Egads! I’ve been Strumpetted! The folks at the snarky PR blog Strumpette apparently took issue with my column on Bulldog Reporter this week in which I listed the Five Stupid Reasons to Avoid Social Media. They dressed me up in scarecrow clothes and exposed me for the straw man that I am. I think I'll make this my next Halloween costume. Just don’t light a match.

You can read their review yourself and see if it makes any sense to you. A free, signed copy of The New Influencers goes to the best interpretation of what the author is trying to say.

As far as I can tell, they believe my piece is opinion masquerading as fact. They're right that it’s opinion. It doesn't pretend to be anything else. I also think they were offended by the headline, which is understandable. The title was meant to attract attention, and it appears to been successful in that capacity, at least with the folks at Strumpette.

I'm not put out because Strumpette is number 8,062 on Technorati while I'm a lowly 23,128. I actually like the site and think it does a good job of poking a stick in the eye of the Web 2.0 zealots. But character assassination isn't a great way to make your point. Clear, well-organized writing is, and that is woefully absent in this garbled mess of a critique. I'm more than willing to debate, but I have to first understand what my opponent is trying to say.

Labels: PR socialmedia strumpette

  ¶ 3:39 PM 12 Comments

  Daily reading 11/29/2007

Survey: 60% of Consumers Use Word of Mouth - Brand Week, Nov. 26, 2007 Annotated

• "The study reports that consumers who create buzz are
  more prone to listen to advertising messages across various media, try
  new products and remain loyal to brands they like, compared to others." - post by pgillin

Ted Leonsis: 'It's the Greatest Time to Be an Entrepreneur' - Knowledge@Wharton

• I'm not a big fan of AOL, but I really like Ted Leonsis. I first met him in 1983, when he was running Redgate Communications, and I've watched him make a billion dollars and build an online empire. Ted joined my team for the Computer Bowl about a decade ago, sharing the joy of getting our butts kicked by the west coast team. He doesn't have a big ego, but he does have the entrepreneur's ability to simply and clarify issues. Here's a description of a recent speech he gave at Wharton.
  - post by pgillin

  ¶ 8:34 AM 1 Comments

  Continuing the meme: my greatest influencers

Katie Paine tagged me to contribute to a meme started by Kami Huyse over the question “Who had a big influence on you and how did that affect the direction of your life or career?" So here goes…

It’s natural to start with my parents, of course. My mom was a great lover of a beauty and she could find beauty everywhere: in a garden, on a stage, in a Beethoven sonata or in a cheese soufflé. I got my love of the arts from her. She was an English teacher who treasured words and instilled in me at an early age an appreciation of language. To this day, one of my greatest pleasures is reading a well-turned phrase.

My dad gave me my sense of humor and love of learning. He was a professor of Asian studies, a red-headed Irishman who taught himself to speak fluent Mandarin. He thumbed his nose at authority, refused to follow rules and taught me to love the Marx Brothers when I was only seven. He was fascinating, infuriating, brilliant and hilarious. I miss him very much.

John Fildes was my best friend in high school. He came into my life when I was adrift and trying to figure out what I wanted to be. He taught me the principle of “work hard, play hard,” which has worked pretty well for me. He’s now one of the most respected trauma surgeons in the country, so I guess all the beer we drank together didn’t affect him too much.

Phil Kasinitz was a friend from early in my freshman year in college. He opened the eyes of this naïve, suburban-bred teenager to the fact that there were other cultures out there and he taught me to appreciate people of all kinds for who they are.

In business, IDG founder and chairman Pat McGovern is my personal hero. He built a business and a fortune through hard work, scrupulous honesty and commitment to fairness and kindness. He’s a remarkable person and I aspire to be half the man he is.

I also owe a lot to Bill Laberis, a close friend who asked me to join him to run Computerworld’s editorial department in 1987. I was in a job that was headed toward a dead end at the time. He was an inspiration and a role model for me and I imitate many of his management tactics to this day. Even though I don’t manage anyone any more!

Those are the my greatest influencers. I’m tagging Renee Blodgett, Paul Dunay and Debbie Weil to see if they want to take a run at this.

Labels: influence, meme

  ¶ 4:37 PM 1 Comments

  Daily reading 11/28/2007

Five Stupid Reasons to Avoid Social Media - Bulldog Reporter, Nov. 27, 2007

  ¶ 8:34 AM 0 Comments

  Should I launch a business blog? Here's a quiz I created for my weekly newsletter about how to decide whether a business blog is right for you. If you want to receive the newsletter, use the signup form at right.

"Should I start a blog for my business?

That’s one of the most common questions I get, and it’s one of the most difficult to answer. Although plenty of social media consultants will tell you that business blogging is a no-brainer, the reality is that the medium isn't for everybody.

In this issue, I'll talk about some factors to consider in deciding whether to enter the blogosphere. Next week, I'll look at the six different categories of business blog and discuss the pros and cons of each approach.

Here's a little quiz you can take to determine if the blogosphere is right for your business. Answer appropriately and then total up your score.

Do you want to do it? A blog isn't a short-term project. Once you start, you need to consistently update your site, at least once per week. The novelty will quickly wear off, so ask yourself whether you have the stamina and a wellspring of ideas to keep you going beyond the first few months.

Yes: 5 points; No: 0 points

Do you have a topic in mind? Ideally, your topic should be expressible in less than a dozen words displayed under your blog title. This isn't always easy. Some markets (marketing, entertainment and sports, for example) have hundreds or thousands of bloggers. In an environment like that, you need to focus your topic very precisely. Other markets (architecture and construction, for example) are nearly wide open. Pick a theme for your blog and be sure it doesn't duplicate what's already being said. The more distinctive your topic, the faster you'll achieve success.

Yes: 3 points; No: 0 points

Are you passionate about the topic? Good blogs have personality and personality is a product of enthusiasm. That doesn't mean you need to be a cheerleader; in fact, some very successful blogs are negative in tone. It does mean that your topic should be something that you can talk about for hours, because that's basically what you’ll be doing with your blog.

Yes: 3 points; No: 1 point

Are you knowledgeable about the topic? A public forum isn't the place to go to school, particularly if you represent a business. It's important to engage in dialogue and learn something from your readers, but you should also have a point of view backed by expertise and experience that makes you credible.

Yes: 2 points; No: 0 points

Do you communicate well? Some people don't, and a blog is probably not the right promotional vehicle for them. You don't necessarily have to be a good writer; many successful bloggers use video and sound to great effect. But you do need to be able to express your thoughts coherently in some form.

Yes: 2 points; No: 1 point

Do you have a thick skin? If you’re opinionated enough to sustain a blog, you need to accept the fact that others may differ with you. Assuming you accept comments (and I strongly recommended that you do), be prepared for some pointed response to what you say.
Yes: 2 points; No: 1 point

Scoring:
12 or more points: What are you waiting for?
8 to 12 points: You’re on track, but you need more focus or enthusiasm
5 to 8 points: Think hard about whether this is the right vehicle for you
Less than 5 points: Don’t bother

  ¶ 10:42 PM 3 Comments

  Daily reading 11/27/2007

No More Comment Spam! 46+ Free Tools and Resources to Stop Blog Spammers - Virtual Hosting Blog

• Here's a terrific list of free software utilities that help you fight the dreaded comment spam. One of my blogs gets about 30 spam comments a day. A discontinued blog that I created for a client more than a year ago gets so much spam that I automatically funnel all notifications to my junk mail folder.
  It can be a real irritant and these utilities should help.
  
  

An Important Lesson About Grassroots Media - Editor & Publisher, Nov. 26, 2007 Annotated

• The founder of a now-defunct community journalism venture talks about what he learned. While the idea of grassroots reporting is exciting and citizen journalists have a lot to contribute, the overall quality of their contributions is weak enough that pure community sites will have trouble succeeding, he says. The better model appears to be to combine content from professional editors with that contributed by citizens without regard to who is the so-called professional. A few pure grassroots sites will succeed - he cites Flickr and YouTube as examples - but only if they have massive membership. For smaller operations like the moribund Backfence, the quantity of good content doesn't justify the amount of time readers have to spend finding it.

  ¶ 8:33 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 11/26/2007

Make Money Online with Etienne Teo: 56 Resourceful Blogging Tips And Tools For The Young & Old

• Here's a great list of resources for the serious blogger. It includes advice on choosing a blogging service, where to get free templates, how to build traffic, search engine optimization strategies and fundamentals of social media.
  
  

Molson pulls plug on Facebook photo contest - Toronto Globe and Mail, Nov. 25, 2007

• Molson's case dramatizes the state of confusion that still exists over how to leverage social media for marketing. It includes top-line results of a survey by Pollara Strategic Insights that found that, among other things
  
  • 26% of business and marketing leaders say they're less familiar with social media marketing than their own customers;
  • 46% say social media tools are becoming more important than traditional mass media; and
  • 85% say social media is now an essential component of the communications mix.
  
  Update 11/27/07: Veritas Communications, which conducted the survey referenced above, has posted more information about the research, including a PDF with detailed results.
  
  

Labels: social_media influence, socialmediaresearch

  ¶ 8:33 AM 0 Comments

  NBC uses character assassination to attract viewers Network television continues to move the bar lower in its desperate efforts to retain viewers. On Sunday night I witnessed a new low in Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the NFL” feature on NBC’s broadcast of the Patriots-Eagles game. This is apparently a regular feature on NBC, which demonstrates how little respect the network has for its audience.

When I heard the title of the segment, I assumed it would be about Michael Vick, who is a bad person by most accounts. Instead, the victim was Denver punter Todd Sauerbrun, who is apparently the worst person because he had two kicks returned for touchdowns by the Bears’ Devin Hester this weekend. For this mistake, commentator Olbermann administered a lashing of sarcastic abuse, concluding “Sauerbrun was once suspended by the league for violating the substance policy, perhaps now to be suspended by the league for violating the stupid policy.”

This was supposed to be funny, I guess, but it came across to me as simply mean-spirited and pathetic. Is NBC so backed into a corner that it has to resort to character assassination to attraction attention to itself? Could Keith Olbermann have embarrassed himself more?

Fortunately, the Patriots won, so I feel better :-).

Labels: idiots, mainstream_media

  ¶ 8:27 AM 1 Comments

  I make a top 100 list - at last! VirtualHosting.com has a new list of the Top 100 Social Media and Social Networking Blogs and Paul Gillin's blog is on it! I'm in the "developer" category, which seems an odd placement since my programming experience consists of one COBOL tutorial in the early 80s. But who's complaining? It's nice just to be on the list with a lot of people I respect. So thanks to VirtualHosting, "the authoritative resource online about retail virtual hosting plans." You're aces in my book! ;-)

Labels: blogging, social_media

  ¶ 2:02 PM 0 Comments

  A Thanksgiving tour of devastated New Orleans We're in New Orleans for Thanksgiving and yesterday took a tour of the devastated 9th District and areas east of town near the levees. I'm like many Americans, I suppose, in that I had largely put the plight of New Orleans residents of out my mind two years after Hurricane Katrina. However, the extent of the damage here snapped me back to reality. Thousands of homes have been destroyed or damaged beyond repair. Even those that did survive are so badly riddled with mold that it's unlikely they can be repaired. Our hosts told us that hundreds of thousands of people have left the area, most never to return. Many of these people are lifetime residents who never conceived of having to flee and put down roots somewhere else.

There are signs of hope. Rebuilding is going on all over the city and some of the wealthier neighborhoods near the breached levees look almost back to normal. The highlight of our visit was stopping by Musicians' Village, a complex of 70 homes being erected by Habitat for Humanity with the help of musicians Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr. About 20 homes have been built and residents are moving in.

We ran into drummer Bob French, leader of the Original Tuxedo Jazz Band and a local legend of sorts. We rapped with him for nearly an hour on the porch of his new home in Musicians' Village. He told us about the resilience of the New Orleans musician community and the many local jazz legends who are now his neighbors. He gave us an armload of his CDs and invited us to come hear his band as his guest next time we're in New Orleans. You can bet we will.

Here are a few photos I took on our tour. You can see more on my Flickr album. For background on the story, see this excellent flash video by the Times-Picayune newspaper. Happy Thanksgiving.

The ASPCA scoured the territory, marking homes where live animals were found so the pets could be fed and sheltered.

This boat came to a rest in a tire store parking lot two years ago and hasn't been moved since.
Many people are living in trailers outside their devastated homes.
One family that returned to its shattered home scrawled a message of hope on the door.

The high-water line was still visible on the inside of this shattered home; it was about a foot over my head.

Signs of hope: some of the brightly colored new homes built by Habitat for Humanity.

Labels: flood, hope, hurricane, Katrina, NewOrleans, rebuilding

  ¶ 12:02 PM 3 Comments

  The 10 categories of influencers Duncan Brown segments influencers into 10 categories ranging from early-stage "idea planters" to post-decision "validators." Each has a different role in influencing decisions and each exerts influence differently. "Aggregators," for example, can be impartial journalists who document a trend by gathering facts and points of view. On the other hand, "recommenders" and "persuaders" take actively partisan positions. One person can fill multiple roles and not all trends involve all kinds of influencers. The chart below from Brown's website shows how influence is applied at different stages of the decision process.

This will all be covered in a forthcoming book called Influencer Marketing, which I'll look forward to reading.

Labels: influence

  ¶ 11:53 AM 1 Comments

  Daily reading 11/16/2007

Top 50 Marketing Blogs To Watch In 2008

• "Top XX" lists are inherently subjective, but they're useful in separating the wheat from the chaff. You certainly can't go wrong with any of the resources listed here.
   - post by pgillin

  ¶ 8:30 AM 1 Comments

  Nielsen's top social media list shows social nets up, AOL down Nielsen Online has released the list of the top U.S. social networking sites and blogs for October, 2007.

MySpace may not have the buzz right now, but it's still #1 by a factor of three. Meanwhile, AOL is off across the board and the classmate sites are struggling.

Top 10 Social Networking Sites for October 2007 (U.S., Home and Work) by name, number of unique monthly visitors and year-over-year growth rate.

Labels: socialmediaresearch, socialnetworks

  ¶ 2:18 PM 2 Comments

  Coke to launch corporate blog The Coca-Cola Co. is just a few weeks away from launching a corporate blog, Adam Brown, Coke's Director of Digital Communications, told the Executing Social Media conference in Atlanta today. That would make Coke one of the few Fortune 100 companies (it's 94th) to enter the blogosphere. General Motors, at #3, has been blogging for three years.

Brown identified Coke's first blogger as Phil Moody, a 30-year employees who's responsible for the corporate archive. However, "We really want to get to an ensemble cast of bloggers where we can talk about not only our heritage, but also the environment, AIDS in Africa and other important issues," he said.

In taking that approach, Coke is adopting a tactic that's being practiced by an increasing number of corporations, including Southwest Airlines, Eastman-Kodak and Chrylser LLC. It spreads the work around and exposes the ideas of interesting individuals in a corporate venue.

Brown didn't identify the URL of the new blog. If anyone comes across it, please post the address here.

Labels: blogging, corporate

  ¶ 2:13 PM 1 Comments

  Daily reading 11/13/2007

Blogging and Blogger relations at SAP

Last week at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas I met up with Mike Prosceno, VP of Marketplace Communications at SAP. SAP has an unusually progressive approach to working with the blogosphere. Not only does the company use blogs for internal and external communications, but it has embraced bloggers as important influencers, treating them in much the same way it treats mainstream media. Listen to an illuminating 11-minute interview with the guy who heads up SAP's blogger relations program.

Virtual events' success grows - BtoB Magazine, Oct. 8, 2007

A study by one event organizer "examined more than 200 Unisfair virtual events that totaled nearly 3,000 sponsors and 500,000 attendees. The results found that the average virtual event has a registration of 3,102 people with an attendance of 1,587. Leads generated for each sponsor totaled 348 per event, and attendees spent an average of two-and-a-half hours at each event while visiting an average 16 locations and completing at leastfive downloads."

"Advanced Micro Devices...held a virtual event last year...the success rate for AMD's event well exceeded expectations: 'When you look at the physical trade show, we'llmaybe give away 700 to 800 pieces of collateral. At a virtual event wecan get 500,000 downloads,' [an AMD executive said]."

Labels: virtual_worlds blogging

  ¶ 8:18 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 11/10/2007

Managing a Corporate Blog, Like HP's - MetzMash

Wal-Mart's Biggest Marketing Tool? Its Web Site - MediaPost, Nov. 8, 2007

Top 10 Marketing Blogs – 2007/2008

ClickZ: Defining Social Media

Labels: blogging, marketing, social_media

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Marketing segmentation through social media Howard Kaushansky of Umbria gave an enlightening talk about audience segmentation of social media influencers at Blogworld Expo this morning. He talked about two examples of what his company has done for different clients in the consumer products field.

For an apparel maker, Umbria analyzed postings to blogs and social networks to identify the following segments:

Fit Finders (39% of the population), Self Expressives (19%), Bargain Seekers (17%), Label Whores (11%) , Style Gurus (8%) and Dissenters (6%).

Here’s an example of segment characteristics: Fit Finders are Generation Xers looking for appropriate jeans for their changing physiques. . Low-waisted jeans aren't working for them any more, but “old person jeans” aren't appealing either. Plus-sized Fit Finders are looking for fashion-forward styles rather than shapeless designs.

Self Expressives want control. They want to distress their own jeans, design clothing reconstructed from jeans and add personal style to jeans through patches and embroiders.

Style Gurus are looking to be unique. They're looking for authenticity and real inspiration. "Some men are actually starting to become interested in wearing women's jeans because they view them as more stylish," he said. These insights emerged from online conversations.

Umbria’s analysis is entirely text-based. “We're listening in on this world, not asking them to fill out surveys or segment themselves,” he said. It’s not just what people say but the words they use. Fifteen-year-old girls speak differently than 54-year-old men.”

For another client that makes packaged food, the company analyzed women’s blogs to identify four core segments: Me Time, Weight Management, Balance and Wellness and Beauty from Within (percentages weren’t given).

They then analyzed women’s needs and interests by time of day. The company also identified common moods at each time of the day and mapped foods, packaging and promotions to these moods and activities.

For example, afternoon is "Connect Time" when women share stories and experiences to gain support, external perspective, humor and advice. During Connect Time, activities include emailing, blogging, phone calls, sharing a meal, getting beauty treatments, going out, and spending time with family.

These segments were mapped to moods and foods. For example, "Me Time" is early morning, often before families are awake. At that time, women are looking to empower themselves. "Me O'Clock" yielded these strategic insights:

• Women embrace this time as an opportunity to regain control
• Don't tell them what's right; enable them to make better decisions and express themselves
• The emotional benefit of this time is personal empowerment

Ideas for productions and promotions:

• Personalized snacks
• Calendars with times blocked out for “Me Time.”
• Market teas and other products with a stimulative effect specific to early morning personal time.

With blog monitoring, "You can listen to these people and understand what are the drivers and unmet needs."

Labels: blogging, BlogWorldExpo, marketing, segmentation, social_media

  ¶ 2:45 PM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 11/08/2007

Online Spin » Blog Archive » My (Early) Predictions For 2008  Annotated

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Last group of AMA Webinar questions answered Here is the final set of responses to questions that time didn't permit me to answer during the AMA Marketing Seminar on Oct. 15. Each of these permalinks is tagged “AMA” so you can easily group them together. Thanks again to everyone for coming and for asking such great questions.

Q: Chris asks, “Do you think this will impact corporate cultures? And how?”

That's a big question, but I'll try to summarize. One enormous impact of new media will be to force companies to be more open and transparent about their activities, motivations and mistakes. Once customers began talking to each other and sharing their experiences with your company, you have very little control over those conversations. It's going to be a lot harder to hide your blemishes and to keep secrets.

Already, many marketers are finding that their carefully managed product rollout plans are sabotaged by bloggers who get their hands on secret information. I believe that businesses, particularly large ones, are going to have to learn to live in a world where information can't be covered up very well. This will force them to be more transparent with their constituents about their plans. That won't be easy for everybody.

Internally, I expect social media to flatten corporate cultures. Communication within most companies has traditionally been controlled from the top down. But once individuals have the ability to speak freely with each other, those lines become much fuzzier. In most companies, this will be a good thing. However, a company that values a strict hierarchy will be challenged by this. They can refuse to give their employees blogs, but they can't prohibit their employees from communicating off-hours via blogs or social networks. Again, this won't be easy for everybody

Q: Viktor asks, “Will passionate social media users get paid at some point in time?

A: Many of them are getting paid now. For example, I spoke in my presentation about Adrants, which is a one-person operation that is generating good cash flow from advertising. Many models are being developed to reward bloggers for their hard work, although in reality very few people can make a living in this way. I expect that a small minority of people will be able to make decent income as new influencers, but only a very tiny number will become wealthy from it. These are niche markets, after all.

Q: S Law asks, “How do organizations and businesses engage bloggers to get that positive word of mouth?”

A: Much of my book is about this, so I'll refer you to that, or to other books I referenced earlier, including Naked Conversations by Scoble and Israel; Marketing to the Social Web by Weber; What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting by Demopoulos, The Corporate Blogging Book by Weil; and The New Rules of Marketing and PR by Scott.

To summarize, though, you need to take the following steps:

• Get to know which influencers matter in your market;
• Read or listen or watch what they've been publishing and learn what their passions and biases are;
• Engage in conversations about topics of mutual interest. Don't try to sell to them, though;
• Provide interesting and valuable information that they can use to further their interest and create new content for their sites;
• Invite them to become involved with your company as an adviser, reviewer and/or media representative;
• Show your gratitude. In most cases, this doesn't mean paying them so much as treating them as insiders and respected advisers. Although t-shirts are always welcome!

Q: Erika asks, “Have you looked at social influencers in the healthcare provider community? What is the prevalence there?”

A: It's very difficult to estimate numbers for any topic because of the large number of spam blogs. All the services try to filter out spam, but none succeeds very well.

Technorati lists nearly 5,000 blogs as being about medicine in some capacity and 2,000 as being about healthcare, although in reality the numbers are much smaller than that. There does appear to be quite a bit of healthcare information out there. For example, a Google blog search on “diabetes” turns up several thousand posts in the last day, and the top few hundred look legitimate.

In general, people use social media for topics that matter deeply to them, and there's no question that medicine is one of those areas. If you try searching the two sources I mentioned above, you'll pretty quickly get a picture of what's being said out there.

Q: Scott asks, “How do you weed out fake comments, possibly from the company or someone that is one-sided?”

A: Most blogging services offer the option to screen comments. This requires a little extra effort on your part, because you must go in and look at each comment individually before approving it, but this is necessary in some cases because comment spammers tend to send a lot of their trash to certain blogs.

There is no way to verify a person's identity when they post a comment, other than to verify e-mail addresses or search for their name. In general, you need to use common sense and make sure that comments don't betray a bias that could be driven by competitive issues.

I should stress, however, that you don't want to suppress legitimate comments just because they're negative. People expect to participate in the discussion, and as long as their words are reasonable and not profane, they should be allowed to do that. If you start censoring visitors, you will quickly hear from people about it, and often in public places. Don't get into blogging if you're not able to stand a little heat.

Labels: AMA, blogging, healthcare, marketing, PR, socialmedia, spam

  ¶ 4:24 PM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 11/05/2007

Web 2.0 Greater in Theory Than Budget - eMarketer  Annotated

  ¶ 8:30 AM 1 Comments

  Daily reading 11/04/2007

It’s very cool — now what are they going to do with it? - Overheard in the Blogosphere

Can Facebook feed its ad brains? - CNET News.com, Nov. 2, 2007

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 11/02/2007

Facebook's Map Might Lead Advertisers Astray - Advertising Age - Digital

Google Takes On Facebook With OpenSocial - MediaPost, Nov. 1, 2007  Annotated

Google: Master Of Digital Universe - Diane Mermigas

iMedia Connection: Did Microsoft miscalculate Facebook?  Annotated

MarketingSherpa: Tutorial: How to Market Yourself & Your Company on Facebook - 11 Steps & Strategies

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Still more AMA Webinar questions answered Here are more responses to questions that time didn't permit me to answer during the AMA Marketing Seminar on Oct. 15. Each of these permalinks is tagged “AMA” so you can easily group them together. Thanks to everyone for coming and for asking such great questions. More to come!

Q: Jodine asks “Another great example of this marketing approach is in the new music industry. Independent distributed musicians that gain their fans from MySpace and other social networks. Is this marketing approach what they call grassroots and/or organic marketing?”

A: That's certainly an appropriate term for it. MySpace, for example, has been a gold mine for independent music groups who don't have the marketing dollars to put into advertising. The idea is to create networks of friends who self-define their interests and share favorite bands among themselves. Also, people who produce podcasts and blogs devoted to music often make it a point to promote lesser-known groups. While these tactics so far haven't duplicated the throw weight of mainstream media campaigns, their popularity testifies to their effectiveness.

Q: Sanjay asks, “Are there any potential problems for a regional retailer with just a few locations?”

A: Not that I can think of. In fact, that person is a natural candidate for social media. Facebook, for example, is a great place to find people nearby who are interested in the products that the retailer sells. If I was a camera store owner in Chicago, for example, I might set up a Facebook group for photography enthusiasts to discuss their favorite Chicagoland sites to photograph. You can use that as a jumping off point to create events and even more targeted groups.

A blog is also a terrific way to showcase expertise, and if you're careful to label the blog and its posts with regional tags, you'll do better on search engines. For small businesses on a budget, social media is a godsend.

Q: Kristin asks, “How will the change in social media affect crisis communications?”

A: I can think of a couple of major ways. For better or worse, people are increasingly taking their gripes and frustrations to their blogs instead of going through customer service channels. This makes the blogosphere an excellent early warning system. You should have Google Alerts set up for every product and brand you own, and you should also create RSS feeds from sites like Technorati, BlogPulse and IceRocket that can alert you immediately to new topics of blog chatter.

In terms of responding to a crisis, a blog is perhaps the fastest way to get information online. This bypasses the media gatekeepers and insurers that the message is coming directly from you. If you link aggressively to the blog from your website and from blogs maintained by your employees and outside constituents, you can build visibility very quickly. Sites like Twitter are also increasingly being used by marketers to get messages out to the public instantly.

Q: Viktor asks “What's your opinion on intellectual property rights
with blogging?”

A: There effectively are none, and this is a huge hairball for new media. The reality is that many people who are now publishing online could care less about intellectual property or copyright. I have had entire articles lifted verbatim from my blog and even mainstream media sites and republished without any attribution whatsoever. It's not worth going after people legally in most cases, and that tactic can actually create unwanted publicity.

The entertainment companies have led the charge in trying to bring some order to this intellectual-property chaos, but they have encountered a lot of resistance and their tactics have not always been diplomatic. They have done themselves few favors. I'm afraid that these issues will take years to hammer out, and that our notions of copyright may look very different a few years from now. I wish I could be more encouraging, but a lot of people are wrestling with this problem.

Labels: AMA, blogging, crisiscommunications, facebook, marketing, myspace, PR, socialmedia, socialnetworks, twitter

  ¶ 12:50 PM 0 Comments

  How podcasting has worked at IBM Podcasting has become the second-largest social media vehicle at IBM, an executive told a Podcamp audience this weekend. George Faulkner, Advanced Communications Professional at IBM and one of its most visible podcasters, gave an enlightening overview of how IBM's podcast library has grown and flourished with almost no internal promotion, and he shared some ideas other companies could learn from.

Podcasting has succeeded at IBM largely because the workforce is so distributed, Faulkner said. Some 40% of IBM's 400,000 employees work primarily outside of an office. The initiative was launched four years after IBMers started blogging, but it has raced ahead of blogs in popularity. Faulkner cited the example of one executive who shifted from a weekly conference call with 500 people to a weekly podcast. The move doubled the listenership of the executive’s briefings, and made him into an evangelist.

Next, executive speeches were converted into podcasts, followed by interviews with employees. People talk about anything and everything, he said, including hobbies and interests. IBM takes a mostly hands-off approach to dictating content.

IBM’s internal podcast library and has more than 100,000 unique members and 12,000 files. The medium’s popularity has grown despite some rather onerous regulatory requirements. For example, IBM must transcribe the contents of any executive interview.

Faulkner said the first podcast he produced was a battle of the bands, featuring groups made up of IBM employees. The show was enormously popular and ran for 35 weeks. IBMers lobbied for an opportunity to be featured on the program. "That was the moment I realized this wasn't about knowledge-sharing; it was about community-building." Faulkner said.

The initiative has spread virally within IBM. "We never made an internal announcement that the blogging and podcasting platforms existed,” he said.

Some secrets of the program’s success:

• Tap your employees for inspiration -- give people a platform, don't put a lot of restrictions on them and stand back and watch the great ideas that emerge. One employee came up with the idea for a game show that had people guessing the meaning of various IBM acronyms. Yet another program called "How It Works" was launched by a "mad genius" engineer, who recorded each episode in a dark closet.
• Sweat the basics -- be clear on the audience you want to reach and the topic you'll address. Decide how often you’ll publish and stick to that schedule.
• Choose a good title – Some people simply call their podcasts "podcast". They rarely get many listeners. “Without a sexy title, you're toast," Faulkner said. Come up with a title that's provocative, and that piques people’s interests. Then run with it.

Labels: podcast blogs IBM

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