Reviews of 3 new books on social businesses

Target audience: Businesses, brands, digital marketers, agencies, entrepreneurs, educators.

I‘ve been head down working on a cruise startup for the past few months, but the weather has been so beautiful the past few days that I carved out some time for reading on the back deck. It’s been rewarding — doubly so in that I’m friends with two of the authors and know the third.

So let me line ’em up and offer some brief highlights. If you’ve read any of these books, please share in the comments!

‘Brand Advocates’: Chronicling the revolution in fans & supporters

Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers Into a Powerful Marketing Voice
By Rob Fuggetta
276 pages, John Wiley & Sons (hardcover)

One of the most important changes in the relationship between businesses and customers in the past few years has been the move by forward-looking companies to harness the power of the crowd. Rob Fuggetta’s “Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers Into a Powerful Marketing Voice” is the ultimate guidebook that explains the hows, whys and what-not-to-dos of this powerful phenomenon. (And yes, that harnessing thing is a big part of what we do here at Socialmedia.biz.)

I met Fuggetta, founder and CEO of the brand marketing platform Zuberance, at a “Brands and Word of Mouth” event in San Francisco two years ago. Now he’s taken his and his team’s learnings about brand advocates and compiled it into a smart, timely, jargon-free book that covers the basics of listening, “activating power advocates” and launching a full-fledged brand ambassadors program, as many businesses have begun to do.

Brand advocates go by many terms: customer advocates, word-of-mouth champions, customer champions, customer evangelists. Companies that largely relied on their fans for the bulk of their marketing include Zappos, Trader Joe’s, Method, The Body Shop and SodaStream.

For the uninitiated, here’s a sampling from “Brand Advocates”:

Top 10 Things Advocates Will Do For You

1. Give you referral leads and help sell your products and services, serving as a virtual sales force.
2. Write highly positive reviews of your products or services, boosting your online ratings.
3. Create glowing testimonials about their experiences with your company or products.
4. Answer prospects’ questions, overcoming buyers’ objections and reducing shopping cart abandonment rates.
5. Share your content and offers with their social networks, driving referral leads, clicks, and sales.
6. Help you launch new products.
7. Create better ads than your high-priced ad agency and more compelling copy than your most skilled wordsmith.
8. Defend your cherished company and brand reputation from detractors.
9. Alert you to competitive threats and market opportunities.
10. Give you profitable ideas and product feedback.

Accessible, engaging and crisply paced, “Brand Advocates” is at its best when it chronicles some of the successes that businesses have already seen thanks to their advocates — brands such as Norton, the consumer brand of Symantec, which doubled its product rating on Amazon and increased sales by 200 percent through an advocates program; a San Diego restaurant whose supporters organically shared over 75,000 offers with friends; a consumer electronics company that unleashed a small legion of advocates to recommend the company’s VoIP service and convert one out of three targeted customers; and GMC, where more than 25,000 GMC truck owners created authentic testimonials and posted them to Facebook and Twitter.

But Fuggetta does more than simply document. He adroitly takes these examples and builds a scaffolding for this still-evolving movement. His 10-step presciption of how to reward advocates and how to set up an advocacy program are worth the price of the book, if you’re a digital marketer, entrepreneur or consultant.

Fuggetta smartly counsels that the most effective brand advocacy programs take place through genuine passion rather than from payments or rewards, though I think he ignores some successful examples of companies that have used what’s-in-it-for-me to good effect.

There’s much more to explore in “Brand Advocates,” particularly for large, mid-size and small businesses looking to put brand ambassadors at the top of their marketing mix. For more info and to order, see the Brand Advocates website.

‘Attack of the Customers’: Brand management for the social media age

Attack of the Customers: Why Critics Assault Brands Online and How To Avoid Becoming a Victim
By Paul Gillin with Greg Gianforte
209 pages, self-published paperback

Most businesses don’t put a great deal of thought into how to manage their reputations — until it’s too late. In “Attack of the Customers,” Paul Gillin lays out a set of strategies that go beyond a traditional crisis communications program by showcasing example after example of the new world that companies now find themselves in, and what to do about it.

“You may think you’re immune from customer reviews because you never registered your business on the sites that publish them,” the authors write at one point. “The reality is that anyone can create a profile of your business on Yelp, TripAdvisor, Foursquare, Google+, Facebook and lots of other services without even knowing it.”

Scary, right?

“Attack of the Customers” offers a fast-paced, clear-eyed roadmap to navigate this constantly shifting landscape. It brims with smart, practical advice for brand managers, marketers, PR pros, social media managers, communications department staffers — anyone with a stake in how a brand interacts with its customers.

Paul (whom I’ve known for some years) details scores of examples of social media crises: the customer exasperated with the customer service of Aviva, the UK-based insurance company; the Twitter brouhaha that threatened a black eye for Ford’s Ranger Station; Walgreens’ public rift with Express Scripts; insurance provider FM Global’s name snafu; the beef industry’s “pink slime” fiasco; a popular icon that turned negative for Progressive Insurance, and many others. All of this comes across without judgment

The book describes different kinds of potential attackers, how to respond to each one, which tools and platforms to use and how to lay the groundwork so that you’re not caught flat-footed in an era when a disgruntled customer’s tweet, negative review or blog hit piece can spread across the Internet in minutes. Silence is not an option. Genuine engagement, on the other hand, can neutralize a potential PR disaster and occasionally turn critics into fans.

For anyone involved in the crafting of social media strategy or customer engagement, “Attack of the Customers” should be high on your reading list.

Attack of the Customers on Amazon.com

‘What’s the Future of Business?’: A roadmap for the social business

What’s the Future of Business?: Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences
By Brian Solis
214 pages, John Wiley & Sons (hardcover)

Brian Solis, a longtime friend and colleague, appeared at a Social Media Breakfast I co-hosted last year and wowed the attendees with a slide show and talk about the end of business as usual. Social is far more than a convenient channel for marketers to interact with customers, he said — to survive and thrive in today’s marketplace, companies need to become full-on social businesses.

“What’s the Future of Business?” beautifully lays out Brian’s vision in a stylized, highly visual package that could easily serve as a coffee table book.

Among the topics Brian touches on are branding, business transformation, disruptive technology, influence loops, engaging with empowered customers, four major stages of change, six pillars of social commerce, different strategies for dealing with Generations X, Y and Z, and much more.

For those baffled by the tectonic shifts confronting today’s businesses, “What’s the Future of Business?” offers an elegant primer that’s free of jargon but brimming with ideas, such as his taking us through the “hero’s journey” in becoming a business that engages with the public, informs its products with users’ insights and explores the various touchpoints that an individual might have with a company before becoming a customer. I was especially taken with the Zero Moment of Truth – the minutes just before a person buys, where impressions are shaped and brand affinity is forged.

“WTF” is a fun, chewy read, made doubly so by the original color drawings of Hugh MacLeod (another friend), whose contributions pepper the book from beginning to end. Add it to your summer reading list and take it in at a relaxed, languid, satisfying pace.

What’s the Future of Business? on Amazon.com

Related

• 5 questions for the author of ‘Engage’ (Socialmedia.biz)

• Review: ‘Social Marketing to the Business Customer’ (Socialmedia.biz)

• 8 books for your Summer Reading List (Socialmedia.biz)

• Review of ‘Your Network Is Your Net Worth’ (Socialmedia.biz)

The post ‘Brand Advocates’: How to enlist armies of loyalists appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Now, illustrating your content is not just preferable, it’s mandatory. Facebook, Google+, and Twitter have become much better at following links and automagically populating your shares with photos, videos, titles, and teasers (instead of just making your Bit.ly links hot); aggregator sites such as The Huffington Post and link-share and social bookmarking sites also spider the link, proffering a selection of images to choose from to be associated with each submission.

If your goal is to be shared or read and you’re participating in social media in order to further your personal or corporate brand, then blog, tweet, Facebook, Tumbl, and Posterous without illustrating that content with a photo, chart, illustration, pull-quote, logo, portrait, or infographic at your own peril.

I have sort of known this for years, especially since I share like crazy. I knew that digg and reddit always looked for an illustrative graphics file every time I would submit a link and I knew that Facebook and Twitter would even give me the option of choosing which photo would best define my thousand words — I knew that.

But it wasn’t until I heard that Flipboard had really grown up and matured to include Google+ and Instagram — as well as rich-content like in-line podcasts and videos — that I took another look and my hat blew off! And I bloody love it (and I get why you all have loved it forever, but I was very old school and did my reading via Google Reader on the web and Reeder on my iPhone).

Flipboard is an app for smart phones and tablets. Until recently, it only offered apps for iOS devices but it’s now Android-friendly. It takes all your own personal social media walls and streams and mashes them together with breaking news, sponsored content, topical content (you can choose from a dozen topics, including Fashion, Style, Design, Technology, Entertainment, etc), and my very mature and awesome collection of RSS news feeds via my Google Reader and reformats and displays them to look very much like an eBook or digital version of the New York Times, Wired, National Geographic, or whatnot — rife with illustrations, cover stories, pull quotes, and panoramic photos.

It is really mesmerizing. Now my Klout score is going through the roof because reading content from the 12k folks I follow on Twitter and the 4,800 I follow on Facebook and on Google+, and the thousands of feeds I have imported to Google Reeder is a morning breeze! I love it. I am engaging more, I am listening better, I am missing less, and I am generally entertained. I am finally doing what I said that you should do: listen 80% and talk 20% (who has the time, right?)

I have been paying attention to my reading habits, too. And I am drawn to pretty things: embedded video content, audio content, infographics, photos of pretty girls, photos in general, scenics — actually, I am almost only drawn to content that has an associated visual element.

It’s impossible not to be drawn to these rich-content posts because Flipboard always gives them at least a quarter of the page but often gives closer to 1/3 to half the page — even for content that is brief. A good, high-quality, high-resolution image always gets you better visibility as simple tweets or Facebook posts without a visual component always just gets pulled together into a list to the side, crushed together with all the other text-only tweets.

Links to other articles with visual content also works because Flipboard populates your Twitter RTs with the destination’s graphic elements as well as makes it simple to read that target content inline with the Flipbook app — very seamless and also very easy to share, retweet (so, in many way, the very best solution is to Facebook, tweet, and G+ longer-form content that, itself, is well-illustrated with photos, videos, infographics, or attractive people.

One piece of advice for all the jerks who only share content teasers on their magazines or blogs, requiring me to leave Google Reader or whatever reader I am using and head off to your site, you had better put that illustration at the top because if it is below the “more” link, it won’t be of much benefit to sites like Flipboard and the other aggregators — though I hate that tactic, I understand that you have an ad revenue model and that you really would love to control the conversation a little bit more and maybe get some new readers and maybe a few comments — I get it, I get it. That said, heed my words and make sure there’s at least one photo of Lindsay Lohan before the “click to read more” link — otherwise, you’ll not only lose me but quite a few others — who can resist good dirt on Miss Lindsay?

Since I am trying to relate to my friends on Flipboard, I try to slow down and read the naked tweets and Facebook posts that are just lonely, lonely, 140-character blobs — but if I were less in love with my friends, I would really just blow all of those off and, instead, just dance around the colorful expanse of the nicer, kinder, prettier world of the illustrated web.

Mind you, that’s just me — but I tend to do all of my best cultural extrapolation with just the one data point: me. Even so, if you really want to draw the attention (and clicks through, reads, Likes, stars, favorites, retweets and shares) from your readers, use a picture.

The post How Flipboard is changing everything appeared first on Inside Social Media.

What has your YouTube channel done for you lately?

You followed the advice of the experts and created a YouTube channel. You even produced and uploaded some videos. Now you watch the numbers grow as YouTubers view your videos and subscribe to your channel.

But what do numbers matter to your business if they don’t convert to sales or leads?

YouTube visitors tend to convert and click deeper into websites than visitors from other social sites. Are you taking full advantage of this motivated audience?

Here are some tactics to help your YouTube channel and videos drive more traffic and generate more sales.

Optimize your YouTube channel

Do you know about all the goodies you can add to your YouTube channel? A couple of these goodies include adding links to your website and other social media accounts and linking your YouTube channel to your Google Plus profile.

Optimizing your YouTube channel helps your presence look more professional and encourages links to landing pages, product pages, and other places you want to drive traffic.

Customize your YouTube channel

It’s not that difficult to customize your YouTube channel to make it stand out from the crowd. Customizing your channel with a branded background sends a distinct message to visitors: that you take pride in what you produce and your videos are worth their time.

At top is a video that walks you through how to customize your background using templates.

Optimize descriptive text for your video

Did you know that you can place linkable URLs in your video descriptions? Take advantage of this by encouraging viewers to click through to products or landing pages relevant to the topic of your video.

Take the time to optimize your descriptions, tags, and categories for each of your videos. Use relevant keywords as tags and within your video description.

Add interactivity to your videos

YouTube allows you to place notes, titles, and other types of annotations in your videos. You can even place links within your videos to encourage viewers to subscribe to your channel or watch other videos.

Take advantage of this annotations feature to encourage subscriptions and to drive traffic to other videos on your channel.

Notes within your videos are a great way to draw attention to the links in your video descriptions. A simple note like: “Look in the Description Below for Links to Special Discounts” can make a huge different in click-through rates.

Just be careful not to clutter your video with too many notes.

Here is a video that shows you how to add interactivity to your YouTube videos:

Add your own call-to-action overlays

Did you know that promoting a video through Google Adwords at any budget level allows you to place your own call-to-action overlay?

A call-to-action overlay is the pop-up that appears as soon as a video begins to play. Adding this type of overlay to your videos can drive a lot of traffic, especially from within a viral video.

The call-to-action overlay option becomes available as a video editing option once the video has been added to an Adword’s campaign.

This post is based on Deltina’s class on Udemy, “Leveraging YouTube to Drive Sales and Traffic.” Take the class today at a special SocialMedia.biz discount of $19, and learn even more ways to turn your YouTube visitors into customers.

The post 5 ways to turn your YouTube views into sales and traffic appeared first on Inside Social Media.

While “everyone” is on Facebook, social media is no longer a land of tinkerers; it’s a land of consumers. If you fill a room of potential brand ambassadors you harvest from your own ranks, I guarantee that only 1% to 10% of those people are active participants, and the rest are passive folks who are mostly lurkers. And when people bring up Zappos as the corporate exemplar, I always remind them that Zappos is exceptional and that’s why they’re the only company anyone can think of who does it as well internally. Plus, Zappos is a dyed-in-the-wool customer-service-centric company with an aggressive, visionary founder — someone who has completely rebuilt itself to over-serve its communities. Kudos, but seriously a truly exceptional example.

Only the largest companies have in-house counsel — their own corporate lawyers. Very few small or medium-sized companies maintain their own in-house accountants, designers, publicists, reputation and crisis managers, or marketers — some don’t even have their own dedicated sales teams.

And this is becoming more and more the reality of modern business — and it started in the ’90s. Why incur internal staff bloating when you can keep your staff limited to core expertise and services in focus, outsourcing everything else to professional service firms — vendors? Specialist vendors, like doctors or lawyers or management consultants, are generally staffed by people who are not only trained and experienced but also have the benefit of being able to load-balance and mind-share across the experience of multiple clients.

The best vendors, like the best docs and lawyers, keep rigorously up to date in the state of the art with a single-minded incentive to keep up and even lead the way. Personally, I have over 15 years of experience in consulting, and the only way a consultant ever gets a job — and keeps it — is by being just a little smarter, more curious, quicker, and more confident than the client — and since this is rarely completely true, most consultants worth their salt work really hard and spend many hours being and staying a top expert in the field.

Why Zappos is the unicorn of social media success stories

For most companies, one would generally need to rehire everyone in a company to make certain they’re dyed-in-the-wool social media passion players with exceptional communications, empathy, and writing skills. Most folks just want to have and keep a job and livelihood in the career they trained for.

To me, Zappos is the unicorn of social media-brought-internal success stories. So many companies that appear to have their own internal social media teams — or even say that they do — actually have leaned very heavily on all the agencies I have owned and worked for.

In my not-so-humble experience, it’s naïve to believe that the “team sport” model works when it comes to sharing the social media brand ambassador load internally. It always lands on one person’s shoulders. Having an agency or dedicated expert to facilitate action and follow-through is the best way. Too many of the team members in most companies “don’t get social media” and quite a few “think it’s a waste of time.” Happens every time.

While these folks might be hot-and-heavy at first, very few if any of them will be able to keep up their excitement over time, especially if they’re OBE — overcome by events. The moment work (or personal life) picks up and gets busy, will the social media responsibilities suffer? How much respect for the importance and power of social media do your employees really have? If any of them consider social media monitoring, engagement, and outreach to be either a secondary task or “beneath them,” then the writing’s on the wall. The honeymoon period with cool and the continuity of outreach and the quickness of the response might suffer. Blog posts, tweets, and page posts will descend to periodically and then to Ghost Town.

I don’t understand all these experts who actually believe that companies even have an interest — or the passion (or even the time) — to take social media in-house, especially if they only hire one community manager or director of social media. One’s not enough. The social mediasphere is enormous, incessant, 24/7/365, and 80% listening which demands crisis management experience to boot.

And when it comes to the argument that social media teams really need to be bona fide corporate employees, it really doesn’t jibe with modern American business. Companies use agencies all the time to represent them. An agency just needs to connect, communicate, and work together with their client consistently, directly, and over time. One can easily weave consultants and agencies into companies.

It happens all the time with lawyers, accountants, counsel, board members, etc. These are independent entities that are very much woven into the fiber of the company even if they don’t have a key card, company health insurance, and a 401k. Getting a key card and a company logo polo aren’t a panacea — these things don’t confer magical powers of connectedness and corporate memory.

That employees are more authentic is a false premise — this is 2012, a distributed world where outsourcing and offshoring are more common and accepted than they have ever been in history.

The post Don’t bring your social media completely in-house appeared first on Inside Social Media.

These companies want to argue they deserve “earned” media coverage when what they are really doing is BUYING that awareness by paying PR agencies to go out and sell it for them. They aren’t earning it by some good deed or being awesome – they are spending money to get a PR agency to talk bloggers into working for free on their behalf.

NOTE The following is basically a copy/paste of the comment that I left over at the article, so it’s written to Gail, which might read weird, so forgive me on that.  At the end of the day, I worship Gail Gardner for starting this conversation so please forgive my mild ‘tude — I am well-caffeinated and really passionate about this topic.

While I don’t believe or agree with a word in this post as the entire premise is flawed, however, I agree with everything that Doc Sheldon says in his comment — thanks Doc (we don’t know each other, I don’t think):

I agree that a blogger should have the option of taking pay for reviews, opinions or publicity, if that’s their chosen business model. For many, it is, and I have no problem with that. But when the required disclosure tells me that a blogger was paid to write about a product or service, it causes me to doubt their objectivity. If they’re okay with that, fine. Personally, I prefer that my readers believe I’m giving them an honest review, so I prefer to do independent reviews. That doesn’t mean that I think that every blogger that receives pay or gifts is being dishonest… just that it casts a shadow of doubt. One I prefer to avoid.

Let me explain the flawed nature. Firstly, I don’t believe that you, Gail, read the post very carefully at all; secondly, I never said their were thousands of exceptional bloggers — I believe that there are a few exceptions — awesome — bloggers, a number of payola bloggers, and then a long tail of passion-players; finally, your line, “they are spending money to get a PR agency to talk bloggers into working for free on their behalf,” is just a little bitter but it is also not true.

We don’t want to get bloggers to work for us at all — we just want each blogger to consider what we’re pitching — yes, to the blogger, but also to the readers. We can only pitch content to the blogger for the benefit of his or her readers.

And, if we’re able to engage with them in such a way that the blogger sees a professional, reputation and content benefit to what we’re pitching, then, and only then, do we “earn” an “earned media” post.

And, the blogger is under zero obligation to write nicely; he or she is allowed his or her own integrity and journalistic distance and is more than able to trash it, to love it, to recommend it or not.

Which is the risk I take when I go any outreach. If my client’s products or services such or if we package it poorly or target it sloppily, then the entire campaign can roll snake eyes at best and at worst, there can be a huge media blow-back.

The biggest flaw in the premise is that we’re stealing from bloggers. That because we’re professionals we’re in some way duping or conning these poor guileless bloggers into doing work for us for free.

With earned media blogger outreach, there must be a win-win-win between the blogger, the client, and the readership or it really doesn’t work at all.

I so do enjoy the conversation, so thank you for that, Gail.

The post Integrity is inherent in earned media but not paid appeared first on Inside Social Media.

And, something you also didn’t know: social media is two-thirds defense and monitoring — listening — and only one-third promotion and publicity — speaking. Most marketing folks not only don’t get PR but they revile it; sadly, this is what social media is, no matter what you call it: public relations, all aspects of it: publicity, of course, but also crisis management!

A social media crisis almost always begins as a customer support call and generally escalates slowly and then exponentially, generally because a customer doesn’t feel heard, doesn’t feel responded to, doesn’t feel appreciate, or doesn’t feel respected. And the truth generally has nothing to do with any of those things (at first) though both sides can easily become very heated.

The truth most often has more to do with “not hearing the knock at the door,” “not hearing the phone ring,” — not noticing they’re there. And that Mr. Nobody, that real nowhere man, need not be a sniping, paranoid, lonely, nebbish, either. That person may very well be Chris-Frigging-Brogen himself!

Yesterday morning, Chris Brogan reported his terrible experience with NMTW Community Credit Union. Though now resolved, let me summarize: Chris lost track of an account at NMTW, one of his many bank accounts, which had drained and been empty or negative for only a couple weeks. NMTW automatically closes account after 15 days. Chris was a 20-year veteran of this bank and reached out via the info@ email and then took to Facebook.

You lost a 20-year member today. I emailed your info@ email address to forward the reason why to your president. Wishing you better in the future.

Long and short of it, he received a form mail:

NMTW takes pride in its member service and we strive to add value to everyone’s day. We regret that in your situation we were unable to assist you any further at the time of your branch visit. NMTW would like to thank you for bringing this to our attention and in doing so will prevent similar events in the future.

At first, Chris sent an email to the company using the only email he could find; then he reached out, gently, using the only other point of contact he had with his favorite community credit union, NMTW, because it mattered to him. Finally, a response! But not a response to his terse Facebook wall post, a copy-and-paste form response (rule one, never copy-and-paste responses, ever).

I didn’t ask Chris but I bet you he was pretty bemused by everything up to this point, though indignation has probably been building. What got him was the fact that the Facebook response was out of sync with what Chris wrote on Facebook — was completely deaf to his comment — but that he was shut down. That his comment reached a dead end.

What Chris expected — demanded — (and what I demand as well) is that Chris’ and my ping via email, form, Facebook, or Twitter actually goes somewhere. And, in this case, Chris was completely explicit as to where, “forward the reason why to your president.” He expected, rightly, that there was a direct path — a stovepipe — that runs from the social media dashboard that NMTW uses in their Social Media Command Center directly all the way up to El Presidente. Rightfully so.

Everyone who consumes social media expects that. We have been trained to. We don’t expect that when we call an 800 customer support line, but we do expect satisfaction when there — or can be — witnesses. On a phone, tarring-and-feathering and stocks in the village square aren’t even worth it, but on Facebook and Twitter, there’s nothing to lose. Every altercation can be a bona fide “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” moment!

So, if you’re going to dance with devil — with social media, naked and covered with tar and feather in stocks at the very center of the village square, you had better spend at least two-thirds of your time, resources, and respect making sure you’re not missing very important conversations — listening — while you’re spending way too much of your time pitching, selling, marketing, promoting, hawking — speaking — like some itinerant peddler.

You’re better than that. Right?

The post Your social media plan needs to shut up and start listening appeared first on Inside Social Media.

My definition–and my assumption–has always been that blogger outreach is public relations and not paid media. I may well be mistaken.

“Earned media (or free media) refers to favorable publicity gained through promotional efforts other than advertising, as opposed to paid media, which refers to publicity gained through advertising. Earned media often refers specifically to publicity gained through editorial influence, whereas social media refers to publicity gained through grassroots action, particularly on the Internet. The media may include any mass media outlets, such as newspaper, television, radio, and the Internet, and may include a variety of formats, such as news articles or shows, letters to the editor, editorials, and polls on television and the Internet.” (Wikipedia)

I recently had a Twitter chat with Serena Ehrlich, Director of Marketing for Mogreet during which we discussed the fine points of blogger outreach.

We agreed on everything except on whether blogger outreach was pay-per-post or earned, what bloggers wanted from a marketing pitch.

To quote @Serena, “Just smile, pay and disclose,” in response to my post, “don’t roll your eyes at social media influencers.”

I quickly responded, “Funny. I am an “earned media” social media marketer. There’s never “pay” so much as “gift” which is generally access, info, news,” and Serena asked, “do you find them moving towards pay? All blog conference preach payment (but I’m earned too so I get ur point)” and I responded “Don’t forget, most bloggers online have never been corrupted by blogger conferences :)” and, finally, “You don’t NEED to be sneaky in social media. You cannot CONTROL the conversation and you had better be as open as humanly possible.”

And that’s really the reason why people prefer the blogs and bloggers that offer predictable and controllable paid-content. Because you can control them by virtue of contracting with them over currency and sponsorship.

That comforts many but it lacks a number of important things, the most important of which is penetrating deeper into the conversation online, engaging with the newest talent–bloggers who have never been kissed or who have been blogging and sharing with their small circle of compadres in perceived invisibility (“what am I even doing this for, didn’t I start doing this so that I could get free review swag from Brooks, Nike, Saucony, and Mizuno?”) and in utter desperation (“I don’t have the time for doing this any more–I should be running about running instead of writing about running”).

What my version of long-tail blogger outreach offers is the ability to efficiently get deeper into the conversation, move further down the list of bloggers, into a social media conversation that’s a hell of a lot more like the blogosphere circa 2006: a cloud of conversations, reviews, insights, editorials, and exposures that reflect something and someone a lot more in touch with what they believe rather than the political and commercial give and take associated with the slick, safe, produced, and programmed world of mainstream media.

In my experience, bloggers want content that’s fresh, relevant, and germane to their topic of interest or expertise; they also want to be associated with something cool or flattering: a brand they like, a company they respect, or a product they have always loved, have been interested in trying, or have never heard of (or have yet to be released).

Being offered exclusive content, getting to be first kid on the block for something, or having the bragging associated with being identified, tapped, and invited, openly, into the fold of a worthwhile organization.

If you need to pay a blogger a posting or linking fee in order to get them to write about you, your social media agency is not doing their job; in fact, they’re just spending your money and they’re getting easy and safe posts but they’re certainly not doing right by you when it comes to identifying, engaging, and building a true relationship with the taste-makers and influencers in your space.

And, because you don’t have to earn their coverage based on the merits of the pitch, it calls into question the quality of the gift.

First, let me define “gift:” a gift is anything that a blogger considered valuable or germane to their news cycle. It could be exclusive content, it could be unique access to a person or technology, it could be the generous use or advance access to a product or service with the express intent of giving them time to experience, review, and critique it to share it with their readers.

It can even include exclusive blogger access to giveaways, discounts, membership, or coupons for the blogger’s readers.

But no, apparently every single blogger who has ever been to a blogging conference has been convinced–conned–into holding their posts ransom to a fee card. I mean, I see it all the time: folks who respond to any query with a fee sheet, be it their price for a “sponsored” post or even for just a keyword link.

I can understand offering me a price list for advertising space in the form of a banner or sponsorship credit, but these bloggers, who I will not name, are impenetrable when it comes to working on building a relationship, on becoming a preferred news channel, or even taking the audition towards becoming an official permanent member of one or more communications programs. This is a pity.

Why is this a pity? Well, most of the true A-list bloggers do not put such a mercenary barrier between companies, organizations, and brands–which is how they became A-list bloggers–by being likeable, accessible, having character, being popular, and having integrity.

The entire culture of the blog is supposed to be more authentic, more honest, and less under the thumb–and in the pocket–of the products and services about which they write. Right?

Long-story-short is that my long-tail strategy for blogger outreach, influenced heavily by the Cluetrain Manifesto, digs much deeper than just the top-50 or even to top-600 bloggers; in fact, my strategy doesn’t care anything at all about Klout, Compete, Google PR, or even page views or age of site. The only thing my strategy cares about is whether they’re topically-, linguistically-, and geographically-appropriate, targeted, and viable.

When you have a list of 1,000-9,000 viable and germane blogs for any particular campaign, you can readily dismiss anyone and everyone with a hand out and spend more attention grooming, encouraging, and rewarding those bloggers who are interested in being part of an interesting campaign, and innovative product, a special appeal, a new opportunity, or hot (exclusive) news.

At the end of the day, I will certainly collect a spreadsheet of all the folks with their hat in their hand, asking for payola for a positive post or a pre-written link through (they’re explicit that the link is a follow-me Google link-juicy link and not the hated “nofollow” blockade).

I will deliver that spreadsheet to the paid content and paid advertising folks–if they exist or are interested–along with their price sheets and offers. But when most of my colleagues and I, in our sundry agencies and associations, are hired to engage in blogger outreaches, our tasks are very similar to the tasks associated with traditional PR: connect with journalists and see if they’ll be willing to cover you.

These campaigns don’t have a discretionary bribery fund. We’re lucky if we even have the kinds of endless review copies that we want to circulate to all interested parties.

Our mission requires that we simply thank the folks who get back to us with their rate sheets and their requests for links and sponsorship, put them aside, and move on to build a connection, a conversation, and a relationship with all the other bloggers who are willing to enter into a conversation–a negotiation, if you will–first, before you shut me down before I even have a chance to make my appeal or to reach a mutually-beneficial agreement.

What I had to say, in appreciation, is that my team and I don’t need to waste a lot of time–these bloggers surely do get to the point right away. There’s not a lot of resource-intensive back and forth: it’s very clear what you’re getting.

But it comes right back down to what I thought blogger outreach and blogger engagement was: earned media public relations campaign wherein you pitch bloggers cum citizen journalists and they decide whether or not what’s in it for them or their readers is consistent with the quality of news, offer, or “gift” that my team and I are willing to give.

And I don’t even know what is valuable anymore, really. I understand the desire for revenue and the desire to not be taken advantage of by big brands (with deep pockets, assumedly) who should really be willing to put up or shut up. Fair enough, but there’s a lot of opportunity and future associations that are dismissed out of hand as a result.

What these brands, associations, nonprofits, companies, and their associated advertising, marketing, and PR companies want is earned media even though they could very well afford the $150 link fee or the $250 sponsorship in any single blogger’s rate sheet; they could probably afford a thousand of those, presumably.

The reason they come to Social-Ally or an agency like mine is because what they get for that money up front is PR garbage. They’ve all been through IZEA, they’ve all been through the SEO link-buying frenzy, and they’ve all bought sponsorship and ads just about everywhere.

What they haven’t found is authentic journalism from someone who is not paid for nice things; someone who has the integrity and character to offer balanced, quality, reviews and insights, be they good or not so good, consistently and over time–and these folks, the folks that my clients are looking for when they look for blogger outreach are not the folks who sound like car-salesmen or infomercial pitchmen when they write a client-friendly (or even client-doting) sponsored post, they want someone who is really passionate for Mizuno running shoes for example or has had a relative build a Habitat for Humanity house of has hosted a child during the summer for the Fresh Air Fund.

They’re looking for taste-makers, of course; they’re also looking for brand ambassadors; they’re looking to get married rather then just getting lucky; and they’re hoping that the enthusiasm of being associated with a real PR campaign from a recognized brand is enough (for now).

And, what they’re really hoping–all except a very few clients (and those are really just in it for the links, I’ll be honest–is that that boundless pride and excitement really translates into an irresistible, passion-infused, post that no longer ever happen in mainstream media.

They’re not looking for neutrality or objectivity–they’re happy with fanboys, fanbois, and bona fide enthusiast-obsessive, but they’re more excited that the end-result is organic, hearth-felt, and extemporaneous–what each earned media blogger wants so say rather than saying what he or she thinks we want to hear (which, like I said before, almost always sounds like the forced song-and-dance of a veteran used car dealer).

Anyway, there are loads of mommy bloggers, sports bloggers, gadget bloggers, tech bloggers, and sundry other topics and categories–none of whom are in their top-50–who have decided that they’re not citizen journalists but something more along the lines of the paid circulars in the paper or the “paid advertising” or “advertainment” section of most commercial magazines.

That’s fine. But because most blogger outreach campaigns are resource poor and their agencies a little lazy, the experience of most blogger outreach campaigns don’t go very far down the list of bloggers–or are restricted to just a certain class, PageRank, Klout, or Compete score, all they ever get is a load of jaded mercenary bloggers who readily hold their posting ransom, posting–or dropping links–only for the highest bidder.

The reason is simple: most brands are not national or global enough to command the attention of the real top bloggers. These bloggers have mostly maintained a semblance of journalistic and community integrity–being honest and open in their review, coverage, or sharing; however, they also have a strong level of discernment as to what they will cover, when they will cover it, and what sort of terms their article or post will follow (first right of refusal or first post or an ability to leak before an official announcement, etc).

TechCrunch will only cover your startup if you’re willing to reveal financials to them in a big way; Om only covers it if he things is personally cool; etc.

I am not saying that these top guys are saints. There is a lot of money going on. There is a lot of access. There are a lot of business class tickets and flights to corporate headquarters being offered, but none of these things (should) effect the quality and comprehensiveness of the copy, be it a review or announcement or just the editorial commentary.

Below them, there are the folks who have been able to accrue the correct metrics–the semi-pros or the advanced amateurs. To them, their “blogs” have become businesses, which is cool enough, I get it; however, they’re exclusively pay-to-play.

They’ve sold their souls to the real market of the Internet these days: keyword phrase links designed to transfer Google juice from a blogger’s blog directly to a company’s site, product, service–or to deposit an affiliate link into an advertorial review designed to drive a direct sales funnel to a commissioned sale.

These strategies are part of my previously-mentioned social media robot armies and zombie hordes: link-farming, affiliate marketing, and inbound marketing.

That’s all well and good but it is not blogger outreach. And if it is, maybe we need to rename blogger outreach to blogger relations instead. Or, rather, I think we need to make sure that we call these payola blogger outreach what they really are: inbound marketing campaigns with a blogger component.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what we at Social Ally call it, it’s what you hear (thanks, Frank Luntz). Let me ask you: what do you think of when you think of a blogger outreach campaign?

Do you think of earned media first–traditional PR mapped to bloggers–or do you think of blogger outreach as a way of identifying bloggers who would be amenable to sponsorship, paid posts, or bough links? Or, both?

I really like to know how that phrase is used circa 2012 instead of 2006, when I started Abraham Harrison, RIP, and if I should even be using blogger outreach to represent earned media blogger relations campaigns on the Social Ally website. I would love to hear your feedback in the comments.

The post Blogger outreach is earned media not paid, right? appeared first on Inside Social Media.

I experience a lot of contempt for bloggers and social media influencers. From agencies and marketing firms as well as from self-professed social media experts and social media gurus. Bloggers and other social media online influencers may not know who Edward Bernays is or have the lingua franca of a trained communications professional, but they sure can spot the eye roll of condescension and contempt from a mile away, even through the terse messaging of a single pitch.

While the biggest brands with the biggest gifts and social cachet can get away with being douche bags and intolerable asses because the level of peer and personal prestige and importance more than compensate for bad manners, rudeness, and a condescending manner — the proverbial upturned nose and eye roll — this sort of behavior isn’t acceptable from anyone but the crown king and queen of their particular demographic.

For example, if you’re offering cars, purses, trips to bloggers to review, you can act as you like; if you’re offering coupons, you had better really try to understand that it is relationships, kindness, attention, and connections that is selling your pitch — and the blogger’s valuable-to-her time — instead of your patently insulting suggestion that “you and your readers would really benefit from this dollar-off coupon.”

If you think that bloggers are actually failed journalists, you may have contempt for your audience; if you consider the time spent to become a blogger would be better spent “working,” you may have contempt for your audience. If you believe that what bloggers do is “just prattle on,” you may have contempt for your audience; and if you actively play favorites and only engage with the crème de la crème of bloggers, you may have contempt for your audience.

Why it’s important to be generous for its own sake

This contempt is made plain by two variations of a quote attributed to Henry Louis Mencken: “No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby” and “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

This blog post came to a head upon reading the time-honored and often-reviled book by Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People. At first blush, it is a deeply troubling and kiddie-pool-shallow indictment of all that is superficial and manipulative about sales, marketing, PR, and social networking.

If you gird your loins, however, and push through, I kick myself for not having studied it further. I will admit that I always get to where it really sounds like Dale is suggesting that we superior elite who are reading his book need to learn to manifest the same sort of compassion, patience, and calm — grace — that we generally reserve for children and the infirm.

And then I realized that that is indeed what Dale Carnegie is saying! But that we should not just reserve compassion, empathy, gentleness, love, patience, attention, and kindness to just children, we should lavish anyone and everyone in our lives with adoration, no matter if that person is one’s child, one’s wife, one’s business associate, or one’s prospect.

What he seems to be suggesting — and this is really revolutionary to see laid out through endless illustration and scenarios taken from history’s greatest and most successful men and women — is that being nice, generous, and friendly should be something one aspires to generally and not just as a ploy to make friends and influence people.

While this book may well have been popularly reflected as insincere, insincerity is what doesn’t work in PR, sales, marketing, and especially in earned media online with bloggers and other online influencers.

Some good advice that Dale Carnegie offers is “bait your hook for the fish you want to catch rather than for yourself.” (OK, if you’re rolling your eyes now and thinking, “pearls to swine” right now, get out of the business immediately and get into a profession that better tolerates insufferable snobs and douche nozzles.)

I have been saying this forever based on what I read years ago in a very popular book of the day called Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray: “You need to give the gift your partner wants instead of the gift you want to give.” Great advice for us men who are constantly giving vacuum cleaners to our significant others for Valentine’s Day instead of a romantic weekend at a bed and breakfast or whatever may well indicate love and appreciation to her or him.

And on the topic of appreciation, Dale Carnegie addresses this, too. And you need to be obsessed with it. Too often in earned media engagement, agencies and firms keep up appearances until a media mention is acquired and then see ya! The fire-and-forget method of acquiring social media mentions works if the brand is high prestige but appreciation goes a long way toward making up for not offering the blogger an Audi A8 to test drive for a month instead of just providing a limited-time-offer coupon for sessions at a regional day spa.

Dale does address this, and I will paraphrase: People will put up with assholes if the reward outweighs the shame. Your boss can be an asshole because he can fire you; the king can be an asshole because he can make you a knight; the judge can be an asshole because he can incarcerate you and instantly turn you into a felon.

The limits to what signifies paid or sponsored media and content

Earned media marketers are pretty vulnerable in this regard! We’re not paying anyone anything. Sometimes we’ll offer a review copy or product, but we’re professionally limited in terms of what signifies paid or sponsored media and content. We have to rely on our wits and of our general, natural, and effortless love, appreciation, and respect for social media, social influence, citizen journalism, and the power of blogging.

And while I think you either have that respect, maybe because you are, yourself, a blogger or social media content producer, I do believe you can fake it ’til you make it. (I have been blogging since 1999 and have been in social media since they were called bulletin board systems and required 1200 baud modems.) But you need to make it, you can’t just grin and bear it because you’re not having fun. If you don’t love love love chatting and interacting with the unwashed masses, the hoi polloi, the vox populi of online influencers — no matter how little influence — then you’re screwed and this whole blogger outreach thing will end up blowing up in your face and you will hurt your reputation, your agency, and the reputation of your client.

Primum non nocere.

Do you have contempt for your audience?

Oh, actually, now that I think about it, if you think fancy bloggers are the unwashed masses, the hoi polloi, the vox populi, you may have contempt for your audience.

And don’t forget, you’re doing noble work. Most bloggers are writing their blogs without any feedback, appreciation, or love. Most bloggers are writing in a vacuum and are generally a couple posts away from hanging it all up, no matter how much work they have already put in. There’s a constant desperation as to why one spends all this time writing, writing, writing into the infinite blogosphere. Getting a pitch from anyone, to say nothing of Kimberly-Clark, Mizuno, US Olympic Committee, or Habitat for Humanity is huge! To be tapped from on-high and asked, authentically, to help and to share, can be the kind of affirmation that fuels that blogger to redouble his or her efforts.

In my experience, most bloggers have never been pitched, tapped, or kissed and are pretty lonely. To read what folks say inside our marketing bubble, bloggers are being pitched to the point of blindness and deafness. Why is this true? Well, because the top-100 blogs are, surely, but that’s 0.000002% of all bloggers. So, that’s like saying that all entertainers are being stalked by paparazzi just because 100 top celebrities are constantly being dogged by TMZ, Us Weekly, OK!, and Star. It’s ludicrous. The top-1,000 influencers of social media, be it blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, MySpace, Instagram, Google+, etc., is no indicator of the norm in social media.

Why do agencies only target the top 25 influencers appropriate to their clients in any particular campaign? Partially because these agents are over-worked and over-committed and there’s generally only enough time and budget to get a short way down their media contact lists. But really it’s because everyone has general contempt for anyone who isn’t already super-hot. While this is a no-brainer for Ford as it chooses folks to give Ford Fiestas to — cars surely get the attention of the hottest online celebs — it is a disastrous strategy for everyone else. Unless you’re Scott Monty, Ford’s awesome social media rock star (he is that good), you’ll generally get shot down if you ask the assumed prom queen — and only her — to the prom. You’ll generally get rejected if you’re not at least valedictorian of your class if you only apply to Yale and only Yale for college.

While Dale does talk a lot about how people aspire to be important — and that is indeed true because when a brand reaches down “from on high” and taps a blogger — especially newbie and baby bloggers — this is more often than not an essential sign of legitimacy and status rather than being a terrible inconvenience or SPAM. If you’re willing to ask someone out to prom who you really like, get on with, have chemistry with, you’re more likely to have an amazing prom with memories to last. And, if your date’s never been kissed before, you’ll forever be his or her first and never forgotten.

Every blogger and tweeter remembers their first time: when they were first contacted by a publicist who asked them for help, be it a good or bad experience. Every blogger with any level of success has loads of “dating” stories they can tell you about their good, bad, and ugly experiences with us PR and marketing executives.

Finally, to close, remember the words of Philo of Alexandria (or Plato) in the words that are chiseled in stone wherever I manage: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

The post Don’t roll your eyes at social media influencers appeared first on Inside Social Media.

They always say that the parents who put in all the boring, taken-for-granted time are the very best. That it’s not even about quality time, it’s about persistent time, time spent.

I don’t want to compare parenting to social media community development and management, but I guess I just did. Folks tend to have the zeal of the newly converted when they first adopt social media into their communications, sales, and marketing plan. However, the truth of being a “parent” is that you’re responsible for the welfare of an entitled ingrate for not just the first 18-years but for life — and that can be dispiriting. Unless you love it; unless you’re passionate; unless you pace yourself; and unless you truly bond with your beloved. As I have said before, these are human relationships and as such, they require constant gardening. They say that true beauty exists in the flaws and not in the perfection and this is true as well when it comes to the consistency of your relationship with those with whom you’re connected online.

Back in the day, when the social mediasphere was smaller and more intimate — maybe just more new — bloggers would let folks know what was going on.

Bloggers would make sure their readership knew when they would be on vacation, why they took days off, and often would make sure guest bloggers would cover their time away with unique voices and interesting topics — in much the same way that TV and radio show hosts often find guest hosts when they’re on vacation.

Too many social media marketers don’t communicate with their readership in the sort of flawed, open, and honest voice that is more common in radio and on television.

We generally don’t have plan Bs, we generally assume that it really doesn’t matter if we’re there or not, and we often don’t recognize how startling and disorienting it is when your readers and followers and friends don’t really know what’s going on.

So, show your readers your beautiful flaws; let them know why you’re not going to be there next week; and especially let them know why you’ve been MIA for a bunch of weeks. I know it’s not ideal, but I have been really busy and distracted over the last few weeks so what I have decided to do on my blog, while I am not in my ideal blogging mode, is to temporarily convert my blog into a photo blog — a makeshift Tumblr.

While it isn’t ideal, surely, as I said, it is also much better than letting my 13-year-old blog go fallow, becoming yet another abandoned building in yet another social media ghost town. So, no matter what, be persistent — even if every day isn’t bubbling with The Best Day Ever, even if every post isn’t Pure Genius, and even if your blog spends some time being banal, obvious, derivative, and frankly dull. Because if you feel like every engagement online needs to be class A, four-star, Quality Time, then you’ll either burn yourself out and abandon all the work you’ve already done or you’ll end up freezing up with writer’s block and start hating social media, blogging, writing, and the whole ball of wax.

And since you’re now the parent of quite possibly a slew of babies — blog, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, et al. — then you had better prepare to be a good parent and put in the time for the long haul.

The post Be a persistent social media parent appeared first on Inside Social Media.

If you call yourself a social media marketer and you’re not completely promiscuous about it, you’re not serving yourself, your boss, or your clients. If you’re not constantly downloading new apps or registering for every single new social network, you’re slacking. If you don’t endlessly click YES when it asks you if you want to search for or invite your friends, you’re derelict in your duties. And if you aren’t hooked in to share everywhere whenever possible, you’re not going to understand how all of these connectors, sharing strategies, cross-posting techniques, check-in features, and general spaminess and shamelessness quotients work first hand.

How, then, would you be able to honestly either know about or recommend any of them? Unless you want to be a professional tweeter and Facebooker all your life, you had better know both what’s out there now as well as what’s coming down the pike.

This line of thinking has surfaced because I have gone crazy now that I have my iPhone. I have jumped in with both feet and have explored any and all passions and hobbies through apps and vertical communities. Since I am on a health kick, I have joined just about every social network that allows me to track my food intake, my activity, my workouts, my progress, my calorie burn, my running and biking routes, as well as my general movement and sleep patterns: fitbit, Runkeeper, LoseIt, MapMyRun, Strava, Endomondo, DailyMile, PolarPersonalTrainer, and Garmin Connect.

Each one tracks differently, each one enjoys a different segment of my followers as members, and each one touches me in ways that either pain or tickle me. And, for now, I am keeping them all fed and watered — a little easier because all but RunKeeper allow me to upload data directly from my Garmin Forerunner 305, so it’s not too hard.

And since I am the new owner of a motorcycle, I am the member of the Adventure Rider Motorcycle Forum; and because I am a bouncing baby gun nut, I am a member of GlockTalk, Elsie Pea Forum, Rimfire Central, and the Virginia Gun Owners Forum. So, downloaded loads of forum-reader apps, saw how they share, saw how they allowed me to engaged, and decided upon Tapatalk.

That’s not all. After years and years, I have finally admitted to being a TV addict in addition to every other form of media, including books and movies, so I have joined GetGlue, Goodreads, TV Guide, yap.TV, and BuddyTV as a way of keeping track of shows and movies as well as being able to check in and comment and engage and track hashtags and mentions, and so forth.

Yes, in addition to checking in with Yelp and FourSquare in the physical world, I have even started checking in virtually when I am watching dumbass shit on TV such as 2 Broke Girls, Girls, Veep, Suburgatory, Grimm, et al.

And, whenever I have been given the opportunity to share to my Facebook or Twitter steam, I say YES. And whenever I am asked if I want to find friends who already on there or to even invite a massive amount of my friends via email, I surely do do that — to all of our chagrin. But I do it so I know and I do it so that I always know exactly what will happen if and when I recommend something like that to my clients.

Spend some time exploring new communities of action

What’s more, Facebook and Twitter are not the only games in town. Nor are Google Plus and Pinterest. Or even Instagram. So, in order to make the best recommendation to your clients or to best access your target consumer and customer exactly where they live and spend their time, you need to be aware of all of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-tier communities in addition to the most obvious, most competitive, and most costly 1st tier platforms — both to participate in as well as to build partnerships, sponsorships, prizes, and other tie ins and opportunities. While you might be channeling IBM in that you’ll never get fired for choosing it, a Facebook Page-only campaign is pure laziness.

At a very elite conference years ago, I introduced myself as a syphilitic trucker on the social media highway. No, it’s not funny. Truckers are the No. 1 reason worldwide why heretofore isolated rural villages the globe over are getting sick with all kinds of sexually and socially transmitted diseases. Before, only single-tracks, rivers, and airfields — if anything — connected the most remote points on earth; now, a comprehensive spider web of roads and highways is allowing commerce to reach just about everywhere, both to bring in supplies but also to extract commodities and valuable natural resources.

While that sort of shameless behavior may well have made me quite a few enemies, I am generally patient zero when it comes to turning people on to new communities, new interests, new resources, and new passions. I can’t even tell you how many people are on LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, and Twitter because of me; too many to count had been on MySpace and Friendster before that.

And I recommend you, too, really take the time and energy to get off of Tiny Wings for a little while and spend some time exploring these communities of action, circumstance, inquiry, interest, place, position, practice, and purpose yourself. You can’t be a competent advisor unless you’ve had first hand experience over time. So, go git ’em, Tiger!

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