Trying Out Clouds And Other Stuff

Lots of new things happening in my world these days.

We’re just finishing up the Goddard Schools /Eco Childs Play Eco Toy Test.  This was a project that was near and dear to my heart as it was focused on green toys. I was honored to be asked to develop the social media program for this project as well as act as one of the judges.

One of the benefits of having worked in product marketing prior to the advent of social media  I’ve found  is the ability to contribute in a variety of ways.  In this case, I was able to draw on my experience in the toy industry, as well as my green marketing knowledge and reach out to the wide variety of contacts I have for input.

On another front, I’ve recently been working with top LA based publicity firm, Levine Communications and am heading up their social media division, along with Josh Goodman. We’re working on clients ranging from authors, to rock bands. Again, a wide range of prior experience comes in handy.

Finally, in all my free time, I’m playing around with Twitter lists…which is what led me to this great idea (thanks @pamdyer) – making a resume cloud using Wordle.com.

Great way to quickly showcase your skills!

Digital Strange Glove Gets The Point

Thanks to Dave Knox, and a series of click-throughs to avc, I was able to find this 263 slide presentation and actually make my way through the whole thing. I was rapt most of the time, though I do think a little editing would have improved it because within the first 50 or so slides I ran across this quote:

The truth is…the Internet, as we know it, is only about 15 years old…we’re still figuring it out!

And that makes it hard to figure out what to do. I fully expect the internet and social media to look radically different in a few years…only nobody, me included has any idea how. (It’s something I tell my clients regularly.)

And then I ran across this:

This has taken the previous model of content being scare, media being expensive and the attention of the audience being guaranteed…and flipped it!

In other words, in the 21^st century, there is actually too much content, as opposed to in the last century when we eagerly awaited our the nightly newscast to tell us what happened  and our morning paper to tell us what it means.

What this means is that…well, I’m not sure what it bodes for the future. Right now we can only acknowledge it.

And finally, last cool quote:

If I tell my Facebook Friends about your brand it’s not because I like your brand, it’s because I like my friends. – Mike Arauz

What does it all mean? I think it means that we need to keep our eye on the core marketing principles; target market, positioning, etc. and dust off some that weren’t always used in the last century, honestly, transparency and consumer engagement.

I don’t know where we’ll be in a few years, but the lens I’m using to try to predict the future is observing and tracing developments to their logical end…whatever that may be.

The Problem With Press Releases – A Paucity of Permalinks

As a blogger, my inbox is filled with press enquiries. Every day I get perhaps 3 or 4 or 5 or 6. Perhaps, ummm…none of them are social media ready. I’m serious. I receive them from fairly large companies and really large companies, as well as small ones and few acknowledge the realities of the web in 2010.

That reality can be summed up in a quote I heard at the Blogher conference this year: “Twitter killed the blogsphere.”

In reality, of course, Twitter did not KILL the blogsphere, but like many bloggers, I often find it easier to tweet out interesting pieces of information than to write a blog post about them. That goes for Facebook, Myspace and a variety of other social media sites.

A friend of mine, an avid blog reader, rather than blogger, commented to me yesterday that the new standard appears to be to update your blog once a month. I think that is perhaps an exaggeration, but there is definitely a trend toward writing less and tweeting more.

For companies sending out press releases, this means, fewer blog posts perhaps, but more mentions….if it’s easy. By that I mean, if it’s easy for a blogger to tweet out the information.

Press releases and enquires without a permalink to which a person can link end up requiring way too much additional effort on the part of the blogger. which leads to…”delete”.

The process goes something like this: I open my inbox to find 47 new messages, I browse through them, deleting those that are uninteresting. Those I find interesting, of which there are usually at least 10-20, I scan through to see about which one, if any I would be interested in writing. Often I would like to write about 5 or 6. Usually I have time to write one to none. If I can quickly tweet out the information in those enquires, I do. If not..”delete”.

So what’s the answer? Instead of writing a press enquiry, write a news story. Assign it a permalink. Send me a brief note including a link to your article.

I assure you…you’ll get more mentions that way! My clients do!

Why Celebrities Need Social Media

I’ve recently had the opportunity to work with several well known personalities to develop social media campaigns. Celebrities with their own “brand”, personal or professional have some of the same challenges and opportunities that companies face when considering social media.

It’s been interesting noting, as I always seem to do, that in marketing whether it is a person, product or service, the questions I ask always remain the same…it’s just the answers that differ. In social media as in traditional marketing , many of the tactics always stay the same, it is just how they are implemented that differs.

Here is a slideshow I recently presented with ATAK Interactive describing the services we can offer. Enjoy!

Psychographics Comes into Play Again

A Rising Tide floats all boats; a falling one sinks them. Those were the thoughts that came to my mind as I read Beware Rising Differences In Outlook in Marketing Daily this morning.

Bob Deutch points out the differences in outlook of Baby Boomers, Gen-Xers and Millennials with a great chart and makes this, very true, statement:

In the past years of easy financial growth and seemingly endless consumer demand, many marketers have gotten away with more general mass-market strategies or sloppy hyper-CRM targeting. Now, in times of fewer goodies and more unpredictability, basic temperamental, generational differences will surface that advertising dollars and ROI will have to take into account.

In other words, marketers, caught up for the last few years of giddiness, MAY have mistaken good economic times for genus. I think we all have. We’ve all been patting ourselves on the back at how brilliant we have been. How we’ve zeroed in consumer need. How we created pin pointed, strategic, successful programs.

Maybe we’ve just been lucky.

Like all of those day traders making money hand over foot in the late 90s…we’ve been caught up in a trend that rewards all those play. Now that the tide is going out, we have a generation of young marketers that haven’t experienced tough economic times and haven’t had to really apply those strategic marketing principles they learned in school.

It’s time once again to dust off the old marketing theories and apply them… albeit with new tools and tactics.

Search Dying; Page Views in Critical Condition

I was reading this article in Media Post titled: The Death Of Search and started thinking. I’m not an SEO or SEM expert, but do use SEO techniques in my work (I have friends and colleagues I call when it gets complicated)  so I usually just glance at these types of articles, but this one caught my eye because I am noticing something similar happening too – the subtle shift in page views.

For one thing, in the blogger outreach world, we tend to focus more on total social media presence rather than page views when selecting bloggers for outreach. Really, what’s more important – 10,000 page views on a blog or 10,000 followers on Twitter or Flickr or Youtube? What combination of page views, RSS feeds and social media accounts is most powerful?

Secondly, as this article mentions, because often content hides behind walls, search engines aren’t always able to grab the content. Furthermore I would add, especially as concerns Facebook and Twitter, how much does actually reading the content count versus just seeing the headline? From a marketing standpoint, if your brand name is in the headline you are getting the exposure you need. When it is tweeted out you can count Re-Tweets, but not the passive audience that actually saw the tweet but didn’t click on the link or retweet.

Obviously, we have tools that have been around for years to measure impressions. As page views become harder and harder to calculate, we’ll go back to using offline tools or perhaps the online version of them to see how our programs shape up. That’s not a bad thing.

What Makes a Quality Tweet? Umm – Wrong Question

When Mashable posted the question: What Makes a quality Tweet? People rushed to answer. I was one of them, but, true to form, I actually answered a different question. Mainly because I think they’ve missed the point.

Step back a minute and think about why companies and dedicated Twitter users tweet:

1)    to provide customer service

2)    to increase brand recognition

3)    To display expertise

4)    To increase visits to a site

And ultimately to get more followers. The process most of use to determine if we will follow someone is:

1)    Notice an interesting tweet

2)    Take a look at their tweet stream.

So yes, putting out interesting tweets is important, but, as any marketer will tell you, it’s what the consumer sees next makes the difference on whether they make the purchase, or in this case, follow or not.

What shows up in a tweet stream is more important than an individual tweet.

There are a number of Tweople who do it right, vary their tweets between those that give information and direct to interesting articles, answer questions (including a bit about the conversation so folks reading it have some clue about the issue being discussed), retweeting and  sharing some personal (and interesting to other people) personal activities.

We should all be following their lead.

Libel in 140 Characters or Less

Since I’ve had a side gig teaching marketing at various universities for a number of years, I consider myself fairly well versed in the nuances of both plagiarism and copyright infringement. It goes with the territory.

Writing on the web for both my personal blogs, as well as several, real life business entities, I’ve learned about the geeky web stuff like Creative Commons Licensing and accurate citations online; when and how to link to outside sources and how much of an article to copy before you are just, well copying the whole thing (and thereby ripping off the original author). This it seems though is a less respected law on the internet.

But now comes the latest issue – how does Twitter fit into this mix? I did a little research and found info on copyright infringement issues having to do with background images on the aptly named Plagiarism Today site (nice find). But I didn’t find anything about tweets.

Now in general, this isn’t a huge issue. Often, in the interest of getting things down to 140 characters, we all slice and dice headlines, interesting tweets and body copy and include a link back to the original article. But as I ended up paraphrasing a line from an article in the NY Times this morning, I wondered – gee – might Maureen Dowd get upset with me? I did misquote her.

Or is this libel? Granted, mine was just a little paraphrasing, but what if I intentionally misquoted her to make a more interesting headline…and she didn’t like it?

What if I listened to a song uploaded by an amateur musician, tweeted out the lyrics (140 characters at a time) and they went viral…under my name?

Where exactly does the Digital Millennium Act tackle these issues? It’s nebulous language, (which is good in general) hasn’t prevented cyber squatting on Twitter and Facebook – though yes, both sites have slow and cumbersome processes for retrieving your brand name via a DMCA procedure.

I’m just wondering……

You Just Don’t Understand – Bloggers, Brands and BlogHer09

Wow, I just returned from the BlogHer09 conference with a bag full of goodies and a mind full of thoughts. So happy to have met so many people whose names or blogs I knew, but not their faces.

Susan – after years of reading Toddler Planet it took a trolley ride to finally meet- I’m glad I went to that party!

Kaitlyn, I appreciate your comment that Lynn and I, with a brand management background, mommy blogging experience and social media success stories, were perfectly suited to write our Buzz From BlogHer Report. Since you’re a rising star at Ogilvy that means a lot!

As I spent 3 days, mostly interviewing sponsors and chatting with bloggers, as well as attending sessions and parties, I’m a bit worn out, but have a few impressions (which I will be covering in more detail when my copious notes turn into The Buzz From BlogHer Report).

First it was fairly obvious that this year was different.   Last year, attendees were live blogging during the sessions – this year they were tweeting. I don’t know how many people, bloggers and panelists mentioned their “poor neglected blogs” – seems everyone’s tweeting, writing books and vlogging instead.

Second, though a fair number of bloggers arrived with expectations of obtaining suitcases full of SWAG (rumors had been circulating in the blogsphere for months), many just wanted to come to the conference to learn and to mingle. It was somewhere around the second day of the carnival conference that the tide started to change.

In meetings bloggers got a bit heated when discussing the issue of whether they should accept payment from their work. Marketers (of which an amazing number attended many of the sessions) looked bewildered at the response. Everyone was up in arms or at least concerned about the FTC stepping in.

This payment tension led to the frantic “SWAG grabs” where bloggers targeted the parties with the best gifts. It led to PR and brand folks with barely a moment to interact with bloggers before they were on their way to the next party.

Much of the green sphere was up in arms at the amount of “stuff” given away and the lack of a solid recycling effort- though the organizers did try.  Marketers and bloggers in general seemed a bit overwhelmed, both are airing complaints ( though brands are being a bit more circumspect while bloggers are well, blogging ( and tweeting) about it.

This it seems is a transition year for blogging and brands. Not quite journalists (they aren’t in general paid by a living wage by a publication) not really “just consumers” (though they are obviously the “innovators and “early adopters” of the product adoption cycle), they’re a bit of both. Brands are slowly figuring out how to work with them. Bloggers are learning how to work with brands too- minus editorial guidelines, in many cases business experience and any of the journalistic guidelines set by publishing companies. It’s a work in process!

We’ll see how it progresses over the next year!  I’ll be publishing more of my impressions plus analysis, charts and interviews from brands and bloggers in The Buzz From BlogHer report which you can order here.

Using Twitter to Engage Green Consumers

Since I’m planning to do a presentation on Greenwashing tomorrow night, I thought it was about time I uploaded this presentation, given at the Cool Twitter Conference in San Diego2 weeks ago.