media

...now browsing by tag

Doing Social Media Well Means Not Going By The Book

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from I lana Rabinowitz, Vice-President of Marketing for Lion Brand Yarn Company . Social media consultants often suggest developing a unified “brand voice” and creating a rulebook about how to interact on social media. This goes against two of the most basic criteria for success in social media: openness (transparency) and being yourself (authenticity). The parentheses are the buzzwords often used with these concepts, that are a pet peeve of mine. Until my company started engaging in social media, all anyone knew of our 132-year-old brand was what they saw in our products on the shelves at retailers and in a few magazine ads. Very few customers ever spoke to anyone at our company because most of our business has always been through retailers. Image by On Hooks & Needles via Flickr We got involved in social media because we were a faceless corporation and we needed to personalize and humanize ourselves. We wanted to present the human faces and voices of our people because there isn’t any way to create a relationship with a corporate entity or to connect on a personal level. We did it because people buy from people, not from corporations. Working without a rulebook has worked for us for two reasons. First, the people who talk to our customers on Facebook, Twitter and the blog are our customers. Not only do we not pawn off our day-to-day conversations on an agency, but the people who talk to customers are passionate about our company and are often heavy users of our products. They don’t need to be told what to say or how to say it because they are members of the community and know intuitively how to speak to them. Of course, we have made a few missteps. Just like real life, relationships things can get messy. When we make a mistake, we apologize, learn from it and then move on. There is a moment in the movie, “A Few Good Men”, when the defendant in a military murder case is being questioned by the prosecuting attorney. The defendant says he was only carrying out an order to perform a “code red,” an unofficial, but heavily ingrained form of punishment meted out to undisciplined recruits. The prosecutor asks the defendant to open the rule book and show him where it talks about this “code red.” Of course, there is nothing in the manual about this. Then Tom Cruise cross examines the defendant and asks him to point to the place in the book that tells him where the Mess Hall is. His point was, that just because something isn’t in the guidebook, doesn’t mean that people aren’t being guided by it. The way to interact with other people, especially in our own small circle of friends, family and community, is known to us. We learn it by being brought up in that group, interacting with them, observing them, mirroring and responding to behavior and learning. I’m not suggesting you let people loose on your brand’s social media platforms without any training, but if you need to develop a brand voice then you may not have the right people speaking for your brand. Editor’s Note: We will feature occasional guest posts from smart peeps from time to time. The following is one from one, namely Ilana Rabinowitz, Vice-President of Marketing for Lion Brand Yarn Company . Her credits include having developed Lion Media, which includes a 1.15 million subscriber newsletter, a 1 million circulation “magalog”, a Facebook page with 137,000 “likes,” an award-winning blog with 50,000 monthly visitors, a YouTube channel with 1.3 million views, 4,800 Twitter followers, a podcast with 10,000 listeners and a website with 2 million monthly visits. Not too shabby.

Read this article:
Doing Social Media Well Means Not Going By The Book

Posted in Social Media | Comments Off
Tags: book, business, case study social media, customers, defendant, facebook, flickr, marketing, media, movie, people, products, social media marketing, social media philosophy, social media strategy

Could Consultants Offer Incentive-Based Pricing?

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

Karen Klein asked a tough question of me at Social Media Club Seattle last week. Karen is the CEO of SilverPlanet.com , a website focused on helping boomers and elders with aging products and services, particularly home facilities. She expressed an interest (past or present) in hiring a consultant to help with her company’s social media marketing. But, like many small business owners, non-profit organizations or recession conscious companies might agree, Karen seemed to say that consultants are often too expensive. Her question was a good one: Would you consider incentive-based pricing, so I could afford you? (For the record, I’m paraphrasing. She offered some other context. I just simplified it for the sake of argument.) Not really knowing how to answer and having never thought of the possibility before, I said that I would consider it because if I don’t perform, I should be held accountable for that. But I also said the problem arises that you’re getting my time and counsel, which is worth something whether the projects and programs we develop work or not. I also can’t pay my bills on the possibility your social media marketing programs work. But the question is an interesting one to consider, social media notwithstanding. Chris Brogan’s now infamous pricing post got people talking about what a national social media consultant charges for his time and services. Peter Shankman , another elite PR and social media expert even posted this flippant (but perfectly valid point) tweet recently: I can certainly attest that being someone who has built his reputation on sharing knowledge through blogs, tweets, conference talks and even responding to the occasional email asks, there are lots of people who mistakenly think you’ll just counsel them for free all the time. My typical approach is that I provide general opinions and observations on my blog , Twitter stream , Facebook Page and even direct communications (in-person, email, phone call, etc.) free of charge. If you ask my opinion, I can’t help but give it. But when you ask me to consider your specific business challenges, the meter is running. So I can sympathize with Shankman’s tweet, even if Kami Huyse thinks its egotistical . But even that general, free advice comes with a catch: I don’t have enough hours in the day to only do that. My time is valuable and a 30-minute lunch or a 15-minute phone call do answer your question is probably 30- or 15-minutes I’m unable to bill. No disrespect and I don’t want to be rude, but by asking for my nice guy helpfulness, you’re costing me money . No, money isn’t all that drives me. But I have kids to feed, friends. That’s just life. And please know: I recognize daily how blessed I am to be able to make a living doing what I’m doing. To take something I did as a hobby for years on my own time and turn it into a viable job is like winning the lottery in a lot of ways. If you can’t sympathize with someone who is constantly asked for free advice, “10 minutes to pick your brain” and friendly lunches that are all about what their business should be doing on Facebook, I’m sorry. It’s the perspective I have. Every time someone approaches me with their somewhat-of-an-imposition ask for free advice, I’m not earning money that puts food on the table for the three people who matter most to me. No offense, but I choose them. The premise of Brogan, Shankman and other consultant’s business model is that you’re paying for their time. The price of that time varies by consultant based on their experience, availability, ego (yeah … that plays into it, too) and opportunity. I typically charge $200-250 per hour for my time. It’s far less than some consultants I would consider at a similar level of experience and ability. But I’ve also had PR and marketing folks hear my rate and laugh, saying no one should ever pay that for my efforts. My hours are typically booked at least 60-90 days out, so I’m not sure others agree with them. And no, I don’t charge people to go to lunch with me like others may. Perhaps I’m leaving money on the table. But I just think that’s a dick move. If you think they’re trying to milk you for advice, just say “no” and offer them an hour of consulting at your standard rate. Being asked to price my services on performance alone is terribly problematic. While I agree that if I don’t deliver, you deserve some form of discount, restitution or break, it’s not only the social media marketing program I’m giving you. It’s my time, energy and expertise. And we are working together on it. I don’t just wrap it up and hand it to you. Social media marketing also doesn’t exist in a vacuum. How are we to know the promotion to drive Facebook fans didn’t work because your media company placed the ads in the wrong venue or your oil well ‘sploded the day before the launch? (Hypothetically. I have not worked with BP.) You don’t buy traditional media on performance alone, either. An ad in the New York Times costs a ton of money whether it compels people to buy your stuff or not. Sure, Pay-Per-Click advertising is a step closer to a more efficient system, but all you’re paying for is the click. The performance should be judged on the lead or purchase capture. Yes, I sympathize with Karen and businesses in similar circumstances when it comes to paying consultants. Small businesses get the raw end of the deal when hiring social media help. For what they can afford, they typically get inexperience or a limited perspective. And yes, I think social media marketing consultants are generally overpriced … at least the good ones. But capitalism teaches us interesting things, like when the market is ripe, you charge more. I want to see the world from the incentive-based perspective. It’s the only true measure of a vendor’s worth in many ways. But even with a ton of capital and even more balls, I’m not just charging for productivity or success. I’m charging for my time, experience and wisdom. And isn’t that worth something? Am I an egotistical prick or fair-minded capitalist? Would you resent it if I said “no” to your lunch invite? If you’re the person who has emailed five times, called 10 and DM’d me on Twitter everyday for a month would you clue in and realize I’m not going to give you constructive feedback on your strategic plan, “when I have a moment?” I’m here for the whoopin’. The comments are yours. Related articles by Zemanta Peter Shankman and Kami Huyse Engage in Epic PR Blog Battle (mediabistro.com) The Audacity of Free: The Products and Services Edition (techipedia.com)

Posted in Social Media | Comments Off
Tags: business, consultant fees, education, facebook, lottery, media, media marketing, Peter Shankman, philosophy, possibility, reputation, Seattle, shankman, Social Media, social media consultants

30 Questions For Your Content Strategy

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

The more companies that step to the plate to take a swing at social media, the more scratch their heads at this concept of content. Whether it’s their Twitter feed, which makes content short and simple, to Facebook posts (a bit longer, still simple) or blog posts (more involved and complex but not rocket surgery), content confuses them. This is bad since content and a strategy around it drives a lot of social media success. Understanding content is confusing, too, since content can be anything. A tweet, a video, a picture … content. A white paper, a graphic, a blog post … content. An audio recording, an interactive instruction video, a sketch on a napkin … content. Even how you respond to a customer’s question is content in the social era. Frank Eliason is awesome at content, even though most of his is limited to 140 characters of response to someone whining about Comcast. Jay Baer developed a nice questionnaire about content he shared last week over at Convince and Convert . He presented a Content Rationale Worksheet as sort of a creative brief, to borrow an advertising agency term, for the social media activators in an organization. His report is a great first step to defining the type of content you want to create and giving you a nice direction for that content once you know the answers. Content rationale worksheet View more documents from Jay Baer . Baer’s worksheet is mighty handy if you’re the content producer and you’re trying to construct a single piece of content. It’s a little closer to the ground than what you would need to start an overall content strategy. (Of course, that wasn’t what Jay was shooting for with the piece.) When you’re developing a more broad content strategy for an organization, you have to ask yourself a lot more questions. Here are just a few I have on my list when working with clients. What more would you add? Organizational Questions What do you think social media can do for your organization? What do you want social media to do for your organization? In terms of providing content on social platforms, what are you afraid of? What confuses you? Who approves the content before it’s published? How many departments or divisions will be contributing content? How many departments or divisions will you provide content for? How do you engage and communicate with the various departments? Does a distinctive goal for the content exist? How will you prioritize content from one department or division over the next? Who will be responsible for providing content and on how many platforms? Audience Questions How do you currently communicate with your audiences? How often do you communicate with them? Who provides the content for those communications? What kind of content is provided for the audiences? What do you ask your audiences to do? Do they do it? How does your audience prefer to communicate with you? Others? Have your audiences ever asked for specific content? What kind of content do you think your audience needs? Wants? How comfortable with technology, the web and social media is your audience? What is our audience interested in besides our product? Content Questions What general area of knowledge to we have that we can share? What kind of expertise or even products can we give away? What can we explain? What type of content from others can we share with our audience? Who can we interview that would interest our audience? What can we have fun with that isn’t a disconnect from our brand or industry? What sensitive topics may we take advantage of to engage discussion? What topics are off-limits? Who in our company connects with customers most naturally? What is our capacity to produce content? Our audience’s threshold to consume it?

Visit link:
30 Questions For Your Content Strategy

Posted in Social Media | Comments Off
Tags: content, content marketing, content-rationale, convert-social, facebook, media, organization, Social Media

How Share Alike Copyright Can Hurt Your Brand And SEO

Monday, June 28th, 2010

I recently altered my Creative Commons copyright as it pertains to Social Media Explorer . I switched from an open, share and share alike copyright to a non-commercial, share and share alike copyright. While this might seem like a minor alteration that has little implication on anything, I wanted to share with you the agonizing (literally) decision because it has implications on how you might consider applying copyright to your own publishing. The free and open world of social media advocated by the purists is kind of a, “just share, it’ll be okay,” mentality. Open source, open copyright, don’t be stingy, etc., mantras have created this vast universe of free flowing content and gladness that is the blogosphere. I’ve benefited from the share and share alike movement greatly. Image via Wikipedia But the more you learn about the implications of that approach to your content, the more you see the disadvantages. When you openly allow people to use or reposition your content, you expose yourself to two major business risks: damaging your branding and damaging your search value. Damaging Your Branding It’s bad enough that my friend Michael Stelzner named his site Social Media Examiner (awfully close to my blog name) and that I guest posted there a few times to help him get some early content. I’ve now been cited as the author of “Social Media Examiner” on a number of occasions (Doesn’t offend me. I love Mike and Examiner.) and even had one person ask me why I changed the design of my blog away from the eye-catching jungle theme (which I never had … that’s Mike’s site). But when sites like Social Media Today (a great resource, by the way) literally pull the entirety of your content and publish it as if you were authoring it for them, the attribution waters become very murky. Social Media Today aggregates great blog posts on the world of social media from around the web. If I’m not mistaken, they do so with each author’s permission and with respect to their respective copyrights. They have always had my permission to do so and have respected my copyright. And I do like the site because it pulls together good posts I may not have found on my own. I do believe there is some original content there, but scrolling down their posts recently, I found that most of their recent posts were repositioned from elsewhere. However, as Social Media Today’s audience has grown, so has the mistaken attribution that I write for Social Media Today. While I did reach out to them several years ago to ask how to be featured on their site and sought their active use of my blog posts, none of my content there has ever been exclusive or even written for their audience. I write for Social Media Explorer — my blog. If SMT wants to use that content, until now, they’ve been welcome to it. While I certainly don’t feel as if being associated with Social Media Today is a bad thing, I am concerned that the lack of clarity in who authors what for them takes away from each author’s independent and respective blog, website, business and brand. Sure, it’s a trade-off. Up and coming authors get increased name recognition and exposure, some inbound links and enhanced credibility. But there comes a point where the brand confusion can be problematic. I’ve reached that point … good or bad. Damaging Your Search Value Perhaps the bigger problem here is that sites like Social Media Today reposition the same content. While I don’t consider myself to be an SEO expert and duplicate content penalties from the search engines can be circumvented in various ways, simple logic tells you the same content on two different sites consistently can cause problems. I first noticed the problem with Tweets and inbound links. My post of the day would be tweeted with a link. Awesome! Someone was sharing my content. But the link would point to the post on Social Media Today. Not awesome! I deserve that web traffic on my site. Then I noticed references to my material linked from other blogs and websites. Awesome! Someone took a further step and said, “Jason’s content is good enough, I’m going to link to it from my content.” But the links pointed to the post on Social Media Today. Not Awesome! I earned that inbound link. It should come to me. The big kicker was when I began doing some searches for keywords I’d targeted and found that the Social Media Today content was competing with my own for actual Search Results, not just components of good SEO value. This is when I realized having my content there was hurting me. Social Media Today has a big enough audience and is a credible enough website that the same content on it can feasibly beat out Social Media Explorer for the same search term, though the content, author, etc., is all identical. Not good. Selfish vs. Selfless I realize there’s a thick layer of self-serving attitude underlying all this. The social media purists will be critical of me for being selfish and wanting to horde my content. But the business value of what I sacrifice when doing so is large enough for me to want and need to do so. This decision is 100-percent pro-Social Media Explorer and has nothing to do with being anti-Social Media Today. I love what SMT does, fully endorse and support their efforts. But also feel that the reasoning above is good grounds to now ask them not to use my content. They are a commercial venture, so my copyright would now prohibit them from reusing Social Media Explorer posts. How This Effects You If you haven’t already, you certainly should walk through the Creative Commons licensing exercise to determine what type of copyright to apply to your own material. But know that it’s not a determination you should take lightly or in haste. Think about the possibility that a perfectly fine and upstanding effort, like Social Media Today, may want to use your content. Does SEO value mean that much to you? Will you want to protect your brand from confusion with others? Know and understand that you can say, “Anyone can have it and alter it!” but you can also say, “Anyone can have it but you can’t alter it.” You can also say they can have it if they’re non-commercial but not if they’re a commercial entity. Or you can say, “It’s mine … all mine! Bwahahahaha!” In all seriousness, though, copyright is an important issue to consider for your content. It’s also important to know the benefits of being open, the benefits of being closed and the challenges of each as well. Hopefully my recent change can help you at least think your copyright through. What Say You? Am I right or wrong here? Is being also published at Social Media Today of greater benefit to me? Have I made a sound decision? What would you do in similar circumstances? What copyright do you apply to your content and why? The comments, as always, are yours. ( NOTE : After writing this, I discovered Social Media Today now allows authors with registered SMT accounts to control the feeds sent to SMT for publication. This was not always the case and doesn’t change my decision. I have removed my feed from my profile page there.) Related articles by Zemanta Copyright Law and Public Domain Explained (brighthub.com) Copyright Refresher – If You Blog You Need to Know This Stuff (realestate.about.com)

View original post here:
How Share Alike Copyright Can Hurt Your Brand And SEO

Posted in Social Media | Comments Off
Tags: branding, business, content, content copyright, copyright, creative-commons, Design, media, SEO, Social Media, today

PR Reader’s Choice Blog Award Voting Is Open

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

My friend Arik Hanson started compiling a reader’s choice awards for public relations blogs last year. Arik is a smart guy and a hell of a blogger in his own right and the program was both a kind way of elevating good PR bloggers in several different categories but also a smart way to drive traffic, interest and links for his own blog, which deserves to be nominated in a few of the categories, too. The 2010 PR Reader’s Choice Awards voting is now open on Arik’s blog. If you’re a PR person who reads some blogs, go vote. You should also go subscribe to all the ones listed for the various awards. They’re good. This year, the people who have participated in nominating candidates have chosen Social Media Explorer as a finalist for Public Relations Reader’s Choice Blog of the Year for 2010 . I’m honored to be recognized, though I’ve always shrugged off awards for blogs. Blogging is not a competition. The winners are the readers who get to learn from smart people. But I am appreciative that a few folks threw my name into the hat. The finalists for Blog of the Year include Todd Defren’s PR Squared (which one last year, I think); Danny Brown’s blog ; my buddy Mark Schaeffer’s {grow} and Gini Dietrich’s F.A.D.S. (The Fight Against Distructive Spin) blog . I read each of them regularly and am friends with three of the authors, kindred spirits with the other. The other categories, which include some awesome blogs, too, include best Up-And-Coming Blog, Most Educational Blog and Most Thought-Provoking. You can vote for the various categories on the PR Reader’s Choice Awards post on Arik’s blog . Please vote for the most deserving candidate. Not me.

Read the original here:
PR Reader’s Choice Blog Award Voting Is Open

Posted in Social Media | Comments Off
Tags: choice, choice-awards, Danny Brown, education, media, public-relations, reader, social, Social Media, training, voting, voting-page, year

Prophetic Marketer