You Are Your Brand: The Importance of Using Your Own Product

If I am stuck between two meals on a menu, I prefer to ask the server which is best.  When possible, I would prefer to ask the cook.  If the staff doesn’t eat at the restaurant, then I begin to wonder why I am eating there.

http://flickr.com/photos/paintitblack/2439080330/

Now I wonder, why don’t more people ask how we use our own products?  When I am listening in on a sales call, prospects and customers will ask about other customers, ask about future products, and several have even asked to see our books to make sure we are as big as we say we are and not about to unload a product just before folding (and therefore not supporting it

anymore.)  This has become my new favorite question for potential vendors: tell me about how you use your product?

Granted, this is not always relevant.  A company selling construction equipment does not necessarily need to bulldoze on a regular basis.  However, when my

http://blogs.adobe.com/genesisproject/Windows-iPhone.jpg

neighbor got a job managing a division of Ford, he sold his Mercedes and stepped right into a Ford.  Good for him (granted it was in his contract), and I hope Ford provides opportunities for all of their employees to promote the brand through usage.  It promotes a pride in your product that has, perhaps, become the note of product designers and architects, rather than all stakeholders of a brand.
So, tell me about the bells and whistles, tell me about the big names using your product, and finally tell me about the flagship installation or use at your organization.  If I’m not to trust a skinny cook, then I would probably not trust a college that wouldn’t hire its own graduates or a computer company that wouldn’t use its own computers.

Serial Commas and Double Spacing

I’ve read the articles, I know the rules.  Using two spaces after a hard stop is apparently archaic and drives graphic designers up the wall.  I hate to argue against this trend, as I’m sure it tends to make me look either ignorant or stubborn, but I have good reason for choosing to continue using two spaces.

To start off, I understand that modern types have much more advanced kerning than the days of the typewriter.  I have never used a typewriter as a serious implement of typing, so I am not necessarily falling back on old, fixed-space habits.  In the days of the typewriter, two spaces made it clearer where a sentence began or ended, and I think that still holds true.  For the purposes of automation, punctuation is certainly more easily interpreted with two spaces, and for the purposes of clarity, two spaces resolves even the most obscure situation where a hard stop might be unclear (such as a sentence that includes a period followed by a capitalized word that does not indicate the start of a new sentence.)  The double space simply allows for better readability, clarity, and the all-important quality of being easily browsed.

The aesthetics of spacing seems to be at the heart of this debate, and I have always supported the idea that aesthetics is relative.  Readers tend to skip over spaces when reading, so one or the other is not going to be detrimental to the function of reading.  Most html compilers remove the second space to compress whitespace (the web is not taking a side, it is merely following certain protocols), so readers obviously function just fine without the second space.

Good Comma, Bad Comma

And my related but tangential second topic, is the serial comma.  The main argument against the serial comma is that it can create ambiguity and is truly redundant.  I think a good argument is put forward and the votes for its use (including Chicago Manual of Style, the US Government Style Manual, and the Oxford Style Manual) are neatly balanced by the votes against its use (including the AP Stylebook, the New York Times stylebook, and the Oxford Writing and Style Guide, apparently differing with the Oxford Style Manual.)  The Economist style manual makes a nice compromise, saying it should only be used when it resolves ambiguity (such as when I refer to my blogposts about social media, commas and spaces, and whatever else.)

I do not intend to resolve this seemingly age old schism in the typed world, but I am putting my vote in for using the serial comma.  For my style of writing and reading, it seems quite a bit more relevant to clearly delineate boundaries in a sequence than it does to avoid one extra dash.  It does indeed limit the ability to make parenthetical comments in a sequence, but I have run into many situations such as that limitation in my writing, and I tend to always find a better way (usually by switching the elements in the sequence and making the parenthetical description on the second item.  Then there is no ambiguity.)  So, call me what you will, I am an Oxford-comma using, two-spaced writer.  I’m sorry to the half of my teachers, employees, and colleagues that disagree with me; and to the other half, well, there you have it.

Of course, the reality is, I will use whatever style my client or brand requires.

Social Media Marketing Roadmap

Google is now a transitive verb according to the dictionary. As is commented by every generation, the world is different than it used to be.

Roadmap Print Collateral (Print on 11×17 and fold left 1/8 with map to meet right 3/8)

Though the way people use the internet might have evolved, the internet has not created any new human behavior. Networking has grown into a constant and widespread activity, but it is still networking. Word of mouth has transformed into an overnight fortune maker by becoming viral marketing, but it is still word of mouth. What this evolution has created is a wealth of opportunity for the right ideas to rise to the top, through effective use of social media.

And so I, like many bloggers before me, choose to share my thoughts on how to deal with this ever changing landscape. The following entry is a rather theoretical roadmap for marketing (B2B, B2C, marketing your personal brand, whatever.) So, if you are looking for a tactical plan to use out of the box, I’m afraid my only advice is to stop looking, because every brand’s social media plan should be rather unique. The simple nature of social media is that it is fast to evolve and your brand will resonate differently in each new venue social media offers. What you might find in the following article is some of the information I have either learned or come across in my venture to learn more about social media marketing.

Also be forewarned that this post is rather long (but I do have a very small puppy chewing on my toes as I write this, so I am motivated to get to the point and get off the computer.)

Social Media Roadmap Presentation Slides

What is Social Media

Let’s just use some social media to define itself (users of social media love to write about social media it seems… yeah yeah, I know.)

In the words of Wikipedia:

Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few.

Examples of social media applications are Google Groups (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr (photo sharing), Twitter (social networking and microblogging) and other microblogs such as Jaiku and Pownce. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms like Mybloglog and Plaxo. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media 20 June 2008)<\p>

Who is Participating?

People no longer connect to the internet, they are either connected or not. This has created a new place in our lives for media. There is a smooth transition between the real and virtual when it comes to information for those connected, and writing a review on Yelp is just as likely to be my first action after trying a new restaurant as telling my friends about it.

Certainly there are a few differences in usage out there. Different parts of the world have different numbers of people connected to the web at all:

There is Opportunity Everywhere
	Population	Internet Usage,	% Population	Usage Growth
	( 2008 Est.)	Latest Data	( Penetration )	2000-2008
Africa	955,206,348	51,022,400	5.30%	1030.20%
Asia	3,776,181,949	529,701,704	14.00%	363.40%
Europe	800,401,065	382,005,271	47.70%	263.50%
Middle East	197,090,443	41,939,200	21.30%	1176.80%
North America	337,167,248	246,402,574	73.10%	127.90%
Latin America/Caribbean	576,091,673	137,300,309	23.80%	659.90%
Oceania / Australia	33,981,562	19,353,462	57.00%	154.00%
Global Totals	6,676,120,288	1,407,724,920	21.10%	290.00%
NOTES: (1) Internet Usage and World Population Statistics are for March 31, 2008. (2) Demographic (Population) numbers are based on data from the US Census Bureau . (3) Internet usage information comes from data published by Nielsen//NetRatings, by the International Telecommunications Union, by local NIC, and other reliable sources. (4) This information was gathered at http://www.internetworldstats.com. Copyright © 2001 – 2008, Miniwatts Marketing Group. All rights reserved worldwide.

And of course, younger users participate more than older users and smaller businesses adopted social media before big businesses, but the key is to find what your audience is doing. As a B2B marketer in high tech, I was surprised and pleased to find that 90% of B2B professionals with technology buying decision power consume or create internet videos, 80% participate in blogs, 80% participate in wikis, almost 70% participate in social networking sites, and more than 50% consume podcasts. I was lucky enough that KnowledgeStorm assembled this neatly targeted information about my audience, perhaps you will be just as lucky.

The Social Media Marketing Process

Social media is an ever changing landscape and communities continue to evolve (sometimes devolve) and adapt to new circumstances and opportunities. Changes to accessibility, such as cheaper mobile data packages and expanding free WiFi, are making video and microblogging newly viable, and communities are already moving to take advantage of them.

Because of constant change, staying relevant in social media means an adaptive approach, which is why I have put together a cyclical process.

Social Media Marketing Process

Stage 1 – Evaluate the Landscape

Monitor

The place to start, whether you are uninitiated to social media or a strong participant looking to effectively market through it, is with evaluation. Your first tools for this phase will be sites such as Google Blog Search, Technorati, Summarize, and other blog aggregators to find the existing conversations. Also useful is TweetScan for Twitter and PlurkLurker for Plurk.

Start by identifying relevant topics. These might include conversations specifically about your brand, conversations about your industry, or tangential conversations that might impact your industry if appropriately applied.

You want to know if your brand is being discussed, because this could offer you access to existing web momentum. Negative coverage offers you an opportunity to be proactive (and impress your disgruntled stakeholders with successful solutions) and positive coverage is something you can leverage right away.

Identifying conversations relevant to your industry are useful as they can help you set expectations. You may be able to generate additional interest in your industry once you have built some influence, but it will be easiest to participate in the conversations already happening when just starting out in social media.

Next, identify influential users. Find out who people are listening to, and join their conversations. Here you will stay tapped into the greater community, and possibly build relationships that can help you develop a more relevant online presence for yourself. These are also useful figures to be aware of when pursuing social media relations.

Finally, identify the influential channels for your industry or specialty. This will be useful in choosing your own marketing mix and may provide you insight into the community. Backchannels are especially useful to uncover, as you can gain valuable insight into the particular idiosyncrasies of your industry’s social environment. A good example of such a useful backchannel is http://angryjournalist.com/, where communications professionals can learn what journalists most dislike about them. Back channels may go beyond open communities to include groups on social networking sites or email lists that are sometimes more challenging to discover.

There will be a great deal of qualitative measurement in this phase. Some metrics may be available (such as readers and subscribers to certain blogs or members of certain communities), but you may need to develop your own opinions about channels based on mentions by others and presence in respectable newsletters or already identified influential channels.

Strategize

Set specific goals for what you are trying to do in your social media endeavor. Some common goals for social media might be:

1. Engage the community

a. Increased brand loyalty (brand evangelists)

b. WOM & Viral Marketing

2. Communication

a. Voice of the customer

b. Pulse of stakeholders

3. Transparency and Visibility

a. Viral marketing

b. Develop brand personality

4. Collaboration

a. Product development

b. Creative development

Then establish realistic expectations of how you might realize your goals. New ideas, brand exposure, valuable conversations, and the development of an influential voice might be realistic expectations, but building throngs of followers that will do whatever you say might be a bit beyond your future with social media. You should also clearly delineate whether you are pursuing social media or SEO, because there are tempting link-baiting opportunities that you can pursue through social media, but relating to the linkerati is quite different than relating to your target audience. I would suggest keeping those activities separate, and personally, I see content as a more useful internet currency than links. You will have to decide for yourself.

Also be aware of the challenges you might face. Fear is absolutely the top reason for social media strategies that fail before they begin. The lack of control inherent in engaging with your audience rather than broadcasting to them is something that many professionals are not prepared to accept. Also top on the fear list are fears of criticism and fears of privacy loss. The only one that I think is not viable is the fear of criticism. If you are not prepared to do anything about criticism, then perhaps it is best that you not know; but it is a far better business practice to know what people are thinking of your brand, whether it is good or bad. Fear of privacy loss is something you can manage and mitigate through well defined guidelines regarding content creation (more on this later.)

Another challenge facing any business is availability of resources and prioritization. There is a minimum investment of time required to succeed in this medium, and you need to strike a balance between your existing business goals and your commitment to social media. Most successful strategies will involve your organization’s experts and it may fall to marketing to convince them of the value in participating with social media.

Codify Your Tactics

Develop a set of well defined guidelines based on your expectations and challenges, before you embark on this endeavor. Define boundaries for participants such as excluding internal politics and not disclosing protected information. Establish best practices for contributors such as providing links in comments that direct readers back to your core messaging platform (website or social media.) Provide direction for how to effect a conversational tone and what to do with useful information your team members might come across in their social media explorations. Strong guidelines are important, because you will be expanding the number of people involved in your marketing efforts, but want to still maintain brand cohesion.

Social Media Metrics

Social media can be measured through a mixture of media coverage metrics, web traffic metrics, and newly relevant social media metrics. To start, measure:

• Positive / Negative coverage or comments
• RSS subscriptions
• Bookmarks
• Presence on existing platforms (Facebook fans, bookmarking site presence, incoming links.)
• Amplification of messages (blog posts, referrals, wiki entries)
• Views and unique visitors

Stage 2 – Build a Relevant Presence

Participate. There is not much more to say for this phase. To succeed in social media marketing, it is best to be a member of the community rather than an outsider trying to talk into the community. It is extraordinarily transparent when an organization’s representative inserts themselves into a forum or community for specific motives.

Share your expertise as a member of the community, and you will find a voice that can more realistically and effectively interact with other members of the community. The basic rules of participation are as follows:

• Establish profiles on relevant sites
• Comment in conversations
• Comment on blogs
• Comment on anything you can comment on
• Share media, knowledge, interesting thoughts
• Reach out and build relationship with other users

Once you become a successful participant you will be ready to begin developing your own community. Do not progress to stage three until you are a successful participant, because you will undoubtedly gain an important sociological education by learning how social media works before trying to carve out your corner of it.

Stage 3 – Develop Your Community

Decide on your marketing mix and begin building your social media mesh. As a participant you will already have profiles and presence to link back to the platforms you choose.

Each platform has its own benefits and limitations, and you should choose them based on the merits they hold in the current climate. Everyone is familiar with blogs, but not everyone should attempt hosting a blog.

Search the web and find all you need to know about how to develop a good private online community, a good blog, a good forum, a good podcast, a good video presentation, and more and more. Of course, you will have to discern between content you agree with and content you do not (some say this blog post is far far too long and others say you should have some pillar articles that are this in depth… you need to decide some things for yourself.)

Draw Participants

Whether social media users or not, your existing stakeholders are a great place to start recruiting participants. Use your existing communications infrastructure to promote your social media presence. Place links on your website, in your newsletter and in your email signatures. Distribute URL’s at tradeshows and brick and mortar locations. You should also consider including social media information on your business cards, whether user specific or company wide. And, of course, you can always advertise your social media presence drawing certain search strings or certain audiences from other venues.

Integrate Social Media with Other Efforts

Develop a social media relations strategy to complement your standard media relations strategy. Consider how you will treat bloggers as compared to classic media journalists (developing social media releases and deciding whether to make information available simultaneously or to specific audiences first.)

With a social media relations effort in place, decide how to treat social media coverage. Developing a social media newsroom might let you publish important topics from your community’s conversations and display public customer feedback as well as displaying coverage. Infusing your existing newsfeed with social media coverage might lend relevance to social media coverage in the eyes of initiated and uninitiated readers alike.

Stage 4 – Leverage Your Presence

Once you have accomplished your goals, you will hopefully have some momentum built up, allowing much of the community to hum along without you. At this stage, the more control you give your stakeholders, the more they will do for you. Your role is to monitor, motivate (when necessary), and sparingly publicize newsworthy items that the community might actually be interested in.

Use your social media presence to poll your constituency and harvest new ideas. Take advantage of the strong avenues of communication you have worked to build and monitor as much as you participate.

Build a strong focus on measurement and prepare to start the cycle over again. You may find that the mix you have chosen is not as effective as another combination, and you will be able to transition truly invested users from one venue to another if you do it gradually.

Make sure you know what is going on in your community. You now have the opportunity to have a self-sustaining engine of creative looks into the future, very relevant reviews of the past and present, as well as an emotional measure of your brand’s perception in the community.

Repeat

This is an evolving landscape. Things will change and you want to make this process constant. Focus on adaptability and constant improvement when pursuing social media marketing.

Some Links You Might Find Useful or Interesting

Lessons and instructions for social media marketing (blog now considered complete): http://nowisgone.com/

Glossary of social media terms: http://www.converstations.com/blogging_glossary.html

What U.S. internet users are doing with social media: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_24/b4038405.htm

How To Be Special, or, 5 Rephrased Snippets of Common Marketing Knowledge.

Stand Out

You have to specialize to be special. Some business leaders want to be everything to everyone, and though your broad knowledge and abilities are admirable, you risk alienating some clients who rightly think that they are also special.  Go back to basics for each market and define your presence in a clear and substantial way.  What you can do to optimize billing is less important than what you can do to help patient billing, which is not as interesting as what you can do to help patient billing for community hospitals with about 100-200 beds when you are talking to a decision maker in a hospital that size.  You may need all three layers for your sales process, but the last one is the most important.

Know your audience. A played out mantra for marketing, but it is always important.  Part of specializing is narrowing your focus and consequently, narrowing your audience.  Describe in detail the things you do best before targeting audiences that are new to you.  By having well targeted, well substantiated messaging you will have more effective responses because you will be more relevant every time.  If you are targeting a new audience, you need to develop some understanding of that audience and convey to them that you understand.  When you know your audience, you will know what options they have available to them, what things they would like to see, and, consequently, what you have to offer them.

Relevance prompts attention. You cannot hold your prospects hostage.  They will not listen to what you want to talk about; they will listen to what they want to hear.  Make sure you are resonating with your audience by answering a question or answering a need.  If you are not needed, you are not special.  You might be different even if you are not needed, but I want you to be special (nothing personal, but it is better for our society and economy if businesses all put in the effort to be at least a little special.)

Listen. If you don’t know why a prospect would prefer you over someone else, then you have to seek out the opportunity.  The great thing about the modern customer is, they do everything for you.  With the right communications mechanisms in place, you can have the community perform your product development, message definition, feedback gathering, prospect vetting, prospect nurturing, and possibly even promotions.  The key is opening up the proverbial door to stick out your proverbial head and see what is being said.  By door of course I mean online community and by head I mean your marketing department.  Well… you get the picture.  When you know what the community has and what the community wants, you can better strategize how you will uniquely meet them (or better yet, surpass their needs.)

Process, process, process. Creativity is great; it is how I make my living.  However, creativity is not spontaneous and innovative companies that execute strategy poorly should not expect good results.  In my last post I mention the basic costs of doing business (good customer service, friendly faces, reliable products) and these cannot be ignored when trying to be special.  Sort of a Maslow’s need hierarchy for business (in fact I think I remember business school having something just like that… just don’t remember what it was called), an innovative business will fail if it does not perform the basic tasks of business well.  A great product that takes 12 weeks to receive will discourage most consumers.  A great idea for marketing is relatively useless without seeing how it will fit into the sales cycle.  Having a process means having a plan, and having a plan is the logical beginning and end to any strategy.  By knowing your process, you will know what needs to be done and how to ensure that your special status (or “specialosity” as I choose to call it for now) is not lost in the shuffle.

The Importance of Being Special

Competition is the great motivator for modern business. It drives efficiency and innovation. It keeps price in check and hands control over to the customer. How much true competition is there when the contest in your industry is between marketing constructs?

Certain industries are doomed to commoditization. Marketing assembles some differentiators through a combination of good customer service, reliable quality, and just plain friendly and personable brand representatives. As a marketer, I don’t mean to marginalize the importance of these things, but in reality, every company is trying to do this (or should.) These factors are not the metrics of real competition; they are the minimum requirements of doing business.

Proof in nature exists for brand differentiation (if I can be so absolutist about it.) The blood orange, or Moro Orange, I think is the easiest to identify among a bowl of oranges, and holds the most mystique for its differences. When every other orange is, well, orange and tastes like a variation of an orange, a blood orange is a linguistic paradox and sometimes carries a slight flavor of raspberry with it. In this case, the differentiation is manifested in a special personality when compared to “peers’, but it all relates to nuanced differences in the core makeup of the orange.

Moro Orange

Going back to business, this is where a brand like Virgin gets it and a brand like Northwest doesn’t. One competes on price alone and relies on its marketing messages to make something happen. The other tries to make flying a different experience through nuance and process, using marketing messages to communicate the real differences between one experience and the other. If a consumer decides to fly on Virgin, the price is not necessarily the factor that pushed the decision, but that is where Northwest is competing.

Whether a core message of the brand or the subject line of an email, poor differentiation not only won’t sell your audience, it will likely annoy your audience. I remember going to a booth at the AIIM tradeshow and asking someone to tell me about his company. He said they were a “solutions provider for marketing” and I responded with, “sure likes like you specialize in printing on some interesting substrates to me.” My time was wasted with the misdirection in their message, and I would much have preferred a frank answer to my question. Everyone is a solution provider. That tagline “Solutions for You” would fit under any logo because it is as ambiguous as the English language allows.

So here is my point: paying attention to differentiation starts in planning your business. Messaging can paint a picture, but it cannot make something ordinary into something special (and of course lying will set you back further than being ordinary will.) Focusing on innovation is obviously one “Blue Water” tactic that will keep you not only competitive, but maybe unique. Being unique, however, is fleeting. We will see the uniqueness of the iPhone fade as real competitors move in, and then it will be back to what makes the iPhone different. Apple is surely an example of one company that constantly asks, “why us?” Why should anyone do business with you?

You might be unique for a year or two, but you need to refresh your brand constantly to be any sort of a leader in your industry. If you can’t answer the “why us” question every few weeks, or if your answer doesn’t change, then you may have been left behind and, worst of all, you may not realize it yet.

I don’t think you need drastic and constant changes to jar your stakeholders awake every few months. Change can probably be done to scale. Apple has set a high bar for change, making uniqueness a core element of the brand, but Apple is also a global leader focused on growth. A local restaurant might focus on smaller changes like seeking local suppliers to identify with the growing number of locavores.

To summarize: Consumer expectations have risen and differentiators must be real in the modern marketplace. Don’t count on success to come out of crafting your message more cleverly than your competitor. If you can’t be direct and have a frank conversation with your audience, then perhaps you should revisit your core strategy.

Way Finding

The information super-highway. I haven’t heard that phrase in a while, and I suppose it is now so dated that it elicits laughter before it draws you into a metaphor. These days the glut of information out on the internet is creating a layer of haze that reminds me more of an information traffic jam. Everyone wants my attention when I am online and marketers (like me) are all vying for a few minutes to explain themselves in a supremely commoditized world with shorter attention spans. Explain why you think you are different in 8 words or less.

Some might say this has produced savvy consumers who can see right through marketing tricks. To a degree I think this is true. People are not subject to basic commands delivered by marketing. To another degree, I think psychology has become more important for marketing and the internet has become a more manipulative environment, where we still expect consumers to follow the chain of calls to action that we marketers lay out like breadcrumbs.

I have enough data about myself online to assemble a rather complete profile of my consumer behaviors, psychological habits, political beliefs, intelligence, reading habits, and just about anything else that would be useful in creating an advertising environment where I might buy something. As a marketer, I think this is an excellent opportunity to essentially aggregate my desires and meet me with things I might actually find interesting. As a consumer, I don’t appreciate being profiled with information that I did not volunteer for the purpose of evaluation so much as for the purpose of ordering a book or connecting with people (it’s Web 2.0. I’m finally a part of the movement! So I’m not always an early adopter…)

Because of my conflicted approach to things, I am still not convinced that using the data out there to target our audiences is really the best new thing for MarComm professionals. We run the risk of drowning in data while true understanding still evades us. I know the use of demographic data will still be a part of my proactive marketing activities, but I put it in the same ethical bucket as direct mail. It works at a predictable pace and though it runs some reputation risk for my brand, it is a manageable risk. In favor of considering the virtual copies of personalities that form the modern web as rich mines of information, I would prefer to think of them as the individuals they represent, not the demographics they represent.

The more data you know about someone the less you probably understand. Someone like me with a plethora of personal information on the web does not “go online,” we are always online. The internet is a component of the modern world, integrated into my work, play, and everything in between. As such, you may know what I buy and where I shop, but you will only capture the things I have done in the past. Now, granted, there is a lot you can profile and infer based on where my information is coming from, my age group, my politics, and many other things that can be used to create a sophisticated model of who I am. I know I just don’t have the time or budget to concern myself with this, and there will always be companies and organizations that simply can’t worry about such advanced options. My point here, is that in the basic steps of trying to push information out into the market, I do not think the all-seductive data is the only answer. We need to be prepared for the fact that many users will want to find us on their own. Some of that push through advertising, SEO, or media will create awareness, but once awareness is established, the modern organization needs to be prepared to be poked and prodded in ways that not everyone is ready for yet.

You cannot be all things to all people, and you cannot advertise everywhere; but you should have a flow to your online presence. There should be direction provided to your online investigators that brings them to an information rich environment. Nothing makes me dismiss a company more quickly these days than not being able to find anything online. Even the pizza restaurant around the corner at least has some online reviews (whether they know it or not) and though I don’t need an online presence for my brick and mortar stores, I do for my business partners.

If your brand is successful, people will identify with it. People will talk about you (this may happen for a broken brand promise as well.) You will not be able to control it. The best thing you can do, however, is participate in it. By participating, you can bring people where you want them to be. Dealing with savvy consumers and giving control over to the mob does not mean you can’t let people find their own way to where you want them to be. If you bring people to an information rich environment, and you are participating or responding to the good and the bad, then you will at least know what is going on. If people complain about you and you do nothing, then you have made the choice to ignore the free advice. If people complain and you respond, then you are embracing the collaborative environment that modern stakeholders demand, and you might stand a chance.

That is the point in the end. It is not about trying to control the consumer through analysis and suggestion; it is about meeting the consumers on their own turf. You should still be able to portray a voice of the company, even if the company is more transparent than it has ever been. At times the new landscape of the information age can seem more compartmentalized than unified, but you should develop an idea of where the pieces click together and how you are doing in the community that your business serves.

I truly believe that most marketers have embraced a healthy sense of collaboration with stakeholders in their lead nurturing and acquisition cycles; I think this is meant more as an advocate’s plea for non-marketers to adopt a marketing mindset. Don’t be afraid of the new landscape. Jump in, embrace the opportunities. You will benefit from it, your stakeholders will benefit from it, and ultimately the economy will benefit from it.

Review: Vocus

Vocus is an impressive web-based platform for PR. I spent a good deal of time with one of their sales reps on a WebEx demo, and I was impressed by the possibilities of implementing something like Vocus in a small department like mine.

Essentially Vocus acts as a CRM for PR professionals, but the database comes pre-loaded and is maintained by Vocus. There are over half a million media contacts in the database for North America, and nearly 300,000 for outside of North America. You can add to the database, as can any other Vocus user, and the new information is vetted and maintained by the Vocus team. Using in depth search features you can create a distribution list, attach it to projects (which may be clients for an agency) and have it updated in time. If a contact changes within a media outlet on your list, the changes are automatically made. The only thing we were unsure of is how distribution lists are updated if new media contacts (such as new top bloggers) are added since your list was created. Given the leap this database represents for many companies, I think this can probably be forgiven for now, and there are saved search options that may allow you to check in and update lists with new search results on occasion.

Putting the distribution list to use is the next step. Using the detailed information available on media contacts (which includes recorded monologues with some of the contacts on how they prefer to be pitched) Vocus can produce mixed media press releases that default to the preferred methods of the recipient. The variable data program can burst out emails, faxes, and printed pitches in the same instance that it posts the release on a newswire service. For pitching to particular audiences, personalized messages can be set for individual contacts, just as in many variable data email programs.

Treating this as a mass mailing, Vocus manages ISP relations and CAN SPAM compliance, allowing for recipients to opt-out of messages from specific organizations. The deliverability reporting is only the beginning of the measurement that is available once a release is distributed.

Automated reporting can be used in conjunction with the automatic clipping service or not. Using advanced metrics, Vocus can provide measurement down to the level of good, bad and neutral press. Using algorithms to value different media outlets and keyword density, worth is given to coverage in a way allowing unprecedented quantitative evaluation for media relations.

Aside from this push information, Vocus also has an opportunities window with some of the functionality of a ProfNet style media lead service. The three categories under which opportunities are managed include stories, awards, and speaking engagements. As a communications professional who manages all of these opportunities on Excel spreadsheets, the idea of someone updating the database for me is very appealing. Using the project tagging feature of Vocus, opportunities and subsequent or previous activities can all be grouped together for project management and review.

Vocus can also be used to automate the newsroom of a website. Though this part seemed somewhat limited to me, I have to give the disclaimer that I did not explore it too much nor was it a main selling point of the demonstration. What was mentioned was the non-automatic contract renewal which I appreciated. Rather than requiring advance notice for cancellation the contract is considered under review each year and you are expected to sign it to continue for another year. Support was described as working under a “no hold, no voicemail policy” for regular business hours. This seemed to hold true as I was called back within 15 minutes of the demonstration with answers to some of my unanswered questions.

In summary:

cons: Vocus included information on bloggers but did not seem to be entirely up on the idea of social media releases or social media news rooms. The company was founded in 1992 and I can only imagine they have made large strides to keep as up to date as they are, but it seems as though they are targeting agencies and larger companies in their approach. I would like to see something like a social media newsroom that might include their current clipping service and some RSS capabilities. If that could be truly integrated straight onto the website or into a private online community, I think Vocus would have even greater value.

The other thing I noted as missing was a feature of ProfNet that I really enjoy: the expert profiles. In an attempt to create a database for media contacts, I think this platform would be more complete if it employed a user generated database of professional and academic expertise for journalists to pull information from the users. This might also allow them to create stakeholders in the Vocus community if they made this a free account service. I know as soon as I got a media lead from my free Vocus profile I would be that much more ready to subscribe and see what else I could accomplish on the platform.

pros: I was truly impressed by them. They seem to take feedback from their clients and improve their product constantly using the ideas they hear. When I asked about the items listed as cons, the sales rep simply said, “we haven’t been asked to do that yet, but I’m sure we can.” Now I know that is what our sales reps say as well; but it is not always the philosophy (and our reps mean it when they say it, so I assume others do as well. There is always the option of “I’ll look into that” followed with a delayed “no.”)

With a minimum of $5K to $6K per year for a very basic installation, this web based application could be just the right thing to get smaller companies started off in PR with a more junior person in-house. The scalability of it to include things like the clipping service and advanced metrics make it an excellent platform for a growing company or department.

Dragged Kicking and Screaming Into the Future

The title is not entirely accurate. I am happy to welcome you to my blog and join the social media world.

The intent of this blog is to publish some of my professional work, opinions, and questions.