Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

If you take the online population as a whole and break it up into segments of people who actually contribute content, it’s pretty stunning how few people drive conversations and content in social media.

90 - 99% Read-Only Participants

I’m one of the 1% of people who blog fairly regularly, and regularly add content to online conversations, whether it be on my own blog, AboutUs.org, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

1%. It holds up.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, noted the following stats in 2005:

• 50% of all Wikipedia edits are completed by 0.7% of users
• 1.8% of users have written more than 72% of all articles

Bradley Horowitz, formerly with Yahoo!, once estimated that 1% of Yahoo! users formed groups, and that about 10% of Yahoo! users interacted with content in some way.

Even in the most serious of social networks, LinkedIN, there are just a few of us who contribute content and actively utilize the built-in social network features available to all users.

Harvard Business School did a study on LinkedIN adoption, and found the following:

• 90% of LinkedIN users use LinkedIN as a “better Rolodex” or better than email
• 5% of LinkedIN users are active online networkers (mirroring results in the real world)
• 5% of LinkedIN users are actively focused on searching for people to help them solve problems - recruiters, consultants, etc. The question and answer generators are here…

So it turns out social media isn’t all that social after all. Just like in the real world, there are relatively few people actively generating and propagating conversations online. Think of the last party or real-world social gathering you attended. My bet is that there were fewer than 10% of the people doing 90% of the talking. (I’m a listener in the real world… hardly a talker at all.)

The key to businesses and organizations tapping into social media effectively, then, is this:

• Develop your 1% content contributor(s) and leverage their activities on your behalf to the hilt. They’re rare, and they might not be the types you’d suspect. (Remember me? Not a talker at parties…)

Find them in your organization by seeking people with strong opinions. People who write great emails, or already blog themselves. Do you know who these people are in your organization? If you don’t think you’ve got them inside, hire them, contract with them, give them food, props, whatever… but find and support your content contributors in their efforts.

• Engage with other 1%’ers to get the word out about your products and services. Authentic, enthusiastic and well-targeted communications are most effective here.

I’d always recommend reaching out via social networking engines first…it’s much more interesting to get a DM (direct message) on Twitter or a comment from LinkedIN or on my Facebook wall (even when delivered via email) than a traditional email.

So few of us actively participate, imagine the messages and media for which are our ears and eyes are most finely tuned…

I’ve been working with several clients recently who are just now setting up their company blogs. One of the first things we do is to create categories, also known as keywords, for their blogs, which serve two functions:

1. From a search engine marketing (SEM) perspective, categories and keywords should be phrases for which we want the blog to appear in search results.
   • Properly constructed, long tail (define) keywords can help refine a topic so much that your relevance in search results is more accurate. For example, I was searching the other day for best practices in commenting on blog posts. I typed in “commenting best-practices” and found nothing but developer information on how to properly comment code. When I changed the search to “commenting etiquette,” the results I was served were much more relevant. Defining as closely as possible how you want to be found is critical to how you write your blog. And thinking like your clients and prospects is key to creating categories and keywords that will ensure your success.
2. From a PR, or thought leadership perspective, what are the topics around which the blog will be built?
   • Every blogger and every blog should have a mission, and every post should support the mission in some way. So as you’re considering what you want to be known for in the blogosphere, think about the words you’d want your readers to know you by. In my blog, I think I’m known for discussing marketing technology - a broad category. In that category, I write about topics such as blogging, RSS, social media, collaboration tools, SEMPR - the combination of search engine marketing and PR, etc. These topics are all topics for which I’d like to be known, and (therefore) found in search.

At the same time, most of my categories are very broad, with the exception of SEMPR (on which few search, I would imagine, since I made it up).

I should practice what I preach, and refine my categories further.

For example, instead of simply using “RSS,” as a broad category, I generally write about “enterprise RSS” which is a much tighter definition, and likely to generate a more relevant result for those who are interested in how business use RSS, vs. RSS itself.

There are tools to help pick great keywords, but the very best one is sitting right between your ears and behind your eyes…

How might you refine your keywords and categories to better serve your blog, your prospects and your clients?

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.

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 told a new client just last week that my silly, personal posts often generate the most comments. And today I had that experience, once again. My little vacation from technology over the weekend generated a little conversation that’s been quite fun for me. And it welcomed a new resource into my world, Dawn Foster, who writes over at the FastWonder Blog.

I’d heard of Dawn from one of my clients, who mentioned she does online community consulting, and used to work for Jive Software, source of one of the major platforms for online communities.

Well, she happened to stop by my post this morning and comment on it. And (as is human nature, and why I tell my clients not to be afraid of posting little personal posts once in awhile) I had to go check out her blog.

Wow. 

What a resource. Her post last week on Maintaining A Successful Corporate Community is a fantastic example of what a great blog is about. Real information, eminently readable, and truthful advice. In a blog about topics that are fascinating to me. I’ve not yet met Dawn, but as soon as I’ve finished this post, I’m going to email her to invite her to lunch. I suspect we might have a lot in common. I know I’ll learn from her. I hope we’ll each have time to make lunch happen.

Regardless, I’m subscribed.