As a brief follow-up piece to the article I wrote this week on Search Engine Land, “Three Ways To Optimize Business For Local Search Via Online Newspapers“, I thought I’d list a few tips on how to pitch stories to local newspaper reporters in order to get coverage of your business along with the almighty links and reference citations which can help your site and listing rank higher than competitors.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sis/ / CC BY 2.0

8 Tips for Getting Reporters to Promote Your Business:

• Issue a press release or “media alert”. Prepare when you pitch a story idea to local news editors and reporters. Reporters and editors are not at all lazy, but they are pulled in many different directions and are presented with multiple story options every day. So, if you want to increase your chances of having your story idea get taken by them, prepare it a bit. Do a brief write-up of the concept and prepare it like a written news release. Write it up in clear, “Who, What, Where, Why, When” format. For the “What” part, explain exactly what your concept is and why it should be considered compelling.
• Hop on a media feeding-frenzy! Watch the current news and see what’s hot in public perception, and when some bursty bit of news is emerging into public consciousness as The Next Big Thing, be prepared to exploit it for your own advantage. Formulate a story idea linking your business/product to the current hot news item, and issue your media alert so that your local reporters will have a hot story item handed to them on a platter, ready to run with!
• Be unusual! Run-of-the-mill story ideas are yawners and will cause your story idea to get ignored. Think in terms of attention-grabbing headlines. Can you state in one sentence why a story about your company or product would attract the attention of an average man-on-the-street? Make this your press release headline. Even just a clever turn of phrase about a moderately run-of-mill story concept could be the differentiating factor that gets your story some media coverage.
• Do your homework. If your story idea involves making some sort of significant claims or is founded on some sort of facts external to your company, help the reporter by finding the information they’d need to check out your claims and verify facts. Provide them with links to independent reports, phone numbers of experts who back you up, and other supportive documentation.
• Provide free photos. I’ve written previously about how free photos is good for SEO. In this same vein, providing photos that illustrate your press release or story idea for a reporter helps save them time and makes the story that much more compelling if it’s done right. Furthermore, provide an easy-to-use Press Kit on your website with a number of images that help the press and bloggers illustrate stories about you. Press kits should include a few sizes of your company logo, for both print and online, pictures of your company, employees performing typical services, customers having fun at your place of business, and pictures of prominent employees who may be frequently quoted. Be sure to have signed image releases of any recognizable people appearing in these photos, though!
• Offer to be an expert commentator. Whenever stories come up about your industry, businesses type, or area of expertise, it’d be great if reporters would think of you as an expert they can quote. There are a number of places on the internet where you could register yourself as an expert commentator for particular subject matter, and you can also provide your credentials in advance to various TV news channels, local newspaper offices, radio station, and to local reporters and bloggers.
• Build rapport with your reporters! Be friendly, accommodating and easy to work with for any reporter who calls you up! Let’s face it – they’re doing you a big favor, and you should be thankful. If you’re fun to work with, they may think of you much more frequently as a person to go to for stories. Send a thank you note after a story about your airs, and even send them a freebie or discount coupon from your business.
• Manufacture a PR stunt! It may be cheap and, frankly, very blatantly engineered as a self-serving effort to get attention, but if you can arrange it for a “slow news” period, it can work just as well as any meatier news idea. Just be restrained about doing such a thing too often. Use this for slow business seasons and when you may’ve had a long dry spell from any media attention. Do it too often and you’re risk audience fatigue and it will not be as effective.

These tips owe quite a bit to Emmy Award-winning reporter, Jeff Crilley’s book, “Free Publicity.” You can read his book for even more ideas.

When it comes to traditional marketing, companies are so entrenched in having to define their value statements, and defining them in their marketing messages they don’t even realize that with today’s new technologies and mediums to communicate in, it’s really the customers who are defining what the value is of their products. While company executives are so focused on “features” providing what they perceive is value, they never stop and think about what the person who is plunking down their hard earned dollars to buy the product or service truly perceives as value.

The same can be said of any type of content you are producing for consumption on the internet. In the end it is the audience who is going to decide the value. While you are thinking these are great tips on how to change a light bulb and that’s the value, the audience perceives something else as more valuable about your content. It could be that the tips save them valuable time and money, something you likely hadn’t considered. While you might be thinking certain points of a video you produced about how your product works is the value, the audience viewing it find more value in how it saved them a ton of time figuring out how to integrate your product in with something they are already using, making both products exceptionally useful to them.

Once your audience finds value in the content you are providing, when they truly believe this content is worth its weight in gold, that’s when it has the potential to spread like wildfire. It may not hit the front page of Digg, but if one loyal audience member finds true value in your content they are going to spread it out to their friends by sharing their experience with it. People love to relate the experiences and those experiences, if valuable, are powerful marketing agents all on their own. The notion of “look what it did for my friend Suzie” after Suzie has explained the value she found is a very persuasive tool, and then all of Suzie’s friends relate it to their friends. If these friends are in social networks like Facebook, MySpace, or an Ning network out there, the potential for the content going from reaching just a few people to instead touching thousands is great.

This is why marketers both online and offline need to stop thinking of themselves as the “be all end all” decider of what is of value in marketing messages. Instead of consistently trying to push messages on an audience or customer base, they need to start sitting back and listening to the current conversations going on about what they are marketing and how those current messages are being received and interpreted. By listening to the conversations marketers can learn a lot more about their demographics and how they think, instead of just assuming because they are a certain age bracket and sex or race they act a certain way. Things change in the real world and the internet and the social media platforms that have been created offer marketers access to a huge , unself-conscious and very brutally honest, focus group.

Let’s face it the way traditional marketing, that of continually pushing the message that’s been carefully crafted, has changed. Audiences become banner blind, they fast forward through commercials on their Tivos, they channel hop on the radio because they do not find these messages or this type of content of any value. Marketers in today’s world of instant soapboxes (blogs) and the world’s fastest telephone chain (Twitter, Facebook & even email) have to now understand what the customers are deeming as value and create content focused on that value, not the values they crafted in a sterile office space to make CEO’s and senior management feel better about themselves. Whether companies like it or not, customers are now defining a lot of what a brand, product or service means.

There was a time where announcing that you’ve hired a new employee was enough to get a mention in the newspaper. Announce that you launched a new website, it could get the local news station to your office for an interview. Back in the day, those were hooks that could catch a reporter’s attention enough to bring them in and have them talk to you more about you and your company or organization. “Back in the day” was 2003 when I’d do public relations for my clients and getting the press interested with them was part of what I did with my web design firm. Still I always need a hook, not just “We Launched a New Website”, but something more.

Today, it’s not just the press you need to bring in, its your audience. Clients, fans, evangelists and even detractors are all online all craving for reasons to care (or not care) about what’s going on in your company that matters to them. Just sending out announcements that you’ll be appearing here or there, that your are adding a new product line or you’ve changed the name of something really isn’t enough to get your audience to care ….. unless they were involved or responsible for your actions.

As with creating valuable content for social media, with press releases PR people have to start thinking well beyond “I need to get Buzz”, to “why will our company’s audience care about this information”. It isn’t about that its new, or its got great features, it’s about how the audience finds value in the information you are trying to disseminate. Your audience isn’t just the media or industry “experts” anymore, it’s now your consumer audiences. No longer does your audience see the TV reporter or the newspaper journalist as the preeminent authority. The authorities now are bloggers, forum members, photographers posting their work on Flickr, it’s the people holding a conversation about you & using your brand with a hash tag in front of it on Twitter, and its those people active in a fan group on Facebook. These are the people you need get to care about what your press release is about and they really don’t care if your CEO is a keynote somewhere at an industry conference – unless you are Apple and it’s Steve Jobs at MacWorld.

The hook now becomes “how does this affect my life” or “why should I care”. If you’ve changed something about your company, products or brands after listening to the conversations in social media circles – that’s something your audience will care about. So rather than announces a product launch to the entire media like CNN and the NY Times, look to your audience first. Take the approach “We Listened, We Responded, What Do You Think?” with the bloggers or “community elders”. Give them the scoop first and fashion it in a way that it’s not the “normal spin”, that this is truly about your customers and audience.

At the end of the day, it takes a lot to change the mindset of entrenched PR Agencies, PR Specialists and marketers that there’s been a dramatic change in who people view as authorities. There’s also been a dramatic change in how audiences and consumers consume information and what they care about. Understanding both of those can dramatically increase the exposure of your press release and its success to the right targeted market.

So the next time your PR Agency suggests writing a press release about an internship, a keynote speaking event, or a new website redesign, maybe you should stop and think about your audience. Are they REALLY going to care? Then after you do that, maybe you should rethink who your PR Agency is.

A few weeks ago Google launched “Google Profiles“. Looking at how Google Profiles works, its reminiscent of an online dating site ad minus the creepy old guy that could be my grandfather sending me winks. With that said, Google Profiles can be a powerful tool in online marketing, especially when it comes to online reputation management. Already, Google profiles are showing up in the search engine results. They may not be showing up number 1 for all vanity searches, but they definitely have the power to rank in the top 20 and the potential to rank even higher. Why? Well, Google I guess must really trust itself.

I created a Google profile early last week. This morning I decided to test and see how it was affecting searches for “Liana Evans”. While not in the top spot for my name, the Google profile is now ranking in the top ten, along with several other profiles and videos from social media sites. So keep that in mind, its not just your profile on Google that has the potential to rank and usurp static websites, its profiles on just about any social site. Take a look at the screen shot below:

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The social media profiles and videos I’ve got highlighted in red boxes are all ranking for “Liana Evans” near the bottom of the rankings on the first page of the search engine results for my name. Accept for the power of Google, the other profiles don’t rank “just because”. They rank because they are my more “social” profiles. What that means, is that it’s not just because it’s “Twitter” or it’s “FriendFeed”, I’m actually social in those platforms – I hold conversations, I have “friends”, I comment, I share, I watch other videos than my own, etc., that’s what gives these profiles their ability to rank. They also rank because I make sure they are properly optimized, for “Liana Li Evans”, incorporating both my real and my nick name. While being social is the primary key, you also need to remember how you want people to relate to you in these social settings, and make sure your profiles reflect that.

Now before anyone screams “Google Conspiracy” about Google having all your information from your profile, there’s one thing to remember. You do not have to fill it out completely. In other words, you choose what you want to provide to share in your profile. I don’t share all my contact information, just general information about myself and what I do, and my Flickr photos which are already visible through my public Flickr stream.

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If you or your company is actively pursuing reputation management, establishing a Google profile might be a wise step in that campaign effort. If you are monitoring your CEO, CMO or any other prominent names that matter to your company, you should be encouraging them to fill out a Google profile with the information related to your business. There are some sacrifices, you are giving Google a little bit more information about yourself, however, again you choose what information to give. The individual is the primary owner of that Google profile, and can choose what information to share, but as an online marketer you can guide the person how to make sure they are presenting the information in a manner that positively affects the reputation management efforts you are undertaking.

What prompts me in asking this, is how in the past 2 years the rise of “Web 2.0″ (I really hate that term) has begun to affect how people consume content, media or anything on the web. Focusing on just SEO, PCC or even Affiliate Marketing, we tend to rely very heavily on the search engines. Heck, we live, die and cry by what Google does. Take a look at the announcement by Matt Cutts about the canonical tag, the search marketing world went nutz!

But what happens when more and more surfers on the internet stop using the typical search engines to find what they need? Confused? Let me explain.

With the advent of the iPhone and its open application system, you no longer need to go to Google to find a nearby restaurant. That’s right, iPhone users have a bevvy of applications that connect them to the internet without a browser and without going to Google and getting a map with a list of restaurants. OpenTable will tell you which restaurants near you have available seating, Urban Spoon does just about the same thing.

It’s not just the iPhone either, AccuWeather just launched a nice little widget much better than than the dreaded desktop “WeatherBug” app(that adds those dreaded tracking cookies that Norton catches). Through the slick Adobe Air backend, AccuWeather tells me my weather without opening a browser and typing in “Weather 19468″. There’s also a nice AdobeAir Application called Tweetdeck to help you manage Twitter, never having to connect to a browser to hold a relevant conversation.

Facebook and Myspace both have phone applications for iPhone, Blackberry or just about any smart phone out there. It’s becoming easier and easier to connect to the internet and the sites you want, and to find the things you want without using a browser or even a search engine.

So with that in mind, I posed this question to the panel. With the ability to connect to the internet w/o a browser, is it the SEO’s job to still work with these types of applications? Only one panel member answered, bravely, Rand Fishkin said he didn’t believe this was the SEO’s job.

I agree, to a point. If you define yourself as an SEO who just optimizes web pages or websites, then yes, he’s right.

But if you have an eye on the future of marketing and are seeing what new technologies are emerging and being embraced in our world, I have to disagree with Rand, in that, that view is really limiting. Businesses are going to have to embrace moving even beyond just the typical web page for an online presence. Search Engines aren’t just browser based anymore, the OpenTable application demonstrates that to a “T”. As responsible online marketers, we have to look beyond just websites and Google, we have to look at the entire online presence, and move beyond the thought that SEO means web based search engines because it doesn’t. So are we SEO’s or Online Marketers, or perhaps both? I guess in the end its how you define “SEO”.

That leads me to wonder this question, is the holy grail of search – the “Google Killer”, just going to be the inevitable change of end user habits? Interesting thought isn’t it?

This past weekend the internet was buzzing. What were they buzzing about? The movie trailer for the new Wolverine movie coming out. It wasn’t on main stream news, where it was buzzing was on social networks, social news sites, video shares and forums as well as social communication channels like Twitter.

The trailer hit theaters as a lead in to the Keanu Reeves’ movie, a re-adaptation of “The Day The Earth Stood Still“. The first real big buzz coming Friday night. A smaller bit of buzz about the Wolverine movie came during Comic Con this year where they showed a slightly different trailer.

So how did 20th Century Fox stumble out of the gate on this one? There’s several ways, and as a marketer who’s well versed in online media, it just frustrated me to no end that these big movie houses still just do not get online marketing in any sense of the form.

What Happens When You Can’t Find The Website?

Let’s start with their website. Think you can find the official Wolverine website by typing in Wolverine Movie? How about Wolverine Movie Trailer? How about using it’s official movie title “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”? Nada – Zippo – Zilch. All through out the weekend I tried, today I took screen caps – no where in the top 10, take a look below (click the thumbnails to get a larger view).

     

Their website is in flash, totally absolutely in flash with absolutely no content a search engine’s spider can read. The only thing it can read is the title tag for this site. Talk about being invisible to the search engines, and to the rabid Wolverine fans! It wasn’t until I typed in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine Official Site” did I get the movie site to come up in Google. Now tell me who the heck is going to type that in, other than me who was bound and determined to find the official site?

Video, Video, Video… It’s Where the People Are At

Now lets go to the subject of the trailer. Talk about needing to loosen control! 20th Century Fox definitely needs to loosen their death grip if they aren’t going to put their trailer out on their site the same day they release it in a movie theater. They also need to realize that when they don’t come up for “Wolverine Trailer” for their own site, they need to have it ranking else where, or someone else will. On Friday, Saturday and early Sunday there was still no Wolverine trailer on the official site, what in the world is wrong with their marketing team? Granted today when I went out to look the trailer is now there.

People were clamoring to see this trailer who didn’t want to go see this movie. Let me tell you, as a comic book gal, and a XMen fan from my childhood years, I was clamoring to see this trailer. I’ve been waiting like the rest of the XMen fans since the last movie to get more. We all scour the internet for clues, tidbits and the slightest bit of information we can glean to satisfy our need.

Thus why looking for this trailer became an obsessions with not just me, but others as well over the weekend. According to Groundswell, the author Charlene Li, points out that 29% of the people in social media are watching videos other people have made. Google was pulling down more trailers of Wolverine this weekend than you can imagine. But people were still searching for this trailer on YouTube and any other video share they could find.

The Fans Take Action…. 20th Century Fox Misses Out

I did find it on another video share, I’m not going to say where, because I don’t want to see it taken down. I found another trailer from Comic Con too – and what’s amazing about that video, it captures people cheering during the trailer, talk about fandom! Cheering during a trailer – now that speaks volumes.

People were videoing the trailer from their phones while in the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still. They uploaded it to video shares and blogged about it. Why did they do this? 1) they love XMen, Wolverine in particular 2) they recognized that 20th Century Fox wasn’t filling their need or the need of others.

No where on YouTube is there an official Wolverine, 20th Century Fox, or Marvel Channel for the movie. What 20th Century Fox doesn’t realize is that there is real buzz going on about this movie. One look at Google Insights tells the story. Just over this weekend searches for Wolverine skyrocketed, several terms are break out terms with searches increasing over 1000% (I don’t get the big surge in Michigan though). None of these terms are pushing traffic towards the official XMen site either, and if you notice, none of these terms use the long arduous title that 20th Century Fox Does.

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So this leads to showing you the audience, a lesson in strategy in combining both SEO and Social Media strategies together when you are launching something big. When you understand online media, and aren’t having such a death grip on control of your brand, you can reap huge rewards. Unfortunately for 20th Century Fox, they are just making their fans of XMen and Wolverine not like them very much.

And btw the way, yes I did a fan girl squeal when I saw Gambit. ahhh Remmy LeBeau makes me weak!

I first heard Katie Delahaye Paine speak at Blog Potomac this summer (thanks to Geoff Livingston for bringing her in to that event) and she just amazed me. Few speakers really enthrall me into what they are speaking about, but at that event Katie sure did. When I saw Katie listed as speaking here at eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington DC, I circled that session in red as a must attend and report on.

Katie’s got a wonderful, straight forward, and to the point way of telling an audience “how it is”. Not in a rude way, but in a way that everyone sitting in those seats understood, what’s worth your time to look at and what’s a waste of your time. She’s got an amazing way to relate to audiences and it was certainly reflected in the questions asked when it was time for Q&A.

Katie started out her discussion talking about “reputation”. “The world ‘reputation’ is so 1999,” Katie began. The term that should be used today is ‘conversation’ and / or ‘having a conversation’. Trying to manage your reputation in a social media environment of today, is just plain silly (and futile), you just can’t.

Both PR Coverage and Social Media (it’s better when they are working together) have a big affect on how companies are perceived and in the end a big on affect on what they are doing. They key though, is to measure both what’s work and what’s not working. Companies also need to understand that people are talking online, they are saying and doing things with brands, products & services, whether you are active in the conversation or not.

Katie then presented the audience with some instances where companies were successfully using social media:

• BestBuy measures 85% lower turnover as a result of its “Blue Shirt” community. 65k of their 85k employees are part of the community, the community has helped retain employees
• State Farm measures it internal blog by the improvement in morale, they put tent cards on tables in cafeteria, re-branded their blog “ask your CEO” morale scores have gone through the roof – they feel “listened too”. Prior to this, it was just their CEO “talking to himself”, no one read the blog.
• ASPCA and MADD can track online donations and increased membership back to its pr efforts and social media efforts
• -Dell measures ROI based on the number of usable ideas generated in Ideastorm
• -On Twitter a start up company got 100 great marketing ideas for free, a woman raised over 6k in day [I believe this might be Beth Canter, but Katie didn't elaborate, Katie has a session I'll have a wrap up of on SMG] and a wooden toy maker in NH got a nationwide contract
• -$0 budget YouTube videos about Barack Obama were seen by 120 time the audience than Hilary Clinton’s video

So how do you know what caused the sale, conversion, registration, watching a video, etc.? As it is you don’t, how can you measure your success?

PR & Social Media – The Laws & The Myths

Katie then presented “The Immutable Laws of 21st Century PR Measurement”:

• Banner ad & Popups are not the reason people buy stuff!
• Its not about how many eyeballs, its the right eyeballs
• Its not the media, its the conversation
• Size doesn’t matte so stop screaming, start listening
• “HTS” – How Idiots Track Success [this made me laugh out loud!]
  • (we’re use to big big numbers, but its about how you interpret the data)
• -Be who you are and see who is pleased
• -ROI doesn’t mean what you think it does because you can’t divide by zero

Along with the “Laws”, there’s also some “Myths of Measuring”"

• You can measure after the program is over
• -Measuring reputation in expensive – if you think measurement is expensive, what’s the cost of ignorance?
• Measurement is complicated
• You can’t measure relationships
• You can measure reputation

Reputation vs. Relationships

Reputation = experience + actions + history + people
Katie stressed to the audience, you can manage relationships, you can’t manage reputation, to try and do so, especially in social media is pretty much a dead end. Relationships = trust, commitment, satisfaction, control mutuality, exchange / control. Katie explained that most relationship start with exchange, such as money for a product, but the important relationship to create is the communal relationship because its about loyalty.

7 Steps of Reputational ROI
1. Define the”R” – define the expected results
2. Define the “I” – what’s the investment
3. Understand your audiences and what motivates them
4. Define the metrics
5. Determine what you are benchmarking
6. Pick a tool to analyze the data
7. Then to do the “so what”

Listening to the Customers

Traditional PR drove and can still drive conversations on social media forums – its been going on since 1994, nothing new there. What is new, is the blogs and forums are now starting influence the conversations, for example Techcrunch, etc. But what businesses are finding is that these places were not big influencers on the consumers. What influenced the most – was other consumers reviewing products and services. People who actually bought and used the products and placing their thoughts, as opposed to an “expert” espousing “how great/bad” something was.

In a case study that Katie did for a client, their “traditional media” coverage was all bad press about a product, but yet this was one of their most successful products, when they filtered it down to find out why it was successful despite the bad press coverage, it was in the structured customer reviews of the product. The reviews of customers actually using the product were all positive.

Stop Doing Stupid Things, Your Reputation Changes

If you can change the conversation, you can improve your reputation. You can also improve your reputation by first listening and then responding. Negative coverage tends to come from companies, or company representative doing stupid things. This type of negative coverage can harm your reputation, because the web and social media allow things to travel at a fast rate.

Positive issue discussion over time, share of exposure, favorable position can all have an impact on engagement. Katie presented the case of the ASPCA. Rather than just “letting it happen”, they got everyone involved – analytics, marketing, social, etc. They did every possible known way to communicate except advertising. They utilized their online community, blog, myspace friends, youtube channel views, facebooks fans / causes …. but “So what”. None of this is a difference unless its put into context.

The big “Ah-Ha” was “what’s going on with online donations?” Her example of the ASPCA not really being “ahead” of the Michael Vick issue, and just letting legal handle it – they saw no increase in online donations. However, when the news broke about the ASPCA rehabbing the dogs Michael Vick had, they were ahead of the curve in promoting it through all those changes and their online donations grew.

Katie left the audience with this final thought, web analytics is not the tool for everything, media content analysis could be good, or relationship surveys. You need to match the analytical tool to the objective.

As a business, no doubt you will have your run in with an upset customer or two. But what happens when that customer turns into a troll? Or what happens when you are subjected to the “experienced complainer”?

What’s an experienced complainer? Well those are the people who know how to “troll” the system. Knowing that if they complain enough, they’ll be placated with discounts, coupons, certificates, and special things all to “soothe” their complaints. They then figure out they can do this just about anywhere they go. All of a sudden, seemingly or magically they get free trips, special discounts, and the like, all because they threaten to write a letter of complaint. These days, even more damaging, they threaten to write a negative review on sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor or Epinions, or even possibly more damaging – write a blog post with a scathing review, with links to your website that are nofollowed.

As customers, I’m sure we’ve seen these types of people. Nothing ever makes them happy, not even free things (undoubtedly they’ll find something wrong with that, too). So what’s a company to do? How can they fight back? Can they takes steps to protect their good name and reputation from these types of complainers, scammers and trolls?

Seems helpless doesn’t it? Well take heart, people in these social communities are smart. Especially if you are making an honest effort to communicate with your audience and reaching out to them. They can smell a “troll” a mile away. They can peg a constant complainer usually within 2-5 posts on a forum or a blog, and they can certainly use their own voice to “out” them as the scammer they seem to be.

Is there anything else you can do? Well in this day and age of digital photos, videos and instant reviews by bloggers and review sites, you do need to do your do diligence before taking extreme actions against the constant complainers. Research and documentation into them is probably the best course of action, to proove that the complainer has a history of “never being happy”.

Take the case of Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and a couple from Cleveland. I wrote about them on SearchMarketingGurus. This couple has done nothing but complain for years and were “soothed” with discounts, special packages and percentages off – all because they were Diamond Club members. I did a little poking around in forums, and the wife seems to leave a wide path of complaints all over the place. The communities even call her a whiner.

Royal Caribbean seems to have done a bit of homework here, and felt they’d never be able to make this couple happy. Guess what they did? They banned the couple from taking cruises on their cruise line for life. Drastic? Perhaps, but it does alleviate the issue dealing with a customer who seems more out to take advantage of your business than anything else.

While banning customers from your business might not be the first option you want to take, it is there if you have the need to do so, but prepare for backlash, undoubtedly the customer will play the victim in the end. In the case of Royal Caribbean, the local news interviewed the wife about the distressing news RC banned them, and a website or two came to her defense, saying complaining to much got them banned. But looking at other sites, the wife has been outted as a “constant whiner” – so who’s right? I guess that’s up to Royal Caribbean’s customers and online community to make their decision with their wallets.

If you are active with your audience, talking to them, interacting with them in social media, believe it or not a lot of times your customers will take up your defense. So the lesson to be learned here is hold an honest conversation with your customers or audience, as they say, the best defense, is a great offense.

As much as social media is about starting conversations, its equally as much about building relationships. Once you start getting involved with social media, it becomes very apparent that it takes time and resources to build those relationships within your community that creates the brand loyalists and promoters, not to mention converting the skeptics.

It certainly doesn’t happen over night, or with one Social News site submission. Rather, it takes dedicated resources, as in real human beings, that represent your company or your brand to communicate one on one with individuals who are active in the social circles within your industry space. Shortcuts are few and far between, and in the end, only manage to “cheapen” or even destroy the trust you’ve built up in a relationship.

Take for example, outsourcing a blogger outreach program. A lot of companies out there will spout out how many emails they can send out to bloggers pitching your product, service or brand. If they do that, you should stop, pack up your things and walk out the door. That’s not how you are going to build relationships with bloggers, that’s only going to get them pissed off at you.

So what’s a company to do? Well here’s some simple tips to get your started on building relationships in the social media space.

• Dedicate Resources
  Building relationships in social media requires resources, both time and bodies. You need to have a dedicated person or team that fields the responsibility of communicating on a one on one level with your audience. That means that this team of people needs to read blogs, manage friend lists, write comments, join groups, upload photos, participate in forums, be active on sites like Twitter or Plurk, write blogs posts for your blog and so on. Depending on your industry, you might need to even dedicate an expert to your team that can field questions with the right answers.




• Be Real
  Building relationships in social media requires trust. That means, be real – be who you are. Let your employees be who they are, representatives of your brand. Building fake profiles, writing fake reviews, concocting fake blogs, lying about who you really are will all eventually bite you in the ass, so don’t even bother. Don’t ever underestimate the audience’s intelligence, they can smell a fake a mile away and will crucify you when you are found out.




• Communicate Early & Often
  Whether its through newsletters, blogs or even forum posts, get out there and communicate! By communicating “early” you have the opportunity to head off those “storms” that can arise, but not only that, you can also get a jump start on topics that are hot in your industry and respond to them a lot earlier than your competition. Communicating often helps to build that relationship with your audience that they can trust you will be there, informing them of the valuable information they are looking for or need.




• Get Involved
  Don’t just post links to your blog posts, or press releases in Twitter or Plurk, or posts on forums. That’s just going to make people ignore you, because it’s not a two way conversation. Actually get involved with your community. If people are looking for assistance, point them in the right direction, even if its not to your site, that’ll gain you much more respect rather than slapping a link to your product that isn’t related to what they asked.

  One of the best examples of this “getting involved” point I’m making is Tim Jackson the Brand Manager of Masi Bicycles. This man is deeply involved in the Plurk community and it’s benefiting Masi by leaps and bounds. Why? Because Tim’s done the first 3 bullet points here and has also gotten involved.




• Reward Your Audience
  One thing to always keep in mind, as much as you are involved in building relationships in social media, so is everyone in your community. It’s not just you spending the time and effort, but your audience is as well. They take the time to post reviews, type up comments, write blog posts, do research to answer questions, test out new products or services. Make sure you remember to reward your community for the efforts, time and resources they are putting in. Last but not least, always remember to personally thank those community members who put forth the extra effort.




• Remember to Listen
  Building a relationship requires that you listen more and talk less. That means, as much as your PR department wants you to be promoting, promoting and promoting, that’s the last thing you should be doing in social media. Social media offers a unique opportunity for you to get real reactions, learn about real issues or problems as well as successes straight from your customers’ perspectives. All of this is not hindered by the stigma of a focus group, where people might think then need to “give the right answers”. It’s amazing the things you can learn just by listening to what your customers or your audience is saying, take the time to read their posts in forums, comments to your blog posts, their tweets or plurks and even what they say in reviews. It can be well worth its weight in gold.
]]> http://www.semclubhouse.com/relationship-building-6-tips-for-working-in-social-media/feed/ 14 http://www.semclubhouse.com/its-not-the-a-list-bloggers-you-should-worry-about/ http://www.semclubhouse.com/its-not-the-a-list-bloggers-you-should-worry-about/#comments Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:34:52 +0000 li http://www.semclubhouse.com/?p=101 By Li Evans

What do Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama have in common? It is a woman. However, its not the woman that was taking the spotlight Saturday afternoon. No this time its not Hillary, so you need to guess again. Give up?

Mayhill Fowler

WHO?! Yep, that’s right Mayhill Fowler, someone you probably never heard of until today. Both of these polished and charismatic politicians were rocked by this unsuspecting amateur blogger, who is among 2,500 bloggers that write on Arianna Huffington’s The Huffington Post. The 61 year old, mother of two and Tennessee native, caught both of these high profile people in rather unflattering situations.

Fowler, back in April, caught Barack Obama’s “Bitter” comments on tape and set loose a firestorm for his campaign efforts in my state of Pennsylvania. This was literally non-stop for 2 weeks prior to my state’s primary.

Last week, Fowler was in South Dakota and caught Bill Clinton in what seems to be an unguarded moment when he let loose on his thoughts about Vanity Fair and their article about him.

Fowler, has no journalistic training. Fowler has no online marketing training. Fowler is a citizen journalist who describes herself as a person who “just discovered that I’m impelled to get out there and get the truth of the matter” to Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz. Armed with her tape recorder (not even an iPod!), Fowler won’t even read her own posts, since the editors tend to change her lead-ins so more people will “click in” to read her pieces.

There’s a lesson here for businesses, public relations specialists and online marketers. It isn’t the A-listers like TechCrunch, Scoble or Rubel that are gettting the scoops these days and they should not be the sole focus of your online marketing efforts to get noticed or “picked up by”. Passionate bloggers who are in your industry writing about what they love best are who you should be paying attention, too.

As someone at one of my WOMMU breakout sessions said “A-Listers” at times can be like echo-chambers.

I couldn’t agree more. Be cognizant of the B,C and even D list bloggers. If those bloggers have any type of SEO training, their blog posts could start to rank right up there with the A-Listers. What’s more important to note, is that these “smaller” bloggers probably have a more passionate reader base, and a “scoop” on an “amateur” bloggers blog, can be just as damaging or beneficial, than the echo-chambers of the A-Listers.

Just ask Barack Obama and Bill Clinton about Mayhill Fowler, that should be enough to convince you.

*photo credit, Thor Swift of the Washington Post.

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