CopyDiva

Embarq is in the thick of a launch of their YouTube channel. I know this because my friend Alisa, who works for iCrossing, told me about it.

The idea behind it is to post some how-to support videos for Embarq customers, and make them readily accessible on the web. I am not completely sure that I get the promo for it. The idea is that if you use Embarq for Internet access, your page downloads happen 48 seconds faster than dial-up (I know, dial-up? really? but, Embarq serves a more rural population that has less access to high-speed Internet). The promo is a contest. Make a video of what you would do with that 48 seconds, then submit it. They will award prizes soon to the winner. The disconnect for me is: what does the gained 48 seconds have to do with the customer support videos?

All the support videos are longer than 48 seconds. Hey, maybe that would have been a better gimmick - 48 second customer support videos to take you through various steps in signing up and troubleshooting. Anyway, from what I can see, if you submit a video, you probably have a good chance of winning, for two reasons:

1. not too many people have submitted videos
2. the bulk of the ones up there are not very good

What I want to know is, has it drawn attention to Embarq’s customer support videos? Are people viewing them more? Has it reduced the number of calls into tech or customer support? Has it improved customer opinion of Embarq? I know full well that the market for broadband services is filled with negative commentaries from unhappy customers — there are whole sites dedicated to this kind of customer-to-customer experience. I have no personl experience with Embarq, but know the problems faced by the players in this market.

The YouTube channel itself is very much promotion focused, and the videos with the most views are the “48 seconds” videos. I’ll be curious to see how this plays after the contest is over. How will Embarq direct traffic there? How will they continue to make use of this channel to support a customer service strategy?

Image via Wikipedia

I, as well as some other folks, have been thinking alot lately about influencer lists. Top 50 this, most influential that, etc. Are they a sham, do they have some value, what is the constant fascination and desire to be on one of these lists?

Then, yesterday, Pepsi sent out promo kits to 25 “influential” personalities in the social media space, to drum up discussion of Pepsi’s new logos. Now, certainly, there aren’t Pepsi influencers in social media. And, there’s no saying that Charlene Li, Chris Brogan, Peter Shankman and others have any interest in, or even drink Pepsi. In fact, I’d reason that perhaps one of the reasons these folks received these packages has to do with their personal/professional relationship with Pepsi’s new global social media strategist, my friend Bonin Bough. Or, their relationship with Steve Rubel, who’s PR firm does work with Pepsi.

So, does influence matter here, or really, is this more about personal connection? And, other than the blip from blog posts, flickr pix and tweets from yesterday, what will Pepsi gain from the experience? They’ve got 100+ subscribers to their pepsi cooler Friendfeed group. What’s that doing for them? Is the goal good will, warm fuzzies from the online community?

Thinking about this reminds me of when I went to pitch a measurement account to Crispin, Porter & Bogusky. Talking about influencer marketing when you’re pitching people who hawk french fries is, well, just a bit silly. There are no french fry influencers. The only people who might regularly talk about Burger King french fries are the food pundits, and they are not saying nice things about those french fries. So, trying to influence them as a way to sell more french fries isn’t a good strategy.

Pepsi has a deep challenge — like other mass market producers and big brands — how can they be highly targeted in social media, which is all about building connections, when they pitch a product with mass appeal? We’ve heard about many of the experiments that larger brands are making in social media, many of them failures or showing few tangible results. Smaller companies seem to do better, at least anecdotally, because they don’t have the scalability problem of big brands.

Maybe Pepsi will figure out the magic bullet in all this for the rest of the big brand marketers. Then again, maybe its just a cool experiment.

Mass market companies will continue to be challenged by the social media need (desire? opportunity?) to go small scale and targeted. It’s not a model they understand or are comfortable with.

Over the years that I’ve written this blog, one article consistently brings people to my site via search. What is it? A how-to post on how to write a multimedia script and storyboard. I’ve made a few minor updates to the article and corrected some weird text errors that must be from a recent Wordpress update. Follow the text link above to learn for yourself what’s worked for me in creating compelling multimedia and video scripts.

Here’s an article I wrote for Energy Central’s Marketing Muse publication - a broad brushstroke on social media marketing:

The Social Media Bandwagon: Jump on board using your marketing sense

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, chances are you’re hearing the drumbeat of social media marching it’s way over and threatening to overwhelm you with new technology, too much information and the grand prophecy of solving all your marketing and communications problems. With so much swirling around, it’s really difficult to make sense of it. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, blogging, social networks and on and on. What can these really do for you in marketing? Will they solve your marketing problems, or will they just consume more time and resources?

The answer can most definitely be a “yes” to all of the above, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The biggest problem for businesses right now is understanding how to derive value from social media. Fortunately there are many potential opportunities to gain value, from product development to internal communications as well as customer support and marketing. But, where do you start? Here are some typical questions I get:

• What tactics work best for the energy industry?
• I get how it works for B2C companies, but how can you implement in B2B companies?
• How can I make any time to participate?
• Nobody talks about (your product or industry here) online, so what’s the point?
• How can I sell my boss on moving some of our budget away from traditional channels and into social media?

Talking tactics

Let me put this out there first: Social media are very new and new forms appear frequently, so at this point, there are not tried-and-true tactics to use in the energy industry, or any other industry. Certainly, companies like Burger King have had one-off wildly successful viral campaigns — like Subservient Chicken — but, as more people delve into social media, there will be fewer of those wild successes and many more smaller ones. Just like in the early days of the World Wide Web, companies are in there experimenting, having successes and failures. But, there are ways to narrow your scope. The best way to do that is to understand how social media changes the distribution of media.

The changing media landscape
The advent of online media — websites, online newspapers, etc. — definitely expanded the way people consume information. But social media has radically changed it. Now, anyone and everyone is free to create content and share it. And, with so many places to find information, anyone with any small niche they care about is likely to find other people online who care about those same things. What this means is that instead of being able to reach a mass audience — or even an audience in a trade publication or a local newspaper — you’ve got to find smaller audiences to go after. It also means that you are no longer in control of the message or the brand. Whether or not you decide to experiment in social media, that fact remains. Customers, partners, vendors, reporters, bloggers, analysts — they are framing your message.
With all that in mind, here is a framework to think about taking steps into social media.

Listen: It’s difficult to know where to even start participating if you don’t know where the conversations are or what they are about. A simple, rudimentary way to start that is to do a Google Blog Search to find some blogs that are talking about topics related to your company and/or your industry. Just plug in some keywords that you’re interested in. Another place to find blogs is within an industry portal, like Energy Central. Many will have blogs themselves and may also link out to other blogs related to your industry. You can do similar searches by topic in other social media as well, including YouTube and Twitter. There are also sophisticated tools you can subscribe to that help you to understand and measure the activity about you and your competitors. This is crucial if you plan on creating a social media strategy or are interested in integrating social media into your other marketing or customer service strategies.

Discover: When you start listening, you discover what the conversations are about. How do people really feel about your company, your industry? What are they saying about you? Who’s active in the conversation? Where is it happening? Is your competition taking part? What about industry experts or analysts? Social media conversations are like being in a conversation at your book club or a party — they are more candid then you’ll ever get from a focus group, survey or research project. Pay attention to what people are saying - you might get ideas for new products or services, or find out about a customer service problem you’re having.
Make connections: Find a post that’s interesting? Comment about it. Thank the writer for the ideas or thoughts. Why would you do this? It’s really just a way of making connections — almost like a handshake through the Internet, a way to build trust, create awareness.

Share: Once you feel more comfortable simply connecting, now it’s your turn to participate. Experiment with asking and answering Expert requests on LinkedIn. Share an article you enjoyed on Facebook or another social network. That back-and-forth interaction is crucial in social media, because others will come to know you by understanding more about you. This level of trust builds as you expand your network through sharing.

Personally experimenting with social media is a good way to get your feet wet and understand the dynamics of these tools, but it may not offer you enough to make decisions about an approach to marketing. The best thing to remember about social media is that all of these technologies and platforms are really just tools you can use in your marketing toolbox. Figuring out the best ways to use them — and which ones make sense for your company — takes a strategic approach.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Essential Guide to Social Media - A Free eBook
• Social Media for Business - Who’s Doing it Well & How

This morning I took the plunge and posted on BlogHer. Since I am not the most prolific blogger, I was never compelled to post there, until today. The post simply makes more sense there than it does here.

If you haven’t checked out BlogHer, you should, there are lots of great bloggers and interesting opinions on tons of different topics.

I was inspired today to write about social media advertising today after reading two other posts. One tweeted by Peter Kim, commenting that a 7% click through rate for an online ad is really 93% waste for the company that buys it.  The other, from the content and blogger perspective, by Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim. Andy touches on the fact that pricing for display ads sold through ad networks (and, this is typically how bloggers get ad revenue) have dropped again, to below $0.30 on average.

For advertisers, the drop in pricing is certainly good news, because that means they get more ads from their ad budget. Is it really worth the spend though?

The drop in rates can certainly be blamed on the bad economic news, and you bet that lots of folks will blame it on that. But, from the ad networks folks that I’ve talked to, companies have big expectations for click-throughs that are never realized. Click-throughs rates are tiny, and there’s evidence that people who click through are not your target audience anyway. Plus, we know there’s plenty of evidence that people ignore display ads, meaning they don’t even look at them. Behavioral targeting technology just isn’t perfect either and since people ignore ads, is there really a point in better targeting for more ads that people will just ignore?

Then there’s the issue of the click-through being only the last touchpoint, and the only one that gets measured. True, but eyetracking studies for display ads show (sorry to be redundant) that people don’t look at display ads on the web except in search mode. This is why PPC does work.

When will we all just get sick of the entire idea of social media advertising?

Image via CrunchBase

Last week’s survey and “award” of the Top 50 Tweeples to follow of 2008 strikes me as ridiculous. Other than being another opportunity for egos to promote themselves (similar to the “vote for my SXSW session” of a few months ago), why is there any inherent value in following these people? If I don’t care about Web 2.0 technologies, why do I care to follow people who tweet about that? Why is the twitterverse getting so full of itself?

Don’t get me wrong. I like Twitter, I use Twitter, I teach others about Twitter — heck, I write about Twitter. I think its fun and useful.

This is just some kind of weird popularity contest, along the lines of People Magazine, some kind of microcosm Hot-or-Not for the inside twitter crowd. Ick.

Many of you in the Denver/Boulder area have been waiting to hear the whens and whats of the next meeting of the Mile High Social Media Club. We finalized the details today. They will be updated later on the Ning site (you mean you haven’t been to the Ning site yet?), so check that to RSVP.

Mile High Social Media Club

When: October 21st, 2008, 5:30pm - 8:30pm

Where: Forest Room 5, Denver, Colorado

What: This gathering will be part networking, and part learning. The learning part will be a panel on using Social Bookmarking and Social News for marketing, PR and outreach purposes. The panel will only be an hour, and will start at 6pm, so don’t be late if you want to take part in this piece of it!

Who: Panelists are:

• Brett Borders, of CopyBrighter
• Jason Cormier, of Room 214

Visit the Facebook event page to RSVP, or visit the Ning site and RSVP there.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Following on from Social Media 101
• Social Media Club: A short history, a long and bright future
• A Club Worth Joining: Social Media Club

After presenting two workshops this month on Social Media 101 to marketers, it occurs to me that the rules of engagement for business people might need some definition. This discussion reminds me of when forums and message boards first became popular (oh remember the days of boulder.general or StarTrek.PrimeDirective.CaptainKirkSexLife). Initial discussions on these boards were fun and informative, but after awhile, the spam level from multilevel marketers were enough to make me run from these groups. On top of that, the vitriol that surfaced could be really off-putting.

Already, with Twitter entering the mainstream consciousness, thanks to CNN and the New York Times, I am experiencing spam on Twitter — that’s a first. Fortunately, Twitter makes it pretty simple to deal with spammers, but again, I think there’s more to it than that. Are there basic rules of engagement for business users that we ought to follow? I think so, but I know that some Tweeters will disagree. Why? Because they feel like what they say is so damn important and compelling, that the rules don’t apply to them.
For example, there are people I call the shameless self-promoters. You know who you are. There are some in the “social media guru/expert” space, always promoting just their own stuff (blog posts, conferences, etc. In my mind, this highly transparent self-promotion is nothing but spam. Remember people, this is supposed to be a conversation. It’s not all about you. What that means is, you talk, then I talk.

In Twitter-ville, I personally translate that idea this way: sure, promote your own stuff, but give back too — retweet someone else’s great blog post, tell me about someone else’s photos, podcasts, blog post, conferences, or other words of wisdom. Surely, you aren’t getting all your ideas just from your own genius brain?

But, again, as I write this, I think of a few that I follow where shameless self-promotion might makes sense. Like a business that’s tweeting updates about a sale, or a theme to those customers who want it — an example locally is for one of the few independent video/DVD stores around, The Video Station.

The Video Station promotes, through Twitter, themed movie watching - last week, they posted a link to a top list of Paul Newman movies as a tribute. If you are a regular renter from this store, you will know that they have theme weeks often, and so they are using this as an extension of that theme.

So what’s the difference between The Video Station and a shameless self-promoter?

The difference is that I don’t get 8-10 tweets a day from The Video Station, so I don’t mind it at all. I get one a week. A bad example of I stopped following Whole Foods for exactly that reason — I wasn’t interested in getting multiple tweets a day promoting the store.

Based on my experience using Twitter for business and promotion purposes, here are my rules of engagement on Twitter for business people:

1. Promote your blog posts — but not every one: Sure, go ahead and use it to promote a blog post to those who follow you. But remember that you aren’t the only person who has something compelling to offer. Have you read something today that you liked? Hated? Tweet that. Or, tweet a post from one of your cohorts.
2. Use Twitter to get instant feedback: Interested in what others have to say about what you think? Who agrees? Who has another point of view? Tweet your blog post to get comments from others. I’ve asked for specific Tweeters to comment, people I know that care about the same issue. It’s a great way to start a discussion about something. Again, not for every post. Use sparingly.
3. Use Twitter to inspire discussion: @jasonfalls asked the twitterverse to get in touch regarding small business social media case studies, because he’s interested in writing about them. Others will retweet his request, and I am certain he’ll get some good responses.
4. Airport acronym tweets are boring: Glad to know you are busy, but really I don’t want to know your travel schedule is. EXCEPT. If you are trying to arrange a tweetup or meeting with folks locally, by all means, use Twitter as a good way to possibly connect. EXCEPT. If you are going on a vacation and want to make me jealous.
5. How many posts per day? No right answer here, but this goes back to my first recommendation. If you are using Twitter to only promote yourself and your ideas, I suggest you limit those.
6. Be nice: This probably ought to be the #1 rule. If you want Twitter love, then give it out. If you’re confronted by a mean tweeter, block them (thanks @leahjones for refreshing my memory on how to do that). Remember that the lines between personal and professional twitter usage are very blurry, so forgive people’s excitement about the Red Sox, or the Broncos or World Cup soccer, or the election (as long as they are nice and not mean).

What do you think? What rules of engagement do you follow with Twitter? I want to know. Hey, I know, I will tweet this post and maybe get some feedback…

It seems like every day, there’s yet another conference on social media, web and search marketing, blogging, etc. Many of the presenters at the conferences are the same. Amazingly enough, the conferences are still focused in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Las Vegas and occasionally, Chicago. But, what aImage via Wikipediabout the rest of the people interested in these topics that frankly don’t have the travel budget and don’t live within driving distance?

Well, Bryan Eisenberg has done all of us a favor, and posted an online virtual conference mashup of recorded presentations from conferences he’s been to recently. At the very least, its a great place to start.