Sword and the Script

Smart things: buzz and snappy science (1.26.12)

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:14:00 +0000

Smart things – bookmark them, write them down and turn them into a blog post. In hopes of sharing some content I’ve found interesting and noteworthy, here are five smart things I’ve heard lately.

1. Negative buzz vs. crisis on social media. “Brands with social media experience know they don’t need to respond to every ounce of negative buzz in the social sphere; often, letting consumer brand advocates do it for them can address the problem while also showing how loyal some customers are to the company.” eMarketer: Do Social Media Postings Always Require a Brand Response?

2. The few dominate the many. "Twitter provides both an overwhelming amount of data and is dominated by a minority of influential users." Melissa Parrish's Forrester blog: Twitter: Is Anybody Doing It "Right"?

3. Calling out PR in PR blogs. “When we flame "PR Fail" incidents, we (consciously or subconsciously) send a few messages:

* I keep abreast of the latest trends in PR, so I'd be a great PR pro for you to hire.

* Since I'm showing you an example of "bad" PR, you should assume that, conversely, I practice "good" PR...so I'd be a great PR pro for you to hire.

* Other well-respected PR pros wrote about this, and by weighing in on it, I can earn an invitation to a conversation with these leaders of our industry. And since I converse with the pioneers in our field...I'd be a great PR pro for you to hire.

As much as I hate that we dredge up examples of people behaving badly, we created the economy where this stuff is the currency.” Scott Hepburn in a comment on Arik Hanson’s blog: Are we helping or hurting by blogging about PR flame-outs?

4. The science of snappy writing. “The takeaway from all this is that you should maximize the match of your tagline to the nature of your product and the orientation of your customers. Your message should build on that, with promotion-oriented messages expressed in positive, gain-oriented terms and prevention-oriented messages framed in terms of loss. If your marketing style permits and if you can identify customer segments with different promotion/prevention orientations, craft different messages for each group.” Roger Dooley on Neuromarketing: How to Write Taglines That Double Sales

5. Long live the Web! “Why does the rise of Facebook affect the web? Because it isn’t a part of the open WWW. Facebook exists behind a walled garden. You need to log in to use it. Content or software developers who want to build products that work in Facebook have got to develop inside of Facebook’s framework rather than working on open, Internet standards.” Mark Suster on Both Sides of the Table: The End of the Web? Don’t Bet on It. Here’s Why

Heard or read something smart lately? Please feel free to share.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
Smart (and enchanting) things I’ve heard (3.14.11)

7 Creative PR and Marketing Ideas

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:53:00 +0000

Not everyone gets feedback from David Pouge or Robert Scoble for their PR pitches, but creative PR and marketing ideas do have a way of earning the right attention all on their own – and hopefully from customers. I like to keep an eye out for those really creative ideas, but the reality is they don’t come along every day: The list of seven below was nearly a year in the making.

1. Earning more blog comments. “Commenting seems to have decreased over the past six years,” wrote Geoff Livingston on his blog recently. You wouldn’t know it by the number of quality comments on Adam Singer’s blog, The Future Buzz. Perhaps that’s because Adam does something very clever in rewarding great commenters: every so often, he turns the best comments on his blog into a blog post. It’s a savvy tactic I’ve also observed elsewhere, like Mack Collier’s blog. People like to be acknowledged for their thoughts and this is certainly a nice way of doing it; bonus for re-using great content to develop an easy, but value added blog post.

2. Think outside the template. Now and again a clever PR person comes up with a creative idea for a press release that earns praise; here are three examples: 1) The National Zoo caught my eye by publishing a press release that described animal reactions to a rare earthquake in Washington, DC. 2) HubSpot earned David Meerman Scott’s attention with a press release comprised entirely of Tweets to announce its acquisition of a social media marketing company. Wire to Ear snagged consideration from the Dallas Observer for their client, a band called Slider Pines, in part, by overtly using a press release template, with a creative twist (screen shot nearby; credit: Dallas Observer). Observer writer Pete Freedman apologized for a slow news day, but the headline screamed, “The Most Creative Press Release We've Seen In A Long Time...”

3. Marketing materials with double duty. Mares, which makes SCUBA equipment has appointed its clothing and product tags with an additional duty: bumper sticker. Divers tend to be fanatical about diving and have a strong affinity to gear manufacturers. A tag that doubles as a sticker is liable to wind up on a refrigerator, the bumper on a Jeep Wrangler or a suitcase containing dive gear. Any clothing retailer could adopt this tactic. The GAP, for example, which seems to have customers with deeply passionate convictions about its logo design, could easily find its tried and true logo voluntarily affixed to its customers’ most prized possessions. And maybe even a suitcase of their own.

4. Stopping SOPA. The outcry against SOPA took several forms, but one I found especially creative was “Stop SOPA” tagline included in Twitter profile photos. According to CNET, at least 14,000 people added that tag line to their Twitter photo and the message may have reached millions. Any awareness campaign from cause-marketing to politics could incorporate this idea into marketing tactics. I first saw it when my buddy, Abbas Haider Ali, a former work colleague, retweeted a link I had posted to Twitter. It’s his photo I’ve posted nearby and I’ve linked his name to his Twitter account for any product management types interested in following a pragmatic product strategy guy. By the way, if you think SOPA is dead, I'd caution you to think again ('cause it ain't over). Better yet, take action and stop SOPA with three emails.

5. Make them feel good. “The best marketing or advertising success stories are exactly that – real stories,” wrote DannyBrown in a blog post about a creative marketing idea from smoyz, a creative boutique, working on behalf of Kleenex. The firms monitored Facebook for references of being sick and sent a “Kleenex Kit” to 50 people by courier within 1-2 hours according to a video (nearby) that recaps the campaign. All 50 people – or 100% – of recipients posted a photo about receiving the kit to their Facebook page and earned Kleenex 1,800 interactions. If you have ever wondered how a brand like Kleenex can tally up 70,000+ Facebook fans, with nearly 1,000 talking about them on an idle Saturday, take note, this is how you do it:

6. Power in numbers. Ever have the urge to celebrate Christmas in Birmingham England? Few people probably did before the city launched an integrated campaign with PR, advertising and digital media to attract visitors for 2010. The campaign published an array of videos, an online game and teamed up “with restaurants, theatres, and attractions” in order “to pool the city’s marketing resources,” according The Guardian. The city’s online game netted 70,000 downloads and its website received some 265,000 visitors as a result according to the same article. More importantly, 70% of visitors surveyed said they intend to return in the next 12 months. It must have worked, because Birmingham repeated the campaign in 2011, with another twist for YouTube.

7. Build it with Staples and they will come. Hat tip to O’Dwyer’s Greg Hazley for spotting this creative video by Hill and Knowlton on behalf of Staples Sydney – I bookmarked his link on Delicious nearly a year ago. The firm used common office supplies to build a replica of a new store location in preparation for its grand opening and earned more than 100,000 views.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
Seven Creative PR ideas
PR and the magic number 7

Prediction #3: Marketers regain sense of control

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:30:00 +0000

Note: this is the third and final prediction in a series of predictions I’m making for 2012. The first two can be read here: Prediction #2: Favor tips towards credible media and Prediction #1: Social media slides down the pedestal.

Marketers are no longer in control of their brands. Do you believe it? I did. But as in my first prediction, my thinking is changing.

As I’ve spent nearly a year away from my day job in PR, I’ve found the distance has given me a new perspective. Sometimes we need to step back to see things in perspective. Geoff Livingston’s post (the photo credit also belongs to Geoff via Flickr), The Customer Is Not Your CMO, made it click in my mind:

Companies that don’t understand and listen to their customers experience problems because not only are the ignoring their customer, but also the flaws in their offering. That’s because customer service is usually activated when people are pissed, not when they are happy.

What about the vast majority of happy customers who never call? How can customer service represent them.

Just like the army doesn't want GI Joe managing a supply line, international troop deployment, and war strategy, I don’t want customer service driving marketing. While feedback can lead to innovation, overall I think the effect would be stymied, reactive products that don’t advance anywhere nearly as quickly as they currently do.

Did Old Spice cede control? How about Vitaminwater? Or Blendtec? Skeptics will point to the likes of the Gap fiasco and say, look, marketing lost control. It’s a popular mantra; don’t dare to think anything different.

The Gap didn’t lose control of their brand. They failed to 1) listen and 2) provide leadership. We’ve diagnose a problem based on one or two symptoms when there are multiple symptoms that are interrelated.

Listening is little more than a 30-year-old principle, if not older – its savvy market research. Marketing is the art and science of determining which ideas are worth pursuing, developing and leading.

Leadership in marketing – especially in social media – is the concept Seth Godin describes in his book Tribes.

“Leadership isn’t difficult, but you’ve been trained for years to avoid it,” write Godin. He draws a distinction between leadership and management which he defines as “manipulating recourses to get a known job done.”

Making widgets faster is a management problem. Ensuring all widgets are precisely the same is a management problem. Ensuring the supplies to make the widget are delivered on time is a management problem.

Change doesn’t come without leadership. Leadership by virtue grants control.

Old Spice did it differently. Vitaminwater was unconventional. Blendtec still gets mileage out of an aging but unique concept. These companies are leading – and leading with marketing.

Marketing hasn’t lost control; it needs to hone its leadership skills.

Prediction #2: Favor tips towards credible media

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:11:00 +0000

Note: this is the second of three predications I’m making for 2012. The first one is out and can be read here: Prediction #1: Social media slides down the pedestal.

There’s a growing backlash against infographics. The backlash scale ranges from the inevitable call for the death of infographics to mere issues with aesthetics, but I think The Atlantic was the most scathing. It classified infographics as a plague.

“95% of infographics from unknown sites are full of distortions and lies inserted by internet marketers to get you to link to their websites,” reads a presumably satirical infographic. The article continues by pointing out the factual in accuracies of several popular infographics including the “Hazards of Hospitals” and the “Prison/Princeton.”

To PR pros, this criticism is similar to that of surveys (here’s a little anecdote about the Pope and surveys that sums it up this criticism). However, this time I think it’s different – and it’s indicative of an underlying theme: a trend towards credible media.

While in years past, some predicted the democratizing effects of social media would replace traditional media, I’ve long advocated for a balanced view. PR programs should remain inclusive of mainstream media (and traditional tactics) for one compelling reason: it’s clear that mainstream coverage drives social media conversations.

Certainly the inverse can also true but the threshold is much higher; an order of magnitude higher. One clear example is the fact that in many ways, Twitter owes much of its user growth to media coverage.

“What I really found interesting is that for all the talk about traditional media having lost its luster due to the rise of social media, the report proves that Twitter, in fact, owes some of its popularity and growth to traditional media,” wrote Farida Harianawala in response to a blog post on the topic. “I think traditional media becomes more and not less important with all the information and content overload, as we will need credible sources of information that can cut through all the social media noise.”

I agree, but might add it’s not information overload per se – it’s a filtering problem. One easy filter is to go with the media you trust, which is why many information consumers have favorite blogs they visit over and over. This is an important nuance in my prediction which says credible media, not simply mainstream media.

The mainstream media has credibility. Sure there’s bias in reporting, but by far and large, the ethics of the media community are stringent, and enforcement is largely peer driven and self-policing. It’s shameful to get the facts wrong and carries serious career ending implications.

That the trend favors credible media is indicative of the idea that content producers can earn the trust of a community but the fast growing and wildly successful communities will be fewer and far between. Trust is one of those terms coined early, and bantered around the social web with ease, but the hard work is in the action…consistent, well-conceived ideas grounded in accurate facts and methodical research. The visualization of data – whether it’s pretty or pretty ugly – is but just one more step in this direction.

Prediction #1: Social media slides down the pedestal

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 13:31:00 +0000

Blog posts on predictions are predictable and common. Forecasts range from what sort of content will flourish, what networks will thrive and how the behavior of consumers – and by extension marketers – will change are plentiful.

Many of these predictions are well-grounded, but even as a social media enthusiast, I’m beginning to get a sense that the allure of social media is waning.

In making predictions I offer a caveat: social media will continue to be an important part of content consumption and marketing. However, I tend to think of social media behavior in the context of Tuckman’s stages for group development.

People are after all, a collective group, connected over a social network and the basis for my predictions is we are in the “storming” stage of development, where “different ideas compete for consideration.” Here is the first of my three contrarian predictions I’ll roll out over the next week or so.

#1 Social media slides down the pedestal

Malcolm Gladwell stirred controversy this year when he rejected the conventional idea that social media enabled political revolution across the Middle East. As Wired’s Bill Wasik deftly points out, Gladwell’s argument boils down to the inability to convincingly claim, “that in the absence of social media, those uprisings would not have been possible.”

Few agreed with Gladwell and even I was, at the time, critical of his analysis but the year in passing, notwithstanding having actually visited Egypt, my thinking is changing: Gladwell is right.

For all the laudatory praise, social media traffic during the Egyptian revolution accounted for less than 1% of the total population, according to Stratfor. If users of social media stoked a revolution, albeit a leaderless one, their longer-term success has been limited – one only needs to look at the Egyptian voting data being returned for validation. The election winners rode on the coattail of the revolution – they did not engineer it.

We do not need to look to oversees to see that this statistic is also true elsewhere. As Forrester’s Melissa Parrish wrote in a recent blog post, "Twitter provides both an overwhelming amount of data and is dominated by a minority of influential users."

“Twitter is a fishbowl,” Beth Harte once said to me in a face-to-face conversation. Those words have stuck with me for many months and I was recently reminded of them when I read Infinite Stupidity, a long but fascinating read by evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel that suggests, despite our self-perceptions to the contrary, only a small number of people are truly innovative.

“What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet,” wrote Pagel. “We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by.”

So when I predict social media will slide down the pedestal, I’m suggesting it will drop a notch or two. I’m not proposing social media is dead, or a waste of time, but rather we’ll begin to view it as a more tempered necessity.

Social media will still play a role, especially among Geoffrey Moore’s population of early adopters, but we’ll begin to understand that earning a social head-nod from the social media elite, is a means and not an end. In other words, social media will facilitate initial growth among early adopters, but that market acceptance must be bridged to the early majority if it’s to be withstanding.

Media coverage drove Twitter’s growth, report says

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 18:39:00 +0000

Media coverage drove Twitter’s user base, which now rests at about 300 million. That’s the conclusion of a new report which analyzed the site's growth pattern from 2006 to 2009.

In case it’s overlooked, it wasn’t a self-anointed PR measurement guru that drew this quaint conclusion, but rather MIT civil and environmental engineers that used the analogy of contagion, which epidemiologists and viral marketers alike, will find familiar. Contagion is the process of how diseases are transmitted.

Twitter’s no avian flu, but the study, which used Google Insights for Search as a research tool, cites a positive correlation between the media coverage of Ashton Kutcher’s challenge to CNN about which Twitter account would attract a million followers first. That led to a splash of news including a spot on Oprah where she “ceremoniously” sent her first tweet. Consequently, “the pace of new news stories picked up again, and so did new Twitter accounts.”

Who says celebrities aren’t influential?

Twitter’s germination, at least, “in the United States actually relied primarily on media attention and traditional social networks based on geographic proximity and socioeconomic similarity” according to the study.

While the coverage of the study focuses on the spike in media coverage there are a few points worth driving home.

1. Favor consistency over spikes. Sure big news on Mashable will make you a hero for a day, and a PR pro can ride the Tweet volume high for a week, but the best PR pros are already working on the next story. The demand never ends, and it’s up to the PR pro to be continuously thinking about what makes the company, its product and its customers unique.

2. Media momentum builds media momentum. Nobody likes to write about media like the media, this very story about Twitter’s media coverage notwithstanding. If it’s your small hometown newspaper, or the Wall Street Journal, treat every inquiry, every reporter, every blogger as if they are the most important person in the world. When you are pitching a story, they are…

3. Consistency and momentum together. It takes time to earn regular coverage. Just look at the graph line in the video. Twitter didn’t earn USA Today headlines in the beginning. It took the evangelists at tech pubs and social media enthusiasts years to reach that critical mass – 13.5 percent according to the study. It’s worth remembering that while Twitter is a media darling today but it started out just like any other start-up. Can you imagine explaining 140 character messaging service in 2005 to a business reporter? I remember a time when I thought Twitter was a waste of time, and perhaps it was, until people stopped sharing what they had for lunch.

This is a great story that demonstrates the value of PR. If Twitter could only tie its media coverage to revenue, then we could calculate the ROI.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
One Tweet -- 10 million people
Two Excellent Posts on PR and Social Media Measurement

Twitter’s aimpoint centers on clients

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 20:20:00 +0000

Several years ago, a client of mine and venture capitalist said to me there were three reasons for one company to acquire another: to acquire technology, to acquire customers, or to kill the competition.

Few were surprised then when Twitter acquired Tweetdeck for a reported $40 million because they were addressing a trend: more and more users were using unofficial client applications to interact on Twitter rather than using Twitter.com. Actual numbers were conflicting. At the low end, about 40% of users were estimated to be using clients (i.e. Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, CoTweet, listing), while at the high end, insiders at Twitter said that number was upwards of 90%. In any case, at least 40 million users enjoyed the service, but avoided the interface.

Tweetdeck was among the most popular clients and for good reason: the application functioned faster on a desk, meaning a user didn’t have to wait for an action to resolve. It added shorting services, picture services, the ability to schedule tweets and the capacity to manage multiple accounts. It was easy to use, slick and had an interface, as a heavy user, I found to be fluid.

So like many Tweetdeck users, I was looking forward to seeing what the acquisition might bring. I’d be sorely disappointed.

In the last few weeks, Twitter has launched new code for its mobile app, something it desperately needed, and also for Tweetdeck. The two look very similar in my view. Gone is the slick Adobe Air to the extent, Tweetdeck no longer feels like a client, but an extension of the Web. In many ways, it is, for example you can log into Tweetdeck.com and see the same view.

The rationale behind this is simple: if you can get all the interfaces to function in the same way (Web, client and mobile app), it becomes much more cost effective to develop updates. In order to do that, some features, even the better ones are cut out, or left aside.

Gone is the URL shortener extension for Bitly, useful features like marking obnoxious posts as spam, and the interface is very different: direct messages are buried, ill-categorized and it’s difficult to compose a new direct message, the ability to scroll through lists is clumsy, moves faster than my eye can follow, and the ability to edit messages I’d like to Retweet has become more cumbersome.

I can only imagine that the motivation behind this is that Twitter.com wants users back. The acquisition was something akin to killing the competition, melding a client with the Web in hopes of luring customers back. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that logging on to Tweetdeck.com resolves to Twitter in 2012.

In taking out one client, it leaves room for new growth and to that end I find myself using HootSuite on the road, BufferApp for posting, and Twitter.com to interact and respond. Maybe Twitter has succeeded for now, but I’m keeping my eyes peeled though for a new tool for the desktop.

Are you finding yourself using Twitter.com more now? If not, what clients are you using?

Additional reading:
Tech N' Marketing: Four Unfortunate Ways Twitter Is Killing Tweetdeck

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
How to create a tightly connected Twitter network
Twitter users are old but (print) newspaper readers are young

The market opportunity: sizing up the PR market

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 20:12:00 +0000

As an industry PR is challenged: it struggles with who we are, what we do and how to measure our work. It should be no surprise then that there’s a great deal of discrepancy to be found in the methods and results of sizing up the PR industry.

Case in point? The latest VSS Communications Industry Forecast:

“The only Traditional Marketing segment to outperform the economy, Public Relations & Word-of-Mouth Marketing, will see CAGR of 14.0% in the forecast period to $10.96 billion in 2015, as the role of PR in integrated marketing campaigns expands and social media fuels gains in WoMM spending.”

If you can get past the verb “outperform” as applied to categorization of “traditional marketing,” you’ll see the data was part of a report that will cost you a mere $4,000 to read, produced by PQ Media, which sells research services, and commissioned by private equity Veronhis Suhler Stevenson, which funds debt for leveraged buyouts.

Thankfully, snipits of it including the part I cited were published in a press release on September 8, 2011 and others were rebroadcast everywhere on the Web – in news, blogs and social media. As a result, these numbers are being bantered around the social web as if they were handed down on stone carved in heaven, but as I’ll explain in a bit, $10.96 billion really isn’t big enough for heavenly engraving.

PRSA, in citing numbers from the same report on its website, breaks out spending in 2010, the base year for the market forecast, like this: Word of Mouth totaled $2 billion in spending in 2010, while traditional PR services accounted for $3.7 for a combined total of $5.7 billion at the end of last year.

So what’s wrong with that? The Holmes Report’s annual survey of about 300 mostly public PR firms, says these firms alone earned revenue of $8.8 billion in 2010. This means Holmes looked at a partial segment of the PR industry and determined a number anywhere from 35 percent to nearly 60 percent larger than that of the VSS report, depending on whether or not word of mouth marketing is included or excluded.

While Holmes’ market sizing is significantly larger than VSS, it’s important to underscore that it’s a mere fraction of the PR industry. This is because it openly excludes revenue from private PR firms – the hundreds, or even thousands of solo, small- and mid-sized PR firms – but also corporate spending on PR. I’d venture to say that corporate spending on PR easily rivals, and perhaps outweighs, the revenue figures Holmes reviewed – my last two gigs have been in-house.

Just think of how much Facebook, Microsoft and GE spend on PR – and then consider we’ve got other sectors of spending in associations, non-profits and government. In addition, put on your international hat to include Europe, or growing PR markets like China or India – and it becomes easy to see how VSS’ forecast looks extremely conservative. As Paul Holmes wrote of his own report, “it is clear that the PR agency business generates at least $8.8 billion in worldwide revenues – and probably considerably more.”

The good news is that the PR industry is probably larger today than VSS estimates and is likely to be growing at a pretty good clip – but also making up lost ground over the last couple years. For example, two years ago I (very unscientifically) estimated the market was about $10 billion, but any way you look at it, PR is still in a larger context, a relatively small market.

PR accounts for less than one percent of $1.120 trillion (yes, with a T) of the all-inclusive communications industry VSS analyzed. Or to put it another way, it’s about 1/16^th the size of spending in direct marketing which comes in at about $160 billion.

Maybe if PR were better defined, we’d have an easier time measuring the market size and forecasting the opportunity. For now, it’s mostly guess work, published in reports and debated in blogs.

PS: for those cynics that say PR isn’t a profession, your right, it’s something that requires far more commitment – PR isn’t a profession, it’s a lifestyle.

Unintended consequences: don’t blink, it’s buyology

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 19:53:00 +0000

Ever see cigarette warning labels in Europe? They’re pretty gross (pictured nearby). Think they work? Surveys of smokers say yes, but interviews with their brains say no. In fact, researchers have found that warning labels actually trigger smoking stimulus. Talk about unintended consequences.

So says Martin Lindstrom in a new book called Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy. Market researchers scanned the brains (think MRI) of smokers and found that warning labels seemed to indicate an inclination, rather than aversion, to smoking during viewing. This despite indicating on a survey that those same smokers felt warning labels had the same effect. What does that mean for your market research survey?

What’s more fascinating is that Lindstrom suggests the survey takers weren’t lying, but rather the marketing messages we see every day influence our brains subliminally and often in ways our conscious cognitive reasoning would otherwise reject. Meet neuromarketing.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s 2007 book Blink, about how we “think without thinking” Gladwell describes a taste test conducted by Pepsi that demonstrated cola drinkers overwhelmingly preferred Pepsi to Coke, yet in just about every market, Coke is by far the dominate soft-drink maker. How can this be true? Perhaps it’s just a sip – and that drinkers prefer a sweeter drink when sipping, but less sugar when downing the whole can – hence Pepsi wins the sip battles but loses the cola war to Coke.

In Buyology, Lindstrom drives deeper to uncover how marketing, packaging and brand power may just subliminally influence cola drinkers to favor one over the latter.

It’s a fascinating read, and if you’re looking for a new marketing book to devour, this one just might be your ticket. Separately, the Foreword is written by Paco Underhill, who several years ago published a book called “Why We Buy: the science of shopping,” which is another great read I’d highly recommend.

Pressed for time and can’t read them all? Try the audio book on iTunes and listen to it while you get a workout done or drive to work.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
Auto dealerships, coffee and same store sales

Feedback wanted: do you like this new blog design?

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 08:05:00 +0000

Taking a tip from @adamsinger, who also recently launched a redesign of his blog The Future Buzz, I've hired the same company to redesign this blog. They've offered a mock up of a potential template and while I started to provide feedback, it occurred to me I should share the design here before it do: What do you think of the design? What feedback do you have?

Reloaded: deliciously purity of social sharing

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 21:09:00 +0000

Web 2.0 is delicious. Delicious in the intellectual sense: how it’s weaved, related and repeated. It’s been a relatively short life that feels like ages -- a continuous ideation, yet reinvented.

Delicious – the social bookmarking site – is an icon in that sense. It was an idea that manifested early and became, as the New York Times said today, “popular among the technorati, but failed to catch on with a broader audience.”

Born too soon, Delicious was conceived prior to the social enlightenment, circa 2003, just as the groundswell was filling over the echo from Geoffrey Moore’s chasm.

Like an artist whose genius was only discovered long after passing, Delicious was an idea reborn, replicated and reproduced; there are dozens of social bookmarking sites now. It never died as a social network, like Friendster, however it never quite became a verb, like Digg, or a noun, like a Stumbler, or a developed a shadowy editorial mystery, like Quora.

And while the Web world moved on to the next friend-something network, Delicious was bought, languished and sold – changing money – billions worth – among somehow familiar hands.

Delicious was Web 2.0, it is Web 2.0 and if the people that had a vision for Web video have anything to say about it – the future maybe Web 2.0 as well. The Web is not dead -- and surely Web 2.0 has patches in the making before the new version is released. According to the same Times article the new regime, amid a social revolution with a twist, aims “to introduce Delicious to the rest of the world.”

This is a welcome reincarnation, no reinvention, because as far as social sharing goes, Delicious one of the most useful mediums on the Web. Why? Because Delicious has found a way to take selfish ends, like social media karate, and use them to promote a higher quality of sharing.

A few days ago in a loosely related conversation on Google+, Danny Brown asked me a follow up question, “Do you still find Digg as a viable share option, mate?” Yes, was my answer then, but in reflecting now, I didn’t answer his question completely. He didn’t ask me if Digg was a viable option, he asked me if it was a viable sharing option. Digg is the former, it’s not the latter. Not today.

Social fishbowl

Digging is the social fishbowl at its finest with bloggers, including me, filling the site with our own links to the point the once popular referral source is sliding into diminishing returns. This is true of other social networks. MySpace became dizzying with advertising – corporate noise rather than user-generated noise -- and its fans jumped ship to Facebook. Even StumbleUpon stumbles its own stuff, but at least you can Stumble and find a blog post from someone other than those in your own network.

Twitter, the one-time supposed RSS killer may also walking on thin ice. It has “become noisy,” said Valeria Maltoni, “I can hardly even exchange messages on here w/o [without] them being drowned.” If Google+ is the reboot for popular social networkers – with an acquaintance too many to follow – then perhaps Delicious too can reboot with the advantage of eight years of Web 2.0 experience behind its rebirth.

Eight long social years is a credential few social networks can claim.

A selfish return

Delicious is unique in that it’s a useful place to catalog, tag and archive content for future reference – from anywhere there’s a Web connection. The blessing of a popular share button is that it takes little effort to share content – and that’s also the curse that I think leads to volume, noise and ultimately, disenchantment.

Fewer are the links on Delicious that rack up 500 bookmarks – so the value of those links are fleeting. Likewise, fewer are the links on Delicious which account for noise, which means the value of those links is long tail. Further, like-minded people in your Delicious network, are also saving articles in a similar way – and that’s a beautiful thing: an act of selfishness leads to purity in social sharing.

By the virtue of effort it takes -- not too much, like Reddit or BizSugar, not too little, like the rest -- ensures a higher quality of links.

“There’s a waterfall of content that you’re missing out on,” read the Times, quoting Steve Chen, a co-founder of YouTube and now co-leading the Delicious matrix.

It'll be good reading, delicious in fact.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
Sphere of influence: 11 social media statistics
Emerging faces of social media content

A post about posts about dead press releases

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 20:10:00 +0000

This “press releases are dead” thing just won’t die. It’s too bad because it’s killing me…figuratively of course. In reality, these conversations are ridiculous. Sure, I’ve engaged in them, again, and again and again, and I worry I actually wind up a little dumber when they are over.

So here are a few things about press release posts on my mind tonight (its 10 pm in where I am).

1. Press releases don’t equal PR. PR stands for Public Relations, or perhaps Puerto Rico, but certainly not press release. Writing a post that insinuates otherwise is hardly the vehicle of choice for drumming up new business.

2. News release or press release? Oh. My. God. Really? Want to argue about that? Let’s argue instead about whether ketchup qualifies as a vegetable. That way, the snarky blog comments could point out that technically, a tomato is a fruit. Personally, I'd rather watch paint dry.

3. That press release – or social media release – is in the wrong format. Really? Says who? Where is this elected executive that signed the press release format legislation into law? Some of the most talked about and creative press releases I’ve seen buck the conventional press release wisdom.

4. Reporters hate press releases. Yes…when PR people stuff erroneous stuffing that’s not related to their work in their email inbox. Research your contacts. It’s your friggin’ job! You are supposed to know these people and what they write about. I empathize because I hate getting emails proposing an international business venture, cheap Viagra and or how I can get rich quick helping some dude on another continent get his inheritance by giving him my bank account number. I delete them. Immediately. And sometimes angrily. And I feel better when I’m done. Oh, yeah, consider for a moment, that a press release is NOT only intended for reporters.

5. What’s the ROI of a press release? I give up. If I construe a point from Adam Singer’s post today, this online thing…it’s probably not for you. You can’t catch up now. It’s too late. You’re a decade behind. Or maybe you can find a print publisher looking for a publicist. That might be fun.

6. Finally, and most importantly, if press releases are dead, don’t use them. Why waste your time writing press releases or blog posts about dead press releases are when you could be writing about the Sony Walkman instead.

Sorry for the rant. I’m usually more disciplined about resisting that urge and I’m done now. I acknowledge the irony of my own post. It represents 30 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

If you enjoyed this post, you might like the other posts I wrote while wasting minutes of my life away:
Nineteen-seventy-something...and a press release
Insanity: Very pleasing press release quotes

Communicating without words

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 13:50:00 +0000

“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” - Mark Twain

Words. Words are overused. Words are disposable. Words should be banned.

Words can be spoken, but are not always understood. Sometimes we struggle to find the right words, while at others those around us complete our sentences.

Words provide a common operating picture. The alphabet is our programming language, our minds the open source operating system.

Actions may provide effect, but no matter the medium – the quill, the telephone, email or Twitter – meaning travels in words.

If as Mark Twain once alluded, fewer words produced more meaningful prose, then no words would force us to think even harder about what we wanted to say. Imagine communicating without words.

What would you say?

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:

One Tweet -- 10 million people

Reputation Management Tips for Small Businesses

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 08:35:00 +0000

Note: This first guest post is penned by Jiyan Wei, a former work colleague of mine at Vocus, which owns PRWeb and HARO which is STILL free, BTW). As I’ve often found with most product managers, he has a keen observations: observing habits, inclinations and trends in order to make educated guesses about the market direction and where to take a product. He’s recently taken the helm as CEO of BuildZoom, a site that matches contractors with home improvement enthusiasts.

>>> While driving to work one morning, I listened to a radio ad from a notable Silicon Valley company (which has raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $60m over the past few years), promising to help consumers monitor and manage their online reputation.

Reputation management, once a term only relevant to mid and large market businesses, has hit the mainstream.

It wasn’t too long ago that I was working for a public relations agency, helping to build and implement a reputation management product for several Fortune 500 companies with some serious reputation management issues. It’s startling that in such a short amount of time, the media landscape has evolved to the point where companies are finding success selling reputation management to consumers.

Granted, the current value of reputation management for the majority of individuals is somewhat debatable however what is not up for debate is that reputation management has become extremely relevant to small businesses. If you’re a local business that relies largely on word-of-mouth, a few bad Yelp reviews have the potential to impact your bottom line and this dawning realization is what has investors lining up to fund reputation management services.

However, the price tag for these services can be high and given the reality of how most reputation management services work, it can be far more economical and effective to take matters into your own hands.

Fundamentally speaking, reputation management is about exerting influence on what prospective customers see when they go online to find out about your business. The various tactics range however these days, most still focus primarily on SEO, which means getting supportive content above the fold in search so when consumers research your company name, they will see results that you can influence – either directly or indirectly.

The following mix of tactics can be used by any small business to take control of your reputation online without having to make a significant financial investment:

1. Create a presence in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – If you haven’t done so already, it’s a good idea to create a company page on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Facebook and LinkedIn allow users to create actual company pages while on Twitter you will just want to create an account for your company. All three of these services are high authority domains that will be instantly visible in organic search.

2. Create or claim your profile on Google Places – When it comes to local search, Google Places is the dominant player. If Google Places already has a profile on your company, you can “claim” your profile through a phone or postal verification system and update your profile with keyword rich content. If you don’t already have a profile on Google Places, you should create one in order to add one more piece of content on a high authority domain that you exert control over.

3. Create or claim a profile on review sites – If you are in the restaurant business, claim your profile on Yelp. If you are in the home improvement business, you can build or claim your profile on BuildZoom (disclaimer – I co-founded BuildZoom). There are countless other free directory sites out there that represent opportunities to create content, optimized for your brand, on domains with existing authority.

4. Syndicate content – There are a variety of services like PRWeb that will syndicate articles and stories that you write, to a network of Web sites. These stories (either the original or the syndicate version) will often be hosted on high authority sites and you can bank on at least one of the versions showing up in organic search for your company name, provided you use your company name in the title of the story.

5. Optimize your own site – Finally, your own Web site is going to be your best shot at showing up #1 in Google for queries of your company name for a variety of reasons but most importantly, because Google wants to show your site #1 in their search results when someone is searching for your company name. Obviously the various SEO tactics for optimizing your site can fill up a series of novels however you should at a minimum, pick a good domain name and ensure that your home page has title tags, H1 tags and page content that contain your business name. If you can link all the other channels you are using back to your site, it will help ensure that long-term, your site will show up #1 for queries of your company name.

About the author
Jiyan Naghshineh Wei is the CEO and Co-Founder of BuildZoom, a site that helps consumers find reliable home improvement businesses. Prior to BuildZoom, he spent four years as Director of product management at Vocus, where he helped PRWeb grow into a leading online marketing tool.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
Social media and touch points on a sales cycle
PR as lipstick on the proverbial pig
Branding...just saying it’s so doesn't make it so

A creative press release you’ll love

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 13:06:00 +0000

Press releases sometimes get a bad rap. Sometimes they are confusing. Sometimes they are both.

For example, if you type “press releases are” into Google, the search engine suggests press releases are "not a PR strategy” or are "spam.”

The Smithsonian’s National Zoo bucked conventional wisdom today with a pretty creative idea for a press release: National Zoo Animals React to the Earthquake.

There are many accounts of the earthquake’s impact. From the Californian sneer, to journalist apathy, to the tangible damage to the Washington Monument. I wrote my own take, of getting information on the earthquake via social media while wondering if my friends and home were okay.

But animals' reaction? Of course. Brilliant! Who wouldn’t be interested in the science of animal reactions?

“About three seconds before the quake, Mandara (a gorilla) let out a shriek and collected her baby,” reads the press release. “Kibibi, and moved to the top of the tree structure as well.” (Note: photo of Mandara and Kibibi nearby, credit to Smithsonian's National Zoo’s Flickr account)

Amazing – a mother’s first instinct to protect her offspring.

Perhaps even animals can serve as an early warning detection, since the release notes that “red ruffed lemurs sounded an alarm call about 15 minutes before the quake and then again just after it occurred.”

And snakes? Who isn’t fascinated by snakes? Even people that despise snakes can’t help but be mesmerized by their movement, their mastery of ambush, evolution for hunting, or more imaginatively, their lethality if venomous. According to the press release, the snakes at the zoo “began writhing during the quake.”

It’s a job well done by the PR team at the zoo – and seems to be one with legs. Nearly 300 Diggs and 30 comments at last count and some 1,200 Tweets according to Backtype. Too bad the release doesn’t have share buttons on it.

As for results? I’d love to see if the Zoo can measure an increase in attendance.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:

Nineteen-seventy-something...and a press release

Stop the presses! It's a press release revival

Insanity: Very pleasing press release quotes

Earthquakes, news and the pace of social networks

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 19:06:00 +0000

We've seen many cases of social media outpacing the traditional news media. Word from the Iranian protests, the Tunisian and other Arab revolutions and more recently, the riots in London, traveled much faster than the news could report.

Its one thing when the news is an ocean away, but it’s another when it hits closer to home. Even if you are an ocean away.

I am an ocean away. As many of my personal and professional contacts know, I’m deployed again and have been for several months. Tonight, at dinner, news broke that a 5.8 scale earthquake struck DC. News was piped in over the Armed Forces Network to a flat screen TV in the chow hall.

Fox had little substance to add other than an alert posted on screen with a talking head. MSNBC offered more of the same, though they trumped Fox’s story with a report of 6.0. The volume was low and so the audio was not audible over the roar of chow hall noise.

Then reports that the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol buildings were evacuated started to flash on screen. Since I live in the area, I started to get nervous.

I exited and on my way to the nearest Internet connection, called my boss who I know also lives in the area, and my First Sergeant, to start thinking about who among my troops might need to make a phone call home.

I logged into Google and searched. The first story that ranked was an Associated Press story posted to ABC News’ Website. Headline aside, it was a single line that read, “5.8 earthquake in Virginia felt in Washington, New York City, North Carolina.” A screen capture is posted nearby.

I turned to social networks – all of them. Several friends had posted status comments. One simply read, “Earthquake.” Another read, “EARTHQUAKE!! Holy schnikies was that freaky.” A third read, “Just experienced a 5.8 earthquake and it was SCARY!”

Quickly, I commented back “Everyone okay?” or “Any damage?” Answers came back rather quickly. “Not that I know of. Unless you count things falling off walls.” Or this one, “Nothing I know of. But it was 'shaky'. They evacuated all the buildings in DC, just in case.”

Next came an official alert via email from the local municipal government, which read, “Nat'l Capitol Region has experienced an earthquake. There is no reports of major damage at this time. Local government authorities are assessing the situation. Further information will be sent as it become available.”

I breathed easier.

All of this (online action) happened in a span of about three or four minutes and long before I found this somewhat informative article, under the circumstances, by the Washington Post.

News travels fast by social media word-of-mouth. The news media has no edge on the speed of social networks. What’s left is to evaluate the analysis.

Coke, Target, rumors, SEO and crisis communications

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 18:43:00 +0000

My dear mother forwarded me an email today with the subject line, “Target Says "Veterans do not meet our area of giving." It was one of those emails that had been flashed around the world and the string was filled with vows to never shop again at Target.

According to the email, “Recently we asked the local TARGET store to be a proud sponsor of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall during our spring recognition event. We received the following reply from the local TARGET management: ‘Veterans do not meet our area of giving. We only donate to the arts, social action groups, gay & lesbian causes, and education.’ ”

Five things entered my mind at that moment: 1) I’m a veteran. 2) I shop at Target. 3) I recall Target made headlines last Christmas for not allowing the Salvation Army to chime bells outside their store fronts. 4) Such an act of affronting veterans is a sure path to a PR crisis that even a large corporation couldn’t possibly botch. 5) I don’t believe everything I read on the Interweb.

So I did a quick search, which demonstrated to me that both PR and SEO have a role in modern crisis communications.

A search for “target” and “veterans” and saw five links disproving the contention made in that email. The first three links were to venerable Web-myth-busting sites Snopes and Urban Legends. Links four and five were to Target’s own site dedicated to veterans, which featured a brief stating that Target was named a “2011 Top 20 Military Friendly Company” by head-hunting giant Orion.

The email wasn’t true and Target, in my view, had been successful in getting its message out. I sent a note back – a reply all – to my mother and the dozen or so people she had forwarded her note to with a short paragraph and links indicating it wasn’t true. Sorry Mom, if I put you out there like that, but isn’t your granddaughter cute?

Not a bad result, but contrast this with the crisis communications advice three professors offered to Coke, which has a similar problem, in The Economist on February 10, 2011:

“Such rebuttals are unwise, argue Derek Rucker and David Dubois, of the Kellogg School of Management, and Zakary Tormala, of Stanford business school, three psychologists. By restating the rumours, Coke helps to propagate them. Its web page is a magnet for search engines. And people who read rebuttals tend to forget the denial and remember only the rumour, says Mr Rucker.”

The article referred to an ongoing struggle The Coca-Cola Company faces in the Middle East, where “For example, some people believe that if you read Coke’s Arabic logo backwards, it says: “No Muhammad, No Mecca,” according to the article. I can read Arabic (at a kindergarten level). It says no such thing.

According to SEOmoz’s link tracking tool, Open Site Explorer, Target’s veteran site has a page authority of 45 on a scale of 100 and just 50 inbound links – the majority of which are from other Target sites that cross-link to the veteran’s site. Just one link among the first 26 came from an outside domain – an AM news talk radio station.

Coca-Cola’s crisis page has a higher authority ranking at 54, but with a similar breakdown of inbound links – the first five stem from other Coca-Cola sites. Recall that Coke’s page ranks first in search and this is likely because the organization, by virtue of its page, has been successful in obtaining other inbound links including a story from Forbes, and longtime PR pub, The Bulldog Reporter.

These pages have a number of practical applications for crisis – in the short term, it’s a place to both communicate directly with interested market segments – including reporters, investors and consumers, while in the long run, these sites attract links or votes of confidence on the Web that slow or stop potential future crisis that these companies may not even be aware are taking root. These votes include your own company’s links – and they can weigh heavily.

Both Target and Coke hold top search spots for key words related to their respective crisis cases and cross-linking tactics. Despite what the academics say, I tend to believe in Lanny Davis’ school of thought, “Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself.”

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
The #1 secret PR tip: spread happy truths
PR pros should write for search engines

Social media IS word-of-mouth

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:16:00 +0000

“THREE hundred years ago news travelled by word of mouth or letter, and circulated in taverns and coffee houses in the form of pamphlets, newsletters and broadsides,” wrote The Economist this past July in an insightful article titled “Back to the coffee house” – about the impact of net on news.

“The internet is taking the news industry back to the conversational culture of the era before mass media,” proclaimed the subhead. By “internet” the article of course means social media and the way word-of-mouth travels among users that generate their own content.

It’s true – and it’s a path that strikes me as amazingly similar as the (shorter) journey from mainframes -- to distributed workstations – and now back to cloud-computing. In other words, just like the cloud is something akin to a mainframe, social media IS word-of-mouth.

And this is what amazes me about an eMarketer study published today which found that small businesses are apathetic about social media as a marketing vehicle, but ironically, it also says they are clearly committed to word-of-mouth.

“More than half of the small-business decision-makers surveyed in June by small-business insurance provider Hiscox said they used social media for business purposes, but a plurality also declared that it wasn’t necessary to their business,” according to the study.

However, word-of-mouth was deemed essential. “At the same time, though, 50% of respondents said the marketing tool they could not do without was word-of-mouth. Just 4% said the same about social media, even though the goal of most social media marketing efforts is to create word-of-mouth.”

I’ve seen over and over examples of social media, particularly Facebook, used exceptionally well for small business marketing.

1. A martial arts school uses social media to foster community, promoting events, competitions and mixing in a bit of sales for both classes and merchandise. Moreover the school appeals to segments: content catered to MMA fighters, but also self-defense classes designed for women and children, alongside fitness programs like CrossFit and Yoga. The content is sticky for the target audience.

2. A SCUBA diving school is another example, which provides tourist travel information, event invitations and most engaging of all – photographs of their students in the water learning to dive. People are both surprised and love to see themselves in such photos that they in turn share.

3. A Skydiving school has even turned it into a revenue source where customers actually pay the school several hundred dollars to have a photographer (or videographer) jump out the plane in front of them and film their adventure. What do you suppose the first thing those customers do when they get home? They post those videos on YouTube and Facebook – and embed those videos in their blogs to show off their 13,000 foot skydive to all their friends.

Social media is word-of-mouth – and it travels at a speed and velocity that could not have been dreamed in coffee houses 300 years ago.

Enjoy this post? You might also like:
How one small business uses Facebook
One simple way Google has changed the world
Small business; smart marketing

Public Relations RFP for a homicidal dictator

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 09:47:00 +0000

“Libyan strongman Moammar Khadafy is looking to hire a New York public-relations rep to scrub his homicidal image,” reports the New York Post.

I can only imagine there must be a new technological development where pitches, press releases and blog posts can take out laser-guided precision munitions in midair. Somebody better call the Pentagon. This is revolutionary. No pun intended.

So what exactly does a reference client for a PR firm looking to win new business from a sociopathic dictator look like? Charles Taylor? Robert Mugabe? Saddam Hussein?

The Post suggests Khadafy (also spelled Gaddafi) should try his hand at Dancing with the Stars, but The Economist could also help with some PR advice for a tyrannical dictator on the run. As the British publication wrote earlier this year, “Instead of denying false rumours, a company should put out a stream of positive messages about itself.”

And imagine the key messages: The people support us. The international community should stop meddling in our internal affairs. This sovereign government reserves the right to kill its own people at will. Please Retweet. #savelibya. By the way, think we could get a low-interest reconstruction loan for several billion dollars?

Reminds me (again) of aliens on a shooting rampage in the movie, Mars Attacks, while screaming through a megaphone, “Don’t run, we are your friends!”

According to the same Post article the embattled (former?) leader who has paid reparations for terrorism, and who for the second time in his life is seeing American bombs up close, is seeking to expedite the deal. “The teetering government seeks to move quickly but without being exposed for mounting the campaign.”

Awesome. Let me contact my unsolicited Nigerian banker friend. I’m sure I have a few of his emails in my spam folder somewhere.

So is this a spoof? A prank? A trick? No says, the Post, “The request is legit, according to an official with the Libyan Mission on East 48th Street, who said the e-mail came from a central government group in Tripoli called the Peoples Media Center.”

It’s cliché in PR circles to suggest just like the accused has a right to legal counsel – they also have the right to be heard. While I’m a huge advocate for the spirit and philosophy of the First Amendment, I might borrow a phrase from the PR guy quoted in the article in saying, “I highly doubt any PR firm will positively respond to this request."

I can only hope he’s right.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like: The Economist and PR: Stereotypes and Reflections

Branding...just saying it’s so doesn't make it so

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 18:43:00 +0000

I think social media has confused branding. Or social media has confused people about branding. Or maybe confused branding leads to confused people.

Why? First, it’s this notion of "personal branding,” which for the PR or marketing employee of a corporation or agency, flies in the face of good for the organization. As economist Peter St. Onge put it in this post on cooperation and social media, “in many situations cooperation is best for everybody, but non-cooperation can be best for an individual. This temptation to defect can break even a highly profitable cooperation.”

Secondly, it’s oversimplified “branding” to the extent that people appear to think if a phrase appears in your Twitter, Facebook or Google + profile, you’re branded. That wasn’t true for printed brochures, and it’s sure as heck not true for social media.

In what should be a reference book on an iPad for every aspiring marketing or PR pro, Al Ries and Jack Trout spell out a very logical explanation: branding occurs when your customers and prospects think it’s true – not when you do. Sure saying it can be a step in the right direction, but it’s an early step, not the final step.

Stepping on perceptions can be dicey. People’s self-perceptions can vary widely from other’s perceptions and they are blind-sided when the feedback is revealed. That’s why football practice on Monday’s consists of a good sampling of film clips. The film is without bias and is blatantly, or perhaps, brutally honest. Businesses fall into the same trap – the organization perceives itself to be viewed one way, when research can demonstrate that view is a far-cry from public perception.

Why does this matter? Would you let a carpenter perform brain surgery on you? If the public perceives an organization one way, and the organization is trying to sell a product that’s out-of-line with the public perception, your sales team has an enormous objection from the get-go.

Branding, winning the perception in the minds of customers and prospects, requires several factors:

1. It’s believable – the person or organization has demonstrated experience

2. The person or organization continues to build credibility

3. The message is consistent and matches actions

4. The brand is monitored through continuous research, both traditional and today, by sampling social media through monitoring tools

From Egypt masa' al-khair.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
Ergo Ego | personal brands | top 10 PR
Positioning is central to improving your brand (regardless of the tactic)

Parting words...and 9 posts you might have missed

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 04:56:00 +0000

I’m taking a page, well half a page, from Danny Brown’s playbook this week. He wrote, er spoke, about a topic worth considering: promoting old blog posts. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and Danny has changed my thinking.

So why half a page? Because I’m going to offer some posts here that have gotten some traction on other blogs, in addition to pointing out a couple on this here humble blog that I felt were solid, but didn’t see too much light. In addition, there’s a few links below to articles that are not mine, but that I have bookmarked because I found them worth saving: saving the best for last.

Guest posts:

Pragmatic Marketing. In my role at Vocus, I hear it from customers and prospects alike: what do I do with social media monitoring data? It’s a great question and in my view, social media is like the world’s largest focus group. So using company time and resources, I was able to track the launch of the Verizon iPhone and provide an illustrative example of what you can do with the data, thought it’s more than just social media: What Media Monitoring Can Teach Us About Product Launches.

Ragan.com. The good folks at Ragan.com thought this article fit for print: Is a fuzzy definition of PR a case of lousy PR?. Sometimes the best part of having an article published is the discussion, debate and comments that follow. Jeff Julin (@JeffJulin), a former PRSA Chair, pulled no punches writing, “However, as a past Chair of PRSA I am confounded by his [mine] statement on PRSA's definition of public relations.” Paul Roberts, a Twitter friend of mine and also was adamant he wasn’t convinced. I’m a bit short on time now gentleman, but rest assured, I’ll write up my thinking behind PR and third party validation. And no, it’s not just media relations, and I’m not bent on convincing you – a debate was in part the goal for that post so that we might develop an adequate definition.

Bye, bye, baby girl! We'll talk soon. I promise.

Waxing Unlyrical. It’s remarkable who you meet on Twitter – especially about the time you’re getting ready to leave. If you don’t know, I’ll be leaving the U.S. for a bit and a casual conversation with @Shonali on Twitter about it led to this guest post on her blog: 6 Things The Army Taught Me About PR. Quite frankly, I was floored by the reaction – and my the number of personal messages I received from people on social media. Thank you. So yes, I’m leaving, and if these pages get a little quieter, you’ll know why, though I do have high hopes to publish an occasional post now and again. I'm not much for goodbyes, so for now…this is my parting word.

Older posts that are worth a look:

5 things Batman can teach about social media. Quick: what’s Batman’s superpower? Trick question…he doesn’t have one. His best weapon is his mind – and it’s something we all have too. Social media isn’t rocket science and you don’t need magical influence powers to succeed.

Toyota PR crisis: glass road to redemption. This is an absolute tragedy. Toyota was mercilessly ripped to shreds in the media for a year for “defective brakes” and a powerful government bureaucrat was helping to promote the crisis. In the end, Toyota was NOT found to be at fault. The media world yawned and gave a couple of perfunctory “we’re sorry” posts tucked away on the back pages. I’m wondering what the effect on Toyota will be now that the double whammy of the tsunami has wrought havoc on Toyota’s homeland. What would you do if you worked in PR for Toyota?

Instagram’s creative PR idea. This post explores an easy an inexpensive way to build a relationship with your community: Meetup.com. The genius, as I write in the post, is that it provides its large base of users a self-managed forum to meet with like-minded users

Good reading, delicious in fact:

LEWIS PR’s CEO (@largeburrito) writes a stellar post with an oxymoronic title that makes sense (if that makes sense and isn’t an oxymoron): A brief history of the future of PR. Don’t let the intro, “Firstly, let me say that I don’t know anything,” fool you. Seriously, carve out a few minutes and read this or bookmark it to read it later.

Are you a PR pro without a blog? Don’t have time, right? Read this: How to Run Two Blogs in the Midst of a Busy Life.

HARO helper and sometime blogger, Adam Boettiger, tackles the concept of Twitter reciprocity in this post: Follow Me on Twitter. He addresses these three questions, “What’s the proper etiquette? If someone follows me do I have to follow them back? Is not following them back rude?” For the record, I follow Adam, and recommend you do too.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like these:
A post about most popular posts
Most read from Amplify and Posterous

How to deal with the social media complainers

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 23:25:00 +0000

Twitter’s divided says Mashable – and it has rigorous data to back up the claim. It’s seems there’s a division forming on Twitter between two camps: The happy and the miserable.

“In other words, the happy people have formed little Happy Twitter clubs. Meanwhile misery loves company in social media – as much as, if not more than, in real life,” read the post.

The challenge is the miserable can be distracting and range from a minor annoyance to a daily if not hourly thorn on the keyboard: The miserable complain. No matter what you do…you can’t please them.

What do you do about it? If you’ve already tried to help, but couldn’t get anywhere, perhaps the solution is to do nothing.

Peter Shankman dubs a person like this as “the constant complainer” in Customer Service: New Rules for a Social Media World.

“Strangely, the constant complainer isn’t that big of a threat to you,” he writes. “In the end, no one takes them seriously. Of course, you should try to solve his problem. But remember that the constant complainer isn’t as important as the one-time-complainer because most likely, no one listens to the constant complainer anymore, anyway.”

It’s the electronic version of crying wolf. You only get so many cries before people start discounting what you say. This is especially important for PR pros: imagine what a future employer or customer might think if they peruse your Twitter stream and see nothing but complaints?

Photo credit: Flickr, frotzed2

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
PR framework for negative news
New Rules for Customer Service

Smart (and enchanting) things I’ve heard (3.14.11)

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 02:18:00 +0000

Smart things – when you hear something smart it’s worth writing them down, to internalize them, to make them their own. It’s been a while since I wrote a smart things post, and though I offered something that resembles a review of Guy Kawasaki’s new book, previously, I had admitted to being only 62 pages into it.

On a recent Southwest flight, I was able to finish it up. While reading, I diligently highlighted points I found interesting and dog-eared the pages. Here’s a list of a handful of citations from those pages.

1. “Embrace the nobodies,” Guy writes on page 62. “Anyone who understands and embraces your cause and want to spread the word is worthy of your attention.” I agree with this philosophy on so many levels – and have strong sense that it’s often worthwhile to forget the “influencers” and focus on those who actually care about your brand. It will grow in time and produce what Charlene Li called the Groundswell. It’s also a pretty good argument for being thankful for those Retweets on Twitter.

2. “Engage many,” reads the subhead on page 113. “Don’t focus on the rich , famous and traditional influencers…Remember: Nobodies are the new somebodies in the world of wide-open communications.” It’s an echo of line one, but the point rings true and is worth restating.

3. “Surprise your fans,” says the Holy Kaw guy on page 141 about Facebook fans. “From time to time, give your Facebook fan page a burst of excitement by introducing initiatives like ‘Fan Page Friday’ or ‘Share Your Blog Day’ and invite all your fans to share their links on your wall. The latter seems like a creative PR idea to me – and one that enhances the relationship with your existing fans. It’s also the type of tangible advice this book will leave you with.

4. Don’t make a “viral video” your goal for YouTube, he writes, enlisting the help of Greg Jarboe, who wrote the book on YouTube marketing. “The right goal is to provide a steady supply of video that is inspiring, entertaining, enlightening, or educational and that, over time, enchants people.” In other words, forget about home runs and focus on base hits. Greg makes an appearance on page 141.

5. He provides a little culture too – the Japanese word “Yahoku-no-bi” means “appreciating the beauty of what is implied, unstated and unexpressed. Application: Don’t sell past the close in your enhancement efforts.” Selling past the close is sales folk knowledge, passed down from generation to generation, which means when you get to a “yes” leave it alone. You’re done. You won. He tells us so on page 149.

6. Another bit of knowledge from Japan: bakatore comes to the reader on page 151. “It means ‘stupid’ or ‘foolish,’ and it’s the perfect description of people who think disenfranchised employees can enchant customers.” This is an important point for managers: don’t haggle over a few hundred dollars. Pay for performance and promote for potential. If you do that, you’re employees will be happier and enchant your customers.

7. “Make your boss look good,” Kawasaki writes on page 165, providing advice in this book to both managers and employees alike. “You should do this within the boundaries of ethics and morality, but the reality is that when your boss looks good, you look good.” It reminds of what Ralph Waldo Emerson is attributed as saying, “It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.”

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like these:
Smart things I've heard lately (Vol. 1)
Smart things I’ve heard lately (Vol. 1.1)
Five and a half smart (social meida) things I’ve heard lately (Vol. 1.2)

PR as lipstick on the proverbial pig

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:37:00 +0000

Lipstick. Until we collectively do something about it, it'll be there staring us in the face.

“I reject the characterization of public relations in this book,” wrote Richard Edelman on his blog 6 A.M. “It is degrading and deeply flawed.”

Edelman was referring to a new book by Philip Kotler, Marketing 3.0 and he cites several examples from the book including:

"We have observed that many companies undertake socially responsible actions as public relations gestures. Marketing 3.0 is not about companies doing public relations. It is about companies weaving values into their corporate cultures."

"Some employees are ignorant of their corporate values or see them designed only for public relations."

"In Marketing 3.0, addressing social challenges should not be viewed only as a tool of public relations...on the contrary companies should act as good corporate citizens and address social problems deeply within their business models."

I have not read the book (yet), but I have read some of Kotler’s earlier books, notably his textbooks and also Kotler on Marketing, which I found helpful, even enlightening. He is after all a tenured professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management which houses a very reputable MBA program.

So how could a studied, widely published scholar like Kotler mischaracterize public relations? Why are the terms “public relations” and “PR” used as synonyms for the lipstick on the proverbial pig? I’d suggest it’s because as an industry, we haven’t done well to define the term.

If you ask 10 PR professionals to define PR, you’ll get 10 different responses. For example, Heidi Cohen identified 31 common definitions of PR, which caused Beth Harte to write in this post, “31 Definitions. Really! 31. Does anyone else see anything wrong with that?”

Yes. I do.

I also have a hard time swallowing PRSA’s definition too: “Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.”

Really, what does that mean?

Contrast the definition of PR with the very clear and neat definitions of sales and advertising according to the American Marketing Association:

Sales. Any of a number of activities designed to promote customer purchase of a product or service. Sales can be done in person or over the phone, through e-mail or other communication media. The process generally includes stages such as assessing customer needs, presenting product features and benefits to address those needs and negotiation on price, delivery and other elements.

Advertising. The placement of announcements and persuasive messages in time or space purchased in any of the mass media by business firms, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and individuals who seek to inform and/ or persuade members of a particular target market or audience about their products, services, organizations, or ideas.

While I’m critical of PRSA’s definition, it’s admittedly not an easy problem to solve, though I do believe as the largest professional organization for PR in the U.S., it can and should make a good faith effort. However, I’d also admit that gaining consensus and buy in across the industry that struggles to define the difference between PR and publicity and yet is so quick to invest time and resources in pointing out each other’s faults is no small undertaking.

My argument is that while I agree with Edelman and dislike Kotler’s characterization of PR, it’s going to continue happening until we collectively address the problem. Correcting it starts with properly defining the term. More importantly, if we properly define the discipline, it will make our lives easier in a number of ways – notably justifying expenditures on sound, honest and transparent relations with the public.

Until we do, PR will be used as a callous characterization – the lipstick that gets applied to the proverbial pig.

P.S. How do I define PR? Three words: third-party validation.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
The Economist and PR: Stereotypes and Reflections
Definition, dimensions and domain of PR
What hasn't changed about PR

Photo credit: SeeMidTN.com, Flickr

5 must have iPhone apps for social media

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Strong, MA, MBA) — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 19:01:00 +0000

Since switching from a Blackberry Curve to an iPhone early last year, a whole new world has opened up via iPhone apps. It is to put it mildly, been an enlightening experience.

“But just as Web 2.0 is simply Web 1.0 that works, the idea has come around again. Those push concepts have now reappeared as APIs, apps, and the smartphone,” wrote Wired in a provocatively titled article last August. “And this time we have Apple and the iPhone/iPad juggernaut leading the way, with tens of millions of consumers already voting with their wallets for an app-led experience. This post-Web future now looks a lot more convincing. Indeed, it’s already here.”

Wired was partly wrong. Maybe it's genius or maybe it's just out there. The Web is not dead, but it is true that more and more people are accessing media on the go.

Research firm eMarketer says U.S. smartphone users will rise to 109 million people – one-third of the total U.S. population by 2015 – or a 50% increase between now and then.

As I test out new tools and experiment with new apps, here are five that I have found very compelling for social media:

Reddit. It’s a social bookmarking site in some ways similar to Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon and in many ways it’s different. For example it’s owned by Condé Nast, which acquired Reddit in 2006. The iPhone app is a great tool to get relevant news for selected categories on the go. One of the things I like about Reddit is that it has a subcategory uniquely for public relations, sadly though, just a handful of PR pros use it. Pity. Reddit is a source of traffic. As Mashable wrote, “Reddit has reached a new milestone: 1 billion monthly pageviews. That’s up 300% from a year ago and a 20% increase from just last month.” The iPhone app is free.

AdFeed Flairification. It’s an app featuring curated content by @BryanJones according to the introduction on Apple’s App Store. What I like about the app is a) the content and b) the share-ability of content as denoted in the screenshot nearby. It’s amazing to me how many apps out there make it difficult to share content on Twitter or other social networks. If you spend the time and effort to get an iPhone app made, make sure the content is easy to share! This iPhone app too is free.

Yammer. It’s like Facebook but for a select few. In other words you can create a social network just for your company – it’s an excellent way to collaborate and stay up to date. For example, I will often share news coverage with the rest of the team on Yammer rather than clogging up the old email inbox and since many people are already using Facebook, Yammer is easy to understand and adopt. The iPhone app simply provides access while on the road. While I’m currently on a leave of absence from my employer, Yammer provides me with a way to see what’s going on internally within the company. It’s a free iPhone app.

Facedekk. This app will set you back $2.99. It’s a paltry sum given it allows you to manage Facebook fan pages and your own account while on the road, something I have not been able to figure out how to do on Facebook’s own organic app. It’s definitely a cool tool for social media community managers who need to respond and curate content on Facebook fan pages from anywhere there’s a mobile signal.

"Work geography is dead."

Flickr. What I like about Flickr is it allows me to take and share photos – images that I might later use for blog posts on these pages, or short snipits like this post on Posterous: Are you asking me or telling me? Since my Posterous and Flickr accounts are linked any images that I share on Posterous are automatically shared on Flickr. Sometimes however, in the process I might share a screenshot that I don’t feel is a fit for Flickr. The Flickr iPhone app allows me to manage, edit or delete photos from my iPhone from almost anywhere. It also allows me to view new posts from my social contacts and perhaps, if they’ve agreed to the Creative Commons, I can use their photos in a post with attribution. Why are images so important? Because they capture a reader’s eye, draw them in and can increase the amount of time they spend with your content.

“Work geography is dead,” wrote Peter Shankman in a blog post from early February. I couldn’t agree more. I’m increasingly finding, I can almost get my entire job done with little more than an iPhone.

What apps do you find especially useful on the move?

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
Five free must have iPhone apps for PR pros