategy first, then tightly define your audience. It is, after all, the people that matter most in the marketing equation. Once you clearly understand your target audience, the message almost crafts itself. That hasn’t changed and never will. End of sermon.

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Get Social Fresh

I’m part of a group which is presenting a social media conference, Social Fresh, in Charlotte, Monday, August 24 at the Holiday Inn Center City. Consider this your invitation to attend. You can register here. Here’s what we have announced so far:

We are very excited announce our first round of speakers. From left to right above, Jim Deitzel of Rubbermaid, Keith Burtis of Best Buy, and Social Media evangelist Wayne Sutton, Laurie Smithwick of Kirtsy.com, Chris Harrington of @VoteWoz, and Social Media developer Mike Rundle. These experts and panel announcements can all now be found on our Content page. We have many other speakers in the works from Fortune 500 companies, hip new social media companies as well as social networking power houses.

This is a solid group of social media experts. If you want to learn about where technology is going and how social media can be harnessed for business purposes, then you need to attend.

Additionally, we are accepting sponsors for the event. If you are interested, please sign up here and we’ll get back to you to discuss our sponsorship packages.

Keep apprised of more announcements by following us on Twitter @sofresh.  Below is the rest of our contact information. Hope to see you at the first Social Fresh.

Links

Site - http://socialfresh.com
Tickets - http://sofreshclt.eventbrite.com
Twitter - @sofresh
Contact - info at socialfresh.com
Hashtag - #sofresh
LinkedIn - Fresh SM Pros
Facebook - Social Fresh Page

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Social Media: Strategic Or Tactical?

A friend asked me recently to come talk with him about social media. He has an international client that still focuses on the traditional methods of reaching influencers, the channel and consumers. He wants to think through whether social media is viable for this brand. So, that got me thinking about the nature of social media. This is the first in a series of posts about social media planning.

During my more than 30 years in communications there is one thing that has become clear to me: strategy should come first. So, it’s no surprise that I believe that you should outline your social media strategy first and then the tactics will typically fall into place. Lee Odden has a good post outlining the possible outcomes a social media program might include:

• Gain insight into a community of interest -You can run all the customer surveys you want, but some of the most interesting and progressive market research can be found within the social communities where your customers interact, share information and make recommendations. Tapping into the streams of dialog is a great start to engagement and social participation with your brand.

• Build brand visibility and authority - You’ve heard it before, “Conversations are happening online about your brand, with or without you.” You might as well participate and do so in a way that pays close attention to the interests and needs of your customers - providing them with information and interactions that further support your brand.

• Influence and promotion of products/services - Providing information to educate customers about your products in the formats and media types they prefer can go a long way towards building the kind of buzz that results in new business. By promotion, I mean advertising on social media sites.

• Link building for traffic and SEO - Creating linkbait and promoting it to social media news and bookmarking sites can attract a slew of links from bloggers that read them. However, sustaining high levels of promotion to the same site or with the same user accounts will quickly be outed as social media spam. Creating value for the community is not the only rule, creating value and behaving according to formal and unwritten rules is what sustains social media sourced link building.

• Drive traffic for ad revenue models - Becoming a power user of several social communities involves consistently contributing quality content, rewarding those who vote positively on that content as well as growing a large base followers. That base of like-minded connections can serve as an effective distribution channel for unique and interesting content which drives traffic to ad supported blogs that host the content. The linkbait suggestion above not only attracts links, but also attracts traffic. However, many ad supported sites report that traffic from social media sites is notorious for not clicking on ads. It’s the bloggers that write about linkbait content first viewed on social media sites that drive the kind of traffic which results in ad clickthroughs.

Now, not everyone of these outcomes is right for every brand. To determine which ones are right you have to ask some questions. We’ll delve into that next time.

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Everyman 1, Influentials, 0

Back in the 20th Century, you might remember, PR people were advised to determine who were the influentials in their market and spend the majority of their efforts reaching these elites. The theory was that if you reached these centers of influence - the media or someone who could influence popular culture - you could develop more targeted programs and avoid a mass approach. Approaching influentials was less expensive than mass communications.

The internet changed all that. Information and influence have now been democratized. Like the corporate world, culture is less hierarchical and has fewer layers.We now have a cheap way to reach a mass audience. That’s not to say there is no place for influentials in your marketing program. Although, Duncan Watts disagrees. He thinks it is a waste of money to try to target what Malcolm Gladwell called “tastemakers.” But that is a story for another day.

The media is losing much of its power and its mass appeal thanks to its lockstep liberal media bias and the rise of citizen journalism. I still think PR pros can utilize the media to help reach key audiences, however there are new ways to spread your message. Blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter are the new media PR practitioners need to master.

Guy Kawasaki has some excellent advice for anyone who wants to master these new tools for profit. You’d be well advised to read and put his thoughts into practice.

By Harry Hoover

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Twitter: Time Waster Or Cool Tool?

Liberal newspaper columnist, Leonard Pitts, today says he won’t Twitter. Ever. Works for me. The only thing Pitts and I agree on in this particular case is in his column’s last line:

I will never Twitter you. In the first place, you have better things to do. In the second, I am not that interesting.

It’s not just liberal Pitts. I heard our local Libertarian radio host this morning disparaging Twitter, too. They don’t get it. They condemn it because some people misuse it to broadcast the banal aspects of their lives. Hey, movies, telephones, newspapers, TV, email, blogs, all communication tools have been misused at some point in time.

And, they condemn it because they don’t take the time to figure it out. Luddites!

Scott Hepburn has an excellent response to Pitts’ screed. Hepburn says,

Yes, Mr. Pitts, some people actually accomplish things via Twitter. We’re growing businesses, finding jobs, raising money for charity, planning conferences and engaging in ethics debates.

I’m going to help out the Luddites. Sometime back we took a look at the tactical business use of Twitter, and we provided a list of the top 8 links on the business value of Twitter.

I welcome your thoughts on Twitter. Is it just a fad for broadcasting the banal, or does it have real value?

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Get Write To It

Today’s retrospective look through THINKing’s archives is all about writing. Let’s get going:

Write Tight -  My first news editor hammered one thing into my consciousness: write tight. Leave out the frills, just present the facts and move on.

Tell Me A Story - Since the dawn of time mankind has been a sucker for a story. We may be wearing synthetics now instead of skins, but that one truth has not changed. Whether you are communicating with employees, customers or the media, a story has the most power.

Writer’s Block? -  The toughest thing about writing a news release is getting started. But writing doesn’t have to be hard. Here are a few tips and tricks to help you beat writer’s block.

Get Active -  My lovely bride and mystery novelist par excellence, Terry Hoover, is the queen of the vivid verb. Read the first chapter of her book, Double Dead, to see what I mean.

Top 10 Story Starters For Blocked Bloggers -  Are you blogged out? Got writer’s block big time. So big even my previous post on writer’s block didn’t help? Never fear, your doctor of creativity is here. I have some big time block busters.

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Links - 2/24/2009

Internet Media Sways Shoppers - E-mail and social media marketing boosts customer loyalty and has a positive influence on purchasing decisions even when consumers are trying to reduce their spending, according to two newly released studies.

The Marriage Of Search and PR - Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system.

10 Tips for Blogging Your Way To Small Business Success - Sure blogging and social media are great if you enjoy spending your days ‘cyberloafing’, but they certainly can’t help me to promote my business. Or, can they?

Is Your Organization On FaceBook? It Should Be. - With over 50 million people on Facebook, organizations and brands are also starting to see its benefits as a marketing tool.

New Marketing Tools Coming From Yahoo! - Yahoo is expected to unveil new tools on Tuesday that are intended to help marketers better target their online ads, according to a report Monday evening in The Wall Street Journal.

BONUS LINK: The Powerful Potential Of Permission-Based Email

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Old Fashioned Marketing

Every year we start seeing all the articles about what the new year will hold. Everything from politics to marketing is dissected and forecast. I like to take advantage of trends as much as anyone but you can’t let the new blind you to the tried-and-true.

You may be considering adding podcasts, blogs, local search and social media to your marketing matrix and that is fine, if you strategically think through how they fit with your business and your audiences.

Blogging and podcasting are great tactics, but if your website has no traffic they are a waste of time, effort and resources.

Let’s get back to fundamentals. I’ve had clients who were so ADD they couldn’t sit still long enough to even think about who their best customer is. However, they got so excited about new marketing ideas that they just had to try them. Never mind that those tactics didn’t make sense for their business.

If you don’t know who your customer is, don’t bother spending money on marketing. That would be a colossal waste.

Ask and answer the fundamental questions before you go spending marketing money willy-nilly. How many audience segments do you have? Who is your best customer in each? What is your best customer’s age, employment, sex, and marital status? Do they have kids? What are their media habits? What attitudes or values affect their buying habits?

If your customer buys for business, what is her title? Is she the final decision-maker or is the decision made jointly? Who influences the sale? What industry associations do your customers join? Do they go to trade shows? Which ones?

The more you know about the customer, the easier it is for your creatives to develop relevant, original and impactful messages, and to determine the best ways and vehicles through which to disseminate your messages.

While doing this hard work may not be as much fun as podcasting or Twittering, it is infinitely more important to your bottom line. And as my friend ad agency consultant Joe Grant says, the number one rule of business is to stay in business.

What are you adding to the marketing mix this year? Does it make sense?

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