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.

12 million to one, a lesson in pitching

Spam, the bane of all that is Internet. A pesky relic that remains from the dark ages of the Internet, when all was ruled by the simple phrase, "you've got mail."



However, in recent years, many public relations practitioners have had the misfortune of inheriting the occupational slur, "spammers."

Disgusting, I know.

But, to my dismay, I know this title isn't completely unwarranted. With increasing access to media gatekeepers via the Internet, PR practitioners are finding it increasingly easier to blast out "spam" pitches to any and all parties they can reach.

STOP IT!

Conventional wisdom may lead you to believe more e-mails = more media coverage, but this couldn't be further from the truth. And the proof is in the pudding, and by pudding I mean an article posted on techradar.com.

According to techradar.com, for every 12.5 million spam e-mails, one response is received.

What does this mean for PR practitioners? Well, if you started pitching 500 leads each day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for 50 years, you would convert on 1 media placement.

Not a particularly efficient method.

Moral of the story, sending out mass "spam" pitches just isn't efficient, and will not generate the results your organization is hoping for.

My suggestion, personalize your pitches and understand you're not talking to another computer, but rather another human being. Take the time to learn about those you're pitching, and don't send out releases containing no newsworthy information.

No News Like Niche News

Once in every long while I feel like I really gain some headway towards fully wrapping my head around the all encompassing term, social media. This being one of those times, I feel compelled to share what (i think) I've learned.

Yesterday, in a random stroke of luck I stumbled upon a tweet linking to an article titled 48 Social News Websites: A List of General and Niche Social Media Communities, which as I'm sure you may have guessed provides an extensive list of social media news sites.



Before I read this post, my reference point for social media news sites were digg.com, technorati.com and icerocket.com. Admittedly, it was incomplete at best.

I was stunned to see there were social news sites for everything from green news at Hugg.com to SWiK.net, "A community driven resource for people who use open source software."

And this article only begins to scratch the social news surface. The author even references a list of "380 Digg clones."

I feel encouraged.

Each of these niche markets represents another opportunity for PR practitioners to engage their target audiences through a mutually beneficial medium. Although I agree this sounds a bit textbooky(i know this isn't a real word), I'm glad to say I really am beginning to understand how to utilize social media for the benefit of a campaign or organization.

The Wrong Measures Of Web Success

It all about the benjamins, or in this case, Web hits.

How could it not be? According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD), "The number of broadband subscribers in the OECD reached 251 million by June 2008, an increase of 14% from June 2007."

Think about it.... 251 million potential Web hits; who wouldn't want a piece of that pie? However, you have to ask yourself, what are those hits, impressions, unique visitors, etc. really doing for your company?

I find myself in the position once again where my thoughts are best expressed by author of The New Rules Of Marketing And PR, David Meerman Scott. And I quote:

Many marketers and PR people also focus on the wrong measures of success. With Web sites, people will often tell me things like, "We want to have 10,000 unique visitors per month to our site." And PR measurement is often similarly irrelevant: "We want ten mentions in the trade press and three national magazine hits each month." Unless your site makes money through advertising so that raw traffic adds revenue, traffic is the wrong measure.

Don't get me wrong, I believe there is great value to be found in tracking hits for web analytics, but that value extends insofar as the analytics can be interpreted to help add to your bottom line.

After all, what does 10,000 hits really tell you? Can you talk to 10,000 hits and ask them what they did or didn't like about your site?

With this in mind, you really shouldn't be asking, "How many hits did we get," you should be asking, "What are those hits generating for us?"

Social Media And The Recession

What can be expected of the future of social media during a fiscally tight time like now? I have my own suspicions on the matter (which I'll get to shortly), but I wanted to know what those with more industry experience were thinking.

The best article I found was Social media will transcend the negative aspects of the recession written by author jptrenn on the Digital Street Journal.

Basically, the author addresses the notion that traditionally, marketing and public relations are the first "expenses" to be dealt away with during a recession. However, traditions can and do change.

The most relevant point Trenn makes in the article is that, "Social media is a whole new ballgame because it covers so much - marketing, customer relations, media relations, public relations, and a whole lot more."

Because social media can be used to address so many fundamental business transactions (for such a modest investment), it can no longer be seen as a dispensable resource.

These two graphics illustrate my point. With 75% of U.S. adults using social technologies, organizations can actually use social media to cut the costs of both marketing a public relations efforts.

Even better, as the costs of social media productions like pod and vodcasts continue to drop, social media becomes a more cost effective strategy for an organization of any size.

Sooooo, my prediction is that savy PR and marketing managers will begin to make greater use of social media in order to cut production costs and to reach more highly targeted consumer markets.

Viral Marketing: Old News With A New Name

Viral Marketing, the Godfather of buzzwords. After stripping away all of the corporate speak and nonsense surrounding the term, what remains at the core?


In chapt. 10 of The New Influencers, Paul Gillin said of viral marketing:

This specialized brand of promotion, also called "word of mouth" or "guerilla" marketing, is nothing new. Each person tells several friends and word spreads on a geometric scale. It is perhaps the oldest form of marketing, but the Internet has given it new power.

I couldn't agree more. I see the roots of today's viral marketing campaigns in the original bad boy of 1800s press agentry, P.T. Barnum. Barnum was able to generate buzz/hype/press for his shows well before they rolled in to town.

Using a combination of extravagant impromptu shows and strong word-of-mouth marketing, Barnum helped plant the seeds of modern viral marketing campaigns.



According to Effective Public Relations, Barnum even started the trend of coining language for his viral marketing campaigns, introducing the American public to jumbo.

My point, viral marketing is not a new idea that needs to scare, intimidate or confuse new practitioners. Viral marketing is an old dog with a new trick, Web 2.0.

So lets cut through the junk and start demystifying the "new" trend of viral marketing.

Brand Name Social Media News Releases

If you're like me, then you may be wondering what a high-profile, brand recognizable social media news realease actually look like. Learning about the theory of SMNR's is effective only to a point...

Searching through PROpenMic I found an article asking: "Who Uses a Social Media Release?" with a link to a blog titled "PR squared."

In one of co-founder Todd Defren's posts he talked about the growing popularity of the social media news release. What really caught my attention were the sheer number of high profile scoial media news releases he gave examples of.

In reality, not all of the releases are as well made as they could have and perhaps should have been. However, they provide a basis for soon to be practitioners like myself to understand how to format and improve on current social media news releases.

Even better, PR squared authors posted their own suggestions for formatting social media news releases.

So, if your feeling a little overwhelmed this can work as a good starting point for developing your own personal style for your social media news releases.

Search Engine Optimization

This weeks readings really struck a chord with me. In a nutshell, much of what is being discussed concerns search engine optimization, something I worked on with University Hospitals for much of my summer.

Wiki defines SEO as "...the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results." So what does this really mean?

Well, much of my experience with SEO stems from crafting meta tags, the keywords or phrases users search to find information about a specific topic.

David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing And PR makes an excellent analogy about met tags when describing them as the dewey decimal systems of the Internet.

Just like in a library, users browsing the Internet must search through hundrends upon thousands of entries containing useless information to find what they're looking for. However, savvy marketers/PR practitioners can take advantage of the clutter on the Internet by specifying meta tags with keywords their users will search for.

Back to my job at University Hospitals. Being somewhat familiar with the role of meta tags already, I was tasked with the job of going through an entire portal ( of which University Hospitals has approximately 20 or so) and updating the meta tags of each page with key words.

Without much more direction, other than to pull the keywords in from the text on the page, I was set loose. It didn't take me very long to discover that the majority of the text on the Web site sounded as if it were written for other physicians (the majority is not). Could I really expect the average user (who I am told in Cleveland has a 7th grade or lower reading level) to be searching for Opthalmological surgeons?

Probabaly not. Finally, realizing the futility of crafting meta tags from physicians jargon I began crafting my own. Opthalmological surgeons became eye doctors and meta tags became useful!

So like Scott, I advocate the use of keywords that will really "speak" to your audience in a way that they will actually understand.

Why Do Social Media Campaigns Fail?

I just read an excellent article about the difficulty of generating tangible results from social media camapaigns. This brings up a great question, what are the criteria by which to determine the success of a social media campaign?

In an article posted by Caroline McCarthy, media analyst Adam Sarner expresses his belief that social media campaigns need "...a way to serve both the company putting out the campaign and the audience interacting with it."

How do we as PR practitioners begin to engage our audience in a way that goes beyond just creating "buzz," but also drives people to action (whether that be to engage a specific brand, or influence an action)?

Fortunately, I've been able to find some useful information about how to engage consumers. on he blogs about engaging consumers through the use of widgets.

According to Spoon, good widgets are the result of 3 factors:

• Give Users a Reason to Come Back


• Make it Customizable


• Market Softly and Carefully

I Suggest you check out the articles, they are good sources for beginning to piece together the puzzle that is a successful social media campaign.

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.