Archive for May, 2007

Online Revealed Canada was held this week in Toronto.  This is the second year for this show and the numbers attending were way up.  The organizers partnered with Yahoo! Canada and the keynote by Dr. Hunter Madsen on Social Media in the travel space really resonated.  By a show of hands it was a clear winner as most interesting and helpful session.

Reviews and recommendations are the number one influencer online – and although this is perfect for the travel industry it is conspicuously absent from most travel and destination sites, says Madsen.  By a show of hands in the room a mere handful are doing any social media marketing.

Madsen pointed out that images and video are strong influencers for travel purchase and if a travel or destination site is not using visual elements they’re missing an effective marketing tool.  Using photo and video sharing would be a perfect social media strategy for a travel site. 

Madsen offers these basic principles of social media

1. You do not own your brand. It lives in the hearts and minds of your customers and the public at large
2. You have to be authentic. People want genuine, from the heart content.  They’re not interested in marketing message-speak
3. Tolerate and learn from negative feedback
4. Empower and showcase your advocates.Help them to talk about your brand.

He says there are four sectors of social media. See how you could use these categories to best advantage:

Connecting – networks, newsgroups

Expression – blogs, feeds, ratings, reviews

Facilitate with tools – brand universe (http://www.pontiacunderground.com) flickr, YouTube

Incentives – competitions, create community

Lessons to be learned:

• A brand advocate will create content that promotes your brand
• Focus on the user – make them the heroes
• Sometimes they need a hand – give them the tools or facilitate the end product
• Good user generated content fuels more user content

A good first step is to create articles about the destination and syndicate this content in an RSS feed along with social media bookmarking and tags in place. And use images and video to pre sell the experience.

This has indeed been a week of bad blog pitches, mis-steps and learning moments. 
As blogs nip at the heels of traditional media and become a trusted source of information PR people are paying attention.  “How do we get our news into the hands of bloggers?” is a question I often get asked. “How do we pitch a blogger?”

The answer is – you don’t.  You read their blog.  You comment.  You link to their blog from your own posts. You genuinely communicate with them and build a relationship.  You offer them information they would find valuable.

Vocus released a whitepaper on the rules of blogger relations last week – Five Golden Rules for Blogger Relations. They interviewed some of the luminaries of the blogosphere and got their take on best practices.  It’s a good whitepaper.

The text on their site says:  There are countless accounts of “PR flaks” who have spammed bloggers, mis-targeted or have just plain gotten blogger relations wrong. Don’t risk finding your next pitch blasted on your favorite blogd then they did just that. The way the paper was distributed broke all the rules.

Susan Getgood is one of the bloggers who was interviewed for the whitepaper and this is what she had to say in her blog:

“..the firm appeared to have broken just about every guideline I and the other bloggers had suggested. Impersonal pitch, mass email, untargeted, no relationship with the recipient. You name it, all the rules broken.”

Bill Wagner, Vocus CMO responded:

It (the whitepaper) was sent to our internal list of marketers and PR professionals as well as directly to our customers, including those from both Vocus and PRWeb.  While most of these recipients are familiar with Vocus and welcome our content, some are not.  For instance, many users of PRWeb (a company Vocus acquired last year) may not recognize the Vocus brand and don’t understand why they’re receiving communications from Vocus.  Understandably, some of them viewed our whitepaper offer as spam.

You can read the full response on Susan’s blog post.

If you’re one of the countless PR folk getting your feet wet in the social media sphere please take these golden rules to heart. And take the quiz on Jeneane’s Sessums’ blog. You could just learn how to score good blog coverage and avoid being the next agency with egg on your face.

This survey was conducted By Rebecca McKinnon on journslists who cover news in China. 90% follow blogs.

Blogs are now a near second to newspapers as the most trusted information source in Europe.  A quarter (24%) of Europeans consider blogs a trusted source of information, just behind newspaper articles (30%), but ahead of television advertising (17%) and email marketing (14%).  More than half (52%) of those polled said that they were more likely to purchase a product if they had read positive comments from private individuals on the internet.
 A Pew Internet and American Life survey showed that blog readership in the US jumped 58% in 2005 spawning a new desire for immediate news and information. News blogs like the Daily Kos have readership figures that put all but a handful of the major newspapers to shame.

And the trend continues.
 A recent report on Web 2.0 adoption in the US from the Luxury Institute found that 76 percent of people whose income exceeds $150,000 per year read blogs, up from 57% a year ago.
 This shift creates opportunities for luxury goods marketers to deepen relationships with their wealthy clientele, and the skill with which they seize — or fail to seize — these opportunities will have long-term implications, says the report.

How does this affect your media relations plan? Here are some tips from David Meerman Scott’s book on the New Rules of PR and Marketing: (My comments added in bold)

• Reporters who don’t know you yet are looking for organizations like yours and products like yours. Make sure they will find you on sites such as Google and Technorati.(Search optimized news releases, social bookmarks  and tags on syndicated content will do it for you.)
• If you blog, reporters who cover the space will find you.
• Pitch bloggers, because being covered in important blogs will get you noticed by mainstream media. (Talk to bloggers – don’t pitch them)
• Some (but not all) reporters love RSS feeds.  (Bloggers love RSS feeds)
• Personal relationships with reporters are important.  (Personal relationships with bloggers aren’t just important - they’re essential. Web 2.0 is about a conversation, not a pitch)
• Does the reporter have a blog? Read it. Comment on it. Track back to it.
• Before you pitch, read (or listen to or watch) the publication (or radio program or TV show or blog or podcast) you’ll be pitching to!
• Once you know what a reporter (or blogger) is interested in, send her an individualized pitch crafted especially for her needs.

I’ll be talking more about this at the Media Relations Summit 2007 in D.C. in a few weeks.  I hope to see you all there.

 

I am in Irvine today at the Making the Web Work for You seminar hosted by the Irvine Chamber. Evan Ling from Google is speaking about why it’s so important to use the Web to reach your audience.

A study Google did with Forrester Research shows that traffic is being driven by search. 80% of respondents rate it as the number one resource for finding information prior to purchase, whether online or offline.  64% research online when they intend to buy offline.

So even if you sell only offline it’s very important to have a visible online presence.

Evan quotes the New York Times – consumers no longer want to just hear the message.  They want to be involved with the brand.  The consumer is the new marketing manager.

He talks about the online life of consumers – it’s all about networking and collaboration.  This really reinforces the data about how important this is from the lunch keynote at PR Convergence yesterday. The best time to get the attention of the customer is when they are interested and searching.

Search allows you to particpate in every stage of the consumer’s decision making and purchase cycle.

• Drive interest with a search listing or ad
• Consideriation is ignited by your content
• Purchase – conversion is influenced by the site when they click through

Search is the most cost effective lead gen tool – source: Piper Jaffray.
Over 60% of all websites get more than half of their traffic from search engines.

Do you ever use a search engine when you research [category] online?

Professional services                96%

Health information                   93%

Entertainment                         89%

Real Estate                             78%

Using search to drive your marketing makes it highly targetable and very measurable. Smart marketers want to know if their ads work – with adwords you can test, test, test.  Put up an ad and see what happens.  You can see the response immediately and measure it.

So how much will it cost to run ad AdWords campaign?  Can Adwords pay for itself?  Yes, says Evan. He showed some examples and case studies of how PPC campaigns can return excellent ROI.

C&E Fashions – 7 to 8 times more orders

Cufflinksdepot.com  10% clickthrough rate and sales 10X higher than their initial estimate.  Wall St Journal reporter saw the ad and covered them.

Brian is up first.

He gives a list of social media tools. The ones that this audience was most unfamiliar with was tagging and social bookmarking. 

What’s preventing adoption by PR?

Lack of technical expertise and fear

Social media is all about the conversation- people are talking to each other.

“We’re the people formerly known as the audience”  Jay Rosen

Phil Gomes of Edelman Me Too

Trust Barometer showed that a big shift happened in 2006 – the person most trusted is someone just like me. It’s not a doctor or an academic or someone who wrote a book – it’s ordinary people, your peers.

What have I learned about PR and Social Media?

• Companies have more social media-acceptable content than they think they have
• Finding our voice online is not that hard – it’s not rocket science
• Technology is the easy part
• You need to listen first
• You need a new definition of influential
• Your commitment to the medium must be sincere
• You can’t have a conversation with someone who speaks in messages
• Free tools can help you find the conversation and see how online communities behave
• You need to be knowledgeable, passionate and put in the sweat equity
• The reward is getting attention
• The role of a PR person is to help a client find their voice online – not to be their voice online
• Make your friends online before you need them – engage with the community
• Give them some content they can’t get anywhere else

Eric Schwartzman of iPressroom is the moderator for the conference. He makes the point that there are a few hotbeds of awareness of social media across the US and Los Angeles is not one of them!  Witness the fact that the Social Media Club meeting did not happen here last night.

Eric opened with trends

A big part of PR is about media relations and now there is less opportunity as the traditional media shrinks. As one conpnay gobbles about another there are less and less people to pitch.

Numbers from a recent survey from PR Week shows that there is still only a minimal awareness and appreciation among PR people for new media and no framework to integrate new media into PR strategies.

None of the top 10 print outlets has more than 25 million readers.  The top blogs like engadget and boingboing passed that figure in 2006 and never looked back.  The place you want to see your content has changed.

He gives a quick overview of all the tools available and how to use them in media relations and PR programs.  The walls between marketer and media are collapsing. Instead of pitching for coverage in a magazine a link from their website to your blog or podcast might be a more successful strategy.

Old way:  Find the influencers, trickle down to national media, trade media, local media and the audience.

New way: Influencers are going directly to the audience.  The audience is connected and communicating – they are a community.

Build a business case to convince management that new media is necessary and will bring ROi.

Set objectives: Look at what expertise and resources you have : How will it be inegrated : Benchmark before you start : Measure the results. 

The new media mantra?  You are the media.  You have to create content and if it’s not compelling content you will get lost in the noise.

Traditional methods in PR are fatigued.  They don’t produce results like they used to.

Linda’s session starts with a video – appropriately.  Wow!  It’s a great video.  The soundtrck is Video Killed the Radio Star – the first music video ever played on MTV.

She shows how blogs reported on the London bombings. The iconic photo of the  bombings that showed up in all media was taking with a cell phone,  lt was sent to a friend who posted it on a mobile blog under a Creative Commons licence. picked up by picturephoning.com, from there to WikiNews and from there to Sky News, to the Associated Press and thus into traditional media.  it happened in under an hour!

It was the moment when traditional media realized they no longer owned the news.

Our audience in many cases is now also armed with the technology and the desire to create news content as well as consume it.

Social media is forcing us to open our minds to the definition of media.  User generated content for brands is changing how we market. We are co-creating with mainstream media. Newsweek cover says putting the “we” in WEB.

RSS is driving the Read/Write Web.

Social media is a channel to get your content out.  But more than that it is a place where the conversation is taking place. It’s where your audience is.

Trusted content is becoming very important. Our audiences are connecting around us – we either participate or leave them to talk without us.  Move away from thinking about an audience to thinking about collaborators.

Social media has changed who we trust, who we share with.  84% of consumers go to the blogosphere to do a ‘reality check” before they buy.  They want to hear from someone just like me.

Linda showed the video of the Global Night Commute – see www.invisiblechildren.org

It got lots of mainstream media coverage. And they influenced the powerful 

We have to understand the technology, but more importantly we have to understand how they all work together in order to build effective social media strategies.  You will not be successul if you only understand the tactics.

New technologies have created new mediums.  Knowing where you audience is and which parts they participate in is vital to a successful strategy. 

Twitter – a new online social network tied into your mobile phone. CNN and Google News on Twitter. Social networks are drivng the flow of information.

USA Today now offers a community – a great example of traditional media using social media.  Carnival Cruises launched Carniival Connections – built for about $300 000 and it showed ROI within a few months.  It’s all about bypassing the traditional lines and connecting with others.  Gatekeepers are breaking down.

Figure out how to connect audiences to one another and accelerate the flow of inforimation.  You need to shift your thinking to connecting people, facilitating the conversations, seeding content, making tools available and managing trust.

Linda showed a quick tour of Second Life.  She has a blog  – Business Communicators for Second Life.

The aession closed with a video from the Washington Post on how they are using Social Media – how theri reporters are using web video and laptop editing to create online content. They compete now with CNN.

“We want to make the Washington Post able to be consumed in any device. It’s not about the device – it’s about the content.”

Today is the first day of the Communitelligence PR Convergence seminar.  I am doing a workshop today with Linda Zimmer of MarCom Interactive on social media and how to integrate these campaign in to a PR program.
Stay tuned – it’s going to be live blogging today and tomorrow.  If you have questions, put them on the blog.

 

 

Social media marketing is a topsy-turvy landscape, said Sage Lewis at the Search Engine Watch live event. Users become a part of your brand marketing and social media experiments can easily backfire.

Just as a lawyer should not ask a witness a question he does not already know the answer to, marketers should be wary of throwing open the floodgates of user content. The Chevy Tahoe user-generated video commercials is a perfect example. As part of the Apprentice TV show Chevy created a contest for consumers to produce their own version of a Chevy Tahoe video ad and were hit with a flood of very negative content.

GM still regarded the contest as a success. Consumers submitted more than 21,000 ads and e-mailed commercials over 40,000 times. Chevyapprentice.com has generated 2.4 million page views, and the average visit to the site lasts more than 9 minutes.

However not all traffic is good traffic, warns Lewis.  While it might look good on the stats it’s important to identify who the visitors are, what they’re viewing and what they do on your site. Is it creating positive or negative brand effects?

Targeting social news sites can also bring traffic that might not be positive.  Will a hoard of Digg users really contribute to your bottom line?  Or should you rather aim for Newsvine of Stumble Upon?

The job of the marketer is no longer to control the message – it’s to guide the message. If you get negative content address the issues fast and aim to bring it back to a positive result. It can be a delicate dance, says Lewis.

Online reputation monitoring and measuring the impact of social media on your brand is an essential part of a successful social media strategy. The basic PR and marketing rules, like creating the right content for the right audience, still apply.

Is social media the best way to reach an audience today?  Many advertisers think so. 

MySpace, still the most popular social network by far, is estimated to generate $525 million in the U.S. this year, predicts eMarketer in a report out yesterday. Social Network Marketing: Where to Next? also upped the estimate of U.S. ad spend on social networks overall to $900 million for this year. That’s a hefty jump from $350 million in 2006.

Social networks have spurred a major shift in the way people interact with each other and with media, with more than 70% of Americans ages 15 to 34 actively participating in online social networks, says a study from MySpace/Isobar.

The predicted ad spend is attributed to increased revenue projections for Facebook and additional spending on niche and marketer-sponsored social networks. The study predicts that between 2007 and 2011, U.S. ad spending on social networks will grow 180% to $2.5 billion.  Advertisers obviously feel strongly about where the audiences can, and will, be found. 

Social networking sites are also the ideal platform for marketers to facilitate word-of-mouth campaigns, according to another study released by Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions and research firm MetrixLab. Social networkers–always after brands to help better define themselves–take their cues from information they find on friends’ personal pages and blogs. In turn, 64% of consumers will visit other sites to find out more about what they have read on a friend’s site, the study finds. 

Are you prepared for this mass migration to social media?  Is your brand a part of the strong influence social media has? Do you have a plan to incorporate social media into your marketing and PR campaigns?

Here are some steps you can take to start the process 

• Listen to the conversation
• Find out where your audience is socializing 
• Use tools like Technorati and Blog Pulse to find out what they’re talking about
• Deliver content that is of interest and value to your audience – one of the top five influencers prior to purchase in both BtoC and BtoB is reading an article  
• Get this fresh content on your site regularly
• Syndicate the content with RSS feeds
• Socialize the content – make it easy to save and share..28% of US Internet users are tagging and bookmarking content on social media sites like del,icio.us, digg and newsvine.
• Use a content syndication tool that already has the tagging properly programmed into the pages.