I’m not surprised, but I’m also wondering what we can all take from that. See, the problem is that our social media efforts will fail the same way. News issues and concerns hit companies all the time. How do they respond? I just went looking for a few social media people who I imagined would be responding to international news stories about their company. Not a word. So, instead of being lit up to keep relationships afloat, I’m seeing silence.

When the going gets tough, how will you respond on these new social channels? How will you use the Internet as a primary driver instead of as a bolt-on?

David Weinberger’s story points out that the Internet presence of these companies was obviously an afterthought to their telephone presence. More than two decades after companies have come to the web, they still look at their online presence as secondary.

Social media’s even newer. How will it fare?

Something to think about. Are you in? Or are you just setting up a facade?

I just went to a few blogs in a row to get a sense of it. Here are some of the ratios I saw, with self-referential in the left, and about others in the right:

* 9:1 (not saying who)
* 1:9 (my blog)
* 0:10 (Christopher S. Penn wins most selfless).
* 0:10 (Julien Smith is the same.)
* 1:9 (Brian Clark).

Those were just a few I checked out. Most were heavily weighted towards talking about others (though often citing examples from our own perspective). But when I go look at corporate blogs, and/or less focused blogs, the ratio changed a great deal.

How does your blog stack up? How do your tweets stack up? How much are you promoting others?

Photo credit visualpanic

Let’s talk about it.

Do Your Homework

All bloggers aren’t the same. Big numbers don’t mean big response. Just because someone writes about X doesn’t mean that your product is actually X to them. Bloggers can be fickle and often work to the beat of their own drum.

I get dozens of pitches a day. I delete almost all of them unread, unless I know the person, and then half the time, I delete those, too. The reason is that people aren’t considering what I write about before pitching to me. I rarely ever cover software here, so if you’re showing me a software story, it damned well better have a human angle.

The same is true for any of the bloggers you need to reach. Not sure where to find the bloggers you need? Use these resources:

• Alltop – the Internet’s magazine rack.
• Google Blogsearch – search by topic.
• Twitter Search – find bloggers by what they tweet about.
• Postrank Topics – search by topic.

Once you have a sense of who you might want to reach for your stories, it’s all about building relationships.

Be There Before the Sale

This is something Julien and I wrote about in Trust Agents, and it’s the first part of making your blogging outreach more successful. If you want people to write about you, they should probably know about you first. Quick ways to get that started:

• Follow them on Twitter.
• Comment on their blog posts.
• Set up Google Alerts and comment on related articles.

Is this more work than just blanketing someone with email and hoping a few write about it? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes.

The trick is not to talk about your stuff. You should have started this outreach weeks and weeks before ever needing anything, and it should be genuine. Be interested in the people you hope will take an interest in you.

Make It Easy

People that I like in the outreach department work to find the people who she thinks make the most sense for the story. They deliver tons of information and preparation. They do lots of checking and double-checking (because bloggers can be fickle or forgetful). They make everything as seamless as possible. Some ideas:

• Make everything dead simple.
• (Tyler in the comments suggested) Be clear what you want the outcome of the outreach to be.
• Provide URLs to everything, so that bloggers can refer.
• Provide photos to go with the piece, or a video, or whatever other content.
• Keep your outreach emails brief, and keep the details highlighted and bolded appropriately.
• Make sure your FIRST email does nothing but get the buy-in to pitch the story.

Let’s pause on that last point. Some people disagree. They want the whole pitch in the first email, because two becomes a clutter. I’ve honestly seen it done both ways. I know that when Cathy sends me an email asking to pitch me, I’m going to ask for the pitch. I’ve seen others send me the pitch in the first email and it’s been okay, but more often than not, I prefer the two-email system. You can dispute this. Really.

To me, making the effort simple is a good thing.

Ask the Right Questions

I’m often given business books to review. I’m a voracious reader, and I like sharing the good ones with people. However, I also tell people who send me books that I don’t guarantee a review. Sometimes, the book is okay, but not my favorite. Other times, I really don’t like the book. If the people who send me the book ever push for a review, I usually explain that it might not be as positive as they’d like. As an author, myself, I don’t like giving bad reviews.

To that end, think about some questions that might let you have some guidance on how the blogger acts.

• Can you tell me how long it takes to post from when you receive the product?
• May I check back in a few weeks from now?
• What do you do with negative reviews?
• If you have disagreements or problems with the product, could you email me first to make sure you have all the information?

Questions like this and others can be really helpful to you setting your own expectations.

Above All Else, Don’t Push

If not this story, the next one. Believe me, relationships in this space run long and weird.

Christina Pacelli from Red reached out to me to cover the Eye Fi (a USB-to-wifi cool gadget) over a year ago. She sent me one. I couldn’t really get over my own techno-idiocy to make it work. A year later, Christina and team got smart and mailed me a new Eye-Fi (still have the old one, by the way) and a Novatel Mifi device (which acts like a wandering hotspot). Combined with BOTH, I’ll be able to use this product on the show floor at my next event and report back what I think of its benefits to various groups.

A year. Christina has been politely persistent for a year. And it will pay off. (Who knows? Maybe the links already make it pay off.)

Don’t push bloggers, and just accept that sometimes the story doesn’t hit. I’ve had a series of situations where things seemed right, and upon checking them out, I just didn’t feel good about blogging it, or wasn’t moved to blog it, etc. As the person pushing that particular product, I’m sure it doesn’t feel well when your push goes nowhere. I’m so sorry when I’m the cause. I imagine bloggers also have their own reasons and feel bad, too.

In most cases, it comes around to the better at some point. This is a long game for lots of us. Be patient. Learn who doesn’t work out. Move onward.

An Imprecise Science

There’s more to it than all this, but this is a good start. If you’ve questions, I can definitely add more. What do you think? What have you tried that’s worked? What else have I missed?

Photo credit 蓝莓兔子

I have a hundred thousand followers on Twitter. I follow back about 93,000. I don’t see most of what you tweet about. I use search and lists to keep up with what I can, but the software API can’t even serve all your tweets to me.

But there’s value in that number. I get value in the following ways:

• You find the good stuff for me, so I can learn more.
• You promote social causes that I support if they resonate with you.
• You visit the great voices I share with you, growing their audience and potential for relationship.
• You help spread important news like Amber alerts fast.
• You support the better of my posts. (Heck, sometimes you support my posts that I don’t even like.)
• You keep me in the loop and talk with me when we both have a moment.

I get tons of value from Twitter every day. Heck, just today, I mentioned on Twitter that I’ve made the Roger Smith Hotel my exclusive hotel in NYC, and that spurred a new conversation with a hotel in Boston. I spoke to the folks at Legal Seafoods, after they noticed I recommended them to a friend visiting Boston. Now, they’re going out to buy my book, and so I offered to swing by and sign it and talk.

I get value every day from Twitter. It’s my serendipity engine. It’s my liner notes.

Where Seth is right, however, is that bullhorns are stupid and useless.

But no value in Twitter? Not on my watch.

I don’t get a break from spam on social sites. No, not at all. I got about 20 Direct Messages in Twitter this morning from some automation software site (I’m not giving them a link or any kind of love). I immediately set to unfollowing all the users who had used the service to stuff my direct message box full of useless messages. This, to me, is spam.

In Facebook, if I choose not to join your group or fan page, please stop sending it to me over and over again. It’s not that I didn’t see it. I wasn’t interested in joining. More than twice, to me, is spam.

Spam is a Perception- Mine

If you push unwanted messages into my face over and over again, you’re the enemy. And I don’t mean ME specifically, I mean people. I’m showing you the receiving end of what some of us call marketing.

Here’s how I delineate. (Feel free to send this to marketers everywhere)

You May Be Spamming Me If:

• You’ve signed me up to your email newsletter when I didn’t sign myself up.
• You’ve violated my Twitter inbox with your automated message.
• You’ve invited me repeatedly to participate on your Facebook Fan Page or Group.
• Your software automates repeat messages to my inbox with no options to throttle that.
• You flood me with @replies on Twitter to your product/service.

I bet there are more we could add to this list, if we felt so inclined.

Want to share your spam stories?

Photo credit jbcurio

These are written from a marketer’s perspective. I can write from other perspectives if you want. Just let me know in the comments.

Prioritize Your Social Media Efforts

First, the Foundations

Without the following, there’s no point doing social media and social networking for business.

• Goals first – If you don’t stick to your goals, there’s no reason to put any time into social media, period. If your goal is to build relationships that yield sales for your organization, then make sure you’re always trying to answer the question: “how do I know which relationships will yield, and how do I attract/find more of those people who are perfect for my product/service?”
• Dashboard – At New Marketing Labs, we’re going into 2010 with the rule that all projects have a dashboard of measurements. We will be clear with every client which needles we’re going to move for them, and how. Without an understanding of progress, how will we know we’re helping them with their goals?
• Strategies – Strategies are paths one might take to accomplish one’s goals. Come up with a few strategies (not too many, but not one), and make those strategies relate to your goals and not to the tools. To start with the tools in mind is to believe those tools will be there forever. Where’s your Plurk strategy? Right.
• Wins/Losses – What do you want to count as a win or a loss? Make sure your dashboard can report on this.

In Order Of Value

• Listen – Listening gives you data, gives you metrics, gives you topic material for content, gives you a sense of where your crowd is. Use professional listening tools and even some free ones to be sure you’ve got information and a hot map of the territory.
• Read/Consume – Might seem counter to what you think I’d say, but I read several blogs and news sources before I start in on many of my other social media duties. Why? Because it gives me perspective, it lets me know what folks are finding useful, it gives me ideas on what the topics I follow might need from me.
• Comment/Share – I comment and share other people’s work for two reasons: first is that I want you to see the good stuff. Second, is that it also starts/encourages new relationships between people. Some of these relationships benefit me. Many benefit the person I point out. It all works to form a nice ecosystem.
• Create – Making media (blogging, video, podcasts, ebooks, tweets, email marketing, whatever) is the reason you came to start using these tools. By all means, use them. Creation is your chance to have a voice, to share your thoughts, to encourage people to do business with you. This blog is where I share with you, because I’m also simultaneously signaling to my typical clients (midsized-to-Fortune-100 companies) that if I’m giving you all this for free, you’d be thrilled with what I charge you for. Creating is important, but only after you’ve done the other steps.
• Communicate – It might be weird to see email/phone calls/face-to-face so low in my social media prioritizing. It’s “social” media after all, right? But if you look at all the above, you’ll note that they’re all meant to help the most possible people. With email/phone/f2f, that’s about a 1:1 connection (most times- email can be more). I find that communications help out fewer people than all the above so I try to handle them after I’ve done my other work.
• Close – Okay, closing is more sales than it is a social media tool, but that’s what I try to do last in my order of priorities. Not all that I do is a sales funnel (at least not for my own site and personal use of social media). To that end, I think closing goes last in my order of things I try to do, though I still have goals and targets for this. This might seem the most backwards for business people, especially sales people, to think about. But then again, think about what REALLY goes into a sale: awareness, education, negotiation, purchase, support, renewal. Right? Sales, or the close, is only the last in the line of all that. The rest of what I’ve listed out above lines up with those other parts of the funnel. Now does it make sense?

In Explaining This to The Leadership

The way I do business with companies is by sharing what I’ve learned and what I know, and then mapping that to the company’s goals and desires. I work mostly from the mindset of “how can I get you more _____” and then we talk through the various ways that can be accomplished. In almost all cases, we work to “teach them to fish,” as our goal isn’t to be in some kind of endless retainer loop.

In how YOU might explain this and get your goals across, try lining everything up with business objectives. Try working out how this all integrates to your departments, how the process flows will go, etc. Make sure you think of as many questions that other departments and key voices will throw at you, and work out your answers ahead of time.

If you’re a small business, then you get to make all the decisions. You’ll note that I wrote this from the marketer’s perspective. I haven’t factored in the time you need to create your product or service. Let’s cover smaller business in another post. Fair?

Your Take

How do you think this maps for you? Do you see it? Do you have questions based on what I covered up there? How can I help you better understand the priorities?

Photo credit theogeo

In blog comments, on Twitter, all over Facebook, Yelp, YouTube, and several other sites, we’ve been groomed to give our opinion. We spit it out everywhere. We share, rate, criticize, deride, praise, and everything in between. Forrester’s Ladder graphic suggests that critics are second on the content ladder, just below creators.

But if you look at the ecosystem, and what we’ve built, are we “starting conversations” or are we inviting commentary? And what’s the difference? To me, one is an exchange of knowledge, whereas the other is more of an end product. Make sense? Commenting and giving opinions becomes an “object” or “artifact” or “creation” of its own. See where I’m going?

So the question becomes: if we’ve built all these tools, these comment buttons, these like buttons, these “share and add notes” buttons, how is this impacting our interactions and our communication? Now that we’ve gone from not having a voice to having tools to give our opinion about everything, how does this change us? How does it impact how we interact with people? What does it mean to the larger ecosystem?

Photo credit Hashmil

Product

Depending on your product, you might want to think about these kinds of alignment questions:

• How does it share? – In software, this means adding features like “post this to Facebook.” In physical products and businesses, it might mean giving consideration to how the real-world experience can spread via the online tools. For instance, if I’m Steve Wright over at Jay Peak, I’m going to want to have a bunch of “rental” Flip cameras or Kodak’s Zi8 camera on hand, plus some simple instructions for YouTube tagging and Flickr groups.
• How do we collaborate? – In software, look at the difference between Flickr and Picasa. In the real world, determine if there’s some way to extend relationships between users. To keep with my ski resort example, I might throw together a Ning site, and invite EVERY guest to join a social network around their experience.

Price

With social software, maybe there’s a chance for “invite a friend and you both save X” kinds of pricing options. “10% off if you fan our Facebook page.” There are all kinds of ways to think about how you can align social tools to pricing. Woot.com made a great integration with Twitter. So did Dell Bargain Outlet. Your blog can have specials of the day or week posted there. There are tons of ways price aligns with social software.

Place (distribution)

Look how easy the social web makes cause marketing. Take blogging software, make a post about the cause, throw a ChipIn widget on there, and you’ve got the basics for a charity fundraising experience (technology-wise). Distribution is the web’s best talent. You can put things everywhere. You can build a simple presence framework and move information to where it’s needed. Place is the easiest of the Four P’s to align to the social media world. Make sense?

Promotion

The social web is the talk of the town because of promotion. It’s free and easy, right? Heh. Most people accidentally promote in very damaging ways. They haven’t learned how to promote without being “that guy”. But it’s true that these tools are the best tools for promotion ever.

Through my Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter outposts, I get thousands of new readers and prospective clients every week. Thousands. I make new relationships that I wouldn’t have had before the land of blogging and all the other social tools. I use YouTube and I can podcast and I can make photos on Flickr. There are tons of ways to use these tools to promote and build community opportunities.

What’s Old is New Again

I lined up all the old fashioned marketing “Four P’s” to how social software can interact. I didn’t exactly lay out step-by-step plans, but maybe you can infer a bit from what we started with. You’ll notice something. The tools aren’t all that spectacular and amazing, except that they make performing certain tasks simpler than it used to be. Instead, the potential and the wonderment are all inside the human part of the equation.

What’s exciting about how social media and social software aligns with marketing is that there are new opportunities that far surpass the old methods for marketing, and that’s where the magic truly hides. Marketers do have to understand the tools, but more so, here’s a quick list of what else needs to be understood:

• From bullhorn to phone – Your message is no longer to be shouted, but to be socialized.
• From theater on the stage to theater in the round – Marketing is human again. Don’t stay “on message.” Stay connected to people.
• From millions, to the right 10,000 – Mass never worked well. It just did well enough. Find relationships that yield.
• From campaign to community – You’re in it for the long haul. Build awareness, reputation, and trust by being there.
• From exclusion to “one of us” – Your customers (b2b or otherwise) want to be included in the whole experience, not just to buy.

Truth be told, there are a dozen more things we could talk about in that list. But let’s start with those. You get the starting point. It looks easy, until the boss starts yelling at you for numbers and fast. Farmers can’t rush crops. You can’t join a gym a week before a wedding and drop five sizes. This is re-inventing stuff, not rehashing the old stuff with new line items.

You with me? What else do we have to cover here?

If you’re not yet subscribed to this blog, consider starting your free subscription today, as we’re going to cover even more of this in the coming weeks. You can receive it via email, or in your blog reader of choice. And thanks.

Photo credit wwarby

If you can’t see the video, click HERE to watch it.

These could be all within a public system like Twitter, with the private channel activities being performed via Direct Message only, or the private conversations could be via a private platform like Socialcast or Yammer. The benefits to keeping them all in Twitter is a simple user experience for employees of the business. The downside would be the potential to spill private business into the public channel in error.

Now, where this gets interesting is when you think of either b2b additions to this, or affinity relationships. What if all the people up and around Jay Peak in Vermont, like Steve Wright all kept a Twitter list of local related businesses. Maybe Steve’s list would have alternative lodging and dining options, some medical professionals, massage therapists, ski repair shops, etc, all wired together in a Twitter list, so that he could monitor their public conversation for potential crossover opportunities. Suppliers to Steve could see his needs easily. Steve could assist in directing customers to related businesses while being up to the minute with what the situation is at their establishment (this all assumes that everyone’s keeping their channels updated).

The only thing missing is some kind of “memory” for the system. For instance, if Steve finds out that Boyd from the ski repair shop is going away for two days, how will he alert the next day’s crew to this information? And how will the overall “system” stay aware of such logistical changes? It would probably require some kind of alternative platform, like either a Facebook fan page that relates to that wired up group, or maybe a group blog. Either way, it’s not too hard to add it on.

What makes this different than email? Brevity, for one. For another, it’s a more flexible sharing option requiring less duplication of effort. For another, it serves many purposes in the public-facing channel mode, and helps speed up processes on the private in-business mode.

Squint a little, and you’ll see a few other ways to design these experiences for a business. Can you see the value?