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Social media marketing challenges traditional practices

December 30, 2008

Book Review
Social Media is a Cocktail Party:
Why You Already Know the Rules of Social Media Marketing.
By Jim Tobin with Lisa Braziel
Ignite Social Media, 2008. 179 pages.

If you’re a marketer or a CEO and you think social media is dumb, or a waste of time, or a bunch of amateurs, please know this: Sometimes you’re right. Often you’re wrong.

Jim Tobin acknowledges that crowdsourcing, the wisdom of crowds, and the democratization of content creation often leads to junk. But it also produces some jewels.

Tobin is a veteran of advertising, public relations, and digital marketing, and directs Ignite Social Media. His coauthor and collaborator Lisa Braziel develops social media strategies for Fortune 1000 brands. They call social media the largest, best, most accurate market segmentation tool ever invented. “Whatever you sell, from cars to cancer drugs, consulting services to machines,” they write, “there are groups out there talking online about your category.”

Adopting social media marketing, Tobin says, means un-learning the idea that customers are “targets” to be seized. In social media marketing customers become your partners and potential advocates. Get to know and appreciate those people who love their Macintoshes, their Chicken McNuggets, their video games, their TiVo, and who talk about them in their blogs and podcasts and online social networks.

They’re creating a gold mine for marketers. Listen to consumer-generated conversations across the Internet as potential purchasers dig deep into user-generated product reviews, feature lists, comparison prices, rave reviews, and cautionary tales. Find those conversations, monitor them, and participate in them on their terms.

If you listen to the conversation long enough, Tobin says, you’ll find that there are not, in fact, an infinite number of issues. Rather, you’ll find a reasonably long but finite list of issues that your prospects and customers care about.

While Tobin and Braziel are social media evangelists, they do caution that marketing in social media isn’t for everyone. It’s important to evaluate your company first. Is your company ready for transparency? For authenticity? Are you ready to lose control of your brand a bit?

If so, then it’s time to start planning. A community analysis plan begins by examining the search landscape and the social media landscape. Then a community engagement plan outlines the primary goals of your social media campaign and what you know about the primary audience.

Tobin and Braziel also pointedly discuss what ‘viral’ marketing is and is not; why Second Life will never work for marketers, and how Dell uses social media for product development.

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Posted by paul baker

Social media turning marketing on its head

December 26, 2008

Book Review
Secrets of social media marketing:
How to Use Online Conversations and Customer Communities to Turbo-Charge Your Business.
By Paul Gillin.
Quill Driver Books, 2009. 290 pp.

Not that long ago, public relations professional typically scanned three or four newspapers every morning. Today, that routine has been replaced by a network of search engines, RSS feeds, and paid monitoring services.

Welcome to the new world of influencer marketing, says Paul Gillin.
Gillin’s 2007 book The New Influencers documented the effects of ‘citizen publishers’ on markets and on companies. Social networks were only beginning to gain traction then, but today their members number in the hundreds of millions. Thus this book.

Gillin writes as traditional broadcast (and print) channels produce poorer returns for marketers as mainstream media fades in importance. He points to Barack Obama’s campaign as an example of decreased reliance on 30-second TV ads. Instead, the campaign narrowcast his messages through every conceivable electronic medium, every waking hour.

When marketers talk about social media applications, Gillin says, they typically start with the tool and then work backwards. As an example, a manager issues an order to start blogging! But this method is all wrong, Gillin says. The choice of social media tools is no more relevant to a campaign’s success than is the choice of paint to a house’s structural integrity.

Why should a company care? Because customers are publishing their opinions of companies and products. Customers take their problems directly to the Web, whether through consumer advocacy sites like Consumerist.com, RipOffReport.com, My3Cents.com, ConsumerAffirs.com, and PlanetFeedback.com. Or they publish on their own blogs and social networks.

Gillin says failure to listen will only be taken as evidence that the company doesn’t care. On the other hand, repeating the message back to the source and delivering a well-reasoned response can go miles toward demonstrating concern. For example, the Southwest Airlines blog Nuts About Southwest has won awards and frequently been cited as a shining example of how businesses can use new media to create meaningful dialogue with their customers.

Chapter 7 describes the opportunities and limitations of advertising in social networks, including MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Companies should monitor the conversations taking place there. Conversation monitoring has caught fire in the last couple of years, Gillin says. He cites an early 2008 survey showing that top-performing companies were nearly seven times as likely as poor performers to use social media monitoring tools to predict customer behavior. Nearly two-thirds of the top performers had formal monitoring programs in place and 42 percent were actively listening to detect early warning of threats to their brands.

But be circumspect. Before you start to use social media channels at all, you need to decide if that’s a good idea in the first place, Gillin cautions. For some businesses, it isn’t. Not everyone is online-savvy. Large swaths of the population barely even know how to conduct a Google search, much less join a Facebook group. Your social media efforts will probably miss this audience entirely, which means that if those are the people you’re seeking, you’ll be wasting your time.

Social media marketing demands a different approach to customer interactions. Engagement is in, interruption is out. The first thing you need to do is stop pitching, Gillin says. The new style of marketing is about engagement. That means throwing out the elevator pitch and the 30-second spot. It means forming a relationship with a prospect through the exchange of useful, meaningful information. It’s about forming relationships that lead to long-term repeat business as opposed to making a sale. Long-term relationships invariably par off better than one-off transactions.

In the past, Gillin says, business success was based on anticipating customers’ requirements and responding at just the right time. In the future, success will result from continuous innovation and outstanding customer service wrapped around a continuous feedback loop.

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Posted by paul baker

Developing a Web 2.0 business plan

December 16, 2008

Book Review
Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide.
By Amy Shuen.
O’Reilly, 2008. 243 pp.

This book explains how successful Web 2.0 companies do what they do.

Author Amy Shuen says the biggest challenge to a company’s success in this area is to convert from an engrained culture of competition to a culture of collaboration.

As a strategy researcher and an authority on Silicon Valley business models, Shuen speaks at industry conferences, venture capital events, and business school seminars. She offers this book to provide theory and practice behind the concepts of collective user value, capitalizing on social networks, and collaborative innovation.

Amazon.com provides an excellent model to follow, Shuen says. Amazon “integrates Web 2.0 approaches into every page of its bookselling site. It tests new possibilities constantly.”

Shuen says Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has creatively repositioned the company to play many different syndication roles. Amazon Associates syndicates its online store to the web sites of its affiliates. Affiliates provide specialized content and organize product listings for a specific audience or community. So thousands of non-employees act as a virtual sales force that gets paid only on a success-fee basis when a sale is realized.

What’s new about Web 2.0, she says, is that both businesses and individuals can make money by providing services to customers for free. How? Web 2.0 allows online users to interact, combine, remix, upload, change, and customize content for themselves. This online DIY self-expression benefits businesses and other users. For example, Flickr bases its photo sharing and storage site on a “freemium” business model. Flickr leverages collective user value, positive network effects, and community sharing. WordPress and Technorati are similar in that they have created tools that millions of users can play with for free. Oh, and by the way, they offer really cool premium features you can use for a small fee.

How did relative latecomer Google beat out its many search engine competitors? By figuring out how to monetize the long tail of the search market. In October 2000 Google introduced AdWords, which opened up online advertising for small and mid-size companies that had never done so. Shuen says Google’s direct positive network effects result from aggregating the “wisdom of the crowd” as measured by popularity and frequency of user-created links, site visits, and advertising click-throughs.

In the collaborative innovation model, Shuen says, the entire perspective of innovation changes. In the old days, companies competed in an industry to capture new and old markets using different kinds of innovative technologies. Now, big and small companies orchestrate collaboration, often across industry boundaries, in innovative ways. Consider Apple’s iPod. Apple conceives, designs, and oversees the innovation and creativity of many external suppliers, creators, affiliates, and partners to support an innovative product and service.

Shuen’s “big three big takeaways” for developing a Web 2.0 business plan:
Online network effects are a powerful multiplying force.
A few active uploaders can create online critical mass and community.
Viral distribution and cooperative advantage can build eco-systems rapidly.

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Posted by paul baker

Citizen Marketers

December 15, 2008

Book Review
Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message.
Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba.
Kaplan Publishing, 2007. 223 pages.
Citizenmarketers.com

Mike Kaltschnee has been blogging at HackingNetflix since November 2004. Each day, he composes three to five posts about the company’s DVD-by-mail subscription business. Some 7,000 readers follow along daily.

He is one of many citizen marketers Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba portray who, collectively, affect the culture of business.

Citizen marketers are advocates who use relatively easy and inexpensive tools to create online content and to provide “unaffiliated, uncompensated work on behalf of a product, brand, company, or person.” Other examples include Dennis Lloyd, a civil draftsman, who started iPodLounge.com in 2001, and Jim Romenesko who runs the hobby blog StarbucksGossip. Because they are not paid for their work, they retain credibility.

Citizen marketers can be any age, but most are young. Having grown up with TiVo, cell phones, and video games, millennials want to interact with culture. And more broadband access means more citizen content creators. Participation is the future of marketing. Given that, participation should be added to the well established four P’s of marketing (product, price, place, and promotion).

So what does this mean for business? Your customers can form communities of interest and lead conversations about your brands and products. The authors argue that you can only benefit from working with them: “Companies are bound to reduce their risk of failure by embracing the principles of democracy and participating in established democratized forums or creating their own.”

What is the risk of ignoring citizen marketers? One influential blogger can cause major headaches for a company he or she perceives as providing lousy customer service (it happened to Dell) or damaging the environment. One influential blogger can begin a process that topples a nationally known figure like Dan Rather.

These activists are a powerful minority. Based on the authors’ research into the work of citizen marketers, they postulate the 1% Rule: About 1 percent of the total number of visitors to a democratized forum (Wikipedia, for example) will create content for it or contribute content to it. These 1 Percenters are typically well educated, highly involved, and on the leading edges of technology.

McConnell and Huba says the key is to build a community with a stake in outcomes. A community can help your company design products or services they are more likely to buy. Just check out the Threadless T shirt company, where you can submit designs, rate them, and participate in challenges.

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Posted by paul baker

An encyclopedic podcasting book

June 23, 2008

How to do Everything with Podcasting.
Shel Holtz with Neville Hobson.
McGraw-Hill Osborne. 2007. 360 pp.

What can podcasting do for a business? That’s the wrong question to ask, say Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson. Like any communication tool, podcasting should be applied as a solution, not as a goal in and of itself. “Podcasting ought to come up in larger discussions about ways to reach audiences, to convey particular messages, or to address specific situations and problems,” they advise.

Hobson and Holtz are internationally known business communicators, bloggers, and consultants. I learned of their work through their podcast For Immediate Release. Friendly and engaging, For Immediate Release focuses on the latest communications technologies and social media.

How to Do Everything With Podcasting aims to “provide a resource to anybody engaged with podcasting, from casual listeners to independent podcasters to businesspeople looking for a new communication channel.”

Besides detailing all the technical aspects of podcasting, Hobson and Holtz preach the gospel of strategic planning. Thinking about producing a podcast? First, address the question: What outcomes are you trying to achieve? Would it serve as a marketing vehicle, or to supplement public relations and financial communications, or to enhance customer relations, or to enhance customer support? And how will you measure the success of your efforts?

The authors emphasize that perhaps the most important is the podcast’s social aspects. They encourage building a social network around your podcast, which is as important as the software and hardware you use.

They offer many examples of podcasting done well. Purina’s Animal Advice podcast, for example, provides information pet owners can use; it does not ‘sell product.’ Stanford University podcasts offer faculty lectures, interviews, music, and sports content. Target groups include students and alums. IBM’s The Future Of …. Podcast reaches investors and features interviews with engineers, product managers, and others in the trenches—not with PR or marketing staff.

Getting people to listen is step one, the authors say. Providing content that people will listen to because it is interesting, valuable, or entertaining is step two. Step three is making sure the way you present the content reflects the value you would bring to your listeners should they shift their business from a bigger business to your business.

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Posted by paul baker

2011: Trendspotting

June 20, 2008

2011: Trendspotting for the next decade.
Richard Laermer
McGraw Hill, 2008. 305 pp.

First: The difference between a trend and a fad:
A fad is a “flash in the pan that doesn’t deserve mention,” says veteran Trendspotter Richard Laermer, while a trend is “something that is just beginning to percolate—but is happening in a significant enough manner that we can see how it’s going to change us.”

If you’ve read Laermer in Huffington Post or elsewhere, you know he is funny, blazingly smart, and … well… he loves to write. Among other titles, he is the author of Native’s Guide to New York (1989), TrendSpotting (2002), Full Frontal PR (2003), and and co-author of Punk Marketing (2007). He has contributed to Public Radio’s Marketplace program and he copublishes the BadPitchBlog.

Although it’s impossible to do justice to this 300-page book and its nearly 80 essays covering every conceivable topic part in contemporary life, here’s a stab at it. . . .

Do you want practical tips?
“If you’re not thumbing through business magazines on a regular basis, checking out industry blogs … and staying informed about the world, you’ll be left behind.
“You’ve got to evolve or die.
“Be a noncliché spotter of trends so that you don’t become obsolete or, worse, stale.”

Or do you prefer Gestalt?
Picture a tree, Laermer suggests. “The roots of new trends are in technology, while the branches are finance, travel, weather, sex, education, communication techniques, gracefulness, and societal changes.
“Most trends come and go, but some recur like the seasons. Rather than stemming from the vacillations of technology and pop culture, they are rooted in deeper phenomena . . . “perennial” or “meta- trends.”

Do you want research?
Laermer’s essays cite data from the census bureau, the FDA, the World Health Organization, the Harvard Medical School, and other studies. “By 2008 the median age of the workforce is expected to rise from 38.7 to 40.7. Contributing to these trends is the new influx of ‘boomerangs’—those boomer retirees who come back to the workforce after a short time away.”

Or do you prefer personal observation?
Laermer’s encyclopedic knowledge of popular culture informs many trends he identifies.
“Teens shall remain narcissistic. Those whom I dub Generation Broke … have their parents navigating and engineering their lives. They don’t subscribe to the so-called learning via the school of hard knocks, or making the grade, or rising up the ladder, or earning one’s keep.”

How about an insider’s view on the media industry?
“When you deconstruct the news … you need to know that most information comes not from sources who proffer it because they wish to “get the story out” (or are prodded to do just that), but rather from those who are paid to make sure the world knows about their latest glory. … “News is a consumer product just like all the others: it’s created by someone, for someone, with a single goal in mind—to make a profit.”

His web site www.laermer.com offers “essays, trend advice, ways to spot trends, and blog posts. It provides links to many other useful and entertaining sites too.

General readers will find this book entertaining, funny, and thought-provoking. Practitioners of marketing and public relations will take away some new things to try.

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Posted by paul baker

Book Review: Groundswell

June 17, 2008

Groundswell:
Winning in a world transformed by social technologies
Charlene Li and John Bernoff
Harvard Business Press, 2008. 286 pp.

You and I and half of American adults are using more online tools to connect, to find information, get support, compare products, rate movies, buy from each other, or post blog entries. But most companies and institutions still don’t understand this trend, and their customers are slowly dribbling away.

Charlene Li and John Bernoff call this evolving online activity the groundswell. In this very readable book Li and Bernoff draw from extensive research to describe what the groundswell is and to offer case studies showing how organizations have readjusted their thinking to take advantage of it.

Although the groundswell trend includes social networks and related technologies, the authors say, equally important is the change in consumer behavior. People are getting more things they need from each other, and less from traditional institutions and corporations.

Listening (and becoming involved in) the groundswell should help your organization find out what your brand stands for; understand how buzz is shifting; save research money; increase research responsiveness; find the sources of influence in your market; manage PR crises; and generate new product and marketing ideas.

Li and Bernoff caution that there is no single ‘right way’ to engage with the groundswell. Depending on the objectives of your company, you’ll choose among the following options: listening, talking, energizing, supporting, or embracing your audience.

Case studies examine how Salesforce.com uses an innovation community to involve customers in the design of new products; how a French credit union made customers’ suggestions a part of how it does business; and how a Canadian grocery store uses customer ratings and review to improve its products.

An instrument that Li and Bernoff use in their work at Forrester Research is called the Social Technographics Profile. “Social” refers to the people-to-people activities in the groundswell. “Technographics” refers to Forrester Research’s way of surveying consumers—it’s similar to demographics and psychographics, but focuses on technology behaviors.

The authors define six kinds of online consumer behaviors. Learning which types best define your audience (or clients, or communities, or target groups) is the first step in any strategy you take to reach them. The Creators are those who publish a blog or article online, maintain a web page, or upload videos at least monthly. Critics post comments on blogs or forums, post ratings or reviews, or edit wikis. Collectors save URLs and tags on a social-bookmarking service, vote for sites on a service like Digg, or use RSS feed aggregators. Joiners maintain profiles on a social networking site like MySpace. Spectators consume what the rest produce. Inactives—nonparticipants—still remain.

Nearly one in five of online consumers in the US—18 percent—are Creators. This means that a significant chunk of six of your target audience, customers, community, etc., are blogging, uploading video, and maintaining Web sites, and quite possibly discussing your company. One in four are Critics, and nearly half are Spectators.

This groundswell is taking place not just on desktops and laptops. The groundswell is about to get embedded within every activity, including mobile devices.

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Posted by paul baker

Book Review: Now is Gone

June 13, 2008

Now is gone:A Primer on new media for executives and entrepreneurs.
Geoff Livingston with Brian Solis.
Bartleby Press, 2007. 194 pp.

Marketing and PR professionals live in a world of constantly changing social media platforms.

Users want access to content anywhere and any time.

Marketing and PR professionals who successfully make the transition to this world have learned that “participation is marketing,” and that’s the theme of this book.

Geoff Livingston and Brian Solis have teamed up to offer a punchy little book that’s packed with insights into the principles that can guide communicators into, and through, the increasingly diverse and changing marketing environment.

Successful marketers will focus on social media principles rather than tactics, for example.

There is no more ‘audience.’ There are, instead, communities. By participating in online communities communicators can learn what the community wants and likes, and can create content that’s most valuable to it. The take away from this book: build value for your community, and work for them.

Public relations and marketing professionals who resist social media fail their companies and their clients.

Forget about pitching stories. Instead, engage in conversations. Social networks offer companies and organizations a way to engage potential community members outside of the confines of a corporate URL.

While PR 1.0 was all about controlling the message and broadcasting it, PR 2.0 encourages communicators to spark conversations to help people solve problems and discover new solutions.

This book is not intended as a primer, or a detailed how-to. It offers organizations and executives a foundation to help create social media strategies for their companies.

If even 15 to 25 percent of your buying community is using social media, or if a significant portion of your revenues are attributed to the right demographic, then it’s time to start and invest the necessary effort into new media strategies. … This important minority segment of your business will expand over time as adoption increases, and generations X and Y begin to dominate the workforce.

Create value for the community so they find your material worthwhile. This requires a) knowing what the community wants, b) understanding the intrinsic value the company has to offer, and c) being creative enough to deliver this value in a way that’s interesting and compelling.

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Posted by paul baker

The New Rules of Marketing and PR

May 28, 2008

Book Review
The New Rules of Marketing and PR:
How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing, & Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly.
David Meerman Scott. Wiley, 2007. 275 pp.

“Standard marketing education still talks about the 4 Ps of marketing—product, place, price, and promotion—as being the most important things. That’s nonsense,” says David Meerman Scott. To succeed on the Web under the new rules of marketing and PR, he says, companies need to focus on their audiences first. When you understand your audiences, then begin to create compelling Web content to reach them.

This book could have been subtitled: “Content is King.” The theme runs consistently throughout its chapters.

David Meerman Scott maintains the site www.WebInkNow.com. For most of his career he worked in the online news business. He was vice president of marketing at NewsEdge Corporation and held executive positions in an electronic information division of Knight-Ridder. As such, he’s uniquely qualified to critique old-school PR practices in light of the realities of the Web.

So what is the best way for PR people and marketers to communicate directly with their audiences? Learn and use new Web tools and techniques. Scott says he is continually surprised that “only about 20 to 30 percent of marketing and PR people read blogs.” And when he asks how many people publish their own blogs, “the number is always less than 10 percent.”

Try to apply the old rules of advertising and media relations to the Web and you’ll fail fail miserably, he says. That’s because we’re now in an environment governed by new rules. So marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses, to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of underserved audiences via the Web.

Part I of the book explains how the Web has changed the rules of marketing and PR. Part II introduces and details each of the various media including blogs, podcasts, and viral campaigns. Part III offers “how-to” information and an action plan for using the new rules in your company.

This entire book is about search engine marketing, Scott says. Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just at the precise moment that a buyer needs it. “Organizations gain credibility and loyalty with buyers through content. Smart marketers now think and act like publishers in order to create and deliver content targeted directly at their audience.”

And how to reach those audiences? Create many different microsites—with carefully thought-out “landing pages” aimed at each target constituency. He emphasizes throughout the book to forget for a while your products and services. Focus your complete attention on the buyers of your products or those who will donate, subscribe, join, or apply.

And forget about the old school practice of “spending tens of thousands of dollars per month on a media relations program that tries to convince a handful or reporters at selected magazines, newspapers, and TV stations to cover your company.” Instead, reach the New Influencers: the bloggers, online news sites, micro-publications, public speakers, analysts, and consultants that reach the specific audiences that are looking for what you have to offer.

Case studies of people using the New Rules to their advantage include Gerard Vroomen, who co-founded Cervelo Cycles. His web site tells cycling enthusiasts compelling stories, engages them in conversation, and entertains them. “Because he uses web content in interesting ways and sells a bunch of bikes in the process, Vroomen is a terrific marketer,” Scott says.

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