Flack's Revenge

How SMBs can Build Sales with Social Media

In her Handshake 2.0  blog post, Anne Giles Clelland nicely summarized a discussion consisting of threads across email, Twitter, blogs and telephone about affordable ways for small businesses to leverage social media for increased sales.

I thought I'd reiterate some of the core concepts and add a few new thoughts and links here.

Power of Self Publishing
Among the ideas we discussed is something I've called user-generated PR.  Others have referred to the same idea as "vendor as publisher."  There are more places than ever to post your content.  Find an online forum where your buyers are likely to congregate and determine what opportunities there are to get your content posted. 

In general, the copy should be educational and not self-promotional.  Still, a thought provoking piece gets your name out there and offers the opportunity to link back to your website.

Establish a Digital Identity
Speaking of linking back, you will need to establish and build a digital identity.   This means your businesses website, of course (see TechNewsWorld's series on building a small business website) but it can also mean building out the brand by launching a blog about your specialty, and profiles on social networks that are appropriate for your niche.

These days most people go online to explore purchasing options and get the information they need to make buying decisions.  As Anne says, Contact=Sales, and contacts are increasingly made online these days, on Twitter, blogs and social networks.

There are affordable ways to launch websites and blogs, and micros sites and landing pages - the Web destinations that provide a "welcome mat" to new business prospects, and help you capture their information through a registration form.

The Brand of "You" and the Power of News
Media Post had an article The Personal CPM: Quirky Idea or Future Marketing Reality?.  According to the article, Forrester's Charlene Li

hypothesizes that marketers will bid for access to personal social networking profiles with greater reach and influence among their peers.

I wrote about something similar in U R The Media on the Fusion PR Forum blog.

Back in the day, we called PR "media marketing," the thought being that communications with information intermediaries like journalists required a special approach.  These days, the reader of your news could just as easily be a prospective customer, who can discover the information in a Google search.  So let's not forget the power of news, and the press release.

Announcing new products and services is a great way to generate interest amongst prospective customers.  You can launch news over the news release wire distribution services, send it out in an email campaign, and share it with your social network.  When backed by substance and written well, news releases are less likely to be dismissed as just spam, even though one of the goals for your press release can be similar to the goals of a direct marketing campaign: generate customer demand for your new offerings.

The press release offers a non-threatening approach because the wrapper connotes news and information, it is more appealing in my opinion than a hypey direct email piece.

As Anne so eloquently says, it is The Great Forward.  Each person can be a reflector, and the news can spread virally as search engines index it, and it is shared across social networks and news sites.

Closing the Empathy Gap in Tech PR

The NY Times featured an interview with Dev Patnaik, author of "Wired to Care", about the importance of developing a sense of empathy with customers.  His main point is that, despite all the noise that is made about the need to innovate, an "empathy gap" - the emotional and experiential disconnect between companies and the customers they serve - is often the real stumbling block for many.

Companies that scored well on the empathy scale, according to the author, include IBM, Target, Nike and Harley Davidson.

One example of companies missing the mark as a group are U.S. auto manufacturers (it seems they can do no right these days).  According to the article:

In Detroit, employees get discounted cars, executives receive a new car once or even several times a year. They never take it to a car wash and they park in an executive parking lot. Some don’t even drive the car themselves. If you have no firsthand, real-world experience with your own products or people who use your products, it’s very hard to make good decisions about what people want to buy.

The topic got me thinking about ways to show empathy in the PR agency world.

The first step is to really care about the clients' success.  Without caring, it is pretty much guaranteed that you will not be successful.

Above and beyond that, you need to get a sense of what it is like to inhabit their worlds.  This may come more naturally for those who have worked on the client side in PR, or have worked in other roles in industry. 

It means truly tuning into the conversations during briefings and resisting the temptation to multitask.   It means observing clients "in the wild" by attending trade shows and other customer events, watching the demos, seeing how they engage with their customers and listening to the questions they get.

It means sometimes attending clients internal meetings, e.g. sales meetings are a great forum for understanding the marketplace realities that customers face.  it means getting first hand experience with their products where possible, and talking to friends who work in industry and are familiar with your client's market space to get their take of "the word on the street".   It means becoming familiar with how your clients get info and actually reading complete articles that are relevant.   Most important, it means being on the same page with clients in terms of goal setting and how they view success.

If this sounds too hard, or you think it will take too much time away from other activities, remember the goal is simply not to just to enjoy koombaya moments with clients (although that is a beautiful thing too, of course).  In learning about your clients and the worlds they inhabit, you will actually do a better job because this inevitably leads to ideas that you can take to your other important customers, the media.

Web 2.0 Montetization for the SMB

Anne Giles Clelland posed an interesting question via Twitter about Web 2.0 monetization strategies for the SMB.   It is a great question, and one a lot of people are asking these days: "cut through all the hype, what can this technology really do for my business in a tough economy?"

The question is not an easy one to answer in general terms because there are so many different types of businesses, and the term "Web 2.0" is a bit amorphous.

But I'll do my best.

There are direct and indirect monetization strategies. When it comes to direct monetization, there are two primary vehicles: ads and subscriptions.

Both have there ins and outs, people have proven to be pretty reluctant to pay subscriptions for information or buy Web memberships.  Despite all the attention given to the long tail, unless you have beaucoup traffic you will not make much from ads. 

Forrester recently came out with a report on community platforms, which was mentioned on Read Write Web.   These are solutions that let you leverage various Web 2.0 technologies to put in place anything from a simple blog or website to Web-based hubs that help build community amongst your extended business network including customers, prospective customers and partners. 

Near-Time, a vendor that I have worked with quite a bit over the years, is a provider of one such platform.   It combines blogs, Wikis, file sharing and calendars.  As an example, Near-Time makes it easy to put up a Web-based community that you can monetize by running ads.   It also features an e- commerce engine that lets you charge for premium content and access to private forums.

Community platforms are ideal for information rich businesses.  For example, Near Time has been used by publishers (traditional and online, consumer and B2B), analysts and consultants.  Their website also lists customers in retirements benefits and staff augmentation.  Other examples include golf instruction (see Golf by Design) and a website for keyboard and piano enthusiasts (see Whole Octave).

In terms of indirect monetization, many are using Web 2.0 types of tools such as blogging and micro-blogging to build awareness of their offerings, establish reputations and drive traffic to the their websites.   Handshake 2.0 can help small and mid-sized businesses with this.  The agency I work for, Fusion PR, helps tech companies leverage social media for PR and demand generation.

Although soft benefits seem less compelling these days, it would be a mistake to ignore the potential of Web 2.0 to improve communications, support and collaboration amongst customers and business partners.  Web 2.0 tools like RSS, and many different types of search can help you keep your finger on the pulse of the marketplace.

Better communications and information inevitably lead to stronger bonds with customers and better business decisions for those who master these tools and act on the information gained.

Obama, A Boon for Tech

They say all politics is local, my "neighborhod" is tech.

I don't want to appear to be myopic by focusing on just this aspect of the Obama administration amidst all the inauguration after glow.  But let's face it, the sector can use all the help that it can get, and it is great to have a President who really gets it when it comes to tech.

From his attachment to his BlackBerry, to his co opting of social media as a communications platform, to his views on building out our broadband infrastructure and healthcare information systems (see this Healthcare IT News piece), you can tell that Obama is literate and forward thinking when it comes to tech.

This Portfolio article talks about the positive reception for his FCC pick and links to Obama's Technology and Innovation Plan.

The right will continue to grouse that he is a liberal tax and spender, and find every way to undermine and criticize. 

Yet it is pretty clear that the government needs to continue to do its part in getting the economy going and part of this is spending on public works.  As I have long maintained, continuing to build out our information highway is no less vital than investing in physical infrastructure.  Other nations are ahead of us on this.  (People might think we are doing fine here, but weren't the Internet "pipes" slow yesterday - what did that do to productivity?  What about the digital divide and widespread availability of mobile broadband?)

And stimulating the development of better methods for pooling and sharing medical records will lead to dividends in fewer medical errors, better information for research, and ultimately better health care at lower costs.

HOLY CRAP!!! (Real Time News Power of Twitter)

It has been much talked about, but I got to experience the real time news power of Twitter first- hand last Thursday when that plane went down in the Hudson River.

I was in the middle of sitting in on a briefing with my colleague Bennie, a client and Mobile Radio Tech, a publication that ironically covers mobile tech for first responders.

We are located in Times Square, near the West side of NYC (and not far from the Hudson River).  The first inkling I had that something was wrong was when I realized that it was hard to hear the call because of the all sirens.   Sirens are not an unusual occurrence in Manhattan, but these were pretty loud and persistent.

It was not Twitter that first alerted me to the mishap, but a colleague who passed by my office.  I overheard him exclaiming that a plane had gone down in the Hudson River (and immediately flashed back to 911, that is how I first heard of planes going into the World Trade Center).

Suddenly, my Twitter seemed to come alive - some Tweets popped up via Twhirl, which seemed to relate to what was happening.

The first was from Peter Shankman, who lives on West side of Manhattan, his eloquent HOLY CRAP tweet was followed by comments from some other Twitterers that I follow.   One Tweet carried the link for the real time MSNBC video feed, which I tuned into.  I chimed in my 2 cents about the sirens via Twitter (see below for the actual details of the dialog).

Meanwhile, the briefing continued uninterrupted (we had it on mute so the sirens would not interfere).

This all unfolded in 40 minutes or less. As the call was winding down I saw the cliched  - but surprising and much welcome news "and no one got hurt!" via Twitter, marking an end (for the time being) of a very intense briefing and event.

Your News Crystal Ball in Tech PR

 

Good PR is about being fast, smart and creative.  You want to get a sense of where the media will go next, and be there waiting and ready to help them build their stories, a step ahead of everyone else.

 

Any good PR play book will attempt to do this.  Part of blocking and tackling in PR is calling the plays that anticipate the defense's (i.e., media's) next move. Pitching stories, not ideas means having the right stories lined up and ready to go.

 

But no one has a crytal ball, right?  No one can predict with any certainty what news will break (unless it is your news, of course).  

 

So, short of having that truly groundbreaking announcement, how does one boost the odds of guessing correctly where the media will go next?

 

Actually, you are probably already doing this without thinking too much about it.  If you have been smart, paying attention to editorial calendar items, getting to them early and anticipating the fairly predictable stories, you are doing this.  

 

Here are a few examples of obvious stories (that may or may not be reflected in ed cals).  Just as surely as the calendar turns every year, there will be year-in-review stories in December.  If you are in tech PR, as I am, you will observe end-of-year awards and "best of" stories, and what worked and what flopped in certain solution areas.  You will see broad stories about technologies that broke through and those that came up short.  

 

Ever pitch your employer or client's participation at a trade show?  Doing this is generally based on the fairly good odds that certain segments of media will be writing show round-up stories.

Aggressive, fast and smart PR teams will anticipate these types of opportunities and go after them far enough in advance to make something actually happen.

 

"Got it!" You say.  "Nothing new here, just PR common sense.  What about that crystal ball?"

 

While I unfortunately can't help you tell the future, I can share some additional ideas for anticipating where the media will go next.

 

Here I am thinking about the major stories that affect news coverage across beats and different types of media.  These stories may or may not be tech related.  And in most cases your client will not play into the headline news and first round of stories (actually, that is a good thing if it is negative news).

 

But every major story creates ripples of follow-on coverage as long as the news remains relevant.  Media outlets compete to stay one step ahead and bring to light new info and fresh perspectives.  Similarly, the tech media and bloggers will be looking at tech focused angles.

 

Why not make a friend out of a reporter by helping him or her find and break that next hot story, ahead of the rest of the media pack?  

 

Part of PR planning and brainstorming should be taking this into account and determining if your employer or client may have some kind of play in these areas.  This means discussing the idea with stakeholders, and then - if it is a go - getting ducks in a row as far as assets that can help the reporter build the story (e.g. executive commentary, customers, friendly third party influencers).

 

This all may sound very abstract, so let me provide some specific examples.  First I will cite the headline news, followed by the types of stories and technologies that could have a play in follow on coverage:

 

NORTEL bankruptcy: Impact on telecom equipment market and customers, convergence, telecom vs. enterprise networking and switching equipment

Banking and broader economic crisis: Risk management technologies

Obama inauguration and other major "pop-up" events: security solutions and mobile / wireless communications infrastructure

Enterprise Reporting for Dummies

The No Train, No Gain site website - a training resource for journalists - has a page on enterprise reporting, a sort of "how to" guide that I thought my tech PR readers would find interesting.   I first saw this in The PR Practitioner's post about dealing with reporters.

It seems to me that reverse engineering the piece can help tech PR folks who wish to have a better understanding of the realities of an enterprise reporter's job (this assumes, of course that the article reflects widely held views and best practices.)

The article seems to be written for editors of daily publications.  Its main points are :

• Give reporters more latitude in covering the enterprise, covering tech is not like covering general news.
• Let them go where the story takes them

There is often the debate in PR about which relationships can be most productive to cultivate: is it the beat reporters, or their editors - those who arguably have more clout at a publication?  The gist of the article is that editors should respect the specialized knowledge and news instincts that enterprise tech reporters (ideally) have.

Here are some excerpts:

Let the reporter manage her/his beat. Are you really listening to what the reporter is telling you or are you coming up with your own ideas? Before you start taking over your reporter's story, listen. This is not to say you can't help shape the story. But the reporter is out on the street, working sources, noticing trends. Let them take the lead on the enterprise.

Don't hold your reporter to their initial angle if they've learned something different.

Don't force them to commit until you've given them time to get into the subject. You and are your reporter should be talking about the story all along the way, and eventually you will need to focus, but try to give a little latitude at the front-end.

Let the reporter decide deadlines for the enterprise story.

Every meeting does not a news story make. This goes along with the above. Don't penalize reporters by making them write a story from a meeting that didn't yield any news.

Copywriter's Alchemy: Turning Mud into Gold

At a dinner party over the break, the husbands retired to the living room after the meal and sat in front of a cozy fire while the wives continued chatting in the dining room.

The conversation amongst the men turned to baseball.  We discussed the high price of ball park tickets (which are getting higher in NY with new stadiums), and the unfairness of it all.  Even people who earn a good income can feel stretched by what it costs to take the family to see a game these days.

At some point our host brought up the topic of Blackburne mud.  Others seemed to know what this was.  I am not the biggest baseball fan, and had never heard of it.

As Paul, our host explained, it is an exclusive kind of mud that they use in major league baseball to condition the playing balls, which otherwise would be too bright and shiny from the new leather.

Paul became very animated while explaining all this, and went and fetched some Web pages he had printed on the topic.  He started reading and I quickly became transfixed by the story.

It was about one outfit that is apparently the primary source of rubbing mud for Major League baseball.  "What," you ask.  Why was this particular brand of mud so special?  And what was the reason to rub baseballs in mud again?  Of course, I had the same questions.

I am sure I was softened up by the great food, drink and warm company.  Perhaps the fact that I had watched There Will be Blood - another "turning mud into riches" story (in that case the mud foretold the presence of oil burbling beneath the surface of the land) - influenced me and contributed to my interest in this story.

But damn if the copy he read from the company's website did not make me want to go out, buy some mud and subscribe to a Lena Blackburne Rubbing Mud IPO.

I smelled a great story and blogging topic.   When I got home, I looked it up and saw that others have been there first (see this CS Monitor article - The Dirt on Baseball - from 2005).  It sure is not easy to be the first to write about interesting stories these days.

Anyway, I know that readers of this blog include marketers and copywriters, so I thought that I would share it anyway, and include this link and some excerpts of great marketing copy on the subject (their text is in italics below).

Enjoy!

P.S. After reading from the Web pages and answering my questions, Paul scurried around and found two baseballs.  One was spanking new and the other had been treated with Blackburne mud.  Indeed, the former looked bleached white, kind of cheap and hard to handle.  The second had a rich hue and conditioned skin - of course this one had been treated with the mud.

How it All Began

Any knowledgeable baseball fan will tell you that the big league baseball teams never use brand new baseballs in a game. They're too shiny to play with. So, what do umpires use to prep the balls and dull the shine? New Jersey mud.

For nearly three quarters of a century, a special variety of Jersey muck, Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud, has been removing the sheen from baseballs for just about every professional baseball team in the country.

It all began in 1938 when an umpire complained to Lena Blackburne, a third base coach for the old Philadelphia Athletics, about the sorry condition of the baseballs used by the American League... Something was needed to take off the shine but not soften the cover.

The Blackburne "Secret Sauce"

Blackburne took on the challenge. Next time he returned to his home in Burlington County, he checked out the mud along tributaries of the Delaware River until he found some muck (the whereabouts of the mud hole is still a dark secret) with a texture he felt would do the job. Taking a batch to the Athletics' field house, he rubbed some balls with the stuff. It worked like a charm! What's more, it had no odor and didn't turn the balls black.

Soon the entire American League was using the amazing gunk. Later, the National League took to using it. Before Blackburne's death in the late 50's, his baseball rubbing mud was being used by every major and most minor leagues in the United States...

How it Works

Does [founders' son-in-law and current owner] Jim Bintliff wave a magic wand over the mud during the winter, or add some mysterious ingredients to it? That too is a dark secret. He'll never tell. What counts is that the muck, described as resembling a cross between chocolate pudding and whipped cold cream, really works! Other kinds of mud and even mechanical methods have been tried to de-slick baseballs, but they couldn't make the grade.

So, when the umpire yells "Play ball!" rest assured, good New Jersey mud will be part of the game.

The Revolution will be Tweeted ("Your Nation has Been Disgraced on Twitter!")

My news radar has been tuned to "Twitter + PR" for some time now.   As this blog has maintained, Twitter is quickly being co-opted by forward thinking communications professionals everywhere.

It is only a matter of time before your client asks about this service.  Why not get smart about it now, by perusing some of the related links in my recent posts?  Better to be proactive than blindsided.

It is absolutely nothing short of amazing, the buzz this service is getting (I suppose I have added to the cacophony), and the speed at which an ecosystem is developing around it.  I recently switched smart phone platforms and got a Blackberry, in part because one of my colleagues showed me his phone that was equipped with Twitterbery - an add-on application that integrates Twitter with the Blackberry (OK, yeah, I know, Twitter works with many if not virtually all cell phone devices and I am probably the last person in the universe to get a Blackberry - Twitterbery is an elegant implementation, though).  A second reason for getting a BlackBerry - I got tired of watching the top of my wife's head, as she constantly sits hunched over the device deep in Blackberry Prayer mode.

There are similar services, and others which arguably do much more - e.g. FriendFeed - so why all the thunder for Twitter?  Better memes, I suppose: the name, variants and experience are captivating.

Speaking of memes and variants on the word Twitter, one can't talk about Tweeting and revolution (I mean real Revolution, the blood and guts variety) in the same breath, and do this with a straight face, right? 

Yet if it is not quite revolution - after all they are the Goliath in this case - I just learned that one nation, namely Israel is currently using Twitter as a war time communications tool.

Previously, I had observed that the Israelis are using some pretty advanced communications tactics in their latest confrontation with Hamas - using YouTube and blogs to bring their case to a global audience, for example.  I opened up the NY Times on Sunday to also learn that the Israeli consulate had conducted a news conference on Twitter.

Please see this link to the story.  The article included a partial transcript, and it is kind of surreal, the way it reads, as Twitter's 140 character limit mandates abbreviations, and the real-time nature of the event caused improvising and perhaps some errors / sloppiness.  A quick read could easily be mistaken for the text messaging conversations your kids have, until you look closer and realize that the interchange is about matters of life and death.  An excerpt follows:

backlotops: 1 side has to stop. Why continue what hasn't worked (mass arial/grnd retaliation)? Arab Peace Initiative?

israelconsulate: we R pro nego. crntly tlks r held w the PA + tlks on the 2 state soln. we talk only w/ ppl who accept R rt 2 live.

shahidkamal: Your nation has been disgraced on Twitter. This inverted Nuremberg Trial will not rescue your image.

israelconsulate: the point of this was to hear what ppl say and to share our POV with fellow twitters.

Catching up on things: Social Searching & Graphing Tools, etc.

It has been a nice couple of weeks, relatively quiet at work and the long weekends rounded out the year and softened the impact of launching into 2009.  I used my days off as an opportunity to relax, spend time with family and friends, and catch up on reading.

My oldest daughter, who turned 16 in December and wasted no time in getting her driver's permit (I mean literally no time, we went to DMV on her birthday) used her school recess and my availability to get in more than her fair share of driving practice with dad (that is my domain as the wife gets anxious in the car).  I looked in the mirror this morning, and it might be my imagination but I think I have a few more gray hairs as a result of this.

I also took a refreshing break from blogging and Twitter. I did do quite a bit of reading about social media however - there is no other way to keep pace (let alone push the envelope) than to stay informed and see what works best.

The following are a few articles I ran across, found helpful, and want to share:

The Online Marketing Blog had a great post on social search tools.  Links for the sites referenced provide an excellent addendum to my post on conquering info sprawl.

See: Delver, WhosTalkin?, Samepoint, socialmention, serph and OneRiot.

Mashable had a great article How to 2008: How to Do Almost Anything with Social Media.  You can forgive them for overreaching a bit - e.g., it doesn't tell me how to walk my dog or prepare my taxes with social media, but otherwise is a great collection of "how to" articles.

The compilation led me to a number of gems, e.g. one article outlines a tool called TwitterFriends that analyzes your Twitter social network, provides all kinds of useful metrics, and actually generates a Twitter social graph.

Mine looks anemic (not taking away anything from the few connections I do show).  I guess I need to get to work on building my Twitter network.

Another discussed a tool called Twollow, which automates the process following people who tweet key words that you specify (up to five terms are allowed for free).