Tag: social marketing

The Ethics of Sponsored Outreach

Posted by Rich Harris – April 6, 2010

The Truth

Today’s web audience can smell bullshit a mile away. And I thank them for it. Companies are lucky to have them for so many reasons outside of being paying customers. Their low attention span and ability to talk to their trusted friends before making a purchasing decision can squeeze the accountability out of companies like a ripe grapefruit in a vice. They help make our world and the companies that run it, a better place. My opinion of course.

At the core, my philosophy on social media/marketing (and in life really) has always been: “Be unapologetically genuine, truthful and transparent.” I’ve really tried to stay true to this my whole life, in all my business endeavors and I try to keep those traits as mainstays in everything else I do.

The challenge with social media is that it’s so vast and enormous and noisy. Because it’s so huge, we need to get more calculated and efficient. As we grow our efforts and things start to take off, new opportunities and scenarios are unearthed.

I’m sure this scenario sounds familiar: You are trying to maximize your ROI with a big campaign push. You are trying to pull out all the stops by seeding relevant key influencers, implementing a solid social media strategy relying on the most extensive outreach and syndication plan possible with the budget and manpower you were given. You realize you are ready to go bigger. You are ready to step up your game and numbers on a grander scale. Unfortunately, the size of your golden revolutionary game-changing campaign vision is WAY bigger than your allocated tangible means.

So how do you go big with way less headcount and budget than your vision requires? There are a number of ‘services’ that exist out there now that would like to help you. But while their technical abilities are sound, I’m concerned that the needle between real and ‘payola’ will get pushed too far in the wrong direction.

Here’s what I’m talking about……

The Proposition

I was approached recently by an agency recently about hiring them to do ‘targeted, sponsored outreach’ utilizing paid blog posts, tweets, et al. The process is pretty simple. You have a kick off meeting with them to discuss the following:

  • Your product or service and brand
  • Your business objective with the particular campaign or initiative you are hiring them for
  • The demographic(s)/market segments you’re trying to proliferate
  • Known subject/demographic (and very specific) key influencers (so they can research all of their conversations, posts, etc.)

Once you establish some of these basics with them, they then move forward with profiling bloggers, tweeps, and others from a pool of hundreds of thousands (so they say) of authorized content creators that have gone through a review process. This process interviews bloggers to find out what they normally write about, their hobbies, their focus, knowledge level, etc.

Example

If you were selling a new camera for instance, they would work with the bloggers they’ve profiled that are photographers, or are at least enthusiasts on some level. Then, they would orchestrate a blog post idea/concept by each of these bloggers that would all go out at the same time (roughly), mentioning your product, your company, with all positive commentary when the launch happens. There would be a HUGE amount of link love, exclusive content, and thousands of people that were advocates of your company and this new camera……………at least algorithmically. :-)

The Concerns

If you were to go down the path of basically the modern day payola version of social media, and savvy consumers saw or recognized the pattern and sudden onslaught of blog posts/tweets about you that came in at a volume that was NOT part of your track record, would they lambaste you for it? Would they start to write their own blog posts about your company paying for synthetic blog posts instead of ones that were written organically by people that actually do know/follow/buy your company’s products or services? Would it turn into a PR nightmare and make your company look shady?

Would you be the coveted winner of the “Social Media Used Car Salesman” award?

The Questions

I’m curious to know what others’ experiences have been with sponsored outreach, blogs posts in particular. Maybe hundreds of companies are doing this and no one notices, or even cares for that matter. I already know why it *works* from a technical and human behavior level, but is it the right thing to do or is it better to just continue to grow everything organically….or a combination of both? Did I leave the iron on?

Onward.

Social Media & The Responsibility of Thought Leadership

Posted by Rich Harris – March 7, 2010

It’s so easy to get buried in information nowadays if you aren’t methodical about channeling, funneling, and organizing your incoming tweets, feeds, and messages. Even when you get organized, you have only made it to zero. How can you and your clients or company get above zero? How do you propel your company in a way that makes them visible above the others without looking like just another news regurgitating spammer junkie? For the sake of spewing at least one social media and business cliché in this post: How do you rise above the noise?

Some of the most well known thought leaders currently in the social media spotlight [@BrianSolis, @SethGodin, @ChrisBrogan, @Britopian, @Mediaphyter, @AaronStrout and many many many many more] did not get where they are by doing only what has been known to work. They’ve always focused on pushing us outside of the traditional approach, existing marketing patterns, and evolving the marketing status quo, focusing on the understanding of human behavior, it’s place in business. If there’s a calculated risk opportunity presenting itself that maybe others haven’t seen yet, they’ll try it and discuss it publicly. These folks know that business won’t get better and advance closer to that streamlined revenue utopia we all strive for unless they go ‘this way’ while everyone else is going ‘that way’.

Succeed and Expand

While being a copycat can be traditionally considered the purest form of flattery, I think it’s important for social marketers to realize that in the online marketing world, imitation is only imitation and offers no real value to what we are all trying to do if that’s all you do. News comes and goes fast and the competition for something fresh is fierce.

So You Have A Mountain…

…of data at your finger tips that you’ve accumulated. After lots of trial and error, say you’ve learned how to target and cultivate a niche market. What now? How can you aggressively capitalize on that market and get even more niche, dissecting it into more detail so that you can execute even more effective campaigns and conversations? You will need to get creative in the way that scientists had to when they worked towards dwindling physical matter down to molecules and eventually atoms. In some cases where there’s a mountain, there is a mountain range. After going to the top of one and slamming your flag into the dirt, set up a functional camp of explorers to delve deeper on said mountain, and then you should start heading down hill and start your next climb on the adjacent peaks to see what lies ahead (figuratively speaking of course). :-)

Be The Modern Day Lewis & Clark of Marketing

Social media for me has really been more of an expedition than it has been a job. I think it’s really easy to get mired down in the day to day, pulling the same old story of coming into work, checking out industry specific news and influencers, retweeting some cool stuff, having some convos with relevant and meaningful people on Twitter and Facebook, and then heading home to throw down a Guinness and do it for another hour or so before bed. While it’s important to recognize, acknowledge and maintain all the things you’ve discovered over the last quarter and even the last week, the successes should only make you hungrier for more ideas, new territories and new markets. Never stop.

The Personal Brand: The Balance of Give and Take

Lastly, social media is un-ending monster-sized manufacturer of the personal brand. It has given those of us that know how to promote ourselves, our talents, our hobbies, our lives and everything we do, as a brand. While I’d be an idiot that should be slapped if I produced “Rich Harris the T-shirt”, I’ve always had some inkling of narcissism in my hat. I acknowledge it. I roll with it. I embrace it. However, I am also very aware that not only does the world not revolve around me and everything I have going on, more importantly there is an amazing amount of value in what thousands of other people are doing around me. Their marketing and business ideas, their ambitions, are all extremely important to the big picture and the greater good of successful business and networking.

It’s a great thing for me to simply acknowledge that there are others around me, but as someone who is trying to shine in his own little bubble, it’s more important that I extend myself and elevate those folks around me who also have great (and hopefully even better) ideas than me as well as great ideals. Not to cater to my hippie side too much here, but it’s important that you pay very close to attention to the balance between 1. Giving back to social media, business and marketing and 2. Building your own legion of followers. In my opinion, your value is absolutely and ONLY equal to the amount of value you place on others and how much you lift them and their social capital up. In this life, you get what you give and I believe that couldn’t be more true in marketing and business. The social information age is the perfect time and place to do it.

Part of your priority menu as a social marketer should always be finding people that are smarter and better at what you do than you are……and sharing their thoughts and leadership with others.

Other sources…

Digital Marketing Today: Leverage Social Media to turn your Thought Leaders into Sales people

Redmond Channel Partner Online: Become A Thought Leader

Thought Leadership Times [blog]

[Image Credit: Paige's Arting & Scribbling Blog]

Onward.

Social Media: Living In Cultural Lethargy

Posted by Rich Harris – October 31, 2009

Forgive the Easy Rider Fonda era tone/vibe to this post. I typed the initial bulk of this post at 3AM on my BlackBerry, Halloween morning.

It seems funny to me that Social Media is considered this new thing to everyone. It actually seems kinda sad. A natural behavior that sites like Twitter and Facebook just happen to catalyze, has a *special new name, if not only for the reason that apparently we repressed a natural aspect of who we really are. Since we are not repressing it anymore, something that was always there inside us is now considered some new way of thinking, the brilliant new marketing method and approach that everyone is hyping and talking about. Why do we find it so surprising and fresh human beings actually want to engage other human beings directly in business? Are we using the fact that there was no Twitter or Facebook or MySpace before as an excuse to not directly engage customers? Are we somehow ready to come out of our little anti-social hovels and holes and cubicles that we essentially put ourselves in as a standard for the last bunch of decades?

It’s funny to me that we have ads and TV commercials whose attempt to yield a return were created with a “personal touch” by our usually overpaid agencies of record to be successful…yet they were all one way communications, directly engaging no one. It’s like a mother trying to nurture her new baby and raising her child through a glass window. The child never gets to actually be touched but the mother is there talking him/her through life without ever truly bonding or connecting with it. This is how marketing has always been so we never questioned the morbidity of it as a standard. We needed the internet, a bunch of computers (in essence a robot network), to teach us that what we needed all along was inside us already but that we were too caught up in corporate insecurity to realize the natural importance of engaging other humans directly as a standard in business.

Social Media to me, I’m starting to discover, does not currently exist as this great new idea. It is just filling a gap in business of sociological depravity that we have created for ourselves emotionally in our culture. Think about the family-owned bakery in a small village in Greece somewhere, 10 generations deep. All they know is consistent sales, happy loyal customers, and real relationships with those customers. Take a look at all the cultures that don’t have big business but still consistently make money because of a human touch that they just executed on naturally. Social marketers could learn a thing or two from these people. Yet, here in big business, while billions of dollars have been made, billions have also been lost because we struggled to have that winning marketing campaign in Q1 of nineteen eighty whatever when the culture-created consumer zombies stared at the TV, watched our commercials that didn’t quite stimulate them enough to get that false sense of “I need this to truly be alive inside” that we were hoping.

Are we finally ready to stop being in denial that being social is necessary for the survival of business? Did we just need the information age and networked computers and the chat rooms AOL introduced us to in the 90′s as an excuse break down walls so that we could learn this new fascinating discovery about being alive called “talking directly with other people?”

Don’t get me wrong, I love social marketing but Social Media and it’s current success as “the new thing” is kind of a big slap in the face reminder that we’ve kind of lost ourselves, as a standard. Maybe it won’t just help our companies. Maybe it will have cultural healing properties and help us exploit human qualities that currently STILL work to bond indigenous tribes in remote parts of the world with their families and communities.

Social Media is about the basics.

Pseudo hippie rant done.

Onward.

Automation Killed The Social Media Star

Posted by Rich Harris – September 1, 2009

So a short while ago the mighty Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) tweeted the following: “Social media isnt cool. Human interaction is cool. Just fyi.”

Some people took that as him dogging Social Media but if you know Chris you know that’s not true. I think he’s just getting a little spent on the level of noise and clutter that is being slung around Twitter spammy DM’s and other social sites. I’m sure he’s also probably tired of all the new social media “experts” that have cropped up that are more savvy as used car salesmen than they are true marketers who actually care about the conversation. The buzz-word minutiae that won’t seem to let up when it comes to “Social Media” is…..overwhelming, like tidal wave :-) . When I hear or read that phrase now, it is starting to feel like I’m getting my first tattoo and the artist keeps going over the same spot again and again and again even though he should be moving on to another spot. “STOP I GET IT!” Shotgun marketing methods and not knowing the real point of Social Media is the cause of all this chaos.

Here’s How I See It

Now onto the main point of this post. Whether you are using Auto DM messages on Twitter or regularly and aggressively scheduling libraries of recursive tweet ads (twads? blech…) on TweetLater, you are tired of the time commitment and maintenance of this new “social media” fad that you are trying to convert into a “get rich quick” scheme. My humble message to those people: I have some news for you.

Automation (“in the recurring output of scheduled ads” sense) and Social Media cannot live in the same in universe philosophically with causing the apocalypse. This does NOT include one press release tweet being scheduled early one morning, an Auto DM set up to let people know you are on vacay, etc. I’m talking about the meager attempt, whether intentional or not, by low quality marketers who are trying to replace human interaction and relationship building, with scripts and automated tools.

We all know that the marketing relationships with our customers are only as solid (and lucrative over the long term) as the amount of time, effort and genuineness that we are willing to give to them. It takes time to cultivate real conversations and relationships in marketing. You can’t automate that. It’s like me trying to write a script that will raise my 3 sons for me…..as much as I’d like to have that lying around when they are bickering so I could go have a peaceful cup of coffee some place until my new bickering children script helps them figure it out, there will never be a time when marketing is not about real people having real conversations, especially in this day and age.

If you don’t like people, interaction with people, investing time in people, then please don’t get into social media. :-)

Social Media Experts? You Have Lots To Learn Grasshopper.

Posted by Rich Harris – March 11, 2009

Now that title may at first glance appear somewhat pretentious but even being someone who manages social media for a large company like myself, I have a hard time proclaiming guru or expert status.

Here’s the thing. You can’t be an expert at something that first of all has really only started culminating the last couple years, and second, changes almost every week. You can call yourself a social media ninja, bad ass, maestro, whatever the hell you wanna call it….but there’s a 96.87% chance you are no guru or expert.

First, to say something positive (I’ve been trying to start off all my recent blog posts on a positive note), I love social media and I love how excited everyone is about it. It’s reshaping company/brand PR/Marketing efforts in a way that is healthy, creative, and cost effective…most of the time. I’d say my only complaint about it is that it’s made internet life quite a bit “noisier”…which I expected to happen.

Now then…..my point in this post is that to those claiming to be social media experts or even someone that claims to be in the know with social media and it’s big picture….this is probably not true. Just because you have a twitter account and you know how to use it, doesn’t make you a social media marketer. There’s an art to understanding that social media is all about people, about meaningful conversation that is genuine, relevant, intelligent (sometimes), and more importantly: REAL.

No one likes repeated spammy comments on Twitter, their MySpace comments section, or their Facebook walls, etc.

Also, you need to understand that because you have accounts on all the various sites, it does not make you an expert. If you want to eventually be an expert or guru at social media, the most important aspect of it that you need to understand, more important than the tools themselves that are at your fingertips is PEOPLE. To be really good, you need to ‘get’ people….different types of people, their interests, personalities, various thought processes, locales, etc. You might say to yourself..”ok that’s basic segment marketing analysis,” but we, as social marketers, have to understand that this landscape is different. The consumers of social media don’t like to be spoon fed empty one way communications about products, services and other crap. They are smarter than the old consumer, they have a lower attention span, and they put up with less bullshit than ever before. They have the power to immediately weed out and block all crap, unlike email spam which is and will always barely be under control.

The other side of this on the tools/technology side is that you need a cohesion that takes the sum of all the parts of what you do for a company or client. There should be a high level premise and plan on how all the accounts/tools all tie together to push out one message and a wave of consistent content. If you don’t have that, your efforts are null and void. Might as well head home and start gardening.

To be a social media expert or guru, you need to understand all the tools, how they all work together and you need to have a passion for human beings and their behavior, good, bad and ugly. If you understand that stuff, have a vision,  and are fascinated with human beings, you will be a social media jedi one day. I hope I get to be one too. :-)

Seth Godin: The New Marketingseth

Posted by Rich Harris – March 17, 2008

I recently went to an Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City Utah. For you web analyst people out there, you know what Omniture can do, SiteCatalyst is awesome, and it’s potential is even more awesome. While I enjoyed the learning tracks at the summit, the Omniture strategic partnership upsells sprinkled throughout, I have to say I most enjoyed listening to Seth Godin speak.

He gave away free copies of his book Meatball Sundae. I’m not easily impressed and I’ve considered myself ahead of the curve when it came to the new way of marketing to people on the web and beyond via web 2.0, blogs, social tech, etc. What Seth did for me was not only augment conclusions I came to on my own a year or so ago, but he pulled all my scattered marketing thoughts together and put them in a relevant context, packaging it all up together in one tight little bundle that made sense.

I’ve just finished part one of his Meatball Sundae book and am getting into part two where he talks about the 14 new marketing trends. I think one of the biggest things I got out of this was realizing not only how clueless most companies are nowadays, but more importantly the new way of looking at your company.

Most companies that have been around for awhile, are trying to use the new marketing methods and mold them to their old school status quo way of doing business. Seth’s approach in this book is to make your company a more fast moving, dynamic company but altering your way of doing business BASED on what new marketing methods are out there as well as making sure that you are ready to change and morph when new ideas come out.

It’s an excellent (and I believe a required) read for any marketers, online or offline. The concepts are the same for both. The information age has started to render the ‘big and slow’ companies obsolete in the way they do consumer business and marketing.

SETH’S BLOG

SETH’S BOOKS