Or when did social media become all about online PR?

As things have evolved these last two+ years in the digital social space one thing is becoming increasingly clear: there is far too much focus on blogger relations (aka product pitches direct to consumer) and focusing on alleged “influencers”. The echo chamber has been filled with arguments about how to best “reach out to bloggers” (which means how to best get them to write about your product at the end of the day) and the alleged “social media” press releases. I’m going to throw my wet blanket onto this because frankly I see it doing a real disservice to the potential of the space and leading companies down a path that skirts the outsides of the promise of what Web 2.0 communication tools can really bring to marketing communications.

Let me say this at the start: Web 2.0 is not about YOU. No really, it’s not.

That may sound dogmatic and counter-intuitive, but allow me to explain… It never was about you to begin with, it’s always been about filling a need for the people buying (or looking to buy) your products or services and providing them with *information* where they are seeking it, listening to their feedback, and interacting when *they* want to… not spin or hype. It’s about facilitating their interactions, not yours. It’s not about shiny new toys, or 80 million different channels to push your message out.

Most average folks really don’t care, or have the time, to have a “relationship” with a brand. The majority don’t have blogs where they want to review products. Most people aren’t paid to do so as the plethora of social media consultants are. If we step outside of the echo chamber of PR bloggers, social media evangelists, and tech start-ups, the majority of people just want the product they bought to work as advertised, to be able to find out real information about it, to be able to provide feedback when they feel the need, and a real person (who is empowered to do more than say “thems the rules”) to interact with them painlessly when they do - online or offline. Oh, and the ability to find out quickly what their peers are saying about it - with biases clearly spelt out.

For a company, web 2.0 tools have the potential to expand the reach of their messaging if approached strategically and with fundamental marketing principles in play. They can be used to facilitate content distribution & development; intelligence gathering to inform your marketing and product development; customer service (online & offline); search engine optimization; internal communications; usability and user experiences; expanding the brand essence, etc.

Where does “please send me links to your press release via email” come into play?

Let’s be realistic and clear — Social Media Press Releases are micro-sites for a product or announcement. This isn’t “game changing”, it’s just borrowing from what interactive advertising was doing 7 years ago and adding RSS and API feeds and using it as a landing page to direct bloggers and journalists to. That’s hardly something that deserves the amount of air-time it’s been getting if we are being honest (and doing more than patting each other on the back within the echo chamber). And it’s something that companies are spending a ton of money on for a highly niche audience, which may or may not be the right strategy for their brand.

Where’s the “pull” in product pitches?

/end rant (for now).

[Photo Credit: FelipeArte via Flickr]

As the social space begins to mature and more attention is paid by marketers on how you can provide some type of measurement on your outreach efforts through social media channels, efforts are being made to define benchmarks for metrics. To that end, Joe Thornley, of Thornley Fallis Communications, has organized a Social Media Measurement Roundtable for May 20th, 2008 in Toronto. There are some very smart and accomplished people coming (yours truly included), and we will be spending the day debating and trying to establish “dashboards” for measurement and assembling the results in a white paper for social distribution. The participants hail from Communications, PR, Marketing, Analytics, and the social media space. Kudos to Joe & team for doing the heavy lifting and organizing this session.

As those who know me, or read my blog, are aware, I’m a wee bit of an oddity in the social media space because while recognizing the power (and necessity) of community, communications and honest engagement, I also come at the space from an integrated marketing standpoint and recognize the need for brands to continue to “brand”, that awareness still matters at a certain point in the interaction/funnel, that there will always be a “next” but history and context still matter, businesses need to sell stuff, and that the digital tools (and creative) used can impact the nature of the interaction… among other things! To that end, a few of the issues I’m very interested in talking about is interaction and engagement from the “time spent engaged”, “long-tail” & “opt-in” aspects. I’d also love to hear from the community on any questions or points you would like raised during the day-long session!

Leave a comment, drop me a line, or tweet @ me with your thoughts or insight… I’ll share results as we go, and plan on attending Third Tuesday Toronto (on yes, wait for it, a Tuesday this time! :)) and will be happy to chat further!

[photo credit: chrisjohnbeckett via flickr]

As the Social Media Press Release reaches its second anniversary an interesting study was released recently by PR Week that gauges where, and how, bloggers and journalists like to receive company information. It’s a topic that’s picked up steam recently as the major news release companies and PR firms have gotten on-board with the notion of making their news “sharable” and “findable”.

Which brings me to the most recent report and then some thoughts on what “findable” really means on the interwebs as they stand today, and as they will organically move forward with Universal Search and the semantic web (aka Web 3.0). But first, the findings in the report:

Across the board, both traditional journalists and bloggers (approx. 85% respectively) received pitches from public relations folks.

No surprise there, but this is where things get interesting…

Traditional journalists rely primarily on a companies website (89%) for information when researching a story, followed by Google search (73.8%) and personal contact by a PR person (70.9) or press release. On the flip side, bloggers rely on a Google search and the company website almost equally (86.1% and 87.3% respectively) and are just tipping over 50% in the personal contact or press release department (54.4% and 57% respectively).

And then of course the question relating to the title of this post, how about the SMPR?

“What would the ideal pitch look like?” — A personal, concise email - 63.1% across the board, with the highest percentage being bloggers at 70.9%.

When asked about the social media release bloggers were slightly more receptive than the average at 17.7% vs. 7.1% in aggregate including traditional TV, radio and print journalists.

Now of course, no one wants to receive a traditional release with the abysmal stats of 2.5% for bloggers and 19.9% in aggregate.

Finally, video isn’t swaying many editors it seems with 70.1% aggregated journalists and bloggers (60.8%) stating that including video in a pitch doesn’t sway them.

So there are some stats here that make it pretty clear we have a long way to go in wide-spread adoption of the SMPR, although with the echo chamber noise about it, it seems the bubble effect keeps going and SMPRs are becoming major parts of a brand social media strategy but without any thought to the fundamentals about who is paying attention, and perhaps more importantly, how they are doing so.

No offense, but the way SMPRs are being presented range from a blog post format to a traditional ad-agency microsite format to a press release on the wire with some video and “share it” buttons. There is no consistency, and frankly, no context or long-term planning for the most part. It’s a bit ironic, but what I’m seeing happen with SMPRs is akin to the rampant use of microsites in the late 90s/ early 00s… lots of content thrown at the users, no contextual relevancy, no personalization, and an expiry date.

Let’s go back to web principles 101 here for a minute:

Everything you do should be intuitive, findable, and relevant (both in the immediate and in the archive). This is what drives the semantic web, what will drive the future of our online experience, and why tagging etc. has become a standard categorization method across all social media applications and tools.

So about the SMPR…

First off, and I cannot stress this enough, what ever you do online MUST be hosted on your own servers, with your own domain strategy in place, not exclusively on a newswires or an agency’s. Otherwise you are giving away your brand SEO juice and contextual content to a third-party and it provides absolutely no value to you unless that third-party has the built-in organic relevancy for your brand that you do (I cannot even imagine an example). Leaving aside the obvious SEO elements, from a conversational, and a web usage standpoint, search is where people go first to find information they’re looking for unless they are triggered by a friend’s recommendation or conversation. That’s where, if they’re searching, they want to find your information - in one of the top organic results. Why would you want to compete with anyone when you’re building an SMPR (especially yourself)? Your site has the brand equity of, for most corporations, a decade; build on it, don’t dilute it.

Secondly, using a newswire that’s enabled social sharing is a great idea as a supplement to sharing your content or news, but nothing beats one-to-one interaction, as the study further reinforces. There is no substitute for getting to know the community you are a part of. In addition, as multiple studies over the years have shown, when it comes to domain and branding strategy, simple and contextual is key to recall. Making sure your social content is part of your overall website and marketing strategy is crucial to maximizing visibility and interaction.

In the end, it ultimately comes back to being “findable” and “relevant” on a topic in the long term. Let’s also keep in mind that as much as an SMPR is a valuable tactic within social media, there is nothing inherently “social” about a “share this” button. The sociability comes in the interaction and the conversation over multiple channels and platforms.

And part of interaction, conversations, and what drives it all, context, is being accessible. Which leads us into universal search.

Universal search is a hot topic, and with it the reality that content is findable across a wide spectrum of properties using a single search term (a search for “Hyatt” could yield video, images, podcasts, as well as the corporate website and blog, etc.). Google, for example, is all about building a relevant experience for their users. If they know (because their algorithms look for patterns and context) that not only is the Hyatt video on YouTube hot, but it’s also embedded and linked to from the Hyatt Press Room that has historical and brand credibility, that contextually confirmed video will appear in the top results in most cases.

And that’s where the SMPR plays a valuable role: in your Media Centre/ Press Room, properly optimized for search.

The whole report really has some meaty stats and questions in terms of journalists views on the state of their industry, and how they work & bloggers take on their place in the eco-sphere - it’s worth a thorough read.

h/t on PRWeek report @dannysullivan via Twitter

[photo credit: monicutza80 via Flickr]

In a wonderfully humorous bit of irony, GMail is now sending Google Alerts to the Spam folder! Do their servers not speak the same language? Is there a family spat we should know about? Do they need a hug?

When publishing “Join the Conversation“, Joe Jaffe decided to take a collaborative approach to it’s marketing (dubbed “UNM2PNM” or “Using New Media to Prove New Media”), to prove that a book could be a success without the huge launch support of most book publishing events. He offered up 150 review copies to bloggers who requested it and agreed to post a review, positive or negative, on their site. Having enjoyed “Life after the 30 second spot” and his blog, I thought I’d take him up on it.

Without further ado, my review:

Joe Jaffe is a passionate guy and it comes through in this provocative call to action to corporations used to shouting at their customers from their ivory towers. Its rallying cry to speak ‘with’ your customers vs. ‘at’ them is a gospel truth for any business in my view. But Jaffe is also realistic and one of the key points he makes is that brands can “catalyze the conversation”.

Joining a conversation implies participating as an equal partner, which is an ideal situation. However, it doesn’t mean that a brand cannot step up to the plate and lead the conversation or attempt to take the conversation to the next level.

I absolutely agree. The caveat is that it has to be done transparently and with actual vs. forced value.

Equally valuable in my view is his addition of 3 new “C’s” to the original new marketing model premise from the late 90’s of the 3 C’s. The original three are: Content, Commerce and Community. Jaffe adds three more to the mix with: Context, Customization and Conversation, and by doing so brings much needed additional depth to the discussion.

Although I feel that the book is absolutely a must read, especially for traditional marketers struggling to come to grips with “Web 2.0″ and “social media”, I do feel that there are a few weak spots that may fundamentally occur by his insistence on separating conversation from communication, which makes some of his arguments appear forced and not fully articulated. Conversation is communication, otherwise it’s a different form of one-way dialogue. The ultimate goal of any conversation, or communication, should be to build a relationship. Jaffe actually makes these same points at various points in his book, however, because of his aversion to talking about “relationship marketing” the basic premise appears forced to become a catch phrase.

His own examples in places can contradict his main point of only a few paragraphs before. For example, in “The Ten Tenets of Good Conversation” he talks about how traditional advertising is built on a web of lies and we are constantly going to market with deficient products that we are lying about to consumers, yet later on in that same section he mentions “Snakes on a Plane” as an unqualified viral success, but states the studio could have done more to drive box office receipts after opening weekend by offering up the stars for interviews with bloggers and such. Perhaps. But after opening day the buzz shifted from how cool the film concept was (and the nostalgia for Sam Jackson as Pulp Fiction character) to how absolutely awful the movie actually was. More buzz online can’t make up for a bad product. With social media/ new media as with traditional advertising; you can’t mask a bad product behind buzz.

I also feel that in many ways the book neglects to truly take technology and historical context into account and provide a deeper understanding as to why some parts of the culture at large are embracing two-way conversation and mashing up their own brand related content (or the Read/ Write Web) at this point in history. And on the flip side, recognizing that an equally large portion of the population has no interest in having a conversation with a brand, or having them insert themselves into their social interactions.

By somewhat disparaging “traditional interactive” (by which I gather he means email, websites, search, online advertising, newsletters, games, etc. etc.) as just as much of a problem as “traditional advertising” Jaffe neglects to recognize how the technology has not only limited, but has also paved the road of experimentation to arrive at a point in time where two-way conversation online is possible. The “conversation” aspect has always existed in the online world that most people know, with email, live help, IM, etc. The ability for the consumer to *start* or change, the conversation with potential strangers and have it exist for posterity is what has significantly changed in my view.

Although it has it’s flaws (as does everything in life!), I absolutely feel JTC is a valuable addition to the marketing conversation and should be a must read in not only Fortune 1000 corporate boardrooms, but is also incredibly valuable for smaller organizations looking to make a difference and engage their customers as a competitive edge.

Give away: I have an extra copy of the book to give away to the first person to leave a comment or email me (addy is on the sidebar and timestamps will determine the winner in case of tie) with the answer to the following trivia question:

Which chapter of Join the Conversation is comprised of thoughts from contributors on the Wiki prior to the books publication?

Update: And the book is gone!