Archive for January, 2009

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Vitrue.com, a tool that captures a brand’s social media presence, has put together a list of the top 100 social brands.

“What was an afterthought of marketing, just a few years ago, has now emerged as a significant part of the marketing mix and it continues to grow fast. The Vitrue 100 list represents companies who are establishing their social presence and doing so successfully.”

Apple leads the pack with iPhone at #1,  Apple at #3, iPod at #7 and the Mac legacy brand at #16.

Here’s the top 10:

1. iPhone
2. CNN
3. Apple
4. Disney
5. Xbox,
6. Starbucks
7. iPod
8. MTV
9. Sony
10. Dell.

Microsoft just missed the top ten coming in at # 11.

Note on the methodology:  The Vitrue 100 is the result of Vitrue’s daily analysis of over 2,000 popular brands.  While Google, Facebook and others are top brands, this is a list of companies that are using social technology, not those who are the technology.

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The first and most important action you should take in social media is listen and respond. Every company has a community.  You have customers and interested visitors who come to your website or blog. Your community might be a small one, but it is a community nevertheless.

Muhammed Saleem writes today about lessons we can learn from companies that have run into trouble with their community.

“It often stuns me to see how poor social media entrepreneurs and their executives are at listening to their communities, communicating with them, and generally using the communities’ feedback to improve their services.”

Saleem gives examples of uproars that have occurred on some of the top social sites.  Although the post is about top sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg with million of users, the lessons are just as valid for any company with an online presence.

1. Communicate – even when you have nothing groundbreaking or newsworthy to announce.
2. Be forthright – talk to your community first. Tell them everything you know, what you plan to do and why you have to do it.
3. Let them know you’re listening – be responsive to their requests and comments.
4. Acknowledge your mistakes – never try to brush mistakes under the rug.  It will backfire on you every time.  Be open and willing to admit errors.
5. Learn from your mistakes -  make improvements and really deliver on promises to change.

Social Media Bootcamp and Advanced Social Media Practice workshops

NYC,  DC, Chicago and San Francisco  February 2009

Jakob NIelsen of the Nielsen Norman Group is known in the online world as the guru of usablity.Back in 2001 he wrote his first rpeort on the usablity of online media rooms and his latest insights on how journalists use the web is out today.

Summary:
As 3 studies of journalists show, they use the Web as a major research tool, exhibit high search dominance, and are impatient with bloated sites that don’t serve their needs or list a PR contact.

Journalists work on tight deadlines, notes Nielsen.  And he says that while this is not a novel insight,  it certainly is not taken into account by webmasters who create corporate websites.  It is this fact that has led to many of the guidelines for making an online media room usable for journalists.

“Most of the PR sections of sites we’ve studied fail to support journalists in their quest for the facts, information, and contacts they can use to write stories about companies and their products.”

That statement should be more than enough motivation to get PR people interested in, and actively involved with, the design and content of the PR section of the website – the media room.

Here are some comments from journalists who participated in the study.

After having a difficult time using a site, one journalist said:

“… I would be reluctant to go back to the site. If I had a choice to write about something else, then I would write about something else.”

Another journalist described what he’d do if he couldn’t find a press contact or the facts he needed for his story:

“Better not to write it than to get it wrong. I might avoid the subject altogether.”

Nielsen Recommendations:

• Many journalists work from home and do not have the latest technology updates.  It’s wise to offer your press materials in two software versions behind the latest release
• Don’t put your material in PDFs
• Offer basic information cleansed of marketese or spin
• Include links to external sources, including press coverage
• Make the site easy to navigate and the information simple to find and use
• Write the releases so they can be scanned for data
• Give them facts they can use in their stories
• Include multi media

This sounds very like a Social Media Press Release format to me!

How Journalists Read a Press Release

Take a look at this “gazeplot” from Nielsen’s new eyetracking study that shows a journalist reading a press release on TNT’s website.  Each blue dot represents one fixation of the user’s eyes. (Bigger dots indicate longer dwell times.)

Note how the journalist focused on the facts in the initial bulleted list and the second table. The journalist hardly read the concluding paragraphs and mostly ignored the first table, which was not as interesting.

Changes observed in this new study:

1. Journlaists rely more on search engines than they did in the past. And with Universal search displaying news, blogs and videos it is imperative that PR people understand how to maximise their digital assets.
2. Journalists are embracing multimedia. But there is a caveat: their main complaint is that multimedia content tends to be harder to use and to contain superficial information. Companies clearly need to work harder to turn “new media” into “useful media.”

“Ultimately, PR-related usability comes down to a simple question: Why spend a fortune on outbound PR (trying to pitch journalists) when you neglect simple steps to increase the effectiveness of inbound PR (satisfying journalists who visit your website)?”

Social Media Bootcamp and Advanced Social Media Practice:  February in NYC, Chicago, DC and San Francisco

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If the media is truly dying, what happens to PR?

Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 and co-author of Get Content, Get Customers, spoke at a PRSA Cincinnatti luncheon recently.  His presentation was titled The Present and Future of PR.

Pulizzi says that in a conversation with Forrester Research he heard a prediction that within two years half of all US newspapers will stop production.  If that happens the PR and media relations model will be broken beyond repair.

Who gets to tell the story then? ” If PR’s role is to help manage the information from an organization to its “public”, doesn’t that include the creation of targeted story-telling initiatives like custom magazines, enewsletters, blogs, white papers, etc.?” asks Pulizzi.  And I’d add video.

Perhaps this explains why the session I do on Storyteller Markteing has become so popular at Search Engine Strategies.

Is telling the story and creating the content PR’s realm?  Or is it the realm of the marketer/corporation communications, the advertising agency, the custom publisher, or even the traditional publisher, asks Pulizzi.

He feels that PR may have the advantage because we understand the value of the story.  And I agree.

However, PR has seen some of their tasks get outsourced to other agencies in new media simply because we have not jumped on this track fast enough.   We don’t understand the technology and the tools.  But this can lead a company into troubled waters – when SEO agencies are writing the press releases I believe we’re way off course.

There is a learning curve here, but it’s one we absolutely have to embrace.

Social Media Bootcamp and Advanced Practice Workshops:  February 2009  NYC, Chicago, DC, San Francisco

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I am always on the look out for good sources of information about digital marketing and PR. Three years ago when I was in London to speak at Search Engine Strategies I discovered a great resource -  Econsultancy.

Since they’re UK based their research is mostly focused on that side of the pond, but I really like their content.  And apparently I’m not alone - great content gets found online.  Much of their content – case studies,and research reports – is universally relevant and attracts readers from all over the world.

So it’s no big surprise that they have a growing audience in the US.  To service this market they’ve decided to start a US operation and their New York office opened this week.  Rebecca Lieb, previously a VP at Incisive Media and chief editor of ClickZ, is at the helm. Smart people those Brits!

I chatted with Rebecca yesterday on her first day on the job. Just back from a short stay in the UK her first task is to set up the office and find an editor.  That job description is here.

“Since we have an audience in the US – and that without any effort on our part – we want to provide these marketing and PR professionals with relevant information,” said Rebecca.  “And there is a wealth of data on digital marketing, online PR and social media here that will be of interest to our readers and members in other English speaking countries around the world”

This is squarely in Rebecca’s field of expertise – she has successfully developed global markets in both TV and publishing.  “I’m looking forward to doing it deliberately this time, rather than serendipitously,” she said.

Although there are already several other publications and companies that offer research and training in this field, E-consultancy feels it has its own niche.  They focus on deeper research and group education. One of the events they do in the UK is the Roundtable series, where select groups of leading practitioners get together to discuss the latest challenges and opportunities.  There are 12 – 20 attendees, no journalists, no vendors or sponsors.  It’s chaired and facilitated by E-consultancy.  I’m looking forward to the events they plan to do in the US.

They offer some compelling reasons for joining the community - basic membership of the site is free, but there are several levels of paid membership.

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Two statistics that caught my eye this week were the increases in traffic to Facebook and Twitter. 

According to Mashable, and the graph they ran on Compete, Facebook is now running neck and neck with MySpace.

Twitter’s remarkable growth in the second half of 2008 i anoter big story.  Acording to Compete, their visitor stats are up 752%, for a total of 4.43 million unique visitors in December.  Considerin that they strated the year with only around 500,000 unique monthly visitors, that’s pretty dramatic.  And we’re only talking about the US here.

Many companies are still unsure of how to use Twitter, and if it makes sense for them to be on Twitter at all

Go to the Search function and type in your brand or comapny name and the major keywords relevant to your busienss.  See how much traffic there is.  I just found a bunch of evangelists and detractors who are very active on Twitter for a non profit client.  They had no idea this was going on.  You cannot influence the conversation and the perception about your brand if you don’t even know that it’s happening or where it’s happening.

Twitter is one of the social media tools we will focus on at the Social Media Bootcamp and Advance Social Media Practice workshops in Febreuary

So says John Blossom, publishing and information industry analyst.  His new book “Content Nation: Surviving and Thriving as Social Media Changes Our Work, Our Lives and Our Future” looks at how the explosion in electronic publishing by individuals and enterprises using social media and social networking tools is fundamentally changing the way people relate to each other in their personal, business and community lives.

“These tools are challenging many of the fundamental assumptions that have held together human societies,” says Blossom.  ” Social media’s importance and impact in its current early stages must be measured not just against the backdrop of traditional electronic media but also in comparison to how people have communicated throughout human history. Social media and social networking are more than a challenge to today’s institutions — they have the potential to change the very DNA of human society.”

Blossom predicts that 2009 will see social media and social networking move front and center as a prime concern in business, politics, government, the arts and any number of other arenas.

“Social media is not a trend or fad; it is a realignment of the essential tools of human communication that is giving new power to individuals and institutions to change the world.”

Need help with your Social Media Strategy for 2009?  Bulldog Reporter’s Social Media Bootcamp and Advanced Social Media Practice workshops can help you navigate the social media waters.