- Feb 09
- 10
Social Media Campaigns Aren’t “Replacing” Anything
- Posted by Clint Fralick
- Published in Social Media Marketing
Whenever I hear someone talking about the use of social media or about how social media campaigns are going to replace e-mail marketing, direct marketing, public relations or stunt campaigns, I cringe. Early last year, we wrote that there are more ways to reach an audience than ever before. And even in the current economic climate, in which business ar
e reducing marketing budgets while devoting larger chunks of the remaining dollars to online media of one form or another, it is reckless and silly to talk about one marketing channel obsoleting another. Social media, by definition, is collaborative, and effective social media campaigns are always designed with synergy in mind.
This is nowhere more evident than with e-mail marketing. E-mail is already a fairly social marketing channel. Companies send small polls, surveys, and contests in many of their mailings, and an even higher percentage of mailings feature a call to action for the recipient to forward the e-mail to a friend. For a medium that, at its core, is interruptive and monologic, e-mail does a surprisingly good job fostering interactivity and community. Better than perhaps any other method, e-mail allows companies to directly target and engage an audience that has universally expressed interest (by opting to receive the e-mails). What e-mail cannot do, however, is bring customers into direct contact with a company and with each other. Social media can, of course, through blogs or social networks or video or Twitter.
But the larger point is that, when combined, e-mail and social media complement one another and shore up their respective weaknesses to such a significant degree that it’s almost impossible to see how some marketers came to the conclusion that social media campaigns would replace e-mail marketing campaigns. If you want to give customers an avenue for discussion, for instance, you can add information about a company Facebook page (or even an internal forum) to your mailings, thereby giving your e-mail audience a direct path to that discussion. Conversely, you can feature opt-in links for your mailing list on Facebook so that people who discover the page organically can easily subscribe to the e-mail list. This is just one of many simple and straightforward ways e-mail and social media can work together.
But enough with the simple ways. There are far more interesting approaches that leverage the synergy between e-mail and social media campaigns. You could use e-mail to promote the initial launch of a promotional or viral video, or use a blog as an informative tool that is also a gateway to premium content distributed only by e-mail. You could leverage social network presence to make your e-mail seem more disarming and familiar, or use both e-mail and social networks to push a contest, game, incentive program, or sale. And as more people enter the social web and mobile e-mail clients continue to improve, there will only be more opportunities like these.
I think the mistake people make when they discount these synergistic strategies is to assume that e-mai
l campaigns should promote social media, or that social media campaigns should somehow promote e-mail. It is, of course, ridiculous to use one marketing channel to promote yet another marketing channel, and any company who does so will not have an effective marketing program. To take the first simple example I gave, the synergy I’m talking about has nothing to do with sending an e-mail to your subscribers that tells them your company now has a Facebook page. It has everything to do with adding a small panel to your e-mails that simply tells your subscribers that, should they wish to connect on Facebook, your company is there. Regardless of what marketing channel or combination of channels you are using, your priority must be to give value to your customers.
It’s important to remember that word of mouth marketing and social media campaigns have a somewhat unique ability to act as the proverbial glue that holds a larger marketing program together. Whereas TV advertising, publicity stunts, and even e-mail can’t access targets within their comfort zone, social media’s pervasive presence can. It is the casual voice, the near-constant presence, and the reinforcer. Social media has no means, no method, and no desire to supplant other marketing channels. To suggest otherwise is absurd.
3 Comments- Jan 09
- 20
Don’t Dismiss Twitter Marketing
- Posted by Clint Fralick
- Published in Advice and Tips, Online Reputation Management, Social Media Marketing
Just before Christmas, the venerable Seth Godin proclaimed that brands have little to gain from being on Twitter because they cause “the clutter of the impersonal.” Once again reminding us that traditional interruption advertising is selfish, he calls out Dell, P & B, and Dunkin’ Donuts for asking the medium to do something for them instead of doing something for the medium.
While you need only be on Twitter for a day or two to see that there’s a great deal of spam and bad corporate Twitter marketing (the exact sort of impersonality that Godin dislikes) there are also a number of
companies doing it right. Their Twitter voice–which, importantly, is not a corporate voice but the voice of a real person with a name–is entirely personal. Their updates constitute a very real and genuine conversation. Is there some corporate promotional material mixed in there? Sure, but to no greater degree than in the feeds of the oft-tedious Twitterati or countless entrepreneurs and marketers who pump their blogs and trade links while they complain about their commutes and talk about their weekend skiing trips. That many companies can’t break away from their suited monotone doesn’t mean that ALL companies can’t.
Take Starbucks–or, as I should say, Brad from Starbucks. Considering that over 30,000 people follow Brad, he does an excellent job answering questions and talking to people. His tweets aren’t overly clever or exceptionally charming. But then again, neither are Barack Obama’s, and quite a few people seem to think he’s fantastic at Twitter.
Or take Dunkin’ Donuts. (Full disclosure: We’ve consulted with Dunkin’ Donuts on their Twitter marketing strategy.) Dave over at Dunkin’ Donuts was tweeting about the sub-zero temperatures in Chicago a few days ago, and he even had time to give someone a little ribbing about her math. Again, does he post some promotional information and some business content? Of course. But, as a native Bostonian I can tell you that, while I may not really care to see every link that Chris Brogan thinks is cool or know when ijustine is going running or watching CNN, I definitely want to know if Dunkin’ Donuts is giving away free coffee or opening up a new shop near me.
Godin, who recently treated print journalism on his blog with a similarly dismissive wave of his hand, wants to know why someone is “going to spend time with Dunkin’ Donuts unless there is something in it for you?” With all due respect to his larger point, it doesn’t seem to follow, logically, that anyone on Twitter (or on Social Networks, for that matter) could spend time with someone they get nothing from. The beauty of Twitter is that you can opt-in and opt-out whenever you want. 30,000 people follow Starbucks. Clearly, they see value. More than that follow Chris Brogan and iJustine (even though I don’t). They wouldn’t if they didn’t see value.
While Twitter marketing may not in itself be a direct line to sales, it is a direct line to increased brand loyalty. And when you consider that the cost of creating, designing, and maintaining an interesting Twitter profile is very low, it’s unwise to be as dismissive of the idea as Godin appears to be.
7 Comments- Jan 09
- 15
Digital PR Etiquette and Your Social Marketing Plan
- Posted by Clint Fralick
- Published in Advice and Tips, Blogging, Social Media Marketing
The last thing any of us needs is more useless e-mail. If you’re like me, you spend the first few minutes of your day riffling through your inbox to filter out the detritus. You sort quickly: internal business, clients, friends, mailing lists. Mixed in there, as always, are the emails from marketers touting some new service, some revolutionary project, or some website I “might be interested in”. Let’s be honest: It’s not as if I think people shouldn’t be sending these introductions. On the contrary, networking with other bloggers and seeing if they’re interested in what you do is part of any social marketing plan. But you need to do your research before you reach out, and you need to have some genuine interest in the blogs and bloggers you contact. A canned, formulaic e-mail that you send to me and hundreds of other people is going right in our collective garbage cans.
Take this e-mail we received as an example of how not to reach out to a blogger or business online (please note that I altered the company URL for confidentiality):
Dear webmaster, We want to inform you that recently we have launched a website called www.failrail.com. FailRail.com is a website that allows visitors to view, create and compare timelines. These timelines can be illustrated with pictures, text, YouTube movies and MP3. On our website, you will find timelines about music, movies, history, politics, art et cetera. The website is very educational, so our site is very popular among teachers and students.We noticed that your blog is focused on internet. We would be grateful if you could post an article about Failrail.com on your blog.
This company could be interesting, and their service could be fantastic. I’ll still never write about them because of their impersonal social marketing. They turned me off with “Dear Webmaster” (I’d much rather get a simple, human-style “Hey there” or “Hello”) and they lost all hope with “We noticed that your blog is focused on internet.” Hack work like this shows only 2 things: you’re not taking your product seriously, and you’re not taking your audience seriously. The PR component of a good social marketing plan has to begin with your genuine interest. Whether you’re a blogger looking to network or a business looking to get some buzz, put all that business about traffic and clicks aside for a moment and invest yourself in the bloggers and sites that you’d like to network with. If you can’t find anything that interests you or that you’d like to comment on, save yourself and the blogger time and move on to someone else.
The dangers of spamming bloggers with canned e-mails are extreme. The best-case scenario? Your e-mail will get ignored and your web site or company will go on that blogger’s mental blacklist. You may forget—indeed, you never really cared to begin with—but the blogger will not forget. The worst-case scenario, of course, is that your careless e-mail will appear in a post like this, exposing your misstep to a fairly large audience. (We were nice enough to change the name of the company, but not all bloggers are as kind.) Regardless of the reaction you get, your social marketing plan isn’t going to be effective if you’re alienating nearly 9 out of 10 people you contact.
For the digital PR component of every social marketing plan I work on, I probably spend about 75% of my time doing research. I would much rather send out 5 e-mails to interesting writers who I would read even if I wasn’t in the business of doing digital PR than send out 50 or 100 e-mails to whoever happens to be at the top of the Blogged.com or Technorati search results. I’m interested in bloggers that write innovative, engaging content. Those writers, those few, are the people I want to help me generate buzz.
Further, when I do write to a blogger for the first time, I almost never “pitch” them. I talk to them about the articles that I like or tell them why I enjoy the blog overall. Quite often I’ll say how I ended up reading the blog because I’m always interested in how people find the blogs I write for, and I tend to think other bloggers feel the same way. My goal, simply, is to get a conversation going and see if there’s a potential fit. One of the biggest mistakes people and companies who are new to social marketing make is viewing the first contact as a selling opportunity. This isn’t traditional business, and this isn’t traditional selling. Even those who blog for a living are still doing it primarily to share their voice and their ideas; helping you share your ideas or make money isn’t their priority.
Then again, most of the digital PR e-mails we receive reveal that most people aren’t even ready to think about the sell/non-sell question. They’re still struggling with the fundamental element I talked about earlier: Actually reading and being genuinely interested in the bloggers they decide to contact. In this e-mail pitch we received, the writer assumes that we’re going to be just overcome with enthusiasm for her company’s SEO quiz:
Dear Search Blogger, I wanted to let you know about a really cool contest we launched earlier this month at www.nondescriptlink.com. The Contest will identify the Biggest Search Geek in the SEM industry. Please take a look and test your SEM smarts! So far over 800 people have taken the test, and the top score is only a 71.25%, so the test is really quite difficult. See if you can beat the current Search Geek.Try the test today: www.nondescriptlink.com, or post about it on your blog!
Like the first e-mail, this one commits the mistake of openly asking me to write about their contest. There’s no need to ask. I know why you’re writing. Spend that valuable space getting me more intrigued, and we can talk about how interested I am in posting an article about it later on. Or use that space to make your case that my readers would like to hear about your contest. This e-mail also commits an even larger error: the salutation tells me the writer has never even riffled through the post titles on PandemicBlog. “Dear Search Blogger”? As much as I dislike “Dear Webmaster,” I’d rather be addressed with a vanilla catch-all term than with something I am fundamentally not. “Dear Webmaster” is like meeting your friend’s dog Rusty for the first time and saying “Hello Animal.” “Dear Search Blogger” is like saying “Hello Anteater.”
If I’m seem overly vitriolic about this, it’s because the etiquette of digital PR—indeed, of social marketing in general—isn’t difficult to understand, provided you can separate yourself from the formality and hard-sell habits of traditional business. Much of it is common sense. Do like the bloggers you choose to contact. Spend most of your digital PR time with reading and research. Don’t go in with a selling attitude, but instead think of it as one student talking to another, one thinker talking to another, and one writer talking to another. Never send an e-mail to a blog if you can’t give an impromptu summary of what it’s about and why it’s interesting. And, above all else, don’t confuse dogs and anteaters. This is, after all, social marketing. It behooves you to at least get names right.
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Astroturfing: It’s not the ethics, it’s the content
In this photo: an astrobeast
It seems like every month or two a high-profile brand or agency gets caught using some questionable black-hat tactics. Over the summer, Reverb was nailed trying to manipulate the App Store by posting positive reviews with fake accounts. The agency admitted no wrongdoing and went to great lengths to justify their practice as completely innocent. More recently, Sports Illustrated was discovered openly soliciting Digg users in an attempt to force mediocre content to the front page. When word got out, the press—particularly the social media press—were sure to make a moral example of these two naughty companies.
Let’s not be naïve here: Black hat marketing goes on all the time, in every channel that will permit it (think back to what e-mail was like prior to all of the CAN-SPAM regulations before you start thinking that this only affects SEO and social media). The people who get caught are a small fraction of the people who actively do it. And while it would be easy for me to take the cuddly-indignant social media line on black-hat practices and denounce them as crimes against our common humanity, the reality is that you can boil the issue down to 2 points:
Let’s look at the Sports Illustrated case: Their social media guy contacts a Digg user who has posted sports content before and asks him to submit SI content in exchange for SI merchandise. Aside from the amusingly corporate tone and the offer of merchandise (which is a pretty weak exchange for what’s essentially access to a Digg power user’s influence and network), what you’ve got here is a simple request for help—the same sort of request that thousands of marketers and PR people send to thousands of industry experts and influencers every day. Take out the memorabilia bribe, and it’s one pitch among a million.
At Pandemic Labs, we’ve known influential members of the Digg community for quite a while now. We certainly understand the marketing value of a front-page story on Digg, of course, and, when they’ve had something worthwhile, we’ve helped some of our clients get some attention on various social news sites by connecting these users with our clients. Our contacts won’t push bad content; they’re rightfully concerned with maintaining their reputations, as was the user Sports Illustrated contacted. Even if they will, we stand to gain nothing from trying to force-feed an online community bad content. It hurts reputations, lowers the quality of information, and drives away users (who are by and large clever enough to identify content that’s been forced through).
To “game” Digg, as Mashable so pejoratively put it, but to do it honestly and transparently, is very simple:
We’ve turned down more requests from clients to help them promote their content on social news sites than we can count, and it’s because we know that when you do what Sports Illustrated did, everyone loses.
Watch your step
Where Sports Illustrated’s failure was simply to misunderstand how social news sites work, Reverb’s astroturfing represents a much more dishonest and calculated game. If we put the ethics aside for a moment, the problem with astroturfing is that to have the influence you want, you need to maintain a huge number of users, complete with believable histories, philosophies, political views, and opinions about a wide variety of subjects. I know it sounds obvious, but go try it and see how quickly you fail and end up falling into the patterns that make your users stand out as fakes: Copy-pasted posts, incomplete profiles, and boring user names.
One of our client’s competitors (no, we won’t be naming any names) has been astroturfing on forums for months. They’re nice enough not refrain from disparaging our client directly, always preferring to say that while our client was great, our client’s competitor was just a little bit better, or more friendly, or a better value.
We discovered the ploy during one of the regular brand audits that we conduct for this client. These audits compile data on online conversation about our client and our client’s competitors. We quickly noticed that there were a significant number of similar forum posts about our client’s competitor, and after 5 minutes of reading we realized that the competitor had simply written a few stock forum posts and then tasked some unfortunate intern with the job of making user accounts and posting the stock language everywhere he or she could.
There’s nothing inherently dishonest with getting on the forum circuit (whether it’s really the most efficient way to spend your marketing dollars is another matter entirely). But as with Digg, you need to have the content. A forum user won’t care who you are if you’ve got something they like.
It’s unfortunate that the astroturfers out there who try to make up for bad content with grunt work have made it much harder for conscientious, content-driven marketers to try to give people what they want. Any misjudgment on a social news site or a forum can severely compromise the reputation of a company or its agency, and every time one of us gets caught it makes us more like the annoying traditional marketers we claim to be different from. But we’ve got not right to complain: as an industry, we brought it on ourselves.
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