What I Told the Higher Ed Conference People
I just gave the morning keynote at the Stamats Higher Education Marketing conference in St Petersburg, Florida, and I decided to go totally away from slides, and just speak from passion. To do that, I kept a single sheet of paper with some notes so that I didn’t forget what I wanted to say. (I did the same thing in my making money isn’t evil presentation - remember, that one had lots of cursing.) I wanted to capture some of what I said as part of my presentation: Turning ROI into Return On Influence. I’m sure I’m missing a lot of what I said, but here are the main points.
I led with a quote.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.- Ralph Waldo Emerson US essayist & poet (1803 - 1882)
I went on to tell everyone in the room (marketers) that they are salespeople. They might not think they are (more than 50% raised their hand when I asked them about it). I say this because marketing is about moving a behavior forward from one state to another, and especially in 2009, it’s even more important that marketers feel and believe just how tied they are to the sales cycle, and for that matter, to the PR and customer service cycle.
I mentioned that marketers have to think like media makers, like CEOs, like salespeople. they have to OWN the process, the experience, the business of moving people from a to b. (Yes, this is a mix of Seth Godin and Tom Peters stuff.)
I talked about the five steps of media as an influence tool, but I think I forgot to tell them all five in detail. Here’s the five phases of it, at least.
- Awareness. - People become aware that you’re out there.
- Attention. - People actually open their eyes to what you’re saying.
- Influence. - People start thinking about what you’re saying and map it to themselves.
- Reputation. - You become known for having good information/ideas/whatever.
- Authority. - People consider you the top voice on the matter.
Where do YOU want to be on that continuum. I know.
Beyond that, it’s all a blur. If someone recorded it, I’m sure it won’t sound nearly as good as it felt coming out.
Mostly I shared that folks must atomize their marketing. Break media into bites and throw it all over the place. Don’t focus on a newspaper. Focus on getting two way conversations started everywhere. Get things out to the places where people are. That kind of thing.
What would YOU have told them?
Photo credit, FoundPhotosLJ
The Ethics Imperative in Social Media
I had the pleasure of addressing Steve Quigley’s Public Relations class at Boston University today, and as a bonus, I asked Todd Defren to be part of the conversation as well. Steve Quigley, I have to say, is turning out quite a crop of Boston’s social media up and comers. Between him and Professor Ed Downes, BU seems to be the college to beat in Boston for PR’s next wave of rockstars.
We talked about a lot of things, from the ways in which traditional PR must thread with the new stuff, to the ways in which students will find themselves challenged in the coming months. We talked about the importance of your personal database, and how to better annotate (post coming about this on Mashable shortly).
One question that Steve raised at the very beginning that we didn’t touch on nearly enough, but that floated around in my head after we’d long since departed the campus was this: in modern public relations, there’s a stronger sense of maintaining your personality, your personal views, and a level of ethics that doesn’t square with how things got done in the old days. Sure, there were ethical practitioners in the old days, but there were plenty more people just taxed with getting a result for a client. My thoughts on this couldn’t fit into the remaining minutes. Here, Professor Quigley’s class, are my answers:
Ethics in the World of Social Media and New Marketing
First, my simple measure of what is ethical and what is not, as told to me by a professor in the late 1990s: “If you don’t want to talk about it with your family at the dinner table, and you don’t want to read about it on the front page of the Boston Globe, it’s not ethical.” Seems easy to me. (Essentially, ethics are our guideline of what we consider right and wrong.)
In public relations and marketing, the primary goal is that those acting as an agent for an organization, their professional communicators, move the needle in some way. In PR, that might be press mentions, or blog posts, or publicity through speaking at conferences. In marketing, the projects can be more complex, or more indirect, but all relate to getting some other lever or number somewhere to move. There are nuanced and personable ways to do this, and then there are heavy-handed, let’s just call them SPAMMY, ways to do this.
You could do that. You could spam 10,000 people to get 100 positive results to show your client. But, as Todd Defren pointed out in the class, in the old days, those people used to have no voice, no real recourse that mattered or could be seen. Today? Everyone can blog. Everyone can put the word out that your organization is spamming them. Not only would it be less ethical to attempt to gain customers this way; it would be bad business.
Here’s the thing: Google remembers everything. And by “Google,” technically I mean the web at large (by which, I still mean Google, don’t I?). So, by extension, pretty much ALL business you do in social media can be “remembered” by anyone interested in what you’re doing, and where you’ve been, and what comes next. This, by the way, features heavily in Trust Agents, my forthcoming book with Julien Smith, but that’s a tangent for another time.
In a world where the entire space around you “remembers” your choices and your actions, do you have much in the way of an alternative but to operate ethically?
You Can Hide it For a While
There’s an entire mechanized side to the web. If your firm gets my site onto the Digg home page, I’ll get tons more traffic than I normally get. If you orchestrate a complex way to build all kinds of links to my site, I’ll gain rank or authority or whatever system you use to measure relevance. All of this happens and can happen such that people can’t see it easily.
But people who understand these schemes can figure out if that’s what happened. There are trails back to actions. It can eventually be uncovered that your organization architected a false Digg campaign, a doctored Wikipedia entry, another stuffing of the votes in some Internet-savvy way.
We already have stories of people doing things wrong. Most of you in the space already know them.
Be Human or Else
This space will remember. That can feel a bit daunting, but please realize that there’s a world of difference between doing something out of ignorance, or in a weird situation, versus gaining a reputation as someone who performs unethically. If you’re someone on the rise and learning and you twinge someone the wrong way, that’s one thing. If it turns out you’re “that guy” habitually, it just won’t really fly well this time around.
I’m grateful to Steve Quigley for turning over his classroom to Todd and me. I had lots of fun, and I look forward to the opportunity learn from the rising stars of PR and Marketing, and to share what little I know in return. And besides, Steve bought us noodles for lunch afterwards.
And, for further reading, check out Steve Rubel’s post on ethics in social media marketing. Seems it was in the air today.
The Basics
Social media “stuff” is hot right now. It’s almost a bubble. And yet, several companies are seeking to learn more about how to use these tools and strategies to build business relationships, deliver new customers, solve customer service education issues, and more. This post is intended for the aspiring social media types.
Part of my energy around this post comes from a great speech by mister Gary Vaynerchuk I attended yesterday. Gary is nothing if not passionate, clear about his plan, and focused on his next steps.
You MUST do the basics.
If You Are A Business
- Be as professional as you can be. If you’re looking to help these businesses, realize that they need you to be reliable (something I wish I could do better). They need you to be there.
- Educate people from their side of the fence. If you’re providing advice and training, don’t talk about your tool knowledge. Talk about their business challenges.
- Study the market. Don’t just do your own thing. Learn how other people are selling. Learn how other people are marketing. Learn how other people are educating.
- Know your price. Know how much you need to make to do business. This is so important. It also relates to how people value you. Be sure you value you.
- Be clean and clear about selling. If you’re selling something, like consulting, like a service, like design work, whatever, be really open and clear about what you sell.
- Ask. Ask for referrals. Ask for the sale. Ask for advice from lots of people. Make sure that asking is part of your DNA.
- Be personal. Be real. Be who you are. It won’t last long if you try to be other people, or try to be something you’re not. This includes admitting when you’re wrong.
- Know what’s next. Always have a plan. Always have a sense of where you’re going in your business, and what you need.
Why are these the basics? Because this is the baseline price for entry to doing this work. It’s what people are expecting from you, especially when you get the opportunity to work with them.
What have I missed? What do you know about?
Photo credit, Brian “I have every web person’s photo and you don’t” Solis
Workflow- Social Media School Teacher
Dharmesh wakes up a little late. After a quick shower, he skips checking email, but goes right to his RSS reader to see updates of where the students worked within the social network. Luckily, Ning (and lots of services) send new activities out via RSS, so they’re easy to track.
It looks like Margarite has added more YouTube videos to the video section, and Franklin has written a blog post about the town’s historic water cooler. Jeremy has already commented that Franklin forgot to cite a source, saving Dharmesh the effort. He eats a breakfast bar, and hops in his car for the commute to work.
On his iPod, Dharmesh listens to last week’s book reports read out by the students. The quality of their work has improved a great deal since switching to the audio requirement. The second report, by Kelly, is a little loud and the audio clips a bit. Dharmesh makes a mental note to show Kelly how to level the audio in Audacity.
At school, the first period media students are all frustrated. They’ve built a media room in FriendFeed, but haven’t figured out what they’re going to use to present their collected information. Dharmesh lets them discuss the benefits of a blog versus just adding a group to Ning. He asks if they’ve tried Scrapblog yet, which makes simple pages in a primarily drag-and-drop interface. They agree to check that out.
Period four is right before lunch. Dharmesh has special permission to mix the two time frames, so he takes his class out on a walk, asking them to snap pictures with their cell phones’ cameras. Only one student doesn’t have a smartphone, and Dharmesh gives him a Flip camera, instructing him to shoot some video of the student’s collecting their photos. Now there’ll be a documentary to go along with the photo walk project.
There’s only one fast computer in the class room. The others are horribly out of date. But Mister McBrian has done a great job of keeping them updated, and their browsers work well enough to be mostly useful. Because the school has opted to use only web apps instead of buying software for each computer, they were able to use some money to improve memory on the machines. It’s not ideal, but classrooms are rarely state of the art for long.
Before the end of the day, Dharmesh has recorded a quick video on the fast computer, giving the next week’s assignments audibly. He’s already sent the assignments as a forum update to their Ning group, so the class doesn’t have to write anything down to remember. It’s already in their RSS feed.
On the commute home, Dharmesh listens to more podcast book reports and thinks about what he can do to raise money to get just a few more good computers into the class room. Before these kids get to fourth grade, he figures, they should know that not all computers take two minutes to load a page. Maybe a fundraiser, he think, as he drives home to meet up with his family for dinner.
What do you think? Make sense? Was it surprising that I have this as a 3rd grade classroom? It’s not inaccurate. My daughter is entering first grade and she knows how to navigate a browser, iTunes, and various websites.
These posts are made for sharing. Feel free to repost all or portions of this (as long as it’s not for profit). If you do post it, please make sure you kindly link back to [chrisbrogan.com] and give me credit. Thanks!
Photo credit, LizMarie
