State of the Media

Does Facebook actually work? Depends...on you

There was a significant kerfuffle last week as General Motors' pulled their advertising from Facebook, with prognosticators pointing to the failure of Facebook as a marketing tools.  Having been recently in the market for a new car, and having bought a GM car in the end, I can say with certainty that GM's use of Facebook advertising really sucked.  And Ford's was much better.

Once I started online research for my car I started noticing ads for car manufacturers popping up on FB.  I noticed that GM ads were pretty standard.  Essentially, they said, "buy our car."  I was not impressed.  Then there was this one ad I found that didn't even mention who it was from.  It was a link to an article about the raw materials that go into electric vehicles.  I was considering EVs so I clicked on it.  It took me to a another manufacturers site, but not an ad. it was actually an article about the raw materials used in EVs.  And that gave me and opportunity to go check the specs of an EV for that manufacturer.

The bottom line was I was engaged in what the other manufacturer offered as content and I considered their offering for an EV.  Now, in the end, I chose a GM car because of other reasons, but I was not helped by what GM tried to sell me through Facebook.

That's the issue with social media.  Using it like a typical advertising platform will end in failure. Using it as a promotional tool alone will end in failure.  Offering real content that helps people make a decision succeeds.

If your social platform is not delivering results for you, don't blame the platform.  Get someone in with some perspective and look at your content

Bolaji Ojo is tired. Be interesting

In a continuation of my effort to catch up, EBN EiC Bolaji Ojo tipped me over the edge again bolstering my position, tangentially, my last post.

Ojo, and his partner in crime at EBN, Barbara Jorgensen addressed the product of not doing social media right: Site Fatigue.

"Each week," he wrote, "I receive a deluge of requests to Like companies on Facebook, follow tweets on Twitter, or be LinkedIn with others. Don't ask me to follow your tweets if they aren't worth following. Don't ask me to tag or recommend you if I can't justify the investment of my time."

Which has been my point for many years.  Social media is not about mass marketing communication.  It's about building relationships and trust.  If you are posting links to poorly written and repetitive press releases and marcom material (that's pretty much everyone) then you are not using social media properly or even efficiently.  You're just pissing people off.  And in the case of Bolaji and Barbara, those aren't people you want to annoy.

The problem is most marketers and engineers don't really know how to do anything else.  They are ensconced in their technology, absolutely sure that what they are doing and saying is completely unique and superior than it is to everyone else.  Most in-house communicators and the publicists they hire have no idea what is actually unique to their product.  It takes someone with objectivity and a broader world view to figure that out.  Someone, like, a journalist.

The problem is that journalists are so bombarded with extraneous, unusable content that they lack the time and resources to filter it out.  As Barbara commented, "Barbara chimed in with a comment to Bolaji's piece.  "I think there is opportunity here for anyone who is willing to be a filter. Not just a random filter: an educated, balanced filter." 

As I've pointed out in my series on earned media, some companies are hiring laid off journalists to manage their in-house publication efforts, which is a great first step.  But that effort doesn't really reach outside of the corporate wall and is, therefore, suspect to potential customers.

We seem to have reached a significant pain point in media.  My company, Footwasher Media, saw it coming many years ago.  Welcome, pilgrims.  Time to give us a call.

 

SEO: it should be about who, not how many

This week I've been getting bombarded with SEO consultants wanting to link their sites to New Tech Press.  I've dutifully gone to their sites to see what they are all about and have been thoroughly disappointed in what I see.  They are filled with poorly written, unconnected, bland content that provides absolutely no value to their audiences.  They are designed only to drive search traffic.

What makes it all the worse is some of these sites are for well-known corporations.  And, no, I won't tell you who.

I understand the value of good SEO.  It's important to give people making random searches on the interwebs a chance to hit on your site, regardless of its value to the searcher.  That's how lots of marketing people justify their investment in the web.  And when your objective is to gain new customers without concern to the needs of those customers, getting 100,000 hits is more likely to turn into one real customers than getting 100 hits.

But what if you could get 100 real customers instead?  It's possible if you actually care about the customers.  

It is hard to find companies that actually do care.  In the decades I've been doing this 90 percent of the comments marketing and sales people make about their customers is not very complimentary.  I completely understand the feeling.  Sometimes their obstinancy and budget decisions are enough to drive you crazy.  And their willingness to go with an inferior choice because it is cheaper is similarly maddening. But whatever business you are in, you initially chose to go in this direction because you thought you could solve some poor schmuck's problem. 

What's missing from most company websites, or at least what is craftfully hidden, is that very reason for being.  Companies hire SEO consultants who have absolutely no understanding of the market for the companies' products and just jam the web traffic with random hits from spiders, which makes everyone feel good until you look at the sales figures for the year.

I have yet to hear a pitch from an SEO consultant that says, "We aren't going to increase your web traffic.  We are going to bring you customers."  Why is that? Because most people are still stuck in the 20th century of mass marketing.  A 1 percent return is acceptable.  It's like seine net fishing but no dolphins are killed in the process.

Does that mean SEO is a useless enterprise?  No, it is a part of your marketing process, although one that is getting less and less important.  What is increasingly more important is finding the right audience for your message and keeping them coming back to your site, getting them to promote your business and treating them like you actually care about them.

There are lots of consulting companies doing this, like Badgeville, Shoutlet and CrowdFactory but before you call them, be prepared.  They speak a much different language from most marketers.  It's focused on meeting your customers' needs, not your president's ego.  And you may have to cut into your SEO budget to get them to work for you.

There's media, then there's media, part 5

We've looked at content for purchase content, owned content and social content in the previous posts and we're getting close to the end of our series.  Today we look at the reality and difficulty of earned content.

This is why earned media is so valuable.

The chart indicates relative costs and effort that go into the various forms of content and how the market audience views those various forms. Paid content (advertising) is the most expensive of all media and requires the least amount of effort but is the least trustworthy.  Owned content costs less and takes about more effort but us not viewed with the same level of suspicion, generally because there is a level of human contact involved.  Social content takes more effort but even less cost than owned because you can do it even without a website. Social begins to cross the trust barrier because objective third parties may have the opportunity to state their position... if social is done right.  Most of the time it isn't, which is why it is still in the untrustworthy realm.

Earned content alone resides primarily in the trustworthy realm.  Even people who don't trust the press will refer to a magazine, newspaper, broadcast on online site for information before they will visit a corporate site or advertisement.  As we have said in previous posts, press releases are not earned content, nor are rewritten press releases even if they are published.  The best they can be are owned and owned isn't trustworthy.

Earned content is the most valuable of all content in your communications arsenal.  You don't produce it, you don't control it and you pay relatively nothing for it.  Earned content is created by journalists, no one else.  It is as objective as a human being can be, it is independent, it is the most trusted of all, and it takes enormous effort and/or time for it to become reality because it require developing trusted relationships with the third party journalists.

However, because you can't control it, it can't be considered a strategic effort.  A press release that goes through the marketing effort is packed with cliches, buzzwords and superlatives and, with some luck, may include a nugget or two of information interesting to a journalist.  It may or may not stay in his files or floating in the back of his head until he has enough information to put together an interesting story.  Or it may or may not get rewritten into a small blurb on his publication.  In the least, the publication may just post the release in it's entirety.  You won't know what will happen for sure until you see it published.  It is hard to build a strategic plan with all that uncertainty, but why is it so hard?

Because most companies and publicists really don't understand how a journalist's mind works.  Most companies are nose-deep in their own marketing committee discussions and cannot see beyond their own messaging.  They may think they have looked at all the possibilities and come up with something unique, but the journalist they are trying to reach really does see more than the marketers do.  And even with their perspective, most of them are just taking educated guesses as to what the reality is, simply because they have far too much information to process and not enough time to do more than they already are. 

So while earned media is the most valuable content you can get for your company, it can be harder to find than gold in the Sierras, which is why so many companies never even attempt to make a decent effort to get it.

 That doesn't mean, however, that getting it cannot become a strategic effort.  And that's what we will talk about next.

There's Media, then there's media, part 4

 We come now to a discussion of earned media, which we will attack in two parts.  Today were going to look at search results as earned media.

 We've touched on this in earlier discussions.  Not all search results are earned media, especially if you've paid for placement, but they can be considered earned if you've put the effort into making your content accessible through proper SEO practices.  

 One of the main ingredients in proper earned media is effort.  Earned media takes more effort to get than paid or owned media, but is an order of magnitude more valuable than the others because people tend to trust it.  As I've said earlier, the aspects of search that can be paid for (keywords, SEO gaming and outright pay for placement) have lessened the value, but if done right, it can be very beneficial to your communications program.

 For now.

 A few months ago, Google announced that it was changing the way in approached search and while a few people have made pronouncements of doom, few people who have actual responsibility over search have expressed any concern.  Which tells me they are clueless or just ignoring the problem.

 In short, Google has realized that search as they created it has been gamed out of its value.  They are revamping the way they do it to diminish the importance of keywords in search and increasing the importance of what people do with information on the net.  That will include what they consume, what they buy, who they are friends with, who they share with and what they share.  In other words, social media is going to be the key.

 I don't want to get into whether this is good or bad.  It just is.  And combined with the next point in this post, it will take SEO search out of the realm of earned media almost completely. Now, point two.

 We've recently survived what could be the death of a free internet in the US over the PIPA and SOPA legislation that died in Congress last week, in no small part to the widespread online protests.  But even if those kind of laws never come back to haunt us, we still have the virtually unknown ACTA that has snuck in on us internationally.

 In short, ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is currently before the Senate and EU for ratification and is essentially the same as the PIPA and SOPA laws... only we don't get a say in how it is enforced.  It gives international governments the right to shut down websites for the alleged theft of intellectual property.  That means all someone has to do is level a charge of theft against you.  That means trouble for a lot of sites that feature contributed articles.

 I've been involved in developing contributed articles for corporations for many years and realized how deep the problem was when an article I wrote for one corporation showed up in a major electronics trade publication under the byline of an executive of another corporation, who never worked for my client, 10 years later.  Doing an internet search I found the same article three times attributed to three different authors.  PIPA, SOPA and ACTA mean an end to that practice.  Companies will have to create original content for their sites or face having their websites shut down.

 A hallmark of a successful social media strategy is sharable content.  If you fill your sites with plagiarized material you not only face the possibility of being shut down, but you end up with a site that no one will share with others.  Original, interesting and focused material keeps you safe from copyright infringement but starts you on a path to creating real earned media.

 Stay tuned.

 

Communication and media strategies... and me

Been away for a while, deeply submerged in our new collaborative business model, re-engaging with my journalism roots, and gaining new clarity on tthe intricacies of modern media strategies. Today I'm going to be speaking to a group of European entrepreneurs on how to develop communication strategies in the US market and what I've come up with will be the basis of a new series that I will crank out over the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you'd like to see what I've been up to for the past three months, click on over to New Tech Press, the Element14 news page, Electronic Products, Chip Design, ECN, Embedded Computing... Footwasher Media is all over the place now.

Sylvie Barak Joins EE Times

Just got the OK to say that United Business Media has hired Sylvie Barak as the West Coast Online Reporter.  Who says being a social media maven isn't a good career move?

What? Never heard of her? That's probably because you are still on the trailing edge of social media.  Barak made her bones as a reporter for the Israeli Army news service and moved steadily through other online sites, including the UK's The Inquirer.  With her move into EE Times, she's not going to have as broad a subject pallette to work from but the good news is what she produces might actually convince the stodgy electronics industry to boost their marketing budgets to include effective social media programs.

Yeah, it's a long shot, but hope springs eterna,.

 

 

95% Of Facebook Wall Posts Not Answered By Brands

via www.allfacebook.com

If you are a company using social media, do you ever wonder why you don't seem to be getting any results? Maybe it's because you are doing it wrong?

How often do you even look at whether anyone is engaging in your site? How often do you respond to posts. do you even take the time to find out who, exactly, is looking at your content?

Social media works, but not in a vacuum. And, yes, I am saying most companies suck at social media.

Total unique visitors: Who cares?

Been having some interesting discussions with web managers for b2b companies.  All of them start talking about their web traffic and SEO results.  I always step into the discussion with a series of questions that ends up stumping all of them.

"So.  Who are all of those people visiting your site?"

They stare at me blankly for a few seconds and then respond, "Why they're our customers, of course."

"Like who?"

"Well, we don't know who they are specifically..."

"Then how do you know they are your customers?  Maybe they're your competitors."

"They might be..."

Then the stumper:  "So if you really don't know who it is visiting your site, why does it matter how many there are?"

It is possible to determine if the right people are visiting your site, but the problem is that most marketing managers never ask that question and so most web site managers never take the time to dig deeper into the numbers.  They just say how many unique visitors and how many referrals the site got and everyone is happey... except when they look at the sales numbers.

This is not to say that unique visitors and referrals aren't important numbers... if you are an online media company.  After all, a media company is in the business of getting as many eyeballs as possible on the site to make sure they can justify their advertising rates.  But if you are a b2b company the volume on those numbers is meaningless unless you are driving current and potential customers to engage with you.  That's why it is more important to know that the one customer you really want visits your site than the hundreds of thousands of people that found your site through a search.

Print is still relevant. No, really. It is.

Been having some interesting discussions with social media marketing/techdev types the past few weeks and I've come to realize that the SM industry is about as inbred as an industry can get.  That's not good.  Here's the background:

I am still very tied into the old media world through very deep relationships.  I have good friends that not only work for newspapers, they own them.  5 years ago these friends saw they businesses crumbling but they still thought there was a chance to turn it around and the SM was just a fad.  Today it is quite different.  They understand they were wrong now, but they still don't understand how to put it into the context of their audience... because the SM industry doesn't care about context.  They care about selling stuff... through relationships.  In other words, an industry built on Amway marketing philosophy.

But that's not what social media is supposed to be about.  SM is about building community through shared information.  The health of that community is specifically tied to the validity of the information.  If your core of information is subjective gossip and self-promotion, you will have a very sick community.  If that community is based on objective information and common purpose, you have a healthy community.

That's where the headline comes in.  Our objective information core is still in print and old media.  When I hear people, whatever the age, sit down and talk about the state of the world, their opinion is still based or at least directly influenced by something they read in a newspaper or what someone they know told them about what they read in a newspaper.  Of course it is socially acceptable to say bad things about that source, or whether one actually agrees with the content.  But nonetheless, the core is still a newspaper and generally a local one.

But what happens if that information core goes away, like so many are? John Paton, the new CEO of MediaNews has said he is all in on digital for the future of newspapers, but at the same time MediaNews has been steadily shutting down local papers it buys and creating single entities for large metropolitan entries.  For, example, the respected Contra Costa Times is soon to be melded into a large entity covering everything from Walnut Creek to San Jose.  Good luck getting the news of your town's city council when that happens.  The community essense will be going away and with it an informed local electorate.

Even when a newspaper has only 10 percent of the local population reading it, that means 1 in 10 people you know are reading that paper and are influenced by it.  Ten percent of the electorate is nothing to sneeze at.  President Obama would kick his dog if it would boost his rating by 10 percent right now.  So why would a social media company turn up it's nose at the opportunity to reach 10,000 users every single freaking day?  I don't know either, but they are.

Communications is not an either/or process.  We have been hearing that social media will kill newspapers for a long time, but they are still there (and in fact are growing at 10 percent per annum outside of Europe and the US). TV was supposed to kill radio, but it is still there, too.  In fact, every form of communication since the dawn of media is still in use somewhere (What about stone carving, you ask? Anyone read --- in newspaper probably --- about the Martin Luther King Memorial).  There is a large as yet untapped market out there ready to be taken.  For the social media company that realizes that partnering with an old media company-- and making themselves relevant to their needs -- it will be the golden key to success.  All those that don't will end up following MySpace into irrelevancy.