Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

Here are the notes from my SEMpdx afternoon. I wasn’t able to get connected to wireless to live blog or tweet the notes, so you’ll get ‘em here, delayed but useful, nonetheless, I hope. Certainly I’m not going to format, but if anyone has questions, ask away!

Marketing with Social Media -

Hallie - Anvil Media - Moderator
Paul Colligan - paulcolligan.com
Sandra Ponce de Leon - BuzzLogic
Dan Harbison - Portland Trail Blazers

Buzzlogic ranks #1 (over Wikipedia - quite a feat) in definition for “what is social media?”

Paul Colligan - bring social media into your marketing mix in a smart way, using:

Social News - digg, reddit
Photo Sharing - flickr
Video Sharing - YouTube
Bookmarking - del.icio.us
Social Networks - Facebook, LinkedIN
Answer Services - Ask.com
WIKIs - AboutUs.org

But remember the “one eared mickey mouse” - don’t let social media try to stand alone for your brand, be sure to integrate social media into your greater media strategy.

S3 Internet Marketing
Strategy - figure this out first
Search - make your keywords work (and URLs) for you from the start
Social Media - utilize these tools in the following ways:
- social media tools: don’t do the work of a computer, let the tools work for you
- subscription mindset: quality content will drive people to subscribe to your thoughts
- strategically delivered: with the brand in mind

ubersyndication - Paul googled define: ubersyndication on thursday last week, 0 results - today 85 results via microblogging techniques
Consider what makes good “spider food” - on your web site and other sites like Twitter, etc.
Use multimedia - podcasts, video, etc.

Brand your Twitterpage
- encourage your twitter followers to Twitter about your ideas…

Subscription mindset - push not pull…

Strategically delivered, SEO friendly

He’s gotten higher CTR on his best tweets than his best email lists

Twitter application on Facebook - Twice message and reach - no need to visit twitter
TwitterSearch.com - who’s saying what?
SocialPoster.com - uberposting tool

twitter your notes rather than blogging them, making it easy… all done.

::

dan h. - make your product fans do your marketing for you…
fans have opinions - their passion is what drives them to you and on your behalf

Blazer Fan site:
- started with video testimonials
- linked it to a marketing strategy for engagement and passionate fans
- taking the voice from a few to many
- enable a contagious environment
- integrated it with a ticketing component - people could form groups and get a discount

Successfully sold season tickets to rabid fans (bringing college basketball attitude to pro basketball) +100 season tickets for a special section + got a title sponsor for the community (Blazer Maniacs)

augments their traditional, 1:1 marketing - especially in email
integrates with their main, Trailblazers.com website

Recommends integrating social media with your business online and offline to further real connections and conversations in all spaces

uses Twitter - first around the draft debate - realtime updates
YouTube channels are there
Facebook and MySpace
Fan Toolbox - place for widgets, arm fans with photos, etc.

All of this generates content that can be indexed - “spider food” spread across myspace and twitter, elsewhere - pushing to multiple sites, linking back to your sites
RSS pushes get spidered and indexed much more quickly than traditional updates
mobile integration is coming - struggle now is consistency across all mobile channels

::
Sandra - BuzzLogic
IDs influential discussions online
“Conversation Targeting” - to drive ad performance
- think of psychology of users
- metrics - traditional do apply, but engagement measurements (passing along, comments)
- copy - read up and find out how bloggers are talking about your topic
- creative - how will you get their attention??

Blog reach rivals media
57M reading - 60% access blogs to get opinions, 65% go to blogs to make decisions
Who’s influential on any topic, who’s following the conversation?

BuzzLogic socially map conversations - show link direction, whther on, or off topic, whether popular, who’s influencer?

Reach pockets of engaged audiences
Brand is lifted linking to new media influencers
Linking can tell you about your customers,
Conversational nature can aid in advertising

Question from audience: Tools to monitor social media?

Feedburner - for RSS feeds - ensure they’re clean, shows subscriber rates and clickthru rates
- use yourbrand feature - www.you.com - brand your domain name not feedburner - it’s free
- as an insurance policy leverage your feed and brand
Flock - browser - built on Firefox engine, uses plugins for Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, your RSS feeds, etc.
Buzzlogic - helps interest influencer

Track your domain name - through any social media method utilize your domain names and track them

Alternative ROIs for social media ? sponsorship, advertising, content syndication, attention
don’t try to do too much with your social network engagement - phase it in.

ning and kickapps - free tools to get your feet wet, but your brand should be hosted on your URL…

One interactive agency put their culture up on twitter - got business from their twitter feeds

jott.com - killer twitter tool - who do you want to jot? audio recording goes through transcription - adding text to your voice… put a speed dial on your phone and verbally update your twitter account.

Share This

I talk a lot on this blog about linking SEM (search engine marketing) efforts to PR efforts - I call it SEMPR - to boost awareness and relevancy online. It’s my opinion that my clients should get the benefit of integrating both efforts, rather than keeping them separate, as most marketing communications teams do.

(I was a VP managing corporate marcom efforts for many years, and I neglected to link them in my organizations. Most of my peers still do….)

In a very passionate post over on Micro Persuasions, Steve Rubel (long time blogger and PR pro) has taken a very pointed view on the subject he calls “SEO Shenanigans” - that of gaming social media solely to improve search results. In his very articulate argument, he states:

“Some respected experts are advocating launching social media marketing programs solely for the purpose of influencing search engines, rather than with the intent of fostering collaboration and genuine communication.

This represents a clear and present danger to the fabric of the community. If you care about the social web, then you should be alarmed.”

Good content and collaboration should always be the foundation and intention of any marketing effort, otherwise, why bother?

Some truths I’ve learned about both SEM and PR:

• Shortcuts in content quality are outed quickly online - who cares about your blog/tweets/facebook profile or your press release if I can’t learn anything about or from you? If I can’t, you’re largely going to be ignored - regardless of your search relevancy or reach.
• Fostering true collaboration will result in meaningful conversations. When I was at Marqui and we [unintentionally] started an ethical debate among bloggers and traditional media, the conversations weren’t always pleasant, but they were meaningful. And, by the way, those conversations without content were dismissed quickly as being without merit.
• Linking search engine marketing and PR efforts are jarring for each profession, usually. I’ve found the people in each vertical to be wildly opposed in many ways - how they think, measure and relate, for starters. On one hand, you’ve got relationship/rolodex-driven folks who measure awareness and reach in months, if not years. On the other hand, you’ve got measurement-driven folks who relate to spreadsheets and percentage shifts in A/B tests in days or weeks…
• But just because it isn’t easy doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it… with the right intention (collaboration and conversations) and content (properly written, tagged and optimized) for the best possible results.

Finally, I agree with Steve’s parting salvo:

“….the SEO shenanigans for the sake of SEO has to stop. If you’re going to play in our sandbox, follow the community’s (unwritten) rules.”

…Even though following “unwritten rules” is nearly impossible. Which is why smart marketers will always turn to other smart marketers - even us unruly consultants and those with opposing positions whom we listen to - in order to learn more.

Share This

I’m just plain happy this morning. Maybe it was the lunar eclipse, maybe some great meetings this morning, and maybe, just maybe it’s that I’ve felt terribly productive this morning. I’m pretty excited that my RSS reader - from Attensa (a client of mine) - gives me the capability to tag my persistent search results (and have them appear in my del.icio.us account) and comment on blog posts that reference my persistent searches right from within the RSS reader itself.

I don’t have to follow a link to the site, I just get a little window with the post right in it, and can comment right from there, saving tons of time.

Check it out - hoping the thumbnail shot here will work for y’all. (Just click on it, and you’ll see the whole shebang…)

You can also see that Attensa searches 18 different sites for the most up-to-date mentions of any keyword combinations you want to track. Attensa’s RSS reader is free (as is their virtual feed server for little [1-5 people] groups - enterprises pay, but the increased productivity I’ve seen will quickly pay for itself), and you can download it from Attensa’s site for Outlook, Mac, or web reading…

Eclipses are cool, wherever you find them.

Share This

“Spin doesn’t work anymore…. the Internet has a built-in BS detector.” - Chris Pirillo

My friends Johnny Hartman and Rod Pitman sent me a great little four minute video that they produced featuring people like Chris and Joshua Green from MIT talking about “transmedia; (define)” and how companies (and each of us as individuals) need to take a completely holistic approach to what constitutes new “media” entry points for effective storytelling and reputation monitoring in this brave new world.

Even though I agree with Chris about the BS detector, it’s incumbent on each of us to carefully manage our reputations online. It’s no secret that anyone has the ability to write about anyone’s brand, person, or product.

Spin isn’t really dead, it’s just been plopped in the hands any consumer, partner, competitor or detractor who wants to take it… marketers have lost control before they even release their carefully crafted messages.

But that shouldn’t make us hopeless. Once educated, we can manage this fundamental shift….

How?

Learning What Kids Already Know

Business is just learning about new media entry points. Kids have been learning about them for years.

Joshua Green heads up MIT’s “Transmedia Convergence Culture Consortium (C3);” set up specifically to advise media and entertainment (among other) businesses how to navigate the waters of brand and reputation management as media becomes more accessible to the masses.

From their site: “C3 explores the ways the business landscape is changing in response to the growing integration of content and brands across media platforms and the increasingly prominent roles that consumers are playing in shaping the flow of media…”

Two years ago this spring I spoke at a conference at the University of Washington on Media Literacy - where educators, social services professionals and media literacy advocates from around the world gathered to share information about teaching media literacy to kids. In short, (define:) media literacy helps kids know what’s real, what’s not real, what to expect online and in other forms of media they’re inundated with on a daily basis: television, movies, etc…

It seems business is just now catching up with the kids in knowing what’s real, what’s not real, and what to expect online with regard to their brands.

What’s real/not real?

The first thing we need to do is track exactly who’s saying what about us… in real time.

The Law of Large Numbers and the Personal Web

The thing is, you don’t have to be a big entertainment consortium to produce amazingly effective, entertaining stories - true or not - about pretty much anything.

Today, anyone can be a content producer and generate interest and awareness from millions of people. Look at dooce.com - a very entertaining blog (that I enjoy every day) by Heather B. Armstrong. The word dooce has become synonymous with being fired for blogging, as Heather was

“fired from my job for this website because I had written stories that included people in my workplace.”

In 2005 her website (a suite of blogs) started pulling in enough ad revenue to support her family, as it continues to do today.

It’s the law of large numbers, as my learned friend Paul Kedrosky would say.

With 1.3B people currently connected to the web, there are a plethora of us producing personal, public content. We’re spending time updating our Twitter posts, managing our LinkedIN profiles, chatting with friends on Facebook and trying out Plaxo’s Pulse; it’s only a matter of my content coming up in search results that will connect me with hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people around the globe.

Consider these (smaller, but still significant) numbers:

• LinkedIN counts more than 17M members - mostly business people
• Facebook has more than 43M members - businesses are pouring in
• Technorati is tracking more than 112M blogs - businesses are beginning to blog (the spigot isn’t turned on far yet)

Tracking conversations about my products, my company, my personal reputation is critical in this more complex, transmedia world.

Online Reputation Monitoring - Essential to Your Brand

I talk about monitoring online conversations a lot in this space (dare I say, My Space?) because it’s a critical component of marketing and brand management. And it’s simple to do - using managed RSS technology tools.

RSS readers are free. And there are excellent, free RSS readers with a reach far beyond Google, including those from (my favorite, my client) Attensa.

How do I monitor my brand?

1. Download Attensa (or other RSS reader of choice). It’s free, and your results can be sent to your inbox or a web site specifically set up to track your feeds. Go to www.attensa.com/get-it and just do it (to borrow heavily from a great brand tagline).
2. Go into the Attensa application and set up a persistent search. All you have to do is put in your company name, your product’s name, your own name, and tell Attensa to keep a watch out online for ANY mention of your name(s); and it’ll do so automatically, persistently scanning 18 different search engines (way beyond Google - although if that’s all you do, good for you!) for instances of [your name(s)].
3. Any time something is said about [your name(s)], you’ll get it in your inbox or on your web-based reader.
4. When it happens, follow the link, see what you think, engage in conversation, drive to closure.

I’ve told audiences for years - in answer to the ubiquitous question, “What if someone says something bad about me?” - if they do, wouldn’t you rather:

• Know who’s saying what?
• Be able to address what’s real, what’s not real, and
• Provide your point of view?

… than not know they’re saying such things?

After all, you can’t please a million/thousand/hundred/all of the people all of the time.

But you can listen, learn and interact - using your own finely-honed BS detector.

And that, my marketing friends, is what brand awareness and engagement are all about.

Share This

I’ve been awake in a strange bed since 4:30 a.m., obsessing over story telling.

I’m in Eugene, Oregon, attending the Oregon Wine Industry Symposium, and speaking on a panel on “How to Make Your Web Site Work Harder For You” in a couple of hours. At our panel’s practice session and the annual wine industry dinner last night, I was impressed by simplicity and effectiveness of the storytelling going on… every award had a story, every acceptance speech had a story, and every vineyard, vintner and enthusiast had a story.

It seems the wine industry itself is a compilation of stories, and the people in it are natural story tellers, which is a great attribute for making the web work harder for you…

So the theme that’s going to be called out this morning, as I speak to my section of the panel - Engagement - is the art of online story telling.

It’s simple: people are captured and compelled to action by great stories.

As prospects and shoppers go online, they might be researching people, products, healthcare decisions or (like millions of us) posting our random thoughts, photos, videos, for friends, family and perfect strangers to see.

(”You’re either on the screen, or watching the screen, baby!” my friend Paul shouts in my ear…)

Simple, engaging stories serve to: 1) attract our attention; and b) provide the power of persuasion, once we’ve offered it. And so, in an effort to capture my thoughts about storytelling before I share them with attendees, I find myself here… in the quiet of my hotel room, at my desk, looking at a laptop, telling a story.

Our room is going to be the smaller of the two large rooms at the Hilton Hotel, which was built sometime in the 70’s and hasn’t been updated since. Three things that could have an effect on our attendance:

1. We’re the first session of the dreaded “Morning After…” You know the drill, the big dinner (with lots of wine) was last night, and everyone had a good time. The last thing they want to do is get up and go anywhere but The Big River Grille, and order up an “exceptional northwest cuisine-themed” breakfast.
2. We’re up against a session called “Impact of Grape Maturity on Wine Flavor” and I’m hoping people will say, “Yep, it does!” and come listen to our session instead of the learned folks from Oregon State and UC Davis. And another session called “This Just In: Extension Research Updates,” with speakers from Oregon State, Cal Poly and USDA Prosser, where ‘Short Shoot Syndrome’ and ‘cover crops’ will likely attract a healthy audience.
3. We’re in the “not geeky” track for oeneophiles. What a hoot.

I expect (fingers crossed) 100 or so people to brave their way in to listen to us. We’re focusing on simple, effective, FREE tools you can use to improve your web presence for attendees.

Our Panel’s Story:

Digital Footprints Don’t Lie - Debora Geary from Fireweed Analytics, will show us that using Google Analytics, which is a free analytics tool (and Google is the only one you’ll ever need, no matter what your ISP says, according to Debora), anyone can see the ‘digital footprints’ their customers will leave as they walk around a web site. What captures their attention, and what you can tell about their paths and meanderings are quite telling.

She studied the Sokol Blosser site in preparation for the panel, and found one of the top pages people visited on the site has been the “meet us” page - a simple compilation of photos of the people behind the wines. (JLJ: People love to buy stuff from people they like. Especially foods and wines.)

Capture Prospects with Content - Katherine Gray, content strategist, will speak to the importance of content on a site that will both support your brand and deliver the message you think most important. She’ll speak to authenticity of voice, and how to use words (first and foremost) and design to effectively tell your brand’s story. But it doesn’t stop there.

She’ll point out the critical links to a site’s shopping cart (JLJ: when they have them… most wineries take their orders by fax, and the abandonment rate off of “buy now - send us a fax!” pages are huge.) that could be vastly improved by simply adding a bit of contextual content here and there.

Think Like a Spider - Ben Lloyd of Amplify Interactive will tell attendees to go online, turn off the graphics in their browser, and look at how search engine spiders “see” their sites. (JLJ: go to your browser’s Preferences… Content… Uncheck the “Load Images Automatically” button. You’ll be amazed at what you see or don’t see…) Then sprinkle relevant keywords (pinot noir, pinot gris, pinot blanc…) in your title tags (most importantly!) body copy and headlines to give the spiders a notion of what your site is about. That will give you the opportunity to come up in search results when people are looking for a lovely pinot to take to the party Friday night.

Get Into the Magic F - I will wrap the panel by talking about how easy it is to use blogging, sharing, tagging and social networks to engage readers, tell great stories about your wines (and the people behind them), and improve your chances of showing up at the top of a Google search results page (”the Magic F”). And how to easily manage and monitor your online reputation using free RSS readers (like those from my client Attensa), so you’ll know exactly who’s talking about you, when they do, delivered right to your inbox if you like.

Dennis Hahn, ID Branding CEO and our panel moderator did a wonderful job of pulling all of our presentations together into a story… and he’ll lead our lucky attendees through the session in a memorable, compelling manner.

I’m off for coffee - fuel for the stories I’m about to share.

Share This