Starry Eyed Over Social Media

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The Internet has been ablaze the last few months about social media and business. Everyone is trying to figure out the value of the different sites – from the “oldies” like Facebook and LinkedIn to newbies like Twitter, Seesmic, Plurk, Brightkite, etc. The value of such communities is especially abuzz in the realms of marketing and communications. People are catching on that marketing and PR are now – more than ever – about building relationships (as opposed to spinning news). PR executives who are not engaging with constituents – media, customers, partners, colleagues, competitors – in these new communities are missing a huge competitive advantage and opportunity. But who are the right constituents?

Just like anything – it’s how you yield the sword, not the sword itself, in my humble opinion. While building a fan base, securing thousands of followers or becoming a “top friend” can be fun, when it comes to business, how do these numbers translate? Where does the value lie? Does having thousands of Twitter followers suddenly make you a “social media expert?”

The ability to use – or experience with – communities like Facebook and Twitter do not make anyone a communications expert. Sheer follower numbers do not necessarily mean value – at least not to everyone. I may have 1000+ followers but that doesn’t mean anything to my clients unless I’m gleaming value specific to their goals. And even if one of their goals is to increase their user base, not all – or even the majority – of those followers are going to be appropriate users for my client’s products.

What if the content I’m sharing on these communities is irrelevant or my approach is more personal than professional? For example, some Twitter users don’t actually converse – they just spew updates about their day. That doesn’t actually build relationships. Some don’t recognize Twitter as a business opportunity but just have fun with their followers. (The smart ones do both – personal and professional communications – for reasons discussed in previous posts). Others build corporate entities only to “spam” followers and quickly lose them. So, while having a great following on these communities is important, so is understanding how to participate appropriately and glean the right value from them – and how to combine that with other communications strategies.

A lot of folks in the industry are also abuzz about “social media experts.” We’ve had plenty of six figure-seeking applicants tell us they know everything there is to know about social media. Personally, I think there are very few who can truly call themselves experts in this arena – yet – and I’m not impressed when an applicant just runs down a list of “Twitterati” that they have on their follower list or “web celeb” Facebook friends list.

Don’t spew names. Give me an example of how these relationships have helped add business value to your organization or your client’s business. How did your relationships increase a company’s users? What strategy did you have in place for using social media to build a brand and what metrics have you used to measure that brand awareness? Just using social media does not mean you know how to tie it to the bigger picture. I find this to especially be true with the younger generation of workers. Yes, they know how to use social media and are fully immersed in it. But do they understand business strategy, marketing goals and how to leverage these communities for such? Some do, but the majority may not yet understand the intricacies of business relationships and communication.

When thinking about new media and marketing, don’t get too starry eyed just because social media is a hot topic right now. Just as anyone can put a press release across the wire, anyone can build a massive following in these communities. But if the tools aren’t used properly – and combined with other elements of the business to execute a larger strategy – they become useless from a business perspective. Sometimes they can even become harmful.

What do you think? Have you found value in hiring a social media expert? How do you define “expert?”

Persuasive Picks for the week of 06/02/2008

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This week features a shorter set of picks that center around notable videos I’ve spotted. The last even features my appearance on a MyRaganTV.com segment talking about LinkedIn.

Video: Social Media in Plain English
Lee Lefever and his Common Craft videos continue to educate and entertain while breaking down topics in a way that anyone can understand.

Authors@Google: Garr Reynolds
Garr Reynolds, author of the excellent book Presentation Zen, recently spoke at the Google campus. The session has been posted on YouTube for all to enjoy.

Are you LinkedIn?
This week I had the opportunity to contribute some content to MyRaganTV.com. In this segment, I talk about how PR Pros can utilize LinkedIn as a valuable tool for both internal and client work.



Persuasive Picks for the week of 05/26/08

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Weezer - Pork and BeansTag Recommendations for Content: Ready to Filter Noise?
Properly tagging your content can go a long way to improving your visibility on the Net. Hutch Carpenter shares his review of four bookmarking and tagging services you can use to boost your “Google-Juice.”

Death of Education and the Dawn of Learning
Here’s a great post on the Servant of Chaos blog that speaks to the way kids communicate in a Web 2.0 world and how the education system needs to catch up. Today’s kids are tomorrow’s employees and customers. Will your business survive if you don’t join the social media/network space?

Charity Auction: Buy Yourself a Social Media Guru
Buy yourself time with one of five social media and online marketing experts as part of this excellent charity auction. The toughest part will be deciding on which guru to bid on with the talents of Chris Brogan, Joseph Jaffe, Aaron Strout, Geoff Livingston and Greg Verdino up for grabs!

Basic Business Blogging Suggestions
Speaking of Chris Brogan, this post he wrote earlier this week provides some nice basic information for companies that are just starting to launch a blog. As usual, Chris’s community of readers are providing great comments to the post, so be sure to read through those as well!

Pork and Beans
I’ll wrap up this week with something entertaining. Here’s a link to the new Weezer video that has been released by the band to promote the new single. The relevance? They included noteable internet “celebrities” in the video which is a sure-fire way to boost it’s potential for going viral.

Does Anyone Know a Good PR Firm?

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Well, sure! But the question is… is it the right firm for you?

I’ve noticed this question being posed a lot lately on LinkedIn Answers, Twitter and other communities. Sometimes we chime in, sometimes we just mine for competitive intelligence. It’s interesting to see the PR firms who take the time to provide context as to why they might be a good firm, rather than a self-serving (and, perhaps, lazy) statement such as “PerkettPR is the best” with a URL. Those answers in and of themselves should be very telling.

We thought we’d share some tips here on finding a good PR firm – for you.

What type of questions does the PR firm ask? Or do they? If they spend the entire first conversation or meeting just talking about themselves, this should raise some flags. How will they know if they can help reach your goals if they don’t ask what those goals are?

Are the executives meeting with you the ones who will be on the team? If not, why not? You’ve heard it before, but it amazes me how many prospects still come to us with a recent “bait and switch” complaint. If the CEO (or VP overseeing the practice) is present – and he/she should be so you can get a feel for the culture and leadership – what, if any, role will he/she play? (Keeping in mind they cannot possibly work daily on every account and if they tell you they do – they’re lying.)

How many accounts are the proposed PR team members on? Ask them to name them. Ask those same executives to give you an example of a recent strategy they recommended for one of those clients and how it was brought to fruition or made an impact.

Do the executives in the meeting use words such as “me,” “mine” and “I” or “we,” “us” and “ours”? PR agencies are teams. Good ones emphasize this across their culture in every way.

If something is important to you – take social media, for example – ask how all the team members are involved or have had experience with it. If social media is key and just one executive is active and involved (on Twitter, for example), that doesn’t bode well for the entire team’s knowledge or expertise in that area. One person is not enough. These types of initiatives should be embraced – and practiced – at every level of the agency. It’s equally important for the senior executives to demonstrate their working knowledge – and involvement in – the tactics executed by the account team.

How do they measure – and demonstrate – results? Any PR firm worth their retainer is going to tell you what you can expect ahead of time, and then clearly measure against those metrics on a regular basis.

Are budgets tied directly to hours? A good PR firm should build a budget around what they believe they can do for you and provide metrics in other ways. If it takes them 10 or 20 hours to reach such metrics, that shouldn’t be your problem. You don’t want the team stopping in the middle of an important project or launch because “we’ve reached our hours.” That’s so 1999.

Do they demonstrate a clear understanding of what is important and applicable to your business and your goals, not just what’s “hot”? For example, social media is fabulous, Twitter rocks when it’s working – but they aren’t appropriate for every client. Make sure the firm executives aren’t just using the latest buzzwords when discussing their approach. How does it apply to your needs? How do they foresee it helping your business?

Keep in mind that while a PR firm may not have experience directly in your space, relevant experience comes in many forms. A good firm – and experienced executives – can quickly learn and promote new technologies, products, companies or individuals. We’re professional relationship builders. Instead, ask for examples of how they helped promote a client in a market that they had never before worked in – and what the results were.

Like them. I don’t think I need to explain this one, do I?

What elements have you found to be valuable in your working relationships with PR firms? What do you like? What do you wish our industry would improve?

Persuasive Picks for the week of 05/19/08

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Memorial Day CupcakesMarketing Jobs of the Future
Valeria Maltoni dives into the rapidly changing role of today’s marketer and gives some good incite into where the space is going and the challenges of hiring for marketing positions. She also includes a nice link to my post on SocialMediaToday.com featuring a video of Aaron Strout, VP of New Media for Mzinga (client) speaking about hiring and getting hired in a Web 2.0 world.

10 Green Social Networks You Should Know
With all sorts of people and businesses jumping on the “Go Green” bandwagon, it was only a matter of time until “Green” oriented social networks started popping up. This post lists 10 such sites that will let you connect with fellow environmentally-minded individuals.

5 Quick Tips on Pitching Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists
PerkettPR’s attendance at multiple TechCrunch, TechCockTail and PopSignal events definitely brought to light that there’s certainly no shortage of start-up companies looking for money. This post from Ben Yokosvitz’s Insigator Blog gives some good advice on successful pitching during your fund raising efforts.

Robert Scoble Joins Up with Revision3
There aren’t many details available about Robert Scoble’s newly announced show (called WorkFast.TV) on Revision3, so we’ll just have to wait and see what comes out in the upcoming weeks. However, this post includes an interesting speech from Scoble about his use of Twitter during the recent Chinese Earthquake.

Celebrity tipping point on Seesmic
Video conversation platform Seesmic created a big buzz earlier this week when several celebrities appeared in interviews on the service. Famous names included Harrison Ford, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg to name a few.

Thanks for checking out this week’s Persuasive Picks and for those in the United States – have a great Memorial Day weekend!

PerkettPR’s Heather Mosley featured on MyRaganTV.com

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PerkettPR’s very own executive vice president, Heather Mosley, is featured in this video interview from MyRaganTV.com. She was selected to participate in their “First Person: Conversations with Communicators” video series during PerkettPR’s speaking engagement at the 2008 Ragan Conference. In the video, Heather explains how PR professionals utilize social media tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogs and Twitter as part of their recipe for success. (You can follow Heather on Twitter via @mosleyppr)



Persuasive Picks for the week of 05/12/08

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Why Twitter Matters
As the popularity of Twitter continues to grow, we’re starting to see it gain more mainstream press coverage. This post on BusinessWeek.com by Stephen Baker dives into what the future might hold for the Twitterverse.

Best Social Media Advice From This Site
Chris Brogan compiles some of the best and most informative posts on his site and breaks them up into categories for mass consumption. Enjoy filling your brain with this Social Media feast!

Answers to all of your Groundswell questions
From one information packed pick to another! Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li provide answers to the many Groundswell related questions that came to them from the 700+ people who joined their recent webinar.

SEO Quick Tips
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is generally an area of expertise that can take a good portion of mental bandwidth to master. However, most readers will find value in getting some exposure to the basics. Steve Spalding from the “How to Spilt an Atom” blog posted these SEO Quick Tips that were shared with him by Mark Hager of Knoxville, TN Web Design.

CBS to Acquire CNET for $1.8 Billion
Definitely the most highly “tweeted” acquisition story this week. It should be interesting to see how CNET’s content changes and what plans CBS really has in-store post merger.

Top Time-wasters for Web Workers (And How to Cure Them)
Valuable advice for those (like you) who utilize the web on a daily basis. Just be sure to practice the cures AFTER you finish being distracted by this week’s Persuasive Picks!!

Please join us at POPSignal Thursday: Wii’d Love to Meet

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PerkettPR will be sponsoring POPSignal’s Boston event Thursday night at Tequila Rain. There, we’ll be mingling with clients, VCs, reporters, bloggers and social media friends from various backgrounds. Please stop by our table to say hello and light up the night (yes, we’ll be the ones glowing in the dark again), or come challenge us to a game of Wii, where we’ll be introducing our new client, Slingpage, and offering additional private beta invitations. (The first 500 went like hotcakes today after TechCrunch offered them in a pre-launch post.

We’re also continuing our trend of on site interviews – we’re interested in turning the camera on reporters, bloggers and entrepreneurs. Have a new technology to tout? Opinions on the social media landscape? Insights on the future of tech? Please share them with us and we’ll feature them here post-party. We look forward to seeing Boston’s best!

Thanks to Brian Balfour and Jay Meattle for organizing the event.

Persuasive Picks for the week of 05/05/08

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How I Increased Page Views on My Forum by 66.7% in a Month
In addition to ProBlogger.com, Darren Rowse also runs Digital-Photography-School.com, a wildly popular digital photography blog. In this post, Darren chronicles his experience in bringing more traffic to his forums by running a prize-based competition. It’s a nice little case-study for those looking for new ways to stimulate activity within their online communities.

Social Media FAQ #5: How Do I Talk to my Executives about Social Media?
Jeremiah Owyang continues his excellent on-going Social Media FAQ series with this post which contains advice on convincing your executive team why social media may be important to your business.

Building Community in the Enterprise
ACDSee Community Manager, Connie Bensen, visits the topic of community in the enterprise by recapping the main points from this week’s Forrester webinar presented by Rob Koplowitz. She provides an excellent summary for those who weren’t able to catch it live.

Make a Professional Podcast on a Minimal Budget
If you’ve considered starting a podcast for your company but have been overwhelmed with the technical aspects, then this post from SocialMediaTrader.com will help ease your anxieties a bit. The whole process is really easier than you would think. Our client Mzinga has been turning out great interview podcasts for a while now. Feel free to check them out at http://www.wearesmarter.com

FaceBook In Reality
I’ll wrap up this week’s set of picks with some humor. If you use Facebook in any capacity, you’ll appreciate the humor in this YouTube video from idiotsofants.com and BBC’s The Wall.

Have a great weekend!

Drop the Excuses and Start Participating

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As you may know through my various Tweets, I spoke yesterday at the Ragan Corporate Communicators Conference in Chicago with our EVP, Heather Mosley. We substituted at the last minute for another speaker who dropped out unexpectedly. I’m not going to lie, I was nervous coming in as the backup substitute – none of the conference materials had indicated any change in the session until about one hour beforehand, when it was announced at the opening session. It was definitely on our minds that the audience had been expecting some heavy lifters (a much larger, global agency) to discuss digital marketing. I’m not a “digital marketer” and we had only a few days to pull together our presentation. Would we disappoint them? Could we teach them anything new? Would they walk away feeling the session was valuable? What if they already know everything we were talking about?

We changed the subject matter to something more our in line with our expertise, of course. At PerkettPR, we’re enthusiastic about social media and the opportunities – and challenges – that it presents to the PR profession. Our session was titled, “Join the Conversation: More Effective PR Through Social Media.”

For some, this may seem to be an oxy moron. Many constituents are shouting from the rooftops that PR is dead – due to social media. I completely disagree. I think it’s forcing us to evolve – but that’s a good thing. Social media presents amazing opportunities for communications professionals to engage with their publics in ways never before possible. For me, it’s thrilling. I am so enthusiastic about social media that I liken it to wanting to jump on the couch like Tom Cruise to emphatically express my love for it.

Yesterday, as we started speaking on this topic, the majority of faces in the room looked at us like we were crazy. Facebook for business? Linkedin Answers? Link love on blogs? Twitter-what??? Although, their eyes did light up when Heather explained Twitter like this: It’s like entering a noisy, crowded stadium and saying, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’… The entire stadium quiets to silence and everyone sits down except for four people that raise their hand and say ‘I can help!’…It’s that powerful and can provide a whole new lifeline of resources to draw from.

We had expected that the majority of the room would not yet be embracing social media (luckily, we were right or we could have been really boring). We knew we weren’t going to be in a room full of technology PR professionals. However, I’m also surprised at how many communicators haven’t embraced what is arguably the biggest evolution of our industry in decades…and their reasoning has nothing to do with technology.

Here are some of the questions and objections to social media participation that really stood out for me:

1) How do you find the time
2) What do you do if someone says something negative about you in the blogosphere?
3) How do you get corporate management to let you participate in social media?

I could go on and on about these topics but I’ll try to keep my recommendations simple.

1) If you don’t find the time I believe you will be out of a job. This is the way communications is going. Participate or be left behind. It’s that simple. Seriously.

Okay, okay, I did provide real tips such as: start slowly; join Twitter and observe for a while. Try to go on a few times a day to begin – post a question in the morning. Come back at noon and check for responses in DMs or aggregators like Tweet Scan. Post thank yous/follow up and another question. Come back before the end of your day and repeat. This can take ½ hour total.

2) It depends. Was it a customer? Was it a competitor? Was there any truth to the complaint or comment? There is no one right answer but there are guidelines to keep in mind – transparency and common sense being two of them.

We provided a few examples from experiences with our own clients. Two different crisis and two different recommendations: one, a posted apology and two, a personal phone call to the blogger. Different situations that called for different actions. In the end, both were turned around by … participating.

3) My answer for this today is simple – hand them a copy of the new book Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research. (Really, it should be required reading for all marketers, communicators and C-level executives.)

Better yet, read it first, highlight the parts that apply to you and the company (and trust me, no matter what industry you are in, there are examples that will apply to you) and put it on every corporate executive’s desk. Include a sticky note with this great quote – one of many – from the book:

“…While you can’t stop it, you can understand it.”

And just for good measure – maybe include another of my favorite quotes from Charlene Li: “While you cannot control word of mouth, you can influence it.” Then explain to them that you cannot do either of these things if you are not allowed to participate.

I hope we helped some communicators at the conference to begin to understand “it.” Forrester calls it the groundswell. Others call it Web 2.0 and still others the new social landscape. Whatever you call it, it’s here to stay…so jump in!

I’d love to hear comments from you, Dear Community, as well. Can you chime in with your ideas and help these professionals learn? After all, isn’t that the spirit of what this new social movement is all about? (Thank you, in advance!)