Learfield InterAction

Multiple home pages in Firefox

Eureka! I may be the only moron who didn't realize this -- but I just accidentally discovered that you can set multiple home pages in separate tabs, using Firefox 2. Just open the pages you want for your home pages, each in a different tab, then go into your preferences menu. Where it asks for your home page, click the "Use Current Pages" button. From now on, every time you open Firefox, all three tabs will open for you. (This might come in handy for our Learfield Web guy, Steve Mays, because he could open each of our network pages as home pages, using this technique. Alas, he is the last Web-savvy guy in the world who still intentionally uses Internet Explorer.)

What USA Today's social media success means for your small organization

Pronet Advertising points out the huge growth at USA Today, since it implemented social media functions (like recommending stories and submitting photos) into its website.  This story, though, has implications far beyond big media outlets -- it also effects your small organization. 

As a direct result of these community-focused changes, the site has seen a staggering 380% increase in new user registrations, in addition to a 21% increase in unique visitors, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Not only have the registrations and visitors increased, but there has also been exponential growth in user-interaction with the site. . .

Not only does this show the strength of social media and its ability to create community and engender user-engagement, but it also shows the versatility of the medium and its adaptability to any space, no matter how old or truly novel. (emphasis mine)

The value of social media is not only for media outlets like USA Today.  It's important that you and your organization enter the social media space that already exists, even if you don't create your own.  Sites like Digg are built on user-submitted stories.  There's no reason the stories of your organization shouldn't be among them. As long as you're telling real, engaging stories, instead of issuing crappy press releases, your organization can benefit from the explosion of social media.  Best of all, social media brings together people and allows them to interact -- and that's exactly what you want as you seek to spread the message of your organization.


Technorati Tags: socialmedia, nptech, nonprofit, journamarketing, PR

Stop pitching bloggers

Ben McConnell at Church of the Customer points out the hopelessness of "cultivating bloggers" for PR purposes. Instead, he advises this:

PR companies could actually become more strategic service providers by helping their clients cultivate relationships with existing, well-connected customers. Appeal to the people who already love your client and foster those relationships.

"Cultivating bloggers like traditional media" is an old-school view of people as message receptacles. Involving customers in a strategic communications plan is the new form of message management. It recognizes that people are the message. They'll spread the word if it's worth spreading. If it spreads far enough, then the popular bloggers will pick up on the grassroots phenomenon.

I love the image of people as "message receptacles." It fits well with what I've come to believe about public relations, as it's been commonly practiced for the past several decades. PR has become about manipulating the public by giving people one-sided messages, rather than actually engaging people in a relationship. It might've worked in the past, but it doesn't work anymore. And if you try to use that old model on bloggers and other online communities, you're going to be screwed.

Technorati Tags: PR, blogging, communications, journamarketing, marketing

How 1 school harnessed the power of its biggest fans

More evidence that until you relinquish some control, you'll never unleash the power of the passionate. Church of the Customer tells the story today of OwenBloggers.com. That's a band of students who came to Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management, only to discover that the experience of attending was far better than they expected! It seems the slick brochures from the marketing department just couldn't convey "the emotion, the hardships, the challenges and the achievements you experience in business school."

Our idea is simple: Tell it all. Tell the good. Tell the bad. Tell the unexpected. Let every prospective student know EXACTLY what they’re in for. We feel better information makes better informed consumers.

The response so far has been overwhelming. Very overwhelming. Every prospective student I’ve talked to said OwenBloggers has made a difference in their decision. We receive emails every week from people all over the map: recruiters, students, faculty and alumni telling us how much more they’ve learned about Owen because of our site.

The big question for college and university marketers is whether they trust their students enough to let them sell the school. Those marketers with nagging doubts must ask themselves whether it's the students they don't trust, or the quality of the experience they're offering those students.

Technorati Tags: customerevangelism, marketing, media, churchofthecustomer, journamarketing

Using new media to make people feel

Here's another reason new media tools are an important part of your work as a communicator or marketer. Seth Godin makes a good case that how you make people feel is far more important than what you actually do. And new media tools allow you to make people feel.

If you hold your breath every time you put out a press release or preview a new ad -- just hoping and praying nobody dislikes it -- you're really not trying to make anyone feel anything about you or your organization or your product. That kind of work might keep you on the job, but it's not doing anybody any good. (Kathy Sierra has great stuff about this "zone of mediocrity.")

On the other hand, a good podcast or blog lets you interact with like-minded people. These tools establish your credibility and authority on a subject about which you really are an authority. And most importantly, they allow you to connect with people -- personally -- and let people feel. Feel something. Feel anything. That's far better than the alternative.

More ammo for arguing with your office's Internet skeptic

It's late in the day, the sugar from my soda has worn off, and I have just enough energy to shatter one more cliche today. This one comes from JaffeJuice, who reports on the EverCare 100 @ 100 Survey."

* 31% have watched Reality TV and 27% have watched MTV (!) or music videos
* Nearly 25% have purchased a music CD and 1 in 7 has played a video game
* 6% said they have been on the Web and 4% have listened to music on an iPod
* 11% have ordered coffee at Starbucks

Nobody's going to make the case that you should communicate with old people exclusively through podcasting. But next time your designated workplace skeptic rolls his eyes at the suggestion that the communications department start blogging, pull out a couple of these numbers. If 6% of centenarians have been online, imagine how many 80-year-olds you can reach with well-crafted online content!

Community Marketing: Which party are you throwing?

My first response to Jake's Customer Interaction Manifesto got me thinking about how social marketing is like a party. But you can only be successful if you know what kind of party you're attending. Organizations tend to view community interaction in one of two ways: as a kids' birthday party, or as a dinner party.

Social Marketing as Kids' Party

Here's how the typical birthday party goes. First the kids play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Then they open presents. Then they eat cake. Then they whack the pinata. Then they gather up their party favors and go home. Under no circumstances are the kids allowed to play with the presents before the cake is eaten! Jimmy's new toys will be smeared with sticky ice cream if the presents are opened too soon. Everything is perfectly ordered, and done for a reason. Nothing's left to chance, because kids never, ever have a good time without a little adult organization to guide them.

This is how organizations typically want to enter the community marketing space. They organize every last detail up-front. Set up the website. Create a MySpace page. Start blogging -- comments off. Get approval for all new posts. Post a video to YouTube. Wait for traffic to roll in.

The trouble with all this, of course, is that it fails to recognize that people are social. They don't need your blog or your MySpace page or your "viral" video to have a good time. What they really need is other people. Your job, as a community marketer, is to create a place around which a community will gather -- not to lay out a regimented agenda for people to follow.

Social Marketing as Dinner Party

A dinner party is much less regimented than a kids' birthday party. We instincitively trust that adults, when gathered together, will entertain themselves. The dinner provides the occasion around which people will gather. After that, we let people mingle, and talk, and interact. We introduce people to each other, serve them drinks and food, and leave them alone.

If you're serious about community marketing, this is the model to follow. It's scary (What if those 3 people over in the corner are complaining about my dry chicken?!). But it will ultimately engage people by giving them the opportunity to join the community at their own pace. It will establish you as a valuable member of the community -- as someone who cares about others, and shows that care by being a good host.

Photo: BeccaG at flickr

Community Marketing is Common Sense

Jake at Community Guy works up the start of a "Customer Interaction Manifesto." It's designed to be "something us marketing folks can use as a baseline before charging into social groups trying to meet our revenue objectives. . . the focus is how, as a company rep, to interact with existing online and offline communities, social groups. " In other words, the manifesto is a "how-to" for companies looking to jump into the community conversation, online and elsewhere. Among the high points:

• Honesty is not only the best policy, it's the only policy.
• Survey the landscape.
• Listen. Always.

I don't doubt that this is necessary, but it strikes me as a little bit sad and pathetic that we have to give people a primer on how to behave as members of a community. It shows how thoroughly we've separated our business practices from our personal practices. In personal interactions, most of us know it's good to be honest; we survey the landscape (we don't walk into a group at a party and start talking about ourselves to the exclusion of others); we listen to people. But when it comes to PR and marketing, we throw it out the window until someone tells us to act like a normal human. It's really ludicrous, if you think about it.

So here's my own short "manifesto" for anyone in PR or marketing who wants to be a part of a community: act like a human being, for crying out loud. Be polite. Be honest. Understand that the people you're talking to are actual humans. With brains. Engage the community just like you'd engage any group at a social gathering -- not as if they're an audience, but as if you're all in it together.

p.s. None of this is to disparage Jake's manifesto. As I said, it's a good idea. It's just sad that so many of us need to be retrained away from our bad business-interaction habits.

Markets vs. marketing

Shel Israel today has perfectly summed up the nuance in how "new marketing" differs from "old marketing." I spent about 15 minutes yesterday trying to come up with this description for my own blog, and I finally gave up and figured I'd come back to it later. Thanks to Shel, I don't have to:

A marketing guy figures out messages and the devises ways to insert them into people's foreheads, even people who do not wish to have them inserted. This is no longer what I do.

Lately, I’ve started calling myself a “markets guy,” which is someone who finds markets relevant to a business and joins or starts conversations that are useful or interesting to those markets. If you think about it, this is very different.

Shel also has the same issue I have with what's come to be called "public relations." PR isn't really about a relationship with the public at all. It's about crafting messages and, as Shel writes, " injecting them into the markets." Real public relations, after all, should involve a 2-way relationship with the public.

Technorati Tags: marketing, PR, public relations

Social marketing strategy

Toby the Marketing Diva has some advice today about using social media as marketing tools. In a nutshell, she says you've got to have a strategy. Don't just jump in and build a MySpace page willy-nilly because it's the cool thing to do. Toby suggests 10 ways to use social media. Among them:

1. Open customer communications .. listen and learn.
3. Improve Customer service
8. Build community

But one of the great insights in this post is Toby's discussion of the "value add" in social media. Building on the thoughts of Amy Gahran at The Right Conversation, she points out that we all gain something when we communicate with our customers or our constituents or our members. We are building goodwill, we are learning from diverse perspectives and creativity, and we are growing in a host of other ways. Those things might not be classified as part of a "strategy," but they are nonetheless benefits.

Rocketboom's ad trouble is not everyone's

Rocketboom's not making it with ad revenue. Marketwatch reports that the daily video podcast can't make decent money despite having 200,000 downloads a day. Those numbers aren't enough for advertisers, who would rather reach millions. I don't blame them.

The trouble with Rocketboom is not that its audience is too small for big advertisers (though it is). The trouble is that Rocketboom is mass media dressed up as niche media. It's general entertainment on a smaller scale than TV networks and major media websites can achieve. Because Rocketboom reaches a general audience, it's really not any better an advertising bargain than a cable TV channel. It's relatively cheap to produce, but that advantage is likely offset by continued hesitancy of advertisers to jump into such a new area.

The future of online media is not in big shows like Rocketboom, which reach 200,000 people of divergent interests. The future of online media is in shows of all sizes with much more narrowly focused content -- shows like Podclimber or TWIT. The future of online media is about communicating with people effectively, consistently and authoritiatively -- not renting out billboard space on someone else's channel.

Scott Bourne chimes in with some thoughts on whether Rocketboom is representative of all online media. I agree with him that it's not -- and for a lot of the same reasons.

HT: MicroPersuasion

Don't take shortcuts with content

In my continuing effort to shamelessly, selfishly reap the benefits of Seth Godin's huge brain, here's his latest riff on taking shortcuts to get traffic to your Website:

Others spend time studying the algorithms of Google and Yahoo to figure out the very best way to jump ahead in the rankings for their blog or corporate site. Is it reciprocal links or careful metatags? What if I create some sort of ring so that the spider won't realize the scam?

Hey. It's not so hard. If you make great stuff, people will find you. If you are transparent and accurate and doing what's good for the surfer, people will find you. If you regularly demonstrate knowledge of content that's worth seeking out, people (being selfish) will come, and people (being generous) will tell other people. It turns out that it's easier and faster to do that than to spend all your time on the shortcuts.

Come to think of it, that's another reason your newsletter may not be working. Maybe you're just not making great stuff. It's not that you can't do it. You have great stories to tell about the things your organization does. Maybe you've just believed the fiction that you don't have time to tell good stories well. Stop believing that, and start believing in the power of your great stories. They're all around you.

Technorati Tags: marketing, shortcuts, newsletters

5 reasons to ditch your lame newsletter

You hate writing your monthly article. The overworked receptionist hates nagging contributors to finish by their deadline. Spam filters are catching about half the newsletters you send out, and people aren't even missing it. Even if they get through, a lot of them end up in the trash box before they're opened. And within the last 72 hours, you spent time fretting about what you're going to put in the newsletter next month.

You may not even realize it, but your answer is a blog. Why?

1. You can add content whenever you want, in small pieces, instead of in a big monthly article.
2. The receptionist saves the time spent nagging you and the other people who contribute an article.
3. Your opt-in feed doesn't get caught in spam filters.
4. Readers get more control of what they read and what they don't read. And their opinion of you goes up, because of it.
5. This kind of website probably looks and performs better than the static website you have now.

Advertising 2.0 does not exist

Hugh MacLeod reminds us that Advertising 2.0 does not exist. Here are a couple of highlights:

6. So a lot of clients have been recently asking their ad agencies, "So what can you do for us in Web 2.0?" And the agencies have been replying, "Lots! Lots and lots and lots and lots!" Bullshit. Ad agencies have so far been hopeless in this space. I don't know of ONE SINGLE piece of work coming out of a traditional ad agency in the last five years that has been even halfway original, thought provoking or effective. Captain Morgan's? Beyond lame. Juicy Fruit? Beyond lame on steroids. Glenfiddich? A missed opportunity.

11. I've never flown on Jet Blue, I've never seen a Jet Blue commercial, I've never been on their website. But I know all about Jet Blue, and think highly of it. Why? Because bloggers are always talking about it. This is exactly what Seth Godin means by "remarkable". I suppose if you have a unremarkable product, I suppose you have no choice but to do a remarkable ad campaign, like Crispin Porter's "Burger King" campaign. If your boss or client will let you. Which is unlikely.

12. If somebody looks like they're trying to impress you with their "future of advertising" credentials, ask them if they they themselves have their own blog. If they don't, they're full of it. It's a good acid test. Just my opinion.

What are you waiting for?

Podcasting News tells us that a new report (from Edison Media Research) shows the audience for podcasts has grown 18% in the past year. Awareness of podcasting has nearly doubled. A year ago, about 1 in 5 people were aware of podcasting as an information medium. Now, it's more than 1 in 3.

What's this mean for you? It means you should get started now. There are things you can do to make sure people who are not tech-savvy can access your podcast. Make it easy to open the audio right on your website. (That's a simple thing to do.)

If you're not starting because you think you don't have content to fill a podcast, you're just downright wrong. I guarantee it. And if you don't believe me, email me (dbrazeal(AT)learfield(DOT)com) and we'll have 5 podcast topics in 10 minutes of thinking about it. You can do this -- and best of all, your competitors almost certainly aren't doing it yet. So get started now before the other 2 out of 3 people know about podcasting, and someone else has grabbed your niche.

Marketing Knees

They're advertising knees on TV now. Yeah, knees. Elaine Fogel makes a great point about this. Don't you think a company that makes replacement knees could spend its money more effectively with something other than a TV ad?

It's not as if we can go to the knee store and buy one of those suckers, is it? So, why market to the entire TV audience when the end user is a niche market of middle-aged to senior women, with bum knees?

You can view the ad online. The ad invites viewers to visit a website, where they can see real stories about real patients. The site features a few standard testimonials and photos. But it could be so much more.

Imagine if the Stryker marketers had saved some of the money they spent to reach tens of thousands of TV viewers with perfectly healthy knees. Instead, they could've invited some of those patients to blog their experiences. They could have gone into the homes of the patients and shown the difference in their lives--instead of merely telling about it.

Charisse says, "I can pick things up, bring my laundry up and down, I can stand, I can wash dishes and scrub the floors. I can take down my blinds, I can climb up on a stepladder. I had the surgery March 30th, May 22nd I'm on the dance floor boogying to disco music." What a wonderful marketing tool to have shown all those things, and to heard Charisse in her own voice, instead of spending thousands on a 60-second commercial.

PR Up; Advertising Down?

Steve Rubel notes that staffing at ad agencies is down, and staffing at PR firms is up.

This indicates that a fundamental shift is underway. The PR biz is now driving the marketing agenda. Futher, the new two-way mode of communications - which is driven by users and Web 2.0 - plays to our industry's strengths in dealing with uncertainty and risk. I don't think the people in ad sales see this coming. It's our game to lose.

This relates my previous post on innovation in advertising. Rubel is right that ad agencies don't see this coming. But I'm not sure PR agencies are much ahead of the game. Too often, PR is still about one-way communication. It's not really public relations, at all. It's public manipulation. The PR practitioners who put the emphasis on the "R" (relations/relationships) will indeed be ahead of the competition. I still don't see a lot of those people around yet -- so if you're a communicator, you have an opportunity to put yourself at a competitive advantage by moving in that dierction.

Innovation in Advertising

BL Ochman writes today about innovation in advertising:

I believe the era of the big ad agency is over. And so is the time when a giant like Google or Yahoo! will dominate online advertising. The specialization, the real creativity, the new direction will come from niche agencies that specialize in particular aspects of online advertising. Those will soon be popping up like spring flowers.

Read the whole thing, because it's downright brilliant. (Of course, I do tend to say that when people agree with me.) Ochman's got it right when she points out that this is all about the content. It's not about continuing to do the same interruptive, irrelevant ads, and putting them in topically related podcasts. It's about doing podcasts as ads. It's not about slapping a banner on a topically targeted site. It's about building a site full of content that drives the brand's message.

I'm increasingly coming to Ochman's conclusion -- most big ad agencies do not understand this. And even when they figure it out, they don't have the talent in-house to create meaningful, engaging content without making it a commercial. They're fundamentally built for an age of advertising when we're entering an age of audience engagement.

So what's next? Marketing will be done by creative people who've been separated from it in the past: journalists and story-tellers and videographers. These new media story-tellers will create engaging content for groups of like-minded people, on behalf of clients who want to reach those people. Smart organizations will enlist the story-tellers who know how to engage an audience, but don't necessarily know diddly about making a commercial. In all of it, companies and organizations will be skipping the agency middle-man and engaging people directly.

Put these ingredients together and you have everything you need to market -- without traditional advertising. You have an organization or company establishing its authority by offering content to people who need it. You have creative content that's addressing the specific needs of people who might be interested in a product or service. And you have an engaged audience. If you can't succeed with those three ingredients, maybe your product stinks, and no amount of marketing will help it.

Clipmarks

I just found a new Web tool called Clipmarks that allows you to clip parts of websites and put them easily into a new blog post. (You can also email the clipped contents and do some other things, but I'm just exploring the options.) This post is a test.

clipped from learfield.typepad.com

If you want to see a small organization's website done right, take a look at Missouri KidsFirst. Compare the blog format to what you typically see when you go to the website of an advocacy group or association--a bland, static, brochure-type website. The KidsFirst site just pops. It has daily updates. It's got all the information anyone would need about upcoming events. And it's engaging!

King of the Blues

Guitar Center sells musical instruments and gear. In the old days, they would try to put out lots and lots of information about the stuff they're selling, hoping to get it in the hands of musicians. Marketing was all about the product.

Now, thanks to the Internet, Guitar Center can make its marketing about music. Guitar Center is offering a series of interviews with blues greats. It's not about how these great musicians shop at Guitar Center. It's just about the stories they tell. It's interesting stuff, even for someone like me, who doesn't know much about blues. And it's applicable to your organization -- because you have similar stories to tell to people who are just as interested in your area of expertise, whether that's sports, or vacation planning or child-abuse prevention. Find your stories, and start telling them.