Shrinking budgets make blogs appealing

The shift has begun. In the final chapter of Paul Gillin's The New Influencers he discusses the how the shift from traditional marketing - where the big $ is spent - to peer to peer marketing will slowly continue to change.

However, I would argue that the recent economic crises has changed that. With unemployment on the rise and companies scrambling to slash budgets, now is the best time for organizations to make their moved to break into the blogosphere.

This will not be an isolated trend.

As many bloggers are quick to point out, the technology surrounding this medium is developing so rapidly, that many organizations are now able to utilize and thus analyze blogs and social media networks in a quantifiable way.

For example, organizations like Telligent are creating social media analytics tools. According to a post on the Wall Street Journal, Telligent has announced the release of a new analytics tool that has the ability to:

Harvest 2.0 provides deep analysis and trending on how people are contributing within a community and helps enterprise organizations prove the value of their social computing investments.
New innovations in Harvest 2.0 include:

-- Social Fingerprints(TM) -- View the unique social fingerprint of every member of your community and quickly see how they contribute.

-- Scorecards -- Quickly summarize important information and enable community managers and business owners to understand the pulse of the community.

-- Sentiment and Tonality -- See what people are saying--either positively or negatively--in your community. Visual trending information lets you know immediately what people think.

-- Forecasting -- Predict future behavior based on current trends. Know where your customers are going before they get there.

-- Widgets and RSS -- All reports created within Harvest are reusable as either widgets or through RSS, enabling the reuse of data back into the community.

I believe social analytics tools such as these will continue to spur the rapid movement from traditional marketing mediums to blogs and social media sites.

The New Rules of Marketing And PR: A Reflection

So, I've just finished reading David Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing And PR, and I feel that it is only appropriate to reflect upon what I believe are the most important points of the book.

At first glance, this is not an easy task considering the numerous insights Scott provided, but nevertheless one worth doing.

So here are my thoughts.

Distilled to its purest form, Scott's book is comprised of a series of insightful case studies and "new rules," all used to illustrate one point: The Web has changed the way marketing and PR professionals can converse with masses of "underserved," highly attentive consumers, and we (professionals) can't afford to miss out on these conversations.

An important point - and one blasphemous to my kind (PR folk) - is that the Web has blurred the traditional lines between marketing and PR. Rather than opposing disciplines, we are both goal oriented practitioners wishing to make a quantifiable impact - whether that stem from additional revenue, petition signatures or listserv signups - on our organization's bottom line.

Okay Jay, but how can we go about doing this?

Im glad you asked. The answer is simple, Content.

The key to any successful Web presence is quality content, and lots of it. Not only does frequently updated quality content help drive your web presence up in search engine rankings, but it also can be used to drive customers into the sales process (or a mutually beneficial goal for a non-profit).

Overall, I think Scott's book was an invaluable tool that opened my eyes to the immeasurable marketing and PR opportunities made possible through Web based social mediums.

Talking With A Marketing Legend

This evening I had the privilege of having Dr. Ron Tatham as a guest speaker in my Consumer Behavior course.

Dr. Tatham has a laundry list of accomplishments in the field of marketing, including his most recent 2007 receipt of the American Marketing Association (AMA) "Legend of Marketing Research" award. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that when any professional organization labels you a "legend," you're damn good at what you do.

And tust me, he is.

As is customary on such occassions, my professor sent our class a bio on Dr. Tatham several days ago and requested we come to class prepared with several questions to ask. Usually I don't get very excited about these events because in my experience most guest speakers aren't overly enthusiastic or insightful and cause time to drag.

But, After reading Dr. Tatham's Bio my interest was peaked. Admittedly, I still didn't prepare any insightful questions. I like to think I work better on the spot.

Dr. Tatham's speaking style had clearly been honed over decades of boardroom and classroom experience. Like every good teacher or mentor, he was easy to listen to.

As the discussion progressed and I became more vocal, the topic suddenly turned career advice. Dr. Tatham said there only three questions any person in any career at any level needed to ask to be successful:

First, ask the question, "What decision do you need to make?"

Second, determine "What info. you need to make that decision?"

Third, determine "What criteria will the information be judged by?"

I truly belive with these three questions I've just learned everything I will ever need to know to be a success in any career.

If anyone checks this out, let me know what you think. I may be way off-base, but I feel like Dr. Tatham is on to something.

Wheres the $ in blogging?

Have you ever paused in the middle of a post and wondered how you could turn your new hobby into a career? And, even if you could, how much could you really expect to get paid?

I know I have.

To start, how much do the "top tier" bloggers make?

I found some good figures in an article titled How Much Do Top Tier Bloggers and Social Media Consultants Get Paid? We Asked Them! written by Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb.com that lists the average per post payment as $25.

$25 per post... Kirkpatrick estimates taking on two clients and averaging three posts per day for each client will net you about 40k a year. I know to me, 40k doesn't sound like much for a "top tier" blogger. Now I don't intend to sound greedy, but personally, I think bloggers who are turly capable of generating ROI for their customers deserve more than 40k.

Apparently, the real money for professional bloggers stems from consulting. These consultants reported their average rate from as low as $150 per hour to as high as $300 per hour. Down side..... these professionals have to work their asses off to preserve current clients and pusruit new ones, an especially difficult task during the current (budget slashing) economy.

I was intrigued by the prospect of making $ by blogging, so I started to look around for some information on how to get started in this field. To my surprise, I came across another article on ReadWriteWeb.com titled Participate in Social Media, Get Money for College about a new social network site called collegeNET.

If your in college and trying to hone your social media skills, this is a great place to start. CollegeNET is a unique forum that is completely supported by advertisers and scholorship sponsors. Students who enter the community are able to post their ideas (on any topic) to be voted on by their peers. The catch... students who host the most popular posts for a given month are awarded college scholarships!

If your a student of social media, or even an average Joe who could use some scholarship money you should check out collegeNET and start make those $$benjamins$$ now.

Democratizing or Reublicanizing of the Web?

In Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba's Citizen Marketers, much time is spent analyzing the democratization of the Web. But I ask the question, doesn't it seem that this democracy is being side stepped for the republicanization of the Web?

I completely agree with the basic tenents of their argument, in which increased broadband speed, availability of more tools and open source data sharing lead to the increased ability of citizen marketers to disseminate both compelling and entertaining information.

However, does this not reflect America as a whole in that the majority of people THINK we are living in a democratic society when in fact we are more like a republic? Is it not true of both our government and the evolving blogosphere that a small number of elceted representatives are (for the most part) in charge of the country/ blogosphere?

As with government, when citizen marketers defer much of their authority to several prominent Web figures (like our Digg's and Technorati's) they have transferred a great deal of power to a select few.

Understandably, many would argue that I am way off base, and that Web sites like Digg and Technorati (both of which I have quickly fallen in love with) are merely a representation of what the blogosphere is already chatting about, calculated through numerous complex systems of algorithims and that whole shpeel (like that word? me too). But, as with elected officials, how do we know that special interest groups aren't really running the show behind the scenes?

Maybe this is just my skeptical nature at work, or maybe I'm on to something(wishful thinking perhaps?). I would love to hear back from anyone who can support or even better, contradict my statements.

What to take away from the slideshow

I Think this slideshow is an excellent introduction to the uses of important networking sites such as Twitter and the like.

Matt Dickman brings up a great point in his slideshow. Communication mediums are becoming soooo saturated these days the best way to make a real impact is through a MULTI-FORMAT or multi-medium approach.

As Dickman points out, we are practitioners of the 21st century, and as such we have easy access to multiple mediums of communication inclduing; text, audio, video and photography.

So what can we do to make the most of all of these forms of communication? And what does a modern marketing mix containing these mediums look like? All questions I wish I knew the answer too.

But as I crawl my way through this experience I have found a few interesting insights. Once of the most compelling conversations about these emerging questions was posted on The Daily Joe, an interesting blog about "Publishing + Marketing insights in the age of user-generated content from Joe Kutchera."

Kutchera was able to talk with Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra about the emerging trends in the blogosphere and where this is all leading. The conversation is insightful and I would reccomen this as a read well worth your time.

Facebook Heats Up in Chile

The omnipresent social meedium facebook continues to assert its' importance to the future of PR 2.0 with blistering growth from Aug-Sept. Reported by Matt Dickamn on his blog Techno//Marketer, Facebook experienced major growth in many foreign markets, with Chile leading the pack, gaining more than 1,000,000 new users throughout the month.

This type of continued growth coupled with the increasingly useful social marketing and trend tracking tools are making facebook more appealing to a wide variety of users.

According to Inside Facebook, a blog about tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for Marketers and Developers

Facebook has just launched a limted test of a new version of Lexicon, the tool for researching what users are saying on each other’s walls on Facebook. The previous version only showed relative volume of terms over time, but the new version has several key enhancements:

• Actual numbers, instead of just relative volume. Now, you can see how many wall posts are actually being written containing the given term.


• Demographic breakdowns, by gender and age


• Geographic breakdowns, by US state, Canadian province, or UK country (no data is available outside of these 3 countries yet). You can also do comparisons between two terms on the same map.


• Sentiment over time. Facebook has not said exactly how it determines this measure. You can also compare sentiment between two terms.


• Associations. You can see terms frequently mentioned alongside a given term.

Tools like these give me hope that the difficulties of quantifying message and campaign exposure that have plagued PR and Marketing practitioners alike, are soon to be a thing of the past.

Marketing Language

I was struck by an an amazingly concise, thoughtful observation while reading David Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR. "Marketing language that can be substituted for another company's isn't effective in explaining to a buyer why your company is the right choice."

At first, I dismissed the line as common sense, but when I started looking around I saw countless examples.....EVERYWHERE, that violate this principle. Just go searching through PR Newswire and browse any industry release; there is a 90% chance (*Caution, fictional statistic) what you've read is a cookie-cutter press release stuffed with corporate jargon about cutting-edge ideas and break through technologies.

My question is, when did it become out of style to write like your talking to a human and not a biological information processing unit (if that doesnt make sense in context them in clearly not as clever as I think I am). I liken corporate jargon to today's Politically Correct (P.C.) speech. Although it serves a purpose in some cases, the language often detracts readers from the real point of an article.

SO I ask myself, what can I do to avoid falling into the same traps when I get "out there?" Luckily, Scott addresses this idea a little further in his own blog, and suggests several good texts to help remedy the matter. Hopefully, with a little help we can all eliminate this problem and help rid the world of marketing language.