Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I’m participating in an international movement called Blog Action Day, sponsored by Blog Action Day.org. From their site:

Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.

The subject of this global discussion today is poverty.  And I know more of us are feeling impoverished as the world’s economy teeters on its axis. But feeling impoverished is not poverty.  For many of us, it’s likely to be an emotional feeling rather than physical state of homelessness, hunger, cold…

In the Oregon area, requests for food assistance have grown by almost 5% over the past year, for the first time in four years, according to the Oregon Food Bank, which served more than 792,000 boxes of food to people in need last year. Some stats from their most recent report:

• More than 200,000 people per month ate from an Oregon Food Bank box this year, up from 192,000 in 2006/7
• Every dollar donated to the Oregon Food Bank will buy five pounds of food to supply the food boxes
• About 61% of the food in food boxes comes from the food industry themselves, but that still leaves 39% on our shoulders
• About 16% of the food comes from food drives - learn how to hold your food drive here.
• Anyone can drop off food at one of the food banks, if you’d like to donate. They’d just like you to contact them first, so they can be prepared for you.

I’m a big believer in blogging for social good. I hope this little post will inspire someone to contact the food bank and either donate, learn how to hold a food drive, or drop off some food for those in need.

Trust has been a common theme that the universe keeps thrusting in my face of late.

• Our planet has been shaken by a lack of trust and transparency in the mortgage, banking and financial markets.
• Our nation’s political leaders’ approval ratings (a form of trust) are in the toilet, and the mud-slinging has just begun in earnest as our future political leaders jockey for votes. Whom do we believe?
• Closer to home, people are having trouble paying their bills. For a (sorry) myriad of (sorry) reasons, sorry. We’ll write the checks this week.

I’m a living microcosm of the world. And right now, that’s not a good thing.

On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, trust is broken when shelter, food and sleep are threatened. And a breakdown of trust is ugly. Even in a microcosm. Who isn’t feeling the general malaise gripping our globe?

My personal mistrust and malaise are showing in the following ways:

• Scattered attention - that never bodes well for clients…
• Irritation - knowing I can’t do more than pick up a phone and beg them to write the checks tomorrow, as promised…
• Disappointment - at myself for not following up more promptly, or checking in to remind them to approve the invoice, please…

Which, in turn, thwarts productivity, purpose, creativity, graciousness, my sense of humor.

[Rarely do I use this little pulpit for personal gripes. In fact, I'm not sure it's happened before. But (as I tell my clients) this is my living room, it's my choice what I share, and apparently I need to get this out of my heart. If you see yourself here, forgive yourself.]

Rebuilding Trust - One Gesture at a Time

So. How am I going about rebuilding trust with my fellow world travelers? By trying to make even tiny gestures matter:

• Thanking those who pay their bills early (! and there are those who do!)
• Being polite to those with whom we deal - and offering help where we can
• Understanding that people forget - my inbox has some ‘reminders’ I need to pay attention to… (noted)
• Kindness is important - one of my mantras - and especially appropriate in today’s times
• Prying the mind open - and the ears while we’re at it - and listening to others’ points of view

Just as we’re being told to take a long-term view of the financial markets and not panic; I think we’re in a place where we need to take a long-term view of humanity and know that this is an impermanent breakdown in concentration, efficiency, abundance and trust.

In the spirit of “the greed that got us into this situation is the greed that’ll get us out of it…” Trust is the first step to reparation.

Let the spirit of trust (and the abundance that comes with it) begin to flow…

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Public Relations (PR) professionals are logically linked by technology and human behavior, yet few companies are combining their knowledge of each to generate big results in today’s rapidly evolving communications landscape. A few smart PR agencies are exploring adding SEM capabilities to their teams.

At minimum, PR agencies should be training their employees to understand the basics of SEM. (I’ve done that with local agencies, and it’s been great fun. According to the participants, results have been strong so far.)  Here’s some background for the PR agency management team to consider…

The People Effect

It’s no new news that “new media” influencers are proliferating online – there are expert bloggers in every niche market and Technorati tracks more then 112.8 million blogs today. That’s up from 90 million in July, 2007 and 78 million in April of 2007.

In addition to sharing stories and opinions, people are sharing all sorts of media - known as user generated content (UGC) - in social networks like Facebook and LinkedIN; and in content portals like Flickr (photo sharing) YouTube (video sharing) and iTunes (audio sharing).

And every single piece of media that is uploaded online is categorized, or “tagged” by the author. Technorati currently tracks more than 250 million tags (July, 2007). There are plenty of tag sharing sites today, like stumbleupon, delicious and ma.gnolia. I’ve blogged about smart uses for tagging sites before.

Steven Johnson, author of Emergence, envisioned the results of this phenomenon in 2002:

“Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts…And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher-level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up.”

The Technology Effect

Enabling this huge public publishing push has been the availability of cheap, easy to use publishing technology. Blog software is free and extremely easy to use. Computers have built- in video cameras, and phones have built-in cameras and video. Anyone can be an online, multimedia publisher today.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is the ultimate consumption technology. RSS allows publishers to feed their content simply and easily from their web sites to their readers. When readers subscribe to their RSS feeds, they’re automatically delivered to email inboxes, to phones and PDAs - anytime information is updated. Information comes to you as it happens… I’ve blogged a ton about RSS here, so go explore.

Basically, you can subscribe to favorite sites or  you can set up persistent searches for categories (tags or phrases) you’re interested in, and anytime someone tags their content with your search phrase, you’ll have it delivered right to you immediately. RSS is built into blog software, to social networking applications and into web sites. All you have to do is turn it on, and you’ll notice RSS icons are cropping up everywhere online.

The Read/Write Web

Largely as a result of these forces, the profession of journalism has gone well beyond credentialed reporters and into the hands of bloggers.  New York University’s Jay Rosen on his PressThink blog wrote of the current state of journalism:

“1. The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most (not all) of today’s journalism comes out of the market economy.

2. Journalism had become the domain of professionals, and amateurs were sometimes welcomed into it—as with the op-ed page. Whereas the weblog is the domain of amateurs and professionals are the ones being welcomed to it.

3. In journalism since the mid-nineteenth century, barriers to entry have been high. With the weblog, barriers to entry are low: a computer, a Net connection, and a software program like Blogger or Movable Type gets you there. Most of the capital costs required for the weblog to “work” have been sunk into the Internet itself, the largest machine in the world (with the possible exception of the international phone system.)”

And with smart RSS platforms, people can now instantly read feeds from within their email, react to them by adding their comments or thoughts, and publish their reactions along with the original feed and their own relevant tags to their own blog, their company’s intranet site or Wiki.

In addition, my Search Engine Marketing-based Public Relations (SEMPR) approach is based on the following tenets:

1) People are increasingly going online first when looking for information about a product or service to purchase. (Source: WOMMA)

2) The Internet is the only medium in which trust is raising vs. television, newspapers, and other media outlets (Source: Forrester Research)

3) People trust word-of-mouth recommendations by 2:1 over other sources in their purchase decisions. (Source: McKinsey)

4) Journalists and analysts are not the key influencers even for Business to Business (B2B) purchases that they used to be; while new media influencers are growing in strength. (See sources below)

5) User generated content (UGC) have been effectively tagged by people with authority – their creators, viewers, detractors and admirers.

There are very compelling statistics that support these tenets and our different, SEMPR approach to building sustainable conversations:

- 76% of Americans don’t believe advertising – Yankelovich, 2005

- 92% of Americans rate WOM of friends, family, and others as the best source of ideas and information (up from 67% in 1997) – GfK NOP/Roper 2005

- WOM ranked as #1 driver of directly influencing technology or services purchase decisions – CNET Business Network

- 85% of U.S. marketing executives plan to incorporate WOM, customer evangelism and blogs into their marketing mix – CMO Magazine Survey 2007

- 74% of people hearing a personal, negative recommendation were influenced to buy another brand – Millward Brown, 2005

SEMPR, then, is about leveraging the activities of people searching, categorizing, tagging, sharing and talking with each other online. Who better to manage those activities (from a business perspective) than those responsible for positioning an organization, their products, their effects on markets, etc.

Why not SEMPR?

I had a meeting yesterday with Pam Pickens from the City of Portland’s Office of Sustainable Development. Pam and I got together through our mutual friend, Suzame Tong, who is brilliant at putting people and events together selflessly.

Pam has a big (but fun) job - she’s helping businesses learn sustainable business practices - as described on the Best Business Center website:

Don’t think your business needs to go green?
Ask yourself these questions:

• Will your business remain profitable as energy and utility costs continue to rise?
• Are your customers asking if your business is “green?”
• Do you believe that your business practices affect your customers and your community?

Their services are free, and there’s a sustainable practice audit that any business can sign up for, where auditors will come in and look at your business practices and tell you how to improve them.

In this time of “drill, drill, drill” echoing in our ears, and our dependence on foreign oil costing billions monthly, even a relatively small step toward sustainability will do wonders for our earth and our economy at the same time.

Go! Go green!

It’s viral, with more than 2.7M views, although I’m not sure how long ago it was posted. This Wii commercial breaks all sorts of old rules, which, in my experience, you have to do in order to go viral.  Smart developers responded to a “what if we could…” questioner, and wow.

Have a look. It’s quite brilliant. And thank you, Craig Calder, for bringing it to my attention!

(and thus, she broke her long string of radio silence in the blogosphere… whew.)