Category Archives: Word of Mouth Marketing

Are You an Online Marketer or Just an SEO?


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At SES London, Mike Grehan headed up an Orion Panel with Jill Whalen, Brett Tabke, Chris Sherman, Kevin Ryan and Rand Fishkin. The panel was taking a look at “SEO Where To Next”. I’m not going to rehash what went on at the panel, if you’d like a run down Paul Madden did a good summation of it. What I am looking to discuss is our roles, are we just SEO’s, PPC practitioners or affiliate marketers, or, are we online marketers?

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? :)

Relationship Building Is At the Heart of Building a Solid Community


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building relationshipsAny community whether it is offline or online is only as strong as the relationships that have built it. Understanding that building a community one relationship at a time is critical to how long or how fleeting a community survives. Knowing that fact, is critical to any online marketing strategy companies or even individuals embark on in social media. One day you might find that a community has sprung up around your brand, product or service, if you don’t build solid, enduring and transparent relationships with your audience, it can disappear just as quickly if you don’t invest in building relationships with community members.

There’s no quick fix for building lasting relationships. No “drive-thru”, “fast food”, “overnight success” answers to building a lasting, thriving community that can withstand the trends and falls of the every picky, constantly distracted consumer. There’s only the ardent task of reaching out to one community member at a time and touching them personally. Unfortunately and sadly to some marketers, they are only interested in “how can I get X number of links fast”, or “how can I get X number of friends fast”, and that’s where they go wrong when jumping into social media.

Something magical happens to companies and individuals who take the time to reach out on a more personal level to build those relationships they deem important. They create evangelists. They create word of mouth marketing. They create something viral. All from taking the time to personally respond to an email, a blog comment, a post on a forum, a message on a FaceBook fan page, a glittery comment posted on MySpace, that personal “reaching out” means something to people. The simple act of saying “Thank You” or “I’m Sorry” or even “How Can I Help?” goes a long way towards building trust and a relationship that can touch many more people than who you reached out too.

Social Media and Community Building are not overnight sensations, you can ask any forum moderator or message board administrator. It takes time to build relationships that last. Even the “A” list bloggers (o.k. Perez Hilton could be the exception) didn’t become hot sensations overnight, it took reaching out, commenting on others blogs, linking to other posts and sites and speaking directly to the audience members to build their communities.

Social Media and Community Building are areas that do need a specific strategy planned for. How do you approach building a relationship, who handles building the relationship, what are the boundaries (yes, you do need to define them), and how do these relationships help you as a company or an individual become even better? Those are things that need to be considered before jumping in. If you just set you team loose on building relationships, it could go array, as one person on the team has a very different idea of how to build a relationship than another person.

Take the time to figure out what your message is and how you want to build the relationships around you, your brand, service or product. Research your audience and understand what they are receptive to, and then go out and start building those honest relationships, before your know it, you could have a thriving community on your hands.

Are Ghost Writers for Social Media Profiles Wise?


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Britney Spears MySpace PageI stumbled across a piece on MSNBC today about Britney Spears advertising for a “Britney Spears 2.0 Media Manager”. I paused and momentarily thought about how manufactured some of the music industry “pop princesses” have become. I’m no fan of Ms. Spears, but I, along with every other American who has an internet connection, couldn’t help but watch that train wreck shave off all her hair and beat a car with an umbrella a few years back. Now that her father is in charge of her affairs and her image, this in some semblance of saneness does make a logical sense (using a social media ghost writer) if you are trying to control every aspect of a persona that’s been manufactured (and not have a Lindsay Lohan MySpace situation).

There are some cases in social media that expecting to speak to “the person”, pr having a conversation with “the person” is generally accepted as “not going to happen”. Take for example Barack Obama. Most people on Twitter or Facebook understand it isn’t exactly Barack Obama speaking to you, it’s someone he’s appointed from his campaign team to handle that interaction. Thus, in a sense, a ghost writer. There’s sort of an “unwritten rule of understanding” in these types of situations. It works in these types of situations because in the case of Barack Obama’s team, they were very focused on bringing back the feedback to Obama and his senior staff and have a conversation about it. That knowledge alone is enough for people to feel like they were having a conversation with a “team” that cared. It works because everyone is on the same page on the team and understands its about conversation, not about just “having a profile and adding friends”.

Just Because Your a Social Media Addict Doesn’t Mean You Understand The Social Sphere of Influence

The Spears job ad has a requirement of “you are addicted to social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. … You are a popular culture addict and passionate about the intersection of Silicon Valley and Hollywood.”

Britney Spears Facebook PageThis job requirement makes me stop and think. Do these people even understand these social networks or social media outlets at all? Just because you are an “addict”, doesn’t mean you understand how the online social sphere works. With these record labels so closely manufacturing these images, you’d think they’d have a clue!

What If We Use a Ghost Writer, What’s the Worst That Can Happen?

Clients ask “does it have to be our CEO working our social media profile?” No, but it should be an experienced, seasoned company professional that knows your brand, marketing and the direction your company wants to go in that is representing you out on the social sphere. You should also be transparent. Don’t have someone running around on these social networks pretending to be your CEO, that just makes for really bad situations.

Clients ask “can we have a ghost writer for our CEO on the blog?” I strongly caution against this, for many the same reasons as not to have a CEO “ghost written” social media profile. If your ghost writer does not intimately know your CEO, how can they reflect their tone, idiosyncrasies, humor and inflections? What happens if your CEO is so out of touch, doesn’t read the blog he’s got someone ghost writing for him, and lands in an interview on the Today show and Matt Lauer asks him about a piece he wrote for the blog? Uh oh, big trouble.

But it gets worse with social media. If your “ghost writer” starts having conversations with customers or fans that you don’t know about, and then you come in contact with these fans at events and they mention these conversations and you have no clue what went on, its you with the egg on your face. But it doesn’t end there, word of mouth spreads, “do you believe he didn’t even remember our conversation we had on Facebook about xxxxx? What a farce, it probably wasn’t even him!” From there is just moves from person to person within these social networks and the trusting base you so meticulously grew with your ghost writer is gone because of one interaction gone wrong.

In some cases, ghost writing makes sense and its acceptable. Character blogs, like Robin Scorpio of General Hospital, are the ideal example of this, as is the Barack Obama situation. But in general I strongly caution against ghost writing anything on any social media platform. Every situation is different, however, not knowing or not controlling what’s going on with your social media profiles and just handing the “keys” over to a ghost writer is just asking for another WalMart fiasco to happen with your brand.

XMen Origins – Wolverine & 20th Century Fox Miss The Online Marketing Buzz


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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).

Wolverine Movie Google Search   Wolverine Movie Trailer Google Search   X-Men Origins Wolverine Google Search

X-Men Origins Wolverine Official Site Google SearchTheir 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.

Wolverine Trailer Search on YouTube

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.

click images for a larger view
Google Insights - Wolverine - Trend and Map Data  Google Insights - Wolverine - Search Trend Data

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!

Offline & Online Marketing Convergence – Missing Out on Key Opportunities


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Sometimes I get a little frustrated when I see things in an offline environment, and I cannot find head nor tail of it online. Has that ever happened to you?

Techno Twins Comercial from AT&T on YouTubeRemember those AT&T Wireless commercials from about a year ago, where one person said they went from city to city, the background would move behind them to reflect those cities, and they’d come up with some weird concoction of a city name like PhilaDevMunichopolis? I thought those commercials were clever and wanted to show them to my mother without having to wait around for the commercial to actually appear on TV. Do you think I could find them on the AT&T site? Hell no! Think I could find them on YouTube? Hell no! The closest I could find was a blog post about them because of the director Wes Anderson. The videos though, are no longer on YouTube, and don’t play on the blog post.

Talk about a missed opportunity.

Now AT&T has “the techno twins, Slad and Veeder”, I laugh every time I see this commercial. This time, AT&T has stepped up a little bit better, they have their own YouTube channel and have the commercial out there. But here’s the thing, it’s not on their website! You would think they’d have this as a widget in their front page. These commercials are catchy – from the family going to a nude beach in Spain by mistake, to the guy who’s checking into some shady French hotel, they are funny and they get people talking about AT&T – people go to their site and get disappointed.

However, take a trip and go to their service centers and all their commercials are being played on a loop in the waiting area ( I had to back in May). Now, that’s monotonous when you’ve seen the guy in the pool hall missing out on concert tickets 8 times, and the other guy calling a client Mr. Stinky Fish Face.

Talk about a missed opportunity.

Travel + Leisure Magazine Front Page 10/31/2008Today, I was on MSNBC, and I clicked to watch a video segment from the Today show about “23 secret beach retreats”. It was about a 4 minute segment, with Nilou Motamed from Travel + Leisure magazine. I got interested of course, I’m a beach bum at heart. I then went to Travel + Leisure’s website to look for the rest of the list since the Nilou only discussed 4 places with Meredith Vieira, gosh darnit, I wanted to know the 19 others!

Travel + Leisure didn’t have the article anywhere on its front page for me to click, not even giving me a tidbit and then have to pay to see the rest. They didn’t even have an image of their latest magazine’s front page on their site, so that if I wanted to go pick up the magazine because of this article, I would know it’s there – I remembered a brief flash of it in the interview and thought I saw it, but wasn’t sure. Then there’s MSNBC, no link to an actual article on the video.

Thank goodness I’m a bit more technically savvy, and decided to check out the Today Show website. It wasn’t on the main page of the Today Show, so from there I clicked into the Travel section, and found the article, it’s 2 pages on the site, with very little to really go on. I suspect this is to draw in the person to either buy the magazine or go to Travel + Leisure’s site. Two problems here with going to Travel + Leisure’s site 1) I’m not sure at this point, if that magazine on the shelf has my article 2) Travel + Leisure isn’t featuring this article on their site.

Talk about a missed opportunity.

Carnival Cruise Lines - World Record PinataHas your Public Relations department let your Online Marketing folks know about that special event you are planning? Carnival Cruise Lines apparently does.

Carnival is planning to break a world record for the largest pinata, ever. 6 foot tall this thing is suppose to be. I’ve heard about it on the news, and on the radio, since it’s suppose to happen here where I live in the Philadelphia area (home of the 2008 World Series Champs – The Phillies). I go to Carnival’s site and they’ve got the information about this right on their front page, featured front and center.

Talk about pulling things together and getting it right.

So these instances always lead me back to my clients, and making sure their offline efforts are easily found online. As our population becomes increasing web savvy, and relies more and more on finding things on the internet whether it’s going through a companies site, or even through Google to find something, stop and think – Are you tying all your marketing efforts together?

Don’t be an AT&T, or a Travel + Leisure magazine, don’t miss out on the opportunities. It can end up costing you branding opportunities, relationship building opportunities, the chance to create brand evangelists or even sales. Make sure that you have someone pulling together all the ends of your marketing strategy, not just one or two.

eMetrics: Word of Mouth Metrics


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Emetrics Word of Mouth Marketing Metrics SessionThe third day of the eMetrics Marketing Summit was chalk full of great information, just as the prior days were. I found myself completely enthralled with everything in the Social Media track, even the Word of Mouth Metrics session. In this session Sandra Ponce de Leon of BuzzLogic and Ann Green of Millward Brown presented some interesting information when it comes to measuring the effects of WOM campaigns.

Sandra Ponce de Leon, BuzzLogic

Social Media Metrics: Measuring Influence to Drive Effective Engagement & Sales

Social media means a lot of different things, it can mean social platforms, social bookmarking, etc. This fact makes measurement challenging, and without measuring where do you know where do you place your marketing dollars. More and more, marketers are having feet to fire – measurable results are demanded!

Reliable Social Media

Blogs: “old timers” in terms of consumer adoption and maturing. Blogs are pretty much mainstream these days. Over 77 million visitors go to blogs which is much more than Facebook or Myspace.

  • 90% of bloggers already talk about brands, 4 out of 5 post product reviews
  • 65% of blog readers seek an opinion when reading blogs
  • half of all blog readers consider bloga as a useful source for information

BuzzLogic offers a SMM platform & Ad network which:

  • measure influential content in social media across any topc and ..
  • serves display and rich media ads on relevant influential sites and / or…
  • makes it easy for brands to engage with content creators directly

Why does measuring influence matter?

  • looking at the influencers you can separate the signal from the noise
  • verifies perceived impact
  • provides insight into the people behind the content
  • facilitates intelligent relationship building
  • focuses traditional online advertising efforts

Social Media Strategies with Influence

Defense

  • determining whether the noise is just noise – and focus resource wlsewhere
  • commenting on blogs w/ high impact to steer conversation
  • competitive intel from blogs most influentinal on your customers

Offense

  • commenting on blogs w/ high impact
  • cultivating largely unkown but influential bloggers
  • cross-linking relationships from a corp blog to influencers
  • maximizing ad campaign ROI by targeting ads to the most influential sites

Identify “Conversations”
Quantify the “Influencers”
Identify Influencer Networks for Ad Placement

Ann Green Millward Brown,

Framing the Word of Mouth Measurement Discussion

eMetrics Word of Mouth Marketing Metrics SessionTwo types of WOM
1) Buzz – something to talk about, creates curiosity, exogenous
Great example of this is “Will it Blend” – iPhone 3g blended in their blender “buzz based campaigned” it got Bendtech on the Tonight Show (blended a rake handle on the show)
2) Advocacy – driven by product quality, offers proof, endogenous
Great example of this is Google- simple, easy to do, goal was to build a great product, they spent virtually no money on advertising. Google is now a top 10 valued brand.

89% of all marketers told MillwardBrown that they execute integrate marketing campaigns (across all fronts).

Web Analytics tools are critical to measuring online WOM transmission:

  • Audience/Reach/WOM Units
  • Tonality
  • Brand Recommendations
  • Visibility Times
  • Frequency
  • Depth of Dialog

But marketers also want to understand the impact of WOM. Its all about accountability, spending little on WOM. Word of Mouth Marketing does not operate in a vacuum, it’s about understanding its role in the purchase process. However not all Word of Mouth Marketing is all about online, WOM is a hugely influential touchpoint from any medium. In the end marketers need to make the distinction between buzz and advocacy – they build brands in totally different ways.

Can Businesses Combat the Constant, Experienced Complainer?


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By Liana “Li” Evans

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”?

Santa with the Reindeer ComplainerWhat’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.

More Evidence Shows Power of Consumer Reviews


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by Matt McGee

People are talking online. They’re talking about your company, your products, or perhaps your industry. And what they’re saying has a big impact on your chances of converting that next lead or closing that next sale.

Last month, Li made an impassioned case for conversations being the focus and goal of social media. Social media, she said, is an “opportunity for the general public to voice their opinions about brands, products, companies and their opinion of what is really relevant.”

The latest evidence proves that’s exactly what a lot of people are doing online. According to a survey done by the Opinion Research Corporation, reviews are a major influence on consumer decision-making. This isn’t new information, either; consumer reviews have been cited for years as a growing trend in determining who wins and loses online.

Here are some of the stats from the ORC survey:

  • 83% of respondents said online reviews had at least some influence on their purchasing decisions.
  • 70% said they look for reviews and information about particular types of products and services, with travel/recreation/leisure topping the list of most researched niches, and electronics right behind in 2nd
  • 61% look for online reviews before purchasing a new product or service

There’s no hiding from the power of consumer opinion online. If you’re a business owner, the time is now to make sure you know what’s being said about you, your products or services, and your industry as a whole.

You can download the ORC news release (24k PDF) for more background on the survey.

Relationship Building – 6 Tips For Working in Social Media


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By Liana Evans

Building RelationshipsAs 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.

It’s Not the A-List Bloggers You Should Worry About


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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, Photo Credit Thor Swift of Washington PostMayhill 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.