Flack's Revenge

There has been lots of buzz recently about what I see as two different sides of the same coin. Some call it “content marketing“, and say it is the New PR. Others use the term “inbound marketing.”

In either case, the objective is to get people to find out about your company, product or service by publishing compelling content. Content marketing in the online world translates to inbound marketing through links that direct the reader inbound, i.e. to your website or blog (as opposed to outbound marketing tactics like telemarketing or advertising).

Blogging combined with Twitter can work together and comprise pillars for a powerful content marketing system. Your blog offers the persistent content hub, while Twitter provides a platform for quick, conversational updates – some of which include links back to the blog.

I find that many are enamored of Twitter. It is the shiny new social media “toy”. Clients often ask me how to get the most out of social media after being infected by the Twitter buzz – but before they have committed to an effective blogging strategy.

As Heidi Cohen wrote very eloquently in yesterday’s ClickZ piece Use Blogs to Extend Social Reach and Drive Online Sales:

While not as sexy as other social media formats, blogging can
effectively utilize text, photographs, video, audio, and PDFs to fuel
other social media interactions, most notably Twitter and social
bookmarking. By using other communication channels, such as RSS and
e-mail, to distribute blog content, you can extend your reach. To be
effective, blogging requires ongoing work, commitment, and time to
yield benefits.

Now, after hitting the “Publish” button, I will promptly issue an update via Ping.fm – which will in turn update my Twitter and social networking accounts – which will no doubt result in some traffic to this blog and demonstrate content marketing in action.

Last week I wrote about the growing number of ways in which we are using Twitter to support PR programs.  I cited an example of Twitter as another channel to use and monitor during media interviews (see Fact Checking the Fact Checkers).

I thought I’d also share an example of how Twitter helped us in our efforts to get the info we need for market search and product positioning.

In this case, the client was struggling to find the appropriate “bucket” for their technology – software that offers interesting innovations within the broad category of Business Intelligence.

Of course, finding the right sub category is important for many reasons (I have blogged about the topic quite a bit).   You want to be accurate in how you describe your technology and align outreach efforts with the right publications, beats, bloggers and analyst practice areas.  Finding the right category – or defining a new one if necessary – is one of the first steps in formulating product positioning, which in turn sets the stage for how you tell your story.

You want to be strategic as well; all things being equal, it is much better to be in a category that is seen to be interesting and that has a pulse.

After lots of soul searching (and some investigation) the client suggested DSS, Decision Support Systems (Wikipedia definition).  They asked for our opinion, which we offered – both the good and the bad – in terms of our perceptions about this label and its relevance.

We then took it a step further and augmented the secondary research we had done with primary research conducted via Twitter.   In short, we put a query out over Twitter, to get a better understanding of how the industry and influencers view the term and state of the DSS space.

I should mention that we have been integrating Twitter into the PR efforts for this account and most others at Fusion PR.   We follow key influencers in the BI space, and a number in turn follow members of the account team.   Our hope was that at least one of the influencers would take us up on the request and provide some helpful feedback.

One influencer did in fact reply, and a number of his followers chimed in too (he has thousands of followers, presumably, for the most part, people who follow or are in the BI space).   The replies confirmed the PR team’s thoughts on the space and provided additional validation.

So, we got some quick feedback from a key influencer and others.  Equally important, we got key insight into how a pitch related to this area of technology might be received.

Could we have just called this influencer?  Sure, and maybe we would have eventually connected, and maybe he would have had the time to hear us out and answer our questions.  Ditto for email.

Twitter proved to be a fairly frictionless way for us to get quick feedback from an important influencer and also tap into a sounding board of BI industry participants.

The more our teams use Twitter in support of PR programs, the more uses we find for it.

I thought I'd share two recent examples: one in which Twitter helped during an interview, and a second (for tomorrow's post) that demonstrates Twitter's value for market research.

At Fusion PR we have taken to following influencers (traditional media and analysts as well as key bloggers) on Twitter.  The account person for one of our clients scheduled one such influencer, a long time BI and data management reporter, for an interview with the client.

Since we were following the journalist, we could tune into her Tweets – which we did in real time, during the interview.

We were surprised to see the journalist issue questions via Twitter during the briefing.  In general, she was trying to get a better understanding of the client's technology.  Of course she could have (and did) ask the client questions directly.  But Twitter gave her another way to fill in gaps and research the client further, in real time, by querying industry folks (who, it can be assumed, comprise her followers) to get additional information – to fact check.

The cool thing was that Twitter gave the PR team a way to fact check the journalist's fact checking.  We could do this directly, by seeing the questions she issued on Twitter and her replies to those who answered.  We could click on the Twitter names of the responders to see what they said.  If we wanted to, we could have taken it a step further and used Twitter search to see all responders – not just those she replied to.

I should note that there was nothing sensitive being discussed.  It was a background interview, not about anything that was secretive.  There was nothing sneaky going on from either side; it was all very above board and very transparent.  The journalist knows we follow her and in fact follows the person on the account – the person who related the story to me.   The journalist was simply trying to get smarter – and we were trying to make sure she had accurate information.

By monitoring the interview on Twitter we were able to spot and correct some misinformation that someone had Tweeted, and the journalist and client were appreciative.

As if things weren’t already fast-paced and noisy enough, the rise of Twitter and similar tools over  the past year or so has increased the pace of and the volume of online chatter.

I have blogged about the growth of search tools that index the social Web.

Even though these may do a better job than Google of taking a deep dive into discussion threads, it is still easy to get lost in a sea of search engine results .

You may be interested to know there are tools that take a visual approach to help you make sense of the online content and buzz (or just entertain).   They range from utilities in fee-based platforms like Cision and Radian6 to free, Web-based services.   Some show rising buzz topics dancing across (or down) the screen through animation, and others generate tag and word clouds.

It is a fascinating topic, and it can be great fun to play around with some of these.

The following is a quick tour of the sites that I have run across.  I will be exploring this topic further in upcoming posts.

Digg Labs

Digg Labs offers a variety of graphical applications that show buzz happening in real time;   as people Digg stories and the stories rise in ranking, you can see the trajectories unfold.

Gleaning Insight from Clouds

Word clouds provide a great way to get a quick take of which words and phrases stand out amidst a sea of text.   They can help you understand the focus of a blog, or which words are used most often in association with a brand.

Wordle

Wordle creates word art for your blog, website or presentations.  It
accepts text and generates a corresponding word cloud, which you can
save as a graphics file.  I have found that is is a great tool
for analyzing word usage – you can enter article text, for example, and see
which words jump out in association with a topic or brand.

Many Eyes

I first read about this application (developed by IBM Watson research lab) last year in the NY Times.  It lets users upload tabular or textual data and generates different types of visualizations.  Many Eyes looks like it has great promise but can be a bit intimidating for the novice.  This tutorial from the eContent blog should help.

WP Cumulus

WP-Cumulus is a tag cloud generator plugin for WordPress blogs.  I first saw it on Steve Kayser’s blog and was captivated.  The utility generates a shimmering, moving word cloud – as you hover your mouse cursor over it, the cloud rotates.

Twitter “Mood Ring”

Twistori  (see image, above) tracks and streams those tweets that indicate feelings and emotions such as love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish.  Highlight the feeling and you will see associated Tweets rise up your screen

I just thought readers of this blog ( typically tech PR and social media types) should know  that part II of the ZDNet survey on the state of PR and social media is now out.

The second part in the series is based on a survey of PR agencies (part I surveyed the client side).

Here are some findings that caught my attention:

The blogger, Jennifer Leggio, found a disconnect between agencies’ perceptions about how well they  address general business issues and the social media program needs of clients and what the surveyed clients reported.

The post referenced a link to a recent NY Times article on a slowdown in the “spin industry”.

On the state of the tech PR business (it can be assumed that mostly tech focused shops participated in a ZDNet survey), the post reported:

…more than 42 percent say their client load has stayed the same and 38.9
percent say they have gained more clients during the downturn.

The following excerpt is interesting and mirrors what we have been seeing:

The last survey showed that clients are hungry for social programs that
specifically map back to their business objectives. Many are relying on
their agencies to come up with creative ideas and to educate them on
how social media can impact their businesses. It’s not just about PR or
media relations anymore, either. Traditional PR people are being forced
to – as they should be – learn more about lead generation and SEO in
order to fully support their clients. 

Ironically, some of the agencies that responded seemed to think that they were doing a good job with social media simply because they use Twitter.

I am going to be speaking at the Conference Board Corporate Communications and Web 2.0 event this Friday in NY.   I’ll be co-presenting with Jay Krall of Cision.

One of the points I will make – and this should come as no surprise to readers of this blog – is that business leaders need to seriously consider how they and their organizations use social media to communicate.

It is not just a matter of technology but also of embracing a new style of  communications.  Using social media tools like blogging and Twitter to communicate with the world in an open and honest way puts more of a human face on the organization.  Of course social media presents risks as well, but you don’t mitigate these by looking the other way.

I am not saying “jump on board” because I am a social media zealot.  Improved communications that result will increasingly prove to be good business.

I was thinking about this while catching up with the Sunday NY Times on the train this morning.  The following article jumped out at me:  The CEO, Now Playing on YouTube.

It ran in the business section and featured an interview with James Schiro, C.E.O. of Zurich Financial Services.  Please see below for an excerpt.

[Schiro]:

You have to be comfortable using new tools of communication even though you’re not comfortable with it.

Q. Like what?

A. Young people today look at Facebook. They look at YouTube.
They are in a totally different communication realm. I still read
newspapers. But they are getting their information off the Internet. I
went to our communications people and I said, “I’m going to use
YouTube, and we’re going to set up a blog.”

We usually have a midyear meeting where we bring 400 people in. I
said: “Look, we’re going to cancel that for cost reasons, but we’re not
going to cancel the communication with people. I’m going to go on the
road every week to visit the locations. When I come out of these
meetings or have a message, we’re going to put something on YouTube,
and tell people, it’s on YouTube. You can go here.” So there was a lot
of pushback in the organization on this.

Q. Proprietary reasons?

A. Proprietary — anybody can see it. But
when I give an interview to the newspaper, anybody can read it. Or if I
give a speech at an investor conference, anybody can usually get it. So
if I’m not willing to tell our people something that I’m not ashamed of
anybody seeing, why am I saying it? So I have no problem with it being
on YouTube, articulating the strategy, telling them where we’re going,
what I want them to do, and what I’m hearing, good and bad, in the
organization. The response has been fantastic in a short period of
time.

Q. How long are the videos?

A. About a minute to a minute and a half.
I get good feedback from my children, who tell me: “Stand closer to the
camera. Make sure you are smiling the whole time.”

Q. Are you on Facebook?

A. I don’t know if I’m ready for prime time Facebook yet.

Q. Where did you get the idea for doing YouTube videos?

A. I just said, “Look, in this
environment, it’s a cheap way of communicating.” It’s free access. If I
am just careful in what I say, maybe somebody will see it and want to
join Zurich.

With the growth of Twitter more PR people are using URL shorteners, but what does this mean for the future of your links and are there SEO implications?

To find our more please read my article The Skinny on URL Shorteners (inactive) that is in Cision Navigator today.